Diversity, Design and Speaking Machine with John Maeda

Ronald: Hello, I’m here joined again with my co-host, Kathy, and we are talking to John Maeda. Hi, John. How are you?

John: Hello, Kathy and Ronald, good to see you here.

Kathy: Pleasure to meet you.

John: Or hear you here, I guess, if this is a podcast. There we go.

Ronald: Well, we can see each other. John, you have a fascinating background. There are so many keywords that are linked to your name. We talk design, machine learning, security, and way more, Automattic, so I’m not quite sure where to start with you, but maybe you’d like to introduce yourself a little bit, where you are now, and maybe some of the key projects you’ve worked on in the past.

John: Well, I’m chief technology officer of Everbridge. We are a risk management info-tech company, and that’s been for the last two years because I felt this pandemic thing like all of you, and I felt like, wow, I want to get closer to the dark parts of the stack, not just cybersecurity, but just physical security, but if you rewind back, I was an Automattic, I love Woo, woo. I was at Publicis working on digital transformation. Before that, I was in the Valley where I heard about remote work for the first time, and then went to work at Automattic. That was a wonderful three years, and I’ve just been trying to learn like us all. I think that’s a neat thing about the WordPress ecosystem, learning is appreciated.

Automattic, open source and the impact

Ronald: Your time at Automattic, was that the first time you worked on open source or did you contribute before that?

John: Well, I’ve been writing code before we had that term open source, we just gave it away to each other. So, I remember that and I used to work at MIT where I would see Richard Stallman, the open source coach. So, I was part of that world but never really part of a project. So, when I learned that WordPress is like this wonderful forest that grows all over the Earth and it connects so many people across so many different interests. There’s a squirrel, there’s an acorn, there’s a big tree, there’s a palm tree, it’s such a diverse ecosystem.

Ronald: It’s nice how you put a different view on WordPress. Your time at Automattic, what did you do there and what influences did you have on what maybe currently is still active?

John: Well, I don’t think I did anything at all. I just did my job to corral people, maybe nudge them to do different things, but I like to note that such incredible people… When you have such good people you don’t really have to do anything but get the pizza. So, I think that just seeing Gutenberg come out of the ground and then I remember I was at a WordCamp where there were two theme developers who were really upset because, if you remember at the time, it was going to change their whole business model, and then they were really mad at me because they felt that I had a part of it, so we had a long conversation in the hallway at a WordCamp and in the end we hugged each other, so there was that.

So, getting to watch that come out of the ground, it was a lesson in resilience because the WordPress world has different camps, and Matt is really the mayor of that entire world and I like how he doesn’t push, he just nudges, and so that nudging is what I did for the design space and also I was passionate about inclusion because when I was in the Valley, I could see the disparity. And so, Matt was so kind to let me push it even further, inclusion as a theme in tech in general, and we got a lot of early work down in that space, I think.

Fostering innovation with a diversity of ideas

Kathy: I was going to say, in one of your WordCamp talks, you talked about diversity of ideas and how that fosters more innovation. Could you speak to how you saw that happening at Automattic?

John: Well, I’ve been noticing that there’s all this great research on diverse boards and diverse leadership teams and all of that, but I’ve got to tell you, I was invited to talk to one of the biggest, most important tech companies, this famous CEO and their top 30 reports, and I walked in and it was all guys and one woman in HR. And I was like, “How are you going to tell a successful organization that diversity matters? Because it seems like everything is going okay right now.” So, to me that signaled how making the point around diversity as more about ideas that can come from people of different ages, different cultural backgrounds, and then gently move into the gender space and the gender spectrum space, let’s go there.

Let’s gently move into the underrepresented minorities, people of color, let’s go into there. I think starting from that larger umbrella is an easier way to begin the conversation, but I remember when I would do that, there would be people who are offended because I’m not taking the movement seriously at the different sub levels, which I understand because, who wants to be microaggression really to tears? However, my approach was to start at the… It’s like traversing a tree, so I started at the root node. It was like breadth-first search versus depth first.

Shallow design vs deep design

Kathy: Interesting, you talked a little bit in one of your talks about shallow design versus deep design, and I’d like to unpack that a little bit with you. In the WordPress space, a lot of people are just installing a theme and getting their content in there and boom, all of a sudden they have a site. And, that lends itself towards more what you talked about in terms of shallow design. And, I wanted to address that in this open source space where you can get free software, you can get free themes, you can get free everything, but does that lend itself to better design?

John: This is a really hard question and problem to answer, so thank you for bringing up, Kathy, because I thought about it a lot. I’ve been wrong in the past too thinking about it, and then I’d get something blowing up at me because of what I said. So you get data, it’s like user research. So like, “Oh okay, maybe don’t say that.” “Oh okay, how about that?” “No one really cares. Oh, don’t say that.” So, the problem with shallow design is it makes people feel that the people who do the decorative work as shallow. I’m not shallow, I’ve trained to make the CSS work this way with a flexbox, and come on, that’s not shallow just so that it flips around and then I’m not shallow. I care about the typography. So, what if it isn’t performant? Actually a problem as we know, this is me expressing myself.

And so, shallow design is probably a misframing on my part. And, then I would move to decorative design, which some people can’t stand, but there are an incredible number of decorative designers who are proud of illuminating manuscripts, which I think is what CSS is. It’s illuminating a manuscript, either both visual and underneath. So, I think it is a decorative in all the good ways you would say that. I think deep design however, is going into the core of how it works. You mentioned your background, Kathy, in security. That’s great, wonderful theme, but did you design it to be secure? And it’s like, “No, I didn’t because I don’t care because I’m making this beautiful website. Thank you very much, Kathy.” That misses stuff, so deep design is going to the core and starting the core going outwards. I think shallow design starts something outside and tries to dig in. I think both approaches are dependent upon how much budget you have and who’s on the team.

Kathy: It almost seems like the shallow design is designed almost as an afterthought. It’s like, “Well, we want to develop this thing and we want it, of course, to look beautiful,” but deep design is almost like design first. What are we trying to do here? And with security, it’s baked in from the beginning, all of the ingredients includes security, includes design, and includes design that dovetails to the user experience.

John: I love how you have pinpointed the challenge because if you are engineering first and you built the bridge and the bridge stands in the wind, it’s like, “Oh my gosh, the bridge works.” It’s like, “Now let’s make it less bumpy. Let’s make it so more cars could go through.” So, that’s the shallow design, which is very important and has become an afterthought. That is common because building the bridge is hard stuff, but I think that… I’m so moved by the WordPress community because it really taught me how great customer support happiness engineering. If it’s hard to understand a happiness engineer will make you happy, so you can understand what you didn’t understand, and now you know how to build the bridge, what metal to pick. And, next time around when you’re asked to do shallow design, you’re going to say, “Whoa, I think you are missing a security first piece of steel in it.” Like, “Whoa, where’d that come from?” “Well, it’s because I’m a deep design person.”

Ronald: Some interesting thoughts there. I loved it. Can I take that one step further and bring it back to some e-commerce?

John: Yes, I’d love to do that.

Shallow design and eCommerce

Ronald: E-commerce use cases. So for example, am I right to suggest that a customer might come up with a brief or a very shallow design? It’s how it looks, what the customer would see, and the agency developer would take that brief, but actually take that a step further into functionality. Is that how I should translate that?

John: Well, if you’re going to go there and you’re bringing the customer, then it starts to change because now if you’re doing it for open source and the good of the ecosystem versus I have a paying customer, I want to make a living… Oh my gosh, I remember I was at a meetup in Miami with Matt and then Matt got up and did his thing, talking about stuff, and then I was sitting in the second row and there were two people who… I’m not sure how you categorize people older or younger, but they were definitely not Gen Z. And after Matt gave us a talk, the woman got up and said, “Matt, because of you, me and my husband are retired. We can now make extra income thanks to how the WordPress ecosystem helps us do this work.” And I remembered, wow, it’s like WordPress feeds so many people.

So going back to the customer, the problem with the engineering first approach is that you haven’t talked to the customer, you’re fighting physics, and the physics defy your gravity, so you defy gravity and build that airplane. You did it, amazing. And then you’re like, “Maybe I’ll put some paint on it. Let’s do that shallow design on it.” “Oh, great. Now I’m going to try to give it to someone, it’s free, easy, but I’m going to charge money for it?” So, I’ve heard this called supply-side product creation versus demand-side product creation.

And so, the supply-side method is faulty because if you build it, they will come. The demand-side methodology is asking, “Well, what do you want?” “Oh, you want a decorative, ornate, whatever, you’re going to pay me for it? You got it.” The customer is telling you what they want, and the question is on the supply-side. You’re trying to negotiate supply-side and demand-side to optimize their relationship, and that’s where I think the neat thing about the switch to Gutenberg is it enabled the supply-side to make different calculations about what could they make in one amount of time, so that I can actually meet the demand-side desire, and I can be in many cases secure by design because before I would find parts and hope it works, but looking at Kathy, a lot of parts are designed to be used elsewhere now because of the Gutenberg ecosystem that lets you map supply-side, demand-side differently.

Ronald: I was not expecting this answer and I was going to take it, for example, developers or designers or people working in WordPress struggle with answering a question or a demand or a brief and to apply some of this mythology to that work, but I have to think about it now, what you’ve said, it’s not easy at all, but incredibly insightful.

John: Well, most of tech coming from the bridge-building world, the bridge just needs a touch of paint, and there you go, and design is good at painting, I want to be very clear, there are incredible designers who can decorate your house, who can create things that you like to sit in or wear. That’s a real craft, but when tech is involved, the technology is no longer static. It’s like this amorphous thing, so there isn’t a lot of good sense for people who like to paint the outside of things because this thing inside just changed.

So, I think the WordPress ecosystem, like every part of tech has a challenge for designers who discovered that, “Oh, you mean you don’t need me to design the UI, the outside?” You need to design the UX, and I think that shift in the WordPress ecosystem is something that you can see happening over time. However, you always need a good looking icon. I cannot discount that importance, I’m serious. So, there are people who will always be comfortable being UI designers, and there are some who are trying to be UX designers, but engineers cannot tell the difference between the two, and that’s the problem.

Design web-based experiences

Kathy: It’s so interesting because the way something looks and feels doesn’t necessarily mean that that’s your experience of it. You talked a lot about Apple and how their experience design comes first in terms of how they’re thinking about their product. I’m really curious, as we’re talking to a lot of people who are trying to design web-based experiences in the commerce space, so that there’s an immersive experience that gets an end user into the place where, I have to buy this thing, what kinds of thinking could someone who’s maybe just getting started doing their first e-commerce project or somebody who’s building e-commerce for other people, what types of things should they be thinking about in terms of that experience?

John: Well, when I was at Publicis, we created a system called LEAD, L-E-A-D: light, ethical, accessible, data-full. And so, these four facets are intrinsic to deep design of a product. Light meaning super fast. Everyone loves when it’s fast. It’s like a thing. E is ethical, everyone wants to know the provenance of, is this good code, is this secure, accessible as champion in the WordPress ecosystem, not only for people who have challenges, but just people like myself who are dumb on some days, can’t figure it out? Accessible, easy.

And then lastly, my favorite, data-full. Data-full is a word that I created because I wanted a word that sounds like beautiful like, “Oh my gosh, that’s so beautiful. Oh my gosh, that’s so data-full.” So, it didn’t really stick, but it’s out there, internet, but data-full things are ones that use user data, use customer research, use live data to improve. So, I think that when you think of e-commerce, ask yourself, is it fast? What are its ethics? Is it using dark patterns or not? Because sometimes you have to make a buck and that’s not good too, accessible. Is it easy and accessible and data-full? Are you just making this up on the fly and not considering user research or scale data approaches? That’s LEAD.

Kathy: That’s amazing, I wrote that down, very, very helpful.

Ronald: And I’m going to use the word data-full, that’s beautiful.

John: Oh good, it’s like, “That’s so data-full.”

Ronald: Let’s make sure it gets an entry into the dictionary. Nice work on that, I love it

Thanks to our Pod Friends Nexcess and PeachPay

Learn how to speak machine

Kathy: That’s perfect. I want to ask you about AI because you did talk about that in that WordCamp talk and then lead into How to Speak Machine because apparently from what you’ve told us in that WordCamp talked about AI. We all need to learn how to speak machine and you have a book about that. I’d like to talk a little bit about why should people get that book, what are they going to get from it, what inspired you to write it?

John: When I was in the Valley working at venture capital and design was rising, I separated design into three kinds of design: classical design, my cool glasses, design thinking, organizational consensus driving methods with Post-its, and computational design, design that uses the cloud, et cetera. I discovered that everyone understood the first two, but there’d be big question mark on people’s forehead. Computational design? What is this? So, I spent six years trying to explain to myself what I meant by it, and in the process, I ended up in the AI world because computational design, its most refined version of it is using AI machine learning, and the problem with AI machine learning, as we know, is it doesn’t use code, it uses data. There is no PHP, people helping people. It’s just pour the data in some algorithms and the data’s driving the bus, which is problematic, but also where the world is right now.

Kathy: It is where the world is right now, and more and more non-technical people are talking to computers than ever before, and just in looking at the sort Cliff Notes version of your book, a lot of the things that you talk about are things that I grew up with learning databases at a very young age. I think my uncle tortured me teaching me VisiCalc when I was young, but I grew up thinking that way, but now we have more and more people who aren’t necessarily, but they’re just thrown an iPhone when they’re five, and learning what goes on behind that I think is so critical for us to understand and to grow into a place where we can communicate better with machines. Who is this book for? Who should be reading it?

John: Well, I created two personas. One was Bob, a picture of George Clooney in that movie where he’s that business person in Up where he’s flying around and whatever, not in a good job. Bob is someone who is in the business world of sales, trying to understand this digital whatever stuff, doesn’t show up at WordCamps clearly. So he doesn’t understand, “What is this stuff? What’s coming out of Silicon Valley? I don’t get it,” so that was Bob. The other was Sandra. Sandra was a super Marissa Mayer executive, but not in tech, more in the manufacturing space, just on the rising track wanting to understand, “What is this stuff happening over in tech?” So for both of them, I wrote this book to understand the three underlying physical properties of computation and to understand the three ways it manifests in digital products that are strange, but good to know.

Hard machines vs. soft machines

Kathy: Excellent, I wanted to ask also about something you said about hard machines versus soft machines. What does that mean?

John: Well, hard machines are ones that… Because I came from hardware and when you make hardware, you can’t make a mistake. If you ship the chip inside the iPhone and it’s wrong, broken, you can’t fix it in the field. It’s an expensive recall. Soft machines are built out of code and data and they have different laws of physics, because as we know, the strangest thing about software is that, and makes it hard for design, is that you should ship it often and unfinished, which no one would ever do.

You’re making the perfect iPhone, the perfect whatever. No, it’s got to be perfect, and then we ship it. Software is like, “I want to learn, and I want to learn fast. So, I’m going to give you… Here’s a Mrs. Field cookie sample.” Is there Mrs. Fields anymore? I’m not sure. Here’s a cookie sampler. “Oh, I think I like this cookie.” “Oh, I don’t like this cookie.” “Oh, okay, maybe I should make oatmeal ginger instead, versus making 100 batches of oatmeal raisin and no one buys it.” So, I tested it early by standing in front of the Mrs. Fields shop. “Oh, hello, Kathy, Ronald. Try my cookie. Oh, you didn’t like it?” Go back in the kitchen, fix it.

John catches up on Gutenberg and blocks

Ronald: This has got Gutenberg written all over it, isn’t it?

John: There you go. Oh my gosh, so I’m wondering because I’m now further away from it, has the Gutenberg augite peaked, and is it over?

Ronald: People are enthusiastic, very excited. Kathy, part of your business that you work for has totally embraced it.

Kathy: What it’s done and I’m really blessed to be working in this space. I work on a project called Cadence and it is a block plug-in basically. It’s a theme, but it’s mostly a black plug-in that basically extends Gutenberg, and the lead developer, the founder basically saw what Gutenberg was when it was still a plug-in and said, “I can run with this.” And so, there’s this whole ecosphere of product-first designers who are building out different blocks and extending Gutenberg into this… It’s fascinating and it’s really cool, and I tell people all the time, when I first looked at Cadence, it changed my relationship with Gutenberg because I was like, “I see what we’re doing here.”

John: Wow, that’s so great.

Kathy: But, now we have advanced blocks and we have blocks with all these different settings. It has opened up this whole ecosphere and it’s not just Cadence, there’s GenerateBlocks, Stackable, Crackle Blocks, there’s all of these developers who in our developing new ways of working with blocks. It’s cool.

John: Interesting.

Kathy: It’s really fun.

John: So it sounds like in your case, Kathy, you observed that maybe there were end theme developers and theme plug-in developers, but now there’s M and M is larger now because of Gutenberg maybe? Has that happened? Sounds like probably.

Kathy: Well, it’s like you had all these page builders like Elementor and Divi and all these things that would just get slapped on top.

John: I get confused. There’s so many ways to cook the eggs.

Kathy: Right, now you have what’s happening, it’s this post page builder world where you have blocks and you can install four different block plug-ins if you want to and use different blocks from different block plug-ins and it’s all based on Gutenberg. So, Gutenberg created this platform of innovation, of building pages. So, it’s been really cool to see and I get to soak in it every day, so I’m lucky.

John: That’s so cool. Ronald, are you pro-Gutenberg? Are you good with Gutenberg?

Ronald: I’m very good with Gutenberg.

John: Which side are you on?

Ronald: I’m more excited with WooCommerce coming out with many more Gutenberg blocks because I think that’s key and that’s maybe a nice lead in to the next part.

John: Please, I’m excited.

eCommerce and the future

Ronald: To talk about e-commerce and design and maybe your vision and add a flavor of machine learning in there if you like and artificial intelligence. This is now what’s going to happen in the future, and maybe some of your personal frustrations.

John: Like I shared with in that Miami meetup where the woman got up and thanked Matt for enabling her livelihood with her retired husband to thrive. I was like, “Whoa.” So, I think of commerce systems as really lucky, a terrible word, for the pandemic to have occurred because all data shows that the reason why the Chinese were so ahead on mobile commerce is because of their avian virus, all of that stuff before 10 years ago. And so, e-commerce took off because they had to stay at home and also mobile commerce was the norm. So, I feel like WooCommerce and different activity around it is key to enabling everyone with a WordPress site or knowledge to be able to find those customers who really could never figure out how to use a Shopify or whatever. So, I like the economic opportunity.

Ronald: Especially in countries, or places in the world with underprivileged users and who maybe don’t have access to a Shopify platform or don’t have the finance.

John: And also, if you think about LEAD: light, ethical, accessible, data-full, ethical, they can look at the code if they want to and they can judge, “Are they using data the right way or wrong way?” They have the choice, and so the open source idea is so powerful because you can ask ethical questions about the code because you can change it. You can do something about it. You can be like, “Oh my gosh, this code’s bad. It’s doing bad stuff.” Are you going to do something about it? I’ll use one of Kathy’s blocks instead. It’s got better provenance. People can actually ask these questions. So, Kathy can say like, “Look at my block, look inside. Oh my gosh, there we go, security by design, zero trust. Okay. I’m good.”

Kathy: Open source is so great in terms of opening up that marketplace of ideas and marketplace of code where the best ideas and the best implementations rise to the top. So, it’s beautiful to see, and I can’t wait to see some of the stuff happening with WooCommerce adopting more of that.

John: Well, the thing that I really didn’t know, and I was very humbled by being in the WordPress ecosystem, going to WordCamps, going to meetups, just seeing how in many senses, many of the ecosystems I was participating in before were closed, I would dare say elitist tech ecosystems. And when I was able to meet so many people in the WordPress universe, in some cases, they were there at the very beginning. There’s this pride and it’s also international.

I was going to say it’s American, but it’s not. It’s so international of we did it together. And, so-and-so has been doing this and they got a better job. So, they’ve got a new job. So, I think that job creation aspect of WordPress is, I think, of one of the most beautiful things out there that I try to tell people and they don’t understand because they haven’t met the people who make WordPress the forest. So, I wish for someone who’s new to this world to go to a meetup and have that interesting moment where it’s almost like a church or something. “Has anyone ever contributed to an open source project before? Raise your hand. Oh, you haven’t. Come on, come here, you’re now going to contribute to [inaudible 00:32:58]. I think that’s so cool.

Ronald: There was a moment at a WordCamp where I met Mike Little and he shared a really nice story and it just falls right into this. So, he joined a WordPress meetup a few years after he started with Matt to create WordPress and in the room, somebody asked, “How many of you are making a living with WordPress?” And, then he turned around and so many, many hands go up, and that was a really humbling experience for him. So, I thought it’s a nice story to add to this, but it’s so true, and personally, my side of the story is exactly the same.

John: It’s such a big deal. Even people in marketing with SEO, you don’t have to be technical to make a difference to where [inaudible 00:33:53]… But, you get to contribute to the tech ecosystem, so that’s been cool. That was such a cool thing.

Ronald: Nice. John, what are you working on at the moment? What’s keeping you awake at night?

A touch on the space of resilience

John: Well, I’m really interested in how resilience is a difficult thing to achieve for organizations of any scale, that’s what I do, but I’m also interested in how important it is that we take notice of the climate, which I never thought deeply about until I entered this space of resilience. Let me give example. It’s embarrassing because I didn’t know this, but I’m sure you knew this, but I didn’t know this. And I’m like, “Oh.” Wildfires, so Kathy’s in the US, you’ve seen wildfires, it’s a thing.

Ronald, in Europe, in the UK there’s some wildfires, but Spain was lighting up. So wildfires, bad, dangerous, end of story. But it’s like, “Why do wildfires happen?” Wildfires happen because of something called fuel moisture content, which is an index used to measure if the plants are dry or wet because if the plants are dry, fuel moisture content low, it’s like catnip for a fire.

If the ground is wet, the trees are filled in water, it’ll burn as easily. So, drought creates conditions for wildfire, and so when we think of the temperature rising, it’s like that next step that is logical, but you only get the end part where the fire’s coming at you, but it was part of a sequence of Mother Nature. Another one, floods. In urban areas, we’re terrified of flash floods. Why do they happen? Because we paved the ground with concrete and there’s no place for the water to go. So, it’s like we made that situation, and so seeing the causality is more clear to me now.

Ronald: Can I add a variation to your LEAD?

John: Please.

Ronald: And, say the for ethical may be also add environment to highlight that part.

John: Very nice.

Ronald: In your power, what ideas do you want to put forward for people to become more conscious of it and maybe it’s your own clients?

John: Well, the neat thing about working in the disaster critical event space is you understand a simple fact, that is that a bad thing happens. There is time before the bad thing happens and time after bad thing happens. There’s a boom, before the boom, during the boom, after the boom. Most of us work during the boom, fire extinguisher preparation. A few of us work before the boom, preparation like, “Oh, well this could happen, that could happen, this could happen, that could happen.”

And so, the reason why data AIML is so interesting is because no, you can have a pretty good guess of what’s going to happen. And someone said to me, “Do you mean like Minority Report and Tom Cruise or whatever?” Now think of Farmers’ Almanac. It’s like, “Wait, it rains this much every year for 100 years.” So, it’s past behavior of the Earth and people and election cycles, everything. We all have a general notion. I have a prediction, Kathy, Ronald, that it’s going to get colder in two months in Massachusetts. You’re like, “What, John? That’s impossible,” but it’s this patterns and resurfacing patterns to us can help us be ready in the pre-boom phase. That’s what I’m passionate about and focused on.

Kathy: So much of security is that incident response, planning is that preparing for, assuming that bad things are going to happen, and then having a plan and an understanding that when the boom happens, that there isn’t such a long space between the boom and your reaction to it, and that you know where to put the boom in terms of your organization’s response to it.

John: Totally, I’m so glad we have a security expert here. You know much more than me, Kathy, by the way, this is very clear. The thing I do like about this industry is realizing that digital, like your world, Kathy, the calamities are high frequency because they’re robots just flying through cyberspace and crashing into things. Physical space is slower and it’s less data. Cyberspace is like cyberspace, it’s the speaking machine world. So, I wish that people understood what’s in your head, Kathy, to understand that this world of cyber is like… When I saw Netflix’s Stranger Things, I love the upside down world because to me the upside down world is the world of computation. It’s this wizard-like world of impossible things that you cannot see, but you know it’s out there. I think that world is the world that I tried to make visible with How to Speak Machine, but it’s hard because I know what you’re talking about in Stranger Things. “What? A Demogorgon. Ah, right, for sure. Someone broke into our what? Where? Show me the lock, Kathy.”

Kathy: Wow, what an analogy.

Ronald: John, I know we could probably talk for many more hours. I’ve got so many things to ask you, but because of time… I have a favorite quote and it’s a quote that suddenly I thought of all throughout this conversation and it’s a quote by Charles Mingus and it goes like this, “Making the simple complicated is commonplace. Making the complicated awesomely simple, that’s creativity.” And, this has got your name written all over it because of the way you describe things and look at problems and how you are forcing people to think about it in a creative way to make it simple, so you can actually solve something. I really like that, so thank you so much for your contribution.

John: Thank you, that’s very kind to say. I’ve gotten more complex over time, but I do try to simplify where I can.

Ronald: Kathy, do you have a final thought to share or question?

Kathy: No, just that this has been one of my favorite conversations on Woo Vision. It was such a pleasure to meet you, John, and to ask you some of these questions. I am going to be a super fan following you from now on because I really love your thinking about technology and how people interact with it, so thank you so much for being here.

John: Oh, thank you. Thanks for teaching me new things too.