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I wish I were a better conversationalist

2026-01-30 · 1181 words

I had the opportunity to meet Jeff Dean today, on very short notice. I am at a loss for words. He is an awesome guy.

I never was into pop stars or celebrities as a kid. (I know, crazy.) I only realize now that, although I mostly grew up writing code instead of following the drip of gossip, I also have my idols.

I have deep reverence for the great names in computer science: Knuth, Djikstra, Kay; Dean, Norvig, Cox, to name a few. I didn’t realize that I had built up, in my mind, something of an altar to these people. If computation was God’s language, these were his prophets. And I am a God-fearing man.

As a kid, I memorized every Jeff Dean fact. I would read about BigQuery and MapReduce while on the school bus each morning. (Even today, I often use Google Search, Jeff’s Noogler project.) Jeff Dean is a much larger part of my headcanon than I am a part of his. I never thought I’d meet him.

This morning, I was talking to a friend, and he asked if there was anyone I wanted to meet. I mentioned that it was a dream of mine to one day meet Jeff Dean, not thinking anything of it. Just now, my friend called me, out of the blue, and asked if I would like to speak to Jeff Dean within the next hour.

Is he crazy? Of course I would! How could I ever say no!?

So a handful minutes later, I’m finally sitting there, on a Google Meet call, face to face with Mr. Dean. I was at a loss for words.

How to situate you, dear reader? I can only try: Here was this man, who I felt as though I knew so much about, who I believed knew so little about me, waiting for me to start the conversation. Where does one even begin?

“I love your work! It’s an honor! I’m not going to ask you for any new facts, though I’ve read quite a few.”

“Oh yes, most of those are April Fool’s jokes.”

I stop and think. He probably has hundreds of conversations a week. The list of questions I had written down was looking less appealing by the minute. Quite obviously, I didn’t want to ask him about anything I could find on his Wikipedia page. I also didn’t want to ask him the same questions he gets every time he meets someone new. I didn’t want to talk about myself, because I am a fairly simple man. And I didn’t want to go off into the technical weeds, because like, he’s a smart guy but does he really want to talk about CRDTs with a stranger for the next 15 minutes of his life? Like, really?

“So, uh, are you familiar with, I guess, CRDTs? Conflict-free replicated datatypes?” I ask.

“Like, the ones used in distributed consensus?”

Great start! Great start! Really what a great start!

We talked about CRDTs for a bit. Then he mentioned that he had seen my blog post about differentiable logic cellular automata. Jeff’s really sharp, for what it’s worth. He makes connections quickly. For the original Google search index, I hear, he ran the first few iterations of PageRank in his head before manually writing out all the connections between all the websites on the internet and writing a program to do it.

We talked about different ways to quantize neural networks at first, and then the hardware to run them on; I asked him about some speculative alternative architectures I had heard whispers about, and he mused and pondered while I listened.

Halfway through, I interrupted,

“I really am quite sorry. You see, I really am quite flustered. There are so many interesting technical conversations we could have, I’m sorry to ask you about topics you have thought about many times before.”

He reassured me, and we chatted some more.

I asked him about his family, how he met my friend who put us in touch. I asked him if he happens to know my uncle, who works at Google. (To my surprise he did. My uncle designed Roboto, the font. Jeff said, “Roboto’s a nice font. Crisp. I use it for my, uh, slideshows and presentations sometimes.”)

If you could draw a path for our conversation it would trace a curve in some basis of { technical conversation, personal life }. That’s a pretty good basis, all things considered! It could have been worse. But I wish I would have picked a richer basis for our conversation to have unfolded in.

Were I to chat with Mr. Dean again, with the benefit of hindsight, I would ask him about, perhaps, Moral Formation (archive). Or the state of advanced manufacturing in the US (archive). Or perhaps the narrow intersection of faith and reason, which I find to be so richly compelling; and to hear his thoughts on which beliefs he finds to be compelling in turn. Or shared with him my favorite piece of short fiction, The Epiphany of Gliese 581, and ask him whether he had read any interesting books worth reading recently.

Or perhaps some other topic that was interesting to both of us, that neither of us were experts in, as a substrate upon which we could exchange a larger conversation. Some object that we had different slices of, that we could put together to jointly imagine a picture of the whole.

I wish I could have asked more about his approach to life philosophy, or the type of future he wants to live in. The types of people worth building relationships with, and how to maintain them over many years. Though it was just a 15 minute conversation. Perhaps it was exactly what it needed to be. I wish it could have been more.

You see, I grew up moving around quite a bit, and I come from a big family. My siblings became my closest friends growing up, because they moved with me: I always had them to rely on when starting over in a new place. I knew that Jeff grew up moving around quite a lot too. I wonder what that was like for him. How it was similar; how it was different. I wish I would have asked.

Well, at the end of the day, life is long and there are many opportunities. If Jeff ever reads this, I promise I’m a better conversationalist. While this may have been our first conversation, I hope it isn’t our last.