Everything's a Fad (Including This Podcast) — with Benn Stancil

Benn Stancil built Mode Analytics, spent a decade in the data trenches, and now writes some of the sharpest, funniest essays in the data world. On The Test Set, he talks about the cultural shift from Nate Silver to Rick Rubin why AI might kill the analytics dashboard, and what happens when a thousand startups all build the same thing. Plus: boy bands as a model for collaboration, and why the best creative work starts with cheating.

What's inside: 

• Why the modern data stack was basically big data 2.0
• The cultural flip from Nate Silver to Rick Rubin
• Gas Town, tar pits, and the AI startup zero-sum game
• Software is becoming content, and that changes things
• Benn's creative process: Lorde lyrics, Codenames, and cheating
• The boy band as a model for small-team collaboration
• BI is (mostly) dead, and vibes might replace SQL

Transcript

0:02

Welcome to The Test Set. Here we talk with some of the brightest thinkers and tinkerers in statistical analysis, scientific computing, and machine learning. Digging into what makes them tick, plus the insights, experiments, and OMG moments that shape the field. Today, we're sitting down with Benn Stancil. You may know him from his writing on Benn with two n's dot Substack dot com, where he's just as likely to weave in Lorde lyrics or Olympic gymnastics scoring drama as he is to talk about SQL. Benn spent a decade building Mode, one of the early modern analytics and BI tools. We talk about how he got started, we talk about the layers of hype inside the tech ecosystem, and we talk about why he's still optimistic about writing in an AI world where output is cheap. I really like how he uses AI like at the source, idea generator, but not necessarily as a writer. And I have to say, for someone who comes off roundly as a pessimist, Benn gives us a lot to be optimistic about. So without further ado, Benn Stancil. Alright. So Benn Stancil, welcome to The Test Set, where we are really interested in talking to the people behind the data. We're here in Times Square, and I'm joined by Wes McKinney, who's a principal architect at Posit. And I'm Michael Chow, a software engineer at Posit. And I I think we're so excited to talk today about all of the takes you've had over the past decades on data, and I feel like maybe just by way of introduction, one thing that really stuck out to me as I was looking at your writing is that you're the type of person who seems to be writing, like, lyrical essays on data that might involve, like, a SQL poem or a bait and switch where you give someone a quote about analytics and then reveal that it was actually a nineteen o four quote about accounting. I'm so curious about your writing and and thoughts on data, but maybe maybe to start, do you mind telling us a little bit about yourself? Sure. So, like I I'm Benn. I started working in tech twelve, thirteen years ago, initially worked in DC, done a think tank job. It's a very DC job, done policy research. It's actually pretty similar to a data analyst job. It's just instead of telling people PMs or engineers or whatever what people are doing on the product, you're basically telling Congress people what you should do to the economy, and Congress people do not care what the twenty two year old think tank thinks you should do to the economy. But it's the same kind of idea, take a bunch of data and make some recommendations. So I did that for a bit, then ended up joining a tech startup in twenty twelve, was there for a little while, and then me and two other folks who worked on the data team at that company started a company called Mode, which built like an analytics and BI tool. We did that for about ten years, and then have done a couple of things since then. It got acquired in twenty twenty three, worked at the acquiring company for about a year, spent a little bit of time doing some side projects, spent a little bit of time working on political campaigns, and periodically yelling at the Internet about whatever data nonsense, or tech nonsense, or nineteen o four quotes about accounting, I guess. Right. Yeah. And you didn't I I saw you started on the Mode blog pretty early. You're sort of like the early posts on the Mode blog. Is that Yeah. So we when we started Mode, there were three of us. There was a guy who was an engineer who could, like, write code, we're, like, chain them to his desk, and be like, go build our thing. There was the guy who was our CEO who was personable, and could talk to investors, and could make friends with people, like Wes, who was also working on something similar at the time. And then there was me, who was like, neither of those things. Like, I was not going to go out, like, please stay inside. But also, you can't write code, so what are you going to do? And so I basically started writing this blog as I needed something to do. Like, why was I there to begin with? I don't you have to ask them. But I started writing this blog that, at the time, was very FiveThirtyEight, like, analysis on pop culture stuff. Like, the first blog post is about Miley Cyrus. There was stuff about, like, parking spots in San Francisco and weed, like, prices of weed, scraped from a price of weed website and stuff like that. It was not related to, like, tech at all. Yeah. Or or mode, I guess. Or did it did it have mode? No. No. It did not have mean, nothing existed at that point. Like, the the first blog post was three days in after we started the company. Yeah. And we we were fairly intentional trying not to or fairly intentionally trying not to do and at the end of this, here are five tips for running a data team. Tip five is buy modeanalytics.com. So it ended up being, like, sort of, like, very niche popular, but a little bit popular around, like, data people, because, like, oh, this is the the original inspiration for it was kind of things like the OkCupid blog, which all, like Yeah. Twenty ten data people are obsessed with. Called like Dataclysm, or No, no, no. That was the book. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But it was that sort of stuff. And so some people liked it for that, but eventually, started having other things to do. We had customers, and we had support tickets to answer, and I had to respond to support tickets, and so I kind of stopped doing the blog. And then the substack was kind of a return to that, or original attempt to return to that, ended up taking kind of a different direction of, like, whatever it is now. But Yeah. If not pop culture data analysis y stuff to the degree it was. Right. And you've been doing the Substack for like five or six years? Five years, I think. Nice. I think I did it I started doing it in middle of the pandemic. I wanna say it was like early It's like during COVID? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think it's so interesting. Like, I think we'll have a lot from the substack to discuss. Like, there's so many interesting topics on data and AI, but I I almost think, like, for one maybe one last bit of context is, like, I I think I've run on the substack a couple times, like, this substack is not about anything in particular. I think you've, like, at different times, tried to set people's expectations for what the substack's about. Like, I don't know why you go to it. I don't I'm not really, like, not really trying to give anything in particular. It's originally was, okay, you spend a bunch of time building a data thing, you have a bunch of ideas, you're like, okay, I'll write something that was intended to be more like, here are tips for doing stuff. I got kind of bored with that pretty quickly, and it became a little bit more of like, these are the things that are interesting to me. I my ambition with it, and it's a blog about data stuff, so like, God knows if it actually can do this, is I want people to read it and leave it thinking, that was ten minutes I enjoyed. I had a good time. There's no takeaways. There's no the intent is not to have someone to come away and be like, oh my god, I'm going to go implement this thing. It's like, no, Okay. I I learned a thing. It was kind of fun. Whatever. I can leave and walk away and not have something I'm supposed to do with it. I don't know. Whether that delivers that or not, I know it's a blog about, like, SQL stuff, probably not, but we can dream. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I mean, I I read the I read the Substack, like, you know, I think in the early days, was like, wow, Benn's publishing a lot of Substack posts, and usually would start on Twitter, you know, before it was X, and it would be something like, it's Friday, so let's fight about this, and it would be some some topic in, you know, data engineering, analytics, startups, the tech industry, know, whatever was on Benn's mind at the moment. And I think the consistent theme is that, yeah, like it's it's a blog that has a lot of technical content and a lot of like observations and data about like what's going on presently in the industry, but but mostly it seems like it's written to be enjoyable. Like, the reason reason I keep reading is because I enjoy reading it. But I think, you know, Benn and I met, was also doing a startup in San Francisco back in twenty thirteen, and so I was working on, you know, something in the same kind of domain, visual analytics, business intelligence. You know, my company didn't go very far, you know, Mode ended up, you know, surviving, you know, over a decade. But we got to become, you know, got to know each other back then. I remember my first impression of Benn, and especially reading the Mode blog post, was like, wow, this guy knows a lot about SQL. Sure. Yeah. It's like, here's all these like, it's like, this this person has really suffered writing some tremendously complicated Vertica queries essentially, or whatever you're using back at back at Yammer. Yeah. Yammer was Yeah. Yammer was Vertica. But what I like about the writing, and, you know, I read a lot of blogs and it's like I consume a lot of, you know, I prefer to like, you know, just read people's blogs, especially smart people, people who have like spent a lot of time thinking about things that I haven't thought as much about. I'm especially interested in people that have contrarian takes or that are like maybe not accepting the like the standard dogma because I feel like in the in the tech community, especially in the startup ecosystem, like, there's almost like these mantras that get repeated or these shared delusions or like things that you're supposed to believe, but then, in San Francisco in particular, that there's essentially this monoculture, like this group thing where, you know, in a sense, like, if you don't conform to, you know, the group think about like what is good and like what, you know, what seems to serve like the overall operations of the tech ecosystem and startup ecosystem in particular, And often, like in the last, you know, ten, fifteen years, like that has been the, you know, up until very recently, like the zero interest rate period where, you know, money was cheap, and so startups were raising tons of money. And so, you know, there's a lot of like, it's good, it's great, like everyone's raising a ton of money, but, you know, is it productive? Like, are the companies making money? Like, are we advancing society? And so I think, I don't know that there's any easy answers to that, and just, you know, being contrarian and, you know, like poo pooing on things because you don't, you know, you don't like them, or maybe you're not part of, like, you know, people, companies that are raising a lot of money or being, like, nominally successful. Like, I it's worthwhile to like take a step back. It's like, we're building a lot of stuff, but like, is it, you know, is it helping like the modern data stack? It's very complex, like, the whole diagram, the landscape, it's like got thousands of companies on it now. Like, you need a microscope to check out like all the ecosystem of different, you know, open source tools and companies and things, and it's a little bit overwhelming, you know, just trying to make make sense of it. Yeah. Well, we've we've cleaned that out some. The modern data sack There are fewer now. Yeah. Yeah. There's some consolidation happening, yeah. Yeah. We've removed some from the map, so Yeah. It is interesting too that, like, I know for the modern data stack stuff, like, I listened to you and Tristan talking I think last year ish about his that post he released, like, is the modern data stack useful? No. And that's, yeah, that's an interesting one where sort of like you got to ride along with him and almost like discuss this concept. I know you've sort of hit on the modern data stack as a kind of like hyped up I mean, view on that for us is always, it's like, it's the same as big data. Like, it's an era. It's useful term for a thing that happened over some period of time that's like, what is big data? I don't know. It was the thing we all got excited about in twenty ten or whatever that was like, we're going to predict the future with just magic and data science and stuff, and nobody really talks about that anymore. That's not a thing, but it's like, was it successful? Kinda. Was it what people said it was? The Economist had all these articles about it, I remember in like twenty fourteen, that was like, oh my god, the world know, it's like, did that happen? Not really, but it's useful as like a marker in time, and I think that's basically what this was. It was like the joke I kind of always make about it is it's data companies that launched on Product Hunt, because it's like, one, that's sort of when this happened, like, I don't know if people use Product Hunt anymore, but they certainly did in twenty seventeen, and there's a little bit of like a bottoms up, it was kind of consumer y, it wasn't go sell to giant companies, it was all like, oh, we'll do like product led growth type of stuff, so it's like useful for that as a bucket to just put these sort of like spiritual things in. Is it still exists? Not really, but that's not because everything's dead, it's because that era is past. We have moved on to something else. Yeah, I guess that's interesting in that it seems like it connects too to some of the stuff you've talked about lately. I think in the talk you gave, like, in the long term, everything's a fad. Like, big data is kind of like being at a point in time and, like, serving a purpose for, like specific people. I I was really curious about this talk, because if I had to break it down, it's like fifteen minutes of you talking about the mechanics of gymnastics scoring. It's very complicated. And two minutes tying into data, but like, your point about like wanting people to be entertained for ten minutes, I was like, for the gymnastics juicy goss alone, I feel like totally sold. I mean, the stuff that we do is not that interesting. Yeah. But like, you know, a giant like set of lawsuits over who wins, like, medals and women's gymnasts is way more interesting than, like, the ins and outs of SQLs. Yeah. So Yeah. Do you mind, like, really quick, just recapping, like, just the, like, little tidbit of juicy goss, what went down in Olympics in gymnastics? So there's a women's floor exercise final in twenty I don't know, twenty twenty four. Yeah. It's Paris. Women's floor exercise final, bunch of gymnasts go, Simone Biles is supposed to win, she, like, messes up a couple times, she's in second, there's a Brazilian named Rebecca Andrade who's in first, and then there are two Romanians tied for fourth. And the way women's gymnastics scoring works is there's a starting score value, which is basically computed from the elements that you do. There is an execution score, which is kind of like subjective judging, was it artistic, and that sort of stuff. And then there are deductions, which are the like, you stepped out of bounds, and the things we all yell at people from the count. It's like that whole, oh my god, they took a step on their landing. A tenth. After the all but one people one gymnast had gone, there were these two Romanians tied for fourth. One of them had the tiebreaker because she had a higher execution score, which is the, like, kind of middle score there, And then the last gymnast to go was an American named why am I sounding blanking on her name? Jordan Jordan Chiles. Jordan Chiles, yep. Jordan Chiles goes. Jordan Chiles gets a score that, like, puts her in fifth behind these two Romanians. Her coach realizes that they calculated her difficulty score wrong, like they basically added up the elements wrong, and had they calculated correctly, she would have come in third. So the coach protests, she ends up getting third. The judges say, yes, you were right. We should have calculated it differently. She ends up getting third. After that happens, the woman who was in third and then became in fourth said, actually, she protested too late, that you have a minute to initiate the protest. You can't actually initiate the protest. She said she initiated after a minute and twenty four seconds. It goes to some sort of tribunal. The tribunal said it was after a minute and four seconds, like, actually, Jordan Childs does not get that change in score. She goes back to fifth, but then the other Romanian who was in fourth the whole time or fifth or whatever, nobody knew, said that she got a deduction for stepping out of bounds, but she didn't actually step out of bounds, and there's like a video of her not stepping out of bounds. And like, had basically her foot landed where heel was above out of bounds, but she never touched, and you have to touch her to be out of bounds. And so then she protested, being like, I should have gotten third, because had she not gotten that deduction, she would have actually been above the other Romanian and Jordan Childs' better score. Even if Jordan Childs had her score commuted correctly, she would have been above that. It became this huge thing. It became all these, like, lawsuits. Ultimately, I think it is still in court. There is, like, various some Swiss court that does arbitration for this stuff. The initial ruling was basically the first judging was correct, because Jordan Childs could not actually change her score. The review of a deduction is not reviewable. There were all these protests, and it's been a whole thing, and the point was it was like we were fighting over all of these weird tedious like, became about it became sort of a legal battle where it's like, what's the letter of the law, not whose routine is better. Yeah. Like, at the end of the day, if people wanna know, like, who did best, we've entered some very detailed, like, quantitative hell to figure out, like Yeah. I don't like maybe in an unsatisfying way. You see how we get there, which is like there was all these I mean, there was some giant controversy in, like, two thousand six, I think. I don't remember when this was. Maybe it two thousand two, where basically the judges messed they did more of the perfect ten thing. It was just like judges subjectively perfect ten. There was like some mechanicalness to it, but a lot of it was just like, you know, the Russian judge kind of stuff. And so they're like, okay, we have this much more structured thing. There's these giant rule books with tons and tons of elements and stuff like that, but then it becomes this weird, like, the whole game is playing that rule book as opposed to, like, do the best routine. I mean, the best routine becomes gaming the math in some sense. Like, there's stuff in in, like, figure skating where you get, like, bonuses the later you do elements, and so people will try to do harder elements later because they get, like, a bit there's, like, a a special twenty percent, but I don't know what the actual number is. There's all these sorts of things like that, where like these, what used to be sort of artistic sports became extremely quantified around these kind of weird rules, it's stuff like, yeah, what how many seconds do you have to protest? Right. Became, like, decided the medal? It's like, that's the rule, but I don't okay. Yeah. And I find it so interesting, because I do feel like I really saw myself in that, like, tale, and the point you made about sort of like, if the CEO hits me up and asks me, like, what should I do when I break out all these formulas when they could go to, like, ChatGPT or something and get, like, a very quick answer. I don't I don't know. I'm I'm curious if you could recap that to, like, this idea that we used to be very or like, being really quantitative and model oriented was a huge virtue, if I'm understanding correctly, but that now there's this world where we can actually, like, get answers, it's all vibes. Yeah, and that was kind of the It's like before, and then the gymnastics case, it was vibes. It was, you're an expert, tell me how I did. Okay, so who does the best with vibes? And like, I don't know, this person presumably knows more than we can all dispute it, but it was kind of vibes. To me, the data stuff was and this is sort of the everything is a fad it's better, kinda, but a lot of it is like that was the culture. It was the culture of Nate Silver became popular, and things like the OkCupid blog a bunch of people got into this stuff, and our generation basically got into the like, well, actually, let me show you all the numbers and why you're and that became like a thing, a signifier of how smart you are and like how successful you are, and this stuff, and I think we have very much there has been a lot of pushback to that somewhat, in some places anyway. Things like this gymnastic stuff happens when it gets so quantified where it's just like, my god, what are we doing? It's been a year. We still don't know who won this thing. These routines are ninety seconds long, And there hasn't really been an alternative, but now AI kind of is an alternative. You can just be like, what's the vibe? You can give it don't go and analyze one thousand support tickets. Give one thousand support tickets to ChatGPT and say, what's the vibe? And if I can do that and get an answer in five seconds, and I can do that as much as I want, like, I'm not gonna go ask an analyst to give me some giant report of a bunch of, like, numbers that don't align, and they're like, well, did you think about this way or this way? But it depends on how you count what a user means. It's like, what's the vibe? Yeah. And I feel like we're about to cut Wes loose on this here, because I feel like Wes has a lot of opinions. But if I can just put a thread through it, I feel like it's so interesting to hear you describe, like, the Nate Silver OkCupid blog era, which you mentioned, kind of like inspirations for the original Mode blog posts, and then the shift into today of more vibes, which is I feel like a lot of the topics we hear right now, like on your Substack about like AI and and people vibing out. I know, like, Wes, you came up in a recent post that's very vibe code related. Yeah, there's a lot of, there's definitely a lot of topics there. I mean, I think it is interesting, you know, I think all three of us have spent a lot of our careers basically focused on building tools and environments to make it easier for people to do things with data, and that might be like writing SQL queries and computing things and looking at the answers or making plots, or in the case of pandas it was like, I just want to be able to read CSV files or get a little bit of data out of the database and like clean it up and wrangle it and get the answer. And surprisingly, in two thousand and seven when I started working, was shocked at how difficult it was to do, undertake like those basic data questions. But yeah, I mean now we're in this, you know, now we're in this weird era where like the whole concept of like usability of data tools and the environments in which we ask those questions is being completely turned, you know, turned on its head, and so, like I find myself, you know, for probably the first time in my career, like essentially not writing code, like, just looking at code and, you know, pressing return, more or less. And so, you know, the way that we work and, like, the shape of our tools and how we ask questions, get answers, and make decisions is certainly, you know, hasn't completely changed yet, but is like on its way to changing, and so I don't think we have a clear picture yet of what that's, you know, what that's going to look like. And there's a broader, to me, like, kind of cultural thing in all of that, which is, in twenty fourteen twenty twelve, twenty ten, twenty fourteen, whenever, like, the data was kind of a status thing. It was big tech startups had big data teams, and like, not like capital B Big Data, like, they had data teams, lots of people on them, and they were like, look at That was one of the things they would sort of show off, is how smart they are about making decisions because they're being so data driven and all these things they do. And you go to a VC pitch, you go to a board meeting, they want to see all the numbers, and that was kind of how you represented that you were with it, as you did these sorts of things. Now, your point, not just in vibe coding type of stuff, but if you talk to companies like some of the leading AI companies, not necessarily like the Anthropics and OpenAI, but companies like Cursor, that cohort of things, they're like the big companies with not a ton of people, data's not a big part of what they do. It's very vibey. Cursor famously has said, like, the way that they basically test their their agent harness stuff is mostly vibes. They're not really like an evals driven thing, and I think that broadly is happening with, like, taste in Silicon Valley is a big thing. It's like, we don't need someone to be, like, tweaking the numbers based on an A/B test that has this half a percent lift. It's like, what's good taste? And so I think status has become a lot less about how well do you understand the numbers, and more of just like, are you what's the guy's name? Rick Rubin. That's yeah. Yeah. Rick Rubin became this weird, like, that's who we all want to be, not Nate Silver. Yeah. And I think that culturally becomes like, oh, we don't want to do the data stuff. We want to have somebody who's like, who's the artist that can tell us, can just conjure the great ideas in their head. Yeah. Maybe that works, maybe it doesn't, I'm not saying it's necessarily better, but I think that's at least the ascendant cultural trend. Yeah. It's so funny you mentioned Rick Rubin. Mean, maybe this came from one of your posts, but I was just thinking about that where I think he starts an interview with, like, a brief, like, minute of meditating with the interviewer, and I'm like Sure. That's why yeah. And then he is like, well, I don't really like I just feel it out, like, the music and but it's Yeah. It's hard to deny the, like, impact. And if you had done that in twenty twelve, everyone would have been like, oh, it's like a HiPPO thing. It's like, oh, your intuition's totally wrong. You've gotta watch where the users go and look at look at what's actually are they doing? Don't tell me what you think they're doing. And now it's like if you're Rick Rubin, you sit and you have a minute of meditation, you're just saying, like, I just intuit it, people are like, oh, that's the guy we Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Which again, I don't know. Maybe it's better, maybe it's worse, but it's at least the thing that we've, like, that's who we want, I suppose. Yeah. Yeah, I'm here for it. I As a data person, you shouldn't be here for it. You should be like, what are we doing? Yeah. Yeah. I'm so curious, I don't West, do you any burning yeah. Do you have any burning AI questions? Because I feel like there's million things I mean, I have a lot, right? And and it's not not simply because I've been I've been I I don't like to describe what I'm doing as vibe coding. Like, I feel like vibe coding has almost become this like pejorative term. Like, vibe coding means like, I don't care about the output. If it seems like it works, it works. Like, you know, like I I still care about like, you know, code quality and like how fast my test suite runs, like how fast the code runs, like the long term sustainability, like growth of the code base. Like, I think that a lot of, like, Vibe coded software is gonna reach some kind of a breaking point if there's not, like, a reinvestment in, like, architectural quality and, you know, essentially design patterns. So, in a sense, like, design patterns have become more important than ever. Like, right now it's like an army of agents building, you know, these giant, you know, hairballs of code bases, and they're, you know, riddled with bugs, and, you know, how we reckon with that and how we manage that, time will tell, but I think the, you know, the big thing is like, it's both like one of the most exciting times in my life in terms of technology. I think the closest analogy I can think might be the beginning of the internet, like nineteen ninety five, like I was ten years old in nineteen ninety five, and so I remember how exciting it was to get my hands on Netscape Navigator and start using the internet. And I, you know, I was too young to do anything meaningful in that era, certainly, you know, didn't, I didn't program, like, I wasn't gonna go off and, like, start a company. I was interested in, like, video games and I did GoldenEye speedrunning on the early internet in the late nineties, you know. But now, it's like, thirty years later, it's like everyone is, it's like this collective, like, fixation on like this thing, right? Everyone's trying to figure out like, how do we get the most out of this thing right now? Either like, how do we start companies? Like, how do we become rich and like, be the first, like be the best, like deliver the tools, deliver the interfaces, deliver the environments, deliver the solutions to make this new, like fundamentally interesting and like powerful technology work well for people. And so, it's both exciting and fun and I'm having a lot of fun, but there's also, like, this weird kind of, like, joyless grind that's happening where, like, a big part of the tech industry is, like, working harder and longer than they ever have before, and, like, essentially, like, lot of people are not having any fun, and that to me is like weird, and maybe it's because there's so much money sloshing around in the ecosystem. There's so much money to be made evidently from this, and so there's a lot of, you know, young twenty somethings who are, like, yeah, this is my opportunity to, like, you know, work one hundred and twenty hours a week and have, you know, fifteen Claude Code sessions going all the time, and then maybe I can become a billionaire if I keep that up for as long as possible. So I think there will be some kind of like, you know, collective kind of community burnout that happens at some point, but it is very exciting, and I, you know, definitely am like on board with this new way of working. Like, I think there's no going back, and I don't want to go back, but how to actually make it work, like how to build software, like how to do analytics, how to do data science, who knows? Like, it's I'm questioning everything, like, kind of rethinking everything. So, I don't know, just kind of interested in, like, what's been your experience and how you've, like, gotten to know this new technology and, like, incorporating it into your your world. I So, one, GoldenEye doesn't hold up. Like you want it to Over to? Like, today? Does not hold no. It really does not hold up. Is it the square? It just it doesn't look It's, like, kinda clunky. I mean, it's still, like, it's still charming. Like, I still I I it has a special place in my heart, like, but but, yeah, like, I got one of those, like, the analog three d. It's like an FPGA clone of a of a of an N64, and, like, plugged in GoldenEye, and, like, I played for a little bit, and I was like, it it had its time and its place. Yeah. You know? Like, it's you want it to be like, oh my god. This is gonna be the and you're like, this is not so great. Okay. So to answer your question, I guess I would say a couple of things. On on, like, using the things and what happens, the analogy I've used with this before is, like, it feels a little bit like when Google came out that when Google first came out, I don't know, I was in like middle school, high school, something like that or whatever, and people were like, oh my, this is the newer thing. You gotta learn how to use it. Gotta learn all the tricks. You gotta learn all, like, the search Booleans. You've got to learn query languages for Google and how to exclude sites, and don't exclude this, include these terms, don't use them. It's like, okay. And then obviously, ten years nobody knows how to do that. You just get a feel for Google. You get a feel for the thing. People who grow up with it understand how to you want search for something there, people can find anything, and And it's not because they're using any sort of fancy search parameters. It's just like you kind of get a feel for the machine. Broadly, think that's what will happen with all of this, is like there's a whole bunch of like the internet grifter type of here's how to get the most out of your five Claude Code sessions, and blah, blah, blah. And it's like, hey, this will all kind of come together, best things will emerge, and you'll just get a feel for it. So I think there is a lot of stuff around that that can be kind of and what emerges from it? I don't know. Somebody will figure out some crazy thing, and they'll release a product, and Claude Code is an example of this, but all of a sudden it kinda came from nowhere. Not really, but it went from being this kind of side thing to like, oh, this is the only thing anybody ever talks about. To your point, though, about the Silicon Valley burnout stuff, This is a this is a half written post that we'll see if I can actually make this analogy work now. Earlier this year, there was a guy, he was an engineer, Steve Yegge, wrote a post called Gas Town, which was very viral when it came out. Basically, was like, how do I turn my Claude codes into the most insane thing you could possibly imagine? And it's like, there's one, like, gnarly thing. Think Gastown is a reference to Mad Max. Right? I think so. Yeah. I think so. Yeah. Where your orchestra is on, like, a convoy. Gastown is, like, yeah, it's like a it's like a city in Mad Max universe, yeah. But it's it's like there's there's like a king, and then the king has all these other, like, bots that do things, and there's it's it's agents all the way down. There's like four or five layers to it. And he basically says like, this thing burns enormous amounts of money for a lot of noise. Basically the point is like a thousand things do something and one gets picked up, and that's tried a thousand times and most of them are trash and a few are good ideas, and one of them only one can actually get chosen because we're only implementing one thing. And the imagery uses for because it's this Mad Max thing imagery uses for it is like it's like men in tar pits. It is not like lot of like the future of technology is like some that's like the paradise of the floating cars and stuff, and this is just like, nah, we're all in tar pits. And there's a part of that that feels like that's actually a little bit of what the world is right now, is like, this actually is all kind of a we're all, like, just in these tar pits nonstop to where, to your point, yeah, there's a thousand companies in San Francisco right now. Two of them are gonna work out because only two can. You can't have a thousand billion dollar it's not gonna happen. And so there's gonna be a whole bunch of people who are like these agents. The point of their work is to be thrown away. Oh, wow. Like, everybody's figuring out how to build stuff, and most of those things can't work because they're all building the same thing, one's going to win. And I think we haven't really reckoned with that, not as a it's like, okay, it'll be fine. A bunch of people try a bunch of stuff, it won't work out, but it feels like if you go to SF, there is this sense of like, oh my god, we're all like at the beginning of the internet, we're all going to be enormously rich and famous, and it's like ultimately, that's kind of like a status game, and there's only so many people at the top of that pyramid. Status is a zero something, And in some sense, business success is a zero something. There's only that much money people are going to spend. It's not like everybody can sell you can't sell one thousand dollars ten million dollars contracts to Coca Cola. You can sell like two. And so I don't know. It feels like there's a and one way to look at it is like, oh my god, this is like so much potential in creation and possibility, and I guess that's kind of right. Another way to look at it is like, oh, this is sort of a new a certain salt mine that feels sort of fun. Yeah. But ultimately, I think a lot of it is gonna be, like, just industrial waste. Yeah. I mean, like, my optimistic take, and, like, I am, you know, ultimately, you know, even though there's a lot of, like, questions about the, you know, the financial kind of private credit bubble, like, the infrastructure bubble, debt infrastructure bubble, and its effect on the economy, like the over concentration of the, you know, US economy in AI, essentially, like the S and P five hundred, like NASDAQ, essentially becoming an AI play. If you're in the US stock market, essentially, you're long AI whether you want to, wanna be, or not. You know, your index funds, your four zero one ks and all that. But I am also on the core tech, the technology, I'm an optimist, and, you know, what I've been telling people is that initially there was fears of like, AI is going to replace software engineers, and we're gonna build the same amount of software, it's just gonna be built by AI. But actually, no, we're gonna build ten to a hundred times as much software, and yes, it's going to be built by AI, but there's still going to be a lot of professional software engineers. But to your point, if we build ten to a hundred times as much software, who's going to buy it? And like, essentially, much money is there going to be to buy software? And one of the memes that's been going around Silicon Valley lately is this concept of like software as a service is dead, which I think is a little bit hyperbolic because like some software as a service products are hard to build. Some, turns out, are, like, not. Like, there's a lot of to do list apps. Like, I'd say probably to do list apps are in trouble, especially, you know, people can build their own. You know, I've built my own to do list app with Claude Code, you know, why not? But I think certain classes of software will become very difficult to, you know, very difficult to monetize as there are like, you know, free open source versions or you can like roll your, you know, you know, pretty soon, like, I think right now it's, you still need to be a pretty good software engineer to get good output out of out of Cloud Code, but over time, like, you may not need to be able to and so maybe a year from now or two years from now, you'll be able to pull up your phone and voice interface and say, make me a new to do list app that has these characteristics and come back a day or two later and the agents will have built your iOS or Android app and it will be installed on your installed on your phone. But I think like nobody really knows like what that like compression of the software industry looks like. Like so much more software fitting into effectively the same amount of space. It's like, you know, population's only growing so fast, like, maybe it will increase GDP, like US GDP, like world GDP, but not by ten to one hundred times, not even by a little bit. And yeah, and even if it does, like ultimately most people want to be rich because they want to be richer than their neighbor, not because they care about like how much money is in their actual bank. Like, a lot of this is just status to me, but I think to me the easiest analogy for it is just like content creation basically. That sure, it used to be to make a movie, you gotta go to Hollywood, and then you gotta pay a bunch of people to whatever. Now anybody can do it. There's a lot more people making movies. There's a lot more movies. We only have so much time. We've given a lot more time to staring at TikTok than we did when we had to go to movie theaters or whatever, but, like, it's not like everybody now is make there's a whole bunch of people who are, like, on the cusp of sanity trying to become TikTok influencers, who that's obviously a very viable career, and for some people, it's been great, but like, there's a lot of people who are like kind of on the fringe of that, and it it seems kind of bad. Like, it seems very difficult if you're there, and there's a lot of a lot of stuff that's that edge of like, yeah, you've got enough to maybe make a thing, but like, not really, and like, that feels closer to what the software stuff will be. Yeah. Could you say more about people on the edge? What type of people what are you thinking of? Like, if when we started Mode, there was a starting a software company was like a serious endeavor. Not serious in the sense that like we knew what we were doing, but like you had to go out and raise money, you had to spend a bunch of time building a thing that from the day we started the company, the day we like first put out the first product that anybody outside of it ever saw, was close to a year, and that was seen as being reasonably quick, and we made a product that was pretty simple. For us to build anything that had any kind of meaningful feature set, was going take several years, it was to take millions of dollars of spending on engineers. It was very hard to get something that was sellable at all to market without spending a bunch of money and a bunch of time, and that didn't mean everybody who did it therefore was like a real professional, but it just meant that there weren't that many people doing it, and if you did, you spent a lot of time thinking about it, and it was just like, this was a lot of work, and you kind of tried your best. And I think the same was true for, like, content. Like, to write a book? Great, you write a book. You gotta sit down and write a book, it's gonna take you a long time. You may be a bad book, you may be a bad author, but it takes a long time. Even if you're gonna write some bad beach read, you gotta write every word, and that like takes some time. And now you can write a book in ten minutes. You can create shippable software in two days. That doesn't mean like, oh my god, the bar is either just that much higher, but there's also, to your point, like, we can't read every if everybody writes a book in ten minutes, we can't read that many books. Those books aren't gonna get read. Like, it's just not possible to consume that much content or read that many books or use that much software. And because you can create a thing that you could have created ten years ago and two days, it would have taken you two years before, so what? Like, the market isn't growing at the same rate. It may be growing a lot. It may be doubling. I don't know. But when you can create ten to a hundred times as much, you know, what's the market for video? It's way more than it was ten years ago, but there's probably a thousand times more video that people are creating now than they did ten years ago. And so like, there's a whole lot of people the people on the edge to me is like a whole lot of people who try to make that a career, but like, they're making stuff that seems pretty good. It looked like it should be of quite like professional it's like, it it is good enough, but when there's that much, how do you a lot of it just doesn't catch, you know? You're you're the market is extremely saturated, and I think software will be like that. Yeah. It's a it's a funny issue. Like, I feel like authors it's so interesting because, yeah, if a person spends a year of their life on a book, I feel like we're I mean, they're gonna die one day. Like, we're all gonna die one day, and I think for a person to spend a year of their life on a book makes me think, like, oh, that's kind of remarkable that a person would dedicate a big chunk of time to this thing. I feel like it makes me wanna talk to the person, like, more about what pulled them into it. But I could say if you spend an hour vibe coding a book, there's something much less compelling about that, like it's And and maybe it's I don't know, like, maybe it's But also, presumably, the other part of this to be is if you spent an hour making a book, writing a book and making a book, somebody also will spend two years. And if you're picking up a book to read, which one are you gonna read? Like, they have the same tools you do. If I'm gonna build software in two days, you're gonna build the same thing in two years, yours probably a lot better. Like, it'd be weird if it wasn't, and if we get to the point where it's not, we get to the point where like, hey, I can make something in two days that I can't make a better version of in two years, I think like, then God knows what like, that's that's a weird world that's like hard to see around that corner. But but if it's like, the stuff that you've built, if you spend two years on it, it's gonna get way better than any version that somebody built a similar thing in two days. Yeah, yeah. Mean, think now, like if you use, if you do ******** agentic engineering and build, like spend a year working on one project now, certainly it's going to be way better than somebody who just, you know, tries to vibe code a replacement in a weekend. Or, you know, the same year that you spent pre AI, obviously, like you would make a great deal more progress. You know, it might have taken you five years or ten years to do the same amount of work in the past, but I think like, I think what's interesting right now is this feeling of like, you know, in the past you had to be very deliberative about where, as a software engineer, where you would choose to spend your time, Like, what projects do you build? And so for me, as somebody who, like, I really like building software. I, you know, up till now, like, really enjoyed writing code, but now I'm like actively enjoying not writing code and, which is weird, but at the same time, like, you know, I realized at some point that I had a whole mental backlog of projects that I thought of building over the last twenty years that I just, I would always have the same conversation in my head. Wouldn't it be nice if I had the time to do that, but I can't because my time is valuable, I need to get paid for my time, I need to pay, you know, my rent, you know, I've got a, you know, I've got a plan for the future, I want to be able to retire, and so I would choose to spend time on software projects that served my professional goals and that were working towards, like building something that I could, you know, release out into the open source ecosystem, something that would have value and impact for other people. And so now all of a sudden, you know, I've got that mental backlog of all these like orphaned project ideas that I just never had the time or the, you know, inclination to work on because I have a life outside of work and like, I do like, you know, being able to close the laptop and, you know, cook, or, you know, go on a vacation and things like that. You like being able to close the laptop now? No, and that's becoming a bit of a problem, you know, because now when I close the laptop I feel guilty. I'm like, the computer, the computer could be doing things right now. And so, that definitely is happening. But it is like an exhilarating feeling, the ability that now, like, I'm beginning to revisit all of those old ideas and say, especially because like, I can have like a terminal, like a terminal tab that's like just working on that side project, I thought of that eight years ago and now like I can build the thing that I always wanted, and it doesn't, it does require me to like nudge it along like a little bit every day and say, hey, that's not right, and like, oh, I've got a few more, every day I have a few more ideas, and I nudge along the agent and I keep grinding on it, and, you know, there's a few things that, you know, I'll continue to like release things, you know, some things are only for me, some things I'll open source, but but it's nice, like, sitting there watching, you know, watching Netflix at home and and just nudging along my my little agents working on my, you know, personal side projects, clearing out the backlog of stuff that I, you know, things that I dreamed about and just never, you know, never would have gotten built without without AI, and and that's, I'm having fun doing that. That makes me think of a kind of interesting thing, which is how long does that feeling last? So, or how far can it go? So say, you saw this happen with, like, ChatGPT when it first came out, where people would ask it these sort of dumb questions of, like, rewrite this email in the style of whatever, you know, like and it and it had this sort of, this was, like, this fun little gimmick that it can do. And at some point, it was like, okay, I know what it's gonna do. It's gonna produce the thing. It's not the artifact isn't that fun. It was sort of like the process of doing it that was fun, and the artifact itself, like whatever. And to your point, you have all these things like churning away on your backlog, your project backlog, your idea backlog, basically It'll be cleared out eventually. But it's partly that, but it's also like, if you just said, Let me give you a two paragraph spec of the thing I want, you push one button and it's done. Do you think that's fun? Like, is it fun if it could if it could really do the whole thing autonomously, where like RoboRev was done in one and if you can one shot RoboRev, would you have fun building it? I don't think so. Yeah. I think the part of the fun, like, part of the fun is the process, and like, seeing the thing the thing take shape take shape, you know, kind of that feeling of like, you know, I'm not an artist, but, you know, I imagine like what it might have seemed like to, you know, Leonardo da Vinci to like be chiseling, you know, chiseling David like out of the block of marble, and a little bit like the agentic coding right now, you know, maybe that's a little bit of a grandiose analogy, but it does feel like that a little bit where you can, you know, your feedback, like the feedback that I'm giving the agent, I can see the project taking shape, like, you know, you can see that it's like, you know, it's the agent's behavior out of the box, it gets most things wrong, and so you have to go through and like, you know, find all the things that it got wrong and get them right, and then refine and refine and refine, and so it takes, you know, hundreds or thousands of iterations with the agent, you know, to make a thing that, you know, essentially meets, you know, meets my standards, which, you know, and I have high standards for tools, and so, you know, maybe for other people it would be different, and like, maybe their one shot tool, you know, would be, their one shot tool would be like totally fine for them, you know. If it's like a piece of throwaway code, like it serves a one time, a one time use or like limited time use, but if it's a tool that you're gonna be using for years, like, I, the way I'm approaching it is like I'm building things that I want to be using five years from now and so I might as well, you know, put in the effort to do it the, you know, do it the right way and to make it, make it good, you know. But, I don't know, it's fun. Like, I think the feeling won't last forever and maybe a year from now, six months from now, it'll just feel like work again and, you know, at six o'clock or seven o'clock I'll be happy to close the laptop and say, you know, the day is done, enough is enough, you know. It will the agents will be there tomorrow morning. Yeah. It's it's such an interesting point to, like, the the question of, like, do you like closing your laptop? Like, are you having fun? Would you have fun if you could like snap it into existence? It feels like questions of like, what do engineers enjoy? What does like a person who might contract an engineer to like build something they want enjoy? Like, who enjoys kinda like being in the process and maybe seeing the process sped up or automated? And who kinda just wants it done? Like, I guess, like, tools like RoboRev that you're talking about that's very, like Guess I should explain what that is. Yeah. Or like Yeah. A tool for reviewing commits, like RoboRev that kinda augments, like, the development process with AI. It's funny because it is kind of like an engineer's tool. Like, it's something they enjoy, I think, having something like speed up the process, but there's this whole other group of people who probably do, I guess, wanna snap things into existence. Yeah, but even something like that, I mean, you built the thing, can tell us, but there's even if you could snap your fingers and have the problem that that tool solves solved, I'm not sure that gives you the same satisfaction either. Like, is something about building a thing and using the thing, and like And it's like, it's my thing. Yeah. It's like, look at it and I see the spinning wheels, and I see it come back with stuff, and it's like there is an enjoyment in using it at all, and I think that like we're not It's not all just like how do I maximize some utility of this thing does my particular job. Some of it may be. It's like, okay, you have a button that fills out your tax forms, okay, that may be a different thing, but there's a very different, to me, set of things that's like I just do not want to ever see this again versus I built this partly because it's like a thing I like to use. A lot of people like do woodworking, they're not like, snap my fingers and have the thing exist. It's like, I want to do the thing. Yeah. And I think there's still some of that here. Yeah. I mean, yeah, I think like the, you know, just, yeah, to, for people listening, like, what are they talking about? Like, the thing I I started building, started building recently as part of some of the, like, agentic agentic development side projects, like, I found myself And just just to recall, I think people might have seen too, because we've talked about it on a couple episodes, like So I think some people might be familiar, but maybe like a quick Well, yeah, we'll we'll can't I can't I can't can't mean, the software's so new, like Yeah. It's hard to even know, but you know, I essentially, like many people, I started running multiple Claude Code sessions, and then I found that most of the work that Claude Code was doing was full of bugs. And so I started running separate, additional either Claude Code or Codex from OpenAI sessions whose entire purpose was to review the work of the other Claude Code sessions. And so, I would have three Cloud Code sessions and then three reviewers who, and all they were doing was review this commit, review this commit, review this commit. And so like Claude Code would return control to me, would commit its work, and then I would say here's the commit hash, and I would give that to the reviewer, the reviewer session. And then, you know, this went on for a period of time and I was like, I'm losing time because I have to manually, like, take the commit hash and like give it to the reviewer and that that's time that's wasted. Basically the whole thing just didn't seem very efficient, and so I said to myself, well, you know, this whole process be automated, and so, yeah, so the project RoboRev that we mentioned is basically like, it automatically triggers a code review whenever the agents return control to you, like whenever they commit and return, git commit and return control. And I found that to be really liberating, like I didn't have to run those extra, you know, Codex or Claude Code sessions anymore. And if I have parallel, like multiple Claude Code sessions, whenever I return to the session from another side project or, you know, another, you know, Git work tree or whatever in the same project, I have not only the agent has finished what it was doing, but then also the associated code review that was done asynchronously while I was working on something else. And so, if I, you know, forget what I was doing or if I'm not sure what to do next, like, it's just easy to say, hey, you know, Claude, fix these bugs that were discovered in the work that you just did. But you're right, like, I think part of the fun of it was, you know, making a tool, seeing, you know, building the tool yourself, seeing the tool work, and I think, you know, maybe a side, you know, corollary of that now is that a lot of people are going to prefer to use tools of their own making, and I find that whenever I show new AI tools or like new tools that I've created to other people, usually the response is something like, I'm exhausted with how many tools I'm being shown and like how many new tools I'm seeing on the internet and like I have no, you know, the only tool I can manage right now is like a single agent session or maybe like a couple of agent sessions and any other tools beyond that is just, is almost exhausting. And I've also felt like that exhaustion of like the head spinning feeling of like ten new AI tools and systems and solutions coming out seemingly, you know, seemingly every day that, you know, influencers are really excited about on social media and on LinkedIn and on YouTube videos and things like that. And so, you know, for the longest time, like, I was tuning out a lot of what was going on in LLM world, and the only thing that really pulled me in were these CLI coding agents. I think prior to that I was, like, you know, not impressed, to be honest. Yeah, but I think that's, like, sort of reaction, being shown ten new tools, and you have things like that, we've all sort of played around with this stuff, is that to me is like the content thing, where it would be like, if iPhones and, like, iPhone video editing had just come out, it was like, look at my video, and it'd be like, oh my god. This yes, it's very good. It's as good as any video I've seen ten years ago, but like, I can't look at this much video. Like, I'm I gotta tune it out. I think that I don't know. There's this kind of feverish pace to the whole thing where all these people make things that seem really good, but it's like, I can't I can't keep up. Yeah, Benn, I know we've we've been down the AI rabbit hole for quite a while. One okay. Maybe one thing I'm very curious about is when I before doing this, when I asked you what you were most excited about, you said joining a boy band, and I I wonder if you could maybe tell us more about that, your boy band dreams. I mean, that does seem like a fun gig. Okay. Basically Yeah. No. Sorry. Please. It's like a model of collaboration. So okay, so you like It's your Gastown. Is that I you know, Gastown's probably not a bad boy band name, to be entirely honest. That you can if you like ever interview an exec, and being like especially an exec from Salesforce, this is apparently famously a thing that Salesforce did, you ask them like, what are they good at and stuff like that. They would say stuff like, they're just they're incredibly collaborative. Just the most collaborative, and it's just like, they're just I'm just so good at work. Like, oh, great. And I feel like one of those things we all say, oh, I'm pretty I'm collaborative. I'm like, you know, whatever. I'm like not I don't really wanna work with that many people. Like, I don't wanna it's like a lot. And you want to work with some people, but like not an army of people. I don't want to work with the whole Gastown army. And I think it's more fun to work with like a small group of people who's like all committed to a project and like wants to do the thing, and it's basically a model of collaboration like a boy band, where it's like, there's a handful of us, we all have our fun little personalities, we do our own things, you could do your own thing if you wanted to, but you kinda like being a part of this thing. Maybe sometimes you kinda do a little bit of your own thing, but ultimately we all have to do the same song and dance, but you can maintain some amount of independence in what you are, and it's not like each person in the boy band is overseeing enormous departments. Their job isn't managing a ton of people, the job is like, no, I make the thing. Historically, to me, there's always been like one of the downsides of startups is in some ways you get punished if you're successful because you have to go hire a bunch of people, and you become the, oh, I have to manage tons of people and the things that go along with that, and sometimes there's things about that that are fun and you like, but a lot of it is just like administrative- Administrative sort of downplays it too much, but it's just like organizational work. It's like how do you make sure everything is aligned, and how do you make sure this department is on Sunday to this department? What happens when they disagree, and how do you make sure stuff's set up such that these people can communicate with these people, and how do you keep everything on the rails? I don't know, I don't particularly enjoy that work, but that's been like what you have to do. Like, you build a company, like, the goal is to get to the point where you have to do that work, otherwise what have you done? And I think that may not be the case now, that you can do a lot more with fewer people, you can keep it relatively small, you can have it be like, no, this is just a handful of people who are working on an exciting thing, and you can make maybe not an enormous business, maybe not the next trillion dollar thing, but you can make something that is a functional, profitable, successful business, and in all sort of reasonable definitions of those words, with a relatively small group of people. At least that is my hypothesis. Yeah. And not not to stretch the, like, analogy too far, but do you know in your, like, dream data work, or or, like, just building boy band scenario, like, what role are you? Are you the, like, bad boy? Are you the father figure? Like, which Is there a father figure in boy band? I not I mean, maybe not in the modern boy band. I feel like in the OG boy band, there was always kind of like a Responsible party. Responsible. Okay. The one like driving them home after I think I would be like more of the moody guy in the back. That you don't know that much about. Yeah. It's like, what's his backstory? It turns out it's like nothing, there's nothing interesting there, but you gotta like You're doing like a lot of skulking around, is that? Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And every once in a while, like you emerge and you have your your like, verse and stuff, and people go, oh my god, he never told me that. I would be more than that. Yeah. I'm not trying to be the guy in the front. No, that's fair. It is I mean, it is interesting too that, like, people aren't when a boy band succeeds, it's not like people are say, like, we need to add two hundred people to this stage. Though there are some k pop dams Yeah. Right. But yeah. But right. Like, it's not a it's it's not like it's you gotta scale the whole thing And I don't know, I think that seems more fun. Yes. You mean, you forming any boy bands right now? Like, what's What do you got? I think he's maybe like a metaphorical boy band? Yeah. Or like Here's some ideas to do metaphorical boy bands. I, you know, if I could like snap my fingers, I know kung fu, like, Matrix y one skill, it would definitely be, like, boy band skills. Yeah. Like, being a being a pop star seems like a really good time. I mean, that's sure yeah. Like, if if you get the chance, I I think you should take it, like, hundred percent. Yeah. Oh, I would, but I don't hold your breath. Or I was thinking maybe other projects. Are you working on projects right now, and have you succeeded in kinda, like, keeping the essence of a boy band in them? Yeah, because it's me. Nice. It's not really a boy band. It's kind of a bad solo Yeah. Mean, like playing around with some stuff. It's similar to Wes, except I would say with Wes's success. You have a bunch of ideas. Want to play with them. There are things that you think are interesting to experiment with. A lot of them are less, like here is a very precise problem I have, but more of like this is a rough way of working or doing a thing that I feel like I could I feel like there's got to be a way to sort of solve this problem. To your point earlier about like, there's a creative process you like, so I periodically yell at the internet. There are parts of that process I really like. There are parts that are kind of a grind. I am not sure how much of that you can AI away, and there's delicacy there too of like, I don't want to. Is not push button, get blog posts is not a thing that I wanna do. However, there are a lot of parts of that drafting process that you're just like, this is painful. And it's like, I don't know, are there things you can do to help unstick you with those things, or stuff like that, where it's like, the things that I do, I wanna try to find ways around. Yeah. So we'll see. So it's stuff like that. Just to get a little more concrete, like, so you mentioned doing stuff like like what? So are you saying, like, using, like, Claude code or when writing and maybe, like, getting, like, assistance? Like, what kinda stuff are you cooking on? So I I basically use AI to write stuff in one way, which is as a thesaurus. It's a pretty good thesaurus, because you can be like, here's the word, but make it more X, like, you can kind of guide it a little bit, and so like, obviously that is not you're not getting a whole lot done there, like, it's useful sometimes, but like, that's basically the only way that I found it being useful. The thing that it writes I do not wanna ever say a single word that it ever writes. Like, certainly you try periodically, oh, try this, and it's like, oh my god, cannot. But there are processes in writing there's like points in the process of writing these posts when there is something akin to a thesaurus that is like a broader set of problems. You have a bunch of like basically loose ideas in a doc, and you're kind of like, I don't really see how to weave these things together, I don't really know what the narrative here is, I kind of like this sentence that I wrote here, and I like this idea, and I think it needs to work here, but like my god, it's a mess. I mean, it's like that is the stressful point of writing these things, because you're like, you're not just kind of refining paragraphs. You're having to be like, does this fit together at all? Like, do I have puzzle pieces that can make a thing that look like anything? And I think that there are ways you can attempt to mimic sort of the creative process that helps solve that for me that is again very much not write that paragraph, because I think it does a terrible job of that, and people have written a lot of stuff about this, and think you cannot beat certain patterns out of it. But I do think it can help you, like, here's some ideas for ways to arrange things. Most of them aren't any good, but there is like some inspiration that you could be like, oh, that's kind of an interesting thought. Like, let's play with that some, that it is basically the equivalent of having a conversation with someone about Like, a lot of these posts end up getting written because you have these loose ideas, and you sit down and talk to somebody, and you're like, oh, I didn't think about connecting, that They don't tell you to do it, it's just like they say something that triggers a thing in your head that like, it connects to ideas in ways you haven't seen, and so it's like, can you use it in that way? The analogy I have a friend who's used with this is like, have you played the game Codenames? Yeah. With it? Yes, sir, you do. So it's like basically you get random words that you have to find associations between, and it's that process where interesting things come up, because it's not like, here's a word, find three related words that are very similar to it. It's like, here are two very disjoint ideas, forcing yourself to be like, how might these be connected? There's something kind of interesting that comes out of that, and so I think it's like, is a process that right now has to sort of happen serendipitously, because you'd have to walk around the world and do that, and I think there are ways you could like, again, use it as a conversation partner of sorts that isn't just like ChatGeeBT. Think it needs to be more guided than that, but it's like basically, can can you use it to to find those, like, serendipitous stuff faster? Yeah. Yeah. It's so interesting of, like, hearing you talk about it. It sounds like you're kinda browsing the space of possible connections just to see what's out there, and is there anything useful? But it's pretty broad, like storyboarding and Yeah. So this is a bit of a weird example, but there was a thing I wrote a while back, I don't know, was a month or so ago, that was about it was about, like, some degree, like, the addictiveness of AI stuff. It wasn't just like, oh my god, like, chat GBT psychosis or whatever, but it was kind of about how this feels like a certain kind of, like, are creating our own realities in certain ways and stuff like that, and you see that kind of extending in other places. I don't remember what the exact sort of like news hook was on that, but there was something like that. A couple of hours before, I went to a Lorde concert, and there's a couple songs that, like, you're saying I wasn't a LORD concert. They're like, oh, that's kind of an interesting thing to it. You're like watching all of these, like, teenagers totally dissociate from the concert so they can take pictures for, like, Instagram and not pay attention to the concert, and then Lorde has a song or an album called Pure Heroine, where heroine spelled like hero, like female hero, but it's also like AI is kind of pure heroine in that way. That connection, seeing that, actually ends up driving a lot of the narrative of the you can't it's not like, oh, have this exact article I write. Oh, I can tack on this analogy. It's like, I have all these loose ideas, and then you see that, and you're like, oh, there's actually an interesting thread. This is the thread that can tie it together, but you need to be sitting at that concert to see the thing happen to do it. And so it requires these random collisions, that then one of the random collisions is like, oh, that's where the interesting connections are. And I think that, for me anyway, is where a lot of attempted creativity comes from, and so it's can you speed up that? Can you force that process a little bit more? And I think, again, Codenames is exactly Don't do exactly that. You become very, very creative playing that game, because what else are you gonna do? And I think, like, there may be ways to be like, help me run more threads through this to see what happens. It's like, it's not gonna ride or anything, but it will help you see more interesting things potentially. Yeah. It's really interesting that it's like it sounds like like it's not a rhyming dictionary, it's not a thesaurus. It's like a little more granular than that, but it's still not writing the thing, you know? It's just a different way of like exploring the associations or like paths. Yeah, and part of it to me is because so so people have asked about these blog posts before, and a lot of them do have these like, there's Why is Lorde the sort of hook for all this thing? Yeah. And it's like, how did you did you come up with that? And the answer is you cheat. The answer is you didn't come up with that. You came up with one association with Lorde, and then you read some Lorde lyrics, and you found four others that felt kind of attached, and then you would hook other ideas onto them, and so it looks like, oh my God, you had all these ideas, and you found like Lorde is the thing that perfectly weaved through it. It's like, no, I didn't do that. I started with a Lorde song, then like, figured out ways to sort of tack on things that feel associated, and it creates like a much more tighter sense of connection than you kind of should, because it seems like you found this analogy that maps so well when in reality, you've just like stuck ideas onto the analogy to make the analogy work. The analogy was a starting thing, and the ideas were glued onto that. And so it's that kind of thing, where to me, the process for writing this stuff is not what are the ideas? Stick on the Lorde analogy. It's like the Lorde analogy is actually the thing that drives it, that forcing you to describe everything through this analogy, I think, forces you to come up with more creative ways to say it, whereas if you're not doing that, you end up just writing kind of a boring outline and then sticking on sort of weird, forced, like half connected jokes. Yeah. Yeah, it's so interesting to hear, like, the process and, like, the yeah. Finding the associations. I'm I'm also I'm, like, so curious about do you have, like, literary influences in are there people you love to read that have influenced your style, or how did you kinda No. Two things, this is I mean, like, Matt Levine stuff is great. Think and I think Matt Levine, like, he has a style that is, one, you It's very much a thing that you can't emulate because, one, everybody knows, it's like, I'm gonna try to write like Everybody sort of knows that, and you can't, like, do that anyway, but it's also, like, very hard, and he's very good at it, and I think that's her stuff. But the thing I really do appreciate about him is his thing is kind of about nothing. Like, there is a what's the point of this? I don't know, there's a bunch of interesting things in the world to look at, and I like to look at him, and so I do think that I very much read his stuff because I find it enjoyable, that no shade to Ben Thompson. Ben Thompson obviously is very popular. To me, Ben Thompson Ben Thompson writes about a subject that I should care a ton about, and I find his posts hard to get through. Like, is a thing that I read because I think he has very good ideas, but it's sort of like, this is fascinating. The structure of it is, and the ideas he has are, but I don't particularly enjoy reading it. Matt Levine makes me care about stuff I should not care about. I'm just interested in it because it's like, he tells a good story with it. I don't care about any of the topics at all. It's like, yeah, the private credit bubble. How much do I care about the private I don't know, not really, but when he tells a fun story, it's fun, and I appreciate that style of thing. The other thing, and actually, this is where a lot of this originally came from, was there's a guy, I don't remember his name, he is in chemistry, he's a chemist. He won a Nobel Prize in chemistry. He made Buckyballs. There's some like Buckyballs. Yeah. Mr. Fuller, maybe. Wasn't it? There's some sort of like compound that is like this giant hexagonal thing that when he he won a Nobel Prize for it, and it was like, this is amazing, and it turns out to be, like, completely useless. It was just like a a very stable ball. I don't know. Clearly did not stick. But when I was in college, I like went to some thing that he gave this talk, it was like a lunch thing that he gave a talk at, and was like, whatever, it's kind of in the background. But he gave the talk in this style where it was probably a twenty minute talk, and he had like three hundred slides, and you just like can't look away because it's just like, slide, slide, slide, slide, slide. And part of it's each slide is like, there's this sub narrative to it, where he's giving a talk that basically you don't really need the slides for exactly. They're not like, And now we go to slide six, and here's the bullets, and here's the diagram. But it's like, he will say something, and it'll be like, an image that's sort of related to it. And it ends up creating kind of like these sort of two stories, where there's a story behind it that's like the entertainment, and like this thing he's saying, but you kind of like, it keeps you really attached. And I started giving talk like, I really like that style for talks, and so that's the kind of style I gave for talks, and the thing that creates is like, there is a certain pace to it that I like. It requires you to kind of weave a bunch of stuff into it, because you can't just be like, AI, picture of AI. You can't computer, picture. You have to come up with like little vignettes that follow along throughout the course of it. I think it's much more entertaining, and so like a lot of the blog style actually was more of like, how does that look on paper? I'm not sure it delivers on that, but like, that's where there's like footnotes and stuff that are sort of like, the whole thing is a little bit of like, there's a sub narrative to it that's like me entertaining myself. Yep. Yeah. Because again, it's about SQL, and like, my god. Yeah. I mean, it is interesting. It's like all the elements of like, a lot of like stream of thought, and collage, and association, but it is crazy that it all like comes back to data. I feel like it's, like, really not not to butter you up too hard, but it's interesting to read. It to some degree comes back. Like, I'm not gonna you know, sometimes they don't really tie together. Are you saying there's no promises? You might, like, some point, drift off data and go full? Well, yeah, like broadly, yeah, and I would say I, at this point, mostly have. Like, there are still things there, but like, don't It's not a lot about ETL tools these days. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, on the subject of, like, you know, like, teams and small companies, like, I feel like examples of companies that have remained small and yet been really successful, like, just aren't that many. I think like Craigslist is always the canonical example of a company that, you know, still has the same, you know, very bland, you know, utilitarian website that it had, you know, twenty or thirty years ago. I don't know when it started now, over twenty years ago, and yet they have tons of revenue and like some really small team. And, you know, me as a software developer, like, I always found myself torn between like, the desire to like, build open source software and like, make the world a better place through like, building tools and giving them away for free on the internet, with the downside that it's hard to do that in a sustainable way, like to get people, it's very hard to get people to pay you to do that for a long period of time. It's hard to be able to hire people because people need salaries and they need health insurance and all those things. And on the other end, you know, the other, know, and you have entrepreneurship and starting, you know, starting companies, and then invariably, you know, with the way the world works, like, you get nudged into the, like, you know, the venture capital and the raising money, and that has a lot of strings attached, there's a lot of expectations that, you know, everyone has in terms of like how fast you're going to grow and how many people you're going to hire and then, you know, that gets really complicated as you know. And so I think one optimistic, you know, hope that I have is that, you know, there might be some, like, new model of, you know, people that build software in the world and can do, you know, build new things or like create things that have impact that's like neither of those things and yet like can be fun and sustainable, like, kind of the best of both worlds, and I don't know what that looks like, but something I'm really interested in. I mean, my answer to that is it's a It looks like a business. It's a small business. Like, Like, it's only in software where, and this made sense again, kind of the economics of like building software, there's a ton of upfront costs and stuff, but only in software, like, we're gonna start a thing that's gonna be ten people, and we're gonna try to make more money than we spent. That's the goal. And like, you start a restaurant, duh, like, yes, that's the goal, but in software it's like, that's a ridiculous goal. Like, how are you gonna grow? How are you gonna, like It's kind of famously parodated in Silicon Valley. It's No, no, you want to be pre revenue Yeah, exactly. It's like there's very much a model for a handful of people working on a fun thing forever that you can be sustainable. It's like, that's a business. But start up like, again, I think it's not just the VC ecosystem. It's like the economics of software have not been able to support that. You do have to spend five million dollars before you can sell anything. You're in a lot of debt, and that doesn't quite work. But now you don't have to be. You can get to the point where you can probably make you can be probably making money after a year of one person working on a thing. And like, all right, that's just a business, and I don't know. It seems like if building stuff is fun and a business you can run forever isn't bad, then like, not a bad gig, maybe. No, I don't know. Maybe that doesn't work, and maybe software is too like winner take all, and so you have to get super huge, but I don't know. I'm like not that cynical about that, I think. I think it's like, how many people do you really need to really love a thing to make it sustainable for a handful of people? Not that many. Yeah. Does seem like there's a big space for a small useful thing that people are willing to pay monthly for or something. I don't know. Yeah. It doesn't isn't quite right because there's certainly a lot of things that are just, like, pure productivity tools, but it starts to feel a little bit more art oriented or, like, content oriented. It's almost like Substack, but, like, Substack for, you know, somebody's, like, vibe coded software. Yeah. Like, was One of things I've noticed is people seem to have replaced, in a lot of ways, decks have gotten replaced with, like, Vercel apps. Because you can kinda do it in same amount of time. You're like, you wanna give a demo or something? I just I just made a thing. Like, you get random pitches from people about, check out this thing or whatever. I have gotten a lot of those that are links to Vercel apps now, because it's about it used to be a here's a PDF of some slides or whatever, and now it's like, why would I do that? I can make a little clicky app thing. And so don't know, that that feels more like it's just software's just content at that point, as opposed to like a tool for anything. It's just like, I just have a much more flexible canvas to make a thing I wanna make. It's interesting, the idea of a deck being replaced with the Vercel app, which is like deck plus plus, just a little bit more, like, interactivity that the the bar is just way lower. Yeah. And it's not that different than what's the simplest version for me to explain something? It's a bunch of text. Okay. What's a slightly more complicated version? A Word doc with text with, like, some bullets and some nice formatting. What's, like, a very flexible version? Like a deck, because it's just a it's a bunch of static canvases that I can literally draw anything I want on. What's an even more complicated version? A deck that I can click on. That's kind of a website? Like, okay. It's not that different. Yeah. And are you looking at decks? Like, what's your what's bringing decks past your eyes? I mean, so people periodically reach out because of the blog stuff. You'll complain about something, and they'll be like, well, actually, here's my version. They're like, would love your take on Yeah. Which I think, I mean, as slide aside, the one thing that does sort of is a bit of a character of that is because I complain about a lot of stuff. People mostly will send things and be like, give me your worst opinion on this, and so it's kind of asking for a lot of like, what do you hate about it? Which some things are very good. Don't know. Yeah. How do you like How's that job? Do you do you like doing the job of how do you hate this? Like, what do you hate about this? Job is a real stretch. Yeah. No. I I don't I mean, I don't I'm not like, I hate everything that you do. That said, I do think there is a relatively useful hole in, like, VCs in that, where if you go pitch Sequoia, and they don't like it, they will tell you, like, it's too early, nobody was pounding on the table, we really like it, we'd love to see it next round, like, we're just not there, we just couldn't quite get there. Market wasn't quite big enough, we had questions about competitors. Like, they will tell you nothing. And the reason they tell you nothing is because they have no incentive to tell you anything other than that. Like, why would they tell you something that's going to Why would they tell you what they really think, which is probably like, I hated the way that founder dressed? Like, they reject you, one, I mean, not just like every VC, you get rejected probably for emotional reasons. Get probably rejected because literally two minutes into the pitch, they don't take you seriously, and they're tuned out, and they're off looking at something else. Maybe they reject you for real material reasons, and they really evaluate it and they didn't like it, but they're not gonna give you that memo of the thing they said, and it's like they want you to like them so you come back next time. If you do are successful, they want to maintain optionality in that deal. And it's very frustrating when you're pitching because you just don't get anything honest. You get a lot of like kind of soft, it's just not for us yet. We'd like to see a little bit more, a little more meat on the bone, and you're like, okay. But I think it's, so it's like there is a little bit of a, this is a, like, I am not a VC, nor do I give feedback that people should listen to, but I would appreciate a VC where you walk into it, and it's a little bit of like the Simon Cowell of VCs, where you're like, they're going to hate it. I'm not going to be offended when they hate it, because I know they hate it, and if they like it, Simon Cowell liked my song. Like, oh my god. I would pitch that VC because the worst that happens is the thing I expect to happen, and there's a million others. I'm just going pitch them for the actual money. And so I don't know. The VCs have like sort of weird- the Hollywood system's like this, but like there's some weird incentives there, and so I do think like, yeah, what do you really think is nice to hear in an uncomfortable way sometimes? But again, if if Simon Cowell tells you you're bad, you're not gonna be like, I must suck. You're gonna be like, that's his job. That's what he does. That's his shtick. Yeah. Yeah, that's fair. I don't know, you've pitched a lot of VCs. Maybe you have it's, no, I largely agree with what saying. I mean, it's, especially in Silicon Valley, it's rare to hear, like, honest, like, honest feedback. Like, and I've known, you know, I've known VCs and have been in pitches where I've received, like, honest feedback, like, this is not good, you shouldn't be doing this, you should be doing something else, like, the way that you're approaching this problem is wrong. And it is refreshing to get those, like, to get those takes, but, you know, but usually, like, I think professional, you know, venture investors are looking at so many pitches and talking to so many founders that generally, like, they're just pattern matching, like, don't have, you know, the time or energy to, especially at the early stage, like, to think super hard about things, and so it's basically like, you know, have I seen any, you know, similar companies in the past that have done this successfully? Like, does this, the way that this product is being sold, like, does that make sense? Like, are they selling to the right people? Like, the tech, does the team seem incredible? Surprisingly often, like, you look at the backgrounds of the, you know, the founders of a company and, you know, it's like, they can't build this, or like, or they, you know, if there's going to be a successful product, it shouldn't be this team, and that's often, you know, in many cases that's just the right answer. And it isn't always the most, unfortunately, very frustratingly, is not the most competent and qualified founders that, you know, succeed in a space, and I know that that, you know, often, you know, it's the founders who were, like, had the right background, were at the right place at the right time and yet still, you know, came in second or came in, you know, fifth who end up, know, very frustrated and bitter. But, so, that's just kind of how the cookie crumbles, unfortunately. But, yeah, it's a lot of, you know, it's a lot of pattern matching because ultimately, yeah, like, in investing, want to maintain, build or maintain relationships, not burn bridges. You don't want somebody to come away from interaction being offended, or being like, you know what, that guy was a jerk, you know. He was honest, but he was a jerk, you know? Yeah. You should never be a jerk. Like, I'm never a jerk, so Yeah, to be fair, like, yeah, I think a lot of times VCs don't give totally truthful feedback, because they're trying to be nice, and a lot of times the answer is like, not the horse I wanna bet on, and like, I don't know. What use is telling somebody that? You know, like so yeah. And then but as a result of that, I think you also just get, like, kind of very sort of soft answers on just like, yeah, we're not excited. It's nice, though, that you're well, I don't I don't know if you want more of these, but that you're giving people kind of I don't wanna say radical candor. You're giving people, like, candid feedback, right, with with Yeah. I mean, I'm certainly not trying to, like, maintain some sort of set of deal flow around that sort of stuff, but also, I don't know, that's kind of what I would want, and if you're nice about it, it's fine, and maybe I am, I don't know, I try to be. Yeah. Yeah. But yeah, I don't know. And I was like, I don't for me, that stuff's interesting. It's interesting to see what other people are working on and stuff, so Yeah. Anything you're excited for this year, or what are you most excited for this year, would you say? I mean, there's I don't know. There's bunch of stuff. The way all this stuff changes things is exciting in a very, do I Maybe we could just have a down year? Maybe we could just stop for a bit? Right. It's like Ticketies. It's like all gas, no breaks. We need a moment to catch up. Can we just all So I don't know. I am sure there are things that will come out that will be you like and are fun and stuff like that, and I think I think Plug Code is a good example to me of of what that has been, where you use it, and you're like, this is pretty fun. I can do a lot of stuff. This is cool. And yet, there's also half of you that's like, I am so behind. This is like, what do I need to be doing stuff all the time? And like, am I keeping up? Or like, everybody else is doing the same thing? Or like, all of the all of the ideas I had, are they all, like, gonna be built a hundred times over? Like, when things are moving that fast, it is both exciting, but also sort of terrifying, and so I think, like, there will inevitably be more moments like that to me, where something happens, and it's just like, there is an opportunity, but there is also, I don't know, so many opportunities that you will miss because stuff is moving so fast about you. So it's exciting, but like somewhat existentially stressful. Yeah. I mean, existential has has come up a couple times, like, people mentioned, like, feelings of uncertainty, which is is so interesting, yeah, to think about, especially in, like, your your response of, like, it's a really exciting technology, and there is this, like, maybe like slight existential I mean, I spent a lot of the last I spent honestly, very honestly, I spent a lot of twenty twenty five in a in a state of like, essentially existential dread about like what it means to be a software engineer, you know, after, and, you know, like Ben and I, like, we're a little different, like, I'm more of like, you know, like writing C plus plus code, writing Python code, like, you know Wes is an engineer, am not. Yeah, that's not an engineer, yeah. You can say it. Yeah. But, you know, but I feel like the, you know, the rapid pace in AI development was, for me, like disruptive to my core identity as a person who has spent a lot of time becoming good at software engineering and getting really good at writing code, and so this feeling of like, you know, taking, like essentially yanking the keyboard, you know, the proverbial keyboard out of my hands, and it's like, you don't need to write code anymore. And so there's this feeling of like, well, you know, what am I for? Like, what's, you know, what's my purpose here? Like, where can I add value? And I think that at some point, I don't know, you know, at some point it clicked and I regained my agency and started having the, as Peter Steinberger puts it, you know, I can just do things, you know. So I'm a little bit more embracing this mentality of like just doing things again and not worrying too much about whether, you know, other people are doing more or other people are, you know, working smarter and just focusing on like, you know, am I building things that are useful, things that people care about? Maybe they're only things that I care about and maybe that's okay, but it's definitely like that existential dread I think has been, you know, present in a lot of the industry. Like, don't know if there was any one thing that caused me to break out of it, but, you know, I remember there were like weeks where I was just like, you know, like, I'd sit down and like start writing code in Emacs or in, you know, VS Code and I'm like, I feel, you know, I feel so ineffective, you know. And so I've, you know, I've gotten over that I guess, and maybe that's just like a morning, just this morning process for like the old world that feels like it's now gone, but I don't know if you felt that way at all. Yeah, and I think the thing, the just doing things I think is a useful reminder sometimes where there is another, again, sort of a lot of the stuff I do is, again, this kind of blog stuff, so sort of a lot of things tie back to that to me. The process of writing these things or putting together presentations or anything like that that isn't just sort of like, I am going to methodically plod through something, but some like discovery in a sense to it. You spend a lot of time wasting your time. Like, there is a lot of work that goes into it that you're just like, that was bad, and you gotta throw it away. And like, that's part of the It has to happen. You can't skip that. Like, you can't skip some of that process. So I think the just doing things, it's not to me I could go out, oh, everything is happening so much. Everybody who's going to create a new iPhone app is going to make a zillion dollars. I have to go create a new iPhone. I can just create an iPhone app, and I'll make a zillion dollars. It's not really that. It's like doing the thing is the process how you figure out what to do, what the actual thing to do is. It's that you can't you're trying a bunch of stuff. Maybe some of them will work, maybe they won't, but the point is whatever you find that does work, that's the the way to find something that does work is by doing what you're doing. And I kind of view it as that, as like, are any of these ideas I'm gonna play with any good? Probably not. But either in two years I'll look back and be like, I may come up with a bunch of terrible ideas, but I tried something, you'll oh, well. Or you'll look back and you'll be like, yeah, it took seven failed things to find the eighth that was any good. So all you really can do is just do the first one and see what happens. The one part of that, though, that I think as it relates to, like, startups that is particularly important, this is true with, like, any kind of creative stuff, is you have to be willing to move on, and I think that's one of the things other things about like, you don't have to raise a bunch of money that is helpful, is you don't have to necessarily go out and like, I spent six months researching a problem, I raised a bunch of people to solve this exact thing, we were gonna hire a team to people who want to work on this thing, now suddenly we have eighteen months of time we've spent on a company to solve a problem, and we've sort of like half pivoted a couple times because this is the idea we have, and we built a tech around it, and like, you can't get away from that. You have like this anchor that you've attached yourself to, and so in a sense you couldn't just do things. You could just do one thing, but you couldn't do like a bunch of stuff to figure out what's interesting and so or what might work, And now you kind of can. You can have five projects working at once, and maybe you realize one is a great utility you want to use, and one's actually a thing that people want to buy, and one's a thing that people want to buy, but you hate it so you don't want to do it. Maybe you realize eight of them are all terrible and throwaway things, but in the course of that, you found these other things you're interested in, like, you can do a lot more of that. And I think that's like my optimistic view of how you find your way through this is more of that, which is like, yeah, you can just do stuff, and then the way you'll figure out what's actually exciting is by doing that. Yeah. It's super interesting to hear. I mean, may maybe to tie it back to, like, your way earlier point, like, the long term, everything's a fad, and this idea of more, like, vibe oriented. Feldman, I I hate to use the word vibe so much, but I I I think it's a really interesting point that, like, people today, if if someone it sounds like if someone's, like, worried about, like, what do I do now, it's like they you're like, it's okay, you can do six or seven things now really easily, and explore what's out there. Never thought of this analogy before, but it's like, I went to a liberal arts school. A lot of people show up at liberal arts schools, don't know what they're gonna major in. The way you figure out is you take classes. You try a bunch of stuff, and you're like, that was really interesting. I wanna keep doing that. It wasn't in an engineering school or like a lot of schools where have to declare a major up front. And if you go to one of those schools where it's like, gotta I think European universities might be like this, where they're basically trade schools, like up from You wanna be a nurse, you start out of You're locked in. You go from high school to nursing college, or I don't know how it works. I'll take it. Yeah. Uni. I don't know what any of it is. But the point is, like, you have to make that choice up front, and there you can't you can again, you can just do a thing. You can do whatever you want, but you can just do a thing. Whereas if you go to some liberal arts school, you can, like, do what yeah, you can do a lot of things. Don't worry when you show up, don't worry about you wanna major, and try it, and you'll have a lot better sense in a year when you take ten classes. And I think it's kind of like that. It's like, just try it. I don't know. You how do you how could you possibly know until you try it? Yeah. Try a bunch. Yeah. I think it's probably super helpful advice today for people, yeah, thinking about the future and like the pace of technology and AI, and like wondering what to do that they can just try things. I mean, do you reflect it like much, like thinking about the analytics work that you used to do, like, lot more of in the past, like, you know, thinking about, like, you know, kind of the data analytics team at Yammer and, you know, early, you know, kind of the BI dashboarding, you know, world of know, the 2010s with Mode, like, you know, if you, you know, were in a business and had to solve those problems, like, you know, what do you think that, you know, what do you think it looks like now? Like, does that space, like, is that still something that interests you to work on, like, or yeah, it's kind of a big question mark, like, kind of the fate of like that whole segment of the industry, like, even the whole concept of business intelligence is a little bit, you know, unclear, right? Like, everyone wants to make their own, you know, everyone wants to make their own custom dashboards now, why should you be forced to use somebody else's, you know, dashboard builder, you know, interface. But it's kind of, you know, funny to think about, like, remaking these, you know, fields that used to be well defined with a set of tools that you would use and an established set of practices being, you know, not totally thrown out the window, but, you know, maybe a little bit, maybe on their way too, I don't know. Yeah, I mean, don't, I have no idea. Do I want to work on that stuff again? Not really. There is still a couple things where I'm like, it would be kind of nice if this particular thing existed. My guess is, if I had to say where it goes, is traditional BI looks very different, and like, we kind of get rid of it, partly because it never really worked in the first place. Like, People have BI tools, they have a bunch of dashboards. They're mostly little apps for salespeople to look at their list of leads and how stuff is going, and they're not The idea of these things being like, go here to find drag and drop my way to insight is not really a thing that happens, and they become very focused on like the presentation of it, because I need to look like all the styles and whatever, and I kind of think that does become we figure out a way that that becomes more people get really accustomed to chatbot stuff, and I don't know that that necessarily means, back to the sort of gymnastics point conversation from earlier, I don't know that becomes a chat bot that writes SQL queries for you. Though in some ways, I think it becomes more of like, we just bypass SQL queries altogether. Again, if I want to understand what my customers are talking about, I could drag and drop my way to doing a bunch of analysis on top of like some structured data set of support tickets, or I could just be like, tell me the vibe of the support tickets. I'll probably just do the other one and never bother with the like analytical stuff first. The other way to kind of talk about this is like, we have done data work because it's the only way we've been able look at things at scale. If you have a million support tickets, how do you look at You can't do it but with math. Math works really well at any sort of you average a billion numbers just as easy as you can average ten. How do you average a billion conversations? You don't. There's no way to you have researchers read some of them and summarize them manually, and now we have a thing that can kind of very approximately do math on text, and so the point of numbers was to do math on- we quantified stuff so we could do math on it, but if you can do math on stuff that's not quantified, do you do that much math? Like, maybe not. So I think that stuff kind of I think there's a real essential thing there to the stuff that like POSIT does. It does feel like there's a place more for nice tools for people that are continuing to work with, like, when I open a CSV, how do I open a CSV in a really useful way? There's a bunch of things that sort of, like Excel, it's Pandas, or it's Posit in a way, but Posit doesn't, it's designed for a much richer experience than that. There's a bunch of stuff like that that's like there's still people who want to look at data and manipulate it, and there still isn't really a tool that does it. The ones that start in that space, which I think like Moe tried to be like a nice workbench for that sort of thing, get dragged in the BI world, and there's a lot of startups that have, like, started as these, like, nice data oriented utilities that then end up being a BI tool, and so I think there could actually be something that comes out of, this is actually a thing that's just, like, a really good way to view and manipulate, like, CSVs Yeah. Essentially. I mean, even just just in the last, you know, just in the last two years, like, I've worked on exactly that inside inside Positron, which is a it's a, you know, posits VS Code VS Code fork, and the use case was like I have CSV and Parquet files in my workspace. I've got Python code. I've got R code. I want to be able to just click on the CSV file and see what's in it and see some summary statistics. Like, I've got some Parquet files, like, I wanna be able to just click on them too, and and be able to look at what's in them, and I shouldn't have to write a bunch of code to analyze it, like, why not just open the file, look what's in, look what's inside, and turns out that that's surprisingly not only useful for humans, it's useful for agents too, and so. Like, think there's a, every BI startup, I think, like underestimated the value of I can just send you a file. There's like, Excel files is this anti pattern of like, why don't send a, it's in the cloud, it should be a web, whatever, But it's like actually a whole lot of people. It's like really nice to be able to email you a file that is the data itself. It's like static version of the data. It is like the manipulation on top of it. Is chart is the whole thing in a box, whereas like the, oh, it's a B actual, it's a textual database that runs queries and all this stuff. It's like, yeah, I get why that's useful, but, like, so much data work is just files. Yeah. It's interesting to hear you talk about the, like, vibe aspect of it, that there's these, like, big sources of data that we used to have to quantify because we couldn't put eyes on them, that now could be maybe fed in to, an LLM to get a useful gist out of. But there's also these small things, like, emailed files that we've also kind of overlooked, or even just cracking like a CSV open that we've kind of overlooked at times that are just like really simple glimpses at things that people want to do, it sounds like. Yeah, and I mean, think the other version of this to me is we spent, I dunno, whenever we started all this data stuff, we've spent twenty years, probably more, figuring out ways to collect it because we had a thing to do with it. Say like, let's collect web events on every single click you've ever had on the internet. Why? Because we have something useful to do with it. And so there's an enormous industry of data collection, largely structured because we have something that can be stuffed into something, and was that thing useful? I don't know, but theoretically, yeah. We didn't actually bother to collect a lot of other stuff because what are you gonna do with it? To me, an easy example of this is, it seems like a thing that could one day exist, but you go on a website, you have a button that some intercom type of thing pops up, and you're like, would you like a five dollars Starbucks gift card to yell at this website for thirty seconds? I'm sure there's lots of reasons why that doesn't exist, but why would you ever pay five dollars for a thirty second audio clip of feedback? What am I gonna do with a thousand of those things? But if you have today, if you have a thousand thirty second audio clips of people telling you feedback, would you pay five thousand dollars for that? Like, absolutely you would, because you have something to do with it. Before it'd be like, oh, it's gonna not cost five thousand dollars it's gonna cost me twenty five thousand dollars because I'm gonna have to have someone read them, there's gonna be a user researcher who goes through them and parses them and makes a bunch of stuff, it's a huge process, and I don't really trust it. Now, that data's useful, and so I think there's a lot of places like that where we've never started to do it with things that are like sucking in emails and Slack conversations and whatever, but like that feels very early in what data would we collect now that we actually can kind of make use of unstructured stuff. Like, like a little bit Black Mirror y where like other examples of things like, there's a whole bunch of conversations that happen every day at a Starbucks counter between the barista and the customer. That's really useful if you were Starbucks to figure out what you could do better. Is it collected? No. Why? Because what in the world are you going to do with that? But now what are you going do with it? A lot. And like, do you want people to collect that? I don't know. We very much got comfortable with people tracking every single thing you do on the internet. Probably end up getting comfortable with that because someone figured how to do something with it, but we a thing we can actually do with it, and so I think those sorts of sources start to emerge because it's like, oh, this isn't just a bunch of audio files that sit somewhere hypothetically. It's like, no, they get fed into a real Yeah. Yeah. It's so interesting, like, I fingers crossed that I get to yell at a website in the next, like, two years. It is it is scary, the Starbucks thing where sometimes these things start to feed back into themselves, like, if the Starbucks worker and me are in a Panopticon and we know it, like, that I feel like sometimes our interactions change because we know we're going to, but But like it doesn't do you do you use websites differently because you know what you're clicking on is like like, may be first, oh, I'm gonna mess up this. This is fun, and then you do it for like two times, and you're like You get used to it. Who am I? I am one of a million visitors to ESPN dot com every day. I'm not gonna Fine. I'll click on the things I want to click on. Yeah. We've been we've had a sweet, long jam sesh. Yeah, Benn, appreciate you coming on. I feel like honestly, like, think the advice to people who are wondering, like, what to do is so helpful to explore things. I feel like we've heard so many interesting things from like in the long term everything's a fad to takes on AI to also like writing practice. So I I I feel like there's so much to chew on and just really appreciate you coming on and chatting with us. Yeah, for sure. Glad y'all could have me, and yeah, do things include don't take my advice. A lot of that is like, don't listen to random people like me tell you anything to do. Oh, it's legit. Yeah. Thanks for coming. This is fun. For sure. Thanks for having me. The Test Set is a production of Posit PBC, an open source and enterprise tooling data science software company. This episode was produced in collaboration with creative studio, AGI. For more episodes, visit the test set dot co or find us on your favorite podcast platform.