#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting

**Lex Fridman** (0:00)
The following is a conversation with David Heinemeier Hansson, also known as DHH. He is a legend in the programming and tech world, brilliant and insightful, sometimes controversial, and always fun to talk to. He's the creator of Ruby on Rails, which is an influential web development framework behind many websites used by millions of people, including Shopify, GitHub, and Airbnb. He is the co-owner and CTO of 37signals that created Basecamp, Hey, and Once. He is a New York Times bestselling author, together with his co-author Jason Fried, of four books. REWORK, REMOTE, Getting Real, and It Doesn't Have to Be Crazy at Work. And on top of that, he's also a race car driver, including being a class winner at the legendary 24-hour Le Mans race. And now, a quick few second mention of his sponsor. Check them out in the description or at lexfriedman.com/sponsors. It's the best way to support this podcast. We got a couple of new sponsors actually, so please go support them. Uplift Desk for beautiful workspaces, Lindy for building AI agents, Element for hydration, Shopify for selling stuff online, and NetSuite for your business. Choose wisely, my friends. And now, on to the full ad reads. I do try to make them interesting, but if you skip, please still check out our sponsors. I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will too. To get in touch with me for whatever reason, go to lexfriedman.com/contact. All right, let's go. This episode is brought to you by Uplift Desk. Like I mentioned, it's a new sponsor, but I've been using them for many, many years. I have six Uplift Desks. Three of them are in the podcast studio. Across many years, I don't know how many years, three, four years, if you see the wood-colored desk in the podcast studio on camera, those are Uplift Desks. Once again, have loved them, have used them for many years. I also use it for the programming setup. I use it for the robotics work I'm doing, and I'm also using it for music when I practice guitar. For programming, I split my time standing and sitting. I think they have some ridiculous amount of possible desk combinations, but I went with the biggest or close to the biggest, mostly because I love horizontal desk space. Anyway, I can't believe they're sponsoring the podcast. I feel truly fortunate that they are. I feel truly fortunate to be alive. It's just all of us feels like a simulation because I've been using it for so long. The fact that they somehow decided out of nowhere to be sponsoring this podcast is like, what is happening? Anyway, go to upliftdesk.com/lex and use code Lex to get four free accessories, free same day shipping, free returns, a 15 year warranty and an extra discount off your entire order. That's upliftdesk.com/lex.
This episode is also brought to you by Lindy. It's a platform that helps you build multiple AI agents in minutes. No code. It can do a lot of stuff. Sales, customer support, recruiting. It can take care of phone calls. It can do a bunch of email automations, integrates quite incredibly with a huge number of services. All of the Google services. Drive, Gmail, Slack, HubSpot. User-friendly, easy to set up. Let's see. You can do a bunch of other kind of stuff. Meetings. A lot of people talk about using it for meetings, meetings, recording. It can monitor job boards. It can snapshot Airbnb listings via Gmail. It can easily set up, if this, then that, automations, including filters and conditions for more tailored responses to emails. And they have just a huge number of templates and recipes to get you started with any kinds of automations. You can deploy your first AI agent in just 24 hours. Sign up at go.lindy.ai/lex to get two weeks free plus 50% off a pro plan for a year. That's go.lindy.ai/lex.
This episode is also brought to you by Element, my daily zero sugar and delicious electrolyte mix. I'm sipping in it right now because I had a crazy difficult workout at a shitty hotel gym. I've actually not been to many hotels in my life that have a great gym. But the challenge and many of the amazing things in life are all about the challenge. The challenge with hotels and the hotel gyms is to get a good workout while there. The one positive thing about those gyms is that they're usually empty. And there is, on the negative side of the empty, a kind of depressing quality, almost like a sad coldness. And it is usually extremely air conditioned to that gym. The treadmills have not been used for years. And there's the dumbbells that only go up to 50 And those haven't been used. And there's just a sadness to the whole thing. So you have to reinvigorate the space, I would say, by going nuts and just sweating your ass off. That's what I try to do. Anyway, before that and after that, I hydrate and rehydrate always with Element. Get a free eight count sample pack for free with any purchase. Try it at drinklmnt.com/flex. This episode is also brought to you by Shopify. A platform designed for anyone to sell anywhere with a great looking online store. In fact, in this very episode, we talk about how amazing Toby, the CEO of Shopify, and Shopify is because of the underlying technology of it running on Rails, Ruby on Rails. And DHH lays out brilliantly and rigorously with clarity in an awe-inspiring way, I would say, why Ruby and Ruby on Rails is just a beautiful programming language. And one of the concerns, sort of the memes about it was that, does it really scale? And I think Shopify also responding with memes on top of memes showed that it can scale incredibly. I'm always fascinated by the technological details that allow this kind of scale. That's true for social networks, that's true for e-commerce sites. I'll probably do a conversation with Pavel Durov, a Telegram invention. One of the things that's really fascinating to me is the very detailed technological challenges of pulling that off. And I'll probably also talk to Toby eventually, in part for that. But there's a lot of really incredible, brilliant people in Silicon Valley who have all said just how smart Toby is. Not just in the space of technology, but also in the space of business and the space of philosophy broadly, about human existence, about this whole thing that we have going on here. But anyway, you can sign up for a $1 per month trial period at shopify.com/lex. That's all lower case. Go to shopify.com/lex to take your business to the next level today. This episode is also brought to you by NetSuite, an all-in-one cloud business management system. It's an ERP system, Enterprise Resource Planning. That's the machine within the machine of a company. You could think of it as a kind of API between the different components of a company, manages those different components and ensures that they can communicate effectively, manages financials, HR, inventory, supply, e-commerce and all that kind of stuff. One of my favorite podcasts called Founders, that I highly recommend to everybody, is making me fall in love with businesses and entrepreneurs of all kinds more and more. It's such a fascinating puzzle how to get right, and the people that do in all the different ways that they do are just geniuses. They're bold, they're fearless, sometimes lucky, but almost always there's a deep wisdom in there, how to pull it off, how to put it all in the line and make it happen. David is the host of the podcast. I'm sure I'll do a podcast with him eventually. Anyway, the point is, creating and running a business is difficult. So yeah, download the CFO's Guide to AI and Machine Learning at netsuite.com/lex. That's netsuite.com/lex. This is the Lex Fridman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description or at lexfridman.com/sponsors. And consider subscribing, commenting, and sharing the podcast with folks who might find it interesting. I promise to work extremely hard to always bring you nuanced, long-form conversations with a wide variety of interesting people from all walks of life. And now, dear friends, here's DHH.