Lightning round

`1:39:49`

and tools and how people make weapons out of combs and pens. It's just, I find this like, I have nothing, I need something, I can use my human brain to figure out how to make it. I think that scrappiness is beautiful. Yeah, I was just going to say it speaks clearly to your scrappy mentality. And what is that book called again? This one's called Home-made: Contemporary RussianFolk Artifacts. And there's also an Eastern European one and there's another one too, but Home-made. What an awesome, unusual selection. Okay, next question. What is a favorite recent movie or TV show? I don't watch TV. I rarely get a chance to see movies these days. I really thoroughly enjoyed Oppenheimer though. I mean, I went to the theater to see it, and seeing that in the theater was really special,

`1:40:37`

but I just love the movie, is fantastic. Do you have a favorite interview question that you like to ask candidates that you are interviewing to hire? I think we actually went over this one a little bit, which was, I'm always curious about what else... if you had more time, what would you do with this idea? Another one is, whose work do you admire? So it's not so much about what you can do, but what are other people doing that you think is great? I find that, that really illuminates what kind of pulse they have on the world and what they're looking at and what inspires them and what they think is good. So I like that question. In that second question, what do you look for? Is it someone that you also admire? Ultimately, in the moment, I don't care who it is. It's more about, tell me why. So someone will say, I like so-and-so, I'm like, why do you like them?

`1:41:25`

What are they doing that you think is interesting? This is kind of the thing I tend to always ask, which is, why do you think that that's interesting? I'm always trying to get behind the words and understand where this is coming from because people can prepare answers and they can sound great. But it's like, well, what's behind that? Where are you going with that? Why? What's the genesis of this? That's what I'm always after. And so whether or not I agree with the work or whatever, in the end, it plays a part to some degree but I'm more interested in, how did you get there? Is there a favorite product that you've recently discovered that you really love? Yes, although it's more of a category. I bought an old car, and I've fallen back in love with stick shifts.

`1:42:17`

I learned how to stick, and then I basically have had automatic cars for many years and I got back into sticks. And now it's even deeper than that. I got back into the old analog driving experience and how wonderful it is to feel attached to the machine that you're using, that you turn the wheel and it turns it rod and it turns the wheels, and that your leg muscle actually is what's breaking the car, to some degree. There's something about that direct feel that really surprised me. It surprised me how much is missing in modern cars and it actually... I like to draw these parallels because this is how I see the world.

`1:43:02`

It reminded me of our business, actually. I think we have a very stick shift business. We have a very direct business. Everything's very, very tight, very straightforward. There are not a lot of layers of abstractions. There are not a lot of things in the middle between the work we do and the way it feels, and I think of large businesses as automatic transmissions and modern cars where you just... everything's simulated. You don't really know what the road feels like. You can't really feel it in the steering wheel, or maybe there's some fake feel in there now. The brakes are just sending a command to a computer to squeeze the pads. The transmission is like, you don't control it, it just does its own thing. And there's a beauty in that too, but there's also a disconnect that I forgot about until