Jon Bell
The Importance of Practice, Passion, and Patience
In this episode of Brave UX, Jon Bell shares his perspectives on addressing disinformation on social media, the importance of the 'designers mindset', and how he's overcome resistance to be a better writer.
Highlights include:
- How do you challenge the status quo without getting fired?
- What is bright-siding and how is it dangerous?
- How do you push past resistance and become a better practitioner?
Who is Jon Bell?
Jon is a product designer who has worked for some of the most well-known tech companies in the world.
While at Microsoft, Jon was the Senior UX Design Lead for Windows Phone’s first party apps. At Twitter he dedicated himself to making the app more accessible and led the design for features aimed at reducing abuse and disinformation.
Jon has since joined Replay.io, as the Founding Designer, a startup building a new generation debugger.
Transcript
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Hello and welcome to another episode of Brave UX. I'm Brendan Jarvis, Managing Founder of The Space InBetween, and it's my job to help you to put the pieces of the product puzzle together. I do that by interviewing world class UX researchers, UXers and product management professionals, and they share with us the expert learnings, stories and advice. My guest today is Jon Bell. Jon is a designer, founder, teacher, author, blogger, mentor, and artist. He's even one of several people named on a patent. For most of the past 20 years, Jon has worked for some of the most well known tech companies in the world, including Twitter, real Networks and Microsoft. While at Microsoft, Jon was the senior UX design lead for Windows phones, first party apps such as mail, calendar and photos. He also lead the UX of the mobile suite of office apps. After three years at Microsoft, Jon left for Twitter in 2014 where he dedicated his time to making the app a better experience for users regardless of how able bodied they were, where they lived, the speed of their internet, or how old their device was.
- He also took on the design lead role for features that were aimed at reducing abuse and disinformation on Twitter, giving him a really interesting front row seat during a very intense time at the platform. More on that later, Jon received a Bachelor of Arts with majors in multimedia and web design from the Art Institute in 2002, which inspired him to start UX Launchpad, a company that teaches good design practices. Originally from Seattle, Jon now lives in Wellington, New Zealand, with his wife and three children. They made the move across the Pacific Ocean in late 2017 in search of a new adventure. In September of 2020, Jon launched a not-for-profit called Arbiter. Arbiter is building products and classes to help people with media literacy and disinformation. He's also recently joined replay.io as the founding designer, which is a startup building a new generation of debuggers for product teams. I first saw Jon speak at UX nz in 2019 on the topic of design ops and was inspired by his engaging delivery and practical takeaways. Jon is a super active contributor to the UX and design communities and I'm very much looking forward to today's conversation with him. Jon, welcome to the show.
- Jon Bell:
- Thank you. That was a very flattering and wonderful intro. Thank you.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And what nobody else knows, but I'm gonna let them know is that, I think that was take 11 or 12 [laugh] of the intro. So Jon was being very patient with me is we struggle through on Monday the 21st of December, which is when this is being recorded. So I think it's been a big year for everybody, but this is a great way to be able to finish the year off. Jon doing this with you today. And I think from your introduction it's pretty clear to everyone that you've done and still do a lot of things. And what I have observed in your recorded talks is that you bring a lot of intensity to your work. Where does that intensity come from?
- Jon Bell:
- Gosh, I've never been asked that question. Yes I think my wife would like to know where this is coming from and where my coworkers as well. Yeah, I just think always a lot of creative people. I've just always liked making things and building things. I think also a lot of creative people, you can sometimes get a little impatient because when you're first making your thing, you're really excited about it and if it starts to stretch on too long, you can start losing motivation. And so I think everything from the talks that I'm doing or the latest proposal at work or whatever I think I'm coming from a place where a lot of creative people do, which is like, I made a thing, isn't this cool? Let's do it. And then just kind of repeating it from there. Another thing that I'd say is that my talks something that people might not know looking at my talks, but I very much know and so does my family. I practice my talks so many times. I'm talking in the hundreds, so if the talk is gonna be in three months, I'll be practicing it in its entirety every night, multiple times. And so by the time I get up there, I'm more like m and m doing a really, really complicated rap verse where I know every word [laugh] and where it's all gonna go. And I think that comes out in a pretty sort of intense way cause I'm like, I finally get to do this on stage after so much practice. So yeah,
- Brendan Jarvis:
- It's a, sounds like a really steep jobs approach to preparing for presentations. It's something that people, I suppose if you don't have that insight into how people prepare and why the talks are so good, it's great for our listeners to be able to hear that today that it really is just a lot of drilling. It seems like I need to apply that back to my introduction. So that's a note for the new year. That's good lesson for me, [laugh].
- Jon Bell:
- Yeah, on that note, I'm glad you brought up Steve Jobs. First of all, I just love telling Steve Jobs stories just cuz I've read a lot about him and stuff, but that's actually a really apt comparison. Steve Jobs, people believe that he was just a natural communicator. So when he's going up and making you buy an iPhone, he must just naturally be good at this. But anyone he had to practice at it. Obviously there there's some amount of talent that you start with, but the bigger issue is that he was working on those keynotes three months literally before going on stage. And I feel like when people write something off as talent, then there's a reason to not try. I'm like, oh, I'll never be a good basketball player. I'll never be Steve Jobs, I'm just gonna do this thing I'm good at. But yeah, the secret of course is that it's just hard work. You just work at it. And I think that was a really good lesson for me to learn a long time ago.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah, it's an interesting secret because it's not something that I feel a lot of people want to hear, but it's actually the honest truth for 99.9% of us is that if you want to be really great at something, you just have to keep practicing it.
- Jon Bell:
- And I think the flip side of that practice, and we all know this intellectually, but it's hard to remind ourselves, especially as perfectionists, is that the part of practicing a lot is that you've gotta be bad at first. You just do. And so Iass has this great thing Ray talks about when you have taste, there's this giant gap between the people you're inspired by and the reason you started doing this thing and how good you currently are. And that can be an agonizing golf. You want it to be so much better than you are. And so I think a lot of the people that end up being true masters are the ones that find a way to be okay with being bad [laugh] long enough to practice.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah, that's a really insightful point. Thinking back, Jon back before you got started in technology, do you remember how you came to discover that this was something that you wanted to spend two decades and counting of your life pursuing?
- Jon Bell:
- I grew up in an area in Washington, DC when we hear about the beltway and you hear about Bethesda, Maryland. So that's where I'm from and this is the area where there's a lot of wealth because you're right there near the seat of power. And so a lot of lobbyists and a lot of people working in the government and so forth. And so all around me I saw there's plenty of really amazing people, truly just extraordinary people that you'll never hear about on the news, but they're just committed to their country and doing their thing. But I also saw a lot of miserable rich people people that they just were not happy in their lives. And I just remember having a really strong sense of, gosh, whatever I end up figuring out, I can't be as unhappy as these people. I have to be doing something for the love of it cuz this isn't working.
- And so I was born in 1979, meaning the first Nintendo was when I was five and the internet, I was on the internet in the eighties with back then they were called BBSs for bulletin board systems. So I just remember having a very strong kind of anti-capitalist, anti rich person. I've gotta find my own way, kind of punk rock mindset. And so I was like, okay, this stuff over here is stupid. I'm not gonna be a doctor or lawyer. This just seems like it's not going well for these people. I'm gonna get into this thing called the internet and they'll never be any money in that. And so I just sort of lucked out in that I really, I was able to follow my hobby as this tidal wave of capitalism took over. And so I looked around one day and realized, gosh, the things that I was trying to do, just as my hobby ended up being very lucrative just in the industry. So I've always been into tech I've always been a nerdy kid writing code and stuff. Again, I thought I was, I thought I was doing the equivalent of do making a zine out of paper or writing poetry. I thought I picked a side thing and then the side thing kind of took over the world. And I was lucky in that sense that I happened to be good at a thing that was in demand.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah, it's interesting that tension between the internet and what it could have been, and I'm a very subjective view, but a lot of people, I'm a little younger than you, I was born in 85, but I certainly remember the mystical world at around that 1995 period where my grandparents got the first computer and I live next door to them. And just dialing up into the internet and just the whole digital world opening up and this sense of possibility, that was really evident in the people that were online at that time. And it feels like we have somehow lost a little bit of that. And I'm not sure if it's because of the commercialization or just the sheer number of people that are now involved, which is a great thing by and large. But I certainly could certainly in my own journey resonate with what you are saying about how thing that was a hobby has now become your career. And it's just fortunate in that respect. But yes, it has changed.
- Jon Bell:
- One thing that I always say here, and to be clear, I think I'm the only person on the entire internet that has this point of view. So if you find yourself thinking either watching this video or you in front of me, if you find yourself thinking, I'm not so sure I agree with that, you're in good company. Most people don't agree. I believe that if you take a pie chart of my nostalgia and you kind of cut it into pieces of why I feel that way about the early internet, a big part of it is that I'm just old now, right? So when you look back, you know, talk to some boomer about music in 1967 and they'll say it was never good again. And you talk to independent comic artists and they'll say, oh, the golden age was, and I feel like it takes, you sound kind of like an idiot when you say that we're living through a golden age because everyone always agrees at the current time things used to be better.
- We always think that Apple was better five or 10 years ago. We always think Saturday Night Live was better five or 10 years ago. We just sort of always think it was better When I worked at Twitter and I saw the sorts of anti things that we were having to put together. One thing that wasn't always that far from the back of my mind as we were building these features is I was saying once we make this feature mute, our team shipped mute. Mute is so taken for granted now that when you're overwhelmed on Twitter, you can just hit that button and at least you don't have to deal with that, right? Well, Twitter used to not have mute. So I think we would all agree that of course things are better now than them, at least on that metric. Well the same is true with the broader internet.
- When you were on a bulletin board system back in the day and you decided that you wanted to completely harass someone or spam them or stalk them or whatever, there was no filing a ticket. Like sure, Twitter's got its own issues, but at least you can file a ticket. At least people are being paid to deal with that. The other one of course was diversity BBS is it was just a bunch of people that looked exactly like me and listened to exactly my music and were just as nerdy as me. And of course we play Dungeons and Dragons and on and on and on it goes. And so the diversity there I do have nostalgia for that time, but I have to be honest with myself and realize, yeah, there were three women that I ever came in contact with back in, I'm referring more to 1988.
- I'm sure there were non-white people somewhere, but I certainly wasn't being exposed to their points of view. What would be more common is that somebody would be gay or a woman or a person of color they'd probably just be harassed off the system. And so that's always something that I have in my mind is like, yes, I'm nostalgic for the way it used to be, but I think it's objectively better in some key ways. And the last thing I wanna say about that is I challenged myself on this about a year ago and I decided to start a new list of links called People Having Fun on the Internet. That's the point of the site. And I'll tell you this is a good challenge. What would you do right now if you were trying to find someone having fun on the internet? You can't go on Google and say Fun website cause that doesn't work.
- You can't go on Twitter and do a search for this is cool because it's like you're not gonna find anything good. What you end up having to do is kind of like a librarian. You've gotta go into the deep, deep recesses of the web that are apart from Twitter and Google and really sleuth them it out. And it would take me maybe two hours to find one interesting link because it wasn't on Twitter, it wasn't on Google, but they're out there and in sheer numbers it's way more than there ever was in 1988 or 1995. And the fact that we have things like GitHub or Reddit to go find people that like the things you do or whatever means that you can actually amplify that joy way more than we ever could back then when Netscape 4.7 couldn't even render a page. So that is my somewhat contradictory point of view on that is my nostalgia is really high, but then I try to kind of remember, I don't know, I feel like objectively this is way better even though it felt really cool back then.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- So speaking of having fun on the internet, I know that's something that you are quite excited about at the moment is replay.io, which is a company that you've just joined us, their founding designer. Now what can you tell us about us at this, about ET to us at this stage?
- Jon Bell:
- I saw a talk in 2012 by a guy named Brett Victor and the name of the talk was inventing on Principle and I heard, oh this was amazing talk. You should watch it hit play, start watching. Not super impressed by the first sort of 15 minutes or so because he was sort of saying abstract, high level things wasn't really landing for me. Then he says, I think creating needs to be more malleable. So if you're looking at sculpture or clay or whatever, you know can move things around. And he said, code doesn't allow for that. You have to write code. And then you go over here and hit reload. So he sets out this framing about how writing code is too hard. And I thought, okay, okay this could be something. And then he starts doing things and my jaw hit the floor and I don't want to give it away cause I want people to actually look at it.
- He was doing some stuff there in that presentation that was the mother of all demos back from the sixties. It's just the new version. And I looked up this guy, he used to work at Apple, he helped invent a lot of the interactions that Apple ended up doing and I just went running around telling everyone that would listen. I went and told my wife, I literally said these words to her. I said, Sarah, on my deathbed when I one day am about to die, if someone were to say to me, Hey Jon, you've seen technology from before the internet to now when we're living on Mars or whatever. When they ask me what are the top five moments in technology in terms of new ideas, I think I just saw one of them that is literally what I said to her in the kitchen. And then I have my emails, I wrote emails to all my friends, I was like this is gonna change the world.
- And then I was on the Windows phone design team, which has a hundred people on it and I sent out a meeting invite for a couple days later at lunchtime and I named this the invite let's get inspired together or something like that. And in the description I said, we're all gonna watch a movie together but I'm not gonna tell you what it is cause I don't want you just to load it up in a background tab. I want us to watch it together so the day comes, I hit play, we're all in there, there's a lot of us there having lunch, I hit play, we watch it. The first part maybe not so exciting. And then he gets into those examples that I'm referring to. And the room just about died because the designers in the room were like, oh my gosh, this is a completely different framing of everything.
- I also had invited a bunch of developers and they were like, we've never seen anything like this. And directly this video directly was so inspiring to us that we actually went and built a bunch of features inspired, I wouldn't say a bunch, but one key feature called the u and i tool, which I talked about in the talk you referred to. It inspired a bunch of this new thinking about getting developers and designers working closer together. I think you can actually tie this thinking to things like Figma as well. So anyway, all that to say eight years pass and I learn about this company called replay.io and they're making a visual debugger and that doesn't mean much to most people if you're not a developer and even if you are a developer, you're probably gonna roll your eyes at it a little bit cuz like eh, debugging whatever.
- I already have my system. But then I looked at the job description and it was like we're looking for curious people and excitable people and people that are nice to others and to learn. And I'm kind of reading through it and at the very end they said, tell us your favorite tool to get things done or something like that. And then they said mentioning Brett Victor a plus who of course was that guy from eight years ago. That blew my mind. So I opened up an email, I'm like, Brett Victor, seriously let me tell you this story. And so that's why I'm so excited this concept of making sure that developers and designers can see the same thing. So you're not over here in your research lab, which is broken out from what people are doing in Figma, which is broken out from what the executives think we should go do, which is broken out from what the marketing people think we should do to do. Which is of course separate from the code. The more you can get all those people together the better. And so that's what replay is working on. It's not really just a visual debugger I'm seeing it in a much broader sense that it's a really important way to get people collaborating even if they don't all write code, even if they're not all researchers, et cetera. So that's why I'm really excited
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Just for everyone that's been listening to this particular segment that Brett Factor talk is excellent in everything that Jon said is a hundred percent true. We'll also link to that and replay so you can check out what's going on over there. It's such an important product and it's forming part of a wider ecosystem of these products that are aiming to reduce that friction that exists between the different disciplines and creating world class products. And so anything that we can do to help support that, we certainly will. So check it out for sure. Now Jon, I was reading through your blog recently and you mentioned in a post called We Live here now that you still sort of pinch yourself with the sort of spontaneous surprise that you and your wife feel. Sarah, I believe about the move that you made a few years back from Seattle to New Zealand. What was it about moving to New Zealand that made it one of those one out of 100 ideas that you described in that post as one that actually happened?
- Jon Bell:
- I don't know. And so for those listening I was describing in our relationship, I'm boring and don't do adventures. And I married someone, we've been together for 23 years, she's wanderlust a wanderlust kind of person and loves new adventures and trying new things. And so I always describe our relationship a little bit like this, I'm the rock and she kind of leans and it works really well. And one day I was just taking a shower and I just thought I could move to New Zealand just kind of out of nowhere and all of a sudden instead of there being a rock and one person leaning against the rock, we both kind of went woo. And then that was it. There was no one minding the store. I don't know exactly what triggered it. I'm very happy that we're here. I'm also quite I have a bit of a feeling of survivor's guilt, just that I have so many friends in the states and I'm American.
- And so when I see America having trouble whether it's C or things happening with race, racial justice or whatever it is, I feel a little bit like a traitor. I'm over here having this great life and I'm seeing these things happening and really wanting to help. One of the things that I found and just my tiny little way is all right, I can't be on the ground protesting the way that I used to and I don't know how to help my nurse friends and my doctor friend and they're having a tough time. So I don't know what to do directly. What I am discovering however, is that my bubbly personality when I'm giving talks about optimism or I'm trying to help write an article about how here's a cool new thing that I learned and it might help you that's turning into my calling lately is just like I've had a long career.
- I'm an old guy now and I just call it leaning out. I know I'm talkative, I know I tell long stories and so I do everything I can to try to package up my stuff and then hand it off to the next generation. Here's an inspiring talk Now for example, the talk I did at UX New Zealand, I was telling all my friends Hey we don't need another straight white dude on stage with a beard that looks like me. Please apply. And so I'm doing everything I can to get people to out there. And then I also submitted my own talk just also and when they accepted my talk, I actually turned it down. I was like, Hey, very flattering, maybe let's just not go with someone that looks like me. I really appreciate it. And they're like, no, we think it's good. But they did tell me after this talk maybe no more me cuz I've now spoken at that conference three times, maybe it's time to open up.
- So been my calling since coming here is my life is a lot simpler and I've tried to pay it forward where I can and be like look, it's not about my benefit to the world is not some guy living in New Zealand just sitting in a hammock. It's like, all right, if stress has gone down in my life slightly because I've moved to another country, I need to try to give back. I do a little advice column in design and tech and videos like this. I try to do my best to bring some of the optimism and some of the ideas around.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah. And I wanna talk to you about optimism as well because your UX 20 was I believe the took that ended the conference and was also aiming to end it on a high note of talking about the power of design after what's, you've talked about a really challenging year more so in outside of New Zealand than it has been for us here in New Zealand. But before we do that, I just wanted to explore this notion of the way that you explained your relationship with your wife, how you are the rock, and I think you self described as the boring guy and she's the sort of wonder last little leaning on you. Do you feel that that metaphor or analogy is applicable when you think about your contribution and your role in the UX and design community? Are you still the rock in your professional life or are you maybe more of the
- Jon Bell:
- [laugh]? Yeah, I think anyone that's ever worked with me would point out that if there's a spectrum between blue sky and a project manager trying to make sure we hit the schedule. I live way over here. I came up in design with a very sort scientific mindset. We know that there are things like Hicks's law and Fitz's law that describe in more scientific terms than many things why this was easier to click and why a contrast level of this number is better, not only better but more accessible and therefore legal, whereas it's illegal to have things that are don't have enough contrast. So all that stuff about accessibility and making sure it works even if you don't have a fast connection and usability and just all that kind of stuff. It's not that it's old fashioned cuz we still care about it now, but when I came up you didn't have frameworks to lean on that has already figured out your alt tags are there and it it's easily translatable.
- And of course responsive design is built in and all that. I came up when you had to do it all from scratch. And what I discovered is that back then it's like you either knew Photoshop or databases, there wasn't this beautiful gray area in between of strategists and UX versus UI and all this variety that we've come to is great cuz it used to be you're either an artist so get in Photoshop and of course you're not a product person cuz you're the person that makes things look pretty. So that was one side or you're a developer who has a giant beard and is in a closet somewhere and doesn't have to talk to anyone because they have the keys to the kingdom. That's how it used to be.
- So I did come up very boring. I'm the guy where you show me a really cool new interaction and my brain is just processing through, okay accessibility issue there. You've using a horizon, horizontal scroll on a webpage, we know that that's gonna fail. Testing that's not gonna work cuz you're not using iOS allows you to change your font size. But the thing that you're doing there, you put the font in an image, therefore it's not gonna resize with iPhone. That's bad for people that have bad vision. One for me by the way, is that I will get a headache in five seconds if you show me white text on a black background. And I know that dark mode I advocated for dark mode for years and so I'm very happy that it came, but it has to be optional. And we overshot a bunch of designers, they started making everything look like dark mode and I have astigmatism, my eyes will start shimmering, I'll get a migraine actually if it takes too, if I look too long.
- So yeah, I am that boring guy in a group of 10 designers where they're all way better at visual design, they're all way better at pushing the boundaries of all the things we could do and all the latest interactions and I need those people in my life. But I'm kind of the killjoy, I'm the one over here saying, well did you know in user testing if you test a magnifying glass, it'll often fail testing. You think a magnifying glass means search? It's not actually that simple and we have the data to prove it. Did that a plus sign, you'd think that a plus sign means ad, you'd think that would be unambiguous? Not, and I think where I got a lot of this, by the way I was raised on it, this was my education, but when I was at Microsoft, they had the most extraordinary research situation where you're at your desk in Photoshop or whatever, you design out an idea and maybe a variant.
- And then it was pretty much as simple as exporting that PMG over to your researcher and you're in testing within 24 hours and you can walk down the hallway and go into a thing with double sided glass or double sided mirror, whatever it's called where they can't see you but you can see them and you can actually see your designs being tested that rapidly. So you go I think maybe you don't have to debate it, you just throw it into testing, you see people struggling with it, you see people crying over the idea you thought was good and then back to your desk. And that really amazing feedback loop. It really beat out of me [laugh] a lot of the more blue sky like, ooh, it looks so nice on Pinterest kind of thinking because I saw someone crying when I tried this crazy interaction. And so as a result as I said a minute ago, I really do need people like my wife in my life to help me think bigger and I need really strong visual designers on my team or else I'm just gonna make everything look incredibly spartan and utilitarian. And that's what I've learned over time is it's a blend. It's not that my approach is being the rock and it's not that the wander list people are amazing just by themselves. It's the combination of the two that I think makes the best work.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah, and I think this is really interesting thinking about how we started off talking about the sort of notion of the nostalgia of the internet as it was and the internet as it now is. And you talked about your training sort of baked these usability, accessibility core principles of product design in and while you might not be the best visual designer, having that sort of anchoring in that has done a good service to the teams that you have worked in. And also we take for granted now a lot of the things that are baked into our tools as product people that you mentioned that now a lot of the accessibility aspects are by and large taking care of and some of the frameworks that we use to develop on, I mean this didn't exist before and that's really changed the internet for a lot of people that aren't as able bodied as you and I. And it's easy to forget that there are people not bearded white males like you and I that actually use the internet and know what a plus sign means and know what a magnifying class means. So I really like that. I wanna come back to,
- Jon Bell:
- I wanna, yeah, go on. Say one quick thing there. You know, talk about the white male perspective at Twitter, there was a guy named Dave Beddingfield and he was, I would say the most respected designer on the entire team. He had the highest title, he's a really great person, he's just an amazing designer. He was just sort of solid gold. And Dave Beddingfield as he's actually from my neck of the woods. I think he might be from Maryland also, but with his age and experience and just natural privilege, he spent all day every day fighting the good fight on things like accessibility. And I've seen it happen before where you have maybe a younger person or maybe a woman or maybe a person of color, they'll try to fight for these things and they'll sometimes have success, but you see a very clear difference between them trying to argue for these and someone like Dave, he's older and so forth.
- So I don't wanna say it's every feature, but it kind of feels like every big accessibility leap forward that I saw at Twitter between 2014 and 2018. If it wasn't Dave Beddingfield originally pushing it, he was the one that got it over the line or he was the one mentoring the person that got it over the line. And for all the straight white dudes out there that might be watching this, just remember there are people around you that have the ideas that you do. And sometimes putting your neck out there a little bit and saying, yeah, we have to do alt tags on Twitter, it sounds ridiculous but we have to do it. That can make such a huge impact not only on the culture of your team, but on hundreds or hundreds of millions or billions of people using your product. So just a shout out to hope more people are like Dave [laugh] in the world. [laugh].
- Brendan Jarvis:
- So tell me the talk that you delivered in UX nz just a couple of months ago. I think it was in November actually just last month. It was quite an inspiring talk. And if people haven't watched the talk, what is the short summary of it and can you tell us what was it that inspired you to talk about the power of design and the power of designers as you did?
- Jon Bell:
- Well, thank you. I'm glad you liked it. The summary of the talk is really quite simple. My son went to school learned about climate change and he had already known about climate change, but he learned at a deeper level at a 13 year old level instead of just hearing about it randomly. And a friend of his stopped coming to school for a day or two, just existential dread. His friends started saying, I'm so terrified by what I've learned. I don't even know how to get out of bed anymore. It was such an intense feeling for them. And so my son started having trouble sleeping and I thought, okay, this isn't good. And the message, if you imagine a spectrum, if one end of the spectrum is denial where I tell my son it'll be fine, it's all made up. Well that's a lie, first of all.
- And even if it weren't a lie, it's a very short term strategy because he's gotta notice that the world is changing. So denial is not acceptable. I think the other extreme, which is where most of us live that's despair, is looking at it and being like, yep, we're doomed. And I guess what frustrated me when I realized that spectrum and that I was living on the despair side of it is like, well what kind of role model are you for your children? If they give you bad news and you either deny it exists at all or you just completely melt down and don't know what to right, that's not good. And so I was trying to think how can I talk to my son about climate change where I am admitting that, oh, it's a real problem, but I'm also explaining what the smart people are doing to address it and that he can be one of those smart people.
- So the whole talk is just saying, look, designers and researchers and frankly anyone that has ever made any progress in the world, ever, we don't get to live over here in denial land. Those people have opted out. We also can't stay in despair land because then we're not doing anything cause we're just curled up in the fetal position. We are taught to have this third way, which is, I admit that this is really a problem. Let's figure out best practices, let's do our research, let's do more of the things that work and fewer of the things that don't. And then we'll iterate and we'll just keep it up. So that's what the talk was all about. That's where it came from. And I have to say it with my son, I figured out a vocabulary to talk to him with where I wasn't denying things and I wasn't just despairing and he already wanted to be a scientist and stuff, but now he's in a whole new level of I wanna be one of the fixers instead of just thinking like, oh, there's nothing we can do.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- So it sounds like run to the fire, don't run away from the fire. That's the job of the designer. And I think Jon, in that talk, he also, you reference a really great website called Beautiful News. Can you tell us a little bit about Beautiful News?
- Jon Bell:
- Yeah, beautiful news is great. If you imagine a really great infographic, they thought, okay, we're gonna do one infographic day for an entire year. And it's just nothing but good news. And so you don't have to go read a white paper and you don't have to read along dissertation on Twitter with people disagreeing. Imagine just a visualization that says there have never been more female CEOs before right now. And it shows the graph rising. The graph also shows that there's only 38 female CEOs in the Fortune 500, which is clearly still way too low. So these infographics are not trying to just give you dumb, just trying to pretend everything's fine. Cuz 38 outta 500 is not fine. But you see this exponential curve and as we all know as designers, a picture can really hit you just right. And so it's really good for your soul I think to go and see beautiful news and just soak it in and just be like, wow, I didn't know that. I didn't know that. And then for me it helps me just think now what's next? So we're up to 38 female CEOs out of 500, what can we do to make that number not so pathetically slow, let's continue this exponential growth.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- [affirmative]. Yeah, it's been actually really powerful. I used it once I saw it in your talk, I sent it to our family group just in our messenger chat group. And it was I think quite important to help move some of my family members from that mo to spare into the spectrum and start having a conversation based on fact about good things that are already happening. And then the question becomes, well where do we go from here as opposed to chuck your hands up and not know what to do or just have this overwhelm, this sense of overwhelm. So it was such a great talk and we'll be linking to that in the show notes as well. Now I wanna jump into,
- Jon Bell:
- Sorry really quick. My wife has a term that she uses, it's called Bright siding. And anybody that has dealt with someone that has a really bad illness or has had a horrible death in the family, just horrible things. The term bright siding is if someone near me were to die, God forbid, and then someone were to say, well, at least. And then they try to say something and it's frankly kind of insulting. I think that's the key with optimism and good news is you can't tell a person that's struggling, well, at least you have more time to spend with your other child. That's not acceptable. You of have to hit it and say what you're going through is difficult and I'm so sorry and let that be what it is and then allow the other good news to be its own thing. And it's really tough. I make this mistake all the time where my wife just wants to be upset about something and I'm like, pew, pew, good news. And it's not the right time for it. So I think that's the other key is not just to share good news but make sure it's meaningful and truthful and to someone that was asking for to be told that good news. Cuz oftentimes it can just feel like you're not listening to the person having a tough time, which has its own issues.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And she reminds me of the conversation I had with Phil Gordon who works at Spotify as one of their product insights leads. And he was explaining this notion of having sympathy versus having empathy for your users. And he was talking about how sympathy is the mindset. Usually quite a paternalistic mindset focused on trying to remove the pain for someone. So very solution first but also very self-centered in the sense that it's you trying to remove their pain so that you don't have to feel it. And I have to say that the way that Phil framed that, I could apply that back to myself and think about how sometimes my wife who works at the hospital as a doctor comes home and tells me stories of really difficult things that have happened and I just wanna jump in there and be like, oh, have you thought about doing this? And the other thing, and I have done that in the past and it was a really good reminder, you've just talked about Jon, about the tonality and the approach that you take to letting people and acknowledging that when there's something difficult going on, just that you have to start there with them and be with them in that before you jump into the good news.
- Jon Bell:
- And I think that applies to design, research and design as well. I have seen situations where we learn a thing in testing and I want to go deploy it but there's this whole delicate dance where the research might be telling you a thing that's gonna really hurt this person's feelings or mess up their goals for the year or a million other kind of political things. One quick example of that by the way, is that the surface, the surface from Microsoft that has that little cloth keyboard, the very first surface the marketing team had put together these ads that said this cloth keyboard is just as fast as normal keyboards or 80% as fast as normal keyboards. And I interviewed with a researcher who ended up on our team. She said, Jon, I got in there. All the marketing was ready to go. Everyone was very proud of this.
- It was just taken for granted that of course the keyboard says good as a real keyboard. And I went and did some research and it was not true. It was 30% as good as a keyboard. And she was like, I was new to the team, I didn't have any clout. Nobody knew who I was. But all I had was this really inconvenient data point that it was only 30% and we're taking out billboards that say 80%. But it was my job as a researcher as much as it was gonna be a bummer to find a way to tell the team because the reviewers were gonna tell us. So I think that's another sort of tie in. Sometimes you can, whether it's optimism or knowing that the keyboard is only 30% of good [laugh], figuring out the way to express it to others in a way that it can be heard is sometimes I feel like it's my whole job. [laugh] not about the objective truth, it's about how well can you communicate it.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah, and that actually reminds me of your talk at 2019 at UX nz where you sort of touched on this notion it was the design ops you were talking about, but you sort of started off about midway through actually you started framing the context for the tools and techniques that you were delivering. Can you sort suggested that when you first start off as a designer, you are trying to figure out what it's all about for you. What do I believe in? What practices make sense to me? Then it moves to a conversation of, okay, well now that I know some things after some years in the saddle how do I go about positively affecting my team? And then I suppose as you progress further into your career, you get to the point well, okay, well how do I scale that impact outside of the team, whether it's to the company or the wider world?
- And one of the other things that keeps coming up in these conversations that I've been having, and it's something that I've recognized in my own business and relationships as well, is that the empathy that we have for our users is almost a given. You wouldn't find any product person that doesn't think that it's a good idea and that we should be doing that. And we're doing testing and we're seeing people cry when we make bad design decisions and that's wonderful. But the other part of this is actually turning that empathy inwards, like the researcher you just described who was new to the team, who then had to go and find a way to tell the bad news to a team that had invested their heart and soul into bringing this product to market and say to them, actually it's not as good as we thought it is.
- And having that empathy for your internal stakeholders is such a key part. And I think people like yourself and the other people that I've spoken to, that is such a common theme no matter where they've worked, what their role is, where they're from, it's really, really important. I wanna talk about something that's also really important, which is the not-for-profit that you've just launched, arbiter, which I think is kind of somewhat cheekly named after the platforms don't wanna address and be the arbiter of truth for the disinformation that's going on those platforms. What is arbiter Jon?
- Jon Bell:
- To be perfectly honest, arbiter right now is more in the sort of think tank stage. I don't have a product to point people to cuz I tried making a product and it didn't test well. So we're back to the trying board. And then I got employed at Replay, which has taken all my time cuz I'm new. So right now it's a collection of ideas which sounds so vague that if I were watching someone say that on a video, I would skip forward five minutes. Cause I don't wanna hear about a collection of ideas. But I would say just at a high level, there are things that we know in the data. We know, for example, that a lot of harassment and horrible things that you're seeing online, you can actually trace it back to the human need to just be accepted. For example. That's a thing that we know.
- There's a great talk online about a guy that used to run the KKK in America or something like that. And he just tells the story of how he's 70 years old, he's an Italian immigrant, interestingly enough an immigrant leading the kk. He he's walking along and he's smoking pot. It's like the seventies or something. He's smoking pot and he sees this cool guy in an alley leaning against a Camaro with a leather jacket. And this guy says to this kid something horrible, don't smoke pot. That's what the Jews want you to do. Or something like that. So a super racist thing. But the guy is wearing a leather jacket and he's got a Camaro and he's a father figure like that. Now he wasn't a father figure because he was saying this, the antisemitic comment, he's a father figure because he even cared enough to talk to this kid.
- So the kid walks over and the racist stuff gets dialed down so the guy can indoctrinated him and the guy was like, Hey, where do you go to school? Here, let me help. I can show you how to dress like me, whatever. So he takes him under his wing and yeah, he turns into this young boy, turns into the head of whatever it was, Nazis or KKK or something like that. So he now gives Ted talks about how he was saved from all this and how now he goes around explaining how not to do this and what he will tell you and what anybody who studies this will tell you this is a unanimous finding, is that you cannot punch these people in the face to the degree that they changed their mind. You cannot embarrass them in public to the point that they changed their mind.
- You cannot make them feel bad morally and ethically to get them to change their mind. That's just not how the human psychology is wired. What happened in his case is that he received love from somebody and that person slowly dealing with a really tight nut, that person slowly over time was able to say, I think you're an amazing person. You're caring, you're, you're all these things. You're really good at having friends but this racist stuff, it's not okay with me. And if you keep doing it, but she didn't lead with that, of course that came later. And so we know that it sounds so cheesy to say that we know love is better than hate when you're dealing with things like this. But I'm sorry, it's just what the data tells us, [laugh]. So when we have people saying, I don't know why we're debating this anymore, they're Nazis, of course we need to punch them in the face.
- I'm not denying that that would feel good from a self righteous standpoint, we just also know that it doesn't work. We know that it isolates people further and we know that you can't bring them into the fold of mainstream society when you do that. So arbiter, the first product that we made arbiter was attempting to give people better media diets. Finding a way to say, here's what you're consuming every day. And almost like nutritional labels, finding really, really simple and easy ways to let people read what they want to anyway. But then help understand, did you know this has been disproven or did you know this? Did you know that I actually ended up doing a whole bunch of to kick off the company, I did a whole bunch of little animated videos to get my thoughts in [affirmative]. And that ended up kind of becoming the thesis [laugh] for what I was gonna go do.
- But what was interesting is you can know that you can know these things, you can know the data points here, here and here, and you can know, yeah, people like this and this in a product and you can say, here's how you get funding. You can kind of put together all those pieces. But one of the hardest things to break through is that you are going to be more drawn to things where you have like-minded people than things that make you think. And we all fall for it. So whether you love Trump or you hate Trump, we have all moved into our camps. We surrounded by people that are backing up our worst impulses and that is always going to be more compelling like eating junk food than eating nutritious food. And so that would be the central challenge. I mean, Twitter is dealing with it, Facebook's dealing with it.
- It's the central challenge of any tool like this that you make is that junk food and junk information is always gonna be more compelling than a healthy alternative, which is where, last comment on this, which is where the media literacy was coming in, I started to realize that the product that you make is getting someone really far downstream. So they're already on Twitter yelling at people all day. So my product is harder to make an impact, but if I can talk to a bunch of teenagers in school as part of a syllabus in the New Zealand school system, for example, and say, Hey look, I used to work at Twitter and I can help you understand how to debunk things. I'm starting to feel like more and more it's that educational angle that's probably the long term play.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah, and I, I'm pausing in my own head here because I could talk to you for hours about this. In fact, I went through all of the videos that you did twice and I've taken some, like what I think a interesting notes on those and questions that fell outta those notes on this notion. And I got to a very similar place where this central question I couldn't answer was, do people really want facts? And I know that's a very general broad brush I'm painting with, obviously some people do. But it seems to me that the assumption for something to be effective and intervening in this media diet, which is what you've just touched on, is that you have to get people before they become too fully tribalized and are no longer able to connect with facts because it's so much disagrees with their own identity that it's almost like a separation of self needs to occur before they're able to engage with content in a objective truth mindset.
- But this is such an important issue, Jon, and I know you've dedicated, well the last of quarter of your career, at least objectively through what I can see from your history to this. And I'm just mindful of time as well. We don't have a lot of time left together, which is upsetting for me because I have about 20 questions on this very topic to ask you. I suppose one that I would like to touch on through your experience on Twitter was this idea that what if news organizations and social media platforms were mandated to label their content as we're seeing Twitter do with some examples of the current US president. This may or may not, this may not be factually correct as being labeled on some of those tweets. Is this something that from what you saw at your time at Twitter, that is something that the platform are opening up to this sort of aggregate or third party sort of analysis on content that's coming from official sources?
- Jon Bell:
- I don't wanna speak for current Twitter cuz I don't know, and I don't wanna speak for Twitter when I was there cuz of course it's a company of a lot of people with a lot of different ideas and that that's one of the hallmarks of Twitter is that there's a lot of different ideas. And so I don't wanna make it sound like I can speak for Twitter now or then it's just one guy. Of course, the one thing that I'll say though is that I personally believe that the answer is regulation. I have friends that work at Facebook and Twitter and so forth. There seems to be a sense that that is probably the key. You tell a tech nerd that their new OKR is something that they can measure. Oh, they're gonna optimize the hell out of it, but without the government telling them that they have to hit that, you're kind of back to a bunch of discussions.
- So I think that regulation yes, I think I personally like it. I think I have a sense that people are more open to it. Even someone like Zuckerberg, I might be misremembering, but I'm pretty sure I remember him saying that regulation may need to be on the horizon. He, he's maybe not saying it as effusively as I am but I remember getting the sense that he was further along on that than I might have thought. The other thing that I wanna throw out here is that the gears of capitalism can really help us here. And I know that we're all mad at capitalism for good reason, but there's a vision that I have and I've had for a while, and I'm just really excited by this. If you could tag a tweet, you're not a third party company, you're just you. And let's say I follow you on Twitter, and let's say you see a thing and you tag it as funny, and let's say another one of my friends tags it as funny, and a third number of my third ones, my friends tags it as funny. Well, let's pause there. Number one, the algorithm can be like, huh, funny is something that we've defined as good. Jon seems to click into funny things. So just having my three friends tag something as funny, so I see it quicker. That seems like a pretty easy whim. And you haven't gotten into fact checking. You haven't dealt with any of the craziness. Just you said it was funny and said it to other people. Okay, so then you go a step further. Now imagine a world where you tag something as click bait.
- That means I don't see it as often. Okay? The gears of capitalism would kick in. You'd get to a point where if you are a writer for stuff, which for those that don't know, that is a news organization here. If you are a writer for stuff, and I'm your editor and I say to you, Hey, I need more articles out of you, there's an unspoken agreement that when I say I need more out of you. You know what I mean? Clicks doesn't mean you're a bad journalist, it just means like you're gonna need to find some more clicks. So there's an unspoken agreement that you're gonna say something a little more sensational. Cuz we know that real articles don't spread as quickly as clickbait. Well, imagine this magical new world where people can tag tweets. There's no fact checkers. This isn't being done at Twitter's level or goo or CNN or anything like that.
- It's just us. So if your friends tag something as click bait and enough people do that, that stories end up tanking and getting less traffic because it's the kiss of death. That's how you turn capitalism back on itself. Let's make the concept of click bait enough to tank a dumb article. So if somebody comes out with some sensationalist garbage and the editors know that it's gonna cause them to get no clicks because it's sensationalist garbage, they're gonna start telling their journalists, listen, we're looking to get tagged with thoughtful because that trend's highest on Twitter. We're looking to get tagged with accurate tough, but fair. All these things that are real journalism and not clickbait. That's the vision that I have. I think it's possible. I don't think it even requires Twitter itself to do, but Twitter has actually worked on that as long as 10 years ago they had something called Twitter tags, I think. But anyway, when I think about all the big fuzzy stuff and how do we do it and regulation and governments, it all gets very complicated. But when I think of just the feature I just described, or I can say that this tweet is a lie, or I can say it's click bait, or I could say it's funny, or I could say it's nutritious. That's the one that I think a third party or the big organizations could do, and that's a vision worth aiming towards. I think
- Brendan Jarvis:
- That might finally put the last nail in the daily mails coffin as well. [laugh]. Hey I wanted to briefly talk about your creative output and I have been reading some of your essays mostly from reasonable defaults. And for those of you listening Jon has published two books of essays the second of which is called Reasonable Defaults, and we'll be linking to those two in the show notes. And it strikes me that no one puts this much effort into writing, including you've written outside of these two publications, you've written some very long format design critiques, and we're talking 10,000 plus words long of various digital products. What is it that writing gives you that makes you want to do so much of it?
- Jon Bell:
- I don't know what's going on there. Honestly. I think some people struggle to write. I think about 95% of the world it's writing, it's squeezing blood from a stone. I don't know what happened. For some reason I, it's just natural when I sit down, it just feels right. The thing that I'd say though people ask me a lot about my output cuz it's just weird how much I'm writing. I don't,
- Brendan Jarvis:
- It's prolific.
- Jon Bell:
- Yeah, I have the Stephen King gene. I don't understand where it comes from. I can't take responsibility for it. But I will say this, I have a post. It went viral on a medium because I think it just so resonated with this topic. It's called McDonald's Theory, and it's this idea that when someone asks, where should we go get lunch? I like to say, how about McDonald's? And it's a joke. I say McDonald's cuz people don't like, I mean they secretly like it, but you know what I mean, [laugh]. So I say McDonald's and that bad idea triggers people into action and they go No Soul Shack or whatever. So they come up with other ideas. When I throw out a bad idea Nike has that phrase, just do it. Anne Lamont has a great book on writing. She talks about writing shitty first drafts. I used to run a podcast called Fuck Perfect.
- I had a website called Fuck Jet Packs. I just have this kind of punk rock thing in my head where it's like, I don't know, I'll get there, blah. And honestly, I don't think it's necessarily that I'm prolific or courageous or any of these really wonderful words. I think it's that I'm just clueless enough about my own ability that I don't stress out as much at the beginning as I think other people do. So when I start writing, I'm just like, she'll be all right, I'll get there. And most people that I talk to, they struggle with that first bit because they want that first sentence to be good or the first paragraph to be good. And I'm missing a screw, I guess, where I don't mind sucking for a while or permanently [laugh] because I just like the process. So I think, oh,
- Brendan Jarvis:
- This is so key, is if you're listening to this, this is such an important point that Jon is making. This is all it takes to start walking that road, to being great at something, is to ignore the little voice that Jon's just spoken about. And just to keep writing. If you listen to any interviews with the Stephen Kings of this world, often Neil Gayman, a lot of these guys and woman as well, authors, they mandate the time that they have dedicated to writing and they sit down and they write and they just keep writing. It's such an important point. In fact, Stephen Pressfield has actually got a great book called Do the Work, which I'll link to in the show notes as well as the books that Jon's mentioned as well. And it's literally that simple. I think we talked about this at the beginning, right? It's just get it done, just do it. And I really, really, really like that. And I think that's such a key piece of advice for anyone that's listening that's been struggling with writing.
- Jon Bell:
- And I wanna throw one's bringing one quick thing there. There's a great two minute video called Brain Crack. So if you do a search for Z Frank, z Frank Brain Crack, he answers a letter from an audience member that says, are you ever afraid you're gonna run out of ideas? And his response is, yes, every day. And he basically talks about this and it's such a great video actually, when I teach design courses, I show this brain crack thing. So it's only two minutes and it helps, I think, get over that perfectionist thing. So that's another highly recommended thing to look at.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- If Frank, he had come down to Webstock, I think many years ago. He was one of the very early internet innovators, wasn't he, in terms of content. And memes
- Jon Bell:
- Was, and again, I mean this ties it all back together. But the reason he got good is that he forced himself to do a video a day. This is before YouTube, probably before anything. I'm gonna do a video a day indefinitely. And so yeah, he'd wake up and he'd be sick with the flu and he'd be like I said, I would make a movie. So he'd, this is a dumb example that he really do, but he'd just aim it at the wall and just from behind the camera, be like, everybody, I'm sick. So this is my video. And go team [laugh]. The key is not that the quality of that video was good. The key is that he didn't let himself stop. And so he's a big hero of mine just in terms of a lot of his stuff is garbage, who cares? He's worked on it and now he's done about a thousand times more videos than anyone else. So now he is actually kind of good at it. So I'm a big fan of that.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah, yeah, just get to use slogan, as you mentioned before, just do it. Just get out there and do it. Yep. So after 20 years of trying to design better digital lives for other people, Jon, what is it that keeps you going and so active in our community?
- Jon Bell:
- Well, I do wanna say, so first of all, I've never had someone be so flattering and lengthy and an intro. You've really done your research and I'm really impressed. Just, gosh the one thing that I would correct though is that I would say that I'm not particularly active in the community. So it's kind of a softball question where I could be like, well, I'm amazing, actually, I'm pretty bad at it. I struggle to go to meetups and to figure out ways to get in the community. And so one thing that I've found is if I can have a one-on-one conversation with someone over coffee and we can talk just like this and I can help in any way. So they say, I'm 22 years old and I'm just curious, what do you do when your dev refuses to whatever? I feel like I can answer those questions on a one-on-one basis pretty well.
- And so I kind of do a lot of stealth help. I do some work with Victoria University and just through the grapevine people here, there's this guy, Jon be he'll tell stories for an hour over coffee. So that's been the thing that I've discovered. But when it comes to being active in the community interestingly, no one really knows who I am. And that's kind of by design. I kind of pick and choose really carefully. So that is a slight correction. But also my answer is that that's how I'm involved in the community is very, very targeted strikes over coffee to anyone that I think might be helped. And then when I think about doing broader things like, oh, maybe I could help organize a conference or something, it doesn't scale cause I have too many children, there's too much going on, so I just don't have the time to devote. But I think it's amazing that a lot of people do have that time to devote, and I'm really happy that they do that. Just we more
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Just to disagree with you disagreeing. I just wanna make it clear to anyone that is watching this, that Jon, I feel is being a bit modest here. Jon has run a conference in the past that ran for five years. He has organized a meetup off the back of that. There's another book coming out that is inspired by that conference. And we really appreciate the time that you've spent today talking to me. I say, there's not more than one of us, I promise. It's just me. So yeah, is, it's been wonderful to have you on the show. Jon, before we go though, have you got time just to play a little game? I like to play. Okay, cool. So this game is cool. What's the first word that comes to mind? So I'm gonna say a word [affirmative], and then you think of something, it doesn't even have to be a word, it could be a picture, whatever, but you describe it to me when it comes to mind. Great. Are you ready?
- Jon Bell:
- Yes.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- First word is disinformation.
- Jon Bell:
- Twitter, like a big Twitter bird,
- Brendan Jarvis:
- [laugh]. Second word writing.
- Jon Bell:
- I envisioned the cover of the Stephen Book Stephen King book called On Writing, which I highly recommend and love.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And the last word is 2021
- Jon Bell:
- In my brain kind of did a funny little trick on me. It almost like I'm a director in a movie. I envision just a big beautiful what's the word I'm looking for? A big, beautiful meadow with flowers. It just looks like heaven or utopia or whatever. Just amazing because I just wanna say my wife would call this bright siding, but really this was the year that the vaccine that some people said we would never get, let alone do quicker than five years we did it. It's getting around the world now. We did that this year. This is the year that Donald Trump, who's not really a big fan of American democracy and was trying to fundamentally change how America does things. He lost. And that was a big question and a big concern. And there's a third one that I can't remember that was also that size thing. This year has been so hard and yet some real wins came in this calendar year. The wins are not next calendar year. The vaccines now and the last happen this year. So when I think of 2021, I am aware it's still a lot of issues in the world always. But I feel a little bit like if 2020 we were flat on our back, now at least we're back on our feet. And so I think 2021 it's gotta be better than 2020 and I'm really looking forward to it.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Me too. Now thinking ahead. So get your crystal ball out for this final question. [affirmative], thinking ahead to 2030, what is your greatest hope for how we might be interacting with each other online in 2030? Compared to how we're doing it today?
- Jon Bell:
- We have gotten so much more literate on how to communicate online. There was a time where if somebody said you suck, that would ruin your entire day. Where now at a point where if you spend enough time online, someone's saying you suck. We're more able to move past still might make you sad of course, but I think it's better than it might have felt in 1985 when there's like 10 people on the internet. So my hope for 2030 is that we get more perspective is that we understand people are still gonna be mad at each other in 2030. There's still gonna be warring political factions. And by warring, I mean with words, not weapons. Everything that we have right now will also exist in 2030 will feel like we're not doing enough over here. We'll feel like we really have to get our act to go there over here.
- But the perspective that I'm referring to is in 2030, we're not gonna be talking about polio anymore. And that's because we will have eradicated polio in 2030. We're not gonna be talking about extreme poverty anymore, and that's because we won't have eradicated it yet. But the numbers will have gone from 2 billion down to it looks like it's gonna be about 400 or 500 million. We should still be talking about it. Of course, it's just lower. We are very good at humans as taking the next thing in front of us and say, well, that's why we're doomed. And then when it does get fixed, we take it for granted. So I, that's the only difference in 2030 is that of course the climate is gonna be a real issue. I think we're gonna be amazed though, at how far down our emissions have come. And of course, racism and sexism will still be perennial issues, but we're gonna have more than 38 women on the fortune, on the top 500 companies. Black Lives Matter will have only grown, if not that name, the concept of racial equality will have grown. So that's what I'm really hoping for. We're gonna be dealt the exact same deck. There's still gonna be a lot of things to be sad about, but I hope we have this perspective to understand that we are in fact making progress. And the key to making progress is not saying, okay, we're done. It's to stay committed and keep it up. And so that's what I hope for in 2030.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Oh, that's a really great place for us to finish today's conversation. Jon, it's been a real pleasure having you on the show. And I wanna say thank you for so generously sharing your experiences and the stories that you have with us today.
- Jon Bell:
- Thank you so much.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah, I mean, I'm just gonna have to, I think, decompress after this conversation. There's been a lot of things to think about and we certainly would have to schedule at some point around two. I have so many unasked questions for people that have enjoyed today's conversations. And I know you said you're not purposely that active in the community, but what is the best way people can connect with you?
- Jon Bell:
- My favorite thing, I'm not on Twitter, I'm technically on Twitter, but there's like three tweets there. I'm like, whatever. My favorite, favorite thing is for people to write me an email. And anyone that's written me an email can attest. If you write me, my email is JB for Jon Bell, JB lot 20 three.com. If you were to write me an email and just be like, Hey Jon, if you ask me a question or wanna hear a story, it just that Stephen King thing kicks in and I just write this long story just like I've done today. So that's my favorite thing. If someone just writes me an email, I spend a lot of time writing just like these media responses. It's pretty much my favorite thing.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- [laugh]. Yeah, honestly, we linking to so many of Jon's materials too. There's no shortage of good stuff to get stuck into. And everyone else that's been tuned into the show, it's been great to have you here as well. If you've enjoyed the conversation today please leave us a comment. If you have a question for Jon give the video alike and subscribe to the channel if you want to hear more of these great conversations with people like Jon. And until next time, everybody, keep being brave.