00:00:04 ◼ ► by Lauren Brantz. Lauren is a poet and illustrator, and a pretty accomplished one. She's a two-time
00:00:10 ◼ ► Emmy Award winner and a New York Times bestselling author. The Emmys came from her work on Sesame
00:00:16 ◼ ► Street, and her bestseller is Poems of Parenting, a collection of illustrated poems about the reality
00:00:22 ◼ ► of raising kids. That book started as a series of posts on Instagram, where Lauren has built a
00:00:27 ◼ ► huge following sharing her poems and illustrations, which clearly resonated enough that they have
00:00:33 ◼ ► taken on a whole new life of their own. Lauren is also the creator of Cuppy, the Good Advice
00:00:38 ◼ ► Cupcake, which she built while working at BuzzFeed, and which became one of their biggest original
00:00:43 ◼ ► characters going extremely viral. But these days, Lauren is a fully independent creative.
00:00:48 ◼ ► I wanted to talk to Lauren because I find the way that she works to be really interesting.
00:00:53 ◼ ► She is a writer and an illustrator, and I wanted to understand what that creative process actually
00:00:58 ◼ ► looks like. How do the ideas come? How does she know when something's working? And also how she's
00:01:04 ◼ ► built a career around this creativity. To me, the idea of talking to a poet was just very interesting.
00:01:10 ◼ ► How does someone structure their life to encourage this kind of creativity? That's what we're going to
00:01:16 ◼ ► get into in our conversation. Before we get started, though, there's something I wanted to mention.
00:01:20 ◼ ► Since we recorded this episode, it came to light that BuzzFeed has licensed the Cuppy character that
00:01:26 ◼ ► Lauren created to Amazon for an AI-generated animated series without Lauren's involvement.
00:01:31 ◼ ► Lauren has spoken out about this publicly and is very against the way in which BuzzFeed has gone
00:01:37 ◼ ► about all of this. Obviously, we didn't talk about it because it hadn't happened, but I will include
00:01:47 ◼ ► One last thing. Stick around to the end of the episode today because I have a new project that
00:01:57 ◼ ► Okay, so Lauren, I want to get started today by asking, what is your favorite app right now?
00:02:04 ◼ ► Something you're using on your phone or your computer that's useful for you, bringing you joy,
00:02:10 ◼ ► I'm using an app a lot, I have to say, that I was surprised I would use a lot. It's Gabby
00:02:17 ◼ ► She's a motivational speaker, and I forget how I came across her, I think, on Instagram, but
00:02:24 ◼ ► I thought I was kind of past the manifestation, trying to manifest things in my life phase
00:02:30 ◼ ► from my 20s. And she has a lot of that, but she also has so many great meditations and relaxation
00:02:37 ◼ ► techniques. And I actually go to sleep to her voice every night to the point where it's like
00:02:42 ◼ ► Pavlovian. She's like, hi, friends. And I'm like, immediately, if I've ever met her, I would
00:02:51 ◼ ► Yeah, I have some like these little sleep headphones that I use, and they play like wave noises. And
00:02:56 ◼ ► literally, as soon as I hear it, I'm done. Like, I don't think I need them anymore for sleep. But now
00:03:01 ◼ ► it's just I think maybe I would never sleep if I didn't have them. It makes me nervous. So you are
00:03:07 ◼ ► an independent author, an artist. Now, that's where you are right now in your life. But I want to talk a
00:03:13 ◼ ► little bit to kind of set some context about how we got to this point. And maybe digging into a couple
00:03:18 ◼ ► of the roles that got you to today. I'm writing understanding you worked on Sesame Street.
00:03:30 ◼ ► Working on the puppets and the props for Sesame Street. I had an internship there my senior year.
00:03:46 ◼ ► I was like in the back with like power tools I had never used just being like, I'm going to make
00:03:51 ◼ ► this work. I'm going to do this. It was so dangerous. I actually did bleed on like several
00:03:59 ◼ ► Also, it's almost like accidental, really. Like it was, you know, you were doing digital work,
00:04:03 ◼ ► you got an internship doing the physical work and then decided that was what you wanted to do.
00:04:08 ◼ ► Yeah. So I did traditional animation, which is really a lost art form, a very unnecessary degree.
00:04:13 ◼ ► So I was drawing with pencils all day. And then I started interning in both that and Jim
00:04:20 ◼ ► Henson. And it really did open up for me a new world of like ways to use your creativity to have
00:04:27 ◼ ► a positive impact on the world that wasn't just animation and storytelling. So yeah, it was surprising
00:04:36 ◼ ► And then after this point, you went back into the digital world, right? You were at BuzzFeed. Was
00:04:43 ◼ ► Yes, there was a small break. So I was doing children's books independently while I was at
00:04:49 ◼ ► Henson's. I never stopped doing them. I was doing them right out of college. And I got to a point I had
00:04:55 ◼ ► just gotten married. We went to have a family. And we really needed health insurance and like,
00:05:01 ◼ ► you know, needed to be able to provide more. So I saw a job listing at BuzzFeed for Illustrator.
00:05:09 ◼ ► And, you know, there are not a lot of jobs for illustrators within corporations. So I jumped on it.
00:05:15 ◼ ► I didn't get it the first time I interviewed and I got it the second time. And then I was there for 10
00:05:21 ◼ ► 10 years? Wow. Now, one of the things that comes up most in doing research about you is a character that
00:05:29 ◼ ► you created called Copy, the Good Advice Cupcake. How on earth did this come to be? Like, it almost
00:05:36 ◼ ► seems strange now to think that this was a thing that BuzzFeed were kind of dabbling in, like animation.
00:05:44 ◼ ► So I was there and I was drawing and writing and we started doing comics there. A bunch of the people
00:05:50 ◼ ► on my team, like Adam Ellis or comic illustrators. I was doing mostly character that was based on me.
00:05:58 ◼ ► And then Copy was kind of like an extreme version of me. Like if you took my most extreme personality
00:06:04 ◼ ► traits and put it into a cupcake, I just wanted to like shake people. And, you know, I'm not violent, but
00:06:11 ◼ ► like, you know, this is your life. Like, grab it by the horns. Tell it who's boss. And so I found a way to do that
00:06:17 ◼ ► through Copy. And, you know, went viral right away. And they were starting an animation team too. And they
00:06:25 ◼ ► were like, we should animate this character. And then there was a big struggle on how that was going to
00:06:31 ◼ ► work because it wasn't an animation studio and there wasn't a contract, this whole big kerfuffle.
00:06:37 ◼ ► But eventually, I was like, you know, I get to draw all day and I have health insurance. Like, let's just do it. And we did. And it was a web series for a long time.
00:06:47 ◼ ► Yeah. And it was very successful. There's like an Instagram account with like millions of followers. Yeah, there was products in stores, the merchandise and everything.
00:06:58 ◼ ► What did that feel like to create a character that's so popular that belongs to someone else when you're doing it in the world in which people do independent stuff?
00:07:11 ◼ ► Like, it's not like working for, as you say, like for a big animation studio where there's a big team coming together to create a character. This is you.
00:07:21 ◼ ► And it did start to like drain me after a while. And I could feel sort of the soul of Cuppy leaving because I wasn't just making it. It was, you know, we were churning it out and they're looking at numbers and it became something that wasn't me. It became like an employee.
00:07:40 ◼ ► Like, Cuppy was an employee of BuzzFeed, which isn't like, it's just the art starts to like drain away. It was tricky because I was very grateful to have a job. In any art form, it's hard to have a job where you're doing that sort of thing. And I love the people that, you know, wrote in and said, Cuppy, help them. And I loved helping people. But at the same time, it felt like my soul was being sucked out of me slowly.
00:08:04 ◼ ► Because it's like, you know, you mentioned it went viral. The reasons it goes viral is not helped to continue when you're constantly looking at analytics. Like those two things really kind of start to come into conflict with each other at a certain point. Right. And as you say, it starts to feel like Cuppy's the employee at the end of the day, which is a very strange thing to think about, but it's probably, I'm sure how it felt.
00:08:30 ◼ ► And then we get, I think, closer towards today. And the way that I came across your work, because I'm sure that many people do, especially people in my situation, having just had a kid, is through your poems on parenting. And you post those to Instagram. And you also have a book. But it started as posts on Instagram. What encouraged you to start writing them?
00:08:59 ◼ ► It was very sudden. You know, I had always been writing poetry for children. And then I'd always been writing comics for adults. And I never really gave the poetry that much thought. But one night, we all had colds, like the entire family was sick and slept in like two days. And I had finally gotten my son to go to sleep. It's like 3am or something. And so I'm in bed and I'm like, I'm going to unwind by looking at cute pictures of him.
00:09:26 ◼ ► And then he starts crying. And I was like, Oh, my God. And immediately, like, wrote a poem about it, which was the first poem I wrote for Poems of Parenting. It's like, Oh, my God, shut up. I'm trying to look at photos of you.
00:09:40 ◼ ► And from there, I just couldn't stop writing them. You know, he had to put himself back to sleep because I was like, Mommy's writing poetry now about this. So it was good because he like got a little bit of sleep training. And it all happened really fast from there, which is nice.
00:10:02 ◼ ► I was working with Miss Rachel at that time and had just kind of been like, you know what, I'm done with BuzzFeed. I've done my time on the internet. I want to take a break and work on something else. And I hadn't done anything for myself in a while. So I started posting them and I was like, I'm gonna do it every day.
00:10:19 ◼ ► So I was getting all these messages about the poems. And I was lying and I'm always lying in bed. I'm lying in bed laying in my phone. This is what I do all the time. This year's to start there. And I got this message that was like, do you ever think about publishing a book of these?
00:10:33 ◼ ► And I thought that was someone on my Instagram and like a person that wanted to know. And I was like, I don't know, I might self publish or something. Who knows? Like, thanks so much. And then I checked their profile. And it was the executive editor of HarperCollins.
00:10:53 ◼ ► Yes. And I have an agent and I'm very professional and you should talk to them. So I was like, I didn't realize that. So you said who she was and I was like, you talked to my agent for a serious conversation. And then got a book deal from there and did the book.
00:11:08 ◼ ► Yes, I was going to ask you if you had decided, I want to write a book about this, but it kind of feels like the book came to you, really, which is a fun way to think about it.
00:11:18 ◼ ► Yeah, it was nice because I've, you know, I've had books that I really felt like I kind of pushed out creatively. And then books that felt like they just came ready to go.
00:11:29 ◼ ► Once you knew this was the path, so you were going to turn this into a book, did the content of the way you were thinking about the poems, did they change? Like, did you start thinking about the more as pages in a book, then posts on Instagram? Or was it very much the same that they were easy to kind of combine in your mind?
00:11:48 ◼ ► I think either way, I was thinking of it more as poetry, no matter where it was going to go, book or online. So I didn't even think about how it would be online or anything. It was just about making good poems and art. And it ended up when I collected them all, it was very cosmic or something, but they did end up having enough for each section of growing, you know, from baby to toddlerhood. So ended up putting that in that order.
00:12:14 ◼ ► And when you're writing them, are you kind of choosing that you want to spend time to write these things? Or do they just appear to you like the first one that you mentioned? Does that tend to be the way they come about?
00:12:25 ◼ ► Yes, that's usually how I work. They kind of pop into my head. You know, there are times I've done poems where someone's like, can you write a poem about this? And they'll spend time and write it. But most of the time, they're just kind of sneezes in your brain.
00:12:44 ◼ ► Is this something you have to manage? Do you sometimes have to add funny to some things? Or do they just come to you that way? The balance?
00:12:55 ◼ ► They typically come that way. And I feel like that's a result of parenting being that way. It's such a dichotomy of feelings all the time. So beautiful, so stressful, so funny, so miraculous. So they just end up coming out like that.
00:13:12 ◼ ► Yeah, I think that that is what your work captures. And I think I imagine what resonates with so many people is that it is such a strange thing, the thing that I couldn't fully appreciate until I was in it, that you can have these, at the same time, two very, very different emotions.
00:13:31 ◼ ► And they're both equal. And it's very hard to express how you can feel both, like, angry and happy at the same time.
00:13:42 ◼ ► It's very strange. And that is what you're so great at summing up. And I'm sure that this is part of the reason why Poems for Parenting became a New York Times bestseller. Did you expect that?
00:13:57 ◼ ► So the truth is, I mean, I have vision boards with that on there. So a part of me was hoping, expecting, aiming. And it was like a big dream of mine. And so having it come true was really exciting. I don't know if that's an expectation as much as a hope.
00:14:15 ◼ ► Yeah. And I don't know how I would have felt if it didn't happen, but I probably would have been pretty bummed out.
00:14:21 ◼ ► It feels like something that it could happen, right? Like, especially because it was popular online, you hope you've kind of got a bit of a groundswell kind of thing going on that could get you to that point. Did you have to do like a big book tour and lots of engagements and all that kind of stuff as part of this?
00:14:37 ◼ ► I did a mini book tour that I, you know, put on myself because that's how it is, author life. And I did do some podcasts and things. And I told all my friends and anyone that like had any sort of following that I knew online, like, share this, please. That's about the most of it.
00:14:54 ◼ ► Does being a best-selling author help you with other things now when it comes to other books and other projects? Like, just having that attached to your name kind of open doors?
00:15:07 ◼ ► You know, I don't really know because no one's like, you know, we're giving you a steal because we see this, but I'm sure it does. I can imagine it doesn't help on some level.
00:15:17 ◼ ► And now going in this direction where, as you said, you were writing children's books, but now you're kind of writing about children for adults. Has this changed the types of things you want to make next?
00:15:27 ◼ ► Not really. I kind of go with whatever I'm most creatively excited about, like, comes up in my head. Typically, it's for children. So I'm actually back on that path. But I also have a book for adults coming out again next year. So I really like both.
00:15:44 ◼ ► I don't think I ever expected to write for adults because I always loved children's media and that's been my focus. But then once I had kids and became, like, the viewer of the child, all of that came too.
00:15:57 ◼ ► I guess it's nice to hear you say that because I can imagine it would be very easy to fall into the trap of feeling like you've got to kind of ride away for, like, you know, this works so well. I should make the sequel.
00:16:11 ◼ ► Maybe, you know, talking about when you were a BuzzFeed and pushing something too hard made it less fun. Maybe there's something in there that you've carried forward.
00:16:21 ◼ ► Yeah, I'm very aware of, I think, how my best ideas come at this point. And it involves making a lot of space for them to come.
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00:18:38 ◼ ► Like if you're sitting down for the day, like you want to get some work done, some creative work.
00:18:53 ◼ ► I think when my kids were under two, it just wasn't possible because I wasn't sleeping at night.
00:19:04 ◼ ► But I do do the same process and a lot of my day is trying to make space for the ideas to come.
00:19:22 ◼ ► And it's kind of like I think when you can't think of someone's name and you try and you try and it's not going to come.
00:19:33 ◼ ► And I wake up in the morning and I have like a sticky note in front of my face when I wake up and it says, who are you today?
00:20:01 ◼ ► And so I start my day with that and then I go and then I get my daughter ready for school.
00:20:13 ◼ ► And then I have like a really funny process that my husband thinks is going to be like the weirdest thing that ever happened when people discover it later on.
00:20:25 ◼ ► Okay, so first off, I never know what the date is because I just don't pay attention to that.
00:20:39 ◼ ► So I have like mountains of journals filled with like just scribbly writing that like I can't even read afterwards.
00:20:50 ◼ ► Okay, so in the moment, you're saying something and your hand is moving along with you saying the thing, but it is indecipherable.
00:21:31 ◼ ► And that's always really resonated with me because I don't often go back and read notes that I've written in notebooks.
00:22:11 ◼ ► And I try to get a lot of walking in my day because I get my best ideas when I'm walking.
00:22:20 ◼ ► And I do have like a specific thing that I try to do, which is a kind of a meditative walk.
00:22:41 ◼ ► But it really makes you feel like a fuller picture and a fuller connection to the world because you're not having all these labels.
00:22:54 ◼ ► And if I don't think the word bread, suddenly I'm like imagining all the steps that went into making that bread.
00:23:01 ◼ ► The wheat at the farm being cold, the grinding and the packaging, the person shipping it.
00:23:11 ◼ ► It's kind of like a way to make you feel like I think it's how people feel like when they're on drugs, but you can just do it naturally.
00:23:19 ◼ ► But I love hearing people talk about these kinds of things because everybody is so different.
00:23:30 ◼ ► But it's the type of work that you do is so interesting because it requires you to be able to take in so much about the world and about your surroundings in a way to try and describe them to other people.
00:23:45 ◼ ► So I can imagine there has to be like a bunch of tricks of how can I take in the maximum amount of information like all the time without trying to do that because you're trying to find anything that can spark a thought, right?
00:24:17 ◼ ► And then I have a big list on my computer and I try to organize it by importance or like when it needs to be done and sections and then things I'm going to get to like in 10 years all the way down.
00:24:36 ◼ ► Do you have one Google Doc that everything goes in or do you have different Google Docs?
00:25:48 ◼ ► It's flexible, but it's also, I'm lucky enough, I think maybe the past year I've just been full
00:25:55 ◼ ► So it feels like anytime that I'm working as I get to be creative, there isn't like a lot
00:26:04 ◼ ► I really try to, you know, I have the two most important things, my family, the work, and I try
00:26:23 ◼ ► When the kids are home, it's kids time, especially after, you know, at 5pm, I have a brick for
00:26:32 ◼ ► So this is the thing where you tap your phone and it locks a selection of apps that you want.
00:26:48 ◼ ► I just don't want to look at my phone when I first wake up, even though it's very tempting
00:27:06 ◼ ► Yeah, I think as time goes on, I'm starting to realize that I need to be more judicious
00:27:12 ◼ ► Like I've taken a bunch of apps off my phone just completely, but I've definitely had that
00:27:59 ◼ ► And I really do feel like when I have like a full day off of it, I become smarter like instantly.
00:28:14 ◼ ► But I'm one of those people that, you know, when you do what you love and then you're doing
00:28:25 ◼ ► Like, you know, there's all this messaging that you should have better balance or socialize.
00:28:49 ◼ ► I think we're bombarded with specific ways to do things and they don't work for everybody.
00:28:55 ◼ ► When you're writing, so when you're writing your poems, where are you writing them into?
00:29:05 ◼ ► So I'll quickly write it in my notes and then come back later when I can actually focus and
00:29:21 ◼ ► I guess the inspiration means that, yes, you're usually thinking of these things when you're
00:29:48 ◼ ► I do hand draw some things and especially in children's books, I add like some color pencil
00:29:57 ◼ ► When you're working on something, whether it's a poem or any part of your book writing,
00:30:02 ◼ ► you're writing work, do you have people around you that you share work with for feedback?
00:30:24 ◼ ► And I used to share things with my mom until I realized that her reactions always stressed
00:30:40 ◼ ► So, you know, if I was like, you know, it's going to be this baby that's a feminist, she'd be
00:30:57 ◼ ► When you're producing for things to be a book, you have to share them, I'm assuming, with a
00:31:11 ◼ ► And I also, with the kids' books, I do send it to neighborhood kids to get their read on
00:31:42 ◼ ► And it was a big lesson that, like, it's, you know, you can listen to other people and get
00:31:56 ◼ ► like it in a nice way, it just became a very important way to have, like, good relationships
00:32:14 ◼ ► And I was really young and I took it to HarperCollins by hand because it's, like, before you, like,
00:32:38 ◼ ► And I went and I did it at 64 pages and I ended up with, like, a very small new publishing house
00:32:59 ◼ ► It's just a thing that you realize you maybe reacted to it more negatively than you should have.
00:33:24 ◼ ► There have been times when I thought I knew and then eventually I realized that they were right.
00:33:30 ◼ ► I think that might also be why I've softened to feedback because my first reaction is always, like, absolutely not.
00:34:03 ◼ ► And the key thing is it's all in the same place you're already monitoring your application.
00:34:28 ◼ ► But however you're doing it, I think something that's really important is that you understand how the code impacts your users.
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00:34:40 ◼ ► Whether that's from something that a developer entered or something that an LLM entered.
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00:35:25 ◼ ► I actually only post twice a week very like rigidly because otherwise I get kind of caught up in the tornado of always posting, which then my brain only thinks about content.
00:35:54 ◼ ► And also, do I love this enough that even if nobody liked it or everyone hated it, that I stand by it and like it?
00:36:09 ◼ ► Or I'll post it and then like realize that I should have just listened to myself and deleted it really quickly.
00:36:13 ◼ ► And so, even if you've answered those questions, it doesn't mean that everyone's going to like what you say one way or another.
00:36:26 ◼ ► I think BuzzFeed really strengthened my shell to comments because the comments were bananas at BuzzFeed and the trolling was so intense.
00:37:29 ◼ ► And even if you're just, like, the most, you know, calm person, it's very difficult to not feel that stress.
00:37:43 ◼ ► But if you go through that and still decide you want to be a part of that world, then you must have been able to kind of build a bit of an armor to it.
00:37:59 ◼ ► By having such a presence on Instagram, you are giving a lot of content to Instagram's algorithm and to their platform.
00:38:23 ◼ ► I love hearing from readers on Instagram and it makes you feel like you're more community.
00:39:02 ◼ ► I don't know if you know this, but I'm assuming lots of people find you from your work being shared.
00:39:44 ◼ ► I'm not currently still doing it aside from, you know, we're friends and I'll give them advice sometimes.
00:40:02 ◼ ► And every day, you know, the people around me, my husband, my mom, would talk me out of it.
00:40:19 ◼ ► And she was coming to this inflection point at her company where they were about to do licensing.
00:40:25 ◼ ► And they were working on this puppet they needed help with and books and all these things that I had experience with.
00:40:39 ◼ ► And it was one of those times where everyone around me still really didn't want me to quit.
00:40:58 ◼ ► And then I was working as an executive creative director for her and Aaron, her husband, for six months, which was incredible.
00:41:14 ◼ ► My, like, walking thoughts were going, which was great because it was a great job and I love the show.
00:41:35 ◼ ► And I imagine as well that at a certain point, again, you come back to wanting to shape your own ideas rather than someone else's ideas or ideas for someone else, right?
00:41:45 ◼ ► It's like going back through your career where you're kind of always doing things for other people.
00:41:50 ◼ ► And I guess you've maybe gotten to the point what you really wanted to do was have your own thing, your own outlet that's yours.
00:42:00 ◼ ► And I think as an artist, it's really hard and really scary to try to do that because the career isn't known for making consistent salary or benefits or anything.
00:42:14 ◼ ► I wanted to kind of touch on some bigger picture things with you for creating in the world that you are and that you have been.
00:42:23 ◼ ► Does creating things for children and also for parents carry a different set of responsibilities to other types of work that you could produce?
00:42:33 ◼ ► If you were creating poems that were affirmations just for people in general, I feel like that would carry less responsibility and less weight than the type of work that you produce.
00:42:44 ◼ ► Yeah, I think when it comes to writing for children or making media or TV, the weight of the seriousness is heavy.
00:43:10 ◼ ► I think these things end up being the voices in their heads, I think, in a lot of ways.
00:43:28 ◼ ► And that was something I always wanted to give to other kids when I was older, like make those characters that make them feel comfortable and safe when they didn't necessarily feel like they had that in their family or with friends at school or anything like that.
00:43:43 ◼ ► And when it comes to looking at work for parents, do you have areas that you feel like you try to be really careful about?
00:43:52 ◼ ► So like things that parents struggle with, you know, like anger and upset or feeling less than other parents.
00:44:06 ◼ ► I actually, my next book coming out, I Am a Spicy Nugget, is a lot about that and sort of the journey of my daughter being very explosive and realizing that you don't have any control of that.
00:44:30 ◼ ► And the kid in it, I think, gets to feel really seen and also makes it a little lighter.
00:44:59 ◼ ► There was a poem called A Spicy Little Nugget because that was something I had called my daughter.
00:45:16 ◼ ► So I called her a spicy nugget and I told her I was going to like dip her and milk the cooler off.
00:45:27 ◼ ► Obviously, you're able to draw and you do draw a lot from your life to produce your work.
00:45:38 ◼ ► And that was hard at BuzzFeed specifically because they wanted you to turn out so much content.
00:45:47 ◼ ► And I really do think they take advantage of their creators that way because they end up starting to share all these personal things just to make more stuff.
00:45:55 ◼ ► But at this point in my life, I try to be really careful showing my kids online or things about them.
00:46:02 ◼ ► It's hard because they're like so adorable that I want to be like, look at this cute kid.
00:46:07 ◼ ► But I know, you know, after Dolly turned four, I was like, I'm not going to share her so much.
00:46:13 ◼ ► I watched a great video years ago that Joanna Stern, she was at the Wall Street Journal then, and she made a video kind of talking about sharing photos of kids online.
00:46:24 ◼ ► And her whole point was with the way that like, we didn't even know about AI at this point, but just like facial recognition training and stuff like that.
00:46:53 ◼ ► But then also that thing in the back of my head of like, you shouldn't want to share that with everyone.
00:47:22 ◼ ► You know, a lot of it was, I found that traditional parenting advice hasn't worked for me.
00:47:29 ◼ ► The things I'm supposed to say to my daughter, like I'm keeping you safe from hitting, would just make it so much worse.
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00:50:09 ◼ ► I find her creative process to be absolutely fascinating, so it was really great to dig into it.
00:50:31 ◼ ► When Apple turned 50 earlier on this year in April, we made an episode of the show which was actually more historical.
00:50:38 ◼ ► Going back and looking at the history of how they were founded and talking about how that came together.
00:50:53 ◼ ► A few weeks ago, Jason and I launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund the first year of a podcast that we're calling Designed in California.
00:51:00 ◼ ► This is a heavily researched, historical-focused show talking about the entire history of Apple over the last 50 years.
00:51:11 ◼ ► We'll be telling the stories of products, telling the stories of what goes on behind the scenes,
00:51:15 ◼ ► using books, podcasts, interviews, tons of research to produce, I would say, a pretty definitive story of Apple's history.
00:51:24 ◼ ► If this is of interest to you, please go to design.fm, and you can check out our Kickstarter campaign.
00:51:36 ◼ ► I mean, we've got really great resources and a great runway now because people have been so supportive and encouraging.
00:51:45 ◼ ► So throughout the month of June, we've been publishing kind of teaser episodes, essentially, like the first season as a second episode of Upgrade Every Week.
00:52:07 ◼ ► So with this, we're telling the story of how Apple goes from their first computer, the Apple I, to the Apple II, which is a huge leap.
00:52:16 ◼ ► And so we're telling the story of how they go from, like, here's some circuit boards we're just kind of, like, slaughtering together in a garage to an actual computer inside of a case that they sell to people.
00:52:29 ◼ ► And as I said, if you enjoy this, you can go and check out the rest of the episodes in the Upgrade feed.
00:52:34 ◼ ► And I'll put a link in the show notes, as well as to the Kickstarter campaign for Designed in California.
00:52:39 ◼ ► If you have any interest in technology, in business, I think you're going to love this.
00:52:43 ◼ ► It's going to be going through the entire history of one of the most important companies in all of history.
00:52:56 ◼ ► People have been hearing all sorts of things about computers during the past 10 years through the media.
00:53:15 ◼ ► Yet, in spite of that, most adults have no idea what a computer really is or what it can or can't do.
00:53:23 ◼ ► Now, for the first time, people can actually buy a computer for the price of a good stereo, interact with it, and find out all about it.
00:53:32 ◼ ► We started a little personal computer manufacturing company in a garage in Los Altos in 1976.
00:53:49 ◼ ► People expect blinking lights, but what they find is that it looks like a portable typewriter,
00:54:01 ◼ ► There's a feedback it gives to people who use it, and the enthusiasm of the users is tremendous.
00:54:11 ◼ ► But in my opinion, the real thing it is doing right now is to teach people how to program the computer.
00:54:19 ◼ ► These are the words of a 22-year-old Steve Jobs quoted in the November 14th, 1977 issue of The New Yorker.
00:54:29 ◼ ► Welcome to Designed in California, where we are telling the best stories from across 50 years of Apple history.
00:54:57 ◼ ► The Apple II, Steve Wozniak's second computer design, at least under the aegis of Apple computer.
00:55:04 ◼ ► Now, we are here continuing a story that we started on the 50th anniversary of Apple, which is to tell some of the story of the very earliest days, the prehistory and very early history.
00:55:17 ◼ ► We're talking 1976, when they signed those papers through basically early 1977, extending essentially to where young Steve Jobs shows up randomly in an article in The New Yorker.
00:55:31 ◼ ► Last time, we talked about how Apple came to be, how it all happened because a 26-year-old Steve Wozniak designed his own personal computer circuit board, and a 21-year-old Steve Jobs had the idea to produce a bunch of them and sell them to a local computer store.
00:55:54 ◼ ► It had gotten some help in doing net 30 accounting from their suppliers because they didn't have the money otherwise to buy the supplies, to assemble the computers, to fulfill that first set of Apple I's to their first customer, which was a computer store called the Byte Shop.
00:56:09 ◼ ► Once they did that, they had money left over from their profits to make some more Apple I's and start to sell those.
00:56:21 ◼ ► Eventually, they would need to ship a real product, not a sort of pre-assembled circuit board.
00:56:27 ◼ ► That product was this new computer Steve Wozniak had been working on that would ultimately be known as the Apple II.
00:56:41 ◼ ► But first, we need to take a few steps back because I need to take you back to the late summer of 1976, where the Apple I is finally out there.
00:57:07 ◼ ► The truth is that even though the Apple I was a major step forward in terms of the hobbyist computer world, you didn't have to buy the chips and install them yourselves, right?
00:57:24 ◼ ► What Steve Jobs delivered in our last go-round with this to the Byte Shop and what Apple advertised in some computer magazines and took to the homebrew computer club, you still needed to attach a keyboard and a display.
00:57:56 ◼ ► And as a result, the volumes of what Apple was selling were not even close to some early PCs like the Altair, which was, again, a lot less friendly.
00:58:20 ◼ ► I think that the Byte Shop was catering to a hobbyist market who appreciated the fact that they were completely assembled, even though there is that famous line about how the guy from the Byte Shop wanted it with keyboards and displays, which they're like, are you kidding?
00:58:38 ◼ ► I have to imagine that that was also in Steve Jobs' mind that, oh, what people really want and what we really should get them is a whole product.
00:58:56 ◼ ► So does Apple go down one path and become a forgotten hobby project launched by a couple of kids from the Valley who should have known better?
00:59:09 ◼ ► So when I've been thinking about this and like reflecting on our last episode and even you saying right now this idea that the Apple One is kind of a failure, I guess the assumption is at this point that nobody would have assumed that Apple would have been able to be a company to be taken seriously at this point.
00:59:27 ◼ ► Because I would guess there are many small teams in the Valley trying to do something in this space at this time.
00:59:35 ◼ ► And that while the Apple One is interesting, it isn't an obvious path that we get to where we are today.
00:59:42 ◼ ► Yes, including one of the prime movers in the Homebrew Computer Club, who we'll be hearing from soon, who has started his own computer company.
00:59:53 ◼ ► This is not there is nothing. The most notable thing about Apple at this point is that they would become Apple that we know.
00:59:59 ◼ ► This is going to come back again and again, Mike, in this series, which is it's a couple of kids and their friends making technology things in one of the kids' parents' garage.
01:00:29 ◼ ► The combination, the alchemy between Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak is going to launch them on that path.
01:00:34 ◼ ► But at this moment, I guess what I could say is there's a path here where Apple just ends right now.
01:00:54 ◼ ► And then there's this idea like they did that for a while and then they stopped and said, well, I guess what comes next?
01:01:02 ◼ ► Steve Wozniak designs the Apple one, setting off everything we talked about in our last episode.
01:01:08 ◼ ► He knows all of the limitations of the Apple one and he wants to make his next computer.
01:01:17 ◼ ► He has been counting all the ways that he can make a better computer than that first computer that he designed.
01:01:31 ◼ ► They're going to need money because they already had this issue with the Apple one to get enough money to make them and and a 30 day net at the technology supplier in order to get it to work.
01:01:42 ◼ ► And keep in mind that they're only this far because Steve Jobs sold his van and Steve Wozniak sold his HP calculator.
01:01:58 ◼ ► So what are they going to do to build a real consumer product instead of just a hobbyist gadget?
01:02:03 ◼ ► They're going to need serious investment and a business plan and probably a lot more discipline than you might expect from a couple of 20 somethings and their friends who are assembling computers in a garage.
01:02:14 ◼ ► Or alternatively, you could just sell the company and provide the technology for a more established company with a ready made hit new personal computer.
01:02:55 ◼ ► The reason that Mike Markala comes into the scene and helps make Apple what it is going to be is because Steve Jobs is trying to sell Apple to anyone who might buy it.
01:03:09 ◼ ► Surely a large company with lots of money will give us money, take our technology, and then help us build the next personal computer.
01:03:18 ◼ ► That's the big idea that Steve Jobs has is, can I take this little Apple thing that we did, this hobby, and sell it?
01:03:39 ◼ ► But just putting it in the context, Mike Markala is always like, oh, well, and then he invested in Apple and got them a credit line, and then everything worked out.
01:03:57 ◼ ► I didn't know, because I guess it's not in the condensed histories that people tell now, that Apple was essentially trying to be sold for parts.
01:04:07 ◼ ► One of the things we're trying to do with this show is tell these stories, and I hope that we are unflattening some of the history.
01:04:16 ◼ ► Because there is a simple, flat history of Apple that skips over a lot of these twists and turns that we're trying to get across here that are part of the actual story.
01:04:24 ◼ ► The story, as much as with any history, it's much more complicated and messy than the simple version that you might have heard.
01:04:35 ◼ ► Literally, if Steve Jobs had gotten his way, they would have sold off Apple to somebody, and they wouldn't have had to worry about it ever again.
01:04:46 ◼ ► And then when we come back, we can talk about the near misses of selling Apple to the best bidder.
01:05:04 ◼ ► So many of you have, in fact, that we're now going to be doing 50 episodes of this show for its first year.
01:05:11 ◼ ► Essentially, Designed in California will be a weekly podcast when it launches later on this year.
01:05:24 ◼ ► And we're so excited that we're going to be able to get to tell you these stories over the next year.
01:05:31 ◼ ► And if you haven't backed yet, or if you want to look at some of the higher level pledge levels where we've got cool stuff coming, you can still adjust your pledge.
01:05:40 ◼ ► We have stretch goals that we're working toward, including, and some of these have been announced and some of these will be announced as we go.
01:05:48 ◼ ► But like including doing an interview series where I talk to people who have either written about Apple or who have worked at Apple about some aspect of history that they were involved with.
01:06:04 ◼ ► Just stay tuned to the Kickstarter page and the Kickstarter updates as we move along because we've got a whole month because this campaign ends July 1st in the morning Pacific time.
01:06:21 ◼ ► We thought we would have more time to arrange a lot of these things, but your support has really blown us away.
01:06:30 ◼ ► We couldn't be happier, you know, as we said in Upgrade, Jason and I have been so excited about this project and we've really wanted this Kickstarter to fund so we could make this show for you.
01:06:45 ◼ ► We have so much great stuff planned and if you just go to designed.fm, you can read more.
01:06:53 ◼ ► We're going to be popping in during every one of these preview episodes and kind of giving you updates about where we are and the things that we're planning on.
01:06:59 ◼ ► There is so much left to share throughout the campaign, so please go and check it out at designed.fm.
01:07:17 ◼ ► So when we talked about this on the 50th anniversary of Apple, I mentioned that this all started with Steve Wozniak saying,
01:07:24 ◼ ► well, I work at Hewlett-Packard, so I should probably give them the opportunity to buy the Apple One design before I go and make a company of my own.
01:07:40 ◼ ► Now, Steve Jobs had been working at Atari, the video game company, which for people who don't know was the name in video games.
01:07:52 ◼ ► This was the earliest video game era, and Atari was one of the first huge successes in Silicon Valley.
01:08:04 ◼ ► He ends up meeting with the president of Atari, who is not the person that he'd been working with when he worked there.
01:08:12 ◼ ► And he is a much more conservative business guy than the people Jobs had been working with at Atari.
01:08:23 ◼ ► And while it is an unfair flattening of the history, if you will, to say that Silicon Valley was a bunch of smelly hippies,
01:08:34 ◼ ► this is an era where Steve Jobs didn't want to bathe, only ate fruit, and frequently walked around barefoot.
01:09:02 ◼ ► But I struggled to be able to reconcile a person who is trying to either A, start a company, or B, sell a company,
01:09:37 ◼ ► The more I dive into Steve Jobs for this project, the more I'm reminded what an odd person he was throughout his life.
01:10:05 ◼ ► He clearly is so enamored with what they're doing and what they have and who he is that he thinks that it's fine.
01:10:41 ◼ ► Nolan Bushnell, who was the CEO of Atari at the time, because Keenan was the president.
01:10:50 ◼ ► And what he said, I believe, to David Pogue in his Apple First 50 Years book, excellent book, on sale now.
01:10:56 ◼ ► Bushnell said, he asked me if I would put $50,000 in and he would give me a third of the company.
01:11:14 ◼ ► But at the time, do you blame any of these people for saying, I'm not going to give these kids money?
01:11:52 ◼ ► So people were using electronics to build calculators or adding machines, sometimes they were called, which I think is a hilarious term.
01:12:09 ◼ ► He had heard that they were interested in getting in the personal computer game, and they had an office in Silicon Valley in Santa Clara.
01:12:17 ◼ ► Let me stop you for a moment now and tell you about Commodore Business Machines, a company that people now know, if they know them at all, as the makers of the Commodore 64, right?
01:12:31 ◼ ► There are a lot of our friends who are children of the C64 and love it and had it and played games on it.
01:12:52 ◼ ► So Michael S. Malone wrote a book called Infinite Loop that I think is out of print now, but it's a great book about Apple.
01:12:58 ◼ ► He refers to Commodore as registered in the Bahamas, incorporated in Canada, lists its headquarters as Santa Clara, and at times appear to be run out of Norristown, Pennsylvania.
01:13:07 ◼ ► This is just normal stuff that you do when you have a regular business on the up and up.
01:13:17 ◼ ► Well, because it's so normal, you will not be surprised by the other totally normal stuff that happened at Commodore.
01:13:23 ◼ ► Like a decade earlier, its chairman had died under suspicious circumstances while under investigation for defrauding investors.
01:13:33 ◼ ► But it had become a major player in adding machines and calculators, led by their CEO, a person who has the most main character energy of maybe anybody ever.
01:13:57 ◼ ► He learned how to repair office equipment, including typewriters, and started a business.
01:14:08 ◼ ► He couldn't get the names Admiral or General, so the company became Commodore Portable Typewriter.
01:14:19 ◼ ► No, I mean, the idea is like everybody is very, you know, so many people are veterans of World War II in this era, and he wanted to kind of like steal a little bit of that valor maybe, and Admiral and General were taken, so Commodore it was.
01:14:30 ◼ ► His first big deal, and I am not making this up, was importing typewriter parts from Czechoslovakia to Canada to avoid import issues.
01:14:45 ◼ ► It's a tariff thing involving the Cold War, because, of course, Czechoslovakia was part of the Warsaw Pact, was part of the Russian sphere of influence, the Soviet sphere of influence.
01:15:00 ◼ ► So Jack Tramiel used Canada as a way station, that he would assemble his typewriters from the parts in Canada, and then the Canadian-assembled typewriters, nobody mentioned Czechoslovakia, would be resold throughout North America.
01:15:17 ◼ ► So that's how he built Commodore, and then he later pivoted to the adding machines and electronic calculators as well.
01:15:29 ◼ ► He was bald, he was gruff, he was impatient with employees, he was famous for withholding payment to suppliers, and generally, throughout all of the references I can find to him, terrifying, just terrifying.
01:15:43 ◼ ► He would sometimes shut down all conversation, this was his big move, he would shut down all conversation with people he felt considered themselves superior to him because of their educational background.
01:15:53 ◼ ► Because he was a poor kid from Poland who got out of the labor camp, got to the U.S., built himself up by his bootstraps, right?
01:16:37 ◼ ► So, another feature of Commodore's products, apparently, and their calculators in particular,
01:16:47 ◼ ► At some point, Tramiel was frustrated by his chip partners, and he ended out buying MOS technologies.
01:16:57 ◼ ► That was the chip that inspired Waz to make his first personal computer circuit board design.
01:17:01 ◼ ► It was very much a, honestly, it's a very much a, an Apple kind of move, which is, we're, we don't like how this chip business is going.
01:17:09 ◼ ► We're going to buy the chip maker, and then we're going to own them, and then we can get all the chips we want, I guess.
01:17:15 ◼ ► Along with MOS technologies came the guy who created the 6502, who was a guy named Chuck Petal.
01:17:27 ◼ ► And he knew, Chuck Petal knew, where they could get a good computer design on the cheap.
01:17:33 ◼ ► Namely, are you getting it yet, from two guys who had to sell their van and calculator to make a computer in a garage.
01:17:41 ◼ ► We can swoop in there, we can just duck into that garage, write them a check, get their computer, and we're good.
01:17:50 ◼ ► Sometime in the early fall of 1976, Chuck Petal and another Commodore executive who was not Jack Tramiel
01:18:12 ◼ ► we'd opened Steve's garage to the sunlight, and he came in wearing a suit and a cowboy hat.
01:18:29 ◼ ► And you have to guarantee that both of us have full-time jobs at $36,000 a year, which is a lot back then.
01:18:39 ◼ ► So, today, that's about half a million dollars for the company and jobs that would pay the Steve's $200,000 a year each.
01:19:02 ◼ ► And so, he's going to ask for more money than either of them has ever seen in their lives.
01:19:16 ◼ ► This is, this is, I think Woz would have been happy to get, like, a pat on the back and a stick of gum for his designs, right?
01:19:28 ◼ ► He's like, he sees the big picture, which is that this, that Wozniak's design is revolutionary, but also he sees a company that, you know, they got a lot of money.
01:19:39 ◼ ► So, the Commodore people are like, okay, okay, we'll take your offer, and we'll consider it.
01:19:56 ◼ ► They know pedal, but, like, I need to know if this is going to happen, I need to know who I'm getting into business with.
01:20:03 ◼ ► And so, he starts researching, and, you know, they, remember when I said they were sort of shady?
01:20:22 ◼ ► Commodore often didn't pay its bills, which is a red flag if you're trying to get money from them.
01:20:27 ◼ ► And what Steve Jobs later said about it was, the more I looked into Commodore, the sleazier they were.
01:20:49 ◼ ► I guess the timeline of that is interesting, because he's made the offer, and they've gone away to think about it.
01:20:55 ◼ ► Jobs has had enough time to do some research, and Commodore still hasn't said yes or no,
01:21:12 ◼ ► A Commodore exec who had been interested said they thought it was ridiculous to acquire two guys working out of a garage, which, fair.
01:21:26 ◼ ► Instead, Commodore did what it always did, which it rushed out a cheaper, less impressive computer nine months later called the Commodore Pet.
01:22:10 ◼ ► In fact, I do wonder if that aspect of the pet inspired Steve Jobs a little bit in terms of the Mac,
01:22:27 ◼ ► It had, like, this extra set of characters in its character set that were, like, shapes and lines and stuff.
01:22:37 ◼ ► But it was, like, if you wanted to do a box, you had to do, like, right angle, top line, top line, top line, top line, top line, right angle the other way.
01:22:45 ◼ ► And then on the next line, you had to do, like, vertical line, a bunch of spaces, vertical line.
01:23:05 ◼ ► They shipped the VIC-20 and the Commodore 64, neither of which had an integrated display, both of them attached to TV sets, basically.
01:23:10 ◼ ► But they could have had that all with the Apple II, and that's, I think, what Steve Wozniak laments about this whole situation, is that Commodore had this right in front of them.
01:23:25 ◼ ► The question, and this is super important for where we go next with this story, is Steve Jobs didn't wait to be told no by Commodore.
01:23:34 ◼ ► Steve Jobs made an enormous request of Commodore that Steve Wozniak thought was beyond the pale, and then Steve Jobs said, forget about it.
01:23:55 ◼ ► But at this point, clearly Jobs still believes in what they're attempting to do, because it seems like he would prefer to continue going it alone and struggling than to kind of just throw it all in for the only company that's interested in buying them, potentially.
01:24:16 ◼ ► Yeah, I think something must have changed in Steve Jobs' estimation of their potential at this point, because he could have made a lower offer, lower request to Commodore out of the gate, and he didn't.
01:24:37 ◼ ► But keep in mind the dynamic here, which we will explore soon, which is Steve Wozniak is the engine that's creating the assets for this company, right?
01:24:57 ◼ ► So when he's asking for all that money, he's making decisions for Steve Wozniak on his behalf, essentially, because now they're a partnership.
01:25:26 ◼ ► And we're actually going to talk about one of those places on our next episode, which is a computer fair in Atlantic City.