#9: Justin Murphy - Rationalism-to-Satanism-pipeline, internet writing, and censorship

Hey, this is Jason Levin. Welcome to another episode of Brain Blast. Today we've got Justin Murphy on. He's a political science PhD. He was a professor and he left to go full-time on the internet. He now writes a newsletter which he dubs the coolest newsletter ever. It's called otherlife.co. Highly recommend you check him out. We have a very interesting conversation today. Hope you enjoy. Got you. Got you. All right. I hit recording. You want to give a little introduction? All I know about Justin, I know he's got a PhD. I know he writes the coolest newsletter ever and definitely has some sharp opinions. So could you tell the listeners who you are?

Yeah, sure. I'm Justin Murphy. I'm a political scientist. I write a newsletter. I was a professor for several years and then I left to pretty much just go full-time on the internet.

How did you make that happen?

There's a pretty standard playbook now. At the time, it seemed kind of dicey, but now with the Substack revolution and a few different other developments like in crypto that have happened after I left academia, now when I tell people about it, it's not too surprising. It's not too crazy. At the time, it was kind of risky, but now a lot of people have a pretty good mental model of how this stuff works. Like you just build an audience and once your audience is big enough, there are a number of different ways you can monetize that. So I think it's becoming more and more a standard playbook really.

Got you. Yeah. That's, that's my goal right now, working in corporate currently and writing on the side and we'll see what happens, but yeah.

Totally.

Yeah. I'm curious. You've had a couple fun tweets recently. The rationalism to Satanism— I've never pronounced that word. Satanism. There we go. There it is.

Satanism.

Yeah, rationalism to Satanism pipeline. Um, say more.

Yeah, well, I don't want to blow up anyone's spot. I don't know what kind of names I can use or not use, but, um, I have it on pretty good information. There are just a lot of interesting stories basically that you hear told and, uh, that I've heard kind of verified from from multiple people. And it is basically an open secret that in the rationalist circles, there are people who generally identify with immoralism, like the idea that, you know, evil or immorality is actually good to pursue. And that would be the way that I would think about what I would call Satanism. Yeah, because, you know, you may or may not be interested in Satanism, you may or may not be interested in Christianity, so that kind of, uh, dichotomy might only, you know, apply so far depending on whether you see that as a valid or interesting or worthwhile distinction. So you don't even need to use that distinction if you don't want to. But, uh, the point— the larger point being that if one is sufficiently committed to pure rationality, one will very naturally start to think about the ways in which it's pretty justified to be evil. I think the reason is, the way I would summarize it is that most moral constraints are ultimately founded on something other than hard rationality itself, like the reasons why we don't go and have sex with as many people as possible, or go and kill people. The real reason for that is not ultimately a rational reason. There are medium-term rational reasons to not do that. If I go and hurt people, I'm probably going to go to jail or something like that. So it's rational to avoid unethical behaviors if those unethical behaviors get me punished in some way. Yeah, that's rational. But what if you can commit an an immoral activity and you can be absolutely certain that no one will ever catch you. If it's pleasurable for you, but no one will ever catch you, then it does actually at certain junctures, at certain margins, it does appear quite rational to do those things. And that's why when you get people together who are rallied around the concept of pure rationality, like that is their commonality, that's the criterion that they want to optimize for, there's going to be a non-trivial portion of that group that becomes genuinely attracted to literal immoralism or evil, uh, for its own sake, uh, because it's actually not excludable by rationality. You actually can't prohibit evil on rational grounds alone.

Fair, fair. Um, rationalism and objectivism, are they They're similar, right?

Rationalism and did you say objectivism?

Yeah. So like—

Are you referring to like the Ayn Rand stuff?

Yeah.

Yeah, sure. I mean, they're probably not the same exact thing. If someone wants to mince words and look into those distinctions, sure, you could draw out differences. I mean, when I talk about rationality or rationalism and what I think most people on the internet mean when they talk about that nowadays, it's actually a fairly specific kind of sociological formation in recent years on the internet around sites like LessWrong and Scott Alexander's writings. It's like a certain cluster of actual human beings. And what they have in common is this idea that it's generally good to break things down as rationally as possible, and that this kind of single-minded commitment to rationality alone is good and promising and productive. And yeah, it's interesting. Definitely can produce a lot of brilliant insights and provocative ideas and definitely a thriving, interesting, generative intellectual culture. All of that is very good. And you know, I read a lot of stuff from the, from the rationality circles and there's a lot of really smart people and it produces interesting stuff for sure. It's just that when you actually look at what that type of social formation is and what it can support and foster, it's going to include a lot of stuff that's really, really not good. And I'm not smearing all of them for that. I don't think anyone's responsible. People are only responsible for what they do. This is not some kind of public campaign where I'm doing guilt by association and I'm saying all rationalism is bad or evil because it can support Satanists. I'm just saying, hey, this is interesting that there is a non-trivial portion of that culture that generates satanic dynamics, essentially. And it's not accidental, it's not coincidental, I don't believe. So yeah, your question about objectivism, I read all the Ayn Rand books in high school, like many people, so I know what it is and I know those philosophies. But no, so they're similar. They're definitely similar because Ayn Rand's very interested in the rationality and she does have a Bay Area rationalist attitude in that she does think that rationality can just— She's actually even more aggressive and naive than I think the average LessWrong person is actually more sophisticated on this question. Ayn Rand, from my memory, really does have a kind of belief that rationality is everything. It's the only thing. It can completely justify itself. And there's not, you know, that it is kind of like the single criterion of all kind of thinking and social life and, or should be rather. And yeah, so they have that in common for sure, but different times, different places, different types of people. I wouldn't conflate them, but they're very correlated schools of thought, I would say. Probably a lot of less wrong people. Have read all the Ayn Rand books and had at least a point in their life where they really, really liked it, and some probably still do.

Yeah, yeah. Um, I— here's a, here's a solid quote from Ayn Rand: She knew, even though she was too young to know the reason, that indiscriminate desire and unselective indulgence were possible only to those who regarded sex and themselves as evil. At the time, she was cheating on her husband. So I always, always found that funny. Um, Yeah, Ayn Rand, after reading that, I started seeing in black and white, and life isn't black and white most of the time. And once you start seeing in black and white, things get darker sometimes. But yeah, nice talk with my therapist later, it's like, oh, there's gray areas in life. Not everything's that simple. Um, but yeah, yeah, definitely, definitely interesting. I think Satanism almost— yeah, it's, uh, when I saw Satanism, I was like, oh, devil worshiping. Um, but more just pursuing evil. Uh, is there a word for that?

Um, yeah, well, immoralism. Uh, but also I think there is some devil worship also, like straight up Satanism. So, um, yeah, there's some of that too.

Okay. I, um, interesting. And then amoralism, that's just no morals at all, right? Like no good or bad.

Yeah. I don't really think people refer to that as a doctrine, but that you could say that. Sure. Okay.

All right. Interesting. Um, so tell me about, is it Erbit? Is that how you say it?

Yeah. Erbit.

Yeah. Tell me about the community that you're building that is from what I understand, censorship-free. And, uh, could you explain a bit?

Yeah, sure. Well, Urbit is, uh, just this really novel technological network. It's actually an operating system and a network at the same time. So it's basically a reimagination of computing as we know it, like the idea of us having personal computers and interacting with those personal computers on a network such as the internet. It takes that whole question and basically thinks Everything, everything. So it says, can we redesign all of that stuff from scratch in a way that is not going to lead to the problems of the current internet? And the problems of the current internet are pretty easy to see when you, when you look at it closely. We have these big, big data companies essentially that are the middlemen or the third parties that, uh, we are dependent on for all of what we do as, as people on the internet. So this is of course Facebook, Twitter, Google. These, these megacorps that basically own all of our data. They own all— they do the computation in their big server farms. They have these big data centers and tons, tons of, you know, computational resources. They buy all of that computational substrate, and we, to do things with our friends on the internet, have to go through Google and Facebook and Twitter and these other megacorps. So they own everything. They own everything, and we are dependent on them to do anything on the internet. So it's this kind of structurally rotten picture of how the internet has evolved. The crucial thing to see is that it doesn't have to be like that. It's a fairly accidental contingent outcome of how the history of these technologies unfolded in a fairly happenstance way. Most people will be at least vaguely aware of the the cartoon history of the internet, people generally know it started off as this military research project. And then through a series of very accidental evolutionary steps, we have this consumer internet that we have today. But it doesn't need to have the architecture that it has. It only has it because of happenstance, essentially, and it's turned out to be a very perverse equilibrium that we're stuck in. Um, what Urbit proposes is that to avoid those problems where we're all slaves to these megacorps that literally own all of our data and that we're dependent on, what you want instead of the current internet structure or architecture is— what you really want is individual computers to just be able to talk to other individual computers. Um, because then we wouldn't need these big data centers, we wouldn't have to run through these big servers that are owned by other people. What if every computer was its own server? and you could just have this mesh net of computers that talk directly to each other. If you could build that, then the unfolding of the network structure would be totally different. The incentives would be totally different. The way that software is built and shared would be totally different. And ultimately, everyone would have way more autonomy and sovereignty over their own data. And people could create computational structures together in groups if they wanted to, and they could also stay isolated and private if they wanted to. And that, that could kind of grow in a more organic, bottom-up way rather than all of us having to run through Facebook or Google or Twitter. So that's the idea. That's the arch— that's how, uh, Urbit was designed. And so it's basically an operating system that is designed from first principles to be networked. So it's both a network and an operating system. It's both a platform that people interact on and talk on and build things on So like a kind of like a social media platform, um, but it's also just an actual computer design. And so your Orbit is a computer. It's a, it's a complete computer. It's a self-contained computer, um, that can do all the things that, you know, a Mac can do, uh, at a basic level. But it's made to, uh, interact and exchange data and computation with other, uh, Orbit computers. Um, so there are no third parties. There is no data center owned by some big megacorp It's purely peer-to-peer. And so it has all of the affordances and attractions of crypto platforms and cryptocurrency, but it's doing that for computers and for computation rather than for money and for currency. So that's one way to put the basic pitch.

Got you. Okay. All right. That reminds me a lot of centralized social media and the DeSo Bitclout attempt that is currently flailing and failing miserably.

Yeah. Well, it's totally, it's very different in the sense that like Bitclout is just one platform. It's like a, yeah, it uses crypto rails, which is cool. And it's decentralized in a sense, but it's still just one startup building one platform where they're trying to aggregate and centralize attention. On that, on that one platform. Um, and that's, that's like the economics of that type of venture. So it's kind of cool, and I think a lot of stuff is kind of cool. Um, but it— none of this stuff comes anywhere near the fundamental, like, re-architecture of computing that Urbit is. So you can never put Urbit, um, uh, on, on the same shelf with any kind of individual recent new social app or platform, because Orbitz intervention and disruption comes at a way, way lower level of what your computer even is. [Speaker:JASON_LEVIN] Okay.

All right. Going back to DARPA starting the internet, they kept it fairly low-key and private to the government for 10, 8 to 15 years, somewhere around there. I tweeted about this recently. What do you think the government has private right now that we don't have as citizens?

Not much, honestly. I don't think they have. I mean, the government is a massive bureaucracy that's just become very sclerotic and gridlocked. I mean, I'm sure there are government tools and technologies that exist that are private and classified that we don't have, but I just doubt that they're very good. I mean, I'm sure that the tools, the analytical tools, the research tools, the applications that Google and Facebook have behind closed doors as proprietary knowledge is far more advanced than whatever you know, the State Department has or the Defense Department has. I'm guessing, I mean, I'm sure they have, you know, they have technology, they have researchers and people building, you know, they have cybersecurity experts, they have, they do have teams and staff of very smart people building tools and maintaining tools, no doubt. I just doubt that much of it is more advanced or more sophisticated than what they have, you know, at somewhere like Google or Facebook behind closed doors would be my two cents, my guess. But I don't know, I have no access to classified knowledge.

So no, I definitely feel that. I feel like they want us to think that it's super slow, like UPS and income taxes and filling all that shit out, and secretly they got, they got some cool stuff back there they're saving all their money on. But I don't know.

No, I doubt that. I think they are slow. I think they are slow, and I think they are— they don't have much and they can't do much. I mean I mean, we'll look at their results. When was the last time we've seen the US government or the US military do anything particularly remarkable? I mean, we know they have drones, we know they have computerized weapon systems and stuff like that, which again, yeah, fairly good, better than a lot of other countries around the world. We probably have one of the most sophisticated militaries in the world. Sure, you could say that, but I doubt that they're sitting on any kind of particularly impressive novel technological breakthrough or advancement that is not already quite well understood and being developed in its own way in the private sector, would be my guess. And in fact, it's probably the defense contractors that if they do have cutting-edge military technologies, it's probably the private company contractors like Boeing or whatever, or those types of companies that are doing it and that own it. I just don't think there's many legitimately government-run offices in the world that are developing fundamentally novel technological breakthroughs that are orders above what private industry knows or does. I just, I really doubt that.

That's fair. That's fair. So reading your top-down versus bottom-up article, that was great. I'm writing reflections on it actually. Top-down. Do you consider a government, a local government position, bottom-up or top-down? So say like president elected by people, that's bottom-up, but then everybody that the president assigns is bottom-down or top-down.

Well, I mean, you can have the— I mean, no, that's not how I would think about it. The path to power that is taken by a presidential would-be is a top-down path, because you jump through a bunch of institutional hoops to get to the place where you get elected. There can be some exceptions, for sure. There are some examples of deeply, deeply populist kind of paths to power. Um, but no, just because there's a lot of career types are, um, so I made, I made the argument in that essay that this is a very like categorical distinction. And typically there, you're looking at either a bottom-up path or a top-down path. Um, and they don't, they don't really blend. It's usually like you can usually classify things in one or the other, and they're mutually exclusive. But I guess something you could say to qualify that somewhat is that, um, certain types of career paths maybe alternate or toggle between the two. And there can be certain career paths where, um, there are clear examples of one, uh, over and over. And then maybe there's like some unique part where there is, uh, the other type of path that the, the other type of modality one has to use. Maybe the election of a president is kind of that, but even if you look at Donald Trump, probably the most populist outsider president we've had in recent memory for sure, even he got to where he was through a series of somewhat more top-down logics. I talk about in the essay that pretty much if you came up through any of the well-known coastal centers, like LA or New York City, you are mostly playing a top-down game. And he came up through kind of Northeast real estate stuff, like around New York City. So yeah, his election was a fairly bottom-up thing, but he only got there through Navigating upward in this like very top-down system.

Fair. Yeah. So I was writing about it in relation to media and what I found definitely what you're saying is the toggling. Like I thought about Tim Ferriss, like started out as blog writer, you know, that's bottom-up and then published by a legacy publisher for 4-Hour Workweek. That's top-down.

Right.

And then the podcast, he doesn't have a boss. He's, you know, bottom-up. It's interesting to see and like Who else was I looking at? Let's see. I think with traditional media like TV and stuff like that, it makes sense that it's top-down. You know, you get it, you get cast on Broadway, you get cast on television. Now we're seeing a lot of those top-down stars, somebody like Bella Thorne or whatever, go and then do a bottom-up, building her own audience, OnlyFans, all that kind of stuff. It's, um, yeah, it's really interesting to see how how the world's changing in that modality.

Yeah.

Yeah. I, um, so you're in Austin, right? The prep, the prepper movement is kind of big down there. Is, have you witnessed that part of the movement or the world?

I know a few people like that. Yeah.

What's your thoughts on that?

Yeah, I'm into it. I'm pretty, I'm just like too lazy and I'm too, uh, like complacent basically, but I think it's cool. I think it's cool. I would like to be more like that. I'm just, you know, busy with my, with my, you know, metropolitan affairs. So I don't do that stuff, but probably should.

Fair enough. Yeah. I'm in a similar boat. I read Tucker Max's essay and then went down a rabbit hole of, of Neil Strauss and Clay Marden and some other people, bought some water bottles for my car and pocket knife. And that's about as far as I got. So, but Yeah. Is there, is there anything you're currently reading right now?

Sure. Yeah. Always reading.

Yeah. What are you reading?

Right now reading a lot of Emerson and recently been rereading some Bataille books that I've read before, but just kind of going back over him. Yeah. You talked about prepping. I'm kind of, I'm interested in like autonomous weapons systems. Like I want, I want, I want like personal household drones that have like AI in them and can, so like if someone like walks up to my property, like right at the property line, if they, if they like are about to cross the property line, the drone goes up to them, uses a camera to scan them, uses machine learning to make an estimate of whether or not this is a friend or a foe, or really if they're on an approved list of people that are allowed to be on the property, then it lets, you know, the drone says, Okay, welcome, you may pass. And if the machine learning says that it's not someone who's approved, then the drone like has like a machine gun next to it and just ices them.

Yeah. Yeah. I like it. Also dogs do that. They're pretty cheap, but my dog will lick anyone though. So can't trust him as a guard dog, unfortunately. Yeah. Yeah. What's kind of your thoughts on pseudonymous accounts gaining gaining fame and notoriety, especially in the Web3 world, but I've been thinking about it a lot. You think about skin in the game, we're both doxxed, and I don't know. I don't know how it makes me feel. I think it's like an insurance policy for creators. If you want to go make a second account and go pseudonymous, you always have that option.

Right. Yeah. I think there are different ways to play it. Uh, people have different reasons for different, uh, strategies. I, I, I basically think it, it just all depends on your personal circumstances. It depends how much, you know, how bad do you need to run your mouth and also how bad are the sensitivities and the consequences in your career path, basically. So yeah, I think if you, I have a career that you love, that's very politically sensitive and you like to run your mouth, then having a pseudonymous account is a very sensible way to organize your public digital creative or intellectual life. But I think that some people are more motivated by speaking the truth in their own name. For some people, that's like a That's an intrinsically rewarding thing to do. And it kind of, it kind of hurts to not do that. I'm kind of more that type of person. You know, it can be a combination of things. It can be, you know, to some degree, maybe it's narcissism. You know, you like, you like seeing your own face on things, or you like seeing your name on things. That could absolutely be one part of it. But I think another part of it is just a certain drive for, and a certain kind of natural yearning for consistency and wholeness and, um, you know, self, self-transparency, self-consistency. And for some people, I think it just feels really good to say what you think and sign it with your name. It just feels a kind of like, uh, it feels satisfying and it gives a feeling of, of just consistency with yourself. And for some people it's really painful to not have that. So If you kind of go to work 9 to 5 and you are a certain person and you, you say certain things and you perform in a certain way, and then you come home at night and you go wild on your pseudonymous Twitter account where you pretend to be like a right-wing bodybuilder, edgelord or something like, I guess for some people that's like a fine satisfying, you know, like way to balance their, their competing desires in life. I just could never do that. I, that sounds hellish to me. And I would suffer very much if I had these very segmented compartmentalized lives, I would feel when I go to work, I would feel like a shell of myself. And then when I cut loose on my aesthetic, wild pseudo-suit account, I would feel fake and lame and like a LARPer. So I'm not looking down on it. I think for some people it's a necessary approach. It can be fun and people can do it. Some people do it really artfully and impressively. And for some people that pseudonymity allows them to click into something amazing and allows them to kind of access this other plane where they can really go full throttle and it becomes this artistic kind of path. And if that's you, that's a beautiful thing. I think that's perfectly fine. And that's a certain type of personality that's going to be suited to that. Some people just want to sign their name and they just want to say what they think. And I was always like that kind of person. And so I think it really boils down a lot to personality and there are many different ways to hack it.

Fair enough. Fair enough. I definitely understand that. I've been doing some ghostwriting and a thread went viral and somebody just asked me like, doesn't that piss you off? And I'm completely fine with it. Like the—

Who do you ghostwrite for?

I'm not at liberty to say, but can you like hint? Um, you could do research and find out very easily. Um, but you know, it's, I think the value will come back to me. I enjoy it. I'm learning a lot from them. So it's all good. Like, I'm like, it's all good.

Um, are you in Austin too?

No, not currently. No. I, I'm outside of New York. I'm in Jersey. Um, yeah. Moving to the city in a few months. Um, And yeah, so I just changed my profile picture to the NFT, which was like, I had a similar, maybe it was narcissism where I was like, I like my face, like that's who people should get to know if it's a personal brand. And then I was like, ah, this NFT is kind of dope. It's dark, it has a 666 on its face and money in its mouth. I was like, I kind of appreciate that. A lot of thoughts about that recently. Maybe I'm spending too much time on the internet, but so it goes. That's life. Curious also, as a fellow writer, what's your knowledge collection system? I feel like you're a Roam guy, Roam research.

No, I think all that stuff's bullshit.

Say more. That's like my life, man.

It's just not— it's not real. It's just a meme. It's just like a big marketing. It's a big marketing thing. It's a scam. So here's, here's my, here's my take. The most people today are suffering from such an overwhelming amount of information glut. It's just completely scrambling all of our brains how much content there is out there every day. And a lot of it is amazing. A lot of it's not amazing, but it's sexy and it's attractive and it pulls on our psychological strings to the utmost. So basically, All people today, even educated people, perhaps even especially educated, thoughtful people, precisely those people who care about thinking clearly and having a productive, healthy life of the mind, those people are rightfully feeling devastated and they're feeling so confused and overwhelmed by information that it's pretty much this kind of extremely widespread and deeply, deeply felt need for systems to manage all of this information overwhelm. And basically in any context where you have a really severe problem that's really, really widespread and the potential payoff to solving that problem is indeed tremendous, guess what? You just have an amazing kind of market opportunity. Um, you have an amazing market context where basically anyone, uh, selling some kind of framework or idea or tool or app that promises to solve this problem, even partially, is just going to get a ton of kind of psychological investment from tons and tons of people. And then, you know, what happens is you see this, you see whether it's different courses that are popular or different apps that are popular like Roam Research or whatever the case might be. What happens is people, you see this, like people get, people will come across one, they'll get super excited. And cuz they'll be like setting up their, their operation, they'll be setting up their knowledge base and all these sexy terms people have in, you know, some given tool, given, you know, following some given framework or some, you know, fancy course or whatever. And they'll feel really excited, really pumped. And they'll be like sharing it with their friends. They'll be showing it off. Like, um, and then you check in on them like 6 months later and they've changed their entire system and they're on to like another cool tool, right? You see, you see this everywhere. You see this all the time, even with some of the course creators and the influencers in this area. Even them, you'll see they built— they, they make this massive epic kind of, uh, program for people and all this messaging and all these blog posts around you know, how to use certain tools, they're life-changing, it's game-changing. And then you look at them 6 months later and they're basically selling a totally different program with different tools because in that 6-month period, someone made some new tool that's even cooler and it's even, you know, more interesting and sexy and seductive. And but guess what? If you're changing your tools all the time, then you don't actually have a real system. And so that's my That's my theory there. I think a lot of it is bullshit. And another reason I think this is because I come from academia, right? And so a lot of my colleagues and peers who are— I mean, I know people who are incredibly prolific and some of the most prolific, brilliant, genius, and disciplined, productive intellectuals I've ever met in my life. They have no system whatsoever. Do you know what their system is? You know what their system is? They fucking open Microsoft Word and they start typing. And they just do that. I mean, I know people who publish several books a year and several peer-reviewed journal articles a year. Literally, I know people who can do 2 books or more a year. In some years it's 3. And multiple peer-reviewed journal articles every year. And They literally have— you look in their office, it's just a total mess, and they just open Microsoft Word and they just type into Microsoft Word over and over again, and that's all they do. And their computer is filled with a bunch of files all over the place in no particular order. Their office is filled with books all over the place in no particular order. It's chaos. And so I've seen firsthand that some of the most productive people with genuine years and years of output and, and proof proof of consistency and discipline and productivity. Some of those people have no system whatsoever and it's absolutely chaotic. And then I look at people who have these super sexy, fancy trademarked systems, and every time I check on them every 6 months, they have a different one. And you know what? Those people, I'm not seeing those people publish 2 books a year and tons of meaningful long-form work. What a lot of those people publish is just endless screenshots of their system. There's a lot of people who get super pumped on some personal knowledge management system, and you check on them in 6 months or a year, and they're not actually publishing real books. They're not publishing meaningful long-form research articles. They're publishing content about their fancy system. Which is fake. That's fake. If you're not actually churning out real work over years, writing meaningful, original, significant books and articles, then your system is bullshit. And a lot of the people who are most on about this, they don't actually— I don't ever see these personal knowledge management systems produce meaningful, real, original work other than just more content about personal knowledge management systems versus personal knowledge management knowledge management systems. So yeah, I think it's a, it's a, it's a big scam, honestly. Fair.

Um, that's an interesting hot take. I, I use Notion, uh, probably all day, every day. Um, but I also do think that Notion ambassadors should be banned from Twitter. Like, there, there doesn't need to be an ambassador or a Notion creator. That's not a thing. You just type and like play around. It's like a micro— that's stupid. Um, so I do agree, but Notion, I'd be lost without it personally. Um, I have a page open for you right now with questions, so I don't know what I'd do otherwise. I see my dad and he like writes on the back of business cards. I'm like, dude, like how do you, how do you run a business? Like what the, how, how's that possible? Um, like reminders, like how did people live before that app? I have no idea. Yeah.

And there's nothing wrong with having some preferred app. Yeah, of course. Like I have my preferred apps that I write in and I keep a calendar with this app and I do my, you know, task lists with this app. So I'm obviously like, yeah, any kind of person who uses computers today is gonna have some little suite of preferred apps and tools. So obviously that's fine. I have nothing against that. But the whole kind of memeplex that has been built up around it is, is a lot of hype, a lot of— essentially, it's marketing buzz that these tools have, and the founders and developers and creators and influencers in this space have just gotten very, very good at convincing people that these things matter more than they do. That's really all it is. And so it's like, if you want to keep your notes in Roam, that's cool. It looks fine. I've played with it before. It's cool if you like how it works. And it's a good place for you to keep your thoughts and write things, like, okay, cool, use Roam. The trick is that because the demand is so great and the dream is so great, it's almost like the Fountain of Youth or like the Holy Grail or something like that. It's such a kind of massive desire that's a real, real problem. All of these apps and all of these course creators and all of these like productivity influencers, they just overhype everything and they overinflate the claims of everything. And so Roam can't just be like a cool note-taking app. Roam has to be like a revolutionary world-changing system for revolutionizing your mind, right?

Or— People do that with everything, like diets, like you just eat healthy.

Yeah, it's true. It's true. There are many other examples of this type of phenomenon, but Yeah, but it's important for people who want to do intellectual work, because you're never going to get anything real done if you actually— all you care about— if you care too much about the tools and stuff like that, you're really barking up the wrong tree, and you're not going to get a lot done. And so I have a personal bone to pick with a lot of these people in this economy, because I talk with a lot of people in my circles are about really about doing real intellectual work on the internet outside of institutions. So that's what I represent, that's what I'm all about. I talk with a lot of people and work with a lot of people. On this kind of thing, like building serious long-term intellectual work outside of institutions. And I'm constantly finding these people's brains are just obsessed with tools and should they use Roam or should they use Notion? And I'm like, dude, you've been totally psyoped by like marketers and influencers to think that this stuff is so important. It's not important. Use Microsoft Word if you want to, use anything, it doesn't matter. What really matters is doing the work. Showing up and doing real research and real thinking and doing real original work. That's like 90% of it. And the tools you use and the workflows you set up is like 10% of it. Honestly, I agree.

Same thing goes with meditation. Um, everybody who thinks you need some fancy meditation or transcendental meditation paid— I had a friend who paid like exorbitant amount of money for a transcendental meditation teacher. Like, all you have to do is just sit down and close your eyes for 2 minutes, 5 minutes, and that's it. It's been free since the beginning of time. It will be free for the rest of time. It's a free service.

Definitely.

I agree. Yeah, definitely an interesting take. If you were advising, I don't want to say a younger version of yourself, but just like a teenager, high schooler, to go to college or not to go to college or take time? What would you advise them? Say they wanted to be a, I don't know, let's say a writer, creator. Should— is there any reason to still go to college?

It's— this is super, super sensitive to and dependent on the personality traits of the individual under question. So there is simply no responsible advice that one can give on a general level on, on this. Um, super dependent on the person. And so what you can say though is you can give some pointers for how people should make this decision or think about this decision with respect to their own personality traits. So one thing I always tell people is that, I mean, even if you think that academia is a dead end and it's a sinking ship, and even if you have the, the most negative view viewpoints about academia possible, it can still, for certain types of people, be perfectly worthwhile to pursue an education, even an extended education. So in my case, I'm someone who— I spent most of my adult life in education before then entering into the education system as a professor. So I've spent most of my adult life in education one way or another. Even though I gave pretty much 10 years of my life in undergrad and PhD, from the day I started my undergrad to the day I finished my PhD, it was about 10 years all in. And I gave 10 years of my life to succeeding in the academic system. I did all of that. I worked super hard and completely subordinated my heart and soul to this system in the interest of being able to get a job as a professor, and I succeeded and I did that. I quickly was disappointed with the lifestyle, and I did decide that it just wasn't what I hoped it would be. So I did decide to leave it all and to pursue a different life. But even me, who basically has the painful story of losing all of that capital that I invested. It's a tough thing when you give a lot of yourself to a very specific, narrow institutional circuit, and then you step out of it because you have to face the fact that you gave a lot of your heart and soul to something and you're never going to get it back because the capital that you accumulate in that world does not fully— It's not convertible outside of it. But even me, who who has that story of leaving a lot of my heart and soul in this closed system, I don't regret it at all. I don't regret it at all. It was worth doing. It was very, very, very worth doing, getting a PhD, even though that PhD is kind of useless for anything outside of the system. It was still very, very worth it. I don't regret it for a single second. And the reason mostly is just that these academic pathways depending on who you are, can be a very salutary structure that basically just forces you to stay disciplined, to stay productive, to constantly be challenging yourself. And yeah, because doing a PhD is hard. It's this kind of intense process where you have to show up, you have to write a lot, you have to read a ton, you have to impress people that are smarter than you, you have to hold yourself to a discipline. You have to not just write interesting stuff like you can do on your blog or whatever, but you actually have to become an expert in a particular scientific literature, and then you have to make an original contribution to that specific literature. It's hard. It's painful. It's like you're really disciplining your mind, and it's very hard to discipline your mind in that way for 10 years if you don't submit to the academic system, because there's just no other system in the world that's so developed in terms of forcing someone to do intellectual work in that way. So there are perfectly good reasons to submit to that process. There's a lot to be gained from it. Even I don't regret it for a single second. I really loved all of it. I loved my PhD. I didn't love being a professor, but I loved doing my PhD. I loved every minute of it, basically, even though it was hard and challenging. So yeah. I'm known for the idea that you can leave academia and be more successful on the internet. So if even I can say that, then that should tell you a lot. But I do think that if you have a very outspoken personality or you're extremely creative, or you just have a strong inner— You know that a part of your personality is you have a strong inner urge to run your mouth and push the limits and push the envelope and be provocative and that kind of stuff. If that's your strong suit, if that's what you're good at, what gives you life and joy, then yeah, you should probably just be aware that you're not going to make it very far. You might be able to buckle down and make it pretty far like I did, but you're going to explode at a certain point. You're not going to thrive. You're not going to feel like you're sustainably thriving. And so you should just be aware of that. So I actually personally like a combination strategy. I find when I talk to younger people, it's all dependent on the person, but I often find myself recommending or suggesting that a good strategy for many people is to pursue an academic path as far as you can, and all the while being prepared to exit when the time is right. So I think the best thing is to have an independent audience online that you build and cultivate while pursuing formal academic studies. And you basically just do both, have one complement the other, and you do— But you try your best to make it as far in the academic game as you can. And wherever you max out, wherever you top out, you just notice that and you say, "All right, now I'm going to exit and I'm going to cash in this academic cultural capital. I'm going to cash it in for some kind of game on the outside." It doesn't convert fully, but it converts somewhat. With any kind of academic expertise, you can use that and parlay that into other things. So if you do feel yourself to be intellectually kind of oriented and called by the intellectual vocation, I think like for most people it's worth trying the academic path at least as far as you can.

Yeah, understood. I was an English major and got very fed up. I was planning on going down grad school and becoming a professor. I figured it'd be the only way I could write and read all day and get paid for it. And then I took a couple 2 or 3 bad classes senior year that just made me lose all hope in academia, especially in the English profession. So dropped out, did Lambda School, and now work as a data support engineer and am trying to build up the audience. But yeah.

Are you pleased with Lambda School?

Yeah. Changed my life forever, man.

Cool.

People give it a hard time, but I can't say how much it changed my life. So yeah, yeah. I think it was worthwhile. You get out what you put in, but it's like everything else in life. Like, what do you expect? Same thing with Twitter. Yeah.

And do you feel like it was a good deal economically? Like you're pleased? Yeah.

So nobody knows the secret, but if you get hired before the 3-month mark, You only have to pay like a quarter of it. And so that's what I did.

So basically as soon as you started Lambda School, you started like trying to get hired basically.

Yeah. Why wait?

Interesting. So does the, do, do you feel then like the, the very fact that you're in Lambda School is like a big selling point to, to people hiring?

Yeah. Yeah. They like, I had 3 months experience, which was more than enough for my current job. Like the stuff that—

What's your expertise? What's your like specialty?

SQL.

Okay. Yeah. Yeah.

So I mean, I can write Python as well, but SQL is where like, that's, that's what I do every day.

And there's a ton of hiring around like SQL, right? Like, yeah.

Yeah. And there always will be. But I actually, similar to what you're saying, like I'm very ready to give it up. I actually had an interview before this call for a full-time writing position and it would probably be less pay, but I would get to just read and write all day instead of pretend and smile and fake smile through tech calls. So that's, that's what's—

You can't find SQL jobs where like you don't have to go to meetings and you just kind of like stay as a kind of like quiet anonymous remote worker doing SQL. You can't find that?

Sort of like, I don't have that much of it today. Like there's only one meeting a morning basically. Which isn't, you know, that's amazing, but it's a lot of, a lot of Slack, a lot of email, a lot of just pretending.

Honestly, one meeting a morning even sounds like a lot, like every day.

That seems like, I mean, that seems like, I don't know, but, um, it, trust me, most of it could be one meeting a week and we'd get just as much done.

You should become one of these. We should become one of these people who like, um, with remote work, you, you get like 3 full-time jobs and you slack on all of them. Have you seen this?

Yeah. I've thought about that. I've, trust me, I've, I've considered, um, Uh, the thing is, uh, the insurance, apparently they find out, and if you have two insurances, and that's, that's what my friend told me when his friend tried it.

Really? Yeah.

Yeah, I just, I'd rather not get caught in an insurance scam this early in life.

Oh, is that a scam? Does that count as a scam just because you have something of this sort?

Yeah, I don't know. Yeah, we'll see what happens.

Yeah, I've thought about doing, I've thought about that. Like, it seems kind of fun, honestly. And sometimes I think about like Sometimes I think about just trying to get a job just for the heck of it to see what would happen. And like, I'm honestly curious, like if I'm even hireable, like I know that I am, but I'm like curious, like what kinds of jobs I could actually score. I never get around to doing it because I don't actually want a job. And I feel like all these years being, I feel like these multiple years since leaving academia that I've been like totally feral. I feel like the idea of having to like be accountable to anyone, just like, I feel like I'm like, I can't do it anymore. Like I almost wonder if I even could do it if I tried. I'm sure if I had to, if I wasn't making enough money and we just were like, if our finances were sinking and I had to just make real money immediately, I'm sure that I could get a job and I could grit my teeth and be a respectable, compliant worker or whatever. But I find it very hard to imagine myself voluntarily working for anyone at this point. Just because you have to like be respectful. You have to kind of like have this, like, uh, you have to kind of submit to authority. And I've just been feral for so long now that, uh, it's hard. It's hard to imagine, but we'll see. Maybe one day I'll have to eat my words.

And I hope not. You're much more interesting. I feel like, uh, I didn't know you then, but interesting now. So one more question, uh, before, before you go. Um, how long did it take you to adjust to a lack of schedule, a lack of like meetings and stuff. You know what I'm saying?

Yeah. Not long because when I quit academia, I had to like hustle to make money. Like I had to really, like the pressure was on as soon as I left academia. So I'm, I've always been propelled by that. Like I have, I don't, I really don't have that much problem working hard because for that reason that like it was synchronous. I meant Yeah. And I come from a working class family. And so like, I don't, I don't really have anything to fall back on. Like I need to, I need to be economically successful and stable. And so, you know, when I, and I'm not getting any younger either. So it's like, I don't, yeah, I don't really have, I can't really afford to chill or waste time. So that's, that's since I left, since leaving academia, like that's really not been a problem. I just naturally work hard every day from fear, like fear and anxiety, honestly, of failure and being poor.

Um, yeah, I, I feel that. I definitely do. Um, so I guess I, I gotta run and pick up my dog from daycare, but, uh, where can people find you? Uh, what do you want to leave?

Yeah, main thing is the main thing of everything I do is just the Otherlife newsletter. Just go to otherlife.co, otherlife.co. And, uh, yeah, I publish a ton of stuff on theory, philosophy, science, technology, and, uh all the weird stuff going on in the internet underground. I have a super thriving, super impressive community of like crazy geniuses in my kind of underground internet community on Urbit. But the newsletter is the main, is the main thing. So just otherlife.co, otherlife.co, that is.