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The Promises of Tech with Scott Hanselman · Oxide and Friends

• 0:00
  Adam Leventhal: Scott was here a minute ago and he did an audio check. Scott, if you're here in the audience this time, just take up your hand.
• 0:05
  Bryan Cantrill: I think it maybe he stormed out. Maybe he realized, like, wait a minute. What am I doing? This is not these these jokers. I'm in the wrong room.
• 0:12
  Adam Leventhal: Not impossible. He was like, wait, there's no video? How do I turn
• 0:16
  Bryan Cantrill: on video? And I was
• 0:18
  Adam Leventhal: like, no.
• 0:18
  Bryan Cantrill: Excuse me. I keep waiting for the higher production quality. Where does that happen? Where's the green room? Yeah.
• 0:24
  Where there's snacks in here.
• 0:26
  Adam Leventhal: Audio problems. JH 77 that you cannot, you cannot take that free square yet. Yeah.
• 0:33
  Bryan Cantrill: Oh God. They get the bingo. Okay. So I noticed it. Exactly.
• 0:39
  I was just gonna make run. I'm not sure. I oh, no. It's all the great. Thanks.
• 0:43
  Sorry. The I noticed that Scott was in the chat talking up a certain bingo square that I will remain out of. I think the bingo, it's throwing me off. It's throwing me off. You know, this is the I feel this is like this is the the I feel this is like MLB's gambling problem.
• 0:58
  Like, I feel like, you know, we we've got we've got these punters kind of waging on every pitch now, and I I I don't know. It's it's screwing up my game is what I gotta say.
• 1:06
  Scott Hanselman: Hello?
• 1:07
  Adam Leventhal: Hello, Scott.
• 1:08
  Scott Hanselman: Hello.
• 1:09
  Bryan Cantrill: Scott, welcome.
• 1:10
  Adam Leventhal: Brent apropos of of Bingo ruining the game. I don't if you remember this, but many, many, many years ago that we did this big Slayers kernel group planning session. Do you remember this? And we had made some bingo cards, and I needed, like, JPMC or something. It was, like, the last card I needed.
• 1:28
  Scott Hanselman: You got up there
• 1:29
  Adam Leventhal: and spoke for, like, thirty minutes about banks. And I swear, like, you were mentioning, like, regional banks in Ohio or whatever just to, like, avoid mentioning JPMC.
• 1:39
  Bryan Cantrill: Did he just say KeyBank? KeyBank's always what is he doing? PNC. Keep going. Well, no.
• 1:45
  Come on. Too big to fail. Think too big to god. This guy.
• 1:47
  No. Can't do anything right.
• 1:49
  Adam Leventhal: Be right. So keep your bingo card secret.
• 1:51
  Scott Hanselman: This is like Conan's show.
• 1:53
  Bryan Cantrill: Yeah. Sorry, Scott. Welcome aboard. I'd be so No. I'm just learning
• 1:56
  Scott Hanselman: how it works. I usually fast forward twenty minutes into Conan's show.
• 2:02
  Bryan Cantrill: Yeah. Normally, this this would be a very fair criticism from a regular listener. It's like, wow. I've actually I've always been working through this.
• 2:11
  Scott Hanselman: Like, oh, we're so sorry to to what's the what's the guy that they always boot off of Jimmy Kimmel's show? Apologies to Matt Damon. Are you familiar
• 2:21
  Bryan Cantrill: with that name?
• 2:22
  Adam Leventhal: We're very familiar with that. Scott, the reason why Brian is stunned and I am cackling is we have lifted that gag as well.
• 2:32
  Scott Hanselman: Oh, no.
• 2:33
  Adam Leventhal: Yeah. Our version of that is Morris Chang, but
• 2:35
  Scott Hanselman: yes. Interesting.
• 2:37
  Bryan Cantrill: Scott, Adam has given me the stretch goal in in 2025 to get Morris Chang on as a guest for the podcast, which I it's definitely I mean, stretch is definitely one word for us.
• 2:50
  Scott Hanselman: Morris, I think we're the founder of TSMC.
• 2:52
  Bryan Cantrill: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
• 2:53
  Yeah. That guy. Okay. That guy. It feels like I I liken this to to being tasked not with climbing Kilimanjaro, but with climbing Olympus Mahan.
• 3:03
  So it actually necessitates a I've got to actually I think I think I need go build a spaceship first for this one. But the yeah. So we we got some but you know what? We also have some you know what? Actually, was actually re listening to our gear wrap up last year, Adam, because I wanted to I feel like I'm need to like check up on our goals from last year.
• 3:24
  Right? And I and, you know, because we've got we've got some time. It's still actionable, but, you know, I I need to need to kind of get on it. And you know, we wanted to have Kate Conker and Ryan Mac on. And I I was convinced that I had made less likely because I was so thirsty to have them on.
• 3:38
  We already did that. So look at that. Check that one off.
• 3:41
  Adam Leventhal: Good job, Buzz.
• 3:42
  Bryan Cantrill: Yeah. Thanks. Thanks. It's always Morris Chang with you. It's always where's Morris Chang with you.
• 3:47
  Fine. Fine. Anyway, Scott, do you know Morris Chang? Can you connect us, please? Is that possible?
• 3:51
  Has he has he been on hands on it yet?
• 3:53
  Scott Hanselman: We're in the we're in the group chat. I'll text him now.
• 3:56
  Bryan Cantrill: That's right. Morris Chang is fiercely DMing you. If they are talking about me again, please ask question.
• 4:02
  Scott Hanselman: We're we're in a we're in a fellow Taiwanese billionaire group chat,
• 4:06
  Bryan Cantrill: so we're we're I'm on it.
• 4:09
  Adam Leventhal: Makes sense.
• 4:09
  Bryan Cantrill: There you go. Yeah. Exactly.
• 4:11
  Adam Leventhal: Never know who's in the group chat these days.
• 4:13
  Scott Hanselman: So true. True.
• 4:15
  Bryan Cantrill: And, you know, Scott, because by the rule, there's always a group chat that consists of everybody except you. You know that there's also group chat where everyone else is just talking about someone like that guy.
• 4:25
  Scott Hanselman: The everyone but Brian the everyone but Brian group chat is blowing up right now.
• 4:29
  Bryan Cantrill: No. I know. That thing is always melting down. Yeah. I that's Well, Scott, thank you very much for for being with us.
• 4:36
  So this is so we are, I I guess, to provide context at a at a very early hour of only 05:05. The we are talking about your TEDx talk, tech promised everything that it deliver.
• 4:49
  Scott Hanselman: Oh, that talk the one that no one here has watched.
• 4:52
  Bryan Cantrill: No. I oh, the oh, contrary. I I think actually okay. On that note, if you're listening to this in the in as a podcast, you should you should stop right now and just go watch it because it's it's nineteen minutes. It's it I I gotta tell you, I'm not a real Ted talk kind of a guy, but this is a great Ted talk.
• 5:10
  This is the right kind of talk for that vector. I gotta say, Scott. So I'm I'm I this feels like faint praise, but it actually I I I think it's a it was a great talk. What is what was the origin of the talk? How did you how how did you intersect with this thing?
• 5:28
  Scott Hanselman: It's so complicated. I so I live in Portland and the TEDx of Portland TEDx is like a franchise, right? Like you want to open a McDonald's, but you live in Billings, Montana, so then you go to McDonald's and you get a franchise deal, right? You hope that the Billings, Montana McDonald's is up to snuff of the other McDonald's. And TEDx, you know, Portland's pretty creative.
• 5:53
  It's known as a pretty creative town, so the gentleman who owns the TEDx franchise for Portland is known to put on a pretty good show. Historically, it's been quite large and quite creative, And I had had an opportunity over the last three or four years, both during COVID and post COVID, to give an opportunity to speak at TED. And I've been like, do we really need another dude just duding on stage? Like, and I had kind of like said, no, I don't really want to do it. And I'd met with them on and off for the last three or four years.
• 6:23
  And my buddy, Steven Green, who's very well known here in Portland, is like, need you have a thing to say. You're you're you're useful. You know, he talked to me kind of off the ledge because I was just like, there's there already should be a tariff on white guys with podcasts, you know, frankly, all of us should be paying through the nose. You know? And I've been podcasting for twenty years since before it was named podcast.
• 6:47
  But I thought I got away with it because I have a pretty decent show, and I have a podcast you can check out. And so he convinced me to do it, and they assigned me a speaker coach. And I then that's why I had a formal professional speaker coach who literally has like written the book on how to give a good TED Talk. And I have a style of speaking, and it is not Ted Tedian, you know, it's it's my own style. It's kind of stand up comedy with with source code, which is not appropriate for TED audience.
• 7:17
  They assigned me the speaker coach, she and I, she's great, name's Kathy Armas, and we sat, we vibed immediately. I went and I presented my talk, and the TED people were like, this is trash. This is not even this is
• 7:30
  Bryan Cantrill: barely a concept. Apple's part of it. It's fun. Okay. Yeah.
• 7:34
  Yeah. And I can What kind of stuff? Thanks for you having asked me to do this. Maybe I won't
• 7:38
  Scott Hanselman: It's do like the
• 7:39
  Adam Leventhal: Gong Show, not a TED Talk. Right? Totally.
• 7:41
  Scott Hanselman: Yeah. I left in tears. I was like, this is not what we want to do, you know, because I was going to show up and be myself and there is a thing, right? I think it would be similar if someone asked you on Conan and like, hey, you're going to come on, you're going to do five minutes of material, you're going to walk over to the couch, you're going to sit down, you're going to go back and forth with Conan. Like there's an expectation, it needs to be produced.
• 8:04
  So just like you can't vibe code directly into production, you cannot vibe a TED Talk. There is an expectation of quality that I did not provide. Then Kathy and I went back and we rewrote the talk probably four or five times. And I think I presented that thing probably 30 times before I kind of got it right. And even on the last even on the day of when I bring the Commodore 64 physical box out, that was not planned until the morning of the TED talk.
• 8:35
  Bryan Cantrill: It's all the same theme? Was the theme always what what it was in terms of your own journey in Or was the theme changing as well?
• 8:43
  Scott Hanselman: They wanted I they're very lovely guys. They're called the Davids. There's two guys named Dave. The Davids wanted an AI talk, and they wanted a tech talk. Oh, god.
• 8:53
  Oh, Because the T in TED is technology, right? It's technology, education, and design. Okay. And I'm not an AI bro. I'm kind of an AI vegan, but I do work for a company that wants me to be all in on AI.
• 9:06
  So I'm kind of in on AI, know what I mean? I'm in on the good stuff. I'm in on the local models. I'm in on the useful models. I'm in on ethics and responsible AI.
• 9:16
  So I found a thing where it's like, well, tech has been promising us a lot and with AI, this is their latest promise. And that's how Kathy, the speaker coach and I put together a, well, you're old, Scott. So what what has tech promised you over the last thirty plus years?
• 9:35
  Bryan Cantrill: Oh, interesting.
• 9:37
  Scott Hanselman: And then I assembled the promises of tech, of which one is AI.
• 9:41
  Bryan Cantrill: Yeah. That's interesting. Well, I mean, and AI, I think as actually you you hit on it very well in the talk, but it's not it's not central to the talk, wouldn't say by any means. I mean, I think it's your your you're carving a much bigger arc. And I and in fact, I think you you follow advice that I I frequently give is to speak from the heart, not from the book.
• 10:00
  And I mean, this talk speaks straight from the heart, which is part of what I think makes it compelling is that it is it is so personal. And it and so it but interestingly, that's not where it's because I kinda would've would've has assumed that that's where it started because that Internet is so compelling there. But you arrived there because Yeah. They wanted you to give an AI talk. Like I the fact that you're an AI vegan, but like you your employer forces you to, like, wear a bacon suit or whatever the the the analogy is there.
• 10:31
  And because I think the so and as you were kind of polishing this, are they beginning to realize like, oh, actually, is sorry. That thing we've been telling you about is being trash. Actually, this might be okay. Did you get get it possible?
• 10:45
  Scott Hanselman: I think there was well, one of the other things that happened that I was not excited about, just to give you a sense of like, they are putting on a show, right, which is a day. It is a day of beginning, middle, and an end. And I was supposed to be the guy before lunch that does stuff, and then you go to lunch and you go, Oh, that was really, that was kind of cool. Like, you know, we'll talk about the thing during, the thing we just saw during lunch. And this is not a tech audience, right?
• 11:07
  These are muggles of all flavors. So I'm having to do something that is somewhat somewhere between the Today show and, you know, if you're familiar with XOXO and the Andes that put on, like, a regular weird web joyful festival every year. It it's it's, like, not quite it's, South by Southwest circa 2005 is kind of my audience and this is a group that's a little bit more artists and regular people and creatives and stuff like that. But I also wanted to have a beginning, a middle and end, and then I also realized that I'm older and I don't care anymore, so I wanted to have a certain amount of apathy.
• 11:44
  Bryan Cantrill: Isn't that great though? Isn't the isn't that the best part of aging? Yeah. Absolutely. It's just like, I I just don't give a fuck
• 11:52
  Scott Hanselman: Well, about I wouldn't say that. I wanted it when when people say it was an emotional talk, it's like, if I have all this privilege, including level privilege, which is the privilege of having a VP in your title, why not just use that privilege to say the thing, the quiet part out loud? The show- was that was saying the quiet part out loud was the goal of the talk. And I think I effectively like did that. Like I could drop the mic now and just say, okay.
• 12:19
  Bryan Cantrill: Yeah. Oh, I think that this is what I mean. I think this is the best part of getting of aging. It's just like, just, you you you're not as there's certain truths that you're just willing to speak and that that there's because you're not and they're also the the you to me anyway, that talk very much speaks to a younger generation and I think that you not only do you have the kind of the guts to speak one's own truth as you get older, but also you feel responsibility to like, hey, there's certain things that I would have wanted to hear had I been younger.
• 12:52
  Scott Hanselman: Yeah. Some folks in the chat here are saying like burning social capital, which is valid. Someone said they don't PIP VPs, they do. I said some stuff on my LinkedIn that is on my annual review. So like you do get, you do pay a cost, right?
• 13:08
  But you burn social capital, you burn work capital on saying the thing out loud. But then the question is, you work for a giant company, what do you say? Like, you know, I like getting a paycheck, but I'm not, like, 100% beholden on the paycheck, but I'm bet like, the company's better on the inside than it if if I'm there, is my current working theory.
• 13:32
  Bryan Cantrill: You know what
• 13:32
  Adam Leventhal: I mean?
• 13:32
  Bryan Cantrill: There are haters. You're is this haters in the in the comments section?
• 13:37
  Scott Hanselman: There's haters in the comments section. They're like, yeah, but Microsoft made all those promises and you you represent the 300,000 who work for Microsoft. You know, it's like, well, no, not really. Like, I am one of them. I went there to open source everything.
• 13:50
  I'm going to keep open sourcing stuff until they ask me to leave nicely. I represent there's this I don't know if you maybe anyone in the Pacific Northwest on the call, but, like, there's there's this guy I would grew up hearing from this diamond business, and it was the Shane company. Oh, Shane company. Absolutely. Yeah.
• 14:12
  You've got a friend in
• 14:13
  Bryan Cantrill: the diamond Absolutely. Okay. Yeah. So I went to my channel. I went
• 14:19
  Scott Hanselman: to Microsoft to be their friend in the diamond business. Does that make sense? It's like, oh, I'm happy with our guy on the inside. So whenever Microsoft does something stupid, people always text me, like, is this stupid thing that Microsoft did? Is that your fault?
• 14:33
  You know? Like, can you fix that thing? Can you go work on that? And, you know, sometimes I can't, sometimes I can't. But if I stop working there, like if I quit Microsoft and there's like a tiny little blurb in the verge, like, can someone finally quit?
• 14:47
  Well, then I can't fix stuff.
• 14:49
  Bryan Cantrill: You know what I mean? Yeah.
• 14:50
  Scott Hanselman: Yeah. So I stick around trying to fix stuff until I finally decide that I can't fix stuff anymore. Because it's really just this big giant company, like, Darth Vader's gone, and now it's just a bunch of stormtroopers trying not to blow up another planet.
• 15:03
  Bryan Cantrill: Yeah. And you know what? Our colleague, Jeff Bonnwick at Sun, always I love the way he he phrased it because we were also same thing. We're a large company and, you know, large companies do things that are are are positive and negative. And as a part of that company, you kind of feel responsible for the negative stuff.
• 15:21
  And Jeff had always said that I I'm I'm here until it's impossible to make the right thing happen. And the great thing about Sun was it was always possible to make the right thing happen. And I I I always thought that was a good good kind of indicator for when it is time to like when it when a large company is doing something that that that you can't live with and you can't change it, it's then it's time to move on. But I mean, you get the you also have the privilege of working for a kinder, gentler Microsoft than it was. And you know, says, I was kind of thinking of the, know, reflecting on your talk.
• 15:54
  Actually, a question, step back for a question. Are you a little concerned that you're gonna give people too much nostalgia for the eighties? I feel like I need to offer a a slight counter perspective on how much the eighties sucked in so many ways. Just because I'm worried they're gonna be like
• 16:11
  Scott Hanselman: thing about like living within an Overton window that is constant shifting. Like there's like, you know me, I'm all about the retro. Like, I get that the 80s sucked, but like 1984 was a really good year for me, you know what mean? Like, I have a lot of nostalgia for 1984, it was good. Not because of the 1984, the book, I was like, that's when they gave me the Commodore 64, you know?
• 16:31
  Yeah. Like, everything sucked, and everything does suck, and everything will suck. Like we were heading towards suckage and we were leaving suckage behind. That is nostalgia and the allure of it, but we can just do our best to make things suck less for the next people.
• 16:50
  Bryan Cantrill: For sure. I guess I guess here's my concern. My concern is that sometimes people hear about the the I mean, there's a lot to be nostalgic about and they hear only the nostalgia and they think like, goddamn it, I was born in the wrong decade. I've been born too late. And and I I just feel it's like it's important to also emphasize that they're like, know, when when we had Randy on and talking about 1973 and Xerox PARC and how what but what a bad year 1973 was in so many ways.
• 17:18
  And I think that like when people kinda get down on the current era and there are many many reasons to be down on the current era, it's important to remember that there were lots of reasons to be down on past eras as well. And like 1984 was a great year for you. In 1984, I, like you, like Adam, thought we were gonna die in a nuclear holocaust. Like, and Don Hart. And I I I think that
• 17:40
  Scott Hanselman: Red Dawn.
• 17:41
  Bryan Cantrill: Some Red Dawn, a 100%. And and and the day after, and I don't think people realized just how terrifying they are the early the the big red button of and and the idea of and this was War Games came out in 1984 and I mean that WarGames obviously terrific film, but also there was a documentary aspect to it where there was a real concern that we were gonna blow ourselves And
• 18:10
  Scott Hanselman: next the next decade was the nineties and I was working and it was 100% my fault if if Y2K didn't happen. Like I was actively working on banking systems to add an extra two bytes because those two bytes were going to save the world. Right. And so this was
• 18:27
  Bryan Cantrill: not in my and this is also an era of the because I was kind of thinking to myself, you know, if you give me a year swap, it's 2025. Do you wanna go back to 1985? No. Definitely not. And for a bunch of reasons.
• 18:38
  And for reasons that you were
• 18:39
  Scott Hanselman: not at aol.com. Like, that's how much nostalgia that I have for this time.
• 18:46
  Bryan Cantrill: And I mean, you hit on the promises of tech. I also think that those were mean the and the promises you outlined were connection, convenience, and creativity. What do you think those were were those explicit promises or or implicit promises? Kinda vacillating on that. Because I think they were at times very explicit and at times very implicit.
• 19:05
  Scott Hanselman: I think that they were, I would, until, you know, like he who is most likely to make a declarative statement is most likely to be called a fool in retrospect, but I would say that those are explicit things. Connection, right? Community, like this is what they told us. Join AOL, join CompuServe, join us Like on get connected, like don't be left behind was 100% explicit. This is why you joined the internet was to connect with your people who are like minded.
• 19:36
  I don't think it was
• 19:37
  Bryan Cantrill: implicit And I think we at It was implicit, yeah, right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And that and then certainly you had you know, I was going back.
• 19:43
  Do do you remember the the AT and T video phone?
• 19:47
  Adam Leventhal: It's crazy. You were you don't I was just thinking about those AT and T ads, the the theme that was like, have you ever, you know, tucked a loved one in from afar or whatever? You will. Yeah.
• 19:57
  Bryan Cantrill: Have you
• 19:57
  Adam Leventhal: ever paid a toll without slowing down? Right. Yeah.
• 20:02
  Bryan Cantrill: Can you imagine going back to the future, going back to the past and like, do you do all those things? Like, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We do all those things.
• 20:08
  But that's actually like No. It's that's wrong on the Internet.
• 20:11
  Adam Leventhal: Like, let me tell you. Let me tell it went terrible. Right?
• 20:15
  Bryan Cantrill: Yeah. Because it is amazing, you know, and I was just thinking about how, you know, and just on connection, Scott. Like, the connection is really amazing. I mean, it is in some ways overshot the mark because we are connecting all the crazy people to one another as well. And all that connectivity, well honestly, right?
• 20:35
  All that connectivity has got like, we've seen the downside of all that connectivity where, you know, people turn into echo chambers and where where you you you you kinda unite like minds and they they gin one another up. And the next thing you know, it's like we're making very bad societal decisions.
• 20:51
  Scott Hanselman: But Yeah. The Not everyone should have been given the Internet. Sometimes people should have just hung out like in the basement of the local community center and just been weird without a place to go and meet them.
• 21:03
  Bryan Cantrill: There was a charm when it was all dial up, and it was all, you know, it was all Fidonet and BBSs. There was a certain, like there's a stigma. Fidonet. There's also a charm.
• 21:10
  Scott Hanselman: This is just now this has just turned turned into the old men who shake their fist at the cloud podcast. I was a FidoNet node. You know? And, like, my my FidoNet node was only on once I got home from school.
• 21:20
  Bryan Cantrill: Totally. Totally. I mean, I feel like if if your mother picking up the phone didn't disrupt your your connectivity, you haven't there's a level at which you haven't lived. You know? But I also think that looks like the degree I mean, it it's remarkable to me that we so I I was just kinda thinking this in terms of of something that happened to me recently.
• 21:40
  My mom had a had a bad fall and I needed to go be with her and she's recovering, which is great. But I I think about like how that looked in 2025, that whole thing where I was able to be with her, but also able to work remotely. And, you know, she was heartbroken that she wasn't able to attend my son's, her grandson's graduation from high school, but then she watched that remotely. We watched the graduation remotely. We FaceTimed with him immediately after the graduation.
• 22:07
  I mean, we and, you know, it it just the the the level of something there wasn't a real connectivity and the fact that, you know, we are able how did how did grandparents keep up with their grandchildren in 1985? Web TV.
• 22:26
  Scott Hanselman: I went over to my grandmother's single wide trailer and installed Web TV, the Microsoft MSN network thing that allowed her to use a little box. It was a little box and a dial up, she didn't know how to do it, and she would send me like one, hello, how are you? Like painfully typed out from like a t nine Yeah. A day. That was how I talked to my grandma.
• 22:51
  Bryan Cantrill: And so I feel like I mean, there are aspects of this that like tech has delivered really really well on that promise. And and then it's just it's it has because I feel like this is where you do get to the promise being implicit that where it's like, well, we didn't just we just promised connectivity, not necessarily grandma. So grandma comes with like eight chan for free. You're like, what? Where did we okay.
• 23:13
  Can this can we can we somehow choose a little bit more about and I think maybe that's part of the part of your point, Scott, about how like people constructing boundaries for themselves about what that connectivity looks like.
• 23:26
  Scott Hanselman: Yeah. I mean, like, I'm on every social network right now. Right? I'm except for except for Twitter. Like, we'll always call it Twitter.
• 23:35
  Paused on Twitter for a while. I have noticed how bad threads is, because it's Facebook. Right? Facebook on Twitter. Right?
• 23:48
  And like, Mastodon is like IRC on Twitter, and Blue Sky is like people that I would normally hang out with on Twitter. Like, these are all different kind of flavors of Twitter, but I'm bringing up Threads specifically, because Threads is like the next door, except on Twitter. And people on next door are horrible. They're just awful, mean people. Which gets to the thing that we've been kind of coerced to believe, which is that 50% of the world sucks, and 50% of the world thinks like us.
• 24:20
  But every time I log into threads, I am just it's a deluge of Karens and just mean people complaining that they can't get into the the Diamond Lounge or whatever. And I was just like, ugh. And I just closed thread.
• 24:36
  Bryan Cantrill: Know what mean? Does it make you feel any better for the rising generation that that my son and his his teenage friends used TatchyBT to write Nextdoor posts to troll next door. Which this is
• 24:47
  Scott Hanselman: another thing that is generational. Then I know I know I'm gonna get roasted in the comments for this, but I don't like trolling. Like, trolling is unkind. Is is nonproductive. Is too easily Trolling taken anyone, care of like being unserious to the point of misleading, I find to be an extremely unattractive quality.
• 25:13
  And like trolling as a hobby turned into 4chan, and trolling as a hobby turned into like what people did to to like, hey, you know, I'm gonna go home and rather than just watching TV or doing a puzzle or making LEGO, I'm gonna go be mean to people on the Internet for the lulls.
• 25:30
  Bryan Cantrill: And I just don't like it.
• 25:32
  Scott Hanselman: Don't like it.
• 25:33
  Bryan Cantrill: Sorry to hear the first troll. No. No. No. No.
• 25:35
  No. I I I I'm gonna tease this a little bit though because I think that the the what what made this particular order, the Nextdoor posts, a truly artful troll is that they weren't actually being mean to anyone. They were actually creating the kind of fiction that people wanted to believe. And they this is what so it's a little little more subtle than than than they they were allowing people to expose themselves.
• 25:59
  Scott Hanselman: One could fair, but one could argue that leading people down the Primrose path to believe that a reality that they wish was this case is the case is why we're in the political environment that we're in today. True. True. We are literally in this situation for the laws.
• 26:15
  Bryan Cantrill: I I think that that's that there's truth to that for sure. There is truth to that. I think that there is yeah. No. I I Got a little steep there for
• 26:22
  Scott Hanselman: a second. Sorry.
• 26:22
  Bryan Cantrill: Yeah. Well, and I think we were talking about Nextdoor here. So I think that the it it's I mean, it it's a little hard to be to be sympathetic. I for whatever it's worth, their account was banned in several ways. I mean,
• 26:33
  Scott Hanselman: trolling then turned into, like,
• 26:35
  Bryan Cantrill: FAFO. Right? Yeah, for sure.
• 26:40
  Scott Hanselman: And everyone's like, Oh my God, didn't know. Well, you got trolled into it, like, I don't know. I'm just the way that I am trying to not like people ask me at work, How are you Scott? How's going? It's Monday morning, how are you?
• 26:50
  Someone this morning on a teams call said, How are you? And I said, The darkness persists, but so do I. And there was this pause. A blessing
• 26:58
  Bryan Cantrill: on a Monday morning. Wow,
• 27:00
  Scott Hanselman: okay. That was not I just want to know how you were. They thought I was going be like, Oh, I went hiking with the kids. Everything's great. No, no, everything sucks and everything is bad.
• 27:09
  So I went to McDonald's and I drowned myself in Diet Coke. How are you? The only way I'm getting through just like the late stage capitalism of it all and the promises of tech to try to give you a way to jump back to the topic is No,
• 27:24
  Bryan Cantrill: I'm actually happy to talk next door and trolling for the rest of hour.
• 27:30
  Scott Hanselman: It's through extreme toxic positivity and empathy. Like, know, I got flipped off today driving to McDonald's to get my diet coke, and it was not for anything I did with my car, somebody was having a bad day. So rather than letting their bad day ruin my day, I was just like, wow, I wonder what happened to that person today. Maybe they had a job interview and it didn't work out, or maybe they're running out of gas and they felt that I cut them off, they were on the way to fill their car, but they're on E. Something that has nothing to do with me ruined that person's day, and they chose to flip me off outside McDonald's today.
• 28:12
  So I will not be trolled. So okay. I that. I comment love in the chat. Empathy in this economy?
• 28:21
  In front of my
• 28:22
  Bryan Cantrill: So but but okay. So I'm I'm gonna push back a little bit, because isn't it a little bit reductive to say that Threads is a bunch of Karens. I mean, isn't that? Aren't you Threads
• 28:31
  Scott Hanselman: is a bunch of people in pain that are going to the Internet to find their redemption, and they're only finding more pain.
• 28:39
  Bryan Cantrill: Okay. And Is that
• 28:40
  Adam Leventhal: different than social media generally?
• 28:43
  Scott Hanselman: It I think that we are starting to split up the Internet into these neighborhoods of Twitters with different people's goals. You know, you go there to find people that agree with you, you go there to find community, you go there to find some warmth or kindness and think, maybe the world doesn't suck. You go there to find people who think like you, and hopefully not be sold, you know, a bill of goods. And the problem is, rather than just living quietly without knowing that all these worlds existed, now we know that all of the multiverses exist. So if you want to go and get left wing politics, you go here.
• 29:26
  If want to go to get right wing politics, go there. And I think I was just happier when I didn't know that those places existed. Social media factions in the chat. Excellent. Yeah.
• 29:36
  But those happier. Like, it's the fog of war in, like like like, isn't isn't it simpler in Age of Empires when you just don't know that there's just a giant looming army over there in the darkness? So just don't send a scout over there and just live in the ignorance of the fog of war.
• 29:49
  Bryan Cantrill: But those but those places that exist, remember shock jocks on the AM dial? No. They existed in the eighties, and we knew they existed.
• 29:56
  Scott Hanselman: I didn't know that.
• 29:57
  Bryan Cantrill: But you you mean, Rush Limbaugh came to came to prominence in the eighties.
• 30:01
  Scott Hanselman: And I ignored him. We ignores
• 30:03
  Bryan Cantrill: it was
• 30:04
  Scott Hanselman: in that context. Yeah. I ignored him to my peril, apparently.
• 30:09
  Bryan Cantrill: Yeah. I mean, I just think that, like, I I don't know that that's new, though. I mean, I don't know that that is
• 30:14
  Scott Hanselman: I guess it's I guess it's easier. Like, I don't know. Red pilling is quicker and easier now than it was in the eighties, wasn't it? Isn't it? I don't know.
• 30:21
  Maybe I maybe that is No.
• 30:23
  Adam Leventhal: I think that's unimpeachably true. Right? Like, that it is more accessible, that it's that everyone has a megaphone, that the the megaphone gets passed to the person with the most extreme views. I think there's a lot true there, but I also agree, Brian, that, like, that stuff was there. It was just much less accessible.
• 30:43
  Bryan Cantrill: Yeah. I mean, definitely it it definitely left some fire lines for sure. And you had the the you had beliefs that were very fringe that suddenly became very mainstream because they were being and there was an Overton window that moved for sure. I just I wonder if I can figure out is like, so how much is that like tech not fulfilling its promise versus tech being like, no, sorry, I did fulfill the promise. I connected you.
• 31:13
  I'm holding the mirror up to you, and this is like, what you're getting is some of the fundamentals of the human condition that are deeply unsettling, which they are.
• 31:23
  Scott Hanselman: No, I think the problem is it all comes down to eyeballs. This is The problem is if you create a system like the New York Stock Exchange, that creates day trading, then creates algorithmic day trading, which then creates trades that rely on milliseconds. And if you create late stage capitalism that requires the eyeball economy, that creates the algorithm, which creates blogs that are generated by AI, which then contain an advertisement after each paragraph. So when I'm playing Assassin's Creed and I just want to go and look up a freaking game guide to get this side quest done. I am 10 into reading the thing before I realize that it was generated by an AI, and there's an advertisement and a banner after every single paragraph.
• 32:17
  Now the algorithm goes, I like that. And now Have you it's in my face.
• 32:21
  Bryan Cantrill: I I assume you have watched your talk while on TEDx. You've watched your talk on YouTube, I would I would presume.
• 32:28
  Scott Hanselman: Oh, I would never watch one of my talks. They're garbage.
• 32:30
  Bryan Cantrill: No. But it but but I'm actually it's serious question because I
• 32:33
  Scott Hanselman: I watched it. I mean, I I did the damn talk 30 times. So, yeah, I I know pretty much how the story goes in my talk.
• 32:38
  Bryan Cantrill: No. No. I know. I know you story goes, but have you because the thing that is funny is that there are two ad breaks. They inject two ads.
• 32:44
  Scott Hanselman: Oh, god. Yeah. And I and one of the main complaints is that, like, the Ted people added ad breaks. They they put in the mid roll, which is horrible.
• 32:52
  Bryan Cantrill: It is horrible. And, like, also hilarious because well, with the ads and this may just be a I've been getting an ad recently on YouTube that is very insistent on an AI job seeker, which is like, I feel like I'm on the other end of this now where these would where you upload it to your resume and it automatically applies for a thousand jobs for you. Just like, oh my god. So this is the ad that broke in in the middle of your talk, Scott. Oh.
• 33:21
  About the peril of tech, and it's like, I can't do it for a thousand jobs for you.
• 33:24
  Scott Hanselman: Talk, but that's how Ted makes money. And Ted's even a nonprofit. Right? And they still have to make money to keep the nonprofit running with ads.
• 33:31
  Bryan Cantrill: Well, it it definitely felt like a a kind of an and scene moment where you are are kind of decrying the peril of it, and then you are interrupted by the by the need to support the attention economy. And with and and with ads that seem to be handpicked to undermine you at some level. And yeah. I mean, it's I I I it was surprising in its it also happens like mid sentence. So it definitely is like, no, nope.
• 34:00
  Sorry. I need to interrupt Scott. There's something actually that much more important that needs to be said about some schlock that we're kind of trying to sell you. Yeah. And I mean, it's it's kind of the full picture of all because it's also like one has to be really grateful for the talk itself.
• 34:16
  Mean, I certainly I am grateful that we live in a post YouTube era where you ideas I mean, if if you kind of going back to Ted's, I guess, original ideals about about the the transmission of ideas, we can transmit ideas, good ones and bad ones, much more readily than we could twenty years ago, thirty years ago, forty years ago. I mean, and it's so you do get many more people get to get to hear your ideas, which I think is great. Then they also have to hear an ad for an AI job seeker.
• 34:44
  Scott Hanselman: Well, and this is totally random complaint about tech, but I'm a G Suite or Google, whatever that's called now, I mean Google apps. Like I'm a Google I've had a I've run handsomeman.com on Google for twenty years, right? So you can't buy a Google Ads premium, you can't buy a YouTube premium account to get rid of the ads if you have a G Suite account. So I am being told every time I open YouTube, you should upgrade, and I click upgrade, and it says, oh, I'm sorry, you're a Google Workspace user, you can't find upgrade. They tell me every single day, every single day I open YouTube, hey, you don't want to see these ads?
• 35:23
  Fine. Fine. Fine. Here's your $7. Nope.
• 35:26
  Sorry. Google Workspace.
• 35:28
  Bryan Cantrill: Just kidding. You are a customer you would think you're a customer of Google, but you're in fact a customer of a rival organization. So I'm afraid that you are
• 35:35
  Scott Hanselman: They're shipping the org chart and they don't even care.
• 35:37
  Bryan Cantrill: Totally. It it would violate my OKRs to actually remove your ads, so I'm sorry I can't do that.
• 35:41
  Scott Hanselman: Yeah. And I and it would also violate the OKRs to not show the ad because they know I'm an invalid person who can't upgrade even if I wanted to. So now I'm just shamed that maybe I should never have bought Google Ads. But I know now I've signed into so many things with Google, I'll never be able to be rid of them because of the Google identity magic.
• 36:02
  Bryan Cantrill: Yeah. Well, and say then you were forced to clockwork orange style, watch the ads that are being placed upon you on on your account.
• 36:09
  Scott Hanselman: And now I have logged in on Facebook and Google and Microsoft in so many places. The only thing that I really own anymore is just my domain. And I I who knows? And if if one day one of those identity providers went away, would I ever be able to get into that account ever again? Who knows?
• 36:26
  Bryan Cantrill: That's a terrifying thought. Yeah, that's a terrifying thought. Also like I'm much more worried about like talk about estate planning. I need like Google estate planning. That's the thing that I'm I'm really concerned Yeah.
• 36:38
  Did a whole
• 36:39
  Scott Hanselman: blog post on a digital a digital will and the estate planning involved in making sure that when you're dead, your nontechnical partner can keep that system running. Because there's 20 Hansel people out there that cousins and my parents and my kids and, like, everyone who has an hanselman.com account, including random Hanselmans out in the world that email me and say, hey. Can I have a hanselman.com account? Sure. Here.
• 37:03
  Bryan Cantrill: If if I'm gone, it dies. Hansel people is the plural. I I do like that.
• 37:08
  Scott Hanselman: Oh, I have I also own hancellmen,plural,.com just in case.
• 37:12
  Bryan Cantrill: Just just just in case.
• 37:13
  Scott Hanselman: You never know. You might need it.
• 37:15
  Bryan Cantrill: Hey, the one question I wanna ask you about. You talked about this teacher that you had. Yeah. I did. Marion Mayfield, who sounds really extraordinary.
• 37:26
  I mean, it just like I I kinda went back to my did I have a jazz singer that was an elementary school teacher that I was unaware of at any point? But she just sounds like a really extraordinary teacher. I mean, could you elaborate a little bit more on her?
• 37:41
  Scott Hanselman: Yeah. So for those who haven't seen the TED talk, my fifth grade teacher was Marion Mayfield Hill at Glen Haven Middle School, and she was a jazz legend. Like, she was at all the Portland jazz spots, and she was know, because you have to everyone always had two jobs when you're teacher. You're a teacher and then you have your main thing. So the Marian Mayfield Hill quartet had albums out, and you can find her online.
• 38:03
  She's great. Oh, wow. I didn't realize that the Oregon Encyclopedia had a thing on her. Thank you for that, Brian.
• 38:10
  Bryan Cantrill: Yeah, bet. No,
• 38:10
  Scott Hanselman: It's pretty interesting. And she came to my wedding, and I collect people So like this isn't just a random teacher. We stayed in touch until she passed away.
• 38:20
  Bryan Cantrill: Oh, wow.
• 38:21
  Scott Hanselman: She was at my wedding. I spent time with her and her husband for years. And for some reason, you know, I was one of her faves and she let me borrowsteal the Apple II computer and I took it home. Like I was on the street running around causing trouble, making fake IDs, doing all kinds of stuff I shouldn't have done. I found this computer and I was good at it.
• 38:47
  And like it all started there. There is some Thanos parallel universe where I never met Mrs. Hill and I didn't get that computer. And that was it, you know, and Portland Community College didn't exist. So it cannot be overstated that my existence hinged on that kind of if you've ever seen the movie Sliding Doors with Gwyneth Paltrow, Marion Hill was my split my universe in half.
• 39:13
  Bryan Cantrill: Yeah. That's that's amazing. And I mean and so part of what you capture in the talk is her own optimism about tech, about looking at the personal computer, the Apple two e in 1984 and saying, this is going to change everything.
• 39:25
  Scott Hanselman: My best friend at the time was a kid named Chris Bates who had cerebral palsy and he and I would sit in the back and back in the day you would have a helper. So he had a person sitting with him and the computer was coming out, so like accessible technology was a big thing, you know, making sure that we actually put a thing on the keyboard so that when his fingers touched the keyboard, they went into holes so that it wouldn't slip and push the button next to it. So I was, you know, working on and thinking about accessible technology forty years ago. That has been a passion area for me because I've got some mobility challenges in my hands and my arms, and I've had frozen shoulder, which I do not recommend, zero out of ten, three times and had surgery on my shoulders. So anytime an accessibility opportunity comes along, I'm into it.
• 40:16
  She introduced me to that in the freaking 80s. And accessibility was a thing that like somewhere in 02/2005, people popped up like, hey, we should make everything accessible. It's like, hey, we should have been doing this since day one. She got me into that as well.
• 40:29
  Bryan Cantrill: Can Adam, it gives us an occasion to ring the chime. We've got a our our brief history of talking computers with with Matt Campbell talking about Yeah. He's asking you.
• 40:37
  Adam Leventhal: From a real long
• 40:38
  Bryan Cantrill: time ago. Really long time ago. Yeah. But the the this is where we we we were reading about Plato and the the Brian's book with the Pale Orange Glow. Am I I'm getting that wrong.
• 40:56
  Adam Leventhal: No. I think that's
• 40:56
  Bryan Cantrill: right. Friendly Orange. Friendly Orange Glow.
• 41:00
  Scott Hanselman: Thank you.
• 41:01
  Adam Leventhal: Knew that
• 41:01
  Scott Hanselman: was wrong.
• 41:01
  Bryan Cantrill: I knew Pale was wrong. Yes. It it it was it was nicer than Pale. It friendly. Was But about the development of PLATO, terrific book and the and just the the you know, one of the earliest roles for personal computing were taking people that were unable to that that that had a a disability so acute that they were really and it opened up a whole new vistas for them,
• 41:21
  Scott Hanselman: and Mhmm.
• 41:22
  Bryan Cantrill: Conversation with Matthew was really amazing about that.
• 41:24
  Scott Hanselman: Yeah. Absolutely. I use most of my emails and Teams meeting chats are all dictated with dictation, And I'm an extensive user of Siri, and I do probably 90% of my work on my on my phone, my iPhone with accessibility as well.
• 41:42
  Bryan Cantrill: Well and then you also are are a type one diabetic that has an artificial pancreas, which is Yeah.
• 41:47
  Scott Hanselman: I forgot. Actually, that is a that is valid as well. It's kind of a
• 41:49
  Bryan Cantrill: It feels like that one's kind of like it was pretty close to home. It feels like that one's worth mentioning.
• 41:53
  Scott Hanselman: No. It's just it's one of those things where, like, you don't you are more than your disability. But yeah, I've talked to a type one diabetic for thirty two years, thirty three years. And there's a woman named Dana who invented the open source artificial pancreas with open APS. I remember I hung out with them and saw the very first one when Dana Lewis made this open artificial pancreas system by basically hacking a Raspberry Pi and carrying it around in a fanny pack.
• 42:24
  Dana Lewis and Scott LeBrand and Ben West back in like 2014, 2015 cobbled together JavaScript and Python, and now I'm using an open source artificial pancreas written in Swift by a gentleman named Nate, and it's using a hacked Omnipod. And like, I don't I mean, I'm no longer driving stick shift with diabetes, which is extraordinary, and I have no side effects after thirty years, which is nearly unheard of. So it is a blessing. Yeah. It's amazing.
• 42:56
  Yeah. You search for Hanselman artificial pancreas, I've got YouTube videos on that as well.
• 43:01
  Bryan Cantrill: And so profound in terms of what that has allowed. And and not just I mean, in lots of people. I mean, just like these these all the and then part of what I liked about your talk is that like you didn't, know, you didn't flinch from that that these profound and important promises that have been made and kept. But then also you're not shrinking from these the the the promises that have made or we've either not kept or we've overshot the mark. I just feel like a lot of the stuff we we I mean, just for example, you you call out, you know, the convenience is another thing that tech has promised.
• 43:32
  And I mean, I think we've been somewhat convenient to a fault almost. I don't know. What do you Yeah. Mean, most
• 43:39
  Scott Hanselman: people on this call probably touch their phone before they poop in the morning. That is a level of convenience that is unnecessary, I think. Like that's a level disconnected, it's just not needed. But I just got back from New York, which would have ordinarily required a lot of challenges moving through three time zones and my insulin pump managed it for me. So like this simple act of getting on a plane and traveling somewhere, or spending a month in Johannesburg with my wife's family, all completely managed, effectively 99% managed on the pancreas.
• 44:14
  Going across time zones is something that people take for granted and it makes makes it possible.
• 44:22
  Bryan Cantrill: Totally. And then on so more generally on convenience, how do feel that tech has done that promise?
• 44:31
  Scott Hanselman: Well, again, it's so challenging because everything is through the lens of being a certain age and growing up in a certain time. But like, is it necessary that Amazon destroyed PC Micro Center and Fry's Electronics and, you know, all of these things so that I can have a drone drop resistors on my front porch in you know, I I could order something now at 06:00, and it would be here before ten. That's both magical, but the price we paid was too much, I think. Like it's just not necessary. Yeah.
• 45:01
  My son found surfboard at Goodwill. He bought a surfboard and it got cracked. I was surfing a couple of days ago. And I was on an airplane flying back from New York. He text me, I get the text because I'm on the free T Mobile WiFi.
• 45:17
  I go to Amazon, I get the surfboard epoxy, the surfboard epoxy is dropped and it's waiting for me before I land. That's just like, magical and stupid. Like, we he and I should have been able to turn that into a weekend activity and drove to the beach and found a surfboard place and helped a small business and bought the epoxy there. It didn't need to be dropped by a freaking taco drone in my front porch.
• 45:39
  Bryan Cantrill: Right. But but but we're also encouraging it to be dropped. I mean, we're we were participating in that. Right? I mean, for the same way about
• 45:45
  Scott Hanselman: like Late stage capitalism. I keep coming
• 45:47
  Bryan Cantrill: back The to the the but the death of what you know, the death of Radio Shack, the death of a lot of these things. And but, like, also the death of fries. I mean, how
• 45:54
  Adam Leventhal: much late stage fries for you in? The death of fries, it's kinda
• 45:58
  Bryan Cantrill: hard to be sympathetic. It got I mean, fries arguably died of dementia. I mean, it got very the the there there were when because when we
• 46:06
  Scott Hanselman: started Friday's fault because everything turned into an iPhone. Right? The Swiss army knife is now in your pocket. All the things, the the video camera, everything now streaming like video you know, stereos don't exist. You You know what I mean?
• 46:21
  Like, all that stuff. Everything that one went to Fry's for is now a iPhone.
• 46:27
  Bryan Cantrill: Although, you know, my kid bought a the one that was admittedly also using ChatGPT to post on Nextdoor, Bon, a record player and buys a bottle of bunch of vinyl. So, you know, it's it it is it definitely exists, but I I it there was even I was like, why are you doing this? Just like play it on your Bluetooth speaker. Why Why are are you you doing it this way? But that there was there was something.
• 46:53
  Scott Hanselman: In the chat though, Adam just said it's an accessibility feature to have instant delivery to your door. This is a thing that I think is worth talking about. I'm not pushing back on it, but I do wanna call out that like using accessibility as a justification for all the harm that these things has done, I don't think we need to say that things shouldn't be accessible. Like remote work is amazing, right? It's also worth noting that like we're growing a generation of people that don't know how to go to the office and talk to a human and shake their hands and look them in the eye, and accessibility in getting stuff delivered to you, prescriptions are amazing.
• 47:30
  Like that's totally awesome and amazing. But that doesn't mean that it's not fun to go to the mall and walk around and like put on a pair of pants before you have 12 pants delivered to you and then mail 11 back because they don't fit. Do you see what I'm saying? And just saying, well, but accessibility, which is good. I want people to have I want people who are unable to move like I move to have the ability to have all of those things, but I don't want the breakdown of the third place to also happen at the same time.
• 47:59
  Bryan Cantrill: Yeah. In the third place yeah. I agree. But that third place is not gonna be, like, it's not gonna be a mall. Right?
• 48:06
  Just not.
• 48:07
  Scott Hanselman: Well, not in America.
• 48:09
  Adam Leventhal: I pause on that one because I I I there's something interesting about San Francisco where, you know, there was the Westfield Mall right downtown downtown Orion.
• 48:16
  Bryan Cantrill: Yeah.
• 48:17
  Adam Leventhal: Yeah. And that's, like, cooked, completely cooked. Like, done.
• 48:19
  Bryan Cantrill: Have you been in it recently? I think the shoes I'm wearing now were bought at the Westfield Mall not that long ago, and it is a very post apocalyptic place to go to. Yeah. The the shoe stores are all there. Oh, really?
• 48:29
  Shoe store Walk
• 48:29
  Adam Leventhal: away from there.
• 48:30
  Bryan Cantrill: No. The the shoe stores, it's like a total like Nash equilibrium. The shoe stores are all huddled together among these kind of all of these these cadavers of I mean, they're they're in a morgue of, know, Neiman's. Every of the store is gone. It's just the show stores anyway.
• 48:45
  Adam Leventhal: But apparently, Stonestown is is thriving. And a part
• 48:48
  Bryan Cantrill: Yeah. Understand.
• 48:49
  Adam Leventhal: Part of the how they're thriving is by making, like, places where there are activities and that are kind of more niche things that it's not just lines of McDonald's everywhere, but things that are more esoteric and cater to more specific communities. There's bowling, stuff like that. So I think agreed writ large that the mall is not the third space, but I think not intrinsically.
• 49:16
  Bryan Cantrill: Yeah. And I really should be like, I shouldn't even be saying this because I was just at the Great Mall in Milpitas, like struggling to find parking. So I was like, so I've clearly, yeah, clearly the I guess I guess the mall's death has been greatly exaggerated. But it does not have the same kind of default resonance that it had
• 49:37
  Adam Leventhal: when you
• 49:38
  Scott Hanselman: were kids. Well, for sure. The mall got bigger and bigger and then you needed to there's a science of REITs, a real estate investment trust that require a mall to have two or three anchor stores that sit equidistance to each other and all of the science of capitalism that caused the mall to do that created malls like the weird mall, like Westfield or whether it be Portland's Lloyd Center Mall, which is a fascinating mall that I grew up on. We would go there to hang out. But now because the mall is collapsing, it's so cheap to get a spot there for like $500.
• 50:09
  You can open a store at the mall now when it used to have been like $10 a month. So now you've got tabletop games and toy stores and comic shops and weird nerdy little places that sell only d 20 dice. Right?
• 50:22
  Bryan Cantrill: Yeah. Which I think is I mean I mean, that is part of like why some of this collapse is is not necessarily bad news. No. Because I think that what you out of that collapse, you you kind of build the next thing. I mean, certainly the city of San Francisco has collapsed many times over.
• 50:39
  And and actually, you know what? Let's not talk too hard into that one. I'm I'm gonna be forced to defend San Francisco if I but the I I mean, I think that there is something positive to in that all that change. Just as you're you're describing in terms of, like, the the new things will come in there. The problem with the the malls though, it it you do need a certain critical mass or or you the whole thing will sink.
• 51:02
  Scott Hanselman: But then when you reach critical mass, the whole thing then gets taken over by a startup, and then it turns into Uber or Instacart or DoorDash or Amazon.
• 51:13
  Bryan Cantrill: Yeah. So Okay. So on private equity.
• 51:15
  Adam Leventhal: Let's not come on. There's a
• 51:16
  Scott Hanselman: Oh god. Don't even get me started on private equity. That's a whole episode.
• 51:20
  Bryan Cantrill: God. I hope that there is a are do is there any private equity firm that's got ads on YouTube? I just hope they can be placed right in the middle of your TED Talk. That'd be that'd be really KKR is good. But the the KKR surely has got a a feel good ad out there.
• 51:33
  So on because because I mean, because my kind of thinking is like on a lot of these things, again, I don't think these promises are explicit. I think they're broadly implicit. And because there's no one truly at the wheel, we don't know when to stop. We don't know when to stop on connectivity so we become over connected. We don't know when to stop on convenience so we will become overly convenient and we will just destroy all else.
• 51:56
  I like like bacteria. And the and and I think we're beginning to see that too with with creativity or or there there's a peril of it. I I still don't know where we kind of net out on on, and this is maybe to tack into the the AI theme of your talk of I mean, what are your what are your kids make of of AI, Scott?
• 52:19
  Scott Hanselman: Oh, that's a great question. So I have a seventeen year old, almost 18 and a 19 year old, almost 20. So I've got one kid who's going into his senior year, I've got one kid who is just starting nursing school, as a sophomore, next week, and he just became a certified nursing assistant. He was majoring in art and switched to nursing because he felt that AI was going to cheapen his original major, which was going to be anime. And the Studio Ghibli nonsense basically destroyed that.
• 52:51
  He's like, nope. That's that is trash. Right? So we're gonna you know, if they're gonna cheapen this, then I will do a thing that they can't AI. Right?
• 52:59
  You know, taking blood or putting someone under is not something that can be easily AI ed, at least not yet. Geek Gone Crazy in the chat says, have you seen the kids seeking out retro trekking dumb phones? I have an almost 5,000,000 view TikTok about how my 17 year old got a flip phone. He got a flip phone with several thousand MP3s that we may or may not have gotten from Napster, and we put it on an SD card, and he now has a very happy flip phone that has Google Maps. My oldest son is 20.
• 53:31
  He 100% knows what a videotape is. He knows VHS. He knows he's got a CD player. He's got vinyl. Like, am trying to raise feral eighties kids that go out and they come back at midnight.
• 53:44
  Bryan Cantrill: Oh yeah, definitely on that.
• 53:49
  Scott Hanselman: When it comes to AI, they know that it's a BS machine, they use it to brainstorm but not to generate. They use it as a I told them that it is like talking to a mirror and you get in what you put in, right? So they know that if you try to generate a five paragraph essay, you're certainly validating that the idea of, hey, this assignment is a five paragraph essay essay is a stupid thing, like, that's a dumb piece of homework, but also that you learn nothing. I've been very, very clear with the boys that to if you decide to outsource your brain, you are going to put your value in this world at risk. The only thing that they can't take away is your brain.
• 54:34
  So for them, it's an exoskeleton. They believe in Iron Man, not Ultron.
• 54:39
  Bryan Cantrill: Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. And and and, you know, Adam, you've got you've got an actual, like, a computer science student. What what's his disposition towards it?
• 54:50
  Adam Leventhal: You know, it's it's interesting. He's, like, he doesn't really use it much. I think he is someone who very much is like a first principles kind of person, like, really wants to pull apart things to understand them from from their roots. And, you know, I've even encouraged him, like, you know, kinda kick the tires on this or that. I mean, not unsurprisingly, that's completely deterred him.
• 55:16
  But, yeah, he's like he's he is, like, pretty opposed to it and or, like, irritated by the by by classmates who lean on it too heavy heavily, and he feels like ruin it ruin it for everybody else.
• 55:31
  Bryan Cantrill: Yeah. Interesting.
• 55:32
  Adam Leventhal: But for Scott, I do not credit myself at all for instilling that behavior.
• 55:37
  Bryan Cantrill: Well, I I I think you you've been actually very crafty by maybe even suggesting that he does use it just so he won't. He's like, I'll show you, old man. I won't I won't use this thing at all. I'll only use my brain. Yeah.
• 55:48
  I mean, I think it's a it's a is a very Atkins or Atkins? Well well, I mean, I'd I'd I was talking about Adam's kids, you know, either.
• 55:55
  Scott Hanselman: I'm sorry.
• 55:55
  Bryan Cantrill: You know? They, you know, the I I think that the the kids are pretty level headed about it. I mean, I would say that the in in my experience, I think that the I mean, education does need to really figure out how to internalize it and hasn't. And I think that one of the that mean, the kids see the hypocrisy very, very quickly. And the number of teachers that forbid AI and then use AI to help grade assignments.
• 56:21
  Adam Leventhal: Absolutely.
• 56:22
  Scott Hanselman: So there's a great book by a gentleman named John Warner, who is taught writing at the college level for like twenty years. And when it all came down to No Child Left Behind, they over standardized everything. So then the entire American scholastic system, academic system, started teaching everyone how to pass the test. So then the five paragraph essay and all these necessities of creating homework became rote, and then once they became rote, they became AI ed, and now you can have the AI do any of your things. So when we go off and we say, look, the AI can pass all of these tests, that's not really a good thing.
• 57:03
  Like you've made everything so standardized that like perfectly mid, you know, like, ah, look, the AI got a B minus, just like your current doctor. You know, there's no exceptionalism, there's just, there's literally statistically most likely doctoring. So I'm not super impressed when an AI passes the MCATs, because it's just regurgitating mediocrity. I'm concerned about that, and I'm really encouraging the boys to use it as a brainstorming tool. Like, basically it's a rubber duck, but no more.
• 57:35
  Bryan Cantrill: Yeah, it's hard to draw that line though, because it is like, there is stuff that it's really I mean, like, doctor ChatGPT is indisputably better than doctor Google. And, I mean, physicians for a generation complained about doctor Google because doctor Google Google is terrible, right? And will drive you to things that won't actually help you diagnose.
• 57:57
  Scott Hanselman: Let me agree with you, but also let's break that down a little bit. So I'm a little bit of an odd duck in this context because not only have I been diabetic for thirty years, but I have gone to the doctors every three months for the last three decades.
• 58:12
  Bryan Cantrill: Yeah, exactly. Yeah.
• 58:14
  Scott Hanselman: Because I'm different, right? Some people won't go to the doctor for ten years until something hurts. I go there and I get a complete blood count, right? A CBC, I draw blood, blood sugar. I've got data going back decades about my system and all the things that are happening to it because I'm just that guy, kind of like, you know, Tim Ferrissy in that respect.
• 58:34
  Like, I want all the numbers so that I can improve stuff. In the doing that, I've built a relationship with my doctors where that is not really typical in America, where I have a team of people who are interested in keeping me alive and they also appreciate the data. And the reason that Doctor. Google doesn't work is because we'd never give enough information in Doctor. The Google doesn't work because in a Google search, the more words you put in, the more likely you are to get no results.
• 59:04
  So we've been trained over twenty years of Googling and AltaVista ing and ask Jeevesing to put in less works, less words, and hope that the Google algorithm did it. It gives us the answer. But in ChatGPT, if you yap, you are rewarded. More context means more variables, means more word vectors, means a better answer. So the data is the same, it's just whether or not you give less with the Google search and you're sad or you give a ton.
• 59:33
  So Doctor. Google is good given the corpus of medical information that we have available. More tokens, more answers, says Eric in the chat. I Google with Bing, to your point, Brian.
• 59:45
  Bryan Cantrill: Okay. I thought that's a related Yeah. I just wanted to make sure. I I'm really just trying to save you from your own pip here. You know?
• 59:50
  Scott Hanselman: Truth, Barry? You know what I use? I use DuckDuckGo.
• 59:54
  Bryan Cantrill: Do you use DuckDuckGo? Look at that.
• 59:55
  Scott Hanselman: I love it. DuckDuckGo is on the home screen of my of my my iPhone. It is my primary search engine. It uses Bing under the hood, but I met Gabriel, who made DuckDuckGo literally in 2011, Gabriel Weinberg, and it was part of my startup series, September 2011, fourteen years ago, when Dotdocgo And was just starting I've just loved it ever since. It stands they stand it's like the he's like the Craig Newmark of search engines.
• 1:00:34
  Bryan Cantrill: God, I don't know how I feel about that. I just feel I feel because Is Craig Newmark
• 1:00:38
  Scott Hanselman: a bad guy? Did something happen?
• 1:00:40
  Bryan Cantrill: Well, not Craig Newmark himself, but Craigslist destroyed journalism.
• 1:00:45
  Scott Hanselman: Well, the Craigslist deliberately. Not deliberately. Back when Craigslist was more like Reddit.
• 1:00:50
  Bryan Cantrill: Yeah. Not deliberately, but they but as it turns out, we all of journalism was leaning on classified ads. We it wouldn't it it's Owen's fault. It's just it's like you're it's the disappearance of the surf shop that sells you the wax. It's like the actual
• 1:01:04
  Scott Hanselman: confusing. I had never put I'd never put that on Craigslist.
• 1:01:08
  Bryan Cantrill: Yeah. It's a 100% on Craigslist, unfortunately.
• 1:01:10
  Scott Hanselman: They got Craigslist. The classified ads and classified ads paid for journalism. That's what you're saying?
• 1:01:15
  Bryan Cantrill: That's right. Yeah. That's right. Yeah. And and I mean, this is like and again, it's it's no one's real fault.
• 1:01:21
  Like, the previous system wasn't good. But I mean, it is amazing that in 1984, you have a very heartwrending story about your family selling the Econoline van to to buy you a computer, which is amazing. That Econoline van was probably sold via a classified ad or maybe that Yeah.
• 1:01:40
  Scott Hanselman: That definitely was. It was done in a classified ad and and printed in the Oregonian.
• 1:01:44
  Bryan Cantrill: Yeah. Right. And that's the way you bought and sold things because there was an information monopoly. There's no there was no connectedness, you know, to your
• 1:01:51
  Scott Hanselman: I think it is worth noting though to it is a bit of a pointer to a pointer though. Like, they didn't go out there thinking I will destroy journalism. Think no one realized Yeah. Yeah. For sure not.
• 1:02:00
  Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It a bit of a of a of a but it was a sorry.
• 1:02:07
  Bryan Cantrill: It's kind of my meta point actually. Is that actually that my kind of my meta point is that a lot of this destruction has been actually creative destruction in the true sense of like because like, you know, I I I don't think well, maybe Bezos is a bad example. I'm not gonna use Bezos as an example here, but because Bezos actually might have it's like Bezos is like, no. I was absolutely trying to destroy the surf shop.
• 1:02:27
  Adam Leventhal: I was like, of like who The wanted to name the company relentless.com. You're you're saying
• 1:02:34
  Bryan Cantrill: Okay. Bad example. You know what? Actually, never mind. But I I think that that some of this was, think, or at least started out earnest.
• 1:02:41
  And Yeah.
• 1:02:42
  Scott Hanselman: Under Craig Newmark certainly did not create a blast intend to create a blast radius to hurt Did not. Journalists.
• 1:02:47
  Bryan Cantrill: Absolutely did not. Right. That's right.
• 1:02:49
  Scott Hanselman: But people get caught up in the blast radius. That's how grenades work.
• 1:02:53
  Bryan Cantrill: Yeah, that's it. And I think actually the other problem with Craig, it works as he made something that was like really effective and free. It's like you can't displace Craigslist either. It's just like
• 1:03:05
  Scott Hanselman: The excellent point of the chat from Eric is pointing out that no one funded Craig to destroy journalism. So this is again Yeah. For sure. Yeah. Yeah.
• 1:03:13
  Yeah. Intent versus indirectly doing something.
• 1:03:16
  Bryan Cantrill: Look. It's manslaughter, not not murder one, you know, which is fine. You know, that there are the but it journalism is dead. And so it's a result. And it but there is we get these things that are like we do things that are that that feel that are reasonable, but then we don't know when to collectively stop.
• 1:03:33
  Like, we don't have brakes on this thing necessarily.
• 1:03:35
  Scott Hanselman: Well, that's because Babylon five quote, the avalanche has begun. It's too late for the pebbles to vote.
• 1:03:43
  Bryan Cantrill: Yeah. Yeah, we're just going lay it somewhere else.
• 1:03:46
  Scott Hanselman: We're going be in a different only thing that we stopped the guy Dean Kamen who made the segue. Remember when everyone was like, Oh my God, they're going to design cities around this.
• 1:04:01
  Bryan Cantrill: Oh, yes.
• 1:04:02
  Scott Hanselman: We were gonna like we were gonna tear cities down and build them around the Segway, when in fact Amsterdam already existed as did bicycles.
• 1:04:13
  Bryan Cantrill: And I believe this is book which books in the box is reinventing the wheel in? Adam, I'm desperately like, we've the actually if you haven't, Scott, have you I don't if you've you've read Reinventing the Wheel about the development of Segway, amazing book. Dean Caveman is such an asshole and really difficult person to work for.
• 1:04:35
  Scott Hanselman: Interesting. Interesting. Did you ever see I just wanna call out, did you ever see any of the Fred Armis in Portlandias where they sit around and it's just going back and forth? Did you see that article in The New Yorker? Yeah, but did you look at that piece in The Atlantic, piece I've seen on NPR?
• 1:04:50
  I just feel like we've hit that moment just now.
• 1:04:54
  Bryan Cantrill: Because I have not read book.
• 1:04:55
  Scott Hanselman: I apologize. Now I feel bad for having not read the book.
• 1:04:58
  Bryan Cantrill: Yeah. You should feel bad. That's my point. It's that you should feel
• 1:05:00
  Scott Hanselman: bad for
• 1:05:00
  Bryan Cantrill: not having read this obscure book that's out of print. No. No. The the book is outstanding in part because the it was an authorized book until halfway through when Dean came and realizes that he's gonna write his own thing and then he basically deauthorizes it. And it's a really interesting retelling of but just to your point of kind of the the hubris of the segue and the I still find like that chapter in kind of the history of technology to be so hard to relay about like, no, the entire country for a summer was hanging on what this guy had done.
• 1:05:36
  And was it a hovercraft? Was it a time machine? It's like
• 1:05:40
  Scott Hanselman: It was really a big deal. It was huge. And and he also has that wheelchair that can walk up and down stairs. That's important stuff.
• 1:05:48
  Bryan Cantrill: Totally important stuff. I mean, that amazing. And Yeah. I mean, he is such a complicated guy because he I also watched him speak about a a water purifier that he developed for the developing world and talking about his own it it basically removes it both removes chemicals and metals and viruses and bacteria, which is like kinda there are things that it both treats water and filters it effectively.
• 1:06:17
  Scott Hanselman: Doesn't the LifeStraw do that?
• 1:06:19
  Bryan Cantrill: The LifeStraw is not gonna remove metals. So the the this is gonna it it's really for I believe. I know I'm sure like now water filter Twitter is gonna blow me up or whatever the equivalent is on blue sky. Mastodon. Mastodon's gonna come after me on this one.
• 1:06:35
  But really interesting story that was that, he's very a very captivating speaker, but I haven't read the book. I'm like, well, now I kind of want to hear what the other I want to hear what the other half of the story is, kind of like the
• 1:06:47
  Scott Hanselman: So now here's a question. Is Dean Kamen in the same ethos or strata as the Dyson guy, the vacuum cleaner guy? Because he seems like a genius and I love my Dyson vacuum. I have this theory that my Dyson vacuum is like bringing in dust from parallel universes the way that the Hulk brings in mass from a pocket universe when he transforms. Because there is no chance that there's that much dust in my house, but dust just comes from the parallel universe directly into the Dyson to tell me that I'm a filthy piece of crap every time I run it.
• 1:07:21
  Bryan Cantrill: Wow. You're real real I know. I think the the die because the Dyson is telling you you're filthy. The Dyson tells me I'm stupid because I can never find the right button. Like, the Dyson is always like, it has thought of something.
• 1:07:32
  I always thought find those things to be a little too clever by honestly.
• 1:07:35
  Scott Hanselman: Oh, see, because I've got I love my robot vacuum. You know what I mean? Like, You know, I know that there's a there's a layout in a database in China of every inch of my house that's been created with radar and LIDAR. Like,
• 1:07:49
  Bryan Cantrill: I yes.
• 1:07:50
  Scott Hanselman: Like, I'm willing to give the Chinese the layout of where we live in exchange for clean floors. And I've never quite understood, though, that it says you only have to change the the dustbin, like, every six weeks, and it's, like, barely the size of a Dyson. So I run this thing daily. Right? It it cleans the house while I sleep, and it's been running forever, and I love it, and I'm always removing dust.
• 1:08:11
  And then I run the Dyson once, and it's like, you filthy piece of crap. What have you been doing?
• 1:08:16
  Bryan Cantrill: Who have you been
• 1:08:17
  Scott Hanselman: cheating on? Who you're right.
• 1:08:20
  Bryan Cantrill: Yeah. Interesting. Okay. So interesting what you make about, like, you not caring that the the Chinese have a map of your house. I do feel that, like, when they try to kinda make the argument about to the youngs about you shouldn't be using TikTok because you're giving China your information.
• 1:08:36
  At least my kids are like, dude, like, that does not move the needle. I do not care that, like, the PRC can have and I'm literally like, I'm not sure what, like, sacred data my kids have. Like, go ahead and take it. I'm not sure it's worth anything.
• 1:08:49
  Scott Hanselman: Well, I mean, like when during the great TikTok scare, which happened every twenty minutes throughout January, I was like, fine. I just joined Rednote and started doing my post in Chinese. It's just like, fine, whatever. Right. They can have it.
• 1:09:02
  I don't really they have it already. Honestly, I'm worried about Zuckerberg. I'm not worried about China.
• 1:09:07
  Bryan Cantrill: Totally. Yeah. Exactly. Zuckerberg
• 1:09:09
  Scott Hanselman: has my details. I I China is not the the one to fear.
• 1:09:16
  Bryan Cantrill: So what do you mean? And and it sounds like in terms of your own kids as they're looking towards the future, they have they have and this is true for me as well. Like, my kids do not have the same relationships only with technology that I had. They view it much more as a tool and much less as kind of an exciting future. And I kind of was trying to think is like maybe this is kind of how I viewed like I'm definitely not a car guy.
• 1:09:43
  Right? And maybe it's just like cars were so much newer in the sixties that by the time I mean, I I I almost think like I view cars the way my kids view technologies like, okay, this is a thing. It's not I it's kind of like a black box. I don't really like, I'm not really interested in taking I can't really take it apart, so I really don't take it apart. But it it it sounds like your your kids I mean, how do you deal with the fact that your relationship with technology circa 1984 is so different than your kid's relationship with it circa 2025?
• 1:10:18
  Scott Hanselman: I would expand that to not just my kids, but I would just say young people in tech And as a general I think it's interesting given that you work at Oxide is that your relationship, you're probably the last of the full stack engineer. Like you respect the fact that we took a rock, we put lightning in it and made it think, and no one else will. And, yeah, there'll be some weird 25 year olds that'll do Ben Eater's sixty five zero two kit. You know what I mean? But, like, you know that kid on TikTok, doctor Frankenstein, they're like it's this kid that, like, lives in the 1920s, and he only uses anything that was created before 1925.
• 1:10:56
  Have you seen this kid?
• 1:10:57
  Bryan Cantrill: No. This sounds great.
• 1:10:59
  Scott Hanselman: There's a guy, I forgot his name. It's like Doctor. Franken something. He's a kid. He's like 25 years old.
• 1:11:05
  Someone in the chat will put his name. He's adorable. And he lives in the 20s. And he only uses 20s material. He has like old cars, old wax cylinders, and all that kind of stuff.
• 1:11:20
  Like he just wants to be there. So that's what he does. He's got like a million followers on TikTok. He's great.
• 1:11:25
  Bryan Cantrill: Does he have tuberculosis or how does he deal with it? Mean, that's Yeah.
• 1:11:29
  Scott Hanselman: Don't know. Think he does believe in penicillin, but everything else. Alright. Alright. Yeah.
• 1:11:32
  Okay. Could choose everything else. He's not he's not Amish. He's just he's just an old soul. Okay?
• 1:11:37
  Bryan Cantrill: Okay. I like it. Yeah. I like it.
• 1:11:39
  Scott Hanselman: So, you know, I'm sitting here in a room with and I look to my right, and there's a Raspberry Pi stack, which is a Kubernetes cluster of Raspberry Pi's, you know, and I'm I'm looking at I made a Apple one on a board, you know, like, out of 7,400 series parts, you know, and, like, why am I stick why do I care? Why do I care about the new Commodore 64 FPGA edition that's coming out? Is it simply clawing back nostalgia, or is it remembering that, like, going right click view source in Chrome is not the source code of the Internet?
• 1:12:15
  Bryan Cantrill: You know
• 1:12:15
  Scott Hanselman: what I mean? Like Yep. I I know I know my biases. I know who I am biased for and against. And if you don't know how to drive stick shift, your relationship with the vehicle is fundamentally different than someone who knows how to do that.
• 1:12:29
  And I think there is value in always thinking about the level at which you operate and going one level down. So if you know Python, go look at, you know, how Python makes those function calls into the Yeah.
• 1:12:43
  Bryan Cantrill: I understand. You know what I mean?
• 1:12:44
  Scott Hanselman: Like and if you and if you use JavaScript, go learn what v eight is and why it exists and learn about why TypeScript was needed, and things like that. Not so that you always drive stick shift, but then you drive stick once, so that you might know that stick shift exists. Because otherwise you're at the mercy of Uber. And one day there won't be an internet. The stack is so deep.
• 1:13:09
  We were told not to have strangers pick us up in vans and give us candy. And now we have apps to do just that. One day the entire stack of the internet from wifi to pocket supercomputers will not be available. And there are no, you know, Brian Cantrell's on The Walking Dead. Right?
• 1:13:28
  You know, like, the people who are you and I, we didn't survive the zombie apocalypse because no one needs us to reboot the router. The people there know how to chop the weed and carry water.
• 1:13:36
  Bryan Cantrill: Eaten? Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
• 1:13:37
  Fine. Okay. Yeah.
• 1:13:38
  Scott Hanselman: Yeah. You've you've been eaten. You've been eaten. I would like to point out to
• 1:13:41
  Bryan Cantrill: our overboard. I'm a pretty rangey guy, like you're going need to brace me to make me edible. I've thought about this. So But
• 1:13:48
  Scott Hanselman: you know what I'm saying? So like everyone should just think about the level at which they exist and go one level lower so that they might just be a better, more complicated systems minded person. The problem with all the folks believing that they understand how things work from mRNA all the way down is that they Google and they read a paragraph and they go, yeah, that pretty much works the way my intuition works, or I reject that, it doesn't work the way my intuition works. And very few things work the way your intuition works. Therefore, Yeah.
• 1:14:20
  Drives
• 1:14:23
  Bryan Cantrill: I think there's I mean, is a lot of value to understanding the way all of these things work for sure. I I think and and the there's a lot of value in taking all these things apart. I do think that that the, you know, you were asking about is your interest in the Converse 64 and FPGAs. Is is this nostalgia or is this kind of pining for a time when systems were simpler or is it and and I think it's like It's a Yeah. Exactly.
• 1:14:48
  It's a little of them. I think that there's actually part of the way that we we I mean, just from an engineering perspective, complexity is the enemy as Adam, our colleague Roger Falcon was a lot of saying. And part of the way you you when you get this kind of complexity heat death and you get replaced by simpler components. And it is very important that simpler components are gonna look more like your your Commodore 64 on an FPGA. So I I think it is really, really important.
• 1:15:15
  Scott Hanselman: Well, I think we're in a weird time right now where Intel is cooked. Right? Cooked.
• 1:15:20
  Bryan Cantrill: Rich. I was I was gonna get through this entire podcast without mentioning. Talk about, like, when you were when you literally were talking about using the phone before pooping, I'm like, I woke up to Craig Barrett's batshit insane plan for Intel this morning, and it was definitely before any pooping took place.
• 1:15:36
  Scott Hanselman: Intel Intel is now chips as a service, they're going to sell the fab. It's going to become Airbnb for chips. And that's sad. And we're all in what we need now is a decent ARM desktop that isn't a Mac Mini, right? Like, want one that can oh, I'll have a great little fast computer that runs on 20 watts and then a GPU that runs on a thousand and everything will be great.
• 1:15:58
  We'll have a 20 watts between them. Then what will happen to Intel? Like it's gone, but then it's all about how many of these do I need? Do I need just 32, 64? Like, what's the right number?
• 1:16:11
  We've hit Moore's Law. They're not gonna get faster. There's gonna be more of them.
• 1:16:15
  Bryan Cantrill: Yeah. But it is said none of
• 1:16:18
  Scott Hanselman: these things are fast anymore.
• 1:16:22
  Bryan Cantrill: I don't know about that. I mean, Moore's law is slowing down for sure. But the Moore's law were truly dead, Intel would not be dead. It is because they would not need to produce new nodes. It is slowing down though.
• 1:16:35
  And Intel is extremely cooked. I I I would like to say that going back to our the the the Lip Bu at Intel episode, Adam. I believe I had a line in there. I need to go re listen to it, I believe I had a line that if Lip Bu because I they just have for Scott when after Pat was fired, we spoke about kind of the prognosis of the company and believe that like Lieutenant would be the right person to lead it, they weren't gonna actually land him. They didn't land him until March.
• 1:17:04
  So like a huge time gap at after landing Lieutenant. I'm so sorry. This is like I write I this is why I was not gonna mention until today because I knew I'm just not gonna have the ability to shut up about it.
• 1:17:14
  Scott Hanselman: But the the Your opinions are more valid than most though, to be clear.
• 1:17:17
  Bryan Cantrill: They they landed Lip Bu and I Adam, we we had our episode about it. And I said that if Lip Bu leaves within the first six months or something, there's no floor. And we are perilously close to that moment. We are like When there was
• 1:17:37
  Adam Leventhal: like, gotta get Lip Bu out because of these investments, he's, you know
• 1:17:41
  Bryan Cantrill: In Spain.
• 1:17:42
  Adam Leventhal: Made it oh my god. Made made in China. Just like just so crazy. Just like nobody wants to do this job. Nobody can do this job.
• 1:17:52
  What are you talking about?
• 1:17:53
  Bryan Cantrill: And so, Adam, you know what the thought I had today? And of course, I'm gonna be jinxing it by just saying this, but actually don't care. Because you recall my famous prediction, famous to me, my prediction from we we the The At the beginning of the year. Well, is true of many things. Yes.
• 1:18:05
  The prediction at the beginning of the year, the co CEOs were still gonna be in charge at the end of the year. Can you imagine if the co CEOs are still in charge after Lip Bu is fired? Like, that's not inconceivable.
• 1:18:17
  Adam Leventhal: No. That what a parlay. That'd be crazy.
• 1:18:19
  Bryan Cantrill: What a parlay for the ages. Yeah. I mean, it is a I mean, Scott just said that the bit of context is that Lip Bu is unquestionably the right like, if there is if any if Intel has any chance of survival, I mean, it it is totally like the Linda Hamilton in Terminator vibes. Like, come with me if you wanna live. And Intel's like, I don't I don't think so.
• 1:18:42
  Scott Hanselman: But but also there's this weird thing with Trump where Trump meets Lip Bu and says he should be ousted and now like eleven minutes ago he says no, he shouldn't be.
• 1:18:52
  Bryan Cantrill: Oh, yeah. Because he gets the ring. And but it's like but it mean, it's just and I it's just amazing to me though. This this this timeline we're in is really awful. Can we get please get it?
• 1:19:03
  And Intel is Not a fan. In the deepest possible trouble. And okay. So but I okay. Here's what I think though.
• 1:19:09
  I think that the and the the the reason the Craig Barrett thing was so trolling because his plan for saving Intel is that Intel's customers do you see this, Adam?
• 1:19:20
  Adam Leventhal: Yes. It's so crazy.
• 1:19:23
  Bryan Cantrill: Intel's customers put up $40,000,000,000 to bail out Intel. Yeah. Hold on.
• 1:19:29
  Adam Leventhal: Time out. First, it was like first, yes, 40,000,000,000 is the number. Government obviously can't be the ones to pony that up because that's the whole chip sack. So let's just set that aside. It's
• 1:19:38
  Bryan Cantrill: like, okay. Which is the right. Okay. Okay. Yeah.
• 1:19:39
  We can't obviously, that can happen. But these customers have money. They've got money. Yeah. Who is the guy that said he went to rob the banks because that's where the money was stored?
• 1:19:48
  I feel like that that this is like where where we are. It's like, no. The customers have the money. That's where we go. It's like, what?
• 1:19:55
  He's like, no. But you only need to get 5,000,000,000 from eight of them. It's like, like, are you
• 1:20:01
  Scott Hanselman: oh my
• 1:20:02
  Bryan Cantrill: I mean,
• 1:20:02
  Adam Leventhal: why not just, you know, like, 10,000,000,000 from four of them? Isn't that isn't that easier?
• 1:20:07
  Bryan Cantrill: No. I totally. It just feels like it's easier. It's it's half as many. And, like, yeah, it's twice as much.
• 1:20:11
  But once you're 5,000,000,000, what's 10,000,000,000? I just absolutely batshit insane. And it is so I think it will I mean, at this state, I mean, it's gonna it's in danger of perishing as a company. The but any investment in Scott, this kinda goes to your like the the the kind of the point of building just like you're you're you're selling the 20 sided die in the abandoned mall. Like what is the the analog of that for an Intel fab?
• 1:20:40
  Like, where we because actually, I don't know. I kinda feel like my nutty idea of them just like opening every aspect of their fab. This looked a little more plausible this morning, actually. This is like but they they need to do something where it's like we are encouraging, like how do we encourage many people to endeavor in aspects of this problem as opposed to just constantly lighting cash on fire for for folks that aren't making it happen. Man, in terms of like it feels to me that like the the maybe to to to summarize, it feels to me like many of the problems that you outlined are a consequence of overly centralized tech.
• 1:21:18
  Do you think that decentralization is a is a kind of a path forward on any of this stuff?
• 1:21:23
  Scott Hanselman: Well, decentralization is how the Internet is is and exists. Decentralization is the promise of both Mastodon and of Blue Sky. Decentralization as a general concept is a positive thing. There's 50 states, there's 200 plus countries. Like, if there was just one, it would kind of suck.
• 1:21:43
  So I think decentralization in all things is really about having what am I trying to say here? It's backups, man. I mean, it's just three with the backup rule of three. If this thing doesn't work out, you'd have backups. If you start following your way all the way through the supply chain, if you go through the bill of materials, and then you go and you say, oh, this special kind of unique metal only comes from this one dude's house in Iceland, That's a problem.
• 1:22:17
  Right? You've got to have backups. So I feel like decentralization is the only way that we make it.
• 1:22:24
  Bryan Cantrill: The only way that we, in terms of get yeah. All right. There we go.
• 1:22:26
  Scott Hanselman: Because I I think that's interesting. Because there's only right now, I'm nervous because there's only a couple of places that make insulin. You know what I mean?
• 1:22:34
  Bryan Cantrill: It's Somebody who is in like, Nuke, Novo
• 1:22:36
  Scott Hanselman: Nordisk, then I have less insulin. You know? I have one place where my insulin pump comes from. You know? Like, I don't have backups, and decentralizing all the things is the way to do it.
• 1:22:48
  And and being able to make insulin in my garage would also be nice.
• 1:22:51
  Bryan Cantrill: Okay. And then so What and then maybe some of the the great promises that tech has delivered on is a consequence. I mean, you're saying that the Internet is obviously this grand decentralization and democratization. Open source is a grand decentralization and democratization that's been really important. Absolutely.
• 1:23:07
  And so maybe that's what we should be. I'm just trying, you know, I'm trying to end on I mean, I know it's I I know it's tough because you like we like to start our Mondays on staring into the darkness of the abyss, but like I'm trying to, you know, how do we how do we how do we keep the Youngs inspired?
• 1:23:23
  Scott Hanselman: So this is where we call back to the very beginning of the podcast when I talked about my own personal preference for the right amount of toxic positivity. I reject the darkness. I push back against the nonsense. I would argue that it's it sucks, but it's gonna be okay. I don't know why, but I know that being empowered is gonna mean knowing how to make stuff.
• 1:23:50
  I'll give you a brief tale, and then I have to go because my wife is leaving for the hospital. She's a nurse and she's going to leave in three minutes, I want to catch her before she goes. My 17 year old, the one with the flip phone, wanted these $400 pair of Japanese pants, and they were like, Japanese denim and blah blah, and was telling me this whole tale about the Japanese denim and how amazing it was, and I was just like, bro, you're not going to have these pants because that's stupid. Your legs aren't worth $400, much less these pants. So he's like, well, I mean, how much how hard could it be?
• 1:24:20
  I'll just make them. So I said, all right, you won't go make these pants, I will buy you the denim. So he bought a bolt of Japanese denim. I've got the pictures to back it up, and he spent two solid weeks with Nana's sewing machine on TikTok learning how to sew until he made himself a pair of jeans from scratch, and he saved, you know, $360 or whatever it was we paid for the we paid like $50.60 bucks for the bolt of denim, And he learned a ton. Like that's that's one of those like the kids are gonna be okay kind of situations.
• 1:24:52
  Yeah. That happened.
• 1:24:53
  Bryan Cantrill: Yeah. Yeah. And that's that is like that's deep in our DNA. That is that that's deep in the human condition, I think. So I think we've got Makes stuff.
• 1:25:01
  That makes stuff. That's the optimism we can have. And I and yes, I'm I I guess I'm embarrassed that while your children were making their own clothes, mine were trolling the neighbors on Dexter. I'm not trying
• 1:25:12
  Scott Hanselman: to like I know that there's like people always want their kids be fancy or whatever.
• 1:25:16
  Adam Leventhal: No. They're both making things guys.
• 1:25:17
  Bryan Cantrill: Come on. Exactly. Exactly. Well, Scott, thank you very much. Wanna make sure you can get to get your wife Portia Spitz.
• 1:25:25
  Thank you very much. Terrific talk. Must watch for folks. And thanks for joining us. It's been a fun a fun venture as we threw abandoned malls and the demise of Intel and and Japanese jeans and everything else.
• 1:25:39
  So thank you very much. Awesome. Alright. Thanks, everybody. Until next time.
• 1:25:45
  And I I'm sorry to I for those of you who had intel on your on your bingo card, you were had given up all hope until the last, like, six minutes. And then you're like, holy shit. I'm gonna get bingo. Thanks everyone. See you next time.