Thoughtwax
Get Back chronological rewatch
If I should die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph: The only proof he needed for the existence of God was music. — Kurt Vonnegut
For me, the Beatles are proof of the existence of God. — Rick Rubin
I say in speeches that a plausible mission of artists is to make people appreciate being alive at least a little bit. I am then asked if I know of any artists who pulled that off. I reply, ‘The Beatles did’. — Kurt Vonnegut
Unless you are a certain type of person, the prospect of an eight hour documentary of restored archival footage of a band rehearsing is an understandably hard sell. Even if the band is The Beatles.
However if you are that certain type of person then you immediately binged the entirety of Get Back on release day. What a gift. But, you were then perhaps also left in kind of a daze afterwards.
It turns out that listening to an album pretty intently for your entire life (again, you are this type of person in this scenario) and then getting to watch an excruciatingly detailed documentary revealing the entire process of creation is (for you, this type of person) Tutankhamun-level stuff. It’s almost too much information to take in at once. And so, for this wretched creature, even one eight-hour viewing is somehow still not enough.
Nonetheless an eight-hour rewatch remains an intimidating prospect, even for the faithful. Fear not: one bite at a time. The documentary covers the whole month of January 1969, from the band first assembling to kick around new ideas on the 2nd to the complete rooftop concert and conclusion on the 31st. Follow along with this phenonmenal creative achievement in real time for about 30 mins a day.
Also, the days of the week line up in 2025. When it’s the weekend for the Beatles, it’s the weekend for you too.
Daily timestamps, created by my digtial serf using this excellent fan page.
January 2, 1969
Part 1: 00:00:00–00:27:16 (27 mins)
The project begins; Paul introduces the idea of a live show; Early rehearsals of “Don’t Let Me Down” and “Two of Us.”
January 3, 1969
Part 1: 00:27:17–00:50:13 (23 mins)
Continued rehearsals at Twickenham; Development of “I’ve Got a Feeling” and “She Came in Through the Bathroom Window”; First signs of creative tensions.
January 6, 1969
Part 1: 00:50:14–01:16:42 (26 mins)
The group returns after a weekend break; George works on “I Me Mine”; Tensions between George and Paul escalate.
January 7, 1969
Part 1: 01:16:43–01:44:30 (28 mins)
Paul pushes for more structure; George becomes increasingly frustrated; Experimentation with “Get Back.”
January 8, 1969
Part 1: 01:44:31–02:12:18 (28 mins)
Paul and John harmonize on “Two of Us”; George distances himself creatively; Mood improves briefly with collective improvisations.
January 9, 1969
Part 1: 02:12:19–02:30:00 (18 mins)
Further work on “Get Back”; Tensions remain high; Discussions about the project’s direction.
January 10, 1969
Part 1: 02:30:01–02:36:25 (6 mins)
George Harrison leaves the band; Paul, John, and Ringo continue rehearsals without him.
January 13, 1969
Part 2: 00:00:00–00:33:42 (34 mins)
The band meets to reconcile with George; Move to Apple Studios is finalized.
January 14, 1969
Part 2: 00:33:43–01:01:16 (28 mins)
Rehearsals resume at Apple Studios; Billy Preston is introduced to the sessions.
January 15, 1969
Part 2: 01:01:17–01:30:29 (29 mins)
Billy Preston officially joins the sessions; Mood improves significantly; Work on “Don’t Let Me Down” and “I’ve Got a Feeling.”
January 16–20, 1969
Part 2: 01:30:30–02:53:17 (83 mins)
Intense studio sessions; Progress on “Let It Be,” “The Long and Winding Road,” and “Get Back”; Early discussions about the rooftop concert.
January 21–28, 1969
Part 3: 00:00:00–01:30:00 (90 mins)
Recording of album tracks continues; Final preparations for the rooftop concert; Refinement of performances for the live show.
January 30, 1969
Part 3: 01:30:01–02:18:35 (48 mins)
The iconic rooftop concert; The Beatles perform “Get Back,” “Don’t Let Me Down,” and others live.
January 31, 1969
Part 3: 02:18:36–End (18 mins)
Final studio recordings for “Let It Be” and “The Long and Winding Road”; The project concludes.
a new type of computer
Traditional computing could be boiled down to operations over numbers. Every app, microprocessor, website, and shitpost is ultimately reducible to binary digits, the star-stuff of digital information. Every output is entirely predictable. *slaps roof of traditional computing* Yessir, reliable foundations.
But AI’ll soon soften your cough. It’s no longer just operations over numbers; it’s operations over information. AI systems essentially eyeball some data, perform the robot version of a rorschach test, and then just freestyle it live. AI makes gloopy, fuzzy, inconsistent decisions.
Neither are without their charms. In fact, each can be both astonishingly capable and remarkably dumb in their own special ways.
What you really want is an elegant combination, the best of both worlds. So now an intriguing design puzzle is emerging: how do you take these two very different approaches to conceiving of what a computer even is, and alloy them into something new?
Maybe you try to tame the LLM: add guardrails and safety nets and suggestions and whatever else is needed to bring the beast to heel long enough to get some work done with the damn thing. Or, maybe you try to extend the existing paradigm by stuffing little AI trinkets into existing products. Lots of people are now excited about Agents, the goal-oriented, System 2 reasoning, action-taking, and generally better-looking descendent of crummy old chatbots.
So computers are about to get weird! There’s a ton to figure out. No doubt it will all make sense in retrospect. But it can also be hard, after a big shift like this, to viscerally remember what the before state was actually like. Did the resort match the promise of the brochure? What didn’t you know back then that seems obvious now?
For fow we’re still in the middle, with the before and after states still only an armspan away. So setting aside the bigger societal questions, here are some high level product-ey questions that I don’t currently have confident answers for, but I’m interested to see what happens:
- Will probabilistic LLMs become like determinisitc computers faster than deterministic computers can become like probabilistic LLMs?
- What new UI patterns will we have for AI-native applications? Will we see a “pull to refresh” moment for AI interfaces? (My esteemed colleague Des is maintaining a great thread of emerging patterns here.)
- How will this change how products are sold, and how will market share be divided? Is SaaS really dead? Will we move from subscription-based to usage-based pricing? Is the money at the model layer or the application layer?
- What level of the tech stack will Agents live at? OS-level (e.g. Siri), browser (Gemini in Chrome), application (ChatGPT), or product (Fin by Intercom)? All of them? Is there a Dunbar’s Number for Agents I’d want to use? Will they talk to each other?
- Will highly capable AI Agents become the ultimate general-purpose application? How much will it displace? Taken to the illogical extreme, might we end up with just one piece of software that does everything?
- Are we all screwed?
The Tools We Use
Sure, I could have posted this talk I gave at UX London last year sooner. But I decided to sit on it in case the global social, economic, and infrastructural system happened to go belly-up and people might want a little distraction.
I possibly went a little self-indulgent on this one, rambling through hammers, monkeys, 2001: A Space Odyssey, pencils tied to bricks, the Whole Earth Catalog, the Space Jam website’s HTML, and 1980s Toyota manufacturing all before arriving at a simple point: designers should iterate on how they work as much as they iterate on their work itself.
If that’s your type of thing you might enjoy it. If video or Irish accents are not your type of thing you can read the full transcript on the Intercom blog.
This Too Shall Pass
“This too shall pass” is often said to struggling new parents. Solid advice! You’re cooped up at home, minding a baby, unsure how to cope, no clue when things might be normal again. It’s a gentle way of advising someone: I know. But you’re going to have to dig in now. You will endure.
“The days are long, but the years are short” is the best parenting advice. In truth there’s a melancholy to being a parent: you’ll want to jump out the window at times, but when it’s all over you’ll wish for that time back again.
“When this is all over…” is something people have been saying a lot recently. When this is all over we’ll meet up more, we’ll have a new appreciation of nature, we’ll hug our parents, we’ll pay the nurses what they deserve, we’ll reinvent society, we’ll have the mother of all sessions.
When this does pass we won’t pine for it. But a couple of weeks in, I’m now trying to notice the little moments in all of this. Our little family cocooned away. We’re doing okay. This is going to be the only summer we’ll ever have with the kids being 6 and 3. There are small moments to be had. These days do feel long, but the year will be short.
TLDR: We’re in lockdown and my kids are giving me Stockholm Syndrome.
Design in Interesting Times
Just realised that I never posted my talk from the 2017 Inside Intercom World Tour. It’s about using system thinking to cope with rapid change, whether that’s inside a fast-growing startup, or a world that seems to be going to hell in a handbasket. I gave versions of the talk in New York, Tel Aviv, and finally in San Francisco, which is what’s recorded below. Had a ton of fun working with lovely folks from our Brand Studio on the visuals for this one.
Full transcript on the Intercom blog, or there’s an audio version if that’s your thing.
Stories and storytelling
In my post last week about Google Duplex, I mentioned Tristan Harris’ 2013 internal presentation at Google about the ethics of attention.
I looked for a public copy of it, which didn’t exist last week, but does now: it was just leaked/released. It’s an interesting read in itself. But I still often think about this actual presentation – the slide deck itself – as an example of GREAT storytelling. The whole thing is designed to be viewed, not presented. Each slide is a single thought; just an image and a few words. There are no speaker notes. It’s an essay designed to be viewed rather than read. I remember it spreading like wildfire through Google at the time and immediately sparking conversation. It’s a object lesson in the power of presenting your ideas or work narratively.
Another post last week was about the Dissect podcast and how new types of media lead to new forms of content.
Tristan’s slides feel like a desktop predecessor of the most obvious new mobile-first content type: the Story. Invented by Snapchat and mainstreamed by Instagram, Stories are the ne plus ultra of smartphone patterns: atomic units of vertical rectangle content navigated via the simplest possible interaction. Tap, tap, tap, one pellet of info at a time. But done well it can add up to a fully realised narrative told across a single day.
There’s a lineage here. Robin Sloan’s 2012 “Fish” tap essay feels like a more literary precursor to Stories. Both Fish and Tristan’s deck are writing, but the delivery is edited into discreet cue cards to create rhythm and emphasis. Twitter threads are part of this scene too, being a series of atomic thoughts strung together into an argument. Bad threads are bad because they are nothing more than longer essays arbitrarily chopped into 240-character chunks; get a blog, dude. But a well-written thread can use the limitations of the medium to create pacing and tell a story, one thought at a time, and work better than it ever would as prose.