The following is a conversation with Michael Poulson, better known online as The Primagen.
He is a programmer who has entertained and inspired millions of people to have fun building stuff with software, whether you're a newbie or a seasoned developer who has been battling it out in the software engineering trenches for decades.
In short, The Primagen is a legendary programmer and a great human being with an inspiring roller coaster of a life story.
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This episode is brought to you by InVideo AI, a video generating app that allows you to create full length videos using just text prompts.
I have been using it more and more myself and trying to figure out how can I integrate it into the visual presentation of the podcast or some of the other videos so that we can kind of add the experience of what the person is talking about.
It's a real challenge because when you generate, even in a simple overlay image, you know, you don't want to interfere with the imagination of the listener.
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I think of the digital marketplace that Shopify creates as a kind of cognitive interface between the seller and the buyer.
Economic interface too, it's a mind -meld, a network plugged in into the collective intelligence of our species.
The wants and desires fueling the network.
And theoretical computer science, it's a multi -commodity optimization problem.
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Nothing fancy. It was super easy to do.
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That was one of the fascinating things that Jeff Bezos said, that all businesses eventually die.
And it's true, of course.
All empires eventually fall.
And so the task of a business, I think it's the day one thinking that he's referring to is to uh delay the inevitable death of a company for as long as possible, much like the heat death of the universe, there's a heat death of a business and that's the point what you're trying to do in your life, in your business is to delay the inevitable and have fun doing it.
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Have I been going through a mental rollercoaster over the past few months, and certainly over the past few weeks?
This may not be the right place to talk about that, but the point is talking helps.
It's the paradox that in order to fortify the castle of your mind, you have to first be vulnerable enough to reveal the fears, the anxieties, the weaknesses of the castle.
Although referring to the mind as a castle seems like a very douchy thing to say, which by the way the whole castle world was my favorite Lego world.
I think there's a bunch of worlds.
This is how I knew, I wasn't a sci -fi Lego person.
I didn't care about the spaceships and all that kind of stuff.
I wanted knights and I wanted dragons and I wanted castles and pirates and boats with cannons and just war when face -to -face combat was the way that war was conducted.
Technology made military conflict less personal less human cold and somehow in doing so makes it too easy to slide in the deeply immoral.
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is I need to get back to jujitsu.
I tweaked my knee. ACL.
Not torn, just sprained.
White belt going crazy on me.
Oh, life. Life is full of adventure, of surprises, of turns and twists.
And all of a sudden, I'm excited.
White belt takes you on a detour because of a minor injury.
Anyway, it takes time to heal, you know, And I'm very cautious with things that prevent me from moving about this world, and actually prevent me from exercising because, you know, I have fun running.
And by fun, I mean it's torture, but I enjoy it.
But, you know, running is part of my regular daily life is, yeah, overall makes me feel good.
I can push my body to the limit, I can push my mind to the limit.
It's an escape from the intellectual world and rolled into the natural world and run outside and really enjoy the fresh air and all that.
And so if I get injured in jujitsu, it affects that.
But then of course I love the chess, the puzzle, the complexity of jujitsu and all the combat sports, judo, boxing, and so yeah, I need to get back to jujitsu because I think I'm getting close to that 100%.
And I need to also talk to Donaherson.
and Donna Harr soon.
We've talked 17 times, so this is gonna be the 18th time.
No, I don't know, I don't know how many times we talk, but it's never enough.
The man is brilliant.
And there's the Craig Jones CGI 2 coming up, where there's going to be a lot of athletes clashing, a lot of ridiculous humor from Craig.
I can't wait to see the spectacle of it all.
And of course, I think Jon is participating.
That'd be a good super fight.
Craig Jones versus John Donner but not J ujitsu would be slap fighting.
Anyway, I can't wait to talk to John, it's been a while and there's a lot of interesting philosophical things to discuss.
This all somehow has to do with AG 1 because of health and let's see jiujitsu health equals AG 1, let's go.
They'll give you one month supply of fish oil when you sign up at drinkag1 .com slash Lex. this is the Lex Freeman podcast to support it please check out our sponsors in the description and now dear friends here's the primogen What do you love most about programming?
What brings you joy when you program?
I can tell you the first time that I ever felt love in programming or felt that joy or that excitement, which was in college, it was the second class of data structures.
And the teacher that was teaching Ray Babcock, he was talking about linked lists.
Now, you have to learn Java at Montana State University when I went, and so he's off there kind of explaining this whole link list thing and all that.
And then he shows code.
And in the code, it's like abstract class node or whatever it was.
I can't remember what it was.
And then it had a private member, and that private member was of type node, and I've I've never seen that before.
It is a class that is called node with a member that is of itself.
And for the first time ever, I was like, oh my gosh, like, there's no end, there's no way to iterate.
This is not like a set of 10 items, this is a set of infinite items. And so, like, my mind kind of like exploded in that moment.
Like, there's actually, like, the what you can express is huge.
I can see what memory looks like.
Like, I can see this kind of hopping through space.
And I just remember being just so blown away, Cause up until that point everything was just, all right, I have a list of 10 items. I have a list of 20 items, right?
It was very rigid and small and the things I built were really small and trivial.
And all of a sudden I felt like I could build like anything in that one moment.
And it was so amazing.
I just remember sitting in class for what I don't even remember how long those classes were anything, but I just remember being just completely like profoundly impacted by this notion.
And so I just sat there and I watched it.
And I had the exact same experience, in Heavens 4vid, by a software engineering class when we talked about the decorator pattern, where you can keep on constructing these objects in this recursive way.
Not that I think that's actually a good idea to do, but just watching that and realizing like there's so many weird and unique ways you can solve problems. And like you can just, anything your mind can think of, you can just create that.
And I just remember getting just so excited about the possibility that anything is possible.
Yeah, let's wax philosophical bottling lists.
It is pretty profound for people who don't know.
A node in a linked list doesn't know anything about the world it's in, it only knows about the thing.
It's linked to its neighbor.
Maybe that's symbolic, it's a metaphor for all of us humans.
There's billions of us on this planet and we only know about our local little network.
And it's kind of beautiful.
And you realize like in that little simple data structure you can construct arbitrarily large systems and they they're like roots that go through memory and then of course that's where you get all the programming languages that allow you to dump junk into memory and have memory leaks.
And that there therefore create infinite pain as you try to figure out where that unfreed memory is.
For me yeah probably it's so beautiful the way you put that.
Link lists are indeed beautiful.
recursion also for me.
When I finally wrap my brain around what it means to write a recursive function.
What was the thing, what was the one that taught you?
Cause I think we all probably, you probably did factorial where you like, you know, just do like a quick factorial of it, it just doesn't hit home.
What was the thing that kind of made it hit home?
I don't remember the first. I remember my first. How do you not remember your first?
It was magic. I've had so many that just - I mean, you are a Lisp guy.
You're probably pretty used to the recursion.
Yeah, all I remember is just surrounded by C of parentheses.
I mean, that's really probably what I, in high school, I think it was either Java or C++.
Wow, how do I not remember that?
It must have been C++.
And then college, it was the generic bullshit software engineering classes were Java.
But then the Renegades, the cool kids, were all using LISP.
That's when you're doing the AI, the quote unquote AI at that time.
That was LISP. If you want to write a chess engine, you would use LISP.
So for me, probably the moment I really fell in love with programming was LISP.
And writing a fellow programs and chess engines.
All kinds of engines that play a game.
and then I could play against that thing, and that thing would beat me.
The joy of being destroyed by the thing you've created.
And, oh, game of life, too, a cellular automata.
That's when I built that, in all kinds of programming languages, that's less about programming languages and more about the system you create, and that just filled me with infinite joy, having, not similar to the Linkless situation, creating a system where each individual cell And now it only knows about its neighbors and operates in a very simple rules, but when you take that system as a whole and allow it to evolve over time, you can create infinite complexity.
So I just, man. Those are many pot head moments where I'm just like looking at the beautiful complexity that can be created with cellular automata.
That filled me with just infinite joy for sure.
But yeah, all I remember is parentheses.
So memories of my first are drowned in a sea of parentheses.
Oh, man. Mine is, I have, well, first off, mine was in Java so my first was a little bit more rigid, kind of a corporate experience, but, Cold.
Me. Cold, yeah. I was in a lab.
Everyone was using Sentos at that, or SentOS or however you say it.
I always called that Sentos, the fresh maker.
And so it was just, I mean that's very cold.
That's nice. Thank you.
I've been like this cold rigid environment with my Microsoft keyboard programming away in Java and I still I have just such this memory of despair because I Love programming this was after the linked list and I cannot figure out Recursion and so I go to you know The university store and I buy a book and its die tell and I tell learn Java and it has a section recursion So I open it up and I start reading it and it just doesn't hit home And I'm like I'm spiraling into this like kind of I maybe I'm not a programmer Maybe I'm not worthy enough to enter into this circle of people who can figure out
what what the heck recursion means And so dietele and I tells like I still remember this their phrase, their exact phrase was every young budding developer Solves this recursion program and it was the Tower of Hanoi and guess what I don't know if I can solve the Tower of Hanoi to this day, it's, it's like a very hard recursive problem.
And I just sat there and thought, oh my gosh, I'm not going to make it.
And I sat there in the lab for eight hours, 10 hours doing these things.
So worried. It's the week of recursion.
We have to do a lab assignment.
I'm not going to be able to do it.
And I just remember being like genuinely worried about that.
Uh, and then, because I always, my big problem was, is like, okay, do factorial, why not just use a for loop?
Okay. What about Fibonacci sequence?
It's why not use a for loop?
Like I don't understand what's the purpose of recursion.
I don't understand it yet.
It's so powerful. Why it looks like a really complicated for loop.
And so I just could not understand it.
And then lab came that day and it was, I'm going to give you a 2d array you have to read from a file.
This is what a starting position looks like.
This is what an ending position looks like.
This is what a wall looks like.
I want you to find me a path through the maze.
And so I just sat there and I like, okay, well, I guess I can just go up and I can create like a visited grid that so I know not to visit these places anymore.
And all of a sudden just started clicking.
I'm like, well, wait a second.
I don't know the maze, but if I just go up right down and left and hop back every time I had been to that square, don't visit it, like I can just, it will just go forever.
And I realized in that moment, like I actually understand recur.
I've understood recursion this whole time.
I just never had a problem in which it actually made sense to use.
And that was like my big downfalls that I was measuring.
my understanding with the problems that I had available which were just, you know, list traversal which is not a good use of recursion.
And so I just, I just remember that free email, man recursion, it was a great moment in my life.
I mean, it does require it to be fair, a leap of faith like, because people will tell you those conformist dogmatic Java instructors will tell you that this isn't, you know But it takes a leap of faith that this is something, this is a different way of looking at the world, and it's a powerful way of looking at the world.
I actually remembered when I think I first, I think I remember my first now.
All right. I think it was Deb first search for one of the games, maybe Othello, something like that.
And for that, implementing recursion.
Understand that you can search trajectories through the space of states and do that recursively.
That was mind -blowing.
Just imagining like, the possibilities.
Yeah, just like numbers flying was like the beautiful mind.
And then that's when I also discovered conspiracy theories.
And I just saw, I saw the truth.
Okay, yeah, so what were we talking about?
oh, what was the most painful aspect of programming for you?
Like what memories do you have of deep, profound suffering in terms of programming in the early days?
I would say the biggest one that I can really hold onto had to be one of two experiences.
The first experience was when I was at a place called Schedulicity and am I not allowed to say the place?
You're allowed. I'm not sure if they were even operating still at this point but they're in both something funny about the name, I'm sorry.
Oh, Gradulisti? Yeah.
They actually, the name was so bad that when you looked at, they're like, paid for its Google Ad terms that they would make sure that they're at the top of the list. The spellings were just insane because no one knew how to spell the word scheduling.
So it was just like the Google optimizing for that is just hilarious.
But, okay, go back to the thing.
And the thing that kills me the most about programming, what I actually considered the worst aspect of programming is when you know everything.
And so when I was at this job, it's just every single day I come in, there were no surprises.
There was no questions, I didn't understand the code base.
Sure, that's, that's fair.
I didn't understand all the things about the code base, but I knew I was going to go in, I was going to generate some sort of object from the database, I was going to take that object from the database, and I was just going to map it over and just display it on the web page.
There's no creativity, there's nothing to it, it's very like almost factory line kind of work.
And that was a very kind of difficult moment for me.
Which is, I didn't enjoy programming, because I knew everything about it.
I already knew exactly what I was going to do that day.
I knew all the hurdles I was going to have to go over.
There was no unknown unknowns, if you will.
It was just knowns at all times.
And it's just, that is for me, that is the worst part about programming is when you already know the solution and it's just a matter of how fast you can type and get it out from your head to your hands.
So the absence of uncertainty, the absence of challenge was the pain.
Yeah. That's pretty profound, Brian.
I'm more than just good looks.
I want you to know that.
It's a low bar. What do you identify as?
I'm enjoying asking the general question.
38 male. Male. Husband of beautiful wife.
You stream about all kinds of programming, but what kind of programmer are you?
Are you a full stack developer, web programming, and maybe can you lay out all the different kinds of programming and then place yourself in that in terms of your identity, sexual identity as well?
Yep, we can put it all in there.
Plus obviously those two are very very tightly coupled.
I have seen you on the border sexually aroused by certain languages.
I think you got real excited about OCaml, Okay, let's go.
Thank you, Dylan Mulroy.
Okay. Yeah. That did not expect that.
That escalated quickly.
Anyway, what do you identify as?
Okay. So, first, let's do the previous or the in -between question first, which is the different kind of archetypes.
I think that's a really interesting kind of question because if you go on Twitter or you're new, your thoughts are probably that there is just web programming and maybe there's some other stuff.
you have game programming, but you'd be like game programming in JavaScript and on the web.
There's this very kind of very myopic view of the programming world, and I bet if you ask a lot of people these days, what is the most popular form of programming?
They'd probably say web.
If you said what contains the most amount of repos, how many percentage of repos on GitHub are web based?
They'd probably say 90 % or some huge number.
But the reality is that there's an entire embedded robotics world.
You're familiar with the ML side of things.
There's networking, there's gonna be just like performance operating systems compilers.
There's just huge amounts of variation of all these different type of programming verticals that you can be.
And so we often talk about programming in perspective of web, or something that's pretty narrow.
And I think that's just a social construct of Twitter more than anything else, that it's actually, I don't believe it's that representative of the entire kind of programming world out there.
And I think a lot of programming's really, really fun.
And there's some really great stuff, building your own language is just a very fun experience to do, every programmer should just do that once, just to have a completely different, you know, perspective on how things work in life.
But as far as what do I do, I've always looked at myself as a tools engineer.
So at my time at my jobs, typically I would start off on the UI and then they'd be like, okay, well, hey, we need a library for this thing.
So then I'd be the one writing like the library.
So in 2012, 2013, I was writing a UI library for the web that can behave just like an iPad.
So you can pinch and zoom on it, but it's still a webpage.
Cause we didn't have any of that stuff back then.
It was a canvas, had to do all of the like matrices operations and all that stuff to kind of, you know, it felt like you're on an iPad, but it actually wasn't on an iPad.
And this was iPad two, by the way.
So this is a long time ago.
And so every single time I got into a job, it's like, okay, Hey, we need to do a library.
Hey, can you work on a build system?
So back then there was no grunt.
There was no gulp. There was no, any of those things.
So I had to hand roll my own JavaScript to build system.
And so I always fell into these positions of building tools for developers to be successful.
And I've always really enjoyed that region.
So as I went on to say, Netflix, I spent 10 years there.
I'd say the majority of my 10 years were building things for developers to use that they can be successful at their job.
And so I just, I've always really enjoyed that aspect because your share, your stakeholders and the people that use your program understand programming.
And they're gonna say like hey, I need this and typically the thing that they need they actually want Whereas with people people want stuff But what they actually need versus what they actually want often are kind of like this weird Separation people, you know, that's like the old Henry Ford quote I just want a faster horse and he's like know what you actually want as a car And so it's like this like you have to play this game of trying to really figure it out.
Whereas developers It's like I know you know what I'm doing.
I know what you want.
Let's figure it out together That gives you a really nice big picture view of programming in general, so I love the idea of just starting at the interface, you need to pinch and all that kind of stuff, and then figure out the entire thing that requires to make that happen, including maybe the side quest tooling, how to make it more productive and efficient, all that kind of stuff, so the entirety of the thing.
That's really cool.
Okay, so that means that would be full stack.
By the general definition of full stack meaning like.
Perhaps, yeah. Versus like systems engineer, like starting at the bottom and trying to optimize a certain kind of specific thing without seeing the big picture of like what the resulting interface would look like.
And a lot of people in web programming, they never go beyond the front end of how the thing looks.
They kind of always assume there'll be somebody, some grunt in the shadows, in the darkness of the basement that will implement the backend.
Some filfoil out there, I'll be doing the back end.
Yeah. Like I like to call myself a generalist, um, just to kind of give some ideas is, you know, at one point at Netflix, I built the web socket connection.
So for TVs, how web socket works is code I just wrote.
And so I, you know, built the framing thing.
And before that I was doing stuff with memory and before that I built the UI for a tool.
It's just like, I can just do the thing you just tell me the thing to do, and I'll just go do the thing.
I don't worry too, I don't try to get super good at one specific activity.
Like, I don't want to be a Cooper Netty's engineer.
who's the world's greatest deployer.
But if I had to go learn Kubernetes, I'd go learn it and learn how to deploy some things and then hopefully move on to the next thing, if that makes sense.
I posted about the fact that I'm talking to you on Reddit and there's a lot of wonderful questions.
Somebody mentioned that I should ask you about DevOps.
Can you explain what DevOps is?
Is it a kind of special ops of programmers?
Is it CO team six of developers?
What's DevOps? Can you define, are you a DevOps engineer?
Well, people keep telling me DevOps isn't real.
There's actually, you want platform engineers, cloud engineers, infra engineers, I just often think, I think the easiest way, if we're doing like, just kind of like some basic nomenclature, it's just DevOps are the people that make sure that when you launch a service and all that, it doesn't just disappear.
Right? It's all the kind of backbone of being able to operate something at scale, like you really don't.
And if you think about, if you're just writing a mom and pop, like website, people that do PHP, that are doing WordPress and all that, they're going to build something they're going to hand it off to, I don't know, Leno Digital Ocean, some company, they don't really need a really complicated build deployment, all this, it's just someone with a simple website so they can sell their goods.
And so they don't really need that.
And so that's kind of how I think of a DevOps is when things need to scale.
That's kind of the person you hire.
Yeah, those people are actually amazing.
Yeah. The time I spent at Google, it's like, oh yeah, yeah, there's all these fancy machine learning people, but the the folks that are running the compute infrastructure, basically, that make sure the shit doesn't go down, they're like wizards.
And they're essential incredible, like vertical of job.
And obviously, I'm using a very broad term to describe I'm sure like a bunch, you know, because making sure stuff doesn't go down, you can also say that's like an SRE, right site, reliability engineer, whatever, you know, the ones that were the the bomber jackets at Google.
And so when we say DevOps, I think people get very particular about terms specifically in this category, they're like, well actually you're mentioning infrastructure engineer versus, you know versus site reliability engineers.
It's just like, okay, yes I hear you.
But generally when someone thinks DevOps, they think somebody that manages the servers and their lifecycles and the reliability.
There's DevOps. Is it real?
I'm not sure. Okay.
Did Vercel kill DevOps?
Question mark? Wow, that's, you're Almost a journalist. That's a headline.
Let's go back to the beginning.
All right. Baby Prime.
So you mentioned Netflix.
You've... Probably worked at Netflix by the way.
For people who don't know who the primogen is, he mentions the fact that he has been very successful and has worked at Netflix, and basically every other sentence.
Correct. Almost as much as I mentioned NeoVim.
Oh, great. tell me more about Neovim.
No, please don't. So, baby Prime.
At the very beginning you've had one hell of a life, and I think it's aspiring to a lot of people.
You've gone through a lot of painful low points, including meth addiction, loss, and like you mentioned, you've come out of that to become a successful programmer and a person that inspires a huge number of people to get into programming.
And and just to find success in life.
So maybe I would love it if you laid out just your whole life journey from the beginning.
So I guess if we're gonna start with this whole journey I think it's probably best to start when I was about four or five years old.
That was the first time I was ever exposed to pornography.
And it's kind of just earwormed me for a large portion of my life.
And so I don't think there was a day that didn't go by from when I was a very young lad all the way up until I was 20 some years old where I didn't think about porn on the daily basis.
And so it's just like every single day even that young.
And so it's just a very mind consuming, time -consuming, thought -consuming thing that kind of plagued me from starting at a very young age.
When I was seven years old, my dad died.
That was kind of a really tough period of life.
I still think about this time that I went over to China and there's kind of some rules that we were given, and one of the rules was just like, Hey, don't talk about God.
And if you do, use the word dad instead.
And I was just like, Okay, dad, it was like the first time I said that word in like 17 years or something long time.
It was like so weird to say that phrase.
I was just like, Oh, that was just the strangest thing I've ever said my entire lifetime.
It just felt so weird. So kind of rewind, as I got older, obviously, was very good at computers, good at accessing porn, of course, uh, played, uh, video games on the internet.
Fun, fun, kind of like side quest story.
I think the guy's name is Lord Talk on Twitch. I can't quite remember his name, but he built this game called grail G R a a L and grail online.
And when I was a young lad that it was just like Zelda, except for it also had a level editor and it had like a C like language.
And that's how I discovered how the program, as I looked at these symbols and figured out what they meant and then I was able to make things happen.
in the game. And that was like a, that's my introduction into programming.
So thank you, that guy, whatever your Twitch name was.
But all right, so keep on going.
As I got older, I was super bad socially.
I was not a very great social person.
I, high school is brutal, got made fun of a lot.
Really didn't enjoy.
I wouldn't say I had a great time during high school.
Definitely felt very out of place or offset or maybe misplaced.
If you will, I'm not sure what the right word is and so of course at that point.
I just always wanted to I Wanted to be accepted to fit in and all that I did forget to say one side story after my dad died my brother older brother He got I started getting into drugs and along with that he exposed me to pot so at eight years old I was smoking some marijuana For a while there until like maybe 11 or 12 and took a break and then again and did a lot of that as I got a little bit older.
So I got a lot of these exposures fairly young.
16, 15 through 18, a lot of drinking and all that.
When I graduated or as I was graduating high school, it's just like, I had such sadness, if you will.
I was very sad about how everything went.
Tried to commit suicide.
Obviously it was a very poor attempt and I'm still here today.
I'm very happy about that aspect.
I'm glad that I didn't follow through with anything, had to go to the hospital and all that.
And when I was done, I just still remember coming out of the hospital and that moment, it's kind of something broken you.
Have you ever read the book, Wheel of Time?
It's 14 ,000 pages or something like that, but right around page 12 ,000 Rand has to intentionally kill a girl, the main character.
That's like the moment he breaks and he gets into hard Rand, Quindelar Rand, if you will, for those that know Wheel of Time, we'll appreciate all that.
But for those that don't, it's very confusing, I understand.
Not the Amazon movie show, not that wheel of time.
So now that we kind of go back onto it, at that point it's just like something kind of broken me.
And it's just like I just didn't care anymore.
So all the kind of social awkwardness, if you will, all that kind of just died away with me.
But also, so did everything else.
And so I started using a bunch of drugs, LSD, mushrooms, meth.
did a bunch of math, did a bunch of that stuff, and then went off to college and continued to do a bunch of stuff.
I took too much acid to her for like quite a few years, I had like little squigglies on the side of my eyes whenever I'd walk by high contrast objects, and so it's just like that whole period of life was just kind of marked by just poor decisions, and then sometime, when I was about 19 years old, somewhere in that range, I just had this one evening Whereas just I felt the very dramatic and real presence of God.
And it's just like, I kind of had this choice, like Frodo, uh, on a razor where it's like, if I go either way, I'm going to fall off.
And I need to change my life.
You just, you get to make the choice now.
Do you want to do that or not?
And so I remember going, okay, do I do want to change my life?
Like, I don't like this experience.
I don't like what I'm living.
I am still very sad.
I still feel very desperate.
I still feel all those things.
I'm just like, pretending to be this other person.
And then I just went to sleep that night, nothing changed in my life.
Everything was still the way it was.
I woke up the next day, the same person.
And I was just like, Oh, that's just like such a strange, weird kind of experience.
And I just went about my day.
And then I remember.
I think that evening I looked at porn, and all of a sudden, I just had a conscious.
I just like this deep profound, like shame.
And I was like, I've never felt shame in my life, right?
Like I have no idea what's happening now.
And then all of a sudden, when I smoked pot, I just felt deep shame.
And when I heard somebody or did something wrong, also, it's just like I got unconscious from that evening.
That's what kind of my gift was, if you will.
And it's just like, at that point, I didn't even have a choice.
I had to change my life, because for whatever reason, I've kind of been changed in a moment.
And so from there, I started actually trying in school.
I always kind of joke around that I got 2 .14 in high school.
I had a teacher hand write me a note saying as the worst student she's ever had, all that kind of stuff.
I was not a really great student.
And then in that moment, it's just like, okay, now life's changed.
And I start trying to learn, and I try to become a good student.
And it turns out it's really hard like I was I was really bad.
I still got Cs. I went and took pre calculus and failed pre calculus, and I'm like, oh my gosh, I used to be the smart math guy.
And now I'm kind of the idiot failing.
And so it's like, I'm just questioning myself and all that.
And I spent hours upon hours in a studying math learning center.
And then just at some point years into this journey, I'm like a year and a half into this journey at this point.
It's just like something clicks.
And I go from being the worst person to just immediately becoming the best. Everything after that is just, I don't know what happened.
All of a sudden, I was the best person at math.
I started going to my computer science classes.
I just really got everything.
It's just like everything that's just years after trying, just all of a sudden became easier and I'm not sure if it happened over the course of weeks or when the easier started.
But it was just first predicated by just a huge amount of difficulty.
And then this is kind of where I started really desiring and loving the process of learning was when things started getting easier after all those years, cause I just was motivated by this desire to do something, not, not not thinking it was going to get any easier.
And then, all of a sudden, it just started getting easier.
And it was great! And that's really where, I guess, I started having the biggest parts of my life change.
At that point, I started really, really, really wanting to never look at porn again.
Because every single time, just such shame and I really wanted to stop.
And that was by far the hardest addiction to quit.
Like smoking cigarettes was also a really hard addiction to quit.
Shockingly hard addiction to quit.
But porn by far was just the worst of them all.
Then I think about 22.
I was finally done with all kind of addictions, if you will.
And then for a year, I just worked in all that.
And I think right around, maybe it's 21 and three quarters, somewhere in that range.
I'm not really sure where I stopped all the addictions part or at least the outwardly addictions.
And then at some point, six months later, a year later, met my beautiful wife, things just started falling more and more into place.
I loved more and more work.
I loved programming.
I started programming like 12 hours a day.
I watched the social network movie and after that I was just like, I'm doing a startup.
That night I'd started my first startup and I was just like, it was in PHP, by the way.
PHP, 5 .2 or something like that.
It was great times.
I was just so motivated to do that.
I would just program for...
Sometimes I program for 24, 36 hours straight?
And I'm just like, nonstop, just that's all I wanted to do at all points.
I think my wife got a little sick of me.
I wouldn't, she would be like, can you drop me off at school?
And I'd be like, no, I'm programming.
I was not a very nice, I didn't think through things that well, and I was just so into it.
And I just did it nonstop.
And that's kind of like how I became me is that story, if that makes sense.
Let's try to reverse engineer some of the pain and some of the triumph.
You made it sound easy at times.
Let's try to understand it better.
Maybe when you were seven years old.
What do you think about the pain you've experienced there losing your dad?
What do you think, what kind of impact did it have on you, what kind of memories do you have at that time?
The best way I can kind of put it is that I just never knew what a dad was.
I was young enough that I could kind of maybe repress or just even have the capability of remembering things long term.
Cause I know most people don't remember a lot from when they're young.
And so I'm not exactly sure.
I probably as at one of the best possible ages if I'm gonna lose a dad to lose a dad, you know?
If you're gonna lose one, if you're 11 or 12, it's like a terrible age.
That's what my brother was and he fell into drug addiction and never got back out.
And so I just kind of have more of like a fuzziness and just kind of a longing that I just wish I had a dad.
What impact did that have on your evolution, on your life, sort of having that longing?
I think that's why I was so bad Socially in the sense that I was looking for approval Right like something I needed approval I think a lot of people kind of desire that approval or that Loving figure and I just didn't have that and so I think I just looked for it in everything else All right, like if I was to say psychoanalyze my actions during the time, it's not like I was actively thinking that But yeah, I just Always wanted something to fill in whatever that was I felt I think a lot of people listening to this will resonate with your experience in high school.
Like being the outsider being picked on, struggling through a lot of different complexities at home.
What advice would you give to them?
The worst part about high school is that you're surrounded by a bunch of people your age and it feels eternal.
You don't think. Like the people that are around you you feel like are the people that will be there for the rest of your life.
At least that's what I kind of like I thought.
And I didn't really even realize this until many years later that they are going to be some of the least consequential people in your life which is very shocking to kind of Think about especially if you're in it right now right like right now they are the Everything that your experiences your whole reality and then one day it all stops and then real life starts to begin Yeah, and it's just that's such a shocking thing.
And if I could just tell myself that maybe I would have been a bunch different person That's so beautifully put.
I mean, it's like a trial run.
At the beginning of video games, there's a little tutorial.
That's what that is.
Yeah. And actually, that should be a chance to try shit out.
To take risks, because real life will begin with...
There is more consequences after that.
Yeah. Here you can, if you're like a girl, ask her out.
Try, try shit. If you get picked on, hit that guy back.
Try shit out. I'm not gonna condone punching another person.
I will beat the shit out of him and Take some jiu jitsu and learn how to take him down and then and then and then that girl that rejected you a back Hmm.
Maybe I'll give that guy a second chance Get bad motherfucker.
It's a chance to try stuff out.
There's a very motivational speech for kicking ass It is true there I mean, there is something very true about that that I think especially I I mean I have no idea what the girls experience of high school would be like But as a guy there's definitely a lot of like physical requirements in high school There's a lot of physical measurement at least where I grew up I think that might not be true in all high schools But if they're filled with boys, it's probably true and so it's just like yeah, it probably does help to do those things to go to BJJ to do any of these activities because even if You
don't ever kick someone's ass.
Just having some level of confidence in yourself is probably a very valuable thing, but just Remembering that this is such a short tiny moment in your life.
It's just like a huge help.
I mean, the way you phrased it is exactly right.
That's what it feels like.
That this is these are the people that will be with you for the rest of your life, and this is the whole world.
And so that means that there'll be just tremendous amount of impact if somebody picks on you or if you fall somebody low, somewhere low in the hierarchy and the status hierarchy of this high school.
that means you'll be low in the status hierarchy of the world and you're fucked for the rest of your life.
And that care is a tremendous amount of weight.
It's just why psychologically, it's extremely difficult.
I think it's understated often by parents, by society, how difficult it is to be a high schooler.
How difficult psychologically it is, how it actually makes sense that some people would suffer from depression and be on the verge of suicide.
It's very, very difficult.
Yeah, I think it's even I you know people always say back in my day.
You know blah blah I think it's genuinely harder today than it's ever been in the sense that when I was a kid There was a qualification to people I mean, this is a cool guy.
This is not a cool guy today There's a quantification of people you have 32 ,514 people following you you have 12 like their people can visually They can inspect your exact social value on whatever platform you're on and that has to be just so much harder And I can imagine that there's a lot of just so much weight to put on that, that it's just, it feels probably way worse and way more damning to be uncool because you have an exact number of how uncool you are.
Yeah, the challenge there.
And the task, the quest is to remember that just because your social circle on social media and in high school thinks you're uncool, it actually might mean you are cool.
And you need to find that cool and grow it and let it flourish, so that when real life begins, you can fucking come out of the gate firing on all cylinders.
That's a great way to put it.
I think, if anything, high school is really bad at picking out the cool people.
That like the whatever the system of the hierarchy that forms it is so it's such a basic bitch hierarchy like You're good at very generic shit.
Yeah, that's how you rise your parents bought you an expensive car expensive car, right?
Materialistic shit.
Yeah, exactly. It's a greedy search. See they didn't have a proper search So they're just hitting that local optima but the heuristics I mean even the objective function the for that greedy search is just a really shitty one Yeah where those people that win the game of high school are very often not going to be the people that win the much more exciting, beautiful game of life.
So do epic shit and try stuff out.
The weirdos are the ones that are going to succeed.
The weirdos in high school, probably because they also get bullied and they get to be tormented more psychologically and get to explore their own mind and think through what it means to be a human being more.
because if you're winning in high school, you're not being challenged, you're not self -reflecting, you're not trying shit out.
So there is some degree to like being tormented as long as it doesn't break you.
The porn addiction, that's another powerful one that I think will probably resonate with a lot of people.
And it's interesting that you say that's one of the hardest addictions to overcome.
Let me say it this way.
some addictions have a much bigger societal look and porn is just not one of them, which makes it super hard. None of your friends are going to cheer you on.
If you go on Twitter and say, I quit porn, they're gonna be like, well that's good for you, but not everybody, you know, not everybody, no one makes that argument with meth, right?
No, one's gonna be like well, not everyone has to quit meth, okay?
It's actually a fine industry and people who, you know, are the ones producing it, they're good also, right?
No one's gonna make that kind of argument whereas with porn, you're gonna have like a whole thing and friends, friends are gonna think you're dumb for doing it or whatever it's like you have a, it's a much more difficult one and just like that.
So it feels accepted.
And I think it's also an addiction you can practice, participate in privately, hide it from the world.
There's certain addictions that are harder to hide from the world for prolonged periods of time and porn addiction is probably one you can just have for many years and then it can deepen.
That's probably like a serious issue.
Boy, am I glad I grew up before the internet because this porn is so accessible, so, so easy to go deep into that addiction.
I mean, what can you speak about what impact it had on your life?
Maybe some of the low points, but also how to overcome it.
I'd say as far as impact goes is that you will have such a long and broken look at women by the very like, I can, again, I'm only speaking from a male's perspective of that porn, and it's just like most basic thing, is that you use another person for your own desire or your own want.
It's not something that is deeply needed.
There's no, like, need for porn.
It's purely a want -based activity, or a lust, however you want, whatever word you can fill in there.
And it is purely an objectifying activity, like someone else is on display for your own enjoyment.
movement. And so I think you carry this around.
Like I do think that the women that I dated during high school or the women after high school and college, like I looked at them as a means to an end.
I think porn greatly kind of shifted that kind of perspective in my head that I did not give the value that was desired to another person.
It really devalues humanity just in general is my perspective of it.
And then it makes people into commodities.
And I don't think people are commodities.
I think everyone has value.
And so during And that for me, that's kind of like the great effect of porn is that, you know, it's just consumerism gone wild or materialism.
Maybe you could ask, argue gone wild.
And it's extremely hard to quit, just like you said, because I can look at porn and then I can go out to lunch. You know, no one's going to know.
No one's going to have any ideas.
Like it's a very private.
It can be very short session.
It doesn't have to be something that takes like, you know, you can't take acid then go out to lunch, right?
You're going to be, you're going to, your whole day is going to be a very different day.
And so there's, it's very quick, easy, accessible.
And then obviously there's like all the, like the science and you know, statistics, like men make worse decisions for some period of time after looking or being exposed to sexualized images.
There's the whole dopamine effect.
That's just like, you're constantly need more and more dopamine.
That's why people typically don't just watch five minutes of porn and call it a day.
That's like, you know, the hundred tab joke that's always made on the internet.
It's because you, it's just this, this constant dopamine cycle you're constantly doing.
And all that stuff is great to say.
And I'm sure statistics and science and all that stuff is really great arguments for some amount of people.
But for me, it just comes down to like, is it really a good thing to do?
Like, is it really actually something we want is to value people in such a profane or kind of just like disregarding way?
Like, I just really think it's just bad for the soul.
Even if all the stats said it was great for you, I still say it's actually bad.
Yeah, you have to look at the long term big picture psychological impact it has on your relationships with human beings in general.
That's my, more generally than just porn, my problem with the quote unquote sort of manosphere is I think sleeping with a bunch of women is great.
Wonderful. But the problem is making that the primary objective of your life, similar with porn, is you devalue one of the most awesome things, which is intimacy.
That's true for deep friendship, that's true for relationships.
And I think porn does that in its pure darkest form, which is the thing that matters is the sex, not the deep connection with another human being.
I think, again, going back to high school and the Manosphere, the objective function, if it's to get laid, which helps with status and confidence and all of that is wonderful, I think.
Again, it can be an addiction.
But the thing that's even more awesome for a lot of people is a deep friendship or deep intimacy with a romantic partner.
That's also fucking awesome.
And both of those are great.
It's objectively better to have. I would say that there's no universe that exists, or there should be no argument possible that exists, that a guy who has meaningless sex, has a better or a more meaningful life than say me and my wife who've been together for 15 years.
We have a very like, I can depend on her in all circumstances.
Whereas if you live that other life, it sure could be, it could feel great but there's no meaning to it.
There's no actual real value to it.
That's absolutely correct.
I do think that getting laid can have a tremendous positive impact on the confidence of a young man.
I think just, there's a certain number of sexual partners from which you can collect a lot of data and you can free you about like not to be so nervous about the opposite sex, not to be so nervous about human interaction.
And that will allow you to see the world more clearly and to actually find that one partner that with whom you can be deeply intimate with.
Sometimes like the nervousness around like this societally constructed like value in getting laid can cloud your judgment.
And if you just released that by getting laid a bunch of times, then like, you could see that the world clearly, that getting laid is not as nearly as important as you said, as finding the right human.
Including, I should put in that pile, not just like a romantic partner, but like friendships, like deep lasting friendships.
Well, I mean, I think you're right that our society puts a lot of emphasis on getting laid And I'm sure that's true among any group of males throughout any point in history.
I'm sure that's a very common joke.
That's never actually like never stopped at any point.
So I'm sure that exists.
And there's probably some truth to the sense that after you've...
Who was it? Jim Carrey, I hope that everyone can get rich so they realize that money solves none of your problems. Like the realization that this thing that society told you is hyper important is actually not the important part.
Like, it is a very important...
a great sign that your relationship is healthy.
Like if me and my wife were to have no sex at all for months on end, like something's gone wrong, which means what, you know, we are no longer like on the same plane, some, you know, but it's not also a good identifier.
Just because you're having a lot of sex doesn't mean you're having a good relationship.
And so it's kind of like a unique kind of, I forget the right term here, but it's a unique way at looking at the problems and our society puts so much emphasis, And maybe that's why porn was so hard to quit, but I my guess is just all the dopamine effect that it is But for me it's like the most important part and the thing that actually has a real reward is having that Having just my wife.
I do not look it I try I desperately try not to look at any other woman I'm hopefully not gonna get caught mark Zuckerberg at the White House like that You know like I don't look at porn my wife has complete confidence in me that there is not going to be a situation in which She asked to question me in any kind of sense and that builds a much more deeply, I would argue a very deep relationship because the trust is that much bigger.
I think the deepness of the relationship is probably proportional to the trust you have in each other.
It's very hard to have a deep relationship with no trust. Yeah, and probably a prerequisite, maybe a component of trust is vulnerability to where you take the leap of being vulnerable Being vulnerable is another human being and that vulnerability, when reciprocated, builds this really strong trust and it's a beautiful thing.
I personally just given my position, that's even more challenging, you know?
Being vulnerable with the world and there's a bunch of people out there that want to hurt you for it.
But I think it's worthwhile, anyway, to be vulnerable.
It's always worth it.
The risk is always worth it in some sense.
like obviously everyone has a different kind of life they have to filter through their actions with right, because the person that has no say social following or anything, their risk -reward profile could just be local impact, which could be just as, you know, damning or harming to them.
And so it's always worth the risk, though, in my personal opinion, because like finding my wife has been obviously the most impactful or changing thing in my life.
So, or second most. I'd argue to that one night with God will probably be the most impactful thing that led to everything else.
But then the wife would be the next most impactful.
I mean, I'm like cleaning up after myself and stuff now.
Changed man, I'm a changed man.
Can we try to reverse engineer that moment of you finding God, what is it at 19?
Cause it feels like that was a big leap for you to escape, to escape the pain, to escape the addiction or the beginning of that journey.
What do you think? What do you think happened there?
I think it just felt like I just there was no line that I wasn't willing to cross like everything was fine and just like it just all of a sudden just in that moment.
It's just like I had uh, I guess some sort of deep fear and understanding like I am going down a path is this really the path you want to go down?
And I don't know what the result of that path would be or anything like that.
I don't tend to speculate on things I don't understand.
I just know that in that moment I had the option.
And I just chose, I didn't want it anymore, right?
It's kind of mixed in this whole thing where it's just like I had no value.
I wrapped up all my meaning or value in having sex or getting laid.
I have, you know, all that stuff, all the things we just talked about.
Like that was where all my worth was, and that was just such like a terrible place to have your worth.
And it was just, I kind of all came to a point and I can't tell you the day of the week.
I can't tell you anything other than it was nighttime.
And I was in South hedges in Montana state university.
Go Bobcats. We all, um, that's about, yeah, that's the sign that we do it football games.
Don't worry about it.
But like, that's all I can really, that's all I can really tell you.
Cause the night it, that night was no more or less special than some other night.
It's just the specialness was.
I got at least. It's just a chance to make a choice.
Because you find in that advice that you can give to others who are probably, there's probably just an endless amount of people that are struggling with porn addiction, not young people.
What advice could you give to them?
How to overcome it?
For me, to overcome it, I had to realize that I was taking something away from my future wife.
Some people would be like, oh, well, you just you know, once you get a girlfriend, then you can stop.
It was just like no, because you never stopped the problem.
You don't stop a problem by replacing it.
And so I didn't have a girlfriend, didn't have all that.
I just realized that I was truly taking away from something from my future wife.
And I didn't even know my current wife at that time, I didn't even, she was not in the picture, not even sure if she was at Montana State University at that point.
And so it was just, that's, once I made that realization, I think it went from my head to my heart, which they say is the greatest distance in the universe.
I finally like got it and that's really where things change so if The the ability to say like what's gonna help you change and all that I don't know if there's I don't think there's silver bullets Right if someone could offer you a drug.
I forget who says this phrase, but there's this really interesting phrase that goes something like he was a very depressed man and He was struggling with suicide and you kind of writes about this in this memoir and he goes to these doctors and the doctors effectively say well, here's antidepressants, it's going to help you.
And he says that to well, the problem was is that scientists told me that I could just touch my brain and make myself happy.
And that's it. Like they could reach in, they could configure some stuff and I'll be happy.
He's like, for me, it was a lot like going out into a field and being able to take a drug to see the rain.
I could look out, see the rain, it would fall down, it'd be silvery, it'd be beautiful, but all the crop would still die because there's not actually any rain.
I had to discover how to be happy myself.
And so for me, It's like the reason why I looked at porn is because I was unhappy, I was trying to find meaning, I was trying to find value in some thing, right, something that was supposed to finally give me this ultimate satisfaction and it just does not.
No matter how hard and no matter how much you think it will, there is no escapade, there is no pornography that will ever give you that satisfaction you're looking for, that's the reason why it's addicting.
That's kind of like my call to why you shouldn't do it, but how to get out of it?
I only got out of it by realizing.
I think that's really brilliantly described.
You knew that this thing you're doing is preventing you from finding your future wife.
And future wife could mean more even broadly this path to flourishing to a beautiful life.
I think there's a lot of choices we make that are just preventing us From opening the door to whatever future they were thinking.
I think what's really nice to do is to imagine, just like we said with high school, that there are a bunch of trajectories in life where you'll be truly happy.
And you need to construct your life in a way where you have the chance to travel down those paths.
And there's a bunch of addictions, there's a bunch of choices that prevent us from traveling down those paths.
So just believe that you're gonna have an awesome life and remove from your life the things that are preventing you from walking down that path, which is essentially what you did.
It's a leap of faith that like, if you let go of porn, that a better life is waiting for you on the other end.
Yeah, I definitely can't say how long it will take a better life, but for me there's no way in the universe I could have had the relationship that I have without first making those steps, because I couldn't value, I couldn't value my wife in the way that was proper for who she was.
I would have valued her through the index or the lens that I currently was looking through, so.
Got to ask. So, I've never done math.
I've never done math.
That was a great segue, by the way.
Oh, man. I don't know what the fuck I'm doing honestly with this interviewing thing, but yeah.
Meth and LSD, you know, I did ayahuasca, I did shrooms a bunch of times, oh, and this topic, I should say that, like, there's a lot of, on Twitter and on tech, in the tech community in general, sort of people speaking negatively about ayahuasca, and some positively.
I think it's such a roll of the dice.
Like, I had incredible experiences, but I don't think I wanna recommend it to anyone, it's a risk.
It's a serious risk.
It really is a roll at the dice.
You could meet your demons, and it could destroy you, or you can meet your demons and let go of them, or you could have experiences like I did, which is never, apparently I don't have demons.
I'm pretty sure they're somewhere in the basement, but I've never met them on drugs.
I'm always really happy.
I'm happy drunk. I'm super happy on ayahuasca, just full of love.
I don't understand.
I don't understand where the demons are, But that's my biochemistry.
Whatever that is. And for some others, one trip could be amazing and the next one could just completely destroy you and wreck your life.
So I don't know what the recommendation from that is.
Maybe avoid it. But then all of us die and I tend to lean into adventure.
But drugs, if you fuck with the biochemistry is your brain.
You could really destroy yourself in a way that's going to torment you.
So I would generally recommend that people avoid drugs altogether, probably.
Unless you're crazy motherfucker.
Hunter S. Thompson.
What an intro to this topic.
I'm sorry, what's meth like?
That's a great intro.
I like, you are very correct in the sense that there is, at least when it comes to hallucinogens, There is a wild variance to what you're going to experience.
And there is no guarantee.
There's no, you know, just because you buy the product doesn't mean you're going to have a good time, right?
There's a lot of, uh, personally I find that stuff, uh, to be very, I believe in the spiritual realm, right?
Like I believe demons and angels exist. I believe God exists and that kind of whole realm is like, I don't know what it opens you up to, but it's much, much different experience.
Now some people will be like, oh, it was just a bunch of chemicals in your brain.
They all get mixed up.
It just takes all your pathways and they all go, you know, they all get kind of scrambled up in your brain.
It's just like, yeah, the experiences are profound.
I had some really bizarre, very cool, very awful.
I've had all the experiences in the mall.
I can just tell you that I, like I personally always say the same thing.
It's like choices that I made.
I can never take back.
I would never take that away from myself because I don't know if I would be who I am today without all those experiences going up to it, but if you have not had that experience, I'm on your team.
or at least partially on your team, maybe more severely, I don't think you need those experiences.
I don't think they're going to, you don't have to put yourself through that to make a good decision or to realize that people have value, right?
You can, you don't have to do that.
So as far as like, what is meth like?
Meth is like, if you've ever done cocaine, cocaine starts off with like a 15 minute dance party.
Just, it's just so intense.
It's like, so great.
And then it just followed up with like, like a five hour, like just feeling wiggly, right?
I don't know how else to describe it.
A meth is like that except for I didn't get as much dance party, or any dance party.
But instead I just got that part for like, twelve hours.
So, did a lot of skateboarding.
Did a lot of running around, Would you say it's a pleasant feeling or is it more like an escape from the loneliness of life?
Is it pleasant or negative in the actual moment?
not the consequences, but in the moment.
So, I mean, this is just like a very interesting kind of area, which is that not...
Universally you can't say that.
Often you'll find that there's kind of these two groups of drug addicts.
There's those that liked the opioids and those that liked the uppers.
They typically don't like...
There's very few people in the drug world that do both.
They're really just kind of like find their side and they go for it.
So will is meth a thing that everybody's gonna enjoy?
categorically as you can see and just like how people experience drug addiction know but for me it's just like I had a really it kind of like feeds into like the ADHD nature of like this like because you know you kind of high energy you're kind of like always in the moment so it's just like you're in the moment but it's just like come in the moment you know like everything's just so intense you don't like just wanna like really be in the moment and so it's just experiencing that constantly and so was that great well some people you know, my wife always tells me this.
Like being like nervous or I forget the anxiety of a situation can also be the same thing as like thrill.
I forget the exact way she she's probably super disappointed that I messed this up, but it's like you could perceive those two experiences in very different lights.
Some people get in front of a crowd.
It's like thrilling.
Some people get in front of it and it's just like the worst experience of their lifetime.
They would actually literally rather die, which is a crazy thing to think about than stand up and speak.
And so for me, meth was that kind of thrilling side.
But at the same time, it still didn't quite give me that thing I wanted.
Whatever I was looking for.
I'd use it to help try to get that thing I want, but it was never giving me that thing I wanted.
Yeah, for me, I've had all really wonderful experiences.
Do not recommend them.
But like it was true.
That blanket YouTube policy, by the way, that you have to say, by the way, do whatever you do, do not do a legal activity.
I had great experience, but don't, whatever you do, don't do it.
Mr the primogen, I have no master.
I don't have YouTube or whatever.
I'll say whatever the fuck I want.
I'm just a but seriously kind of no, no, no. I don't give a shit about YouTube or anybody.
Honestly, I'm just kind of careful about the words I say because just because I had positive experiences, I don't want young people listening to this think they should try the experience.
And so I think the much more powerful message is that life is awesome even without that.
That's something I definitely experiment with on the alcohol side.
So for me, I'm an introvert, I'm afraid of the world, social interaction fills me with anxiety, alcohol is definitely a thing that helps with that sometimes.
But I think honestly, it's not even the alcohol, it's like having to do something while a person is talking to me I could just like drink a liquid.
Yeah, there's like a social thing with a beer, it's like, yeah, uh -huh, yeah, we're having fun.
And I think it's it worked, for me it works the same as, if the liquid actually looks like alcohol, it does the same purpose often because like alcohol, like if you have a whiskey or a beer looking thing, it kind of sends a signal that we should be having fun.
so we're socializing, right, we're fucking getting crazy and then you don't actually need the alcohol.
You can get fucking crazy without the alcohol substance.
But there is some kind of social signaling that happens when you have a drink in your hand, so I've been to get togethers where I'm not drinking but just doing, like, a fake drink situation and I can also have fun.
So I've been, but that said, traveling across the world, there are times when you need to be able to don a bottle a vodka, that's very essential for my line of work.
But that's just sort of, that's almost like a cultural experience versus like a necessary component of a successful social interaction and one that brings you happiness.
So not drinking, I think you can have fun and not drink too.
So all of this, man, I'm so careful saying drugs have had a good effect on my life, because I think for most people, no, for a majority of people, they will in the long term have a negative effect.
So I think if you were to choose one or the other just no drugs, and no drinking means one day you can be the president of the United States, kids.
And I should say, oh man, that this is Is great.
That's its funniest line, which is you would hate me if I drank, which I just like, to me that tickles me, like to no end, just like, oh my gosh, that is such a funny line.
Self -awareness and humor is wonderful there.
But I am on your team, like all of the reasons why I used drugs and all that was of form, it's some level of escapism.
I'm sure that's like, would be the archetype or the box I'd put that into or the pursuit of trying to feel something that cannot come from them.
It's like trying to find a meaning in your job.
You can find satisfaction in what you do.
That is a very good thing.
You can find satisfaction and be happy with what you've created.
You can be thrilled by the experience, but I doubt you can find purpose.
Maybe some people in specific jobs, this obviously have very broad strokes I'm painting with.
Like, if you're an EMT and you save someone's life, there can be purpose in that whole experience.
I'm not saying all things, but as programming programming goes, most programmers, you cannot just simply find your purpose.
And same with drugs.
Like you cannot find that thing you're looking for, but they are a very great distraction.
And then at some point, that distraction comes with a heavy cost. I think Dr. Faust would probably know the best about the heavy costs, but it's just you're making one trade for another.
And at some point that the bill comes due, and that bill can be very, very large.
The other moment you mentioned, that I think is really inspiring, is that you failed pre -calculus you really struggle in school like you realize that school is really hard and then eventually you're able to sort of persevere and I don't know break through that wall of struggle can you by way of advice figure out what happened and what kind of advice you can give to people who are struggling yeah I'll paint it in kind of more clear picture a very fast speedrun of it is that I took pre -calculus failed I took pre calculus again failed took pre Calculus again and got a C.
So it took it three times.
Then I took Calc over the Summer, so Calc I.
In that one, at the end, the final, the final is a two hour final, I finished it in 30 minutes, and that is the highest score in all of the school.
And I proceeded to be the highest score in all Calculus and Diffie Q.
I was the only person out of 400 people to finish the Diffie Q Final, and I got the highest grade.
And so I was like, I got really good.
So I somehow went from really bad to really good.
And so my only, the thing that I did is that I had to win.
It was not a option.
It was not like, Oh, you know, this would be really great.
It's like, I will not graduate.
I will not finish my stuff if I cannot do this.
And so every single day I got up, I went to my, what, however many hour class it was right after that, I went straight to the math learning center, did those problems. When I got home, I just got the book and it had the odd answers in the back, and I would try to walk through the problems over and over and over and over again until I absolutely got it.
And it just became this thing where it's just I, it just simple rote memory took over.
And the ability to just effectively have the timetable, but for calculus, all stuck in my head, inverse trig, substitution, trig substitution, doing Taylor McLaren series, like all those things kind of just over and over and over and over again, eventually, they became easy.
They became very easy.
It's just that I had to cram it in there.
And some people, you know, you hear these stories, whether they barely show up to class and they get A's, I've never been that person.
I've always been the person that has to sit down, read through everything, and I'm bad at abstract concepts.
I like the concrete into the abstract, not the abstract into the concrete.
Very bad at talking about things theoretically then trying to apply them.
But if I can do it once literally, then it's really easy for me to go into the abstract.
And so it's just like for me, it just I had, there's no substitute for the hours.
So if you've, if I were to give advice, it's just that you have to have time in the saddle hour after hour will make you slowly better.
And at first it's crushing, it's defeating and it's not fun because you are bad at it.
But then at some point, you're just not bad at it.
If you can just do it long enough and you'll start getting okay at it.
And then at some point you might even get good at it.
And when you get good at something, it feels amazing.
There's like an exploratory thing.
Like if you ever played a musical instrument, you stop having to think about all the little teeny things you have to do to be able to play something correctly, and you start thinking about how you can explore that space.
It's like a completely different problem.
Same with programming.
Programming has an identical kind of feel to it.
It's just like you'll cross that barrier, and it becomes magical as opposed to a chore.
Yeah. Once you cross that barrier, somehow other things become easier.
But then if you want to have a truly successful life, then you find the next barrier, the next barrier.
Yeah, I've always been the same.
Everything's come really hard. Yeah, I do not, I've had no free lunches.
Everything's just been a lot of pain and struggle.
I think somebody said that on this topic that you think work smarter, not harder is a phrase that you dislike.
Somebody on Reddit told me this.
Yeah, I don't just dislike it, I hate that phrase.
Okay. Tell me about your hatred.
How do you feel? The reason why I dislike that is that there is a kind of a hidden suggestion there, which is that you already know what smarter is, so just do that, that actually things should be easy.
You should just not have to like try that hard, you should just do the quick, easy, obvious path, and boom, it's done.
It's like I've never experienced that in anything I've done.
Everything is actually really hard, and most of the time, I don't even know what I'm doing.
So therefore, I don't even know what smart looks like.
And so for me, the only way I can learn how to work smart is by working very, very hard and knowing that there's no shortcuts.
And then when I finally figure out what smart is, when I work smart and work hard, it is that much better.
I think there's a deep, profound truth to that.
There's a lot of these phrases that just drive me nuts in our society.
But that one is... That one is really accepted if we can just linger on it because it really bothers me as well.
So one, which is a really nice thing you said, the presumption there is things should be easy and you're a failure if you don't see the easy path.
That's kind of the implied thing.
Just work smart, dog.
Why you putting in all those hours?
And so it makes a lot of people that struggle feel like they're a failure because like I don't see it.
and then the choice they have, well, I'll just go with the, I'll just be lazy and then maybe the profound truth will come to me somehow and yeah, I think I don't think I've ever and I don't think I've met great engineers that find the smart way without the extremely hard work.
The annoying thing about those great engineers is then looking back, they forget the hard work Because they remember all the joy they now are experiencing from all the efficient, smart work they figured out how to do.
So when they give advice, they give the stupid fucking advice of, well, just do it like the easy way, and here's the easy way, but no, no, no. You have to put in the hours.
Like, the musical instrument is a beautiful example of guitar and piano. I've put in, I don't know how many thousands of hours.
And now when I'm explaining stuff, Jiu Jitsu as well, I sound like, I sound like one of those people, just relax, by the way, just relax is a really wonderful thing for physical endeavors like piano and so on.
But to learn how to relax your hand, how to relax your mind, your body, and use whatever the biomechanics of your body to apply the correct kind of leverage and the timing and all that that takes thousands of hours of learning just to learn how to relax takes a lot of really hard work and Jiu -jitsu that takes many months of getting your ass beat over and over until you like uh you know ride the bus home crying your your ego completely shattered and destroyed and then like a little element is figured out late that night or next morning.
And from the depression there's this little plant that grows this flower of insight.
And you use that insight to then get your ass kicked again all next fucking month and year.
And then you grow and grow and grow.
And from that you discover how beautifully simple Jiu -Jitsu is or Judo is, just speaking for myself or piano or guitar.
And then yes, the profound truth or the mastery of a skill feels simple when you finally arrive to it.
But the path is, for most people, is going to be a hard one.
Ken, can I, I think I should make an addendum to the phrase.
And then the phrase should be, work hard, get smart.
Yes, that's a T -shirt.
That's what it should be.
Yeah, agreed. Okay, that was a tangent of a tangent.
Can I say one more phrase, cultural phrase that I absolutely hate.
The journey is better than the destination.
Right? Everyone's heard this, right?
Just take one second to apply what that means.
That means forever starting from now you are only going towards a place that's worse.
Right, like that literally is what it means.
Enjoy the journey, celebrate the destination.
That's like, that should be what it would be, but no. People say these phrases are everywhere.
where there's these very shallow phrases that have no logical bounds to them.
You're just like what does that, why would the journey ever be better than the destination?
Cause you're always, I think this might even be a CS Lewis quote is that CS Lewis was like, no, this is terrible.
Though the journey is not in fact better than the destination.
I love the demotivational posters.
Progress, moving forward is better than moving backwards even if you're still going nowhere.
I feel that one so, so much Being in California for a few years.
That is that is painful.
Positivity, if it doesn't break you today, don't worry, it will try again tomorrow.
Just a lot of really great posters.
I don't even know this was a thing.
This is a thing. Oh my gosh, I want that.
Yeah. Hey, hi, this is the primogen, you know, one thing that I forgot to mention in this podcast, which feels just so foolish to me for forgetting is just what a big role my mom played in my life.
She had to work 18 hours a day after my dad died.
She really made her house be able to survive I always looked up to her I always thought her amazing and she really was the reason why when I decided to get my butt kicked back in gear She's just someone who I looked to as like an internal kind of Inspiration for me to continue to keep on going because I really wanted to make her proud and all those years of just high Energy effort.
I really wanted to make sure that she knew that I was just so dang appreciative for it So, hey, I just wanted to say, thank you, love you mom.
For people who don't know, you worked in Netflix.
By the way. By the way.
No, how did you go from there, from the hardship that we mentioned, from the struggle from the addictions, and so on to a place where you were working at, this is incredible engineering company.
And building cool shit there.
So tell the Netflix story.
Yeah. So, you know, I kind of alluded to it earlier that I wanted to do my own startup.
So for, I forget how long it was one or two years or two and a half years built a startup PHP J query, everyone's favorite languages all put together.
Uh, you can solve math stuff with jQuery.
So I just was like totally into just nonstop doing that.
This is like the height of stack overflow.
I was asking really dumb questions on stack overflow, like what is more Pythonic.
And then try to steal a bunch of karma away.
Like all the fun stuff to do.
Good times and I was just like so into it.
Breathing and I just breathe it in, breathe it out and that's what I do all day, every day.
And so it's just like nonstop building of a startup.
Ultimately that startup failed and so I had to go get a real job.
Can you say where this startup was?
It is so wild thinking about it in the past. Before I tell you what it is, I wanna tell one quick thing about my dad.
My dad in the early 90s like 91, 92 was building kind of like a phone card company where you'll be able to prepurchase long distance minutes.
Now, if you remember the nineties and bought like what 97, 98, 99, 10, 10, 220, all those different things dialed down the center, like all of those companies where you can prepurchase long distance minutes kind of came out and were very, very big.
And so my dad was like six years early to that notion and ultimately his startup failed, but he was just really early to something that would catch on really, really big, specifically in the telecommunication space.
Me as I grew up and did my own startup, I did a startup where it was text message marketing.
This was in 2010, where you could receive say text about various deals, all that kind of stuff.
And of course 10 years later, now you don't stop receiving texts and text message marketing is all the rage.
And so I also, much like my father, had a startup in the telemarketing space, in which was just like a half decade too early.
So is it fair to say you're almost always ahead of your time at your visionary of sorts?
No, in fact, I am not ahead of my time.
I just got on Someone said I got unlucky on that Situation, but I did see it was it seemed so obvious to me at that time when I was doing it 80 % of phones were dumb phones Most people had flip phones when I went and sold Via text is what the name was of that specific product.
It was and we had the shortcode via text, too So it's pretty you know pretty clever right six digits When I went out and sold it, I only had a flip phone during that time, I didn't even have a smartphone.
Right, cause they were kind of untenable for a lot of people.
So it's kind of just wild times to think about.
But then after that, obviously had to get a real job.
We were living in an apartment in right next to campus, Bozeman, Montana, and the guy below us must've been on some amount of drugs, he threatened to kill us several times, just like scream and just loses marbles all the time.
Very unhinged man, angry downstairs man, is what we called him.
One time my wife dropped a battery, AAA.
We're not talking about a B battery or D battery.
We're just talking about a AAA, drop it, pa, laying on the ground.
I'm gonna kill you, like crazy, right?
Absolutely unhinged behavior down there.
So I had to go get a real job.
We need the move outta there.
We're gonna start our life, and so I worked at a small place, Schedulisti, which I kinda talked about the boredom there.
Got to go to a place called Web Filings, where I'm working just tons and tons of hours during all that time.
I'm still trying to figure out startups.
I did one where you could pre -wish your friend's birthday messages, and then it would automatically send it via Facebook beforehand.
We called it Greed Feet.
It was pretty clever.
Nonetheless, that story, I'd say all that story because everything that I was doing was exploring, building, finishing things, working, learning about corporate life, learning how to communicate in corporate life, being able to be successful at a job, learning about bunch of kind of technologies that were about, and one of the big technologies during that day, specifically 2013, was RxJS.
If you remember that one, RxJS, that's a link from C -sharp kind of ported over to JavaScript.
And for people who don't know, I guess C -sharp, what is its closest neighbor Java?
It's Java like… They obviously just took Java and ripped it off at one point.
Yeah. But now it's such a dynamic, interesting language, that it seems like it could be a really like bounds of practical versus not practical?
It's just I'm not really into wearing pleated pants in programming at a Microsoft house, so.
Is pleated pants a requirement or?
I think so. Okay. We'll get back to this.
Can we just get back, okay, come on.
All right, focus, what filings?
Okay, so anyways, what filings was, that's where I had to do all the matrices stuff and build systems and just kind of all that.
And it really pushed me, because they also wanted me to do like 60 hours a week.
It was not very healthy work -life balance.
It was very hard work and kind of like that really hard work.
Going to cutting edge stuff, really understanding the world, really made it so that I was able to just be able to talk about stuff very commandingly.
Because you know we had to build really complex state machines for the UI for what we're building.
And so when I went and started getting a LinkedIn and all that inevitably just due to the fact I've touched all these technologies and I had some sort of paper trail saying I've touch these technologies Microsoft or Microsoft dang it Lex pleated pants pleated pants reached out no Netflix reached out and said hey like I see you've done RX JS you know we do a lot of it you want to come and interview with us and you know I was always told that you should never reject a kind of like a handwritten personal invitation to interview this was way before bots and even the bots were pretty obvious to tell
that we're bots this was a manger at a Netflix, Jeff Wagner, first manager ever.
And he just wrote a really nice note, and just like, Hey, I see you're doing a lot of these things.
We really need help with JavaScript.
Um, I would love for you to come interview.
We even using a lot of RxJS if you're interested in that.
And so I was like, all right, you know, I can come and I'll interview.
And lo and behold, interview went on.
And I called my wife, I think halfway through the interview and I was just like, defeated, absolutely crushed, because I said.
And she might remember this, but I said, we now have to make a decision.
Are we actually going to move to California or not?
Because I already knew I had the job at that point.
Like I just was just knocking them out of the park.
I was doing a great job on that.
And so I just knew for a fact I'm getting a job on Netflix.
There's this thing that people always get so freaked out about when it comes to interviews and all that.
And I luckily somehow avoided this.
I don't get test anxiety.
I don't get any of that.
Because when I go into these situations, my only goal is to show the things I already know.
And so it's like, I walked into the situation, I've been preparing for this 80 hours a week for the last like five years.
So just walk in and I'm just showing the things I know.
And it was perfectly fitting for Netflix at that time period in the 2013 early JavaScript days on television.
And so it was just awesome.
Just worked out perfectly.
Got hired there. So we're in California with Netflix?
This is San Francisco - Los Gatos.
So if you're familiar, so classic symbol people do which is this is San Francisco, Oakland, San Jose, Los Gatos is just a little bit, kind of little bit below, a little bit south of San Jose.
Same make a contiguous city.
Yellowstone's in Montana, Yellowstone, the show.
Yeah. So is it basically like that, Kevin Carlson riding on a horse?
Were you riding on a horse to campus?
No. I mean, I love those stereotypes actually.
I mean, to be completely fair, when I was 15 years old, I was driving around on what is now a very busy populated street, shooting gophers out the window of our car with a .22.
So it's like Montana was a different place at one point than it is today.
And there's plenty of parts of Montana that's still very rural, still kind of more of that old world.
So yeah, a little bit, you know, you can kind of get whatever you want from Montana.
As far as like culturally goes, I'm not really sure the best way to put the difference between California and Montana.
It's just different expectations.
One thing I can really appreciate about California, or at least when I say California, I mean the Silicon Valley.
Because obviously, LA and California, or the Silicon Valley, very different attitudes, very different mindsets.
You can't really compare one to the other.
One thing I can say that's really positive about the Valley is that everybody is operating on this idea of trying to build or create something, and there's an energy to it that's very exciting.
Like you meet somebody and they have a startup and they're working on the startup, and it's very exciting.
And you know, there's a lot of negative aspects to that, and we can all agree that our entire life being commercialized has probably not been that great.
But the kind of the experience of being there and everyone's excited to build something, it's a really cool experience.
Yeah, it's great, it's really great.
The excitement, the energy.
Montana doesn't have that.
I have an admiration romantic admiration for like for the shows like Yellowstone being out in nature.
It's beautiful Yeah, I like writing somebody also said rather is full of wisdom about you Some of it could be fake news But something about horses and this kind of thing like you right you like horses you like riding We have horses on our up our neighbor had much more hilly land Yeah, and one of them horses broke its legs so they had to put it down Yeah, and so we just said hey we're on much flatter land like you can just have your horses in our property and so we just have horses that run around on our what about milking cows somebody asked about cattle and and cow and So I've only had open open
cows So if you don't have how many girl open means that hey They've tried to get the cow pregnant the cow did not get pregnant first try and so they're calling that gene They're getting rid of that gene the cows gonna now or the open cows gonna now go out to pastor pastor for the year.
And then get turned into delicious T bone steaks and various things.
And so we would house open cows on our property.
So no, there's no milking of open cows.
Okay. They'd be very upset if you tried to milk an open cow.
Because they're not milking cows, right?
You have to get like that cow pregnant.
And then once you get pregnant, you have to kind of put it into this permanent state of milking and all that.
And it's a little bit more complicated than say, what we did, which was just cows on eating grass.
And I didn't have to touch them.
Okay, well that's wonderful.
Reddit is not a great place for wisdom about me they're going to give you the craziest answers.
We will return to Reddit time and time again my friend.
So yeah, you took the leap into Netflix so what was that like?
It was, you know, this is one of those things where when you talk about it people love to trivialize this because it's like oh you're taking a leap of faith by going into a FAANG company and like 2013 sounds super risky.
Uh, my wife was 36 weeks pregnant.
We had to travel to a place where we knew not a soul.
We were about to have our first kid.
We didn't even have a doctor.
If you don't know having a baby does like kind of, you kind of want a relationship with a doctor.
There's like a whole thing that goes on there.
So it was kind of, it was a really hard and great experience.
So I went to a job in which their culture deck.
So during this time, this is where Netflix still had like, kind of that old generation X feel to it.
Their culture deck was higher, fast, fire, fast. It was very in your face about like, hey, this is how we operate.
You don't meet the standards, we kick you out.
So it's like, I'm leaving a place where it's more secure to go to a place I don't know anybody, to a job that's bold in its claims about firing everybody with a wife that's just about to have a baby.
And so it's like, I'm from Montana and every Montana's born with a natural dislike of California.
So there's like all these things kind of flowing into it where it's just going to be like wow, this is going to be, this is a very intense experience.
And it was hard for sure.
Like it wasn't just some easy, simple experience that we were just like, oh, well I work now at Fang.
We had to kind of work through that, having a kid was very difficult, our first kid was very difficult.
You know, not having any family around to ever help you.
Like, took a much larger toll on my wife than me for sure.
What was the technical learning curve for you?
You showed up in your plaid pants, like dressed up.
Yeah. And what was it?
Well, what did you have to learn about the stack?
Cause Netflix, I imagine is this incredible infrastructure that has to deliver just a huge amount of data.
I'm just blown away by Netflix, but also like YouTube, these companies that have to deliver like serve a huge amount of like bits.
Netflix has the easiest out of all the companies Netflix by, even though we have, you could say maybe we have, maybe we beat YouTube in view hours, I'm not sure if we do, but let's just pretend Netflix has 5x more view hours than than you, uh, YouTube, whatever it is, Netflix has a fundamentally easier problem than all other companies.
And let's get back to that.
I'm gonna first tell you about the stack, but I'm gonna tell you why it has a fundamentally easier problem.
Alright. So when I first got there, they gave me my PlayStation three, my boss said, go learn some code, come back to me in a couple of days and tell me what you've learned and then I'm going to giving you bugs to fix.
Wait, wait, PlayStation 3?
What are you talking about?
Well, I was on the TV team.
I had to go plug in a PlayStation and start launching programs onto the PlayStation 3 and figure out how to work Netflix on a television device.
Oh, so like you have different kinds of devices.
Why PlayStation 3? There's other different.
It's just 2013 and that's what you have. Any devices that plug into the TV?
Okay, cool. Yeah. Not as many TVs had Netflix, let alone what they called their Darwin app, which is their new application.
So if you bought a Vizio earlier that year, you'd get their older one.
It's called plus UI.
You get their older version and so not many had the newer version.
We no longer supported plus, or we never actively developed on plus.
We only did stuff on Darwin.
And so I had to learn that whole stack.
I the backend or the middle end, the middle layer between the actual back end and the front end was written in groovy.
And as I went around groovy is if you're not familiar with Jenkins, then you've probably never interacted with groovy, but groovy is is a JVM language.
It's a very interesting language, but here's how it got started at Netflix.
Oh, it's Apache. Apache Groovy's a powerful object -oriented programming language that runs on the Java Virtual Machine released in 2007.
It has evolved to become a versatile language that combines both static and dynamic typing capabilities.
All right, so the AI is kind of lying to you.
Groovy is not a powerful, great language.
That statement makes it seem way cooler than it actually is.
You will meet one out of 100 people that have touched Groovy that said, oh yeah, Groovy's great.
The other 99 will be like, heavens forbid you ever have to touch that language.
So, when I got there, nobody, not a single soul at Netflix.
There's 40 -some engineers, had any idea how Groovy pretty much worked.
Somehow people just hacked together these scripts and put them all on there and it worked and it was all, this was before there was a Groovy RX port.
We wrote our own version called WX.
It was a nightmare.
Observables, all these things, I remember one time they told me that, oh yeah, with RX, it's really easy.
You just say what you need to do, it maps out and boom, boom, Boom, Boom, everything will run multi -thread and all that, and I was like, oh wow, really?
So all I did was go like observable .sleep1, because I just wanted to see it sleep and then do the next thing.
And it turns out when a thread sleeps itself, no thread can wake it up.
And I just turned off all of staging because I ran it like 10 times was like, Oh, it's not responding.
Oh, it's not responding.
Oh, now it's not even coming back.
Broke all of staging for everybody.
So no developer could work for the rest of the afternoon.
Cause I locked up all the instances because it turns out, no, it was in fact not multi -threaded.
Every assumption we've been told is a lie.
No one had any idea what they were doing.
It was a wild time.
And so I just simply naturally gravitated towards that cause I'm good at print deaf debugging.
I'm good at doing those things.
So I was like, here, I'll just figure this out here.
I will do this. So I had the rewrite how we do the data structure on the front end for of a TV from what is called a Lolo Mo, list of list of movies into Lolo Romo, which is a list of list of recommendation objects for a movie.
Why would we need to do that?
Think about this, you have two lists, one has live free die hard, Bruce Willis, because you love Bruce Willis.
The other one has live free die hard because you want tough men doing tough jobs.
Well, during those days, we'd only have one way we could show evidence why you wanted it.
So we couldn't say, oh, because you liked this other movie.
You'd go to that one and say the same thing.
So we had that kind of add one level of indirection where we could decorate the video with the recommendation information.
Okay, so you can abstract away into the space of recommendation versus the space of moving directly in it.
Yeah, so you can't hang it off the video because, obviously, then it'd be the same for everything that shows that same video.
That's amazing. So I had to do all this and I wrote it in Groovy and I just did it.
And people were like, how did you write this in Groovy?
And it was just like, well, I read the language reference for a day and then programmed it well.
What do you mean? It was a very radical language, shall we say.
And so, I just simply became the person that knew these things.
They just give me more and more jobs with that.
So that's kinda how I excelled, being the person that was willing to do the thing that no one else was.
Yeah, can you actually speak to the printout debugging?
You walk into a system, and there's a lot of systems in the world like this.
Twitter was like this.
When Elon acquired Twitter, and then rolls in, and there's this old janky code base That's just like a giant mess and you have to basically do print after bugging Like what's the process of going into a code base and figuring out like what the fuck?
Well, how does this work?
What are the flaws?
What are the assumptions you have to like reverse engineer what all these other engineers did in the past and the mess across You know the space of months and years and you have to figure out how all that works in order to make improvements the thing the reason why I've always just been good at print after bugging because one of my first kind of sidequest jobs that I got was writing robots for the government when I was still at school And so, I'd kind of do this contractually for so many hours, so many hours a week.
And my boss, Hunter Lloyd — great professor, by the way — he just said, hey, here's your computer, here's the robot, here's how you plug it in, here's how you run the code.
Can you write the flash driver, the Ethernet driver?
Can you write the planetary pancake motor?
Here's some manuals, I'm missing some.
Just figured out. I'll be back.
So that was government work for me.
So I was like, okay, I'll figure all these things out.
And I figured them all out.
And the only way to really get anything out of the machine was to print.
And so it's like, I had to become really good at printing my way through problems. And so that kind of became this like skill.
I guess I adopted is that I can just kind of print after bug my way through a lot of these problems. Obviously I'm not a game developer.
Probably a different world probably should use.
I think John Carmack was on here and talked to how great the debugger is different world.
Cause when I was at Netflix, there's machines that exist somewhere on AWS.
I'm not logged in to them.
I don't even know how to log into them.
I'm not even sure if I have credentials to log into them.
They run once somewhere, and I have to figure out what happened and why it's happening.
So it's like I'm gonna become, this is like, this is what I've trained for.
I'm a printf debugging champion.
So it's just like, I could just run through these things really quickly and figure out why they're happening the way they're happening.
You're a special human.
I think that's an incredible skillset to have. To be able to drop into any code base, drop into any situation and do printout debugging.
Meaning like, you know, you're in a dark room and you're feeling around that room to try to figure out what the room is.
Well, I had the code, so I was like I can kind of blueprint what's happening, I don't understand the services or anything that's happened, but you can start guessing pretty quick as to what's going wrong.
Right, but then the print side of that helps you confirm your intuitions, test your intuitions and build up more and more information, and then you start to accumulate this bigger picture from that, what the edge cases are that break the system or not.
I mean, I think that just, that kind of space, like that kind of situation is intimidating for a lot of engineers.
Like, they break down at that point.
I think this really is a powerful thing to be able to come into a code base.
That's generally a skill set of like, very few of us start from scratch. And actually, this is the fundamental problem of web development and in general, where they're like, I don't know what's going on, I'm going to write my own thing from scratch, right?
As opposed to like, actually doing printout debugging on the space of languages, on the space of problems, because there's a lot of wisdom and solved problems already in this code base.
It's a much more important skill set to understand, to learn from the mistakes and the wisdom of the past, of the ancestors that came before.
And build on them as opposed to throw it all out and start from scratch. This is something obviously you see a lot with a JavaScript framework that comes out and you run every single day, so.
I have a very great story about that.
This is what like I think has shaped me the most about my perspective of other devs. There was this dev and he always just wrote things in just what I thought was such a bizarre and weird way.
And this had to do with Falcor, our data fetching library for Netflix.
This would run on mobile, so I had to write an Objective C, it had to run on television, And it had the also run on web.
So it ran on everything and it, me and one other person were responsible for this thing working.
And the request side, where we'd have to dedup the information that we already have, the request that we're pending.
And the new data. So I had to figure all that out based on what someone's requesting, and then just only optimal, optimally request the stuff that we don't have. He wrote in such a goofy way and I'm thinking, man, this guy's just, what a goof ball.
So I delete it all.
And I start writing and I'm like, look at how much nicer to this is it's looking so good.
I'm like, Ooh, there's that one edge case.
Oh, okay. I can see why he wrote it this one way.
That's not a big deal though.
The rest of my code is really great.
By the end of it, I'm like, I literally almost line for line just reproduced what he already wrote.
It's like slightly different towards my style, but I just wrote the same code.
I'm like I'm an idiot.
I am the idiot in this situation because it was already a solved problem.
I just didn't take the time to learn what he did.
Instead I relearned what he did by rewriting the entire thing.
I think that's the skills that is extremely important for people to learn.
I see that in myself, that's a constant struggle for myself.
When facing a code base, for example, but this applies generally in life, where somebody did a lot of work to do a thing, you should invest a huge amount of time and get really good at figuring out what they did, why they did it, do a lot of printf debugging to understand what they did, it's a much more efficient way to understand a problem deeply, than to start from scratch, even though there's a constant temptation to start from scratch, because starting from scratch is fun.
You do get the puzzle solving all of that kind of stuff.
It's just not going to be the right thing to do.
Usually pain is the right thing to do.
And it is for most people, painful to understand other people's code bases.
I highly recommend starting from scratch. If you want to understand a concept, you don't know how an HTTP server works.
Create a TCP socket, learn how to parse HTTP.
It will become very easy and you will go, this is the reason why whenever I get a request I have to await the text.
I now understand why the text is, for whatever reason not there, I get it.
I now understand it.
And so you kind of gain these new perspectives just by simply parsing something out.
All right, back to the wisdom of Reddit.
Apparently there are memes and legends about your programming arc in Netflix.
This Falcor system you mentioned, somebody I think it was, Tiege, how do you pronounce his name by the way?
Tiege. Tiege, okay, Tiege.
It's Tiege. It would be his name, but we call it Tiege.
Or telescopic Johnson.
Oh, wow. So many names.
You know, DDoS, distributed denial of service attacks.
You apparently were able to accomplish the simplified version of that of just DOS.
that's a legend, so you basically broke down the system somehow.
Yeah, I had to. Can you tell the story of that?
I'd be glad to. So there's Felt Core, there's this Felt Core business, right, and I kind of, I did discover the bug before anybody else and I did report it to security and it was so bad, it actually got its own name, Repulsive Grizzly Attack, and they even give examples of how to do it.
Effectively what it means is that there is a request that targets both memory and CPU and will destroy...
There you go, look at that how Netflix...
The next one down was the article that was actually written.
I don't get mentioned, which is a little bit upsetting considering I was the one that discovered it and told everybody how bad it was.
Anyways, N had to write the fix for it, or the first fix.
So this is how it works is that...
You can do something pretty similar, I believe with GraphQL as well.
It has the same kind of danger.
Any of these kind of RPC requests as much or as little of the data as you would like frameworks are vulnerable to this kind of attack.
So with Falcor, what you do is you could, you give it an array.
This is an array. It's called a path and that's the path to the data.
But sometimes you don't want, just like, you don't want to have to write out.
I want movie, I want row zero or list zero or row zero, column zero title.
I want, you know, row zero, column zero description.
I want, you know, you don't want to have to write out all of that.
So instead you could just be like I want I want rows 0 through 10 columns 0 through 10 Titles and descriptions so you can write in a very compact nice little format And I'll give you all that data will go to the server the server will fill that all in and give it to you Oh dang it list 3 it only had three videos in it So what happens when I try to re -request the data well I need a way to be able to tell my system that you'd have requested the data, and there's nothing there So this is called a, they call this like a boxed value, so it's gonna be like type something, value, there's nothing there.
We've already requested it and there's nothing there.
They call, you know, it's like a sentinel value, if you will, a boxed value.
And we have this little special flag we passed called materialize, meaning that when you ask for a path, we will make sure we fill it out so we don't accidentally erase anything.
And at the very end, we'll say, okay, the thing does, the request you've made has already been made and there's nothing there.
Well, what happens if I request rows zero through 10 ,000 columns through 10 ,000 one more item through 10 ,000 and then a whole bunch properties and then ask it to materialize?
Well, I'm about to go create billions of objects in the JVM.
And what happens to the machine?
It stops running. And then we try to chase.
Even if it could create them all, we then ask it that Jason serialize.
It's not going to do it.
Like it's impossible.
And so that was the attack vector.
is a simple while loop would have taken down and held down Netflix for a very long time, because one request would kill one machine on AWS, and so that means it would just turn it all off.
And this was on the website this was on TV, this was on mobile, like this was profound and here's the worst part, it was in production for years so we couldn't even roll it back.
There was no like, oh crap let's just roll back to two weeks ago and we'll kind of fix forward and figure No, it's like we could roll back to 2011 like that's our option is 2011 and that's it so we had to figure out a way forward and all that and so it was like The amount of problems that would have happened if nephew if someone would have discovered this is is Unstatable just to be clear the infrastructure that's Serving the videos would shut down.
Yeah the UI like you couldn't perform any action than you It surprisingly could still stream video but you would never be able to get to a video to stream because every action you would take would be completely shut down.
And so it wasn't a DDoS because you didn't need a bunch of computers to try to overwhelm the system by making a bunch of requests.
One request, one machine.
If we had 50 machines serving the millions of requests, it'd only take 50 requests to shut down the entire UI.
Isn't it possible to do DOS or DDoS on basically any software system?
Like defending against all the, you know, closing all those attack vectors is probably really difficult.
So if you take any sufficiently complicated software system, there's probably so many ways to overwhelm it.
Yeah. I mean, this is why people use Cloudflare.
I think DHH said it best, which is like, we have our website and we have a strong body yard on the outside.
So Cloudflare has a bunch of utilities all built in, because obviously this is why everyone hates all these Bluetooth devices that connect to the internet because they just turn into attack vectors where people use those to DDoS other sites.
And so you don't need something sophisticated, you just need a bunch of requests to come in.
And you can take down websites.
And so that's why these fronts are really good at kind of discovering where these problems are.
But DOS is a bit different, because it doesn't have to be overwhelming by using resources with a whole bunch of requests.
It really just means simply that there's a denial of service attack, one of them could be there's a regex attack that existed where CloudFlare actually did it to itself and shut itself down, which is there's a rejects expansion attack.
We're given the right kind of rejects.
If you know someone's running a specific rejects, you can actually provide input that is maximally bad.
And that thing goes to like, super processing, it takes 10 seconds to process a single request, then you only need to make hundreds of requests and you shut down the whole service.
It's not like you need some giant machinery to make 1 trillion requests, you only need just some small amount to completely destroy a service and so there's the web is an extremely difficult place to do it correct.
This is super fascinating I do also wonder how many ultra competent what is it black hat hackers there are versus sort of the good guys versus the bad guys how many bad guys there are and what is the average what is the distribution of skill set on the bad guy side they're constantly trying to attack.
I assume there's probably a huge number of just really simple ones script kitties, right?
Just people trying to just do things.
And then there's a huge amount of like social engineering that just goes in where hacking is done, not with a computer, but just by.
Yeah. You know, one of the classic ones, Kevin Mitnick had this one in his book, which was you'd call up somebody pretending to be like, leave Charlene.
We're doing some auditing and, uh, I think you're pins out of date on file.
Is it two, three, two, three still?
And they're like, no, it's four, seven, four, seven.
And you're like, ah, thanks, Sharon.
You know, boom. You just hacked them, right?
Like the classic, people love correcting bad information.
This is like a standard. So like there's all these ways people hack.
And so my assumption is that there are really great white hat hackers.
There's really great black hat hackers.
But the vulnerability space, the thing is is that discovering a vulnerability and you don't let anyone know, the white hat hacker still has to make that same discovery.
And that's where I think the real thing is that black hat hacking in some sense has a fundamentally easier job, or at least a job in which they can take advantage of for much longer periods of time.
One's the process of discovering who's breaking the system, the other one's trying to figure out how to break the system.
And it seems like most software is held together by toothpicks and glue.
And there is a lot of dangers in every piece.
And also the social engineering aspect, that's a real attack factor.
I think that's the attack factor that will do in the long -term the most damage in the world especially as AI tooling becomes easier and easier to convince people at scale so do that kind of grammar me male grandma I think that's a really serious attack vector like human psychology and all that I kind of assume whenever there's a girl that approaches me it's kind of some kind of social engineering project yeah attack vector some some agent intelligence agency in fact I'm pretty you sure.
We're back to a beautiful mind, aren't we?
A beautiful mind. Yeah.
I have a whiteboard upstairs that I calculate everything.
Everybody's trajectory and move.
You're you're not wrong though with the attack vector, especially in the day of AI.
Like one thing that I don't think a lot of people are talking about as we integrate more and more AI is that prompt injection is like an extremely hard thing to defend against because it's not really clear how you defend against it.
If it's just a, you know, at the end of the day word calculator make word come out, if you can figure out the proper word calculator input, it might just break its bounds and start doing something it's not supposed to do.
And there's a whole future where there's all these products that are going to be vulnerable to things they never thought about, like you, it's one thing where you forget an edge case while you're programming.
Now you have to guess what people might be able to think of making something that has access to a system be able to do, right?
And you don't have a way to reason about it.
Its reasoning came from Reddit and other words that it's read and how to put things together.
like this is a very, it's a massive space that's gonna be happening.
It's why I'm personally thinking don't give too many powers yet.
We don't know the attacks that are about to happen.
Yeah, the more power we give to software systems, the more damage they can do, that certainly is the case, but the more awesome they could do, and that's the knife's edge that we all walk along as a human civilization together, hand -in -hand.
Will we flourish or destroy ourselves?
Question mark. Folks on Reddit, the good folks on Reddit, demanded that I ask you about the time you broke production.
Is this related to Falkor?
Did you break production?
Is this - I broke production quite a few times.
I broke in productions for so many stupid reasons.
One time I broke production because I came up in the PHP and PHP static means static for the lifetime of the PHP and PHP was the lifetime of every request, right?
That's why PHP was so inefficient, was that every request was its own instance And therefore static memory was for the lifetime.
I guess I never put that together.
And so I had some objects that I made static because I was like, Oh, I just need this for the lifetime of the request. And low and behold, those weren't lifetime.
A whole bunch of bad data got all over the place.
People were showing up saying they were from all these different countries and everything was all wrong.
Cause I just. Whoopsie daisies.
I just made a whole conundrum with that.
So that was one time I did it another time, as I took down.
If you were on the homepage on the website, waiting for lady Gaga's video to come out and you are watching the countdown go down if it reached zero the billboard would freezing it wouldn't work if you refreshed it would work but the reveal yeah the big reveal I screwed that up in my boss got real upset and so did other people in Hollywood got upset about that one that was like a my bad sorry Jeff Wagner again I remember that one I remember that one specifically one time I released a bug where again on the billboard if you pressed add to my list, I accidentally programmed in, uh, an infinite loop.
And it just, your whole webpage would just freeze.
Are some, are some of these bugs difficult to discover until you said that one seems really easy.
Looking back on it.
And there was, we actually, during those days, we had manual QA that are supposed to go through everything.
So I didn't feel as bad because my manual QA counterpart also missed it, like we all missed it, but it was just so simple.
Just press that button.
Boom. It just completely freezes the website.
polluting the code with sort of global variables that are holding values as PHP, I think allows you to do.
That's a tricky one to discover.
Cause you rely on it, but then there could be somebody else assigns a value to it.
Yeah, it erases everywhere.
And I just didn't understand like, in my head, static was like all this for the life.
Like I was just so locked into the PHP world at that time that I just made a just such. Like looking back on it, it's so obvious, but during the time it was hard. So in general, pushing to production, I talked to Peter Luebbles about this.
I mean, obviously he's operating as mostly a solo developer, but he often on the web site said thousands, not hundreds of thousands of people used, he often ships to production, pushes to production.
Meaning like just no testing, just like push to fix.
What are the pros and cons of that approach in general What do you think?
It's obviously much easier the smaller your organization is.
I think, no one would argue that sentiment if it's just you working on a singular project.
It is obviously much easier for you to push directly to production because you are the only one working.
You know all the ins and outs and if something were to break, you would discover it.
So to me, that makes sense.
Like I think the way he operates is perfect for what he does.
You couldn't take what he does and move it to say Microsoft or Netflix or Google, because that would obviously, it would just be a disaster just due to the amount of people all pushing to production and so, I personally love that.
I think that you have to gauge both the application you're building and its complexity and what you're pushing and how many people are working on it.
I think those all go into how you can kind of do that.
Because not all applications are created equal either.
Like that application I was making was zooming and scrolling where we had all of our own everything.
it was a very deep, large, like, heavy logic app.
And that was regardless of what was happening on the website.
Most the code was library code.
And that becomes way harder if you don't have a good test suite and stuff to kind of run before you push it out.
Because when you squeeze that ball, you know, different things come popping out in different areas.
And that's like, that's very, that's a very harder problem than, say, if you're doing more of like a heavy visual one, because a heavy visual one, you're you're affecting just this one area is visual stuff, and you can test it, and like that's normally the end of it.
Whereas, you know, so it depends on like the coupling and everything.
So, I mean, I love his approach, by the way.
I have such mad respect for anyone that operates that way because I think it's a great way.
It just is so good because it kind of breaks this notion that tech Twitter has that oh, you have to use all these expensive services, you need to use all these kind of things because if you don't use all this kind of stuff, if you're not using the latest version of React, if you're not using the latest version of this, you're gonna simply, you know, you're simply not gonna make it as a startup.
It's impossible and it's just like no, no that's not software like most of software isn't the new stuff most of software is old crappy software that someone has to maintain and It actually is really really great and has lots of really hard problems. And if you look at it differently, it's actually fantastic For people who don't know his tech stack in terms of web development is PHP jQuery and SQL like yeah All great stuff.
I'm just surprised he still uses jQuery Just give them the fact that at this point on the modern web, everything is, I mean, you have document query selector and add event listener click, right?
It pretty much has everything you already need.
It had a Dom content load.
Like all the reasons I used jQuery back in the day was adding a click on a button was hard. You had the deal with IE7, IE8, IE9.
Like those are hard differences.
Whereas now it's just so easy.
I'm just surprised it's even there.
I mean there's definitely a trade -off, I have still used the exact same stack, PHP, jQuery, and different flavors of SQL.
But the question there is, you know, you keep using jQuery because you can get the job done really fast and there's no significant performance hit that you detect.
So like why swish or something else.
But it's always probably, as we'll talk about, good to explore and to learn.
I can't. Not all tools are great at solving all problems. And so what you think is really, like, the problem is is you run into this kind of trade -off, which is you have some tool belt that you're very adept with.
You know, all the ins and outs, there's no unknown unknowns, but there's no surprises in this.
You know what you're building, you know what you're getting into, you will go through and you will be able to solve the problem.
but if you ever use a different language or a different experience you could find that some things are able to represent states way easier in a way more efficient way and you can solve problems really efficiently in some versus the other and so it's like if you don't take the time to explore as well you could be missing out on something that makes you twice as good on this one specific problem like subset and so I kind of value being able to look at all problems and so I don't want to get stuck on one thing though I see why people do which just for the efficiency's sake.
Let's just return to the infrastructure of the platform of Netflix and speak more generally Netflix, Twitch, YouTube.
Like any time I use any of these services I'm just blown away by the infrastructure it takes to deliver this service.
YouTube and Twitch are unique.
Versus Netflix where the creators can roll in themselves and upload stuff.
So on the consumption side, YouTube has over 100 billion views a day, over one billion hours watch time.
But on the sort of creator side, one million hours of videos are uploaded every day.
One million hours. It's like you have to, you have to service both and you have to deliver everything.
It's incredible to me.
Can you maybe speak to your own intuition?
Just zooming out on it, what it takes to deliver that kind of infrastructure?
For me, the thing that I find vastly complicated, and I can't imagine the engineering hours, is how do you even create an edge in that situation?
What I mean by an edge, I mean, when people say this phrase, if you're unexperienced, an edge is where you deliver data.
You want that edge to be as close to the customer as possible, because that's where the data lives, and then the communication between the customer and what you're doing is really, really small.
Obviously, the speed of light adds up.
The amount of hops adds up.
The amount of services that you have to remotely call adds up, they all add up and they all add inefficiencies to the system.
So something like YouTube, they want to be able to serve that data as quick as possible, but their data changes constantly and relevance is almost directly tied with the newness of the item.
So it's like, how do you even cash these things out?
How are you doing this?
So they must have such an incredible caching network that I can't even, I can't even fathom what it takes to do that.
That just to me is just so impressive.
of a million view hours in how many different resolutions with how much data?
What is a million view hours?
Is it 4k million view hours along with 1080p, along with 720p along with 1440p?
Like that number is an insane number.
Actually, and it is brilliant what you said, which is for YouTube, often the new thing is extremely important to show to everybody.
And so you can't rely on caching or trivial kind of caching.
Yeah. I have to like deliver the new thing as quickly as possible.
Yes, I mean, it's incredible.
So there's the entire system, the recommendation system that knows each individual human watching YouTube, and it has to integrate into that the new thing while also caching this incredible cluster of possible videos that you're potentially interested in, so and integrate into that ads, right?
in the case of YouTube and Twitch and so on.
It's a really tough problem, because you have to think, like, what is the cache hit rate on this?
Because there's so much. Because the problem now actually comes down to space.
Like, space actually becomes a real problem.
Like how many hundreds of petabytes do they have that they have to, like, okay, what do we cache?
And where do we cache this, right?
Like, the number, I mean, I think in the terms of, like, gigabytes, or maybe megabytes, like, they have to think in probably versions of bytes I don't even know the name for, right.
It's such a different problem.
And that's why I said Netflix, Netflix has a much easier job when it comes to caching.
So if you've never looked it up, it's called OCA.
And that, we know what videos we're releasing.
We know what videos are hot in specific areas.
It's a very limited set.
We're not gonna all of a sudden get, oopsies, we got a million new view hours, right?
We don't even have to worry about that as a problem.
Instead it's like okay, we know Stranger Things season five's about to drop.
We're gonna pre -cache Stranger Things season five have in every single OCA across the world, because that thing's about to get hammered, right?
And so it's like, it's able to do such a different kind of decision making than what you have to do with something like YouTube.
And then Twitch is even more wild because now you're actually ingesting video and trying to make it go out all at the exact same time for all video.
And you have to transform that video from whatever format and whatever the bit rate is into something that's more efficient in a system like that.
hats off to Twitch engineering because that is like some that's some serious work.
And here's some asshole Lex coming out and tweeting about YouTube features so like listen.
You're not wrong on the features you're asked for though.
I think there's this is an engineering problem of how do you allow fast iteration and additional features that shouldn't have to be integrated or impact our whole code base.
So at the edges of the code base, improve on certain features, without having to consult the mothership of the code.
It's the large team.
That's the fundamental problem.
When you get into YouTube size, there is the team slash organization that deals with data warehousing.
There's the team slash organization that deals with delivery.
There's a team slash organization that's like the middle layer, how you even, you know, they're gonna be like the little micro surfaces to talk to these places, then you have this front end.
So like for a small feature, you have to get middle team, you have to get back end team, you have to get all these things.
Quick example, Netflix.
Are you familiar with the dystopian Black Mirror?
Okay, season one episode one, do you know season one episode one?
Everyone who watches Black Mirror typically knows this episode.
Okay, yeah, I don't remember what it is but - Forgive my language, but they call it the pig fucker episode.
Oh yeah, of course.
Once you've seen the episode, you will then know this episode.
Well, when Netflix adopted it, I got pulled into a room, there's like a VP, a VP, a product designer, a VP, and they said, hey, we're about to release our own version of Black Mirror, season, season three, I think at that time, we need episode one, season one, to not be the first thing people see.
So let's just reverse the season order.
That required me. I had like 20 engineers, I had to gather together to be able to have this happen.
And that's just the problem of big companies, is that eventually every little thing has to become its own team.
And so even small, there's no such thing as a small feature.
Reversing the order of the dropdown that selects the seasons is a meeting with a bunch of EPs and engineers, that's really interesting.
Yeah. There's gotta be a way to accelerate that.
The natural scaling of a company and the bureaucracy that grows, yes slows that down.
But just having seen Elon work a lot, but his teams are able to like still keep it very fast even as the company grows.
There's got to be like a process to doing that, especially for...
Yeah, for the pig fucker episodes, like, I don't know where that's in the priority list, but like for important things like that, you should be able to do that quickly.
I don't know. Can you speak to like, how would you do that?
Well, I can tell first how it was done, remember?
So at a place like Netflix there would be I think that at that point is called a product called Dexter I can't remember.
There's are actual like movie metadata Warehouse that's gonna be highly integrated with Hollywood That's gonna be you know where that side is able to manage all that so I'm like hey You need the ability to mark things that need to be reversed because we're gonna run into this a bunch and we did we ran Into quite a few topical shows that all need to be reversed and all that and so it's like we need to be able to reverse episode numbers season numbers We need to be able to hide season or episode numbers.
Like in the case of the Chelsea handler show, it was like a daily show.
So it's like you don't, you don't need episode numbers.
You just need the latest one.
And so like, there's this whole problem that exists.
And so it's like, okay, you need to work on that for your UI over there.
Then you need to be able to store that data.
Then we need to be able to go to the, like the people that can actually get the video data out of that and provide it to our, our, our service layer.
I need to go talk to them and convince them.
They need to be able to give me the new methods and everything to do that.
Then I need to be able to go write the methods to get it down and I need to go to the UI And make that accessible now I need to go to website people I need to go to the mobile people I need to go to the TV people and so it's like yeah You can see this thing like snowballing and for us the big thing that Netflix did that was so well is After I met with these people that were high -level.
I was then I was the captain.
I'm the captain now Yeah, so I went to all these teams and said hey manager.
I needed an engineer We need to get this done within the next couple months because we got black mirror coming out so she would go, okay, here you go.
The map team, I need someone to help me with being able to get data out of the LoloMo for this.
And so it's like, all right, you're working with this engineering.
I'd go to the BMS team, okay, I need this engineer.
I'd go to the billboard team, I need this engineer.
Go to all of these little places to get all these little pieces of data, and then I was the captain, so I was like, you're working on this, you're doing this, you're doing this, you're doing this, I'm doing this, let's go, right, and so it's like, that worked, and we were able to go pretty fast for a big company in the fact that it required Like 20 engineers to do such a simple task.
We were able to do it in like, gosh, I'd say about like three weeks worth of effort.
But that was still, I thought that was amazing comparatively to how many people moved.
Well, because you have the freedom and the agency to do it, you set the captain of the ship.
That's really powerful.
For big companies, that's a risk.
Cause you can fuck it up.
You might not see the bigger context legally or any of the bigger context of the impact on the industry or all the contracts that are made all that.
So it's a risk. It's a risk, but it's the risk you have to keep taking.
And then when you fuck up, you fix, and then maybe pay a cost legally for that, whatever, but the longterm, that risk pays off because you're going to keep creating a better and better product, evolving where the industry is going, constantly innovating ahead of where the industry is going, and so on, yeah.
And not only that, I think one thing that is just so important is that, yes, the products will get better, but the people that you hire and the people that you keep around are better because they're the ones that show maturity.
They're the ones that can just, you give them something and they can rally the troops and make something happen.
Like that's a very great group of people to hire.
And so you also naturally select out great engineers that aren't just simply good at coding, they're good at coding and they're good at explaining and they're good at convincing and they're good.
You know like you have to create a very lean audience that can move fast. And I think for great engineers, having to wait for like, okay, let's schedule a meeting for next Wednesday with the, with the VPs and that destroys their soul.
And they either don't want to contribute anymore, they leave the companies or they just kind of tune out and take the golden handcuffs and just, you know, buy a nice house and focus on a family.
And I feel like I would die under that.
So like, honestly, like that is, that is my death sentence is where it's just that that there's no reason to try.
There's no reason to do anything.
I'm just gonna go in there, like effectively zombie through my day and call it like I don't wanna live like that.
I want to feel like I'm trying to do something.
I should also mention on top of that, so you've brilliantly laid out how incredible the challenge that Netflix has to solve.
On top of that with YouTube, you know, the metadata thing, because users are able to upload video and there's an API where they can upload automatically automatically and change all this kind of stuff automatically, every one of those things is an attack vector as we mentioned.
That's something they have to consider seriously on the engineering side, and on the sort of the legal side, they can get into trouble in all kinds of ways.
So they have to consider all of that, so it's just fascinating.
The legal side is obvious, but it's not really ...
like I would never have initially thought someone would say, upload images that you're not allowed to own or have, but that'd guarantee to you that happens then you have the whole kid side right yeah I think about when you mark something as kid friendly how many times have they snuck porn into a Taylor Swift video or whatever.
That was like a few years back there's that whole Taylor Swift or whatever I forget what it was I thought it was Taylor Swift but there'd be these mock videos that came up and then boom it's like that's a that is such an awful problem and I'm so happy that is not a problem I have to try to figure out yep okay so yes YouTube and and twitch and Netflix They're doing an incredible job.
You eventually chose the mad man you are to leave Netflix and to start a new journey of being a wolf pack of one start streaming.
What was that? What was the story of that?
So I was streaming for almost seven years now.
It started actually at Netflix.
We did a charity extra life.
Shout out extra life for starting my streaming career.
Effectively, it's just you stream and whatever money you raise, It goes to Kids with Cancer Research. They are a great charity in the sense that they take no overhead and they raise their own donations for their website and everything.
It's a very great, straightforward charity.
Really love what they've done.
It was super cool because I live in South Dakota now, but I actually could choose a hospital directly where the money goes to.
There's a direct impact from A to B.
It's a pretty cool organization.
And so my friend guy Sereno, uh, nice try guys, what I like to call him.
He was probably. The single greatest engineer I've ever met in my lifetime.
And he has just like, Hey, come do this.
We're going to all do this.
And so I played Fortnite.
And so before I did that, I was like, Oh, I better learn how to stream first. I better get, you know, affiliated so I can like take subscriptions.
And then if anyone gives me a subscription, I'll also pay that forward. And so June 2018 or something like that, I start.
I start streaming and I start streaming some fortnight and I'm getting affiliated end up doing the whole extra life thing I end up really enjoying it.
I'm like, this is a lot of fun I'm playing fortnight at that point.
Okay, so mind you I'm a fortnight streamer at that point And I start really enjoying and I keep doing it and then one day I decide I'm gonna do some programming cuz I Really love him and I think I'm kind of fast at them And maybe people think programming is kind of cool because there was no really programming section at that point And I had like 30 people show up, and it felt like incredible numbers at that point.
So I was like, oh my gosh!
It was like, 30 people watching me program.
And so it just kept on going, and it kept on happening, and it just kept on growing.
I did it for year after year.
I would do my job, I would come home, I'd eat dinner with the kiddos, I'd read them Lord of the Rings and the Hobbit during that time, I'd read to them for half an hour, then I'd set that down, and then three nights a week I would program until like 2 in the morning or play video games until two in the morning streaming and building up this like whole side thing.
And I did this for a long, long time.
And then eventually it just kept working out so well and I started making YouTube videos and then that started getting better.
And it was just like a long, long grind until April of last year.
I went to the streamer Awards and I got to like announced the programming category.
And Pirate Software One, it was awesome.
It was a great time.
And during that time he gave me a challenge coin and just said like, you You just gotta go for it.
Just go full time." And so I just sat there and my wife can attest to it.
It was kind of like an emotional turmoil thing and it just took a lot of ...
It was pretty awful.
Because I didn't ...
Netflix is a very safe option.
It was both very fun, it was challenging, I liked a lot of the people I worked with.
It was overall a really great thing, I had a really great boss.
Really appreciated him.
I still have every text of now and then he's really great guy.
So it's just like. I'm leaving all these things for something that's unsure.
And the reality is, is that streaming and all these things, you know, people love you one day, they could hate you the next day.
There's like all this stuff that goes into being on the public side.
And I had Netflix as the backing, so it's like, if public hit me the next day, I'd be like deuces, I'm out.
Like, I don't care.
Now it's like, now I'm going to do this as a job.
And so there's like a whole huge turmoil to this whole thing that kind of went through it.
And eventually I just said, okay, I'm gonna make this, it resonated with me when I first made the decision to join Netflix.
I'm getting older. There's not a lot of chances to do something unusual.
Like those chances go down constantly as you get older.
This might be the last crazy thing I get to do.
Let's just try it. So in April, I went full time and I guess I haven't looked back.
I'm not even a year into doing this as a full time gig.
and it's just been a lot of fun.
And the biggest thing is just being, you know, just being able to really explore and do these things on stream where people really enjoy watching and engaging has just been, it's been a great, hard, fun, amazing, difficult experience.
I mean, it's really inspiring.
It's a really hard one to take for many reasons like you outlined, but also like the loneliness of it, I think it's a pretty lonely pursuit.
It is, yeah. Just you and the camera and the audience and the ups and downs of that and there's not really a team I do have one lucky thing.
I'd say that my editor Flip shoutout flip.
He was Being the world to him if I said shut up flip, but I love you flip.
I love you. I love you Oh man, he uh He had you know as he would say he had nothing going for him He he had a really hard growing up a lot of a lot of rough life decisions have gone into his life and he's kind of crawling back out of it and he just said, hey I'll edit full time for you.
So I just said, alright, like 50 -50 whatever I make on YouTube you get we're gonna do this together, and we did that for years, making zero dollars a month pretty much, you know, and so it's just like that was an incredible jump and now like we get to work together so that I do get that one team aspect that I think is really nice, but there's, it's not like it was at Netflix where I could hear about stuff people are building, I I don't have a team, I don't have product or cycles.
I don't have a manager that I have to try to make happy.
It's just like, it is very lonely.
And I don't think a lot of people realize how lonely it actually can be.
Yeah, so combine that loneliness with, in my case, I don't know how many people attack you.
I have a shockingly low amount of attack rate, I feel like.
Yeah, people generally, I mean, it's sometimes fun sort of teasing, that kind of thing, but it's mostly just really, I mean, you give so much love to the world and inspire so many people, even when you're making fun of stuff, yeah.
But with me, you've sort of taken the loneliness of it, combined with just really intense attacks, as tough as can be rough.
Psychologically really a tough journey.
You miss working with the team, just from even a software engineering side where you can share code or talk over code?
Yeah. The collaborative aspect of it?
Yeah, multiple things there, one, hey, we love you, Lex. So, don't let the things get you down.
Thank you. But - Thank you.
I love you too. Thank you, hey.
Little bonding moment.
You're going on. But you know, one thing I really miss - Not in a sexual way, just to be clear.
The tension is a little - Yeah, I'm getting uncomfortable.
Yeah, anyway, team.
It's just the, one thing I really miss is just, even when I hated how people did it, just seeing how other people solved things.
Right? Like, it's really amazing, just like the raw creative power so many people have. And just being like, oh wow, like I would have never done it this way.
Crazy. Right? Like, wow, I just...
This is awesome. And you kind of internally process this and you're like, oh, I now have a new little tool in my tool belt.
Because at some point, it's really hard to find a mentor.
When you're first young and you're just starting out programming, I mean, anyone with a couple bit better than you, but like infinitely better than you.
It's like...it feels like crazy how much better people are, and so you have to like get mentors and you learn from people, and then as you get better, that amount of availability gets really small.
And so it's something that I really do miss is kind of that forced hard problem solving together.
I think there's also a skill to sort of mining the wisdom from other people.
Like, I generally try to approach even like junior people, young folks, just mentally at least for me it works as a hack, to assume they're the smartest person in the world, way smarter than me.
And so I take every single word they say as potential wisdom.
And that helps me mind for potential wisdom there.
Because it's so easy for us to get older to judge, to be like, okay, I've been through that, I remember feeling like that, I remember thinking that, that's incorrect, whatever.
But it's just assume that you know that I don't know what the fuck I'm doing and the other person is this like sage.
And from that, in that kind of interaction, I think you could actually learn a lot.
And my favorite interactions is when we both think that way.
So from there, I think that's a catalyst for a great, great collaboration and interaction.
It just also makes everything much nicer.
It really stings to work with someone that's combative and negative.
Like I don't mind combativeness.
If it's like, I'm trying to figure out what's best to do right now versus combativeness just because you're a negative person and things have to be this one particular way because if they're not this one particular way, it's the end of the world.
And that's actually really hard for me to work with.
What's the origin story of the Primogen name?
The origin story of the Primogen name was, are you familiar with the video game called Turac?
Nintendo 64. So Turac had Turac one, and then Turac two, Turok too was a brutally hard game.
This was back when first -person shooters, they would only give you a certain amount of health and you had to go discover health and get that health.
And you had to beat the whole game without effectively dying.
That's an old, that's like the first version right there, that's like truck one and Turok two.
Turok is a renowned first -person shooter video game series featuring dinosaurs, action and sci -fi elements.
The franchise has evolved significantly since its inception in 1997.
There you go, so 1998, there you can see it right there.
Truck 2, seed of evil followed in 1998 featuring larger levels, more challenging puzzles, and deadlier enemies.
The notable difficulty, it was very, very, very difficult.
Okay. And so I spent, when I got it, it came in a black cartridge, not like your standard grey Nintendo 64, the black cartridge.
Oh nice. It was a badass game, right?
And I got it. And I put it in and I played.
And I played every day for like 10 hours a day for a month straight and I beat it and it was like such an Incredible great experience in the last leader of truck 2 is called the primogen And so when I was a kid when you're in like fifth grade That's like super cool like named after the bad guy And so like for a long time on any internet thing like grail online that I mentioned earlier But it was the primogen It was great and then you know, I became an adult eventually and it's just like okay You know, I'm gonna don't have my name is michael paulson underscore, you know That's what I was on the internet
for a long time, was that.
I remember it was like 2017, 2018, somewhere in there.
I remember just how bad the tech world had kind of become.
It was just like this super pretentious place, tons of dick measuring, just everything that just was the worst. Ken Wheeler got canceled over playing the Circle Game.
It was just like it It's so hard to describe to people that weren't there But it was just the worst place to be tech was extremely unfun.
It was extremely awful everything was just so it wasn't academic because it was research it was like We're building the most sophisticated things and this is for the smart people and you're everyone else's the dumb people Don't worry.
We'll design for you dummy We got the wheels will show you how to make the perfect architecture And I remember changing my Twitter handle cause I got so upset and just went back to my video game name.
Cause I was like, I want things to be fun.
I want this to stop.
And so while I start, when I started streaming tech, my goal became to destroy whatever that tech mentality was because it includes nobody.
Everyone thinks that they're the smart people and they designed for the dummies.
And it's just like, no, like I want tech to be this place where people feel like they can be creative and excited and actually build something.
And if you're new, like, it's okay to be dumb and ask dumb questions, like learn from your dumbness.
No one's expecting you to be smart, pick whatever you want.
Like actually do something and have fun and build like your crazy ideas.
Oh, you're gonna reinvent the wheel?
Reinvent the wheel, understand what you're doing, learn it really good, and like interact and stuff.
And it's just so different than what was out there and that, the name, Arnold Schwarzenegger talks about this thing where when he first started acting, his name was like the thing that people hate it as he once said you have a strange voice you have a strange body and your name your name's unpronounceable no one's gonna Snights and financial no one's gonna remember that yeah he said but now the name is the strong part and for me I just I've always felt akin to that though my name is not nearly as cool Norma is a popular as Arnold Norma has tough or good -looking or successful but nonetheless it's
just the the name represented this like counterculture like movement within myself in which I I just hated what was there and I wanted to defeat it.
And so this has like been the thing.
And now people remember me so well because of how weird my name is.
And so it's just like, for whatever reason it became its own thing and so that's kind of the, now I would never change it.
And back then I would never change it because it was my rage against the machine moment, if you will.
Yeah, I love that. It's a symbol of rage against the machine and the rage being fun.
Yeah, I just want people to like be creative than to have fun again, it's okay.
What about the mustache?
It's an epic mustache, it's an epic stache.
It has a life of its own.
Is there an origin story, or did you guys discover each other at some point?
Or did it emerge from the darkness of the struggle that is your life?
Where does it come from?
Well, the original, original mustache is that it was no -shave November.
Back before it became Movember, it was no -shave November back in the day.
And after no -shave November, You had all this hair.
And so what's the natural thing you got to do?
You got to sport a mustache for a day.
Right? So whenever I'd forget to not shave for a long time, and then I'd let it start growing out really big, I'd just go, Oh, this is kind of funny.
I'll have a mustache.
And so one day when I was streaming, it was just one of those times I just didn't shave and then I started just letting it go.
And then I got kind of a beard and then I just had a mustache.
And when I did it, People were just like, okay, that's a mustache time.
And I was just like, okay, it feels like it's like a lifestyle decision.
It's like the fun times and so all of the sudden it was just like exciting to have a mustache and I shaved it off and I was like, okay, but then, you know, part of me is like, you know, there's this weird energy that comes from just having a mustache.
So I was like, I'm going back.
Told my wife, forgive her.
She was very not as thrilled about my decisions to have a mustache long -term but I just decided to have it back and it's just like, it was the right thing.
It's always been the energy that I had was the mustache.
It was always been there it just never was visible until later on it feels like yeah We're chatting offline how one of the components of a successful relationship of sacrifice and your wife was willing to take the sacrifice of allowing You'd have a mustache.
I clearly was not willing to sacrifice not having one, so You do this incredible Incredible thing where you tried a bunch of different programming languages when you stream you a you have like you go all out on certain programming languages like Rust and then Go and then try to pick a new one but also are experimenting constantly.
So maybe one question I can ask is about learning.
What's your approach to learning a new programming language and maybe what's your advice on learning a new programming language when you begin that journey?
So I've kind of done a bunch of different ways to go through this learning process and I've tried a lot of different ones, something that is obviously successful is just start building something.
Just put your hands on the keyboard. You know, like, especially if you already know how to program, you're like, okay, I'm now using Zig.
How do I do a main function so I can just run the program?
Okay. Now know how to build.
Okay. How do I do an if statement?
What does it look like?
Okay. How do I do declare my own functions?
How do I do modules, right?
You just kind of like Google your way through it, if you will, to get to the end product and build something.
It's a good, it's a great way to do things because I find that repetition, like rote learning is obviously the best way to do this.
Uh, you have to kind of go over it a bunch and you can, you can definitely get out and build a lot of stuff with that.
And I, I like that initial kind of get used to things.
But on top of it, I find that by doing that, you also fall into like traps.
You kind of Google and you try to solve a problem in the language based on all of your previous experience.
And so you don't have what makes that language special, you kind of have what all the other languages make special.
And so you end up kind of not really being able to use it very effectively, but you can certainly kind of learn it and get kind of good at it.
And so the second approach I've been doing lately, and this has been inspired by the creator of Ghosty, Mitchell Hashimoto, is to just start by reading the language reference, the whole thing.
And so lately, I've been just kind of going through and just reading the entire manual for these languages, like Zig, I'm almost done with that one.
And, you know, it's like eight to 10 hours of just sitting down, reading, and I'll whip out my computer and kind of practice a couple of the things from the actual docs.
And that way I can learn all the things.
So then when I start building again, I remember, okay, I know there's a thing over here, let me go reread about it, because now I have it indexed in my brain somewhere that it'll kind of remember.
And so I don't think there's like a right or wrong way.
I mean, at the end of the day, the right way is always that you have to build something eventually.
You cannot just read about it.
You have to put your hands on the keyboard, you have to build something out.
And then once you do that, that's where you really discover what makes it painful or what makes it great.
And if you don't have the breadth of what the language offers, you just may make it painful by simply being bad at it.
What exactly are you reading?
Like the language reference.
The language reference.
So it just goes through like every feature at the bottom, right?
Yeah. Every way it's described, all the different things.
I think Ziggs is, it's a decent size, but it's not just simply read the words.
You want to internalize each concept as well, so it takes a long time.
I'm a slow reader so you're like building in AI terms like a background model I'm hmm.
I'm just I just cuz cuz I don't think you can just start building once you're done reading because you probably forgot yeah, you know how to do a for loop like you kind of forget the specifics you just are building up the The design choices the set of features available.
What are the strengths and weaknesses all that kind of stuff and Then you start building.
That's really interesting Probably not the thing you would recommend to a junior developer, something who's just starting out at first. If you don't know what an if statement is, that's not a good way to learn.
To me, the best way to learn, then, is really hands on the keyboard and building extremely simple things and slowly growing in complexity.
Because understanding what a class and methods and instances versus the blueprint, which is the class, versus functions, versus modules, versus all that stuff.
That just takes time to learn.
And so that's a completely different style of learning.
I wonder, because for me, learning right now, AI is a huge help, but I already have a lot of experience.
I wonder if you're starting from scratch, whether that's a good idea.
But I still think it's probably a really good idea, but basically generate some code using AI and figure out what it's doing by playing with different parts.
Maybe can you comment on that aspect, like the use of AI as part of the learning process?
This is where I have both the hopeful and the doom or take at the exact same time and it's the same thing with Google or Stack Overflow.
Like this, it's, it's all the same kind of take, which is, it's just making things more democratized.
In some sense, I get to ask questions in probably the most personal possible way with my own voice and my own words.
And it's able to produce out answers and kind of hopefully help guide me.
Now, regardless of just say the errors and the incorrectness of it, like ultimately just using it as a learning tool and being able to just, you know, formulate and read answers in your own voice, I think is super powerful, and I think it's super amazing.
But the part that I think is gonna be really difficult is that we don't value remembering things anymore as a society.
Like since the internet came about, I can just look that up.
I can just look that up.
No need to like, you don't need to memorize your times tables, right?
You can just use a calculator.
You can just do all that.
I remember, I just was sitting on the airplane and I watched someone do the world's most simple addition and subtraction, like 10 times on their phone.
I'm like, why are you not just like you should already know these things that you should be able to do these things?
And I realized that we kind of offload our brains, right?
Well, I don't need to know these things because I can look them up.
And that's not a bad answer.
In some sense, I can understand that, like I don't need to remember every last thing.
But then it also makes me realize that you kind of developed this learned helplessness that a new error comes up I'll just ask the AI and I says oh, okay.
I got to fix this line I fixed the line you didn't actually learn anything You kind of just used it as a quick means to get something out and move on and so you sacrifice knowledge for speed Which is a great thing in some like you we have to make those trade -offs all the time in engineering Sometimes you have to move fast at the sacrifice and knowledge and I'm totally on board for that But I worry that what we'll create is an entire generation of incompetent programmers who can do some amount of things well, but anything that is unique, bespoke, or requires some extra little elbow grease might become
very difficult. It might cause a whole chasm where juniors remain juniors forever.
And I don't want to see that.
I want to see people grow.
I want to see people actually be able to take this as a craftsmanship thing.
And so that's kind of what I, that's like both my hope and my, my worry is is that AI I think can, can do both really.
Cause if you could ask whatever question you want and you don't have to rely on, say a book to give you that exact answer.
And if the book just said it wrong and you can't understand it's just like, sorry, you don't get to learn what this is.
Like recursion for me.
I spent way too much time until someone gave me the right problem to understand recursion, you could imagine AI could have solved that for me way faster because it could have gave me the right problem and walked me through much better.
But what happened if I just always have recursion solved by them and not actually learn it myself?
So if I ask AI to generate code to do a certain thing, some, actually, large percentage of time, most of what AI generates is going to be correct for me.
But some percent of time, it's not, like fundamentally not.
And for me to recognize the difference between those two, I think it takes a lot of experience.
Like, I think to learn that skill of knowing like, and say, like, no, no, no. A different new out of the box solution is needed here than the one you're providing.
You're missing the point.
That's a skill. And how do you learn that?
You learn that by building from scratch. So both are probably really necessary.
But I think it's the first step of learning how to program.
It's pretty nice to generate a function, to generate for loops and all that kind of stuff, and then just fuck with the different lines and like modify them to try to adjust the behavior of the program and from the way that the behavior of the program adjusts or of bugs are created, you learn about the syntax of the language, the behavior of the language, all that kind of stuff.
So I think it's a super powerful way to learn, but yeah, you need to also write from scratch. At some point you have to take off the training wheels because I think what you're really spotting is the difference between reading and writing code.
Like I can read a lot of languages very well.
I can see what's happening.
I can understand it, but like I would not be very good at writing it.
I can understand a lot of things about C plus plus and I can read it, but I'm just not that because I just don't, I haven't done it in so long.
I can't remember all or all the semi -colons and colons and like, you know, you do public and private and how you should you name and convey, like, you know, all those things kind of add all together and then you're just like, Oh, I'm really bad at writing it.
Though I can read it.
And so there's like this, there's a skill gap chasm that exists between those two.
Alright. Well, let me talk about the various languages, the cheesy, uh, ridiculous question of what's the, what's the best programming language?
Uh, let's say what's the best programming language that everybody should learn maybe, uh, let's go with the top five.
I want to pull up the stack overflow developer survey, because I think Go ahead.
What, you don't like them?
No, no. Those aren't...
You gotta remember, because you're a data guy.
You know about biases in data.
What does Stack Overflow naturally bias towards?
Well, they have the different slices of professional developers, junior developers that have different slices.
Okay, what is it bias?
I hear you, but who fills out a Stack Overflow survey?
Someone who participates on Stack Overflow.
Who's participating on Stack Overflow?
Largely very, very new people and that one guy that loves answering questions.
And so I'm not sure if that like if stack overflow is a great place to get data It could be a very biased set of data.
Is it really only new people?
I mean that's who's using stack overflow Alright most popular technologies on this JavaScript HTML Python SQL SQL SQL is with a more general kind of I'm sure they're not doing the individual Sort of flavors of sequel By the way pronounce SQL versus SQL.
It's squeal. Squeal?
You squeal. Squeal, that's the correct way.
Squeal. I did sequel because I didn't, you know, I didn't know the audience.
I don't know if I can handle the truth.
Okay. Which is it squeal.
Squeal of joy squeal.
Squeal light, my squeal, postgres squeal.
By the way, I had a lot of joy from earlier saying pig fucker for some reasons, because Squeal.
It's such a big, I mean, can you believe that that was a real conversation that I had?
Yep that was. TypeScript, Bass, Java C sharp, C plus plus It largely kind of aligns with the world you'd expect but like assembly, why is assembly more popular than Ruby?
Who is writing just assembly by, no one writes assembly by hand, other than like maybe that one guy that's developing TLS 1 .3 and hand rolling a cryptography algorithm to be the fastest possible algorithm, right?
Yeah, assembly is a weird one.
Maybe people write it, maybe it's school, but even a school now for like operating systems course or something like that or systems engineering.
I don't know if they write assembly anymore, I don't think so.
Anyway. Swift and Ruby being less popular than assembly seems ridiculous.
But nonetheless, okay, you get my ideas behind that, but as far as top five languages go, that's probably too broad because you could just name so many.
I think you should probably archetype it by what do you want to do.
So if you want to get into game development, perhaps C sharp C++ could be good choices or JavaScript and doing canvas games.
I could see that also working but you know you gotta...
you're limited by doing JavaScript obviously because you can't do as much because the language is just not fast enough to do as much. So it's like a good thing to remember.
If you're going to be doing back -end stuff, you know, if you want a job, if you're looking for a job maybe C sharp slash Java or JavaScript or Go would be great choices.
If you're looking to do embedded, do you probably want to do C++?
Like, that would probably be a good choice.
And so you kind have to...
I think you have to first determine what do you really want to get out.
If you're just curious about programming, which I talk to a lot of people who are...
Yeah, you can consider jobs, but basically their question is, okay, what's the first language I should learn?
Maybe what are the several languages I should explore?
Can I say something that's gonna make a lot of people angry?
Yeah, sure. I think the first language people should learn if they have no idea about anything thing is JavaScript.
Yeah. Why would that make people angry?
Oh, because people just, I mean, first off, I'm not supposed to say anything nice about JavaScript.
Yeah, usually that's the meme that you hate JavaScript.
Yeah, no, JavaScript is a beautiful language and it has a lot of things that are very great for it.
And one of them is that you can express anything with very little effort.
And so someone that's new, I think it's really great to be able to draw a box and move a box.
Like that's great, you could just see it visually.
I think that's one thing that's really great read about JavaScript is that you can do that, and then you can go, okay, I want to learn about the back -end, I'm going to make a request now, you can write a quick back -end and now you're starting to get familiar with programming a little bit.
I can save this to a database, I can bring it down, I can put it on a screen, and I can animate it all around, and I can even put it on a canvas, and render it in 2D or 3D.
So it's like there's so much variety of what you can do with JavaScript.
It's a great way to get introduced into programming.
But then at some point you have to go, okay, I now need to learn more about this whole thing.
I mean, yeah, just like you said, you can make games, you can do front -end, back -end for web development.
You can even do embedded, they actually have jobs.
There's... Wes Boss is building his Roomba or something and programming it with JavaScript and React which is just the world's worst language to choose from embedded but you can still do it.
Also, we mentioned in terms of applications, anything that relates to data or machine learning, Python is the sort of the leader there.
Yeah. So that's a great one seems like python Cuda stuff and C++ would be a dynamite in that because a lot of these python libraries Are assumed are just you're just smuggling in C++ underneath the hooder see Okay, so JavaScript, I'll say Python. Python is a great one, too You can get quite far with it, but you can't write the front end So I mean if you love the front end right why haven't if you really just want to design things and you just didn't know that Well, it's okay So for that JavaScript but Python's a good choice because you can't do the ml stuff in JavaScript.
Now it's easy Do we call HTML and CSS as programming languages?
I think there's like some technical definition that it is if you put it up if you use this certain amalgamation of CSS plus HTML it actually has like it can be a Turing complete language Yeah, but I mean for practical purposes.
No HTML is not a language You know I if for me this yes, the Turing test is a good one But for those that are just not wanting to be as academic If I can't write a function in an if statement, I don't feel like that's, if I can't loop, if and function, I don't feel like that's a good, that's a programming language.
Although modern HTML has a lot of features.
It's crazy how much it has.
But it's more of a specification than anything else.
I specify it to be a pop -up.
I specify it to have this kind of like accessibility, this kind of look, this kind of, you know.
Under these conditions, look like this, transform like this, move down here.
I don't know, I kinda like these popular programming languages in this list that like JavaScript.
You like Bash? Well, yeah, I like Bash a lot.
Yeah. Why? Okay. Bash is kind of one of those ones where it's like, do you really like do you really like it?
I like it up until I need an array.
Oh, as a programing language.
Just no, but I like I like the command line.
Okay. Do you like, no. Nobody likes Bash.
Do you mean someone is so offended right now?
Means do you use it a lot?
Yes, it's good to. I mean, it's good to learn, right?
It's good to be comfortable in the command line because it's a bit of a superpower.
It's like, I think I follow on Twitter, FFmpeg.
Great account! Like there's certain Twitter accounts that are just like legit and you know, I think FFmpeg, they have all these sort of parameters that you can add on the command line that it's like one of those cryptic languages is that only very few wizards understand, but once you begin to slowly understand, and I'm only at the very sort of beginning stage of that journey to mastery, the powers you gain at every step is like, it grows exponentially, it feels like.
I mean, FFM Pack is just this incredible, like what would you call a library system, there's just, the people behind them must be just brilliant masterminds because they have to work with all these code apps, with all these containers, with all this, They're the mysteries of the media kodak universe.
They're like masters of and understand compression, which is another super fascinating technical set of problems that I don't know.
FFmpeg just fills me with joy that it exists, but you need kind of bash type comfort, command line comfort, to work with it, to really unlock its power.
I think FFmpeg is probably one of the most consequential libraries of our day, and the Twitter count is so unhinged.
It is, it's the most amazing thing to see, because I think FFmpeg does not get the love it deserves.
Every single application that OBS, probably FFmpeg underneath the hood, all of the prof...
Everything. FFmpeg underneath the hood.
And then, and yet you know, they do not get the love they deserve.
I just love it. I just think that the best. Yeah.
I would say JavaScript, HTML, CSS, Python, SQL.
I mean that is a SQL, Squeal is a programming language.
This is an incredibly sophisticated programming language.
SQL is interesting.
I believe you can classify it as a programming language, it does have like, if you have case statements, and it's pretty crazy what you can do with it.
You can do functions, you can do all that.
Yeah, it's stored procedures, that's how you make your life hell.
I will say that all the top languages right there, none of them are like strict static typed languages.
And so even TypeScript, you can, I don't like this any.
And so for people that are learning, doing something that's much more strict would be great.
Something like Go, Rust, even C sharp, C++, anything that kind of changes your perspective of types, I think is really helpful to kind of go through.
They're not getting nearly as much love on this most popular language list, but I think they're very fantastic.
All right well if I put a gun to your head five top five languages, let's let's list them out That there's a bright eyed 20 year old asking you What are the top languages to a five languages to learn?
if I were to pick five languages that I think people should learn or at least How will let's rest it this way.
I'm gonna say a couple languages, and you should at least explore some of them I think you should explore explore a lucy language so Python slash JavaScript where there is truly only one type, which is a boxed value which is a multivariate different types underneath the hood, right?
What'd you call a Lucy language?
Lucyongoose language, right?
It's a dynamic language.
And so I think it's really good to explore one of those too.
So I'd put Python or JavaScript right there, even Lua.
Throw a Lua in the bunch. I think you should explore a strict language.
So I'd do something like Rust go.
I think those are both really, really great.
C++. You can do C++, You can do some type erasure in C++.
You can do it with go as well, but it's for the most part.
That's, it's a great language to do that in.
It can get a little wild.
New C++ seems great.
Everyone keeps telling me new C++ is great.
It has every feature you've ever wanted and all the features you don't want.
Yeah, exactly. I mean, there's smart pointers, there's dump pointers, there's all kinds of pointers.
There's no memory leaks, that's not an issue.
A face guns, soft beds, there's everything in there.
Unless you like memory leaks, that it has that too, if you want that kind of thing is great.
Okay. How about this one languages that I actually want to really learn that at least sit in my curiosity bank.
There's three languages which is going to be Swift, elixir O camo.
And then I'm going to throw Odin in there just to.
Just because ginger bales, great, but elixir and O camo.
I don't have a strong functional language underneath my belt.
That's something that I just genuinely lack.
Yeah. I've heard incredible things about elixir, about Odin and about O Camo.
Uh, obviously, I'm a person, as you know, who loves Lisp.
I have never done Lisp, Lisp could be in that category too, just like learn or closure.
I think at this point is what everyone tells you to use.
So in the case of Lisp, actually I don't want to speak negatively about Lisp, but it's important about like modern community, what the community looks like.
And it seems like there's an excited, maybe small but an excited community around Elixir or Oda or Ocamo.
So that helps. Yeah.
Is that you can post shit on Twitter that you're like, I accomplished this and people get excited.
and it's nice, it's a good feeling.
You can post something on Twitter and you'll get like 1 ,000 likes if you do something cool in Elixir.
Yeah. Okay, like, which is a pretty big, that's like a pretty big amount of people to like a post for such a niche topic.
Yeah. Programming's already a pretty small topic.
Then you get into functional programming.
That's a small topic and a small topic.
Yeah, I don't get that much. If I post something about Emacs, I'll get crickets.
If I post something like, if I proudly use Neovim, there'd be a lot of people like, Yeah.
Good job. because it is the best editor.
Yeah, maybe it's just hype.
Come back to the Civil War, wax.
Yeah, sometimes you have to sacrifice and go from the superior editor that is Emacs and choose neo -vim just to be popular.
You sacrifice integrity and values and quality for just popularity.
Absolutely. I love how you put it.
Anyway, it's what we were talking about.
I like how you're doing this in bunches, that's great.
Right now my kinda side honeys that I'm exploring is side honeys.
Yes, side honeys. They're like, they're not my mainstay.
Right now Go is kind of my favorite one to build a web app in.
Like if I'm going to build some sort of back -end with a lot of complicated logic, Go's just so convenient.
But I get really frustrated with its ability to express everything that I need.
Like if you have a list, a heterogeneous list, a list that contains two types.
Go's just really not that fun to use.
And so I could see...
so the ones I'm exploring is Jai, or J or the language, as Jonathan and Blo says and Zig.
And both of them have a lot of power to them.
They're both very interesting.
They definitely have foot guns in them.
They're definitely more, you know, they don't take it easy on you.
Zig seems like it's a really amazing language and so does Jai.
They're both very cool.
Yeah, actually I saw Dave Plummer's testing of close to 100 languages for speed as Zig came out on top.
Yeah, that was a mistake.
I mean, when I say mistake, nothing against Dave Plummer.
He's an extremely talented engineer.
It's just that Zig, C, C++, all those languages that were being tested, they're all LLVM backends, right?
That's the one that actually turns the thing into the executable part.
And if there's a variation in speed, it just means in one language, you didn't quite express what you're supposed to correctly.
Like there's the language ball test that's been bouncing around on Twitter, Zig was like sixth or seventh below.
I forget what language is.
I played around with the example, added the word no alias to the argument, which means that the P the piece of memory that's coming into this function there's no global pointers there's nothing to it and so the compiler can make these really cool optimizations and I made it faster than the C version so it just means that it just it's just not correctly specified is all that means yeah but it's still it's still exciting it to me the competition between ZIG rust and C++ is really interesting like part of us for speed part of his far how easy it is to write perform a code I'll say something that's
the reason why I think Zig is so interesting comparatively to say, see your rust. See is like the ultimate language.
It can do anything you have pre processor macros.
You can do quite a bit with it, but it's also really difficult.
And it's also really simple and you can learn it.
So it's kind of, it's like own unique beast. And when you get really good at C C's a magical language and people are really great at it.
Um, and people speak very highly of it.
Rust is like this ultra safe language.
What you can do and see, you just can't even express and rust rust is going to be that safe the safe man that holds you at night, keeping you warm, right?
It's going to be just the greatest, but somewhere in the middle lies zig, zig has optionals, if you're not familiar with optionals, that just simply means there's a value here or there's not, but you first have to check that before you can use it, so it prevents that whole null pointer dereferencing, say fault problem, and that's not, that's not available in C just by default.
You have to kind of build that thing in.
It is the only option in Rust, but zig says, Hey, if you have a pointer, you can't express it as null unless if you market that it can be null, there's ways around that there's like other types of pointers and stuff like that that can do that, but for the most part Zig, like, we'll give you safety for the most part, right?
So it's like a little bit of safety, but more like C, so it kind of gives you like everything you kind of want in that region where you can express safe code and unsafe code.
It's very easy to write, it's very pretty.
Or at least the idea behind it is very pretty.
The language itself is bland, but.
Wow, there's beauty in everything.
Yeah. Prime. You've programmed in Rust a lot.
What do you love about Rust?
What are the strengths?
What are the weaknesses?
Maybe you can speak about memory management that you already mentioned.
The challenge of memory management that several of these languages address.
But yeah, what do you love about Rust?
What I love about Rust, I love that it's that the ability to free the memory that you're using is directly tied to the stack.
So whenever you create something, there's a stack variable or there's some amount of stack memory, whether it's a pointer off to the heap, a pointer in a length.
So, you know, some amount of memory on the stack and then some memory on the heap because like a string is not all on The stack it's some on the heap some on the stack and when that stack variable goes out of scope and gets cleaned up It also cleans up what's on the heap.
So it kind of simplifies this whole idea of whoops I forgot to free my memory.
It just does it for you.
So it's not a garbage collector, which will do it sometime later It's not like see where you have to call it yourself.
It's somewhere in between Now there's a lot of strategies people use arenas and all that that make that see part much easier.
I'm just not even mentioning it, but it just makes it a lot easier.
But Rust does that really beautifully.
And it's just like a really cool idea about it.
And I really like that.
And the second thing that I think Rust does really like is such a good thing is that mutability of something is you have to specify it.
So you don't just create a variable and then mutate it.
You have to say this is not only a variable.
It's immutable variable Mm -hmm, and I think that just makes code really readable and really understandable Because anything that does not have the word mute next to it, you know for a fact it cannot change So there's some miles around that but you get the general idea unlike most programming languages You have to explicitly state that this is going to be changed.
This is going to be changed.
Yeah. Yeah, that's really interesting I mean it's safe.
It's it's trying to be and and this the safety might be it's create limitations.
Let us consult the AI overlords.
Rust is a blazing fast memory -efficient systems -programming language that emphasizes performance, type safety, and concurrency.
The language enforces memory safety without using a garbage collector, as you said, instead utilizing a unique quote, borrow checker that tracks object lifetimes at compile time.
This prevents common programming errors, like non -point or dereferencing and memory leaks and so on.
So you've also spoken about metaprogramming.
Which of these languages do you like for the metaprogramming?
I love metaprogramming in C++, but it's a giant mess.
At least when I program C++, C++17 standard. It's just a mess, especially a mess to debug.
Yeah, I would consider myself kind of a metaprogramming newbie.
I have only solved some amount of problems with it.
That's kind of like what this year is for is for me to really, I want to see where the ends can go in that so I don't have a strong opinion on this one.
Zig. One thing I really like about Zig is that the metaprogramming is also the language itself.
So you don't have to like there's not, there's not an alternative.
So with Rust there's an alternative.
When you create a macro, you have to do the macro syntax with Zig.
It's just, it is the thing you just program it, you add the word comp time, if you want it to be a compile time only.
So you can do like, you can create the list of prime numbers at compile time in Zig, which is kind of an interesting, unique thing.
So you have code that executes that compile time, and then you can take advantage of the result of it at runtime.
So, neat, all right?
Like that's how I'd look at it.
But again, I haven't, I haven't used it to the point where I feel like I can super authoritatively talk about it.
You have been undecided, what language are you going for this year?
I'm going to keep go as my mainstay.
My two side honeys, a giant's egg, I'm going to explore and try to build out a service in them that can do a bunch of talking to say, chat Gippity and 11 labs and send stuff down to client and work with web sockets.
And I want to make sure that I just want to see kind of, how do they perform in this realm?
And, you know, I may be using the language incorrectly, like JI, I'm not exactly, it's not really been designed for the web world.
I just got done writing the ability to read Twitch chat and it required me to do Berkeley sockets.
So if you're unfamiliar with Berkeley sockets.
It's like the old way of doing it.
How you do it and see.
So you have to kind of go through the whole nine yards of creating your own connection.
I had to create my own connection.
I have to read from the socket, and I have to parse out all the IRC, right?
Like you have to kind of build it from scratch. There's not like a new TCP connection to this server.
You have to be like, I'm creating a socket.
You're going to be of the IPV4 family and TCP.
And you're going to do, you know, I'm going to now have to take your address and go look up your address with DNS, get that address back and then connect it to a TCP.
So it's a lot more manual still.
It's a lot more raw in that area, but it's fun.
What are some epic projects you've built on Stream that jump to memory?
My most favorite, sorry for interrupting you.
So I'm really jazzed right now.
Let's go. Okay, so jazzed.
Jazz hands. My most favorite project was the one I did last year.
Someone built a Doom ASCII port.
So you could play Doom with ASCII.
So that means you could play it in your terminal.
Very, very fun, very exciting.
So I made a Go program that could spawn out the Doom ASCII.
Then I took that Doom ASCII and I sent it to the browser so that people could play Doom ASCII in the browser.
But then I made it so that Twitch chat could control that instance of Doom ASCII by piping in Twitch Chat, taking the average of the movements over so much time and replaying it as if it was a controller.
And I had Twitch Chat beat level one by spamming it, But the fun part was, I used a bunch of fun and coding techniques.
So I used like quad trees to be able to take smaller amounts to use run length and coding, try them create my own compression algorithm.
Because if you're sending out a bunch of ASCII stuff, it's still pretty expensive because you have to represent color, color's not cheap, on top of it.
You have to represent, what does it look like?
What does the ASCII look like?
Well, I realized, you know, there's all these fun techniques you can do for compression.
Like the shape of the ASCII you send down is in a lot of these engines are actually just proportional to the lumosity of that pixel.
So like you use an eight to represent or a pound sign to represent like white, but black, you're going to want to do like a period or a comma or a bar, you know, something smaller.
So it's like, I then developed all these different compression algorithms that turn a bunch of data, which would take, you know, I forget how much it would take, it take gigabytes upon gigabytes to be able to send out to thousands of people to all see the same image at the same time, to all be able to interact with doom at the same time, I turned it from gigabytes into kilobytes by just trying to figure out how to like make it as small as possible and send it all out.
It was super fun. Absolutely had a great time.
So you're actually sending it to all the people in chat so where's that pipeline, how chat is able to control the Doom thing?
Twitch chat. yeah so they would go people would span W and if you said W it would hold down W for 150 milliseconds if the majority of people during that time period, said W.
Nice. Okay. And how were they getting the input of where you are on the screen?
So originally, I was going to send that through Twitch, but Twitch is like five seconds behind.
So that's why I piped it out to a website.
Nice. So everybody could see from my computer to the website in typical, lag was right around 70 milliseconds.
Mm -hmm. So it's like they could mostly see what was happening in that short period of time.
It was pretty exciting.
So we had 1 ,000 people or I had somewhere between 1 ,000 to 1 ,400 100 people smashing W's and pressing F to fire and turning and we killed some zombies.
We blew up the barrel at the very end of level one to kill the imp.
How are you getting the W's from the Twitch chat?
Is there an API? I was using IRC, so just a little TCP socket and then you just parse out IRC.
Okay, and there's very little lag there, okay.
Yeah, I think it's a couple hundred milliseconds though.
It's enough that it actually made it a little bit difficult because people would often overturn and then go forward and like miss the door and then they had to go back and.
That's awesome. It was awesome.
So that was my favorite project of all time, just because I never got to do a lot of encoding.
Encoding is kind of like, what do you normally do?
Okay, I need to send something down, I don't know, gzip it, server will just do it.
Server just does the right thing, I don't need to think about it.
So instead it's like, I think about it.
I'm gonna send the right thing.
Yeah, you have to think about the compression, yeah.
And there you go, that's some more left over FFFmpeg, because I have to think about that a lot.
Ultimately inspired by FFF MPEG and their awesomeness.
everything. So can you speak to just the chat community in general?
Like a big part of what you do in terms of streaming is the humans that are communicating with you live.
Can you talk to the different chat communities?
First of all, which is the best chat community?
YouTube, Twitch, or X?
This is where I feel bad for YouTube.
Cause I do think it's technically the worst, But it's not YouTube's fault.
Let me kind of explain why.
And then I will explain why you're wrong, but go ahead.
YouTube is great. I know you love YouTube, but let me explain why.
YouTube is great, yeah.
Is that when you go on Twitch, you go to anyone's channel, they have this like cultural human centipede thing that's happening where as the memes flow in, all of Twitch kind of reacts and morphs to all those memes.
So every channel you go to has this same culture.
Everyone, there's a lot of similar emotes and everything, so it's very tight knit.
So when I stream, I get all the same jokes that you would pretty much see if you saw, I don't know, soda poppin or some big streamer, Asmin gold, whoever, Pratate Software streaming.
All the same memes that all flow through the exact same kind of pipe.
And so it's a very holistic kind of community.
So every time you're making jokes, you're making jokes that are like in the ether.
Twitter kind of has that too.
Tech Twitter kind of has like a set of jokes.
So, you can kind of see it.
The problem with Twitter chat is that there's just nobody there right now.
Typically just put it into perspective, I have somewhere between 1500 to 3000 people on Twitch, somewhere between 800 to 2000 on YouTube and 50 people on Twitter.
It's like the difference is massive.
Twitter has that same thing that's developing where there's memes that are constantly flowing through it and so they're very highly connected.
YouTube just doesn't seem to have that.
They're just a bunch of people and people go to YouTube for various reasons I'm going to YouTube to learn.
They come in, they want to learn.
So they're not like on the meme train, they're not in this like cultural zeitgeist train.
They're just like, but why would you use this if statement to win a switch statement in this one particular case?
And you're just like, well that's not what I'm trying to do here.
Yeah, you want to captain the meme train or you want to ride on the meme train?
Yeah or you just want to be able to like create a culture on your chat, because your chat's going to be some variation of that kind of zeitgeist that's flowing through Twitch, and it kind of is very contiguous between X and Twitch, it just feels really out of sync with YouTube.
And then YouTube particularly does a bad job, and some people would argue a good job, because you can swim, swimming, you can actually change what timestamp you're at.
So all of a sudden you'll be like, oh, yeah, you know, I, you know, something about like driving to soccer in my minivan, and then 20 minutes later You'll be talking about zig and it's almost like I personally use whatever to drive to soccer and you're like What are we talking about like so YouTube is a very disjointed chat as well because it depends on where they're at within?
The video swim comes from Netflix, by the way Call swim swim the term.
Yeah, that's that's that we People said swim.
Oh, so you're you're okay swimming through the yeah.
You're not just making up the term.
Thank you well Yeah, but it's probably made up and probably only 10 people said that Netflix.
It's so no one's gonna know it and they're gonna be like, yeah, right, that thought happens on Netflix.
Uh, so guys, going back to projects, what projects on stream or in general?
No, you need to answer why YouTube chat's the best chat.
Well, you kind of convinced me.
Okay, why YouTube is the best chat?
Well, I think I'm just a hater, that's basically what it boils down to.
And I'm just talking shit.
And I'm probably just like from the outside, you know, shooting in because Twitch is such a fun culture.
you know of memes and so it's just fun to shoot from the outside to like I throw to like egg the house of twitch and I just sit back on my lawn chair and with the small YouTube communities just talking shit no you're absolutely right there is a there's a real sort of sense of community that twitch can conform by just like the openness of YouTube it's just better at opening to the world It's more accessible.
It's easier to share.
It's just a more established platform.
That's all. Fully on that.
For the Non... For the open world like I can send it to people that don't usually watch video game streaming or that kind of stuff.
Yeah. If you send a Twitch link, they're like, I don't like video games.
You're like, well, actually it's not video.
That talk happens every single time you mention Twitch because Twitch does have a perspective about it that YouTube does not.
I was just on Rogan's podcast and I think it came up he asked something like is Twitch still a thing so that just gives you an example and then Jamie said yeah definitely still a thing, it's still like growing and so on and so yeah there's just a big slice of humans that don't participate in the Twitch Twitch sphere and I just like talking shit so yeah.
That's a beautiful answer But it's cool that you sort of make it accessible on all these different platforms and I have high hopes for acts but yeah, it's Feature -wise it still has a lot of growing up to do and and just like why do people use acts?
You typically are going there for like a text -based interaction.
You want to look through so I also think they just have like a User expectation change that needs to happen and that that just takes a while, you know That's gonna take a little bit before people get to it but I think their idea of audio first is a great first step where people can kind of listen to it and have the phone away maybe.
There's a lot of like changes that have to happen before X can be successful, Matt.
I mean, X is this incredible comments section, just like Reddit, right?
No, no, no, no. You said incredible.
That's not Reddit. Comments section, correct.
Comments, yeah. Incredibly dynamic and vibrant, even if it's...
Yeah. Yeah, what is the technological platform?
Like, how does the interface and the technology shape the discourse?
It's fascinating, because X has a different style than Reddit, different style than like Facebook, different style than Instagram.
It's interesting, and all those common sections are different technologically, like how the sorting is done, and how easy it is to build the community around it.
Because YouTube is not really a community.
Every single video on YouTube has its own mini community.
Like all talking shit on just that one video.
But like you're not, you can't jump across.
There's no like, hey Bill, hey Jordan.
There's no crosstalk that happens in multiple videos.
Yeah, but the community is awesome.
I love community. I love the feeling of community And I guess that's what Twitch really provides.
YouTube also does have it though, they have an aggregate community.
There's a lot of fun comments and all that on the videos and a lot of thumbs up and then you see that fun discourse that happens and it's like that's the community.
It's just only a certain slice sees it.
I think that's even more so on YouTube for live streaming.
All the same folks show up and they talk shit, they celebrate, they all like the meme training arise.
Yeah. So now what projects shape you as a programmer?
What are the ones you streamed or offline?
For me, I don't know if there's like a one project I can point to, but I can point to a specific spot where I think it happens and I think you can learn a lot from.
Any small program you write will be somewhere between like 1000 to 5000 lines of code.
I consider like a pretty dang small project.
project. You can kind of correlate this to any feature within a larger system as well.
You know, a specific feature on a website could be a thousand lines, couple thousand lines.
There's a point in which all your choices add up.
And that's, I typically find that right around 5 -10 ,000 lines of code.
The choices you've made either weigh you down or kind of free you up.
And so it's right in that, that I feel like I learned the most, is because I love getting to that point in a project, or in some small part of the code base, because at that point I get a test A, how good were my initial gut decisions about how I designed software, but B, now I need to go back and think about like, how am I going to do testing across this in a more effective way?
How can I scale this out to 20 ,000 lines of code?
How can I do all these things with what I've got, or do I need to kind of rethink it?
And I find that that's really where the best learning happens is that everybody has probably a different number that exists.
And as you go to each one of these numbers or how well or holistic you want your project to be, I think that you'll come up with different numbers and I think that number should just get bigger as you get more experienced, because you know those like those projects that are a million lines of code, but they're most certainly not holistic, right?
Like every part of the codebase is some age at some capsule of time with some sort of programming style, some is more functional, more class based, more God help yourself, it's pre -processor macros and C++ right?
Like there's like all these different kind of things you'll find throughout time.
And so that's why I kind of try to think about it as like the feature or the thing you're working on.
It's usually about 5 ,000 lines, is where I find that things get kind of, did I make good or bad decisions?
And that's where I do all my learning is, right on that phase, I'm trying to get it to the point where I should be able to shoot from the hip and do 20 ,000 lines and not be upset about it.
So first of all, the just enjoying the thing you create part, yeah, about there, you can sit back I can see all the parts dancing together.
For me also, debugging.
You get to see the choices you make, materialize is like how easy it is to debug.
I'm a big proponent, I think you mentioned this in the past. I put asserts everywhere.
No, you are the reason why I do that.
Yeah. You're like the first one, keep on going, sorry.
Really? Okay. So for me, one of the joys, whether it's try cash blocks, whether it's a certain, whether it's testing.
I get to see the payoff of all the the mind field of asserts of laid out before me in my kingdom.
By how quickly I can debug a system that as it grows larger and I can, first of all discover errors before they become real bugs.
and also how quickly I can solve those errors.
And that brings me joy.
For me, a lot of the joys of programming is creating powerful systems that don't break down, that work correctly.
The work correctly in majority of the cases.
And there, sort of the stress testing the system and getting all the signals from that system that everything is working correctly is something that fills me with joy and makes sure that the system actually works.
So yeah, that, I don't know if it's five, 10 ,000 lines of code.
If it's Java or C++, it's millions of lines of code.
But yeah, in Python, yeah, I would say 10 ,000 lines of code.
That's when you first get to see the magic.
But anyway, you were saying...
Okay, so you and John Carmack had a conversation about asserts.
Yes. You talked about this idea of putting asserts everywhere that effectively crashed the program.
When you, you have some state in your program that should not be represented and you have made this choice actively.
And so I've never done that before.
And I know this is like an old technique and I obviously must be too young or too dumb to know that this was a thing people did.
I grew up in Java and I think that's probably why I didn't run into this.
So I saw that and I was like, I'm curious about how to use Asserts more.
And then I ran into a person named Yoran, he's the CEO and creator of Tiger Beetle.
It's like the world's fastest, greatest financial database.
And it was spawned out of a company that needed to do a bunch of financial transactions and it's written in Zig, and what they do is they do deterministic simulation testing and they just use NASA's kind of guarantee for creating really great software.
So like don't use you size specify your exact size of inch you expect everywhere.
All these kind of like things they do to be very specific and one of them is that every function should contain two asserts.
Whether it's positive space like you know these things should happen or negative space like you should know this point or should never be.
No, you're programming into things that should never happen.
Normally, you just never specify that you'd never think about that.
So every single function everywhere has all these asserts and these asserts run both in production and in testing.
They're always on and then they did take determination simulation test deterministic simulation testing and run like 200 years of just random data, just complete slop going through the system And seeing how far it goes and when an assert happens.
They're like, here's the input that caused it Here's every last little bit that happened and now you can identify where this went wrong and it was so cool So between you John Carmack and you're on that's where I like, okay, I got a real and NASA I'll throw NASA bonus while NASA can join in on that one As like okay I want to try this and I did try to I built Kind of like this big reverse proxy for me trying to do some game development stuff and I just went ham on the asserts And then I built the whole simulation testing that could do everything deterministically.
So even the result of requests would all come in specific orders.
And I found a bunch of bugs that I just would never have found.
And then I did it for a game I was making.
I found some bugs where my cursor went off screen, it would cause all these different problems because I just never tested them.
And it was super fun.
And it's like a really great way to program.
Yeah, I think it's a skillset, you go over time.
It's not just that you have to specify the preconditions, like everything that has to be true.
It's also adding things that are like, you might not even think about.
You have to sort of anticipate really weird things.
And if you add asserts, especially in complicated functions or in complicated classes that are able to catch really weird things.
That's going to save you so many headaches.
And it's going to help you learn about your own code.
This is one of the things, I think it was Jonathan Blow, that either in conversation with you, or was it in a presentation, he said that when he's starting on a project, he usually doesn't know what, like how to implement it.
Like what, how it's going to work, and I think he was saying that he wants to program in language.
This might have been a criticism of C++, I'm not sure, where he wants to program a language that makes it as painless as possible for him to not know what he's doing how he's going to implement it and to quickly get to a place where he figures it out.
I think there's a fundamental like part of programming is building stuff while not really knowing what the next thing you're doing is.
You kind of have a loose design, maybe a strict design but really you're solving puzzles that are not it is a dark room in a fundamental sense and there you have to anticipate the kind of weirdnesses that might emerge while not really knowing everything just this this full like fog fog of war and there that's a real skill to anticipate the kind of issues that might arise and put asserts on top of them.
And it's also like spiritually, for me, been a really nice way of programming a building of living life is having like very strict asserts that say like, you're gonna fix this problem if it ever arises, you can't just look the other way like this idea of treating warnings as errors.
Like, make sure your code compiles without any warnings.
That was a big leap for me, it's like, But there's so many of them and I it's not really that important.
Yeah, it's like no No, no warnings like make sure you treat every single problem Even like fuzzy problems seriously because that's actually long term is going to create code That's much easier to work with much more fun to work with much more robust resilient to all kinds of weirdness is all that kind and stuff, so it's a different way of approaching coding, probably more NASA -like versus like web programming style.
But yeah, it has made programming for me personally much more fun because one of the most painful things about programming is creating, when you get past 10 ,000, 20 ,000 lines of code and you have to find a bug and that bug can take hours, it could take days to find And that's torture.
Yeah, when your system gets sufficiently large, some of these bugs are just, they are very difficult.
I, you know, bless anyone's soul that's working on Million Line code bases because it does.
I can't tell you how many times I've spent multiple days just trying to figure out the root cause of the bug.
Not even the fix. Just like, why does this happen?
And that's hard. So I love it.
I just love the asserts, because I'm not good at them.
I can see it's definitely a skill that I don't put into practice constantly, which means It's just not like a muscle memory type of thing.
And so it's just one of those things I just love.
It's just, it's such a fascinating way to approach a problem.
Cause I would have never thought, you know what I'm gonna do.
If I'm wrong, I'm gonna crash this thing.
And I'm going to crash right here because I should never be wrong.
But instead of like, oh, actually that makes perfect sense.
I should crash this thing.
I've done something terribly wrong here.
Why would this ever exist?
And then you're like, this is gonna solve a whole class of problems. Yeah.
And especially if it's some productions like well the user is going to see this crash.
Yeah, well, you should minimize the number of times any user ever sees the crash.
Not by like having a nice blue screen or whatever the fuck, but like actually stopping everything.
And that's going to create an incentive for you to never have that happen.
You're actually going to put in the time to make sure it never happens.
And the nice part is like with the web and all that you can always pop up something and say, hey, things have gone very, very wrong or unable to recover.
you can give them a nice message and then log it off so you can see it and then measure how often are you doing it?
I understand that there's a bit of interestingness to a web project.
Do you want to always crash a server?
There's a bit of a gamble if you release a bad version and you crash all your servers constantly, that's a pain you're going to have to accept.
I think this is more applicable for single systems like robots and so on.
you have struggled with ADHD.
I think a lot of people are really inspired by the fact that you're able to be productive and flourish while having ADHD.
How'd you overcome it?
Well, there's a lot of things that ADHD affects.
And so I'll start with some of the easiest things because there's directly applicable to these kind of collateral damage applicable things that happened.
So, one thing that has really helped me with ADHD is maturity.
I think that's just a thing that everyone needs more of, meaning that I found myself getting so wiggly and so out of control when I would try to sit down and read.
I just couldn't handle it.
I just felt like I'd read a page and didn't read anything.
The part of me that just went, oh my gosh, I just can't even do this.
I had to just simply quit listening to it and said, nope, I'm rereading this page.
I'm, I will remember reading some pages in college like 18 times in a row, just like I'm going to force myself to just do this the correct way.
And so there's an aspect of maturity that really helps no matter what I will do the thing I'm going to do.
And I'm going to do it well, and maybe it takes me a lot longer and that's okay.
That's not the point of it.
It's that I'm doing it.
And that's the point.
And so that's kind of like one thing that I think just generally helps and ADHD, no ADHD, you know, the resilience, emotional resilience.
It's just like a really important aspect that just helps.
And so I think that has been a large part.
That really helps me.
Um, there's things that I still obviously struggle with.
Like it's clear where I'm really bad at stuff and just trying to like, think through all the different things that I'm bad at.
There's more things I'm bad at than I'm good at.
And so programming obviously has something that just allows me to remain and focused and it's like a strength of mine.
And so I started off where I could just do it for a little bit and then just through kind of that emotional resilience, I was able to start doing it more and more.
And so now I can just do it for like 10, 12, 15 hours at a time.
And I absolutely love it.
And so it's, it's become kind of like a joy.
It's like playing a musical instrument.
I'm really into it, but then if it came down to, Hey, you need to go schedule your own, you know, dentistry and go do all these other things or make sure the kids have this type of stuff ready for, you know, the meals, even the pack throughout the week.
I'm historically very bad at that and will probably, uh, continue to be very bad at that.
And so I must say that one of the reasons why I excel so much is because I also have a wife who is so good to me and she helps clear out a lot of the things in my life that cause.
A lot of like me kind of getting snowballed into a weird spot where I'm just like distracted getting nothing done.
And so she's really helped me.
So it'd be foolish of me to claim that I've defeated day ADHD by myself, but instead I find that the places that I can really control, I've done a very good job at, and the things that I obviously need to do much better at, my wife has helped me a whole bunch. And so I've kind of cheated.
Maybe I found a cheat code loving wife, but that has been the thing that has really helped.
You said a lot of interesting things.
So on the reading and for me it's also audio book side, I do the same thing and I've gotten much better at it.
Which is like, you know, I tune out mentally and I, you know, I'll, yeah, they read a page and you don't understand anything on the page, you didn't actually read it.
And yeah, I forced myself to just reread it or re -listen to an audio book, which is a much more common problem for me now.
And forcing myself to really pay attention, because I listen to audio books often when I run and it's so easy to just tune out.
Yeah. It's a skill, like I didn't realize just how much of a skill listening to an audiobook is, especially when there's other sensory inputs, like when you run.
So I have to force myself to like really pay attention to every single word. And if I don't like tune out, don't remember what I just listened to in the past 30 seconds, I forced myself to re listen to it.
And sometimes that means like five times until I like it's like punishing myself to like, you're gonna listen this boring shit over and over until you get good at that little skill of like, zoom in and you're like, yeah, there's people.
They're like doing stuff, there's nature, it doesn't matter.
You're listening to every single word and loading it in and trying to stay focused.
Even though there's just so many distractions all around you.
It's definitely a learning skill and it takes a lot of time.
And when I say, you know, oh, I was able to do from here to here, I'm speaking over the course of like five years of doing this every day.
I guess not some small, there's no...
You could, the nice part about that decision though is you can make that decision today.
You can make it right now.
You're gonna be like from here on out, I'll never make that mistake again.
I will say, I'm going to read 50 pages.
I will sit down and read 50 pages.
And when I get distracted, I'll go back to the last place I remember and I'll start again.
And like, that's a decision you can make.
That's a mature, you know, non -emotional decision to make and you can do that.
It just may be really painful for the first couple of years of making said decisions and then it gets easier and then it gets easier.
And then it just, it becomes more natural to change yourself.
Yeah. And with every media, with every platform, I think it's like a new skill.
For me like using social media has been that just like I end up doing doom scrolling too easily on platforms. So, and one solution is not to look at all, which is kind of when I lean on mostly these days, but I feel like I should be able to check, just read.
feel a thing learn a thing and then put it down yeah versus like This glaze look over your eye and you're not really paying attention anymore and you're dead inside and you feel horrible afterwards I don't understand The horrible afterwards is real serious I I've definitely I can 100 % notice that I am a more anxious person the more time I spend scrolling Yeah, yeah, I can just feel it.
It's like something inside of me That's kind of I don't know how to say it other than it like wants to get out but I don't really know what that is, it's not anger.
But it's not, it's very anxious.
It's like the opposite of the feeling I have when I wake up in the morning and I'm feeling good and I look out in nature and look at the sun and just and there's like a bird chirping and this kind of thing like scrolling through social media, even if it's like super positive stuff or whatever, it's still not the same feeling as a bird chirping.
Bird chirping on Instagram is a different bird chirping than in real life.
Because bird chirping on Instagram, I'll start swiping until there's demons of different types fighting inside my head.
And then, yeah, different anxiety, insecurity, whatever the hell, just the mixture of chaos versus the bird chirping in real life, that's beautiful.
But again, that's the same thing as with the audiobook.
It boils down to, man, these people that talk about meditation, I think that's probably, they're onto something.
Cuz like the that's what that's what it is is be able to like focus Calmly and deliberately on a thing whether it's reading or audiobook or existence When I have sort of observed the breath you're able to silent out everything else Remove everything else from focus.
Yeah, that's a skill I heard it put really beautifully which is that Uh, we in America really have misunderstood liberty because we typically have liberty as just the freedom to do whatever you want.
And the argument was that it's not the freedom to do whatever you want.
It's the freedom to be able to do what you will and how often is what you, you actually want to do, you don't do.
Cause you get trapped doing something that you've convinced yourself in this quick moment you want to do.
And so it's like, I want liberty.
I want the ability to control my energy and to be able to like, do the thing I want to do not to get distracted and destroyed in all the millions of distractions and some of us get you know Handed a worse deck of cards some of us get a better deck of cards But I don't think there's anybody that doesn't struggle with it in the technological age Yeah, and there's the skill what will you say to the the skill of achieving focus and programming?
Like do you have a process of how you?
Sit down and try to sort of approach a problem.
So all the different And not just distractions, but the challenges of starting a project, of thinking through the design, how to maintain real focus, because it's a really difficult intellectual endeavor.
I guess at this point, I'm lucky, but when I first started, I can remember that every last part of programming, I had to go look up, I had to go read, I had side quests at all times, every step was a side quest. Why is my screen blinking when I'm trying to render this thing out?
Oh, I didn't know about double buffering.
Why is this happening?
How do I even write to the screen?
How do you know like everything was a question.
I had more questions than answers.
And so I constantly had this, like the problem of side quests.
And I find that to be a very exhausting thing.
But as I learned my instrument very, very well, I don't have as many side quests.
I become more and more able to just focus on the thing I want to do.
And I find that to be something that is just super, super useful.
So when I say I'm kind of lucky, meaning that I've spent so much of my life preparing for this moment, that now when I have the opportunity to do something, I can just do that thing and I don't like, I can be just on an airplane and I can just program for hours.
I don't have to look up a single thing.
I don't have to do anything.
I don't even have to test the code.
I can write a thousand lines of code on an airplane and I'm very confident that it's going to be 98 % pretty dang good.
And I'm very happy about that because that allows me just to be in the moment, solving the problem I'm trying to solve.
then I have one hundred percent of my brain power solving a problem.
And this is why I also, it's the same reason why I recommend learning how to type and learning your editor so well you don't even have to think about the action because the people that have to, even if you just look down, that's still mental processing power.
You have to spend looking at a keyboard in which you already know where the key is.
Like you do, you know at this point if you've been typing for thousands of hours you know where the key is, just stop looking down and you'll learn really quickly.
And so it's like this thing where it's like, I'm not gonna spend all that time And all that mental effort, like, looking up the thing, I'm gonna just memorize, you know, I'm just gonna get it in me and then I can go fast. And it feels good.
And so that's how I'd kind of defeat that, is cause now I get to do something where it's like, there's no more questions.
It's now me just expressing myself into this medium, and it feels really good.
I'm sure there's still like, things that pull at you, like curiosities, distractions.
Like, ooh, I wonder how, you know, you know, anytime I guess you have access to the Internet, you're gonna like - Twitter's a big one on that one, yeah.
You're gonna get curious about stuff.
Including, I guess you're speaking about everything in the editor's optimized, but you're, okay, you can always improve stuff, you can always find better, sort of, plugins and macros, and oh, you know what?
This thing that took, this pain point I just found, this tiny pain point, let me spend the next five days creating a plugin for my editor or whatever the fuck.
uh, to, uh, remove that one pain point when you should have just kept going, uh, as opposed to taking the side quest. So I have a rule.
Yeah. Which is I do not edit my RC other than some kind of cataclysmic thing.
Like someone updates a plugin, I didn't know they update it and now there's like a hard error in my editor and I have to like move forward. Um, but I have a rule where I will edit my RC, my NeoVim RC or anything once a year, something that bothers me.
I'll write it down.
I'll remember it. I'll be like, okay, I want to change that.
But I will just not go back to it.
Now, every now and then I, I'll break that rule.
If I know, like, Oh, I want a new remap to be able to do this one command.
And that takes like literally 13 seconds.
Like copy paste, do this, ba, ba, ba done.
Okay. I have this new remap.
It made perfect sense in this situation, but I don't go plug and exploring.
I don't try to solve every problem.
I don't want a perfect editor.
Cause that is a pursuit that will never stop.
I just go. This is good.
Good break point. I won't do it again.
So I spent, last month, I probably spent 100 hours just like editing every possible thing I could about how I start up my system, and make I can have a computer from zero to 60 in almost no time now.
Everything, the way I exactly want it.
NeoVin everything all perfectly set up, happy enough.
I'm not gonna touch that system again.
Maybe I'll touch it next year.
Maybe I'll take a year off.
You know, it's just, I'm fine with that.
I'm fine with not being perfect.
All right, zero to 60.
Let's talk about the perfect set up.
Uh, what's your perfect programming set up keyboard operating system?
How many screens chair all right.
I like all this idea.
Let's go. So keyboard you're using my favorite keyboard right there.
The Kinesis advantage, uh, save my career.
Beautiful keyboard. Uh, concavity and some clusters are just so important because if you really think about it, especially if you're using clarity, when you're pressing the symbols, like on a standard keyboard, you're just doing this the whole time, backspace, enter, cymbals, like, you're just doing this, and it just screws up your wrist constantly doing this, and this one you're constantly doing like, control and shift, and it's just this messin' you up, so it's just right here.
That's so much nicer in life.
So, keyboard, most important, I'd say, get that one done.
For people who don't know, can you use this keyboard?
I think the thing that you experience the most is exactly the thing you just said now, which is the backspace is really easy to press.
Yeah. versus what it is on normal keyboards.
So Backspace in general symbolizes, like you're deleting a thing, it symbolizes a mistake.
Not symbolizes, it usually means a mistake.
And so not only did you just make a mistake in what you were typing, you also have to take a physically painful action, annoying action.
Yeah. To fix that mistake, and for most of us, we make a lot of mistakes.
So Kinesis just makes it pleasant and fast and easy physically to correct the mistake?
That's probably for me the number one reason of Kinesis.
Everything else, yeah, Super Plus with the macros and the positioning, the concavity like you mentioned, but their mistakes are pleasant.
Yeah, I'm on that team, that's why I love that.
I would say that's one of the most important things.
The next thing that I find to be very, very important is that one monitor.
I'm a one monitor kinda guy.
What? Really? Really?
So when I program, when I do anything ...
Now, when I stream, I obviously have a second computer that runs the stream, because I sometimes crash my computer at the restart or whatever, so I do have a second screen there that I put stuff up, but most of the time, you'll notice that even when I'm streaming, you've been there, I have to physically switch to the streaming channel for me to read it, and that's because I'm operating off of one screen, and so I have this whole style in which I like to navigate, inspired by Starcraft, is that I believe in the press one key, go where you want to be mentality.
And so everything about my setup is press one key.
So when I want to go to Twitch chat, Alt 2.
Twitch chat. When I go on and go to my browser, alt one, that's my browser alt three.
That's where I go to my programming.
That's power finger.
Obviously a big middle finger right there, just to smash it down.
Uh, Alt six is going to be gimp.
So my a GNU image manipulation program.
So if I want to draw, I go there.
When I used to have slack, it was all five.
If I have a spare terminal where I need to run some extra things, That's all for I had all these kind of everything is perfectly mapped out to a single key And then when it comes down to using say tea mucks I have all my terminals into one single terminal and now I'm able to kind of switch between there prefix one goes to my vim editor whatever project I'm in it's always the first Teamups tab a tab if you will not sure they call it a session But I'm not sure how to describe it if you're not familiar with tea mucks a tab Second one is like my spare terminal.
Third one is my long running process terminal.
My fourth one is a long running process terminal.
So I have it all set up.
So every project I go to automatically spawns session, one zim session, two spare terminal session.
Three, we'll also open it.
So it's like, everything's just ready to rock.
Everything has been optimized to where I do that.
If I want to go to a project it's control f and any terminal will bring up a fuzzy Find list of every one of my folders on my operating system in which I can go to with just a couple of keystrokes and boom.
I'm in that one now.
And so it's like very oriented to find where I need to be as quickly as possible.
Via keyboard. Via keyboard. Then in VIM, I developed a plugin called Harpoon, which is I press one button and I can pin one of the files to, like, a temporary buffer.
I think projectile is potentially close to this in Emacs?
I can't remember projectile.
I think projectile is closer to my sessionizing script.
But anyways, uh, so now I can, I have four.
Pinned files in which I can go to any of those pinned files with just a single keystroke.
And so now it's just like, because every time you develop a feature, usually you have like three files you're kind of primarily working in, and then I can fuzzy find for the other files and that's that, but usually I just have like these three power files that I'm always swapping in between.
And so it's like, now everything is just, I want to go to the browser.
That's one press. I want to go to my workstation.
That's one press. I want to go to a specific folder.
I need to change folders.
is sometimes you work between two different projects.
So in Temucks, that's prefix capital L will swap between your last two.
So I have alternate projects, I can even swap between projects and pretty much one key.
So it's just like, do, do, do, just trying to optimize it, so I don't think as much. Because I think search fatigue is a massive fail where you have to look for it.
Like when I see people on a Mac do this and then explode all the different ones, that gives me anxiety.
I'm like, why are you using your eyeballs to search for what you want to do?
Like, make it into a key press and never think about it again.
You're making you think a lot, whether I can live with your system, whether it's better because it feels better, at least intellectually feel better.
It may not be great for some people.
There's a few profound things he said, which is like, really what you're.
The, the, the number of windows or tasks you're switching between, whether it's programming, the number of files you're working on is small, anyone time, anyone like space of like 20 minutes or something like that.
So okay, that's a profound truth.
Sometimes we think like, Oh, I need the full freedom to search, but you don't.
You're usually working on a very small slice.
But I guess the trade off there, like I always have three monitors.
Not when I'm traveling, but my happy place is three monitors.
It's like, do you really need all of them to be present there?
So you're turning your head.
Now the monitors I have is two vertical ones, which is just better for certain kinds of content, I mean they're positioned vertically, so you can read, you can use your eyes to scan quickly.
Interesting, so I don't even do that.
I even have it so zoomed in that I probably only had like maybe 25 lines of code at any one time on my 27 inch monitor.
Yeah I think that's, okay, I think I feel fundamentally constrained when I can't see more.
Because your eyes are just good at jumping, like okay like you could like when I searched why not press a couple key strokes control you control B jumped down by up and up and down by half because the ape visual system was designed to like you're loading a lot of information like what if every time you have to investigate this table what's on this table you had to press a keystroke you you could develop the skill set that integrate that information.
But it's really, there is an effective thing where if you have a sheet of paper like this and I'm looking at it, my eyes will be able to load in the structure of the information, the topics of the information.
You just could do it faster, I think.
There's a big cost because it's an extra monitor.
But there is some stuff that's vertical one vertically positioned code.
See code is an if you want.
Cause code you really, 25 lines at a time.
I think you can do a lot.
This is more for like articles and especially with visual information and them or documentation.
You could just jump faster.
But I'm trying to, as you were speaking so eloquently, I was like wondering, am I just like deceiving myself that I need that?
can I just keyboard shortcuttify everything and just have everything in one monitor?
That's something I should probably try because I'm a big proponent of just automating everything with the keyboard because you could just move really, really fast so you don't have to think.
One of my, you know, because I also do creative stuff like whether it's recording music or video editing, it's hard, you know, some of these programs don't make it super easy for you Windows with autohocky, you can do quite a lot, but still there's limitations on how much you could do with the keyboard. So it really is a pain in the ass to have to use the mouse.
But man, you're really making me think.
It's, you know, even the text with the reading one, I like fundamentally I think I agree with you that you can see a lot more and you can kind of look up and down and see those two things and probably in articles or things like that, I could, you know, if there's like a graph down here that's really big that would take up your whole screen, plus text, I could see why that would be very beneficial to zoom out to be able to have all that information.
But for me, I can only look at like a square inch, like really, that's all my eyes can actually focus on.
So when I'm reading, I'm right here.
And I have to like structurally try to pattern match what I think the information looks like.
Then I start reading it.
So I'm not exactly sure if I actually get any real benefit of having a lot of stuff on screen.
As opposed to, I can relax my eyes so much. I don't even have to focus.
The words are so big.
Like I actually program pretty zoomed in.
Um, my text is bigger than this when I, when I program.
And so, it's just that it's so comfortable, I don't even have to exert any effort to read the code.
But you have to kind of train your brain to know that you can navigate in the like, spatially using keys.
Yeah, the, NeoVim, by the way.
Or maybe it has everything to do with NeoVim, okay.
All right, and then NeoVim's obviously the next big one.
I love NeoVim. Reason being is that I think you can make all the arguments you want about which editor is the best, I do not think you can make an argument that Vim Motions aren't superior.
Here we go. Can you explain Vim Motions?
Okay. What is this?
So Neo Vim, Vim is a old school editor, Neo Vim - It's a modern take on an old school editor.
Yeah. And what's ELI -5, what does it take to work with Neo Vim?
Oh, okay. I thought you were talking about a Vim motion there?
That's how... You know that meme that's just like, Hey, Jarvis, can I tell you about Vim Motions, Cause they can't fit anything else in their head.
Cause they only have VIM motions.
You said EL five, like explain it like a five.
Yeah. But in my head, it's like, okay, E has jumped to the end of the word L's one more, it's like, dude, I'm so like broken.
I'm like, okay, VIM motion when I hear letters.
Um, yeah. So you can think of it like this is that VIM has a language to describe movements in text because its primary mode of operation is manipulating or editing text.
So it is a well thought through set of movements, deleting, yanking, pasting, popping, all that kind of stuff that goes in motion that are optimized for working with pretty much code.
Good example, say you have three lines of code you want to delete.
If you're in VS code, take your little beautiful mouse, highlight those things, press the backspace.
That's lovely. Your hand left the keyboard, very simple to do though, it's very beginner friendly.
I was a huge vim hater by the way, so I just probably the biggest VIM hater.
If there was an, like SAWL to Apostle Paul, I am like the SAWL to Apostle Paul of VIM.
So you see how big the gap was or you can do something that's like, I don't know what the VS code shortcut is, but I'm sure there's some keys you can press to delete the current line you're on, delete, delete, delete.
Right. And you can just do that.
In VIM, I can go DAP, delete around paragraph, all contiguous code in that thing, I'm gonna delete.
And so D then I can choose my motion.
I want to take, AP, a round paragraph, or maybe I want to D.
F mean jump up to the next character that matches the next character I'm going to press.
So DF, opening parentheses will delete everything from your cursor up to the first opening parentheses.
So you get to describe your motion in these little keystrokes.
And as you get really good, you've seen people that can master Fortnite, it's the same thing with mastering them motions, when you get so good, you no longer think about each individual movement instead, you're just like, get rid of the paragraph, jump here, jump this, highlight this, yank this, do this.
You know, it becomes so fast that you can superiorly edit text at a very fast rate.
And there comes a point where you, when you know your language really well, you know, the problem you're really working on really well where editing text and getting code out actually becomes one of the many bottlenecks.
People always talk about, well, most of the time I think, most of the time I'm not thinking I'm programming.
I know what I want to do.
I want to go as fast as possible because I've been just doing it for so long.
And I'm so familiar with kind of the general space that it becomes a huge problem for me.
I cannot tell you how many times that I've been purely bottlenecked by the fact that I just can't type fast enough, I just need to get it out of my head onto the text editor.
And so, that's why I think VIM motions are superior in all aspects.
Keep your hands on the keyboard, on the home row, and can manipulate text in very wide and fast ways.
Oh so, this is not just about writing text, this is about modifying text.
It's primarily about modifying text.
Yes. And I'm sure that most editors, including Emacs, including VS Code, can do all those same things, but there is something that just don't encourage you to discover those things.
That's like an important thing about a lot of technologies and programming languages, that a lot of them can do a lot of the stuff.
But it's something about whether it's the community or the style of the language or anything like this that encourages you to not be lazy in the beginning and learn the fast way to edit text In this particular example.
Yeah. How to use the keyboard. That's a fascinating sort of, just reality of how technology is used.
You want to be encouraged to find the fast thing as quickly as possible so that longterm it's efficient and fun to use the thing.
It takes a long time for dividends, a long time.
But on top of that, notice I didn't say VIM.
I'm not saying go use VIM, I'm saying VIMMotions.
Let me give you one more example, okay.
I'm a big fan. Okay, let's say you have a line that contains some variable, some function you're calling something that takes in a string.
And you need to do that again.
So you would typically copy that line, you'd paste that line below, you'd go into the string and you'd change the string.
Let's say it's calling some sort of configuration, you need to call it three times with three different configuring strings.
In Vim, I like to do shift V to highlight the whole line then Y.
Some people do Y Y but I don't like to do double ones, I like to be able to do two different fingers because you can do that way faster than one finger twice, just a little optimization for me cause you can't press that as fast. So anyways, very optimized in my approach. So I yank the line, paste the line, CI double quotes will delete everything inside the first occurring string.
Then I can type the string, escape, save. And so it's like so optimized that I can just jump so fast in between that, whereas the copying and pasting line is probably the same speed, but the navigating to the string, deleting what's currently in the string.
And then you know like that's such a fast motion in vim, and I just do that all the time to backtrack really don't question CI What's the difference between typing the letters and using the letters to navigate in that it?
How do you switch between the two modes?
Okay so insert mode means that you're just putting in text.
Yeah, and then Normal mode means that you're moving your cursor.
And how do you switch between the two escape?
Skate. Skate goes from insert mode into normal mode and to go into insert mode, press I to take your current cursor and go to the beginning.
A to go to the end of the year cursor.
Capital A to go to the end of the line.
Capital I to go to the beginning line.
O to put a new line below and then put your cursor at the proper intent for the language.
Shift O to shift your current line down and then put a new line in.
Like you can see. There's a lot.
Oh, there's like a line.
So you're pressing escape a lot.
Yeah, I mapped mine.
I do control C. Control C does the same thing except for in one edge case.
People hate that. I got used to it just due to the fact that I was using IntelliJ, and I really hate pressing the Escape key So I just got used to pressing us So that seems like an essential thing to do if you're using NeoVib to map escape to something.
Caplock would be like your standard go -to.
Oh yeah, I map it too.
Cool. I got you. Yeah, so then it's just really easy to press in.
Boom boom boom. Not a big deal at all.
But yeah, I think that if you're willing to learn it the emotions are superior But if you're not willing to learn it then they're not superior.
You should just not do it, right?
If you're willing to endure pain it's good.
If you're not, it's actually way worse.
It's a hundred times worse.
Right, so if you like pain, use Neovim, totally.
Yeah, you're totally unfortunately, now you get it.
If you like joy, you useemic.
Oh, sorry, sorry. Did Emacs ever get a good text editor?
I know they're a great operating system, but I never caught up if they got a good text editor.
Operating system, I think you've been mis -educated my friend.
So at least 30 minutes on Emacs versus Neovim is what Reddit requested.
Have you actually used Emacs in order to be able to talk some of shit, or no?
I used it for a year.
You used it for a year.
Yeah, yeah, Doo'll Mac, Spaced Macs, and regular Emacs.
But you don't know Lisp, so did you really use it?
I kind of hacked my way through kind of like, okay, so this is how the configure, you know, like, you kind of get your way through and do all that.
So, you recommended sort of mastering U of M and really learn the depths of it, but Emacs is okay to just kind of use before making a judgment.
I think everybody - You got me on that one.
Yeah, no, and what's new, is Lua?
So Lua would be the configuration language, but you have, it's written in C, but you have Lua for, and Lua's just a dead simple language, anyone can program Lua.
I actually don't know why.
I think it's because my love for Lisp that I went with Emacs.
You just choose a path and you walk down that path.
And because there's just such a vibrant intense battle between the two communities, you just start fighting just because everybody else is fighting.
And then one day, you're like an old warrior, like on a horse and you're wondering what, what was this all for?
And I mean, it's quite sad, you know, a seriousness that I haven't, to this day, tried new of him.
It's uh, I think because there is a learning curve.
There's a learning curve to a lot of these editors to really like to really learn it and I think this is some of the criticism of maybe VS code or Sublime or Adam that it's so easy to not learn it to just kind of half -ass use it.
And there is a big benefit to having editors that like forced you to have some learning curve where you like take the art the the science the procedure of editing seriously because like you spend so much time in it you might as well like learn like how to use the thing my big takeaway really like what I'm trying to say with all these words is that I honestly don't actually think that the editor obviously does not make the programmer but I think it says a lot about your character as a programmer if you don't know how to use your editor Well, there's something about a person who's willing to commit
their life to programming and spending literally 50 ,000 hours, doing an activity over the course of their lifetime and never take the time to learn their editor through and through.
It just seems strange.
Like, right? You'd never see that in another world where people would be able to build something or do something and just completely forget how these things work and only just focus on one part of like their craft. And so to me, it's just like, it doesn't matter.
how you use it, I want to see the person that just knows how to use it.
And they know how to use it well.
When there's a problem, they can say why the problem exists and then go and fix the problem.
To me, that's like, there you go.
You've done it. You now know your tool.
Go forth and conquer with said tool.
Especially for tools to use a lot.
Like your whole life, your life, whatever, if you're a developer or anything.
What is the thing you do a lot?
Meetings. Yeah. Yeah, I mean I keep got a question like how can this be done a lot better because Every single day you do this for hours a day How many hours did you spend on thinking how to do this better or whether to do it at all in the case of meetings That's the people surprisingly just don't do this enough.
I see this just to go back to jiu -jitsu There's a lot of people that show up and do jiu -jitsu or martial arts They do the same way over and over and over and they invest a tremendous amount of energy and they don't ask like, how do I do it differently to improve faster?
In the case of jiu -jitsu or any kind of sport, same with practicing the piano or the guitar, They just religiously put in a lot of time and derive a lot of joy from getting better.
They don't enough ask the meta question of like, how can I do this better?
and with editors it's surprisingly how often people do just that, with typing, it's surprising how many people do just that.
Like you said they, like they're pecking or looking down, it's like the quality of life improvement you can have by learning to touch type, by just like typing without looking is like, it's like immeasurable, you're bringing a lot of joy to your life because all of us are typing a lot and yeah, I mean, the reason by the way, I was extremely efficient with Emacs.
I'm sure, you know, all jokes aside, it feels like NeoVib has more room for the kind of efficiency I've had with Emacs to be able to move really fast, as you described me, to edit.
There is a real joy.
It's not just efficiencies, it's a freedom that you can get when you get really good with an editor.
The reason I chose to go with VS Code is it felt like there's going to be an acceleration of features to which Neovim or Emacs will not be able to catch up and I don't mean in the next five years.
I mean in the next 30 years.
Yeah. And it felt like I almost want to take the pain of learning new editors constantly and just switching and learning that because I was getting so comfortable in Emacs, you know this is this Kinesis keyboard everything all the shortcuts I know how to program and it felt like this is not you know new VM will not be here in 50 years possibly might be I don't know but it felt like you want to learn these constants are different technologies.
No cursor is example - a great example that I've primarily and using cursor now, I go back to VS Code, and Cursor, just the skill of using AI is a real skill.
From the shortcuts, to the timing, to the layout of the windows, to how I think about where, when, how to use the AI that doesn't distract me, that it empowers me, not just for the fuck of it, or for the fun of it, for the actual measure of productivity.
It's a skill, and I feel like I would be stuck in a local max and will have comfort if I stayed with Emacs.
And maybe the same should be true for me with new vim, I should try it seriously.
I'm sure there's a plugin like a copilot type of situation that you could set up with new vim.
I should possibly consider that, but like cursor is doing a lot of really fascinating stuff on the IDE side not just sort of generate code and like edit that code manually.
it's like continuously be able to rewrite code.
It's like the idea of tap, tap, tap, tap, move the cursor around, but also modify parts of code and do the diff really nicely.
That, whether it's cursor or VS code, that wins that battle out with Copilot, I don't know.
But like that feels like fun with a different experience than the really efficient, joyful experience that you just described in your own, selling me on this as Neovim.
That doesn't have AI in the picture, obviously immediately, but you can.
Yeah, absolutely. I would have 100 % agree that Curser seems like such a cool product.
Like I actually think there's like a lot of really neat things coming down with all of that.
And I could, you know, I could change from Neovim.
I don't use Neovim because I love Neovim.
I use Neovim because I love the instrument I play.
And so it's like if Curser can meet those needs I could see myself moving over.
where I don't have some sort of obsessed attachment with it.
I am curious though that every time I use, I think I just have scale issues.
I think I'm just so riddled with skill issues when it comes to using AI.
I've yet to be able to use it in a way that I really love it.
We'll talk about it before then.
Oh, ball to sit on.
I forgot to say that.
Ball to sit on. Desk needs to be properly hided.
One monitor. I should be two thirds way up the screen.
I don't like to turn my head.
I prefer my my hands in kind of like a pistol neutral position and there you go a ball to sit on yoga ball Yoga ball.
What's that about? I just helps just maintain good posture cuz when I have something to lean against I do this So you're for hours sitting without?
What are you doing?
I sit on the ball and then I bounce Are you is your back leaning on a thing?
No, what the fuck? Well, how else do you like the policy?
You're the only person in the world sitting on the yoga ball as you program for hours.
You do realize that, all right?
It feels great. The problem is whenever I get it back, I just slouch and I find myself just getting uncomfortable and I'm like, why am I uncomfortable?
Like my shoulders are going to be getting goofed up.
I'm just chicken -necking, constantly like, ah, you know, it's just like ...
But you're able to keep your posture for hours on the yoga ball?
Yeah. And so I can just do that.
And then I find myself if I slouch like okay.
No gotta get back You know like incredible back muscles or no I I'm well I I don't think it takes incredible back muscles to keep posture remain upright.
Yeah, I think that's a pretty basic human function I'm I would not consider myself a strong person.
Yeah, basic human function.
I don't know facts of the logic okay, cool with one screen NeoVim with operating system.
Linux, just because I want a good window manager.
That's the whole press one button, bring up Chrome.
I just use i3. I'm sure I could use something better than i3.
People always tell me all these window managers are really great, but I just want, I just have like those three screens I switched between, so it doesn't really, I don't really care what I use, just as long as I can press one button and go.
Yeah, I'm the same, so half and half.
So half Linux, the other half, windows with Linux, meaning WSL.
What's that? Windows Subsystem for Linux.
Weasel. Weasel. See, there's got to be a better one that's more positive.
Weasel just sounds.
Seems right up Microsoft's alley.
That seems perfect.
So, people often accuse me of being a shill for somebody.
Sometimes dictators, if I'm a shill for anybody it's for Windows, there you go.
I get paychecks every week from.
It's a lot by Bill Gates.
Well, he's not Microsoft, anymore, a bomb.
Developers, developers.
I'm just joking. I think, man, I need to try Mac.
I need to try. I'm surrounded.
I'm surrounded by people with iPhones.
I use Android. I use Android.
Yeah, there you go.
Oh. We're losers together.
Losers on a sinking ship.
Okay, so just to stay on you, Vin, for a sec and to give love and a shout out to your friend, Tej.
He streams, by the way.
He's a streamer and I subscribed and I've been enjoying it.
My allegiance is slowly shifting from you to him.
The quality is far superior with him, the looks, the intelligence, the skill set, everything.
Just far superior. No, okay so he...
You know you're making his day.
All right. So he mentioned that he loves Neoven because it gives him the ability to eliminate having to do things he doesn't like.
That's just a nice way to frame sort of what does the automation process described of automating away, assigning shortcuts to things that are painful, so that procedure.
I mean, I wonder if you'd agree with that.
Fully agree. We have very similar mentalities when it comes to usage of neovim, why people should use it, all that kind of stuff and how to even use it well.
He definitely takes it probably to a further degree.
He spends more time automating and all that.
I don't necessarily derive a lot of joy from getting the perfect setup.
And so but a lot to learn from he's very very good at what he does He is by far probably one of these he's 30 years old been programming for not too many years And he is one of the most talented developers for sure it's very shocking to see how Smart someone can be so people should check them out at T E E J underscore DV.
Yep Tij dv is his name.
His last name is Deveri's Deveri's December.
Oh, it's not a real bro.
Okay. Cool Yeah, yeah, so it's just TJ.
That's just his name just nice felt kind of fun What do you love about him?
How much did he pay you to ask these questions?
Thousands of dollars.
So many dollars. I can't even count that many dollars.
He is a trust. Obviously, trust is the biggest thing, especially in the quote unquote streaming YouTube kind of world, if you will.
It's very easy to find people that will want to like be a part of stuff.
People tend to latch on to things, and it's very hard to find someone that you can really really trust. And so he's just somebody whom I can genuinely trust. He'll always tell the truth He's all he's all the right things for a good friend in this kind of endeavor.
So as a good friend, he told me Questions that could backstab you with I forgot how much I don't trust him So speaking of harpoon you mentioned it he said, you know to to ask you about whether Basically how many years or decades it is going to take to transition to harpoon 2, to actually release it, develop it and so on.
Can you describe what harpoon is, and why you seem to be incapable of finishing a single project?
Okay, that was a lovely framed question.
So harpoon 2 is actually done.
This is what I did.
To avoid the swirl and the thousands of questions I will inevitably get.
I kept the master branch as harpoon one and I've kept harpoon 2 as harpoon 2 branch And people that don't read the read me to say that I just use harpoon two now.
That's that's their fault That's it.
I just don't I really don't like answering hundreds of questions about open source stuff I used to love doing open source and all that but I kind of got my soul crushed during the falcon years and so I guess I'm just kind of allergic to being a really active maintainer, I built everything just for me.
Like Harpoon is just literally just built for me.
It's just what I spent like three months trying to figure out the most optimal navigation for files.
And that's what I came up with.
So Harpoon, it's a take on alternate file.
If you're familiar with alternate file, typically you'll have this in all editors where you can go back to the file you were just in.
And so that means you can have effectively two files you swapped back and forth in.
You probably used it a bunch, really fast way to navigate, pretty nice thing to do.
Um, I want something with, I want alternate file, but like three of them or four of them.
And so that's all harpoon is, is just being able to pin a file.
And so I have one button to press, to go to a file, another for another, another for another insight and have up to four.
So I just had my four power fingers, uh, for Dvorak.
What is that? That's HTN S.
So if I go control HTN or S it goes to one of the four files and that's it.
That's all it is. And you could technically make it so you can add in functions and be able to execute things externally.
So you can open up, uh, terminals, you can send requests off to servers.
and you can do anything you want with it.
I just have it primarily designed for opening files.
Since you're mentioning, what keyboard layout do you use?
Do you use Dvorak? I use Dvorak, but I use a custom version of Dvorak.
The reason why I used it is in 2017, we were just having my second kid, it was Christmas and I am having so much pain in my arm and I'm sitting there freaking out, like, oh my gosh, is this the end of my career.
Am I done programming?
Is this all over? And so I decided that I was going to create my own keyboard layout, optimized to prevent the pain I'm experiencing.
So I used a Dvorak as the base and then laid out the symbols in a symmetrical reasonable way.
So that it's opening, closing, opening, closing, opening, closing, right.
And so it's and they all right here, I actually have to hold shift to press the number.
So symbols are actually my first thing I get the press.
And so it's very optimized for a laptop keyboard layout.
So I can use my laptop in a very efficient, nice way.
That's how I got started on the Dvorak and all that And I wouldn't actually recommend it if you, cause I didn't have a Kinesis at the time.
I didn't even know Kinesis existed at that time.
And so when I discovered Kinesis and also 2017, that's when I was like, oh, okay.
Would you recommend Kinesis to people?
I am technically sponsored by Kinesis.
So, people, you know, it's hard for someone to believe someone that's sponsored by it, but I did use it before I ever became sponsored.
They're the only sponsor that I reached out to and said, I need a sponsorship from you.
You are the key. I'm gonna use you either way.
You can say no, But I really love it and for the first three years of using kinesis.
They gave me free kinesis is Kinesi as my sponsorship Kinesis yeah, I'm always torn I tried to leave so many times.
You can't it's too good But see I have this absurd situation Of like traveling with it.
I Relate yeah, I mean I'm literally you know going to war zone in Ukraine have a kinesis keyboard a laptop, and just a few other small things, and that's it.
And it's like, can you keep, we're really gonna be 30 % of volume that you're bringing to a warzone, you know?
Looks like the answer's yes.
Yeah. Like, do you really derive that much value?
I think it's probably spiritual, psychological for me, it feels like home, it's the comfort associated with it.
Yeah. I try to leave. And I love this experience, you just, to, it's like a relationship you have with a thing.
It is, but I'm trying to figure out if it's a toxic relationship.
I don't know. I think it's mostly love, I think it's love.
Like all relationships, there's some, you know, push and pull complications, but.
They say that distance makes the heart grow fonder.
So maybe sometimes the Kinesis keyboard needs to stay at home, and the laptop keyboard can be the one so that your heart grows even more fond and that connection grows even deeper.
I already miss it, as you said.
so I don't know, I think it's coming.
Coming along to all the trips.
If it breaks down though, you know, I was worried that Kinesis was shut down as a company.
I'm like, what's the business model here?
Who actually uses these keyboards, right?
But apparently they're still going strong.
Who uses these keyboards as you use the keyboard?
Yeah. You're like, I have to take it with me everywhere.
I wonder who uses these keyboards.
Yep. I should mention that one of the things when I first became a fan of yours, I heard you talk about coffee in terminal, I still don't, by the way, understand what you've been talking about.
I need to actually use it but you run amongst many things, a coffee company.
Man, this smells so good.
So this one is Dark Mode, dark roast whole coffee beans.
There is seg origin, dash, dash location, Brazil.
Yeah, there's a bunch of stuff on there.
The stuff on there that's very dev -y, shop, server, web, can you legit order coffee via SSH?
So as of right now, it's the only way you can get the coffee is via SSH.
That was kind of, okay.
So can I just origin story you?
Yeah, yeah, right. I was gonna do some kind of command line command to request or like dash dash help or something or like man.
Yeah, man coffee. Man coffee.
Okay. Okay. So TJ and I again, same teach teach TV about, by the way, very amazing designs done.
Yeah. They're very, very good.
Um, so let me kind of give the basic ideas.
Like, it must have been about a year, a year and a half ago, TJ and I were talking like, Hey, you know, every one of these people that have like some sort of following some sort of online presence, they're always like selling a thing.
I got nothing to sell.
I don't really want to do merch. I've never really enjoyed to doing merch, I just find that, I don't know, it's just not as much fun for me.
I don't want to have a tequila.
I don't want a tequila.
I want something that, and I also want something that I really don't feel bad about selling.
You know, there's like a lot of people that will go on the internet and they'll show for a whole bunch of products like, Oh, okay, try this.
Try this. And this is why I've only ever really done Kinesis is because it's like, well, I can point to something that was really bad my life.
I was very scared and now it's not bad anymore.
So it's like, okay, that one made sense, but everything else always has been, you know, It's harder for me.
And so we just talked for so long and we love Neovim.
So we're just like, oh, why haven't we could do something from Neovim?
And we're kind of like laughing about that, like ordering from Neovim is just so ridiculous.
And then at some point we're just like, well, wait a second.
And maybe we could do like coffee, like every developer loves coffee.
Maybe we could figure out this coffee business.
And so I had a good friend named Dax, THDXR.
Dax, yeah, Dax. Uh, he, the most sassiest man alive, sassiest, oh yeah.
He has a lot of sass beard. Yup.
He has a beard, very, uh, very, he does a SST. He does a lot of stuff.
Very, very talented.
Uh, we'll call them DevOps engineer.
He's more than that, but, um, very talented guy, him and another person named Adam .dev vegan, by the way, great guy.
We make, we take them to Korean barbecue all the time.
He needs nothing. Um, then Liz.
She has been super important to the terminal coffee company.
I think without her, we would not have been able to do what we have done.
And then also David Hill designer, he does, Laravel designs for Laravel, very talented designer.
And so we all kind of came together and we are just laughing about how can we like, could we do something that's just ridiculous?
And that's kind of what we came up with.
Yeah, you're like, there you go.
You just open the website.
You actually, you literally cannot order.
We actually do not allow you to order The website is something that kind of looks like the terminal use command below to order your delicious whole coffee SSH terminal shop.
Yeah, you can only SSH into it So you have to copy that command and throw it in there If you want to add in the little terminal shop for your known hosts, you could do that How do you handle payment?
through stripe and So one of the things we'll be adding a mobile checkout to where I'll show a QR code in the terminal and you can just like Check out on your phone.
But right now you enter in your credit credentials.
It goes to stripe via all terminal Yeah, all so yeah, sh is obviously distance for secure shell.
It uses elliptical, you know Quantum safe algorithms to ensure that your data is not being intercepted.
Yeah, but does he use AI?
I I'm pretty sure DAX uses AI so that you said quantum so I don't know quantum AI can this fusion quantum AI Like, it can't even be a company if it's not using AI.
We have some crypto chains with some quantum AI that's powered by fusion, so it's pretty wild.
Anyway, so yeah, we just kind of came together where we thought, that was from the Mike Tyson fight.
All right. It was literally that night Mike Tyson kissed the reporter and then walked out without any...
Close we did an ad for somebody, but we decided to make a coffee shop and then we thought instead of just making it Neovim, what if we made it from SSH, because everybody has SSH.
You have VS code, launch VS code.
You can order coffee from within VS code, right?
Because your little bottom terminal and it has access to SSH, bada -bing bada -boom.
It's kind of fun. And so we kind of really, we just wanted to do something where there's no level and there's no world that makes me feel bad about selling this and people buying it.
It's good ethical coffee.
We developed the entire supply chain and everything.
It's all packaged. It's all boutique.
It's all really, like it's pretty high end coffee.
It tastes really, really good.
At this point, I don't like drinking other coffee.
I get kind of upset about it because it's not as good.
And so it's kind of funny that I've fallen for my own stuff.
I'm high on my own supply pretty hard right now.
I just got done ordering 16 bags and gave it out to my family to try to convince them.
But it's just something where it's like I didn't sell you a software product that's going to influence your startup that could potentially lead to disaster.
I didn't convince you to do a bunch of stuff that's going to change your career, I just said, hey, here's some coffee.
And it just like it's, it's like a fun experience.
Yeah. It's fun. Everything the humor out is great.
Yeah. Uh, people should go to terminal .shop.
SSH. I was speaking to people that don't know what SSH is and there you can read the command and then figure out how to use SSH in order to, I mean it's a kind of documentation right on the website.
If you can't use SSH, you probably should just not worry about buying a coffee.
Like, that's the whole way you can learn.
You can learn. If you are active and you're a computer person, you'd like to launch the terminal and feel like a hacker, go for it.
We even have subscriptions.
What I would love to see.
This is how it came up, I think on the on the cursor conversation is that I would love it if an AI agent, you know, did this, like, anthropous computer use or something like that, It actually took the action of ordering the coffee while it was programming They're like hey order me some coffee and it'd actually go off Give me dark roast or the coffee that could actually go through the whole flow of order Yeah, the whole flow.
But even better if you didn't ask it to order coffee after to do something and as Danger as a side quest it did that which is computer use does that right they showed off that It's able to go to I think like Google for some images, take a pause and then continue doing other stuff.
Anyway, yeah, super cool idea, love it.
Speaking of which, let's talk about AI.
All right. You've been both, sort of positive and negative on the role of AI in the whole programming software engineering experience.
As it stands today, what do you think, well what's your general view about AI?
What is it effective at?
What is it not so good at?
Okay, so my general view is it comes down to something that's pretty simple, which is that if you're doing something in which is very predictable, AI is really nice.
When you're doing something that is just not predictable, AI is not very nice to use.
If you're using anything that's more cutting edge, AI will not be using it, or AI won't be very good at doing stuff with it.
Like it's not great at Zig because Zig is just like, say less documented, it's really great at TypeScript.
I think there's a lot of interesting things that are gonna come down through AI that I think a lot of people aren't really prepared for or thinking through, TJ's kind of the genesis of this idea, but the idea that I think there's gonna be a lot of kind of market manipulation, if you will, through AI, meaning like, hey, you want to research, say best woodworking tools.
Someone's gonna be buying an ad spot, someone's gonna be buying premium training data.
They're the ones that get the big boost in the LLMs but LLMs don't really have to market as an advertisement because it's not really directly an advertisement, they just had a more premium spot for say in the training data.
A little bit extra learning to it.
There's a lot of things about AI that I fear upcoming.
A lot of it just comes down to people not learning or making the trade -off where productivity is the only thing that matters.
And I don't think productivity is the only thing that matters.
If you want to build something complex and difficult, productivity is not the only thing.
You actually are going to have to do deep learning and kind of pursue it beyond the basics.
And so I see AI as kind of like this, really cool thing.
It feels like a magic trick.
I remember the first time I used it, I got early access to GitHub, co -pilot.
Nat, in fact, Nat Friedman saw my Twitch clip of me asking GitHub for it.
And he sent me early access himself.
It was awesome. And when I used it, it predicted an if statement, correct.
And my mind was just absolutely blown because I had nothing before then and now it's just like first time ever.
And I just remember thinking, man, this is going to change programming so much. And then the more I used it, the more I just, for me personally, I kept introducing bugs and I couldn't figure out why.
And I, what I realized is that I kind of developed, I wasn't co -piloting well, I was auto -piloting, much better.
In my ability to read code versus my ability to critically think and write code, they're definitely different sets of skill levels.
I don't consider as well when I just read code as opposed to where I write code, and so I struggled there.
I do think that's the skill set.
Yeah, skill issue for sure.
Skill issue, but people who are not aware, that's a hashtag thing.
Sometimes you use mockingly.
In this case, there's several layers, mockingly, but also seriously.
I mean like the criticism is grounded in the fact that you lack the skill versus of some kind of fundamental truth.
Yes, I think that that's the reason I use actually Copilot cursor a lot is for developing the skill of editing AI.
So I can just learn how to do that better and better.
because I think as I do that better and better I start to utilize AI better.
At this time it is a bit of a boilerplate code thing.
But you could do out of the box kind of novel design decisions or tricky design decisions from scratch. But fill out stuff using AI and then just learn the skill of modifying.
I personally just...
It's more fun to program with AI.
Even when I delete a lot of the code, it's more fun.
It's less lonely. It's more, it's what I imagine, like, pair programming to be and I've never done it, but it just feels like that friction that you get when you're, like, staring at an empty thing is not there, like empty function, empty class.
It's just more fun less lonely.
And I do think that a lot of the easier type of coding it really helps with like interacting with APIs, basic things that I would usually have to look up to stack overflow for it's just really fast at that.
Like as an example, just interacting with the YouTube API.
The YouTube API documentation is not very good and you can just load it all in there and ask it to generate a set of functions that access the API, do all kinds of read and write operations and it figures it all out.
And then you can just, well, you do have to read.
You have to read and check everything and you start to develop the skill of understanding where it misinterpreted the task.
What is that skill?
I don't even know. You have to kind of be empathic about what the AI is, what it's limitations are.
A lot of the times that has to do with prompt engineering.
You have to like at the same time understand what the AI is aware of, like, what did you actually give it as data to be able to generate the code.
A lot of times we don't realize that we're not giving enough information.
So you have to like, actually, okay, okay, alright, you have to be empathic, be like, okay, these are the code, the files it's aware of, this is the specifics of the question you asked it.
Like you have to imagine you're an intern that doesn't know anything else like it.
Oftentimes we want the AI just like figure out the things that's left unspoken, but you can't know those things.
You have to like specify those things.
And so you have to actually be much more deliberate and rigorous in the things you specify is to spell it out.
And so I just have this like sea of prompts that I have saved up and I'm building these, like, library of different templates and prompts, and it's a mess.
And I'm sure there's a lot of developers that have this similar kind of mess.
So a lot of it has to do long -term with the tooling that's going to improve that.
One, the systems are going to get much more intelligent when you don't need the nuance, and two, there's going to be the tooling that allows you to specify those things and load it in correctly and give all the context that the system needs in order to make good good decisions or maybe the system asks you follow -up questions.
Here's things you didn't make clear, all that kind of stuff.
A lot of that has to do with the interface, with the actual design of the tools like we said with cursor.
It's going to keep getting better and better and better.
My sense is like developers in general should be learning this to see, to not be left behind, to see how they can be used as a superpower to boost their productivity, their effectiveness, their joy of programming versus like, be seen as a competitor to them or something like that.
So, but I, you know, for me already, it's been a big boost of productivity.
Like if you measure the actual, how quickly you're able to get a thing done, it's been a big, and measured not across minutes and hours but days also.
Sometimes there's things I have to do that are not that important that I'll just out of procrastination will push off.
And AI helps me actually get it done.
Because that thing, the empty page, like I mentioned before, it helps me write the thing, get it done, get it tested.
Ship the thing, maybe it's just because it's just less lonely to work with an AI.
I don't know if any of that made sense, but.
It all made perfect sense.
I really do like that phrase, it makes it less lonely.
I think there's something to that that's kind of interesting, having just some level of interaction that's not just like an LSP autocomplete, like having something that's actually a little bit more than just that where it actually is kind of thinking through and you can see a different thought and you're like, oh, wow, that's like, that's a way different approach than I would have taken.
Hey, that's kind of cool.
I like these kind of things.
And the thing is, I'm not like an AI -negative person.
I can see why people really, really like it.
Um, I just haven't, like I just, every time I used Copilot for, from when Nat gave me the, uh, access all the way up until about six months ago.
Like, that's how I used it for quite some time.
And I really, I really did enjoy the things I used out of it.
It just never, it kind of did the opposite for me.
I felt like I was more reviewing than writing and I felt like I was more.
Kind of just letting things slide, where I just didn't really think to heavily about stuff and it just, I wasn't as engaged.
And so I'm like, okay, so something's kind of wrong.
here. And that's just like a me personal thing.
So I recognize that as not how someone should approach these things.
That's not a good reason for why you should or should not use AI like, I just don't think that that's right.
Cause I could probably correct that and figure out a better way to do it.
I've been meaning to have another AI round.
And so I've been thinking about like maybe I just need to spend like two weeks in cursor and just like fully embrace what does it mean to be somebody like this and, and God, what can I do with this?
Like these new powers, Have they improved to the point where they're actually good?
And I mean, for me, cause like a lot of the decisions I make, a lot of the little functions I'm writing, it's not cause I'm trying to write this function to solve this problem.
It's cause I'm writing these functions are this set, not just to solve this problem, but because I know in about another 2000 lines of code of building all these other things, I'm going to need to start doing this next activity.
So it's like, I'm trying to like really try to chess move myself into the exact things that as I let things go faster, I kind of fall apart on that a chest move and again, skill issues on my behalf.
And I mean it in the truest sense of the word where it's like I'm making your critique because I don't use it well enough.
The better you are at programming.
I don't know if this is a general rule.
This is my anecdotal data.
The better you are at programming, the less you want to use the AI.
The more it gets in the way, like the good programmers.
Fair enough as far as I can tell.
So like the more beginner programmers are much more happy to use AI.
I, you know, when I use AIs for basic like, for just like, I don't know if this is a better term, it's not boilerplate, but it's like pretty easy programming.
And that kinda programming is much easier to do.
Like the sort of 10X, not to use the meme, sort of programmers that I know that are ultra productive and brilliant people, they hate AI.
They're like, this is nowhere close to what's needed.
So there's something to that.
I still think they should be using AI just for the learning, because it's going to get smarter.
It's going to get better and it's the same thing.
It's like when you super optimize Neovim or super optimize Emax, you may not discover new things that are in the pipeline.
So it's always good to be sort of training in that way.
Let me ask you a question here.
Just kind of from my understanding, you talked about this idea that you have all these kind of LLM kind of prompts, all like this big backlog of messy LL prompts that you kind of have these templates for that you can do various.
actions, you probably, you have these strategies of making it self explain itself and then do the right thing, right?
Like you have, as far as I can tell, that's, that's really built into a lot of people.
Well, then you make this phrase re -like, but then at some point the interface is going to get better.
And maybe it can do a lot of these things better where I won't need.
Then my question is, well, Is anyone actually falling behind for not using AI then, because if the interface is going to change so greatly that all of your habits need to fundamentally change.
And it will be able to clarify and make all those statements.
Have I actually fallen behind at all or will the next gen like actually just be so different from the current one?
That it's kind of like yeah, you're you're over there like actually doing punch card AI right now I'm gonna come in at compiler time AI so different that it's like what's a what's a punch card?
So obviously open question.
It's a fascinating one.
I Personally think yes, you're falling behind not you But if you're not me could be if you're not playing with it that you're falling behind, because the thing I'm doing with the prompts is you're learning, you're building up like this intuition about how AI works.
You're understanding like what is its strengths and weaknesses, not the even the current version, but the next version and so on.
Like what does it mean to teach an AI system about the world?
What kind of information does it need to make effective decisions?
I think that does transfer to smarter and smarter models.
You'll need to make less rigorous and specific in details instructions over time, but you still have to have that kind of thing.
I think it's the skill of almost empathy with an AI system because it doesn't know the, you know what is missing?
It's missing like common sense.
it's missing long term memory.
A lot of things when we talk to other humans, they have a basic common sense about reality, like and AI systems often lack that kind of common sense.
And they also don't remember things.
So you have to like realize there's a constant blank blank slate happening.
So it's almost like a just a skill of talking into an AI system, that I'm training.
And by having to write all those prompts and communicating back and forth to understand what kind of prompts work better or not, you build up that intuition.
And also just raw, the skill of reading somebody else's code.
Maybe for people who work on large teams, that's a skill that's already developed.
For me, not so much. So, learning how to modify the code that somebody else written is a real skill.
And also the other thing you mentioned, which is like, considering another perspective on a piece of code is really nice, but it is also a skill to understand, okay, this is what you did.
There's a skill to asking a question about that code that's been generated such that you can have a conversation about the approach that was taken.
I think there's just a lot of subtle little skills was involved in a cooperative endeavor to code.
There was a real skill issue between you and Teh when you guys did the video of 280 S1 keyboard, right?
People should go watch that video where you guys obviously sucked at it.
Yeah. Co -using. That was pretty cool, which you guys did, which is controlling one Neovim interface from two different keyboards.
Yeah. And then we each get an allowance of certain characters or motions we could perform.
Yeah, and so you both have to like communicate together.
That that's a real skill I'm sure you can get super like super efficient with that Yeah, but it takes you it just takes time to learn that kind of thing So yeah, I think there's some value to it, but I think there's a learning curve So I have so I I wanted I do want one thing to be pretty clear is that I actually use AI quite a bit I just don't use it for programming And so one thing I've been trying to get it to is To be able to have like a long interview or understand what twitch chat is saying and become twitch chat and be able to speak as if it is Twitch chat, try to like learn how to prompt
it in different ways.
And so I think those things for me are just really fun.
I tried to get it to learn how to play tower defense.
I made a tower defense game in SIG and then made it play tower defense and then played a cloud 3 .5 against open AI cloud 3 .5 would do better during the daytimes and open AI did better during the nighttime.
So I don't know why I don't, I have no idea what was going on there, but just. One would just start winning.
And the other one would start losing is just very strange.
And so it's just this, you know, I'm learning to prompt well, but I'm learning to prompt in a very different accent.
I just don't find it very useful yet in programming.
And I should also say that I'm using it, in every walk of life, in every context, I use that same kind of exploration about prompts and so on, I'm using in learning.
I think it legit is a whole field in itself.
You have a prompt engineering and how to interact with AI systems. I think it's worth the investment.
He actually speak to that cause you, I saw You're you're basically pulling from Twitch chat and having an LLM speak I Didn't realize I thought you're you're not reading the exact Chat messages.
Yeah, you're doing kind of some kind of summarization yeah, so what I Try to go through like a I end up making like eight queries off to open AI or it's just like Like the first thing is like, I have it, have it like a default personality.
Hey, you're Randall, the manager.
You're a software engineering manager.
Kind of explain their position, what they like, what they don't like.
And then be like, these are the list of thoughts you have in your head.
Yeah. And you need to talk to this person and ask them a question.
This is amazing. Give me 10 of these responses that you think are probably thoughts that you have and you want to ask.
Yeah. You know, like make it kind of give you a list and let me like, okay, then re -prompt and be like, Hey, you're Randall, you're this, this, this, this, this.
this, you have these 10 questions before you, and now you need to select one of them and reword it in a way that sounds more like you, the engineering manager.
You know, and so you're like, you know, I'm constantly trying to make it like iterate on itself, as opposed to just like one shotting it.
And I found if I iterate too much, it becomes like it loses the vow.
It like loses what it was originally trying to ask if I don't do it enough.
And it's just too degenerate from Twitch chat.
And so it's like, I have a lot of improvement to do with this idea.
Just to clarify, you're feeding in Twitch chat, these are the thoughts you're a manager, these are the thoughts you have in your head, pick out some of the most profound thoughts.
Effectively, depending on what I want to do, I'm tryin' to work on a better system still.
Kinda brilliant. And so it's like, how can I give voice to Twitch chat?
Can I make it so that I can create adversarial characters against Twitch chat, or for Twitch chat?
Can I incorporate YouTube, all that kinda stuff?
And how do you describe to an LLM to roleplay into its position.
And so, you know, just thinking through those kind of things.
So maybe I am having some prompt skills, but just, you know, it's just not in the coding world yet.
Sure. One day, one day I'll get there.
I saw that you were having like playing with different voices.
There was like a sexy voice.
That started off as a French voice.
And then it turns out 11 Labs just cannot do a French lady.
And when you do multilingual French lady, she starts.
Yeah. Okay, yeah I was like, what?
I tuned in to one of your streams and there was just this lady like, you know, in a sexualized way.
It became too funny.
And so we called her not French Stormy Daniels.
Oh, nice. Yeah. But hold on, I wanna go back to the AI and some of the aspects.
Sure. And so my big gripe with AI has nothing to do with its capabilities.
It's exactly capable as it should be capable because that's what people program to do.
as the things that I really dislike is, a, there's a whole group of people that are just like, the end is nigh, AI is here.
You just need to stop programming.
Like I, I cannot see, I cannot tell you, even on like, uh, you mentioned Peter levels earlier, he made some sort of tweet and one of the person's responses was, yeah, no one in this, like in 2025 or whatever should be acquiring hard skills.
You should rely on everything for the AI effectively.
And it's just like, these are really damning pieces of advice for young people.
like young people are being told that you should never become an expert in anything.
You should always offload and the problem is that anyone worth any of their salt will tell you that AI, though, can produce code is going to get a wrong in a huge number of cases.
And as the code becomes bigger or more complex or more input, it's going to just start kind of sloshing back and forth between bugs.
And so if you don't have those hard skills, and you're not ultimately the driver at the end of the day, like you're going to really find some hard times and your ability to progress will be directly bound to how good the LLMs are.
So if you believe that the LLMs will be vastly superior to humans in the next year, maybe that's a good bet.
But if they aren't, then your skills ceiling is bound to whatever they are.
And even beyond that, there's just as like a whole, there's just like a level of information problem, which is like, can the thing actually navigate larger, like do we even have enough compute power to be able to solve things at this real scale?
And even if we did, if everybody started using it right now, do we even have the compute power for everybody to use it right now?
There was like a lot of kind of bounding questions.
There's privacy concerns.
And I just don't want people to make the immediate or what appears to be the obvious choice where you don't need hard skills.
You don't need these things.
Our life is already going to be...
We just need to only think creatively.
It's like, no, I don't think so.
I think these hard skills are going to be around for quite some time, even with a massive improvement in the AI.
Like you're gonna really be needed to step in regularly for quite some time as far as I can tell but I also think even on top of that just you know, acquiring the hard skills or Whether that means programming from scratch for example in the context of programming That's going to make you better at steering the AI Mm -hmm not just correcting the ad but steering the AI.
I think there is some kind of if you know how a computer works You can program Python better it's maybe counterintuitive but if you know the low level abstractions, some intuition around that, you can steer the high level abstractions better.
That just seems to be the case.
Unless of course AI becomes truly super intelligent, like many levels of ball, but it's very unlikely in the short term and in the long term it's still good as it gets better and better and better to be able to steer to ride the wave of the improvement.
Yeah, I'm on that team very much though.
A lot of people have written to me I think a lot of developers programmers are really concerned about the future of their profession In the context of quickly improving AI system.
So do you think AI will eventually replace programmers?
The hard part about that phrase is use the term eventually Do I think in five years ten years a hundred years like what is that what does that term actually mean?
Uh, I think at some point if we were able to scale, if all things continue at the current rate of improvement, there does come a point where programming as a hard skill does become unnecessary, right?
There, at some eventual point way, way down the road.
Yes. I don't know what that point looks like.
I don't know when it's going to happen.
I don't even attempt to make predictions about that, but there are still some like leaps and bounds we need to make just. I mean, even just like, societal, like there's plenty of companies that don't even allow you to use AI, right?
Like I mean, there's just practical problems that exist. So that's like a question I just try not to answer in the direct sense.
There will come a day if humanity continues and all things continue in a good positive direction where a lot of skills will go out the window due to immense computing systems. So I, yeah, I'll give you that one, but it's just like if I don't think it has anything in the near term, there's been no computer improvement up to this date that did not result and more jobs?
Yeah, absolutely. I would just say that I think it depends how you define programming also, because you know, when the community moves from assembly, to C, from C to I don't know, Python and JavaScript.
Like that's evolution, that's really painful for a lot of people who are used to programming that lower level language so there's going to be a continuous evolution and maybe that means with with AI there's going to be more and more evolution towards natural language as part of the tool chain like being able to learn how to write proper prompts.
Yeah, that might you know because natural language is still a language and in the long term it's possible that a large percentage of programming is natural language there probably is still going to be some percentage, just not, that's going to be extremely structured language.
Right now I don't think we are anywhere near natural language being possible because it's ambiguous.
And I think what we'll end up seeing as people push really hard into this, you're going to see some sort of like pseudo lane, which is going to be a language for a eyes in which you prompt it, which is going to be less ambiguous, right?
People keep striving towards the less ambiguous state.
And at that point, you're just programming, you're just programming.
Get another evolution into a higher order language.
language. And perhaps that is a future in which people have a more terse language.
I'm just not sure how much more terse it can get.
Yeah, I mean, all I see is that if you say natural language can be used in the pipeline, you've just made that many more people can become programmers, which means that much more software will eventually be created, which means there's that much more software that will need to be maintained and just becomes It becomes a real big snowballing effect.
But, you know, there's just people, programmers, who are worried about their jobs.
Yeah. Not a complete replacement, but maybe a rapid evolution of what it means to be a programmer.
Like you mentioned, if natural language becomes a way that you can communicate, you can program, that means the pool of people who can get programming jobs changes rapidly.
So, they're really concerned.
To some extent, right.
Correct. because no matter how much, no matter how much we want to say how good AI is, there comes a point where there exists a bug, there exists a large piece of software in which to describe the change requires just like pages and pages of description.
To the point where it is significantly just faster or easier for someone to just whip something out.
Like there, there's definitely a balance there.
It's not like a perfect trade -off.
And so I still don't, I think people need to quit worrying and think about how they can integrate it and try like prove it to themselves.
Do they actually make themselves irrelevant?
And if you truly make yourself irrelevant, I would challenge you that you're already, like you're just doing something that was just slightly too complicated to automate.
Like if you're only writing just straight up crud apps from back end to front end and like simple table displays, like, yeah, maybe we just couldn't quite automate that away.
And now we just have something that can just do that a little bit better.
So now that's automated the way, but that's not really programming.
That's almost like building Legos at that point.
Where the design's already set, you just simply have to move piece from bag into correct position.
Yeah, is there something you recommend how a developer, programmer could avoid the situation where AI can automate them away?
I think that the bigger the project you can manage, the bigger the thing you can build, the more understanding both down and up to stack you can go, the more value, valuable you become.
Because if you understand how to build something in the front -end, okay.
Well, now you kick off some LLM task of some sort.
That's going to go off and make a change to the front -end.
Okay. Well, it's doing that.
You can go and kick off something in the CLI tool.
You can go and you can go kick off something somewhere else.
And as these things come back with results, you can review the results.
Make sure it's the way you want it, change it, commit it, go to the next.
Like you only become more, you know, as you said, in the end, more productive if we reach this state where it's truly able to do that.
I think there is a skill to working together with AI, which is why I'm kind of excited to watch you keep trying to do it.
It's like we don't know how it fits exactly, but it feels like AI should be a boost to productivity, and I definitely think it's a boost to just the joy of programming.
I think there's a lot of people, yeah it's a job, but it's also a source of meaning, a source of joy.
Like, programming is fun, you're creating something cool, and also potentially that a lot of people use.
There's this one thing that just really frustrates me, and this is kind of going into the Deven category, which is that I want an intern that cares.
You don't get that out of an LL.
It does not care, meaning that I don't want it just to make a UI for me that displays these icons like I asked.
I want it to care, I want it to think about it.
I want it to present to me, and maybe be like, Oh yeah, yeah, that's great.
and then me to make changes and then later on it's like actually you know what I really rethought about this it actually it'd be way better if we change you know like it doesn't actually care about the craft you know but when you work with an intern or you work with somebody else they care when they factor something they actually go over and go ah yeah this is actually kind of bad I'm gonna come back to that they finished this they go back over and they make this even better right they like actually care about the thing itself it's a completely different experience I just want something that also cares
that wants to make the thing better not just simply accomplish the task and I know I'm asking way too much that's not, you know, now we're getting into like Blade Runner level AI, I just want something that's, it just feels like I'm missing that or it's just like it will complete the task to whatever level it understood what I was prompting, but it just doesn't, it doesn't actually care about it.
I mean, there's so many aspects to caring, but sort of the trivial version of that that is a kind of restlessness where you want to keep improving and I think that is very much AI could do.
Where it constantly just ask itself can I make this better and if it keeps doing that, it probably is going to take it to some ridiculous place.
So actually it's also knowing when to stop.
I think developing something you can call taste which is like trying, working extremely hard, constantly improving, until it just feels right.
This is it. And I think that is a thing that AI is not good at.
It was just like, yes, this is it.
I've iterated three times, and three was the - Yeah.
That's it. Yeah. We're now there.
And that - I think ultimately that is what humans are amazing at, which is like knowing what something is right.
Like, this is it. This is - especially as you understand, as you develop taste in a particular industry between a particular context application, knowing like this is it, yeah.
The rounded corners on this button, that's exactly, that's beautiful.
So it's just a sense of beauty, a sense of function and efficiency, and so on.
But humans could do almost like supervision of AI systems in that context.
Yeah. Yeah, you've ranted about Devan just full of rage.
I mean, first off, The people that run Devin are extremely nice.
I want that to be understood.
I don't have some sort of upsetness against them or anything like that.
Um, second Devin is just, it's, it's kind of like the full, it's like the full package when it comes to programming.
So it's going to have, you're going to give it a task and a repo and it's going to go through, it's going to try to understand the repo and the task, make the change to the repo by exploring it.
Then actually make a commit to GitHub and explain what it did so that you can have like, you know?
So hopefully you have this whole offline thing, which is the other part of this AI part that I actually really like where it's just like, go fix this thing.
Then I can just go and unbroken fix this one thing and come back and go, okay, good enough merge.
Boom. Like I want that kind of running, being able to complete things, I think the ideal solution is that you can start giving it small bugs and it goes and fixes these bugs.
And you can just come back to these backlog tickets that no one ever does.
And it actually starts going through these backlog tickets.
And it's actually a really amazing experience.
So I love the idea, right?
I think we can all agree that that sounds great, but every time I've done it.
And I've, I've asked it for many and I try to keep narrowing down the problems. The more narrow the problem, the better it does.
So if I'm like, just add one singular icon and when it gets clicked, I want you to do this, just, just console click me, like just at least create me an SVG and place it so it's nicely placed.
The more narrow the task, the more likely it's to be successful.
Um, there's like a certain level of specifying where you specify too much. It just like, can't do it.
If you specify too little, it just does weird things.
So it's kind of like this very kind of fun, unique way.
You have to play the balance game, but so far, every time I do these things, I always end up going.
Gosh, you know what?
I should just get better at tailwind and write it myself.
Cause I always go back and I just rewrite it.
And then it's just like, dang it.
What am I saving at the end?
I feel like I'm not saving anything yet.
And he was just like this, I want it so bad.
Like I actually want AI to be great because then I can really go fast. I mean, I can go amazing fast, but then I always just go, gosh, I should just learn tailwind myself to like the nth degree and just go fast. Yeah.
We should also mention that debugging, this might be intuitive or counterintuitive is, AI is really bad at.
Yeah. Like that is one of the hardest. Actually makes you realize how special humans are and how difficult the task of debugging is.
Obviously for trivial debugging, maybe you can find bugs, but like that is the the real art of programming is finding bugs, logical bugs, like extremely complicated, rare bugs, edge cases.
AI can assist, but, man, the hard ones really require so much context, so much experience, so much intuition from, again, operating in a fog full of uncertainty.
It's hard! Of course, AI could maybe create like logs and do traces and do some kind of loading a huge amount of data that humans can't.
But ultimately, that just means it could be a better assistant in debugging versus the actual lead debugger.
Yeah, I mean, it'd be great if they could.
The more it can do that, the better, right?
Because as far as I can tell, I mean, correct me where I'm wrong on this, current state debugging, it's really, it looks at the code, it looks at the bug problem, it just kind of tries to text predict where it's most likely accurate, and then just tries to fix that spot.
And so it's just like it's likely this spot, you said admin panel slightly off this, this, this, it's probably this location, which could actually be a really great way to do search, right?
Let me do semantic searching, point to me where this is, because maybe that is a really great way to navigate large code bases is like smart, intelligent search, as opposed to trying to make it do the thing, ask it to just help you do the thing in like pinpointing problems. Oh no, I'd love to see more of that because that's for me is like the exciting part.
And there's this really great article by creator or maintainer of curl.
It's the eye and LLM stands for intelligence, and he writes curl and maintains curl.
Curl has been inundated with security problems and all this.
And it's all from LLMs being like, Oh, I found a security flaw.
Uh, here's the security flaw.
Details it out in the code.
And he's just like, okay, how did you reproduce that?
Show me. because if you look at the code right here, that's actually an impossible situation you're speaking of.
And it's just like going in these circles and security right now is being inundated.
These bug bounty programs are being inundated by LLM submitted responses.
Cause they can't actually analyze the code beyond just like basic text prediction.
Oh, this is a STIR copy.
STIR copy is commonly referred to you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, boom.
There you go. Here's the bug.
And it's just like, no, that's actually impossible because the if statement and right beforehand, leaves the function if the string is too long.
So it's like, we don't even run into this case.
It's impossible what you were saying.
So the bugging is very interesting.
Yeah, I mean, that for me would be the big, if it can solve that, not solve that, but improve that, that would be huge, whether it's agents or just LLMs integrated into IDs.
I think there's this whole idea, I call a denial of attention.
I think there's an entire attack vector that's gonna be happening.
We're using LLMs to generate fake bug reports, words fake all these things to just actually effectively to demotivate and hurt open source maintainers.
Poli -Kill was the first bug that kind of had this experience is this denial of attention where a active, malicious maintainer just hounded the owner.
And then a white knight came out and offered to buy some stuff from under them and when they bought it, they actually replaced it with a malicious piece of code and then used it.
And so there's like this whole security world that's developing around using these in a very aggressive format.
I mean, it's a fascinating world we're entering into, but I do agree with you that human developers will be a huge part of that world.
This is not, the job might evolve, but it's going to be there.
If I can't, I didn't really look at this page.
I thought it would be cool to go over with you.
This is again... Stack Overflow my favorite.
Stag Overflow developer survey talking about their sentiment of usage of AI systems. The general sentiment of yes, 61 % say yes, they use it.
And 25 % say no, don't plan to.
So majority, we use it, majority have a favorable sentiment over it, favorable or very favorable or indifferent.
That's like, it looks like over 90%.
That's really surprising that that many people just have no plan in looking into AI.
Like as much as I don't like using it for coding, I hope one day I can use it more.
Right? And so it's like I, to me, I'm always looking for the next thing.
I'm just surprised that people are that, I guess, obstinate for it.
Obviously, the second one, the AI tool sentiment, it must be only the users who responded Yes, to the top two of that first one just given the amount of respondents.
I wonder if know and don't plan to are people who have tried it and quickly built up intuition like this really sucks.
Yeah, so You know, we could be like experienced programmers like no, this is not making me more productive 81 percent agree that increasing productivity is the biggest benefit of the developers identify for AI tools Okay, so this is what are the benefits increase productivity speed up learning greater efficiency improve accuracy and coding make workload more manageable, improve, collaborate.
Where's the fun? Increased fun.
I would say that's like number one for me.
Maybe speed up learning is like a subcategory of fun.
If you're able to learn more and be able to become better, I mean, that sounds good.
Yeah, I don't know.
It's different because productivity is part of fun too.
There is just the lightness.
I mean, maybe improve collaboration, all of these elements, for sure.
There's, my time using Copilot, there was certainly a level of wonder that would happen for quite some time where it's just like, it's just amazing what it can do.
I'm just super impressed by what it can do even though I don't use it.
Like, it's amazing to me that we have something that can even get that close.
In terms of accuracy of AI tools, only 2 .7 % highly trust. I would say that you have to be very green to think that you should highly trust in AI output.
You should be very skeptical.
Yeah, I don't know where I stand probably somewhat distrust highly distrust seemed aggressive Like you should definitely be in the somewhat like you should always assume that there's something wrong and then from there you can go and challenge and and then Estimation of whether AI can handle complex tasks most people don't think it can handle complex tasks I mean, it seems like people have a good sense of what it's able to handle or not I would argue that people don't have a good grasp of what complex is in programming.
Sure Yeah, if you say write to me, you know, write me quicksort Some people think quicksort super complex. Mm -hmm But I would argue that that's actually probably the simplest thing you could ask an AI to do Right things that are so well documented.
It's gonna do a great job at that Yeah, probably high level design decisions which people don't even use AI for right now I guess agents are supposed to be doing that kind of stuff.
That's probably the most difficult thing or the most impactful thing Well, the most difficult thing is finding bugs.
Yeah. AI tools next year, writing code and so on.
Now, this one, the ethics part.
I'm actually super curious, your take.
Yeah. On the ethics.
Will we see Europe laying down some new regulations?
My boy. What about artists, right?
Yeah. What about people that are really...
Because the difference between coding and artists is very, very simple.
If you gave me a sheet of paper, I could draw you a crab.
You go that's a crab, but you can't do that with coding.
It's like, it's right.
Or it's wrong. There's not a variation of interpretation for what a crab is.
It's like, no, that statement's just, you cannot make that statement.
You know it's very bounded in what it can express.
And I could see why artist, like that's a very frustrating point.
And then who gets rewarded for all that, you know, obviously, and then there's like the whole thing with coding and licenses, how much of it is GPL licenses?
Do you think they have scraped and used as training data?
GPL forces open source.
What are you going to do with that one?
Like that means your model might need to be open source.
Like open AI may have to get forced open.
Yeah. All their previous stuff, if there's any hint of GPL.
Yeah. That's a weird one.
That's a really weird one because most of these models I think are training on data.
They don't technically have rights to be training on.
Yeah. There's there's another question.
There's an unspoken it's a, it's a real wild west. Cause like you could imagine that weapon if, yeah, I always use Europe because because they tend to have like maybe the most consumer protection laws out there.
You could imagine what happened if a law came down that said that if you used a model that produced GPL potential code, you have to open source.
Like how many companies are going to be like, oh my gosh, right?
Like you have one year to get rid of all code that was generated that's potentially GPL source from a model.
Like that could, you could imagine just the sheer panic that's gonna happen.
It'd be a fire sale of code.
So given all that, can you give advice to young programmers?
Like this is another question from Reddit, the Infinite Wisdom of Reddit.
What should a person in their early 20s do to move forward as in the tech industry?
And this is an interesting addition to the question.
And by doing it, will this be walking on someone else's path?
I am going to try to answer that question, I guess, the best I can.
Which I think that if you're entering into the tech world.
One of the hardest pieces of advice that I took a long time to learn was I became enamored and addicted, obviously, we talked about that program for way too many hours, forgetting to spend the time I needed with my wife, with my friends, all that stuff, like totally wrapping myself up into one activity.
I think though it made me who I am, was probably an unhealthy activity and probably not a wise activity.
And so the best advice I can give is that.
You've got to develop the love, the skill, the desire for, whether that's just only using AI agents, programming yourself using SIG or programming JavaScript, whatever, you know, that flavor is, that's going to get you coming back every single day, get in the reps in the gym, if you will, for programming, but also knowing how to value what is valuable and not getting lost in the sauce where you're just so stuck on trying to make the next greatest startup that you sacrifice your health, you sacrifice your relationships, or even worse, you sacrifice your own morals to take certain shortcuts that you
probably shouldn't be taking, uh, in life to be able to achieve these things, because you know, I'm sure there's hundreds of horror stories you could hear where people will definitely shortcut their morals for monetary success.
Yeah, I mean the Golden Hand Coast comfort can destroy the soul in some sense.
Yeah so that's really important to remember but would you, you know there's young people kind of thinking, do I even wanna be a programmer now?
It seems like A .I's getting better, and better, and better at these programming.
If they're trying to make that decision, And would you still say, yeah, if this is something that fills you with joy?
I still want my kids to learn how to program.
If I can answer that.
If that can, if that's a good enough answer in a sense is that my kids are, are decade younger than a young person trying to learn how to program right now.
And so if I want, you know, I'm hoping that my kid can run and build whatever he wanted in Roblox.
I'm showing him chagipity and be like, all right, let's ask questions.
How do we do this? It's still extremely confusing for him to do all these things.
And so it's like, let's do this.
I want him to learn and be effective and maybe one day he has to throw away all those skills in 20 years but I bet you that whatever skills he threw away or Whatever hard skills he had to throw away an entirely new field that none of us have thought about just like if you would have Asked somebody in the 70s, you know about social networks They'd be like what the heck are you even talking about?
Like you know things will exist in the future that are gonna be massively different and crazy and exciting maybe in virtual reality There you go.
Maybe all of us actually down the line would just be building video games.
Just entertainment for all the brave new world of our world.
Well, I think entertainment is a kind of trivialized version of what a video game could be.
Mm -hmm. It's like what is the purpose of life anyway?
I mean, it could be a deeply fulfilling video game.
It doesn't have to be just like dopamine rush.
It could be educational, could be scary.
It could be challenging, forcing evolution, the leap of adventure that makes up a fulfilling life.
That could be video games.
Who knows, especially in virtual reality.
I tend to say the other thing.
I play a lot of video games.
I think there's a lot of room to make video games is deeply fulfilling.
Like there's a lot of space where that can go.
I didn't know you played a lot of video games because when I asked you, specifically, should I play World of Warcraft or do Advent of Code, you're like Advent of Code, Advent of Code.
Oh, well that might mean I've never played World of Warcraft because there's certain games that I avoid, Fortnite by the way, I think was one of them, because I was worried I'd become too addicted.
Yeah, yeah. So there's certain games I just know I won't get super addicted to, Like for example, I'm terrified of Civilization, like I've never played a Civs game because I'm worried, I'm worried the dark path in my lead, because there's some games just to really pull you in.
I'm much better with, that's why I play Skyrim.
I can play these games or Baldur's Gate and moderate my, how much I play.
And they could be like a lifelong companion versus an addiction where I'm like, it's like sunrise and you're like, what's happened with my life and I find myself naked behind a dumpster somewhere just wondering what happened.
Yeah, so that's how I choose my video games.
You're not the first person who has specifically called out civilization.
I've had more than one person, also very high up in the tech world be like, civilization is my downfall.
If I get near that game, I'm done.
So I've never even played the game now.
It makes me be like, I kind of give this a try.
That sounds crazy. Yeah, and the new one is actually supposed would be really, really good.
What were we talking about?
Yes, for that same young developer, is there a trajectory through jobs that you could give advice on?
So you started out with scheduleicity?
Yeah, that was my first full time when I had the government contracting before that wasn't quite full -time.
It was in C, it was a lot of fun.
And then building my own startup for quite some time.
So if you count either of those as full -time then those would be the full -time.
But scheduleicity was the official on the docs.
So is there some value to jumping around like Working in one company and another to try to figure out like what brings you joy I think there's a lot to that because Not every job you're gonna get is gonna it's gonna be great Now your first job you could get could make you think you hate programming And happen I did an internship out of place I know I keep on like surprising you with more kind of things I did in the past to the internship at uh, fuck you just so many things It's incredible.
At a place called like a Total Information Management System.
Remember when I talked about that hours ago, about healthcare and that, and industrial shipping and all that.
It was a C -Sharp shop.
It was so bad that after I did that, I went and changed my major to mechanical engineering for a semester in college.
Oh boy. I thought I, okay, actually, I like computer science.
I hate programming.
So, you know, just because you've had a job doesn't mean it's the, it's gonna be the one.
And the thing is here's the best part though.
If you get a job and you like it and you want to do it, and it's exciting.
You don't need to change.
I think a lot of people are like, oh, I got to find the next thing.
I've been here for two years.
There's kind of this like you got to move around mindset.
I don't think you have to move around.
I don't think it hurts your career, because if anything, you'll gain more responsibility and you'll be able to talk with way more authority.
And the next time you interview, you're going to be way more into like, oh, yeah, I had to get these ex people and these ex people to be able to do all this stuff.
And it's like you can talk with much more authority if you stay at a place longer.
And that's nothing but benefits in my book.
It's only if you stay at a place because you're afraid or you don't want to, you know, you already have something that works for you and you just never want to change.
And you're just like, I get to go in and just be completely mindless.
I think if you go mindless for a couple of years you'll find yourself, that's like the only real danger.
You just come out with nothing at all.
Yeah, especially when you're younger, that's the whole point.
Take the risk, take the leap out to the next thing to the next thing.
And not for money, but for just personal, like joy, joy.
And money could get at the end.
That's the best part, when you don't strive for the money, sometimes the money just shows up anyways.
Yep, and some of what makes life worth living is the people you work with, like a good team.
Some of it's like, not to be generic, but culture matters, it's whatever makes you happy.
For example, I just won't call out places, but there're certain companies where it's very nine -to -five and even if the work is exciting, they don't work hard enough, I would say, I'm one of those people that likes to go all out, likes to be surrounded by people who are super passionate.
Now, to be fair, a lot of them don't have families or don't.
It's a fascinating choice, I really don't want to talk down on any choice, work -life balance or not, I think both are beautiful paths.
And if you really derive a lot of value from joy from your work, going all in, At least for some stretch of your life, is a beautiful thing to do.
Just all out full on passion, sacrifice a lot of social life, all of that kind of stuff.
I don't know. That could also be beautiful.
There could be something very, very exciting about that in some sense, especially if you're building your own thing.
Uh, I can imagine that would be very exciting.
Like if I was Amazon, Jeff Bezos building Amazon, one could imagine that those early years were probably very rough and the amount of hours he probably we put in we're very, very rough.
Uh, but I will say that there's this kind of unique aspect in our culture where we kind of make this as an equal trade -off between family or work, uh, like, oh you don't, you do, or you don't have to have kids.
And my only kind of real notion with that one is that you will never know your capacity for love until you have kids.
Like you, you just don't know.
And some people are like, oh yeah, but I'd like love my dog.
It's just like, I loved my dogs too.
And then I had kids and now my dogs are, they're all right, like I like them.
I could come home and I pet Indy and I'm like, Woo, Indy.
And then I'm just like, okay, bye, Indy.
I can't even describe the difference between the two cause it's not even the same.
And so it's very, that trade -off you're making is no one can tell you what it's like.
Cause there's a real reality that's right now and I'm sure, I'm 100 % positive this is with my wife as well, where if right now we got news that said you have some medical procedure where if we do this, you will die, but your kid will live, there's not a question in my soul that I wouldn't do that, right?
If I was given, if I could look into the future and if I had to die right now, knowing that my kids would have a better life, they would be happier.
They'd be more fulfilled in all those things.
I guarantee you either my wife or I would take that every single time.
It's just like you will never be able to say that about most things.
People will jokingly say that until it's actually on the line.
But it's like, with, with that, you just have this ferociousness.
I can break out in sweat, thinking about somebody fictionally pushing my kid to the ground.
I actually get real adrenal responses flowing through my body.
So it's just like such a different world and it's hard to explain and you could never have convinced me when I was young that it'd be this big.
Yeah. I thought I knew, I didn't know.
But to add on top of that some of the most successful people I know, some of the most productive people I know have kids.
So I don't know if it's even a trade -off.
That love you feel, it seems to be a catalyst just for like, to make sure you have less time, but you're going to use that time better to be productive.
I would argue that.
It definitely changed a lot of my life and how I approach problems and everything in a very different way.
Let me ask some random questions from Reddit.
On a scale of one to 10, how much do you hate every product Microsoft has ever created and why is it at 10.
Okay. I think we covered that.
We hadn't technically covered it.
There you go. All right, go ahead.
Okay, the only thing I'll say is that I don't like that Microsoft pretends to be the good guy when what they really wanted to get you addicted to their products, to get you to use their products as much as possible so they can extract as much money out of you.
Well, in this world, are there really good guys?
That's a great point.
I would argue Neovim is a great guy.
There's no way they can make money.
Justin Keys is the benevolent dictator and he thinks deeply about the product and tries to make it the best as possible, where something like Microsoft, they made VS Code as a loss leader.
Copilot is probably operating on a loss leader.
These things are all getting you so tied into GitHub, remote workspaces, CI, co -pilot, you've become this trapped in permanent person.
And if that price rises, the switching cost is so great at some point that you'll never be able to switch. That's my only fear is that Microsoft was once accused of EEE and it feels like they're EEE -ing again.
yeah I'm nervous about criticizing a good thing because you could see an incentive to do that good thing like Google creating all these services that don't make money like Gmail for example you can sort of sort of cynically say like they're only doing that to tie you into an ecosystem so they can like basically keep you for life but also it's awesome that they created Gmail yeah and they create incredible product right so I can side with you on that one It is a good product.
VS Code is a good product.
Don't put that on the, but it was fine.
They did a great job.
Yeah, so like there is going to be financial incentives behind some of these companies, and by the way, me defending, not defending, but saying positive things about Microsoft is just so I could talk shit to Prime, but that's...
I love that, by the way.
Yeah, Linux is my first and last love.
It definitely, the spirit of Linux and open source is a beautiful thing.
so I do think that when you have these large corporations, even when they try to do good, oftentimes the profit imperative just takes over and they can corrupt themselves and Microsoft has a long history of doing just that to themselves.
That said, they've done, they have, you could say for cynical reasons because they want to see, seem like the good guy amongst developers but they've done a lot to support on the source, it's just like, same with meta.
Meta's done like insane amount to support open source.
You can say, actually for that one, I don't know if I can even make a financial or a cynical case for why meta is open sourcing llama and like these - Yeah, that one's confusing, it just seems great.
Maybe for hiring, but no, I think that's legit just an ethical, really powerful decision.
And sometimes these companies, companies, because they have a lot of cash, can make the right, do the right thing.
It's a really positive way to look at it, and I think that's really nice.
Well, we should always be skeptical.
Yeah, I mean, because at the end of the day, companies, they're not good, they're not bad.
They're morally neutral.
It's the people that are running them the decisions those people make that aren't really where the bad or the good comes from.
Another question, asking if he knows how to milk a cow, I've already asked that.
The answer is, no. No, you don't know.
I've never milked a cow.
Never milked a cow.
Almost been killed by a cow but never milked a cow.
Do you ever write a book?
No. All right. Why male models?
Okay, so I can explain that one.
I will say something like, I really dislike the color purple because the color purple makes me upset.
I don't know, just something very benign.
But then someone right afterwards will be like, but why don't you like the color purple?
And it's just be like, it's just like Derek Zoolander is just like I get done on a Five -minute talk about it and then the next question is like but seriously why though it's just like why male models Yeah, so that's the Zoolander reference when there's a long explanation.
Why male models and He he agrees and then forgets.
Yeah What is ligma You know I've died by ligma quite a few times ligma so do you know the origin story of ligma?
No. So, Ninja, famous streamer.
Someone got him with ligma.
I said, like, oh, something like, have you heard about ligma?
And he was like, no, and he's like, oh, ligma balls.
Right. And then after that, Ninja got like so hurt by getting had by that, that he started banning anyone in chat, who said the word ligma or something like that.
And so then it'd be, you know, if you don't embrace the meme, you get destroyed.
So, of course, it gets destroyed.
And so then the whole goal is that can people get me with ligma?
TJ did ILadies. He's like, oh, did you hear that e -girls got renamed to iLadies?
And I just didn't even see it coming.
And I was just like, what?
And he's like, iLadies, now it's on your face.
And then it's just like, oh my gosh.
And then a pirate software has also got me like, oh, have you heard about Google CMA, which CMA is a real product by Google?
And I'm like, oh yeah, I've heard about this.
What is this again?
He's like, yeah. CMA balls, right?
It's just like, dang it.
How do I keep? So I've just had it happen live on stream many, many times I've died by Ligma the most. Please ask him about the size of his Dict.
Okay. That's D -I -C -T.
That's dictionary in Python. Who doesn't love Dicts?
Yeah. That's a great question.
Just a Dict party when you use Python. I love Dicts.
That should be a t -shirt.
That's actually a hilarious t -shirt.
So, on Stack Overflow, you can ask any question you want.
I decided to craft a question one day on Stack Overflow that says, is how to measure your dictum bites.
And then I proceeded to really go to town and like explain all the different things like, well, what about the cost of the strings and the references and you know like when you really get both hands on your dicton and really go after it's like very hard done like really threw in some innuendos.
The Stack Overflow team deleted the question and then someone hand wrote me an email explaining why they deleted the question and complimented me on how thoroughly and thoughtful the question was just to wave, just to weave in innuendos and that the entire team was impressed, but it's inappropriate and it had to be deleted and don't do it again or we're gonna ban your account.
And so it's like very funny moment and so I was like, Oh, that's funny.
You know, that happened too.
That was about six years ago.
Last year, I was at a conference and there's a guy wearing a Stack Overflow, uh, nametag.
And I was like, Oh, you work at Stack Overflow.
He's like, Oh yeah.
It was like, do I got a story for and he goes, no wait a second, are you the dicked guy?
Like that was his only question was that.
And I was just like, let's go, I didn't even say anything about me, and he already knew, immediately I was the dicked guy.
I should say in all seriousness, I think I've had a bunch of conversations sort of in the Python world where I would have to mention the name of this data structure and it makes me uncomfortable every time.
You know, it's a very unfortunate shortening of a word. Dicked.
It's just like when I go to the hardware store and ask for caulk.
And there's always a nice old lady, and I ask her where to find, and it's very uncomfortable.
I try to pronounce it as hard as I can.
You really get that L in there, like caulk.
Just to be clear and try to avoid eye contact the whole time.
You said that God was a big part, was a big part of your life.
Can you speak to that a little bit more?
Who is God, and what effect?
What role do you play in your life?
So I, I did talk about that one important evening where I, for whatever reason, gained my conscious, that moment.
So obviously for me that I grew up with a life where I would probably argue myself as a functional atheist. I went to church a handful of times, I can't quite really remember actually going to church as a family in any sort of sense, so there wasn't like some super strong tie or anything like that to it.
Like pretty much anyone else growing up in America in the 90s.
You had some sort of impact or Intersection with church at some point in your life.
That was just a very normal thing.
I would probably say And so when that happened it was a it was a fairly big surprise for me I was you know, I wasn't necessarily gone that direction or deciding to do any of those things and so for me It's it's obviously the the turning point of my entire life I would, I cannot speak to who I would be now without that.
I can just tell you that I wouldn't have had the drive.
I probably would not have completed college.
I would not have found my wife or had my kids.
I wouldn't know how to value people.
I don't think without that whole thing, my value for people would have been very, very small because I would have continued just objectifying in the way I was.
And then probably the biggest thing is there's this one verse, I don't even know where it's at. And it effectively says that we love because He first loved us.
And so for me, it's like, I don't think I would have ever lived a life that was happy without this.
And I just didn't even know that that was an option for me.
And I never really, you know, it was a very tough set of years for me and I was very, very sad.
And just always kind of, just constantly looking for something to fulfill me.
And so it's like, I didn't have any confidence.
I didn't have any joy.
I was I felt very sad.
And so that was kind of this moment Where For the first time ever I didn't all of a sudden I just felt like I didn't have to live up to a standard All right Like my standards have already been paid for like everything's already like that.
That's the free gift That's the exchange.
And so it's just like for the first time.
I didn't have to be the cool guy I didn't have to have all the right words.
I didn't have to feel I didn't have to go on the sexual conquest to find validation, I didn't have to do any of those things, and it was exceptionally liberating.
Who is God? That's more of a catechism question, perhaps.
What is man? Who is God?
Those are much, much harder questions.
I believe that any time you try to get too deep into describing who God is, you typically fall into Christian heresy.
But for you, he gave you a chance to be happy.
Yeah. He gave me a chance not just to be happy, but also made it so that like the first time I can actually feel forgiven, I guess in some sense, and able to forgive people that hurt me.
Like for a long time I had this like weight I'd carry around from like the things I hated about high school and all that kind of stuff.
And through that experience, I just wrote down every last person's name and actually held them with me for quite some time.
And this was the list of people I, I forgave. And I read it a few times because like I couldn't let myself be angry or consumed by that kind of stuff.
Cause like hate is so sticky, right?
It's, it sticks for a lifetime.
And there really is only one cure for hate, which is forgiveness.
Like I just don't think you can get rid of it without that.
And so I just had choose to forgive these people and to move on.
And it really kind of freed me and I would never have thought forgiveness as a means for that change.
if I didn't first experience it myself.
What's the role of love in the human condition to go to the philosophical, and what's been the role of love in your life?
It's very obvious that every person wants or desires love.
My wife has recently convinced me to watch Love is Blind with her one time, and you watch the show, and if you're not familiar with it, It feels like just a disaster of an experiment to just cause crazy filming.
But anyways, the idea is that if you just don't see somebody, you can fall in love with somebody and want to marry them after like 10 days or some very small period of time.
And what you really end up seeing is all these people who are just desperate for actually love.
And there's like some part of it, I told my wife it's like love gladiators.
We're watching people battle it out for drama and really what they want is love.
And it's like they're fighting to the, the death and love, if you will.
And it's just almost kind of sad aspect to watch. And so I think that it's, it's, it's hard to call, like, what is its role in the human experience?
Because I don't think, I think it's just something that we all naturally, not just want, but need, and I don't think that you can really progress.
And when I say the word, love, I would like to kind of narrow it down, maybe a bit more.
And I don't mean like Eros, the Greek word, like sexy love.
I think that paternal and friendship love are extremely important.
And I think Agape, like God love is also very important.
Agape love is the one that is superior to them all, but obviously different.
And also, you know, co -needed with the parental ones and all that.
And so you kind of need this mixture of them all.
And each one is different for each reason and where it's applied.
side. And so, I don't think...
I just don't see a world in which is good of any kind without that as a very foundational piece.
Because, again, I didn't come here trying to quote any sort of scripture, but it says that it's not the nails that hung on there, it's love.
That's the reason why these things happen.
And so, it's... if forgiveness is the requirement to kind of pay off hate in some sense, then love has to be the motivation for forgiveness.
Yeah, that's the tragic aspect of life.
I think we're all, there's like a deep loneliness in all of us and longing to be a part of this bigger thing and that longing is a love and it has many names, but yeah, the love aspect of it is the beautiful aspect of life.
the tragedies, the loneliness and the unfortunate suffering.
That is a fundamental part of life and the beautiful aspect is the love.
Which, I think, is a good time to mention more Reddit, the place for everlasting positivity and love.
Somebody wrote, please thank him, you, for his everlasting positivity.
and give him a big hug for me.
So, I won't give you a big hug on camera because I'm afraid I'll get a boner and I will be very unfortunate.
Hey let's not bring dicks into this again, okay.
It's my favorite data structure.
Like I said, I love dicks.
All kinds of dicks, ordered dicks.
Ounordered? Unordered dicks.
I don't discriminate.
And yeah, but just that to say like, big thank you.
For me, like I listened to you a lot and I just really enjoy, I've been going through a lot of shit myself and just the positivity even when you're building the stupidest shit, it's just the positivity radius from you and you inspire me to be a good person, you inspire me to build stuff, so thank you.
And I'm sure there's many, many others who are listening to you for the same reason.
So thank you for your positivity, thank you for, uh, being the light in many people's lives, and thank you for talking to me brother.
Dang, I was very, very kind.
I really do appreciate all those extremely nice words, even from Reddit that's very surprising, but thank you.
I mean, I know you know that there's many people's lives, and I'm sure you've received the letters that have been changed from, from actions and things you've said in things you've done.
It's one of the best parts about doing this side is that you get a chance to potentially improve somebody's life, and you getting to interview a lot of people.
There's a lot of people that listened to Chris Latner and saw his excitement for Swift and probably went and learned Swift and then got really amazing jobs, and it can be all origin to back to you and that interview.
And so it's, those are amazing things.
And so, same goes back to you.
You've done a lot of good stuff.
Right back at you, brother.
Thank you for talking today.
Thanks for listening to this conversation with Michael Paulson, aka The Prime Minister.
To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description.
And now let me leave you with some words from Paulo Coelho.
When we strive to become better than we are.
Everything around us becomes better too.
Thank you for listening and I hope to see you next time.
