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The History of the World and How it Scales with Sam Lambert

/ 01:19:18/E102
Sam:

What if you say nice things about computers, they will immediately let you down.

Adam:

Yeah. They will. Exactly.

Sam:

I really enjoy the podcast, by the way. I just wanna tell you that.

Adam:

Oh, wow.

Sam:

I don't I I really don't listen to tech podcasts. Like, I, but I listen to you guys. And I actually fell asleep with my AirPods in, which I do all the time. And I woke up at, like, 4 in the morning to just you 2 talking into my ear, about, how self driving cars. And the answer is the answer the answer is LiDAR, by the way.

Sam:

It's the big difference. Cameras and lights.

Adam:

Oh, is it?

Sam:

Yeah. Yeah. Come to SF and ride them. They're amazing. I put people I was at, like, me and a few PlanetScare people in, like, the early early bay beta of the Waymos, and I was just sending people in them and they were just losing their minds.

Sam:

They're absolutely

Adam:

So so the Waymos use LiDAR is what you're saying?

Sam:

Yeah. That it could get so much more predictable. And you're you're doing the Tesla is doing camera models, which I'll achieve one day, but but it's not good enough

Adam:

now. Yeah. And I I wonder, like, I I still have this open question with why they are so restrictive, like, why they have the the thing turned on so aggressively to make sure you're paying attention. Like Waymo, if they've had driverless I

Sam:

knew the answer to that, by the way. The levels of self driving are not just a comment on the tech. They're a comment on the indemnity.

Adam:

Okay.

Sam:

So when you hit level 4, you're actually telling the authorities that you take responsibility for the crashes as the manufacturer.

Adam:

Oh, interesting.

Sam:

And the only persons who got and the only people for good enough tech that have done that are obviously Waymo, but Mercedes is the only ones that have level 4. If Mercedes, like, auto driving shit, if that crashes you, they're happy to be on the hook for it. And and you know what Tesla's like. Interesting. If they if they say

Adam:

Oh, yeah. So yeah. Will they ever?

Sam:

Correct. They will like, if they say it's safe and say you're allowed to take your hands off and smash, like, you're on you've you've said you're level 4 without saying you're level 4 and then you're in trouble. So that's that's why that works.

Adam:

Well, what other questions can you answer for us that we've raised over the years? This is awesome. Now I kinda wanna talk about Unify because I use Unify stuff, and I generally like it.

Sam:

I love it. I I I've been a bit too ridiculous with it and, like, I I I'll send you a picture. I've built, like, a whole server rack and got everything in it. I love it. Yeah.

Sam:

Same.

Adam:

No. It's the best.

Dax:

He loves talking about it. He loves going. The fiber terminates right in that closet.

Adam:

Yeah. I love talking about it.

Sam:

You Unify have nailed prosumer. They've crushed prosumer. It's just like

Adam:

Yeah. Exactly.

Sam:

It's perfect. They run Mongo on it, though. So not everyone's perfect.

Adam:

Oh, really?

Dax:

Yeah. It runs locally on, like, on the server.

Sam:

Mhmm.

Adam:

Yeah. That's funny.

Sam:

I mean, sort of the 2010s era is pretty weird for tech, honestly.

Dax:

That's when I entered that's why everyone had that MongoDB shirt, that brown one with the leaf on it. That was, like, all over New York, everyone had that. That was my first intro to, like, tech.

Sam:

I found a MongoDB mug in in the GitHub kitchen. Just threw it in the trash immediately. I couldn't I couldn't even look I couldn't even look at that swag. It drove me so fucking insane. It drove me crazy.

Adam:

I think, like, the very early days of my startup stat news, because it was, like, 10 years ago, I think we built on the MEAN stack. Just, like, right after the prototype, we did, like, MEAN stack, and then we're like, never mind. Then we went back to stuff we knew. We did, like, one iteration of it was Mongo.

Sam:

MERN. The MERN stat. That's all I had was just to

Dax:

learn. Yeah. Yeah.

Sam:

Yeah. That's all I hear is the MERN. It's terrible. It's absolutely terrible.

Dax:

Hey. They fixed it now. Mongo's good now.

Sam:

Yeah. It is. It is. They started writing the data to disk, and everything went better from there. Right?

Dax:

Yeah. That is it is

Sam:

so much critical. Yeah. Yeah.

Dax:

Are you in SF?

Sam:

Yes. And I'm you know, like the painted ladies, the kind of famous view, the Apple TV view. I'm like a block behind there, basically. Cool. Yeah.

Sam:

It's pretty nice. Very simple. Hayes Valley, you see people talk about Cerebral Valley on Twitter or whatever because it's now there.

Dax:

Yeah. The reason I ask is, like, the I you guys talk about the the UniFi routers. I've lived in New York where no one has a place big enough to justify that at all.

Sam:

Yeah. Right. Right.

Dax:

And then and then, like, you you get one router, and you have, like, a 100% coverage in, like, every corner of your space.

Sam:

Yep.

Dax:

And then now I'm in a place that is right on the cusp. Like, my I do have, like, one of those generic, like, Google Home cluster.

Adam:

The mesh.

Dax:

Yeah. The mesh things. And it's good, but if I go into my hammock, which is in the back corner of my backyard, it starts to not be so good.

Adam:

And I'm like, do I

Dax:

need to go up one level now?

Sam:

Yeah. It's awful, isn't it? It's really awful when you're gonna get a plan.

Dax:

When you can't get Wi Fi in your hand, make it that you can use you around. It's it's basically what's the point.

Sam:

Someone at times have told me that if you the the no brainer, like, it just fucking works is the Netgearero stuff is apparently just Yeah. Yeah. Just does really good. Like, buy that one for your parents, you know, like, pretty

Dax:

pretty well. My friend just got that, and, it works pretty well. So what is, like, what is this the deal with Unify? And I see a bunch of people I saw, like, Nikita Beard just did a bunch of upgrades, and I think that's what he went with too. Why is everyone so into it?

Sam:

They are not quite like a Meraki or, Cisco who are doing the really big stuff, but they're kind of moving there actually. And they started off just by having really good access points, a really good controller, and just some, like, simple stuff. And they've just kept and the kind of the platform is essentially a very good controller operating system and then just

Adam:

It's really nice.

Sam:

It's very nice.

Adam:

Like, I constantly am surprised by how nice it is.

Sam:

Exactly. And so then you then they use that platform to incrementally add even better things. So now they do all my cameras for the outside of the house Same. Secure so because it's POE. And then also and they've also mega embraced POE.

Sam:

They now do office lighting that's POE controlled.

Dax:

Oh, that's crazy.

Sam:

So, like, I've got POE controlled cameras. I've got PO like, doorbell. Like, everything just goes

Dax:

Yep.

Sam:

In POE, and you can just reboot that, and you can do all this kind of stuff. And then good outdoor, like, access points, indoor, plug based ones. It's just like every accessory, every type of camera, every type of thing is you can run it in a mode where you don't change anything and it gets to about plug and play if you're like, don't wanna fuck around. But if you really wanna do traffic shaping and, like, all of the complex stuff, you can do that too.

Adam:

Yeah. It's one of my favorite things to do is, like well, 2 things. 1, I actually read when they send emails. I, like, open them because it's, like, some new device, and I wanna read about it.

Sam:

Got it.

Adam:

But 2, like, it's like a weekend pastime for me is to, like, open up the controller and just play around with, like, what can we do on the network that'd be fun? Like, there's this stupid game that my kids' school has him play that he they just get so addicted to it, and so we can shape when they can use it, when they can't. I just love playing around with it, and the software is so good.

Sam:

It's amazing. You can bridge stuff. I've got a different another house, and now I'm using their multi site capabilities because I put unified Oh, wow. Damn. So I can have VPN and do everything.

Sam:

It's like very cool. You can and now they do a consolidated camera view where I can get both houses in one. They've done a full, like, multi camera dashboard, somewhat over that shit now. Yeah.

Adam:

So Dax can't get Wi Fi in his, hammock, but you've got the same network in 2 different locations in different houses. My hammock a

Sam:

100 miles away has great Wi Fi, actually. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Sam:

Yeah.

Dax:

They just

Sam:

do that shit. It's really fun. Really good. Just pros and I think there's some ex Apple people. I think that's why it's actually.

Adam:

The yeah. The hardware's good too. Like, the design, all of it is done really well. I didn't know there was ex Apple. That makes sense, though.

Sam:

I actually found out that Mongo was on the box because I had one time where it actually, like, shit the bed, and I was running the old Mhmm. RPY versions. I have all the controllers now, and Mongo had done something. That was all I could tell.

Adam:

Interesting.

Sam:

But, yeah, like, other than that, if you just buy the hardware, which I do do now, it's really good.

Adam:

So there you go, Dax. You've got an upgrade path.

Sam:

Do it.

Adam:

One of us. One of us. Come on. Join me.

Dax:

So the power of Internet thing is super cool because I feel like finally, there's, like, some amount of standardization happening where you, like, can kinda rely on just one thing. That said, my house is a 100 years old.

Sam:

So Yeah. Mine is 2 actually. Yeah.

Adam:

The wiring situation.

Sam:

100 years old. Yeah. Like, Victorian. They're they're built like crap. Like, wood is a ridiculously bad building material.

Adam:

Sam, did you, like, have it retroactively wired?

Sam:

Mhmm. A lot of it. Not into some places, but Yeah. Most of it. It's annoying, like, I didn't do enough planning, but I could've got it all done.

Sam:

If you don't know Yeah.

Adam:

I wish I had way more. Yeah. Exactly. And I built my home, like, in the last few years, and I wish I would've thought about the camera situation, thought about like, there's a lot of things I just didn't preplan enough. Yeah.

Sam:

You need to do 10 gig. This is no. It's annoying that normal houses don't come with risers and cable trays. It's really annoying.

Dax:

Yeah. It's my experience is, so I I swapped out one of my switches in this office with a like a like a like a smart one, and I opened it. And there's just 2 wires going into the switch. There's no ground. There's no, like I think modern there's, like, 4 wires coming out of it for all the different things.

Dax:

So it's literally, like, if you touch if something, like, gets elusive, touches the wrong thing, it's electrocuting me, and the whole house is set up that way.

Sam:

So Fantastic. Fantastic.

Dax:

Yeah. But I will say my house is built pretty well. Like, it's it's been through several hurricanes, like

Sam:

Nice.

Dax:

And it's like, for how old it is, it's in pretty good condition. But, the modern houses that are built around here are not built quite well.

Sam:

So Yeah. It's very surprising. I was talking to my one of my closest friends who's German, and he was, like, called the plumber. He was, like, did you ever call plumbers when you lived in England? And I was, like, no.

Sam:

I never have, and I've called, like, 10 miles here. I I swear they know that they I I swear there's some collusion going on. They just build houses terribly so that you require rely on people constantly.

Dax:

Alternate theory, maybe the food here results in more wear and tear Okay. On the plumbing.

Sam:

Yeah. Yeah. We don't There's no Mexican food in England.

Adam:

Yeah. This

Sam:

is One of my my one of my favorite tweets is it's like the biggest shame is that they don't have, toto toilets in I don't know. It's saying no. It's the biggest shame is that they don't have, Mexican food in Japan. Why own a Ferrari if you're not gonna take it to the racetrack?

Dax:

Yeah. I did see

Sam:

that. Yeah.

Dax:

And you live in, you know, Southern California. It's like or

Sam:

Yeah.

Dax:

Yeah. It's

Sam:

It's a thing. It's a problem. Adam, I'm gonna change your life if you don't know about the thing I'm about to tell you about. And I've used them everywhere. You can buy like 12 volt, 18 volt power adapters that take a PoE input.

Sam:

Have you seen these? And they What? No. They take and they output another Ethernet connection and a power. So you can take any of your Ethernet powered, like small kind of, I don't know, like Phillips Hue or whatever.

Adam:

Yeah.

Sam:

POE that shit and reboot it from anywhere

Dax:

I'm doing.

Adam:

That's so cool.

Sam:

Dax is on the Unifi website right now. Buy it. Yeah. It's really good. So I because I bought, like, an I bought a non unified doorbell, and I can just, like, reboot it from here.

Sam:

This is really cool.

Dax:

That's so cool. So speaking of, of food and Mexican food, Adam, have you seen all the pictures I've been posting?

Adam:

Oh, yeah. The meat.

Dax:

You do post

Adam:

a lot of pictures of meat. I've noticed. Yes. Yep.

Dax:

Yeah. I I forgot to tag you. I usually tag you whenever I post a picture of meat, but I forgot the last couple of days. So I'm I'm, yeah, one of my first messages to Sam ever was that because he Sam, you cook a lot of meat. Like, you post a lot of pictures of

Sam:

I do. Yeah. Yeah. I do. I'm trying to cook less meat now, but I do cook a lot of food.

Sam:

Yeah. Basically.

Dax:

Yeah. So Sam used to post a bunch of pictures of, like, these crazy steaks he'd make, and I asked him about his searing technique. Because I think you you use a a torch. Right?

Sam:

It highly depends. I've tried every method. I've got one that I like the most, but I I have I I do have a torch to, yeah, use it. Yeah. Yeah.

Dax:

Nice. Yeah. So I so what I've been doing, for this week, I basically so I'm I'm trying to eat, like, just meat for a week to see how I feel. Yeah.

Adam:

Oh, right. I saw that too.

Dax:

To offend Adam as much as possible, just to counterbalance Adam's veganness and then all

Sam:

of that.

Dax:

So I went, I bought, like, a whole tenderloin, and I, cut it up, vacuum sealed it, and I can drop it straight into the sous vide, which is so convenient. Like, after this, I'm gonna go just drop it in, and then it just

Adam:

comes out. What is sous vide? I thought it was

Dax:

Usually, what is that? I'm very surprised that you don't have one, Adam.

Sam:

I believe I believe sous vide is French for under vacuum. And what it means is you like vacuum pack food, you have a water bath, and then you have the sous vide circulator that keeps that water bath very consistent at temperature.

Dax:

Precise temperature. It can be like half a degree precision. Yeah.

Sam:

Wow. Professional ovens are extremely expensive because the airflow in a regular or even if you buy, like, a fancy oven in a com in a home at home, the airflow sucks. Like, you people test this by, like, lay bread out on trays and just cook it for the middle will be, like, black. The sides won't be.

Adam:

Yeah. And it's very hot.

Sam:

So, like, in professional kitchens, they use steam ovens. Those those ovens actually dissipate steam. I did buy a steam oven. Yeah. It was quite bad, so I sent

Adam:

I had one that was like a Gaggenau steam oven that we loved in our last house.

Sam:

And we

Adam:

didn't do it in this one, and we miss it. It was amazing.

Sam:

Because that's not efficient for transferring heat. Right? Like and so the sous vide takes that to a whole other extreme, which is you are just submerged in the same temperature water. But it has other benefits, which is it's kind of impossible to overcook something. You can definitely turn it to mush.

Sam:

Right? Like, you can just break the fibers down too much and it becomes messy.

Adam:

But You

Sam:

have to

Adam:

leave it

Dax:

in there for a long time though. It's like, if it's done an hour and you wait, like, 4 hours, yeah, then it'll start to mess up.

Sam:

Yeah.

Dax:

Yeah.

Sam:

But it's kind of like you just can't really fuck it up, and you just kinda

Dax:

It's impossible. Yeah.

Sam:

Yeah. It's it's great. It's it's it's

Adam:

Is it like a crock pot sized thing that you have, Dax? Like, what is the

Dax:

No. So the actual device is just this, like, cylinder, and you can clip it onto any thing that can contain water. So I just use, like, a big metal pot.

Adam:

Okay.

Dax:

And, like, I'm the reason I'm surprised they're not more popular is so we have a really crazy one, but you can just get a pretty good one for, like, $70, and it guarantees, like, just way better quality that you can you can probably like, you can achieve it if you're, like, very good at, you know, cooking a steak on on a pan. But this, like, guarantees that you get, like, professional chef level quality automatically every single time. Like, you just can't mess it up. And then there's so many things you can make with it. Like, it's not just for meat.

Dax:

Like, people people make all kinds of stuff stuff with it. And, yeah, it's one of those things where it's, like, that weird sciency part of food where they, like, just went at the engineering science angle on it, and they just and they actually it was like a crazy achievement. Like, it does work perfectly, and there's, like, almost no trade offs. Restaurants use it too. Like, professional restaurants often sous vide, a lot of the food that you eat just because it's so easy and consistent.

Dax:

Yeah.

Sam:

And it also solves the timing problem. Mhmm. You can leave a lot of basically finished food for a long period of time warm.

Dax:

Yeah.

Sam:

And so you can just, like, take it out. Interesting.

Dax:

Pull it out whenever you need it.

Adam:

Yeah. So you also have to have, like, a way to vacuum seal stuff. Is that,

Dax:

like, a big vacuum seal it. That that definitely, like, makes it better, but I only got a vacuum sealer this past week, and I've had a sous vide for, like, 3 years.

Adam:

Oh, okay.

Dax:

Yeah. Yeah. So you can just put it in a bag and, like, there's, like, a method to get most of the air out, and then you you drop it in.

Adam:

I am a sucker for kitchen contraptions. Like, kitchen stores are one of my favorite places. It's so fun.

Sam:

I will admit to owning 3 sousvides. It's the worst one.

Dax:

Yeah. I'm on number 2.

Sam:

You just need more elaborate stuff.

Dax:

You know, again, this is a space thing. So, like, my parents' house, which is, like, a very suburban house, they just have infinite space for every single kitchen gadget. And I feel like this like, all my friends, when you go to their parents' house, they just have, like, everything. Like, every little thing that they'll use, like, once a year, they just have it. Whereas for me, it's like a big you know, am I are we, like, committing to this or not?

Dax:

Like, you know, vacuum sealer? I'm committing to it. We're getting it, but I can't just get every little thing because my space is limited.

Sam:

Single use, kitchen items are the worst thing ever, though. Like, someone gifted us, like, an avocado slicer. And I Okay.

Dax:

Okay. It's funny because that is the one single use kitchen item thing that I have, and I actually love it because I because we do all of that kind of.

Adam:

What? How does it work? What does it do that's special for avocado?

Dax:

It's so stupid. It's totally unnecessary.

Adam:

I just cut avocados in half, and then I, like, get the pit out. Yeah.

Sam:

Yeah. Exactly.

Dax:

It's all this does.

Sam:

Okay. My my wife, like, my wife, William, forget she was like, we got an avocado slicer. I was like, it's called a knife, and just put it in the pile. Like, just put it into donation. We just donated it because it's just like we're not we're not even unpacking.

Sam:

That's not not saying anything.

Adam:

There has to be, like, a giant group of people that are churning out these kitchen innovations, though, because there's so many news that every time you go to a kitchen store, they've come up with some new thing. Mhmm. I've never met somebody that, like, designs kitchen appliances. It's Shark Tank. It's, like,

Dax:

all Shark Tank products. If you go watch pictures on Shark Tank, like, 70% of it is just plastic shaped into, like, a shape that no one's done before. Yeah. Just that over and over and over. And, yeah, people keep coming up with new stuff.

Dax:

And

Sam:

that plastic is gonna end up in your balls because, like, you're just you're just doing this all the time.

Adam:

Yeah. I keep seeing microplastics. Like, every article every time I open my phone, I see an article about microplastics. Maybe because I clicked on one, and now, like, they just keep coming up. But it's like, is this is this a new phenomenon, or is it like they're just discovering it?

Dax:

I feel like every article is like, microplastics, we figured out. They're literally everywhere. Does it mean anything? We don't know at all.

Adam:

Yeah. That's yeah. I haven't seen, like, the conclusive, like, what have we gleaned from this? I've just seen a lot of it.

Sam:

It's it's like endocrine, like, disrupting, and there's, like, often they've now start like, I I believe I I I would have to check, but I think they've started to actually found it. You know, like, when people get plaque buildup in their heart and

Adam:

and Oh, yeah.

Sam:

They've actually seen it contribute to that now. It's it's very bad. Like, it's extremely bad.

Dax:

Well, I

Adam:

was just gonna say they need to come up with, like, something that goes in and eats all the plastic. And then, like, we use it in the oceans, we use it in our bodies.

Sam:

Yeah. We could do that.

Dax:

Feels like a ridiculous, like, an impossible problem. It's like it I think it's like a a crazy microscopic level, and it's literally everywhere already. Right? It's Yeah. I don't know.

Dax:

The solution to that's gonna look like.

Sam:

It is a big concern. It is it like, genuinely is a my my wife, she's a scientist. She does drug development, and she so she works on cures, and she obviously can read scientific papers and whatever. And, like, this is the this is one thing she's definitely, like, worried about. Like, ever since we got a kid, everything's glass or silicone or and it's just Yeah.

Sam:

Toys Toys you can't avoid. Like, we bought all the wooden, like, Montessori, one of the toys. They hate them. Like, they're just they're

Adam:

They're not always as good, are they?

Sam:

No. Like, they're Yeah.

Adam:

The Melissa and Doug and whatever. Yeah. Yeah.

Sam:

We went to, like, a Diwali party, and all the kids were playing, and they'd all brought their own toys. And I just saw his, like, eyes light up when he saw, like, a fire engine toy. I mean, I literally went to the I left the party, went to Target, and I was just like, give up. Oh, yeah. And just gave him gave him, like, a like a police car or whatever, because he never had these Yeah.

Sam:

And he just because he all only had wooden toys, and he just lost his mind. And, like, so I just gave up on the plastics for the toy stuff. And, obviously, Lego and stuff, you can't avoid it.

Adam:

Yeah. Oh, my boys love Lego.

Dax:

I guess that that is the one place where plastic is good, but I feel like in most of the world, like, way too much shit is made of plastic, and I feel like it's just, like, bad vibes. I feel like everything just kinda looks crappier than it would have 50 years ago. There's a

Sam:

lot of high end plastics now, though. Porsche have put plastics all over their cars now because you can because if you buy if you build high end plastics, you can have amazing weight to, like, weight to strength

Dax:

Oh.

Sam:

Ratio and flexibility. Like, they they do tons of high end plastics now that are really very useful.

Adam:

So is the, like, timeline such that we don't like, the jury's not out on what plastic might be doing to us because it's not been around long enough? Like, I feel like plastic's been around a long time, but is it just to the quantities that we see today? Like, do we not know yet the impact on humans over some amount of time?

Sam:

We know it's bad. We know it's we know it's very bad.

Dax:

Okay.

Sam:

And it's also volume. It's literally everywhere. Like, you microwave a takeout container, you're blasting microplastics into your food.

Dax:

You

Sam:

know, manufacturing. Right? Like they like, so any Yeah. Any fermented foods are put in giant industrial plastic barrels. Right?

Sam:

Like

Adam:

Ah, geez.

Sam:

Another thing

Adam:

to know other fermented foods.

Sam:

Another thing to know is a lot of chemicals in a lot of American products are banned in Europe. There's a lot more allowed here than there's other places because they've already proven it.

Adam:

So so are we gonna learn that, like, our generation in America is gonna all, like, die at 55 or something? What's what's the what what should I be nervous about? What am I worried about right now? Or just like diseases that we would have other

Sam:

I would say you're definitely gonna die to just worry about enjoying every minute till you have it.

Adam:

It's a good talk. Go into that.

Dax:

It turns out cold plunges neutralize plastics entirely.

Adam:

Oh, nice. Okay.

Sam:

The now there's new data on cold plunges that shows that it does too much aggravation of your nervous system and might actually

Adam:

No. I'm getting killed in every possible way. No. Oh, man.

Sam:

That that is why it's extremely annoying to be married to a scientist because you get no hope. You you like, you find something, and you're like you text it to her, and, like, this is awesome. And she's like, I read the paper. It's complete books. Or like they like they don't like the amount of studies she like the the the press do a terrible job with this.

Sam:

And there's this Twitter account. All it does is reply to articles and say, in mice. Because all of these the the news pick up on, like, loads of things, and it's always the last thing in mice. It's always always been proved procured in mice. And so it's it's relevant, but nowhere near done in terms of relevant

Dax:

It makes me wish I was a mouse because I feel like they've we've made mouse mice immortal at this point if they would solve every possible mice problem.

Sam:

Joanna has something really weird related to this. At work, she has catalogs where she can order diseases and people's, DNA and people's blood cells. And there's, like, specific people that there's one woman that, like, donated blood, I believe, and or or donated some, like, some cell that has been grown.

Dax:

Yeah. It's a cancer one. Right? I I I heard about this. Yeah.

Sam:

Yep. And so she can literally say, like, I would like the blood of a HIV positive Hispanic male, and she can get it mailed to, like

Dax:

Wow. So crazy.

Sam:

I wanna buy the, like, tissue of from a cancer cell that was grown in this animal straight through the male. It's wild.

Dax:

So so the one with the woman, this woman's been dead for a long time, but they can keep reproducing her cancer cells. Yep. So she, like, still exists in this weird way. Woah. Yeah.

Dax:

Just use her resources.

Adam:

Legacy. It's really wild. Did you say it was a catalog? Like, a physical like, JCPenney holiday catalog? Like, it's a physical book?

Sam:

Like like, literally, she's got, like, a paper copy and it can go on the website. Oh my god. This is crazy. It's crazy.

Adam:

That's wild. I never thought about that though. Like, if you're a scientist and there's lots of them out there, they need access to the things that they need to do experiments. So I guess it makes sense that there'd be what yeah. I now I gotta know.

Adam:

Like, the public can't get a hold of us, I guess. You have to have, like, your science card or something. Science card.

Sam:

Science card.

Adam:

Like, if I were to order this

Sam:

I don't know, actually. I'm an Oscar. I'll see what I'll see

Adam:

what Yeah.

Sam:

I'll let you know. I'll see what I'll see what we can find.

Adam:

Okay.

Sam:

But it's a funny way. Like, science science is so funny because it's the literal opposite of tech, like, just in every way, all the pressures and dynamics. And she's just gonna work everyday because they have a lab and because we're like this I don't know if these exist, but like we're the center of biotech in, you know, California. And so there's office space in like South San Francisco that are WeWorks for laboratories. So they can rent an office and lab space

Dax:

Oh. Just like we do when we work.

Sam:

And there's, like, hundreds of these things. Like, you can just go and buy lab facilities, like, rent them for even a day at a time if you need certain equipment. It's and the equipment they get, is insane. It's insane.

Dax:

The part of New Jersey that I'm from has a bunch of, pharma companies there. I don't really know why. Maybe it's just proximity to some of the universities. And we had this crazy case where this woman who was this like crazy, like high paid, pharmaceutical researcher, like snuck in and stole something. I forgot what it was.

Dax:

Sold some chemical and she poisoned her husband with it And he didn't die, but in the hospital, they didn't really believe him that he was, like, trying to communicate that he thinks his wife poisoned him, but, like, I don't know. It didn't get across. And she continued to poison him in the hospital, and then he eventually died.

Adam:

What?

Dax:

Yeah. And then they they caught her at the end of all of it. But, yeah, they have access to some crazy stuff.

Sam:

Lies wide.

Adam:

That's some nerve. She must have really wanted him dead to be a dune in the hospital.

Sam:

Yeah. You might have

Dax:

seen some HIV for you with your name on it.

Sam:

Yeah. Right.

Dax:

I did see they've, like, completely cured HIV now. I saw they, like, completely rid it on on someone. It's pretty crazy.

Sam:

Yeah. I think I got vaccine coming. And it's also been, like, they've got they've got biologics that I think it's a biologic that, that's that's another interesting science kind of recent ish thing is biologics. But I think it's a biologic that basically I think it's PrEP. If you have any risk of exposure, you take it and it's you just have no chance of catching it, basically.

Adam:

Wow. Is

Dax:

it wild how far it's come compared to where it was? Like, it was an immediate death sentence before? Yes.

Sam:

But can but cancer is the because cancer is still just the plague, and it's getting worse. Mhmm. It's just so hard. You it's a lottery for some people. You can be the healthiest person alive, and certain cancers will just get you.

Sam:

We like, lung cancer is a fascinating one. Like, I think it I I sorry to anyone listening thinking my facts are wrong or whatever, but I believe it's some only like 50 to 60% of lung cancers are caused by smoking. Really? Really know what the rest was. And we've only started to kind of figure out is cars probably plus, you know, just it might just happen anyway.

Sam:

Any cell division risks can like, there's just we're just really learning about all these environmental factors. But it's not just like, it's just not as obvious. There's so many people that have never touched a cigarette in their life can get it. Like, it's it's it's, horrible, horrible, honest.

Dax:

Yeah. I think I I saw someone from some not exactly in our circle, but I did I did come across on Twitter, like, someone randomly developed, like, stage 4, like, lung cancer, like, out of nowhere. They caught they by the time he went in, it was, like, already too late. He was, like, in his thirties, I think.

Adam:

And and are cancer rates actually increasing? I this sounds like an obvious fact that I should just know.

Sam:

They are. Maybe they're not I don't know if they're fully increasing, but the they are increasing lower down the population tree. So, like, for certain cancers Mhmm. They just didn't ever bother testing people pre 40 or whatever. You just haven't, like, been around long to develop it.

Sam:

And now they are seeing a whole category of those cancers coming way way down in younger people, which is probably things like the microplastics and things like that That's what

Adam:

I wonder. Yeah.

Sam:

Environmental state that we're in. We may cure it one day, but then we still don't know enough about it. Like, a conscious issue was explained to me the other day, there's still some division in belief of whether there's a cancer stem cell or not, like, whether they can actually like, they don't fully know why people get cancer back, and that and it could just be very it's, like, very hard to find a cell, and that's why even some of these treatments, like, are kind of risky. There's a lot of treatments now that people take for, you know, like, you injure yourself and they, like, kind of take out stem cells.

Dax:

Your your blood inject it back in. Yeah.

Sam:

There's a real risk to those, by the way, because mis modifying a cell, cells don't die. Every drug has a half life. A a a drug, if they can keep you alive, the wrong drug gets you, it will just flush out of your system. Cells can technically live forever inside your body. So if a cell was doing the wrong thing, you could be in real trouble.

Sam:

And so that that one of the theories and not fully proven that cancer comes back because of stem cells. I, again, could be wrong, but, like, I know there's still just real divisions as to why some of these things happen.

Dax:

Yeah. It's wild that it could always be a single cell and you have so many of them. Like, it's crazy. I mean, think about it that way. It's crazy that, like, it goes right in most cases, you know?

Sam:

It's a

Adam:

wild number

Dax:

of cell divisions that are happening and most of them go correctly. It's pretty insane.

Sam:

But it is why some kids get cancer. Right? Because they are just a constant cell division machine until they've fully got it.

Adam:

Oh, interesting.

Sam:

You just Higher

Dax:

rates of oh, interesting.

Sam:

Yeah. You you just risk a copying error or whatever.

Adam:

Well, now I'm depressed. I don't know. We're gonna talk about anything else?

Sam:

What's that? You are alive at the right time that if you live healthy, you can probably get quite a long life extension based on the the kind of medicine and drugs that that we have.

Adam:

Even despite all of this?

Sam:

Yeah. I mean, it's

Dax:

But despite cancer rates, like cold plunging, because cold plunging increases your cancer rates by by 10 x.

Sam:

And then yeah. Correct. They they literally say that, actually, in mice. In mice. They only done it in mice.

Sam:

But I think the other thing with mass the the other issue is, like, a lot of this is on mass population studies. Right? And us and everyone who's probably listening to this podcast lives significantly better than 99% of the population in terms of pretty much everything.

Adam:

And so We have hammocks. I mean

Sam:

hammocks. Right? Like, exactly.

Adam:

First world problems.

Sam:

My controllers.

Adam:

Yeah. I think UniFi controllers. You know,

Sam:

if you're if you're a 15th century peasant, a UniFi controller, and they would lose they would absolutely lose their minds.

Adam:

You know

Dax:

what actually buzzed me out? I always picture, like, imagine you're George Washington and you, like, did this crazy thing where you fought revolution and then you, like, started a country. At that point, it's, like, basically nothing. It's it's, like, nothing, and then you die. Yeah.

Dax:

It sucks that he didn't get to see that it worked

Adam:

out. Right?

Dax:

It's, like Yeah. It's so wild that he's gotten he had no idea how well it worked out, which is a sad thought.

Adam:

I had never considered that.

Sam:

Founded the greatest country ever and doesn't even know it.

Adam:

Yeah. I I just heard A lot

Dax:

of people didn't know it. Like, it it wasn't good until, like, maybe in the last 100 years. So all the people involved just had no idea.

Adam:

Yeah. The the founding fathers didn't know dinosaurs existed. Right? We've discovered them since

Dax:

Wait. What?

Adam:

Yeah. Like, they didn't know.

Sam:

No. They I

Dax:

Was that alright? They didn't know. Well, like, Chinese mythology. Like, didn't all that come from finding dinosaur bones?

Sam:

Yeah. Throughout yeah. Throughout history, they there's been lots of reference. They like, some people believe that's, like, kinda maybe where people thought dragons came from or whatever. You know?

Sam:

Uh-huh. You know, they also, they've been fairly easy to find in a lot of places. You know?

Adam:

Well, yeah. When when I heard the I don't remember where I heard this, but that, like, people had been discovering dinosaur bones for a long time, but nobody had put together, like, what they were until, like, the last, I don't know, 150 years or something. Like, there's no name for a dinosaur until sometime in recent modern history.

Sam:

Open a textbook in Kentucky, and it's the same situation. Like

Adam:

Oh, wow.

Sam:

I think the explanation is the devil put them in the ground to trick everyone.

Adam:

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Devil. I I never thought about the dragon thing.

Adam:

Like, dragons do seem so much like dinosaurs, and it makes sense that the people long, long ago that were dreaming up dragons had probably seen dinosaur bones. Yeah. It's interesting. Yeah.

Dax:

Have you guys seen the artist renditions where they try to where they give artists skulls of things like rhinos and elephants? Oh, yeah. Artists try to draw what it is, and it just comes out so crazy because the animals look nothing like like, you never like, a an elephant skull looks hilarious. It, like, looks really funny and weird. You would never know there was this giant trunk thing coming out of its head Yeah.

Dax:

On top of the bones.

Adam:

Yeah. Yeah.

Sam:

Yeah. It's wild. What they really think T Rex looked like? Stupid animal. Like I know.

Dax:

Did did did you see the did you see the newest like, you know, all those, like, Human Planet, Blue Planet, like, all that series, the David Amber ones? They did one for dinosaur prehistoric planet. And it's, like, our latest conception of a of a T Rex, and it looks so lame.

Sam:

Yeah.

Dax:

It's like the lamest thing. We have these tiny, tiny arms and, like, it's just it's not, like, aerodynamic or anything like it was in Jurassic Park. It's Yep. It's not a great it's not great.

Sam:

Such a lot, though. Such a lot, though. I guess if you drew a human from a skull, you wouldn't draw the nose.

Dax:

That's true.

Sam:

You wouldn't have it. Right? No. Yeah. It's not easy.

Adam:

Yeah. There's not yeah. There's nothing there to go off of.

Sam:

One of our one of my colleagues who I've worked with for a decade now, Actually, no. 11 years now, from the GitHub days all the way through PlanetScale. His wife has my, like, dream job because I love history. She's like an archaeologist. She's very famous in her field.

Sam:

She's got loads of toilet. Like, it just really he digs up bodies to study, like, their bones, like, the chemical and everything to just discover how they lived. And she they can find out an unbelievable amount of stuff. Mhmm. And it's incredible what they can learn.

Sam:

And she went to Pompeii and and, like, dug up one of, like, the really famous villas there and found loads of stuff. And it's just so interesting. It's, like, amazing what you can learn from these stuff. And it's it's phenomenal when you, like, read, like, kind of what we're learning about history just by looking at bones. Like, you know, it's it's it's amazing.

Sam:

It's truly amazing.

Dax:

Yeah. It's crazy how they, like, find these little hints and they can kinda connect the dots and draw, like, a pretty big conclusion. Because there's so little left, you'd think it'd be hard to know some of this stuff. But, yeah, I guess if you, like, stare at it long enough, you can figure it out. I mean, even with the dinosaur stuff, a lot of it is just looking at animals now and, like, understanding that, okay, some of these properties could have existed and some of these behavior could have existed.

Dax:

The other thing was have you seen I don't know how recent this is, but I came across this more recently all the theories about, like, South America and, like, the ancient civilizations that were there. So I think we think of, South American history as, like, kind of what you imagine in movies and TV, like, the Mayans and the Aztecs and whatever and, like, that level of society they had, they believe that there's now there was maybe a more advanced society prior to that, like, on the level of, like, Rome that collapsed. And then everything we know about was, like, people living in, like, a postapocalyptic type of Woah. Environment because they they found, like, like, streets, like, lined streets. They found, like, all this stuff that, is more advanced than what the civilizations that we know of, how they operated.

Sam:

Crazy.

Dax:

Yeah. It it's wild. Like, that that totally changes your perception of, like, what the world was like.

Sam:

There's an amazing fact that Oxford University started teaching lessons before the Aztec empire started. Like the Aztec Empire has been and gone. It was like 108 they started teaching at Oxford.

Adam:

That's insane.

Sam:

It's wild. And the and another thing I always find fascinating is the Romans were obsessed with the Egyptians like we are the Romans because they were 2000 years apart. They they look back at that and be like, they're an ancient, civilized, they were fascinated

Adam:

by this.

Sam:

And and obviously, for us, it's kinda wild.

Adam:

So I now I can't stop thinking about what, like, a 1000 years from now, they're gonna think we did. We we, like, have our whatever's left of, like, our Sony cameras and our Elgato key lights at our desks.

Sam:

Like They're gonna run NPM once and just be like, forget it.

Dax:

Put it all back. Yeah.

Sam:

Put it all back in the vault. Put it all back. All back in the vault.

Dax:

It's like the, oh, I guess you're at GitHub. That GitHub, what was that thing you guys did? The code

Adam:

for the

Sam:

guy product? Thing? Mhmm. The code vault? Yeah.

Dax:

Yeah. What was that? I don't really I never really looked into it.

Sam:

They took a snapshot of the all of the open source repositories that met a certain criteria and then spooled it onto this tape that can last, like, a 1000 years and buried it in a, like, a mine type vault near the seed vault in in the Arctic.

Dax:

Oh, seed vault. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It was

Sam:

very you know, obviously, I think it was like a very cool interesting fun thing to do, as like humans. But now there's like old versions of Bandler sounds and tapes. Just

Dax:

Well, I I I feel like when they because I like, like, a lot of code got in there. Like, I I, like, I have that badge in GitHub, and I'm like, I don't think I had anything public that I really wanted to last off the top of that point. Like, I don't think I was good enough at that point. Like, maybe now I'd be a little more okay with it, but Yeah. I guess it's there forever.

Dax:

Yeah. I don't know if people will look back because, like, what's different is we don't have a 100% clarity on information and that's, like, a lot of the mystery of it. Like, I always think about how my kids will have crazy detailed documentation of what I looked like at every single point of my life pretty much and, like, what my life was like and records of my conversations and all of it. Whereas, I know, like, basically nothing about about my parents and and going backwards. So, yeah, it definitely changes things a bunch.

Adam:

Well,

Sam:

we'll know about our they'll know about ourselves as well because we take pictures of them with our iPhones all the time. Yeah. Yeah. But within this 1st month, there was probably more pictures taken of our kid than ever was taken of me as a child.

Dax:

Yeah. Exactly.

Adam:

I feel like, Sam, you you do database stuff. I feel like you're gonna have an informed, answer to this question. I've never thought about this before, but, like, we we talk about the doomsday clock and, like, the chances of a civilization is destroying itself. Is there, like, some chance that, like, all the data that exists out there right now just gets wiped out for some reason at some point in history? Like, is there a similar risk where we're all fine, but we lose, like, all of this?

Sam:

It has wouldn't it be like a I don't know. It has to be like a massive electromagnetic pulse or something?

Adam:

What I was thinking, I guess. Yeah. Like, I know of those, but I don't know if there's other risks that I just don't know about.

Dax:

Depends depends how many availability zones you're running in.

Sam:

Yeah. Right. Yeah.

Adam:

Yeah. I guess it just seems crazy to think, like, 500 years from now that there's not some chance that all this data has gone somewhere Mhmm. Disappeared.

Sam:

I mean, I think people have already lost a load of data from archiving that they wish they had back in the age of AI. Right? Like people just used to like a lot of people. Like, you know, we sometimes get customers that we'll talk to and the the trade off for them, like if they're not very large, the trade off for them is like, can't maybe we'll we'll make a product decision to delete some data, maybe, to like stave off having to go scale. But we have a big emphasis on, like, consumer products, basically, because consumer experiences are ruined without data.

Sam:

Like, if, like Strava can't archive your best run,

Dax:

you know?

Sam:

Just because it was 5 years ago, you're gonna remember that. Like consumer experiences, you remember a lot more. But some people and because of technical limitations, especially in the kinda data center age, the early data center age, you know, we just got rid of data and we probably lost a load of really cool things because of that. A sad thing, a really sad thing is that we've lost great Internet sites.

Dax:

Yeah. The the data thing is crazy because I have this, like, visceral image I get where sometimes I think about it and I'm, like, I'm hitting the camera button on my phone. I'm taking a picture. It's getting uploaded to the cloud that's, like, ending up on some hard drive. It's someone's job.

Dax:

It's some team's job just to keep, like, manufacturing and installing these hard drives over and over and over. And I'm, like, can this really go on infinitely? Like, is my data really gonna be there forever, or at some point, does it need to get reclaimed? Because, like, the whole world is constantly uploading a crazy amount of data every single day, and we're able to keep up with it, but it feels weird,

Sam:

you know. I can actually answer this quite well because I worked at Facebook.

Dax:

Mhmm.

Adam:

And I

Sam:

can tell you that old data at Facebook eventually goes to tape. It goes that far. And Facebook has, like, an another tier of cold storage that is so cold that if it's not being accessed, the disk literally spins down. And when it gets when it gets access, it will wake itself back up. So it goes on hyper skirt like high very large spinning platters and gets spun down to store all this stuff.

Sam:

The hilarious thing is, like, the highest load peak and from from kind of, like, October onwards, everyone's preparing for New Year's Eve so that the entire world can send us a blurry, shitty picture, a video of a pilot. Like and and then you but the scale the scale is absolutely insane. A fact I and I I, you know, I had 2 teams. I had the traffic the edge the edge, like, the traffic team basically that did all of the 12% of the planet's Internet was man is is Facebook alone. And then, the other team I had was the video infrastructure team, which is our infrastructure was what received and everything's custom at Facebook.

Sam:

Like, what, inside WhatsApp and Facebook, the video,

Dax:

was

Sam:

it out codec? Whatever. How whatever Yeah. Media format is custom to Facebook. They have their own networking, like, it's moving to quick, but it's like an own networking stack that's in every client.

Sam:

Because you have things like we have like services like Cartographer. Because when you go on vacation, we now need to start serving you stuff more locally to you, but not forever. We don't wanna move your database. So Right. Like, the app can ask where to go, and that's all done and managed automatically through, like, APIs inside the apps.

Sam:

It's all custom. But there is more it is an insane fact. There are more servers at Facebook that receive, process, and put images on Blob storage than the entire of Azure.

Adam:

Wow. Woah.

Dax:

That is really wild.

Sam:

There's one node class, and there's more machines than that, all of Azure globally.

Adam:

That's insane.

Sam:

There's a whole

Adam:

You said 12% of Internet traffic is Facebook? Mhmm. Wow.

Dax:

This is what this is why this is so crazy to me because your point is, yeah, most of that stuff is garbage and never gonna be needed. It's never really gonna be needed again. Like, 99.9 percent of it is never really gonna be needed again. We have to store it all just in case it is. And this feels like is the whole world just gonna be up, like, a giant hard drive at one point?

Dax:

Like, how

Adam:

This is how I always thought about dead people. Like, how do we not run out of space to bury people? Yeah. Like, I've always wondered that. They

Sam:

decompose. Yeah.

Adam:

So then we just we just reuse the space. Mhmm. We just oh.

Dax:

Well, that's, like, a weird thing. Right? Like, let's say you buy a funeral plot.

Sam:

Yeah.

Dax:

Like, what's your right on that? You're buying it

Adam:

for now.

Dax:

But then who's there to defend it if someone claims it? In the

Sam:

UK, you always see these, like, big construction projects getting delayed because it's very hard to dig deep into the ground in the UK. There's

Dax:

a lot of And like,

Sam:

not find dead people. And so, there was a mystery of, like, I think King Richard III disappeared. They found him under a parking lot. Like, seriously. And then so, but the other one, there was like a tube station being built in London and they accidentally dug into like a gravesite of a monastery that's been there for like a 1000 years.

Sam:

So it's like they had to move, respectfully move, hundreds of dead monks somewhere else so they could build this train. Because you have to just, like, eventually you wanna be respectful, but you kinda gotta be like, there's other shit to do now, guys. You're long dead, and I can shift you out.

Dax:

It it's weird. So when I lived in, when I was in New York, my apartment there it's right next to Trinity Church. And if you if you've seen National Treasure, the final scene of National Treasure is in Trinity Church when they go under it into that crazy tunnel. But what's wild is it's literally, like, next to the World Trade Center. Like, if you're buried there, your grave is facing, like, the the World Trade Center.

Dax:

And some of those graves are there from, like, the 1600. Like, I think Alexander Hamilton's also buried there. Woah. And I'm like, these people were buried so long ago, and they have this they have again, the same thing. They have no idea.

Dax:

They have this, like, insane, insane plot of land. Like, they're buried in this craziest spot. I'm like, at some point, this can't be there forever. Maybe Alexander Hamilton, you know, he's he's famous and relevant, but it's just like these random people that have, like, almost unmarked graves that are that are right next to it, and it's in this wild location. You know?

Sam:

Yep. You could just mow it over and go to Barry's boot camp. It would just be that it just be so much more useful.

Dax:

No. I don't I don't understand. I have to look into it because I do I do wonder what the legal stuff is. When you buy a plot, like, is it a lease for some amount of time? Must be right.

Sam:

Basically all land lease hold technically. Like, aren't we isn't it?

Dax:

Yeah. Because the government can always take it from you. Yeah.

Sam:

Yeah. I'm on demand for this. Yeah. The sad thing about history is the recycling that happened, though. Right?

Sam:

Because it I ain't older civilizations that didn't care about preserving anything, and some still don't. Right? Like, the I think the weird interesting thing about the UK is even for, like, a 1000 years, we've actually still been interested in our own history and history. Like, some of the earliest historians were, like, Bede and Britain. And so we've always preserved stuff.

Sam:

Like, the oldest house I we're talking about old houses. The oldest house I lived in was 550 years old.

Adam:

Woah. My my my That's crazy.

Sam:

My mom

Dax:

used to America.

Sam:

Yeah. She used to convert houses. Right? So so so jobs, she bought, like, old houses and she converted them and she converted a chapel as well so I've lived in a chapel. So that was a good reuse of some like old stuff.

Sam:

But like this this 550 year old house had up the chimney, they were doing they were putting a flue up. They had to put an artificial one up because the bricks were so old. And they were going up to the and, my stepfather found a 8 by 8 secret room inside the chimney stack that was from the reformation where priests used to go and hide up the chimney to not get, found by the Protestants. And so we've we've served history so fantastically well. But the like, the Rome so the Catholics, like, destroyed all of the Roman palaces to build, Saint Peter's Basilica and stuff like that.

Sam:

So we just we've lost we've lost the majority of the amazing artifacts that we've known existed in history. Unfortunately, because of that level of recycling, we're just now getting better at not destroying things and appreciating them.

Dax:

Yeah. It's wild because you would think that's so innate, but it's not. So in Miami, there's a bunch of art deco stuff here from, I don't know when, maybe like the fifties or sixties. I don't know exactly when it's when it's from. Preserved really well, like, and it's really cool.

Dax:

But this was not a Miami thing. Miami was planning on just demolishing all of it and building, like, new stuff. A bunch of people from New York came here, and they were like, no. This is actually cool. And they, like, fought to put up all this stuff to, like, preserve the Art Deco thing.

Dax:

So, yeah, yeah, weirdly, like, it's you you can be blind to that stuff, I guess, as as obvious as it as it might seem.

Adam:

You just have

Sam:

to care about preserving it. We still lose artifacts. We we lost one of the wasn't it one of the 7th ones of the world we lost recently? What?

Dax:

Oh, really? Of the

Sam:

ancient world, I think. There's these in Afghanistan, there's these giant carved Buddhas. They're huge, and they're beautiful. The Taliban just, like, lit to piss everyone off, they just, like, fired, mortar shells at them and just wrecked just destroyed them. Oh my god.

Adam:

That was

Dax:

really sad.

Adam:

I hadn't heard this.

Sam:

Like like revolutions and all of these things. Like, you know, people take big digs at the British Museum, but they probably should send the stuff back now, but it's extremely revisionist because most of those things like, the Elgin Marbles would be gone. And and and they were they were bought. Like, a British explorer went to Greece during some sort of socialist thing and said, Can I buy those? And they were like, Sure.

Sam:

Oh, good shit. And I just literally bought them. Like, and and, you know, and then no one knew. Like, and, like, the Rosetta Stone was like the French, like, they stole it, but I think probably someone was just like kneading some bread on it. There's some ridiculous stories about this stuff.

Sam:

People were using just, like, crazy things from history that they just found. And, yeah, like, most of it was just, like, sold. And some a lot was a lot was plundered, but it exists today because people take care and look after this stuff.

Dax:

Yeah. The the monument thing is funny because I recently learned that the French sold the Arc de Triomphe to Saudi Arabia. So which sounds like, what does that even mean? But that's a point. Right?

Dax:

Like, it's just free money. You can just sell it to Saudi Arabia. It's still in France. It's not gonna move. And technically, Saudi Arabia owns you know, you just, like, got free money.

Dax:

I'm sure you can sell it to, like, through other people too if you want. Yeah. Yeah.

Sam:

You can buy insane things. You can buy futures on parking meters in San Francisco. You can buy. Oh, really? You can just, like, buy all of that.

Sam:

Like, you give basically 3, 4, 5 years of forward revenue. And then as prices increase, you can get you can hear the differences.

Dax:

Yeah. Everything securitized these days is great. Yeah. That's the thing in New York too. I mean, even just parking spaces in New York go for, like, $1,000,000.

Dax:

There's, like, some, like, private parking spaces. It's, that's

Sam:

crazy. Same story. Like, you can buy

Dax:

Yeah.

Sam:

That's wild. Really wild.

Dax:

This this thing with I mean, you're from you're from the UK. UK, so you have like, when you say like I said, you lived in a house that's 550 years old. Like, that's impossible here, like, for us. And, like, Florida is even like, it's so new. Like, nothing here is over a 100 years old.

Dax:

Like, it just was nothing before then. So, yeah, old for us, like, doesn't really exist compared to you guys.

Sam:

It's very relative.

Adam:

I was trying to think if there's if I've encountered a man made object that's older than a 100 years old. Probably not. I can't think of what it'd be.

Dax:

Wait. So where you live, there's not houses older than a 100 years old? I mean,

Adam:

a 100 around a 100 years old, I guess.

Dax:

I think for me, the oldest in America there's parts of New York. There's some streets in New York that are from, like, the Dutch like, the original Dutch settlement, and those are, like, 1500 something like that, I think. Maybe 1600. I don't know exactly when, but that's probably in America at least. I don't know if it gets older than that because that's, like

Sam:

Well, you've got, like, adobo kind of houses in where's that? New Mexico, is it? Like, you've got the kind of more native buildings that are here that they are pretty old. But for yeah. For, like, kind of the modern era of America, I don't know how much is there would be.

Sam:

There maybe some artifacts. There's obviously artifacts and stuff that we have here, but yeah.

Dax:

Yeah. Yeah.

Sam:

It's kinda strange. It's it's it's funny how different cultures based on the length of their time, I think, they genuinely, I think, really affect, like

Adam:

We're just babies in America. We're just little little baby civilization.

Sam:

Yeah. I thought yeah. We're like a kind of growth stage startup of countries now, I guess. We've got Yeah. It's kinda good.

Dax:

Yeah. It's when the bureaucracy comes in. Mhmm. Mhmm. I went to Europe for the first time a couple months ago, and, yeah, that was the main thing.

Dax:

Like, I would just we would just we're in Lisbon, and we just like, everything was just, like, shockingly, shockingly old. And it it's all, like, all works really well. It looks looks pretty good. Everything was really small. I will say that.

Dax:

Like, for most of the parts of Lisbon we were in, all the apartments were, like, just small, and I'm not, like, a big person. And I'm like, this feels kinda cramped. Like, were humans just smaller back then, or, like, what was what was going on?

Sam:

I I love like, so in this 554 like, I was, you know, a teenager, and I was I probably would be like 5.8 at that time. Right? Like, just I would smash my head off the top of the doors. And it it's amazing to think back at history and think of all these great epic battles and tales. Think it's just like 5 foot people running around with swords.

Sam:

It would just be it would just be hilarious to watch now. Like Yeah. I know. The battle of Ashencourt would just look so funny to us and and, like, once a time, little people smacking each other. It's pretty amazing.

Sam:

Yeah.

Adam:

Yeah. In New York,

Dax:

we have the the Met, and, they have, like, this armor Yeah. Section. And you see, like, the badass, like, Spartan armor. It, like, it looks like it's made for a child.

Sam:

Yeah. Yeah.

Dax:

It wouldn't even fit me at all.

Sam:

Yeah.

Adam:

And I'm

Dax:

sure they would have still kicked my ass, but it just it it just doesn't fit in your brain. And it's weird because it's not like I'm sure Vikings were so big back then. I'm sure there were some people that were large, but, it's like when these groups ran to each other, it must have been hilarious.

Sam:

Yeah. They were yeah. Go for it. There's there's tales of big people. Right?

Sam:

Like, so 1066, there was a Viking Berserker. He was, like they talked to it about him as if he was 7 foot tall. He, like Mhmm. Stood on a bridge and, like, held, like, 20 people. I've killed 20 men before finally someone snuck on the bridge and got him, but, like, speared him.

Sam:

But, like, there's this touring with these berserkers. I also lived in India, I grew up there, for a period of my life, and I love going back. I go back every year, and, you know, that you can go to Jaipur and go to the fort, and they look back at this kind of there's like Rajasthani kings and and and they were huge, they were giant. They they're like one of the princes was just massive, and they had his sword, and it was like, you just look at it and you just, I couldn't pick this up. Like I would have to like properly, like, pick like this is like the fact someone wielded that, it was like 7 foot tall, was just unbelievable because they just had these, like, random giant people, throughout history.

Dax:

Well, that that's the funny thing about India is because, there's this like, I think there's, like, a wide range of genetics, I feel like, in some ways. Like, I'm from the south, so everyone's, like, pretty small. But, like, on the north side, like, like Punjab, like, those people can get huge, but we're all the same race. Yeah. But then if you go look at who's in the army, it's, like, just one one subsection of of the country because they're all just just way bigger than the rest of us.

Sam:

Yeah. A lot of it like, car car this car car system did a lot of that.

Dax:

That was true. Yeah.

Adam:

Who who's the one of those?

Sam:

Brahmins? Who's the warrior class? What's the one just below Brahmins?

Dax:

I I just I don't have this memorized.

Sam:

I don't that will that will be that will be Me neither. Genetic selection. Like, you just eventually, like, so like, societal roles of that will select for these traits over time. Works.

Dax:

Yeah. So just shifting gears a little bit to PlanetScale stuff. What's going on there?

Sam:

I this because that like, we this week has been amazing. I'm actually a little tired right now. I was up for 2 working last night, 11 in the night, 4 and 2 again on Monday with colleagues. Like, they're like, we've just we've unlocked a few things that we are insanely excited. Like, we've had a shift.

Sam:

I won't and I'll tell you now. I will tell you both after this. We've had a a quite a shift, and so we're very excited. We've just moved some very large databases onto our cloud platform, which was very fun.

Dax:

I see

Adam:

you tweet some of that sometimes. The numbers just blow my mind.

Sam:

Yeah. Yeah. It's it's actually, going back to, like, scale, Facebook scale, stuff like that is one of my biggest learnings, personal growth learnings is there is 0 point talking about, like, your trade offs that you've made for scalability to people that don't give a shit about it. Like, they just don't care. They don't understand what it means to scale.

Sam:

I get it. It's fine. They haven't seen it. But, like, once you see that stuff and the size like, people used to complain about us, like, the the minimum cost of a database. Right?

Sam:

Well, the way our architecture looks is all in service of we actually have some databases that have 10,000 nodes just in that one cluster, right? And so we've made all the trade offs for making that work and the bottom, like I don't care about the like $29 one.

Adam:

Yeah. Yeah.

Sam:

And so you're gonna see a lot more from us in terms of, we've got some incredibly cool at scale stories and benchmarks and proof points and stuff to show. So it's been really fun. It's been really, really good to do those things.

Adam:

It's interesting, like, I hadn't thought about the scale situation from a planet scale perspective. Like, you have to scale with all of your customers, which is interesting. Like, it's not like a vertical situation where you have to worry about this one company. Like Facebook, crazy scale.

Dax:

Yep.

Adam:

But PlanetScale, like, is the it's the cumulative total of all of your customers' scale, which is kinda nuts, like different types of problems, I guess.

Sam:

Absolutely. And it's very fun though because we know about games launches for major blockbuster games. Yeah. Because they tell us. Right?

Sam:

We know like, Black Friday, Cyber Monday is a hilarious phone at PlanetScale. We have we have one customer. They they they send, like, the 3rd largest amount of text messages in America. Can you guess the top of the first two? Twilio's number 1.

Sam:

Who's in the middle of the thing?

Adam:

Oh, jeez.

Sam:

I have

Dax:

no idea.

Sam:

Uber. Uber is another second.

Dax:

Oh, really?

Adam:

Oh, interesting.

Sam:

And so their biggest, like, like, so much of their business is made up between Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Like, it's just such a big deal for retail, basically. And now we've got, like, a lot of retail customers. So for all these kind of retail black like, their load graph, the Thursday before just goes for doesn't change. Like, it's just like 500,000 a second.

Sam:

For and then the Tuesday, it just go, whoop, just drops straight off. And so it's fun to be able to see. I mean, learn about, like, customer's products and stuff they're doing, and it's just real fun. It's actually really fun. I do, like we've now got some very big consumer apps that run on PlanetScale, so buying a coffee is a little stressful for me now and then.

Sam:

If it doesn't go wrong, I'll be straight to my I do if it doesn't happen, I'll go straight to my laptop. Like, there's like You'll hear something. Let's just press like, there's some stressful things about it. I I think, like, we calculated if we did a if we had a full, like, global outage, which we've never we've actually never caused a customer a full outage, which is incredible. If we did a full global outage, we'd take down about a 150,000,000,000 of market cap instantly if we went there.

Sam:

Oh.

Dax:

So we

Sam:

take that so seriously and it so that's why Yeah. Again, everything is done in scale. It's just like so refined to do certain operations that are normally scary. We have to do about a 100000 database failures a week just because we have to roll versions and we have to do whatever. And so normally like a database failover is like a massive thing to for people to deal with.

Sam:

It just kinda rolls, right? It just kinda goes through it. Yeah. It's fun. But it's it's no one you don't you can't just, like, you don't that's not a shiny feature.

Sam:

Right? You can't do a launch week about well, we can roll. You know what I mean? Like, we can do these,

Adam:

before

Sam:

and scare off.

Dax:

It's not that it has to be invisible. Yeah. Yeah. And that's, like, that's a whole marvel how invisible it is.

Sam:

Yeah. Exactly. And and the people that we focus on now, the customers we focus on now, they have problems that require that solution, and they love it. They they pay for you know, it just works. Like, they have they have businesses that are just ripping in growth, and it's not stopping.

Sam:

You have to fix it. You have to the database has to happen. Right? And so it's much nicer to focus on that end of the market because we also work with customers where we've worked at that company before. Or, like, some of our employees worked at that company.

Sam:

And I've said to people, you know I you know we like like you know we've got the guy that like invented the online scheme of changes, he works here. Would you hire him? Obviously. Why would you build the thing like 60 of his friends have been building with him and just buy that. Right?

Sam:

Like it's so it's a very when you work with people that truly their other choice is doing it themselves, they really learn what you're actually doing for them. It's impossible to get to do that for a hobbyist. Like, they just don't it's like, how cheap is it is the only thing they care about, all free. You know?

Dax:

Yeah. So the reason why question that I had so there's obviously those are 2 ends of the market. Right? Like, you know, CrazyScale and the people that are you know, they're looking for them that's effectively free. I don't I don't fall into either end.

Dax:

So how do you guys think about, like, the mid mid level people that are never gonna have scale, but, you know, they're not complaining they're paying a couple $100 a month for a database either. Is that, like, like, do you yeah. I was wondering how you think about that.

Adam:

Like, which camp are they lumped more into in your eyes, I guess? Like, do you view them more like the indie hacker types, or do you view them No.

Sam:

No. No.

Adam:

More like a yeah.

Sam:

Because you're clearly running a business on it, and our intrinsic motivation is to not cause outages for anyone that trusts us, basically. Like Yeah. Care about that so much. But the rising tide raises all boats, and you benefit from things that have been built for so many other people. And we can, like, hand that down to you.

Sam:

You were at the beginning of the thing I really obsess about, which is the graduation curve from start up to public company with a petabyte of data in your relational database. And we wanna unlock those so it feels very gradual because no database product has ever done that. Mhmm. If your company takes off, it is inevitable guarantee

Dax:

You would eject you

Sam:

will replace your database or you will have to significantly the database at GitHub, the database was harder than the Git stack. And you can't buy an O'Reilly book on scaling Git platforms. Like, if anyone was gonna write off, it would have been us. And we wrote a one off distributed system. He works at PlanetScale as well, the guy who built that.

Sam:

Like, this one off distributed system that hosts all of the world's code, and that was easier than scaling relational databases. Every every company runs into this, and they use year like, when you have that middle year, and we work with a lot of companies in that middle year of, like, we're a real deal now, they that year is lost. Because only going back to your customers not being mad at you, you've shipped nothing. And so that's a year out of it's what? 10 to 13 years you get a little limited to build a company.

Sam:

Mhmm. So so it's 10% gone, because of database problems. I wanna eliminate that in the long run. Like, I like, hopefully, it feels obvious to you that you use PlanScale because it makes you more productive. You're not scared.

Sam:

I hope you're not scared of your database stack. Like, that's the like, if you I I hope you know you can, like, you need a schema change into production, and it's, like, gonna work. You know you know, like, that's that's, like, the first thing. And again, we do stuff under the hood. Like, we rate limit you if you, like, try sending high amount of traffic during a schema change.

Sam:

We'll turn the schema change down and do all this sort of stuff to make it stable. The idea is you should build super fast because you're unlocked to do so and you can do schema change, you can do whatever you want, and your database isn't breaking. And then we want as you start to take off, that become very progressive. And so soon, very soon, you'll see and all everyone has the ability to shard in the UI. That has been a very hard thing to do.

Sam:

Mhmm. Extremely hard. Vitess is so complicated. There is hundreds of flags for single commands to do very complicated things. Mhmm.

Sam:

We have to choose what's so that's the long term vision of PlanetScale is we have the tech that ran YouTube, 70,000 servers, 20 data centers. Some of the largest relational databases on earth run-in Verdesk. Bring that to people in a way that they're starting on the eventual state, but it feels like they're on the hottest new thing, and they

Adam:

will just Mhmm.

Sam:

Ride that graduation curve as they go. That is the thing that gets me most excited about, building a database company because I've seen and lived through many companies having database hell.

Dax:

Yeah. Yeah.

Adam:

I wish I wish there were companies in every category doing that because I I do think there's a whole lot of dev platform things that they don't have that and people just don't even know that

Sam:

Yeah.

Adam:

They're kind of like set up for this year of pain that you described Yeah. For whatever their web hosting or whatever else.

Dax:

So on on the other side, I guess there's always this assumption that, oh, Planetscale exists. Therefore, there's going to be, like, a Postgres equivalent. And I remember Citus being a thing. I think they got acquired by Azure, and then it, like, just didn't work out. Yeah.

Dax:

Do you have a sense of why there isn't, like, something on the other side?

Sam:

Yeah. There's multiple reasons. So it starts off with if there's gonna be a PlanetScale for Postgres, it will be built by PlanetScale. Because you just the intangibles, the things we know, the experience we have running operations at scale, like, every single person in the engineering team has worked at one of the largest websites in Earth based on Earth, basically. You know, like, every single one of us.

Sam:

We have the first in like, our VP of infra, he was the 1st infrastructure hire at Instagram. Like, we have just been around for a very long time. Load of us built GitHub, like, you know, we know this shit. 1, very hard to assail that. 2, Veritas is so mature.

Sam:

It is nearly 2,000,000 or it's like 1,000,000 or 2,000,000 lines of code. It's like the oldest Go app around that's still running. It was built to serve 1 of the the 2nd largest website or 3rd largest on the planet. Those failovers, that failover code being trusted a 100% of the time, all of that stuff, it's very hard to build that in. And then what people hate to hear when I tell them this is, Postgres is a great database.

Sam:

That's true. They don't hate that bit. That's it's a great database. But in around, like, in the nineties, Postgres and MySQL diverged heavily. Like, the the design goals of early MySQL, it's hilarious to look back at it now, was user experience and operability.

Sam:

Right? It was the main thing. Like, they you could you could do, like, master multiple replicas in

Dax:

Right.

Sam:

MySQL in the year 2000, like, easily. You know, real logical, like, real good replication. Postgres just shipped that. Right? And it's not wrong.

Sam:

Their trade offs were different. But they literally Postgres like MySQL was like, we're gonna make it easy to scale, and scale was relative to those that error. Postgres kinda more styled as like a correct like a prod single server, like, correctness was very key, demonstrate the power of SQL, and then they've retrofitted good things at scale, and that's going great. Like, they've got some fundamental issues, like every connection makes a process in service.

Dax:

Yeah. That's a huge one. That's that's one that I, like, don't get how everyone isn't constantly complaining about because, like, the one time I tried to use Postgres, and we added, like, a multi tenant type of or, sorry, we had a single tenant type of deployment so every single one of our customers got their own container talking to a single database. Yep. Like, the connection management there was just impossible.

Dax:

And I'm confused how, like, nobody is like

Sam:

They do. There's a couple of maintainers trying to push it through, and they just get framed. People don't wanna hear the post Postgres has any faults. It's crazy.

Dax:

Yeah. Yeah. I I did see I did see something with someone who was suggesting reworking that whole it's obviously a crazy amount of work, but Yeah. Again, just it's it's just funny because it so reminds you of that time where it's like, oh, yeah. Just if you wanna do anything in parallel, you just have a new process.

Dax:

Like Yeah. Yeah. That's, like, that's approach to everything, which doesn't make any sense at all anymore.

Sam:

It's just so expensive for the server to do that. Like Yeah. People that are like I see I see guys where it's like, when you get to 2,000 connections, you need pgbouncer. Every MySQL node at GitHub has 70,000 active connections to it.

Dax:

Wow. The

Sam:

threads. They're 4 k each, and they sit there doing nothing when they're not being used. Yeah.

Dax:

You have to, like, load a ton of RAM, and you're not actually using any of it. It's, yeah. Well, the pricing side of that always gets really out of whack.

Sam:

Yeah. So MySQL has, like, innerDB, which is an exceptionally mature storage engine. MySQL replication is incredibly robust and is used all over plant scale. And it's used at, like most companies, like, very large scale companies rely on MySQL replication to be their cross data center replication. Right?

Sam:

Like, you replicate to your MySQLs, you rebuild all the caches on the other side. It's, like, hyper robust. And MySQL is extremely operable. Like, no matter, like, just no matter what you wanna say, the reason it it powers most of the top 100 Internet websites, which it just truly does, is because for a long time it's been robust and at scale that's all you really choose. It's operability and robustness.

Sam:

It's automation tooling. It's predictable. It does all that stuff. So we have the test counts on a bunch of that stuff. Postgres will get there eventually and maybe we'll do Postgres one day.

Sam:

But, like, this level of operability has meant that the largest graph database on Earth is actually sharded MySQL.

Dax:

The

Sam:

largest graph issue on Earth is actually sharded MySQL. It kind of just ends up all boiling down to under the hood. You need to just your data stores just need to be heavily sharded, fast, and consistent, and you just build everything else on top. And so when you boil it down, what it's really good at, the job to be done, MySQL is exceptionally good at doing that. Like, it's very good.

Dax:

Yeah. I think even Dynamo is, is on top of my SQL too. Right? Mhmm.

Sam:

Yeah. No DB.

Adam:

Yeah. I've never understood, like, enough about the differences in my SQL and Postgres. I feel like such a dummy. But I've I've never understood why app developers, people like me who just build, like, at this very high level stuff, like pages and Mhmm. Components and whatever, like, why do people have strong preferences?

Adam:

There's a lot of people that love Postgres, and I don't even know what they love about it. Like, why they choose it?

Dax:

I As a web developer features. Postgres has so many features. Like In fact,

Adam:

I just don't use any features.

Dax:

Well, it's just not how you build. I think some people like to do have a database do everything, and then other people like to have the

Sam:

application do everything.

Dax:

Yep. And at scale, obviously, the application scales busier than the database, so it's dumb to do everything in the database. But yeah, it has like an insane amount of features. Like what I like, and I, like I started with Postgres and I moved to MySQL later, and initially I was like, like less features.

Sam:

Yeah.

Dax:

But over time, I sort of like that more because I'm like, there's it's like a smaller surface area and I like that smaller surface area. I had to go back to Postgres for something and I was like, yeah. There's more stuff here, but, you know, it it does, like, complicate things quite a lot.

Adam:

I still feel so dumb, but, like, what features? Like, what are the

Dax:

what They

Sam:

have they have they have more types. They have more some some correct some things they're more correct on. My secret has some stupid defaults, like ridiculously dumb defaults. In terms of, like, encodings and shit like that, it's just by default bad. They fixed that a lot of that stuff now, but, like, it has way more types.

Sam:

They had JSON columns in the early days. But, again, like, this is

Dax:

a I

Adam:

knew about the JSON thing.

Sam:

It's a great and, like, this is a great perfect analogous between Postgres and MySQL world. So they built JSON columns, and they sucked at the beginning. Of course, they did. It's like early, but the performance was terrible. Like and people would just say, don't use these things.

Sam:

But Facebook looked at that and said, that's good. I like Jason Collins. That's a good idea. They built it into my it took them a year to build it into MySQL or whatever and put it into prod on an obscene amount of MySQL servers. And it was working robustly.

Sam:

And then Postgres got good. And that's the difference. Right? Like, you can ship something early that isn't gonna get used by Facebook, or you have the burden of shipping something that's gonna get used by Facebook. And you kind of converge maybe around the same time, but one is, like, a lot more operable still and can do all of these types of things.

Sam:

And so it might seem a lot slower to do a lot of these chase these features that Postgres implements. And there's and the and the the their architecture is a lot more segmented, and they have a plug plugins architecture as well.

Dax:

Yeah. I was gonna say the extensions are a big, big thing.

Sam:

Yeah. Which is exactly very good. Right? So people do these extensions. They have downsides.

Sam:

They don't have, like, full access to all the APIs that would allow you to do, like, really perform things or whatever. But the other side of that is Amazon has to only has to verify them because one of the largest ways people were getting hacked on Amazon was because of extensions.

Dax:

That's funny.

Sam:

And the other thing is like, people used to shit on us for having not having foreign keys and still not supporting triggers and we never will ever support triggers. And no one at scale uses foreign keys. It's because no one use these things at scale. It just it just doesn't it does not matter to to have these things. So we just don't, like, bother support supporting that stuff because at scale, people don't need it.

Sam:

But at not scale, there's loads of little features and things you can do and build.

Adam:

So so this idea, Dax hinted at it, of, like, doing most stuff in your application and not in your database, that's actually good because that's I just felt lazy for not learning how to do all the stuff in the database, but maybe that's just okay and that's even a good way to build. Is that what you're saying?

Sam:

It's a big it depends on that one, unfortunately. It's very unsatisfying. It's all trade offs. But I fully believe you just shouldn't do dumb things inside your database, and people do really dumb things inside the database. Yeah.

Sam:

And people also don't understand that certain types of data can be stored in much more efficient ways on other specialised databases. Mhmm. And so it's a yeah. It's a big like, search isn't very good in the in, MySQL, not right now anyway. And so you might have to, like, archive your data over, like, replicate it over to Elasticsearch to get better search and stuff like that.

Sam:

Sure. But for a small amount of data on a simple website, the search is like just enough and it just depends. But people we we do when people move to us and they have to move to a sharded architecture, that's when they do have to do a bit of app changing and a a little changing around. But when you're going to scale, everything sucks. So there's just no, like, at any scale, it's all bespoke.

Sam:

You know, there's just you're working on there's a 5 person team at Facebook that are the world's experts on TCP and they work on network level stuff. So somebody rewrote all of the network drivers to get for like, just everything is whack a moly, cost efficiency, speed, performance, uptime, and everything sucks and everything breaks.

Dax:

Yeah. I read this book called The Art of PostgreSQL, and what was interesting about it is it went to the extreme of being like, here's like what code you'd normally write, but it turns out you can just do that, like, directly in Postgres. And it goes like that crazy extreme. It It was definitely interesting, but I feel like it, like, totally messed up my perspective for, like, a year till I shook it off because I started feeling bad anytime I, like, was pulling out a little bit more data than I technically needed because I could have, like, massaged it in a certain way in the database. But I think it's like recover from reading that book to get to a good place.

Dax:

But, yeah, like, there are people that argue, like, any kind of, like, reshaping your data because, like, it's in one format and you need it in a different format to serve from your API. They say, like, technically your Postgres database can do that if you write your queries to reshape it the way you want, and then you just pipe it through your application. The downside is that work of transformation is not like your data doesn't have to do that work. Your application can do it and your application, like, scales easier than your database. So, you know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it there.

Dax:

It's it's a lot of stuff in that pattern. Yeah.

Sam:

Stored procedures are a mistake. No no one should be putting that amount of logic.

Dax:

Yeah.

Sam:

And we've we've we've spoken to people coming from other databases who have written giant and have thousands of stored procedures. So they've got a whole second code base inside their database, and it's just bad. It just doesn't work. It doesn't scale. The whole, like, the if you don't understand that stored procedure, you could like, it makes it really hard because you have to understand the upper level stack, like the code, the language of the upper level stack, then how stored procedures work, and the edge cases that could perform just to get back silly.

Sam:

It's just it's just bad. It's just it shouldn't be done.

Dax:

Yeah. I think what people forget about code is everyone's so practiced with it. Like, we're practiced at collaborating on it. We're practiced at, like, like, using it with Git and, like, looking at the history and pull requests and workflows and all that stuff, like, goes away when you try to eject out of out of code. Yeah.

Dax:

I did come across but when I was consulting, I did come across a team that did everything through store procedures. Like, their all their business logic, everything was in there. Obviously, like, it wasn't great, but it was also one of those things where they've been doing it that way for super long and they, like, kinda gotten decent at doing stuff that way. And, like, it definitely isn't for me, and I think I'd recommend it for anyone. But, like, I can see how you can maybe, like, get good at, like, almost anything if you do it for long enough.

Dax:

Yeah.

Sam:

Some people do some really hard like, people talk about monoliths. Most people's real monoliths is their database.

Adam:

But a

Sam:

lot of people have more than one application talking to their database. And that's again, maybe it's better to have some stuff in the database, but probably don't do that.

Dax:

Consistency. Yeah.

Sam:

Yeah. Probably shouldn't do that.

Dax:

Well, we're at, like, an hour and a half.

Sam:

This was fun.

Dax:

Yeah. It was good. It's really fun.

Sam:

That I won't listen to because I hate my own voice.

Adam:

So Oh, it's funny.

Sam:

It's even weird if I didn't wake up at 4 AM in the morning with my own voice. My Yeah.

Dax:

No. If it's in this next episode, you're gonna see yourself. It is it is weird. Yeah. I used to I think I used to hate the way my I think everyone hates the way their voice sounds.

Dax:

I've gotten used to it because I, like, hear it by accident so much now. But it is weird when I, like sometimes, like, I'll hear, like, my like, I was listening to, like, me and Adam's voice. I'm like, this is it's like kind of a weird experience. Yeah.

Sam:

Yeah. Yeah. If I do if I do a ever do a, like, like, formal, this is, like, purely only, like, a tech podcast that just want you to talk about PlanetScale, I just send it to a couple of people on my team and just please listen to this and check I didn't say anything stupid because I can't. I just can't I can't do it myself. Yeah, it works.

Sam:

It's absolute.

Dax:

That's funny.

Adam:

On that note, we can send this to you if you wanna run it by.

Sam:

Just to stick in my ever expanding bag of data that I want people to discover.

Adam:

Oh, there you go. Yeah.

Sam:

Like, 500 videos.

Dax:

I was

Adam:

just gonna say, I have to figure out my, UniFi controller. Something is wrong. My whole house doesn't have the Internet. I was gone for a little bit and I restarted mine. So I'm

Dax:

thinking things are good. What a coincidence. Not a good

Adam:

not a good commercial for UniFi.

Sam:

Yeah. Sorry. That's what if you say nice things about computers, they will immediately let you down.

Adam:

Yeah. They will. Exactly. That's

Sam:

not that's not that's not good.

Dax:

Yeah. It's funny when you got on, you were like, if you don't hate computers, you haven't worked in it long enough. My dad's an engineer, and it's funny because if you see him operate in his, like, day to day life, you would never think he knows anything about tech Because at this point, he just hates everything and doesn't wanna learn anything.

Sam:

Yeah. So,

Dax:

like, he's always, like, does not use a TV. Doesn't know how to, like, do any of the thing, any of the stuff. But he's built some wild crazy stuff in his career.

Sam:

Yeah.

Dax:

Yeah. But, you know, he's like, he's he's overall a bit at this point. Yeah.

Sam:

I I've met so many people that oh, I know people who have retired. They closed their laptop, and I'm never looking at a fucking computer ever again. That's awesome. They would've gone. It's awesome.

Sam:

She wandered off into the woods. It's fantastic.

Dax:

Yeah.

Sam:

Okay. Should we do a would we stage a little bar? Do we say goodbye at the end?

Adam:

Yeah. Yeah. Goodbye. Alright. We we're terrible.

Adam:

We're terrible at the ending. We don't ever know. Thanks for coming on, Sam.

Sam:

Yeah. Bye.

Creators and Guests

Adam Elmore
Host
Adam Elmore
AWS DevTools Hero and co-founder @statmuse. Husband. Father. Brother. Sister?? Pet?!?
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Dax Raad
Host
Dax Raad
building @SST_dev and @withbumi
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Chris Enns
Editor
Chris Enns
I edit podcasts so you don't have to.
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Sam Lambert
Guest
Sam Lambert
CEO at PlanetScale
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The History of the World and How it Scales with Sam Lambert

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