The following is a rough transcript which has not been revised by The Jim Rutt Show or David Chapman. Please check with us before using any quotations from this transcript. Thank you.
Jim: Today’s guest is David Chapman. David’s an independent thinker whose newsletter, podcast, essays, and links to his other works can be found on his Substack website called Meaningness, where he explores topics like meaning, purpose, and culture, including special focuses on meta-rationality, Buddhism, and AI. And he isn’t some guy I found behind a dumpster. He has a PhD in AI from MIT. Welcome, David.
David: Thank you, Jim. It’s delightful to be here.
Jim: Yeah. I’m really looking forward to this. I’ve been reading David’s stuff for a long time since he originally started working on the Meaningness online virtual book, which was how long ago? I started reading it soon after you started writing it.
David: I think 2010. Yeah, I may have…
Jim: Been 2012, 12 or 13 when I discovered it.
David: Yeah. Something like that. It’s been a long time, and the book is about 20% finished. So maybe don’t hold your breath.
Jim: And, of course, as always, there’ll be links on our episode website at jimruttshow.com to all this and anything else we discuss, which my astute team of producers can extract from our podcast. So today, David has recently written four essays, which I have given the name, the nobility tetralogy. And their titles are “Nobility Ofermöd,” “You Should Be a God Emperor,” “That’s a Good Idea to Me,” and “Software Engineers are Eating the World.” So let’s start with my takeaway on what this is all about, which is rethinking nobility for the modern age.
David: Yes. Exactly that. So I think nobility is the missing ingredient in current culture or a missing ingredient, and that’s a lot of why things are not going so well nowadays. We’ve got ourselves in a bit of a pickle where simultaneously there’s been a lack of positive innovation on the whole over the past half century. And at the same time, there’s this sense that our institutions are failing, fraying at the edges, falling apart, and that’s kind of coming to a head now. And my argument is that the lack of a coherent current understanding of nobility is a big part of that.
Jim: Yeah. And, truthfully, I sometimes talk about character and virtue. Right? And the three of them together are actually considered risible by a lot of people. Like, you know, what kind of a fool are you to believe that something like character, virtue, and nobility could actually exist in our world?
David: Yeah. I mean, when I talk about it, I have to use these kind of Victorian-sounding words like honor and courage and confidence, dignity, decency, magnificence. And you think, like, you know, who wants to be honorable or magnificent? That’s ridiculous.
Jim: Yeah. That’s funny. I have read a fair bit of Aristotle on his virtues, and magnificence is one of them. And they go, I don’t know about magnificence, but the rest of them sound pretty cool. Right?
David: Yeah. Well, I mean, magnificence is something that you can manifest on behalf of other people. It can be an uplifting quality that inspires people into productive positive action and developing their own virtue and nobility.
Jim: Yeah. And this is the, again, now highly obsolete concept of noblesse oblige or however the fuck you pronounce it. Right?
David: Yeah. So a big part of what I wrote about in “Ofermöd” is how noblesse oblige was taught to the sons of the ruling class by the elite universities up until about 1980, and it’s about how that was taught and why that was important and then why they stopped teaching that.
Jim: Yeah. We’ll get into that in a bit. But one of the things that was an interesting touch point – you mentioned that you went to Harvard in ’81. Is that right?
David: Well, I was officially a student at MIT, but they have a cross-registration thing. So I was able to take Harvard classes, and the setting for this is a story about an English language class at Harvard where I was a student.
Jim: I was gonna mention, I also was an MIT lad, class of ’75. So I got there in ’71, ten years before you exactly. And at that time, they still had the Western Tradition series of courses that most freshmen took.
David: At MIT? Yep. Yep. I had no idea.
Jim: Yeah. They had…
David: It’s fabulous.
Jim: They had a wonderful humanities department, and I took way more than the absolute bare bones minimum that most of the engineering students took. In fact, the professor I had for the very first one – Watson, what the hell is his first name? Hilariously, he was a postmodern commie, but he taught the classics absolutely straight and in a brilliant fashion. He was a really good teacher. I still recall with great fondness the things we read in that course. And the very first one was the Iliad, which I’ve remained obsessed with. I just read a recent new translation of the Iliad, another new translation of the Odyssey just in the last few months, and that was quite different than by the time you got there in ’81.
David: Yeah. The humanities department had been pretty much nuked at MIT at that point. I had no idea.
Jim: I took a course later on, a whole course dedicated to Joyce’s Ulysses. Again, another brilliant teacher, and I’m sure a guy who also was of the more postmodern perspective. But again, that’s a good book to use postmodern as a lens. But anyway, neither here nor there, just to introduce the fact that I’ve got some complimentary perspective to yours perhaps on what we’re going to talk about. But before we get into the Ofermöd stuff, let’s talk a little bit more about the overlying idea of nobility. And I thought this was a really important takeaway, which was nobility as an intention, not a status or an accomplishment.
David: So I describe nobility as the wise and just use of power, and everyone has – we all have some power, and we can choose to use that wisely and justly or not. And knowing how to do that and choosing to do it is something that’s not part of our culture so much anymore. But the fact is, nobility is not hereditary aristocracy. That’s an absurd anachronism. It’s a way of being that we can choose to adopt regardless of whatever our position is.
Jim: And you distinguish it from specialness, which I thought was also interesting.
David: Yeah. I think a lot of us have – I certainly did – a kind of conflict between a sense of “am I special? Do I have some kind of special role or destiny?” Or “am I basically ordinary?” And I think both of those are really wrong views of what we are or can or should be. Nobody actually can be special in some kind of metaphysical sense, like, God gave me this mission that’s just for me. But it’s also the case that we shouldn’t just kind of subside into dull averageness. We should aspire to more than that.
Jim: Yeah. Of course, we do probably many of us exercise nobility in certain narrower realms, like in good parenting, for instance.
David: Yes. I think nobility is something that is available to all of us, and it’s something that we all are sometimes noble. But kind of pointing it out and making a theme of it and describing it may help do that more.
Jim: Yeah. So let’s now switch to the Ofermöd, and first, why don’t you give the setting of the poem, and then transition to your experience in elite higher education circa 1981.
David: Yeah. Well, this is a long complicated essay that’s kind of a puzzle box. It may be sort of confusing when a reader starts on it, but I keep feeding little nuggets of exciting bits, and eventually the pieces start to fall into place. The first part of it is about how nobility was taught in elite universities in the past before postmodernism took over. And I caught the very tail end of that as you did. It was more dwindled when I did it than when you did it.
But there’s a poem that I was taught in a class at Harvard. It was an Anglo-Saxon language and literature course. Anglo-Saxon is Old English, which is the oldest version of the language. The poem is called “The Battle of Maldon,” and it is about a historical event where the Vikings were repeatedly invading England. They were after loot, not conquest. So in September, a party of about 4,000 Vikings landed on an island just off the coast and demanded loot, and a much smaller British military force rode out to meet them.
The island is within hailing distance of shore, and it was high tide. The island is connected to the mainland by a very narrow causeway that you can only get one person across at a time. It’s still there, and that’s underwater at high tide. So they’re yelling at each other at the beginning of the poem, and the Vikings are demanding loot, and the English lord, who is the commander of the British force, the English force, is basically saying “F.U.” in fancy language.
Eventually, the tide went down, and the Vikings started to try to cross the causeway, but the English were able to block it because it was very narrow and only one Viking at a time could come across. The Viking leader said, “Okay, we’re not gonna have a proper fight here. How about you let us cross the causeway, and then we can have a fair and normal battle on dry land, and that would be better.” And the English lord said, “Yeah, okay. Let’s do that.” So the Vikings all came across, and they had a normal battle in which everybody on the English side was killed.
It’s a great poem. It’s one of the three or four greatest Old English poems. But the question that can arise is, did the English commander make the right decision here? And the question is, what is noble? There’s a word that typically this poem is taken as turning on, which is “ofermöd,” which means something like vainglorious pride or overconfidence. And the poem says that this choice to let the Vikings across the causeway was an instance of ofermöd on the part of the English commander.
The interpretation of the poem has to do with there being two contrasting notions of nobility in it. The Anglo-Saxons, who were the English, had converted to Christianity not that long before, but they retained a lot of the pre-Christian ethos of nobility, which was about glory and absolute loyalty to your commander and courage in the face of certain death. So from that point of view, the English commander’s decision to allow the Vikings across was glorious. It was like the Charge of the Light Brigade. It was a choice to defend the realm in the face of certain death.
Because the English had converted to Christianity, there’s a second notion of nobility that is operative, which is one of caring for others, putting others before yourself. And from that point of view, he doomed a couple thousand of his men to horrible death, not to mention the Vikings who, you know, mostly were just farmers and they’re not particularly evil people. So from a Christian point of view, this seems like a very dubious thing to have done.
Jim: And from our modern perspective, you know, the utilitarian perspective or God knows what we use in place of the concept of nobility today, you know, most people would say, “You’re fucking nuts, dude.” Right?
David: Although, I mean, it’s tricky because we don’t know enough about the context of the battle plans of the Vikings. It’s possible that this was the least bad option from a completely rational point of view. So we kind of have to set that aside. But also, that kind of rational utilitarian view was not something that was operative at the time that the poem was written. There’s a more modern conception of nobility, which does turn on rationality among other things.
Jim: Well, before we get into where next, because it’s one of my favorite things to talk about, your analogy between this particular situation in this poem and the Ophramode, behavior versus Gandalf at the bridge.
David: I mean, it’s just fascinating when you realize the parallel in The Lord of the Rings in the Mines of Moria, Khazad-dûm in the dwarven speech. The good guys are led by Gandalf are running from a horde of orcs, and they come to a place where there’s a very narrow bridge that only one person can cross at a time. It’s dangerous to cross. And they rush across the bridge, and then the Balrog appears, the Balrog being an enormously powerful fire demon. And Gandalf makes the decision to defend the bridge in order to let the rest of the Fellowship of the Ring escape. And he does that, and he dies. He falls into the pit and battles the Balrog, and he dies, and the Balrog dies. And then he’s resurrected. Critics argue, and I think this is completely compelling argument, that this was a reworking of the decision of the Byrhtnoth, who was the name of the English lord who made the decision to let the Vikings across. Gandalf made the decision to defend himself at the cost of his own life, the bridge, so that the Balrog, the enemy couldn’t cross.
Jim: Yeah. It was one of the two great pivot points, I thought. I think you in the essay said it was arguably the pivot point. I believe the other pivot point is where Galadriel renounces being given the ring as a free gift by Frodo in her garden at her fountain. I go, woah. That’s just like that right there. Yeah. That’s more of the wisdom form of nobility rather than the courage form of nobility, but both are important. Anyway, after that interesting bit, let’s turn back to what went wrong with our elite universities, and why are they no longer inculcating nobility in their students, and what are they doing instead?
David: Well, I sort of have two answers to that, and I equivocate a bit in the piece. One piece is the advent of postmodernism, which basically ate the humanities curriculum, replaced it wholesale. The other is the advent of postmodernity, which is the condition in which we recognize that everything is volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous. And, therefore, big intellectual theories about how everything should go are no longer credible. And the definition of postmodernity is incredulity towards grand metanarratives. And that’s just the condition that we’re in. And so the question is, what do we do about that? Now in terms of nobility, in terms of the curriculum, postmodernism was originally trying to work consequences of postmodernity in a somewhat creative and positive way, it got dumbed down and mixed in with a lot of politics and is, I think, basically a malign force. And it’s not stuff that – well, it is anti-noble because nobility itself was one of these grand metanarratives. And so that’s why, you know, when you say magnificence, everybody laughs. That’s not credible anymore. So we need a new form of understanding of nobility that is not a grand metanarrative, but that is functional and that can operate in postmodernity in which we don’t believe stuff like that anymore.
Jim: Yeah. I have a slightly different take on postmodernism and postmodernity, and I think I agree with you that in its basic claim, postmodernity is true. Right? There are no foundations. We are up here at the mesoscale between the Planck scale and the universal scale, and we’re making shit up the best we can. We know from complexity science that an awful lot of things are practically unknowable about what will happen next. We can, with $13 billion a year worth of computers, predict the weather out for about nine and a half days, growing at the rate of one day per decade. Postmodernism’s right about that, but it doesn’t mean that grand narratives are not useful or that large-scale narratives or myths or anything else aren’t useful so long as you don’t believe they are literally true and should be worshipped. And the huge mistake of the postmodern, particularly in the elite universities and in the liberal arts more generally, even outside universities, is to basically attack and denigrate any attempt at all to tell stories of how we ought to be in ways that are at all reminiscent of the stories of the past, which certainly had their bad points. I mean, it’s very useful to remember that Moses, Jesus, and Mohammed all endorsed slavery, for instance. Right?
David: And so did Buddha.
Jim: And did Buddha too? I don’t know enough about Buddha, but, you know, that was just the thing people did. Right? And now we are horrified about that once we had the liberal perspective that we are all more or less equal in some canonical sense at least, and we’re outraged by the thought of slavery or, you know, frankly, in the West, at least something like the caste system. But there are other parts of the great learnings of the past, the great writings, even something as bizarrely cold-blooded and bronze age pure as the Iliad. Right? There are things to be learned if not taken literally seriously. It’s just thrown it all out was to leave us entirely ungrounded.
David: So, I mean, there’s two things there. One is that postmodernism jumped from “nothing is absolutely true” to “nothing is true at all,” and therefore, all public claims are just propaganda, and the only thing that matters is whose side you’re on. Power. Power. Raw power. You know, it’s us versus them. That’s just so damaging. The other thing is the denigration of myth, which I think is enormously important. And one of the things that I say about nobility is that it is a myth, but it’s a true myth. And being noble yourself has to involve seeing in a mythic way and accepting that you are a myth, that to be noble means having one foot in the visionary realm, which allows you to see things in mythical terms and to see a better future. And seeing a better future is this major missing part of our culture, and a lot of that is due to, you know, postmodernism as it got degraded.
Jim: You know, I see it all the time. I do a lot of work with younger people on my social change work and things of that ilk. And I will tell you, no matter how screwed up things were in the seventies – and people forget how screwed up they were – we had the bomb hovering over our head. We assumed good chance we’d all get blown up. We had Vietnam. We had Nixon. We had the Weathermen. We had the Soviet Union on the march. Yet we were all optimistic, having a good time. I’m sure there was depression, but I don’t really know anybody who was depressed, thinking back to the good old days. And now there’s this – with young people, it’s very sad to me that they are pessimistic or at least utterly confused about what the future could be. And there is no draw of gloriousness, magnificence about what we could build if we had our shit together. Goddamn it, yes, we do not have our shit together, hence the need for social change. I, at least, being an old geezer with a sixties and seventies mindset, still believe that a glorious path for humanity is possible if we don’t fuck up.
David: You mentioned another one of the pieces that I wrote, which is called “Software Engineers Are Eating the World,” and that’s a lot of the point of that, which is that the tech industry is one of the very few places where the future is still alive as a possibility. There’s a lot of things wrong there, but at least there’s this sense that if we got our stuff together, we could make things a whole lot better.
Jim: Though, I mean, look at the actions of people like some of the tech leaders of today and the ethos of Silicon Valley. How far from nobility could you get? Think of a certain wedding going on at the present time. What’s wrong with them people, Mr. Chapman?
David: Well, they’ve forgotten nobility. They weren’t educated in it. I mean, it’s something that we got some of through the tail end of the classical curriculum, and they didn’t. And it wasn’t part of STEM education anyway, although apparently MIT required that of everybody in the 1970s. That’s great to hear. But the tech leaders of today were not there for that, and they don’t know what the wise and just use of power is.
Jim: Yep. And instead, we have something. We have hedonism, for sure. We have nihilism, for sure. And then we have an interesting sort of neighbor of them both, but something qualitatively different, which you write about, and I’ve been long interested in, knew some of the people that were involved in the very beginning – Effective Altruism.
David: Yeah. So there’s a section of Ofermöd about Sam Bankman-Fried, who was the head of FTX, which was a cryptocurrency exchange that he set up to fund Effective Altruism, which I think Effective Altruism was certainly at least trying to be noble, and I think on the whole, they did a lot of good work. He, however, famously engaged in a lot of financial crimes for which he and a bunch of other people associated with him went to jail.
Jim: I never knew quite how much sincerity to give the Effective Altruists, but they would do the math and say that if I stole $100 billion now, the good I could do for the people a trillion years in the future, take an integral, apply a discount rate, and stealing the $100 billion was the moral thing to do.
David: Yeah. He seems to have thought that. I think that was an error.
Jim: Maybe. Or either that or it’s his story. I don’t know.
David: Yeah. It’s hard to know. It was a very complicated situation.
Jim: Now what are some other examples? These aren’t necessarily in your essay, but you’re a general independent thinker. Some other examples of this kind of unnoble approach to the world that our leaders seem to be taking?
David: Well, I did discuss Elon Musk’s Twitter effort as a kind of example of a failure. I have a lot of respect for earlier work that Musk did, and I think he really had a sense that glory is important, that the space program is not something maybe you could actually justify in utilitarian terms, but it is important for the world to do things that are ambitious and glorious. And, you know, he dragged the auto industry into the electrical era, which just wouldn’t have happened otherwise, maybe ever, certainly not for a long time. But I think at a certain point, maybe because he was under tremendous amount of pressure, the Twitter effort was ill-conceived. And this term hubris, which means arrogant overconfidence, I think may have been at work there, that he really believed that fixing the government couldn’t be that hard, and he was enormously capable, which he is. And that in a few months, he could sort out everything that’s wrong with America, and that wasn’t realistic. And it failed and has had, it looks like, a lot of very negative consequences.
Jim: I’ve written a fair bit about – I actually have an unpublished essay comparing Musk to Napoleon. To compare his amazing business triumphs to Napoleon’s best battles, I end up actually saying Elon was even more superior than Napoleon was in his realms. But then I said, they both made the mistake of thinking that they were greater than they were – hubris as the Greeks would call it. With Napoleon, of course, it was the invasion of Russia where his amazing skills at tactical maneuver and getting there firstest with the mostest just made fools of all of his opponents. But that was totally different than a battle of logistics over hundreds of miles in the winter in Russia. And in Musk’s case, yes, I still was like you. I do not agree with the people who say “Oh, Musk just made it, he was a fool, he just lucked out, he was right place, right time” – wrong. Nobody accomplished the things that he accomplished in this essay lays them out in great detail unless you are an exceptional once-in-a-century type talent. But his thought that those same skills of kicking ass, focus, recruiting well, etcetera, could be used to fix the federal government – not good. Not good. How would more nobility perhaps have helped him? I’ll frame the question a little sharper. In my little essay, I do say that Musk’s Russia 1812 was deciding to get involved in electoral politics as a major player, actually. That was actually my call, at least, of where he went wrong. An area he had no expertise as a self-admitted autistic person doesn’t necessarily understand what motivates the average voter, etcetera. So what the hell? Why would somebody do that? And how might a more noble perspective have made them think about it differently?
David: So I describe nobility as wise and just use of power. Wisdom includes a realistic assessment of what you’re capable of and more generally what is required to accomplish a particular goal, and he was very badly miscalibrated on that. And it wasn’t like he did a careful calibration and got it wrong. He just sort of waded in and thought, “Hey, presumably I can do this, it seems.” And just disproportionality and fairness, and that was not particularly manifest in the slash and burn approach that Twitter was taking.
Jim: Let’s move back to the main line of the story in your essays. One of the things you talk around and about is meritocracy and how the nature of elite institutions has changed from, I think you describe it as being the province of a few dozen New England families to now some other criteria is used to define who enters these meritocrat factories or frankly more like rubber stamps.
David: Yeah. Well, in the old days, which is really up until the mid-twentieth century, the job of the elite universities was to take the sons of the ruling class and teach them how to be the ruling class, the next ruling class. And that worked as well as it did. I mean, it wasn’t perfect, and it certainly wasn’t fair or just. And in the 1940s, I think, the president of Harvard said, “This isn’t just. We need to be admitting students who can be excellent and be the next ruling class on the basis of merit rather than birth” because the United States, at least in New England, still had effectively a hereditary aristocracy. And he wrote a really pretty interesting article about that in The Atlantic at the time.
So they switched to a meritocratic basis for admission instead of “we let in the sons of the ruling class.” And in a lot of ways, I think that was very good. However, whenever you set up any kind of criteria, you’ve got Goodhart’s rule so people can game it. And what happened was the same people who would have gotten in for the most part still did get in because they were the people who knew how to game systems.
There’s two classes. I wrote a piece called “In His Nobility” series, it’s a piece about kings, courtiers, and priests. The analogs of kings, courtiers, and priests are the secular power. Political power is kings. The courtiers are the administrators, and the priests are, I say, virtue experts. That’s activists. And the education that Harvard slid into first started to produce a lot of administrators rather than kings. So we have everybody at Harvard going into Wall Street, or McKinsey Consulting, or the tech industry, where their job is to administer and optimize existing kinds of systems rather than to create innovative new institutions, which the ruling class had previously done. So that’s a source of continuing economic material progress without social and cultural progress that might otherwise have taken place. And then Harvard and the other elite universities increasingly took people in who were virtue signalers, and those people became activists. So the elite universities created a huge activist class, which has not necessarily been to the general benefit.
Jim: And this is, of course, to some degree. I remember it again in MIT 1971. I’d say 40% of our class were first generation to college people like myself. My dad dropped out of high school in ninth grade. My mom left home when she was 14. So there was real meritocratic access.
David: Well, MIT is special. I mean, MIT is not like Harvard. I mean, it always was. I’ve heard some histories where, going back to the early twentieth centuries, a lot of working-class guys at MIT. There were no working-class guys at Harvard.
Jim: And yeah, it’s probably fair to say. It’s funny you talk about these courtier classes or this, you know, these people that go to Wall Street. I often tear my hair out that what kind of society would send its best and brightest to be investment bankers or lawyers. Right? It’s like, it really is a waste of brainpower. It could be a doctor, which at least you’re doing something – you could be an automatic transmission mechanic. Right? Do somebody good something good on somebody’s old load of a car, but, you know, be fucking with paper and be a symbolic manipulator in some bizarre ass game. I mean, what the hell? I suppose that’s an attribute of a lack of virtue and nobility to think that that’s a life well lived somehow.
David: It’s a lack of vision. It’s not having an idea that the future could be actually different as opposed to just optimizing. We’ve gotten a lot of economic growth out of that. I mean, capital allocation is the most important function in an economy according to some people, and I think it’s sort of roughly right. So the people who make the decisions about where investment goes, that’s actually important. We got economic growth, but we don’t get a qualitatively different, more exciting, uplifting future.
Jim: That seems pretty accurate. Now you also talk about the loss of nobility – I don’t remember if you used these words or not, but I put in my notes as a cultural trauma. Let’s talk about that a little bit and how the culture has reacted to the current kind of elite that we have.
David: Well, I mean, there’s obviously been a revolt against the existing elite, which is what has driven the last election and a lot of current politics. And the revolt is certainly justified in a lot of ways. The existing elite class has not delivered on what people want. Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be any sort of positive vision about what could replace them. So we collectively are actually just tearing down critical institutions like science and not having any idea what’s gonna replace that. It’s very scary.
Jim: I mean, I certainly have been one critiquing the elites for quite a while, but I hate to say it, the worthless elites we have today are better than Trump. Right? I mean, the guy is just a total shit show, and yet a majority of Americans voted for him, or I guess 49.9% something like that, after seeing the clown show that he ran for four years. I give people who voted for Trump in 2016 a little bit of slack saying, yeah, the world was obviously screwed up. Putting somebody in who’s gonna take a golf club and stick it into the spokes of the bicycle might be a thing to do. But then to actually see what kind of person he was for four years and even more egregiously, his ridiculous stolen election claims and stuff, and then still vote for him – on one hand, it shows that there is no decent alternative. But on the other, I suppose we should take it as a warning that people really, really, really are pissed off by the lack of allegiance of our elites to the regular people.
David: And also, I think the sense of stasis that the elites are just offering more of the same, and more of the same is not what people want. There’s a sense among the revolt of “we have to finally have some change” because everything has degenerated into a fixed pattern that is not working. And I agree with that. I mean, we do have to have some change. I know you agree with that too, and you’ve been working on that. And that’s just not going to be delivered by the current, you know, the previous elite class, which has been dethroned. What happens now? I don’t know.
Jim: And it may be as you talk about – you don’t know what the alternatives were with the Viking story. Who knows? Ridiculous as it sounds, Trump burning down the elite institutions to the degree that he can do so may in the long term end up being okay even if it does kick our civilization in the guts for quite a while, particularly as you mentioned, you know, the attack on science. I mean, how stupid is that, at least seemingly stupid is that. Right?
David: Yeah. Well, you know, science has been drastically corrupted. It is not working well. Most of the money spent on science is wasted on stuff that is false or just pointless, and people also react to the fact that it’s politicized in a way that’s completely inappropriate. So, you know, again, I can sympathize with that. At the same time, I have a PhD in science, and I think science is tremendously important. That’s what has generated most of what makes the world better than it used to be. And there’s still amazing advances in medicine happening despite everything, and that could go 10 times faster than it’s going now if things were not so messed up. But, you know, hitting it with a sledgehammer is not going to help, I think.
Jim: Though on the other hand, when you tear down an old decrepit building, you have to use a sledgehammer or bulldozer first. So we’ll see.
David: Yeah. Yeah. But then you have to have some plan for rebuilding, or, you know, maybe the hope is—I mean, I don’t think there’s a hope. Right? I don’t think there’s any coherence in it, but we could hope that after the destruction, somebody somehow will say, “Oh, now there’s an opening here. There’s space. There’s an empty plot of land. Let’s build a new thing.”
Jim: Yeah. Before we—and that will be our next step. Where do we go from here? But before we do that, why don’t you discuss a little bit the false temptation of going back?
David: The old system of elite education worked in some sense. It produced a functional ruling class. There’s what’s called sometimes authoritarian high modernism, which is the system that we had in, say, the 1950s, which conservatives look back with great nostalgia at the 1950s as an era when there was tremendous prosperity and rapid technological progress and peace. It also was stultifyingly boring and repressive in some ways, which is how your generation reacted against it and tore it down for better or for worse. So can’t we go back to that? And the answer is no. We can’t because modernity is over. You know, that whole thing was reliant on everybody collectively believing that systematic, rational institutions would lead us forward. And we just don’t believe that anymore. And we’re right not to believe it in some ways because the world is moving too fast, because everything is too squishy. So there has to be some new thing. We can’t just go back.
Jim: Alright. Now after we talk about all the bad shit, now let’s turn mostly at least to what should we do? What could we do? What should we at least possibly imagine doing? And, let’s maybe start with your concept of a new nobility and what it might be. I think you called it fluid nobility, if I recall correctly.
David: I’ve written a lot about what I call the fluid mode. An aspect of that is what I call metarationality, which is a way of thinking and seeing that fully understands the value of rationality, but that also understands its limitations and where it’s applicable and where it isn’t, and can think and act in ways that are not rational in the narrow sense, but that are effective and positive. I’ve got a website called metarationality.com, which is about that. There’s a lot of examples from science and other fields of what this is like.
There’s also a theme of myth, which we touched on earlier as a way of seeing and thinking and acting that is tremendously powerful. We all have a concept of what it means to be a good king, and that concept lives in fantasy fiction. It’s dropped out of reality, but it’s still very alive for us because we have movies and novels and video games in which there are good kings. And there are good kings who are acting in postmodernity in the sense that these fictions are created in our time for audiences who are living in postmodernity.
So I think fantasy fiction is a tremendous resource for thinking through what a new model of nobility might be. I have only sketches of ideas about how to develop this. It’s really hard in our world to think about new positive futures. I think everybody who tries is frustrated by how difficult that is. I think past models of nobility are useful as a resource because they point to things that are not considered possible now, like glory, magnificence, honor.
Jim: Character, courage.
David: Courage, character.
Jim: Yeah. All these laughable things. Right?
David: Right. And I think this can be part of a vision for a better future.
Jim: You mentioned in passing and other writings, I know you mentioned more, thoughts about what we know about adult development and how this may be impinging on this issue.
David: Yeah. I’m very influenced by a thread of research that was done mainly at Harvard, actually, in the psychology of adult development through a series of stages. And the most interesting part for me is the transition from stage four, which is systematic and rational, into stage five, which goes beyond that into what I call fluidity or metarationality, metasystematicity, which is this broader way of seeing in which you have a simultaneous overview of your whole context and are drawing on resources from all kinds of places without trying to make this fully consistent. And at the same time, you’ve got a good eye on the practical details of the situation and what needs to be done.
This is a really powerful way of seeing and acting. I do a detailed analysis of the discovery and development of penicillin, which there’s a story that most people know about how Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin by seeing that some mold spores had fallen on a petri dish, and they created a dead zone around them, and he isolated the chemical. This is a false story. This is not what happened at all. There’s a much more interesting story about penicillin, which was primarily not a scientific discovery. It was a technological development during World War II with a fantastic scale up using engineering methods. I think it was 10 orders of magnitude in production scale up over a few years. It was considered the second most important aspect of the American war effort after the development of the nuclear bomb, which was the first one, because deaths on the battlefield during the First World War were primarily from infection, and penicillin could keep soldiers fighting who otherwise would be disabled or dead.
Jim: Yeah. I have also read the more accurate story of the Fleming one. It is quite interesting. Meta rationality. Now, when I think about social change, one of the things I think about is how scalable are ideas. Right? Is meta rationality something that everybody can practice or is this an elite priesthood type, level of hierarchical complexity and cognition in your mind?
David: We don’t know. This line of research was, as far as I can tell, deliberately terminated in about 1990 because of its political implications. So there’s been very little empirical work done. There is no system of training in meta rationality, which is something that I kind of am trying to work towards. So how many people are capable of this? I don’t know. Understanding systematic rationality is a prerequisite, and that’s not something that most people actually do. So it’s always going to be a minority unless we bring a whole lot of people up to the rational level first. I do think it could be a whole lot more people than it is now. In terms of social change and scalability, metamodernism is a pretty closely related idea. And I listened recently to your podcast with Hanzi Freinacht – or half of Hanzi Freinacht. He’s actually two people. That’s very interesting ideas there that they are thinking in scalable terms about transformation of society as a whole.
Jim: Yeah. And then, of course, our Game B group was another one that’s all moving in similar directions. Right? As they say, alignment beyond agreement. I think we all see something out there, and some things are pretty similar, but our orientations and particularly the focus of our works tend to be a little different. We’re in great conversation with not just Hanzi, but lots of the metamodern people as well and find them to be a very good community of thinkers.
David: Yeah. One of the aspects of nobility that has to be developed is a recognition of pluralism – that people are actually different. People actually want different things. Different kinds of social forms are gonna be functional for different people, and somehow a metamodern society has to take that into account.
Jim: Yep. And in fact, it is near the core of the Game B ethos. We call it coherent pluralism, and we say that the failure of most social change movements or revolutionaries is somehow thinking there’s one answer for everybody. Wrong. Right? Humans vary over a broad scale on anything you can possibly measure. Right? And so why shouldn’t they be able to build membrane, you know, little communities where they establish via accords what their roles are? Right? As long as they honor a small number of rules, which are necessary for global coherence, do what you want. Right? And yet that lens is really hard for people to grasp. You know? We’re so used to killing our neighbor who we disagree with. Right? Especially in the West. We got really good at that at one point.
David: Yeah. I take as a model for that, or partial model for that, what I call the subcultural era in the eighties and nineties. There were, particularly around San Francisco, a whole lot of these communities that were local groups of people who knew each other well, who developed their own culture with their own social norms that were really vital and productive and creative. And the Internet kinda killed that off because those communities had to have, like you say, a membrane that’s semi-permeable, but you need to keep out people who are not really adequately aligned with the vision of the subculture. And the Internet made everything available to everyone, which is great in lots of ways, but it meant that that kind of permeable membrane is much harder to maintain now.
Jim: Yes. But you have to focus on it. I mean, again, it’s like the idea of semipermeable membrane. We use exactly the same terminology, and it includes both in and out. Right? And yet you have to not be afraid to manage the cytoplasm essentially. But to your point about postmodernism, a lot of postmodernists have a problem even at the local level saying, “We, these 500 people, have decided by some process, these are the rules. Goddamn it. If you don’t like it, leave.” Right? Nothing wrong with that, in my mind. So long as you do it at the level of 500 and don’t coerce anybody and have the principles, which are part of our coherent core, a voice and exit. Everybody has a voice in what the accords are, and nobody is ever held against their will. So, you know, no cults.
David: Right. I mean, in the essay about kings, courtiers, and priests, I say that courtiers have no vision. Priests just want to universalize their local morality, and the priests or the activists and the postmodern – you know, post-activists are very much in the lineage of postmodernism now for the most part. That’s how they were educated. And they just want to take their ideas about what’s moral and say that that’s how it has to be for everyone, and that really isn’t helpful at this point. I’m close to a lot of people who are doing deliberate community design, and I see that as a potentially very positive way forward. Scalability is an issue. There needs to be a mass of scale between national scale institutions and some little community of 500 people, as you say – even that’s very large pretty much for an intentional community.
Jim: In our theory, it’s membranes contained within membranes, some of which oddly interpenetrate each other. Right? So we have a whole little architecture for it. Read about it in my book when it comes out. Right? I think at least we understand the failure modes. Whether we have the way forward right or not, only time will tell. But let’s move on in your idea of grooming nobility, shall we say. And you talk about the importance of both communities, but also practice. Talk about that a little bit.
David: Yeah. So I think one of the ways that the teaching of nobility was not all that successful in modernity is that it was classroom, propositional. Here’s a text by a dead white man. We’ll analyze that, and you have to talk about rulership. How do you bring that, if you even remember it, into a difficult decision-making choice in your community, your workplace, in national politics? I think nobility has to be developed through doing as much as knowing, maybe a lot more through doing than knowing. The knowing can give you an aspiration, can give you some guidelines, but one learns to exercise power wisely and justly by exercising it and making mistakes and getting it right sometimes and watching other people. So I sort of sketched at the end of Ofermöd a possible outline for a curriculum for a two-year program in learning metarationality, and in nobility, and fluidity and how that impacts on social and cultural change. Very preliminary.
Jim: Well, you did mention elsewhere that we probably need to imagine new institutions. Right? Probably fixing Harvard isn’t gonna happen. Right?
David: Yeah. I think the university system is… I love universities in the abstract. I loved my time at MIT and at Harvard. I don’t think they’re functioning well anymore, and I think they probably can’t be rescued. There’s a lot of talk about rescuing them, but the reality is they’re now being destroyed rather than rescued. I don’t think it’s too late for reform, probably. I would love to see reform happen, but I think something else is needed. And there’s some efforts to create new university-like institutions, but I think the closer you get to being a university, the less likely it is that that’s going to work. So I think quite different models may be good, like artist colonies I mentioned as a possibility. That’s a very different kind of structure where people are much more independent. There is support for people to do project work, to collaborate, and to try things out. It’s explicitly experimental. I think that universities, as a result of meritocracy, became systems for vocational education, really. They’re training you for jobs, and that’s why people go to university. And that’s fine, but that’s not where we get a better future. We get people who can fit into existing sorts of jobs. That’s not gonna give you creation, and the kinds of institutions where people can be creative are not like universities as they currently are structured.
Jim: That’s how it seems, and, you know, it would be for people who think of themselves as social entrepreneurs, creating such membranes could be… they don’t have to be big. Right? How many people were actually hanging out with Socrates and Plato in Greece? You know, 15 maybe, something like that. And Jesus Christ had 12 disciples. Right? So big things can start from small places.
David: Yeah. There’s some interesting, innovative science institutions that are not affiliated with universities that are being funded by tech money, that give the scientists much more freedom to pursue unlikely but potentially powerful and important projects. One of them recently banned publication by their scientists because the current science publication system has these really distorted incentives. And if you say, okay, you can’t publish, you put stuff up as blog posts, and that apparently has freed the scientists to do things they would not otherwise have been able to do because forcing things into the format of a scientific journal article really narrows the kinds of work you can do.
Jim: Do you happen to remember the name of the institution that chose to do that?
David: There’s several that have similar names. It’s confusing. I think it may have been Astera. I think it was the one led by Simai Chow. I think that’s Astera, but there’s maybe also a different one that also starts with an A.
Jim: Alright. I’ll look it up. I’m involved with two – one Pure Science, the other science and engineering – the Santa Fe Institute, where we still do a lot of formal journal publication, but we also publish on archive and on blogs and then Nautilus and places like that. And then I just recently joined as chairman of the board at the California Institute for Machine Consciousness. We’re in a very formative stage, and we probably are not going to emphasize traditional journal publishing, but occasionally we might stumble upon one.
How we couple with the dissemination of information and the true worldly community of scholars – that was the original purpose of publication, right? Was to build this interesting fractal network, or probably closer to a scale-free network, world of scholars. That’s what publication was for. It wasn’t to get tenure, goddammit! And I think part of our challenge with this new institute will be to think how we want to couple to the world of fellow travelers. It’s an interesting question, and we shouldn’t just accept that taking a year grinding through peer review, blah blah blah, so that Elsevier can sell its journals for $3,000 a year to 300 libraries is the right way to communicate science. You might check out the California Institute for Machine Consciousness. I think you would probably be horrified by it, but you might also be interested.
David: I’ll do that.
Jim: Really good people involved with it, really top folks. Now let’s switch directions a little bit. You know, I’m sort of famous on my show for saying, when I hear the word metaphysics, I reach for my pistol. But we’re gonna dabble a little bit in it, at least in the near neighborhood of it. Let’s talk a little bit about Nietzsche and this master-slave morality debate, which has some bearings here indirectly. Nail them to where you can to the rest of the discussion.
David: Well, I say first that metaphysics is bad. It’s the root of all evil, and I started writing a series of posts called “Undoing Philosophy,” which was working towards a detailed explanation of why metaphysics has screwed up everything. Everybody hated that, and I’ve kind of dropped it because everybody hated it so much because it’s a religion. It really is an enormously powerful religion for secular people and for religious people also, and it’s bad. Nietzsche is sometimes called an anti-philosopher, and I think he did more to destroy metaphysics than anybody else in history, which is really admirable. He was insane, and a lot of his stuff is kind of repugnant. But wow, he really managed to blow a hole in Plato, and that’s really good.
He observed that the two roots of the Western cultural tradition are the ancient Greek philosophers and Christianity. He said these have different conceptions of morality, and he called the pre-Christian pagan conception the “master morality.” It is the morality of the aristocracy, and he saw Christianity, and also Buddhism, which he knew a little about – he considered these to be slave moralities that are driven by resentment of the slave caste or class of the power of the elite, and the whole thing is fake, and it is justifying resentment of the position of the slave.
I think this is wrong in a lot of ways. One way is that what he called the master morality isn’t a morality at all. It’s an ethos. It is, I think, compatible with a morality of putting others before yourself. That was what he was working on at the time that he went insane and stopped working.
Tolkien was fascinated with this poem, “The Battle of Maldon,” because of this contrast between the pagan and Christian conceptions of nobility. He wrote an essay also called “Ofermod,” which is about that. And he wrote a sequel to the poem, “The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm’s Son,” which is the aftermath of the battle, where there’s two guys who are hunting through the corpses on the battlefield and having a discussion about what had happened and what it meant.
That fascination with that poem, I think, is a lot of what drove The Lord of the Rings and his working out his simultaneous attraction to the earlier pagan model of nobility with his commitment as a devout Catholic to the Christian model of nobility. In The Lord of the Rings, he synthesizes these in a lot of different characters. I think one of the fascinating things about The Lord of the Rings is that it’s got so many different models of what it means to be noble. The nobility of Gandalf is a correction to the failed nobility of Beorhtnoth in The Battle of Maldon. But you have very different kinds of nobility in Frodo or Éowyn or Faramir or Sam, who is, I think, actually, in some ways, the hero of the whole book.
Jim: He’s the greatest single character, right? He’s the one who holds it all together.
David: Yeah. He’s the one who saves the world, and he’s a gardener. And at the end of the book, he goes home. That’s the end of the book – he goes back to his wife and says, “Well, I’m back.” And he doesn’t make a big deal about the fact that he saved the world. Nobody makes a big deal of the fact that he saves the world. But he was the most noble. He was the only one – well, he and Galadriel, and I guess also Gandalf – are the characters who were not corrupted by the ring, and that was critical.
Jim: And don’t forget Tom Bombadil, my personal role model.
David: Yeah. He’s a fascinating character. That’s a real enigma.
Jim: He’s got a bizarre history because he wrote some funky stories and poems about Tom Bombadil, totally independent of the trilogy. Right? And he just decided to recycle them. Whether that was actually smart or not, I don’t know. Because, of course, the whole forest epoch was left out of the movies. Right? So you could tell the story without it, but I love that little part of it. He’s the other one who could not be corrupted. Before we get to our final crunch on what technologists have to do with all this – you write a fair bit, and I think you call yourself a reluctant or some form of Buddhist, and I can’t even pronounce the damn word, but Vajrayana Buddhism. The fuck is that? And what does it have to do with this question?
David: Vajrayana – Vajra is a word which means a number of things. It means thunderbolt. It actually derives from the Proto-Indo-European god of thunder. So Thor and Zeus are both wielders of thunderbolts as Thor’s hammer. The Vajra is the Indian equivalent of Thor’s hammer. So it is the lightning bolt – Yana is “path.” It is the lightning bolt path. It is also the indestructible path. That’s the derivation of the word. It is the branch of Buddhism that is life-affirming, that’s the phrase we use. It says that the world that we actually live in is actually good and glorious. Nietzsche criticized both Christianity and Buddhism for rejecting the world, for saying that the world that we live in is a garbage world that has nothing good in it, and the real world, the good world is some heaven somewhere else. Vajrayana says no – this is it, and this is the world in which we live. It is glorious, and we should be like kings or gods even in this real world, and we should take that power that we derive from being like kings or gods and use that for the benefit of everyone. And it then says, here are these methods that you can use to develop that kind of both noble aspiration to benefit everyone and to develop the ability to do so.
Jim: That sounds pretty good. Even me, famous hater of religion, could agree with that. My lumpen take, you know, my curmudgeonly lumpen take on Buddhism – fucking suicide cult. Right? You wanna go to Nirvana and be dead. What the fuck?
David: Yeah, it’s nihilistic. So this is a criticism very explicitly of the nihilism of mainstream Buddhism. It’s saying that – yeah, suicide cult is – I mean, it’s a death-centered religion, and Vajrayana is an explicit critic of that saying no. Life, power, mastery, and creativity, and playfulness – these are what it valorizes, and all of that in service of others. So it’s like what Nietzsche was trying to do at the end of his life as a synthesis of the master and slave morality. He talks about the Roman Caesar with the soul of Christ. That is also the Vajrayana ideal of using power with compassionate intent.
Jim: Yep. Check this out. Doesn’t sound nearly as much nonsensical as most religion. Alright. Well, let’s now enter our final section. Your last – the famed nobility tetralogy is “software engineers are eating the world.” And, you know, being a tech dude myself for a long time, still dabble in the shit from time to time, and fair number of our listeners are, but by no means all. Why don’t you tell the story about what that means and what you’re trying to get at with the title, and then what are the implications for those of us who work in this world, with respect to bringing us back to a more noble world?
David: So Marc Andreessen, who is maybe the foremost venture capitalist in Silicon Valley, wrote an essay ten-ish years ago called “Software Is Eating the World.” And this was in the wake of the dot-com collapse, so I guess it must have been a lot more than ten years ago – fifteen, twenty years ago. He was prophesying that every industry would be radically transformed by software, and that turned out to be right. Basically, there is nothing you can do now where you’re not gonna have your lunch eaten by somebody else unless you deploy software in every aspect of your business. He was totally correct about that.
That seems to have pretty much run to completion at this point, and Silicon Valley’s kind of out of ideas, or it would have been out of ideas if it wasn’t for the unexpected advent of powerful AI a couple years ago. But the consequence of that is that software engineers have enormous power now. Elon Musk is basically a tech guy, and he obviously is one of the most powerful men in the world as an example. Andreessen himself is tremendously powerful.
Andreessen has written a number of essays more recently outlining a positive vision for the future, which I completely applaud. Partly, I like a lot about the specific vision, but there are so few people who are even willing to make any kind of positive vision for the future. And it’s a vision of material abundance primarily through clearing away all of the really stupid obstacles that we have to actually doing anything. So I’m completely on board with that. And he says, this can also enable greater meaning. It can enable more cultural production. I find that more interesting, but I’m really glad that he said that as well.
So software engineers now have a lot of power. I think that means that we have the responsibility, the noblesse oblige, to exercise that wisely and justly, but we aren’t trained in that, so we don’t know how. And we’re on the whole not doing a very good job of it. So if you look at what the tech industry is doing, a lot of it is probably making the world worse, and very little of it – there’s lots of glorious exceptions where people are doing things that are actually surprising and exciting and future-oriented. But the vast bulk of what the tech industry does is at best neutral, and a lot of it’s quite negative.
I say that part of the reason for the power of software engineers now is that we are, more than anybody else, the people who understand and can deploy meta-rationality, although that term is not very well known or used. It is the ability to see systems whole and to see the space around the system, the context, what it interacts with, and to use that to alter systems and to create entirely novel systems. Software systems, but it’s also institutions. And a software entrepreneur, which I was, is somebody who’s building a new institution, a company. And a lot of those are innovative in various ways, and building a new system is, by definition, a meta-rational task because you have to be meta to the system that you are building where most people’s work is within a system rather than meta to one.
So that meta-rationality, I think, is the key enabler for power now, and that’s why we have potentially a great deal of power. Software engineers now have a great deal of power because the tech industry is really pretty much the only place where there is a positive vision for the future. It’s not exactly the vision that I would endorse, but a lot of it is good. And we have a lot of power because meta-rationality is a critical capability for addressing postmodern situation of nebulosity, of uncertainty, of constant flux, and ambiguity, and change.
And this gives us the ability to create new institutions, as you said, that software entrepreneurship is creating a new system, an institution, a company, and that has trained many people for power. And what is missing is an understanding of how to exercise the power that we have in ways that are wise and just, that is to say noble. And a lot of what the tech industry does now is not clearly of benefit other than in an economic sense, which is still something. A lot of it seems like it may even be negative on an economic sense other than locally. It would be good if software engineers understood that we have power, and then took up the responsibility for using it in ways that are wise and just. And that’s gonna require a recognition of that and then a collective decision to educate ourselves in what that might mean.
Jim: Yeah. From the current system, that’s a lot to expect. Right? You know, I often argue that the inner ethos of Game A, our current world, is short-term money-on-money return. By short-term, I mean three years, something like that, five years. Anything that can be profitable that isn’t clearly illegal will eventually get built. And in fact, unfortunately, companies like Google and Facebook have taken it beyond clearly legal to “we know it’s illegal, but we also know the penalties will be smaller than our win, so we’ll do it anyway.” Right? It’s amazing the number of times Facebook and Google have been fined hundreds of millions and billions of dollars for blatant violations of various regulations, but they go, “that was worth it.” And they go about their business. So, unfortunately, very difficult for nobility to trump money-on-money return, particularly when money is the fuel to build things.
David: Yeah. It’s easy to despair and say the system is so powerful and so locked in. The incentives are so bad that we’re just doomed, and that might be true. Maybe we are doomed. But I try to search for ways forward even if they don’t seem especially likely because otherwise, we are doomed. If we’re not gonna be doomed, it’s gonna have to be because people think new things.
Jim: Exactly. They always ask me, “Why do you waste all your time on the social change stuff? We’re all doomed.” And I go, “We might be. But if we don’t do anything, we’re definitely doomed.” Right? So at least buy the lottery ticket, goddamn it. Right? More specifically, prescriptively, people who are in tech and maybe have some responsibility in tech or are training themselves to be in tech soon – what could you advise them in terms of how can they get some practical wisdom?
David: I think the first thing is to recognize that you do have power. A lot of software engineers feel they don’t, and that’s often realistic, but you’re in a position where you can gain power, probably. Many people, not everyone. And if you have power or potentially have power, then the next step is to recognize that that gives you responsibility, that you are obliged, noblesse oblige, to exercise that power in a way that is wise and just. It means you need to resist the easy temptation of saying, “Well, I’m not expert in politics or morality. I actually don’t really care about that. So to the extent that I have to make decisions, I want to outsource that to somebody who is expert in that.” The problem is the people who claim to be expert in those things have their own agendas and incentives that are highly distorted, and their answers may be quite wrong. You need to develop independent judgment, and that means a lot of reflection. It means a lot of learning. And, again, you know, we just may not wanna do that. That’s fine. If you don’t wanna do that, then stay in a job where you just take orders. That’s okay. If you’re not gonna be in a job where you just take orders, then that gives you responsibility.
Jim: And so you talk about the need to envision. Let’s wrap up on your vision of a positive future. If everybody listened to David Chapman, goddamn it, and then listened to Jim Rutt on the new institution side, what might the new – but just focus on your stuff. What might the world look like? What’s the good, glorious, magnificent world that is available to us if just we could do the right thing?
David: I concentrate on social and cultural factors. I want to see a world that’s more playful, more connected, more creative with strong communities that are opt-in, opt-out, as you say, exit and voice. I would like to see material abundance, but I don’t think that’s the most important thing at this point. It’s very difficult to be specific because of the pluralism that I think is necessary. So I can’t lay out a vision of “this is how it should be” because that implicitly has “for everyone” attached. I would like to see it feasible for many different visions of the future to flourish that don’t get in each other’s way too much, don’t step beyond each other’s toes too much.
Jim: I want to really thank David Chapman for a wide-ranging, deep, interesting conversation. Thanks for coming on The Jim Rutt Show.
David: Thank you, Jim. This has really been fun. I’ve really enjoyed it.
Jim: Yeah. Me too. Let’s do it again sometime.
David: Cool. Alright.