The first value is intellectual honesty. The first value. You will always say what you think. And then the second rule is playing politics in the first degree will get you fired on the spot.
And even later when I was working back in Big Corporate America, I'm recruiting a manager to work for me. I'd say, if you play politics in the first degree, I will fire your ass. And what do you mean by that? I go, well, you make anybody try to look bad.
You withhold information that the organization needs. You mis-attribute who came up with an idea. Any of these things, I will fire you. I have references, right?
And it's another hand, if you steal money out of the petty cash, you'll probably give you a second chance. Particularly if you're going to use it for something while I go out and get drunk or something, right? So I made a one on politics and intellectual honesty as the prime value, my two foundation stones for my entrepreneurial career. Greetings, future fossils.
And welcome back to the podcast that explores our place in time for episode 181. This is your host, Michael Garfield, about to take you on a rump into the undeveloped wilderness around one of the more interesting and honestly confusing, promising, but challenging and controversial sub-cultural topics on my radar these days, by which I mean game B, which is intentionally, nebulously defined as the alternative to the default standard in our modern society, which is game A, a game of competition for scarce financial resources in an eco-cidal, endless growth paradigm. Some of you might remember back in episode 51 when I had Daniel Schmachtenberger of the Neurohacker Collective on the show to explain the problem of game A and lead us right up to the doorstep of game B thinking. And those of you who listen to the show regularly know that embracing a more complex, multivalent understanding of what matters in this world and enacting it through both our individual behavior and social contracts is a constant discussion on future fossils.
So it is with great pleasure that for this episode, I get long-awaited guest Jim Rutt on the show. Jim is quite a character, co-founder of the game B conversation with Jordan Hall. Jim's life is one fascinating story after another, starting with his childhood and a pack of troublemaking scamps in the woods around the DC Beltway and following his meteoric success, writing the dragon of the Personal Computing Revolution through one corporation after another. Jim has his own show, the Jim Rutt Show, which I consider a sister program to both future fossils and the other broadcast I host, Complexity.
He and I were both recently indicted, if you will, in Joe Lightfoot's Taxonomy of what he calls the liminal web, a loose constellation of sense makers and system poets, alongside fellow friends of future fossils, Tyson Yum Caporda, Jeremy Johnson, Nora Bateson, and many others. But for this episode, I really wanted to focus on the pre-history and post-history of game B, the contingencies of Jim's biography that shaped his personal philosophy, the way that he engages in life and in his organizational work, and then ultimately the way that they have shaped the discourse around this potent idea with all of its promise and its problems and how he understands the world into which the game B conversation might be leading us in our era of collapse and transformation and on through to the other side. I just wanna say here that with game B, as with many things, I find myself ambivalent and this conversation I found to be full of challenging and difficult ideas that let me not knowing really what I think about all of this. At different times in this conversation, I hear myself and Jim and I thank my God, are we prophets or are we fools?
But by the end of it, I was left with a much deeper appreciation for him and for this entire game B discussion and with a lot of hope that listeners and adjacent to the future fossils, community will be able to take this bath bomb of a discussion and in its froth, find something of value, something that can be explored in greater depth. I deeply look forward to seeing what discussion this engenders in the future fossils Facebook group and Discord server, which are both available to members of the Patreon community, as well as of course my public facing Twitter account. And now seems like the right time to thank everybody who has been supporting the show and all of the community management work that I've been volunteering over the years, all the time it takes to edit this program, including the 240 some, extant future fossils patrons as well as new patrons, Nicole Creedler, Sam Sonega, Pamela Shapiro, and Andrew Nann. If you too would like access to our communities, as well as Patreon exclusive episodes, new art, new music, and all of the other creative work that I cannot just squeeze into this one show, then please visit me and help me keep this listener supported program afloat at patreon.com slash Michael Garfield.
Also, I highly recommend that you check the show notes there for this episode because we list such epic bibliography of historical and current luminaries, excellent reading and listening, and other inspiring media that will keep you busy for quite a long time, pursuing every strange rabbit trail that we follow in this conversation. If this is your first time listening to future fossils, thank you for tuning in. I hope that you will subscribe and review this show on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, and now buckle up for two very intense hours with the delightfully provocative and painfully interesting Jim Rutt. One last of addition to the show notes for a link to participate in a unique and interesting air drop by my friends at Ideal Market, who are launching a prediction market-based reputation system on web three.
Those of you who follow me closely will remember that I appeared on their podcast last year with a bevy of my own skeptical questions about the platform, and I was very pleased with their response. I think this is a unique and interesting project, and they're air dropping the equivalent of $850 of tokens to each of the first hundred of my listeners and community members that sign up for this experiment. So, an opportunity to get your skin in the game with a bottom-up social epistemological game will be laboratory in the wild, as it were. Having said that, enjoy, and thanks for listening.
Howdy, Jim, how you doing? I am doing well in yourself. I'm getting over COVID. Ooh, that sucks.
It sure does, yeah. What was yours like? Mine was relatively mild, but my wife had it, and half of her family had it, because we've got it from each other over the holidays. We've got two small kids, so having to care for someone else while you're sick is not great.
But, yeah. Yeah, I've been, we've been dodging it and so far so good, but, you know, I'll say sooner or later, we're gonna get it, but, truthfully, we've got it. We've been more of my wife and I've been more rigorous than we probably otherwise would have been, because we have a 17-month-old grandchild who we see a lot, and we really don't want her to get it, so we've been, her parents, too, have been very rigorous. Yeah, we have been, too, until, you know, we have a five-month-old, and there was kind of no negotiating my way out of holiday trip to see the 90-year-old great-grandma, you know?
So, I don't know, I saw this meme that was someone playing the Mario Brothers level, where it's just all like rods, rotating rods of flames that you have to jump through. They're like people who haven't got COVID yet. This is what they're... No, but one day we'll get through, right?
Somebody will get the lever level 127. There'll be one blast person on Earth that never had COVID, and, you know, maybe I'll be that guy who knows, right? It was starting to feel like a children of men prequel. You know, I was like, you know, why is it that everyone went sterile in that film?
Well, I've heard of that, I've heard of the book children of men. I didn't know there was a movie of it. Oh, it's fantastic. Yeah, it's a sort of slow apocalypse, you know, where...
I know the premise, yeah, I know the premise. I've seen reviews of what I've put this on my list of books to read, but I didn't know it was made into a movie. It's interesting. Oh, God, it's got one of the best climax sequences.
Like the, I think the last 20, 30 minutes of the film are all one shot. Oh, it's just extraordinary. But yeah, it's that same kind of thing. It's like there's one person in the world that can still get pregnant, you know?
And it's like, oh my God, we've got to care for this person like a seed bank, you know? So anyway, what else is fresh with you today, sir? We on the air, we just doing pregame. I don't know, we'll figure this out in post.
Okay, let's go on a lot of things going on, really in jamming mode, getting ready to watch a game B movie. I'm just gonna, we're premiere six of the year of Eastern Time on Monday. And we're gonna have a, that would be Monday, the 17th, I guess. I don't know when you, I don't know what your production backlog is, but.
In the ancient history by the time this is out. But yeah, but I can go check it out. It's called an initiation to game B. Also on the stove will be the filmmakers and then a panel, which will consist of Daniel Schmockenberger, Jordan Hall, Tyson, Yunka, Porter, and myself that will discuss the movie, the film.
I feel like a maker tells me I can't say movie. I have to say film. And I'm particularly interested in talking about the role of the arts in the unfolding of game B. Well, that's something I definitely wanna touch on with you today.
But first, I guess first the thing to do would be to assume zero knowledge on the part of an audience. And to talk a little bit about you, your background, the road that got you to where we are now. So I'd love to, you know, cause this is all a matter of kind of intense personal interest from me is just hearing people's autobiography and knowing sort of like how you got into your career in the first place. I will say there is one topic, and I think I've told you there's one topic we can't talk about on today's call.
Because. Which is, oh yeah, it's a bat, that institution. Yes, unfortunately there is a very key part of the story that actually happened there. As long as it goes unnamed, I think we can.
Okay, well I will euphemize it. So it's actually, well, I could go to bed without this event. It's the origin story for actually. So we'll just have to euphemize it.
Well, let's be back even further. All right. And let's talk about Jim Rhett as a young man or as a child. As a child.
Yeah, because this is your entry into the museum, the digital archives. This is your fossil. That's gonna be dug up in Spalbard or whatever in a thousand years. So, you know, the game B film, maybe it's on the blockchain and it's on the, it survives on Mars somewhere.
But, you know, after the great whatever on Earth, all they found was this. And so this is what they have to go off of. So what are they gonna learn about you first? All right, cool.
Now I grew up in a little town called a Delphi, Maryland, which was a working class suburb of Washington, DC. My parents were like a lot of people in our community. They had come from elsewhere. Right after World War II to reinvent themselves, my mother was from Northern Minnesota.
Grew up on a B-dast tenant farm in the swamps of Minnesota. They didn't have electricity or indoor plumbing or central heat or anything like that. She left home when she was 14, saved her money. And with her nickel's dimes and quarters took a bus to Washington, DC when she was 17, lied about her age and got a job at the phone company.
You know, my dad grew up in Madison, New Jersey, kind of a very different spot. I worked for the railroad, dropped out of high school after ninth grade, when his father died and he had to help support the family, went to work for the Erie Railroad, through some family connections, then worked for the railroad to World War II, joined the Marine Corps, fought in the South Pacific, was part of three of the agents, came back, worked for the railroad for a year or two, got bored with it and he and a good buddy went down to Washington, DC to take the exam for the Washington, DC police department. Apparently they were advertising all over the Northeast. They both did pretty good and they both joined the police.
The town I grew up in was upper working class, lower middle class, I describe it. You know, the people on our block, you know, you had an electrician, you had a meat cutter, you had another electrician, you had a machinist, you had a bricklayer of stone mason, you had an HVAC dude, school teacher, bank clerk, runner of a small used furniture business, and an SDI agent and my dad, right? So it was kind of a kind of interesting, it was a good place to grow up. It was an inner burb, we call it today, inside the Beltland, DC.
But at that point it was not the kind of cutting edges of vervification, somebody had bought a farm and put 120 houses on it, but there were still an abandoned farm behind us and some woods behind us, which never got developed through a bunch of interesting quirks of history. And so we had vast amounts of woods, well, I'm from miles, all interconnected woods that we could explore and nobody was rich, but nobody was missing any meals. You know, DC after World War II was boom pound, right? There wasn't a recession from 1945 till 1992 that touched DC.
So all these upper working folks were doing great, and they were enjoying life. You know, they weren't fancy people. They much prefer Pavlou ribbon beer or such to, you know, anything too fancy, but it was a great place to live, lots of social capital still there. There's lots of community-based organizations.
We had our own private swimming pool, and boys clubs, girls clubs, boy scouts, ballerina, troops, you know, it was just good. Great place to grow now. Well, that's great. Okay, so hold on just a second, because there are two things that I want to focus on in that telling, we're actually three, but let's start with two.
One is that you and I share something that I think is a little strange, which is that both of our fathers were police officers. Ah, no idea. Yeah, my dad, other than, I mean, my dad was over 40 years in the travel industry. He, you know, working for Royal Viking Lines, Universal Studios, and then Walt Disney for the last 20 years of his career.
But I was conceived in a home that backed up against the McLean Game Refuge in Simsbury, Connecticut. But I was born in Los Angeles because my parents moved out there and would be closer to my grandparents. And my dad was a reserve police officer in the Hermosa Beach Police Department. So that's an interesting thing.
And one thing is I would like to explore with you what you think the influence of having a police officer father might have been on your personality and on your view of life. Because I mean, I can definitely say in my case, when my parents split up, I was a teenager and I got arrested for shoplifting CDs from Walmart at like 16. And somehow my father knew when I went back to visit him in Orlando, he sat me down in the kitchen. He was like, so do you have anything you want to tell me?
And it turned out that he had an old friend in the Kansas City Police Department who was keeping tabs on every member of the family. And so. That's the way it works, absolutely. That's the first thing.
I'd love to hear your thoughts on that. Yeah, of course my dad was a career police officer. He did his 20 years and he retired and he did other stuff for a couple of years. Then he kind of went back into the federal government and ended up in federal law enforcement.
So he was a classic Irish Catholic Marine cop. There's a whole bunch of those people in the family tree and around and about. And that was interesting. It was, it had a certain amount of glamour to it actually.
I suppose I got a little secondhand status. Upper working class police were revered, I guess, or at least considered role models and minor heroes and what have you. My father was a very social character. He loved the talk and got along well with everybody and was not considered a hard-ass cop.
He was in fact, he finished his career as the number two guy in the community relations division where they go around do the policemen to school kind of stuff and what have you. But prior to that he did it all. He was a beat cop for nine years. And then he started getting promoted, ended up as a sergeant and then a lieutenant and a radio, a shift at one of the precincts and all.
So he did a whole real cop thing. But yeah, growing up you got to one. He certainly stressed the straight and narrow, not that we followed it. But they stressed it.
But I was saying that's actually less important than the other values from him and my mother, both, which were about honesty, good faith, reliability. If you have to be in the police department, if you were late twice in a year, you could be fired. And so that was all kind of just reinforced in us as to be punctual, be reliable. Don't be a shitbird with the terminology in the police department those days.
Don't be a shitbird. A person who walks around with their shirt tail out, doesn't show up to work on time and stuff like that. So even though I suppose we could say we came from peasants on my mother's side and working class on my father's side, we somehow developed some petite bourgeois values that probably flowed over, for apart, at least apart from his police thing. And we were also taught physical courage, I would say.
But that was not uncommon. That was in our town, everybody fought. It was okay to lose a fight, but it was not okay to not fight, right? In fact, the most famous character in our hometown, a complete derelict and wild man who had 800 people show up at his funeral and had a funeral procession led by the pagans in a torturous motorcycle gang, was famous for all the fights he got into and the fact that he almost always lost.
But he had a big heart. So that was, that was my dad to teach me how to fight. Some Marine Corps police tricks and stuff like that. So even though I never started to fight my life, just not my father's style either.
It was not that guy. I ended up with plenty of fights, right? And so that was part of my personality growing up. And I was able to have this weird hybrid where I was a bit of a nerd in school, did pretty good in college, I mean high school and stuff.
But I also had my street creds. So I could kind of walk both sides of the street and I think that was kind of interesting. And in some ways, it's probably an important part to my personality. And I would also say my success, in fact, to someone said, well, how would you attribute some of your business successes to you?
I said, I grew up in my hometown, right? It taught you all these boutique bourgeois values, but it also taught you to be fearless, touch a group adherence, because I would say there was a strong sense of community. And amongst the kids, there was a kid culture that was sort of independent of the adult culture. And there were, you might call them squads or gangs and stuff like that.
We all had my own posse at one point. All those things were really, really good. And so some of that was sort of a little bit of police. I would say it's sort of police costs growing up in a slightly rough and tumble kind of neighborhood.
Yeah, my dad talks about the same kind of thing growing up in the Bronx, that there was the squads that were like breaking off aerials on trucks and wacking each other with the aerials and the football and that. And so that's interesting because that's kind of the second thing I wanted to talk to you about, which was my mom growing up in Kansas City has a very similar sort of memory of mid-20th century suburbia as being adjacent to like large, large tracks of undeveloped land. Yeah, that was huge for me. Yeah.
And the other cool thing was towards the end of the non-hilocopter parenting epoch, right? Parents just turned you out in the morning, off you went. And you're four years old. You wanted as far as you dared basically.
And of course a four year old, even a posse four year old isn't going to wander too far. And so this vamming, literally this stretch of woods before they put the DC beltway in, ran for about seven miles. It wasn't real wide in some places, a couple hundred yards wide in some places, maybe a little narrower, but in some places it widened out. It was all just interconnected.
A lot of it became park land later or schools, whatever. But we had this long, long, long mini wilderness to penetrate and four years old, you didn't get out of that. You never went any further than you could turn around and see where the houses were. But then when you were five, you went into the big woods.
And then when you were six, you went down the creek. And then by the time you're probably six and a half, you made it to the power lines on the other side, right? Which was maybe 300 yards through the woods. And then for a long time, you didn't cross the power lines into the other side, because who knows what was over there, right?
And it was actually under the control of another neighborhood. Who was the one who happened if you were into them? Yeah. They go over there, go over there with a pretty good size puzzle with posse with sticks and all that, right?
And so, you know, that was huge. We built three forts all the time, ground forts, underground forts, that was between the various forts. You know, it was very, it was truly formative in my experience. I feel like your mother had a serious similar kind of experience.
Yeah, she did. To this day, she's still a complete romantic about creek crawling to find stones. My, her parents ended up moving out of Kansas City up to the rural North end in Holt where they bought, I think 18 acres or so up there. And a sizable chunk of my childhood visiting them, I remember being down in the creek, you know, poking sticks at tadpoles.
Yeah, catching crayfish. That was one of our standbys. We're catching minnows and every, every one of us, say, seven, eight, nine, we go out and catch box turtles and we build a turtle pen, you know, pretty good size. 10 by 20 feet and we provide cover for them and food and water.
And then I'd say my father in particular was adamant about this. He says, okay boys, you can have the turtles and the turtle pen for summer, but you know, come the fall, you're trying those turtles loose in a place that's good turtle habitat. And so we would, you know, our turtles would then be, you know, set back in the woods, you know, come late August. And that was a big deal.
Okay, let's go out and find some turtles, right? And we got a little older, we knew where the best places were and all that. And just a funny little story, there was just about the wonderful weird little edges and things. I said there was an old abandoned farm which was eventually bought and turned into the elementary school.
But it turned out that there was one little tiny patch of wild strawberries that was right on the margin between this long woods and the school property. And nobody knew about it except me and this girl, right? And we went there and we didn't like each other exactly, right? And we were not even friends, but every year from time we were about 12 till we were 16, we would go to the strawberry patch every late May when the strawberries came and we would take them.
And neither of us ever told anybody else ever. This is the first time, no, I've told the story. This is one of the very first times I've ever told the story about the Claudia and my secret strawberry patch. And we never became friends, we never became friends, we never became friends, you know, but it was a thing.
Oh, we were we friends, we weren't enemies, but you know, it was never close friends. It was certainly never romantic. But we had that secret. We had that secret.
We had a missed opportunity. I don't know. It's the secret strawberry patch. The secret strawberry patch.
And every year we got, we just run into each other and say, hey, at that time of year, yep, I guess Saturday, we're going to the strawberry patch. And we did and there'd be like 30 wild strawberries. A big bit of wild strawberries are tiny, right? So 30 wild strawberries is much less than a cupful.
But again, just a weird little thing about growing up in a place like that. So yeah, so for me that's interleaved with this thing about you talking about youth culture, like after I got out of school studying paleontology, right around that time is when they found the first evidence, I think, in the trackway in Asia somewhere, I'm not remembering exactly that, they thought that like these, the baby sauropods, like this enormous 50 ton dinosaurs, they were like, how are they, like, are they giving live birth? How are these little baby dinosaurs staying in the herd with their parents that must eat this, you know, consume an enormous amount of food? And then it turned out that they don't, that they found the trackways that showed that the babies had their own like, Lord of the flies herds, that they would just lay the eggs and walk off and that the babies would grow up together and they would be preyed upon by these enormous as-darked pterosaurs, like Ketsl Colatolus, that would stand up on these like death giraffes and just like pick off baby dinosaurs.
So, but I mean, but you know, that's, that seems very sort of like, you know, it rhymes with the kind of stories I'm hearing from you and from my dad about the Bronx, but of course, you know, growing up in the Bronx, you don't have access to that kind of wilderness and it remains kind of a romantic mythological distance. And so there's something interesting in your story about the intersection of those things for me and about how that has, you know, shaped your thinking on the, you know, the social theory and the economic theory that you espouse and that you explore in, in game B, et cetera, you know, and the way that it has, so that's one fork that we can take down this creek trail. And the other one possibly is the fact that, you know, you mentioned your mother working for the phone company, your father working for the railroad and I know that you made your career in, you know, computer stuff, telecommunications and, and, you know, so there's, there's an interesting sort of like industry piece of this, which I think is the, I don't know if you ever watched Deadwood. Oh, yeah.
So, so, you know, cusses like I do, of course, I'm going to watch Deadwood, some of the best swearing by Swear engine ever. You know, you know, the one with him and the Chinaman, right? Oh, God. Yeah.
So, so the, so the, exactly, you didn't build the railroads. Okay. Yeah. But exactly.
So, so, yeah, there's this thing, you know, in the Deadwood movie where the villain comes back and he's, instead of his obsession with gold, he's now obsessed with putting in telegraph lines. And this, you know, he's got this, he's animated by this, this sort of manifest destiny ghost of history to, you know, he's like, this is it. This is the thing. This is the future and I'm serving it.
And, you know, and I, and I catch, not necessarily the villainous part of that, but I catch that, that sense of participation in the, in the boom, right? In, in the proliferation of these new technological platforms in your work. And I think that, I don't know if you can sort of square the circle between those two branches of the trail, that would be really interesting. Because there's something about, you know, growing up in this lost boys kind of world, but also in, in the midst of the largest ever historical transformation in, in the technological basis of our species that I think is really curious here.
And that's, I think an undertold story in your generation broadly and that, and actually telling the stories of your generation is one of the significant major reasons that I started this podcast and I kind of languished on that front primarily, except for the, I mean, even when I got Kevin Kelly on the show, it was basically just talking theory, like I didn't really get into his prehistory there. So I would love to hear this and how, how you might reflect on getting us to where we are today and the job that should go unnamed has a special preoccupation with interests and collapse. As do I, as someone trained in paleontology, you know, I'm fascinated with extinctions and catastrophic failures generally. And there's no shortage of opportunities to study this phenomenon in my generation.
And so, and I, you know, looking forward, I had Michael Dowd on the show last year. Michael Dowd is a pastor who actually toured Christian communities, evangelizing evolutionary theory for years before he decided that it was actually more important to evangelize climate change. And he's got a series of interviews called the post-doom series where it's basically about making peace with the fact that we've jumped the shark, climatologically, and that, that, you know, like basically, you know, smoke them if you've got them, you know, like mitigate if you can, but basically how do you make the best life knowing that the era that you grew up in, in his estimation, and he's, you know, he's probably the same age you are, is over now. And, and I, you know, I, I just agreed with him on several points in his thing.
I think there's a lot of reason for hope. I am a cheerleader on team plasticating microbes. But, you know, I would love, yeah, anyway, that's a lot to chew on. And I know you can.
So, yeah, let's put the hell right. I think I'm just going to do a fast war through my bio and then plug into the very beginnings of the online revolution. So, as I mentioned, I was pretty good at school work as well as being a street kid. And somehow or other, I got accepted MIT.
And off I went. And I didn't know much about higher education. Didn't hardly know anybody who was a college grad other than school teachers and Catholic priests and doctors, I suppose. But I had this vision.
I was, I mean, I'm a physicist, right? Because I was, of all the sciences when I like the best. And it was pretty good at, and, but I went up, off and arrived in Cambridge, Mass, September 1971. Quite culture shock, as you can imagine.
From a quite conservative working class, a rough and tumble kind of place to, you know, very left wingy kind of counterculturey kind of place. And, it was a bit off putting. But I adapted pretty quickly. For about nine months, I refused to smoke marijuana because that's what goddamn hippies did, right?
It was no way, when I graduated my school, no marijuana. I never saw anything, right? It was still a big, or a whiskey kind of place, right? After about nine months, I succumbed, like the rest of them, and tried all the psychedelics.
And they had a good time, basically. But I decided the academic life was not for me. Does psychedelics have anything to do with that? It might have.
But actually, I think I made the call before I got into the serious psychedelics. I basically just decided that, because I was also a student in history. I said, you know, formal academia, Ph.D. track is the last remaining remnant of feudalism since the end of the Middle Ages.
And, you know, just- When were you at MIT? 71 to 75. So you were there when William Irwin Thompson was teaching history at MIT. Did you take a class with Bill Thompson?
Good. I don't know. One course in history there. It was born.
You know, William Irwin Thompson, I think, rage quit MIT in 1973, saying that he teaching history at MIT was like being an atheist at the Vatican. Yeah, exactly. The thing in the humanities was horrible there. I still recall my first humanity's course.
It was actually a great course. It was a guy who was doing a sabbatical year from Columbia, Eugene Goodhart. And, man, was he good. But he was brought almost to tears by the other apathy of most of the MIT students.
So I never heard that in no particular exemplar, but yeah, teaching humanities at MIT, including history, is like being an atheist at the Vatican. I just want to poke on this a little bit, because you got to get yourself a copy of At the Edge of History. Because this is the book that Bill wrote right after leaving MIT in the 70s on his passage to forming the Lindisfar Association, which included Stuart Kaufman and Lynn Margulis and Palace Larry and facilitated the foundation of the discipline of neurophenomenology, putting Buddhists and neuroscientists together for the first time. Cool.
And so, I think you'll have a strange sort of anemesis doing a little bit of research in history. Anyway, so please continue. Yeah, I did take one of my history courses. MIT and it sucked.
It was no good. It was just a very bland traditional American history course. But the other two, I really enjoyed some writing courses. I took a course on Ulysses.
Joyce is Ulysses. That's a really good teacher there. But, man, I felt sorry for it. Maybe it's never today.
Anyway, finally early on, halfway through sophomore year, I decided, nah, not the academic track. I figured, on the first to go to college and our family trees, so probably I would graduate. So I just kind of fiddle-fucked my way through undergraduate, graduated with some half-ass interdisciplinary degree. Things were rife in the 70s and then just sort of went off into the world.
And I did get some exposure to computers, but not a lot. I did some Fortran programming for the Astronomy Department. I wrote the first model of any atmosphere other than the Earth. We wrote a model of the atmosphere of Jupiter, for instance.
At Out of Cubes, atmospheric models used cubes of atmosphere. Cars were 100 kilometers by 100 kilometers by 100 kilometers. So it was ridiculously loosey-goosey. We didn't know what the fuck we were doing, but what the hell, right?
I was supposed to go to Fortran there, took one computer science course, Intro to as an undergraduate. I did all SPSS programming and some of the social science courses I took in some of the business courses I took. What was my no-means at computer nerd? And, you know, graduated.
I just graduated. Went back to my hometown. Took up my position on the street, essentially. And got a job as a car salesman because it looked like easy work and easy money.
And so, did that for a year, paid off my student loans and then quit and hitchhiked around the country for a year. Actually, I took a long hitchhiking trip when I graduated too. Went out to the West Coast, up and down the West Coast, around and about and back, up to Boston for a few weeks, and then back. But that took a really long long long.
I'd gone for almost a year, you know, after my year selling cars. And that was really a lot of fun. Got to see the country at the grassroots level. And again, very, I would say, very formative part of my development.
You know, came back in 77, said, ah, I've got a real job, god damn it. You know, hey, I'm getting old. I'm almost 23, right? And I looked around.
So I kind of went to a fairly easy but interesting job and somehow I stumbled into the college textbook industry. And became a college textbook peddler for a very nice small company called Wadsworth. And became the man on the ground in eastern Kentucky, east Tennessee, and the southwestern corner of West by God, Virginia. And so I'd run around to all the colleges and meet the professors and peddle our books and what have you.
And I was pretty good at it. And as I explained people later, it was kind of like getting a PhD that was a mile wide and an inch, because of my technique, everybody had different techniques. My technique was just to talk to the people about what they did and what they were doing, right? And I had some amazing, interesting conversations with these college professors and some colleges were quite good.
Some of them weren't quite bad, but they were all over the place. I talked to anybody. I don't care. And one of the things I started seeing about 1979, 78, 79, were these weird things on professors desks.
They were old boxes about, you know, two and a half feet wide, two feet deep, foot tall. Look at how are those? Oh, those are computers, right? These are like North Star Horizon, inside, midst, you know, some of these very early kit computers and profs, particularly in engineering departments and math departments, physics departments, chemistry departments.
They were kind of just like into it. I just have to ask, do you know Bruce Damer by any chance? No. Bruce Damer, a dear friend of mine, old friend of mine, he has the Digi Barn in Boulder Creek, California.
It's a computer history museum. I think it's the greatest private computer history museum in the world. He actually has like all of Apple's foundational paperwork that they were going to shred. He managed to like escape and like pull out in a bunch of Tupperware.
He's got like analog computers. He has the first desktop computer in his place. I will have to connect you with Bruce Damer. Oh, that would be hilarious.
Yeah, go check out the Digi Barn. It's extraordinary. Anyway, please continue. Yeah, yeah.
So I say these things and I go, that's kind of interesting. And so I started putting some percentage of my focus on what the hell are these things? Micro-computers. They weren't even called personal computers yet because a lot of them were designed to be like little small business computers.
You know, running CPM. You get running accounting systems on and stuff. But it also turned out you could do mathematical calculations. And then what I was interested in was simulations.
I started becoming interested in Monte Carlo simulations because I was always reading, reading, reading, reading. I started reading about Monte Carlo simulations. And I actually had bought a programmable calculator, a TI-99 that you could actually write in an assembler code and it had a magnetic strip, like a card reader. You could put a thousand statements on the little magnetic card and then run it back through.
And I actually wrote a Monte Carlo simulation of our publishing company. And this was hilarious living in Kentucky in the summertime when we didn't have much work to do as college textbook peddlers. I wrote this thing. It took 17 hours to run.
And the problem was in the summer, thunderstorms were always coming through and the power would glitz. And so getting 17 hours of power that didn't glitz was problematic. That was pretty funny. But anyway, anyway, anyway, anyway, anyway.
So anyway, people were doing this kind of stuff. I got really fascinated with this. I started talking to them about it and all this and started doing research. So this is a coming thing.
Personal computers are coming. I subscribed to BitBite magazine and started hitting the little nascent computer stores that were starting to emerge. Certainly late-seventy-90. They're really starting to emerge even some bigger ones in some of the bigger towns.
And I can convince that this is off the edge. And so I'm always exploring. I was back to the woods, right? As a three year old going to the edge of the woods and a four year old old old four years old, six year old, further still.
I've always had this desire to go to the edge, right? To always be exploring. Maybe it came from all that. I don't know.
But anyway, I just became convinced that this whole personal computer thing was going to be interesting and important. And in the 1980, early 80 dumped about 90% of my net worth into buying a high-end Apple II, right? I was one of the few people in lecture, they had two floppy drives. So people come over to my apartment and copy disks, right?
I had a high-end dot matrix graphics capable printer, all this stuff. That was fine. It was $4500 at the whole ring cost me. It had the stupendous amount of $48K of RAM in it.
And when I hung a here, I thought I'd get it. I went off in K. That was most of them. I had $16K at the time.
But I splurged for the 48K version. And that was the most you could put in one at the time. And I rewrote my simulation that took 17 hours to run on TI99 calculator and it had taken me weeks to write an assembler. I rewrote it in about 20 minutes on the Apple and it ran in 30 seconds.
That was quite interesting. I went on to write the world's champion, Othello game in 6502 assembler, hand-coded, beat an IBM 370, and really got into computing. I mean, I had an ambivalent to negative relationship with the computer center kind of computing. When I was at MIT where you write your programs on punch cards and you turn them in and you get your put outs back and they don't even let you turn your cards in once every 12 hours.
But your own computer, you know, later than the night was just like extraordinarily seductive. So I quickly just learned a lot about them and was said, oh, okay, now I found something I'm actually interested in from a business career perspective. The college textbook was a job and I was pretty good at it. I had been tagged as a potential star of the future and would have been a editor, while a senior editor and probably a division president, whatever.
But it was kind of okay. You know, it beats big in ditches but it didn't really excite me that much. But computers did, especially personal computers. So I made a campaign to convince our publishing company to start a software division, educational software division.
It took me a while, but I eventually did. But they were taking their time. And then, oh yeah, then the parent company, they kind of bought by some big major conglomerate. There was some budgetary crunch at the conglomerate.
Even though our unit was doing well. And I said, no new initiatives for six months. And of course, we're in 26 years old. Oh, fuck that shit.
I started looking for jobs in educational software, got like three offers. But while I was doing this, I stumbled across another thing by accident in a computer store. I found a magazine called SourceWorld. And what the hell is that?
So I bought it and took it home. And it was for a brand new service called The Source, which was the first consumer online information service. Before CompuServe, that was The Source. CompuServe and The Source were about contemporaneous.
But Source was first. And they published this glossy magazine that they've peddled through computer stores. And you could buy a membership to The Source at the local computer store. So I did.
And you log on. And what the hell is this online world with thousands of people in it? And it had surprising, in 1981 at least, it had a lot of it. We have on the web today.
It had chat and bulletin boards, it had shopping, it had email, it had news, it had squats, all kinds of stuff. Text mode only 30 characters a second and $10 an hour. I mean, this was a tiny little niche, right? Why would anyone pay $10 an hour for 30 characters?
Because there was no alternative, right? If you were a person, if you did not have access to a university that was hooked to ARPANET, which even in universities most professors did not, the only way to get access to some interconnected world was the source and then CompuServe seen there after. And so there was a small number of maniacal people that just said, holy shit, and then paid $10 an hour for this text mode interface to this intersection of people. And I said, okay, now this is considerably more interesting than educational software.
So I wrote a lot of interesting power tools. My Apple allowed me to write faster and better than most people in those days. And that's probably how I won the war at my publishing companies. I write the 17 page memo that used Apple writer to write, and then I put something similar to those five pages to send off to the source.
I said, I can build a $2 billion business for you people in the educational area, right? And you know, bombass. But you know, typical runny and rhetoric was full of facts and figures and logical arguments and this and that. Immediately replied and said, and that's not going to be around the DC area.
Let's just stop by. Let's talk. Turns out, as I mentioned, I grew up in the DC area. I was going to be back there for Thanksgiving, which was in about three weeks.
And so I stopped by the source and sat with them and they said, well, you know, it's an interesting young fellow. The only job we have open now is regional sales manager for Chicago, for the Midwest. And I thought about it for a little bit. So I don't think about it.
I really would prefer to move into a product role. But they said, well, that's what we've got to open right now. Let's go back and think about it. I thought about that.
That's actually turned out my publishing company got winded, but I was very close to my boss. It was a really wonderful guy. Hi, Mike Neum. If you have to be listening to this.
And he told him, hey, what's getting ready to quit? He's pissed off because he won't let him do his software division. So they somehow did some magic or other. And I got a call from the COO, I think.
So I went out for a walk and I always do have to make a key decision. And my rule is, before my foot touches the front step, I will have decided. And fortunately, it's been an easy decision. And I said, the future is networking.
And this was 1980, right? This was before we had any idea whether that would be true. And I kicked myself in the ass because people I knew had gone to work in the PC business, the hardware business or PC software. That industry took off a lot faster, actually, than the network businesses did.
I said, this is the future. This is the opposite of collapse. This is growth from level zero, essentially. And I said, this is going to be the world someday, God damn it.
So I called this very senior executive back up and said, hey, I really appreciate it. But I decided to do the other thing. And so I called the people at the source and said, all right, I'll take your job. And I went to a writer truck, loaded all our crap in it and drove from Lexington, Kentucky to Chicago in a snowstorm.
And then unloaded our crap and moved into an apartment that I found on a house hunting trip. And then sure enough, a job did come up in the home office to run market research. And so I applied for that and gave it to me and I moved back to the HQ and I didn't know any market research what to help. But I could learn anything pretty quick.
And I did. And we actually did have some pretty good market research there for a while. And then I ran the application software division for a bit. And then I was like the associate head of product management, what had you.
And I built the second generation design, the second generation email system. I generate the design, the second generation bulletin board system. And I was co-product manager on a very interesting product called Participate, which I would say was a precursor of social media. And all this was in 1981 and 82.
And we certainly thought we were doing the good work for the world. We were absolutely convinced that this would help democracy and help society. How could it not? Everyone would be much better informed?
All this sort of stuff. How could it not? I mean, how could it not? We were absolutely convinced.
It's funny because the episode I just finished editing was a very, very tense panel discussion at Complexity Weekend on Web 3. And on taking a complex system position on Web 3 and critiquing it. And saying, okay, are we basically asking the question that it sounds like you and your colleagues were not asking in 1981, which is, are we accidentally damning the future? What are the spandrels in this thing that are going to get populated by some opportunistic horror?
And those are very good questions that people should be asking, right? But we also suffer from boomeritis, right? In our prime, full of piss and vinegar, we're going to reinvent the world, God damn it, and the world needs reinventing, and whatever we reinvent is going to be good, right? And probably should have had a little forewarning, but we didn't participate.
This first thing that you could probably call social media immediately evolved into a warfare between memetic tribes, as we would say today. And we go, and we came up with some ad hoc fixes and stuff, but it was constantly trying to dampen out the flare-ups of memetic warfare everywhere. And some of the first great flame wars. Oh, it was interesting.
Were you a censor? Jim, were you a social media censor in the 80s? Jim? No, no, I did not.
I did not personally ever do that. But quite contrary, one of the other things I personally invented was something called user publishing. During my market research phase, I invited a number of prominent source users to come to headquarters and just chat, and several of them had their own little publications on the source. The source had some programmability to it.
You can actually write software on it and have other people run it and stuff. And so people had put together a half-ass bullet and board software, rogue independent, and publications had formed. And there were several of them that were pretty good. So I invited five of them to come to McLean, which added about it.
And then when they left, I said, I smell something here. And so I convinced the bosses that were quite a bit of work to allow me to want something called user publishing, where we built, I wrote it actually. So new software for the people to use, and some of them want to continue to use their own software, but that's fine. And we came up with the APIs to allow them to get paid.
And so here it was, 1980, late-81, I think we want to use your publishing. It had 17.5% of the revenue that was generated because the clock was always running on the source and went to the publishers. And so we launched it. So it was a huge success.
Within a couple of months, it was the number five product got several hundred on the source. But anyway, one person put up a publication that had an essay about the varied uses of the word fuck. And it was very humorous. It was brilliantly written.
And this thing started pegging the meter all the time, highest usage anything on the source had ever had. And the source was actually a network between email and chat and bulletin boards and participate. Messages could disseminate over the graph, right? And they did very rapidly.
So within the second day, this was by far the most popular thing that had ever been on the source. And so I got a call from the CEO. I really liked him for a good guy named Graham Keeping. Hi Graham, if you're out there.
And the source has been acquired. It's horrible mistake in history. Source was acquired by the reader's digest. Nowadays, like I said, total joke.
But in those days, it was one of the biggest publishing companies in the world. Two billion dollars around it, it was ridiculous. Anyway, Graham was actually one of the only good people that ever came down from the digest. But it was the reader's digest.
I mean, this is the most square bourgeois bland publication known to man. It was a cliche of blandness to say that something was the reader's digest, right? So Graham calls me into his office and says, well, I hear about this essay that's going crazy on the source. I go, well, Graham, it was blah, blah, blah.
And I read a paragraph, and he was trying not to laugh. He was actually a great guy. He was trying to be the stern boss from the reader's digest. And I go, yeah, it's like, it's great, don't you think?
He goes, well, I'm probably not appropriate to have something like this on a property owned by the reader's digest. When you think he was a Canadian, so he had that little bit of a conduct accident. But I go, well, I think this is great. I think this is funny.
It's accurate. It's short because 30 characters a second, $10 an hour. It was its own reward. I think it's exactly what we should be having on the source.
He goes, do you really think so? Yes. And then he says, well, I don't think so. I think you need to take that down.
And I told him, we had a very good relationship. But I said, no, I'm not going to unless you specifically order me to. I just paused and stopped. And he said, well, I specifically order you to take it down.
And I said, yes, sir. And I turned around, walked out of the office and took it down. That was my one and only example of me personally censoring anybody. I mean, you got to keep your job.
And, well, you know, I didn't really care that much about my job because I realized I was in a hot spot now. But I also respected Graham and figured that he probably knew more than I did about the gestalt of the situation. And I respected him enough to not say, fuck you, I quit or argue with him endlessly, but make him the act of the perpetrator. And it didn't hurt our relationship at all.
We're still five, six months ago. We always had a good relationship. That was my one, I never was a censor. Never a believer in censorship.
Still not a believer in censorship. But it was just me off that so many of the people who used to be advocates for net freedom have gone over to the dark side and want to choke our information sphere. But anyway, that was in Japan with Graham got fired eventually or kicked us somewhere else because he was he was a little too much of a radical for the reader's digest. They sent this real turn down from the reader's digest who eventually ended up being CEO the whole thing.
So I suppose he was a big way, but man, he was a useless turn didn't get at all what we were up to. And I had a once he'd been there about a week. He called me and said, all right, what are we supposed to be doing here? And I said, I've been working on for Graham, which was the theory of our future.
And I said, I analyze all the data and look at our competitors. They're only one computer. I think only one at that point. I said, the future is not these information products.
We're spending so much time on, but the network connectivity stuff. More than all of our profit comes from email, chat, user publishing, participate, bulletin boards, et cetera. I'm looking at CompuServe. They're going crazy with this new thing called special interest groups, which are very similar to Facebook groups, very similar.
And in some ways better functionality in some ways in 1980. And I said, we should not be, we should re-orient our product development budget away from all these ponderous information products, which nobody uses in a very expensive and time consuming and have high royalties and all this stuff, and build out the suite of connectivity products, including multi-user chat, which CompuServe had just rolled out. We did not have. That has to be priority one.
We have a SIG killer. Here's what it would look like. We have to have a second generation participate and all this stuff. And he goes, well, young man, don't you know that content is king or some kind of horrendous publisher cliche and they just turn around.
Okay, here's my report. Have a nice day when I immediately called up a guy who made me an offer to come join his startup and a couple of weeks before. And I said, hey, Bill, is that offer so good to go join your startup? And I go, yep.
I said, let's talk. I'll give you a call tonight. So I ended up joining a startup in Boston and quit my job at the source and in disgust and went to Boston to do a startup. And the source failed just right place, right time, swatted the right idea, but the wrong management and a horrible culture, in fact, during my entrepreneurial years, I would often use the reasoning method.
How would they have done this at the source and then do the exact opposite? I mean, it was bad. Oh, well, but. So that's actually great because this brings us to the question that I had for you before this.
I love just wandering through the woods with you here. But I know and I told you this that I wanted to ask specifically about, you've said in other places that you are proud for having encouraged descent in your companies. Absolutely. And of course, I'll just go just lay out there on the table as a new age weirdo and say I have an ascendant Mars and Libra, which I am told means that I love fighting in order to achieve some sort of diplomatic solution or common understanding that I come at people with a challenge in order to find a synthesis.
And this is something that I see in you and something that I really respect and something that I'm curious to understand in the way that is instantiated and enacted in an organizational structure and in practice and like how how does one, because let's be real. Like, you know this, most companies don't do this. They suck. They're broken.
They're merely and they're corrupt and broken. And I figured that out at the source. And when I did my startup, fortunately, this much more senior guy who brought me in as the junior founder understood that if he just let me have my head, it would be a good thing. And so he basically just stayed out of the way.
And he had some great expertise in one part of our business. He did that and he let me run the rest of the company and that included the culture. And so this is my most important insight in business and in life that I ever had. And I will say, God's worth publishing had this to a reasonable degree.
They were a very good and honorable company. So I think I probably saw the weak form of it there. I saw the anti-pattern at the source, which was full of corporate bureaucrats brought in from places like Xerox and former Army, Colonel's and... And when everybody lied to everybody else and it was all politics all the time and what meeting you got to be in was a measure of your status, not the work that you did.
It was an anti-pattern for out of business. So when we had our first company and in all my companies thereafter, and I tried to insert this even into Big Corporate America, when I went back to Big Corporate America later in my career, the first value is intellectual honesty, the first value. You will always say what you think. And then the second rule is playing politics in the first degree will get you fired on the spot.
And even later when I was working back in Big Corporate America, I'm recruiting a manager to work for me. I'd say, I still remember I told this to a guy who was going to run advanced labs for me, Thompson Labs, which was a bunch of PhD level R&D people. And I said, you know, I think if you play politics in the first degree, I will fire your ass, blah blah blah. And what do you mean by that?
I go, well, you know, make it right. Make it right. Make it right. Try to look bad.
You try to withhold information that the organization needs. You misattribute who came up with an idea. Any of these things, I will fire you. I have references, right?
And I said, on the other hand, if you steal money out of the petty cash drawer, I'll probably give you a second chance, particularly if you're going to use it for something worthwhile, I go out and get drunk or something, right? So I made a one on politics and intellectual honesty as the prime value, my two foundation stones for my entrepreneurial career. And of course, with that, you had to have some auxiliary values. Never, ever shoot the messenger.
A person who brings you bad news is a hero, right? They're the hero because they have brought forth useful information on a timely basis so that you can make better decisions. You know, other companies I've looked at, of course, Thompson, we did vast amounts of due diligence. We bought 80 companies in here.
We bought 60 lots of companies under the skin. And as we're all well aware, the lying that goes on about where things are at in corporate America, why the products always late, right? My products were never late. That was my hallmark.
Our products were delivered on time, on budget, God damn it, right? Why? Because we honestly budgeted both the time and the money. And everyone knew.
Do not why? Do not give false estimates to make the bosses happy, right? We will figure out what we actually need and how long it will actually take. And that's what we'll say.
And if they don't like it, we won't do the project. But we're not going to lie. But most businesses, all the incentives are to lie about how long it will take and how much it will cost. And then the thing ends up costing three times as much and takes four times as long.
And that just screws everything up. So I never tolerated that. Everybody knew I didn't tolerate it. And nobody ever, you never got negative consequences for bringing those bad news forward.
You were the hero because you said, oh, that ain't ever going to happen. Well, let's figure out how to make it happen. I would say that a business is nothing but a machine to process information. So why would you not want the very best information?
So the worst virus your machine can have is politics and lack of intellectual good faith. Awesome. So, okay, I feel like at this point, we can pivot a little bit here. I mean, I do want to hear about the next act here.
I do want to hear about the later 80s and the 90s and on into today. But I also really want to take this opportunity to ask a question that I think has been burning in people's minds about Gamebeat broadly. And you let us right onto the doorstep of this question, which is about this notion of non-rivalry, right? Because, okay, I got to be frank with you.
I work so hard. I don't have enough time to be the enormous volumes of information that are conversations that other people are having about this out there. So, you know, just count me as sort of the usefully naive in this regard. But I mean, I'll put it in the words of a friend.
People who hype Gamebeat do so in a way that seeks to expand as much territory as possible into people's dissatisfactions, never winds up being tremendously generative as a thought tradition, combined with rule Omega, which says essentially that you should give everyone the benefit of the doubt. You wind up in these weird, over accepting philosophical positions that allow things like, Propertarianism to find a home. So this is actually Naomi Most, who I know you know. Naomi asked me to ask you if you can define any part of Gamebeat in terms of what it stands for, as opposed to what it's simply a reaction against.