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`3:04:05`

When are they happy? And what he learned was quite illuminating. He learned that people aren't happy when they sit on Mojito Island. They're not happy when they're free of all obligations and responsibilities. No, they're happy in these moments where they're reaching and stretching their capacities just beyond what they can…

`3:05:06`

I'm just gonna sacrifice everything, my health, my family, my hobbies, my friends, but in 10 years I'm gonna make it all up because in 10 years I can do it. It never works out like that. It doesn't work out on both ends of it. It does not work out if you're…

`3:06:08`

— You can't do it again or most people can't do it again. A, because their second idea is not gonna be as good as the first one. It is so rare to capture lightning in the bottle like we have, for example, with Basecamp. I know this from experience because I've been trying to…

`3:07:09`

And I say bullshit in the sense of the most endearing sense. It's all great to do it. I know too much. This is one of the reasons why, whenever I'm asked the questions, if you could tell your younger self something that would really, what would you say to your younger self? I would…

`3:08:10`

This notion that responsibility is actually key to me. "Man's Search for Meaning," Viktor Frankl talks about this as well, that we can endure any hardship if there's a reason why. Now he talked about it in truly life altering concentration can't waste. But you can also apply at a smaller scale with less…

`3:09:13`

And so there is a degree to which you wanna make the mistake. So I think I would still give the advice of you want to have a stretch of your life where you work too hard, including a thing that fails. I don't think you can learn the lessons why that's a bad idea…

`3:10:15`

about how when he went for a bike ride, he could go really hard all out and he could do the ride I think in whatever 19 minutes. Or he could enjoy the ride, go 5% slower, do the ride in 21 minutes and realize there's only two minutes apart. Either I go all in all…

`3:11:16`

I am not that smart. I'm not that good. I'm not that talented. I can do interesting things by combining different aspects and elements that I know, but I'm not gonna be the best at anything. And that released me from this singular obsession with just going, I'm gonna be the best programmer…

`3:12:17`

— If you wanna be Senna, you gotta be a maniac. — But I would argue that there's most disciplines like programming allows if you want to be, quote, unquote, "the best," whatever that means, I think that's judged at the end of your life. And usually if you look at that path, it's gonna be…

`3:13:18`

of whatever I defined as good at something much, much easier. Perhaps it's 20 times easier, 100 times easier to get into the top 5% than it is to get into the top 0.1%. That's almost impossibly hard to get into that. But if I'm content just being in the top 5%, I…

`3:14:18`

maybe even in a few cases months, I have to come up for air and I have to go do something else. Like, all right, that was programming for this year. I've done my part and I'm gonna go off riding or annoy people on the internet or drive some race cars to do something…

`3:15:20`

— And for the moon includes? — Venture capital. — But also... — And other things in not caring about cost. — But also because AGIs are on the corner, you should have been investing into AI, right? Is this just part of? — Sort of tank ginger? I think it's a bit of a muddy argument, but if we just take…

`3:16:22`

goes directly to the bottom line, which means it's return to Jason or I as owners and our employees part of our profit sharing plan, is totally worth doing. This idea that costs don't matter is a very Silicon Valley way of thinking that again, understand at the scale of something maybe, but I also…

`3:17:24`

shouldn't things be getting cheaper? Why are we spending more and more money servicing more customers? Yes, but with much faster computers, Moore's Law should be lowering the costs and the opposite is happening. Why is that happening? And that started a journey of unwinding why the cloud isn't as great as the deal…

`3:18:25`

or 3.4 million at its peak. That's kind of a lot of money. 3.4 million, I mean we have a ton of users and customers, but still that just struck me as unreasonable. And the reason why it was so unreasonable was because I had the pitch for the cloud ringing in my ears…

`3:19:26`

That if he could just make 2% when the other guy was trying to make 4%, he would end up with all the money. And on volume, he would still win. So I thought that was the operating ethos for AWS. It turns out that's not true at all. AWS by the way operates its almost…

`3:20:26`

the whole jing-a-ma-jing has become. But what's certainly true is that it's no longer easier. It's not easier to use AWS than it is to run your own machines, which we learned when we pulled out the cloud and didn't hire a single extra person. Even though we operate all…

`3:21:27`

if buying those servers is way, way cheaper so we get vastly more compute for the same amount of money. Could we just buy more servers and not even care about the fact that we're not hyper optimized on the compute utility? That we don't have to use things like automatic scaling to figure things…

`3:22:28`

that we've been using for our entire existence. But anyway, these pallets arrive in a couple of weeks and we rack 'em up and get everything going. And we were out. At least with the compute part. We then had a long multi-year commitment to S3 because the only way to get decent pricing in…

`3:23:30`

meant returning to more of an original idea of the internet. That the internet was not the sign such that three computers should run everything. It was a distributed network such that the individual nodes could disappear and the whole thing would still carry on. DARPA had designed this such that the Russians could take out Washington…