Ivan: Hi there.
You're listening to ONE OF 8
BILLION, a podcast about all of us.
I'm your host Ivan Stegic.
This podcast is supported by
TEN7, a technology studio, whose
mission is to Make Things That
Matter, online at ten7.com.
We all have a story don't we?
We've all had successes and failures,
joy and disappointment, love and sadness.
And yet we've all made it to here.
To right now.
Our stories are one
amongst 8 billion others.
8 billion other stories,
each of them unique, each of
them grand in their own way.
And each of them a window into
the humanity that connects us all.
ONE OF 8 BILLION tells life
stories from around the world.
Let's listen.
Our story today is about Jeff Eaton.
A Partner at Autogram where he
helps large companies understand
and manage their digital content.
Jeff has always been driven to find order
in the complex, whether it was teaching
himself programming skills as a child,
or re-evaluating his relationship with
faith and religion as he got older.
Welcome to ONE OF 8 BILLION.
Would you please introduce yourself?
Jeff: So I'm Jeff Eaton.
What's my now?
Who am I?
I would say probably the easiest way to
sum it up is middle-aged, kinda nerdy tech
guy in the midwest of America, which is
a very narrow slice of the population.
You don't run into those a lot.
But I'm one of the partners of
a small consulting agency that I
founded with Karen McGrane and Ethan
Marcott about a year and a half ago.
And we do a lot of work in information
architecture and large scale content
planning for organizations that
have big digital publishing efforts.
A long time before that I
worked in open-source software
development, CMS stuff.
And that's how, I know a lot of
people I keep in touch with online.
But beyond my professional work I'd say,
all of the stuff that I'm interested in
from podcasting about religious extremism
in American politics, or, organizing
electronic supplies for my workshop
I think one of the consistent themes
that is there in my work and my study
and my recreational stuff is making
sense of things and understanding
systems and how they work and how they
interact with us and the world around us.
That's something that keeps
me waking up every morning.
Ivan: I'm fascinated by
your tweets and your work on
religious extremism in America.
And I think we've had a couple of
backwards and forwards on the Twitters.
So let's get to that a little later on,
but I want to put a pin in it, cause it's
definitely something I want to talk about.
I love how you talked about making
sense of things, because that's
definitely something that you
do in your work with Autogram.
Ethan was on the show and I asked
him about the name and the origin
of the name, and he said that I
needed to talk to you about the name,
because you're the one that actually
I think came up with the name.
So could you tell us about Autogram,
why did you dot.is for the domain
name and tell us a little bit about
the word and like how that came up.
Jeff: Just to, step back a bit.
Probably about two years ago or so
Karen McGrane and Ethan Marcott and I
started talking, about some of the shared
challenges that we'd been seeing with
clients that we worked with, cause we'd
all worked in different parts of this
general digital stuff on the web industry.
And we kept finding, certain kinds of
problems that each of us was seeing from
different angles with different clients.
And it was this like emerging, fuzzy,
frustrating muddle that a lot of large
clients that were really trying to do the
right thing and push forward and build
good systems we're still running into.
A lot of what we wanted to work on
with Autogram was helping them solve
some of those specific problems that
we were seeing in like the intersection
of design and organizational process
and workflow and content architecture
and IA and stuff like that.
It's the kind of nerdy stuff that, we
rant about on Twitter all the time.
But we started talking about
names for okay, if we were to put
our shingle up and and do this,
what do we want to call ourselves?
And Autogram was one of the names
that we came up with just thinking
about different kinds of interesting
linguistic I guess novelties.
An autogram was a term coined and I
think the 1980s by a mathematician.
It's basically a sentence that describes
its own content alphabetically.
Like this sentence contains five A's,
two C's, 10 N's and so on and so forth.
And it's tricky.
It's almost creating a complicated
palindrome, but squared, because as
you change the sentence to describe
the sentence, it loops back on itself.
And it's very difficult to create one
without many iterations through tweaking
it and refining it and trying to arrange
things so that correctly enumerating
all of the letter cues doesn't in fact
ripple off and change something else.
And that challenge of describing the
thing that's changing as you describe
it just felt very familiar to us as
we talked about the kinds of problems
we were seeing with our clients.
Because with the kinds of things that
we tackle at auto Autogram and with
large digital publishing and digital
communications teams, it's rarely a
technology problem in and of itself.
Ah, there's the switch you need to flip.
Or ah, you just need
program X or service Y.
It's complicated issues with like
how different parts of an organization
work together and understand each
other and communicate both with
themselves and the outside world.
And as you learn about that
and describe it, investigate
it, you're changing it too.
It's catchy.
It wasn't offensive in any language.
And that's all you can really hope
for in a domain name these days.
It's catchy and not some sort of
horrifying profanity in another language.
And .is the domain, it was what we
went for just on a whim in part,
because well, obviously it's available.
There didn't seem to be any
profound ethical conundrums with
Iceland's government at the moment
which, just a quick due diligence.
But it also allowed us to do some fun
tricks when building out the URLs for
our website, because our bio pages
are, URLs like autogram.is/jeff,
autogram.is/ethan, autogram.is/karen.
And we've got new posts under a URL like
autogram.is/reading and stuff like that.
Language of speakable URLs
which is pretty down pretty far
down the nerdy rabbit trail.
But that's, I think, we follow each other
on Twitter that's, that is nothing new.
Ivan: That is nothing new no.
I love the complexity and the self
referential idea behind the name.
And I know how hard it is
to run a company, and how
complex client problems can be.
And we work so hard to solve them.
I want to try to take an even bigger
picture of just our own little industry
and our microcosm of people and clients,
and take a step back and think about
the whole planet, all 8 billion of us.
We are each one of those 8 billion.
And to me that's both amazing and scary,
and allows me to feel both connected
and disconnected from people around
me and from the people I work with.
How does being one of 8
billion make you feel?
What thoughts come to mind
when you think about that?
Jeff: Boy, you're one of a billion.
I mean it I will say like when we
first started chatting that was one
of the things that really struck me.
I love the concept of the podcast and just
that frame is one that it's valuable and
it's both instructive and encouraging.
It nudges us towards a kind of
introspection that I think is
really important and easy to
lose in like the scramble of just
work and day-to-day, humaning.
But I think, how do I see or
understand myself in that 8 billion?
Today, I would say it's comforting and
reassuring in that burden of achieving
significance or something like that.
That I think can really, it can
really drive us or gnaw at us,
depending on how you experience it.
That's always going to be fairly relative.
It's in a world of 8 billion people, the
odds that I'm going to be the one who
shifts things, or I'm going to be the
one who changes humanity is fairly slim.
And there's a comfort in that,
that, it's I'm not screwing up if I
haven't altered life for 4 billion of
those people or something like that.
But at the same time, thinking about it
as 8 billion individual lone folks just
interacting with each other and living
life, I think there's a responsibility
that goes along with that, because at
least now like where I'm at today, it
helps me to remember that the place and
the meaning in that big giant pile of
humanity is really about the tiny pool of
people that I actually touch and connect
with and interact with in my actual life.
It's not about changing the world,
or leaving a giant footprint on
history or something like that.
It's about making sure that those
interactions with that tiny sliver of that
8 billion people that I know, and I come
in contact with, that those individual
interactions are ones that make their
little slice of human experience better.
Does that make sense?
Ivan: I think so.
And while you were talking and I while
I was listening, I realized that there's
actually more than 8 billion because
there are all those people that came
before us, and that will come after us.
And we are a slice, as you said,
not just an 8 billion, but a
slice in time of those 8 billion.
Jeff: Yeah.
And and I realized too that take
on it the sort of tension between
significance and scale and personal
connection, I don't necessarily
think that's a universal drive, and
that's what everybody takes from it.
You've mentioned that you've
listened to some of my, writing
and ranting on let's say more
philosophical and spiritual topics.
And I think for me, at least the shift
away from feeling that it's my job to
change the world has been a process.
It's been a slow process of accepting
that, and coming to believe that it's
not giving up, it's not failing to not
constantly strive to alter the world.
It doesn't mean giving up.
It doesn't mean just, accepting
things that you don't think are okay.
It's maybe we'll dig into it a little
bit more later, but that concept of a
quest for like grand significance, it's
really easy for that to eat you alive.
Ivan: I'm going to try not
to let it eat me alive.
Cause I, I think I can identify with
what you're with what you're saying.
Let's go back a little bit in time, Jeff.
I would love to find out
where life started for you.
Where were you born?
Who was around at the time?
When did that happen?
What did the early little
baby Jeff look like?
Jeff: So the fun bit of trivia was
born on August 16th, 1977, which
coincidentally is the day Elvis died.
Ivan: Supposedly.
Jeff: So they say.
But one of the funny anecdotes is that
my father and my mother had gone to the
hospital and they'd gone through the
whole complicated labor and birth process
And my mother woke up the next morning
to the sounds of just nurses sobbing.
And it was the they had just gotten news
that Elvis had passed away and it was
all of the nurses were just shaken by it.
And so that, that was definitely what
heralded my birth, sobbing nurses
But yeah, I'm a solidly, midwestern guy.
I grew up in the Chicago
area, the Chicago suburbs.
Bounced around in that general
area for a number of years.
And my family comes from Indiana
which is not too far away, but for
for a five, six year old kid, the
long trek from the Chicago suburbs to
visit relatives in Indiana feels like
you're traveling across the world.
Getting in the back of the car
and killing time and wondering oh,
when are we going to get there?
That was an iconic, experience
around holidays or vacations for me.
And I look back on that and it's
that was like maybe a two hour and
45 minutes, maybe three and a half
hour drive, depending on traffic.
I've waited for flights
longer than that as an adult.
So it's funny to look back and
think about that as remembering
the sensation of it being such
a sense of such an epic journey.
But it's about that scale thing
again, it's about perspective.
Some of my earliest experiences,
yeah, I think early on, I was very
fortunate in that my parents definitely
encouraged me to pursue various
creative endeavors and stuff like that.
So I, I wanted to get
a dog when I was a kid.
So I, went door to door and collected
aluminum cans in a little red wagon
and collected newspapers and took
them to the recycling center over
two summers, saved up enough money.
I look back and it's there's some
deeply iconic, idyllic American,
suburban life kinds of experiences.
And I feel tremendously fortunate to have
had that kind of stability and support.
My parents weren't rich by
any means, it was like solidly
middle-class and the Midwest.
My dad was an electrical engineer, and
had an opportunity to get an old TRS 80
computer back in the very early eighties.
So like I grew up not necessarily
being, neck deep in technology, but with
easy, ready access to a lot of those
things that I think helped me make a
transition into a career that relied
on a lot of technology very early.
Ivan: TRS 80.
That was a Tandy product, I think.
Jeff: Yeah.
The Radio Shack Trash 80.
Ivan: Yes.
Jeff: I very happy cause he'd
gotten the 4k memory upgrade.
Ivan: Oh, my gosh that made a big deal.
Didn't it?
Jeff: If you're counting the number
of kilobytes you have total to run
software, that makes a big difference
My earliest technology memories are
like finding I was probably about six,
which, I was a nerd early, but there was
a magazine that he had that had a game.
Something like, later, like Excite
Bike on the Nintendo would probably
be the closest version of it.
You get a little motorcycle and you're
jumping on hills and over barrels.
But there was source code for
a game like that in a magazine.
And these were the days of Byte Magazine
where you would get a magazine and you
could type all of the source code in
from like 16 pages of printed code and
execute it and hope that you had not
made the typos, or that there wasn't
a problem in what they had published.
And then I learned to save things to and
load things off of a cassette player that
he had hooked up to it to load software.
And I looked back and it was, it's
I wanted to play games and I learned
how to move the move pixels around
on the screen with turtle graphics.
But it, it was super nerdy for a, a
six-year-old in the early eighties.
Ivan: Jeff, I think we, we are
definitely of the same generation.
I have the same memories of my first
computer, a Sinclair 48K Spectrum.
And I remember typing those
words, that code out and copying
it from the magazine as well.
Such cherished memories for me.
I know that for myself, it
influenced the way I see the world
from an open source perspective.
I saw that code early on.
And that was just the way it was.
Do you think there was any
influence there for you?
You worked for open source companies.
Jeff: You would be shocked to
discover that I've got some
rants on the topic in general.
I'll hold those off.
But probably the biggest influence for me
in terms of conceptualizing like how we
relate to software is probably influenced
by those early opportunities to type in
stuff and see the computer do things.
But HyperCard was actually probably
the biggest influence for me,
because I think probably when I
was like, 10 or 11 my dad was able
to get a loaner, like old fat Mac.
For the Apple nerds in the house
that's like a Mac 128, or maybe 512
that had been upgraded with extra
memory to be equivalent to a Mac Plus.
Ivan: Oh, I have not
heard of a fat Mac before.
Jeff: It existed for a very narrow
window of time, a chance to like,
tinker around with with Macintosh.
And then over one extended,
formative summer we were loaned a
Mac, an actual Mac Plus, and I did
all kinds of stuff, tinkering with
that over the course of the summer.
And ended up writing a lot of like
weird little HyperCard scripts
and stacks and learned how to
do a lot of stuff with that.
It was really my first experience
programming in a way that you would call
programming, not just typing in code from
a magazine and writing little comments
that would print out on the screen, but
like actually thinking about a problem I
wanted to solve and deconstructing it into
what I would need to do in order to solve
that problem and learning how to make
the computer do each one of those things.
HyperCard was where I did that.
And for those who are familiar with it,
it was basically a free piece of software
that was created around I think 1987.
So fairly early in the Macintosh's life
by an amazing genius named Bill Atkinson,
I've been a big fan of his for years.
He basically conceived it as like cards
that were linked together, like almost a
stack of index cards, but you could put
anything you wanted to on those cards,
fields of text or buttons, and then you
could make links on the buttons to go
from card to card and make them do things.
And you could write increasingly more and
more complicated little HyperCard scripts
that were attached to those buttons or
pieces of text or things on those cards.
Cards themselves could have scripts and
slowly but surely you could assemble
some fairly sophisticated software.
The game Myst was written in HyperCard.
it was one of the very
early, like big name.
HyperCard public of software, and it
was, used as some special hacks to
allow it to display color graphics
instead of black and white graphics.
But under the hood, it was lots
of these cards that were chained
together with complex internal logic
to govern what your state in the
world of Myst was and what you had
clicked on and where you were going,
It was designed with the idea of a stack
of index cards that could do complicated
things, but it was almost web-like in
the complexity that you could achieve by
combining those things in different ways.
And I don't know how accurate it is,
but I know a lot of people have said
that it was a significant influence
on Tim Berners Lee when he was first
working on the web as a concept.
I've always thought it was a shame that
Apple didn't really run with HyperCard
once the sort of modern era of Apple began
because it feels like it would have been
a very interesting complement for the way
that technology and digital publishing
went under with the web's influence.
But one of the keys was a piece
of software you wrote in HyperCard
anyone who could run it could also
open it up and decompose it and look
at what all of the scripts were.
What are the objects that
are sitting around in?
What are buttons?
What are icons?
What are just a picture that someone
painted and put on the background.
And does it have any
logic associated with it?
How did the scripts
interact with each other?
You could go through and learn
about that stuff and copy and
paste other people's code.
And it was very weblike in that sense,
too, that the mechanics of what was
going on under the surface to make
it do what it did were discoverable.
It wasn't open source in the legal sense.
We would say today, it also predated
things like the GPL and stuff like that.
It was before that time, but the
idea that you could go in and learn
from it and that it was all there
to, to examine and manipulate and
customize was a real shaping factor
in how I thought about software and
how I thought about approaching it.
It was a fairly simple
programming language.
So it was a sort of rude awakening when
I tried to dive into more complex stuff.
It definitely shaped the way I conceived
of software in the world of how we
solve problems and how we do stuff.
Ivan: And that summer, when you had that
Mac and you were tinkering, did you see
yourself in computers when you grew up?
Or you think you were going
to be doing something else?
Jeff: On the contrary I wanted to
be a writer, I wanted to write,
I wanted to be a journalist.
When I was 10 I actually
started publishing a zine.
And I ended up doing it for close,
I think about six years or so.
So which is a long run
for a solo zine effort.
Ivan: Indeed.
You're an indie publisher, right?
Jeff: I suppose so, yeah.
And it's funny because like I stopped
that I think it finally ended up, I
let that go around '91 or '92, which
when I think about it is just shy
of when the web started taking off.
And like a lot of that same energy
reappeared, but in a very different
way in the form of random, weird
web zines and stuff like that.
That was really what I saw my future as.
I wanted to, go into magazine
publishing or journalism of some kind.
That was what I cared about.
And when you're 12, maybe 13 or so,
it's your conceptions of what the future
is going to look like, and what you're
going to be doing are always hazy.
My actually using technology and software
and having that as a primary focus
really wasn't something I anticipated.
But that programming experience and
background that I got of just, tinkering
around with that stuff and using it
to make things that were interesting
or to solve problems that I had, or
to just mess around because it was an
interesting little puzzle to to unpack.
That ended up helping when I
eventually got a job at a local
marketing and design company.
I ended up being the guy who sat next
to the web server, where we had home
pages for clients in the days when
charge someone to make a homepage.
So I, ended up saying, oh I guess I'll,
read up on how Windows NT works and so on.
A lot of my experience in that world
was picking it up as I went and
discovering what the next step was to
do something more interesting or to,
stretch and do the next useful thing.
I feel tremendously fortunate because
the timing of when I was at that spot
was very fortunate timing ,because
nobody really knew what the big picture
was and it was all just emerging.
So discovering it, piecemeal that
way, even though I had no technology
or, computer science or mathematics
background or whatever in my, I had no
credentials to my name, I was able to
just work my way into a position where
five years later I looked up and I
said, "Oh, wow, I guess this is my job.
Doing this stuff.: writing
database backends for complicated
websites that we started making
once home pages weren't enough
I don't think that I'm a fantastic
programmer, but I enjoy the work of
figuring out how things work, and how they
can be used to solve interesting problems.
And that has served me really well.
As I grew and did more in
different kinds of work in the
software and technology industry.
Ivan: Your earlier statement about
making sense of things certainly
feels like there's a thread of
that going through very early
years and your first job as well.
Jeff: Yeah.
It's that sense making.
When I started that zine that I
mentioned at age 10 that was also the
first year that I was homeschooled.
My parents, due to concerns about, the
school district that I was in, in one
particular year, nothing dramatic, just
the usual, parents wondering what the
right choice would be due to some, a
combination of those kinds of concerns.
And also what I can now look
back on and see it, see what's,
100% undiagnosed ADHD on my part.
They started homeschooling me in 1987
when I was 10 and that ended up going
through like the end of high school.
So I was homeschooled basically from
fifth grade to the end of high school.
After that rather than going to
college, I just got a summer job at the
marketing company that I had mentioned
cause I'd been doing zine for a while.
So I knew desktop publishing software
and design software, and I was a
passable copywriter I don't think
I'm stretching things too far by saying
that I was a passable copywriter from
having done so much of that zine writing
and production stuff for the zine.
And my plan was to, use that summer,
do some of this work and eventually,
get a degree in new media, which
was what I really wanted to go into.
But I just looked up after a
couple of years and realized,
"Whoa, hey, time has passed.
And I guess I'm doing this web thing."
And it, again, that's, that, that
was a very fortunate moment to
stumble into that kind of a thing.
Because it was just
before the dotcom crash.
But, there was still this understanding
that there was, there's something
interesting going on here, but there
were no courses you could take.
There was no majoring in anything
that was directly about that.
So you could just blunder and improvise
your way into being a professional.
And I'm still humbled and staggered
by the fortunate timing of that.
And how it ended up shaping my life.
Ivan: Timing is everything I think is what
I've learned over the last 20 to 40 years.
You spent a great deal of
time at Lullabot as well.
And can you talk about
how that originated?
What's the origin story, be it
that landed you at Lullabot?
Jeff: I'd been working in various software
development and web jobs for quite a
while since that initial marketing agency
job I worked my way through various
kinds of work, digital publishing.
I did a stint in grocery industry
supply chain management software.
So it's some, somebody's got to make sure
Fritos make their way around the country.
uh, it it's true.
So I worked on different kinds of,
software development work and it
was, the webmaster slash you know,
kind of software developer for a mega
church in the Chicago area for a while
working on one of their websites.
I worked my way through a couple of
those jobs, but on the side there
were also different projects I was
always, kicking around and starting.
And one of them was a weird cyber
punk, web comic that a friend and I
were working on that probably around
starting around '97 to 2000 or so.
We kicked around a lot of ideas
on what we wanted to do with this.
But I wanted to build out a slight
sort of thematic encyclopedia
to store all the lore we'd been
accumulating for it and also to
publish the actual web comic itself.
And I looked around at a
bunch of different pieces of
software that could do that.
It dates it the area that I was in
Zupes and I don't think Jango was at
yet Jango Jeff and definitely wasn't
out yet, But I did end up coming across
a piece of software called Civic Space,
which was an outgrowth of the Howard
Dean campaign and the software they'd
used to do Dean campaign websites.
And I dug closer and found out it was
this open source program called Drupal.
I didn't know, PHP.
I was a C-sharp guy at the time,
but I knew SQL and use lots of SQL
database stuff involved in this and
I just dove in and started tinkering
with it and logged on to IRC and
got in touch with the community.
Primarily just because I wanted to,
build out some thing to store all of
this information and like what I had
wanted to do, Years earlier, I'd
built out a complex database schema
to store all the stuff that I had.
And I wanted to be able to take any
kind of information, like an event
or a person or a place or a piece
of ephemera from the fictional world
that were, we were creating an article
from a fictional magazine that took
place in 2032 or something like that.
And I wanted to be able to feed it into
all of this, and I wanted them to each
have their own special kinds of data.
Like a magazine would have a publishing
date and maybe a byline from a
fictional writer or something like that.
But an event would have, different
information associated with it, but I
also want them to be able to treat them
as just like the same kind of thing.
In other ways.
Like I wanted to be able to treat
them as just like articles, if I
wanted to look at the whole pile
of information in a different way.
And I built out a big
database schema to do that.
And then I realized I did not
want to write an entire CMS from
scratch that did all of that stuff.
It was one thing to sketch out
all the data was going to look,
but actually all the legwork
of writing CMS was a nightmare.
And I found Drupal.
And just by pure luck and
happenstance, the content architecture
of Drupal had that approach.
It had, what they called the node
system, where every piece of content
was a node and there were different
types of nodes that could have different
data, but you could still look at
them as nodes if you wanted to slice
and dice things in different ways.
And at the time, a lot of the tools that
were easily accessible and available
to like hack on really siloed things
by type of content have a plugin for
your website that would add products,
or you could have a plugin that would
add forum posts, but products and
forum posts never met, they were just
two separate universes essentially.
And Drupal's approach to that
sort of cut down the wall,
divided those kinds of content.
And it really clicked with the way that
I was thinking about that big sort of
swimmy, encyclopedia of knowledge for
this fictional world that I was creating.
Now, ironically, I never ended up
publishing that, and my friend and I
produced maybe like an issue and a half
of content for the web comic, but I ended
up going deep into the Drupal community
and spent probably the next like 15 to
16 years working in digital publishing,
content management, large scale content
management software and open source.
And it was probably like maybe it, a
year or two after I really got heavily
into the Drupal community that a couple
of other, very smart folks who were
doing independent work Jeff Robbins and
Matt Westgate started a company called
Lullabot to do like consulting and
education and training because Drupal
was starting to take off at the time.
And there was a lot of interest and
people are doing interesting things, but
there wasn't necessarily a lot of good
learning resources and it, wasn't easy
to get access to expertise about Drupal,
unless you too were willing to wade
into software developer world and like
hanging out in IRC and debug SQL calls.
For companies that were starting
to try to figure out how to use
it effectively there were very few
resources at the time for that.
And that was like Lullabot's sweet spot.
When I joined they wanted to educate
and also provide expertise and
advice for larger organizations
that were trying to make sense of
this wild and wooly open-source CMS
Ivan: Yeah.
And you spent a great career there and
Jeff: About 15 years.
Yeah.
Ivan: gosh, that's a long time.
That's a really long time,
especially in this industry.
It speaks volumes for what Jeff
and Matt built at Lullabot.
Jeff: And it in, I can't say enough
about, the entire team at Lullabot.
It's 60 plus people now.
I think it was like maybe
seven or eight when I joined.
And they've consistently
worked to grow slowly and and
sustainably and very carefully.
And over time have changed what the
focus was, what kind of work they
were doing as needs became apparent.
For a long time Lullabot didn't
do like development of websites.
It was like a training
and advisory consulting.
But increasingly it became clear
that, it was very hard to do that,
without being able to be confident,
there was a team that you could say,
"Okay, now here's five people who
know how to run with that advice."
And so Lullabot started building a team
to be able to do those kinds of things.
And that's actually, that's what
it does now, Lullabot builds
and implements giant sites.
And like things like the addition of
Jared Ponchot as the head of design
at Lullabot that, that was another
one of those sort of landmarks.
And yeah it's a wonderful team.
And I while I was there and that was
when I got my, started sinking my teeth
into content strategy because for one,
it's, it was such a, I can now look
back and say, it's such a big part of
any kind of digital publishing work.
And a lot of the stuff that seemed to
go wrong on projects that we were trying
to figure out and trying to solve, that
wasn't technology, it was just something,
some sort of planning problem that hadn't
been accounted for, content strategy,
where does the content fit into it?
Who's producing it?
How has this stuff planned?
A lot of the stuff that I was drawn
to, trying to figure out in order
to make these projects make sense, I
discovered was content strategy and
information architecture questions.
Ivan: And I'm reminded of this
almost on a daily basis that really
we're not building websites or
supporting websites or pushing code.
And we're not really
dealing with technology.
Everything we do every day is people.
It's people that use the site.
It's people that want
the site to be built.
It's humans that we interact with,
like at the end of the day, that's
who you're servicing the humans
on the other end of the screen.
And it can be easy to get a waylaid
by the technology and by the code.
Jeff: It's a very easy rabbit hole to
dive down, it's there, there's always an
endless amount of interesting complexity
and new vistas, in the world of like pure
technology that you can mess around with.
And people are the messy, frustrating part
that like always throw curve balls at you.
And you can't pause a person
and open up the debugger to
figure out what's going on.
You just have to, you just have
to walk, work through it in
real time as part of the mess.
Ivan: I never thought of opening
a debugger up for someone that's a
Jeff: I think that's
like getting a therapist.
Ivan: Okay.
Yeah.
Okay.
I can buy that.
Okay.
Jeff: It's Wednesday.
I got to go see my debugger.
Yeah.
Ivan: What, and I could
change the mood a little.
What has been your
greatest struggle in life?
Do you think?
Jeff: Oh I'll say two.
One, the challenge of what and
how to dedicate my energy to
accomplish, meaningful things.
I think that's, that can be a struggle
for, I think everybody to a certain
extent, Probably about two to three
years ago I was diagnosed with adult
ADHD and I had always joked about
ADHD, but I was very I was very set
in like the traditional assumption
that ADHD looks like a hyperactive
kid running around in circles when
he should be studying for class.
And only ,very recently, we're
doing some reading did I start
realizing like, oh no, actually
that's that's a neurological thing.
It's there's this thing
called executive function.
That it is literally what your
brain taking an idea like, oh man,
I should really do my taxes and
turning it into you standing up and
going over and getting papers and
a pencil and starting work on that.
The executive function is what
actually does the work of making
those tasks happen in your brain.
And ADHD is a disorder that
basically means you don't have
a working executive function.
So the running joke is that, if you've
meet anybody, who's survived to adulthood
without their life falling apart and has
ADHD, you've met someone who's figured
out how to like weaponize anxiety as
a substitute for executive function.
Because that sort of impending deadline
panic that we all face sometimes
can kick the brain into a rough
equivalent of executive function.
I'm not a doctor or a
neurologist, so I've probably.
I probably goofed that up a bit.
But like the idea is, you can use
anxiety to kickstart and fuel a kind
of focus and drive that can help
you power through difficult stuff,
but there's a real limit to that.
And a lot of people either end up
developing fairly sophisticated
work arounds or systems in their
life to keep things on the rails.
So that, they have, when they're not in
the middle of an anxiety, fueled deadline
push everything doesn't fall apart.
But you know that a lot of energy can go
into that and ADHD can be very difficult.
I, again, feel fortunate because the
world of technology is full of people
with ADHD, and it's very friendly to
them, because the idea of either being
attracted to shiny things or being
hyper-focused on a task and blind to
the outside world fits very well with
the stereotype of a smart coder or
a programmer developer type person.
You don't stand out too badly.
But trying to figure out how those
things have impacted my personal
relationships, like with my wife
and my friends and my loved ones.
And how to improve the way that I treat
them and the impact that the way I live my
life has on them that's spent difficult.
Being diagnosed with ADHD and going
on medication for that and learning
where to put a lot of my energies that
has been a significant challenge with
the payoff for it has been massive.
I'd say that's probably one big thing.
I didn't know.
It was a struggle until a couple of years
ago and starting to get treatment for it
opened my eyes to holy cow, other people's
brains, just do these things naturally.
That's amazing.
But the other thing that I think would
probably be unpacking my own relationship
with fundamentalist Christianity,
authoritarian ideologies in general
and figuring out how to be a good
person in a way that is meaningful to
me and bears positive fruit in my life
in a way that I believe is healthy
and sustainable and good I guess.
The challenge when you start
wrestling with questions about
faith and spirituality and
religion, is that even words like
good are tremendously overloaded.
What it even means to say that something
is good can be a lifetime of unpack it.
And like grappling with some of
those questions is significant.
It's it's interesting for me, because
I spent probably my teen years what
my relationship to this faith that I
had been raised in was going to be.
And I like to think that I was pretty, on
fire, I was gung ho I wanted to go out and
change the world and spread the good news.
And I also wanted to be right.
I wanted to be correct about things, which
is always an important quality in both
people who are drawn to like authoritarian
movements or internet arguments.
But I faced increasing challenges with
that as I got deeper into apologetics
and theology, because I wanted to
know if this was the right thing.
If this was the only way that
people should live and the only way
to be truly good, then everybody
else needed to get on board and I
needed to be able to convince them.
I needed to learn apologetics and
theology and rhetoric and debate
skills and all of this stuff.
You can imagine how incredibly
insufferable and annoying I was as like
a 17 year old, like it's mind boggling
that I wasn't just like curb stomped by
our next door neighbor at some point,
just for being incredibly insufferable.
But increasingly.
I like to say that I
hit the wall eventually.
And I think that's very common in
fundamentalism for very idealistic people
who are driven to earnestly do what they
ought to do and do the right thing inside
of the framework that they've been given.
Fundamentalism and a lot of totalizing
ideologies don't allow a lot flexibility.
They don't allow a lot of room
for people to find what their
path through something is.
And without that ability to
flex, breaking is usually the
only other option when there are
difficult questions that are faced.
And I think that's very
common in fundamentalism and
evangelical Christianity in
particular that flavor of it.
I think that's a common thread with a
lot of people who grew up in there and
left, at least it could be selection
bias, my experience is usually that
there's more of that than people who just
drifted away because they didn't care.
And that's my story.
I was tremendously passionate about it,
but I couldn't figure out how to resolve
a lot of the fundamental inconsistencies
that I was encountering as I grappled
with deeper questions and arguments
about what was good, what's the source
of goodness, so to speak, why should we
pursue one direction versus the other?
And it wasn't the opposite of some
sort of wild teenage rebellion phase
because it wasn't like I, went off and
pursued, drugs, sex, and rock and roll.
It was more that I just got depressed
and read Kierkegaard for awhile.
But I think I came out on
the other side of that.
It took years, but I, think the struggle
was figuring out what my values were in
the sense of what I value in the world.
What I feel is worth
pursuing and protecting.
How to articulate those and how to arrive
at them if there wasn't some external
authority dictating what they ought to be.
And I didn't realize that was such
a significant drive for me until
I was stripped of that external
framework for it and had to stumble
and puzzle through it myself.
And I think it's a, it's
an important exercise.
I think all of us have values in the
sense of things that we value and prize.
And I think one of the most dangerous
things about the kind of fundamentalism
fundamentalist authoritarianism that I
came out of is that it too has values
and ideologies and perspectives,
but it launders them through a story
about a literal take on the Bible.
It's we don't have a perspective.
We're just taking this thing at face
value and everyone else is bringing a
perspective that they have to prove.
And we're just the unvarnished version
and and like sociology and philosophy
wise, that's like a, it's a primitivist
strain, which isn't to say that it is
primitive, but that it's animated by this
desire to, for to return to something pure
and simpler before it got complicated.
But it launders what is a very specific
set of values and set of perspectives as
being the original, pure thing, rather
than what it's bringing to the table.
And not to go too deep into the theology
and the, politics of it, but like that
tendency to launder our perspectives as
just the facts on the ground or something
like that is very easy to slide into.
You can see the same tendency
sometimes when people say just,
check the science and this is just
what science says when the actual
truth is a lot more complicated.
And what they are really saying
is this is what I've concluded
from what I see in the facts.
But I'm not comfortable enough with that.
I need science to be on my side, not
just something that I'm engaging with.
And I'm not like euphemistically referring
to any particular specific controversy
right now or something like that.
And I'm just reflecting on the
fact that, that tendency isn't
exclusive to spiritual belief.
But like the world I grew up in,
evangelical fundamentalism it's
almost a defining characteristic.
And wrestling with that and
trying to acknowledge perspective
and to iron out what my values
are what is important to me?
I have to do that, but also I can
do it without universalizing it.
I don't have to convince everyone else
that my values have to be their values.
There may be some things that I think
are necessary for everyone to value
are important for everyone to value,
but it doesn't that's a different
kind of question than what I've out.
Sorry that was far a field, but
Ivan: No.
I quite appreciate the the thesis.
I can identify with the process of being
somewhere and leaving said thing and
finding one's own values and discovering
that what you've been brought up to
believe has been essentially passed down
by generations and maybe not exactly true.
Jeff: it may not be the bedrock of
reality, but in fact, just another
layer that's been accumulated.
Ivan: Yeah, exactly.
Exactly.
I really appreciate you
sharing that with us.
And I would love to know on the opposite
end, what gives you joy these days?
Are you reading anything
that brings you joy?
Are you doing things that make you smile?
Jeff: I do, I'm really enjoying
reading more about different fields
that do this sense-making thing.
In particular linguistics and physical
architecture of books, stuff like that.
And even things like museum exhibit design
The attempt to translate the concept
of a particular museum collection
into space and image, like how do you
communicate those things and linguistics.
I like to joke that if you scratch
most structured content problems
under the surface, what you've
got is a linguistics problem.
But I enjoy those things.
And I wouldn't say they're about work,
but they give a lot of useful perspective.
recreationally speaking, I think,
my wife and I we, there's a
lot of, a lot of, films, books
that we read, a new chat about.
She's a big fan of
Chinese and Korean series.
So I've my horizons isn't have been
expanded over the last couple of
years and it hasn't been a lot of fun.
I enjoy like some 3d printing and design,
it's tinkering around like making brackets
and tiny little shipping containers to 3d
print and learning how to solder and make
simple circuits when something breaks.
It's for me, like it's interesting and
enjoyable from a creative perspective,
but it's also a shift from the very
like high concept abstract intangible
world that a lot of my work lives in.
Figuring out how to make a tiny little
brass nozzle that's clogged with
plastic, how to clear that out so
that the 3d printer can keep printing
is a very different kind of problem.
That it's a really nice change of pace.
Ivan: And you're still
making sense of things.
Jeff: Guilty as charged.
Ivan: Jeff.
Thank you so much for your time.
It's really precious to me.
I'm so grateful that you spent the time
answering my questions and thinking
about the larger picture in life.
It's just awesome to be
one of 8 billion with you.
And thanks for joining us.
Jeff: Likewise, thank you
so much for the opportunity.
It's been a real pleasure.
Ivan: I hope you'll join us in the next
episode of ONE OF 8 BILLION when we
hear from Tolu Adeleye, co-founder of AJ
Tennis Academy, which is working to use
tennis to inspire kids around the world
and help them achieve their potential.
Tolu: What makes me smile?
It's a connection with humans every
day, I'm able to travel here and there.
And those moments when I'm able to
connect with another human, who speaks
a very different language from me.
Who has a different experience from me.
To borrow your words, a
different story from me.
But somehow we're able
to find that connection.
Whether it's over tennis on the
tennis court, whether it's over
travel, or whether it's over food.
That's a reason to smile.
Ivan: This has been ONE OF 8
BILLION a podcast about all
of us online at 1of8b.com.
Join us again next time as we listen
to one of eight billion other stories.
ONE OF 8 BILLION is supported by TEN7
a technology studio whose mission
is to Make Things That Matter.
Find out more at ten7.com.
I'm Ivan Stegic.
Thank you for listening.