Remaining Authentic in Retirement With Kelsey Hightower  ## Metadata - Author: [[Fork Around And Find Out]] - Full Title: Remaining Authentic in Retirement With Kelsey Hightower - Category: #podcasts - URL: https://share.snipd.com/episode/46da8a42-7dcb-4c62-9d43-6a036a6c55ca ## Document Notes ## Highlights - **Kelsey's Career Journey** - Kelsey Hightower reflects on his 25-year tech journey, from IT certifications to distinguished engineer. - He emphasizes the importance of lifelong learning and building relationships, citing his long-term connection with Justin. Transcript: Justin Episode, episode one. And so today on the show, I am so happy that Kelsey Hightower is here with us. Kelsey, thank you for coming on the show. Yo, happy to be here. And for anyone that doesn't know you, which would be weird in the podcast worlds, but especially with our audience that we're trying to reach, you were distinguished engineers when You retired at Google, longtime contributor to Kubernetes, CoreOS, and Puppet before that. You've been around for a little while. Kelsey Hightower I've been around. I had almost a 25-year career. I retired last year, but it doesn't feel like retirement because I'm still at some of the same places I was at when I was working. But I get to do it on my terms now, so that feels good. That's baller. Autumn Also, Kelsey Hightower is a man that made Twitter leave, like, tech Twitter leave Twitter and follow him like the exodus to like blue sky like be so much more than just the code that he Kelsey Hightower Wrote and a storyteller and amazing speaker and all the things oh thanks for all the kind words i gotta i gotta let y'all update my wikipedia like this sounds this sounds so much better Autumn I'm trying not to like lap my body like my soul leave my body right now. Like, I'm just like, don't just hold it in. Justin I'm just excited you came on. And for this episode, we can talk about the boring infrastructure stuff and the code you've written. But like Autumn was saying, that's not like the legacy you're leaving. And in many regards, I love your retirement. How do you phrase it? You're buying your time back, right? Like at that point, you're paying yourself for whatever it is you want to do. And it's been fun just following along with the last couple of years of what you've decided to do, because there's been some of this tech investing and there's been some, instead of building The future, you're kind of investing in the future and helping people guide to the future. But there's also been a lot of other projects, which has been fun just following along in on Blue Sky and places, seeing you rewire parts of your house and kind of dive into different things Like you're diving into some sea and some sequel light and some other things so what's been interesting the last six months for you when you're starting out there's so much content for Kelsey Hightower Beginners how to get started with linux how to get started in tech should you get an it certification or should you go to college there isn't a lot of content for what do you do towards the End of your career. And looking back, I think a lot of decisions I made in the early parts of my career, mid parts of my career, the relationships I built contributed a lot to what I'm doing now towards the End of my career. And someone really said something really dope to me. He was like, hey, if you get good at something long enough, you will eventually become a philosopher. It's one thing to master a particular technology, but it's another to have an opinion about something. But to have a philosophy about something requires time and learning from people and then sharing that stuff over the years. And that's where I've arrived. So look, I started my career like a lot of people listening to this, IT certifications. Nothing is wrong with college. I just didn't go. So I can't tell you about college. My daughter's in college now, and I think it's the best thing ever, the things she's being exposed to, the structure, all the things. But one thing that I learned is no matter what path you chose, you're going to be learning for the rest of your life. I often meet people and say, I didn't learn Kubernetes until I was 32, because that's when it came out. You don't pick when it's time to learn. You just got to be willing to do it when the time comes. And I had a bunch of the jobs that people listening to this, I managed storage, backups, Tivoli, VMware, OpenStack. And then I helped build some of the tools that we're using today, like things like Puppet and Open Source. Towards the end of my career, I built a bunch of relationships along the way. All those people you work with, all those people you manage, all those problems you solve together, every job interview, every conference talk, every meetup. Each of those kind of contributed to like the people around me today. I have friends that I've known for 20 years. And you get that by paying attention to those relationships. And I meet a lot of people out here that put more effort into building good relationships with infrastructure and machines and less emphasis on actual people, right? The people you're going to call on later in your career to give you opportunities. Justin reaching out now and saying, Hey Kelsey, you want to be on the podcast? And I met Justin when I almost went eight years ago. Justin It was the first HashiConf. Yeah. I was thinking about it was Portland 2014. Kelsey Hightower That was, uh, I think it was 2015. So nine years. And that relationship has paid in dividends over the years during your time at Disney, the things I learned from you when you were at Amazon, hell, just even being on this podcast. So for me, that's the combination. Again, everything you're going to hear today occurs over 25 years. Do not think that this is something you should just start doing tomorrow or you're behind in some way. Everybody's on their own timeline. I just want to give that context before we dive into it, because when people say, what are you doing now? It's built off of that previous quarter century. ([Time 0:01:57](https://share.snipd.com/snip/8664a894-94b7-4310-ba46-100deec5dc4d)) - **Google's Deprecation Philosophy** - Google's project deprecations reflect a pragmatic business approach, prioritizing profitable ventures. - Kelsey advises businesses to anticipate and plan for potential service disruptions, emphasizing nothing lasts forever. Transcript: Justin Question about your time at Google, which maybe you can't answer this question, but I've actually wanted to ask you this for a long time. Google has a reputation for killing off projects that people love. The Killed by Google website exists with more dead projects than Amazon has alive projects, which is a lot. How did that wear on you as an engineer trying to inspire people and build something at a place that you had no control over what was going to be deprecated or going to be turned down. And people are going to say, we don't trust Google anymore because they've already turned off all the stuff that I loved. Google Reader still lives for a lot of people as like the thing they all loved. But how did that affect you as someone that's internally powerless about what you could do about that, but still on the outside have to say, trust us, we're going to build something cool For you. Kelsey Hightower I hold no Google stock. I don't want no one thinking that I'm biased. I made all of my money and I'm out of there. I'm graduated. If you've ever built anything, I remember building an open source project called ConfD. I maintained that thing for three or four years. I watched people give talks on it. It inspired HashiCorp to do console template. And I got to a point where I was done with it. I'm done. If you don't want to trust Kelsey anymore for the rest of your life, that's your problem. I am not signing up for a lifetime commitment because I gave you something that I am now done with. And I think there's this illusion in tech that, and surprisingly, even stuff that's free. We've gotten accustomed to that it should be free forever and you better maintain it forever. And the day you stop is the day I'm mad at you because you've taken away a thing that you gave me for free. And I think in many ways, we kind of lost a pot on the consumer side. If you're not paying for something, like, so let's say you're an engineer. Let's talk about the powerless point. You're an engineer at Google. You do have a lot of power. You have the power to make a product viable. Giving away software, like for example, Google Translate, and that thing starts making bad translations, you can destroy the reputation of your employer because you wanted to give Away a translation service for free and support every language under the sun. So at some point you got to say, is this really scalable? Is not. Or there are situations where there's four people working on something, literally four, 200,000 people company, four people working on a thing. Those four people on year six want to do something different. And no one in the whole company wants to work on the thing that they're leaving behind. Why does someone not want to work on it? Because you ain't getting no promotion making Google Reader better or maintaining bugs. You're just not. A lot of people have chosen, and I don't know that predates my time at Google Reader going away, but this idea that things have to be around forever, I'm going to be honest with y'all, Google Don't owe you that, but plan accordingly. If you use any of these services like Gmail, I will not be surprised one day if Gmail went away. I used it for free for like a decade. I am not going to go on Blue Sky and complain that the thing I got for free for a decade is now being deprecated. Thank you, Google, for all the fish. You know what I do instead? I actually pay my little $12 a month for the pay for version of G Suite so I can contribute to the thing that I want to exist. So when I think about the deprecation thing, I think all businesses that are relying on these SaaS or hosted managed products, if on your game plan, you don't have some contingency for Going away, you're lying to yourself. There are many reasons why things could go away. Regulation, right? In the news right now, they're talking about TikTok has to leave the United States, not because they want to go. It's because the government is telling them they may have to go. Did you think TikTok was going to be around forever? A lot of people did. They never thought TikTok would ever be risk of not being usable by them. So I think honestly, we got to just remind ourselves that nothing is forever. And so me as engineer at Google, thinking about the whole complex and the whole business around it, it never shocked me when things that don't make money go away. Like if you went to your job tomorrow and you just stop doing anything, they will make you go away because it doesn't make sense. So as you know, this is why I'm a big proponent of open source. So contrast that with Kubernetes. If Google gave up on Kubernetes, it doesn't mean the rest of the industry will. And so that was kind of the sweet spot for me at Google, being involved in things that were backed by open source, backed by industry standards. I kind of felt that the proper hedge was, if Google walked away, does this thing still exist? And so I would just balance things out and every project at Google that way. I think they're trying to get better. And to be fair, I remember when one of the big selling points of Amazon was they never deprecate anything. And I remember like this year, they're starting to deprecate stuff. Autumn Dude, not just this year. The last six months has been wild. Kelsey Hightower So there you go, because that's reality. Some stuff needs to be deprecated. It's past its shelf life. But I do think, to your point probably, is they could have done a better job of setting that expectation. Nothing is forever. And here's the plan around that. Like when they got rid of Google domains and sold it to Squarespace, I felt that one a little bit. I paid for that one. I paid for that one, but I wasn't surprised. Because I started thinking through the liabilities of managing domains. A.io domain is not as easy as people think. That particular government has a lot of restrictions on what you can do with an.io domain. So imagine you being a small team at Google, managing Google domains, dealing with almost the same complexity as probably the cloud team is doing. So it just makes sense, but I'm more of a pragmatist on this stuff. Sure. ([Time 0:09:15](https://share.snipd.com/snip/fa7e1b7f-d00e-49e5-931c-6563cc583a42)) - **Building Trust and a Lasting Legacy** - Build trust by aligning actions with beliefs, focusing on principles and fundamentals over fleeting trends. - Invest in open-source work to create a lasting legacy beyond any single employer's lifespan. Transcript: Justin How did that affect your trust within the community of you're looking at the open source stuff that will last longer than any one company's interest in it. But I know at some point you were the person that a lot of people pointed to and said, Kelsey's at Google, right? Like Kelsey's the Google representative in a lot of ways. And they put all that weight on you. Yeah. Kelsey talked about things that Kelsey believed in. Did y'all hear Kelsey talking about crypto when it was at Google? Kelsey Hightower No. So my thing was, if I wouldn't use it, I tried not to talk about it. If I didn't believe in it, I'd try not to talk about it. So what'd you see me associated with? Istio, Kubernetes, even Cloud Run was backed by Knative. And so I tried to leave with like the principles and fundamentals, things that I knew would last beyond. And also look, if you have a job, I learned probably 12 years ago that there are parts you take with you. And that's really when I started to double down on open source. I don't want to leave a job and my entire resume is all I have to show for it. I want to be able to take my relationships. I want to be able to take my work. This is why I love GitHub so much. You can put your work on there. And the network lives beyond the current employer you're at. And so at Google, man, so much of my work still lives on that I have access to because I chose to do it. Not everyone's going to have that as an output, but I was very curious about, like, for example, I would never talk about Spanner until they added the Postgres interface. It felt like if I was going to tell you to use this fancy database in the cloud with a proprietary protocol, would I even do that? Probably not. And so that's the way I did the balance. But look, I knew I was working for a business. It wasn't my own company. And so I had to understand to balance those two things well. ([Time 0:14:47](https://share.snipd.com/snip/e4de9f0a-1d95-481c-8e62-cd0ec1d50361)) - **The Cost of Honesty** - Honesty in tech has a price, often requiring financial stability to afford potential backlash. - "Love you money" empowers individuals to prioritize values over immediate financial gains, facilitating courageous decisions. Transcript: Autumn Like how would you navigate that? Because it does take a special level of privilege to be like, you know, I'm out or to say, I don't want to work for this company. But right now, like people that could say that two years ago can't even say that, you know, people with amazing 20 year careers. Kelsey Hightower I don't think people and their leadership think every day about the psyche of the average person. You have to be able to afford to be honest. Being honest is expensive. People will pay you a lot of money to lie. People will pay you a lot of money to be what they want you to be. In many ways, there's an expectation. No, I'm paying you. You're going to do what I'm telling you to do. I don't really care about your morals. I'm not paying for that. I'm not paying for your ethics. I'm literally paying you to be at my disposal, right? If you get burnt out, then we'll hire the next person. There's a little bit too much of that in general, not just tech, but in general. And so for me, when I got to Google, I could afford to be honest, meaning I could quit and be fine. I could not get a promotion and be fine. When I say fine, not just mentally, but financially. My family was going to be fine. And so that gives you a bit of courage to say, no, I don't believe in that. I don't want to be involved in that. Oh, that sounds like a great opportunity, but I'll pass. I want to stay in my lane based on my current set of beliefs. And I always did that respectively. Like everyone talks about F you money. I kind of approach it more like love you money. I love myself and I can afford to. So that means if I told you, I don't want to be involved in the thing. Like even when I was at Google, there was a situation where there was like a big keynote, the big cloud next keynote. It's kind of like Amazon's re-invent. And we're doing rehearsals, right? I got my keynote slot. And if anyone's ever worked at a large tech company, this stuff sucks up like two or three months leading up of all of your time is getting ready for this kind of thing. And I remember going to one of the rehearsals and I didn't like the format at all. It was a little too comical. There was stuff that just didn't match my personality or anything I wanted to be associated with. So during the table read, I said, hey, I don't want to be involved in this. I'd be like, oh, what's wrong? This is fun. It's going to be cool. It's going to be great. I was like, hey, I'm not here to judge. Y'all might actually be right. I don't even want to get into an argument about what y'all should change. This project belongs to the team. I just personally will not like to be involved. Do you know what that does? Imagine what people say when you're not around. Oh, not a team player, only looking out for himself. You got them right. You better be the first person to look out for yourself. But you also kind of give the team feedback. But the thing is, I'm not always trying to change everybody's opinion because I could just be wrong. I just didn't want to be involved in that. And that takes a lot of personal capital. That takes a lot of political capital. And you better have a capital in the bank in case someone decides that you shouldn't be at the company anymore for making a move like that. And so that's where I would say it's a little tough. ([Time 0:18:20](https://share.snipd.com/snip/2e90c5c1-4db7-49d4-879d-09bc2c3ae3bc)) - **Leading by Listening** - Effective leadership involves listening to individual needs and optimizing for their success. - Facilitate growth by understanding motivations and placing individuals in positions where they can thrive. Transcript: Kelsey Hightower I was the VP of engineering once. Maybe this is to Justin's point. You do have to take the job sometimes because that's all you have in front of you. You don't have that ability and you do what you got to do. No problem. But I was a VP of engineering once and I had two people. One worked on the Linux side of the house, writing code that ran on Linux servers. And one worked on the Windows side of the house, writing.NET for desktop apps. And both of these people did not really like the spot they were on. So I met with them individually. I said, hey, what's going on? I was like, hey, look, I love working here at this company, but I hate Linux. I was like, what would you prefer to work on instead? He's like, I just want to go back to working on.NET. I said, okay. Met with the other person. I hate Windows with all my heart. And I was like, I understand. Me too. I was like, what would you rather do instead? Linux. And they report to two different managers under two different directors. I said, oh, I have a solution. Starting tomorrow, y'all just swap. And everyone's like, y'all can just do that? Yeah, you're not getting them at 100% capacity right now with this feeling of being trapped and stuck. You might as well let them swap and get the full potential of these two individuals by just making this simple fix. They didn't ask for a raise. They didn't ask for a promotion. They just asked to be in the best situation possible. And me as a leader at the time, I'm just listening, saying, hey, let me just put you in position to succeed. And I think that's what a lot of teams, team leads, managers, and directors could do. Just listen a little bit and just see what you can do to put people in a better situation, even if they're uncomfortable asking for themselves. I ([Time 0:21:18](https://share.snipd.com/snip/6efd380f-33ef-4176-a988-e6f60df1f994)) - **Sustainable Maintainerships** - Treat maintainership like a relay race, passing the baton to ensure project sustainability. - Recognize that continuous involvement isn't mandatory; step back when appropriate and allow others to contribute. Transcript: Justin 100%. How do we make it all more maintainable? Being in it for 20 years or so, 25, like you just see it happen over and over again and it just kind of fizzles out. And then until the next thing comes, is that just always the cycle now? Kelsey Hightower In one regard, that's why it's sustainable. Like one thing in the U S that we have that a lot of countries don't have, we have a lot of risk takers. We have a lot of people with money that are taking risk. And that creates a situation where there seems to be this pipeline of cash to try stuff, even dumb stuff. And so that just creates this situation where there's always something to try. Now, what's not sustainable is working on a free open source project used by millions of people who all want different things. That's not sustainable for one person. It's just not. Like having a job and then working on a side project that becomes popular becomes a second job with no pay. And you tried to do your best because now your identity is tied to it. Like when you go to GitHub, it's github.com forward slash your name and the project everyone's using. So now it's literally linked to your identity. And now you're asking yourself, it's like, well, how much effort should I put in it? And given that it's you on the line, your identity on the line, you feel like you don't want to let anyone down, even when they are asking for things that you have no interest in using, and It would be crazy to implement, so you do it anyway. And then you get burnt out. And the hard part is like, man, how do you walk away from something that bears your name? So from a sustainability point, I think the best thing I ever did when Kubernetes started getting real hot, I was there in the early days, but maybe year six or seven, I was like, I'm done. But people are like, oh, no, no, it's finally blowing up. Everyone's coming. KubeCon is big. It's like, yeah, I'm done. It's time for me to move on. Let me go check out service mesh. Let me go check out serverless. Let me go check out databases. Let me go check out something different. And it's not because I think Kubernetes is a failure. I just know that there's so many more people involved in the project now that it feels like it's in good hands. It's going to go where it needs to go. But sustainability, I think, is also realizing that you ain't got to be there forever. And so we always talk about it's a marathon, not a race. No, it's a relay. You got to be willing to pass the baton. And the problem is if you think you're going to run a two trillion mile marathon, you're mistaken. I think now, I think is a healthy way to think about maintainership. Leave your mark. Make an impact. And start lining up that next person that you need to hand a baton to, like identify who that person is ahead of time. And that way you can hand it off and you get to stop. You can look at it, but nothing's stopping you from preparing yourself down the road to maybe receive the baton again, if that's where things line up. So I think that's going to be the other part of sustainability here. We got to know when to stop and pass the baton. ([Time 0:38:53](https://share.snipd.com/snip/4d54833b-65e5-4bcf-b73a-ddcdceab8ca1)) - **Kubernetes Community’s Welcoming Nature** - The welcoming nature of the Kubernetes community fostered inclusivity and encouraged wider participation. - This approach facilitated easier onboarding for contributors with diverse backgrounds, unlike other open-source projects. Transcript: Autumn I think one thing that is very starkly different about Kubernetes working in the Java space and just seeing Linux from the outside, Kubernetes has a lot of, you've been really good at Giving the baton away and bringing more younger maintainers and like contributors in and people that don't have the stereotypical background and kind of being a more like accepting Community. Like it is so much easier to get involved in Kubernetes than some of the big, longer maintained open source projects. And that's going to keep it alive. I think that in the fact that they figured out a sustainable, like funding. Justin I contribute that completely to the documentation and process that Kubernetes wrote in the beginning. Everyone that comes to me and says, how do I get to be like a senior engineer? I say, how many docs do you write? Because every company I've been at, the documentation I've written has long outlasted the code I wrote. Autumn That, but the people though, there's something special about Kubernetes. Justin Kubernetes community and people are so welcoming. ([Time 0:42:36](https://share.snipd.com/snip/a98770e6-74b8-4a2f-83f5-3c253925a42d)) - **Kubernetes' Humble Beginnings** - Kubernetes' success stems from its humble beginnings, leveraging existing tools and acknowledging their creators. - This collaborative approach fostered a culture of respect and recognition within the community. Transcript: Kelsey Hightower Autumn, you know, there's something that made me think about why is this the case? Right. I've never talked about why I think the community is the way it is. But one thing that I think plays a big role, number one, Google was not first place in cloud. There's a humbleness that comes from not being number one, striving to be number one. Second, Docker was on a tear, redefining everything. Right. Docker was like, we are the container runtime. We are setting direction for everybody. Even the cloud providers must follow. And so when Kubernetes comes out, it was competing with OpenStack. It's competing with Mesosphere. It's competing with all of these things that are kind of settled in. And so now Kubernetes has to enter the market humble. You are not number one. There is no clear reason why anyone would use this over the incumbents, but you know what you're doing. And so what do you do? You start by using things that already exist. Let's take Docker as the container runtime. Let's take XCD as the store. Let's take CNI as the networking component. And you push these things in and you're actually giving kind of clear credit to these groups because you're not burying these things. They're just right there in the documentation that these are hard dependencies. And I think there was just so much, we hope people accept this. Those first couple of years, I hope people like this. Oh man, Docker, we got to be as user-friendly as Docker. And when I remember when I got involved in the community, I remember someone on Twitter saying, we're killing Mesos. I was like, no, no, no, it ain't no killing. There's so much that we've learned from those communities that we carried over to Kubernetes. We shouldn't even try to move that way. What we should try to do is say, hey, all the ideas we've all ever had in this space are finally coming together into something we can touch. That's enough to motivate us to do what we do. And I think that carried itself over to the foundation. It carried itself over to the way they give out awards, where they chop wood and carry water. Like the things that they're recognizing, all of that to me has turned into this kind of permanence around what our community is. I ([Time 0:45:17](https://share.snipd.com/snip/39bd66c8-da27-48c6-913b-86bb77a9cd94)) - **Investing in Open Source** - Support open-source sustainability by directly funding developers or hiring them to work on projects. - Enterprise should shift from viewing open-source contributions as charity to recognizing their inherent value. Transcript: Autumn Think that's what's going to sustain it. How do you think the relationship between corporations and open source kind of goes on from here? Because it's been a wild ride the last year. But I mean, 70% of infrastructure is open source. You know, we're going to have to figure out how to do this responsibility and this relationship the right way. So like, how do you think we move on to a better future? Because I agree that open source is where I want to be. I don't know where in open source, I'll go for like the rest of my career, but open source and just the community and kind of contributing to something bigger than a company is definitely Something I feel like I need to motivate me in a career. But how do we make that sustainable? Because it does take money and it does take corporate influence at this point. Kelsey Hightower Man, the thing about open source my whole life, I'm 43 years old. And if I watch the news, I can get depressed really quickly. When I look at the way people talk to each other, sometimes I can get depressed really quickly. It kind of feels everybody's trying to do Game of Thrones and one-up each other. And then when I go into the open source community space, it just feels like utopia. I'm not saying that it's perfect. I'm saying that you found a way to get complete strangers to come together and work on something with no guarantee of financial gain. And they've been doing this for decades. And they've gotten so good at it that they're building things that are better than the things that you can actually pay money for. This is like Star Trek level wishful thinking that we actually get to touch every day. But then there's a flip side of this is when people do try to work on this full time, because a lot of people are volunteering their time on the side. And maybe that part isn't sustainable. Things that do work, I give credit to all the big companies from Netflix to Amazon to Google to even Oracle. That they do have people that are working on open source. A lot of them are doing it full time. But they're at the direction of that particular company. But the part that I think needs to be sustainable is these companies that are built on top of open source, they are literally trying to do the right thing, making the software free and Accessible, but also giving you something to pay for. And what I think we've seen for the last 15 years is people only pay for things that they have to. So if you're not having an Oracle-like licensing model, you're going to have a hard time getting money because I think a lot of big corporations who make a lot of money, by the way, look At paying for open source software as a form of charity. And that's not sustainable. So I think what we've seen as a result is a lot of companies saying, hey, you know what? No more giving the full product away. Some companies are saying now the bills are now proprietary. The software is available, but good luck making the builds. Or maybe we start doing a feature split, right? Like HockoRochDB is getting more towards, hey, open core, maybe a lot of it has to go more down the closed route and slightly different licensing model. I think at some point, enterprise is going to have to figure out that they were getting an extremely good deal here. If I was a company and they say, hey, how would you contribute back? And I'm just trying to be very hyper specific, but there's millions of other ways of doing this. If you use Postgres full time at a company and you're not paying a licensing fee or anything like that, go and hire two people from the Postgres community. Do not add them to Jira. Do not make them come to your standups. Literally let them just be tier one engineering support when the time comes. But other than that, let them focus on making Postgres a continuous sustainable project. Maybe they can work on things you care about more in order of prioritization. But I can't think of a slightly better way of giving back than putting a little bit of your budget towards keeping these things sustainable. So shout out to places like Facebook. I know they have a lot of Postgres engineers there. Shout out to people like VMware. I know they employed the guy from Redis for a number of years so that he can just focus on building Redis all those years that we all got it for free. So there are good use cases out there. And then the last one I would probably mention is Let's Encrypt. That whole project is phenomenal. So if you're listening to this, go research their funding model. Go research how they found a way to build something so critical to the entire internet. But they seem to have found a way to do it sustainably. ([Time 0:47:24](https://share.snipd.com/snip/6f4140ec-4f36-4bc5-9763-8ea916a04e77)) - **Home Improvement as Skill Development** - Kelsey's home electrical project taught him new skills and gave him a sense of accomplishment. - He advocates for learning practical life skills, broadening one's capabilities beyond technical expertise. Transcript: Justin Switching to a new, a different vein of maintenance. You were doing some maintenance on circuit breaking. So some circuitry at your house. And you had to go through a process for that, right? Like you were talking about in the States, we have, we have a lot of risk takers and doing electrical work on your own house is probably the biggest risk you can take. I mean, that's just like straight up. I used to do, I used to do construction in college. I had a summer job doing construction and they had me, we would install wells out in the boonies out in Southern California. And and I was mainly doing electrical work. And I never told them that I'm colorblind. And so I always had to have them check my work because I knew at some point, like, hey, I'm going to mess this up because I physically. Autumn He makes me make that face like once a week. Like, so like I'm just. Justin And now and like, I mean, my work was was distant from the house. It wasn't something that was like part of. It'll start a fire in your garage. It was always validated by by, you know, my, my supervisor and everything. But that was something that, and so now you're, you're doing that you're pulling wires in your house and doing some stuff. How does that, like, that's a new project. That's a new thing to learn and a new place that maybe you don't need mastery, but you do need competence. Kelsey Hightower Yeah, I mean, honestly, I've just been very respectful of the little things, like the people who maintain the sidewalks. When I look at my house, I look at life sustaining systems that are put together that sustain life for you and your family. And so when I look at tradespeople, these are people that are literally keeping the lights on for society. One of my very first jobs, I was pulling Ethernet cables through buildings so I can set up their networks. And that is a very small form of construction. And the tools that go into that, there are codes. You need permits. Sometimes you need special licenses to do this kind of work. And so very simple project. It should have been simple, but I can't let it be simple. My wife is like, hey, I want a bidet. I was like, hmm. And there's an easy route to this. You literally can just go get the ones and, you know, put it on top of what you already have. And it may not have any hot water, but you can literally just unscrew two screws, put something on top. You are done. Justin That's all she asked for. That's bolting on a sidecar to your logging system. Autumn Can we have Kelsey sound effects? Because you have your own set of sound effects and they make my entire life. You on Twitter in blue sky is great, but you in real life is fire. You have a whole set of sound effects. Y'all have been missing out. You got to get this man like record it like a lot because it's great. Kelsey Hightower So look, that's all she asked for. And I was like, I could do this. And for $200 a toilet, I would have been done. But I was like, you know what? What is the best bidet you could buy? And so then you eventually land on this place called Toto and you're like, hmm, I can't get the Toto bidet with the existing toilets. Now my house is like one year old. And I was like, I got to replace these toilets. There's no way. And I've never done that before. So now I'm buying- Is your life very stressed out during this process? Autumn Yeah. You're stressing me out a little bit. Kelsey Hightower You walk in the bathroom, you be like, where's the toilet? I said, I got to replace the toilet too. So there's a hole in the ground. Like, don't use this bathroom. Autumn Has she you to go back to work yet? No, no, no. Kelsey Hightower So here's the thing. So I go down this path, but it turns out for these bidets, you need electricity behind the toilet. And I call the electricians like, hey, these bidets use a lot of power. The first thing I try to do is like tap into like where my lights are connected, but the bidets are so powerful that they make the lights flicker when you're using it. So I'm like, this is fail mission. And it turns out if you read the instructions, you need 20 amp circuits. And so that's way more power than that I had nearby. So I was like, you know what? I'll call an electrician, get a quote. This should be easy. It's thousands of dollars to run new lines from first floor up through wall, through the attic to these two bathrooms. I was like thousands of dollars. I ain't paying that. And you just start buying tools. You're pulling permits. You're watching YouTube videos. You're reading electrical codes. And then you have a tool bag of stuff and you run the lines. And the thing is, when you're doing it yourself, you're cautious because I don't want to die. I can't have Kelsey died trying to install power lines. That's not how I wanted to go out. And so the thing about doing that work though, is I felt like, man, I learned a new set of skills that provides value. And the dope part about finishing that project, you know, a couple days ago, I got my green sticker from this inspector that showed up to make sure I did everything correct. And I remember like a couple of months ago, my mom got new floors put in in her bathroom, but they didn't bolt the toilet down correctly. And they cracked the flange that the toilet bolts down on. And I'm thinking like, oh, I can fix this. She's like, no, no, no. We're just going to call a plumber. I was like, no, I got you. And we went to Home Depot and a couple of hours I replaced the toilet and the flange because I had this new set of skills. So for me, I think Justin is like the ability to learn new skills, to manage life-sustaining systems feels like the highest order of learning for me right now. Learning how to cook, learning how to maintain your house. All of these skills are extremely valuable to me. So when I think about wealth, I don't think about just how many digits you have in your bank account. What can you actually do, right? And so that served me well in my tech career. And I just wanted to serve me well in my real life as well. So whether that's maintaining my house, but yeah, this is something I take actually super serious. I want to just show you my tool bag, but I'm not quite ready yet, but it's ridiculous. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. My toolbox over there. Yeah. I ([Time 0:51:33](https://share.snipd.com/snip/c1b87e20-caa1-4a58-a7c1-a55c9423d745)) - **Leaving Twitter for BlueSky** - Prioritize authentic interactions over platform loyalty; find communities that align with your values. - Kelsey's Twitter departure underscores the importance of prioritizing mental well-being over online engagement. Transcript: Kelsey Hightower Blue Sky. Autumn You're the migration. You should. What do you want to talk about Blue Sky? This is you. Like, I mean, we were there and nobody came because we were cool. Everybody came to be you. Justin I moved off of Blue Sky the day. I remember the day Elon walked in with his sink. I deleted all my tweets. Anything from here, I'm going to, if I'm investing here, this is a very specific reason that I'm on this thing. I did not delete my account yet. I think it's time. Autumn I kept mine so they can't take my username. Justin I think it's time I can delete it now. I don't have any interest in going back, but I tried Mastodon. I invested a bunch of time in Mastodon. I was, I had to understand it. I feel like Kelsey, in a lot of ways I was trying to embody you in some ways where I was like, what's the simplest version of Mastodon that I could build? And so I re-implemented Mastodon in static files. I'm like, could I build this with a Lambda function and an S3 bucket? And that was my goal of how do I understand the protocol at that level? And I got there mostly. I was like, oh, I can, I can read stuff out of here. I could put some JSON in a, in a bucket. And I was, I was fine for people to read the content, but I'm like, this isn't the ownership that I want. And all of these little pockets felt too disjointed for me to really understand. And then I really talked to people at like Hackaderm and other places that like, this is way too expensive. And the biggest problem is the legal responsibility of the architecture of Macedon required us to set up legal entities to protect the admins because of all of the other network, all Of the other things that just that architecture of your, you're caching information on your server. Now you are responsible. And that is a huge risk. And I was like, okay, I'm out. I'm not doing this anymore. Let's see the model blue sky. And then I just started from there. Like, okay, how would I as simply as possible, re-implement some of the stuff? And I haven't re-impleted PDS, but I've been running it and I've been understanding pieces of that. You were on blue sky for a minute and then you kind of left to back to Twitter for a little while. Autumn Before we move on, can we just talk about how the last couple of years have been so ridiculous? Like how does the onion still write like articles? Like you just said when Elon walked out with a sink, like that's the world we live in right now. How are we going to explain this in history books? Like this one time when this very orange man took over the world. Like it's wild. Kelsey Hightower It feels like this is the prequel to Iterocracy the movie. You ask yourself, how do you even get to that point? Maybe we're living this is how. Autumn And everybody's just acting like it's normal. And I'm like, do y'all see this? Kelsey Hightower Look, one thing that I do is go outside. Seriously. Like when I go outside, it reminds me that the internet over indexes on foolishness. It just over, and like when you go to a grocery store, people do normal stuff. They don't jump into your conversation. They don't tell you why you buying those apples instead of this one. Like they just kind of keep to themselves. Most people are polite. Excuse me. They'll stand out your way. That's just like been my normal outside interaction. So I just try to log off a bit more and get connected to reality. And look, when Elon bought Twitter, I don't think I liked it. But remember, this is the Elon before MAGA Elon. So a lot of people were like, oh, Tony Stark, SpaceX, Tesla guy is buying Twitter. Now, I think a lot of people in tech were like, he's over indexing this whole get rid of everybody. But if you think about it, we just had this conversation. How much more do you need to improve Twitter? And look, I'm going to have to give him a little credit. He cut 80% of the staff and is still running years later. That kind of defied all. Is it best shape it can be? Absolutely not. But it's still running. Autumn Is that him or is that the engineers that made it? Kelsey Hightower It don't matter. He cut 80% of the people. He's going to take that credit. A lot of people said he's a fool for doing it. He did it and it's still running to this day. Right. So I'll give him that. But where I don't give him credit is, or the thing that made me leave the platform, it wasn't actually all the Nazis and I should have left then. It wasn't all the bots because they were there before he got there. The thing that made me really leave is when the platform started to not just over index on ingertainment, but paying people to do it. Like when they started monetizing, people started optimizing for anger. And it wasn't even just that there are trolls always. There's always people who do that for a living. Like I still blows my mind. There's some people wake up in the day, get on the internet to troll people. Like, is that your life? If you're listening to this and this is your life, please explain. Why does every day you feel like that's a thing society needs you to do? It's not. Okay. Autumn Not to quote Taylor Swift, but like she has a line in her song that says that people would never say this stuff to her face, you know? And it's like so real though, because like, I love the internet and I've got to meet awesome people like Justin and like follow you, but it is wild. Like it's almost like human brains haven't caught up to the fact that we have both real life and the internet because like the stuff people will say to you on the internet, like tech bros Will come for you. Justin And we're like, dude, like some of that to me, like even before the internet, right? Like driving, right? Like you are protected in your bubble of a car and people can't see your face. They might see your hand out the window, but they don't know who you are necessarily. And the internet has like changed that dynamic, right? Cause now people are like taking video and they can find who you are. But I've never thought of that. Autumn People think about road rage. People do some crazy stuff. That same person, like we all know that one person that you never want to get in a car with they made a whole documentary on netflix called beef i've really never thought about that that's Interesting maybe it's just a certain level of removed at some point there's this it's a weird phenomenon with people like tools become part of us, right? Justin Like our clothes, like you don't think about your clothes as a tool, but they are. And you don't think about like when you have a hammer or screwdriver, your keyboard, like you be, if you get in the zone of that, like you, it part of you, you know how to operate it so well, But then you still distance your identity from that thing that I feel like in a lot of ways, the cars and the internet and all these things are so like, that's, I'm a different person in Those situations that I can be more angry or I have more of a priority for more selfishness for my, like, I need to get somewhere or this is my lane or all of a sudden I'm privileged. I'm like, who's around me. Like all that stuff just gets so bizarre. And people do the same thing on social media and the internet. And they're just like, Oh, you're tailgating me. I'm going to slow down to five miles an hour to get you somewhere else or something like this. This behavior is not the same thing as if we're having a conversation in person. Autumn Is this a manifestation of humans? Kelsey Hightower Because humans are just always see negativity more or like when you're a human and you behave this way in real life, you can get a fist to the face and change your whole perspective. Autumn You're not wrong because I think that so often. Like, you know what? Like, I just like just the stuff that people say, nobody would say ([Time 1:08:50](https://share.snipd.com/snip/ff361ff7-5d8d-41e8-9589-e691322f38cb)) - **The Power of Community and Mentoring** - Kelsey values social media for its power to connect with and mentor individuals directly, impacting their lives. - He emphasizes the importance of personal connection and sees social media as a tool for positive change. Transcript: Justin Why go to another social media site when you could have a website? Why put it in AT protocol like it is today? It's still a social thing. This is still a micro blogging. We interact with people. We have followers. We do all that stuff. Versus I have a static site generator. I've had a website and a blog for, for 20 years. It started in 2005 and, and I've, it's gone through some iterations. I've done some WordPress, I've done a bunch of different stuff, but I've been consistently writing since 2005. I've had one blog post on average, one blog post a month for 20 years. And I am so more proud of that than any of my social media sort of engagement stuff and like that side of it and being able to just a lot of it's garbage like i don't want to look back at something But a lot of my early tweets were garbage too i guess this isn't a thing that like i'm necessarily proud of but like that consistency and being able to share in a and an actual more open like Kelsey Hightower The internet is the most open platform we have i'm not just trying to share content is the thing i'm gonna tell you what like was probably about eight years ago. I mean, even more recent examples. I'm walking through San Francisco and a kid runs out of a restaurant. I was like, hey, don't rob me. I got nothing. He's like, I'm not trying to rob you, Mr. Hightower. You don't remember me, but I pinged you on Twitter and we jumped on a Google meet and you gave me some career advice on how to break into tech. I'm in tech now. I live in the Bay Area. I'm making good money. And when I saw you walk by, I just wanted to run out and tell you the impact you made on my life. Not some cool blog post you put together. My life is different and you helped. And I have numbers of stories of this connection. And I'm telling you, when you meet people and they tear up because you changed their life in some way, it reminds me of when I first started to get into tech. I was like, man, if I could just get a job that's not fast food, ain't nothing wrong with fast food. I'll never look down on anyone doing that. But it's OK to look up, too. And so when I got into tech, I was just like, man, I remember going to Barnes& Noble and spending $35 on probably the same A-plus certification book you bought. The red one with the gold cover, right? That one. So I bought that book. We had a shared one. I couldn't pay for it. I borrowed it. And so I'm flipping through that book. I was like, I can't believe this person is giving me all of this knowledge to break into this field. I just couldn't believe, I've read that book probably 12 times and there's a little CD in the back so you can take a practice exam. And I felt like this dude was my professor, my mentor, and I never met them. And so the idea that I could do something similar at scale, and when I say scale, one person at a time is the only thing that matters to me. This whole, oh, we got to reach a million. I can't reach a million people. I don't need to. But this idea where I can just make myself available, people hit me in the DM. Hey, I'm running into a career issue. And the thing is, when you're really, really patient with someone. And what I learned from mentoring, first I thought mentoring was about telling everything you know and giving people clues on what they can use from that. Nah. Mentoring became a hold up the mirror and try to convince the other person to like what they see. And so what social media gave me an opportunity to do is that all the time. And so I'm on these calls and you start, I just listened first. And I remember there's one guy I was just listening to, he just needed to vent a little bit. There's only so many characters and you can't do it all there. So I'll just say, here's a link. Let's jump on and meet. He's just venting. And I said, dude, I get it. I think I understand. If I were you, I would probably do things in this order, in this pace, but just realize you are enough. Don't compare yourself to me. You ain't got to compare yourself to nobody else. Here's what's unique about you. And I started explaining their uniqueness. This person was like a soccer coach. I said, what do you like about coaching soccer? Oh, player development, all these things. I was like, and you're the team lead. Why don't you take that same coach characteristic to the job? Train the newcomers, write the docs, watch how people play, make them better. And he's just thought about it for a moment and his eyes just lit up. And I did something similar with another person and we're on a follow-up call and his wife jumped in and said, Hey, whatever you told him, I want to say thank you. Because the demeanor of a person can then impact the whole family. You know how that is where your kids feel it, your spouse feel it. So when I'm doing that social media work, that's what that means to me. I don't care if it's only 10 people that I touch between now and the end of time. Those 10 go on to do something magnificent. So I'm a big believer in the power of community. And given that most people, when I started out, they were not accessible. I read about them. I saw them on Wikipedia, but I never got to get close. So now that people see me somewhat in that regard, and I get to be close, that's what this social media thing. This is why I didn't walk away from it, because I don't want to miss the opportunity to just make that little tweak in society if I can do that. That's why I'm still there. ([Time 1:19:40](https://share.snipd.com/snip/f2fdc85f-171f-48b4-bf4b-895a33c919bc))