Ep. 37 | Being Unreasonable With Jason Lengstorf  ## Metadata - Author: [[Overcommitted]] - Full Title: Ep. 37 | Being Unreasonable With Jason Lengstorf - Category: #podcasts - URL: https://share.snipd.com/episode/3330680d-f5a0-471e-b9e6-b3c85bd1cb85 ## Document Notes ## Highlights - **Ambition Is Learned, Not Innate** - Jason says surrounding yourself with ambitious people taught him nothing magical was holding others back; they just kept showing up. - That realization let him attempt big ideas without assuming they were impossible for him. Transcript: Jason Lengstorf Yeah, I think, I mean, this is, this is a really, there's a million things that go into it. So I'm going to probably gloss over a bunch of really important points, but I've, I've been very lucky in my life to be surrounded by people that are really ambitious. And part of that is, you know, when I was younger, I had some friends who were, you know, 10 years older than me that owned businesses, and they were kind of further down the path than I ever Thought I would get. And they would just kind of talk about how they did stuff because they didn't know they weren't supposed to. And I think, you know, when you get access to somebody who you might look at online and realize you'd think to yourself like, oh, I mean, they must have something special that I don't. But, you know, they're clearly playing on a different on a different playing field. And then you spend time with them and you realize this is just a person like they they're not magic. They didn't do anything that I'm not capable of doing. They just kind of kept showing up. And that, so a combination of that, of, you know, being fortunate enough to have access to a lot of educational information, you know, I've been a curious person for my whole life. So I always kind of read whatever I can get my hands on. And, you know, I think I developed a sense of like, hey, can I take this thing apart and figure out why it works? And the idea of just learning for the sake of learning has always been really big for me. So that kind of whirlwind of different things has always driven me to sort of look at what I want to do regardless of whether or not it's supposed to be possible. And so I think that my general approach to career and to life and all this stuff is, you know, I started out trying to go on the predetermined path of, you know, you graduate high school, You go to college, you get a job, you start a family, you retire, and it kind of goes on. And then I got to college and I looked and I was like, you know, this isn't one, this doesn't feel like it's going to get me where I want to go because I was looking around at the college curriculum And I was like, you know, this is a lot of the same material we covered in high school. And I don't think I went to a particularly good high school. So that's concerning. And, you know, I'm looking around at the other kids and half of them were completely checked out. And the other half were like clearly riding on their parents, you know, their parents money. And I was kind of caught in the middle of that. And I was like, this doesn't feel right. Like something about this feels right. I don't I don't know what it is, but I should be doing something else. I dropped out, joined a band and it like felt like that at the time felt like the right thing to do is, you know, if I don't try this, I'm going to regret it. And what's the worst that can happen? You know, I don't have kids. I don't have bills. I don't have any long obligations. So if I go try to be a rock star and I fail, like I lost some time, but I'm not really like doing permanent damage to my life. So let's try it. Let's see what happens. And my entire career, my entire life has sort of been a series of that. Like, OK, well, what do I stand to lose if I try this? Probably not a lot. Let's see what happens. And it just sort of led to this this continuous chain of weird stuff that if you look at any of it in isolation sounds completely unreasonable, but ultimately it's led to me. ([Time 0:01:26](https://share.snipd.com/snip/17ae2243-99bf-4f9a-ba83-8c4ae9aed581)) - **Agency Burnout Nearly Broke Him** - Jason recounts running an agency poorly, ending up $35–40k in debt and physically burned out. - He recovered by pivoting to contract work and living cheaply abroad to rebuild financially and mentally. Transcript: Jason Lengstorf Mean, I think, you know, I kind of barely survived my first foray into this because after the band, I started an agency because I realized that I'd had, basically I was running an agency With a single client that was my band. And so when the band broke up, I was like, well, what can I keep doing? So I started taking clients and I wasn't very good at the business side of things. So I didn't know how to delegate. I didn't really do a good job of pricing or managing money. So I was running on margins that were virtually non-existent. I was delegating all the parts of the business that I enjoyed and that I was good at and was instead hoarding the things that I was really bad at, like sales and admin and accounting. And so I was just like burning out super hard and I was falling further and further behind on projects. And by the time I bailed out of that agency, I think I was like 35 or $40,000 in debt. And I, you know, I was so burned out, so stressed out that I'd had patches of my beard were falling out in clumps. And, you know, I was physically kind of decomposing. So I'd say that's a, that's a time when my dream of, of sort of being this big shot agency runner, I mean, quite literally started to kill me and almost financially ruined me. And if I hadn't had another fortunate set of circumstances, which is that following that agency, I went and did two years of living out of a suitcase and in cheap countries, which allowed Me to recover from being deeply in debt. ([Time 0:05:03](https://share.snipd.com/snip/2e6e7bc8-fc33-4a7e-abf6-ab4281fc3989)) - **Commit Forever — For Now** - Give yourself permission to change course: treat commitments as "forever for now" and reserve the right to pivot. - Detach identity from projects so walking away isn't a moral failure but a strategic choice. Transcript: Jason Lengstorf When I was talking to one of those business owners that I was talking to, talking about earlier in the podcast, one of the things that I asked was like, well, how do you know this is the thing To commit to? Right? Because I had this belief that you, you had to call your shot and then that was it. You were stuck with it forever. And I remember he said this phrase to me of forever for now. And he was talking about making a call on what to do with your life. And based on where you are, the information that you have, you have to go all in on something. But you also have to reserve the right to change your mind if things go bad. And so I had not internalized that lesson. And I had I had my agency going and we were I was hitting my road bumps. You know, things were going wrong. I was getting into debt. I couldn't keep up on projects. I couldn't figure out how to delegate. And it no like that was not making me happy. I wasn't enjoying it. It's not what I wanted to do. But I believed that I had to stay in it because I believe that was the path I had set for myself. And when I gave myself permission to say, you know what, this isn't right. And it's not a failure. Like it's a failure in the sense that the business I wanted to build didn't work out. But it's not a failure like I'm a bad person and I don't deserve to be, you know, to have nice things or to enjoy myself. It's not a moral failure. It's just it was not the right business. And as soon as I was able to internalize that and set it down, it really fundamentally changed my relationship with the world because then I went and I did the next thing, which was, you Know, taking a contract and being fully remote and living on the road for a couple of years. And then I didn't like that anymore because I felt like I was too disconnected from everybody. So I took a job at IBM because I wanted to be on a team again. And I was like, I'm that's it. I'm never going to be an entrepreneur again. I'm done with entrepreneurial life. It was too stressful for me. And then after a few years of being in businesses, I was like, you know, I actually I think it's just as stressful to be in a business. So I think if I'm going to take on that stress, I want to be more responsible about it. But I'd rather be the one holding the bag at the end of the day, because at least then when it goes wrong, it's not because I couldn't convince somebody in a position of power to try it. It's because I tried it and it didn't work. And so that's a very long way of answering your question. But I think I've had a lot of scenarios that spun out of control. But when I embrace the fact that none of this is my identity or my value as a human being, it got much easier to walk away from something when it felt like it was no longer serving the purpose That I had initially set out for. ([Time 0:06:28](https://share.snipd.com/snip/529dd29c-b4c5-40f1-b278-13ed9fbf79cf)) - **De-Risk Big Career Moves** - Measure risk by mapping safety nets and testing ideas while still employed or on the side. - Replace income incrementally, build relationships, then transition once you can afford the 40-hour swap. Transcript: Jason Lengstorf Mean, some of it is is very like super pragmatic. If you have bills to pay, you know, then you have to be able to cover those bills. So if if I'm doing a thing and I don't have a backup plan, and if I stop doing the thing, I'll be broke. Like then, yeah, I got to keep doing that thing. Right. So so for me, what I what I've tried to look at is what are my safety nets? What are the what are the choices I can make to help me move toward the things that I want to do? And how do I make sure that when I make the change, it's not stepping from something that was secure and working well into something that I have no idea how to do? I would love to, for example, be on, you know, a cooking show. Right. And so I could burn my whole life down and start trying to be like a Instagram chef and see if I could build that career. And I think I could maybe figure it out. But the amount of risk in that would be so high because I don't know how to monetize it. I don't have relationships in that world. I don't know anything about what makes food content work. I only know what I consume. So I'd be operating off my instincts and basically nothing else. Tremendously risky. But when I moved into what I was doing at Code TV, I had been working in Devro. I had a lot of relationships around the engineering world. I knew people who worked at every level of companies across most of the web dev space. And I had already done a lot of collaborative stuff with those companies as part of my roles at Netlify and Gatsby and IBM. When I started making the transition, I actually started the transition a couple of years before I left my job because I was realizing, oh, well, I guess I could do a little bit of sponsored Content because I know it's good. Like it works well with the company that I'm in now. I was at Netlify, which is basically anything you can deploy on the web is a good partner for Netlify. So for them, they were happy because I was still producing stuff that promoted their product. But I could do collaborations with these companies. And I started looking at like, OK, well, how much would this cost and how much of this would replace my income? And I started realizing that I'd started to replace my income, not 100 percent, but enough that I felt strongly that if I had the 40 hours a week back that I was spending at Netlify to focus On this business, that it would very quickly replace my income. So it didn't feel like a risk, right? That didn't feel like something that I was doing without a safety net. And, you know, my wife works and she works in tech. So I knew that we'd be able to live off of her income for a while. I'm very fortunate that I've got a strong family support network. So if I really, really needed to, my parents would always let me sleep in their basement for a little while and they'd tease me relentlessly about it, but I'd be okay, right? I'm not out on the street. And so I, you know, I had that, that support system in place that allowed me to take the calculated risk. And then I think, you know, on top of that, there's, there's just these, these things that you can do to, to sort of test waters without having to go all in. And it's hard because it requires you to have side project time, which I think is, again, that's one of my privileges is that because I don't have kids and because I don't have pets or a Lot of extracurricular obligations, I can kind of start a side hustle and focus on that with a pretty significant amount of time to see if it's going to work before I make a move. And I think, you know, when I didn't have that kind of time, when I was working as an executive and it was putting me 65 hours a week, I would try to figure out how to make the thing I wanted To do part of what I was doing. Kind of see, like, can I bring a little bit of video production into my work at Netlify? And that was how I did it, was I started pushing projects that like, okay, let's do some, let's do, you know, a high production commercial. Let's see if we can build something that's, that's, you know, pushing the envelope on, on like what a live event could look like if we had a good production crew. And I was able to test those waters as well and start building those relationships so that when I did cut the ties with Netlify, again, I wasn't starting at ground zero. I was able to step into at least a few ideas. And it still took me a year and a half to get on my feet. But that that year and a half wasn't me going, OK, I said I make videos now. What is a video person do? It was like, OK, I know what I want to do. I've got some basic relationships. How do I convince somebody to partner with me on this in a way that allows me to fund it at the level that I know it needs to be funded? So it became more of like a sales challenge as opposed to a baseline skills challenge. And that all that all makes it all feel, you know, the risks feel lighter at that point. Brittany Ellich It kind of reminds ([Time 0:10:53](https://share.snipd.com/snip/119a199f-fdf9-489c-b710-bd9ef3d8af1a)) - **Shrink The Ask, Amplify The Value** - Jason learned to sell ideas by shrinking them and reframing around what people actually value. - Present a minimal box that removes burdens (support, compliance) so teams see clear upside. Transcript: Jason Lengstorf Well, and I had, so I had an experience in software directly where I was at IBM and this was in 2016, I think. And the project that I was working on was this sort of GraphQL middle tier. We had 30 something teams in the area of the company that I worked in, and they all had different microservices that all weren't communicating to each other. So everybody was maintaining these bespoke endpoints that were super hard to track. And there was just a big mess and a ton of tech debt because of it. And this thing that I had created was a way for teams to register a schema centrally. GitHub knows how this works. You have a million bespoke things that you want to do with GitHub data. So a GraphQL layer really simplifies the way that you communicate that stuff out because people can sort of construct whatever they need. So it was the same general idea. Take that to IBM. And I met a ton of resistance on it. And I remember sitting down with one of the SVPs and I was just kind of, it was a skip level. I was complaining. I was like, why is this so hard? Like this is something that when everybody who uses this has been really blown away by how much it saves them on time, everybody who's willing to give this a chance has gotten great results. So why is everybody so resistant to this? And he's like, listen, when you walk into somebody's team, they are all extremely busy. They've got a set of things that they have to get done. They are, you know, on the hook for stuff that they sometimes care about and sometimes don't. And they've got the things that make them feel valuable as developers. So when you come in and you say, here's your service, and they draw a box and here's my service and they draw a box at the same size, and what I want you to do is let me take over a lot of your stuff, They immediately go, well, that looks like a big, that looks like a big lift, it's going to ask a lot for me, and it's me giving up control over what I do day to day, and why should I trust you To manage this, because this could go poorly, and now I'm dependent on you for something that's already taking way too much of my time. And he said, so why don't you draw the box smaller? Like, think about what it is that they don't like. What is it that makes them sad? What is it that makes their life hard? And what is the thing that they value? Can you come up to them and say, here's your service? And you draw a box and you say, here's all the things about your service that are burning your time that aren't valuable, that aren't going to get you promoted. You've got security compliance, you've got maintenance, you've got all of these different rollouts, these bespoke endpoints, these 10 million teams sending you DMs on Slack, asking For specialty stuff. This is all things that that provides no valuable value to them in their business. And if you say, now look at my service, you draw a tiny little box, you draw the box as small as you can. And you say, now what I'm going to do is I'm going to automate compliance. I'm going to eliminate the support burden and I'm going to make sure that everybody always knows what the up to date schema is for your service. And all you have to do is register this schema. Suddenly they, they could understand the value in a way that, that previously it was like, I was asking them to do more work. And when I rearticulated around what they cared about and what their stress points were, then suddenly they were thinking of it as like, OK, so I can hand off this burden and it lets me Focus on the stuff that I care about. That's more reasonable. And we know we still met resistance because some people just don't want to change. But it was significantly lower resistance when we started reframing it that way. ([Time 0:16:07](https://share.snipd.com/snip/b75312c2-b3e8-44fe-9e07-786e6d2061c6)) - **Sell Outcomes, Not Tech** - When proposing technical changes, speak the language of stakeholders and tie work to measurable business outcomes. - Don't push technology because it's fun; show how it improves metrics like velocity or customer value. Transcript: Jason Lengstorf And I think this is true too, when you're going to ask for time to like work on technical debt, or if you're trying to take a big swing at this really ambitious, weird project, I don't want To talk about it from like, okay, as an engineer, I get really sad when I have to work on legacy code because it's really hard and I don't like it. Instead, you go to the PM or the sales team and you say, okay, we want to deliver features much faster. We want our customers to get things at a much higher rate. If you're willing to let me build in three days per sprint to clean up these messes, we will be able to increase velocity by 15% over the next quarter. And suddenly sales is going like, okay, but you're still going to get features out. Yeah, I'm still going to get features out, but I'll be able to get them a lot faster. If you give me, you know, 10% of bandwidth or 20% of bandwidth to go after these features, it's really difficult to sell somebody on an abstract thing like technical debt, but it's really Easy to sell somebody on a metric like velocity. And but if you if you're willing to speak the language of the people who are doing the thing, it gets so much easier. I'm not 100 percent sure how I got on this tangent. Brittany Ellich Kind of making unreasonable propositions reasonable where like you're yeah like on the on the surface of it like you know maybe this idea that's like coming out of left field like doesn't Seem like the initial solution like it might not be the simplest path forward but like is it gonna get us where we need to go like if so yeah like maybe it's a shortcut. Maybe it's a bit of a winding road, but like maybe it gets us to a better a better place. Yeah. Jason Lengstorf Yeah. Yeah. And like anytime you're trying to sell anything, you know, the the you're already sold on it. So selling it in terms that you value doesn't benefit anybody because you you already understand the idea and why you think it's good. So it's more about understanding why somebody else would value it. And that I think really, it also helps you as the idea haver, make sure that your idea is good and not just fun. I think one of my big complaints about software engineering in general is that many of us are in software because we like working on code. And that means that in a lot of cases, instead of proposing a thing that would benefit the product, we're proposing something that would be fun to work on. And so when somebody says like, hey, what if we refactored the whole thing in Rust? It's like, but why? Right. And a lot of times if you dig down, the answer is because I really want to learn Rust. It sounds fun. It's like, OK, but that doesn't actually benefit us. Right. So as the idea have or me taking the time to think about like, is this actually going to help anybody? Like what is this going to do for the marketing team? What is this going to do for the sales team? What does it do for the customer? What does it do for product? If I can articulate those things in a way that doesn't feel like I'm just lying to get my way, then I know I have a good idea. ([Time 0:19:32](https://share.snipd.com/snip/0513ac24-7a3a-4947-89d4-af554387b830)) - **Network Outweighs Classroom** - College's main advantage is network access, not exclusive technical skills. - Curiosity and drive matter far more than pedigree for long-term success in tech. Transcript: Jason Lengstorf But I think that the value of college is the network, not the skill set. Because like if you go to MIT, you don't really learn anything that you can't learn for free on the internet. But what you get is access to a whole bunch of MIT alumni. And so it's much easier to get a foot in the door to get an interview to, you know, because people want to work with people that are like them. And so if they're an MIT grad, they want to work with an MIT grad. But I don't necessarily think that skill set wise, it had any positive. I mean, I've worked with people who went on traditional paths who were absolutely brilliant. And I've worked with people on traditional paths who literally can't accomplish any basic task. Like they're just full of academic, useless knowledge. And they want to argue minutiae that has no impact on the product. And I've worked with people from non-traditional backgrounds who are exactly the same. Some of them are rock stars and some of them are absolutely terrible. So I think it's far less about the background and far more about how curious the person is and how motivated they are to overcome hurdles and push through hard problems. But yeah, I don't think that... I've been very lucky in that I was able to build a network through, I largely relied on conferences and that helped me get jobs that were at places that were sort of cool. Like I worked at Gatsby and at one point in time, Gatsby was like the center of the front end universe for like this glorious three months, which was great for my network. And then that got me recruited by Sarah Drasner. And if you get a chance to work with Sarah Drasner, that's sort of like a huge power up to your career, because she knows literally everybody and is, you know, she's so well respected. So if you if you get connected to somebody like Sarah to somebody like Angie Jones to somebody, like, there's these people that that are just these centers of gravity in the community. And I've been very fortunate to be able to get connected to and mentored by many of them. And so that to me, that was my like major advantage was the people I've been able to connect to along the way. ([Time 0:23:20](https://share.snipd.com/snip/13c6ab5d-a9df-4ce0-a27c-bb0c54eaa4bf)) - **Turn Notes Into Action** - Consolidate knowledge by synthesizing and turning notes into actions, not hoarding summaries. - Use lossy longhand notes or post-meeting synthesis to capture intent and create next steps. Transcript: Jason Lengstorf That comment that comment is kind of born out of a frustration i have with uh i feel like sometimes people hoard information and don't do anything with it right and so it i will never throw Shade at people's process but i always kind of wonder when you know everybody's bringing their ai assistant to a Zoom call, like, has anybody ever actually read the notes from an AI Zoom Summary? And I think the answer is almost exclusively no. Like a vanishingly small percentage of people are really putting those notes to work. And I think the same thing is true if you read like an AI book summary or things like that. Like the ingestion of information is not learning or thinking. It's the synthesis, right? Like taking that information and doing some active work to take those thoughts, combine them with your own thoughts and experience, and then turn that into action steps or a new spin On an idea or a change to your perspective. And so you're kind of it's not amassing information. It's actually consolidating information from the the infinite points that you can get by watching every YouTube video or watching every conference talk or reading every article. And instead, it's kind of getting the information, but then doing the work to turn that information into action whether that action is I've done the research and now I'm going to do this Project or whether that action is I've done the research and now I'm going to change the way that I approach things because I learned something new and and so I'm very big on notebook I Think pen and paper is really good because it's a it's like a wasteful medium. It takes a really long time and it's you know, you're not going to write something out word for word. So you necessarily have to make information capture lossy when you are going longhand. And that requires you to think about what were they actually saying and not what did they say? So you're capturing intent. You're not capturing verbatim, just a quote, right? And so that I think just the act of listening to somebody speak and rephrasing it in your own words. I think this is why active listening and like tells you to do this is once you listen to somebody talk, say, okay, what I heard you say was, and then paraphrase it to show that you comprehended, Not just that you heard it, right? I think longhand notes are another way to do that, but you can do it a million ways. I know people do it through, they'll like type notes throughout a meeting. And that's, you know, they're still synthesizing there. They'll, some people will actually take the time after a meeting to like, look through the notes or look through the transcript and turn that into a list of action steps. Everybody thinks in different ways. So I don't want to say that you got to do it a certain way. But I think the one non-optional step there is you have to actually use your brain to think about the information that was presented using whatever process you want. As long as that process isn't, I listened and clearly that's all I needed to do. ([Time 0:26:25](https://share.snipd.com/snip/6e2c9414-bd07-49ba-89d6-13a3a6ef066f)) - **Practice Slow Adoption** - Adopt new tech slowly: marinate in what the community repeats before committing. - Stay surface-aware via newsletters so you can shortlist proven tools when a project demands them. Transcript: Jason Lengstorf I've always been a big fan of slow adoption because I I made the mistake early on of trying to adopt the newest coolest thing. And of course, they you know, everything has a pretty short life cycle with with few exceptions. So if you immediately jump onto the new estate management library and then later the creator of that state management library has a new idea. So they abandon that project and start a new one. Then you're left either maintaining the old one or having to migrate again but if you wait six to 12 months it'll still be good and you'll have a better idea of whether or not it caught on And functionally there's not a huge amount of risk in almost every like little software library there's very very little risk in adopting something new so what I try to do is I try to marinate In the information without actually acting on any of it. And the thing that I've found is that through channels like social media, through newsletters that kind of keep up on, you know, there's like the bytes.dev newsletter, and there's A handful of others that are similar that are plugged into different pockets of the dev community. And they'll talk about things and you'll see the same names come up over and over again. And a lot of them you'll see once and you'll never hear about again because they were a really, really cool demo that didn't have as much practical application as everybody thought. And then once I'm ready to do something, like I have a new project, I've got this sort of atmospheric information that I haven't acted on. I haven't really thought about it, but I'm at least, you know, passingly aware that, okay, we've got to do this thing. I've been hearing a lot of people talk about these libraries for the last year that are related to this thing. So I have a short list now to pilot and I can build little projects that allow me to start actually synthesizing this ambient knowledge into, you know, limited experience. And that then allows me to make, you know, much better choices, but it prevents you from like not paying attention at all would put me in a position where now I'm, you know, I'm like, okay, I have to do this project and I literally don't know what's going on. So I only know the things that I used the last time I approached this, which may have been five, six, seven plus years ago. And those might not be relevant anymore, right? There's probably this industry moves fast. But because I've been sort of, you know, kind of keeping an eye on what's going on in social media, I'm at least passingly aware of options and also passingly aware of which ones have had Sustained attention so that they are actually getting adopted and being used as opposed to ones that are just very hypey and good at getting a good launch bit of attention, but not necessarily Any sustained adoption or investment. But yeah, I mean, I think it's really just a matter of figuring out where your attention should be and not closing yourself off to other information, but being willing to passively observe Information that's not relevant to you right now with with the strict goal of just being surface level aware of it until it's relevant to what you're trying to do so that you don't burn Cycles on stuff that you can't act on. ([Time 0:29:43](https://share.snipd.com/snip/92e3ee58-4319-42dc-abd0-a357a3868e1a)) - **Value Trumps Hype** - Most project success depends on delivered user value, not the latest stack. - Technology goes out of fashion, not function, so prioritize build quality and usefulness. Transcript: Jason Lengstorf I think it's I mean, it's it's hard when you watch, you know, the way people talk about this on the Internet. But vanishingly few things that we work on are super time sensitive or super sensitive to the specific technology. And most of the things that people are building with AI, the new joke is, well, okay, congratulations, you made a state machine that's non-deterministic. You could have built that whole thing with no AI. And that's very commonly true because people are trying to adopt this tech into their stacks. But that was true when everybody was rushing to adopt things like Redux or everybody was rushing to adopt Rust or everybody was rushing to adopt Kubernetes or everybody was rushing To adopt Docker. And like any of these things is like they're useful when they're useful. But if you just shoved it in because it was new and you were like, we're going to we're going to make this thing work, then a lot of people, I think, found themselves doing the equivalent Of like deploying a Next.js site for a marketing landing page. It's like, why are you shipping somebody nine megabytes of megabytes of nothing for a static image and a like sign up for my newsletter form? It just doesn't really make sense. But we get swept up into this hype of like, well, we have to use this or else. And it results in us kind of having a lot of big, heavy things to maintain because they were cool to ship, but none of it was actually useful. The people using the website honestly would have been way happier if we would have shipped something far more boring, far more stable. And like, that's not to say that any of the things I just named aren't useful, but now that it's been long enough, most of us can kind of spot, hey, this thing we're building is complicated Enough and does have enough uptime requirements that standing up Kubernetes is worth it. This other thing, though, isn't like it would be a lot of work. It would require a lot of maintenance. And ultimately, if it goes down, nobody cares because it's not a moneymaker for the business. So let's not invest the engineering resources in making that happen. So I think, yeah, I just like as much as it's kind of funny as a technologist to say, like, drag your feet as much as you can. I have found that being slow to adopt to save me a lot of heartache because very, very few things that I've built were made or broken by the tech. They've all been made or broken by the value they deliver to the person using it. And that is almost never determined by the underlying stack that's determined by the quality of the build. And you can build really, really, really good things with Fortran today. Like, should you? Probably not. But, like, it's still possible. The tech doesn't go out of style. It goes out of fashion. ([Time 0:33:14](https://share.snipd.com/snip/d78029e0-5fb0-4066-9902-947952f0231e)) - **Unreasonableness As Regret Insurance** - Jason follows "sunny nihilism": he pursues interesting projects to avoid future regret even if they might fail. - That mindset lets him treat experiments as lessons rather than identity-threatening failures. Transcript: Jason Lengstorf I think, I mean, the idea of being unreasonable is, I guess the thesis of it is like everything that I've ever imagined has been something that, you know, very reasonable people around Me will say, well, couldn't you do the same thing with like X, Y, and Z existing solutions? And it would be a lot less difficult and it's kind of already established. And I just, and like, yes, I could have, but I didn't want to. Like I wanted to explore and see if I could push the boundaries and figure out how to do this thing that I could imagine in my head, but that didn't exist yet. So the idea of being unreasonable is just sort of, you know, if you've got this hunch and you feel like something's going to work, if you can manage the risk away, then there's not really A downside to trying it other than the time. And my philosophy has ultimately become this form of, I've heard it called sunny nihilism, where I believe that the only true meaning in life is internally assigned. And so for me, time spent on a thing that is interesting and challenging is not wasted time, even if it doesn't work. So my, my value of like what an unreasonable thing does is pursuing that allows me to eliminate a regret. So I'm not like on my deathbed looking back going, you know, I wish I would have taken a swing at this TV for devs thing. Like, I feel like it could have worked. And then I chickened out and I took this other job. Instead, I'm going to look back and I'm going to say, no, I did that thing. And maybe I'll look back on it and go, boy, that was a, that was a long, hard road to nothing. And I'm so glad that I stopped doing that and did whatever comes after this. Or maybe it's not, but either way, it's not going to be a regret, right? It'll just be a lesson that I learned. ([Time 0:36:10](https://share.snipd.com/snip/0bedd16e-b713-4500-92ab-06c32682a673)) - **Big Bets For Code TV's Next Phase** - Jason describes ambitions for Code TV: serialized seasons, high budgets, and interactive hardware-software experiences at events. - He imagines human-powered contraptions and escape-room style interactive installations tied to sponsor content. Transcript: Jason Lengstorf I'm looking at right now, everything that we do is what's called a standalone episode. They're self-contained. You've got a different cast every time, a different challenge every time. There's no continuity. I really want to get to art seasons where we have a story that carries through the entire season. Budgets are much higher for that sort of thing. I'm also looking at getting into interactive software, hardware, humanity combined experiences. Early prototypes with some companies for can we build a giant like contraption at events that's that's powered by software powered by different hardware bits you know can we use pressure Plates can we use rfid can we use actual physical cranks and knobs and levers so that we can build these fun experiences that are you know powered by humans that that give people who who Participate in the events something memorable right and then we of course make a bunch of content about how we made it about the people who were there who participated in it you know we We can do a bunch of shows on like how we use this this particular company's technology to build this thing which is the value for the company and so that's that's like the next big swing I'm taking is, can we like effectively, could I build something that is a hardware and software connected escape room that we could install at events and make that a game that anybody Who wants to can play? Like that's kind of what I'm imagining. Bethany Janos That's amazing. I will be first in line for whenever that comes out. So please keep us updated. That would be amazing. ([Time 0:37:54](https://share.snipd.com/snip/0161a23f-9597-46d0-908c-09028d56eca4))