Unpacked In Santa Cruz
Mike Howard talking ....
Unpacked In Santa Cruz
Episode 47: Chris Yeh: Balancing Innovation and Humanity
Chris Yeh, our talented guest and coding virtuoso, shares his personal journey from the burgeoning computer science department at UCSC to becoming a notable figure in the tech world, all while maintaining his roots in the vibrant Santa Cruz community. We explore his daily commute over Highway 17 and the unique challenges and rewards that come with living in a place known for its laid-back lifestyle, even as it becomes intertwined with the fast-paced tech industry. Chris's story is a testament to the power of choice and passion in shaping one's career and life balance.
Join us as we unravel the history and transformation of computer programming, tracing its journey from the days of DOS and Apple Macintoshes to the interconnected world of cloud computing. This episode offers a window into the relentless pace of technological innovation, a theme that Chris and I reflect on, drawing parallels with other fields where fresh perspectives have revolutionized the status quo. Our discussion on the potential of artificial intelligence stands out as we consider its ability to redefine industries and the surprising solutions it can offer, demonstrating the unpredictable nature of progress.
The conversation takes a thoughtful turn as we consider the human aspects of technology and how they shape both professional and personal landscapes. From the cultural impact of Silicon Valley on Santa Cruz to the motivations that keep tech enthusiasts like Chris dedicated to their craft, this episode highlights the importance of maintaining a human-centric approach in software development. We also tackle the ethical implications of AI and the balance between technological advancement and the complexities of human interaction, leaving listeners with a hopeful perspective on the future of technology and society.
Oh, it's sleepy time today on the Unpacked and Naked podcast. Right now the internet is not working well, so you guys all get my meditative music before I go to sleep. But anyways, as we lead in here, I just wanted to welcome my guest. I'm not going to introduce him just yet, but there's a theme that happened about the 38th podcast that I did with Lucas, about the kind of people that choose to live here, and the man that's sitting in front of me really embodies a lot of the qualities of what it means to say that I live in Santa Cruz. And before I introduce him, there's a thing, and the thing is called tech and we're a bedroom community to it.
Speaker 1:And what a lot of you might not know about tech, especially with how everything has changed here over COVID, is that anybody who chose to be the person that this man is paid a price for living in Santa Cruz, and it's not that it cost him a career or anything like that, but there was a very hard choice that a lot of my friends, a lot of friends that we have in common, made to choose to call this place home, because you know there are built-in prejudices everywhere, and in particular in the Valley.
Speaker 1:To be a person who makes the commute that he makes every day over Highway 17 is a big deal. It meant something you know. It meant at least two hours a day being in a car. It meant something you know it meant at least two hours a day being in a car. It means that there's this thing that just happens in the way that it's thought about over there, that somehow if you're in Santa Cruz you're not part of the game the way that they are. And you know, to my point earlier about what Lucas and I had to say, that this choice that people make to live here, this man has made that choice and at times it's cost of money, you know, on the career side. But it hasn't changed who he is as a person and who I'm sitting in front of though he would never say this about himself is a man who are you 55 now?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'm still 50.
Speaker 1:I wasn't sure if I turned 55 before you did. I think I do. But at 55, this guy is still a hard coder and he sees the world in ones and zeros and he's not going to be somebody that's going to be a household name. But you can trust me when I say that your life is different because the coding this man does. There are gadgets that you hold on a daily basis, there are cars that you have driven, there are spaces that you go on the Internet. Because of the way this man sees the world, that he has chosen to be a person who still codes, I see him constantly avoiding management, unlike most of the people I know that are his age, and he's still very, very good at it. And that's saying something because coding is a young man's game and so I dare to call him friend.
Speaker 1:Over the course of the last 30 some odd years, I've been able to do his hair and we've had our moments for 45 minutes once a month. And we've had our moments for 45 minutes once a month. We've had our dinner times together. We've seen movies together. You know he lives unique within the lexicon of my clientele, but really it's this thing that I call hairdressing that has allowed me to be in the space that he lives in and the people that we're not saying, that we're not name-dropping about. We have been in rooms together, seen the people that you all read about, and this is a man who functions in that but chooses to call this place home, and so it really is a great privilege to introduce Chris Yeh to the program. Thanks for coming, chris. Well, thank you for having me. So for the audience, why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself, anything you want them to know?
Speaker 2:Well, I think the probably the best place to start is how I ended up in Santa Cruz to begin with.
Speaker 2:So that's you know I think that's the theme of the day. So I'm one of these people who came here for school, went to UCSC, and just was one of these people who came here for school, went to UCSC, and just was one of these people that just somehow never managed to leave. Very much remember that first day that I came up to UCSC and was in the campus in the Redwoods and I went oh my God, I can see the ocean from here and immediately fell in love with this place. Took five years to graduate, not the usual four, kind of burnt a year there.
Speaker 2:Then you know, computers was always a hobby of mine. I was always interested in computers, ever since I was really young, and you know, mostly the same way, that a lot of kids get into computers these days. You know like I like playing computer games and so I kind of stayed with computers for a long time, uh, and it was a hobby. And then the thing I always tell people is that computers for me was just a hobby. That got way out of hand and um discovered, uh, that people would pay me for the stuff that was in my head and so I was very lucky to get a couple of gigs here in santa cruz was the software company down at Watsonville, and then it just kind of got another gig and then started traveling over the hill and so, yeah, that's kind of how it started.
Speaker 1:So what was the computer department like when you started at UCSC? I mean, that's been a little bit of discussion here on the podcast before, but when you showed up it was something very different than what it is now?
Speaker 2:Oh, it was totally different. I mean it was. Ucsc was very unique in that it actually had a computer science department. So just to date myself, this was 1987. And you know the internet wasn't a thing. Computers were just kind of coming into their own and there weren't that many universities that actually had a full-fledged computer science and computer engineering department, and so it was very unusual for people to be able to access the Internet in 87.
Speaker 2:But that's kind of what could happen at UCSC. In fact, one of the things at UCSC that made it extremely unique was it had something called the open access policy, and what that meant was is that anybody it didn't matter, you didn't have to be a computer science major, you could be any UCSC student and you could register for an email account, which was unheard of in 1987. And you could get internet access, which was also unheard of in 1987. And so you had people who wouldn't, who would be able to access computers that normally wouldn't. So you'd have the philosophy majors and the biology majors and the mathematics majors and linguistics majors and they all log in online and they would effectively kind of get on and there was a community of of nerds or geeks that were there in 87. And there were forums that were kind of you can kind of think of them as as like Reddit kind of things for for UCSC, and so it was just very, very unusual and a very unique culture that allowed so many different kinds of people to have access to the Internet. So that was real special.
Speaker 2:And you know we've spoken about this before Now it's just very, very different. You know, computer science is a huge, huge program and part of a lot of universities' curriculum, and I mean pretty much it was the dot-com boom that did it, where everybody sensed this entire way of being able to make ginormous amounts of money by going into the internet and going at computers. And suddenly it was like being a finance guy in the 80s when people were doing corporate rating and all that kind of stuff. It was just like everybody smelled the money and so there's a lot of stuff, that kind of stuff. It was just like everybody smelled the money and so there's a lot of stuff that kind of went in there. But yeah, no, it was very, very different. It was very much more community and we didn't realize, I think, at the time how special it was that all these people had access to the Internet when nobody even knew what it was.
Speaker 1:So let's kind of sit in this spot for a little bit, because you know part of what you're describing. Here is an Internet that existed before the Internet of Things Right, where this concept came about through another company you may or may not have been involved in, where there were actually search engines and things like that, where it would give people access to the kinds of access that you had, but certainly not at scale the way that we're talking about. So I think what you're referring to is was it just the internet for UCSC or was it even bigger than that in a way? Were there ways to pass messages on to other universities, things like that, when you first got on campus?
Speaker 2:Well, I mean, the community was strongest amongst UCSC students, I mean, I think that was kind of a lot of experience. But when I said access to the internet, it really meant access to the internet. So if you had someone's email address across the country, you could actually send them an email which was just in 87, which was again, again unheard of. Um, there was this old ancient technology it was called read news, which I guess is again, is kind of like another reddit like thing, where there were topics and things like that you could actually post and people would be able to read that and respond to that anywhere in the world.
Speaker 1:uh, so that was you know pretty big deal, so out of my own curiosity. So when AOL shows up, you know we're. We're so pre what the internet even is now Like it's hard to even remember what that felt like to actually see something on a computer screen that you've went to this computer device to go find, which was absolutely unheard of to the regular public. You had been operating in that space for years already, in a way, and that was the genesis of you being exposed to computer science up at the university, or were you into computers before you even stepped onto the campus?
Speaker 2:I mean, I was into computers even before I stepped onto the campus again to play computer games, and one of the things that happens inevitably with all computers is that they go bad. There's something wrong with them, and so one of the things you'll learn very quickly to do is to learn how to system, admin and fix your own computers, because that's the thing that's getting you in the way of playing computer games. So you know, you got really good at it and then um, ironically, I didn't study computer science when I was at UCSC. I was actually a, an economics major, and I did not know.
Speaker 1:Oh yeah, no, I studied economics. Um little things that we miss over 30 years.
Speaker 2:So, um, that was the direct result of my not being able to decide what I wanted to do and then kind of hitting year three and kind of going, oh crap, I need to go find a degree, don't I? And I actually studied economics and actually liked studying economics. It was a lot of fun. I had a great series of professors which I should tell you about at some point, but they made studying economics fun. And I kind of looked at the course syllabus. I'm like, oh, I can get the BA in this in 11 courses, like that. That fits the bill. It's fun, it's easy, it's fast, and so that's what I ended up graduating with.
Speaker 2:But I was always into computers and always kind of hung around people and kind of worked in you know computer stuff. A lot of it was doing manual testing and then it kind of turned into automated testing where you actually had to write code, and then it turned more into writing more code and it was really about learning enough coding to get the computers to do the thing that I wanted them to do, to kind of have them act. In this vision in my head, and it's a lot like the practice of writing. You know, if you write every day. Pretty soon you're going to get really good at it, and so it's the same thing with coding. It's after a while of doing it, even though I had never studied how to do it. You look at the way other people do it and the way they write and you start writing and you start getting good at it and that kind of snowballs on it, on itself.
Speaker 1:So I'm going to tap into my previous nerd self, who was never really good at math, but I was a good coder when I was in high school and I quit coding in 87. So you know, back then it was DOS. You know, by the time you graduated were there other codes and other coding material that you could work with at the time, or were you still coding in DOS?
Speaker 2:Well, I actually ended up doing development on probably one of the hardest platforms at the time to develop on, which was Apple Macintoshes, because they were very closed. And as far as computer languages go, I mean pretty much, your two options at the time was either Pascal or C. Those were the newer languages at the time. So that was Borland's yeah, that was Borland's bread and butter. So Borland was in Scotts Valley and they made a very successful C compiler.
Speaker 1:It was Borland C and C++ and so that entire campus was born out of that compiler yeah, I played with that a little bit back when I had my borland folks and and uh, you know it was getting way above my pay grade at that point because I had long since stopped plugging myself in front of a computer or in front of a keyboard. So you know we have, we have a loose friend in common who was a source code for Java. You know what has it been like for you as a coder to see things kind of graduate into this thing that coding is now. You know that that code has had its different matiations from DOS. You know, through C++. You know that that code has had different matiations from DOS. You know, through C++. You know these things mosaics in there too, I'm sure. Right, you know I I mean I don't really have a hard history of any of this stuff, so I'm going to flub around on it a little bit. But but because I think you've been part of this architecture of what we're calling internet encoding, it's fascinating for me to hear this, because I'm hearing it for the first time, even though we've known each other for a long time.
Speaker 1:I'm curious what that was like for you to be, you know, at UCSC in these moments, as the Valley is really coming alive. You know we had these. You know companies like IBM, apple, hp that were doing things with hardware. But you're sitting on the other end of all that. You're sitting in the software side of things realizing what the hardware would be capable of with the right of ones and zeros in the right sequence, and I'm still amazed by how much has shifted so fast and the acceleration path that's happening now.
Speaker 1:You know we can maybe get into that later but, like, this whole thing has always felt crazy to me. But it's a world that you see clearly and you know what has it been like for you to see all of these different things. You know showing up in Santa Cruz, the way that you showed up as an econ major. You know basically just trying to get a degree, which is still kind of the catch. All right, you know most people show up. They don't know what they want to do at UCSC. It's econ or history, one of those two things.
Speaker 2:So oh, don't forget that there's a huge marine biology program.
Speaker 1:Well, those are people who want to do things.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, People who actually know what they're doing, as opposed to just kind of I don't know.
Speaker 1:Maybe I'll teach, maybe I'll study this thing we call economics.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so the thing that I think is that maybe people don't realize is that you end up having to retool every five years. The languages change, the things evolve just very, very rapidly and there's been at least two or three major shifts in the way that people think about computers. You know, for me you know I was was starting off it's like everybody had a computer, everybody had a hard drive and it sat on their desk and you know it wasn't connected anything. Then it was connected to something and then it was connected to the internet and then you had a whole bunch of computers that were connected to everything and that you had the explosion of you know the internet with, uh, you know internet one, oh, which is all websites.
Speaker 2:You know HTML, everybody remembers. You know those really old creaky websites with you know a lot of text and very slow loading images. And then broadband got faster and that was a another kind of kick. And then, uh, you know, mobile phones started kind of coming online and that caused another explosion of you know, now everybody can carry the internet in their pocket. Yeah, I could spend hours just talking to you about the shift in virtualization of computers. So now you can actually have computers that actually just running completely in software, and what that did to kind of enable cloud computing, where now you have these massive, massive buildings everywhere that just hold nothing but computer hardware, that just do nothing but host other computers and software. So I'm trying to give an example here.
Speaker 1:Yeah, again, you know, from the layman's side of things, this point is really important because when you talk about something like cloud computing, I think the person who buys that that little $500 unit with a keyboard, doesn't realize what's happening, that that is just an internet connection, but there's actually a computer somewhere that's computing for them. You know that that. That it's not that it isn't doing anything, it's just that you know it's not doing what you think sitting sitting in that little desktop thing that you got.
Speaker 2:It's really hard to describe to other people exactly how many shoulders I'm standing on to go do something Like the act of my going onto my phone, opening up a browser and typing in a URL and then having that go out over the internet to some computer somewhere in some cloud. Give me the web page and have it all come back. Give me the webpage and have it all come back. There's a there's a fun little game that I play is like how many layers of APIs or programming layers and how many thousands or hundreds of thousands of people that that just require in order to make that very simple thing happen. And those of us in the industry realize that there is just a crap ton of code and people that have been built layer upon layer upon layer upon layer in order to be able to make that happen, and we just all take it for granted.
Speaker 2:Now, and what's been interesting is kind of slowly watching these layers kind of grow on top of each other to now where somebody can have a phone in their pocket like I. I can't even imagine just the engineering and the, the millions of man hours that have gone in just to create an iPhone. And then you think about the millions of hours to create networks, the millions of hours to create software that gets traffic routed from here to Virginia and back again, and you don't even know? Mm-hmm, yeah, you don't. And well you know, from here to Virginia and back again, and you don't even know.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you don't. And well, you don't know, in whatever side hustle stuff I have. You know, with what has happened happening with AI at a very fast pace. You know how AI is going to change the landscape where, two years ago, if you could come up with an app that changed everything because it could organize a particular space, get you to all these millions of hours that you're referring to of platforms that weren't available, etc. That can help make your life better in some way, and AI is actually even cutting through all that to make it even more seamless than as seamless as it is.
Speaker 1:In a way, especially in the landscape of what it is you're talking about, there's this perception of the valley that there's a bunch of people just coding and nothing's really happening. But you're doing a really good job of articulating no, this, this has been millions of people that have built this thing. That seems like nothing because it's so easy, but in reality it's universe of, of thinking uh, architecture, time, like the amount of building that has taken place, is its own thing and we just touch a button and all of a sudden we're there. And you know, especially, I think, when it pertains to fundraising. You know, because that's my space where you know I have people, you know, asking me to get them in contact with the billionaires next door of, well, it's just bad pocket money.
Speaker 1:You know that because you know this weird perception that, well, they have the money, why wouldn't they want a good idea? You know it's different than that. It's there's. There's more to it than good ideas, than something that will go and make money. There's this thing that is bigger than all of us, that's been built and it's really hard to use words to encompass these things. You know, as you said, you could sit here and talk for hours just about the hardware. You know of all the maciations that have happened in the last 30 years and the uniqueness of those things and all the software that had to change because of the hardware. Like it's just, it's crazy when you think about the layers.
Speaker 2:Oh, it's even. It's even freakier than that They've it's. Sometimes the software needs to change the hardware.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:So Intel made special chips at one point for certain use cases, for virtualization, which is basically the computers that are running in software, and you can kind of see some of that happening with the NVIDIA cards, which is the hardware that is specifically designed to do things like Bitcoin mining and is also happens to be really good at doing, you know, a lot of these AI computations that are necessary.
Speaker 2:So software is a beast that needs to be fed by hardware, and then the hardware feeds the beast, which is software, and it kind of becomes this circle of of evolution. I think the one thing that, as you're, as we're talking, and the one thing I just wanted to point out that maybe isn't obvious to people, is that the rate of evolution is really rapid. I, like I mentioned a little while ago, I end up having to retool the way I think and learn new software and learn new ways of doing things every five years, and that's the price of trying to be very close technically. And you had also mentioned that programming is a young person's game and I've done a pretty good job staying ahead of the young people, but I can feel them coming behind me, I can feel their breath on my neck and I'm like oh God, it's coming, isn't it?
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's, it's fun. I'm going to pick on Chris right now. He just got done working out on his legs, so it's. It makes the joke that much funnier in the room, because it's like, yes, yes, I just did squats and, oh my God, my legs don't work the same way. But really, though, I don't want to move past this reality that, yeah, the young people just show up and think it's normal to lift the big weight of these things when you realized what it took to get those extra plates on that bar, you know to be where we're at today in computing, and they're just like, oh, this is normal, this is just what we do. And it's like, ah, you don't know, but yeah, you do, you're better than me, you know this thing.
Speaker 1:That happens. It certainly happens at jujitsu. There's always a white belt that doesn't understand all the rules that we do and he's not coming to hurt anybody, but he's beaten us. You know it just because he doesn't know that you're quote, unquote not supposed to do it that way, you know, and it ends up maybe you don't, you know, but he didn't know, you know it's, it's, it's weird, you know, because it's so normal to you and I that this is just the way it is and you never know when that wind blows the other direction and everything that you've known doesn't matter anymore because somebody else just did it a different way and now that's where the whole market's going and all the things you built may not matter. You know two weeks from now, because you know, as as as who, who, who was. Who was a guy that wrote in search of Tom Peter said. You know, there's just some guy in a garage, he doesn't care about anything. You think you know he's doing his thing.
Speaker 2:Right, or just having the right idea at the right time, like there were. There were people way back in 2000, uh, when I used to work at Netscape and there was a guy I can't remember his name, he worked in marketing. He says, no, the internet is gonna turn into TV. And everybody in Netscape just hated that idea. Now I remember the gentleman's name. His name was Mike Homer. Everybody hated that idea because everybody hated TV. I'm like, no, the internet's going to be different. It's going to be this wonderful utopia where everyone is going to be able to share and have a community just like we had grown up with in college. And now it's 22 years later.
Speaker 2:It's just like, goddammit the internet just turned to the TV, you pull up CNN and it's like you know, it's like you get video ads for, you know, mylanta or whatever. I was just like God damn it.
Speaker 1:Yes, all our AARP stuff is now showing up on our feed. Yeah, because we're at that ripe old age already. Oh, they know it too. That's the other scary thing.
Speaker 2:Yeah, they know it. Now, you were talking about AI a second ago a second ago, and one of the things that's interesting about watching this whole AI thing kind of come into being is that everybody knows that AI is important. Everybody is seeing its capabilities. I think that you know the killer app for that. The one thing that we're going to discover that AI is really going to get at, it's going to be really good at, it's going to blow the doors off of everything, and it's going to be highly disruptive. When that happens, you know, is it going to be, uh, putting, you know, radiologists out of business because the computers can look at millions of x-ray images and be able to identify cancer better than a human? I don't know, uh, is it going to be, um, you know, that would be a great outcome, yeah, but it would suck if you're a radiologist. I mean, that's kind of the thing of disruption like ai. It's just like, well, you know, uh, trying to think of other, less palatable, uh, alternatives for ai, and I can't think of anything.
Speaker 1:Well, you know it's. I'm not sure if I shared this with you last week, but you know the project that I've been working on off and on since 95, that I gave up on this last little emaciation where I was trying to pull you in, potentially to engineer, a mutual friend of ours passed by the problem in the middle of his project. You know he's in the middle of a far bigger thing and he just calls me up, you know, out of the blue, he's like hey, I found it. I'm like he's the middle of a far bigger thing and he just calls me up, you know, out of the blue, he's like hey, I found it. I'm like what's that? He goes. I found the problem that we were always in front of. You know we were looking the wrong direction. It's south facing. And I'm like what do you mean? He goes. We had to listen. And I'm like what does that mean? And he comes back. You know, three days later, in an hour, he fixed everything that I had been sitting on for 30 years. Like what? Like this is all sitting here. He goes yeah, it was just south-facing, that's all it took.
Speaker 1:And you know, with as many times as I've tried to drum myself up, you know, over the course of years to you years, to have this idea that's been sitting in play.
Speaker 1:There's a certain intelligence that I have on the interaction that has fortunately lived with me to this moment.
Speaker 1:We'll see if the slight pause that we're doing in this moment about that maciation of the thing it's weird to think that in one hour he resolved an issue that there has now been billions of dollars spent to create a bigger problem where someone has to now answer the phone to interface with the stupid thing that they've created. You know we're back to square one and you know it's just a weird time because, to your point, ai could be the best thing that ever happened. You know I'm already now sitting in the space again going, really, am I actually going to get back to being a technical advisor of some sort to some engineer to make tech more human, you know? But here we are again after I had given up on that thing, you know, 10 years ago. And so this is a weird time and, and you know I I don't know that um, I want to go down the dark road road of of talking about all the potential dangers of ai, but when you look at ai.
Speaker 2:You know what are the things that you are hopeful about well, I think the the the radiology example, you know being able to find cancer faster, reliable, I think is something to be hopeful about. Um, I think that again, it's just one of those things like you don't know. The way I kind of look at it is when we were working on the internet, we knew we were on to something that when you connect that many people's computers and ideas and allow individuals to be able to publish things on blogs, you were producing a degree of freedom for some of these people to become successful and start new businesses. And that was all true. We also didn't realize at the time, but we were also creating the perfect medium for cat memes.
Speaker 1:So you know Of which I watch. You know I've turned into that guy.
Speaker 2:I know, but I mean, that's kind of the thing is you don't know exactly what it's gonna turn into, but you know you're onto something. So I think that really realistically, with the AI, I think we're standing on the precipice. I think everybody knows that it's gonna turn into something. We don't exactly know what that thing is, and I think a lot of people are now examining and spending a lot of money and trying a whole bunch of different things right now to try and figure out what things are going to stick and what things AI is going to be really good at and what things are going to cause us to give a pause or have ethical concerns about it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean this seems like the first time in my lifetime where a question has honestly been asked is this the right thing to do? And you know I remember when Chachi Petit came out. You know again another mutual friend of ours. You know I remember when ChatGPT came out. You know again another mutual friend of ours. You know I showed up at his house. You know he laughs.
Speaker 1:The world ended today. You know like it's all going to change from here, like how we think about it's done. And you know, apart from the existential threat, there just are certain realities that whenever something new happens, things change and the impact of those changes are hard at times. And from my vantage point, not really knowing any of that technical side anymore, that's not my space, technical side anymore, that's that's not my space. But how have those changes as you've, you know, gone through them been for you as a person? Like, like, how do you feel? Like tech and being involved in that has maybe turned into a better person who sees more things because of the nature of, of, of gosh, just trying to find the TV channel or the right show, you know, and the humanity that you have to encounter to produce the code you do so we can have a better exchange with it, like what has that done for you as a person? You know putting yourself in our shoes and our interactions with it.
Speaker 2:Wow. Well, that's a big question I think you tend to. What's happened to me, I think, is I'm trying to think of a good analogy for this. I mean, when you've been in tech for this long, through as many changes, you kind of get to see how the sausage is made, and so I think that there would be things that would surprise your average person about just how much work and then also how messy a lot of this stuff is, and to be actually be able to produce something that is easy to use involves a lot of work.
Speaker 2:As far as being in technology now and kind of how it's changed me as a person, you know, I definitely think a little bit more now about the ramifications, about some of the things that I'm doing. I think when you're younger and you're in tech, you spend a lot of time just fighting the computer, getting it to do the thing that you want it to go do, and you look at it kind of as an abstract thing where it's just like I'm going to win this game, I'm going to solve this problem, I'm going to vanquish this foe and I'm going to get some work done. I'm going to accomplish things Over a period of 30 years. You start seeing the ramifications and the repercussions of some of those things and it just makes you, I think, a little bit more conscious about some of the things that could work out well for technology and some of the things that wouldn't. I mean, there's a story about when I was first working at Netscape. So for those of you who don't remember, netscape was one of the first commercial companies to ever produce an internet web browser.
Speaker 2:And odds are, if you were using a web browser in you know 97, 98 to 2000,. If you were using it, I built your browser, I compiled the thing. It was literally compiled on the computer at my desk. But anyway, I remember when the internet was taking off and I went into a grocery store and I picked up an orange and it had a URL stamped on it. It said, you know, wwwsunkissedcom. And I'm holding this orange imprinted with this URL on it and I'm like, oh my God, what have we done? There's a URL on my orange. I'm not exactly sure the URL should be on an orange. We made lots of jokes about it at the time but as we've seen the internet kind of grow and evolve with social media and all those kind of things, it's just when you start working in tech and you've been in it long enough you get to see the direct lineage of the things you've enabled.
Speaker 1:And so now, as you get into ai, I find it both magical as a user, but I also wonder about what the negative repercussions of that are going to be yeah, and that was kind of what I was referencing on the front end of all those words before that, before I got to my question about you is that it seems like this moment has been one of the few times where there's been a conscious conversation about is this okay? You know it's. It's really strange to watch. You know the players have their deeper discussions, you know out loud with with the world about whether AI is safe or not safe. You know, I don't think there's been any technology in my lifetime where it just wasn't given to us Like here's the next thing. You know that, that there's this open discussion, public. You know politically all these things, but you know the thing is still being created. You know politically all these things, but you know the thing is still being created. You know whether we want it to be or not.
Speaker 1:And you know, at least in my heart, it makes me a little bit hopeful that at least many of the big players are asking these bigger questions, unlike what they did before, not understanding the implications of having a URL on an orange shortly after the internet, right, you know that somehow the orange is now a piece of tech. To get to tech, you know it used to just be a consumable that you ate and shit out, you know. Now it's. Wait a minute I'm somehow being advertised to by eating an orange I was already going to buy. What are the implications of this? Nobody was asking that question back then.
Speaker 2:I think the thing that scares people about AI. Well, I mean, all right, so there's two things that I think are kind of driving the AI fear and it's different depending upon where you're standing. The AI fear and it's different depending upon where you're, where you're standing. So if you're standing as a lay person who doesn't understand how any of this stuff works disclaimer, even though I'm in computer software, ai like I've read some papers about how it works and I've like studied it and like mathematical graphs of probability and you know, uh, you know chains of probability and I kind of sort of get it, but not really not to any any great degree.
Speaker 2:But getting back to the, my original point was, if you're a lay person, you're looking at it like, oh it's magical, it's just spitting out these things and you tell it to write. You tell it to write a poem in a particular you know author style and I'll just go do it. You'll tell it to go create an image of a dog in a space suit and it'll just go do it. And so you know there's, there's a lot of magic there and I think that that amount of magic is really scary. And I think the first reaction a lot of people have, like, well, if a computer can go do it, like, what am I gonna, I going to do for um, so that's that there. That's the scary part of it. Like, or you're like, is the? Is asking kids to write essays going to be a passe thing now, when you can just prompt, chat, gpt, and it'll just give you an essay, and you know I won't get into the whole cheating thing yeah there's a lot of kids getting a's
Speaker 2:now. Yeah well, I mean, there's, there's, there's whole articles about cheating and then you have to deploy software to detective people that are using ai, and so it becomes this like just producing more industry. It's like just escalating, you know, escalating and escalating more. I think the thing that scares me more as a computer person about AI is, at a certain point there are people that know how this stuff works and sometimes they'll tell you we don't know how it's coming up with the answers that we get, which means that somebody wrote a set of instructions and you can actually trace those instructions down and you know exactly what happened. Sometimes it's really hard to figure out.
Speaker 2:Some of the great bugs are weird timing issues where things just collide in just exactly the right moment and that's when the entire computer falls over. But usually, or up, you know, up to this point, as far as computer science goes, is you can actually trace it back to a line of code and you know exactly why you're getting the result you're getting. So in many ways it was provable With AI. The models are so big and there's just so much data that sometimes you'll ask a question, it'll give you the right answer, but no one can tell you how it got there, and I think that's the thing that scares the pants off of some of us in computer science. It's like now you want to give this thing control over your airplane. I don't know how I feel about that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, yeah, just in the actual application, when we don't know what brain it was that came up with what answer.
Speaker 2:That's where the fear lies yeah, I mean, it's all you know, it's all based upon probability. Or you can't say like, why did you give me that answer? Why did you decide to do it that way?
Speaker 1:I'm like well, I just felt like the right thing so switching gears a little bit, chris, um well, well, not really, but you know. Kind of. Back to Santa Cruz. What has it been like to explore that world from this view? You know, because you know I I made a very long statement going in that that there's there's a bit of a price you've paid for living here. You know that at minimum you spend two hours in the car every day to go to work. There's an emotional expense that comes with that. The road in between here and there can be often complicated, especially this time of the year. There's that toll. But there was also this reality that your choice to be from Santa Cruz and have the zip code you have and be who you are has come at a bit of a cost at times. That you know when they're looking over candidates and once they see that zip code they're like I'm not sure if I can take this guy seriously because he wants to be there and there really is a difference between the valley and here. But there's something that you love about this place and you know you expressed it really coherently in that when you showed up and saw the redwoods at UCSC. You know that was it. This is where you want to be.
Speaker 1:But the choices you have made over and over in your career and I've watched you do it you know, sometimes working for companies here that are heading out, you know, generally speaking, because you know the Valley has a way of gobbling this zip code up in some way. You know, even though there are lots and lots of people who get their start here, they generally don't get to stay here if they want to stay in the game, you know, for any really prolonged period of time. And so you know from that vantage point of, again, you know we have companies like Borland, which were the benchmark, seagate, you know, one of the best hardware companies ever. Just go down the list of things. I mean Joby's here right now they're making flying cars, people you know like, but I doubt Joby will be here. You know, if this thing really comes to life the way that it's here, you know we've had multiple companies like Google, like Amazon, who have tried to establish in this region.
Speaker 1:But it is such a pain in the butt to actually get here and do anything. And again, I like a little bit that it's that way because it keeps this small town vibe. There is a physical cost to being here and choosing to call this place home. And so what has really kept you here? Because there are easier ways to do the things that you do other than living here, but this is a place that you like. Again, a couple friends you're getting to be a smaller and smaller group have fought a very interesting fight with the valley just to call this place home. So what has that been like for you? I mean what? What are the things that that just keep you in this place? That makes it feel like you're the most you?
Speaker 2:Well, I will get to, I will answer that for a moment, but I just wanted to say that when you say that I've paid a price for staying here, that is completely true, both in terms of, you know, financially, you know as far as career and lost opportunities. There were two gigs that I couldn't take because I wanted to live here. One was early Facebook, and I had many people who wanted me to join early Facebook before they became the giant company that they are and they were based out of Menlo Park and that was impossible. That one was tough to swallow just because I knew what Facebook was likely to become, and they became huge and swallowed a lot of social media for a long time. The other one hurt even more and that was I had gotten an invite from some friends to go work at Pixar Animation Studios and there is no way on earth that I could commute to Oakland every single day.
Speaker 2:It just was not going to happen. Emeryville, and you know, over the intervening years, I've just watched a lot of software companies just slowly march up the peninsula. First it was, you know, san Jose, which was okay, and then it became Mountain View, and then it became Palo Alto, and then I blinked and it all, everything went up to San Francisco for me. And so it it has restricted a lot of stuff. Uh, even one of the startups that I did work at in Scotts Valley for a little while, um, they were based out of Scotts Valley and the founders there were given a large degree of shit for basing their company out of Scotts Valley, cause they said, no, we're not, we're not going to give you the money unless you get, unless you base yourselves out over the hill. Then they just said, no, we're going to base ourselves out of Scotts Valley, and that was a really fun company to work with.
Speaker 2:But you know, kind of getting back to the decision to stay, I actually have a little interesting story about that, and that is when Netscape gave me an offer to go join them in. I think it was 96, 95, 96. They actually gave me a relocation package and for those people who don't know what it is. A relocation package basically says we'll pay for you to move, and so they were going to foot the bill to pack up my house and move it to wherever I wanted to be. And that was just part of the offer. And I had a conversation with them, with my wife at the time, and kind of said well, well, we could move over the hill, we could move to Mountain View. And then very quickly became a conversation about well, where, where do you want to spend your weekends? And it was very quickly. The answer was here and that turned out to be the best thing ever.
Speaker 2:Just because if you look in San Jose and you look at the Silicon Valley Silicon Valley, cupertino, south San Jose, mountain View it's a big city and I didn't want to live someplace that big.
Speaker 2:I also really enjoy looking at the ocean. I like being able to take a bike ride along the ocean and kind of be a little closer to nature and feel not necessarily as much in the rat race. You go into San Jose and you know it's a lot of office buildings uh, less so now with after COVID and work at home, but I mean everybody kind of went in there and you know it's a lot of highway, it's a lot of flat, it's a lot of hot, it's a lot of uh. You know it's a lot of flat, it's a lot of hot, it's a lot of uh. You know it's a lot of strip shopping malls, and I just didn't want to have any part of that. So that's why I decided to remain here, just because it kind of felt like I was still connected to something real that wasn't just part of the rat race and just wasn't part of um, you know, kind of corporate rat race mentality, full of office buildings yeah, you know, and we joke around about it.
Speaker 1:You know this side. You know the tech bros with skinny jeans patagonia jacket. You know whatever logo is on on that jacket representing that, they represent this other thing. You know, and without mocking that so much, as like just being honest with it, that there's this identity that the Valley has that it imposes on its employees and it imposes on the culture here. You know that we are this thing and we are present. And you know, for a while there was funny because everybody looked the same. You know they all look cool the same way, all had the same beards, all had the same everything. And you know, once, once being once, tech became actually cool.
Speaker 1:You know, around just past the early aughts, you know, as we've kind of entered into the last decade, it's become normative for that identity to be a normal part of inhabiting Santa Cruz.
Speaker 1:You know, especially with the impact of that little company Looker that we had, you know that Google got to buy.
Speaker 1:You know it just became a thing that Santa Cruz could be about tech and they could also have this look and you, like a few others, you know, have always chosen to identify with this place and all that it brings and you know I it's it's hard to express to all of you who are listening like it costs something you know to actually decide to be from here. You know, decide to be a part of this community. Because you know, as Chris is expressing, yeah, they would have given you a package to, in essence, be anywhere closer. You know that. You know you get to get, you get to get this transfer of your taxes and all that kind of stuff to the new house and whatever else and be in the zone, but here represent something to you and you know I'm, I'm presuming that it just really feels more like home to you. Uh, because of all the things that isn't you know as as pertains to the Valley and it's not.
Speaker 1:I'm and listen, palo Alto is beautiful, you know as it as pertains to the valley, and it's not. I'm, listen, palo alto is beautiful, you know it's, it's, it's a great spot, you know it's got great food, it's got great people, got a great university. You know you go down the list, it's not like it's a bad spot. But it is very different when you're in that hub of all those brains, all ideas, all that money that ended up showing up in those times that we're referring to, that you would have this next little town in San Jose that might have been all orange fields at one point, but now is one of the most important centers in the world where it changes the whole landscape of the place. You know the this idea. Like I would have never imagined South San Jose ever becoming something. And then, come 2010, man, it was the new hot market. And you're like that's the ghetto, bro. Like you don't want to go anywhere near those streets and you spent what kind of money on that house. Like you're nuts. Like you're going to get your car jacked. Like you're nuts, like you're going to get your car jacked, and that's just normal. You know it's normal here and you know, although that's really been shipped out across the country now.
Speaker 1:You know, places like Montana, idaho, utah, are all experiencing these things. You know Minneapolis, minnesota, you know, are experiencing what tech touches. When people decide that they want to be present somewhere else other than in middle of the valley, it really changes the landscape of how that place is. You know, forever Like it's, or until things really change. You know what we export changes things and you know, somehow Santa Cruz has maintained an identity in a very cool way, I think. But you know, we're still at one of these friction points where, you know, as I keep expressing, the big money's moving in with the big houses that are empty. You know that, yes, we had all these tech founders that lived on Black Point Lane, from IBM, all these HP, all these groups. Those people actually lived here. These people, this is just another spot for them, you know, as they live here on the cliff and things like that, the rumors of who's who and what's what in the buildings that sit empty and the best views in the house.
Speaker 1:So let's shift gears a little bit and and not necessarily close things out. But but you know, you and I have lived a lot of life together. You know we've had good experiences, bad experiences, this kind of thing. You know, what do you find yourself getting up for in the morning? Like what, what's still driving you morning. Like what, what's still driving you, you know, again, as this, this guy who has in a way done it all but you're still like, you're still on that keyboard grind. You know we all laugh at you behind your back, not not as as a joke, but like shit, chris is still doing it, like, like he still loves that part of it. You know, what is it for you that gets you up in the morning to really drive you to keep doing this thing that you do?
Speaker 2:That's a really good question and a question that I have been asking myself, perhaps a little bit more often now than I had in the past, but there's a couple of things about it I had in the past. But there's a couple of things about it. One is, you know, I talked about, you know, playing computer games and kind of getting started in the computers and then, you know, trying to solve coding is kind of a puzzle and there is a puzzle thing. There is a sense of enjoyment about being able to make the computer dance to your whims and being able to get it to do the things that you're trying to get it to do. I think there's always a certain degree of satisfaction about that.
Speaker 2:You know, as I said earlier, you know I can kind of feel the kids kind of coming up behind me and you know that I've been having to retool every five years and it's getting harder for me to try and retool. Uh, I, I kind of missed the AI window, for example. You know the the time to have hit AI was like five years ago and I didn't really invest really heavily into that and uh, gosh, that would have been nice if I had. But you know, one of the things that you mentioned very, very early on is just kind of like. You know, chris is still coding. Why isn't you know? Know, other people have grown up and got into management or something um not that you haven't tried it on management.
Speaker 2:No, I mean, I've done management, I mean um and so this is just an interesting thing for me to say is one of the reasons why I stay in Santa Cruz is because I didn't want to be in that rat racy kind of environment of the Silicon Valley and the valley, where you know there's a lot, so much money flowing around that you almost have to kind of dress up in order to feel like, or at least look like, you're part of the tribe, and so as you get more money, you spend more money, and part of me just didn't want to have anything to do with that. So I just live in Santa Cruz and I don't have to dress up. In fact I don't dress up hardly at all when I go into work. You know I like to not have to, you know, keep up with the latest things and wear the latest fashions. I just like to be able to go bike along the ocean. So a lot of ways it was being able to have your cake and eat it too, which is I could do the thing that I like, but not be consumed by it, not be turned into some of the things I didn't want to do, and you know the barrier of highway 17 and living in santa cruz and kind of in really being a part of this vibe is kind of my way of resisting, kind of giving into the everything that or some of the things I find distasteful about the Silicon Valley culture. So, getting back to your original question about what keeps me, you know, keeps me getting up every morning, is that I've kind of taken the same approach recently.
Speaker 2:Just in my own career I have managed people before. I think the largest team I had at one point is eight, and I realized there were some elements of it that I really liked and some elements that I didn't like. And some of the elements that I really did like was working with some of the younger people and getting them to think about the bigger picture. So a lot of times you get this sense of myopia or focus on just trying to solve the problem that you're working on at the time, to try and fix this bug or get this feature working, and you know I run into that too. But experience has taught me to take a huge step back and say, okay, but why are we doing this? What is this for? And trying to instill that kind of thinking about the big picture. And mentoring some of the really gifted people that I work with has been a lot of fun. In fact, I've been working with someone you know young kid, he's 32. I hired him, you know, five or six years ago and one of the things I'm trying to get him to do now is to start to think about the bigger picture. I'm like, okay, we're doing this, but why? Where is this going to lead? Where is this going to go? Think about it a little bit more.
Speaker 2:And as I'm imparting these gifts, one of the things just to kind of go way, way back as I'm imparting these gifts and these thoughts to him, is I realized a while ago that that's the strategy that I do when I approach my work, because I don't actually have a computer science degree. I have to think very carefully about the things I do, because I'm not one of these people that can like write four prototypes and see which one works and then burn the other three down. No, I have to think very deliberately like I can only code fast enough to. Not one of these people that can like write four prototypes and see which one works and then burn the other three down. No, I have to think very deliberately Like I can only code fast enough to build one of these things.
Speaker 2:So I just take a lot of care and thought of, like what problem am I really trying to solve? And so trying to teach other people to, kind of ironically, slow down and think a little bit more has been a lot of fun to work with these people and say, like, why are you doing the things you're doing? Is this really the thing you want to go do? And trying to make people think a little bit more and mentor some of the younger generations that kind of come into this and they're discovering things. It's going to be interesting to think about them in 20 years, what their perspective on tech is going to be like.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Sorry if that was meandering?
Speaker 1:No, no, no, it's not meandering at all. I think it's a touch point that we don't just want to move past. You know that. You know you, like others in my life, you know, and not just going about coding whatever shows up. You know that these different approaches because you know there are certainly a lot of managers that I know that that barely know any code at all, but they understand the language, but understand people, you know. So their job is to actually manage the humans, to keep them human. So they're coding for humans. You know one of them was a manager at Joby, which was, you know. Again, if you looked at his resume, he's got no business sitting for the interview. You know, if this is the case, if you need a top coder, he's not your guy. But as far as managing humans, he's amazing and he knows how to keep the directive right. You know this is where we're going. These are the safety measures that we need to put in play.
Speaker 1:There's humans on the other end of this product and we need to help them, not help our code. You know this, this mentality that that you know again, building before we understand what the outcome is has a cost on humanity. And you know, I guess social media can be one of those examples. I think it's the easiest one to to slap in the face, but there's thousands of those examples. I think it's the easiest one to to slap in the face, but there's thousands of other stories, you know, there's, there's, there's my own, you know, thing that I have hovered on, which is, which is uh, which is appointment-based models. You know, like how, how did? How did we, after spending billions of dollars trying to make it easy to go on a computer and make an appointment, end up in a spot where now you have to call another receptionist so that they can interact with this data point and still not get it right, and it's nearly impossible now to make an appointment with the doctor. Like it. Like it did the absolute opposite of what it was intended, you know, which is why I never dove in, as you know, in my thinking, thinking, I saw what the code was limited to and I'm like this is creating a bigger problem. Okay, 25 years later, here we are. This is what I saw. This is why I didn't do it.
Speaker 1:Whatever, whatever thing is wrapped around in my head, I just wasn't the person to go first, but that wasn't what the Valley wanted at the time. Like you just go, you find out whether it works. After you know, if they're giving you money to do it, do it. You know that that's the game, and whatever moral compass I thought I had was like, well, shit, it's not going to work because, like it just creates more complication in a strange way. So you know that, that it's good to hear from you that human side, that that again, I didn't. I didn't know you were not a computer science person, that you were an economics person. So actually you see how it all works, but that's for another discussion. We'll talk democracy another time.
Speaker 2:Oh, it's even worse. If the computer thing hadn't worked out, I would have become an accountant.
Speaker 1:Yes, oh, yes, yes, yes, yes.
Speaker 2:Well, you.
Speaker 1:George, George, we need to talk about your receipts here.
Speaker 2:Well, you talked about not being good at math. I mean, that's one of the reasons why I was going to be an accountant. It's just like it's just addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. I'm like, okay, I can deal with that. Yeah, I can be really good at that. You said something about human factors and I had an interesting thing to say and unfortunately it drifted right out of my skull, human factors we can rehearse a little bit.
Speaker 1:I asked about what drives you. You know, in essence, the nuts and bolts of it. You shared that there's this thing that you've done that you want to share with young people. You know about taking a slower approach, like really minding the problem you're actually willing to resolve, not just the one that that came up because there was some improper code somewhere. So is that triggering any?
Speaker 2:no, I remembered that.
Speaker 2:Okay, let me. Let me finish your thought before I go back on on my snarky comment. Um, yeah, I mean some. This actually touches on another.
Speaker 2:Another theme, uh, which is that people I don't think from the outside don't understand, is that you're writing software and people think that computer geeks are. They just sit there and type with their headphones on and a lot of them do. I do, um, but at the end of the day, you're still dealing with people, and so one of the phrases I often have is software is a contact sport. You actually have to have the arguments, you have to go into a room and like, have the disagreements and really have a debate and challenge of the ideas, and some people are really good at facilitating that, and some people are just really horribly accepting the fact that their golden idea is not going to be the thing that we're going to go with, and so, um, that's also another part of the mentorship that I'm trying to tell people. It's like, no, you're right, but they don't understand the problem, and it's our job to tell the story to make them understand the problem, and then, once they understand that, then they're going to green light this project. So it's a little bit about the human side and you know, building a team and trying to get an understanding amongst multiple people and the right people to try and make the decision to go do the thing that will allow you to go code and do the solve the problem the way it should be solved.
Speaker 2:Um, I remember my snarky comment you were talking about appointments and I just want to state for the record that calendars have sucked, they have always sucked and the they they will continue to suck forever. I mean, if you think back, I mean calendars have not. Online calendaring has not appreciably improved since like forever, since like 1980. Yes, it's like it still sucks. Even though it's on your phone now and everything is synced, synchronizes to the sky, it's still a pain in the ass to use. So it's just like calendaring is a lost cause.
Speaker 1:I think you'll be a little surprised by this little one hour moment with our friend. I was stunned because it was only an hour. I'm curious what will happen in a day. That's all. My jaw was wide open because it was a phone call. It wasn't, yeah. Anyways, we'll maybe save that for another point in the podcast of. Maybe I'm a guy all of a sudden. Who knows, yeah, who knows, that's how it is here in Santa Cruz, california, when you're, when you connect to the valley. Maybe you got your thing.
Speaker 1:Well, chris, did you have any parting thoughts in closing here? I, I mean, I, I really don't want to take too much of your time, but but I have appreciated really, because what you've done is contextualize a lot of things that we've talked about. You know that. That you know. Of course, I'm thinking of all the conversations we've had over the course of years and, and you know, I, I, I've known you're brilliant the whole time. You know you think about a lot, like I think about a lot of things, but you know, getting to hear from your mouth, just you, talking about what it is you do, how it is, you approach things, is good for me. You know it's like wow, yeah, yeah, those things. You know that that that's really important. Just being able to heal that, hear those words on display, that it that was your motivation. You know that this is what I'm going for, and I'm sure there are many people like you, that that that is the point of of tech is making humanity live in the space better with each other. And so you know it's it.
Speaker 1:But there's a catch. You know it is tech, you know it is only as good as it's coded to do, and living in that friction point of that dilemma that you're shooting for one thing and maybe it produces another thing, those are the realities of markets and ideas and things like that. And I don't think people understand fully the ramifications of the risk of all of these ideas, because every solution produces more problems in a very strange way. And so you know it is intriguing to have someone who's been in that space for the last 30 years, you know, trying to resolve those things. So so that's really what I've gotten from this to get a little minor viewpoint into these things, what I've gotten from this to get a little minor viewpoint into these things. It's not as though you've shared any huge details, but it certainly painted a landscape that I may not have thought about on my own.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, tech is just like any other tool or instrument of change. Sometimes those changes can be wonderful and sometimes they can be really horrible. Sometimes those changes can be wonderful and sometimes they could be really horrible, and it does give me pause sometimes realizing that for two times in my career that I played a role in a couple of serious shifts social shifts in how we interact amongst ourselves as humans. There's a group of us that were all there and we occasionally will have a moment where we're just like, oh my God, what do we do? And it's a very strange and humbling place to be in. Sometimes Not at all. As far as the time goes, I'm more than happy to talk to you about something else. I personally have enjoyed being able to sit here after a horrible leg day.
Speaker 1:Yes, well, you actually have to walk to your car now, so that's going to be a funny thing.
Speaker 2:Oh no, I'll be okay.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:No, I don't have any. I don't. I don't have any final thoughts for you.
Speaker 1:Okay, Well, I want to thank you for coming on. I know well, I wasn't pulling teeth, but this isn't necessarily your favorite setup here with microphones, but I appreciate the risk that you took.
Speaker 2:You know, I can say that I've now been on a podcast. Yes, you can, it's a brand new thing for me, so of course I had to say yes.
Speaker 1:It's a fairly brand new thing for me. So of course I had to say yes, it's a fairly brand new thing for me and for those of you who are listening, I just want to make a shout out. You know, to all of you, you in Sweden, you in England, you in Australia, you in Germany I don't know how the hell you found out about me. But, like, thanks for listening. I appreciate you as we're, as I'm doing this dumb tech thing, no-transcript reaching out to the world right now and of my, you know, less than 200 listeners in the in the first month that as this thing spreads. You know, with Santa Cruz Vise magazine carrying the thing. It's a very strange process to watch. Like holy shit, like people actually want to hear about this place, want to hear from me, want to talk to the people I know, or at least listen in on our little conversation. So thanks for taking the risk. I appreciate that about you, chris.
Speaker 2:Hey, no, that that little spiel there.
Speaker 1:That's what the internet is for about you, chris, and hey, no, that, that little spiel there. That's what the internet is for. Yeah, you know this, this, this is what I know it was meant to do. I just don't know that that is exactly what it's doing right now, but but I know that was the intent.
Speaker 2:Well, you know, if you just wait a little bit longer, you'll find out.
Speaker 1:I know and, and you know, fortunate for me, I get to hang out with the guys who broke it, who broke people, and and I get to hear their stories about how they want things to change, and so I'm excited about that. You know that, that you know that this, this is what people don't imagine is is the people that did the thing know what they did and they're trying to fix it and, and that's that's beautiful to know. You know so for all of you. You know, I know, you think what you think about some of these guys that may have been standing behind a president you don't like, but not all of them aren't seeing you. This is my point. You know they are trying to do some things and, even though you might not agree with the current politics, they're smart people and they know what they're trying to do. So, anyways, that's enough of a political lecture for anybody, but anyways, bless you all. Thanks so much, chris, and we'll talk with you soon. Thanks.