Kind: captions
Language: en
No one anywhere who's serious believes
that Cookie banners does anything good
for anyone. Yet, we've been unable to
get rid of it. This is the thing that
really gets me about cookie banners,
too. It's not just the EU. It's the
entire world. You can't hide from cookie
banners anywhere on this planet. If you
go to goddamn Mars on one of Elon's
rockets and you try to access a web
page, you'll still see a cookie banner.
No one in the universe is safe from this
nonsense. It sometimes feels like we're
barely better off. Like web pages aren't
that different from what they were in
the late 90s, early 2000s. They're still
just forms. They still just write to
databases. A lot of people, I think, are
very uncomfortable with the fact that
they are essentially CRUD monkeys. They
just make systems that create, read,
update, or delete rows in a database.
And they have to compensate for that
existential dread by over complicating
things. That's a huge part of the
satisfaction of driving a race car is
driving it at the edge of adhesion, as
we call it, where you're essentially
just a tiny movement away from spinning
out. Doesn't take much. Then the car
starts rotating. Once it starts
rotating, you lose grip and you're going
for the wall. That balance of danger and
skill is what's so intoxicating.
The following is a conversation with
David Heinmire Hansen, also known as
DHH. He is a legend in the programming
and tech world. Brilliant and
insightful, sometimes controversial and
always fun to talk to. He's the creator
of Ruby on Rails, which is an
influential web development framework
behind many websites used by millions of
people, including Shopify, GitHub, and
Airbnb.
He is the co-owner and CTO of 37 signals
that created base camp and once he is a
New York Times best-selling author
together with his co-author Jason
Frerieded of four books rework remote
getting real and it doesn't have to be
crazy at work. And on top of that, he's
also a race car driver, including being
a class winner at the legendary 24-hour
lemon race. This is the Lex Rubin
podcast. To support it, please check out
our sponsors in the description and
consider subscribing to this channel.
And now, dear friends, here's DH.
For someone who became a legendary
programmer, you officially got into
programming late in life. And I guess
that's because
uh you tried to learn how to program a
few times and you failed. So can you
tell me the uh the full story, the saga
of your failures to learn programming?
Was Commodore 64 involved? Commodore 64
was the inspiration? I really wanted a
Commodore 64. That was the first
computer I ever sat down in front. And
the way I sat down in front of it was I
was 5 years old and there was this one
kid on my street who had a Commodore 64.
No one else had a computer, so we were
all the kids just getting over there and
we were all playing Y Kung Fu. I don't
know if you've ever seen that game. It
was one of the original fighting games.
It's really a great game. And I was
playing that for the first time at 5
years old. And we were like seven kids
sitting up in this one kid's bedroom all
taking our turn to play the game. And I
just found that unbelievably
interesting. And I begged and I begged
and I begged my dad, could I get a
computer? And he finally comes home.
He's like, "I got your computer." I was
like, "Yes, my own Commodore 64." And he
pulls out this black, green, and blue
keyboard. That's an Armstrong 464. I was
like, "Dad, what's this?
>> The disappointment.
>> This is not a Commodore 64." But it was
a computer. So, I got my first computer
at essentially 6 years old, that
Armstrad 464. And of course, the first
thing I wanted to do, I wanted to play
video games. And I think the computer,
which he, by the way, had traded for a
TV and a stereo recorder or something
like that, came with like two games. One
was this Frogger game where you had to
escape from underground. It was actually
kind of dark, like this frog. You're
trying to get it out from underground.
And I was just I was pretty bad at it.
And I only had those two games. And then
I wanted more games. And one way to get
more games when you're a kid who don't
have a lot of money and can't just buy a
bunch of games is to type them in
yourself. Back in ' 84 85 magazines
would literally print source code at the
back of their magazines and you could
just sit and type it in. So I tried to
do that and it would take like two hours
to print this game into the Armistrad
and of course I'd make some spelling
mistake along the way and something
wouldn't work and the whole thing I
wasn't that good of English. I was born
in Denmark. So I was really trying to
get into it because I wanted all these
games and didn't have the money to buy
them and I tried quite hard for quite a
while to get into it but it just never
clicked. And then I discovered the magic
of piracy. And after that I kind
basically just took some time off from
learning to program because well now
suddenly I had access to all sorts of
games. So that was the first attempt
like around six seven years old. And
what's funny is I remember these
fragments. I remember not understanding
the purpose of a variable. If if there's
a thing and you assign something, why
would you assign another thing to it?
So, for some reason, I understood
constants. Like, constants made sense to
me, but variables didn't. Then, maybe
I'm 11 or 12. I've gotten into the
AmIGGA at this point. The Amigga, by the
way, still perhaps my favorite computer
of all time. I mean, this is one of
those things where you like people get
older and they're like, "Oh, the music
from the 80s was amazing." To me, even
as someone who loves computers, who
loved new computers, the AmIGGA was this
magical machine that was made by the
same company that produced the Commodore
64. And I got the AmIGGA 500, I think in
87.
>> Look at this sexy thing. That is a sexy
machine right there.
>> This is from an age, by the way, where
computing wasn't global in the same
sense. The different territories had
different computers that were popular.
The Amigga was really popular in Europe,
but it wasn't very popular at all in the
US, as far as I understand. It wasn't
popular in Japan. The there were just
different machines. The Apple 2 was a
big thing in the US. I'd never even
heard of Apple in the8s in Copenhagen.
But the Omega 500 was the machine that
brought me to want to try it again. And
you know what's funny? The reason I
wanted to try it again was I remembered
the first time to learn. And then there
was this programming language that was
literally called easy Amos.
>> Mhm.
>> Like the easy version of Amos. I'm like,
if it's if it's easy Amos, how hard can
it be? I got to be able to figure this
out. And this time I tried harder. I got
into conditionals. I got into loops. I
got into all these things and I still I
couldn't do it.
And on the second attempt, I really got
to the point like maybe this is just
maybe I'm not smart enough. Maybe
programming is just not maybe it's too
much math. Like I like math in this sort
of superficial way. I don't like it in
the deep way that some of my perhaps
slightly nerdier friends did who I had
tremendous respect for. Like I'm not
that person. I'm not the ma math geek
who's going to figure it all out. So
after that attempt with easy Amos and
failing to even get I don't even think I
completed one even very basic game. I
thought the program is just not for me.
I'm going to have to do something else.
I still love computers. I still love
video games. I actually at that time had
already begun making friends with people
who knew how to program who weren't even
programming easy Amos. They were
programming freaking Assembler. And I
would sit down and just go I'm how do
you the moves and the memories and the
copies? How do you even do this? I don't
even understand how you go from this to
AmIGGA demos, for example. That was the
big thing with the Amigga. had this
wonderful demo scene in Europe. It's
this really interesting period of time
in the Amigga's history where you had
all these programmers spread out mostly
all over Europe who would compete on
graphic competitions
>> where you could probably bring one of
these on YouTube on on this thing. They
would make these little um almost like
music videos combining some MIDI music,
combining some cool graphics and they
would do all of it in like 4K. 4
kilobytes that is not 4K is a
revolution, 4 kilobytes of of memory.
And I just thought that was such a cool
scene. This was obviously pre- internet.
It was even prebs
bulletin board systems to some extent.
me was you swap your demo software with
someone else by sending them a disc in
the mail
>> like the 3.5s and I just I was enamored
with that whole scene. I was enamored
with what they were able to create and I
just wanted to be a part of it even
though I kind of didn't have any skills
to contribute and that's how I got into
running BBS's. I didn't learn
programming then and I wouldn't learn
programming until much later until I was
almost 20 years old. The bulletin board
systems existed in this funny space
where they were partly a service to the
demo scenes allowing all these demo
groups to distribute their amazing
demos. And then it was also a place to
trade piracy software, pirated software.
And I ended up starting one of those
when I was 14 years old in my tiny
little bedroom in Copenhagen. I had my
at that point Amigga 4000. I had three
telephone lines coming into my tiny
room.
>> Nice.
>> Which was funny because again, I'm 14
years old. By the time I was installing
my third line, you had to get someone
from the telephone company to come do
it. I get this guy and he's just looking
around like, "What is this? Why the hell
is a 14-year-old having three phone
lines into their tiny little bedroom?
What are what's going on here? Why are
all these modems blinking red and um
black and making funny sounds?" Did your
parents know?
>> They did and they didn't. They knew I
had the phone lines. They knew I had the
computer. I don't think they really
understood that I was trading pirated
software that was both illegal and
whatever else was going on.
>> Oh, we should probably say that in
Europe, maybe you can comment on this in
especially in Eastern Europe, but Europe
in general, piracy, I think, was more
acceptable than it was in the United
States. I don't know there maybe maybe
it's just my upbringing. That
conversation wasn't present. I never
spoke to anyone growing up in Denmark
who had any moral qualms whatsoever
about piracy. It was just completely
accepted that
>> you're a kid. You want a lot of games.
You don't have a lot of money. What do
you do? You trade.
>> Yeah.
>> Some people would occasionally buy a
game. I mean, I once bought a uh Sega
Master System and the I bought one game
cuz that was what I could afford. I got
Afterburner 2. I don't know if you've
ever played that game. It's pretty bad
implementation on the uh Sega Master
System, but it was like 600 crowners and
I was making money at that time uh doing
newspaper delivery. I had to do that for
a month to afford one game. I like video
games way too much to wait a month just
to get one game. So piracy was just the
way you did it. And that was how I got
into running this bulletin board system,
being part of the demo scene, being part
of the piracy scene to some extent. And
then also at some point realizing, oh,
you can actually also make money on this
and this can fund buying more phone
lines and buying more modems and buying
more amiggas. Oh yeah, that was one of
the demo parties. These were amazing
things.
>> What am I looking at?
>> Look at all those CRT monitors.
>> All these CRT monitors. Again, when I
was 14, I I don't understand fully why
my parents allowed this, but I traveled
from Copenhagen, the capital of Denmark,
to O, this tiny little town in Judan on
the train with a bunch of dudes who were
like late teens in their 20s. I'm 14
years old. I'm lugging my 14in CRT
monitor with my computer in the back to
go to the party. That was what it was
called. That was the biggest demo scene
party at that time. And it was exactly
as you see in that picture. Thousands of
people just lining up with their
computers, programming demos all day
long, and trading these things back and
forth.
>> That's kind of awesome. Not going to
lie, it's a little ridiculous.
>> It's totally awesome. And I I I miss it
in ways where the internet has connected
people in some ways, but the connection
you get from sitting right next to
someone else
>> who has their own CRT monitor who's
lugged it halfway around the country to
get there is truly special because it
was also just this burst of creativity.
You're constantly running around. You're
constantly surrounded by people who are
really good at what they could do.
They're really good at programming
computers. It's infectious. It was part
of that pang I felt then going like oh
man why can't I figure this out? I mean
why can't I even figure out easy Amos?
I it's kind of frustrating.
>> But on your third attempt you were more
successful.
>> So third attempt is when I start getting
it. This is when I start helping out
let's say building things for the
internet. So around 95 I think it is or
I discovered the internet. Actually
ninth grade that was my first
experience. I went to some university in
in Denmark and in ninth grade we had
this excursion and they sat us down in
front of a computer and the computer had
Netscape Navigator the first version or
maybe it was even the the precursor to
that and they had a text editor and us
kids just got like hey built something
on the internet and it was just HTML and
the first thing you do is like oh I can
make the text text blink by just putting
in this tag and saving it. That was that
moment. That was actually when I
reawakened the urge to want to learn to
program because I got a positive
experience. All the other experiences I
had with programming was I'd spend hours
typing something in, I'd click run and
it wouldn't work. And I'd get an error
message that made no sense to me as a
kid, either at six or seven or at 12.
And here I am sitting in front of a
computer connected to the internet and
I'm making text blink. I'm making it
larger. I'm turning it into an H1 or an
H2.
And these guys out here, we just did it
for like an hour and a half. And
suddenly I go, "Oh, I can make things
for the internet that someone in Germany
can be able to access and see and I
don't have to ask anyone for permission.
This is super cool. I got to do more of
this." So I got into the internet. I got
into working with HTML and I still had
all these friends from these demo
parties
>> and I started working with them on
creating gaming websites. I'd write
about the video games. I'd review him.
This was another good way of getting new
video games was to walk down to some
store and say like, hey, I'm a I'm a
journalist. I'm like this 15year-old kid
and they're they're looking at me,
you're you're a journalist. Yeah. Can I
borrow some some games? Cuz this was
when games moved on to the PlayStation
and these other things. You couldn't
just as easily pirate, at least not at
first. So, I went down there, did all
that. And that started the journey of
the internet for me. It started working
on these gaming websites, working with
programmers,
figuring out that I could do something.
I could work on the HTML part. It's not
really programming, but it kind of
smells like it. You're talking to a
computer, you're making it put text on
the screen, and you're communicating
with someone halfway around the world.
So, that became my pathway back into
programming. And then slowly I picked up
more and more of it. First website I did
with someone, one of these programmers
from the demo scene that was dynamic was
ASP.NET. net and it wasn't even actually
called.net that was what we started on
and then we moved on to PHP and PHP was
when I finally got it when it finally
clicked when conditionals and loops and
variables and all of that stuff started
to make sense enough to me that I
thought I can do this.
>> So would it be fair to say that we
wouldn't have DHH without PHP and
therefore you owe all your success to
PHP? 100% that's true and it's even
better than that because it's PHP to me
didn't just give me a start in terms of
making my own web applications it
actually gave me a bar in many ways I
think the pinnacle of developer web
developer ergonomics is late '90s PHP
you write this script you FTP it to a
server and instantly it's deployed
instantly it's available you change
anything in that file and you reload
boom it's right there. There's no web
servers, there's no setup, there's just
an Apache
>> that runs mod PHP. And it was
essentially the easiest way to get a
dynamic web page up and going. And this
is one of the things I've been chasing
that high for basically the rest of my
career that it was so easy to make
things for the internet in the mid to
late 90s. How did we lose the
sensibilities that allowed us to not
just work this way, but get new people
into the industry to give them their
success experiences that I had, adding a
freaking Blink tag to an HTML page,
ftping a PHP page to an Apache web
server without knowing really anything
about anything, without knowing anything
about frameworks, without knowing
anything about setup,
all of that stuff have really taken us
to a place where It sometimes feels like
we're barely better off. Like web pages
aren't that different from what they
were in the late 90s, early 2000s.
They're still just forms. They still
just write to databases. A lot of
people, I think, are very uncomfortable
with the fact that they are essentially
CRUD monkeys. They just make systems
that create, read, update, or delete
rows in a database. And they have to
compensate for that existential dread by
over complicating things. Now, that's a
bit of a character. There's more to it,
and there's things you can learn for
more sophisticated ways of thinking
about this, but there's still an ideal
here, which was why I was so happy you
had Peter Levels on because he still
basically works like this. And I look at
that and go like, man, that's amazing.
>> Yeah, you're chasing that high. He's
been high all along using PHP, jQuery,
and uh SQLite.
>> I think it's amazing because he's
proving that this isn't just a nostalgic
dream. He's actually doing it. He's
running all these businesses. Now, some
of that is, as he would admit up first
up front, is that he's just one guy. And
you can do different things when you're
just one guy. When you're working in a
team, when I started working on the
team, when I started working with Jason
Freed on Base Camp, we at first didn't
use version control together. I used
version control for myself and then I
thought, you know what, designers
ah, they're probably not smart enough to
figure out CVS. Yeah.
>> And therefore I just like, "No, no, no.
You just FTP it up. You just FTP it." I
knew they knew how to do FTP. And then
after the third time, I had overridden
their changes. I was like, "God damn it.
I guess I got to teach Jason CBS to not
do that again." But I think there's
still way more truth to the fact that we
can work the way we did in the '90s,
work the way Peter works today, even in
the team context and that we've been far
too willing to hand over far too much of
our developer ergonomics to the
merchants of complexity.
>> And you've been chasing that with Rails
8. So h how do you bring all the cool
features of a modern framework and make
it no build make it as as easy to create
something and to ship it as it was in
the '9s with just PHP. It's very
difficult for me to beat the Peter
Level's approach
uh of just just it's so easy to just
ship some PHP and it should be why
should it be harder than that? Our
computers today are almost infinitely
faster than what they were in the 90s.
So, shouldn't we be able to work in even
easier ways? We should be looking back
on the '90s and go like, "Oh, that was
way too complicated. Now we have more
sophisticated technology that's way
faster and it allows us to work in these
easier to use ways." But that's not
true. But now you can see the line I
draw in my work with Ruby and Rails and
especially with Rails 8. No build to me
is reaching back to that '90s feeling
and going now we can do some of those
things without giving up on all the
progress because I do think you can get
too nostalgic. I do think you can start
just fantasizing that everything was
better in the '90s. It wasn't. I mean I
was there. There was a lot of things
that sucked. And if we can somehow find
a way to combine
the advantages and advances we've had
over the past 20 years with that ease of
developer ergonomics, we can win. No
build is a rejection of the part of web
development I've hated the most in the
past 10-15 years which is the JavaScript
scene.
>> Yeah.
>> And I don't say that as someone who
hates JavaScript. I mean I often joke
that JavaScript is my second favorite
programming language. It's a very
distant second. Ruby is by far in a way
number one. But I actually like
JavaScript. I don't think it's a bad
language. It gets a lot of
>> flak. People add a string of two plus a
one and it gives something nonsense and
I just go like, "Yeah, but why are you
why would you do that? Just don't do
that." The language is actually quite
lovely, especially the modern version
ES6 that really introduced a proper
class syntax to it. So I could work with
JavaScript in many of the same ways that
I love working with Ruby made things so
much better. But in the early 20110s
until quite recently, all of that
advancement happened in pre-processing
happened in built pipelines. The
browsers couldn't speak a dialect of
JavaScript that was pleasant to work
with. So everyone started to
pre-ompiling their JavaScript to be able
to use more modern ways of programming
with a browser that was seen as stuck
with an ancient version of JavaScript
that no one actually wanted to work
with. And that made sense to me, but it
was also deeply unpleasant. And I
remember thinking during that time, the
dark ages as I refer to them with
JavaScript, that
this cannot be the final destination.
There's no way that we have managed to
turn the internet into such an
unpleasant place to work where I would
start working on a project in JavaScript
using Webpack and all of these
dependencies and I would put it down for
literally 5 minutes and the thing
wouldn't compile anymore. The amount of
churn that the JavaScript community,
especially with its frameworks and its
tooling, went through in the decade from
2010 to 2020 was absurd.
And you had to be
trapped inside of that asylum to not
realize what an utterly
perverse situation we had landed
ourselves in. Why does everything break
all the time? I mean, the joke wouldn't
be just that the software would break.
That would annoy me personally. But then
I'd go on hacker news and I'd see some
thread on the latest JavaScript release
of some framework and the thread would
be like um someone would ask well aren't
we using the thing we just used three
months ago and people would be like that
thing is so outdated that's so three
months ago you got to get with the new
program we're completely rewriting
everything for the teen time and
anything you've learned in the framework
you've been spending the last amount of
time on it's all useless. You got to
throw everything out and you got to
start over. Why aren't you doing it,
stupid idiot?
>> Is that a kind of mass hysteria that
took over the developer community? You
think? Like where you have to keep
creating new frameworks and new
frameworks and we are we past that dark
age?
>> I think we're getting out of it. And
we're getting out of it because browsers
have gotten so much better. There was a
stagnation in browser technology. Some
of it was an overhang all the way back
from IE5.
So I5 essentially put the whole internet
development experience into a deep
freeze because Microsoft won the browser
wars in the mid 2000s and then they
basically disbanded their browser
development team because they're like
all right job done we don't need any
more innovation on the internet. Can we
just go back to writing Windows forms or
something now that we control
everything?
And it really wasn't until obviously
Firefox kind of kindled a little bit of
something, then Chrome got into the
scene and Google got serious about
moving the web forward that you had an
kindling of maybe the browser could be
better, maybe the browser wasn't frozen
in time in 2005, maybe the browser could
actually evolve like at the development
platform that it is. But then what
happened was you had a lot of smart
people who poured in to the web because
the web turned out to be the greatest
application development platform of all
time. This was where all the money was
being made. This were this was where all
the billionaires were being minted. This
was where the Facebooks and whatever of
the world came to be. So you had all of
this brain power applied to the problem
of how to work with the web. And there
were some very smart people with some
I'm sure very good ideas who did not
have uh programmer happiness as their
motivation. Number one, they had other
priorities and those priorities allowed
them to discount and even rationalize
the complexity they were injecting
everywhere. Some of that complexity came
from organizational structure. When you
have a company like Facebook for example
that does depend on the web and want to
push it forward but have sliced the
development role job into these tiny
little niches. I'm a front-end
glob pipeline configurator. Oh yeah well
I'm a front-end whatever engineer. And
suddenly the web developer was no longer
one person. It was 15 different roles.
That in itself injected a ton of
complexity. But I also want to give it
the bold case here, which was that some
of that complexity was necessary to get
to where we are today. That the
complexity was a bridge. It wasn't the
destination, but we had to cross that
bridge to get to where we are today.
Where browsers are frankly incredible.
The JavaScript you can write in a text
file and then serve on a web server for
a browser to ingest is amazing. It's
actually a really good experience. You
don't need any pre-processing. You can
just write text files, send them to a
browser, and you have an incredible
development.
>> And we should also say that it can kind
of be broken. At least the HTML, but
even the JavaScript could be a little
bit broken, and it kind of still works.
Like maybe it halfass works, but like
the just the amount of mess of smelly
code that a browser has to deal with is
insane. This is one of the hardest
problems in computing today is to parse
the entire internet because thankfully
for us as web developers but perhaps not
so much for the browser developers every
web page that has ever been created
minus the brief period with flash still
runs today.
>> The web page I did in ninth grade would
render on a modern browser today 30
years later. That is completely crazy
when you think about the amount of
evolution we've had with the web, how
much better we've made it, how many more
standards browsers have adopted. It's
essentially an Apollo project today to
create a new browser, which is why it
doesn't happen very often, which is why
even companies like Microsoft had to
throw in the towel and say we can't do
it. Now, I actually don't think that's
good for the web. There is the danger of
the monoculture if we just get a single
browser engine that runs everything. And
we are in danger of that. I love the
fact that the Ladybird project, for
example, is trying to make a new browser
engine from scratch. I've supported that
project. I would encourage people to
look into that. It's really a wonderful
>> nice
>> thing. It's staffed by a bunch of people
who worked on other browser projects in
the past.
>> Truly independent web browser.
>> We really need that. But I can hold that
thought in my head. At the same time, I
hold the thought in my head that
Google's Chrome was pivotal to the web
surviving as the premier web development
platform. If it had not been for Google
and their entire business depending on a
thriving open web,
Apple, Microsoft, I think would have
been just as fine to see the web go away
to disappear into being something that
just served native web applica or native
mobile applications and native desktop
applications that they could completely
control. So I have all sorts of problems
with Google, but it's not Chrome. Chrome
is a complete gift to web developers
everywhere to the web as a development
platform and they deserve an enormous
amount of credit I think for that even
if it's entangled with their business
model and half of Chrome is code that
spies on you or informs targeted ads and
a bunch of things I'm not a big fan of.
I can divorce that from the fact we need
champions in the corner of the web who
have trillions of dollars of market cap
value riding on the open web.
>> We're going to take tangents upon a
tangent upon a tangent. So, let's go to
Chrome. I think Chrome positive impact
on humanities is immeasurable for
reasons that you just described. On the
technology front, the features they
present, the competition they created,
it's spurred on this wonderful
flourishing of web technologies. But
anyway, I have to ask you about the the
recent stuff with the DOJ trying to
split up Chrome and Google. Do you think
this is a good idea? Do you think this
does harm? Is a disaster?
And I say that as someone who's been
very sympathetic to the antitrust fight
because I do think we have antitrust
problems in technology. But the one
place where we don't have them by and
large is with browsers, is with the
tools we use to access the open web.
First of all, we have Firefox. Now,
Firefox is not doing all that great and
Firefox has been propped up by Google
for many years to deter from exactly
what's going on with the DOJ that they
were the only game in town. Apple has
Safari. I have a bunch of problems with
Apple, too, but I love Safari. I love
the fact that we have a premier browser
running on a premier operating system
that people can't turn the web into just
a Chrome experience, but I also think
that the open web needs this trillion
dollar champion or at least benefits
from it. Maybe doesn't need it, but it
certainly benefits from it. And of all
the things that are wrong with monopoly
formation in technology, Chrome is the
last thing. And this is why I get so
frustrated sometimes about the anti- or
the monopoly fight that there are real
problems and we should be focusing on
the premier problems first like the toll
booths on our mobile phones. There are
far bigger problem. It's not the open
web. It's not the tools that we use to
access the open web. If I don't want to
use Chrome, if my customers of my
businesses that run on the internet
don't want to use Chrome, they don't
have to. We're never forced to go
through it. the open internet is still
open. So, I think it's a real shame that
the DOJ has chosen to pursue Google in
this way. I do think there are other
things you can nail Google for and their
ad monopoly maybe or the uh shenanigans
they've done in controlling both sides
of the ad ledger that they both control
the supply and the demand. There are
problems. Chrome isn't it. And you end
up making the web much worse. And this
is the thing we always got to remember
when we think about legislation, when we
think about um monopoly fights is you
may not like how things look today and
you may want to do something about it,
but you may also make it worse. The good
intentions behind the GDPR in Europe
currently has amounted to what? cookie
banners that everyone on the internet
hates that helps no one do anything
better, anything more efficient, that
saves no privacy in any way, shape, or
form, has been a complete boondoggle,
that has only enriched lawyers and
accountants and
bureaucrats.
>> Yeah. You said that the cookie banner is
a monument for why Europe is losing is
is doing the worst uh of all the regions
in tech. It's it's a monument to good
intentions leading straight to hell.
>> And the Europe is actually world class
>> in good intentions leading straight to
hell.
>> So hell is the cookie accept button.
They have to accept all cookies. That's
what hell looks like over and over. You
don't actually ever get to the web page.
>> Just on a human scale. Try to imagine
how many hours every day are wasted
clicking that away and how much harm
we've done to the web as a platform that
people enjoy because of them. The
internet is ugly in part because of
cookie banners. Cookie banners were
supposed to save us from advertisement
and advertisement can make the web ugly.
There's plenty of examples of that. But
cookie banners made the entire internet
ugly in one fell swoop. And that's a
complete tragedy. But what's even worse,
and this is why I call it out as a
monument to everything the EU gets
wrong, is that we have known this for a
decade. No one anywhere who's serious
believes that cookie banners does
anything good for anyone. Yet, we've
been unable to get rid of it. There's
this one piece of legislation that's
now, I think, 10 or 12 years old. It's
complete failure on every conceivable
metric. Everyone hates it universally,
yet we can't seem to do anything about
it.
That's a bankruptcy declaration for any
body of bureaucrats who pretend or
pretend to make things better for not
just citizens but people around the
world. This is the thing that really
gets me about cookie banners, too. It's
not just the EU. It's the entire world.
You can't hide from cookie banners
anywhere on this planet. If you go to
goddamn Mars on one of Elon's rockets
and you try to access a web page, you'll
still see a cookie banner. No one in the
universe is safe from this nonsense.
>> Probably the interface on on the rocket
>> slower. You have basically
150 second ping time. So it'll take you
45 seconds just to get through the
cookie banners from Mars.
>> Um, all right. Let's walk back up the
stack of this recursive tangents we've
been taking. So Chrome, we should say,
at least in my opinion, is not winning
unfairly. It's winning in the fair way
by just being better.
>> It is. If I was going to steal man the
other side just for a half second,
>> people would say, well, maybe yes, most
people do sort of begrudgingly agree
that Chrome is a pretty good browser.
But then they'll say the reason it got
dominance was distribution. And the
reason they got distribution was because
Google also controls Android and
therefore can make Chrome the default
browser on all these phones. Now, I
don't buy that. And the reason I don't
buy that is because on Android, you're
actually allowed to ship a different
browser that has a browser engine that's
not the same as Chrome. Unlike on iOS
where if you want to ship a browser,
Chrome, for example, ships for iOS, but
it's not Chrome. It's Safari wrapped in
address.
And every single alternative browser on
iOS have to use the Safari web engine.
That's not competition. That's not what
happened on Android. Again, I think
there are some nuances to it. But if you
zoom out and you look at all the
problems we have with big tech, Chrome
is not it. Chrome won on merits. I
begrudgingly have switched to Chrome on
that realization alone. As a web
developer, I just prefer it. I like
Firefox in many ways. I like the ethos
of it, but Chrome is a better browser
than Firefox. Full stop. And by the way,
we've never mentioned Edge. Edge is also
a good browser
>> because it's also Chrome in address,
>> but it never gets the love. I I don't
think I've ever used Bing and I'm sure
Bing is really nice.
>> Maybe you have because you know what is
Bing in address?
>> What?
>> Duck.Go, which is actually the search
engine that I use. Duck.Go gets its
search results from Bing. Or at least it
used to. If they changed that, that
would be news to me.
>> Well, maybe everything is just a wrap or
a dress. Everything is wearing a dress.
Underneath there's some other turtles.
It turtles all the dresses all the way
down. Okay. What were we talking about?
We got there from JavaScript and from
you learning how to program. So
eventually
the big success story is when you built
a bunch of stuff with PHP
and you were like actually shipping
things.
>> Yes.
>> And that's when the the Ruby story came.
So when your big love affair with
programming began there. So can you take
me there? What what is Ruby? Tell the
story of Ruby. Explain Ruby to me. PHP
was what converted me from just being
able to fondle HTML and turn out some
web pages to actually being able to
produce web applications myself.
So I owe a tremendous gratitude to PHP
in that regard. But I never thought of
PHP as a calling. I never thought I'm a
professional programmer who writes PHP.
That's who I am and that's what I do. I
thought of PHP as a tool I needed to
smack the computer with until it
produced web applications I wanted. It
was very much a means to an end. I
didn't fall in love with PHP.
I'm very grateful that it taught me the
basics of programming and I'm very
grateful that it set the bar for the
economics. But it really wasn't until
Ruby that I started thinking of myself
as a programmer. And the way that came
about was that the first time I ever got
hired as a professional programmer to
write code was actually by Jason
Frerieded, my business partner still.
All the way back in 2001,
I had been working on these gaming
websites in PHP for essentially 18
months at that point. No one had been
paying me to do code in that regard. And
I connect with Jason Freed over an email
sent from Copenhagen, Denmark to
Chicago, Illinois to a person who didn't
know who I was. I was just offering
solicited advice. Jason had asked a
question on the internet and I had sent
him the answer and he was asking in PHP
and I'd sent him the answer to that
question and we started talking and then
we started working which by the way is a
miracle of what the internet can allow.
How can a kid in Copenhagen who's never
met this guy in Chicago connect just
over email and start working together
and by the way we're still working
together now 24 years later that's
incredible but we started working
together and we started working together
on some client projects Jason would do
the design 37 signals would do the
design I would bring the programming PHP
and after we worked on I think two or
three client projects together in PHP
we kept
hitting the same problem that whenever
you work with a client, you start that
project off an email. Oh yeah, let's
work together. Here's what we're
building and you start trading more and
more emails and before a few weeks have
passed, you got to add someone to the
project. They don't have the emails.
They don't have the context. You send
where's the latest file? Oh, I've
uploaded on the FTP. It's like final
final V6 2.0, right? That's the one to
get. It's just a mess, a beautiful mess.
in some ways a mess that still runs the
vast majority of projects to this day.
Email is the lowest common denominator.
That's wonderful. But we had dropped the
ball a couple times in serious ways with
customers and we thought we can do
better. We know how to make web
applications. Can't we just make a
system that's better than email for
managing projects? It can't be that
hard. We've been doing blogs. We've been
doing to-do list. Let's put some of
these things together and just make a
system where everything that anyone
involved in the project needs is on one
page. And it has to be simple enough
that I'm not going to run a seminar
teaching you how to use the system. I'm
just going to give you the login code.
You're going to jump into it. So that's
base camp.
>> And when we started working on base
camp,
I for the first time in the experience I
had with Jason had the freedom of
technology choice. There was no client
telling me, "Yeah, PHP, that sounds
good. We know PHP. Can you build it in
PHP?" I had free reigns.
>> And at that time, I'd been reading uh IE
magazine
>> and a couple of other magazines back
from the early 2000s where Dave Thomas
and Martin Fowler had been writing about
programming patterns and how to write
better code. And these two guys in
particular were both using Ruby to
explain their concepts because Ruby
looked like pseudo code.
>> Whether you were programming in C or
Java or PHP, all three constituencies
could understand Ruby because it
basically just reads lang English. So
these guys were using Ruby to describe
the concepts. And first of all, I would
read these articles for just the
concepts they were explaining. And I'd
be like, what is this programming
language? I mean, I I like the concept
you're explaining, but I also want to
see the programming language.
Why haven't I heard of this? So, I
started looking into Ruby. And I
realized at that time, Ruby might not be
known by anyone, but it's actually been
around for a long time. Matts, the
Japanese creator of Ruby, had started
working on Ruby back in 93, before the
internet was even a thing. And here I am
in 2003,
10 years later, picking up what seems
like this hidden gem that's just laying
in obscurity in plain sight. But Dave
Thomas and Martin Fowler, I think,
successfully put me and a handful of
other people on the trail of a
programming language that hadn't been
used much in the West, but could be. So
I picked up Ruby and I thought this is
this is very different. First of all,
where are all the semicolons?
>> I'd been programming in PHP in ASP. I'd
even done some Pascal. I'd looked at
some C. There are semicolons everywhere.
And that was the first thing that struck
me is where are the damn semicolons? And
I started thinking actually why do we
have semicolons in programming? there to
tell the interpreter that there's a new
line of instructions, but I don't need
him as a human. How? Oh, someone is
looking out for the human here, not for
the machine. So, that really got me
interested. And then I thought to
myself, do you know what? I know PHP
quite well. I'm not an amazing
programmer. I haven't been working in
programming for all that long,
but maybe I can figure it out. I'm going
to give myself two weeks. I'm going to
write a proof of concept where I talk to
a database. I pull some records. I
format them a bit and I display them on
an HTML page. Can I figure that out in a
couple weeks? It took about one weekend
and I was completely mesmerized. I was
completely mind blown because Ruby
was made for my brain like a perfect
tailored glove. by someone I'd never
met. Like, how is this even possible?
>> We should say maybe like paint a picture
of the certain qualities that Ruby has.
Maybe even compared to PHP. We should
also say that there's a ridiculous thing
that I'm used to that I forget about
that there's dollar signs everywhere.
PHP
>> there's line noise. That's what I like
to call
>> line noise. Line noise. That's such a
beautiful phrase. Yeah. So, there's all
these things that look like programs.
And with Ruby, I mean, there's some
similarities in Python there. Uh, it
just looks kind of like natural
language. You can read it normally.
>> Here's a while loop that does a five
iterations. You can literally type the
number five dot. Now, I'm calling a
method on the number five. By the way,
that's one of the beautiful aspects of
Ruby that primitives like integers are
also objects. And you can call five dot
times
start brackets. Now you're iterating
over the code in that bracket five
times. That's it.
>> Okay, that's nice.
>> That's not just nice, that's
exceptional. There is literally no other
programming language that I know of that
has managed to boil away the line noise
that almost every other programming
language would inject into a five time
iteration over a block of code to that
extent.
>> That's a really nice Well, thank you for
giving that example. That's a beautiful
example. Wow, I don't think I know a
programming language that does that.
That's really nice.
>> Ruby is full of that. And there's So,
let me dive into a couple examples
because I really think it helps paint
the picture. And let me preface this by
saying I actually I like the ethos of
Python. I think the Ruby and the Python
community share a lot of similarities.
They're both dynamic interpreted
languages. They're both focused on
immediiacy and productivity and ease of
use in a bunch of ways, but then they're
also very different in many other ways.
And one of the one ways they're very
different is aesthetically.
Python to me, I hope I don't offend
people too much. I've said this before,
it's just it's ugly. And it's ugly at it
in its base because it's full of
superfluous instructions that are
necessary for legacy reasons
of when Guido made Python back in ' 87
that are still here in 2025 and my brain
can't cope with that. Let me give you a
basic example. When you make a class in
Python, the initializer method, the
starting method is defaf. Okay, fair
enough. That's actually the same as Ruby
def definition of a method. Then it is
underscore
not one underscore two in it underscore
underscore.
>> Yeah.
>> Parentheses start self,
and then the first argument.
>> Yeah, the whole self thing. Yeah.
>> Mhm.
>> I look at that and go, I'm sorry. I'm
out. I can't do it.
It's just it's everything about it
offends my sensibilities to the core.
Here you have the most important method
that all new objects or classes have to
implement and it is one of the most
aesthetically offensive ways of typing
initialize that I've ever seen anywhere.
And you guys are okay with this?
>> Yeah, you're making me you know where
you're like talking about my marriage or
something like this and and I'm now
realizing I've been in a toxic
relationship all along. Yeah, I just get
used to it. That to me, by the way, was
the magic of Ruby. It opened my eyes to
how beautiful programs could be. I
didn't know I'd been working in ASP. I'd
been working in PHP. I didn't even have
the concept that aesthetics, beautiful
code, was something we could optimize
for, that something we could pursue. And
even more than that, that we could
pursue it above other objectives. That
Ruby is, as beautiful as it is, is not
an accident and it's not easy. Ruby
itself is implemented in C. It's very
difficult to parse Ruby code because
Ruby is written for humans and humans
are messy creatures. They like things in
just the right way. I can't fully
explain why the underscore_initers
make me repulse, but it does. And when I
look at the Ruby alternative, it's
really instructive. So, it's defaf. same
part df space
initialize
parenthesis not even parenthesis if you
don't need to call it within the
arguments there's not even a parenthesis
that in itself is actually also a major
part if the human doesn't need the
additional characters we're not just
going to put them in because it'd be
nicer to parse for the computer we're
going to get rid of the semicolons we're
going to get rid of the parenthesis
we're going to get rid of the
underscores we're going to get rid of
all that ugliness all the line noise and
boil it down to its pure essentials
and at the same time we're not going to
abbreviate. This is a key difference in
the aesthetics between Ruby and Python
as well. In it is shorter type. It's
only five characters. Initialize is a
lot longer, but it looks a lot better.
And you don't type it very often. So,
you should look at something pretty. If
you don't have to do it all the time,
it's okay that it's long. Those kinds of
aesthetic evaluations are rife all over
the Ruby language. But let me give you
an even better example. The if
conditional, that's the bedrock of all
programming languages. They have the if
conditional. If you take most
programming languages, they all have if.
That's basically the same in almost
every language. Space start parenthesis.
We all do that. And then you have um
perhaps let's say you're calling a
object called uh user
dot is admin close parenthesis close
parenthesis start brackets
and here's what we're going to do if the
user is an admin. Right? That would be a
normal programming language. Ruby
doesn't do it like that. Ruby boils
almost all of it away. We start with the
if. Okay, that's the same. No
parenthesis necessary because there's no
ambiguity for the human to distinguish
that the next part is just a single
statement. So you do if space user dot
admin question mark.
>> Yeah.
>> No open brackets, no parentheses, no
nothing. Next open line here's
unconditional. That
question mark means nothing to the
computer,
but it means something to the human.
Ruby put in the predicate method style
purely as a communication tool between
humans. It's actually more work for the
interpreter to be able to see that this
question mark is there. Why is this
question mark in here? Because it just
reads so nicely. if user admin question
mark. That's a very human phrase. But it
gets better. You can turn this around.
You can have your statement you want to
execute before the conditional. You can
do userupgrade.
Say you're calling an upgrade method on
a user
space if space user.admin question mark.
We do the thing if the thing is true.
Instead of saying if the thing is true,
do the thing. But it gets even better.
This is why I love this example with the
conditional because you can keep diving
into it. So let's flip it around.
>> User.downgrade
if exclamation point not
user.admin. Right? That'd be a typical
way of writing it. Ruby goes, that
exclamation point is light noise. Why do
we have if and then an exclamation
point? That's ugly. We could do
user.downgrade
unless
useradmin
question mark. That to me is an
encapsulation of the incredible
beauty that Ruby affords the programmer
through ambiguity
that is only to serve the human reader
and writer. All of these statements
we've just discussed, they're the same
for the computer. It'll compile down to
the same C code. They'll compile down to
the same assembly code, it makes no
difference whatsoever. In fact, it just
makes it harder to write an interpreter.
But for the human who gets to choose
whether the statement comes before the
conditional or the predicate method has,
it's just incredible. It reads like
poetry at some point. It's it's also
incredible that you know, one language
designer is creating that. you know,
Guido and Ross also it's like one person
gets to make these extremely difficult
decision because it's you have to think
about how does that all get parsed and
you have to think about the thousands if
it's a popular language the millions of
people that end up using this and what
they feel with that question mark on the
for the if statement what what does that
feel like for
>> that's what Matt's thought about because
he started his entire mission off a
different premise and almost every
programming language designer that I'd
heard at least articulate their vision.
That his number one goal was programmer
happiness. That his number one goal was
the affordances that would allow
programmers to articulate code in ways
that not just executed correctly,
but were a joy to write and were a joy
to read. And that vision is based on a
fundamentally different view of
humanity. There's no greater contrast
between Matts and James Gosling, the
designer of Java. I once listened to
James talk about the design of Java. Why
was it the way it was? Why was it so
rigid? And he was very blunt about it,
which I, by the way, I really
appreciate. And I think Gotham has done
a tremendous job with Java. But his view
of humanity is rather dark. His view of
humanity was programmers at the average
are stupid creatures.
They cannot be trusted
with sophisticated programming languages
because they're going to shoot their
foot off or their hand off. And that
would be kind of inconvenient to the
regional development office of a
mid-tier insurance company writing code
that has to last for 20 years.
Now, it's actually a very Thomas Saul
view of constrained capacity in humans
that I've come to appreciate much later
in life. But it's also a very depressing
view of programmers that there are just
certain programmers who are too dumb to
appreciate
code poetry. They're too ignorant to
learn how to write it. Well, we need to
give them a sandbox where they just
won't hurt themselves too much.
>> Matt's went the complete opposite
direction. He believes in humanity. He
believes in the unlimited capacity of
programmers to learn and become better.
So much so
that he's willing to put the stranger at
his own level. This is the second part I
truly appreciate about Ruby. Ruby allows
you to extend base classes. You know how
we just talked about five dot times is a
way to iterate over um a statement five
times. That five is obviously a base
class. It's a number. Do you know what
you can add your own methods to that? I
did extensively in Rails. We have
something called active support which is
essentially my dialect of Ruby for
programming web applications.
And I'll give you one example. I've
added a method called days to the
number. So if you do 5 days, you get
five days in seconds because seconds is
the way we set cash expiration times and
other things like that. So you can say
cash expires in 5 days.
>> Yeah.
>> And you're going to get whatever 5*
24 * 60 * 60 is or whatever the math is,
right? very humanly readable. In a novel
programming language, you would type out
the seconds and then you would have a
little comment above it saying this
represent five days. In Ruby, you get to
write five days. But even better than
that, Matts didn't come up with it.
Matts didn't need the five days. I
needed that because I needed to expire
caches. I was allowed by Matts to extend
his story with my own chapters
on equal footing such that a reader of
Ruby could not tell the difference
between the code Mattz wrote and the
code that I wrote. He trusted me as a
complete stranger from Denmark who had
never met to mess with his beautiful
story. That level of trust is
essentially unheard of. I know there are
other programming languages that allow
things with macros and so forth, but
none do it in a way like Ruby does it.
None does it with an articulated vision
of humanity, a trust in humanity like
Matts does.
That is the opposite end of the spectrum
of Java.
>> Yeah. I mean, for my aesthetic
sensibilities, just the way you describe
five days, that's really pleasant to me.
like I could see myself sitting alone
sleepdeprived and just writing that it's
just is an easy thing you can write it
in a long way with a comment you can you
can write a multiple lines you could do
and now with AI I'm sure it's going to
generate it correctly but there's
something really pleasant about the
simplicity of that I'm not sure what
that is but you're right there is a good
feeling there
and I'm sure we'll talk about happiness
from all kinds of philosophical angles
but you know that is what happiness is
made of. That little
>> exactly
>> good feeling there.
>> It's the good feeling that come out of a
concept compressed to its pure essence.
There's nothing you can take away from
that statement that's superfluous.
>> But see, I I also want to push back a
little bit because it's not cuz I also
program in Pearl a bunch just just to be
cool. Um so like it's not all about
compression. No, you can compress it too
far. Pearl Gulf is a thing where you can
turn programs into something that's
unreadable for humans. Now, the great
thing about Pearl was that it came out
before Ruby. Mattz was a great student
of Wall, was a great student of Pearl,
was a great student of Python and Small
Talk and Lisp. He took inspiration from
all of these prior attempts at creating
good programming languages and really
edited down the very best bits into
this. So he was able to learn from his
lessons. But what I found incredible
about Ruby is that here we are 2025.
Ruby has been worked on for over 30
years and essentially the first draft is
90% of what we're still using. There was
almost a sense of divine inspiration
possible in wherever Matts was writing
that initial version of Ruby that
transcended time to such a degree that
no one has still even begun to reach it.
This is the other thing I always find
fascinating. I generally believe in the
efficient market theory that if someone
comes up with a better mousetrap or
better idea, others will eventually copy
them to such an extent that perhaps the
original mousetrap is no longer even
remembered. No one has been able to copy
that essence of Ruby. They borrowed
elements and that's totally fine, but
Ruby still stands taller than everyone
else on these metrics on this trust in
humanity and programmers.
>> And we should also say like you know uh
maybe the perfect programming language
that that metric and then there's the
successful language and those are often
different. There there's something
wonderful about the Brendan Ike story of
creating JavaScript.
>> Yes. of of there's something truly
beautiful uh about the way JavaScript
took over the world. I've uh recently
got to visit the Amazon jungle and just
one of my favorite things to do is just
to watch the ants take over anything
everything and it's just like it's a
nice distributed system. It's a messy
thing that doesn't seem to be order but
it just works and the machinery of it
>> worse is better. I mean that's actually
the name of a pattern for in in software
development and other ways of how do is
the pattern of Linux. Linux was
quantifiably worse than I think it was
minix at the time. Other ways of it that
were more cathedral
>> less bizarre and is still one that
there's something to it that the
imperfections can help something go
forward. It's actually a trick I've
studied to the degree that I now
incorporate it in almost all open source
that I do. I make sure that when I
release the first version of any new
thing I work on, it's a little broken.
>> It's a little busted in ways that invite
people to come in and help me cuz
there's no easier way to get the
collaboration of other programmers than
to put something out that they know how
to fix and improve.
>> Yeah, that's awesome. But Ruby is
somehow or was at least a little bit
different in that regard. Not in all
regards. Matt's got the ethos of the
language, the design of the language
just right. But the first versions of
Ruby were terribly slow. It's taken, I
mean, hundreds of man years to get Ruby
to be both this beautiful yet also
highly efficient and really fast. And we
should say that the thing that made you
fall in love with this particular
programming language is meta
programming.
>> Yes. So that takes all of these elements
we've just talked about and turned them
up to 11. I'll explain metaroming real
soon.
>> Metar programming is essentially a
version of the five days. You get to add
keywords to the language.
>> Active record is the part of Rails that
communicates with the database. This is
a system where every table in the
database is represented by a class. So
if we take the user example again you do
class user
um descends from active record base and
then the first line you can write is
this I want my users to have many posts
or have many comments. Let's do that.
We're making some system where users can
make comments. The very next line is has
underscore many space
colon comments. Now you've set up a
dependency between users and comments
that will give you a whole host of
access and factory methods for users to
be able to own comments, to create
comments, to update comments. In that
line alone has many looks like a
keyword. It looks like it's part of the
Ruby language. That's metaroming. when
Rails is able to add these elements to
how you define a class and then that
runs code that adds a bunch of methods
to the user class. That's metaroming.
And when metaroming is used in this way,
we call it domain specific languages.
You take a generic language like Ruby
and you tailor it to a certain domain
like describing
relationships in a database at a object
level. And this is one of those early
examples where you can do um user has
many comments belongs_2
space colon account. Now you've set up a
uh onetoone relationship. Before we had
a one to many relationship. Rails is
rife with all these kinds of domain
specific languages where at sometimes it
doesn't even look like Ruby. You can't
identify Ruby keywords. You can just
identify what looks like keywords in its
own programming language. Now again, I
know that lisp and others also do this
stuff. They just do it with the maximum
amount of line noise that can ever be
crammed in to a programming language.
And Ruby does it at a level where you
cannot tell my metarogramming from
Matt's keywords and with zero line
noise.
>> Yeah, I should say that my first love
was lisp. So there's a slow tear that
you can't see.
>> I've actually never written any real
lisp myself.
>> Well, how can you judge it so harshly
then?
>> Because I have two eyes and I can look
at code and my aesthetic sensibilities
forbid me to even go much further, which
is a limitation. I know I should
actually dive into Lisp because I found
that I've learned a lot just diving into
maybe I'm insulting Lisp again here but
the past of programming languages with
small talk for example I think small
talk is a incredible
experiment that also worked but isn't
suitable for today's programming
environments.
>> I love that we're talking about Ruby so
much and what beautiful code is what a
beautiful programming language is. So
one of the things
that is I think implied maybe you made
explicit in your descriptions there is
that uh Ruby is dynamic typing versus
strict typing and you have been not just
saying that it's a nice thing but that
you will defend dynamic typing to the
death like that freedom is a powerful
freedom to preserve it's the essence of
what makes Ruby Ruby this is why I don't
fully understand when people call for
Ruby to static typing because to me is
the bedrock of what this is. Why would
you want to turn one of the most
beautiful languages into something far
uglier? This is one of my primary
objections to static typing. It's not
just that it limits you in certain ways.
It makes metaroming harder. I write a
bunch of meta programming. I've seen
what it takes to do meta programming in
Typescript. That was actually one of the
things that just really sent me on a
tear of getting meta or getting
Typescript out of some of the projects
that I'm involved with. We pulled
TypeScript out of um Turbo, one of the
front-end frameworks that we have
because I tried to write some meta
programming in Typescript and I was just
infuriated. I don't want that
experience,
but I also don't want it from an
aesthetic point of view. I hate
repetition. We've just talked about how
much I love that Ruby boils all of these
expressions down to its essence. You
can't remove one dot. You can't remove
one character without losing something.
This moment you go for static typing
that you declare at least I know there
are ways to do implied typing and so
forth. But let's just take the
stereotypical case of the of a example.
For example, um, capital U user. I'm
declaring the type of the variable
lowerase user. I'm now naming my
variable equals uppercase user or new
uppercase user. I've repeated user three
times. I don't have time for this. I
don't have sensibilities for this. I
don't want my Ruby polluted with this.
Now, I understand all the arguments for
why people like static typing. One of
the primary arguments is that it makes
tooling easier. It makes it easier to do
autocomplete in editors, for example. It
makes it easier to find certain kinds of
bugs because maybe you're calling
methods that don't exist on an object
and the editor can actually catch that
bug before you even run it. I don't
care. First of all, I don't write code
with tools. I write them with text
editors. I chisel them out of the screen
with my bare hands. I don't
autocomplete. And this is why I love
Ruby so much. And this is why I continue
to be in love with the text editor
rather than the IDE.
>> I don't want an IDE. I want my fingers
to have to individually type out every
element of it because it will force me
>> to stay in the world where Ruby is
beautiful. Because as soon as it gets
easy to type a lot of boilerplate, well,
guess what? You're gonna have a lot of
boilerplate. Every single language
basically that has great tooling support
has a much higher tolerance for boiler
plate because the thinking is, well,
you're not typing it anyway. You're just
autocompleting it. I don't want that at
all. I want something where
the fabric I'm working in is just a text
file. There's nothing else to it. So,
these things play together. There's the
aesthetic part, there's the tooling
part, there's the meta programming part,
there's the fact that Ruby's
ethos of duck typing, I don't know if
you've heard that term before,
>> it's essentially not about can I call
this method if a object is of a certain
class. It is can I call this method if
the method responds. It's very out of
small talk in that regard. you don't
actually check of whether that class has
the method which allows you to
dynamically add methods at runtime and
do all sorts of really interesting
things that underpin all the beautiful
meta programming that we do in Ruby. I
don't want to lose any of that and I
don't care for the benefits. One of the
benefits I've se touted over and over
again is that it's much easier to write
correct software. You're going to have
fewer bugs. You're going to have less
null pointer exceptions. and less all of
this stuff. Yeah, I don't have any of
that. It is just not something that
occurs in my standard mode of operation.
I'm not saying I don't have bugs. Of
course I do. But I catch those bugs with
unit testing, with integration testing.
Those are the kinds of
precautions that'll catch logical bugs,
things that compile but are wrong along
with the uncompilable stuff. So, I've
never been drawn into this world. And
part of it is because I work on a
certain class of systems. I fully accept
that. If you're writing systems that
have 5, 10, 50 million lines of code
with hundreds, thousands, or tens of
thousands of programmers, I fully accept
that you need different methods. What I
object to is the idea that what's right
for a code base of 10 million lines of
code with a 100,000 programmers working
on it is also the same thing I should be
using in my bedroom to create base camp
because I'm just a single individual.
That's complete nonsense. In the real
world, we would know that that makes no
sense at all. That you don't, I don't
know, use your Pagani to go pick up
groceries at Costco. It's a bad vehicle
for that. It just doesn't have the
space. You don't want to muddy the
beautiful seats. You don't want to do
any of those things. We know that
certain things that are very good in
certain domains don't apply to all in
programming languages. It seems like we
forget that. Now, to be fair, I also had
a little bit perhaps of a reputation of
forgetting that. When I first learned
Ruby, I was so head over heels in love
with this programming language that I
almost found it unconceivable that
anyone would choose any other
programming language at all to write web
applications. And I kind of engaged the
evangelism of Ruby on Rails in that
spirit as a crusade as I just need to
teach you the gospel. I just need to
show you this conditional code that we
just talked about and you will convert
at the point of a sharp argument. Now I
learned that's not the way. And part of
the reason it's not the way is that
programmers think differently. Our
brains are configured differently. My
brain is configured perfectly for Ruby,
perfectly for a dynamically
ducttyped language that I can chisel
code out of a text editor with. And
other people need the security of an
IDE. They want the security of classes
that won't compile unless you call the
methods on it. I have come to accept
that, but most programmers don't.
they're still stuck in essentially I
like static typing therefore static
typing is the only way to create
reliable correct systems which is just
such a mindblowing
to be blunt idiotic thing to say in the
face of evidence mountains of evidence
to the contrary this is one of the
reasons I'm so in love with Shopify as
the flagship application for Ruby and
Rails Shopify exists at a scale that
most programmers will never touch. On
Black Friday, I think Shopify did 1
million requests per second. That's not
1 million requests of images. That's of
dynamic requests that are funneling
through the pipeline of commerce. I
mean, Shopify runs something like 30% of
all e-commerce stores on the damn
internet.
A huge portion of all commerce in total
runs through Shopify. and that runs on
Ruby and Rails. So Ruby and Rails is
able to scale up to that level without
using
static typing in all of what it does.
Now I know they've done certain
experiments in certain ways because they
are hitting some of the limits that you
will hit with dynamic typing and some of
those limits you hit with dynamic typing
are actually by the way just limits you
hit when you write 5 million lines of
code. I think the Shopify monolith is
about 5 million lines of code. At that
scale, everything breaks because you're
at the frontier of what humans are
capable of doing with programming
languages. The difference in part is
that Ruby is such a succinct language
that those 5 million if they had been
written in let's just say Go or Java
would have been 50 or 25. Now that might
have uh alleviated some of the problems
that you have when you work on huge
systems with many programmers, but it
certainly would also have compounded
them. trying to understand 25 million
lines of code.
>> So, the thing does scale. That's a
persistent myth that it doesn't scale.
Uh Shopify and and others, but Shopify,
I think, is a great example. Uh, by the
way, I love Shopify and I love Toby.
>> You got to have Toby on. Yeah. This
morning
>> for sure. He's a brilliant I I got to
hang out with him in the desert
somewhere. I forget in Utah. He's just a
brilliant human. Um, and uh, and
Shopify, Shopify.comlux has been
supporting this podcast for the longest
time. I don't I don't think actually
Toby knows that they sponsor this
podcast. I mean, it's a big company,
right?
>> It's a huge company. I think uh, just
under 10,000 employees, market cap of
120 billion,
uh, GMV of a quarter of a trillion every
quarter,
>> and he's involved with the details
still.
>> He is very much so. A funny story about
Toby. Toby was on the Rails core team
back in the mid 2000s. Toby himself
wrote active merchant which is one of
the frameworks for creating shops. He
wrote the liquid templating language
that Shopify still uses to this day. He
has a huge list of contributions to the
Rails ecosystem and he's the CEO of the
company. I think it's just it's very
inspiring to me because it's such at the
opposite end of what I like to do. I
like to chisel code with my own hands
most of the day.
>> He runs a company of almost 10,000
people that is literally like world
commerce depends on it. A level of
criticality I can't even begin to
understand. And yet we can see eye to
eye on so many of these fundamental
questions in computer science and
program development.
That is a dynamic range.
>> Mhm.
>> To be able to encompass Rails being a
great tool for the one developer who's
just starting out with an idea, who
don't even fully know everything, who is
right at the level where PHP would have
been a good fit in those late 90s
because yeah, I could probably upload
something to an FTP server and so on.
Rails does have more complexity than
that, but it also has so much longer
runway. The runway goes all the way to
goddamn Shopify. That is about the most
convincing argument I can make for sort
of dynamic range that we can do a lot of
it. And even having said that, Shopify
is the outlier. Of course, I don't think
about Shopify as the primary target when
I write Rails. I think of the single
developer. Actually, I do think about
Shopify, but I don't think about Shopify
now. I think of Shopify when Toby was
writing Snowevil, which was the first
e-commerce store to sell snowboards that
he created. There was the prehopify
Shopify he created all by himself. And
that was possible because Ruby and Rails
isn't just about beautiful code. It's
just as much about productivity. It's
just as much about the impact that an
individual programmer is able to have
that they can build system where they
can keep the whole thing in their head
and be able to move it forward such that
you can go from one developer sitting
and working on something and that
something is Shopify and it turns into
what it is today. When we talk about
programming languages and we compare
them, we often compare them at a very
late stage like what is the better
programming language for let's say
Twitter in 2009 when it's already a huge
success. Twitter was started on Ruby and
Rails. They then hit some scaling
problems. It was a big debacle at the
time. They end up then I think writing
it in some other language which by the
way I think is the best advertisement
ever for Ruby and Rails because nothing
fucking happened for 10 years after they
switched over right essentially zero
innovation. Some of that was because
they were doing a long conversion and
all of the early success in part came
because they had the agility to quickly
change and adopt and so forth. That's
what startups needs. That's what Shopify
needed. That's what Twitter needed.
That's what everyone needs and that's
the number one priority for Ruby and
Rails to make sure that we don't lose
that because what happens so often when
development tools and programming
language are driven by huge companies is
that they mirror their orc chart. React
and everything else needed to use that
is in some ways a reflection of how Meta
builds Facebook because of course it is
because of course it's a distraction of
that. I'm not saying React isn't a great
tool and that can't be used by smaller
teams. Of course, it can. But it's born
in a very different context than
something like Ruby and Rails.
>> Uh let me say as a small aside because I
think we might return to Shopify and
celebrate it often. Just a sort of
personal note, uh this particular
podcast has way more sponsors and
sponsors that want to be sponsors than I
could possibly ever have. And it's
really really important for me to not
give a shit and to be able to celebrate
people like I celebrate people. I
celebrate companies and has I don't care
that they're sponsoring. I really don't
care. I just want to make that very
explicit cuz we're going to continue
saying positive things about Shopify. I
don't care. Stop sponsoring. It doesn't
really matter to me. But yeah, I just
want to make that explicit. So, but to
linger on the scaling thing with the
Twitter and the Shopify, uh can you just
explain to me what Shopify is doing with
uh with the Jet? What did they have to
try to do to scale this thing? Because
that's kind of an incredible story,
right?
>> Yeah. So, one of the great contributions
that Shopify has made to the entire Ruby
ecosystem, not just Rails, but in
particular Rails is YJet. So, Yid is
their compiler for for Ruby that just
makes everything a lot more efficient
and at Shopify scale eking out even a 5
10% improvement in Ruby's overhead and
execution time is a huge deal. Now,
Shopify didn't need YJ. Shopify was
already running on the initial version
of Ruby that was I think 10 times slower
than what we have today. If you look
back upon the Ruby 186 that Topi
probably started on just as I started on
and that was enough to propel Shopify to
the scale that it has today. A lot of
the scaling conversation in is lost in a
failure to distinguish two things.
Scale is kind of one package we talk
about when there are really multiple
packages inside of it. One is runtime
performance latency. How fast can you
execute a single request? Can it happen
fast enough that the user will not
notice? If your Rails request takes a
second and a half to execute, the user
is going to notice. Your app is going to
feel slow and sluggish. You have to get
that response time down below, let's
say, at least 300 milliseconds. I like
to target 100 milliseconds as my
latency. That's kind of performance. How
much performance of that kind of latency
can you squeeze out of a single CPU
core? That tells you something about
what the price of a single request will
be. But then whether you can deal with 1
million requests a second like Shopify
is doing right now. If you have one box
that can do a thousand requests a
second, you just need X boxes to get up
to a million. And what you'll actually
find is that when it comes to
programming languages, they're all the
same in this way. They all scale largely
beautifully horizontally. You just add
more boxes. The hard parts of scaling a
Shopify is typically not the programming
language. It's the database. And that's
actually one of the
um challenges that Shopify has now is
how do you deal with MySQL at the scale
that they're operating at? When do you
need to move to other databases to get
worldwide performance? All of these
things. The questions about scaling Ruby
are economic questions. If we're
spending so and so much on application
servers, if we can get just 5% more
performance out of Ruby, well, we could
save 5% of those servers and that could
filter down into the budget. Now, that
analysis concludes into basically one
thing. Ruby is a luxury language.
It's a luxury, the highest luxury in my
opinion. It is the Koko Chanel of
programming languages. Something that
not everyone can afford. And I mean this
in the best possible way. There are some
applications on the internet where each
request has so little value you can't
afford to use a luxurious language like
Ruby to program in it. You simply have
to slum it with a C or a Go or some
other low-level language or Rust. Talk
about line noise there for a hot second.
>> The thrift store of languages.
>> Exactly. where you need kind of just you
need a very low level to do it. You
can't afford to use a luxury language to
you to to build it with. That's not true
of Shopify. It wasn't true of Base Camp.
Even back in 2004, it's not been true of
99% of all web applications ever
created. Because the main cost component
of 99% of web applications, it's not CPU
cores. It's wet cores. It's human cores.
It's human capacity to understand and
involve systems. It's their personal
productivity. I did a calculation once
when someone had for the 400th time said
that oh if you switch from Ruby to some
faster language you could save a bunch
of money and I calculated it out that at
the time and I think the last time I did
this calculation was almost a decade ago
we were spending about 15% of our
operating budget on Ruby application
servers. So for me to improve my cost
profile of the business um by seven
percentage points, I'd have to pick
something twice as fast. That's quite
hard. Versus if Ruby and Ruby and Rails
was even 10% more productive than
something else, I would move the needle
far more because making individual
programmers more productive actually
matters a lot more. This is why people
are so excited about AI. This is why
they're freaking out over the fact that
a single programmer in Silicon Valley
who makes $300,000 a year can now do the
work of three or five at least in
theory. I haven't actually seen that
fully in practice, but let's just assume
the theory is correct. If not now, then
in 6 months, that's a huge deal. That
matters so much more than whether you
can squeeze a few more cycles out of the
CPU when it comes to these kinds of
business applications. If you're making
Unreal Engine rendering stuff like Tim
Sweeney you had on,
>> yeah, he needs to really sweat all those
details. The Nanite engine can't run on
Ruby. It It's never going to. It was not
meant for that. Fine. These kinds of
business applications absolutely can.
And everything that people are excited
about AI for right now, that extra
capacity to just do more, that was why
we were excited about Ruby back in the
early 2000s. That was be because I saw
that if we could even squeeze out a 10%
improvement of the human programmer,
we'd be able to do so much more for so
much less.
>> Probably argue about this, but I really
like working together with AI,
collaborating with AI, and I would argue
that the kind of code you want AI to
generate is human readable, human
interpretable.
>> Yes. If it's generating pearl golf code,
it's just it's not a collaboration. So,
it has to be speaking the human. It's
not just you're writing the prompts in
English. You also want to read the
responses in the human interpretable
language like Ruby, right? So it's
that's actually is beneficial for AI too
cuz you've kind of said that for you the
sculptor the sort of the elitist Coco
Chanel sculptor you want to on your
fancy keyboard to type every single
letter yourself with your own fingers
but it's also uh that uh the benefit of
Ruby also applies in when some of that
is written by AI and you're actually
doing with your own fingers the editing
part.
>> Yes.
>> Because you can interact with it because
it's human interpretable. The paradigm I
really love with this was something Elon
actually said on one of your shows when
you guys were talking about Neurolink.
That Neurolink allows the bandwidth
between you and the machine to increase.
That language either spoken or written
is very low bandwidth. If you are to
calculate just how many bits we can
exchange as we're sitting here, it's
very slow.
Ruby
has a much higher bandwidth of
communication,
reveals, conveys so much more concept
per character than most other
programming languages do. So when you
are collaborating with AI, you want
really high bandwidth. You want it to be
able to produce programs with you,
whether you're letting it write the code
or not, that both of you can actually
understand really quickly and that you
can compress a grand comp or a grand
concept, a grand system into far fewer
parts that both of you can understand.
Now, I actually love collaborating with
AI, too. I love chiseling my code, and
the way I use AI is in a separate
window. I don't let it drive my code.
I've tried that. I've tried the cursors
and the wind serves and I don't enjoy
that way of writing. And one of the
reasons I don't enjoy that way of
writing is I can literally feel
competence draining out of my fingers
like that level of immediacy with the
material disappears. And the where I
felt this the most was I did this um
remix of Ubuntu called amacube when I
switched to Linux
>> and it's all written in bash. I'd never
written any serious amount of code in
bash before. So I was using AI to
collaborate to write a bunch of bash
with me because I needed all this. I
knew what I wanted. I could express it
in Ruby, but I thought it was an
interesting challenge to filter through
Bash because what I was doing was
setting up a Linux machine. That's
basically what Bash was designed for.
It's a great constraint. But what I
found myself doing was asking AI for the
same way of expressing a conditional,
for example, in Bash over and over
again. That by not typing it, I wasn't
learning it. I was using it. I was
getting the expression I wanted, but I
wasn't learning it. And I got a little
scared. I got a little scared like, is
this the end of learning? Am I no longer
learning if I'm not typing? And the way
I for me recast that was I don't want to
give up on the AI. It is such a better
experience as a programmer to look up
APIs, to get a second opinion on
something, to do a draft, but I have to
do the typing myself because you learn
with your fingers. If you're learning
how to play the guitar, you can watch as
many YouTube videos as you want. You're
not going to learn the guitar. You have
to put your fingers on the strings to
actually learn the motions. And I think
there is a parallel here to programming
where programming has to be learned in
part by the actual typing. I'm just
really this is this is fascinating.
Listen, part of my brain agrees with you
100%, part doesn't.
I think AI should be in the loop of
learning. Now current systems don't do
that but I think it's very possible for
cursor to say
to basically force you to type certain
things. So like if you set the mode of
learning I just I don't want to be this
uh sort of give up on AI. I really I
think I think vibe coding is a skill. So
uh for an experienced programmer it's
too easy to dismiss vibe coding as a
thing.
>> I agree. I wouldn't dismiss it,
>> but I think you need to start building
that skill and start to figure out how
do you prevent the competency from
slipping away from your fingers and
brain. Like how do you develop that
skill in parallel to the other to the
other skill? I don't know. I just it's I
think it's a fascinating puzzle though.
I know too many really strong
programmers that just kind of avoid AI
because it's currently a little too
dumb.
>> Yes, it's a little too slow is actually
my main problem. It's a little too dumb
in some ways, but it's a little too slow
in other ways. When I use uh Claude's
code,
the terminal version of uh Claude, which
is actually my preferred way of using
it, I just I get too impatient. It feels
like I'm going back to a time where code
had to compile and I had to go do
something else or boil some tea while
the code is compiling. Well, I've been
working in Ruby for 20 years. I don't
have compile weight in me anymore. So
there's that aspect of it. But I think
the more crucial aspect for me is I
really care about the competence. And
I've seen what happens to even great
programmers the moment they put away the
keyboard. Because even before AI, this
would happen as soon as people would get
promoted. Most great programmers who
work in large businesses stop writing
code on a daily basis because they
simply have too many meetings to attend
to. They have too many other things to
do and invariably they lose touch with
programming. That doesn't mean they
forget everything. But if you don't have
your fingers in the sauce, the source,
you are going to lose touch with it.
There's just no other way. I don't want
that because I enjoy it too much. This
is not just about outcomes. This is
what's crucial to understand.
Programming for programmers who like to
code is not just about the programs they
get out of it. That may be the economic
value. It's not the only human value.
The human value is just smudge in the
expression.
When someone who sits down on a guitar
and plays Stairways to Heaven, there's a
perfect recording of that that will last
in eternity. You can just put it on
Spotify. You don't actually need to do
it. The joy is to command the guitar
yourself. The joy of a programmer of me
as a programmer is to type the code
myself. If I elevate, if I promote
myself out of programming, I turned
myself into a project manager, a project
manager of uh murder of AI crows, as I
wrote the other day. I could have become
a project manager my whole career. I
could have become a project manager 20
years ago if I didn't care to write code
myself. And I just wanted outcomes.
That's how I got started in programming.
I just wanted outcomes. Then I fell in
love with programming and now I'd rather
retire than give it up. Now that doesn't
mean you can't have your cake and eat it
too. I've done some vibe coding where I
didn't care that I wasn't playing
myself. I just wanted to see something.
There was an idea in my head. I wanted
to see something. That's fine. I also
use AI all day long. In fact, I'm
already at the point where if you took
it away from me, I'd be like, "Oh my
god, how do we even look things up on
the internet anymore?" Is is Stack
Overflow still around? Are forums still
a thing? Like, how do I even find
answers to some of these questions I
have all day long? I don't want to give
up AI. In fact, I'd say the way I like
to use AI, I'm getting smarter every day
because of AI. Because I'm using AI
to have it explain things to me, even
stupid questions. I would be a little
embarrassed to even enter into Google.
AI is perfectly willing to give me the
ELI5 explanation of some Unix command I
should have known already, but I don't.
I'm sorry. Can you just explain it to
me? And now I know the thing. So, at the
end of the day of me working with AI all
day long, I'm a little bit smarter, like
5%. Sorry, not 5%, half a percent maybe.
That compounds over time. But what I've
also seen when I worked on the OMAKU
project and I tried to let AI drive for
me, I felt I was maybe half a percent
dumber at the end of the day.
>> Okay, you said a lot of interesting
things. First of all, let's just start
with the very fact that uh asking dumb
questions. If you go to Stack Overflow
and ask a dumb question or read somebody
else's dumb question and the answer to
it, there's a lot of judgment there.
>> Yes,
>> AI sometimes to an excessive degree has
no judgment. It usually says, "Oh,
that's a great question to a fault."
>> Yeah. Oh, that's wonderful.
Yeah. I I mean, it's it's such a it's so
conducive to learning. It's such a
wonderful tool for learning and I would
I too would miss it. And it's a great
basically search engine into all kinds
of nuances of a particular programming
language, especially if you don't know
it that well or like APIs you can load
in documentation. It's just so great for
learning. I for me personally it
I mean on the happiness scale it makes
me more excited to program.
I don't know what that is exactly. Part
of that is the I'm really sorry Stack
Overflow is an incredible website but
there is a negativity there. Yes,
>> there's a judgment there. There's it's
just exciting to be like a with a hype
man next to me just like saying yeah
that's a great idea and I'll say no
that's wrong. I'll I'll correct the AI
and the and the AI will say, "You're
absolutely right. How did I not think
about that?" He'll rewrite the code. I'm
like, "Holy shit, I'm having it's like a
buddy that's like really being positive
and is very smart and is challenging me
to think and even if I never use the
code it generates, I'm already a better
programmer." But actually, the deeper
thing is for some reason I'm having more
fun. That's a really really important
thing.
>> I like to think of it as a pair
programmer. for exactly that reason.
>> Pair programming came vogue in like the
2000s where you'd have two programmers
in front of one machine and you'd push
the keyboard between you. One program
would be driving, they'd be typing in.
The other programmer would essentially
sit and watch the code, suggest
improvements, look something up. That
was a really interesting dynamic. Now,
unfortunately, I'm an introvert, so I
can do that for about five minutes
before I want to jump off a bridge. So,
it doesn't work for me as a full-time
occupation, but AI allows me to have all
the best of that experience all the
time. Now, I think what's really
interesting what you said about it makes
it more fun. I hadn't actually thought
about that, but
what it's made more fun to me is to be a
beginner again. It's made me it made it
more fun to learn Bash successfully for
the first time. Now, I had to do the
detour where I let it write all the code
for me and I realized I wasn't learning
nearly as much as I hoped I would. and
that I started doing once I typed it out
myself. But it gave me the confidence
that you know what if I need to do some
iOS programming myself. I haven't done
that in probably 6 years was the last
time I dabbled in it. I never really
built anything for real. I feel highly
confident now that I could sit down with
AI and I could have something in the app
store by the end of the week. I would
not have that confidence unless I had a
pair programming body like AI. I don't
actually use it very much for Ruby code.
I'm occasionally impressed whenever I
try it. They're like, "Oh, it got this
one thing right. That is truly
remarkable and it's actually pretty
good." And then I'll ask you two more
questions and I go like, "Oh, yeah.
Okay. If you were my junior programmer,
I'd start tapping my fingers and going
like, you got to you got to shape up."
Now, the great thing, of course, is we
can just wait five minutes. Um, the
entropic CEO seems to think that 90% of
all code by the end of the year is going
to be written by AI. I'm more than a
little bit skeptical about that. But I'm
open-minded about the prospect that
programming potentially will turn into a
horse when done manually, something we
do recreationally. It's no longer a mode
of transportation to get around LA.
You're not going to saddle up and go to
the grocery store and pick up stuff from
Whole Foods in your saddle bags. That's
just not a thing anymore. That could be
the future for programming, for manual
programming. Entirely possible. I also
don't care like even though we have
great renditions of all the best songs
as I said there are millions of people
who love to play the guitar it may no
longer have as much economic value as it
once did I think that I'm quite
convinced is true that we perhaps have
seen the peak now I understand the
paradox when the price of something goes
down actually the you overall usage goes
up and total spend on that activity goes
up that could also happen maybe but what
we're seeing right now is that a lot of
the big shops, a lot of the big
companies are not hiring like they were
5 years ago. They're not anticipating
they're going to need tons more
programmers. Controversially, Toby
actually put out a memo inside of
Shopify asking everyone who's
considering hiring someone to ask the
question, could this be done by AI? Now,
he's further ahead on this question than
I am. I look at some of the coding
trenches and I go like, I'd love to use
AI more and I see how it's making us
more productive, but it's not yet at the
level where I just go like, "Oh, we have
this project. Let me just give it to the
AI agent and it's going to go off and do
it."
>> But let's just let's just be honest.
You're like a Clint Eastwood type
character, cowboy on a horse, seeing uh
seeing cars going around and you're
like, well,
>> that's part of it. And I think that's it
is important to have that humility that
what you are good at may no longer be
what society values. This has happened a
million times in history that you could
have been exceptionally good at saddlem
for example. That's something that a lot
of people used to care about because
everyone rode a horse and then suddenly
riding a horse became this niche hobby
that there's some people care about it
but not nearly as many. That's okay. Now
the other thing of this is I've been had
the good fortune to have been a
programmer for nearly 30 years. That was
a great run. I try to look at life in
this way that I've already been blessed
with decades of economically viable,
highly
valuable ways of translating what I like
best in the working world to write Ruby
code that that was so valuable that I
could make millions and millions of
dollars doing it. And if that's over
tomorrow, I shouldn't look at that with
regret. I should look at it with
gratitude. But you're also a highly
experienced, brilliant, and opinionated
human being. So, it's really interesting
to get your opinion on the future of the
horse because it, you know, there's a
lot of young people listening to this
who love programming or who are excited
by the possibility of building stuff
with software uh with a Ruby with Ruby
with Ruby on Rails that kind of language
this and now the possibility.
>> Is it a career?
>> Is it a career? And
how if indeed a single person can build
more and more and more with the help of
AI like how do they learn that skill? Is
this a good skill to learn? I mean that
to me is the real mystery here because I
think it's still absolutely true that
you have to learn how to program from
scratch currently.
>> Yes.
>> But how do you balance those two skills?
Because I too as I'm thinking now there
is a scary slipping away of skill that
happens in a matter of like really
minutes on a particular piece of code.
It just it's it's it's scary. Not the
way
driving, you know, when you have a car
drive for you, it doesn't quite slip
away that fast.
So that really scares me. So when when
somebody comes up to me and asks me
like, "How do I learn to program?" I
don't know what the advice is because I
think it's not enough to just use cursor
or copilot to generate code.
>> It's absolutely not enough. Not if you
want to learn. None of you want to
become better at it. If you just become
a tap monkey, maybe you're productive in
a second, but then you have to realize,
well, can anyone just tap if that's all
we're doing is just sitting around all
day long tapping? Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes.
Yes. That's not a marketable skill. Now,
I always preface this both to myself and
when I speak to others about it is rule
number one, nobody fucking knows
anything. No one can predict even 6
months ahead. Right now, we're probably
at peak AI future hype because we see
all the promise because so much of it is
real and so many people have experienced
it themselves. this mind-boggling
thing that the silicon is thinking in
some way that feels eerily reminiscent
of humans. I'd actually say the big
thing for me wasn't even chat GBT. It
wasn't even Claude. It was DeepSeek.
Running Deepseek locally and seeing the
think box where it converses with itself
about how to formulate the response.
I almost wanted to think is this a
gimmick? Is it doing this as a
performance for my benefit? But that's
not actually how it thinks. If this is
how it actually thinks, okay, I'm a
little scared.
>> Yeah,
>> this is incredibly human how it thinks
in this way.
>> But where does that go? So
>> in 95, one of my favorite movies, one of
my favorite bee movies came out. The
Lawn Mower Man.
>> Great movie.
>> Incredible movie about virtual reality
being an Avatar and living in VR. Like
the story was a mess, but the
aesthetics, the world that built up was
incredible. And I thought, we're 5 years
away. I'm going to be living in VR now.
I'm just going to be floating around.
I'm going to be an avatar. This is where
most humans can spend most of their day.
That didn't happen. We're 30 years
later. VR is still not here. It's here
for gaming. It's here for some
specialized applications. My oldest
loves playing Gorilla Tag. I don't know
if you've tried that. That's basically
the hottest VR game. Wonderful. That's
great. It's really hard to predict the
future because we just don't know. And
then when you factor in AI and you have
even the smartest people go like I don't
think we fully understand how this
works. But then on the flip side you
have Moore's law that seems to have
worked for many many many years in uh
decreasing the size of transistor for
example. So like
>> you know uh flash didn't take over the
internet but Moors law worked. So we
don't know which one AI is
>> what it is and this is what I find so
fascinating too. I forget who did this
presentation but someone in the web
community did this great presentation on
the history of the airplane. So you go
from the Wright brothers flying in what
was 1903 or something like that and 40
years later you have jet flight just an
unbelievable amount of progress in four
decades. Then in 56 I think it was the
halt design for the Boeing 747
essentially precursor was designed and
basically nothing has happened since.
Just minor tweaks and improvements on
the flying experience since the 50s
somehow if you were to predict where
flying was going to go and you were
sitting in 42 and you'd seen you
remember the Wright brothers flying in '
03 and you were seeing that jet engines
coming. You're like, "We're going to fly
the to the stars in another two decades.
We're going to invent super mega
hypersonic flights that's going to
traverse the earth in in two hours." And
then that didn't happen. It tapped out.
This is what's so hard of predicting
about predicting the future. We can be
so excited in the moment because we're
drawing a line through early dots on a
chart and it looks like those early dots
are just going up and to the right and
sometimes they just flatten out. This is
also one of those things where we have
so much critical infrastructure. for
example, that still runs on cobalt that
about five humans around the world
really understand truly deeply that
there's a it's possible for society to
lose a competence it still needs because
it's chasing the future. Copalt is still
with us. This is one of the things I
think about with with programming. Ruby
and Rails is at such a level now that in
50 years from now, it's exceedingly
likely that there's still a ton of Ruby
and Rail systems running around. Now,
very hard to predict what that exact
world is going to be like, but
yesterday's weather tells us that if
there's still cobalt code from the 70s
operating social security today, and we
haven't figured out a clean way to
convert that, let alone understand it.
Um, we should certainly be humble about
predicting the future. I don't think any
of the programmers who wrote that cobalt
code back in the 70s had any damn idea
that in 2025 checks were still being cut
off the business logic that they had
encoded back then. But that just brings
me to the conclusion on the question for
what should a young programmer do?
You're not going to be able to predict
the future. No one's going to be able to
predict the future. If you like
programming, you should learn
programming. Now, is that going to be a
career forever? I don't know. But what's
going to be a career forever? Who knows?
Like a second ago, we thought that it
was the blue collar labor that was going
to be abstracted first. It was the
robots that were going to take over.
Then Gen AI comes out and then all the
artists suddenly look like, "Holy shit,
is this going to do all animation now?
It's going to do all music now." They
get real scared. And now I see the
latest Tesla robot going like, "Oh,
maybe we're back now to blue collar
being in trouble because if it can dance
like that, it can probably fix a
toilet." So no one knows anything and
you have to then position yourself for
the future in such a way that
it doesn't matter that you pick a
profession or path where if it turns out
that you have to retool and reskill,
you're not going to regret the path you
took. That's a general life principle
for me. How I look at all endeavors I
involve myself in is I want to be
content with all outcomes. When we start
working on a new product at 37 signals,
I set up my mental model for its
success. And I go, do you know what? If
no one wants this, I will have had
another opportunity to write beautiful
Ruby code, to explore a green field
domain, to learn something new, to build
a system I want, even if no one else
wants it. What a blessing. What a
privilege. If a bunch of people want it,
that's great. We can pay some salaries.
we can keep the business running and if
it's a blowway success, wonderful, I get
to impact a bunch of people.
>> I think one of the big open questions to
me is uh how far you can get with vibe
coding, whether an approach for a young
developer to invest most of their time
into vibe coding or into writing code
from scratch.
So vibe coding meaning so I'm I'm
leaning into the meme a little bit but
the vibe coding meaning you generate
code you have the this idea of a thing
you want to create you generate the code
and then you fix it with both natural
language through the prompts and
manually you learn enough to manually
fix it. So that's the learning process,
how you fix code that's generated or you
you write code from scratch and have the
LLM's kind of uh tab tab tab tab add
extra code like which part do you lean
on? I think to be safe, you should find
the the beauty and the the artistry and
the skill in both. Right from scratch,
like there should be some percent of
your time just writing from scratch and
some percent by coding. There should be
more of the time writing from scratch.
If you are interested in learning how to
program, unfortunately, you're not going
to get fit by watching fitness videos.
You're not going to learn how to play
the guitar by watching YouTube guitar
videos. You have to actually play
yourself. You have to do the sit-ups.
Programming understanding learning
almost anything requires you to do.
Humans are not built to absorb
information in a way that transforms
into skills by just watching others from
afar. Now, ironically, it seems AI is
actually quite good at that. But humans
are not. If you want to learn how to
become a competent programmer,
you have to program. It's really not
that difficult to understand. Now, I
understand the temptation and the
temptation is there because vibe coding
can produce things perhaps in this
moment, especially in a new domain
you're not familiar with with tools you
don't know perfectly well that's better
than what you could do or that you would
take much longer to get at, but you're
not going to learn anything. You're
going to learn in this superficial way
that feels like learning but is
completely empty calories. And secondly,
if you can just vibe code it, you're not
a programmer. Then anyone could do it.
which may be wonderful. That's
essentially what happened with the
Access database. That's what happened
with Excel. It took the capacity of
accountants to become software
developers because the tools became so
accessible to them that they could build
a model for how the business was going
to do next week. That required a
programmer prior to Excel. Now, it
didn't because they could do it
themselves. Vive coding enables
non-programmers to explore their ideas
in a way that I find absolutely
wonderful but it doesn't make you a
programmer. I agree with you but I want
to allow for room for both of us be
wrong. For example, there could be vibe
coding could actually be a skill that if
you train it and by vibe coding let's
include the the the step of correction
the iterative correction. It's possible
if you get really good at that that
you're outperforming the people that
write from scratch that you can come up
with truly innovative things, especially
at this moment in history while the LLMs
are a little bit too dumb to create
super novel things and a complete
product, but they're starting to creep
close to that. So, if you're investing
time now into becoming a really good
vibe coder, maybe this is the right
thing to do uh as if it's indeed a
skill. We kind of meme about vibe coding
just like sitting back and in the it's
in the name. But if you treat it
seriously, a competitive vibe coder and
get good at riding the wave of AI and
get good at the skill of editing
code versus writing code from scratch.
It's possible
that you can actually get farther in the
long term. Maybe editing is a
fundamentally different task than
writing from scratch if you take that
seriously as a skill that you develop. I
see. I don't to me that's an open
question. I just think I'm I personally
and now you're on another level, but
just me just just personally
I'm not as good at editing
the code that I didn't write. That's a
different
>> no one is of this generation.
But but maybe that's a skill. Maybe if
you get on the same page as the AI
because there's a consistency to the AI.
It's like um it really is a pair
programmer with a consistent style and
structure and so on. Plus with your own
prompting you can control the kind of
code you write. I mean it could
legitimately be a skill. Like
>> that's the dream of the prompt engineer.
I think it's complete pipe dream. I
don't think editors
exist that aren't good at writing. I've
written a number of books. I've had a
number of professional editors. Not all
of them wrote their own great books, but
all of them were great writers in some
regard. You cannot give someone pointers
if you don't know how to do it. It's
very difficult for an editor to be able
to spot what's wrong with a problem if
they couldn't make the solution
themselves. Editing in my opinion is the
reward. The capacity to be a good editor
is the reward you get from being a good
doer. You have to be a doer first. Now
that's not the same as saying that
vibe coding prompt engineering won't be
able to produce fully formed amazing
systems even shortly. I think that's
entirely possible. But then there's no
skill left which maybe is the greatest
payoff at all. Wasn't that the whole
promise of AI anyway? that it was just
all natural language that even my clumsy
way of formulating a question could
result in a beautiful succinct answer.
That actually to me is a much more
appealing vision that there's going to
be these special prompt engineering
wizards who know how to tickle the AI
just right to produce what they want.
The beauty of AI is to think that
someone who doesn't know the first thing
about how AI actually works is able to
formulate their idea and their
aspirations for what they want and the
AI could somehow take that messy clump
of ideas and produce something that
someone wants. That's actually what
programming has always been. There's
very often been people who didn't know
how to program, who wanted programs, who
then hired programmers who gave them
messy descriptions of what they wanted
and then when the programmers delivered
that back said, "Oh, no, actually that's
not what I meant. I want something
else." AI may be able to provide that
cycle. If that happens to the fullest
extent of it, yeah, there's not going to
be as many programmers around, right?
But hopefully presumably someone still
at least for the foreseeable future have
to understand whether what the AI is
producing actually works or not. As a
interesting case study maybe a thought
experiment if I wanted to vibe code uh
base camp or or hey and some of the some
of the products you you've built like
what would be the bottlenecks? What
where would I fail along the way? What
I've seen when I've been trying to do
this, trying to use vibe coding to build
something real is you actually fail
really early, uh, the vibe coding is
able to build a veneer at the current
present moment of something that looks
like it works,
>> but it's flawed in all sorts of ways.
There are the obvious ways, the meme
ways that it's leaking all your API
keys, it's storing your password in
plain text. I think that's ultimately
solvable. Like, it's going to figure
that out or at least it's going to get
better at that. But its capacity to get
lost in its own labyrinth is very great
right now. You let it code something and
then you want to change something and it
becomes a game of whack-a-ole real
quick. Peter levels who've been doing
this wonderful flight simulator was
talking to that where at a certain scale
the thing just keeps biting its own
tail. You want to fix something and it
breaks five other things which I think
is actually uniquely human because
that's how most bad programmers are at a
certain level of complexity with the
domain. They can't fix one thing without
breaking three other things. So in that
way, I'm actually in some ways almost a
positive signal for that the AI is going
to figure this out because it's on an
extremely human trajectory right now.
The kind of mistakes it's making are the
kind of mistakes that junior programmers
make all the time.
>> Yeah. Uh can we zoom out and look at the
vision, the manifesto, the doctrine of
Rails? What are some of the things that
make a programming language, a framework
great, especially for web development?
So, we talked about happiness.
>> Yes.
>> The underlying objective of Ruby. Uh,
what else?
>> So, you're looking at the nine points I
wrote out in I think 2012. And first
before we dive into them, I want to say
the reason I wrote it down is that if
you want a community to endure, you have
to record its values and you have to
record its practices. If you don't,
eventually you're going to get enough
new people come in who have their own
ideas of where this thing should go. And
if we don't have a a guiding light
helping us to make decisions, we're
going to start flailing. We're going to
start actually falling apart. I think
this is one of the key reasons that
institutions of all kinds start falling
apart. We forget why Chesterton's fence
is there. We just go like, why is that
fence there? Let's yank it out. Oh, it
was to keep the wolves out. Now we're
all dead. Oops. So, I wanted to write
these things down. And if we just take
them quick one by one, you talked about
optimizing for programmer happiness. I
put that at number one in homage of
Matts. And that's a lot about accepting
that there is occasionally a trade-off
between writing beautiful code and other
things we want out of systems. There can
be a runtime trade-off. There can be a
performance trade-off, but we're going
to do it nonetheless. We're also going
to allow ambiguity in a way that many
programmers by default are uncomfortable
with. I give the example actually here
of in the interactive Ruby shell where
you can play with the language or even
interact with your domain model. You can
quit it in two ways at least that I
found. You can write exit, boom, you're
out of the program. You can write quit,
boom, you're out of the program. They do
it the same thing. We just wrote both
exit or the people who built that wrote
both exit and quit because they knew
humans were likely to pick one or the
other. Python is the perfect
contrast to this. In the Python
interactive protocol, if you write exit,
it won't exit. It'll give you a fucking
lesson. It'll basically tell you to read
the fucking manual. It says use exit
parentheses or control D, i.e. end of
file to exit. I'm like, one is very
human and another is very engineer. And
I mean that both of them in the best
possible way.
>> Python is pedantic. Python's
the value from the start stated is that
there should be preferably one and only
one way to do a certain thing. Ruby goes
the complete opposite. No, we want the
full expression that fits different
human brains such that it seems like the
language is guessing just what they
want. And uh part of that is also you
described the principle of least
surprise which is a difficult thing to
engineer into a language because you
have to kind of it's a subjective thing
what is
>> which is why you can't do it in one way
which is why I use the example of both
exit and quit the principle of least
surprise for some people would be like
oh exit that's how I get out of the
prompt for other people it would be quit
why don't we just do both
>> okay so what's the convention over
configuration that's a big one
>> that's a big one that's a huge one and
it was born out of a frustration I had
in the early days with especially Java
frameworks where when you were setting
up a web application framework for Java
back in the day, it was not uncommon to
literally write hundreds if not
thousands of lines of XML configuration
files. Oh, I need this. I want um the
database to use the foreign keys as post
ID. No, no, no. I want it as post
capital I D. Oh, no, no, no. you have to
do a capital P ID. There are all these
ways where you can configure how foreign
relation keys should work in a database
and none of them matter. We just need to
pick one and then that's fine. And if we
pick one and we can depend on it, it
becomes a convention. And if it's a
convention, we don't have to configure
it. And if we don't have to configure
it, you can get started with you
actually care about much quicker. So
convention over configuration is
essentially to take that idea that the
system should come preassembled. I'm not
just handing you a box of fucking Legos
and asking you to build the Millennium
Falcon. I'm giving you a finished toy.
You can ed you can change it. It's still
built out of Legos. You can still take
some pieces off and put in some other
pieces, but I'm giving you the final
product. And this cuts against the grain
of what most programmers love. They love
a box of Legos. They love to put
everything together from scratch. They
love to make all these detailed little
decisions that just don't matter at all.
And I want to elevate that up such that
hey, I'm not trying to take the
decisions away from you. I just want you
to focus on decisions that actually
matter that you truly care about. No one
cares about whether it's postc ID or
post ID or pit. Yeah. Great defaults.
Yeah. It's just a wonderful thing. You
have all these aspirations. They're
going to do some kind of custom most
beautiful Legos castle that nobody's
ever built from these pieces. But in
reality to be productive in most
situations you just need to build the
basic thing and and then on top of that
is where your creativity comes.
>> Absolutely. And I think this is one of
those part of the doctrine that a lot of
programmers who get to use Ruby and
Rails begrudgingly will acknowledge is a
nice thing even if they don't really
like it. Like it's hard to beat the
sort of attraction to building with
Legos from scratch out of programmers.
That's just what we like. This is why
we're programmers in the first place
because we like to put these little
pieces together. But we can direct that
instinct towards a more productive end
of the stack.
>> Okay. What are some of the other ones?
>> The menu is amacasa. It actually comes
out of the same principle that great
defaults really matter. If you look at
everything that's wrong with the
JavaScript ecosystem right now, for
example, it is that no one is in charge
of the menu. There are a billion
different dishes and you can configure
just your tailored specific
configuration of it, but no one done the
work to make sure it all fits together.
So you have all these unique problems in
the JavaScript ecosystem. For example,
there's probably 25 major ways of just
doing the controller layer and then as
many of how to talk to the database. So
you get this permutation of n * n * n of
no one is using the same thing and if
they are using the same thing they're
only using the same thing for about 5
minutes. So we have no retained wisdom.
We build up no durable skills. Rails
goes the complete opposite way of saying
do you know what Rails is not just a web
framework. It is a complete attempt at
solving the web problem. is complete
attempt at solving everything you need
to build a great web application. And
every piece of that puzzle should
ideally be in the box, preconfigured,
pre-assembled. If you want to change
some of those pieces later, that's
wonderful. But on day one, you'll get a
full menu designed by a chef who really
cared about every piece of the
ingredient, and you're going to enjoy
it.
And that's again one of those things
where many programmers think like I know
better and they do in some hyper local
sense of it. Every programmer knows
better. This is what Ruby is built on
that every programmer knows better in
their specific situation. Maybe they can
do something dangerous.
Maybe they think they know better and
then they blow their foot off and then
they truly will know better because
they've blown their foot off once and
won't do it again. But the the menu is
that. So you in general see the value in
the in the monolith.
>> Yes. The integrated system.
>> Integrated.
>> Someone thought of the whole problem.
This is one of the reasons why I've been
on a crusade against microservices since
the term was coined. Microservices was
born out of essentially a good idea.
What do you do at Netflix scale when you
have thousands of engineers working on
millions of lines of code? No one can
keep that entire system in their head at
one time. You have to break it down.
Microservices can be a reasonable way to
do that when you're at Netflix scale.
When you apply that pattern to a team of
20 programmers working on a codebase of
half a million lines of code, you're an
idiot. You just don't need to turn
method invocations into network calls.
It is the first rule of distributed
programming. Do not distribute your
programming. It is makes everything
harder. all the failure conditions you
have to consider as a programmer just
becomes infinitely harder when there's a
network cable involved. So I hate the
idea of premature decomposition and
microservices is exactly that. The
monolith says let's try to focus on
building a whole system that a single
human can actually understand and push
that paradigm as far as possible by
compressing all the concepts such that
more of it will fit into memory of a
single operating human and then we can
have a system where I can actually
understand all of basecap I can actually
understand all of hey both of those
systems are just over 100,000 lines of
code I've seen people do this at maybe
twice maybe three times that scale and
then it starts breaking down once you
get north of certainly half a million in
lines of code. No individual human can
do it. And that's when you get into
maybe some degree of microservices can
make sense.
>> Base Camp and Hay are both 100,000
>> 100,000 lines of code.
>> Oh, that's small.
>> It is considering the fact that Basec
Camp I think has something like 420
screens, different ways and
configurations.
>> Uh do you include the front end in that?
>> No, that's the Ruby code. Well, it's
front end in the sense that some of that
Ruby code is beneficial to the to the
front, but it's not JavaScript, for
example. Now the other thing we might
talk about later is we write very little
JavaScript actually for all of our
applications. Hey which is a Gmail
competitor. Gmail ships I think 28
megabytes of uncompressed JavaScript. If
you compress it I think it's about 6
megabytes. 28 megabytes. Think about how
many lines of code that is. When hey
launched we shipped 40 kilobytes.
>> It's trying to solve the same problem.
You can solve the email client problem
with either 28 megabytes of uncompressed
JavaScript or with 40 kilobytes if you
do things differently.
>> But that comes to the same problem
essentially. This is why I have fiercely
fought splitting front end and back end
apart. that in my opinion this was one
of the great crimes against web
development
>> that we are still atoning for that we
separated and divided what was and
should be a unified problem-solving
mechanism when you are working both on
front end and back end you understand
the whole system and you're not going to
get into these camps that decompose and
eventually you end up with shit like
GraphQL
>> okay
uh let's fly through the rest of the
doctrine. No one paradigm.
>> No one paradigm goes to the fact that
Ruby is a fiercely object-oriented
programming language at its core, but
it's also a functional programming
language. This five times I told you
about you can essentially do these uh
anonymous function calls and you can
chain them together very much in the
spirit of how true functional
programming languages work. Ruby has
even moved closer towards the functional
programming end of the scale by making
strings immutable.
Um there are ideas from all different
disciplines of and all different
paradigms of software development that
can fit together.
Small talk for example was only
object-oriented and that was just it.
Ruby tries to be mainly object-oriented
but borrow a little bit of functional
programming a little bit of imperative
programming be able to do all of that.
Rails tries to do the same thing. We're
not just going to pick one paradigm and
run it through everything. Object
orientation is at the center of it, but
it's okay to invite all these other
disciplines in. It's okay to be
inspired. It's okay to remix it. I
actually think one of the main benefits
of Rails is that it's a remix. I didn't
invent all these ideas. I didn't come up
with active record. I didn't come up
with the MVC way of dividing an
application. I took all the great ideas
that I had learned and picked up from
every different um camp and I put it
together. Not because there was going to
be just one single overarching theory of
everything, but I was going to have a
cohesive unit that incorporated the best
from everywhere.
>> Is that idea a bit at tension with the
beauty of the monolith system? I think
the monolith
can be thought of as quite roomy, quite
as a big tent. That the monolith needs
actually to borrow a little bit of
functional programming for the kinds of
problems that that excels that
discipline excels at solving or that
paradigm excels at solving if you also
want object orientation as its core. I
actually think when I've looked at
functional programming languages,
there's a lot to love. And then I see
some of the crazy contortions they have
to go through when part of the problem
they're solving calls for mutating
something. And you go like, "Holy shit,
this is a great paradigm for 90% of the
problem." And then you're twisting
yourself completely out of shape when
you try to solve the last 10.
>> Oo, exalt beautiful code is the next
one.
>> We've talked about that at length. Then
here's a great example that really
summarizes the domain specific language
quality of Ruby and Rails that you can
make code actually pleasant to write and
read which is really funny to me because
as we talked about when I started
learning programming it wasn't even a
consideration. I didn't even know that
that could be part of the premise that
that could be part of the solution that
writing code could feel as good as
writing a poem. Class project
application record belongs to account
has many participants class name person
validates presence of name.
>> See you could read it out. You didn't
even change anything.
>> It's a haiku or something,
>> right? Isn't that beautiful?
>> Yeah, it's nice. It's really it's really
it's really nice. There's a there's an
intuitive nature to it. Okay. So, I have
specific questions there. I mean, active
record, just to take that tangent, that
has to be your favorite feature.
>> It's the crown jewel of Rails. It really
is. It is the defining characteristic of
how to work with Ruby and Rails.
>> And it's born in an interesting level of
controversy because it actually uses a
pattern that had been described by
Martin Fowler in the patterns of
enterprise application architecture. one
of the greatest books for anyone working
on business systems and if you had not
read it you must pick it up immediately.
Patterns of enterprise application
architecture I think it was published in
2001. It is one of the very few
programming books that I have read many
times over. It's incredible. In it
Martin describes a bunch of different
patterns of how to build business
systems essentially. And active record
is a little bit of a footnote in there.
The pattern is literally called active
record. You can look it up in it's
called active erot. I wasn't even
creative enough to come up with a name
of my own,
>> but it allows the creation the marriage
of database and object orientation in a
way that a lot of programmers find a
little um off-putting.
>> They don't actually want to pollute the
beautiful object-oriented nature of that
kind of programming with SQL. There was
a rant by Uncle Bob the other day about
how SQL is the worst thing ever. Blah
blah. Okay, fine. Whatever. I don't
care. This is practical.
>> We are making CRUD applications. You're
taking things out of an HTML form and
you're sticking them into a damn
database. It's not more complicated than
that. The more abstractions you put in
between those two ends of the spectrum,
the more you're just fooling yourself.
This is what we're doing. We're talking
to SQL databases. By the way, quick
aside, SQL was one of those things that
have endured the onslaught of NoSQL
databases, structured list data for a
better part of a decade and still reign
supreme. SQL was a good thing to invest
your time in learning. Every programmer
working with the web should know SQL to
a fair degree. Even if they're working
with an ORM, an object relational mapper
as active record, you still need to
understand SQL. What active record does
is not so much try to abstract the SQL
away behind a different kind of paradigm
as just making it less cumbersome to
write. Making it more amenable to build
domain models on top of other domain
models in a way since you don't have to
write every damn SQL statement by hand.
>> We just say that active record is an OM
which is a layer that makes it intuitive
and human interpretable to communicate
with a database. Even simpler than that,
it turns tables into classes and rows
into objects. I actually think SQL is
very easy to understand. Most of it, you
can write some SQL golf, too. That's
very hard to understand. But SQL at its
base and much of the criticism against
SQL was it was written for human
consumption. It's actually quite rebose,
especially if you're doing things like
inserts over and over again. It's quite
ribbos. Insert into table parenthesis,
enumerate every column. You want to
insert values, parentheses, every value
that fits with that column. It gets
tedious to write SQL by hand, but it's
actually very humanly readable.
Active record just takes that
tediousness away. It makes it possible
to combine things in a way that a
humanly describable language just
doesn't. It composes things into methods
and you can combine these methods and
you can build structures around them.
So, I don't dislike SQL. I dislike a lot
of things in programming. try to get rid
of them. SQL wasn't really one of them.
It was just a sense of I don't want to
write the same thing over and over
again. It was a can we be a little more
succinct? Can we match it just slightly
better to the object orientation without
trying to hide away the fact that we're
persisting these objects into a
database? That's where I think a lot of
OM went wrong. They tried to live in the
pure world of objects, never to consider
that those objects had to be consistent
into a SQL database. And then they came
up with convoluted way of translating
back and forth. Active record says, do
you know what? Just accept it. This
record, this object is not going to get
saved into some NoSQL database. It's not
going to be it's going to be saved into
a SQL database. So just structure the
whole thing around that. It's going to
have attributes. Those attributes are
going to respond to columns in the
database. It's not more complicated than
that. Stop making it. So
>> yeah, but I I should say so I personally
love SQL because I'm an algorithms
person and so I love optimization. I
love to know how the databases actually
work so I can match the SQL queries and
the design of the tables such that there
is
you know optimal squeeze the optimal
performance out of the table okay based
on the actual way that that table is
used. So I mean I I think that pushes to
the point that like there is value in
learning and understanding SQL.
I I wonder because I I started looking
at active record and it looks really
awesome. Does that make you lazy? Not
you, but uh a person that rolls in and
starts using Rails,
you can probably get away with never
really learning SQL, right?
>> As long as you want to stay at the entry
level of competence. And this is
actually my overarching mission with
Rails is to lower the barrier of entry
so far down that someone can start
seeing stuff on the browser without
basically understanding anything.
>> They can run Rails new blog, run a
couple of generators, they have a whole
system, they don't understand anything,
but it's an invitation to learn more.
Where I get fired up, and this ties back
to the AI discussion, is when that's
turned into this meme that programmers
no longer have to be competent. They can
just I mean, the AI is going to figure
it out. The generators is going to
figure it out. I don't need to know SQL.
Active record is going to abstract it
away from me. No, no, no, dude. Hold up.
The path here is competence. I'm trying
to teach you things. I understand I
can't teach you everything in five
minutes. No one who's ever become good
at anything worthwhile could be taught
everything in five minutes. If you want
to be a fully well-rounded web
application developer, that takes years,
but you can actually become somewhat
productive in a few days. You can have
fun in a few days for sure. You can have
fun in a a few minutes, and a few hours.
And over time, I can teach you a little
more. Active record says like, "Yeah,
yeah, all right. Start here and then
like uh next week we'll do a class on
SQL." Uh, and actually you have this
beautiful expression that I love that a
great programming language like Ruby has
a soft ramp go the ramp goes to
infinity.
>> That's exactly right.
>> So yeah, it's super accessible, super
easy to get started
>> and it never stops.
>> Yeah,
>> it never there's always more to learn.
This is one of the reasons I'm still
having fun programming that I'm still
learning new things. I can still
incorporate new things. The web is deep
enough as a domain. You're never going
to learn all of it.
>> Provide sharp knives. This is a good one
because another way of saying this, the
opposite way of saying this, the Java
way of saying is do not provide foot
guns, right? I don't want to give you
sharp knives. You're a child. You can't
handle a sharp knife. Here's a dull
butter knife. Cut your damn steak,
right? That's a very frustrating
experience. You want a sharp knife even
though you might be able to cut
yourself. I trust humans in the same way
that Matts trusts humans. Maybe you cut
off a finger. All right, you're not
going to do that again. Thankfully, it
was a virtual thing finger. It's going
to grow back out. Your competence is
going to grow. It's more fun to work
with sharp tools
>> and that actually contributes to the the
ramp that goes to infinity
>> to the learning
>> value integrated systems.
>> We kind of hit on that one. This is
Rails is trying to solve the whole
problem of the web, not just one little
component. It's not leaving you a bunch
of pieces you have to put together
yourself. Progress over stability. You
know what? If there's one that's dated,
it's probably that one. At this stage,
Rails has been incredibly stable over
many, many generations. The last major
release, Rails 8, was basically a no
upgrade for anyone running Rails 7. Rail
7 was almost a no-up upgrade for anyone
running Rails 6. I used to think it
required more churn to get progress to
stay on the leading edge of new stuff.
And I wrote this before I experienced
the indignity of the 2010s in the
JavaScript community where it seemed
like stability was not just unvalued, it
was actually despised. That churn in and
of itself was a value we should be
pursuing that if you were still working
with the same framework 3 months later,
you were an idiot. And I saw that and I
actually recoiled and if I was going to
write the doctrine today, I'd write that
differently. I wouldn't say progress
over stability. Well, maybe that it'd be
a function of the the age of the
programming language also
>> maybe or a deeper understanding of the
problem. I think part of what's so
fascinating about technology is that we
have this perception that everything
constantly moves so fast. No, it
doesn't. Everything moves at a glacial
pace. There is occasionally a paradigm
shift like what's happening with AI
right now. like what h happened with the
introduction of the iPhone in 2007 like
what happened with the internet in '95
that's basically the total sum of my
career three things changed everything
else in between was incremental small
improvements you can recognize a Rails
application written in 2003 I know
because the base camp I wrote back then
is still operating making millions of
dollars in ARR serveing customers on the
initial version that was launched back
then and it looks like the Rails code if
I squint a little that I would write
today. So most things don't change even
in computing and that's actually a good
thing. We saw with the JavaScript
ecosystem what happens when everyone
gets just mad about constant churn.
Things don't change that often.
>> By the way, on that small tangent, you
just sort of visibly verbally changed
your mind with the you of 15 years ago.
>> Yes.
>> That's interesting. Have you have you
noticed yourself changing your mind
quite a bit over the years?
>> I would say oh yes and then also oh no
in the sense that there are absolutely
fundamental things both about human
nature about institutions about
programming about business that I've
changed my mind on. And then I've also
had experiences that are almost even
more interesting where I thought I had
changed my mind and I tried it a new way
realized why I had the original opinion
in the first place and then gone back to
it. So it happens both ways. The an
example of the later part for example
was um managers at 37 signals. For the
longest time I would rail against
engineering managers as an unnecessary
burden on a small or even mediumsized
company. And at one point, I actually
started doubting myself a little bit. I
started thinking like, you know what,
maybe all programmers do need a
one-on-one therapy session every week
with their engineering manager to be a
whole individual. So, we tried that for
a couple years where we hired some very
good engineering managers who did
engineering management the way you're
supposed to do it, the way it's done all
over the place. And after that, I
thought like, no, no, I was right. This
was correct. We should not have had
managers. Um, not every programmer needs
a therapy session with an engineering
manager every week. We don't need these
endlessly scheduled huddles. We don't
need all these meetings. We just need to
leave people the hell alone to work on
problems that they enjoy for long
stretches of uninterrupted time. That is
where happiness is found. That's where
productivity is found. And if you can
get away with it, you absolutely should.
Engineering management is a necessary
evil when that breaks down. What's the
case for managers then?
>> The case for managers is that if you do
have a lot of people, there's a bunch of
work that kind of just crops up. The
one-on-one is one example that
programmers need someone to check in
with. There's another idealized version
that someone needs to guide the career
of juniors, for example, to give them
redirecting feedback and all this other
stuff. And it's not that in the abstract
I don't agree with some of those things,
but in practice I've found that they
often create more problems that they
solve. And a good example here is can
you get feedback from someone who's not
better at your job than you are? You can
get some feedback. You can get feedback
on how you show up at work. Are you
being courteous to others? Are you being
a good communicator? Okay. Yes. But you
can't get feedback on your work. And
that's more important. It's more
important that you work under and with
someone who's better at your job than
you are if you wish to progress in your
career. And every single programmer I've
ever worked with was far more interested
in progressing in their career on that
metric, getting better at their craft,
than they were in picking up pointers
that a middle manager could teach them.
That's not saying that there isn't value
in it. It's not saying there isn't value
in being a better person or a better
communicator. Of course, there is all
those things. But if I have to choose
one or the other, I value competence
higher. Right? That's again, I cavit
this a million times because I know what
people sometimes hear. They hear the
genius asshole is just fine and that's
great and you should excuse all sorts of
malicious behavior. Someone just really
good at what they do. I'm not saying
that at all. What I am saying is that
the history of competence is a history
of learning from people who are better
than you. And that relationship should
take precedence over all else. And that
relationship gets put aside a bit when
engineering managers introduced. Now the
funny thing is this conversation ties
back to the earlier things we were
talking about. Most engineering managers
are actually former programmers. They at
least know programming to some extent.
But what I've seen time and again is
that they lose their touch, their feel
with it very very quickly and turn into
pointy-haired bosses very very quickly
who are really good at checking for
updates just seeing where we are on uh
project A here if you need anything or
we ready to deliver to okay yes and also
no just shut up leave me the hell alone
let me program and then I'll come up for
air I'll talk with other programmers who
I can spar that we can learn something
with, I can turn the problems over with
and we can move forward. If you look
back on the history of computer
industry, all the great innovation
that's happened, it's all been done by
tiny teams with no engineering managers,
just full of highly skilled individuals.
You've had uh John Karmag on here.
I used to look up to its software so
much, not just because I loved Quick,
not just because I loved what they were
doing, but because he shared a bit about
how the company worked. There were no
managers, or maybe they had one business
guy doing some business stuff, but that
was just to get paid. Everything else
was basically just designers and
programmers, and there were about eight
of them, and they created a goddamn
Quake, too. So, why do you need all
these people again? Why do you need all
these managers again? Um, I think again
at a certain scale, it does break down.
It's hard to just have 100 thousand
programmers running around wild without
any product mommies or daddies telling
them what to do. I understand that. And
then even as I say that, I also don't
understand it because if you look at
something like Gmail, for example, there
was like a side project done by Busher U
at Google at the time. So much of the
enduring long-term value of even all
these huge companies were created by
people who didn't have a goddamn
manager. And that's not an accident.
That's a direct cause and effect. So,
I've turned in some way even more
militant over the years against this
notion of management, at least for
myself and knowing who I am and how I
want to work because the other part of
this is I don't want to be a manager.
And maybe this is just me projecting the
fact that I'm an introvert who don't
like to talk to people in one-on-one
calls every week. But it also
encapsulates how I was able to progress
my career. I did not really go to the
next level with Ruby or otherwise until
I had a door I could close and no one
could bother me for six hours straight.
So in companies probably one of the
reasons is it's very easy to hire
managers
and uh managers also
delegate responsibility from you.
So if if you just have a bunch of
programmers running around you're kind
of respons like you it's it's it's work.
It's intellectual work to have to deal
with the the first principles of every
problem that's going on.
>> So managers like
>> you can like relax. Oh be taken care of.
uh but they then hire their own managers
and it just multiplies and multiplies
and multiplies. I would love it if some
of the great companies we have uh in the
United States if there was like an extra
side branch that we could always run
maybe physicists can come up how to
split the simulation to where just all
the managers are removed also just with
it just just in that branch just the PR
and the comm's people also and even the
lawyers just engineers and let's just
see and then we merge it back
>> I've essentially run that branch at 37
signals for 20 years and I've
experimented with forking back on the
other side. I've experimented with
having a full-time lawyer on staff. I've
experimented with having engineering
managers. And I can tell you life is
much better at 50 60 people when none of
those individuals or none of those
roles. It's never about the individuals.
It's about the roles. None of those
roles are in your organization
full-time. Occasionally, you need a
manager. Occasionally, you need a
lawyer. I can play the role of manager.
occasionally
fine and then I can set it back down to
zero. It's almost like the like a cloud
service. I want a manager service I can
call on for seven hours this week and
then I want to take it down to zero for
the next 3 months.
>> Yeah, I read I don't know if this is
still the case that Base Camp is an LLC
and doesn't have a CFO like a full-time
accountant. Is that
>> what's funny is these days we do have a
head of finance. We did not for the
first
19 years of life I think. Um we got away
with basically just having an accountant
do our books in the same way you do a
small ice cream shop except we would
over the times have done hundreds of
millions of dollars in revenue. The
scale seemed quirky and at some point
you can also fall in love with your own
quirkiness to a degree that isn't
actually healthy. And I've certainly
done that over time. And we should have
had someone mount or count the beans a
little more diligently, a little
earlier, which was part of a blessing of
just being wildly profitable and selling
software that can have infinite margins.
Basically, that you kind of can get away
with a bunch of stuff that you perhaps
shouldn't. What partially taught me this
lesson was when we realized we had not
been collecting sales tax in different
US states where we had nexus. And it
took us about two years and $5 million
in settlements and cleanups to get out
of that mess. And after that, I went
like, "Okay, fine. We can hire a finance
person."
>> Okay.
>> And we now have a wonderful finance
person, Ron, who actually ended up
replacing something else we used to
have. We used to have a full-time data
analytics person who would do all sorts
of insight mining for why are people
signing up for this thing. We ran that
for 10 years and realized, you know
what, if I can have either a data
analytics person or an accountant, I'm
picking the accountant. I love this so
much on so many levels. Can we just
linger on that advice that you've given
that small teams are better?
I think that's really less less is is is
more. What did you say before worse is
better.
>> Okay. I'm sorry.
>> Worse is better on adoption with
technology a lot of times. Yeah.
>> And I think actually comes out of the
same thing. It comes out of the fact
that many of the great breakthroughs are
created by not even just tiny teams but
individuals. Individuals writing
something and an individual writing
something on some parameter what they do
is worse. Of course it's worse when one
person has to make something that a huge
company have hundreds if not thousands
of developers that they can have work on
that problem. But in so many other
parameters that worseness is the value.
That less is the value. In getting real,
which we wrote back in 2006, we talk
about this notion of less software. When
we first got started with Base Camp back
in 2004, people would ask us all the
time, "Aren't you petrified of
Microsoft? They have so many more
resources. They have so many more
programmers. What if they take a liking
to your little niche here and they show
up and they just throw a thousand
programmers at the problem? And my
answer, perhaps partly because I was
like 24, was first of all, no, no care
in the world. But the real answer was,
they're not going to produce the same
thing. You cannot produce the kind of
software that Base Camp is with a team
of a thousand people. You will build the
kind of software that a thousand people
build. And that's not the same thing at
all. So so much of the main breakthrough
in both end user systems but also in
open source systems in fundamental
system they're done by individuals or
very small teams even all these
classical histories of Apple has always
been like well it was a big organization
but then you had the team that was
actually working on the breakthrough it
was four people it was eight people it
was never 200
>> and large team seems to slow things down
>> yes
>> it's it's so fascinating thing and part
of it is the manager thing
>> cuz humans don't scale. Communication
between humans certainly don't scale.
You basically get the network cost
effect. Every time you add a new node,
it goes up exponentially.
This is perhaps the key thing of why I
get to be so fond of having no managers
at base camp because our default team
size is two.
>> One programmer, one designer, one
feature. When you're operating at that
level of scale, you don't need
sophistication. You don't need advanced
methodologies. You don't need multiple
layers of management because you can
just do the magic of small teams is that
they just do. They don't have to argue
because we don't have to set direction.
We have to don't to worry about the road
map. We can just sit down and make
something and then see if it's good.
When you can get away with just making
things, you don't have to plan. And if
you can get out of planning, you can
follow the truth that emerges from the
code, from the product, from the thing
you're working on in the moment. You
know far more about what the great next
step is when you're one step behind
rather than if you try 18 months in
advance to map out all the steps. How do
we get from here to very far away? You
know what? That's difficult to imagine
in advance because humans are very poor
at that. Maybe AI one day will be much
better than it than us. But humans can
take one foot or put one foot in front
of each other. That's not that hard. And
that allows you to get away with all
that sophistication. So the process just
become much simpler. You need far fewer
people. It compounds. You need much less
pro uh pro process. You need to waste
less time in meetings. You can just
spend these long, glorious days and
weeks of uninterrupted time solving real
problems you care about and that are
valuable. And you're gonna find that
that's what the market actually wants.
No one is buying something because
there's a huge company behind it. Most
of the time they're buying something
because it's good. And the way you get
something good is
you don't sit around and have a meeting
about it. You try stuff. You build
stuff.
>> It really is kind of incredible what one
person, honestly, one person can do in
100 hours of deep work, of focused work,
even less.
>> So, I'll tell you this. I tracked
exactly the number of hours I spend on
the first version of Base Camp. And I
was doing this because at the time I was
working on a contract basis for Jason.
He was paying me I was going to say $15
an hour. That's what I got paid when we
first got started. I think he had bumped
my pay to a glorious 25. But I was
billing him. And I know that the invoice
for the first version of Base Camp was
400 hours. That's what it took for one
sole individual in 2004 to create an
entire system that has then gone on to
gross hundreds of millions of dollars
and continues to um do extremely well.
One person, just me setting up
everything. Part of that story is Ruby,
part of that story is Rails, but a lot
of it is also just me plus Jason plus uh
Ryan plus Matt. That was the entire
company at the time. And we could create
something of sheer sustaining value with
such a tiny team because we were a tiny
team. Not the spite of small is not a
stepping stone. This is the other thing
that people get into their head. This is
one of the big topics of a rework that
it gave entrepreneurs the permission to
embrace being a small team. Not as a way
point, not as like I'm trying to become
a thousand people. No, I actually like
being a small team. Small teams are more
fun. If you ask almost anyone,
>> I'm sure Toby would say this too, even
at his scale, the sheer enjoyment of
building something is in the enjoyment
of building it with a tiny team. Now,
you can have impact at a different scale
when you have a huge company. I fully
recognize that and I see the appeal of
it. But in the actual building of
things, it's always small teams. Always.
>> How do you protect a small team? Base
camp has successfully stayed small. has
been the dragon you had to fight off
that like basically you make a lot of
money.
There's a temptation to grow. So how do
you not grow?
>> Don't take venture capital.
>> Okay, that's step one.
>> Point number one.
>> First of all, everybody takes venture
capital. So you already you already
went.
>> I mean that's been the the answer for
the longest time because the problem
isn't just venture capital. It's other
people's money. Once you take other
people's money, completely
understandably, they want a return and
they would prefer to have the largest
return possible because it's not them
sitting in the code. It's not them
getting the daily satisfaction out of
building something, chiseling beautiful
code poems out of the editor, right?
They don't get that satisfaction. They
get the satisfaction maybe of seeing
something nice put into the world.
That's fair. But they certainly also get
a satisfaction of a higher return. And
there is this sense certainly in venture
capital stated in venture capital that
the whole point of you taking the money
is to get to a billion dollars or more.
Now the path to that usually does go
through running established playbooks
and then when it comes to software the
enterprise sales playbook is that
playbook. If you're doing B2B software,
SAS, you will try to find product market
fit and the second you have it, you will
abandon your small and medium-sized
accounts to chase the big whales with a
huge sales force. And by then, you're a
thousand people, and life sucks.
>> Mhm. Uh that said, you you uh I mean,
people are just curious about this. I've
gotten a chance uh to get to know Jeff
Bezos. He invested in base camp
non-controlling. He bought secondaries.
So this was the funny thing is that when
investing have these two dual meanings.
Normally when people think about
investing they think you're putting in
growth growth capital because you want
the business to hire more people to do
more R&D so they can grow bigger. Basis
didn't do that actually. He bought a
ownership stake directly from Jason and
I and 100% of the pro proceeds of that
purchase went into my and Jason's bank
account. personal bank accounts. Not a
single cent went into the account of the
company because we didn't need the money
to grow. What we needed or what we
certainly enjoyed was
to some extent maybe the vote of
confidence but more so the security of
taking a little bit off the tables is
that we dare turn down the big bucks
from venture capitals. It was
essentially a vaccine against wanting to
take a larger check from people who then
wanted to take the company to something
enormous that we didn't want to go with
it. So Jeff
gave Jason and I just enough money that
we were comfortable turning all those
people down in a way where if it had
turned belly up like 6 months later we
wouldn't have been kicking ourselves and
calling we had something here that was
worth millions and now we have nothing
and I have to worry about rent and
groceries again.
>> I it is a vote of confidence. I wonder
from uh I'd love to hear Jeff's side of
the story of like why cuz he he he
doesn't need like the money.
So, it's really I think it probably is
just believing in people and wanting to
have cool stuff be created in the world
and make money off of it, but not like
>> 100% the motivation for Jeff wasn't a
return because he actually has a team,
he's private office that runs these
investments who did the calculus on the
investment pitch we gave him, which was
so ridiculous that Jason and I were
laughing our asses off when we were
writing down our metrics. I was like,
"No one's going to pay this. No one is
going to give us this multiple of this
amount of revenue." And that's fine. I
mean, we took the call essentially out
of kind of an awe that Jeff Bezos even
wanted to look at us and like, do you
know what? We don't want venture
capital. We don't need other people's
money, but like, let's just give him a
bullshit number that no sane person
would actually say yes to. And then, I
mean, we can we can each go our own way.
And his investment team said, like,
Jeff, no way. This makes no economic
sense at all. They're asking for way too
much money with way too little revenue.
And Jeff just went like, I don't care. I
want to invest in these guy. Because to
him at the time, it was chump change,
right? Like Jason and I each got a few
million dollars. I mean, whatever the
currency swing between the yen and the
dollar that day, probably moved 10x that
for his net worth than our investment
did. Jeff seemed genuinely interested in
being around interesting people,
interesting companies, helping someone
go to distance. And I actually look back
on that relationship with some degree of
regret because I took that vote of
confidence for granted in ways that I'm
a little bit ashamed of over the years.
I've been more critical about some of
the things that Amazon had done that I
feel now is sort of justified. So that's
just sort of part of that processing um
of it. But on the economic sense, he
gave us that confidence. He gave us the
economic confidence, but then he also
gave us the confidence of a CEO running
perhaps at the time the most important
internet business in the US, showing up
to our calls, which we would have with
him like once a year and basically just
going like, "Yeah, you guys are doing
awesome stuff. You should just keep
doing awesome stuff. I read your book.
It's awesome. You launched this thing.
It's awesome. You should just do more of
that. I don't actually know how to run
your business. You guys know." So the
book goes out because I'm I'm just so
from a fan perspective
am curious about how Jeff Bezos was able
to see because to me you and Jason are
like special humans in the space of tech
and the fact that Jeff was able to see
that right. How hard is it to see that?
>> He certainly saw it very early and I
think this is something that Jeff does
better than almost anyone else. he spots
that opportunity so far in advance of
anyone else even open their eyes to it
or certainly he's willing to bet on it
far early and far harder than anyone
else is and he's just right time and
again I mean we were not the only
investment that he made and certainly
Amazon had a extremely long-term vision
so far longer than I have ever had the
gumption to keep like I think of myself
as a long-term thinker I'm playing a
child's game compared to the game that
Jeff is playing. Like when I looked at
Amazon's economics around the dot boom
and bust, they looked ridiculous. Like
they were losing so much money. They
were so hated by the market. They were
no one believed that it was going to
turn into what it is. But Jeff did in a
way that that level of conviction I
really aspire to. And I think that's one
of the main things I've taken away from
that relationship is that you can just
believe in yourself to that degree
against those odds. That's ridiculous.
He did that at so many times our level
that it's pathetic if I'm doubting
myself.
>> Yeah, I think Amazon is one of those
companies.
I mean, it's come under a bunch of
criticism over the years.
Uh this is something about humans that
don't appreciate so much that we take
for granted the positive that a thing
brings real quick and then we just start
criticizing the thing. It's with the
Wi-Fi and the airplanes.
>> That's exactly it.
>> But I think I think Amazon there could
be a case made that Amazon is
one of the greatest companies in the
last hundred years.
>> For sure. I think it's an easy case to
make. What I also think is that the
price you pay to be one of the greatest
companies in the last hundred years is a
lot of detractors, a lot of push back, a
lot of criticism that this is actually
order restored in the universe. One of
my favorite teachers in all the time
I've been on the internet is Kathy
Sierra. I don't know if you know her
work, but she was actually for only a
few short years before the cruel
internet ran her off, but she wrote a
blog called creating passionate users.
And she carved into my brain this notion
of balance in the universe. If you're
creating something of value that a lot
of people love, you must create an equal
and opposite force of haters. You cannot
have people who love what you do without
also having people who hate what you do.
The only escape from that is mediocrity.
If you are so boring and so
uninteresting that no one gives a damn
whether you exist or not, yeah, you
don't get the haters, but you also don't
get the impact of people who really
enjoy your work. And I think Amazon is
that just at the massive scale, right?
They've brought so much value and change
to technology, to commerce that they
must simply have a black hole size of
haters, otherwise the universe is simply
going to tip over. Uh let me ask you
about small teams. So you mentioned
Jason a bunch of times. Jason Freed, you
have been partners for a long long time.
Perhaps it's fair to say he's more on
the sort of the design business side.
You're like the tech the engineering
wizard. Uh how have you guys over all
these years creating so many amazing
products not murder each other? It's
it's a great story of like partnership.
What's what can you say about
collaboration? What can you say that
about Jason that that that you love that
you've learned from? Uh why does this
work?
>> So first I'll say we have tried to
murder each other several times over the
years but far less I think in the last
decade. In the early days, our product
discussions were so fierce that when we
were having them in the office and there
were other employees around, some of
them were legitimately worried that the
company was about to fall apart because
the volume coming out of the room would
be so high and sound so acrimonious
that they were legitimately worried the
whole thing was going to fall apart. But
you know what's funny is that it never
felt like that in the moment. It always
felt like just a peak vigorous search
for something better.
And that we were able to stomach that
level of adversity on the merits of an
idea because it was about the idea. It
wasn't about the person. And it never
really got personal. Not even never
really. It didn't get personal. It
wasn't like, Jason, you're an asshole.
It was like, Jason, you're an idiot, and
you're an idiot because you're looking
at this problem the wrong way, and let
me tell you the right way to do it.
>> As a small tangent, let me say that some
some people have said, we'll probably
return to this, that uh you're sometimes
uh uh can have flights of uh temper on
the internet and so on. I I never take
it that way because it is the same kind
of ilk. Maybe I haven't seen the right
kind of uh uh traces of temper, but
usually it's about the idea and it's
just excited, passionate, human.
>> That's ex exactly what I like to think
of it as. It doesn't always come across
as that. And I can see why spectators in
particular sometimes
would see something that looks like I'm
going after the man rather than the
ball. And I I do think I've tried to get
better at that. But in my relationship
with Jason, I think it's worked so well
because we have our own distinct areas
of competence where we fully trust each
other. Jason trusts me to make the
correct technical decisions. I trust him
to make the correct design and product
direction decisions and then we can
overlap and share on the business, on
marketing, on writing, on other aspects
of it. So that's one thing is that if
you're starting a business with someone
where you do exactly the same as they do
and you're constantly contesting who is
the more competent person, I think
that's far more difficult and far more
volatile. So if you're starting a
business and you're both programmers and
you both work on the same kind of
programming,
ah good luck. I think that's hard. I
tried to pick an easier path working
with a designer where I knew that at
least half of the time I could just
delegate to his experience and
competence and say like you know what I
may have an opinion I have an opinion
all the time on design but I don't have
to win the argument because I trust you.
Now occasionally we would have overlaps
on business or direction where we'd both
feel like we had a strong stake in the
game and we both had a claim to
competence in that area. But then for
whatever reason, we also both had a
long-term vision where I would go, do
you know what? I think we're wrong here.
But as I learned from Jeff Bezos, by the
way, I'm going to disagree and commit.
That was one of those early lessons he
gave us that was absolutely crucial and
perhaps even instrumental in ensuring
that Jason and I have been working
together for a quarter of a century.
Disagree and commit is one of the
all-time Jeff Bezos greats.
>> I'm just surprised that Yokoono hasn't
come along. You know what I mean? like
there there's
there's so many yokos in this world.
>> It might have happened if not in part
because we don't sit on each other's lap
all the time. Most of our careers we
haven't even lived in the same city.
Like I lived in Chicago for a couple of
years while we were getting going after
I' had moved to the US in 2005. But then
I moved to Malibu and then I lived in
Spain and then I lived in Copenhagen and
Jason Ry from the foundation of our
relationship
learned how to work together in a
remarkably efficient way where we didn't
have to actually talk that much on any
given week. I'd be surprised if Jason
and I spent more than 2 hours of direct
exchange and communication.
>> Yeah. Sometimes it's the the basic human
frictions that just up against another
person, that person damn well better be
your spouse if it's too much for too
long.
>> Yeah. But even there
co co has really test the relationship.
It's fascinating to watch.
>> It has and I do think that having some
separation which is kind of
counterintuitive because I think a lot
of people think the more collaboration
you can have the better. The more ideas
they can bounce back and forth the
better. And both Jason and I for
whatever reason came to the conclusion
early on in careers absolutely not.
That's complete baloney. This is why we
were huge proponents of remote work.
This is why I enjoy working in my home
office where I can close the door and
not see another human for like 6 hours
at the time. I don't want to bounce
ideas off you all the time. I want to
bounce ideas off you occasionally and
then I want to go off and implement
those ideas. There's way too much
bouncing going on and not enough
scoring, not enough dunking. And I think
this is one of the great traps of
executive rule. Once a founder elevates
themselves all the way up to an
executive where what they're doing is
just telling other people what to do.
That's the realm they live in 24/7. They
just live in the idea realm. Oh, I can
just tell more people more things what
to do and we can just see it happen. If
you actually have to be part of
implementing that, you slow your horse.
You think like, you know what, I had a
good idea last week. I I'm going to save
the rest of my good ideas until next
month. And there is a temptation for the
managers and for the exe for the people
in the executive layer to do to do do
something which that something usually
means a meeting.
>> Yes.
>> Right. And so that's why you say
>> their job is telling other people what
to do.
>> Yeah. And the meeting So this is one of
the big things you're against is
>> meetings are toxic.
>> Yeah.
>> And this really I think ties into this
with Jason Ry. If I had to count out the
total number of meetings we've had in 24
years of collaborations where we in
person sat in front of each other and
discussed a topic, I probably it'd be
less than whatever 3 months at a fan
company. We just haven't done that that
much and we haven't worn it out. One of
this funny metaphors that Trump came up
with at one point was a human has like a
limited number of steps in their life,
right? Like that's the longevity
argument here. You can do you can do so
much activity and then you run out.
There's some kernel in that idea that
can be applied to a relationship.
There's some amount of exchange we can
have. There's some amount of time we can
spend together where you can wear it
out. Jason and I were diligent about not
wearing each other out. And I think that
is absolutely key to the longevity of
the relationship combined with that
level of trust. And then just combining
with the level that we really like the
work itself. We don't just like the
brainstorming, the the says where we
just come up with good ideas. No, we
like to do the ideas and we like to be
part of that process directly ourselves.
I like to program. He likes to do
design. We could go off and do our
little things for long stretches of
time. Occasionally, come together and go
like, "Hey, let's launch a great
product." This might sound like I'm
asking you to do therapy.
But I find myself to sometimes want or
long for a meeting because I'm lonely.
Like cuz it remote work, just sitting by
yourself,
I don't know. It can get really lonely
for long stretches of time.
>> Let me give you a tip.
>> Uhhuh.
>> Get a wife.
>> God damn it.
>> Get Get a couple kids.
>> All right.
>> Like family really is the great antidote
to loneliness. And I mean that as
sincerely as I can possibly say it. I
certainly had exactly that feeling you
described earlier in my career when I
was working remotely. And I was just
like me living in an apartment, a total
stereotype where for the longest time
when I first moved to Chicago, all I had
on the floor was a mattress. And then I
bought this big TV and I didn't even
mount it. And then I had a stack of DVDs
and I was basically I was working a lot
of time and then I would just go home
and I'd do that. And it wasn't great. It
really wasn't. Like I do think that
humans need humans
>> and if you can't get them at work and I
actually sort of kind of don't want them
at work at least. I don't want them for
40 hours a week. That's not what I
prefer. You need something else. You
need other relationships in your life.
And there is no greater depth of
relationship if you can find someone
that you actually just want to spend a
lot of time with. That's key to it. And
I think it's key for both Jason and I
that we've had families for quite a long
time. And it grounds you too in a way
where the sprint of a startup can get
traded in for the marathon of an
enduring company and you get settled in
a way. We talked briefly about sometimes
I get fired up. I mean a lot of times
maybe even most of the times I get fired
up about topics
>> but I don't get fired up in the same way
now as I used to when I was 24. I'm
still extremely passionate about ideas
and trying to find the right things, but
having a family, meeting my wife,
building a life around that has just
mellowed everything out in a completely
cliche way. But it I think it's actually
key. I think if we could get more even
younger people not to wait until they
were in their late goddamn 30s or early
40s to hitch up with someone, we'd be
better off and we'd have more stable
business relationships as well because
folks would get that nurturing human
relation somewhere else. Now, when I say
all of that, I also accept that there
are plenty of great businesses that's
been built over the years that have not
been built remote, that have been built
by a gang of hooligans sitting in an
office for immense hours of time. I
mean, both John Carmarmac and Tim
Sweeney talked about that in the '9s
with their careers that that was just
basically work, sleep, hang out with the
guys at the office, right? Totally fair.
That never appealed to me. Both Jason
and I saw eye to eye on the idea that 40
hours a week dedicated to work was
enough. That if we were going to go to
distance for not just the 5 to seven
years it takes to build a VC case up to
an exit but for potentially 10 years, 20
years or further. We needed to become
whole humans because the only that whole
humanness was going to go to distance
which included building up friendships
outside of work, having hobbies,
finding a mate and having a family. And
that
entire
existence, those legs of the stool that
work is not the only thing in life is
completely
related to the fact that we've been
around for 25 years. There's way too
much, especially in America, of false
trade-offs. Oh, you want to build a
successful business? Well, you can
either have uh money, enjoyment, family,
or health. Pick one.
>> What? Why do we have to give up all of
this? Now again, I'm not saying that
there aren't moments payers in life
where you can sprint, but I am saying if
that sprint turns into a decade, you're
going to pay for it. And you're going to
pay for it in ways I've seen time and
again seemed like a very bad trade that
even if it works, and by the way, most
of the time it does not. Most of the
time startups go bust. Most of the time
people spend five, seven years or
something that does not pan out and they
don't get the payout and then they just
sit with regret of like what the fuck
happened to my 20s.
>> Early on, Jason and I basically made the
pact that working together was not going
to lead to that kind of regret that we
were going to allow ourselves and each
other to build a whole life outside of
work. And
the fact that that worked is something I
feel
is almost like forbidden knowledge.
Certainly in technology circles in the
US, it's something that we've tried to
champion for 20 years and we still get
slacked for. Just two days ago, I had
another Twitter beef with someone saying
like, "Oh, well, okay, maybe it worked,
but you didn't turn into Atlassian, so
you're a failure. You base camp isn't
Jira, so why are you even bothering?"
And it's such a fascinating winner takes
all mentality that unless you dominate
everyone else in all the ways, you've
lost when so much of life is far more
open to multiple winners. Where we can
end up with a business that have made
hundreds of millions of dollars over the
years and we've kept much of that to do
whatever we want. And that that's
enough. That's good. That's great.
that's actually
something worth aspiring to. Certainly,
it should be a path for someone to
consider choosing rather than the VC
unicorn and bust mentality that
dominates everything.
>> Yeah. I'd love to ask you about this
exchange so you can explain to me the
whole saga. But so just to link on that
a little bit is I think there's a notion
that success
for a tech founder is like work for a
few years all out and then
uh exit sort of sell your company for I
don't know hundreds of millions of
dollars that's success when it seems in
reality when you look at who the
people like you like really smart
creative humans who they actually are
and what happiness entails.
It actually entails working your whole
life a little bit. Just like cuz you
actually love the programming, you love
the building, you love the designer, and
you don't want to exit. And that's
something you've talked about really uh
really eloquently about. So like you
actually want to create a life where
you're always doing the building and
doing it in a way that's not completely
taking over your life.
>> Mojito Island is a mirage. It always
was. There is no retirement for
ambitious people. There is no just
sitting back on the beach and sipping a
mojito for what? For two weeks before
you go damn crazy and want to get back
into the action. That's exactly what
happens to most people who have the
capacity to build those kinds of exits.
I've never seen I shouldn't say never.
I've almost never seen anyone be able to
pull that off. Yet so many think that
that's why they're doing it. That's why
they're sacrificing everything. Because
once I get to the finish line, I'm
golden. I've won. I can retire. I can
sit back. I can just relax. And you find
out that that kind of relaxation is
actually hell.
>> Yeah.
>> It's hell for creative people to
squander their god-given creative juices
and capacities.
And I was really lucky to read the book
Flow by Mihi Chicken Mihayi early on.
>> Nice. the pronunciations.
>> You know what? I had to practice that
with AI over the last few days because I
knew I was gonna cite him and I
butchered his name several times. So, AI
taught me how to pronounce that um at
least somewhat correctly. But his main
work over his career was essentially the
concept of flow
>> that came out of a search for
understanding happiness. Why are some
people happy? When are they happy? And
what he learned was quite illuminating.
He learned that people aren't happy when
they sit on Mojito Island. They're not
happy when they're free of all
obligations and responsibilities. No,
they're happy in these moments where
they're reaching and stretching their
capacities just beyond what they can
currently do. In those moments of flow,
they can forget time and space. They can
sit in front of the keyboard, program a
hard problem, think 20 minutes have
passed, and suddenly it's been three
hours. They look back upon those moments
with the greatest amount of joy. And
that is what peak happiness is. If you
take away the pursuit of those kinds of
problems, if you eliminate all the
problems from your plate, you're going
to get depressed. You're are not going
to have a good time. Now, there are
people who can do that, but they're not
the same kind of people who built these
kinds of companies. So, you have to
accept the kind of individual you are.
If you are on this path, don't bullshit
yourself. Don't bullshit yourself into
thinking, I'm just going to sacrifice
everything, my health, my family, my
hobbies, my friends, but in 10 years I'm
going to make it all up because in 10
years I can do it. It never works out
like that. It doesn't even It doesn't
work out on both ends of it. It does not
work out if you're successful and you
sell your company because you'll get
bored out of your mind after two weeks
on retirement. It doesn't work out if
the company is a failure and you regret
the last 10 years spent for nothing. It
doesn't work out if it all works and you
stay in the business because it never
gets any easier. So, you're going to
fail on all metrics if you just go
there's only work and nothing else. And
I didn't want that. I wanted the
happiness of flow. I understood that
insight was true, but I wanted to do it
in a way where I could sustain the
journey for 40 or 50 years. And uh
there's another other interesting caveat
that I've heard you say is that if you
do exit, you sell your company and you
want to stay in, you want to do another
company, that's going to usually not be
as fulfilling.
>> Yes. Cuz really your first baby like you
can't do it again or most people can't
do it again. A because their second idea
is not going to be as good as the first
one. It is so rare to capture lightning
in the bottle like we have for example
with base camp. I know this from
experience because I've been trying to
build a lot of other businesses since
and some of them have been moderate
successes, even good successes. None of
them have been base camp. It's really
difficult to do that twice. But founders
are arrogant pricks, including myself.
And we like to think that you know what,
we succeeded in large part because we're
just awesome. We're just so much better
than everyone else. And in some ways,
that's true some of the time. But you
can also be really good at something
that matters for a hot moment that that
door is open, the door closes. Now
you're still good at the thing, but it
doesn't matter. No one cares.
There's that part of it. And then
there's the part of it that
going back to experience things for the
first time only happens the first time.
You can't do it again. I don't know if I
have it in me to go through the bullshit
of the early days again. And I say
bullshit in the sense of the most
endearing sense. It's all great to do
it. I know too much. This is one of the
reasons why whenever I'm asked the
questions, if you could tell your
younger self um something that would
really What would you say to your
younger self? I would fucking not say a
thing. I would not rob my younger self
of all the life experiences that I've
been blessed with due to the ignorance
of how the world works. Building up the
wisdom about how the world works is
a joy. And you got to build it one brick
at a time. If you just handed all the
results, it's like, "Oh, should we watch
your movie?" Here's how it ends. I don't
want to f watch the movie now. You You
spoiled it. I don't want you to spoil my
business experience. I don't want to
spoil any of my ignorance. The greatest
blessing half the time when you're
starting something new is a you don't
know how hard it's going to be. B, you
don't know what you don't know. Like the
adventure is the payoff. The
responsibility is the payoff. This is
something Jordan Peterson has really
taught me to articulate this notion that
responsibility is actually key to
meaning. Um,
man's search for meaning. Victor Frankle
talks about this as well that we can
endure any hardship if there is a reason
why. Now he talked about it in truly
lifealtering
concentration camp ways but you can also
apply it at a smaller scale with less
criticality of even just your daily life
that all that hardship in building the
original business that is responsibility
you take upon yourself the appeal the
reason you take that on you is in part
because you don't know fully what it
entails if you had known up front if id
known up front how hard it would be how
much
frustration there'd be along the way if
you told me that in a narrative before I
got started, I would have been like,
"Ah, maybe I should just go get a job."
>> You said so many smart things there just
to pick one.
It It's funny that sometimes the advice
givers, the wisdom givers are have gone
through all the bullshit. And so there
is a degree to which you want to make
the mistake. So I think I think I would
still give the advice of you want to
have a stretch of your life where you
work too hard including at a thing that
fails. I don't think you can learn the
lessons why that's a bad idea in any
other way except by doing it. There is a
degree but of course you don't
>> I think you should stretch. Should you
have to stretch for a decade? I'm not so
sure.
>> Yeah. The decade thing is 20s is a
special time.
>> It's a lot to trade. You don't get your
20s back. You don't get your 30s back,
you don't get your 40s back. You really
I would have regretted personally if I
hadn't done the other things I did in my
20s. If I hadn't had the fun I had, if I
hadn't have the friends I had, if I
hadn't built up the hobbies that I did,
if I hadn't started driving race cars at
an early enough age to actually get
really good at it. If I had just gone
all in on business because I would have
got the same out in the end. This is
something Derek Civers really taught me
is he has this great essay about how
when he went for a bike ride, he could
go really hard all out and he could do
the ride I think in whatever 19 minutes
or he could enjoy the ride, go 5%
slower, do the ride in 21 minutes
and realize there's only two minutes
apart. Either I go all in all the time,
there's nothing else. I'm completely
exhausted at the out end or I travel the
same distance and I arrive maybe 2
minutes later but I got to enjoy the
scenery, listen to the birds, smell the
flowers. That journey
is also valuable. Now I say that while
accepting and celebrating that if you
want to be the best at one thing in the
world, no, you have to sacrifice
everything. You have to be obsessed with
just that thing. There is no instant of
someone who's the best in the world at
something who's not completely obsessed
at. I didn't need the best at anything.
This was a a blessing of a rare blessing
of humility I had early on is like, do
you know what? I am not that smart. I'm
not that good. I'm not that talented. I
can do interesting things by combining
different aspects and elements that I
know, but I'm not going to be the best
at anything. And that released me from
this singular obsession which is going
like I'm gonna be the best programmer in
the world. I know I'm not. I fucking
failed at it twice before I even got how
conditionals worked. I'm not smart
enough to be the best at anything. I'm
not dedicated enough to do that. That's
a bit of a blessing. And I think as a
society we have to straddle both
celebrating peak excellence which we do
all the time and celebrating the peak
intensity
of mission it takes to become that and
then also going like you know what we
don't all need to be Michael Jordan.
There's only going to be one of those.
Well we should say that there's certain
pursuits where a singular obsession is
required. Basketball is one of them. by
the way, probably racing. If you want to
be the best at F1 in the world,
>> if you want to be Senna, you got to be a
maniac.
>> But I would argue that there's most
disciplines like programming
allows if you want to be quote unquote
the best, whatever that means. I think
that's judged at the end of your life.
And usually if you look at that path,
it's going to be a nonlinear one. It
you're not going to look like the life
of an Olympic athlete who singular
focus. You're going to there's going to
be some acid there in the 20s or there's
going to be a det several detours
which the true greats there's going to
be detours and sometimes they're not
going to be Steve Jobs asset type of
situation. They'll be just different
companies you worked for, different
careers or different uh sort of efforts
you allocated your life to. But it's
going to be nonlinear. It's not it's not
going to be a singular focus.
>> The way I think about this sometimes is
I want a good bargain on learning. I can
become in the top 5% of whatever I
defined as good at something
much much easier. Perhaps it's 20 times
easier, 100 times easier to get into the
top 5% than it is to get into the top
0.1%. That's almost impossibly hard to
get into that. But if I'm content just
being in the top 5%, I can be in the top
5% on like five things at once. I can
get really good at writing. I can get
decent at driving a race car. I can
become pretty good at programming. I can
run a company. I can have a family. I
can do a lot of things at the same time.
That gives me sort of that variety that
almost um idealized K Marx has this
idea. Oh, I'm going to fish in the
morning and uh hammer in the evening and
paint on the weekends, right? That
there's a sense for me at least where
his diagnosis of alienation was true.
That just that tunnel vision, there's
just this one thing I'm just going to
focus on that gives me a sense of
alienation I can't stomach. When I'm
really deep on programming and sometimes
I go deep for for weeks, maybe even in a
few cases months, I have to come up for
air and I have to go do something else.
like, "All right, that was programming
for this year. I've done my part. I'm
going to go off riding or annoy people
on the internet or drive some race cars
or do something else and then I can do
the programming thing with full
intensity again next year."
>> Speaking of of annoying people on the
internet, you got to explain to me this
drama. Okay, so what is this guy that
said, "Imagine losing to Jira, but
boasting that you have a couple million
dollars per year." So, this had to do
with this almost now a meme decision to
leave the cloud. DH left the cloud. I
think that's literally a meme, but it's
also a fascinating
decision. Can you talk to the full saga
of DHA leaves the cloud?
>> Yes.
>> Leaving AWS,
um, saving money. And I guess the case
this person is making no
>> is that we wasted our time optimizing a
business that could have been 100 times
bigger if we' just gone for the moon
>> and and for the moon includes
>> venture capital other things includes
not caring about cost
>> but also because AGI's around the corner
you should have been investing into AI
right is this just part of
>> sort of tangent I think it's a bit of a
muddy argument but if we just take it at
its peak ideal which I actually think is
a reasonable point is that you can get
myopically focused on counting pennies
when you should be focused on getting
pounds, right? That
>> I've optimized our spend on
infrastructure by getting out of the
cloud and that took some time and I
could have taken that time and spent it
on making more features that would have
attracted more customers or spend even
more time with AI or done other thing.
Opportunity cost is real. I'm not
denying that. I'm pushing back on the
idea that for a company of our size,
saving $2 million a year on our
infrastructure bill, which is about
somewhere between half to 2/3,
goes directly to the bottom line, which
means it's returned to Jason and I as
owners and our employees part of our uh
profit sharing plan. It's totally worth
doing. This idea that costs don't matter
is a very Silicon Valley way of thinking
that I again understand at the scale of
something maybe but I also actually
think it's
it's aesthetically unpleasing. I find an
inefficient business as I find an
inefficient program full of line noise
to just be a splinter in my brain. I
hate looking at an expense report and
just seeing disproportionate waste. And
when I was looking at our spend at 37
Signals a while back a few years back, I
saw bills that did not pass my smell
test. I remembered how much we used to
spend on infrastructure before the cloud
and I saw numbers I could not recognize
in proportion to what we needed. The
fact that computers have gotten so much
faster over time. Shouldn't things be
getting cheaper? Why are we spending
more and more money servicing more
customers? Yes, but with much faster
computers. Moore's law should be
lowering the cost. And the opposite is
happening. Why is that happening? And
that started a journey of unwinding
why the cloud isn't as great as the deal
as people like to think that.
>> Yeah. Can we look at the specifics just
to for people who don't know the story
and then generalize
to what it means about the the the role
of the cloud in in a tech business. So
the specifics is you were using AWSS3
for
>> we were using AWS for everything.
Hey.com launched as an entirely cloud
app. It was completely on AWS for
compute for databases for all of it.
We're using all the systems as they're
best prescribed that we should. Our
total cloud bill for Basecam. Our total
spend with AWS was I think 3.2 million
or 3.4 million at its peak. That's kind
of a lot of money. 3.4 million. I mean,
we have a ton of users and customers.
But still, that just struck me as
unreasonable. And the reason why I was
so unreasonable was because I had the
pitch for the cloud ringing in my ears.
Hey, this is going to be faster. This is
going to be easier. This is going to be
cheaper. Why are you trying to produce
your own power?
>> Like, do you have your own power plant?
Why would you do that? Leave the
computers to the hyperscalers. They're
much better at it anyway. I actually
thought that was a compelling pitch. I
bought in on that pitch for several
years and thought, do you know what? I'm
done ever owning a server again. we're
just going to render our capacity and
Amazon is going to be able to offer us
services much cheaper than we could buy
them themselves because they're going to
have these economies of scale. And I was
thinking Jeff's word ringing uh my
competitor's margin is my opportunity.
That was something he used to drive
Amazon.com with that if he could just
make 2% when the other guy was trying to
make 4% he would end up with all the
money and on volume he would still win.
So I thought that was the operating
ethos for AWS. It turns out that's not
true at all. AWS by the way operates at
almost 40% margin.
>> So just in that there's a clue that uh
competitors are not able to do the
competitive thing we like about uh
capitalism which is to lower costs and
so forth. So the cloud pitch in my
optics are fun is fundamentally false.
It did not get easier. First of all, I
don't know if you've used AWS recently.
It is hella complicated. If you think
Linux is hard, you've never tried to set
up AM rules or access parameters or
whatever for AWS.
>> Yeah, AWS was always difficult. It was
always clunk.
>> Well, I think it's gotten even more
difficult. But yes, now some of that is
it's difficult because it's very capable
and you have a bunch of capacity on tap.
And there are reasons. I don't think
they're good enough to justify how
complicated the whole jing and majing
has become. But what's certainly true is
that it's no longer easier is not easier
to use AWS than it is to run your own
machines, which we learned when we
pulled out of the cloud and didn't hire
a single extra person. Even though we
operate all our own hardware, the team
stayed exactly the same. So, you have
this three-way pitch, right? It's going
to be easier. It's going to be cheaper.
Certainly wasn't cheaper. We've just
proved that by cutting our spend on
infrastructure by half to 2/3. And it's
going to be faster. The last bit was
true, but way too many people
overestimated the value of that speed.
If you need a thousand computers online
in the next 15 minutes, nothing beats
the cloud. How would you even procure
that? If we just need another 20
servers, it's going to take a week or
two to get boxes shipped on pallets
delivered to a data center and unwrapped
and racked and all that stuff, right?
But how often do we need to do that? And
how often do we need to do that if
buying those servers is way way cheaper
such that we get vastly more compute for
the same amount of money? Could we just
buy more servers and not even care about
the fact that we're not hyper optimized
on the compute utility that we don't
have to use things like uh automatic
scaling to figure things out because we
have to reduce cost? Yes, we can. So, we
went through this journey over a
realization in early 2023
when I had finally had enough with our
bills. I wanted to get rid of them. I
wanted to spend less money. I wanted to
keep more of the money ourselves. And in
just over 6 months, we moved seven major
applications out of the cloud in terms
of compute, caching, databases, the
works onto our own servers. A glorious,
beautiful new fleet bought from the king
of servers, Michael Dell, who really, by
the way, is another icon of my I saw he
just celebrated 41 years in business. 41
years this man has been selling awesome
servers that we've been using for our
entire existence. But anyway, these
pallets arrive in uh a couple of weeks
and we rack them up and get everything
going and we were we were out at least
with the computer part. We then had a
long uh multi-year commitment to S3
because the only way to get decent
pricing in the cloud, by the way, is not
to buy on a day-to-day basis, not to
rent on a database basis, but to bind
yourself up to multi-year contracts.
With compute, it's often a year. That
was in our case. And with storage was
four years. We signed a 4-year contract
to store our pabytes of customer files
in the cloud to be able to get something
just halfway decent, affordable. So, all
of these projects came together to the
sense that we're now saving literally
millions of dollars, projected about 10
million over 5 years. It's always hard.
How do you do the accounting exactly?
And to this, that and the other thing,
but it's millions of dollars. But it's
not just that. It's also the fact that
getting out of the cloud mean meant
returning to more of an original idea of
the internet that the internet was not
designed such that three computers
should run everything. It was a
distributed network such that the
individual nodes could disappear and the
whole thing would still carry on. DARPA
designed this such that the Russians
could take out Washington and they could
still fight back from New York. that the
entire communication infrastructure
wouldn't disappear because there was no
hub and spoke. It was a network. I
always found that an immensely beautiful
vision that you could have this glorious
internet and no single node was in
control of everything. And we've
returned to much more of a single node
controlling everything idea with these
hyperscalers. When US East one, the main
and original region for AWS goes
offline, which has happened more than a
few times over the years, seemingly a
third of the internet is offline. Like
that in itself is just an insult to
DARPA's design. I it doesn't detract
from the fact that what AWS built was
marvelous. I think the cloud has moved
so many things so far forward,
especially around virtualization,
automation, setup. It's all those giant
leaps forward for system administration
that's allowing us now to be able to run
things on prem in a way that smells and
feels much like the cloud just at half
the cost or less and with the autonomy
and the satisfaction of owning hardware.
I don't know what the last time you
looked at like an actual server and took
it apart and looked inside of these
things are gorgeous. I mean, I posted a
couple of pictures of our racks out in
the data center and people always go
crazy for them because we've gotten so
abstracted from what the underlying
metal looks like in this cloud age that
most people have no idea. They have no
idea how powerful a modern CPU is. They
have no idea how much RAM you can fit
into a oneU rack. Progress in computing
has been really exciting, especially I'd
say in the last four to five years after
TSMC with Apple's help really pushed the
envelope. I mean, we kind of sat still
there for a while while Intel was
spinning their wheels going nowhere and
then TSMC with Apple propelling them
really moved things forward and now
servers are exciting again. Like you're
getting jumps year-over-year in the 15
20% rather than the single digit we were
stuck with for a while. And that all
means that owning your own hardware is a
more feasible proposition than it's ever
been. That you need fewer machines to
run ever more. And that more people
should do it because
as much as I love Jeff and Amazon, like
he doesn't need another whatever 40%
margin on all the tech stuff that I buy
to run our business.
And
this is just something I've been focused
on both because of the ideology around
honoring DARPA's original design, the
practicality of running our own
hardware, seeing how fast we can push
things with the latest machines, and
then saving the money. And that has all
been so enjoyable to do, but also so
counterintuitive for a lot of people
because it seemed I think for a lot of
people in the industry that like we'd
all decided that we were done buying
computers that that was something we
would just delegate to AWS and Azure and
Google Cloud that we didn't have to own
these things anymore. So, I think
there's a little bit of whiplash for
some people that, "Oh, I thought we
agreed. We were done with that." And
then along come us and say, "Yeah, do
you know what? Maybe you should have a
computer."
>> Is there some pain points to running
your own servers?
>> Oh, plenty. There's pain points to
operating computers of all kind. Have
you tried just like uh using a personal
computer these days? Half the time when
my kids or my wife have a problem, I go
like, "Have you tried turning it just
off and on?" Again, computers are
inherently painful to humans. Owning
your own computer though kind of makes
some of that pain worth it. There's a
responsibility that comes with actually
owning the hardware that to me at least
make the burden of operating that
hardware seem slightly more enjoyable.
Now there are things you have to learn
certainly at our scale too. I mean we're
not just buying a single computer and
plugging into an Ethernet. We have to
have racks and racks of them and you got
to set it up with network cabling and
there is some specialized expertise in
that. But it's not like that expertise
is like building nuclear rockets. It's
not like it's not widely distributed.
Literally, the entire internet was built
on people knowing how to plug in a
computer to the internet, right? Oh,
Ethernet cable goes here, power cable
goes here. Let's boot up Linux. That's
how everyone put anything online until
10, 12 years ago when the cloud sort of
took over. So, the expertise is there
and can be rediscovered. You too can
learn how to operate a Linux computer.
Yeah. And it's, you know, when you get a
bunch of them, there's a bunch of
flashing LEDs and it's just so exciting.
>> Beautiful, calming, amazing. Computers
are really fun. This is actually
something I've gotten into even deeper
after we moved out of the cloud. Now, my
next kind of tingle is that if you could
move out of the cloud, can you also move
out of the data center? Personal servers
have gotten really scarily quick and
efficient. and personal internet
connections rival what we connected data
centers with just a decade or two ago.
So there's a whole community around this
concept of home lapping which is
essentially installing server hardware
in your own apartment connecting it to
the internet and exposing that directly
to the internet. that harks back to
those glorious days of the '90s when
people building for the internet would
host the actual website on their actual
computer in the closet.
>> And I'm pretty fired up about that. I'm
doing a bunch of experiments. I've
ordered a bunch of home servers for my
own apartment. I marvel at the fact that
I can get a 5 gigabit fiber connection
now. I think do you know what 5 GB that
could have taken base camp to multiple
millions of MR in the way that back then
I ran the whole business on a single box
with 2004 technology and two probably
100 megabit cable like the capacity we
have access to both in terms of compute
and connectivity is something that
people haven't readjusted to and this
happens sometimes in technology where
progress ever sneaks up on you. This
happened with SSDs. I love that. By the
way, we designed so much of our
technology and storage approach and
database design around spinning metal
discs that had certain seek rate
properties. And then we went to NVME and
SSDs. And it took quite a while for
people to realize that the systems had
to be built fundamentally different now.
that the difference between memory and
disk was now far smaller when you
weren't spinning these metal plates
around with a little head that had to
read off them. You were essentially just
dealing with another type of memory. I
think we're a little bit in that same
phase when it comes to the capacity of
new businesses to be launched literally
out of your damn bedroom.
>> So, you can get pretty far with a large
user base with home labbing.
>> Absolutely.
>> That's exciting. That's like the old
school That's really exciting. It's
bringing back the startup in the garage
in the literal physical sense of the
word. Now, some of that is, do we need
to? You can get relatively cheap cloud
capacity if you don't need very much.
>> Hell yes, we need to. I mean, the
feeling of doing that by yourself, of
seeing LED lights
uh in your own home, I mean, there's
nothing like that.
>> There's just an aesthetic to it that I
am completely in love with and I want to
try to push on. Now, is that going to be
the same thing as getting out of the
cloud? I'm not sure. Our exit out of the
cloud was not the exit out of the data
center. We basically just bought
hardware, shipped it to a professionally
managed data center that we didn't even
actually touch. This is the other
misconception people have about moving
out of the cloud that we have a bunch of
people who are constantly driving to a
data center somewhere to rack new boxes
and change dead RAM. That's not how
things happen in the modern world at
all. We have a company called Summit,
previously deaf, that is what we call
white gloves. They just they work in the
data center. When we need something
like, hey, hey, deaf, can you uh go down
and uh swap the debt SSD in box number
six, they do it. And what we see is akin
to what someone working with the cloud
would see. You see IP addresses coming
online. You see drives coming online.
It's not that different, but it is a
whole heck of a lot cheaper when you are
operating at our scale. And of course it
is. Of course, it's cheaper to own
things if you need those things for
years rather than it is to rent it. In
no other domain would we confuse those
two things that it's cheaper to own for
the long duration than it is to rent.
There is some gray area like I've gotten
a chance to interact with the XAI team a
bunch. I'll probably going back out
there in Memphis to do a big podcast
associated with the Grock release. And
those folks in order to achieve the
speed of building up the the cluster and
to solve some of the novel aspects that
have to do with the GPU with the with
the training, they have to be a little
bit more hands-on. It's a less white
glove. Oh, and I love that. Right.
They're dealing with a frontier problem
and they're dealing with it not by
rending a bunch of GPUs at a huge markup
from their main competitor. They're
going like, "No, screw that. We're going
to put 100,000 GPUs in our own tents,
right, and build it in absolute record
time." So, I think if anything, this is
testament to the idea that owning
hardware can give you an advantage both
at the small scale, at the medium scale,
and at the pioneer levels of computing.
>> By the way, you know, speaking of teams,
that those are XAI, Tesla are um large
companies, but all those folks,
I don't know what it is about. You said
Jeff is really good at finding good
people,
at seeing seeing strength in people.
Like Elon is also extremely I don't know
what that is. Actually, I I've never
actually seen maybe you could speak to
that. He's good at finding greatness. I
don't think he's finding as much as he's
attracting.
He's attracting the talent because of
the audaciousness of his goals and his
mission. The clarity by which he states
it. He doesn't have to go scour the
earth to find the best people. The best
people come to him because he is talking
about Elon here. One of the singular
most invigorating figures in both the
same order of the universe here. Haters
and lovers, right? Like he's having such
an impact at such a scale that of course
he's got to have literally millions of
people think he's the
worst person in the world. And he's also
going to have millions of people
thinking he's the greatest gift to
humanity depending on the day. I'm
somewhere in between, but I'm more on
the greatest gift to humanity end of the
scale than I'm on the others end of the
scale. And I think that really inspires
people in a way that we've almost
forgotten that that level of audacity is
so rare
>> that when we see it, we don't fully know
how to analyze it. We think of Elon as
finding great talent. And I'm sure he's
also good at that. But I also think that
this beacon of the mission, we're going
to fucking Mars.
We're going to transform transportation
into using electricity. We're going to
cover the earth in internet is so grand
that there are days where I wake up and
go like, "What the fuck am I doing with
these to-do lists?"
>> Like, Jesus, should I go sign up for
something like that?
>> That sounds invigorating in a sense I
can only imagine like a Viking back in
1050 going like, "Should we go to
Normandy? You may die along the way, but
oh boy does that sound like a journey
and an adventure.
>> There's a few components there. One
definitely this bigger than life mission
and really believing it. You know, every
other sentence is about Mars. Like
really believing it. It doesn't really
matter what like anybody else the
criticism anything there's a very
singular focused big mission. But I
think it also has to do a bunch of the
other components like being able to hire
well once the people once the beacon
attracts and I've just seen people that
don't necessarily on paper have a resume
with a track record. I've I've seen
really who now turned out to be like
legendary people. He basically like
tosses them the ball of leadership. Yes.
sees something in them and says like you
go and gives them the ownership and they
run with it and that that happens at
every scale that there's a real
meritocracy
and like there's something
uh there's there's just like you could
see the flourishing of human intellect
in these meetings in these group getting
together where they're like the energy
is palpable. It's it's it's like
exciting for me to just be around that
cuz I don't I there's not many companies
I've seen that in because when a company
becomes successful and larger, it
somehow suffocates that energy that I I
guess you see in startups
at the early stages, but like it's cool
to see it at at a large company that's
actually able to achieve scale. You
know,
>> I think part of the secret there is that
Elon actually knows things. And when you
know things, you can evaluate the
quality of work products. And when you
can evaluate the quality of work
products, you can very quickly tell
who's full of shit and who will actually
take you to Mars. And you can fire the
people who's full of shit and you can
bet on the people who get us to Mars.
That capacity to directly evaluate the
competency of individuals
is actually a little bit rare. It's not
widely distributed amongst managers,
hiring managers. It's not something you
can easily delegate to people who are
not
very skilled at the work itself. And
Elon obviously knows a lot about a lot
and he can smell who knows stuff for
real. And is this at our tiny scale.
Something I've tried to do in the same
order where when we hire programmers,
for example,
it's going to be interesting now with AI
as a new challenge. But up until this
point, the main pivot point for getting
hired was not your resume, was not the
schooling you've had, was not your
grades, was not your pedigree. It was
how well you did on two things. A, your
cover letter, because I can only work
with people remotely if they're good
writers. So if you can't pen a proper
capital letter and can't bother to put
in the effort to write it specifically
for us, you're out. Two, you have to be
able to program really well to the
degree that I can look at your code and
go like, "Yeah, I want to work with that
person." Not only I want to work with
that person, I want to work on that
person's code when I have to see it
again in five years to fix some damn
bug. So we're going to give you a
programming test that simulates the way
we work for real and we're going to see
how you do. And I've been surprised time
and again where I thought for sure this
candidate is a shoein. They sound just
right. The CV is just right. And then
you see the code getting turned in. I'm
like, no way. No way are we hiring this
person. And the other way has been true
as well. I've like I don't know about
this guy or this this woman.
I don't know. And then they turn in
their coach stuff and they're like, holy
shit, can that person be on my team
tomorrow? Preferably the capacity to
evaluate work product is a superpower
when it comes to hiring.
>> There's a step that I've seen Elon do
really well which is be able to show up
and say this can be done simpler.
>> Yes.
>> And but he knows what he's talking about
and then the the engineer because Elon
knows enough the engineer who first
reaction you can kind of tell like it's
almost like rolling your eyes if your
parent tells you something.
>> Yes. this this is not no we've I've been
working on this for a month you don't
know but then when you have that
conversation a little more you realize
no it can be done simpler find the way
so there's a good when two engineers are
talking one might not have perfect
information but if if if the senior
engineer has like good instinct that's
like been battle earned
>> then you can say simplify and it it it
actually will result and simplification
>> and I think this is the hallmark of the
true greats that they not only have the
insight into what's required to do the
work but they also have the transc
transcendent vision to go beyond what
the engineer would do the programmer
would do I think if we're looking at
these rarities obviously the myth of
Steve Jobs was also this even though
perhaps he was less technical than Elon
is in many ways He had the same capacity
to show up to a product team and really
challenge them to look harder for the
simplification or for making things
greater in a way that would garner
disbelief from the people who are
supposed to do it. Like this guy is full
of shit. Like this is crazy. We can
never and then two months later it is.
So there is something of this where you
need you need the vision. You need it
anchored by the reality of knowing
enough about what's possible. knowing
enough about physics, knowing enough
about software that you're not just
building bullshit. There are plenty of
people who can tell a group of
engineers, "No, just do it faster."
Like, that's not a skill. It's got to be
anchored in something real. But it's
also got to be anchored in,
it's a tired word, but a passion for the
outcome to a degree where you get
personally insulted if a bad job is
done. This is what I've been writing
about lately with Apple. They've lost
that asshole who would show up and tell
engineers that what they did was not
good enough in ways that would actually
perhaps make them feel a little small in
the moment, but would spark that
zest to really fix it. And now they have
a logistics person who's very good at
sourcing components and lining up
production Gant charts,
but you're not getting that magic. Now,
what's interesting with that whole
scenario was I actually thought how well
Tim Cook ran things and has run things
at Apple for so long that maybe we were
wrong. Maybe we were wrong about the
criticality of Steve Jobs to the whole
mission. Maybe you could get away with
not having it. I think the bill was just
going to come later and now it has.
Apple is failing in all these ways that
someone who would blow up Steve's ghost
and really exalt him would say like see
this is what's happening now. So the
other thing here too of course is it's
impossible to divorce like your
perception of what's a critical
component of the system and the messy
reality of a million different moving
parts in the reality of life and you
should be skeptical about your own
analysis and your own thesis at all
time. Since you mentioned Apple, have to
ask. Uh, somebody in the internet
uh submitted the question.
Uh, does DHA still hate Apple? I believe
the question is, um, so there was a time
when Basecam went to war with Apple over
the 30%. What's Can you tell the saga of
that battle?
>> Yes. But first, I'll tell you how I fell
in love with Apple, which was all the
way back in also early 2000s
when Microsoft was dominating the
industry in a way we now see Apple and
Google dominate mobile phones. Microsoft
was just everything when it came to
personal computers. And I really did not
like the Microsoft of the '90s. The
Microsoft of the 90s was the cut off the
air supply to Netscape kind of
characters. Was the Bill Gates sitting
defiant in an interview with the DOJ
asking about what the definition of what
is and just overall unpleasant. I think
you can have respect for what was
achieved, but I certainly didn't like
it. And as we've talked about, I came
begrudgingly to the PC after Commodore
fell apart and I couldn't continue to
use the AmIGGA. So, I already had a bit
of a bone to pick with PCs just over the
fact that I love my AmIgga so much. But
then in the early 2000s, Apple emerged
as a credible alternative because they
bet the new generation of Macs on Unix
underpinnings
and that allowed me to escape from
Microsoft and suddenly I became one of
the biggest boosters of Apple. I was in
my graduating class at the Copenhagen
Business School. I started with the
first white iBook, first person using
Mac. And by the time we were done and
graduating, I had basically converted
half the class to using Apple computers
because I would evangelize them so hard
and demonstrate them and do all the
things that a super fan would do. And I
continued that work over many years.
Jason or I actually in I think 2004 2005
did an ad for Apple that they posted on
the developer site where we were all
about like Apple is so integral to
everything that we do and we look up to
them and we are inspired by them and
that love relationship actually
continued for a very long time. I
basically just became a Mac person for
20 years. I didn't even care about
looking at PCs. It seemed irrelevant to
me whatever Microsoft was doing which
felt like such a relief because in the
90s I felt like I couldn't escape
Microsoft and suddenly I had found my
escape and now I was with Apple and it
was glorious and they shared so many of
my sensibilities and my aesthetics and
they kept pushing the envelope and there
was so much to be proud of so much to
look up to
and then that sort of started to change
with the iPhone which is weird because
the iPhone is what made modern Apple.
It's what I lined up in 2007 together
with Jason for 5 hours to stand in the
line to buy a first generation product
where Apple staff would clap at you when
you walked out of the store. I don't
know if you remember that. It was it was
a whole ceremony and it was part of that
myth and mystique and awe of Apple. So,
I just I wasn't in the market for other
computers. I wasn't in the market for
other computer ideas. I thought perhaps
I'd be with the Mac until the end of
days. But as Apple discovered the gold
mine it is to operate a toll booth where
you don't have to innovate, where you
don't actually even have to make
anything, where you can just take 30% of
other people's business. There was a rot
that crept in to the foundation of Apple
and that started all the way back from
the initial launch of the app store. But
I don't think we saw at the time, I
didn't see at the time, just how
critical the mobile phone would become
to computing in general. I thought when
the iPhone came out that like, oh, it's
like a mobile phone. I've had a mobile
phone since the early '9s. Well, it
wasn't a mobile phone. It was a mobile
computer. And even more than that, it
was the most important computer or it
would become the most important computer
for most people around the world, which
meant that if you like to make software
and wanted to sell it to people, you had
to go through that computer. And if
going through that computer meant going
through Apple's toll booth and not just
having to ask them permission, which in
and of itself was just an indignity when
you're used to the internet where you
don't have to ask anyone permission
about anything. You buy a domain and you
launch a business and if customers show
up, boom, you're success. And if they
don't, well, you're a failure. Now,
suddenly, before you could even launch,
you'd have to ask Apple for permission.
That always sat wrong with me. But it
wasn't until we launched Hey in 2001
that I saw the full extent of the rot
that has snug into Apple's apple.
>> For people who don't know, and we'll
talk about it, hey is this amazing email
sort of attempt to solve the email
problem.
>> Yes. I like to pitch it as what Gmail
would have been with 20 years of lessons
applied in a way where they could
actually ship. Gmail was incredible when
it launched in 2004. And it still is a
great product, but it's also trapped in
its initial success. You can't redesign
Gmail today. It just has way too many
users. So, if you want fresh thinking on
email, I wanted fresh thinking on email.
I needed to build my own email system
and not just my own email client. That's
what a lot of people have done over the
years. They build a client for Gmail,
but you're severely constrained if you
don't control the email server as well.
If you really want to move the ball
forward with email, you have to control
both the server and the client. And that
was the audacious mission we set out to
do with Hey. And that was what's funny.
I thought our main obstacle here would
be Gmail. It's the 800 lb gorilla in the
email space. something like 70% of all
email in the US is sent through Gmail.
>> I think their world rates are probably
in that neighborhood as well. They're
just absolutely huge
and trying to attack an enormous
established competitor like that who's
so actually still loved by plenty of
people and is free seems like a suicide
mission. And it was only a mission we
signed up for because we had grown
ambitious enough after making Basec camp
for 20 years that we thought we could
tackle that problem. So I thought, hey,
this is dumb. I would not advise anyone
to go head tohead with Gmail. That seems
like a suicide mission. We're going to
try anyway because you know what? If we
fail, it's going to be fine. We're just
going to build a better email experience
for me and Jason and the people at the
company and our cat, and that'll be okay
because we can afford to do so. But when
we got ready to launch after spending
two years building this product,
millions of dollars in investment to it,
we obviously needed mobile apps. You're
not going to be a serious contender with
email if you're not on a mobile phone,
and you need to be there with a native
client. So, we had built a great native
client for both iOS and for Android. And
as we were getting ready to launch, we
submitted both of them to the app
stores, got both of them approved on, I
think Friday afternoon for the iOS app.
And we then went live on Monday and we
were so excited. Hey world, we've been
working on this new thing. I'd love for
you to check it out. And of course, as
with anything, when you launch a new
product, there are some bugs. So, we
quickly found a few in the iOS client
and submitted a new build to Apple.
>> Hey, here's our bug fixes. can you
please update? And that's when all the
help broke loose.
Not only were they not going to approve
our update, they said, "Oh, wait a
minute. We gave you permission to be in
the app store, but I'm sorry. That was a
mistake. We see that uh you're not using
our inapp payment system, which means
that we don't get 30% of your business.
You will have to rectify that or you
can't be in the app store." At first, I
thought like, well, it got approved
already. We're running on the same model
we've run base camp on in the app store
for a decade. If you're not signing up
through the app and we're signing up our
own customers on our own website and
they're just going to the app store to
download their companion app, we're
going to be fine. That was the truth,
right? That was why I never got so fired
up about the app store even as Apple
started tightening the screws was like
my business was okay. Now suddenly my
business wasn't okay. Apple was willing
to destroy hay if we did not agree to
give them 30% of all the signups that
came through the iOS app. And it wasn't
just about the 30%. It was also about
splitting and not longer having a direct
relationship with our customers. When
you sell an app in the app store, you're
not selling an app to a customer. You're
selling an app to inventory at Apple and
then Apple sells an app to that
customer. that customer has a purchasing
relationship with Apple. So if you want
to give discounts or refunds or
whatever, it's complete hell. If you
want to easily support multiplatform,
that's complete hell. If someone signs
up for Hey, on their iPhone and they
want to switch to Android, but that
billing relationship, it's tied to
Apple, it's complete hell. For a million
reasons, I did not want to hand my
business over to Apple. I did not want
to hand 30% of our revenue over to
Apple. So, we decided to do something
that seemingly Apple had never heard
before. We said, "No, we're not going to
add the inapp payment. I don't care if
you're threatening us. This this is not
fair. This is not reasonable.
Please approve." And of course, they
didn't. And it escalated. And after a
couple of days, we realized, you know
what? This isn't a mistake. This isn't
going away. we're going to be dead if
they go through with this. If we're not
going to yield and give them the 30%.
They're going to kick us off unless
we make such a racket, such noise that
they will regret it. And that's exactly
what then happened. We were blessed by
the fact that we launched Hey, one week
before the WWDC, their worldwide
developer conference where Apple loves
to get up on stage and harp on how much
they do for developers, how much they
love them, and why you should build for
their new devices and so on and so
forth. And then we also just happen to
have a platform on the internet which is
very uh convenient when you need to go
to war with a $3 trillion company. So I
started kicking and screaming and
essentially turning it up to 11 in terms
of the fight and going public with our
denial to be in the app store and that
turned into a prolonged twoe battle with
Apple that essentially ended in the best
possible outcome we could have gotten as
David fighting Goliath which was a bit
of a truce. We wouldn't hand 30% over to
Apple. they wouldn't kick us out of the
app store, but we had to build some
bullshit
dummy account such that the app did
something when you downloaded it. That
was a rule that Phil Schiller seemingly
made up on the fly when pressed for the
fifth time by the media about why we
couldn't be in the app store when a
million other companion apps could. But
we just happened to be able to create so
much pain and noise for Apple that it
was easier for them to just let us be
than to keep on fighting. What do you
think about uh Tim Sweeny's victory with
Epic over Apple? I think it is
incredible and the entire developer
ecosystem, not just on iOS, but on
Android as well, owe Epic, Tim Sweeney,
and Mark Rain an enormous debt of
gratitude for taking on the only battle
that has ever inflicted a serious wound
on Apple in this entire sorted campaign
of monopoly enforcement, and that is
Epic's fight versus them.
Tim recently revealed that it has cost
well over $100 million in legal fees to
carry on this battle against Apple. We
for a hot moment considered suing Apple
when they were threatening to kick us
out. We shopped the case around with a
few law firms and perhaps of course they
would tell us you have a good case. I
mean they're trying to sell a a product
here. But they would also tell us it's
going to cost a minimum of $10 million
and it's going to take 5 to seven years
through all the appeals. Now we now
learned the actual price tag was 10
times higher, right? Epic spent over
hundred million. It would have destroyed
us to take on Apple in the legal realm.
Only a company like Epic could do it.
And only a company run by founders
>> Mhm.
>> like Tim, like Mark, could risk the
business in the way that they did, the
audacity they had to provoke the fight
in the first place, which I thought was
just incredible, and to stick with it
for the long term. No board would have
signed off on this lawsuit to a
professional CEO. No freaking way. So,
the fact that they've been able to beat
Apple in also the most hilarious way
possible, I think is just incredible cuz
remember their first victory in the case
was actually not much of a victory.
There were about 11 counts in the trial.
Apple basically won 10 of them and the
judge awarded Epic this one little win
that Apple couldn't tell them not to
link out to the internet to be able to
do the payment processing. So they won
this one little thing and Apple instead
of just taking the 10 out of 11 wins and
going fine, you can have your little
links but all these other rules stay in
place decided to essentially commit
criminal contempt of court as they've
now been referred to for prosecution
um and angered the judge to such a
degree that the rule of law in the US
now is that you can launch an app in the
app store and you don't have to use
inapp payment, but you can have a direct
billing relationship with a customer if
you just link out to the open internet
when you take the credit card and then
hop back into the app. And we owe all of
that to Tim and Mark. We owe all of that
to Epic. We're going to launch new apps
any minute now. I hope um actually next
week that take advantage of this that
revamp the Hay app such that people who
download the Hay app off the Apple app
store can sign up in the app and can
then use uh the web to put in their
credit card. So we don't have to pay
30%. So we have a direct billing
relationship and such that they can take
that subscription to Android to PCs
whatever without any hassle and we have
Tim and Mark to thank for it. Yeah, Tim,
I mean the like you said founders but
also specific kind of founders because I
think maybe you can educate me on this
but uh Tim is somebody who maintains to
this day sort of the unreasonleness of
principles.
>> Yes,
>> that's what I love.
>> I I think sometimes maybe even with
founders you can get worn down. It's a
large company.
>> There's a lot of smart quote unquote
people around you,
>> lawyers and just whisper in your ear
over time and you're like, well, just be
reasonable being, you know, this is a
different thing and
>> to to be the sort of maintain I mean
Steve Jobs did this maintain
m still are the asshole.
>> Yes.
>> Who says no
>> this whole company I'll sink this whole
fucking company over this. That's the
exact language basically I used in our
original campaign. I will burn this
business down before I hand over 30% of
it to Apple. And that sort of
indignation, that actual rage is
something I try to be a little careful
about tapping into because it is a
little bit of a volatile compound
because I mean I have a bunch of
employees. We have a bunch of uh
customers. It would be pretty sad if the
journey of 37 signals after 25 years
would come to an end because Apple would
burn us down or I would burn the
business down over this fight with
Apple. But I think you also need that
level of conviction to be able to even
drive the day-to-day decisions. One of
the other Apple examples, I know I'm
racking on Apple a little bit here, and
I don't actually hate them. I really
don't. I am tremendously disappointed at
the squandered relationship that did not
need to be sold away for so little. Now
I understand that the app store toll
booth is actually pretty big business.
It's multiple billions but Apple is a
trillion dollar company and I think in
the lens of history this is going to
come off as a tremendous mistake and I
think it's already coming off as a
tremendous mistake. The flop that was
the Vision Pro was partly because Apple
had pissed off every other developer. No
one was eager to come build the kind of
experiences for their new hardware that
would perhaps have made it a success. So
when you're on top and you have all the
cards, you can delude yourself into
thinking that you can dictate all terms
at all times and there are no long-term
consequences. Apple is learning finally
the fact that there are long-term
consequences and that developers
actually are important to Apple's
business and the relationship is not
entirely one-sided. We don't owe our
existence to Apple and Apple alone.
We've built our own customer bases.
Apple has been beneficial to the
industry. I'm glad the iPhone exists. Uh
da da. It's not that it doesn't go both
ways, but Apple wants it only one way.
And I think
that is a mistake. And it's a mistake
that was avoidable. And a that's
disappointing. Certainly disappointing
for me. I've literally spent 20 years
evangelizing this shit, right? I've
spent so much money buying Apple
hardware. Um, excusing a bunch of things
they've done over the years and then
for what?
For the fact that you wanted 30% of
something that I created in the most
unreasonable way possible. Couldn't we
have found a better way to do this? I
think they're going to get forced to to
do a better way. But did you also have
to go through the indignity of having a
criminal contempt charge against you,
getting referred to prosecution? It just
seems so beneath Apple. But it also
seems so in line with what happens to
huge companies who are run by quote
unquote professional managers rather
than founders and unreasonable people.
Well, we should probably also say that
the thing you love about Apple, the
great spirit of Apple, I think still
persists and there's a case to be made
that this 30% thing is a slice a
particular slice of a company, not a
defining aspect of the company and that
it Apple is still on top in the in the
hardware that it makes in a lot of
things that it makes. Uh and
you know this is uh there could be just
a hiccup in a long story of a great
company that does a lot of awesome stuff
for humanity. So like Apple's a truly
special company. We met we mentioned
Amazon. There is no company like Apple.
>> I agree. This is why the disappointment
is all greater
>> because we had such high aspirations and
expectations to Apple that they were the
shining city on the hill and they were
guiding the industry in a million
positive ways. I think as we talked
about earlier, hardware is exciting
again in large part because Apple bought
PA Semi and pursued a against all odds
mission to get ARM up to the level it is
today. And we have these incredible M
chips now because of it. And the design
sensibilities that Apple bring to the
table are unparalleled. No one has taste
certainly at the hardware level like
Apple does. Even at the software level,
I'd say there's a lot of taste left in
Apple, but there's also some real sour
taste now. So, they have to wash that
off first, I think, before they find
their way back. But Apple's been in a in
a mirage before. I mean, uh, Wasnak and
Steve Jobs started this thing in the
garage, has great success with the Apple
2. He hands the company over to a sugar
drink salesman who tanks the company
into the 90s. He doesn't learn the
lesson. Spends the next 20 years
building up this amazing company. Then
hands the company over again to a
logistics person who presumably had more
redeeming qualities than uh the first
guy who put in charge but still ends up
leading the company astray. Now this is
the norm. The norm is that great
companies don't last forever. In the
long arc of history, almost no company
lasts forever. There are very few
companies around that was here 100 years
ago, even fewer 200 years ago, and
virtually nothing that are a thousand
years old outside of a handful of
Japanese swords makers or something like
that, right? So,
>> you can get deluded into thinking that
something is forever when you're in the
moment and they seem so large. Apple
could absolutely stumble and I think
they have more reason to stumble now
than ever. They're behind on AI,
terribly behind. Their software quality
is faltering in a bunch of ways. The
competition is catching up on the
hardware game in part because TSMC is
not an Apple subsidiary, but a foundry
that services AMD and Nvidia and others
who are now able to use the same kind of
advanced processes. This is something I
learned after not looking at PC hardware
for the longest time that holy smokes,
AMD actually makes CPUs that are just as
fast, if not faster than Apple's.
They're not quite as efficient yet
because ARM has some fundamental
efficiencies over x86, but they're still
pretty good. So, Apple should have
reason to worry. Apple's shareholders
should have reason to be concerned not
just about all these stumbles but also
by the fact that Apple is run by old
people. Apple's board has an average age
of I think 75. Their entire executive
team is above 60. Now
that sounds horribly agist and in some
ways it a little bit is in the same way
I'm agist against myself. Like I'm 45
now and I sort of kind of have to force
myself to really get into AI because it
is such a paradigm shift and a lot of
people when they reach a certain age are
just happy to stay with what they know.
They don't want to go back to being a
beginner. They don't want to go back to
having to relearn everything. And I
think like this is a little hard for me
at 45. How the hell do you do that at
75?
>> Mhm.
>> I have to come back to you mentioned it
earlier.
You're a parent. Can you speak to the
impact that becoming a father has had on
your life?
>> I think what's funny about fatherhood is
that for me, I wasn't even sure it's
something I wanted.
>> It took meeting the right woman and
letting her convince me that this was
the right idea before we even got
started. I didn't have starting my own
family on the list of priorities in my
late 20s or even early 30s.
It was really the impetus of meeting my
wife Jamie and her telling me this is
what I want. I want to have a family. I
want to get married. I want to have
kids. I want to have three. And me going
for a second like whoa whoa whoa. and
then h
all right let's do it and I think
that's the kind of happy accident where
some parts of my life have been very
driven where I knew exactly what I
wanted and how to push forward to it and
what the payoff was going to be
but when it comes to having a family
that always felt like a very fuzzy
abstract idea that sure someday maybe.
And then it became very concrete because
I met a woman who knew what she wanted.
And looking back on it now,
it almost seems
crazy like there's this fork in the road
of reality where if that hadn't happened
and I had been sitting here now, not
being a father, not having a family,
the level of regret knowing what I know
now about the joys of having that family
would have been existential,
would have been
I don't know if they would have been
devastating. I think men have a little
bit of a longer window to pursue these
things than women do. There are just
certain biological facts.
But
ending up with the family I have now,
ending up with my three boys have been
just a transformative experience in the
sense that here's something that turned
out to be the most important thing. And
it was an open secret. Not even an open
secret. It was an open truth through all
of history. You listen to anyone who's
ever had children, they will all say,
"My children are the most important to
me." Yet somehow that wisdom couldn't
sink in until you were in the situation
yourself. I find those truths
fascinating when you can't actually
relay them with words. I can tell you,
"Hey, Lex, what are you doing? Get a
wife. Make some kids.
>> Get a move on it." And these are just
words. They're not communicating the
gravity of what it actually feels to go
through the experience. And you can't
really learn it without going through
it. Now, of course, you can be
influenced and whatever, we can all help
contribute and little sparks and little
seeds can grow in your your mind about
it, but it still has to happen.
>> And
now that I am in this situation and just
the sheer joy on a daily basis where you
think your level of life satisfaction is
on a scale of 1 to 10.
>> Yeah.
And then the satisfaction of seeing your
children understand something,
accomplish something,
learn something, do something, just be,
just goes like, "Oh my god, this scale
doesn't go from 1 to 10. It goes from 1
to 100." And I've been playing down here
in the 1 to 10 range all this time, and
there's a there's a one to 100.
That has been humbling in a way that
is impactful in and of itself. This
whole idea that I thought I had a fair
understanding of like the boundaries of
life in my early 30s. Like what is this
about? I mean, I've been on this earth
long enough now here to know something.
And he don't know. I did not know. I did
not know that the scale was much uh much
broader. And I've often talked about
the joys of having kids and just seeing
your own DNA, which
is remarkable to me because literally
that's been the pursuit of humans since
the dawn of time. I am here today
because whatever 30,000 years ago, some
Neanderthal
had the same realization that I should
procreate and I should continue my
bloodline and that that all amounts to
me sitting here here now. But
it didn't become a practical reality to
me before meeting the right woman.
>> And I think that that's sometimes not
part of the conversation enough that
there's something broken at the moment
about how people pair up in the Western
world.
>> Yeah. And it's at the source of why
we're not having enough children because
there's not enough couples. There's not
enough marriage. There's not a lot of
these there's not enough of all these
traditional values that even 50, 60, 70
years ago was just taken for granted.
We're in this grand experiment of what
happens if we just remove a bunch of
institutions? What happens if we no
longer value marriage as a
something to aspire to? What happened if
parenthood is now seen in some camps as
almost something like weird or against
your own self-expression? It's a grand
experiment that
I'm kind of curious how it turns out. I
I'd prefer to watch it as a movie like
the children of men of like that was a
good show. I kind of wish that wasn't
reality, but we're seeing that reality
play out while I'm sitting here in a
very traditional two parent loving
household with three children and going,
um, this is now at the top. I've done a
lot of things in my life. I've built
software. I've built companies. I've
raced cars. I've done all sorts of
things. And I would trade all of it in a
heartbeat for my kids. That's just a
really fascinating human experience that
the depth of that bond is something you
can't appreciate before you have it. But
I also think there is a role to play to
talk it up because we're being bombarded
constantly with reasons why not to. Oh,
it's it's too expensive. Um well, you
could get divorced and then you might
lose half. There's all these voices
constantly articulating the case against
marriage, the case against having
children
that those of us who've chosen to do the
traditional thing to get married and to
have children have an obligation to kind
of talk it up a little bit, which would
have seemed ridiculous again 50 years
ago that you'd have to talk up something
so fundamental at that. But I have
become
kind of obligated in that sense to do
just that. To talk it up, to say, do you
know what? You can look at everything
that I've done and if you like some of
those parts, realize that to me in this
situation,
the kids, the family, the wife is more
important than all of it. And it sounds
like a cliche because you've heard it a
thousand times before. And by becoming a
cliche, maybe you start believing it's
not true. that it's just something
people say,
but it is reality. I know almost no
parents that I have personal
relationships with that don't consider
their children to be the most important
thing in their life.
>> So there's a lot of interesting things
you said. one it does seem to be I know
a lot of uh parents
perhaps more interestingly I know a lot
of super successful people who are
parents who
uh really love their kids and who uh say
that the kids even help them to be more
successful. Now the interesting thing
speaking to what you're saying is it
does seem for us humans it's easier to
articulate the negatives
because they're sort of concrete
pragmatic you know it costs more it
takes up time you know they can be you
crying all over the place they're you
know tiny narcissists running around or
whatever
>> which is all true by the way
>> yeah pooping everywhere that kind of
stuff uh but to articulate the thing you
were speaking to of there's There's this
little creature that you love more than
anything you've ever loved in your life.
It's hard to convert that into words.
You have to really experience it. And
but I've I believe it and I want to
experience it that. But I I believe it
because just from a scientific method
have seen a lot of people who are not
honestly not very capable of love
fall completely in love with their kids.
>> Yes.
>> Like you know very sort of um let's
let's just call it what it is. engineers
that are very like beep boop b up.
>> Yes.
>> They just fall in love and it's like all
right
people who just like you said they don't
really want they don't really care or
don't really think about having kids
that kind of stuff once they do it
changes everything. So you know but it's
hard to convert into words. One of the
reasons I think it's also difficult is
I mean I like kids not that I actively
dislike them but when I was around other
people's kids I didn't have a emotional
reaction. Some women have right they see
a baby and they go I never never had any
emotion of that. I mean I could
appreciate I'm I'm glad for you that you
have children. It did not provoke
anything in me.
The emotions that are provoked in me
when I look at my own children this this
doesn't exist in the same universe. So
you don't have something you don't have
a complete parallel or at least a lot of
men or at least me I didn't have sort of
a framework to put it into what would it
be like to have my own child and then
you experience it you just it's like the
and it happens so quickly too this is
what I found fascinating it happens
before that little human is even able to
return any words to you that the love
you develop to an infant happens quite
quickly not necessarily immediately.
I don't know, different people have
different experiences, but it took me a
little bit, but then once it hit, it
just hit like kick of a horse.
>> And I love that it's also just such a
universal experience that you can be the
most successful person in the world, you
can be the poorest person in the world,
you can be somewhere in the middle. and
we share this experience that being a
parent for most of them turns out to be
the most important thing in their life.
>> But you know it is really nice to do
that kind of experience with the right
partner. But I think because I'm such an
empath, the cost of having the wrong
partner is high for me. But then I also
like realized, man, I have a friend of
mine who's divorced happily and he still
loves the shit out of his kids and it's
still be it's a mess, but there's still
all of that love is still there and
it's, you know, you just have to make it
work. It's just that I don't know that
kind of like divorce would destroy me.
You should listen to uh the school of
life. He has this great bit on YouTube,
you will marry the wrong person. If you
accept upfront that you will marry the
wrong person, that every potential
person you can marry is going to be the
wrong person on some dimension. They're
going to annoy you. They're going to be
not what you hoped in certain
dimensions. The romantic ideal that
everything is just perfect all the time
is not very conducive to the reality of
hitching up and get making babies.
Because I think as you just accounted,
even when it turns to shit,
I find that most of the people I
personally know where things have fallen
apart and have turned to shit, never in
a million years would they go like, I
regret it.
>> I would rather my children did not exist
because a relationship turned sour. I
mean, I think you should try very hard.
And I think this is also one of those
things where we didn't fully understand
those fences and when we pulled them up
and celebrated how easy it is to get
divorced, for example, that that wasn't
going to have some negative
consequences. I'm not saying you
shouldn't have divorces. I'm not saying
return to
times past. I am saying though that
civilization over thousands of years
developed certain technologies for
ensuring the continuation of its own
institutions and its own life that
perhaps we didn't fully appreciate. I
mean again this is something Jordan
Peterson and others are far more
articulate to speak about and that I've
learned a lot to just analyze my own
situation. Why is it that this
incredible burden it is to be
responsible for someone else's life that
you brought into this world is also the
most rewarding part of existence? That's
just curious.
>> Before I heard Peterson articulate the
value of taking on the greatest burden
you know how to carry. I always thought
about burdens as a negative things. Why
would I want the burden of a child? I
might screw it up. might be a bad
parent. They might have bad al right.
All the reasons why you shouldn't and so
few voices articulating why you should.
>> Yeah. But there I should also add on top
of that thing you mentioned currently
perhaps in the west the matchmaking
process
>> is broken
>> is broken and technology made it worse.
It's fascinating this whole thing that
that hasn't been solved. So hiring great
teams, that's probably been solved the
best out of matchmaking. Finding great
people to hire,
>> right?
>> Uh second, finding great friends. That's
like that's also hasn't been solved and
it's breaking down.
>> It's breaking down. And third is
matchmaking for like relationships.
That's like the worst. And in fact,
technology made it even worse.
>> Yes.
>> It's fascinating.
>> It is. It's a great example again of how
all the greatest intentions still led us
straight to hell. I really enjoyed Louis
Perry's analysis of the sexual
revolution not being an unqualified
good, which was something I hadn't
thought about at all before she
articulated it, that of course uh women
should be able to have freedom until
termination and abortions and all of
these things. And
Louise Perry is not arguing against that
either, of course. But there are second
order effects that we don't appreciate
at the time and we may not have
ready-made solutions for. That's just
interesting. You make life better in a
million different ways and somehow we
end up more miserable. Why is that? Why
is it that humans find meaning in
hardship?
And I think some of that is that it's a
difficult question to answer through
science.
And again, Peterson articulates well
this idea that you have to find some of
it through art, some of it through
authors, some of it through different
I was just about to say modes of knowing
before I stopped myself because that
sounds like woo bullshit. But there are
different ways to
acquire those deep lessons that sort of
uh paper is not going to tell you.
>> I mean that this is really the point uh
also applies to religion for example. If
you remove from society the software of
religion
>> yes
>> you better have a good replacement. And
we've had a bunch of bad replacements,
especially over the last few decades.
Religion is one of those things I've
struggled with a lot because I'm not
religious, but I sort of wish I was. I
can now fully appreciate the enormous
value having an operating system like
that brings, not just at the individual
level, but rather at a societal level.
And it's not clear at all what the
answer is. I think we've tried a lot of
dead ends when it came to replacements
and people have been filling that void
in a million different ways that seem
worse than all the religions despite
their faults in a myriad of ways have
been able to deliver.
>> Yeah. Religion is like the cobalt code.
It's just
>> Yes.
>> It's the institutions where we don't
fully understand the rules and why
they're there and what's going to happen
if we remove them. Some of them seems
obvious to me are just bullshit of the
time. Oh, you shouldn't eat whatever
shellfish because in that region of the
world there was something something
something. Okay, fine. But there's a
bunch of other things that are pivotal
to keeping society functioning for the
long term and we don't fully understand
which is which. What's the bullshit and
what's the loadbearing pillars of
society?
>> Can you speak to the hit on productivity
that kids
have? Did they increase your
productivity, decrease it, or is that
even the wrong question to ask?
>> I think it's one of the reasons why
ambitious people are often afraid of
having children because they think, "I
have so much more to do, and I barely
have enough time now. How would I
possibly be able to accomplish the
things I want to accomplish if I add
another human into the mix? Now, a
we've always worked 40 hours a week, not
80 or 100 or 120. I think that's very
beneficial. B,
kids don't exist in this vacuum of just
them alone being entered into your life.
Hopefully, there's a partner. And in my
life, I'm married to a wonderful woman
who decided to stop working her
corporate job when we got together and
have been able to carry a huge part of
that responsibility. I was just about to
say burden. And I think that's exactly
how it often gets presented, especially
from a feminist perspective, that caring
for your own children is some sort of
unpaid labor that has to be compensated
for in some specific way beyond the
compensation of what? Bringing life into
this world, raising wonderful humans.
There's something screwy about that
analysis that I actually think the
modern trad movement is a reply against.
Whether they have all the answers, I'm
certainly not sure of either. But
there's something that's just not right
in the analysis that children are a
burden and that if
woman chooses to stay at home with the
kids that that some sort of failure mode
of feminist ambition. I think that's
actually a complete dead end. Now
depends on different people, different
circumstances. I can just speak to my
life being married to a wonderful woman
who have decided to be home with the
kids at least at their early age and
taken on a lot of those
responsibilities. Now, it doesn't mean
there isn't plenty of ways that I have
to be part of that and have to chip in,
but it's allowed me to continue to work
the 40 hours a week that I've always
worked, but it's made the 40 hours more
strict. I have a schedule where I wake
up whatever 6:30 and we have to get out
of the door a little before 8. I usually
have to play at least one or two rounds
of Fortnite with my youngest, sometimes
middle child, then take the kids to
school, get in, start work at, I don't
know, uh, 8:30, 9, then work until 5
5:30, sometimes 6:00, but then it's
dinner and I have to be there for that
and then I have to read to the kids and
by the time that's done, I don't want to
go back to work. So my work time really
is 9 to5 9 to6 depending of whatever is
going on. Sometimes there's emergencies
and you have to tend to them but it's
made it more structured and I found some
some some benefit in that. I found some
productivity in that that I can't goof
around quite as much that the day will
end at around 5:36. That's just if I
didn't accomplish what I wanted to do
today. If I get to that time it's done.
I'm over. I have to try again tomorrow.
>> Whereas before having a family and
before having kids, I could just like
not do it and just make it up in the
evening.
>> So, in that way, it's made me more
structured, but it hasn't really changed
my volume of work all that much. I still
work about the same amount of hours. And
that's, by the way, enough. This is one
of the key points we make in it doesn't
have to be crazy at work, the latest
book we wrote, is that there's enough
time. 40 hours a week is actually a ton
if you don't piss it away. Most people
do piss it away. They piss it away in
meetings. They piss it away on just
stuff that doesn't matter when
even 3 hours, 4 hours of concentrated,
uninterrupted time every day would move
the goals they truly care about way down
the field.
>> I think kids do make you more productive
in that way for people who need it,
especially people like me. uh they
create their urgency like you have to if
you have to be done by five
>> I it's a maybe counterintuitive notion
but
>> for people like me who like to work
you can really fill the day
>> yes
>> with fluff
>> yes
>> of work and um if you have to be done by
five you're going to have to do the deep
work and get it done like really focused
singular work
>> yes
>> and then you're just going cut off.
>> It keeps you honest. It keeps you honest
because
>> you can you can squander one day, you
can squander two days, but if I squander
a whole week,
>> I feel terrible.
>> Now, that's just some drive I have in me
where I feel content and full of meaning
if I actually do stuff that matters. If
I can look back upon the week and go
like, that was that was a nice week.
Really, we moved forward. Maybe we
didn't get done, but we moved forward.
Everything got better. Um, and I think
kits really help just time box things in
that way. And a lot of people need that
because I find just so much of the
celebration of overwork to be so
tiresome. Oh, I I work 60 hours or 80
hours, 100 hours a week. And just like
first of all, no you don't.
>> No, you don't. Like those 80 hours are
full of all sorts of fluff that you
label work, but that I would laugh at.
And that most people laugh at that you
would laugh at if you actually did the
analysis of where's that time going.
Most of the important stuff that have to
be done is done in these uninterrupted
chunks of 2 hours here or four hours
there or 5 hours there. The hard part is
making sure you get them in the whole
piece. Um so don't give me don't give me
that. There's time enough. And also
what's so important that it ranks above
continuing your lineage? I think there's
just some ancient honor in the fact that
again this DNA that's sitting on this
chair traveled 30,000 years to get here
and you're going to squander all that
away just so you can send a few more
emails. There is something that's also
hard to convert into words of just the
kind of fun you can have just playing
with your kids. I don't know what that
on the surface it's like. I could have
that kind of fun just playing video
games by myself. But no, it's like
there's something magical about it,
right?
>> I have a thousand hours logged in
Fortnite since 19, I think,
all of it with my kids. I'd never be
playing Fortnite. Well, I don't know if
I never would be. I wouldn't be playing
a thousand hours of Fortnite if it
wasn't for my kids. The enjoyment for me
is to do something with them that I also
happen to enjoy. I really love Fortnite.
It's a phenomenal game. I don't have to
force myself to play that with them. I
often ask like, "Hey, uh, do you want to
play Fortnite?"
>> But still, it's an activity that I get
to share with them. It's a passion that
I get to share with them. I've started,
uh, doing go-karting with my oldest.
I've been driving race cars for a long
time and now they're getting into
go-karting. And just being at the
go-kart track, seeing them go around,
seeing them get faster, seeing them
learn that skill,
you just go look at like what else would
I be doing with my life at my age, 45,
I'm standing here truly enjoying life I
brought into this world. What else is it
was so important at this stage that I
would otherwise be spending my time on?
>> All right. Like you mentioned, you like
to race cars and you do it at a world
class competitive level, which is
incredible. So, uh, how'd you get into
it? What attracts you to racing? What do
you love about it?
>> The funny thing about getting into
racing is I did not get my driver's
license until I was 25.
>> I grew up in Copenhagen, Denmark,
where the tax on cars is basically over
200%. So you pay for three cars and you
get one. And I didn't even have the
money for one car, let alone three. So I
could not afford a car growing up. We
did not have a car growing up. But
Copenhagen is a nice city to be able to
get around on a bike or with a bus or as
I did for a long period of time on
roller blades.
But
when I was 25, I realized I wanted to
spend more time in the US. I wasn't sure
yet that I was going to move there. That
turned out later to be true, but I knew
that if I wanted to spend time in the
US, I needed to have a driver's license.
I was not going to get around very well
if I didn't know how to drive a car. So,
I got a driver's license at 25. Then
ended up moving to the US later that
year. And I'd always been into video
games, racing video games. Metropolitan
Street Racer on the Dreamcast was one of
those games that really sucked me into
it was the precursor to Project Gotham,
which was the precursor to essentially
Forsa Horizon, I think. Oh, okay.
>> I think that's what how the lineage
goes. It's just a great game. I actually
just fired it up on an emulator um a few
weeks ago and still sort of kind of
holds up because it has enough real car
dynamics that it smells a little bit
like driving a real car. It's not just
like an arcade racer like Sega Rally or
something like that. But I'd always been
into that. Then I got my driver's
license at 25 and moved to the US. And
then two years later, a friend that I'd
met in Chicago took me to the Chicago
Autobon Country Club, which is this
great track about 45 minutes from
Chicago. And I sat in a race car and I
drove a race car for the first time. And
I had the same kind of pseudo religious
experience I did as when I started
working on Ruby
>> where I did maybe 20 laps in this
basically a Mazda race car from I think
like the '9s or something like a pretty
cheap race car but a real race car.
Single seater manual gearbox but exposed
slick wheels all the stuff. And after
having had that experience, first of
all, it was just the most amazing thing
ever. Like the physical sensation of
driving a race car is really unique. And
I think if if you're in a car fast, you
have a maybe a 2% taste of it.
the exposure to the elements that you
get in a single seat race car,
especially one like that where your head
is actually out in the elements. You can
see the individual wheels and you
sensation of speed is just so much
higher is at a completely different
level.
>> So can you actually speak to that? So
even at that even in that Mazda, so you
can feel what can you feel like the
track reverberating? You feel the grip?
you not only can you see the bumps
because you're literally looking
straight at the wheel, you can feel all
the bumps because you're running a slick
tire. It's a really stiff setup. It's
nothing like taking a fast street car
out on a racetrack and try to driving a
little bit around.
>> So, can you feel like the slipping?
>> That's a that's a huge part of the
satisfaction of driving a race car is
driving it at the edge of adhesion as we
call it where the car is actually
sliding a little bit. Couple of percent
slip angle is the fastest way to drive a
race car. You don't want to slide too
much. That looks great. Lots of smoke,
but it's not fast. How you want to drive
it is just at the limit of adhesion
where you're rotating the car as much as
your tires can manage and then slightly
more than that and playing at it,
keeping it just at that level because
when you're at the level of or at the
limit of adhesion, you're essentially
just a tiny movement away from spinning
out. I mean, it doesn't take much. Then
the car starts rotating. Once it starts
rotating, you lose grip and you're going
for the wall. That balance of danger and
skill is what's so intoxicating. And
it's so much better than racing video
games, too, because the criticality is
taking up two notches. I often think
about people really like gambling where
I think like, aren't you just playing
poker? Like, and like, no, the point is
not poker. Poker may be part of it, but
the point is that I could lose my house,
right? Like that's the addiction that
some people get to gambling, that
there's something real on the line. When
you're in a race car, there's something
very real on the line. If you get it
wrong, at the very least, you're going
to spin out and probably hit a wall and
it's going to be expensive. At the very
worst, you're not getting out alive. And
even if modern race cars have gotten way
safer than they used to be, there is
that element of danger that's real. That
there are people who still get seriously
hurt or even killed in a race car. It's
mercifully rare compared to what it used
to be when those maniacs in the 60s
would do Formula 1 and whatever 13% of
the grid wouldn't make it to the end of
the year because they just die in a
fiery flaming fireball. But there's
still some of it there. And I think that
sense that there's something on the line
really contributes to it. But it's more
than that. There's al just a physical
sensation. There's activation of all
your forces. There's the flow.
And I think that really cements like why
I got addicted because I always I love
that flow I got out of programming. But
getting flow out of programming is a
very inconsistent process. I can't just
sit down in front of a keyboard and go
like, "All right, let's get the flow
going." It doesn't happen like that. The
problem has to be just right. It has to
meet my skills in just the right moment.
It's a bit of a lottery. In a race car
is not a lottery at all. You sit down in
that car, you turn the ignition, you go
out on track, and I get flow virtually
guaranteed
because you need or I need at least 100%
of my brain processing power to be able
to go at the speed I go without
crashing. So there's no time to think
about dinner tonight or the meeting next
week or product launch. It just it's
completely zen in actually the literal
sense of the word. I think of someone
who's really good at meditation. That's
probably kind of state they get into
where it's just clear you're in the now.
There's nothing but you and the next
corner. That's a really addictive
experience. So after I've had that, I
couldn't get enough. I just I kept going
to the track. Every opportunity I got
every single weekend for about four
years, I would go to the track. And by
the end of that time, I finally worked
up enough skill and enough success with
the company that I could afford to go
quote unquote real racing.
So, I started doing that. I started
driving these Porsches. And then as soon
as I got into that, as soon as I got
into quote unquote real competition, I
was like, I wonder how far you can take
this.
>> And it didn't take that long before I
decided, you know what? I can take this
all the way. My great hero in racing is
Tom Christensen. Fellow Dne, the Mr.
Lama, as they call him, the greatest
endurance race in the world, the 24
hours of Lama, has been won more times
than any other by Tom Christensen. He
won the race nine times.
So Tom
just really turned me on to Lama. I've
been watching Lama since I think the
80s. I have my earliest memories of
watching that on TV. The race has been
going since I think uh 20s, but in the
80s I got kind of into it. And then in
the late 90s, early 2000s when Tom
started winning, I like pretty much
every other Dane started watching the
race almost religiously. So I thought,
you know what? I want to get to Lal. And
this is the magic thing about racing
that if I get into basketball, like I
can't set a realistic expectation that
I'm going to play in the NBA, that I'm
going to go to the finals, or I get into
tennis and I'm going to play at
Wimbledon. That just doesn't happen. But
racing is special in this way because it
requires a fair amount of money to keep
these cars running. It's really
expensive. It's like having a small
startup. You need to fly a bunch of
people around the world and buy
expensive equipment so forth. So you
need a bunch of capital and I had some
through the success of the company. So I
could do it which meant that I could get
to Lal. So I set that as my goal. I want
to get to Lal and I started racing in
real competition 2009 and three years
later in 2012 I was at the grid of Lamal
for the first time
>> we should say so lemon 24-hour race
endurance
I mean this is insane
>> there are three drivers mind you so it's
not like one guy just driving for 20
hours 24 hours straight but still it's a
pretty tough race both physically and
mentally especially mentally when you've
been up for 24 plus hours, you're not
quite as sharp as uh when you first wake
up. And this is funny about Lama, too.
It starts at around 4:00 in the
afternoon. So, you've already been up
for half a day by the time the race
starts. And then there's 24 hours to go
before you're done. And you'll be in the
car for anywhere from usually an hour
and a half to a maximum of four hours.
The regulations say four out of six is
the max you can do. I've spent perhaps
two and a half hours in a single stint
at Lama. It's pretty taxing. You're
going 200 miles an hour into some of
these turns and there's another 60 cars
on track whenever I'm in my normal
category, which is the LMP2 category. I
have GT cars, which are more like a
Ferrari and a Porsche that I have to
overtake. And then I have these
hypercars, which is the top class that
are overtaking me. So, you got a lot
going on. And you got to stay sharp for
two and a half hours straight to do
that. That is just a guaranteed way to
get incredible flow for long long
stretches of time. That's why you get
addicted to it. That was why I got the
>> You got to talk me through this video.
This video of you in these LM2. This is
such a cool. This is so cool.
>> Yeah. This was probably my favorite
battle of my career.
>> And Hansen has beat and fights.
>> Yeah. So this is me driving against Nico
Miller at the Shanghai International
Circuit.
>> You're on the outside here.
>> I'm on the outside in the blue and
white.
>> And we go a whole track around with
basically a piece of paper between us.
See down this back straight. I get so
close to him because I want to force him
over on the other side of the track
>> such that he can't just box me in. And
we've been fighting already at this
point for basically 40 minutes straight.
I've been maning managing to keep this
professional driver behind me for 40
minutes. and he finally passes me. But
we just keep the battle on for the whole
time. And it really just shows both
these kinds of cars, the Lama
prototypes. We don't actually ever
touch.
>> We get within about an inch.
>> And um and keep going around Shanghai
circuit to
>> How did you get so good?
>> Like what I mean that's a fascinating
story, right? That you were able to get
so good.
>> I'm pretty good for the kind of driver I
am, which is called a gentleman driver,
which means I'm not a professional
driver. And like many good gentleman
drivers, when we're at our really best,
we can be quite competitive with even
professional drivers who have been doing
this their whole life. The difference
between us and the professionals is the
professionals can do it every time or
more or less every time. So, I can't be
this good all the time. When everything
is just right, I can be competitive with
professional drivers. But that's not how
you win championships. That's not how
you get paid by factories to drive. You
got to be good every time you go out.
So, that's a huge difference. But some
of it was also just I really put my mind
to it. By the time I realized race cars
is what I want to do as my serious
hobby. I put in thousands of hours. Have
you crashed? What's the worst crash?
>> I've had a lot of crashes. But
thankfully, knock on wood. I haven't had
any crashes where I've gotten really
seriously hurt.
>> Have you like wrecked the car?
>> Oh yes. Oh yes. I've wrecked many a car.
So what does that feel like? Just you
wreck a car. like how do you get it
feels like total shit if you're in a
real race and other people depend on
you. It's not even so much the car,
although it's also sometimes that these
cars are expensive to repair and that
sucks and it feels so wasteful in a way
when you crash some of these cars, but
the sense that you're letting a team
down. Endurance racing is a team sport.
Not only do you have your mechanics, you
usually have co-drivers. So when I
crash, I just feel like, damn it, I
could have avoided this.
>> Yeah. But also, you could have died.
>> Do you know what's funny? I never think
about that. I don't think you can
because I think the moment you start
thinking about being able to die, you
can't do it. You can't go fast.
>> Well, I'm sure not not to go all Carl
Carl Young and Freud here, but I'm sure
that's always present in the back of
your mind somewhere. You're not just
bringing it to the surface.
>> It is in the sense that it's part of the
appeal. is part of the sense that
there's something on the line that this
isn't just virtual. I can't just hit
reset, restart, reboot.
>> If I crash this car,
>> we're going to be out or we're going to
be disadvantaged or it's going to get
destroyed or I might get hurt. I've
gotten lightly hurt a few times. I
actually had the year we won the 24
hours of Lama in our class, I'd been
training in this Formula 3.5
car. It's a really fast car. It's a
really nice exercise to do, but it's
also it doesn't have power steering. So,
some of these race cars, especially the
open seaters, they don't have power
steering, which means that the steering
wheel is basically directly connected to
the front wheels. So, if you crash one
of those cars and the front wheels
suddenly turn, you're really going to
hurt your hands if you don't get your
hands off the wheel. I hadn't raced
enough of those cars to know that I had
to get or to have the instinct to have
developed the instinct that I had to get
my hands off the wheel. So I didn't and
I really hurt my hand and this was just
I think a month before the 24 hours of
LA. So I thought oh man I'm gonna have
to miss it this year. I had like a not a
cast it was just seriously sprained and
then somehow miraculously like a week
before the event I was like ah yeah
actually it's okay now. So got to do it
and that would have been grave regret if
I would have seen my team go to on to
win the race and I would had to sit on
the sidelines. But I really have been
quite fortunate in the sense that most
of my crashes have just been expensive
or sporting inconvenient. They've never
been something where I got seriously
hurt. But I've seen plenty of people who
have. In fact, my co-driver this year
and for several years, Petro Fidipali,
drove a race car at Spa. Spa is one of
the great race tracks of all time. and
it has this iconic corner called Arouge,
which is probably the most famous corner
in all of motorsports that has a great
compression before you climb uphill.
It's a extremely fast, very difficult
corner. And just as he does the
compression, his car basically sets out
and he loses his power steering and he
drives straight into the wall and breaks
both his legs and basically face the
prospect that maybe his career was over.
I've had other teammates and people I
know have serious injuries that's really
hurt them. And yet, what's funny is you
say, you'd think that would sink in. The
year before we won in 2014, that same
car had a Danish driver in it at Lama at
the race I was driving who died. He
lost control of the car when there was a
bit of rain on the track and the track
went unfortunately designed in such a
poor way that there was a very big tree
right behind the railing and he hit that
tree at full speed, pulled 90 gs and was
dead on the spot which was just such an
extremely awful experience to go
through. I finished second that year,
which should have been cause for a bunch
of celebration, but it was just tainted
by the fact that
not only did a driver die, a fellow Dane
died, a guy I knew died.
>> That was that was pretty tough. So that
uh throw that into the pile of the the
the things that have to be considered is
the weather conditions that you
mentioned of the track, the
whether it's dry or wet. It's a huge
part of it. Even just last year at Lama,
it was raining and I was out and I
hadn't made a serious mistake at the 24
hours of Lama since I did the first race
in 2012 where I put it in the sand trap
with like 4 hours to go and we lost a
couple of laps getting pulled out, but
it didn't actually change anything for
our result because that was just how the
field was spread out. I'd made minor
mistakes over the years, but nothing
that really set us out. And at the race
last year when it was raining, I first
clobbered a Ford Mustang when I made an
over ambitious pass on a damp part of
the track and couldn't stop in time. And
then felt absolutely awful as I sat in
the gravel pit for two laps and knew
that our race was over. A race where we
were highly competitive. You're not
blessed with a competitive car, a
competitive team and competitive setup
every year. I know how rare that is. So
to know that we had had a chance that
year and I sort of squandered it. Felt
really bad, but that got compounded. I
got back on track, barely made it
another stint and then put it in the
gravel trap again when it started
raining on the entrance into Porsche. So
this is part of why racing is so
addicting, too, because the highs are
very, very high. When you win a race
like the 24 hours mod, it feels just
incredible. There's so much emotion, but
if you fuck it up, the lows are very,
very low. What are the things you're
paying attention to when you're driving?
What's what what is the what are the
parameters? What are you loading in? Are
you feeling the grip? Are you basically
increasing the speed and seeing what
like a constant feedback system effect
it has on the grip? You're trying to
manage that. Trying to find that optimal
slip angle. Are you looking around using
your eyes?
Are you smelling things? Are you
listening? He's feeling the wind. Are
you Are you Oh, you looking at the
field, too? Like, how how did you not
hit that guy at all? You get close
within inches, right? So, you have to
pay attention to that, too.
>> It's really interesting about that
specific battle where we're literally a
few inches apart. I can't fully explain
it, but humans can develop an incredible
sense of space where I can't see the
edge of the back of my car, but I can
know exactly where it is. I can have a
mental model in my head that gives me
the exact dimensions of this car such
that I can run within a few inches of a
competitor car or within a few inches of
the wall and not hit either when things
go well. The car is about 2 m wide and
it's quite long, 5 m, and you can't see
everything. The mirrors are actually
kind of shit. There's no rear view
mirror in these cars. You can't see out
the back. You can only see through your
two side mirrors. But you form this
intuitive mental model when you get good
enough at this. But what I actually pay
attention to most is I run a program.
What I try to do when I go to a
racetrack is I try to load up the best
program I know how for every single
corner. What's my break point? What's my
acceleration point? What's my brake
trailing curve? And I try to pick up
that program in part just by finding it
myself and how fast I can go. But even
more so than that, by copying my
professional competitors or not
competitors, co-drivers. So I usually
always race with a pro and modern race
cars produce an absolute enormous amount
of data and you can analyze all that
data after each outing. You can see an
exact trace of how much you pushed the
brake pedal, how much you did in terms
of steering inputs, how when you got on
the gas, you can see every millisecond
you're losing is evident in those
charts. So what I try to do is I try to
look at the chart and then I try to load
that in and like that's what I got to
do. Oh, in this corner 17 I actually I
have to be 10 bar lighter on the brake.
So I try to load that program in and
then I try to repeat it. Now then there
are all the things that changes. Your
tires change quite a lot. These tires
are made to only last 40 minutes in many
cases. Sometimes at least
tracks they'll last as little as 40
minutes before they really fall off. So
you got to manage that that the grip is
constantly changing. So your program
have to suddenly fit those changing
circumstances. And then in endurance
racing you're constantly interacting
with other cars because you're passing
slower classes or you're getting passed
by a faster class. So that's part of the
equation. And then you're trying to
dance the car around the limit of
adhesion. So you got all those factors
playing at the same time. But above all
else for me is to try to become a robot.
Like how can I repeat this set of steps
exactly as I'm supposed to for 2 and 1
half hours straight without making 100
milliseconds worth of mistakes.
>> Yeah. Low latency algorithm.
>> That's really a huge part of it
actually. Your latency is enormously
important in terms of being able to
catch when the car starts slipping. You
get this sensation in your body that the
G-forces are a little off, the slip
angle is a little off and then you have
to counter steer. And obviously the best
race car drivers just feel like an
intuition. I have some intuition. I
don't have all of it. So I do
occasionally spin my uh car, but that's
the challenge. From everything you've
studied and understand, what what does
it take to achieve mastery in racing?
Like what does it take to become the
best race car driver in the world?
Obsession is part of it. When I read and
hear about Senna and the other greats,
they were just singularly focused. Max
Vstappen is the current champion of the
world, and he is the same kind. Max has
been fascinating to watch. I mean, he's
a phenomenal race car driver, but he
also literally does nothing else. When
he's not at the racetrack, he's driving
sim racing. like he's literally in video
games doing more racing when he's not
doing all the racing he's already doing.
>> Is there a specific skill they have that
like stands out to you as supernatural
through all that obsession? Like what uh
is it a bunch of factors or are they
actually able to you like you said
develop a sense? Is it is it that
they're able to get to the very edge of
the slip?
>> They're able to develop very finetuned
sensibilities for when the car is
sliding. They can feel just these tiny
moments or movements in the chassis that
transports up usually through their ass.
That's why you call it like a a butt
meter that goes up and you feel like the
car is loose or you feel like you're
just about to lock up, you can really
hone that tuning. Then the other thing
is you have to have really good reaction
time. And when you look at great Formula
1 drivers, they can generally have a
reaction time of just under 200
milliseconds, which is awesome. And even
10 milliseconds difference makes a huge
difference. You'll see it when the
Formula 1 grid, for example, they do a
standing start and you see the five red
lights come on. And when the last light
goes out, they're supposed to release
the clutch and get going. And they can
time this so you can see exactly who has
the reaction time. And even being off by
20 milliseconds can make the difference
of whether you're in front or behind at
the first corner.
>> How much of winning is also just this
the strategy of jostling for position?
>> There's some of that and some of it is
also just nerve. Who wants it more?
That's exactly when that sense of danger
comes in. There's a great quote from uh
Fernando Alonso when he was driving at
Suzuka against Schumarker. I think
they're coming up to this incredibly
fast corner. It's very dangerous. And
Alonzo basically accounts. I was going
to make the pass because I knew he had a
wife and kids at home.
>> That's so gangster.
>> Just absolutely rude. Right.
>> Wow.
>> That I knew he valued life more than I
did. So there's a bit of poker sometimes
in that. Who's going to yield? There's a
bit of chicken race in that regard. And
sometimes it doesn't work. No one yields
and you both crash. But very often one
person will blink first.
>> Can the pass be both on the inside and
the outside or is
>> you can pass wherever you want as long
as you have just a slight part of the
car on the racetrack
>> and then you just improvise and take
risks. What a what a sport. What and
then Santa of course is like a legendary
risk taker.
>> Yes.
And even before him, by the time I mean,
he died in the 90s, but by the time we
got to the 90s, racing was already a lot
safer than it was when Nikauder raced in
the 60s.
That level of danger is no longer there.
There's still just a remnant of it. And
it is still dangerous, but nothing like
that. And it's a little hard to compare
through the ages like who's the greatest
driver of all time. I think there's a
fair argument that Senna is, but we
don't have the data. We don't know who
he was up against. Like, how would he
fair if we pitted him against Max
Vstappen today? I do think sometimes
that you can have a bit of a nostalgia
for the all-time greats, but the world
moves forward and new records are being
set all the time. And the
professionalism keeps improving
sometimes to the detriment of the sport.
I think there's a lot of professional
drivers who are not only just very good
at driving, but are very good at being
corporate spokespeople. And it used to
be quite different. There used to be
more characters in racing that had a bit
more personality that they were allowed
to shine because there weren't a billion
sponsorships on the line that they were
afraid to lose.
>> Ridiculous question. What's the greatest
car ever made? Or maybe uh what's the
funnest one to drive?
>> The greatest car for me of all time is
the Pagani S.
>> Okay, I'm looking this up. Pagani sand.
>> So, the Pagani S was made by this
wonderful Argentinian called Horashio
Pagani. My god, that's a beautiful car.
Wow.
>> It's a gorgeous car. You can look up
mine. It's the Pagani Zonda HH. Yep. So,
that's um a car I had made in 2010 after
we visited the factory in Modernum and
by sheer accident ended up with this
car. But it became my favorite car in
the world basically when I watched an
episode of Top Gear I think in 2005
where one of the presenters was driving
the Pagani F around and I just thought
that's the most beautiful car in the
world. It is the most incredibly
sounding car in the world.
If I one day have the option, this is
what I want. And then I had the option
in 2010. I've had the car ever since.
I'm never ever going to sell it. It's
truly a masterpiece that stood the test
of time. There's some great cars from
history that are recognized as being
great in their time. This car is still
great.
>> Have you taken on the racetrack?
>> I have. It's terrible at that, but I I
don't want to say it's terrible at that.
That's not what it's designed for. It's
designed for the road, and that's why
it's great. There are a lot of fast cars
that are straddling their race car for
the road. You don't actually want a race
car for the world. A race car for the
world is a pain in the ass. It's way too
stiff. It's way too loud. It's way too
uncomfortable. You can't actually take
it on a road trip.
>> So, this actually feels good driving.
>> Totally.
>> And you of course always go to speed
limit.
>> Always. This is why I love having this
car in Spain cuz they're uh a little
more relaxed. Not entirely relaxed, but
more relaxed than they are in a lot of
places. In Denmark, I kid you not, if
you are on the highway and you go more
than twice the speed limit, they
confiscate your car and keep it.
>> You're not getting it back. They don't
even care if it's your car or not. Like,
if if you were boring my car and you
went twice the speed limit, it's gone.
So, they don't do that in Spain. I mean,
they in most places, except for the
German Autobon, they get pissy. If you
go twice the speed limit for all sorts
of fair reasons. I'm not advocating that
you should be going much more than that.
But there are certain special roads
where you can't open things up and no
one's in harm's way. And that's an
incredible sensation. And I do think
that some of those speed limits actually
are kind of silly. And I'm not just
saying that in the in a vacuum. In
Germany, they have the glorious Autobon.
And on the Autobon, there is no speed
limit in a bunch of segments. And
they're so committed to their speed
limitless Autobon, which is, by the way,
very weird of Germans. They usually love
rules. They usually very precise about.
And then they have this glorious thing
called the Ottabban. There was a great
case a couple of years ago where a guy
took out a a Bugatti Chiron, went 400 km
an hour on the Autobon and he filmed it
and put it on YouTube and a case was
brought against him because even though
they don't have a speed limit, they do
have rules that you can't drive
recklessly. And he won the case. He
wasn't driving recklessly. He was just
going very, very fast. I've done the
Autobon a couple of times. Uh my wife
and I went on a road trip in Europe in
and I got the Lamborghini Giata we were
driving up to 200 miles an hour and it
I'd driven 200 miles an hour or close to
it on a racetrack before. That feels
like one thing driving on a public road
200 mph feels really really fast.
>> Scary.
>> Actually a little scary. Yes. Because
you constantly think like on a racetrack
you know the road you know the surface.
You can walk the track most of the time.
You can know if there's a dip on a
public road. You can't know if there's
suddenly a pothole. Presumably, there's
not going to be a pothole on the German
autobon, but it does feel a little
scary, but also exhilarating. Speed is
just intrinsically really fun. I don't
know anyone I've taken out in a fast
car. Well, actually, I do know a few
people. Most people that take out in a
fast car, they grin. Just it's a human
reaction to grin when you go really
fast.
>> Do you know what the fastest you've ever
gone?
>> I was probably at Lamar. I think when
the LMP2s were at their maximum power
and had 600 horsepower and really sticky
tires, we were going 340 km an hour,
which is just over 200 mph. A bit over
200 mph. That's that does feel fast. And
it's really interesting with speed is
that the difference between going let's
say 150 and 160
doesn't feel that much. actually those
10 uh mph, but the difference between
going 190 and 200 feels crazy faster,
which as a percentage change is actually
less than going from 150 to 160, but
there's some sense of exponentiality
once you get up to those limits. Um
where it's just on a complete different
level.
>> Yeah, cuz to me like 110
120 feels fast. 200
>> that's
>> that's crazy. It really is crazy.
>> I got to ask you about the
the the details of your programming
setup, the IDE, all that kind of stuff.
Let's paint the picture of the perfect
uh programming setup. Do you have a a
programming setup that you enjoy? Are
you very flexible? Like how many
monitors,
what kind of keyboard, what kind of
chair, what kind of desk? It's funny
because if you'd asked me, let's see, a
year and a half ago, I would have given
you the same answer as I would given
anyone for basically 20 years.
>> I want a Mac. I like the Magic Keyboard.
>> I like the single monitor. Apple makes
an awesome 6K 32-in XDR screen that I've
still haven't found anyone who beaten
that I still use. Even though I switched
away from Apple computers, I still use
their monitor because it's just
fantastic. But I've always been a single
screen kind of guy. I do like a big
screen, but I don't want multiple
screens. I've never found that that
really works with my p perception. I
want to be able to just focus on a
single thing. I don't want all of it all
over the place. And I've always used
multiple virtual desktops and being able
to switch back and forth between those
things. But the setup I have today is
Linux. that I switched to a little over
a year ago after I finally got fed up
with Apple enough that I couldn't do
that anymore. And then I use this
lowprofile mechanical keyboard called
the low free flow 84
which is just the most glorious sounding
keyboard I've ever heard. I know there
are a lot of connoisseurs of mechanical
keyboards that'll probably contest me on
this. this is too thcky or too clicky or
too clacky or whatever. But for me, the
Lowree Flow 84 is just a delight that I
did not even know existed, which is so
funny because I mean, I've been
programming for a long time. Mechanical
keyboards have been a thing for a long
time. And the keyboard when you look at
it like this, it just kind of it looks
plain. It doesn't look extravagant, but
the tactile sensation you get out of
pushing those keys, the the talky sound
that you hear when the keys hit the
board, it's just sublime. And I'm
kicking myself that I was in this Mac
bubble for so long that I wasn't even in
the market to find this. I didn't I knew
mechanical keyboards existed, but I to
be blunt, I thought it was a bit of a
nerd thing that only real nerds that
were much more nerdy than me would ever
care about.
And then I got out of the Apple bubble
and suddenly I had to find everything
again. I had to find a new mouse. I had
to find a new keyboard. I had to find
everything. And I thought like, all
right, let me give mechanical keyboards
a try. And I gave quite a few of them a
try. The Keyron is one of the big brands
in that. I didn't like that at all. I
tried a bunch of other keyboards and
then I finally found this keyboard and I
just went like angels are singing. Where
have you been my whole life? We spent as
programmers so much of our time
interacting with those keys. It really
kind of matters in a way I didn't fully
appreciate. I used to defend the Apple
Magic Keyboard. Like it's it's great.
It's actually a great keyboard. And I
think for what it is, this ultra low
profile, ultra low travel is actually a
really nice keyboard. But once you've
tried a longer travel mechanical
keyboard, there's no going back.
>> Uh you do have to remember in in many
ways both on the software side and the
hardware side that you do spend a lot of
hours.
>> Yes.
>> Behind the computer. It's worth
>> it's worth investing in.
>> And also worth exploring until you find
the thing where the angel starts singing
or whatever.
>> That's exactly right. And I I'm I
actually do regret that a little bit.
Especially with this damn keyboard. I I
could have been listening to these
beautiful thoughty keys for years and
years, but uh sometimes you have to get
really pissed off before you open your
eyes and see that something else exists.
I feel the same way about Linux. So,
I've been using Linux on the server
since
late '9s probably. We ran servers on
Linux back then. I never seriously
considered it as a desktop option. I
never ran Linux before directly myself.
I always thought, you know what, I just
I want to focus on programming. I don't
have time for all these configuration
files and all this setup bullshit and
and whatnot. And Apple is close enough.
It's built on Unix underpinnings. Why do
why do I need to bother with Linux? And
again, it was one of those things I
needed to try new things and try
something else to
realize that there is other things other
than Apple. And again, it's not because
I hate Apple. I think they still make
good computers. I think a lot of the
software is still also pretty okay, but
I have come to realize that as a web
developer, Linux is just better.
>> Yeah,
>> Linux is just better. It's closer to
what I deploy on. The tooling is
actually phenomenal. And if you spend a
bit of time setting it up, you can
record a reproducible environment that
I've now done with this cube concept or
project that I've done that I can set up
a new Linux machine in less than 30
minutes and it's perfect. It's not
pretty good. It's not like I still need
to spend two hours on. It's perfect
because you can encode all aspects of
the development environment into this.
And I didn't know I I didn't even know
to be fair that Linux could look as good
as it can. If you look at a stock Ubuntu
or Fedora or Boot I mean not that it's
ugly, but I'd pick the Mac in day of the
week. You look at a you look at I mean
I'm biased here of course because I
built it with my own sensibilities but I
look at that and go like this is better.
This is beautiful. And then you look at
some of those true Linux rising setups
where people go nuts with everything and
you go, "Oh yeah, I remember when
computers used to be fun in this way,
when there was this individuality and
this setup and it wasn't just all bland
the sameness."
And I think that's a flip side sometimes
of something like Apple where they have
really strong opinions and they have
really good opinions. They have very
good taste and it looks very nice and it
also looks totally the same. And Linux
has far more variety and far more
texture and flavor. Sometimes also
annoyances and bugs and whatever. But I
run Linux now. It's Auntu based with the
Yamakoup stuff on top. The low free
keyboard. I use a uh Logitech uh what's
it called? The MS3 mouse which I love
how it feels in my hand. I don't love
how it looks. I actually was a magic
mouse stand for the longest time. I
thought it was genius that Apple
integrated the trackpad into a mouse and
I I used that and I always thought it
was ridiculous that people would slag it
just because you had to charge it by
flipping it over cuz the battery would
last for 3 months and then you charge it
for half an hour. I thought like that's
a perfect compatibility with my
sensibilities. I don't mind giving up a
little inconvenience if something is
beautiful and that magic mouse is
beautiful but it wasn't going to work on
Linux. So I found something else. the
the MS3 is is is nice, but I sometimes
do wish like uh the magic mouse is
pretty good.
>> Yeah, Linux is really great for
customizing everything for for tiling,
for macros, for all of that. I also do
the same in Windows with auto hotkey or
just customize the whole thing to your
to your preferences.
>> If you're a developer, you should learn
how to control your environment with the
keyboard.
It's just it's faster. It's more fluid.
I think one of those silly things I've
come to truly appreciate about my alma
setup is that I can in whatever time it
takes to refresh the screen, probably 5
milliseconds, switch from one virtual
desktop to another.
>> Even on Windows, can't get it that
smooth.
>> You can get close, can't get it that
smooth. on Mac OS. For whatever reason,
Apple insists on having this infuriating
animation when you switch between
virtual desktops, which makes it you
don't want to. You don't want to run
full screen apps because it's too
cumbersome to switch between the virtual
desktops. The kind of immediacy that you
can get from a wonderful Linux setup in
that regard is just next level.
>> Yeah. And it seems like a subtle thing
but you know difference in milliseconds
and latency between switching the
virtual desktops for example. I don't
know it changes
>> it changes how you use the computer. It
really does.
>> Similar thing with VR right there. If
there's some kind of latency or
>> like it just completely takes you out of
it.
>> And it's funny I actually had to watch I
think it was the Primagen on YouTube
when he was showing off his setup and I
was seeing how quickly he was switching
between those virtual desktops. And I'd
always been using virtual desktops, but
I didn't like switching too much because
just of that latency. And it's like, oh,
you can do that on Linux. Oh, that's
pretty cool.
>> Yeah.
>> So, I run that. And then my editor of
choice now is Neoim.
>> Oh, good. All right. Well, we're out of
time. No. All right. You did for many,
many years. You used what is it? Text
me.
>> Yes. Textmate. That was actually that
was the main blocker of moving away from
Apple.
>> Everything else I thought, do you know
what? I can swing it. But Textmate was
and is a wonderful editor, one I helped
birth into this world. The programmer
Alan Uggo is a good friend of mine all
the way back from those the party days
when we were lugging our computers
around and he was a big uh Mac guy and
in
>> in 2005 he was writing this editor um
and I helped him with the project
management of kind of keeping him on
track, keeping him focused on getting
something released because I really
wanted it for myself and I thought this
was the last editor. I thought I was
never going to switch. Forgive me for
not knowing, but how featureful is this
editor? Is this It's quite featureful,
but it's it's it's um
a guey driven editor in some regards. It
was really early on with u ways of
recording macros and having sort of
sophisticated syntax highlighting and it
did a bunch of first and it was just a
really pleasant editing experience. I
think these days a lot of people would
just use VS Code. VS codes exist in the
same universe as Textmate in some ways
and actually I think is compatible with
the original Textmate bundles, the
original Textmate format. So it really
trailed a path there, but it also just
didn't evolve.
>> Now a lot of people saw a huge problem
with that. They were like, "Oh, it needs
to have more features. It needs to have
all these things." I was like, "I'm
happy with this text editor that hasn't
changed at all." basically when Allan
stopped working on it for a decade or
more. I don't need anything else because
as our original discussion went, I don't
want an IDE. I don't want the editor to
write code for me. I want a text editor.
I want to interact with characters
directly.
And Neoim
allows me to do that in some ways that
are even better than Text. And I love
Textmate. But BI, as you know, once you
learn the commands, and it sounds I
sometimes feel like BI fans overplay how
difficult it is to learn because it
makes them perhaps seem kind of more
awesome that they were able to do it.
It's not that difficult and it doesn't
take that long in my opinion to learn
just enough combo moves to get that high
of holy shit, I could not do this in any
other edit.
>> How long did it take you? And by the
way, I don't know. I'm still I haven't
yet. Well, I know intellectually, but
just like with kids, I haven't
>> You haven't
>> I haven't uh gone in all the way in. I
haven't used them.
>> You You have a You have a treat in in
mind? Well, I switched in about I had
three day when I switched here about a
year ago. I had three days of cursing
where I thought it was absolutely
terrible and it was never going to
happen. And I had three days of
annoyance and already the next week I
was like, "This is sweet. I'm not going
anywhere."
>> Oh, wow. But I also had a bit of a head
start about 20 years ago in the early
2000s. I tried Vim for like a summer
and it didn't stick. I didn't for
whatever reason love it at the time. But
Neovim is really good. The key to Neoim
is to realize that you don't have to
build the whole damn editor yourself. So
a lot of Neovim stands are like here's
how to write the confict from scratch
over 17 episodes. It's going to take you
three weeks. I I don't care that much. I
love a great editor. I love to tailor it
a little bit, but not that much. So, you
have to pair Neoim with this thing
called Lazy Vim.
>> LazyVim.org
is a distribution for Neoim that takes
all the drudgery out of getting an
amazing editor experience right out of
the box.
Ridiculous question. We talked about a
bunch of programming languages. Uh, you
told us how much you love JavaScript.
It's your second favorite programming
language. Um,
would Typescript be the third? Then
>> Typescript wouldn't even be in this
universe.
>> I hate TypeScript as much as I like
JavaScript.
>> So, what you hate? Oh, man. I'm not
smart enough to understand the math of
that. Okay. Before I ask about other
programming languages, what's if you can
encapsulate your hatred of TypeScript
into something that could be human
interpretable, what would be the
reasoning? that JavaScript smells a lot
like Ruby when it comes to some aspects
of its metaroming and TypeScript just
complicates that to an infuriating
degree when you're trying to write that
kind of code and even when you're trying
to write the normal kind of code none of
the benefits that acrew to people who
like it like autocomp completion is
something I care about I don't care
about autocomp completion because I'm
not using an IDE now I understand that
that is part of what separates it and
why
I don't see the benefits. I only see the
costs. I see the extra typing. I see the
type gymnastics that you sometimes have
to do and where a bunch of people give
up and just do any instead, right? Like
that they don't actually use the type
system because it's just too frustrating
to use. So I've ever only felt the
frustration of Typescript and the
obfuscation of Typescript in the code
that gave me no payoff. Again, I
understand that there is a payoff. I
don't want the payoff. So for my
situation, I'm not willing to make the
trade and I'm not willing to take a
language that underneath is as dynamic
of a language as Rubious and then turn
it into this pretend statically type
language. I find that just
intellectually insulting.
>> Do you think it will and do you think it
should die Typescript?
>> I don't want to take something away from
people who enjoy it. So if you like
Typescript, all the most part of you, if
you're using TypeScript because you
think that's what a professional
programmer is supposed to do, here's my
permission. You don't have to use
TypeScript. There's something deeply
enjoy enjoyable about a brilliant
programmer such as yourself, a DHA
talking shit. It's just it's like one of
my favorite things in life. Uh what are
the top three programming languages
everyone should learn? If you're talking
to a beginner,
>> I would 100% start with Ruby. It is
magic for beginners in terms of just
understanding the core concepts of
conditionals and loops and whatever
because it makes it so easy. Even if
you're just making a shell program
that's outputting to the terminal,
getting hello world running in Ruby is
basically puts ps space start quote
hello world end quote. You're done,
right? There's no fluff. There's nothing
to rabbit into. There are other
languages that does that especially in
the pearl or python would be rather
similar but go would not java would not.
There's a lot of other languages that
have a lot more ceremony and
boilerplate. Ruby has none of it. So
it's a wonderful starting language.
There's a book called learn to program
by pine that uses Ruby essentially to
just teach basic programming principles
that I've seen heavily recommended. So
that's a great language.
>> How quickly would you go to Rails? It
depends on what you want to do. If you
want to build web applications, go to
Rails right away. Learn Ruby along with
Rails because I think what really helps
power through learning programming is to
build programs that you want. Right? If
you're just learning it in the abstract,
it's difficult to motivate yourself to
actually do it well. Some people learn
languages just for the fun of them. Most
people do not. Most people learn it
because they have a mission. They want
to build a program. They want to become
a programmer. So, you got to use it for
something real. And I actually find that
it's easier to learn programming that
way too because it drives your learning
process. You can't just learn the whole
thing up front. You can't just sit down
and read the language specification then
go like oo like neo now I know kung fu
now I know Ruby. It doesn't download
that way. You actually have to type it
out in anger on a real program.
>> Yeah. Yeah. For sure.
>> So I would start there. But then number
two, I probably would be JavaScript
because JavaScript just is the language
you need to know if you want to work
with the web. And the web is the
greatest application platform of all
time. If you're making business
software, collaboration software, all
this kind of stuff. If you're making
video games, you should probably go off
learn C++ or C or something else like
that. But if you're in the realm of web
applications, you got to learn
JavaScript. Regardless of what else you
learn, you got to learn JavaScript. So
if you're learning Ruby, what does Ruby
not have in terms of programming
concepts
that you would need other languages for?
>> I don't know if there's any concepts
missing, but it doesn't have the speed
or the low-level access of memory
manipulation that you would need to
build a 3D gaming engine, for example.
No one's going to build that in Ruby.
You can build quite low-level stuff when
it comes to web technologies in Ruby,
but at some point you're going to hit
the limit and you should use something
else. I'm not someone who prescribed
just Ruby for everything. Just once you
reach the level of abstraction that's
involved with web applications, Ruby is
superb. But if you're writing, for
example, a um HTTP proxy, Go is great
for that. We've written quite a few HTTP
proxies lately at the company for
various reasons, including our cloud
exit and so forth. And Kevin, one of the
programs I'm working with, he writes all
of that in Go. Go. Just have the
primitives and it has the pace and the
speed to do that really well. I highly
recommend it. If you're writing an HTTP
general proxy, do it in Go. Great
language for that. Don't write your
business logic in Go. I know people do,
but I don't see the point in that.
>> So, what would you say the three? So go
Ruby plus Rails JavaScript.
>> Yeah, if you're willing or interested in
working with the web, I'd probably pick
those three. Go, Ruby and JavaScript.
>> Go Ruby and JavaScript. Okay. Functional
languages.
>> Someone's talking about Okamel.
>> There's always they are always going to
show up. They're always I it must be
some kind of
um OAML industrial complex or something
like this. But they always say mention O
camel. I love that there are people who
love functional languages to that
degree. Those people are not me. I don't
care at all. Like I care about
functional principles when they help me
in these isolated cases where that's
just better than everything else. But at
heart, I'm an object-oriented
guy. That's just how I think about
programs. That's how I like to think
about programs. That's how I carve up a
big problem space into a domain
language.
Objects are my gem.
>> Yeah. Yeah, me too. So I I programmed a
list a bunch for like AI applications
for uh basic so chess engines that kind
of stuff and I did try just to force
myself to program just a very basic game
of life simulation and it's it's not
it's it's much you know lisp is just
parenthesis everywhere. It's actually
not readable at all.
>> That's my bad with uh okamel is very
very intuitive very readable. this
>> I really should pick up a language like
that at some point. I've been
programming long enough that it's a
little embarrassing that I haven't
actually done anything real in anger in
a fully functional programming language.
>> Yeah, but like I I have to figure out
I'm sure there's an answer to this. What
can I do that would be useful for me
>> like that I actually want to build?
>> That's my problem.
>> That a functional language is better
suited for.
>> That's right.
>> Because I really want to experience the
language properly.
>> That's right.
>> Yeah. Cuz I'm still Yeah. I'm very ob at
this point I'm very object-oriented.
>> Yes.
>> And that's my problem too. I just I
don't care as much about these low-level
problems in computer science. I care
about the high level. I care about
writing software. I care about the
abstraction layer that really floats
well with web applications and business
logic. And I just I've come to accept
that about myself. Even though as we
talked about when I was a kid, I really
wanted to become a games programmer. And
then I saw what it took to write a
collision detection engine and I go
like, "Yeah, that's not me at all. I'm
never going to be into vector matrix
manipulation or any of that stuff. It's
way too much math. And I'm more of a
writing person than I am of a math
person." I mean, just in the way you
were speaking today, you have like a
poetic literary approach to programming.
>> Yes.
>> Yeah.
>> That's actually exactly right. So I did
actually a keynote at Railscom 10 years
ago where I called myself a software
writer. I mean I'm not the first person
to say that software writer has been in
the vernacular for a long time. But the
modern
identity that most programmers adopt
when they're trying to be serious is
software engineer. And I reject that
label. I'm not an engineer. Occasionally
I dabble in some engineering but the
vast majority of time I'm a software
writer. I write software for human
consumption and for my own delight.
>> I can get away with that because I'm
working in a high level language like
Ruby, working on collaboration software
and to-do lists and all the other stuff.
Again, if I was trying to apply my
talent to writing 3D game engines,
no, that's not the right mindset. That's
not the right identity. But I find that
the software engineering identity
flattens thing a little bit. I'd like to
think that we have software writers and
software mathematicians for example and
then those are actually richer ways of
describing the abstraction level that
you're working at than engineer.
>> Yeah. And I think if AI becomes more and
more successful,
I think we'll need software writer skill
more and more because it feels like
that's the realm of which cuz it's not
writer.
>> You're going to have to do the software.
You're going to have to be a computer
person. But there had there's a more I
don't know uh I don't want to
romanticize it, but it's more poetic.
It's more literary. It's more feels like
writing a a good blog post than um
>> I actually wish that AI had a bit higher
standards for writing. I find the fact
that it accepts my slobby incomplete
sentences a little offensive. I wish
there was like a strict mode for AI
where it would snap my fingers if I was
just feeding it keywords and like speak
proper, do pronunciation, do
punctuation.
Uh because I love that. I love crafting
a just right sentence that hasn't been
boiled down that it has no meat on it.
It has no character in it. It's
succinct. It's not overly flowery. It's
just right. That writing phase to me is
just addictive. And I find that when
programming is the best, it's almost
equivalent exactly to that. You also
have to solve a problem. You're not just
communicating a solution. and you have
to actually figure out what are you
trying to say but even writing has that
half the time when I start writing a
blog post I don't know exactly which
arguments I'm going to use they develop
as part of the writing process and
that's how writing software happens too
you know roughly the kind of problem
you're trying to solve you know ex don't
know exactly how you're going to solve
it and as you start typing the solution
emerges and actually as far as I
understand you and Jason working on a
new book it's in the early days of that
kind of topic. I I think he said it's
some he tweeted that it's going to be
titled something like we don't know what
we're doing upfront or something like
that. That kind of topic and you figure
out along the way.
>> That's a big part of it. trying to give
more people the permission to trust your
own instincts and their own gut and
realizing that developing
that supercomputer in your stomach is
actually the work of a career and that
you should not discard those feelings in
preference to over
comp or not even complicated to
analytics to intellectualism. Very often
when we look at the big decisions we've
had to make, they've come from the gut
where you cannot fully articulate like
why do I think this is the right thing?
Well, because I've been in this business
for 20 years and I've seen a bunch of
things. I've talked to a bunch of people
and that is percolating into this being
the right answer.
A lot of people are very skeptical about
that in business or unable to trust it
because it feels like they can't
rationalize. Why are we doing something?
Well, because I feel like it. Damn it.
That's a great privilege of being a
bootstrapped independent founder who
don't owe their business to someone else
and doesn't have to produce a return
because I feel like a lot of the
bullshit really creeps in when you're
trying to rationalize to other people
why you do the things you do and why you
take the decisions that you do. If you
don't have anyone to answer to, you're
free to follow your gut. And
that's
hell of enjoyable way to work. And it's
also in very often uh the correct way to
work. Your gut knows a lot. Like you
can't articulate it, but it's spot-on
more times than not. Yeah. Having to
make a plan can be a paralyzing thing.
I've often I mean I suppose there's
different kinds of brains. And first of
all, I can't wait to read that book if
it materializes.
Uh they I often feel like in the more in
the more interesting things I do in my
life, I really don't know what I'm doing
up up front. And I think there's a lot
of people around me that care for me
that really want me to know what I'm
doing. They're like, "What's the plan?
What's the why are you doing this crazy
thing?" And I if if I had to wait until
I have a plan, I'm not going to do it.
People are they have different brains on
this kind of stuff. Some people really
are planners and it maybe energizes
them. But I think most creative
pursuits, most really interesting, most
novel pursuits are like you kind of have
to just take the leap and then just
figure out as you go.
>> My favorite essay in rework is the last
one and it's entitled inspiration is
perishable. And I think that captures a
lot of it that if you take the time to
do a detailed plan, you may very well
have lost the inspiration by the time
you're done. If you follow the
inspiration in that moment and trust
your gut, trust your own competence that
you will figure it out, you're going to
get so much more back. You're going to
go on the adventure you otherwise
wouldn't have. Whether that's just a
business decisions or a life decision,
you have to seize that inspiration.
There's a great set of children's books
written by this Japanese author about
chasing an idea and trying to get a hold
of it. And it's beautifully illustrated
as an idea, something that's floating
around as something you have to catch
and latch onto that I really feel
captures this notion that inspiration is
perishable. It'll disappear. If you just
put it back on the shelf and say like,
well, I got to be diligent about this. I
got to line up a plan. you may run out
and then there's no there's no steam to
keep going.
I have to ask you about open source.
What does it take uh to run a successful
open source project? You've uh spoken
about that it's a misconception that uh
open source is democratic. It's actually
meritocratic.
I thought that's a beautiful way to put
it. So there's often is a kind of a
benevolent dictator at top often. So,
can you just speak to that having run
successful open source projects yourself
and and being a benevolent dictator
yourself,
which is going to be a bit of a biased
uh piece of evidence here, but
>> I
you should definitely have dictators and
they should control everything,
especially when the dictator is me now.
Well, I think I learned very early on
that a quick way to burn out in open
source is to treat it as a business, as
though your users are customers, as
though they have claims of legitimacy on
your time and your attention and your
direction.
>> Because I faced this almost immediately
with Ruby and Rails as soon as it was
released. There were a million peoples
who had all sorts of opinions about
where I ought to take it. and not just
opinions, but actually demands. Unless
you implement an Oracle database
adapter, this is always going to be a
toy.
>> It was actually more or less that exact
demand that prompted me to have a slide
at one of the early Rails conferences
that just said, "Fuck you."
>> Yeah, I saw that.
>> I'm not going to do what you tell me to.
I'm here as a bringer of gift. I am
sharing code that I wrote on my own time
on my own valition and you don't have to
say thank you. I mean be nice if you
did. You can take the code and do
whatever you want with it. You can
contribute back if you want but you
can't tell me what to do or where to go
or how to act. I'm not a vendor. This is
a fundamental misconception that users
of open source occasionally step into
because they're used to buying software
from companies who really care about
their business. I care about people
using my software. I think it's great,
but we don't have a transactional
relationship. I don't get something back
when you tell me what to do except grief
and I don't want it. So you can keep it.
So my open-source philosophy from the
start has been I got to do this
primarily for me. I love when other
people find use in my open source. It's
not my primary motivation. I'm not
primarily doing it for other people. I'm
primarily doing it for me and my own
objectives because um as Adam Smith
said, it's not for the benevolence of
the butcher that we expect our daily
meat. It's for his self-interest. And I
actually find that to be a beautiful
thought that our comments increase in
value when we all pursue our
self-interest certainly in the realm of
open source. This is also why I reject
this notion that open source is in some
sort of crisis that there's a funding
crisis that we have to spend more. No,
we don't. Open source has never been
doing better. Open source has never
controlled more domains in software than
it has right now. There is no crisis.
There's a misconception from some people
making open source and from a lot of
people using open source that open
source is primarily like commercial
software something you buy and something
where you can then make demands as a
customer and that the customer is always
right. Customer is not always right. Not
even in business but certainly not in
open source. In open source the customer
as it is is a receiver of gifts. We are
having a gift exchange. I show up and
give you my code. If you like it, you
can use it. And if you have some code
that fits in with where I'm going with
this, I would love to get those gifts
back. And we can keep trading like that.
I give you more gifts, you give me some
of your gifts. Together, we pull all the
gifts such that someone showing up brand
new just get a mountain of gifts. This
is the magic thing of open source is it
increases the total sum value of what's
in the comments when we all pursue our
own self-interest. So, I'm building
things for Rails that I need. And you
know what? You want me to do that. You
do not want me to build things that I
don't need on behalf of other people
because I'll do a crap job. I do I build
much better software when I can evaluate
the quality of that software by my own
use. I have to I need this feature. I'm
going to build a good version of that
feature and I'm going to build just
enough just for me. So, I'm not going to
bloat it. I'm not trying to attract a
customer here. I'm not trying to see
some angle. I'm just building what I
need. And if you go into open source
with that mentality that you're building
for you and everything else is a bonus,
I think you have all the ingredients to
go the distance. I think the people who
burn out in open source is when they go
in thinking, I'm making all these gifts.
I don't really need them myself, but I'm
like hoping someone else does and maybe
they'll also give me some money. That's
a losing proposition. It never basically
works. If you want money for your
software, you should just sell it. We
have a perfectly fine model of
commercial software that people can make
that kind and then they can sell it. But
I find a lot of
confusion, let's just call it that
politely, in open source contributors
who want to have their cake and eat it
too. They like the mode of working with
open source. They maybe even like the
status that comes from open source, but
they also would like to earn a living
from making that open source. And
therefore they occasionally end up with
the kind of grievances that someone who
feels underappreciated at work will
develop when others aren't doing enough
to recognize their great gifts and and
then they might walk away. I wish I had
one of the I wish I had more insight
into their mind state of the individual
people that are running these projects
like if they're feeling sad or they need
more money or they're burn like it's
just such a dark box. It can be.
>> I mean, of course, there's some
communication, but I just I just sadly
see too often they just kind of walk
away,
>> right? And I think that's actually also
part of the beauty of open source. You
are not obligated to do this code
forever. You're obligated to do this for
as long as you want to do it.
>> That's basically your own obligation.
>> But there is a I know. Okay, you might
criticize this and push back. You did
write a blog post on forever until the
end of the internet with Tadalist.
There is a beautiful aspect and you
found a good balance there.
But I don't know, you're bringing so
much joy to people with this thing you
created. It's not an obligation, but
there's a real beauty to taking care of
this thing you've created and not
forgetting. I think we what I think what
the open-source creator is not seeing
enough I mean there's like
>> how how many lives you're making better.
There's certain pieces of software that
I just quietly use a lot.
>> Yes.
>> And like they bring my life joy and I
wish I could communicate that. Well,
there's ways to donate, but it's
inefficient. It's usually hard to
donate. It is there's some ways for some
people that made it easier. GitHub
donations is one way of doing it. I
donate to a few people even though I
don't love the paradigm. I also accept
that we can have multiple paradigms.
except that I can do open source for one
set of motivations and other people can
do open source for other motivations. We
don't all have to do it the same way.
But I do want to counter the
misconception that open source is
somehow in a crisis unless we all start
paying for open source. That model
already exists. It's commercial
software. It works very well and plenty
of great companies have been built off
the back of it and the expectations are
very clear. I pay you this amount and I
get this software. Open source once you
start mixing money into it gets real
muddy real fast. And a lot of it is just
from those misaligned expectations that
if you feel like you're starving artists
as an open source developer and you are
owed x amount of money because your
software is popular, you're delusional
and you need to knock that off. Just get
back on track where you realize that
you're putting gifts into the world. And
if you get something back in terms of
monetary compensation, okay, that's a
bonus. But if you need that money back
in terms of monetary compensation, you
should just charge for software or go
work for a software company that will
employ you to do open source. There's
tons of that. That is probably actually
the primary mode that open source
software is being developed in the world
today. Commercial companies
making open source that they need
themselves and then contributing it
back.
>> So I'm glad you brought sort of like
drew some hard lines here. is a good
moment to bring up uh what I think is
the maybe one of the greatest
open-source projects ever, WordPress,
and uh you spoke up in October
uh about some of the stuff that's been
going on with WordPress's founder, Matt
Mullig, in a blog post, Open Source
Royalty and Mad Kings. It's a really
good blog post on sort of just the idea
of benevolent dictators for life, this
model for open source projects. And then
the basic implication was that
Matt as the BDFL of WordPress has lost
his way a bit with his battle with WP
Engine.
Uh so I should also say that I really
love WordPress. It brings me joy. I
think it's a really it's a beacon of
what open source could be. as he has
made the internet better. It allowed a
lot of people to create wonderful
websites.
And I also think, now you might disagree
with this, but from everything I've
seen,
WP Engine just gives me bad vibes.
I I think they're not a good the good
guy in this. I don't like it. I
understand the frustration. I understand
all of it, but I don't think that
excuses the behavior. There is a bit of
see this kind of counter to a little bit
what you said which is when you have a
open source project of that size there
is a bit of a like when you're the king
that for of a project
of a kingdom that large there's a bit of
responsibility anyway could you speak to
your uh maybe to your empathy of Matt
and uh to your criticism
and but and maybe uh paint a path of how
he and WordPress can be winning again.
First, I echo what you said about what a
wonderful thing it is that WordPress
exists. There are not many projects in
the open source world or in the world at
large that has had as big of an impact
on the internet as WordPress has. He
deserves a ton of accolades for that
work. So that was my engagement
essentially my premise. Do you know what
I had tremendous respect for what Matt
has built with WordPress, what that
entire ecosystem has built around
itself. It's a true marvel, but there's
some principles that are larger than my
personal sympathies to the characters
involved. I agree. The Silver Lake
private equity company that's involved
with WP Engine is not my natural ally.
I'm not the natural ally of private
equity doing some game with VP Engine.
That's not my interest in the case. My
interest is essentially a set of
principles. And the principles are if
you release something as open source,
people are free to use it as they see
fit and they are free to donate code or
resources or money back to the community
as they see fit. You may disagree about
whether they've done enough, whether
they should do more, but you can't show
up after you've given the gift of free
software to the world and then say, "Now
that you've used that gift, you actually
owe me a huge slide of your business
because you got too successful using the
thing I gave you for free." You don't
get to take a gift back. That's why we
have open source licenses. They
stipulate exactly what the obligations
are on both sides of the equation. The
users of open source don't get to demand
what the makers of open source do and
how they act. And the makers of open
source don't get to suddenly show up
with a ransom note to the users and say
actually you owe me for all sorts of
use. I'm 100% allergic to that kind of
interaction. And I think Matt,
unfortunately, for whatever reason,
got so wrapped up in what he was owed
that he failed to realize what he was
destroying. WordPress and automatic
already makes a ton of money. This is
part of the wonder of WordPress. This is
a project that generates hundreds of
millions of dollars and Matt didn't feel
like he was getting enough of that.
That's not a good argument, bro. You
can't just violate the spirit and the
letter of these open source licences and
just start showing up with demand
letters even to characters that are not
particularly sympathetic. This goes to
the root of my interpretation of open
source in general. The GPL
is a particular license that actually
demands code from people who use it
under certain circumstances. I've never
liked the GPL. I don't want your shitty
code if you don't want to give it to me.
What am I going to do with that? Some
code dump that you've I I'm not on board
with that part of Stallman's vision at
all. I love the MIT license. To me, that
is the perfect license cuz it is
mercifully short. I think it's two
paragraphs, three paragraphs, really
short. And it basically says, "Here's
some software. It comes with no
warranty. You can't sue me. You can't
demand anything. But you can do whatever
the hell you want with it. Have a nice
life. That's a perfect open source
interaction in my opinion. And that
license needs to be upheld. These
licenses in general, even the GPL, even
if I don't like it, we have to abide by
them because if we just set aside those
licenses when we in a moment's notice
feel like something's slightly unfair,
we've lost everything. We've lost the
entire framework that allowed open
source to prosper and allowed open
source to become such an integral part
of commerce too. I mean back when open
source was initially finding its feet,
it was at war with commercial software.
Stallman is at war with commercial
software and always has been. Bill Gates
was in return at war with open source
for the longest time.
The open source licences and the clarity
that they provide allowed us to end that
war. Today, commercial software and open
source software can peacefully coexist.
I make commercial software, I sell base
camp, I sell Hey, and then I also make a
bunch of open source software that I
give away for free as gifts.
That can't happen if we start violating
these contracts. No commercial company
is going to go, "Let me base my next
project off this piece of open source."
If I'm also running the liability that
some mad maker is going to show up seven
years in and demand I give them $50
million. That's not an environment
conducive to commerce collaboration or
anything else. And it's just basically
wrong. I think there's one analysis
that's all about kind of the practical
outcomes of this which I think are bad.
There's also some an argument that's
simply about ethics. This is not right.
You can't just show up afterwards and
demand something. This is not too
dissimilar in my opinion to the whole
Apple thing we talked about earlier.
Apple just showing up and feeling like
they're entitled to 30% of everyone's
business. No, that's that's not right.
That's not fair. So, I think Matt
unfortunately
kind of stared himself blind on the
indignity he thought was being
perpetrated against him because there
was all this money being made by VP
Engine making a good product and not
giving quite enough back in Matt's
opinion.
Tough tough cookie. I I think they're
maybe I'm reading too much into it, but
there might be some personal stuff too,
which they weren't not only not giving
enough, but probably implicitly
promising that they will give
and then taking advantage of him in that
way in his mind. Just like interpersonal
interaction and then and then you get
like interpersonally frustrated. You
forget like the bigger picture ethics of
it. It's like when a guy keeps saying,
you know, promising he'll do something.
>> Sure. And then you and then you realize
you wake up one day like a year or two
later. Wait a minute. I was being lied
to this whole time. And then that I
don't even know if it's about money.
>> I I'd get mad, too. It's totally fine to
get mad when people disappoint you.
That's not justification for upending
decades of open- source licences and the
essential de facto case law we've
established around it. This is why I
chose to even weigh in on this cuz I
like WordPress. I don't use WordPress.
I'm not a part of that community. I
don't actually have a dog in this fight.
I'm biased if anything towards Matt just
as a fellow BDFL.
>> I would like to see him do well with
this, but I also think there's some
principles at stake here that ring much
louder. I don't want Rails to suddenly
be tainted by the fact that it's open
source and whether companies can rely on
it and build businesses on it because
wait, maybe one day I'm going to turn
Matt and I'm going to turn Matt King and
I'm going to show up with a demand
ransom letter. No, screw that. We we
have way more to protect here. There's
way more at stake than your personal
beef with someone or your perceived
grievance over what you're owed.
>> What would you recommend? What do you
think you should do, can do to walk it
back to to to heal?
Decide. This is the curious thing. He
could decide to give this up. That's
very, very difficult for driven,
ambitious people to do, to accept that
they're wrong and to give up and lay
down their sword. So, I had a hope
earlier on in this that that was
possible. I haven't seen any evidence
that Matt is interested in that. And I
find that deeply regretful, but that's
her his prerogative. I continue to speak
out when he's violating the spirit and
ethics of open source. But I wish he
would just accept that this was a really
bad idea. He just he made a bad bet and
I thought I think he thought he'd just
get away with it, that they just pay up
and that he could put pressure. I mean,
I know that temptation when you sit as
the head of a very important project.
You know that that comes with a great
degree of power and you really need a
great degree of discipline to rein that
in and not exercise that power at every
step where you feel agrieved. I've felt
agrieved a million times over in the 20
plus years of Ruby and Rails. I've
really tried very hard not to let those
sometimes petty, sometimes substantial
grieviances over time
seep in to the foundation of the
ecosystem and risk ruining everything
>> as the king of the rails kingdom. Has
the power gotten to your head over the
years?
>> I'm sure it has. I mean, who wouldn't?
>> Do you pace around in your chamber?
I do occasionally
and I I do marvel at both what's been
built, what's been possible. Over a
million applications have been made with
Ruby and Rails by one estimate that I've
seen. Businesses like Shopify and GitHub
and a million others have been built on
top of something that I started. That's
very gratifying,
but you really have to be careful not to
smell your own exhaust too much. And you
have to be just as careful not to listen
too much to the haters
>> and not to listen too much to the super
fans either that you assess the value
and the sort of principles of what
you're working towards on its own merits
on your own scoreboard. I try to
block that out and then just go well I'm
working on Rails because I love to write
Ruby. I love to use Ruby to make web
applications. That's my north star. And
I'll continue to do that. And I'll
continue to share all of the open source
gifts that I uncover along the ways.
And and that's it. That's enough, too. I
don't have to get all of it out of it.
This is sometimes just as with the guy
who thought I'd given up on being Jira
or something instead of doing base cam.
There are people over the years who've
asked like, "Why didn't you charge for
Rails?" Like, "Don't you know how much
money I've been made off Rails? If we
just look at something like Shopify,
it's worth billions of dollars. I'm not
a billionaire." And so freaking what? I
got more than enough. I got plenty of my
share. I will say though, I'm also
introspective enough to realize that if
it hadn't panned out as well as it did
for me on my own business, maybe I would
have been more tempted. Maybe if you see
other people build huge successful
companies off the back of your work and
you really don't have a pot to piss in,
you might be tempted to get a little
upset about that. I've seen that in the
Rails world as well where there are
people who contributed substantial
bodies of work and then got really
miffed when they didn't feel like they
got enough back. I was fortunate enough
that the business that Jason and I built
with Ruby and Rails was as successful as
it was and I I made the money I needed
to make that I didn't need to chase the
rest of it. But we should also just make
explicit that many people in your
position
chase
uh chase the money. It's not that
difficult to chase. Basically, you
turned away money. You made a lot of
decisions that just turn away money.
Maybe I also think of
this example with Matt. He probably
thought there was easy money for the
taking. And it wasn't so easy, was it?
It looked like lowhanging dollar bills
and they turned out to be some really
sour grapes. It turned out he turned he
probably destroyed vast sums of money by
undermining the whole WordPress trust
and the ecosystem and putting question
marks in the heads of folks who would
choose to use WordPress or something
else going forward. So, I often think
when people think like, "Oh, you left
money on the table." First of all, so
what? I don't have to have all the
money, but second of all, maybe the
money wasn't on the table at all.
>> And maybe the cost, even if you got the
money, maybe the cost in other ways,
like we've talked about,
>> yes,
>> would outweigh all the money that you
could have possibly gotten. Meaning like
>> I think you said that the thing that
makes you happy
>> is flow and tranquility. Those two
things beautifully really beautifully
put
>> and it you know m gaining money might
assign to your responsibility of running
a larger thing that takes away
the flow that you gain from being from
from fundamentally for you what flow
means is programming and then
tranquility is like I think you also
have a beautiful post of like nirvana is
an empty schedule
>> when I look at a upcoming week and I see
that I have no scheduled meetings at
all, which is quite common. Or maybe I
just have one thing for one hour on one
day. I think to myself, do you know
what? This could very easily have been
very different. We could have been
running a company of hundreds of people
or thousands of people and my entire
calendar would have been packed solid
with little Tetris blocks of other
people's demands on my attention and
time and I would have been miserable as
fuck.
>> Yep. And I look at that and go like
that. What more can I ask for? Which is
a really nice state of being. I'd
actually say I didn't have this always.
I did have early on in my career some
sense of like I need a little more a
little more security. And I remember
this really interesting study where a
bunch of researchers asked people who
had made certain amounts of money, how
much money would it take for you to feel
secure? They'd ask people who had a
million dollars net worth. How much
money do you need? Probably need two
million. 2 million. Then it'd be good.
Then they ask people with a net worth of
five million. How much do you need? Ah,
10. I need 10. Ask people with 10
million. What do you need? 20. Every
single time people would need double of
what they did. I did that for a couple
of doublings until I realized, you know
what? This is silly. I am already where
I wished I would be and a million times
over. So, what less is there to pursue?
Now, that doesn't mean that if more
money is coming my way, I'm going to say
no to it. Of course not. But it does
mean that I'm free to set other things
higher. And I also do think you realize,
as Jim Carrey would say, I wish everyone
would get all the money that they wished
for and they'd realize it wasn't the
answer. That money solves a whole host
of problems and anxieties and then it
creates a bunch of new ones. And then it
also doesn't touch a huge swath of the
human experience at all. The world is
full of miserable, anxious, hurt rich
people.
It's also full of miserable, anxious,
poor people. And I'd rather be a
miserable, anxious, rich person than a
poor person. But it isn't this magic
wand that make everything go away. And
that's again one of those
insights just like having children that
you cannot communicate in words. I've
never been able to persuade a person
who's not wealthy that wealth wasn't
going to solve all their problems.
>> One quote you've returned to often that
I enjoy a lot is the Coco Chanel quote
of the best things in in life are free
and uh the second best things are very
very expensive. And I guess the task is
to uh focus on
uh surrounding yourself with the best
things in life like family and all of
this and not caring about the other
stuff.
>> I would even say you can care about the
other stuff. Just know the order of
priority.
>> Yeah. If you are blessed with
a partner that you love, some children
that you adore, you've already won the
greatest prize that most humans are able
to achieve. Most humans in this world,
if they are of marital age and they have
children, if you ask them what's the
most important thing, they would all say
that. They would all say that. no matter
whether they're rich or poor. It's easy
to lose sight of that when you're
chasing the second best things because
do you know what? They're also very
nice.
>> Mhm.
>> I I really like that Pagani Sonda. It
was a very expensive car and I would had
no chance of acquiring it if I hadn't
become rather
successful in business. So, I don't want
to dismiss it either. It's great fun to
have money. It's just
not as fun for quite as long or as deep
as you think it is. And these other
things, having an occupation and a
pursuit that you enjoy, being able to
carry burdens
with a stiff up lip and with again a
sense of meaning is incredible. to have
family, to have friends, to have
hobbies, to have all these things that
are actually available
to most people around the world. That's
winning. And it doesn't mean you have to
discount your ambitions. It doesn't mean
you can't reach for more. But it does
mean it's pretty dumb if you don't
realize that
it's not going to complete you in some
hocus pocus woo sense to make more. It
it really isn't. What gives you hope
about the future of this whole thing we
have going on here, human civilization?
I find it easier to be optimistic
optimistic than pessimistic because I
don't know either way. So if I get to
choose, why not just choose to believe
it's going to pan out?
>> Yeah.
>> Like we suffer more in our imagination
than we do in reality. That's one of the
quotes out of stoicism. And I also think
we have a tendency, a lot of humans have
a tendency to be pessimistic in advance
for things they don't know how it's
going to pan out. Climate change, for
example, is making a lot of people very
anxious and very pessimistic about the
future. You know, nothing. 40 years ago,
we thought the problem was that the
planet was going to be too cool. I
happen to believe that it's probably
correct that the planet is getting too
hot and that CO2 has something to do
with it. Whether we have the right
measures to fix it in time, if that's
even possible or not, is completely up
in the air. And we don't know. If you
convince yourself with such certainty
that the world is going to turn to shit,
it is right up here in your head today.
Climate change might wipe out this
entire species in 200 years. It's not
next year. It's not 10 years from now.
you life might become more unpleasant
and there might be more negative effects
and so on. Yes. Okay. But then deal with
that hardship when it arrives. Don't
take that in advance. How are you
helping earth by just walking around
being depressed?
I think our whole conversation today is
also an indication there. It's just two
humans talking. There's billions of us
and there is something about us that
wants to solve problems and build cool
stuff. Yes. And so we're going to build
our way out of whatever shit we get
ourselves into. This is what humans do.
We create problems for ourselves and and
come up figure out how to build rocket
ships to uh to get out of those
problems. And sometimes the rocket ships
create other problems like nuclear
warheads. And then we'll I'm sure
I hope figure out ways how to avoid
those problems. And then there'll be
nanobots. And then the aliens will come
and it'll be a massive war between the
nanobots and the aliens and and that
will bring also all of us humans
together.
The funny thing just to pick on one of
the points you mentioned the atom bomb
for example when that was first invented
a lot of people thought we have
essentially ended life on earth right
or maybe we prevented World War II from
happening in the past 80 years because
assured mutual annihilation kept the
superpowers from attacking each other at
least head on and kept their fighting to
proxy wars. You know what? Proxy wars
are not great, but they're probably
better than World War II with nuclear
weapons. So, it's quite difficult in the
moment to tell what's actually benefit
and what's not. And I think we should be
a bit more humble. I've certainly become
more humble over time of thinking I know
which way it's going to turn. I think
the pandemic was a huge moment for a lot
of people where there was so much
certainty about whether this
intervention worked or that intervention
didn't work. And most people were wrong.
Certainly a lot of very smart people,
very qualified people got that just
utterly and catastrophyingly
wrong. So just a little intellectual
humility. I think back upon that and go
like you know what I'm not a PhD in
viology.
Um and I don't claim that like I somehow
saw how it all was going to play out.
But the people who were really experts
and that they got a bunch of it wrong.
Nobody knows anything. I keep reminding
myself of that every day. No one knows
anything. We can't predict the economy a
month out. We can't predict world
affairs a month. The world is just too
complicated.
>> Yeah. I when I watched the Netflix
documentary Chimp Empire
and how, you know, there's a hierarchy
of chimps,
all of that looks eerily similar to us
humans. We're recent descendants. So,
these experts, some of the chimps are
got a PhD, others don't. Uh, others are
really muscular, others are like beta
male kind. They're sucking up to the
alpha. There's a lot of interesting
dynamics going on that really maps
cleanly to the geopolitics of the day.
They don't have nuclear weapons, but the
nature of their behavior is similar to
ours. So, I think I think we barely know
what's going on. But I do think there's
like a basic
uh will to cooperate.
There's a basic compassion that
underlies are just the human spirit
that's there. And maybe that is just me
being optimistic, but if if that is
indeed there, I think we're going to be
okay.
>> The capacity is certainly there.
>> Whether we choose that capacity or not,
who knows? And in what situation, I
think accepting that we all have the
capacity for both ways for both
incredible generosity and kindness and
also cruelty. I think uh Young with his
whole theory of the shadow was really
spot on that we all have that capacity
in us and accepting that it's our job to
attempt to cultivate the better parts of
our human nature
is weighed against our propensity to
sometime be the worst of ourselves.
I'm excited to find out what's going to
happen. It's so awesome to be human. I
don't want to die. I kind of want to be
alive for a while to see all the cool
shit we do. And uh one of the cool
things I want to see is all the software
you create and all the things you tweet,
all the trouble you get yourself into on
Twitter. Um David, yeah, I'm a huge fan.
Like I said, thank you for everything
you've done for the world, for the
millions of developers you've inspired
and uh one of whom is me. And thank you
for this awesome conversation, brother.
>> Thanks so much for having me.
Thanks for listening to this
conversation with DHH. To support this
podcast, please check out our sponsors
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subscribing to this channel. And now,
let me leave you with some words from
Rework by DHH and Jason Frerieded.
What you do is what matters, not what
you think or say or plan.
Thank you for listening and hope to see
you next time.