RobbieTheWagner 
Charles William Carpenter III Robbie Wagner: [00:09] What’s going on, everybody? Welcome to Whiskey Web and Whatnot, your favorite podcast about whiskey web and whatnot with your host RobbieTheWagner and Charles William Carpenter III.
Chuck Carpenter: [00:21] Yeah, I like the other one about whiskey and web better, actually.
Robbie Wagner: [00:25] You do?
Chuck Carpenter: [00:25] This one is okay. It’s a strong number two for me.
Robbie Wagner: [00:28] Okay. All right.
Chuck Carpenter: [00:28] The other one is pretty great.
Robbie Wagner: [00:31] All right. And our guest today is Nathan. Is it Sobo? I should have asked before.
Nathan Sobo: [00:36] Yup, Sobo.
Robbie Wagner: [00:37] Cool.
Nathan Sobo: [00:38] Yeah. When my grandfather emigrated, he told him his name was S-Z-A-B-O. It’s like a kind of Romanian name, but he said Szabo, and they just wrote down whatever they heard, I guess.
Chuck Carpenter: [00:53] Yeah.
Nathan Sobo: [00:54] Kept it simple.
Chuck Carpenter: [00:55] That sounds about right. Oh, you’re coming in. We’ll make the decisions for you.
Robbie Wagner: [00:59] That sounds hard to spell.
Chuck Carpenter: [01:00] This is who you are.
Robbie Wagner: [01:00] So we’ll just change it. Cool. Yeah. Do you want to give a quick intro into who you are and what you do?
Nathan Sobo: [01:09] Yeah. So who am I? I am very much defined by my work, so what I do is very much who I am. Like, it’s a big part of my life. I’m one of those types of people. So I work on code editors, and I have for a really long time. It started as like, oh, I want a little of this editor, a little of that editor, and some of my own ideas, but none of these are quite the thing I want. And that was, like, 2006, and I haven’t been working on editors the whole time, but I’ve been thinking about it and dreaming about it for most of that time and then working on them quite a bit. I was one of two of the founding members of the team that built Atom at GitHub and then didn’t have it out of my system and got to a point with Atom where I was like. This doesn’t represent what I’ve learned doing this, if that makes sense. And I really wanted to precipitate the knowledge and the ideas in a higher fidelity form. And so started Zed, which is what I’m doing now, a new code editor. It’s written in Rust. Our focus is on performance, minimal design, and then we’ve also built the entire tool around being multiplayer. So the idea being able to right now, it’s really good at pulling people in real-time and just talking through code or working on code together, but our aspirations are to go further and have text-based collaboration as well, just built right into the editing experience.
Chuck Carpenter: [02:47] Interesting. Okay.
Robbie Wagner: [02:49] Yeah, very cool.
Chuck Carpenter: [02:50] Yeah. We’ll dig into some whiskey, but I’ve got some questions around that.
Nathan Sobo: [02:54] Oh, shit. Should I hold off on? I mean, I started drinking the whiskey that these guys shipped me before I even got on the phone with them. They’re like, we really usually pour on air.
Chuck Carpenter: [03:05] Can you do a quick purge, a quick run to the restroom, and purge? So we can start over. I think it’ll be fine.
Nathan Sobo: [03:13] I’m only a few sips in.
Chuck Carpenter: [03:15] Yeah.
Nathan Sobo: [03:16] But I’ve been like, yeah, just working a lot. And then I had my kids, and so it’s like big context shift. And so an excuse to drink whiskey in the afternoon and call it work is like just what the doctor ordered right now.
Chuck Carpenter: [03:35] Right.
Robbie Wagner: [03:35] Yeah. That’s why we do that.
Chuck Carpenter: [03:37] I was going to say you have just revealed the impetus of this entire podcast. It’s secondhand so that anyone listens to it at all. All of it is about that in context shift, so we can empathize with that. I also have two young kids, and you got to go from one to the other somehow.
Nathan Sobo: [03:54] Yeah. Or recover from the process of doing so.
Chuck Carpenter: [03:57] Right. Yeah.
Nathan Sobo: [03:58] Just kind of where I’m at right now.
Chuck Carpenter: [03:59] Yeah. [crosstalk 00:03:59]. All right, so today we’re having the Red Breast Kentucky Owl edition, which is, I can’t confirm this, but I believe it is their twelve years.
Robbie Wagner: [04:10] It’s not Kentucky Owl.
Chuck Carpenter: [04:12] Not Kentucky Owl. Sorry. Kentucky Oak.
Robbie Wagner: [04:14] That’s another brand, Kentucky Owl.
Chuck Carpenter: [04:15] Kentucky Owl is a brand. That’s a brand. I haven’t even had any yet. Exactly. There’s a bird on the front. There’s all these things. Red Breast is not an owl, though. Kentucky Oak Edition. Thank you for the clarification. I cannot confirm whether it’s a twelve-year or not, but I think it starts with their twelve-year distillate. It’s 101 proof. It’s made from malted and unmalted barley and triple distilled and copper pot stills, which is pretty normal for an Irish whiskey. And then it’s finished for a minimum of four months in hand-selected air-dried American used oak barrels, and whiskey advocate score of 96 was number two on the top 20 whiskeys of 2022.
Robbie Wagner: [04:54] Okay.
Chuck Carpenter: [04:54] I don’t know. Didn’t know that. But hey, why not?
Robbie Wagner: [04:56] No idea.
Chuck Carpenter: [04:57] Yeah.
Robbie Wagner: [04:59] Smells good.
Nathan Sobo: [05:00] Kentucky Oak.
Chuck Carpenter: [05:02] Yeah. So that means Kentucky oak is probably like a correlation to bourbon barrels. So it has to be in brand new American charred oak barrels. Bourbon has to be like federally regulated. Not that Irish does, but.
Nathan Sobo: [05:18] Do they ever make whiskey in French oak, or is that only wine?
Chuck Carpenter: [05:22] You can make whiskey in French oak. You can’t make bourbon in French oak.
Nathan Sobo: [05:27] I see.
Robbie Wagner: [05:27] And it wouldn’t be advised because they wouldn’t put enough oak into it because French is less oaky.
Nathan Sobo: [05:33] Just a little too soft.
Chuck Carpenter: [05:35] Yeah. It’s seen where it’s been finished in French oak barrels, though, that were used with something else, but never like the first time around.
Nathan Sobo: [05:43] You can tell I’m more educated about wine than whiskey, although neither is like a particular expertise, but I enjoyed hearing that description. Triple distilled.
Chuck Carpenter: [05:53] Yeah.
Nathan Sobo: [05:54] That’s the typical Irish maneuver.
Chuck Carpenter: [05:57] Yeah. They’ll keep running it through, just trying to make it a bit cleaner and cleaner each time and reduce the heads and tails, that kind of thing.
Robbie Wagner: [06:03] Yeah. So I’m smelling some new Nike shoes with popcorn in them.
Chuck Carpenter: [06:10] Wait. Are they Jordans or Bo Jacksons? Because I don’t know.
Robbie Wagner: [06:14] They’re neither.
Chuck Carpenter: [06:15] Oh, bummer. See. I smell a Bo Jackson. The black colorway, the Raiders colorway.
Nathan Sobo: [06:20] Whenever my girlfriend tastes like any red wine with, like, tanic structures, she’s, like, tastes like erasers. I hate this.
Chuck Carpenter: [06:29] Interesting. I love that, though.
Nathan Sobo: [06:31] I don’t know. I like it, though.
Chuck Carpenter: [06:33] Yeah, I love that. Look, they’re personalized descriptors, right? Because this pseudo-agreed-upon vernacular across alcoholic beverages that reaches into things like tennis balls. Fresh open thing of tennis balls is a thing I saw in a documentary once.
Nathan Sobo: [06:49] That is a distinct smell.
Chuck Carpenter: [06:51] Right.
Nathan Sobo: [06:51] It’s a good smell.
Chuck Carpenter: [06:52] Yeah, I think it’s a good smell. I don’t know if I want to drink that, but I like the smell. Yeah. Like pencil shavings and weird stuff like that, I’ve heard. I don’t know. This one actually smells a little like vanilla extract to me. Like, it’s a little sweet, but like an essence of it, and then you know if you just drank it.
Robbie Wagner: [07:13] Oh yeah.
Chuck Carpenter: [07:13] Right? Yeah, I get a lot of that upfront.
Nathan Sobo: [07:15] I like it.
Chuck Carpenter: [07:15] So Irish whiskey tends to be pretty mild too, and so it’s smooth and peaty drinking regardless.
Robbie Wagner: [07:22] But this is higher proof. And also an American oak.
Chuck Carpenter: [07:26] Yeah, I would expect that to give it a little spice. I get a smidge of it, but.
Robbie Wagner: [07:30] Yeah, I think it’s got a lot more flavor than most Irish I’ve had. Irish can tend to be not as much as the Japanese ones that were literally somehow like drinking water, but it’s more towards that where it’s not as complex, and they want it to be smooth, but this has some more complexity, so I’m a fan of that.
Chuck Carpenter: [07:49] I get a little orange in the beginning, like orangey orange rind kind of thing, and I get some cinnamon or something on the finish of it.
Robbie Wagner: [07:58] I can taste all of that now that you’ve mentioned that.
Chuck Carpenter: [08:00] That’s what I’m here for.
Robbie Wagner: [08:02] You tasting the Nikes?
Nathan Sobo: [08:04] I’m just closing my eyes and tuning in.
Chuck Carpenter: [08:06] Yeah. And see if you can pick that up once I’ve implanted into your brain.
Nathan Sobo: [08:10] I’m definitely tasting alcohol.
Chuck Carpenter: [08:13] Yeah. Well, that’s all right. As long as it’s pleasant. That’s kind of a thing.
Robbie Wagner: [08:19] Half the battle.
Nathan Sobo: [08:20] It’s awesome.
Chuck Carpenter: [08:21] So we give it a really distinct rating system. So it’s one to eight tentacles. Robbie and I will categorize whiskey just because we’ve had so many, but you don’t really need to. You can just say based on other whiskeys I’ve had.
Nathan Sobo: [08:34] Okay.
Chuck Carpenter: [08:34] One being like, this is gross. I don’t want it anymore. Eight being, I don’t want anything else. This is amazing. And obviously everything in between.
Nathan Sobo: [08:43] So one whiskey that was really memorable for me is GitHub had a barrel of Four Roses made, or I guess they ordered a barrel, and then they bottled it in the typical Four Roses bottle, but they made their own label.
Chuck Carpenter: [08:59] Cool.
Nathan Sobo: [09:00] And so I don’t know. I think it must have had a lot to do with just the emotional impact of getting that bottle and how cool that was. But I really liked that whiskey. So it was Four Roses Single Barrel, but then I’ve had a bunch of other whiskey that I still like them all right. But I will put this, like, a close second behind that one.
Chuck Carpenter: [09:21] Nice. So would you maybe give it a seven?
Nathan Sobo: [09:24] Six, seven tentacles? Yeah, but I don’t know how to categorize it. It’s drinkable.
Chuck Carpenter: [09:29] No, it could be all whiskeys. When you think about whiskey, what would you pick up? Like, if someone was to say, hey, pick your favorite? You probably would pick that sentimental bottle, and then they were to say, okay, well, it’s not a special occasion. Then what might you have? You might go this direction. Right. So I think about it in that way.
Nathan Sobo: [09:46] Yeah, that sounds right.
Robbie Wagner: [09:48] Yeah, we just categorize because we’ve done 90 whiskeys now.
Nathan Sobo: [09:54] Whoa.
Robbie Wagner: [09:54] You’re fine. Yeah. We have to differentiate a bit.
Chuck Carpenter: [10:00] Is this episode 90?
Robbie Wagner: [10:01] It is. Well, no.
Chuck Carpenter: [10:03] You think we’d be better at this?
Robbie Wagner: [10:05] I guess we’re on a delay. So there’s, like, ones that haven’t been published yet. The next one to come out will be 90. This is 92, I think.
Chuck Carpenter: [10:12] Oh, my gosh.
Robbie Wagner: [10:13] 93.
Chuck Carpenter: [10:14] 92 bottles.
Robbie Wagner: [10:14] Something like that.
Chuck Carpenter: [10:15] Of whiskey on the wall. Well, yeah, I love that. I also love Four Roses. Single Barrel. That’s like a regular go-to sipper. And recommendation for folks, it’s a strong bourbon. It’s got a lot of spicy notes to it, a lot of roundness. I’ve been to the distillery a couple of times and done tastings and stuff. It’s a beautiful place. Highly recommended. I’m from Kentucky originally, too, so I had access.
Nathan Sobo: [10:40] My grandma’s from there. She talked about it a lot.
Chuck Carpenter: [10:43] Yeah, I was in the north.
Nathan Sobo: [10:45] She was a hillbilly. That’s what she says.
Chuck Carpenter: [10:49] Yeah, I know plenty of hillbillies, but I lived in the north. Right on the river, actually, Ohio River across from Cincinnati, so it’s way more urban. But I had connections to both sides.
Nathan Sobo: [10:59] Yeah.
Robbie Wagner: [11:00] Isn’t the river just made of chili?
Chuck Carpenter: [11:02] I wish. Go swim in the river of Cincinnati chili. But that’s for another episode, I suppose. I’m going to get to the business, Robbie. Okay. Stop trying to distract me.
Robbie Wagner: [11:12] Do it.
Chuck Carpenter: [11:12] So, yeah, for me, in terms of Irish whiskeys, I’ve had a couple of other Red Breasts that I really love on their own, though. The 15 is a great one. There’s a Teeling rum barrel finished one that I really enjoy, too. Would recommend.
Nathan Sobo: [11:26] A rum barrel.
Chuck Carpenter: [11:27] Rum barrel finish.
Nathan Sobo: [11:28] So rum was previously fermented in the barrel.
Chuck Carpenter: [11:31] Yeah.
Nathan Sobo: [11:32] That’s cool.
Chuck Carpenter: [11:33] Yeah. So they would have aged rum in there first, and they just used it to finish for a few weeks or a couple of months, and oh, man, it’s good.
Nathan Sobo: [11:40] It’s really interesting.
Chuck Carpenter: [11:41] So given those, those would be a little higher for me. I’m going to give this a six. I enjoy it, though, quite a bit. I might even try to figure out how to put a little water in here to open it up some more. But yeah, this is an easy drinker. It’s got good flavor.
Nathan Sobo: [11:55] I’m having it on ice. I don’t know if that’s sacrilege, but probably is.
Robbie Wagner: [12:00] It’s fine.
Chuck Carpenter: [12:00] Not for our guests. Only for Robbie.
Robbie Wagner: [12:02] Yeah.
Chuck Carpenter: [12:03] Robbie knows better.
Robbie Wagner: [12:04] He used to give me tons of shit for doing it before because, like, the first at least ten episodes, I would always did ice, and Chuck would comment on it every single time and be like, you can’t do that. And I’d be like, okay, so I’m not going to do it anymore. But yeah, it’s fine to do whatever however you like it.
Chuck Carpenter: [12:18] I just said, taste it first and then add your ice. That’s what I said. Taste it first, and then add your ice.
Robbie Wagner: [12:25] That’s fair.
Chuck Carpenter: [12:26] Figure out how they expected it to taste out of the bottle.
Nathan Sobo: [12:29] Right.
Chuck Carpenter: [12:30] And then be like, okay, I’m going to have it the way I like. I mean, I’ve given this advice a few times that I was given on a distillery tour once. Old man doing the tour, super nice, whatever else. But he’s like, the best whiskey is the one you like. Is it $20? Is it $300? Whatever. Is it on ice? It’s your stuff. This isn’t some sort of aficionado parade here. Have it how you enjoy it. That’s the whole point in the end.
Nathan Sobo: [12:58] And as you have it more, what you’ll enjoy will probably change. That happened with me with wine, which I am more familiar with drinking, but I always found it kind of pretentious, that whole world. But it feels less pretentious as I drink it more, I guess, and realize these people are, like, referencing something that is a reality.
Chuck Carpenter: [13:18] Yeah.
Nathan Sobo: [13:18] It’s not like they’re totally making it up, but it does feel like people can kind of get a little pretentious sometimes around this kind of thing.
Chuck Carpenter: [13:25] Yeah.
Nathan Sobo: [13:25] Around anything like that.
Chuck Carpenter: [13:27] I think they can. I think that when you can go into spending hundreds and thousands of dollars on a bottle and go down that kind of path of things.
Nathan Sobo: [13:33] Whoa.
Chuck Carpenter: [13:34] Right. That’s one area of it. And you can do that in whiskey, too, so there’s anywhere you want to spend money. Commerce exists in the world. But conversely, if you just want to have some enjoyable beverage, alcoholic beverage or not or whatever, there’ll be approachable things at various price points. I think you can get a $15 to $20 bottle of wine that is excellent.
Nathan Sobo: [13:56] For sure.
Chuck Carpenter: [13:57] I’ve done it before.
Nathan Sobo: [13:58] Especially in Italy.
Chuck Carpenter: [14:00] Oh, yeah.
Robbie Wagner: [14:01] So good in Italy.
Chuck Carpenter: [14:02] Oh, man.
Robbie Wagner: [14:03] We’ll come back to that.
Chuck Carpenter: [14:04] We’re going to have to come back to this.
Robbie Wagner: [14:05] I’m going to give this a seven. I think it’s pretty good.
Robbie Wagner: [14:08] All the reasons you said.
Chuck Carpenter: [14:09] Excellent.
Robbie Wagner: [14:10] I don’t really have anything to add.
Chuck Carpenter: [14:11] All right, we’ll talk a little tech before we have too much.
Nathan Sobo: [14:16] I could talk tech in any state, just to be clear. We’ll see. You can rate my on one to eight tentacles. Tech talk.
Chuck Carpenter: [14:23] Oh, I love it.
Robbie Wagner: [14:24] All right.
Nathan Sobo: [14:24] At the end.
Chuck Carpenter: [14:25] Okay.
Nathan Sobo: [14:26] All right.
Chuck Carpenter: [14:26] Yes, we’ll do this.
Robbie Wagner: [14:27] So tell us about Zed. Like, what made you want to make a new editor? How’s it different?
Nathan Sobo: [14:32] So, big part of Zed was born out of frustration with web technology that was, like, one big pillar of it, where I don’t know if people know this, but we created Electron to make Atom. That’s why it’s called Electron because it was like the shell of Atom. And back then, it was like this cool idea. What we wanted to do is create the modern emacs. And so the cool thing about emacs is, like, everything’s written in emacs list, but it has this tiny core that’s written in C, but then you can extend the editor while the editor is running. And we got really inspired about that and felt like, okay, to build the modern emacs environment, you need to use JavaScript and web technologies and the DOM, and it’s this incredibly malleable environment where you can just throw on some CSS, screw with nodes, and that felt like the way to do modern emacs. The funny thing is, there was this joke about emacs eight megs and constantly swapping, which you can see. The joke originated at a time when eight megs was a lot of memory. But the point is that approach consumed a lot of resources, at least for a particular point in time. And so the downsides of writing an editor in web tech was that the browser foundation, Chromium, basically is a pretty serious piece of overhead to carry to deliver a very particular experience. So what the web excels at is being very broad. You can do so many different things, and nobody has to install it. It just works. But, like, okay, when you’re building a desktop app in web tech, then nobody has to install it. Strength isn’t as high, although cross-platform is obviously awesome. And then what we realized was, like, even though we really wanted to let people go broad, actually, a code editor is a pretty particular experience. It’s a very focused type thing. And so, I don’t know, at some point in Atom, I just was running up against these constraints. Like, I’d look at the profiler in the Chrome DevTools and just be like, where is the time going? It’s just like, slipping through my fingers. Like, I can’t find any low-hanging fruit to pick anymore, and it’s still not as fast as I want it to be. And then I’m pausing and collecting garbage at random times. I don’t like that. And so, at some point, I just kind of threw up my hands and said, I have to start over. And so, I started this project called X-Ray because I didn’t really think it was appropriate for me to call it Atom 2.0. Like that would have [inaudible 00:17:25] Atom. And nobody had really approved that, but it was kind of this little experimental project of, like, let’s learn, or let’s see, what can we do with Rust? How much better of an editor can we build? And of course, one of the first things that we came to contend with is like, well, I mean, the first thing I contended with is that the learning curve for Rust was, yeah, I describe it as like a vertical cliff with like snakes nesting in the rocks biting me as I ascended it. And there were times when I’m like, can you even build anything fucking useful with this language? It’s so, like, the constraints of the borrow checker and the ownership model and everything were such a bitch at first, especially for trying to build a UI. But when we finally kind of learned to think like the borrow checker and learned how Rust wanted us to do stuff and stopped trying to take things, we learned from writing in garbage, collected memory, managed languages and kind of embraced it, which involved some innovation, I think, and some new, at least for us. We didn’t see any ready-made formulas for building a UI in Rust, but as soon as we kind of figured it out, I felt like we had ascended the cliff and we were standing at the top, just like looking out over the promised land. Kind of like it was just like, holy shit, this is an absolute super weapon. So that was one big piece. And then the other big piece was just kind of finishing the collaborative dimension that I’d always intended to be in Atom, and we just never really got around to it. To make an editor that acknowledges that you’re working with other people and you got to talk to them, you probably need to talk to them about code, and you probably need to have conversations that are more nuanced than are really possible by hanging comments off of version control artifacts.
Chuck Carpenter: [19:26] Oh, for sure.
Nathan Sobo: [19:27] You need your conversation to be embedded in the code. So that’s the other big piece.
Chuck Carpenter: [19:32] Yeah. And I think in the heavily remote, collaborative world of tech, where we’re at right now, like, that kind of tool is pretty useful. Instead of trying to combine some other things. I mean, I know VS Code has some kind of collaborative plugin. I know there’s.
Nathan Sobo: [19:46] They do.
Chuck Carpenter: [19:46] Some things like Tuple and Screen. I think Screen is still around. I don’t know, was Pop, and then it was or was Screen, then was Pop or something.
Robbie Wagner: [19:53] Screen Hero, you mean that was what Slack acquired?
Nathan Sobo: [19:56] Oh, yeah. Back in the day, I was actually on their landing page for a little while. Screen Hero.
Chuck Carpenter: [20:01] That guy started a new one, though. He like remember he started.
Robbie Wagner: [20:04] Yeah, Pop. Yeah.
Chuck Carpenter: [20:05] Pop. Yeah. I feel like it was Screen at first and then became Pop, and he’s like, yeah, I’m doing this again because they buried it.
Robbie Wagner: [20:10] Oh, was it called screen first?
Chuck Carpenter: [20:11] It was called Screen.
Robbie Wagner: [20:12] Maybe it was.
Chuck Carpenter: [20:13] It became Pop. And he was like, yeah, I’m doing this again because they acquired and buried it and whatever else. So, yeah, I mean, collaborative tools are highly necessary. I want to regress back to two different things that you mentioned. First of all around, the decision to do something just clean slate, Rust. Did you make that decision before or after your time at Warp?
Nathan Sobo: [20:33] I made that decision well before my time at Warp, yeah.
Chuck Carpenter: [20:37] Okay.
Nathan Sobo: [20:38] Yeah. A lot of Warp, basically, is Zed. In a lot of ways. It’s like an early prototype of Zed. And when I was leaving GitHub. I don’t know. I had never raised money. I had never contemplated starting a company, and I didn’t thinking about it a lot, but I don’t know. I was reticent. And so when somebody was like, oh, we want to build this terminal, we want to do it. And so at that, I think the point they talked to me, they were using Electron, and I was like, no, I don’t think you should use Electron. I think you should use Rust. We had the UI framework. We had an editor. There were some issues, but yeah, we had the foundations. And then I joined, and my plan was I was going to kind of head engineering there. So I licensed them that tech. They’re like, well, I don’t know. I’m not going to join a company and not do it the way I think it should be done. And I had all that code there, so that’s what we did. And then I realized, like, three months in, I want to do my own thing. I don’t know. I’d been at GitHub for nine years, and so anyway, Bitcoin was like, going crazy, and everything was going crazy, and I’m like, okay, I’ve got enough savings that I can kind of just do this. I don’t know where this is going to go. It’s probably going to be hard to raise money, but I’m going to just quit and do this and see what happens. And I had money raised in, like, two weeks, but I didn’t know that was going to happen.
Robbie Wagner: [22:11] Yeah.
Nathan Sobo: [22:13] I don’t know. And in retrospect, maybe I should have known, like, oh, duh, but that’s not where my head was at. I’d assumed that raising capital was like, I don’t know, you were like, walking up and down Sand Hill Road crying for three months. I don’t know. That’s what I envisioned it. And it was really easy, at least in spring of 2021, when everyone was just throwing money into the sky.
Robbie Wagner: [22:37] When money was still free.
Chuck Carpenter: [22:39] Yeah, I’m sure many people will have that experience that you were expecting. So sometimes timing, luck, the right thing at the right time has a lot to do with it. But good for you. That you didn’t have to go through that. I’m glad you brought up Bitcoin. I thought I was digging something up because a lot of your old tweets were around Bitcoin and stuff, and I was like, oh, I wonder if are you still into that? But we’ll get there eventually. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Where that could inform your next steps. Kind of like looked into another thing, went somewhere else. I was curious where the influence was there around Warp. We talked to Zach months ago or something, maybe last year.
Robbie Wagner: [23:16] A while ago.
Chuck Carpenter: [23:17] But yeah, Rust is the right choice for a lot of things, so that’s cool.
Nathan Sobo: [23:21] Definitely, for a tool like this.
Chuck Carpenter: [23:23] Yeah. Electron, though, lives and breathes all kinds of applications, right? Tons of stuff there.
Nathan Sobo: [23:29] Absolutely.
Chuck Carpenter: [23:30] So, yeah, you had no idea where that was going to? We built a thing in Electron. Open source color management app or whatever else. So we’ve had some experience there.
Robbie Wagner: [23:38] Yeah. How else do you build apps for Linux? Like, no one’s doing that.
Nathan Sobo: [23:44] Yeah, I mean, to really do anything else is kind of what we’re doing, and I was afraid to do what we’re doing. Even when we started X-ray, the plan was we’re going to do the UI and Electron, and then when we kind of rebooted X-Ray after Microsoft acquired GitHub and I went on paternity leave for a while, when I came back, it was kind of like, you can’t work on this anymore. And so I stopped it, and we started well. For a while, I tried to let it go, but I just couldn’t get excited about doing anything else because anytime I would start writing software again, I’d be in an editor I didn’t love. And I’m like, back to the same freaking problem. It’s staring me in the face. I can’t get away from this. So anyway, we tried to use Electron, even for a little bit after we rebooted X-ray and started over on our own time. And it would just feel like we worked so hard to get this performance in the Rust piece, and then we would just kind of piss it away on abstractions that make a lot of sense when you’re looking to be very cross-platform, move fast, be malleable. But they didn’t matter to us enough. We were committed to building an editor, and I didn’t care if I had to paint the text on the screen exactly where I wanted it. None of those things mattered to me. All that mattered was speed. But I was like. I can’t build a UI framework. That’s crazy. I can’t do that. So I looked at Flutter, but I’m just like, this isn’t at the time, the desktop offering felt really experimental, and it was Dart, which was like, I want to write Rust. At that point, I was really excited about Rust. And so, little by little, the Electron used to spit JSON at Electron, and then it morphed into spitting data at the GPU.
Chuck Carpenter: [25:40] Interesting. Okay, well, I could see why force something that isn’t giving you your intended output, which sounds like something that’s fast as possible and trying to make those connections. It’s like, oh, well, I’m sacrificing something here, so why not just stay at the source?
Nathan Sobo: [25:55] Yeah, exactly. So when we lay out to get pixels on the screen, we have an element tree which is very much inspired by React, where there’s just this tree of elements that we want to render. The cool thing is, though, that you can program your own element. So it’d be as if you could write div, and then you write layout, and you write paint. And so you’re controlling in this very imperative way how the element decides to take up space and then exactly how the element and whatever data is associated with it maps to geometry in this scene object. That’s ultimately what our shaders consume to render pixels on the screen. And so you have this very low-level imperative control over exactly how things are laid out and painted. But then we also have stuff like flex, and this is all curb from Flutter, but then it’s evolved in its own direction. So anyway, in React, you’re like diffing a virtual DOM against the previous virtual DOM. And then that’s computing updates to a document object model. What we do is we lay it out, and then we just paint it. And it turns out that even on an integrated GPU, on a modern machine, you could easily repaint the entire window with extremely low latency. And we could do more sophisticated approaches that only invalidate part of the window buffer, et cetera. But we’re not even doing that yet. That’d be more power efficient, but we’re well below the time needed to deliver the frame rate required to saturate the capabilities of the hardware of the display. Anyway, that’s what you get out of, kind of cutting out the bullshit and just going straight to what you want. But it comes at a cost, obviously. Like, it took us a while, and we’re still investing in that. So it’s been a journey.
Robbie Wagner: [27:53] Yeah, for sure. So obviously, all of this performance is like top of mind for everything. I’m wondering what the future plans are for. Will there be a plugin system or anything like that? And how does that affect performance as you start to layer things on?
Nathan Sobo: [28:12] Yeah, it’s a great question, and performance is a big question as we consider plugins. So on our roadmap for kind of the coming months is to make languages extensible. So that’s like only a baby step toward a plugin system, but it will kind of lay down some infrastructure for us. So the pieces of that is Tree-sitters 1, which is our parsing framework, which is a separate conversation, but to actually interface to the language server, we have like a tiny adapter trade object in Rust. That’s got a handful of methods around. How do you check for updates to the language server, how do you download a new one, how do you start it? We clean up some data coming out of the language server, and that right now is compiled into the binary. Right. So we have support for Rust analyzer and the Python language server TypeScript, et cetera. That is the first thing that we want to make pluggable in WebAssembly because it’s just a really simple teeny little piece place to start. But what it will drive out is what is running WASM inside of Zed look like. What’s the packaging format going to look like? How are these things distributed? Figuring that all out will be like a first step, and then doing Tree-sitter, which is also going to be organized around WASM. I think the plan right now is like, Tree-sitter is compiled. Basically, it’s like what Tree-sitter’s job is to do is to take a JSON description of a language grammar and spit out a C program that parses it. But the cool thing is, Max has come up with this way of basically taking the parse table, which is just like a giant bunch of C-like literals, and copy it out of a WASM binary directly into our native heap and then using that to drive the parser on our native side, not through WebAssembly. But then we call back into the WASM binary to do lexical scanning. Because you can imagine that lexical scanning is kind of touring complete. It’s an arbitrary function. In Python, you need to figure out the indentation level and kind of insert closing brackets when the indentation level drops. And in Ruby, God only knows what you do in the freaking parser for Ruby. So that’s the beginning of it. But WebAssembly, then from there, I’m hoping that we can start to add more surface area and figure out, okay, now that we’ve got the basics like you could at least bring your own language, what else do people want to do? What’s kind of the intersection of what’s really stable API-wise inside the product, what would be easy to open up an API too, that we’re not going to have to change anytime soon, and what do people want? And try to find the Venn diagram of those two things and then just grow from there?
Chuck Carpenter: [31:11] Yeah.
Nathan Sobo: [31:12] So that’s the plan.
Chuck Carpenter: [31:13] Okay, that’s essentially what I grocked from your Hacker News post when you were kind of announcing all of this and what would be the API for composability and flexibility or whatever over time and how maybe that was some of the issues that you had with Atom. It was a little kind of too open, and so it limited you as you were working on it. And so you’re trying to think of it from the other side of it. That’s what I gleaned from that. So you describing this kind of, like, makes a whole lot of sense. Like, you’re very pursuant upon the performance aspect, and then obviously the ability to collaborate in this tool and then extension is kind of something else.
Nathan Sobo: [31:52] Yeah, but I mean, one thing I want to say around extensions is I do like giving people power. But what I’ve learned from Atom is that if you just give people power with no responsibilities, people are going to abuse that. They don’t care. They’re busy. They’re in a hurry. It doesn’t matter to them. It works for them. And then, they publish extensions that degrade the experience. And then once you’ve got a bunch of extensions installed, like, okay, which is the extension that’s causing you to have a slow experience in some corners, you don’t care. It’s just the thing feels slow. And that’s your experience. And so, ultimately, we’re responsible for the user’s experience, and that means we got to transfer some of that responsibility onto the package authors. And so I think if we put you on the main thread, which I’m not opposed to, we’re going to give you a deadline. You need to respond, and we’ll see how this goes over. But I want to try it. You need to be done in like 200 microseconds or whatever your budget is, and maybe the user could choose a budget, or I don’t know. And if you go over, we just disable your until the user’s got to go click a button and turn it back on next to the open issue button so that we’re really defending the user. And then, if you set the bar high, I think people will need it.
Chuck Carpenter: [33:18] I think if you quote the Spider-Man meme, as you almost did, with great power comes great responsibility. Exactly. Uncle Ben, he knew what was going on. Not the rice guy, the other one. From Spiderman.
Robbie Wagner: [33:32] Isn’t it just Ben’s now? Or like.
Chuck Carpenter: [33:35] Oh, I don’t know.
Robbie Wagner: [33:35] Not Uncle Ben anymore or something, I think.
Chuck Carpenter: [33:37] I don’t know.
Robbie Wagner: [33:38] I don’t buy a lot of rice.
Nathan Sobo: [33:40] I buy rice at Costco.
Chuck Carpenter: [33:42] Exactly. I buy Kirkland rice. I don’t know.
Robbie Wagner: [33:45] I don’t have a Costco membership. Can’t do it.
Nathan Sobo: [33:48] Oh, man.
Chuck Carpenter: [33:48] Because it’s too far. Right? Because you live on a farm.
Robbie Wagner: [33:51] Well, everything’s too far.
Chuck Carpenter: [33:52] Yeah, everything.
Nathan Sobo: [33:55] You grow your own rice.
Chuck Carpenter: [33:57] Exactly.
Robbie Wagner: [33:58] I should, though.
Chuck Carpenter: [34:00] Got rice patties out in Virginia. I don’t know if that’s the same climate or whatever. And then here I’ll go further down the spiral and really throw us off. I just was reminded, like the other day. So on the weekends, when I’m doing house chores, like outside or whatever, when it’s not 115 degrees, I wear overalls. I have some overalls. It’s like grandpa, whatever else.
Robbie Wagner: [34:21] I’m going to need a picture of this.
Chuck Carpenter: [34:23] We’ll see. Because you’ll publish it. So I’ll show you. I’m not giving you any assets.
Robbie Wagner: [34:28] Just tweet it at me.
Chuck Carpenter: [34:30] So I wear these overall. I think overalls are cool, too, so whatever. Wear my overalls and my daughter now. Recently, every time I put them on, she’s like, Daddy, that’s wrong. That’s for farm. Because she has like a little farm play set, and the farmer is wearing overalls. She’s like, no, that’s wrong. I’m like, what do you mean? I’m going to go work in the garden or wherever else. She’s like, no, that’s for farm. Anyway.
Nathan Sobo: [34:53] How old is she?
Robbie Wagner: [34:54] She’s not wrong.
Chuck Carpenter: [34:55] She’s four. She just turned four last.
Nathan Sobo: [34:57] Okay, perfect.
Chuck Carpenter: [34:58] Yes. So it’s great when the first time she did it? Like a couple of months ago. It’s like I lost it. Anyway, I digress. Where were we before that?
Nathan Sobo: [35:08] Yeah, WASM. And plugins collaboration.
Chuck Carpenter: [35:12] Extensibility and controlling certain. Like having a responsibility to the users, having an API that maybe has limits, but prioritizing collaboration and speed.
Nathan Sobo: [35:24] Absolutely. But I mean, extensibility for a long time was something I was just like, I don’t even want to think about that right now. We’ve got to get the core experience good.
Chuck Carpenter: [35:34] Right.
Nathan Sobo: [35:34] Because another thing I learned with Atom is, like, cool, you want to put all your investment into extensibility, and it takes a lot of time. And after you sink all that investment in, now you got to have other people build on top of what you’ve done to produce the thing that the user actually ultimately experiences. And ultimately, people did do that with Atom. But it’s just like. I had a team at Facebook building developer tools for all of Facebook that were very particular to their needs. And I’m like, this team’s like, five times the size of the Atom team. Help. So, I don’t know, I just really wanted to focus on, let’s have a really good out-of-the-box experience, and we’re getting there, but we still have a ways to go. But now I’m starting to think more about extensibility because one of the biggest feedback is like, can you support Vue? Can you support Svelte? Can you support PHP? It just goes on and on, and I don’t know, it’s funny because the received wisdom is like, you got to focus. But I don’t know. What I’m hearing is all these people who want to use Zed, we don’t support them right now. We use Tree-sitter, we use the language server protocol. Both are totally language-agnostic. So anyway, we’re doing it. We’re going to make languages extensible. I think it makes sense.
Chuck Carpenter: [36:58] I’m sure you’ll get there at some point and maybe even like just chipping away one at a time or something. Big community.
Nathan Sobo: [37:05] Oh, we’re doing it now.
Chuck Carpenter: [37:06] Yeah.
Nathan Sobo: [37:07] Maybe building the extensibility now.
Chuck Carpenter: [37:09] Yeah. Support Rust. There you go. There’s your start. You’re built in Rust. Support Rust. Go from there.
Nathan Sobo: [37:15] That’s built-in. Rust analyzer.
Chuck Carpenter: [37:17] Nice.
Nathan Sobo: [37:17] And I think we’re pretty good at Rust.
Robbie Wagner: [37:20] Yeah, I think obviously when you’re bootstrapping and building a company, it’s like, you got to support the bigger things first. Svelte is getting bigger, Vue, I guess. I don’t know. I don’t know if Vue is growing or not. But the problem I have is I use Ember, and no one uses Ember, so nothing supports Ember. So I’m always screwed. But yeah, prioritizing who gets what is like you almost have to make it a community thing because.
Nathan Sobo: [37:50] Exactly.
Robbie Wagner: [37:50] There’s always going to be a new framework that comes out that’s like, oh, hot new thing dot JS and like, oh, you don’t support it already? What are you doing? Okay, well, we’ll make it extensible so that you can do that.
Nathan Sobo: [38:03] Yeah. And I don’t know, who knows? One thing I am learning about all this is to me the optimal path. If I look for 20 miles in any direction, I see shit that would be a really good idea to add to Zed. Finding the optimal path through that is daunting. And I don’t think it’s really knowable if that makes sense. How would I even look back and assess? But we’ll see. Ultimately we’ll take the time into doing it. But I don’t know. It’s hard to ignore from so many people that they want extensibility, and they want all these languages supported and hear that over and over and over again and not respond to it.
Chuck Carpenter: [38:44] Right. It’s almost like squeaky wheel syndrome, though, right?
Robbie Wagner: [38:48] Yeah.
Chuck Carpenter: [38:48] You subjectively hear just the loudest voices who are coming to you on these things, but that doesn’t necessarily represent the majority need or demand. And sometimes I wish it did this, and they don’t tweet you or something. Who knows?
Nathan Sobo: [39:06] Well, and ultimately that’s why we’re not going to only do the things that people ask for. But I do want to loop that in because it’s tricky to figure out from a big group of people. Maybe you guys have tips on it. How do you get an understanding as to what the hell is going on with this group of people using your product? I mean, one thing that we did is we just added, like, send us your feedback, and you click it and opens a buffer, and it’s like the absolute minimal friction. You could type like three words, or you could type I don’t know. There is a limit on it, but you could type a lot. So then we got like 1250 pieces of feedback from people, and something I like about that is so easy. The barrier to sending that is trivially low. You’re not like navigating through issues on GitHub or something. Right? But now the burden is on us to understand it. So we’re kind of in the process of doing that. But Joseph on our iterm is helping me spin up this thing where we just batch as much of it as we can into GPT4 and have it boil it down and then link back to the primary sources so we’re able to dive in and get more detail. But it just is helping us wrap our head around it, and then we have quantitative information as well. But ultimately, we also have to trust our own intuition and just like, what we want to do.
Chuck Carpenter: [40:32] Yeah, there you go.
Nathan Sobo: [40:33] What do we want?
Chuck Carpenter: [40:36] When you start to analyze that from a human perspective and not from the AI perspective, what hits for you? What makes you excited to work on next and that kind of stuff? I think that plays a part too.
Nathan Sobo: [40:46] Huge part.
Chuck Carpenter: [40:47] Remember, like, a few years ago. Everybody was shooting stuff through Austin for sentiment analysis?
Nathan Sobo: [40:53] I did not know that.
Chuck Carpenter: [40:55] Oh, no. Yeah. Well, I worked in media for a little while.
Robbie Wagner: [40:59] I saw like a couple of those things.
Chuck Carpenter: [41:01] Yeah, I worked in media for a little while, and that was like a big part of AI, like, plays into news posts and things of that nature. And comments like, feed a bunch of comments in based on this article and get an overall sentiment analysis of how people felt about it. And it feels like there’s an actual parallel there because people get really jazzed or incensed about their tools. You know this because you’ve worked on it. Because of that, you have an emotional connection to your tools. And developer experience has become such an important thing to look at now. That’s why these things are important. So, yeah, I almost would like parallel it to that, is I’m asking for feedback about the tool, and you’re getting comments, and there’s sentiment related to that, and there’s commonality in terms and keywords and all that kind of stuff. So hopefully, the old GPT4 has given you some of that.
Nathan Sobo: [42:01] Yeah. And I mean, I’m not literally being like, GPT4 tell us what to build.
Chuck Carpenter: [42:05] No, of course not.
Nathan Sobo: [42:05] But I’m being like, GPT4. What critical things are the people who love the product saying? That’s a really important signal for me of, like, okay, you love the product, but you.
Chuck Carpenter: [42:15] Mass parse information. Right?
Nathan Sobo: [42:17] Yeah. But then we’re still going to ultimately do what we think is the right thing to do, and that’s up to us. And a lot of that is about our own agenda because I think it’s gotten us this far. It’s gotten me this far. I didn’t lick my finger and figure out which way the wind was blowing to start working on Zed. I did it because I wanted to do it, and I didn’t even know why I wanted to do it. So I think we got to keep that mentality alive. But I don’t want to be like myopic and self-centered and not listen at all, either. It’s got to be this balance between those two somehow.
Chuck Carpenter: [42:53] Yeah. You had an itch, and it’s just kept you going. It’s kept you.
Nathan Sobo: [42:56] Itchy.
Chuck Carpenter: [42:56] Obviously it’s kept you motivated. Right. And that matters. That’s, like, interesting. Where does Zed come from? I want to know where Zed comes from because all I can think about is Pulp Fiction.
Robbie Wagner: [43:07] Because it’s a zeditor.
Nathan Sobo: [43:08] Yeah Zed is dead. Which is like, what I hope nobody will ever say it’s not the greatest association.
Chuck Carpenter: [43:14] Yeah, we also hope that.
Nathan Sobo: [43:15] But Zed is kind of an homage to the editor Ed. I don’t know. I’ve always been really captivated with the early history of computing. And there’s this photo of Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie, and they’re, like, next to a big PDP-11 cabinet. And one of them, I don’t remember which one, is, like, working on a teletype machine and just, like, coming to the realization, like, holy shit. These guys were, like, coding Unix on a machine that didn’t even have a display. They were literally editing code on, like, a teletype printer with no interactivity whatsoever. So there’s this editor, Ed. It’s one of the first editors. And I was like, maybe I should call it Ed. I was just, like, driving. I think I was biking around Boulder one day, thinking about what did I want to call this project I was working on, but then realized, like, oh, Ed is still ships with Darwin. You can type Ed, and it pulls up an editor. And so I knew that the editor would need whatever mate or subple or code or needs a command line tool. And so I’m like, well, it would be really rude to pay homage to Ed by calling the editor Ed and then clobbering the command that runs the program and just kind of like so started thinking, okay, well, what could we call it? And there were a lot of bad options, but Zed was one that I liked.
Chuck Carpenter: [44:52] That stuck.
Nathan Sobo: [44:54] Yeah.
Chuck Carpenter: [44:55] And that’s French for Z in the alphabet. I mean, there’s a whole lot of correlations, right? And that, also with the Z and the color blue that you’re using, makes me think of Steve Zisu. So maybe you can get a red beanie with that on the front, and then that will be some cool swag, too, with, like, homage to Wes Anderson films. I don’t know. It’s cool.
Nathan Sobo: [45:17] Thanks.
Chuck Carpenter: 45:17] That’s my weird roundabout way of saying, like, actually, it’s pretty cool. I like that there’s all these other correlations to it.
Nathan Sobo: [45:25] And the cool thing was we needed a domain. And I was looking around, and Zed.dev was taken, but I emailed the person, and I just tried to play it cool because I didn’t want to let on that we had gotten funding and needed a domain name because then what would you do, right?
Chuck Carpenter: [45:49] And they know you’ve got cash piles. You’re going to be like, great, give me some of those.
Nathan Sobo: [45:53] Yeah. And so I talked back and forth with this guy in the UK. I don’t remember his name, but the domain transfers. And I’m like, okay. Thank God. We really needed this domain. I couldn’t come up with any other domain that would be reasonable. And he’s like, oh, by the way, like, huge fan of Atom. Excited to see what you do. He knew who I was the whole time. That’s awesome. And he sold me the domain at cost. It was like such a cool moment of like.
Chuck Carpenter: [46:21] He did you a solid. That is cool.
Robbie Wagner: [46:23] What a stand-up guy.
Chuck Carpenter: [46:24] Yeah, I love it.
Nathan Sobo: [46:24] Yeah.
Chuck Carpenter: [46:25] I wish you knew his name now. Before, I was like, we’re hiding from him. No, now we want to. Yes.
Nathan Sobo: [46:30] Yeah, I really should know his name. I’m like, well, whatever we build, like, you have lifetime access to it, like, whatever you want to do. I appreciate that.
Chuck Carpenter: [46:38] I’m sure you have old emails or something.
Robbie Wagner: [46:40] Yeah, I would have been like, hey, cool, big fan of Atom, give me ten grand.
Chuck Carpenter: [46:46] Totally don’t buy domain names. TLDs from Robbie. That’s what you like.
Robbie Wagner: [46:51] I don’t have any good ones to sell you, sorry.
Chuck Carpenter: [46:53] I don’t either. Yeah.
Robbie Wagner: [46:54] If I did, I’d be making money.
Nathan Sobo: [46:55] I don’t need any other ones. Luckily, I’m good for now.
Chuck Carpenter: [46:59] The best one I had for a while, and I did sell it, was kit swap.
Robbie Wagner: [47:03] Kit swap?
Robbie Wagner: [47:04] Because I am into soccer, and in Europe they call them kits for the uniforms, in particular, the shirts or whatever, and I was like, oh, cool, I’m going to whatever. Fifteen years ago, I was going to build some shirt-swapping site very specific to that domain. Bought this and sat on it, as we all do with many domains.
Nathan Sobo: [47:25] Oh, yeah.
Chuck Carpenter: [47:26] Never did really anything with it. And there you go. Yeah, I’ve actually sold it.
Nathan Sobo: [47:31] I had a domain for a while. It was emoji coin because before the idea of NFTs ever existed, I was just like, what if there’s like a coin where it’s like, there’s only a finite number of Santa Clauses, and you’re trading these things around, and it might have flown, honestly, but I could never, I don’t know, take it seriously enough. I was kind of blown away when the whole NFT thing took off, and I’m like, that Emoji Coin idea I had wasn’t, like, that crazy, actually.
Chuck Carpenter: [48:01] And you still have it, or? No?
Nathan Sobo: [48:03] I don’t know. I’ll have to look.
Chuck Carpenter: [48:06] Probably yes.
Nathan Sobo: [48:06] Probably not.
Chuck Carpenter: [48:07] Yeah. So I was trying to dig for interest and other dirt and whatever. Not dirt in any way. That’s the wrong way to put it. Other interests.
Nathan Sobo: [48:14] Dirt.
Chuck Carpenter: [48:15] And I saw a lot of Bitcoin posts in your Twitter past and so obviously you’ve had some interest in web three technologies and blockchain and all of that. Is that somewhere in your head still, or you kind of moved on?
Nathan Sobo: [48:29] Yeah, no, it’s definitely a big part of my consciousness. I think I’m a bit of a maximalist. A Bitcoin maximalist. I mean, it’s not to the extreme where I would say, like, nothing else of value can ever be built on cryptographic distributed consensus protocols, but more just like, I’m so much more excited about Bitcoin than any of the other stuff. The other stuff is just like, it’s kind of interesting, or that’s a fun idea. Whereas Bitcoin is actually pretty meaningful to me, and it really roots back to a really young age where I’m just like, what is money again? How does this work? And one of my first jobs was writing. It was like in the lead-up to the 2008 crisis. I worked for a mortgage company writing these scripts that would send their data out of their terrible database that God knows how I even got data out of it, to Countrywide Home Loans and these terrible files with till these in them. But that was really when questions started to swirl around, like, how does this all work? And yeah, what I love about Bitcoin is it’s just like.
Robbie Wagner: [49:43] They didn’t know.
Nathan Sobo: [49:45] Nobody knows.
Chuck Carpenter: [49:47] Trust them. Trust them.
Nathan Sobo: [49:49] And there are really intelligent people who think that it’s all above board and it all makes sense. But to me, the whole credit-driven system, this idea that I work hard to be paid whatever I’m paid per hour, and then there’s some other participants in the system that just get to conjure those units out of nothing. Now, if they carried some risk for doing that, that’d be one thing, but it kind of seems like they don’t because there’s moral hazard involved where they get to conjure the units, and then when that goes awry, then they’re bailed out anyway. And so if money represents human labor multiplied by time, attention human, attention, human something, effort times time, then I don’t know. To me, it just doesn’t seem ethical. Obviously, chattel slavery in the South was this horrific, brutal thing, but there’s something akin to it of like slavery is sort of taking someone’s labor from them in a non-consensual way. And to me, the process of being able to inflate the money supply, the seigniorage awarded by that, is just not honest. It enables the government to operate in a way where they’re not asking for tax revenue, like, directly. They’re kind of backdooring it and putting it off anyway. I just like a system where it’s like, no human gets to decide. And that was gold. But the problem with gold is I can’t beam $20 worth of gold from here to Australia in 3 seconds.
Chuck Carpenter: [51:30] Right. Yeah. This sounds like its own podcast, actually.
Nathan Sobo: [51:33] Yeah, sorry, I get a little ranty about it.
Chuck Carpenter: [51:36] No.
Nathan Sobo: [51:37] Okay.
Chuck Carpenter: [51:38] I don’t discredit dislike or any of those things, what you’re talking about, because I think we could go on for another hour about that. Specifically, if you happen to be in Atlanta later this month, I think we should talk in person about that.
Nathan Sobo: [51:53] Okay.
Chuck Carpenter: [51:54] Yeah.
Nathan Sobo: [51:54] Cool.
Robbie Wagner: [51:55] Are you going to Render?
Chuck Carpenter: [51:56] Yeah. Are you going to Render?
Nathan Sobo: [51:57] I’m not. I don’t even know what Render is. Tell me.
Robbie Wagner: [52:01] Render ATL it’s a conference in Atlanta.
Chuck Carpenter: [52:04] Yeah. And it’s huge.
Nathan Sobo: [52:05] Cool.
Robbie Wagner: [52:05] There’s, like, everyone ever speaking there. Yes, like 80-plus speakers or something.
Nathan Sobo: [52:10] Damn.
Chuck Carpenter: [52:10] I encourage you to come just to hang out. We’re going to go because we’re like, we got to go and hang out.
Nathan Sobo: [52:16] That sounds really interesting.
Chuck Carpenter: [52:17] Yeah. If you don’t have plans.
Nathan Sobo: [52:19] The funny thing about me is this is one area where I definitely need to level up is I just am so, like, grinding all the time, right? Like heads down grinding building that I don’t even know what this conference is that everyone’s going to, and 80 people are speaking at of note. Like, I didn’t even know what that was.
Chuck Carpenter: [52:36] That’s okay. That’s why you get shit done, and we talk on a podcast and drink whiskey.
Nathan Sobo: [52:43] But honestly, I do need to fucking tell people this thing exists. Right.
Chuck Carpenter: [52:47] Right.
Nathan Sobo: [52:48] Excuse my language. Maybe bleep that out.
Robbie Wagner: [52:50] No, you’re fine. We are unedited.
Chuck Carpenter: [52:52] No.
Nathan Sobo: [52:52] Okay.
Chuck Carpenter: [52:53] This is an alcohol-fueled discussion. So we encourage profanity because it’s natural language to a degree. Right. You’re not, like, applying for a job here or something, whatever. Or asking for funding.
Robbie Wagner: [53:05] Inverse a binary tree.
Chuck Carpenter: [53:06] Yes. Hurry up and do it now. So I’m going to go into some whatnot here because I know we’re starting to push time and whatever else.
Nathan Sobo: [53:13] Yeah. Use guide.
Chuck Carpenter: [53:14] One thing is, one of our inspirations for this podcast is the Hot One’s YouTube show.
Nathan Sobo: [53:20] Okay.
Chuck Carpenter: [53:20] Right. Under duress, increasingly like interesting and difficult questions. And so the more whiskey you drink, and then we ask you things, and then we get off the rails, and we curse, and we start to talk about the money system and trust and whatever else.
Robbie Wagner: [53:35] What’s your question here, Chuck?
Chuck Carpenter: [53:37] I just wanted to state that first, and then my question is, you mentioned Italy earlier.
Nathan Sobo: [53:42] I’m scared.
Robbie Wagner: [53:43] Italy?
Nathan Sobo: [53:43] Oh, yeah.
Chuck Carpenter: [53:44] No, I want to go down the path of Italia, si chao. Right. Because I’ve spent a lot of time there. You have a lot of friends and all that kind of stuff. And one day wouldn’t mind making it a home, but or at least a temporary home.
Nathan Sobo: [53:57] Same.
Chuck Carpenter: [53:58] Okay, well, then we’ve got a whole thing. We can go down there.
Robbie Wagner: [54:02] I’ll live there. If you’re there.
Chuck Carpenter: [54:04] That’s all it takes?
Chuck Carpenter: [54:05] Someone to set you up and speak the language?
Robbie Wagner: [54:07] Well, no, I would like to live there, but I need people that aren’t Italian to hang out with.
Chuck Carpenter: [54:13] Yeah, right. Well, all my friends speak English, so that’s helpful. We have some friends in Como who have kids the same age as us, so it’s very appealing to us to bring your kids there, and then you have someone that’s helped foster some comfort for them.
Nathan Sobo: [54:27] Yeah.
Chuck Carpenter: [54:28] Yeah. I don’t know. I love going there. I’ve been to a bunch of vineyards there and traveled around multiple times. It’s a kind of regular haunt for me. But tell me a little about your time in Italy and what you love, and where you like to be.
Nathan Sobo: [54:46] Well, I mean, a big part of my connection to Italy is Antonio, who’s one of my co-founders of Zed.
Chuck Carpenter: [54:52] Oh, yes.
Nathan Sobo: [54:53] What?
Chuck Carpenter: [54:54] My new best friend.
Nathan Sobo: [54:56] I loved Italy before Antonio, but he’s definitely deepened my love of it and visiting him.
Chuck Carpenter: [55:06] Where does he live?
Nathan Sobo: [55:07] He lives in. I’m probably mispronouncing it, and he would correct me. Gembetola, which is in Romania, which is about an hour-ish south of Bologna. I’m actually visiting him. We’re getting an Airbnb in Bologna, and I’m just going to, like, yeah, last time I went to visit him, I did not eat for three days. To make room to just destroy food while I was there and not even worry about it.
Chuck Carpenter: [55:36] Yeah, for sure.
Nathan Sobo: [55:37] Worked out perfectly other than I arrived. And he’s like. I have not even heard you finish a sentence without mentioning food. So it kind of put a damper on me as a conversation partner until we got the plate of salami and cheese. But anyway.
Chuck Carpenter: [55:56] You know what’s funny is that most times that I’ve been there, I can just eat my we’ll eat, like, pizza and gelato every day and obviously lots of pasta and whatever else. I usually lose weight.
Robbie Wagner: [56:08] Oh, yeah.
Chuck Carpenter: [56:09] I think it’s just based on.
Robbie Wagner: [56:10] Because they don’t put chemicals in there. Like it’s real food.
Chuck Carpenter: [56:13] Because it’s just real food in normal portions. And so it’s like, not a big deal to just eat without having a problem.
Nathan Sobo: [56:21] Well.
Chuck Carpenter: [56:21] Yeah, that’s an interesting thing. Yeah. My wife is lactose intolerant. She goes there, eats cheese every day. Not a problem.
Nathan Sobo: [56:29] Oh, damn. Yeah, it’s an alternative dimension, clearly.
Chuck Carpenter: [56:32] Yeah.
Nathan Sobo: [56:34] So I speak German. They didn’t offer Italian in high school, nor would I probably have elected it.
Chuck Carpenter: [56:41] Right.
Nathan Sobo: [56:41] They offered French, German, and Spanish. And everybody took Spanish, and German just seemed interesting, like, weird. But someday, I would love to learn Italian. I tell Antonio I’m going to learn Italian, and then I last, like, two weeks in freaking Duolingo or whatever, and then I’m like, oh, shit. I actually have a lot going on in my life, and this is a lot right now.
Chuck Carpenter: [57:05] Yeah.
Nathan Sobo: [57:06] But I would love to speak it. And I agree.
Robbie Wagner: [57:07] The problem is when they actually think you do speak it. We did that. So we went to Italy for our honeymoon, and we thought we learned it for a while and went to a restaurant and got our way to the table without them knowing that we didn’t speak Italian. And then the waiter is speaking to us in Italian nonstop, and we’re like, I’m sorry, you got to stop. We don’t know what you’re saying anymore.
Chuck Carpenter: [57:32] Yeah, apologies. But this is where it ends.
Robbie Wagner: [57:37] It’s hard.
Chuck Carpenter: [57:38] It is. It’s a difficult language. My wife actually took Italian in college, and so when we go there, she does most of the driving, or we’re with friends who speak English, and it fine. Doesn’t matter. But I always have on my bucket list. Like, I want my Italian friends to respect me more, and if I had more of this, it would help, and my wife would just enjoy it because she loves Italian. It was like a dream come true for her.
Robbie Wagner: [58:03] If you had a wine podcast, they would respect you more than if you had a whiskey podcast, I think.
Chuck Carpenter: [58:08] Well, they don’t drink a ton, to be honest. I mean, yes, they have wine or whatever. Yeah.
Robbie Wagner: [58:13] They don’t have wine with every meal.
Chuck Carpenter: [58:14] Yeah. But, like, one, maybe two glasses, and that’s kind of the end of it. Like, social drinking is very much less a thing there than it is here, and definitely less so than England. In England, you’re constantly pounding drinks no matter what. And in Italy, it’ll be like they’ll put out they might, like, on a casual social engagement, put out a liter of beer for a table of four, and people share that and have a little bit of it and talk and whatever else, and they’re like bibity boobity bobbity. And that happened. That’s for sure.
Robbie Wagner: [58:46] The hands talking.
Chuck Carpenter: [58:47] Yeah, for sure.
Nathan Sobo: [58:49] You know, an area of alcohol that I think is really interesting. I don’t know a ton about it, but I know a little is Amaros. So interesting.
Chuck Carpenter: [58:58] I know a lot about amaros. You just get so excited. That’s, like, probably my other favorite spirit, and I’ve had a ton of different ones, and I’ve made limoncello myself. Oh, wow. Which is actually considered a part of Amaros. There’s, like, Amaros Amaris. And there’s things with herbs, things with just fruits and stuff, and they’re all kind of in the same boat of things. It’s amazing. Yeah. Campari is an amaro. Yeah.
Nathan Sobo: [59:28] I like Amaro Nonino. That’s one I’ve had that I like.
Chuck Carpenter: [59:31] And there’s another one. Frenette is a big one.
Nathan Sobo: [59:34] Oh, yeah, of course.
Chuck Carpenter: [59:35] That’s huge. In Argentina, originated in Italy.
Chuck Carpenter: [59:40] And there’s, like, Aperol, which is kind of like the Bud Light of Amaro, probably, right?
Chuck Carpenter: [59:44] Yeah.
Nathan Sobo: [59:44] But I like those Aperol spritz.
Robbie Wagner: [59:46] I like Aperol.
Chuck Carpenter: [59:47 Yeah. The spritzes are nice. Yeah, they’re good.
Robbie Wagner: [59:50] There’s no shame.
Chuck Carpenter: [59:51] I can’t tell you how many, like, happy hours where you can get an amaro spritz or a negroni, and then they have all this food out, and that just became dinner for me a number of times.
Nathan Sobo: [01:00:00] Oh, yeah.
Chuck Carpenter: [01:00:01] It was amazing.
Nathan Sobo: [01:00:01] Oh, yeah. It’s crazy.
Robbie Wagner: [01:00:02] You order one drink, and they give you, like, eight plates of food, and you’re like, wait, what?
Chuck Carpenter: [01:00:06] It comes from all. Yeah. I volunteered in Milan for a couple of weeks, and it was like, oftentimes, that was dinner, and then we go get gelato.
Robbie Wagner: [01:00:16] Oh, yeah.
Chuck Carpenter: [01:00:17] We have a couple of drinks. All this food now, let’s just get the dessert. Who cares?
Robbie Wagner: [01:00:21] Yeah.
Nathan Sobo: [01:00:22] Sounds good to me.
Robbie Wagner: [01:00:23] Yeah, it’s a different world.
Nathan Sobo: [01:00:26] So when you went to wineries in Italy, which region were you in?
Chuck Carpenter: [01:00:30] We were mostly in Tuscany. We’ve been to a few all over the place, but mostly in Tuscany, so our favorite is one Nakianti. Yeah, they had some other things there. It’s called Avignonesi in Tuscany. Oh, yeah.
Robbie Wagner: [01:00:44] The one that’s Sangiovese-like, with letters taken out and rearranged.
Chuck Carpenter: [01:00:48] Yes. And they’re an organic winery, but it was the first organic wine that I ever had that didn’t taste like absolute garbage. It’s amazing. And they have the whole thing where they designed one of their vineyards where it’s like a tree in the center, and it’s all this big circle.
Nathan Sobo: [01:01:03] Oh, that’s cool.
Chuck Carpenter: [01:01:03] And all the vines grow out from there. And they have a whole horticultural reason for this. And they rotate it around, basically, to like.
Nathan Sobo: [01:01:12] I love that.
Chuck Carpenter: [01:01:13] Yeah, it’s really neat. So this place, yeah, I love that place. And we did, like, a whole food thing there, too. So we had, like, a six-course thing with trying all these different wines and stuff to it.
Robbie Wagner: [01:01:25] And you never sent me any wine.
Chuck Carpenter: [01:01:26] It’s at my house. Come get it.
Robbie Wagner: [01:01:28] All right. I’ll get on a flight right after this.
Nathan Sobo: [01:01:31] We had our first when we were just, like, Antonio, Max, and Nate. Nate is our designer. Max is my other co-founder. We all visited and stayed at this little inn kind of outside of Oste, and just I drank a lot of Barbera. It was really fun. So, yeah, that’s the area that I’m more familiar with.
Chuck Carpenter: [01:01:52] Did you have any Hanna with your barbera?
Nathan Sobo: [01:01:55] I think maybe.
Chuck Carpenter: [01:01:56] Hanna-Barbera.
Robbie Wagner: [01:01:57] Oh my God.
Nathan Sobo: [01:01:58] Hanna.
Robbie Wagner: [01:01:58] Okay.
Nathan Sobo: [01:02:00] Wait, that’s an American winery, probably.
Chuck Carpenter: [01:02:03] It’s a whole what is the bear, and I don’t know.
Robbie Wagner: [01:02:09] Yogi.
Chuck Carpenter: [01:02:10] Huggleberry Hound and Yogi Bear, and yeah. Hey, Boo Boo. Anyway, yeah, we really devolved this conversation. That’s how we know this is working.
Nathan Sobo: [01:02:18]Yeah. The real wine around there that’s, like, the fancy wine is the Nebbiolo, which I also think is really good, but I, like, dolcetto just, like, tossing it back anyway. I don’t know. I’m not picky.
Chuck Carpenter: [01:02:33] You know what I love about being there is that you can get amazing Lambrusco all over the place. Lambrusco is really good, but the problem is it’s a young wine and doesn’t ship well. It doesn’t sit on shelves well. And all that because Rio Nido is garbage.
Nathan Sobo: [01:02:45] And, like, it’s a really good point.
Chuck Carpenter: [01:02:47] Yeah, Lambrusco all over the place. Super good. Like, great summer wine. Yeah.
Nathan Sobo: [01:02:54] I like it.
Robbie Wagner: [01:02:55] We are way over time, though, so we’re going to have to talk more wine another time. Before we end, is there anything we missed about Zed or anything you want to plug before we end?
Nathan Sobo: [01:03:06] I mean, we just landed copilot support. I’m excited about language models generally, so that’s another thing that’s heavy in the mix on our roadmap is getting language models more involved in what it’s like to code in Zed. We’re in open beta. Give us a try. I would appreciate if you click the little message in the status bar and send us your feedback. Even if you decide, this isn’t ready for me yet. It’s missing X, Y, or Z, or I don’t like this. We want to hear it. It will go into our giant digester in the sky. But then we just drill down in and read specific stuff, so it’d be super helpful to us. So yeah. I don’t know. Anything else? Any other questions? I guess we’re overtime, so no.
Robbie Wagner: [01:03:48] Yeah. All right.
Chuck Carpenter: [01:03:50] Only offline. That’s it.
Robbie Wagner: [01:03:51] Yeah. Thanks, everybody, for listening. If you liked it, please subscribe, leave us some ratings and reviews, we appreciate it, and we will catch you next time.
Nathan Sobo: [01:04:00] Five stars.
Chuck Carpenter: [01:04:04] Thanks for listening to Whiskey Web and Whatnot. This podcast is brought to you Ship Shape, and produced by Podcast Royale. If you like this episode, consider sharing it with a friend or two and leave us a rating, maybe a review, as long as it’s good.
Robbie Wagner: [01:04:19] You can subscribe to future episodes on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. For more info about Ship Shape and this show, check out our website at shipshape.io.