About three weeks ago, Leo Laporte and I recorded the first episode of a new monthly show on the TWiT network. Naming things is hard—we almost voted on it, like we did for Stack Overflow—but we quickly landed on Off By One. It's a programmer joke, and it fits.
The second episode is now out. It's 1 hour and 47 minutes of pure joy, end to end. No negativity. Just low-level insanity, computing history, prop comedy, and the kind of freewheeling conversation that happens when two people who genuinely like each other talk about things they care about.
Why a show?
I've written here for years about what matters to me: coding, community, the open web, and the occasional rant about wealth inequality. But writing is a solo act. A show is different. You can see the expressions, hear the tone, feel the laughter. It's a completely different dimension of connection.
Credit where it's due: Wesley Faulkner introduced me to Leo and recommended I appear on a show. That first appearance was chaotic—I dialed it down for Off By One, but honestly, watching Paris' reaction to me for the entire show is still pretty funny.
Three quotes from episode two
Here are a few moments that stuck with me, with timestamps so you can jump straight to them:
Jeff: I am not an elite coder by any stretch of the imagination... I am very persistent. Leo: Isn't that funny? Because people... I mean, I think of you as one of the voices, one of the chief voices, in coding. Jeff: Well, I advocate for code that doesn't kill you in so many different ways. You know, survivable code. Ideally, no code at all.
And this one, which got me thinking:
Jeff: It's a bit of a zen statement but it's true. So, I'm an advocate for good engineering. Good process. A process that recognizes that we're human and we should do this together, and we should actually kinda like each other, even.
The show also touched on things that matter beyond tech. I talked about my dad—his dark sense of humor, the "last season of the John Atwood show," and how we "won capitalism" and then went back to help improve it for everyone. I've done the math: if we collected a fair tax from billionaires, we could eliminate poverty in this country at the 100% FPL level. We have the resources. It's a choice.
Three quotes from the first appearance
The episode that started it all—recorded on Feb 25th with Leo, Paris, and others—was a different kind of chaos. Here are three moments:
Leo: Well in a way it's a shame because we have in the last year kind of stepped back from our global initiatives in the United States and I think we do have a responsibility.
Jeff: What is money even FOR? I don't even have "that much", what do you.. how do you spend it all? I just want a simple life, man!
And on AI:
Jeff: Have you seen some of the stuff LLMs will do when you tell them to optimize? It's like, optimize this for 95% and it's like okay, "return true". Because it doesn't know what it's doing. It has no actual understanding. It's playing a game of global brain statistics and copy paste.
Come watch
The show is free to view for everyone. We record the next episode in four days, with a live stream for Club TWiT members. If you watch the whole episode and like what you see, I'll cover the first 10 people's Club TWiT membership for a full year.
And if you make your way from the Discord to post regularly on the TWiT forums? I heard a rumor you might get a super cool little token of appreciation in the mail from some user named "Junk." Who knows what might happen.
Thank you, Leo and Wesley, for giving me another way to make happiness real and share it with all of you. All the feels, all the time. Well, once a month.