AI is Overrated – Why ThePrimeagen Ripped Out GitHub Copilot From His Code Editor [Podcast #124]

**The Reality of AI and Automation**

One of the biggest misconceptions about AI is that it's going to revolutionize our lives overnight. In reality, most people are just scratching the surface of what these tools can do. For example, when I was working with AI, I thought I had found a magic bullet for predicting outcomes, but in hindsight, it was just a clever use of algorithms and autocompletion features. These tools are not yet ready for prime time, and relying on them too heavily can lead to disappointment.

**The Importance of Fundamental Skills**

When it comes to investing time and effort into learning new skills, there's no one-size-fits-all approach. However, I would argue that the most important thing is to find what works for you and stick with it. For me, the biggest skill to learn was simply building and experimenting with different projects. This helped me develop a deep understanding of how these tools work and how to use them effectively.

**The Value of Time in the Saddle**

One of the most valuable things I can offer is time in the saddle – experience and hands-on practice. There's no substitute for building real-world applications and learning from your mistakes. This is especially important when it comes to programming, where understanding the fundamentals of data structures, networks, and software engineering is crucial.

**Learning Resources**

For those looking to learn new skills or expand their knowledge in a particular area, I would recommend exploring various resources. For example, Thorsten Ball's book "The Interpreter" provides a clear and accessible introduction to how programming languages work, making it an excellent resource for beginners. Additionally, free coding courses like CodeCamp can provide a solid foundation in algorithms and data structures.

**The Importance of Real-World Experience**

While learning the theoretical foundations of programming is essential, it's equally important to gain real-world experience. This can be achieved by building small projects or contributing to open-source software. By doing so, you'll develop practical skills that will serve you well throughout your career.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enI mean how much do you feel like you're just like falling back on your instincts that are honed over the years I rarely rarely really think welcome back to the free Cod Camp podcast I'm Quincy Larson teacher and founder of free Cod camp c.org each week we're bringing you Insight from developers Founders and ambitious people in Tech this week we are talking with the primagen he is a software engineer he worked at Netflix up until recently for quite a while and now he's focused full-time on streaming live streaming coding on Twitch and on other places and just you know talking about coding showcasing his skills welcome man how's it going it's going well how are are you I'm doing fantastic man it's great to talk to you uh I am a longtime viewer of your YouTube videos like I don't watch Twitch because I like to do everything at Double speed but I've enjoyed some of your takes over the years uh especially on the AI related things yeah okay okay I I feel like I personally have great takes on AI yeah well we're going to talk about some of those first though a lot of the people listening to this may not uh even though you have have a huge audience like right before you were streaming this I I went over to Twitch and I saw that you had like more than a thousand people watching you uh working on some different projects and uh yeah yeah like a lot of people obviously know who you are you're a big deal in the programmer space but uh a lot of people in the free Cod Camp community may not yet know who you are so uh one of the things I like to do whenever I have somebody on is kind of go back and do their programmer origin story uh and kind of get that out of the way before we launch into the many many questions I have prepared for you so yeah maybe you could tell us a little bit about like who you were as a kid and who you looked up to uh as far as looking up to uh I'm going to I I I have a stack brain so I just order I answer things in Reverse so just be prepared for that so if you ask more than one question you will get a reversal uh so as far as people who I looked up to Jim Carrey was probably my number one person that I looked up to uh Jim Carrey was absolutely uh just the coolest as far as like what did I did as a kid you know I I think my biggest claim to fame my biggest accomplishment is when I was somewhere between the ages of three and four I beat Super Mario I was really really into playing NES I just was something that from a very young age just spoke to me I I could not I could in fact beat level uh level three of battle toads the classic one that people can beat the Speeder Bike one yeah the SP the speed yeah the scooters where you jump on there and you go back and forth and you go yeah I could I could beat that at a very young age right when it came out I could beat right away and fun story here I I got all the way up to level seven vul Meers Inferno if I'm not mistaken and I was like oh man that was so hard and I was like five or six years old at that time and I just couldn't beat it and then at 21 years old I bought an NES and I bought battle toades and I'm like I'm older I'm faster I'm Wiser I'm everything here we go got to level eight and I was just like oh my goodness this game is so hard and eventually I got pretty good at it so I could speedrun it I I I was able to beat in about 36 minutes I think was beat the entire game in 36 minutes that I mean did you use like the level three warp there's like a special go the way through oh so no wall yeah there's a bunch of walls so on like level level one if you if you headbutt the first two guys you drop down headbutt go to the next one headbutt jump to the next scene you'll go to a level three on level three I think on the 10th gravestone on the very very fast ending part you'll hit a warp to a level five on level five I want to I I want to say there isn't a uh warp you just had to go through and serve but on level six the snake level there's actually one if on the second snake room if you sprint off the moment this the first snake turns and becomes flat you'll actually run through fall through a bunch of Pokey things and not actually hit any of them and land right into a warp interesting you go all the way up to level eight and so level Eight's about as far as as I know where the warps are I've never actually looked up any of these things I just kind of discovered them all as someone who was just trying to get really fast at the game yeah I mean that game is notorious for just its ridiculous difficulty and like the spike and difficulty it was so inconsistent because level one and level two were not that hard then all of a sudden you get to the speed thing and it's just like as a kid I got really frustrated I paid like you know six bucks which back in like 1980s was like 10 bucks 15 bucks uh and uh rented that game and I was like all right I'm gonna have a great weekend I'm gonna beat this game that because I beat every other ANS game that I rented right but no that speed bike thing I I was banging my head against and I can't remember if there even continues in the game but basically you just run out of lives and you're just like damn I have to yeah play level level one Lev there's no continue yeah yeah there's no safe spots there's no continues it's just it's just brutal that's that's how it works yeah they call it NES hard it's like Elden ring just without saving yeah yeah and Elden ring without saving would not be very fun there are people that can beat Elden ring without taking a hit or at least I'm not sure if it's for Elden ring but for the other Souls games yeah I've heard about this these no hit playthroughs of these of the Souls game I've never actually watched one or actually seen anyone do even part of it I never actually got into the souls game until as uh until Elden ring I didn't even know that was a category of games absolutely loved it speaks to my NES loving kind of nature it is a game that is just most certainly something that I love Challenge and difficulty and preciseness because there's something that's really pretty about preciseness you know uh you can't you can't be off by any amount it's just like you it's really like a very constrained way to do something but you can do it really fast which makes it fun yeah yeah I mean like eight frames to Parry uh in a lot of cases or if you have like the little Mitten you can Parry with like slightly more frames uh yeah I love uh I I did play Elder ring my kids love watching me play Elder ring uh but I just got I I couldn't I it took too long to figure out where I was supposed to go I like the Dark Souls 3 is my favorite of the souls games and it's because it's pretty clear where you need to go like the levels are pretty linear and it's all about like just getting from one place to the next and combat I encourage you to go back and try that if you haven't played Dark Souls 3 I've never tried it all I know is I've only played elen ring and when I played Elden ring I really just just had no idea where I was going it is extremely unclear what you have to do yeah and I think this part of they're trying to recreate that like old early computer game kind of like experience of just you know you've got this instruction manual that doesn't help all point is the game itself it's not to win it's to play the game yeah absolutely Dark Souls though uh I'm a huge fan of that series and uh of the designer and everything he's done to revitalize that kind of like Nintendo hard type uh to to frankly respect the audience and yes like it it does become an accessibility issue when you have people who have uh you know like motor uh skill impairments and other things and it's simply just not accessible to those people and he refuses adamantly to add like an easy mode to the game because he feels like that would compromise the Integrity of the game I mean the easy mode to the game is you go and you like Farm a whole bunch of XP and you become like overpowered at a lower level and then you can kind of like skate through some of the early encounters but I I definitely respect that philosophy and that commitment to look this game isn't for everybody yeah so I love it so playing a lot of really hard video games um looking up to Jim krey let's talk about Jim krey for a minute like that guy is super Innovative if you watch like the first Ace Ventura movie like all the different Impressions he's doing uh yeah yeah what was it about him that Drew you to him I don't know I'm just like every other kid I just thought he was hilarious he was fantastic Ace Venture or two when Nature Calls was like my favorite movie uh growing up all that kind of stuff so I know whatever that is it just was a natural thing the mask absolutely fantastic uh Ace furo one was fantastic the the tutu with with him dancing on the or getting freaked out by the bubble ramp like that's just it just it was all so fantastic yeah so you know I want to talk a little bit about your childhood and again I don't want to pry uh you know I came from like a family you know we were middle class and um I didn't have any early tragedies in my family uh but you know I'm trying to like figure out a way to put this but but like you lost your father at a pretty early age and you've talked about how that impacted you uh but could you talk about how that maybe like changed your trajectory like do you ever think of like a m Universe of like what you would be like like if I don't know if you watched Star Trek but like like the tapestry episode where uh Captain peard like sees what his life would have been like if these certain events hadn't happened and he's got this idealized version of his life and then he's got the real life where he ended up being the captain and that's the one that's you know marred with setbacks and bad judgment calls and all these other things that were just part of his exploration uh as a youth like would you would you be cool with talking about that a little bit yeah sure so what what is the specific question sorry there's a lot to it was it is it that I what would my life be like if it hadn't well yeah whether you think about that and you know maybe I do yeah I do do are you ready for an answer that might not be the answer you're ready for I am ready for anything man uh all right so have you ever read the book of the problem of Pain by CS Lewis I'm familiar with CS Lewis and his work uh I haven't read that specific book okay uh it's it's probably his most meaty book if if if meaty is the correct term for books and it in the very beginning it starts off with this idea where there's like there's various canards in in in a life where it's like is God so powerful that he himself can create a rock that he cannot lift right like it's it's it's it's stating a question which it's meant to be something you're supposed to think about blah blah blah blah and so when he talks about that he talks about this idea of impossibility so if something is impossible what it actually what what you're actually saying is that it is impossible suppressed Clause unless and then you change the situation uh meaning that it is impossible for me to see the road where I'm currently at unless if I were to leave the room I'm in and walk outside so that's called an impossibility it is impossible for me to see the road right now and so you have the suppressed Clause an intrinsic impossibility is something in which there is no time space actor or Universe in which The Impossible becomes possible there is no suppressed unlust Clause because it cannot exist and so I do not believe that there is any universe or uh time or situation that could have been conceived in some sense that would have changed the past or for me to understand what that you know what the outcome of that is and so I think of it more like an intrinsic impossibility so I don't actually think about what would my life be like if I were to have cuz it it changes it at such a fundamental level that there's no real point in thinking of it yeah and so that's kind of like my general answer of like what does it mean to have a dad that you know I can only answer in the in the affirmative of what does it mean not to have a dad growing up which you know there's there's a lot of difficulties I'd say uh one of the hardest things that ever came about was when I was I don't know I'd say I'd say it's like maybe 22 23 years old uh I used the term dad for the first time that I could conceivably remember that was strange right that's not a that's not a situation that a lot of people maybe can you know recognize but for me that was a very unusual thing uh I think having kids has allowed me to understand what it's like to have a dad so I don't get a dad but I can understand what it's like to have a dad and I can understand the importance of being a dad but I can never understand what it's like to have one I have no person in which I could feasibly have someone because whether you like it or not a mom is will never be a dad a dad will never be a mom a kid growing up really just needs this kind of dynamic duo uh my mom tried her best she did a great job doing as the best she could do but she could never be my dad and there's just something about that that has always been this like deep desire for me to have that side and I just never ever got it and that I know that it's missing and that's it and so I can't fill it I can just vicariously observe it in my kids yeah so yeah that's that's effectively my my life as growing up without it uh a lot of hard things transpired because of it but you know like I never had someone to tell me uh in in kind of the way I needed to hear it that I was being an idiot you know I never had someone that showed me how to do things in the way that I could I guess understand it yeah were you able to find any other like people in your life like teachers or other people that they could kind of serve even interraction of that role no uh my uncle uh physically abused me my other uncle was in prison so not not necessarily any male side in my life that you know was quality if you will yeah well what got you interested in computers um in terms of like like you got really early on you were you were interested in computer I'm laughing cuz that was just like such an intense 180 from where just going uh yeah I'm kind of thinking like like just just to articulate my thinking there cuz yeah I'm not like reading from a list of questions like that that is my NE next logical question because I don't know what else frankly there is to be said uh and you know I don't want to um denature what you just said by oh I'm sure everything worked out anyway and all that you know Jazz I I just want to like be because computers were a big part of your life from a very early on period from what I understand from listening to lots of interviews with you um and uh you know watching your channel and stuff and I mean was that was that an escape or was that just a way of channeling your energy like like cuz I mean it sounds like you grew up in a pretty you know adverse environment like despite the best efforts of your mom I would say that video games were more likely the Escape um Perhaps Perhaps programming in some sense was that as well um I didn't really grow up doing programming or anything like that I really enjoyed trying to install doom and get that done and be able to play Doom that was that was a great time uh there's all these like little things that I didn't quite understand that I just I very much so enjoyed uh about computers when I had a problem I I kept trying to figure it out and it was very frustrating and it'd be very upsetting but that's you know that was just part of part of life we just had a computer we had access to a computer really early on because before my dad passed he was doing a startup uh you know it's irony uh story at some point I'll I'll tell later about my first startup but for whatever reason uh he was just too early to uh to the startup he had you know if you remember 10 10220 dial down the middle I believe or whatever it was called Uh there's some like dial down phone card type longdistance situation he was doing in the late 80s early 90s which was just entirely too early for it to exist really cuz that didn't really come about until just a little bit later maybe like 5 years later that became a real thing people wanted cuz you know phones were a rarity in the late '90s early 2000s they weren't a common nearly as common as they are now yeah and so uh he we we just always had some access to a computer and so I was always able to play around on a computer and I played a lot of Mong tile and freei and all that stuff in Windows 31 you had to start up Doss and then in Doss you had the xq windows to get it to run and all that so had like some basic early experience with computers though I largely didn't understand anything it wasn't until there's this video game called Grail or growl I'm not really sure g r a a l and sorry and with it they had a level editor and I started playing with the level editor and if you double click on an NPC it would actually load up some script like some sort of Grail script I think is what they call it uh NPC script not really sure but it was a c like syntax and so I was able to look at it and effectively figure out what it's trying to say and it's not I mean programming in itself if you're sufficiently motivated is not terribly hard to start figuring out uh if it's a simple enough script like Lua is a pretty simple enough script that I think you could eventually figure out everything about it and so it's it's it was something simpler than Lua very very unexpressive and so you could just I just started looking and understood if if statements and while loops and all that and yeah it was it was fun so that's kind of how that's like my early time into computers and so I just really enjoyed doing that building stuff yeah and L of Warcraft 2 level editor yeah so so you might be just programming kind of incidentally without even realizing you were programming with the higher objective of building a level or making you know NPCs do certain things uh you you kind of learn it in rout to the goal of developing levels is is that like something like that I just wanted to build stuff and so I could see I could build interactive things so I just I just played around and kept trying to build interactive things yeah right on yeah and my understanding is like a lot of people approach you know me and they're like hey does free C Camp have like a Lua course because like that's one of the easier like languages to learn and and like I don't know if it's used in Minecraft uh M Minecraft Roblox like a lot of believe it is used in Minecraft yeah a lot of these uh these games especially like massive online games uh seem to like get serve as a good Gateway for kids to get into programming right um and like I think yeah most most games use Lua because Lua is an incredibly easy embeddable language like even an experienced embeddable person could probably embed Lua uh the language like I've never embedded a single language in my lifetime I could probably do it in an afternoon or two yeah so I think that's why it largely works with a lot of game development and all that is just it's it's really simple like embedding V8 extremely difficult that might take me a year embedding Lua might take me a week yeah that's a good endorsement of Lua as like just like an accessible language people can add if they want to get like a community of creators around and when say creators not necessar like YouTube creators but like people just creating levels right um my kids love making Mario Maker levels for example um yeah how I don't want to like get too personal about your your kids but like how old are they uh 10 through three uh my daughter just turned three a couple days ago so 3 six uh 8 and 10 yeah so so they're probably in that age like do you allow them to play video games and stuff like a lot like we have a rule that we don't let our games on days but yeah yeah pretty much same thing we don't do uh weekday we try not to do too much they just turn into they turn into little uh I'm not sure what other term to use other than they just like turn they just like it's like when you give them too much sugar it's just emotionally brittle they become very emotionally brittle when you let them play too many video games just like if I veg out and do something and watch too much TV I find everything to be inconvenient it's the same thing except for I just have the emotional wherewithal to kind of you know push through it whereas they're still so young it's just it's very difficult for them to understand what it takes to live a regular life and so if you let them play too many video games obviously things kind of go off the rails and so yeah we we do some weekend time like we'll play fortnite the kids love playing fortnite with me so we'll all load up into fortnite and go run around shoot stuff and since they since it's largely like uh my 10-year-old and my 8-year-old and they're not that very good and you know I can I can play I used to I used to play a lot of fortnite you know and it's like now just a lot of bots are really bad people it'll be like I'll get like 25 kills in a game and I'm just like man this what it feels like to be like a pro fortnite player playing with regular people because it's just like so easy because it's probably all Bots yeah it's fun we like it yeah that's cool so uh video games have been a way for you to like kind of share your childhood passion with your kids it sounds like yeah I really play them though uh just because uh they you know they they became uh I'd say probably like a crutch or a coping mechanism and it's not that I explicitly was like a crutch or coping mechanism it's just that I just recognized uh if I wish to be be really good at programming or really good at anything or do anything in life I just kind of have to make time and most of life is a choice of what you I mean we are fortunate enough to live in a day and age in which there's a huge amount of self-direction and so with that comes the both the joys and the Pains of saying yes to doing something that may not feel as good and saying no to something that feels as good in the moment yeah yeah I mean like I could just sit and spend the weekend on the couch watching Netflix for example example or I can go and like you know compose a new song or I can go uh make it to the gym or you know any number of things that yeah Advance me closer to my goals and yet we we live in an age when like literally every movie every song is like a few clicks away you know reddits an ALT tab way and you're suddenly like seeing interesting half photos and stuff like that so uh yeah like being able to manage yourself has become like a key skill if you want to achieve your goals and like I guess stand out from the other people that have I guess less impulse control I sure if that's like the right way of saying it but yeah I see what you're saying we I constantly say on the stream that uh people misde Define liberty or Freedom quite often which is that Liberty uh is the ability to do what you uh what you want or your higher will and we often we often find especially in our very you know quote unquote free world that we live in that we find we're often just subjugated to our lower will what feels good in the moment will you eat that extra cookie or will you say no because you want to get in shape right like what is which will wins well often you find that the lower will wins much much more than the higher will and so perfect Liberty is the ability to know and say what you want and actually act upon that and so if you want to like say you know you have a large programming audience or a large newer wanting to get into programming audience what is the answer do you say I want to learn programming therefore you learn programming or do you say I want to learn programming like I say I want to learn Chinese which is just like some fictional want that not actually materializes into anything yeah yeah you do you really want to learn Chinese or you just you said just an example I I say I want to learn another language but it's just like the reality is is I'm not going to learn another language you know I say I want to that's it I know I don't I don't I know I don't actually want to we do we do what either our higher or lower will wants us to do and right now all effort and everything is pointed towards either is making what I'm doing right now a success well this isn't like a philosophical podcast so I don't want to delve too deep into this but one question that like I like to ask people sometimes is like whether you think that people actually have potential do people have potential or are people currently realizing their potential can you can you can you say that I I I don't quite know what that means can you can you state in a different way sure so uh for example I I could I could say oh I you know I want to become a really good uh I want to get really good at um let's say like a contemporary language like a rust or something like that and uh oh it'd be great to be a rust player like a rust you know developer and uh oh I know I have kind of a loose idea of what I need to do I just need to sit down and do it so I have the potential to become a great rust developer but am I actually going to invest the time like is that potential actually like a latent property or is it just you know I could be spending my time right now learning rust you know there's a comprehensive rust course on free cooking there's probably lots of other comprehensive interactive rust courses out there that I I could go through and I could I could learn that skill uh do you do you feel like people actually have potential or are is everybody realizing their maximum potential right now unless they change the status quo somehow does that does that make sense I I not 100% I it doesn't make sense to me but I'm going to try to say it in my way and maybe you'll tell me how close I am are people actually living up to what they could live up to now or is it all just Whimsical ideas and we are really not quite being as great as we can yeah like do we just tell ourselves there's the potential there when really like we like the will to act I I apologize I'm doing a bad job of structuring this question but like the question has been posed to me hold on I'm looking up a quote uh let's see uh dang it I know that there's a really really uh give me just one second it's a it's a great quote um all right well I'll hold out for your Zinger here we go I bet you I got this one uh here we go here we go I think this is a pretty good one uh we are half-hearted creatures fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite Joy is offered to us like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what it is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea we are far too easily pleased see us Lewis it's a great quote uh effectively how I read this is that we we we settle for significantly significantly less than we can actually achieve I think that that you can you can just you can count how many times in a day that you decided to take the easy dopamine fast route as opposed to uh doing something that's going to actually affect your life in a positive way yeah like how much time is spent scrolling Instagram scrolling Twitter watching just like you know cat videos they don't actually give you anything right there's nothing out of that I know people try to say oh it's how I relax um I somehow doubt that that's really how you relax I think it's just a trained uh mentality cuz I mean you're telling me that all of life and all of humanity never got the chance to relax like my my real thing is is that we've just built up patterns and habits that uh just numb us from the the reality and difficulties of life and we choose that over reality that's I mean I know that's a very intense statement and you said you're not a philosophical podcast but that's that's just kind of my you know just my kind of Take On The World Is that we just settle for we you know it's my I know we're going to get into AI but it's my biggest worry about AI which is AI is there as this infinite teaching well that can help you get from A to B and it is you know theoretically if you have the $40 a month $30 a month whatever it takes to do uh to have chat jity for Omni uh you have the ability to get all these great things and instead you're just going to ask it to solve all your problems you're not going to take the route of becoming some one better you're going to take the route of getting what you need answered you'll become more helpless not more Wise by the end of using AI yeah well we could actually we could absolutely extrapolate that out to other tools like you know Google search as opposed to back in the day knowledge was hard fought you know I'd go to the librarian and I'd have to explain something that librarian who has trained their entire life to to be able to to take my query and like figure out okay what what what is going to help this person and then or maybe sends me over to the doy Decimal System you know card files and I'm I'm looking I'm going through a bunch of old microfilm you know I'm like scouring for the the answer and it's it's hard to get the answer there when you know you can just go on Google and Google like your no matter how half hard your Google query is you are going to get some results right and it's easy to think like oh that was great I solved my problem Google just gave me what I needed right and AI is going to be perhaps even easier to get you know a serviceable solution but that's not really what you needed it's just what you told you yourself that you needed because you didn't want to burn the extra calories to do the extra work you didn't want to invest the extra time in doing like exhaustive research yeah no do you ever hear the story about how unbroken the book was uh written it turned into a movie as well it's the same lady who wrote SE biscuit if I'm not mistaken unbroken I'm not familiar with it it's a very great story about Louis Zamperini a World War II uh veteran who I believe is still alive to this day very very old fell at this point he's like 90 something years old um he got caught in uh Japan flying over the waters and he had to spend quite some time in a Japanese internment camp uh or labor camp or whatever they called it in Japan and uh he also was an Olympic hopeful he was someone that went out there and was I think he ran the 400 or something and he was he was likely slated to win the Olympics when he went and so he had his whole life ahead of him but he joined the military was going to do two years and then boom out comes World War II and all that and the story of the book goes that uh the lady I forget her name um gosh I I literally have no idea what her name is uh she is doing all this research for seab biscuit and she's just reading old newspapers and reading old newspaper she stumbles on this story that's like oh we found Louis Zamperini and we were able to rescue him from one of these Japanese Japanese camps and like that's it and she's like oh that's really interesting put a note on it went back there later ended up spending seven years to write this book it's like you know wild success but if you have the direct answers well this whole story goes to show that if you have the exact A to B there's so much stuff that you miss like the you know often the answer isn't just simply what you want to know it's like that act of Gathering it going through things and yes it's like way inefficient and yes it's not you know like you could certainly move faster if you could just get exactly what you wanted at that exact moment but moving faster isn't like the goal always you know like it can't always be the goal there's more to life than just moving fast yeah 100% and people can delude themselves into thinking oh I'm doing so much you know that's like the whole multitasking thing uh that's uh people like trying to pack their schedule with like tons of conversations like quick 20-minute meetings with like all these different people and I'm sure you're familiar with this having worked in Tech versus like you know a substantial conversation and I would argue that this podcast even though hopefully we'll be able to talk for like 90 minutes or two hours or something like it's really just a a very brief conversation considering like if you consider like a lifelong friendship that you have with somebody and like the things you learn from them over a longer period of time and kind of the ongoing discussions and the ongoing themes the undercurrents in your friendship and and the the things you do together whe whether it's play together in a band whether you're working on a software uh project together in PA programing periodically like whatever it is like greatness takes time right that lady she needed to to spend seven years even after she like filed that note away like actually thoroughly researching it and then writing the book right um yeah and I do think that that is something that we could lose and I know I'm sting like an old man shaking his missed a cloud you know but like really like I do hope we there's a return to form and I hope that there are a lot of people who use these AI tools uh not as crutches but to to further deepen the research rather than just shorten the research process yeah yeah yeah I mean I think it's good I you know like I I realized because I tried to use chat Chad jity 4 for a long time to make it do all my python work because I just never liked python I'm not going to lie it's it's it's the true low codes solution is python uh just because you know people who don't like to code tend to code in Python and they are able to just get a lot done without actually becoming you know like full-blown software Engineers they're just like researchers that are just like oh gosh okay done right and so it's like I always looked at python as this language I just never wanted to invest a lot in and so I just tried to always get chat jippy to do it all for me by the way I call it Chad jippy it's just way easier than saying GPT and so jippy way easier and um so it sounds more like Jiminy Cricket or something something like that it sounds like a fun yeah it's just it's fun it's stupid sounding right like the whole point is that it's just dumb sounding and that's funny to me I don't I don't know maybe the Jim Cary days influenced me on this one but uh what I realized is that I was able to make it so far but at the end of the day I learned nothing about python I had nothing to show for my time and I did spend a decent amount of time coaxing it coercing it convincing it begging it to make the right stuff and I just realized that all I was doing was training myself how to provide input to make the AI solve the problem I was solving a problem just a different problem and I realized that if I could have gone back and I could have waved a magic wand I should have asked it how to do those step by step and then programmed it all myself and acquired that little bit of knowledge that would have probably been like three hours worth of work and then I would have been just so much faster I would have been able to move so much quicker and that would have probably paid out tfold but instead it paid out zero fold cuz I IED on it to solve my problems didn't use it as a platform of research yeah I mean like people who I guess get really good with tools but lack the fundamentals they're always kind of you know they can't ever really get leverage and like scale their output they're they're kind of limited by the I guess throughput of those tools and what those tools can do um and that's that's why like we we encourage people to really dive deep into the fundamentals and really learn math computer science Concepts you know take time to read Donald K and stuff like that if that's how you pronounce his last name and and you know I hope that doesn't sound too like uh High flute and heavy-handed like like you got to really put in your time uh but people are in a rush they've been told by the marketers like hey learn a code in nine weeks get a get a Fang job you know pay off your student debt from your degree that didn't you know help you pay off your student debt right and uh I guess I'm grateful that like there is kind of this Back to Basics movement and you're out there preaching uh for lack of a better word like it encouraging people to strengthen their fundamentals and you're introspecting you're talking about this experience that you had with uh you know using jid 4 uh to uh to be able to basically kind of like shortcut actually having to learn and put in the hard work and that you saw that darkness in yourself you saw that that anti-pattern like emerging do you think that do you think that everybody uh like like What proportion of people do you think Will Will just cave to that like do you think everybody has the capacity to step back and think like gee like I just took a bunch of shortcuts and and to introspect well enough that they realized that they didn't actually write that code that all they did was do a series of like naive prompts and GPT 4 was smart enough to kind of like fill in the blanks I I think people will always optimize to I in our society maybe maybe there's there exist different Societies in which you know I'm not a I'm not a cultural narcissist I do not believe that everyone behaves like we do and so I'm speaking from a very American perspective maybe broader you could broaden it out to the West perspective but that we will always do what is most efficient generally speaking so if I took a 100 people and I said hey you could a learn all these things solve the problem it'll take you one week or B hey you could prompt and you know get far enough and you could be done in two hours and you had a job and you had things to do and you had people to answer to you you just go okay well I just want to I just want to move on not that you actually you know you don't get the dividends you just get the paycheck and so I think we often trade dividends for paychecks and I I I've been trying to you know if you will the Renaissance of becoming a more learned man uh trying to slow things down and try to adopt a different culture which is that you know you you want to become the master of your craft I love I love those stories of these like that one dude from Norway who could roll steel so well that we it took us all the way until we had our fantastic Technologies just to be able to understand how he built these swords that were like unbreakable it's just like you know how he got that good he probably had some freak genetic gift but he also spent like 30 years making swords to the point where he could flick it listen to The Ring of it and be like this one's bad you like just like just understand deep down it's just such a hidden knowledge secret secret knowledge level like how to do things at just this beautiful level and like I want that I want that I I want the craft you know I want the craft for the sake of the craft I don't want the craft just to just to Simply have output because at the end of the day output works and it's great and I would say that output is much more entertaining slash driving for younger people I think when I was younger output was way more Chief the concern than the craft itself and as I've gotten older I find I find myself realizing that you know life is is just it has to be more than just productivity you know I want to wake up every day and even if I work on the worst things I want to enjoy it yeah yeah I mean like what you just said since we were talking about NES and like you know speedrunning and things like that your ability to speedrun battle toades in like 36 minutes there was this guy and you may already be familiar with this but there was this guy who would speedrun all these games back before speedrunning was really even a thing he submitted times and everything his name was Matt Turk and uh have you heard of this guy he had like records feel like I did watch the recent like big speed running thing of the origins of all the speedr running with Games Done Quick and all that I feel like that name was mentioned but I'm trying to like place it where it was it took people years to reproduce like deliberate like like speedrunners didn't understand how he was able to get these times but they eventually were able to like kind of reverse engineering he just got it and then he moved on to the next one and he was just obsessed with the craft he didn't even really care that much about the street credit or anything like that there's no Street credit to be gained I don't think he even like filmed his attempts or anything there was just a culture of like that seems like a really fast time but I guess it's realistic and then years later people were able to like gradually beat it but he he had so many records stand for so long and it was probably some freak combination of like natural aptitude and ability maybe he just had superhuman like uh attention to detail some sort of weird thick genetic cord down his spine that just like allowed super fast you know electricity flow yeah but but it's it's it's kind of the same thing it's like I I don't know if that even knows that people know who he is or care you know but he's just some Forum user from like you know 2006 or something like that playing Nintendo games that nobody even plays anymore back in back at that time uh and uh just the Romanticism like like it's very romantic the notion that this guy's just sitting there probably you know in the proverbial mom's basement like just getting really good at these games and like totally underappreciated but he appreciates himself he appreciates that he is getting these ridiculous times even though he's not even competing with anybody at this time cuz he's so far beyond the competition he's still competing with himself he's trying to like one up himself with each attempt and uh there's something really I don't know like like for me as you know a man and as somebody who like uh takes pride and what they do like there's something very romantic about that so yeah I used to do a a speedrun myself in Mario Kart the original one with Yoshi on Rainbow Road I don't remember my exact times but I know that I could hit every single corner I would drift across every single like it was perfect and we're drifting didn't give you a boost this is the OG I could play the entire thing perfect every single time and I forget the exact timings I was but it was just like awesome and I just loved it and I'd never fall off an edge it was just this idea of just doing the thing so well and then that one time you got lucky and you got a mushroom and on the back side of rainbow road you could hit the mushroom and take the jump across the entire Chasm it was just like that one run was just so much faster than all the rest the runs and it was just so cool but you had to get in all the other runs and like you know play the the you know random number generator game until you until you got in the position and you had to get your skills into the position to where you wouldn't choke the moment you got that mushroom and you would actually finish the run I choked many times because it was so exciting like I was like you know yeah well just keeping with like our general theme of chronology and uh like just to establish the primin origin story like so let's talk a little bit about like high school and college and like because you did ultimately go and study computer science and uh but when you went into like was your like high school guidance counselor like were people like yes this man is going to be a software engineer like what what did people think about you when you were in high school what what was your general vibe off well my teachers all but uh a couple very few um I think of Mr Patrick all the time if somehow Mr Patrick from Billings West High ever heard this a shout out to Mr Patrick great guy and if you know anyone in Billings you tell them to tell Mr Patrick if he's still around uh that he's the best but all the rest of the teachers um you know I was I was I probably wasn't the best student okay you know I there's this one teacher named Mrs be and she had 200 bears in her room and I may or may not have thrown one of or two of the Bears out the window you know I may or may not have gotten in in some decent trouble she handw wrote me a note telling uh telling me that I will never amount to anything in my life she literally like handw wrote you a not saying that the she she she took the time she took the the the time and the effort and the patience to really remind me that I am by far the worst person in the universe and so you know I was I was a shitthead granted I don't know if cursing is allowed on this I was a poop head I don't censor anything don't worry about it okay okay and so I I I agree I I I was not very nice uh but you know I wish I it would it would have more positive teacher been good for me maybe not you know maybe that was just what I needed I never hold on to things negatively and use that as motivation you know you hear Michael Jordan talking about that that he'd intentionally pick a fight with someone else on the opposite team because he needed that drive I don't I don't want to win because I can beat somebody else I want to win because I can be better than I am at this current moment right again the ghost running uh Super Mario uh go-kart all that kind of stuff it's the Perpetual drive to win perfectionism maybe is the right term for it um and so yeah like high school I was definitely a disaster for sure uh College it extended into that disaster just worse and it took me three tries to get through college the third try is when I really took off you a lot of people put it into perspective um in my third try in college I had uh for calculus 4 differential equations usually we just call the calc 4 or dyq I had the highest grade on the final and I was the also the only student to finish the final and there was over 400 students so I think that was pretty good uh for Cal 2 I was the only I finished it in 30 minutes out of a two-hour final and for Cal 1 it was like 20 minutes and I finished it I had a friend come up and said you finished it so fast that someone thought you just quit and then I also got the highest grades out of all those and so I was like really really good at math but what people don't know is that before that I failed pre-cal three times and I went to the learn the Learning Center 4 hours a day for calculus one and it's just like that's the part that people don't recognize is that um I didn't get good or any of these things by uh it wasn't a natural born Talent or anything so going through high school and going through college it was a huge fight against myself I largely I was my own personal worst enemy for sure for a huge amount of it uh and I had a million and a half excuses everyone has an excuse I mean there's people that have worse lives than me there's people that have better lives than me but we all feel you know pain relatively we all have excuses for why it's unfair or uneven or you know any of those things but it's just like until I let go of all those things and just really went after it I was just such a disaster when it comes to all these things when you say let go of all these things like can you elaborate on that like like what were you like the the kind of Angry Young Man chip on his shoulder kind of like that that kind of archetype that you see when you see like the the cop dramas and stuff like that like were you were you like cuz cuz I was absolutely never been me okay so you weren't it was more just like I didn't care okay so it was apathy it was like you like nihilistic or like what was going on I you know like I was I was a drug addict that wasn't a drug addict yet right I I just wanted to feel something uh and it and and and school was not it right long-term the dividend play was never it so I'd much rather have drank or chased girls or smoked pot done something like that does anything to like try to feel something largely into porn I saw porn for the first time when I was four years old and so that was always been a huge struggle for a large portion of my life I haven't looked at porn in 15 plus years 18 years I have no idea how long but it's been a long long time yeah and and so in this you because you didn't feel anything like again I'm not like a therapist or a psychiatrist or anything like that but I'm just trying to make sense of this like uh as as like we can RI I don't hold you to Scientific standards don't worry Okay cool so so I mean were you just kind of apathetic as far as like academics and stuff you're just like H I kind of suck at math whatever like were you resigned to just sucking at math no it's not that I was resigned sucking at math I was just resigned to not try yeah and so what changed what was it the snap because you put in the time right you went to the Learning Center which is kind of a humiliating thing like I'm not good enough at this I have to ask for help right like like what was it that I guess inspired did did the school compel you to go to the learn Center for like 4 hours a day and get tutor I mean that's a lot of resources you know math tutors like like having somebody teach you oneon-one was it one-on-one instruction one-on-one or one on two yeah there's always a math there's always open seats at a math learning center very few people ever take advantage of it ntas are required like people get their college paid for by volunteering or spending all their time it's not really volunteering if you're getting paid to do it or your college paid for they they they make that trade-off they pay their time for uh for being able to go to college or get their masters or get doctorates and so there's always was seats available so I always had there was never like me waiting for somebody um and so it was just it was just that I just had to put in the time as far as the things that kind of uh like transpired to that it was it was my second go round of college and I became a late Life Christian and I kind of changed like my whole life changed on a dime on a single evening uh never really had any of that um wasn't planning on having any of that and unlike all these fancy stories where people say how their whole life changed and all that the only thing I gained was a conscious and all of a sudden I couldn't like I couldn't do things that I used to do so I if I watched porn I felt bad about it never felt bad in my lifetime all sudden I feel bad about it if I smoked pot I felt bad about it if I drank I felt bad about it I was like what is going on with my life and so it's just like just everything changed and so then it's just like me I I was the most reluctant person becoming a normal contributing citizen I think of all time it's just like I it just every single step of the way I hated it and it's was just like oh man absolutely just the worst just teeth pulling the whole way yeah can you talk about that like that moment of like just hearing a conscious like was it like a voice in your head or was it just a vibe in your gut like I shouldn't be doing this yeah more vibe in the gut probably than anything else you know however that happens where I you know I don't I don't pretend to know any of these things because obviously it's not like I was a well researched person I wasn't I wasn't you know this was not an intellectual exercise that led me to a be this was a very sharp moment that I just felt like uh the the reality of all decisions I've ever made compounded plus like the reality of all future decisions I will make if you were to travel back to that moment you remember the specific Moment Like were you just sitting on the couch like and it just hit you or you know it's a largely it's a personal moment I'm going to I'll keep that to me but it was just yeah it was just it was just a very intense thing and that's all I remember is just being so um compelled to do something that's it like that's why I just say like holy cow is this is this what Experiencing God is like I have no idea because it was vastly like if my realm of experience was this circle it was somewhere way far out on the outside so I was like this is vastly different than all things in my entire lifetime and so therefore I'm going to have to I I it would be a fool of me not to respond and So I responded right and that's that was what led me down the path of being changed where I was fine doing work it's like all a sudden it also unlocked one thing I could I could learn I could I could now not look at school as a complete disaster yeah and what happened from there I mean it sounds like you like frankly it sounds like you were a new man like like it had a dramatic Sudden Impact on your academics on how you manage your time on how you managed your own behavior and like impulses and things like that yeah it it took a long time for me to catch up you know like often I think we all experience this where our heart will move but our actions aren't representing how we feel like I think we've all had these kind of things where you know like take any person that's not in shape but they've all of a sudden they really want to get in shape like their heart has moved and they now feel bad because they know that they didn't do what they thought they should have done right like and so that's kind of like what happened in my life and this this distance took three years for it to close and so it was a long time but it was just like I knew that I didn't like where I was yeah so so like that's I didn't want I didn't want to be addicted to porn or drugs or any of those things like I wanted a life that was meaningful and good and I could actually you know I I could actually one day have a wife and kids and and not give them the same curse that I was given at a young age like how do how do I how do I give something better than what I had yeah and you know to fast forward a little bit you like you have a wife and kids uh you have been able to to find success and it doesn't sound like much of this would have materialized if you just stayed doing what you were doing uh do you ever think about like how like if you could I often I often think like like I I had some pretty dire times like I had a big falling out with my parents I spent like a year sleeping in my car at the Walmart where you can fun fact you yeah Walmart will generally not call the cops on you if you're sleeping in their parking lot they they have kind of like a unspoken rule that you know PE people who are between places to live can like sleep in their car there um and you know hospitals and other places like that are generally pretty understanding so yeah like like I kind of went through a period like that too where I you know dropped out of high school and just spent like a my entire teenage time doing a lot of things that I'm not like super proud of not it's not that I'm not proud of them but it was just like looking back I just I feel guilty that I squandered so much of that time and energy that I could have spent you know reading or learning um and eventually I was able to you know go to state school and and get my degree and everything like that but I always felt like that there there was the Lost Years so to speak um and I always wish that like have you I talked about Star Trek earlier I'm going to talk about it now there's this one episode of start Trek the Next Generation where they're trapped in like a Mobius like a loop of time and uh data and Captain rer figure out this way that they can communicate and send information back to themselves so that they can change some sort of like thing because the ship's going to blow up if they don't do something different than what they've been doing over and over the ship I saw that I saw all the episodes but I can't remember that many of them but I I feel like I remember that one there's another movie called arc on Netflix that is effectively the same thing okay cool and and so anyway they figure out this way that they can like basically use you know Tech as the writers refer to it like neutrinos or something like that that they could send like a few bits of information back and all they could do was send they sent like something in data is like you know AI powered mind like he could actually perceive these and it would like flip a bit or something like that and he would be aware of it and they could only send like I think he sent back like the number three or something like that right um and that's it so again I don't want to spoil this episode but I often wish that I could send something back to myself when I was sleeping in my car at Walmart just like if I could just send back two letters or something so that I could have some sort of Hope because I felt really hopeless I felt really nihilistic I genuinely didn't think that I would live into my 20s I just figured like a lot of my friends died you know like suicide uh other things like that and I just didn't see a feature for myself and I wish that I could send back the letters okay or something like that just to just so I would be like oh there's hope for me you know did you feel any sort of hope uh and and do you wish you could send hope back or do you think that if you sent hope back that would corrupt you somehow and like potentially ruin the process like would you would you trade what you went through um I would never trade what I went through I hold no resentment uh towards anyone or anything um no I would never I would never trade what I had because if I would have traded what what I had I have you know again I I if I could make myself feel better I would have not probably had the same life change event I would have artificially felt better about myself that would not have CED anything that would not have changed anything fundamentally with in me like it took a hard time to make a different person and like there's that there's that old phrase right it goes something along the lines of like hard times make good men good men make easy times easy times make bad men bad men make hard times some some some I forget it's an old phrase it goes something along those lines it's just like I had to have that same internal small cycle where it's like in if I didn't have the bad I don't think I could have had the good yeah awesome well um you know it's it's like the uh you know you always see these like there's there's a lot of these stories that exist where the person that was the the ultimate bad guy whatever it was they're doing something and they're fighting you know the the good guy this happens in chess as well you give up something that looks so high value in the moment but you win in the end because you're able like the person doesn't realize that though they're making the most winning best move in the moment like the thing that they're losing is actually the game and so like it's that greater thing where it's just like I wouldn't want to do that cuz I don't know how the chess pieces would have fallen out to make that better to make a better analogy there which is like I I'm glad that I had to give up the queen yeah yeah like Bobby Fisher sacrificing like almost all his pieces in order to like is that the immortal game yeah I think it's the The Immortal game I think refers to a different game but it it okay it's like they lose every last piece except for two and then win the game like the greatest the greatest bamboozling of all time yeah but it's just like like seeing that line and committing to it and being willing to go through all that pain for what you believe is a good outcome cuz I mean you your judgment could be wrong or your opponent could do something that is like maybe they see that oh he keeps sacrificing high value pieces he's trying to bait me into something but but like can you maybe they're not as greedy as you think they are um but um yeah I see what you're I see what you're saying um and I I think sacrifice let's let's talk a little bit about sacrifice CU you put a ton of time and energy into your skills over the years um you've put a ton of time and energy into optimizing different aspects of you know just being a developer uh and and we can geek out on a lot of the different tools and techniques you use and things like that and I would love to do that if you if you are interested in talking about that yeah but like well first I got to I got to do the philosophical side of why yeah working hard and all these things are good so you hear this phrase a lot which is work smart not hard and so this is where I call absolute on that phrase because when you don't know what smart is there's only one way to get it which is by working hard and so the smart way to work when you don't know what you're doing is to work hard because there you know if let's just say that it's going to take you roughly 10,000 hours of good focused time to become great at programming and after you've worked say x amount of hour your focus time kind of reduces by 10 15% some some amount that you're just not as good you're still getting closer every hour that you're you're you're putting effort and time into and you know if someone's working say 80 hours a week and someone's working 40 hours a week and you compare them in two years like I would take the BET blindfolded and spun around in circles every single time that the person that did 80 hours is in a significantly different position than the person that did 40 hours like it doesn't matter how smart that 40 hour person worked it's just sometimes time wins every time time like that's that was that was a very 60% of the time it wins every time phrase but it was like time wins time wins every time right the person that's just willing to do the most will always win that's why you see the stories about like Kobe Kobe was the first person in the gym last person out of the gym you're telling me that there wasn't times he didn't feel it didn't want to do it it was too ouchy things were hurting probably should have taken a break no it's just that laser focus to do something great but not everybody needs to be Kobe not everybody wants to be Kobe and that's okay you first determine where you want to be and then you set in motion the steps you need to take to get to that position and if Kobe's the goal be the first person in be the last person out yeah if Kobe's not the goal then you know adjust accordingly and that's something I'd also like to talk with you about because freeo camp like I worked I mean there were probably literally weeks uh where I was working like more than 100 hours uh maybe even like 120 hours early on trying to get this open source project off the ground and stuff and uh of course like you in my humble opinion it's bad management to expect your charges to do that like I absolutely advocate for I'm on your team 100% with that but as a founder or as somebody who's trying to like I mean you could be considered a founder of the primagen like Persona the the stream like everything you've built right like that took probably an incredible amount of work it sounds like uh I mean where do you kind of draw the line like between believing that work life balance is important and yet seeing that your own success probably would not have happened if you were trying to work life balance your way or do you believe that do you believe that you could have gotten where you were if you didn't I call it the TRU like because I don't like the term gatekeeping I don't know if you've ever heard any of my rants about it 90 99% of what people say is gatekeeping isn't gatekeeping it's just someone being mean on the internet but I'd say one of the most actual gatekeeping things you can ever see are these people who've achieved a lot in programming and they achieved it VI via like working to death and doing these things tell everybody how important work life balances and that you shouldn't do that and don't do that what they've done is they've sold you a bill of goods that they themselves didn't follow and they themselves didn't use to achieve what they achieved and then tell you you shouldn't do that like is Success only relegated for them that's how I kind of take these type of phrases it's like there's a good kind of thing you can say and then there's a bad kind of thing you can say saying you should never do that that's probably not the right phrase saying hey you know you got to know when the trade-offs are and you got to be able to make the right decisions and at some points in your life it is good to do something that's probably unhealthy for a short period of time like that's okay if you're a founder and you want your company to be a success well there's only one choice you have to make you just got to have more hours in like that's that's just going to ultimately make it potentially more successful and it's not like it's good I don't recommend anyone doing a 100 hours worth of work a week like that's just not healthy like it's not physically healthy spiritually or emotionally healthy but if I had to do it for six months I would do it for six months not that I want to it's just a kind of like a a willingness to do that uh as far as like work life balance stuff goes and all that how I think about it is that I see it all I I do see this quite frequently people talk about how important that is but when it comes to actual life balance they're around their kids they're around their wife they're around their husband they're around family moms whatever but their brain is completely somewhere else they're not they're not in it and so it's just like that's not work life balance yeah you're just somewhere else like that that how does that count and so it's like if you're going to do something you should just do it you should just do it well and so when I go home I turn off my work brain and I can just do that and it's it's a skill I've been practicing it it wasn't just something that immediately you know popped out of nowhere it was something that took effort and effort and effort and how I typically go about it is it's the same thing when you're at work and you get distracted you will never be able to take away distractions but you will be able to respond to a distraction when you realize you're distracted to respond in the positive that is your chance uh you know I have had different phrases my life to describe it but that's how I think about it now which is that you can't control the distraction you can control how you respond when you realize and so when I'm with my kids that time to realize I'm being distracted has just gotten smaller and smaller and smaller because I actively fight against it the moment I realize I'm not doing something I don't finish the thought I don't keep on thinking about be like oh I should really do this but hold on you know okay well what about no no no cut it off the end move on back in you know oh I don't I really don't feel like getting up I really don't feel like crawling on the ground I really don't feel like caring my kids you know what shut up you're going to do it cuz it means way more to them and it really doesn't feel that bad I'm willing to lift weights I could be willing to crawl on the ground yeah you know it's just like that willingness that desire to like not listen to the thing that says don't do it but listen to the thing that says this is going to be like I'm in the moment so when I'm programming I want gosh darn it I want to be programming and when I'm with my kids gosh darn it I want to be with my kids yeah do you do you find that they ever like bleed into one another like like I mean do you work at home or do you have like a you know some sort of bar that I converted yeah I have a horse barn that I converted that is you can walk across your property to your studio essentially yeah yeah yeah yeah but I do have a physical barrier which I think does help a physical barrier does help uh uh you know I if you have some form of of routine I think routine helps a lot because then you can build that muscle via routine to like stop doing something you know like that's just pract more practical tips you know so if you if you get off of work get off work at the same time every day you know don't you sometimes you can't control when you start work but you can always control when you stop and you just force yourself to stop and it's just like I I always say the same thing with sleep if you want to get a good sleep schedule you don't control when you go to bed you control when you wake up your body will eventually say uncle and will start we we'll fall in line but there will be a time of period where it's very uncomfortable but you kind of forced yourself into a new schedule 5:00 is when I'm going to wake up like sorry me who stayed up till midnight last night man this sucks but I'm going to drink 14 cups of coffee and just call it a day until I can like make myself fall into line and so that's kind of like the ideas that I I generally float around with is just creating strong um routines and so I get off at 4 I get up I try to get up at 5: and I go straight to work I like make coffee and go straight to work I don't do a morning routine there's no red light therapy cold plunge hot plunge all that kind of stuff just bam straight to work right and just go right into it because that's the only way I can get in the hours I want yeah the best thing I ever did for my sleep schedule was have kids cuz my kids wake up at 7 o' no matter what sometimes 6:30 yeah and eventually you will fall into line like you I mean you you most certainly experienced this you probably were a night outl I'm a light I'm a natural night out I'd rather program at 1: in the morning than 1 in the afternoon and it's just like a natural part of me but it's just like you know I just fought it and changed it because life circumstances forced it and so then I just leaned in yeah so let's talk a little I mean we we could go through the whole like your entire developer origin story but like frankly I'm more interested in just gleaning like insight and sharing them with you because you're prolific man like I'm I'm sure you're aware of this but like you stream a ton you have like three YouTube channels where you're publishing stuff you you are constantly posting on Twitter uh and other probably other social media as well and uh and you're building like substantial you're like not just on the stream like let's chat you're actually building things and uh you know maning theow of and responding intelligently while you're also holding a of in your head when you're cing like I want to get I don't want this to turn devolve into like productivity bullet points or anything like that but but like if you want to learn a little bit more about your process if if that's cool um and maybe you could walk me through like a typical day like do you know when you're sitting down what you're going to do that day like you you get your coffee it's 5:00 a.m. you're walking you live in uh like a pretty cold part of North America right like yeah yeah I live in South Dakota so it's cold it also is hot during the summer colder than here in Texas very variable yeah so you're like trudging through I mean Texas potentially to this horse barn and you're sitting down I hope you have insulation in there you have insulation you have a space heater how how do you stay warm I I do have I have a mini split that I put up there that was like the most expensive part of this it was Framing and the mini split that were the two big ones and so yeah so this is paint that's like a literal pain wall you're not using like the flimsy green screen never aink I got a green room unironically Green Room yeah so so like let's talk about like okay 5:00 a.m. like put us in the shoes of the primagen as he's sipping his coffee oh wow yeah so it's like it's like it's a real it's a real green room and then of course there's the camera the ring light there's a bunch of yeah there's a bunch of foam fil all over the place like if I go on that side the the next season of the Mandalorian could be filmed right there in your Horse bar it could be yeah this is L literally A Horse bar and two stalls very cool so like what is your day like like you got the you got the coffee you're walking out there you're sitting down what happens walk us through it uh I generally come in with a very very uh I know that I'm going to program I know I'm going to do something and that's typically how I start like I I have a project that I've been building and that project is fairly complex or fairly Technical and I know that if I just sit down I'll just you know I'm it will come back to me all the things I need to learn so sometimes you know as I BS or talk with people I'm I'm in my back brain going okay what was the last thing I did okay I remember all this stuff all right now I know what I need to do like I have five things that I know I need to do to put this what I'm working on on the Shelf I just don't remember right now that there what the five things are I'm sure I could like derive them if I just rewalk the path but we'll start later and I'll start figuring out things and get it done well tell us a little bit about your frame of like what you experience as somebody who has a thousand people watching you on Twitch and like rapidly typing you know comments and what it's like to watch that that all that stream by knowing that you got to keep the show going this is live uh yeah like like what is what does it feel like um you know it's shockingly it doesn't feel much different than when I had 30 people watching me or 20 people uh when I started uh programming on Twitch uh a big stream was like 30 people that was like amazing and so it's like yeah it's changed quite a bit but it's it's still the same thing I'm still just trying to build something that's ridiculous I don't have like you know I don't have just some you know a lot of people you you'll see a lot of people with these things where they have all these um they have all these tips and like oh man such good marketing ideas and oh you know you got to send it at this time of the day to do these kind of things and oh you want to talk about this at this time and I just have I have no I have literally no plans so you're just relying on your ability to perform in the moment essentially like uh it's a it's a performance essentially there there's not like a whole lot of yeah systems in place to like help you uh like like perhaps like a less interesting streamer would just have gimmicks or something like oh let's go to dumb human dumb pet tricks or something like that or whatever it would be like different segments or thing do do you do anything like that or is it like and I'll be completely can I've never sat down and like actually watched one of your streams I just watch YouTube and I watch it like double speed and I usually watch it while I'm doing something else like not to denigrate your art or anything like that but uh what would a typical flow be like for somebody who's never watched uh you stream before it just depends on the day so I either do a heavy programming day days or we do like article style days and all that and so these are the heavy you know like today was a heavy programming day so for five six hours we just wrote go code uh wrote All of Huffman encoding for stuff and I could do you know various value size and all that for Huffman en coding and then we ended up beating gzip for this kind of real-time rendering engine that I'm doing right now and so that was fantastic I was very very happy about that but that was today and so that was the plan I knew I wanted to get far into the Huffman thing didn't think I was going to put a bow on it but hey we put a bow on it and so now it's done now I get to move on to the next thing quad trees uh I have a theory that if you break up the screen into various regions those regions change less than if you try to do the entire screen at once for encoding and so obviously this all this stuff has been done before but I'm just doing it myself and I'm doing it all myself and I'm going to make a you know little fun engine for game stuff and so yeah that's that's the next thing I'll do and and like pardon me if if I'm asking kind of really l l question but essentially just more efficient impression is what you're after yeah yeah then yeah so it's the idea is that I'm rendering in the browser using Dom elements and so everything is rendered on the server and all finished and just on the uh just in the browser do you see the result and that's it and so it's kind of like web RTC or something like that but it's it's just with asky so it's all asky games that's part of the fun I wanted to make them all asky and so it's all browser based asky stuff so it's just like minimizing how much data you send down yeah yeah that's really cool so like uh Dwarf Fortress type games or I mean would that be a representative of the type of games you're developing are you a dwarf well the first one I'm doing is uh I'm I'm I'm encoding Doom okay and we're going to play Doom so that way everyone in chat can play Doom at the same time so instead of having doom on the most bizarre device I want to have 2,000 people play Doom at the same time yeah that's a novel approach instead of running having it running on a pregnancy test you're having a whole bunch of people running on you know twitch is like Twitch Plays Pokemon I think was like an experiment that first one the problem is latency latency sucks right yeah and like turn kind of Doom is very instantaneous like you have to be quickly moving around if you're not going to get slaughtered by these demons right precisely hence the reason why you have to have why I'm building all this real-time stuff is that I want someone to be able to open up a web browser and I'll be shooting up from my computer up into some fly iio noes or something like that and then it will display what's on my computer within like 500 milliseconds see there's some there's some like latency that you could have that's fine it's just that anything beyond that it becomes you know it becomes untenable so if they press in chat and chat takes 200 milliseconds to get to my computer plus you know or 300 or 400 or 500 milliseconds Plus for them to see what they're seeing is you know 400 milliseconds behind that still actually largely works because Doom is such a simple game you don't need to be precise you just need to like like shoot in the Demon's general direction and you hit it so you know there there's a lot of forgiveness in the game this isn't fortnite this is yeah so you're a lot of people are going to be using the double barrel shotgun if they're going to have any success I would imagine um yeah yeah yeah you can select Guns by just selecting a different gun yeah and twitch itself has like a good amount of latency like like several seconds so like if they're looking at the actual twitch stream then what has happened in the game has already moved on like a couple seconds before they their input actually quite a bit so how do you address that is there a way to address that that's why I'm doing the whole Real Time stuff is that they're going to open up a website ah so you're not going to rely on what's on my computer within a few hundred milliseconds and if I really felt like I could shave off another 150 or whatever it is my my guess is my guess is that a lot of my ping up to these servers is like 40 50 milliseconds so it's it's not like terrible and so for me to send up this data and then just have it routed back down to somebody it'll be like 90 milliseconds for that it's like not a huge you know it's nothing that's deal breaking the deal breaker will be all twitch chat latency which will be like on the order of 500 milliseconds have you talked to Twitch is there anything you can do to like improve that latency I I could make them so they could play via um just the website but I don't want to yeah it's more fun to make them go on Twitch and all vote with W's and as's and S's and D's to say exactly what they want so it's a consist is like like most people said a here so we're going to move to the left basically like yeah I'll be taking like every 100 milliseconds every you know 75 milliseconds that consensus will then play that key for the next 75 milliseconds or whatever it is except if it's a fire it just plays it once you know and so it's just like you kind of have to make it play these different things and can you do like WF so that it both moves forward and Fires at the same time so I got to figure out like some of those things yeah uh so uh I guess this is an interesting kind of metac cognition thing but there there are going to be a certain number of people in your audience who are going to be wanting to step toward the imp's fireball as opposed to away from it and what if the number of trolls or Griefers like outnumbers the people who just want to play an honest game of Doom then we lose like that's that's the end you know the thing is is most generally speaking most people want to win so that's the nice part uh so that's why the second game I want to develop is going to be a tower defense where it's chat versus me and you can troll just the thing is you got to pay Bits And if you troll you hurt yourself you let me win so then there's like this whole fundamental thing so you the troll toll is only to hurt yourself and so the whole idea is that you get to if you're going to troll you make your own team lose and which makes me win and you the viewer there's a fundamental like you don't want the streamer to win yeah like there's there's definitely that just exists they want to see you not be successful so it like puts them in this really painful position where they have to try to make the right decision and you benefit monetarily from the bits I guess they make the worst decision if they troll to then you know yeah it's going to cost them five bucks so you have been successful on two mediums so this is like not like their influencers can never break off of Tik Tok right and like never really have success out of their their first platform but you have managed to kind of like transplant yourself over onto YouTube through like these vods video on demand and and other things like that you you seem to have like a really good editor uh who identifies like interesting clips and like chops them out and puts them up as Standalone videos like so you're kind of at the Forefront of the difference in culture between twitch which is primarily gamer driven and like YouTube which I mean is like everybody is the biggest website on the internet basically yeah um and like like so you're almost kind of like in a position where you could be like a cultural anthropologist uh between those two worlds like what are some of the things you've observed that are different on Twitch and the nature of that Medium versus YouTube which is you know like like real time with with chat versus YouTube with its extremely sluggish comment system not sluggish but like yeah you know people watch the video then they it's not it's not for communication yeah it's not for synchronous communication um it's for you know I always feel bad using the term async ever since Annie made a big deal about async and now I'm just like oh man it's so true async means to you know asynchronous communication is to take two Communications and synchronize them so we've been using the word all wrong but uh uh twitch is you go to Twitch for connection so that means that you're going there because you want to see someone you have something in mind typically is what twitch is about and YouTube you typically go to YouTube to watch something you want to watch and so there're just vastly different crowds people that you know really like YouTube they they they they'll just pretty much largely stay on YouTube people that really like twitch will largely just stay on Twitch okay so you've cultivated two like very different audiences um generally yeah have you noticed so like a lot of people probably have a parasocial relationship with you where like you don't necessarily know a whole lot about them but they know quite a bit about you especially if they spent a substantial amount of time watching your videos it could be said that before this call I had a parasocial relationship with you and you Pro you may not have had any sort of relationship with me I don't know if you ever listened to the free cocan podcast before so no I just knew your picture that's it ah well um what uh like how do you interact with people on Twitch and do you even go over to YouTube and like interacting the comment section on YouTube generally I stay away from the comment section uh just because there's a lot of really nice comments but then there's also a lot of like not so nice comments and so you know that's just a you know that's just a reality to all of it and so I'm I'm I'm okay with that and so I just I I don't like to I just don't it's just not there so I I like all the live stuff and so it's fun like talking to them because you can have like a more real conversation whereas if you you know if you're trying to respond to Twitch comments or a a YouTube comment section it's just like you say something they may say say something back but you'll probably never get the notification you have absolutely no idea what happened so it's like there's no real back and forth or real communication with it all and so it's it's just different yeah it's kind of like if I go on if I go on YouTube I have something like it's like 20,000 notifications yeah that's a lot those are those are mostly like people commenting on things that unfortunately comments that you probably won't have the time to read and like thoughtfully respond to yeah how do you do it on Twitch moving back to Twitch because I did live stream coding on Twitch for like maybe like six or eight months or something like that and I was right about like where you were talking like I might have 30 people tuning in like oh let's watch Quincy you know build the early versions of free C camper implement this feature or whatever how many years ago was that nine years ago okay so uh and there wasn't like a live coding section I don't even know if there is a live coding section on Twitch like people have been asking for like live coding like sections on Twitch for a long time is there one now yeah software and game development okay great I'm glad they added that cuz that was like really frustrating that like there was like no discovery on Twitch um yeah discover you never go to Twitch for Discovery that's generally A good rule thumb yeah and you know I it felt weird for me to be using like Twitter and like these other places that worked really hard to like try to steer attention to Twitch was a platform that like at the time N9 years ago not very many people got it I still don't really get it frankly like I don't use twitch uh just because like I podcast at Double speed while I'm like you know walking my kids and stuff like that like everything I don't know maybe that sounds like to toxic productivity type stuff but but like the idea of me sitting there and just watching somebody at real in real time do stuff on Twitch uh so so like I just want to be forthcoming I don't get twitch but but you seem you may missed doing it a little bit like if you were programming a whole bunch and you're just hanging out a lot of times people just use it as co-working space okay I'm over here building something you're over there building something you're remote working you don't have any people that you work with every now and then you start chatting and you know maybe I chat back with you and it's just like oh that's kind of like a fun experience is that how you started with it uh I mean I think that's just generally how people view it is this is just like something that they they're a part of it I think it's more of that kind of like so it's just more of a social interaction type thing yeah well are there any any big like changes or any big things that you're really excited about on either the twitch or the YouTube front like I know that you've got now your third Channel and I guess one question I have is like why all the channels like one's like news and reaction like article reaction Tech have four I technically have four channels um but yeah yeah I have my edited thought through video channel which I I'm we're editing a video right now H then I I did a keyboard review on the glove 80 um then I have like kind of like my article read hot t Channel and then I have uh me just long form programming Channel and then I have just like clips and shorts and just just things that I said and did on stream channel okay yeah reason being is it it should be pretty it should be pretty obvious uh but maybe maybe it isn't most people that watch you don't subscribe the people that do subscribe uh they come and they go and so if you don't have a voice on your channel you will attract many different groups and then as your videos go out you'll have these many different groups see your channel and they'll go oh I don't watch that you know and so you just have these like hard Nos and so Google doesn't really know how to promote that and so they just kind of shut it down and so it's just like okay here's my here's my people that want to watch curated engineering videos here is a curated engineering video oh people that just want to hear me riff off of an article or or something like that or a TW a tweet or something like that here's this group that just is like engineering ajacent they just want to hear about programming in Broad terms uh here's the hardcore coding one because if I just took an hour coding video and threw it on any of the other channels it just would it would just do horrible because that's just not the expectation people have yeah and so that's the that's the idea is that you just you create your own verticals and it just makes more sense because people just they don't want to see all the same content you have a pretty big audience of people that uh take your opinion seriously and it it carries a lot of weight especially as far as like you know programming practices or uh things that you think are you know more effective than other things you know just just basically like trade-offs where people's opinion can fall on one side or the other but you have a strong opinion in a lot of these cases but you've said I'm just a man giving my opinion on the internet like how do you reconcile like just being a man giving your opinion with the responsibility of like essentially training a lot of the maybe mid career devs that tune in to your uh to your Twitch stream and and watch your YouTube videos like like how do you carry that responsibility uh as far as carry the responsibility I just don't think about it but I mean gen I know that sounds kind of weird but I mean generally speaking is that I really am I just I am just some guy on the internet and I just give my opinion and that's it I don't I don't try to be more than that I don't try to be less than that um I think that I think people often just take everything so dang seriously so I just I just I just do the opposite I think that's I think that's why I've been been so successful is that if you look at the older kind of the longer stayed Twitter Tech celebrities they're all so serious and and you know and as in the last like two years I feel like I single-handedly have destroyed a lot of the online tech Twitter like what it was uh I feel very proud of that but it's just it's just it was so serious all the time it's just like so highbrow and the thing is is that most people just aren't highbrow most people are just normal people that don't care and they just would rather laugh a little and you know if there's a little something to discuss about Tech then we'll talk about tech and then we'll make some stupid tweet you know like I just like today just all I did was make a tweet where it's just if you know new promise instead of reject or resolve reject it was respect disrespect you know it's just like there's nothing to that and someone said it the best part someone even said it in the chat and so I was just like MIT grabbed it and tweeted it or turned it into like a code picture and then tweeted it and it's like that just does fantastic because it doesn't mean anything it's just a dumb observation that we're all familiar with and that's it and like that's that's just fun and so I just I feel like the the the general discourse is still struggling between these two halves but it's definitely like just caving to one side which is just you know it's not like like maybe maybe it doesn't have to be that important on at all times maybe not everything has to be the most academic maybe it can just be dumb for the sake of being dumb and we can just have fun about it and that's okay it's only male modeling it's it's just models all the way down and so it's funny I don't know I just I I've enjoyed it I've really enjoyed it yeah so another thing that I think is really interesting about uh you is like you jump from one project to another but you do actually finish the products usually um and you say uh you've said that you love the process of creation for creation's sake but as creation turns into maintenance it starts to feel like work since most projects eventually become more about maintenance than creation if you're working like with like a large Legacy codebase or something like that you're probably spending I don't know maybe maybe you could argue on this point but you're probably spending about as much time just maintaining that and making sure that that continues to work as you are actually building out new functionality and stuff would is that a fair statement yeah yeah Harpoon is like my big Thorn to my side it's my most popular plugin I absolutely love it it works for me but people keep using it in Stupid Ways and they want me to fix it and so I'm just like I don't know quit doing it that way you know but I also realize that there's some bugs and some things that people want fixed or some extensions and so it's like I need to do some stuff I I really do need to spend another two weeks or probably I I honestly probably need to spend just 10 more hours kind of just wrapping up stuff with Harpoon and then I can release version two on 69 yeah so how do you know when it's time to like just let a project rot or like completely deprecate it and and move on with your life it's just when when I don't care anymore that's it you know I I build things for the sake of building them and if if there's something that I really like I build it to the point where I like it and use it all the time what makes you care about it is it like knowing a whole lot of people are depending on it because there's a lot of Open Source projects that like you know everybody's depending on like you know I think like Heartbleed and the one guy in his you know server closet like trying to keep basically the internet afloat uh and uh you know pretty thankless job but like that has to be maintained right that's Mission critical infrastructure is there anything You' built that you feel is like even though you don't like working on it you feel compelled to work on it just because so many people are depending on it oh yeah Harpoon would be the only one and so that's the one that I I will try to make something better with it but I I I like it the way it is and I don't want to add new features and so it's like me just saying no is the predominant way I maintain it but every now and then I begrudgingly add something yeah yeah and you said that programming is such a key part of your life and that it's always been such a part of your life that you really can't even imagine doing anything other than programming let's say hypothetically that you're like a Kevin mitnik type character rip and the FBI has literally forbade you forbade forbidded you from using computers for like 10 years or something like you cannot get within 10t of a computer or you're going directly to jail like if you were in a situation like that where you literally could not program what would you do like where would you Channel your time property property what do you mean by property real estate Adventures let's talk about that for a second uh because you used to live in San Francisco Bay area where I used to live before I moved back to Texas um and you moved back to back to uh South South Dakota South Dakota yeah and and like obviously there's like a you can buy a lot more in South Dakota and you can buy a lot more in Texas than you can in San Francisco uh have you ever thought about taking like your ridiculously high Netflix you know like I don't know if Netflix like adjusts your income at all if you like work remotely or if you move to a different place yeah they they adjusted my income for sure okay I don't work there anymore I I worked there for 10 and a half years and recently quit about a month and a half ago yeah so but but up until that point like what were you thinking about doing with those fund like where does the extra money go is it just going towards supporting a family of six uh we did a very big investment into the land that we bought we bought a strategic place as opposed to a place to live um just because we knew that a lot of building was going this direction the school was bidding on land near us all that kind of stuff and so we bought a plot of land as as an investment you know to try to hold for five years and it's it's fairly expensive so that's where most of our funds honestly go um so that's that's one thing uh the next thing is that after that we just kind of put a lot of we've just focused on my wife really likes running airbnbs and so we got a couple airbnbs and she just loves doing that and she likes Remodeling and all that and so or she does I let me rephrase that she hates remodeling but she knows she needs to do it to make the place look really nice and be the way she wants it to be and so that's where like a lot of her effort and time gets spent and so I know if I couldn't do this I would just pivot into that you know I just learn all the things you need to learn to be really great at that because it's it's like all all these activities aren't hard they're again it's just time right like just like programming programming I mean programming is objectively hard but it's also just a time orienting and so if I were to do some of these things like I I would never be a great woodworker I probably am starting way too l uh late in my life but could I hang sheetrock yeah I could hang sheetrock and you know learn to paint learn to refinish floors do everything and just get really good at that and just put my time completely into that yeah it's funny you mentioned woodworking because there's like this meme or something that like programmers like all the programmers today are the people that would be Woodworkers like 100 years ago 200 years ago and that like do you see parallels between doing things with your hands like in in a like a wood shop or or even metal shop like and you know building software yeah I mean you could also probably swap us out with like potentially painters and all that but I mean obviously back then things were so much different and so like here's a good example that did you know that college uh the original idea of a Bachelor of Arts was to prepare someone's life for leisure so it was the it was the act of um of endowing someone who's already rich with the ability to know how to read and follow out the poets and all that so I would definitely probably not be in that c category just if my life were simar I would probably not be on that side and so when people are doing these you know I probably wouldn't be on the art side would be would be a fair take I wouldn't be writing poetry SL doing art but you know I think that it's just the creation part it's just that you want to be able to build things and most of the things you build are probably just very practical for your life in the moment just you know so I'd probably fall on that side maybe I'd hope yeah you know the reality is probably if I lived 200 years ago I'd probably be on a farm or die in it would have probably been pretty horrible but you know like luckily I don't have to you know be in that time yeah unfortunately most people probably would have died like long before their time before they could realize their creative Pursuits just because it's the way things were was and people forget that yeah and people also yeah forget that fact about higher education that it wasn't designed to train you know soldiers returning from World War II to be able to enter industry and it was designed to help rich kids be able to have peacock brains and show off to mates and stuff like that basically and and to be able to fit in at dinner parties and oh look at Junior he's so audite you know stuff like that and yeah it was literally 1% like in the most educated place in the world London the 1900s right like like college really did not pick up steam as something that people did until post World War II era um when the government started funding uh through the GI Bill and stuff like that but anyway I digress but it is really interesting uh that like you know like you could actually kind of consider programming more of a craftsmanship than you could consider it like a high art or whatever right I I don't know where do you fall in that Spectrum like like CRA or an artisan probably depends on the area right uh you know like if you're doing like the really high academic thought things machine learning I think once you get into like I don't know if you've ever handrolled your own MLP or RBF or any of those things uh it's it's it's it's a lot of effort and now you you know once you start getting into the research area then I think you fall into this really intense like it's much more of an artisan become a master at math and then apply the math to these specific categories and all that kind of stuff that's you know that's a different vibe than uh being able to build stuff yeah you know being able to build stuff quick like I can build most things and most things that I build you know like I've been building this project now for you know about a month and a half and I've probably put a good 100 plus hours 200 hours into it and I've just been building only the coing side of things how to make a bunch of bites and make them smaller and I've built almost everything out and now I'm going to combine them all like right now and you know the interfaces largely just all fell together almost just perfectly despite making many mid mid programming shifts it's just because I've just done it for so long that I have a bunch of just like General ideas of how to program for the long term and this is kind of where that craftsmanship comes in where I can just kind of I I will fall within the 80 to 90% now it won't be you know won't hit a 100 but most of the time but I I'll I'll hit a good 80 90% pretty regularly and so that's like it's fun you know it's that it's that craftsmanship that's building quality stuff yeah I mean how much do you feel like you're just like falling back on your instincts that are honed over the years at the keyboard uh when you're when you're doing like a lot of like does stuff disappear and you're just like doing it or are you frequently pulling back to really think are you going to like the Whiteboard and I rarely rarely really think I rarely I it's just like I just know what I want and I feel like I can see the path and I don't really think about the path it's kind of like walk you know it's like when you go hiking you don't think about every last turn you kind of think like I want to get up to this point and I know there's that one part with the field with the flowers there's this other part with the Rocks you know oh then there's that one part with just a bunch of really tall pine trees right like you just have like these places in your head that you know you're going to go through and then the rest is just kind of you know just details a so it feels like walking and and by the way that walk I just described was uh the easy way on the m in Boseman Montana so if you ever done the hike in bosan Montana to the m it starts off with like a bunch of rocks kind of deeper bush area and then you go out into the field of flowers and then you turn into these really tall pine trees and so it's like know each spot's a little different I don't know how many turns or twists there are in between each but that's generally what happens yeah but you just kind of manually or like instinctively navigate things and it just it just happens right before you know it you're toward the end of the trail um okay so so likening building software and like integrating all these bits of software that you've written almost to just walking a trail because you've been you've done that so many times you kind of just instinctively know how to put one foot in front of the other yeah yeah like I I know what I want so if you watch one of my streams like today programmed I've never ever once in my life done Huffman and coding uh uh ever I've just never built a Huffman and code anything and so last week I watched a five minute YouTube video on it and it's like okay this is how you write a Huffman tree I was like ah okay I I see how that works and so from there I wrote the Huffman tree generator I wrote the in I wrote how how I'm going to Binary serialize that into a protocol so I could have it on the other side how to take that protocol and efficiently walk it and then also how to like how do you encode and decode encoding and decoding is really difficult because you got to walk from the most significant bit to the least significant bit and putting in these bits one at a time and all that and so there's like a lot to it that just wasn't a part of the video I just knew that I would do that like that's it it's just because I've seen it so many times that I've never done something before and I can and I even first tried one of it like genuinely first try just programmed for 45 minutes straight hundreds of lines put it in pressed play and it just worked all the way through unit test pass and everything wow so you like it was like movie coding yeah movie coding yeah yeah yeah it just it's still not movie coding in the sense that the next one I then took me four it took me four runs we do this thing where I get three runs and if I cannot make it pass on the third run then I lose or I win so we have bets and people place Channel points on whether I'm going to win or lose on these things and so today on the encoding side it took me just one try so one out of three to just get it done on the decoding side it took four out of three so I had to go into a second round best out of three to get it so I first tried the second try let's because I bit shifted the wrong direction like that's it I bit shifted I bit shifted the thing over as opposed to bringing it back down so like a very common error the programmers probably just stupid yeah yeah and it sounds like because you've put in the Reps at the keyboard and because you have this massive kind of Corpus of knowledge and learned experience from spending so much time coding that you have this kind of frame this scaffolding that you just kind of throw new ideas on right like you watch this five minute YouTube video and you kind of like maybe almost subconsciously saw the patterns and made these associations and you just internalized it yeah pretty much yeah that's something an experienced programmer can do and that uh maybe that's why like sometimes it's seems like if you're a new developer and you're trying to like solve like a project Oiler problem or something like that and you're just oh my goodness you spend like six hours doing it uh and then you could just like somebody like you could probably sit down and do that in like two or three minutes you know maybe maybe thing with it right yeah yeah and and that's why you know experienced developers are so in demand and we could we could kind of maybe talk about the job market because I do want to talk about AI um yeah we're coming up on two hours so we may want to uh figure out which one because I might get longwinded and talk about 40 minutes on one and then we're just like so far over time that your kids are going be like you're I'm taking my kids to cce's Pizza yeah yeah they they love that means you gota at some point you got to feed them so let's let's pick one you can you can choose okay so let's talk about Ai and let's go that's the one I wanted I mean yeah yeah I I mean I do kind of want to talk about like some of the misconceptions about how it's going to impact the labor market let's just start with with AI though okay okay so you published a video like maybe six or eight months ago a year ago like where you're like I tried uh I tried a co-pilot for like six months and then I just ripped it out and I I didn't want to use it anymore do you remember that video that was about a month and a half ago that I talked about that yeah it was just it was just recently I'm only about a month and a half into not using co-pilot okay but I could have sworn I saw a video like a long time ago where you talked I've started using co-pilot uh I started using it in the beta phase like way before everybody a net Freedman the CEO of GitHub at that point sent me how to use it and gave me the credentials and access to a private GitHub library to be able to use it in Vim okay so you use it like like I just like I'm going to step back I just want to hear your thoughts on co-pilot having been like one of the early beta users having used it a lot having stepped back from it like you know everything that's transpired since this tool kind of fell into your lap MH um so here's my my my general take on cop I think co-pilot is great I think that it's a very fancy autocomplete uh but that's all it is if you don't like I I was starting to get my masters in AI so I have a general idea of how MLPs what what their like purpose is and I have some understanding there's no reasoning that goes on and I know everyone will say you know this or that and oh it's it's AGI and all these kind of things now it's just it's really good at predicting the next set of tokens that should come out you give it some input it gives it it gives you some output it's really great at predictive stuff it's really great at extrapolating and it can just do some things that are just so amazing right you give it a p picture of a pop can it's like pop can right it just knows it doesn't you know like you you look at this and you see green you see green all the way through but a computer like right here that's like white like if you were to look at a picture of this it would dramatically change color because it it's actually it's not it's not green at that point and so but our brain just maps all these things on and makes it so easy and we just don't realize how you know complex these actions actually and so it's you know when I start when I stopped using co-pilot what I realized is that it was just during the time right after I've been learning go for the first time like in a in a serious sense uh I was learning go for about two months and when I turned off co-pilot I realized I didn't know go I didn't I I Bamboozled myself into thinking I knew go I didn't know go and what I knew is how to use co-pilot to write go and I realized like man I'm like I'm not good at this like I thought I was a lot better but I'm really not that good and so I quit using it and I realized all these weird habits I would just like stop typing and you know like one of the videos I watched at not too long ago talked about like the co-pilot pause yeah it's real I would just pause I would just stop for whatever reason that's that waiting for co-pilot to tell me what to do and it's just like I realized I was just like largely inhibiting myself and I did not like that one bit I did not like the fact that I was kind of um it's not that I thought I was going to become redundant or thinking the robots are going to take over I was just simply not I I effectively it's almost like I just filled my coating abilities with water and turned the temperature way down I just froze them in time and so it's just like from when I picked up go for the first time which generally you're like okay at go you can just you can just go if you have any programming experience you just you just know it by nature and so it's like I just froze it and I just kept knowing that same amount of go despite getting faster I was just getting FAS with AI and so once that turned off it was just like I had a I had a reality call and I was like wow okay so I see what it actually does and I don't like that I want to change this I want to be you know I want to be better at it so I turned it off and for the last month I've turned it off and I feel like despite having to type more and I do miss some of the auto completes quite a bit I am happy I still have it off even though I would definitely say I have to type more for sure and there's times where I'm like oh gosh this would be such a good co-pilot Moment Like right here co-pilot would just know exactly what I want you know it's just like it's so obvious what I want and so it's just like that part's painful but the rest is just like so like the tradeoff is just I'm not willing to go back right now so like that's what it is for you like all the hype and everything and it's really just something that saves you a few keystrokes you already know what you wanted to type it's just like okay did it autocomplete it correctly so I don't have to type an extra 60 characters here effectively yeah like you can see it too if you start using co-pilot like write something that will read one bite out of a buffer and then name the next me method 16bit reader and then watch it go like that's all it's doing is it's just trying to extrapolate what you're already doing into the next thing and it's just like ah we just got done building this thing that looked like this shape here's the next thing that's probably the shape you're looking for and bada bing bada boom it's just going to work you're going to be like wow that was pretty convenient I like that a whole bunch and it's just like I found like I'm not going to say I was addicted to it but I was most certainly like I was dependent there was a dependency for sure on it and it just I was just so dang Blown Away by how much that thing kind of made my learning process atrophy like I couldn't write a for Loop in in like in Lua so I was doing a lot of Lua as well I could not write a for Loop during that time I realized I did not know the syntax yeah because it always autocom completed it for me it's like do you need to know the syntax I mean toine the word need that's the problem and so it's like that for me it's just like that's that's my big takeaway with co-pilot is that I I believe it's a fan bargain as of right now for those that don't know Dr fa you get what you want in the moment and ultimately it's the devil that takes everything away in the end right you trade something good for ultimately something evil that's my person I know I know some people they strongly disagree with this and they talk about oh man it's it's it's making it so that more it's it's making programming more approachable more people can start programming it is better in general for everybody I hear all those arguments I'm not even arguing against those arguments what I'm saying is that the people that are feeling more productive they're not actually being more productive they're not actually learning anything and there's something pretty serious about that long term there's something very serious about you not actually learning some pretty important skills CU I don't know what the consequence is I could just see in myself the atrophy that happened or the inability like I I saw in myself atrophy is probably not the right term I saw in myself the inability to become good at something that I was doing full-time and so know it at like a more personal level so I was like holy cow that's that's a red flag for me I don't know what the consequences are but that's a red flag yeah and for you like it seems like being good at something is like the whole name of the game like the whole reason you're playing is to get better um so so that like it seems like an incredibly counterproductive thing to basically give yourself a tool that'll help you get your work done faster but your work is always going to you're like plateauing yourself essentially yeah and that I mean that's the big worry is like is is it good for anybody like yeah maybe I like the craft you don't like the craft but then my argument next thing is will you actually will this help you ship faster in six months 12 months or are you actually like is there some line that exists where you actually Plateau faster even though the other person maybe took a little bit longer but they grow even faster and you can say oh well it helps me learn the canonical way of doing things all this kind of stuff and my counterargument is that it's really hard to know if the canonical way or what you perceive as the canonical way is actually the good way to write code you don't know like that's it that's the answer again it's not about working hard or smart you just don't know so you have to Simply fail and learn why certain things don't like lend themselves well so if you never have to switch environments switch languages switch you know various things you're not going to like get bamboozled into bad traps you're not going to try to apply a certain of thinking to a problem that's like drastically terrible for it it's CU you just don't have that that experience you you've you've traded it off for Speed yeah do you think that uh people are just kind of like I mean Guitar Hero kind of like got people like at least making the motions of playing guitar even though they weren't really playing guitar but they could feel like they were playing guitar and maybe they were actually developing like some Rhythm and some of the manual dexterity and stuff to play guitar but it's just like this kind of like uh you know Similac of act it's like almost a parody of actual coding if you're just hitting Tab and like tapping a few things and hitting Tab and you're just tabing through the different results and like it it I can definitely see how this is bad for new programmers and potentially bad for like more experienced programs because you're pretty experienced and you're you're thinking it's bad for you at what point do you think that people should introduce this into their workflow let's say they're new to software development completely like they've been coding for like six months they they've solved a bunch of project Oiler problems or they've gone through like a certification on freeo Camp or something like that and they're really still just getting their their wings as developers there's got to be a temptation to use this tool that helps you get things done and and can it feel like training wheels do do you have kids who learned how to ride bikes I guess would be a question yeah yeah yeah I do you know the funny part is that you know the best way to ride to learn how to ride bikes which has been a large big change since we were kids assuming you're approximately the same ages age near me me being 37 okay go you definitely have the same experience then training wheels you don't do training wheels anymore training wheels are objectively bad they're not just kind of bad they're objectively bad you don't do training wheels anymore Striders you get kids bikes with no pedals and they learn to push and ride and glide on them and what it does is it it teaches them the more Superior skill to learning how to bike which is balance pedaling is not hard pedaling is something you learn in a moment but balance is that thing you have to go do like 50 times 100 times thousand times until you're like really comfortable making turns and all that you start hitting Hills on those little Striders and kids start going back and forth like they get good at the act of biking just missing the pedaling part and so it's like that has been a huge just a huge game Cher for kids learning how to bike and so I that's that's I look at co-pilot more like training wheel so like should you learn how to uh or should you when should you use co-pilot here's my general rule of thumb is when you should uh use co-pilot if co-pilots produce code that surprises you or if you use co-pilot to solve a problem because you don't know how you probably shouldn't use it it's not an autocomplete it's not a co-pilot it is a pilot you know you're on autopilot change things up learn how to do those things you're the one who autopilot yeah it's doing the actual heavy lifting you're basically just kind of like teeing it up and like letting yeah so are you you should be like it should be you know that like I'm not a sports ball guy but in in in football someone snaps someone catches and lines the ball up and someone kicks are you the kicker or are you the person that sets up the ball you want to be the kicker you're the person doing the thing you want someone that's just like taking out the boiler plate of getting ready to kick for you yeah that's a good analogy so a lot of people are like really freaked out about Ai and like Devon Ai and like you know the the AI hype cycle like has has reached yet another Crescendo in its many years of AI Winters and AI Summers not that it's not bringing a lot of fruit like I use AI all the time and I imagine you do too for good things not just for things that I'm too lazy to do properly right um there are novel things you can do with AI with using like gp4 which I use a lot structured questions that you would never be able to get like a good Google result for but you can potentially have like a a rich conversation with it and like learn stuff and yet a lot of people are really freaking out because they greatly overestimate this token predictor and what it can do and you know yeah like like what would be your advice to somebody who's getting into and you probably get this question all the time I get it like several times a day I'm not exaggerating like people email me all the time uh yeah what at least once or twice a stream someone asked this exact question about is the AI going to take our jobs what's going to happen am I just learning a useless skill like there's like a thousand of this that direction of questions that are all kind of wrapped up into the answer that I'm I'm going to attempt to give okay great uh so let's first start with momentum uh the internet we can all argue is a phenomenal uh thing for business right businesses have been able to do a vast amount more with less resources due to the internet existing the internet started coming around with what arpanet in the 60s it really started to hit its stride in the 90s when you started getting uh 144k and 56k modems like how long until you really started to see the internet well the first.com bust was really to just a bust because we didn't have the pipeline we didn't have the infrastructure to really handle it and so didn't it it like the internet was around for so long but for businesses to really adapt and start using it which today you still have most businesses like most businesses don't even really have a personal website if anything you know they may have just something really really small and that's it uh and so that took like 25 years to really get integrated into society and so just apply that to AI let's just say the AI is incredible it's not it's like society's not changing tomorrow it's going to take a long time these big businesses these big corporations right now we're in the exploratory phase which is here's this thing that is just really you know like the culmination of the last uh 80 years of research into into AI in this one particular branch of uh multi-layer perceptrons or whatever you know whatever the llm underlying Tech is and here it is we have a business what happens if you start letting things be steered by this what are the consequences what kind of guidelines do you have to have what kind of this that you like think about the 9,000 questions that have to be set up for this to even become a business viable solution some people rushed in used it and then backed away you I mean how many stories have you read about like people going oh crap we overdid this one not a good plan and so they're all pulling things away and so that like that's just like the business learning phase and that's like a 10-year phase and then at some point it's going to be good enough to be integrated and we're going to start seeing it as a real part of our life so my guess is we still got like at least 10 years where things are going to be fairly the way they are today it'll just like slowly be going and then that's something point it's going to go from slow to fast and now it's everywhere uh so the next question is is what is it going to affect in my opinion and I don't think this is I don't think this is an opinion I think this is just a matter of fact if you ask the AI to do something it will do that something hey paint me a picture of a crab it produces you crab my counter question to you is why was that the right crab and you'll realize there's no reason why I couldn't have been one of 10 million other variations of the same crab it they crab is an archetype it can be visualized in a bajillion different ways but do the same thing with the AI and ask it hey give me a perfectly white canvas it's like just not going to do it you saw in the new uh jiid 4 Omni video uh the guy was just like hey girl and guy I want you to sing trading Lines by and they just didn't do it he's like no no no I want you to you sing one line and then he sings one line and then it didn't did it it's like no you got to stop at one line and you need to like the problem is again is that you went from an answer can be the answer to a specific answer is the answer and once you go from that that translation layer all of the sudden that's where the like AI completely fall off a perfectly white canvas is virtually impossible just like it is asking like there's that Meme that's going on the internet right now ask the AI ask chat chippity 4 40 the newest greatest most fantastic piece of technology ever how many ARS are in strawberry and what positions and it was coming up with the craziest answers even though it's like perfectly obvious to us because again you've gone from uh like a conceptual question like what could be the next thing that comes out to I want this precise thing and this is why we don't this is why you don't program in English you don't program in English because English is highly uh uh tolerant to like heirs I can like how I'm even describing this there's a thousand different ways I could have just said what I got done saying and all of those would have been acceptable English is just not a precise form of communic ation it's meant to go from thought to thought and the path we take is going to be some sort of you know version of our upbringing our culture all that kind of stuff and so now you're on to this idea of going from that language which is just terrible for specific uh or for specifications I.E read any legal document two like uh like this is a legal specification for what the AI needs to do and it just it utterly fails because it's not the right like that's not going to be it and so I'm not worried about this version of AI could there exist a future version in which can do all these things sure why not um but let me hit you with like a different idea yeah in the in the 2005 2003 to 2005 era you were going from a 1.3 MHz computer to like a 2 mahz computer the rate of change was incredible if you would have been living down that in that era which I was I thought man in 10 years I'm going to be using 10 10 GHz computers it's going to be crazy all these kind of things and guess what happened yeah it didn't yeah it didn't happen it did not happen because there is a fundamental diminishing return that exists out there and so like is this AI the worst version of AI we'll ever experience or is this AI actually in that Golden Era of growth where we're about to come up to a hard wall we actually don't know the answer to that and so if anyone tells you there's some future AI that's going to be magical and all powerful maybe we don't have any evidence of that ever being true in any other form of of creation right now like everything scales hor like the the economy of scale is never it just never goes that direction I would love it to be real but I don't see any evidence for it and so long story short should you be worried about the AI taking your job if you are a customer service representative in which your job is to take in a fundamentally flawed input match it against some sort of business requirements and then spit out another fundamentally flawed response to a person like yeah that's a very dangerous place to be if your job is to look at images like TSA looking at what could be dangerous and not dangerous in a backpack there very well could be a place where that starts to become a diminished return on that like there's these activities that you're just kind of like guessing and oh we need to check this backpack to see if it actually is bad or good like maybe that is maybe those type of positions will go away because you're just kind of it's kind of a guessing thing but at the end of the day anything that's like really concrete like I need to check the backpack now or hey I'm the doctor I'm going to review the MRI like those still have people behind them and programming is the like the Pinnacle of the world's most specific thing ever every single keyword every single symbol every single identifier has its exact position and its meaning and one has a consequence into the next one that's why it's just like such a disaster as these llms get longer and longer into stuff cuz the consequence of being mostly right compiles just horribly so even if they take that mostly right and you know are able to move it down to a thousandth of what it is today that's still completely wrong right there is no completely there's no mostly right in programming this is not horseshoes this is not hand grenades this is a precise mathematical expression of what your intent is so there you go so I think there's just no danger in this current world for or AI is taking your job if anything it's going to be the greatest uh I think the greatest amount of jobs will be created in the next 10 years in uh in general programming because of the amount of pure nonsense that is created I don't know if you saw the study I know I'm still going sorry I just have so much to say about this this is great but there's this study that rated or that that tracked the amount of lines changed in public op like open source repos in the last four years on GitHub and since the Advent of AI and its usage the amount of uh line changes not line additions not line deletions but lines in which were reworked has gone up from once every 6 months on average to once every two weeks like the rate of change is just blowing out of the water things are just being changed so much faster now they can just be wildly changed now you could argue many reasons for that maybe in the next in the last couple years so many new people have gone in so they've kind of poisoned the well for like just constantly changing code and blah blah blah you could come up with a bunch of different potential answers but the rate of change either way is going a lot like how many times do you commit code and then have to rework code especially if it's I've been bit by chat chippity co-pilot so many times on generating code that I thought was correct because I didn't take the strong care to create it myself but instead just went that looks correct and then just got you know I lgmt that one or whatever it is looks good to me and just slapped that seal on these codes over and over again and Bam I've been hit with so many bugs because of that yeah all right I got a last question for you first of all I just want to say that like uh that is pretty much how I've been responding uh to people is just that like you're greatly overestimating what might come to pass and you're also overestimating how good these tools are today because they're not that great yeah right um precis they're great novelty like the fact that I predicted you had a tie game after you said Win Lose else and it's like tie you're like oh my goodness this thing's magical that's because no no autocompletes ever done that it was magical yeah it doesn't mean it's like it's actually good it's just magic it just feels magical Ian people were impressed with the lives of when it came out because it could keep a conversation going wow this great but but once you understand the trick and once you understand the trick about how these llms work it does kind of like you're like okay it's doing good but like this is nowhere near ready for prime time no pun intended there all right so last question so if people shouldn't be you know getting uh co-pilot integrated into their workflow if they shouldn't be like just you know relying on these tools and assuming that these tools are going to be able to deliver them uh from you know the drudgery of having to like manually code things themselves what are the fundamentals that you think people should prioritize let's say like people who are you know undergraduate studying computer science or people that are transitioning into Tech from other careers like accounting or truck driving or something like that like what are the skills that you would encourage people to prioritize investing their time into right now well so there's kind of a couple things there one what should you learn is a is a hard question and that really depends on you what you're interested in uh for me the biggest thing that I say is the same thing I say about working out what's the workout that's going to make you do that workout that tomorrow you're going to do another workout that's much better than the world's most perfect wellth thought through workout because if the the world's most perfect wellth thought through workout isn't the workout that's going to make you come back then don't do that one what's the one that's going to make you come back because your biggest like the biggest Ally to you today will be just time in the saddle time in the saddle is your like greatest indicator for you becoming successful at something just do it right now right you don't you don't know what you like you don't know what you don't like so build stuff read stuff read you know like there's algorithms courses I'm sure free code Camp has some algorithms courses learn a little bit of data structures learn a little bit about networks go learn about HTP servers go learn about the front end go learn about the back end go learn about embedded why not right why don't you get thorsten Balls book uh what's it called uh in The Interpreter p.com go if you're interested in how interpreters work like how does JavaScript actually run that's a very easy book to get into like just like these kind of simple things that just simply open your eyes and you go through the process of building cuz that's like that's like your first few years right if you want to be useful at programming that should be your first 10 years right and I know that's that sounds horrible but like there is no six I don't believe there is a six-month path to becoming some six-figure job like I know that may have existed at one point during Co but that's because I mean we went from you don't have to be on the internet to like oh my goodness for the next year you have to be on the internet like obviously that kind of changed the demand and need for people to build stuff and some budgets got really blown out to the point where you could have that happen so yeah there was a time period where that may have happened but that is not the normal that should never be your expectation it should be a marathon it should not be a Sprint amen well it's been an absolute pleasure having you on the free cam podcast Prime and uh yeah I'm going to include links to a lot of cool primagen stuff like your YouTube channels anything you think I should uh if there's like a particular video that you think be helpful for people I can link to it and I just want to thank you again for coming here everybody who uh listen this far into the conversation I hope you have a fantastic week until next week happy codingI mean how much do you feel like you're just like falling back on your instincts that are honed over the years I rarely rarely really think welcome back to the free Cod Camp podcast I'm Quincy Larson teacher and founder of free Cod camp c.org each week we're bringing you Insight from developers Founders and ambitious people in Tech this week we are talking with the primagen he is a software engineer he worked at Netflix up until recently for quite a while and now he's focused full-time on streaming live streaming coding on Twitch and on other places and just you know talking about coding showcasing his skills welcome man how's it going it's going well how are are you I'm doing fantastic man it's great to talk to you uh I am a longtime viewer of your YouTube videos like I don't watch Twitch because I like to do everything at Double speed but I've enjoyed some of your takes over the years uh especially on the AI related things yeah okay okay I I feel like I personally have great takes on AI yeah well we're going to talk about some of those first though a lot of the people listening to this may not uh even though you have have a huge audience like right before you were streaming this I I went over to Twitch and I saw that you had like more than a thousand people watching you uh working on some different projects and uh yeah yeah like a lot of people obviously know who you are you're a big deal in the programmer space but uh a lot of people in the free Cod Camp community may not yet know who you are so uh one of the things I like to do whenever I have somebody on is kind of go back and do their programmer origin story uh and kind of get that out of the way before we launch into the many many questions I have prepared for you so yeah maybe you could tell us a little bit about like who you were as a kid and who you looked up to uh as far as looking up to uh I'm going to I I I have a stack brain so I just order I answer things in Reverse so just be prepared for that so if you ask more than one question you will get a reversal uh so as far as people who I looked up to Jim Carrey was probably my number one person that I looked up to uh Jim Carrey was absolutely uh just the coolest as far as like what did I did as a kid you know I I think my biggest claim to fame my biggest accomplishment is when I was somewhere between the ages of three and four I beat Super Mario I was really really into playing NES I just was something that from a very young age just spoke to me I I could not I could in fact beat level uh level three of battle toads the classic one that people can beat the Speeder Bike one yeah the SP the speed yeah the scooters where you jump on there and you go back and forth and you go yeah I could I could beat that at a very young age right when it came out I could beat right away and fun story here I I got all the way up to level seven vul Meers Inferno if I'm not mistaken and I was like oh man that was so hard and I was like five or six years old at that time and I just couldn't beat it and then at 21 years old I bought an NES and I bought battle toades and I'm like I'm older I'm faster I'm Wiser I'm everything here we go got to level eight and I was just like oh my goodness this game is so hard and eventually I got pretty good at it so I could speedrun it I I I was able to beat in about 36 minutes I think was beat the entire game in 36 minutes that I mean did you use like the level three warp there's like a special go the way through oh so no wall yeah there's a bunch of walls so on like level level one if you if you headbutt the first two guys you drop down headbutt go to the next one headbutt jump to the next scene you'll go to a level three on level three I think on the 10th gravestone on the very very fast ending part you'll hit a warp to a level five on level five I want to I I want to say there isn't a uh warp you just had to go through and serve but on level six the snake level there's actually one if on the second snake room if you sprint off the moment this the first snake turns and becomes flat you'll actually run through fall through a bunch of Pokey things and not actually hit any of them and land right into a warp interesting you go all the way up to level eight and so level Eight's about as far as as I know where the warps are I've never actually looked up any of these things I just kind of discovered them all as someone who was just trying to get really fast at the game yeah I mean that game is notorious for just its ridiculous difficulty and like the spike and difficulty it was so inconsistent because level one and level two were not that hard then all of a sudden you get to the speed thing and it's just like as a kid I got really frustrated I paid like you know six bucks which back in like 1980s was like 10 bucks 15 bucks uh and uh rented that game and I was like all right I'm gonna have a great weekend I'm gonna beat this game that because I beat every other ANS game that I rented right but no that speed bike thing I I was banging my head against and I can't remember if there even continues in the game but basically you just run out of lives and you're just like damn I have to yeah play level level one Lev there's no continue yeah yeah there's no safe spots there's no continues it's just it's just brutal that's that's how it works yeah they call it NES hard it's like Elden ring just without saving yeah yeah and Elden ring without saving would not be very fun there are people that can beat Elden ring without taking a hit or at least I'm not sure if it's for Elden ring but for the other Souls games yeah I've heard about this these no hit playthroughs of these of the Souls game I've never actually watched one or actually seen anyone do even part of it I never actually got into the souls game until as uh until Elden ring I didn't even know that was a category of games absolutely loved it speaks to my NES loving kind of nature it is a game that is just most certainly something that I love Challenge and difficulty and preciseness because there's something that's really pretty about preciseness you know uh you can't you can't be off by any amount it's just like you it's really like a very constrained way to do something but you can do it really fast which makes it fun yeah yeah I mean like eight frames to Parry uh in a lot of cases or if you have like the little Mitten you can Parry with like slightly more frames uh yeah I love uh I I did play Elder ring my kids love watching me play Elder ring uh but I just got I I couldn't I it took too long to figure out where I was supposed to go I like the Dark Souls 3 is my favorite of the souls games and it's because it's pretty clear where you need to go like the levels are pretty linear and it's all about like just getting from one place to the next and combat I encourage you to go back and try that if you haven't played Dark Souls 3 I've never tried it all I know is I've only played elen ring and when I played Elden ring I really just just had no idea where I was going it is extremely unclear what you have to do yeah and I think this part of they're trying to recreate that like old early computer game kind of like experience of just you know you've got this instruction manual that doesn't help all point is the game itself it's not to win it's to play the game yeah absolutely Dark Souls though uh I'm a huge fan of that series and uh of the designer and everything he's done to revitalize that kind of like Nintendo hard type uh to to frankly respect the audience and yes like it it does become an accessibility issue when you have people who have uh you know like motor uh skill impairments and other things and it's simply just not accessible to those people and he refuses adamantly to add like an easy mode to the game because he feels like that would compromise the Integrity of the game I mean the easy mode to the game is you go and you like Farm a whole bunch of XP and you become like overpowered at a lower level and then you can kind of like skate through some of the early encounters but I I definitely respect that philosophy and that commitment to look this game isn't for everybody yeah so I love it so playing a lot of really hard video games um looking up to Jim krey let's talk about Jim krey for a minute like that guy is super Innovative if you watch like the first Ace Ventura movie like all the different Impressions he's doing uh yeah yeah what was it about him that Drew you to him I don't know I'm just like every other kid I just thought he was hilarious he was fantastic Ace Venture or two when Nature Calls was like my favorite movie uh growing up all that kind of stuff so I know whatever that is it just was a natural thing the mask absolutely fantastic uh Ace furo one was fantastic the the tutu with with him dancing on the or getting freaked out by the bubble ramp like that's just it just it was all so fantastic yeah so you know I want to talk a little bit about your childhood and again I don't want to pry uh you know I came from like a family you know we were middle class and um I didn't have any early tragedies in my family uh but you know I'm trying to like figure out a way to put this but but like you lost your father at a pretty early age and you've talked about how that impacted you uh but could you talk about how that maybe like changed your trajectory like do you ever think of like a m Universe of like what you would be like like if I don't know if you watched Star Trek but like like the tapestry episode where uh Captain peard like sees what his life would have been like if these certain events hadn't happened and he's got this idealized version of his life and then he's got the real life where he ended up being the captain and that's the one that's you know marred with setbacks and bad judgment calls and all these other things that were just part of his exploration uh as a youth like would you would you be cool with talking about that a little bit yeah sure so what what is the specific question sorry there's a lot to it was it is it that I what would my life be like if it hadn't well yeah whether you think about that and you know maybe I do yeah I do do are you ready for an answer that might not be the answer you're ready for I am ready for anything man uh all right so have you ever read the book of the problem of Pain by CS Lewis I'm familiar with CS Lewis and his work uh I haven't read that specific book okay uh it's it's probably his most meaty book if if if meaty is the correct term for books and it in the very beginning it starts off with this idea where there's like there's various canards in in in a life where it's like is God so powerful that he himself can create a rock that he cannot lift right like it's it's it's it's stating a question which it's meant to be something you're supposed to think about blah blah blah blah and so when he talks about that he talks about this idea of impossibility so if something is impossible what it actually what what you're actually saying is that it is impossible suppressed Clause unless and then you change the situation uh meaning that it is impossible for me to see the road where I'm currently at unless if I were to leave the room I'm in and walk outside so that's called an impossibility it is impossible for me to see the road right now and so you have the suppressed Clause an intrinsic impossibility is something in which there is no time space actor or Universe in which The Impossible becomes possible there is no suppressed unlust Clause because it cannot exist and so I do not believe that there is any universe or uh time or situation that could have been conceived in some sense that would have changed the past or for me to understand what that you know what the outcome of that is and so I think of it more like an intrinsic impossibility so I don't actually think about what would my life be like if I were to have cuz it it changes it at such a fundamental level that there's no real point in thinking of it yeah and so that's kind of like my general answer of like what does it mean to have a dad that you know I can only answer in the in the affirmative of what does it mean not to have a dad growing up which you know there's there's a lot of difficulties I'd say uh one of the hardest things that ever came about was when I was I don't know I'd say I'd say it's like maybe 22 23 years old uh I used the term dad for the first time that I could conceivably remember that was strange right that's not a that's not a situation that a lot of people maybe can you know recognize but for me that was a very unusual thing uh I think having kids has allowed me to understand what it's like to have a dad so I don't get a dad but I can understand what it's like to have a dad and I can understand the importance of being a dad but I can never understand what it's like to have one I have no person in which I could feasibly have someone because whether you like it or not a mom is will never be a dad a dad will never be a mom a kid growing up really just needs this kind of dynamic duo uh my mom tried her best she did a great job doing as the best she could do but she could never be my dad and there's just something about that that has always been this like deep desire for me to have that side and I just never ever got it and that I know that it's missing and that's it and so I can't fill it I can just vicariously observe it in my kids yeah so yeah that's that's effectively my my life as growing up without it uh a lot of hard things transpired because of it but you know like I never had someone to tell me uh in in kind of the way I needed to hear it that I was being an idiot you know I never had someone that showed me how to do things in the way that I could I guess understand it yeah were you able to find any other like people in your life like teachers or other people that they could kind of serve even interraction of that role no uh my uncle uh physically abused me my other uncle was in prison so not not necessarily any male side in my life that you know was quality if you will yeah well what got you interested in computers um in terms of like like you got really early on you were you were interested in computer I'm laughing cuz that was just like such an intense 180 from where just going uh yeah I'm kind of thinking like like just just to articulate my thinking there cuz yeah I'm not like reading from a list of questions like that that is my NE next logical question because I don't know what else frankly there is to be said uh and you know I don't want to um denature what you just said by oh I'm sure everything worked out anyway and all that you know Jazz I I just want to like be because computers were a big part of your life from a very early on period from what I understand from listening to lots of interviews with you um and uh you know watching your channel and stuff and I mean was that was that an escape or was that just a way of channeling your energy like like cuz I mean it sounds like you grew up in a pretty you know adverse environment like despite the best efforts of your mom I would say that video games were more likely the Escape um Perhaps Perhaps programming in some sense was that as well um I didn't really grow up doing programming or anything like that I really enjoyed trying to install doom and get that done and be able to play Doom that was that was a great time uh there's all these like little things that I didn't quite understand that I just I very much so enjoyed uh about computers when I had a problem I I kept trying to figure it out and it was very frustrating and it'd be very upsetting but that's you know that was just part of part of life we just had a computer we had access to a computer really early on because before my dad passed he was doing a startup uh you know it's irony uh story at some point I'll I'll tell later about my first startup but for whatever reason uh he was just too early to uh to the startup he had you know if you remember 10 10220 dial down the middle I believe or whatever it was called Uh there's some like dial down phone card type longdistance situation he was doing in the late 80s early 90s which was just entirely too early for it to exist really cuz that didn't really come about until just a little bit later maybe like 5 years later that became a real thing people wanted cuz you know phones were a rarity in the late '90s early 2000s they weren't a common nearly as common as they are now yeah and so uh he we we just always had some access to a computer and so I was always able to play around on a computer and I played a lot of Mong tile and freei and all that stuff in Windows 31 you had to start up Doss and then in Doss you had the xq windows to get it to run and all that so had like some basic early experience with computers though I largely didn't understand anything it wasn't until there's this video game called Grail or growl I'm not really sure g r a a l and sorry and with it they had a level editor and I started playing with the level editor and if you double click on an NPC it would actually load up some script like some sort of Grail script I think is what they call it uh NPC script not really sure but it was a c like syntax and so I was able to look at it and effectively figure out what it's trying to say and it's not I mean programming in itself if you're sufficiently motivated is not terribly hard to start figuring out uh if it's a simple enough script like Lua is a pretty simple enough script that I think you could eventually figure out everything about it and so it's it's it was something simpler than Lua very very unexpressive and so you could just I just started looking and understood if if statements and while loops and all that and yeah it was it was fun so that's kind of how that's like my early time into computers and so I just really enjoyed doing that building stuff yeah and L of Warcraft 2 level editor yeah so so you might be just programming kind of incidentally without even realizing you were programming with the higher objective of building a level or making you know NPCs do certain things uh you you kind of learn it in rout to the goal of developing levels is is that like something like that I just wanted to build stuff and so I could see I could build interactive things so I just I just played around and kept trying to build interactive things yeah right on yeah and my understanding is like a lot of people approach you know me and they're like hey does free C Camp have like a Lua course because like that's one of the easier like languages to learn and and like I don't know if it's used in Minecraft uh M Minecraft Roblox like a lot of believe it is used in Minecraft yeah a lot of these uh these games especially like massive online games uh seem to like get serve as a good Gateway for kids to get into programming right um and like I think yeah most most games use Lua because Lua is an incredibly easy embeddable language like even an experienced embeddable person could probably embed Lua uh the language like I've never embedded a single language in my lifetime I could probably do it in an afternoon or two yeah so I think that's why it largely works with a lot of game development and all that is just it's it's really simple like embedding V8 extremely difficult that might take me a year embedding Lua might take me a week yeah that's a good endorsement of Lua as like just like an accessible language people can add if they want to get like a community of creators around and when say creators not necessar like YouTube creators but like people just creating levels right um my kids love making Mario Maker levels for example um yeah how I don't want to like get too personal about your your kids but like how old are they uh 10 through three uh my daughter just turned three a couple days ago so 3 six uh 8 and 10 yeah so so they're probably in that age like do you allow them to play video games and stuff like a lot like we have a rule that we don't let our games on days but yeah yeah pretty much same thing we don't do uh weekday we try not to do too much they just turn into they turn into little uh I'm not sure what other term to use other than they just like turn they just like it's like when you give them too much sugar it's just emotionally brittle they become very emotionally brittle when you let them play too many video games just like if I veg out and do something and watch too much TV I find everything to be inconvenient it's the same thing except for I just have the emotional wherewithal to kind of you know push through it whereas they're still so young it's just it's very difficult for them to understand what it takes to live a regular life and so if you let them play too many video games obviously things kind of go off the rails and so yeah we we do some weekend time like we'll play fortnite the kids love playing fortnite with me so we'll all load up into fortnite and go run around shoot stuff and since they since it's largely like uh my 10-year-old and my 8-year-old and they're not that very good and you know I can I can play I used to I used to play a lot of fortnite you know and it's like now just a lot of bots are really bad people it'll be like I'll get like 25 kills in a game and I'm just like man this what it feels like to be like a pro fortnite player playing with regular people because it's just like so easy because it's probably all Bots yeah it's fun we like it yeah that's cool so uh video games have been a way for you to like kind of share your childhood passion with your kids it sounds like yeah I really play them though uh just because uh they you know they they became uh I'd say probably like a crutch or a coping mechanism and it's not that I explicitly was like a crutch or coping mechanism it's just that I just recognized uh if I wish to be be really good at programming or really good at anything or do anything in life I just kind of have to make time and most of life is a choice of what you I mean we are fortunate enough to live in a day and age in which there's a huge amount of self-direction and so with that comes the both the joys and the Pains of saying yes to doing something that may not feel as good and saying no to something that feels as good in the moment yeah yeah I mean like I could just sit and spend the weekend on the couch watching Netflix for example example or I can go and like you know compose a new song or I can go uh make it to the gym or you know any number of things that yeah Advance me closer to my goals and yet we we live in an age when like literally every movie every song is like a few clicks away you know reddits an ALT tab way and you're suddenly like seeing interesting half photos and stuff like that so uh yeah like being able to manage yourself has become like a key skill if you want to achieve your goals and like I guess stand out from the other people that have I guess less impulse control I sure if that's like the right way of saying it but yeah I see what you're saying we I constantly say on the stream that uh people misde Define liberty or Freedom quite often which is that Liberty uh is the ability to do what you uh what you want or your higher will and we often we often find especially in our very you know quote unquote free world that we live in that we find we're often just subjugated to our lower will what feels good in the moment will you eat that extra cookie or will you say no because you want to get in shape right like what is which will wins well often you find that the lower will wins much much more than the higher will and so perfect Liberty is the ability to know and say what you want and actually act upon that and so if you want to like say you know you have a large programming audience or a large newer wanting to get into programming audience what is the answer do you say I want to learn programming therefore you learn programming or do you say I want to learn programming like I say I want to learn Chinese which is just like some fictional want that not actually materializes into anything yeah yeah you do you really want to learn Chinese or you just you said just an example I I say I want to learn another language but it's just like the reality is is I'm not going to learn another language you know I say I want to that's it I know I don't I don't I know I don't actually want to we do we do what either our higher or lower will wants us to do and right now all effort and everything is pointed towards either is making what I'm doing right now a success well this isn't like a philosophical podcast so I don't want to delve too deep into this but one question that like I like to ask people sometimes is like whether you think that people actually have potential do people have potential or are people currently realizing their potential can you can you can you say that I I I don't quite know what that means can you can you state in a different way sure so uh for example I I could I could say oh I you know I want to become a really good uh I want to get really good at um let's say like a contemporary language like a rust or something like that and uh oh it'd be great to be a rust player like a rust you know developer and uh oh I know I have kind of a loose idea of what I need to do I just need to sit down and do it so I have the potential to become a great rust developer but am I actually going to invest the time like is that potential actually like a latent property or is it just you know I could be spending my time right now learning rust you know there's a comprehensive rust course on free cooking there's probably lots of other comprehensive interactive rust courses out there that I I could go through and I could I could learn that skill uh do you do you feel like people actually have potential or are is everybody realizing their maximum potential right now unless they change the status quo somehow does that does that make sense I I not 100% I it doesn't make sense to me but I'm going to try to say it in my way and maybe you'll tell me how close I am are people actually living up to what they could live up to now or is it all just Whimsical ideas and we are really not quite being as great as we can yeah like do we just tell ourselves there's the potential there when really like we like the will to act I I apologize I'm doing a bad job of structuring this question but like the question has been posed to me hold on I'm looking up a quote uh let's see uh dang it I know that there's a really really uh give me just one second it's a it's a great quote um all right well I'll hold out for your Zinger here we go I bet you I got this one uh here we go here we go I think this is a pretty good one uh we are half-hearted creatures fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite Joy is offered to us like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what it is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea we are far too easily pleased see us Lewis it's a great quote uh effectively how I read this is that we we we settle for significantly significantly less than we can actually achieve I think that that you can you can just you can count how many times in a day that you decided to take the easy dopamine fast route as opposed to uh doing something that's going to actually affect your life in a positive way yeah like how much time is spent scrolling Instagram scrolling Twitter watching just like you know cat videos they don't actually give you anything right there's nothing out of that I know people try to say oh it's how I relax um I somehow doubt that that's really how you relax I think it's just a trained uh mentality cuz I mean you're telling me that all of life and all of humanity never got the chance to relax like my my real thing is is that we've just built up patterns and habits that uh just numb us from the the reality and difficulties of life and we choose that over reality that's I mean I know that's a very intense statement and you said you're not a philosophical podcast but that's that's just kind of my you know just my kind of Take On The World Is that we just settle for we you know it's my I know we're going to get into AI but it's my biggest worry about AI which is AI is there as this infinite teaching well that can help you get from A to B and it is you know theoretically if you have the $40 a month $30 a month whatever it takes to do uh to have chat jity for Omni uh you have the ability to get all these great things and instead you're just going to ask it to solve all your problems you're not going to take the route of becoming some one better you're going to take the route of getting what you need answered you'll become more helpless not more Wise by the end of using AI yeah well we could actually we could absolutely extrapolate that out to other tools like you know Google search as opposed to back in the day knowledge was hard fought you know I'd go to the librarian and I'd have to explain something that librarian who has trained their entire life to to be able to to take my query and like figure out okay what what what is going to help this person and then or maybe sends me over to the doy Decimal System you know card files and I'm I'm looking I'm going through a bunch of old microfilm you know I'm like scouring for the the answer and it's it's hard to get the answer there when you know you can just go on Google and Google like your no matter how half hard your Google query is you are going to get some results right and it's easy to think like oh that was great I solved my problem Google just gave me what I needed right and AI is going to be perhaps even easier to get you know a serviceable solution but that's not really what you needed it's just what you told you yourself that you needed because you didn't want to burn the extra calories to do the extra work you didn't want to invest the extra time in doing like exhaustive research yeah no do you ever hear the story about how unbroken the book was uh written it turned into a movie as well it's the same lady who wrote SE biscuit if I'm not mistaken unbroken I'm not familiar with it it's a very great story about Louis Zamperini a World War II uh veteran who I believe is still alive to this day very very old fell at this point he's like 90 something years old um he got caught in uh Japan flying over the waters and he had to spend quite some time in a Japanese internment camp uh or labor camp or whatever they called it in Japan and uh he also was an Olympic hopeful he was someone that went out there and was I think he ran the 400 or something and he was he was likely slated to win the Olympics when he went and so he had his whole life ahead of him but he joined the military was going to do two years and then boom out comes World War II and all that and the story of the book goes that uh the lady I forget her name um gosh I I literally have no idea what her name is uh she is doing all this research for seab biscuit and she's just reading old newspapers and reading old newspaper she stumbles on this story that's like oh we found Louis Zamperini and we were able to rescue him from one of these Japanese Japanese camps and like that's it and she's like oh that's really interesting put a note on it went back there later ended up spending seven years to write this book it's like you know wild success but if you have the direct answers well this whole story goes to show that if you have the exact A to B there's so much stuff that you miss like the you know often the answer isn't just simply what you want to know it's like that act of Gathering it going through things and yes it's like way inefficient and yes it's not you know like you could certainly move faster if you could just get exactly what you wanted at that exact moment but moving faster isn't like the goal always you know like it can't always be the goal there's more to life than just moving fast yeah 100% and people can delude themselves into thinking oh I'm doing so much you know that's like the whole multitasking thing uh that's uh people like trying to pack their schedule with like tons of conversations like quick 20-minute meetings with like all these different people and I'm sure you're familiar with this having worked in Tech versus like you know a substantial conversation and I would argue that this podcast even though hopefully we'll be able to talk for like 90 minutes or two hours or something like it's really just a a very brief conversation considering like if you consider like a lifelong friendship that you have with somebody and like the things you learn from them over a longer period of time and kind of the ongoing discussions and the ongoing themes the undercurrents in your friendship and and the the things you do together whe whether it's play together in a band whether you're working on a software uh project together in PA programing periodically like whatever it is like greatness takes time right that lady she needed to to spend seven years even after she like filed that note away like actually thoroughly researching it and then writing the book right um yeah and I do think that that is something that we could lose and I know I'm sting like an old man shaking his missed a cloud you know but like really like I do hope we there's a return to form and I hope that there are a lot of people who use these AI tools uh not as crutches but to to further deepen the research rather than just shorten the research process yeah yeah yeah I mean I think it's good I you know like I I realized because I tried to use chat Chad jity 4 for a long time to make it do all my python work because I just never liked python I'm not going to lie it's it's it's the true low codes solution is python uh just because you know people who don't like to code tend to code in Python and they are able to just get a lot done without actually becoming you know like full-blown software Engineers they're just like researchers that are just like oh gosh okay done right and so it's like I always looked at python as this language I just never wanted to invest a lot in and so I just tried to always get chat jippy to do it all for me by the way I call it Chad jippy it's just way easier than saying GPT and so jippy way easier and um so it sounds more like Jiminy Cricket or something something like that it sounds like a fun yeah it's just it's fun it's stupid sounding right like the whole point is that it's just dumb sounding and that's funny to me I don't I don't know maybe the Jim Cary days influenced me on this one but uh what I realized is that I was able to make it so far but at the end of the day I learned nothing about python I had nothing to show for my time and I did spend a decent amount of time coaxing it coercing it convincing it begging it to make the right stuff and I just realized that all I was doing was training myself how to provide input to make the AI solve the problem I was solving a problem just a different problem and I realized that if I could have gone back and I could have waved a magic wand I should have asked it how to do those step by step and then programmed it all myself and acquired that little bit of knowledge that would have probably been like three hours worth of work and then I would have been just so much faster I would have been able to move so much quicker and that would have probably paid out tfold but instead it paid out zero fold cuz I IED on it to solve my problems didn't use it as a platform of research yeah I mean like people who I guess get really good with tools but lack the fundamentals they're always kind of you know they can't ever really get leverage and like scale their output they're they're kind of limited by the I guess throughput of those tools and what those tools can do um and that's that's why like we we encourage people to really dive deep into the fundamentals and really learn math computer science Concepts you know take time to read Donald K and stuff like that if that's how you pronounce his last name and and you know I hope that doesn't sound too like uh High flute and heavy-handed like like you got to really put in your time uh but people are in a rush they've been told by the marketers like hey learn a code in nine weeks get a get a Fang job you know pay off your student debt from your degree that didn't you know help you pay off your student debt right and uh I guess I'm grateful that like there is kind of this Back to Basics movement and you're out there preaching uh for lack of a better word like it encouraging people to strengthen their fundamentals and you're introspecting you're talking about this experience that you had with uh you know using jid 4 uh to uh to be able to basically kind of like shortcut actually having to learn and put in the hard work and that you saw that darkness in yourself you saw that that anti-pattern like emerging do you think that do you think that everybody uh like like What proportion of people do you think Will Will just cave to that like do you think everybody has the capacity to step back and think like gee like I just took a bunch of shortcuts and and to introspect well enough that they realized that they didn't actually write that code that all they did was do a series of like naive prompts and GPT 4 was smart enough to kind of like fill in the blanks I I think people will always optimize to I in our society maybe maybe there's there exist different Societies in which you know I'm not a I'm not a cultural narcissist I do not believe that everyone behaves like we do and so I'm speaking from a very American perspective maybe broader you could broaden it out to the West perspective but that we will always do what is most efficient generally speaking so if I took a 100 people and I said hey you could a learn all these things solve the problem it'll take you one week or B hey you could prompt and you know get far enough and you could be done in two hours and you had a job and you had things to do and you had people to answer to you you just go okay well I just want to I just want to move on not that you actually you know you don't get the dividends you just get the paycheck and so I think we often trade dividends for paychecks and I I I've been trying to you know if you will the Renaissance of becoming a more learned man uh trying to slow things down and try to adopt a different culture which is that you know you you want to become the master of your craft I love I love those stories of these like that one dude from Norway who could roll steel so well that we it took us all the way until we had our fantastic Technologies just to be able to understand how he built these swords that were like unbreakable it's just like you know how he got that good he probably had some freak genetic gift but he also spent like 30 years making swords to the point where he could flick it listen to The Ring of it and be like this one's bad you like just like just understand deep down it's just such a hidden knowledge secret secret knowledge level like how to do things at just this beautiful level and like I want that I want that I I want the craft you know I want the craft for the sake of the craft I don't want the craft just to just to Simply have output because at the end of the day output works and it's great and I would say that output is much more entertaining slash driving for younger people I think when I was younger output was way more Chief the concern than the craft itself and as I've gotten older I find I find myself realizing that you know life is is just it has to be more than just productivity you know I want to wake up every day and even if I work on the worst things I want to enjoy it yeah yeah I mean like what you just said since we were talking about NES and like you know speedrunning and things like that your ability to speedrun battle toades in like 36 minutes there was this guy and you may already be familiar with this but there was this guy who would speedrun all these games back before speedrunning was really even a thing he submitted times and everything his name was Matt Turk and uh have you heard of this guy he had like records feel like I did watch the recent like big speed running thing of the origins of all the speedr running with Games Done Quick and all that I feel like that name was mentioned but I'm trying to like place it where it was it took people years to reproduce like deliberate like like speedrunners didn't understand how he was able to get these times but they eventually were able to like kind of reverse engineering he just got it and then he moved on to the next one and he was just obsessed with the craft he didn't even really care that much about the street credit or anything like that there's no Street credit to be gained I don't think he even like filmed his attempts or anything there was just a culture of like that seems like a really fast time but I guess it's realistic and then years later people were able to like gradually beat it but he he had so many records stand for so long and it was probably some freak combination of like natural aptitude and ability maybe he just had superhuman like uh attention to detail some sort of weird thick genetic cord down his spine that just like allowed super fast you know electricity flow yeah but but it's it's it's kind of the same thing it's like I I don't know if that even knows that people know who he is or care you know but he's just some Forum user from like you know 2006 or something like that playing Nintendo games that nobody even plays anymore back in back at that time uh and uh just the Romanticism like like it's very romantic the notion that this guy's just sitting there probably you know in the proverbial mom's basement like just getting really good at these games and like totally underappreciated but he appreciates himself he appreciates that he is getting these ridiculous times even though he's not even competing with anybody at this time cuz he's so far beyond the competition he's still competing with himself he's trying to like one up himself with each attempt and uh there's something really I don't know like like for me as you know a man and as somebody who like uh takes pride and what they do like there's something very romantic about that so yeah I used to do a a speedrun myself in Mario Kart the original one with Yoshi on Rainbow Road I don't remember my exact times but I know that I could hit every single corner I would drift across every single like it was perfect and we're drifting didn't give you a boost this is the OG I could play the entire thing perfect every single time and I forget the exact timings I was but it was just like awesome and I just loved it and I'd never fall off an edge it was just this idea of just doing the thing so well and then that one time you got lucky and you got a mushroom and on the back side of rainbow road you could hit the mushroom and take the jump across the entire Chasm it was just like that one run was just so much faster than all the rest the runs and it was just so cool but you had to get in all the other runs and like you know play the the you know random number generator game until you until you got in the position and you had to get your skills into the position to where you wouldn't choke the moment you got that mushroom and you would actually finish the run I choked many times because it was so exciting like I was like you know yeah well just keeping with like our general theme of chronology and uh like just to establish the primin origin story like so let's talk a little bit about like high school and college and like because you did ultimately go and study computer science and uh but when you went into like was your like high school guidance counselor like were people like yes this man is going to be a software engineer like what what did people think about you when you were in high school what what was your general vibe off well my teachers all but uh a couple very few um I think of Mr Patrick all the time if somehow Mr Patrick from Billings West High ever heard this a shout out to Mr Patrick great guy and if you know anyone in Billings you tell them to tell Mr Patrick if he's still around uh that he's the best but all the rest of the teachers um you know I was I was I probably wasn't the best student okay you know I there's this one teacher named Mrs be and she had 200 bears in her room and I may or may not have thrown one of or two of the Bears out the window you know I may or may not have gotten in in some decent trouble she handw wrote me a note telling uh telling me that I will never amount to anything in my life she literally like handw wrote you a not saying that the she she she took the time she took the the the time and the effort and the patience to really remind me that I am by far the worst person in the universe and so you know I was I was a shitthead granted I don't know if cursing is allowed on this I was a poop head I don't censor anything don't worry about it okay okay and so I I I agree I I I was not very nice uh but you know I wish I it would it would have more positive teacher been good for me maybe not you know maybe that was just what I needed I never hold on to things negatively and use that as motivation you know you hear Michael Jordan talking about that that he'd intentionally pick a fight with someone else on the opposite team because he needed that drive I don't I don't want to win because I can beat somebody else I want to win because I can be better than I am at this current moment right again the ghost running uh Super Mario uh go-kart all that kind of stuff it's the Perpetual drive to win perfectionism maybe is the right term for it um and so yeah like high school I was definitely a disaster for sure uh College it extended into that disaster just worse and it took me three tries to get through college the third try is when I really took off you a lot of people put it into perspective um in my third try in college I had uh for calculus 4 differential equations usually we just call the calc 4 or dyq I had the highest grade on the final and I was the also the only student to finish the final and there was over 400 students so I think that was pretty good uh for Cal 2 I was the only I finished it in 30 minutes out of a two-hour final and for Cal 1 it was like 20 minutes and I finished it I had a friend come up and said you finished it so fast that someone thought you just quit and then I also got the highest grades out of all those and so I was like really really good at math but what people don't know is that before that I failed pre-cal three times and I went to the learn the Learning Center 4 hours a day for calculus one and it's just like that's the part that people don't recognize is that um I didn't get good or any of these things by uh it wasn't a natural born Talent or anything so going through high school and going through college it was a huge fight against myself I largely I was my own personal worst enemy for sure for a huge amount of it uh and I had a million and a half excuses everyone has an excuse I mean there's people that have worse lives than me there's people that have better lives than me but we all feel you know pain relatively we all have excuses for why it's unfair or uneven or you know any of those things but it's just like until I let go of all those things and just really went after it I was just such a disaster when it comes to all these things when you say let go of all these things like can you elaborate on that like like what were you like the the kind of Angry Young Man chip on his shoulder kind of like that that kind of archetype that you see when you see like the the cop dramas and stuff like that like were you were you like cuz cuz I was absolutely never been me okay so you weren't it was more just like I didn't care okay so it was apathy it was like you like nihilistic or like what was going on I you know like I was I was a drug addict that wasn't a drug addict yet right I I just wanted to feel something uh and it and and and school was not it right long-term the dividend play was never it so I'd much rather have drank or chased girls or smoked pot done something like that does anything to like try to feel something largely into porn I saw porn for the first time when I was four years old and so that was always been a huge struggle for a large portion of my life I haven't looked at porn in 15 plus years 18 years I have no idea how long but it's been a long long time yeah and and so in this you because you didn't feel anything like again I'm not like a therapist or a psychiatrist or anything like that but I'm just trying to make sense of this like uh as as like we can RI I don't hold you to Scientific standards don't worry Okay cool so so I mean were you just kind of apathetic as far as like academics and stuff you're just like H I kind of suck at math whatever like were you resigned to just sucking at math no it's not that I was resigned sucking at math I was just resigned to not try yeah and so what changed what was it the snap because you put in the time right you went to the Learning Center which is kind of a humiliating thing like I'm not good enough at this I have to ask for help right like like what was it that I guess inspired did did the school compel you to go to the learn Center for like 4 hours a day and get tutor I mean that's a lot of resources you know math tutors like like having somebody teach you oneon-one was it one-on-one instruction one-on-one or one on two yeah there's always a math there's always open seats at a math learning center very few people ever take advantage of it ntas are required like people get their college paid for by volunteering or spending all their time it's not really volunteering if you're getting paid to do it or your college paid for they they they make that trade-off they pay their time for uh for being able to go to college or get their masters or get doctorates and so there's always was seats available so I always had there was never like me waiting for somebody um and so it was just it was just that I just had to put in the time as far as the things that kind of uh like transpired to that it was it was my second go round of college and I became a late Life Christian and I kind of changed like my whole life changed on a dime on a single evening uh never really had any of that um wasn't planning on having any of that and unlike all these fancy stories where people say how their whole life changed and all that the only thing I gained was a conscious and all of a sudden I couldn't like I couldn't do things that I used to do so I if I watched porn I felt bad about it never felt bad in my lifetime all sudden I feel bad about it if I smoked pot I felt bad about it if I drank I felt bad about it I was like what is going on with my life and so it's just like just everything changed and so then it's just like me I I was the most reluctant person becoming a normal contributing citizen I think of all time it's just like I it just every single step of the way I hated it and it's was just like oh man absolutely just the worst just teeth pulling the whole way yeah can you talk about that like that moment of like just hearing a conscious like was it like a voice in your head or was it just a vibe in your gut like I shouldn't be doing this yeah more vibe in the gut probably than anything else you know however that happens where I you know I don't I don't pretend to know any of these things because obviously it's not like I was a well researched person I wasn't I wasn't you know this was not an intellectual exercise that led me to a be this was a very sharp moment that I just felt like uh the the reality of all decisions I've ever made compounded plus like the reality of all future decisions I will make if you were to travel back to that moment you remember the specific Moment Like were you just sitting on the couch like and it just hit you or you know it's a largely it's a personal moment I'm going to I'll keep that to me but it was just yeah it was just it was just a very intense thing and that's all I remember is just being so um compelled to do something that's it like that's why I just say like holy cow is this is this what Experiencing God is like I have no idea because it was vastly like if my realm of experience was this circle it was somewhere way far out on the outside so I was like this is vastly different than all things in my entire lifetime and so therefore I'm going to have to I I it would be a fool of me not to respond and So I responded right and that's that was what led me down the path of being changed where I was fine doing work it's like all a sudden it also unlocked one thing I could I could learn I could I could now not look at school as a complete disaster yeah and what happened from there I mean it sounds like you like frankly it sounds like you were a new man like like it had a dramatic Sudden Impact on your academics on how you manage your time on how you managed your own behavior and like impulses and things like that yeah it it took a long time for me to catch up you know like often I think we all experience this where our heart will move but our actions aren't representing how we feel like I think we've all had these kind of things where you know like take any person that's not in shape but they've all of a sudden they really want to get in shape like their heart has moved and they now feel bad because they know that they didn't do what they thought they should have done right like and so that's kind of like what happened in my life and this this distance took three years for it to close and so it was a long time but it was just like I knew that I didn't like where I was yeah so so like that's I didn't want I didn't want to be addicted to porn or drugs or any of those things like I wanted a life that was meaningful and good and I could actually you know I I could actually one day have a wife and kids and and not give them the same curse that I was given at a young age like how do how do I how do I give something better than what I had yeah and you know to fast forward a little bit you like you have a wife and kids uh you have been able to to find success and it doesn't sound like much of this would have materialized if you just stayed doing what you were doing uh do you ever think about like how like if you could I often I often think like like I I had some pretty dire times like I had a big falling out with my parents I spent like a year sleeping in my car at the Walmart where you can fun fact you yeah Walmart will generally not call the cops on you if you're sleeping in their parking lot they they have kind of like a unspoken rule that you know PE people who are between places to live can like sleep in their car there um and you know hospitals and other places like that are generally pretty understanding so yeah like like I kind of went through a period like that too where I you know dropped out of high school and just spent like a my entire teenage time doing a lot of things that I'm not like super proud of not it's not that I'm not proud of them but it was just like looking back I just I feel guilty that I squandered so much of that time and energy that I could have spent you know reading or learning um and eventually I was able to you know go to state school and and get my degree and everything like that but I always felt like that there there was the Lost Years so to speak um and I always wish that like have you I talked about Star Trek earlier I'm going to talk about it now there's this one episode of start Trek the Next Generation where they're trapped in like a Mobius like a loop of time and uh data and Captain rer figure out this way that they can communicate and send information back to themselves so that they can change some sort of like thing because the ship's going to blow up if they don't do something different than what they've been doing over and over the ship I saw that I saw all the episodes but I can't remember that many of them but I I feel like I remember that one there's another movie called arc on Netflix that is effectively the same thing okay cool and and so anyway they figure out this way that they can like basically use you know Tech as the writers refer to it like neutrinos or something like that that they could send like a few bits of information back and all they could do was send they sent like something in data is like you know AI powered mind like he could actually perceive these and it would like flip a bit or something like that and he would be aware of it and they could only send like I think he sent back like the number three or something like that right um and that's it so again I don't want to spoil this episode but I often wish that I could send something back to myself when I was sleeping in my car at Walmart just like if I could just send back two letters or something so that I could have some sort of Hope because I felt really hopeless I felt really nihilistic I genuinely didn't think that I would live into my 20s I just figured like a lot of my friends died you know like suicide uh other things like that and I just didn't see a feature for myself and I wish that I could send back the letters okay or something like that just to just so I would be like oh there's hope for me you know did you feel any sort of hope uh and and do you wish you could send hope back or do you think that if you sent hope back that would corrupt you somehow and like potentially ruin the process like would you would you trade what you went through um I would never trade what I went through I hold no resentment uh towards anyone or anything um no I would never I would never trade what I had because if I would have traded what what I had I have you know again I I if I could make myself feel better I would have not probably had the same life change event I would have artificially felt better about myself that would not have CED anything that would not have changed anything fundamentally with in me like it took a hard time to make a different person and like there's that there's that old phrase right it goes something along the lines of like hard times make good men good men make easy times easy times make bad men bad men make hard times some some some I forget it's an old phrase it goes something along those lines it's just like I had to have that same internal small cycle where it's like in if I didn't have the bad I don't think I could have had the good yeah awesome well um you know it's it's like the uh you know you always see these like there's there's a lot of these stories that exist where the person that was the the ultimate bad guy whatever it was they're doing something and they're fighting you know the the good guy this happens in chess as well you give up something that looks so high value in the moment but you win in the end because you're able like the person doesn't realize that though they're making the most winning best move in the moment like the thing that they're losing is actually the game and so like it's that greater thing where it's just like I wouldn't want to do that cuz I don't know how the chess pieces would have fallen out to make that better to make a better analogy there which is like I I'm glad that I had to give up the queen yeah yeah like Bobby Fisher sacrificing like almost all his pieces in order to like is that the immortal game yeah I think it's the The Immortal game I think refers to a different game but it it okay it's like they lose every last piece except for two and then win the game like the greatest the greatest bamboozling of all time yeah but it's just like like seeing that line and committing to it and being willing to go through all that pain for what you believe is a good outcome cuz I mean you your judgment could be wrong or your opponent could do something that is like maybe they see that oh he keeps sacrificing high value pieces he's trying to bait me into something but but like can you maybe they're not as greedy as you think they are um but um yeah I see what you're I see what you're saying um and I I think sacrifice let's let's talk a little bit about sacrifice CU you put a ton of time and energy into your skills over the years um you've put a ton of time and energy into optimizing different aspects of you know just being a developer uh and and we can geek out on a lot of the different tools and techniques you use and things like that and I would love to do that if you if you are interested in talking about that yeah but like well first I got to I got to do the philosophical side of why yeah working hard and all these things are good so you hear this phrase a lot which is work smart not hard and so this is where I call absolute on that phrase because when you don't know what smart is there's only one way to get it which is by working hard and so the smart way to work when you don't know what you're doing is to work hard because there you know if let's just say that it's going to take you roughly 10,000 hours of good focused time to become great at programming and after you've worked say x amount of hour your focus time kind of reduces by 10 15% some some amount that you're just not as good you're still getting closer every hour that you're you're you're putting effort and time into and you know if someone's working say 80 hours a week and someone's working 40 hours a week and you compare them in two years like I would take the BET blindfolded and spun around in circles every single time that the person that did 80 hours is in a significantly different position than the person that did 40 hours like it doesn't matter how smart that 40 hour person worked it's just sometimes time wins every time time like that's that was that was a very 60% of the time it wins every time phrase but it was like time wins time wins every time right the person that's just willing to do the most will always win that's why you see the stories about like Kobe Kobe was the first person in the gym last person out of the gym you're telling me that there wasn't times he didn't feel it didn't want to do it it was too ouchy things were hurting probably should have taken a break no it's just that laser focus to do something great but not everybody needs to be Kobe not everybody wants to be Kobe and that's okay you first determine where you want to be and then you set in motion the steps you need to take to get to that position and if Kobe's the goal be the first person in be the last person out yeah if Kobe's not the goal then you know adjust accordingly and that's something I'd also like to talk with you about because freeo camp like I worked I mean there were probably literally weeks uh where I was working like more than 100 hours uh maybe even like 120 hours early on trying to get this open source project off the ground and stuff and uh of course like you in my humble opinion it's bad management to expect your charges to do that like I absolutely advocate for I'm on your team 100% with that but as a founder or as somebody who's trying to like I mean you could be considered a founder of the primagen like Persona the the stream like everything you've built right like that took probably an incredible amount of work it sounds like uh I mean where do you kind of draw the line like between believing that work life balance is important and yet seeing that your own success probably would not have happened if you were trying to work life balance your way or do you believe that do you believe that you could have gotten where you were if you didn't I call it the TRU like because I don't like the term gatekeeping I don't know if you've ever heard any of my rants about it 90 99% of what people say is gatekeeping isn't gatekeeping it's just someone being mean on the internet but I'd say one of the most actual gatekeeping things you can ever see are these people who've achieved a lot in programming and they achieved it VI via like working to death and doing these things tell everybody how important work life balances and that you shouldn't do that and don't do that what they've done is they've sold you a bill of goods that they themselves didn't follow and they themselves didn't use to achieve what they achieved and then tell you you shouldn't do that like is Success only relegated for them that's how I kind of take these type of phrases it's like there's a good kind of thing you can say and then there's a bad kind of thing you can say saying you should never do that that's probably not the right phrase saying hey you know you got to know when the trade-offs are and you got to be able to make the right decisions and at some points in your life it is good to do something that's probably unhealthy for a short period of time like that's okay if you're a founder and you want your company to be a success well there's only one choice you have to make you just got to have more hours in like that's that's just going to ultimately make it potentially more successful and it's not like it's good I don't recommend anyone doing a 100 hours worth of work a week like that's just not healthy like it's not physically healthy spiritually or emotionally healthy but if I had to do it for six months I would do it for six months not that I want to it's just a kind of like a a willingness to do that uh as far as like work life balance stuff goes and all that how I think about it is that I see it all I I do see this quite frequently people talk about how important that is but when it comes to actual life balance they're around their kids they're around their wife they're around their husband they're around family moms whatever but their brain is completely somewhere else they're not they're not in it and so it's just like that's not work life balance yeah you're just somewhere else like that that how does that count and so it's like if you're going to do something you should just do it you should just do it well and so when I go home I turn off my work brain and I can just do that and it's it's a skill I've been practicing it it wasn't just something that immediately you know popped out of nowhere it was something that took effort and effort and effort and how I typically go about it is it's the same thing when you're at work and you get distracted you will never be able to take away distractions but you will be able to respond to a distraction when you realize you're distracted to respond in the positive that is your chance uh you know I have had different phrases my life to describe it but that's how I think about it now which is that you can't control the distraction you can control how you respond when you realize and so when I'm with my kids that time to realize I'm being distracted has just gotten smaller and smaller and smaller because I actively fight against it the moment I realize I'm not doing something I don't finish the thought I don't keep on thinking about be like oh I should really do this but hold on you know okay well what about no no no cut it off the end move on back in you know oh I don't I really don't feel like getting up I really don't feel like crawling on the ground I really don't feel like caring my kids you know what shut up you're going to do it cuz it means way more to them and it really doesn't feel that bad I'm willing to lift weights I could be willing to crawl on the ground yeah you know it's just like that willingness that desire to like not listen to the thing that says don't do it but listen to the thing that says this is going to be like I'm in the moment so when I'm programming I want gosh darn it I want to be programming and when I'm with my kids gosh darn it I want to be with my kids yeah do you do you find that they ever like bleed into one another like like I mean do you work at home or do you have like a you know some sort of bar that I converted yeah I have a horse barn that I converted that is you can walk across your property to your studio essentially yeah yeah yeah yeah but I do have a physical barrier which I think does help a physical barrier does help uh uh you know I if you have some form of of routine I think routine helps a lot because then you can build that muscle via routine to like stop doing something you know like that's just pract more practical tips you know so if you if you get off of work get off work at the same time every day you know don't you sometimes you can't control when you start work but you can always control when you stop and you just force yourself to stop and it's just like I I always say the same thing with sleep if you want to get a good sleep schedule you don't control when you go to bed you control when you wake up your body will eventually say uncle and will start we we'll fall in line but there will be a time of period where it's very uncomfortable but you kind of forced yourself into a new schedule 5:00 is when I'm going to wake up like sorry me who stayed up till midnight last night man this sucks but I'm going to drink 14 cups of coffee and just call it a day until I can like make myself fall into line and so that's kind of like the ideas that I I generally float around with is just creating strong um routines and so I get off at 4 I get up I try to get up at 5: and I go straight to work I like make coffee and go straight to work I don't do a morning routine there's no red light therapy cold plunge hot plunge all that kind of stuff just bam straight to work right and just go right into it because that's the only way I can get in the hours I want yeah the best thing I ever did for my sleep schedule was have kids cuz my kids wake up at 7 o' no matter what sometimes 6:30 yeah and eventually you will fall into line like you I mean you you most certainly experienced this you probably were a night outl I'm a light I'm a natural night out I'd rather program at 1: in the morning than 1 in the afternoon and it's just like a natural part of me but it's just like you know I just fought it and changed it because life circumstances forced it and so then I just leaned in yeah so let's talk a little I mean we we could go through the whole like your entire developer origin story but like frankly I'm more interested in just gleaning like insight and sharing them with you because you're prolific man like I'm I'm sure you're aware of this but like you stream a ton you have like three YouTube channels where you're publishing stuff you you are constantly posting on Twitter uh and other probably other social media as well and uh and you're building like substantial you're like not just on the stream like let's chat you're actually building things and uh you know maning theow of and responding intelligently while you're also holding a of in your head when you're cing like I want to get I don't want this to turn devolve into like productivity bullet points or anything like that but but like if you want to learn a little bit more about your process if if that's cool um and maybe you could walk me through like a typical day like do you know when you're sitting down what you're going to do that day like you you get your coffee it's 5:00 a.m. you're walking you live in uh like a pretty cold part of North America right like yeah yeah I live in South Dakota so it's cold it also is hot during the summer colder than here in Texas very variable yeah so you're like trudging through I mean Texas potentially to this horse barn and you're sitting down I hope you have insulation in there you have insulation you have a space heater how how do you stay warm I I do have I have a mini split that I put up there that was like the most expensive part of this it was Framing and the mini split that were the two big ones and so yeah so this is paint that's like a literal pain wall you're not using like the flimsy green screen never aink I got a green room unironically Green Room yeah so so like let's talk about like okay 5:00 a.m. like put us in the shoes of the primagen as he's sipping his coffee oh wow yeah so it's like it's like it's a real it's a real green room and then of course there's the camera the ring light there's a bunch of yeah there's a bunch of foam fil all over the place like if I go on that side the the next season of the Mandalorian could be filmed right there in your Horse bar it could be yeah this is L literally A Horse bar and two stalls very cool so like what is your day like like you got the you got the coffee you're walking out there you're sitting down what happens walk us through it uh I generally come in with a very very uh I know that I'm going to program I know I'm going to do something and that's typically how I start like I I have a project that I've been building and that project is fairly complex or fairly Technical and I know that if I just sit down I'll just you know I'm it will come back to me all the things I need to learn so sometimes you know as I BS or talk with people I'm I'm in my back brain going okay what was the last thing I did okay I remember all this stuff all right now I know what I need to do like I have five things that I know I need to do to put this what I'm working on on the Shelf I just don't remember right now that there what the five things are I'm sure I could like derive them if I just rewalk the path but we'll start later and I'll start figuring out things and get it done well tell us a little bit about your frame of like what you experience as somebody who has a thousand people watching you on Twitch and like rapidly typing you know comments and what it's like to watch that that all that stream by knowing that you got to keep the show going this is live uh yeah like like what is what does it feel like um you know it's shockingly it doesn't feel much different than when I had 30 people watching me or 20 people uh when I started uh programming on Twitch uh a big stream was like 30 people that was like amazing and so it's like yeah it's changed quite a bit but it's it's still the same thing I'm still just trying to build something that's ridiculous I don't have like you know I don't have just some you know a lot of people you you'll see a lot of people with these things where they have all these um they have all these tips and like oh man such good marketing ideas and oh you know you got to send it at this time of the day to do these kind of things and oh you want to talk about this at this time and I just have I have no I have literally no plans so you're just relying on your ability to perform in the moment essentially like uh it's a it's a performance essentially there there's not like a whole lot of yeah systems in place to like help you uh like like perhaps like a less interesting streamer would just have gimmicks or something like oh let's go to dumb human dumb pet tricks or something like that or whatever it would be like different segments or thing do do you do anything like that or is it like and I'll be completely can I've never sat down and like actually watched one of your streams I just watch YouTube and I watch it like double speed and I usually watch it while I'm doing something else like not to denigrate your art or anything like that but uh what would a typical flow be like for somebody who's never watched uh you stream before it just depends on the day so I either do a heavy programming day days or we do like article style days and all that and so these are the heavy you know like today was a heavy programming day so for five six hours we just wrote go code uh wrote All of Huffman encoding for stuff and I could do you know various value size and all that for Huffman en coding and then we ended up beating gzip for this kind of real-time rendering engine that I'm doing right now and so that was fantastic I was very very happy about that but that was today and so that was the plan I knew I wanted to get far into the Huffman thing didn't think I was going to put a bow on it but hey we put a bow on it and so now it's done now I get to move on to the next thing quad trees uh I have a theory that if you break up the screen into various regions those regions change less than if you try to do the entire screen at once for encoding and so obviously this all this stuff has been done before but I'm just doing it myself and I'm doing it all myself and I'm going to make a you know little fun engine for game stuff and so yeah that's that's the next thing I'll do and and like pardon me if if I'm asking kind of really l l question but essentially just more efficient impression is what you're after yeah yeah then yeah so it's the idea is that I'm rendering in the browser using Dom elements and so everything is rendered on the server and all finished and just on the uh just in the browser do you see the result and that's it and so it's kind of like web RTC or something like that but it's it's just with asky so it's all asky games that's part of the fun I wanted to make them all asky and so it's all browser based asky stuff so it's just like minimizing how much data you send down yeah yeah that's really cool so like uh Dwarf Fortress type games or I mean would that be a representative of the type of games you're developing are you a dwarf well the first one I'm doing is uh I'm I'm I'm encoding Doom okay and we're going to play Doom so that way everyone in chat can play Doom at the same time so instead of having doom on the most bizarre device I want to have 2,000 people play Doom at the same time yeah that's a novel approach instead of running having it running on a pregnancy test you're having a whole bunch of people running on you know twitch is like Twitch Plays Pokemon I think was like an experiment that first one the problem is latency latency sucks right yeah and like turn kind of Doom is very instantaneous like you have to be quickly moving around if you're not going to get slaughtered by these demons right precisely hence the reason why you have to have why I'm building all this real-time stuff is that I want someone to be able to open up a web browser and I'll be shooting up from my computer up into some fly iio noes or something like that and then it will display what's on my computer within like 500 milliseconds see there's some there's some like latency that you could have that's fine it's just that anything beyond that it becomes you know it becomes untenable so if they press in chat and chat takes 200 milliseconds to get to my computer plus you know or 300 or 400 or 500 milliseconds Plus for them to see what they're seeing is you know 400 milliseconds behind that still actually largely works because Doom is such a simple game you don't need to be precise you just need to like like shoot in the Demon's general direction and you hit it so you know there there's a lot of forgiveness in the game this isn't fortnite this is yeah so you're a lot of people are going to be using the double barrel shotgun if they're going to have any success I would imagine um yeah yeah yeah you can select Guns by just selecting a different gun yeah and twitch itself has like a good amount of latency like like several seconds so like if they're looking at the actual twitch stream then what has happened in the game has already moved on like a couple seconds before they their input actually quite a bit so how do you address that is there a way to address that that's why I'm doing the whole Real Time stuff is that they're going to open up a website ah so you're not going to rely on what's on my computer within a few hundred milliseconds and if I really felt like I could shave off another 150 or whatever it is my my guess is my guess is that a lot of my ping up to these servers is like 40 50 milliseconds so it's it's not like terrible and so for me to send up this data and then just have it routed back down to somebody it'll be like 90 milliseconds for that it's like not a huge you know it's nothing that's deal breaking the deal breaker will be all twitch chat latency which will be like on the order of 500 milliseconds have you talked to Twitch is there anything you can do to like improve that latency I I could make them so they could play via um just the website but I don't want to yeah it's more fun to make them go on Twitch and all vote with W's and as's and S's and D's to say exactly what they want so it's a consist is like like most people said a here so we're going to move to the left basically like yeah I'll be taking like every 100 milliseconds every you know 75 milliseconds that consensus will then play that key for the next 75 milliseconds or whatever it is except if it's a fire it just plays it once you know and so it's just like you kind of have to make it play these different things and can you do like WF so that it both moves forward and Fires at the same time so I got to figure out like some of those things yeah uh so uh I guess this is an interesting kind of metac cognition thing but there there are going to be a certain number of people in your audience who are going to be wanting to step toward the imp's fireball as opposed to away from it and what if the number of trolls or Griefers like outnumbers the people who just want to play an honest game of Doom then we lose like that's that's the end you know the thing is is most generally speaking most people want to win so that's the nice part uh so that's why the second game I want to develop is going to be a tower defense where it's chat versus me and you can troll just the thing is you got to pay Bits And if you troll you hurt yourself you let me win so then there's like this whole fundamental thing so you the troll toll is only to hurt yourself and so the whole idea is that you get to if you're going to troll you make your own team lose and which makes me win and you the viewer there's a fundamental like you don't want the streamer to win yeah like there's there's definitely that just exists they want to see you not be successful so it like puts them in this really painful position where they have to try to make the right decision and you benefit monetarily from the bits I guess they make the worst decision if they troll to then you know yeah it's going to cost them five bucks so you have been successful on two mediums so this is like not like their influencers can never break off of Tik Tok right and like never really have success out of their their first platform but you have managed to kind of like transplant yourself over onto YouTube through like these vods video on demand and and other things like that you you seem to have like a really good editor uh who identifies like interesting clips and like chops them out and puts them up as Standalone videos like so you're kind of at the Forefront of the difference in culture between twitch which is primarily gamer driven and like YouTube which I mean is like everybody is the biggest website on the internet basically yeah um and like like so you're almost kind of like in a position where you could be like a cultural anthropologist uh between those two worlds like what are some of the things you've observed that are different on Twitch and the nature of that Medium versus YouTube which is you know like like real time with with chat versus YouTube with its extremely sluggish comment system not sluggish but like yeah you know people watch the video then they it's not it's not for communication yeah it's not for synchronous communication um it's for you know I always feel bad using the term async ever since Annie made a big deal about async and now I'm just like oh man it's so true async means to you know asynchronous communication is to take two Communications and synchronize them so we've been using the word all wrong but uh uh twitch is you go to Twitch for connection so that means that you're going there because you want to see someone you have something in mind typically is what twitch is about and YouTube you typically go to YouTube to watch something you want to watch and so there're just vastly different crowds people that you know really like YouTube they they they they'll just pretty much largely stay on YouTube people that really like twitch will largely just stay on Twitch okay so you've cultivated two like very different audiences um generally yeah have you noticed so like a lot of people probably have a parasocial relationship with you where like you don't necessarily know a whole lot about them but they know quite a bit about you especially if they spent a substantial amount of time watching your videos it could be said that before this call I had a parasocial relationship with you and you Pro you may not have had any sort of relationship with me I don't know if you ever listened to the free cocan podcast before so no I just knew your picture that's it ah well um what uh like how do you interact with people on Twitch and do you even go over to YouTube and like interacting the comment section on YouTube generally I stay away from the comment section uh just because there's a lot of really nice comments but then there's also a lot of like not so nice comments and so you know that's just a you know that's just a reality to all of it and so I'm I'm I'm okay with that and so I just I I don't like to I just don't it's just not there so I I like all the live stuff and so it's fun like talking to them because you can have like a more real conversation whereas if you you know if you're trying to respond to Twitch comments or a a YouTube comment section it's just like you say something they may say say something back but you'll probably never get the notification you have absolutely no idea what happened so it's like there's no real back and forth or real communication with it all and so it's it's just different yeah it's kind of like if I go on if I go on YouTube I have something like it's like 20,000 notifications yeah that's a lot those are those are mostly like people commenting on things that unfortunately comments that you probably won't have the time to read and like thoughtfully respond to yeah how do you do it on Twitch moving back to Twitch because I did live stream coding on Twitch for like maybe like six or eight months or something like that and I was right about like where you were talking like I might have 30 people tuning in like oh let's watch Quincy you know build the early versions of free C camper implement this feature or whatever how many years ago was that nine years ago okay so uh and there wasn't like a live coding section I don't even know if there is a live coding section on Twitch like people have been asking for like live coding like sections on Twitch for a long time is there one now yeah software and game development okay great I'm glad they added that cuz that was like really frustrating that like there was like no discovery on Twitch um yeah discover you never go to Twitch for Discovery that's generally A good rule thumb yeah and you know I it felt weird for me to be using like Twitter and like these other places that worked really hard to like try to steer attention to Twitch was a platform that like at the time N9 years ago not very many people got it I still don't really get it frankly like I don't use twitch uh just because like I podcast at Double speed while I'm like you know walking my kids and stuff like that like everything I don't know maybe that sounds like to toxic productivity type stuff but but like the idea of me sitting there and just watching somebody at real in real time do stuff on Twitch uh so so like I just want to be forthcoming I don't get twitch but but you seem you may missed doing it a little bit like if you were programming a whole bunch and you're just hanging out a lot of times people just use it as co-working space okay I'm over here building something you're over there building something you're remote working you don't have any people that you work with every now and then you start chatting and you know maybe I chat back with you and it's just like oh that's kind of like a fun experience is that how you started with it uh I mean I think that's just generally how people view it is this is just like something that they they're a part of it I think it's more of that kind of like so it's just more of a social interaction type thing yeah well are there any any big like changes or any big things that you're really excited about on either the twitch or the YouTube front like I know that you've got now your third Channel and I guess one question I have is like why all the channels like one's like news and reaction like article reaction Tech have four I technically have four channels um but yeah yeah I have my edited thought through video channel which I I'm we're editing a video right now H then I I did a keyboard review on the glove 80 um then I have like kind of like my article read hot t Channel and then I have uh me just long form programming Channel and then I have just like clips and shorts and just just things that I said and did on stream channel okay yeah reason being is it it should be pretty it should be pretty obvious uh but maybe maybe it isn't most people that watch you don't subscribe the people that do subscribe uh they come and they go and so if you don't have a voice on your channel you will attract many different groups and then as your videos go out you'll have these many different groups see your channel and they'll go oh I don't watch that you know and so you just have these like hard Nos and so Google doesn't really know how to promote that and so they just kind of shut it down and so it's just like okay here's my here's my people that want to watch curated engineering videos here is a curated engineering video oh people that just want to hear me riff off of an article or or something like that or a TW a tweet or something like that here's this group that just is like engineering ajacent they just want to hear about programming in Broad terms uh here's the hardcore coding one because if I just took an hour coding video and threw it on any of the other channels it just would it would just do horrible because that's just not the expectation people have yeah and so that's the that's the idea is that you just you create your own verticals and it just makes more sense because people just they don't want to see all the same content you have a pretty big audience of people that uh take your opinion seriously and it it carries a lot of weight especially as far as like you know programming practices or uh things that you think are you know more effective than other things you know just just basically like trade-offs where people's opinion can fall on one side or the other but you have a strong opinion in a lot of these cases but you've said I'm just a man giving my opinion on the internet like how do you reconcile like just being a man giving your opinion with the responsibility of like essentially training a lot of the maybe mid career devs that tune in to your uh to your Twitch stream and and watch your YouTube videos like like how do you carry that responsibility uh as far as carry the responsibility I just don't think about it but I mean gen I know that sounds kind of weird but I mean generally speaking is that I really am I just I am just some guy on the internet and I just give my opinion and that's it I don't I don't try to be more than that I don't try to be less than that um I think that I think people often just take everything so dang seriously so I just I just I just do the opposite I think that's I think that's why I've been been so successful is that if you look at the older kind of the longer stayed Twitter Tech celebrities they're all so serious and and you know and as in the last like two years I feel like I single-handedly have destroyed a lot of the online tech Twitter like what it was uh I feel very proud of that but it's just it's just it was so serious all the time it's just like so highbrow and the thing is is that most people just aren't highbrow most people are just normal people that don't care and they just would rather laugh a little and you know if there's a little something to discuss about Tech then we'll talk about tech and then we'll make some stupid tweet you know like I just like today just all I did was make a tweet where it's just if you know new promise instead of reject or resolve reject it was respect disrespect you know it's just like there's nothing to that and someone said it the best part someone even said it in the chat and so I was just like MIT grabbed it and tweeted it or turned it into like a code picture and then tweeted it and it's like that just does fantastic because it doesn't mean anything it's just a dumb observation that we're all familiar with and that's it and like that's that's just fun and so I just I feel like the the the general discourse is still struggling between these two halves but it's definitely like just caving to one side which is just you know it's not like like maybe maybe it doesn't have to be that important on at all times maybe not everything has to be the most academic maybe it can just be dumb for the sake of being dumb and we can just have fun about it and that's okay it's only male modeling it's it's just models all the way down and so it's funny I don't know I just I I've enjoyed it I've really enjoyed it yeah so another thing that I think is really interesting about uh you is like you jump from one project to another but you do actually finish the products usually um and you say uh you've said that you love the process of creation for creation's sake but as creation turns into maintenance it starts to feel like work since most projects eventually become more about maintenance than creation if you're working like with like a large Legacy codebase or something like that you're probably spending I don't know maybe maybe you could argue on this point but you're probably spending about as much time just maintaining that and making sure that that continues to work as you are actually building out new functionality and stuff would is that a fair statement yeah yeah Harpoon is like my big Thorn to my side it's my most popular plugin I absolutely love it it works for me but people keep using it in Stupid Ways and they want me to fix it and so I'm just like I don't know quit doing it that way you know but I also realize that there's some bugs and some things that people want fixed or some extensions and so it's like I need to do some stuff I I really do need to spend another two weeks or probably I I honestly probably need to spend just 10 more hours kind of just wrapping up stuff with Harpoon and then I can release version two on 69 yeah so how do you know when it's time to like just let a project rot or like completely deprecate it and and move on with your life it's just when when I don't care anymore that's it you know I I build things for the sake of building them and if if there's something that I really like I build it to the point where I like it and use it all the time what makes you care about it is it like knowing a whole lot of people are depending on it because there's a lot of Open Source projects that like you know everybody's depending on like you know I think like Heartbleed and the one guy in his you know server closet like trying to keep basically the internet afloat uh and uh you know pretty thankless job but like that has to be maintained right that's Mission critical infrastructure is there anything You' built that you feel is like even though you don't like working on it you feel compelled to work on it just because so many people are depending on it oh yeah Harpoon would be the only one and so that's the one that I I will try to make something better with it but I I I like it the way it is and I don't want to add new features and so it's like me just saying no is the predominant way I maintain it but every now and then I begrudgingly add something yeah yeah and you said that programming is such a key part of your life and that it's always been such a part of your life that you really can't even imagine doing anything other than programming let's say hypothetically that you're like a Kevin mitnik type character rip and the FBI has literally forbade you forbade forbidded you from using computers for like 10 years or something like you cannot get within 10t of a computer or you're going directly to jail like if you were in a situation like that where you literally could not program what would you do like where would you Channel your time property property what do you mean by property real estate Adventures let's talk about that for a second uh because you used to live in San Francisco Bay area where I used to live before I moved back to Texas um and you moved back to back to uh South South Dakota South Dakota yeah and and like obviously there's like a you can buy a lot more in South Dakota and you can buy a lot more in Texas than you can in San Francisco uh have you ever thought about taking like your ridiculously high Netflix you know like I don't know if Netflix like adjusts your income at all if you like work remotely or if you move to a different place yeah they they adjusted my income for sure okay I don't work there anymore I I worked there for 10 and a half years and recently quit about a month and a half ago yeah so but but up until that point like what were you thinking about doing with those fund like where does the extra money go is it just going towards supporting a family of six uh we did a very big investment into the land that we bought we bought a strategic place as opposed to a place to live um just because we knew that a lot of building was going this direction the school was bidding on land near us all that kind of stuff and so we bought a plot of land as as an investment you know to try to hold for five years and it's it's fairly expensive so that's where most of our funds honestly go um so that's that's one thing uh the next thing is that after that we just kind of put a lot of we've just focused on my wife really likes running airbnbs and so we got a couple airbnbs and she just loves doing that and she likes Remodeling and all that and so or she does I let me rephrase that she hates remodeling but she knows she needs to do it to make the place look really nice and be the way she wants it to be and so that's where like a lot of her effort and time gets spent and so I know if I couldn't do this I would just pivot into that you know I just learn all the things you need to learn to be really great at that because it's it's like all all these activities aren't hard they're again it's just time right like just like programming programming I mean programming is objectively hard but it's also just a time orienting and so if I were to do some of these things like I I would never be a great woodworker I probably am starting way too l uh late in my life but could I hang sheetrock yeah I could hang sheetrock and you know learn to paint learn to refinish floors do everything and just get really good at that and just put my time completely into that yeah it's funny you mentioned woodworking because there's like this meme or something that like programmers like all the programmers today are the people that would be Woodworkers like 100 years ago 200 years ago and that like do you see parallels between doing things with your hands like in in a like a wood shop or or even metal shop like and you know building software yeah I mean you could also probably swap us out with like potentially painters and all that but I mean obviously back then things were so much different and so like here's a good example that did you know that college uh the original idea of a Bachelor of Arts was to prepare someone's life for leisure so it was the it was the act of um of endowing someone who's already rich with the ability to know how to read and follow out the poets and all that so I would definitely probably not be in that c category just if my life were simar I would probably not be on that side and so when people are doing these you know I probably wouldn't be on the art side would be would be a fair take I wouldn't be writing poetry SL doing art but you know I think that it's just the creation part it's just that you want to be able to build things and most of the things you build are probably just very practical for your life in the moment just you know so I'd probably fall on that side maybe I'd hope yeah you know the reality is probably if I lived 200 years ago I'd probably be on a farm or die in it would have probably been pretty horrible but you know like luckily I don't have to you know be in that time yeah unfortunately most people probably would have died like long before their time before they could realize their creative Pursuits just because it's the way things were was and people forget that yeah and people also yeah forget that fact about higher education that it wasn't designed to train you know soldiers returning from World War II to be able to enter industry and it was designed to help rich kids be able to have peacock brains and show off to mates and stuff like that basically and and to be able to fit in at dinner parties and oh look at Junior he's so audite you know stuff like that and yeah it was literally 1% like in the most educated place in the world London the 1900s right like like college really did not pick up steam as something that people did until post World War II era um when the government started funding uh through the GI Bill and stuff like that but anyway I digress but it is really interesting uh that like you know like you could actually kind of consider programming more of a craftsmanship than you could consider it like a high art or whatever right I I don't know where do you fall in that Spectrum like like CRA or an artisan probably depends on the area right uh you know like if you're doing like the really high academic thought things machine learning I think once you get into like I don't know if you've ever handrolled your own MLP or RBF or any of those things uh it's it's it's it's a lot of effort and now you you know once you start getting into the research area then I think you fall into this really intense like it's much more of an artisan become a master at math and then apply the math to these specific categories and all that kind of stuff that's you know that's a different vibe than uh being able to build stuff yeah you know being able to build stuff quick like I can build most things and most things that I build you know like I've been building this project now for you know about a month and a half and I've probably put a good 100 plus hours 200 hours into it and I've just been building only the coing side of things how to make a bunch of bites and make them smaller and I've built almost everything out and now I'm going to combine them all like right now and you know the interfaces largely just all fell together almost just perfectly despite making many mid mid programming shifts it's just because I've just done it for so long that I have a bunch of just like General ideas of how to program for the long term and this is kind of where that craftsmanship comes in where I can just kind of I I will fall within the 80 to 90% now it won't be you know won't hit a 100 but most of the time but I I'll I'll hit a good 80 90% pretty regularly and so that's like it's fun you know it's that it's that craftsmanship that's building quality stuff yeah I mean how much do you feel like you're just like falling back on your instincts that are honed over the years at the keyboard uh when you're when you're doing like a lot of like does stuff disappear and you're just like doing it or are you frequently pulling back to really think are you going to like the Whiteboard and I rarely rarely really think I rarely I it's just like I just know what I want and I feel like I can see the path and I don't really think about the path it's kind of like walk you know it's like when you go hiking you don't think about every last turn you kind of think like I want to get up to this point and I know there's that one part with the field with the flowers there's this other part with the Rocks you know oh then there's that one part with just a bunch of really tall pine trees right like you just have like these places in your head that you know you're going to go through and then the rest is just kind of you know just details a so it feels like walking and and by the way that walk I just described was uh the easy way on the m in Boseman Montana so if you ever done the hike in bosan Montana to the m it starts off with like a bunch of rocks kind of deeper bush area and then you go out into the field of flowers and then you turn into these really tall pine trees and so it's like know each spot's a little different I don't know how many turns or twists there are in between each but that's generally what happens yeah but you just kind of manually or like instinctively navigate things and it just it just happens right before you know it you're toward the end of the trail um okay so so likening building software and like integrating all these bits of software that you've written almost to just walking a trail because you've been you've done that so many times you kind of just instinctively know how to put one foot in front of the other yeah yeah like I I know what I want so if you watch one of my streams like today programmed I've never ever once in my life done Huffman and coding uh uh ever I've just never built a Huffman and code anything and so last week I watched a five minute YouTube video on it and it's like okay this is how you write a Huffman tree I was like ah okay I I see how that works and so from there I wrote the Huffman tree generator I wrote the in I wrote how how I'm going to Binary serialize that into a protocol so I could have it on the other side how to take that protocol and efficiently walk it and then also how to like how do you encode and decode encoding and decoding is really difficult because you got to walk from the most significant bit to the least significant bit and putting in these bits one at a time and all that and so there's like a lot to it that just wasn't a part of the video I just knew that I would do that like that's it it's just because I've seen it so many times that I've never done something before and I can and I even first tried one of it like genuinely first try just programmed for 45 minutes straight hundreds of lines put it in pressed play and it just worked all the way through unit test pass and everything wow so you like it was like movie coding yeah movie coding yeah yeah yeah it just it's still not movie coding in the sense that the next one I then took me four it took me four runs we do this thing where I get three runs and if I cannot make it pass on the third run then I lose or I win so we have bets and people place Channel points on whether I'm going to win or lose on these things and so today on the encoding side it took me just one try so one out of three to just get it done on the decoding side it took four out of three so I had to go into a second round best out of three to get it so I first tried the second try let's because I bit shifted the wrong direction like that's it I bit shifted I bit shifted the thing over as opposed to bringing it back down so like a very common error the programmers probably just stupid yeah yeah and it sounds like because you've put in the Reps at the keyboard and because you have this massive kind of Corpus of knowledge and learned experience from spending so much time coding that you have this kind of frame this scaffolding that you just kind of throw new ideas on right like you watch this five minute YouTube video and you kind of like maybe almost subconsciously saw the patterns and made these associations and you just internalized it yeah pretty much yeah that's something an experienced programmer can do and that uh maybe that's why like sometimes it's seems like if you're a new developer and you're trying to like solve like a project Oiler problem or something like that and you're just oh my goodness you spend like six hours doing it uh and then you could just like somebody like you could probably sit down and do that in like two or three minutes you know maybe maybe thing with it right yeah yeah and and that's why you know experienced developers are so in demand and we could we could kind of maybe talk about the job market because I do want to talk about AI um yeah we're coming up on two hours so we may want to uh figure out which one because I might get longwinded and talk about 40 minutes on one and then we're just like so far over time that your kids are going be like you're I'm taking my kids to cce's Pizza yeah yeah they they love that means you gota at some point you got to feed them so let's let's pick one you can you can choose okay so let's talk about Ai and let's go that's the one I wanted I mean yeah yeah I I mean I do kind of want to talk about like some of the misconceptions about how it's going to impact the labor market let's just start with with AI though okay okay so you published a video like maybe six or eight months ago a year ago like where you're like I tried uh I tried a co-pilot for like six months and then I just ripped it out and I I didn't want to use it anymore do you remember that video that was about a month and a half ago that I talked about that yeah it was just it was just recently I'm only about a month and a half into not using co-pilot okay but I could have sworn I saw a video like a long time ago where you talked I've started using co-pilot uh I started using it in the beta phase like way before everybody a net Freedman the CEO of GitHub at that point sent me how to use it and gave me the credentials and access to a private GitHub library to be able to use it in Vim okay so you use it like like I just like I'm going to step back I just want to hear your thoughts on co-pilot having been like one of the early beta users having used it a lot having stepped back from it like you know everything that's transpired since this tool kind of fell into your lap MH um so here's my my my general take on cop I think co-pilot is great I think that it's a very fancy autocomplete uh but that's all it is if you don't like I I was starting to get my masters in AI so I have a general idea of how MLPs what what their like purpose is and I have some understanding there's no reasoning that goes on and I know everyone will say you know this or that and oh it's it's AGI and all these kind of things now it's just it's really good at predicting the next set of tokens that should come out you give it some input it gives it it gives you some output it's really great at predictive stuff it's really great at extrapolating and it can just do some things that are just so amazing right you give it a p picture of a pop can it's like pop can right it just knows it doesn't you know like you you look at this and you see green you see green all the way through but a computer like right here that's like white like if you were to look at a picture of this it would dramatically change color because it it's actually it's not it's not green at that point and so but our brain just maps all these things on and makes it so easy and we just don't realize how you know complex these actions actually and so it's you know when I start when I stopped using co-pilot what I realized is that it was just during the time right after I've been learning go for the first time like in a in a serious sense uh I was learning go for about two months and when I turned off co-pilot I realized I didn't know go I didn't I I Bamboozled myself into thinking I knew go I didn't know go and what I knew is how to use co-pilot to write go and I realized like man I'm like I'm not good at this like I thought I was a lot better but I'm really not that good and so I quit using it and I realized all these weird habits I would just like stop typing and you know like one of the videos I watched at not too long ago talked about like the co-pilot pause yeah it's real I would just pause I would just stop for whatever reason that's that waiting for co-pilot to tell me what to do and it's just like I realized I was just like largely inhibiting myself and I did not like that one bit I did not like the fact that I was kind of um it's not that I thought I was going to become redundant or thinking the robots are going to take over I was just simply not I I effectively it's almost like I just filled my coating abilities with water and turned the temperature way down I just froze them in time and so it's just like from when I picked up go for the first time which generally you're like okay at go you can just you can just go if you have any programming experience you just you just know it by nature and so it's like I just froze it and I just kept knowing that same amount of go despite getting faster I was just getting FAS with AI and so once that turned off it was just like I had a I had a reality call and I was like wow okay so I see what it actually does and I don't like that I want to change this I want to be you know I want to be better at it so I turned it off and for the last month I've turned it off and I feel like despite having to type more and I do miss some of the auto completes quite a bit I am happy I still have it off even though I would definitely say I have to type more for sure and there's times where I'm like oh gosh this would be such a good co-pilot Moment Like right here co-pilot would just know exactly what I want you know it's just like it's so obvious what I want and so it's just like that part's painful but the rest is just like so like the tradeoff is just I'm not willing to go back right now so like that's what it is for you like all the hype and everything and it's really just something that saves you a few keystrokes you already know what you wanted to type it's just like okay did it autocomplete it correctly so I don't have to type an extra 60 characters here effectively yeah like you can see it too if you start using co-pilot like write something that will read one bite out of a buffer and then name the next me method 16bit reader and then watch it go like that's all it's doing is it's just trying to extrapolate what you're already doing into the next thing and it's just like ah we just got done building this thing that looked like this shape here's the next thing that's probably the shape you're looking for and bada bing bada boom it's just going to work you're going to be like wow that was pretty convenient I like that a whole bunch and it's just like I found like I'm not going to say I was addicted to it but I was most certainly like I was dependent there was a dependency for sure on it and it just I was just so dang Blown Away by how much that thing kind of made my learning process atrophy like I couldn't write a for Loop in in like in Lua so I was doing a lot of Lua as well I could not write a for Loop during that time I realized I did not know the syntax yeah because it always autocom completed it for me it's like do you need to know the syntax I mean toine the word need that's the problem and so it's like that for me it's just like that's that's my big takeaway with co-pilot is that I I believe it's a fan bargain as of right now for those that don't know Dr fa you get what you want in the moment and ultimately it's the devil that takes everything away in the end right you trade something good for ultimately something evil that's my person I know I know some people they strongly disagree with this and they talk about oh man it's it's it's making it so that more it's it's making programming more approachable more people can start programming it is better in general for everybody I hear all those arguments I'm not even arguing against those arguments what I'm saying is that the people that are feeling more productive they're not actually being more productive they're not actually learning anything and there's something pretty serious about that long term there's something very serious about you not actually learning some pretty important skills CU I don't know what the consequence is I could just see in myself the atrophy that happened or the inability like I I saw in myself atrophy is probably not the right term I saw in myself the inability to become good at something that I was doing full-time and so know it at like a more personal level so I was like holy cow that's that's a red flag for me I don't know what the consequences are but that's a red flag yeah and for you like it seems like being good at something is like the whole name of the game like the whole reason you're playing is to get better um so so that like it seems like an incredibly counterproductive thing to basically give yourself a tool that'll help you get your work done faster but your work is always going to you're like plateauing yourself essentially yeah and that I mean that's the big worry is like is is it good for anybody like yeah maybe I like the craft you don't like the craft but then my argument next thing is will you actually will this help you ship faster in six months 12 months or are you actually like is there some line that exists where you actually Plateau faster even though the other person maybe took a little bit longer but they grow even faster and you can say oh well it helps me learn the canonical way of doing things all this kind of stuff and my counterargument is that it's really hard to know if the canonical way or what you perceive as the canonical way is actually the good way to write code you don't know like that's it that's the answer again it's not about working hard or smart you just don't know so you have to Simply fail and learn why certain things don't like lend themselves well so if you never have to switch environments switch languages switch you know various things you're not going to like get bamboozled into bad traps you're not going to try to apply a certain of thinking to a problem that's like drastically terrible for it it's CU you just don't have that that experience you you've you've traded it off for Speed yeah do you think that uh people are just kind of like I mean Guitar Hero kind of like got people like at least making the motions of playing guitar even though they weren't really playing guitar but they could feel like they were playing guitar and maybe they were actually developing like some Rhythm and some of the manual dexterity and stuff to play guitar but it's just like this kind of like uh you know Similac of act it's like almost a parody of actual coding if you're just hitting Tab and like tapping a few things and hitting Tab and you're just tabing through the different results and like it it I can definitely see how this is bad for new programmers and potentially bad for like more experienced programs because you're pretty experienced and you're you're thinking it's bad for you at what point do you think that people should introduce this into their workflow let's say they're new to software development completely like they've been coding for like six months they they've solved a bunch of project Oiler problems or they've gone through like a certification on freeo Camp or something like that and they're really still just getting their their wings as developers there's got to be a temptation to use this tool that helps you get things done and and can it feel like training wheels do do you have kids who learned how to ride bikes I guess would be a question yeah yeah yeah I do you know the funny part is that you know the best way to ride to learn how to ride bikes which has been a large big change since we were kids assuming you're approximately the same ages age near me me being 37 okay go you definitely have the same experience then training wheels you don't do training wheels anymore training wheels are objectively bad they're not just kind of bad they're objectively bad you don't do training wheels anymore Striders you get kids bikes with no pedals and they learn to push and ride and glide on them and what it does is it it teaches them the more Superior skill to learning how to bike which is balance pedaling is not hard pedaling is something you learn in a moment but balance is that thing you have to go do like 50 times 100 times thousand times until you're like really comfortable making turns and all that you start hitting Hills on those little Striders and kids start going back and forth like they get good at the act of biking just missing the pedaling part and so it's like that has been a huge just a huge game Cher for kids learning how to bike and so I that's that's I look at co-pilot more like training wheel so like should you learn how to uh or should you when should you use co-pilot here's my general rule of thumb is when you should uh use co-pilot if co-pilots produce code that surprises you or if you use co-pilot to solve a problem because you don't know how you probably shouldn't use it it's not an autocomplete it's not a co-pilot it is a pilot you know you're on autopilot change things up learn how to do those things you're the one who autopilot yeah it's doing the actual heavy lifting you're basically just kind of like teeing it up and like letting yeah so are you you should be like it should be you know that like I'm not a sports ball guy but in in in football someone snaps someone catches and lines the ball up and someone kicks are you the kicker or are you the person that sets up the ball you want to be the kicker you're the person doing the thing you want someone that's just like taking out the boiler plate of getting ready to kick for you yeah that's a good analogy so a lot of people are like really freaked out about Ai and like Devon Ai and like you know the the AI hype cycle like has has reached yet another Crescendo in its many years of AI Winters and AI Summers not that it's not bringing a lot of fruit like I use AI all the time and I imagine you do too for good things not just for things that I'm too lazy to do properly right um there are novel things you can do with AI with using like gp4 which I use a lot structured questions that you would never be able to get like a good Google result for but you can potentially have like a a rich conversation with it and like learn stuff and yet a lot of people are really freaking out because they greatly overestimate this token predictor and what it can do and you know yeah like like what would be your advice to somebody who's getting into and you probably get this question all the time I get it like several times a day I'm not exaggerating like people email me all the time uh yeah what at least once or twice a stream someone asked this exact question about is the AI going to take our jobs what's going to happen am I just learning a useless skill like there's like a thousand of this that direction of questions that are all kind of wrapped up into the answer that I'm I'm going to attempt to give okay great uh so let's first start with momentum uh the internet we can all argue is a phenomenal uh thing for business right businesses have been able to do a vast amount more with less resources due to the internet existing the internet started coming around with what arpanet in the 60s it really started to hit its stride in the 90s when you started getting uh 144k and 56k modems like how long until you really started to see the internet well the first.com bust was really to just a bust because we didn't have the pipeline we didn't have the infrastructure to really handle it and so didn't it it like the internet was around for so long but for businesses to really adapt and start using it which today you still have most businesses like most businesses don't even really have a personal website if anything you know they may have just something really really small and that's it uh and so that took like 25 years to really get integrated into society and so just apply that to AI let's just say the AI is incredible it's not it's like society's not changing tomorrow it's going to take a long time these big businesses these big corporations right now we're in the exploratory phase which is here's this thing that is just really you know like the culmination of the last uh 80 years of research into into AI in this one particular branch of uh multi-layer perceptrons or whatever you know whatever the llm underlying Tech is and here it is we have a business what happens if you start letting things be steered by this what are the consequences what kind of guidelines do you have to have what kind of this that you like think about the 9,000 questions that have to be set up for this to even become a business viable solution some people rushed in used it and then backed away you I mean how many stories have you read about like people going oh crap we overdid this one not a good plan and so they're all pulling things away and so that like that's just like the business learning phase and that's like a 10-year phase and then at some point it's going to be good enough to be integrated and we're going to start seeing it as a real part of our life so my guess is we still got like at least 10 years where things are going to be fairly the way they are today it'll just like slowly be going and then that's something point it's going to go from slow to fast and now it's everywhere uh so the next question is is what is it going to affect in my opinion and I don't think this is I don't think this is an opinion I think this is just a matter of fact if you ask the AI to do something it will do that something hey paint me a picture of a crab it produces you crab my counter question to you is why was that the right crab and you'll realize there's no reason why I couldn't have been one of 10 million other variations of the same crab it they crab is an archetype it can be visualized in a bajillion different ways but do the same thing with the AI and ask it hey give me a perfectly white canvas it's like just not going to do it you saw in the new uh jiid 4 Omni video uh the guy was just like hey girl and guy I want you to sing trading Lines by and they just didn't do it he's like no no no I want you to you sing one line and then he sings one line and then it didn't did it it's like no you got to stop at one line and you need to like the problem is again is that you went from an answer can be the answer to a specific answer is the answer and once you go from that that translation layer all of the sudden that's where the like AI completely fall off a perfectly white canvas is virtually impossible just like it is asking like there's that Meme that's going on the internet right now ask the AI ask chat chippity 4 40 the newest greatest most fantastic piece of technology ever how many ARS are in strawberry and what positions and it was coming up with the craziest answers even though it's like perfectly obvious to us because again you've gone from uh like a conceptual question like what could be the next thing that comes out to I want this precise thing and this is why we don't this is why you don't program in English you don't program in English because English is highly uh uh tolerant to like heirs I can like how I'm even describing this there's a thousand different ways I could have just said what I got done saying and all of those would have been acceptable English is just not a precise form of communic ation it's meant to go from thought to thought and the path we take is going to be some sort of you know version of our upbringing our culture all that kind of stuff and so now you're on to this idea of going from that language which is just terrible for specific uh or for specifications I.E read any legal document two like uh like this is a legal specification for what the AI needs to do and it just it utterly fails because it's not the right like that's not going to be it and so I'm not worried about this version of AI could there exist a future version in which can do all these things sure why not um but let me hit you with like a different idea yeah in the in the 2005 2003 to 2005 era you were going from a 1.3 MHz computer to like a 2 mahz computer the rate of change was incredible if you would have been living down that in that era which I was I thought man in 10 years I'm going to be using 10 10 GHz computers it's going to be crazy all these kind of things and guess what happened yeah it didn't yeah it didn't happen it did not happen because there is a fundamental diminishing return that exists out there and so like is this AI the worst version of AI we'll ever experience or is this AI actually in that Golden Era of growth where we're about to come up to a hard wall we actually don't know the answer to that and so if anyone tells you there's some future AI that's going to be magical and all powerful maybe we don't have any evidence of that ever being true in any other form of of creation right now like everything scales hor like the the economy of scale is never it just never goes that direction I would love it to be real but I don't see any evidence for it and so long story short should you be worried about the AI taking your job if you are a customer service representative in which your job is to take in a fundamentally flawed input match it against some sort of business requirements and then spit out another fundamentally flawed response to a person like yeah that's a very dangerous place to be if your job is to look at images like TSA looking at what could be dangerous and not dangerous in a backpack there very well could be a place where that starts to become a diminished return on that like there's these activities that you're just kind of like guessing and oh we need to check this backpack to see if it actually is bad or good like maybe that is maybe those type of positions will go away because you're just kind of it's kind of a guessing thing but at the end of the day anything that's like really concrete like I need to check the backpack now or hey I'm the doctor I'm going to review the MRI like those still have people behind them and programming is the like the Pinnacle of the world's most specific thing ever every single keyword every single symbol every single identifier has its exact position and its meaning and one has a consequence into the next one that's why it's just like such a disaster as these llms get longer and longer into stuff cuz the consequence of being mostly right compiles just horribly so even if they take that mostly right and you know are able to move it down to a thousandth of what it is today that's still completely wrong right there is no completely there's no mostly right in programming this is not horseshoes this is not hand grenades this is a precise mathematical expression of what your intent is so there you go so I think there's just no danger in this current world for or AI is taking your job if anything it's going to be the greatest uh I think the greatest amount of jobs will be created in the next 10 years in uh in general programming because of the amount of pure nonsense that is created I don't know if you saw the study I know I'm still going sorry I just have so much to say about this this is great but there's this study that rated or that that tracked the amount of lines changed in public op like open source repos in the last four years on GitHub and since the Advent of AI and its usage the amount of uh line changes not line additions not line deletions but lines in which were reworked has gone up from once every 6 months on average to once every two weeks like the rate of change is just blowing out of the water things are just being changed so much faster now they can just be wildly changed now you could argue many reasons for that maybe in the next in the last couple years so many new people have gone in so they've kind of poisoned the well for like just constantly changing code and blah blah blah you could come up with a bunch of different potential answers but the rate of change either way is going a lot like how many times do you commit code and then have to rework code especially if it's I've been bit by chat chippity co-pilot so many times on generating code that I thought was correct because I didn't take the strong care to create it myself but instead just went that looks correct and then just got you know I lgmt that one or whatever it is looks good to me and just slapped that seal on these codes over and over again and Bam I've been hit with so many bugs because of that yeah all right I got a last question for you first of all I just want to say that like uh that is pretty much how I've been responding uh to people is just that like you're greatly overestimating what might come to pass and you're also overestimating how good these tools are today because they're not that great yeah right um precis they're great novelty like the fact that I predicted you had a tie game after you said Win Lose else and it's like tie you're like oh my goodness this thing's magical that's because no no autocompletes ever done that it was magical yeah it doesn't mean it's like it's actually good it's just magic it just feels magical Ian people were impressed with the lives of when it came out because it could keep a conversation going wow this great but but once you understand the trick and once you understand the trick about how these llms work it does kind of like you're like okay it's doing good but like this is nowhere near ready for prime time no pun intended there all right so last question so if people shouldn't be you know getting uh co-pilot integrated into their workflow if they shouldn't be like just you know relying on these tools and assuming that these tools are going to be able to deliver them uh from you know the drudgery of having to like manually code things themselves what are the fundamentals that you think people should prioritize let's say like people who are you know undergraduate studying computer science or people that are transitioning into Tech from other careers like accounting or truck driving or something like that like what are the skills that you would encourage people to prioritize investing their time into right now well so there's kind of a couple things there one what should you learn is a is a hard question and that really depends on you what you're interested in uh for me the biggest thing that I say is the same thing I say about working out what's the workout that's going to make you do that workout that tomorrow you're going to do another workout that's much better than the world's most perfect wellth thought through workout because if the the world's most perfect wellth thought through workout isn't the workout that's going to make you come back then don't do that one what's the one that's going to make you come back because your biggest like the biggest Ally to you today will be just time in the saddle time in the saddle is your like greatest indicator for you becoming successful at something just do it right now right you don't you don't know what you like you don't know what you don't like so build stuff read stuff read you know like there's algorithms courses I'm sure free code Camp has some algorithms courses learn a little bit of data structures learn a little bit about networks go learn about HTP servers go learn about the front end go learn about the back end go learn about embedded why not right why don't you get thorsten Balls book uh what's it called uh in The Interpreter p.com go if you're interested in how interpreters work like how does JavaScript actually run that's a very easy book to get into like just like these kind of simple things that just simply open your eyes and you go through the process of building cuz that's like that's like your first few years right if you want to be useful at programming that should be your first 10 years right and I know that's that sounds horrible but like there is no six I don't believe there is a six-month path to becoming some six-figure job like I know that may have existed at one point during Co but that's because I mean we went from you don't have to be on the internet to like oh my goodness for the next year you have to be on the internet like obviously that kind of changed the demand and need for people to build stuff and some budgets got really blown out to the point where you could have that happen so yeah there was a time period where that may have happened but that is not the normal that should never be your expectation it should be a marathon it should not be a Sprint amen well it's been an absolute pleasure having you on the free cam podcast Prime and uh yeah I'm going to include links to a lot of cool primagen stuff like your YouTube channels anything you think I should uh if there's like a particular video that you think be helpful for people I can link to it and I just want to thank you again for coming here everybody who uh listen this far into the conversation I hope you have a fantastic week until next week happy coding\n"