>> booktv continues on c-span2. television for serious readers. booktv in prime time starts now. in a minute clive thompson reports on the moral implications of coding. then journalist matt rectal disclosures the immune system at epm easter. investigative reporter reports under kushner in a bucket truck at nine. sarah talks about the religious life of the john adams family at ten. we wrap up the prime time programming at 10:55 p.m. eastern with a presentation of the book of the year award. check your cable guide for more information. now here is clive thompson.

[inaudible] >> thank you so much for coming out tonight my name is serena i am the assistant at books of magic and is not your first time you may notice something new, we have a crew from cspan training us to record the talk. during the q&a portion we will have the gentleman in the blue come around for the mike to get your questions answered. tonight we are hosting clive thompson in his new book the making of a new tribe in the new attorney remaking of the world. it's a comprehensive and entry point to the world of code, history heroes and consequent is. he interrogates the ethics of computer programming in our

modern digital age were certain decisions have the potential to cause serious device on the economic disruption. coders offers the field as gatekeepers and legends including instagram, google's and more. encoders write women in the history programming contributions the world of code have been more or less a race. he also answers the lingering questions around code and try. he also is author of smarter than you think, and then how technology is changing our minds for the better. his interpreting writer for the new york times magazine. here to join is neil with the host of the podcast function. his ruggedized is one of the most prominent voices advocating for more humane and ethical technology industry he worked as an entrepreneur, activist and writer. please join me in welcoming.

[applause] >> thank you and welcome everybody. >> thank you. >> we have so much to cover. it is wonderful to be here at books are magic. i think there is an infinite number of things we can talk about. . . . a website that its goal is to

make it easy and more accessible to create interesting things. things have gotten overly complicated i back in the '90s it was easy now it's gotten way more complicated so the goal is to make it easier for people who didn't necessarily know a lot so what happened was i seen this happening and there is kind of interested in it and i thought what can i make with that because while i was writing the book i was teaching myself a bit more programming. i learned a bunch when i was a kid like basic programming. but i hadn't reall haven't realh coding as an adult so i've been teaching myself and a glitch came along and i thought what can i make with this. i was looking at the different projects that you were allowed to just remix and turn into something new and there was one that you could get automatically

so i thought i will get it to send problems like once every couple of hours, algorithmically generated because i studied literature and poetry back in today so i spent an afternoon and i looked at this and i didn't even understand some of it at all but i could copy and paste and figure out this is where it's scoring the thing it has to save to the world so they are i can write my own function that will take like a thousand lines of poetry and randomly pick three and turn them into this little haiku and send it out so i got that up and running and hit go and there was a hilarious moment i could see this thing staggered to life and start little haiku is into the universe. it's still out there on twitter you can pull out your phone and

look at it right now. it would have probably fired just a few hours ago. what did it say our journey ends the fallen flowers and empty room. >> that's pretty good. >> so you must be a good coder. okay. i wanted to start with that because there was something really remarkable about this established author and journalist if he found a way to express yourself in coding and i don't think that's how most of us are thinking of software in our lives right now. like i put a new app on my phone so does it send you random poetry is more of a concern. there is an expectation of what it can empower us to do and what it has delivered and

particularly you reference being a kid growing up and this was common for people of a certain age that we would have these computers and for the younger folks here, televisions used to have a third dimension they were deeper and then on the back they had a little plug and you would plug in whatever computer. i did the math recently which is your twitter avatar commodore facebook photo, on the computers at that time if you were lucky enough to have a modem which would cost a couple hundred dollars would have taken about 20 minutes to upload your twitter avatar onto the computer you are using so this is the speed at which the internet was. and on that device, you learned a little bit of coding. and that was common. the kids in the neighborhood were probably doing the same thing and it was all cultural stuff back then like nobody was sitting down saying i'm going to

learn coding so i can do something commercial with it. we had chats and terrible text adventures and things like that was the goal just to do something geared an interesting that's what motivated you. >> but they wanted them to stop doing that and go outside. >> my mother in some respects but stopped me is my mother -- my father was a civil engineer. he was interested in technology and so he thought he was a little worried about how nerdy i was that he could see that there was something kind of -- my father is a civil engineer also. there'there is a causal relatio. >> my mother was terrified that if he got the computer in the home i would just play video games and want out of school, which is not an unreasonable concern given the amount of time i spent in arcades.

i would vanish for hours. there was a broad cultural panic. so she never got in a computer. the coding was on a friends computer or school computers. the illicit computing. and i had one summer when my friend's father came over with a 20 under his arm like your kid likes these computer things and my dad said yes so he lent it to me for four months and i went from eight in the morning until two in the morning and it went away in the end tragic. >> i want to start with that sort of grounding because i think the idea that this would be a mode of expression of youthful transgression that it was like somebody handed you a guitar that summer like you can shred as much a as much as the s summer. that's a way of being able to express yourself there's almost a lineup that in the starting narrative of what you talked

about in the genesis moment for so many people who create with technology is and the gap between that and did we make software that is manipulating elections and undermining civil institutions is pretty significant, but is there a through line, like how do you get from one to the other? is >> that's a really good question. you are right that everyone i talked to or most people i werei talk to in the book, and i try to count up it's like 200 developers, they would all talk about this moment when maybe they were young or sometimes they were middle-aged a lo of tm discovered that older, where they would take their first quote on quote hello world program that does nothing more than the computer says hello world. it's a very frankenstein moment. they found that electric bolt through the soul. they loved the feeling of this

thing doing exactly what they toltold ittold us to come havins universal control that have this sort ohad thissort of almost li. >> the moment i had with my poetry bought and when i was young. so they had a dee the deep joy f doing this and if they were older, you know, coders of a certain age like us they have that joy and they had no idea that it was going to be worth anything. this one guy in his 50s were laid 40s told me when i was learning this as a kid, i thought it was about as useful as art theory, like it's just me doing sketching or something like that. he sort of stumbled into making a lot of money so the through line where you get from people doing this joyful thing to like algorithmic horror shows, tossing up conspiracy theories left right and center has a lot to do with the fact once it became really valuable

economically, and that started to really split in the late '80s i would argue the microsoft millionaires. >> exactly. once it became a get rich quick scheme and accelerated again as people saw things like facebook starting to take off and become huge, two things happened. one, the money started to push all the business models towards peace metastasized quickly take over the whole world to do everything free and make money on ads which means you have to start tracking it all the time and try to seduce and convince people to stare at these apps all the time and you're also going to have these algorithms to find the most hysterical and outrageous things because you want people to be mesmerized by the feed. >> the market forces i think had a lot to do with taking something that was created and

joyful and turning it into something that unsettles the creators of it. another thing that happens, the demographic changes as it became more of a get rich quick thing a lot of people started flooding into software that had no innate interest in the crafting of it. i talked to this professor at stanford who said you could sort of see it happen around the financial collapse of 2008. before then, there were all of these smart but terrible people who would go into wall street and leave the fraternity and i'm going to make my million dollars moving subprime mortgages around. >> the pot of gold was there. when that fell apart, they were thinking while the easy money isn't an wall street anymore ine

where am i going to get it and a lot of them were smart enough to learn how to do the coding and make prototypes so they started showing up in the stanford classroom and literally going i have trusted software itself i just want to make money. >> you had this in the early '90s. then there are the true believers and it sounds to be akin to if playing with your legos were suddenly the path to becoming a billionaire like i was playing legos because i love lee goes that if people want to pay me to do this and i can get rich, that's interesting because now you talked to 200 coders and you talked to a pretty broad range. there's all these different identities in the archetypes that today we see of this

generation, and then the generation prior was bill gates but then it's not that big of a leap like a harvard dropout and a certain archetypes, so i'm curious what was the most unexpected part of that? >> on >> one of the most unexpected things was probably a couple things that were unexpected. one is the demographics in recent years were changing in an interesting way for a cool reason that has to do with what you are trying to do with glitch which is you know, coding started out as a very accrediting in the 60s with women involved as anyone could do it and then it became very much a young white dude thing for a bunch of reasons we could talk about, but i won't go into them right now. and that was part of the problem you had with my software is

being made and ignoring the needs of the people that what was fun was being able to see how the kind of web generation started to crack open and allow a bunch of different people in. i kept running into these very talented friend and software engineers, people who do stuff designing for the web like i was like a sketch artist for the philadelphia museum of art and then they bought a camera that made me obsolete, so i started getting into web design and she's artistic so she had this fantastic visual view, or there were musicians like designing the band website and i stumbled intthat i stumbledinto an obsess stuff. it's what i've rebooted that creative streak i think one of the reasons i like them and i like seeing the type of people in spite of the culture so that

was one thing that was kind of surprising. another thing that was surprising and i bring this up a lot, people ask me what characterizes the personality characteristics and i went in thinking there will be logical people and sure enough, true they are good at logic and breaking things down. a lot of people say there will be more likely to be introverts do not always true, but by and large true. people who like being alone so those are the kind of things you would expect. at the one that was left out though is they were all fantastically good at enduring unbelievable brutal levels of frustration because there's almost nothing more frustrating you can do with your awake hours than programming a computer because nothing is ever working right. like its always broken and it's like that didn't work its not telling yoit's nottelling you wa

cryptic error message. the overwhelming majority of the time it's all your fault. >> it's like you literally wrote five lines of code and it's still not working so you are trying to figure out what the hell is going on and there's no idea when it's going to start working. you could figure it out 30 seconds from now or three weeks from now and it's just like pounding nails into the front of your forehead. so, it was of course on the flip side of it when things clear up, then it's just like one coder told me it is as if any time you compile or try running it and it's not working you are just getting hit and the moment it works it's like someone walks up and inject you with heroin. [laughter] it is so high they will endure any amount of broken glass

crawling to get there again. so i thought this was probably something that should become a talking point when we think about like do you want to do programming because people say things like it's really interestinits reallyinterestingy difficult for it requires a lot of logic but honestly it requires being able to roll the boulder up again and being flatlined. >> this is an interesting insight. there is a sense of almost a solitude projected around doing this task. we are seen as a little bit radical in this but other organizations feel the same way like we should do this alone and it's this idea like you are going to toil in frustration -- >> and total isolation. >> right, and an enormous frustration of stress and toil

alone seems absurd. so, do you think that intersects with why and which personalities are allowed to be in the industry? how much resilience do you have to have culturally, socially and just contextually to be able to deal with that much stress at work like who could do that versus the people that would like -- >> i totally agree. it's the reason there's been a kind of monoculture in this stuff but it's also interesting to see how your company is focused on trying to make it more social partly to get past that frustration but it's been interesting to see how social a lot of the coders are. so you go into any of the i think cal henderson told me this delete engineer we were walking

around and he said i think they made a comment and they were like that person's not working. i can tell they are working when they are looking at a stack overflow because it's essentially a forum where people post all my god this isn't working can someone help me out and then someone comes along and usually says you are clearly an idiot for people throughout. so they help you out but they make it known i that you are a moron. [laughter] [inaudible] but it's true i think both parts are true there's this enormously -- there are areas where it's this sort of scolding shouldn't you know this. >> i would say it's also gotten better people told me it's worth 15 years ago. the other part is there is a genuine generosity of spirit which goes back to the early

days because what technology is called open source or whatever it is is no different than peer review in academia or publishi publishing, just idea sharing or teaming up on your homework. >> overflow fo of the sort of yr an idiot things come its people solving other people's problems all day long for free. solving the coding problems of their rivals. it really is weird how giving it a lot of developers are. i don' don't do many other indus that do this. i don't think the people at boeing are like airbus, check out what we did and vice versa or chevy is like just some patented stuff would send over to peopl people of the rival car companies. >> there are entire areas where it's unique to the culture like security. on your phone if you've got an iphone you have the web browser and google has a chrome browser

on your desktop or whatever and they talk to each other about like we've got to make this work so that we can check or credit card numbers and on the web and that is just matter-of-fact. i'm curious though if you see through the lines about why there's that inclination because i think it is contradicted to the narrative that we here. >> and it's something that could be catalyzed and his wrist in a better way. why they like that i think some of it is because there is a very old sense going back to the early days that the code in some respects isn't really yours. yours. you've written these instructions, but it's something you would want to show other people so they can see how you did it so you can learn from

them and learn from other people. in the early days of coding there were not any courses. there were not any programs. they didn't start making computer science programs until the late 60s and even into the second, people were just -- the way you learn this by finding out what other people are doing, apprenticeships, books, going to someone if it is a 1980 generation going to someone's house and seeing how their codes were. so i think it reminds the almost like maybe a gilded thing you would have seen him unlike seamstresses or people working with leather in the 17th century like that's how you learn from you learn from the other people. so that's part of it. the other part is that there is a strong but nobody has a clue what they do all day long like in a disgruntled way the marketing people have no clue what we do like poor us and so he only other people that

understand of them are the coders regardless of where they were. >> you describe it as a tribe and there's an interesting thing because there are positive aspects about this and then there's arguing the tribe, and i think both of these are directing the entire technology industry's going through. what would you center on that idea quite >> some of that is because again, having spent decades i could definitely see and they would tell me, the developers i talk to that they had this kind of sense of we are a weird group of people for good and for ill. there's a wonderful story that i found in like a 1984 computerworld magazine where some guy did a survey of like a thousand coders and said they appear to be more devoted to their crap than their employers. i sort of knew what was there and so i was and asked if i wanted to figure out and explain

to the non- coding audience what's going on in the head of these people so that it was a little easier to understand why they are tackling the problems they are tackling and buildings that they are building and what their motivations are, and also to try to get a grip on some of the demographic stuff like by have this culture fit culture ia walk and talk like become so rigid and it turned into this kind of sort of a shoe gazing archetype young male nerd which has implications. these are literally cultural points that sit in the minds of the people doing the hiring. so i wanted to know why that had calcified into that. >> in a few minutes we will start questions as to think so t what you want to ask. here's an interesting thing where among the coders who taught to you found different

experiences and backgrounds and identities on things. if you can find them how come the big tech companies couldn't? [laughter] >> that's a good question. i guess it's for the same reason like journalists kept finding crazy conspiracy theories and neo-nazis on twitter. it's not that hard. it's what you are looking for. they too frequently think that talent is going to walk and talk like them because a few generations of being like that, but the truth is it really isn't that hard. we are both friends with the owner of a conference specifically for people with two years or less experience in software so they actively try to

get new folks again and i went o the first 12 years ago and it was wild because i walked into a conference in new york and it was probably i'm pulling these stats out of my butt because it is just be looking at the room but it's like 40% african-american, well over 50% women. demographics he would never see at a conference anywhere else. so, yes they exist and they are not hard to find, they are out there looking for work. the reason they are not finding them is they are not looking at them. >> it's interesting because there is also a narrative and culture in particular is the engine of social mobility. i've been to these events and you sort of talk to people in the audience and they see it as that, overwhelmingly women and women of color and of saying i think this will open doors for me and i'm curious like do you think that can become true and

the other thing i should point out is the vast majority are not silicon valley either. >> i could see 8% of programmers in north america working in silicon valley and the rest are in this room attending the javascript for the local bank. so is it something that could actually open up doors for folks that have traditionally sealed the commander of economic opportunities? i would say like 70% yes and 30% no. the 70% there is just a massive gap between the amount of people that companies need in all these theoretical places like medical services companies here in new york frankly bang i always tell young people you want to be employed for life and work like

ten hours a week, learn cobalt which is a crazy ol old languagn the 60s and everyone who knows it is dying or dead so all these banks are like desperate. you could work ten hours a week and then just hang out. [laughter] some of those stores i've seen them over and indexin both in ik for 30% certainly in some of the more leading precincts of technology, there's still a lot of internalized biases and her grasp and sometimes even and until you change that, you have to change education in how people get into that and how the company is prepared. >> that's one of these questions they want to get to if less than 10% of the coders in america are in silicon valley and less than

1% in the world are in silicon valley, but everybody's impression is mark zuckerburg. it's new york city. >> how do you change that? >> i told them all to buy and read my book. i definitely wanted to include some of those bold faced names like facebook and instagram i wanted to illustrate how weirdly diverse this group of people really are. some of it is cultural. frankly it would be nice if we got better cultural representations on the big screen because that is where we will learn this stuff.

one of the serious problem of eve uses this weird science revenge of the nerds movies. it was the beginning of like that is what a nerd walks and talks like. we might be getting slightly better at stuff. like my wife emily introduced me to the show russian doll and when you see her on screen i might she's actually behaving like what a real programmer walks and talks like. she has that weirdly analytical efficiency optimizers mind, but visually she doesn't necessarily present. i would like to see a lot more cultural representation of developers that are more realistic. >> often media is the answer. >> they are going to start with questions. >> we will get a microphone for you.

is this on? okay. i'm really interested obviously i just got your book today. are you all right with that but i haven't read it yet? [laughter] >> just making sure. i'm interested by the psychology of coders and when you said the thing about the collaborative nature of coders and sharing ideas and then you said the thing about the car people and plain people come online mind immediately went to elon musk and it did because i know for whatever his faults and he's been much more open about sharing his ideas. and i was thinking to myself does this portend like a new kind of coders perhaps because i mean obviously there is a lot of that in what he does, and does that bode well for the future? >> frankly would it be nice if not ethic of openness were

spread out more in the marketplace? absolutely. i will say that i've been consistently impressed with companies like google which would have every reason to just hide what they are doing, but they have a recently good track record of taking some core innovations they've done in open sourcing them so anyone can use it. like they took some key work they've done on machine learning at ai and created this flow is a package anyone can work with that now these tiny little companies i talked to can create really, really amazing visual recognition for their robots and whatnot because they got this stuff for free and that is part of the ethic that use the leaking out. i would like for them continually to do more about what i particularly like is for them to be more open about their data. all the data they have and to be a little more transparent about that.

i like their coding but i would like them to be better at letting us know. >> it's an interesting dichotomy around what open source is because we talked about the flow of the most advanced machine learning and i see kids on junior high almost everyday building music acts that will learn from how you play notes to them to mimic back to you and tickets are 13-years-old and doing it and it's mind blowing and great but there's part of the incentive they are getting more and more data to learn fr from. and then that sort of reckoning is open source sharing knowledge, yes that is if they shift to place you can get the sp six >> it's also a business model. it's turned into something that can be a business model for sure. >> if you have an android phone, leaders the software on there that speak to

>> for sure. i also haven't read the book. >> a blanket of forgiveness for everyone. [laughter] >> tomorrow though. >> the question i have is about the responsibility the coders that you encounter you know, how do they feel about the ultimate end to their product and thinking like google. what were some of the issues, did any issues come up? >> it goes throughout the book these large civic and cultural and economic issues there's one chaptethere is onechapter that y focused on the civic impact of

social media so what are the responses? the truth is a lot of the big wigs don't really want to talk about it because they are in the middle of it right now been dragged in front of congress. i talked to a lot of people that were one rung below them that were involved in the early engineering of some of these big products like twitter and facebook and instagram. among them, there's definitely quite evident chagrin and some alarm. to give you an example, there is the story of the life button so the life button originally came about in facebook as a thing to create positivity. it was leah pearlman and justin rosenstein and a few other developers that have this idea like facebook back before the likes of him if he wanted to say

something was good, you had to write a comment. but you basically understood a lot of people are too busy and they are not going to write that comment so they wanted to in their own words unlock positivity by a button that would be very simple. it was originally going to be called because some button -- awesome but in. so they create this thing and sure enough it does exactly what they say it is going to do. suddenly people like this is great. there's a nice feeling coming in. over the next year or two they began to notice these weird problematic side effects. one of them is they created a new quantification, there is a new number to stare at and it's a big number like how many people liked your post. they understood it would be nice to get the approval but failed to predict people would become obsessed with pushing it over and over to see if the number got higher and would get weirded out if it didn't go up for other

peoples were bigger and they would change their behavior to get more likes like maybe i can do something more outrageous or whatnot so eventually after a couple of years o, the major designers were like this is an absolute crap show that we unleashed on the world. >> you give a kid a gold star and a club he has two stars and you can sort of figured this out at five it seems like it would be easy to figure out after he went to stanford. >> one of the early engineer software for told me the phrase was naïve as f. when talking about the early design of some of these things. so yes, some of the people are very concerned about it and a lot of them are willing to say that don't work for the companies anymore, but it's also worth noting the people of software blind for lottop-of-thf reasons they are into deep

there've been walkouts at places like google and handing $90 million to a dude they fired for sexual harassment as a golden parachute. literally they had thousands of people walk out for that so i got kind of interesting and potentially heartening that the moral and ethical responses were coming not from people at the top of people at the bottom. >> this has sort of been a galvanizing moment in the industry the last two years. there's this interesting moment even i think a year before the walkout you had a never again pledge. for the history, ib ibm and the partiein the40s have sold mainfo the nazis, which they did not

use for -- be used for nefarious purposes as you would expect, they are nazis. answer the burning thianswer ple people said we are not going to participate in creating technologies that enable a religious registry here in the u.s.. and this was the first time there have been a movement across all of the sort of major tech companies and sort of classic programmer fashion they made a document to edit and get out the collaborations. they did it that way but it was hundreds of names and eventually thousands of names and it was apple and google and microsoft and that was extraordinary because we had never seen a basic level of fluency in labor organizing so to that point, their loyalty was to coding, not

their employer. and then i think it is no coincidence et months later you have as many as 20,000 people walk out. it was enormous. >> and that to me indicates that was probably the most significant political surprise there were these political offenses but that's happening with a company with that much power especially in the current state of the labor movement. it's fascinating that wasn't just coders but also technical staffing designers. it really is something that the large companies are vulnerable to because this is an industry that sort of loudly tout their talent based, we hired the best that what happens if the people you claim are the best are immobile and willing to leave.

so that is interesting. this is the one group of people in the companies one of the people at google, a protester said to me if you are going to protest google are you going to do, stop using the search engine or gmail? they don't care there's another 7 billion people that might be using their products. but as he said, if i'm an employee i have a lot more sway. the only leverage is their employees, their talent because that is their expense and the scarcest resource. >> there's only two other leverage points into that as the stock market and governments. it's hard to mobilize to do anything about it or they are unwilling to. or highly lobbied by the large tech companies in the stock market won't say anything.

it's really interesting because if you talk about that, that sort of gets into the products. gmail is a good exampl example u are like i don't support google but you have an e-mail, they still have your e-mails. >> so there isn't -- the only way to sort of impact come absolutely. >> if they don't feel bad about working for us then we get people to leave. >> that's great. >> i don't know if that scales with the entire industry. the closest thing might be this. he wrote an essay that he was looking -- this was in the 20th

century where they just loved solving these problems about the way the atom works in the molecular world and they would have a convention and share all of their stuff and get excited about it and then that led to the atom bomb. they had a massive moral reckoning of what it meant their ability to solve the problems could have this catastrophic human consequence and so as they argued looking at the paper and he studied physics which is how he got to be aware of this, they went through a couple decades of moral reckoning to the point where she was at a campus in the 80s arguing about divestment. they were trying to divest investments from south africa and the students leading the charge were trying to get faculties to sign on and none of the faculties that accept from

the physics department and that was a pattern he founded a bunch of universities. they had as a discipline have to reckon with the idea that they had agency and what he said was our field hasn't had that moment. so, the question is for a really big change is there a moment they would recognize and he was saying i don't know whether some of this stuff might be an inkling of that. i don't think it's big enough. there needs to be something bigger but of course you don't want a different version of a nuclear bomb. his implication is like that has to happen. any other questions?

>> but i want to hear, i've read a lot of your posts. it's dictated by the product and they care about the metrics and so like if you feel like your company isn't going and you are seeing this year after year what do you do about it? >> exactly. as somebody that runs a tech company, i'm going to let you take that one. >> [inaudible] >> that is another good

question. you said you were a junior coder but if you are complicit in something that you don't feel is morally justified, i think this is an extraordinary thing i grew up in a union household and learning about how fundamentals in the labor markets work and on the other side of the ceo of a tech company try to sort of square the south and one of the key things i learned is we are at a unique moment in history where programmers today are among the most empowered that have ever existed and the particular instance is also programmer job sites in the world is a good idea for salaries and benefits. the second is an amateurish in if i say i want to hire somebody

to work in a coffee shop i will get 100 resumes and sift through them and for many programmers it's almost the inverse they say i have a skill set 100 banks want and i'm going to start a bidding war like i'm a free agent athlete and i want to go and choose the things which is an enormous amount of power and barely being applied today to get a better laptop like i got a signing bonus and the computer science programs do not teach labor and ethics. they don't know the context of the power collectively into the wild thing they created the tools that help people organize on facebook and twitter and all these other things to organize and then it's like okay, you

build the tools and this is the rare case of how they can be used effectively. i have said this many times i think a lot of them should unionize, 100%. and people are like what side are you on? i don't think it's that complicated. so that is step number one. but short-term, the advice that you give tdoyou give to anybodyd relationship like you are young and attractive that's true there's so much power and demand and that isn't going to be true

forever. it's going to be a minimum-wage job. i think all these things fitting together as they leverage mome moment. there is a sense of seizing the power. we have seen it with google. it wasn't i'm not going to watch youtube videos anymore. >> i spoke to all sorts of people that were fairly early on in their career. this one guy had dropped out of college and bounce around and started doing car sales.

i went to a boot camp before it collapsed and spent six months got a pretty good at it and then got a job out of it. he was immediately fielding offers. he was like i guess i have options so you might want to consider that and if you leave let them know why you are leaving it cause it is an important message. >> you go to the meet ups in any

towns and they are inclusive and welcoming places. i think every town has not and here in new york we have the meet up there were eight of us around the table there's 60,000 members now. it's still a nonprofit and community run. it's still accessible and then it goes back to the homebrew computer club and the people

that built the original personal computers and software were that same ethos of show up, show us what you made. >> i would argue there's theren of professional and nonprofessional he environments. there were companies that were fantastic and doing cool work that couldn't tolerate the behavior so there's a lot of good companies around their and a pitch in the government they need the talent so badly and they have a lot of interesting problems to work on involving crazy code bases that go back.

this is a website that is how you apply for food stamps. something like 30% or 20% of the people that could apply for food stamps in california do so partly because this wretched website is like for the unresponsive pages that don't render well on small phones which is what most of the people are using and yet it is increasingly the only way to apply for food stamps, so they were looking at this and they can't go in and reengineer the whole thing. they need $10 million to do that and there are just three of them so what do they do, they created

a simple response at single static page i think maybe one little click the button that would ask for or five questions and then about your case that would cover like ed present all the questions that were going to be told and the teachers. they would be likely to hear and watch this for three minutes we are going to do this for you and low and behold they made it this easy thing and the number of applications rose and rose so they did this wonderful hack but it worked and had an amazing impact on society. they literally don't see where

they work and go to the parties now because it is kind of -- >> everybody knows because they've provided -- >> they walk around having a great time like they are solving real problems and they find i te really hard problems like that. >> we have time for a couple more. >> we will have some afterwards also. >> recovering coder here, spent a lot of years in those dark rooms and everything it reminded me of one of the things you are saying. there was a project where he could hide his dislike of peop people. i'm interested to know the ethics and things as well.

to retrain such a big thing and the world itself talking a little about unemployment and automation technology is heading and it's also helping. it wouldn't be the pounding nails into your forehead anymore but creating powerful pools and the things you can build now compared to the early months of coding to create something. i would be interested to hear what the future portends for retraining and the workforce. >> sure.

it's about this idea that actually i am quoting. it's about the idea of when and how people should learn to code with a four year degree. you are working in hospitality and salesales and marketing anda journalist like me di and you ln just enough of this stuff it gives an additional superpower without leaving your job you become way better at marketing and nursing and better as a journalist because you can build a weirweird little scripts and . okay i'm an author i'm staring at my amazon sales rank and refreshing if once every three minutes.

this is sick. >> it's your job. >> i wrote a script that went straight to page and send it to me in a text message four times a day so i could forget about that. i like to think of it like cognitive behavioral therapy. that's kind of a joke. the part where the scale is useful because all these studies that showed an increasing number of jobs will reward knowing a little of this stuff and along the lines we are talking about these toolsets. i did that because i am using a library of scraping code that doesn't require me to write it from scratch. it was like putting things

together with legos and that is an interesting realm of this. >> it's like getting data from the website for your own purpose and that speaks to if you get a little bit of whimsy as a programmer or engineer if you get a little bit of fluency the whole world seems to a large degree like i could do something i could control or at least understand what is happening up there when i push the button it's happening the way that it is and it makes it easier to call out this crazy stuff they say like we can't do this. >> that's an interesting point because when i wrote the interview what i was getting to

everybody was in the trade and unionized and also a ton of the folks would come and essentially was not any experience. >> and they would get training on the job. >> but also, when you got further up, when you were the master teacher, there was an enormous victory of personal satisfaction. like this morning, we had a concrete and afternoon we had a plastic screamethe plastic scree whole house. it is incontrovertible that we need something. and then coding at its best sort of polls that feeling from you like there wasn't something and now there is. people need to feel agency control over their life especially when what is making people feel powerless as technology. saying what is disrupting my career as a truck driver or disrupting my career as a taxi

driver is technology. it seems to me it is a reckoning that we are having. we are not all going to be coders. we have to at least know enough that we can have control over our lives. >> that is a big deal. i just realized it's written 1,000 poems and if i printed that up, how thick would that be. ...

>> [laughter] matt richtel a member of o