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Speaker 1

00:00

The following is a conversation with James Gosling, the founder and lead designer behind the Java programming language, which in many indices is the most popular programming language in the world, or is always at least in the top 2 or 3. We only had a limited time for this conversation, but I'm sure we'll talk again several times in this podcast. Quick summary of the sponsors, Public Goods, BetterHelp, and ExpressVPN. Please check out these sponsors in the description to get a discount and to support this podcast.

Speaker 1

00:30

As a side note, let me say that Java is the language with which I first learned object-oriented programming, and with it, the art and science of software engineering. Also, early on in my undergraduate education, I took a course on concurrent programming with Java. Looking back at that time, before I fell in love with neural networks, the art of parallel computing was both algorithmically and philosophically fascinating to me. The concept of a computer in my mind before then was something that does 1 thing at a time.

Speaker 1

01:04

The idea that we could create an abstraction of parallelism where you could do many things at the same time while still guaranteeing stability and correctness was beautiful. While some folks in college took drugs to expand their mind, I took concurrent programming. If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube, review it with 5 Stars and Up, a podcast, follow on Spotify, support on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Friedman. As usual, I'll do a few minutes of ads now and no ads in the middle.

Speaker 1

01:34

I try to make these interesting, but I do give you timestamps, so go ahead and skip, but please do check out the sponsors by clicking the links in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast. This show, sponsored by Public Goods, the one-stop shop for affordable, sustainable, healthy household products. I take their fish oil and use their toothbrush, for example.

Speaker 1

01:58

Their products often have a minimalist black and white design that I find to be just beautiful. Some people ask why I wear this black suit and tie. There's a simplicity to it that to me focuses my mind on the most important bits of every moment of every day, pulling only at the thread of the essential and all that life has to throw at me. It's not about how I look, it's about how I feel.

Speaker 1

02:22

That's what design is to me, creating an inner conscious experience, not an external look. Anyway, Public Goods plants 1 tree for every order placed, which is kind of cool. Visit publicgoods.com slash Lex, or use code Lex at checkout to get 15 bucks off your first order. This show is also sponsored by BetterHelp, spelled H-E-L-P, help.

Speaker 1

02:47

Check it out at betterhelp.com slash Lex. They figure out what you need and match you with a licensed professional therapist in under 48 hours. I chat with the person on there and enjoy it. Of course, I also regularly talk to David Goggins these days, who is definitely not a licensed professional therapist, but he does help me meet his and my demons and become comfortable to exist in their presence.

Speaker 1

03:15

Everyone is different, but for me, I think suffering is essential for creation. But you can suffer beautifully in a way that doesn't destroy you. I think therapy can help in whatever form that therapy takes. And I do think that BetterHelp is an option worth trying.

Speaker 1

03:30

They're easy, private, affordable, and available worldwide. You can communicate by text anytime and schedule weekly audio and video sessions. Check it out at betterhelp.com slash flex. This show is also sponsored by ExpressVPN.

Speaker 1

03:46

You can use it to unlock movies and shows that are only available in other countries. I did this recently with Star Trek Discovery and UK Netflix, mostly because I wonder what it's like to live in London. I'm thinking of moving from Boston to a place where I can build the business I've always dreamed of building. London is probably not in the top 3, but top 10 for sure.

Speaker 1

04:08

The number 1 choice currently is Austin, for many reasons that I'll probably speak to another time. San Francisco, unfortunately, dropped out from the number 1 spot but it's still in the running. If you have advice, let me know. Anyway, check out ExpressVPN.

Speaker 1

04:24

It lets you change your location to almost 100 countries and it's super fast. Go to expressvpn.com slash LexPod to get an extra 3 months of ExpressVPN for free. That's expressvpn.com slash LexPod. And now, here's my conversation with James Gosling.

Speaker 2

04:45

I've read somewhere that the square root of 2 is your favorite irrational number.

Speaker 3

04:49

I have no idea where that got started.

Speaker 2

04:53

Is there any truth to it? Is there anything in mathematics or numbers that you find beautiful?

Speaker 3

04:58

Oh, well, there's lots of things in math that's really beautiful. You know, I used to consider myself really good at math, and these days I consider myself really bad at math. I never really had a thing for the square root of 2, but when I was a teenager, there was this book called The Dictionary of Curious and Interesting Numbers, which for some reason I read through and damn near memorized the whole thing.

Speaker 3

05:37

And I started this weird habit of when I was like filling out checks, you know, or, you know, paying for things with credit cards, I would want to make the receipt add up to an interesting number.

Speaker 2

05:55

Is there some numbers that stuck with you that just kind of

Speaker 3

05:58

make you feel good? They all have a story. Fortunately, I've actually mostly forgotten all of them.

Speaker 2

06:08

Are they, so like 42?

Speaker 3

06:11

Well, yeah, I mean, 42 is pretty magical.

Speaker 2

06:14

And then the irrationals. I mean, but is there a square root of 2 story in there somewhere? How did

Speaker 3

06:19

that form or get started? Well, it's like the only number that has destroyed a religion.

Speaker 2

06:26

In which way?

Speaker 3

06:27

Well, the Pythagoreans, They believed that all numbers were perfect, and you could represent anything as a rational number. And in that time period, this proof came out that there was no rational fraction whose value was equal to the square root of 2.

Speaker 2

07:00

And that means nothing in this world is perfect, not even mathematics.

Speaker 3

07:05

Well, it means that your definition of perfect was imperfect.

Speaker 2

07:11

Well, then there's the Gatel and completeness theorems in the 20th century that ruined it once again for everybody.

Speaker 3

07:17

Yeah, although, although, although Gödel's theorem, you know, the lesson I take from Gödel's theorem is not that, you know, there are things you can't know, which is fundamentally what it says. But people want black and white answers. They want true or false.

Speaker 3

07:43

But if you allow a three-state logic that is true, false, or maybe, then life's good.

Speaker 2

07:55

I feel like there's a parallel to modern political discourse in there somewhere. But Let me ask, so with your kind of early

Speaker 1

08:09

love or appreciation of the

Speaker 2

08:10

beauty of mathematics, do you see a parallel between that world and the world of programming?

Speaker 3

08:17

You know, Programming is all about logical structure, understanding the patterns that come out of computation, understanding sort of, I mean, it's often like, you know, the path through the graph of possibilities to find a short route.

Speaker 2

08:45

Meaning like find a short program that gets the job done, kind of thing. But so then on the topic of irrational numbers, do you see programming, you just painted it so cleanly.

Speaker 3

09:01

It's a

Speaker 2

09:01

little of this trajectory to find like a nice little program, but do you see it as fundamentally messy? Maybe unlike mathematics? I don't think

Speaker 3

09:11

of it as, I mean, you watch somebody who's good at math do math, and often it's fairly messy. Sometimes it's kind of magical. When I was a grad student, 1 of the students, his name was Jim Sachs, was he had this reputation of being sort of a walking, talking, human, theorem-proving machine.

Speaker 3

09:49

And if you were having a hard problem with something, you could just, like, accost him in the hall and say, Jim, blah, blah, blah, blah. And he would do this funny thing where he would stand up straight, his eyes would kind of defocus. He'd go, you know, just like, you know, like something in today's movies, he's just, And then he'd straighten up and say, N log N and walk away. And you'd go, well, okay, so N log N is the answer.

Speaker 3

10:20

How did he get there? By which time he's down the hallway somewhere.

Speaker 2

10:27

Yeah, it's just the oracle, the black box, it just gives you the answer.

Speaker 3

10:31

Yeah, and then you have to figure out the path from the question to the answer.

Speaker 2

10:36

I think in 1 of the videos I watched, you mentioned Don Knuth, well, at least recommending his book as something people should read.

Speaker 3

10:47

Oh yeah.

Speaker 2

10:48

But in terms of theoretical computer science, do you see something beautiful that has been inspiring to you, speaking of N log N, in your work on programming languages that's in that whole world of algorithms and complexity and these kinds of more formal mathematical things. Or did that not really stick with you in your programming life?

Speaker 3

11:20

It did stick pretty clearly for me because 1 of the things that I care about is being able to sort of look at a piece of code and be able to prove to myself that it works. And, you know, so For example, I find that I'm at odds with many of the people around me over issues about how you lay out a piece of software. So software engineers get really cranky about how they format the documents that are the programs, you know, where they put new lines and where they put, you know.

Speaker 3

12:14

The braces. The braces and all the rest of that, right. And I tend to go for a style that's very dense.

Speaker 2

12:27

To minimize the white space.

Speaker 3

12:30

Yeah, well, to maximize the amount that I can see at once, right? So I like to be able to see a whole function and to understand what it does, rather than have to go scroll, scroll, scroll, and remember, right?

Speaker 2

12:46

Yeah, I'm with you on that. Yeah, that's, and people don't like that.

Speaker 3

12:52

Yeah, I've had, you know, multiple times when engineering teams have staged what was effectively an intervention. You know, where they invite me to a meeting and everybody's arrived before me and they all look at me and say, James, about your coding style. I'm sort of an odd person to be programming I'm sort of an odd person to be programming because I don't think very well verbally.

Speaker 3

13:31

I am just naturally a slow reader. I'm what most people would call a visual thinker.

Speaker 2

13:41

So when you think about a program, what do you see?

Speaker 3

13:45

I see pictures, right? So when I look at a piece of code on a piece of paper, it very quickly gets transformed into a picture. And it's almost like a piece of machinery with this connected to that.

Speaker 3

14:05

Like these gears of different sizes. Yeah. Yeah. I see them more like that than I see the sort of verbal structure or the lexical structure of letters.

Speaker 2

14:18

So then when you look at the program, that's why you want to see it all in the same place, then you can just map it to something visual.

Speaker 3

14:24

Yeah, just kind of like it leaps off the page at me.

Speaker 2

14:28

Yeah, what are the inputs, what are the outputs, what the heck is this thing doing? And getting a whole vision of it. Can we go back into your memory?

Speaker 2

14:39

Memory, long-term memory access. What's the first program you've ever written?

Speaker 3

14:47

Oh. I have no idea what the first 1 was. I mean, I know the first machine that I learned to program on. What is it?

Speaker 3

14:58

Was a PDP-8 at the University of Calgary.

Speaker 2

15:06

Do you remember the specs?

Speaker 3

15:08

Oh yeah, so the thing had 4K of RAM. Nice. 12-bit words.

Speaker 3

15:16

The clock rate was, it was about a third of a megahertz.

Speaker 2

15:26

I was like, you didn't even get to the M, okay.

Speaker 3

15:30

Yeah, Yeah, so, you know, we're like 10,000 times faster these days.

Speaker 2

15:37

And was this kind of like a super computer, like a serious computer for?

Speaker 3

15:42

No, the PDP-8i was the first thing that people were calling like a mini computer. Got it. They were sort of inexpensive enough that a university lab could maybe afford to buy 1.

Speaker 2

15:59

And was there time sharing, all that kind of stuff?

Speaker 3

16:02

There actually was a time sharing OS for that, but it wasn't used really widely. The machine that I learned on was 1 that was kind of hidden in the back corner of the computer center. And it was bought as part of a project to do computer networking.

Speaker 3

16:34

But they didn't actually use it very much. It was mostly just kind of sitting there. And it was kind of sitting there and I noticed it was just kind of sitting there. And so I started fooling around with it and nobody seemed to mind.

Speaker 3

16:52

So I just kept doing that. And I had a keyboard and like a monitor. Oh, this is way before monitors were common. So it was literally a Model 33 teletype with a paper tape reader.

Speaker 3

17:09

Okay.

Speaker 2

17:11

Okay, so the user interface wasn't very good.

Speaker 3

17:14

Yeah, yeah. It was the first computer ever built with integrated circuits. But by integrated circuits, I mean that they would have like 10 or 12 transistors on 1 piece of silicon.

Speaker 3

17:31

Not the 10 or 12 billion that machines have today. So what did that,

Speaker 2

17:40

I mean, feel like if you remember those? I mean, Did you have kind of inklings of the magic of exponential kind of improvement of Moore's Law of the potential of the future that, was that your fingertips kind of thing? Or was it just

Speaker 3

17:57

a cool thing

Speaker 2

17:57

to play with?

Speaker 3

17:58

Yeah, it was just a toy. You know, I had always liked building stuff, but 1 of the problems with building stuff is that you need to have parts. You need to have pieces of wood or wire or switches or stuff like that.

Speaker 3

18:15

And those all cost money.

Speaker 2

18:16

And here you could build. You could

Speaker 3

18:18

build arbitrarily complicated things and I didn't need any physical materials. It required no money.

Speaker 2

18:27

That's a good way to put programming. You're right. If you love building things, completely accessible, you don't need anything.

Speaker 2

18:38

And Anybody from anywhere could just build something really cool. Yeah.

Speaker 3

18:42

If you've got access to a computer, you can build all kinds of crazy stuff. And when you were somebody like me who had like really no money, and I mean, I remember just lusting after being able to buy like a transistor. When I would do electronics kind of projects, they were mostly made, done by like dumpster diving for trash, and 1 of my big hauls was discarded relay racks from the back of the phone company switching center.

Speaker 2

19:37

Oh, nice. That was the big memorable treasure.

Speaker 3

19:41

Oh, yeah. Yeah. That was a really cool.

Speaker 3

19:43

What do you use that for? I built a machine that played tic-tac-toe.

Speaker 2

19:50

Nice.

Speaker 3

19:51

Out of relays. Of course, the thing that was really hard was that all the relays required a specific voltage. But getting a power supply that will would do that voltage was pretty hard.

Speaker 3

20:06

And since I had a bunch of trashed television sets, I had to sort of cobble together something that was wrong but worked. So I was actually running these relays at 300 volts. And none of the electrical connections were like properly sealed off. I'm surprised you survived that period of your life.

Speaker 3

20:36

Oh, for so many reasons. For so many reasons. I mean, you know, you're, you know, it's pretty common for teenage geeks to discover, oh, Thermite, that's real easy to make.

Speaker 2

20:50

Yeah, well, I'm glad you did. But do you remember what program in Calgary that you wrote, anything that stands out? And what language?

Speaker 3

21:03

Well, so, mostly, anything of any size was assembly code. And actually before I learned assembly code, there was this programming language on the PDP-8 called Focal 5. And Focal 5 was kind of like a really stripped down Fortran.

Speaker 3

21:29

And I remember playing, you know, building programs that did things like play Blackjack or Solitaire. Or for some reason or other, the things that I really liked were ones where they were just like plotting graphs.

Speaker 2

21:50

So something with like a function or a data, and then you'd plot it. Yeah.

Speaker 3

21:56

Yeah, I did a bunches of those things and went, Ooh, pretty pictures.

Speaker 2

22:03

And so this would like print out, again, no monitors.

Speaker 3

22:07

Right, so it was like on a teletype. Yeah. So it's using something that's kind of like a typewriter And then using those to plot functions.

Speaker 2

22:23

So when, I apologize to romanticize things, but when did you first fall in love with programming? You know, what was the first programming language? Like as a serious, maybe software engineer, what you thought this is a beautiful thing?

Speaker 3

22:40

I guess I never really thought of any particular language as being like beautiful, because it was never really about the language for me. It was about what you could do with it. And, you know, even today, you know, people try to get me into arguments about particular forms of syntax for this or that.

Speaker 3

23:00

And I'm like, who cares? It's about what you can do, not how you spell the word. And so back in those days, I learned PL1 and Fortran and COBOL. And by the time that people were willing to hire me to do stuff, it was mostly assembly code and PDP8 assembly code and Fortran code and control data assembly code for like the CDC 6400, which was an early, I guess, supercomputer.

Speaker 3

23:43

Even though that supercomputer has less compute power than my phone by a lot.

Speaker 2

23:50

And that was mostly, like you said, Fortran world. That said, you've also showed appreciation for the greatest language ever that I think everyone agrees is Lisp.

Speaker 3

24:04

Well, Lisp is definitely on my list of the greatest ones that have existed.

Speaker 2

24:11

Is it at number 1 or, I mean, are you, I mean?

Speaker 3

24:16

You know, the thing is that it's, I wouldn't put it number 1, no.

Speaker 2

24:23

Is it the parentheses? What do you not love about Lisp?

Speaker 3

24:34

Well, I guess the number 1 thing to not love about it is so freaking many parentheses. On the love thing is, you know, out of those tons of parentheses, you actually get an interesting language structure. And I've always thought that there was a friendlier version of Lisp hiding out there somewhere.

Speaker 3

24:57

But I've never really spent much time thinking about it. But, you know, so like up the food chain for me, from Lisp is Simula, which a very small number of people have ever used.

Speaker 2

25:16

But a lot of people, I think, had a huge influence, right? Yeah. On the programming, but in Simula, I apologize if I'm wrong on this, but is that 1 of the first functional languages?

Speaker 2

25:27

Or no?

Speaker 3

25:28

No, it was the first object-oriented programming language. It's really where object-oriented and languages sort of came together. And it was also the language where coroutines first showed up as a part of the language.

Speaker 3

25:48

So you could have a programming style that was, you could think of it as multi-threaded with a lot of parallelism. Really? There's ideas of parallelism in there? Yeah.

Speaker 3

26:05

Yeah. So that was back, so the first Simulus back was Simulus 67.

Speaker 2

26:12

For like 1967? Yeah. Wow.

Speaker 3

26:17

So it had coroutines which are almost threads. The thing about coroutines is that they don't have true concurrency, so you can get away without really complex locking. You can't usably do coroutines on a on the multi-core machine, or if you try to do coroutines on a multi-core machine, you don't actually get to use the multiple cores.

Speaker 3

26:48

Either that or you, you know, cause you start then having to get into the universe of, you know, semaphores and locks and things like that. But, you know, in terms of the style of programming, you could write code and think of it as being multithreaded. The mental model was very much a multithreaded 1 and all kinds of problems you could approach very differently.

Speaker 2

27:22

To return to the world of Lisp for a brief moment, you at CMU, you wrote a version of Emacs that I think was very impactful on the history of Emacs. What was your motivation for

Speaker 3

27:40

doing so? At that time, so That was in like 85 or 86. I had been using Unix for a few years.

Speaker 3

27:59

And Most of the editing was this tool called ED, which was sort of an ancestor of VI.

Speaker 2

28:10

And... Is it a pretty good editor, not a good editor?

Speaker 3

28:14

Well, if what you're using, if your input device is a teletype, it's pretty good. Yeah. It's certainly more humane than TECO, which was kind of the common thing in a lot of the DEC universe at the time.

Speaker 2

28:32

TECO is spelled T-K? Is that the?

Speaker 3

28:35

No, TECO, T-E-C-O, the text editor and corrector.

Speaker 2

28:39

Corrector, wow, so many features.

Speaker 3

28:44

And the original EMACS came out as, so EMACS stands for Editor Macros, and Tico had a way of writing macros. And so the original EMACS from MIT sort of started out as a collection of macros for Tico. But then, you know, the sort of Emacs style got popular originally at MIT.

Speaker 3

29:15

And then people did a few other implementations of Emacs that were, you know, the code base was entirely different, but it was sort of the philosophical style of the original Emacs.

Speaker 2

29:30

What was the philosophy of Emacs? And by the way, were all the implementations always in C? And then how does Lisp fit into the picture?

Speaker 3

29:39

No, so the very first Emacs was written as a bunch of macros for the Tico text editor.

Speaker 2

29:46

Wow, that's so interesting. And

Speaker 3

29:50

the macro language for Tico was probably the most ridiculously obscure format. You know, if you just look at a Tico program on a page, you think it was just random characters. It really looks like just line noise.

Speaker 2

30:09

So it's kind of like LaTeX or something?

Speaker 3

30:11

Oh, way worse than LaTeX. Way, way worse than LaTeX. But if you use Tico a lot, which I did, Tico was completely optimized for touch typing at high speed.

Speaker 3

30:31

So there were no two-character commands. Well, there were a few, but mostly they were just 1 character. So every character on the keyboard was a separate command. And actually every character on the keyboard was usually 2 or 3 commands because you can hit shift and control and all of those things.

Speaker 3

30:52

It's just a way of very tightly encoding it. And mostly what Emacs did was it made that visual. So 1 way to think of TICO is use Emacs with your eyes closed. Where you have to maintain a mental model of, you know, sort of a mental image of your document, you have to go, okay, so the cursor is between the A and the E, and I want to exchange those, so I do these things, right?

Speaker 3

31:31

So it is almost exactly the Emacs command set. Well, it's roughly approximate, roughly the same as Emacs command set, but using Emacs with your eyes closed. So what Emacs, you know, part of what Emacs added to the whole thing was being able to visually see what you were editing in a form that matched your document. And a lot of things changed in the command set.

Speaker 3

32:11

You know, because it was programmable, it was really flexible. You could add new commands for all kinds of things. And then people rewrote Emacs like multiple times in Lisp. There was 1 done at MIT for the Lisp machine.

Speaker 3

32:28

There was 1 done for Multics. And 1 summer I got a summer job to work on the Pascal compiler for Multics. And that was actually the first time I used Emacs. And so...

Speaker 2

32:47

To write the compilers. You've worked on compilers too, it's fascinating.

Speaker 3

32:52

Yeah, so I did a lot of work. I mean, I spent like a really intense 3 months working on this Pascal compiler, basically living in Emacs. And it was the 1 written in Macless by Bernie Greenberg.

Speaker 3

33:11

And I thought, wow, this is just a way better way to do editing. And then I got back to CMU, where we had kind of 1 of everything, and 2 of a bunch of things, and 4 of a few things. Since I mostly worked in the Unix universe, and Unix didn't have an Emacs, I decided that I needed to fix that problem. So I wrote this implementation of Emacs in C, because at the time C was really the only language that worked on Unix.

Speaker 2

33:55

And you were comfortable with C as well? Oh yeah. At that point?

Speaker 3

33:59

Yeah, at that time I had done a lot of C coding. This was in like 86. And, you know, it was running well enough for me to use it to edit itself within a month or 2.

Speaker 3

34:17

And then it kind of took over the university. And

Speaker 2

34:23

it spread outside.

Speaker 3

34:25

Yeah, and then it went outside, and largely because Unix kind of took over the research community on the ARPANET. And Emacs was kind of the best editor out there. It kind of took over.

Speaker 3

34:45

There was actually a brief period where I actually had login IDs on every non-military host on the ARPANET. You know, because people would say, oh, can we install this? And I'd like, well, yeah, but you'll need some help.

Speaker 2

35:09

The days when security wasn't. When nobody cared. Nobody cared.

Speaker 3

35:13

Yeah.

Speaker 2

35:15

Can I ask briefly, what were those early days of ARPANET and the internet like? What was, I mean, did you, again, sorry for the silly question, but could you have possibly imagined that the internet would look like what it is today?

Speaker 3

35:36

You know, some of it is remarkably unchanged. So, like 1 of the things that I noticed really early on, you know, when I was at Carnegie Mellon, was that a lot of social life became centered around the ARPANET. So things like, you know, between email and text messaging, because text messaging was a part of the ARPANET really early on.

Speaker 3

36:11

There were no cell phones, but you're sitting at a terminal and you're typing stuff.

Speaker 2

36:17

And- So essentially email, or like what is-

Speaker 3

36:19

Well, just like a 1 line message, right? So. Oh cool,

Speaker 2

36:24

so like chat.

Speaker 3

36:25

Like chat. Yeah. Right, so it's like sending a 1 line message to somebody, right?

Speaker 3

36:34

And so pretty much everything from, you know, arranging lunch to going out on dates, you know, it was all like driven by social media. Social media. Right, in the 80s.

Speaker 2

36:52

Easier than phone calls, yeah.

Speaker 3

36:54

You know, and my life had gotten to where, you know, I was, you know, living on social media, you know, from like the early mid 80s. I was living on social media from the early mid 80s. And so when it sort of transformed into the internet and social media explodes, I was kind of like, what's the big deal?

Speaker 3

37:21

It's just a scale thing. Right, the scale thing is just astonishing.

Speaker 2

37:29

But the fundamentals in some ways.

Speaker 3

37:31

The fundamentals have hardly changed. And, you know, the technologies behind the networking have changed significantly. The, you know, the watershed moment of, you know, going from the ARPANET to the internet.

Speaker 3

37:52

And then people starting to just scale and scale and scale. I mean, the scaling that happened in the early 90s, and the way that so many vested interests fought the internet.

Speaker 2

38:12

Oh, who, oh, interesting. What was the, Oh, because you can't really control the internet? So who fought the internet?

Speaker 3

38:20

So fundamentally, the cable TV companies and broadcasters and phone companies, You know, at the deepest fibers of their being, they hated the internet. But it was often kind of a funny thing because, you know, So think of a cable company, right? Most of the employees of the cable company, their job is getting TV shows, movies, whatever out to their customers.

Speaker 3

39:06

They view their business as serving their customers. But as you climb up the hierarchy in the cable companies, that view shifts because really the business of the cable companies had always been selling eyeballs to advertisers.

Speaker 2

39:36

Right.

Speaker 3

39:41

And that view of a cable company didn't really dawn on most people who worked at the cable companies. But I had various dust-ups with various cable companies where you could see in the stratified layers of the corporation that this view of, the reason that you have cable TV is to capture eyeballs. They didn't

Speaker 2

40:13

see it that way.

Speaker 3

40:15

Well, so the people who, most of the people who worked at the phone company or at the cable companies, their view was that their job was getting delightful content out to their customers and their customers would pay for that. Higher up, they viewed this as a way of attracting eyeballs to them. And then what they were really doing was selling the eyeballs that were glued to their content to the advertisers.

Speaker 2

40:52

To the advertisers, yeah. And so the internet was a competition in that sense.

Speaker 3

40:57

Right. And so- They were right. Well, yeah. I mean, there was 1 proposal that we sent that we, 1 detailed proposal that we wrote up, back at Sun in the early 90s, that was essentially like, look, anybody, with internet technologies, anybody can become provider of content.

Speaker 3

41:27

So, you could be distributing home movies to your parents or your cousins or your, or anywhere else, right? So anybody can become a publisher.

Speaker 2

41:41

Wow, you were thinking about that already.

Speaker 3

41:45

Yeah, that was like in the early 90s. And we thought, this would be great. And the kind of content we were thinking about at the time was like home movies, kids' essays, movies, kids' essays, stuff from grocery stores or a restaurant, that they could actually start sending information about.

Speaker 3

42:16

That's brilliant. Sending information about. That's brilliant. And the reaction of the cable companies was like, fuck no, because then we're out of business.

Speaker 2

42:34

What is it about companies that, because they could have just, they could have been ahead of that wave, they could have listened to that, and they could have-

Speaker 3

42:42

They didn't see a path to revenue.

Speaker 2

42:45

You know, there's somewhere in there, there's a lesson for like big companies, right? Like to listen, to try to anticipate the renegade, the out there, out of the box people like yourself in the early days writing proposals about what this could possibly be.

Speaker 3

43:03

Well, and that, you know, it wasn't, you know, if you're in a position where you're making truckloads of money off of a particular business model, you know, the whole thought of like, you know, leaping the chasm, right? Model. The whole thought of leaping the chasm.

Speaker 3

43:27

You can see, oh, new models that are more effective are emerging, right? So like digital cameras versus film cameras. You know, I mean,

Speaker 2

43:44

Why take the leap?

Speaker 3

43:45

Why take the leap? Because you're making so much money off of film. And, you know, in my past at Sun, 1 of our big customers was Kodak, and I ended up interacting with folks from Kodak quite a lot.

Speaker 3

44:03

And they actually had a big digital camera research and digital imaging business or development group. And they knew that you just And they knew that, you know, you just look at the trend lines and you look at, you know, the emerging quality of these, you know, digital cameras. And, you know, you can just plot it on a graph, and it's like, sure, film is better today, but digital is improving like this, the lines are gonna cross, and the point at which the lines cross is gonna be a collapse in their business. And they could see that, right?

Speaker 3

45:05

They absolutely knew that. The problem is that, you know, up to the point where they hit the wall, they were making truckloads of money, Right? And when they did the math, it never started to make sense for them to kind of lead the charge. And Part of the issues for a lot of companies for this kind of stuff is that, if you're gonna leap over a chasm like that, like with Kodak going from film to digital, That's a transition that's gonna take a while.

Speaker 3

45:49

Right, we had fights like this with people who were like smart cards. The smart cards fights were just ludicrous.

Speaker 2

45:57

But that's where visionary leadership comes in, right? Yeah, somebody needs to roll in and say, and take the leap.

Speaker 3

46:04

Well, it's partly take the leap, but it's also partly take the hit.

Speaker 2

46:09

Take the hit in the short term.

Speaker 3

46:12

Right, so you can draw the graphs you want that show that if we leap from here, on our present trajectory, we're doing this and there's a cliff. If we force ourselves into a transition and we proactively do that, we can be on the next wave, but there will be a period when we're in a trough. And pretty much always there ends up being a trough as you leap the chasm.

Speaker 3

46:46

But the way that public companies work on this planet, they're reporting every quarter. And the 1 thing that a CEO must never do is take a big hit. Take a big hit. You know, over some quarter.

Speaker 3

47:06

And many of these transitions involve a big hit for a period of time. You know, 123 quarters. And so you get some companies and, you know, like Tesla and Amazon are really good examples of companies that take huge hits, but they have the luxury of being able to ignore the stock market for a little while. And that's not so true today, really, but in the early days of both of those companies, they both did this thing of, I don't care about the quarterly reports, I care about how many happy customers we have.

Speaker 3

48:01

Yeah. Right, And having as many happy customers as possible can often be an enemy of the bottom line.

Speaker 2

48:11

Yeah, so how do they make that work? I mean, Amazon operated in the negative for a long time. It's like investing into the future.

Speaker 3

48:17

Right, but, you know, so Amazon and Google and Tesla and Facebook, a lot of those had what amounted to patient money. Often because there's like a charismatic central figure who has a really large block of stock and they can just make it so.

Speaker 2

48:46

So on that topic, just maybe it's a small tangent, but you've gotten the chance to work with some pretty big leaders. What are your thoughts about on Tesla side, Elon Musk leadership, on the Amazon side, Jeff Bezos, all of these folks with large amounts of stock and vision in their company. I mean, they're founders.

Speaker 2

49:08

Either complete founders or early on folks. And Amazon have taken a lot of leaps. That probably at the time people would criticize as like, what is this bookstore thing? Why?

Speaker 3

49:26

Yeah, and Bezos had a vision. And he had the ability to just follow it. Lots of people have visions and the average vision is completely idiotic and you crash and burn.

Speaker 3

49:45

The Silicon Valley crash and burn rate is pretty high. And they don't necessarily crash and burn because they were dumb ideas, but often it's just timing. Timing and luck. And you take companies like Tesla and really the original Tesla, sort of pre-Elon, Elon was kind of doing sort of okay, but he just drove them.

Speaker 3

50:26

And because he had a really strong vision, you know, He would make calls that were always, well, mostly pretty good. I mean, the Model X was kind of a goofball thing to do.

Speaker 2

50:44

But he did it boldly anyway. Like there's so many people that just said, like There's so many people that oppose them on the Falconwind door. From the engineering perspective, those doors are ridiculous.

Speaker 3

50:58

Yeah, they are a complete travesty.

Speaker 2

51:02

They're exactly the symbol of what great leadership is, which is like, you have a vision and you just go, like.

Speaker 3

51:08

If you're gonna do something stupid, make it really stupid.

Speaker 2

51:11

Yeah, and go all in. Yeah,

Speaker 3

51:14

yeah. And, you know, to my credit, he's a really sharp guy. So going back in time a little bit to Steve Jobs, Steve Jobs was a similar sort of character who had a strong vision and was really, really smart. And he wasn't smart about the technology parts of things, but he was really sharp about the sort of human relationship between humans and objects.

Speaker 3

51:53

And, but, he was a jerk. You know, Can

Speaker 2

52:00

we just linger on that a little bit? Like people say he's a jerk. Is that a feature or a bug?

Speaker 3

52:08

Well, that's the question, right? So you take people like Steve, who was really hard on people. And so the question is, was he needlessly hard on people or was he just making people reach to meet his vision?

Speaker 3

52:35

And you could kind of spin it either way.

Speaker 2

52:41

Well, the results tell a story. Through whatever jerk ways he had, he made people often do the best work of their life.

Speaker 3

52:51

Yeah, yeah, and that was absolutely true. And I interviewed with him several times. I did various negotiations with him.

Speaker 3

53:06

And even though kind of personally I liked him, I could never work for him.

Speaker 2

53:18

Why do you think, can you put into words the kind of tension that you feel would be destructive as opposed to constructive?