Transcript of Ben Fry — Co-creator of Processing (#13)

Listen to this episode · 1 hr 29 min

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Please enjoy this transcript. Co-creator of "Processing" and founder of Fathom Information Design — Ben Fry (@ben_fry) — on the beginnings of the Processing programming environment, the use of information design and visualization to understand complicated data problems, and his approach to design, life, & work. Transcripts may contain typos. You can find the episode notes here.

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0:06Nono Martínez Alonso: In today's episode, I bring you an interview with the co-creator of Processing, Ben Fry. We recorded this episode at Fathom Information Design, in Boston, Massachusetts, on August 8, 2018.

0:17 I had a lot of fun hearing about the beginnings of processing and Fathom, and I really hope you do as well. Before we begin, I'd like to remind you that you can find a detailed list of episode notes for this episode at gettingsimple.com/13. You'll find the list to a lot of the things that we mention in this episode, like typefaces, books, movies, companies, programs, or other things that Ben mentions, and a list of links to the people we mention as well. Also, there's a list of chapters I've added to the episode that you can both see in that link, or also follow along in your favorite podcast app. These markers appear in applications like Apple Podcasts or Overcast, and allow you to jump in between different parts of the podcast by theme.

1:07 If you're listening to this episode, I would love to hear about it. So please reach out directly to me on Twitter, at @getting_simple, or on Facebook, Instagram, or Patreon @gettingsimple.

1:21 In Getting Simple, I look for ways in which you can be more productive and creative while enjoying a slower, more balanced life, by deconstructing the lives of artists, researchers, engineers, designers, and other professionals from many different fields. Without further ado, I'd like to thank you for listening to this episode. Enjoy.

2:06 I want to introduce you today to Ben Fry.

2:10Ben Fry: Hi!

2:11Nono Martínez Alonso: Many of you might know who he is already, I'm going to try to find out some more about you, beyond processing, and Design by Numbers, and Fathom. I think there [are] a lot of things that you do that are really of interest to me, like how in your practice—or even in the project—how you framed the approach to design, and how that affects a lot of more stuff in our lives. And yeah, I've dug down a bit [into your life] and I just want to give a brief introduction. Ben here went to Carnegie Mellon University undergrad, has a background in graphic design—it's his major—and then a minor in computer science. And then—well I mean—I know you're not from Pittsburgh, that will come later. At Media LAB you did a master's degree and then a PhD, at the ACG group. So "Aesthetics and Computation Group" that—if I'm not wrong—kind of disolved, right?

3:21Ben Fry: Yeah, it actually finished really the year before I wrapped up and John started a new group, and then stuck around for a couple more years.

3:33Nono Martínez Alonso: And after that you did processing—so co-founded processing— with Casey, which is.. For those of you who don't know, I will probably talk about that. It's a highly enabling programming tool for non programmers. It's been used for by artists, and designers, and a lot of other people, different realms, and Daniel Shiffman was also involved in this project.

3:58Ben Fry: Yeah.

3:59Nono Martínez Alonso: Ben also worked at different places... I saw the name Netscape..

4:03Ben Fry: Yeah, in between undergrad and going to grad school I worked at Netscape, and it started blowing up, or imploding.

4:11Nono Martínez Alonso: You've also been a visiting lecturer at Harvard, done a postdoctoral associate job at Broad Institute—so you've some work with them—and a bunch of other stuff. But in 2010, you founded Fathom Information Design, where we are right now. And you've also been teaching at MIT.

4:34Ben Fry: Yeah.

4:34Nono Martínez Alonso: Okay, so is there anything else that I left out, that we can say?

4:38Ben Fry: No, there's plenty, plenty to cover there.

4:42Nono Martínez Alonso: How would you describe the city where you're coming from, where you grew up?

4:46Ben Fry: Oh. Hmm.. The the city that I grew up in, or Boston and Cambridge?

4:56Nono Martínez Alonso: The city you grew up in.

4:57Ben Fry: The city I grew up in.. Hmm.

4:59 A liberal oasis in the heart of Michigan.

5:06Nono Martínez Alonso: Ypsilanti.

5:08Ben Fry: Yeah, Ann Arbor, I guess Ypsilanti is a little bit different—but yeah—originally from Ann Arbor, but spent most of my time in Ypsilanti until high school, because the University of Michigan is there. It's kind of a funny contrast from some other parts of Michigan, or what other folks have necessarily heard about Michigan. Not far from Cambridge, I guess.

5:36Nono Martínez Alonso: So Benalso has multiple awards, some of his data visualization pieces have been exhibited in MoMA, or Whitney Museum, or even Hewitt Museum. I'll [leave] a link to the list of books that has published, some also related to data visualization and processing. And I would start having you talking about processing, whether you imagined that this project that you started in 2001 would be something you were still involved in almost 20 years afterwards?

6:20Ben Fry: Hmm.. Yeah it's a good question. I don't think we would have expected it. I think my expectation was always that we would do it for a little while. And if it was successful, that would still mean it was kind of around for a couple years, and then somebody else would kind of come along with a replacement. And so there would be something else to do in place of processing. Because we weren't trying to build a thing that was set up to last for many, many years, or we weren't trying to kind of make the ultimate tool for doing this kind of work. But really, it was built around a collection of things that are an intersection between making things easier for just our own work—and be able to sketch things quickly, and work through different ideas and code—and then the connection between that and teaching, and the kind of things that you wanted to do teaching wise.

7:31 I think the funny thing has been that, instead of there being something that's replaced it, instead the projects have all kind of gone in lots of different directions. So there are different kinds of things where—I don't know, you've got Arduino and OpenFrameworks, and this new one Open Render—there's just all these different things, that none of them are really like a one to one correspondence, or aren't really remotely a one to one correspondence to what we're doing, but just take a different set of goals and a different kind of approach to the particular problem, they carve off a different kind of piece of the problem. And so in one sense, I really enjoy seeing that, and sort of seeing how the field has evolved. Because, you know, there really weren't other tools like this at the time we started processing. So I think that development is nice to see. But I think there's also some part of me that is surprised about the fact that "Oh wait, there isn't actually a replacement that kind of gives us license to say all right we're done, we can move on." There isn't a different tool that I'm ready to use that's been created by somebody else that will help me create the kind of work that I want to create, or that is more effective than say, processing for certain kinds of work, at least.

9:08Nono Martínez Alonso: I'm curious about how processing started, and if it was one among many other side projects you had, or it was a full-on project that you said "This is the bet I'm going to take."

9:21Ben Fry: Yeah, it was always a side project. There were a number of different threads. Most formally, it's things like.. There was a culture around building libraries to get our work done, because there weren't really very good tools of frameworks or libraries to be used. So that was just something that was in place at the Media Lab, that prior to us doing processing, we did a library called acu. Prior to doing acu, we did another one called acWorld, prior to that we hadn't called acWindows, and that was just within the Aesthetics and Computation Group. When I first started, there was a library done by Dave Small that we used to kind of build c++ and OpenGL apps. So that's like, late 90s kind of thing. But that dates back even until mid and early 90s with Bob Saviston, doing this thing called Bad Windows, which was like his own library for doing—or framework—for building the work that he was doing at the Visible Language Workshop, which was the predecessor to the ACG.

10:45 Yeah so, there was that built in kind of culture around it. And then the other part of it was, in our personal work, we would build small kind of mini frameworks for things. So, working on Design by Numbers, we needed some stuff for the graphics engine there, or working on my own projects, building small, API's that helped make it a little bit easier to kind of create some of the kinds of shapes, and elements, and things, that I wanted to have readily available. Also things like "I want to get all the pixels out of an image and start doing things with that image data." That was just something that required half a page of code to do, and that's kind of silly. So basically taking all this stuff—all of that as a backdrop—and then basically saying, with what Casey and I had been working on, sort of the teaching and maintaining Design by Numbers. So we learned so much about kind of how people used it, and what they wanted to do with it, and, where it was deficient, or things that would actually make sense to add, or where people got tripped up in terms of learning coding. And given that experience, we said "You know what, this also looks like.. Can we actually build an environment that feels as immediate and simple as DBN does, where I can sit down and write a line or two a code and hit run, and it just goes?" But also behind that have something that's much more performant—like Java in this case—so that I can rapidly, kind of sketch with code that I'm not limited by "Oh, it's sort of this toy language that I'm using to build things."

12:49Nono Martínez Alonso: What was the role of John Maeda?

12:54Ben Fry: In processing?

12:55Nono Martínez Alonso: Well, on Design by Numbers.

12:57Ben Fry: Yeah so, Design by Numbers was John's project. He was just finishing the book when I joined ACG. I think he wrote the first version of the language. And then Tom White rewrote it, and then I wrote two subsequent versions of it. And so really a lot of the inspiration came from there, just sort of that whole idea of write a little bit of code and hit run, Design by Numbers was a big pole for that, and also just the experience of working through it. But by and large, John didn't actually want us working on processing.

12:57 Back to your earlier question about, it was always kind of a side project, because it wasn't our research. Casey and I had, talked about it a bit over one summer, and I started building—sort of prototyping it a bit—during Casey's last summer at the Media Lab. And then he left to go teach at [Obrea], and I stuck around to do my PhD, and we kept in a way hacking away on it. But it was always kind of a separate, sort of side project. And John wasn't really interested in us pursuing that, because it wasn't a huge challenge for us. It wasn't rethinking a way of doing creative coding or—actually wasn't called creative coding at that point—but it wasn't sort of rethinking the way that you learn to code and build things visually, it was very much the sort of evolutionary step he didn't.. He was kind of like "I know, you guys can build this sort of thing." So that for him wasn't very interesting as a research endeavor. And we weren't really interested in kind of making a new language for its own sake. We wanted something very pragmatic that we could get people up and running with it. And that, worse comes to worse, they know a little bit of Java and Java syntax, and hey, that actually translates nicely to JavaScript, and ActionScript, and these other kinds of languages. So it's not time wasted doing our sort of pet environment, or pet model for how to do a text based language or something like that.

15:35Nono Martínez Alonso: So your doctorate work was on computational information design.

15:42Ben Fry: Yeah, so my actual doctoral work was about doing information design and visualization. So, starting with my master's, it was about what does it mean, when you mix graphic design and computer science, in the same context? And so with that, and what sort of things does that actually enable, and how you work with information having the background of computer science there, so that you're not kind of limited by your level of patience with what you can lay out in Adobe Illustrator, InDesign or something like that.

16:26 So, the graduate work was about working through some of those things. And then for my PhD work, it was really focused on trying to take those ideas, and in particular, apply them to genetic genetic data. The Human Genome Project—the draft version—became available in June, in the summer of 2000. And that was right, when I was making the transition from finishing my master's and starting the PhD. So this seemed like something that would be interesting, compelling enough to kind of keep me going for four years of a PhD, and give me a nice domain that was both a massively complicated problem—it was very timely—but also our understanding—popular understanding—of what it meant to actually have the human genome decoded and understandable, was way out of sync with what we actually understood about it. It was something where, science was kind of a ways ahead of popular culture, and then somewhere in between there, there was policy and politics, and "How do you think about this data?" But also, there is so much to do on the science side as well, as far as just learning about the genome. Each new finding in science kind of opens up 10 new things that you don't know, or a hundred new things that you don't know. And so it was one of those kinds of moments where there's just this real discontinuity between what people understand, how it's understood in popular culture, what it looks like, how do you actually break that data down for a science audience or a non science audience.. So it just was a really interesting domain to look at

18:21Nono Martínez Alonso: Was Casey looking at the same problems?

18:24Ben Fry: No. So, Casey finished in summer of 2001 and his master's work was really around kinetic sculpture, and building various machines that could react in form and space, and taking some of the two dimensional work he'd been doing on screen and making that into a much more physical and three dimensional kind of thing.

19:03Nono Martínez Alonso: So, Daniel Shiffman. What was his involvement, or how did it happen?

19:13Ben Fry: Over the years, we've had different people help out in various ways. Dan was teaching processing at NYU, and so—I don't know, I can't remember how we first were in touch with him—but probably doing a talk or something, or running into him at a conference, or he invited us—one of us, or both of us—down to NYU, also doing things like hosting events for us to kind of get together. So, Casey and I have never lived in the same city while working on processing—so we only get together maybe once a year, two or three times a year, depending—so sometimes Dan has done a couple of events, for us at NYU, where it's kind of an excuse to, come in and maybe do a talk, or just hang out there for the weekend and work with, Casey, and folks like Andreas and Dan and others, and just kind of get informal input, and feedback, and things, about where we should take stuff. Yeah, Dan was more and more involved with that over the years, and he's just such a great guy. And he just has such a valuable perspective on this stuff to—especially on the teaching side of things—he teaches so many students how to get started with this stuff. That's just enormous, just a really wonderful set of input that we can get, as far as testing kind of what we we've seen in our own classes versus what he's been doing—even at a larger scale sometimes—with just a whole range of students at ITP. It's been great. It's just a whole whole extra level of energy to things, and he's a good counterpoint to Casey and I. I think Casey and I have a tendency to want to just think it through and grind it out, and all that. And Dan occasionally, will kind of pop in and say like "Ehh, it's not fun, don't do it. Don't worry about that feature, don't worry about this, or that's not as much of a priority." So he helps us kind of keep things from getting too stock.

21:49Nono Martínez Alonso: Well, I saw one of your talks from way back and I found this Valence visualization. I see it also can be—you can call it visualization, piece of art—Valence is one of your projects, that is kind of a different way to read a book, or to analyze, or to see how it evolves in time as you pass the pages. But in a different way, what's really interesting is it made it to Minority Report, or to the Hulk I think, also?

22:17Ben Fry: Yeah, there's a version of it, that's using genetic data that's in the Hulk.

22:23Nono Martínez Alonso: And in one of your writings I've seen that you kind of say to yourself like "I'm not a futurist." And in some way that made me ask myself "What is futurist?" Because in some way you have invented that visualization that then determined what they envisioned as the future.

22:44Ben Fry: Yeah, so that one I thought it was funny. So it's something that existed—I mean it was what, probably January of 1999 that I created it— and that the core of it was "I want to design a system where there are a set of rules about how things are laid out, and then I'm going to keep feeding data into the system. And I want to see how the elements inside of that system move around and rearrange themselves over time." Because, sort of a fixed set of data isn't that interesting, most information is continually undergoing change. So how do you represent that? And how do you build representations that can actually withstand change over time, and be balanced systems that you're designing with a time element in mind, and designing with a change of input in mind? As a designer, what you have to do is, you're kind of setting up the incubator space around this. And part of the funny thing for that was [that] it was something that was done and finished as of 1999, but it's like "Oh, this is something that's visually striking." And so they had it running on Tom Cruise's computer, when he comes back to his apartment in one scene. And that's supposed to be 2054. And it sort of cracks me up, because it's like this idea of this thing that already exists, but it's like "Oh, he's going home." And it's now just kind of standard built in—sort of feature there—on Windows 2054, and he's using it to read his email, or whatever. I guess the thing that I find fascinating for that—just for films in general—is the cues we take from films, that start guiding our expectation of how the world should work, or things that are possible or can be done

25:06 I saw a really wonderful exhibition once—maybe like the Air and Space Museum, or something like that—but it was basically.. The whole exhibition was about the influence of sci-fi—or maybe it was even specifically Star Wars and Star Trek—and it showed lots of different things that have been developed over the years, at NASA in particular. But also interspersed with all of these researchers and scientists talking about "Yeah, so I saw Star Wars." Or "I saw this particular thing in Star Trek, and I wanted to go build that." And so I went, and had this career, and I've just been chasing after that thing that I saw as a as a kid, because I was like "Well, that's cool, we need one of those." Or that you have this expectation of "Well, that's just how things should work." And so therefore, that's your baseline for how interfaces should behave. I mean, even Big Hero 6—which is like a kid's animation movie—the way that the researchers interact with things is all entirely gesture based, and that they have these really wonderful fluid systems for building very sophisticated engineered artifacts. And so I just picture these 8, 9, 10, year olds watching that and being like "Well yeah, okay, that makes sense, this is how these things should behave." And if they don't behave like that, or those systems don't work like that in the intervening 10 years before they're actually building those things themselves, they're going to be pissed. And then they're going to try and build it themselves. I find it interesting just how those kind of influences work. I don't think that particular case of Valence in Minority Report is one of those where it's like "This is a changing the world kind of way of looking at things." At least not of the way.. My friend John Underkoffler who did the gesture interface stuff for it. And that's really been a touch point for people, as far as—or a a reference point for people—that anytime you have a interface that kind of works like that, people say "Oh, like Minority Report." And that's a real credit to him, because he was just doing such groundbreaking work, that was coming from the work that he had done at the Media Lab.

27:45 A funny counterpoint though, is a different variant of that Valence project that was based on working with the genome—or genomic data—was in the Hulk. And in the Hulk again, it was something that actually worked. The thing that it did was, it actually showed basically how searches of the genome work. So, if you're searching genetic data, there's this really fascinating system that you're looking for these sequences of A-C-G-T letters, but you can't look for exact matches, because there might be single letter changes, or something like that. And so, the visualization was then modified to be about that—and sort of an explanation of how that worked—but also to look interesting. But even though that was a working art piece, tool, installation—whatever—at the time, the Hulk was set in present day, they had to add extra interface and UI elements around it, so that it looked like it was real. So, even though this was a real thing, it was using real data, you could do real searches on it—actually implemented the algorithm—they had to roll it back down to what people's expectation of what an interface looked like.

29:18 So, John—who had done the Minority Report stuff—he was also the one who worked on and worked on the Hulk had to have this whole argument with the director, that he's like "Oh yeah, this is real, this is real, real data tool being used, scientists are aware of this, this is how this stuff goes." And he's like "No, this is like too sci fi, too weird, we're not doing.. This isn't a sci-fi movie, it needs to be more present day." And so, just this interesting conversation of "Well, what's that actually mean?" And also again going to the expectations thing that having to kind of dial back the interface—so adding a lot of gray and scroll bars, and text, and things like that around it—so that it felt more like a people's expectation of what an interface looked like.

30:16Nono Martínez Alonso: Microsoft Word or..

30:17Ben Fry: Yeah, right. More "Let's Microsoft Word it up." So..

30:21Nono Martínez Alonso: So you have a post about not needing approval to publish something. And I just wanted to hear your opinion on how—I guess you could do the same thing today, like release process in the same way—but how did the open source community, how was in that epoch.. How did you manage to distribute the application? And how would it be different today?

30:47Ben Fry: Yeah, it's a good question. So the post is about.. Kind of with the advent of the App Store, and Apple having guidelines and rules about what can go in the app store, that everything has to go through the store, and everything has to meet with their approval. Really a set of criteria that are quite arbitrary, it's really not a good model. It's really problematic for doing new things, or things that don't fit under the mold of what people expect out of it. And it's really quite counter to Apple. What's made Apple successful in the past has been third parties doing really interesting things in their platform that stretched it in different ways that really added to it. Nowadays, Apple is kind of the opposite of that, where they set up a really walled garden kind of thing, but they restrict people to working within that set of constraints. And I think it's really problematic, I think it's really set back software—and software development—quite a bit, because I think that there just isn't much innovation on those platforms. I think we'd be in a much more interesting place, the stuff that you can do with a phone or a tablet is really pretty amazing.

32:38 Say, when I was writing the Valence piece—that's 1999—I was working on an SGI Octane, and it costs $25,000. Even the cheapest iPhone can actually run that software now, and run it faster than it ran on that original SGI Octane. The idea is that suddenly, we have this amazing amount of IO, and devices, and all the things that that platform can do. But instead, things need to fit into a bucket of a utility, or "This is a game." And really, the store has been kind of overrun by games, and it's a small number of people, and companies who are making the vast majority of the money. But for me, my whole career has really been about being able to create whatever I want, and not really have to ask permission to work within a platform. I mean—over in the genetics domain—part of the reason I was able to get into genetics was that people worked very aggressively to release the human genome data, because they wanted to get out ahead of people trying to patent parts of it, or something like that. So yeah, it's a frustrating, state of affairs, as far as I think it sets back what you can really do on the platform. And I think if you want to build something for Apple's platform, you have to use their tools. Apple over the years has not been traditionally a very good maker of tools and development environments, it's usually been sort of third parties who have done much more compelling stuff for the first few decades of Apple's existence. And so, it's neat the places they've been able to take the platform, but I can't help but think about what would it be like if there were third party tools, and I wish I could support that. As a platform, I'd like to build more things that were more iOS centric, or specifically Android centric—or whatever—but it's really kind of a bad choice to have to make as far as "Well, you can do this iOS stuff." But you're completely walled in. Or you can do Android, which is like the Wild West, and they're kind of closing things down a bit, but it's still sort of problematic in its own sort of direction. And Apple has built a community of people who are more willing to pay for the, the software, and tools, but they've also destroyed the pricing for what those tools are and so forth. So, it's just disappointing to see. I think Apple really had a turning point—sometime around when Jobs returned—where the apple that I grew up with was really about sort of this amazing enabler of what you could do in the platform. If you read the the Apple 2 manual, or the original Mac—any original Mac documentation—it's about welcoming people in, it's about speaking clearly, it's about being very readable, and plain, and straightforward, and about "Hey look, here are all these possibilities for this platform." And as a result, people did really interesting things with those platforms. And they've really become.. If you read the documentation now, the first several paragraphs, or the first paragraph is always "Aren't you lucky to be here? You're using the most beautiful device, and the most amazing framework you've ever.. It's ultra.." I don't know, but it's like marketing copy. It's about Apple and it's about marketing. It's not about the people who are using it, and it's not about it being an enabler. It's just sort of this "Well, you're lucky to be here and enjoy."

37:01Nono Martínez Alonso: I completely agree. I have a bittersweet feeling as well, because sometimes you get—as you say—locked down into a platform. You get to really like—I don't know—the frameworks they have, and the way of working, and how sandboxes, everything.. And it feels like it's really performant, and it works, and it's kind of beautiful—or things like that—but then you say "Wait a minute, I'm investing all these resources, all this time in doing this, that only people who have an iPad are going to be able to run. And I can rewrite the whole thing in P5 and put it on-line. Or Processing and distribute it over different." And it's just like sometimes it feels a bit too much, that they have this kind of closeness.

37:45Ben Fry: Yeah, so for a long time—well I mean processing has always supported Windows, Mac and Linux from the outset—because we think it's important to be cross platform. And well, in everyday use we work with multiple platforms, that we have Windows machines, and Linux machines, and Macs here. The majority of machines might be Macs but it doesn't mean we don't need to work well with this other stuff. And also we've done maybe four or five apps with the App Store, and every single time, it's been an incredibly negative experience, as far as we've never had something accepted on the first go. And the rejection stuff tends to be very arbitrary, or.. I mean, I had to have a whole discussion with somebody about like "Is it functional enough?" And that they're like "Well, I mean I guess it is it is nicely designed. So I mean, maybe it's okay." It's like "I don't get care about your opinion. The people downloading this can make that decision. I don't need you to approve my design, or what I've done here, or give me this sort of.." Yeah, and sometimes that's really problematic. We had a project that we were trying to get launched for a client, and Apple held it up in review for six weeks. So we had several rounds of going back and forth with them dealing with paperwork, and submission problems, and whatever. And just arbitrary things about like "Oh, when you rotate the iPad, if you start it up, upside down, it needs to respond this way." And it's like "What, we're doing this for a client." The point there being these are arbitrary things. And as somebody who's running a business, I can't build a business around somebody who is a gatekeeper about, like "Yeah, I don't like that app. So we're not going to approve it, because well, it kind of sort of violates this rule, or that rule, or I'm having a bad day, or whatever."

40:17Nono Martínez Alonso: So one topic I would like to hear about from you is that I always think of Jose Luis as building his own tools and other people like in architectural field, and graphic design, or even myself build our own tools to then use them. So thinking, I need this thing that I have in mind, that might make my life easier, or in the case of processing the life of a lot of other designers and artists. What I think is really valuable is that you have built this design firm—or business—which relies on a fairly amount.. for some things—I don't know to what extent—but it's really powerful that you're involved on the development of a tool that it's actually actively used by you. How does that play?

41:14Ben Fry: One of the things I get excited about, for people learning to code—especially people who are creating things themselves—is that those are folks who are making decisions about the things they build based on the things that are in their head, and that they want to actually see, or, work with, or touch in some way. And that's very different from tools that you purchase, which are designed by some combination of marketing and engineering, and what can be charged for, and what's going to be a useful feature for a lot of people, and a sort of lowest common denominator kind of thing. And so, a lot of times—in terms of the way it applies to say, something like processing—I'm much more interested in—and this goes for Casey too—that we're more interested in somebody building not a replacement for Photoshop, but building their own Photoshop or building that subset of features. Well, or just enough of it that makes it useful for their work, but also extends in a way that, does all these things that you can't do with with Photoshop, but it still might be image oriented, or something like that. And so, just the idea of having lots of these sort of smaller tools that are very practical for one's own work. And then sometimes those evolve further and become tools that are used by not just one person, but a few dozen people, or a few hundred people, or maybe they get out of hand like processing did, and get used by thousands of people. It's just that much more more interesting that way. But again, those are tools also coming from people who are creating things themselves. And so they are focused on the creative process, not meeting a lowest common denominator for what can be sold to the largest possible audience.

41:24Nono Martínez Alonso: Yeah, so actually I even thought you were going to get into the people making tools for themselves, we should talk about that too. But as far as for me, I think one of the main things for processing was always.. Casey and I wanted something that we could use for our own work, and it wouldn't be very interesting—or I don't think you can really make it a very effective tool—if you don't care about it, and use it yourself. So a lot of the decisions that go into it are based on experience with.. Well nearly all the decisions are based on actual experience of either teaching people how to do this stuff, or trying to simplify something that we found frustrating, or difficult to do, or felt like it should just be more accessible and easier to get at. So there's that, but there's also this idea of people who are creators building their own tools that actually support their work. So the name processing is sort of a play between the idea of process, that it's not necessarily an ends, but more of a means—and we get excited about people who integrate processing is one piece in a much larger design process—and then also processing as far as computers are processing machines, and so forth. But this idea of building your own tools that help you get your own work done, I think is really very powerful and really important, Jose Luis being a good example there. In some ways that some of the work that I get most excited about is seeing people who use processing as sort of a bridge to build something that then helps them make it easier to create the thing that's actually in their head.

41:24 Do you have any examples of a favourite app, that you consume, that somebody else developped and makes your life easier?

45:45Ben Fry: Built with processing, or just just in general?

45:46Nono Martínez Alonso: In general.

45:47Ben Fry: Oh, I don't know.. Not off the top my head.

45:52Nono Martínez Alonso: What about if I tell you what's your favorite user interface?

45:59Ben Fry: Haha, I'm really into film user interfaces, and the campier the better usually. I really love sort of the geeky part of them just being these funny sort of sci-fi things, or they're just like really corny, or whatever. But also, the more intellectual part about it that I enjoy is seeing the expectations of the way that people feel like a an interface should behave, kind of like what we were talking about before. People complain about how computers work in movies, but there's so much of it that's grounded in like "Well why doesn't the computer just do that? Why isn't it just one button to do this particular feature." I mean, stripping away the sort of big blaring access denied screens, or uploading virus in Independence Day, or some of this other goofier stuff. But basically any interface that's in 2001, or Alien has some really beautifully designed stuff around it, or.. Yeah, I mean you can kind of go down the list, there is really wonderful stuff there.

47:28Nono Martínez Alonso: But you mentioned 2001, do you have any favorite typeface or family of typefaces?

47:36Ben Fry: There's a set of things that I tend towards for sure. Certain kinds of sans-serif and then certain kinds of serifs as well. For Fathom we used Sentinel, because it's a really wonderful sort of update of something older—like Century—but it takes the nice aspects of that, but also modernizes it around the corners. And it's just a really elegant face with lots of different weights that are useful in different ways. And we used that for Fathom logo type. We used National as a sans-serif—which is a nicesans-serif that's still a little bit friendly. We also recently have been looking at Fabriga, which is a really beautiful sans that we found works really well for certain screen interfaces. Ringside is another one that we've been looking at a bit, that we are looking at as a potential replacement for National as far as just sort of an elegant sans that isn't quite as plain as the of overuse of Helvetica, that seems to have taken over everyone's brains.

49:07Nono Martínez Alonso: So what's the first thing that you look at for any design? Both when you have to do it—so let's say you have a brief and you have to do it—and also when you see someone else's design, and you kind of analyze it, what do you look at?

49:23Ben Fry: I don't know, I think when presented with a design problem, mostly I start digging, alot of pictures immediately come to mind. We work exclusively with data, so usually what happens, is that a lot of pictures come to mind about what shape that data is, and ways that we might clearly explain what that shape is to other people, and how to make sure that that representation is something that actually shows the side of the data—or the aspects of the data—that are most relevant and that are most mapped into what the way people need to use it, or see it, or think about it. And yeah, looking at other work, it's really kind of the inverse of that process. I'm trying to unpack what what decisions have been made, and try and map that back to the criteria with which the person in question created the particular piece. Because I think the context of these things is so important that I think there's a lot of design critique, and it's really unfortunate. In information design and visualization, where a lot of the critique, you take away all of the context and say "This is the right way to do this kind of design." Or "This is the right representation." Or "You should always use this and not that, and bar charts are better than pie charts." And all these other silly rules that have no bearing on anything, but people like to cling to, as far as—I don't know—just ways to make them feel smart, or be exclusive about the field or something. So in evaluating something, it's like, how do you look at what's there and think about the context that they're trying to reach? And also the audience—the context in which it's intended to be used—and then the audience that they're trying to reach with it and sort of say "Does this make sense for the people for whom this has been created? Or is this unclear? Or is it too much detail, or not enough detail? Or is it true to the data in question? Or is it actually hiding something?" You know, a lot of stuff just is the first draft that you.. Data is kind of pretty on its own, and so there's a lot of visualization stuff that's sort of "Meh, I took this data set and made a picture out of it, and then that was it." Because they had a nice image, but it wasn't really about communicating something interesting or useful about the data. Just "Because, it looks good."

52:21Nono Martínez Alonso: To recap a bit, Ben is a founder of Fathom Information Design, and paraphrasing their statement on their website, they "Build platforms and products for understanding data." And basically, whoever hires them, they help them think about their information, and not just display it, but try to make it more meaningful, to convey it in different ways. I'm curious if you guys here in the office have any magic rules of things that you usually do to make things easier to understand. I mean, there might be some rules of thumb, like when you get a certain piece of data.

52:59Ben Fry: Yeah, there's probably a lot of them, and we should probably be writing them down and talking about them more. The big thing is just that trying to—that audience and context thing—establish that as early as possible the audience and context. And then also just what's interesting about the data. We did a piece recently with ProPublica and it's about basically spending at Trump properties, so the Trump Organization. Unlike all of the President's since Nixon, Trump didn't bother divesting his his companies or as assets or anything like that, after coming into office. And so the Trump campaign then basically just spent millions of dollars at Trump Hotels, and paying themselves to use the Trump Airline—sort of private airline—to fly around. So basically just took donations from people who supported his campaign, and just dumped that right back into his companies, and therefore his pocket. It's perfectly legal, but then as soon as he became the nominee, the Republican National Committee started doing the same thing. And other campaigns started donating—which is another level of like "Meh, that's a little weird."— But then in January—post inauguration—the US government started doing that. So basically, people who wanted to hang out with Trump, or have meetings with him, or have proximity, they were that much more likely to spend taxpayer dollars at Trump properties. And this is an ongoing and pervasive thing. So it presents a lot of design challenges around, how do you build a visualization that is a comparison against zero? You know, it's not about how much money is being spent. It's the fact that any money is being spent at all. So, given that kind of problem, we're trying to figure out how do we convey that—just the magnitude of what's happening—versus kind of saying "Well, it's this many million." Or "This many hundred thousand dollars in this thing." Because if you do that people are immediately thinking about like "Well, does that sound like a lot of money, or not?" You know, and it's like "Wrong thing, wrong question." What you want to be thinking about is the fact that this is happening at all. And in that particular representation, one of the things was it's really about the frequency of it, and the ongoing nature of it. So the final representation that we went with was about showing that frequency, and showing how that was changing over time, and how that was continuing, and how it would continue to fill in overtime as more data was added over time. But that's a different thing than just "Hey, we're gonna do bar charts that stack up how much money is being spent," And things like that, like how do you make something that's relatable in a way that conveys that frequency aspect of it, and hopefully helps make that broader point.

56:39Nono Martínez Alonso: So I believe now, one of the biggest mediums for spreading what you create is the Internet. Before we had computer screens—now have tablets, iPhones—and there is still some print, but that's not really.. Well I mean, it depends on where you are. How does that play in your information design? Does it make it easier to spread, but harder to..

57:13Ben Fry: Yeah, we're fairly output agnostic in the sense that we enjoy doing stuff for phones—phones or for screens—or for large scale installations. We love doing print stuff—there are enough graphic designers in the offic— that we really geek out about printing—printed things— and high density materials like that. We like to use prints. I've often used print throughout my career as a way of doing a first draft of something where I have a bunch of data that I'm working with. Sometimes it's nice to just print it all on a nice high density poster and get a look at things, and get a sense of what you're actually dealing with, and the scale and scope of things. So we still use it that way, and then also—occasionally, like in between other projects—we might do, you know a poster here, a book, or something like that, just because we enjoy working with print. But also, if somebody wants us to do an AR project, we'll do an AR project, or VR project, great! What we care about is that it's information and design centric. Everything else is a different medium to work in with different sets of constraints—going back to that audience and context thing—a different context in which you're creating the thing and you make very different artifacts for those different contexts.

58:56Nono Martínez Alonso: Which of your projects do you consider has been most influential? Or most well known, viral?

59:04Ben Fry: Oh I don't know. For Fathom?

59:09Nono Martínez Alonso: Yes.

59:11Ben Fry: Let's see.. Probably in sheer number of hits.. We did a project about MacGyver once and another time we did a project about Rocky. And I think just in pure number of.. Well actually no, that's not true because our China project got more. Those would be the biggest for the non client projects, because those got.. I don't know, there's a lot of MacGyver fans on the internet. And same thing with Rocky. I didn't even realize what a cult—I knew what a cult the MacGyver stuff was—but didn't realize the extent of how much people wanted to.. It was a comparison of the various movies and the breakdown and what was in them. And man, people like to argue about which is the best Rocky movie. Had we known that going in—or had I known that going in—we should have made that an element of peace too, for people to kind of weigh in on what's best, or worst, or whatever. And in terms of client stuff, it's really hard to say, because the metrics on each are so different. We did a project about China that had a quarter million users in the first week, and then, continue to have hundreds of thousands of users afterwards. We did stuff with the Clinton Foundation and Gates Foundation. Chelsea Clinton was on one of the morning shows, and talked about the project, and the hits just went completely bonkers. We kind of forget how incredibly influential TV is—just how massive—or at least I do, I don't know.I don't watch a lot of TV, so it's just kind of funny to see how those those play out.

1:01:20Nono Martínez Alonso: Okay, I would like to change gears a bit and talk more about yourself.

1:01:28Ben Fry: Oh-oh.

1:01:30Nono Martínez Alonso: Do you consider your life simple?

1:01:36Ben Fry: Haha, not terribly simple. I think I'm still trying to do too many things at once. And so that's making for a point of complexity with things.

1:01:48Nono Martínez Alonso: What things—if you can think of a specific—make your day more complex, that maybe couldn't just be like that?

1:01:55Ben Fry: Just day to day at work, for instance. We are people, so it requires me and everybody else to wear a lot of different hats at various times, and the context switching between.. Over the course of the day today, I've done IT stuff—like server setup—I've done management stuff—like working with staff on different things—done design direction things to go through how to refine a particular piece, things around product development for us to prioritize features that we want to put in an upcoming product, client development things around setting things up for with a potential, client management things about modifying the scope a current project. Also just doing software development, to support other things that are happening internally, or showing somebody else about how to do a particular coding thing for a specific project. And so it winds up being a lot of just context switching. So that can be tricky.

1:03:28Nono Martínez Alonso: Do you have any daily habits of less than half an hour or so that have an impact in your life?

1:03:35Ben Fry: I walk too and from work every day—which is a huge, huge thing for me—just lifestyle wise. It gives me a way wake up in the morning, and also to wind back down in the evening. It's a mile and a half —or two miles—and I just do that, rain or shine. And usually, I'll even listen to a book or something like that, which is great to be able to just listen to books faster than I can read them. I'm a terrible reader. But great, because I haven't been able to read nearly as much as I would like. And so just being able to get through a lot of stuff that way. It's been really fantastic.

1:04:22Nono Martínez Alonso: Are there any other activities you enjoy outside of work time?

1:04:28Ben Fry: Most of my time outside work is spent with my family. We have a one year old and a four year old. And so anytime that I'm not working, I really need to be helping out my my bride, who's shouldering that all of the other hours of the day. So yeah, that's a lot of fun. But italso can be very tiring too.

1:05:01Nono Martínez Alonso: How do you face boredom—if you get bored—because you might not have time for that?

1:05:06Ben Fry: Yeah, I really despise boredom. I get really upset. It's really quite rare that I feel bored about anything, and I actually get really upset if I actually am feeling bored. Because it's just like "That's so stupid. How can you possibly be bored about something?" But usually, I'm just exhausted and need to rest, or something like that. I don't know how you can be bored, there are too many things to do, and too much interesting out there.

1:05:52Nono Martínez Alonso: What's your relationship with social media?

1:05:54Ben Fry: it's weird, I kind of enjoy reading the news and understanding what's happening out there, and learning things about how the world is functioning, and working and all that. I feel kind of weird about it, because I'll read Twitter because I want to track the news and sort of see what's happening. But it's also this horrible cesspool, so I wish there were a better way of having the positive aspects of what I like about that, and with fewer of the negative parts of the hurt mentality stuff, and all the other problematic things that come along with it. Also separately, social media is important forus, as far as people knowing what work we're doing, and what we're up to. Our business is really based on what.. The inbound work that we get is really contingent on people even knowing that we exist. So we have to make some amount of noise about that. I've never been comfortable with promotion and self promotion, and things like that, but it's also a pure necessity. Some some element of that has to be done in order to help support all the other things that we care about a lot more.

1:07:36Nono Martínez Alonso: Just in case I forget afterwards, where can people find you online?

1:07:41Ben Fry: Fathom.info and BenFry.com and Processing.org.

1:07:46Nono Martínez Alonso: Thank you. How do you disconnect from the internet, and devices, and communication?

1:07:54Ben Fry: Yes, I like to just shut down completely. In particular I like to go to places with family that are detached from that, and I can focus on people around me, but also even on a day to day basis. For instance, here at Fathom, we stop midday and have lunch together for an hour or so, just as a group. And we have a rule that you're not allowed to use your phone, and we also don't talk about work during that time. So it's kind of our Mid Day—kind of detached from everything—and talk about other stuff, and think about something else. And it was something that started as a tradition, because very early we were working on a very difficult project—or very difficult couple of projects—that were really just intense. There were two or three of us, and we were just kind of cranking away, and then we needed to stop, and reset before we got back to work. So we just started doing that as a thing, and then that's just continued for the almost nine years now that we've been around.

1:09:26Nono Martínez Alonso: So how do you think that affects—both—you personally, and also the work that you do here?

1:09:34Ben Fry: I just think I prefer to be able to.. I'd rather be focused, and dialed in, and getting things done, and then take a break from that—take a mental break from that—rather than just trying to grind out the entire day in as shorter time as possible. You know like, just sort of force yourself, eat through lunch. Eating at your desk is particularly vile, your brain just can't work that way. And I think for me, I work a lot of hours in the day, and so it's one way of just keeping some some sanity from that.

1:10:24Nono Martínez Alonso: Is there there any app that you—on purpose—don't install on your phone?

1:10:28Ben Fry: Don't install? Uhh.. Nothing in particular.

1:10:39Nono Martínez Alonso: So if I tell you, what's a healthy relationship with technology?

1:10:45Ben Fry: It's a good question. I probably shouldn't think a lot about this, but I think it's something on the lines of being able to use it for how it makes things useful, things that are useful for you but understand the ways that it's changing what you're doing, and be fully aware of that. Any tool that you use, it's going to have an impact in the way that you think, and in the outcome of the thing that you're creating, similar with any technology. I think that if you spend too much time around technology—or working within a too small community of people who are just technologist—it's really easy to get caught in a loop of what a normal relationship—or what appears to be a normal relationship with technology—but isn't really normal. So being around other people who use technology in very different ways, or I think about spending time with family and the extended family that they have such different relationships to this stuff, and that's a helpful perspective on how you relate to these things, I think.

1:12:12Nono Martínez Alonso: How do you think advertisements online affect us?

1:12:16Ben Fry: I don't know, that's a big one.

1:12:18Nono Martínez Alonso: It comes from because I get the perception that we are opting in to get ads everywhere now—like promoted posts on things—and everyone seems to feel that they are not affected by them. I believe it's a bit of a naive thought.

1:12:34Ben Fry: I feel like we're on the on the edge of something giving way on ads. Because I think the current model just doesn't seem sustainable to me. It's just very weird to be tracked from site to site—actually we were talking about this at lunch a little bit today—just this thing of going to one site to shop for something, and then visiting a completely unrelated site hours—or even days later—and having it pop up an ad for the thing that you were looking at once. And it's like "I don't want to buy that thing from that company anymore." That's just so pervasively creepy. And that's like an extreme case, but a lot of it is done in various subtle ways. But also, our biggest companies—like Google and Facebook—so Google—93% of their revenue, I believe it is—comes from advertising. If you were to ask 100 people—especially who aren't into technology—what Google does, they're like "Oh they do search." And it's like "No, they're just a a big ad company. They just sell ads." And similar with Facebook, what's gotten them into trouble is the fact that they're just selling all the data about us for advertising. And basically their business model.. And I think Twitter is the same way. Basically, you can't take what makes Facebook horrible out, or what makes Twitter horrible out of it, and still have a sustainable business model for them at remotely the scale that they're at. So that's a highly problematic thing, because there are billions of dollars invested in—literally billions of dollars—going to convincing them not to change that model, and that they're so far down that path that—I don't know—Facebook can't really pull back. And I think the same thing happens with Twitter that it's CEO is saying particularly dumb things online. Take today or yesterday about their willingness to ban people or whatever, and just this idea that.. But basically, I think that what they know is that if they ban people who are problematic—and kind of clean up the place—they're not going to have the same levels of engagement and numbers. The controversy keeps people clicking, and coming back and being ragy. And at some point that's going to burn out and we're gonna have to read a lot of insufferable pieces on medium by Jack Dorsey of Twitter—and others—who are like, "Oh, we really screwed this up. We should have done this, or that, or whatever." But it's like, "Whatever, they're rich, they're fine." So it's an unsustainable thing, and I'm curious. It's interesting how it's come to the fore, whether through the Russian ads during the election, or people getting spooked about what Facebook does, or people getting frustrated with Facebook, but then they're like "Yeah but they're still on Instagram. It's the same company, same stuff."

1:16:05Nono Martínez Alonso: We're getting pursued by police.

1:16:07Ben Fry: Yeah the Mass General Hospital is across the street, obviously. So we get the ambulances from one side, or any police car heading to 93 is going to noisely go out that way. Or there's a fire station half a block down. So plenty of noise.

1:16:32Nono Martínez Alonso: What would you define as success?

1:16:33Ben Fry: Pff.. Haha, saving the easy ones for last.

1:16:40Nono Martínez Alonso: Or if you can name one successful person that comes to mind?

1:16:45Ben Fry: Hmm, I don't know. I think it's something like being in a spot where you can.. For me, it's being in a spot where you can do work that you really enjoy, that is challenging, and you're making, you're creating things that you intern and enjoy further with other people whose company you appreciate and can learn from, and it's great to hang out with them. And that's something that moves along in a positive way, and as a long term thing. And then separately, personally making the time to be with family and friends, and sort of establishing—and maintaining—those kinds of relationships outside of the work side of it—that are much more worthwhile—and provide that kind of support and happiness and whatnot. Everything else comes out of that, whether it's other measures of success, or whatever. But those are kind of a baseline things.

1:18:20Nono Martínez Alonso: I think that was a great answer. So, if you could send a message that the whole world would read in the morning, what would it say?

1:18:30Ben Fry: Wow, so there's a quote I love—probably my favorite—but it sums up so many things for me. So the quote goes "We act as though comfort and luxury were the chief requirements of life, but all we need is something to be enthusiastic about." And I think that speaks so nicely to this thing of—well just about anything—as far as the work that we do. It's not about having an easier work day, it's about doing things that you actually care about. Or in terms of technology, it's not about gadgets that shave 10 seconds off of this, and 30 seconds off of that, and make your life easier—in quotes—but make it more complex in 10 other ways. But just this thing of the things that actually make us happy, tend to be out of sync with the things we perceive to make us happy, or the things that we might create that are shortcuts—or whatever—to being happier, I guess. It goes to that other stuff of the boredom thing, it's like "How can you be bored?" There are too many other things out there, or places to visit, languages to learn, books to read, people to meet. Yeah, you'll never run out.

1:20:29Nono Martínez Alonso: Do you have any book recommendations?

1:20:33Ben Fry: Let's see.. Two kind of related to work here—that are nice kind of overviews—and the stuff that we've been talking about. One is called The Information, and it's sort of a pop science look at information theory over the years. And it's just a really wonderful combo of history, and science, and pop culture, sort of blending together. I think that's is James Gleick. And another one is called The Innovators, I think it was Walter Isaacson. The thing about it—basically it's a history of computing—but goes at this premise of a lot of the press—for instance—talking about technology is obsessed with these solo characters who are these geniuses that make everything happen, and it's like "Well yeah, and then they have like 30,000 employees behind him who actually kind of make all this stuff work." And I say "Him" subconsciously, but also usually it's a "Him" that's being deified in the press. But one of the nice things that it does in the book is that it goes back, sort of the counter to that is "Well, no. It's the institutions and structures and the environment in which these things happened, that allowed different people to be successful." Or there's always a much larger number of people or things that have been put in place—whether institutionally or policy wise, or funding wise, or whatever—that made these things happen. But it's nice, because the book takes a really even handed look at going back and forth between those two. And that instead of saying "Oh, it's all these specific people." Or "Oh no, it's the institutions." It's like "Well, here's where a person kind of helped move these things along. But also, here's the context in which they did those things that allowed them to do the work that they did. And here are the other people that were behind that." It just does a really wonderful job of weaving story together. I've always—since being very young—been interested in these fields—both design and engineering, computer science—and also have always been interested in the history of both. So this is one of the best takes that I've read as much of that material I've consumed over time.

1:23:39Nono Martínez Alonso: What would you do if you had a couple of weeks to work on a side project?

1:23:44Ben Fry: There's a specific side project that I've been wanting to do for many years. We have somebody in this summer and I've made him start working out a bit, so we can make some headway on it, because I'm sick of thinking about it. And I think people in the office are sick of hearing about it. So stay tuned.

1:24:07Nono Martínez Alonso: And the last thing I'll ask you today. What's your take on simplicity? Or what role do you think it should play in our lives?

1:24:17Ben Fry: On some level, I don't actually believe in simplicity. I think there's a lot of attention given to sort of simplicity or complexity, and I think it's entirely a perception thing, and it's just two different sides—or two different aspects—of the same thing. The things that we think of as being simple are often simple because of a lot of complexity underneath them. Or the things that are complex, are complex because of a lot of simple elements that form together to do something that's very messy. There's even kind of a side comment in the powers of 10, where they talk about moving through the various orders of magnitude of distance, sort of this pattern going back and forth between very sparse and simple, and very complicated, and active, and very complex and. So there it is playing out at these orders of magnitude of space. But you think about—even the room we're sitting in—it's like "This is fairly simple. There's not a ton of stuff on the walls, there's a table, some and chairs, and a screen and whatever. But what does that mean?" So you and I are each made of 37 trillion cells, you're working on a computer that can operate at a clock cycle of 3—Gigahertz, Megahertz, what is it these days?—and just the phenomenal complexity that went into that, or to the engineering of that artifact, or the texture—if you look at the wood here in this table under a microscope—the way the fibers hold together, and the things that they've done to make the wood flat and smooth enough to work nicely as a table. Or the panels in the wall, they're there for soundproofing to prevent the sound from just bouncing all over this space. So yeah, it's really just a matter of the level at which you're looking at things.

1:27:10Nono Martínez Alonso: Okay, so we've reached the end, we made it. The first thing I wanted to say is thanks a lot to you, Ben.

1:27:19Ben Fry: Thanks for the opportunity.

1:27:20Nono Martínez Alonso: And thanks a lot for Fathom Information and Design for letting us use the space. And thanks to Danielle. A lot of amazing people work here—Mark, Terry, Olivia and Rachel, and a lot more. You can actually go and see them on their website. That's Fathom.info again.

1:27:45 And I would really recommend you to go because they have amazing design sensibility. I really like the typeface they use. Their print work, that you can buy on their shop, is really cool. I actually got one of their maps from the US. Yeah, it's worth taking a look because a lot of things are really informational—never better said—and they also have really good computational skills. So you can also get inspired to do your own projects, or maybe just take a peek.

1:28:19 Anything else you want to say?

1:28:20Ben Fry: No, it's great. Thanks for the opportunity.

1:28:22Nono Martínez Alonso: I really enjoyed the conversation. Thanks for this opportunity, a lot. I really value your time, I know how hard it is to schedule things these days.

1:28:31Ben Fry: Oh. It's fun. It's great.

1:28:32Nono Martínez Alonso: Thank you everyone. I hope you enjoyed it.

1:28:36 Before you go, I'd like to remind you that you—the listener—are the reason why I make this podcast. If you want to keep up to date with new episode releases and writing, you should join my mailing list at gettingsimple.com/follow. You can find the whole list of episodes at getting gettingsimple.com/podcast. If you want to support the podcast, you can rate the podcast on the iTunes store as this is the best way for other people to find about it. And if you want to support it financially, you can become a Patreon at patreon.com/getting simple.

1:29:09 Now, you can listen to The Getting Simple Podcast not only on iTunes, but also on Spotify, Overcast, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts, really.

1:29:18 As I mentioned earlier, please reach out to me directly on Twitter at @getting_simple, or on Facebook, Instagram and Patreon at @gettingsimple and let me know what you think about this episode.

1:29:30 Once again, I'm your host, Nono Martínez Alonso, and this is one more episode of The Getting Simple Podcast. A podcast for you to find ways to be more productive—and creative—while enjoying a slower, balanced life.

1:29:44 Have a simple week.

1:29:45 Thank you so much, and see you in the next episode.

November 19, 2018

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