#126 – James Gosling: Java, JVM, Emacs, and the Early Days of Computing

James Gosling is the founder and lead designer of the Java programming language. Please check out our sponsors to get a discount and to support this podcast: – Public Goods: https://publicgoods.com/lex and use code LEX – BetterHelp: https://betterhelp.com/lex – ExpressVPN: https://www.expressvpn.com/lexpod If you would like to get more information about this podcast go to https://lexfridman.com/podcast or connect with @lexfridman on Twitter https://twitter.com/lexfridman, LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/lexfridman/, Facebook https://www.facebook.com/lexfridman, Medium https://medium.com/@lexfridman, or YouTube https://www.youtube.com/lexfridman where you can watch the video versions of these conversations. If you enjoy the podcast, please rate it 5 stars on Apple Podcasts https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/id1434243584, follow on Spotify https://open.spotify.com/show/2MAi0BvDc6GTFvKFPXnkCL, or support it on Patreon https://www.patreon.com/lexfridman. Here’s the outline of the episode. On some podcast players you should be able to click the timestamp to jump to that time. OUTLINE: 0:00 – Introduction 4:45 – Irrational numbers 8:04 – Math and programming 10:36 – Coding style 14:41 – First computer 23:54 – Lisp 27:22 – Write an Emacs implementation in C 35:15 – Early days of the Internet 45:57 – Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos 56:13 – Work hard and smart 58:48 – Open source 1:10:25 – Java 1:28:31 – Java virtual machine 1:44:05 – Android 1:47:04 – Advice

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Lex Fridman?

  The following is a conversation with James Gosling, the founder and lead designer behind the Java programming language, which in many indices is the most popular programming language in the world, or is always at least in the top two or three. We only had a limited time for this conversation, but I'm sure we'll talk again several times in this podcast. Quick summary of the sponsors, Public Goods, BetterHelp, and ExpressVPN. Please check out these sponsors in the description to get a discount and to support this podcast. As a side note, let me say that Java is the language with which I first learned object-oriented programming, and with it, the art and science of software engineering. Also, early on in my undergraduate education,

• 0:43Lex Fridman?

  I took a course on concurrent programming with Java. Looking back at that time, before I fell in love with neural networks, the art of parallel computing was both algorithmically and philosophically fascinating to me. The concept of a computer in my mind before then was something that does one thing at a time. The idea that we could create an abstraction of parallelism, where you could do many things at the same time while still guaranteeing stability and correctness, was beautiful. While some folks in college took drugs to expand their mind, I took concurrent programming. If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube, review it with five stars on Apple Podcasts, follow on Spotify, support on Patreon,

• 1:28Lex Fridman?

  or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Fridman. As usual, I'll do a few minutes of ads now and no ads in the middle. I try to make these interesting, but I do give you timestamps, so go ahead and skip. But please do check out the sponsors by clicking the links in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast. This show, sponsored by Public Goods, the one-stop shop for affordable, sustainable, healthy, household products. I take their fish oil and use their toothbrush, for example. Their products often have a minimalist black and white design that I find to be just beautiful. Some people ask why I wear this black suit and tie. There's a simplicity to it that, to me, focuses my mind

• 2:10Lex Fridman?

  on the most important bits of every moment of every day, pulling only at the thread of the essential in all that life has to throw at me. It's not about how I look, it's about how I feel. That's what design is to me, creating an inner conscious experience, not an external look. Anyway, Public Goods plants one tree for every order placed, which is kinda cool. Visit publicgoods.com/lex or use code LEX at checkout to get 15 bucks off your first order. This show is also sponsored by BetterHelp, spelled H-E-L-P, help. Check it out at betterhelp.com/lex. They figure out what you need and match you with a licensed professional therapist in

• 2:54Lex Fridman?

  under 48 hours. I chat with a person on there and enjoy it. Of course, I also regularly talk to David Goggins these days, who is definitely not a licensed professional therapist, but he does help me meet his and my demons and become comfortable to exist in their presence. Everyone is different, but for me, I think suffering is essential for creation, where you can suffer beautifully, in a way that doesn't destroy you. I think therapy can help in whatever form that therapy takes, and I do think that BetterHelp is an option worth trying. They're easy, private, affordable, and available worldwide. You can communicate by text anytime and schedule weekly audio and video sessions.

• 3:39Lex Fridman?

  Check it out at betterhelp.com/lex. This show is also sponsored by ExpressVPN. You can use it to unlock movies and shows that are only available in other countries. I did this recently with Star Trek: Discovery on UK Netflix, mostly because I wonder what it's like to live in London. I'm thinking of moving from Boston to a place where I can build the business I've always dreamed of building. London's probably not in the top three, but top 10 for sure. The number one choice currently is Austin, for many reasons that I'll probably speak to another time. San Francisco, unfortunately, dropped out from the number one spot, but it's still in the running. If you have advice, let me know.

• 4:22Lex Fridman?

  Anyway, check out ExpressVPN. It lets you change your location to almost 100 countries, and it's super fast. Go to expressvpn.com/lexpod to get an extra three months of ExpressVPN for free. That's expressvpn.com/lexpod. And now, here's my conversation with James Gosling.

• 5:02Lex Fridman?

  I've read somewhere that the square root of 2 is your favorite irrational number.

• 5:06Speaker 01

  I have no idea where that got started.

• 5:10Lex Fridman?

  Is there any truth to it? Is there anything in mathematics or numbers that you find beautiful?

• 5:15Speaker 01

  Oh, well, there's lots of things in math that's really beautiful. You know, I used to consider myself really good at math, and these days I consider myself really bad at math.

• 5:30Speaker 01

  I never really had a thing for the square root of 2, but when I was a teenager, there was this book called The Dictionary of Curious and Interesting Numbers,

• 5:44Speaker 01

  which, for some reason, I read through and damn near memorized the whole thing.

• 5:54Speaker 01

  And I started this weird habit of when I was like, filling out checks, you know, or, you know, paying for things with credit cards, I would want to make the receipt add up to an interesting number.

• 6:12Lex Fridman?

  Is there some numbers that stuck with you that just kind of make you feel good?

• 6:16Speaker 01

  They all have a story. And fortunately, I've actually mostly forgotten all of them.

• 6:25Lex Fridman?

  Are they, so like 42?

• 6:28Speaker 01

  Well, yeah, I mean, 42 is pretty magical.

• 6:31Lex Fridman?

  And then the rationals, I mean, but is there a square root of two story in there somewhere?

• 6:36Speaker 01

  Well, it's, it's like the only number that has destroyed a religion.

• 6:43Lex Fridman?

  In which way?

• 6:44Speaker 01

  Well, the, the Pathagorians, they, they believed that all numbers were perfect and you could represent anything as, as a, as a rational number. And

• 7:01Speaker 01

  in that, in that time period,

• 7:06Speaker 01

  this, this proof came out that there was no, you know, rational fraction whose value was equal to the square root of two.

• 7:17Lex Fridman?

  And that, that means nothing in this world is perfect, not even mathematics.

• 7:22Speaker 01

  Well, it, it means that your definition of perfect was imperfect.

• 7:28Lex Fridman?

  Well, then, then there's the Godel incompleteness theorems in the 20th century that ruined it once again for everybody.

• 7:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, although, although, although Gödel's theorem,

• 7:41Speaker 01

  you know, the lesson I take from Gödel's theorem is not that, you know, there are things you can't know, which is fundamentally what it says.

• 7:52Speaker 01

  But, you know, people want black and white answers. They want true or false.

• 8:00Speaker 01

  But if you, if you allow a three state logic that is true, false, or maybe,

• 8:08Speaker 01

  then, then life's good.

• 8:12Lex Fridman?

  I feel like there's a parallel to a modern political discourse in there somewhere, but

• 8:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:18Lex Fridman?

  Let me ask, so with your kind of early love or appreciation of the beauty of mathematics, do you see a parallel between that world and the world of programming?

• 8:34Speaker 01

  You know, programming is all about logical structure, understanding the, the patterns that come out of computation, understanding sort of.

• 8:53Speaker 01

  I mean, it's often like, you know, the path through the graph of possibilities to find a short, a short route.

• 9:02Lex Fridman?

  Meaning like, find a short program that gets the job done?

• 9:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 9:06Lex Fridman?

  Kind of thing. But so then on the topic of irrational numbers, do you see, do you see programming, you just painted it so cleanly. It's a little this trajectory to find like a nice little program, but do you see it as fundamentally messy? Maybe unlike mathematics?

• 9:27Speaker 01

  I don't think of it as, I mean, I mean, you know, you watch somebody who's good at math do math and, you know, often it's, it's fairly messy. Sometimes it's kind of magical.

• 9:44Speaker 01

  When I was a grad student, one of the students, his name was Jim Sacks, was, he had this, this, this, this, this reputation of being sort of a, a walking, talking, human theorem proving machine. And if you were having a hard problem with something, you could just like accost him in the hall and say, Jim, and, and he would do this, this, this funny thing where he would stand up straight, his eyes would kind of defocus, he'd go, you know, just, just like, you know, like, like something in today's movies, he's just, and then he'd

• 10:28Speaker 01

  straighten up and say, N log n, and walk away.

• 10:32Speaker 01

  And, and, and you'd go, well, okay, so N log n is the answer. How did he get there?

• 10:41Speaker 01

  By which time he's, you know, down the hallway somewhere.

• 10:44Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. Hey, there's just the oracle, the black box that just gives you the answer.

• 10:48Speaker 01

  Yeah. And then you have to figure out the path from the question to the answer.

• 10:53Lex Fridman?

  I think in one of the videos I watched, you mentioned Don Knuth, well, at least recommending his, you know, his, his book is something people should read.

• 11:04Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 11:05Lex Fridman?

  But in terms of, you know, theoretical computer science.

• 11:10Lex Fridman?

  Do you see something beautiful that has been inspiring to you, speaking of N log N, in your work on programming languages? That's in the, in the, that whole world of algorithms and complexity and, you know, these kinds of more formal mathematical things? Or did that not really stick with you in your programming life?

• 11:35Speaker 01

  It did stick pretty clearly for me because one of the things that I care about is being able to sort of look at a piece of code and be able to prove to myself that it works. And, you know, so, so for example, I find that I'm, I'm at odds with many of the people around me over issues about like how you lay out a piece of software, right?

• 12:20Speaker 01

  You know, so, so software engineers get really cranky about how they format their, the documents that are the programs, you know, where they put new lines and where they put, you know,

• 12:31Lex Fridman?

  The braces.

• 12:32Speaker 01

  The braces and all the rest of that, right? And I tend to go for a style that's very dense.

• 12:42Lex Fridman?

  To minimize the white space.

• 12:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, to maximize the amount that I can see at once, right? So I like to be able to see a whole function and to understand what it does rather than have to go scroll, scroll, scroll and remember, right?

• 13:03Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, I'm with you on that. Yeah, that's.

• 13:05Speaker 01

  And.

• 13:06Lex Fridman?

  And people don't like that?

• 13:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, I've, I've had, I've had, you know, multiple times when engineering teams have staged what was effectively an intervention.

• 13:24Speaker 01

  You know, where they invite me to a meeting and everybody has arrived before me and they sort of all look at me and say, James, about your coding style.

• 13:38Speaker 01

  I'm sort of an odd person to be programming because I don't think very well verbally.

• 13:48Speaker 01

  I am just naturally a slow reader.

• 13:54Speaker 01

  I'm what most people would call a visual thinker.

• 13:59Lex Fridman?

  So when you think about a program, what do you, what do you see?

• 14:02Speaker 01

  I see pictures, right? So when I look at a piece of code on a piece of paper, it very quickly gets transformed into a picture.

• 14:15Speaker 01

  And, you know, it's almost like a piece of machinery with, you know, this connected to that and

• 14:22Lex Fridman?

  Like these gears of different sizes.

• 14:24Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah, I, I see them more like that than I see the, the, the sort of verbal structure or the lexical structure of, of letters.

• 14:35Lex Fridman?

  So then when you look at the program, that's why you want to see it all in the same place, then you could just map it to something visual.

• 14:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, and it's just kind of like, like it leaps off the page at me and

• 14:45Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. What are the inputs, where the outputs, what the heck is this thing doing?

• 14:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 14:50Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. Getting a whole vision of it. Can we go back into your memory, memory, long-term memory access? What's the first program you've ever written?

• 15:06Speaker 01

  I have no idea what the first one was. I mean, I, I know the first machine that I learned, that I learned to program on.

• 15:15Lex Fridman?

  What is it?

• 15:15Speaker 01

  Was a PDP eight.

• 15:19Speaker 01

  At the University of Calgary. Do you remember the specs? Oh, yeah. So, so the thing had 4K of RAM. Nice. 12 bit words. The clock rate was,

• 15:38Speaker 01

  it was about a third of a megahertz. Oh, so you didn't even get to the, to the M. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, we're, we're like 10,000 times faster these days. And was this kind of like a super computer, like a serious computer for? No, the PDP8i was the, the first thing that people were calling like mini computer. Got it. They were sort of inexpensive enough that, that a university lab could maybe afford to buy one.

• 16:16Speaker 01

  And was there time sharing, all that kind of stuff? Um, there, there actually was a time sharing OS for that, but it wasn't used really widely. The machine that I learned on was one that was kind of hidden in a back corner of the, of the computer center.

• 16:39Speaker 01

  And it was, it was bought as a, as part of a, a project to do computer networking.

• 16:51Speaker 01

  But,

• 16:53Speaker 01

  you know, they didn't actually use it very much. It was mostly just kind of sitting there.

• 16:59Speaker 01

  And it was kind of sitting there and I noticed it was just kind of sitting there. And so I started fooling around with it. And nobody seemed to mind. So I just kept doing that and. It had a keyboard and like a, a monitor? Oh, this is way before monitors were common. So it was, it was literally a, a Model 33 teletype. Okay. With a paper tape reader.

• 17:28Lex Fridman?

  Okay, so the user interface wasn't very good.

• 17:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, it was. It was the first computer ever built with integrated circuits.

• 17:40Speaker 01

  But by integrated circuits, I mean that they would have like 10 or 12 transistors on one piece of silicon. Not the 10 or 12 billion that the machines have today.

• 17:55Lex Fridman?

  So what did that, I mean, feel like if you remember those? I mean, did you have kind of inklings of the the magic of exponential kind of improvement of Moore's law? Of the potential of the future that was at your fingertips kind of thing? Or was it just a cool?

• 18:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was just a toy. You know, I had always liked building stuff.

• 18:21Speaker 01

  But one of the problems with building stuff is that you need to have parts, you know? You need to have pieces of wood or wire or switches or stuff like that. And those all cost money.

• 18:33Lex Fridman?

  And here you could build.

• 18:34Speaker 01

  You could build arbitrarily complicated things and I didn't need any physical materials.

• 18:42Speaker 01

  It required no money.

• 18:44Lex Fridman?

  That's a good way to put programming. You're right. It's a, if you love building things.

• 18:51Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, completely accessible. You don't need anything. And anybody from anywhere could just build something really cool.

• 18:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. If you've got access to a computer, you can you can build all kinds of crazy stuff.

• 19:08Speaker 01

  And, you know, and when you were somebody like me who had like really no money.

• 19:20Speaker 01

  And, I mean, I remember just lusting after being able to buy like a transistor.

• 19:32Speaker 01

  You know, and when I would do sort of electronics kind of projects, they were mostly made done by like dumpster diving for trash, you know, and, you know, one of my big halls was discarded relay racks from the back of the, the phone company switching center.

• 19:54Lex Fridman?

  Oh, nice. That, that was the big memorable treasure.

• 19:58Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. Yeah. That was a

• 20:00Lex Fridman?

  What do you use that for?

• 20:01Speaker 01

  I, I built a machine that played tic tac toe.

• 20:07Lex Fridman?

  Nice.

• 20:08Speaker 01

  Out of relays. Of course, the thing that was really hard was that all the relays required a specific voltage, but getting a power supply that will, would do that voltage was pretty hard. And since I had a bunch of trashed television sets, I had to sort of cobble together something that was wrong, but worked. So I was actually running these relays at 300 volts and, and none of the electrical connections were like properly sealed off.

• 20:50Lex Fridman?

  I'm surprised you survived that period of your life.

• 20:53Speaker 01

  Oh, for so many reasons, for so many reasons. I mean, you know, you're, you know, it's pretty common for teenage geeks to discover, oh, thermite, that's real easy to make.

• 21:07Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. Well, I'm glad you did. But do you remember the, do you remember what program in Calgary that you wrote? Anything that stands out and what language?

• 21:20Speaker 01

  Well, so mostly the, anything of any size was assembly code.

• 21:31Speaker 01

  And actually, before I learned assembly code, there was this programming language on the PDP eight called Focal five. And Focal five was kind of like a really stripped down FORTRAN.

• 21:45Speaker 01

  And I remember playing, you know, building programs that did things like play Blackjack.

• 21:56Speaker 01

  Or Solitaire, or for some reason or the things that I really liked were ones where they were just like plotting graphs.

• 22:07Lex Fridman?

  So something with like a function or a data and then you plot it.

• 22:12Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah, I did a bunches of those things and went, oh, pretty pictures.

• 22:20Lex Fridman?

  And so this was like printout, again, no, no monitors.

• 22:24Speaker 01

  Right. So it was like on a teletype.

• 22:28Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 22:30Speaker 01

  So it's using something that's kind of like a typewriter. And then using those to plot functions.

• 22:40Lex Fridman?

  So when, I apologize to romanticize things, but when did you first fall in love with programming? You know, what was the first programming language? Like as a serious, maybe software engineer, where you thought this is a beautiful thing?

• 22:57Speaker 01

  I guess I never really thought of any particular language as being like beautiful. Cause it was never really about the language for me. It was about what you could do with it.

• 23:09Speaker 01

  And, you know, even today, you know, people try to get me into arguments about particular forms of syntax for this or that. And I'm like, who cares? You know, it's, it's about what you can do, not, not, not how you spell the word.

• 23:27Speaker 01

  And, you know, so back in those days, I, I learned like PL1 and Fortran and COAL. And, you know, by the time that people were willing to hire me to do stuff, you know, it was mostly assembly code and, you know, PDP8 assembly code and, and Fortran code and

• 23:51Speaker 01

  control data's assembly code for like the CDC 6400, which was an early, I guess, supercomputer.

• 24:00Speaker 01

  Even though that supercomputer has less compute power than my phone by a lot.

• 24:07Lex Fridman?

  And that was mostly, like you said, Fortran.

• 24:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 24:10Lex Fridman?

  World. That said, you've also showed appreciation for the greatest language

• 24:17Lex Fridman?

  ever that I think everyone agrees is Lisp.

• 24:21Speaker 01

  Well, Lisp is definitely on my list of the greatest ones that have existed.

• 24:28Lex Fridman?

  Is it at number one? Or, I mean, or you, I mean?

• 24:33Speaker 01

  You know, the, you know, the thing is that it's, that, you know,

• 24:38Speaker 01

  I wouldn't put it number one, no.

• 24:40Lex Fridman?

  Is it the parentheses? What?

• 24:44Lex Fridman?

  What do you love and what do you not love about Lisp?

• 24:50Speaker 01

  Well, I guess the number one thing to not love about it is so freaking many parentheses.

• 24:55Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 24:58Speaker 01

  On the, on the love thing is, you know, out of those

• 25:03Speaker 01

  tons of parentheses, you actually get an interesting language structure. And I've always thought that there was a friendlier version of Lisp hiding out there somewhere.

• 25:15Speaker 01

  But I've never really spent much time.

• 25:18Lex Fridman?

  Thinking about it.

• 25:19Speaker 01

  Thinking about it. But, you know, so like, like up the food chain for me,

• 25:26Speaker 01

  then from Lisp is Simula, which a very small number of people have ever used.

• 25:33Lex Fridman?

  But a lot of people, I think you had a huge influence, right?

• 25:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:36Lex Fridman?

  On the programming, but in the Simula, I apologize if I'm wrong on this, but is that one of the first functional languages?

• 25:44Speaker 01

  Um, no, it was, it was, it was the first object oriented programming language.

• 25:49Lex Fridman?

  Got it.

• 25:49Speaker 01

  It's really where object oriented and languages sort of came together.

• 25:56Speaker 01

  And it was also the, the language where coroutines first showed up as a part of the language. So you could have a programming style that was, you could think of it as multi, sort of multi-threaded, with a lot of parallel, parallelism.

• 26:17Lex Fridman?

  Really? There's ideas of parallelism in there?

• 26:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 26:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, so that was that was back, you know, so so the first Simul spec was Simul 67.

• 26:29Lex Fridman?

  For like 1967?

• 26:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 26:32Lex Fridman?

  Wow.

• 26:33Speaker 01

  So it had it it had coroutines, which are almost threads. The the thing about coroutines is that they don't have true concurrency. So you can get away without really complex locking. You can't usably do coroutines on a on the multi-core machine. Or if you try to do core coroutines on the multi-core machine, you don't actually get to use the multiple cores. Either that or you, you know, because you you start then having to get into the universe of, you know, semaphores and locks and things like that.

• 27:17Speaker 01

  But, you know, in terms of the the style of programming, you could write code and think think of it as being multi-threaded. The the mental model was very much a multi-threaded one. And all kinds of problems you could approach very differently.

• 27:39Lex Fridman?

  To to return to the world of Lisp for a brief moment, you at CMU, you've you wrote a version of Emacs that that I think was very impactful on the history of Emacs.

• 27:54Lex Fridman?

  What was your motivation for for doing so?

• 27:59Speaker 01

  At at that time, so that was in like 85 or 86.

• 28:09Speaker 01

  I had been using Unix for a few years. And

• 28:17Speaker 01

  most of the editing was this this tool called ED,

• 28:22Speaker 01

  which was sort of an ancestor of VI.

• 28:26Speaker 01

  And

• 28:27Lex Fridman?

  Is it a pretty good editor, not a good editor?

• 28:31Speaker 01

  Well, if if what you're using, if your input device is a teletype, it's pretty good.

• 28:38Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 28:39Speaker 01

  It's certainly more humane than TECO, which was kind of the the common thing in in a lot of the deck universe at the time.

• 28:49Lex Fridman?

  TECO is spelled TK? Is that the?

• 28:52Speaker 01

  No, TECO, T E C O, the text editor and corrector.

• 28:56Lex Fridman?

  Corrector, wow, so many features.

• 28:58Speaker 01

  Um, and the original Emacs came out as, so Emacs stands for editor macros. And TECO had a way of writing macros. And so the original Emacs from MIT sort of started out as a collection of macros for TECO.

• 29:24Speaker 01

  But then, you know, you know, the the sort of Emacs style got got popular originally at MIT. And then people did a few other implementations of Emacs that were, you know, the the codebase was entirely different, but it was sort of the philosophical style of the original Emacs.

• 29:47Lex Fridman?

  What was the philosophy of Emacs? And by the way, were all the implementations always in C? And then?

• 29:54Speaker 01

  No.

• 29:54Lex Fridman?

  And Hunter's Lisp fit into the picture?

• 29:56Speaker 01

  No, so so the very first Emacs was written as a bunch of macros for the TECO text editor.

• 30:03Lex Fridman?

  Wow, that's so interesting.

• 30:04Speaker 01

  And the the the macro language for TECO was probably the most ridiculously obscure format. You know, if you just look at a TECO program on a on a page, you think it was just random characters. It really looks like just line noise.

• 30:26Lex Fridman?

  Just kind of like LaTeX or something?

• 30:28Speaker 01

  Oh, way worse than LaTeX, way, way worse than LaTeX.

• 30:35Speaker 01

  But, you know, if you use TECO a lot, which I did, the the TECO was completely optimized for touch typing at high speed.

• 30:47Speaker 01

  So there were no two-character commands. Well, there were a few, but mostly they were just one character. So every character on the keyboard was a separate command.

• 31:00Speaker 01

  And actually, every character on the keyboard reads usually two or three commands, because you know, you hit Shift and Control and all of those things. And it's just a way of very tightly encoding it. And mostly what Emacs did was it made that that visual. Right? So one way to think of TECO is use Emacs with your eyes closed.

• 31:31Speaker 01

  Where you have to maintain a mental model of, you know, sort of a mental image of your document. You have to go, okay, so the cursor is between the A and the E. And I want to exchange those, so I do these these things, right? So it it it almost it is almost exactly the Emacs command set. Well, it's roughly approximate roughly the same as Emacs command set, but using Emacs with your eyes closed.

• 32:04Speaker 01

  So what Emacs, you know, part of what Emacs added to the whole thing was was being able to visually see what you were editing

• 32:16Speaker 01

  in a form that matched your document.

• 32:22Speaker 01

  And, you know, a lot of things changed in the in the command set. It it, you know, because it was programmable. It was really flexible. You could add new commands for all kinds of things. And then people rewrote Emacs like multiple times in Lisp. There was one done at MIT for the Lisp machine. There was one done for Multics. And one summer, I got a got a summer job to work on the Pascal compiler for Multics.

• 32:57Speaker 01

  And that was actually the first time I used Emacs.

• 33:02Speaker 01

  And, and, and so To write the compilers. You've worked on compilers too. It's fascinating. Yeah. So I did a lot of work, you know, I mean, I spent like, like a really intense three months working on this Pascal compiler, basically living in Emacs. And it was, it was the one written in MacLus by Bernie Greenberg. And I thought, wow, this is a, just a way better way to do editing.

• 33:36Speaker 01

  And then I got back to CMU where we had kind of one of everything and two of a bunch of things and four of a few things. And since I mostly worked in the Unix universe and Unix didn't have an Emacs, I decided that I needed to fix that problem. So I, so I wrote this, this implementation of Emacs in C. Cause at the time, C was really the only language that worked on, on On Unix. On Unix. And you were comfortable with C as well? Oh, yeah. At that point? Yeah. At that time I had done a lot of C, C coding. This was in like 86.

• 34:23Speaker 01

  And, you know, it was running well enough to be, for me to use it to edit itself within a month or two. And then it kind of took over the university and And it spread outside? Yeah. And then it went outside the, and largely because Unix kind of took over the research community on the, on the, on the ARPANET.

• 34:55Speaker 01

  Then, and Emacs was, was kind of the best editor out there. It kind of took over. And there was actually a brief period where I actually had login IDs on every non-military host on the, on the ARPANET.

• 35:15Speaker 01

  You know, because people would say, oh, can we install this? And, and I'd like, well, Yeah, but you'll need some help.

• 35:26Lex Fridman?

  Ah, the days when security wasn't.

• 35:28Speaker 01

  When nobody cared.

• 35:29Lex Fridman?

  Nobody cared.

• 35:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 35:32Lex Fridman?

  Can I ask briefly, what were those early days of ARPANET and the Internet like? What was, I mean, did you, again, sorry for the silly question, but could you have possibly imagined that the Internet would look like what it is today?

• 35:53Speaker 01

  You know, some of it is remarkably unchanged. So like, one of the things that I noticed really early on,

• 36:06Speaker 01

  you know, when I was at Carnegie Mellon was that a lot of social life became centered around the ARPANET. And so things like, you know, between email and text messaging,

• 36:23Speaker 01

  because, you know, text messaging was a part of the ARPANET really early on. There were no cell phones, but you know, you're sitting at a terminal and you're typing stuff.

• 36:33Lex Fridman?

  And essentially email or like what is?

• 36:36Speaker 01

  Well, just like a one line message, right? So, so, so.

• 36:40Lex Fridman?

  Oh, cool. So like chat.

• 36:42Speaker 01

  Like chat.

• 36:43Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 36:44Speaker 01

  Right. So it's like, like sending a one line message to somebody, right? And, and, and so pretty much everything from, you know, arranging lunch to going out on dates, you know, was all like driven by social media.

• 37:06Speaker 01

  Right? In the, in the, in the eighties.

• 37:09Lex Fridman?

  Easier than phone calls. Yeah.

• 37:11Speaker 01

  You know, and my life had gotten to where, you know, I was, you know, living on social media, you know, from like the early mid eighties.

• 37:28Speaker 01

  And, and so when, when it sort of transformed into the internet and social media explodes, I was kind of like, what's the big deal? Yeah, it's just a scale thing. It's, it's right. The, the, the scale thing is just astonishing. Yeah. But the fundamentals in some ways. The fundamentals have, have hardly changed. And, you know, the, the technologies behind the, the networking have changed significantly. The, you know, the, the, the watershed moment of, you know, going from the ARPANET to the internet.

• 38:09Speaker 01

  And then people starting to just scale and scale and scale. I mean, the, the, the, the scaling that happened in the early nineties and the way that so many vested interests fought the internet. Oh, who, oh, interesting. What was the, oh, because you can't really control the internet. Yeah. Who fought the internet? So, so, so fundamentally, the, you know, the cable TV companies and broadcasters and

• 38:45Speaker 01

  phone companies, you know, at, at the deepest fibers of their being, they hated the internet. But it was often kind of a funny thing because, you know, so, so, so think of a, a cable company, right? Most of the employees of a cable company, their job is getting TV shows, movies, whatever, out to their customers.

• 39:24Speaker 01

  They view their business as serving their customers. But as you climb up the hierarchy in the, in the cable companies, that view shifts because.

• 39:44Speaker 01

  Really, the business of the cable companies had always been selling eyeballs to advertisers. Right.

• 39:56Speaker 01

  And, you know, that view of like a cable company didn't really dawn on most people who worked at the cable companies. But, you know, we, you know, I had various dustups with various cable companies where you could see, you know, in the stratified layers of the corporation that, that this, this, this, this, this view of, you know, the reason that you have, you know, cable TV is to capture eyeballs. You know, they're They didn't see it that way. Well, so, so the people who, the most of the people who worked at the phone company are at the cable companies.

• 40:38Speaker 01

  Their view was that their, their job was getting delightful content out to their customers and their customers would pay for them, would pay for that. Higher up, they viewed this as, as a way of attracting eyeballs to them. And, and then what they were really doing was selling the eyeballs that were glued to their content to the advertisers. To the advertisers, yeah. And so the internet was a competition in that sense. Right, and, and, and They were right. Well, yeah. I mean, there, there was one proposal that we

• 41:23Speaker 01

  sent that, that we, one detailed proposal that, that we

• 41:30Speaker 01

  wrote up, you know, back at that sun in the, in the early 90s that was essentially like, look, anybody, you know, with, with internet technologies, anybody can become provider of, of content. So, you know, you could be distributing home movies to your

• 41:52Speaker 01

  Parents or your cousins or your who are anywhere else, right? So anybody can become a publisher.

• 41:58Lex Fridman?

  Wow, you were thinking about that already, yeah.

• 42:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, that was. Yeah, that was that that was like in the in the early 90s.

• 42:05Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 42:06Speaker 01

  And we thought this would be great. You could, you know, and the kind of content we were thinking about at the time was like, you know, home movies, kids essays.

• 42:21Speaker 01

  You know, stuff from like grocery stores or, you know, you know, that the or a or a restaurant that they could actually like start sending information about out. And.

• 42:37Lex Fridman?

  That's brilliant.

• 42:38Speaker 01

  And and the the the reaction of the cable companies was like, fuck, no. Because because then we're out of business.

• 42:51Lex Fridman?

  What is it about companies that because they could have just they could have been ahead of that wave? They could have listened to that and they could have.

• 42:59Speaker 01

  They they didn't see a path to revenue.

• 43:02Lex Fridman?

  You know, there's there's somewhere in there, there's a lesson for like big companies, right? Like to to listen, to to try to anticipate the the renegade, the out there, out of the box. People like yourself in the early days, writing proposals about what this could possibly be.

• 43:20Speaker 01

  Well, and that, you know, that, you know, it wasn't, you know, if you're in a in a position where you're making

• 43:28Speaker 01

  truckloads of money off of a particular business model.

• 43:36Speaker 01

  You know, the the the the the whole thought of like, you know, leaping the chasm. Right? You know, you know, you can see, oh, new models that are more effective are emerging. Right? So like digital cameras versus film cameras.

• 43:59Speaker 01

  You know, I mean. Why take the leap? Why, why take the leap? Because you're making so much money off of film. And, um, you know, in my past at Sun, one of our big customers was Kodak. And I ended up interacting with folks from Kodak quite a lot. And they actually had a big, um, digital camera research and, you know, digital imaging business or development group. And they knew that, that, you know, you, you know, you just look at the, at the trend lines and you look at, um, you know,

• 44:43Speaker 01

  the emerging quality of, of, of these, you know, digital cameras. And, you know, you can just plot it on the graph, you know? And it's like, you know, sure, film is better today.

• 45:01Speaker 01

  But, you know, digital is, is, is, is improving like this. The lines are going to cross. And, and, you know, the point at which the lines cross is going to be a collapse in their business. And they could see that. Right? They absolutely knew that. The problem is that, you know, up to the point where they hit the wall, they were making truckloads of money. Yeah. Right? And when they did the math,

• 45:40Speaker 01

  it never started to make sense for them to kind of lead the charge. And part of the issues for a lot of companies for this kind of stuff is that, um, you know, if you're going to leap over a chasm like that, like, like with Kodak going from, from film to digital, that's a transition that's going to take a while.

• 46:06Speaker 01

  Right, we had, we had fights like this with people over like smart cards. The smart cards fights were just ludicrous.

• 46:14Lex Fridman?

  But that's where visionary leadership comes in, right? Yeah, somebody needs to roll in and say, then take, take, take the leap.

• 46:21Speaker 01

  Well, it's, it partly take the leap, but it's also partly take the hit.

• 46:26Lex Fridman?

  Take the hit.

• 46:27Speaker 01

  Right, so, so, so, so you can draw the graphs you want that show that, you know, if we leap from here, you know, the, you know, on our present trajectory, we're doing this and there's a cliff. If we force ourselves into it, into a transition and we proactively do that, we can be on the next wave, but there will be a period when we're in a trough.

• 46:56Speaker 01

  And pretty much always there ends up being a trough as you leap the chasm. But the way that public companies work on this planet, they're reporting every quarter. And the one thing that a CEO must never do is take a big hit.

• 47:19Lex Fridman?

  Take a big hit.

• 47:21Speaker 01

  You know, over some, some quarter. And, and many of these transitions involve a big hit for a, a period of time, you know, one, two, three quarters. And so you get some companies and, you know, like Tesla and Amazon are, are really good examples of companies that take huge hits, but they have the luxury of being able to ignore the stock market for a little while. And that's not so true today, really, but, you know, in the early days of, of, of both

• 48:02Speaker 01

  of those companies, um, you know, like, like, like, like, like they, they both did this thing of, you know,

• 48:12Speaker 01

  I don't care about the quarterly reports. I care about how many, how many happy customers we have.

• 48:18Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 48:18Speaker 01

  Right? And having as many happy customers as possible can often be

• 48:26Speaker 01

  an enemy of the bottom line.

• 48:28Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. So how do they make that work? I mean, Amazon operated in the negative for a long time. It's like investing into the future.

• 48:34Speaker 01

  Right. But, you know, you know, so Amazon and Google and Tesla and Facebook, a lot of those had what amounted to patient money.

• 48:47Speaker 01

  Often because the, there's, there's like a charismatic central figure who has a really large block of stock.

• 48:58Speaker 01

  And they can just make it so.

• 49:02Lex Fridman?

  So what, on that topic, just maybe it's a little small tangent, but you've gotten the chance to work with some pretty big leaders. What are your thoughts about on Tesla side, Elon Musk leadership, on the Amazon side, Jeff Bezos, all of these folks with large amounts of stock and vision in their company? I mean, they're founders.

• 49:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 49:23Lex Fridman?

  Either, either complete founders or like early on folks. And they're, they, Amazon have taken leap, a lot of leaps. And, you know, that probably at the time, people would criticize as like, what is this bookstore thing? Why?

• 49:43Speaker 01

  Yeah. And, and, you know, Bezos had a vision. And he had the ability to just follow it. Lots of people have visions and, you know, the average vision is completely idiotic and you crash and burn.

• 50:01Speaker 01

  You know, the, the Silicon Valley crash and burn rate is pretty high.

• 50:09Speaker 01

  And they're not, they don't necessarily crash and burn because they were dumb ideas. But, you know, often it's, it's just timing. Timing and luck. And, you know, you take companies like, like, like Tesla.

• 50:24Speaker 01

  And, and, and, and really, you know, the, the original Tesla.

• 50:30Speaker 01

  You know, sort of pre Elon.

• 50:36Speaker 01

  Was kind of doing sort of okay, but, but, but he just drove them. And because he had a really strong vision, you know, he would, he would make calls that were always, you know, or well, mostly pretty good. I mean, the Model X was kind of a goofball thing to do.

• 51:01Lex Fridman?

  But he did it boldly anyway. Like, there's so many people that just said, like, there's so many people that oppose them on the Falcon one door, like the door.

• 51:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 51:11Lex Fridman?

  From the engineering perspective, those doors are ridiculous. It's like.

• 51:15Speaker 01

  They, yeah, they're, they are a complete travesty.

• 51:17Lex Fridman?

  But, but they're, but they're exactly the symbol of what great leadership is, which is like, you have a vision and you just go like.

• 51:26Speaker 01

  If you're gonna do something stupid, make it really stupid.

• 51:29Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, and go all in.

• 51:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. And, and, you know, to, to Musk's credit, he's a really sharp guy. So going back in time a little bit to Steve Jobs. You know, Steve Jobs was a similar sort of character who had a strong vision and was really, really smart. And you, you know, and he wasn't smart about the technology parts of things, but, but sort of, he, he was really sharp about the, the, the sort of human relationship between, you know, the relationship between humans and objects.

• 52:10Speaker 01

  And, but, he was a jerk.

• 52:16Lex Fridman?

  You know.

• 52:17Speaker 01

  Right?

• 52:18Lex Fridman?

  Can we just linger on that a little bit? Like, people say he's a jerk.

• 52:23Lex Fridman?

  Is that a feature or a bug?

• 52:25Speaker 01

  Well, that's, that's, that's the question, right? So you take people like Steve,

• 52:32Speaker 01

  who was really hard on people. And, and, and so the question is, was he really, was he needlessly hard on people? Or was he just making people reach to?

• 52:49Speaker 01

  To meet his vision. And you could kind of spin it either way.

• 52:58Lex Fridman?

  Well, the results tell a story, you know, he's a he through whatever jerk ways he had, he made people often do the best work of their life.

• 53:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, and that was absolutely true. And, you know, I interviewed with him several times.

• 53:17Speaker 01

  I did, you know, various negotiations with him. And

• 53:26Speaker 01

  even though kind of

• 53:30Speaker 01

  personally, I liked him. I could never work for him.

• 53:35Lex Fridman?

  What? Why do you think

• 53:38Lex Fridman?

  that what can you put into words? The kind of tension that you feel would be

• 53:45Lex Fridman?

  destructive as opposed to constructive?

• 53:50Speaker 01

  Oh, he he'd yell at people, he'd call them names.

• 53:56Lex Fridman?

  And you don't like that?

• 53:57Speaker 01

  No. No, I don't. I don't think you need to do that.

• 54:03Speaker 01

  And

• 54:07Speaker 01

  you know, he, you know, I think, you know, there's, there's pushing people to excel.

• 54:15Speaker 01

  And then there's too far, and I think he was on the wrong side of the line. And I've never worked for Musk. I know a number of people who have many of them that have said, and it's, you know, shows up in the press a lot that that Musk is kind of that way. And one of the things that I sort of loathe about Silicon Valley these days is that

• 54:44Speaker 01

  A lot of the high-flying successes are run by people who are complete jerks. But it seems like there's been become this, there's come this, this sort of mythology out of Steve Jobs, that the reason that he succeeded was because he was super hard on people. And, and, and, and, and, and in a number of corners, people start going, oh, if I want to succeed, I need to be a real jerk.

• 55:17Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 55:18Speaker 01

  Right? And, and, and that, for me, just does not compute. I mean, I know a lot of successful people who are not jerks, who are perfectly fine people.

• 55:31Speaker 01

  You know, they, they tend to not be in the public eye.

• 55:37Lex Fridman?

  The, the, the, the general public somehow lifts the jerks up into the, into the hero status.

• 55:45Speaker 01

  Right. Well, they, because they're, they do things that get them in the press.

• 55:49Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 55:49Speaker 01

  And, you know, the people who,

• 55:56Speaker 01

  you know, don't do the kind of things that spill into the press.

• 56:04Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, I just talked to Chris Ladner for the second time. He's a super nice guy. Just an example of this kind of kind of individual that's in the background. I feel like he's behind like a million technologies, but he also talked about the jerkiness of some of the folks.

• 56:23Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. And the fact that, that being a jerk has become your required style.

• 56:30Lex Fridman?

  But one thing I maybe want to ask on that is maybe to push back a little bit. So there's the jerk side, but there's also, if I were to criticize what I've seen in Silicon Valley, which is almost the resistance to working hard.

• 56:45Lex Fridman?

  So on the jerking aside, is,

• 56:51Lex Fridman?

  It's so Posty Jobs and Elon kind of pushed people to work really hard to do. And it's a question whether it's possible to do that nicely. But one of the things that bothers me, maybe I'm just Russian and just kind of, you know, romanticize the whole suffering thing. But I think working hard is essential for accomplishing anything interesting, like really hard. And in the parlance of Silicon Valley, it's probably too hard. This idea of the issue work smart, not hard, often

• 57:27Lex Fridman?

  to me, sounds like you should be lazy because of course you want to be to work smart. Of course, you would be maximally efficient. But in order to discover the efficient path, like we're talking about with the short programs.

• 57:38Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, you know, the, the, the, the smart, hard thing isn't an either or, it's an and.

• 57:46Lex Fridman?

  It's an and, yeah.

• 57:47Speaker 01

  Right. And, um, you know, the, the, the, the, the, the people who say you should work smart, not hard. They pretty much always fail.

• 58:01Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, thank you.

• 58:03Speaker 01

  Right. I mean, that's, that's, that's just, just a recipe for disaster. I mean, there are, there are counter examples, but there are more people who benefited from luck.

• 58:15Lex Fridman?

  And you're saying, yeah, exactly. Luck, luck and timing, like you said, is often an essential thing. But you're saying, you know, you can be, you can push people to work hard and do incredible work without, without.

• 58:29Speaker 01

  Without being nasty.

• 58:30Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, without being nasty. I think, uh,

• 58:35Lex Fridman?

  Google is a good example of the leadership of Google throughout its history has been pretty good example of, uh, not being nasty.

• 58:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, the, the, the, the twins, Larry and Sergey, are both pretty nice people.

• 58:54Lex Fridman?

  Sundar Pichai is very nice.

• 58:56Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, it's, it's a culture of, of people who work really, really hard.

• 59:06Lex Fridman?

  Let me ask maybe a little bit of a tense question. We're talking about Emacs. It seems like you've done some incredible work, so outside of Java. You've done some incredible work that didn't become as popular as it could have because of like licensing issues and open sourcing like

• 59:25Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 59:26Lex Fridman?

  issues. What are your thoughts about that entire mess? Like what's about open source now in retrospect, looking back? About licensing, about open sourcing? Do you think open source is a good thing, a bad thing? Do you have regrets? Do you have wisdom that you've learned from that whole experience?

• 59:56Speaker 01

  So in general, I'm a big fan of of open source. The way that it can be used to build communities and promote the development of things and promote collaboration and all of that is really pretty grand. When open source turns into a religion that says all things must be open source.

• 1:00:22Lex Fridman?

  Right.

• 1:00:25Speaker 01

  I get kind of weird about that because it's sort of like saying, you know, some versions of that end up saying that all all software engineers must take a vow of poverty.

• 1:00:40Lex Fridman?

  Right.

• 1:00:41Speaker 01

  Right, as though.

• 1:00:43Lex Fridman?

  It's unethical to have money.

• 1:00:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:00:47Lex Fridman?

  To build a company, to, right.

• 1:00:51Speaker 01

  And, you know, there's a there's a there's a slice of me that actually kind of buys into that.

• 1:00:57Lex Fridman?

  Right.

• 1:00:58Speaker 01

  Because, you know, people who make billions of dollars off of like a patent and the patent came from like, you know, literally a stroke of lightning that hits you as you lie half awake in bed.

• 1:01:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's lucky. Good for you. The way that that sometimes sort of explodes into something that looks to me a lot like exploitation. You know, you see a lot of that in, in, in like the, the drug industry.

• 1:01:38Speaker 01

  You know, when, you know, when you've got a, got, got medications that cost, you know, cost you like a hundred dollars a day. And it's like,

• 1:01:51Speaker 01

  no.

• 1:01:53Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. So the, the interesting thing about the sort of open source, uh, what bothers me is when it, something is not open source. And because of that, it's a worse product.

• 1:02:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:02:08Lex Fridman?

  So like, I mean, if I look at your just implementation of Emacs, like that could have been the dominant implementation. Like I use Emacs. That's my main ID. I apologize to the world, but I still love it.

• 1:02:22Lex Fridman?

  And, you know, I could have been using, um, your implementation of Emacs. And why aren't I?

• 1:02:30Speaker 01

  So are you using the GNU Emacs?

• 1:02:33Lex Fridman?

  I guess the default on Linux is that GNU?

• 1:02:35Speaker 01

  Yeah. And, and that through a strange passage started out as the one that I wrote.

• 1:02:41Lex Fridman?

  Exactly. So it's, it still has, uh,

• 1:02:44Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:02:44Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. Right.

• 1:02:45Speaker 01

  Well, and, and part of that was because, you know, in, you know, the last couple of years of grad school, it, it became really clear to me that I was either going to be Mr. Emacs forever, or I was going to graduate.

• 1:03:08Lex Fridman?

  Got it.

• 1:03:09Speaker 01

  I couldn't actually do both.

• 1:03:13Lex Fridman?

  Was that a hard decision? That's so interesting to think about you as a part. Like it's a different trajectory that could have happened.

• 1:03:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:03:20Lex Fridman?

  That's fascinating.

• 1:03:23Speaker 01

  You know, and maybe, you know, I could be fabulously wealthy today if I had become Mr. Emacs and Emacs had mushroomed into a series of text processing applications and all kinds of stuff. And, you know, I would have, you know, but.

• 1:03:43Speaker 01

  I have a long history of financially suboptimal decisions. Because I didn't want that life, right? And, you know, I went to grad school because I wanted to graduate. And, you know, you know, being Mr. Emmax for a while was kind of fun. And then it kind of became

• 1:04:16Lex Fridman?

  Not fun.

• 1:04:17Speaker 01

  Not fun. And, you know, when it was not fun and I was, you know, there was no way I could, you know, pay my rent, right?

• 1:04:33Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:34Speaker 01

  And, and I was like, okay, do I carry on as a grad student as a, you know, you know, I had a research assistantship and I was sort of living off of that. And I was trying to do my, you know, I was doing all my RA work, all my RA, you know, being grad student work and being Mr. Emmax all at the same time. And, and I, I decided to pick one. And one of the things that I did at the time was I went around, you know, all the people I knew on the, the ARPANET who might be able to, to, to take over looking after Emmax.

• 1:05:15Speaker 01

  And pretty much everybody said, eh, I got a day job. So, so I actually found, you know, two folks in a, a couple of folks in a garage in New Jersey, complete with a dog. Were willing to take it over, but they were going to have to charge money. But my deal with them was that they would only that they would make it free for universities and schools and stuff. And they said, sure. And you know, that upset some people.

• 1:05:58Lex Fridman?

  So you have some, now, I don't know the full history of this, but I think it's kind of interesting. You have some tension with Mr. Richard Stallman over the, and he kind of represents this kind of like, like you mentioned, free software.

• 1:06:20Lex Fridman?

  Sort of a dogmatic focus on.

• 1:06:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, all, all, all information must be free.

• 1:06:27Lex Fridman?

  Must be free. So what, is there an interesting way to paint a picture of the disagreement you have with Richard through the years?

• 1:06:36Speaker 01

  My, my basic opposition is that, you know, when you say information must be free,

• 1:06:46Speaker 01

  to a really extreme form that turns into, you know,

• 1:06:53Speaker 01

  all people whose job is the production of

• 1:07:01Speaker 01

  everything from movies to software.

• 1:07:06Speaker 01

  They must all take a vow of poverty because information must be free. And that doesn't work for me. Right? And, and I, and I don't, I don't want to be wildly rich. I am not wildly rich. I do okay.

• 1:07:31Speaker 01

  But I do actually, you know, you know, I've, you know, I can feed my children.

• 1:07:37Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, I totally agree with you. It does just make me sad that sometimes the closing of the source, for some reason, the people that.

• 1:07:48Lex Fridman?

  Like a bureaucracy begins to build and sometimes it doesn't, it hurts the product.

• 1:07:54Speaker 01

  Oh, absolutely, absolutely.

• 1:07:56Lex Fridman?

  It's always sad.

• 1:07:57Speaker 01

  And there's, and there is a, there is a balance in there.

• 1:08:01Lex Fridman?

  There's a balance.

• 1:08:04Speaker 01

  And you know, it's, it's not hard, hard over, you know, rapacious capitalism. And, and it's, and it's not hard over in the other direction.

• 1:08:19Speaker 01

  And, you know, a lot of the, the open source movement, they, they, they have been managing to find a path to actually making money, right? So doing things like service and support works for a lot of people.

• 1:08:40Speaker 01

  You know, and there are some, some ways where it's, it's kind of,

• 1:08:49Speaker 01

  some of them are, are a little, a little perverse, right? So as, you know, a part of things like this Sarbanes-Oxley Act and various people's interpretations of all kinds of accounting principles. And this is kind of a worldwide thing, but if you've got a, a corporation that is depending on some piece of software,

• 1:09:17Speaker 01

  you know, the often, you know, various accounting and reporting standards say, if you don't have a support contract on this thing that, that your business is depending on, then that's bad. You know, so, so, so, you know, if you've got a, if you've got a database, you need to pay for support. And, and so, but there's a difference between.

• 1:09:44Speaker 01

  You know, the the sort of support contracts that, you know, the average open source database producer charges and what somebody who is truly rapacious like Oracle charges.

• 1:10:01Lex Fridman?

  Yes, it's a it's a balance, like you said.

• 1:10:03Speaker 01

  It is. It is absolutely a balance. And, you know, there are there are a lot of a lot of different ways to make, you know, the math work out for everybody.

• 1:10:22Speaker 01

  And, you know, the the very, you know,

• 1:10:28Speaker 01

  unbalanced sort of, you know, like, like the winner takes all thing that that happens in so much of of modern commerce. That just doesn't work for me either.

• 1:10:43Lex Fridman?

  I know you've talked about this in quite a few places, but you have created one of the most popular programming languages in the world. It's a programming language that I first learned about object oriented programming with. You know, I think it's a programming language that a lot of people use in a lot of different places and millions of devices today, Java. So the absurd question, but can you tell the origin story of Java?

• 1:11:20Speaker 01

  So, long time ago at Sun, in about 1990, there was a group of us who were kind of worried that that there was stuff going on in the universe of computing that the computing industry was missing out on.

• 1:11:42Speaker 01

  And so a few of us started this project at Sun. The really got going, I mean, we started talking about it in 1990 and it really got going in 91.

• 1:11:56Speaker 01

  And it was all about.

• 1:11:59Speaker 01

  You know, what was happening in terms of, you know, computing hardware, you know, processors and networking and all of that, that was outside of the computer industry. And that was everything from the, the, the, the sort of early glimmers of cell phones that were happening then to, you know, you look at elevators and locomotives and process control systems and factories and all kinds of audio, audio equipment and video equipment. They all had processors in them and they were all doing stuff with them.

• 1:12:41Speaker 01

  And, and it, and it sort of felt like there was something going on there that we needed to understand. And So C and C++ was in the air already. Oh, no, C and C++ absolutely owned the universe at that time. Everything was written in C and C++. So where was the hunch that there was a need for a revolution? Well, so the, the need for a revolution was not about the language. It was about, it was just as simple and vague as there are things happening out there. We need to understand them. We need to understand them.

• 1:13:24Speaker 01

  And, and so a few of us went on several somewhat epic road trips.

• 1:13:36Speaker 01

  Literal road trips? Literal road trips. It's like get on an airplane, go to Japan, visit, you know, Toshiba and Sharp and Mitsubishi and Sony and all of these folks. And, you know, because we worked for Sun, we had, you know, folks who were willing to like give us introductions, you know, we, we visited, you know, Samsung and, you know, a bunch of Korean companies and we went all over Europe, went to, you know, places like, like Phillips and Siemens and Thompson and.

• 1:14:14Lex Fridman?

  What did you see there?

• 1:14:16Speaker 01

  You know, for me, the, one of the things that sort of leapt out was that they were doing all the usual computer, computer things that people had been doing like 20 years before. The thing that really leapt out to me was that they were sort of reinventing computer networking. And they were making all the mistakes that people in the computer industry had, had made. And since I'd been doing a lot of work in, in the networking area, you know, you know, we'd go and, you know, visit, you know, company X, they'd describe this networking thing that they were doing. And just without any thought, I could, I could tell them like the 25 things

• 1:15:02Speaker 01

  that were going to be complete disasters with that thing that they were doing.

• 1:15:09Speaker 01

  And I don't know whether that had any impact on any of them, but, but, but that particular story of, you know, sort of repeating the disasters of the computer science industry

• 1:15:24Speaker 01

  was there. And we, and one of the things we thought was, well, maybe we could do something useful here with like bringing them forward somewhat, but, but also at the same time, we learned a bunch of things from, from these, you know, mostly consumer electronics companies.

• 1:15:49Speaker 01

  And

• 1:15:51Speaker 01

  you know, high on the list was that

• 1:15:56Speaker 01

  they viewed their like relationship with the customer as sacred.

• 1:16:02Speaker 01

  They, they were never, ever willing to make trade offs between.

• 1:16:11Speaker 01

  For for safety. All right, so one of the things that had always made me nervous in the computer industry was that people were willing to make trade offs in reliability to get performance. You know, the, you know, they, they want faster, faster brakes a little more often because it's fast, you know, you, maybe you run it a little hotter than you should, or like, like the one that always blew my mind was the way that the folks at, at, at Cray Supercomputers

• 1:16:51Speaker 01

  got their division to be really fast was that they did Newton Raufson approximations.

• 1:16:59Lex Fridman?

  Uh huh.

• 1:17:01Speaker 01

  And so, you know, the bottom several bits of, you know, A over B were essentially random numbers.

• 1:17:12Lex Fridman?

  What could possibly go wrong?

• 1:17:13Speaker 01

  What could go wrong? Right? And, you know, just figuring out how to nail the bottom bit, how to make sure that, you know, if you put a piece of toast in a toaster, it's not going to kill the customer. It's not going to burst into flames and burn the house down.

• 1:17:39Lex Fridman?

  So those are, I guess those are the, the principles that were inspiring. But how did, from the days of Java is called Oak because of a tree outside the window story that a lot of people know, how did it become this incredible, like, powerful language?

• 1:18:00Speaker 01

  Well, so it was, it was a bunch of things. So we, you know, after all that, we started, you know, the, the way that we decided that we could understand things better was by building a demo, building a prototype of something.

• 1:18:15Lex Fridman?

  Got it.

• 1:18:16Speaker 01

  So, um, kind of because it was easy and fun, we decided to build a control system for some home electronics, you know, TV, VCR, that kind of stuff. And as we were building it, we, you know, we, we, we sort of discovered that there were some things about standard practice in C programming.

• 1:18:38Speaker 01

  That we're really getting in the way. And it wasn't, it wasn't exactly, you know, because we were writing this, all this C code and C++ code that, that we couldn't write it to do the right thing, but that, um, one of the things that was weird in the group was that we had, um, a guy who's, who's, who's, you know, his sort of top level job was, he was a business guy, you know, he was sort of an MBA kind of person, you know, think about business plans and all of that. And, you know, there were a bunch of things that were kind of, you know, and we would talk about things that

• 1:19:23Speaker 01

  were going wrong and, um, or things that were going wrong, things that were going right. And, you know, as we thought about, you know, things like, like the requirements for security and safety, um, some low level details in C like naked pointers. Yeah. And, you know, so, so back in the early nineties, um, it was well understood that, you know, the number one source of like security vulnerabilities. Is pointers. Was just pointers, was just bugs. Yeah.

• 1:20:02Speaker 01

  Right? And it was like, you know, 50, 60, 70% of all security vulnerabilities were bugs and the vast majority of them were like buffer overflows. Yeah. So you're like, we have to fix this. We, we have to make sure that this cannot happen. And that was kind of the original thing for me was this cannot, this cannot continue. And one of the things I find really entertaining this year was, um, I forget which rag published it, but there was this

• 1:20:39Speaker 01

  article that came out that was, um, an examination, it was sort of the result of, of an examination of all the security vulnerabilities in Chrome. And Chrome is like a giant piece of C++ code. And 60 or 70% of all the security vulnerabilities were stupid pointer tricks.

• 1:21:05Speaker 01

  And I thought, it's 30 years later and we're still there.

• 1:21:11Lex Fridman?

  Still there.

• 1:21:12Speaker 01

  And we're still there. And you know, that's one of those, you know, slap your forehead and, and just, just, just wanna cry.

• 1:21:21Lex Fridman?

  So would you attribute, or is that too much of a simplification, but would you attribute the creation of Java to, uh, to C pointers? Obvious problem.

• 1:21:33Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, that was, that was one of the, the trigger points.

• 1:21:38Lex Fridman?

  Concurrent, you've mentioned.

• 1:21:40Speaker 01

  Concurrent was a big deal.

• 1:21:44Speaker 01

  You know, because when you're interacting with people, you know, the last thing you ever wanna see is, is the thing like waiting. And, you know, issues about the software development process, you know, when faults happen, can you recover from them? What can you do to make it easier to create and eliminate complex data structures? What can you do to fix, you know, the, one of the most common C problems, which is storage leaks?

• 1:22:20Speaker 01

  And it's, it's evil twin, the,

• 1:22:25Speaker 01

  the, the freed, but still being used piece of, piece of memory, you know, you, you free something and then you keep using it.

• 1:22:34Lex Fridman?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:22:36Speaker 01

  You know, so, so when I was originally thinking about that, I was thinking about that in terms of, of sort of safety and security issues. And one of the things I sort of came to believe, came to understand was that it wasn't just about safety and security, but it was about developer velocity. Right? So, and I got really religious about this because at that point I had spent an ungodly amount of my life.

• 1:23:06Speaker 01

  Hunting down mystery pointer bugs.

• 1:23:10Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:11Speaker 01

  And, you know, like, like, two thirds of my time as a software developer was, you know, because the mystery pointer bugs tend to be the hardest to find because they tend to be very, very statistical. The ones that hurt, you know, they're, you know, they're like a one in a million chance.

• 1:23:36Speaker 01

  And

• 1:23:37Lex Fridman?

  But nevertheless create an infinite amount of suffering.

• 1:23:40Speaker 01

  Right. Because when you're doing a billion operations a second.

• 1:23:44Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:45Speaker 01

  You know, I'm one in a million chance means it's gonna happen.

• 1:23:52Speaker 01

  And, and so I got really religious about this thing about, you know, making it so that if something fails, it fails immediately and visibly.

• 1:24:02Speaker 01

  And, you know, one of the, the, the things that was a, a real attraction of Java to lots of development shops was that, you know, we get our code up and running twice as fast.

• 1:24:17Lex Fridman?

  You mean like the entirety of the development process, debugging, all that kind of stuff?

• 1:24:21Speaker 01

  Yeah. If you, you know, so, so if you measure time from, you know, you, you first touch fingers to keyboard until you get your first demo out.

• 1:24:36Speaker 01

  Not much different. But if you look from fingers touching keyboard to solid piece of software that you could release in production, it would be way faster.

• 1:24:49Lex Fridman?

  And I think what people don't often realize is, yeah, there's things that really slow you down, like it's hard to catch bugs probably is, is the thing that really slows down that.

• 1:25:00Speaker 01

  It really slows things down. But, but also there were, you know, one of the things that you get out of. Object oriented programming is a strict methodology about, you know, what are the interfaces between things? And being really clear about how parts relate to each other. And what that helps with is so many times what people do is they kind of like sneak around the side. So if you've built something and people are using it, and then, and you say, and you say, well, okay, you know, I built this thing, you use it this way. And then you change it in such a way that, that it still does what you said it does.

• 1:25:45Speaker 01

  It just does it a little bit different. Then you find out that somebody out there was sneaking around the side. They sort of tunneled in a back door. And this person, their code broke. And because they were sneaking through a side door. And, and normally the attitude is, huh, dummy. But a lot of times, you know, you can't get away, you can't, you can't just slap their hand and tell them to not do that. Because, you know, it's, you know, somebody's,

• 1:26:29Speaker 01

  you know, some bank's, you know, account reconciliation system that, that, you know, some developer decided, oh, I'm lazy. You know, I'll just sneak through the back door. And because the language allows it, I mean, you can't even be mad at them. Right. And, and so one of the things I did that, that, that on the one hand upset a bunch of people was I made it so that you really couldn't go through back doors, right? So, so the whole point of that was to say, if you need, you know, if the interface here isn't right.

• 1:27:04Speaker 01

  The wrong way to deal with that is is to go through a back door.

• 1:27:07Lex Fridman?

  Yep.

• 1:27:08Speaker 01

  The right way to deal with it is to walk up to the developer of this thing and say, uh,

• 1:27:12Lex Fridman?

  Change the interface.

• 1:27:13Speaker 01

  Fix it.

• 1:27:14Lex Fridman?

  Yep.

• 1:27:15Speaker 01

  Right. And so it was kind of like a social engineering thing.

• 1:27:18Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:19Speaker 01

  And um.

• 1:27:21Lex Fridman?

  It's brilliant.

• 1:27:22Speaker 01

  And people ended up discovering that that really made a difference. Um, in terms of, you know, and, and, and, and a bunch of this stuff, you know, if you're just like screwing around, writing your own like, you know, class project scale stuff, um, a lot of this stuff doesn't, isn't quite so, so important. Because, you know, you're, you know, both sides of the interface. But, you know, when you're building, you know, sort of larger, more complex pieces of software that have a lot of people working on them. And especially when they like span organizations.

• 1:28:03Speaker 01

  You know, having, having really clear, having clarity about how that stuff gets structured, um, saves your life.

• 1:28:10Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:12Speaker 01

  Um, and, you know, especially, you know, there, there's so much software that is fundamentally untestable. You know, and, you know, until you do the real thing, right?

• 1:28:25Lex Fridman?

  It's better to write good code in the beginning as opposed to writing crappy code and then trying to fix it. And trying to scramble and figure out and through testing, figure out where the bugs are.

• 1:28:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's like, it's like, it's like, which shortcut caused

• 1:28:42Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:43Speaker 01

  that rocket to not get where it was needed to go?

• 1:28:48Lex Fridman?

  So I think one of the most beautiful ideas philosophically and technically is of a virtual machine, the Java virtual machine. Um, again, apologize to romanticize things, but uh, how did the idea of the JVM come to be? How to you radical of an idea it is? Cause it seems to me to be just a really interesting idea in the history of programming.

• 1:29:20Speaker 01

  So.

• 1:29:21Lex Fridman?

  And what is it?

• 1:29:22Speaker 01

  So the Java virtual machine, you can think of it in different ways.

• 1:29:31Speaker 01

  Because it was carefully designed to have different ways of viewing it. So one view of it that most people don't really realize is there is that you can view it as sort of an encoding of the abstract syntax tree in reverse Polish notation. I don't know if that makes any sense at all. I could explain it and that would blow all over time. But the other way to think of it and the way that it ends up being explained is that it's like the instruction set of an abstract machine that's designed such that you can

• 1:30:16Speaker 01

  translate that abstract machine to a physical machine. And the reason that that's important, so if you wind back to the early 90s when we were talking to all of these companies doing consumer electronics and you talk to the purchasing people, there were interesting conversations with purchasing. So if you look at how, you know, these devices come together, they're sheet metal and gears and circuit boards and capacitors and resistors and stuff.

• 1:30:57Speaker 01

  And everything you buy has multiple sources, right? So you can buy a capacitor from here, you can buy a capacitor from there and you've got kind of a market so that you can actually get a decent price for a capacitor. But CPUs and particularly in the early 90s, CPUs were all different and all proprietary. So if you use the chip from Intel,

• 1:31:39Speaker 01

  You had to be an Intel customer for the end till the end of time. Because if you wrote a bunch of software, you know, when you wrote software using whatever technique you wanted. And C was particularly bad about this because there was a lot of properties of the underlying machine that came through.

• 1:32:05Lex Fridman?

  So you were stuck. So the code you wrote, you were stuck to that particular machine?

• 1:32:08Speaker 01

  You were stuck to that particular machine, which meant that they couldn't decide, you know, Intel is screwing us. Um, I'll, I'll start buying chips from, you know, Bob's better chips. This drove the, like, the purchasing people absolutely insane. That, that they would, they were welded into this decision. And it would, they would have to make this decision before the first line of software was written.

• 1:32:42Lex Fridman?

  It's funny that you're talking about the purchasing people. So there's one perspective, right? It's, you could, there's a lot of other perspectives that all probably hated this idea.

• 1:32:52Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:32:52Lex Fridman?

  But from a technical aspect, just like the creation of an abstraction layer that's agnostic to the underlying machine from the perspective of the developer, I mean, that's brilliant.

• 1:33:07Speaker 01

  Right. Well, and, and, and, and, you know, so that's like across the spectrum of, of providers of chips. But then there's also the, the time thing because, you know, as you went from one generation to the next generation to the next generation, they were all different and you would often have to rewrite your software.

• 1:33:27Lex Fridman?

  Oh, you mean the generations of, of machines of different kinds?

• 1:33:31Speaker 01

  Yeah. So, so like, like, like, like, one of the things that sucked about a year out of my life was when Sun went from the, the Motorola 68010 processor to the 68020 processor. Then they had a number of differences and one of them hit us really hard. And I ended up being the, the.

• 1:33:57Speaker 01

  Point guy on the worst case of where the new instruction cache architecture hurt us.

• 1:34:06Lex Fridman?

  Well, okay, so I mean, so when did this idea, I mean, okay, so yeah, you articulate a really clear fundamental problem in all of computing. But how, where do you get the guts to think we can actually solve this?

• 1:34:22Speaker 01

  You know, in our conversations with, you know, all of these vendors, you know, these, these problems started to show up. And I kind of had this epiphany because it reminded me of a summer job that I had had in grad school. So back in grad school, my, my thesis advisor, well, I had two thesis advisors for bizarre reasons. One of them was a guy named Raj Reddy, the other one was Bob Sproul.

• 1:35:05Speaker 01

  And Raj, I love Raj, I really love both of them.

• 1:35:10Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:11Speaker 01

  So the, the department had bought a bunch of like early workstations from a company called Three Rivers Computer Company. And Three Rivers Computer Company was a bunch of electrical engineers who wanted to do as little software as possible. So they knew that they'd need to have like compilers and an OS and stuff like that. And they didn't want to do any of that. And they wanted to do that for as close to zero money as possible. So.

• 1:35:52Speaker 01

  What they did was they they built a machine whose instruction set was

• 1:35:59Speaker 01

  the was literally the bytecode for UCSD Pascal, the P code.

• 1:36:07Speaker 01

  And so we had a bunch of software that was that was written for this machine.

• 1:36:20Speaker 01

  And for various reasons, you know, the company wasn't doing terrifically well. We had all this software on these machines, and we wanted it to run on other machines, principally the VAX. And

• 1:36:36Speaker 01

  and so Raj asked me if I could come up with a way to port all of this software Translate. From the from from from the the the PERC machines to VAXs.

• 1:36:52Speaker 01

  And and I think he, you know, what he had in mind was something that would translate from like Pascal to C or Pascal to, actually, at those times, pretty much it was you could translate to C or C. And if you didn't like translate to C, you could translate to C.

• 1:37:17Speaker 01

  There was, you know, it's, you know, it's like the the Henry Ford, you know, any color you want, just as long as it's black.

• 1:37:26Speaker 01

  And and I went, that's really hard. Fascinating. And and I and I noticed that, you know, and I was like looking at stuff and I went, oh, I bet I could rewrite the P code into VAX assembly code.

• 1:37:46Speaker 01

  And then I started to realize that, you know, there were some properties of P code that made that really easy, some properties that made it really hard. So I ended up writing this thing that translated from P code on the Three Rivers perks into assembly code on the VAX. And I actually got higher quality code than the C compiler. And so, so everything just got really fast. It was really easy. It was like, wow, I thought that was a sleazy hack because I was lazy. And in actual fact, it worked really well.

• 1:38:31Speaker 01

  And, and I, and I tried to convince people that that was maybe a good thesis topic.

• 1:38:36Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:37Speaker 01

  Um, and nobody was, was, you know, it was like, nah.

• 1:38:43Lex Fridman?

  Really? That's, I mean, yeah, it's kind of a brilliant idea, right? Or maybe you didn't have the, you weren't able to articulate the big picture of it.

• 1:38:54Speaker 01

  Yeah. And, and I think, you know, that was a, um, a key part. But so then, you know, clock comes forward a few years and it's like, we've got to be able to, you know, the, you know, the, you know, if they want to be able to switch from, you know, this weird microprocessor to that weird and totally different microprocessor. How do you do that? And I kind of went, oh, maybe by doing something kind of in the space of, you know, Pascal P code, you know, I could do like multiple translators. And I spent some time thinking about that and thinking about, you know, what worked

• 1:39:35Speaker 01

  and what didn't work when I did the, the, the, the P code to VAX translator. And, um, I talked to some of the folks who were involved in Smalltalk because Smalltalk also did a VAC code.

• 1:39:51Speaker 01

  And, and, and then I kinda went, yeah, let's, that, I wanna do that. Cause that act, you know, and, and it had the, the other advantage that you could either interpret it or compile it.

• 1:40:07Speaker 01

  And interpreters are usually easier to do, but not as fast as a compiler.

• 1:40:17Speaker 01

  And so I figured, good, I can be lazy again.

• 1:40:22Speaker 01

  You know, so, you know, sometimes I think that most of my good ideas are driven by laziness. And, and often I find that people, some of people's stupidest ideas are because they're insufficiently lazy.

• 1:40:38Speaker 01

  Yeah. They just wanna build something really complicated. It's like, doesn't need to be that complicated. Yeah. And so, and so that's how that came out. And, um, you know, but that also turned into kind of a, you know, almost a religious position on my part, which was, which got me in, in several other fights. So like, like one of the things that was a real difference was the way that arithmetic worked.

• 1:41:11Speaker 01

  You know, once upon a time, there were, you know, it wasn't always just two's complement arithmetic. There were some machines that had one's complement arithmetic, which was like almost anything built by CDC.

• 1:41:25Speaker 01

  And occasionally there were machines that were decimal arithmetic.

• 1:41:30Speaker 01

  And, and I was like, this is crazy.

• 1:41:34Speaker 01

  You know, pretty much two's complement integer arithmetic has one. So just.

• 1:41:42Speaker 01

  Let's just do that. Just do, do that. One of the other places where there was a lot of variability was in the way that floating point behaved.

• 1:41:53Speaker 01

  And that was causing people throughout the software industry much pain. Because you couldn't do a numerical computing library that would work on CDC and then have it work on an IBM machine and work on a on a DEC machine. And as a as a part of that whole struggle, there had been this this big body of work on on floating point standards. And this thing emerged that came to be called IEEE 754, which is the floating point standard that pretty much has taken taken over the entire universe.

• 1:42:37Speaker 01

  And and at the time I was doing Java, it had pretty much completed taking over the universe. There were still a few pockets of holdouts, but I was like, you know, it's important to be able to say what 2 plus 2 means.

• 1:42:51Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:53Speaker 01

  And and so I went that. And one of the ways that I got into fights with people was that there were a few machines that did not implement IEEE 754 correctly.

• 1:43:10Lex Fridman?

  Well, of course, that's that's all short term kind of fights. I think in the in the long term, I think this vision is won out.

• 1:43:19Speaker 01

  Yeah. And and I think it's, you know, and it worked out over time. I mean, the the biggest fights were with Intel. Because they had done some strange things with rounding, they had done some strange things with their transcendental functions, which turned into a mushroom cloud of, you know, weirdness.

• 1:43:41Lex Fridman?

  And the name in the name of optimization, but from the perspective of the developer, that's not that's not good.

• 1:43:49Speaker 01

  Well, their issues with transcendental functions were just stupid.

• 1:43:52Lex Fridman?

  Okay, so that that's that's not even a trade off, that's just absolutely.

• 1:43:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, they were they were doing range reduction in for sine and cosine using a slightly wrong value for pi.

• 1:44:05Lex Fridman?

  Got it. We've got 10 minutes. So in the interest of time, two questions. So one about Android and one about life. So one, I mean, we could talk for many more hours. I hope eventually we might talk again, but I gotta ask you about Android and the use of Java there because it's one of the many places where Java just has a huge impact on this world. Just on your opinion, is there things that make you happy about the way Java is used in the Android world? And are there things that you wish were different?

• 1:44:46Speaker 01

  I don't know how to do a short answer to that, but I have to do a short answer to that. So, you know, I'm happy that they did it. Java had been running on cell phones at that time for quite a few years and it worked really, really well. There were things about how they did it and in particular, various ways that they kind of, you know, violated all kinds of contracts. The guy who led it, Andy Rubin, he crossed a lot of lines.

• 1:45:23Lex Fridman?

  There's some lines crossed.

• 1:45:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, lines were crossed, but have since, you know, mushroomed into giant court cases. And, you know, they didn't need to do that. And in fact, it would have been so much cheaper for them to not cross lines.

• 1:45:41Lex Fridman?

  I mean, I suppose they didn't anticipate the success of this whole endeavor?

• 1:45:50Speaker 01

  Um.

• 1:45:51Lex Fridman?

  Or do you think at that time it was already clear that this is gonna blow up?

• 1:45:55Speaker 01

  I guess I sort of came to believe that it didn't matter what Andy did, it was gonna blow up.

• 1:46:02Lex Fridman?

  Okay.

• 1:46:03Speaker 01

  So you see, you know, I kind of started to think of him as like a manufacturer of bombs.

• 1:46:15Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. Some of the best things in this world come about through a little bit of explosive.

• 1:46:22Speaker 01

  Well, and some of the worst.

• 1:46:24Lex Fridman?

  And some of the worst. Beautifully put. But is there, and like you said, I mean, does that make you proud that the Java is in?

• 1:46:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:46:34Lex Fridman?

  Is in millions? I mean, it could be billions of devices and.

• 1:46:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, I mean, it was in in billions of phones before Android came along. And, you know, I'm, I'm just as proud as, you know, of the way that like the, the smart card standards adopted Java. And they did a day, you know, everybody involved in that did a really good job. And that's, you know, billions and billions.

• 1:47:05Lex Fridman?

  That's crazy.

• 1:47:06Speaker 01

  The SIM cards, you know, the SIM cards in your pocket.

• 1:47:10Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, I mean, it's.

• 1:47:11Speaker 01

  I've been outside of that world for a decade, so I don't know how that has evolved. But, you know, it's just been crazy.

• 1:47:21Lex Fridman?

  So on that topic, let me ask, again, there's a million technical things we could talk about, but let me ask the absurd, the old philosophical question about life. What do you hope when you look back at your life and the people talk about you, write about you 500 years from now? What do you hope your legacy is?

• 1:47:51Speaker 01

  People not being afraid to take a leap of faith. I mean, I, you know, I've got this, this kind of weird history of doing weird stuff.

• 1:48:04Lex Fridman?

  It worked out pretty damn well.

• 1:48:06Speaker 01

  It worked out, right? And I think some of the weirder stuff that I've done has been the coolest and some of it, some of it crashed and burned. You know, I think well over half of the stuff that I've done has crashed and burned, which has occasionally been really annoying.

• 1:48:29Lex Fridman?

  But still you kept doing it.

• 1:48:30Speaker 01

  But yeah.

• 1:48:32Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, and you know, there, you know, even when things crash and burn, you'll you at least learn something from it.

• 1:48:39Lex Fridman?

  By way of advice, you know, people, developers, engineers, scientists, or just people who are young, uh, to look up to you, what advice would you give them? How to, uh, how to approach their life?

• 1:48:54Speaker 01

  Don't be afraid of risk. It's okay to do stupid things once.

• 1:49:02Lex Fridman?

  Maybe even a couple of times.

• 1:49:03Speaker 01

  You know, you, you know, you get, you get a pass on the, the first time or two that you do something stupid. You know, the third or fourth time, yeah, not so much.

• 1:49:12Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:16Speaker 01

  But also, you know,

• 1:49:20Speaker 01

  I don't know why, but really early on, I started to think about, um, ethical choices in my life. Um, and because I'm a big science fiction fan,

• 1:49:37Speaker 01

  I, I, I, I got to thinking about, like, just about every technical decision I make in terms of, how do you want, you know, are you building Blade Runner or Star Trek?

• 1:49:50Lex Fridman?

  Which one's better?

• 1:49:51Speaker 01

  Which, which future would you rather live in? You know?

• 1:49:55Lex Fridman?

  So what's, what's the answer to that?

• 1:49:57Speaker 01

  Well, I would, I would sure rather live in the universe of Star Trek.

• 1:50:01Lex Fridman?

  Star Trek, yeah. And that opens up a whole topic about AI, but that's a really interesting.

• 1:50:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:50:08Lex Fridman?

  It's a, it's a really interesting idea. So your favorite AI system would be data, uh, from, uh, from Star Trek.

• 1:50:15Speaker 01

  And my least favorite would easily be Skynet.

• 1:50:17Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. Beautifully put. I don't think there's a better way to end it, James. I can't say enough how much of an honor it is to meet you, to talk to you. Thanks so much for wasting your time with me today.

• 1:50:29Speaker 01

  Uh, not a waste at all.

• 1:50:30Lex Fridman?

  Thanks, James.

• 1:50:31Speaker 01

  All right, thanks.

• 1:50:33Lex Fridman?

  Thanks for listening to this conversation with James Gosling, and thank you to our sponsors, Public Goods, BetterHelp, and ExpressVPN. Please check out these sponsors in the description to get a discount and to support this podcast. If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube, review it with five stars on Apple Podcasts, follow on Spotify, support on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Fridman. And now, let me leave you with some words from James Gosling. One of the toughest things about life is making choices. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.