What does it mean to consider every single detail in the thing that you're making? What does it mean to push the extent of details that you can consider when you're making a piece of software, a piece of furniture, or you know even like a particular dish when you're cooking something? What happens when you consider the maximum number of details? What happens to you? How does it change how you perceive that thing? How does it change how you perceive yourself? How does it change the experience people have when they interact with that object or software or dish? On this episode of the other stuff I had the honor to speak with Steph Engel who is a very interesting thinker, a designer, and the CEO of Obsidian. This was a very unique conversation where I got to see how he applies this kind of deep thinking and love for making things across different mediums, software, furniture, food. It was really interesting to see that almost like the inciting incident of his career was essentially making very successful Winamp skins. Winamp was an iconic MP3 player and coming up using a computer and stuff, I wasn't aware that I had actually used the skins that he made. It's cool to see the full circle of that inciting incident all the way to the work that he's doing now. Fascinating conversation that really pushed me to want to be better at everything I do. And yeah, just an absolute honor to be able to talk to him. I hope you enjoy this episode. Thank you for everything. Every person has a single question, I think, that they're trying to figure out. Yeah. About the world? Or about? Yeah, about the world. Like I have theories on what your question is. About the world or about you? No, not about me. About life. About what it means to be human. Purpose of humanity. Everyone's good. Okay, what is it? I'd love to know what it is. I'm not sharing that. You don't know. You're not willing to share. Of course not. That's crazy. That's like pointing at the thing. That's weird. That'd be nuts. Okay, maybe... That's not fair. Yeah, that's nuts. That's like the... I was taking the magic out of it. Everybody has something that they're driven by, but you can't point at it. Once you point at it, it's gone. It's got to be like the whole thing. You kind of got to see it. It's tough. That's a weird thing. Sometimes when you point at things, like if you say something explicitly, you're no longer saying the thing. It's weird. You have to put all these other things around it. You can't even really say it yourself, even as the person doing the thing. It's just like... It's happening. As soon as you say it, it's almost going to be reductive no matter what. Exactly. Even if it's really true. Exactly. Exactly. And that's like the limitation of certain mediums too, right? That's why sometimes you have to go over to Carpentry to explain something. Sometimes you have to go over to Music to explain something. Sometimes you have to make something with food or whatever. It's one of the weirdest things about being human, I think. We're trying to talk to each other. And then we do all these weird-ass things to talk to each other. Like cut down a fucking tree, adjust that thing, try to... You know what I mean? Put it in some kind of form. And I'm like, "This is what I'm trying to say." Yeah. Are we live? Are we live soon? Oh, we're live? We're live. This is live? Oh shit. Sorry. Sorry about that. Are we live live as in people on YouTube or something are watching us or what? Or is it live just recording? We're live on air. People are watching us. Yeah, I'm good. Yeah. Good hi, everybody. Yeah. So why is your name... Your name is Steph Ango. Yeah. Also known as Capano. Hmm. What is the origin of this Capano name? When I was little, I went to Hawaii. And Hawaiian has... Capano is just Stefan. So my... Wait, what? My full name is Stifan. Yes. Stifan. Because my dad's French. Yes. And my mom's American. She's actually half Swedish. My grandmother is full Swedish. Wow. And my grandparents on my mom's side loved Hawaii and brought me to Hawaii when I was young. And you know, you go to the touristy shop and it's like get your name on a name plate, you know, like on a license plate. And Capano is the translation of my first name. In like Hawaiian? Yeah. Well, the Hawaiianization of the alphabet is just kind of, you know, cutting out a lot of the letters that don't have those equivalent sounds. So S becomes K and a bunch of other letters get swapped out because there's only 13 letters in the Hawaiianized. So I'm like Punewele. Wait, what? Okay. Wait, what? Okay, but they're trying to try... The Hawaiianized version of Internet Vin would be likely Vin Punewele or Punewele Vin. Punewele is the word for Internet literally spiderweb. That's pretty cool. Okay, but yeah. Interesting. So Vin, that makes sense because... But do they have a... You must have cool parents. Do they have a V in Hawaiian? Or would it be... I don't think they have a V. They would put W. So your name would probably be like Wynn. Yeah, this is different from chat. GPT has said Wynnie. Yeah, Wynn. Go back to... You'd probably be Wynn or like Wynn Sintek. I don't know what they would say. Wynn Kinn. The Hawaiian alphabet has 13 letters, five vowels, A-E-I-O-U and eight consonants, H-K-L-M-N-P-W and the okina. The okina is a global stop similar to the sound between uh-oh. Yeah. Vowels can also have macron. Macron, sorry. Kahako above them, which lengthens the vowel sound. Interesting. Right. So is Vin short for Vincent or Vin? I can't tell you that shit. Okay. That's fucking crazy, man. Vinny? That's insane. I'm Hawaiian. So they would probably cut out. Okay, good. Oh, wow, Claude knows a lot about me. So this is, the origin of this name is a trip to Hawaii. Yeah. Interesting. That's it. Yeah. But you obviously like, it meant something to you. Because I mean like you use it. Well, I love my grandparents. They're super, all my grandparents. They're still kicking their, I'm very lucky to have long lasting genes. I still have three of my grandparents in their 90s. Yeah. That's crazy. My, my grandfather, my father's side died last year. Yeah. Two or 93. Yeah. Um, so, and my grandmother is, um, was an elementary school teacher. My mother is too. My mom spent a lot of time teaching us and me and my sisters English when we were growing up in France. Um, and so there was always kind of like a multilingual thing going on between French, English, Swedish to some lesser extent. Um, and I just thought Hawaiian was so cool. Yeah. And somehow it does have like a connection to early internet, not, not intentionally, but like Wikipedia is, is a Hawaiian, like Wiki means fast and. Oh, really? Hawaiian. Yeah. Um, and they have all these, you know, we would go snorkeling and that kind of stuff. And yeah, how, how many times have you been to Hawaii? I don't know, four or five, something. Four or five. Maybe six. So that, so was that Kapano name the first time you went to Hawaii? Probably. Yeah. Then I'm guessing it was, it was my grandmother probably gave it, like gave me a, or kind of bestowed me that name. And they lived there, right? No, they didn't live there. They lived in California. Um, but we just would go, we just go visit, um, mostly around Kona on the big Island. Kona. Yeah. So here. Yeah. Uh, on the West coast over there. Go snorkeling around there. You, they have all the. Humuhumunuku. Nuku. Appu. Uh, uh, wait, what? Humuhumunuku. Nuku. Appu. Damn. What is that? La-willy-willy. Nuku. Nuku. Oi. Wait, you can just speak the language. No, those are just, uh, some of the famous fish you can see there. Damn. That's what the language sounds like. That's pretty interesting. This one. See that? That one, uh, is the, is the. Wait, did you just type what he said? No, he said, he typed Hawaiian fish. But that fish is, that fish is the, uh, is the kind of, uh, state fish of Hawaii. But see, see, this is the state fish. Yeah, you see the name right there? Humuhumunuku. Appu. Uh, uh, oh my God, that's incredible. I can't believe you can say that. How is that the name of something? And people remember that? It's just funny. I mean, it's funny that it's so long. Yeah, man. But like that's crazy. It has the glateral stop in there. If you, you know, with the. Wow. We are looking at Hawaii and many mispronounce. How do you say this one? Humuhumunuku. Appuaha. Easy, right? So easy. That's not easy. Simple. That's crazy. But it has a meaning. I forget what it is. It's like pig nose to fish or something like that. It has some, some meaning. Interesting. What does it say? It's not like a pig. Yeah. Yeah. That's cool. How many languages can you speak? Um, two mostly. French and English? Yeah. Wow. That's cool. There, it's interesting that this, this Capano name like stuck with you. It's a great name. It's cool. Yeah. I don't know. I still have a lot of those old, you know, screen names and that it's too, too hard to change everything. Yeah. I was able to lock in, you know, early Twitter, early Instagram. And then once you're there and you have it on all the social media platforms. It's stuck. Yeah. What was your, like, what is your, like, what's the story of your relationship with computers? Like, yeah. Like, I just, I got a computer when I was young. Um, my dad bought me an IBM PC, I think I was born in 85. So I was a little after, um, I never had a Mac until like the 2000s. That makes sense. Yeah. Um, I was born in 1986. So, but my grandfather, so husband of my grandmother that I was talking about, uh, my American grandfather, uh, worked with NASA and very, like he's had a lot of engineering jobs, um, in his career and built a lot of PCs at home. Yeah. So he was true dork. Um, and very inspirational to me. It just the idea that that was possible and that computers were cool. Um, and I was pretty nerdy grown up. So it was inherently attractive. But my parents wouldn't let me play any video games unless I was at some friends house. So all I had was like educational content and like MS docs. That's the Huxman. Yeah. Like, where in the world is Carmen San Diego video game or something like that? Uh, that those were the things I was allowed to play at home. Um, but yeah, I would, I'd play like Nintendo and Sega at my friends houses. Um, so I would just, you know, mess around with computers and then, um, when I was a teenager, got into a lot of video games, like first person shooters, like Counter Strike and all the kind of like half life mods, um, Age of Empires, all those types of things. Yeah. So I was into those games and like the online communities that kind of emerged from that. Um, I was really early on this website called deviant art that's still around for sure. Amazingly. Yeah. I mean, great, weird website. Yeah. And deviant art somehow, you know, back then was all about, um, skinning, like themes for apps. And I was, you know, plan around with Winamp and all kinds of apps where you could add skins to them. Um, for the longest time, deviant arts, um, tagline was something like where art meets application. Yeah. And for like 20 or 30 years, they had this tagline, but it was originally because, um, app, the application part meant apps, like where, where art meets apps as in it was all about skins. But now it's mostly about, you know, people doing like weird, you know, fan fiction stuff. Um, I don't really go there much, but it's. It was really, really feel open the Wikipedia page. It's like this, this website was really important for a lot of people. Yeah. Um, it's interesting. Yeah. And, and they got some of this stuff so early, like the, the feed, like they had feeds and likes and all this stuff before Facebook or Instagram. Um, the, the whole concept of following people. So they, they invaded on a lot of, um, patterns on. Yeah. This is what it used to look like. The green was so iconic. They had this like weird grayish green. It was older than this. It was actually more like the, that image here. This is what I remember. Yeah. That's probably like one of the earliest versions. Yeah. Wow. Okay. So you, you start with a computer. I'm assuming like your grandpa has like computers like littered around his house and stuff like that. Somewhat. No, just in his office. Just in his office. Yeah. And he had one. Yeah. The thing about computers at that time was it was very common to like open a computer up and look inside it, switch out a mother board, switch the brand and put your own video card in. Yeah. Um, people still do that. Yeah. People still do that, but it was, I find it was much more common then cause at a baseline, every computer did that. That was like the baseline. Yeah. Um, like max weren't like as like when I was coming up max weren't as prominent. There was like, it was mainly dominated by PC. And then I saw, you know, the, the reemergence of Apple as like the main computer into like the world that we're at now, where like everybody has a Mac book. Um, but when I grew up, it was like, you know, it was very common to just open up a computer and look at it, you know, um, I think back then there was a greater proportion of nerds using computers. Now it's become so much more mainstream. Yeah. I'm sure that the absolute number of people who are modding computers is actually far greater than it's ever been. It's just that proportionally there's so many more, you know, people who don't want to do that now, which makes sense. For sure. Okay. So you, you kind of like start tinkering with a computer. You're using DOS. You've got like some educational content, right? Yeah. And then you're not allowed to play video games. So video games is maybe this alluring thing. Yeah. That's just like, you know, this thing that you're not allowed to do this world. So, so what was the first video game you played that was like a world that like opened a world in your mind that you were like not supposed to play? Like it was off limits, but it was like the first game where you were like, it like, like it really opened the world. You know what I mean? I've like, I've like the relationship between a human and like your relationship with a computer and interactive media. I mean, the ones that I remember the most are definitely like Super Mario, the early NES, SNES ones, playing those at my friend Jerry's house. Like we would, we would play those a whole bunch. And, but then because I couldn't have consoles specifically, I got into PC gaming with Half-Life and Age of Empires. So it seems like half of it. Yeah. Warcraft, the original Warcraft. Yeah. Age of Empires was huge. We played that all the time. The Age of Empires too, especially. And then yeah, Half-Life, when that came out, that was really, really big for me because Counter-Strike, there were so many mods. So the Half-Life itself, because it was a single player game, you know, it was cool, but once you finished it, you're kind of done. But Team Fortress, Classic, Natural Selection, I think was probably my favorite of all of them. Damn, that game was so good. Spent a lot of time playing Natural Selection. That was like a sci-fi version, right? It was such a crazy game. I haven't heard someone bring that up for years, man. That's crazy. The guy who made it, Charlie Cleveland is a genius. It was a mod, Half-Life mod. And they, this is it. They made a second one, but the original one. I remember this. This was amazing, this game. It was so crazy because they came up with a mechanic that I think is, I mean, very few games have ever tried to do this and they did it as a mod where I scroll up a little bit. Yeah. You could play as the commander. Yes. And see, so there would be like Aliens versus Marines. And the Marines had a commander who could see the map top down like an RTS. Yeah, that was so good. And then so good. And then most of the people are just running around doing first person shooter stuff, but one person can play as this person. And then the aliens, they have all these different, so it's a very asymmetric game. Really fun. You should find video of this. I forgot about this game. Love this game. Damn. This one didn't take off, but let's look at this. Wow. Okay. I, that's not a, okay. You're, you're scrubbing. So this is the top down. Yeah. And then if you're an alien, you start off as this little creature and you can see you're inside of its mouth and you run around. Oh yeah. You would literally be like this like alien dog thing. Yeah. And you can run. Yeah. That's you. You could run through the Vents. Well, that's the. I hated being the alien in this game. But there's like it's so it was so lame to me. No, it was amazing. Really being the alien. Oh, I loved it. I would love being the aliens, but there's so many different versions. Oh yeah. That's right. That's right. You could have evolved. Oh yeah. The drop down on someone, you know, you would hide behind and then if you, so you could climb on all the walls. Yeah. Go up onto the ceiling. Yeah. A classic place to hide if you were the early life form is right above behind a door and then, you know, a Marine walks in and you just like drop, drop onto this head and like headshot their head using your mouth. Yeah. Um, and so if you played this game enough and you would be playing, you know, Marines and aliens, you would just get used to every time you walk into a room, look up or behind. Yeah, totally. To just make sure there's nothing about to drop on your head and like those reflexes come into real life to some extent. Can you go back to that gameplay video that we were just on the weapons in the game were good too? Yeah. Man, it was so good. That was definitely a world that I was like really sucked into. Um, and they, they took so much inspiration from all the classic. Yeah. So you could be that thing. That that was like late, late stage games. Yeah. You become the onus. You remember the name? Wow. Um, that's awesome, dude. Yeah, that was great. Man, it looks honestly. In my mind, it looks better than this, but it does look pretty good, but it does look pretty good. It looks good. The sound effects and the sound design in this game were excellent. I remember that. And they were just making this thing for free at, I can't believe it. And then, but now you probably, a lot of people know their game, subnautica. Um, subnautica was, was great game. Um, don't never heard of it. Oh, everyone should play subnautica. That, that one came out probably 10 years ago. I don't know. So this is, oh, I've heard of this. Yeah. Sorry. I have. It's kind of, these are the same guys. It's kind of a crafting game. You, you arrive on a alien planet that's covered in water and you're, it's just a single player game, but it's really, it's really fun. Just roaming around. It's a, it's nonviolent game. So there's, there's no weapons. Um, you're just exploring. Gathering materials, making underwater sea bases. Um, there's a storyline to it. Um, I've seen this game before. This is amazing, man. It's really fun. And yeah, if you're someone who gets, uh, spooked out by deep water, it's, uh, it's either the worst, your worst nightmare or, you know, something that's going to help you deal with that fear. Totally. Um, so who are the guys that made these games unknown worlds? Yeah. That's unknown. There's some big drama going on with them right now. Cause, uh, I don't know. So there the producer is, uh, unknown worlds entertainment is an American video game developer based in San Francisco. The studio is best known for the natural selection and subnautica series in October 2020, one, the studio was acquired by South Korean video game developer, crafting. Who are the founders? Charlie Cleveland. And he's making a movie now. Um, so you know this game, like to make this game natural selection and subnautica, like you have to be a fucking genius. Yeah. You have to be a literally a genius. They're geniuses. Yeah. Truly. Yeah. They're incredible. Yeah. And they had some amazing artists. So I would, um, hang out in the unknown worlds entertainment forum. Oh, really? And just chat with other people and made a lot of friends online. Like when I was a teenager, is it? Yeah. Yeah. But they, they redesigned it. I don't know. I don't know. And you, I don't know if anyone's still on there, but back in the day, I would, I would chat with people on here or you, you would just make friends playing on, you know, online servers. Totally. And, um, yeah, I made a lot of friends through these communities. DeviantArt. Totally. Uh, Counter-Strike. Yeah. Unknown worlds. For sure. Uh, natural selection. And it, I think back then it was kind of weird because it was the early 2000s and my parents, my parents didn't really get it. Um, the idea that, you know, most of your friends are just people you've never met online. Super, uh, super random idea at the time. Very uncommon. But now I think it's pretty, pretty normal. It's the default, I'd say. Yeah. But thinking about that progression over time is kind of odd. Hmm. I find. Um, especially in the con, like the thing is, the thing that's hard to understand is like, it's like, just think of it this way. Imagine, imagine like right now, think about how interconnected your social life is from in real life to the internet. You're constantly looking at your phone and you're using social media apps. There's a continual connection between your real life and a social layer on the internet. Now imagine that that doesn't exist. Hmm. Try to, try to imagine like if you can, that that does not exist. And now imagine that some people, a few, a few, a subset of people are getting plugged into this dual world before everybody else, that there's a lot like, and the majority of people are not plugged in, but there's a subset of people that are plugged in, right? That's what we're talking about. And like, and, and, and, and there's a certain kind of person that gets plugged in early. Yeah. And, and it's not, and it's, uh, and the technology was in these communities were being built on like, like as the technology was getting better, the internet and the related web technologies that make all of this stuff possible as it was getting better, communities started to build on top of that. So this technology is early, right? So there's a certain kind of person that builds the community. There's a certain kind of person that participates in the community. And it's, it's weird because it's not locked into a specific age. There's certain people that are like young, that have those attributes that make them interested in these things and they start participating. Yeah. There's certain people that are older that have those same attributes and they start participating in these things. And that's what you're talking about. You're talking about this like time. And there's a, and, and the thing is the weird thing about it is that as you, as you started participating in these like forums and in these online communities, you would learn things. You would learn like how to make websites. How to make a video game. Like one of the cool things about being in the forums was you would get to see the, like art, um, cause early stages when they're making new creatures or something, it'd be like, oh, here's some concept art for, um, the new, you know, alien creature or this is a new level that I'm working on. That a lot of people were, I got, I never really made, um, maps that much, but I kind of played around with the tools for it. And, you know, instead, there was this kind of multimedia nature to it, especially with video games, cause there's music, there's art, there's levels, there's like all these different disciplines coming together. And I've always loved the work in progress stuff. Like, if I, you know, like making ofs, like, for example, like, um, like very related to this, the making of alien, like there's a great documentary about really Scott making of alien and all the kind of pieces and the special effects and how did they make it in the sketches. Um, but what you're talking about, I think was possible before the internet is just was so much more friction, like throughout history, there's this phenomenon where people find each other and create movements, like the impressionists or something like that. And somehow before the internet, it would have been cities, you know, if you got kind of interested in painting and you would move to Paris and then in Paris, you would meet this one person and then you'd go to a party. And then that person was like the curator, like you're describing of a community that it would just be a lot, you know, more friction. Whereas now you could be in your bedroom, in the middle of nowhere and somehow find your way into a community with people without having to leave your parents' bedroom. Totally. Yeah. And then also there's like a, there's like a weird thing where there's like an age. Um, it's accessible to younger people. Maybe exactly. It's accessible to even some kid in their room. And the other thing is that as this is, as this thing was like emerging, it's odd because you got to remember, like the majority of the world is not plugged in to this dual social layer. So if you're a young person, you're just in your room and you're just hanging out on this community. Yeah. Your parents don't know what the fuck you're doing on your computer. They're existing in their own different world. Exactly. They don't, they, they, they're not even aware of this dual like layer. Especially back then, but now, you know, parents who grew up in the internet era, their kids, they'll maybe have a different kind of relationship to that. I think they'll have a different kind of relationship with it for sure. Yeah. It's very, it's a, it's a whole different situation now. But I think like, um, people are always, it's just, I, I, I think it's interesting reflecting on this time because, especially now, because I talk to a lot of people that are doing interesting things that are like my age. And they often go back to these same games. Yeah. You know, they go back. It's, it's like the same kinds of games like Counter-Strike, you know, half life was pivotal, right? The communities and the forums related to that. It's just, it's just really cool to me. I didn't realize at the time when I was going through it, it was, it was, I was also online, I was also in the same situation, you know, you know, I played Counter-Strike, right? And like, um, form teams and stuff like this, all the games that you're mentioning, I played, I'm aware of these like mods. I remember, I remember being on forums and participating in these things and seeing the way certain people, certain designers and like engineers, what they would write about what they were working on. And it was just so obvious to me at that time that I'm like, Oh, this is a person that's thinking in a lot of detail about what they're working on. This is a person that there's like a certain set of reasoning to what they're doing in there. And they're, and they're like, uh, they're having back and forth conversations about what is the right decision to make. There's like clearly feedback happening here. Right. And even, even if you just think about like a forum, a forum, uh, like a community board or a forum or whatever, if you think about like the mechanics of it, so it has structural elements and those structural elements. When you're, when you're a kid, they, you don't realize you're not as aware of the structural elements you're participating in, but those structural elements are very much, um, influencing the experience. Right. So first, you have to write a post, right? Which means that you have to, you have to write a post, which means you have to like outline your thinking. You have to give it like a subject and you have to explain why this matters. Second, you have a user, you have a user account. Okay. So that account, and I also think they had like ratings. They had like some kind of rating system and, and like, uh, like, uh, badges. Like this, this is an admin. You know, I forgot what the other word. Some kind of hierarchy. Yeah. Yeah. There's like some kind of hierarchy. And so when you're a kid and you're like reading this stuff, right, you recognize, okay, one, there's value in thinking, right. Two, there's value in reputation. A certain person can think a particular way. Three, there's a hierarchy to ideas. And so when you see this thing, like it's like, for me, it's like a signal. Okay. This person has this particular badge. Oh, fuck. This is the creator of the game. And then you read the way they think and you can see the difference. Not only, not only that, but also it's telling you, because if you don't participate in that online world, you're primarily participating in your, the offline world of your school. And there is that's own hierarchy and clicks and things that exist there. But they might be just, you're just kind of, that's where you, you don't have as much control over where you want to go and what you want to be interested in because that structure already exists. Whereas online, you can find whatever world you're interested in. Totally. And also the, the, one of the ideas that was really powerful to me was making a WinApp skin. I make this just random little thing, pixel art stuff. And just for fun, cause I'm interested in learning, you know, Photoshop and these tools, but then hundreds of thousands of people downloaded it. And yours. Yeah. And you made it, you made a WinApp skin that a hundred of thousand people downloaded for real. Yeah. Yeah. How old were you? Uh, I don't know, like 16, 17. Do you remember the name of the skin? It was WinApp. Uh, I made some that were popular for WinApp too, but my most popular one. Maybe I used them. My most popular one was called impulse for WinApp five. Um, it was there. So WinApp was crazy. Yeah. This is like an amazing software. Is this it? So that one was very popular. Wow. Um, Holy shit, man. If you go to my website, um, like, yeah, go third result there. Yeah. Um, 2004. I think I used this. Yeah, I was like this one, this one, it had different colors. Yeah. It had, you can, you can select like blue, green, right? Yeah. I used this skin. It was, it had a lot of customizability. You could change all the colors, the stripes. Holy shit. You made this. Yeah. This is like better than obsidian. Yeah. It is actually. Yeah. R. Peter Clark coded it. Um, I just did the design. So this is what's fucking crazy, but this was cool because back, this was like when I'm five was the first app where you could, uh, oh, that's weird. You gotta go back. I think your JavaScript doesn't work. Okay. There's a few different skins that I made, but any who the, the, um, the thing that was pretty radical about this was this was like the first time a PNG format was around. So you could do transparency and shadows before then everything was, you know, in a box and now you could start to do like, um, translucency. So you could do any kind of shape and you could program the, the shape of your skins. So anyway, I'm just, you know, making skins and then if you, if your conception, yeah, uh, there's one that I made for this. I think if you search for rusty heaven, you'll find it, uh, not, not remove impulse from there. Yeah. Hmm. Maybe one word. Man, I'm impressed. I'm like really, I'm like actually like, so this is like really, really, really impressed by this. So then there were all these little animations. I think I use this too. Cause I was like a fiend for win amp skins. Like I would download so many of them. It has the equalizers. Like if you go all those things, like click on that. Yeah. So it was all these, uh, pixel art was very popular at the time. So I'd spend my time doing these little things. But my point is if your whole world is like, you know, you're at school and there's a hundred people, you know, and they have their own like hierarchy, but then you go online and you make this thing and a hundred thousand people start to use it. It's, it's changes your perspective on like, what is the world actually? Yes. But now I think kids, um, with TikTok and stuff like that, like a random. You know, seven year old can make something that will have a hundred million views, which is, it's a whole other level of, of like that. But the difference is that if you, if you are on TikTok, let's say, or, or in YouTube or whatever, like you make some video and it gets distribution, right? And you tell someone, Hey, I made a video and it got 10 million views on YouTube. Yeah. Everybody understands what that means. Yeah. In the modern world. Right. What you're talking about is you did something very, very interesting here where you made a Win Amp skin and like hundreds of thousands of people download it, right? And like, I know what that skin is, but it's like, if you were like, like, nobody knows what the fuck that means when you did it. Right. But it's like, but it's like so amazing. Right. It's just interesting. That would have, that would have, that would have warped someone's brain. Right. Well, it definitely changes your perception of what's important. Um, because not that the skin itself was important, but rather like, can you make something that has a positive impact in people's lives at a larger scale? So your skins, this impulse thing and, and this, this rusty heaven, they're both really good. So why are they so good? Hmm. Well, I don't know. Like the impulse one is like, like, why, why are they good? Like, were you, are you like a good visual artist or like? Yeah. Well, my mom is an artist and she's always dabbled in a lot of arts. So she was very, she encouraged me to, you know, draw and paint and do photography and stuff like that. So I think from an early age, um, you know, I wasn't the most, I was pretty shy. I was very shy as, as a, as a young person, teenager still am. Like I've gotten to a point where I can communicate with people outwardly. But, um, back then I would definitely immerse myself in art and try to understand. My dad's also very interested in art more as a study, whereas, um, my, my mom is more of a practitioner. Um, so I think that definitely influenced me. Wow. But then it was just hanging out, you know, in those communities for a long time and seeing what, what was cool. You could definitely tell when someone put more effort into it. 100%. You know, like if you go back to that, um, gallery of all the wind amp two skins, there's a lot of them that are just crap. I mean, they, like what is this weird owl one? It's like there's, there's a lot of these, these ones back then. They're just like an image. Yeah. They just put a photo in the background and, and whatever, but there's some where you could see that people like spent a lot of time. Um, so which of these do you think is a good skin? This yellow one is speaking to me here. Yeah. Yeah. And black up there. Um, that's nice. There was, um, maybe, uh, look up, um, sign no, sir, C Y N O S U. Yeah. I think that's, uh, uh, is this the guy? No, I'm thinking of a different skin. But anyway, there, there is, there are some, some people that I, that I knew kind of in, in the skin community that would just like, you could tell they spent days and days like perfecting all the animations. What do you think is the greatest wind amp skin of all time? Uh, what is the Mona Lisa? I, I, well, God, I don't, I don't remember the names of them. Um, there was one that really speaks to me, which was, uh, like an old hi-fi and it was like wood and slightly pinkish. Okay. Wait, go back, go back. Okay. Yeah. That one, uh, no, no, no, no, go down. Oh yeah. I remember this one. Yeah. This was insane. That, that, that came out was like, oh my God. That's so genius. Yeah. Zoom in. Yeah. Well, it's because of, uh, it's because of the way that the material lights. Yeah. The way that it looks like it's so real and DJ, Mike, Lama, Lama whip and intro. Yeah. The man, you see that head, the one with the head and the things coming out of it. I don't know why that one's not on here. Yeah. You see this one? Yeah. So like this is interesting because when I saw this as a kid, I thought it was lame. Yeah. But now looking at it as like time has gone by. Yeah. It's interesting. I think because, oh, that, that, to push the medium. Yeah. That, that green one right there. Um, who made that one? Can you see? Can you zoom in? That's when I'm five. That's when they moved. Yeah. That's when they moved away from this, like, uh, the core format of it in a way. The other interesting thing is in a way, a skin was like a tweet. Yeah. Cause because, because in like before when I'm five, because it was like, it was like a game, Peter Clark. Yeah. So that's the guy I collaborated with Peter Clark. Yeah. He was, he was amazing at coding them because it kind of became this thing where there are some people who are good at coding them. Yeah. Like I, I didn't code this one myself. Sorry. I interrupted you. No, I was just going to say it's like a, a win amp skin is kind of like a tweet in the sense that there's like a set rules to the game. Yeah. Uh, before win amp five. And I'm talking about, I'm talking about like the main, uh, like the, the core thing, the most iconic win amp interface, which is like, uh, just where the decisions. Yeah. It's like, it's like everyone had the same rules. This is where the EQ goes. This is the main top interface. Right. Like if you just, yeah, I clicked this, this was like the rules of the game. That was the template. So it's literally all you could do was change it. So the original ones, and this is why there was like art to making your equalizer cool was that the way that those equalizer buttons actually worked was there was a, a sprite template with a frame for every position. So really? That's why you could make little animations. I was just jumping up to each. Yeah. It's just like a separate image for every position of where that slider is. So that's why you could do fun little animations. And like the art of it was to find all the places where you could just kind of obsess over those little details. Um, but yeah, once they went to win amp five, I mean, nowadays we're always trending towards consistency in interfaces. Everyone's always. I mean, the first thing that did that was bootstrap. Uh, Twitter had bootstrap had, was this like Twitter? Oh yeah, the framework. Yeah. The framework. And it was like, oh, everyone should use bootstrap. Cause now, you know, we really want to make, um, web design and interface design consistent so that people know what, um, what to click on, you know, what's a call to action. Why did they do that? Like what, like what's, I mean, I think it has a good, um, you know, reason for existing that if websites have these patterns that make sense, then, you know, you're, it's more usable. People will get used to, um, I just look up. Yeah. That you're going to, if you go, if you go to AI mode, bootstrap, just go back. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that, that is it right there. It's just that when that first came out, like whenever it was, I think early Twitter, it was a design language that anyone could adopt and it made your website a little bit more user friendly by default, but it's pretty much the antithesis of what Winamp five was like every Winamp five skin had its play button in different place and you would click on things and some stuff would animate out. And there is a definite, like we've, we've, we've the pendulum has, has swung all the way to cohesiveness and consistency is like the only thing that matters in UI design and very little, um, there's very little creativity unless you're in the video game world, like in video games, there's a lot of creative UIs, but not in web design for the most part. Yeah. Can you go back to that AI mode thing for a second? I just want to read that. I think it's super interesting. I'm sure there were other ones, but bootstrap, I think was the most popular one back then. I think you got to go to AI mode or whatever that. Oh yeah. Just, yeah, there you go. Bootstrap is a free open source front end framework providing HTML, CSS and JavaScript templates for building responsive mobile first websites quickly featuring prebuilt components, buttons, navbars, forms, and a powerful grid system to create consistent adaptable designs without coding everything from scratch. But that's probably like 2008, 2009 that came out something like that. That's when, you know, we were getting into Ajax and all that kind of stuff. Like that's when, you know, what is this happen? Cause I feel like this is a common pattern. Why? Yeah. I think like, um, this idea of going from like, you have a lot of different options to choose from people are kind of inventing all the primitives on their own to one where someone like, because for them to say, this is the bootstrap framework, this is the framework you should use for interfaces. Yeah. In order to be able to say that you need a culture that's willing to listen to that. So there's something about the culture had to have shifted because it's not like people, it's not like when like these frameworks came out like bootstrap. It's not like people were saying like, Hey, fuck you, man. People were, people were happy about this. Well, what happened was the, the, the change from static to dynamic websites. Cause before every webpage was, you know, you, you were controlling each page. And then when Ajax and some of these other like web 2.0 type of concepts came out, that's when Facebook and Twitter and all these tools started to, all the, the platforms that allowed you to post to them, so it's come out. And it meant that a page that you were looking at could have dynamic content on it, as opposed to being kind of this static thing. And, and that required now lots of people to be using this interface. So you want to have, and there, there could be, you know, dozens and dozens of layouts for different, you know, your profile page, your list page. And I think that forced, um, yeah, does web design to change towards these like re, like reusable patterns. I think the way, yeah, I remember that now after when you're saying it, I think, I think the way I understand it is basically like, um, the, like when, you know, when these social media apps like Twitter and stuff started to emerge, the, like the, the excitement and the, the magic of having these like environments that felt even faster moving, like, or like fast moving, like real life, like faster moving than like these forums that you were on. They felt like this new, they felt like a new world, right? They were, they were like, they were faster. Something about them was faster. And I think what you're saying is like, they were dynamically updated. Well, the user generated content allows, you know, something fresh to be there every minute that you go back. And that, that's very addictive. And the fact that many people can collaborate towards something, it's going to be less, um, distinctive. I mean, this, there's this recurring question around refinement culture or something like that, like refinement culture. Yeah. When you look at cars, for example, like when, when you look at cars in the 50s, 60s, they're all crazy different shapes and different colors. And now we all just have like a gray blob, you know, and it's all, they all look the same. They're made from the same components. They use the same interface. Everything, um, is optimized and like the optimal form is just a gray blob. So like everything goes towards that. Um, interesting. Cause you, you, you start to find something like, you know, oh, we want, uh, better mileage, you know, like fuel efficiency. So if you want better fuel efficiency, you need something that's more aerodynamic. Well, in the end, like the most aerodynamic thing is just the blob. And so, you know, it over time, every brand is like, well, you know, we really liked having our headlights sticking out this particular way, but blob is going to be better because, um, you know, we'll be able to, um, have better fuel efficiency. So yeah, I don't know how, I don't know how you get away from that because. Well, what is the, what, like you, like what, what are the drawbacks of it? Of blob? Yeah. What are the, what are the drawbacks of moving in this direction where we have like these kind of like free form express, like as I, the benefit of a time where everyone can, anyone can do whatever they want. Like you have these wind amp skins. Um, you have like every website looks different. They're not, they have their own patterns. You have to figure it out as you go to the website. The, the benefit of that is that it explores the idea space. Yeah. It allows you to poke around to discover what's possible. The drawback is that you get friction where every time someone uses a thing, they got to figure out how to use it. Right. Exactly. Yeah. And of course there's breakthroughs. There's, there's some, someone does something and it's, it's fucking awesome. Because if you're part of that time where everyone's exploring the idea space and you see someone, uh, uncover some kind of pattern that you know is going to matter for the future. It's going to matter for every other iteration of this thing. It's amazing. It's amazing to be part of that. Um, but the blob, like what's the blob? What's the job? I don't know. There's a lot of benefits to the blob. I mean, like this car evolution diagram is pretty much the same thing as going from when amp skins to like modern web design. And it's just like, oh, in the beginning, everyone's doing their own different thing. And I mean, the, the, the, these blob cars are, first of all, every, uh, component is, uh, modular, just like web design, right? You take out, uh, every, every piece of it can be replaced very easily by someone. Um, and multiple different car manufacturers can use the same pieces. And when you, you know, open the door and you go in, you're expecting something like relatively similar. So, you know, the, the, the patterns are more user friendly, I suppose. Um, but what are the drawbacks? I mean, cause then you get people walking around saying the cars are more reliable. So yeah, I mean, what, what's, you lose personality, you lose a connection to the maker, like who is, who, who made anything is kind of being lost. And so you, you lose a sense of a vision and a personality behind things. And the more you can kind of like factory manufacture, uh, something, the more efficient you are with it, but the less connection you have to the, to the origin of it. You lose meaning. You lose a relationship with other people, a direct relationship with people. You can think of it the same way with like ingredients and food, you know, what you, you can, you can go buy, uh, I have this essay about. A software, but it's about, it's about how, um, independently made software is like going to the farmer's market and you go and buy like a jar of jam from someone who, you know, they grew those berries and turned them into jam in their kitchen and then they sell it to you versus you can go to the store and get, um, you know, mass produced stuff and, and, and having a direct relationship with the people who made that thing is just fun. It's just nice. It, it like, it allows for a little bit more personality. This, this person will make it with a slightly different technique. I think people also get kind of lost. Uh, I think the, like when, when, when a car looks like a blob and when everything starts looking like a blog, like, blah, blah, like a blob, like a blob, like this optimized, super optimized thing. I think people get lost about the future. They get lost about what matters because, um, there's like a high, like even me, my reaction to the fact that you made that when I'm skin, right? Like there's like a high from when, you know, a culture of a community is focused on exploring the idea space to see who can figure it out. You know, who can, who can, who can, who can push the genre, who can push this thing. And, and I think what happens is that gives you meaning. It gives you purpose. Right. And I think that's kind of the interesting thing is like, uh, there is something about the kind of stupidity of things that is like really important. The, the, the inefficiency of things. Yeah. Yeah. I do, I want to do this way because it, because, uh, because it, it, it, it, even though it doesn't make sense, I want to do it this way, even though it's not the most efficient way, I want to do it this way. Yeah. That, that's interesting to me because. Yeah. And I think that there's a lot of that happening right now, like, um, in the world, especially in, in relation to like the creation of technology where it's like, uh, I think that's what's so interesting about something like obsidian where it's like obsidian is this thing that it looks, it's actually more like wind amp, like far more like wind amp than it is like, you know, like, like a, like a Honda Civic or something like that. Like, you know, um, I just think that's like super interesting. And I think the reason why a lot of people are fascinated with obsidian and the reason why a lot of people think it's a fascinating project is because, uh, often those things don't work from like a business perspective either. Yeah. Right. Like, but like obsidian is like super successful. And I, I think that's what it's like. That's, I think that's what's so fascinating about it. It's funny because I'm, I'm currently, um, redesigning the mobile app for obsidian and we're making it really nice. It's it, because the mobile app is, it's, I mean, we're a really small team. We're seven people, like three engineers. Um, and so we, it just takes us a while to get around to certain things. And we've been meaning to do some mobile stuff. And it brings me back to the days of doing wind up because there's so many little, um, tricks and hacks. But at a certain point I was like, we don't want to make a big part of obsidian's popularity is that people love to make it their own in various ways. And I was thinking, maybe we shouldn't try to make it too good looking. Like, because otherwise it doesn't create the desire to change it. Right. Um, that might be a stupid idea, but it's just interesting to think that if you're given this thing where like the defaults are okay, then maybe you don't have the desire or incentive to tweak it. Totally. When you look at the default wind amp skin, it's it is ugly. It's actually, it's, it's weird because it's both ugly and nice. Are you talking about wind amp or obsidian? No, not obsidian. Yeah. Well, I think that if you go to the default wind amp skin, the original wind up to you mean? Yeah, wind up to images. Yeah, I left. I think it's, I think it's, um, I think this is really nice. But I, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. So this is, yeah. So I think it's nice, but it has, it's like, it's ugly and nice. Yeah. What I mean by that is like, it's, I think it's nice, but, but, but when I see it, I want to change it. I don't know how that's possible. But like, I think, like, if you look at it, like, I think it's, it's, it's kind of nice. Like things are pretty well laid out. The equalizer is really nice. It makes sense. The little thing with the, when the, when the equalizer goes up, there's a, there's a gray rectangle that stops at the high point. Everything else drops down. Like I, I think the guys who made the default wind amp skin are like brilliant designers. Yeah. That's my theory that they are brilliant designers. And I think they, I think the fact that they got the core elements, right? Is that, that other people could build an aesthetic on top of. I think that's really fucking hard to do. True. Yeah. I actually remembered something. Everything we've been saying about wind amp five, I think technically is wind amp three. Oh, is it? Yeah. Because five, there was no wind amp four. They just made wind amp five, like two plus three equals five for some reason. Oh, three was the one where they introduced like the, you know, you could do whatever you want with the design. Yeah. I didn't like that shift. Well, no. It was, it was, it was epic. It was, it was, it was, it was pretty epic. It was pretty epic. It was pretty epic. It was, it was pretty epic, but there was something about the, I really enjoyed something about the fact that they were containing it to this thing. I guess like eventually they needed to break beyond it, but yeah. The other thing that's hard to remember is how low res all the screens were back then. Um, so all of these things, you know, when you look at them now in the screen shots, they look so pixelated, but, uh, back then, I don't know. These things could be like quite small on your screen, even though they were very few pixels. It's interesting. The default, the reason I was saying that is cause I actually think the default theme of obsidian is really good. It's changed a lot over the years. If you go back to like the original, uh, you know, uh, design, it was quite different. Yeah. That's like a pretty recent, uh, version. Really? Yeah. That, that, um, uh, I don't know. Yeah. I think if you go one up, yeah, that, that, that's like pretty similar to the original design. Um, and we changed a lot of things over the years. So yeah, I'm trying to see, I use obsidian a lot. Can you stay on that image? I use obsidian a lot. So let me see if I can see what's different here. Okay. Well, this guy's obviously using like Linux or something. I don't know. He's not on a Mac. Oh, he's windows. Okay. So the finder on the left is still there. Um, the graph is still there, but the graph looks a lot better now. There's like refinements to it or something. Um, it's just like, it looks like the whole interface just got like, it looks like it retained its fundamental essence, but it just got like sharper everywhere. Yeah. Pretty much there was, there's a few things that we introduced. The typography changed a little bit. Like again, just sharper everywhere. Yeah. Um, yeah, I guess it's not that different. I mean the, we introduced tabs on the main page. So now you have, you can have tabs there that there was a ribbon on both sides. We got rid of the right ribbon. This is, this is a weird website. Yeah. Interesting. Oh, this is just a bunch of themes. Is that what you're looking at? Oh, interesting. Yeah. And some of the themes are really old now. Uh, well, really old obsidian launched in 2020. Yeah. Obsidian launched in 2020. Yeah. Yeah. This is the, this is what you did. This is a, this is how I became the CEO of obsidian. Yeah. I made a skin for it. So, so let's stay here. So when you, when you, uh, when you, um, that's so crazy that you made a fucking skin for obsidian, especially cause I was running a company with like 50 people, especially cause, especially cause like the thing you did was like a win app skin. And like that was kind of like your, you're just like really good at skins. Yeah. It's a, it's a talent that nobody really cares about, but once in a while, it comes in handy. It's just a really funny that you ended up making a skin for obsidian. Yeah. I didn't start obsidian. Um, I, I, uh, the, the, the couple that started sheet America, they're geniuses. I'm, I'm staying at their house. They're here in Toronto. Um, obsidian is like a Canadian company. Right. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know if everybody knows that. I mean, I don't know if it makes a difference. We're all like, you know, citizens of the internet now. Totally. Um, so, um, but yeah, they were, they, they were making, uh, another app called dino list that was an outliner and they learned a lot from that and, um, started making obsidian and it instantly clicked for me because it was very similar to an app that I had been clinging together based on this other tool called tiddly wiki. Yeah. And that I made a skin for tiddly wiki too. Cause it basically what happens is I adopt a new tool and I'm like, I hate the way this looks. It's, it doesn't fit with what I want it to look like. Yeah. So I do tend to go towards tools that let me mess around a little bit. Yeah. And, um, yeah, I made this thing minimal and then got to know sheet America and, um, eventually, um, joined the team full time and they're both amazing engineers. Uh, I'm more of a designer, although lately I've been doing more engineering stuff, but, um, it's been a really good fit. So I joined in, uh, started working on the 1.0 update in 2022. At the time I was, um, still, uh, running a different startup and then, um, then eventually I joined full time and just almost exactly three years ago. So what was the, like, you know, when you first started using obsidian, what was the thing that made it click for you? Uh, at the time there were at the time from what I remember, there was like, an emerging set of tools really focused on bi-directional linking, right? Well, bi-directional linking had been around for a long time, but it was, uh, mostly based around like wiki, uh, syntax. So Wikipedia had, I would say Wikipedia was the, the main embodiment where you could see that idea the most and it had been around already for 20 something years by that point. Um, but the syntax that they use is kind of like a markdown type syntax. Um, and, um, this idea of wiki links, which is just you put a double brackets around a word and then it suddenly becomes a link to something. So, you know, if I'm writing the internet, then Wikipedia page, I would say, you know, internet then is based in Toronto. And if I put Toronto brackets around that in a Wikipedia editor that instantly kind of creates the stub of that page. And if Toronto doesn't exist yet, you'll see that link up here in red, but you can click on it and make it into a full page. So that concept had been around for a long time, but it was mostly used around publishing wikis for public consumption. Um, and not really being used for creating a wiki of your own internal world. Yeah. Um, and so Tiddly wiki was, was this great tool still around that I used, um, to journal for a little while. I went through a lot of different phases over the years, but that was the one I was using right before obsidian. And what obsidian did was just kind of take all these different concepts from different apps and put them all in one app. So it had a nice wiki links from, you know, wikis. It had the command palette and the quick switcher that people were used to. If they had used an ID, like the S code, I had, um, this interface where you could kind of drag and drop elements everywhere. It had plugins. So all of those things made it kind of right out of the box. Really appealing. And also the fact that it was based on markdown, which I had been using by that point for a while. So, and, and like files. So I could just adopt the adopt obsidian very, very easily. Um, and the fact that it's built on mostly web technologies makes it really accessible for anyone for me as someone who knew CSS. I could make a theme for it very quickly for people who, um, are familiar with JavaScript. They can make plugins very easily. So, um, that turned out to be really powerful, especially once the mobile app was launched because, um, obsidian runs on, on any OS, you know, you can, and you can, you can have it essentially do the same thing, regardless of windows, Mac, Linux, Android, iOS. Um, whereas if, you know, people often ask how, you know, what would obsidian ever make a native app and you get a lot of, I love native apps. I would, you know, I would much rather be making a native app to some extent, but it would make certain things so much harder. Like plugins would probably not be possible because it would require, um, you know, developers to understand all these different frameworks for every operating system. So the, the ecosystem will be so much less rich. Um, so all those things kind of just made sense to me and made it really easy to adopt. The, the idea of a backlink, it kind of goes even further back than that. Right. Like I think wasn't like Ted Nelson. Yeah. All the way back. Yeah. Xanadu project or something. Wasn't the original like web? Yeah. Wasn't the original like, uh, idea that, um, the internet should function as a bi-directional linking system, like the, all of the entire thing. And also even just there's concepts like transclusion that are still like. One of the most powerful things that people haven't really adopted. Um, what is transclusion in a city and we call it embeds just to be less dorky about it, but it's just the idea that you can take a piece of, um, content and put it somewhere else. Right. The most basic way you can think of a transclusion is like a YouTube video that you embed as an iframe in another website. That's a transclusion, right? Cause you're taking a piece of content where the canonical version of it is a youtube.com URL, but you're putting it inside of your webpage. Yes. But imagine if you could do that for anything, like any image, any, um, text, any portion of text, a sentence and just have the, have the one true, you know, version of that have a canonical URL or place, but then anytime you want to repeat or reuse that concept, put it somewhere else, um, as a reference. Problem is now, I mean, like link rot is, is so pervasive. Like nothing has durability on the internet really. Um, so that concept is very idealistic, but you can to some extent, you know, recreate it in a local way inside of obsidian because you can, you can take portions of, um, you know, notes and, and move them around and display them in, in other places, but it's very hard to have this like continuity of a reference. Totally. Does that exist, that exists right now in obsidian. Transclusion. Yeah. If you go to obsidian, um, embed, you'll find that on, on the help page. Just obsidian embed help, maybe. Yeah. Embed files. So let's see this. So you just put an exclamation mark in front of the name of something. And you can also do this for, you can do it for images. You can do it for, um, Text as well. Portions of text. So like paragraphs or, um, headings, Audio files. Um, if you go back up to the first, oh yeah, embed a list in a note. So click on block identifier. Yeah. So yeah, I've seen this before. This is the part of obsidian that I'm not as good at with the block identifiers. Yeah. Uh, I mean, it depends on how you use obsidian. Some people really like, uh, this idea of atomic notes where, um, you just take really small notes and then you can combine them. So you don't actually need to use the, the block embed, um, reference. You can just reference the entire note cause it's itself small. A block is a unit of text in your notes, such as a paragraph, block quote, block quote or list item. You can link to a block by adding hashtag. What is that up arrow at the end of your link destination, followed by a unique block identifier. Fortunately, you don't need to manually find the identifier when you type the carrot. Sorry, that's kid. That's what it's called. Carrot, a list of suggestions will appear, allowing you to select the correct block for simple paragraphs, place a blank space followed by a carrot and the block identify at the end of the line. Interesting. But if you go back to like the original 10 Nelson stuff, he talks about trans, transglusion, I think he invented maybe that word. I'm trans, yeah, I might be making that up. He invented like a lot. Oh yeah. Here. The original bider of the origin of bi-directional linking in the knowledge system traces to Vannevar Bush's 1945 Mmex concept linking trails and Ted Nelson's hypertext vision, Project Xanadu. But it's modern automatic implementation, backlinking popularized by apps like Rome Research, Obsidian and LogSack creates a dynamic, creates dynamic second brains by automatically showing incoming links. Simulating is so, what, what, what, it's so crazy that obsidian's mentioned in the AI overview. It's cool. It is very cool. It's just cool that obsidian's mentioned with these other like four front, like, yeah, it's like pioneers. Yeah, it's pretty amazing. Yeah. Associative key features of the Mmex. The concept was detailed in his seminal essay, as we may think, published in the Atlantic, Associative indexing Bush criticized traditional hierarchical hierarchical indexing systems as artificial and instead propose a system that mimicked the human mind's ability to operate by association. Associative trails links. The core feature was the ability for a user to link any two items, documents, notes, photographs together, regardless of their physical location on the microfilm reels. But all of this, I wonder when we talk about this, I feel like we alienate 99% of people immediately. Like what do you mean? Just, it sounds so much more highfalutin than it actually is. It's not that, you know, here you are, you've got these like notes on, on paper. And the basic question is, you know, imagine you have 10,000 of those sheets of paper. Yeah. How are you really able to keep track of anything? The core point that they were trying to make early on and that we're still working on making these tools convenient for regular people, like in the blobification of the evolution of interfaces is the basic problem is you had an idea on a certain page of a notebook that you wrote five years ago. How do you bring it up in that particular moment that you need it, you know, in your own notes, in your own world? Totally. And if you're living in a world of paper, that's, that's just impossible. Like the physical medium doesn't really allow for that. Totally. Whereas the digital medium doesn't care about how long a page is, how deep, you know, in any XYZ access, you can kind of manipulate information and bring it up where you need it. And I think that idea, if you can somehow, you know, make it really convincing and simple to understand and simple to use is, is useful to pretty much anyone. It's just kind of hard to explain. Yeah, it is hard to explain, but I think the way that it's best explained or best understood right now is through that obsidian graph. Yeah, I think so. Yeah, the graph helps people understand what's going on that all these things are linked together. Yeah. Yeah. I think that everybody knows that their ideas can be interlinked or that their ideas are linked. I think people know that. I think people know that something they thought of yesterday is related to something they thought of today. Yeah. People know that. Um, sometimes you forget it. Um, but I think generally when people are presented with that idea, they know it. But I think the, the visual of the obsidian graph is like super powerful because it just visualizes that concept. Yeah. It's kind of a meme in the obsidian community that the graph is useless. Like people, people, but everyone agrees that even the people who think it's useless agree that it's, it's something that if you're a normie or what, I don't know how to say that in a less insulting way, but that as soon as you see that, you get something fundamental. Just like seeing that image makes you understand something that even if you end up never using the graph day to day, it put that idea in your brain that actually there is a connection between those different notes that exists somewhere in the computer. Totally. And that could be powerful. I think the, so I, if you should throw up some obsidian graphs, it'll make more sense, but like if you, yeah, I think I shared, I shared mine at one point on Twitter. I don't know if you have a link to that one, but if you, if you share your coupon or something, you might find it, but that's what they look like. Oh yeah. That's mine right there. Okay. So it's a little less readable. Yeah. So like, um, but actually day to day, I don't, I don't look at this. Yeah. So I have some thoughts on this. I look at the local graph. Oh yeah. For sure. Local graph is where you just take one node and see what's related to that one thing. This is like the entire map of everything. Yeah. So this is an obsidian graph. And basically what's happening here is each one of these circles is essentially a file. And, um, this is showing the interlinking relationships between the files, um, or the topics or the subjects or the labels of these links that, uh, Steph has created. And this is like, it's a very beautiful looking thing. It's very much Steph's like, like, like clearly you played with this, and got it to look like this for a while. And like, it looks really, really cool. And it looks almost like an art piece. Right. And so if you go back to like those other graphs, like just see a bunch of them. So when I, when I started using obsidian, I was very aware of this meme that the graph is kind of useless, but exactly we said, but it, but it, but it's, it's useless, but it's, uh, useful to people to get the idea of like, Hey, it's interesting if you continue to catalog relationships as you're making your notes through the day that it builds up into something. It communicates that this builds up into something. But, and so I just adopted that view that, oh yeah, the graph is kind of useless, but it does that thing. But I started watching some YouTube videos on like just like vault walkthroughs and like just, just how different people use obsidian. And there was this one girl, uh, she did this video. I don't remember the video. It doesn't really matter, but like, well, I mean, you can look it up yourself. Like, but she did this one video where like, she's looking at her. She, she sets some time aside to browse through her graph in order to get ideas. Yeah. And I thought that was super interesting. Right. The, the, and it just depends how serious you are. Like if you're, if you're somebody that's like, okay, I'm starting to make notes more often and I recognize that there is a potential for things to interlink to each other. Cool. You're at that stage of the process. That's great. For me, I, I write a lot, like a lot, a lot. Yeah. And so I'm at a stage where I'm willing to grow. I'm willing to like, yeah, like I'm willing to look at something like this and you can, you can change the degrees in, in the relationships. And I'm willing to just hang out in my graph for a little bit and just kind of thinking like, oh yeah, I guess that is kind of related or it can kind of glitch my brain. Yeah. I mean, the question, I feel like we're kind of explaining it backwards in a sense, because it's like, why does it matter? And I think that's what you're getting to. Like, why is it even useful at all for you? For me? Yeah. Why does it, why is it useful? I think, I think it's because for me, the way I see it is everything I'm doing right now is I'm building up to a body of work in my, in my like career and like my creative practice. And so I recognize that everything is interrelated. Right. There's like this Miyamoto Masashi quote where he says like something like, uh, once you say this, once you, once you see the way or something, you see it in all things. Right. Yeah. And so I think like there's patterns, right? Like there's patterns in the way I approach, you know, making software, there's patterns in the way I approach making a video. There's patterns in the way I'm approaching this conversation right now. There's different things that I'm trying to understand. And these things are building up over time. It's like this puzzle and map that I'm mapping through. And I want to collect these things and I want, I want them to all be in the same place. And so that's why I use obsidian for that. And I, I am, I, it's a very, very, very important tool for me. Right. And as I've collected things, it's, it's very interesting to me to kind of like look at a graph and look at the things that I've collected and just see how it affects my brain. How does it affect the way I think about things? Yeah. Am I going to write notes after this episode and like carpentry is going to come up because, you know, like if that comes up in this conversation or wind app, like, like the idea that wind app is connected to the origin of obsidian, that's like what we realized through this conversation. The idea that skinning is like a point and like the inciting incident of you working on obsidian and the inciting incident and like you leaning probably more deeper into like online culture and stuff like that. These are interrelated ideas. Like when I'm here, exactly. I wouldn't be here in Toronto talking to you if it wasn't for making a skin and wind amp and then that, yeah, exactly. It's all interrelated. Right. And so I like that the tool matches the reality of like the way ideas work. Yeah. Right. It's more aligned with the reality of ideas. It's not some new thing. It's actually the default way that ideas work. They're interrelated. Exactly. And so that's why I like that tool because there's not a lot of other tools where I can reflect that interrelated relationship. And sometimes when I'm just like thinking like this, I can catch the interrelated relationship. Like right now we're just thinking out loud. There were just, we're just talking and we're catching the patterns between each other. We're seeing what we're seeing what connects and what doesn't connect. It's cool. I can do that in real time when I'm being very generative. But if in a week, am I going to remember all these inner relationships? I'm not. Correct. Yeah. I'm not. But if I catalog them and I link them, right, then I can remember in like a month that, oh yeah, fuck, Winamp is related to Obsidian. And hey, man, maybe I should make like a documentary about Winamp because through Winamp, I could probably explore a lot of like design concepts in terms of like how we navigate cultural movements, how we navigate things, how people, how people figure things out on the go. Right. What are other examples of this? Is this related to jazz in some way? Is it related to hip hop? Like, you know, what I'm like, what are, what is the process of going from this explorative space to this kind of like understood pop culture space? You know what I mean? Like from exploring patterns to understood patterns, all of these things are related. I can look at my graph and I can see those relationships. Sorry. Yeah. That's why I like it. No, it's very, very similar to what, how I use it and how I, what I like about it. You can, you can go back in time very easily. You can understand how your thought process evolved over time. You can, for me, I'm, I'm quite consistent about cataloging where I've been, things I've done, the ideas that I've had recently. So I can go back to, hey, when was the last time I was in Toronto? Where was, you know, what was I doing that day? That last time? Who did I talk to? Oh, I wonder what they're up to now. Oh, that's a weird coincidence. Like I just talked to that person last week and now it's like five years later. Or what, you know, like all these weird little things come up. Or then the idea of once you, so there, there are these things like on here. It might be a place, a movie you watched, a book you read, a person you met. But then you can also bring it into the space of ideas, like a concept or an original idea to you can be a note. And then once you create that little fragment, like an, like an idiom or, or something like that, or a meme phrase that just means something to you for some reason, like a quote that you heard or something that someone said to you. Then you can start to write where the building blocks are the ideas themselves. So you can take two ideas and combine them together and play, play around with them and see what, what happens if I combine these two ideas. And now, you know, that's, that's what makes things like memes so powerful because, you know, I can, I can show you an image or, or, or talk about a phrase, like just a sentence of a meme. And to you, it already evokes like 20 different things. Like a meme can mean so much, you know, just from a few words. And if you can start to think about your own ideas as memes and combine them, now you're like accessing a more like zoomed out, um, abstracted view of your own ideas. Totally. And hopefully you can have some new ideas that you wouldn't have had otherwise, or it can help you see patterns that otherwise you'd be just kind of stuck in the quick sand of like, you're just trying to get out of, of your current situation where now you can, you can maybe zoom out and see where you are. For sure. I think like at a, at a baseline, it's like, uh, it's like, it's interesting to hear your, hear you say like, how do you make it like more accessible in a way? Right. It's, it's interesting because I think it's this delicate balance with the tool, like obsidian where it can't be, it can't be like overly accessible. We can't blobify it. We can't blobify it, right? Cause like that's what people love about it. Yeah. And so what's interesting is it's not, it's, it's not necessarily about making the tool accessible. It's more just like, if you're somebody that wants to develop your understanding of something and develop your understanding of your subject, of your projects, of any investigations you're doing and of yourself, I think at a baseline, the best way to do that, as far as using computers is, is, is a bi-directional linking system. Yeah. Right. So like, you know, so you got to like, if you're into that, if you're into understanding yourself and you want it to compound over time. Is there a word that's better than bi-directional linking? That's the question because that immediately is jargon, you know, and, and my, my instinct is as soon as you say that, if you're at like a dinner party and someone's like, oh, you know, what do you do? I'm like, I work on this app that lets you do bi-directional linking. And it's like, you lost them. Totally. 100%. I think. I think the way I would say it, if I was at a dinner party and I was working on Obsidian, I'd say I work on an app where it's the best, it's, it's, it's for taking notes, but what's different about our app is it's the absolute best way to link, to interlink two ideas together. It's like a note-taking, note-taking app, but our note-taking app. But why is that useful? Why do I care? Because all other note-taking apps don't factor in the idea that, okay, sorry. You already lost me because I'm already like, I already take notes. I have, you know, let me take a shot at this. Yeah. Okay. So why is that useful? So it's like, uh, it's, it's like, it's very difficult to show how two ideas are linked together. Hmm. But that's not a benefit to my life. Why, why is that helping me in my life? What does it do for me? If you want to understand yourself and understand the world, now you're talking, it's very useful to see the relationship between the things you notice. Helps you understand yourself. Yes. Yeah. That's a, that's a benefit for sure. Yeah. Or help, help you understand a lot of students like to use it to understand the, whatever their discipline is. Yeah. Cause it's like, oh, now I can understand how these, you know, topics of biology or whatever are interrelated. And I, I get it better. Once you can see those links, it makes more sense, but the link is, is not, the link is not the benefit. The benefit is the understanding. Yes. Yes. And you're totally right about the, like saying bi-directional linking and stuff like that. And yeah, it took us a long time. If you go to obsidian.md, the homepage, it took us a long time to figure out what's the tagline on the front. We came up with sharp and you're thinking, cause it was a bit of a joke on obsidian itself, which has been used for as sharp, sharp tools, um, like arrowheads and things like that knives were made out of obsidian. This is really, really, really hard. It's so hard. Yeah. Yeah. This is like the kind of thing where you got to kind of like, you lean into a bit and you got to lay off it a bit. Cause you'll go insane thinking about this shit. Yeah. Yeah. We haven't updated this in a few years. Um, maybe needs a refresh, but. It's really good, man. And obsidian in general is really good. The way that they build all their services around it and stuff like that is really good. I'm like, I use every single obsidian service. Really? Yeah. That's cool. Every single one. Okay. We got to make more for you then. Yeah. What else would you, what else? So I got obsidian sync. I use publish. What do you use published for? My website. Oh yeah. Yeah. Let's go to it. Let's check out your publish site. Internetvin.com. Nice. Okay. Let's check it out. Essay. It's very simple, but yeah. No, because simple is good. Yeah. Got some photos and shit. I got some messages. Yeah. But I, I, I, I haven't like pushed it really hard in terms of what I'm sharing publicly yet, but I definitely, I definitely, um, I definitely use it. Um, this is cool. Thanks man. Yeah. I definitely use it on my own. It's like much more extensive in terms of what I'm doing. And then I use obsidian sync. Nice. And I, um, yeah, I'm excited for the new stuff too. This is not a big. I haven't jumped into bases yet. Oh, bases. Bases are, I love bases. I kind of, I'm so happy that, so we just released that. I know it doesn't look like much here, but, um, I'm so happy about this. Yeah. This is my favorite thing. I could tell from reading your posts that there's like depth to this, that I don't see that you're thinking about. Like this matters for some reason. Um, I just really love how obsidian E it is. It's a, it's a very obsidian way of building this particular feature because this, the idea is not new. There's a lot of tools out there like air table or, you know, um, like there's different tools to have this concept of it's kind of like a database notion has its own thing like that where you can enter information. But the difference here is that every row is a file and from a. You know, digital archiving standpoint. I really like that. Um, and also the fact that it's very modular. So you can create your own views. Like this is just a table, but we have a few other examples. If you scroll down the one that I added most recently as maps. Um, so you can kind of visualize. Um, you know, so like each one of those dots as a note, but it's the same information. So fundamentally, like if you think about the graph, right? So it's basically just like the graph is just showing you links of your notes, like in this kind of virtual 3d space, but what if your notes were on a geographical map? What if it's was in a table? What if it was in a list? Like all these different ways of representing the data with what if it was a chart? So it's just a way to take the same kind of information that you would see in a graph, but make it very easy to display that in a different format. Totally. Yeah. So yeah, I haven't dove into bases yet. That's like, I haven't messed around with it yet, but I think I'll get there. Uh, the other thing I'm excited about is like the multiplayer stuff you guys are working on. Yeah, we haven't been making very much progress on that. Cause we kind of, we got sucked into the bases stuff and people responded to it really well. So we decided to basically spend more time on it. Multiplayer is a hard problem. You go to roadmap, obsidian roadmap. Yeah. We're not, I don't mean to give you like, uh, not bases, you can just click on, yeah, or obsidian on emity slash roadmap. Yeah. I don't want to like stress you out looking at the roadmap right now. No, it's fine. Um, it's just people don't understand. I look at this. Yeah. Uh, I look at this a lot. Really? Yeah. It's updated like once every three or four months. I just go and check in just as if, is it active yet? No. So like canvas support for publish. Hmm. Yeah. That'd be great. Super excited about that. Hmm. Okay. Cause like canvas is like, I like canvas. Yeah. That's good. Good. Yeah. It's cool. It's cool to just like map out your ideas. I use a lot of like, um, okay. I'm like a huge obsidian fan. So like, yeah. Okay. You know what I mean? It's like, sorry for it. Yeah. Sorry for it. I hope this is interesting. Like, I think it's interesting, but like, um, the, uh, so I really like outlining things. Hmm. And I feel like outlines are a really good way of like, uh, giving something, giving something structure very quickly. Yeah. Cool thing about outlining the way that obsidian does outlining is like, I guess like it kind of borrows from dino list and like these other like outliner tools where it's like, you can be like, uh, you can make a quick outline, right? Like one, two, three, four, and you like lifting points and then like you're listing out points or whatever. And then if you indent them, um, you know, you can, it's cool because you can like collapse these things right, right in there. So it's awesome for outlining. And that is for me just a quick way to give an idea of structure. Yeah. And then we can this, it's cool because it's like, you can, uh, you can also just give things structured, but like more spatially. So I see it almost as like a spatial outline. Um, yeah. I mean, the, the, the fundamentally everything at the in obsidian is a markdown file. Um, so the, the nice thing is, um, how do we, and different people think differently for some people, canvas is totally useless. They don't think that way at all. They don't, you know, they don't have a visual. They don't care about like the spatial nature of it. Um, but it's just how can we give people all those different modalities? Yeah. Um, so that they can use the ones that make the most sense to them. Totally. I think when you guys do, uh, um, canvas publish, I think you guys called it. Yeah. I think that's going to be really cool. Okay. Because I think it adds a lot to like the way that people will be able to present their websites, um, and the way they'll be able to present ideas. All right. I'll let the team know. Yeah. prioritize that one. Yeah. I think it's really cool. And then the multiplayer thing is going to be nuts because, um, one of the thing, one of the challenges with us, like at new and everything we're doing is like, I have my obsidian graph, right? And then I'm like building up towards, but it's kind of, it's, it's frustrating cause like I have to then take all of these, this information and I have to transfer that into like Google docs. Yeah. Right. And so, so the way we handle that is we create a master document for different projects or different like divisions of what we're doing. And then we have tabs and then the tabs become like these like, uh, you know, related documents, right? Okay. So, I mean, there is something you can do now, which is what we do at obsidian, which is we have a shared vault. Um, the problem with that is it's like you're sharing your entire vault. Exactly. So, um, the obsidian team uses obsidian to make obsidian. And now that we have bases, we use it as our task management tool too. So, um, in obsidian sync, there's a collaborative vault feature. So you can share your vault with other people. Some people like to use git, um, and collaborate through git. Uh, there's other tools that, that let you do it, uh, off a shared like drop box folder. Have you guys made a video of like how you make obsidian? I feel like you need to do that because I think that, um, like the collaborative vault, I would love to use a collaborative vault, but it's like hard for us to jump into it. I think it'd be way easier if we saw like somebody using it a lot. I haven't seen many videos online about like, yeah, we should do that. Yeah. I've been thinking about that. Um, I have that article about how I use obsidian, which is for my personal, but I've been thinking about writing something about how we use it as a team. The thing with multiplayer multiplayer is, um, there's kind of two separate concepts. One is having just shared cursors, uh, like in, you know, Google docs or something like that. I think that would be cool. Very hard to do. Yes. Um, because of the way that, um, it's, it's sort of easy ish to do if you have one source of truth, which is like Google docs, there's just one document because it's the one that's stored on the cloud, but with obsidian, because it's all local first. Everyone has a copy and there could be unsinked changes from different people. So it's a very technically difficult challenge. Um, and there's some different ways that people have tried to solve it. This like concept of CRDT's, but, um, doing it right is going to be hard. And then the other concept is just the idea of being able to share a single note that is not, um, you know, your entire vault. So like that's also conceptually quite difficult because of the fact that obsidian is all local first, um, because there's certain things that you wouldn't think about. But for example, what if you share a note with somebody else that already has a note that has the same name, you know, like because of it's all stored on the file system, it's not stored as an idea. It's stored as that file name. Um, so what do you do? Because the file system doesn't allow two files of the same name. Um, so there's all these, like you wouldn't think that that is a big problem, but there's a whole bunch of them that come up that are related to that. Um, obsidian being local. I really respect the fact that you guys have like this file over app architecture. Because I respect it because it's like, um, you guys think that that's the right thing to do. That's the architecture that you think makes sense. And then you're just like committing to that architecture. Yeah. And it's like probably a really pain, like probably interesting in a lot of ways. And like, you know, but it's also probably like really frustrating. It's really hard. Yeah. And that's why I was saying I like how basis turned out because it's very obsidian. He like the way that it's architected fits with that. But it's by the way, you know, I think file over app is not necessarily like. Morally superior at all times. And it's not technically superior at all times. There's certain circumstances where that approach breaks down. Um, but it's an approach that is logically consistent and has a lot of benefits in certain cases. And I like that we're pushing that always, that we're using that approach and trying to solve all of our problems within that constraint. Um, because there's already a zillion apps that do it the other way. Like we don't really need to do, people ask, Oh, why did you make bases a file per, per row? Like, would it be more efficient to actually use a database for that? And maybe, but also then it wouldn't be obsidian, you know, then there's already a billion, you know, apps that have databases that are like SQLite or, you know, some other database. We don't need to reinvent the wheel that already exists out there. Super cool, man. I also think that, um, obsidian sync is like an interesting kind of project to me because everything's still local and you guys found a way to sell this sinking service, right? But it, but within, within the philosophy of obsidian, I just think it's so cool. I mean, it honestly, uh, well, first of all, she did who built it as a genius. Um, yeah, I think you think this is worth also telling the story of like the origin of like, like what is the story of obsidian sync? Uh, well, I mean, by the time it was launched, uh, uh, that was a pure shita and Erica, uh, thing. They were just two people working on this when they launched it. Um, I think that sync wouldn't exist if big tech didn't. Wasn't so terrible because, uh, that fundamentally the reason why sync exists is because people want to be able to use obsidian across devices that are not one, a provider, you know, like some people have a windows, uh, computer and an iPhone or some people like Linux and Android or, you know, so, so basically if you have any two devices that are not part of the same ecosystem, um, then there's, there's like no solutions for you, um, that are, that are native. Um, so sync was initially, you know, providing a way for you to access your notes from any device and also on top of that being intended encrypted, which almost none of the other services are intended encrypted. So Google docs, Apple, iCloud, um, anything that is like web based primarily is not intended encrypted. And then encrypted means that, you know, even though your files are stored on the sync server, there's no way for obsidian or anyone to read them because they're encrypted before they leave your device and they're unencrypted when they get to your other device that you're syncing to. And fundamentally doing that, you know, on the web is like really, really hard and annoying because then you have to put your encryption key in every time to decrypt it. Um, so most, you know, web based, no taking apps don't do that for that reason. Um, even iCloud, it's actually illegal now in the UK to, for iCloud to be intended encrypted. So the Apple removed it, uh, in the UK, uh, because they do have this like advanced encryption option that's off by default. So there was the like security and privacy angle. And then there was the cross platform angle. I think those were the reasons to do it initially, but then because it's just files, you could, yeah, you could definitely use Dropbox. You can use, there's a like, you know, half a dozen plugins that are out there that let you connect to every different syncing service you might want to use one drive, Google drive, et cetera. Um, so we essentially compete with every big tech company. And we're just still trying to make the best one. Um, that is the fastest, the most reliable deals with conflicts. The best is the most secure, um, you know, and is, and is designed to work really well with the app. And it's a very small percentage of people who use sync. Like I, I don't know how, which percentage it is because we actually don't know how many people use obsidian. Like you can just download obsidian, never create an account. And we just have some vague ideas about how many downloads we have from the different platforms where we host the file. But I would say it's probably, it's like much less than 1% of users use sync. But still it is plenty for us to run the company and pay ourselves. And so it's good. Obsidian sync is so good. It's so good. Yeah. It's so well executed. Um, it just like works. And people don't want to pay $4. That's absurd to me. I, I had this, um, I had this issue the other day where I fucked up a file. And then I was able to just like, yeah, they got the version history and I went back. And it's not, it's not even just like, it's not just like, oh, the sync. It's like, oh, well, you know, there's other, there's other like, um, apps where they're like, they have like a sync service. Uh, and you'll, and you'll, and you can pay for it. But it's like, okay, it's four bucks, but it's like, it's, it's like the files are on your fucking computer. Yeah, you own it. Like, like it's insane. It's, it's like, you're getting the benefits of like syncing while maintaining the files on your computer or your phone or whatever. It's just so good. It's like really well executed. I would love to understand like another time, like what the architecture of this was, like how it all went down. Um, it's just really cool that you guys committed to this like local file first philosophy and then like, you know, executed a syncing service. Just really inspiring, right? It opens your mind. It makes you think beyond like the way we look at a lot of these like, uh, predominant architectures, like, you know, it doesn't have to be that way. You can, you can, you know, if you, if you want to innovate, you can. The fact that you guys are doing that is just really cool. I think we were also really lucky that, um, you know, when Obsidian was launched, this was before chat GPT or any of the LLMs. And now LLMs are basically a markdown first. Like every LLM uses markdown as its, uh, form of formatting. So when you're chatting with chat GPT behind the scenes, it's just markdown like that, that is being presented to you in a formatted way. Um, because the way that these things work is just, you know, character based. And that's how, um, plain text is. Um, and so we were, that was never part of the calculus of why we should use markdown in the first place, but the fact that it worked out that way means now there's this whole generation of users who are using Obsidian plus cloud code or Obsidian plus cursor to interact with their files in different ways. And I think that, um, for the most part enterprise, like companies, businesses haven't yet realized, um, the danger of keeping all of their, you know, company data in, you know, unencrypted cloud based services. Like almost every startup just doesn't think about the fact that like their data is easily trained on by, uh, you know, all the big tech companies. And I was, I was talking to, uh, Obsidian has been, for some reason, Obsidian's been blowing up in Japan recently. Like there's like, if you go on Twitter and search for Obsidian stuff, it's like half of it is Japanese users, um, talking with each other. And I think it was interesting. I was talking about this with someone, but, uh, in Japan, there, there's a big culture of like long-term thinking. Uh, a lot of the oldest companies in the world are Japanese. There's like, you know, if you get Kikomon soy sauce, it's like that company was established in the year, like 1000 or something. I'm serious. And there's, yeah, they're one of my favorite articles on, on, on line is, uh, Wikipedia list of oldest companies in the world. You should, you should pull that up. Yeah. Um, and they're like, most of them are Japanese or German. And, uh, they're like soy sauce, alcohol. We had some, some hotels, um, but there's some really old companies still around. Japan, Japan, Japan, Japan, Japan, Austria. Yeah. Germany is, is big too. Uh, there's a lot of breweries in Germany that've been around for like 800 years. A lot of old Japanese companies here. Yeah. But I mean, these are old, old, but like Nintendo, you know, is 150 years old. Yeah. It was a card company. Oh yeah. That's right. Um, there's, there's a lot of like sake brands. There's, um, you know, there's, there's a lot of old knowledge. I mean, we're talking 1600s, but even 100 years old is old by today's standard. Yeah. And I think a part of it is like this kind of generational passing down of information, but also kind of keeping their recipes secret, their, um, their techniques kind of in house. And in the world of digital files and digital information, we kind of just forgot about that. But I think it's actually extremely important in the time of LLMs because now if you're not keeping your own concepts and recipes and approach, you know, in house to some extent, you don't have a competitive advantage because everything else is just being like distributed everywhere. Yeah. So I think, um, you know, these ideas will turn out to be, I expect that as people realize that that's what's happening, um, local first, um, you know, kind of intent encryption will become more popular over the next 10, 15 years. I think you're right. Yeah. But that's just kind of a thing that we hadn't, we did not predict what so for sure. But it was just, it's just, it just happened, but you, you were definitely operating on fundamentals that you thought were correct. But I actually think you're right about that. I think we're going to start seeing more, we're going to go back to this like, uh, situation where like companies are managing their own networks again. I think so to some extent. Yeah. Yeah. Or, or using, um, intent encryption to, you know, if they are using cloud storage, um, maintain the privacy of that data. Yeah. Hmm. We'll talk more about artificial intelligence, but let's see this cookie first. Oh, wait, can I use the bathroom? Yeah. Yeah. Use the washroom. We'll get you a cookie. All right. So let's eat a cookie. Okay. Bring the cookie. When did you guys bake these? Okay. Wait. So before this comes up, like, well, I guess we'll bring up, you, there's a, there's like this deluxe chocolate chip cookie that you really like. You've made, right? Can we pull that up? It's a recipe. It's only get, oh, you looked at it. What? Oh, no, I thought I saw it earlier. Okay. Go to, go to deluxe. I haven't seen it. I, this is my first time looking at that cookie. Okay. Good. Yeah. Okay. So this is a cookie that you've made. Hmm. Deluxe chocolate chip cookies. The recipe is the result of years of experimentation, attempting to create a luxurious version of the classic chocolate chip cookie. The result is a big cookie with a fudgy inside and crisp exterior. And so there's some ingredients here. Two and a half sticks of unsalted butter, one ice cube, three hundred and seventy five grams of light brown sugar, 125 grams of white sugar. Holy fuck. Okay. Directions. All right. So we had our friend, John make this cookie. Where's, where's John? He's, he's there. So he'll, John made the cookie. Yeah. So, John, you want to throw headphones on or something? Or, oh yeah. So yeah. Do you want to, was this cookie hard to make? Um, no, I mean, it was, it was kind of the same as a normal, not that I bake a lot or anything, but it was somewhat standard for sure. You little things that were interesting about it. Like what? Um, I think this is the largest ratio of like chocolate to flour. I've experienced, which I'm a fan of chocolate. Um, there's little things like the 240 grams of flour I thought was interesting. Why? 250 grams is exactly a cup. 240 grams is a little less, which means that this has been tinkered with or something because generally I don't know if I've ever. I never measure things. Uh, I always measure it with by weight. So that's why it ended up that way. Oh, I see. But also, uh, it should be fine. Right. A cup is pretty inconsistent in terms of how much weight of flour it is. I guess it depends how you measure it. Yeah. I mean, just the, the, uh, recipes that I've, like completed before once again, not that I've done a lot, but actually just by like half a cup or a full cup or something at 240 grams is very specific. What, what's this measuring tape thing? Oh, cause he said, um, in the instructions, that it should be approximately two and a half. So I was trying to turn. Yeah. They turned out a little bit on the flatter side for some reason. But, uh, they look really good. Oh yeah. Is there, can we show this on the camera? Like, look at this. It's beautiful. Oh yeah. There you go. Oh yeah. It's the size of my head pretty much. Yeah. And they, I didn't expect them to be so big. Yeah. They were, they're a little thinner for some reason. It might've been the heat of the oven. Um, these things, you know, there's a lot of small adjustments, but yeah, they look great. I've been working on, I have a new recipe that is totally different. It's a different kind of cookie, um, that I've been working on lately. I'm almost ready with a recipe. I'm going to put it up. So when did you, okay. So how long did you actually, um, let it stay in the fridge? I made these on Saturday afternoon. Okay. And then you baked it today. I baked it yesterday. Oh, okay. Yesterday night. Now you got to bake it today. So that's it immediately going to be less good, but it's, it's coming. It's coming together pretty nicely. Should we eat it? What do we do? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. Yeah. Okay. Hmm. And what, uh, brand of chocolate did you put? I knew it was going to ask that. I was fucking with it. I knew it as soon as, I knew it was going to say that. Um, I used a lint for the dark chocolate and then, um, president's choice for the milk chocolate. Yeah, we didn't do the exact same. I couldn't track down the, that's okay. There weren't the Valrhona, Monjari and Givara feeds that those actually, I, you know, I should change that because I didn't use, um, there's a chocolate I like better than Givara now. Who combi? Who combi? H-U-K-A-M-B-I for the, for the light chocolate. What do you think of this cookie? I think it's awesome. Yeah. But, you know, it's really good. Yeah. I definitely learned a lot about you while making it. Like, cause I did a lot of research on you leading up to this. And I think if I just made the cookie, I would have got the same amount of information. Okay. Like, what do you mean? The chocolate tells you everything about the, the chocolate. Just like the precision of it, um, they can tell that he really, he's big into like mastery of little things. Um, that's good. Like tinkering and making stuff his own, like his related to like the skins. He took an existing recipe, combined it with ideas from another, uh, chef and then kind of made it his own to suit like what he wanted out of it, which is indicative of pretty much everything that he does. Um, yeah, I don't know. I could go on, but really good stuff, man. Thank you. It really opens, I guess. Yeah. Great job. It's stuff. Good stuff. It really opens you up to, um, being. Psychoanalyzed. Yeah. Just sharing stuff online. I mean, by us, yeah. For sure. Well, what is Tommy, you got a cookie. What do you think? Oh, right. No. Yeah. Everyone got a cookie, huh? Yeah. Thank you for making these. I think the chocolate to the flour ratio is like really key. So the new one that I'm working on is. Crunchy on the outside and very, um, it has, um, buckwheat and, um, rye and oats. It's like very, it's like a. It's like a meal. It's like it feels very healthy. Um, but also has a ton of chocolate still. Hmm. This sits the spot after two hours of, um, video. Why are you so crazy, man? Like, why are you so into like these details? Like, why does this, you know what I mean? Like even, even with the. I'm so crazy. Yeah. I've been wondering that myself. Yeah. Like, why is that? Like, why, why, why go to so much detail? I wish you could tell me that. I don't know. Yeah. Like even with the, the carpentry stuff you're doing, right? Why, why? Like, why is it, why is it that you keep going to like so much detail? Well, okay. Well, let's talk about this cookie for a sec. Okay. Before we start. Okay. What, like, what is the inciting incident of this cookie? Like, why did you decide to do this? Well, there's, there's a few recipes on my website. I think that I have so many unpublished recipes. I think I should, um, put more up. Um, okay. So this. Because when I look at all of these recipes, I see the same thing. Hmm. Let's see the same kind of thing. Hmm. The same kind of thing. The thing that I see, and maybe I'm wrong about this, but the thing that I see is somebody that is, wants to immerse themselves in a particular thing. Yeah. I see somebody that wants to go. I'm trying to find the right words. It's like somebody, it's like someone who's hardcore. It's someone who, who wants to, um, like, get into the, like, obsess over every single detail of something. Right. I see it. Like when I look at this, when I see the bread and, and the way you're approaching it and like the details, noting this, the, the, the taking the photos, I see the same thing as when I look at the cookie. And then I see the same thing again when I look at the popcorn. Right. Yeah. Okay. You get what I'm saying here. It's so. I'm like trying to think of a real answer to your question. It's okay if you don't have the answer. I'm just saying I see, I'm seeing a pattern. So the answer that comes to mind is I am an agnostic. I don't believe in, uh, life after death in a way that I, that would make sense to us as living people right now. Like what do you mean? I don't think of, um, I guess I feel like if, I think a lot of, uh, this is, these are just speculations, not, uh, these are not scientifically backed, um, theories, but I think that if there is such a thing as, you know, life after that, it will be very different. That I think a lot of our experience of life is literally stored in our body, like a hard drive almost like our memories and our feelings, um, exist because of our bodies. Right. And so, um, like what does that mean? Well, when you die, I don't think you're going to, even if you go to some kind of heaven, you're not going to remember what, uh, life was like, right? Or if you were reincarnated into another body, you're not going to have real memories of, um, your past life. Right. Um, so I think that life, that's that this is it, you know, like this is, we got to, we got to live life. Yeah. Um, and maybe there will be some, something that happens afterwards that is cool and interesting and different, but it will probably be quite different. And in this time, we have our bodies, we have eyes, we have, I mean, not everyone has eyes actually, like it's something to take for granted. We have tongues, we have arms and legs, like, and I feel like it's our job to, it's our purpose, it's our duty to use all of those things to the fullest extent. Yeah. Um, while we have them. And so I think about, um, you know, what exists in the realm of flavors that is interesting and textures that is worth exploring. What can we, this is not necessarily like a hedonistic pursuit. It's not like, Oh, I just want to, um, it's, it has to somehow be balanced with other things. If, if I was purely only obsessed with food, then maybe I wouldn't care about, um, hiking or calisthenics or something else. Like it's kind of trying to find the right balance of exploring all these different things that we have access to our sensory perceptions, our brain, our thoughts, our ability to go explore the world and see, see things. So I guess the answer to why am I so crazy or why am I pursuing these things? It's just, I have a tongue. So like, let's see what, what can we do with that? What do I enjoy? My mom is a, is a pastry chef. So also she, she taught me a lot, um, growing up about cooking. And I got really into that. Um, so, you know, those, those can be inspirations, um, to some extent, or, you know, ways that I learned certain things. Yeah, it's really cool. And I, I think that it's like just really inspiring to see somebody who's like pushing things to the limit. No. And I know that's not like the exact reason of it. Yeah. I just mean like it's interesting to see things, but this is accessible to anyone. That's what I mean. You know, like anyone can just make a cookie. Totally. And I think this is something where, you know, you go out and like now there's all over the US people. There's like this crumble, uh, brand, you know, uh, it's like a cookie store. You can go, see our, yeah. These are really popular for some reason. They've like sprung up all over the place. It looks like they've got a bunch here in, in Toronto. So why, why does this matter? I don't know. I just, I don't know when this company started popping up, but they're very popular and I'm like, you know, you can just make this at home in like 20 minutes. And I think maybe it's the same, uh, wow, 2017. That's pretty new. Maybe this is the same problem as, uh, backlinks and, uh, skins skins. And why cars are becoming blobs is that everyone, like everyone wants to be able to get into a car and eat a cookie and, and it's all served to them. But I'm interested in how all these things, why these things exist and making them myself. Like that's, to me, that's the point of being alive. Totally. Totally. Yeah, totally. Why you're just going from one place to another, like engaging in consumerism when you could be the maker of the thing, of the world around you. Yeah. Um, so I don't know. I mean, sometimes it's fun to, you know, be part of someone else's vision and see what they can come up, um, with for you. But when it comes to like this kind of mass market cookie, like cookie, to me, this is frustrating. I see this and I'm like, okay, maybe at some point in my life, I'm going to need an emergency cookie and I'm going to have to like go to that place. But for the most part, it's a problem that you can very easily solve for yourself. And I think it's a lack of agency that people are not, you know, willing to read a recipe and make something at home themselves. It disconnects us from, um, our, the basic foundations of life, like eating. You have to eat every, you know, pretty much every day to survive. You have to, um, breathe. You have to, um, you know, live somewhere, sit on something. Like all these things that we do, we've been doing since the beginning of time. Like that's why I'm interested in furniture design. Like somehow you have to sit on something. So why don't we think of like what is, what, which we sit on. Yeah. I think the reason that that happens is because people are, I think they're exploring two different questions. So I think when someone just goes to a store that they, that they find that it's like getting popular or whatever on Instagram or something. And then they find out about it and then they just go to it. I think it's like they think that there's nothing wrong with it. I don't think, but I think they, they think that by going and doing this thing, they're doing something that they think matters. They're doing, they're doing something that they think like this, there's like meaning and purpose in this thing. You know, and I think versus when you, what you're doing, when you're like making this cookie or, or when you're making a front piece of furniture, or when you're thinking deeply about like a particular piece of software or anything like that, I think what's happening there is you're asking a different question, which is like, what does. Going really deep into this thing and understanding it for myself revealed to me about the way the world works. What does it reveal to me about who I am? And what does it reveal? Like, like, what does it reveal to me about this thing? Hmm. Everyone around it, what they care about, how it got to be this thing. That's a different, that's a different set of questions than, you know, like, I, I think they're just like, let's go, let's have some fun. Let's get this thing, you know, it's a really, really, really, really, really, you know, it's, it's not, it's not asking that surface level thing, but I, yeah. It's hard for me to imagine not thinking that way. Like I can't, I can't really, or people, I often hear people say like, oh, I can't cook or I can't draw or I can't do, and I don't, cooking, anyone can cook. You can just, I feel like I'm like the guy from Ratatouille. I'm like, just read the recipe and do it. It's doable. Or maybe you just can't cook yet. You know, you can, it's very easy to learn. Um, yeah, Chef, Chef Cousteau. Yeah. Uh, the anyone can cook. I think it's not even just that, I don't think the thing that you're just saying is that anyone can cook. You're also saying that you get the most joy in life from understanding what something, what understanding what things are, like developing your understanding. Yeah. That's where, that's where joy comes for you. It's not, it's not even just saying like, I can't cook. It's like saying, you're saying part of being human is eating. And how could it be possible that you don't want to fundamentally understand your relationship with food? Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. And all of the stuff that surrounds us, like the butter and the chocolate that was in here, the flour comes from somewhere and someone put their pants on in the morning to go and literally, you know, make wheat, like to, well, now it's just all out of it is automated. My, my, on my dad's side, they're all farmers in France. Um, so like they're literally grow wheat. Um, and someone does that, you know, seeds are planted. Like this is the nature of being a human is that you somehow have to like farm or hunt or go pick berries and consume them. I don't know. I feel, I feel, I feel like I'm the world is crazy for not thinking about this all the time. And it's also fun and enjoyable and connected to like our real, the, the, the real world, like, especially because so much of my work is online and inside of the digital, you know, internet realm, it's fun to be able to connect to things like gardening or calisthenics, which is just like, to me, calisthenics is like the equivalent of, you know, file over at, but for the body. It's like, what do you mean? Um, calisthenics is all, um, just like pushups and pullups, just basic, um, movements and you, in order to do calisthenics, you don't need anything at all. You don't need any equipment or anything. It's like just your body movements. So like squats, uh, with no equipment or pushups, you can just do that anywhere. So you're, you're really just using what you have to strengthen yourself or to create a relationship with your body to understand your own sense of balance, to understand your own feeling of strength, of being able to, you know, use this thing that you're given. I think the other thing I like about developing your own understanding and like going into things like that is when you understand something fundamentally, it's like, it leads you to like a form of independence. When you don't understand how things work, you're kind of like a slave to be, to like the abstractions of it. Like you're a slave to, um, someone has to take care of it for you. But when you understand how things work, you can kind of get independence through that. Um, and I, and I really like hanging out with people that value that because you can like learn from each other. Right. And I think like sometimes when the whole world is like telling you, like, Hey, don't worry, I'll take care of that for you or you don't need to understand this or something. What happens is, um, you can kind of like adopt that because it's hard to fight back on that thing on your own. But when you have like a group of friends that have that kind of framing, it's cool because you can get inspired off that. Like when you, when you go, when I see your, what I see, what you're doing, and I see you going super deep on things, it reminds me that I got to, I got to stay focused. I have to, I have to stay like, I can't compromise. You know, I can't sell out on myself. You know, I can't give up halfway through the process because that's the point of what I'm trying to do is go the distance, go, go to the end of this experience. Right. And so it inspires me when I see what you're doing, when I see like the Obsidian sink thing and the fact that you guys got it to work. It makes me, it's like, okay, all right, just keep going. Like don't, don't cut corners. Yeah. You know what I mean? Don't cut corners, keep going. And I think, um, and I think it's like really useful for me to be around that kind of energy and to, and to have that framing, because to me, that's the root of like skill progression. Right. It's like, if I want to be very skilled, I have to stay in that pocket of thinking for as long as I can. You know, so yeah. What is that for you? It's, it's what you're doing right now with the, the show. Yeah. I think right now, I think the, where do you feel like you're pushing the edges? I think right now it's definitely this show. Like, like, I feel like, um, there's like new and then I'm like, I'm the CEO of new and we're pushing on that front. But in the most like, like in the most, in the simplest sense, I'd say my edge is probably this show right now. Right. Where I'm like, I feel that it feels that way. I mean, even just how we were setting up and connecting to the screen and yeah, kind of trying some new things and figuring out everything from the camera placement to the lighting, to everything, those, those, there's a lot to explore there. Totally. Yeah. And then there's like, that's one part of it, but then another part of it is just like the pocket I have to stay in my mind in order to have the conversation to be able to, you know, have like a cohesive structure to the conversation, but then also be able to introduce change and follow tangents. Right. There's a level of like, uh, there's a certain pocket of energy that I need to be in to do that. If I'm tired, I can't do it. If I'm sad, I can't do it. And if I'm too happy, I can't do it. I have to be, I have a certain like internal cocktail that I got to have. It's a little sad. It's a little happy. And then I got to have a little anger in there. If I don't have the anger, then I can't, I can't be like as edgy as I want to be. I can't get my perspective across the way I want to get it across. So it's like this cocktail that I have to kind of keep my mind focused on. And then that's only one aspect of it. Right. The other aspect of it is like, well, why am I even doing this? I'm doing this to learn. I'm doing this to progress. So when I meet someone like you and I'm like, man, what, you know, what you're doing is awesome. Like the level of detail that you're putting into, like how far you're willing to go. Another part of it is like, I want to get to that level. You know, so I want it. So part of the, part of the non-intuitive thing is that I have to progress so that when we talk again, you're like, okay, so hopefully I'm that guy where you look and you're like, okay, wait a second, this guy is going really, he's going deep. Damn, I got to, I want to progress. Right. So it's, it's like counterintuitive where it's like, as you keep doing the show and you keep getting better at the show, I think I need to be able to internalize and demonstrate that I'm learning the things that, you know, that I'm picking up in all these conversations. I think that's part of it. There's this, there's this quote I really love by TS Eliot, which is only those who are willing to go too far can possibly find out how far one can go. Yeah. And we use this in our household. It's like, we're going to TS Eliot this. And usually it's something super dumb. Like, you know, you're making chocolate chip cookies and you're like, I wonder if it would be too much chocolate to ratio and you just like, just go, just take it too far in your mind, go to the thing, like think of everything as an experiment and like, what was the cost of putting too much chocolate in the cookie? Maybe you ruined a batch slightly, but then you also, you know, no, okay, I got to dial that back 10%. But it's so much better to just like overshoot it by some, like most likely you're not going to overshoot it by that much, but it's better to overshoot it and then dial it back than to try to come up right to the edge of a line that actually is way further than you thought. Um, and you can do that if you start to think of everything as an experiment, like really what's the cost in the end? Oh, you know, I had to throw out that, that thing. It's not that bad actually, but somehow, you know, if you don't force yourself to think that way, that you just constantly limit yourself. I do it every day. Like I constantly am like, Oh, what would, how do I like take it too far on purpose? That's a really, really useful. Yeah. I don't know. So when you, when you're getting into, like right now you're, you're getting into like furniture design, carpentry. Okay. Maybe we can use that as a way to explore this idea. Like how does it, how do you, uh, how do you go too far? Can you, can you, can you explain what you're doing in furniture design through that lens and like what is it? What is like, what is the process of like, you know, like in advance framing up? Cause you must be defining some kind of sandbox in advance, right? Okay. So, well right now I'm trying. How do I, how do I do that? Okay. Oh, how do you do that? Like how do I, how do I, if I want to bring that into my projects? Well, I mean the most simplest version, you know, like let's say you're just using, uh, cameras as an example. Okay. Um, you might shoot it with the depth of field way too low, you know, like on purpose and see what that looks like and, and see how that feels instead of like, you know, inching your way up to the right depth of field on a shot, just go all the way to the, you know, the maximum that, you know, uh, or the lowest f stop that your camera can give you and then back off, you know? So that, that's like just the op, just do the opposite of what your natural tendency would be to like come up to the edge, just overshoot it and then come back down. Um, so you can do that in really small ways, but then you can do it like as a startup, for example, on a bigger scale. Um, you know, I'm not, I'm not sure what that would be in your case. Yeah. Um, in the case of furniture design, um, so I started my design career, like, you know, skins was just like a hobby. But when I was making skins, I was actually, um, studying to become a biologist. So I, I first thought that my career would be in biology and I went to, that's what I went to college for. And then at some point I realized actually I didn't want to be a biologist and that I wanted to, I re, I discovered that all the things that I wanted to do, the stuff that I was doing with design was actually a job. I thought it was just for fun. Yeah. Um, and I realized people get paid to do this. So I went back to school to become an industrial designer. Um, you know, doing furniture, electronics, product design, physical product design. So that's where I learned, um, woodworking, um, you know, just using all of the tools in the wood shop. And if you go actually on my website and projects, you can go back to like some school projects that I made, um, so like, um, slash projects on my website. Yeah. And scroll all the way down. Some of them are stuff, things that I made in school. Yeah. Like, so chomp is, you know, an early furniture design that I did. This was just in school. So the, the, the assignment was, um, take an eight and a half sheet. Uh, it was not eight and a half. Um, uh, eight by four sheet of plywood. So it's like a standard, um, eight foot by four foot, um, and make a piece of furniture. That was the only. I was it. Yeah. So the prompt. Yeah. So you have to, and in this case, I used a CNC, um, machine to cut out. So you can just think of it as like a flat piece of material and all these pieces are cut out and then assembled. And, um, I had a lot more photos, but that is amazing. It's just a simple, I mean, it's just like one of those toys, you know, like those dinosaurs that you assemble. Um, but each thing connects into blue or blue or that was part of the, that was part of the, um, prompts. So you can't use flat packed family furniture, plywood construction uses no glue or fasteners. So that was one of my earlier pieces. Um, Dexter is another one that's a wood. This is not exactly furniture, but, uh, yeah, you can watch that video. If you want, that's a, it's a, technically it's called a creeper. That's the, that's the word for the object. Dexter works. This is a whole product. You have to kind of ignore the metal frame that has more of a prototype, but the, the top is also plywood. Is that magnets? Yeah. That's cool. So the, the, uh, the idea was to, I forget what the prompt was for this one, but I had a lot of fun making this. What's that thing he just pulled up there that locks the wheels? Yeah. That's me, by the way. Oh, is it? I made this whole video by myself with a tripod. Um, but the, um, the way that the plywood is, um, that is similar to if you've ever seen the Ames chair. Yeah. Um, it's, it's a similar kind of concept, except mine was made with vacuum and not heat. So this was a prototype of an idea I had for how to lock the wheels. It's a little finicky, but the wood part I was happy with. Yeah. If you look up like Eames furniture, you'll see, um, yeah, the kind of around the arm rest, I believe. Yeah. They, they, they, they innovated on this concept. Actually there's a, there's a thing code search for Eames stint S T I N T. He said this was like, uh, stint, I think splint, splint, splint. Sorry. That was like the original thing that they made, um, back in the day for, uh, World War II. So in World War II, they came up with this way of bending plywood to, uh, make these devices, you know, to help, um, you know, injuries during World War II. In 1942, the Eames is pondered how molded plywood could address a serious problem the medical corpse was struggling to solve. The standard metal splints used to brace wounded World War II servicemen were causing further injuries due to vibrations and metal during transport. So if you look at the third photo, you can see their, um, thin pieces of wood veneer, and so they get stacked together and put into, uh, a machine that has a mold and it uses, um, heat to kind of, uh, form the wood and there's glue in between the, in between the layers of wood. So you can do this with heat or you can do it with a vacuum. Um, but that's what it looks like. And, and plywood bending was like pretty new technology and they used it also for making airplanes. Uh, but then it got superseded pretty quickly by, I think it's beautiful. Yeah. It's an amazing object. You can find them. They're really expensive now because they're like these vintage, uh, objects. I mean, you wouldn't really use it in day to day life, hopefully, but yeah, this, this technology for bending plywood kind of fell out of fashion for military applications because, you know, um, aluminum frames and things became more popular for making, uh, airplanes. And, uh, they also were innovators in carbon fiber, but then both carbon fiber and or glass, uh, fiberglass, uh, was being used as well as plywood to make furniture. So they ended up going down the path of making, you know, bent plywood furniture and you can see a lot of this. If you just search, like there's a lot of, um, Danish, um, like Arne Jacobson, I can see the bending now. It's a, I noticed it. Search for plywood. Um, yeah, plywood. Um, yeah. So this is like a really classic design. Yes. Uh, by Arne Jacobson. There's, there's all over Alta. There's a, there's a bunch of famous Danish. So this is what I went to school for, uh, in, in Pasadena place called art center. And that was after I was nice chairman. That was after I was, uh, thinking about becoming a biologist. I thought this is the kind of stuff I'm interested in. So I made that dexter piece kind of inspired by that. Um, and it was really fun to learn that method of bending plywood. Um, but eventually I kind of decided not to go down that path and like just got sucked back into software and other things. I, I built a couple of companies we can talk about later if you want, but to come back to the question of, um, or omac is a fun project. Those are all, 2009 are all from that school era. This was like a little barbecue grill. That looks good. It's a, uh, little, uh, waterproof barbecue grill. Um, cooking. Oh, and then it serves as like a cutting board. Yeah. It's actually, it's a technique. How does this work? Uh, there's two different ways. That's the grill thing. Yeah. Like that's the surface. That's the surface inside. There's a compartment for the lid and underneath it, there's, um, the fuel. You could use different fuels. If you want, you could use, um, charcoal if you wanted, but it was, um, the prototype was using this corn, uh, ethanol fuel, which had, which is basically waterproof. So you can light it even if you're like backpacking it through a river or something like that. The wood surface is optional, but it's this, um, method called cedar plank. Cooking where you will soak a cedar plank in water and then cook fish on top of it. And it, uh, as the wood, um, as the, uh, the water in the wood evaporates, it like heats the, the fish and it will give it this like nice smokiness. Um, so that was the concept, but you don't, in this concept, this is just a purely like hypothetical product that's never was made. Although I think a company made something very similar, um, since then. This is awesome. Um, it looks so good. Anywho, the point is, uh, to come back to the furniture, like what happened and why I've been sharing a lot of furniture recently is that I bought a house and, um, almost two years ago and up until then I had been renting. And so I never really had the opportunity to work on, um, more, uh, built in furniture. Cause I mean, I don't know, it wasn't worth the investment to me, but, uh, built in furniture is where you, you know, create furniture, like, spect to the space and it's meant to be, you know, stay there. Um, as opposed to like free floating furniture and products, which is what I hadn't mostly been doing before. Um, so the, it's reeling all the way back. The question is like, how far can you go with built in furniture? Right. You know, um, and it opens up a lot of different kind of concepts, um, around, you know, hinges. It gets really nerdy very quickly, but like, uh, you know, what do you want to do? How do you want to build drawers? How do you want to mount things to walls? Um, and I wouldn't say that for the most part that, uh, the recent furniture stuff pushes too far into, um, the T S L E it. Can we see it? Can we like pull up all the furniture? Yeah, I, I shared some photos. Um, do you want me to pull it up on my screen or on, on yours? Yeah, let's try that. You want me to pull it up over here? Okay. Let's see. See if this works. This is a new innovation in, uh, oh, here we go. Okay. Did it work? Yeah. Uh, I don't see it on here. Okay. Oh, perfect. Can we zoom in? Oh yeah. Uh, I'm going to see if I can find first time anyone ever plugged in. Let's see. So when, when we bought the house, okay. Yeah. So when, so that I want to preface also by saying that I am not doing the woodworking myself now, I did on those previous projects that we talked about, but now I just, I mean, I'm working on obsidian, like to do the kind of stuff that I'll show you is, um, I mean, first of all, the equipment, I, this is a very small house. Like our house is about a thousand square feet. I don't have space for a full wood job. The wood job you would need is bigger than my house to do the things that we're doing. And also, um, because I'm collaborating with a lot of, uh, woodworkers, most of them have way, like decades more experience than I do and can do things that I never like acquired the skill for. So this is, this is, there's about five different woodworkers I've worked with on different projects throughout the house. But yeah, the first thing we did was, you're still, you're still designing though. Yeah. So what's, why don't you talk a little bit before you do about what your role in the process is? Um, um, I guess, um, designing, coming up with, um, the functional requirements, you know, what, how, how should it be? What kind of material should be used? What kind of, um, defining the, um, guidelines, I guess, I'm a big fan of, um, using, creating your own constraints for yourself. So what are the, the patterns that you're going to reuse? So for example, almost all of the furniture in the house uses the same kind of wood. Same, same kind of, uh, finish for, for the wood, same kind of edge treatments, same kind of, um, you know, cosmetic details for certain relationships between, um, the thickness of different materials, the connection points, um, the handles, the type of drawer slides, like all of those things are mostly functional. And it's really fun to be working on something that is like totally selfish. Like there's the users of this thing are going to be me, you know, my wife, our kids someday, their guests. Um, I really love the idea of, uh, making this space into some, into a place that where, you know, we can host and have, you know, friends over for dinner or something like that. And when someone steps into our place, um, they have a feeling of like, oh, this is, this is a specific place where I'm going to get specific kind of food and I'm going to have a specific kind of experience. And when I use the bathroom, I'm going to interact with, you know, the door handle in a specific way. Like, and that kind of, um, I'm just, it goes back to like, why am I obsessed about this cookie or why am I obsessed about this like skin for the interface? It's, it's like all of those interaction points that you're going to touch or feel or taste or hear. What do we, where can we have an opportunity to, um, be the conductor or director of that experience? And I mean, it's like this one, I came when, you know, when I walked into this office and in this place, it's like, Oh, you know, it has a feeling. It has a smell. You have the incense going, you have the music going, you have the certain kind of lighting going. And like, I know when I walk in here, Oh, this is, this is this place. Totally. Um, and I kind of wish that that was happening all the time. Like anywhere I would go that those details would be considered and felt like that person or felt like that. Even if it's a brand, I suppose some brands are really good at doing that. Like if you go to, you know, ASOP or something like that, that you go in and it's like, Oh, this, this has a feeling to it. Um, so the question was, and again, when I'm like, if I'm making this recipe for a cookie, I'm not saying this is the best cookie period in the world. I'm just saying this is my cookie. So when you come over to, you know, my house says the kind of cookie you might get. And so I, that's, that's the, that's the question. I was also like, when I show you some of these photos, I'm not saying this is the best kind of wood or this is the best kind of detail. I'm just saying this is something that we chose for our house, but maybe if we, you know, move to another house and did something new, maybe we would choose. A different kind of wood or a different kind of texture to everything because. And that would be the thing that feels more native or endemic to the location of that house, you know, I see. Uh, okay. Yeah. So I'm going to skim through this cause maybe it's kind of boring, but yeah. I don't think it's me boring, man. I think you're good. I think this is why we do the whole project. Sure. That, well, this is, uh, the first thing that we did was rip out the floor cause the, the previous owner kind of, um, was, uh, you kind of a like a bit of a house flipper, but not professionally did a lot of like home remodeling, like kind of on the cheap. So there was a lot of like cheap decisions that we decided to rip out, including the floor. Um, so this is just to show you some of what's weird is actually this is another floor that was under the floor. There was a different floor. Uh, so we just, and every time I was trying to think, how can we do it the right way as opposed to, uh, like cheapening out on certain things. Um, so this, oh, this is before. So this is like, this is what it, this is what it, this is when we bought the house. Yeah. But this is the floor that was in there before. So we ripped out both of the floors. Nice roof lines and stuff. Yeah, it's fun. Uh, it's a nice, it's a nice house. Um, it's very, you know, if I was, uh, trying to do this kind of thing in a bigger house, I think I would go totally crazy because, um, there'd be too much space, but this is when we started building the library. So we went, uh, I don't, I don't have these quite in the right order, but that the library was fully built. This was our first big project after the flooring. We, um, designed this and then built it up in the wood shop. Um, but this is where we came up with one of the, a few of the main design patterns that now we have this as a reference to kind of reuse throughout the whole house, this project to find those. Yes. Yeah. Exactly. Um, because, um, because the house is quite small, it's only two bedrooms and one bathroom. Um, we, we wanted to make very efficient use of the space everywhere possible. So, um, everything has to be, um, every surface wall surface is trying to be functional. The entire house on all around the wall surface in the house. Yeah. It's trying to have a functionality to it because, um, all of the, most of the walls are windows. So on the whole perimeter, it's just a one, um, level house on the perimeter. There's windows on every side. So there's actually not that many walls in the house. You're actually seeing some of the main walls that we have. Um, so we wanted to be able to, you know, kind of increase the amount of storage that we had, um, and, um, by making it built in, we don't have to compromise even like small amounts of extra material that's needed to make the thing standalone. I don't know if that makes sense. That part, that second part didn't make sense. The standalone part. If you have a standalone piece of furniture, then you have to have extra material to like contain that thing, or you have to be able to put it up against the wall, whereas here you can, you can save like layers of material. I see. Oh yes. Yes. It might not be the best example. This, this one might not be the best example, but some of the concepts that came out of this, where one of them is, um, this relationship between like thick and thin wood. Um, so there's like, um, this thicker material. Yes. And the thinner one. Yes. That was just the nature of this project. But, um, we wanted to create this like, you remember the snake game where there's like, yeah, so throughout the house, there's a snake and it like basically starts here and it goes like this and it connects through the whole house. Yeah. Holy shit. Well, it's for real. Yeah. It's still, it's still in progress, but yes. Okay. So this is like, we're starting to, we're starting to understand the going too far thing. Yeah. Okay. This is that's fucking crazy, man. So this thicker, this thicker wood goes like this and then it goes up behind here and up here. And then this, this part up the top is where our projector goes, uh, cause we, we watch movies on the opposite wall. So like, um, okay, here's the final thing sort of, you know, you have the projector up here. Damn. So we're looking from the perspective of where the, where the wall is. It's so nice, man. So this is after, so right now we're working on another project that's back in the back hall, but here you can kind of see what it looked like after it was installed. There's missing one piece here. And then the desk. So on this side is my wife's desk. She has this like nice little, so here's another, you know, angle where you can see now another detail, which is the chamfers. So one of the things with, um, using wood is that most furniture that you buy at IKEA or something like that is going to be made of particle board. Yes. And, and particle board, you know, is, uh, everyone's seen it, but doesn't necessarily know what it looks like. It's just like lots of tiny chunks of wood that are compressed together with glue. And then they usually put a veneer on top of that and that veneer could be, uh, fake wood or it could be painted, a painted wood surface. Um, but it's kind of hidden and particle board is like a very cheap material that you can just pretty much punch through within a force. Um, and you can not really have a chamfer like this on any material, but solid wood, because otherwise you'd be exposing the fact that it's not a solid material, you know, you'd be showing the particle board. Um, so it's kind of like a flex from the woodworker to be, to be saying, this is one piece of material. Yeah. Um, so we wanted to show that wherever possible and creating these like, you know, it kind of goes back, there is actually a lot of glue and screws and things like that, but going back to certain, certain connections are mechanical in nature. And how do we, how do we show that this is like a strong desk, um, through the connections that, that it has. So this is, um, this is the desk. And that's so nice, man. That, um, my wife works at, uh, that was, so when I was like the first, first project, you can see some other details, like, um, this pattern here. So there's the door handles, these little, um, joints. Um, those are mostly cosmetic, but they're kind of fun because it's another, you know, thing that you wouldn't really be able to do if you're not working with solid wood. This is another example. So, you know, this is like fun. You guys, you define these details. Yeah. I didn't make this myself, but we did a bunch of different handle designs. And then we were like, okay, what feels right. So another thing that we landed on is anytime there's a thing that you want to touch with your hands, it should be curved. So there should always be a curve wherever there's, um, an interaction point with your hands, because the rest of the house for the most part is very, you know, like strict, uh, you know, rigid lines everywhere. Uh, oh, this is fun. This is when we were in the wood shop. Yeah. You can kind of see it. It's really fun to be able to do this. How did you get this in your house? It was an obvious question. I guess. Yeah. It's just very temporarily. Um, so this is like a, this is how you're, you're looking at a prototype, right? No, this is the real thing. It's just, but I mean, they, they, this is going to be undisputed. Yes. This is going to be deconstructed. Correct. Yeah. Yeah. But it's, it's, it's pretty convenient to be able to look at it that way. Yes. Um, yeah, this is the opposite side from, we ripped out this like wall that was completely unnecessary. This, there was no reason for it, but there was like a thing up there. Yeah. Um, and then throughout, there's also all of these like literal interaction points, like we wanted to never have like cables exposed. So you have the curve there on the vent as well. Yeah. So anytime there's a, like something that's for that one's like for, um, you know, electronics, um, forget what this is. Oh yeah. That's the door curve again. So that was one project. Um, this project, this, so the, the initial prompt is like, how far can we push built in furniture? Yeah. Then you start working on this thing. And then that reveals to you that part of how far you can push built in furniture is like taking these like this visual language that you essentially came to through working on this project. Yeah. And then it's like, okay, well, if we wanted to push it really far, this visual language would be reflected through an entire house. Every piece of the furniture. Yeah. Exactly. Then it's like, okay, well that's kind of far, but then you're like, okay, what if the line of the shelf like connected with all the other built in furniture in that like, like pushing it even further would be like, oh, where it's actually one piece of integrated furniture through the, out the whole house. Exactly. So, so, so the thing that we're working on next is, um, okay. So something you might notice is anytime there's two, uh, disconnected pieces of material, they connect like this, like a little L shape. I don't know if you can see that. Yes, I can see that for sure. Um, so you can see it here too. Yes. Um, so one of the project that we're working on right now is to level up. The project we're working on right now. I got it. I got like, I got to like sit down and think that you can't see it on screen because it's, uh, our faces, but okay. So here there's a connection and here there's a connection to the floor. So that's an L thing there as well. You integrated it. No, this is, this is the old, um, yeah, but it's still in. Yeah. It's still made it work. Oh, you know, we're gonna, we're getting rid of this thing here. Trim thing. Yeah. So then it will, then this part will connect to the, to the bedroom. Oh, yes, yes, yes. Because we have to continue the, so you're gonna keep the wood, right? Yeah. So you're going to keep that same wood. It connects from there and then that's how it connects. Yeah, I'll show you. So you're going to get rid of the trim in the whole house. No, no, well, I had our new own trim, kind of like this. Uh, it's, this one is in the bedroom. So this little thing is, uh, this has doors now. Yeah. This was an early project. This was done with some slightly cheaper materials. We used plywood more here because we were like, you know, this is not. Showcase like the library is one of the first things you see. So we're like, where can we save a little more money? Um, but, um, okay. Other things that were considerations. The height of everything is a little higher and a little. So the toe kicks, this is, toe kick is like where your, your foot goes when you go, if you have no toe kick on a, on a cabinet, then you can't get as close to it as you'd want. Right. So like it's nice to be able to walk very close to a cabinet. Cause here we will usually put, um, you know, some of our favorite books out that things that we're reading right now or like nice coffee table books might go up here. So it's nice to be able to walk right up to it because then you can look at it more closely. Yes. But also the height of it and the depth of it is partially defined by, um, these are robot vacuums that we have. So we wanted to make sure that the robot, like the house is very robot friendly. Um, so, uh, every surface has to be like, we don't want to have any cables touching the floor, any like, like legs. Like there's a lot of things that those robot vacuums hate. And so just long by the way, robot vacuums, they're so good now. Yeah. The new ones are getting one are insanely good, especially the robot mop combo vacuums like here in this house or in this office. Unfortunately you have a lot of cables on the ground, but, um, yeah, we got to, I think we need to like, we have a lot. There's this place must look like healthy. No, it's great. No, this is a working environment, you know, but the robot vacuums are good. They're so good now. Yeah. It's like, it's like we're like in, you know, iPhone of 2009 era where like every year they're getting so much better, even just in the vacuum. Realm. Yeah. You gotta tell me a good one to get after this. Yeah. We can talk about robot vacuums. They're really fascinating. Okay. Um, okay. So yeah, let's see what else do we have? So the next project we worked on was this credenza. So it's like kind of on the opposite end of the, the, um, so it's basically the same concepts, right? You know, the, the little L shape, the joinery, this, this curve, uh, this is curved on the inside. Um, this is just to kind of put some little items. It's also a bench. I don't have a great photo of the whole thing. Um, but it's a nice place to sit when we have guests. Then the next one we worked on was the, um, bedroom. So this is another one where like the trim will connect. So we made these wardrobes on the left side. I don't have a good photo of that, but it's how will that connect? Um, I'll show you once. Oh, I didn't bring this photo. It's on Twitter. Um, there's a photo of the, the new doors that we worked on, um, for the kitchen, but it will make, hopefully it will make sense. This is the kitchen. This is ridiculous. Yeah. This is honestly one of the hardest projects I've ever worked on period. Really? It was really hard. Yeah. Why? Um, mainly because of the integration of all of the different things, like plumbing, electrical, um, the ventilation system, the, all these drawers and hinges, making sure everything would fit, making it. There's like a little bit of a file over app thing here too, where it's like, um, I didn't want to, I wanted to design everything around replaceable appliances. So that, that this would work is going to last 30, 40, 50 years easily. Yeah. Uh, they're just standard sizes only use things that have standard sizes. So like, um, all of the ranges, like the cook tops, like the cooktop that we got is actually kind of this unusual new startup called, uh, copper. Yeah. Charlie. Charlie, I think is the name of the product in copper is the name of the, so it's, it's like, this is one of the things that is like fairly, um, I tend to like to buy things when I buy anything. I tend to look at like stuff that's been around for a long time that will last for a while. Um, this concept of cost per use matters a lot to me. Like can we, can we, I'd rather buy something. There's a whole movement called buy it for life. That's kind of similar. Um, this, um, cooktop is definitely not yet in the buy it for life category because it's using this new induction battery based technology. Right. And I was just really curious about it. So I made this choice, but it's integrated into a 30 inch wide, um, um, Bay that if I wanted to, I could easily swap it back out for a normal gas, uh, stove. Um, so it was just trying to think about which things will age out before others and making sure that whatever we design for, if the woodwork stays around for 50, 60 years or more or a hundred years, I don't know how long this house will last for, but it's been, the house is from the fifties. So it's very possible that this woodwork could stay around that much longer. Um, so you can see that the snake is connecting here. This is the bar. It's coming back around on every side. Um, so you looked into, you, when you were thinking about durability, you started looking at appliances and you started looking at thinking like what aspects of this, yeah, like, like where is the, where is the longevity in these things? Yes. And then eventually you worked out that it has to do with the size of the dimensions. The dimensions. Yeah. And their connection points, like, for example, we were using gas, a gas stove before, and this one is purely electric, but we didn't get rid of the gas. Uh, we, we still have a, we could easily connect back to gas if we need to at some point in the future. Um, so, you know, because who knows, maybe we'll change our mind or something or something will change or this, maybe this stove will not last as long as we had hoped. Um, and we decide nevermind induction is not the way to go. Yeah. Cool. So, so yeah, making decisions based on like how long the thing is, you know, going to be around. This is, this is when we were like ripping everything out. Um, this is the kitchen. Yeah. This is like six months ago. Um, so then we, we had to, uh, put some new floorboards because, um, when we read the floor at the beginning, we, uh, we only did the section that was, um, accessible because we didn't want to tear down the whole kitchen, like when we first bought the house. Um, so actually there's some fun photos, like similar to the other ones, but of the kitchen being built. Um, I don't have, how did you figure out what the layout of the kitchen should be? Yeah. We, we pretty much kept the same footprint as before, but which made a few changes. Like the oven used to be where this, uh, open, even this, even this like the bar. Yeah. The bar, like you're obviously optimizing for something. Yeah. This is like, uh, a macaque kind of setup, right? Yeah. We wanted to, um, and you're cooking right in front of the bar. Yeah. So this is, this is how, yeah, that looks beautiful. This is how it looks at night. So this is the, you know, this is like the opposite view where I'm cooking or. So when you're in that image here, it's kind of a hard, it's like very, if you go to the two, if you go over images to the left over here, yeah, like here. Okay. So where are you cooking here? Like right here? Yeah. I see. Yeah. And you're facing the people that are eating, right? Yeah. So I mean, it was very much, that was a key element of the design. It was a hundred percent designed by like, omacase experiences. So going out to a sushi bar, I love, I feel like, I feel like that should be the main way that you interact in a restaurant. If you can, not just for, you know, sushi, but for anything. Why? Because it's so fun to watch someone prepare food for you and to be able to interact with them and to, to kind of have this like direct relationship from where the food is being made to it, you know, going into your body. Yeah. And when I'm cooking for someone, I love that like exchange. And then they have questions like, oh, what are you, you know, what are you doing right now? What kind of ingredients are you using? Where did you get this? Um, I like being on both sides of it as a, as a customer or as a user or as a consumer, I want to be able to ask all those questions. And it's so it's more interactive. Yeah. As opposed to, you know, a normal restaurant, like everything is hidden. It's all in the back. And then you interact with like a server. I think it's more fun to interact with the chef. Totally. Have you hosted anyone at your house yet for dinner with this kitchen? Yeah. How's it going? It's, it's really great. I, the only problem is we only have like basically we can sit four people slightly not comfortably, three is good. Um, and then me and my wife like to cook together. She's amazing at chef too. So we just, um, we don't have a place to sit sometimes. So we're just kind of eating, standing up in there and they're sitting, but it's okay. Um, we, we, we have some more room to optimize. We're, we're, we're kind of, uh, busy these last few months. So we haven't had as much time to entertain, but I think next year we'll have some more, some more fun. Yeah. That's cool. So that's, I mean, you know, like you can still see all of these little connections, like the, that, that snake idea. Um, this is, um, I don't know if I have a good example of, um, something else. Let's see. Yeah. That's kind of what I brought for the most part, but I think there's a photo. Oh, here we go. This is in a daytime. So you can see this better. Yeah. Damn. That's nice, man. So, so there's that trim thing. Yeah. So that's the trim thing. So you can see it connecting, um, like here and then even back here. Like this little corner and over the door. So this door, we, we changed out the store. So then this, this little piece connects here and then it will connect to the bottom. So this is the next thing that we're, we're changing and it will go to the bathroom and the bedroom that are down in the, in the hallway. The other way. The office, I've been working on a bunch, um, but it's not quite ready. This is my, this is a piece of furniture that I was working on. That's like a sofa. Um, we also have a, a piano case that is not photographed. I don't think. So yeah, it's just, I mean, yeah, the idea of taking things way too far, um, where you kind of get to reuse all these patterns is, it's, it's, I guess a recurring. Yeah. Uh, let's see. I had some other videos in here. Like this is a fun one. There's a lot of functional decisions we made. Like these, these are, uh, really nice, um, sliding, um, storage that is hidden in here. So again, it's like that concept of how do we maximize the amount of storage that we have available. This kind of weird because the, the ceiling is slanted. Right. So to open these doors, uh, they both swing to the left. So they don't open like a book. They open this one opens to the left and this one opens to the left because it has to open on the like longer side. But before the previous kitchen, the, they didn't bother with this. They just like put a cap on the top. You know what I mean? Yes. So it's just like finding all of those like little details where we could save some space or add more functionality, um, in places where, you know, it hadn't been used before. So I guess that's it. That's inspiring, man. Oh, there's also a whole door. Uh, yeah, it's fine. I have to share. There's, there's so many details that this was really a very hard project. Did you like, what was the two questions I guess I have is like, well, the first one is, um, do you ever choose these like defaults or these constraints and you're like, fuck, I'm sick of this joinery technique. I wish we chose something else or, cause a lot of times when people want to change something, when they want to break out of that constraint, because they just want to like a hit of some novelty, you know, where you ever like going through the process thinking like, uh, this fucking joinery technique or this joint, you know, or, or, or is it, or is it the uniformity that gets you, you know what I mean? I totally know what you mean. I think in the case of the house, the answer is no, it, it, I have had that experience in the past, but in the case of the house, it's, it's, it's the opposite. It's like everything feels like it goes faster and more smoothly because of those choices that were made early on and it makes the decisions faster and faster and faster. So, um, in the beginning, it was really painful making decisions about certain things like, Oh, what kind of, cause you're making the decision for the first time and you want to try and make a decision that's going to be durable across the whole environment. So you're putting a lot of weight into those decisions and especially with something like this is not very reversible. Whereas like when you're in the world of software, you can, if you don't like how your buttons are, you could probably change them pretty easily. But with this, like if you don't like the way that the handles are, it's a little harder to change. Um, a lot of very, very hard. Yeah. Uh, so that was kind of painful, but now it's like so smooth, so fast. Um, like we're, we're working on doors for the bedroom, bathroom, and they're all kind of like in this one hallway and it's like the decisions come together so much quicker. So the enjoyment of how fast decisions supersedes the like maybe lack of creativity. Yes. I can find that creative juice somewhere else. Yeah. I also think probably the process of taking in a bunch of scattered information um, from different sources when you're in the exploratory process, tinkering and thinking things through to get to a point where you can decide on the defaults or the constraints that you're working with. And then executing on those constraints and those defaults and seeing how they pan out. Yeah. I guess by going through that process over and over and over again, you get better at, you know, making those decisions about what, about what constraints or what defaults or what patterns are the best ones. Like you could probably, you probably have gotten good at like, okay, this will work. Yeah. Knowing when, knowing when somebody's going to work. You know, in a way for me, this is practice because I feel like what's nice about this project is the house is small. There's very few like spaces that I could like, I would go if the house was like, you know, three times bigger or something, which is like, would be relatively normal. Uh, I would probably go crazy trying to have this like level of attention to detail, especially for things that I haven't had to consider in the past. Now I feel like I have this like palette of options that I know, uh, to choose from things that I like or don't like. And I have enough experience with that process that I could do something bigger. Ideally, I would love to design a whole house from completely from scratch, like actually the architecture, like work with an architect and build something completely from scratch. And so I think at some point in my life, I hope to do that, you know, um, but it's nice to be able to work within the constraints of this house has these like bones that we have to work within. And it's relatively small. So we can, we can't stray too far from the constraints that we have. Um, but it kind of gives you a training ground to work on something harder in the future. Do you, do you follow that same pattern with obsidian as well, where it's like you're pushing, you're pushing far in a particular domain and then using that, using pushing far as a way of like capturing a bunch of new information, taking that information, formalizing it into patterns that are then reusable by everybody or something like this. Definitely. Uh, like recently when we launched bases, we opened up an API a couple months ago that allows people to make their own views. So, um, you know, I showed you the map view, the table view. So we opened up this API and people are making their own views like calendar or charts or Kanban. And for that, uh, feature, we decided to approach settings a little bit differently than we had in the past. So because obsidian is so flexible to plugins, plugins have their own settings. And if you go into the plugin settings area, uh, every plugin implements settings in its own different way and it's very chaotic. It doesn't feel, I don't know if you have plugins, but like they all have different ways of like laying out, you know, tabbed, uh, settings and it's a mess. And so for bases, we decided when you create a setting as a plugin, you have to register it in this specific way. And you have to say, I'm a setting, I'm a toggle switch, and this is my label. And that way, uh, we can make sure that the layout of the settings area for the base is going to be cohesive. And, you know, there was some debate about that because it was like, Oh, well, this, you know, this is a little bit more constraining for the plugin author because they can't just do whatever they want. But on the other hand, it's a little bit better for the user because the settings are going to look like fairly predictable and in a certain setting area. And people have forever asked us, can we make settings searchable? Cause they want to be able to search for, you know, like if they've installed lots of plugins, how do they find things? It's not really possible for us to make settings searchable in a good way. Without those settings being registered. Um, I don't know if I'm making sense with that language. So in the future, what we want to do, if the, if, if your settings are not registered, there's nothing to search. Exactly. Yeah. So, so yeah, the current situation for plugins is they can just put anything like any toggle switches, however they want, they don't have to register them. But with bases where like, okay, let's take like one step of a little bit more constraint. It's like coming up with our own, um, you know, new pattern, like the snake or the connection. And it's just saying, if you're a plugin, you have to put your setting in, in, in this particular way. And it's a little bit new because we haven't done this before with obsidian, but we're, we're going to push more in that direction because it creates a little bit more consistency for the user. So that's an example. And I'm a big fan of that kind of approach, uh, of creating your own style guide. Like, uh, we have a style guide for obsidian. If you go to obsidian help, um, like style guide, you'll find it's, it's mostly for copywriting, but, um, for example, how do you label a button? You know, what do you, how do you, how do you write interface copy? So we have all of these rules and it's amazing how often these things come up every time you make a new interface in obsidian, you have to name things. Like what, how is the button going to be labeled? How's the heading going to be labeled? What is the setting name? Um, and so we have all of these rules, but it's a good, it's a, I'm a big fan of style guides. It's good to, um, create a style guide for yourself too. Like what do you mean? Like, um, like for your clothes or something. It could be for your clothes. It could be for your own style of writing. It could be for your own, you know, like video production style. Like if, okay, you're doing this show right now, but what is the like VIN style of video and you made a second show, what would that show be like? Totally. Um, like an example of, um, that is in my previous startup, Lumi, we had this show called shipping things. Yes. Um, so if you go to YouTube or if you go search like YouTube shipping things, one of the things that we did, I don't think I've never thought of like wrote about this, but yeah, go here, uh, click on shipping things. And, um, so one of the things that I created for this was the style guide. So like you can see, you know, all of our titles are handwritten. They always have, so we were making the, we made this like startup for, that was a supply chain startup. Yes. Um, for packaging and things like that. So that was my, my co-founder. But if you look at the top, uh, scroll all the way to the top, you can't really see it very well, but that, uh, the banner, the banner is real. This is not a 3D render. These are all little tiny paper models that we had produced. So I had a guy make these out of little pieces of paper. Um, and they look like, so the, the whole concept of Lumi was, it was a platform that kind of think of it like door dash, but for factories, like you're interacting with factories that can sell you various things like packaging. So then if you look at some of the videos, uh, I'm not sure what's a good one, but we would use these, um, now go, go home. These are like, uh, go to some of the recent ones. Unboxing things or shipping and look at, yeah, I don't remember. I'd have to click around. Yeah. It's not any of those. Um, scroll down some more. I forget, but there, there's, there's some that were, uh, where we used those objects. Yeah. Maybe look at that. Like shit stickers for packaging or shipping stickers for packaging. Try to try it out. Oh, you're on on the third video. Yeah. Some of those videos, you know, so like our aesthetic for our aesthetic for this was like Sesame Street, uh, you know, like our inspiration was, um, you know, those original videos. Um, this is probably not a good example, but do you know, do you know, do you know, like go to Sesame Street, um, you know, factory making things or something like that. Um, yeah, like how crayons are made. Oh, I see. Like our, our, our, yeah, our customers are, yeah, this is, yeah, making crayons. Our customers are high and people would spend hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars on our platform. So like our customers are very, you know, um, higher end direct to consumer businesses, but our inspiration was like a, you know, show for four year olds of how do they explain, because there was so much knowledge that we needed to explain to people about how things are manufactured in the real world and why you should use certain materials over others. What's more sustainable. And so we, we kind of like, uh, decided to go towards this, like more, um, DIY aesthetic with our videos, but that was a style guide, right? That was like all of the thumbnails are going to look a certain way. Uh, we're going to use these kinds of materials. We're going to use these kinds of like lenses, this kinds of shots. And it's just a way to start to create a feeling of something that feels like something. Yeah. And it's kind of arbitrary. Actually, it doesn't really matter what your choices are, but that's the, the, there's an essay on my website called style is consistent constraint, which is just that idea. As soon as you start to create your constraints for yourself, now you have this palette that you're painting with that is going to make something feel like you. Super cool. That's great. Let's see this piano app you're working on. Wait, did we get the cable? Yeah. Oh shit. Okay. Okay. Well, we got to pause for a second because I want to try it on the real piano. Is that possible? Okay. Okay. I think so. Yeah. Okay. So we can just pause and come back. So are we going to move the piano over? Let's just make sure that it works first. Otherwise, I'll just pull it up on the computer. Yeah, let's see. I had to move my chair up because, um, so when you want to adjust this thing, remember, yeah, here, yeah, yeah, loosen it and then really tighten it. You got it. Can you still see me? I had to move my chair up because, um, we have some new props. We're alive. So yeah. Okay. Good. Wow. Okay. This is a little, this is a little dodgy. We were not planning to show this. But then for some reason, uh, Tommy has his keyboard here. What Tommy, why do you have your keyboard here? Are you just office keyboard? Office keyboard. So what is this app? Okay. This is Ke piano. Ke piano. I, someone, someone, someone on, on Twitter, I, I forget the username. Someone, um, named it that and it was so good. I had to keep that name. So what is this app? It looks a little messy. Okay. So, um, you're a really funny guy. I think there's something funny about how far you go with shit. It's, it's, uh, it's kind of, it's, it's cool. I don't know how far back to go. I think you should go far back, man. Hmm. So I never, I love music. And what's, what are you laughing about? It's just funny, man. It's just, it's just, you're like sitting here with this fucking piano in front of you and shit. The first thing you say is I love music. It's like to move this piano, put this MacBook on top. You're like, I just want to show my piano app. Can you try reconnecting the MacBook? Oh, is it, is it sleep? Yeah, I fell asleep. Well, I need to explain the story of this. Yes, please. Um, okay. Well. I think music is kind of similar to the idea of everyone can cook. Everyone should be able to music is just one of the inputs that we have. We have ears. So I know you enjoy music. I came in here. There was amazing sound going on. Yeah. And I think one of my greatest frustrations that I've had throughout my life is that I never learned to play music or play an instrument. Um, and a few years back I learned about aphantasia. You probably have heard. Aphantasia. It's like, oh, that's like that. I can't see images in my, in my mind. Like I don't have a strong mind's eye. So, um, you know, if you asked me to imagine something, my brain works very much in terms of relationships. Like I can, I'm pretty good at sketching things. I could draw things from memory, but not by copying something that I see in my mind just through what I know about that thing. Like if you asked me to draw an apple, I could probably draw a pretty good apple, but it wouldn't be by copying an image that I have in my mind. It would be from, I know what the shape of an apple is. I know how shiny an apple is. I know, you know, uh, like how light behaves. Um, and weirdly for me, music is the opposite. Where, where with images, I can't really see images with music. I'm constantly just hearing music. It's like an iPod inside of my brain. I'm like, oh, I just want to listen to this song and I can play it inside of my head at any time. I feel like I'm similar to that too. Yeah. And I can play songs in my head that I don't know, that I have no method of expressing in the world. And that's what's very frustrating, but I never really applied myself to learn any instrument. So then I, I met, um, the person who had become my wife and she, um, learned, she was, she's incredible pianist. Um, she doesn't do that professionally, but as a child, she learned how to play piano. She was like a piano prodigy from, um, like three or four year old, like starting to play music. And I mean, even just like in our first date, we started talking about this stuff and I was like, you got to teach me how to play piano. And so I think literally the first day we met, uh, she brought me some like piano, um, instruction books and we started learning. She's got a lot of, uh, her own, she doesn't really play that much anymore, but, um, and she doesn't want to teach me the way that she was taught because it was much more, you know, a very strict kind of school. Uh, and it's also probably not the best way that I would learn. I really like to learn by just bumping my head into things and just trying stuff until it breaks. And lately, um, with LLMs, it's the, the vibe coding stuff has become so good. Obsidian is 100% human authored code. Um, but in my like hobbies, I've been experimenting a lot with vibe coding because it's just so fun to go from like an idea to something really quickly. Yes. And I wanted to experiment with, uh, I've been, I've been experimenting with this framework called Tory. It's like a Rust based, uh, framework. And I just wanted to try a few new technologies that we, we haven't been using in Obsidian. That, that's kind of like one thing that was on my mind. And then the other thing is I feel like, um, one way I, one way I learned things is through making tools. Like I find that yes, there's already lots of piano apps and synth apps. And I've used like Ableton and, you know, I, I first started experimenting with like fruity loops all the way back in the day. Like, you know, I've played with all those apps, but you, you're coming into this thing that someone else created and you're trying to like map your brain to how they think about music. And I wanted to start from scratch and see, uh, if I could learn, if I could make something that would help me, because I find, uh, you know, music notation very confusing. It's almost like I have dyslexia for it. I have a really hard time reading music. Um, there's an entire vocabulary of music theories that I just struggled with. And if anyone, you know, anyone who's watching this is a musician, um, you know, all of the stuff that I'm explaining is probably extremely basic, but for me, it was very difficult to pick up. Um, and this is only started, I only started working on this app, maybe, um, at the beginning of this year. And I've probably put a total of eight hours into it. It's not very much time. I have a lot of ideas of how it could be better, but its function is just mainly to teach me about things. Like, um, the circle of fifths and keys and stuff like that. So the basic idea was, um, I have this synthesizer at home. It's the main keyboard that I use. So Yamaha keyboard. It's actually a lot like this one. And I just wanted to see if I could get the MIDI connection to actually be an input. So I don't know if you can see my screen now, but this, this layout is kind of like similar to obsidian you can, you can like, except instead of the pains being, you know, marked down, they're like, you know, these different things that you can activate or deactivate. Um, and so the first thing that I was just learning was again, this is going to sound so basic, but what are the keys for C major? Right. So, you know, you're like, so I just wanted to, uh, see visually what keys I would be supposed to play. Um, you know, so if you try different, different keys, you're going to get, uh, the keys highlighted. Now this is also around the same time that I went to this amazing, uh, exhibit by this guy, Olaf or Eliasson. Yeah. And, um, I just started to realize that a lot of he's Icelandic, right? Yeah. And he does a lot of art with prisms and kind of like physics based art, you know, mirrors and prisms and light. And, um, I realized that what he's done is kind of build up this palette of ingredients. Like, Oh, I can use a prism. I can use a mirror. I can use a source of light and what can I do with that? And one of the things that I had been working on was this color palette, um, called flexoki. Um, I don't know if you can pull that up or if we'll, if we'll lose our input here. No, it's all good. But flexoki, that sounds really familiar. Yeah. So if you go to, is there an obsidian theme or something? Yeah. So I made this color palette that is the color palette for the website. And so I started thinking, can I combine my, like I have aphantasia, but I have good music, uh, and good color connect connection to color. So can I use synesthesia? I have some like minor synesthesia for numbers. Can I use the existing synesthesia that I have to try and connect, connect, um, chords and notes to colors? So like C and my, if you go back to the, my screen, C is always red in, in here. Oh yeah. Am I, is it too loud? Is it okay that the sound is good? It's good for me. Okay. Good. And so I was trying to create these relationships between colors and notes to see if that could help me kind of remember, um, the notes. And so that the purpose is just the purpose of this whole thing is just very, very basic. It's just to learn, um, keys and to be able to play. So, you know, most songs that you listen to are in a specific key. And if you can quickly get to that key, then you can kind of play along, um, a lot of like pop music and jazz and funk is like, you know, just basically playing along with these, um, chords and, and, and so, um, another aspect was trying to identify keys. So I would, you know, I added this like functionality where if you play a key, it will try to, it will try to figure out what, what it is. So like now it knows that it's C major, just based on the notes that I played. Um, but this isn't, I mean, there, this, there's not that much to it. Um, there's a little, um, feature here working like. And so I think that maybe recorded. Yeah. Oh, oh, I think you're, I forget if your keyboard has MIDI in, but basically now I can play that little, uh, thing and it would play it back into, into the keyboard itself. And so I can hear the keyboard playing it and then I could loop myself and play. So I could play the left hand and right hand and separately and record them. Then, um, and then I can, I can start to understand, okay, you know, what key is this song in what, um, you know, so I wanted to be able to like see all of these things in one place at the same time, like what's going on. Cause these are all just different ways of reading the same information. Uh, kind of like in the way that bases, you know, graph map, it's all, it's all the same information is just visualized in different ways. Um, I have to be honest, I haven't been playing with this for a few months, but it does inspire me a lot to keep improving and why music. Because I feel like these concepts, when I started my like piano journey, we're so foreign to me. I had never been exposed to the words, um, that there's so much vocabulary in music and I had a really hard time learning it, uh, you know, from, from paper, from materials, I have to be like touching stuff and seeing what happens. And so just the, the fact of, um, trying to program this UI taught me a lot about music. I would show this, um, to Aisha, my, my wife and she would be like, oh, you know, like, it got this, like the, the vibe coding got this part wrong or like, um, my UI that I came up with was wrong for some reason. And, and by looking at the mistakes that it was making or that I was making and designing this thing, I was able to understand something about how music theory works. Yes. Uh, hopefully that makes sense. But it makes sense. It makes a lot of sense. Do you, that's, that's, isn't it, isn't it crazy that you want to learn something and then you're the tech technologies at a point where you can make your own tooling to like learn that thing? Isn't that insane? I hope everybody does that now soon. You know, cause it's, it's so empowering because you can, hopefully the tools get to the point where, um, you either you will understand the tool or it will understand you in such a way that the tool that gets created is exactly the right thing for you. Yeah. Um, it's weird because it seems like we're going in a world where this thing behind like, you know, Win app skins or like super custom software. It's like, it seems like we're going in a world where like we're creating the technology that enables anyone to create whatever their tooling is. That's kind of nuts. Yeah. I think that's going to be really cool. I wonder, um, it's like skinning computers. I wonder where the constraints will be because there's still something that is true about, um, some people learn better a certain way. And so you have to find the right intersection and not everyone is a designer. So not everyone is going to know how to design the thing that's right for them. Do you know what I'm saying? Hmm. So cause it's a lot to expect someone to be also a great designer. But then there's like weird things that happen where it's like, you think about someone that's a good designer. You think about someone that's a good chef and you imagine something. You imagine an archetype, a stereotype, a certain kind of label. Right. Yeah. But then there's also like people that break that mold and they don't even realize that they're breaking the mold. Like think about like, you know, some grandmas that just, you know, they don't even identify as like chefs or something and then you go, you eat, go to someone's house and then you eat food at their house and it's like their grandma is cooking or something and it just fucking bangs. And you, she's not, you know, she's just like, she just, she's just like doing it. All the best cooking is from grandma's in my opinion. Yeah. Right. And so it's like, it's interesting to think what like the grandma's a vibe coding is where it's like the people who are just using the tools cause they're like accessible or something like that. They're not necessarily thinking about, you know, the, the design aspect of it, but it's just the tool is getting to a point where it allows you to go from something in your mind to something in reality. It's fluid enough. It's frictionless enough to the point where somebody brings some new kind of context to it and they would have normally never made software. Yeah. And then they just make it and it just fucking bangs for that reason. You know, the thing that I think vibe coding and kind of the generative UI stuff is good for is I think everyone can at least see something and say, I don't like it. Make it more this way or less this way, like make it more like that or make it more like that. And my whole career, I've been, you know, working with engineers and other designers to make stuff where maybe I had an idea like that Win Amp skin that I made with Peter Clark. And I was like, this is how it should be. And Peter helped actually engineer it. Um, but there's always this friction that exists where sometimes you go down a rabbit hole and you're like, actually, this is totally the wrong way. We have to scrap everything that we did. Like, you know, you, you, you TSLE it and you go too far and you realize actually this whole thing is wrong. I have to go all the way back and go down a different path. And when that moment happens, which has happened many, many times in my life, hundreds of times I've worked with engineers and we got to a certain point. And at that point, you have a pain in your heart, which is we just spent hundreds of hours. I can't do that to this person. Like they've invested their soul into making it this particular way. And now we're saying we have to throw it all away because it's not right for the end product. The AI never has any of those feelings. And, and, you know, the only thing that is remotely like that is you've created like a chat with that, that you're like deep into the context. And you're just like, sorry, I'm just going to have to like delete you and start fresh. And there's no feelings about it. And that implementation that might have taken 10 hours for a person took, you know, 15 or an hour of like semi uninterrupted time for the AI to do. And, and so the, the speed of like radical different directions that you can try something is so much, uh, it's more, it's more free and it's less feelings getting hurt about something that you, you put a lot of soul into. Cause it does like oftentimes you take an idea to like the 90% market, but you realize, and it was a lot of effort to get it to 90%, but you realize that that path is dead and you can never get it to a hundred percent and you have to restart. And that is the thing that I think AI, I've never had that feeling working with human beings, but I have that like feeling of freedom with AI. And I think in the future, if the tool has become easy enough, then, you know, non geeky people will be able to at least direct the output to a direction of like, I need it to be more like this or more like that. Uh, and that's enough direction to create something that will be, that will satisfy that person's way of learning or working or doing things. How do you think that affects like the future of like startups and the future of like software creation in general? Cause like the whole landscape of making software and startups and like VC and all this kind of stuff, it's all based on certain like unit economics around, around creating these things. I think it'll be fine. I, it's not like, how do you think it's like, what is a startup going to be then? Um, is it going to be the exact same thing or like what something's got to change? Can I ask, can I ask a meta question? Should we move to the keyboard or should we have Tommy? Uh, I think, I think we should have, I think you should answer this question. Yeah. Tommy hits the piano with your app on. Okay. And we wrap. Oh, really? Yes. I'm ready to keep talking for another five hours. Okay. Good. Um, okay. How do I think, um, okay. I'm going to close the keyboard then. Um, or the computer. I think Tommy's the, okay. So one thing that will happen is that there will be a lot of small companies like Obsidian that can be sustainable and, um, you know, profitable and don't need to raise VC at all. Um, a lot more, you mean a lot more of them. Yeah. Yeah. It will be a lot more accessible for a single person or small group of people to build a company that's based around an idea and make a decent income and, you know, make a living, making that tool. And that's going to be great. And they won't ever have to raise a whole bunch of money. Um, they can stay in control, make something really artistic and interesting that fits their values. Um, it's going to create a lot more because the tools will be more accessible. It's going to create a lot more noise. So how do you actually, um, get your thing seen and breakthrough the noise? How do you get those early customers is going to become really hard because you're going to be competing against a hundred or a thousand times more other small people doing their own small app. That's going to be really hard. And I don't know how that's going to get solved. I still think there will be big companies and medium sized companies too. And they will find ways of being more efficient with, um, their, you know, workflows, um, in the case of Obsidian were, like I said, we're still, you know, handwriting all of the code, but sometimes I'm not the most sophisticated engineer. You know, we have Shida and Liam and Tony who are incredible engineers. And sometimes I will vibe code something and show them as a prototype. Here's kind of the UX that I have in mind for this thing. And the code is, you know, nowhere near as optimized or as clean or as nice as if they were to write it. But the idea is good enough that it's saved so much time compared to the old way, which would have been like do the design and figma or something like that. And, you know, mock it up and do all the states. And like now it's much easier to prototype and code and have like a fully functional prototype where the input is the input to an engineer who really knows what they're doing is much more high quality or high fidelity. Um, so that's going to save some time. It's, I don't know what to do about like how competitive the landscape is going to become as a result of like everyone doing things all the time. That's going to be hard to deal with for startups for sure. But maybe people will just, um, apply their tools to more set, more narrow segments of like, I don't know of any app that does this thing that I'm doing with my piano thing. My point with that piano app is not to, I'm not trying to, I haven't even published it or tried to sell it or anything. I'm just trying to make something that's useful for me and maybe someday I'll put it out there. Maybe someone will find it useful. Um, it's a little unknown to me what will happen. Yeah. What do you think what's going to happen? I think, I think it's difficult to extrapolate, but I think the, the way that people use computers is the human computer relationship is fundamentally shifting. I think, um, yeah, it's fundamentally shifting in like a really, in some time, it's a really very interesting way and also in some ways a very scary way. Um, I think about, um, and it all has the same kind of signature to it. And that signature is, it's like the technology is whispering, not on purpose, but it's whispering. Don't think, right? It's like you vibe code an app. Boom. Here's the code. You don't, you know, you're not reading it line by line. You don't fucking understand it. You don't understand the underlying architecture of it. Um, you talked to chat, you asked it a question, it spits back some text. Uh, you know, people are like looking, looking at that text for advice and things like this and, um, it can have like any aesthetic you want. It can have, uh, an encouraging aesthetic. It can have, have an authoritative aesthetic and you don't understand the underlying architecture of the ideas that led to like what it's saying, but it's really alluring. It's really, um, enticing to just accept it because then you don't have to think, then you don't have to go to do it through the trouble, through the trouble of trying to understand something for yourself. For someone like you, I don't know how you use LLMs, but I think it would be amazing because you can look at things more fundamentally. You can accelerate the rate at which you can deepen your understanding of something. You can use it as a way of augmenting your, um, explorations, but you have a set of rules, you have a code. Your code is that you are going into this to deepen your understanding of something, of a subject, of a, of a project of yourself, you go into that. So I would imagine when you talk to an LLM, you're inherently a little skeptical of everything that you're seeing. You're breaking it down. Does that make sense? You have this like code, but not everyone else has that code. And I worry that I worry about that. You know, um, you know, even, even like with obsidian, right? It's like, you know, uh, obsidian, it's like at a baseline in order to use obsidian, you have to value your own thinking at a baseline. Right. Yeah. And so, you know, it's like, I just really hope this technology is not taking us in a direction where we stop valuing our own thinking. There's a, there's a great story. Um, the machine stops. Did you read that one? No. Go to search for, uh, Steph Angle, the machine stops, because I republished this story. It's from 1906 or 1909 by EM Forrester. Um, yeah. So I didn't write this, but you can find it. You can buy the book form. I just published it on my website because, uh, I found that it was hard to get a nice copy of it, but this is a sci-fi story from, um, 1909. That is, you know, you can read it in an hour or so. And to me, it's one of the best pieces of science fiction science fiction ever written because it is, it's written. Okay. So the, the basic premise has been, uh, the inspiration for a lot of stories. Like I think Wally has a lot of elements of the machine stops. It's a society where everybody lives underground and each person kind of lives inside of their own pod. And it predicts everything about the modern, uh, internet and apps. Like they figured out, uh, you enforced or had this idea for commercial flights, Spotify, really zoom. Like it's, it's, it's so prescient and it's written in a style that is somewhat vague about how the technology works, uh, which makes it really applicable regardless of when you're reading it. Cause it's not trying to explain things in a super technical way of how it exactly works, but it explains it in kind of this, how it feels to use the technology. So for example, you know, instead of meeting people in person, they always are chatting through this interface and seeing each other through video, but he doesn't explain it as you're going to see pixels on a screen. He just says, it's kind of like you're interacting with a person in real life, except it's a little worse. And like everything is, it's like everything in their world is like, oh, you know, you, when you listen to music, it's kind of like going to a concert, except a little worse. And the people in this world, they get, you know, very used to it and they just kind of sit in a chair all day. That's kind of the Wally aspect of it. And they're, they have buttons for everything. They have a button to get food. They have a button for music. They have a button to chat with their friends. And they kind of become these like blobs that can't move or do anything. And it's, this is seen as a good thing. It's also seen as a good thing that you should not seek direct experiences in this society, which is obviously a cautionary tale. And, you know, in our world, the best interface is no interface. Like if you could, instead of having to use a phone, just, just call an Uber out of thin air and it just came to you. If everything you wanted to do, you could just speak it or imagine it. And then it happened that would probably feel better than opening your phone, scrolling, finding the button, clicking the thing, checking out, you know, there's all these steps that it feels like maybe AI is going to keep removing that friction to the point where you could just think something like, Oh, I need this cable for this podcast I'm recording. And it would just magically show up in all of the like steps that need to happen for that to occur, which has happened behind the scenes. But you would totally, it's an abstraction that would continue to remove your understanding of how all of those things happen. And so that, that's the scary part to me. And that's why I think, you know, if you can go to a farmer's market, if you can go like milk a cow yourself and understand how to make butter, it's like a really interesting thing for every human to have a relationship to. Because if you don't know the inputs into your life of what you're eating, what you're breathing, what you're drinking, what you're surrounding yourself with, how things are made, then it's easy for those that's where like, you know, shrink flation and, and shitification and all of those like. Capitalistic patterns can encroach on the quality and the ethics of like how things are made, because now from your perspective, you're just like imagining something that's coming to you and all the steps that happen in between our opportunities for something to be like eroded. Yes. So yeah, I think the, the, the way to fight back against that is to like seek understanding and like have a curiosity for how everything that comes into your body, whether it's a sound wave or a piece of food was created. Or software. Software. Yeah. Worded. Table. Where did this come from? Anything. Who made it? Do they care? Yeah. Or can I make it myself? Can I, even if the thing that you make is not, you know, nearly as good as the, the thing that someone who's spent their whole life making, you will gain a greater appreciation. Like when I made that omakase bar or we started like learning, I started learning how to make sushi and I was like, boy, sushi is really hard to make. Well, like getting all the ingredients, forming the rice in the right way. I was like learning how to do it myself. And I was like, man, this gives me so much appreciation for like the people who are masters in this, you know, people spend their whole life learning how to become good at certain things. And if you can experiment with it, you can get some appreciation of how, how that happens or form an opinion about what's the proper way of receiving that thing. You're a cool dude, man. Really, really appreciate you. Thank you. Yeah. We'd love to keep hanging out with you. If I can, we'd love to keep learning from you. We should wrap, but I just want to do one last thing. Yeah. Yeah. So Tommy, can you bring, can you bring those things over all that stuff? I just want to see, I just want to see like real quick, that everything, like all of it. I just want to see like, if you know what this stuff is. What is this stuff? You just put on the floor and then you can't have all of it because some of this is mine. Oh, okay. I can already see some things. Buckminster Fuller. Well, a few of them were lucky. Yeah. I haven't read that one. This is one of my favorite books of all time. Yeah. I mean, he's an amazing out of the box thinker. Huge influence on me. Yeah. Yeah. Save my life, man. Yeah. How so? Uh, I was really lost and pretty depressed. Didn't know what to do with my life. And, uh, yeah, I just felt like kind of really, really lost, man. Dark place. Didn't know what to do. And, um, I was in a state where I was like just talking to smart people I knew and I would just ask them, Hey man, like, what do I do? You know? And what, yeah, one of my friends was like, Hey, you should read a critical path by Buckminster Fuller. I didn't know who he was, but I was just like, honestly, sad enough to dry anything. And yeah, I read that book and just, just like his origin and like, um, the way he thought, like he was, he was kind of lost too. Right. And, um, yeah, it's, I think he has this thing when he was like 32 or something. He's like, you know, I decided to become an experiment, guinea pig B or something. And he's like, what is it that I can do as a penniless man? You know, with just my talents, essentially, right? Um, that could be like beneficial to humanity. And just really, that is just really inspiring in his process of thinking was really cool. I, yeah, I love, um, that he just always challenges any notion. Um, and thinks what's, what's the right way to think about that? Like, yeah, he would have these really strong opinions, like North and South, you know, like things about the coordinates, like he would, he would just have like really strong opinions about, I love people who have like a really, really strong, clearly explained explanation about why something that we all do every day is totally wrong. Well, he was, he was really about that. Yeah. So this, you obviously know this concept. Yeah. Yeah. Space ship Earth. Yeah. And you've written about that. Yeah. Space ship Earth is, uh, yeah. Oh yeah. That's good too. This should be a game. Guess the name of the book based on the like super ballerie image. Yeah. Great one. Um, I could see why you like this book a lot because it's basically taking in a bunch of information and then synthesizing it into constraints and patterns. Right. Yes. I want to write a book or not a book, but a big blog post about the house and all the constraints that would be very inspired by that. Uh, it's just kind of scary and overwhelming to write about. This is so much information. This you can have. Oh, okay. Great. You probably already have this actually. Let's see. Ooh. Yeah, I have that. Yeah. I knew. Funny story. Okay. So man, this is kind of a story. I went to see them. So air, um, wait, how much time do we have? Just go ahead. Air, air is like one of the probably top three, four most well known French bands from the last 30 years, aside from like Daft Punk and Justice and maybe a couple others. Yeah. And, um, they, they were all like kind of their formative years in the same sort of suburb where I grew up. Um, so I grew up in Moudon, but they're all from Versailles, which is like known for the castle, but, um, a lot of them were in, um, bands together. Some of them are brothers and cousins like air, Daft Punk. Like, yeah. So I think the drummer from air does another band called Phoenix. Um, that's also quite well known. So all of these different bands, um, just all kind of, uh, grew up in and kind of started up in the same area, um, in the suburbs of Paris. Interesting. And, uh, yeah, I was, I got really into them. I was still living in France at the time, uh, when Moon Safari came out and Pomme de Saint-Dôme and I had never seen them live until their most recent tour in September and, uh, this was one of the first dinners that I had at the, with the new kitchen. Um, some of my friends came over that, um, this duo, uh, yacht, they have this like amazing, um, game that they made recently. Check it out. Uh, uh, blipo, but yeah. Um, and they, for play date, I don't know if you know, play date. Yeah, of course. Yeah. Teenage engineering. Okay. Yeah. So they made a, uh, a, essentially a show that you can only watch on play date. Wow. It's really weird. I think that it's on other platforms now too, uh, on switch too. Okay. Um, but we were having dinner with them and they're like, oh, I was saying, yeah, we're going to go see air tomorrow. And they're like, oh, um, this air show has an orchestra playing Moon Safari and they're doing Moon Safari end to end and the band leader, the conductor who, uh, did the, um, arrangement for, for the orchestra of Moon Safari is one of our friends and did music for our video games. So we're going to go see it too. So then we're all at the, at the show, uh, and I bumped into them. And later that day, um, another friend of mine was like, oh, I saw you in a show where at air, but I couldn't get to you. Um, my, the band's manager is staying at my house. Do you want to come over and listen to, uh, some music with him? So I went over and I was just like, man, you don't know how influential this band was to me. Like, thank you so much for like all of the stuff, um, that you guys have done over the years. And it's just like such a random, um, kind of like sequence of, of events that happened where it was like, man, the, like going back to that idea of how small the world is and how like those, when I was writing my journal entry for that day in obsidian, I was like, this is an opportunity to link these things that on the surface you would never think are related. But like this person that I know from one part of my life, this other person from another part of my life, this like random suburb, this band, the place where I live now, they all became interconnected on that like one day in a way that I would have never, ever predicted when I started listening to this album, you know, as a teenager in, in France. Um, I, that's just like so cool. It's so cool. It's so cool. It's so fun. So now that there's a little node in my obsidian that connects these things together in such a random way, I love that album. One of my favorites. It's great. Yeah. Um, Tommy, you want to try out this app? I want to see you. I want to see you just mess around with it and see what you think of it. Um, it's probably not going to change your life, but I'd be curious. Yeah. And then Oh, good. That's good. So I resonated with a lot of what you said. Nice. Hopefully I learned. So just play and hopefully. Nice. So this. Yeah. Talking to the mic. I think it will having this while learning music would have been super helpful. I think. Hmm. When did you start learning? Started when I was like seven. Oh, okay. But I had a really bad habit of not actually reading the sheet music. My teacher gave me because I was like really slow and instead what I did was I started just copying what she played by you. The fuck. So this is like really cool because it's like it's just breaking down everything. So hopefully it's like, uh, guessing things correctly. Wow, so cool. So I wonder how it handles. No, it's it's can't know like if you're playing to something that gets stuck. But yeah, it can't know if you have like two chords playing at the same time. Because it can only detect one at a time. Yeah. That's pretty tricky. It's reading them pretty well though. I'm pretty impressed actually. I love this. It's really cool too. Yeah, I mean, it's really for beginners, but you know, hopefully, no, I think it's helpful for everybody. I should put it out there and see what people think. I just don't want to have to deal with people's bugs that they find. Wow. Yeah, that was such a beautiful way to end. Thank you. Yeah, yeah, yeah. All right, Amigo. Thanks. Appreciate you. Thanks for jumping on, man. Of course. Thank you. Thanks, Ben. Yeah, yeah. See ya. Yes. Thanks. I gotta have some cookie. It's up, man. I can't believe you had this right here. [Laughter] [Music] [Laughter]