Tech Brew Ride Home - (Bonus) Office Hours With Chris Messina

Episode Date: November 21, 2020

A deep-dive conversation with hashtag inventor Chris Messina about what makes good product design, how to Product Hunt effectively, and his unique advice about finding success in the Tech Industry. Sponsors: VistaPrint.com/techmeme Netgear.com/bestwifi Watch this episode on YouTube here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vekRLZcnfpU       Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On April 4th, 2023, around 2 in the morning, a man was found stabbed multiple times on a sidewalk in downtown San Francisco. Hey, who did this to you? What happened next turned the story into a political firestorm. Reports have identified the victim as Bob Lee, the founder of Cash App. From Bloomberg Podcasts, this is Foundering, the Killing of Bob Lee, beginning April 16. Welcome to another weekend bonus episode of the Tech Meme Ride Home. I'm Brian McCullough. So here it is, our first ever office hours episode, Chris Messina, dives deep into product design, dishes advice on how to better promote projects on product hunt, and how best to craft a career in the tech industry.

And he gets into his personal viewpoints and philosophies on life itself. As I said, that's what we're trying to do here. Find space to talk to tech folks, not just about what's in the headlines, but also what's in their heads, how they do what they do. And also, if I could ask a quick favor, those of you who are so inclined, I encourage you to watch this episode on the YouTube page for this show. Link to the episode is in the show notes. Even if you don't watch on YouTube, if you listen to the podcast that you're listening to right now, if you were willing to help out, go ahead and press play on the YouTube video anyway. I just let it play and walk away. Most of the videos that we

post YouTube are small little clips like three minutes or less. So I want to see what happens to the algorithms if a long-form video that we post gets a lot of play all of a sudden. Anyway, please enjoy. Thank you to Chris Messina for very collaboratively helping develop this new episode format with me and also for being willing to be so open and be the first person to share like this. Thanks for being the guinea pig on this one. Yeah, right on. I'm happy to be. Because, I mean, I really, I really don't know what questions will work and how this will work. So, you know, we're doing you because I know you and it should be easy in theory. So let's start here.

Like, in the time that I've known you, like, I think I mentioned before that I was a film major that originally I was supposed to be Quentin Tarantino by this point. And actually, when I launched my first company, it was just to raise money for a film that we were. going to do. Anyway. It's not a spack. Yeah, kind of. So anyway, but the reason I'm saying that is when I see the way you operate around products and things like that, it reminds me of when I was so into movies, like, I almost, I couldn't watch them recreationally. I was always like trying to deconstruct what worked or something was horrible.

And so I couldn't appreciate the movie because, oh, you did all these things wrong or something like that. But like when a new product comes out or a new feature, like I saw that you just did a fleet about this. Like, is it just like Christmas morning to you? It's like I need to deconstruct it and put it back together. Or is it like, oh my God, look at all the ways they did this wrong? That is, I really appreciate that observation. I feel seen deeply.

I think it is one of those things where I actually was having this conversation with myself this morning. The world that we live in is kind of both very magical and also intimidating and kind of scary because there's kind of like the front channel and the marketing and the spin and kind of the what is it that people want you to think about the future that they're building. And then there is what is the actual underlying motivation and reasons for why they're doing it? And because there is like communications has become somewhat fraught where you have to have a very kind of basic banal message for the masses because if you're, try to communicate what you want, then someone's going to like pull it apart and then you kind

of like miss, I guess the opportunity to sort of shape the narrative. One of the reasons why I look at features and release notes and products so much is because I'm constantly trying to figure out either what is actually happening, what they're saying is happening, whether they're being honest and truthful or not. And then what evidence do I have based on what I know about the past and their past behavior? maybe sometimes the people who are working on the thing and what they care about and are trying to achieve. And also what I think they might be trying to bring into or from the future into the present. So I guess in a way, it's not exactly like you with like a film where I'm watching it

and I'm deconstructing it and I'm like being critical. It's a little more like decoding the future as it's arriving and trying to sort of understand where we are in the transformation from where we've been to where we're going. And when you do that, is it because you have an underlying philosophy of the way, like, again, a movie that I, like, you should have done it this way or something, or even like if you were an artist in a band, like, oh, I can hear the sound you were going, is there a sound in your head? Is there a vision in your head for a product that you're trying to match up to or what? You know, that's really interesting. I don't, because at root, I think of what I'm hearing

you say is, is there a kind of, like, critical aspect where I'm a value, you know, evaluating like the like and I'm saying actually that was that was not the right way to do it and maybe having worked in big tech companies it just seems to me that the number of conversations that are had that lead to a release and the number of people that have to sign off on something for it to get out the door is significant and usually prevents kind of just like random oh I just built this over the weekend I'm just going to launch it like those days with Facebook you know are kind of behind us now so I think it's more about trying to understand what was the thought process that I can relate to and understand and seems likely. And then do I think or anticipate

that it's actually going to work? Like I think fleets is a really good example of this. Like we knew that it was coming. We know that more and more media is moving into this kind of like short form, attention grabbing, fomo. It's going to, you know, be deleted in 24 hours. So you have to like watch it. Right. But what and I tweeted about this yesterday, I said, saw someone, and a lot of the analysis is on how every app is just copying off every other app. And to me, when I look at that, like my criticism doesn't come from, oh, they're wrong. It's more like, yeah, but the underlying reason for this is because the cycle of attention is getting closer and closer to the moment of sort of creation.

And then there's exploration, as opposed to before, where if you go back to email, you'd sort of create a message, you'd send it. You know, maybe you'd dial up and you'd connect to a server, you'd download. It was like super slow. There just wasn't a lot of media to complete. consume and it was much slower. Now we're moving to a world where these big social media platforms are trying to monopolize our attention as close to the moment of creation and consumption as possible because that's where their advertising growth is going to be. So if Twitter doesn't move

to a faster form of content, then Instagram and Snapchat and all the rest basically will monopolize that moment and that phoma. And you won't, you'll, you'll, you'll sort of like eventually, you'll, it's sort of like a paper newspaper. You'll eventually get around to it. It'll sort of sit on the table for a while. You know, it's like, I mean, like, I love the economist and I love that it's like, you know, dense and ters. And like, every time I go through an airport, I usually steal a copy or something, but like I rarely like read it unless I'm offline because my phone sort of sucks me in and gives me like up to the minute things that I think I need to see. And in that way, I become a bit of a news junkie. So when I'm evaluating a new feature like fleets, I'm trying to put it into the larger

context and not just a superficial kind of like, oh yeah, they copied, you know, this feature. They don't have any original ideas. It's like, no, actually, advertising is who pays their bills. And so if the advertisers are spending millions of dollars producing content that fits into the stories format, Twitter would be stupid and irresponsible from a financial perspective to not have a similar format that can receive that content that they're investing in. But Twitter isn't going to come out and say that. So there's two things there. Like you're you're describing it from the, you're trying to unpack it from the, you know, business case side of it, from the business plan side of it. When you, what do you think of most when a new product hits? Is it that like trying to put it in

the context of what this company is trying to do or from the side of, from the user side? How is this more compelling to users? How is this more, how is this moving? How is this moving the ball forward for users. What is more interesting to you, the business side or the user side? I guess I would push back on that dichotomy because advertisers are users. And increasingly, and I think this is the thing that is the most, you know, like a lot of people are reacting to like the election with both shock and surprise. And it's kind of like a simultaneous thing that's like oscillating back and forth. I think in a similar way, like users are not like users like they once were, where you'd sort of like see a free app and you try it out and you play around

with it and you just like see what it was back in the days where we were like learning the internet. You know, we were like toddlers. Now we're moving into kind of like the teenage years and suddenly everything is expensive and like we want things. And so we have to figure out how to like, you know, pay for those things. So the reason why I bring this up is because the shift in Facebook's products. And by that I mean WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook proper towards commerce. is so significant and the lack of seeming awareness in that is blowing my mind. And I feel like if there's an underreported story in tech, it's that, and I said this before and I was a lot, I think on a lot more on shakier ground, but whether Facebook is going after

Amazon, I don't know, but the amount of commerce that is going to show up on Instagram, the fact that they just moved, you know, reels and the shopping bag. into like pole position and they've basically gutted the notion that Instagram is a place for photographers is like a master stroke in this kind of jujitsu of taking the momentum of that platform and moving it towards commerce and it's amazing I was on TikTok the other day and I saw a Walmart ad which made no goddamn sense whatsoever and yet you can see exactly like where this is going because these major players are essentially moving I don't know like I do listen to professor

Galway a lot and I do sometimes like his you know war analogies just you know from a visual perspective you have a set of resources and you're moving them around the battlefield and you're deciding what land to take and what I feel like has been happening for the last 10 years is that there's been these massive armies that have been

being built up and there was no war and it was like quiet and we thought that was normal and I feel like the next starting in 2021 probably going through 2024 and I don't know why I'm so specific, but like there's going to be a massive war for the creative class, basically, to win them over and to get them to spend most of their time, most of their attention,

and most of their creative production capabilities on one platform or another. And the degree to which they can, you know, generate calories from those platforms will determine which ones they stay at. Is that because up until this point, it was such a land grab, like the vistas were so wide open, that they didn't have to go to war, and now we're entering the zero-sum game where you're only going to win at the expense of another platform?

I mean, to some degree, I think it's also a matter of creators are really, like we're being, and I say we, like I'm sort of tangential to it. Like, I'm sort of creative adjacent, I guess. Like, I do produce things, but I don't only make my money like through being like an influencer or something,

but my partner does and she is. And so she has a lot of relationships to brands. And the way in which advertisers have realized that they no longer really need to spend this enormous amount of money, well, I mean, they will continue to do for some time, but on like television. And instead they can give it directly to creators who then will share or spread a message with a different level of authenticity and alacrity. And to a set of people who are, you know, following and listening to them is a very different disposition. And the amount of money that used to get spent through advertising for, you know, movies or for television is so enormous. relative to what you can spend on an individual, that it's just like, you know, you're like changing or directing like the money spigot or fire hose, I suppose, at these individual

people and you're like blowing their faces off and it seems like a ton of money, but actually it's a drop in the bucket relative to what used to be spent. So advertisers see this, they recognize this. This is amazing. And they're starting to be able to have like personalized relationships with their customers. So that is this whole new environment that now that there's kind of a it's almost like a behavior market fit as opposed to product market fit, that that is what is going to be mined, because living in the attention economy, the thing that is scarce is 24 hours.

In 24 hours, you basically can monetize it to a certain degree, and then that's it. So you need more density, more density of interactions, more density of content, more density of surface areas that have the ability to sell. And so this is why Instagram is moving this direction where reels, not stories,

because stories are almost too fast, too flippant, where reels, you spend a little more time on and you embed product tags in them, and suddenly that becomes a shopping experience. So instead of fighting Amazon on the sort of utilitarian, it's a Walmart type, walk through the aisles and see stuff you like, Instagram is becoming more of an aspirational shopping platform,

kind of cutting off Pinterest's potential and giving people the ability to shop directly from other individuals and people. And so that's where the land grab will, be because people are now starting to become normalized to that circumstance. And I want to say one more thing about this, which is that the people who are computing are not the same people like us who have been computing for the last 10 years. That to me is the major difference. And so where you and I used to like want to play with apps and try them out and like kind of figure them out and like you said like films, right? Like is this one better than that one? You know, did they use this drop shadow right?

Like, you know, is there consistency? Like, does it have a nice swipe effect? Whatever. Those are, like, marginal things that people don't really need to worry about. Most of the top-tier apps are quite good. They're quite well-designed because the surface area is, like, relatively small. It's not about giving you view source. It's not about giving you freedom.

It's about connecting you to commerce and media and all those things that, you know, to me were not that important a while ago. I want to bring in the listeners here for the first time. And I promise J.C. that he would be the first. to ask a question, but he swears to me he doesn't have a question. So if he comes up with one later. So, Joe, you got the first one because I think that your question will play right off of what Chris was just saying. Yeah, Chris, thanks for being here, number one. And Brian, thanks for doing this. You know, my question is, obviously, the country's pretty polarized right now.

You know, me being in Indiana, you can only imagine the type of polarization that I see here. But, you know, how do you think the polarization in the country is going to have and what kind of ramifications is it going to have for new products and how marketers are going to be able to break through successfully with their messaging? Because I do think it's going to have a dynamic at play. And I don't know where it goes, but I'm just curious your thoughts on that. That is an excellent question. And one that's going to be, I think, hard for me to answer in a way that I anticipate might be a little bit triggering in some ways. Because it seems to me, and again, this is just what I'm observing, that there is a kind of information sickness that has taken over.

a portion of the population. And I suppose to me, information sickness is kind of a disavowal of science-backed information that comes from looking at repeated trials and then seeing a consistent set of outcomes, where instead

it's a set of beliefs or aspirations for how you want the world to be, and therefore you kind of apply that worldview to the information that you receive, and you sort of filter it accordingly. And the reason why I say that is because, you know, I've been watching what's happening with Parlor and with the Senate testimony. And it's very confusing to me.

As someone who's lived in, you know, like Silicon Valley, but came from New England, like I have these two sort of, you know, influences, I suppose, on my perspective. One is the data-driven approach from Silicon Valley where you just don't make decisions if you don't have the data to, like to do something, right? And then there's kind of like the more, I don't want to say the conservative, but, you know, coming from New England, there's more of a. connection to like European heritage and like coming, you know, from across the pond and what that means. Whereas like in California, we're like, well, everything's new, so we don't have any rules.

We're just going to figure it out as we go. And we're going to use science as sort of our guide. So to your point, to your question, there's clearly been a trend towards increasing inclusivity, increasing, like the broadening of the set of people or users who might use a product. a lot of companies have been, I think, rightly criticized for being too, I don't know what the kind of phrase would be like sort of like mono, to having too many people that don't represent a broad set of users, right, the broad set of people who are on the internet, you know, representing them in their products. I think when people come to a company or a brand, they want to see themselves represented

in the materials that are shown. I think Apple does a pretty good job of this of having a very wide set of different people, you know, in their advertising and marketing. And that's because the Internet has really connected so many people that it doesn't make sense to try to limit your messaging to a small subset of people. So when it comes to products in the future, there's a question, you know, will people who have a more, you know, conservative, you know, lean or we talked about this a little bit last time, you know, when you're living in an environment where, a lot of the people around you look like you, then you have less exposure and less of a need to develop more of a liberal sort of inclusive attitude about what's out there.

And so the problem, though, is that I think a lot of internet companies, and you see this with Netflix, I mean, the kinds of content they produce, they want to be as broad and as inclusive as possible. So whether that does a turnoff for some people, I don't know. But I'm sort of watching that, and I'm seeing what's happening with Parlor,

and it's kind of becoming this place, this refuge, for people who are feeling, you know, really either like not listen to or they're feeling shut down by this platform that, you know, prefers facts and science. And so I, to me, it seems like that's only going to get worse over the coming years. And so from an information sickness perspective, I don't know what's going to help us get better and get through that. I want to take this a little more into the personal direction, but obviously if there's other questions that are more timely,

we can still do that too. But what's the number one skill that a good designer, in your opinion, should have? Curiosity and empathy. So I think I wouldn't call myself a good designer per se, but I think I'm very curious about the world, and I'm very interested in why things are the way they are and what decisions someone made and what it was that informed the decisions that they made along the way.

I may not agree or I may have a different set of information and decide to design something differently, but at the very least I'd like to see consistency and if there are maybe blind spots in their thinking. And then once they have that curiosity and they're trying to solve a problem, are they able to take themselves and their ego kind of out of the solution space,

so that they can really hear what someone is talking about in their own language and terms, as opposed to imposing an attitude or set of solutions based on the language that one is already familiar with. My next question was going to be like what makes you want to work with people? And I figure that's kind of along the same lines if someone has that sort of an outlook on things. Yeah, I mean, I think there's also like, the learning aspect, you know, I think there is, I know so little relative to all that there is to know. And I think that being able to observe and get into someone's process as it's unfolding can be like super rewarding and super interesting. You know, like if I, if I bring my own ignorance

and I, you know, knock it down a wrong or two in the course of working with someone, that's just like, it's like a gift, you know. So I guess like I really enjoy learning that's experiential as as opposed to learning from, you know, books or things like that. Do you have a mentor? Like, and I mean, it can even, we can go all the way back to, like, you know, high school teachers or whatever, but, like, is there one person that you could, like, name and fame and be like, you know, this person did the most to influence where I am today? And I think mostly professionally, we can take, like, you know, parents and things like that

out of it. Yeah. You know, I wish I had a better answer. And I probably, you know, am in need of a mentor of sorts. I think what's happened is, it's funny. I tell my partner all the time that, like, I hang out with my friends when I'm like hanging out with her. And my friends are my podcasts.

And so I listen to a lot of podcasts. So like, I learn a lot about how people think through listening to them, kind of either have interviews or conversations. And it sounds like a kind of insane person, you know, answer. But like one person that I've learned probably the most from in the last, you know, six or seven years is probably Esther Perel, who really just shaped and changed my thinking about relationships and how, and I want to be very clear, I'm thinking relationships very broadly, like not just, you know, interpersonal or romantic or whatever, relationships between a person, you know, and a rock or, you know, between their environment or whatever it is.

I find that very fascinating. I find the language of relationships specifically really, really useful and kind of emancipating or freeing from the way in which we think relationships need to be based on past structures. So this is kind of the stuff that I want these episodes to go into. For people who are not familiar with Esther Perel, give us some background and tell us what has been most influential. Sure. Well, so I just like that.

I discovered Esther Perel through her book, mating in captivity. And I believe I discovered this book around the time that I was opening my marriage, which then eventually became a divorce. And part of what she, I think, spoke to, which I felt, was maybe providing either like an answer or some guidance for some of the confusion that I had in my own life about why my parents' relationship hadn't worked out,

and why our relationship relationship, like any human relationship that is supposed to last like your entire lifetime now with the world that we live in is increasingly difficult to impose on any other individual. In other words, like marriage used to, the construct of marriage came about in a very different era and in a different period. Actually, I mean like this is like going back to like the conversation about product, you know, marriage is a product of a certain literally like church of thought or school of thought. And the church. had a bunch of products, and those products had growth hackers. And they basically did really well with distribution in a period, like through Gutenberg, right, that allow those ideas to spread. So marriage was one of the core ideas and principles or like design patterns. Frameworks. Frameworks, patterns, exactly, for how people could organize their lives and ideally keep the peace. and it was very, you know, sort of rooted in a patriarchal order of power and hierarchy. And anyways, now that we live in this world of interconnectedness,

and even probably the telephone more than anything else, has changed the dynamic and the nature in which you can stay connected to people and even have an intimate relationship, whether it's physical or not, in a way that requires people to think differently about the boundaries around a relationship and where you derive your sense of trust, honesty, integrity, and connection. So anyways, I discovered Esther Perel back when I was in a period of opening my marriage because I was deathly afraid of copying the mistakes that my parents had made in staying together for as long as they did in such an unhappy relationship, and I did not want to

emulate that. And unfortunately, I got the wrong lesson out of watching the disconnection of my dad in that relationship. And I tried so hard to not become him that I ended up becoming him because I only was looking at him. It's one of those weird things where it's like, you know, you're kind of like, it's a good metaphor for this. It's sort of like you're like watching like the car crash and you're like, oh my God, I don't want to crash. And because you're like sort of looking at the wrong thing, you end up careening into like a telephone pole. And I feel like that's kind of what happened in my relationship. So I sort of took away some of the wrong lessons, some of the wrong information. And Estrepro was there to provide some more information about

how to think about this and how to maybe move into those conversations with a little more grace and a little more curiosity to say, well, what is it that you really want out of your relationship? What is that you really need out of your life? And how is it that in getting into a relationship with another person, you're able to support those goals? And then in what way do you want to support your partner in that? Not to be too cute about it, but is this, you know, along the lines of perhaps marriage is a product that could use an update? Well, there's sort of a very both like embarrassing and humbling experience that I had when I literally wrote that in a medium piece.

And then I also said the same thing on CNN when I was interviewed about non-monogamy. And I basically was like, you know, if your product is failing for 50% of the population or 50% of your users, you might want to consider like, you know, changing it. And I think that both the institution of marriage and monogamy, which are two separate things, like, to be clear, totally work for a lot of people. And they should. And I have no problem with them. And nor would I doubt or take away like people's choice to like pursue those

relationships. Like you can have very healthy relationships. However, I think it's also worthwhile to sort of expand the gamut of like what's possible and to think about other types of relationships, given the environment that we find ourselves in, specifically the media environment. I sort of was saying, you know, again, maybe be a little more cute, that we've entered into the era of big dating where, you know, you have all sorts of access to different people, different conversations,

different connections that in a prior era would have maybe felt like infidelity or felt like cheating or something. And it's, I don't think that that those types of language and that type of judgment and the type of shame that was intended to correct. those behaviors really makes as much sense in the current era. The threats to integrity are just different today, and to the conversation that you need to have about them and the way in which you need to own your own responsibility for yourself,

I feel like it's just very, very different, especially if you want to get to a level where, you know, male and female, I guess, not role models, but sort of a masculine and feminine archetypes are relaxed a little bit. In other words, like you can have like a, like a, like your wife could be like the breadwinner or, you know, you could be in a gay relationship or something. Like it doesn't really matter. You can have a relationship with all sorts of different people? And can I ask like, is it something that doesn't have to like to like you're not saying I'm set in stone now in the other way. Like it could be something that evolves at various points in your life. You might evolve back towards being strictly monogamous and things like that. It just depends. It's more important to be flexible for. for what works for you at a given time? It's more important to have the language to describe kind of where you're at

and what you're available for and what you can provide someone else. And sometimes there's a period in your life, as I've gone through recently, where I needed to be on my own and I needed to date myself. And I wasn't any good to date anybody else because I was in a period of kind of restructuring

and re-articulating how I felt about myself. And I think that that's really important to be able to do. And to not go into that was sort of a sense of self-halt hatred or self-shame or I should be this or I should be that because I started there and it wasn't healthy and it wasn't useful. So I'm not at all prescribing any one set of relationship types or styles or approaches or solutions. What I'm saying is the rigidity that we've had for the last 1500 years doesn't seem to make as much sense in an

era when we're more connected to more people than ever, especially people, you know, outside of our local environment where we might have grown. grown up, right? Yeah. So I just find that that's like it's... Yeah. And the amount of... And the thing that like I think really bothers me about this and worries me about this is that

for people that bring in and inherit the shame or the assumptions from past eras or generations, they bring that into the current moment and they think it's okay or they think that it's useful, it actually, I think hurts us more. Because we are dealing with a different set of stresses and a different set of interactions than our four parents had to deal with. Okay, I said at the outset that this is an experimental one, and we're going to bounce all over the place. So I want to bring in Mike to ask a question that's actually timely, again,

because this is something. Did I talk about Yubo today? Did you listen to a show, Chris? I did. Yes. Mike, Mike, ask your question about Yubo, the French social app. Sure, yeah, I hadn't heard about it until the podcast, and I don't know much about it, but I just was generally interested in, like, what Chris was thinking about other models for social.

Seems like there's this paradigm of, like, the broadcaster and lots of receivers. But I don't think a lot of people use Facebook. I feel like that's something that kind of, like, gets pushed on them. And I guess I wonder if there's a way to do it where, you know, you're just connecting with the people that you care about. and all that broadcasting somehow doesn't get involved. I don't know if you can make money doing it that way. It looks like Ubo's trying to, but I just wondered what you thought about that, Chris. I haven't used Ubo, so I'm actually quite ignorant about it,

but I think there are some maybe just like the way that I would think about it if I were approaching it or seeing it for the first time. And that would be first to recognize that there have been attempts in this realm before, specifically PATH, you know, tried to sort of say this is a social network for 150 people, and it actually came from someone who worked at Facebook. I think Snapchat is a really good example that started out with that premise and promise. So what I would suggest thinking about this and evaluating it, and again, I don't know enough about the demographics of the people who use it, but that there is going to be a younger generation

that grows up, and they are going to not only be like digital first, but like the idea that you even mentioned digital is kind of like, what do you mean? It's like air. You know what I mean? Like, like the first fish that became, you know, amphibious, like they're like, what do you mean, like water? Like, you know what I mean? Like it just was like their normal state. So for that generation and that demographic, I think their experience of FOMO will be rather different. And so although we're currently in a state where streamers are kind of becoming like sports teams for people that you kind of gather around them and they become a social object and they're interesting and they're engaging and they're constantly creating new, new experience. I mean,

like Donald Trump is basically like a sports team where, you know, they're the diehard fans. I mean, it's like, you know, soccer, right? Like, I know, I know Brian knows a lot more, thinks a lot more about soccer. And it's sort of like, like, the, when I think about like a British pub and like soccer and like the fights that break out, like that's something that people really seem to enjoy doing in London, I guess. It's not really like my thing, but like they get very passionate about it. And it's something to be passionate and to feel connected to other people around.

So anyways, all that is to say that these patterns of. of social organization repeat. And they repeat around different types of entities or objects. Sometimes those are inanimate objects. Sometimes those are stories or movies. Sometimes they are people. And so what's happened with media is that any one individual who happens to be hilarious and super funny,

but they're totally disconnected and in a remote part of the world, suddenly they connect to the internet. And now they have an audience that they never would have had elsewhere. And you see this with TikTok, where it's sort of like the micro-influencer or something like that. So we're in this phase where that's like really fun and engaging and interesting. But it seems like the phase that comes after that is sort of like a, yeah, yeah, it's fun to like go tune into like those little like, you know, dramas that are going on or something like that.

It's not like terrestrial television per se or sort of time-bound television that, you know, used to exist where it would sort of go out to everyone and everyone have the same conversation. Now, not only do you get to like choose your influencers that you want to see on a regular basis, but you start to create smaller groups of people that you want to interact with on a regular. basis. And you want to have deeper, more intimate connections. And the reason why I say this, there's this Gen Z Mafia that exists on Twitter. And I don't know that much about it, but I've seen a couple other things. They did this thing during the Black Lives Matter movement, where they were talking about this new app that was coming out, where the name of the app was, I think was an eye lips and an eye as emoji. And it was it like blue. Right. I remember that. Yeah.

Yeah. Right. And so they basically pumped the internet. And anyways, then they turned it into like a fundraiser and yada yada. But the point was, was that there was a small group of people, sort of like what I imagine Yubo might be about, where they're coming together on a regular basis, and they're just kind of like, that is the new mall. That is the new kind of hangout. And it's normal to be there.

It's normal to come on video. House party was doing this before. So I'm trying to answer your question in a way that says that the preciousness that we feel about certain types of advances in digital media technology that many of us have gone through and experienced, and we feel like this is important to get into this podcast and do this now, I think people do this like every day, and it's normal. And so that is probably where the opportunity lives for that kind of product.

Just a reminder to everyone that's in the chat here. If you have questions, put them in the chat and we'll get to you. I want to make sure that we hit Product Hunt because I feel like that's something that you can give a lot of advice to people that are listening. That project that you were working on for Product Hunt, is that live? Or can we even talk about that? Tell us about that, because I know you're working on that just this week. Yeah.

So yesterday was a big launch day for me. I don't have that many launches. And it's been really interesting because there have been a few products lately that I've become part of the story of, which I wasn't really anticipating. But as a result of doing the hunts that I do, I offer these super peer consulting calls. And essentially, part of it is just kind of like trying to understand, again, taking this product lens and listening. to the problem that someone wants to solve, the pain point that they've understood, and then trying to really empathize with their target user and thinking through whether or not they've really achieved that with whatever is that they're producing, whether it's

the product side or whether it's the marketing, you know, and so on. And then we take all those things up and we bundle them together and then we present them to the product hunt community, which I think of as the Olympics of product that sort of happens every 24 hours. And I help them, like I become like a product coach. I'm like a product therapist. I'm like, okay, tell me what's wrong. Tell me where it hurts. And I'll tell you, you know, like, is this a relationship with your mom or your dad or like, you know, whatever? And we'll go through it. So what I realized as of this year, because, you know, with shelter in place, I'm not traveling, I'm not giving talks anymore, that I could take all this free advice, frankly, that I've been giving to people and start charging on a consulting basis.

But then I was having a lot of the same conversations over and over again. And I was like, well, okay, clearly there's a need for just kind of a basic orientation to product time. to what it is, to its history, to how it got to be the way it is, and also how to communicate clearly about a product to this audience. And so I took up, so I've done over 150 calls this year, and I took a lot of those insights, and I've also done over 2,500 product hunts on product hunt, and took all my insights from that, and I'm building a course.

And so yesterday I launched a course, and I also launched with my friend Melissa, has a company called EWebinar, And what's cool about the webinar is that it essentially is a, it's like taking like a recorded video and then adding in moments throughout the timeline where different interactions will appear. That could be a quiz or a poll or a question or send a message or things like that so that the person actually feels like they're having like more of an interactive experience with like a webinar. And Melissa built this because she was in sales before and she probably did like 3,000 calls

and got just totally burnt out by having the same conversation. over and over again. And I can see this happening for many of us who learn something and then want to share that knowledge with other people. So how do you sort of capture and distill that knowledge, make it available to a broad audience? How do you then create sort of an interactive experience of it so that based on someone's relative experience or exposure with the thing that you're telling them about, they can ask questions, they can move with their own pace? So it's a bit of an education thing. And then how do you then produce and sort of disseminate that? So anyway, so we launched a webinar for the course.

And then the course is a whole other thing, which is the thing that then you can do in your own time and has like a bunch of resources that help you figure out product hunt and then nail your launch. So I can get that course on eWebinar? So you can use eWebinar to learn about the course. Gotcha. And then if you want to spend money, then you can buy the course.

And I'm happy to provide those links. That information will be on my website as well. Well, and actually remind me to do that and I'll put them in the show notes. And not to steal the thunder from it, But just for shits and giggles, what's the number one thing that you see people doing when they launch on product hunt that you're like, please stop doing this? Oh, wow. You know, maybe it's, okay. Oh, man, there's like, there's a whole bunch of them.

You know, they're sort of like I have my checklist now. Okay. There are a couple things. Yeah. Probably the most important thing is that the maker comment is, like, really important. And this is your chance. It's like a blog post to describe what it is that you've built, the problem you've solved, who you're solved. who you're solving it for, what insights you've learned along the way,

why you're doing what you're doing. Like, on the one hand, it's very limited because it's text. And that's why I think eWebinar is cool or any other video that you record that kind of like gives people a sense of who you are and why you're doing the thing you're doing. So I think the maker comment is incredibly important. And a lot of makers just kind of like throw it out there and they don't really think that much about it. The second thing that I see is that in the gallery, there's two tips here.

So the gallery is your visual way of describing what the product is and telling people what it does. A lot of times people will just take the screenshots, like from their App Store listing, which are oftentimes vertical screenshots, and they don't look good, they don't make sense. And then the screenshots themselves are like these little piddly, like unreadable, kind of like little stupid things. And then you're like, oh, why did you do this? Like you're hurting people's eyes who are looking at this thing. So you need to create content that is specifically like purposeful, like towards product hunt and where each slide has very clear, legible text and it says one thing and one thing only. So those are the two things that I think I look for the most.

Oyeabo, I'm asking you to unmute because that's a good question. So go right ahead. Hi, Chris, thank you for doing this. I appreciate it read up about you after listening, hearing about you on the podcast and really a fan of what you've done. My question is, is there a particular social media website besides product cunk that you think is is like a good place, an untapped place to launch products. I remember when flash sales websites were a thing, they really took advantage of the way that Facebook was structured

and then Facebook kind of cut off that tap. So is there any place in particular that you think, like, hey, people are not using this and I would maybe use it in this way? Is there something that you're seeing about product hunt that you think is not, like I'm just trying to understand why you'd be looking for something else then I might have some thoughts. Not that I'm particularly looking for something else. I am on something, and that is a place that I'm going to be going

and I'm going to be checking out your course. But, like, you know, the different streams, I think, is something that I think kind of makes sense. Or maybe even it's such a big crowd on Product Hunt right now. Is there another place? And it's such a big crowd and like being the first somewhere and using it. Got it. something that interests me as well.

Yeah, I think, so the reason why I was asking for clarification was because it kind of depends on your intended audience. And product hunt, again, being like the Olympics of product is going to have a bunch of kind of product Olympiads, in which case the people who are going to use your product are probably PMs or possibly investors or people, you know, who are kind of like either in or adjacent to tech and they're looking to try new things, right? Whereas if your audience are, I mean, it's interesting. I launched a friend's app on Monday called Plant Parenthood, which is basically like an app for keeping track of your plants and making sure you water them.

I imagine that there are some people on Prada Hunt who use plants, but I would say long term that wouldn't be like the growth strategy for getting people to use that app. I would think that maybe House or Pinterest or Instagram would probably be better for that. Now, those are obviously also kind of tapped out to some degree. But if you're building for like, makers or indie makers, there is indie makers, which is a site.

My friend Ben Tossel has MakerPad, which is for kind of people in the no code space. You know, even like it's been interesting for me to be in this on-deck community, I think, which is beondek.com. It's sort of this community of either soon-to-be founders or ex-founders or people who are kind of between, like they're considering what they might want to do next after spending, you know, five or six years at, you know, Twitter or Stripe or something. And so it's a safe community of people to sort of come together and, you know, launch and try things out. So that's not the kind of absumos of the world, which is kind of what you're describing about, at least historically.

It's not like this big mass, untapped market. Like that to me feels like all the new media formats that just launched have a lot of potential to be, to figure out what kind of content works within them. So fleets, right, is kind of a piece of shit right now. Like it's definitely not better than Snapchat. It's definitely not better than Instagram. It's not really better than any of them. And so you're going to have to have someone who like, maybe it's inspirational quotes from like Gandhi or Alan Watts or whatever.

And that's the stuff that people love there. Like I don't know. You know, like, so I would just be looking for new mediums on big platforms where people are trying to experiment and try things out. And, you know, like I would say I love Gary Vaynerchuk and he's like a friend of mine and I got him on Twitter back in like 2006. but like he is great at basically jumping on every medium that comes out and really trying to like figure it out. And I want to be clear.

There's just to last like to close stuff like there's the big mass mediums that you can move to where there are audiences already. And then there's your own owned mediums. And that can be like community.com and so your own SMS channel or that could be substack or your own hosted, you know, email, whatever. It really just depends on the audience that you want to accrue and who you want to engage with and how. That helps. Actually, I was on mute too. Sorry, everybody got muted. Sorry.

So, all right, I'm going to move it along, though. Chris, what's your main driver? What's your main computer? Oh, my main computer? Yeah. Oh, God. It's a MacBook Pro 13-inch. It's not bad, actually.

I got it, I think before I went on my little sojourn. What do you ask? Just, I'm doing tools here. When you go on your sojourn, because I know you were a bit of a nomad for a while, aside from your computer or your phone, like, what's the one tool that you can't do without? A spatula. Are you, do you cook a lot? I do, actually.

I think you need that. Yeah. Yeah. So now I use some basket, which is great. It's sort of like a competitive to Blue Apron. and like literally I mean I swear to God to you like the two things that suck about Airbnb's is that they always have horrible spatulas if they have them at all they're like usually like really plasticy and kind of like you can't you can't flip a fried egg and that like it drives me

crazy because like my breakfast is so important to me and then you know their knives they always suck too and so there's these little great little ceramic knives that are foldable I bring those two I have little salt box where I put my mold and salt in I'm such a little I don't know what to call myself. But like I realize I'm very sensitive and very opinionate about things. But I mean that's that's that's product advice for Brian right there, which is make sure that every Airbnb has a decent spatula in there. That's product improvement right there. What's what's an app? We used to say what's on your lock screen, but what's an app on your phone that I probably don't know about that you could evangelize for or it could be recent or

it's just, you know, the app that I wouldn't know that you can't live without. Okay. You know, there's, there's two. I think there's two that I would probably recommend. Three, I'll give you three. One would be podlink. So I use pod link as a tool. It's sort of similar to Songlink. Songling had to rebrand itself for some trademark bullshit. But pod link, okay, again, because I listen to a shit ton of podcast. And I'm like, oh, I want other people to like benefit from all these things I listen to. And then I'm like, oh, what podcast? app to you use because chances are any friction that's involved in them getting to the podcast means that they won't listen to it. So Podlink allows you to do a search and then find the podcast and find the episode. And that basically creates kind of like a link in bio type solution where it has, you know, here's all the different services where you can get this podcast. And so it just generates

that for you. So if I want to like link to like tech meme right home, you know, and my partner uses Spotify, but my other friend uses Overcast, that solves that problem, right? Second in the podcast, space is an app called shuffle. And shuffle is a great app that I use to create snippets or highlights of the podcast that I listen to. So I find that very useful because, again, most people don't listen to like the podcast that I send them to listen to. So if I just create a shortcut of that, then they'll get that value. The third one is called bridge. And I don't think it's out yet in public, but it's BRDG.com. And I use it for intros. And so I'm a person who likes to make a lot of intros.

It's funny, when you ask, like, what is my driver? I thought you actually meant, like, what motivates me? And I'm like, what, it's useful. And one of the ways in which I'm useful is to connect people that should be connected who are doing similar or adjacent things. And Bridge allows me, one, to put people in contact. And then, two, what it does that I haven't seen any of that app, too, is it will send a follow-up email to each party and ask for feedback about how the introduction was.

And so that's useful for me to learn more about that. Richard's up next because I did want to I was just going to seg into like ideas about or advice about careers and professional stuff so go ahead Richard you should be unneeded thank you very much thanks Chris so my idea or what I'd like to pick your brain in this and people that want to maybe start a startup ready on the fantasy but then because of limitation because they need the income or immigration in my face for example right i'm in a job visa and i need to keep my 95 and then it becomes hard to do it after work and then on the weekends i mean if you really want it i guess you can do it right but sometimes you just get comfortable

and i love my job and i learn you know but i do have these fantasy of someday starting something you know and so i don't know if you've heard stories with other people like how do they do it or do you set yourself on time or any advice on that right like people don't want to start a startup but need to keep a 95 This is, it's so, it's so tough because it really, I guess I kind of look at like the, what are they called when there's a bunch of stars in alignment. They're called, consolations. Thank you. Yes. So if I were to provide advice, it would be to look at the constellation that that person is in, whether it's with their personal relationships, whether it's with family, if you're a parent or a parent to plants or to dogs or whatever animals, you know, children.

any of those different things. And then also kind of like, what are your personal goals in terms of or needs even? And maybe, you know, do sort of an inventory or documentation of that to see, like, like, why do you want to do this other project? Like, what is motivating you to do it? Is it just that you want to have a side project? You want to have a side hustle. Is it that you're bored?

Is it that like you want to work with other people? Or is it that you want to make more money? Or is that you want to like choose your own adventure and, you know, not work for anybody else? Like there's all sorts of different motivations and reasons, right? Like it sounds like, at least with what you described, you have something that's, you know, pretty comfy, pretty comfortable. One, and it's not just based on the like horoscopes and signs, but, you know, our personalities are kind of set based on kind of like when we were born in the year. I'm a Capricorn.

And so like I tend to really like want to make things happen and get things done and to manifest them. But I'm also like incredibly distracted. And so I feel like I'm probably like a horrible example to emulate. And yet I still live my life. and I'm still surviving. And so there are at least some lessons in there. The reason why I say all this is because, you know, you may have this like comfortable life and it's good.

And you, you know, may feel like, oh, I made it or something. The question then to me, again, based on this is where I get into like the, like astrological stuff is how would you feel in five years from now looking back if you didn't actually make a change? And depending on your disposition, you may be like, well, whatever, I just need to get done, what I need to get done now, and I need to keep that going. and so then that type of thinking doesn't actually work for you.

But for other people who are able to be a little bit more of like dreamers and to think about, yeah, actually five years in the future, if I haven't actually left to do my own thing or I haven't started, I'm probably even less likely to leave because now I'm actually like really responsible for some kids or I'm really responsible for my partner or like, well, my parents are like, you know, in the situation. So to me, I feel like it's trying to get approximate sense for how reality is going to unfold for you

and to anticipate that and think about it. and really put yourself in that situation, and then almost work from a position of regret or loss. And so that's one approach. Chris, I'm sure you're aware, but listeners, if you're not aware, there's that famous regret minimization framework that Jeff Bezos used to decide he was going to start Amazon.

And obviously, you know, that's like going all the way to the stratosphere and using an example. But, I mean, that's literally, I think his quote was, when he left, he was making good money on Wall Street. He was working for a quant firm. He could have been a billionaire at this point from starting a hedge fund or whatever.

But the internet came along and his regret minimization framework was, I will always regret it if I don't check out this internet thing while it's new and hot and things like that. So that's one way to think about it is if I can't, if I don't do it now, am I unlikely? I say that to people about having kids when they're like, is it the right time? Is it the wrong time? And at least for kids, I always say there's no. never a right time. But if you put it off, you could never do it. And it's almost like, you know, look, you got to let life happen sometimes. I don't know. So again, like on that front,

it would be very, I think, regrettable, at least I would think somewhat universally, if you are responsible for a family or for other people and you shirk your financial responsibilities and you let everything go and it all crashes and burns. And, you know, it's one thing if you're like a solo person and you can go moving with your parents or your siblings or cousin or, you know, whatever. But if you don't have those obligations, then just like in the Bezos case, it's like, think about what is holding you back and whether it's fear or whether you want things to be into like this perfect situation. There is none.

There is no perfect situation, whether it's for kids or whether it's for starting something new. It's really just what is the thing that you did today that moved you closer to achieving that outcome or goal? And which is a way to answer your question. It could literally be 10 minutes. I was thinking that this morning, I was like, I started doing yoga this year, which is, which is good because, like, I'm so sheltered in place and my gym is closed and it's like horrible and, you know, everyone is atrophying and I have my cocktails, et cetera.

And I was like, you know, if I just spent five minutes every morning like with a kettlebell, like I'd probably get like a really nice booty. And granted, no one like would really appreciate it except for me. But nonetheless, like five minutes of a kettlebell every day gets me much further closer to having like a nice booty than not doing five minutes a day. So if you want to start a company or you wanted to like start your own thing, I don't care if it's five. Like basically like what happens is those five minutes turn into 10, turned into 15, turn into however many. So I think it's more just giving yourself a permission to be like, you know, fuck it.

Like this isn't going to start itself. It's on me. I'm the boss of myself. Therefore, okay, I'm going to hire myself to do that. There's also an insanely good TED talk by Tim Urban about inside the mind of a, it's called inside the mind of a procrastist, a master procrastinator. Oh, I have one of those for sure. Right, but also, if you've never seen it, at the very least, watch the last two minutes

of that talk, because it'll absolutely blow your mind. And it speaks to this idea of getting off the pot, shitting or getting off the pot and actually making the leap and things like that. Real quick, can I shoehorn one in here? Because my question to you is sort of kind of drilling down on this idea of what to do and when to make the leap. If you sit down with somebody that's 25, 26, and they say to you, Chris, should I go off and do it myself or should I go work for Facebook or Apple or whatever?

You've run the gamut in your career. Do you have a philosophy on that? I know, obviously, it could be personal, obviously, you know, person specific. But if it was do it yourself, be an entrepreneur or go be with the best team, whether I'm not saying you have to go work for Facebook, but whoever's the best team out there and join that team. What's your philosophy? If I were to go back now probably 15 years and have a conversation with my younger self, the thing that I would encourage myself to really focus on would be to lose the chip on my shoulder

and open myself up to more vulnerable moments of unknowingness in order to learn in really tough situations. And I say that because I was independent. it for a long time until I think 2010. And I worked for myself and I've done my own startups because I was resistant to the idea of selling out. And literally, I wrote a blog post that you can read about joining Google where I was like, I've sold out to the man. I've like gone corporate. Like that's it guys. Like I'm done. Like you can't trust me anymore. And it was half tongue and cheek, but it was also half, it's sort of like, you know, when Trump says things, like, you know, he's actually talking about himself. Like in a way, I was like, I've, I've, I've,

I've let you down, I've let myself down. I haven't figured out how to do it myself because I'm so allergic to money. And I wish I had really noticed those things that I was averse to or afraid of and really become more inquisitive about them as opposed to judgmental. And so the reason why I bring this up is because, you know, if you have a parent that worked at a big tech company, then going to work for a big tech company may not teach you that much. Whereas, you know, if or you have a parent in, you know, law enforcement or law or something, Like, you've been around it, you have a sense for it.

So I would suggest moving towards a divergent set of experiences where you can learn more, where the delta and the gulf between what is familiar versus the unknown is greater. And part of that is about, and this is what I learned from my nomadic journey last year, was I left having a lot of shame and doubt and, like, just distaste for myself. And I went to 25 different cities and countries. what I learned in the process was kind of like seeing what was consistent in each of those different places. And what was consistent in each of those places turned out to be me. And so what was left after I went to all these different environments and interacted with all these different people and all

these different cultures and all these different languages was a real centering in myself. And like, I'm able to come and like have these conversations now because I'm not as embarrassed by myself. Like there are some good parts. So if I already go back and talk to like a 25 or 26 year old, I'd be like, what are the parts of you that feel like you need to defend or that you're not ready to, like, show to the world? And how can you learn more about them and expose them to yourself so that they don't hold you back? Because the reality of starting any company or anything that's great is going to push you up against so many of your boundaries and so many of your limitations, and you're going to have to go through them that you actually have to be pushing yourself harder than going with the familiar. So I think that's how I would structure that conversation.

We're getting into the hippie-dippy stuff now. Where do you get your inspiration from? And that could be it's in the shower or I go for a run or I microdose. Is there a hack that you have for getting ideas and like getting your juices cooking on something? I mean, in some ways, like psychedelics have been very useful and great, you know, in a way because they allow me to see my thinking and to see the rigid. Like some of the things that I've talked about so far in terms of relationships, it's, I find when I previously have used them, it's kind of like, you know, pulling a, I want to say a blueberry bush, like out of the ground and then like shaking the dirt out of the roots. That's kind of what happens. And then you see kind of like the amazing structure of what's actually there as opposed to all the stuff that's kind of barnacled on over time. So that's been very helpful for me to allow me to let go of certain thoughts that I thought were very important and we're quite like, I think, rigid. And it's, again, given me that sense of grace or forgiveness when it comes to being like, oh, wow, I was actually really wrong about that.

Like, I really need to, like, learn new things about this. So, but that isn't something that is like a regular experience. It's something that has been an experience. Otherwise, like I said, I mean, I have my friends and my friends of the podcasts. And so I learn a lot from all sorts of different sources. I just like to observe. I like to see people, like to see people doing things and try to figure out what's going on. Along those lines, what was the framework we came up for this one?

It's not to inspire you, but to maybe keep you grounded or calm you down. What were the choices? Exercise, meditation, chemicals, legal or otherwise. what do you do to stay level or relax? So as maybe you can sense, I'm a very cerebral, verbal person, and I spend a lot of time in my mind. And one thing that my partner has really taught me and helped me to become more aware of

is to do a better job of embodying like myself. and that might mean going for a walk or cooking or using other aspects of my sort of embodied intelligence that don't really get used when I'm in like sort of like the information field and like, you know, working with things and, you know, doing the whole minority report, you know, type of like matrix experience. So I think it's that. I think it's when you, I had this experience last night where I probably had one too many two drinks and because I got this amazing new Monkey 47 Distillers variants of their gin that just came

out. And anyways, I found myself getting angry on the internet. Like, it normally doesn't happen because, like, you know, I've done some meditation and I'm kind of like self-aware and I'm like, oh, right, I'm becoming an asshole. Like, I probably should step away. But I wasn't stepping away. And I just kind of like getting more and more angry. And I know this is going to sound so, so trite to, you know, people listening. But I posted this tweet about these people that have reached out to me to try to get their monor names on Instagram. I saw that. Yeah. And I was, I was, I was like, I was like ready to like blame and shame and say this whole thing's fucked up and stupid and I want to burn the whole thing down because I'm like, why do you motherfuckers keep

coming to me like to ask for some bullshit where like you want these like usernames that mean nothing to nobody anywhere. Why are you spending your life on this and why are you talking to me? Leave me the fuck alone. And I got really angry and I don't normally get angry. And like I just, I realize that, uh, there are certain things that really trigger me. And I don't like being lied to. I don't like bullshit.

And I just want you to fucking own up to what it is that you want. And if you want to make some money off of your goddamn stupid usernames, then just tell me, bro, like, I can make 500k off this in a minute. You know, like, I just need to use you to get to the people that you know so I can make that money. I'm like, cool. Like, fuck off, but no. Like, but trying to come at me and like, oh, like my girlfriend's account could compromise. And so what can I do to like, you know, I'm like, hmm.

You know how many requests I get like that? Like, anyway, so to stay level, I just like get back into my body. show the fuck down just like shake it up does that mean unplug do you ever unplug yeah yeah actually I'm actually so I will say that

one of my secrets is going to Hawaii Hawaii is a great place for me to go where whatever it is with the time zones the world has kind of gone to sleep and I just don't feel any need to like stay up to date with everything when I'm in the Bay Area and I'm in San Francisco it's a competitive place and I feel like everyone's like

it's just like the energy like it's different than New York. New York is kind of like a Coke environment, whereas like the Bay Area is kind of like, oh, like, let's figure everything out. And yeah, yeah. And so on the one hand, like I kind of thrive in that because I love that because I love like being in my mind and I love being clever, but it's probably like not super sustainable. So I do go for a walk every day. Like I said, I do some yoga. Cooking is very important to me. So I break up the things that I do. It's like I'm just like on the computer all the time. I feel like that would lead to a very boring version of myself and I'm already spending a lot of time, you know, kind of in this world. See, I, I, I, I,

I've come to peace in the last few years with the fact, especially with doing the show, that I never unplug. I don't know how you do it. And that's okay for me. I mean, this isn't about me. But you know what I can say is that, because I can think of two specific cases, when I'm about to do something stupid on the internet, I DM you and you talk to me down. That's, you're my solution for that. If I forced you to tell me a book that you insist everyone should read, and it could be a design book, it could be a philosophy book, it could be a life book,

it could be Catcher in the Rye, I don't care. If there was one book that you would, if you were king of the world, you'd make everyone read, what would it be? And it's like the Tim Ferriss, like, you know, what billboard would you have in like Times Square? And I'm kind of like, wow, I would invent one where everyone could see a personalized message so that it would be the thing that they need to see then. But you know what? So I listened to, there was a great podcast that I just listened to with James Bishara

and Alan Watts, which just came out, which is, I think, below the line. And it was like really, really clever. Like he basically sort of, anyways, you should go listen to it. We can drop a link. Oh, yeah. Remind me of that because I actually, we're running ads on that show. And James is another one that would be a good candidate for this. But anyway, so send me that link and we'll put it in the show notes.

Go ahead. Okay. It'll actually be a pod link. And I have, oh, we didn't even talk. about it, but like I have the most amazing Alfred setup, which we'll talk about at some point, I'm sure. It's great. So I can get, like, I have people build things for me because I'm not really a builder. Was it below the line? That's what's happening. Anyways, I really enjoyed Alan Watts's the wisdom of insecurity. That was really valuable to me. That would be a book that I would recommend.

I would also recommend, and this is more personal, and so it's more a matter of whether or not this challenge or issue speaks to you, but I read a book called Passionate Marriage, which not really like looking at the title, what it taught me about was codependence and codependency in relationship, and I didn't know that it was a thing. And I realized how much my own decision making had become fraught because it was commingled with my previous partners like thinking and her judgment. And that really stifled my individuality. And it it led to a lot of fights. So that was a very, like, freedom-enhancing book to realize that what you want to aspire to

in a relationship is interdependence as opposed to codependence. So in terms of life-changing, that was really, really important to me. And, yeah, I mean, again, any of the Esther Perel books, I think, are great, whether it's meeting in captivity or state of affairs is really great. All of our podcasts are great. I actually, I mean, I do have a reading list about, you know, like, non-monogamy and whatever, but it's more just like, you know, explore those topics as opposed to, again, be dogmatic about, you know, anything.

Like, if you're in a monogamous relationship, awesome is working, awesome. Like, I, 1,000% support that. To bring this sort of to a landing, I always say to people that there's two things that you can't, there are no hacks for, and that's either being lucky or being smart. If you had to choose lucky or smart, where would you come down? smart I think I want to

and this is maybe more a sense of my need to have some control over things I would need to know what's going on like if things are not working out I would need to have some awareness I mean I like the idea of being lucky but if I were unaware of how lucky I am and I didn't have an awareness of either like that privilege

or I feel like I could be a dick really easily and I don't want to be a dick so all right well here's the last one and here's how here's how i've decided we're going to do this i'm going to give you i'm going to give you rapid fire and then you give me the the either or one that we talked about at the end okay so um elvis or beetles beetles uh beetles or stones beetles teupac or biggie two puck coke or pepsi coke iOS or android iOS or android iOS or Mac or PC? Mac.

Star Trek or Star Wars? Star Wars. PlayStation or Xbox. Xbox. What we need to do is come up with a framework for like where that puts you, almost like the astrological sign. If we ask everyone those same questions, and then it's like, well, you're a chaotic neutral because...

Yeah. But then what's the one that you... Sketch your figma? Yeah, sketch or figma. So make your argument for Sketch or Figma, which one? I'm a big fan of Sketch. Probably because it's familiar to me. However, Figma is like the future.

So I find this like a very interesting dichotomy. And I guess going back to what I was saying about challenging yourself, like, Figma, or sketch is like a beautiful tool. It has like a nice sort of plug-in architecture. It's moving some stuff to the web, but it's still very much a desktop application. Whereas Figma, as they say, is browser first. And in terms of collaboration and in terms of where things are going, like, we are in like an interesting era.

We have the software that we design and build is like still represents maybe like the view or the perspective of a team of how an interface should look and behave and be beautiful and so on. And I think software in the future becomes a lot more adaptive, a lot more malleable, a lot more algorithmic. And so just in the way that Google is. When I search for something on Google, I see one set of results, you see something else. And so in a similar way, the way in which we use apps, which even the idea of an app, I think, goes away to some degree when we have app clips and we have different fragments of software that appear to us. Figma is going to be allowing people to, I guess maybe, I should say maybe web-based design collaboration will be the way in which the best teams produce.

the best outcome. And sketch still very much is about creating an artist tool that creates beautiful things that are kind of set by a hierarchical order. And maybe those two things will coexist. And so I think I like sketch because of the control that it gives me, but I definitely see the productivity that teams get out of Figma. And I know that that's really where this is going to go. Unfortunately, I'm not qualified to have any whatsoever. But for those of you that tuned in to hear that sort of stuff. There you go. Chris,

we're going to end with this one because this used to work for me on the Internet History show. What are you most excited about right now? And it can be anything from, we're three months away from vaccine to, you know, O'Mallek told me he got into photography. It could be your latest project or whatever.

What are you most excited about in life right now? I think I'm both really really. excited and also I have some trepidation that for the first time in a while I really don't have a good sense for where things are going to go next year. I don't know what's- For you personally or the world? Yes. Yes. I don't understand what's happening with social media. I don't understand the conversations that are happening in Congress. I don't understand the way in which a Trump administration ending will shift things. I don't understand how a vaccine will or won't change things. I don't understand the timing in terms of people's relative fatigue, you know,

with this pandemic and how that changes things globally. You know, there's going to be some people who either get vaccinated and want to go out in the world. But then if you don't wear a mask, then you're breaking the social contract. If you do wear a mask, then, you know, it's like, oh, you know, you're with them or something. So that polarization is going to continue for some time. And I just worry that for at least, you know, until 2020, we're in this no man's land, you know, with a new administration that's going to behave in a very different way. And so on the one hand, I'm very excited because that means there's a lot of really interesting, promising things that can happen where different voices that have different perspectives can come to the fore and help us through. On the other hand, there's going to be a lot of forces that recognize the power of these platforms and recognize the power that they had when Trump was in power. and they're going to want to persist that. And that concerns me greatly because those people are now

in Congress or in the Senate and they're going to be creating rules that maybe are about antitrust, but not from a historical, let's do the right thing and lead the world perspective, but let's penalize our enemies and politicize the state. And I don't know what that looks like. I don't know where that goes. And that concerns me greatly. Now, normally that's where I would cut it and be like, thank you, Chris, for coming on. But one more thing. Which is you're officially the ombudsman for the podcast. So, and I know that you were the subject of this interview, but as the ombudsman, how do you think that went as an office hours episode?

I mean, hopefully, like, it really is more about, like, the listeners and the folks who are here. And if this was interesting, I mean, I felt this was very self-indulgent. So I really appreciate you guys listening to me drone on about myself. I want to be useful. I want to be, you know, interesting. So, like, let me put this to you. Let's say I said in three weeks, Reed Hoffman is going to be in the chair that you're in.

And I got Reed Hoffman to go off on stuff like that. Would that be interesting? Yeah. So what I will say is that I think you and I have the ability to, like, riff on a bunch of different topics. Be more personal. But that's what I'm saying is I want to try to poke people enough that they can be like, tell me what.

works for you. Tell me what your, you know, biggest failure, biggest, I want to be a little more personal than just what was in the news this week, you know? Yeah. For someone like a Reed Hoffman or someone who was like working, you know, like, and they have a company or a job or something, it's hard. No, no, no. What I was going to say was if you could get more drilled into a specific conversation that they had in the last two or three days, that you allow, you. us to get into like their office or into their head or into a dilemma that they experienced. Like to me, I think that would be kind of interesting because the opportunity with, you know, so one, like tech meme is interesting because it provides a broad gamut of all the, like more

than 16 billion colors or whatever it is, you know, and whatever we're at now. I don't know. There's always more, you know, of the tech world. And so that, you know, panoply of things is what makes tech. meme and the tech meme podcast, great. To then talk to the people who are actually making those stories and are behind the kind of aggravated headlines and to humanize them through a momentary experience that they had, I think would be really interesting. So, for example, if you had Jack Dorsey here, like, I would be fascinated to know what was the training that he went through to be able to field

dumbass questions from Ted Cruz, right? Yeah, good example. Like, is he meditating, you know, 48 hours beforehand? Like, is he, you know, drinking kombucha, you know, like, like, you know, fisting in or like, whatever, like, I don't, whatever that is. It would be interesting to know how do you prepare yourself for testimony with someone who doesn't believe in science? And, you know, the other motivation for this, you know, to go behind the curtain is that there are people that I've had conversations with, and these are people who have entire

PR teams and comms teams where it's like, oh, they would love to come on and talk to you, but they can't because they can't talk about anything that they're doing right now. So this is also, I'm trying to explore a way to have an avenue for people to, that are at companies that are doing things right now that are publicly traded where they can, I'm interested in learning about them. And so I don't necessarily need to be the newsmaker. And so trying to find an avenue where I can do that and still have their comms team sign off on it and their lawyers sign off on it. basically.

Yeah, I mean, I think you're right, right? Because, like, if you talk about the frameworks, you talk about how they think, you talk about, like, maybe how they're thinking has changed. You talk about what's new as a result of the world environment that we find ourselves in. Those might be safer areas than specifically what they're working on or plans or, you know. Or also, and you know this too, like getting them away from the PR speak. Like, there are certain questions that I can ask any certain very powerful people where they've got pat answers down.

so I'm not going to get anything other than the, so I'm just trying to find ways, not to ask them safe questions, but to ask them questions that are off the beaten path that might be a little more revealing without getting them into trouble, you know. I mean, I think part of it is maybe also tapping into the way in which they envision the future and why they envision it that way. Right, right. One of the questions I think that I've been hearing lately on some podcasts is sort of like, you know, if you had a magic wand to change this one thing, then it would be X.

Or if, you know, what is the one thing that people misunderstand about your business? or about your action over the last six months. Or things like that, to try to dig into, there's the perception and the reality, and there's how they kind of feel that, right? Because one thing that I will say is, like, when I went to Google, it was so irritating,

and yet we couldn't do anything about it when the press would cover certain things that we were doing, like, let's say, on Google Plus, and they would get it totally wrong. And I'd be like, oh, that's like not, what are they talking about? Like, they didn't talk to anybody. They just like making them sound.

Like, it's literally, that was like literally thick news. And so are there things like that where they can maybe split the difference a little bit to provide a little bit more color to say, well, actually, yes, that was the reporting, but this is really the consideration that was going on. Or really, like, here's something that you haven't considered about, you know, what it takes to make the M1 silicon and how long we had to like, you know, and the amount of money that we invested in the fabs to make that possible.

And it was only possible in this time frame. Like, I don't know, you know. Well, listen, that was indulgent of me. but I do want feedback on this and like if this was a little too loose, a little too, or if this was, you know, compelling to try to dive into other things. But listen, I'm willing to be self-indulgent on this podcast. I believe we're going to have a weekend bonus episode

sometime in the next few months with a scientist about the whole Omorama thing. Remember that like space rock that came by that down kind of thing might have been a UFO? So there's a book coming out of the, and like he's a like from heart or some stuff, and that'll have nothing to do with tech, but it's my show, and so we're going to do it. Thank you all for participating, and I do encourage feedback, and thank you, Chris, and I love you all. Yes, thanks for staying up. Later, everybody.