Michael Paulson (10:31)

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

Lex Fridman (12:26)

Yeah. Let's wax philosophical about a linked list. It is pretty profound for people who don't know. A node in a linked list doesn't know anything about the world it's in. It only knows about the thing, its link to its neighbor. Maybe that's symbolic. It's a metaphor for all of us humans. There's billions of us on this planet and we only know about our local network.

Michael Paulson (12:49)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (12:50)

And it's kind of beautiful. And you realize, like, in that little simple data structure, you can construct arbitrarily large systems and they, they're like routes that go through memory. And then, of course, that's where you get all the programming languages that allow you to dump junk into memory and have memory leaks and therefore create infinite pain as you try to figure out where that unfreed memory is. For me, yeah, probably. It's so beautiful the way you put that. Linked lists are indeed beautiful. Recursion also for me, when I finally wrap my brain around what it means to write a recursive function.

Michael Paulson (13:34)

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

Lex Fridman (13:46)

I don't remember the first.

Michael Paulson (13:50)

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

Lex Fridman (13:53)

I've had so many that just.

Michael Paulson (13:56)

I mean, you are a lisp guy. You're probably pretty used to the recursion.

Lex Fridman (13:59)

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

Michael Paulson (15:56)

Oh man, mine is, I have. Well, first off, mine was in Java, so my first was a little bit more rigid, kind of a corporate, you know, a corporate experience. But cold, meaningless. Yeah, I was in a lab. Everyone was using CentOS at that or CentOS or however you say. I always call that CentOS, the fresh maker.

Lex Fridman (16:14)

Yeah.

Michael Paulson (16:15)

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

Lex Fridman (16:17)

That's nice, thank you.

Michael Paulson (16:18)

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

Lex Fridman (18:46)

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

Michael Paulson (19:22)

All right.

Lex Fridman (19:25)

I think it was dub first search for one of the games, maybe Othello, something like that. And for that, implementing recursion, understand that you can search trajectories through the space of states and do that recursively. That was mind blowing. Just imagining you can. Just the possibilities. Yeah, just like numbers flying. It was like the Beautiful Mind. And then. And that's when I also discovered conspiracy theories. And I just saw. I saw the truth. Okay. Yeah. So what were we talking about? Oh, what was the most painful aspect of programming for you? Like what. What memories do you have of deep, profound suffering in terms of programming? In the early days, I would say.

Michael Paulson (20:13)

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

Lex Fridman (20:32)

Something funny about the name. I'm sorry.

Michael Paulson (20:33)

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

Lex Fridman (21:55)

So the absence of uncertainty, the absence of challenge was the pain.

Michael Paulson (21:59)

Yeah, that's pretty profound.

Lex Fridman (22:01)

Prime.

Michael Paulson (22:02)

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

Lex Fridman (22:06)

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

Michael Paulson (22:12)

38 male. Male husband of beautiful wife.

Lex Fridman (22:16)

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

Michael Paulson (22:34)

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

Lex Fridman (22:40)

I have seen you like on the borders, sexually aroused by certain languages. I think you got real excited about OCAML or.

Michael Paulson (22:48)

Oh, Camel, let's go. Thank you, Dylan Mulroy. Okay. Wow.

Lex Fridman (22:54)

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

Michael Paulson (22:58)

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

Lex Fridman (26:05)

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

Michael Paulson (27:03)

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

Lex Fridman (27:43)

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

Michael Paulson (27:59)

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

Lex Fridman (28:49)

Yeah, those people are actually amazing.

Michael Paulson (28:51)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (28:51)

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

Michael Paulson (29:08)

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

Lex Fridman (29:43)

Okay.

Michael Paulson (29:44)

Did Vercel kill DevOps?

Lex Fridman (29:47)

Question mark?

Michael Paulson (29:48)

Question mark.

Lex Fridman (29:49)

Wow, that's. You're almost a journalist. That's a headline. Let's go back to the beginning. All right, Baby Prime. So you mentioned Netflix. You've.

Michael Paulson (30:00)

I worked at Netflix, by the way.

Lex Fridman (30:02)

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

Michael Paulson (30:16)

Almost as much as I mentioned. Neovim.

Lex Fridman (30:18)

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

Michael Paulson (30:55)

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

Lex Fridman (39:58)

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

Michael Paulson (40:18)

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

Lex Fridman (40:54)

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

Michael Paulson (41:01)

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

Lex Fridman (41:29)

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

Michael Paulson (41:43)

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

Lex Fridman (41:49)

Yeah.

Michael Paulson (41:50)

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

Lex Fridman (42:27)

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

Michael Paulson (42:35)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (42:36)

And actually that should be a chance to try out, to take risks, because real life will begin where there is more consequences after that.

Michael Paulson (42:48)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (42:49)

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

Michael Paulson (42:56)

I'm not gonna condone punching another person.

Lex Fridman (42:58)

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

Michael Paulson (43:16)

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

Lex Fridman (43:57)

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

Michael Paulson (44:46)

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

Lex Fridman (45:30)

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

Michael Paulson (46:00)

That's a great way to put it.

Lex Fridman (46:01)

I, I think if anything, high school is really bad at picking out the cool people that like this, whatever the system, the Hierarchy that forms it is. So it's such a basic hierarchy. Like, you're good at very generic shit.

Michael Paulson (46:17)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (46:17)

That's how you rise.

Michael Paulson (46:18)

Your parents bought you an expensive car.

Lex Fridman (46:20)

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

Michael Paulson (46:23)

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

Lex Fridman (46:27)

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

Michael Paulson (46:33)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (46:33)

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

Michael Paulson (47:05)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (47:06)

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

Michael Paulson (47:28)

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

Lex Fridman (48:06)

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

Michael Paulson (48:41)

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

Lex Fridman (51:14)

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

Michael Paulson (52:30)

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

Lex Fridman (52:55)

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

Michael Paulson (53:59)

I mean, I think you're right that our society puts a lot of emphasis on getting laid. And I'm sure that's true among any group of males throughout any point in history. I'm sure that's a very common joke that's never actually like, never stopped at any point. So, yeah, I'm, I'm sure that exists. But. And there's, there's probably some truth to the sense that after you've, you know, who was it? Jim Carrey? I hope that everyone can get rich so they realize that money solves none of your problems. Yeah, like the realization that this thing that society told you is hyper important is actually not the important part. Like it is a very important. It's a great sign that your relationship is healthy. Like if me and my wife were to have no sex at all for months on end, like, something's gone wrong, which means what? You know, we are no longer like on the same plane. Something, you know, but it's not also a good identifier. Just because you're having a lot of sex doesn't mean you're having a good relationship. And so it's kind of like a unique, kind of. I forget the, the right term here, but it's a unique way at looking at the problems. And our society puts so much emphasis. And maybe that's why porn was so hard to quit. But I, my guess is it's just all the dopamine effect that it is. But for me, like, the, the most important part and the thing that actually has real reward is having that having just my wife. I do not look at. I try, I desperately try not to look at any other woman. I'm hopefully not going to get caught. Mark Zuckerberg at the White House like that, you know, like, I don't look at porn. My wife has complete confidence in me that there is not going to be a situation in which she has to question me in any kind of sense. And that builds a much more deeply, I would argue, a very deep relationship because the trust Is that much bigger. I think the deepness of the relationship is probably proportional to the trust you have in each other. It's very hard to have a deep relationship with no trust.

Lex Fridman (55:44)

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

Michael Paulson (56:21)

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

Lex Fridman (57:02)

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

Michael Paulson (57:22)

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

Lex Fridman (58:43)

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

Michael Paulson (59:00)

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

Lex Fridman (61:05)

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

Michael Paulson (62:17)

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

Lex Fridman (62:44)

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

Michael Paulson (62:48)

That was a great segue, by the way.

Lex Fridman (62:53)

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

Michael Paulson (64:37)

What? What? An intro to this topic.

Lex Fridman (64:40)

I'm sorry, what's meth like?

Michael Paulson (64:42)

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

Lex Fridman (66:25)

Yeah.

Michael Paulson (66:26)

So did a lot of skateboarding. Did a lot of, you know, running around.

Lex Fridman (66:31)

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

Michael Paulson (66:46)

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

Lex Fridman (68:28)

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

Michael Paulson (68:35)

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

Lex Fridman (68:39)

I.

Michael Paulson (68:39)

But I had great experience, but don't know, whatever you do, don't do it.

Lex Fridman (68:42)

Mr. The Primogen. I have no master. I don't have YouTube or whatever. I'll say whatever the I want. I'm just.

Michael Paulson (68:51)

But seriously, kind of, no.

Lex Fridman (68:54)

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

Michael Paulson (71:27)

Is his funniest line.

Lex Fridman (71:29)

Diet Coke is great.

Michael Paulson (71:30)

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

Lex Fridman (71:37)

Self awareness and humor is wonderful there.

Michael Paulson (71:40)

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

Lex Fridman (72:45)

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

Michael Paulson (73:10)

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

Lex Fridman (76:00)

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

Michael Paulson (76:08)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (76:08)

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

Michael Paulson (76:12)

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

Lex Fridman (76:20)

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

Michael Paulson (76:32)

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

Lex Fridman (76:35)

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

Michael Paulson (76:39)

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

Lex Fridman (77:24)

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

Michael Paulson (77:27)

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

Lex Fridman (77:30)

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

Michael Paulson (77:47)

Smart dog. Why are you putting in all those hours?

Lex Fridman (77:49)

And so it makes a lot of people that struggle feel like they're a failure. Yeah, because, like, I don't see it. And then the choice to have, well, I'll just go with the. With the la. I'll just be lazy, and then maybe the profound truth will come to me somehow. And. And yeah, I think. I don't think I've ever. And I don't think I've met great engineers that find the smart way without the extremely hard work. The annoying thing about those great engineers is then looking back, they forget the hard work because they remember all the joy they now are experiencing from all the efficient smart work they figured out how to do. They forget. So when they give advice, they give the stupid fucking advice of, well, just do it like, you know, the easy way.

Michael Paulson (78:38)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (78:38)

And here's the easy way. But no, no, no, no, no. You have to put in the hours like, you know, musical instrument is a beautiful example of guitar and piano I've put in. I don't know how Many thousands of hours. And now when I'm explaining stuff, Jiu Jitsu as well, I'm. I sound like. I sound like one of those people, like, just, you know, just relax. In Jiu Jitsu, by the way, just relax is a really wonderful thing for physical endeavors like piano and so on. But to learn how to relax your hand, how to relax your mind, your body, and use the. Whatever the biomechanics of your body to apply the correct kind of leverage and the timing and all that, that takes thousands of hours of learning. Just to learn how to relax takes a lot of really hard work. In Jiu Jitsu, that takes many months of getting your ass beat over and over until you, like, you know, ride the bus home crying, your. Your ego completely shattered and destroyed. And then, like, a little element is figured out late that night or next morning. And from the depression, there's this little plant that grows this flower of insight, and you use that insight to then get your ass kicked again all next fucking month and year. And then you grow and grow and grow. And from that, you discover how beautifully simple Jiu Jitsu is, or judo is just speaking for myself, or piano or guitar. And then, yes, the profound truth or the mastery of a skill feels simple when you finally arrive to it. But the path is, for most people is. Is going to be a hard one.

Michael Paulson (80:30)

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

Lex Fridman (80:37)

That's a T shirt.

Michael Paulson (80:38)

That's what it should be.

Lex Fridman (80:39)

Yeah, Agreed. Okay. That was a tangent of a tangent.

Michael Paulson (80:42)

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

Lex Fridman (80:44)

Yes.

Michael Paulson (80:46)

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

Lex Fridman (81:28)

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

Michael Paulson (81:39)

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

Lex Fridman (81:44)

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

Michael Paulson (81:52)

I didn't even know this was a thing.

Lex Fridman (81:54)

This is a thing.

Michael Paulson (81:55)

Oh my gosh. I want that.

Lex Fridman (81:56)

Yeah.

Michael Paulson (81:57)

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

Lex Fridman (82:40)

For people who don't know you worked at Netflix, by the way. By the way. No, how did you go from there, from the hardship that we mentioned, from the struggle, from the addictions and so on to a place where you were working at this incredible engineering company and building cool shit there? So tell the Netflix story.

Michael Paulson (83:05)

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

Lex Fridman (83:51)

Can you say what the startup was?

Michael Paulson (83:53)

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

Lex Fridman (85:00)

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

Michael Paulson (85:05)

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

Lex Fridman (87:10)

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

Michael Paulson (87:14)

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

Lex Fridman (87:29)

So pants a requirement?

Michael Paulson (87:31)

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

Lex Fridman (87:35)

All right. Trigger web web filings.

Michael Paulson (87:38)

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

Lex Fridman (90:04)

So where in California was Netflix?

Michael Paulson (90:06)

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

Lex Fridman (90:19)

Yep.

Michael Paulson (90:19)

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

Lex Fridman (90:24)

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

Michael Paulson (90:33)

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

Lex Fridman (91:51)

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

Michael Paulson (91:54)

Yeah. Montana doesn't have that.

Lex Fridman (91:56)

I have an admiration, a romantic admiration for like, for the shows, like, Yellowstone being out in nature. It's beautiful. I like writing. Somebody also said Reddit is full of woods. Them about you. Some of it could be fake news, but something about horses and this kind of thing, like, you write, you like horses, you like riding horses.

Michael Paulson (92:13)

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

Lex Fridman (92:17)

Yeah.

Michael Paulson (92:17)

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

Lex Fridman (92:21)

Yeah.

Michael Paulson (92:21)

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

Lex Fridman (92:29)

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

Michael Paulson (92:34)

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

Lex Fridman (93:01)

Okay.

Michael Paulson (93:01)

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

Lex Fridman (93:20)

Okay, well, that's wonderful.

Michael Paulson (93:21)

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

Lex Fridman (93:26)

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

Michael Paulson (93:35)

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

Lex Fridman (95:08)

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

Michael Paulson (95:14)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (95:14)

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

Michael Paulson (95:40)

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

Lex Fridman (96:12)

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

Michael Paulson (96:14)

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

Lex Fridman (96:23)

Oh, so, like, you have different kinds of devices. Why? PlayStation 3 is other different devices.

Michael Paulson (96:27)

It's just 2013.

Lex Fridman (96:29)

That's what devices that plug into the T. Okay, cool.

Michael Paulson (96:31)

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

Lex Fridman (97:15)

Oh, it's Apache. Apache. Groovy is a powerful object oriented programming language that runs on the Java virtual machine. Released in 2000, 2007, it has evolved to become a versatile language that combines both static and dynamic typing capabilities.

Michael Paulson (97:27)

All right, so the AI is kind of lying to you. Groovy is not a powerful, great language. Nothing. That statement makes it seem way cooler than it actually is. You will meet one out of a hundred people that have touched Groovy that said, oh, yeah, Groovy's great.

Lex Fridman (97:40)

Yeah.

Michael Paulson (97:41)

The other 99 will be like, heavens forbid you ever have to touch that language.

Lex Fridman (97:44)

Yeah.

Michael Paulson (97:45)

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

Lex Fridman (99:37)

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

Michael Paulson (99:41)

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

Lex Fridman (99:46)

So that's amazing.

Michael Paulson (99:47)

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

Lex Fridman (100:13)

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

Michael Paulson (100:49)

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

Lex Fridman (102:11)

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

Michael Paulson (102:25)

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

Lex Fridman (102:33)

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

Michael Paulson (103:10)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (103:11)

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

Michael Paulson (103:54)

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

Lex Fridman (105:14)

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

Michael Paulson (106:06)

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

Lex Fridman (106:35)

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

Michael Paulson (106:51)

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

Lex Fridman (106:55)

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

Michael Paulson (107:10)

Yeah, yeah.

Lex Fridman (107:11)

So can you tell the story of that?

Michael Paulson (107:12)

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

Lex Fridman (107:27)

Yeah.

Michael Paulson (107:27)

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

Lex Fridman (110:40)

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

Michael Paulson (110:45)

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

Lex Fridman (111:08)

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

Michael Paulson (111:27)

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

Lex Fridman (112:44)

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

Michael Paulson (113:08)

I assume there's probably a huge number of just really simple ones, script kitties, right? Just people trying to just do things. And then there's a huge amount of like social engineering that just goes in where hacking's done not with a computer, but just by, you know, one of the classic ones, Kevin Mitnick had this one in his book, which was you'd call up somebody pretending to be like, Charlene, we're doing some auditing, and I think your pins out of date on file. Is it 2323 still? And they're like, no, it's 4747. You're like, oh, thanks, Sharon. You know, boom. You just hacked them. Right? Like the classic. People love correcting bad information. This is like a standard. So like there's all these ways people hack. And so my assumption is that there are really great white hat hackers, there's really great black hat hackers. But the vulnerability space, the harp. The thing is, is that, that discovering a vulnerability and you don't let anyone know, the white hat hacker still has to make that same discovery.

Lex Fridman (114:03)

Yeah.

Michael Paulson (114:04)

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

Lex Fridman (114:25)

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

Michael Paulson (114:58)

To a beautiful mind, aren't we?

Lex Fridman (114:59)

Beautiful mind. Yeah. I have a whiteboard upstairs that I calculate everything everybody's trajectory and move.

Michael Paulson (115:05)

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

Lex Fridman (116:05)

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

Michael Paulson (116:33)

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

Lex Fridman (117:56)

Are some. Are some of these bugs difficult to discover until you.

Michael Paulson (117:59)

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

Lex Fridman (118:17)

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

Michael Paulson (118:32)

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

Lex Fridman (118:49)

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

Michael Paulson (119:16)

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

Lex Fridman (121:23)

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

Michael Paulson (121:30)

Yeah, all great stuff. I'm just surprised he still uses jQuery just given the fact that at this point on the modern web everything is, I mean you have document, query, selector and add, event, listener, click right. It pretty much has everything you already need. It had DOM content load. Like all the reasons I use jQuery back in the day was adding a click on a button was like hard. You had to deal with ie7, ie8, ie9. Those are hard differences. Whereas now it's just so easy. I'm just surprised it's even that.

Lex Fridman (121:58)

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

Michael Paulson (122:24)

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

Lex Fridman (123:20)

Infrastructure, the platform of Netflix and speak more generally. Netflix, Twitch, YouTube. Like, anytime I use any of these services, I'm just blown away by the infrastructure it takes to deliver this service. YouTube and Twitch are unique versus Netflix, where the creators can roll in themselves and upload stuff.

Michael Paulson (123:39)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (123:40)

So on the consumption side, YouTube has over 100 billion views a day. Over 1 billion hours watch time. But on the sort Of Creator side, 1 million hours of videos are uploaded every day. 1 million hours. It's like you have to service both and you have to deliver everything. It's incredible to me. Can you maybe speak to your own intuition, just zooming out on it, what it takes to deliver that kind of infrastructure.

Michael Paulson (124:10)

For me, the thing that I, I find vastly complicated and I can't imagine the engineering hours is how do you even create an edge in that situation? And what I mean by an edge, I mean, like when people say this phrase, if, if you're unexperienced, an edge is where you deliver data to be. You want that edge to be as close to the customer as possible because that's where the data lives. And then the communication between the customer and what you're doing is really, really small. Obviously the speed of light adds up. The amount of hops adds up, the amount of services that you have to remotely call adds up.

Lex Fridman (124:39)

Up.

Michael Paulson (124:39)

They all add up and they all add inefficiencies to the system. So something like YouTube, they want to be able to serve that data as quick as possible, but their data changes constantly. And relevance is almost directly tied with the newness of the item. So it's like, how do you even cache these things out? How are you doing this? So they must have such an incredible caching network that I can't even, I can't even fathom what it takes to do that. That just, to me is just so impressive. A million view hours in how many different, different resolutions with how much data? What is a million view hours? Is it 4k million view hours along with 1080p, along with 720p, along with 1440p? Like that number is an insane number.

Lex Fridman (125:19)

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

Michael Paulson (126:03)

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

Lex Fridman (127:29)

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

Michael Paulson (127:37)

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

Lex Fridman (127:41)

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

Michael Paulson (128:04)

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

Lex Fridman (128:36)

Yeah.

Michael Paulson (128:37)

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

Lex Fridman (128:42)

Okay. Yeah. I don't remember what it is.

Michael Paulson (128:43)

Forgive my language. What they call it the pig episode.

Lex Fridman (128:46)

Oh yeah, of course.

Michael Paulson (128:48)

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

Lex Fridman (129:27)

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

Michael Paulson (130:10)

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

Lex Fridman (131:28)

Yeah.

Michael Paulson (131:29)

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

Lex Fridman (132:14)

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

Michael Paulson (132:53)

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

Lex Fridman (133:26)

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

Michael Paulson (133:49)

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

Lex Fridman (134:07)

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

Michael Paulson (134:43)

The legal side is obvious, but it's not really. Like, I would never have initially thought someone would say, upload images that you're not allowed to own or have, but that guarantee you that happens. Then you have the whole kid side, right?

Lex Fridman (134:55)

Yeah.

Michael Paulson (134:56)

I think about when you mark something as kid friendly. How many times have they snuck porn into a Taylor Swift video or whatever. That was like a few years back. There was that whole Taylor Swift or whatever. I forget what it was. I thought it was Taylor Swift, but there'd be these mock videos that come up and then boom. It's like, that's a. That is such an awful problem. And I'm so happy. That is not a problem I have to try to figure out.

Lex Fridman (135:16)

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

Michael Paulson (135:37)

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

Lex Fridman (139:46)

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

Michael Paulson (139:59)

It is, yeah.

Lex Fridman (140:00)

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

Michael Paulson (140:06)

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

Lex Fridman (140:13)

But I love you, Flip.

Michael Paulson (140:15)

I love you.

Lex Fridman (140:15)

I love you.

Michael Paulson (140:16)

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

Lex Fridman (141:04)

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

Michael Paulson (141:10)

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

Lex Fridman (141:13)

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

Michael Paulson (141:50)

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

Lex Fridman (141:57)

Thank you.

Michael Paulson (141:58)

Thank you.

Lex Fridman (141:58)

I love you too.

Michael Paulson (142:00)

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

Lex Fridman (142:05)

A sexual way, just to be clear.

Michael Paulson (142:06)

The tension is a little.

Lex Fridman (142:07)

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

Michael Paulson (142:12)

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

Lex Fridman (143:04)

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

Michael Paulson (144:04)

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

Lex Fridman (144:28)

What's the origin story of the Primogen name?

Michael Paulson (144:32)

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

Lex Fridman (145:01)

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

Michael Paulson (145:12)

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

Lex Fridman (145:15)

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

Michael Paulson (145:22)

The notable difficulty, it was very, very, very difficult.

Lex Fridman (145:25)

Okay.

Michael Paulson (145:26)

And so I spent. When I got it, it came in a black cartridge, not like Your standard gray Nintendo 64. It's a black cartridge. Badass game, right? And I got it and I put it in and I. I played every day for like 10 hours a day for a month straight, and I beat it. And it was like such an incredible, great experience. And the last leader of Turok 2 is called the Primogen. And so when I was a kid, when you're in like fifth grade, that's like super cool, like, named after the bad guy. And so, like, for a long time, on any Internet thing, like Grail online that I mentioned earlier, the name was the Primogen. It was great. And then, you know, I became an adult eventually, and it's just like, okay, you know, I'm an adult. My name is Michael Paulson. Underscore, you know? Yeah, that's what I was on the Internet for a long time was that. And I remember it was like 2017, 2018. Somewhere in there. I remember just how bad the tech world had kind of become. It was just like this super pretentious place. Tons of dick measuring, just everything. That just was the worst. Ken Wheeler got canceled over playing the circle game. It was just like it. It's so hard to describe to people that weren't there, but it was just the worst place to be. Tech was extremely unfun. It was extremely awful. Everything was just so. It wasn't academic because it was research. It was like, we're building the most sophisticated things, and this is for the smart people and you're. Everyone else is the dumb people. Don't worry, we'll design for you, dummy. We got that. We'll. We'll show you how to make the perfect architecture. And I remember changing my Twitter handle. Cause I got so upset, set, and just went back to my video game name because I was like, I want things to be fun. I want this to stop. And so while I start. When I started streaming tech, my goal became to destroy whatever that tech mentality was, because it includes nobody. Everyone thinks that they're the smart people and they design for the dummies. And it's just like, no. Like, I want tech to be this place where people feel like they can be creative and excited and actually build something. And if you're new, like, it's okay to be dumb and ask dumb questions. Like, learn from your dumb stuff. No one's expecting you to be smart. Pick whatever you want, like, actually do something and have fun and build, like, your crazy ideas. Oh, you're going to reinvent the wheel. Reinvent the wheel. Understand what you're doing, learn it really good and, like, interact and stuff. And it's just so different than what was out there and that. The name Arnold Schwarzenegger talks about this thing where when he first started acting, his name was like the thing that people hated. As he once said, you have a strange voice, you have a strange body, and your name, your name's unpronounceable. No one's gonna Schneitz and Finitzel. No one's gonna remember that.

Lex Fridman (148:07)

Y.

Michael Paulson (148:07)

And he said, but now the name is the strong part. And for me, I just, I've always felt akin to that. Though my name's not nearly as cool, nor am I as popular as Arnold Norma, as tough or good looking or successful. But nonetheless, it's just the. The name represented this, like, counterculture, like, movement within myself in which I just hated what was there and I wanted to defeat it. And so this has, like, been the thing. And now people remember me so well because of how weird my name is, is. And so it's just like I, for whatever reason, it became its own thing. And so that's kind of the now. I would never change it, and back then I would never change it because it was my rage against the machine moment, if you will.

Lex Fridman (148:46)

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

Michael Paulson (148:52)

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

Lex Fridman (148:56)

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

Michael Paulson (149:14)

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

Lex Fridman (150:23)

It feels like, yeah, we're chatting offline. How one of the components of a successful relationship is sacrifice. And your wife was willing to take the sacrifice of allowing you to have a mustache.

Michael Paulson (150:33)

I clearly was not willing to sacrifice not having one.

Lex Fridman (150:36)

So you do this incredible, incredible thing where you tried a bunch of different programming languages when you stream. You have like, you go all out on certain programming languages like Rust and then go. And then try to pick a new one one. But also are like experimenting constantly. So maybe one question I can ask is about learning. What's your approach to learning a new programming language? And maybe what's your advice on learning a new programming language when you begin that journey?

Michael Paulson (151:11)

So I've kind of done a bunch of different ways to go through this learning process, and I've tried a lot of different ones. Something that is obviously successful is just start building something. Just put your hands on the keyboard, you know, like, especially if you already know how to program. You're like, okay, I'm now using Zig. How do I do a main function? So I can just run the program? Okay, I now know how to build. Okay, how do I do an if statement? What does it look like? Okay, how do I do declare my own functions? How do I do modules? Right, you just kind of like Google your way through it, if you will, to get to the end product and build something. It's a good. It's a great way to do things because I find that repetition, like rote learning, is obviously the best way to do this. This, you have to kind of go over it a bunch and you can, you can definitely get out and build a lot of stuff with that. I like that initial, kind of get used to things, but on top of it, I find that by doing that you also fall into, like, traps. You kind of Google and you try to solve a problem in the language based on all of your previous experience. And so you, you don't have what makes that language special. You kind of have what all the other languages make special. And so you end up kind of not really being able to use it very effectively, but you can certainly kind of learn it and get kind of good at it. And so the second approach I've been doing lately, and this has been inspired by the creator of Ghosty, Mitchell Hashimoto, is to just start by reading the language, reference, the whole thing. And so lately I've been just kind of going through and just reading the entire manual for these languages, like Zig. I'm almost done with that one. You know, it's like eight to 10 hours of just sitting down, reading, and I'll whip out my computer and kind of practice a couple of the things from the actual docs. And that way I can learn, learn all the things. So then when I start building again, I remember, okay, I know there's a thing over here. Let me go reread about it. Because now I have it indexed in my brain somewhere that it will kind of remember. And so I don't think there's like a right or wrong way. I mean, at the end of the day, the right way is always that you have to build something. Eventually you cannot just read about it. You have to put your hands on the keyboard. You have to build something out. And then once you do that, that's where you really discover what makes it painful or what makes it great. And if you don't have the breadth of what the language offers, you just may make it painful by simply being bad at it.

Lex Fridman (153:15)

What exactly are you reading?

Michael Paulson (153:17)

Like this, like, language reference.

Lex Fridman (153:19)

The language reference.

Michael Paulson (153:21)

So it just goes through like every feature, top to bottom, right? Yeah, every way it's described, all the different things. Like, I think Zigs is, you know, it's a, it's a decent size, but it's not just simply read the words. You want to internalize each concept as well. So it takes a long time. So I'm a slow reader.

Lex Fridman (153:36)

So you're like building in AI terms, like a background Model. Like I've just. Because I don't think you can just start building once you're done reading. Because you probably forgot.

Michael Paulson (153:48)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (153:48)

You know how to do a for loop. Like you, you kind of forget the specifics. You just are building up the, the design choices, the set of features available, what are the strengths and weaknesses, all that kind of stuff, and then you start building. That's really interesting. Probably not the thing you would recommend to a junior developer, somebody who's just starting out or first, if you don't.

Michael Paulson (154:09)

Know what an if statement is, that's not a good way to learn. Like to me, the best way to learn that is really hands on the keyboard and building extremely simple things and slowly growing in complexity. Because understanding what a class and methods and instances versus the blueprint, which is the class versus functions versus modules versus all that stuff. Right. Like that's, that just takes time to learn. And so that's a completely different style of learning.

Lex Fridman (154:30)

I wonder, because for me, learning right now, AI is a huge, huge help. But I already have a lot of experience. I wonder if you're starting from scratch, whether that's a good idea. But I still think it's probably a really good idea. But basically generate some code using AI and figure out what it's doing by playing with different parts maybe. Can you comment on that aspect? Like the use of AI as part of the learning process.

Michael Paulson (155:00)

This is where I have both the hopeful and the doomer take at the exact same time.

Lex Fridman (155:03)

Yeah.

Michael Paulson (155:06)

And it's the same thing with Google or Stack overflow like this. It's all the same kind of take, which is, it's just making things more democratized in some sense. I get to ask questions in probably the most personal possible way with my own voice, in my own words, and it's able to produce out answers and kind of hopefully help guide me. Now, regardless of just say the errors and the incorrectnesses of it, like ultimately just using it as alert learning, you know, tool and being able to just, you know, formulate and read answers in your own voice, I think is super powerful. And I think it's, it's super amazing. But the part that I think is going to be really difficult is that we don't value remembering things anymore as a society. Like since the Internet came about. I can just look that up. I can just look that up. No need to, like, you don't need to memorize your times table tables. Right. You can just use a calculator. You can just do all that. I, I remember I just was Sitting on the airplane and I watched someone do the world's most simple addition and subtraction like 10 times on their phone. I'm like, why are you not just like, you should already know these, that you should be able to do these things. And I realized that we kind of offload our brains, right? Oh, I don't need to know these things because I can look them up. And that's not a bad answer. In some sense I can understand that. Like I don't need to remember every last thing, thing. But then it also makes me realize that you kind of develop this learned helplessness that a new error comes up. I'll just ask the AI. AI says, oh, okay, I got to fix this line. I fixed the line. You didn't actually learn anything. You kind of just used it as a quick means to get something out and move on. And so you sacrifice knowledge for speed, which is a great thing in some like you. We have to make those trade offs all the time in engineering. Sometimes you have to move fast at the sacrifice of knowledge. And I'm totally on board for that. But I worry that what we'll create is a, is an entire generation of incompetent programmers who can do some amount of things well. But anything that is unique, bespoke, or requires some extra, like little elbow grease might become very difficult. It might cause a whole chasm where juniors remain juniors forever. And I don't want to see that. I want to see people grow. I want to see people, you know, actually be able to take this as a craftsmanship thing. And so that's kind of what I, that's like both my hope and my, my worry is, is that AI, I think can, can do both really. Because if you could ask whatever question you want and you don't have to rely on say a book to give you that exact answer. And if the book just said it wrong and you can't understand, it's just like, sorry, you don't get to learn what this is like. Recursion for me. I spent way too much time until someone gave me the right problem to understand recursion. You could imagine AI could have solved that for me way faster because it could have gave me the right problem and walked me through what much better. But what happen if I just always have recursion solved by them and not actually learn it myself.

Lex Fridman (157:48)

So if I ask AI to generate code to do a certain thing, some actually a large percentage of time, most of what AI generates is going to be correct for me. But some percent of Time. It's not like fundamentally not. And for me to recognize the difference between those two, I think it takes a lot of experience, like, I think to learn that skill of knowing, like, no, no, no. A different new out of the box solution is needed here than the one you're providing. You're missing the point. That's a skill. And how do you learn that? You learn that by building from scratch. So both are probably really necessary.

Michael Paulson (158:29)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (158:30)

But I think as a first step of learning how to program, it's pretty nice to generate a function, to generate for loops and all that kind of stuff and then just fuck with the different lines and modify them to try to adjust the behavior of the program. And from the way the behavior of the program adjusts or if bugs are created, you learn about the syntax of the language, the behavior of the language, all that kind of stuff. So I think it's a super powerful way to learn. But yeah, you need to also write from scratch.

Michael Paulson (159:02)

Yeah. At some point you have to take off the training wheels because I think what you're really spotting is the difference between reading and writing code. Like, I can read a lot of languages very well. I can see what's happening. I can understand it, but like, I would not be very good at writing it. I can understand a lot of things about C and I can read it, but I'm just not that because I just don't. I haven't done it in so long, I can't remember all, or all the semicolons and colons and like, you know, you do public and private and how you should use naming convention. Like, you know, all those things kind of add all together and then you're just like, oh, I'm really bad at writing it though. I can read it. And so there's like this, There's a skill gap chasm that exists between those two.

Lex Fridman (159:40)

All right, well, let me talk about the various languages. The cheesy, ridiculous question of what's the. What's the best programming language? Let's say, what's the best programming language that everybody should learn? Maybe. Let's go with the top five. I'm going to pull up the Stack Overflow developer survey because I think.

Michael Paulson (160:01)

Yeah, those are.

Lex Fridman (160:03)

Well, you don't like.

Michael Paulson (160:04)

No, no, those aren't. You got to remember because, I mean, you're a data guy, right? You know about biases and data. What does, what does Stack Overflow naturally bias towards?

Lex Fridman (160:13)

Well, they have the different slices of professional developers, junior developers. They have different slices. Okay, what's what, what is the bias.

Michael Paulson (160:21)

I hear you, but who fills out a Stack Overflow server survey? Someone who participates on Stack Overflow. Who's participating on Stack Overflow. Largely. Very, very new people. And that one guy that loves answering questions. And so I'm not sure if that, like, if Stack Overflow is a great place to get data. It could be a very biased set of data.

Lex Fridman (160:37)

Is it really only new people?

Michael Paulson (160:39)

I mean, that's. Who's using Stack Overflow.

Lex Fridman (160:43)

All right, Most popular technologies on this.

Michael Paulson (160:47)

JavaScript, HTML, Python, SQL.

Lex Fridman (160:50)

Sequel is one of the more general kind of. I'm sure they're not doing the individual sort of flavors of sequel. By the way, pronounced sequel versus SQL, it's squeal. Squeal. You squeal.

Michael Paulson (161:03)

Squeal. Squeal, I think is the correct way.

Lex Fridman (161:04)

Squeal.

Michael Paulson (161:05)

I did sequel because I didn't, you know, I didn't know the audience. I don't know if they can handle the truth.

Lex Fridman (161:09)

Okay.

Michael Paulson (161:09)

Which is. It's squeal.

Lex Fridman (161:10)

It's squeal of joy. Squeal, squeal.

Michael Paulson (161:13)

Light my squeal. Postgres. Squeal.

Lex Fridman (161:16)

By the way, I had a lot of joy from earlier saying pig fucker for some reason.

Michael Paulson (161:20)

I mean, can you believe that that was a real conversation that I had.

Lex Fridman (161:23)

Yeah, that was typescript, Bash, Java, C.

Michael Paulson (161:29)

C. It largely kind of aligns with the world you'd expect, but like assembly. Why is assembly more popular than Ruby? Who is writing just assembly by? No one writes assembly by hand other than like maybe that one guy that's developing TLS 1.3 and hand rolling a cryptography algorithm to be the fastest possible algorithm. Right?

Lex Fridman (161:48)

Yeah. Assembly is a weird one. Maybe people write it maybe in school, but even in school now for like a operating systems course or something like that, or systems engineering. I don't know if they write assembly anymore. They. I don't think so.

Michael Paulson (162:02)

Yeah. Anyway, and Swift and Ruby being less popular than assembly seems ridiculous, but nonetheless. Okay, so you get my ideas behind that. But as far as top five languages go, that's probably too broad because you could just name so many. I think you should probably archetype it by what do you want to do? So if you want to get into game development, perhaps C Sharp C could be good choices. Or JavaScript and doing canvas games. I could see that also working. But you know, you got to. You're limited by doing JavaScript, obviously, because you can't do as much because the language is just not fast enough to do as much much. So it's like A good thing to remember if you're going to be doing backend stuff. You know, if you want a job, if you're looking for a job, maybe C, Java or JavaScript or Go would be great choices. If you're looking to do embedded, you probably want to do C. C, like that would probably be a good choice. And so you kind of have to, I think you have to first determine what do you really want to get out.

Lex Fridman (162:59)

If you're just curious about programming, which I talked to a lot of people who are, yeah, you can consider jobs, but basically their question is, okay, what's the first language I should learn and maybe what are the several languages I should explore?

Michael Paulson (163:13)

Can I say something that's gonna make a lot of people angry?

Lex Fridman (163:15)

Yeah, sure.

Michael Paulson (163:15)

I think the first language people should learn if they have no idea about anything is JavaScript.

Lex Fridman (163:20)

Yeah. Why would that make people angry?

Michael Paulson (163:22)

Oh, because people just. I'm first off, I'm not supposed to say anything nice about JavaScript.

Lex Fridman (163:26)

Yeah, usually that's the meme that you hate JavaScript.

Michael Paulson (163:29)

Yeah, no, JavaScript's a beautiful language and it has a lot of things that are very great for it. And one of them is that you can express anything with very little effort. And so someone that's new, I think it's really great to be able to draw a box and move a box. Like that's great. You get to see it visually. I think that's one thing that's really great about JavaScript is that you can do that. Then you can go, okay, I want to learn about the backend. I'm going to make a request now. You can write a quick backend in it. Now you're starting to get familiar with programming a little bit. I can save this to a database, I can bring it down, I can put it on a screen and I can animate it all around and I can even put it on a canvas and render it in 2D or 3D. So it's like there's so much variety of what you can do do with JavaScript. It's a great way to get introduced into programming, but then at some point you have to go, okay, I now need to learn more about this whole thing.

Lex Fridman (164:16)

I mean, yeah, just like you said, you can make games, you can do front end, back end for web development.

Michael Paulson (164:22)

You can even do embedded. They actually have job like there's Wes boss is building his Roomba or something and programming it with JavaScript and React, which is just the world's worst language to choose for embed. But you can still do it.

Lex Fridman (164:36)

Also we mentioned sort of in terms of applications, anything that relates to data or machine learning, Python is the sort of the leader there. Yeah, that's a great one.

Michael Paulson (164:46)

It seems like Python Cuda stuff and C would be a dynamite in that because a lot of these Python libraries are assumed are just. You're just smuggling in C underneath the.

Lex Fridman (164:55)

Hood or c. Okay, so JavaScript, I'll say Python, Python's a great one too.

Michael Paulson (165:00)

You can get quite far with it, but you can't write the front end. So even if you love the front end end.

Lex Fridman (165:05)

Right.

Michael Paulson (165:05)

What happen if you really just want to design things and you just didn't know that?

Lex Fridman (165:09)

Well, it's okay. So for that JavaScript.

Michael Paulson (165:11)

But Python's a good choice because you can't do the ML stuff in JavaScript. Nearly as easy.

Lex Fridman (165:15)

Do we count HTML and CSS as programming languages?

Michael Paulson (165:18)

I think there's like some technical definition that it is. If you put it. If you use this certain amalgamation of CSS + HTML, it actually has like it can be a touring complete language. Yeah, but I mean, for practical purposes, no, HTML is not a language language. You know I. For me, this, yes, the Turing Test is a good one. But for those that are just not wanting to be as academic, if I can't write a function in an if statement, I don't feel like that's a. I don't. If I can't loop if and function, I don't feel like that's a good. That's a programming language.

Lex Fridman (165:48)

Although modern HTML has a lot of.

Michael Paulson (165:50)

Features, it's crazy how much it has. But it's more of a specification than anything else. I specify it to be a pop up. I specify it to have this kind of like accessibility, this kind of look, this kind of, you know, under these conditions look like this transform like this move down here.

Lex Fridman (166:05)

I don't know. I kind of like these popular programming languages in this list. I like JavaScript.

Michael Paulson (166:10)

You like Bash?

Lex Fridman (166:11)

Well, yeah, I like Bash a lot. Yeah. Why?

Michael Paulson (166:13)

Okay. Bash is kind of one of those ones where it's like, do you really like to. Do you really like it? I like it up until I need an array.

Lex Fridman (166:20)

Oh, as a programming language, just. No, but I like, I like the command line. Okay. Do you like B? No, nobody likes Bash. Do you mean. I'm someone is so offended right now. Means do you use it a lot? Yes, it's good to. I mean it's good to learn, right? It's good to be comfortable on the command line because it's a bit of a superpower. It's like I think I follow on Twitter, ffmpeg great account. Like there's certain Twitter accounts that are just like legit.

Michael Paulson (166:52)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (166:53)

And you know, I think FFmpeg, like they have all these sort of parameters that you can add on the command line that it's like one of those cryptic languages that only very few wizards understand, but once you begin to slowly understand, and I'm only at the very sort of beginning stage of that journey to mastery, the powers you gain at every step is like it grows exponentially. It feels like, I mean, FFMPEG is just this incredible. Like what would you call a library system? There's just. The people behind them must be just brilliant masterminds because they have to work with all these codecs, with all these containers, with all this. The mysteries of the media codec universe, they're like masters of and they understand compression, which is another super fascinating technical set of problems that, I don't know, I just. FFMPEG just fills me with joy that it exists. But you need kind of bash type comfort, command line comfort to work with it, to really unlock its power. Yeah.

Michael Paulson (167:57)

I think FFMPEG is probably one of the most consequential libraries of our day. And the Twitter account is so unhinged. It's the most amazing thing to see because I think FFMPEG does not get the love it deserves. Every single application that opens. Yes, probably FFmpeg underneath the hood, all the profile, everything. FFMPEG underneath the hood. And then. And yet, you know, they do not get the love they deserve. I just love it. I just think they're the best.

Lex Fridman (168:24)

Yeah, I would say JavaScript, HTML, CSS, Python, SQL. I mean that is SQL. Squeal is, is a programming language. Yeah, it's an incredibly sophisticated programming language.

Michael Paulson (168:36)

Yeah, SQL is interesting. I, I would, I believe you can classify it as a programming language. It does have like, if you have case statements and it's pretty crazy what.

Lex Fridman (168:45)

You can do, do functions, you can do all that.

Michael Paulson (168:47)

Yeah, you should stored procedures. That's how you make your life hell. I will say that all the top languages right there are. None of them are like strict static typed languages. And so even Typescript you can, you know, I don't like this any. And so for people that are learning, doing something that's much more strict would be great. Something like go Rust, et Even. I mean even C Sharp, C, like anything that kind of changes your perspective of types, I think is really helpful to kind of go through. They're not getting nearly as much love on this most popular language list, but I think they're very fantastic.

Lex Fridman (169:24)

All right, well if I put a gun to your head, five top five languages. Let's, let's list them out. There's a bright eyed 20 year old asking you what are the top languages to five languages to learn?

Michael Paulson (169:36)

If I were to pick five languages that I think people should learn, or at least, how about let's restate it this way. I'm going to say a couple languages and you should at least explore some of them. I think you should explore. Explore a Lucy language. So python/java, where there is truly only one type, which is a boxed value, which is a multivariant. Different types underneath the hood. Right.

Lex Fridman (169:57)

What'd you call it? A Lucy language.

Michael Paulson (169:59)

A Lucy goosey language. Right. It's a dynamic language.

Lex Fridman (170:01)

Okay.

Michael Paulson (170:02)

And so I think it's really good to explore one of those two. So I'd put Python or JavaScript right there. Even Lua. Throw Lua in the bunch. I think you should explore a strict language. So I'd do something like Rust Go. I think those are both really, really great. C, you can do C. You can do some type erasure in C. You can do it with Go as well. But for the most part it's a great language to do that in. It can get a little wild. New C seems great. Everyone keeps telling me new C is great. It has every feature you've ever wanted and all the features you don't want.

Lex Fridman (170:32)

Yeah, exactly. I mean there's smart pointers, there's dump pointers, there's all kinds of pointers. There's no memory leaks. That's not an issue.

Michael Paulson (170:40)

Face guns, soft beds, there's everything in there.

Lex Fridman (170:43)

Unless you like memory leaks that it has that too, if you want that kind of thing. It's great.

Michael Paulson (170:47)

Okay, how about this one? Languages that I actually want to really learn that at least sit in my Curiosity Bank. There's three languages which is going to be Swift, Elixir, OCaml, and then I'm going to throw ODIN in there just to. Just because Gingerbread is great, But Elixir and OCaml, I don't have a strong functional language underneath my belt. That's something that I just genuinely lack.

Lex Fridman (171:11)

Yeah, I've heard incredible things about Elixir, about Odin, about OCaml. Obviously I'm a person, as you know, who loves Lisp.

Michael Paulson (171:18)

I have never done Lisp. Lisp could be in that category too. Just like learn or closure. I think at this point is what everyone tells you to use.

Lex Fridman (171:24)

So in the case of Lisp, I don't want to speak negatively about Lisp, but it's important about, like, modern community, what the community looks like. And it seems like there's an excited, maybe small, but an excited community around Elixir, Odin and ocamo. So that helps.

Michael Paulson (171:39)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (171:39)

You can post shit on Twitter that you're like, I accomplished this. And people get excited and it's nice. It's a good feeling.

Michael Paulson (171:46)

You can post like something on Twitter and you'll get like a thousand likes if you do something cool on Elixir. Yeah, okay. Like, which is a pretty big. That's like a pretty big amount of people to like a post for such a niche topic.

Lex Fridman (171:56)

Yeah.

Michael Paulson (171:56)

Programming is already a pretty small topic. Then you get into functional program. That's a small topic. In a small topic.

Lex Fridman (172:02)

Yeah, I don't get that much. If I post something about Emacs, I'll get crickets. If I post something. If I. If I proudly use neovim, there'd be a lot of people like, yeah, good job.

Michael Paulson (172:12)

Because it is the best editor.

Lex Fridman (172:14)

Yeah. Maybe it's just hype.

Michael Paulson (172:16)

Come back to the Civil War, Lex.

Lex Fridman (172:18)

Yeah. Sometimes you have to sacrifice and go from the superior editor that is Emacs and choose Neo Vim just to be popular. You sacrifice integrity and values and quality for just popularity.

Michael Paulson (172:30)

So I love how you put it.

Lex Fridman (172:33)

Okay. Anyway, it's. What were we talking about? I like how you're doing this in bunches. That's great.

Michael Paulson (172:38)

Right now, my. My kind of side honeys that I'm exploring is. Yeah. Side honeys. Right. Like, they're not my mainstay right now. Go is kind of my favorite one to build a web app in. Like, if I'm going to build some sort of backend with a lot of complicated logic, go's just so convenient. But I get really frustrated with its ability to express everything that I need. Like, if you have a list, a heterogeneous list, a list that contains two types, go's just really not that fun to use. And so I could see. So the ones I'm exploring is Jai or J or the language, as Jonathan Blow says, and Zig. And both of them have a lot of power to them. They're both very interesting. They definitely have foot guns in them. They're definitely more, you know, they don't take it easy on you. Zig seems like it's a really amazing language and so does jai. They're both very cool.

Lex Fridman (173:27)

Yeah. Actually, I saw Dave Plummer's testing of close to 100 languages for speed and Zig came out on top.

Michael Paulson (173:35)

Yeah, that was a mistake. I mean, when I say mistake, I. Nothing against Dave Plumber, he's an extremely talented engineer. Yeah, it's just that Zig, C, C, all those languages that were being tested, they're all LLVM backends, right? That's the one that actually turns the thing into the executable part. And if there's a variation in speed, it just means in one language you didn't quite express what you're supposed to correctly. Like there's the language ball test that's been bouncing around on Twitter. Yeah, Zig was like sixth or seventh below flow. I forget what language is. I played around with the example, added the word no alias to the argument, which means that the P, the piece of memory that's coming into this function, there's no global pointers, there's nothing to it. And so the compiler can make these really cool optimizations. And I made it faster than the C version. So it just means that just. It's just not correctly specified is all that means.

Lex Fridman (174:25)

Yeah, but it's still, it's still exciting to me. The competition between Zigzag, Rust and C is really interesting. Like part of it's for speed, part of it is for how easy it is to write performant code.

Michael Paulson (174:36)

I'll say something that's the reason why I think Zig is so interesting comparatively to say C or Rust. C is like the ultimate language. It can do anything. You have pre processor macros, you can do quite a bit with it, but it's also really difficult and it's also really simple and you can learn it. So it's kind of. It's like own unique beast and when you get really good at C, C is a magical language language and people are really great at it and people speak very highly of it. Rust is like this ultra safe language. What you can do in C you just can't even express in Rust. Rust is going to be that the safe man that holds you at night, keeping you warm. Right. It's going to be just the greatest. But somewhere in the middle lies Zig. Zig has optionals. If you're not familiar with optionals, that just simply means there's a value here or there's not. But you first have to check that before you can use it. So it prevents that whole null pointer dereferencing seg fault protection problem. And that's not. That's not available in C. Just by default, you have to kind of build that thing in. It is the only option in Rust, but Zig says, hey, if you have a pointer, you can't express it as null, unless if you mark it that it can be null. There's ways around it. There's like other types of pointers and stuff like that that can do that. But for the most part, Zig, like, we'll give you safety for the most part. Right? So it's like a little bit of safety, but more like C. So it kind of gives you like everything you kind of want in that region where it's where you can express safety code and unsafe code. It's very easy to write. It's very. It's very pretty, or at least the idea behind it is very pretty. The language itself is bland, but wow.

Lex Fridman (175:57)

There'S beauty in everything. Yeah, prime, you've programmed in Rust a lot. What do you. What do you love about Rust? What are the strengths? What are the weaknesses? Maybe you can speak about memory management that you already mentioned. Yeah, the challenge of memory management that several of these languages address. But yeah, what do you love about Rust?

Michael Paulson (176:16)

What I love about Rust, I love that it's that the ability to free the memory that you're using is directly tied to the stack. So whenever you create something, there's a stack variable or there's some amount of stack memory, whether it's a pointer off to the heap, a pointer and a length. So you know, some amount of memory on the stack and then some memory on the heap. Because like a string is not all on the stack, it's somewhat the heap some on the stack. And when that stack variable goes out of scope and gets cleaned up, it also cleans up what's on the heap. So it kind of simplifies this whole idea of, whoops, I forgot to free my memory. It just does it for you. So it's not a garbage collector, which we'll do it sometime later. It's not like C where you have to call it yourself, it's somewhere in between. Now, there's a lot of strategies people use, arenas and all that, that make that C part much easier. I'm just not even mentioning it, but it just makes it a lot easier. Easier. But Rust does that really beautifully and it's just like a really cool idea about it, and I really like that. And the second thing that I think Rust does really like is such a good thing, is that mutability of something is you have to specify it so you don't just create A variable and then mutate it. You have to say this is not only a variable, it's a mutable variable. And I think that just makes code really readable and really understandable because anything that does not have the word mute next to it, you know for a fact, it cannot change. So there's some rules around that, but you get the general idea.

Lex Fridman (177:42)

Unlike most programming languages, you have to explicitly state that this is going to be changed. This is going to be changed. Yeah, yeah, that's really interesting. I mean it's safe, it's, it's trying to be. And, and this, the safety might be. It's create limitations. Let us consult the AI overlord. Rust is a blazing, fast, memory efficient systems programming language that emphasizes performance, type safety and concurrency. The language enforces memory safety without using a garbage collector, as you said, instead utilizing the unique quote borrow checker that tracks object lifetimes at compile time. This prevents common programming errors like null pointer dereferencing a memory leaks and so on. Yeah, so you've also spoken about metaprogramming. Which of these languages do you like for the metaprogramming? I love metaprogramming in C, but it's a giant mess. At least when I program C C 17 standard I believe it's just, it's just a mess. Especially a mess to debug.

Michael Paulson (178:45)

Yeah, I would consider myself kind of a metaprogramming newbie. I have only solved some amount of problems with it. I love. I'm. That's kind of like what this year is for is for me to really. I want to see where the ends can go in that. So I don't have a strong opinion on this one. Zig. One thing I really like about Zig is that the meta programming is also the language itself. So you don't have to like there's not, there's not an alternative. So with Rust there's an alternative. When you create a macro, you have to do the macro syntax. With Zig, it's just, it is the thing, you just program it, you add the word comp time if you want it to be a compile time only. So you can do like you can create the list of prime numbers at compile time in Zig, which is kind of an interesting unique thing. So you have code that executes at compile time and then you can take advantage of the result of it at runtime. So neat, right? Like that's how I'd look at it. But again I haven't, I haven't used it to the point where I feel like I can super authoritatively talk about it.

Lex Fridman (179:40)

You have been undecided. What language are you going for this year?

Michael Paulson (179:44)

I'm going to keep Go as my mainstay. My two side hunt Honey's Giant Zig. I'm going to explore and try to build out a service in them that can do a bunch of talking to say, Chad Gippity and 11 labs and send stuff down to client and work with websockets. And I want to make sure that. I just want to see kind of how do they perform in this realm. You know, I may be using the language incorrectly like jai. I'm not exactly. It's not really been designed for the web world. I just got done writing the ability to read Twitch Chat and it required me to do Berkeley Sockets. So if you're unfamiliar with Berkeley Sockets, it's like the old way of doing. It's how you do it in C. So you have to kind of go through the whole nine yards of creating your own connection. I had to create my own connection. I have to read from the socket. Then I have to parse out all the irc. Right. Like you have to kind of build it from scratch. There's not like a new TCP connection to this server. You have to be like, I'm creating a socket. You're going to be of the IPv4 family and TCP and you're going to do. You know, I'm going to now have to take your address and go look up your address with DNS, get that address back and then connect to a tcp. So it's a lot more manual still. It's a lot more RAW in that area. But it's fun.

Lex Fridman (180:48)

What are some epic projects you've built on stream that jump to memory?

Michael Paulson (180:53)

My most favorite. Sorry for interrupting you. Sorry, I'm getting. I'm. I'm really jazzed right now.

Lex Fridman (180:58)

Let's go.

Michael Paulson (180:59)

Okay.

Lex Fridman (181:00)

So jazzed Jazz Hands.

Michael Paulson (181:02)

My most favorite project was the one I did last year there. Someone built a Doom ASCII port so you could play Doom Doom with ascii. So that means you could play it in your terminal. Very, very fun. Very excited. So I made a go program that could spawn out the Doom ascii. Then I took that Doom ASCII and I sent it to the browser so that people could play Doom ASCII in the browser. But then I made it so that Twitch Chat could control that instance of Doom ASCII by piping in Twitch Chat, taking the average of the movements over so much Time and replaying it as if it was a control. And I had a Twitch chat beat level one by spamming it. But the fun part was I used a bunch of fun encoding techniques. I used like quad trees to be able to take smaller amounts, use run length encoding. Tried to create my own compression algorithm. Because if you're sending out a bunch of ASCII stuff, it's still pretty expensive because you have to represent color. Color's not cheap. On top of it, you have to represent. What does it look like? What does the ASCII look like? Well, I realized, you know, there's all these fun techniques you can do for compression. Like the shape of the ASCII you send down is in a lot of these engines are actually just proportional to the lumosity of that pixel. So, like you'd use an 8 to represent or a pound sign to represent, like white but black. You're going to want to do like a period or a comma or a bar, you know, something smaller. So it's like I then developed all these different compression algorithms that turn a bunch of data which would take, you know, I forget how much it would take. It take gigabytes upon gigabytes to be able to send out to thousands of people to all see the same image at the same time, to all be able to interact with doom at same time. I turned it from gigabytes into kilobytes by just trying to figure out how to like, make it as small as possible and send it all out. It was super fun. Absolutely. Had a great time.

Lex Fridman (182:45)

So you're actually sending it to all the people in chat. So where's the, that, that pipe where that pipeline. How chat is able to control the DOOM thing?

Michael Paulson (182:54)

Twitch chat. Yeah. So they would go, people would span W. And if you said W, it would hold down W for 150 milliseconds seconds. If the majority of people during that time period said W. Nice.

Lex Fridman (183:07)

Okay, so. And how are they getting the input of where you are on screen?

Michael Paulson (183:11)

So originally I was going to send that through Twitch, but Twitch is like five seconds behind. So that's why I piped it out to a website so everybody could see from my computer to the website. And typical lag was right around 70 milliseconds. So it's like they could mostly see what was happening in that short period of time. It was, it was pretty exciting. Exciting. So we had a thousand people, or I had somewhere between a thousand to fourteen hundred people smashing W's and pressing F to fire and turning. And we Killed some zombies. Yeah, we blew up the barrel at the very end of level one to kill the imp.

Lex Fridman (183:42)

How are you getting the W's from the Twitch chat? Is there an API?

Michael Paulson (183:46)

Irc. I was using irc, so just a little TCP socket and then you just parse out irc.

Lex Fridman (183:51)

Okay. And there's very little lag there. Okay.

Michael Paulson (183:53)

Yeah, I think it's. It's a couple hundred milliseconds, though. It's enough that it actually made it a little bit difficult. Difficult because people would often overturn and then go forward and like miss the door and then they had to go back and.

Lex Fridman (184:04)

That's awesome.

Michael Paulson (184:05)

It was awesome. So that was my favorite, I think, project of all time. Just because it. I never got to do, like a lot of encoding. Encoding's kind of like, you know, what do you normally do? Okay, I need to send something down. I don't know. Gzip. IT Server will just do it. Server just does the right thing. I don't need to think about it. So instead it's like, I think about it. I'm gonna set the right thing.

Lex Fridman (184:22)

Yeah, you have to think about the compressor version. Yeah. And there you go. That's some more love towards FFmpeg because they have to think about that a lot.

Michael Paulson (184:29)

Ultimately inspired by FFMPEG and their awesomeness.

Lex Fridman (184:34)

So can you speak to just the chat community in general? Like a big part of what you do in terms of streaming is the humans that are communicating with you live. Can you talk to the different chat communities for? First of all, which is the best chat community? YouTube, Twitch or X?

Michael Paulson (184:56)

This is where I feel bad for YouTube because I do think it's technically the worst. But it's not YouTube's fault. And let me kind of explain why.

Lex Fridman (185:04)

And then I will explain why you're wrong, but go ahead.

Michael Paulson (185:06)

YouTube is fault. I know you love YouTube, but let me explain why is that when you go on Twitch, you go to anyone's channel, they have this like cultural Human Centipede thing that's happening where as the memes flow in, all of Twitch kind of reacts and morphs to all those memes. So every channel you go to has this like, same culture, everyone. There's a lot of similar emotes and everything. So it's very tight knit. So when I stream, I get all the same jokes that you would pretty much see if you saw, I don't know, Soda Poppin or some big streamer. Asmongold, whoever Protate software stream streaming, all the same memes would all flow through the Exact same kind of pipe. And so it's a very holistic kind of community. So every time you're making jokes, you're making jokes that are like, in the ether. Twitter kind of has that too. Tech Twitter kind of has, like, a set of jokes. And so you can kind of see it if the problem with Twitter chat is that there's just nobody there right now. You know, typically, like, just put it into perspective. I have somewhere between. Somewhere between. Between like 1500 to 3000 people on Twitch, somewhere between 800 to 2000 on YouTube and like 50 people on Twitter. So it's like the. The difference is. Is massive. But they all kind of. Twitter has that same thing that's developing where there's, like, memes that are constantly flowing through it. And so they're very highly connected. YouTube just doesn't seem to have that. They're just a bunch of people. And people go to YouTube for various reasons. I'm going to YouTube to learn. So they come in, they want to learn. So they're not like, on the meme train. They're not in this, like, cultural zeitgeist train. They're just like, but why would you use this if Statement to want to switch statement in this one particular case? And you're just like, well, that's not what I'm trying to do here.

Lex Fridman (186:47)

Yeah, you want to captain the meme train or you want to ride on the meme train.

Michael Paulson (186:52)

Yeah. Or you just want to be able to, like, create a culture on your chat, because your chat's going to be some variation of the. Of that kind of zeitgeist that's flowing through Twitch. And it kind of is very contiguous between X and Twitch. It just feels really out of sync with YouTube. And then YouTube particularly does a bad job, and some people would argue a good job because you can swim. Swim being you can actually change what timestamp you're at. So all of a sudden you'll be like, oh, yeah, you know, I. You know, something about, like, driving to soccer in my Minivan. And then 20 minutes later you'll be talking about Zig. And someone's like, I personally use whatever to drive to soccer. And you're like, what are we talking about? About, like. So YouTube is a very disjointed chat as well, because it depends on where they're at within the video. Swim comes from Netflix, by the way, called Swim.

Lex Fridman (187:37)

Swim the term.

Michael Paulson (187:39)

Yeah, that's. That's that we people said swim.

Lex Fridman (187:42)

Oh, so you're.

Michael Paulson (187:43)

You're okay swimming through the yeah.

Lex Fridman (187:45)

So you're not just making up the term. Thank you. Wow.

Michael Paulson (187:47)

Yeah, but it's probably made up and probably only 10 people said at Netflix and so no one's going to know it and they're going to be like, yeah, right, that thought happens on Netflix.

Lex Fridman (187:55)

So, going back to projects. What, what projects? On stream or in general?

Michael Paulson (187:59)

No, no. You need to answer why YouTube chat's the best chat.

Lex Fridman (188:03)

Well, you kind of convinced me. Okay. Why YouTube is the best chat. Well, I think I'm just a hater. That's. That's basically what it boils down to. And I'm just talking shit. And I'm probably just like from the outside shoot, you know, shooting in. Because Twitch is such a fun culture, you know, of memes. And so it's just fun to shoot from the outside to like, to like egg the house of Twitch. And then I just sit back on my lawn chair and with the small YouTube community just talking shit. No, you're absolutely right. There is a, there's a real sort of sense of community that Twitch can, can form. But I just like the openness of YouTube. It's just better at opening to the world. It's more accessible, it's easier to share. It's just a more established platform that's all fully on that for the non. For the open world. Like I can send it to people that don't usually watch video game streaming or that kind of stuff.

Michael Paulson (189:04)

Yeah, if you send a Twitch link, they're like, I don't like video games. And you're like, well, actually it's not video games that talk happens every single time you mention Twitch. Because Twitch does have a perspective about it that YouTube does not.

Lex Fridman (189:17)

I was just on Joe Rogan's podcast and I think it came up, he asked something like, is Twitch still a thing? So that just gives you an example. And then, and then Jamie said, yeah, yeah, it's definitely still a thing. It's still like growing and so on. And so yeah, there's just a big slice of humans that don't participate in the Twitch, Twitch sphere. Yeah, I just like talking shit.

Michael Paulson (189:44)

So yeah, that's a beautiful answer.

Lex Fridman (189:46)

But it's cool that you sort of make it accessible on all these different platforms. And I have high hopes for X. But yeah, that's feature wise. It still has a lot of growing up to do.

Michael Paulson (189:56)

And just like, why do people use X? You typically are going there for like a text based interaction you want to look through. So I also think they just have like a user expectation change that needs to happen. And that, that just takes a while, you know, that's going to take a little bit before people get to it. I think their idea of Audio first is a great first step where people can kind of listen to it and have the phone away. Maybe there's a lot of, like, changes that have to happen before X can be successful. Land.

Lex Fridman (190:22)

I mean, X is this incredible comment section, just like Reddit. Right. So it's like.

Michael Paulson (190:27)

No, no, you said incredible. That's not Reddit comment section. Correct.

Lex Fridman (190:31)

Comment. Yeah. Incredibly dynamic and vibrant. Even if it's. Yeah. What is the. What is the technological platform? Like, how does the, the interface and the technology shape. Shape the discourse? It's fascinating because X is a different style than Reddit, different style than, like, Facebook, different style than Instagram. It's interesting. And all those comment sections are different technologically, like how the sorting is done, how easy it is to sort of build a community around it, you know, because YouTube. YouTube is not really a community. Every single video on YouTube has its own mini community. You're, like, all talking on just that one video.

Michael Paulson (191:22)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (191:22)

Like, you're not. You can't jump across.

Michael Paulson (191:25)

There's not like, hey, Bill, hey, Jordan. There's no cross talk that happens in multiple videos.

Lex Fridman (191:30)

Yeah, but community is awesome. I love community. I love the feeling of community. And I guess that's what twitch really provides.

Michael Paulson (191:37)

YouTube also does have it, though. Like, they have an aggregate community. You know, there's a lot of fun comments and all that on the videos and a lot of thumbs up. And then you see the fun discourse that happens and it's like, that's the community. It's just only a certain slice sees it.

Lex Fridman (191:51)

I think that's even More so on YouTube for live streaming, though. All the same folks show up and they talk shit, they celebrate. They all like the. The meme train arrives.

Michael Paulson (192:01)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (192:02)

Okay, so now what projects shape you as a program? What are the ones you streamed or offline?

Michael Paulson (192:12)

For me, I don't know if there's like a one project I can point to, but I can. I can point to a specific spot where I think it happens and where I think you can learn a lot from. Any small program you write will be somewhere between like a thousand to five thousand lines of code. I consider, like a pretty dang small project. You can kind of correlate this to any feature within a larger system as well. Well, you know, a specific feature on a website could be a thousand lines, a couple thousand lines. There's a point in which all of Your choices add up and that's. I typically find that right around 5 to 10,000 lines of code, the choices you've made either weigh you down or kind of free you up. And so it's right in that that I feel like I learned the most is because I love getting to that point in a project or in some small part of the code base. Because at that point I get a test. A, how good were my initial gut decisions about how I designed software? But B, now I need to go back and think about like, how am I going to do testing across this in a more effective way? How can I scale this out to 20,000 lines of code? How can I do all these things with what I've got or do I need to kind of rethink it? And I find that that's really where the best learning happens, is that everybody has probably a different number that exists. And as you go to each one of these numbers or how well or holistic you want your project to be, I think that you'll come up with different numbers. And I think that number should just get bigger as you get more experienced. Because you know, there's like, there's projects that are a million lines of code, but they're most certainly not holistic. Right. Like every part of the code base is some age at some capsule of time with some sort of programming style. Some is more functional, more class based, more God help your soul for its pre processor macros. And C, Right. Like there's like all these different kind of things you'll find throughout time. And so that's why I kind of try to think about it as like the feature or the thing you're working on. It's usually about 5,000 lines is where I find that things get kind of did I make good or bad decisions? And that's where I do all my learning is right on that phase. I'm trying to get it to the point where I should be able to shoot from the hip and do 20,000 lines and not be upset about it.

Lex Fridman (194:12)

So first of all, in the just enjoying the thing you create part. Yeah, about there, you can sit back and see all the parts dancing together for me. Also debugging, you get to see the choices you make materialize as like how easy it is to debug. Like, I'm a big proponent. I think you've mentioned this in the past. I put asserts everywhere.

Michael Paulson (194:36)

No, you are the reason why I do that. Yeah, you're like the first one. Keep on going. Sorry.

Lex Fridman (194:41)

Really? Okay. So for me, me One of the joys, whether it's try catch blocks, whether it's assert, whether it's with the testing, I get to see the payoff of all the minefield of asserts I've laid out before me in my kingdom by how quickly I can debug a system as it grows larger. And I can first of all discover errors before they become real bugs.

Michael Paulson (195:11)

Bugs.

Lex Fridman (195:11)

And also how quickly I can solve those errors. And that brings me joy. For me, a lot of the joys of programming is creating powerful systems that don't break down, that work correctly, that work correctly in majority of the cases. And there sort of the stress testing the system and getting all the signals from that system that everything is working correctly is, is something that fills me with joy and makes sure that the system actually works. So yeah, that I don't know if it's 5, 10,000 lines of code. If it's Java or C, it's millions lines of code. But yeah, in Python, yeah, I would say 10,000 lines of code. That's when you first get to see the magic. But anyway, you were saying.

Michael Paulson (195:56)

Okay, so you and John Carmack had a conversation about. Asserts.

Lex Fridman (195:59)

Yes.

Michael Paulson (195:59)

You talked about this idea of putting asserts everywhere that effectively crash the program. Program when you, you have some state in your program that should not be represented. And you have made this choice actively. And so I've never done that before. And I know this is like an old technique and I obviously must be too young or too dumb to know that this was a thing people did. I grew up in Java and I think that's probably why I didn't run into this. So I saw that, I was like, I'm curious about how to use asserts more. And then I ran into a person named Yoron. He's the CEO and creator of Tiger Beetle. It's like the world's fastest greatest financial database. And it was spawned out of a company that needed to do a bunch of financial transactions. And it's written in zig. And what they do is they do deterministic simulation testing and they just use NASA's kind of guarantee for creating really great software. So like don't use usize. Specify your exact size of int you expect everywhere. All these kind of like things they do, to be very specific. And one of them is that every function should contain maintain two asserts. Whether it's positive space like you know, these things should happen, or negative space like you should. This pointer should never be null. You're programming into things that should never happen. Normally you just never specify that you'd never think about that. So every single function everywhere has all these asserts. And these asserts run both in production and in testing. They're always on and then they take determination, simulation test, deterministic simulation, test, testing and run like 200 years of just random data, just complete slop going through the system and seeing how far it goes. And when an assert happens, they're like, here's the input that caused it. Here's every last little bit that happened. And now you can identify where this went wrong. And it was so cool. So between you, John Carmack and Yaron, that's where I like, okay, I got a really. And NASA. I'll throw NASA bone as well. NASA can join in on that one. I was like, okay, I want to try this. And I did try it. I built kind of like this big reverse proxy for me, trying to do some game development stuff. And I just went ham on the. Asserts. And then I built a whole simulation testing thing that could do everything deterministically so, you know, even the result of requests would all come in specific orders. And I found a bunch of bugs that I just would never have found. And then I did it for a game I was making. I found some bugs where my cursor went off screen. It would cause all these different problems because I just never tested them. And it's super fun and it's like a really great way to program.

Lex Fridman (198:18)

Yeah, I think it's a skill set you go over time. It's not just that you have to specify the preconditions, like everything that has to be true. It's also adding things that are like, you might not even think about. You have to sort of anticipate really weird things. And if you add, asserts, especially in complicated functions or in complicated classes that are able to catch really weird things, that's going to save you so many headaches and it's going to help you learn about your own code. This is one of the things, I think it was Jonathan Blow that either in conversation with you or was it in a presentation, he said that when he's starting on a project, he usually doesn't know how to implement it, how it's going to work. And I think he was saying that he wants a programming language. This might have been a criticism of C. I'm not sure where he wants to program a language that makes it as painless as possible for him to not know what he's doing, how he's going to implement it, and to quickly get to a place where he figures it Out I think there's a fundamental like part of programming is building stuff while not really knowing knowing what the next thing you're doing is. You kind of have a loose design, maybe a strict design, but really you're solving puzzles that are not. It is a dark room in a fundamental sense and there you have to anticipate the kind of weirdnesses that might emerge while not really knowing everything. Just this full like fog, fog of war. And there that's a real skill to anticipate the kind of issues that might arise and put asserts on top of them. And it's also like spiritually for me been a really nice way of programming, of building of living life is having like very strict asserts that say like you're going to fix this problem if it ever arises. You can't just look the other way. Like this idea of treating warnings as errors, like make sure your code compiles without any warnings, that was a big leap for me. It's like, but there's so many of them and it's not really that important. It's like no, no, no warnings. Like make sure you treat every single problem, even like fuzzy problems seriously because that's actually long term is going to create code that's much easier to work with, much more fun to work with, much more robust, resilient to all kinds of weirdnesses, all that kind of stuff. So it's a different way of approaching coding, probably more NASA like versus like web programming style. But yeah, it has made programming for me personally much more fun because one of the most painful things about programming is creating when you get past 10,000, 20,000 lines of code and you have to find a bug and that bug can take hours, it could take days to find. And that's torture.

Michael Paulson (201:35)

Yeah. When your system gets sufficiently large. Some of these bugs are just, they are very difficult. I you know, bless anyone's soul that's working on million line code bases because it does it just, I, I can't tell you how many times I've spent multiple days just trying to figure out the root cause of the bug. Not even the fix, just like why does this happen? And that's hard. So I love that. I just love the asserts because I'm not good at them. I can see it's definitely a skill that I don't, I don't put into practice constantly which means it's just not like a muscle memory type thing. And so it's just one of those things I just love. It's just, it's such a Fascinating way to approach a problem because I would have never thought, you know what I'm going to do if I'm wrong? I'm going to crash this thing. I'm going to crash it right here. Because I should never be wrong. But instead you're like, oh, actually that makes perfect sense. I should crash this thing. I've done something terribly wrong here. Why would this ever exist? And then you're like, this is going to solve a whole class of problems.

Lex Fridman (202:27)

Yeah. And especially if it's in production, it's like, well, users are going to see this crash. It's like, yeah, well you should minimize the number of times any user ever sees the crash. Not by like having a nice blue screen or whatever the fuck, but like actually stopping everything. And that's going to be, that's going to create an incentive for you to never have that happen. You're actually going to put in the time to make sure it never happens.

Michael Paulson (202:54)

And the nice part is like with the web and all that, you can always pop up something and say, hey, things have gone very, very wrong. We're unable to recover. You can like give them a nice message and then log it off so you can see it and then measure how often are you doing it. You know, I understand that there's a bit of interestingness to a, to a web project, like do you want to always crash a server? There's a bit of a gamble if you release a bad version and you crash all your servers constantly. You know, like that, that's a, that's a pain you're going to have to accept.

Lex Fridman (203:21)

I think this is more applicable for single systems like robots and so on. You have struggled with adhd. I think a lot of people are really inspired by the fact that you're able to be productive and flourish while having adhd. How'd you overcome it?

Michael Paulson (203:42)

Well, there's a lot of things that ADHD affects and so I'll start with some of the easiest things. Cause there's like directly applicable than like these kind of collateral damage applicable things that happen. So one thing that has really helped me with ADHD is maturity. I think that's just like, just a thing that everyone needs more of. Meaning that I found myself getting so wiggly and so out of control when I would try to sit down and read and I just, I just couldn't handle it. I just felt like I'd read a page and didn't read anything. Anything. The part of me that just went, oh my gosh, I just can't even do This I had to just simply quit listening to it and said, nope, I'm rereading this page. I'm re. I remember reading some pages in college, like 18 times in a row. Just like, I'm going to force myself to just do this the correct way. And so there's an aspect of maturity that really helps. No matter what, I will do the thing I'm going to do, and I'm going to do it well. And maybe it takes me a lot longer. And that's okay. That's not the point of it. It's that I'm doing it and that's the point. And so that's kind of like one thing I think just generally helps. And it. Adhd? No adhd. You know, the resilience, emotional resilience is just like a really important aspect that just helps. And so I think that has been a large part that really helps me. There's things that I still obviously struggle with. Like, it's clear where I'm really bad at stuff and just trying to, like, think through all the different things that I'm bad at. There's more things I'm bad at than I'm good at. And so programming obviously has something that just allows me to remain focused. And it's like a strength of mine. And so I started off where I could just do it for a little bit, and then just through kind of that emotional resilience, I was able to start doing it more and more. And so now I can just do it for like 10, 12, 15 hours at a time. And I absolutely love it. And so it's become kind of like a joy. It's like playing a musical instrument. I'm really into, into it. But then if it came down to, hey, you need to go schedule your own, you know, dentistry and go do all these other things or make sure the kids have this type of stuff ready for, you know, the meals you need to pack throughout the week. I'm historically very bad at that and will probably continue to be very bad at that. And so I must say that one of the reasons why I excel so much is because I also have a wife who. Who is so good to me. And she helps clear out a lot of the things in my life that cause a lot of, like, me kind of getting snowballed into a weird spot where I'm just, like, distracted getting nothing done. And so she's really helped me. So it'd be foolish of me to claim that I've defeated the ADHD by myself, but instead I find that the places that I can really control, I've done a very good job at. And the things that I obviously need to do much better at. My wife has helped me a whole bunch and so I've kind of cheated. Maybe I found a cheat. Cheat code, loving wife. But that has been the thing that has really helped.

Lex Fridman (206:36)

You said a lot of interesting things. So on the reading and the. For me, it's also audiobook side. I do the same thing and I've gotten much better at it, which is like, you know, I tune out mentally and I, you know, I'll. Yeah, there's, you know, read a page and you don't understand anything on the page. You didn't actually read it. And yeah, you. I forced myself to just reread it or re listen to an audiobook, which is much more common problem for me now. And forcing myself to really pay attention because I listen to audiobooks often when I run and it's so easy to just tune out.

Michael Paulson (207:10)

Yeah, it's a skill.

Lex Fridman (207:12)

Like, I didn't realize how much of a skill listening to an audiobook is, especially when there's other sensory inputs, like when you run. So I have to force myself to like, really pay attention to every single word. And if I don't, like, tune out and don't remember what I just listened to in the past 30 seconds, I force myself to re listen to it. And sometimes that means like five times until I, like, it's like punishing myself to like, you're going to listen to this boring over and over until you, you get good at that little skill of like, zoom in and you're like, yeah, there's people that are, like, doing stuff. There's nature doesn't matter. You're listening to every single word and loading it in and trying to stay focused even. There's just so many distractions all around you.

Michael Paulson (207:55)

Yeah, it's definitely a learned skill. And it takes a lot of time. And when I say, you know, oh, I was able to do from here to here, I'm speaking over the course of like five years of doing this every day. Like, it's not some small. There's no. You could. The nice part about that decision, though, is you can make that decision today. You can make it right now. You're gonna be like, from here on out, I'll never make that mistake again. I will say, I'm gonna read 50 pages. I will sit down and read 50 pages. And when I get distracted, I'll go back to the last place I remember and I'll start again. And like that's a decision you can make. That's a mature, mature, you know, non emotional decision to make. And you can do that. It just may be really painful for the first couple years of making said decisions and then it gets easier, and then it gets easier and then it just, it becomes more natural to change yourself. Yeah.

Lex Fridman (208:39)

And with every medium, with every platform, I think it's like a new skill for me, like using social media has been that just like, I end up like doom scrolling too easily on platforms. And one solution is not to look at all, which is kind of what I lean on mostly these days. But I feel like I should be able to check, just read. Okay. Feel a thing, learn a thing, and then put it down. Versus like this glazed look over your eye and you're not really paying attention anymore and you're dead inside and you feel horrible afterwards. I don't understand.

Michael Paulson (209:16)

And the horrible afterwards is real serious. I, I've definitely, I can 100 notice that I am a more anxious person the more time I spend scrolling. Yeah, Yeah, I can just feel it. It's like something inside of me that's kind of. I don't know how to say it other than it like wants to get out, but I don't really know what that is. It's, it's not anger, but it's not, you know, it's, it's very anxious.

Lex Fridman (209:37)

It's like the opposite of the feeling I have when I wake up in the morning and I'm feeling good and I look on out in nature and like look at the sun and just. And it's like a bird chirping and this kind of thing, like scrolling through social media, even if it's like super positive stuff or whatever, it's still not the same feeling as the bird chirping. Bird chirping on Instagram is a different bird chirping than in real life. Like, because bird chirping on Instagram, I'll start swiping until like, there's like demons of different types fighting inside my head. And then I, you know. Yeah, different anxiety, insecurity, whatever the hell. Just the mixture of chaos versus the bird chirping in real life. That's beautiful. But again, that's the same thing as with the audiobook. It boils down to like, man, these people that talk about meditation, I think that's probably they're onto something because like the, that's what, that's what it is, is be able to like focus calmly and deliberately on a third thing, whether it's reading or audiobook or existence. When they sort of observe the breath, you're able to silent out everything else, remove everything else from focus. Yeah, that's a skill I heard it.

Michael Paulson (210:51)

Put really beautifully, which is that we in America really have misunderstood liberty, because we typically have liberty as just the freedom to do whatever you want. And the argument was that it's not the freedom to do whatever you want. Want is the freedom to be able to do what you will. And how often is what you. You actually want to do, you don't do, because you get trapped doing something that you've convinced yourself in this quick moment you want to do. And so it's like, I want liberty. I want the ability to control my energy and to be able to, like, do the thing I want to do, not to get distracted and destroyed in all the millions of distractions. And some of us get, you know, handed a worse deck of cards, some of us get a better deck of cards, but I don't think there's anybody that doesn't struggle with it in the technological age.

Lex Fridman (211:33)

Yeah, that's the skill. What can you say to the skill of achieving focus and programming? Like, do you have a process of how you sit down and try to sort of approach a problem? So all the different. Not just distractions, but the challenges of starting a project, of thinking through, like, the design, how to maintain, like, real focus, because it's really difficult intellectually. Actual endeavor.

Michael Paulson (211:59)

I guess at this point, I'm lucky, but when I first started, I can remember that every last part of programming, I had to go look up, I had to go read. I had side quests at all time. Like, every step was a side quest. Why is my screen blinking when I'm trying to render this thing out? Oh, I didn't know about double buffering. Why is this happening? How do I even write to the screen? How do you know? Like, everything was a question. I had more questions than answers. And so I constantly had this, like, the problem of side quests. And I find that to be a very exhausting thing. But as I learned my instrument very, very well, I don't have as many side quests. I become more and more able to just focus on the thing I want to do. And I find that to be something that is just super, super useful. So when I say I'm kind of lucky, meaning that I've spent so much of my life preparing for this moment that now when I have the opportunity to do something, something, I can just do that thing. And I don't Like, I can be just on an airplane and I can just program for hours. I don't have to look up a single thing. I don't have to do anything. I don't even have to test the code. I can write a thousand lines of code on an airplane. And I'm very confident that it's going to be 98% pretty dang good. And I'm very happy about that because that allows me just to be in the moment solving the problem I'm trying to solve. Then I have 100% of my brain power solving a problem. And this is why I also. It's the same reason why I recommend learning how to type and learning your editor so well. You don't even have to think about the action because the people that have to. Even if you just look down, that's still mental processing power. You have to spend looking at a keyboard in which you already know where the key is. Like you do. You know, at this point, if you've been typing for thousands of hours, you know where the key is. Just stop looking down. You'll learn really quickly. And so it's like this thing where it's like, I'm not going to spend all that time and all that mental effort, like, looking up the thing. I'm going to just memorize, you know, I'm just going to get it in me and then I can go fast past and it feels good. And so that's how I'd kind of defeat that is because now I get to do something where it's like, there's no more questions. It's now me just expressing myself into this medium. And it feels really good.

Lex Fridman (214:00)

I'm sure there's still like, things that pull at you, like curiosities, distractions, like, oh, I wonder how. You know, anytime I guess you have access to the Internet, you're gonna like.

Michael Paulson (214:11)

Twitter's a big one on that one.

Lex Fridman (214:12)

Yeah, you're gonna get curious about stuff, including, I guess you're speaking about everything in the editors optimized. But you're okay. You can always improve stuff. You can always find better sort of plugins and macros and oh, let me. You know what, this thing that took this pain point, I just found this tiny pain point. Let me spend the next five days creating a plugin for my editor or whatever the fuck to remove that one pain point when you should have just kept going, going, as opposed to taking the side quest.

Michael Paulson (214:44)

So I have a rule which is I do not edit my rc. Other than some kind of cataclysmic thing. Like someone updates a plugin. I didn't know they updated. Now there's like a hard error in my editor and I have to like move forward. But I have a rule where I will edit my rc, my Neo Vim RC or anything once a year. Something that bothers me. I'll write it down, I'll remember it. I'll be like, okay, I want to change that, but I will just not go back now. Every now and then I, I, I'll break that rule if I know like, oh, I want a new remap to be able to do this one command. And that takes like literally 13 seconds. Like copy, paste, do this. Pop, pop, pop. Done. Okay, I have this new remap. It made perfect sense in this situation. But I don't go plug and exploring. I don't try to solve every problem. I don't want a perfect editor because that is a pursuit that will never stop. I just go, this is good. Good break point. I won't do it again. So I spent last month, I probably spent spend a hundred hours just like editing every possible thing I could about how I start up my system and make I can have a computer from 0 to 60 in almost no time now. Everything the way I exactly want it. Neovim, everything, all perfectly set up. Happy enough. I'm not going to touch that system again. Maybe I'll touch it next year. Maybe I'll take a year off. You know, it's just, I'm fine with that. I'm fine with not being perfect.

Lex Fridman (215:58)

All right, zero to 60, let's talk about the perfect setup. What's your perfect programming setup? Keyboard. Operating system. How many screens? Chair.

Michael Paulson (216:09)

All right, I like all these ide.

Lex Fridman (216:13)

Let's go.

Michael Paulson (216:14)

So keyboard, you're using my favorite keyboard right there. The Kinesis advantage saved my career. Beautiful. Keyboard concavity and thumb clusters are just so important because if you really think about it, especially if you're using query, when you're pressing the symbols like on a standard keyboard, you're just doing this the whole time. Backspace, enter symbols. Like you're just doing this and just screws up your wrist constantly doing this. And this one you're constantly doing like control and shift. It's just like messing you up. So it's just like right here. That's so much nicer in life. So keyboard, most important, I'd say get that one done.

Lex Fridman (216:46)

For people who don't know Kinesis keyboard, I think the thing that you experience the most is exactly the thing you just said. No. Now, which is the backspace is really easy to press.

Michael Paulson (216:57)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (216:58)

Versus what it is on normal keyboards. So backspace in general symbolizes like you're deleting a thing. It symbolizes a mistake, not symbolizes. It usually means a mistake. And so not only did you just make a mistake in what you were typing, you also have to take a physically painful action. Annoying action.

Michael Paulson (217:18)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (217:19)

To fix that mistake. Mistake. And for most of us, we make a lot of mistakes. So Kinesis just makes it pleasant and fast and easy physically to correct the mistake. That's probably for me the number one reason of Kinesis. Everything else. Yeah. Super plus with the macros and the positioning, the concavity like you mentioned. But there mistakes are pleasant.

Michael Paulson (217:42)

Yeah. I'm on that team. That's why. So that's why I love that. So that's. I would say that's one of the most important things. The next thing I find to be very, very important. Important is that one monitor. I'm a one monitor kind of guy.

Lex Fridman (217:54)

What really?

Michael Paulson (217:55)

So when I program, when I do anything now when I stream, I obviously have a second computer that runs the stream because you know, I sometimes crash my computer at the restart or whatever. So I do have a second screen there that, that I put stuff up. But most of the time you'll notice that even when I'm streaming, you've been there, I have to physically switch to the streaming chat channel for me to read it. And that's because I'm operating off of one screen. And so I have this whole style in which I like to Navigate, inspired by StarCraft, is that I believe in the press one key, go where you want to be mentality. And so everything about my setup is press one key. So when I want to go to Twitch chat, alt2twitch chat. When I go on and go to my browser alt1, that's my browser alt3, that's where I go to my programming. That's Power finger. Obviously a big middle finger right there. Just smash it down. Alt 6 is going to be gimp. So my GNU image manipulation program. So if I want to draw, I go there. When I used to have slack, it was alt 5. If I have a spare terminal where I need to run some extra things, that's alt 4. I had all these kind of. Everything is perfectly mapped out to single key. And then when it comes down to using say tmux, I have all my terminals into one single terminal. And now I'm able to kind of switch between there Prefix one goes to my vim Editor. Whatever project I'm in, it's always the first TMUX tab, if you will. I'm not sure they call it a session, but I'm not sure how to describe it. If you're not familiar with TMUX a tab. Second one is like my spare terminal. Third one is my long running process terminal. My fourth one is a long running process terminal. So I have it all set up. So every project I go to automatically spawns Session 1, Vim Session 2, Spare Terminal, Session 3 will also open it. So it's like everything's just ready to rock. Everything has been optimized to where I do that. If I want to go to a project, it's Control F in any terminal will bring up a fuzzy find list of every one of my folders on my operating system in which I can go to with just a couple keystrokes and boom, I'm in that one now. And so it's like very oriented to find where I need to be as quickly as possible.

Lex Fridman (219:51)

Via keyboard.

Michael Paulson (219:52)

Via keyboard. Then in Vim, I developed a plugin called Harpoon, which is I press one button and I can pin one of the files to like a temporary buffer. I think Projector is potentially close to this in Emacs. I can't remember if Projectile. I think Projectile is closer to my sessionizing script. Anyways, so now I can. I have four pinned files in which I can go to any of those pinned files with just a single keystroke. And so now it's just like. Because every time you develop a feature, usually you have like three files you're kind of primarily working in. And I can fuzzy find for the other files and that's that. But usually I just have like these three power files that I'm always swapping in between. And so it's like now everything is just I want to go to the browser, that's one press. I want to go to my workstation, that's one press. I want to go to a specific folder, I need to change folders. Sometimes you work between two different projects. So in tmux, that's prefix capital L will swap between your last two. So I have alternate projects. I can even swap between projects in pretty much one key. So it's just like dude, dude. Just trying to optimize it. So I don't think as much because I think search fatigue is a massive fatigue fail where you have to look for like when I see people on a Mac do this and then explode all the different ones, that gives me anxiety. I'M like, why are you using your eyeballs to search for what you want to do? Like make it into a key press and never think about it again, ever.

Lex Fridman (221:13)

You're making me think a lot. Whether I can live with your system, whether it's better because it feels better.

Michael Paulson (221:19)

At least intellectually feels better. It may not be great for some people.

Lex Fridman (221:22)

There's a few profound things he said which is like really what your. The, the. The number of windows or tasks you're switching between, whether it's programming, the number of files you're working on is small.

Michael Paulson (221:33)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (221:33)

At any one time, at any one like space of like 20 minutes or something like that. So okay, that's. That's a profound truth. Sometimes we think like, oh, I need the full freedom to search, but you don't. You usually work on a very small slice. But I guess the trade off there, like I always have three months monitors. Not when I'm traveling, but my happy place is three monitors. It's like, do you really need all of them to be present there? So you're turning your head now the monitors I have is two vertical ones, which is just better for certain kinds of content. I mean they're positioned vertically so you can read. You can use your eyes to scan quickly.

Michael Paulson (222:14)

Interesting. So I don't even do that. I even have it so zoomed in that I probably only had like maybe 25 lines of code at any one time on my 27 inch monitor. Monitor.

Lex Fridman (222:22)

Yeah. I think that's okay. I think I feel fundamentally constrained when I can't see more. Because your, your eyes are just good at jumping. Like, okay, like you could like why not search?

Michael Paulson (222:38)

Why not press a couple keystrokes? Control U, control D. Jump down by up and up and down by half past.

Lex Fridman (222:43)

Because the APE visual system was designed to like, you're loading a lot of information. Information. Like what if every time you have to investigate this table, what's on this table, you had to press a keystroke. You, you could develop the skill set that integrates that information. But like it's really. There is an effective thing where if you have a sheet of paper like this and I'm looking at it, my eyes will be able to load it in. The structure of the information, the topics of the information. You just can do it faster. I think there's a big cost because it's an extra monitor, but there is some stuff that's vertical when vertically positioned. Code. See code is an iffy1 because code 25 lines at a time. I think you can Do a lot. This is more for articles and, and especially with visual information in them or documentation, you can just jump faster. But I'm trying to. As you were speaking so eloquently, I was like wondering, am I just, like, deceiving myself that I need that? Can I just keyboard shortcutify everything and just have everything on one monitor? That's something I should probably try because I'm a big proponent of just automating everything but the keyboard. Keyboard, because you could just move really, really fast. You don't have to think one of my. You know, because I also do creative stuff like whether it's recording music or video editing, it's. It's hard. You know, some of these programs don't make it super easy for you. On Windows, with auto hockey, you can do quite a lot, but still, there's limitations on how much you could do with the keyboard. So that's it. Really. It's a pain in the ass to have to use them else. But, man, you're really making me think.

Michael Paulson (224:38)

It'S, you know, the, even the text one with the reading one. I like, fundamentally, I think I agree with you that you can, you can see a lot more and you can kind of look up and down and see those two things. And probably in articles or things like that, I could. You know, if there's like a graph down here that's really big that take up your whole screen plus text, I could see why that would be very beneficial to zoom out, to be able to have all that information. But for me, I can only look at like a square inch. Like, really, that's all my eyes can actually focus on. So when I'm reading, I'm right here. Then I have to, like, structurally try to pattern match what I think the information looks like. Then I have to start reading it. So I'm not exactly sure if I actually get any real benefit of having a lot of stuff on screen as opposed to. I can relax my eyes so much, I don't even have to focus. The words are so big. Like, I actually program pretty zoomed in. My text is bigger than this when I program. And so it's just that it's so comfortable. I don't even have to exert any effort to read the code.

Lex Fridman (225:31)

But you have to kind of train your brain to know that you can navigate gate in the, like, spatially using keys.

Michael Paulson (225:38)

Yeah. Neovim, by the way.

Lex Fridman (225:41)

Oh, maybe it has everything to do with neovim. Okay.

Michael Paulson (225:44)

All right. And then neovim's obviously the next big One I love neovim. Reason being is that I think you can make all the arguments that you want about which editor is the best. I do not think you can make an argument that VIM motions aren't superior.

Lex Fridman (225:55)

Here we go. Can you explain VIM motions? What is this? So Neo Vim Vim is an old school editor. Neo Vim.

Michael Paulson (226:02)

It's a modern take on an old school editor.

Lex Fridman (226:04)

Yeah. And what's Eli 5? What does it take to work with Neovim?

Michael Paulson (226:14)

Okay, I thought you were talking about a VIM motion there. That's how. But you know that meme that's just like, hey, Jarvis, can I tell you about VIM motions? Because they can't fit anything else in their head because they only have vimotions. You said EL5. Like explain it like I'm five, but in my head it's like, okay, E's jump to the end of the word. Ls one more word like, dude, I'm so like broken. I'm like, okay, VIM motions when I hear letters. Yeah. So you can think of it like this is that VIM has a language to describe movements in text because its primary mode of operation is manipulating or editing text. So it is a well thought through set of movements. Deleting, yanking, pasting, copying, all that kind of stuff that goes in motions that are optimized for working with pretty much code. Good example. Say you have three lines of code you want to delete. If you're in VS code, take your little beautiful mouse, highlight those things, press the backspace. That's lovely. Your hand left the keyboard. Very simple to do, though. It's very beginner friendly. I was a huge VIM hater, by the way. So I just want you to know that before we go into this, I was probably the biggest VIM hater. If there is an like Saul to Apostle Paul, I am like the Saul to Apostle Paul of Vim, just so you see how big the gap was.

Lex Fridman (227:27)

Y.

Michael Paulson (227:27)

Or you can do something that's like, I don't know what the VS code shortcut is, but I'm sure there's some keys you can press to delete the current line you're on. Delete, delete, delete. Right. You can just do that in vim. I can go dap, delete around paragraph. All contiguous code in that thing I'm going to delete. So D then I can choose my motion. I want to take AP around paragraph, paragraph. Or maybe I want a D. F mean jump up to the next character that matches the Next character I'm going to press. So D F opening parenthesis will delete everything from your cursor up to the first opening parenthesis. So you get to describe your motion in these little keystrokes. And as you get really good, you know, you've seen people that can master Fortnite. It's the same thing with mastering VIM motions. When you get so good, you no longer think about each individual movement. Instead you're just like, get rid of the paragraph, jump here, jump this, highlight this, yank this, do this. You know, it becomes so fast that you can superiorly edit text at a very fast rate. And there comes a point where when you know your language really well, you know the problem you're really working on really well, where editing text and getting code out actually becomes one of the many bottlenecks people always talk about. Well, most of the time I think most of the time I'm not thinking, I'm programming. I know what I want to do. I want to go as fast as possible because I've been just doing it for so long and I'm so familiar with kind of the general space that it becomes a huge problem for me. I cannot tell you how many times that I've been purely bottlenecked by the fact that I just can't type fast enough. I just need to get the. I just need to get it out of my head onto the, you know, onto the text editor. And so that's why I think vim motions are superior in all aspects. Keep your hands on the keyboard, on the home row and can manipulate text in very wide and fast ways.

Lex Fridman (228:59)

So this is not just about writing text, this is about modifying text. It's primarily about modifying text.

Michael Paulson (229:04)

Yes.

Lex Fridman (229:04)

And I'm sure that most editors, including Emacs, including VS code, can do all those same things. Things. But there is something. They just don't encourage you to discover those things. Yeah, that's like an important thing about a lot of technologies that. And programming languages that a lot of them can do a lot of the stuff.

Michael Paulson (229:25)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (229:26)

But it's something about whether it's the community or the style of the language or anything like this that encourages you to not be lazy in the beginning and learn the fast way to edit text. In this particular example, how to use the keyboard. That's a fascinating sort of just reality of how technology is used. You want to be encouraged to find the fast thing as quickly as possible so that long term it's efficient and fun to use the key.

Michael Paulson (229:54)

It takes a long time for dividends like a long time. But on top of that, notice I didn't say vim. I'm not saying go use vim. I'm saying vim motions. Let me give you one more example. Okay. I'm big fan. Okay, let's say you have a line that can. That contains some. Some variable, some function. You're calling something that takes in a string and you need to do that again. So you, you. You would typically copy that line. You'd paste that line below, you'd go into the string and you'd change the string. Let's say it's calling some sort of configuration. You need to call it three times with three different configuring strings. In vim I can. I like to do shift V to highlight the whole line. Then some people do yy, but I don't like to do double ones. I like to be able to do two different fingers because you can do that way faster than one finger twice. Just a little optimization for me because you can't press that as fast. So anyways, very optimized in my approach. So I yank the line, paste the line CI double quotes will delete everything inside the first occurring string. Then I can type the string escape save. And so it's like so optimized that I can just jump so fast in between that where. Whereas the copying and pasting line is probably the same speed, but the navigating to the string, deleting what's currently in the string and then you know, like that's such a fast motion in vim, and I just do that all the time to backtrack.

Lex Fridman (231:09)

Really dumb question. CI what's the difference between typing the letters and using the letters to navigate? And how do you switch between the two modes?

Michael Paulson (231:19)

Okay, so insert mode means that you're just putting in text.

Lex Fridman (231:21)

Yep.

Michael Paulson (231:22)

And then normal mode means that you're moving your cursor.

Lex Fridman (231:25)

And how do you switch between the two?

Michael Paulson (231:27)

Escape. Escape goes from insert mode into normal mode. And to go into insert mode, press I to take your current cursor and go to the beginning A to go to the end of your cursor capital A. To go to the end of the line, capital I. To go to the beginning line O to put a new line below and then put your cursor at the proper intent for the language. Shift O to shift your current line down and then put a new line in. Like you can see. Yeah, there's like a lot.

Lex Fridman (231:49)

I'm pressing escape a lot.

Michael Paulson (231:50)

Yeah, I mapped mine. I do control C. Control C does the same thing, except for in one Edge Edge case. People hate that. I got used to it just due to the fact that I was using IntelliJ and I really hate pressing the Escape key, so I just got used to pressing Escape.

Lex Fridman (232:02)

That seems like an essential thing to do if you're using neovim to map escape to something.

Michael Paulson (232:07)

Cap lock would be like your standard go to.

Lex Fridman (232:09)

Oh, yeah, I map it too. Cool. I gotcha.

Michael Paulson (232:12)

Yeah. So then it's just really easy to press it and boom, boom, boom. Not a big deal at all. But yeah, I think that if you're willing to learn it, the emotions are superior. But if you're not willing to learn learn it, then they're not superior. You should just not do it. Right. If you're willing to endure pain, it's good. If you're not, it's actually way worse. It's a hundred times worse.

Lex Fridman (232:30)

Right. So if you like pain, you use neovim. Totally.

Michael Paulson (232:33)

Yeah. You're totally on board. See, now you get it.

Lex Fridman (232:35)

If you like Joy, you use Emacs, so.

Michael Paulson (232:37)

Oh, sorry. Sorry. Did Emacs ever get a good text editor? I know they're a great operating system, but I never caught up if they.

Lex Fridman (232:44)

Got a good text editor operating system. I think you've been miseducated, my friend. So at least 30 minutes on Emacs vs Neovim is what Reddit requested. Have you actually used Emacs in order to be able to talk so much shit or.

Michael Paulson (232:58)

No, I used it for a year.

Lex Fridman (233:00)

You used it for a year?

Michael Paulson (233:01)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (233:01)

Yeah.

Michael Paulson (233:01)

Doom Max, Space Max and regular Emacs.

Lex Fridman (233:04)

But you don't know Lisp, so you. Did you really use it?

Michael Paulson (233:07)

I kind of hacked my way through. Kind of like. Okay, so this is how the config, you know, like you can kind of get your way through and do all that.

Lex Fridman (233:13)

So you recommend to sort of mastering U of M and really learn the depths of it. But Emacs is okay to just kind of use before making a judgment. I think. I think everybody.

Michael Paulson (233:23)

You got me on that one.

Lex Fridman (233:24)

Yeah. No. And what's new of him written is Lua.

Michael Paulson (233:28)

Yeah. So Lua would be the configuration language. But you have. It's written in C, but you have Lua for. And Lua is just a dead simple language. Anyone can program Lua.

Lex Fridman (233:36)

I actually don't know why. I think it's because my love for Lisp that I went with Emacs. I think you just choose a path and you walk down that path. Path. And because there's just such A vibrant, intense battle between the two communities. You just start fighting just because everybody else is fighting. And then one day you're like an old warrior, like on a horse, and you're wondering, what was this all for? And I mean, it's quite sad in all seriousness that I haven't to this day tried new of him. It's I think because there is a learning curve. There's a learning curve to a lot of these editors.

Michael Paulson (234:16)

Yeah, to really like, to really learn it.

Lex Fridman (234:19)

To really learn it. And I think there, this is some of the criticism of maybe Vs Code or Sublime or Atom, but that it's so easy to not learn it, to just kind of half ass use it. And there is a big benefit to having editors that like force you to have some learning curve where you like take the art, the, the science, the procedure of editing seriously because like you spend so much time in it, you might as well like learn like how to use the, the thing.

Michael Paulson (234:50)

My big takeaway really, like what I'm trying to say with all these words is that I honestly don't actually think that the editor obviously does not make the programmer, but I think it says a lot about your character as a programmer if you don't know how to use your editor. Well, there's something about a person who's willing to commit their life to programming and spending literally 50,000 hours doing an activity over the course of their lifetime and never take the time to learn their editor through and through. It just seems strange like, right, you'd never see that in another world where people would be able to build something or do something and just completely forget how these things work and only just focus on one part, part of like their craft. And so to me it's just like it doesn't matter how you use it. I want to see the person that just knows how to use it and they know how to use it well, when there's a problem, they can say why the problem exists and then go and fix the problem. To me that's like, there you go, you've done it. You now know your tool. Go forth and conquer with said tool.

Lex Fridman (235:49)

Especially for tools you use a lot, you have to look at like your whole life, your life, whatever. If you're a developer, developer or anything. Like what is the thing you do a lot?

Michael Paulson (236:01)

Meetings. Yeah, yeah, I mean, keep going.

Lex Fridman (236:06)

Ask a question like, how can this be done a lot better? Because every single day you do this for hours a day. How many hours did you spend on thinking how to do this better or whether to do it at all. In the case of meeting things, people surprisingly just don't do this enough. I see this just to go back to jiu jitsu. There's a lot of people that show up and do jiu jitsu or martial arts, and they do it the same way over and over and over. And they invest tremendous amount of energy and they don't ask like, how do I do it differently to improve faster. In the case of Jiu jitsu or any kind of sport, same with practicing the piano or the guitar. Just religiously put in a lot of time and derive a lot of joy from getting better. They don't enough ask the meta question of like, how can I do this better? And with editors, it's surprisingly how. How often people do just that.

Michael Paulson (237:05)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (237:05)

With typing, it's surprising how many people do just that. Like you said, they like they're pecking or looking down. It's like the, the quality of life improves movement. You can have by learning to touch type, by just like typing without looking. It's like it's, it's, it's like immeasurable. You're bringing a lot of joy to your life because all of us are typing a lot.

Michael Paulson (237:27)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (237:28)

And yeah, I mean, the, the reason, by the way, I, I was extremely efficient with Emacs. I'm sure. You know, all jokes aside, it feels like neovim has more room for the kind of efficiency I've had with Emacs. To be able to move really fast as you described me, to edit, there is a real joy. It's not just efficiency, it's a freedom that you can get when you get really good with an editor. The reason I chose to go with VS code is it felt like there's going to be an acceleration of features to which neovim or Emacs will not be able to catch up in the. And I don't mean in the next five years, I mean the next 30 years.

Michael Paulson (238:14)

Like.

Lex Fridman (238:14)

And it felt like I almost wanted to take the pain of learning new editors constantly and just switching and learning that because I was getting so comfortable in Emacs, you know, this Kinesis keyboard, everything, all the shortcuts I know how to program. And it felt like this is not, you know, Neovim will not be here in 50 years. Possibly might be, I don't know. But it felt like you want to learn these constant sort of different technologies. Now, cursor is example, a great example of that. I've primarily am using cursor now. I'll go back to VS Code and Cursor. Just the skill of using AI is a real skill. Like you know, with from the shortcuts to the timing to the layout of the windows, to how I think about where, when and how to use AI, that doesn't distract me, that it empowers me. Not just for the fuck of it or for the fun of it, for the actual measure of productivity. It's a skill. And I feel like I would be stuck in local maximum of comfort if I stayed with Emacs. And maybe the same should be true for me with neovim. I should try it. Seriously. I'm sure there's a plug in like a co pilot type of situation that you could set up with NEO vim. I should possibly consider that. But like Cursor is doing a lot of really fascinating stuff on the IDE side. Not just sort of generate code and like edit that code manually. It's like continuously be able to rewrite code. It's like the idea of tab, tab, tab tab move the cursor around but also modify parts of code and do the diff really nicely. That whether it's Cursor or VS code that wins that battle with Copilot, I don't know. But that feels like a fundamentally different experience than the really efficient, joyful experience that you just described. And you're selling me on. This is neovim that doesn't have AI in the picture obviously immediately, but you can. Yeah, absolutely.

Michael Paulson (240:15)

I would 100% agree that cursor seems like such a cool product. Like I actually think there's like a lot of really neat things coming down with all that. And I could, you know, I could change from neovim. I don't use neovim because I love neovim. I use neovim because I love the instrument I play. And so it's like if Cursor can meet those needs, I could see myself moving over. I don't have some sort of obsessed attachment with it. I am curious though that, you know, every time I use a. I think I just have skill issues. I think I'm just so riddled with skill issues when it comes to using AI. I've yet to be able to use it in a way that I really love it.

Lex Fridman (240:51)

We'll talk about it, but before then.

Michael Paulson (240:53)

Oh, ball to sit on. I forgot to say that Ball to sit on.

Lex Fridman (240:56)

Yeah.

Michael Paulson (240:56)

Desk needs to be properly heighted. One monitor. I should be 2/3 way up the screen. I don't like to turn my head. I prefer my, my hands in Kind of like a pistol neutral position. And there you go.

Lex Fridman (241:10)

A ball to sit on. Yoga ball.

Michael Paulson (241:11)

Yoga ball.

Lex Fridman (241:12)

What's that about?

Michael Paulson (241:13)

It just helps, just maintain good posture because when I have something to lean against, I do this.

Lex Fridman (241:18)

So you're for hours sitting without. Wait, what are you doing?

Michael Paulson (241:22)

I sit on a ball and then I bounce.

Lex Fridman (241:25)

Is your back leaning on a thing?

Michael Paulson (241:26)

No.

Lex Fridman (241:27)

What the.

Michael Paulson (241:28)

Well, how else do you like the problems?

Lex Fridman (241:30)

Do you, you're the only person in the world sitting on a yoga ball as you program for hours. You do realize this, right?

Michael Paulson (241:38)

It feels great. I mean, okay, I, I, the problem is, is whenever I get a back, I just slouch and I find myself just getting uncomfortable and I'm like, why am I, I'm uncomfortable. Like my, my shoulders are kind of getting goofed up. I just like, I'm chicken necking like constantly. Like, you know, it's just like.

Lex Fridman (241:54)

But you're able to keep your posture for hours on a yoga ball?

Michael Paulson (241:57)

Yeah, and so I can just do that. And then I find myself if I slouch, I'm like, okay, nope, gotta get back.

Lex Fridman (242:02)

You know you have like incredible back muscles or what?

Michael Paulson (242:04)

No, I, I, well I, I don't think it takes incredible back muscles to keep posture remain upright. Yeah, I think that's a pretty basic human function. I would not consider myself a strong person.

Lex Fridman (242:14)

Yeah, basic human function. I don't know.

Michael Paulson (242:17)

Facts and logic.

Lex Fridman (242:19)

Okay, cool. With one screen. Neovim with Operating System Linux.

Michael Paulson (242:27)

Just because I, I want a good window manager. That's the whole. Press one button, bring up Chrome. I just use i3. I'm sure I could use something better than i3. People always tell me all these window managers are really great, but I just want, I just have like those three screens I switch between. So it doesn't really, I don't really care what I use as long as I can press one button and go.

Lex Fridman (242:47)

Yeah, I'm the same. So half and half. So half Linux, the other half Windows with Linux meaning wsl. What's that? Windows subsystem for Linux.

Michael Paulson (242:57)

Weasel.

Lex Fridman (242:58)

Weasel. See? No, there's gotta be a better one that's more positive.

Michael Paulson (243:03)

Weasel just sounds, seems right up Microsoft's alley. That seems perfect.

Lex Fridman (243:09)

So people often accuse me of being a shill for somebody. Sometimes dictators. If I'm a shill for anybody, it's for Windows. There you go. I get paychecks every, every week from.

Michael Paulson (243:20)

Bought by Bill Gates.

Lex Fridman (243:22)

Well, he's not Microsoft anymore. Developers, Developers. Developers. No, I'm just joking. I think, man, I Need to try Mac. I need to. I need to try. I'm surrounded. I'm surrounded by people. People with iPhones. I use Android.

Michael Paulson (243:37)

I use Android.

Lex Fridman (243:38)

Yeah, there you go. See?

Michael Paulson (243:40)

Oh, we're losers together.

Lex Fridman (243:41)

Losers on a sinking ship. Okay, so just to stay on you event for a sec and to give love and a shout out to your friend Teege.

Michael Paulson (243:54)

He streams, by the way, he's a.

Lex Fridman (243:56)

Streamer and I subscribed and I've been enjoying it. My allegiance is slowly shifting from you to him. The quality is far superior with him. The looks, the intelligence, the skill set, everything just far superior. No. Okay, so, you know, you're making his day. All right, so he mentioned that he loves neovim because it gives him the ability to eliminate having to do things he doesn't like. Like that's just a nice way to, to frame sort of. What does the automation process that you describe of automating away, assigning shortcuts to things that are painful so that, that, that procedure, I mean, I wonder if you agree with that.

Michael Paulson (244:46)

Fully agree. We have very similar mentalities when it comes to usage of neovim, why people should use it, all that kind of stuff and how to even use it. Well, he definitely takes it probably to a further degree. He spends more time automating and all that. Um, I don't necessarily derive a lot of joy from getting the perfect setup and so, but a lot to learn from. He's very, he's very, very good at what he does. He is by far probably one of these. He's 30 years old, been programming for not too many years, and he is one of the most talented developers for sure. It's very shocking to see how smart someone can be.

Lex Fridman (245:17)

So people should check him out at TE E J. DV Yep.

Michael Paulson (245:22)

Teach dv. His name, his last name is Devise Dev.

Lex Fridman (245:26)

Oh, it's not Developer. Okay, cool.

Michael Paulson (245:27)

Yeah, yeah. So it's just tj. That's just his name just spelled. Kind of fun.

Lex Fridman (245:32)

What do you love about him?

Michael Paulson (245:33)

Wow. How much did he pay you to ask these questions?

Lex Fridman (245:36)

Thousands of dollars. Just so I can't even count that many dollars.

Michael Paulson (245:43)

He is trust, obviously. Trust is the biggest, biggest thing, especially in the quote unquote streaming YouTube kind of world, if you will. It's very easy to find people that will want to, like, be a part of stuff. People tend to latch onto things and it's very hard to find someone that you can really, really trust. And so he's just somebody whom I can genuinely trust. He'll always tell the truth. He's all. He's all the right things for a good friend in this kind of endeavor.

Lex Fridman (246:10)

So as a good friend, he told me questions I could backstab you with.

Michael Paulson (246:15)

Okay, I hate him. I forgot. I forgot how much I don't trust him.

Lex Fridman (246:19)

So speaking of Harpoon, you mentioned it, he said, you know, to. To ask you about whether basically how many years or decades it's going to take to transition to Harpoon 2, to actually release it, develop it, and so on. Can you describe what Harpoon is and why you seem to be incapable of finishing a single project? Project.

Michael Paulson (246:42)

Okay, that was a lovely framed question. So Harpoon two is actually done. This is what I did to avoid the swirl and the thousands of questions I will inevitably get. I kept the master branch as Harpoon one and I've kept Harpoon two as Harpoon two branch. And people that don't read the read me to say that I just use Harpoon 2 now. That's. That's their fault. That's it. I just don't want. I. I really don't like answering hundreds of questions about open source stuff. I used to love doing open source and all that, but I kind of got my soul crushed during the falcor years. And so I guess I'm just kind of allergic to being a really active maintainer. I build everything just for me. Like Harpoon's just literally just built for me. It's just what I spent three months trying to figure out the most optimal navigation for files and that's what I came up with. So Harpoon, it's a take on alternate file. If you're familiar with alternate file, typically you'll have this in all editor where you can go back to the file you were just in. And so that means you can have effectively two files you swap back and forth in. You probably used it a bunch. Really fast way to navigate. Pretty nice thing to do. I wanted something with I want alternate file, but like three of them or four of them. And so that's all Harpoon is. It's just being able to pin a file. And so I have one button to press to go to a file, another for another, another for another. And so I can have up to four. So I just had my four power fingers for dvorak. What is that? That's HTML. So if I go control H, T, N or S, it goes to one of the four files and that's it. That's all it is. And you could technically make it so you can add in functions and be Able to execute things externally. So you can open up terminals, you can send requests off to servers, you can do anything you want with it. I just have it primarily designed for opening files.

Lex Fridman (248:18)

Since you mentioned. What keyboard layout do you use? You use Dvorak?

Michael Paulson (248:21)

I used Dvorak, but I used a custom version of Dvorak. The reason why I used it is in 2017, we are just having my second kid. It was Christmas, and I'm having so much pain in my arm, and I'm sitting there freaking out like, oh, my gosh, is this the end of my career? Am I done programming? Is this all over? And so I decided that I was going to create my own keyboard layout optimized to prevent the pain that I'm experiencing. So I used a Dvorak as the base and then laid out the symbols in a symmetrical, reasonable way so that it's opening, closing, opening, closing, opening, closing. Right. And so it's. And they all are right here. Here. I actually have to hold shift to press a number. So symbols are actually my first thing I get to press. And so it's very optimized for a laptop keyboard layout. So I can use my laptop in a very efficient, nice way. That's how I got started on Dvorak and all that. I wouldn't actually recommend it if you. Because I didn't have a Kinesis at the time. I didn't even know Kinesis existed at that time. And so when I discovered kinesis in also 2017, that's when I was like, oh, okay.

Lex Fridman (249:22)

Would you recommend Kinesis to people?

Michael Paulson (249:24)

I am technically sponsored by Kinesis, so people, you know, it's hard for someone to believe someone that's sponsored by it. But I did use it before I ever became sponsored. They're the only sponsor that I reached out to and said, I need a sponsorship from you. You are the key. I'm going to use you. Either way. You don't. You can say no. But I really love it. And for the first three years of using Kinesis, they gave me free Kinesis Kinesi as my sponsorship.

Lex Fridman (249:49)

Kinesi. Yeah. I'm always torn. I tried to leave so many times.

Michael Paulson (249:53)

You can't. It's too good.

Lex Fridman (249:55)

But see, I have this absurd situation of, like, traveling with it.

Michael Paulson (250:01)

I relate.

Lex Fridman (250:02)

Yeah. I mean, I'm literally, you know, going to the war zone in Ukraine. A Kinesis keyboard, a laptop, and, like, just a few other small things, and that's it. And it's like, is Kinesis keyboard really going to be 30% of volume? That you're bringing to a war zone.

Michael Paulson (250:22)

You know, Looks like the answer is yes.

Lex Fridman (250:24)

Yeah. Like, do you really derive that much value? I think it's probably spiritual or psychological. For me, it feels like home. It's. There's comfort associated with it.

Michael Paulson (250:33)

Yeah. I try to leave, and I love this experience. You just are. It's like a relationship you have with the thing.

Lex Fridman (250:41)

It is. It's. Is it? But I'm trying to figure out if it's a toxic relationship or not. I think it's mostly love. I think. Is love like all relationship? There's some, you know, push and pull complications.

Michael Paulson (250:51)

But they say that distance makes the heart grow fonder. So maybe sometimes the Kinesis keyboard needs to stay at home, and the laptop keyboard can be the one so that your heart grows even more fond and that connection grows even deeper.

Lex Fridman (251:03)

I already miss it, as you said, so I don't know. I think it's coming. Coming along to all the trips. If it breaks down, though, you know, I was worried that Kinesis was shut down as a company. I'm like, what's the business model here? Who actually uses these keyboards? Right. But apparently it's still going strong. Yeah.

Michael Paulson (251:20)

Who uses these keyboards as you use the keyboard? Like, I have to take it with me everywhere. I wonder who uses these keyboards.

Lex Fridman (251:27)

Yep. I should mention that one of the things. When I first became a fan of yours, I heard you talk about coffee and terminal. I still don't, by the way, understand what you've been talking about. I need to actually use it. But you are. You run amongst many things, a coffee company. Man, this smells so good. So this one is dark mode, dark roast, whole coffee beans. There is seg, origin, dash, dash location.

Michael Paulson (251:58)

There's a bunch of stuff on there.

Lex Fridman (252:01)

Stuff on there that's very devi shop, server, web. Can you legit order call coffee vssh.

Michael Paulson (252:10)

So, as of right now, it's the only way you can get the coffee is via ssh. That was kind of. Okay, so can I just origin story you?

Lex Fridman (252:18)

Yeah, yeah, yeah, right. I was gonna do some kind of command line command to request or like, dash, dash, help or something. Or like, man. Yeah, man, coffee.

Michael Paulson (252:29)

Okay, so TJ and I again, same teach, teach TV about, by the way, very amazing designs done by Dave Hill. They're very, very good. So let me kind of give the basic ideas. Like, must have been about a year, year and a half ago, TJ and I were talking like, hey, you know, every one of these people that have, like, some sort of following, some sort of online presence, they're always like, selling a thing, but I got nothing to sell. I don't really want to do merch. I've never really enjoyed doing merch. I just find that, I don't know, it's just not as much fun for me.

Lex Fridman (252:59)

Don't want to have a tequila.

Michael Paulson (253:01)

I don't want a tequila. I want something that. And I also want something that I really don't feel bad about selling. You know, there's, like, a lot of people that will go on the Internet and they'll show for a whole bunch of products. Like, oh, okay, try this, try this. And this is why I've only ever really done Kinesis is because it's like, well, I can point to something that was really bad my life. I was very scared, and now it's not bad anymore. So it's like, okay, that one made sense. But everything else always has been. You know, it's harder for me. And so we just talked for so long and. And we love Neo Vims, who are just like, what happen if we could do something from neovim? And we're kind of like, laughing about that. Like, ordering from neovim is just so ridiculous. And then at some point, we're just like, well, wait a second. And maybe we could do, like, coffee. Like, every developer loves coffee. Maybe we could figure out this coffee business. And so I had a good friend named Dax Th. Dxr. Dax? Yeah, Dax. He the most sassiest man alive.

Lex Fridman (253:56)

Sassiest.

Michael Paulson (253:56)

Oh, yeah, he has a lot of sass, Pete.

Lex Fridman (253:58)

Beard.

Michael Paulson (253:59)

Yep, he has a beard. Very, very. He does sst. He does a lot of stuff. Very, very talented. We'll call him DevOps Engineer. He's more than that, but very talented guy. Him and another person named Adam. Dot Dev Vegan, by the way. Great guy. We make. We take him to Korean barbecue all the time. He eats nothing. And Liz, she has been super important to the Terminal Coffee Company. I think without her, we would not have been able to do what we have done. And then also David Hill, designer, he does Laravel. He designs for Laravel. Very talented designer. And so we all kind of came together and we were just laughing about, how can we, like, could we do something that's just ridiculous? And that's kind of what we came up with. Yeah, like, there you go. You just open the website. You actually. You literally cannot order. We actually do not allow you to order.

Lex Fridman (254:49)

The website is something that kind of looks like the terminal. Use command below to order your delicious whole coffee bean. Ssh. Terminal Shop. Shop.

Michael Paulson (254:59)

Yeah. So you can only SSH into it. So you have to copy that command and throw it in there. If you want to add in the little terminal shop for your known host, you could do that.

Lex Fridman (255:07)

How do you handle payment through Stripe?

Michael Paulson (255:10)

And so one of the things, we'll be adding a mobile checkout too, where I'll show a QR code in the terminal and you can just like check out on your phone. But right now you enter in your credentials, it goes to Stripe via all terminal.

Lex Fridman (255:20)

Like ssh.

Michael Paulson (255:21)

Yeah, SSH is obviously. It stands for secure shell. Uses elliptical, you know, quantum safe algorithms to ensure that your data is not being intercepted.

Lex Fridman (255:30)

Yeah, but does he use AI?

Michael Paulson (255:33)

I'm pretty sure Dax uses AI. So that you said quantum.

Lex Fridman (255:36)

So it's.

Michael Paulson (255:37)

I don't know, quantum AI.

Lex Fridman (255:38)

Can this fusion.

Michael Paulson (255:39)

Quantum AI.

Lex Fridman (255:40)

Can this even be a. A company if it's not using AI?

Michael Paulson (255:44)

We have some crypto chains with some quantum AI that's, you know, powered by fusion. So it's pretty, it's pretty wild. Anyway, so, yeah, we just kind of came together where we thought, what is the. That was from the Mike Tyson fight. All right. It was literally that night Mike Tyson kissed the reporter and then walked out.

Lex Fridman (255:59)

Yeah.

Michael Paulson (255:59)

Without any clothes. We did an ad for somebody, but we decided to make a coffee shop. And then we thought instead of just making it neovim, what if we made it from ssh? Because everybody has ssh. You have VS code. Launch VS code. You can order coffee from within VS code. Right. Because your little bottom terminal has access to SSH page. Bada bing, bada boom. It's kind of fun. And so we kind of really.

Lex Fridman (256:24)

I love that.

Michael Paulson (256:24)

We just wanted to do something where there's no level and there's no world. That makes me feel bad about selling this and people buying it. It's good ethical coffee. We, we developed the entire supply chain and everything. It's all packaged, it's all boutique, it's all really like, it's pretty high end coffee. It tastes really, really good. At this point, I don't like drinking other coffee. I get kind of upset about it because it's not a good. And so it's kind of funny that I've, I've fallen for my own stuff. I'm high on my own supply. Pretty hard right now. I just got done ordering 16 bags and gave it out to my family to try to convince them. But it's just something where it's like, I didn't sell you a software product that's going to influence your startup that could potentially lead to disaster. I didn't convince you to do a bunch of stuff that's going to change your career. I just said, hey, here's some coffee. And it just like, it's, it's like a fun experience.

Lex Fridman (257:12)

Yeah, it's fun everything. The humor on it. Great.

Michael Paulson (257:15)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (257:15)

People should go to terminal shop.

Michael Paulson (257:18)

Ssh, Terminal shop.

Lex Fridman (257:19)

I'm speaking to people that don't know what SSH is. And there you can read the command and then figure out how to use SSH in order to. I mean, it's a kind of documentation right on the website.

Michael Paulson (257:31)

If you can't use ssh, you probably should just not worry about buying our coffee. Like that's the whole.

Lex Fridman (257:37)

Well, you can learn.

Michael Paulson (257:38)

You can learn. If you are active and you're a computer person, you'd like to launch the terminal and feel like a hacker, go for it. We even have subscriptions.

Lex Fridman (257:44)

What I, what I would love to see this, this is how it came up, I think on the, on the cursor conversation is that I would love it if an AI agent, you know, did this like anthropic computer use or something like that, actually took the action of ordering the coffee while it was programming.

Michael Paulson (258:02)

Yeah, like, hey, order me some coffee. And it actually go off. Give me dark roast to order coffee. And it could actually go through the whole flow of order.

Lex Fridman (258:08)

Yeah, the whole float. But even better, if you didn't ask it to order coffee, you asked it to do something. And as a tangent, as a side quest, it did that, which is computer use does that. Right. They showed off that it's able to go to, I think like Google for some images, take a pause and then continue doing, doing other stuff. Anyway. Yeah, super cool idea. Love it. Speaking of which, let's talk about a AI.

Michael Paulson (258:35)

All right.

Lex Fridman (258:35)

You've been both sort of positive and negative on, on the role of AI in the, in the whole programming software engineering experience as it stands today. What do you think? What's your general view about AI? What is it effective at? What is it not so good at?

Michael Paulson (258:51)

Okay, so my general view is it. It comes down to something that's pretty simple, which is that if you're doing something in which is very predictable, AI is really nice. When you're doing something that is just not predictable, AI is not very nice to use if you're using anything that's more cutting edge. AI will not be using it or AI won't be very good at doing stuff with it. Like it's, it's not great at zig. Because ZIG is just like say less documented. It's really great at typescript. I think there's a lot of, there's a lot of interesting things that are going to come down through AI that I think a lot of people aren't really prepared for or thinking through. TJ is kind of the genesis of this idea, but the idea that I think there's going to be a lot of kind of market manipulation, if you will, through AI. Meaning like, hey, you want to research, say, best woodworking tools? Someone's going to be buying an ad spot. Someone's going to be buying premium trade training data. Right. They're the ones that get the, the big boost in the LLMs. But LLMs don't really have to market as an advertisement because it's not really directly an advertisement. They just had a more premium spot per se in the training data. A little bit extra learning to it. You know, it's like there's a lot of things about AI that I, I fear upcoming. Yeah, a lot of it just comes down to people not learning or making the trade off. Where productivity is the only thing that matters. And I don't think productivity is the only thing that matters. If you want to build something complex and difficult, productivity is not the only thing. You actually are going to have to do deep learning and kind of pursue it beyond the basics. And so I see AI as kind of like this really cool thing. It feels like a magic trick. I remember the first time I used it, I got early access to GitHub Copilot. In fact, Nat Friedman saw my Twitch clip of me asking GitHub for it and he sent me early access himself. It was awesome. And when I used it, it predicted an if statement. Correct. And at my mind, mind was just absolutely blown because I had nothing before then and now it's just like first time ever. And I just remember thinking, man, this is going to change programming so much. And then the more I used it, the more I just for me personally, I kept introducing bugs and I couldn't figure out why. And what I realized is that I kind of developed. I wasn't co piloting well. I was autopiloting much better. And my ability to read code versus my ability to critically think and write code, they're definitely different sets of skill levels I don't consider as well when I just read code as opposed to when I write code. And so I, I struggled there.

Lex Fridman (261:23)

I do think that's a skill set.

Michael Paulson (261:25)

Yeah, skill issue for sure.

Lex Fridman (261:27)

Skill issue for people who are not aware that's like a hashtag thing sometimes used mockingly. In this case, there's like several layers. Mockingly, but also seriously.

Michael Paulson (261:37)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (261:37)

Meaning like the criticism is grounded in the fact that you lack the skill versus is of some kind of fundamental truth. Yes. I think that that's the reason I use actually copilot cursor a lot is for developing the skill of editing AI. So I can just learn how to do that better and better. Because I think as I do that better and better, I start to utilize AI better at this time. It is a bit of a boilerplate code thing. Mm. But you can do out of the box kind of novel design decisions or tricky design decisions from scratch, but fill out stuff using AI and then just learn the skill of modifying. I personally just. It's more fun to program with AI. Even when I delete a lot of the code, it's more fun. It's less lonely. It's more. It's what I imagine like pair programming to be, but I've never done it. But it just feels like that friction that you get when you're like staring at an empty thing is not there. Like empty function, empty, empty class. It's just more. More fun, less lonely. And I do think that a lot of the easier type of coding, it really helps with, like, interacting with APIs, basic things that I would usually have to look up to stack overflow for. It's just really fast at that. Like.

Michael Paulson (263:22)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (263:23)

As example, just interacting with the YouTube API. The YouTube API documentation is not very good. And you can just load it all in there and ask it to generate a set of functions that access the API, do all kinds of read and write operations, and it figures it all out. And then you could just. Well, you do have to read. You have to read and check everything. And you start to develop the skill of understanding where it misinterpreted the task. Ask. So you're. What is that skill? I don't even know. You have to kind of be empathic about what the AI is, what its limitations are. A lot of the times that has to do with prompt engineering, you have to like, at the same time understand what the AI is aware of. Of, like, what did you actually give it as data to be able to generate the code. A lot of times we don't realize that we're not giving it enough information.

Michael Paulson (264:33)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (264:33)

So you have to like, actually. Okay, okay. All right. You have to like, be empathic. Be like, okay, these are the code, the files it's aware of. This is the specifics of the question you asked it. Like you have to like imagine you're an intern, learn that doesn't know anything else. Like oftentimes we want the AI to figure out the things that's left unspoken, but you can't know those things, you have to specify those things. And so you have to actually be much more deliberate and rigorous in the things you specify to spell it out. And so I just have this sea of prompts that I have saved up and I'm building these library of different templates for prompts and it's a mess and I'm sure there's a lot of developers that have this similar kind of mess. So a lot of it has to do long term with the tooling that's going to improve that. One, the systems are going to get much more intelligent. Well, you don't need the nuance. And two, there's going to be the tooling that allows you to specify those things and load it incorrectly and give all the context that the system needs in order to make the good decisions. And maybe the system asks you follow questions, wait, here's things you didn't make clear. All that kind of stuff. A lot of that has to do with the interface with the actual design of the tools. Like we said with cursor, it's going to keep getting better and better and better. So my sense is like developers in general should be learning this to see, to not be left behind, to see how that can be used as a superpower to boost their productivity, their effectiveness, their joy of programming versus like, like be seen as a competitor to them or something like that. So, but I, you know, I, for me already it's been, it's, it's been a big boost to productivity. Like actual, like if you measure the actual how quickly you're able to get a thing done. It's been a big and measured not across minutes and hours, but days. Also, like sometimes there's things I have to do that are not that important that I'll just like out of procrastination will push off and AI helps me actually get it done. Like actually because like that thing, the empty page, like I mentioned before, it helps me write the thing, get it done, get it tested. Like ship the thing. Maybe it's just because it's just less lonely to work with an AI. I don't know. I don't know if any of that.

Michael Paulson (267:06)

Makes made sense, but it all made perfect sense. I really do like that phrase. It makes it less lonely. I think there's something to that that's kind of interesting. Having just some level of interaction that's not just like an LSP autocomplete.

Lex Fridman (267:16)

Yeah.

Michael Paulson (267:17)

Like having something that's actually a little bit more than just that, where it actually is kind of thinking through and you can see a different thought and you're like, oh, wow, that's like. That's a way different approach than I would have taken. Hey, that's kind of cool. I like these kind of things. And the thing is, I'm not like a AI negative person. I. I can see why people really, really like it. Um, I just haven't. Like, I just. Every time I. I used copilot for. From when NAT gave me the access all the way up until about six months ago, like, that's how I used it for quite some time. And I really. I really did enjoy the things I used out of it. It just never. It kind of did the opposite for me. I felt like I was more reviewing than writing, and I felt like I was more kind of just letting things slide or I just didn't really think too heavily, heavily about stuff. And it just. I wasn't as engaged. And so I'm like, okay, so something's kind of wrong here. And that's just like a me personal thing. So I. I recognize that is not how someone should approach these things. That's not a good reason for why you should or should not use AI. Like, I just don't think that that's right, because I could probably correct that and figure out a better way to do it. I've been meaning to have another AI round. And so I've been thinking about, like, maybe I just need to spend like two weeks in cursor and just like, fully embrace what does it mean to be somebody like this? And. And God, what can I do with this? Like, these new powers, have they improved to the point where they're actually good? And I mean for me, because, like, a lot of the decisions I make, a lot of the little functions I'm writing, it's not because I'm trying to write this function to solve this problem. It's because I'm writing these functions or this set not just to solve this problem, but because I know in about another 2,000 lines of code of building all these other things, I'm going to need to start doing this next activity. So it's like I'm trying to, like, really try to chess move myself into the exact things that as I let things go faster, I kind of fall apart on that chess move. And again, Skill issues for on my behalf and I mean in the truest sense the word where it's like I'm making a critique because I don't use it well enough.

Lex Fridman (269:08)

The better you are programming. I don't know if this is a general rule, this is my anecdotal data. The better you are programming, the less you want to use the AI, the more gets in the way.

Michael Paulson (269:16)

Like the good programmers fair enough as far as I can tell.

Lex Fridman (269:19)

So like the more sort of beginner programmers are much more happy to use AI. You know I, when I use AI it's for basic, like for just like. I don't know if there's a better term. It's not boilerplate but it's like pretty easy programming and that kind of programming is much easier to do. Like the sort of the 10x not to use the meme sort of programmers that I know that are ultra productive and brilliant people, they just, they hate AI. They're like this is nowhere close to what's needed. So that there's something to that. I still think they should be using it AI just for the learning because it's going to get smarter, it's going to get better and it's the same thing. It's like when you, when you super optimize neovim or super optimize Emacs you may not discover the new things that are in the pipeline. So it's always good to be sort of training in that way.

Michael Paulson (270:11)

Let me ask you a question here. Just kind of from my understanding you talked about this idea that you have all these kind of LLM kind of prompts, all like this big backlog of messy LL prompts that, that you kind of have these templates for that you can do various actions. You probably, you have these strategies of making it self explain itself and then do the right thing. Right. Like you have as far as I can tell that's, that's really built into a lot of people. Well then you make this phrase where like. But then at some point the interface is going to get better and maybe it can do a lot of these things better where I won't need that. Then my question is well, is anyone actually falling behind for not using AI then? Because if the interface is going to change so greatly that all of your habits need to fundamentally change, change and it will be able to clarify and make all those statements. Have I actually fallen behind at all? Or will the next gen like actually just be so different from the current one that it's kind of like yeah, you're over there like actually doing punch card AI right now. I'm going to come in at compiler time. AI so different that it's like what's a punch card?

Lex Fridman (271:08)

So obviously open question. It's a fascinating one. I personally think, yes, you're falling behind. Not you, but if you're not playing with it, you're falling behind. Because the thing I'm doing with the prompts is you're learning. You're building up this intuition about how AI works. You're understanding what is its strengths and weaknesses. Not even the current version, but the next version and so on. What does it mean to teach an AI system about the world world, like what kind of information does it need to make effective decisions? I think that does transfer to smarter and smarter models. You'll need to make less rigorous and specific and details instructions over time. But you still have to have that kind of thing.

Michael Paulson (272:05)

Yeah, I think it's a skill of.

Lex Fridman (272:07)

Almost empathy with an AI system because it doesn't know, you know what it's missing. It's missing like common sense sense. It's missing long term memory. A lot of things. When we talk to other humans, they have a basic common sense about reality. Like and AI systems often lack that kind of common sense and they also don't remember things. So you have to like realize there's a constant blank slate happening. So it's almost like just a skill of talking to an AI system system that, that I'm training. And by having to write all those prompts and communicating back and forth to understand what kind of prompts work better or not, you build up that intuition. And also just raw the skill of reading somebody else's code. Maybe for people who work on large teams, that's a skill that's already developed. For me, not so much. So learning how to modify the code that somebody else written is a real skill. And also the other thing you mentioned, which is like considering another perspective on a piece of code is really nice, but it is also a skill to understand. Okay, this is what you did. There's a skill to asking a question about that code that's been generated such that you can have a conversation about the approach that was taken. I think there's just a lot of, of subtle little skills involved in a cooperative endeavor to code. Kind of like there was a real skill issue between you and Tiege when you guys did the video of two ads, one keyboard. Right. People should go watch that video where like you guys obviously sucked at it. Yeah, co using that was pretty cool. What you guys did. Which is controlling one neovim interface from two different keyboards.

Michael Paulson (274:00)

Yeah. And then we each get an allowance of certain characters or motions we could perform.

Lex Fridman (274:04)

Yeah. And so you both had to, like, communicate together. That. That's a real skill. I'm sure you can get super, like, super efficient with that.

Michael Paulson (274:10)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (274:11)

But it takes. It just takes time to learn that kind of thing. So, yeah, I think there's some value to it, but I. I think there's a learning curve.

Michael Paulson (274:18)

So I have. So I. I wanted. I do want one thing to be pretty clear is that I actually use AI quite a bit. I just don't use it for programming. And so one thing I've been trying to get it to is to be able to have like a long interview or understand what Twitch Chat is saying and become Twitch Chat and be able to speak as if it is Twitch Chat. Try to, like, learn how to prompt it in different ways. And so I think those things for me are just really fun. I tried to get it to learn how to play tower defense. I made a tower defense game in Zig and then made it play tower defense and then played Claude 3.5 against OpenAI. Claude 3.5 would do better during the daytimes and OpenAI did better during the night times. I don't know why. I don't. I have no idea what was going on there. But just one would just start winning and the other one would start losing. It's just very strange. And so it's just this, you know, I'm learning to prompt well, but I'm learning to prompt in a very different axi. I just don't find it very useful yet in programming.

Lex Fridman (275:09)

Programming. And I should also say that I'm using it in. Yeah. In every walk of life, in every context. I use that same kind of exploration about prompts and so on. I'm using a lot learning. I think it legit is a whole field in itself.

Michael Paulson (275:26)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (275:27)

Prompt engineering and how to interact with AI systems. I think it's worth the investment. Can you actually speak to that? Because you. I saw you're. You're basically pulling from Twitch Chat and having an LLM speak. I didn't realize. I thought you're. So you're not reading the exact chat messages.

Michael Paulson (275:49)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (275:49)

You're. You're doing kind of some kind of summarization.

Michael Paulson (275:52)

Yeah. So what I try to go through like a. I ended up making like eight queries off to OpenAI where it's just like, the first thing is like, I have it. Have it like a Default personality. Hey, you're Randall, the manager. You're a software engineering manager. Kind of explain their position, what they like, what they don't like, and then be like, these are the list of thoughts you have in your head and you need to talk to this person and ask them a question.

Lex Fridman (276:13)

Like, amazing.

Michael Paulson (276:14)

Give me 10 of these responses that you think are probably thoughts that you have and you want to ask. Ask. Yeah, you know, like, make it. Kind of give you a list and then be like, okay. Then reprompt and be like, hey, you're Randall. You're this, this, this, this, this, this. You have these 10 questions before you, and now you need to select one of them and reword it in a way that sounds more like you, the engineering manager, you know, and so you're like, you know, I'm constantly trying to make it like iterate on itself as opposed to just like one shotting it. And I found if I iterate too much, it becomes like, it loses the val. It like loses what it was originally trying to ask. If I don't do it enough, then it's just too degenerate from Twitch Chat. And so it's like, I, I have a lot of improvement to do with this idea.

Lex Fridman (276:52)

Just to clarify, you're feeding in Twitch Chat. These are the thoughts you're. You're a manager. These are the thoughts you have in your head. Pick out some of the most profound thoughts effectively.

Michael Paulson (277:06)

It's like depending on what I wanted to do, I'm trying to work on a better system. Still kind of brilliant. And so it's like, how can I give voice to Twitch Chat? Can I make it so that I can get. Create adversarial characters against Twitch Chat or for Twitch Chat, can I incorporate YouTube, all that kind of stuff? And like, how do you describe to an LLM to role play into its position? And so, you know, just thinking through those kind of things, you know, so maybe I am having some prompt skills, but just, you know, it's just not in the coding world yet.

Lex Fridman (277:31)

Sure, one day.

Michael Paulson (277:32)

One day I'll get there.

Lex Fridman (277:33)

I saw that you're having like playing with different voices. There was like a sexy.

Michael Paulson (277:39)

That started off as a French voice and then it turns out 11 laps. Just cannot do a French lady. And when you do multilingual French lady, she starts, yeah, talking. You know, I was like, what?

Lex Fridman (277:53)

I tuned into one of your streams and there's just this lady like, like in a, in a sexualized way, it became too funny.

Michael Paulson (278:03)

And so we call her not French. Stormy Daniels.

Lex Fridman (278:05)

Oh, Nice.

Michael Paulson (278:06)

Yeah. But I want to go back to the AI and some of the aspects.

Lex Fridman (278:10)

Sure.

Michael Paulson (278:10)

And so, like, my big gripe with AI has nothing to do with its capabilities. It's exactly capable as it should be capable, because that's what people programmed it as. The things that I really dislike is a. There's a whole group of people that are just like, the end is nigh. AI is here. You just need to stop programming. Like, I, I cannot see, I cannot tell you. Even on, like, you mentioned Peter levels earlier, he made some sort of tweet and one of the person's responses was, yet no one in this, like in 2025 or whatever should be acquiring hard skills. Skills. You should rely on everything for the AI effectively. And it's just like, these are really damning pieces of advice for young people. Like, young people are being told that you should never become an expert in anything. You should always offload. And the problem is that anyone worth any of their salt will tell you that AI, though, can produce code, is going to get it wrong in a huge number of cases. And as the code becomes bigger or more complex or more input, it's going to just start kind of sloshing back and forth between bugs. And so if you don't have those hard skills and you're not ultimately the driver, at the end of the day, like, you're going to really find some hard times and your ability to progress will be directly bound to how good the LLMs are. So if you believe that the LLMs will be vastly superior to humans in the next year, maybe that's a good bet. But if they aren't, then your skill ceiling is bound to whatever they are. And even beyond that, there's just as like a whole, whole. There's just like a level of information problem which is like, can the thing actually navigate larger? Like, do we even have enough compute power to be able to solve things at, at this real scale? And even if we did, if everybody started using it right now, do we even have the compute power for everybody to use it right now? There's like a lot of kind of bounding questions, there's privacy concerns. And I just don't want people to make the immediate, or what appears to be the obvious choice where you don't need hard skills, you don't need these things, things our life is already going to be. We just need to only think creatively. It's like, no, I don't think so. I think these hard skills are going to be around for quite some time, even with A massive improvement in the AI. Like you're going to really be needed to step in regularly for quite some time as far as I can tell.

Lex Fridman (280:12)

But I also think even on top of that, just even acquiring the hard skills or whether that means programming from scratch, for example, in the context of programming, that's going to make you better at steering the AI. AI. Not just correcting the AI, but steering the AI. I think there is some kind of, if you know how a computer works, you can program Python better. It's maybe counterintuitive, but you can, if you know the low level abstractions, like some intuition around that you can steer the high level abstractions better. Yeah, that just seems to be the case. Unless of course AI becomes like truly super intelligent, like many levels of ball. But it's very unlikely in the short term and in the long term it's still good as it gets better and better and better to be able to steer, to ride the wave of the improvement.

Michael Paulson (281:04)

Yeah, I'm on that team very much so.

Lex Fridman (281:06)

A lot of people have written to me, I think a lot of developers, programmers are really concerned about the future of their profession in the context of quickly improving AI systems. So do you think AI will eventually replace programmers?

Michael Paulson (281:22)

The hard part about that phrase is use the term eventually. Meaning do I think in five years, 10 years, 100 years, like what is that? What does that term actually mean? I think at some point if we were able to scale, if all things continue at the current rate of improvement, there does come a point where programming as a hard skill does become unnecessary. Right. At some eventual point, way, way down the road. Yes. I don't know what that point looks like. I don't know when it's going to happen. I don't even attempt to make predictions, predictions about that. But there are still some like leaps and bounds we need to make just, I mean even just like societally like there's plenty of companies that don't even allow you to use AI right like that. I mean there's just practical problems that exist. So that's like a question I just try not to answer in the direct sense. There will come a day, if humanity continues and all things continue in a good positive direction where a lot of skills will go out the window due to, to immense computing systems. So yeah, I'll give you that one. But it's just like if I don't think it has anything in the near term. There has been no computer improvement up to this date that did not result in more jobs.

Lex Fridman (282:31)

Yeah, absolutely. We should say That I think it depends how you define programming also because, you know, when the community moves from assembly to C, from C to, I don't know, Python and JavaScript, like that's evolution. That's really painful for a lot of people who are used to programming that lower level language. So there's going to be a continuous evolution and maybe that means with, with AI there's going to be more and more evolution towards natural language as part of the 20th tool chain. Like being able to learn how to write proper prompts. Yeah, that might, you know, because natural language is still a language and in the long term it's possible that a large percentage of programming is natural language. They're probably still going to be some percentage, just not that's going to be extremely structured language.

Michael Paulson (283:30)

Right now I don't think we are anywhere near natural language being possible because it's ambiguous. And I think what we'll end up seeing as people push really hard into this, you're going to see some sort of like pseudo lang, which is going to be a language for AIs in which you prompt, which is going to be less ambiguous. Right. People keep striving towards the less ambiguous state and at that point you're just programming, you're just programming yet another evolution into a higher order language. And perhaps that is a future in which people have a more terse language. I'm just not sure how much more terse it can, can get. Yeah, I mean, all I see is that if you say natural language can be used in the pipeline, you've just made that many more people can become programmers, which means that much more software will eventually be created, which means there's that much more software that will need to be maintained and just becomes a real big snowballing effect.

Lex Fridman (284:22)

But you know, there's just people who are programmers who are worried about their jobs. Not a complete replacement, but maybe a rapid evolution of what it means to be a program programmer. Like you mentioned, if natural language becomes a way that you can communicate, you can program, that means the pool of people who can get programming jobs changes rapidly.

Michael Paulson (284:45)

So they're really concerned to some extent. Right. Because no matter how much, no matter how much we want to say how good AI is, there comes a point where there exists a bug, there exists a large piece of software in which to describe the change requires just like pages and pages of description to the point where it is significantly just faster or easier for someone to just whip something out like there. There's definitely a balance there. It's not like a Perfect trade off. And so I, I still don't. I think people need to quit worrying and think about how they can integrate it and try, like prove it to themselves. Do they actually make themselves irrelevant? And if you truly make yourself irrelevant, relevant, I would challenge you that you're already like, you're just doing something that was just slightly too complicated to automate. If you're only writing just straight up crud apps from back end to front end and like simple table displays, like, yeah, maybe we just couldn't quite automate that away and now we just have something that can just do that a little bit better. So now that's automated away, but that's not really programming. That's almost like building Legos at that point. Point where the design's already set. You just simply have to move piece from bag into correct position.

Lex Fridman (285:56)

Yeah. Is there something you recommend how a developer programmer could avoid a situation where AI can automate them away?

Michael Paulson (286:08)

I think that the bigger the project you can manage, the bigger the thing you can build, the more understanding both down and up the stack you can go go, the more value valuable you become. Because if you understand how to build something in the front end. Okay, well now you kick off some LLM task of some sort that's going to go off and make a change to the front end. Okay. While it's doing that, you can go and kick off something in the CLI tool. You can go, and you can go kick off something somewhere else. And as these things come back with results, you can review the results, make sure it's the way you want it, change it, commit it, go to the next. Like you only become more, you know, as you said, in the end, more productive. If we reach this state where it's truly able to do that, I think.

Lex Fridman (286:46)

There is like a skill to working together with AI, which is why I'm kind of excited to watch you keep trying to do it. Yeah, it's like we don't know how it fits exactly, but it feels like AI should be a boost to productivity. And I definitely think it's a boost to just the joy of programming. I think there's a lot of people, yeah, it's a job, but it's also a source of meaning, a source of joy. Like programming is fun. You're creating something cool and also potentially that a lot of people use.

Michael Paulson (287:19)

There's this one thing that just really frustrates me, and this is kind of going into the Devin category, which is that I want an intern that cares. Yeah, you don't get that out of an LLM, it does not care. Meaning that I don't want it just to make a UI for me that displays these icons like I asked. I want it to care. I want to think about it. I want it to. To present to me and me be like, oh, yeah, yeah, that's great. And then me to make changes. And then later on it's like, actually, you know what? I really rethought about this. And actually, it'd be way better if we change, you know, like, it doesn't actually care about the craft, you know, but when you work with an intern or you work with somebody else, they care. When they factor something, they actually go over and go, ah, yeah, this is actually kind of bad. I'm going to come back to that. They finish this, they go back over here and they make this even better. Right. They, like, actually care about the thing itself. It's a completely different experience. I just want something that also cares, that wants to make the thing better, not just simply accomplish the task. I know I'm asking way too much. That's not. You know, now we're getting into, like, Blade Runner level AI. I just want something that's. It just feels like I'm missing that. Where it's just like it will complete the task to whatever level. It understood what I was prompting, but it just doesn't. It doesn't actually care about it.

Lex Fridman (288:27)

I mean, there's so many aspects to caring, but sort of the trivial version of that is a kind of restlessness where you want to keep improving. And I think that is very much AI could do.

Michael Paulson (288:42)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (288:43)

Where it constantly just asks itself, can I make this better? And if it keeps doing that, it probably is going to take it to some ridiculous place. So actually it's also knowing when to stop.

Michael Paulson (288:55)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (288:56)

I think developing something you can call taste, which is like trying, working extremely hard, constantly improving until it just feels right. This is it. And I think that is a thing that AI is not good at. It was just like, yes, this is it.

Michael Paulson (289:13)

Yeah. I've iterated three times and three was the.

Lex Fridman (289:15)

That's it. We're now there. And that, I think ultimately that is what humans are amazing at, which is like knowing when something is right. Like, this is it. This is especially as you understand, as you develop taste in the particular industry, in the particular context, application, knowing, like, this is it. Yeah, this. The rounded corners on this button, that's exactly that. That's beautiful. So it's just a sense of beauty, a sense of function and efficiency. And so on, yeah, that, but that, you know, humans could do almost like supervision of AI systems in that context. Yeah, yeah, you've ranted about Devin, just full of rage.

Michael Paulson (290:00)

I mean, first off, the people that run Devin are extremely nice. I want that to be understood, that I don't have some sort of upsetness against them or anything like that. Second, Devin is just, it's, it's kind of like the full, it's like the full package when it comes to programming. So it's going to have. You're going to give it a task and a repo and it's going to go through, through. It's going to try to understand the repo and the task, make the change to the repo by exploring it, then actually make a commit to GitHub and explain what it did so that you can have like, you know, so hopefully you have this whole offline thing, which is the other part of this AI part that I actually really like, where it's just like, go fix this thing. Then I can just go and unbroken, fix this one thing and come back and go, okay, good enough. Merge, boom. You know, like, I want that kind of running, being able to complete things. I think the ideal solution is that you can start giving it small bugs and it goes and fixes these bugs and you can just come back to these backlog tickets that no one ever does and it actually starts going through these backlog tickets and it's actually a really amazing experience. So I love the idea. Right. I think we can all agree that that sounds great.

Lex Fridman (291:01)

Yeah.

Michael Paulson (291:02)

But every time I've done it and, and I've, I've asked it for many and I, I try to keep narrowing down the problems. The more narrow the problem, the better it does. So if I'm like, just add one singular icon and when it gets clicked, I want you to do this. Just, just console click me. Like just at least create me an SVG and place it so it's nicely placed. The more narrow the task, the more likely it's to be successful. There's like a certain level of specifying where you specify too much. It just like can't do it if you specify too little. It just does weird things. So it's kind of like this very kind of fun, unique way you have to play the balance game. But so far every time I do these things I always end up going, gosh, you know what, I should just get better at tailwind and write it myself. Because I always go back and I just rewrite it and then it's Just like, dang it, what, what am I saving at the end? I feel like I'm not saving anything yet. And, you know, it's just like this. I want it so bad. Like, I actually want AI to be great because then I can really go fast. I mean, I can go amazing fast, but then I always just go, gosh, I should just learn tailwind myself to the like, the nth degree and just go fast.

Lex Fridman (292:02)

Yeah. We should also mention that debugging, this might be intuitive or counterintuitive. Is AI is really bad at. Yeah, like, that is one of the hardest. It actually makes you realize how special humans are and how difficult the task of debugging is. Obviously, for trivial debugging maybe can find bugs, but like, that is the real art of programming is debug is finding bugs. Logical bugs, bugs like extremely complicated, rare bugs, edge cases AI can assist, but man, the hard ones are really require so much context, so much experience, so much intuition from again, operating in a fog full of uncertainty. It's hard. Of course, AI could maybe create like logs and do traces and do some kind of load in a huge amount of data that humans can't. Yeah. But ultimately that just means it could be a better assistant in debugging versus the actual lead debugger.

Michael Paulson (293:12)

Yeah, I mean, it'd be great if they could. I mean, the more it can do that, the better. Right. Because as far as I can tell, I mean, correct me where I'm wrong on this current state, debugging is really. It looks at the code, it looks. Looks at the bug problem and just kind of tries to text predict where it's most likely accurate and then just tries to fix that spot. And so it's like it's likely this spot. You said admin panel. It's slightly off this, this, this. It's probably this location, which could actually be a really great way to do search. Right. Let me do semantic searching. Point to me where this is because maybe that is a really great way to navigate large code bases. Is like smart, intelligent search as opposed to trying to make it do the thing, ask it to just help you do the thing thing in like pinpointing problems. I don't know. I'd love to see more of that because that's for me is like the exciting part. And there's this really great article by creator or maintainer of Curl. It's The I&LLM stands for intelligence and he writes curl and maintains curl. Curl has been inundated with security problems and all this, and it's all from LLMs being like, oh, I found a security flaw, here's the security flaw, details it out in the code and he's just like, okay, how did you reproduce that? Show me. Because if you look at the code right here, that's actually an impossible situation you're speaking of. And it's just like going in these circles and security right now is being inundated. These bug bounty programs are being inundated by LLM submitted responses because they can't actually, you know, analyze the code beyond just like basic text prediction. Oh, this is a stir copy. Stir copy is commonly referred, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, boom. There you go, here's the bug. And it's just like, no, that's actually impossible because the if statement right beforehand leaves the function if the string is too long. So it's like we don't even run into this case. It's impossible. What you're saying. So debugging is very interesting.

Lex Fridman (294:53)

Yeah, I mean that for me would be the big if it can solve that. Not solve that, but improve that. That would be huge. Whether it's agents or just LLMs integrated into, into IDEs, I think there's this.

Michael Paulson (295:04)

Whole idea I call a denial of attention. I think there's an entire attack vector that's going to be happening, happening. We're using LLMs to generate fake bug reports, fake all these things, to just actually effectively to demotivate and hurt open source maintainers. Polykill was the first bug that kind of had this experience is this denial of attention where a active malicious maintainer just hounded the owner and then a white knight came out and offered to buy the, you know, buy some stuff from under them. And when they bought it, they actually replaced it with a malicious piece of code and then used it. So there's like this whole security world that's developing around using these in a very aggressive format.

Lex Fridman (295:48)

I mean, it's a fascinating world we're entering into. But I do agree with you that humans, human developers will be a huge part of that world. This is not the job might evolve, but it's going to be there. If I can. I didn't really look at this page. I thought it'd be cool to go over with you. This is again that overflow, my favorite stag Overflow developer survey talking about their sentiment and usage of AI systems. The general sentiment of yes, 61% say yes, they use it and 25% say no, don't plan to. So majority use it. Majority have a favorable sentiment over it. Favorable or Very favorable or indifferent. That's like, looks like over 90%.

Michael Paulson (296:37)

That's really surprising that. That many people just have no plan in looking into AI. Like, as much as I don't like using it for coding, I hope one day I can use it more. Right. And so it's like I, to me, I'm always looking for the next thing. I'm just surprised that people are that, I guess, obstinate for it. Obviously. The second one, the AI tool sentiment, it must be only the users who responded to the top two of that first one. Just given the amount of respondents, I.

Lex Fridman (297:03)

Wonder if no and don't plan to. To are people who have tried it and quickly built up the intuition like this really sucks.

Michael Paulson (297:10)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (297:11)

So you know, we could be like experienced programmers. They're like, no, this is not making me more productive. 81% agree that increasing productivity is the biggest benefit that developers identify for AI tools. Okay, so this is what are the benefits? Increased productivity, speed up learning, greater efficiency, improve accuracy and code coding, make workload more manageable, improve collaboration. Where's the fun? Increased fun. I would say that's, that's like number one for me.

Michael Paulson (297:40)

Maybe speed up learning is like a subcategory of fun. Right. If you're able to learn more and be able to become better. To me that, that sounds, that sounds good.

Lex Fridman (297:50)

Yeah. I don't know. It's different because like productivity is part of fun too. There is just a lightness. I mean, maybe improve collaboration. All of these elements for sure.

Michael Paulson (298:00)

There's my time using Copilot. There was certainly a level of wonder that would happen for quite some time where it's just like, it's just amazing what it can do.

Lex Fridman (298:08)

Yeah.

Michael Paulson (298:09)

I'm just super impressed by what it can do. Even though I don't use it. It's amazing to me that we have something that can even get that close.

Lex Fridman (298:16)

In terms of accuracy of AI tools. Only 2.7% highly trust.

Michael Paulson (298:22)

I would say that you have to be very green to think that you should highly trust an AI algorithm output. Yeah. You should be very skeptical.

Lex Fridman (298:28)

Yeah, I don't know where I stand. Probably somewhat distrust. Highly distrust seems aggressive.

Michael Paulson (298:32)

It does seem a little tr. Like you should definitely be in the somewhat like you should always assume that there's something wrong and then from there you can go and challenge it and.

Lex Fridman (298:42)

Then estimation of whether AI can handle complex tasks. Most people don't think it can handle complex tasks. I mean, it seems like people have a good sense of what it's able to handle and not I would argue.

Michael Paulson (298:53)

That people don't have a good grasp of what complex is in programming.

Lex Fridman (298:56)

Sure, yeah.

Michael Paulson (298:57)

If you say write to me, you know, write me quicksort. Some people think quicksort's super complex, but I would argue that that's actually probably the simplest thing you could ask an AI to do. Right. Things that are so well documented, it's going to do a great job at that.

Lex Fridman (299:11)

Yeah, probably high level design decisions which people don't even use AI for right now. I guess agents are supposed to be doing that kind of of stuff. That's probably the most difficult thing or the most impactful thing. Well, the most difficult thing is finding bugs.

Michael Paulson (299:27)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (299:28)

AI tools next year, writing code and so on.

Michael Paulson (299:32)

Now this one, the ethics part. I'm actually super curious. Your take.

Lex Fridman (299:35)

Yeah.

Michael Paulson (299:36)

On the ethics. Will we see Europe laying down some new regulations?

Lex Fridman (299:41)

Oh boy.

Michael Paulson (299:41)

What about artists? Right, right. What about people that are really. Because the difference between coding and artists is very, very simple. If you gave me a sheet of paper, I could draw you a crab. You'd go, that's a crab. Yeah, but you can't do that with coding. It's like it's right or it's wrong. There's not a variation of interpretation for what a crab is. It's like, no, that statement's just. You cannot make that statement. You know, it's, it's very bounded in what it can express. And I could see why artists like that's a very frustrating point. And then who gets rewarded for all that? You know, obviously. And then there's like the whole thing with coding and licenses. How much of it is GPL licenses? Do you think they've scraped and used as training data? Gpl forces Open source.

Lex Fridman (300:21)

Yeah.

Michael Paulson (300:21)

What are you going to do with that one? Like that means your model might need to be open source. Like OpenAI may have to get forced open all their previous stuff if there's any hint of gpl.

Lex Fridman (300:33)

Yeah, that's a weird one. That's a really weird one because most of these models I think are training on data they don't technically have rights to be trained on.

Michael Paulson (300:41)

Yeah, there's a lot of questions.

Lex Fridman (300:42)

There's an unspoken. It's a, it's a, it's a real.

Michael Paulson (300:45)

Wild west because like you could imagine that weapon if, you know, I always use Europe because they tend to have like maybe the most consumer protection laws out there you could imagine weapon. If a law came down that said that if you used a model that produced GPL potential code, you have to open source, like how many companies are going to be like, oh my gosh, right? Like you have one year to get rid of all code that was generated that's potentially GPL sourced from a model like that. Could you could imagine just the sheer panic that's going to happen. It'd be a fire sale of code.

Lex Fridman (301:16)

So given all that, can you give advice to young programmers like, this is another question from Reddit, the infinite wisdom of Reddit. What should a person in their early 20s do to move forward in the tech industry? And this is an interesting, interesting addition to the question, and by doing it, will this be walking on someone else's path?

Michael Paulson (301:44)

I am going to try to answer that question, I guess, the best I can. Which I think that if you're entering into the tech world, one of the hardest pieces of advice that I took a long time to learn was I became enamored and addicted. Obviously we talked about that program for way too many hours, forgetting to spend the time I needed with my wife, with my friends, all that stuff like totally wrapping myself up into one activity. I think though it made me who I am was probably an unhealthy activity and probably not a wise activity. And so the best advice I can give is that you've got to develop the love, the skill, the desire for, whether that's just only using AI agents, programming yourself, using Zig or programming Java, JavaScript, whatever you know that flavor is that's going to get you coming back every single day, getting the reps in the gym, if you will, for programming, but also knowing how to value what is valuable and not getting lost in the sauce where you're just so stuck on trying to make the next greatest startup that you sacrifice your health, you sacrifice your relationships, or even worse, you sacrifice your own morals to take certain shortcuts that you probably shouldn't be taking in life, life to be able to achieve these things. Because, you know, I'm sure there's hundreds of horror stories you could hear where people definitely shortcutted their morals for, you know, monetary success.

Lex Fridman (303:07)

Yeah. I mean the golden handcuffs, comfort can destroy the soul in some sense. Yeah. So that's. Yeah, I mean that's really important to remember. But would you, you know, there's young people kind of thinking, do I even want to be a programmer? Know, it seems like AI is getting better and better and better at these, at programming. If they were trying to make that decision, would you still say, yeah, if this is something that fills you with.

Michael Paulson (303:35)

Joy, I still want my kids to learn how to program. If I Can answer that if that can. If that's a good enough answer in the sense that my kids are. Are decade younger than a young person trying to learn how to program right now. And so if I want, you know, I'm hoping that my kid can run and build whatever he wants. Wanton Roblox. I'm showing him chat Jeopardy. And be like, all right, let's ask questions. How do we do this? It's still extremely confusing for him to do all these things. And so it's like, let's do this. I want him to learn and be effective. And maybe one day he has to throw away all those skills in 20 years. But I bet you that whatever skills he threw away or whatever hard skills he had to throw away, an entirely new field that none of us have thought about. Just like, if you would have asked somebody in the 70s, you know, about social networks, they'd be like, what the heck are you even talking about? Like, things will exist in the future that are going to be massively different. Different and crazy and exciting.

Lex Fridman (304:25)

Maybe in virtual reality.

Michael Paulson (304:27)

There you go.

Lex Fridman (304:27)

Maybe all of us actually down the line would just be building video games.

Michael Paulson (304:31)

Just entertainment for all the brave new world of our world.

Lex Fridman (304:36)

Well, I think. I think entertainment is a kind of trivialized version of what a video game could be. It's like, what is the purpose of life anyway? I mean, it could be a deeply fulfilling, chilling video game. It doesn't have to be just like dopamine rush. It could be educational. It could be scary. It could be challenging. Forcing an evolution, the leap into adventure that it makes up a. A fulfilling life that could be video games. Who knows? Especially in virtual reality, I tend to. That's the other thing. I tend. I play a lot of video games. I think there's a lot of room to make video games deeply fulfilling. Like, there's a lot of space where that can go.

Michael Paulson (305:27)

I didn't know you played a lot of video games, because when I asked you specifically, should I play World of Warcraft or do Advent of Code, you're like, advent of Code, Advent of Code.

Lex Fridman (305:35)

Oh, well, that might mean I've never played World of Warcraft because there's certain games I avoid. Fortnite, by the way, I think, was one of them because I was worried he'd become too. I addicted.

Michael Paulson (305:45)

Yeah. Yeah.

Lex Fridman (305:46)

So there's certain games I just know I won't get super addicted to. Like, for example, I'm terrified of civilization. Like, I have never played a civs game because I'm worried I'm Worried the dark path in my lead because there's some games just really pull you in. I'm much better with. That's why I play Skyrim. I can play these games or Baldur's Gate and moderate my. My, how much I play. And they could be like a lifelong companion versus an addiction where I'm like, it's like sunrise and you're like, what's happening with my life? And I find myself naked behind a dumpster somewhere just wondering what happened. Yeah. So that's how I choose my video game.

Michael Paulson (306:28)

You're not the first person who has specifically called out Civilization.

Lex Fridman (306:33)

Yeah.

Michael Paulson (306:33)

I've had more than one person also very high up in the tech world be like, civilization is my dad downfall. If I get near that game, I'm done.

Lex Fridman (306:41)

Yep.

Michael Paulson (306:41)

So I've never even played the game. Now it makes me like, dude, I gotta give this a try. That sounds crazy.

Lex Fridman (306:47)

Yeah. And the new one is actually supposed to be really, really good. What were we talking about? Yes. For that same young developer. Is there a trajectory through jobs that you could give advice on? So you started out with Schedulicity?

Michael Paulson (307:02)

Yeah, that was my first full time when I had the government contracting one before that. That wasn't quite full time. It was in C. It was a lot of fun. And then building my own startup for quite some time. So if you count either of those as full time, then those would be the full time. But schedule Listy was the official on the docs.

Lex Fridman (307:17)

So is there some value to jumping around, like working in one company and another to try to figure out like, what brings you joy?

Michael Paulson (307:26)

I think there's a lot to that because not every job you're going to get is gonna. It's gonna be great. Now your first job you could get could make you think you hate programming. It happened. I did an internship at a place. I know I keep on like surprising you with more kind of things I did in the past. Did an internship at a. At.

Lex Fridman (307:45)

You did so many things. It's incredible.

Michael Paulson (307:47)

At a place called like Total Information Management System. Remember when I talked about that hours ago about healthcare and that and industrial shipping and all that. It was a C shop. It was so bad that after I did that, I went and changed my major to mechanical engineering for a semester in college. I thought I. Okay. Actually I like computer science. I hate programming. I. So, you know, just because you've had a job doesn't mean it's the. It's gonna be the one. And the thing is, here's the best part though. If you get a job and you like it and you want to do it and it's exciting, you don't need the change. Right. I think a lot of people are like, oh, I gotta find the next thing. I've been here for two years. Like there's kind of this like, you gotta move around minus mindset. I don't think you have to move around. I don't think it hurts your career because if anything, you'll gain more responsibility and you'll be able to talk with way more authority. And the next time you interview, you're going to be way more into like, oh yeah, I had to get these X people and these X people to be able to do all this stuff. And it's like you can talk with much more authority if you stay at a place longer. And that's nothing but benefits in my book. It's only if you stay at a place because you're afraid or you don't want to. You know, you already have something that works for you and just never want to change. And you're just like, I get to go in and just be completely mindless. I think if you go mindless for a couple years, you'll find yourself. That's like the only real danger. You just come out with nothing at all.

Lex Fridman (309:00)

Yeah. Especially when you're younger. That's the whole point. Take, take the risk, take the leap out to the next thing. To the next thing. And not for money, but for just personal, like joy.

Michael Paulson (309:09)

Joy and money could get at the end. That's the best part is when you don't strive for the money, sometimes the money just shows up anyways.

Lex Fridman (309:14)

Yep. And some of the what makes life worth living is the people you work with. Like a good team. Team. Some of it's like, not to be generic, but, you know, culture matters. It's whatever makes you happy. Like, for example, I just had. Won't call out places, but you know, there's certain companies where everybody is very nine to five and it's very. Even if the work is exciting, they're not. They don't work hard enough. I would say I'm one of those people that likes to go all out, like, likes to be surrounded by people who are like super passionate. Passionate. Now, to be fair, a lot of them don't have families or don't. Yeah, it's a fascinating choice. I really don't want to talk down on any choice like work, life, balance or not. I think both are beautiful paths. And like, if you really derive a lot of value from Joy from your work. Going all in, at least for some stretch of your life is a beautiful thing to do. Just all out, full on passion, sacrifice, a lot of social life, all that kind of stuff. I don't know, that could also be beautiful.

Michael Paulson (310:24)

There can be something very, very exciting about that in some sense, especially if you're building your own thing. I can imagine that would be very exciting. Like if I was Amazon. Jeff Bezos building Amazon. One could imagine that those early years were probably very rough and the amount of hours he probably put in were very, very rough. But I will say that there's this kind of unique aspect in our culture where we kind of make this as an equal trade off between family or work. Like, oh, you don't, you do or you don't have to have kids. And my only kind of real notion with that one is that you will never know your capacity for love until you have kids like you. You just don't know. And some people are like, oh, yeah, but I'd like love my dog. And it's just like, like I loved my dogs too. And then I had kids and now my dogs are. They're all right. Like, I like them.

Lex Fridman (311:11)

Yeah.

Michael Paulson (311:11)

I could come home and I pet Indy and I'm like, Indy. And then I'm just like, okay, bye Indy. Right. Like, it's just, I can't even describe the difference between the two.

Lex Fridman (311:18)

Yeah.

Michael Paulson (311:18)

Because they're not, it's not even the same. And so it's very. That trade off you're making is no one can tell you what it's like because there's a real reality that's right now. And I'm sure I'm 100 positive this is with my wife as well. Well, where if right now we got news that said you have some medical procedure where if we do this, you will die, but your kid will live. There's not a question in my soul that I wouldn't do that. Right. If I was given, if I could look into the future and if I had to die right now knowing that my kids would have a better life, they would be happier, they'd be more fulfilled and all those things, I guarantee you either my wife or I would take that every single time. It's just like you will never be able to say that about most things. People will jokingly say that until it's actually on the, the line. But it's like with, with that you just have this ferociousness. I can break out and sweat thinking about somebody fictionally pushing my kid to the ground. Like actually get, you know, real adrenal responses flowing through my body. So it's just like such a different world and it's hard to explain. And you could never have convinced me when I was young that it'd be this big.

Lex Fridman (312:17)

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Michael Paulson (312:18)

I thought I knew. I didn't know.

Lex Fridman (312:20)

But to add on top of that, so some of the most successful people I know, some of the most productive people I know have kids. So like, I don't know if it's even a trade off like that love you feel. It seems to be a catalyst for like to make sure you have less time, but you're going to use that time better to be productive.

Michael Paulson (312:40)

I would argue that I. It definitely changed a lot of my life and my. And how I approach problems and everything in a very different way.

Lex Fridman (312:48)

Let me ask some random questions from Reddit. On a scale of 1 to 10, how much do you hate every product Microsoft has ever created and why is it a 10? Okay, I think we covered that.

Michael Paulson (313:01)

We haven't technically covered it.

Lex Fridman (313:03)

There you go. All right, go ahead, go ahead.

Michael Paulson (313:05)

Okay. The only thing I'll say is that I don't like that Microsoft pretends to be the good guy when what they really wanted to get you addicted to their products, to get you to use their products as much as possible so they can extract as much money out of you.

Lex Fridman (313:17)

Well, in this world, are there really good guys?

Michael Paulson (313:20)

That's a great point. I would argue neovim is a great guy. There's no way they can make money. Justin Keys is the benevolent dictator and he thinks deeply about the product and tries to make it the best as possible. Whereas something like Microsoft, they made VS code as a loss leader. Copilot's probably operating on a loss leader. These things are all getting you so tied into GitHub remote workspaces CI Copilot. You've become this trapped in permanent person in. And if that price rises, the switching cost is so great at some point that you'll never be able to switch. That's my only fear, is that Microsoft was once accused of EEE and it feels like they're eeeing again.

Lex Fridman (313:58)

Yeah, I'm nervous about criticizing a good thing because you could see an incentive to do that good thing like Google creating all these services that don't make money, like Gmail, for example. You can sort of, sort of cynically say like they're only doing that to tie you into an ecosystem so they can like basically keep you for life. But also it's awesome that they created gmail like and they create an incredible product. Right.

Michael Paulson (314:24)

So I can side with you on that one. It is a good product. VS Code is a good product. Yeah, don't put that on the. But it was fine. You know they, they, they did a great job.

Lex Fridman (314:35)

Yeah. So like it, you know there is going to be financial incentives behind some of these companies. And by the way me defending, not defending but saying positive things about Microsoft is just so I could talk shit to Prime. But that's, I love that by the way. Yeah. Linux is my first and last. Love it. Definitely the spirit of Linux and Open source is a beautiful thing. So I, I do think that when you have these large corporations, even when they try to do good, oftentimes the, the profit imperative just takes over and they, they can, they can corrupt themselves and Microsoft has a long history of doing just that. That to themselves. That said they've done, you know they have you could say for cynical reasons because they want to see seem like the good guy amongst developers. But they've done a lot to support open source. It's just like same with Meta. They've. Meta has done like insane amount to support open source. And you can say actually for that one. I don't even, I don't know if I can even make a financial or cynical case for why Meta is open sourcing Llama and like these.

Michael Paulson (315:40)

Yeah, that one's confusing. It just seems great maybe for hiring.

Lex Fridman (315:43)

But no, I, I think that's legit. Just an ethical, really powerful decision. And sometimes these companies, because they have a lot of cash can make the right, do the right thing.

Michael Paulson (315:58)

Yeah. It's a really positive way to look at it. And I think that's, that's really nice.

Lex Fridman (316:02)

But we should always be skeptical.

Michael Paulson (316:03)

Yeah. I mean because at the end of the day companies, they're not good, they're not bad. Right. They're morally neutral. It's the people that are running them, the decisions those people make that are really where the bad or the good comes from.

Lex Fridman (316:13)

Another question, asking if he knows how to milk a cow. I've already asked that. The answer is no. Oh no, you don't know.

Michael Paulson (316:20)

I've never milked a cow.

Lex Fridman (316:21)

Never milked a cow.

Michael Paulson (316:22)

Almost been killed by a cow, but never milked a cow.

Lex Fridman (316:25)

Do you ever ride a bull?

Michael Paulson (316:26)

No.

Lex Fridman (316:27)

All right. Why male model?

Michael Paulson (316:31)

Okay, so I can explain that one. I will say something like I really dislike the color purple because the color purple makes me upset. I don't know, just something very benign. But then someone right afterwards will be like, but why don't you like the color Purple? Right? And it's just be like. It's just like Derek Zoolander. It's just like I get done on a. On a five minute talk about it and then the next question is like, but seriously, why though? It's just like, why Mayo moment. Models.

Lex Fridman (316:57)

Yeah. So that's the Zoolander reference when there's a long explanation why male models. And he. He agrees and then forgets.

Michael Paulson (317:05)

Yep.

Lex Fridman (317:09)

What is Ligma?

Michael Paulson (317:11)

You know, I've died by Ligma quite a few times. Ligma. So do you know the origin story of Ligma?

Lex Fridman (317:15)

No.

Michael Paulson (317:16)

So Ninja famous streamer someone got him with Ligma said like, oh, something like, have you heard about Ligma? And he was like, no. He's like, oh, Ligma. Ligma Balls. Right? And then after that, Ninja got like so hurt by getting had by that that he started banning anyone in chat who said the word Ligma or something like that. And so then it'd be, you know, if you don't embrace the meme, yep, you get destroyed. So of course gets destroyed. And so then the whole goal is that, can people get me with Ligma? TJ did eye ladies. He's like, oh, did you hear that E Girls got renamed to I ladies? And I just didn't even see it coming. And I was just like, what? And he's like, I ladies, not saying your face. And then it's just like, oh, my gosh. And then a pirate software has also got me like, oh, have you heard about Google Sema? Which Sema is a real product by Google. And I'm like, oh, yeah, I've heard about this. What is this again? He's like, sema Balls, right? It's just like, dang it, how do I keep. So I've just had it happen live on stream many, many times. I've died by Ligma the most.

Lex Fridman (318:09)

Please ask him about the size of his dict.

Michael Paulson (318:13)

Okay, so this is. So that's D I C T. That's dictionary in Python.

Lex Fridman (318:17)

Who doesn't love love dicts?

Michael Paulson (318:19)

Yeah, that's a great question. Just a dict party when you use Python.

Lex Fridman (318:23)

I love dicts.

Michael Paulson (318:24)

That should be a T shirt. That's actually a hilarious teacher. But so on Stack Overflow, you can ask any question you want. And I decided to craft a question one day on Stack Overflow that says how to measure your dict in bytes. And then I proceeded to really go to town and like, explain all the different things. Like, well, what about the cost of the strings and the references? And, you know, like, when you really get both hands on your dick and really go after. It's like very hard to like really throw in some innuendos. The Stack Overflow team deleted the question, and then someone hand wrote me an email explaining why they deleted the question and complimented me on how thoroughly and thoughtful the question was, just to wait, just to weave in innuendos and that the entire team was impressed, but it's inappropriate, appropriate, and it had to be deleted and don't do it again or we're going to ban your account. And so it's like, very funny moment. And so I was like, oh, that's funny. You know, that happened. That was about six years ago last year. I was at a conference and there's a guy wearing a Stack Overflow name tag and I was like, oh, you work at Stack Overflow? He's like, oh, yeah, I do. I'm like, dude, I got a story for you. And he goes, no, wait a second, are you the dict guy? Like, that was his only question, was that I was just like, let's go. I didn't even say anything about me. And he already knew immediately I was.

Lex Fridman (319:44)

The dick guy, I should say. In all seriousness, I think I've had a bunch of conversations, sort of in the Python world where I would have to mention the name of this data structure and it makes me uncomfortable every time.

Michael Paulson (319:55)

You know, it's a very unfortunate shortening of a word, dicked.

Lex Fridman (319:59)

It's just like when I go to the hardware store and ask for caulk and there's always a nice old lady lady, and I ask her where to find. And it's very uncomfortable. I try to pronounce it as hard.

Michael Paulson (320:12)

As I can, really get that L in there, like call just to be.

Lex Fridman (320:16)

Clear and try to avoid eye contact the whole time. You said that God was a big part, was a big part of your life. Can you speak to that a little bit more? Who is God and what effect, what role do you play in your life? Life?

Michael Paulson (320:32)

So I, you know, I did talk about that one important evening where I, for whatever reason, gained my, my conscious that moment. So obviously for me that I grew up with a life where I would probably argue myself as a functional atheist. I went to church a handful of times. I can't quite really remember actually going to church as a family in any sort of sense. So there wasn't like some super strong tie or anything like that to it, like pretty much anyone else growing up in america In the 90s, you had some sort of impact or intersection with church at some point in your life. That was just a very normal thing, I would probably say. And so when that happened, it was a fairly big surprise for me. I wasn't necessarily going that direction or deciding to do any of those things. And so for me, it's obviously the turning point of my entire life. I would have. I cannot speak to who I would be now without that. I can just tell you that I wouldn't have had the drive. I probably would not have completed college. I would not have found my wife or had my kids. I wouldn't know how to value people. I don't think without that whole thing, my value for people would have been very, very small because I would have continued to just objectifying in the way I was. And then probably the biggest thing is there's this one verse, I don't even know where it's at. It effectively says that we love because he first loved us. And so for me, it's like, I don't think I would have ever lived a life that was happy without this. And I just didn't even know that that was an option for me. And I never really. You know, it was a very tough set of years for me. And I was very, very sad. And just always kind of just constantly looking for something to fulfill. And so it's like I didn't have any confidence. I didn't have any joy. I was.

Lex Fridman (322:22)

I was.

Michael Paulson (322:22)

I felt very sad. And so that was kind of this moment where for the first time ever, I didn't. All of a sudden, I just felt like I didn't have to live up to a standard, right? Like my. The standards have already been paid for. Like, everything's already like that. That's. That's the free gift. That's the. That's the exchange. And so it's just like, for the first time, I didn't have to be the cool guy, die. I didn't have to have all the right words. I didn't have to feel, you know, I didn't have to go on the conquest, the sexual conquest, to find validation. Like, I didn't have to do any of those things. And it was exceptionally liberating. And so who is God? That's more of like a catechism question, perhaps. What is man? Who is God? Right? Like those. Those are much, much harder questions. I believe that anytime you tried to get too deep into describing who God is, you typically fall into Christian heresy.

Lex Fridman (323:12)

But for you, he gave you A chance to be happy.

Michael Paulson (323:16)

Yeah. He gave me a chance not just to be happy, but also made it so that the first time I can actually feel forgiven, I guess, in some sense, and able to forgive people that hurt me. For a long time I had this weight I'd carry around from the things I hated about high school and all that kind of stuff and. But through that experience, I just wrote down every last person's name and actually held them with me for quite some time. And this was the list of people I forgave. And I read it a few times because I couldn't let myself be angry or consumed by that kind of stuff because hate is so sticky, it sticks for a lifetime. And there really is only one cure for hate, which is forgiveness. I just don't think you can get rid of it without that. And so I just had choose to forgive these people and to move on, on. And it really kind of freed me. And I would never have thought forgiveness as a means for that change if I didn't first experience it myself.

Lex Fridman (324:15)

What's the role of love in the human condition? To go to the philosophical and what's been the role of love in your life?

Michael Paulson (324:25)

It's very obvious that every person wants or desires love. Love. My wife has recently convinced me to watch Love Is Blind with her one time. And you watch the show and if you're not familiar with it, it's just feels like just a disaster of an experiment to just cause crazy filming. But anyways, the idea is that if you just don't see somebody, you can fall in love with somebody and want to marry them after like 10 days or some very small period of time. And what you really end up seeing is all these people who are just desperate for actually love. And there's like some part of it. I always. I told my wife, it's like love gladiators. We're watching people battle it out for drama and really what they want is love. And it's like they're fighting to the. The death in love, if you will. And it's this almost kind of sad aspect to watch. And so I think that it's, it's. It's hard to call, like, what is its role in the human experience? Because I don't think. I think it's just something that we all naturally not just want, but naturally need. And I don't think that you can really progress. And when I say the word love, I would like to kind of narrow it down maybe a bit more. And I don't mean like, eros. The Greek word, like sexy love. I think that paternal and friendship love are extremely important. I think agape, like God love is also very important. Agape love is the one that is superior to them all, but obviously different and also, you know, co needed with the parental ones and all that. And so you kind of need this mixture of the them all. And each one is different for each reason and where it's applied. And so I don't think. I just don't see a world in which is good of any kind without that as like a very foundational piece. Right. Because, you know, again, not, you know, I didn't. I didn't come here trying to quote any sort of scripture, but it says that it's not the nails that hung on there. It's love. That's the reason why these things happen. And so it's. If forgiveness is the requirement to kind of pay off hate in some sense, then love has to be the motivation for forgiveness.

Lex Fridman (326:33)

Yeah. That's the tragic aspect of life, I think. We're all. There's like a deep loneliness in all of us and longing. Longing to be a part of this, of this bigger thing. And that longing is. Is. Is a love. And it has many names, but, yeah. That the love aspect of it is the beautiful aspect of life. The tragedies, the loneliness and the unfortunate suffering that is a fundamental part of life. And the beautiful aspect is the love.

Michael Paulson (327:07)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (327:09)

Which I think is a good time to mention more Reddit, the place for everlasting positivity and love. Somebody wrote, please thank him you for his everlasting positivity and give him a big hug for me. So I won't give you a big hug on camera because I'm afraid I'll get a boner. And that will be very unfortunate.

Michael Paulson (327:36)

Hey, let's not bring Dix into this again, okay?

Lex Fridman (327:38)

It's my favorite data structure. Like I said, I love Dixon. All kinds of dicks, ordered dicts, unordered, unordered dicks. I don't discriminate. And. Yeah. But just that to say, like, big thank you for me. Like, I listen to you a lot. Just. And I just really enjoy. I've been going through a lot of myself and just the positivity, even when you're building the stupidest, it's just the positivity radiates from you. And it. You inspire me to be a good person. You inspire me to build stuff. So thank you. And I'm sure there's many, many others who listen to you for the same reason. So thank you for your positivity. Thank you for being the light in many people's lives. And thank you for talking to me, brother.

Michael Paulson (328:28)

Dang, that was very, very kind. I really do appreciate all those extremely nice words, even from Reddit. That's very surprising, but thank you. I mean, I know you know that there's many people's lives and I'm sure you've received the letters that have been changed from, from actions and things you've said and things you've done. And so it's one of the best parts about doing this side is that you get a chance to potentially improve somebody's life, you know, and you getting to interview a lot of people, like, there's a lot of people that listened to Chris Lattner and saw his excitement for Swift and probably went and learned Swift and then got really amazing jobs. And it can be all origin back to you in that interview. And so it's, you know, those are amazing things. And so same goes back to you. You've done a lot of, a lot of good stuff.

Lex Fridman (329:19)

Right back at you, brother. Thank you for talking today. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Michael Paulson, AKA the Primogen. To support this podcast. Please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you with some words from Paulo Coelho. When we strive to become better than we are, everything around us becomes better, too. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.

Michael Paulson (329:57)

Sa.