JOHN: Welcome to Greater Than Code Episode 188. I'm John Sawers, and I'm here with my friend, Rein Henrichs. 

REIN: Hey, John. That is a large number of episodes. I am here with our guest and I'm very excited to introduce him. Damien Burke started working on Internet startups in 1999 and never stopped. He has been an engineer, founder, CTO, and product manager. Outside of tech, Damien is certified in ontological coaching, hypnosis, and neuro-linguistic programming. He spent several years as a professional poker player and has performed as an actor in theater, commercials, network television, and film. Damien is the co-creator of EarlyWords, a tool to support people on their creative recovery and is the creator of Neverbust, the bankroll manager for professional poker players. He offers coaching and consulting for software startups at Talaria Software. Hi, Damien. Thanks for joining us.

DAMIEN: Thank you so much, Rein. Thank you, John. Thank you for having me.

REIN: So, you know what's coming. Our first question is, what is your superpower and how did you acquire it?

DAMIEN: Such an anxiety inducing question. I'm going to answer it anyway without going on and on about all that anxiety. [Chuckles] My superpower is an ability to hold conflicting beliefs at the same time.

REIN: Interesting. Cool. I like that one. I would agree that that is important because that way, you can get the best out of each of them.

DAMIEN: I would both agree and disagree. [Chuckles]

REIN: I knew you would say that. [Laughs]

DAMIEN: It's too easy.

JOHN: So, how does that play in your life?

DAMIEN: It's largely a way of engaging with a lot of different mindsets. A lot of different levels of being able to see things and operate things as if they're real, if they're not real. Being able to deal with and make good use of -- taking a really extreme example, witchcraft, the law of attraction, that sort of thing. And then also being able to deal with Cartesian duality of science as the phrase is used, et cetera, et cetera.

REIN: It's interesting to me that it took Western philosophy a very long time to figure this out when Eastern philosophy like the Janus speak this out a long time ago. There's a Janus principle called [inaudible] which is the multifariousness of perception, like the elephant and the blind men story, that's a Janus parable.

DAMIEN: And it seems like so antithetical to the basis of Western philosophy, going back to Plato, to Descartes, to Socrates, that sort of get into the singular truth.

REIN: Yeah. I mean, we spent millennia recovering from Aristotle and then centuries recovering from Descartes. So, it's not surprising.

DAMIEN: That's great. I love that framing, recovering from.

REIN: I mean, it wasn't until the postmodernists where you really got this, all points of view are valid and they can disagree without being invalidated sort of a thing going on. 

DAMIEN: Which then again, really in my experience, only exists in artistic analysis. It's not something you'll find in your software team or in your public policy, people working in that sort of area.

REIN: Yeah. Sidney Dekker likes to talk about how the world is sort of dominated by this Newtonian Cartesian worldview and that it's embedded in the language we use and the way we learn and all this stuff. And so, we're really acculturated to think in these ways.

DAMIEN: Yeah. To the point where any thoughts that violate that are outright dismissed and considered invalid. The Law of Excluded Middle is one of my favorites. It's like, "Can something be true? It's either true or not true." No. [Chuckles]

REIN: See, I'm a constructivist, so I just spur that one out entirely.

JOHN: [Laughs]

REIN: One of the things you wanted to talk about that I thought was really interesting was how we make things easy. Life is hard. How do we make things easy? Can you maybe expand a bit on what you mean by that?

DAMIEN: Well, I wrote that in the email, too. Life is hard. We should make things easy. It's kind of a grounding philosophy for me. It's the reason why I build software. Nothing that software does can't be done without software. Nothing that software does can't be done without computers. Our goal is to make it easy. And of course, it's a fractal principle. It goes into the way I build software or the way I advise people to build software, sometimes not the way I do it. [Chuckles] Looking for, like, how can we do this in a such a way that is simple and easy, and easy to deal with and makes life easy for you.

It was really Sandi Metz who opened my eyes in really significant ways in one of her workshops and she walks you very slowly through a couple of refactoring exercises. It goes very slowly. And she points out like, "See, we did this. We can do this without thinking." I was like, "Yeah." "So why don't you do it this way? Because you like being clever." [Chuckles] But there are more important things to be clever about than your method extraction refactoring. Let's be clever about the important things. Life is hard.

REIN: There's another idea that I think is related that I want to bounce off of you and see what you think. Herbert Simon, who was a Nobel Laureate economist, has this parable that's called Simon's Ant. And it is if you look at an ant in the rainforest and you look at the path it makes as it sort of traverses the canopy floor and goes over this log and then around this and so on, if you look geometrically at the path the ant makes, that path is very complex. But ants are very simple creatures, it seems. So where does the complexity come from?

DAMIEN: The phrase there is emergent behavior. That complex things can arise from simple rules. Conway's Game of Life is the canonical example of this. The question is, how do we use that knowledge and that information. 

REIN: I would agree with emergent behavior but I would also add something else, which is the complexity comes from the combination of the ant and its environment. Herbert Simon's idea was, if you want to understand the ant's mind, you can just ignore all that other stuff as being external and just focus on the ant. And then John Haugeland came around and said, "You know what? Actually, if you want to understand the ant's mind, you have to include its environment. You can't just throw the environment out because the ant would behave differently in different environments."

DAMIEN: Which, again, is the opposite of Plato's [brain in a box].

REIN: Yeah. So you get embodied cognition. You get the idea that you have to think of the mind as being more than just the brain.

DAMIEN: Yeah, that is definitely a huge and incredibly viable insight. And this is something that I learned as a hypnotist, which is that cognition happens in the whole body. You cannot be angry and taking slow, deep breaths. It's literally not possible. 

REIN: So, the way I would relate this back to how do you make things easy is people want to find the easy path through their environment that resolves their goals and tradeoffs. And so, if you have the opportunity to design that environment, to make certain things easy, that's a great way to influence behavior. To get the behavior you want, either you can punish people for doing the wrong thing or you can make the right thing easy.

DAMIEN: And then to get to a very practical sense on that, things like an editor that formats your code with spaces instead of tabs. [Laughs] I had to do this with a coworker once. He kept putting spaces at the end of lines, and it drove me nuts. I was like, "I can't do this. I can't live with this." And then I said, "Wait a minute, I can fix my editor so that when it saves a file, it deletes the spaces at the end of the line." That's really my concern. But it was a concern and it was a way to comply with what I thought about when I format code. Made it easy as opposed to trying to change behavior. It is the difficult thing of getting them to think about things that I think are important.

JOHN: Yeah. Clearing that path through the environment such that that's the easy route is underappreciated, I think. 

DAMIEN: Yeah, it's very difficult to make things easy too.

JOHN: Yeah, it's a lot of work.

REIN: I think that a big part of this is cognitive systems engineering, figuring out how people will interact with their environments so that you can design the cognitive environment.

DAMIEN: That is a fact. I've never heard that phrase before. Cognitive systems engineering.

REIN: Hmm.

DAMIEN: That's so good.

REIN: Oh, you're going to love this one, because if you're anti-Cartesian, bet you're going to love joint cognitive systems. So, joint cognitive system comes from this idea that the systems that humans interact with are joint systems. Which means if they don't follow the sort of Shannon Communication Theory of I do a thing, you respond, I respond, you respond. In fact, these systems are all communicating all the time. So even to your point about editors, editors are becoming joint systems. They're not I save a file, it compiles. It's now I start typing, I get a squiggly that says there's a syntax there. That's a joint system. That's different parts of the system presenting information all the time, not waiting for responses.

DAMIEN: So now we're expanding cognition not just out of the brain, out of the nervous system, but we're expanding it into the environment. Cognition happens in the environment.

REIN: So that squiggly line that shows that you have a syntax error, it changes how you think as you write code.

DAMIEN: This actually really connects to something I discovered last year, and I mentioned last week - the greatest chess player in the world is not a computer, the greatest chess player in the world is not a human. It's a human computer team.

JOHN: Right. I remember that.

REIN: Another thing I think you're going to love is that chess players are very good at making just decisions. You give them a chess board and they can figure stuff out very quickly. They are average at making other decisions. They aren't just good decision makers. They are good at chess decisions. And in fact, if you give them a randomly scramble board, they take as long to recognize it as someone who's never seen chess before. Because they're recognizing patterns in chess. They're not just sort of doing decision making in some abstract way.

DAMIEN: Yeah, it's fascinating the things that chess players learn. They can memorize a board at a glance. But like you said, a randomly arranged board, they'll have no clue about.

REIN: It's because of recognition, I think. When you see a board that looks like a board you've seen before a hundred times, you recognize it. When you see a randomly scrambled board, there's no recognition.

JOHN: Yeah. And you probably also didn't follow the process of getting it there. Like, if you had been watching how it got scrambled, you'd know a lot more about it, then you could probably then unscramble or figure out where you're going from there.

DAMIEN: This opens some really good strategic ideas which are difficult to do with very high level in chess. But if you can just give somebody a situation they're unfamiliar with, they will make very poor decisions, even if they're an expert in the domain. 

REIN: Or even if they're an expert in a different domain. You can take an expert in one thing, move them to a different domain, and they'll make decisions of the quality of an average person. It's interesting what sort of some things transfer, but this idea that you can learn to be a better decision maker in general hasn't really borne fruit.

JOHN: This is tied up with some things I've been reading recently about like treating expertise as transferable to different fields where it's like you're an expert in epidemiology and therefore you're an expert in political forecasting. Or like you're in Taekwondo and therefore you're really good at giving life advice, and how you think that expertise in one tends to transfer into some sort of expertise in another, if you don't think about it very deeply. But then what we're talking about here is it's clearly not going to transfer.

DAMIEN: Yeah. Valerie Aurora called that out to me in a very clear way. Specifically, I took her online skills workshop a few years back and she introduced herself and she goes on to talking about this thing. She mentioned later on, she used a term called technical privilege. And she pointed out, she used to be a Linux Kernel developer. And she had mentioned that when introducing herself because people pay more attention to what she says when she tells them that. It had nothing to do with what she was talking about. And I'm sitting in that room, I'm going, "Wow. That's absolutely right." Because she said it. I was impressed. I paid more attention. I recognize that. I'm staring across the room. I have this beautiful poster. It's called Cognitive Bias Codex, basically categorizes the 150 or so cognitive biases that's on Wikipedia. And I always look across the room as if I can read because it's [inaudible]. But one of the cognitive biases that plays into that is the Halo effect. You're good at one thing, therefore, you're a good person and you're good at other things.

REIN: Many of these are instances of the Fundamental Attribution Error, which is thinking the things about myself that are good or characteristic of me thinking of the things about myself that are bad or accidents, and the opposite for other people. So if you do something good, it's because you got lucky. But if you do something bad, it's because you're a bad person. Whereas if I do something bad is because I got unlucky. But if I do something good, it's because I'm a good person.

DAMIEN: Yeah. That's one of my favorites because you can classify a lot of issues [inaudible]. I'm looking for universal theory of cognitive bias. The best I come up with so far is thinking is hard.

JOHN: Yeah. It's a way of avoiding thinking. 

REIN: And even the word bias is rough because a lot of these things either were adaptive or still are adaptive in certain circumstances.

DAMIEN: Absolutely. Just naming them cognitive biases indicates a bias towards Cartesian thinking again, towards the scientific method in Cartesian thinking, because there are places where human cognition don't match that up.

REIN: I've heard people refer to them as heuristics, and I think that's maybe workable. There are shortcuts that our brain takes. And sometimes those shortcuts help us and sometimes they don't.

DAMIEN: That's really great. Heuristic shortcuts. I think I'm going to pull this in. I wrote an essay a few years back called Don't Call Them -- it's about test-driven development -- Don't Call It Test-Driven Development, it's specifications-driven development. You write a specification. You can either match a specification or you don't match a specification. And it gives you a different relationship with the specification than if it's a test in the sorts of judgment and the failure, et cetera, et cetera. That's great.

JOHN: Yeah, I like the terminology switch. It makes it much more clear, the purpose of the test is not to test, it's to specify.

DAMIEN: And if you fail the specification, well, maybe the code's not doing the right thing. Maybe the specification was wrong. But, they're just saying that they don't match. You're not wrong. Your code's not wrong or bad. You're not going to get a bad grade and get grounded for a week.

JOHN: Yeah. The other word failure there is loaded.

DAMIEN: Yeah. I even said it, I said fail a specification, which is a nonsense term. You don't need a specification.

REIN: Failure is loaded. But it also cannot be in a very simple way. A failure is a difference between what we observe and expect that we don't like.

DAMIEN: [Laughs] That's good. That we don't like. I had this instructor say to me once - drugs don't have side effects. They have effects. Some of the effects we don't like.

REIN: Yeah. So, you know how people like to look at the software development lifecycle as a feedback system where working product comes out one end, specifications go in one end, working product comes out at the other end. Here are some side effects of that. Developers that hate their jobs. Are those side effects or are those the system working as intended?

DAMIEN: [Laughs] Right. And so, all of this is really the broader thing is taking judgment out of the language. And this can go into any system we're talking about - software development, socio-political, anything. Is it wrong or bad? Maybe. This is what's happening.

REIN: Again, it depends on who you ask. Various posts are an individual's sort of ethics, normative frameworks and there's a sort of a community of social norms. So, it is different from team to team, even within the same organization.

DAMIEN: I find it's a lot easier to talk about these things when there's less judgment involved in the language.

JOHN: Yeah, I think that goes back to the fundamental attribution error where if there's judgment in the language, that judgment transfers to the people that are causing the things to be negatively judged. 

DAMIEN: And then if I judge the thing, then I judge the people who caused it or are involved with it and they get defensive and then nothing changes. Well, the biggest sort of transformations in my life came from the ability to love myself unconditionally. And when I love myself unconditionally, I can recognize the flaws. And you're okay with them and fix them. When I love myself conditionally based on I'm a good person, I do good things, et cetera, et cetera, then I can't see the flaws because that threatens my relationship with myself, and I end up a bad person.

REIN: There's also a lot of treating people the way we wish they would want to be treated. So, like for example, you are not your code, egoless development. In fact, in a very real sense, you are your code. You wrote it, you're still attached to it. And so this idea that you can divorce your ego from it is not based on reality. It's based on how we wish people would be.

DAMIEN: Interesting. The pin tweet I have on Twitter for the past couple of years has been, "You are whole, perfect, and complete." And that's true even if your code is [inaudible]. 

REIN: I think it's important to make the distinction. It's very easy to give feedback in a way that doesn't make the distinction between the person and the code and assumes that the person will make the distinction for you.

DAMIEN: [Inaudible] clearly make that distinction.

REIN: I always mention Virginia Satir on every episode, that's the rule.

DAMIEN: [Laughs]

REIN: She was an NLP practitioner, too, by the way. 

DAMIEN: In my memory, I thought she was the one of the people they modeled when developing NLP.

REIN: That could be true.

DAMIEN: Okay.

REIN: She is described as an NLP practitioner. But I mean, she started doing the stuff in the 50's. 

DAMIEN: Yeah, so the actual history is confusing and I get wrong. But anyway, go on.

REIN: No. You could be right. I'm just saying that maybe she's known for it because it came out of studying her work. I'm not sure, that could be right, which would be cool.

DAMIEN: Yeah, [inaudible] with NLP is that there were a couple of people, Richard Bandler -- no, Bandler was the one developing it. There's a couple of therapists, and I think Virginia Satir was one who was just leaps and bounds more effectively than other people. And then Bandler and somebody else --. 

JOHN: Grinder.

DAMIEN: Grinder. Thank you. I couldn't come out of it, that's why I can't remember it. Bandler and Grinder, they're like, "Why are these people so effective?" And what they discovered is what we call NLP.

REIN: Yeah. You can see videos of her. There are DVDs. You can buy her sessions she's done publicly and you can see some snippets on YouTube. And watching the way she talks is really incredible, and also the way she uses her body, too. Anyway, Virginia Satir talks about how the basis of all human interaction is built on an acknowledgment of the inherent value in ourselves and the other person. You have to start there if you want to have a real human interaction. And so, when I give feedback and I know that some of the feedback I want to give is negative, I make sure to point out all of the things that I agree with or that I think they did well. So, if I'm like, "I don't like the way this method is named," I want to make sure they know that I like what the method is doing, I just think it could have a better name or something like that.

DAMIEN: Wow. Can you repeat that principle again? That sounded super important.

REIN: Yeah. The basis of human interaction is acknowledging the inherent value in ourselves and the other person. You have to start there - from this fundamental, humans have value. That's where things start.

DAMIEN: Okay. And so, the precise example was, "I don't like the way this method is named." Start out with, "I like what it's doing."

REIN: I want to make sure they know that I see them as valuable, even while I'm criticizing some specific things.

DAMIEN: I've definitely made a lot of my friends upset because I complain about particular media things like, everything that was wrong with this movie. And they're like, "Why are you slacking this movie? Everybody loves this movie. This movie is great." I'm like, "Yeah. I wouldn't bother with a bad movie. I don't talk about what's wrong with bad movies. That's a waste of everybody's time."

JOHN: I think you're on to something really interesting there. But I'm also trying to think of how to balance that against the tendency when giving personal feedback as a manager or as a peer, like trying to avoid the shit sandwich style where you say something awesome about them and then you tell them the negative thing and then you give the awesome thing and then it really loses the impact of that negative thing, so they don't really address it. 

REIN: Because it's obviously not felt. It's also obviously just the thing to do. I think the key is to make it really obvious that you're being authentic and not just using a formula.

DAMIEN: The key is authenticity. If you can fake that, you've got it.

JOHN: [Laughs]

REIN: I mean, if you do this shit sandwich thing, you are being authentic. But what you're communicating is something different than what you think you're communicating.

DAMIEN: [Laughs] That's great. Yes. So really, the key to being a good manager is to care about people. Really. 

JOHN: Yes.

DAMIEN: They don't teach that [inaudible].

REIN: I haven't found another way to do it.

JOHN: You're talking about interacting with people the way you sort of wish they work versus the way they actually work. And I think one of the early things I read when I was trying to learn how to be a manager was the idea that you want to treat them how they want to be treated, not how you want them treated. And learning that there's a difference there is one of those early steps that I was glad I ran into because that golden rule thing has been around since I was five. And it's easy to sort of fall back on that, but that's not actually the best way to go.

DAMIEN: I've heard that, called the platinum rule.

JOHN: Nice.

DAMIEN: It upsets me because because I've been corrected with that and I wanted to defend myself and say, "Well, no. With the golden rule, I want to be treated the way I want to be treated. And so, you want to be treated the way you want to be treated. So, it's the same thing." Not a productive conversation, but just an instinct to defend myself.

REIN: A thing that I've noticed about myself looking back is that the times that I've become defensive have always been the times where there has been an opportunity for me to grow. And I'm doing myself a disservice if I can't find it.

DAMIEN: Yeah. 

REIN: It's really hard in the moment. Sometimes it happens like a month later. 

DAMIEN: That can expand to really all sort of strong, I'll use the word negative emotional reactions. If you have an emotional reaction that you don't like, there is a lesson there.

REIN: Yeah. Virginia Satir again points out that no anger just happens. She actually calls anger a survival emotion. But anger just happens. It arises in our brain from [inaudible] effective parts of our brain. We don't control that. What we control is what we do once it gets there.

DAMIEN: Yeah. Trauma therapist, Ryan Soave, who I've worked with on a couple of things, he told me I'm going to credit him, he probably did it elsewhere. You can feel your emotions. You should feel your emotions. You can't not feel your emotions. If you try not to feel your emotions, that you're going to have a bad time. But at the same time, you should not allow your emotions to control what you're doing. That's what some other part of you is for. And they should influence, they should should listen to them to get some information.

REIN: You know the Mister Rogers song: What do you do with a mad that you feel?

DAMIEN: Ooh, that sounds great. I haven't heard of that.

REIN: So he went before a congressional committee on funding for public broadcast or some such thing, and they were trying to decide what to do with like $12 million. And he made this impassioned plea for public broadcasting and talked about what he did on his show and he's saying that song. And the committee chair, who is this very New Jersey sort of a guy, like, "All right, fine. You got the $12 million." 

DAMIEN: He sang that song in the congressional committee meeting?

REIN: Yup. Saw on YouTube.

DAMIEN: What a guy.

JOHN: What a guy.

REIN: Virginia says the problem was never the problem. How we cope is the problem.

DAMIEN: Yeah, that's great.

JOHN: Yeah, coping. That's where it all unravels.

REIN: A lot of the things that prevent us from achieving our potential are survival rules, which are coping mechanisms we learned that are no longer serving us.

DAMIEN: Which sounds almost adjacent to, I think, Buddhist philosophy. It's like it's not what's happening that's the problem. It's what you think about. Or to quote Hamlet, "I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space."

JOHN: Yup.

REIN: A thing that I have - bad dreams.

[Laughter]

DAMIEN: Impressive.

REIN: Have you read the original draft copy of Hamlet? It was garbage. Hamlet was like a pirate. It was so bad. So, even Shakespeare had to get it wrong before he got it right.

DAMIEN: I'm convinced that there's a good collection of bad Shakespeare. Actually, you know what? I take that back. There actually is a collection of bad Shakespeare plays. I performed at least one of them. [Laughs] They're some trash.

REIN: I guess I can't just spend the rest of the show talking about Shakespeare now. That's disappointing.

DAMIEN: Oh, we can figure out a way to do it.

[Laughter]

REIN: I will very quickly plug. There is an old series from the Royal Shakespeare Company called Playing Shakespeare, and it was originally on VHS. But I think you can find it on YouTube now. And it's like all of the actors at the time, which I guess was like the late 70's, early 80's, in their [inaudible] which includes like Patrick Stewart, Dame Judi Dench, Ian McKellen, Helen Mirren. Like the best Shakespeare actors of all time, discussing like how they interpret Shakespeare, how they play Shakespeare. Like doing recital. It's incredible.

DAMIEN: Yeah. I have so many pet peeves about Shakespeare performances. First of all, it's not highbrow. Shakespeare is dirty. It's crude. It's violent. And it's wonderful for all those reasons. And anyone who tries to pretend that it's high culture just ruins it. Also, why are people wearing Victorian dress? Hamlet is set in 1400's Denmark. Why in the world would you be wearing Victorian dress?

JOHN: [Laughs]

REIN: One of the interesting things about Shakespeare, and then we can maybe move on -- let's give this two more minutes.

[Laughter]

REIN: Is that when you find the really highbrow language, it's there for a fact. Well, it's there for a reason. There is a scene in The Merchant of Venice where there is this really highbrow language. It's like, "Like Signiors and rich Burgers on the flood," or, "The Pageants of..." this and that. It's because the dude is sucking up to someone.

DAMIEN: [Laughs]

JOHN: I wanted to mention, I don't know if you've seen the movie, Looking for Richard. It was directed by Al Pacino and stars as him following the production of Richard, the Third. But the documentary intersperses the actors discussing the parts and learning them and rehearsing along with the final productions, like moving back and forth to tell the whole story of the play. And so, you get that really interesting sort of behind-the-scenes things being built up and the actors discussing how they're going to do what they're doing, in the middle of while they're also doing it and you're seeing it develop over time. So, it's a really interesting documentary.

DAMIEN: Awesome.

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JOHN: So, of the things you're working on right now, are there any things that you are particularly interested in that you want to discuss here that you think will be relevant?

DAMIEN: Yes, actually, that's good, because it's the only project that is valuable to a broad audience and available to the public right now. Me and a business partner, Rob Head, we developed a product called EarlyWords, which is a tool to help people do their morning pages. I was thinking about, I said, "Make it easy that sort of thing I want to talk about." And just thinking about that, having sent that to you all. Nobody needs a software tool to do morning pages. A piece of paper and a pencil or a pen do just fine.

REIN: Morning pages is like a journaling thing? 

DAMIEN: Yes. I probably should go into that. It's a tool for Creative Recoveries called by Julia -- oh, no, I can't see the book from here. Julia Cameron, I think. She wrote about it in a book called The Artist's Way, which is all about recovering your artistic self and recovering yourself as an artist. And the principal tool is a daily practice called Morning Pages. The way she described it, it was three pages written first thing in the morning, longhand of just whatever it is that's on your mind. It's such an incredibly simple exercise, and it feels ridiculous. But something like two, two and a half pages in, things change. And it changes the way you approach your day, it changes the way you approach your life, it changes your mental state.

So, Rob and I, we developed EarlyWords, EarlyWords.io, as a tool to help people do that. And like I said, you don't need a tool for this. You need a piece of paper and a pencil. Weirdly enough, pencil is not a great interface for me. Just must have something to do with my age and my field of study. I can't write with a pencil or a pen for a very long time. I'm not good at it. It doesn't feel good. So, writing via keyboard gets more of what I think writing via longhand was to people 30 years ago or people who are not like me.

But yeah, you do this with a text editor, you can do it anywhere you can type things, really, or anywhere you can write things. So, how do we make this easy for people? How do we make it so that it's easy to become a daily practice, so that it's easy to keep flowing. And that's really what this tool is. It's not necessary. It just makes things easier.

REIN: So, when you decided to make this software -- like you're saying, you can just use a pen and a piece of paper. So, there must have been something that made you think that this would be easier. What is the thing about this that makes it easier?

DAMIEN: It's really the support. This feedback and like you're getting towards your goal, this feedback in like you've done this on a daily basis. We're looking for other ways of doing that. There's also like when you're done, you're done. One of the things we did is when you've written your morning pages, they're done. There's no editing them. There's no writing more. It's really guidance. It's setting up, like what we're talking about with the ants, it's setting up an environment for people to travel along a particular path.

REIN: Is this like a constraint liberating sort of a thing?

DAMIEN: It's constraints are guiding, at the very least.

JOHN: Yeah, I found a lot of benefit when I started doing morning pages. Because I had been journaling before that, but there was always an internal editor going like, "Oh, this paragraph should go down here," and I should group these statements together so they make more sense. Just all that sort of machinery that you get doing things in high school and grade school about how to write. And just realizing there's no going back, there's no editing, there's no 'this has to look good for other people', again, very liberating.

DAMIEN: Yeah. That's such a great lesson. And that's something that's come up with me doing morning pages is training to write without the editor. Writing is so difficult for me because I'm editing. And on the rare occasion I'm doing my morning pages or there's something I wrote recently that I'm just out of luck, that I can write without self-editing, it just comes out in a cascade or a waterfall of good stuff. That needs editing, but it's good stuff.

REIN: Editors are word cops.

DAMIEN: [Laughs] I feel bad saying about that. I have an editor that I love very, very much.

REIN: You have to kill the word cop in your mind.

DAMIEN: [Laughs] [Inaudible] the word cop in your mind.

REIN: Oh yeah, [inaudible], that's what I said. Abolish [inaudible]. So, if I had read your bio, I would have found out that you actually have led theater productions. 

DAMIEN: If you had to read it, yes. I was stage manager for the first round of a show called Pulp Shakespeare, came out as a producer for later runs, which was really wonderful. Pulp Shakespeare was an absolutely amazing show. It's Pulp Fiction as if written by Shakespeare or there's a better way of saying it. It's a production of the original version of Pulp Fiction, which was a Shakespeare play. But it really highlights a lot of what Shakespeare and Tarantino have in common. Their love of language, their love of violence. I guess that's it, really.

REIN: That's so cool. What have you learned about tech from leading a theater production?

DAMIEN: I used this quote maybe once a month that I've never -- I think I finally bothered to look up who said it and I've forgotten again. Sorry, guy. He said, "I play the piano, but my instrument is an orchestra." You can do a lot more with an orchestra than you can with an engineer. I write amazing code. I'm really good at it. I can do better leading a team than I can writing code. I'm a good actor. I'm a very good actor. That show would not happen with only me acting. Probably would be better off without me. It still could happen without me. But it's much more powerful to have 13 actors to a stage manager and three producers than it is to have a great actor. Things happen in teams, teams are just so much more powerful and accomplish so much more than even the most amazing individuals.

REIN: I've got another thing for that. Benjamin Zander, who was the conductor of the Boston Philharmonic, has a thing that he said, which is that the conductor is the only person in the orchestra that doesn't make a sound. And conductors derive their power from empowering the people in the orchestra to make sound.

DAMIEN: I love that. Empowering the people in the orchestra to make sound. Like being in management, being a conductor, being a leader is an act of service. It's an act of service to people to allow them to do the amazing things that they do. And so when I showed up on Friday night with the two muffins that they used as props to eat on stage, it's a silly thing. All it took was going to the store and spending five bucks on a muffin and knowing to do that. But it allowed the actors who are on stage [inaudible] to see what they're eating. It allowed them to do the thing that they do and do it a lot better.

REIN: So, I think that a lot of the job of management is to create environments in which people can do the right stuff and do it easily.

REIN: Yeah, that's exactly it. It's creating the environment for people to do the things they need to be done. I think of employment in the same way. There's a saying among actors, we act for free. We're paid to wait. And it's true. Actors love acting. We do it all the time. But in an environment where that ends up in a movie, that's a whole lot of work. That's a whole nother thing. And so, it's the same about engineers. Software engineers love to write code. I love to write code. Putting me in a place where that code will produce something valuable that will generate economic and other sorts of wealth in the world, that's a thing. Or at the very least, setting me up so that I can pay my rent and don't have to worry about it, so I can spend my time writing code.

REIN: I'm tempted to say that I write code for free, I'm paid to use [inaudible].

[Laughs]

DAMIEN: I hope you're paid well.

REIN: There's a whole thing about how when the thing you love is making someone else rich.

JOHN: Yeah.

DAMIEN: I mean, yeah, we could go deep into that. One of the great things about EarlyWords is that it's a two-person project. We have equal ownership. It's something we're doing for ourselves. I had this great conversation with -- I'm going to call him a socialist. I don't know if you will self-identify this way. But there's very much a lot of exploitation in the labor market. I'm going to pay you a bunch of money to make me really rich. You're not getting the value out of what you're doing. And typically, that's how the labor market largely worked. It largely worked because people with capital have more power than people with labor. But it doesn't have to be that way. Labor market doesn't have to be that way. One of the things I love about the jobs that I've loved is that they allowed me to do things that I couldn't do otherwise. They created environments where even though I wasn't capturing the full value of what I'm producing, the value of what I'm producing was a lot more than it would be on my own. I've been a startup founder, I've been a software engineer, I've been a product manager. And I know that as an engineer, the code I write has great value. But it has great value because of the marketers, because of the product manager, because of the business people. That's a silly type of business people. [Laughs] And so it has more value because of the things that they contribute. So, the fact that I don't get to capture all of that value does not bother me. It's not a bad thing. It's still better than the times I spent on my own working for myself, generating far less value, even though I got to [inaudible].

REIN: Excuse me. They prefer to be called people who business.

[Laughs]

DAMIEN: People [inaudible], yes. Business person is such an awful, awful term. What does that mean?

REIN: So, I have to ask you, what is ontological coaching?

DAMIEN: Yeah, I used the phrase ontological coaching precisely to generate that question, and partly because I have a visceral reaction to the phrase life coaching. And also, because life coaching, without my visceral reactions is far too specific. 

Ontology is the study of being, which does not an informative statement in and of itself, it's more of a Greek definition. But ontological coaching, as I was taught, as I learned in my training is a shift on how we approach the things we want. There's a natural way to think like, "Oh, I want to be fit, so I workout and then I'll be fit." I want to be a pianist, so I sit down at the piano and I practice the piano, and I'll be a pianist. And [inaudible] what you want to have and then saying, "What do I need to do to get what I want to have?" If you change it, if you come from an ontological perspective, it's a focus on what should be. So, you think about, "Who do I get to be such that I'll do the things that I'll have the things I want." 

This comes up strongly in relationships. I want to have these types of intimate relationships. And there's a whole piece that gets into this. But there's a whole industry of how to get to particular intimate relationship that you want. And if you go the other way, "Okay, who do I want to be?" And then those things just naturally happen. And so really, it's helping people shift and guiding into that process and learning that.

REIN: I'm realizing that I probably want to start calling myself an epistemic coach now.

DAMIEN: Epistemic. Is that definitions, no?

REIN: Knowledge.

DAMIEN: Knowledge, I like it.

REIN: What even is knowledge?

DAMIEN: Yes. How do we know things? It's so funny. There's a lot of people who feel so strongly about the scientific method. They have kind of what -- I mean, there really is a religious connection to the scientific method. Have you ever looked at why the scientific method is useful? What makes you think it's useful? Have you ever examined that?

REIN: Yes. 

DAMIEN: You have, because you're epistemolic, whatever that word is. [Laughs]

REIN: It depends on who you ask, in fact, and in which decade you ask. But the sort of modern idea is that the scientific method tells us what is real or at least what we have sufficient reason to believe is real. It used to be falsification and before that is verification. I have no idea what the kids are doing these days.

DAMIEN: The word I was looking for was epistemologist or something. So you start with a presumption of a Cartesian duality. There is an external world and there are observers of that external world. And there's a shared external reality, shared external objective reality. And you go, "Okay, what are the things we can identify about that reality?" But there's an assumption of consistency and there's assumption of external reality. None of the scientific method is scientifically testable. There's nothing supporting it. I'm not coming out against the scientific method, just for the record. [Laughs] I'm just saying there's nothing supporting it.

REIN: The only thing supporting it is a shared belief that it works.

DAMIEN: [Laughs] Well, that's very unscientific.

REIN: I mean, this is the fundamental problem with science, right? It's all ultimately based on human belief. There's no way around it.

DAMIEN: I mean, is that a problem?

REIN: [Crosstalk] It has worked pretty well, but it does indicate that people who think that the scientific messages about discovering objective truths are misguided.

DAMIEN: Yeah. Still useful. I have to say that on the record, people think you're crazy.

REIN: What Sidney Dekker loves to point out is that the scientific method is great for learning things, but it can't tell you what to learn. 

DAMIEN: Oh, it's so good. Or why.

REIN: Yeah, it can't tell you why you value the things you value. It can tell you what to do once you've decided to value something.

DAMIEN: So then how do you value things? We're really heading into like the roots of things. That path leads to crazy things, like I think that's who I am. 

REIN: One of the things that happens on the show is we see how long it takes for me to namedrop Wittgenstein because we're starting to hit philosophical bedrock now.

DAMIEN: [Laughs] There's philosophical bedrock? 

REIN: Maybe.

DAMIEN: There's a game. Oh, God. Somebody said like, "Pick a Wikipedia page at random. Click on the first non-trivial link." And I'm like, five steps to get to philosophy?

REIN: It's true. Works every time.

DAMIEN: Makes me not feel so bad about the highest levels of education being a Doctor in Philosophy. 

REIN: I feel like we have very slightly come off the rails here. [Chuckles] 

DAMIEN: I don't know what the rails were.

REIN: Not in a bad way. I have a tendency to do this in every discussion. So I'm trying to not say [inaudible] myself in because --

DAMIEN: Ohhh.

JOHN: Aha.

DAMIEN: All right. Rein, John, what are the rails here? What is Greater Than Code about?

REIN: There aren't really rails. So, Greater Than Code is about the hypothesis that the socio side of the socio technical system that we inhabit is more important than the technical side.

DAMIEN: Oh, wow, you hit that pretty hard. I'm proud of us. 

REIN: So, there are things that are Greater Than Code, is the hypothesis.

JOHN: Probably a good time jump into reflections at this point.

REIN: Yey!

JOHN: I'm having trouble formulating a reflection, though, despite that. There are a lot of really good threads to pull on. But I don't have a really cogent place to put that. 

DAMIEN: Which is an interesting reflection in and of itself.

JOHN: True. That's true. Probably bears re-listening to this episode in a couple of weeks and seeing what comes back out at me. 

DAMIEN: What I think that I'm less happy about in this conversation is that we didn't find those and dig into them and we veered away from the practical at the first opportunity we had. But I did it because, well, I enjoy it.

REIN: I was your accomplice there. 

DAMIEN: Don't get to do that very often, so I jumped on the opportunity.

JOHN: Well, you'll just have to come back on the show and we'll do the other conversation.

DAMIEN: One of the things about being part of a legislative body is learning Robert's Rules of Order. And this seems like a bunch of silly rules and mostly is. But the principle is we're doing something. A decision will be made. And if we're not heading towards that decision, we're off the rails. There's nothing that we can do. There's nothing you can do under Robert's Rules of Order that's not leading to an actual action by that body. So yeah, I love that concept of, what precisely are we going to do, and having that as a focus for any conversation or any sort of conversation, which is not what we did here at all. And the conversation reflects that. I love these two. I will do this [inaudible].

REIN: So, teleology is the idea that things have goals and purpose. I think it's interesting to think about that in connection with discourse conversations. Does every conversation have a goal? Is it necessary? Is it good for some conversation to not have goals?

DAMIEN: I think it's absolutely good for some conversations to not have goals. I think most conversations, people don't know what their goals are. And I think it's vitally important for some conversations to have very clear goals.

REIN: I guess the question is, what are you trying to accomplish? So, it's like you can't avoid discussions on purpose, it seems like, when you talk about humans. 

DAMIEN: What are you trying to accomplish, is the sentence I use most as a product manager.

REIN: One of the challenges for me, and maybe this will be my reflection, is that it's very hard to translate theory into practice. So, that's literally what praxis is. Praxis is the translation of [inaudible] into practice. In the academic community, you can find papers that talk about the gap between researchers and practitioners. And so, you have all these people thinking all these thoughts, but how do you connect those people doing the thinking with the people that are doing the work? And one way, I think, is to actually recognize that the people who are doing the work are also doing a lot of thinking.

DAMIEN: [Laughs] The difference between theory and practice is that in theory, there isn't a difference.

REIN: Yep, love that one. I think we do the folks who are doing the work a discredit when we assume that they don't get the theory.

DAMIEN: Yeah, absolutely. And even if they can't articulate it, they know the theory better because they're doing it.

JOHN: Yeah, it's embodied.

DAMIEN: Embodied. Thank you.

REIN: Yey! We did it! 

JOHN: It actually ties in with an article I was reading literally this morning about tacit knowledge and how teaching this so often assumes that there is a verbal description that transfer knowledge from one brain to another brain and that there is no test on how [crosstalk].

REIN: That's not how it works. That's not how knowledge works.

JOHN: [Laughs] Yeah. And how knowing that tacit knowledge is there and being able to find the borders of where it exists in the field, allow you to then say, "Okay. Well, how do we get at that?" Whereas if you don't acknowledge it, then you're just going to drive around it and assume that you can transfer everything. And I think that ties in directly with that embodiment of practice, of the theory in practice, where so much of that is not even necessarily able to be interrogated cognitively.

DAMIEN: Yeah. There's so much focus and importance placed on things that can be language, things that can be cognitively introspective. And that is not the important stuff. Our cognition, our rational minds are a tiny, tiny piece of what we are and what we're capable of, and not worthy of so much focusing.

JOHN: Like before, I think our reflections have gone off the rails a little bit. [Chuckles]

REIN: No, we're good.

JOHN: I'm enjoying this.

REIN: So, Damien, is there something that you'd like our listeners to sort of take away from this or to keep thinking about?

DAMIEN: The first phrase that comes to mind is life is hard. And I hate that phrase because it implies a sort of resolve towards suffering, which is not at all what I mean. What I mean is that things are difficult and complicated and tough to understand. I think our conversation reflects that in that we kept going to such deep, fundamental issues that have no bedrock. It doesn't matter what topic you're talking about, to go back to the Wikipedia exercise. It doesn't matter what topic you're talking about, if you get into a deeply [inaudible] philosophy. And then you end up with nothing [inaudible]. So really, what I mean when I say life is hard, what I mean is the things we're doing, whether it's writing a web app or writing specification documents or building a product, the things we're doing in our environments are in and of themselves in an environment that is large and complicated and worthy of a lot of study and effort. And you're going to have some confusion, some difficulty. There are things that you will never know. There are things that you want to understand. There are things that contradict other things that are also true. And all of that investigation is enjoyable, like we've done today, and important and worthy. And that's what I mean when I say life is hard and I think that's the takeaway I want out of this. So, make everything you can easy. 

REIN: I love that. One thing that occurred to me while you were saying that is [inaudible] fluency, which is the expertise hypes the effort in work. So, people making things look easy can do that because of their expertise. It doesn't mean that things will be easy forever.

DAMIEN: Yeah.

JOHN: Yeah. And that ties into that whole unconscious competence level of task acquisition where you don't even realize all the stuff you're doing.

REIN: But one of the things that happens is that when people make things look easy, that work is devalued.

DAMIEN: You know, magicians have this problem and they have strategies for it. Maybe those are strategies we need to learn.

REIN: Yeah, I've heard something like, a magician puts a ton of effort into making it look like nothing happened, or something like that.

DAMIEN: Yeah. But if you're a bad magician like I am, I know a few card slides and I've mastered a couple -- not mastered. I'm effective at a couple of card slides, and discovered that the slide does not make the trick. Nobody's interested. Nobody values. Like something happened, didn't even see it happen. Nobody cares. It's everything else around you that what gives that value, and pattering is actually the magician's term. It's coming from that Cartesian sciences, engineer left brain, right brain, whatever side of the brain was, sort of thing where it's like, no, the actual thing is important and this devalue the part around it that allows other people to recognize its values and importance and to think highly of it.

JOHN: Yeah. That reminds me of a story Penn Jillette was talking about early in his career. He spent a couple of years living in his car, just driving around, doing street magic, but making lots and lots of money doing it. And the routine he had was 90% patter where literally 90% of the time would be spent building up the crowd in such a way that he could do his little five-minute thing and everyone would be really excited about it, and there'd be a massive crowd that could then pay him lots of money. But it was a five-minute act that if he hadn't done that, it wouldn't have generated any interest.

DAMIEN: Yeah, generating the interest is an important part. The slide is just a small tool you use. Same with the code. The code is not the important part. The environments around it - the product, the people paying for it, et cetera, et cetera. All that stuff that we're taught to be value as engineers and the sciences. That's really what's important.

REIN: We're doing a terrible job of wrapping up. You want to just like come back again? 

DAMIEN: Of course, I want to come back again. Does that mean we don't have to wrap this up? We just hang up and we'll be done?

REIN: Works for me.

[Laughter]

REIN: To be continued.

DAMIEN: All right.

REIN: This is really fun. Thank you for doing it.

JOHN: Yeah. This was an awesome conversation.

REIN: I am required by law to say that if you enjoyed this conversation and you want to have more like them, you can join our Slack by becoming a Patreon supporter for as little as one whole dollar, one hundred cents. And all of the panelists and also a lot of the guests are there, too. And also, we have a wonderful supportive community who care for each other. It's cool. You can do that if you want.

DAMIEN: That sounds wonderful. They can talk to people like you and do that?

REIN: Yeah. All of our guests are also invited. So, Damien, you can also come and say hi to people.

DAMIEN: Well, I will be there.

REIN: Great.