Adam D’Angelo

**Rick Rubin** (0:00)
Athenaeum is a new podcast on the Tetragrammaton Network.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:10)
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**Rick Rubin** (1:23)
Coming soon on the Atheneum Podcast. Tetragrammaton.

**Adam D'Angelo** (1:54)
I was in public schools the whole way, and the last two years of high school, my parents sent me to Exeter. And for our senior project, we had to do a project, and Mark and I worked together on, this was before Spotify or any of these recommender systems. The idea was that your music player, and we used Winamp at the time, that was the popular product.
The idea was that the music player should be able to recommend you songs to play next, songs out of your library, because there wasn't a sort of internet distribution mechanism at the time. And it would collect statistics on what you played. So all the music that you played yourself, it would just observe things like after you play this song, you tend to play this other song, or these are the kind of patterns from the songs that you're playing. And it would learn those patterns, and then it would be able to be like a smart autoplay.

**Rick Rubin** (2:58)
It would only be for each user.

**Adam D'Angelo** (3:01)
Yeah, because this was pre-internet.

**Rick Rubin** (3:03)
I was going to say at this time, there was nothing like that then.

**Adam D'Angelo** (3:06)
Yeah.

**Rick Rubin** (3:07)
Wow.

**Adam D'Angelo** (3:07)
Yeah. We had an idea, I remember working on a spin-off idea from it, that we were going to collect all the data from everyone, what they were all listening to, and then use that for this idea called collaborative filtering, but basically find other people who have the same kind of music that you do, and notice that they have certain preferences, and then recommend you even more music based on that.

**Rick Rubin** (3:35)
What do you think was going on at the time that even the idea to do that was a possibility? Where did that come from, do you think?

**Adam D'Angelo** (3:42)
That's a good question. I guess I think it was kind of obvious to me, I guess to the point where it's hard for me to say where it came from.

**Rick Rubin** (3:53)
This is pre-iTunes, right?

**SPEAKER_4** (3:54)
Yeah.

**Rick Rubin** (3:56)
So it would either be stuff that you rip or stuff that you got on Napster?

**Adam D'Angelo** (4:00)
Yeah. And I had been making different kinds of programs for a while at that point. And I think once you do that, you start to think in the space of possible programs.

**Rick Rubin** (4:18)
What were some of the other early programs?

**Adam D'Angelo** (4:21)
I started out making games for myself. Were you a gamer as well? Not like a serious gamer. But when I was in middle school, I grew up at a time where it was possible for me alone to make a game that was almost as fun to play as the kind of games that I could get on floppy disks at the time or the way they were being distributed.
Games today are just so advanced and so optimized.

**Rick Rubin** (4:50)
Do you remember what any of the games were that people would know from that time?

**Adam D'Angelo** (4:54)
There was this game called, it was like Comanche where you fly a plane around. There was the video games were a little more advanced, but it was games like Super Mario 3, or Sonic the Hedgehog had just come out. And there's a lot of work to make something like that, but even just as a self-taught programmer, it wasn't that hard to make games that were on a similar level.

**Rick Rubin** (5:28)
Did you do a little self-taught?

**Adam D'Angelo** (5:30)
Yeah, yeah, basically.

**Rick Rubin** (5:31)