See the interview on youtube here.

Some quick backstory: DHH name-dropped Lazygit (my pride and joy) on twitter and my friend Dirk reached out and suggested I ask DHH for an interview. This was back in May; DHH agreed but was busy until August. And so it was great to see it come to fruition finally.

In this interview, DHH and I talked about various things including:

• Linux on the desktop
• Open-source pros and cons
• Ruby vs Javascript
• Why certain developers prefer certain programming languages
• Stoicism and attachment
• Finding a substitute for religion
• DEI and tech politics
• Culture shock in the pandemic
• Updating your beliefs

The below transcript is yet to be properly edited to remove filler words and such. Nonetheless, I hope you enjoy!

Transcript

Jesse: Okay. David, thanks so much for coming on the podcast.

David: Yeah, absolutely. My pleasure.

Jesse: Okay, so the reason I decided to reach out to you is because you’ve been spending this time on Twitter, talking about your journey, going through like learning Linux and all this stuff. So I want to ask you, is 2024 finally the year of the Linux desktop?

David: Well, I was trying sort of temperate about it. So when I wrote about my own Linux journal, I’ve been calling it 2025.

Jesse: Ah, yes.

David: I’m saying like 2024 is when we’re sort of ratcheting up and getting everything ready.

David: And then 2025 is when the big push is going to happen. Now, what’s so funny about that is partly because it’s a joke. I think it’s been running since what, 97 or 96 people have been saying, this is the year of Linux on the desktop.

David: And everyone has perhaps their own definition of that. And I think the The definition that is Linux is going to dominate the desktop. It’s going to wipe out Windows and it’s going to put Apple out of business with their MacBooks.

David: I mean, that was never going to happen, right? So when I call for Linux on the desktop, I’m more modest in my aspirations.

Jesse: Like Linux for my desktop.

David: ah First of all, Linux from my desktop, well, that we can call 2024 for sure.

David: But then also just getting to a significant market share, at least within technically sophisticated users.

David: Because I think part of the Linux on the desktop discourse that’s been setting itself up for failure is that it’s trying to define, first of all, the whole thing is one market. Like, oh, let’s get on the desktop.

David: That means all desktop computers. That means everyone who’s sort of using a computer or anything and that’s I think a tall order and you should set yourself more achievable goals first before you go like oh do you know what I like climbing let’s start with Mount Everest and maybe start with a mountain that’s slightly smaller and I thinkhmm. Mmhmm.

David: I mean, that’s been certainly always my own experience, is that there’s a there’s a obviously a lot of very technically minded people, programmers and and other folks who are very intimate with computers, start there first.

David: First of all, that is a huge market. ah Second of all, they’re A, more likely to recognize what Linux brings to the table and B, they’re more capable perhaps to still deal with some of the snacks that are on the platform.

David: So ah to when I say Linux under desktop 2025, I’m actually mostly talking about like my own field, my own domain programmers, that let’s get to a significant number of people.

Jesse: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

David: Let’s even just call it like, if 10% of all programmers were on Linux, I think that’s a nice, solid, yet achievable goal.

David: I think the the internet stat says that like 4% of all internet users are on Linux, but I think that also includes Chromebooks maybe.

Jesse: Right.

David: I don’t know how the stats break down.

Jesse: and Yeah, and i feel I feel weird counting Chromebooks. It kind of seems like it’s cheating to include that because, yeah.

David: It is. I think it is. I think you got to go like, you know what? I mean, what’s interesting with it is I think it’s actually pretty awesome. The Chromebook is based on Linux.

David: And I think there is overlap and help and so forth. But that’s not what I would say. Oh, you’re a programmer? You should start using a Chromebook. I think there probably are some people who do maybe.

David: But for most, they should go with a mainstream, which is even a weird word to use, but a mainstream Linux distribution like Ubuntu or whatever.

Jesse: For sure. It’s kind of interesting, like Linux is in many ways, ah it seems to come hand in hand with a more terminal based workflow.

David: Yes.

Jesse: And there’s no, I don’t know if there’s a good reason for that, but that’s often what you see. And there are some diehards who are just fully in the terminal. And that’s just all they do. And obviously you had an experience using like neovim and my own, tried to enjoy lazy git and lazy docker.

Jesse: I want to know like why why do you think we haven’t just moved completely away from terminal applications? like Why is this thing still lingering on and holding on for life? like what is What’s special about it that keeps it in in the zeitgeist?

David: It’s a really good question and I think if you had asked me like a year ago before I started my Linux journal, I would have said I don’t think we are. I think that most people even developers are actually not that terminally.

David: terminally exposed to terminals.

David: They are in VS code. They are in other things. They use a terminal, but I don’t know if most of them necessarily have an affection for it. And that to me really was part of the magic of switching to Linux.

David: I’ve been using a Unix-powered machine since, what, 2001 when I switched to Mac OS or OS X, as it was called back then, which is based on sort of Unix underpinnings, and terminal is a part of that, but obviously also very heavily grounded in the Mac yeah and graphical user interfaces and so forth.

David: And yet, even though all my work is like, I’m a programmer, I work with open source programming language, yeah I use the terminal for a whole lot of things. I don’t know if I had yet had the full exposure of what the terminal could be. And I think that’s why I’m actually so excited about what’s going on with Linux and tools like LazyKit that I didn’t even know existed.

David: and i That was my marvel where I went, do you know what? I’m a programmer. I’m doing open source development. like I should know. How is it that I didn’t know? How is it that I didn’t know that all these wonderful tools existed?

David: Not just sort of replacement for something like ah a Git GUI with LazyGit, but also all the little tools like Eza and all these improvements to the terminal experience that are out there.

David: And like it’s not even like they’re hidden. It’s not like people are like, Oh, you can’t see my awesome terminal world.

David: But there’s almost like a subculture that exists a little bit separate from the mainstream programming environment. And sometimes they overlap.

David: But I was just marveling at the fact that, oh, I didn’t know it was this good. I didn’t know it was this appealing. I didn’t know it was this enjoyable.

David: I thought, To be perfectly honest, I thought that people, Linux people, terminal heavy people, like were a little strange, like a little odd, like ah odd in a good way, right?-hmm. Mm-hmm.

David: But like odd in that that’s not me kind of way. And that was really a mistake. And I kind of feel like I’ve cheated myself out of, being more productive, having more fun as a programmer with all these tools available that I’ve really discovered this year in particular.

David: And that’s why I’m so passionate about going like, okay, if I didn’t know, it’s gonna be a lot of other people who didn’t know either.

David: So we gotta help them see what’s here. And I think Linux in particular, is really interesting because I think there’s a bunch of people in technology who’ve been exposed to Linux their whole lives because they’ve been working with the internet and whatever and Linux been a fixture since the 90s and they’ve anchored their perceptions of what Linux is to whatever some Ubuntu CD from 2008. hmm. Yeah.

David: or seeing some person with a split keyboard that just was like too far away, too weird from what they would do. Maybe they were running um like a a tiling virtual manager or something else that just looked very, very foreign from what they were used to.

Jesse: Yeah, like like a keyboard with no arrow keys, like that kind of thing.

David: And they just thought, exactly, exactly.

David: That Linux today is is a lot better than it was even five, six years ago. And I find this not just Linux. It’s true about a lot of things. Someone who’s been in technology for a while will develop a certain mental model of what certain technologies are capable of.

David: And those mental models will update quite slowly.

David: And they will quickly drift and get out of date. And I’ve seen that in other forms of of web development, what we think browsers are capable of, oh whether we need transpilers or bundlers and all these other things.

David: Sometimes it moves ahead of your mental model, and if you don’t,

David: make a concerted effort to catch up, you’ll just be left missing out on progress that was available to you.

David: And I think that’s really been part of what’s true in the Linux world. And I also think, unfortunately, part of the ah joke of Linux on the desktop, having been around for 30 years, is that it a little bit angers that, right?

David: it’s been It was a joke 10 years ago. It was a joke 20 years ago. It was a joke 30 years ago. Actually, you’d be a rational observer, you’d go like it’s also going to be a joke today and a joke tomorrow.

David: Because I mean, that’s just how most things are. If it’s been that way for 30 years, like it’s going to be difficult to pick up when it’s no longer true.

David: But first of all, I think it is no longer true. And second of all, I think the fact that it’s no longer true is partly connected to the resurgence of this fascination with tech with terminal tools, which I think LazyGet is one example of it.

David: Neovim is another example of it. Zellage and some of these other tools that we talked about are examples of these are actually these are modern tools. These are not tools that necessarily have a 30-year history.

David: I mean, Neovim has. basic back to 78 or whatever you can trace. within But the current implementation, that’s solidly modern, being worked on by someone else in just aging gray beards.

David: and That is a really fascinating phenomenon that reminds me about sort of other shifts where we go back to an earlier way of living and finding that more appealing.

David: Like, I’m into both watches and cars. And with watches, mechanical watches, they went through this quartz crisis in the in the late 70s, early 80s, where everyone went, there’s a new technology out.

David: It’s so much better. At keeping time at a low cost, you can make a quartz watch for almost no money at all. It’ll keep time better than the finest switch watchmaking. So you went through this period of, I don’t know, five, six years. I forget how long the the dark ages of the Swiss industry was with the quartz crisis. And then you came out on the other side and suddenly there were a bunch of people go like, yeah, but do you know what? The point of a watch is not just telling time.

David: The point of a watch is also to admire craftsmanship and the art and the all the stuff in it, right?

David: One example. The other example I like is manual transmissions. So manual transmissions have sort of been outdated for quite a while.

David: I know in Europe, I mean, we clung on to them for a lot longer than they did in the US. I learned how to drive a car with ah with a manual. But then automatic boxes got so good, and most importantly, especially in Europe, got so cheap that it no longer necessarily made sense to have a manual. And you went through the same phase also at the high end of the car market with all the supercars and whatnot. Everyone wanted the paddles. They wanted, like, new technology. It lasted for a quartz crisis amount of time until people realized, yeah, but you know what? Driving a car isn’t just about being efficient. It’s also about being involved.

David: It’s also about the joy of actually shifting a gear. Now, is that a mass market mainstream thing? People would just want to go to the shop? No, that’s not what a lot of them think about. But the enthusiasts do. And I see the same thing with Linux. And the terminal in particular, and those two things like how they’re related, people were just rediscovering the terminal. Actually, there’s something really cool about manipulating a computer predominantly through a keyboard.

David: And the terminal is just like that’s what the terminal is.

Jesse: Hmm. Hmm. here Yeah.

David: Notwithstanding the I’m always amazed when I i move my mouse around in Neovim and I can actually drag things. I mean, it’s about there’s a schism there that doesn’t seem to make sense. i’m I’m happy about it that it’s possible.

David: But I think the approach and the fascination with the terminal is returning to actually interfacing with a computer through the keyboard is really it’s not just neat.

David: It’s not just more direct in some sense. It’s fun. It’s fast. It’s productive. There’s all these different facets of it that all overlap. And I think if I was going to be predicting person, which what I like to do about predicting the future is to basically just extrapolate from wherever I am right now that’s not widespread. The terminal is one of those things. I think we’re going to see more terminal usage, more TUI’s.

David: going forward than we are, that there’s a resurgence with the terminal. And as the terminal resurges, I think the move to Linux is going to be very natural. I think what grounded a lot of people in the Mac was GUIs.

Jesse: yeah

David: That’s what the Mac is exceptional at.

David: That’s where it had an advantage over Linux. In the terminal, there’s no advantage.

David: I mean, if any of us think, if there’s a slight disadvantage, once you get used to a terminal, you like to have like a built-in package manager, and Whatever, all the other things that come with it. which Mac does a passable jump off.

David: I used Homebrew for many years, a wonderful project, but like I like the Ubuntu setup better. and I like some of this tooling better. And I like a whole operating system that’s built around those things. And then when you realize that, especially if you work with the web, you go like, actually, there’s something pretty neat about running the same operating system as I run my services on the computer.

David: My dependencies are described the same way. And I just get more familiar with the technology that runs the thing I put into production. I think that’s a good thing too.

Jesse: Yeah. I think that, um, most of the times that I’ve heard that a colleague is using Linux, it’s just because Docker for Mac was so slow, having to run this virtual machine and the fans will be blasting on your MacBook Pro.

David: Right.

Jesse: It was like a big thing in my previous company.

David: yes Yes.

Jesse: And, um, yeah, it makes a huge difference to just be directly in Linux.

David: Yes. It’s still a thing. It’s still a thing. I mean, what’s interesting is that Docker for Mac has improved leads and bounds.

David: I mean, it was truly terrible. The whatever the file system crosswalk thing that she’s

Jesse: Oh, SFX, whatever it’s called. Yeah.

David: exactly so slow and was so bad. It’s not that bad, but it’s still not great.

David: Like, for example, at at our company, 37signals, we run the test suite against the Docker database now. And when I run it on Linux, I can’t tell the difference whether I run those tests against a native MySQL or Postgres instance, or I run them in Docker.

David: On the Mac, it’s about a 30% haircut. Like, the tests take 30% longer to run. to run So there definitely is still a penalty there. What’s funny about that too is, I mean, I love Docker.

David: And one of the reasons I love Docker is exactly because it works both on the Mac and it even works on Windows and it works on Linux. And we even use it for deployment now. We built this tool called Kamal that uses just basically straight Docker as a much simpler version of getting containerized deployments without going the whole Kubernetes route.

David: So we’re just using Docker. Love Docker. I think it’s one of those great leaps forward containerization and productizing that in a way that makes it so approachable. Absolutely huge fan of it.

David: Can’t necessarily say about that that about the GUI on the Mac in particular. That’s my main source, right?

Jesse: As you can imagine, I agree.

David: Exactly.

David: Versus Lazy Docker has that same appeal to it. Like, this feels like the kind of technology that should be a TUI. Where it’s not even, it’s not a novelty, it’s actually just legitimately better.

David: What I usually want to do when I look at a container, I want to go in and look at its logs.

David: I want to have a quick hotkey to jump into a terminal inside of that container. Dogger for Mac does, makes that kind of cumbersome.

David: And Lazy Doggers is just such a great example of like, boom, boom, boom, you know, three hotkeys and you’re in, you’re doing your thing. Even more so, I’d say, even though I use it a lot less, but even more so than lazy git.

David: Because git already had sort of the foundation that a lot of people used it directly through the terminal. I certainly did. Even if I was also using the GitHub for desktop tool for some merge.

David: comparisons, I would use the the terminal for it a lot too. So you are already in the realm. You see Docker make it so or lay again makes it so much nicer, and especially to be able to… The main thing I used GitHub for, for desktop for, was when I wanted to make a partial commit.

David: I never internalized whatever I had to do in the terminal to commit like two lines out of a diff on a single spot.

Jesse: There was nothing to internalize. It was borderline impossible.

David: Exactly, yes. And actually,

Jesse: I still don’t think there’s a solution to that just directly using the CLI that doesn’t require updating the patch headers manually.

David: Totally. So I just before get up for Docker, I just didn’t do I didn’t do that. I just I would actually literally revert some changes if I had forgotten to make a commit, make the commit and then paste the changes back in versus with with laser get you get as good in fact better because it’s easier to navigate with the with the hotkeys and the terminal to add which lines do I want in and which lines do I not want in.

David: But that was that that was that difference. And then I think, again, the more you get sucked into the terminal because you discover all these great tools, the more of your workflow now lives in the terminal.

David: like the vast majority The only thing that’s basically left that doesn’t live in the terminal for me is the browser.-hmm

David: And all of this stuff reduces your dependency on a specific pacific platform. One of the problems I really had or I thought I had with the Mac was there’s these exclusive tools I could only use on the Mac. And some of them are true. like I like Apple Photos. I think the Apple Photos app is actually a really good app, and it’s one of the best way of synchronizing photos across mobile devices and with family members and so on. Really nice app. I had to sort of compromise when I moved to Linux to to do something else. I ended up with Google Photos, not super thrilled with that. I know there are other solutions. I’ve looked at a bunch of them.

David: But it wasn’t sort of slam donkey, right? And then I thought the same thing was true for my development workflow. I thought, for example, the text mate, which is an editor I’ve been using for damn near 20 years and they still love dearly, which is very much a Mac application.

David: I mean, it wasn’t available to Linux. How could I do without? And then. Over two attempts, the first one failed. The second one stuck. I discovered Neovim. And rediscovered, I’d used BIM like 20 years ago and still had some of those hockeys in my head. I rediscovered how neat it was. Then I discovered Lazy BIM.

David: which is basically taking all this hardship of the configurations, which I think, by the way, is an important point we should touch on, but took all the hardship of configuring Neovim, which can be anything, which also means it can be everything, and like it’s just a thousand blocks dumped on the floor that you have to spend like 50 hours figuring out how to put together into some workable editor.

David: Lazy Bim basically gets like, yeah, do you know what? I put all the pieces together for you. Here’s a great editor built on Neovim.

Jesse: Right.

David: And that was my first exposure actually to LazyGit. I didn’t even know it was LazyGit. I just did space and he was vi having preconfigured it-configured it that kind of led me that way.

Jesse: right

David: I forget whether it like then tells you to install it and that’s how I got the name that, oh, you need LazyGit or something, something, something.

Jesse: Oh, yeah, okay.

David: And I got down this trap and then I realized, oh, okay, my whole development workflow managing Git, my text editor, all my terminal tooling Zellage, like I was slumming it with tabs in the fucking default terminal on the Mac for literally years and years, right?

David: You you start using a Zellage layout where you have multiple panes and all this stuff and you go like, man, I was really on poverty row here with the setup, it’s so good.

Jesse: yeah

David: And then it only really took, I’d say it took probably two to three weeks before I went like, oh shit, I’m better off. like First, like sort of to be fair, I quit a little bit in spite.

David: ah Apple had just finally pushed me over the edge. It was with this whole debacle over whether they were going to kill PWAs in Europe to spite some legislation, whatever.

David: It was just a final straw. I had a tested relationship with Apple for a long time. But just to be fair, I went to Linux

David: at first because I don’t want to use a Mac anymore. I didn’t go to Linux because, like, yes, I want to see what Linux got.

David: but it was ah It was first a negative choice before it was a positive choice. But after about those three weeks, collecting all of that stuff and realizing, do you know what? My development environment is actually a lot better than it was.

David: And I’ve spent literally two decades building up the old muscle memory and using all the tools. And here I spent three weeks. They were difficult three weeks, I will say, when you first go from a gooey text editor in particular, even too lazy, get I’ll say. From GitHub to desktop, it’s not on day one, it’s not on day two, it’s not on day three that you go like, oh yes, I love it.

David: It’s a day like probably four. And the problem with day four is a lot of people don’t make it through day one, two, or three. But I did because I was so motivated to really get out. And then I thought by week three, after things have been terminalized, I could lean back and go like, I’m really happy this happened.

David: Like, actually, thank you, Apple, for whatever fuckery you were up to.

Jesse: Thank you for fucking me around, yeah.

David: but Exactly. Because if you hadn’t, inertia would just have done its thing. I would have stayed in my groove. I wouldn’t have discovered all this wonderful stuff.

David: And now I’m really happy that it happened. And now I’ve been running Linux for for months now. i I went kind of crazy. when When I first felt like I can’t use a Mac anymore, I went like, OK.

David: Then I have to find the perfect alternative. And that’s where I just, I mean, I kind of, it is work, but in another way it’s also not. And I stopped the normal work I did for a fair time to learn everything there is.

David: Like go full deep dive, like hours and hours of YouTube videos, hours and hours of Linux deep dives and styling and so on. And what that ended up to was like basically compressing like literally a total of hundreds of hours into a project.

David: That’s what I like to do. I like to learn something. And then I like to try to see if I can compress the complexity that it took me to understand all of that and then make it easier for someone else. And that’s what become became the Amacube project, which ships not only with Neovim, it ships with Lazy Git and Lazy Docker and all the things such that I could go like, do you know what?

David: I just spent hundreds of hours, some of it needlessly so, but I enjoyed it. Not everyone’s going to do that. There’s going to be a ton of Mac folks who just go like, do you know what?

David: I’m going to give this two hours. I need to see something in the first two hours that makes me hungry for more. And I thought, do you know what? If you set up a stock Ubuntu, and the first thing you see is that fucking purple terminal, you’re going to go like, I don’t know.

Jesse: Yeah, it is it is really depressing how in a lot of the stock, the stock standard ah distributions, the default terminal doesn’t look that good.

David: And again,

Jesse: And it’s like, I thought Linux was all about the terminal. Why is why is the standard thing here so below par, especially if you’re coming from the Mac, which you use like iTerm.

David: Yes.

David: Yes. And I think that that was one of the things where I had that experience when I first went to Linux. Like I spent a couple of days going like, I don’t know if I can do this.

David: Maybe I got to have to eat my hat and go back to the Mac because I just I can’t live like this. And then I forget how I stumbled upon it, but I think I stumbled upon the Reddit Unix porn.

David: which is this super ricer, whatever, everything is a, is a tiling VM set up, this, that, and the other thing. But what it did do to me was, oh shit, Linux can look like this? What? I vaguely remember having seen some images, but then I went into that Reddit and spent quite a while going like, oh, that’s really cool.

David: That’s really cool. That looks better than the Mac. That looks better than the Mac. And I went like, but what is my thing just look like this purple, purple terminal that like doesn’t have good padding doesn’t I don’t like it.

David: Right. And then I went, okay, do you know what?

David: This is possible. So a lot of people have figured out how to write Linux is still too hard and whatever. But like, if a lot of people can find this, could we not make this more accessible? And that was where it kind of is is two parts. And I think this is one of the reasons why Linux for some people have a hard adoption process because you have the Linux people who are literally like, I don’t give a shit how anything looks.

David: Aesthetics are not essential. In fact, they are a distraction. I want something as austere and as basic. I’m just about functionality. And I say, like, that’s the classic limit Linux image I have in my hand.

David: I don’t know what Linus, what his personal desktop looks like, but I kind of doubt it looks like Unix point. I just have the image that maybe he runs the…

Jesse: Same. He’s a very pragmatic person and I think he’s he’s not very aesthetically driven.

David: Yes.

David: And I think, I mean, we have all of the Linux ecosystem to thank for people like that, right? Like I’m ever so grateful that there are a bunch of people who just went like, I don’t care how it looks.

David: I’m just going to make it work and I’m going to make it free and I’m going to make all the things we love about Linux. But what I realized through Unix point is like, do you know what? Those people can still exist and still do their ah purple terminal default thing and not care about how things look.

David: And we can also have the other stuff. And if we take both things and we make it work together and we make it approachable and easy to set up and not hard to get like a good looking Linux that’s heavily influenced by the yeah Unix porn stuff.

David: combined with all the stuff that Linux already does excellently, like the package management and and so forth, combined with a curated set of defaults that are tailored to, for example, programmers, so that they don’t have to figure out how to install all these things and learn all the stuff that goes into learning it, I think we could win over a lot of people. I thought And I mean, I know I’m not exactly a novel here.

David: How many Linux distributions are there? About five million.

David: But I did think, actually to some extent, even seeing all that, there’s a packaging problem here. There’s a packaging problem where all the bits are there. Again, that joke is also literally decades old.

David: But all the bits are there. We’ve just got to put them together better. And that’s what got me sort of super excited about the Omicube project, doing that, at least setting it up as as I would want it. It was very self-serving, too.

David: I was going through new hardware at a ferocious rate, trying to find the perfect laptop and the perfect desktop. So I literally ordered, I think I’ve gone through six or seven different laptops.

Jesse: right

David: And I’ve gone through at least four different desktops. Just trying to find the perfect combination for for me, right? And setting everything up every time was a pain in the ass. And now half the audience is going to scream, this is what Nix is for.

David: And then I look at Nix, and I go, like yeah, Nix is one of those essentialists. I don’t care about how things work.

Jesse: Right.

David: I don’t care about how deep the complexity is. It solves some problems. Again, that’s not me.

David: I ah can’t do that. I don’t want to learn a whole programming language just to set up the configuration.

David: I want to build on something that’s mostly stock. I actually think, except for iss aesthetics, Ubuntu is a very fine operating system. And in fact, I don’t even want to slag on it too much.

David: You don’t have to do that much to default Ubuntu to spruce it up a bit. But you can do a bunch.

David: And that’s why I tried to do a number. Because I tried to set up like, what would but my ideal setup could be? Can I make it a one command replication?

David: So instead, when I get a new laptop in, because I want to try another one, I’m going to be up and running in like 15, 20 minutes, rather than two hours. and And I think i I certainly arrived there for me myself. And that that just gave me the confidence to think, you know what I think we could get a lot of people interested in this. I think a lot of people could see that you don’t actually have to put down the Mac. You don’t really have to be negative on the Mac choice. You can still go like, hey, Apple does a fine job making hardware. They really do. They make some great hardware.

David: But there’s also other good hardware out there, and some of it makes different trade-offs. I remember when I first set up my Framework 13 laptop, and I went like, oh shit, a matte screen?

David: I haven’t seen one of those since like 2008, or whenever the last MacBook was able to have that.

David: And I was like, this is really nice! I had totally forgotten that that existed because it didn’t exist, or doesn’t exist anymore in the Mac laptop world.

Jesse: You can sit outside and and be in the sun and not have to see your reflection so easily.

David: Right, right. and And then I went like, oh, I really like this keyboard. Also this keyboard, like the framework laptop keyboard is 1.5 millimeters of travel instead of, I think the Mac one is is half a millimeter of travel.

David: like This feels so much nicer to type on. Again, it was actually a little almost nostalgic. this It felt very much like the original PowerBook keyboards. I think they probably also had 1.5 millimeters of travel.

David: And I just went like, OK, the framework is not a unibody design.

David: So not everything just feels like it’s carved out of one piece of aluminum.

David: But it does mean I can change my RAM, which I instantly did and upgraded to like 96 gigabytes just because I could. And it cost like $120 or something.

David: Like if you can even imagine what Apple would charge for 96 gigabytes is probably in the thousands of dollars anyway did that always you can change the the SSD you can change the freaking CPU you can change the battery in like

David: whatever, 90 seconds. and And most recently, I’ve changed the screen. I mean, that’s something I didn’t even, never contemplated that that would be a possibility that you could change the screen to a better screen in your freaking laptop. So I realized that having been in the Mac world for so long, I kind of just narrowed the sense of possibilities, that there are different trade-offs that you can go like, yeah, the Mac is a good machine. The M chips,

David: I mean, pretty amazing, right? Like they’ve really started a new Renaissance for laptops and brought the competition to a new level and done wonders for battery. But do you know what? As much as I love a long battery, who doesn’t love a long battery, right? I actually care more about a matte screen and a good keyboard.

David: which is a thing I didn’t even think I was in the market for. I didn’t even realize that that was a thing you could select. And I think this whole Linux journal journey has just made me realize, oh man, there’s actually a very vibrant computer industry. I mean, this is a total joke about Mac people, right? Like that they just, they don’t know what else is out there. They know know what the options are and and whatever, but it was also kind of true. And yet being able to arrive at that place, even though it started from a negative place and then go like, do you know what?

David: i I don’t want to be here because I don’t want to be somewhere else. I want to be here because I want to be here.

David: And the journey started because I didn’t want to be somewhere else. But it’s thankfully, fine not even finally, after a few weeks ended up, oh, I want to be here because I want to be here. I really like this framework 13 laptop.

David: It’s been a while since I’ve really been affectionate about a laptop. I think the last one was probably the MacBook Air 11 inch.

David: For whatever reason, I just loved that machine.

David: It was totally underpowered, had all sorts of trade-offs, but just a great form factor. So I realized, oh, I could fall in love with laptop hardware again, and then falling in love with an operating system. i actually thought If you were to had asked me a year ago, I would have thought, like do you know what? I’m Mac until I retire. So it’s just been an exciting, super exciting journey to discover all these things, to realize just the body of work that’s available, and to align my own body of work more closely with that. I think that’s also part of it. I’ve literally spent my entire career making open source software.

David: yet being quite removed from one of the key pieces of open source software that’s out there, that’s Linux, and all the stuff that comes yeah downstream from that. Notwithstanding again, the law of these terminal tools, including LazyGit and other things, do work just fine on the Mac, but I think you’re more removed from it than you are in the Linux world.

Jesse: There’s so many so many things there that you touched on I’d love to dig into so Let’s talk about open source. So you mentioned configuration. I Get the sense that in open source tools configuration is a bit more unwieldy than what you’ll have in proprietary software and even even with laser gear that I think it’s just because

David: Yes.

Jesse: some guy i can just raise a pull request and say, hey, here’s a config thing it added for me. And you’re like, well, I guess that makes sense. I can’t think of a good reason not to have it. And I do look at the laser get config now. and I’m just like, oh man, like it’s it’s pretty big. And, you know.

Jesse: ah i Maybe it’s just a, like maybe I need to be more of a Nazi when I come to reviewing those pull requests or something like that. But you did mention config before and I was wondering, is that what you were thinking about? Like what what is it the that has struck you about like the complexity of configuration on a Linux machine?

David: Yes, that is a is a huge part. And I think it is really tied to the archetype of the original Linux user, who is all about maximum configuration.

David: I want my bespoke thing just for me, even if it takes me 100 hours to set that up, then I will have this just for me. I don’t share that vision at all.

David: In fact, I find that vision, and I mean that in the best possible way, off-putting.-hmm

David: Because I find it very, inefficient on a planetary scale.

Jesse: Right you kind of scale it

David: And exactly, I mean that in the sense of, so I’ve been working on Ruby on Rails for over 20 years now. And one of the driving principles of Ruby on Rails is convention over configuration. That there’s just a huge body of potential configuration knobs that if we require everyone to understand all of them and tweak them just right, that’s just a massive sinkhole of productive capacity that could have gone into better things.

David: And also, When you look at the array of knobs available, that in itself is a signal to a large group of people who say, this is not for me. I don’t want to understand 1200 knobs and how I need to tweak them just right.

David: I want to have one knob and one selector.

David: I want to get on board with this train before I become an expert in Dwarf Fortress.

David: So that is a… what I would categorize as a product sensibility. I don’t think there’s a lot of, there’s not an excess of product sensibilities in the Linux world in my opinion. There’s a lot of other things and a lot of things are perhaps good because that product sensibility is not there. But I think it is limiting to some extent and and I wanted to to counter that in part because that’s how I driven my open source development. Ruby on Rails is famously, convention over configuration.

David: How can we just all decide that we will spend a long time trying to find, if not the best, then a very good default, and then just go like most people shouldn’t mess with that.

David: Maybe there’s not even a knob. In fact, it’s funny, we’re working on a ah number of new open source tools right now. And No knobs, that’s literally at the sign directive. Like we’ve been going through, that we’re building some proxy stuff for making it easier to set up Rails applications and so on. And like the natural instinct for most programmers, and and I have to push back against this, it’s like, oh, this should just probably just be a configuration. And then I go like, okay, if it should, when would you pick one value over the other?

David: And I’d say, no, no, well, I mean, it should be eight. Eight is the right value because like that just is is’ nice. But in case someone wanted to change it, like they could make it three. And I’d go, no, no.

David: We’re not going to put a knob in until we can reasonably put ourselves in the mind of someone who wants to turn it for a really good reason. And that really good reason has to be sort of an essential thing that isn’t just because this was the first knob I discovered and I was actually trying to do the third thing, but this is a way to get around it.

David: Reducing the total number of knobs has value in and of itself. It makes a piece of software not just a appear simpler, but be simpler. Every single knob that can be turned is part of the power law of total configuration points.

David: If you have five knobs and they can all be turned 10 ways, you’re 10 to the fifth, right? In all the permutations. The more permutations, the more complexity.

David: Both literally, in tape there’s more places for bugs to come in, but also mentally and conceptually. And they actually, it’s the mental and conceptual part I have. The most interesting protecting that like we are fragile squishy humans who can only hold so much in working memory. The more knobs, the more this piece of software takes up in here and the less room there is for everything else. I mean, that’s the other joke about neo vim and vim in general, right? Like that you shove in all the key bindings and there’s actually literally no room for social skills.

Jesse: Yeah, yeah.

David: but should done with that and And I mean, that’s a joke, but it’s also maybe a little bit true.

David: Maybe some of the complexity that we tolerate in one piece of software is preventing us or prohibiting us from zooming out further. I’m a big proponent of conceptual compression, because if we compress concepts into smaller blocks that are easier to understand and remember, there’s room for more.

David: And if you can have room for more concepts concepts literally in your head, you can have room for a bigger and bigger picture.

David: And if your big picture can be so big as to encompass like your entire application and your entire work method, you can make more connections across the different pieces. And that’s where a lot of the core innovation comes from.

David: And that’s where you see simplifications because, oh, I i know the box over here is related to this box. This is why Rails famously tries to not just tries, but is a full stack framework. It’s trying to solve a large problem in a cohesive way. Let’s solve the web application. Now that’s a very ambitious, very large problem. But Rails goes like, okay, fine. Let’s solve HTML generation. Let’s solve database access. Let’s solve email out. Let’s solve email in. Let’s solve talking on web sockets. let’s

David: The only way Rails can remain understandable, not just for me, but for anyone else who wishes to adopt it, is if we try our dampers to compress every one of those concepts into small and small blocks until they fit.

Jesse: I

David: And a large part of that compression is, which knobs can we get rid of? So that’s what helps drive my aversion to knobs.

Jesse: don’t

David: And it’s not like,

David: know that it shouldn’t have any configuration point right like ah especially if you work on infrastructure tools like that’s basically the whole thing it is right now you get rails and then you make your own app and you do it by using rails and changing things and why not but there’s so much that I find to be incidental complexity.

David: right It’s there because it ended up there, not because it has to be there. And if you think hard about the problem, and if you keep it as a top value, that compression is is desirable, you will end up realizing, oh shit, we could get rid of that one.

David: We could get rid of that one. We could get rid of that one. So on the one hand, you’re shrinking the space of the solution, the conceptual space, while enlarging what it can do. That opposite direction is really intoxicating. I mean that’s basically what I love doing.

Jesse: Perfect, so I do want to talk about Rails. i mean I want to know, like what’s your perspective on why Node doesn’t have a viable Rails competitor? like They’ve had so much time to get their shit together. you’ve got ja Everyone has to learn JavaScript to be able to do front-end stuff, unless of course they’re like you know using hotwire and they’re not using stimulus. But what’s going on there? like do you what do you Do you think there’s some advantage that Rails has in terms of just like what the goal is.

Jesse: Like maybe there’s a difference in goals or maybe it’s just ah a time difference. Like what explains that?

David: I think it is a question of value and those values whether those values are able to be kept in check and in tech world to the ecosystem.

David: Ruby, already when I showed up, had very distinct and clear values. Ruby’s primary objective is for happy programmers.

David: That’s a very strange, odd, and at the time novel objective to have near the if not at the top of your list of priorities of how you design a program language. You could have all sorts of other things. You could have runtime efficiency. You could have size of executable. You could have memory performance. All sorts of things that people used to have up there, right? Java had like, let’s prevent anyone from doing anything dangerous. All these these things. Ruby had a happy programmers at the top of the list. That’s first of all weird. And by being weird, it is bound to be um

David: Not mainstream, which meant that the people who chose Ruby and certainly in the early days and I’d actually argue still to this day are choosing Ruby because they really want to.

David: They’re really attracted to that worldview that programmers are really important and you should write code first for programmers and we’re willing to sacrifice runtime performance for

David: lyrical code for poetic code again very foreign to i think a lot of those linux folks the long beers like they would go like what did you just say right I didn’t go like, that just sounds nuts.

David: But that tribe, if you will, those tribal values were both intact. Matt’s the creative group was able to keep them intact because he had control over the the language and no one was forcing him to grow market share or whatever.

David: And Rails was able to show up at the right time inside that community and fuse with those values to a point that, again, anyone choosing to pick up Rails, they were making an active choice.

David: That’s not true with JavaScript. As you just said, everyone has to use JavaScript. So JavaScript becomes this melting pot where folks with very, very different ideas of what constitutes good programs show up and actually both A, have to collaborate to some extent, but B, mostly don’t.m.m.

David: that you get all of this fragmentation because you’re forcing, essentially, the entire world to show up in one language community, and they’re never going to agree on anything, nor should they. hey This is the key point. In an earlier iteration of myself, I thought very imperialistic about program language, that you could sort of just conquer and mindshare. Because if you just taught them the gospel of whatever you were really excited about, they were going to convert.

David: And there’s some of that. I mean, people do convert programming languages when they find it appealing, but there are also a bunch of nonsense in that, in the sense that different people just wire differently. like And I think that’s probably, if we could find to be true, maybe even true on a physical level, like the literal wires of neurons and whatever are different, but it’s certainly true at an intellectual level.

David: Some people are like literally incredulous to the idea that you can write successful, software that doesn’t have ah static typing.

David: they they like i don’t

Jesse: i know I know many such people, yeah.

David: Exactly, where they literally, like their mind is not capable of comprehending someone making large successful systems in something like Ruby. Like forever their mind of it will be like, that’s a toy language or whatever. What about all these bugs? And what’s so fascinating about that world view is that it exists in direct conflict with reality. Direct conflict with like literally decades of proof, literally but hundreds of billions of dollars in enterprise value. All these things can exist and they can say like, no, no, no, but you don’t understand.

David: you have to have types.

David: And that’s what JavaScript is laboring under. It’s laboring under the fact that those people who simply cannot even conceive of the fact that you can write successful software, first of all, they have to use JavaScript, but which they then refuse, and then they start using TypeScript, right?

David: I mean, I’ve actually, I don’t know if I’ve ever seen another programming environment where there’s such a disdain for sort of the underlying system from certain dialects.

David: like There are a bunch of TypeScript users who are really not fans of JavaScript.

David: That to me is fascinating.

Jesse: Yeah, and vice versa as well.

David: that like

Jesse: Yeah

David: right right i don’t i don’t know if that’s it maybe Is that true in list dialects? I don’t know enough about that, or small talk dialects, or some other. Maybe it is. But either way, that’s not the case, obviously, in Ruby. There is Sorbet, for example, a project that’s trying to add types. but it’s it’s There’s not the big conflicts that you get in JavaScript, because everyone is forced to use the same thing in JavaScript.

David: So you could never have a Rails, because you could never have like a critical mass of mindshare capture, because no single concept or approach to software development can ever get that, because the people who are using the language are too different.

David: You’re bound to have all these tribal sections. And then when you have all these tribal sections, you’re going to have this constant churn. constant churn and jogging for position and problems of collaboration and and interaction.

David: It’s actually, to my opinion, kind of a marvel that it’s gone as well as it has, if you will.

David: But to me, it also does explain why we will never see Rails in JavaScript.

Jesse: i think I think about the person, like like how personality relates to programming language choices all the time. Because in my mind, I’m always thinking about like the big five personality model where it’s like ah openness of experience and disagree with us and all that.

David: Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes.

Jesse: And I think about how I made lazy get in go just because I mean, there was a good reason. I just like, oh, it’s a new language. ill I’ll do it and go. And then I found out when I look at like the Reddit, the subreddit for GoSoft and on Hackiness, I have nothing in common with any of these people.

Jesse: Like all the values of this community is just, there’s just no overlap.

David: Yeah. Yeah.

Jesse: And it is funny cause i think that I think about Go developers and they’re very pragmatic. They’re very, I would say low in openness and not in in a pejorative sense, but they’re just very, they’re about getting the work done and shipping code and all that stuff.

David: Yes. Yes. Yes.

Jesse: And I find that it’s ah it’s just interesting that, the like you were saying with Linux, in the early days of something,

Jesse: there’s a selection bias effect because people will go to something because they want to be doing that thing as opposed to being forced upon them and that’s how you can get these uh these communities which have which are very homogeneous and i just find it fascinating i find it really amazing because i was just like you i used to think like surely there is a one true way and maybe it’s Haskell it’s like i don’t know maybe it is but maybe we’ll find out but now i’m just thinking no i think it actually is just

David: Yes.

Jesse: or just a reflection of the diversity of ah personalities and perspectives of of different people.

David: I 100% agree, and I think it it is a great way to tie it to some of those fundamental psychological structures and coordinates. We don’t expect people to be the same in other domains. We don’t expect every person to like rap music or jazz music or classical. There are just different people who like different sorts of music. First of all, that doesn’t mean that jazz is right and rap is wrong, or however you want to put it,

David: or the same in so many other fashions or clothing or or different hobbies and so forth. Yet we have this mistaken notion, and I think a lot of it is rooted in in the miscategorization of most modern software development as software engineering, that it is in an engineering ah practice, and that you can arrive at like the best way of erecting the angle on this pillar.

David: No, you can’t. No you can’t software is just not that it has elements of that it has fractions of that mixed up into it, some parts of software development is more like software engineering, and other parts are very little like software engineering.

David: and i think It took me a while too to realize this, right?

Jesse: -hmm

David: It took me a while too to realize, oh, just because I’ve had this transcendent experience discovering Ruby does not mean that everyone else will. Because again, if you did a big five, like I would come out in a certain configuration and that’s part of the reason I like Ruby.

David: If you take someone who’s at the opposite end of all of that, they’d hate it. and do and they do that’s what I found too right like there’s tons of people think Ruby is a terrible language either they think too much flexibility too much rope to hang yourself too too inefficient too slow like there’s all these laundry list of issues you can line up and again all that

David: I was going to say animosity, and sometimes it is, but it doesn’t even have to be. It can simply just be like, I don’t like this.

David: Coexist in a world where literally there’s over a million Rails applications made in there, hundreds of billions of dollars in enterprise value. Put all that aside. Tons of people who are madly in love with Ruby as their favorite programming language of all time, including yours truly.

David: And once I kind of realized that, or it became apparent to me over the years, I realized, you know what, this must be true on the other side too. I guarantee it. There are people who feel the way I feel about Ruby about, go, probably, I assume.

Jesse: Yeah, totally.

David: um

Jesse: People fall in love with it.

David: OK, good. I’m not sure that is actually true for every single programming language in the world. But for a small enough N, exactly.

Jesse: I’m sure there is, I’m sure a brain spark and, uh, yeah.

David: For a small enough N, I’m sure that is true. And it’s also true that there are tons of people who never fall in love, who never use those terms to describe their relationship to the, I just use the best tool for the job, programming language that they’ve chosen to.

David: Like, I don’t even have an emotional relationship with my

Jesse: Breaks my heart to hear that.

David: with my with my tooling right like there’s tons of people were like that and like we all get to coexist in the world and even more to the point the world is so much more interesting because this is true holy shit the world would be boring as hell if first of all we were all the same on the big five first of all it would be fragile it would be mono branch of sort of history and nature we would be

Jesse: but

David: susceptible to all sorts of plagues that could wipe out the whole thing, that and that. But it was also just you exhausted very quickly. Like I kind of feel like I do know most of what happened or has happened in Ruby land.

David: I’m very well versed in all of it. And then occasionally I dive into another community like Go for example, we’ve been using Go for a bunch of proxies and so on.

David: And I sort of just dabbled in there and I go like, it’s like taking a trip to Japan.

David: When I did that for the first time in I think 2005 and I just went like, This is a hugely fascinating yet totally alien country and culture.

David: And I love going here for that fact exactly. The more the world homogenizes in that sense, the more we make everything just the same part of everything, the less interesting it becomes.

David: I want the internet in particular, and I think the internet, one of its main amazing accomplishments is that it’s a runtime that is indifferent to its programming environment.

David: I don’t even know if there’s literally ever been another major platform in the history of computing that’s like that.

Jesse: Okay.

David: I don’t think so. Where literally you can programming any of the, I don’t know how many programming languages has been in the world, hundreds. Any of the hundred programming languages ever invented can produce things that create web applications where the user doesn’t mind or care. And the web, as a method of delivering application, also doesn’t care. HTTP doesn’t give a shit what you use to produce the text that’s sent down the wire, whether you use Go or Ruby or BrainFug or Amos. It doesn’t care.

David: And that creates such a level playing field for all these communities to sprout in a million different directions. Like, there is not this homogenizing force. Notwithstanding JavaScript, and I mean, this is one of the reasons I bought like and don’t like JavaScript.

David: JavaScript has been a little bit of an homogenizing force and has had a level of gravity because it it has this blessed position in the browser, right?

David: That I don’t actually think is super healthy.

David: I like JavaScript. JavaScript is actually my second favorite language. but I don’t like that part of it. I like individual communities who know what they are and embrace that fully.

David: I don’t want Go programmers to suddenly discover dynamic typing and try to make the Go language a Duck-type language. No, no, no, no. Please keep Go with that temporal vision of what it is and how it’s built.

Jesse: I agree.

David: And the same thing with Ruby. You’re gonna add static typing to the core language over my fucking dead body. Like, I will literally go, Matt, if you’re listening, I will literally go to your house and knock on your door and do a hunger protest outside of it.

David: Or maybe even more to the point, I’ll just stop using the new versions. So allowing, especially the things that are pure. Not all languages are.

David: I have a sense that on the spectrum of purity of, like, PHP, which is a language I have great affection for. This was the first language I really got proficient in. This was the first language I made

David: full products in and made money with it, versus language that turned me into a professional program. I love a lot about that. I wouldn’t necessarily say that it is a language sort of with a high degree of structural integrity. And I don’t mean in the sense that it’s rickety. I mean that it doesn’t have like ah rigid ideology bound lines. It’s been like, oh, do you know what? Some people want some static typing. Let’s just add that in. Some people want to add this method. Ah, who cares if the naming is 100% consistent. Add it in. It’ll be fine.

David: Don’t change. I mean, in fact, anything, I think PHP, unfortunately, did change a little too much towards things that were perhaps perceived as more serious or more endearing.

Jesse: yeah

David: I think adding types to PHP, in my opinion, was a mistake. But anyway, that’s a different, or it is related, but just this idea that we should embrace our differences.

David: And Ruby and Rails have really been fortunate in that regard that it was

David: It was thrust into the limelight.

David: It never achieved sort of mainstream, not only dominance, but even a footprint, and then allowed it to be really strongly integrally sound.

David: Like, no, very few programmers were forced into Ruby and Rails against their will with a mission to then change it and make it interesting. There’s been some attempts, but the immune system in Ruby and Rails is very strong at this point, and I don’t see that happening.

Jesse: yeah

David: And I think that’s good. And I think this is why I love working with the web is because it literally celebrates that. It celebrates the idea that it could be a Commodore 64 that’s replying back with HTTP 1.1 and like, it’ll run it just fine.

Jesse: Hmm. Mm hmm.

David: That’s amazing.

Jesse: Hmm. I agree. Um, I want to switch to talking about once this is a line of products that, uh, yeah, that’s, uh, is it 37 signals to put this out?

Jesse: Is that right?

David: Yes. Yes.

Jesse: Yes. Um, so just as a quick preamble, it’s basically like a line of products. It says like, Hey, this thing you’re paying a monthly subscription for that’s kind of dumb because you’re like renting as opposed to owning something.

Jesse: Um, why does the world need once?

David: You did a good job explaining the basic premise here is I think the world is drowning in subscription software And there’s some irony to that because 37signals became a software company as a subscription software company.

Jesse: Mhmm.

David: We were very early in the SaaS world, well before the term SaaS was even invented. This is all the way back in 2004, February of 2004, when we released, I think actually on the same day as Facebook, Basecamp, our project management tool, which 20 years later is still going strong and is still SaaS.

Jesse: Mhmm.

David: And then we’ve done other SaaS tools since and I like that, but I’ve also grown to dislike the fact that everything is SaaS. Like for example, I i like photography and I think the best photography app is Adobe Lightroom.

David: Why the fuck is Adobe Lightroom a subscription piece of software? For many years it was not, it was just something I bought, and then it turned into this subscription. I’m like, okay, I guess it’s just this one thing, but it’s never there’s just this one thing, right?

David: Especially for organizations. like I thought I saw a stat, and this sounds incredible. me Maybe it’s too incredible to be true, but that the average mid-sized enterprise has 80 SaaS apps that they’re paying for.

David: 80, eight zero.

Jesse: I know that is not an exaggeration. So there’s a quick plug. My, my, the company I founded called Subble solves the same problem as once, but just by ah not trying to completely solve the problem, but just by like plugging in and looking at all your SaaS apps and seeing where you’re wasting money.

Jesse: And we’ve seen from plugging into people like, Oh my God, companies with 10 people could have like just dozens of SaaS apps.

David: Yes.

Jesse: And it’s just crazy.

David: And I think it’s that weight that’s finally, it’s actually interesting how these things like, what is it like a drop in the water somewhere? Because I kind of feel like the institutional awareness of SaaS overload came around the same time as the consumer awareness of subscription overload, right?

David: Like we went through this age where everyone had like five subscriptions to different streaming services and then they had five other things.

David: And then at some point they realized, holy shit, I’m spending half my paycheck.

Jesse: Yo,

David: on subscription software, and I’m not owning anything.

Jesse: Netflix.

David: right And unlike the World Economic Forum, they were not happy. they didn’t own They owned nothing, but they weren’t happy about it.

Jesse: Yeah, yeah.

David: And I think there’s a growing awareness inside ah ah companies as well that, you know what, things got a little out of hand. It got a little out of hand with, first of all, too many overlapping tools. it was One of the great advantages of SaaS is it’s low friction, right?

David: You can sign up for a piece of software and you can start using it like literally seconds later. We rely on that at Basecamp. This is why we’ve been successful over all these other all these years and many others as well. But that friction can also get so low that it’s so easy to sign up for like five different packages that all do overlapping shit.

David: Like why do you have so many pieces of software where then your data

Jesse: Totally.

David: is spread to the wings. It is a little over here, a little over there, a little over here. First of all, that i I just have something fundamental about that. That doesn’t seem like a good idea. I’m not sure I can articulate 100% why, but like having all the data required to run our operation spread across literally 80 different tools, there’s something about that that doesn’t seem right.

Jesse: Hm. Auto dependencies.

David: all that It’s like dependencies. That’s exactly, that’s a great way of thinking about it. I hadn’t thought about that. Yes, dependencies. Which by the way, that was one of those differences between the Ruby world and the JavaScript world, like odd even is a dependency.

Jesse: Yeah, yeah.

David: you have a script we’re like

Jesse: Left bag.

David: Inconceivable that that level of functionality would be packaged as an individual dependency in Ruby land. We deal with much more ingrained things. Anyway, once tries to address this at the root where we go like, you know what, SaaS is in large part popular because the web is so good. The web is such a great software development platform that a large part of SaaS winning was because the web was just better.

David: The browser is an amazing runtime platform. It’s so easy for people to understand just the innovation of like having one navigational interface for all the different apps and so on. Just incredible, right? But that got wrapped up in SaaS, and it needn’t be.

David: e got They got married right from the beginning. A business model got married with a software distribution platform. That’s not necessarily how it has to be. There are different business models that can plug into that distribution platform. And for a while, SaaS seemed like the only option because the other ways of distributing web software were really complicated.

David: I remember getting a preview of how GitHub Enterprise used to work back in the early 2010s before containerization.

David: It was like a consulting project. It was like installing SAP. It was like, all right, let’s put apart a long period of time. You’re going to have your Linux machines and we’re going to send people on site.

David: I don’t know if they actually send people on site. But it was a very laborious process of doing things. And then we’ve had this string of incremental improvements in the ability to package software, web software, and distribute it.

David: Containerization is obviously the big one.

Jesse: -hm.

David: We started talking about Docker. Docker is literally the one to thank for the majority, the lion’s share of all this. All of a sudden, you could take all this hardship of, like, how does it run on this operating system, that operating system?

David: What ah what are the dependencies it needs? and just One fucking file.

David: One file. And then you could do like Docker use and you could even make it a single command line, whatever. I thought that innovation has already been internalized by programmers for like, oh, I need my sequel. Let’s run it through Docker.

David: It’s so easy. And there’s been attempts here and there at doing it with commercialized software. I think GitLab and other things have been distributed this way. But the target audience was always always a heavily technical developer type people. And I just went like, at some point, things have gotten so good. They’ve gotten so easy. I bet you we can boil this down to one command. I bet you we can boil down the entire installation process from like you start with a virgin Ubuntu machine, no dependencies at all. You run one.

David: freaking command and you’ll have a once product up and running and updating, auto updating and all the other things that people like about SaaS software, right? But you will own the software. It will run on your computers.

David: You will own the data. No one will have access to the data and it’s yours forever. I can’t put you out of business, right? I can’t like Google you. I can’t Google graveyard you is what I meant to say.

David: Like, whatever, 300, 400 services they’ve killed, they kill a dozen every year.

David: That can’t happen to you if you own the Docker image. Like, it’s literally you, and I guarantee you, I shouldn’t guarantee anything. I’ve been getting into retro gaming. And one of the things that amazing

Jesse: Wait, wait, wait, wait a second. Which what games are we talking about here?

David: ah We’re talking about basically these sort of things. These retro gaming handles, things that can run everything all the way back to the beginning of of gaming history.

Jesse: Oh, wow.

David: And one of the games we’ve been playing recently is Space Invaders, and you know what’s ah the main one I think?

Jesse: Right.

David: Asteroids. Asteroids is from I think 1978. I’m not playing a version of asteroids. I’m not playing a re-implementation of asteroids. I’m playing fucking asteroids as it was written in the mid-70s before I was born in the Atari offices. That code!

David: is running on my thing today!

Jesse: That’s crazy.

David: That’s amazing! It is, I mean, I don’t think people realize just the amount of things that had to come together for this whatever sub-hundred dollar device to be able to run the original code of a computer from the 70s.

David: That’s insane and it gives me such hope that like this version of campfire campfire is the first once app.

David: It’s a chat application. We basically our main realization on this like subscription overload was actually slack. I heard about some slack bills and I like I couldn’t believe them. What do you mean you paying tens of thousands of dollars to run?

David: whatever, a few thousand people on Slack. That just sounds so fucking crazy. Like this is such a commodity piece of software, yet you’re being charged thousands and thousands of dollars, in some cases millions of dollars. I’ve talked to Toby at Shopify, his Slack bill is just unfathomably large.

David: And I just went like, okay, let’s start there. Let’s make essentially like ah an 80-20 version of Slack.

David: like Slack does about 400 trillion things. And it’s a very good piece of software. Again, I don’t have to say anything negative about Slack. It just it does a lot of things. And a lot of people don’t even need an iota of those things. Can we make a installable software package an alternative to Slack for them that they can buy once and then they can install, run, own their own data and all the things?

David: And then I can have this vision in my head that in 2079, someone’s going to be fucking running that. They’re going to be running it just like asteroids are running on my thing now from the 78.

David: And they’re going to run it for two reasons. One is Docker has now reached escape velocity. Docker is going to be around forever.

David: I mean, forever is a long time, but I would bet good money that’s going to be around in 50 years.

David: It’s like we still have cobalt code and whatever. It’s just ah such a wonderful idea and a way to encapsulate software. Very akin to what’s happening in the rest of the gaming world. And then the other thing is, I bet you that in 50 years you can still render a web page from 1997 and it will render the same way.

David: that these two, both this way of packaging software and this way of running software, have reached such a critical mass and have such an institutional allegiance to backwards compatibility, that it’s gonna last forever. Do you know what I can almost guarantee you? I mean, that’s not exactly a a stretch here. The version of Slack you run today, there’s no fucking way that runs in 50 years.

Jesse: Yeah, definitely.

David: I would give, there’s good odds, it’s not even, first of all, actually, if you go back, what is that, two years? When was the last major Slack redesign? I think it was like a year ago or something. Ton of people did not like that redesign, right?

David: The version of Slack that literally existed two years ago is never gonna exist again.

David: No one’s never gonna be able to run it again. If they like that version, too fucking bad.

David: Run the new version, it changes to something else. That’s not a vision of software I like.

David: And it’s almost enough to turn one to Stalman-esque rants about software freedom and and whatnot. And it’s one thing I’ve had to sort of discover over time where I went like, you know there’s a lot of software I never want to see updated.

David: no I have a Brother LH2364 printer. I never ever want to update the firmware on that fucking thing. like That solves the problem in a way.

David: I have no interest in any improvements, any changes, any upgrades. It just needs to do the thing I bought it from until the end of time, preferably.

Jesse: yeah

David: There’s a lot of software like that. In fact, this was and informed by the fact that so we started 20 years ago, the original version of Basecamp from that I started programming on in the summer of 2003, literally 20 years ago.

David: Those original lines of code, at least a fair portion of them, are still in production today for customers who signed up between 2004 and 2010 when we ran that original version. We’ve chosen as a SaaS provider to do this crazy thing of keeping that software running 12 years, no, sorry, 14 years after we stopped developing new features for it, we’re still running it for those existing customers. It’s, by the way, still a million dollar business, amazing that that thing can happen. and But what’s even more amazing is I will talk to customers of that software, right? And I’ll talk to them like, so what do you like? Do you still like Basecamp? How do you use it? And they were like, we love Basecamp. Love Basecamp. I love what you guys are doing. And I’m like, you know we’ve been doing things for 14 years, right?

David: And they’re like, no, no, no, no. This thing I’m running, this Basecamp, that’s the one I love.

David: They’re not in the market at all. They can be, some of them don’t love Basecamp. They just use it because that was whatever is running. Inertia does its thing, right? But there’s also a contingency of people who just really like that version of Basecamp.

David: And who the fuck am I to argue, right? why Why shouldn’t you be able to run that? Well, with most SaaS, almost every piece of SaaS you can’t.

David: You cannot run the original version of Slack. You cannot run the original version of whatever, Google Docs. You get an internally upgraded version and that has benefits, let’s not discount that, but certainly also have drawbacks.

David: And the drawback in terms of choice and freedom for the individual users to stay with something that they like, I find increasingly problematic and once is our attempt of swimming against the stream on that and going like, do you know what? It’s not written in stone that web software has to be SaaS. We could use the advantages in software packaging to make web software available in the same way that I used to be able to buy and install Adobe Lightroom.

David: That is a vision of computing. Whether it works or not is a completely different thing. Maybe not enough people want this or or whatever. I think it’s too early to tell. In the early days of Basecamp, you could certainly look at our numbers and go like, this SaaS thing, never going to take off. So who knows? Future’s going to tell. But that’s what I like working for. I like to work for like these positive visions of what the future of software should look like, whether it’s directly for developers, conventional configuration and all these things, fewer knobs, or it’s in the consumer space or or commercial space with things like once.

David: More freedom. And again, it’s such a Stalman-esque thing to say in a way that I perhaps would have ridiculed more like 10 years ago, because I hadn’t seen the same things.

David: We hadn’t seen the rise of Apple and Google dominate and strangle distribution for mobile platforms. We hadn’t even conceived that that level of regression was possible.

David: When I started working with the web in 2000, well, actually I started working with the web in 95. But let’s just say when I started working, we started working on on subscription software at 37signals in 2003. The web was becoming the predominant software distribution platform for new software and new things.

David: Mobile wasn’t here yet. It seemed for a golden moment like all software developers were going to have the freedom to distribute whatever software they wanted, written in whatever language they wanted, and had access to the premier software computing platform. And then, to our blessing and curse, 2007 happened, and and Steve Jobs goes like, rep repeat after me again. It’s an internet communicator. It’s an iPod. it’s a Yeah, what was the fucking third thing?

Jesse: Camera.

David: It’s camera? Maybe it was camera?

Jesse: It was one of them.

David: It’s like these three things, right?

David: It’s the iPhone. And the iPhone, again, starts rambling. Slowly, Ballmer’s laughing. What do you mean $500 for an oppson sometimes? This is stupid. And then it’s just Congress all, right? And then we end up now, 2024.

David: Actually, let’s just pull back three years before antitrust sort of got its wheels running. 2020. Actually, yeah, 2020, we launched Hey, our email app, right? SaaS app with mobile clients. And I go like, we have a good idea. We’re going to compete with Gmail. Fucking sounds like the stupidest idea in the world, right? What, you’re going to compete with a really good piece of email software that’s fucking free?

David: What are you, insane? Anyway, that’s the mission we set out to to do. And we thought, like all right, we’re going to take the battle against the Google here. And we realized, oh, no, before you get to that boss, you’ve got to clear this lower boss.

David: And the boss is called Apple. And they guard access to the most popular in the US mobile computer amongst people who spend money on software. Wait, what? yeah but but We have to fight them even to we have the right for users who want to buy our stuff.

David: to be allowed to install that software on their device?

David: What? What do you mean? This is fucking crazy. Yet we had this prolonged battle where if it had turned out the other way, we would literally, ah that business would have gone out of business. Hay would not have been commercially viable if we didn’t have a iPhone app.

David: 85% even, I think, of paying users on hay use Apple devices.

David: I mean, they just have such a stranglehold, right? So you go like, how did this happen? How did I start my career and enjoy such success in a world where like, if you have a good idea, you just put it on the web and if people like it, they buy it and you contact.

David: Now there’s this fucking 800 pound gorilla just standing in the middle saying, first you pay me 30%. And even if you do, I don’t like your app. You can’t sell to users. What? so It’s in some ways, perhaps it’s a curse, like anyone who grew up as a software developer from probably what, 2012, 13 forward, never knew another way.

David: Like Apple as this dominant force in software distribution was sort of just a fact of life.

David: I remember the before times. I remember the web.

David: I remember what it was like to be able to just have a good idea and put it online and be able to convince customers to buy it directly. so That’s, again, one of those positive visions I want to continue to to fight for. And that’s where it all ties back into the Linux thing, right? Where I go like, do you know what? I don’t know if you saw the latest update of macOS. You can no longer, is it Control-Click to start an application that has not been signed and verified by Apple?

Jesse: What?

David: So they took out that shortcut for starting software that has not been notarized by Apple. Now you have to go through a super convoluted step dance to figure out how do you actually allow the software that you’ve downloaded to run on your computer.

Jesse: I’m aware of the right click and click open. Is is that…

David: That’s the one I think they’re killing.

Jesse: Well, I don’t know what I’m going to do now.

David: So again, I think it’s still physically possible. You just have to do a deep dive menu.

Jesse: I really don’t like that. I don’t like that. it’s it’s

David: I don’t like that fucking at all either. And what I like even less about the specifics of that is that I don’t like the trajectory at all that Apple has been on for now quite a while. And like it’s not like they didn’t tell us. when When the iPad was really hitting its stride, and I think it was mid 2010s, Steve Cook at some point goes out and say, the iPad is our idealized incarnation of what computing the future computing should look like.

Jesse: Some ideal.

David: That should have been a fucking chilling warning to anyone who cares about computing.

David: That a lockdown device where you can basically do fucking nothing that Apple doesn’t allow you to do, that’s what they see as the future pinnacle of computing. Fuck me. That is really dystopian in its literal sense of the word, right? Now what’s so fascinating is that, okay, so this is happening and this is before Apple even even puts out the M1 chips on the laptop, right? Like these are computers. Apple makes good computers. They’ve made leaps forward with computers. They should be our allies.

David: And that’s actually what I thought they were for literally 20 years. I’m the biggest Apple advocate and converted my half my student class.

David: I started university and in what, 2001, got a MacBook there. and No, sorry, 2003. I had a MacBook. Everyone else had a PC, everyone.

David: One MacBook, right? By the end of our study, half. And I will take some personal credit for forcefully crusading and perilistically around going like, that PC is dumb.

David: Look at this iBook. Isn’t it great? So we made we made advertisements for Apple. Jason and I, my business partner, in I think 2006 or something recorded an ad for Apple that they used on their developer side.

David: and We’ve been a huge Apple fans.

David: And I’ve been a huge Apple fan because I think they made good computers. And I think they were aligned with people who wanted to use those computers to build the kind of stuff that I wanted to build. And then obviously, first, the iPhone happens, and it’s this blowaway success.

David: And then the iPad happens, and it’s also not the same success, but still a success. And suddenly, the mag is this minority part of the business. And and you end up realizing, as I’m talking about mental models that can that can drift, you end up realizing, oh, shit, my mental model of Apple’s wrong.

David: They’re no longer on the same side of like computing as I am. They have a different region of computing.

David: And what’s happening with the Mac now, I think is just it’s to move, every iteration is going to move closer to their ideal interpretation of what computing should be.

David: And I think that is the literally 180 degree opposite direction of where I want to go. And that’s what I find. but actually not just satisfying, but holy shit, what a relief that Linux exists.

David: I mean, if Linux did not exist, we would be in the same shithole where I am in mobile. You can get get either poison or poison.

David: Do you want Google? Do you want Apple? Both of them suck in terms of the future prospects of computing on on On desktop, you can either pick Apple or Windows, or thankfully Linux.

David: Linux exists here in the middle, offering us a way to have actually a say on the future computing. Holy shit. I mean, thank you, Linus, and everyone else over literally three decades for making that choice possible.

David: Otherwise, I don’t know if I just like chug it all out and go like, all right, I’m going back to potato farming or something.

Jesse: Yeah, like, I need my computer to understand that as far as it’s concerned, I’m God. And I wish, I wish on a Mac that was just a toggle. I could, I could, I could toggle in the setting saying like, I’m an adult, like just let me do my shit.

David: Right, yep, no.

Jesse: But, um, yeah, it is funny that things have just gotten worse. I can even remember, honestly, even back when I was making video games in high school, I’d make a game, I’d export it to a .exe file because I was on Windows, and then my antivirus would say, this is a virus.

David: Yes.

Jesse: It’s like, how the fuck would you possibly know or think that if I just made it?

David: Right, it’s not on the white list.

Jesse: So, that’s right.

David: You’ve not been re-approved to the party.

Jesse: That’s right. And it’s like,

David: Go away. i When you’re like, wait, I remember when the first computer I got was an Armstrong CPC and the fucking thing booted into basic. Like the first thing you see, you turn the thing on, basic prompt, cursors blinking.

David: What do you want to program today, sir? like Literally, you were in command of the thing on its most fundamental level.

David: Now, I do think there is, and this goes to the point of whether the product sensibilities in the Linux community has helped or hurt it or whatever. I do think there’s there’s room to recognize that computing has gotten better for a lot of people.

David: There are a lot of people who would not be using computers if their computers still booted straight into basic. right So we can recognize that. and still but like But there’s a way to marriage What that was, our ability to command the hardware, if we said like, hey, do you know what, jump. The hardware would damn well jump if that was hardware wise possible. Not go like, I’m sorry, sir. Apple has decided that jumping is not for today. ah that That’s not a constraint that that that’s there.

David: But yeah unfortunately, it doesn’t seem like the the future of those mainstream platforms is in that direction. And with Windows, it’s really interesting because Windows, mean i switched to I switched to Apple originally because I was switching away from Windows. I hated the Microsoft of the late 90s. I despised the Bill Gates of the cut off their air supply era, right? Just an absolute Sort of staying on computing.

David: I could not wait to get away. I was very begrudgingly using a Windows machine at that time because I kind of felt like that was the only option.

David: the My beloved Amiga had kind of hit a dead end. Commodore had gone bankrupt and all the other stuff. And then the Mac comes around with a Unix powered operating system that does all those things.

David: And it has huge amounts of compromises, right? Like the first OS X machines were fucking rough.

David: They were slow as hell. Those PowerPC 800 megahertz CPUs were no match for what Intel could put out on on the PC side. But I was like, I don’t care. I don’t care if it’s going to be 50% slower. I want a machine that isn’t owned by Bill Gates. And now history is coming full circle around. And I would actually categorize when or Microsoft as the far lesser evil threat to the future of computing than Apple is.

David: I mean, at Microsoft, even though I don’t love everything they do, certainly not everything around the AI stuff and and whatnot, but their respect for backwards compatibility, oh, i’ve I’ve grown very impressed with that.

David: The fact that you can run a Windows 95 program on a modern Windows machine today is nothing short of kind of incredible.

David: like that That doesn’t exist in the same way in the Mac world. So anyway, all these things go around, but but I cut to the fact of like, do you know what? I wanna be on a platform that is, most is it’s like what you’re saying about the the Go thing.

David: You pick up Go, right? And you go like, oh, I kinda like this. Then you go out into a Go community forum and you go like, oh, these people are not like me at all. They like very different things than me. Am I in the right room? Maybe I’m in the wrong room.

David: That’s what I realized with Apple. I’m in the wrong room. we’re This room is not taking me towards the future of computing that I’d like to see. Linux is. and I had outdated mental models about what Linux was and how nerdy you had to be to figure it out and whether I could even could be an enjoyable place to be and an aesthetically pleasing place to be. And then I updated those mental models. I realized, holy shit, it’s not just good. It’s freaking great. Not without its flaws and drawbacks and whatever, but it’s freaking great. And and it’s very aligned with the future of computing that I’m interested in.

David: Oh, man, I was just thrilled that that exists, thrilled that there was this whole world for me to discover. That’s half the fun. if you just I think that’s part of the problem sometimes. And I did the same problem.

David: The first thing I tried to do when I switched from the Mac to Linux was I tried to set up BS code to be a copy of TextMate.

David: I tried to replicate my Mac environment exactly one-to-one of Linux, and that was always going to be a cheap copy. It was always going to fail.

David: I was always going to notice the ways where whatever the Mac gnome skin was not quite pixel perfect, right? You can’t do it like that. You’re gonna end up feeling like you’re just using the cheap version and that doesn’t have a happy future.

David: the in The breakthrough for me was to realize, all right, you know what? I’m gonna adopt Linux on Linux terms.

David: I’m not gonna remap my ah super key to be the alt key so that it fits my muscle memory from a Mac keyboard

Jesse: That’s funny because I have done that and I have been noticing that it is kind of painful because it’s never, it’s not perfect.

David: It is. It is.

David: And it’s never going to be perfect. And it’s going to be this cheap copy. And I don’t think, actually, you’re never going to end up in a place where you’re there positively. Where, like, I’m on Linux because I want to be on Linux.

David: You’re going to end up with, like, I’m on Linux still because I’m really mad at Apple, even though I want to make my Linux machine just like the Apple.

Jesse: yeah

David: No way to live. No way to live. So once I realized that, and it took me a while, That was when the world opened. That was when the oyster opened up and like there was just like fucking pearls all over the place. Like what? Neovim? Oh shit. Oh, Lazy Kid? Oh my god. Oh, uh, Isa? What the hell? Oh, Alacrity? Oh, Zellage? What?

David: And then I ended up going like, oh, oh yeah, I can live here. like This can be a nice place to be. So that’s what I would say for anyone who’s considering this. First of all, you got to accept the changing computing platforms, especially if you’ve used one for as long as a lot of people have used the Mac, like five years plus, decade plus, two decades plus.

David: You don’t do that in a day. That’s not how the brain works. That’s not how it works with anything. You don’t break any habit, muscle, or otherwise in that amount of time. You have to go almost up front and say, I’m going to give this two weeks, and I’m going to stick with it even when I fucking want to chuck this thing out the window. I want to stick with this thing when it’s even still frustrating, because otherwise it’s just not going to happen. right You’re going to get to day three, and you’re going to go, I’ve wasted so much fucking time, and I still don’t know how to close this file.

David: ah So, i and that’s hard, right? right that That is not an easy task to ask people that this is why there is such inertia in computing, right?

Jesse: yeah

David: I actually think people are more likely to change their insurance company than they are to change their computing platform.

David: And people don’t change their insurance companies very often unless they have a traumatic experience that forces that. Inertia is one of the most powerful forces in the human universe.

David: which is why it’s so important that to un-launch that, we have to have like some emissaries. some Some early wanderers were like, hey, I just came from your your tribe. I used to live there for 20 years, but I saw this oasis over here. You should come over.

David: Come over. It’s actually pretty cool. I made it nicer. So like when you arrive at this Oasis, it’s going to be slightly easier for you to arrive than it was for me. That’s what I’ve been trying to do with Omakoop.

David: And yeah, come join the party. And again, not everyone will. Not everyone should. ah Lots of people love their Mac, right? like i You and I can perhaps talk about it. That’s just a terrible future of computing, whatever.

David: And then there are people who go like, no, I think Apple should just

Jesse: I’m safe. I feel safe. Yeah.

David: right like Wouldn’t it be better if Apple just decided whether every piece of software was safe or unsafe? and I mean, okay. Fair enough. like Continue to buy your Apple.

David: That’s an opinion. It’s not mine.

David: and And let’s self-select, right? like Part of giving up on the Crusades in in programming languages is to give up on the Crusade, period. like It just doesn’t work to forcefully buy the sword, convert people that way. Convert people by going like, hey, this oasis is a lovely place to be. If you’re not happy with the city you’re in and maybe it’s a little dirty, you should come out here.

David: and maybe over time we will build up this oasis and it’ll become even bigger and you’re gonna help us and and all the things right and I think that that’s that’s where Linux is right now.

Jesse: -hmm.

David: It’s a really exciting time or something that’s like actually ancient in computing terms, right? Like we’ve literally had like Linux for like half the time of the modern computing era.

David: Is that right? Yeah, almost, right? Like from whatever, late 50s to now. Almost half the time, Linux has been with us. And to be able to rediscover that that gem exists, that is just incredible. So anyone listening, if they are on a Mac, and especially if they’re like, terminally infected, right? They like living in a terminal and they like working with that, you should give model Linux a try. I think if you give it if you commit to the two weeks,

David: I’d give it better than 50% odds that you can stick.

Jesse: Totally. All right. Do you have a question? Do you have time for a question on philosophy? Because I know you’re one of the few programmers who also philosophize a lot online.

David: Oh. Shoot.

Jesse: Sorry. What is so bad about attachment?

David: that’s ah That’s one of the big ones and it’s a really interesting one because I think especially if you fit think of Buddhism, that’s probably one of the main tenets of that where you go like attachment is the root of suffering.

David: I forget what the exact Buddha wording is of this. I think it actually basically something like it is suffering, attachment is suffering to some extent.

David: And the Stoics, which is sort of the Western interpretation of a lot of those Buddhist ideas, have similar ideas that if once you become attached to something, you become a prisoner to it. And if you realize instead that like your your true freedom is your inner world,

David: and your development in the union world and development of your character and so forth, you’re going to be a whole lot more resilient towards adversity if you can essentially afford to lose more or less everything. The Stoics even went so far as to build up this whole training program, mental training program, for how to become better at dealing with attachment. A negative visualization is what they call it, which is ah which there was a principle instead of like it’s it’s almost the opposite of forget what it was called, there’s a modern thing. like Think it and it will happen, right? The stories went like, eh, do you know what? Think about all the terrible things that could happen. Think about all those, just such that you build up your resilience to to terrible events, because terrible things will happen. It’s just that kind of world.

David: you’re not gonna make it through the end without anything terrible happening to you.

David: Most humans will go to duration and will have multiple terrible things happen to them. And some of those humans are utterly destroyed by it. All of them will have a hard time with it, like that’s the definition of a terrible thing, something you have a hard time with it.

David: But some people will recover more easily and more successfully than others. You should be one of those people. You should be one of those people where when faced with adversity, whether personal, professional, or otherwise, you’re the resilient one. You’re the one who who gets back on their feet faster and starts going again and keeps going. And dealing with attachment is one of the central themes in that building of resilience. And it’s it’s one of those things that’s That’s such a fascinating topic and also really difficult because I think, just think, we know that humans are pre-programmed with loss adversity.

David: right pro Humans would rather would rather not lose $50 than win $100.

Jesse: yeah

David: We’re really loss adverse in a way that like economists would say are irrational or whatever, but that’s how we’re hardwired. so if If you’re gonna sort of make it through and be the resilient, strong character that ah hopefully you desire to be, you gotta deal with that.

Jesse: Yeah. Hmm.

David: You really gotta deal with it and you gotta deal with it with it head on. Now, what’s interesting to me is I’ve been on this stoic journey for, when did I get introduced to that? Maybe that was Tim Ferriss in like 2005 or something, I think, when he started writing about it.

David: So a good, almost maybe 20 years. I am not going to say I’ve come full service full circle on it, ah because I haven’t at all. I think storage system is still the main mental operating system that I try to bootload every morning, because I find it so powerful and so common.

David: What I have also found, and that’s perhaps even more true in the Buddhist version. I’ve been reading a a bit on that side.

David: I think you can also take it too far. literally not being attached to anything. Maybe it’s making for more tranquil mind, but i also I don’t find that that enjoyable. There are actually moments where my relationship to certain things like sport. I’ve competed in motor car racing for quite a long time. And when I started on that, I was quite attached. I was quite attached to outcomes and successes and so forth. And i as part of De-attachment or whatever you will, reducing my reliance on attachment also become less attachment to those things.

David: Like what are the outcome of ah of of a motor racing part of it?

David: And I remember still the feelings, the sort of more stronger emotions that store systems so much about, right? It’s about keeping a calm mind, not being overcome with emotions, emotions are actually So it was a negative for it.

David: And then I think, but there was actually something enjoyable about those swings.

David: There is something enjoyable about getting worked up about the outcome of a sports match or something.

David: That is perhaps, certainly in Buddhism, and also in Stoicism, it’s kind of frowned upon. I think it’s the official canon of scriptures and so forth, right?

David: You’re about to keep a steady line, not be too moved by anything, just oscillate around the steady line.

David: Where I actually think, like you know what? Some of the human experience is to have some of those tips, at least get more of them. Now, I’m not a scholar in either of these things, certainly not in Buddhism.

David: and And maybe these things are as starkly in a position in opposition as as I present them to be here. But that’s at least one of the things that I’ve found.

David: I say, overall, most humans who have not studied any of these mental operating systems can benefit tremendously from growing less attached to things they cannot control.

David: That’s how stoicism puts it. right there It divides the the world into basically two things, the things that you can control, which is your own reaction to things, which is your own disposition, and then the things you cannot control.

David: Those are the outcomes of, for example, the sports match or a motor race or all these other things. You can’t control them. Don’t get in that invested into things you can’t control. Invest all of that energy into building up the things you can control, like your reactions.

Jesse: What interests me about that? So I also like last year spent a bit of time looking at the Buddhism and it is very heavy on the acceptance side of things. It’s just like accept, accept, accept.

David: Yes. Yes.

Jesse: And I think about, you know, the serenity prayer that’s like, God, give me the strength, to change the change of things I can, the grace to accept the things I can’t, and the wisdom to know the difference.

David: Yes.

David: Yeah.

David: It’s a version of the same thing. yeah Yes. Yes.

Jesse: And I feel like that last part is so crucial. And it’s like, you can just go, I’m just going to accept everything, but it’s like, yeah, but there’s also a lot of things that you can change.

David: yeah

David: Yes.

Jesse: And, uh, I feel like, uh, I’m still, I’m still on the lookout for a philosophy that can just tell me, here’s how you decide what you can and can’t change and therefore where to put your emotional resources.

David: Yes.

Jesse: That’s right.

David: and you’re not gonna find it. that that It it is.

Jesse: That’s right. It’s too complex. You can’t have a philosophy that you just write there.

David: And I think as though to some extent that is liberating because if you could literally just find an operating system that was pre-programmed for all the responses you should have to the world and everything that happens in it, you’d no longer be human.

David: You would literally just be an automaton, right? You would already have, you would already know how to react to all the things because it could be pre-programmed according to a certain algorithm. And thankfully, we have not discovered that algorithm.

David: Now that doesn’t mean we actually shouldn’t try searching for it.

David: It’s just like more of an individualized search, right? Like we end up, we fork. There’s a base operating system either Buddhism or Stoicism or or even Christianity. And then you fork and you you put in your own patches to deal with some of the vulnerabilities and whatever the stuff that comes up.

David: and And I mean that’s part of the pleasure of like you’re still involved in your life. You still literally have free will and everything has not been pre-ordained and and so forth. So I think that I mean you should be on the the march for it and I think at least I’m trying to imagine in my head what would have triggered me to look into stoicism early because I kind of sort of wish I did. Stoicism to me discovering stoicism and it’s not quite like discovering Ruby I think That was more immediately inflection point, but I think Storrs has almost had as big of an impact on my mental models.

David: But I had like a ah homegrown version of that. I basically didn’t have anything to fork from. I was just trying to build from first principles, like let’s just start with sand, now make a CPU, now come up with a assembler, whatever, of how I wanted to process the world.

David: And the reason I became attracted to Stoicism was like, it felt like just a more refined version of that. It was like, what if those thoughts had 2000 years to cook?

David: It’d probably be better. And of course it was, right?

David: Yeah, so I think, I mean, still adopting a philosophy, ah trying some out, right? This is the other thing, just sort of with programming languages, I didn’t know upfront that like Ruby was going to be the one that just sort of

David: just fit, right? Like I tried a bunch of different things. I tried Java and tried PHP, ASP.NET, I tried Perl, I tried Python, tried a bunch of different languages.

David: It was Ruby that fit and the only way I could know that was by trying it. So I think this is one, I mean. a lot of religious thinkers, maybe that’s this is blasphemy, right?

David: But to some extent, trying out some of these operating systems. And that’s what’s so interesting, that some of these operating systems are overtly religious, like Christianity or whatever.

David: And some of them are not in the same way. Like Stoicism is not overtly religious. There’s no deities that are baked into the system and whatever. There’s some idea of the universe and living according to nature that you can summarize the same way.

David: Buddhism also has some of the things and whatever, maybe that’s somewhere halfway in between. But like they’re all operating systems. They’re all ways of processing the world and trying to make sense of it and your place in it. And I do think that having knowledge of different operating systems will help you. And for some people, they will discover one operating system and go like, yep, that that’s the one. Now, others will just get their pre-installed. I grew up in a Catholic household, and that’s why we go to Mass. OK.

David: First of all, all power to that.

Jesse: like Totally.

David: ah In fact, if anything, I think one of the, now we’re really getting into the weeds here, but one of the problems of modern day is that there’s not enough pre-installation. there’s There’s way too many folks who are just being left with like an open boot drive and they’re like, oh, well, I’m gonna put my CPU and assembly language and whatever together from scratch. And the most important principle here is just consent. If I say it’s good, then it’s good. ah I think that experiment has failed. And this has been one of the main things I’ve realized over the last, especially 10 years, just going from, I remember Belmar’s, religious,

David: I think it came out in late 2000s or something where he just makes fun of religion and points out all the ways they’re stupid. And like he’s actually right in a lot of particular minor instances of that, right?

David: There are a lot of stupid things. A lot of these operating systems, the ones that endure, they’re like 2,000 years old or more.

Jesse: The fireball of cultural belief system.

David: How would they not have both? Exactly. How would they not have bugs and dead code and whatever things that doesn’t correspond to modern whatever? Okay. Yes. Recognize that. Try to debug it. Try to update it. Try to patch it. But also Steve’s, um, or not Steve, Joe Spolsky, one of my favorite essays, even though I don’t always agree with it is like, uh, I think it’s for 2001 don’t rewrite.

David: And he wrote this about, I think it was the Mozilla rewrite, that like rewriting Netscape from scratch set back in Mozilla so far that they could never catch back up.

David: Rewriting a mental operating system is really, really difficult, and you’re not gonna get it right in your lifetime.

David: like operating systems literally mental operating system literally take hundreds of years if not millennia to sort of hone and perfect or not even perfect because they’re never going to be perfected but like make good and make just viral enough just have enough stories and allegories and whatever that like normal people can sort of understand them and then also make them resilient enough and also make them adaptive enough to their environments and and all sorts of that like to think that we should just like not boot up anything that we should just like all right that’s a civilization we’re not gonna pre-program anything we’re just like you choose whatever you want that experiment I think I used to believe in and I think it’s pretty been a pretty resounding failure yes

Jesse: Yeah, I’ve been, I’ve had a similar experience like the God Delusion by Richard Dawkins and all that stuff. I mean, in high school, I was at a Catholic high school. So I have plenty of reasons to hate religion just by being in that environment, having to do prayers in the morning and we’re always depressing prayers with Grosven for some reason.

David: and Right. Yeah, yeah.

Jesse: Um, and so I was all like, yeah, this is all great. But then you do realize that there’s something there. You don’t want to throw the baby out with the bath water. And we’ve definitely done that.

David: Yes.

Jesse: And there’s many people right now trying to find a way to salvage the good stuff. Um, and it’s just, it’s, there’s like a question about like, do you need to have some, some mystical element to it?

Jesse: Like, do you have to have some like claims about the afterlife or something to, to have a belief system that everyone can get around or is it possible to just kind of be let’s say atheist but then also have like just the s stark stuff and i think that’s an open question we’re going to find out whether you can have

David: I don’t actually think it’s that open, unfortunately. I used to, the School of Life, what’s his name? Shit, it escapes me away. The School of Life have been advocating basically secular churches for a long time.

Jesse: and which Which is just obviously, ah but hang on. So are you about to say that that’s absurd? Because I feel like that’s absurd.

David: I think there’s something in there where where the idea you were just talking about, can we capture the good parts of religion without the the metaphysical or supernatural stuff, right?

David: And I think that’s what the secular churches were trying to do. How can we capture the community and the virtues and the moral instruction and all these other good things that I think A lot of people, at least, would recognize, not all, but a lot of people would recognize as good things out of religion.

David: ah Can we capture those without the package? And I think Bill Maher was on that with religious listeners. We don’t need this. We can have good moral institutions. Ricky Gervais has been on this many times.

David: right like he One of his great jokes is like some religious person there. Well, if God doesn’t tell you that murder is wrong, why wouldn’t everyone just go on my own murdering? And he goes, well, I murder just as much as I want, which is absolutely not at all.

David: And he’s sort of an avowed atheist and has a lot of funny jokes about it. And I can recognize all of those critiques, both from Bill Maher and Ricky Gervais and Dawkins and so forth, and still go like, OK, well, I kind of feel like we’ve had an opportunity to run your experiment.

David: on like a broad population for some time, like ah religious rates have been going down and and whatnot. Like your side of the argument has been winning.

David: Has that improved things? Are we better off?

David: I don’t think so, to just to be blunt.

David: I mean, we can certainly argue about that. And some things are better off, and some things are not better off. On a whole, are more people in a good place where they know their place in the world, they have sort of the security of that?

David: No, I don’t think they are. And I am very susceptible to the idea that some of it comes with Even if it’s supernatural, the belief of an afterlife is a common belief.

David: The belief of a higher power and that there’s meaning with everything and like what was before the universe. And I just started reading the Tao, Confucianism and that sort of stuff.

David: And it’s the same fucking, you you look at that, and which is also not overtly deistic. The Tao is not a deistic thing. It’s more like Stoicism’s sense of nature and according to the universe and so forth.

Jesse: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

David: They all have that. like They all have at the core a higher power.

David: like Something that makes the whole thing make sense. so And I think if you look at the and existentialist Satra and whatever, right you’re like, oh, you’re just thrown into this world.

David: Nothing makes sense. It’s a cold and uncaring universe. All you have to do is you you have to find your own path. And I actually like the a lot of the essentialists writing. I love Camus and and so forth.

David: But you also go like, ah i this is not a this This operating system you’re presenting is essentialism is not compatible with most brains.

David: I don’t think when they run that, we don’t end up but in a good place. We end up in this weird place where suddenly we the golden calf becomes consent theory. But like literally anything and everything goes as long as like two consenting adults or one cons consenting adult is on it.

David: And I just go like, hmm, on further reflection, I don’t believe that to be true. Now, open, very open question. What the hell do you do with that? Like, and I say that, you know, I would say a lot of positive things about religion, right?

David: I’m not a religious person. I don’t have a supernatural belief. Sort of kind of wish I did to some extent, because some of these, like, I like the idea of believing that like, I’m not just worm food, but like, after that, there’s going to be

Jesse: Same. Same. I’m jealous.

David: puffy clouds and I’m gonna, have whatever, program all day on my favorite mechanical keyboard or whatever idea you could have about heaven is going to be right, which by the way is really funny. but George Orwell has this wonderful essay about Why, I think it was a leftist critique, but his critique was essentially, why is it that no one can articulate what heaven is, except in its absence of heaven is a place where you don’t have to work all the time. Heaven is a place where ah you always have enough money, like it’s all very fuzzy. And then everyone seems to be able to articulate hell very specifically.

Jesse: Yeah, you’ll be on fire and you’ll be getting poked by people.

David: none of there’s these guys with horns and you’re in a fucking cauldron of fire being burned for hundreds of years and there’s pitchforks and like that’s very vivid right which gets to this this this leads into this critique is like first of all and this one does yes he comes up with two like humans wouldn’t fucking know what to do with heaven If they arrived in heaven, they’d give it 10 minutes, and then they fucking start smashing things just for something unexpected to happen.

David: I think that’s his line out of Notes from Underground, which is a wonderful book.

David: And you just go in all of this like, OK, I see all the value of religion. I think actually society in in very many ways was better structured and more cohesive and whatever when it was more prevalent force.

David: I don’t know how to put Humpty Dumpty back together again.

Jesse: Hmm. Well, yeah, i so I think that, you know, maybe if stoicism becomes more and more popular, it may be that there’s just enough there, just the fact that it was come up with by like great guys, 2000 years ago or 4,000 years ago, however long it was.

Jesse: Like maybe there’s just enough mysticalness in that that you don’t need to invoke a deity to be able to get behind it. Um, but yeah, I think.

David: Yeah, so so what makes me slightly skeptical in that and I say that as someone who very much enjoys store system I mean it’s, it is my main source as I said of operating system pre programming. But it also has this tendency sometimes when like there aren’t these other parts than it, it pulls in.

David: There is a stereotype of a story stoic Western California dude who’s a little too much into ice baths and whatever that guy on on YouTube um longevity and some of these things where you just go like shit.

Jesse: Yeah Hmm

David: but Maybe that’s also, do you know what, there’s not gonna be a perfect operating system. Not like fucking any of the old ones were perfect. They all had serious material flaws.

David: Maybe those flaws were less, and this is what we’re learning now, than what the absence of those operating systems is offering us. I think that’s a very fair critique. One, Jordan Peterson is very articulate on, I’d say.

David: But still, it leaves us with a lot of sort of consternation without necessarily any good answers. I feel like most of the proposals I’ve seen, to the extent that they’ve actually been tried, pretty modest uptake on it that like, again, maybe it is to get a ah blockbuster viral mental operating system going, you need a little

Jesse: You might need a Messiah.

David: you know, you need a little explosions and a God that shoots fire and some of these other things.

David: and And maybe that just doesn’t work anymore. Like maybe Hollywood actually killed that, right? Like now you can fucking see superhuman hero movies and and all that stuff. Like maybe it just doesn’t, it just didn’t work.

David: And then what does work, I mean, the operating systems or or viruses, I would actually call it. I mean, now we’re really getting into territory. mean ah Memes or mind viruses as a

Jesse: Memes, basically.

David: as the good Elon would like to label some of these ideas that that’s come up, right? That the things that are now, what do you call it, optimal or adapted to the environment are pretty fucking dark, right? Like they take society in really bad places really quickly. And that still leaves us like, what the fuck do we do? Clearly it is still possible to infect societies with The positive word would be, sort of, I don’t know, actually religion is even a positive word and in those people’s own vocabulary, but like,

Jesse: Spirituality.

David: i mean yeah But maybe there’s some of that or maybe it’s just like some sense of the right side of history that was one way of framing some of these things for a while that like that can still sort of work right and so we’re still able to very quickly actually shockingly quickly although maybe not so quickly if you take the ideology of rights out of history, for example, right there’s roots all the way back to the 20s, even back to the 1800s, and certainly to the 60s right like that’s where a lot of the Long March 30 institutions and all that stuff in Google, some of those terms if you’d like to find out more, but some of those things got planted and then maybe now what we’re seeing is basically just a

David: the final outcome of it and just looks like it kind of went crazy in the last 10 years, but actually that’s a 60 year march through the institutions as some of these people would would talk about.

David: But clearly we are able to in to influence how people think. That is still there.

David: Can we find essentially like a positive mind virus? Can we find a way, and that’s, I mean, that is what religion is to some extent, right? Like ah tractors would call Christianity a negative mind virus, I guess, if you don’t like Christianity or whatever.

David: And it’s not like they’re all the same either. So, I mean, it’s not about equivalency here.

David: I don’t think there’s equivalency. I think there is. different religions and thought processes and ideologies lead to very, very different outcomes. And some of them are terrifyingly worse than others. But can we come up with a good one? Like, can we restore those good parts of what religion brought to the table ah in a way that breaks the curve of adoption, the adoption curve.

David: We’ve been on this trailing curve for a long time.

David: Can I find, just like me speaking about myself, can I find one of those? I like to believe in something greater and bigger and whatever. and Stoicism is some of that, from some aspects, but not a uniform theory of everything the same way that a full-on religion is, right?

David: Like, a religion, that’s a pre-packaged program here.

David: Like, here’s your place in the world, and here’s your relationship to the deity, and here’s how it’s mediated, and here’s how you should act, and and so forth. um

David: Sometimes I mean this is I’ll drop another reference here escape from freedom by Eric from is one of those books that really Cooked my noodle which is essentially about what do we do with all this freedom?

David: So we want our freedom from feudal society. We’ve won our freedom from oppressive religions now you are as guess the existentialists would say you’re thrown into this world and it’s up to you to figure it out and And a lot of people go like, well, fuck that.

David: No, thank you. All this freedom, totally anxiety inducing, totally not what I would.

David: Can you just tell me what to do, please?

David: ah You were hinting at that a little bit, right? Can I find an operating system that will just kind of give me more, give me more specific guidance about more specific things? And I think, again, this this is one of the things that you can have that or you can have the adaptability.

David: Like Christianity is actually, if you just take that, quite specific about a great number of things. What are you supposed to do in that situation? And is there a goat?

Jesse: Which is good, right? it’s It’s good if you’re a farmer 2,000 years ago. It’s not as useful in the modern times where there’s this sprawling complexity.

David: Yes. And I don’t think we’ve seen an updated version of that, right?

David: Like Christianity in particular, and many of the other religions of the time, they were very specific about all sorts of things. And a lot of them were quite practical in like, oh, whatever.

David: juism were like ah you should need, what is it, pigs or whatever.

Jesse: Hellfish.

David: There’s all these sort of things that are ah historically angered into things that made a lot of sense in that time and place. And then there are other things that are timeless truths, right? And those timeless truths, that’s the part we now take.

David: I’m like, this is a good part of the religion. We should focus on those part. We should not focus on the over-adapted, very specific parts that made sense 2000 years ago. but maybe those things are still necessary, right?

David: Like, so can we get more of that today?

David: Can we get something that has some of those specific, here’s how, here’s some good eye tips on how to live.

David: Is that what self-help is? ah Then I think, oh shit, that didn’t, whatever was there didn’t hit critical mass either. Maybe that’s not also possible. I mean, 2000 years ago, how many people were on earth?

David: Like, I don’t know, a few hundred million. Now we have going on 10 billion by the middle of the century. Maybe it’s like JavaScript. Like, just forget it. You’re not going to come up with one operating system, one religious thought process that’s going to be able to do it.

Jesse: but That’s right, yeah. like

David: You’re going to get up with these sex or, I mean, I think that’s a negatively, I don’t even mean that a negative word. I just mean that in a religion that’s not like all encompassing, right?

David: I haven’t found one. Like not one that gives me the level of specificity of like don’t eat shellfish.

David: And if there are days where I would like to escape from freedom, where I would very much like, yeah, I’d like a little more prescription.

Jesse: totally

David: And it’s so interesting, too.

Jesse: Totally.

David: is is one So I’m immigrated to the US from Denmark.

David: And Denmark is a far more prescriptive society. There’s far more social norms. They’re far more broadly shared. They’re far more severely enforced. Some people might have heard of yendelung, which is sort of a way of creating social cohesion.

David: Don’t believe you are anything. Don’t believe you’re better than other people, whatever. with That’s a kind of operating system, by the way, one that certainly also has negative consequences.

David: And then the US, where we’re basically, of all the societies I’ve spent time in, is the most

David: You do whatever the hell you want. Pursuit of happiness is a very individual pursuit.

David: It’s very existential to some extent. you That’s up to you, man. You figure it out.

David: Do your thing, right? and No one is saying do your thing in Denmark. I don’t know if there’s even a fucking Danish expression for do your thing. I’m not saying that no one believes that.

David: I’m just saying that’s not a cultural value that like goes on a fucking t-shirt.

David: and And I like some of that, right?

David: But then I also, I went back to Denmark for three years during the pandemic and I went like, oh shit, this is also nice.

David: I really like the cohesiveness. I like the homogeneity of a society that has very shared values, strong social norms that allow my fucking kids at pre-teen to go on the Metro by themselves at nine o’clock at night.

David: I mean, I referenced Japan earlier. A lot of people go to Japan, they go like, oh, it’s so clean. There’s no crime. There’s no, yeah, I mean, they want to they were run an operating system that runs pretty much much a society.

David: It’s got some pretty strong social norms, and it’s keeping that version of what they want that society to be in very tight check, right?

David: And again, that’s stifling for some people in some regards. and America has a different version of that, but I can look at both of those things and say, like, I personally like a lot of things about America, but I also like the things that are really unique to Japanese culture or Danish culture. And a large part of that is that is actually far more prescriptive. Those are very prescriptive societies for the members of those societies, how you should act, how you should live, what’s good, what’s bad, whatever, even to the point of shared sort of interests and songs and ways of acting. I mean, one of the things, just a quick anecdote, when you arrive in Copenhagen Airport and you walk out, you will invariably see a large number of people standing with Danish flags, waving those flags when their relatives come home.

David: They’re just like, yay, we’re Danish!

Jesse: That’s bizarre.

David: This is awesome, and you’ve been abroad, and now you’re home to Denmark, and Denmark is great. I mean, I’m just sort of adding the comments from here.

David: If you stood in Portland Airport with a bunch of American flags waving them back and forth, you’d get coded at a as a certain individual.

David: And I’m not sure most Portlanders would kind of be on your side of that. ah divide, however that is, right? That’s really interesting, right? It’s really interesting that something as being proud of your nationality, as as most things I would say, they’re quite proud, maybe sometimes so full.

David: But they’re like, yeah, this is good. We’re proud of Denmark and Denmark is a great country and we should do great things. And then you come to America and you’re like, oh shit, that’s not a universally shared value.

Jesse: No.

David: We’re not like just all proud of being Americans. That, there’s something else.

Jesse: Even if flying the flag is a controversial decision.

David: Yes, right. And like again, to just to try to take an objective perception of it, you can see how certain expressions or whatever things end up being coded.

David: right Like that side, I don’t like they’re doing the things. So now I can’t do things, even if I perhaps wanted to. right Even if I perhaps thought, like actually, the American flag is good, but now the other side is taking that point, so I can’t use it.

David: Yeah. i is So one of the other things I find in all of this is, first of all, holy shit, the world’s complicated. And I mean that in both that it is and it isn’t.

Jesse: That’s right.

David: Like some of these universal truths, they’re not very complicated at all. And religion, some of them have these great kernels, and they’ll just literally, one of the things I find reading Stoicism is the amazement, like, I’m reading a fucking book that’s 2,500 years old.

David: How is he talking with such specificity about specific situation, I feel like, I mean, right now, in intra-human communication?

David: How does that feel? how has nothing changed in 2500 years and probably much further than that I just don’t have the texts but like the diagnosis of of human psychology for example that is inherent in stoicism amazingly apt not all of it no yeah exactly right and you go like

Jesse: Yeah, not not much has changed. It’s kind of like Ecclesiastes, nothing new under the sun. Yeah, at least in terms of human human interaction and human behaviour.

David: Yes. so So there is obviously some of that that’s like eternal truth and their higher truth. And then on the other hand, in sort of the more specific concrete sense, no one fucking knows anything. Don’t know where we’re going. We don’t know what’s happening. We don’t know what’s up. We don’t know know what’s down. We don’t know what’s true. We don’t know what’s false. It’s a very disorientating, and that’s what Erich Fromm’s Escape from Freedom is is ah is about.

David: ah being set free from sort of universal truths and whatever, and everything is, this is what postmodernism is about, right? Like deconstructing everything, and like everything is relative and it’s all in the eye of the beholder and it’s whatever. It’s first of all, I don’t know where I am at. that Is this fundamentally true? Is it not true? I don’t know. I don’t think it’s helpful.

Jesse: Yeah, that’s right.

David: I don’t think it’s helpful. I don’t think it’s helpful that we all have our own personal truth. That I don’t think is helpful. What was I going to say? yeah so like What do you do? and and We don’t know, right? There was a pandemic I was coming from. to me Pandemic was a really radicalizing period for me. and There was a lot of mental models I had about a lot of different institutions and people and even countries that like just got fucking blown to smithereens.

Jesse: Yeah, i’m I’m in, I’m in Melbourne. I’m in Victoria, or Australia, where we were like the most locked down.

David: Oh shit, ah you really got the full.

Jesse: I did not see that coming i until 2020.

David: on

Jesse: I thought Australia was America light. And then I just watched how we just all locked down and it was all like vaccine mandates and stuff like that. I was like, okay, fair enough. Seems like we have some different values than what I thought we did.

Jesse: Not but making a value judgment.

David: It’s like the go thing.

Jesse: I was just surprised that there was so much uniformity about it.

David: Right? it’s It’s like the go thing. You’re like, oh, I like go, I’m like whatever, and then you show up, oh shit, these people, I thought we were, oh no, oh, we’re not, oh, oh.

Jesse: yeah

David: To me, the i mean I have some friends from Australia, and I got some of the anecdotes from there, including including some of the quarantine stories where I just went like, i I’m believing this because you’re my friend, and I know you’re not lying to me because you’re my friend.

David: If so if a stranger had told me that, I would have gone like, That sounds crazy.

David: I don’t even scarcely believe those stories. So that was pretty wild.

David: The one that really noodled me, though, was the Canadian trucker protest. And because I had the same mental model of Canada. Oh, Canada is like just a kinder, nicer America where they’re more polite and they’re constantly apologizing for everything.

David: And you’re like, holy shit, no. There’s also a deeply authoritarian streak here that I did not have in my mental model. And I think if you’re looking at what’s going on in the UK right now, with their going on, so so let’s just put it like that, the like you will get arrested and prosecuted for retweeting the wrong tweet thing that’s going on.

David: You’re like, oh shit, I also did not know that. like how did that i mean COVID gave some previews, some hints, but what’s happening right now to me is just like, I can, I can, I, sorry, I see a tweet on Twitter and it go like, eh, someone’s fucking exaggerating.

David: Let me look that up through a source and like, holy shit, here’s the official video of the police person, like literally just saying that.

David: We’re gonna come after you and I don’t care if you’re in United States, you retweet the, what? What the what? And again, Actually, I don’t want to say i what I was about to say was almost like the go thing. Hey, if that’s how you want to live all good. I know that’s one of the things where I actually do think there are universal truths and there are more right and more wrong answers. And I think on that particular point, America actually has more of the right answers when it comes to things like the First Amendment. In shining freedom of speech,

David: to that degree, that deep into the operating system that’s really difficult to extract and pull out or even curtail. ah Holy shit, that has been an illustration of why that was such a smart idea.

David: Because then you look at the UK or Canada, I don’t know as much about the Australian situation, where you see like that was not baked into the foundation. And that means it lives on a much higher level in the stack.

David: It’s like in, it’s in Usuland and like fuck could just be deleted.

David: Like someone could just go like, all right, we don’t need that app anymore. Free speech. What do you mean? Like, what was the quote something about? Yeah, I mean, this is the hypocrisy that I find so fascinating.

David: On one hand, people who don’t believe in free speech at all feel a necessity to like still think that they do. Like almost all authoritarian regimes, even if you asked them in China, they’d probably be like, yeah, yeah, yeah, free speech.

David: I mean, except for criticizing the party, except for what was they saying?

David: What’s the term in the EU now? Oh, misinformation. I mean, free speech, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Jesse: True.

David: I mean, except for saying things that like, whoever’s in power right now, nobody can be true.

David: I mean, what? I think that’s basically the definition of not free speech, right? No one needs free speech to say the pie is delicious.

David: but Like that’s not that’s not what we’re trying to protect here.

David: We’re trying to protect controversial statements, opposition, critique, all the things, right? And I mean, that’s also one of those things where like the human instincts are all this time, like no fucking…

David: tyrant in the history of the world has ever like critique, right? How many fucking kings and barons have cut the head off the jesters who were a little too funny at their expense, right?

David: You’re like off with their heads. So we don’t cut people’s heads off most of the time in the West at least. But we still don’t like it. And if we can find a way to finagle the system to essentially prosecute these things and and make them shut up, that’s the main thing, right?

David: Make them shut up. Don’t say that. It’s really, that’s in misinformation, disinformation, malinformation. a It constantly seems to mutate into a new new version here. Then you end up with which sort of this pursuit and you go like, this is actually one of the things that are simple but hard.

David: I love those kind of things. So much of Again, what I like about stoicism and why I keep rereading the manual by picticatists, for example, it’s not because I’m learning new things. It’s because the things I learned are very difficult to put into effect on a regular basis.

David: And I need constant reminders to be able to enact the things I want to enact and act the way I want to act, right? And it’s the same thing with these fundamental principles, right? Like freedom of speech is a very porous and easily sort of dilutable concept that you don’t have to add too many caveats to it before suddenly it doesn’t mean anything at all. And I think, again, and I didn’t use to do this.

David: I would give America a tremendous credit. like It’s actually quite specific in the US case law and whatever, what constitutes free speech and what doesn’t. You’re like, all right, you can’t be in a mob right now saying,

David: attack that person and chop their head off, right?

David: You’re gonna be held culpable for that. You’re not gonna be held comfortable for for general things like saying, like, I don’t like this person or that person. Like, again, now we’re really getting specific and then usually things get spicier.

David: Usually it’s much easier to just talk at the abstract level than it is at the concrete, but like, things like hate speech, right? Like what does that actually cover? They mean different things to different people and let’s not even get into the definition of that.

David: In part because it’s so fussy, right? That’s not a thing that’s illegal. Like First Amendment literally, that’s that’s not, it’s not legal. Neither is misinformation, right? Here, I’m gonna say a lot of things that aren’t true. Now, we have things like defamation laws and and those kind of libel and and those things. Okay, so there’s some potential consequences here for some of these things. And this is why all of it does get murky to some extent at the end. but That doesn’t mean there aren’t sort of lines and where you can go like, okay, I don’t know exactly where it is, but I know this part is over it. I know whatever the fuck is going on in the UK, whatever the hell was going on in Canada with freezing the bank accounts of people who donated to the wrong political campaign, that is fucking bonkers nonsense. i know No, no, no, no.

David: And my mental models needed a serious revamp after going through that, where COVID was really, there’s just so many things at the same time coming at it, right?

Jesse: Yeah, yeah.

David: Like live through, what is it, is it stalling that like, ah decades can go by and nothing ah happens and minutes can go by and decades happen. now I’m really butchering the quote, quote, but like COVID felt like that to me, right?

David: Like you literally had what seemed like decades worth of political I was about to call it innovation. This is a better word, perhaps, but like, period of time, where, like, literally decades could have passed into proceeding time where like, you know, and not not much happened.

Jesse: Revert in perhaps. Yeah.

David: So But I mean, let me also just add to the in end here. is like It’s totally fair for different people to have different analyses here. And this is one of the things I really disliked about the period that existed from, let’s say, late 2010s to maybe even as late as a year and a year and a half ago, I kind of feel like we are on the other side, that like that debate, the legitimacy of debate about philosophical moral questions essentially got shut down.

David: ah Certainly within within technology and so forth. There was a very successful mind virus that just went through. like You can’t even speak these things. We can’t have a debate about them. If you say any of these things, you’re one of the isms. You have committed an ism.

David: and Oh man, what ah what a dark ages too. And it’s so frightening, right?

David: Like the real dark ages, how long did that fucking last? Like 400 years or something? And here we got like a dark ages that felt like we got like the speed run version. What if you did dark ages, but we’re just gonna do like five years and we’re just gonna do it on these moral topics, go.

David: And I was like, holy shit. I thought for a while, like we’re gonna be in this for fucking 10 years, 20 years maybe, Jesus Christ. And then suddenly the skies parted and the sun thrined through to some extent, like not that everything, anything has ever settled, but like suddenly like the whole atmosphere, which is very, very different.

David: I mean, for example, just the conversation we’re having now, which I feel is at a relatively high level, maybe like little sprinklings of spice in it, unthinkable that you could have published this in 2020 and not be actually,

Jesse: but Well, we’ll find out once I publish this interview whether ah everyone stops using laser gear in drives.

David: ah

David: I mean, there’s still pockets of that. I’d be surprised if you don’t hear anything, but I can tell you someone who went through several rounds of transgressive thought and and expression from especially 20, 21 forward, holy shit, the intensity of

David: that era was just off the scales in a way I literally hope never to experience again in my lifetime and I think at least in terms of personal experience the last thing I think what I would compare to like late 60s like Vietnam protest war things like that level of

David: just absolutely at each other’s throat constantly shit going on in like daily life interaction like you can’t escape it kind of thing hopefully this is i mean if i go through it again it’ll be another what is it gonna be 60 years i’m not gonna be here great let’s do it on a 60 year cycle

Jesse: I was thinking because you mentioned technology like I’ve always wondered like why has technology as a profession Why did it get so why was it so involved in that whole thing? And I was thinking about how like if you’re deploying code that gets used by like millions of people maybe you’re just thinking more about the ethical consequences of that and I think about a lot of a lot of um

Jesse: The zeitgeist in many of these strains of thought is about like small things that can have large effects like using certain words and things like that and I’ve always It’s funny because I’ve got a history of having like OCD especially as a kid Or I’d imagine that some small thing that I did would have some catastrophic consequences. So I spent all these years trying to think the exact opposite way, where it’s like, that’s probably not going to happen.

Jesse: And if you catastrophize things, it’s just a very bad way to live. But a lot of these things that were coming out of technology were very much in that same vein, catastrophizing that if you use a certain word, that there’ll be this, these big consequences.

David: Yes,

Jesse: And so it was interesting viewing that from the sidelines and thinking about how like, I’ve got this mental scaffolding that took me a while to build up just based on my own psyche and whatever that seemed to be different to what the the mainstream perspective was at the time.

David: Yeah, I mean, that’s what’s so interesting is that a lot of the sort of psychological labeling of ah these kinds of pathologies, we’re all like ah exposure therapy. Let’s take that one. CPT, cognitive behavior therapy. Like you’re afraid of spiders. How is the way we make you less afraid of spiders? Well, first we put you in a room with a spider, but the spiders in a box, right? Then you walk off to the box. Then you put your hand on the glass like this.

David: with cpt happens over some period of time right then you touch a small spider that’s very innocuous and you realize all the catastrophe that i imagine does not come to pass right and you build up exposure to it so the way you you train your resilience is to to get exposed to something and realize that like the terrible thing you thought didn’t happen

David: A lot of what happened in this awful period was the opposite.

David: like it was Literally, there’s some great articles on this, on reverse CPT, that microaggressions was, how do we train your mind to pick up these Maybe a glance, maybe a word or an intonation that you can somehow internalize as being something negative to you or a slight or whatever. And you go like, this is so fascinating. We have a whole discipline, perhaps the most successful branch of sort of applied psychology, CBT, like the one that literally replicates that where the the studies show that this intervention, line of intervention is actually effective, right?

David: Like we can cure or seriously mitigate people’s fear of heights or arachnophobia or whatever. That’s a major accomplishment. What if we flipped it around and introduced those things into people?

David: Like it’s actually so Devious has to be almost impressive like how to and I mean it actually is impressive and this is where if we go back to the 60s and the log in March 30 institutions and so forth Herbert Mccusay and if you read some of this stuff like how do you radical radicalize the proletariat towards revolution because the problem in the 60s was holy shit the West is actually doing too well and rising standards of living, and we’re never going to goingnna get these fuckers at the assembly line with their pensions and their houses and their cars in the garage to rebel.

David: we never We’re never going to get them to bring the glorious revolution because they simply have it too good. So the way to do that in Herbert Mccusi and the rest of sort of that gang’s optics was, well, first we have to

David: Erase or attack their false consciousness. You think you have it good, but actually here’s a bunch of microaggressions to be on the like lookout for. Here’s a way for you to actually end up feeling terrible about everything all the time.

David: And now when you do that, when you are beaten and everything seems so bad and so dystopian and whatever, you’re ready for the revolution. So there’s a whole thing to unpack there.

David: And as I unpacked it in in the aftermath of all this, just trying to understand like, oh, this is just fascinating. First of all, I’ve been through the grinder here. like I’d like to understand how this machine works. Who designed the machine?

David: Who came up with the the diagrams and and so forth. of it And that trail led all the way back to to the 60s and Marcuse and ah the Frankfurt School and and all that stuff.

David: But you just look at some of this stuff and and you just go like, we’ve been doing the opposite of what like you should be doing to create strong, resilient people who are optimistic and will work for a better future and so forth. Instead, we’ve created a large group of hyperfragile, hypersensitive, bitter, vicious individuals who who who are Not very successful at producing better outcomes and and very adept at making things a whole shit of a lot worse.

David: And I think, again, just a fascinating time to live through. I think when when sort of, obviously you can only understand history backwards, when we get a little distance to this, we will look back upon this as just absolutely incomprehensible insanity.

David: in much the same way and now there’s a Gervin law accusation here but in much the same way that people before the what is the Milgram experiment went like on incomprehensible that like how could world war two happen like how could such unspeakable evil and whatever and then a bunch of Americans in lab coats in some fucking supper somewhere made a bunch of volunteers shock Innocent individuals because they were being told to do so there’s a bunch of sort of a deep understanding of human nature and and whatever that

David: and Things feel or seem very incomprehensible once you get a little bit of distance to it.

David: But like we’re so close to what just transpired in technology and elsewhere, and still is. I mean, by the way, this isn’t all fucking over. It just has receded technology.

Jesse: Yeah, totally.

David: I don’t think we fully appreciate that in 10 years from now, people look back on it with some incredulity.

David: That’s at least my hope.

Jesse: Yeah, I think like for me personally, I’m still always going to be open when someone says, hey, there’s this thing you’re doing that has these bad consequences.

David: Right.

Jesse: like You always have to hear them out and see what the argument is.

David: Right. Yes.

Jesse: But it can be very difficult if it’s like, I’m coming to this with my perspective, and maybe the supposed victim has a completely different perspective, and I just aren’t that person, so I can’t really know what’s going through their head.

Jesse: It’s just a tricky thing. i think The reason this has been such a big deal is just because it is so tricky and because so often the the fact that that the victim is just a a different person to you, ostensibly by, by class or race or gender or something like that.

David: Yeah.

Jesse: And then it’s like, okay, well, what right do I have to impose my viewpoint, you right? As limited as it is onto the situation. It’s just really hairy.

David: Right.

David: But so what what to me, is what’s so interesting to that is it is really hairy in the West. There’s a lot of other places with not hairy at all.

David: You go to fucking China, they’re not having these moral qualms, at least in the broad public, but like it’s not dictating the direction of it. there’s a different ideology in charge and it’s not suffering this kind of shit, right?

David: And that is to the point that many of the Western world’s best ideas are being weaponized against itself, right? Like our sort of like, all right, well, let’s hear it out. Like our openness trait of like, we’re open to new information, we’re open to new ideas.

David: Our sort of ah background Christianity goes all the way to Nietzsche and his like ah Christianity is a slave morality and and all this stuff of like we take the side of the oppressed as a default, that’s like a cultural value, that’s all the way to Jesus.

David: And that stuff can get weaponized, like it can it can be positive things that have really helped the West move forward can be turned into an exploit. Right, like there’s there’s like, there’s this open door and if you program your mind wires in a certain way, it’s gonna fit into these receptors and it’s gonna turn into a cancer that the destroys them.

Jesse: But do you feel that there are people deliberately pulling the strings or do you think it’s like well-meaning, well-intentioned people who are just on the wrong track?

David: And I think that…

David: I think there was absolutely a core ah Not just was is a core group of ideologies who absolutely know what they’re doing. I mean, this is where Herbert Mccusi referenced earlier.

David: They wrote it down. Like, here’s the roadmap. Here’s how we’re going to use Western values to sort of attack itself. Here’s how to subvert these kind of things. Now,

David: Is that the broad masses? Fucking most people who show up in a march or is even part of some of these online mobs or whatever, yeah fucking they don’t have a clue who Herbert Mccusi is. Or if they do, it’s because they’ve seen this four screen comic about the paradox of intolerance, or the paradox of tolerance, I think it’s called.

David: And they go like, yeah there so because they fucking they don’t fucking know. I didn’t fucking know. Most people haven’t traced the lineage of all of this nonsense all the way back to its source. Even fewer are sort of scholars in really understanding it. So no, i don’t I think the vast majority are simply having their exploits triggered. Like having their basic human sympathies and whatever weaponized in a way that end up being their negation right like that’s the if we get even more specific like DEI was such a insidious program in the sense that we go like okay we we in the US for example there was the civil rights movement and there was the content of your character and and all of this like let’s exactly let’s get above ah that let’s treat people as individuals and they’re just in their own merits and their own content of character and whatever and then

David: that gets distorted into now we actually need segregated racial and other identity marker subgroups and they have to be separated from each other and and all this stuff where you go like that it’s literally the opposite like it’s it’s espousing uh sort of an adherence to some ideals that you can perhaps like recognize okay i can sort of see where that comes from but like the final consequences end up being sort of the opposite.

David: And are most people who advocate for that, are they sort of in on that long march through the institution?

David: No, of course they’re right?

David: They’re thinking like, hey, I’m on the right side of history here, like this is what we need to do to make amends, this is all, the the governing explanation for all of this is like, this must be discrimination, like this, there’s gotta be a cabal here of whatever rich white dudes as the stereotype goes who controls everything and the patriarchy and and all of these theories as to why outcomes are the way they are and like that’s what the truth is, right? Yeah. Anyway, I think we could talk about this for hours and I actually think, I mean, I do like to talk about that some because

David: The way I got ah more intimately familiar with these topics was by some individuals talking about this more.

Jesse: Coleman Hughes?

David: Glenn Lorry and the border, they both, the what?

Jesse: Coleman Hughes. Have you heard of Coleman Hughes?

David: I actually, I followed him a little bit, but not nearly as much as ah Glenn Lowry and John McWhorter.

David: They have a wonderful podcast, which in the aftermath of of some of my exposure to this stuff was one of the first things that someone pointed me towards. I was really an eye opener to have these two imminent black scholars go through some of it and say things at a time where it felt like their racial identity allowed them to say things and not get blown into space.

David: at the really height of some of this stuff was really influential and I can highly recommend that. The other one I’d recommend, and this is again coming from someone who like, I’ve considered myself a liberal my whole life, right? Like but if you do big five analysis on my personality type, I’m gonna match up quite liberal. Which meant that to some extent, I was actually literally ignorant about the other side of the argument. That conservatism, for example, was a parody.

David: or it was inhibited by these cartoon characters that didn’t have any intellectual depth.

David: And then once I started reading conservative thinkers with intellectual depth, like Thomas Sowell was one of my favorites.

David: ah What is it? The Cosmic Justice, and he has like, there’s a trifecta of books that are really influential on me. And listening to Glenn Lowry, even McWater, I mean, I wouldn’t classify McWater as a conservative Lowry, yes, but not McWater.

Jesse: Okay.

David: Just, oh shit, here’s some articulated arguments. Whether I buy them or I don’t buy them, getting that exposure to the most articulate form of the argument on the other side.

David: And as most of these things are, and this is one of Thomas Sowell’s main things that really hammered it home for me, they are trade-offs, right? There’s not a solution to, say, poverty.

David: that Just take that for a second. There’s different ways of configuring those trade-offs, and they’re they can be more effective or less effective, but there are trade-offs in how you you treat that. And I came up from it, and and Thomas Al really helped me recognize this. I came from things that still do. That’s still my natural temperament. No, we can solve it.

David: We can just, we can solve pop poverty, for example. Why can’t we solve poverty? Just like I was thinking, we can solve web application development.

David: And that is one of those main ah main fault lines between conservatism and liberalism, at least as Thomas Ahl diagnoses it, that conservatives’ beliefs and trade-offs and liberals’ beliefs and solutions.

David: and i think you need some of both like i still like some of the ideals even if i’m wise up on like their infeasibility but like of solutions i want to work towards some solutions but sal has made a very persuasive argument that like do you know what okay fine just don’t believe you’re gonna get there believe that these are trade-offs

David: And there are, hey, we could get to zero. There’s 42,000 people died on US s roads last year. That’s the number of traffic accidents, right? We could literally cut that to zero. Tomorrow, we ban all automobiles and all sorts of propulsion that travels more than 10 miles an hour. Boom, 42,000 lives saved. Okay, what’s the trade-off?

David: what is

Jesse: Everyone’s lives suck so much more.

David: Exactly. What is, what is, what does human society look like after that?

David: And then you’d get the polemics. I mean, I just set this up as a contrast. I mean, I can just hear it right now. Well, but public transportation and there’s a whole debate that we can have there too.

David: Right. But there’s a way to solve 42,000 people’s death tomorrow. We’re not going to take it because the trade-offs are insane. Um, and there are a lot of.

David: far more nuanced trade-offs than that, right? That’s such an extreme and most people go like, yeah, well, if that’s ridiculous. There are trade-offs that are tighter and harder and become more moral dilemmas where different people can actually end up with different conclusions.

David: And We’re not gonna know necessarily the answer right away. This is one of the things, for example, I felt about legalizing pot. I remember growing up in Denmark and I had a bunch of friends who smoked pot and I was always like, what the fuck is this illegal?

David: Is this really worse than alcohol? I was like, legalize it, right? And then now we’ve run the experiment in a bunch of places. And you’re like, oh shit, I’m not sure.

Jesse: I didn’t know that Seattle would smell like a mix of ah urine and weed everywhere you walk, but there you go.

David: like and

David: That’s actually, that is one of the things I really had not considered. I really had not considered what the oral character of a city, the same thing with New York, whether oral character of a city like can change and you can go like, oh shit, I really don’t like this.

David: Like maybe alcohol is bad for the individual and there’s also other side effects and whatever, but like it doesn’t stink in the public space in the way it does. Now, again, there’s a million arguments one way or another. This is just one cherry picked illustration of something I used to,

David: considered to be obvious.

David: The other thing I also didn’t consider to be obvious was like the pot that my friends smoked in the mid 90s was of a certain potency. that bears no correlation to the shit that you buy today.

David: THC levels and whatever have just, i these things have just gotten optimized in part through the expansion of a bigger market, the professionalization ah enabled by legalization and so forth to a point where like, oh shit, this is not the same thing anymore.

David: These are far more potent potent things and maybe that’s not like just universally good, right?

David: So I’m not even rendering it a a verdict on that I don’t I don’t know still is the right answer this thing or the other thing What I do know was I had a certain certainty that I certainly don’t have any anymore.

David: That reality was able to disabuse me of like this being such an obvious choice. And I remember thinking, this is, again, mid-2015s or something like that. The US has just started with legalization.

David: I forget when that happened exactly. And then I was like, oh, man, my native Denmark, they’re so behind the times. Why can’t we legalize it in Denmark? And like all the all the things right now, I go like, oh, shit, I’m kind of glad they didn’t.

David: Like, let’s give this experiment a little longer in the US s to see whether we’re so sure that it should follow. And then you could take that even further. I actually used to believe quite strongly that you should just legalize all drugs. They’re like, consent theory. I was definitely very much taken by that. If someone chooses that they want to smoke fucking crack or heroin or fentanyl,

David: that Isn’t that their choice? And it turns out, okay, we ran a long run experiment on that, especially in San Francisco and on the West Coast for well over a decade. And you go like, oh shit, no, it’s not just a personal choice.

David: There are absolutely all sorts of catastrophic societal factors.

David: And even on the personal level, it’s just a human tragedy of almost incomprehensible proportions.

Jesse: Yeah, addiction, it changes everything.

David: What is it? twenty thousand 120,000, we just talked about 42,000 car deaths a year, right? Two to three times as many Americans die from overdoses. I mean, that is just a tremendous catastrophic human catastrophe of just incomparable proportions.

David: And we go like, holy shit. So if that all came from the fact that OxyContin was essentially legalized in the 90s, and not just legalized, but halfway pushed, and then we ended up with a bunch of people addicted to opioids, and then dot da, da, da, da, da.

David: Now we’re here, oh shit, maybe humanity can’t take all temptations. Maybe we aren’t that strong.

David: And again, this is one of the things, now we’re really coming full circle. Religion knew this. Religion had all sorts of prohibitions. They built in mechanisms like shame and algorithms for enforcing social norms and so forth to make sure that like the base human instincts didn’t just get free reign, right?

David: And we threw all that away, or a lot of that away, and we replaced it with, you do your thing, man. Whatever you want. Consent is the golden calf that we will worship worship above all else.

David: And as long as there’s consent,

David: It’s all good. a Narrator, it wasn’t all good, right? So yeah, these are really fascinating, deep, difficult moral and societal questions. And a lot of these we don’t have at all all the answers, but we do have some evidence coming back from some of the experiments. And I do think it would be prudent to adjust some of our our hypotheses about incentives and what happens and how things turn out on the basis of actual experiments run in the wild, especially the very grand ones we run a lot of West Coast cities in particular.

David: on say drug legalization or harm reduction theories or whatever that kind of didn’t paint out the way they did even if i personally if you had asked me ten years ago i would have gone that sound that sounds nice like yeah of drug addicts let’s get them clean needles and and whatever just that like maybe then they’ll come to their senses and like oh okay now that wasn’t that didn’t make a dent.

Jesse: Yeah, I listen to a podcast called Econ Talk, which is very much on the pro-capitalist side of economics podcasts. And it does disappoint me that they rarely talk about addiction.

Jesse: I just feel it’s so important. It’s like, it’s not as simple as like, oh, I’m going to use my free will to go and buy something because it brings me value. And it’s like, if if it’s like maybe cocaine is valuable or, you know, whatever it is.

David: Right.

Jesse: But it’s just like, would you want to do that if you weren’t addicted to it? Um, and you know, yeah.

David: it’s It’s difficult because even that one, I’ve known a lot of people who’ve taken a fair amount of cocaine. A lot of people, a lot of those had a very good time and did not become addicted.

Jesse: And, and some of them have made successful companies and

David: They did did not become addict, addict right? Now, what does that mean? like There are some substances. of There’s lots of people who took Oxycontin to get over healing, whatever.

David: They did not become addicts. But theres there is also, OK, on a grand scale, when you run the experiment, the large run. right like What happens? And clearly, sometimes our intuitions are just re not correct.

David: like We think one thing and another thing happen.

David: And we should adjust our sales. When the wind changes, i mean and as evidence comes in, you should update your mental models.

David: right this is What is the the famous quote about like someone some politicians being accused of flip-flopping on an issue? And it goes like, well, I update my opinions when new information arrives.

David: What do you do, sir? So I try to stay in that mode. I really do. that like I try to develop mental models to have an understanding of what the world is and how it functions. I will say now, and this is a function of age, at 45, I have a higher degree of humility associated with those mental models and their ability to be long-term correct. And I have more of a keen interest of updating those models when reality proves them wrong.

Jesse: For sure. Yeah. I always try to like watch debates on YouTube between, you know, on any political or social topics, something like that, where it’s like, so I’ll have friends saying, this is the obvious truth. And they’ll go, okay, I’ll go watch a debate on it. And I was like, oh man, it’s like, it’s not that clear cut. Um,

Jesse: And it’s the same with like, yeah, looking at evidence in terms of actual experiments to get run in the wild. Like you learn so much more from that than just from being in a bubble and just absorbing the zeitgeist from that.

David: Yep, yep, yep, and I think it’s not easy to do. And I think one of the things I’ve been on the lookout for, as as I’ve been updating these mental models, I think the other instinct we have is we want to be tribal. We want to associate with larger group of people. We want to feel protected. We want to feel part of the community, whatever. it’s it’s it’s not It’s quite easy in your process of updating mental models just to flip it. Like, OK, I used to believe this thing, and now traumatic insight happened. Red pill, blue pill, white pill.

David: There’s a lot of different colored pills.

Jesse: ah black There’s a black pill now. I don’t know what it means.

David: I haven’t even can’t keep track of all the pills. You take one of the pills and all of a sudden like your worldview is changed and like now you’re on a team, whatever, 74. You were on 24 before nine and now you’re on 74.

David: To which degree can we kind of try to push back against that and still live in a connected world where we have People who believe roughly the same things and so forth. And I’m trying to expand my personal tolerance for that kind of dissent. And is is one of the characters that’s helped me with that, not that he knows about it, is Elon Musk. I used to be very, very critical and negative about almost everything that Elon did. And I’m still quite credible about a huge inventory of things that that man is up to. it it’s a

David: But I’m also recognizing, all right, I can have a laundry list of shit I think that Elon is a moron for doing. And then I can also look at the laundry list of just undeniable contributions to humanity that that individual has pushed through more or less single-handedly and go like, when I weigh these things, right?

David: Oh. dudes an asshole on twitter posts uh saucy memes in a way that’s not befitting someone of his stature whatever i that that has some pull on this and then there’s the other thing oh i mean single-handedly changed the automotive industry in terms of electrification sending rockets towards mars might save the stranded astronauts and the space state like oh okay actually uh now at least I go like alright this way is heavier for me even if I still recognize all the same stuff but ah what’s even more important than which way the scale goes is that there is a scale and there’s stuff over here and there’s stuff over there and sometimes the scale goes a little like this and sometimes the scale goes a little like that it goes up and down and that is

David: That is the human experience. We’re full of contradictions and we’re full of dualities and we’re full of ah truths and falsehoods.

David: And that’s not a carte blanche. that Again, it’s not full of relativism. It’s about postmodernism. It’s not that everyone has their own truth and there’s nothing we can be sure of, whatever, whatever. It’s just that Life for me is more interesting when I have a broader tolerance of trying to understand different humans and where they’re coming from, whether I agree with them or not. Like what constitutes beyond the pale needs to be truly beyond the pale. And I feel like that’s the that’s the spectrum that have been shrinking for a lot of folks in really

David: bad ways. And I think this is when there’s a great video on YouTube by this guy, William B. Buckley, I think is his name. And he had the show called the firing line.

David: And there’s a great episode from the 60s, where he’s this conservative thinker, right? And he, he invites this Black Panther onto a show, right? Like Black Panther with all the ideology of the Black Panthers in the late 60s, full on armed revolution and all the things, right? and And William Buckley and this guy from the Black Panthers just sit there and relatively calmly have a discussion about ideology, oppression, the US, s whatever. And I just go like,

David: That’s freaking amazing. Like that breadth of spectrum of being literally curiously interested in what like, quote unquote, the other side has to say about topics and really understand their point of view. Oh my God, it feels like it’s from a lost civilization.

David: right Like you go on Twitter and it’s basically nothing but people just screaming slogans at each other in all directions.

David: And then you look at the firing line and go like, holy shit, society could be constructed like this?

David: That was primetime television. Primetime fucking television. You had two people just sit like and discuss ideas relatively calmly without screaming at each other. Holy shit, amazing.

Jesse: inspirational. Well, David, I’ve taken up probably more than enough of your time. It’s been a blast. Thanks for coming on the podcast. And I’ll be keeping up with your latest updates on your Linux journey.

David: Well thank you so much and thanks for the invitation and the very deep philosophical societal sociological exploration we went on. I think that is it’s a lot of fun to talk about these things and I’m really happy that the overtone window has reopened to a degree that like conversations like these are possible and that hopefully people, whether they agree or they disagree, or

David: even strongly or whatever, are able to just go like, oh, all right, I’ll enjoy a conversation and I don’t have to agree with all of it. And maybe I get a little inspired about some things and I don’t like other things. And also then life goes on afterwards.

David: People set words to each other in exploration of ideas. And like that doesn’t have to melt down my inner world here. Like I’m able to comprehend that different people can look at it differently.

David: And we live.

Jesse: Dave, it’s been a pleasure.

David: All right, thanks so much.