The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source - Future of [energy, content, food] (Friends)

Episode Date: February 9, 2024

We're taking you back to the hallway track at THAT Conference where we have 3 MORE fun conversations: one with Samuel Goff about the future of energy, one with YouTuber Jess Chan about the future of content creation & one with Vanessa Villa / Noah Jenkins about ag tech & the future of food.

Welcome to Changelog and Friends, a weekly talk show about the way of the future. Thanks as always to our partners at Fly2IO, the home of changelog.com. Launch your app close to your users. Find out how at fly.io. Okay, let's talk. Hello friends, Jared here. Today we're taking you back to the hallway track at that comp one more time. We have three fun conversations.

I think you're going to enjoy it. One note on the audio for these hallway track episodes. We leave the background noise in on purpose to bring some of the vibe of actually being there. We understand this is distracting to a few folks, but the trade-off is worth it in our opinion. If you strongly disagree, let us know. We appreciate you for listening, and we're listening too. Okay, first up, it's Sam Goff from Minneapolis, Minnesota, who spent the last three years at Hewlett Packard Enterprise, but left recently to found a startup that's still in stealth mode. Okay, so these are like SM57s or something?

Yes. Okay. Are you an audio nerd? I have a recording studio. Oh. Yeah. These are pretty prime for recording studios. Yeah. I write and record music.

I play five instruments. Nice. Which ones? Piano, cello, guitar, bass, and drums. Not at the same time, though. It's difficult. One-man band, right? I am ambidextrous, though.

Okay. So you can go two at once. Yeah. That's cool. Has somebody else strum it for you, but you can do the fretting. Yeah. Yeah. When I was younger, I traveled to New Orleans, and you see the one-man band. Yeah.

They got the, you know. The foot thing. The foot thing. What are they called? The tambourine on their feet. The tambourine, yep. Horns and stuff like that, yeah. Is this just for a level check?

Is that what's going on? This is you down here. Okay. This is what we do is we just talk to people. Okay. So it's very relaxed. Okay. It's not going to feel like an interview. It's going on? This is you down here. Okay. This is what we do is we just talk to people. Okay. So it's very relaxed. Okay. It's not going to feel

like an interview. It's going to feel like the three of us are just talking. Like I'm interested about your musical aspirations or life. Okay.

So life. So I had an offer to come out to the Twin Cities and be professionally produced. Okay. Some of the people that I was working with

had worked with Janet Jackson. Nice, yeah. But I got out there and discovered that the music business was not how I would like to make my living. Okay. And I pivoted to the other thing that I was pretty decent at at the time, and that was computers.

So I started with typography. I couldn't afford a book on Cork Express so and I couldn't afford extra gas to drive to a library to discover that they didn't have anything modern right right so my girlfriend had a job at the Mall of America and so I carpooled with her all right and then I went to be Dalton and walked in there and memorized as much of A job at the Mall of America. And so I carpooled with her. All right. And then I went to B. Dalton and walked in there and memorized as much of the book as I could over the weekend. Really? And then I aced the interview on Monday, got the job.

And then people who were using QuarkXPress, you know, 8, 10 hours a day, 40, 50 hours a week for years, they were asking me, hey, what's the keyboard command to do blah and blah and blah? And I knew it because I memorized as much of the book as I could in one weekend. So that's how I got my start in tech. That's an interesting way to ace an interview. Yeah. And then when this new thing called the web came out, I think it was 93 or 94, I saw a presentation by Guy Kawasaki, who was an evangelist for apple at the time and he was demonstrating i think it was claris home site or home page it was the it was a claris

product but basically the thing that blew my mind is they had a whizzy wig and you could toggle between that and a code editor and you could do like a split screen. And so if you have a large enough screen, then you can actually see your code and you can see the effect on those changes in real time, kind of like with hot module reloading and stuff like that these days. But yeah, back then it was, like I said,

it was probably 93 or 94. That was kind of revolutionary. But yeah, we were using tables and clear GIFs Like I said, it was probably 93 or 94. That was kind of revolutionary. Yeah. But, yeah, we were using tables and clear gifts and all kinds of unnatural things back then. I became obsessed with performance back then. Oh, do you have to worry about stray sounds or anything? Not necessarily. It's new for the show.

Okay. We've got a baby filter. Do they have a filter for that somehow? Sure. We'll gate that baby out. Okay. We'll gate that baby out. Do you have a filter for that somehow? Sure. We'll gate that baby out. They make baby gates, don't they? I recently uncovered there's a, what is it,

RipX DAW. Basically, it allows you to take any audio source, throw it in there, and you can actually see how all the different audio sources are spread out across the spectrum and you can select them you can interact with them you can take a you know a flat note rip x no way rip x

doll have to try the baby gate then because because it allows you to let's say take an existing recording and you can take out all the instrumentals or you can just take out certain you know like like the vocals and put in your own. I've always wondered how that works because there's a drummer I pay attention to. I'm going to jack his name up. Like El Esperino, I believe. He's a phenomenal drummer on YouTube.

Yep. And he's like, I saw him on TikTok at first and he's just phenomenal. Yeah. But he's playing to music, but he's the drum, right? Right. So how do you get that whole track?

Everything minus the drum. Without the drums, yeah. Exactly. So how do you get that whole track without the drums? So it must be something like that. I don't know. Exactly. And so I discovered this fairly recently, and of course I used Logic and I used a bunch of other stuff, but this is exciting to me because it would allow me to take an experiment because if I want to experiment with music yes i can perform everything from scratch but it'd be really awesome to be able to isolate let's say just a billy cobham beat from

an old recording you know yeah or a little you know funk bass or or whatever right you know be able to feed that in as a seed here's my frustration about okay Okay. I'm so deprived of caffeine, I'm going to just jump around topics. So, well, it's too hot to chug right now. I'm barely avoiding He keeps glancing at it. He keeps thinking about it. Will it cool off enough to drink? Is it too hot for

your hand? Because you can set it over there. I feel as if having my hand on it is drawing some of the heat out of it. Right? Because of the thermal mass. Okay. So I'm accelerating. Very intense. Yeah. I am accelerating the time frame.

You're actively cooling it. It's active cooling. Yes. Well, you're a conduit for the heat exchange, right? Exactly. I'm a heat sink. I'm a heat sink for the coffee. We're here with a heat sink talking about his frustrations and whatnot. Okay, so we're talking about AI. Where are we?

I was talking about AI. Oh, you hadn't said that part yet. Yeah. So generative AI, as it pertains to music, is so frustrating right now. I was reading Ken Wheeler was apparently doing a talk about this subject and he did a bunch of research on it. He's like, he was disappointed.

A lot of us who are involved in music and AI are highly frustrated with, it's like there's a huge blind spot around the types of solutions that are being pursued. They can generate audio of a particular style. They can give you subject matter, whatever. But what I want to do as a musician, as a recording artist, is I want to be able to seed an AI with my own sample. Or with Midjourney, you can take two images

and you can blend them together and get amazing results, right? Yep. Now, I want to be able to do that with my own music plus anything that I can hear, be able to isolate and say, okay, I want my loop plus this other loop to have a love child together. And I want it to be expressed both as audio but i also want the midi file so that i can pipe that to any instrument and i can get

any kind of sound and then i can i can isolate it i can i can process it i can do whatever i want with it so that's what i want to be able to do. Like a really talented session artist that you would have to pay not a small amount of money to, you'd be able to give the AI an idea of what you're going for, and it would elaborate on it. And then you'd be able to give it feedback in the same way you can talk to chat GPT or even mid-journey where you can vary region. It's like, this is great, but I want you to change that one thing.

And you can have that interactive feedback and then quickly iterate on it. You know, v0.dev that Vercel created, they have the same thing but for UI where you start with, hey, this is what I'm going for. Okay, this is cool, but I need you to tweak the one thing over here, right? And to be able to have that kind of a conversation the way you would with a peer or a colleague and collaborate with them.

What do you think explains the gap between what you wish existed and what actually exists today? What explains that? Audio content is not as popular, at least on Twitter and a lot of other social media platforms. I think the visual catches people's eye. You know, it's eye candy. You know, video and still image format is easiest to gobble up attention, right? And so right now, I think we're seeing a distortion in the pursuit of different areas of AI based on what gets engagement on social media. So whatever is most popular is going to be incentivized. So I think eventually we will get there with the generative AI for musicians and recording artists.

I was going to say music is pretty popular. I don't disagree with you. It is. But man, you think that music will be coming up next or high on the hit list for what gets attention. Well, and that's the interesting thing though, because I think professional recording artists are probably scared in a lot of situations because they now have a way to train a model on, let's say Taylor Swift or Beyonce, and it will basically re-perform a song in the style of the artist who actually recorded it. But because it is not an actual sample and I'm holding up my, my fingers for an air quote, you know, scare quote. It's not an actual

recording of Beyonce or Taylor Swift. It's a reinterpretation. It's a reinterpretation. And so it doesn't set off DMCA, doesn't trigger any takedown notices or anything else because it's AI generated.

Yeah. It certainly is scary, I think, to a certain extent. Yeah. Especially if you're one of these session artists you're talking about, right? Exactly. Who used to be able to take their skills, which are very valuable skills, and hire them out for a fee that was sustainable for their lives. Now, all of a sudden, I want you to add Carlos Santana playing the guitar onto

my... Exactly. And just as good or close enough, right? Exactly. It is kind of scary. The ones who lose, though, are probably the lower down in the spectrum, like the session artists, the non-Taylor Swifts. Exactly.

Right? Like, if... I don't know. Like, does Taylor Swift really lose if... Like, would somebody be able to make a version of Taylor Swift through AI, through their own work? Oh, yeah. You know what I mean? Yeah.

And would it take her down? Yeah. Would it change her lifestyle? Would it change her fame? Well, here's the dirty little secret. Probably not. Here's the dirty little secret when it comes to the music industry. It used to be that you could be a recording artist who sometimes tours, and you could make a decent living off of that, right?

Now you have to, right? But now, because of the realignment of the incentives and the pricing model of the streaming business, Apple, Spotify, all those guys, basically what you have now is it is almost impossible to get paid for your streams. Right. Unless you are a Taylor Swift, you get into this. Hundreds of millions. Yeah, you get into the situation where if you're not in the top 10 or however many artists, you get pennies.

Everything in the music industry right now comes down to touring. So this is how artists actually make their money because that's the only way that they can actually control the flow of revenue compared to their recordings. And recordings are just a way for them to get people to attend their concerts. You used to tour in order to sell your CD. Exactly. Now you have a CD. That's music. Exactly.

For those of us who have... Compact disc. Yeah, they're no longer on compact disc. Now you write music in order to bring people to your tour. Exactly. It's completely the opposite. Exactly. Which is not a fun lifestyle, right? It is, but you also... Talk about not sustainable. I mean, some people can pull it off like the Rolling Stones for 20, 40 years,

but very few people... Talk about burnout. Yeah. The road, man. The road. I was road man, the road. I was reading this thing about Taylor Swift's workout program, preparing for her eras tour. Yeah. And it's insane because if you think about what she has to do every night, roughly every night,

it's three and a half hours of song and dance and being here and changing your clothes and all these things. Yeah. And the way that she actually had to train for that was she would get on a treadmill for three and a half hours and she would sing her entire set every day on the treadmill as she ran and walked ran and walked and she had to sing through it i mean she's healthy and of age that she can do that 30s right right but i mean you just that's not a very sustainable lifestyle delhi parton could not do that i was trying to think of the maybe she could i don't know she's

hanging in there yeah she's she could she run don't know. She's hanging in there. Yeah. She's, she, could she run though? I know what you're saying. Yeah. No, I agree with your point. Like at some point you just can't do that.

You can't be the same artist and age and maintain the requirement to perform. Well, it's kind of like an open source maintainer, right? It's like I write software that people value and I give it away and they take huge value from it. And in order for me to do that, just like people give their music away pretty much. Now I have to become an influencer and a marketer and all these other things are business person in order to do that. And that's how it is with music now. Like you have to be, you have to be touring, you have to be a business person. And

to a certain extent, it's kind of always been like that, but it's just getting harder and weirder. Yeah. And you have to have, it's kind of always been like that, but it's just getting harder and weirder. Yeah. And you have to have the name recognition to bring people out. Exactly. Yeah, so that's just what occurred to me when it comes to generative AI as it applies to audio. Things are about to get really interesting because we're heading into an election season. The ability to use generative AI for deep fakes and to be able to create a world where you can't trust anything that you see online. I mean, a lot of us haven't been trusting what we see online for a while,

but there's still, I think, a part of our animal or lizard brain that looks at a video, something that confirms our biases, and we're just looking for an excuse to feel a certain way. And we're about to enter into a situation where we can actively reinforce our prejudices and actively reinforce our biases, or we can take a step back and go, okay, what do I actually know? How do I know it? How do I trust these information sources? Because I think it's going to be very interesting over the next year or so. Well, a random person on Facebook may not be the best person to pay attention to for deep fakes. If you see your friend post a video, I would say that's kind of where in the way mainstream media does

lend at least a name recognition reliability, but then you also have indie outlets you could pay attention to. Yep. And I suppose, where are they getting those videos at? Right, like your friend could get duped, and now you're duped by your friend's duping. Right. That happens. Exactly.

For sure. So what does society look like when everybody's always skeptical of everything? Because that's kind of where I'm getting to where I'm like, I don't believe much of anything. And that's not a really healthy way of viewing life. Exactly. Exactly. So I am a very optimistic person. I recognize and I see the danger.

And in fact, I was off of social media for over a decade because I didn't like the impact that it had on me. You know, the self-reinforcing pleasure cycle in your brain that get that dopamine hit, it's just not healthy in the long term. So you have to, at least what I had to do is I had to figure out a way to find balance because I have a highly addictive personality. So I've put in safeguards so I don't get sucked all the way in. But basically, in the process, I watched a lot of people get influenced by things that later turned out to be just a scam or a deep fake or something, you know, very, very well Photoshopped thing, you know. Sure. I think I have faith that people are going to have to evolve past where they are right now in terms of their sophistication of their media consumption. We're going to have to get to a place where we're more intentional about the diet of the mind that we feed ourselves. Because right

now, everybody is competing for everybody's attention. It's all about manipulating and bludgeoning people into giving up their attention, whether it's for a minute or an hour, and then reinforcing that habit and then monetizing it. So something has to change. This is not sustainable in the long term. And that's the beauty of how human beings and living systems evolve. You push things beyond a breaking point. You push things into a problem state and something changes. And either it changes in a way that you hoped for or it changes

and you're just going to be left with the repercussions and it might not be something that you would hope for in fact it might be the the very thing that you fear but uh that's the thing about equilibrium and uh yeah yeah when you when you stress people when you put people into a situation where it's unsustainable something has to change or break or break or break breaking change when they break it still causes a change for sure so exactly yeah so it's gonna be interesting to see what happens with automation as it applies to our industry in the near future so here i'm i'm a pessimist but here's something hopeful based on what you're saying yeah is that the conversations that we've been having amongst techies over the last 18 months

almost all of them have some form of this conversation that we're having with you in it yeah like inevitably for sure in fact we started to have chapters. I'd call it like the obligatory AI chapter. It's like, it's going to work its way into all of our conversations. Even when ostensibly the conversation's about an entirely different thing, here it comes. And so the reason why that's hopeful is because I feel like this is permeating our zeitgeist and we're all thinking about it and we're all concerned about it. And we are being, like you said, more mindful of our media diet and what's changing around us. And I think that we are also well positioned in a place where we can affect change in that space. Yeah. There's my hopefulness. That is hopeful. I'm being very mindful of my media diet.

Oh yeah. Yeah. To the point where I don't really have, I suppose my wife might disagree that I have an addictive personality. I like healthy obsession more than addictive. This is a marketer here. He's convincing himself. I like healthy obsession. It's healthy obsession. Right? And I cannot even allow myself to go on TikTok.

It's just too much. There's just too much things that I want. It's too good. It really is just too good. There's a lot of things I want to know and I have a curious mind. So I'm just naturally curious and about things I don't even really necessarily care about, like the main thing, so to speak. And so I will find myself, I'm bored. Let me give myself permission. 10 minutes. Well, that won't be 10 minutes. It will be hour oh yeah and i'm like i now i just don't even allow it don't even allow it because i just know that i'm going to go on there

and find interesting things and be entertained or be educated or whatever yep and i just don't allow it anymore all the what's healthier for you i'm a teetotaler it's a zero sure but i mean like then what do you when you have that 10 minutes, when you want to decompress, when you. Go to sleep. Yeah. Sleep it out. 10 minute nap. Not necessarily.

Like, I would go on TikTok, like, during, like, when I should be. When you're going to bed. Before bed. That's like a reading thing. You know, so instead. What about, like, you're on lunch hour. Never. You're having a sandwich.

What do you do? Something productive. Probably check email. Organize my to hour? Never. You're having a sandwich. What do you do? Something productive. Probably check email, organize my to-do list. You work through your lunch. Not necessarily. I mean, this is an example of what I do. Sure. Or I would just be present in the moment.

I do have books I listen to a lot. So I'll listen to... I'll re-listen to books. Like if I like that book, I'll re-listen to it again. I might give it six months and I'll re-listen to it again. But I go back to books or read books or catch up with someone via the phone or something like that. I'm just not diving into social media that is really not that important to me. It doesn't really need to feed the, like you said, dopamine beast, basically. I don't want to do that anymore.

That's not how I want to operate. And I know that I'm less healthy mentally when I allow myself to be in that zone. Right. And so the more I'm in control of, I guess, my present state of mind and my present feeling about whatever's around me is the better for me. Yeah. Because there's an easy way you can go in there and just lose your time. In a lot of cases, social media really is about losing your time to something else that's in full control. And in TikTok's case in particular, very much at the whim of the algorithm.

Whatever it's going to give to you next, and it's all designed on swipe, engage, swipe, engage. Exactly. Yeah, they've really got that feedback loop. They do. Oiled, well-oiled machine. It's also a good thing, too. I'm not going to say that TikTok's bad.

I just needed to be more mindful of how I use it and when I allow it to be used by me. I'll still hop on here and there, but just wait. You still tell everybody they should start TikTok? Yeah, yeah, totally. I still think it's a great platform, but I think it begins really even more so with a smartphone being in my pocket. I have access to anything I want. I can be on ChatGPT way more because it's got an iOS app.

The iPhone does a great job of taking my voice, turning it to prose. I've said this before on a podcast where I will just talk to ChatG GPT via the iOS app versus typing it out. Yeah. So I could do the same thing there. It's just at a state in humanity today, like we have access to literally a lot of communication, whether it's positive or negative in our pocket for the most part. Right. You know, most modern society folks have access to that. Yeah. And I think there's a, when you talk about balance, I think we could all exercise a healthy balance with that so it's interesting that you bring that up because yeah somebody posted a meme the other

day i saw it i think just yesterday and said you know at one point we used to think that uh that the problem with the world is that people just don't have access to information. Well, now everybody has access to all the information, whether it's true or false. But, I mean, essentially that theory has been disproven, right? But what I would say is now people have access to their own alternate facts, their own alternate version of reality. Because in the case of Google, let's say I'm going to conduct a Google search on, let's say, something that borders on the political. The results I'm going to get are going to be completely different than an uncle or cousin or somebody on the opposite side of the political spectrum. So that's going to reinforce their version of reality or their existing biases.

Right. And yours as well. Exactly. They feed us ourselves. Tucker Carlson, love him or hate him, he was on a debate with one of the Young Turks hosts recently, and I saw it. And I think the headline was like, Tucker Carlson beats this guy, like dunks on him, basically, like demolishes from an argument standpoint. But one thing he said was about government.

And this is kind of getting political to some degree, but he was saying about government. And he was saying, you know, in no time in history have we ever had a private company be more financially stable and well-funded than our government is. And how much power Google, and particularly like you mentioned, has. We've never had the algorithm or the search algorithm be so in control of society that we can be, like you just said, your results are different than your uncle or your aunt or whomever that we all have this sort of they have just so much power over what we can see and what our filters are and what our bubbles are and our spectrums are you know these are private companies that are for profit and they could be good or they could be evil but like that's something that we've never really experienced in all of human history, having so much power. And yet, when I go into Safari on my iPhone and I search something, whether it's a product or looking for something at Home Depot or whatever, it begins with a Google search in

a lot of cases. Or you're asking ChatGPT, which is a different company, but in the same scenario, right? For sure. So much power. For sure. When that thing answers all your questions, pretty much, and you can't trust them all but you can trust them for the most part but his point was was how much control that company not only has over what we see but how it sways political with lobbying with all the money well it's everything yeah like exactly like

so much power not only as a utility that is very much for good or very much for evil if you want to go that route. Right. But that it also has so much power over our government. Yeah. And you multiply that by Google, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon. It's not just one. It's many. And they all have similar sway over our government.

Yeah. And back to the whole pessimist, like, I don't trust anybody. What does that even do if you're already there? If you're like, I can't trust anybody, yet this is true. Pull the plug. So here's the interesting thing. I think at one point, if you go back enough decades

ago, you'd probably have to go back more than 40 years ago. But basically, I believe that even if you were of a completely different political persuasion, we at least had a commonly accepted set of facts that we could all agree upon. We might disagree about what to do about that reality, but at least we could find common ground on, okay, the earth is not flat. Okay. It's not flat. And, you know, and, and, and unless you're of a particular persuasion, you believe that the

earth is a little bit older than say a few thousand years. Right. So starting with certain fundamental foundational common points of agreement agreement the range of possibilities that you could arrive at about what should we do given this reality that we can all agree upon isn't so night and day compared to when you have a completely separate set of facts and a completely different understanding of reality and And that reality, the Venn diagram is broken because there's no overlap between one political reality and another political reality. And it's causing people to arrive at vastly different, but I want to say by design irreconcilable conclusions about what to do with two completely different realities,

right? So I think the solution is for us to trust our eyes and ears less and start going back to original sources and get to a place where we can actually trust the information that we see and hear and consume. And we need immediacy of that in our media and in every other source, where as you're consuming something, there's a way for you to evaluate, hey, almost like a real-time fact checker. And I feel as if this is where AI could be unleashed to give people contextualization of the information. Because you look at Twitter, somebody says something outrageous, eventually community notes will come in there and say, oh, by the way, you're missing this crucial context,

which basically flips the narrative. So the thing that you agreed with and liked and shared got completely turned upside down. Imagine if you could have that kind of accountability to a broader context in real time. And up until now, it required people who are experts or people who are freaks of nature who just happen to have certain subjects memorized so that they could provide that accountability. And they had to be available and their attention had to be trained on that. AIs that can provide that for you and provide that accountability in real time and actually reduce disinformation before the disinformation has actually had a chance to do its damage. Yeah. Because right now, all of the incentives are aligned around the people who are doing the worst in our society. The people who are saying things that are clearly not true,

they receive benefit of it because it spreads across the internet immediately. What is it? A lie can spread around the world before the truth is even laced up its shoes. So imagine being able to flip that economic incentive. So it's actually painful for somebody to tell a lie in a public space. Yeah. Community notes is interesting. Do you know how it works exactly? I know a little bit about how it works. So there have to be enough people who have disagreed.

Exactly. And so these are people who the community has decided that their feedback is worth upvoting. Right. So they're considered a trustworthy source of information. And the problem with that is if you get enough people acting in bad faith, you can completely distort that kind of an algorithm. And it relies on people acting in good faith. So to me, that seems like a critical vulnerability. If I were trying to hijack a democracy, I would take advantage of that.

But wouldn't we also have to assume that the AIs are acting in good faith? And isn't there ultimately a puppet master for any piece of software? Well, yeah, that's a really good somebody's somebody's training the model right so you have you're kind of rearranging the furniture but it's faster i agree that's better yeah um i like the way community notes works because people have to have disagreed on other topics yeah like they're kind of saying these are not all of the same persuasion but about about this thing, they all agree that that thing's wrong. Yeah. Right? And so there's a counterbalance there. I'm not sure how well it works in practice. It seems like, when I read

the community notes, it seems pretty good most of the time, but it's late. Like you said, it probably is gameable. Yeah. It takes a day or two or three. Right. You know? And by that point, the people who read the original message and either liked or shared it, retweeted it, they eventually get the notification. Oh, hey, that thing that you liked, that thing that you shared, that thing that you retweeted, a community note was added.

Okay, great, but the damage has already been done. Same problem in our publications as well. Like the correction comes days later at the bottom of the page. It's definitely not a headline. The headline's been consumed and moved on from already, and the correction gets a tenth, a hundredth of the viewership as the wrong thing was. So that also is, maybe AIs can help with that as well. I don't know.

It gets even more interesting when you look at the reproducibility issue in scientific publications. Yeah. Because that's where the economic incentives are even more distorted because it's publish or perish in that world. So if you're not publishing, then you're not going to get funded. You're not going to have any means to be able to actually continue your research, right? So the incentive is to actually continue to publish, publish, publish. And if there's a retraction, it's an afterthought. And the thing is, the thing I'll never forget is there's a gentleman, I think he was out of Stanford, and he founded something called the Reproducibility. It was Retraction Watch. That's what it's called. I think he was out of Stanford and he founded something called the reproducibility.

It was retraction watch. That's what it's called. But basically what they discovered is over 50% of the landmark studies that have been done on the subject of cancer are not reproducible. And so you have huge companies spending billions of dollars on trying to cure cancer or treat cancer more effectively, but over half of what they thought they could count on is actually not reproducible. And it's kind of frightening when you think about it. Trust nothing. Well, it'd be awesome if we could get to a place where you could establish trust more quickly and more genuinely. Question everything is maybe another version of that.

Trust nothing, question everything. I heard an adage that I can't recall the source necessarily, but that any time a civilization creates social media, soon after it implodes on itself. That's what happened with the Romans, obviously. They started scrawling graffiti on the walls, and it was straight line. Assuming the multiverse, or assuming whatever. Assuming the multiverse. Was this one of your plausible science fiction books you were reading? I really wish I could recall the source but it was it was interesting to think that

you know if uh it may have been a book it may have been science fiction i don't know but it sounds interesting to me like is it reproducible that's the question maybe not but it's at least plausible or understandable in the fact that when social media is introduced into a society, soon after it begins to overexpose itself to itself. Interesting. And therefore begins to see the differences and the biases and hate becomes the primary versus the love. Interesting. Which, you know, I think is somewhat true.

We've experienced it just based on our need for a diet. There's something there that is not normal. Yeah, it's definitely something worth noting about. And is it social media's fault? I wouldn't say necessarily. But the internet is a very fantastic thing. But we've also layered on this social fabric onto the internet the information highway super highway that now allows us to you know ad nauseum just share you know and consume true or not true things yeah and

so that cannot be sustainable long term and if we have to say trust nothing at the end of a podcast is that a good thing not a good thing i don think. So you have to agree with that at least. Even if the adage of every time a civilization invents social media, X happens, that may be the science fiction side of it. I'm going to community notes that quote, though. I don't trust it. I agree with it, but I don't trust it. Interesting.

Yeah, so I'm optimistic because I see the potential for damage right now, and I see it getting worse before it gets better. Yeah. But at the same time, we're going to reach a breaking point. The current set of conditions cannot continue and accelerate. What do you think would break, or what would that potentially look like? Obviously, you can't tell the future, but what would that look like? Well, I can look at the recent past. I can remember what happened on January 6th and you had an attempted coup.

Yeah, I could see a post-election, you know, serious problem, breaking point. Right. So if we have the world's oldest democracy come to an end because enough people believe that the election is rigged, there are going to be changes. And they're not going to be necessarily changes that the vast majority of people want to live through. Yeah. So something has to change. And he's somehow spinning that as optimistic. I am.

I like it, Sam. I like how optimistic you are about that. Because when there's a safety valve, when there's a minor pressure relief, people are like, oh, well, this is not that big a deal. It's okay. Right? And I feel as if the world of automation, the world of AI, up until now, we've been distracted by a lot of little pressure release valves. Lots and lots of little things that have prevented it from becoming an apocalypse, right? Right. Something will change either by our design or because we have no choice, because something has broken. My theory is that in the near future, we're going to have better accountability. We're going to have better ability to establish trust.

And that the economic incentive to lie and act in bad faith in public is going to get undermined. It's going to be neutralized. I'm going to mention an ad, if you don't mind. It's kind of odd, but we have this ad for Read Write Own from Chris Dixon. And I read the copy for it. I haven't read the book yet, but the premise is pretty interesting. It says this about, at least in the ad spot. So this is not, we were paid to say this elsewhere, not in this context.

It's a recent ad we did. And it says, Read Write Own is a call to action for a more open, transparent, and democratic internet. One that opens the black box of AI, tracks the origins, as you're saying, tracks the origins we see online, and much more. That it's our chance to reimagine the world-changing technologies we have, and to build an internet we want, not the one we've inherited, essentially. So I don't know what the content of the book is, but there's this similarity. I think he even mentioned one way to track some of this AI stuff is... It's blockchain. Yeah, why in the world is blockchain always the solution to everything? That's how you track changes.

But it is verifiable. Publicly. Well, you can't alter it after it's been computed. Right. It's immutable. It's trustless. When done correctly, obviously. Well, that's the thing.

It depends on whether it's a proof of work or proof of stake. There's a lot of ifs there, or it depends. But the math seems sound on it being able to have a trustless public chain of events. Right. Well, that's the thing, though. You're still trusting something. You have to have enough nodes. It goes back to math

right it goes back to having enough nodes on the system that concur with your accounting so just like with the onion router tor at one point i think it was the nsa who actually owned a number of nodes they had compromised enough nodes that they could do a timing-based attack where they would analyze the amount of time that it takes between the different layers and they were able to figure out where somebody was in the world and they were able to

basically figure out who they were based on that timing. The NSA. Trust nothing. But theoretically you could do that with a blockchain network. Yeah. If you own enough nodes, then you can skew the results. Totally.

Because you can fit consensus, essentially. Yeah. Well, this is why the Bitcoiners go back to Bitcoin. They say it's the longest standing, most diverse, secure blockchain there is because of how much value is there and how long it's been not broken. Now, maybe there's somebody with 51% of that. Of course, Satoshi has a whole bunch of Bitcoin that has never moved. Honestly, the moment that moves, I think the network falls. Really? Yeah. Falls?

I mean, okay, yes. Okay, yes. I mean, maybe not. Yeah, I think so. Something changes. Trust erodes. So a couple of things. First of all, when it comes to blockchain, specifically Bitcoin and others that are based on proof of work, not proof of stake, I have a real issue with them.

Because the energy intensity of the computation is so high that you could power multiple countries now. Right? And so what's happening is a lot of dirty energy sources, such as natural gas, coal, oil, things like that, where increasingly it is economically unsustainable because grid-powered solar and wind have completely leapfrogged them in terms of cost efficiency, right? If you're building brand new energy sources right now? By far, you can build anywhere from six to nine times more grid scale solar or wind compared to nuclear, which is the second cheapest or third cheapest, I should say. But everything else is more expensive by comparison. But the problem is, you go to an

oil field where they have these toxic gases and they set fire to those toxic gases as a way of making it safe. Well, that's wasted energy. So what's happening here in Texas is a bunch of Bitcoin miners set up in the oil fields and they've harvested that heat energy, that what would normally be just waste heat. And that becomes an additional revenue stream for those oil extractors, those oil companies. And so it basically takes what was a dying revenue model, a dying industry, and it breathes new life into it and it slows down our adoption of renewables. And it takes, basically, it vastly increases our risk of transforming our environment to a place where, you know, it's going to kill people to go outside, whether it's due to the extreme heat and humidity or the extreme cold because the natural conveyor belt that

used to exist is kind of collapsed or it's sometimes collapsing. Yeah, potentially. I've also seen a lot of proponents of innovation around clean energy sources because of the value in the network and the people that are willing to invest in it. I think it's probably a mixed bag. I don't know enough about it to speak better than that. I'm just speaking to the security of it, which is what they, I don't even enough about it to speak better than that. I'm just speaking

to the security of it, which is what they, I don't even know if that's, I trust nothing. I don't even know if that's fair. It seems to be what they're saying, but how do you go back to origins with a chain of trust that you can actually prove out? I mean, so far that's been, seems to be the one good use case of blockchain. Sure. Do you watch Netflix? Yeah. Do you know how much power they use?

It's not small. It's not small. But you watch Netflix? Yeah, I do. This is where I have a challenge because there's such high value. I'm with Jared on this point that it's such high value that we need innovation around. I mean, we have a sun, right? Right. It's out there right now. The only reason we're here right now is we have a sun, right? Right. It's out there right now.

The only reason we're here right now is because it's there, right? Yeah. We need to better harness the most available energy source ever. And that's solar. That's all the things that the earth provides as its natural ways. Yep. I'm for Bitcoin. I understand the whole, it sucks a bunch of energy,'s let's be humans and innovate and find ways around

the dirty ways and again to jared's point i don't know a ton about energy necessarily but at the same time the world i feel is more hybrid yeah like there's places where something diesel powered will trump for the moment the output of something that is electric powered or lipo battery powered or whatever it might be powered. The world is more hybrid. I think we need balance rather than cut off. You know, at some point, yes, maybe those things need to be less available, but there's so many, if you just cut off the dirty ways, I suppose you'll see a crippled earth. Like there's just so much reliance on diesel power gas powered you know natural powered clean powered we need a a more balanced process of it rather than saying it's

only this way or only that way because that's just like why not both is my best option when it comes to like hard choices why not both can we do both and when it comes to bitcoin and powering it let's find ways to use things that are more renewable, things that are not overly draining the system it's on. You know, I'm all for that. If it's clean or even this, like, what an awesome thing to reuse those off gases, though. It was once waste and now it's not waste. Yeah. You know, it may stump the opportunity for renewables, but it also is a reuse of something that was previously just waste, which is always a positive.

There's so much opportunity with decentralized, non-owned-by-government-entity currency for the world that it scares governments. So just that not right alone, it's almost worth exploring as trust nothing. You know what I mean? It's almost worth exploring because then the trust becomes the network itself. Yeah. Rather than simply like, I trust my government or my government trusts that government. And so therefore it is trusted. You know what I mean?

So a couple of things. First of all, look at who is the primary beneficiary of Bitcoin. And a lot of it comes down to these ransomware gangs and people who want to be able to move illicit substances on the dark, and other cryptocurrencies that are actually profiting and benefiting different parties, it's particularly nefarious when it comes to Bitcoin and other currencies that are based on that.

So the other thing is I've actually invented a blockchain-based technology that generates a ledger of renewable energy. In fact, part of the idea behind it, and I came up with this over a decade ago, is the idea that when you walk into a coffee shop, you don't have to get approvals. You don't have to go through a multi-step process to connect to the Wi-Fi, right? It just automatically discovers. It's zero config. Super simple. Well, right now,

if you want to add solar to your roof or wind or anything to the local grid, you have to go through a month-long process. You have to get all kinds of different people involved, get different stamps of approval because our grid was designed over 100 years ago and it hasn't been updated since then. So the concept was to basically take some of the brains of the Internet, where it's self-configuring. It's able to automatically discover the capabilities of all the different devices around it, and it can also self-heal. So take that resiliency and put it into an electrical grid. So when you hook up your solar panels, you don't have to go through all of the government red tape. And the solar panels communicate with the local electrical grid using blockchain as a way to actually preserve a historical record of the capabilities of the production of that system. So first of all,

the right people get paid, but also that's more valuable to the grid to know what that system is capable of historically. And then also to move more intelligence away from a command and control structure and move more intelligence into the nodes around the electrical grid. So if there's a terrorist attack or if there's a natural disaster, it becomes far more resilient, more secure, more fault tolerant, and it's able to respond much faster than one person like Homer Simpson, you know, watching a dial and adjusting levers and knobs. You can actually automate a lot of that stuff in the way that a lot of the internet, the backbone of the internet is actually capable of self-healing and rerouting traffic. You can do the same with electricity.

Tell us more. Tell us where we can learn more about that. Oh, I licensed the technology like a decade ago. It's come and gone? I'm sure it's being used by somebody somewhere. I have no idea. But the interesting thing about that is the intersection of the blockchain, because from my perspective, blockchain has a lot of potential to establish trust

and to basically provide historically accurate, verifiable information in a way that cannot be forged after the fact, right? So then you can start to establish trust and make use of historical information in a way that benefits everybody. So. I don't know how pertinent it is, but in my small town, Dripping Springs, we have a co-op. Our energy provider is a co-op. Okay.

And I'm still learning exactly what that means, but basically they are for the grid itself. And if there's money to go back, if they overcharge me, I get money back. Yeah, that's awesome. And it's actually better if I don't get money back because they're doing their job. Exactly. But it's an energy grid that is for the community. It's powered by the community. It employs people.

Yep. And that's how it community. It's powered by the community. It employs people. Yep. And that's how it works. That's awesome. And two books that I've read in my life, The World is Flat and Hot, Flat, and Crowded, those are a little dated. I think Hot, Flat, and Crowded was kind of like predictive to a lot of the stuff, which The World is Flat was about the workforce of the world being flattened. Like you could be in Dubai and work for the changelog, you know, producing podcasts kind of thing.

And the hot, flattened crowd was this prediction that because of the energy grid and it needs to be smart, like you talked about, we need to have more intelligence in the grid. I totally agree with that. But at the same time, what in the world is stopping it? Because you see deregulation in energy. You see randos being able to essentially hedge energy,

make a lot of money. It's such a weird, like kind of wild, wild West in a way where it, I don't know if it needs to be government source. Cause I mean, who can trust their government as much? Like maybe it needs to be regulated by something, but like how every state is different in the United States in terms of how their energy works. I don't know how it works in Nebraska, but like everybody's kind of a little different and who's in charge of like literally upgrading the energy grid and how do we need it now? Not like incrementally, iteratively over the next decade. We need it almost immediately, but who's in charge of that? What's the consortium making that happen? Who's agreeing on making that happen? Yeah. So the federal government actually, here's a fun fact. I don't, I don't know if you

were familiar with what happened a few years ago when we had the cold snaps. I used to work at Hewlett Packard Enterprise, HPE. A ton of my coworkers are out of Texas. And so, you know, Austin, Houston, that whole area. And a lot of them were without power for days and weeks i live here i was one of them yeah so you so you know what it's like at least so the the interesting thing about it though is that the uh urquhart was built by the same people who built enron okay so the people whose theory is well well let's just turn it into a free market experiment.

Let's see what happens. Well, the thing is, the free market, free market pixie dust is not a cure for every ill. OK, so just because you, you know, sprinkle free market pixie dust on an energy grid doesn't mean that it's always going to produce better results, right? And in the case of the winter, you know, a couple few years ago, it has disastrous impacts, right? But the interesting thing is, at the same time that ERCOT was collapsing, you have the panhandle of Texas, you've got El Paso, which are on neighboring grids. Both of them were sustainable, and they survived all of those cold snaps because they had a larger grid, and the fundamentals of the grid are completely different than how ERCOT operates.

So here's the thing. The thing that a lot of people use as a reason not to switch over faster to renewables, they say, oh, well, the sun doesn't always shine, the wind doesn't always blow. Well, here's the thing. That only applies if you have tunnel vision. If you're zoomed in so close to your point of reference, that that's the only thing you're looking at. If you zoom out, all of a sudden you notice that if you could look at the entire globe at once, the sun is always shining somewhere and it is always blowing somewhere. And if you can

basically generate energy on a large enough scale and then ship that energy using, you know, the magic of science and three-phase electricity, you can ship that energy anywhere, I mean, within reason. For sure. So on a large enough scale, there is more than enough energy. There was a study probably 20 plus years ago where they looked at all the different wind sites that had ever been examined. At the time, they said, oh, well, we have more than enough energy wind energy to power

the entire earth five times over just on the existing sites that we've actually surveyed and since then you know it's just gotten even better and more efficient so the thing is there's a a way of measuring how much this stuff costs it's called called the Levelized Cost of Energy, LCOE, right? And it's basically a survey of the actual projects that are being built every year and how much it's costing and how much it's generating. And all things being equal, you can compare these things and go, oh, well, let me see. New nuclear is anywhere from six times to nine times more expensive than new grid solar or wind. Natural gas, coal, oil, all of these things are many times more expensive than even new nuclear. So I understand the idea of, well, we can't just throw a switch and cut it off.

However, every time somebody spends billions of dollars building new nuclear, I look at that and go, yeah switch it over to grid scale solar and wind with just a little bit of storage. We could build five, ten times as much. Well, if we had five or ten times as much as we actually needed, that's called over provisioning. Here's the thing. If you generate two, five, 10 times more energy than you actually need, you don't need to store nearly as much of it. So your costs of storage actually go down vastly. But with just a little bit of storage and a little bit of over-provisioning, we could be switching over to renewables in a matter of just a few years. Like literally,

we have all the technology. We don't have to have more research. Literally, we could take off-the-shelf solutions right now, and it would actually save us money. Because everywhere that this has been done, the cost of electricity actually goes down. The grid becomes more reliable. Look at what Tesla did with their massive battery that they installed in Australia. They said, you know, we can do this in, I can't remember what it was, under three months. Turned out they did it in 90 days or something like that. So they basically said, we can stabilize the Australian power grid during the worst of the summer months.

And it did. They stabilized it. They were able to install it within 90 days or something like that. And their cost of energy actually went down because it's more reliable. And all of your equipment lasts longer because of that. You know, all your heavy machinery and stuff like that. If you have, like, a brownout, if you have a brownout or if you have an interruption to your power supply,

that's really freaking expensive. I'm sorry. I love the rant. I just wish it would happen. I feel like maybe in the case of that being effective, not necessarily at the end of this session, but Elon himself might pose a risk to that because he's so bombastic he's so

polarizing yeah you want somebody like that who's willing to be risky with spacex and tesla and boring company these things yeah but at the same time he's kind of a weirdo you know that's sort of you can't really trust him very much because he's so no one yeah he's fallen in with i feel like he's fallen in with a bad crowd. Well, you know, because I want that. I want somebody to focus on that. Exactly. And do well.

My question to that plan is, how far do you have to zoom out realistically inside the United States? Not far. If you look at the scale of our grid, and we have an east coast, we have an east grid and a west grid and then you got ERCOT and you got one or two other smaller grids along the way, but for the most

part it's two big grids. So we need a co-op for all of the US, right? We need a co-op that is for the grid, not against the grid. It's not for higher cost of energy, it's for stabilized stabilized sustainable energy for everyone yep and it needs to almost go side by side to it and incrementally replace old with new yeah similar to the way we've the internet's grown you know from dial-up to fiber exactly the the problem is the oldest sources of energy you know coal oil natural gas all those, they have permanent structural

tax incentives built in. Everything that is remotely renewable always has a sunset. It always has EVs. Up until the act that was passed by Biden within the last couple of years, Chevy, Tesla, and a number of others, all of the tax incentives went bye-bye. Yeah, I heard about that. Because as soon as you succeed to a certain point, then all the tax incentives went bye-bye. So anyway, I did want to bring it back to energy efficiency and specifically the computing industry.

Okay. I'm down for that. What's that? I'm down for that too. Okay. I'm thinking about energy efficiency myself in my home lab. Yes, we could build up more generation capacity, but what if we took what we're already doing and we made data centers and the fabric of the Internet

hundreds or even thousands of times more efficient than they are right now? And that's the kind of problem that I've been wrestling with for the last 10- plus years working in technology. So, for example, image optimization. Right now, something like three quarters of all images shuffled, moved over the internet are not actually optimized. And so there's a tremendous waste of energy and compute resources and storage

and bandwidth just with image optimization or lack thereof, right? Microservice architectures, you know, very, very popular. It's kind of the tool that large enterprises use so that they don't have to worry about backend for frontend, right? And the problem is I had a view in an app that I was developing for HPE and it required over two dozen REST calls before it could render a single view. So I re-imagined what that would look like if I did all my data fetching and edge functions. Yeah. And then I optimized it, tree shook it, okay? And then, of course, encoded using Brotli. By the time it was all said and done, I was able to reduce bandwidth by 99.916%. So that's interesting.

That's a lot of percents. That's a big improvement, right? 99.96, do you say? 99.916%. Yeah, that's like almost 100%. Almost. But here's the thing. We still had real-time data and we still were missing out on a tremendous opportunity to vastly improve the efficiency of even that system. Why? Because when you have lots of data changing all the time, every time you deliver data to the client, the client has no idea if its data is

fresh or stale. So you always have to start with the assumption, if five seconds have passed, it's stale. So you always have to call back to the data source, and you always have to fetch, and then it has to exercise database queries. It has to do all the things that are expensive, and it's a huge bit of intelligence and move over to an event-driven architecture where the data source knows what the data dependencies are, it knows when something I know that you're interested in this data, and by the way, here's the delta. Here's the set of changes. And by the time you're done applying that change at the edge, the hash of what that modified resource will look like is included in the e-tag that I'm including from the data source to the edge function and the edge function can do a patch at the edge and then update the cache at the edge and then you use server sent events to go from edge function to client and then the client only updates when there's actually a useful benefit

to actually making a network request. And so you've eliminated polling, you've eliminated all of this wasted resources and wasted infra bills, right? Your AWS costs is off the charts. You go from, you know, instead of 99.916% reduction, you can take that and you can eliminate every single network request, every single DB op that does not produce a useful result. And in my previous role, we figured out that 99% of the time it was read-only. There was no mutation of the data. So what that means is you have 99% opportunity for cache hits. So only 1% of that would actually require a new database operation. And then you could just push the changes to the edge and update the cache right there. So imagine 99.916% more efficient times an additional 99% reduction in infra costs. And all of a sudden you're talking thousands of times more efficient

and saving yourself potentially millions of dollars in AWS or other infra costs. So those are the types of things that I get excited about because if we just take the tools that are right now on the shelf. Ah, that's the key word right there. If we. No, tools. Tools. Tools.

Okay. If we just take this set of techniques, this set of architectural patterns that have been in existence for decades, we know that they work, and they're actually easier to do now than ever before. Right. But we don't have the tools. Yes, we do. You got them? Yeah. I've been building with them for the last decade or so. But you're the only one who's got them. No, no, no, no. There are other people who

do it. Give us the tools, Sam. Give us the tools, Sam, and tell us. Okay, so for edge functions, I'm a big fan of Vercel. And the reason why I'm a big fan of Vercel is because they basically built the same exact infra that I've built at previous roles, where you evaluate best of breed. And in the case of edge workers, Cloudflare, those guys, are amazing. All of their isolates mean no cold starts. You don't have to wait dozens or hundreds of milliseconds for your Edge function to spin up. It's ready to go right there.

And so it's fundamentally more efficient if you've got easy access to your data and there are ways to architect that, whether you're using Cloudflare, R2, D1, any of that, PlanetScale. There are ways for you to move your data into an event-driven architecture. Postgres has triggers,

a ton of different message mesh solutions, into an event-driven architecture. You know, Postgres has triggers, you know, a ton of different message mesh solutions. You know, you've got NATS.io, you've got Red Panda and Kafka and RabbitMQ. You've got a ton of different options out there to be able to really wire up all of these parts without having to reinvent the wheel, without having to do everything. Let me change my one word then. Oh, sorry. Because I know that all these tools exist.

Yeah. The word is not tooling. The word is packaging. Gotcha. And so, because you're talking about architecture, you're talking about a practice, a technique that you can use tools in order to accomplish. Yeah. Right? But that technique has to be packaged. That's why I said tooling's the word, because if there was a tool that did all these things for you out of the box, blammo. So what you're saying is really a SaaS that makes it an easy button for people. It doesn't necessarily have to be a SaaS, but something that says, hello, web developers in the world. Here's a much better way of doing it.

Gotcha. And you describe it. And then you say, and here's how you do it out of the box. It just works. Yeah. Like that's how you get that technique, which has to be moved around, permeate the industry for it to actually have the huge order of effects that you'd like to see, right?

Yeah. Not just at HPE, but at every shop. Exactly. Right? And that requires, my original word is tooling, but packaging of the tools that are existing and like education and here it is. Is there anything like that?

Or is this your stealth mode startup? Well, I can tell you, but then. But then he'd be out of stealth mode. Exactly. So let's just say that the next six months to a year are going to be very interesting. Okay. Now we're hopeful. Trust in something. We totally trust you. Okay. Okay. Now we're hopeful. Trust in something.

We totally trust you. Well, okay. So let's put it this way. What I've just described to you is I'm not inventing anything terribly unique by describing what I just described to you guys. Okay. This is a set of patterns that I think a lot of people are very well familiar with, but you're right. There is no easy button. It takes a lot more work and effort and experimentation and profiling, and there are a lot of foot guns. There are a lot of ways that even if you're doing

everything right, except for one or two things, instead of being a cost savings it can be a cost multiplier so yeah yeah individual results will vary but I suspect it's about to get easier within the next year okay I'll be enough we think about this as a podcast because we build our own platform and we think about CDNs and delivering mp3 is a ground the world and how to do it well yeah we've been working with FASI for many years we're considering change mm-hmm we've even considered on a podcast building our own CDN yeah but and how to do it well. We've been working with FASI for many years. We're considering change. We've even considered on a podcast building our own CDN.

Yeah, I've done that. But this is kind of like in the similar vein. And I agree with you. I think if we had more efficiency, it's interesting to think about the client not pulling, but the edge pushing, this whole push mechanism, because that's where the intelligence is at of the data being changed or not. Because it knows every time data is added, right? Exactly.

Every time it writes new data, it knows there's change somewhere to its clients. That seems very smart to me. But like Jared said, how do we buy the package? Yeah. No, really, how do we buy the package? In six months or so, it's going to be very interesting. Let's leave it right there on the tees. Thanks, Sam.

This has been awesome. Appreciate it. It's been fun. Thank you. Yeah, it's going to be very interesting. Let's leave it right there on the tees. Thanks, Sam. This has been awesome. Appreciate it. It's been fun. Thank you. Yeah, it's been a lot of fun. Thank you. What's up, friends? This episode of Change Logging Friends is brought to you by our friends over at Vercel. And I'm here with Lee Robinson, VP of Product.

Lee, I know you know the tagline for Vercel, develop, preview, ship, which has been perfect, but now there's more after the ship process. You have to worry about security, observability, and other parts of just running an application production. What's the story there? What's beyond shipping for Vercel? Yeah. When I'm building my side projects or when I'm building my personal site, it often looks like develop, preview preview ship. I try out some new features. I try out a new framework. I'm just hacking around with something on the weekends. Everything looks good. Great. I ship it. I'm done. But as we talk to more customers, as we've grown as a company, as we've added new products, there's a lot more to the product portfolio of Vercel nowadays to help pass that experience. So when you're building larger,

more complex products, and when you're working with larger teams, you want to have more features, more functionality. So tangibly, what that means is features like our Purcell firewall product to help you be safe and to have that layer of security. Features like our logging and observability tools, so you can understand and observe your application and production, understand if there's errors, understand if things are running smoothly and get alerted on those. And also then really an expansion of our integration suite as well too, because you might already be using a tool like a data dog, or you might already be using a tool at the end of this software development lifecycle that you want to integrate with to continue to scale and secure and observe your application. And we try to fit into those as

well too. So we've kind of continued to bolster and improve the last mile of delivery. That sounds amazing. So who's using the Vercel platform like that? Can you share some names? Yeah, I'm thrilled that we have some amazing customers like Under Armour, Nintendo, Washington Post, Zapier, who use Vercel's running cloud to not only help scale their infrastructure, scale their business and their product, but then also enable their team of many developers to be able to iterate on their products really quickly and take their ideas and build the next great thing. Very cool. With zero configuration for over 35 frameworks, Vercel's running cloud makes it easy for any team to deploy their apps.

Today, you can get started with a 14-day free trial of Vercel Pro or get a customized enterprise demo from their team. Visit vercel.com slash changelogpod to get started. That's V-E-R-C-E-L dot com slash changelogpod. Next up, we are speaking with Jess Chan from Coder Coder, a YouTube channel that's filled with practical tips for the beginner web developer. What's your favorite thing in life? That's a deep question. Off the top of my head, tiramisu.

Tiramisu? Yeah. Wow, my wife loves tiramisu. Tiramisu? Yeah. Wow. My wife loves tiramisu. It's good. I had a college roommate who was from Italy, and she made tiramisu with like, she made the real espresso and everything. It was like really good. Solid.

Did that ruin other tiramisus for you because it was so good? Almost, yeah. Almost, but not quite. You can still enjoy it, but it's like. You can still like it, yeah. I've had better. Here's what I appreciate about tiramisu. Via my wife, who's told me this, and she was correct, and I started to appreciate it. It's a very complicated thing.

Or it's a, not complicated, complex, perhaps. Yes. It's not the kind of dessert that just anybody can whip up, you know? There's a lot of different steps and parts. You have to burn the top, right? I don't know how you make it. Don't you like torch the top of it? Is that the one?

I think that's creme brulee. Creme brulee, okay, my bad. Describe it then. Give me a description of tiramisu. It's like ladyfinger cookies or whatever, soaked in rum. Soaked in rum. The rum's very important.

I love ladyfingers. Yeah. If that's tiramisu, then I'm... You like rum? Yeah, I love rum. I was married in Jamaica. Have to. Some kind of cream on top.

Right. And also espresso. I never made it, so I don't know how to make it. I just eat it. You just like it. Yeah. I love espresso, too. So coffee, sweets. But yeah.

Rum. Yeah. And pastry, right? Is there a pastry around it? No. No. Isn't there like a ladyfinger pastry thing? Is that what you mean

about a pastry? Ladyfingers are soaked in rum, so they're basically like a cake. I'm way off then. It's not crunchy. I think you're thinking

of creme brulee. No, not in this case. No, you're not? I was thinking like a cream horn, which is like a pastry with cream in it. We've called those,

I've heard them called ladyfingers before. Maybe there's multiple times ladyfingers. Like an eclair type thing maybe? Yeah, like an eclair, but smaller. You have bigger ones. Kind of like a cannoli too. It's multiple times ladyfingers. Like an eclair type thing maybe? Yeah, like an eclair. But smaller.

You have bigger ones. Kind of like a cannoli too. It's similar to a cannoli. Cannoli's great. But not the exact same shape wise but the pastry is different than a cannoli.

Anyways, that got me excited. I would love to have me some tiramisu. Right? Or a cannoli or a ladyfinger. We'll just talk for 90 minutes

about different desserts that we like. No, no, no. This is just for the fun, right? That was an interesting answer to what's your favorite thing, though. Yes. Tiramisu.

That's a good answer. I didn't want to ask her about her breakfast, you know. Because we all had the same breakfast. Yeah, it's like, you know. Less exciting. If you're excited about breakfast,

you like breakfast? I love breakfast food. If we laid down the best breakfast for you right now, what would it be? Like the one, like you're dying tomorrow, this is the last breakfast, what would it be? Like the one, like you're dying tomorrow. This is the last breakfast.

What would it be? I'd say corned beef hash. Okay. But it has to be sort of crunchy on one side because it's like, you know, been seared. And then eggs. Yeah, of course. I like poached eggs. Same.

Yeah. And then some English breakfast tea with milk and sugar. Wow. No pastries? I'm not a huge pastry person normally. Yeah. No croissant? I like croissants.

I don't know anybody who dislikes them. Well, that's... Yeah, I guess it's a pastry kind of... Maybe you don't eat them because you don't want to have carbs or gluten or something, but no one's like, croissants, those are terrible. so we've established you have good tastes in food you do have good tastes so what else do you have good taste in like let's talk about software and tech and stuff like that like what are you into i mean on my youtube channel i like pretty much deal with like the basics html css a tiny bit of javascript yeah but it's really just about trying to talk about

practical things so it's like all of the things that I wish I had known when I was just starting out, because I'm a self-taught developer. I didn't like get a CS degree or whatever. And so learning for me, and I learned on the job, because I got a job first off a Craigslist, and then I landed a job a couple years later at an advertising agency. So I had to learn at kind of a breakneck pace, you know, while I'm frantically Googling, trying to meet my deadlines. So it's just kind of like educating people who are trying to get into the field with the things that I wish that, you know, I had known when I was starting out

to hopefully make it a little easier and less painful for them. So in terms of tech stacks, I'm not really, you know, up to date on the hottest technologies and stuff. I kind of deal with like the basics. I think there's not enough people talking about the, I don't want to say this necessarily boring stuff, like the practical things, right? It's kind of in a vein, you might think, oh, that's not as cool. Cause you just said that kind of yourself. What would you consider practical then? Like, give me an example of some recent videos you've done. That's been practical knowledge you wish you had when you first started. I think some of it is research and then problem solving.

So I started making some videos where I'm literally just building a website from like a design file or whatever and talking through my thought process and being willing to show in the video like the things that I get stuck on and you know there are some things that had to be edited out if I'm just spending 45 minutes like reading the documentation and like yeah trial and error kind of thing but that kind of learning how to problem solve seems to be a skill that I think a lot of people starting out don't know how to develop so I think it's helpful for them to sort of see that in action. So, yeah, I would say problem solving is kind of a good practical skill to have.

For sure. So, Adam, to give you a little bit of background that I got before on the mic here, Jess has built a channel since 2017. It's called Coder Coder, and she's built it to almost 500,000 subscribers. Dang! And her husband is her editor. Yeah. It's called Coder Coder, and she's built it to almost 500,000 subscribers. Dang. And her husband is her editor. Yeah.

And so this is now sustainable. It's not like a software engineering salary, but it's enough that she can do it, and it can sustain her, and pretty cool. That is pretty cool. I did subscribe. I haven't watched any of your videos, but I just met you five minutes ago. That's very cool. But I did notice you've got the classic mouth wide open, excited thumbnail. And I'd love to hear your thoughts on your thumbnails.

It seems like most YouTubers I meet, they're just doing it because they feel like they have to. Is that pretty much you? Yeah. I mean, it works. I do try to not get overly sensational like Mr. Beast style but you know I think having the picture of yourself it works it works for people who like recognize your channel because I was trying some A-B testing with thumbnails and the ones that I'm not in in the thumbnail like they don't get clicked as much. Right. So, yeah. That's what people say.

You've got to get that lizard brain emotion to get people to click on your video, you know? It's interesting how the algorithm wins there for creators. Because there's actually, if you paid attention to this, there's like a revolt. A lot of creators are stepping away from YouTube. They have been there for sometimes a couple of years, maybe even a half a decade or longer. Oh, yeah.

Because of the treadmill of YouTube. And some of it's YouTube's fault and some of it that they feel like they have to create content that serves the algorithm, not so much their creative creativity, what they think should exist. And so they almost have to like this one in particular. He runs his name's Caleb and he runs DSLR Video Shooter. And I've been paying attention to him for years because I kind of get into video and photography, and it's helped us over the years. And I like the guy a lot. I respect his work, big time. He's got great opinions.

And so he's got videos on super simple YouTube. You maybe haven't seen him over the years, is, he was like, I just would procrastinate on my videos because I would, like, overly make them perfect to not have to ship it. Because my identity would then be rooted in its

reach. Like, did this one flop? I put this effort into it, and he was just saying how the input doesn't always match the output that he desires because he thinks, you know, creatively, this is what I want to put out there. And sometimes the algorithm is kind of in control. So you mentioned the thumbnail. Like, he's got great thumbnails, too, but you kind of have to fall into this algorithm, serve it trap. Are you feeling any of that?

Do you feel that at all? Do you resonate with that?? Do you feel that at all? Do you resonate with that? Yes, I understand that. I take kind of an opposite approach. I feel like a lot of the creators who are stepping down are because, you know, they've done it for 10 years. Like maybe it's time to move on to something new, but there's definitely much like a treadmill mindset that I personally try to not sort of be driven by just because I'm trying to do this as sustainably as possible like I don't want to burn out so I actually don't upload very often so I upload maybe every couple weeks or month recently but I did take a hiatus of like nine months because I'm

working on finishing this course that I have so I feel like you can get on that treadmill and feel like you have to churn out content every week but I think it's possible to make it work without doing that what did you find during that nine months did you find stagnation did you lose subscribers or did you when you when you posted that first one back was it bigger smaller like did it feel like it had real ramifications on your channel? Or was it just like, nah, you can take nine months off. It's still a big deal. I think I did have some slowdown in the views for the first few videos.

But then I released another video that has done really well. So it's really hard with YouTube because you can't truly A-B test something because a video might not succeed. And a lot of people kind of blame the algorithm. They're like, oh, I'm getting shadow banned or whatever. But like, in all honesty, it's like the video kind of sucked. So like I had to look back at like the videos that weren't doing well and be like, you know what? Those videos kind of sucked.

And so like you kind of learn from that and you move on and then you do better. So I think I'm doing okay. Taking a nine month break. Sure. Obviously, I'm losing a lot of views in that meantime, but I think YouTube is actually one of the more forgiving platforms where you don't have to necessarily keep churning that content and running on that treadmill.

Yeah. So, yeah. How do you feel, Jared, about our treadmill? I pay attention to the stats less. It doesn't make me get more or less excited about what we're doing. Although I do pay attention to, we look back at stats

and we're like, that one trended higher than others. What's your lens on? We're not putting a lot of work into our stuff. It's all side effects of our podcasts. We're not crafting videos. We're making clips. You can see them here. It's people talking with captions. We're not crafting videos. We're making clips. You can see them here. So it's people talking with captions, right? So we're putting work into it so far

as we're taking interesting parts of our podcast and putting them in a video. Completely different kind of channel, right? I find that if we post consistently daily a clip, like a clip a day basically, five days a week, maybe on a Saturday if I'm bored, that everything goes better. And if we don't, then everything just kind of chills out. And I just figured that's the way the algorithm wants you to post more.

So it's easy for us because, again, they're just clips. But I don't even know how much of that's just my intuition or accurate or wrong, but that's just the way it feels. It might be the audience that you've kind of trained to keep watching you. If you are uploading clips every day, then like your audience is kind of expecting that. Right. So then those are all the people following you. And if you don't, if you like sort of don't meet those expectations and, you know, things might slow down a bit.

Yeah. Plus a lot of our stuff is short. And I know that like 10 minutes people consider to be like the right length of a YouTube video. And I have noticed we'll post some longer ones. Like a long clip for us is five minutes. A lot of ours are inside 60 seconds. We'll go vertical and put them on shorts and Instagram. And if it's over 60 seconds, we'll go horizontal.

And, but it's still 90 second clip. I mean, you're just not going to get a lot of watch time because even 90, even a full watch is just not a lot. Yeah. And I know they look at watch time quite a bit, but the ones that are longer generally completion is a big deal for the algorithm yeah you know like did you get past 50 percent yeah that's a big deal right that's engagement so that's good for shorter content because you're getting more likely to get past but the longer ones tend to do a little bit better but we're in the we're counting hundreds and thousands of watches and not huge amounts.

So it's also like sample size. I don't know. Is it even a big enough sample size to be meaningful? I don't know. Right. Well, there's a lot of clips too. There's some that went viral on different platforms for us. Yeah.

Which those ones should. But I think you even wrote a post where the ChangeLog podcast has never gone viral to some degree. What was that title? Yeah, the ChangeLog has never gone viral. Podcasts. What was that title? Yeah, The Change Law has never gone viral. Podcasts don't really do what YouTube does and what TikTok does and Instagram. It's always slow and steady. And I think people get burnt out a lot because they don't see the impact that they're having with podcasts as much. I think YouTubers are really happy in that way.

I'm sure you get lots of comments, lots of watches, and you get a lot of immediate feedback of like, people are watching my stuff. Well, podcasters don't really get that quite as much, but it's still a lot of work. And so the burnout happens because you're putting the work in, but you don't see the impact as well because there's a disconnect with the audience that the platform is to really grease those skids for you, which is great.

Yeah, for sure. And so the post I put out was basically encouraging podcasters that just because you're not having this huge impact in terms of numbers that you can see, there's still a depth there that's really meaningful. And so that's what the post was about. But it's easy to burn out in the podcasting game because it's a lot of work

and because you don't necessarily know if you have an audience or not. Yeah, it's a bit more disconnected, it seems. Yeah, and even if you have an audience, you're probably not hearing from them very much because they have to email you or follow you on social media and these kinds of things where it's really nice to have the comment threads right there with the video, you know, and it's just very nice interaction with your audience that way. For sure. What makes you do it? Like, why do you do YouTube at all yeah so i worked in marketing and advertising for several years and i loved it i like learning but i felt like at least toward the end of the time working a regular corporate job that i was just spending a lot of my time filling these like marketing

landing pages and if i do a good job i make the company money but i'm not really necessarily benefiting from that, and I don't feel like I was really helping people because I'm just encouraging people to buy something. So making content that's educational and can give people marketable skills has been way more satisfying. And also, like you said, with the comments,

getting direct feedback, I've gotten comments from people who've said I've helped them get a job, and the comments, getting direct feedback, like, you know, I've gotten comments from people who've said I've helped them, like, get a job. And, like, now they are working as a software engineer. And, like, that's, like, incredibly, like, motivating. And, like, it's, I feel like I am actually helping people, you know, in the little space that I have. And so, like, that's been good. good and yeah I just enjoy helping people get from a point of like not understanding something to understanding something and like helping them achieve excellence in a certain skill set yeah so

you said when you look back at some of your videos that didn't do as well it's because they sucked and then you have something to do well and you think they're probably better so what makes a good video for on your channel you know specifically versus a sucky one. What's good to you? Good, I think is you need to be giving value to your audience. So I think success on YouTube and probably any kind of content creation is like understanding your audience and like, what are their struggles? What are they trying to do? And speak to those specific pain points. And I think that videos that haven't done as well have been either too focused on me. For example, like we made a video a couple of years ago where it was like office tour,

like check out all the gear that I use. And like, that didn't do very well. That's surprising. Those usually tend to trend. Yeah. Um, which is why I tried experimenting. Yeah. But I think my audience is not there to see my gear. We don't want that, Jess. Can you go back to the thing? They're like, can you teach me something new? Right.

It seems like that's more for maybe lifestyle influencers and stuff and not so much as teachers, because you're a teacher, effectively, right? So I think if my channel was focused on different keyboards or gear, then that would make a lot more sense, but I think it was too tangential to what my normal niche is. So it's like, yeah, you want to make your viewer the hero of their story. You don't want to put the focus on yourself as a creator. So it's like you are helping your viewers on their journey to,

you know, at least in my channel's case, become a web developer or get better at your career. So it's just a matter of understanding what your audience is hoping to see. And it can be difficult or maybe even limiting sometimes because I do think that YouTube is not super forgiving when it comes to being experimental. So I actually just created a second channel because I have two types of videos one type is a shorter like super edited short tutorial and the other kind was like four to eight hour long live coding like where I'm just building a website from scratch and like it's not super edited and those were just not doing well and my theory that I'm still in progress is that the two formats

are too different so I'm putting all the long videos on a new channel, hoping that it'll attract an audience of people who are looking for those kinds of videos. And the shorter videos will stay on the main channel. That's interesting because I think that you often, Adam, have talked about YouTube people being able to put everything in one channel and experiment right there. But it seems like she's maybe thinking that's not working for her well i've seen them experiment in the channel and then they would say if you like this i'm now creating a new channel i'll say they would create a new channel i've seen that happen too but i've also seen you know like three or four different format

styles within a channel succeed too yeah so i don't think there's really a recipe that's like this is the way yeah you know but I do agree with that. Like in the case of like Free Code Camp, for example, I was talking to Quincy Larson about they have courses on their YouTube and their YouTube is just like insane. It is just insane. It took them a long time to get there. It did. But they focused on like this super long format.

It wasn't like concise, little, you know, educational things. It was like full on 12 hour courses with chapters. And like he was like, no, no, no. This long format is thriving there. It's got and I don't know why I can't remember what he said, but I was surprised by that because I didn't expect that this longer format. And I guess in their case compared yours is that theirs is just a bit more curriculum and edited probably to some degree, at least chapter. Whereas maybe the other channel you're talking about is a bit more like it's,

it's sort of like you're exhausted in a way. It's like your byproducts that you think are valuable that you want to probably still share. Cause Hey, you get to see everything versus like this zoom in version of the problem only. Right. Exactly. Yeah.

It's like a bird's eye view. Yeah. But yeah. Do you live stream those or you were just recording them yourself? They're all prerecorded. Yeah. I don't really do live streaming. Yeah.

I never really understand live streaming, I suppose. I mean, I get it for the community and the person, but like it seems ephemeral, like Twitter spaces even or X spaces. Well, yes and no, because you can because there's tools in order to capture that and turn that into something else. I think that's what a lot of people do, live stream on Twitch, and then they'll pull sections out of that into YouTube, and that kind of thing seems to work.

It seems really good if you have a tight-knit community of people who like to hang out and talk and hang out with you as a personality. As a viewer, I don't have any time for that. Like, synchronously watch somebody else code. Like, I would love to have time to watch me code. That's just where I am in my life. I understand for young people, especially if you're learning and you're learning a lot from somebody, watching them code live can be very powerful. Yeah, exactly. learning a lot from somebody watching them code live is can be very as a yeah exactly as a as a

young person getting in if i could find like somebody i resonated with yeah something identified with and i can i can like just be a fly on their shoulder as they all say you know like that kind of thing or the fly on the wall that's kind of what twitch is a microphone and that's kind of what twitch is and i in that case then i can see a lot of value. But the live streaming thing is just, it's not my game personally. But as a young person, if I was trying to get in or I was trying to learn, I would want to see. Like Caleb Pike, I mentioned him earlier. I would totally be like, let me just live stream your whole YouTube setup that you've just done. Like, don't give me the video.

Give me the behind the scenes of the video. And don't even worry about editing it. I want to see you turning those knobs. I want to see you attaching the thing. I want to see how it works, not the finalized thumbnail that YouTube blesses as good for the algorithm. Like, give me the unpolished version of it. Yeah, I think I just don't have the personality to be a live streamer. I feel like you do need to really lean into the entertaining side.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think successful live streamers are definitely more entertainers than anything else. Not that they aren't good at their coding or what they're doing. But you have to. They're show folks. They are.

They're put on a show. Yeah. And they can do it for long periods of time. I mean, it's very impressive in some cases that you can command an audience for that long. For like eight hours a day. Yeah, for like eight hours a day, you know day with Vim and Tmux or something. That's impressive.

Yeah. But definitely not for all creators. That's why it's great that there's different kinds of things to do. Here's a question for you. If there's listeners out there, listeners right now, is it your advice to go and create a YouTube channel? What's your advice for those thinking, man, I like what Jess has done, and I've got a version of that for me. Are you encouraging to say

YouTube is like the hub and you have spokes? Should you, you know, like how should someone, should someone even get into this kind of thing? What's your recommendation? Yeah, I think, you know, we always think that the content creation space is super saturated, which it is. I do think that YouTube for the programming niche has gotten more competitive in the last like, you know, six, seven years since I've been there. But I do think there's always room for more people. Yeah, I do use YouTube as kind of the main hub.

And then I sometimes post on Twitter, sometimes I post on Instagram, not really on TikTok. And then I've email, like an email newsletter. So YouTube is kind of the main like bread and butter. And the reason for that is, and I actually started out on Instagram. And then I did YouTube later. But I felt like Instagram was a little bit too ephemeral, I think, as was mentioned before. And you know, they will really punish you if you don't post, you know, a certain number of times a week. And I was trying to not have to feel like I had to do that. So I feel like YouTube is nice because you can get that immediate sort of viral traffic.

But you can also get a lot of traffic later on down the road with, like, SEO type, you know, keyword titles and stuff like that. So there's a lot more, I would say, longevity on YouTube, which is why I've kind of planted my flag there. Have you experimented with shorts? I've done some shorts. I feel like that's, again, with the different types of formats. This is all anecdotal, but I've heard of people who have felt that shorts has kind of killed their channel. But I've also heard of people who felt shorts has kind of killed their channel but i've also heard of people who felt shorts has like really helped grow their channel so i'm not really making shorts at the moment

and if i did i might actually i would put that on another channel and i don't really want to make a third channel you have three channels just again it's like if you have a lot of shorts you're sort of training your audience to expect these like you know 60second videos from you, and they might not want to watch your longer 8- to 20-minute videos. Yeah. So I don't know. It's still like it's a mystery how YouTube works, and things are changing all the time. Have you considered open platforms?

PeerTube is one that I'm thinking about for us. Okay. Haven't jumped on it yet. Not familiar. Okay, so it's a decentralized thing. It's a Fediverse kind of thing. Decentralized video platform, which for a long time languished in obscurity, I think, in the world of people who like decentralized things and open source things. It's gotten a bit of a bump of late because Mastodon has done kind of well. Yeah. And because

people are starting to say, okay, what if we actually have open decentralized non-algorithm driven platforms? And so for instance, Flipboard, which is the member of Flipboard, the digital magazine that was so cool on the iPad. That was cool.

That was awesome. They're still around. They're still doing, making moves and they have a lot of publishers on their magazine app and they're all going in on the Fediverse now. So they have Flipboard.video, which they also post on YouTube, but it's the same videos, and they put them on their PeerTube, and it's all federated, blah, blah, blah, blah.

I'm not sure how the bandwidth requirements and stuff are. I haven't gotten that far into it, but it's interesting. It's like this is an established, high-quality company and brand who are now posting their videos onto YouTube, but also onto PeerTube, and the one they embed into their blog posts is the PeerTube one. They're pushing people towards Flipboard.video, a domain that they own and which is not algorithm-based driven,

and maybe that's a future for YouTubers, a potential side future. I don't know much more beyond that. But I'm curious. I always ask YouTubers, like, are you considering that kind of a thing? Because if you are a slave to the algorithm and you can somehow find freedom somewhere else, obviously the audience is why you're there.

And maybe the centralized web doesn't have the audience or maybe the same audience. But if there's enough people there that you can help them and it's just a matter of uploading twice or whatever it is, maybe it's an idea worth pursuing. It's interesting. I've honestly not heard of that, but I think that's really interesting.

I think a lot of people have not heard of it. I have not heard of it. Peertube? They're on my list of people to bring on the show and talk to about it. That'd be cool. Yeah. I think my perspective is like creating a business and a product.

Do you care about where you sell your thing? Like, no, I must sell it in this brick and mortar store. And if I don't sell it in this brick and mortar store, well, then I don't care about making the thing. I'm more like, okay, I make a thing. I want distribution. So wherever distribution is happening for me, and I suppose

the long-term freedom, and I suppose the shackles being taken off in terms of the algorithm. Like, I think if over time, PeerTube was like better for distribution, like where's my audience? I want to tell people what I have to say in the world. As all creators, it's not necessarily the topic, it's that you have something to say, or you have something of value to give back to the world and i think for me with podcasts it is the freedom like i was asking jared earlier what he thinks about our stats and how that plays into like feelings basically and i don't really feel that pressure and stress of having to match numbers every episode like i kind of get bummed like oh i, I love that show, but the listenership wasn't there for whatever reason. Or maybe

that was a summertime and people were on vacation. Who knows why? I might feel that, but I'm not like, my identity is not crushed by it. But I feel like I would be of the mindset to be wherever distribution is, I want to put my product there. And that's a podcast. Or that's my

words or my prose or whatever. That's probably how I would approach it rather than saying, nah, it must be YouTube, you know, versus PeerTube or whatever. Like wherever I get freedom,

wherever the audience wants to go, kind of like your thought too with Twitter versus X versus Mastodon, where should we post to social? Wherever people, wherever our people are, we want to be there.

Yeah, that's kind of our, that's our current strategy is go where the people are. That makes sense. Give them what they want and go where they are. Yeah, give them what they want, go where they are, and give them what they want. That's right. But one example, I think, which is a nice analog to YouTube and potentially PeerTube, I don't know, is that on Twitter we have a following, and on Mastodon we have a following, and the following on Mastodon is about a tenth of the following on Twitter.

But we can post this exact same poll on Twitter and on Mastodon and get double the responses on Mastodon with one-tenth of the audience. So there's something about that, which to me it's like, okay, less people, but they're actually there. They're not a number. You know most of your subscribers don't get to see your videos. That's lame, right? Like you work really hard to get a new sub, and you have to say, subscribe and hit the notification bell.

It's like, I'm not going to hit the notification bell. Sorry, I'm just not going to. I've never hit the notification bell. Literally zero. Literally zero. And I have lots of, I'm a big time on YouTube for lots of things. But I do want to see the new videos of the people I'm subscribed to. And the fact that YouTube doesn't just show me those things makes me mad as a viewer.

And as a creator, even more mad. Like you worked real hard to get that sub and now they're never going to. I mean, they may not. I have a few subscriptions on YouTube where I was going through my subscriptions. I'm like, oh, I forgot I subscribed to this channel. It's been nine months since I've seen their videos. I go click on it, oh, they got plenty of new videos in the last nine months.

Why am I not seeing those? To me, that's lame and that's the kind of stuff that we could get away from if we had enough people on these alternative networks. Maybe PeerTube will never get to the point where that matters for that network, but it'd be really cool if it did. The analog of your drawing is the Twitter versus Mastodon

poll thing, where maybe it's smaller in terms of subs, but you've got higher engagement. Yeah. Anyways. Food for thought. Food for thought. Touche, man. We podcast together way too much. I can tell.

Thanks for talking to us today. Yeah, thanks for having me on. Super interesting. Coder Coder. Check it out on YouTube. Hit that notification bell. Subscribe and notification bell. Awesome. Do it. Do it now.

Do it. If you're listening, you may remember the early days of the internet where open networks like HTTP and SMTP led to an explosion of websites and online communities. Building a fan site and connecting over shared passions led so many of us to careers in software. Back then, it seemed like anything was possible because the internet of the 90s was built to democratize information, not consolidate it with a handful of big tech companies. Read, Write, Own, Building the Next Era of the Internet is a new book from startup investor Chris Dixon that explores how network architecture plays out in our online lives and the decisions that took us from open networks governed by communities of developers to massive social networks run by internet giants. ReadWrite Own is a playbook for reclaiming control and for reimagining applications so users can own,

co-create, and even profit from the platforms they use every day. From AI that compensates creators to protocols that reward open source contributions, this is our chance to build the internet we want, not the one we inherited. Order your copy of Read Write Own today or go to readwriteown.com to learn more. Or you skipped straight to this spot using your podcast apps, handy dandy chapters feature. Either way, we have one more treat for you. Adam talks to Vanessa Villa and Noah Jenkins about ag tech.

Just Adam on this one, sadly, as I had already flown Omaha by day three. But still, it's a great combo. Let's get to it. Ooh, okay. So there's this huevos rancheros thing. So it's like tortillas and like salsa. I love the huevos rancheros. Oh my gosh, I love it.

That's our icebreaker, by the way. Really? We usually ask people about their breakfast. Everyone's passionate about breakfast, right? Yes. You have a favorite breakfast or a favorite dessert. So pick something like that and that usually gets you going.

But it also gets you hungry. This is true. Well, then there's a barbecue tonight. There is a barbecue tonight. So I think we'll be good. Yeah. Yeah.

We can eat the barbecue. The ag barbecue, right? Yes. So we're here with Vanessa and Mike. No, sorry. Noah. Noah.

Noah. There was a Mike over. That's why I said Mike. There was a Mike, yes. That's why I said, how's your Mike? Sorry about that. We're here with Vanessa and Noah. Noah. There was a Mike over. That's why I said Mike. There was a Mike, yes. That's why I said, how's your Mike? And sorry about that. We're here with Vanessa and Noah.

All good. Noah was in the home lab session with us and then the podcasting one, I think just by happenstance. Yeah, I just kind of stuck around after. But then Vanessa came on purpose. The only person who came on purpose. Really? Of course. Oh.

Just talking about podcasting and tech. And then we started talking about ag tech, which is a podcast you're thinking about creating with a friend of yours that has heads of cattle or head of cattle, as you said, in the thousands. And you care about agricultural because you went to school for this. What's the story there? So I grew up in a really rural agricultural town and it was about, you know, the only industry in that town was orange. So oranges, like they partnered with Sunkist and every putty that I grew up with was basically an orange grower for Sunkist. And so we, the packing house was literally across the street from my house for all of the oranges that we, you know, we're growing in my

town. And so I was like, this sounds like an opportunity for technology, especially at the packing house, so you don't have to have manual labor to sort through oranges. So I originally went to school for computer engineering at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, which is half agriculture and half technology, in order to study ag tech. So that's kind of how I got into it.

And I met my roommate there, and she has cattle. And so that's how we started talking. And do you live near each other now? Or you have you've moved on your careers and stuff like that, right? We've moved on our careers. I've been in tech now, I think full time for about six and a half, almost seven years. And she's been in cattle as well. She's doing cattle and she's doing veterinary science. And what's your story? No, you were talking about so this began because we were like knee deep in good content and I'm like always be recording. That's my philosophy. ABR and our audience knows that.

And so we had a whole conversation outside of this but you were talking about hydroponics, you were talking about precision, what was the precision thing? Precision agriculture. Precision agriculture, yeah. Where you can like shoot the fertilizer directly at it with computer vision. Yeah, so I forget how the conversation started, but we're talking about agriculture technology.

And I think we actually started with distributed agriculture and the idea of, and we used the analogy of load balancing, right? Comparing, instead of having centralized pockets of agriculture, distributing it among communities and households. Yes. To kind of empower, right? Isn't that like a means of empowering people to be in charge of their own production? Yeah, so it among communities and households. Yes. To kind of empower, right? Isn't that like a means of empowering people to be in charge of their own production? Yeah, so it's a few things.

Number one, you're empowering the consumer to produce their own food. You could argue that could help fight rising costs, especially as you grow. Because at the same time, you're growing supply, right? Maybe on a smaller scale, but you're also lowering demand because people are now producing their own food. So their demand is lower while the supply is higher because they are producing it. They might be trying to sell it. And then also it makes the entire, as you can say, ecosystem of agriculture more durable, right?

So when you have these centralized locations, if there's a natural disaster, a war, for example, the war in Ukraine, that drove wheat prices up. So if you have it more distributed, it's more durable and it's more sticky as you would. Yeah. So what is your story? How are you in the ag? I've always just been fascinated with agriculture. Growing up, I always like growing my own plants. I love the idea of crossbreeding. I love the idea of cloning plants. I say clone, you're basically just, they're producing asexually, right? So you're taking- Propagation. Exactly. Yeah. Exactly. So that's always fascinated me and i've always loved the idea of owning a process and what what can be done on scale what can i do myself so growing

stuff i'm at home i have two hydroponic basically little farms uh for growing herbs and little vegetables i've grown my own like jalapeno peppers my own tomatoes uh so that always fascinates me it's not the best though because like who wants to go to the store for like one jalapeno exactly right i don't grow my own. So I'm, I'm that person who would love it. I would love it. Yeah.

No, but I think it's the point is like, I don't have access easily without like learning a bunch of stuff to be empowered in certain ways. Like I watch certain Tik TOK videos. There's this guy who will just take a pineapple and make another pineapple tree from the pineapple. Like he shows you with his little Ninja tricks on like how you can take an avocado and turn an avocado into a tree yeah from the seed

and the same with like taking bananas and putting them the peels at least into water and letting that put the nitrates into it and using that as fertilizer yeah for your plants like all these little things that like we just don't know yeah it's like individuals out there who just are normal i suppose that's kind of lost knowledge like the 40s, like you had the victory gardens and that was a well-known pamphlet distributed by the U.S. government out to people in order to combat the war during, you know, World War II. And so you had these victory gardens where people were growing their own tomatoes, their own lentils, their own, you know, whatever they needed at home for their own household.

And that knowledge just kind of got lost. And that's okay. That's okay. Like we're in an of got lost and that's okay. That's okay. Like we're in an... No, it's not okay. No, it's not okay. Well, I mean, we went to a... My grandmother, she had all this stuff outside of like, I remember like, ah, just all these things outside. Aloe vera, things that like, you know, that's healing. I think a lot of people know about that, right? I mean, aloe veras are a pretty common one, but just so much stuff that my grandparents

and this is like, what, two generations in my family? My dad and his parents, my grandparents, right? That's two generations. They were knee deep in tomatoes and all the things. And here's me, not into all those things. And it's because of that. I think

it's a lost art form in a way. Maybe a lost practice, a lost knowledge base. And maybe some of it's a lost art form in a way, maybe a lost practice, a lost knowledge base, and maybe some of it's the industrial complex of food. The food industrial complex, is that a thing? I'm not sure what the term is for it. You've got GMOs, you've got

certified seeds, you've got patented seeds. It's been industrialized. Right. Food has been industrialized to a point where like there it's it's a monolith and a monopoly at the same time. Right. So it's not good. It's not great. Two monos.

Right. Yeah. Monolith. Monopoly. Like if you if you look at the growers, if you look like, hey, you know, all types of corn in this particular area is done by this one seed. And you only have one seed variety for that season. But that seed variety has been optimized to combat pests. It's been optimized for that climate.

It's been optimized to handle that type of soil. So it's like, yes, it was just slowly industrializing farming to a point where it doesn't seem as accessible knowledge-wise for an everyday person like that's that's kind of what ended up here it's weird because when you juxtapose that to cloud yeah sure right and to i just had a conversation with somebody who's very smart and we're talking about how her photos are in the cloud and she's having trouble getting them down but just this whole idea that like that should be pretty simple for the most part, right?

It should be. Yeah. But we have the cloud now. We have this thing there. And at some point, we'll just rely on the cloud. We won't on-prem anything anymore. We talked Home Lab earlier, which is kind of like on-preming your own things for your own household. I've got my own large-scale storage for my Plex server.

I've got a pie hole. I've got home automation.-scale storage for my plex server i've got a pie hole i've got home automation and that's like a version of us taking power back right into our own hands not that it's being clawed away from us but if you don't know you can have it you know you don't know if you want it or that you need it and i feel like food is like that like if i could more realistically farm my own food not crazily but but like what lettuces do we use often? What greens do we use often? Like is a jalapeno tree or whatever it is, a plant? It's a plant.

Yeah, like I don't even know. See, that's the thing. I don't even understand what they call it. I love the idea of a jalapeno tree now. I want that. Well, and here's what's cool because a lot of people now, I feel like real estate is very different than it was back in the 40s, right? Yeah.

Like now you have a lot of people in apartments and a lot of people with less real estate. Yeah, exactly. And people might say, hey, I don't have the real estate for farming. Well, going back to hydroponics, one of the things I love about those is you can do it indoor. So you can literally in your kitchen have anywhere from one to five even varying sizes. You can make them yourselves. You can buy them pre-built. And it lets you basically turn any real estate you have into whatever you need it to be. And you can grow. And you can get bigger ones. So you can grow full-on bushes or just small

little plants. And it's really exciting with how accessible it is. And really, yes, you can spend a lot on them. There's some that have smart capabilities, some that are just very basic. So there is a range of product there. But the barrier to entry to start getting into that and producing your own food. It's like a Home Depot bucket. Yeah, it's very low barrier to entry, which is exciting. I feel like we need a home lab for ag in my house. Because there are certain things I would totally grow.

Oh, yeah. Right? There are certain things I would just definitely not. I'm not going to have a cow in my backyard because that's just not feasible, right? Exactly. One, my HOA would be like, no. And then two, I don't know how to care for it. Sure.

Maybe my kids will love it. Maybe we'll have some zebus. They don't do anything. I'm not going to kill my zebu and eat it, which is like a mini cow, basically. If you know what a zebu is. Yeah. I learned about this recently. It's not a real cow that you were going to eat.

Maybe you do eat them. I don't know. Maybe people eat zebus. Do people eat zebus? Not that I'm aware of. I learned about this recently. You know, it's not a real cow that you were going to eat. Maybe you do eat them. I don't know. Maybe people eat zebus. Do people eat zebus? Not that I'm aware of. I don't think so. I could be wrong. I'm open to being wrong.

Yeah. Maybe. Maybe. And you mentioned doing a home lab project, right? Here's what's cool. If you really wanted to, there's so many fun IT projects you could do based around that. You could set up your own camera and do some basic image recognition. See which plants are performing.

You could then set up like, hey, let me try different types of food. And then you can actually measure that, take the data, and then actually build your own data analytics project and basic AI image recognition projects and say, hey, I'm going to test these different types of plant food. I'm going to see across these different farms.

I'm going to see which one performs better. So there's a lot of even like, what's happening on scale. Like we talked about the idea of the precision agriculture tech, right? Where you have these robots going in and instead of like spraying all this fertilizer, it's being very precise and saying, okay, only these plants need it. You can do something like that, obviously not on scale, but you can do something at

home with a similar foundation, right? So there's also a lot of room for potential projects you can do in the IT technology space. I want to add this one point and I think you'll like it too, is that I feel like there's a recipe. You ever often have ingredients in your house and you don't have a meal? Yes. I have ingredients and not a meal. I feel like you just described ingredients to the thing.

Who can package it? And I think my question to you is like, you're into ag tech, right? And you want to do this podcast, which is where this began. Who can package this thing into something consumers can actually use? because we have ingredients, not a meal, so to speak. Right. And there's a couple of folk already in that kind of space where you have like, okay, here's your hydroponic herb garden. Like that's what my friend got for Christmas is she got a hydroponic herb garden and it reminds her through an app, like, hey, your water is running low in your hydroponic. Hey, your fertilizer tablet has fully dissolved and your fertilizer levels are too low.

So you need to add a new one. So it's just kind of like there's already tech, I would say, distributors on this idea for, you know, an at-home garden. But it's on the very small scale. I think to get up to that, to a larger scale, like a jalapeno plant or maybe like a dwarf orange. Yes, you could do a dwarf orange. They only get up to about five feet. So that's, you know, not too bad. If you get up to that scale, now you're talking about like a larger manufacturing effort. And so that's where the questions would start to come in. It's like, okay, you have a large tree that requires a

different water level a different type of fertilizer it requires a slightly different system than like something like an herb garden sure right what would be fascinating is because you mentioned how you had that your friend has that system where it reminds her if you do get that bigger system where you have a collection of systems i'm thinking how cool would it be to add more automation like okay what now again this adds to the manufacturing process right this adds and again this is probably my python developer and me talking like okay what if you built like a tank that could distribute the water based on the needs or you have a little almost like a pez dispenser but for fertilizer tablets and it'll automatically dispense them have you ever been

to a hydroponic greenhouse no i've not oh okay i've seen footage but never like in person yeah so they essentially have like that distributed system across all the barrels for the hydroponic systems but the neat part is like some of them you know you say like oh this one needs more fertilizer it fertilizer is essentially like fish poop sure and so they'll have fish and they'll just funnel the fish to the different barrels that's so much that makes sense awesome that's a natural way to do it it's a natural way to do it and the fish is probably like yeah i don't want to poop over there anymore true i'm doing it over here now yeah you want to talk about building something for the consumer make instead of doing like a hard-coated plastic make it clear right and then like hey not only are you growing

food you also are keeping fish. You're also keeping fish. How cool is that? For sure. Yeah. And so they do that, though, through computer vision, and then they'll open the pipes or close the respective pipes to allow the fish to swim from barrel to barrel. I love that so much.

I can't even express that. It's awesome. So what is it that excites you about ag tech? You're going to do a podcast on this. I think so. It might be agtech.fm. You have to now, actually. You just have to now.

I know. I've been in this space, or I've been studying this space for a long time. I went to school for this space. It sounds like it's time to make the podcast. Do it. I know. Okay, sorry. What was the question?

Well, the question is, what is possible, I suppose, in this? What do people need to know about ag tech? Like, what is out there? I know we talked about John Deere and right to repair and the fact that tractors are now computers, basically. Right. What else is in the ether of ag tech? What is out there?

Is it time to talk about drones? I think so. Okay. I think so. Bust out the drones. All right. Okay. So one of the hardest problems to solve is monitoring agricultural stuff at scale. So nobody's farming at five acres anymore.

People are farming in the tens of acres, hundreds of acres for one farmer. That's how farming works nowadays. And monitoring all of that for pests, for gophers, for snakes, for whatever, it's impossible. And so what they're doing now is either they're leveraging satellite imagery or they're using drones. Do you want to talk about drones? I do. Do you know about drones, Noah? So I'm actually an FAA licensed drone pilot.

That's right, you are. I forgot about that. Good, yeah. So now granted, I've not used that license in the agriculture space. It's primarily been just for commercial, you know, real estate, commercial, like advertising, things like that. But yeah, so like Vanessa was saying with drones, there's a few different applications. So number one is for monitoring, right?

You can monitor. And what's cool is you can use different types of cameras and sensors. So you can actually be measuring the thermals. Like, hey, what's the temperature like in these different regions? Well, you need to monitor the thermal in order. So, okay. Adding onto that. Okay. So not every agricultural space needs just like your RGB camera in particular, uh, avocados. So avocados cannot like, because they're, it's a green on green plant. The only way you can detect the quantity of avocados on a tree is by using a thermal camera. Are they hotter or colder than a tree?

Exactly. Well, is it hotter or colder than the respective leaf? Oh, I see. So avocados will usually be hotter than the respective leaf. Okay. So that's the only way to spot them using computer vision or using a camera. Yeah. And then on top of that, you've also had people that, and I think this will become less and

less as precision, you know, agriculture takes over, but you also will have people that will do drones and they'll like say, Hey, here's what areas need more fertilizer. Here's what area needs more, you know, food, whatever. And they'll actually distribute that. Let's say fertilizer said food via drone which is very cool and then you get semi-precise right like you can get pockets of it and again i think that will go down as you have uh now like more land land-based bots that do this precision where it's just going to the root and actually like just sniping which you know which plants which is coming out of like

uc davis right yeah yeah but so i, drones are fascinating in that regard. The original question was like, what tech is in the ether, right? Right. And it's, I mean, most of it. So, again, we talked about image recognition and AI detecting like, hey, which pockets of food need which? You have image recognition. A lot of that's leveraged in the cloud. So, a lot of just the tech that the mainstream industry uses is being leveraged in this space. It's just a matter of, okay, how is it being leveraged in this space it's just a matter of okay how is it being leveraged it's how is it being leveraged it and is it accessible which is like the biggest part of ag and practical

even it's is it practical like i mean when when temple grandlin temple grand all right there was tell us all right so there's this lady in the cattle space and she wanted to move cattle essentially. Like, how do you efficiently move cattle from pen to the butcher house? And she revolutionized the way that cattle essentially they approach that. This is like cattle move in herds. So you cannot move them in a straight line and you cannot move them down a funnel they'll freak out so you have to gradually move them along a curve in order for them to not freak out and that's just the way cattle move you know in herds when they're out in grasses and so that's what they did and that's now what they do at butchering houses and this has

been like but in order for her to get that movement up, it took her decades. Like it took decades for that to be adopted by the industry. Even though she had study after study after study showing that if you don't want cattle to essentially spook, you have to move them along a curve. So coming back to this, it's like we introduced tech and sensors and moved tractors to the cloud. Like John Deere has done this. They've been doing it at least since 2012. Great. How much is a tractor now that's connected to the cloud?

How can you repair it, right? If any of the sensors break, how much is that cloud subscription for them to even look at the data that they're aggregating through these sensors versus the generational knowledge that they've had, you know, passed down? So like, this is the big debate. It's like, how long is it going to get layman tech to farmers, to everyday farmers, or is it going to be continued to control, to be controlled by at scale farming? So, so that's the question, right? And then I would ask you, okay, like what, how, cause the goal is we want to make it accessible. Yes. And I would argue like year over year,

most of that does become accessible just over time to a degree. Yeah. To a degree. For example, I'm in cloud in general for most people is accessible in the sunset. I can go to Azure. I can spin up a VM. Yes. I just have to have a credit card, right? You can go to Azure, you can spin up a VM. You know how to do that because you've been educated in this space. Correct. So that's my point though, is okay, what, how do you, then it's okay. You need the smaller farmer to have that goal to learn, right? But then it's also how do you engage with them? And I think having, think having like for example i think if you started a podcast on the man no no she's dancing i i see if you started a podcast for example you're saying hey as someone not when not if when when thank you yes when you start a podcast you're creating a resource for these farmers the smaller farmers say hey i get you i

i'm someone that understands the ag space and i want to work and I want you guys to get there. And let me show you how. And I think especially maybe the next generation of farmers, I think just will get there. That's I'm thinking optimistically. No, no, no. You're right. Like the FFA, the Future Farmers of America, their entire organization basically takes, you know, I think it's like up to middle school students all the way through high school students and then into university. Yeah. Early. Yeah. Very early. They take them early and they have courses on like, hey, like cloud is coming. What does that mean for farming? Okay, cool. What

does that mean for, you know, the pork industry? What does that mean for, you know, poultry? What does that mean for cattle? And so like yeah, FFA has that educational course. I would say, though, that it's still behind that edge. And with right to repair, they're very hesitant to buy into it because you're buying into debt, right? Got it. Like, everyday farmer, they're living season to season, and it's subsidized by the government heavily. And as soon as they don't make a payment, foreclosure or threats or whatever. And I'm curious if you know this, how much is big ag tech involved in the FAA?

Is there influence over the curriculum and what's being taught? Because if you control the knowledge, you control the people. So it's the FFA. I'm sorry. It's okay. What did I say? FAA. You're still thinking drones.

Sorry about that. I get it. I'm the layman here. I will definitely admit it. You're good. The FFA. Future Farmers of America. I know this because I actually have ag people in my family.

I'm just an idiot in this moment. We won't judge you out loud for it. I know it's like the FFA and then 4-H if want to get like super specific on the orgs and all that uh i mean they definitely consult separation there's separation they're different organizations i would say there there's definitely a council but they're not super involved necessarily like each chapter will have their own policies on how they want to get involved. And so that's something to consider. But, you know, sponsoring for scholarships is is big in ag. So can I. So I'm curious in your thoughts on this, because you were talking about how it's hard for the and there's hesitancy right there for the for the farmer to go into tech.

Yeah. I mean, there was hesitancy with me going into tech. Sure. Yeah. So do you think for the industry to get where it needs to be, do you think it's people in tech need to come into and help out the farmers? Maybe it's partnering with them saying, hey, whether that's starting a service and specifically you're catering to that smaller farmer. Maybe it's, hey, I want to come in with you as a business partner. Here's the value I can add. Do you think it will take tech coming into the farmers rather than the farmers coming to tech? I think it's going to have to be big tech working with big farming is the only way that it's going to move forward. And that'll force the smaller farmers to do it. Trickling down to smaller farmers,

but also making the price point and accessibility of it lower and more accessible for every farmer. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. Like that's kind of going to have to be the move because coming in at, you know, your everyday farmer, like that's not going to be realistic, especially with manufacturing prices and education levels and, you know, even getting connected. Like I used to work on a project where it's like, OK, how do we solve farming in Africa and India? Like how do we help them with tech?

Because, you know, there's droughts, there's famine, there's maybe unreliable weather patterns or, you know, you have to use precision agriculture due to the resources. Sure. So how do you get that connected and how do you, you know, there's no such thing as like 5G. Yeah. So what do TV white spaces, put sensors that communicate in that protocol. And then you have a hub on the edge that they connect to. And now you're using kind of like a mesh system in order to aggregate the data. You have a centralized hub. Only that centralized hub needs to connect up to satellite or up to the cloud. Yeah.

Okay, very cool. So I'm thinking immediately open source, right? What open source solutions could be developed for ag tech, right? Obviously there's hardware. That's something you have to take into mind. That's hard to open source, but you also might have, hey, here's some software solutions that leverage like, let's say a Raspberry Pi or like an Arduino board or something. Or hey, here's an open source solution I built that's based off Google Maps satellite imagery, right? I'm wondering if tech got more involved or was inspired to build

open source solutions, if that would help make more cost accessible solutions for everyday farmers. I think it would be more cost accessible. Again, it's the mindset of like, hey, I've been dealing with this for my generation. My parents have been dealing this for their generation. My grandparents have been doing this their generation. Like if I go back, it's like all the way, my great grandparent, like a hundred years ago, like she had like the same plot of land. Like we know the seasons that goes through, we know which areas are problems. Like that's, it's the generational knowledge and like okay cool tech tech's already telling me something that i already know sure or quote unquote already know right is it an easier solution and more convenient sure but why would i need that like

i already know it it comes down to the education it comes down to like the education and like the small farmer knows their land like i don't want to discount their knowledge it's like we were talking earlier about how like gardening and stuff was very popular during the 40s because of the food shortage. It's the same thing. They maintain that generational knowledge. It's just been lost to the rest of us. Well, H-E-B is right down the street. True.

And that's the beloved Texas grocery store. It is basically the epicenter of all love in Texas. I'm getting like five minutes from my house. I'm so excited. It's the best. And I suppose when you have accessibility, do you need to grow your own thing? I say kind of. Probably should in some cases, but should you in every case?

I'm not going to grow my own grapes. No. Right? I'm not going to grow my own grapes. No. Right? I'm not going to grow my own raspberries. There might be certain things I might be willing to. Would I be willing to because I want to have a lower price point or because I want to reduce the, like we're doing with solar even in our homes. We want to reduce the pressure on the system.

Sure. Is that really the best way? Is industrialized farming the best for humanity, if done sustainably and in wise ways that really is for the people and not just for the profits? Sure. Because I think HEB has been a brand that's been uniquely positioned in the food industry to be for the people. Now, are they for profit?

For sure. And I pray that they continue to be the HEB we love today because they've been very good stewards of the food buying process. However, when I go to HEB right now, my food bill is way high. I'm sure they're doing something to keep my costs low. But you have a very particular well-known Texas-loved grocer that seems to be for the people. When we had, I think it was hurricane ike or i just one of the recent hurricanes in like the last four or five years the very first trucks to come in for

support was not the national guard love them too of course i was in the military yeah but the very first truck was an heb truck yeah to come in and save the day how cool to provide resources because it was either pr they just truly love i don't know know. But they've been first in a lot of cases. I know they serve with the FAA. FAA? Gosh, something has to stop you with the Fs. And they're very involved with the Houston Rodeo. I know that because that's their market.

But I guess the question is, should we be farming at the local level in hydroponics and things like that? Or should we develop because of the population density or theroponics and things like that? Or should we develop, because of the population density or the availability of land in places like Texas or elsewhere where there's more acreage, enable farmers to just do their job better

and keep the big industrial food industry going? I don't want to say going, but I realize it has to be industrialized in a way to meet the needs of population. But is the right answer to do what we've done with solar and bring it localized to the household? Or does it make sense just to bolster and better enable the complex? So there's an in-between here that we haven't really discussed. Okay, what's the in-between? So there's certain, I would say, produce levels that you could do at a community level. You don't have to do it

in the house. You don't have to do it. I love that community gardens, community gardens, or even like, okay, on the outskirts of large centralized hubs, we have a couple of warehouses that do produce, you know, certain amounts of produce for that localized area. And so that's something like strawberries, very easy to produce in hydroponics. Instead of getting all of our strawberries from Fresno, California or Oxnard, California, where the best strawberries come from, by the way, then you have your own little strawberry hydroponic system, you know, just outside of Seattle or just outside of New York. And you don't have to ship strawberries from Salinas or Oxnard anymore and should it be the community being invited in there to like

maybe you work for free and tend the garden so to speak to have access to a membership I don't know like because the knowledge base that's being lost because like the only way you can give that knowledge back is to bring the people in who are consuming it and care about it right and it's just like when when you say you want water in xyz terrible country you don't just go and give them money you go and help them teach them how to build a well and maintain the well because if they don't care or they don't know how to deal with it they're going to rely upon you as the third party resource to save their day or to educate them if you give them the knowledge they can fish of course

right so how do we work out the community's involvement in these community gardens? That's a wonderful question. And I don't know if it's the community necessarily or if it's just distributing ag a little bit, right? Do you mind if I? Go for it. So the original question was, or there's been several original questions. Sure.

The most recent one was, you know, do we keep it industrialized or do we distribute right and i'm with vanessa here i think it's not an or situation it's an and situation so number one i think like let's acknowledge to sustain the food production that like you know where we're at today it needs to continue to be industrialized like i think that's i i don't know if anyone would disagree with that they might but i but I think it would need to be just to sustain the levels. Now, I think, can we get better? Can we become more sustainable? Can we get better, more efficient? And not just, again, for profit's sake, but also like, hey, can we make it more efficient? So we're producing more and lowering costs and helping that

for just the better of humanity. Absolutely. But with that, I think we can also encourage people and grow that knowledge to build a more individualized local solution. Now to the second one, follow up, which was how do you get the community involved, right? I think number one is, okay, what can you do in the household? I think people naturally have a, they would like a sense of ownership, right? This is not our garden. This is my garden. This is my family's garden. So I think building resources, I'm getting faces. I'm not sure if I'm curious what the response will be. Well, you're, you're contradicting her point. Oh, go for it. Yeah. So I think starting there is where it's important right now. Now I say start now after that, I think building community, you know, doing more community centric things, that's going to be the best of both worlds.

But then it's how do you get the community involved? And also, who owns that process? Is it just, hey, some nice people donated this land, and like, hey, we own this, and this is going to be for community purpose. Does the city or county? I'm not sure. But I think ultimately where it starts is in the home.

And I think that's how you get people started, at least. Because then you're building that knowledge. I would love to go to the community garden with my literal neighbor. Yeah. You know, the only way you're going

to have stronger neighborhoods, safer neighborhoods, is people caring about the people next to them. Sure. People loving people, right? That's the only way. Yeah.

Because if I care about my neighbor, I'm not going to shoot him. Yeah. Not that I would, but I would never be desiring any sort of insult against them physically.

Yeah. Because they're my friend. They're for me. Now, that's also assuming you have a neighbor that is willing to also love you back. Yeah. But you can ostracize those folks and be like, you're not welcome here because the no a-hole rule, right? Right. It's a

book. You should read it. The no a-hole rule. right? Right. It's a book. You should read it. The no a-hole rule. I'll say it one time. We don't cuss on our shows. That's why. Love it. But I would love to go to my community garden and do whatever makes sense to farm myself or support that process with my little neighbors. I mean, it could be definitely more of a co-op, right?

Like you sign up. Like, okay, I want to be part of this farming community or I want to be part of growing this thing and like okay cool awesome so now by you signing up you're agreeing like okay hey i'm gonna you know help with the fertilizer cost or if you don't want to be in fertilizer okay i'm gonna help pick the strawberries and containerize them and like okay by signing up and putting in you know you put in as much as you get kind of thing. Maybe there's a credit system. I give you an hour or two a week or an hour a week or every two weeks or whatever it is like you, like you do with sports. Like I go with my son Saturdays and Mondays, we spend a couple hours a week in a sport. Now that's for not him to be an excellent basketball player. It's for him to be an excellent team member. Right. Right. Which is what a community is. I'm an excellent team member of my community.

Sure. Right. So I would love to see the whole foods of this, right? Or the HB of this, who can do this at a scale that profits? Yeah. Maybe like you said, I actually, I'm going to take that back with the profit, the co-op idea, which is like, it is there to serve the community is not there to serve the profits. Yeah. And maybe there are literal profits, but they're not there to be just scooped up by shareholders. It's meant to reinvest and re-enable communities. And ag tech just seems to be all in this.

I think. Right? Yeah. All in this. I like the idea of co-op, especially in this specific community, if you have tech people, right? Right. That might be the

perfect opportunity for people with home labs. And if they want to help allocate some of those resources to say, hey, let me get some sensors installed and let me make this data available to everyone involved. But then that way I can publish these reports. Hey, these are my findings. Where do we want to go with this? That would open up some really exciting collaborative opportunities. And also that would get more people, I think, interested in tech, which I'm all for. But again, ultimately it goes back to how can we serve the community, which I like the way you put that, Adam. Or even like maybe there's farmers. Maybe you don't have to reinvent the wheel.

Maybe there's already the wheel. Sure. So maybe it's about farmers enabling the community to support them, one, by buying, potentially directly, right? Yes. And then, which you could do at farmer's markets. It's the whole point of those things. It's like enabling communities accessibility. But those kind of things have become like basically where you go get your coffee,

where you go get your other things. I don't know, like some random things. They tend to be like flea markets, but upscaled versions of them, and not just simply farmer's markets. You can get your corn there, of course, and whatever else might be grown. But maybe it's also our ability to the farmers letting us in to support them. But there has to be a system. The system is like we can only be efficient if there is a system, a workflow.

And it seems like there's no systems and workflows in this realm that enables communities to serve and be a part of the food that serves their community. So what do you think that system looks like? Would you envision that like almost an open source platform communities can sign up for, gives them access to some basic resources? What does that system look like? Is it a service that a company offers to communities? I think it'd have to be the latter, to be honest. You think so? two communities? I think it'd have to be the latter, to be honest. Like it definitely has

to be the latter because an open source system, like you're, you're, well, you're losing one or you're losing the other. And that's kind of the hard part. It's like, you're either losing the tech community or you're losing, or you're losing the farmers. And so if it definitely has to be an established player in, in farming, in tech and ag that kind of brings all three together and makes that a thing. Yeah. I'm now picturing, okay, let's say you have a private player building this. Right. Like a Whole Foods, Amazon kind of situation. Exactly. I'm trying to picture what they could offer. Could they offer a hardware solution where it's like, hey, these are like greenhouses that you can use. Do you offer add-ons like,

this gives you additional monitoring that you guys all get access to? Yeah. I think that one would work the best i think that makes for an interesting play like i'd be curious how market play market play yeah because it's tricky right because you're offering both physical solutions potentially or maybe you offer solutions that could go into an existing one like just sensors and just the platform okay it has to be a physical solution because this is a physical problem. Sure. Like if a lettuce was a piece of software, I think we would have solved it by now.

That's fair. Maybe. It might have bugs. That's a good pun. That's a good one. I love it. I love it. Is it a pun when you say it's a good pun? I think so. I think so. Yeah. Yeah. So it's like buying the warehouse, setting up the hydroponic system.

Yeah. Like, okay, yeah, the software and stuff, like we could definitely open source. We can like buying the warehouse setting up the hydroponic system yeah like okay yeah the software and stuff like we could definitely open source we can like get the community building that right but if you think about where tech is centralized it's cities if you think about where your major populations are it's cities that's what a major population is who has the highest need for produce and the highest demand it's going to be cities can they grow it they don't have the land for it yeah and so that's, it's going to be cities. Can they grow it? They don't have the land for it. That's why it's like smaller scale community gardens.

Okay, 20 by 20 square feet might produce. Rooftop gardens. Rooftop gardens. Rooftop greenhouses. Exactly. There's probably so much of this out there that maybe you're aware of. I'm just not. You asked that question earlier. Should we do it? I don't think I'm equipped to even be yes or no. I can give a lot of ideas and obviously provide a platform for folks like

you to talk and share what you do know but i would say i would love to see you do ag tech.fm if you like that domain we just was riffing but if that's not your thing whatever either way i would love to see this podcast be done because food is humanity's utility like we cannot not have food right yeah right we can't even not have electricity but even more so we have to have food and we have to have food that is loved by us i suppose that's not crazy expensive the grocery bill is out the like i can't even take going to the grocery store now like anxiety of like will my bill be today? And I'm bearing down what I'm getting, being more mindful of what I'm purchasing even. And trying to be more mindful of that. The idea of community is super important to me.

Obviously, a podcast and this conference, that conference is all about community. It's one of the three pillars, right? It's education, community, and what was the last one? Oh, I don't remember. Network? Networking, that was it. There you go. And I think that's really

what this conversation was about. I don't know how much more we have to say, but I think the conversation could probably go on. I would encourage you to do this podcast because it sounds like

there's some connection out there and some opportunity out there to do that kind of thing. It seems like tech and physical food will play a role. Hardware, software, in some way, shape, or form. There's a lot of ways we can slice and dice. More puns.

This thing. Love it. I can't help it. It's my bad. But it's been fun talking to you guys. Anything else? You want to plug anything? Oh, man.

I guess if you would like to address any... As we're building this at-scale platform, we're going to have a lot of security vulnerabilities and security needs. So if you want to are better than I. Geeky Voices. And then my, yeah. And my final note, I would just, I would say because you ended with a question, right? And I would say to find the answer to that question, you should definitely start this podcast. Start a platform and see what you, if you find the answer. Multiple answers.

I think that's really exciting. I agree. I agree. We need champions in it. And who better to be the champion than you? Yep. Vanessa. Thanks. Excellent job. Thank you. Thank it. And who better to be the champion than you? Yep. Vanessa. Thanks. Excellent job. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you, Noah. Woo. Two and a half hours. This is certainly our longest Change Logging Friends ever. And look at you, still here listening. You just might be crazy. Cool. you're crazy cool for listening for this long here's something else that's crazy cool dance party our newest breakmaster cylinder album is now out on changelog beats enjoy the drop find it in spotify in apple music in youtube music and all the rest just search for changelog beats or simply follow the link in your show notes and get your groove on. Sweet robot dance make-out music. Thanks once again to Fly.io, to BMC, of course,

to Cloudflare for bringing us to that comp, and to Clark and his team for putting on an awesome event. Oh, and also to our longtime sponsors, Sentry. Use code CHANGELOG to save 100 bucks on the team plan at sentry.io next week on the changelog news on monday stefano mafouli the executive director of the open source initiative on wednesday and longtime listener and changelog plus plus supporter jamie tana right here on changelog and friends on friday have great weekend. Share our work with your friends who might dig it. And we'll talk to you again real soon.