ThePrimeagen: Programming, AI, ADHD, Productivity, Addiction, and God | Lex Fridman Podcast #461

The following is a conversation with Michael Paulson, better known online as the Primagen. He is a programmer who has entertained and inspired millions of people to have fun building stuff with software, whether you're a newbie or a seasoned developer who has been battling it out in the software engineering trenches for decades. In short, the Primagen is a legendary programmer and a great human being with an inspiring roller coaster of a life story. This is the Lex Friedman podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's the Primagen. What do you love most about programming? What brings you joy when you program?

I can tell you the first time that I ever felt love in programming or felt that joy or that excitement, which was in college. It was the second class, Data Structures, and the teacher that was teaching, Ray Babcock, he was talking about linked lists. Now you have to learn Java at Montana State University when I went. And so he's off there kind of explaining this whole linked list thing and all that. And then he shows code, and in the code it's like abstract class node or whatever it was, I can't remember what it was. And then it had a private member, and that private member was of type node, and I've never seen that before. It is a class that is called node with a member that is of itself. And for the first time ever, I was like, oh my gosh, there's no end, there's no way to iterate. This is not like a set of 10 items. This is a set of infinite items. And so my mind kind of exploded in that moment. Like there's actually. What you can express is huge. I can see what memory looks like. I can see this kind of hopping through space. And I just remember being just so blown away because up until that point, everything was just all right. I have a list of 10 items. I have a list of 20 items, right? It was very rigid and small, and the things I built were really small and trivial. And all of a sudden I felt like I could build like anything in that one moment. And it was so amazing. I just remember sitting in class for what I don't even remember how long those classes were anything, but I just remember being just completely, like, profoundly impacted by this notion. And so I just sat there and I watched and I had the exact same experience in heaven's Forbid by a software engineering class when we talked about the decorator pattern, where you can keep on constructing these objects in this recursive way. Not that I think that's actually a idea to do. But just watching that and realizing, like, there's so many weird and unique ways you can solve problems and like you can just. Anything your mind can think of, you can just create that. And I just remember getting just so excited about the possibility that anything is possible.

Yeah. Let's wax philosophical about a linked list. It is pretty profound for people who don't know. A node in a linked list doesn't know anything about the world it's in. It only knows about the thing it. It's linked to its neighbor. Maybe that's symbolic. It's a metaphor for all of us humans. There's billions of us on this planet and we only know about our local little network. And it's kind of beautiful. And you realize in that little simple data structure, you can construct arbitrarily large systems and they're like routes that go through memory. And then of course, that's where you get all the programming languages that allow you to dump junk into memory and have memory leaks and therefore create infinite pain as you try to figure out where that unfreed memory is. For me, yeah, probably. It's so beautiful the way you put that. Linked lists are indeed beautiful. Recursion also for me, when I finally wrap my brain around what it means to write a recursive function.

What was the. What was the thing. What was the, like the one that taught you? Because I think we all probably. You probably did factorial where you like, you know, just do like a quick factorial of it. It just doesn't hit home. What was the thing that kind of made it hit home?

I don't remember the first.

I remember my first. How do you not remember your first? It was magic.

I've had so many that just.

You are a Lisp guy. You're probably pretty used to the recursion.

Yeah, all I remember is just surrounded by sea of parentheses. I mean, that's really probably. When I. In high school, I think it was either Java or C. Wow. How do I not remember that? It must have been C. And then college it was the generic bullshit Software engineering classes were Java. But then the renegades, the cool kids were all using Lisp. That's when you're doing the AI, the quote unquote AI. At that time, that was Lisp. If you want to write a chess engine, you would use Lisp. And so for me, probably the moment I really fell in love with programming was Lisp and writing like Othello programs and chess engines, all kinds of engines that play a game. And then I could play against that thing, and that thing would beat me. The joy of being destroyed by the thing you've created. And, oh, game of life too. Cellular automata. That's when I built that in all kinds of programming languages. That's less about programming languages and more about the system you create. And that just filled me with infinite joy. Having now, similar to the linked list situation, creating a system where each individual cell only knows about its neighbors and operates in a very simple rules. But when you take that system as a whole and allow it to evolve over time, you can create infinite complexity. So I just. Man, those are many pothead moments where I'm just like looking at the beautiful complexity that can be created with cellular automata. That filled me with just infinite joy, for sure. But yeah, all I remember is parentheses. So my first memories of my first are drowned in a sea of parentheses.

Oh, man, mine is, I have. Well, first off, mine was in Java. So my first was a little bit more rigid, kind of a corporate, you know, a corporate experience.

But cold, meaningless.

Yeah, I was in a lab. Everyone was using CentOS at that, or CentOS or however you say. I always call that CentOS. The fresh maker.

Yeah.

And so it's just like I'm in this very cold.

That's nice.

Thank you. Yeah, I'm in like this cold, rigid environment with my Microsoft keyboard programming away in Java and I still, I have just such this memory of despair because I love programming. This was after the linked list and I cannot figure out recursion. And so I go to, you know, the university store and I buy a book and it's ditel and DITEL learn Java and it has a section, recursion. So I open it up and I start reading it and it just doesn't hit home. And I'm like, I'm spiraling into this, like, kind of. I, maybe I'm not a programmer, maybe I'm not worthy enough to enter into this circle of people who can figure out what, what the heck recursion means. And so ditel. And DITEL is like, I still remember this. Their phrase, their exact phrase was, every young budding developer solves this recursion program. And it was the Tower of Hanoi. And guess what? I don't know if I can solve the Tower of Hanoi. To this day. It's. It's like a very hard recursive problem. And I just sat there and thought, oh my gosh, I'm not going to make it. And I sat there in the lab for 8 hours, 10 hours doing these things. So Worried. It's the week of recursion. We have to do a lab assignment. I'm not going to be able to do it. And I just remember being, like, genuinely worried about that. And then because I always. My big problem was like, okay, do factorial. Why not just use a for loop? Okay, what about Fibonacci sequence? Why not use a for loop, right? Like, I don't understand what's the purpose of recursion? I don't understand it yet. It's so powerful. Why it looks like a really complicated for loop. And so I just not understand it. And then lab came that day, and it was. I'm going to give you a 2D array. You have to read from a file. This is what a starting position looks like. This is what an ending position looks like. This is what a wall looks like. I want you to find me a path through the maze. And so I just sat there. I'm like, okay, well, I guess I can just go up and I can create, like, a visited grid that so I know not to visit these places anymore. And then all of a sudden just started clicking. I'm like, well, wait a second. I don't know the maze. But if I just go up, right down and left and hop back every time I been to that square, don't visit it. Like, I can just. It will just go forever. And I realized in that moment, I'm like, I actually understand. I've understood recursion this whole time. I just never had a problem in which it actually made sense to use. And that was like, my big downfall is that I was measuring my understanding with the problems that I had available, which were just, you know, list traversal, which is not a good use of recursion. And so I just. I just remember that freeing. Oh, man, recursion. It was a great moment in my life.

I mean, it does require, to be fair, a leap of faith. Because people will tell you, those conformist, dogmatic Java instructors will tell you that this is, you know, that's important to understand recursion. But it takes a leap of faith that this is something. This is a different way of looking at the world, and it's a powerful way of looking at the world. I actually remembered when I think I first. I think I remember my first now.

All right.

I think it was dub first search for one of the games, maybe Othello, something like that. And for that, implementing recursion, understand that you can search trajectories through the space of states and do that recursively. That was Mind blowing. Just imagining.

You can just see the possibilities.

Yeah, just like numbers flying. It was like the Beautiful Mind. And then. And that's when I also discovered conspiracy theories. And I just saw. I saw the truth. Okay. Yeah. So what were we talking about? Oh, what was the most painful aspect of programming for you? Like what, what memories do you have of deep, profound suffering in terms of programming? In the early days, I would say.

The biggest one that I can really hold on to had to be one of two experiences. The first experience was when I was at a place called Schedulisty. And am I not allowed to say the place? I'm not sure if they're even operating still at this point, but they're in both.

Something funny about the name. I'm sorry?

Oh, Schedulisti. Yeah, they actually, the name was so bad that when you looked at their like paid for Google Ad terms that they would make sure that they're at the top of the list. The spellings were just insane because no one knew how to spell the word schedulicity. And so it was just like this. The Google optimizing for that is just hilarious. Uh, but okay, go back to the thing and the, the thing that kills me the most about programming, what I actually considered the worst aspect of programming is when you know everything. And so when I was at this job, it's just every single day I'd come in, there were no surprises, there was no questions. I didn't understand the code base. Sure, that's fair. I didn't understand all the things about the code base, but I knew I was going to go in, I was going to generate some sort of object from the database, I was going to take that object from the database and I was just going to map it over and just display it on the web page. There's no creativity, there's nothing to it. It's very like almost factory line kind of work. And that was a very kind of difficult moment for me, which is I didn't enjoy programming because like I knew everything about it. I already knew exactly what I was going to do that day. I knew all the hurdles I was going to have to go over. There was no unknown unknowns, if you will. It was just knowns at all times. And it's just, that is for me, that is the worst part about programming is when you already know the solution and it's just a matter of how fast you can type and get it out from your head to your hands.

So the absence of uncertainty, the absence of challenge was the Pain. Yeah, that's pretty profound. Prime.

I'm more than just good looks. I want you to know that.

It's a low bar. What do you identify as? I'm enjoying asking the general question.

38 male. Male husband of beautiful wife.

Okay, you stream about all kinds of programming, but what kind of programmer are you? Are you full stack developer, Web programming. And maybe can you lay out all the different kinds of programming and then place yourself in that in terms of your identity, sexual identity as well?

Yeah, I can get it. We can put it all in there. Okay. Plus, I mean obviously those two are very, very tightly coupled.

I have seen you like on the border of sexually aroused by certain languages. I think you got real excited about OCaml or.

OCaml. Let's go. Thank you, Dylan Mulroy. Okay. Wow.

Yeah, I did not expect that that escalated quickly. Anyway, what do you identify as?

Okay, so first let's do the previous or the in between question first, which is the different kind of archetypes. I think that's a really interesting kind of question because if you go on Twitter or you're new, your thoughts are probably that there is just web programming and maybe there's some other stuff. Yeah, like game programming. But you do like game programming in JavaScript and on the web. You know, like there's this very kind of very myopic view of the programming world. And I bet if you ask a lot of people these days, like what is the most popular form of programming, they'd probably say web. If you said what contains the most amount of repos? How many percentage of repos on GitHub are web based? They probably say 90% or some huge number. But the reality is that there's an entire embedded robotics world. You know, you're familiar with the ML side of things, there's networking, there's going to be just like performance operating systems, compilers, there's just huge amounts of variation of all these different type of programmin verticals that you can be. And so we often talk about programming in perspective of web or something that's pretty narrow. And I think that's just a social construct of Twitter more than anything else. That it's actually, I don't believe it's that representative of, of the entire kind of programming world out there. And I think a lot of programming is really, really fun. There's some really great stuff. Building your own language is just a very fun experience to do. Every programmer should just do that once just to have a completely different, you know, perspective on how things work. In life. But as far as what do I do, I've always looked at myself as a tools engineer. So at my time at my jobs, typically I would start off on the UI and then they'd be like, okay, well hey, we need a library for this thing. So then I'd be the one writing like the library. So in 2012, 2013, I was writing a UI library for the web that can behave just like an iPad, so you can pinch and zoom on it, but it's still a web page because we didn't have any of that stuff back then. It was a canvas. Had to do all the like matric operations and all that stuff to kind of, you know, it felt like you're on an iPad, but it actually wasn't on an iPad. And this was iPad2, by the way. So this is a long time ago. And so every single time I got into a job, it's like, okay, hey, we need to do a library. Hey, can you work on a build system? So back then there was no grunt, there was no gulp, there was no any of those things. So I had to hand roll my own JavaScript build system. And so I always fell into these positions of building tools for developers to be successful. And I've always really enjoyed that region. So as I went on to say, Netflix spent 10 years there, I'd say the majority of my 10 years were building things for developers to use that they could be successful at their job. And so I just, I've always really enjoyed that aspect because your stakeholders and the people that use your program understand programming and they're going to say like, hey, I need this. And typically the thing that they need, they actually want. Whereas with people, people want stuff, but what they actually need versus what they actually want often are kind of like this weird separation people. You know, that's like the old Henry Ford quote, I just want a faster horse. And he's like, no, what you actually want is a car. And so it's like this, like you have to play this game of trying to really figure it out, whereas developers, it's like, I know you know what I'm doing, I know what you want. Let's figure it out together.

That's actually, that gives you a really nice big picture view of programming in general. So I love the idea of just kind of starting at the interface, like you need to pinch and all that kind of stuff and then figure out the entire thing that requires to make that happen, including maybe the side quest, tooling, how to make it more productive and efficient. All that kind of stuff. So the entirety. The entirety of the thing. That's really cool. Okay, so that means that would be full stack, by the general definition of full stack, meaning like perhaps. Yeah, versus like systems engineer. Like starting at the bottom and trying to optimize a certain kind of specific thing without seeing the big picture of what the resulting interface would look like. And a lot of people in web programming, they never go beyond the front end of how the thing looks. They kind of always assume there'll be somebody, some grunt in the shadows in the darkness of the basement that will implement the backend.

Some guilfoyle out there will be doing the backend. Yeah, I like to call myself a generalist, just to kind of give some ideas is, you know, at one point at Netflix, I built the WebSocket connection. So for TVs, how WebSocket works is code I just wrote. And so I, you know, built the framing thing. And before that I was doing stuff with memory. And before that I built a UI for a tool. It's just like, I can just do the thing. You just tell me the thing to do and I'll just go do the thing. I don't worry too. I don't try to get super good at one specific activity. Like, I don't want to be a Kubernetes engineer who's the world's greatest deployer, but if I had to go learn Kubernetes, I'd go learn it and learn how to deploy some things and then hopefully move on to, like, the next thing, if that makes sense.

I posted about the fact that I'm talking to you on Reddit and there's a lot of wonderful questions somebody mentioned that I should ask you about DevOps. Can you explain what DevOps is? Is it a kind of special ops of programmers? Is it Seal Team, 6 of developers? What's DevOps? Can you define? What are you a DevOps engineer?

Well, people keep telling me DevOps isn't real. There's actually. You want platform engineers, cloud engineers, infra engineers. I just often think, I think the easiest way, if we're doing like just kind of like some basic nomenclature, it's just DevOps are the people that make sure that when you launch a service and all of that, it doesn't just disappear. Right. It's all the kind of backbone of being able to operate something at scale. Like you really don't. If you think about, if you're just writing a mom and pop, like website, people that do PHP that are doing WordPress and all that. They're going to build something, they're going to hand it off to, I don't know, Lenod, DigitalOcean, some company. They don't really need a really complicated build deployment, all this. It's just someone with a simple website so they can sell their goods and so they don't really need that. And so that's kind of how I think of a DevOps is when things need to scale, that's kind of the person you hire.

Yeah, those people are actually amazing.

Yeah.

Of the time I spent at Google, it's like, oh yeah, yeah, there's all these fancy machine learning people, but the folks that are running the computer, the infrastructure basically, that make sure the shit doesn't go down, they're like wizards and.

They'Re essentially incredible, like vertical of job. And obviously I'm using a very broad term to describe, I'm sure like a bunch, you know, because making sure stuff doesn't go down. You could also say that's like an sre, right. Site reliability, engineer, whatever. You know, the ones that wear the, the bomber jackets at Google. And so when you say DevOps, I think people get very particular about terms specifically in this category. They're like, well, actually you're mentioning infrastructure engineer versus, you know, versus site reliab engineer. It's just like, okay, yes, I hear you. But generally when someone thinks DevOps, they think somebody that manages the servers and their life cycles and the reliability, there's DevOps. Is it real? I'm not sure.

Okay.

Did Vercel kill DevOps?

Question mark? Question mark? Wow, that's. You're almost a journalist. That's a headline. Let's go back to the beginning.

All right.

Baby Prime. So you mentioned Netflix. You've.

I worked at Netflix, by the way.

For people who don't know who the Primogen is. He mentions the fact that he has been very successful and has worked at Netflix and basically every other sentence correct.

Almost as much as I mentioned neovim.

Oh, great. Tell me more about neovim. No, please don't. So, Baby prime, at the very beginning, you've had one hell of a life. And I think it's inspiring to a lot of people. You've gone through a lot of painful low points and like you mentioned, you've come out of that to become a successful programmer and a person that inspires a huge number of people to get into programming and just to find success in life. So maybe I would love it if you laid out just your whole life journey from the Beginning.

So I guess if we're going to start with this whole journey, I think it's probably best to start when I was about 4 or 5 years old, that was the first time I was ever exposed to pornography. And it's kind of just earwormed me for a large portion of my life. And so I don't think there was a day that didn't go by from when I was a very young lad all the way up until I was 20 some years old where I didn't think about porn on the daily basis. And so it's just like every single day, even at that young. And so it's just a very mind consuming, time consuming, thought consuming thing that kind of plagued me from a starting at a very young age. When I was seven years old, my dad died. That was kind of a really tough period of life. I still think about this time that I went over to China and there's kind of some rules that we were given and one of the rules was just like, hey, don't talk about God and if you do use the word dad instead. And I was just like, okay, dad. It was like the first time I said that word in like 17 years or some amount of time. Like it was like so weird to say that phrase. And I was just like, oh, that was just the strangest thing I've ever said in my entire lifetime. It just felt so weird. So kind of rewind. As I got older, obviously was very good at computers, good at accessing porn, of course. Played video games on the Internet. Fun, fun. Kind of like side quest story. I think the guy's name is Lord Tok on Twitch. I can't quite remember his name, but he built this game called Grail G R A A L and Grail Online. And when I was a young lad that it was just like Zelda, except for it also had a level editor and it had like a C like language. And that's how I discovered how to program is I looked at these symbols and figured out what they meant and then I was able to make things happen in the game. And that was like a. That's my introduction into programming. So thank you. That guy, whatever your Twitch name was. But all right, so keep on going. As I got older, I was super bad socially. I was not a very great social person. High school was brutal. Got made fun of a lot. Really didn't enjoy. I wouldn't say I had a great time during high school. Definitely felt very out of place or offset or maybe misplaced, if you will. I'M not sure what the right word is. And so of course at that point I just always wanted to. I wanted to be accepted, to fit in and all that. I did forget to say one side story. After my dad died, my brother, older brother, he got. And I started getting into drugs. And along with that, he exposed me to pot. So at 8 years old, I was smoking some marijuana for a while there until like maybe 11 or 12 and took a break. And then again did a lot of that as I got a little bit older. But so I kind of got a lot of these exposures fairly young, 16, 15 through 18, a lot of drinking and all that. When I graduated or as I was graduating high school, it's just like I had such sadness, if you will. I was very sad about how everything went. Tried to commit suicide. Obviously it was a very poor attempt. And I'm still here today. I'm very happy about that aspect. I'm glad that I didn't follow through with anything. Had to go to the hospital and all that. And when I was done, I just still remember kind of coming out of the hospital and at like that moment, it's kind of like something broken you. Have you ever read the book Wheel of time? It's 14,000 pages or something like that, but right around page 12,000, Rand has to intentionally kill a girl, the main character. And that's like the moment he breaks and he gets into like hard Rand. Quindalar Rand, if you will. For those that know, Will of Timer will appreciate all that. For those that don't. Very confusing. And I understand not the Amazon movie show. Not that. Not that Wheel of Time. So now that we kind of go back onto it at that point, it's just like something kind of broken me. And it's just like I just didn't care anymore. So all the kind of social awkwardness, if you will, all that kind of just died away with me. But also so did everything else. And so I started using a bunch of drugs. Lsd, mushrooms, meth, did a bunch of math, did a bunch of that stuff, and then went off to college and continued to do a bunch of stuff. I took too much acid to where for like quite a few years I had like little squigglies on the side of my eyes whenever I'd walk by high contrast objects. And so it's just like that whole period of life was just kind of marked by just poor decisions. And then sometime when I was about 19 years old, somewhere in that range, I just had this one evening where it's just I felt the very dramatic and real presence of God. And it's just like I kind of had this choice, like Frodo on a razor, where it's like, if I go either way, I'm going to fall off and I need to change my life. You just, you get to make the choice now, do you want to do that or not? And so I remember going, okay, I do want to change my life. Like, I don't like this experience. I don't like what I'm living. I am still very sad. I still feel very desperate. I still feel all those things. I'm just, like, pretending to be this other person. And then I just went to sleep that night. Nothing changed in my life. Everything was still the way it was. I woke up the next day the same person. And I was just like, oh, that's just like such a strange, weird kind of experience. And I just went about my day. And then I remember, I think that evening I looked at porn. And all of a sudden I just had a conscious. I just like this deep, profound, like, shame. And I was like, I've never felt shame in my life, right? Like, I have no idea what's happening now. And then all of a sudden, when I smoked pot, I just felt deep shame. And when I hurt somebody or did something wrong also, it's just like I got a conscious from that evening. That's what kind of my gift was, if you will. And it's just like, at that point, I didn't even have a choice. I had to change my life. Because for whatever reason, I've kind of been changed in a moment. And so from there, I started actually trying in school. I always kind of joke around that I got 2.14 in high school, I had a teacher handwrite me a note saying I was the worst student she's ever had. All that kind of stuff. I was not a really great student. And then in that moment, it's just like, okay, now life's changed and I start trying to learn. I try to become a good student. And it turns out it's really hard. Like, I was really bad. I still got Cs. I went and took pre calculus and failed pre calculus. And I'm like, oh my gosh, I used to be the smart math guy and now I'm kind of the idiot failing. And so it's like I'm just questioning myself and all that. And I spend hours upon hours in. In like a studying math learning center. And then just at some point, years into this journey, I'm like a year and a half into this journey at this point it's just like something clicks and I go from being the worst person to just immediately becoming the best. Everything after that, it's just, I don't know what happened. All of a sudden I was the best person at math. I started going into my computer science classes. I just really got everything. It's just like everything at just years after trying just all of a sudden became easier. And I'm not sure if it happened over the course of weeks or when the easier started, but it was just first predicated by just a huge amount of difficulty. And then this is kind of where I started. Really desiring and loving. The process of learning was when things started getting easier after all those years because I just was motivated by this desire to do something, not, not thinking it was going to get any easier. And then all of a sudden it just started getting easier and it was great. And that's kind of really where I guess I started having the biggest parts of my life change at that point I started really, really, really wanting to never look at porn again. Because every single time just such shame. And I really wanted to stop. And that was by far the hardest addiction to quit. Like smoking cigarettes was also a really hard addiction to quit. Shockingly hard addiction to quit. But porn by far was just the worst of them all. And then I think about 22, I was finally done with all kind of addictions, if you will. And then for a year I just, I just worked and all that. And I think right around maybe it's 21 and 3/4 somewhere in that range, I'm not really sure where I, I stopped all the addictions part but. Or at least the hourly addictions. And then at some point, six months later, a year later, met my beautiful wife. Things just started falling more and more into place. I loved more and more work. I loved programming. I started programming like 12 hours a day. I watched social network movie. And after that I was just like, I'm doing a startup. And so like that night I started my first startup and I was just like. So it was in PHP by the way. PHP, yeah, 5.2 or something like that. It was great, great times and I was just so motivated to do that. And I would just program for. Sometimes I'd program for 24, 36 hours straight and I just like non stop, just that's all I wanted to do at all points. I think my wife got a little sick of me. I wouldn't, she would be like, can you drop me off at school and I'd be like, no, I'm programming. I was not a very nice. You know, I didn't think through things that well. And I was just so into it and I just did it nonstop. And that's kind of like how I became me is that story, if that makes sense.

Let's try to reverse engineer some of the pain and some of the triumph. You made it sound easy at times. Let's try to understand it better. Maybe when you were 7 years old, what do you think about the pain you've experienced there losing your dad? What do you think? What kind of impact did it have on you? What kind of memories do you have of that time?

The best way I can kind of put it is that I just never knew what a dad was. I was young enough that I could kind of maybe repress or just even have the capability of remembering things long term. Because I know most people don't remember a lot from when they're young. And so I'm not exactly sure I probably as at one of the best possible ages if I'm going to lose a dad. To lose a dad, you know, if you're going to lose one, if you're 11 or 12, it's like a terrible age. That's what my brother was. And he fell into drug addiction and never got back out. And so I just kind of have more of like a fuzziness and just kind of a longing that I just wish I had a dad.

What impact did that have on your evolution, on your life sort of having that longing?

I think that's why I was so bad socially in the sense that I was looking for approval. Right. Like something. I needed approval. I think a lot of people kind of desire that approval or that loving figure. And I just didn't have that. And so I think I just looked for it and everything else. Right. Like if I to psychoanalyze my actions during the time, it's not like I was actively thinking that. But yeah, I just always wanted something to fill in whatever that was. I felt.

I think a lot of people listening to this will resonate with your experience in high school. Like being the outsider, being picked on, struggling through a lot of different complexities at home. What advice would you give to them?

The worst part about high school is that you're surrounded by a bunch of people your age and it feels eternal.

Yeah.

You don't think like the people that are around you, you feel like are the people that will be there for the rest of your life. At least that's what I kind of like, I thought, and I didn't really even realize this until many years later, that they are going to be some of the least consequential people in your life. Which is very shocking to kind of think about, especially if you're in it right now. Yeah, right. Like right now they are the everything that your experience is your whole reality. And then one day it all stops and then real life starts to begin.

Yeah.

It's just. That's such a shocking thing. And if I could just tell myself that maybe I would have been a bunch different person.

That's so beautifully put. I mean, it is a. It's like a trial run, you know, like at the beginning of video games, there's a little tutorial. That's what that is.

Yeah.

And actually that should be a chance to try out, to take risks. Because real life will begin with. There is more consequences after that.

Yeah.

Here you can, you know, if you like a girl, ask her out. Try, try. If you get picked on, hit that guy back. Try out.

I'm not gonna condone punching another person.

I will beat the out of him and take some jiu jitsu and learn how to take him down. And then, and then, and then that girl that rejected you will be like, maybe I'll give that guy a second chance. Be a bad. It's a chance to try stuff out. This is a very motivational speech. Kicking ass.

It is true there, I mean, there is something very true about that that I think especially I. I mean, I have no idea what the girls experience of high school would be like, but as a guy, there's definitely a lot of like physical requirements in high school. There's a lot of physical measurement. At least where I grew up. I think that might not be true in all high schools, but if they're filled with boys, it's probably true. And so it's just like, yeah, it probably does help to do those things, to go to bjj, to do any of these activities. Because even if you don't ever kick someone's ass, just having some level of confidence in yourself is probably a very valuable thing. But just remembering that this is such a short, tiny moment in your life is just like a huge help.

I mean, the way you phrased it is exactly right. That's what it feels like, that these are the people that will be with you for the rest of your life. And this is the whole world. And so that means that there'll be just tremendous amount of impact if somebody picks on you or if you fall somebody somewhere low in the hierarchy, in the status hierarchy of this high school, that means you'll be low in the status hierarchy of the world and you're fucked for the rest of your life. And that carries a tremendous amount of weight, which is why psychologically it's extremely difficult to be. I think it's understated often by parents, by society, how difficult it is to be a high schooler, how difficult psychologically it is, how it actually makes sense that some people would suffer from depression and be on the verge of suicide. It's very, very difficult.

Yeah, I think it's even I, you know, people always say, back in my day, you know, blah, blah, blah. I think it's genuinely harder today than it's ever been in the sense that when I was a kid, there was a qualification to people, meaning this is a cool guy. This is not a cool guy. Today, there's a quantification of people. You have 32,514 people following you. You have 12. Like, there are people can visually, they can inspect your exact social value on whatever platform you're on. And that has to be just so much harder. And I can imagine that there's a lot of just so much weight put on that that it feels probably way worse and way more damning to be uncool because you have an exact number of how uncool you are. Yeah.

The challenge there and the task, the quest is to remember that just because your social circle on social media and in high school thinks you're uncool, it actually might mean you are cool. And you need to find that cool and grow it and let it flourish so that when real life begins, you can fucking come out of the gate firing on all cylinders.

That's a great way to put it.

I think, if anything, high school is really bad at picking out the cool people. Whatever the system, the hierarchy that forms it is so it's such a basic bitch hierarchy. Like, you're good at very generic shit. That's how you rise.

Your parents bought you an expensive car.

Expensive car, Right. Materialistic shit. Yeah, exactly.

It's a greedy search. See, they didn't have a proper search, so they're just hitting that local optima.

But the heuristic, I mean, even the objective function for that greedy search is just a really shitty one.

Yeah.

Where those people that win the game of high school are very often not going to be the people that win the much more exciting, beautiful game of life. So do epic and try stuff out. The weirdos are the Ones that are going to succeed, the weirdos in high school, probably because they also get bullied and they get to be tormented more psychologically and get to explore their own mind and think through what it means to be a human being more. Because if you're winning in high school, you're not being challenged.

Yeah.

You're not self reflecting. You're not trying out. So there is some degree to like being tormented as long as it doesn't break you. The porn addiction, that's another powerful one that I think will probably resonate with a lot of people. And it's interesting you say that's one of the hardest addictions to overcome.

Let me say it this way. Some addictions have a much bigger societal look, and porn is just not one of them, which makes it super hard. None of your friends are going to cheer you on if you go on Twitter and say, I quit porn. They're gonna be like, well, that's good for you. But not everybody, you know, not every, you know, no one makes that argument with meth. Right. No one's gonna be like, well, not everyone has to quit meth. Okay. It's actually a fine industry. And people who, you know, are the ones producing it, they're good also. Right. Like, no one's gonna make that kind of argument. Whereas with porn, you're gonna have like a whole thing and friends. Friends are gonna think you're dumb for doing it or whatever. It's like you have. It's a much more difficult one in just like that. So it feels accepted.

And I think it's also an addiction you can practice, participate in privately and hide it from the world. There's certain addictions that are harder to hide from the world for prolonged periods of time. And porn addiction is probably one you can just have for many years and it can deepen. That's probably like a serious issue. Boy, am I glad I grew up before the Internet. Because porn is so accessible, so easy to go deep into that addiction. I mean, what can you speak about? What impact it had on your life, Maybe some of the low points, but also how to overcome it.

I'd say as far as impact goes, is that you will have such a long and broken look at women by the very like, I can. Again, I'm only speaking from a male's perspective that porn in its just like most basic thing is that you use another person for your own desire or your own want. It's not something that is deeply needed. There's no need. There's no like, need for porn. It's purely a want based activity or a lust, however you want, whatever word you can fill in there. And it is purely an objectifying activity, like someone else is on display for your own enjoyment. And so I think you carry this around. Like I do think that the women that I dated during high school or the women after high school and college, like I looked at them as a means to an end. I think porn greatly kind of shifted that kind of perspective in my head that I did not give the value that was desired to another person. It really devalues humanity just in general is my perspective of it. And then it makes people into commodities. And I don't think people are commodities. I think everyone has value. And so during that, for me, that's kind of like the great effect of porn is that it's just consumerism gone wild or materialism, maybe you could ask argue gone wild. And it's extremely hard to quit, just like you said, because I can look at porn and then I can go out to lunch. You know, no one's gonna know. No one's gonna have any ideas. Like, it's a very private, it can be very short session. It doesn't have to be something that takes like, you know, you can't take acid then go out to lunch, right? You're gonna be, you're gonna, your whole day is gonna be a very different day. And so there's a, it's very quick, easy, accessible. And then obviously there's like all the, like the science and statistics. Like men make worse decisions for some period of time after looking or being exposed to is. There's the whole dopamine effect. That's just like you constantly need more and more dopamine. That's why people typically don't just watch five minutes of porn and call it a day. That's like, you know, the hundred tab joke that's always made on the Internet. It's because you, it's just this, this constant dopamine cycle you're constantly doing. And all that stuff is great to say. And I'm sure statistics and science and all that stuff is really great arguments for some amount of people. But for me it just comes down to like, is it really a good thing to do? Like, is it really actually something we want is to value people in such a profane or kind of just like disregarding way? Like I just really think it's just bad for the soul. Even if all the stats said it was great for you, I still say it's actually bad.

Yeah, you have to look at the long term big picture psychological impact it has on your relationships with human beings in general. That's my. More generally than just porn. My problem with the quote unquote, sort of manosphere is I think sleeping with a bunch of women is great, wonderful. But the problem is making that the primary objective of your life, similar with porn, is you devalue one of the most awesome things, which is intimacy. That's true for deep friendship, that's true for relationships. I think porn does that like in its purest, darkest form, which is like the thing that matters is the sex, not the, like the deep connection with another human being. I think again, going back to high school and the, the manosphere, the objective function, if it's to get laid, which helps with status and confidence and all, all that is wonderful, I think again can be an addiction. But the thing that's even more awesome for a lot of people is a deep friendship or deep intimacy with a, with a romantic partner. Like, that's also awesome. And both of those are great.

It's objectively better to have like, I would say that there's no universe that exists or there should be no argument possible that exists that a guy who has meaningless sex has a better or a more meaningful life than say, me and my wife who've been together for 15 years. We have a very like, I can depend on her in all circumstances. Whereas if you live that other life, it sure, it could feel great, but there's no meaning to it. There's no actual real value to it.

That's absolutely correct. I do think that getting laid can have a tremendous positive impact on the confidence of a young man. I think just there's a certain number of sexual partners from which you can collect a lot of data and it can free you about like not to be so nervous about the opposite sex, not to be so nervous about human interaction. And that will allow you to see the world more clearly and to actually find that one partner that with whom you could be deeply intimate with. Sometimes, like the nervousness around like this societally constructed, like, value in getting laid can cloud your judgment. And if you just release that by getting laid a bunch of times, then like you could see the world clearly that getting laid is not as nearly as important as you said as finding the right human, including, I should put in that pile, not just like a romantic partner, but like friendships, like deep, lasting friendships.

I mean, I think you're right that our society puts a lot of emphasis on getting laid. And I'm sure that's true. Among any group of males throughout any point in history. I'm sure that's a very common joke that's never actually like never stopped at any point. So. Yeah, I'm. I'm sure that exists. But. And there's. There's probably some truth to the sense that after you've, you know, who was it? Jim Carrey? I hope that everyone can get rich so they realize that money solves none of your problems.

Yeah.

Like the realization that this thing that society told you is hyper important is actually not the important part. Like it is a very important. It's a great sign that your relationship is healthy. Like if me and my wife were to have no sex at all for months on end, like something's gone wrong. Which means what? You know, we are no longer like on the same plane. Something, you know, but it's not also a good identifier. Just because you're having a lot of sex doesn't mean you're having a good relationship. And so it's kind of like a unique. Kind of. I forget the. The right term here, but it's a unique way at looking at the problems. And our society puts so much emphasis. And maybe that's why porn was so hard to quit. But I. My guess is it's just all the dopamine effect that it is. But for me, like the most important part and the thing that actually has real reward is having that having just my wife. I do not look at. I try. I desperately try not to look at any other woman. I'm hopefully not going to get caught. Mark Zuckerberg at the White House like that, you know, like, I don't look at porn. My wife has complete confidence in me that there is not going to be a situation in which she has to question me in any kind of sense. And that builds a much more deeply, I would argue, a very deep relationship because the trust is that much bigger. I think the deepness of the relationship is probably proportional to the trust you have in each other. It's very hard to have a deep relationship with no trust.

Yeah. And a. Probably a prerequisite, maybe a component of trust is vulnerability to where you like, take the leap of being vulnerable with another human being. And that vulnerability, when reciprocated, builds this really strong trust. And it's a beautiful thing. Yeah. I personally just given my position, that's even more challenging being vulnerable with the world. And there's a bunch of people out there that want to hurt you for it. But I think it's worthwhile anyway to be Vulnerable.

It's always worth the risk, is always worth it in. In some sense. Like obviously everyone has a different kind of life they have to filter through their actions with. Right? Because the person that has no say, social following or anything, their risk reward profile could just be local impact, which could be just as, you know, damning or harming to them. And so it's always worth the risk though, in my personal opinion, because, like, finding my wife has been obviously the most impactful or changing thing in my life, so. Or second most. I'd argue that one night with God would probably be the most impactful thing that led to everything else, but then the wife would be the next most impactful. I mean, I'm like cleaning up after myself and stuff now. Changed man. I'm a changed man.

Can we try to reverse engineer that moment of you finding God? What is it at 19? Because it feels like that was a big leap for you to escape, to escape the pain, to escape the addiction or the beginning of that journey. What do you think? What do you think happened there?

I think it just felt like I just. There was no line that I wasn't willing to cross. Like everything was fine and just like it just. All sudden is just in that moment. It's just like I had a. I guess some sort of deep fear and understanding. Like I am going down a path. Is this really the path you want to go down? And I don't know what the result of that path would be or anything like that. I don't tend to speculate on things. I. I don't understand. I just know that in that moment I had the option and I just chose. I. I didn't want it anymore. Right. It's kind of mixed in this whole thing where it's just like I had no value. I wrapped up all my meaning or value in having sex or getting laid. I had, you know, all that stuff, all the things we just talked about, like that was where all my worth was. And that is just such a. Like a terrible place to have your wor. It's just like kind of all came to a point and I can't tell you the day of the week. I can't tell you anything other than it was nighttime and I was in South Hedges in Montana State University. Go Bobcats. That's about. Yeah, that's the sign that we do at football games. Don't worry about it. But like, that's all I can really. That's all I can really tell you because the night, that night was no more or less Special than some other night. It's just the specialness was I got at least a chance to make a choice.

Because you find in that advice that you can give to others who are probably. There's probably just an endless amount of people that are struggling with porn addiction now, young people. What advice could you give to them? How to overcome it?

For me to overcome it, I had to realize that I was taking something away from my future wife. Some people be like, oh, well, you just, you know, once you get a girlfriend, then you can stop. And it's just like, no, because you never stopped the problem. You don't stop a problem by replacing it. And so I didn't have a girlfriend, didn't have all that. I just realized that I was truly taking away from something from my future wife. And I didn't even know my current wife at that time. I didn't. She was not in the picture. I'm not even sure if she was at Montana State University at that point. And so it's just that's. Once I made that realization, I think it went from my head to my heart, which they say is the greatest distance in the universe. I finally, like, got it. And that's really where things change. So if the. The ability to say, like, what's going to help you change and all that. I don't know if there's. I don't think there's silver bullets, right? If someone could offer you a drug. I forget who says this phrase, but there's this really interesting phrase that goes something like, he was a very depressed man and he was struggling with suicide. And he kind of writes about this in this memoir. And he goes to these doctors, and the doctors effectively say, well, here's antidepressants. It's going to help you. And he says that. Well, the problem was, is that scientists told me that I could just touch my brain and make myself happy, and that's it. Like, they could reach in, they could configure some stuff, and I'll be happy. He's like, for me, it was a lot like going out into a field and being able to take a drug to see the rain. I could look out, see the rain, it would fall down, it'd be silvery, it'd be beautiful. But all the crop would still die because there's not actually any rain. I had to discover how to be happy myself. And so for me, it's like, the reason why I looked at porn is because I was unhappy. I was trying to find meaning. I was trying to find value in Something, right, Something that was supposed to finally give me this ultimate satisfaction, and it just does not. No matter how hard, no matter how much you think it will. There is no escapade, there is no pornography that will ever give you that satisfaction you're looking for. That's the reason why it's addicting. That's kind of like my call to why you shouldn't do it, but how to get out of it. I only got out of it by realizing.

I think that's really brilliantly described. You knew that this thing you're doing is preventing you from finding your future wife. And future wife could mean more even broadly, this path to a flourishing, to a beautiful life. I think there's a lot of choices we make that are just preventing us from opening the door to whatever future. I think what's really nice to do is to imagine, just like we said with high school, that there are a bunch of trajectories in life where you'll be truly happy. And you need to construct your life in a way where you have the chance to travel down those paths. And there's a bunch of addictions. There's a bunch of choices that prevent us from traveling down those paths. So just believe that you're going to have an awesome life and remove from your life the things that are preventing you from walking down that path, which is essentially what you did. It's a leap of faith that, like, if you let go of porn, that a better life is waiting for you on the other end.

Yeah, I definitely can't say how long it will take a better life. But for me, there's no way in the universe I could have had the relationship that I have without first making those steps. Because I couldn't value, like, I couldn't value my wife in the way that was proper for who she was. I would have valued her through the index or the lens that I currently was looking through. So gotta ask.

So I've never done meth. I've never done meth.

That was a great segue, by the way.

Oh, man. I don't know what the fuck I'm doing, honestly, with this interviewing thing. But, yeah, meth and lsd. You know, I did ayahuasca. I did shrooms a bunch of times. Oh, and this topic, I should say that, like, there's a lot of. On Twitter and on tech, in the tech community in general, sort of people speaking negatively about ayahuasca and some positively. I don't. I think it's. It's such a roll of the Dice like, I had incredible experiences, but I don't think I want to recommend it to anyone. It's a risk, it's a serious risk. It really is a roll of the dice that you could meet your demons and they could destroy you. Or you can meet your demons and let go of them. Or you could have experiences like I did, which is like never. Apparently I don't have demons. I'm pretty sure they're somewhere in the basement, but I've never met them. On drugs. I'm always really happy. I'm happy drunk, I'm a super happy on ayahuasca, just full of love. I don't understand, I don't understand where the demons are. But that's my biochemistry, whatever that is. And for some others, you know, one trip could be amazing and the next one could just completely destroy you and wreck your life. So I don't know what the recommendation from that is. Maybe avoid it. But then all of us die and life, you know, I tend to lean into adventure. But drugs is a, if you fuck with the biochemistry of your brain, you can really destroy yourself in a way that's going to torment you. So I would generally recommend that people avoid drugs altogether, probably. Unless you're a crazy motherfucker. Hunter S. Thompson.

What, what an intro to this topic.

I'm sorry, what's meth like?

That is, it's, it's, that's a great intro. I, I, I like, you are very correct in the sense that there is, at least when it comes to hallucinations, there is a wild variance to what you're going to experience. And there is no guarantee, there's no, you know, just because you buy the product doesn't mean you're going to have a good time, right? There's a lot of, Personally, I find that stuff to be very, I believe in the spiritual realm, right? Like I believe demons and angels exist. I believe God exists. And that kind of whole realm is like, I don't know what it opens you up to, but it's much, much different experience now. Some people be like, oh, it's just a bunch of chemicals in your brain. They all get mixed up. LSD just takes all of your pathways and they all go, you know, they all get kind of scrambled up in your brain. It's just like, yeah, the experiences are profound. I had some really bizarre, very cool, very awful. I've had all the experiences in the mall. I can just tell you that I like, I personally always say the same thing. It's like choices that I made I can never take back. I would never take that away from myself because I don't know if I would be who I am today without all those experiences, going up to it. But if you have not had that experience, I'm on your team, or at least partially on your team, maybe more severely. I don't think you need those experiences. I don't think they're going to. You don't have to put yourself through that to make a good decisions or to realize that people have value. Right. You can, you. You don't have to do that. So as far as like, what is meth like? Meth is like if you've ever done cocaine. Cocaine starts off with like a 15 minute dance party, just so intense. It's like so great. And then it just followed up by like, like a five hour, like just feeling wiggly. Right. I don't know how else to describe it. A meth is like that, except for I didn't get as much dance party or any dance party, but instead I just got that part for like. Yeah, 12 hours. Yeah. So did a lot of skateboarding, did a lot of, you know, running around.

Would you say it's a night pleasant feeling or is it more like an escape from the loneliness of life? Is it pleasant or negative in the actual moment, not the consequences, but in the moment.

So I mean, this is, this is just like a very interesting kind of area, which is that not if universally you can't say that. Often you'll find that there's kind of these two groups of drug addicts. There's those that like the, the opioids and those that like the uppers. They typically don't like. There's, there's very few people in the drug world that do both. They're really just kind of like find their side and they go for it. So will, is meth a thing that everybody's going to enjoy? Well, categorically, as you can see. And just like how people experience drug addiction? No, but for me, it's just like I had a really. It kind of like feeds into like the ADHD nature of like this, like because, you know, you kind of high energy, you're kind of like always in the moment. So it's just like you're in the moment, but it's just like, oh, I'm in the moment. You know, it's like everything's just so intense, you know, like you just want to really be in the moment. And so it's just experiencing that constantly. And so was that great? Well, some people you know, my wife always tells me this, like, being like nervous or I forget the anxiety of a situation can also be the same thing as like thrill. I forget the exact way. She's probably super disappointed that I messed this up. But it's like you could perceive those two experiences in very different lights. Some people, you know, get in front of a crowd, it's like thrilling. Some people get in front of it and it's just like the worst experience of their lifetime. They would actually literally rather die, which is a crazy thing to think about, than stand up and speak. And so for me, meth was that kind of thrilling side. But at the same time is. It didn't. It still didn't like quite give me that thing I wanted. Whatever I was looking for, I'd use it to help try to get that thing I want, but it was never giving me that thing I wanted.

Yeah, for me, I've had all really wonderful experiences. Do not recommend them. But like a YouTube policy.

By the way, that you have to say, by the way, whatever you do, do not do illegal activity.

I.

But I had great experience. But don't. Whatever you do, don't do it.

Mr. The Primogen. I have no master. I don't have YouTube or whatever. I'll say whatever the fuck I want. I'm just. But seriously, no, I don't know. I don't give a shit about YouTube or anybody, honestly. I'm just kind of careful about the words I say because. Just because I had positive experiences, I don't want young people listening to this. Think they should try the experience. I think the much more powerful message is that life is awesome even without that. That's something I definitely experiment with on the alcohol side. So for me, you know, I'm an introvert. I'm afraid of the world. Social interaction fills me with anxiety. Alcohol is definitely a thing that helps with that sometimes. But I think honestly, like, it's not even the alcohol. It's like having to do something while a person is talking to me. I could just like drink a liquid if. Yeah, there's like a social thing with a beer. It's like, yeah, huh, yeah, we're having fun. And I think it's. It work for me. It works the same as if the. If the liquid actually looks like alcohol. It does the same purpose often because like alcohol from like if you have a whiskey or a beer looking thing, it kind of sends a signal that we should be having fun. So we're socializing, right? We're fucking getting crazy. And then that means you don't actually need the alcohol. You can get fucking crazy without the alcohol. Substance. Yeah, but there is some kind of like social signaling that happens when you have a drink in your hand. So I've been to get togethers where I'm not drinking, but just doing like a fake drink situation. And I can also have fun. So I've been. But that said, you know, traveling across the world, there are times when you get to be able to don a bottle of vodka. That's very essential for the. For my line of work. But, but that's, that's sort of. That's almost like a cultural experience versus, like a necessary component of a successful social interaction, one that brings you happiness. So not drinking, I think you can have fun and not drink too. So all of this, man, I'm so careful. Saying drugs have had a good effect on my life because I think for most people, no, for majority of people, they will in the long term. Long term have a negative effect. So I think if you were to choose one or the other, just no drugs and no drinking means one day you can be the President of the United States, kids. And I should say, oh, man, that.

Is his funniest line.

Diet Coke is great.

That's his funniest line, which is you would hate me if I drank, which I just like to me, that tickles me, like to no end. Just like, oh my gosh, that is such a funny line.

Self awareness and humor is wonderful there.

But I am on your team. Like, all of the reasons why I used drugs and all that was a form. It's some level of escapism. I'm sure that's like, would be the archetype or the box I'd put that into, or the pursuit of trying to feel something that cannot come from them. It's like trying to find a meaning in your job. You can find satisfaction in what you do. Like, that is a very good thing. You can find satisfaction, be happy with what you've created. You can be, you know, thrilled by the experience, but you cannot find. I doubt you can find purpose. You know, maybe some people in specific jobs, you know, like this obviously have very broad strokes I'm painting with. Like, if you're an EMT and you save someone's life, maybe, you know, there can be purpose in that whole experience. Right. So I'm not saying all things, but like, as programming goes, most programmers, you cannot just simply find your purpose. And same with drugs. Like, you cannot find that thing you're looking for. But they are a Very great distraction. And then at some point that distraction comes with a heavy cost. I think Dr. Faust would probably know the best about the heavy costs. But it's just you're making one trade for another and at some point the bill comes due. And that bill can be very, very large.

The other moment you mentioned that I think is really inspiring is that, you know, you failed pre calculus, you really struggle in school. Like, you realize that school is really hard, and then eventually you're able to sort of persevere and, I don't know, break through that wall of struggle. Can you by way of advice figure out what happened and what kind of advice you can give to people who are struggling?

Yeah, I'll paint it in kind of more clear picture. A very fast speedrun of it is that I took pre calculus. Failed. I took pre calculus again, failed, took pre calculus again and got a C. So I took it three times. Then I took calc over the summer. So calc one in that one at the end. The final. The final was a two hour final. I finished it in 30 minutes. And that is the highest score in all of the school. And I proceeded to be the highest score in all calculus and diffieq. I was the only person out of 400 people to finish the Diffy Q final. And I got the highest grade. And so I was like, I got really good. So I somehow went from really bad to really good. And so my only the thing that I did is that I had to win. It was not a option. It was not like, oh, you know, this would be really great. It's like, I will not graduate. I will not finish my stuff if I cannot do this. And so every single day I got up, I went to my, what, however many hour class it was right after that I went straight to the math learning center, did those problems. When I got home, I just got the book and it had the odd answers in the back. And I would try to walk through the problems over and over and over and over again until I absolutely got it. And it just became this thing where just simple rote memory took over and the ability to just effectively have the times table but for calculus all stuck in my head. Inverse trig substitution, trig substitution. Doing Taylor MacLaren series. Like all those things kind of just over and over and over and over again. Eventually they became easy. They became very easy. It's just that I had to cram it in there. And some people, you know, you hear these stories where they barely show up to class and they get a's. I've never been that person. I've always been the person has to sit down, read through everything. And I'm bad at abstract concepts. I like the concrete into the abstract, not the abstract into the concrete. Very bad at talking about things theoretically, then trying to apply them. But if I can do it once, literally, then it's really easy for me to go into the abstract. And so it's just like. For me, it's just. I had. There's no substitute for the hours. So if you've. If I were to give advice, it's just that you have to have time in the saddle. Hour after hour will make you slowly better. And at first it's crushing, it's defeating, and it's not fun because you are bad at it. But then at some point, it. You're just not bad at it. If you can just do it long enough and you'll start getting okay at it. And then at some point, you might even get good at it. And when you get good at something, it feels amazing. There's like an exploratory thing, like if you're. If you've ever played a musical instrument, you stop having to think about all the little teeny things you have to do to be able to play something correctly, and you start thinking about how you can explore that space. It's like a completely different problem. And same with programming. Programming has an identical kind of feel to it. It's just like you'll cross that barrier and it becomes magical. As opposed to a chore.

Yeah. Once you cross that barrier, somehow other things become easier. But then if you want to have a truly successful life, then you find the next barrier.

Yeah, the next barrier.

Yeah. I've always been the same. Everything has come really hard.

Yeah. I do not. I had. I've had no free lunches. Everything's just been a lot of. A lot of pain and struggle.

I think somebody said that on this topic that you think work smarter, not harder, is a phrase that you dislike. Somebody on Reddit told me this.

Yeah. I don't just dislike it. I hate that phrase.

Okay, tell me about your hatred. How do you feel?

The reason why I dislike that is that there is a kind of a hidden suggestion there, which is that you already know what smarter is, so just do that. That actually things should be easy. You should just not have to, like, try that hard. You should just do the quick, easy, obvious path, and boom, it's done. It's like, I've never experienced that in anything I've done. Everything is actually really hard. And most of the time, I don't even know what I'm doing. So therefore, I don't even know what smart looks like. And so for me, the only way I can learn how to work smart is by working very, very hard and knowing that there's no shortcuts. And then when I finally figure out what smart is, when I work smart and work hard, it is that much better.

I think there's a deep, profound truth to that.

There's a lot of these phrases that just drive me nuts in our society.

But that one is, sorry. That one is really accepted if we can just linger on it, because it really bothers me as well. So one, which is a really nice thing you said, the presumption there is things should be easy, and you're a failure if you don't see the easy path. That's kind of the implied smart dog.

Why are you putting in all those hours?

And so it makes a lot of people that struggle feel like they're a failure. Yeah, because, like, I don't see it. And then the choice to have, well, I'll just go with the, with the late. I'll just be lazy. And then maybe the profound truth will come to me somehow. And, and yeah, I think. I don't think I've ever. And I don't think I've met great engineers that find the smart way without the extremely hard work. The annoying thing about those great engineers is then looking back, they forget the hard work because they remember all the joy they now are experiencing from all the efficient smart work they figured out how to do. They forget. So when they give advice, they give the stupid fucking advice of, well, just do it like, you know, the easy way. Yeah, and here's the easy way. But no, no, no, no, no. You have to put in the hours like, you know, musical instrument is a beautiful example of guitar and piano. I've put in I don't know how many thousands of hours. And now when I'm explaining stuff, jiu jitsu as well, I'm. I sound like. I sound like one of those people, like, just, you know, just relax. You know, in jiu jitsu, by the way, just relax is a really wonderful thing for physical endeavors like piano and so on. But to learn how to relax your hand, how to relax your mind, your body, and use the, whatever, the biomechanics of your body to apply the correct kind of leverage and the timing and all that, that takes thousands of hours of learning. Just to learn how to relax takes a lot of really hard Work in jiu jitsu. That takes many months of getting your ass beat over and over until you, like, you know, ride the bus home crying, your. Your ego completely shattered and destroyed. And then, like, a little element is figured out late that night or next morning. And from the depression, there's this little plant that grows this flower of insight, and you use that insight to then get your ass kicked again all next fucking month and year. And then you grow and grow and grow. And from that, you discover how beautifully simple jiu jitsu is. Or judo is just speaking for myself, or piano or guitar. And then, yes, the profound truth or the mastery of a skill feels simple when you finally arrive to it. But the path is, for most people, is. Is going to be a hard one.

Can. Can I. I think I should make an addendum to the phrase. I think the phrase should be work hard, get smart. Nice.

That's a T shirt.

That's what it should be.

Yeah, agreed. Okay, that was a tangent of a tangent.

Can I say one more phrase? Cultural phrase that I absolutely hate?

Yes.

The journey is better than the destination, right? Everyone's heard this, right? Just take one second to apply what that means. That means forever. Starting from now, you are only going towards a place that's worse, right? Like that. That literally is what it means, right? Enjoy the journey. Celebrate the destination. That's like. That should be what it would be. But no, people say these phrases are everywhere. There's these very shallow phrases that have no logical bounds to them. It's like, what does that. Why would the journey ever be better than the destination? Because you're always. I think this might even be a C.S. lewis quote. Is that C.S. lewis was like, no, this is terrible. The journey is not, in fact, better than the destination.

I love the demotivational posters. Progress moving forward is better than moving backwards, even if you're still going nowhere.

I feel that one so, so much. Being in California for a few years.

That is painful positivity. If it doesn't break you today, don't worry. It will try again tomorrow. Just a lot of really great posters.

I didn't even know this was a thing.

This is a thing.

Oh, my gosh. I want that.

Yeah.

Hey. Hi. This is the primagen. You know, one thing that I forgot to mention in this podcast, which feels just so foolish to me for forgetting, is just what a big role my mom played in my life. She had to work 18 hours a day after my dad died. She really made her house be able to survive. I always looked up to her and I always thought her amazing and she really was the reason why when I decided to get my butt kicked back in gear. And she's just someone who I looked to as like an internal kind of inspiration for me to continue to keep on going because I really wanted to make her proud. And all those years of just high energy effort, I really wanted to make sure that she knew that I was just so dang appreciative for it. So hey, I just wanted to say thank you. Love you, mom.

For people who don't know you worked.

At Netflix, by the way.

By the way, no. How did you go from there, from the hardship that we mentioned, from the struggle, from the addictions and so on to a place where you were working at this incredible engineering company and building cool shit there? So tell the Netflix story.

Yeah, so, you know, I kind of alluded to it earlier that I wanted to do my own startup. So for I forget how long it was one or two years or two and a half years. Built a startup, PHP, jQuery, everyone's favorite languages all put together. You can solve math stuff with jQuery. So I just was like totally into just non stop doing that. This is like the height of Stack overflow. I was asking really dumb questions on Stack overflow, like what is more pythonic and then you get a bunch of upvotes and try to steal a bunch of karma away and like all the fun stuff to do. Good times. And I was just like so into it, breathing. And I just breathe it in, breathe it out and that's what I do all day, every day. And so it's just like non stop building of a startup. Ultimately that startup failed and so I had to get, you know, go get a real job.

Can you say what the startup was?

It is so wild thinking about it in the past. I. Before I tell you what it is, I want to tell one quick thing about my dad. My dad in the early 90s, like 91, 92 was building kind of like a phone card company where you'd be able to pre purchase long distance minutes. Now if you remember the 90s and about like what, 97, 98, 99, 10, 10, 2, 20, all those different things dial down the center, right? Like all those companies where you can pre purchase long distance minutes kind of came out and were very, very big. And so my dad was like six years early to that notion and ultimately his startup failed. But he was just really early to something that would catch on really, really big. Specifically in the telecommunications space. Me, as I grew up and did my own startup. I did a startup where it was text message marketing. This was in 2010, where you could receive, say, texts about various deals, all that kind of stuff. And of course, 10 years later, now you don't stop receiving texts. And text message marketing is all the rage. And so I also, much like my father, had a startup in the telemarketing space in which was just like a half decade too early.

So is it fair to say you're almost always ahead of your time at your visionary sorts?

No, in fact, I am not ahead of my time. I just got. Some would say I got unlucky on that situation. But I did see it was. It seemed so obvious to me at that time when I was doing it, 80% of phones were dumb phones. Most people had flip phones. When I went and sold via text is what the name was of that specific product. It was. And we had the short code via text too. So it's pretty, you know, pretty clever, right? Six digits. When I went out and sold it, I only had a flip phone during that time. I didn't even have a smartphone. Right. Because that would. They were kind of of untenable for a lot of people. So it's, you know, it's kind of just wild times to think about. But then after that, obviously had to get a real job. We were living in an apartment in right next to campus Bozeman, Montana. And the guy below us must have been on some. Some amount of drugs. He threatened to kill us several times with just like scream and just lose his marbles all the time. Very unhinged man. Angry downstairs man is what we call them. One time my wife dropped a battery. Double A. Okay. So not like a big. We're not talking about like a B battery or D battery. We're just talking about double A. Drop it. Pah. Land on the ground. I'm gonna kill you like crazy. Right? Absolutely unhinged behavior down there. So I had to go get a real job. We need to move out of there. We're gonna start our life. And so I worked at a small place, Schedulicity, which I kind of talked about the boredom there. Got to go to a place called Web Filings where I'm working just tons and tons of hours during all that time, I'm still trying to figure out startups did one where you could pre wish your friend's birthday messages and then it would automatically send it via Facebook beforehand. We called it Greet feed. It was pretty. It was pretty clever nonetheless, that story. I say all that story because everything that I was doing was exploring, building, finishing things, working, learning about corporate life, learning how to communicate in corporate life, being able to be successful at a job, learning about a bunch of kind of technologies that were about. And one of the big technologies during that day, specifically 2013, was RX, if you remember that one. RXJS, that's a link from C kind of ported over to JavaScript.

And for people who don't know, I guess C, what is its closest neighbor? Java is Java.

Like they obviously just took Java and ripped it off at one point. But now it's such a dynamic, interesting language that it seems like it could be a really cool bounds of practical versus not practical. It's just I'm not really into wearing pleated pants in programming at a Microsoft house.

So is pleated pants a requirement?

I think so. Okay, we'll get back to this. Can we just get back. All right.

Trick web filings.

Okay. So that's where I had to do like all the matrix matrices stuff and build systems and just kind of all that. And it really pushed me because they also wanted me to do like 60 hours a week. It was not very healthy work. Life balance is very hard work and kind of like that really hard work, going to cutting edge stuff, really understanding the world, really made it so that I was able to just be able to talk about stuff very commandingly because, you know, we had to build really complex state machines for the UI for what we're building. And so when I went and started getting a LinkedIn and all that, inevitably, just due to the fact that I've touched all these technologies and I had some sort of paper trail saying I've touched these technologies. Microsoft or Microsoft. Dang it, Lex. Pleated pants reached out. No, Netflix reached out and said, hey, like, I see you've done RXJs. You know, we do a lot of it. You want to come and interview with us? And you know, I was always told that you should never reject a kind of like a handwritten personal invitation to interview. This was way before bots, and even the bots were pretty obvious to tell that were bots. This was a manager at Netflix, Jeff Wagner, first manager ever. And he just wrote a really nice note, just like, hey, I see you're doing a lot of these things. We really need help with JavaScript. I would love for you to come interview. We even using a lot of RXJs if you're interested in that. And so I was like, all right, you know, I can come and I'll interview And lo and behold, interview went on. And I called my wife, I think, halfway through the interview, and I was just like, defeated, absolutely crushed because I said. And she might remember this, but I said, we now have to make a decision. Are we actually going to move to California or not? Because I already knew I had the job at that point. Like, I just was just knocking them out of the park. I was doing a great job on that. And so I just knew for a fact I'm getting a job at Netflix. You know, all the. There's this thing that people always get so freaked out about when it comes to interviews and all that. And I luckily somehow avoided this. I don't get test anxiety. I don't get any of that. Because when I go into these situations, my only goal is to show the things I already know. And so it's like I walked into this situation. I've been preparing for this 80 hours a week for the last, like five years. So just walk in and just. I'm just shown things. I know. And it was perfectly fitting for Netflix at that time period in the 2013, early JavaScript days on television. And so it's just awesome. Just worked out perfectly. Got hired there.

So where in California was Netflix? This is San Francisco, Los Gatos.

So if you're familiar. So classic symbol people do, which is this is San Francisco, Oakland, San Jose. Los Gatos is just like a little bit.

Yep.

Kind of a little bit below, a little bit south of San Jose. Same mega contiguous city.

Yellowstone's in Montana. Yellowstone, the show. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So is it. Is it basically like that Kevin Costner riding on a horse? Is it. Were you riding on a horse to campus or.

No, no, but I mean, I love those stereotypes, actually. I mean, to be completely fair, when I was 15 years old, I was driving around on what is now a very busy populated street, shooting gophers out the window of our car with a.22. So it's like Montana was a different place at one point than it is today. And there's plenty of parts of Montana that's still very rural, still kind of more of that old world. So, yeah, a little bit. You know, you can kind of get whatever you want from Montana. As far as, like, culturally goes. I'm not really sure the best way to put the difference between California and Montana. It's just different expectations. Like, one thing I can really appreciate about California, or at least when I say California, I mean the Silicon Valley, because obviously LA and California and the Silicon Valley, very different attitudes, very different mindsets. You can't really compare one to the other. One thing I can say that's really positive about the valley is that everybody is operating on this idea of like trying to build or create something and there's an energy to it that's like very exciting. Like, you meet somebody and they have a startup and they're working on the startup and it's very exciting. And, you know, there's a lot of negative aspects to that. And we can all agree that our entire life being commercialized has probably not been that great, but the kind of. The experience of being there and everyone's excited to build something, it's a really cool experience. Yeah, it's great.

It's really great. The excitement, the energy.

Yeah. Montana doesn't have that.

I have an admiration, a romantic admiration for like, for the shows, like Yellowstone being out in nature.

It's beautiful.

I like writing. Somebody also said Reddit is full of wisdom. Them about you. Some of it could be fake news, but something about horses and this kind of thing, like you write, you like horses, you like riding horses.

We have horses on our up. Our neighbor had much more hilly land.

Yeah.

And one of their horses broke its leg, so they had to put it down.

Yeah.

And so we just said, hey, we're on much flatter land. Like you can just have your horses in our property. And so we just have horses that run around on our.

What about milking cows? Somebody asked about cattle and. And cow.

And so I've only had open, open cows. So if you don't. Cow means girl. Open means that, hey, they've tried to get the cow pregnant. The cow did not get pregnant first try. And so they're calling that gene. They're getting rid of that gene. The cow's gonna now or the open cow is gonna now go out to pasture. Pasture for the year and then get turned into delicious T bone steaks and of various things. And so we would house open cows on our property. So no, there's no milking of open cows.

Okay.

They'd be very upset if you tried to milk an open cow because they're not. They're not milking cows. Right. You have to get like that cow pregnant. And then once you get a pregnant, you have to kind of put it into this permanent state of milking and all that. And it's a little bit more complicated than say what we did, which was just cows on eating grass and I didn't have to touch them. Okay.

Well, that's wonderful.

Reddit is not a great place for wisdom about Me. They're going to give you the craziest answers.

We will return to Reddit time and time again, my friend. So, yeah, you took the leap into Netflix. So what was that like?

It was. You know, this is one of those things where when you talk about it, people love to trivialize this because it's like, oh, you're taking a leap of faith by going into a Fang company in like, 2013. Sounds super risky. My wife was 36 weeks pregnant. We had to travel to a place where we knew not a soul. We were about to have our first kid. We didn't even have a doctor. If you don't know, having a baby does, like, kind of. You kind of want a relationship with a doctor. There's, like a whole thing that goes on there. So it was kind of. It was a really hard and great experience. So I went to a job in which their culture deck. So during this time, this is where Netflix still had, like, kind of that old Generation X feel to it. Their culture deck was hire fast, fire fast. You know, it was very in your face about, like, hey, this is how we operate. You don't meet the standards, we kick you out. So it's like, I'm going. I'm leaving a place where it's more secure to go to a place I know anybody to a job that's bold in its claims about firing everybody with a wife that's just about to have a baby. And so it's like, and I'm from Montana and you're born. Every Montanan's born with a natural dislike of California. So there's like all these things kind of flowing into it where it's just going to be like, wow, this is going to be. This is a very intense experience. And it was hard, for sure. Like, it wasn't just some easy, simple experience that we were just like, oh, well, I work now at Fang. You know, we had to kind of work through that. Having a kid was very difficult. Our first kid was. Was very difficult. You know, not having any family around to ever help you, like, you know, took a much larger toll on my wife than me, for sure.

What was the technical learning curve for you? You showed up in your plaid pants, like, dressed up.

Yeah.

And what was it? What did you have to learn about the stack? Because Netflix, I imagine, is this incredible infrastructure, has to deliver just a huge amount of data. I'm just blown away by Netflix. But also, like YouTube, these companies that have to deliver, like, serve a huge amount of, like, bits.

Netflix has it easiest out of all the companies Netflix buy, even though we have, you could say maybe we have. Maybe we beat YouTube in view hours. I'm not sure if we do, but let's just pretend Netflix has 5x more view hours than than YouTube. Whatever it is, Netflix has a fundamentally easier problem than all other companies. And let's get back to that. I'm gonna first tell you about the stack, but I'll tell you why it has a fundamentally easier problem. So when I first got there, they gave me my PlayStation 3. My boss said, go learn some code. Come back to me in a couple days and tell me what you've learned. And then I'm gonna start giving you bugs to fix.

Wait, wait, PlayStation 3? What are you talking about?

Well, I was on the TV team. I had to go plug in a PlayStation and start launching programs onto the PlayStation 3 and figure out how to work Netflix on a television device.

Oh, so like, you have different kinds of devices Y, PlayStation Threes, other different devices.

It's just 2013.

That's the device that plug into the TV. Okay, cool.

Yeah, not many, not as many TVs had Netflix, let alone what they called their Darwin app, which is their new application. So if you bought a Vizio earlier that year, you'd get their older one there. It's called plus ui. You get their older version, and so not many had the newer version. We no longer supported plus or we never actively developed on plus. We only did stuff on Darwin. And so I had to learn that whole stack. The back end or the middle end. The middle layer between the actual back end and the front end was written in Groovy. And as I went around, Groovy is. If you're not familiar with Jenkins, then you've probably never interacted with Groovy. But Groovy's is a JVM language. It's a very interesting language, but here's how it got started at Netflix.

Oh, it's Apache.

Apache.

Groovy is a powerful object oriented programming language that runs on the Java virtual machine. Released in 2007, it has evolved to become a versatile language that combines both static and dynamic typing capabilities.

All right, so the AI is kind of lying to you. Groovy is not a powerful, great language. That statement makes it seem way cooler than it actually is. You will meet 1 out of 100 people that have touched Groovy that said, oh, yeah, Groovy's great. The other 99 will be like, heavens forbid you ever have to touch that language. So when I got there, nobody, not a single Soul at Netflix, there's 40 some engineers had any idea how groovy Pretty much worked. Somehow people just hacked together these scripts and put them all on there and it worked and it was all this was before there was a groovy RX port. We wrote our own version called wx. It was a nightmare. Observables, all these things. I remember one time they told me that, oh, yeah, you know, with Rx it's really easy. You just say what you need to do. It maps out and boom, boom, boom, boom. Everything will run multi thread and all that. And I was like, oh, wow, really? So all I did was go like, observable.sleep1, because I just wanted to see it sleep and then do the next thing. And it turns out when a thread sleeps itself, no thread can wake it up. And I just turned off all of staging because I ran it like 10 times, like, oh, it's not responding. Oh, it's not responding. Oh, now it's not even coming back. Broke all of staging for everybody. So no developer could work for the rest of the afternoon because I locked up all the instances because it turns out, no, it was in fact not multi. Threaded. Every assumption we've been told is a lie. No one had any idea what they were doing. It was a wild time. And so I just simply naturally gravitated towards that because I'm good at printf debugging, I'm good at doing those things. So I was like, here, I'll just figure this out. Here, I will do this. So I had to rewrite how we do the data structure on the front end for the TV from what is called a Lolomo list of list of movies into Lolo Romo, which is a list of list of recommendation objects for movies. Why would we need to do that? Think about this. You have two lists. One has Live Free, Die Hard, Bruce Willis, because you love Bruce Willis. The other one has Live Free, Die Hard because you want tough men doing tough jobs. Well, during those days, we'd only have one way. We could show evidence why you wanted it. So we couldn't say, oh, because you liked this other movie, you'd go to that one and say the same thing. So we had to kind of add one level of indirection where we could decorate the video with the recommendation information.

Okay. So you can abstract away into the space of recommendation versus the space of movies.

Yeah. So you can't hang it off the video because obviously then it would be the same for everything that shows that same video.

So that's Amazing.

I had to do all this. And I wrote it in Groovy and I was the. I just did it. And people were like, how did you write this in Groovy? And it's just like, well, I read the language reference for a day and then programmed it. Well, what do you mean? It was a very radical language, shall we say. And so I just simply became the person that knew these things. So they just give me more and more jobs at that. And so that's kind of how I excel, being the person that was willing to do the thing that no one else was. Yeah.

Can you actually speak to the print of debugging? Like, you walk into a system and there's a lot of systems in the world like this. Like, Twitter was like this when Elon acquired Twitter. And it rolls in and there's this old janky code base that's just like a giant mess, and you have to basically do printf debugging. What's the process of going into a code base and figuring out, like, what the fuck? How does this work? What are the flaws? What are the assumptions? You have to reverse engineer what all these other engineers did in the past and the mess across, you know, the space of months and years, and you have to figure out how all that works in order to make improvements.

The thing, the reason why I've always just been good at printf debugging because one of my first kind of side quest jobs that I got was writing robots for the government when I was still at school. And so I'd kind of do this contractually for so many hours, so many hours a week. And my boss, Hunter Lloyd, great professor, by the way, he just said, hey, hey, here's your computer. Here's the robot, here's how you plug it in, here's how you run the code. Can you write the flash driver? The Ethernet driver? Can you write the planetary pancake motor? Here's some manuals. I'm missing some. Just figure it out. I'll be back. So that was government work for me. So I was like, okay, I'll figure all these things out. And I figured them all out. And the only way to really get anything out of the machine was to print. And so it's like I had to become really good at printing my way through problems. And so that kind of became this, like, skill I guess I adopted is that I can just kind of print f to bug my way through a lot of these problems. Obviously, I'm not a game developer. Probably a different world, probably should use. I Think John Carmack was on here and talked how great the debugger is. Different world. Because when I was at Netflix, there's machines that exist somewhere where on aws, I'm not logged into them. I don't even know how to log into them. I'm not even sure if I have credentials to log into them. They run once somewhere and I have to figure out what happened and why it's happening. So it's like I'm going to become. This is like, this is what I've trained for. I'm a printf debugging champion. So it's just like I could just run through these things really quickly and figure out why they're happening the way they're happening.

You're a special human. I think that's an incredible skill set to have to be able to drop in, into any code base, drop into any situation and do printout debugging, meaning like, you know, you're in a dark room and you're feeling around that room to try to figure out what the room is.

Well, I had the code, so it's like I can kind of blueprint what's happening. Like I don't understand the services or anything this that's happened. But like you can start guessing pretty quick as to what's going wrong. Right.

But then the, the print side of that helps you confirm your intuitions, test your intuitions and build up more and more information and then you start to accumulate this bigger picture from that, what the edge cases are that break the system and not. I mean, I think that just that kind of space, like that kind of situation is intimidating for a lot of engineers. Like they break down at that point. I think it really is a powerful thing to be able to come into a code base. That's generally a skill set of like very few of us start from scratch.

Yeah.

And actually this is the fundamental problem of web development and in general where they're like, I don't know what's going on. I'm going to write my own thing from scratch. Right. As opposed to like actually doing printf debugging on the space of languages, on the space of problems. Because there's a lot of wisdom and solved problems already in this code base. It's a much more important skill set to understand, to learn from the mistakes and the wisdom of the past, of the ancestors that came before and build on them as opposed to throw it all out and start from scratch. This is something obviously you see a lot with a JavaScript framework that comes out a New one every single day. So.

So I have a very great story about that, that this is what, like, I think has shaped me the most about my perspective of other devs. There's this dev and he always just wrote things in just what I thought was such a bizarre and weird way. And it was. This had to do with Falcor, so our data fetching library for Netflix. This would run on mobile, so I had to write in objective C. It had to run on television, and it had to also run on web. So it ran on everything. And me and one other person were responsible for this thing working. And the request side, where we'd have to dedupe the information that we already have, the requests that were pending, and the new data. So I had to figure all that out based on what someone's requesting and then just only optimal, optimally request the stuff that we don't have. He wrote in such a goofy way. And I'm thinking, man, this guy is just. What a goofball. So I delete it all. I start writing and I'm like, look at how much nicer this is. It's looking so good. I'm like, oh, oh, there's that one edge case. Okay, I can see why he wrote it this one way. That's not a big deal, though. The rest of my code's really great. By the end of it, I'm like, I literally almost, line for line, just reproduced what he already wrote. It's like slightly different towards my style, but I just wrote the same code and I'm like, I'm an idiot. I am the idiot in this situation because it was already a solved problem. I just didn't take the time to learn what he did. Instead, I relearned what he did by rewriting the entire thing.

I think that's a skill set that is extremely important for people to learn. I see that in myself. That's a constant struggle for myself. I when facing a code base, for example. But this applies generally in life where somebody did a lot of work to do a thing. You should invest a huge amount of time and get really good at figuring out what they did, why they did it, do a lot of print off debugging to understand what they did. It's a much more efficient way to understand a problem deeply than to start from scratch. Even though there's a constant temptation to start from scratch, because starting from scratch is fun. You do get the puzzle, solving all that kind of stuff. It's just not going to be the right thing to do. Usually pain is the right thing to do. And it is for most people painful to understand other people's code bases.

I highly recommend starting from scratch. If you want to understand a concept, you don't know how an HTTP server works, create a TCP socket, learn how to parse HTTP. It'll become very easy and you'll go, this is the reason why whenever I get a request, I have to await the text. I now understand why the text is, for whatever reason, not there. I get it. I now understand it. And so you kind of gain these new perspectives just by simply parsing something out.

All right, back to the wisdom of Redis it. Apparently there. There are memes and legends about your programming arc in Netflix. This FALCOR system. You mentioned somebody, I think it was Teege. How do you pronounce his name, by the way?

Teege. Okay, Teege, It's TJ would be his name, but we call it Teej or Telescopic Johnson.

Oh wow. So many names. You know, DDoS, distributed denial of Service attacks. You apparently were able to accomplish the simplified version of that, of just dos. That's a legend. So you basically broke down the system somehow?

Yeah, yeah.

So can you tell the story of that?

I'd be glad to. So this falcor. So there's this Falcor business, right? And I kind of. I did discover the bug before anybody else and I did report it to security and it was so bad it actually got its own name. Repulsive Grizzly attack.

Yep.

And they even give examples of how to do it effectively. What it means is that there is a request that targets both memory and CPU and will destroy. There you go. Look at that. How Netflix. The next one down was the article that was actually written. I don't get mentioned, which is a little bit upsetting considering I was the one that discovered it and told everybody how bad it was anyways and had to write the fix for it or the first fix. So this is how it works is that you can do something pretty similar, I believe with GraphQL as well. It has the same kind of danger. Any of these kind of RPC request as much or as little of the data as you would like. Frameworks are vulnerable to this kind of attack. So with falcor, what you do is you could you give it an array. This an array is called a path and that's the path to the data. But sometimes you don't want. Just like you don't want to have to write out I want movie, I want row zero or list zero or row zero, column zero, title, I want, you know, row zero, column zero, description, I want, you know, you don't want to have to write out all that. So instead you could just be like, I want, I want rows 0 through 10, columns 0 through 10, titles and descriptions. So you can write in a very compact, nice little format. And it'll give you all that data, it'll go to the server, the server will fill that all in and give it to you. Oh, dang it. List three. It only had three videos in it. So what happens when I try to re request the data? Well, I need a way to be able to tell my system that you'd have requested the data and there's nothing there. So this is called like a call this like a boxed value. So it's going to be like type something value. There's nothing there. We've already requested it and there's nothing there. They call, you know, it's like a sentinel value, if you will, a boxed value. And we have this little special flag we'd pass called materialize, meaning that when you ask for a path, we will make sure we fill it out so we don't accidentally erase anything. And at the very end we'll say, okay, the thing does, the request you've made has already been made and there's nothing there. Well, what happens if I request rows 0 through 10,000, columns through 10,000, one more item through 10,000, and then a whole bunch of properties and then ask it to materialize? Well, I'm about to go create billions of objects in the JVM and what happens to the machine? It stops running. And then we try to JSON, even if it could create them all, we then ask it that JSON serialize. It's not going to do it. It's impossible. And so that was the attack vector is a simple while loop would have taken down and held down Netflix for a very long time because one request would kill one machine on aws and so that means it would just turn it all off. And this was on the website, this was on tv, this was on mobile. Like this was profound. And here's the worst part. It was in production for years, so we couldn't even roll it back. There was no like, oh crap, let's just roll back to two weeks ago and we'll kind of fix for and figure out. No, it's like we could roll back to 2011. Like that's our option is 2011 and that's it. So we had to figure out a way forward and all that and so it was like the amount of problems that would have happened if neff. If someone would have discovered this is. Is unstable.

Just to be clear, the infrastructure that's serving the videos would shut down.

Yeah, the ui. Like you couldn't perform any actions on the ui. You surprisingly could still stream video, but you would never be able to get to a video to stream because every action you would take would be completely shut down. And so it wasn't a DDoS because you didn't need a bunch of computers to try to overwhelm the system by making a bunch of requests. One request, one machine. If we had 50 machines serving the millions of requests, it'd only take 50 requests to shut down the entire UI.

Isn't it possible to do DOS or DDOS on basically any software system? Like, defending against all the, you know, closing all those attack vectors is probably really difficult. If you take any soft, sufficiently complicated software system, there's probably so many ways to overwhelm it.

Yeah, it's extremely. I mean, this is why people use Cloudflare. I think DHH said it best, which is like, we have our website and we have a strong bodyguard on the outside. So Cloudflare has a bunch of utilities all built in because, you know, obviously this is why everyone hates all these Bluetooth devices that connect to the Internet, because they just turn into attack vectors where people use those to DOS or DDoS, other sites. And so you don't need something sophisticated, you just need a bunch of requests to come in and you can take down websites. And so that's why these fronts are really good at kind of discovering where these problems are. But DOS is a bit different because it doesn't have to be overwhelming by using resources with a whole bunch of requests. It really just means simply that there's a denial of service attack. One of them could be. There's a regex attack that existed where Cloudflare actually did it to itself and shut itself down, which is there's a regex expansion attack. We're given the right kind of regex. If you know someone's running a specific regex, you can actually provide input that is maximally bad. And that thing goes to like, super processing. It takes 10 seconds to process a single request. Then you only need to make hundreds of requests and you shut down the whole service. It's not like you need some giant machinery to make. Make 1 trillion requests. You only need just some small amount to completely destroy a service. And so there's. The web is an extremely difficult place to do it. Correct.

This is super fascinating. I do also wonder how many ultra competent, what is it? Black hat hackers there are versus sort of the good guys versus the bad guys. How many bad guys there are and what is the average. What is the distribution of skill set on the bad guy side that are constantly trying to attack?

I assume there's probably a huge number of just really simple ones, script kitties, right. Just people trying to just do things. And then there's a huge amount of like social engineering that just goes in where hacking's done not with a computer, but just by one of the classic ones. Kevin Mitnick had this one in his book, which was you'd call up somebody pretending to be like Charlene, we're doing some auditing and I think your pins out of date on file. Is it 2323 still? And they're like, no, it's 474 7. You're like, oh, thanks, Sharon. You know, boom. You just hacked them. Right? Like the classic. People love correcting bad information. This is like a standard. So like there's all these ways people hack. And so my assumption is that there are really great white hat hackers, there's really great black hat hackers. But the vulnerability space, the harp. The thing is, is that, that discovering a vulnerability and you don't let anyone know, the white hat hacker still has to make that same discovery.

Yeah.

And that's where I think the real thing is that black hat hacking in some sense has a fundamentally easier job, or at least a job in which they can take advantage of for much longer periods of time. One's the process of discovering who's breaking the system, the other one's trying to figure out how to break the system. And it seems like most software is held together by toothpicks and glue, and there is a lot of dangers in every piece.

And also the social engineering aspect, that's a real attack vector. I think that's the attack vector that will do in the long term the most damage in the world, especially as AI tooling becomes easier and easier to convince people at scale, sort of do that kind of gram email grandma. I think that's a really serious attack vector, like human psychology and all that. I kind of assume whenever there's a girl that approaches me, it's kind of some kind of social engineering project, some attack vector, some intelligence agency. In fact, I'm pretty sure we're back.

To A beautiful Mind, aren't we?

Beautiful mind.

Yeah.

I have a whiteboard upstairs that I calculate everything, everybody's trajectory and move you're.

Not wrong though, with the attack vector, especially in the day of AI. One thing that I don't think a lot of people are talking about as we integrate more and more AI, is that prompt injection is an extremely hard thing to defend against because it's not really clear how you defend against it if it's just a, you know, at the end of the day, word calculator, make word come out. If you can figure out the proper word calculator input, it might just break its bounds and start doing something it's not supposed to do. And there's a whole future where there's all these products that are going to be vulnerable to things they never thought about, like you. It's one thing where you forget an edge case while you're programming now you have to guess what people might be able to think of making something that has access to a system be able to do right and you don't have a way to reason about it. It, its reasoning came from Reddit and other words that it's read and how to put things together. Like this is a very, it's a massive space that's going to be happening. It's why I'm personally thinking don't give too many powers yet. Like we don't know the attacks that are about to happen.

Yeah, the more power we give to software systems, the more damage they can do. That certainly is the case. But the more awesome they could do. And that's the knife's edge that we all walk along as a human civilization together, hand in hand. Will we flourish or destroy ourselves? Question mark? Folks on Reddit, the good folks on Reddit demanded that I ask you about the time you broke production. Is this related to falcor? Did you break production? Is this.

I've broken production quite a few times. I've broken productions for so many stupid reasons. One time I broke production because I came up in the PHP and php. Static means static for the lifetime of the PHP and PHP was was the lifetime of every request, right? That's why PHP was so inefficient, was that every request was its own, like instance and therefore static memory was for the lifetime. I guess I never put that together. And so I had some objects that I made static because I was like, oh, I just need this for the lifetime of the request. And lo and behold, those weren't lifetime. A whole bunch of bad data got all over the place. People were showing up saying they were from all these different countries and everything was all wrong because I just whoopsie daisies. I just made a whole conundrum with that. So that was one time I did it. Another time is I took down. If you were on the. The homepage on the website waiting for Lady Gaga's video to come out and you are watching the countdown go down. If it reached zero, the billboard would freeze and it wouldn't work. If you refreshed it would work. But the reveal, the big reveal, I screwed that up and my boss got real upset and so did other people in Hollywood got upset about that one. That was like a. My bad, sorry Jeff Wagner again. I remember that one. I remember that one specifically. One time I released a bug where again on the billboard if you pressed add to my list I accidentally programmed in an infinite loop and it just. Your whole webpage would just freeze.

Are some of these bugs difficult to discover? Until you sort of.

That one seems really easy looking back on it and there was we actually during those days we had manual QA that are supposed to go through everything. So I didn't feel as bad because is my manual QA counterpart also missed it. Like we all missed it. But it was just so simple. Just press that button, boom. It just completely freezes the website polluting.

The code with sort of global variables that are holding values as PHP I think allows you to do. That's a tricky one to discover because you rely on it. But then there could be somebody else assigns a value to it.

Yeah, data races everywhere. And I just didn't understand like in my head static was like oh, this is for the life. Like I was just so locked into the PHP world at that time that I. I just made a. Just a. Just such a. Like looking back on it, it's so obvious. But during the time it was.

It's hard so in general pushing to production. I talked to Peter Levels about this. He. I mean obviously he's operating as a mostly a solo developer but he often on the website said thousands, not hundreds of thousands of people use. He often ships to production pushes to production. Meaning like just no testing, just like push to fix. What are the pros and cons of that approach? In general to you, what do you think?

It's obviously much easier the smaller your organization is. I think everyone. I think no one would argue that sentiment. If it's just you working on a singular project, it is obviously much easier for you to push directly to production because you are the only one working. You know all the ins and outs and if something were to break you would discover it. So to me that makes sense. Like, I think the way he operates is perfect for what he does. You couldn't take what he does and move it to say, Microsoft or Netflix or Google, because that would obviously it would just be a disaster just due to the amount of people all pushing to production. And so, I mean, I personally love that. I think that you have to, you have to gauge both the application you're building and its complexity and what you're pushing and how many people are working on it. I think those all go into how you can kind of do that. Because not all applications are created equal either. Like that application I was making with zooming and scrolling where we had all of our own everything. It was a very deep log, like heavy logic app. And that was regardless of what was happening on the website, most the code was library code. And that becomes way harder if you don't have a good test suite and stuff to kind of run before you push it out. Because when you squeeze that ball, you know, different things come popping out in different areas. And that's like, that's very, that's a very harder problem than say, if you're doing more of like a heavy visual one. Because a heavy visual one, you're, you're affecting just this one area's visual stuff and you can test it and like, that's normally the end of it. Whereas, you know, so it depends on like the coupling and everything. So I, I mean, I love his approach by the way. I, I have such mad respect for anyone that operates that way because it, I think is a great way. It just is so good because it kind of breaks this notion that tech Twitter has that, oh, well, you have to use all these expensive services, you need to use all these kind of things because if you don't use all this kind of stu stuff, if you're not using the latest version of React, if you're not using the latest version of this, you're going to simply, you know, you're simply not going to make it as a startup. It's impossible. And it's just like, no, no, that's not software. Like most of software isn't the new stuff. Most of software is old crappy software that someone has to maintain. And it actually is really, really great and has lots of really hard problems. And if you look at it differently, it's actually fantastic.

For people who don't know, his tech stack in terms of web development is PHP, jQuery and SQLite.

Yeah, all great stuff. I'm just surprised he still uses jQuery just given the fact that at this point on the modern web, everything is, I mean you have document, query, selector and add, event, listener, click right. It pretty much has everything you already need. It had DOM content load. Like all the reasons I used jQuery back in the day was adding a click on a button was like hard. You had to deal with IE7, IE8, IE9, like those are hard differences. Whereas now it's just so easy. I'm just surprised it's even that.

I mean, that's definitely a trade off. I have. I still use the exact same stack, php, jquery and different flavors of SQL. But the question there is, you know, you keep using jQuery because you can get the job done really fast and there's no significant performance hit that you detect. So, like, why Switch is something else. But it's always probably, as we'll talk about, good to explore and to learn.

Not all tools are great at solving all problems. And so what you think is really like the problem is, is you run into this kind of trade off, which is you have some tool belt that you're very adept with, you know, all the ins and outs. There's no unknown unknowns, but there's no surprises in this. You know what you're building, you know what you're getting into, you will go through and you will be able to solve the problem. But if you ever use a different language or a different experience, you can find that some things are able to represent states way easier in a way more efficient way and you can solve problems really efficiently in some versus the other. And so it's like if you don't take the time to explore as well, you could be missing out on something that makes you twice as good on this one specific problem, like subset. And so I kind of value being able to look at all problems. And so I don't want to get stuck on one thing though I see why people do, which is for the efficiency sake, let's just return to the.

Infrastructure, the platform of Netflix and speak more generally. Netflix, Twitch, YouTube, like anytime I use any of these services, I'm just blown away by the infrastructure it takes to deliver this service. YouTube and Twitch are unique versus Netflix, where the creators can roll in themselves and upload stuff. Yeah, so on the consumption side, YouTube has over 100 billion views a day, over 1 billion hours watch time. But on the sort Of Creator side, 1 million hours of videos are uploaded every day. 1 million hours. It's like you have to do, you have to service both and you have to deliver everything it's incredible to me. Can you maybe speak to your own intuition, just zooming out on it, what it takes to deliver that kind of infrastructure.

For me, the thing that I find vastly complicated and I can't imagine the engineering hours is how do you even create an edge in that situation? And what I mean by an edge, I mean, like when people say this phrase, if you're unexperienced. An edge is where you deliver data to be. You want that edge to be as close to the customer as possible, because that's where the data lives. And then the communication between the customer and what you're doing is really, really small. Obviously, the speed of light adds up. The amount of hops adds up. The. The amount of services that you have to remotely call adds up. They all add up and they all add inefficiencies to the system. So something like YouTube, they want to be able to serve that data as quick as possible, but their data changes constantly. And relevance is almost directly tied with the newness of the item. So it's like, how do you even cache these things out? How are you doing this? So they must have such an incredible caching network that I can't even. I can't even fathom what it takes to do this. That. That just to me is just so impressive. A million view hours in how many different resolutions with how much data? What is a million view hours? Is it 4k million view hours? Along with 1080p, along with 720p, along with 1440p? Like, that number is an insane number.

Actually, it is brilliant, what you said, which is for YouTube, often the new thing is extremely important to show to everybody. And so you can't rely on caching or trivial kind of caching. You have to deliver the new thing as quickly as possible. Yeah, I mean, it's incredible. So there's the entire system, the recommendation system that knows each individual human watching YouTube and it has to integrate into that, the new thing, while also caching this incredible cluster of possible videos that you're potentially interested in. So. And integrate into that ads. Right. In the case of YouTube and Twitch.

And so on, it's a really tough problem because you have to think, like, what is the cache hit rate on this? Because there's so. Because the problem now actually comes down to space. Like, space actually becomes a real problem. Like, how many hundreds of petabytes do they have that they have to like, okay, what do we cache and where do we cache this? Right. Like the number. I mean, I think in the terms of like gigabytes or maybe megabytes, like they have to think in, in probably versions of bytes I don't even know the name for, right? Like, it's like such a different problem. And that's why I said Netflix. Netflix has a much easier job when it comes to caching. So if you've never looked it up, it's called oca and that we know what videos we're releasing, we know what videos are hot in specific areas. It's a very limited set. We're not going to all of a sudden get oopsies. We got a million new view hours, right? We don't even have to worry about that as a problem. And says like, okay, we know Stranger Things Season 5 is about to drop. We're going to pre cache Stranger Things season 5 in every single OCA across the world because that thing's about to get hammered, right? And so it's like it's able to do such a different kind of decision making than what you have to do with something like YouTube. And then Twitch is even more wild because now you're actually ingesting video and trying to make it go out all at the exact same time for all video. And you have to transform that video from whatever format and whatever the bit rate is into something that's more efficient in the system. Like that. Hats off to Twitch engineering because that is like some, that's some serious work.

And here's some asshole Lex coming out and tweeting about YouTube features.

Listen, you're not wrong on the features you ask for though.

I think this is an engineering problem of how do you allow fast iteration and addition of features that shouldn't have to be integrated or impact the whole code base. So at the edges of the code base sort of improve on certain features without like having to consult the mothership of the code.

It's the large team, right? That's, that's the fundamental problem when you get into YouTube size. There is the team slash organization that deals with data warehousing. There's the team slash organization that deals with delivery. There's a team slash organization that's like the middle layer. How you even, you know they're going to be like the little micro surfaces to talk to these places. Then you have this front end engine. So like for, for a small feature, you have to get middle team, you have to get back end team. You have to get all these things. Quick example, Netflix. Are you familiar with the dystopian Black Mirror?

Yeah.

Okay. Season one, Episode one. Do you know season one, episode one. Everyone who watches Black Mirror typically knows this episode.

Okay, yeah, I don't remember what it is.

Forgive my language, but they call it the Pig Fucker episode.

Oh, yeah, right, of course.

Once you've seen the episode, you will then know this episode. Well, when Netflix adopted it, I got pulled into a room. There's like a vp, a vp, a product designer, a vp. And they said, hey, we're about to release our own version of Black Mirror season season three. I think at that time, we need episode one, season one to not be the first thing people see. So let's just reverse the seasonal order that required me. I had like 20 engineers I had to gather together to be able to have this happen. And that's just the problem of big companies, is that eventually every little thing has to become its own team. And so even small, there's no such thing as a small feature.

Reversing the order of the drop down that selects the seasons is a meeting with a bunch of VPs and engineers. That's really interesting. There's got to be a way to accelerate that. That the natural scaling of a company and the bureaucracy that grows. Yes, slows that down. But just having seen Elon work a lot, his teams are able to like, still keep it very fast even as the company grows. There's got to be like a process to doing that, especially for. Yeah, for the pig episode. Like, I don't know where that's in the priority list. But like, like, for important things like that, you should be able to do that quickly.

I don't know.

Can you speak to, like, how would you do that?

Well, I can tell first how it was done, remember? So at a place like Netflix, there would be, I think that at that point it's called a product called Dexter. I can't remember. There's our actual, like movie metadata warehouse that's going to be highly integrated with Hollywood. That's going to be, you know, where that side is able to manage all that. So I'm like, hey, you need the ability to mark things that need to be reversed. Because we're going to run into this ability bunch. And we did. We ran into quite a few topical shows that all need to be reversed and all that. And so it's like, we need to be able to reverse episode numbers, season numbers. We need to be able to hide season or episode numbers. Like in the case of the Chelsea Handler show, it was like a daily show. So it's like, you don't, you don't need episode numbers. You Just need the latest one. And so, like, there's this whole problem that exists. And so it's like, okay, you need to work on that for your UI over there. Then you need to be able to store that data. Then we need to be able to go to the, like, the people that can actually get the video data out of that and provide it to our, our service layer. I need to go talk to them and convince them they need to be able to give me the new methods and everything to do that. Then I need to be able to go write the methods to get it down. And then I need to go to the UI and make that accessible. Now I need to go to website people, I need to go to mobile people, I need to go to the TV people. And so it's like, you can see this thing, like snowballing. And for us, the big thing that Netflix did that was so well is after I met with these people that were high level, I was the captain. I'm the captain now. Now.

Yeah.

So I went to all these teams and said, hey, manager, I need a, I need an engineer. We need to get this done within the next couple months because we got Black Mirror coming out. So she would go, okay, here you go, the MAP team. I need someone to help me with being able to get data out of the LOL for this. And so it's like, all right, you're working with this engineer. I'd go to the BMS team. Okay, I need this engineer. I'd go to the Billboard team. I need this engineer. Go to all these little places to get all these little pieces of data. And then I was the captain, so I was like, you're working on this, you're doing this, you're doing this, you're doing this. I'm doing this. Let's go, go. Right. And so it's like, that worked. And we were able to go pretty fast for a big company. And the fact that it required like 20 engineers to do such a simple task, we were able to do it in like, gosh, I'd say about like three weeks worth of effort. But that was still, I thought that was amazing comparatively to how many people move.

Well, because you have the freedom of the agency to do it. You said the captain of the ship. That's really powerful for big companies. That's a risk because you can fuck it up. You might not see the bigger context legally or any. And so the bigger context of the impact on the industry or all the contracts that are made, all that. So it's a Risk. It's a risk, but it's a risk you have to keep taking. And then if, when you up, you fix and then maybe pay the cost legally for that, whatever, but the long term, that risk pays off because you're going to keep creating a better and better product, evolving where the industry is going, constantly innovating ahead of where the industry is going, and so on. Yeah.

And not only that. I think one thing that is just so important is that, yes, the project will get better, but the people that you hire and the people that you keep around are better because they're the ones that show maturity. They're the ones that can just. You give them something and they can rally the troops and make something happen. Like, that's a very great group of people to hire. And so you also naturally select out great engineers that aren't just simply good at coding. They're good at coding and they're good at explaining and they're good at convincing, and they're good, you know, like, you have to. You have to create a very lean audience that can move fast.

And I think for great engineers having to wait for like, okay, let's schedule a meeting for next Wednesday with the VPs. And that destroys their soul. And they either don't want to contribute anymore, they leave the companies, or they just kind of tune out and take the golden handcuffs and just buy a nice house and focus on family.

And I feel like I would die under that. Like, honestly, like, that is. That is my death sentence is where it's just that there's no reason to try. There's no reason to do anything. I'm just gonna go in there, like, effectively zombie through my day and call it, like, I don't want to live like that. I want to feel like I'm trying to do something.

I should also mention on top of that. So you've brilliantly laid out how incredible the challenge that Netflix has to solve on top of that with YouTube, you know, the metadata thing, because users are able to upload video and there's an API where they can upload automatically and change all this kind of stuff automatically. Every one of those things is an attack vector, as we mentioned. That's something they have to consider seriously on the engineering side and on the sort of the legal side, they can get into trouble all kinds of ways. So they have to consider all of that. That's what is fascinating.

The legal side is obvious, but it's not really. Like, I would never have initially thought someone would say, upload images that you're not allowed to own or have. But that guarantee you that happens, Then you have the whole kid side, right? Like, think about when you mark something as kid friendly. How many times have they snuck porn into a Taylor Swift video or whatever it was. That was like a few years back. There was that whole Taylor Swift or whatever. I forget what it was. I thought it was Taylor Swift, but there'd be these mock videos that come up in the. Then boom. It's like, that's a. That is such an awful problem. And I'm so happy. That is not a problem I have to try to figure out.

Yep. Okay. So, yes, YouTube and. And Twitch and Netflix are doing an incredible job. You eventually chose the madman you are to leave Netflix and to start on the new journey of being a wolf pack of one. Start streaming. What was that? That. What was the story of that?

So I was streaming for almost seven years now. It started actually at Netflix. We did a charity, Extra Life, shout out to Extra Life for starting my streaming career effectively. It's just you stream and whatever money you raise, it goes to kids with cancer research. They are a great charity in the sense that they take no overhead and they raise their own donations for their website and everything. And so it's like a very great, straightforward charity. Really love, like, what they've done. It was super cool because I live in South Dakota now, but I actually could choose a hospital directly where the money goes to. So there's like a direct impact from A to B. So it's like, it's a pretty cool organization. And so my friend Guy Serino. Nice try, Guy. That's what I like to call him. He was probably the single greatest engineer I've ever met in my lifetime. And he was just like, hey, come do this. We're gonna all do this. And so I played Fortnite. And so before I did that, I was like, oh, I better learn how to stream first. I better get affiliated so I can, like, take subscriptions. And then if anyone gives me a subscription, I'll also pay that forward. And so June 2018 or something like that, I start streaming. And I start streaming some Fortnite, end up getting affiliated, end up doing the whole Extra Life thing. I end up really enjoying it. I'm like, this is a lot of fun. I'm playing Fortnite at that point. Okay. So mind you, I'm a Fortnite streamer at that point. And I start really enjoying it. I keep doing it, and then one day I decide I'm gonna do some programming because I I really love vim, and I think I'm kind of fast at vim. And maybe people think programming is kind of cool because there was no really programming section at that point. And I did it and I had like 30 people show up, which was just like. And it felt like incredible numbers at that point. So I was like, oh, my gosh, there's like 30 people watching me program. And so it just kept on going and it kept on happening, and it just kept on growing. And I did it for year after year. I would do my job. I would come home, I'd eat dinner with the kiddos, I would read them Lord of the Rings and the Hobbit. During that time, I'd read to them for a half an hour. Then I'd set that down. And then three nights a week, I would program until like 2 in the morning or play video games until 2 in the morning, streaming and building up this like, whole side thing. And I did this for a long, long time. And then eventually it just kept working out so well and I started making YouTube videos. And then that started getting better and it was just like a long, long grind. Until April of last year, I went to the Streamer Awards and I got to like announce the programming category and Pirate Software one. It was awesome. It was a great time. And during that time, he gave me a challenge coin and just said, like, you just gotta go for it. Just go full time. And so I just sat there. And my wife can attest to it. It was kind of like an emotional turmoil thing. And it just took a lot of. It was. It was pretty awful, you know, because I didn't. Netflix is very safe option. It was both very fun, it was challenging. I liked a lot of the people I worked with. It was overall a really great thing. I had a really great boss, really appreciated him. I still ever text him now and then. He's really great guy. So it's just like I'm leaving all these things for something that's unsure. And the reality is that streaming and all these things, you know, people love you one day, they could hate you the next day. There's like all this stuff that goes into being on the public side. And I had Netflix as the backing. So it's like, if public hated me, the next day I'd be like, deuces, I'm out. Like, I don't care. Now. It's like, now I'm going to do this as a job. And so there was like a whole huge turmoil to this whole thing that kind of went through it and eventually I just said, okay, I'm going to make this. It kind of. It resonated with me when I first made the decision to join Netflix. I'm getting older. There's not a lot of chances to do something unusual like that. Those chances go down constantly as you get older. This might be the last crazy thing I get to do. Let's just try it. So in April I went full time and I have, I guess I haven't looked back. I'm only not even a year into doing this as a full time gig and it's just been a lot of fun and the biggest thing is just being, you know, just being able to really explore and do these things on stream where people really enjoy watching and engaging has just been. It's been a great, great, hard, fun, amazing, difficult experience.

I mean it's a really inspiring leap. It's a really hard one to take for many reasons like you outlined, but also like the loneliness of it, I think, I think it's a pretty lonely pursuit.

It is, yeah.

Just you and the camera and the audience and the ups and downs of that. And it's not, there's not really a team.

I do have one lucky thing. I'd say that my editor, Flip, Shout out Flip. He was, it would mean the world to him if I said shout out Flip.

But I love you, Flip.

I love you.

I love you. Oh man.

He, he had, you know, as he would say, he had nothing going for him. He, he had a really hard growing up. A lot of, lot of rough life decisions have gone into his life and he's kind of crawling back out of it. And he just said, hey, I will edit full time for you. So I just said, all right, like 50, 50, whatever I make on YouTube you get. We're going to do this together. And we did that for years. Making $0 a month pretty much, you know, and so it's just like that was an incredible job bump and now like we get to work together so that I do get that one team aspect that I think is really nice. But there's, it's not like it was at Netflix where I could hear about stuff people are building. I don't have a team. I don't have like product or cycles. I don't have a manager that I have to try to make happy. It's just like it is very lonely and I don't think a lot of people realize how lonely it actually can be.

Yeah. So combine that loneliness with, in my case, I don't know how Many people attack you.

You know, I have a shockingly low amount of attack rate.

I feel like, yeah, people generally, I mean, it's sometimes fun sort of teasing, that kind of thing, but it's mostly just really. I mean, you. You give so much love to the world and inspire so many people, even when you're like, making fun of stuff. Yeah. But with. With me, sort of taking the loneliness of it combined with just really intense attacks, it's tough. It can be rough psychologically. Really a tough journey. You miss working with a team just from even a software engineering side, like where you can share code or talk over code or. Yeah, the collaborative aspect of it.

Yeah, multiple things there. 1. Hey, we love you, Lex. So don't let the things get you down.

Thank you. Thank you. I love you too.

Thank you. Hey, little. Little bonding moment here going on. But you know what I. One thing I really miss, not in.

A sexual way, just to be clear.

The tension is a little.

Yes, I'm getting uncomfortable. But anyway, team, it's just.

The one thing I really miss is just. Even when I hated how people did it, just seeing how other people solved things. Right. Like, it's really amazing. Just. Just like the raw creative power so many people have and just being like, oh, wow, like I was. Have never done it this way. Crazy, right? Like, wow. I just. This is awesome. And you kind of internally process this and you're like, oh, I now have a new little tool in my tool belt, you know, because at some point it's really hard to find a mentor when you're first young and you're just starting out programming. I mean, anyone with a couple years of experience will be not just a little bit better than you, but like, infinitely better than you. It's like, it feels like crazy how much better people are. And so you have to like, get mentors and you learn from people, and then as you get better, that amount of availability gets really small. And so it's something I really do miss is the kind of like forced, hard problem solving together.

I think there's also skill to sort of mining the wisdom from other people. Like, I generally try to approach even like junior people, young folks, just mentally. At least for me, it works as a hack to assume they're like the smartest person in the world, like, way smarter than me. And so I take every single word they say as potential with. And that helps me sort of mine for potential wisdom there. Because it's so easy as you get older to sort of judge, to be like, oh, yeah, okay, okay. I've been through that. I remember feeling like that. I remember thinking that that's incorrect, whatever, but just kind of assume that you don't know that I don't know what the I'm doing. And the other person is this like sage. And from that, in that kind of interaction, I think you could actually learn a lot. And my favorite interactions is when we both think that way. So we're that, that from there. I think that's, that's a catalyst for a great, great collaboration and interaction.

It just also makes everything much nicer. You know, it's really, it really stinks to work with someone that's combative and negative. Like I don't mind combativeness if it's like I'm trying to figure out what's, like what's best to do right now versus combativeness just because you're a negative person. And things have to be this one particular way because if they're not this one particular way, it's the end of the world world. And like that's actually really hard for me to work with.

What's the origin story of the Primogen name?

The origin story of the Primogen name was. Are you familiar with a video game called Turok? Nintendo 64. So Turok had Turok 1 and then Turok 2. Turok 2 was a brutally hard game. This is back when first person shooters, they would only give you a certain amount of health and you had to go discover health, health and get that health and you had to beat the whole game without effectively dying. That's an old. That's like the first version right there. That's like Turok 1, then Turok 2.

Turok is a renowned first person shooter video game series featuring dinosaurs, action and sci fi elements. The franchise has evolved significantly since its inception in 1997.

Yeah, there you go. So in 1998, there, you can see it right there.

Turok 2 Seed of Evil followed in 1998 featuring larger levels, more challenging puzzles and deadlier enemies.

The notable difficulty, it was very, very, very difficult. Okay. And so I spent. When I got it, it came in a black cartridge, not like your standard gray Nintendo 64. It's a black cartridge. Badass game, right? And I got it and I put it in and I played and I played every day for like 10 hours a day for a month straight. And I beat it. And it was like such an incredible great experience in the last leader of Turok 2 is called the Prima Ch. And so when I was a kid, when you're in, like, fifth grade. That's, like, super cool. Like, named after the bad guy. And so, like, for a long time, on any Internet thing, like Grail online that I mentioned earlier, the name was the Primogen. It was great. And then, you know, I became an adult eventually, and it's just like, okay, you know, I'm an adult. My name is Michael Paulson. Underscore, you know? Yeah, that's what I was on the Internet for a long time was that. And I remember it was like, 2017, 2018. Somewhere in there. I remember just how bad the tech world had kind of become. It was just like this super pretentious place. Tons of dick measuring, just everything. That just was the worst. Ken Wheeler got canceled over playing the circle game. It was just like it. It's so hard to describe to people that weren't there, but it was just the worst place to be. Tech was extremely unfun. It was extremely awful. Everything was just so. It wasn't academic because it was research. It was like, we're building the most sophisticated things, and this is for the smart people, and you're. Everyone else is the dumb people. Don't worry. We'll design for you, dummy. We got. We'll. We'll show you how to make the perfect architecture. And I remember changing my Twitter handle because I got so upset and just went back to my video game name because I was like, I want things to be fun. Fun. I want this to stop. And so while I start, when I started streaming tech, my goal became to destroy whatever that tech mentality was, because it includes nobody. Everyone thinks that they're the smart people and they design for the dummies. And it's just like, no. Like, I want tech to be this place where people feel like they can be creative and excited and actually build something. And if you're new, like, it's okay to be dumb and ask dumb questions. Like, learn from your dumb question. No one's expecting you to be smart. Pick whatever you want. Like, actually do something and have fun and build, like, your crazy ideas. Oh, you're going to reinvent the wheel. Reinvent the wheel. Understand what you're doing, Learn it really good, and, like, interact and stuff. And it's just so different than what was out there. And that the name Arnold Schwarzenegger talks about this thing where when he first started acting, his name was, like, the thing that people hated. As he once said, you have a strange voice, you have a strange body, and your name. Your name's unpronounceable. No One's gonna Schneitz and Finitzel. No one's gonna remember that. Y. And he said, but now the name is the strong part. And for me, I just. I've always felt akin to that. Though my name's not nearly as cool, nor am I as popular as Arnold, Norma, as tough or good looking or successful. But nonetheless, it's just the. The name represented this, like, counterculture, like, movement within myself in which I just hated what was there and I wanted to defeat it. And so this has, like, been the thing. And now people remember me so well because of how weird my name is. And so it's just like I, for whatever reason, it became its own thing. And so that's kind of the now. I would never change it. And back then I would never change it because it was my rage against the machine moment, if you will.

Yeah, I love that as a symbol of rage against the machine and the rage being fun.

Yeah. I just want people to, like, be creative and have fun again. It's okay.

What about the mustache? It's an epic mustache. It's an epic stache. It has a life of its own. Is there an origin story or did you guys discover each other at some point, or was it. Did it emerge from the darkness of the struggle that is your life, or where does it come from?

Well, the original, original mustache is that it was no Shave November back before it became Movember. It was no Shave November back in the day. And after no Shave November, you had all this hair. And so what's the natural thing you got to do? You got to sport a mustache for a day. Right? Right. So whenever I'd forget to, you know, not shave for a long time, and then I'd let it start growing out really big, I just go, oh, this is kind of funny. I'll have a mustache. And so one day when I was streaming, it's just one of those times I just didn't shave. And then I started just letting it go, and then I got kind of a beard, and then I just had a mustache. And when I did it, people were just like, okay, it's mustache time. And I was just like, heck, yeah. It feels like it's like a lifestyle decision, right? It's like, this is the fun times. And so all of a sudden, it was just like, exciting to have a mustache mustache. And I shaved it off. And I was like, okay. But then, you know, part of me is like, you know, there's this weird energy that comes from just having a mustache. So I was like, I'm going back. Told my wife, forgive her. She was very not as thrilled about my decisions to have a mustache long term. But I just decided to have it back. And it just is. It's just like it was the right thing. It's like part. It's always been the energy that I had was the mustache. It was always been there. It just never was visible until later on.