Open Sauce vs Better Software Conference

Casey Muratori and ThePrimeagen return from two very different conferences: Better Software Conference in Sweden and Open Sauce in California. They discuss why modern software feels broken, the developers trying to fix it, and the chaotic world of Open Sauce packed with science YouTubers, homemade machines, dangerous experiments, rockets, robots, and wildly ambitious projects built in garages and backyards. Linear helps teams track issues, manage projects, collaborate on docs, and ship products - and the crazy thing is their software is actually fast and a joy to use. Learn more: https://trm.sh/linear

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Also Casey, what's going on?

• 0:01Speaker 01

  I was just trying, I was just testing my little mood lighting.

• 0:04Speaker 00

  Okay, is it mood lighting? Or is it like I'm about to tell you a horror story over a campfire?

• 0:09Speaker 01

  That's, yeah, that's what I meant. Like, if I was gonna be like, "The diarrhea lettuce is coming for you."

• 0:15Speaker 02

  Okay, we might have had different conferences.

• 0:17Speaker 03

  I ain't touching lettuce for a long time.

• 0:19Speaker 00

  Okay, well, I've only ever had regular lettuce. I've never had diarrhea lettuce. But I will say, uh, that it is kinda funny that we had so many world disasters that have happened. And the one that's gonna take us down is diarrhea lettuce. Like, that's the one that's gonna be the end of America, cuz they can't stop eating Taco Bell lettuce.

• 0:41Speaker 00

  Uh, anyways, I'm sorry.

• 0:42Speaker 02

  Not just Taco Bell, it's at Chipotle and McDonald's too.

• 0:44Speaker 01

  Okay, yep.

• 0:46Speaker 00

  Oh, I'm sorry. I'm sorry Chipotle and McDonald's for not mentioning that you also have diarrhea lettuce.

• 0:52Speaker 00

  Like, yeah, sorry for that. Alright, so today's kind of a special episode. I'm gonna do the intro. Is that okay?

• 0:58Speaker 01

  I mean, it's really, the question is, is it? Is it okay, Prime?

• 1:02Speaker 00

  Okay, so first off, I just got back from Open Sauce, so my throat is just apps, is literally like a raw hamburger right now, so it hurts a little bit. So I'm just not going to be, I'm not, I'm not gonna be shouting today. Uh, second, welcome to the stand-up, the world's most attended stand-ups. Thank you interns for all showing up. Today, we have an extremely special episode. We had both Casey Muratori and Beegan and I going to two separate, very amazing conferences. First off, Casey, you went to Better Software Conference, which seems like the best of all the conferences when it comes to software. I do like the idea of better software.

• 1:35Speaker 01

  Well, no, it's not the best, because that would be the best software conference.

• 1:38Speaker 00

  I said better.

• 1:38Speaker 01

  It's the better software conference, right? Out of two things, this one is better, yeah.

• 1:42Speaker 03

  Best conference, then.

• 1:43Speaker 01

  No one knows, no one knows whether there will ever be a best software conference, and I suppose you really couldn't have one, because, well, you could have one once. And then it would have all the best software at it, and that would be it. That would be the end of it. You could never have another one, cuz you've had all the best software at that point.

• 1:57Speaker 03

  Well, you imply there's no progression.

• 2:00Speaker 01

  I guess. Maybe each year, there's new best software. I'm not sure.

• 2:05Speaker 00

  Yeah, they'd be the bestest, the bestest every single time.

• 2:09Speaker 01

  I do like the idea of best software conference, like this is the best software. We have the best software, all the best software. I'm hearing very good things about the software.

• 2:18Speaker 02

  I think that'd be a cool conference, but you could probably not do like big enough. You couldn't do a huge software, it would be like opening a file. This is all we can agree on, we're gonna debate this best opening a file program and then...

• 2:29Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:30Speaker 00

  Yeah, even grep wouldn't make it because there's all these people competing, saying which one is actually the best grep.

• 2:34Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 2:35Speaker 02

  I would actually love to see a full just conference, nothing but dedicating to finding the best grep. That's what I want, a week-long track.

• 2:42Speaker 03

  That has to exist.

• 2:42Speaker 01

  That's what it would be every year, it's the best software conference, colon, and then it's just whichever thing is gonna be debated that conference, right? grep one year, editor the next year, whatever, yeah.

• 2:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, I feel like everyone walks in the room, it's a giant conference, you go, "The answer is RIP grep, let's get drunk."

• 2:59Speaker 01

  Yep, yep. Short circuit.

• 3:02Speaker 00

  Alright, so as usual, before we get started on knowing about these nice times, because I have some good stories. I have some really good stories from it.

• 3:10Speaker 03

  I wanna hear it.

• 3:11Speaker 00

  I would like to hear what Trash has for a snack today, because I'm feeling, I didn't eat breakfast, so I'm like jonesing for some food.

• 3:19Speaker 03

  Dude, I finished it before the call, I just had a whole bag of spicy...

• 3:23Speaker 02

  A whole bag?

• 3:24Speaker 03

  But, but...

• 3:26Speaker 00

  Well, okay, what's a pop corner?

• 3:27Speaker 03

  I got two fortune cookies, I'm buying a snack.

• 3:29Speaker 01

  Nice dude.

• 3:30Speaker 00

  If you're anything like me, you have a bunch of ideas, but perhaps you're a bit disorganized. So often I find myself having a long brainstorming session, but at the end of it, I just have a big markdown file and then, of course, at that point, I've lost everything. Hey, stop doing that. You gotta check out Linear and use the Linear MCP. I have a big conversation, I come up with a bunch of ideas, and at the end, I get a set of tickets that are actually all the things that I need to do. And when I don't know what to work on, I go, "Hey, agent, go to Linear and tell me what I need to do next, and it will find exactly what I need to work on." This has been so successful for me that I'm in actual serious danger of completing a project. Go to linear.app/terminal and get six months for free on Linear.

• 4:15Speaker 00

  Thank you for supporting the channel, and thank you Linear for sponsoring the video.

• 4:18Speaker 01

  You wanna know what's pretty, pretty tight? I'm just gonna tell you this right now, if you go buy those bags of like, of fortune cookie rejects, you know the ones that are flat? Have you seen those?

• 4:28Speaker 03

  Wait, what, they're just like flat circles?

• 4:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, so like, there's this fort-

• 4:32Speaker 00

  They're like Jesus papers?

• 4:33Speaker 01

  There's a fortune cookie-

• 4:33Speaker 02

  Casey, do you mean the paper?

• 4:35Speaker 01

  No.

• 4:36Speaker 02

  You mean the paper?

• 4:36Speaker 01

  No, I'm not, no. Okay, so here's the thing. True story, anyone who lives in the Seattle area, there's a fortune cookie factory down in the International District. And you can go to there and you can walk in, and in the front, they just have these big bags, they're like, really, they're quite large, of fortune cookie rejects. They're the fortune cookies that don't get folded up properly by the machine, and they're just flat. They're just a flat disc. It's the, it's the material of a fortune cookie, if it didn't get folded up into the fortune cookie shape. And these are delicious, like, they are so frickin' good.

• 5:11Speaker 00

  Casey, quick question, do they still contain fortunes?

• 5:15Speaker 01

  Uh, there are usually just like stray pieces of paper in the bag that have the fortunes on them, so yes, but they're not, they don't, aren't contained by the cookie, because the cookie by definition has no interior. It's like, you know, it's like Galahad's dream, it only is a flat, uh, disc, but, yeah, uh, anyway, continue.

• 5:32Speaker 00

  No, actually, I actually have one more question about, uh, fortune cookie rejection. Is there a, is there fortune cookies you can buy that were rejected not because they were made incorrect? But because their fortunes were like, really bad?

• 5:43Speaker 01

  No, not at this place, although I have had that same thought, and I don't know if anyone's ever done it, but I think there should be a company where, that you can order fortune cookies from, where all of the fortunes are really extremely disturbing. Uh, I don't know if that exists or not, but I, I would order fortune cookies from that company.

• 5:59Speaker 00

  Miss Fortune Cookies would go so hard.

• 6:01Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 6:02Speaker 03

  You wouldn't know the fortune's bad unless you opened them, right?

• 6:05Speaker 01

  Well, you know they're bad when you, when you order from MissFortunes.com.

• 6:09Speaker 03

  Oh, I thought somebody from like a quality control standpoint, like, oh, this is a bad fortune, I'm like, did you open it?

• 6:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 6:15Speaker 02

  There is a guy at a fortune cookie factory who does like, get a random fortune, he takes it out, and then he has to log it, and after one week, he says, did it come true or not?

• 6:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 6:23Speaker 02

  And then if the ratios get off, they have to-

• 6:25Speaker 03

  This one says, "Love is the way to a joyful heart." It's a nice one.

• 6:29Speaker 02

  See, that's a question for you, though. That's generic.

• 6:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't.

• 6:33Speaker 00

  Trash. I want specific advice for trash.

• 6:35Speaker 01

  One thing that, this is a complaint that I have with fortune cookies in general, is oftentimes when you open up a fortune cookie, it is a saying, not a fortune. Like, a fortune cookie should have a fortune. Like, you know, you will, you will have, you will stub your toe in three weeks. That's a fortune. Like, you, um, being happy is a good way to live your life is not a for- that's not a fortune. That's just advice.

• 6:58Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 6:58Speaker 00

  Alright, someone just said this in chat, and it's blowing my mind. What if, hear me out here.

• 7:02Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 7:03Speaker 00

  What if we did ads in misfortune cookies?

• 7:09Speaker 01

  What does that mean? You put advertisements?

• 7:10Speaker 00

  That means not only do you get a, you get a fortune such as you'll stub your toe within the next three weeks. Which, by the way, how good would your toe stubbing feel? If you stubbed your toe and it landed and lined up with the misfortune? Like, it wouldn't even feel bad anymore. You'd be like, whoa, that actually came true.

• 7:23Speaker 01

  You'd be like, ow, yes!

• 7:24Speaker 03

  I think that's true. I think it would still hurt really bad.

• 7:27Speaker 00

  I think you'd be stoked. Uh, let's see, but on the other side, it was just like, sign up for facebook.com. Connect with your friends, right? Like, think about it.

• 7:36Speaker 03

  Kick you while you're down.

• 7:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:37Speaker 03

  You know?

• 7:38Speaker 01

  It's like, I, I found out I was gonna stub my toe and also learned about Code Rabbit, or whatever.

• 7:46Speaker 01

  Great, this cookie is so good.

• 7:48Speaker 02

  It gets more awkward when it's a company we've actually used as a sponsor. I think you would.

• 7:52Speaker 01

  Look, man, if you're gonna make fortune cookies, you should do them with people who actually paid you. None of this free advertising crap.

• 8:00Speaker 02

  Well, I was thinking maybe we could just-

• 8:01Speaker 01

  Like Popcorners, where is the Popcorners payment? Why have we not received a big fat check from Popcorners? We're here pimping their product.

• 8:08Speaker 03

  Someone has to work there that has seen the stand-up. Actually, I have a new financial advisor, and I was telling him about the podcast. I was like, check it out. So I have a meeting with him tomorrow. I expect the full report.

• 8:16Speaker 02

  Where did you meet your new financial advisor, Trash?

• 8:19Speaker 00

  It was a fortune cookie.

• 8:21Speaker 01

  On Tinder.

• 8:23Speaker 03

  I'm dealing with a lot of identity theft right now, by the way. It's like awful, if you could imagine.

• 8:28Speaker 01

  Having a password would probably help that a little bit. A unique password.

• 8:33Speaker 03

  I met with a federal agent yesterday.

• 8:35Speaker 01

  Are you serious?

• 8:35Speaker 02

  Really?

• 8:36Speaker 03

  No, like, I'm like dealing with some crap.

• 8:38Speaker 01

  What happened?

• 8:39Speaker 03

  Password aside, like, they're just going to town on my jump.

• 8:43Speaker 01

  Everyone wants to be you, dude.

• 8:45Speaker 03

  I don't know.

• 8:45Speaker 00

  Trash, you're the hottest.

• 8:46Speaker 03

  Someone tried to buy a car.

• 8:47Speaker 00

  Snack influencer.

• 8:49Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 8:49Speaker 02

  Wait, someone tried to buy a car with your name?

• 8:51Speaker 03

  Identity, I don't know, man.

• 8:52Speaker 00

  Something you can do, by the way, is you can lock your credit, so no credit can be looked up.

• 8:56Speaker 03

  I know, I froze it. It's already, it's been frozen for a while. So the guy who got caught trying to buy a car, because like it tripped off something.

• 9:02Speaker 01

  Can somebody explain, I, I would just like to point this out. We are in a world where we have had strong cryptographic signatures for like decades. Can someone please explain to me how identity theft still exists? It's absolutely ridiculous that that's still a thing.

• 9:16Speaker 00

  Casey, I would, I would love to tell you about that, but before I do, I, can I tell you just a quick childhood story?

• 9:23Speaker 01

  Uh, yes.

• 9:23Speaker 03

  Of course.

• 9:24Speaker 00

  Uh, yeah, so when I was young, I used to live on Fulton Street.

• 9:27Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 9:29Speaker 01

  I don't know where that is.

• 9:30Speaker 00

  It doesn't really matter because I just am giving away information, which will allow people to steal my identity.

• 9:35Speaker 02

  Keep going.

• 9:36Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 9:36Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. So my mother's maiden name, like, right? All you have to do is just socially engineer just a little bit and you get so many of these passcodes that people can get in. Security question linked, right? Um, I don't know.

• 9:48Speaker 02

  For Prime to say, when I was young, I stole a lot of identities. Not proud of it.

• 9:52Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 9:53Speaker 01

  Wait, Prime, are you basically, uh, are you like Don Draper? Like, is you, are, did you like go to war and then like come home as somebody else? And now you've, like, that's the Primogen, the real Primogen got blowed up by a hand grenade?

• 10:07Speaker 02

  Casey, spoilers, okay? I just started Mad Men. I'm on season one.

• 10:12Speaker 01

  Are you kidding me right now?

• 10:14Speaker 02

  We have a rule.

• 10:14Speaker 03

  I've never seen it. I just Googled who that was.

• 10:16Speaker 01

  Are you kidding me? You guys have not seen Mad Men?

• 10:19Speaker 03

  No, I know the meme, it's the guy who's like, that's where he stands up in front of the blink.

• 10:23Speaker 01

  This is, it's not, it's not a spoiler, by the way. You find out immediately that this is true. It's not really a spoiler for the series at all, but... What is wrong with you? That's like one of the best shows ever made. Like if you're going to watch one show, you watch Mad Men.

• 10:36Speaker 00

  Okay, I'll literally watch with my beautiful wife, starting Saturday.

• 10:41Speaker 02

  Oh, can I come over?

• 10:41Speaker 01

  It's incredible, and everyone loves Don Draper. Your beautiful wife will love Don Draper.

• 10:47Speaker 00

  Can I interrupt for one quick second? Bacon just asked if he could come over. Just as like a little just heads up for everybody. Never watch a movie with Bacon.

• 10:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, you didn't need to tell me that.

• 10:56Speaker 00

  He literally never shuts the hell up.

• 10:58Speaker 02

  There's things you guys have to know about the movie.

• 11:00Speaker 03

  Shocker, that's shocking.

• 11:02Speaker 00

  You know Mystery Science Theater 3000?

• 11:04Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 11:05Speaker 00

  Bacon is like the combination of all three characters, slightly less funny, and talks 50% more.

• 11:10Speaker 02

  Oh, I am sometimes, I hit, I sometimes get a hit. That's how Mystery Science Theater is too. But here, wait, I can defend myself. Cause you like a movie, right? Let's for instance say maybe a movie like Drumline. You watch it once, I get to talk over it, tell you stories. You didn't get to watch all of it. You get to enjoy that movie again. Like you didn't even watch it the first time. If it's a good movie, it's good. If it's a bad movie, it improves it as well. It always makes it better.

• 11:34Speaker 01

  I see. I see what you're saying.

• 11:36Speaker 00

  Can I tell you guys something?

• 11:38Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 11:38Speaker 00

  I don't like the movie Drumline.

• 11:40Speaker 01

  I don't even know it, I've never even heard of it.

• 11:41Speaker 02

  You can't say that.

• 11:42Speaker 01

  What is Drumline? I've never heard of it.

• 11:44Speaker 02

  It's Nick Cannon's magnum opus.

• 11:46Speaker 00

  Main character is just so unlikable the entire time.

• 11:50Speaker 01

  Okay. I'm okay with that.

• 11:51Speaker 00

  He ends unlikable.

• 11:53Speaker 01

  I'd be okay with that, though. I like Arrested Development. Everyone in that show is unlikable. I love Nightcrawler. Nightcrawler is the epitome of unlikable protagonists. It's one of my favorite movies.

• 12:02Speaker 00

  Oh, really? You like Nightcrawler?

• 12:05Speaker 01

  Loved that movie. Loved that movie.

• 12:09Speaker 02

  Oh my gosh.

• 12:11Speaker 03

  Pokemon Center just dropped while you guys were talking, and I gotta get in the line.

• 12:15Speaker 01

  Alright, so Trash is out for a little while. So what are we doing in this episode? This is the worst episode we've ever had already, and we haven't even started it.

• 12:23Speaker 03

  Look at all this stuff I just got.

• 12:24Speaker 01

  What the hell is that, Trash?

• 12:26Speaker 02

  That is actually crazy. How much money is that box worth?

• 12:28Speaker 01

  What is that?

• 12:29Speaker 03

  Too much. Too much.

• 12:31Speaker 01

  What even is all that crap?

• 12:32Speaker 02

  Here's Pokemon.

• 12:34Speaker 00

  Do you, are you starting to get to the point where you have ancillary cost? To your Pokemon, meaning that you now actually have to buy a separate shelf? Just to store those ones, like you've actually hit, like, uh, you're into incidentals at this point to have so many Pokemon.

• 12:48Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's a problem right now. It's a problem.

• 12:50Speaker 01

  Are you suffering from Pokemon addiction? Is this a, like, do we need to have an intervention here, Prime? I mean, uh, Trash?

• 12:56Speaker 03

  Well, what's gonna happen is all my kids are just gonna come in here and they're just gonna rip it all up. So that's, that's the idea.

• 13:00Speaker 01

  Alright, okay, alright.

• 13:01Speaker 03

  You know, you know? But I do have a problem, for sure.

• 13:05Speaker 00

  At least you can admit it.

• 13:06Speaker 02

  Step one. You're there.

• 13:07Speaker 01

  Alright, so what are we doing today?

• 13:08Speaker 00

  Alright, let's get started. How about Casey, how about you get, you go first, because I think, uh, generally speaking, a lot of people inside of this audience would love to hear about Better Software Conf. Just because it's like, it's this mysterious conference? That is, uh, filled with like, the coolest people in the universe, so.

• 13:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, so, okay, so Better Software Conference is, this is the second time it's been held. The first time it was held was last year. Uh, this is a conference that is held in Sweden in the middle of nowhere. Uh, no one could ever possibly find it without an invitation to the conference. Uh, and it's unclear that you would want to find it without an invitation to the con-. It is literally like it's you and some moose, and that's about it that is at this conference.

• 13:55Speaker 01

  Um, and it is dedicated to exactly what its name implies. It's just for people who, uh, think that soft, that, you know, software is not particularly good right now, and would like it to be better. So for example, if you're the kind of person who boots up Adobe Premiere and thinks that that's a pretty good video editing experience, this is not the conference for you. If you boot up Adobe Premiere and you wanna throw your computer through a window, this is the conference for you, right? And so, uh, the, the conference is structured in such a way that there's like, two days on either end that are just for participants to like, hang out with each other and talk about, like, software development and things like that.

• 14:35Speaker 01

  And then there's three days, like, the interior of it is three days of, uh, just talks and stuff where people are talking about things they're working on that are, you know, attempting to make better software. Uh, that's how it's structured.

• 14:49Speaker 01

  And, I mean, yeah, I wanted to support this conference because I feel like not very many conferences... I feel like it's very hard to find a conference that acknowledges that software currently is terrible, which, you know, is my kind of opinion on it. Like, I feel like it's massively under-delivering on the potential that it, you know... If you think about what we could be doing with the hardware that we have, and you look at the average user experience across most of the things that they're using today, I think it's like we're massively underperforming where we could be. And it's, you know, normally at pretty much anywhere I would go, or on the internet, or anything like that, it's an uphill battle. Like, most people are just like, "You're just stupid. You don't know what you're talking about. Like, you obviously, I don't know, you're a game...

• 15:34Speaker 00

  They're right, Casey. I don't think you'd realize how complex Notion is. Okay?

• 15:38Speaker 01

  All that, all that stuff, right?

• 15:39Speaker 00

  You think you could just enter text?

• 15:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:41Speaker 00

  You think you could just, like, type text, you crazy man? Okay, it takes a lot of processing to get that done.

• 15:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, and so, you know, that's how it normally is, and that's fine. I'm used to it. It's been that way for 20 years, I've been saying this stuff. And so, that's fine. That's just how it is. It's nice to have one conference where you go and, like, you're not gonna get pushed back. Like, if you're like, "You know, I should be able to type text at full speed into an edit box." Like, that's... "I should be able to paste. I should be able to cut and paste text into an edit box. The scroll bar should be visible on the screen, so I know that I can scroll the window." Like, basic crap like that, you can say that at this conference and nobody thinks you're ridiculous, right? Whereas normally, you say those things and you're like, "Oh, you just don't understand." Like, clean user interface means that there's no UI anywhere. You're just supposed to guess if there's a scroll bar or how you might scroll the window, right?

• 16:26Speaker 01

  And so, it's really, that's what the conference is mostly for, is people who are in that mindset and to be supportive of that mindset. And so, it's niche in that sense, because most developers, I don't think, would agree with that. They think, like, all this stuff is good or something. I'm not... I mean, I don't know what they think. I don't want to put words in their mouth, but I usually get pushed back for saying things are, like, low-performance or whatever. So that's what it is. And for the past two years, because I wanted to support it, I did the lead off, like I did the the opening talk. Because in terms of like visibility, like people who have a lot of like, you know, followers on social media, or who have YouTube channels that a lot of people watch, you know, not a lot of the people there had that, you

• 17:10Speaker 01

  know, going into it. And so I was kind of just trying, you know, it's basically like an awareness raising thing. I did the opening talk. And so the big oops, the one that I did, that was kind of that history talk on sort of the, you know, ideas of object oriented programming from the early days. That was my opening, that was the talk that opened BSC in 2025. And then this year, 2026, I did another one of that kind. It was on premature optimization is the root of all evil, the history of that saying, where it came from, what the environment of programming was like at the time, and like who the main figures were involved in it and all that sort of stuff. It's the same kind of lecture.

• 17:49Speaker 00

  Casey, one question?

• 17:50Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 17:51Speaker 00

  Would you say today that the use of premature optimization is the root of all evil is the root of all evil?

• 17:56Speaker 01

  Um, I wouldn't.

• 18:00Speaker 00

  I gotta chuckle.

• 18:01Speaker 01

  I wouldn't. I know where you're going with that. I wouldn't necessarily disagree with you when you're what you're saying there. But I wouldn't say that because I think in software, we have a lot of problems right now. Like, I don't think just people avoiding optimization is, you know, is the root of all evil. I would say it's a it's a bad thing, like not thinking about optimization enough is is a problem. But we've got a lot of problems. So it's one of it's one of many. It's one of many problems that we have, is I guess how I would state it. So anyway, I gave that talk at this this year's one. And then I think, you know, next year, we'll probably, I'm going to kind of bow out from from doing the opening. So next year, you know, I feel like it's a good time. It's a well established

• 18:43Speaker 01

  conference now. Everyone knows what it is. So I think now it's probably a good time to transition. And I don't know who will be sort of like leading the opening up the conference next year, but it won't be me.

• 18:56Speaker 00

  Is it because the travel's too much? Or what, because Sweden is a long way away?

• 19:00Speaker 01

  Well, I think in terms of me going to it, I might not go next year because the travel is extremely difficult for us to go there. But that's not why I wouldn't be opening it. I just think it's good to have a variety. I don't think you want a conference that Casey opens every year, right? Like, it's not my conference, right? So I think it's good to have kind of just like a variety of people. And it's a well-established conference now. It's proven very popular, so I don't think they'll have any trouble getting someone who they want to open it, right? So I don't think they need me to do it, is another way I would say that, right?

• 19:34Speaker 03

  I have a question.

• 19:35Speaker 01

  So I think that's really good. They've done a great job establishing the conference. They've gotten good talks that had nothing to do with me already, so I think it will be easy for them to put together whatever lineup they want. So I'm not concerned about that at all. But yeah, in terms of getting to the conference, it's two days of travel from the US, because you first have to get to Sweden, and then you have to get out to the middle of nowhere. And so it is demanding travel, and I guess, you know, maybe that's kind of what they're going for. They want it to be a conference that only people who are pretty dedicated and actually want to, who really want to go to it are going to go to it, because it is fairly exclusive. You have to get an invitation to go to it, and so on, so.

• 20:18Speaker 03

  Question, Casey. What's the demographic of the audience there? Is there like game devs, a good mix of?

• 20:24Speaker 01

  No, I would say it's, in fact, there are, like, it's probably 50/50 on game dev and app dev. And the more popular things that have sort of been associated with it and come out of it are actually not games. So, you know, the first year, for example, some of the best stuff had nothing to do with games. There were some really good things at it that did have to do with games, like, for example, the author of Takedown, the voxel destruction game. It's really kind of an amazing technical game, physics game.

• 21:05Speaker 01

  Imagine Minecraft where all the blocks were physically simulated, and could like crumble and destroy. And if you've never seen Takedown, you should check it out. Very, very successful game, lots of copies sold, and very popular. The author of that... Gave a lecture there about how they did the multithreading of the physics, for example. So that was a game lecture. But at that same conference, the author of FilePilot talked about how that was made. And that's obviously has nothing to do with games. That's a file browser for Windows that's awesome. I use it. It's my normal file browser now on Windows. And there was also a talk on like the RAD debugger from Ryan Fleury, right? And that's obviously has nothing to do with games. That's a debugger.

• 21:46Speaker 01

  This year, there was a pretty awesome presentation by the authors of a new video editing package called Blik, B-L-I-C-K, which means, I think, Blink in German or something like that, which was basically people who got together at the last better software conference. And in between now and then, they've basically built a replacement Adobe Premiere that's super fast. And it looks awesome. Like, when that VOD comes out, you should check it out. Okay. It is insane. Like, it's so, it's like instantly fast for everything you do, and has all these great features. Like, they do all this awesome stuff. So you can see, like, instead of just your waveform being this, you know, this, you know, just bland

• 22:28Speaker 01

  thing that you can't read anything from, they do this like FFT on it. So you can see like where the base hits are. And like, it just like, it had so much thought put into it, even for just their initial alpha version. It's so cool. And so like, it's stuff like that that's really inspiring, because you see these people who are like inspired to make better software by the conference and by, you know, this sort of movement. And seeing people actually making this software to replace crappy things that I have to use every day is fantastic. And so I think it's a really cool conference for that reason. And that's basically what it's about. My talks there have both been history talks. But a lot of the talks, and that's just because I wanted something that would set

• 23:12Speaker 01

  an appropriate tone, that would be, you know, that would do well online, that people would come to see, and they'd check out the conference and check out the other talks, because the talks get posted on the conference page. But a lot of the talks there are just about software people are making it's better. Eric Lengel, who is the author of Slug, which is the font rendering library used by, like, used by Apple Computer, like that sort of stuff. Like, it's very, very popular. He also presented a new equation editor that he made that looks absolutely fantastic. And I know this is kind of a niche market for people who make technical papers and write books and things like that. But it was a great presentation. I highly recommend watching that one as well. There's a ton of stuff.

• 23:55Speaker 01

  Someone presented a new, Martin Courtois, I can't pronounce his name, he's French, so I won't try, but presented a new raw image editor that he's been working on that has some really great features on it. So there's a ton of really cool stuff in there to check out.

• 24:06Speaker 00

  Fun fact, Blick, written in Odin.

• 24:09Speaker 01

  Yes, written in Odin. The language that Wikipedia won't recognize now has two major software, two major like art productivity software packages written in it, Jenga FX and Blick. But, you know, not noteworthy, according to Jimmy Wales.

• 24:24Speaker 03

  I have a follow-up question. So you've mentioned it was invite only, which I wasn't aware of, actually.

• 24:30Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 24:31Speaker 03

  How does one get an invite?

• 24:32Speaker 00

  Ooh.

• 24:33Speaker 01

  I don't know. Obviously, people who have gone before and are closely associated with the conference can obviously get you an invite. Like, if you asked me, I would ask them, could you please invite Trash or whatever? So one way is to know someone who goes, who could like, ask, right?

• 24:53Speaker 00

  Casey, can I go?

• 24:54Speaker 01

  Other than that, I don't know.

• 24:55Speaker 00

  Casey, can I go?

• 24:56Speaker 01

  Absolutely. Prime, you already had an invitation. I feel like they sent you an invitation for 2025.

• 25:02Speaker 00

  They did, yeah, I couldn't go.

• 25:03Speaker 01

  So, yeah, but I mean, yes, I can absolutely like, pass it along. But in terms of how you actually normally get an invite, I don't really know. It's not my conference. Like I said, I wanted to be very supportive of the conference, so I am associated with it in the sense that I tried to like, give them a good signal boost. But I have no, like, you know, I obviously can send messages to the organizers or whatever, but I am not responsible for it and I have no particular clout. So they could also tell me no.

• 25:32Speaker 00

  I have no particular clout.

• 25:34Speaker 01

  Can you invite Trash and they're like, no? And I don't know, I can't, there's nothing I could do about it, right? So I don't have any authority, I have no power here. I'm just a dude who gave the opening talk, right?

• 25:44Speaker 02

  Well, Prime, it sounds like Casey's setting you up right now, okay? He doesn't want to... Open up the next one. Maybe you could open the next one. I got a good idea too. Since you're now a game dev writing stuff in Odin, they want the conference to be hard to go to. Right? They put it in North Sweden in the Swedish woods, I'm assuming.

• 25:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 26:00Speaker 02

  What we should do is we should build a tower that attacks the people trying to get in. And they have to make it past our tower.

• 26:07Speaker 01

  Oh, my God.

• 26:07Speaker 02

  To get into the conference.

• 26:08Speaker 01

  It's gated.

• 26:09Speaker 00

  Oh, I like it.

• 26:10Speaker 01

  Gatekeeping, like, like, this is the most, forget gatekeeping. Gatekeeping is tired. Wired is towerkeeping. Like, we are towerkeeping this conference.

• 26:19Speaker 00

  I like this.

• 26:20Speaker 02

  Like, I like the idea of someone's packing, they're packing a shield and armor. It's like, what are you doing? I'm going to a software conference.

• 26:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 26:25Speaker 02

  I don't even know if I'll get in.

• 26:25Speaker 01

  I'm trying, I'm trying to go to a software conference. I don't know if I will make it. Yeah.

• 26:31Speaker 00

  I like this idea. Because if they don't make it in, they die. They're obviously not ready for better, better software conferences.

• 26:38Speaker 01

  Yeah. And when, another thing that's weird about this conference, this has nothing to do with anything, but let's end on this. And then we can talk about open source. Is the weirdest thing about this conference is like, it's in the middle of nowhere. Right? And so, you know, the entire lodging of the town is taken up by this conference. And I mean that literally. There is nothing, there's, there's nothing. When the conference occurs, that's it. There'd be nowhere to stay. If you were like a traveler who was trying to stay over in this town, there's nothing. Forget it. You're not staying there.

• 27:07Speaker 01

  So it's kind of like ridiculous, right? And it takes up the entire, like, you know, place where this, the entire lodging that this town has. You would not expect this. But the place where it's held, the food, all the food is included. Like, your breakfast, lunch, and dinner is just included with the conference pass that you buy.

• 27:28Speaker 01

  The food, both years, has been absolutely outstanding. I do not know what the deal is, but, because when I've gone to Sweden, generally speaking, I apologize to the Swedes for this. I'm, I'm sorry, I'm just being honest. Like, in Stockholm, when I eat there, I don't think it's a particularly good food city. Like, like, it's not like when you go to Tokyo or something and you're like, oh, my God, the food here is outstanding. Like, I went and bought this shitty thing for $5 and it was like the best one I've ever had. Right? It's like, it's not like that where you just, everywhere you go in Tokyo, the food is incredible. Right? It's not like that. It's the opposite of that. You go to Stockholm, you're like, well, some of the pastries are okay. Most of the food I had is pretty mediocre or whatever, right? It's like, you wouldn't go there to eat.

• 28:08Speaker 01

  But this town, in the middle of nowhere, whoever this chef is at this venue, the food is absolutely incredible. I do not know what it is, but every year, every single dinner and lunch, you're like, "This is really good. What's going on?" So anyway...

• 28:26Speaker 00

  That is actually a huge selling point to go to this conference, because typically when you go to a conference, the food and the stuff is just like, "Here's a cold sandwich." Right? So that is awesome to hear that this is like...

• 28:36Speaker 01

  No, it's weird. The breakfast is whatever. Like, the breakfast is just a normal, like, hotel breakfast kind of a thing where it's just whatever. There's some, like, eggs. You won't be particularly impressed by the breakfast. But the lunch and the dinner, every time, I'm like, I scoop this, because it's like served buffet style. Like, all the attendees there, there's all these hot plates and stuff. I'm like, "This is... I'm like, "This is really frickin' good. What is going on?" So I don't know how that worked out. Just random luck, I guess. It's both years. So, anyway, there you go.

• 29:05Speaker 00

  All right, a quick question from the audience, which is from last Royal Raven. Did you try a sirstroming in Sweden? A sirstroming?

• 29:14Speaker 01

  Is that some kind of sex act? Because I didn't have a chance. I don't know...

• 29:17Speaker 00

  You didn't have a chance for that?

• 29:19Speaker 01

  I didn't get my sirstromed, if that's what you're asking. I don't know what that is.

• 29:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, fermented fish. It's a fermented tinned fish that some people say is quite pungent.

• 29:29Speaker 00

  Casey, you were way off.

• 29:31Speaker 01

  Probably I have not tried it. What I will say...

• 29:33Speaker 02

  Oh, you know when you try it.

• 29:35Speaker 01

  What I will say, well, let me just add something to that, though. That is what a lot of people say, but I find that my tolerance for your country's weird food is shockingly high. Like, everyone was all going on about, "Oh, my god, you're gonna..." Like, "Natto is terrible. Like, don't ever eat it." I ate it and I was like, "It's fine."

• 29:55Speaker 00

  Have you had lutefisk?

• 29:55Speaker 01

  Very little reaction.

• 29:57Speaker 00

  Is sirstroming like lutefisk?

• 30:00Speaker 01

  I've heard of ludifisk, but I don't.

• 30:03Speaker 03

  I don't know what that is.

• 30:04Speaker 00

  You've never had ludifisk, the Christmas treat?

• 30:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, tr- treat, treat might be putting, might be a little optimistic.

• 30:11Speaker 03

  What is it? Like, what?

• 30:12Speaker 00

  Just a little bit of fermented fish.

• 30:15Speaker 03

  Oh, is that that, that stinky thing that people like?

• 30:17Speaker 00

  Yeah, jellyfish.

• 30:18Speaker 03

  They open it?

• 30:19Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 30:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, I just, that particular fish, like, someone mentioned it. You're not allowed to bring it on planes. That's the one, if you open the can on plane, it is like a, "We need to land."

• 30:28Speaker 01

  Okay, so like a stench, like a real stench?

• 30:30Speaker 02

  Yes, it is a real stench.

• 30:32Speaker 01

  True story, one time, Mitch, the sales guy at RAD, like, microwaved some cod in the microwave at the office, and it stunk so bad that I just worked from home for a week. It was the worst stenching of an office I have ever experienced. And we were pretty small at that time, we were only like five people or something like that, so the office wasn't very big. So this just really, it, it, yeah, so I can understand that. If you've got something, if you've got one of those pungent fish things, you should not be able to open that on a plane. That's not allowed.

• 31:01Speaker 00

  You know, I, I actually feel genuinely bad buying beef jerky, just because even that alone is like pretty pungent for the people around you.

• 31:09Speaker 01

  Except for Kobo beef jerky, which we've, or, which is now like, this podcast has been responsible for so many orders apparently at this point.

• 31:17Speaker 00

  I love this idea that we have somebody that is not affiliated with the podcast, but we keep bringing them up in almost a sponsored style sounding.

• 31:25Speaker 01

  There's just a tiny little operation. It's like, you know, it's like a, a husband and wife team, I think, that just makes the jerky by hand. So I felt really good about the fact that all these, on their Instagram, they're showing all these orders lining up. I was like, oh, we did something good.

• 31:38Speaker 00

  Wait, hold on. They're not vi- they're not vibe jerking? Like, nobody, nobody makes jerky by hand anymore, okay? Everybody vibe jerkies.

• 31:45Speaker 01

  Yeah. Haven't you tried Claude Fable's new jerky? It's, it's way better than, than OpenAI's latest jerky drop.

• 31:51Speaker 00

  It's true. Honestly, it scored way higher on the benchmarks.

• 31:54Speaker 01

  Way higher on Jerky Bench.

• 31:57Speaker 01

  All right, so Prime, let's swap conferences. Oh, and I'll just, and by the VODs for Better Software Comments will probably start rolling out in two weeks once Sander has a chance. Sander does the AV there, he's amazing, he's really good. He does like this pro-level AV, because he works in the film industry. He does like pro-level AV for the conference, like basically by himself. It's kind of incredible.

• 32:17Speaker 00

  I saw you on the AV bench, like you were up and... Yeah, I was gonna bring that up. What were you doing in there?

• 32:22Speaker 01

  I thought he did such an amazing job last time and he was basically all by himself. He has a camera guy who like does the camera for him while he does all the stuff. So this year I was like, "Hey, after my talk, man, like just show me how to do it so you can take a break sometimes." So I didn't do as good as he did, obviously, because I was kind of a novice, so like I can't do as good as Sander, but I kind of learned how to do it. I learned how to do the switching of the camera, which camera angle we were doing, and learned how to do the audience faders and stuff like that to get like on the mix board and all that stuff. And so, you know, I filled in for him, I had a blast doing it. I didn't really get good enough in the short time I was doing at the conference to really be a proper stand-in for Sander, but I did the best I could, and he got to take a break, so that was good. But yeah, he's amazing.

• 33:07Speaker 01

  The reason the conference looks and sounds so good is just because he is a pro, like literally, like what he does for a job is being on film shoots, doing the audio for film shoots. He's like a legit like film audio guy.

• 33:20Speaker 00

  Oh, that's cool.

• 33:21Speaker 01

  And so you go up there and, you know, the AV bank just is insane. He's got like all the like special mics with the headset mics with the things and all that stuff, and he's got it all wired in mixers, he's got the custom like key, one of the, like, you know, the custom like stream deck things set up for like all these different camera inputs, so you can switch between like stage and zoomed and slides and all this stuff, and they have animated transitions. So it's just really pro, and it's hilarious, because I've been at so many conferences that were like these, you know, multimillion-dollar conferences that, you know, big corporations were running, and the AV is garbage, right? You go to this one that was like done by some people, some people who just kind of did it in their spare time to hold this conference, and because Sander was one of the three, you

• 34:05Speaker 01

  know, main people who put it together, the AV is like astronomically good, so that was pretty cool. Anyway, so the VODs will be rolling out. In a couple of weeks, once Sander gets back from vacation, because he's taking a much-needed break right now, when he comes back, he'll edit those together and put them up, and you can check out BSC 2026's, including my lecture and including other people's, like that Blick presentation I think is really cool that you can watch. So, Open Sauce, you guys, while this was happening, you were at something called Open Sauce, which to me, sounds like what happens when you open sauce. Like, I'm gonna pour it on to something.

• 34:40Speaker 00

  Oh, I like it, Casey.

• 34:41Speaker 01

  But, I don't know, that's just a literal...

• 34:43Speaker 03

  It's open sauce, but like, northeast, it was a New England accent, open sauce, but you coat it in open sauce?

• 34:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 34:48Speaker 03

  That's how I picture it.

• 34:49Speaker 01

  Like, cock-a-doodle-doo, you gotta open the sauce. You're gonna open that sauce, stir the sauce, open the sauce, put it on stuff, I don't know.

• 34:58Speaker 03

  That was really good.

• 35:00Speaker 01

  I'm from Massachusetts. I'm literally from Massachusetts.

• 35:03Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah, that's why I can't do it.

• 35:05Speaker 01

  Like, when I used to play Little League, for the town, the next town over, Maynard, they had like, super, super strong Boston accents, like, with, and saying like, retard all the time, always.

• 35:18Speaker 00

  Oh, I love it.

• 35:19Speaker 01

  They're always like, they're like, "That's retarded. Come on, that's totally retarded." All the time. Every, everything you do, like, if you strike out, that's retarded.

• 35:28Speaker 02

  You gotta get Casey back to Massachusetts, see the accent come back out. We're definitely gonna plan something there.

• 35:32Speaker 03

  I'm dying.

• 35:33Speaker 01

  Anyway, so, Open Sauce. Prime, tell the audience about Open Sauce. You went to Open Sauce, where was it? Is that in California? I don't even know. I've never even been to Open Sauce, I didn't even heard of Open Sauce before I heard that you guys was going.

• 35:47Speaker 03

  Could you imagine if Casey's just actually talking like this all the time?

• 35:49Speaker 00

  Casey...

• 35:50Speaker 03

  Can you say, "Welcome to computerenhanced.com" or something?

• 35:53Speaker 01

  Sure. "Welcome, computerenhanced.com, we got a lot of great programming stuff for you to do here." We look at the code, we look at the assembly language, we see how long it's taken, I don't know. It's not my problem, you know, I ran the thing, the benchmarks, it ran crappy, so we tried to fix it. The process is a piece of shit, I don't know what's going on. Anyway, I'm gonna go make some linguine.

• 36:22Speaker 00

  That's really good.

• 36:23Speaker 01

  Oh, I wish I could do that.

• 36:24Speaker 00

  I wish I could do that, too. Afterwards, I'm gonna take this recording and just like sit in my room.

• 36:28Speaker 01

  Practice.

• 36:29Speaker 00

  Retat it. Retat. Retat.

• 36:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 36:34Speaker 00

  I love that. Okay, so, little fun fact about Open Sauce. It was its fourth year as a conference. I believe the original intent was after Maker Faire went out of business or stopped happening, there was no alternative. There was nothing where a bunch of people who build stuff can get together and show people that they built stuff.

• 36:51Speaker 01

  Can you, for those of us who don't really know much about this, can you also explain kind of what Maker Faire was? Because I was kinda out of the loop on that, too.

• 36:58Speaker 00

  I've never been to Maker Faire, but the general vibe that I've gathered from it is that like, you know, there's a bunch of people that just make things, 3D print them, hardware, kind of slap everything together, and it's like, "Look, Home Arcade. Look, I've made, you know, this is a wheelchair that goes 40 miles an hour."

• 37:14Speaker 01

  Okay, cool. Okay.

• 37:16Speaker 00

  Like, that kind of stuff.

• 37:16Speaker 01

  Like, homebrew shit. Yeah.

• 37:18Speaker 00

  Yeah, stuff that's very unusual. Like, the first year I went, the first, one of the first things I saw was somebody made the International Space Station, and it would position itself and like, near an Earth orbit for exactly where it was, including its like, rotation and all that.

• 37:33Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 37:34Speaker 00

  So it's like, it's nothing that's like, super useful, but a lot of like, just super cool things that happened.

• 37:40Speaker 01

  Cool.

• 37:41Speaker 00

  So it's pretty dang awesome. And so the first year I went was three years ago, so I didn't go to the first Open Sauce. I went to the second Open Sauce. And it was an absolutely amazing experience, so of course I went last year. Absolutely amazing experience. That's where I got to meet Eric Comment Etiquette. If you know Comment Etiquette, one of my favorite YouTube channels, he's the one that shows you how to have proper and polite discourse on the internet.

• 38:02Speaker 01

  Oh, really?

• 38:04Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's very funny. A lot of like, Hillary deleted her emails type stuff and all that. Bush did 9/11 inside job. And just like, it's just the most unhinged emails, or the most unhinged comments of all time. Very funny.

• 38:13Speaker 01

  Okay, perfect. So this is facetiously, facetiously.

• 38:17Speaker 00

  Yes. I think he was a writer for several years on Always Sunny. Is that, is that what it was?

• 38:21Speaker 01

  Oh, wow. Okay.

• 38:23Speaker 00

  He was a writer on some show for a long time. Very funny guy. Like, when you... It's, I forget what it was, but it's very, very good. Anyways, very funny guy.

• 38:33Speaker 00

  He uh, so got to meet a bunch like you get like a lot of really cool YouTubers are there. Michael Reeves, Doug, Doug, William Osman, Backyard Scientist, like all these people.

• 38:42Speaker 01

  The Primogen.

• 38:43Speaker 00

  I was there as well. Uh, Vegan Bot may have heard of him, pretty awesome.

• 38:46Speaker 02

  Well Casey, if there's anyone on YouTube, you'll be like, wait, who's that person? They have a giant line. You find out that's a person who's a chemistry YouTuber, who has 10 million, and they build the most dangerous chemicals every week. It'll almost die. And then, wait, who's that right there? It's like, they make home rockets and have 10 million subs and people.

• 39:02Speaker 01

  Got it.

• 39:03Speaker 02

  Every single variation of science, there's someone there doing it at a intense, large level in their backyard. And like.

• 39:11Speaker 01

  And almost dying.

• 39:12Speaker 00

  And a lot of backyard.

• 39:14Speaker 03

  That's a big part of it.

• 39:15Speaker 00

  Asterisk, right? It's just like all, all.

• 39:17Speaker 01

  There's a lot of like, don't try this at home. No, really, don't try this at home.

• 39:21Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 39:21Speaker 00

  Yes. Most of them, they're like, I don't even have to warn you because you don't have this $150,000 machine. That also needs a $150,000 processor that also, like, it's just like, you don't even. Unless if you're a giant company, you won't even have these things. So it's like, they're just crazy items.

• 39:37Speaker 01

  There is, have you guys ever read the article? It's kind of, it's old at this point, but it was called The Atomic Boy Scout?

• 39:44Speaker 00

  No.

• 39:46Speaker 01

  So I feel like uh, it, what you're saying just kind of stirred a memory. I'd forgotten about this, but a long time ago, there was kind of like the OG. Don't do this at home YouTuber before YouTube. Uh, there was a kid who decided for his Boy Scout like merit badge. He was gonna try to build a nuclear reactor.

• 40:07Speaker 02

  Great.

• 40:07Speaker 01

  And so he started like buying like old clocks that had like the radium backplate on the like bioluminescent, like the, the, not bioluminescent. Backplate and scraping it off. And he succeeded in making like a nuclear thing to the point where uh, his backyard ended up having to kind of be condemned. And like, I, it's sad, like, I totally had forgotten about this article. It was pretty famous. And I was like, oh, that guy was just a YouTuber before YouTube. Anyway, continue, sorry.

• 40:37Speaker 00

  Yeah, someone asked if Styro Pyro was there? Yes, Doug was there, Styro Pyro.

• 40:41Speaker 02

  Definitely was there.

• 40:42Speaker 00

  Yeah, like so many people were like Nile Red, that's the big famous chemical YouTuber. There's all these people that you'd go and find and they're like all there, so pretty much every-

• 40:51Speaker 01

  So what'd you do? What'd you do? What'd you do at the conference?

• 40:53Speaker 00

  Well, let me tell you.

• 40:54Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 40:54Speaker 00

  So, uh, the last couple of years, I was on panels, right? We yapped, or I did a Family Feud, kinda just did like joke stuff with the other creators. But this year, they gave me, uh, the, the main stage for 45 minutes, which was a lot of fun. So I got main stage, uh, Saturday, right in the middle of the day, so 12:40, pretty awesome. And we threw a very big event, which was fantastic, effectively like 2,000 plus people showed up for this event. And so let me kinda walk you through what happened, cause I think it was a lot of fun. Uh, photos and stuff are gonna be coming out, and I'm sure we'll have a video and all that at some point. But right now, you're just gonna, we're gonna have to go a cappella on this one, okay?

• 41:33Speaker 01

  Was Teach there, or is it just you and me?

• 41:35Speaker 02

  Oh, yes.

• 41:35Speaker 00

  Oh, I'm gonna tell you all about it.

• 41:37Speaker 02

  That's why, that's why Teach isn't here right now.

• 41:39Speaker 01

  Oh, cause he partied a little too hard.

• 41:40Speaker 00

  He went too hard.

• 41:41Speaker 02

  Oh, my, I, yes.

• 41:42Speaker 00

  Dude, he drank, I saw him at one point drink three Coca-Colas in a single evening.

• 41:47Speaker 01

  What?

• 41:47Speaker 02

  He had two Cokes in his hand, he's like, "I don't wanna get back in lineups, get two at a time." And we were like, "Eh."

• 41:52Speaker 01

  Ca- caffeine-free, I assume?

• 41:55Speaker 02

  He was on Coke Zeroes.

• 41:56Speaker 01

  No! They were real Coca-Colas? Holy cow, alright. Well, he, I've, so he's in like rehab now, or what?

• 42:03Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, he's, he's detoxing right now.

• 42:06Speaker 01

  Cool. Well, hey, man, sometimes you go a little too, sometimes life gets away from you.

• 42:09Speaker 00

  Yeah, I know, he's on a caffeine drip right now, does kind of ease himself back into, you know, reality.

• 42:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, good idea.

• 42:15Speaker 00

  So, uh, the funny, like fun, little fun backstory, when I asked like, "Hey, I think I got an event, that's pretty cool, you should let me throw it." The answer from the, um, from the organizers were, "Uh, you know, we're really full, I just don't think we can do it." And then I showed them a video of what we were thinking, and they're like, "Oh, yeah, how about, like, how about noon on Saturday, let's do this." And so I was like, "Alright, this is awesome," because it was a fun show. So, the premise of the idea is that we're gonna get on stage. And we have a Nintendo GameCube, a proper copy of, uh, Super Smash Brothers, I put it in there. And then Teach presses a couple buttons and boom, up on the main stage, on the big screen, is Super Smash Brothers. But here's the twist, is that we have created, melee, of course, yes, melee, obviously.

• 43:00Speaker 00

  Uh, we have created a program where bots, written in Python, play the game. But when we start it the first time, everyone just stands there, then someone will jump. And then someone else will jump, like, very, like, nothing, right? So they're, they're, they're empty bots. And then what we do is we show some QR codes on the screen and say, okay, everyone from the audience, we're gonna divvy you up into separate sectors and you get to join in your sector and you guys all prompt an LLM to write the code for your bot.

• 43:35Speaker 00

  And so that way, we play the bot via the Python, but the LLM writes the code for the bot, but the LLM's instructions are from the audience.

• 43:45Speaker 03

  How do you mix all those prompts together?

• 43:48Speaker 01

  So basically, like, the audience, the, the bots are, like, sitting there and they're reading, like, some data file that's, like, what they should do, or are you hot-swapping the code in, like, the LLM writes the code and then you swap it in?

• 44:03Speaker 00

  Yes. Yes, there, there's stuff that allows you to control Super Smash Brothers via Python. So it's like the inverted, it's more like, my environment reads the current state, okay, I need to press an A, you know, like, it, it instead tells...

• 44:16Speaker 01

  But the point is, the audience, like, when the audience prompts the LLM, it generates some Python and then you swap that Python...

• 44:21Speaker 00

  Re-run the program, yes.

• 44:22Speaker 01

  Okay, yeah, I was like, somehow their, their LLM has to get onto the thing, right?

• 44:27Speaker 00

  Yeah, to run Super Smash Brothers from zero to fight takes about six seconds.

• 44:33Speaker 01

  Okay, gotcha.

• 44:33Speaker 00

  Right, it's, it's pretty quick, and to answer, Trash, what was your question? Oh, how do I get it all summarized? After we send all those messages, we then send it off to the LLM to say, like, hey, pull out every single concept from it all, you know, make sure we have everything that's, you know, naturally there, so sometimes it's like, uh, when you see somebody, you must attack them right away, next line, when you see somebody, you must avoid them at all costs, right, like, you, you get the whole audience and it tries to attempt to program this thing out and all that, and it's a lot, a lot of fun. But obviously, at Soap Open Source, there's 2,000-plus people in this, this room, so we couldn't just do it the normal way. So I go out there, I explain what we're gonna do, and then I say, I need four volunteers, and it was a fun gag, but it did make me feel a little bit sad, because the first

• 45:18Speaker 00

  three rows uniformly stood up and was like... Like they're so excited and then off to the side I had Doug Doug, Eric, uh, Common Etiquette, Bash Buddy, and Code Bullet, all four amazing YouTubers, uh, great content creators. They're all just standing on the side with megaphones, ready to actually control the audience. So obviously I picked those four, definitely not planted, uh, volunteers.

• 45:45Speaker 02

  Does anyone have a megaphone?

• 45:47Speaker 01

  They just happened to show up with megaphones because they thought it might be useful.

• 45:53Speaker 00

  Yes, it might be useful. They just showed up with it. And so of course, they all four stood up at each with their own section. And so they could walk down their section and yell like what they think they should do. And then everybody worked together. And it was a lot of fun. Some of the highlights, uh, were that Doug Doug, he was Donkey Kong. And, uh, for whatever reason, enough of his audience wrote in that they should grab Jigglypuff, put Jigglypuff on their head and walk off the edge, thus killing himself, but also Jigglypuff. That was a gigantic highlight. That just was a lot of fun. People were screaming so much. The sound of it was so loud that there was like this back area, like the green room

• 46:34Speaker 00

  and stuff like that. Uh, it was reported to me that it was so loud that people had to quit talking when the audience would cheer and yell. And then they could resume normal conversation again because it was just so intense.

• 46:46Speaker 02

  Prime, I think that according to a rumor from Xanus, there's footage in linear right now that you could show the audience potentially. I don't know if that's gonna happen. I saw some people ask.

• 46:55Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. I, I saw some of it. It's, it's kind of, it's hard to, it's hard to get to like the really the big, the big experience here. Xanus, shoot it over for me because it's not quite organized in an easy way for me to be like, here's this part. Cause I looked through it and then I didn't have time to actually like look through it. Xanus, can you just put it to me in terminal chat? Nice.

• 47:14Speaker 01

  I thought we agreed that it was gonna be called Zeanus last time.

• 47:18Speaker 03

  I call him Zainus.

• 47:19Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 47:20Speaker 02

  I don't think, I don't think Xanus like agreed to that one.

• 47:22Speaker 01

  Zainus? Okay, Zainus.

• 47:24Speaker 00

  I'm pretty sure Zainus loves that one.

• 47:26Speaker 01

  Okay, Zainus.

• 47:28Speaker 02

  I will say every time, so the strategies as people like, so each, the crowd was divided into four. They're in the front, like, you know, talking with, you know, uh, megaphones. Code Bullet had one of the worst rounds ever. Just Fox like died instantly. He was, he was playing Fox. And the next round, for some reason, his audience messed up and they said, let's just do it again. No changes. But because everyone else had made so many other changes, he ended up winning that round.

• 47:51Speaker 01

  Right.

• 47:51Speaker 02

  He ended up literally living and he was like...

• 47:53Speaker 00

  It's very funny. Okay, here we go. I'm gonna show you guys something, but I don't think you guys are gonna be able to hear it.

• 48:00Speaker 00

  I'm like 99% sure of it. You're not gonna be able to hear it. So, hold on. The audience, uh, those that are live on Twitch are gonna hear it. Uh, let's see, hold on.

• 48:09Speaker 02

  I got you. Well, let Twitch hear it.

• 48:11Speaker 00

  So, yeah, you're gonna get...

• 48:12Speaker 04

  Everybody's ready? Alright, fantastic. I'm super excited to do this. This is Super Smash Brothers Melee.

• 48:17Speaker 00

  Alright, there we go. We're doing the intro.

• 48:19Speaker 01

  Oh, my god, dude. I didn't know about the bullet, really.

• 48:21Speaker 04

  ...for years developing a one of this game, dude. And now we're finally ready to play. Did everyone bring their controls?

• 48:25Speaker 03

  Dude, that looks so epic.

• 48:27Speaker 04

  You guys didn't bring one? What? We've been doing this for years!

• 48:30Speaker 00

  I'm making fun of them for not bringing controllers.

• 48:31Speaker 04

  Okay, so I need four volunteers. I need four volunteers.

• 48:34Speaker 02

  Well, he did a great bid, because we, the side world is like 200 people play video games. So, they're trying to check, like, grab out your controllers. Nobody brought controllers?

• 48:44Speaker 00

  Yeah, so we just have a bunch of people who are ready. So, they all stood on front of it, and so they could all yell, "Code bullet." So, it turns out the megaphone that we got him had like a musical part to it that can go, "Doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo." You know, like the classic piano song that everyone can play?

• 49:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's "For a Lease," I think.

• 49:01Speaker 01

  "For a Lease," yeah.

• 49:02Speaker 00

  Yeah. Played it. Non-stop, and then even the prompt instructions kept saying "For a Lease," like, "Win For a Lease." It just kept on, it just kept on going, and then like every single time I would talk, that same song would start up again on the megaphone. There was like, it was just pure chaos at all times, and it worked out so much better than I ever thought it could have worked out.

• 49:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, we're gonna, we're gonna do another one on Twitch. We're gonna keep just Twitch only, Twitch chat versus YouTube chat. I'm forcing Prime to do it, right? We're doing this right, Prime?

• 49:32Speaker 00

  Yes, we actually, well, we actually have, uh, tried to make some, uh, potential... Some potential like partners on this one. And there is a non-zero chance that we're gonna get a group of people to all join in where on Twitch stream, uh, each individual Twitch stream will map to a singular character. And there will be the great, like, some sort of great battle between four streamers to see who really has the best chat of them all.

• 49:57Speaker 02

  Yes, well, we got some more, we got some more from the beginning. So we've got now, we've gathered like 2,000 people in this room. It's noon. Teach is really the mastermind behind all of this. He wrote lunch of the code for all, you know, we got ideas, we got jokes. However, he was like the one coding late into the night, waking up early, going to do there. So obviously Teach is so responsible, he was there at 8 a.m. and they had tested it 20 times and everything had worked perfectly. So then they get on stage in front of 2,000 people, go to start the program. And we've, of course, see a brand new bug we've never seen in the history of testing this ever, ever, ever, ever, with all 2,000 people gathered in front of us. And we don't know if it's even gonna work. So there was like a...

• 50:35Speaker 00

  Can I tell a fun story for that one? So first off, right before that, I go to see if I, like, I go and test out if I can jump off the stage or not, like, how far down is it actually? I could, but then the audience guy, or the runner said, "I'm not allowed to do it." Anyways, when I come back from, or right before I go out there, I walk into the green room. TJ's prompting, I'm like, "TJ, you're prompting?" And he's just like, "Yeah, I'm just doing a little, couple, couple last quick things." I'm like, "May, maybe we shouldn't be prompting right now, TJ." And he's just like, "No, it's just a couple, it's just some styles, nothing bad's gonna happen." Walk out, I tell people that TJ's 11th hour prompting right now. Of course, go out on stage, the server, Cloudflare's just responding with like, "Sorry, Cloudflare went back down." And it's obviously us. What did we do? Nobody has any idea.

• 51:20Speaker 00

  Then TJ goes into the microphone and goes like this, "Hey, can you quit sharing my screen?"

• 51:24Speaker 02

  Yes, yes.

• 51:26Speaker 00

  At that point, this is what he does. Opens up the Cloudflare panel, copies...

• 51:32Speaker 00

  Cursor WTF Paste Enter. That's it. Like that's all it was. Because we had nothing left and I kid you not, within one moment, I saw on the screen, something flashed up that just said minus one. We pressed play, boom, it just started working. And so it's just like after that, he had three agents running all with the same stack trace. Nobody knows what actually happened because it was right on stage. And I had to sit there for like three to four minutes. Just yakking it up with the audience while TJ is like, it's not working. It's not working. Like the feeling of being in front of 2,000 people and having your software not be able to launch was one of the most stressful experiences of my entire lifetime.

• 52:14Speaker 00

  But when TJ copied and pasted from the CloudFlare panel, I literally thought, we're not doing it. We're like literally gonna have to cancel this live on stage. There's no universe this is gonna work out. And it worked out and I could not even believe it.

• 52:28Speaker 02

  No, the funniest part is it's happening. I'm in the front row. Me and Zane, we're manning to try and like make sure that the prompts, no one's doing racist things or bad things and highlight funny prompts. And it's happening. It stops working. I start sweating so fast and so quickly. I, my shirt was like soaking wet in like a minute and I was like, well, that took 30 minutes of debugging. It finally is working. We can do a little bit of the show. I look up, it had been like five minutes. I was like, oh wait, we, we have a whole show. It wasn't even bad.

• 52:55Speaker 00

  It was, we were able to get back to it pretty quickly, which was very, very nice. And we got, and we got going. And by the way, there were some really funny prompts that people did.

• 53:04Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 53:04Speaker 00

  That were just absolutely, someone even just said rigged. That's it. Because they lost, so their prompt to the bot was rigged. No matter what you told people to do, no one ever followed instructions. It was always very, very, uh, just ridiculous messages.

• 53:19Speaker 02

  Well, we did set it up. So like Tej put in there that all, it knew all the detailed Smash info. It knows about wave dashing and it knows about L cancelling and all of that. So on the last rounds, people are just putting in, Prime is reading him and he's like, I don't know what any of this means. And then that's when Tej said you were embarrassing him. Cause it was just pure super Smash Bros. talk. Like just.

• 53:37Speaker 00

  It was like there, there, there. I was like, what is it? And I was just like, what does that even mean? And then TJ is like, well, I'm glad that you prepared for this thing that we've known for months. So of course, the only thing that was appropriate at that moment, I opened up the GameCube and took my disc and I said, I'm going home. I'm tired of this crap.

• 53:56Speaker 01

  What was the, what was the AI, so the AI bots, what were they allowed to use as input? Like to this, what was it? Just a video of the screen?

• 54:06Speaker 02

  No, no, there's a library called Live Melee, and this is one of the reasons why this works so well. So I don't know if you know this Casey, but Super Smash Brothers Melee is the most intense video game community ever. Like, they are one of-

• 54:15Speaker 01

  I did not know that.

• 54:16Speaker 02

  So, when, when we started playing this event, Xanus, who's helping us, says, "I don't, I want to learn more about Super Smash." So I said, "Fantastic. Here's a nice hour-long documentary to learn about." He goes, "That was good." I go, "Cool. Now you can start the next one." "This one's four hours, but you might want to do this one before that, which is only an hour." I'm not joking at all. There is collectively, I think, eight hours of high-quality documentaries about this community that they've made, because it's like so intense.

• 54:40Speaker 01

  Oh, okay. So there's like, so there's like a library that, that like reads the internal state of the game?

• 54:47Speaker 02

  Every single thing that's happening at all moments of the time, you have access. It's called Live Melee. And it's been around for a while. When, when, um, when like COVID happened, the programmers, all those Super Smash Brothers-loving programmers, all like swarmed around it and wrote amazing code, so we could, you could play a fighting game online with zero lag, frame perfect. It's, it's incredible. And so we already had this Live Melee that tells you every single thing about the game, and then we just hooked up into that, and it-

• 55:15Speaker 01

  I see. So basically, the LLMs can, can operate directly on the internal game state? They don't even have to like, like do Vision Rec on the screen or anything?

• 55:25Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 55:25Speaker 01

  That's cool. So it's, so, okay, that's cool.

• 55:27Speaker 02

  They can do frame, frame-perfect inputs, which is super common in Smash. We have this thing called wave dashing, which is like, it's technically like abusing the inputs to like get to this moment where you can't be hit and move faster. We had one moment where they're just wave dashing beyond each other, like real players, and we're like, "They might be too good to fight. We might have..."

• 55:46Speaker 00

  Yeah. At one point, Fox, Captain Falcon, kept on trying to punch him, and Fox would just dodge and just wait for the next one. Dodge, wait for the next, dodge, wait for the next one. And just kept on doing the same thing over and over again, just like, "No, no, I don't want to fight you." Then, of course, beat him. But it was, it was pretty exciting. And if I'm not mistaken, Fox won, right?

• 56:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, Fox ended up, yeah, yeah, Code Bull-

• 56:04Speaker 00

  And which was Code Bull.

• 56:05Speaker 02

  Winning. I will say, early on, Jigglypuff was dominating with resting. Jigglypuff would just float into the middle, rest, people die. It was, it was, I thought Jigglypuff was gonna win it all, but then Fox just, I think Fox is the best bot right now in the world, so a slight advantage, but- Don't worry Casey, we're gonna force you to play, okay? We're gonna actually make you, you're gonna-

• 56:27Speaker 01

  Make me do what?

• 56:28Speaker 02

  You're going to be one of the prompters to prompt one of these bots. I wanna see how good you are at prompting them. Remember, you don't have to read the code Casey, you don't have to, we're gonna throw it away after it's done.

• 56:36Speaker 01

  But also, but you forget that the problem here is not my inexperience with AI. My problem here is my inexperience with Smash Brothers. I've literally never played the game even once. I'd be like, I don't even know until the, the first thing I'd tell the AI is, hey AI, can you tell me how to play Smash Brothers first?

• 56:54Speaker 02

  So this is what we'll do, we'll have Casey, you can have a decent model, everyone else, they can be on ChatGPT 2.5, okay?

• 57:00Speaker 01

  Right, okay, yeah, they nerf me. I get, I get the latest model drop and everyone else has to use like some old ass like, you know, thing, thing that could, could run like chat dungeon or whatever it is.

• 57:10Speaker 00

  I think if we just gave you a list of names of things you could do.

• 57:14Speaker 01

  Right.

• 57:14Speaker 00

  You could, you could play and create a, actually a decent bot. Probably a bot that could beat me because I also have played the game just a, you know, a handful of times.

• 57:23Speaker 01

  Well, I guess one question I would sort of have, and maybe this is just me not understanding, but

• 57:31Speaker 01

  couldn't you just ask the AI to make a good Smash Brothers bot? Because isn't there enough information in like the AI's training set to understand what you might wanna do? Or is it just not, not really? Like you'd have to have an agent swarm and you'd have to feed it documentation about Smash Brothers and, and give it a ton of time to iterate on that. It's like, like what's, why can't you just say, make a good bot? Like, what, why do you have to be specific? Other than to be, other than to make it fun?

• 57:55Speaker 02

  Oh yeah, yeah. So we weren't letting the bots talk to the internet, right? They're not able to do tool calls out to the internet number one.

• 58:00Speaker 01

  So they can't read a strategy guide and refresh their-

• 58:04Speaker 00

  Yes, we give them the basic information. Because the reality is someone could have found the open source best bot ever and been like, copy this bot code.

• 58:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, clone this repository and run it.

• 58:13Speaker 02

  Yes, yes, yes, that was out there.

• 58:15Speaker 01

  Okay, okay, okay. So they were kind of nerfed from, from actually being able to iterate on, on, on open information that, you know, so, so obviously their training set doesn't probably include complete verbatim copies of all the things they would need.

• 58:29Speaker 00

  Yes, it might contain it, but it's really hard to coax it out of it.

• 58:32Speaker 01

  Out of it, yeah.

• 58:33Speaker 00

  And so it's just like, even though it's in there, the LLMs just have all of humanity inside of it.

• 58:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's in there somewhere.

• 58:39Speaker 02

  We also limit every person to 140 characters, like OG Twitter. So their actual prompt is 140. You guys said make best bot ever, but it's.

• 58:46Speaker 01

  So, okay, be pretty abbreviated. You couldn't be like, go find this thing, download the book. Yeah, well, I guess you can't download anything, but yeah, okay.

• 58:52Speaker 00

  The idea would have been to just simply do like, your job is to say, when hanging off the edge, press up. But the idea was like, you give it really simple, direct responses.

• 59:04Speaker 01

  Was the idea that in general, you, you are going to like, you will grab all of these and you'll put all of them into one prompt. So it's not like, you're not overwriting the last person's instructions. You're, you're just like, it's a giant fucking mush. And if, if two people gave conflicting instructions, like you said before, that it's just like, the AI is gonna have to just, it'll do what it's gonna do and off you go.

• 59:29Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 59:30Speaker 03

  How long did it take to like process a prompt? Was it pretty quick?

• 59:33Speaker 00

  Uh, it was not too long, probably. Uh, oh, people did do the then kiss. Uh, let's see, uh, probably, there was actually several words with the word kiss.

• 59:41Speaker 02

  It was mostly the focus of some of the crowd, was.

• 59:44Speaker 00

  The crowd really just wanted to see Donkey Kong and Jigglypuff kiss. Um, very weird, but yes, uh, we just mushed them all together and it'd take about 45 seconds to summarize and about a minute and a half to write the code, like tops. So it was pretty quick. We used Grok 4.5 fast. It's just really fast. And so it's just like.

• 1:00:03Speaker 03

  Once it's done and they start fighting, do you guys watch them just fight for, what, like a minute or do they actually finish it down?

• 1:00:07Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. We had a one minute round. Often it would not go to that long. Fun fact, the final round, Fox had two wins and we needed one more win for whoever is gonna be like the winner. And it got to the point where Captain Falcon, or Captain Falcon's hanging on the edge. And when he would fall, he would somehow get back on. He'd like, get up, go back off the edge. And just like, his strategy was to just make somebody else fall off and die. Fox kept jumping down, doing his like little like fiery up B smash back up on and doing this over and over again. And then Captain Falcon, it all timed out just right where he like fell onto a cloud. It confused his programming.

• 1:00:47Speaker 00

  He then just walked off the edge and died and Fox won like by pure accident. It went on for like 45 seconds of them just doing this little dance. And then he just messed up and fell off.

• 1:00:56Speaker 02

  We were like, oh my God, it's gonna be a tie again. Please don't be a tie. We're like, we're in T's like, we are waiting. Okay, we're gonna see something new will happen and something new happened.

• 1:01:05Speaker 00

  Five seconds remaining. We were over our allotted time to be at the audience at that point. We had to get offstage. But we wanted a winner. We couldn't just like end on a tie. So we're just like, okay, we gotta get someone has to win. And so it turned out Code Bullet won. Code Bullet, who he told his audience after winning the previous one said, okay, nobody make a single prompt. Or no one do it. Not a single one. 65 prompts came in. Apparently 65 people had different opinions about what should or should not be done at that point.

• 1:01:35Speaker 02

  Well, that was the other thing we didn't talk about at the very beginning. We flash four QR codes, scan the QR codes, get on the site. Okay. Well, you know, let's get 2000 people on the mobile networks at the same time and see what loads. It was not loading. And then Teach's program wasn't working and people weren't able to load the site. And it was like, oh yeah, I forgot 2000 people can't get on the same website on their phones at the same time. Luckily it did work out, but this is crazy. We never even thought of this. People in the back, the QR codes weren't big enough for them to scan because it's 2000 people and it goes so back. And we were like, it's the biggest QR code in the world. How could you not scan it? It's like huge room. So we definitely get a, yeah, next time we're gonna go even bigger QR codes. I don't know.

• 1:02:15Speaker 00

  If you've never been like in an audience, mobile networks just don't work. Right? Like when you get too many people together.

• 1:02:22Speaker 03

  It's a problem. Yeah, it's a problem.

• 1:02:22Speaker 00

  And so it just, we just never once thought, oh shoot, they're in a, there's, there's just a lot of people in a very small area. Dang, that doesn't work. And so that was a big learning experience right there for us.

• 1:02:35Speaker 02

  Yeah. The antithesis of a better software cop. Exactly. Like literally Teach is going on stage. Teach literally said this. I maybe five minutes were going on, maybe we should use five, six soul. He said that and I go, Teach, we're about to go on stage. We tested for a way con. We're not gonna do new tests. Like I'm.

• 1:02:53Speaker 03

  Glad it worked out.

• 1:02:54Speaker 00

  Teach loves changing things up until the last moment.

• 1:02:59Speaker 00

  I'm more of a, "Let's not change it like, three days before and test it 500 times." TJ's like, "I got one more idea." "I gotta do it, I got one more in me, I got 10,000 lines more in me, let's get this done."

• 1:03:10Speaker 01

  You know, I-

• 1:03:10Speaker 03

  I couldn't imagine what you were feeling, being up there, not knowing if that was gonna work.

• 1:03:14Speaker 00

  Horrifying.

• 1:03:15Speaker 01

  I'm kinda in that zone though, like, I'm with you guys on that one, cuz both years at the Better Software Conference, unlike, pretty much, any other time I give a talk, those history talks are so information-dense and so long, that I never, I'm always like, trying to like, improve and fix the slides right up to the last minute, so both times, I basically had to give talks without ever having rehearsed the slide deck I was on. And so, it felt like that, it felt, it was definitely that kinda thing, it's rough, it's exciting, but rough.

• 1:03:51Speaker 00

  It's exciting, especially when you go to the next, like, you're trying to do a transition, you go to the next slide, you're like, "And that, also, including, just so you know."

• 1:03:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, you're always like, "Well, I don't know what's coming up next, because I can't quite remember if I removed this slide or not," or whatever, right, so you hit the next slide, you're like, "Well, I guess that's the next slide, if I was ready for it," right?

• 1:04:10Speaker 02

  I will say for this conference, since it's a William Osman started it, anyone who's a William Osman fan knows, he's a little unhinged, and so, once you see him on stage, Lindsay, when she saw him, she goes, "Is he always like this?" Because they were doing it, there was a segment called a Carp Tank, it was like a Shark Tank parody, and someone brought in a robot, and pretty much William and the other investors, the other carp, talked about trying to have sex with the robot the whole time. He's like, "It's his conference?" And we're like, "Yeah, it's his conference." And so, he's like, "You can be a little unhinged," you know, it's definitely embraces, like, you know, things can go wrong, things can, which makes it feel better, but, we wanted it to be good, uh, yeah. Carp Tank, also, we did, we saw a live marriage proposal during, after, after someone showed off, actually, Casey would have loved this.

• 1:04:53Speaker 01

  To a robot, or to a human?

• 1:04:54Speaker 02

  It was two humans together, but the thing they were presenting was, they were presenting the world's, I would say, worst video game monitor, which was just a printer that printed out the frames one at a time.

• 1:05:05Speaker 01

  Yes!

• 1:05:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, so they were playing Pokemon, actually.

• 1:05:08Speaker 01

  Dude, that is frickin', dude, that is like, OG, do you remember, like, the world's, like, some of the earliest computer games were like, a teletype, that you could play chess with, you would type in the move, and it would print out, like, what its move was? That is hardcore dude, that is awesome. That's the way it goes. That's the original way games were played.

• 1:05:28Speaker 02

  Well, it was one of those things too where it was like, okay, we're gonna show this demo of this game and they were gonna show Pokemon and then just to get to the Pokemon start screen was 10 minutes of printing. So then they're on stage and they're kinda like feeling time and I'm like, okay, we just did our presentation, dying for five minutes. Everyone is dying in some capacity here because it's like, you know.

• 1:05:50Speaker 01

  If you can't wait 10 minutes for your start screen, then, you know, you clearly don't wanna play Poké- Pokemon enough.

• 1:05:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. Well, it wasn't just that. So like, I don't know if you know, like, Open Sauce, it's like I was saying, it's not just coders. It's so many, it's ever- coding is like the smallest genre of science.

• 1:06:08Speaker 01

  Right, yeah. It sounds like it's more about like sort of the other things, not-

• 1:06:11Speaker 00

  It's the collision of all of them together, which makes it super fun.

• 1:06:15Speaker 02

  Every- it is, it is a, one of the nerdiest places you'll be. I'm just walking around backstage where you hear all the creators and I just walk by Vsauce and this is all I hear him say. He says, "Well, technically, the Earth is the world's biggest telescope" and I just keep, and I'm still walking.

• 1:06:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, alright. It's like, might as well, yeah.

• 1:06:32Speaker 02

  That is the convos that are happening everywhere. Every person you meet who's like into something, like I'm in a chemistry, you walk by, what are they talking about? Well, technically, that chemical you need to store in triple cl- I'm like, they're, they're nerding out on the thing they're nerding out on. It's definitely not like a get together and party, well, there's partying, but it's like, it's, I couldn't believe how much science stuff I heard everyone talking about at dinner in the morning hungover, you know?

• 1:06:57Speaker 01

  It was good. Alright. Oh, no, no, no, say another, say another if you'd like to.

• 1:07:02Speaker 02

  No, I was for you, I was saying, who are some of the other people? So we, we did get to do one other special thing. Uh, we gotta go to, I'm not gonna tell what it was. We gotta go to Mark Rober's, the Crunch Labs, their area and see like all of their, what a like wacky giant operation is. It was exactly what you want. It's filled together with like a science experiment, only a way bigger version of it everywhere. And it was definitely like, it was inspiring me where I was like, we need this for programmers. I need a place where I go and it's like- What is a like

• 1:07:31Speaker 00

  It's cartoonishly big.

• 1:07:32Speaker 02

  Cartoonishly big cartoon, but it's like they, all the science guys have figured it out. Us programming people have it, but I want to go to a place where you walk in, it's like, yeah, we have an Odin room. What's an Odin room? Just go in the Odin room. Okay. And like, I don't know what's going to be in there, but I'm going to fill it up. But whatever. The best, the best conference ever. If anyone hasn't gone before, they really should go.

• 1:07:50Speaker 00

  Yes. Yes. Unlike better software conf, this one is invite for everybody. I think like typically like 40,000 people end up coming through. It's a pretty big.

• 1:08:03Speaker 01

  How do they, this must be in a very large venue for 40,000.

• 1:08:06Speaker 02

  It's like, it's on a, it's a camp, not a campground. It's like the rodeo grounds. Isn't it where the, it's like a, yeah, it's like a, a, a.

• 1:08:14Speaker 00

  It's a mega complex.

• 1:08:15Speaker 02

  It's a mega complex. Yeah.

• 1:08:16Speaker 01

  Where, where is this?

• 1:08:18Speaker 00

  It was San Mateo Event Center.

• 1:08:21Speaker 01

  San Mateo. Okay. That sounds vaguely Californian.

• 1:08:25Speaker 00

  It is. It's right in the valley. So San Mateo Event Center is, it's a, it's a spanning 48 acres.

• 1:08:32Speaker 01

  Jesus. Okay. So this is like a Grateful Dead concert.

• 1:08:36Speaker 00

  Yeah. The thing that we were on was probably like two to three acres worth of stuff. You know, it's just like, it was, it was pretty big. Like the huge event center, like items, like the hall, the main hall that we were in, the one that we did the main show in. The chairs go down so long, they, there has to be 170 rows of chairs. And then there's, you know, and then there's standing room along the sides, which also gets filled and just is, it's crazy.

• 1:09:00Speaker 02

  Well, and there's like hall after hall. I mean, there's like, there was like robot fighting, multiple versions of robot. Every iteration of robot fighting you've probably heard was happening somewhere.

• 1:09:09Speaker 01

  Right. Yeah. That, that sounds exactly like in the wheelhouse of this, like.

• 1:09:13Speaker 00

  They had the unitry robots that we talked about getting hacked. They had unitry robots that, that fought each other.

• 1:09:19Speaker 02

  Yeah. They fought inside of a mini UFC octagon. It was actually a horrible little octagon.

• 1:09:24Speaker 03

  It's so funny.

• 1:09:25Speaker 01

  Yeah. Is this, is this a conference that I could go to, or would it be like, um, like the Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade? Where Marcus is like in the foreign country, asking if anyone speaks English, like how? How out of place would I-

• 1:09:40Speaker 00

  You'd have a great time to walk around for a day.

• 1:09:41Speaker 02

  Basically, you would have the absolute most fun ever. It also, it's like-

• 1:09:43Speaker 01

  Okay, cool, okay.

• 1:09:44Speaker 02

  It's just so many, like, we met, uh, some people who they made a computer out of a Rubik's Cube, where you're literally, you know, just, cool, you want, it's just, you know, registers. Anything that is stupid computing, someone has pushed it to the limits. It also, if you just have, like, if you had a kid, you could walk around with a kid for hours and hours and hours and hours and hours, and just go over every wacky science experiment, wacky thing. It is, it's not like-

• 1:10:07Speaker 01

  Does it have to be your kid, or can you just bring a random kid? Like, you just find a kid on the street, and you just bring him, and be like, "Hey, I'm going to this open sauce thing. Beagan said if I had a kid, I could go to it, so I brought a kid."

• 1:10:17Speaker 02

  Yeah. I went on Craigslist and I said, "Looking for a kid who likes Arch Linux."

• 1:10:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. And somehow, it didn't get arrested.

• 1:10:24Speaker 03

  This is, this is turning weird.

• 1:10:26Speaker 00

  Yeah, Beagan did not get arrested.

• 1:10:27Speaker 01

  Turning weird, turning weird.

• 1:10:28Speaker 02

  I didn't get arrested.

• 1:10:29Speaker 01

  It was weird already.

• 1:10:30Speaker 03

  True.

• 1:10:31Speaker 02

  No, it, it, one thing I think is inspiring, I don't know if you saw the top thing, but like, uh, what, what do you call it? Knife taser fighting? That was a big part of this thing.

• 1:10:38Speaker 00

  What? Yeah.

• 1:10:39Speaker 02

  Yes, you heard me. Uh, it's just here, I'll post a link for the chat, that, the chat and link. It's literally two knives that have tasers on them. There was two people fighting with these constantly on the grounds at all times. If you wanted to get into a knife taser fight, the, if you got in a fight with your friend, "Let's go, knife taser fight."

• 1:10:56Speaker 01

  Isn't that dangerous?

• 1:10:57Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:10:58Speaker 03

  Is the knife sharp, or is it just like a-

• 1:11:00Speaker 02

  No, no, the knife isn't sharp, but the tase is tasing, so-

• 1:11:03Speaker 00

  Very taseable knife.

• 1:11:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, but, but, what I'm saying is, it's not, you know, some sign, like, you'd have a maker sciency thing? Everything's supposed to be, like, really educational and helpful. That's not the vibe here. A lot of it is, like, unhinged. Everything is like, "This is dangerous, and why'd you bill it?" Well, it's dangerous is why, so, yeah, taser knife.

• 1:11:21Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:11:22Speaker 00

  So then I brought it, that I was like, "Yo, Will, can I bring knives that are tasers?" And he's just like, "Yeah, you gonna bring a shield?" He's like, "Yeah, okay, sure." Long as everyone can have a small shield as well, like, then I'm thinking it's completely fine.

• 1:11:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, we're not savages.

• 1:11:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:11:38Speaker 01

  Okay. Well, that's the stand-up. Thank you for joining us this week. It's been a conference week.

• 1:11:45Speaker 00

  Yeah, it was a conference week.

• 1:11:46Speaker 01

  Prime's gonna do a great outro right now.

• 1:11:49Speaker 00

  Here it goes. Hey, thanks for watching.

• 1:11:53Speaker 01

  Beautiful.

• 1:11:54Speaker 00

  That was beautiful.

• 1:11:55Speaker 01

  Short and sweet, you know?

• 1:11:56Speaker 00

  Casey, thanks for joining us. Hopefully, you're feeling okay. You kinda seem a little tired right now. That Swedish time change hitting you twice in just a few days had to be pretty rough.

• 1:12:04Speaker 01

  Yep, it was a bit rough.

• 1:12:06Speaker 00

  Did you eat some Swedish fish while in Sweden?

• 1:12:10Speaker 01

  So, I did not. I actually do eat Swedish fish while I'm here. Imported Swedish fish, because they're so frickin' good. But actually, while I'm there, I get this thing that's really, it's like, super low-rent stuff you get at the 7-Eleven, called Supersert, S-U-R-T. And it's basically like, if you imagined someone took Sour Patch Kids, but flattened them into like, ovals.

• 1:12:38Speaker 00

  Okay, you're really into flattened treats, such as, like, misprinted fortune cookies and flattened...

• 1:12:46Speaker 01

  Topologically, all these things are discs already. Why are we pretending otherwise?

• 1:12:50Speaker 00

  I love it.

• 1:12:51Speaker 01

  Right?

• 1:12:52Speaker 00

  I love this idea of going into a snack meeting and Casey's like, you're consulting for them, and you're like, "All right, I love what you're saying, but what if we flatten it and make it circular?"

• 1:13:03Speaker 03

  Every time he gets a snack, he smashes it.

• 1:13:06Speaker 01

  It's like, that's what I kind of imagine, like, Joni Ives, or Johnny Ives, or whatever the hell his name is. That's what I imagine it is. It's like, "Yeah, we paid this guy $10 million, and he walked in and he was like, 'What if it was rounded?'"

• 1:13:18Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:13:19Speaker 01

  And like, that's it. And that's it. He had $10 million, right, or whatever. It's like, okay.

• 1:13:24Speaker 00

  He adjusts his spectacles and then walks out.

• 1:13:25Speaker 01

  Like, I could do that. Like, I could walk into the room and go, "What if you guys rounded that? Like, give me the money. I rounded it for you." And this is, yeah, my thing is just flatten it into a disc.

• 1:13:36Speaker 00

  Everything's a pepperoni for Casey.

• 1:13:39Speaker 01

  Yeah. All right. I mean, if it's, yeah, it's pepperonis, guys, you know?

• 1:13:44Speaker 02

  New Casey unlocked this stand-up. I'm very excited about that. That's gonna be a mainstay now.

• 1:13:49Speaker 01

  No problem, yeah.

• 1:13:50Speaker 00

  All right, bye. Everybody.

• 1:13:52Speaker 01

  Take it easy.

• 1:13:53Speaker 00

  Bye.

• 1:13:54Speaker 02

  Bye chat.

• 1:13:54Speaker 00

  Bye. Thank you for joining us.

• 1:13:56Speaker 05

  Boot up the day.

• 1:13:59Speaker 05

  Five golden errors on my screen. Terminal coffee. And here. Living the dream.