

        <cite>Ben</cite>
      <time>0:00</time>
      <p>
          And and let&#39;s be completely brutally honest, right? When I code maybe you too, when when we code, we get the dopamine hit. Right? That at the end of the day is a good reason why we love doing what we do, right? And and you know, whether you do when you when you when you build things, when you see those tests passing, when you when you&#39;re in that kind of flow, when you&#39;re in that loop, you&#39;re getting that positive feedback, that dopamine. And and several people I&#39;ve talked to say that, you know, prompting AI does not does not scratch that itch, does not do that for them. Just it just doesn&#39;t. The number one thing you can do for your career is go to the meetups, go to the conferences, do the networking.
      </p>

        <cite>Conor</cite>
      <time>0:48</time>
      <p>
          Probably the most meaningful thing you can do is maintain your friendships and relationships with the folks that you enjoy meeting up with. I have to get Shima&#39;s the book. But she read this book recently. I&#39;m not it&#39;s it has to do with the medium, is the message. It&#39;s not like a book by Claude Shannon, but it&#39;s a book about Wait, Claude Shannon?
      </p>

        <cite>Ben</cite>
      <time>1:36</time>
      <p>
          Is Claude Shannon? Sorry, you do Marshall McLuhan. Marshall McLuhan, yeah.
      </p>

        <cite>Conor</cite>
      <time>1:39</time>
      <p>
          Yeah, Claude Shannon is information theory, sorry. Yeah. But I think well he I don&#39;t think Claude Shannon comes up in the book. I think it&#39;s Marshall McLuhan. Anyways, in this book, I&#39;ll uh I might I&#39;m not gonna remember the name of it, but I&#39;ll I&#39;ll put it in the links. I&#39;ll ask you. I think I know this book. Do you? I I can&#39;t remember the title either, but I think it&#39;s a book I have. I mean, I sometimes can message my wife, what is the name of the Marshall McLuhan book you like? And while she may or may not respond to me because she&#39;s a busy person and sometimes I won&#39;t hear back from her for a couple hours.
      </p>

        <cite>Ben</cite>
      <time>2:14</time>
      <p>
          Yeah. Laws of media? Laws of media. That doesn&#39;t ring a bell. Marshall and Eric McLuhan. Laws of Media, the new science. No, that&#39;s not that one. Okay, anyway. That was my guess.
      </p>

        <cite>Conor</cite>
      <time>2:28</time>
      <p>
          Well, I&#39;m I&#39;m asking, let&#39;s see if the AI can get it based off of my uh my question. Because the book goes back to the.
      </p>

        <cite>Ben</cite>
      <time>2:35</time>
      <p>
          It&#39;s like asking the AI, where did I lose my car keys?
      </p>

        <cite>Conor</cite>
      <time>2:41</time>
      <p>
          Well, the AI is giving me Marshall McLuhan&#39;s work. It wasn&#39;t written by him, it was recommended on an Ezra Klein podcast by the guest. Anyways, it goes back over the last couple hundred years and looks at what the primary medium that people communicated by. Right. Uh the AI said oh no, see, the AI&#39;s first recommendation is The Paradox of Democracy. That is not it. But then right at the bottom, it mentions Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman, and that is definitely the name of the book. And I haven&#39;t read the book. My wife has, and she really likes it. But it talks about, you know, back in the day when TV wasn&#39;t a thing and radio wasn&#39;t a thing, you know, people had newspapers, and people used to sit at dinner tables and like, you know, debate politics and talk about what&#39;s good for society. And, you know, it used to be a thing where people would kind of like give little monologues at at dinners, and you know, maybe this sounds terrible to the generation of 2026. But I I I think it&#39;s quite interesting. And and people used to go apparently, and this is all third hand from my wife who&#39;s read this book. Once again, haven&#39;t read the book, but like people would go to debates where there was no applause allowed, the debates would be like very civil, and they would last for like hours, like four, five, six hours. And they were it was considered like very important that you know these potential leaders of these countries, and I think it mostly focuses on America, they would go and have these, you know, long-winded, from our standards, debates. And anyways, then it goes through the evolution evolution of when radio came out and when TV came out and when the internet came out, and every single time one of these new technologies came out, like there was a moral panic and like uh outcry of like how the impact that this was gonna have on society. And like one of the kind of takeaways of the book is like a lot of the outcries, specifically with respect to like the internet and TV, came true. Like if you look at the political state of the world, one of the things it said is that like with TV it&#39;s gonna become a form of entertainment and no longer like a debate of what is best for society. Yeah, without naming any names, you know, you look around and you go, huh, maybe the people that were outcrying back when these things were happening had a point. I mean, from a certain point of view, it is true.
      </p>

        <cite>Ben</cite>
      <time>4:57</time>
      <p>
          It is also true to say that, you know, plus la chance, plus de la même chose, right? It&#39;s it&#39;s most of the problems of today are the same problems people had a hundred years ago, you know, in terms of society and and the way politics works. A lot a lot of things were the same. But but it&#39;s also true, like we were saying earlier, like try doing a maths test from the 1890s, and you will find out how poor your maths education is from the 1990s, right? Yeah. How do we start talking about this?
      </p>

        <cite>Conor</cite>
      <time>5:28</time>
      <p>
          Oh, right, bringing someone on and the different types of is it even generous to call my vibe-coded sites software, you know? But like the different types of code or software out there, I think, come with a different set of concerns. Yeah. Concerns. How how comfortable and w w you know with specifically how one is using AI, you know, the types of code that I guess you are primarily using AI for, how does that influence you know your feeling? If most of the code that you&#39;re writing is is for work and going on millions of devices around the world, obviously that&#39;s going to inform how you feel about these tools.
      </p>

        <cite>Ben</cite>
      <time>6:06</time>
      <p>
          I I try not to be I try not I I&#39;m an old man, but I try not to be. Mostly. Let me put it that way, maybe the listeners will understand. In other words, I try not to make arguments of the form, you know, the youth of today or people don&#39;t understand what it was like, or whatever. But well from what you were saying, like um I I think it made me think like there is an observation that maybe people of my generation perhaps were the last to be comfortable with being bored. Like, because I&#39;m of the generation where, yeah, on on a weekend your mum would say, Go out and play, be back for tea. So we did. You know, we just had to go out and find the kids in the neighborhood and find a way to to spend our time between, you know, morning and evening. Yeah.
      </p>

        <cite>Conor</cite>
      <time>7:00</time>
      <p>
          Were you bored though? You&#39;re going out to play, you know?
      </p>

        <cite>Ben</cite>
      <time>7:03</time>
      <p>
          Well, I mean Yeah, there were times when I was bored. You have to you have to figure out what to do on your own, right? And you have to take the consequences of your choices. You know, you decide to uh reenact the popular music video of the day and jump down from that tree, you need to be okay with the fact that you&#39;ve skinned your knee or whatever. That would be uh the the music video I&#39;m thinking of would be Stand and Deliver by Adam and the Ants, for anyone who&#39;s listening of the same era.
      </p>

        <cite>Conor</cite>
      <time>7:34</time>
      <p>
          I&#39;m sure there&#39;s a few people out there. Anyways, where does this where does this leave us?
      </p>

        <cite>Ben</cite>
      <time>7:38</time>
      <p>
          I don&#39;t know. I would make one more one more comment, which is to say, you know, regarding regarding technology and AI and everything about the modern world, you know, the The sentiment I hear often expressed is one of resignation and fatalism, of like, well, you know, if we don&#39;t do this, someone else just will, the cat&#39;s out of the bag, you know, this is the way the world&#39;s going. It&#39;s not up to me. But I would say it is up to you to live an authentic life, it is up to you to to behave in a way that&#39;s consistent with your own morals and ethics. You you have agency. Let me just leave you with that, Connor.
      </p>

        <cite>Conor</cite>
      <time>8:22</time>
      <p>
          Alright, I don&#39;t I definitely will we&#39;re gonna leave it there, because I don&#39;t have anything as prophetic uh sounding or or prophetic itself to say. But yeah, it&#39;s uh it&#39;s a hot topic and um it&#39;s gonna be I mean it&#39;s a very well, is it exciting? I don&#39;t know. It that&#39;s the thing. It depends on who you talk to. I guess yeah, we didn&#39;t talk about NDC Toronto at all, but that was one of the themes. There was a lot of talks because it wasn&#39;t specifically a C conference. There was a lot of AI talks, and depending on who you were talking to, because Shima was visited a couple times because she was working downtown and the conference was downtown, and she sat in for like a lunch and breakfast and chatted with some of the people there, and she said she was very surprised because she spends all her time around me, and I am like hyper excited about all this stuff. And then she went to this conference and she&#39;s like, wow, like a lot of people do not share your optimistic outlook and are quite like nervous, concerned.
      </p>

        <cite>Ben</cite>
      <time>9:19</time>
      <p>
          It&#39;s it&#39;s very difficult to feel negativity towards something when it&#39;s paying your paycheck, I think.
      </p>

        <cite>Conor</cite>
      <time>9:26</time>
      <p>
          I mean, this uh this is the problem with work oh it&#39;s it&#39;s not a problem, it&#39;s a downside of working at a company that is what&#39;s the word benefiting from this technology, is that people assume that that is what informs my opinion, but and I guess we&#39;ll never know, because I&#39;m not working at a different company, but I started using these tools before even NVIDIA was paying for them. And I I would like to think that regardless of where I worked, I still would have built the sites that I I built. But anyways, I mean I uh uh maybe the last thing I&#39;ll say is we were talking to someone internally at NVIDIA, Bryce and I, and uh he said he didn&#39;t want to come on to talk about it, but on the last episode with Bryce and Marco, we&#39;re talking about AI. And I brought up that there&#39;s a lot of folks, and I&#39;d seen this YouTube video of a guy who said he kind of you know felt a lot of hopelessness if if his job has turned into just like prompting LLMs to generate code. And I said that like I&#39;m not saying that makes me not excited, but it does like that when I hear about people&#39;s struggling the word or like trying to trying to deal with what does this mean for like you know, I went into a job to do one thing and now it&#39;s you know arguably totally changed. What does that mean for people? That is I think is like uh I I I don&#39;t know, you know, and then I I pose the question, you know, is it something we should care about? And I I definitely feel like it&#39;s it&#39;s it is a problem.
      </p>

        <cite>Ben</cite>
      <time>10:54</time>
      <p>
          And let&#39;s be completely brutally honest, right? When I code, maybe you too, when when we code, we get the dopamine hit, right? That at the end of the day is a good reason why we love doing what we do, right? And and you know, whether you do when you when you when you build things, when you see those tests passing, when you when you&#39;re in that kind of flow, when you&#39;re in that loop, you&#39;re getting that positive feedback, that dopamine. And and several people I&#39;ve talked to say that, you know, prompting AI does not does not scratch that itch, does not do that for them. Just it just doesn&#39;t.
      </p>

        <cite>Conor</cite>
      <time>11:35</time>
      <p>
          And so, yeah, what is that what does that mean? And is is it like, you know, I talked to one person and they said, like, ah, well, it&#39;s hard for me to feel sympathetic because we&#39;re like in one of the most privileged industries and there&#39;s a lot of people in the in the world that have way worse jobs and they don&#39;t get any dopamine hits, they&#39;re just doing something, and I was like, Well, that&#39;s that is true. But that&#39;s also like telling someone that their problems don&#39;t matter because someone else has like whatever a worse problem or a worse situation, which I don&#39;t think is it&#39;s not gonna make that person feel better. That like if your response is like, well, how about you just be grateful even though you don&#39;t like your job anymore, you know?
      </p>

        <cite>Ben</cite>
      <time>12:12</time>
      <p>
          But things can be true. We can be grateful that we have jobs that that we enjoy, uh, but we can also want to preserve those those experiences.
      </p>

        <cite>Conor</cite>
      <time>12:22</time>
      <p>
          Yeah. Anyway, so it&#39;s uh I don&#39;t know. I I find myself uh still excited about these tools, but as I see peers in my industry be more like and more concerned or not share the same excitement, I do I don&#39;t know, gives me more pause for concern of like, you know, ultimately at the end of the day, we&#39;re trying to I mean I I I don&#39;t know if that&#39;s actually what society&#39;s goal is, but you know, I would hope that, you know, we&#39;re trying to build a world where people can live happily and coexist and like live meaningful lives. And if we&#39;re like if a tool gets invented that is stripping a certain percentage of one&#39;s meaning from their life due to the fact that they had a job that they loved and now they like I was like, that doesn&#39;t sound great. Anyway, so will any of this make it in, or will I just cut it right at your prophetic statement as a better one?
      </p>

        <cite>Ben</cite>
      <time>13:13</time>
      <p>
          Oh, it&#39;s up to you. It&#39;s up to you. But we&#39;ve certainly had an interesting discussion. This has been, you know, this like I said, this the you should measure the amount of dead air we have in this podcast, and it might be among the you haven&#39;t made measurements uh over time, but well it&#39;s funny, I the yeah.
      </p>

        <cite>Conor</cite>
      <time>13:30</time>
      <p>
          We have to stop talking at some point, but I I find Shima and I all of our conversations these days uh are you know, what is the best way to live life? And you know, what should what should we really be optimizing for and and with respect to to careers and and whatnot, and going into like parenting and balancing work-life balance and all this stuff, and and then you then you talk to some people and they&#39;re like, I would never want to have kids right now, it&#39;s the worst time to bring children into the world, and I&#39;m just like, what? What do uh I mean I everyone&#39;s entitled to their opinion, but I would just say we haven&#39;t had the kid yet, so maybe this is the best time to ask me. But it has been like the most magical experience seeing my wife like grow our future kid. And I I remember listening, I won&#39;t name the name because a lot of people uh have take issue with him, but he has like a whole subsection of a podcast interview one time where he just gushes about having kids and how he thinks it&#39;s a shame that like because there&#39;s a d I think I think globally, I&#39;m not sure if there&#39;s any I think there&#39;s some countries in Africa that are having upticks and like Certainly in the West, we might say we the trend is down, I think. Yeah, less and less people are having kids. And everybody can have you know live your own life, but I I just I just think it&#39;s like the gonna be the biggest adventure. And anyways, a lot of conversations, yeah, these days. It&#39;s it definitely seems like I&#39;m I&#39;m not sure. I when the internet was coming out, was there this much like buzz around? Because I I was being born at that time, and and I guess maybe you were too young. I don&#39;t know. If like when are you talking about like uh what like early nineties? Yeah, okay.
      </p>

        <cite>Ben</cite>
      <time>14:59</time>
      <p>
          So I was first on the internet in 1992.
      </p>

        <cite>Conor</cite>
      <time>15:02</time>
      <p>
          Okay, yeah. Was it was there the same amount of like how is this gonna affect society and whatnot, or and like concern?
      </p>

        <cite>Ben</cite>
      <time>15:09</time>
      <p>
          I don&#39;t think so. Not that I remember. It&#39;s funny, I remember I remember when spam was invented. Does that seem crazy? I remember Cantor and Seagull, a law firm, posted the first what is recognized generally as the first spam message to a Usenet newsgroup newsgroup. And the reaction from the community was as you would predict, they were kind of outraged. But but Cantor and Seagull were completely unapologetic. They basically said, We can do this. And that was the birth of spam. A sad day. Yeah. Is that the ending? Is that the ending?
      </p>

        <cite>Conor</cite>
      <time>15:53</time>
      <p>
          Oh my gosh. A sad day. Yeah, I don&#39;t know. I guess I guess yeah. Like I always say though, these are half the conversations that we end up having on these podcasts are exactly what we if we if I was at C now and we were chatting, I&#39;m sure we&#39;d be talking about a bunch of the talks that we saw. But uh over dinner and stuff, these are the kinds of conversations that we probably would be having.
      </p>

        <cite>Ben</cite>
      <time>16:16</time>
      <p>
          Yeah, the one time.
      </p>

        <cite>Conor</cite>
      <time>16:23</time>
      <p>
          Oh yeah, yeah. Yeah, everybody should go. And uh if there&#39;s one positive thing to come out of all this, yeah, is it positive? Well, who knows? Is that I think that like the in-person, especially in a world now of remote work, like that stuff is uh it&#39;s become like more and more important, right?
      </p>

        <cite>Ben</cite>
      <time>16:37</time>
      <p>
          It&#39;s always been the most important thing, and it&#39;s now even more important. Yeah. And that&#39;s the thing, yeah. It&#39;s even more important now. The number one thing you can do for your career is go to the meetups, go to the conferences, do the networking. It it it may be hard. It&#39;s it&#39;s certainly hard for, you know, your stereotyp stereotypical standard nerds to do that, if f which I count myself among. But um but yeah, it it really is more important now than ever with the especially with the with the job market the way it is, you know, where it&#39;s basically devolved into AIs sending resumes to other AIs, as far as I can tell. The thing you have to do is actually get in touch with a human and and network and get an in.
      </p>

        <cite>Conor</cite>
      <time>17:28</time>
      <p>
          Yeah, yeah. And that&#39;s the thing, is that if people hear the word that&#39;s the thing, yeah. Here&#39;s a little advice too from someone, you know, I wish someone had told me this when I was younger in my career. People hear the word networking and they hear the word mentoring, and they think of this like, oh, I gotta go, I gotta go to this event and I gotta network. No, you showing up at the event is like the networking. You&#39;re either naturally gonna start chatting with someone, and you don&#39;t have to be thinking, oh, I gotta ask for someone&#39;s business card. Like, just showing up at the conference or at the event is the networking itself and and mentoring. Like, I actually got this from Say What You Will about the book in general, but uh Cheryl Sandberg wrote a book called Lean In. In that book, she talks about how one time someone asked if uh that she could be her mentor, and she had been having these little five or fifty-minute conversations with that person over the last couple years, and she was thinking to herself, like She&#39;s like, You already are.
      </p>

        <cite>Ben</cite>
      <time>18:18</time>
      <p>
          What do you think we&#39;ve been doing this whole time?
      </p>

        <cite>Conor</cite>
      <time>18:20</time>
      <p>
          Exactly. It is the five-minute conversations or whatever, you&#39;re bumping into someone, people don&#39;t realize like your peers can be mentors, you know, you&#39;re you&#39;re the folks on your team can be mentors. Yeah. You can have different mentors for different areas of your life, right? Exactly, yeah. And I and I realized too, at one point in my life, I you know, people don&#39;t know this, but I actually emailed Sean Parent. I was like, hey, can you be my mentor? And then he probably I don&#39;t think he ever uh replied to the email, but like in hindsight, having then read the book later, I realized wait, like Sean Parent, like I is I&#39;m very lucky to call him a friend now, but he was like a mentor, like even just watching his videos before having ever met him. That is like, you know, you you can be mentored by someone that you&#39;ve never actually spoken to just by consuming their content and reading their blogs and stuff. And and friends can be mentors, sure as well. Yeah.
      </p>

        <cite>Ben</cite>
      <time>19:08</time>
      <p>
          I&#39;ve you know the people who you enjoy, the people whose company you enjoy, the people you enjoy at work, the people whose whose friendship you enjoy, keep keep those relationships going. Yeah. Like it&#39;s worth it.
      </p>

        <cite>Conor</cite>
      <time>19:24</time>
      <p>
          Yeah. I mean that&#39;s what I mean, uh we&#39;re this conversation has gone all over the place, but like sometimes Shima and I we we joke about like, oh, you know, what if AI really becomes super in you know, displaces everybody, and it&#39;s like, well, we&#39;re all gonna have to find purpose in other, you know, I&#39;m just gonna start running a whole I&#39;m gonna be in the best shape of my life ever, because my my you know, hour, hour and a half runs, they&#39;re gonna turn into two or three hour runs a day, and you know, board games and there are other things that people do, you know, gardening, and uh, you know, we we have a little whatever backyard now, and you know, maybe I I don&#39;t garden, but you know, I&#39;ve I&#39;ve gotten really into mowing the lawn. It&#39;s there are things you can you know get meaning and like enjoyment from other than work. And like I don&#39;t actually think that&#39;s way the way society is going, but sometimes we joke as like, oh well, you know, what actually are we gonna do? And like if that is the case, people there will have to be some shift in like and the probably the most meaningful thing you can do is maintain your friendships and relationships with folks that you enjoy meeting up with because oh, and I have one piece of advice for being a dad, at least in the early days.
      </p>

        <cite>Ben</cite>
      <time>20:25</time>
      <p>
          Figure out which shirts you like and set them aside. Because your job as dad is mostly to get spit up on the shoulder, right? That&#39;s gonna happen to many of your shirts.
      </p>

        <cite>Conor</cite>
      <time>20:37</time>
      <p>
          Luckily, almost all my favorite shirts, except for two, are shirts that I got quote unquote for free from including the one I&#39;m wearing right now. Okay, okay. From from races, and I have like three times as many as I would need.
      </p>

        <cite>Ben</cite>
      <time>20:54</time>
      <p>
          Oh, you&#39;re at you&#39;re you&#39;re in good stead then. Like yeah, conference shirts, race shirts, whatever.
      </p>

        <cite>Conor</cite>
      <time>20:59</time>
      <p>
          Whatever all those free t-shirts, put them to good use. Yes. And you know, even though I&#39;ve I&#39;ve donated a ton of them over the years, I still have probably because I kind of I can&#39;t probably still have a few dozen. Oh, yeah, yeah. And there&#39;s the ones that uh you don&#39;t actually fit great, but you&#39;re just like, ah, you know, I might need this at some point.
      </p>

        <cite>Ben</cite>
      <time>21:17</time>
      <p>
          They&#39;re about to you can throw it on at 2 a.m. for the feeding.
      </p>

        <cite>Conor</cite>
      <time>21:20</time>
      <p>
          Yeah. Or they&#39;re just gonna become my daily drivers, you know. If I&#39;ve been getting sick on every day, it&#39;s gonna be like, you know what? You&#39;re right. I&#39;m gonna set my favorite race t-shirts aside, and we&#39;re gonna put these ones that I don&#39;t particularly love in rotation for the next uh few months. That is good advice. And luckily I have a whole rotation of free t-shirts ready to go. All right, we should probably call it here. Be sure to check these show notes either in your podcast app or at adspthepodcast.com for links to anything we mentioned in today&#39;s episode, as well as a link to a GitHub discussion where you can leave thoughts, comments, and questions. Thanks for listening. We hope you enjoyed and have a great day. I am the anti Bryce. Um
      </p>