It's not really about your interests, it's about you being naive.
Other people have to do many things to be happy, but they found it all there! These were incredibly intelligent, incredibly creative people expressing their intelligence and creativity. They weren't lesser men for their passion. It elevated them.
Were it my job to build code, I would probably focus on the other aspects of my current role (statistics, ML, forecasting, etc.).
Keeps the ax sharp, fun to do, and leads to great friendships and networks.
I guess I could spend _all_ my time outside of family and work doing something like strategy board gaming, which I find enormously fun, but I guess I see such things are more like spice in life.
Other comments suggest that this is referring to a job posting from Andrew Ng's deep learning startup. If that's the case, you might have access to expertise and compute resources that you could only dream about if you were working on a side project.