The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source - Off the grid social networking with Manyverse (Interview)

Episode Date: May 18, 2019

We’re talking with Andre Staltz, creator of Manyverse — a social network off the grid. It’s open source and free in every sense of the word. We talked through the backstory, how a user’s network gets formed, how data is stored and shared, why off-grid is so important to Andre, and what type of user uses an “off-the-grid” social network.

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into a managed, production-ready cluster without having to maintain or configure the underlying infrastructure. They seamlessly integrate everything with the rest of the DigitalOcean stack, including load balancers, firewalls, object storage spaces, and block storage volumes. They even have built-in support for public and private image registries like Docker Hub and Quay.io. Developers can now run and scale container-based workloads

with ease with the DigitalOcean platform. Learn more and get started for free with a $50 credit at do.co.changelog. Again, do.co. ChangeLog. All right. Welcome back, everyone. This is the ChangeLog, a podcast featuring the hackers, leaders, and innovators of software development. I'm Adam Stachowiak, Editor-in-Chief here at ChangeLog. On today's show, Jared and I are talking to Andre Stahls, creator of Manyverse, a social network off the grid.

It's open source and free in every sense of the word. We talk through the backstory, how a user's network gets formed, how data is stored and shared, why off grid, was listening to our episode on Mastodon and said he would love to hear one about Mediverse with Andre Staltz. And P.S. his birthday is this month. Now that was April, so Yuri, happy belated birthday. And we were very happy to oblige after the show with Dominic Tarr where we mentioned Scuttlebutt. I said we've got to get a show about this soon. Andre, you're a natural fellow to talk about it. So thanks so much for joining us.

Thanks for inviting me. It's really nice to be here. Should we actually sing Happy Birthday or should we just let that go by? Let's not sing it. Let's not do that. Hard pass. We'll say it. Happy birthday, Yuri.

Happy birthday. So we hope you enjoy this show andre on your home page it says you're an open source freelancer that caught adam's eye caught my eye a little bit not too many people call themselves that is that a special designation that you have for yourself or just couldn't think of something to say yeah it's actually quite hard to find a title for what i do and i I didn't want to use like, you know, very esoteric titles that just make people even more confused. I just tried to use terms that people use. I mean, freelancer, you usually think of them as self-employed people who do sort of contract work and then, you know, they do it from home. I am a person who's self-employed

and I do work from home. But mostly what I do is open source. For instance, my sources of revenue are open source donations. So I run like CycleJS Open Collective, which is, you know, CycleJS is a framework for JavaScript and it has donations sometimes from backers, sometimes from companies. And I do a little bit of development on that and I get donations. Then there's the Miniverse Open Collective. I'm sure we're going to talk about Miniverse and that's been also receiving donations. Then donations in total don't give me a living. So I also do workshops to teach programming libraries and stuff like that. Those workshops give me income and also online training through different kinds of teaching portals and all of

these things i mean the common theme is always like some kind of open source so that's i think the title is quite okay yeah it works yeah you're primarily trying to do open source but you're also a freelancer in the open source world does that mean you actually take on some client work yeah yeah i've done that um i think last year I did it twice, if I'm not mistaken. But it's been something like client needs specific bug fixing that they need specifically me or something because it's a very unique case. And the other case was they wanted to get some projects started and they wanted to have like a nice project template, a nice documentation set up. And so I basically was like helping kickstart the project. I do these things sort of maximum one month or two months.

I try to not take very long projects because then it's, of course, time away from all these other things. And honestly, I try to make a small enough income so that, like, I could try to maximize for money and buying stuff, but I try to just maximize for my savings so that I can have enough time to work on these open source things that don't give money or revenue or anything like that. Absolutely. So you have other interests. One of those interests is as i mentioned before scuttlebutt you say scuttlebutt solar punk yeah on your twitter bio and many verse is a do you call it a scuttlebutt client we're going to get into all of the nitty-gritty here yeah absolutely it's a

scuttlebutt client it is some people like to talk about Scuttlebutt as a place, like, you know, a social media platform. But I really think it's like a protocol. So just as you have, you know, email as a protocol, then of course, you need some kind of email app. Used to be Thunderbird. But of course, now we have like, you know, web apps. Right. And I mean, there's so many other protocols out there. And Scuttlebut is one protocol and you need of course apps to make it work so i love the way that you described many verse on the home page when you say free forever and you have kind of this pyramid or triangle of things that it doesn't have which is a very interesting way of pitching something no

ads no paywall no data centers no cloud no company no investors no token no ico i'll run out of breath saying all the things this doesn't have i think it gets more interesting no tracking no spying no analytics no blockchain real minimalism pitch here and definitely setting apart from kind of the big corporate social networks that that we're all using on a day-to-day basis yeah so i mean often when people read these kind of things you know decentralized or something there's some kind of catch in it let's say that you need to have the tokens in order to i don't know buy sort of views to your content and then that token you actually end up buying it from the company that's running the thing and then you're like oh now I see what's the deal here. And of course, you know, sort of making money out of a thing

is sometimes like fundamental for sustainability. And I'm not saying that like, I'm not saying that I don't make money whatsoever because obviously there's a donate page and there's obviously people helping this project with donations. So if we want to go deep into why all of this free stuff, I've been sharing a sort of theory with some people that I still want to share this as a blog post,

but we can do this as a podcast as well. Yes, let's do it. So I believe that open source is like the next frontier for disruption in software. And when you look at the big disruptions that happened in software, the recent decades, for instance, we had at some point, Microsoft being the dominant player and they sold software, they sold Windows

or they sold Microsoft Office literally in a box, you know, that you would buy physically. And that would cost you what, like something like $400 per edition. So for sort of like 2003, there was a Microsoft Office, right? And that costed like, what, $400 a box. And then the next version was 2007. So then that's like $400 for four years. And so it's essentially $100 per year. So then the thing that came after that, that disrupted all of this was, of course, the internet and the web and that growing so much. And then came players like, let's say, Google and other sort of SaaS players. I don't necessarily

mention just, you know, let's imagine like Dropbox or Spotify or Facebook, all these other things. And those, I mean, they sold software in a sense where they gave software. Now, not in a box. So you have the benefits of not having all of those logistic problems, right? Right. And essentially, the revenue that they get per user per year is something around $10 per year or $20 or something like that. Now, it differs a bit if you're paying subscriptions, let's say Netflix or Spotify,

then you might end up actually paying $100 per year, which is still kind of the same level as what Microsoft had because it's kind of crazy when you think about it that people are willing to pay $9 per month. But when you put it as in, are you willing to pay $400 every four years, then it's kind of scarier. But it's kind of the same thing. Plus, you don't have to necessarily upgrade that old Office version. You could buy it and just say, I don't need 2007.

I'm going to run this for 10 years. And it might still work 10 years later. Yeah. But I think my point here is that we went from software as a product or software as a boxed product, right? In a box to software as an advertisement sustained service, right? And that shift, that big shift happened with a 10x reduction in price for users. And I think that, and you know, a lot of people use Google Docs today, which is exactly the use case for Microsoft Office. So there is a big benefit here

for users that of course, I pay much less. And that's actually the real reason why people are so interested in Google is that it's free, right? From their perspective, it's like free. And then of course, I mean, when I say that it costs $10 per user per year, people are paying that still, not in the form of dollars, but in the form of privacy, because obviously Google is getting that money because users exist. So people are paying still something, but with their privacy. And not everybody is comfortable paying that. So I think that in order to disrupt that, you have to be like 10 times cheaper. So you really need to sort of

reduce that cost of going from, you know, $10 per user per year to something like $1 per user per year. And you need to do that in a way that they don't need to pay with their privacy. So how are you going to do that? So I actually did the calculations, and what I receive now for Manyverse through donations, so out of thousands of users, there's like 53 backers. So it's something like 1 out of 100 backers. No, no, 1 out of 100 users becomes a backer, and those users or those backers, they donate approximately like five

or $6 per month. And if you do the math carefully, I mean, it's roughly meaning that each user represents through some backer $1 per year. So you kind of reach that 10x reduction. But it has to be through the value proposition that you don't have to pay anymore through your privacy. So these things are actually sustainable in the sense that if you have 10x less revenue, well, then it means that all your costs should be like 10x smaller, 20x smaller. So you can do that with like a smaller team of developers, of course, like you're not going to have hundreds or thousands, you're going to have like dozens, maybe in the at scale, it also means that you don't have,

you shouldn't have costs such as infrastructure, like servers. So those things are also consistent with like, the many verse situation that we don't have, like servers running, we don't have that kind of cost. And we just have developers or basically just me now. And it's still like not sustainable. I mean, don't have that kind of like sustainability to have myself funded. And I'm the only developer so far. But the point is that at scale, these things are sustainable. If there's like $1 per user per year, then you do the math and with like a million users, then you're probably going to have some kind of yearly millionaire revenue, which means like a team of a dozen people or something like that. So the case for scale becomes even more important once you're going down with these costs.

Right. I think that's the sort of big gist of it. It's not a business because donations don't have that kind of return on investment. You don't have investors. And I think that's the real key to the problem is that donation-driven software, if it would be investment-driven, it would actually be much bigger because investors would make it big, but that's not the case. It would be interesting to go beyond Manyverse and maybe go out to other open collectives and see if you can do that same math on the number of users versus the number of dollars per capita. Yeah.

And see if you still get to that one out of 100, basically. Yeah, I do have like a hint that that's kind of what's happening. If you look at bigger open collectives, there's like Babel and Webpack. And those have like webpack has something like 100k right now in their open collective and babel has something around the same scale and well i do believe that yeah last time i calculated like cycle js which is my framework is a couple of thousands times smaller than babel for instance in terms of like let's say npm downloads right it takes a certain kind of person though to to forego as you said before some or to have your outlook on life in terms of

income you know some people want to maximize income and it seems like you've got some personal i don't want to say their morals but just direction in life that makes it easier for you to forego income and gain other things in relation to that because some people might want to maximize maybe not easier but more important yeah exactly like your your power your level of importance thank you is sort of strive towards this way of life where somebody else may not be that way um you're talking about way of life as in uh not having privacy violations or or privacy costs or maximizing for income and the way you've been able to situate your income flow, I suppose. Yeah. I mean, the fact that it's,

you know, donate, we're talking about open source software as it relates to donations and being able to be, you know, an open source freelancer, like you are creating open source backed by a community. Yeah. So, I mean, like, obviously i am not driven by maximizing money because you know otherwise i'd be doing different things because it's much easier to do in other things and also like i'm not living in countries where i would need to maximize my income for instance i'm from brazil and i know that like there you really need to like you know find your own way because there's not like this kind of welfare state, which is in Finland. And I also know that the United States is roughly the same and that you have to actually look for a lot of money because that's how life is.

So I do think that it helps that like even if I don't try to maximize money, I'm still going to have like public health care and going to be fine. I think that kind of safety really plays a big role in what i'm doing and then you know you start thinking okay what is actually meaningful in life and then i see like you know all these problems out there and i see like well i could just sit down and program this kind of stuff and maybe that would be helpful for people and yeah i mean so that's kind of like a little bit why i'm doing this. But what I was trying to say before is that I do think that there's a big potential in a new wave of software that is 10x cheaper. And this is still like an early exploration of ideas.

But I think that it doesn't need to be necessarily MIT licensed. So there's different experiments in licenses with open source or barely open source or debatably open source. One of them is called License Zero. Have you heard of that? Yep. License Zero is essentially that, you know, depending if you're a business or not, if you're individuals, then you're going to have a license that you can use the software forever, like free and open source. But if you're a business, you have to buy a license. So it's kind of like a business,

even though the code is always open. I think that's very interesting. I think there should be like a lot more experiments and licenses because something like community donations or open source donations, it's essentially like out of 100 users, one of them will pay voluntarily. And that means that essentially like those 100 people are sort of like abstractly sort of getting together and paying it collectively.

That's not what they do like as an actual dynamics, but from your perspective, like if you reach thousands, then those sort of thousands will pay you back. And I think there's a potential of like all kinds of creative licenses here. I'm not implying something specific. I'm just implying like a big field of innovation that could happen in licenses where you could do something like, you know, for instance, in your city, people in this city are not allowed to use this software unless the city buys a license for that software. And then everybody in that city could use that software. So then you have incentives for, let's say, the city to get together and sort of like gym in and sort of out of their public income or whatever.

The government would like pay for this license. So people in that city can have that softer, like, and then the alternative would be, well, you can still use it, but it would be illegal. And these kinds of things kind of worked, for instance, with, what's it called? Sublime Text, the IDE. You could use it, right, for free, but it would just snag it with you all the time. You're actually not paying, right? And it sort of works when at scale.

That's the key. So at scale, enough people are going to understand that, okay, what I'm doing is wrong. I should actually pay for this. And then they pay, and then it's actually a business. Right. they pay and then it's actually a business you know right it's interesting because there's parallels there with the startup world where you have a founder an entrepreneur who's willing to forego uh like they could make more money getting a nine to five they're willing to forego that because when they are successful at scale there's a much larger financial upside in that case and it seems like what you're saying here is these new style not just social networks but

potentially all sorts of kind of software where you're providing it in this way to communities and a subset of that community is going to represent them financially that adds like in the small it's not really going to work out for an individual or especially a team but at scale it starts to make more sense maybe it's not at the same levels as you know a for-profit business but it's sustainable yeah it's sustainable and i think the difficulties with becoming sustainable are mostly related to like initial capital and that kind of stuff because of course like a startup that just you know a typical software as a service startup that has no investors they will have a very hard time, right?

Yeah. They will have a hard time. So it's the same case with donation driven open source software. They just have a hard time similarly because of this lack of like investment. But I mean, these are things that we can solve. I mean, in different ways, maybe legally, maybe in other ways. But what I'm trying to also point towards is that once you build something open source, or let's say once you build something from this next wave of software, then you won't go back to the previous one. For

instance, once you're using Google Docs, and you're, you know, you're sharing your basic documents with your friends, and you're not actually paying physical dollars, you're not going to go back to Microsoft Office and pay like $100 per year for a box. You know, you're not going to do that. And I think that obvious next step is also happening like gradually with open source. So for instance, a lot of people use the VLC, Videoland media player, and that's open source. And you're not going to go back to paying a similar kind of proprietary software for that. So I think that the situation is that once you build something open source and high quality, which has finances, and I mean, mean it has funds and it can maintain itself constantly you basically win it's disruptive yep yeah i mean you that's it it's disruptive

so i think that is probably going to happen in many cases um it's very difficult but given enough people trying and enough different countries and life situations and whatever at some point we're going to start like open sourcing all these different kind of use cases and i think uh for instance mastodon is a very interesting success case because the main developer as far as i understand is like full-time funded to do it and it has this like wave going on so it could be the case that like maybe 10 years from now twitter is like no no one's going to go back to Twitter because, you know, obviously there's this thing Mastodon, you know, could be. I'm not necessarily implying that.

I'm just saying there's a tendency that once you make something even cheaper, like you don't need to pay in privacy or whatever, then you're not going to go back to the brief i think there's an education i don't know not roadblock but there's education that has to happen because for many people the google docs version of the software is free like people don't value their privacy in dollar terms or in very much because they don't value it um i think we're getting to where we're having enough friction with corporations running these free services, especially with Twitter and Facebook when you have all sorts of situations going there with free speech situations, of course, privacy with all sorts of hacks happening and whatnot. People are starting to see the blowback of that, but I think a lot of people think that stuff already is free. And so that 10 X cost reduction requires a lot of education to,

for them to realize, no, you're, this isn't, this isn't free. You think it's free, but it's not free. Here's something that's actually free.

Yeah. And I think that might take a while to ramp up. And on the flip side of that too, like here's something that's actually free, but is it really, is the subtext of like the behind the scenes thoughts that someone's thinking is like, sure, I trusted Facebook or Twitter. Could I also trust Manyverse or something like that? And it's like, they're going to always think, but is it really?

Right. Yeah. Well, on the privacy note, I mean, on one hand, yes, I agree with you. A lot of people don't seem to value their privacy on the other hand if they wouldn't actually value their privacy um then facebook would not have changed their mission to be you know privacy centered and google would not have done that as well like with the recent google io yeah i don't know if i agree with that though because there's so many people that's to continue to use facebook that i talked i'm like you realize they're selling your data, right?

Yeah, I don't care. Yeah, yeah. I think the reason why you see this change is because there's so much media around the change. You know, the fact that Zuckerberg went to Congress and was briefed and all that good stuff. Like, that's probably why those changes are happening. Not because users are like, hey, I want my privacy. It's a small subset that's asking for it. Yeah, yeah, sure.

Not many demanding it by leaving in droves. But it is also the people who are aware and loud and consistently talking about these things tend to be the influencers who will move the general public over time. It's just that you kind of have that wave of adoption even where you have the early adopters. And then here comes the the masses well the masses don't care like they're in terms of like they care but not like the early adopters do so they just kind of follow behind so i agree with with andre that there are things that we're seeing which are indicating that

that privacy is is becoming and will continue to become something that people care about more matters we just think that we've had free lunch for like the last 15 years or 10 years and we that privacy is becoming and will continue to become something that people care about more. It matters. We just think that we've had free lunch for like the last 15 years or 10 years, and we haven't. Yeah, I mean, these things also take a long time. So for instance, Microsoft was quite dominant for a long time. It didn't change their message for a very long time. And after a while, they did. And, you know, on one hand, I really do agree that people don't actually value privacy. And I don't think that I should engage in that much education in the sense that these people just know those things already.

They're already educated. They just choose to not care. But I think that the thing with privacy is that it's not a thing in itself. It's when the lack of privacy expresses itself in other ways. Then you start actually caring. Like if, you know, like, I don't know, my passwords got stolen or, you know, my company details were abused or I'm seeing ads about this thing that I really, really don't want anyone to know. Or when it's, you know, everybody's privacy is violated, then the person violating, not violating, but like, you know, abusing the privacy, they are in a unique position to have more power.

And, you know, we could arguably say that Zuckerberg is already like the president of the world. And then you have all kinds of other, you know, like all of the societies, like Western societies, like Europe and the United States, they're sort of asking Zuckerberg to be accountable for their politics, which is like a crazy idea, right? So it's not anymore privacy. It's about politics. It's about... Yeah, it is. So I don't think privacy in itself is like a crazy idea right so it's not anymore privacy it's it's about politics it's about yeah it is so i don't think privacy in itself is a like a compelling thing it's more like you know you don't have it it expresses itself as a problem in other ways yeah but still i'm still not like not that strong on defending privacy i don't think that's my thing. And that might sound a little bit inconsistent. But so the thing that I'm really looking for with manyverse, which confuses people quite often, or just makes them wonder is, is the focus on off grid,

that to me is like the biggest thing. So the property of, you know, I'm not building a social network that's more private. I'm building a social network that's off the grid. This episode is brought to you by GoCD. With native integrations for Kubernetes and a Helm chart to quickly get started, GoCD is an easy choice for cloud-native teams. With GoCD running on Kubernetes, you define your build workflow and let GoCD provision and scale build infrastructure on the fly for you. GoCD installs as a Kubernetes native application, which allows for ease of operations, easily upgrade and maintain GoCD using Helm, scale your build infrastructure elastically with a new Elastic Agent that uses Kubernetes conventions to dynamically scale GoCD agents.

GoCD also has first-class integration with Docker registries, easily compose, track, and visualize deployments on Kubernetes. Learn more and get started at gocd.org slash kubernetes. Again, gocd.org slash kubernetes again go cd.org slash kubernetes so why is off-grid so important to you so off-grid is a strategy to get somewhere basically the internet and how it works is kind of broken. It's not the best of what it should be. So when they created the internet, of course, they had this idea that, you know, allow computers to talk to each other in an end to end fashion.

And then they didn't have enough IP addresses. And for security reasons, they also wanted to have like a bridge layer between a local area network and the whole internet. So they created a thing called NAT, which does address translation, which means that you can share an address, an IP address with many other computers. It turns out that it would be very nice if the internet would have one unique ip address for each computer that doesn't change no matter where you are because then it could work like phone numbers right of course you can just call people with phone numbers that's like really easy we don't have that for the internet which is like mind-blowingly weird it's sad and then it actually

turns out that we don't we can't build a lot of applications because of that um so we turn to centralized services that give us something like that right let's say your username on twitter is essentially like a phone number a lookup yeah but you know it's like a combination of uh letters that doesn't change and you can always reach that person with that thing so we reached out to those platforms so they can give us that capability. And you know, IPv6 came along, and we tried to try to fix the internet, but I don't think we're going to get that. So how does off grid fit into all this, essentially, we need to put back most of these network capabilities, or the or sort of like the end to end principle means that all of the important software is actually in the end points so it's actually on the end devices and the end software

so by doing that we can sort of start building a new internet but it starts with the applications because one of the things that they've tried to do many times is sort of like okay let's make a new protocol for the internet. And then after that, let's just hope that everybody builds apps and uses it. And that hasn't worked. There's a couple of protocols, I think. One of them that I read was, I can't remember the name, I'm sorry. But there's these sort of very alternative architectures for the internet. But if you build something that works entirely on the app,

on the end device, then you can start building different transport layers. So you can use the old internet, the current internet as we know it, to transfer data in quirky ways, but you can get it done. Or you can use different protocols. Let's say Bluetooth to transfer data from A to B. And Bluetooth is not necessarily the internet, right? It's just one type of transport that works from device to device. And you can also use a local area networking. And all of these

things are not that compelling for people like in developed nations, nations such as United States and America, because we have internet most of the time or all of the time. Right. But there's actually a lot of people who don't have that. And it's in the number of billions. And these people are just waiting to have good internet connections so they can use all these apps.

So there's a compelling case for those people. If they wouldn't have an app that looks like what we have today, but doesn't require internet connection. Then they can use Bluetooth and they can use Wi-Fi to replace the use case for the internet. Of course, it's more quirky. But the point is that if you can get that use case of, let's say, social networking, and you can make it sort of self-sufficient in the end user device and in the app then you can have the internet connection as like a optional thing if you have it it's great okay you can use it but then you can have alternative sort of other transports you can

have like the new internet you can have bluetooth and this way, you can sort of start to transfer this use case from the old internet to the new internet in a very gradual way. So you can still support both the old internet and the new internet. And all of this is tied to sort of reaching the under-connected world, because they actually have a big potential to start using a social networking app. While in the developed world, we don't actually have like a big desire to switch, right? Switching is actually the very difficult thing. Right.

So I actually don't have hope that people would switch on the basis of privacy, you know? I really don't have any hope that people would do that. But I do have a big hope that people will start using something that they've always wanted to use, but they haven't had internet, you know. So then we're talking actually about millions of people in Africa and the Amazon rainforest in Brazil, for instance, that would really be interested in using this. And then you have like a very fast growth sort of vector. And then like this thing could sort of grow and become big at scale. And then we're talking about sort of like an alternative internet maybe growing there.

So that's kind of like the big plan with off-grid. So it sort of has to work without the internet so that we can support alternative internets. That's essentially the nutshell. Gotcha. So admittedly, Adam and I are in the highly on grid bubble because when we talk about this, we're like, it seems like cool ideas, but it's not super compelling to us because it's like, well, I'm always online. So off, you know, offline first or off grid, we're just in that, you know, the bubble where we don't know what that life is like. And so definitely, you know, interesting to hear. I mean, i only go offline if i'm in a

subway or an airplane and they're fixing those problems right yeah but the subways but they're fixing the air airplane problem but obviously there's millions yeah the wi-fi is in the airplane yeah exactly there's millions of people who aren't in this circumstance and like you said they aren't going to switch they're going to finally use something they've always wanted to. They haven't been able to because of their lack of connection or unreliable connection. So it's very interesting. Is the alternate internets more interesting to a developer like you making it or to the end user? Because I think most people are sort of like blind to what the internet really is,

you know, and how data gets to their phone. For example, I connected a couple of devices that I have here locally that are just Bluetooth, but I get that and general users may not really understand or care. Yeah. Well, obviously, I mean, most of the people don't understand how things work. Yeah. But like the more you know how things work, they also, the more you know the potential for misuse or corruption or things like that. And I think that the more we build our society on these technologies, the more we're allowing very sort of dystopian use cases to come up.

And maybe not in like 10 or 20 years. Maybe, you know, actually Zuckerberg might be, you know actually zuckerberg might be you know still nice enough guy you know but what if when he dies and someone like horrible comes along you know like you know in usa you had like pretty okay presidents but now you have this i don't know this dude and that's the point i mean at some point these technologies that we're using might go into the hands of people that we really, really, really don't trust and really don't want to touch it. And if the entire what you call it, but I think there's a lot of aspects to it that are quite tangible. So for instance, people use sort of a decentralized way with photos already when they take a picture is always local and then it's in your gallery app and then you can share it with however way you want. So it gives a sense to people that, of course,

like this is my picture, right? If I don't post it anywhere, it won't reach anywhere. And I can choose who I share it with. I think that metaphor or that use case, it's quite obvious to people. They can do that with photos, but they can't do it with text, which is really weird. I mean, why can you do something with the richer media, but they can't do it with text, which is really weird. I mean,

why can you do something with the richer media, but you can't do it with text? Well, you could take a picture of text, but the point being is that you can't just like, it's not that common to have textual content or messages shared in this fashion. And I think people would understand it if they would just compare it with what the use case that they use now with pictures so there's a lot of arguments that you know the internet and then of course from like a like a developer's perspective you can also see a lot of new use cases that you could build with this kind of decentralized stuff that you couldn't build today with the current internet um yeah i'm just trying to come up with some ideas here.

But yeah, can't find one right now. But this is built on top of Scuttlebutt, right? So you've got this underlying protocol. This is a client. How does the network form? You talked about a world where phone numbers and IP addresses can be unique to a device. Talk about how the network actually develops. Is it one giant network and you incrementally add people to yourself?

Like, just describe that for me. I'm kind of lost on how this network actually is formed. Yeah, so Scuttlebutt is like, it's a local database where you, you know, increment your database with new content that you post. And then the question of how to share that data with others is, you know, you form networks. They could either be ephemeral networks. Let's say if you join some Wi-Fi and that Wi-Fi has other devices connected to it, then you can sort of exchange data with those other devices.

But that is a connection that's ephemeral because you're not always connected to that Wi-Fi and those other devices not always there. But that's one legitimate way of sharing data in Scuttlebutt is with these ephemeral connections. The less ephemeral ones are through the Internet, and we use intermediate servers called pubs. A lot of people think that pubs are very central to Scuttlebutt. I don't believe in that because I'm also devising some other forms of servers. But it's just enough to know that pubs are just one way how you can exchange data between Alice and Bob.

And the way that it works is sort of like a pub is mirroring your data and it's also mirroring Bob's and Alice's data. So it's sort of like a hub there that sort of replicates what all these devices have. And then once you connect to that pub, you will get the most recent data from all of those users. It doesn't need to be like a massive amount of users.

It could just be like a couple of friends that share one pub and they post constantly on there. And then you could have like a couple of friends that share one pub and they post constantly on there and then you can have like a constellation of many pubs and depending who you connect to you can get their updates but the important thing is that if pub goes down then no data is lost because it was just mirroring what everybody had so you connect to another pub that gives you like a path to your other friends then you get can get the data from that other sense so from that other server so it's not a network that is made permanent it's a network that is depends on who you want to connect to so the core idea in scuttlebutt is that you define who are the people that you're interested

or your friends, and then you can get data from them through whatever means are possible, such as ephemeral connections or pubs. And there's also new ways. I'm building one of these called through a distributed hash table. Distributed hash table is what BitTorrent uses and what that uses. And it's essentially like a big lookup that is spread around multiple computers, and they just bounce the request back and forth until it reaches the right destination.

So you could also get updates from your friend through a distributed hash table so it's really about choosing who you want to connect to and then getting their updates through whatever means work essentially so let's say that i want to connect with you all i know is andre's a cool guy i like to scuttlebutt with him. Or what do you guys call it? Do you do many-verse? I like to just hang out with him on this thing. Where do I start? What do I do?

Do I have to have your name? Do I need a device ID? Or do I go to a pub? What's it look like for a user? Yeah, so the use case for scuttlebutt is to connect friends with friends. So it's not so well suited for, let's say, connecting strangers to friends. Like for instance, in Twitter, you can look up a person and follow them. As an email, you could just toss an email to a random stranger, right? These things work.

Right. The downside of those is that you can also get messages from people you really don't want to get messages from. And in a decentralized system without moderation, right, you can get actually very, very undesired messages. Well, essentially email spam is very, very undesired messages. Yes. So Scuttlebutt sort of shields you from that by only focusing on friends that you have opt-in. So essentially your friends and your friends of friends. So you sort of opt into semi-strangers, which are friends that are friends with yours, and those are allowed to send messages to you. But that said, it's also technically possible to build a way where

users could get my messages, even if they're complete strangers. So one of the things I experimented with recently was I built a type of server that mirrors my data, only my data, no one else's data. And then you could just literally go to that server and request the invite code. And the server would always give you an invite code no matter who you are. And then you would get my data. It's essentially like an RSS feed. And it's actually like set up right now as we speak, the servers there. If I would give you the address, you or if you would know the address by yourself, then you could get my data. And that's it. But the downside is that I would not get your data, which means that I would not see your comments, right? I would just broadcast messages, but I wouldn't get yours unless I would literally opt in

to get your data. So Scuttlebutt is really not suited for getting messages from strangers such as email, but it's also the same mechanics that sort of shields you from these stranger interactions. And when you think about someone that had like someone who's really famous on Twitter, their mentions are probably like a nightmare, right? Sure. How could you even filter that thing? Doesn't even have a spam filter or something like that. Well, maybe, maybe to some extent, well, nowadays, they do have filters. But anyway, it's probably still a nightmare, right? So that's not the use case for Scuttlebutt. And I think what Scuttlebutt is trying to achieve is the so-called trust graph.

So a network of trusted peers. And there's a lot of peer-to-peer protocols that allow you to essentially connect with any peer as long as they have this piece of content. Let's say BitTorrent, right? You want this content and you just connect to any peer that has that. But Scuttlebutt is a bit the opposite. It's like you don't want to connect to any peer, but you want a specific peer, right? Let's say your friend, and you're actually happy with any content that they give

you. So it's sort of the opposite. Instead of specific content from any peer, it's specific peer, any content. And it's really good for that. So it's really good for that so it's really good for a network of people that you're interested in and you're fine with getting any of their content and having like enough of these that you're subscribing to then you're going to actually get a interesting database and it's it's going to be meaningful to you essentially you're not going to have these stranger interactions and in a practical sense having friends of friends is actually a lot of strangers. So, for instance, right now I have 12,000 accounts on my computer available offline. I don't know 12,000 people, but they are somewhat connected to me. And there's still a reasonable amount of

data in the sense that it's not too much that it blows up my computer storage, but it's not too little that it's just my friends. This episode is brought to you by Git Prime. Git Prime helps software teams accelerate their velocity and release products faster by turning historical Git data into easy-to-understand insights and reports. Because past performance predicts future performance, Git Prime can examine your Git data to identify bottlenecks, compare sprints and releases over time, and enable data-driven discussions about engineering and product development. Shift faster because you know more, not because you're rushing. Get started at getprime.com slash changelog.

That's G-I-T-P-R-I-M-E dot com slash changelog. Again, getprime.com slash changelog. let's talk about the user type because i'm sitting here back here thinking about this movie called boiler room where we're in great movie ben affleck is famous for saying this he says we don't hire brokers we train new ones and it's almost like you're not interested in as you said before the mass movement of away from x whatever that x might be might be facebook instagram twitter whatever to many verse but you're thinking like hey who is this user type who's wanting to use this because as we said before jared and i are both connected people so it's less interesting to us in terms of usage but

as you can tell you're on the show it's interesting as technology and the idea of it so who's using this yeah so i mean one of the things that i already noticed here is that there's like an idea of building a service for some people but the reality is that scuttlebutt is built by people in scuttlebutt. So it really does, it's like, it's a community of people who make their own things. Most of them are actually quite connected to the internet. The inventor of Scuttlebutt, Dominic, I mean, he himself lives on a boat and he doesn't have actually stable internet. And that's what kind of led him into researching offline related protocols. But what I'm trying to say is that there isn't a lot of sort of like corporate looks to the

things that we build because they are not sort of built by corporate stuff. I mean, sort of like if you imagine like a very sort of corporate picture, okay, like an actual photograph, it will look quite like stock pictures you know sort of bland generic and politically correct right so scuttlebutt is like not that it's like a photograph created by real dirty people and it's more like human it's more authentic it's more poor than what we typically put on you know know, display, right? We put very shiny things on display and iPhones and iPads and AirPods, whatever those are called. But then the actual human things are less shiny.

And Scuttlebutt, you know, it doesn't have investors. It doesn't have like cryptocurrencies behind it. It's literally just a couple of people just building some stuff that they find are nice. It usually looks a bit ugly. And there's a lot of open source that looks like that. You know, it just looked kind of ugly. And what I'm building with Mediverse, it does have like a aesthetic that is a bit, you know, closer to the shiny stuff that we usually see these sort of services and startups that

come up. And a lot of people actually within Scuttlebutt who are quite anti-capitalist, they're a little bit concerned that Miniverse is like going to become some kind of business just because it has this little bit taste of sort of shiny startup type of thingy. So I can talk about that as well,

but it's more like, you know, yeah, that's sort of the community is literally a lot of maker people and also activists and artivists i'm sorry that word does not exist artists i thought maybe i was out i was out of the loop on a new word i'm like oh no i don't even know what an artivist is artivists i'm so out of it well that's actually a good word art not bad yeah i like it that's not bad like people who are. Well, that's actually a good word, artivist. Not bad, yeah. I like it. That's not bad. Like people who are activists through art, that's pretty nice. I mean, they're out there, so now maybe just coined a phrase.

Yeah. The reason why Manyverse looks a bit more shiny is just that I'm trying to replicate the look and feel of mainstream social networks. And just kind of like Mastodon is replicating a little bit the feel of Twitter. I'm just doing that as well with something that looks like Facebook or LinkedIn or whatever, just so that people don't feel like sort of to ease the user experience. So if you enter a new sort of app and it looks and feels like something that you already know, then you don't need to do the learning. You don't need to do any kind of cognitive effort. So that's what I'm after.

Like I'm after sort of this ease of use. And that's why, that's why it looks kind of, you know, like a mainstream social network. But yeah, the people who use are very interesting. Yeah.

I learned a lot from them and I changed a lot of my thinking and aligned a little bit of my ideology because I really got sort of impressed and convinced over time. One thing that for Jared and I, though, we're in that camp also of iPhone users. And from what I understand, we're also locking ourselves out of your usage spectrum, at least for now. Get it on Google Play. Get it on F-Droid. You're not dirty humans. We're not dirty enough we have

clean iphones what is f droid uh well f droid is like a play store but for free and open source on android you don't have other alternative app stores on ios unfortunately that's a that's a big drawback of ios and like huge drawback yeah for sure because i mean of course you have windows you can install whatever software you want you don't need to go through the store. It's just crazy. It's crazy that there's only one app store. But even F-Droid is hard to install if you don't know a little bit of technical things. Yeah, that's one of the reasons why I'm aiming Android besides the coverage of developing countries.

So it says not yet on iOS. So there is still hope for us. And let me just say that as part of the conversation here, we talked about how we're not necessarily your primary users because of our connectedness. That being said,

I think maybe just the opportunity of being part of something that's different than you and maybe a little weird. And like you said, dirty human, like authentic a social network that isn't a facebook or a twitter or even a mastodon which maybe has more you know more similarity in terms of the users maybe that's a good enough reason to you know

give it a try even if you're not interested necessarily in all the off-grid aspects of it because you're always on the grid that is at at least, I think, a good reason to check this out. I think the other aspect of this, though, is also size of group for users. So not just describing who might be interested, because, I mean, theoretically, I might be interested if one of the core usages is to create a small tight-knit network. And that might just be me, my wife, family, or very close people. And that might replace, say, for example, an iOS,

iMessages or something like that, which is great. But there's some drawbacks, obviously, around privacy potentially. Kind of trust Apple a little bit more than others maybe. I say maybe in quotes because, hey, you never know. We don't know what isn't out there yet. So my point is that the user type, sure, we can't use it because it's not iOS yet, but at some point it may or whatever. But the user might be somebody who's interested in, say, small, close-knit friends.

And there's other competing applications, but not the same principles like Group principles like group me for example group me you can create a small group there's others that are like it but yeah the point i'm trying to make is that if the point is to have relationships that mimic more true real world human relationships then it might be like those that are really close to you rather than like those that are very distant from you in terms of acquaintances or connections. Yeah. So one of the interesting things that you guys mentioned was how like authentic the relationships can be on this social network. And I think it's interesting to contrast that with,

let's say Instagram where the sort of point is like show off as much as you can. Yeah. where the sort of point is like show off as much as you can yeah and i think once you sort of remove companies and and for-profit efforts from a space like a social network it's it's more a given that you will get more natural human experiences for instance you know you're not going to have like an advertisement in the middle of your thanksgiving dinner i mean that's like that's one of the i suppose that's one of the cases in america where you still don't have a lot of companies interfering in that specific moment right they wait until midnight and then they

get us on black friday that's when they get us well yeah what i'm trying to say is that with for-profit interference in human relationships our human relationships are getting damaged with artificial behaviors right such as showing off looking for likes and the counter of followers or something like that and once you build a space that's like very neutral you're literally just building sort of like a living room or somewhere that you know is like neutral and you allow people to be themselves one of the things i also like to mention is that if you use this kind of network for your families and your close relatives the nice benefit is that it's a really good archival for all of your photos and all your

things because the concern with like centralized services, let's say Google Photos or whatever, is that okay, like it's really nice to sort of categorize your pictures, but then it's still a service that's being run over time, and they could shut it down at some point. And Google loves to discontinue products and kind of gives you a feeling that oh, this is like, at some point, I would need to download all of these pictures and have it on my computer, right? That's like the immediate reaction. So Scuttlebutt is already sort of downloaded

on your computer. That's like by design, it's always like that. It would actually be a really good archival system, let's say for, you know, diary of all of the baby pictures or something. It also would be tagged with timestamps and could have comments. And that would serve forever.

It would be there forever. It would be a good format. What happens when I drop my phone in the toilet? Oh, then it's backed up by all of your friends. So for instance, everything that I said is also stored in my friends' computers. So it's just enough that one of us has that data still so we call it uh not a cloud backup but a crowd backup oh in the sense that like even private messages are also stored on my friend's computer encrypted so that they can't

understand it i'm going to uh the domain services right now i'm buying i crowd i crowd that's actually a good one it kind of reminds me of the um some of the technologies i don't know if they're still out there but five or ten years ago where you would set up a drobo or some sort of hard drive at your friend's house and you have yours at your house and you'd set them up to basically be your instead of having a backblaze or some sort of third-party service you'd back up your stuff to their house and they'd back up their stuff to your house on some sort of a software and that would be a that'd be your own little iCloud right there it's so funny dude that you say that because when we have this backstage networking conversation

eventually that's what my neighbor and I were talking about because we both live close enough that I could just run some fiber to his house and we can have our own little land basically. And I can back up to him and he can back up to me. But the bad thing is we're literally direct neighbors. So my fire might be his fire at some point if there ever is one. Also, the act of backing up is annoying. You know, it's just a thing that you do in case things go bad.

But just the day-to-day use of Scuttlebutt is backup. So you don't have to ever think like, oh yeah, I need to back up my Scuttlebutt. It's just keep on using it and have some friends that... You know, this has actually happened. A couple of us have, let's know, this, this has actually happened. Like a couple of us have, let's say the computer has died or something. They just need to have their private key stored somewhere.

And we're investigating, you know, ways how we can store that nicely. One of them is just by having a big seed, sort of like 12 words, you know, that you write down and memorize. That's enough to recover recover let's say your account or your private and public key um there's different ways of backing that up another one would be also through your friends which is essentially splitting your uh crypto identity into let's say five parts and then giving uh one part each friend, each close friend. And then once you want to recover your private and public key, then you just ask three of those five, you know, some kind of quorum of your friends, and then they get together

and they can restore your account. So you could literally have no passwords and that just it would be enough to just have your friends so let's talk a little bit as we close up here about the technologies maybe even specific inside of many of us it's an android app are you using stock android stuff are you using web technologies maybe give us a peek underneath the covers of how you're building this and maybe even some of the the ways that you're implementing the scuttlebutt protocol yeah um the big challenge was actually to run a server on the phone. So essentially, with a peer-to-peer protocol,

every app or every node is a client and a server. So of course, running servers on phones are not a typical thing to do. And also, there was a lot of Node.js libraries in Scuttlebutt that were useful and they were working and I wanted to use those Node.js libraries on mobile. So I'm talking about running Node.js on mobile and that was like a big question mark for me at the beginning. But eventually I found some libraries. Well, first I built my own library for running Node.js on React Native because Miniverse is

React Native based. And then I found a better library called Node.js Mobile, which allows you to run Node.js on both Android and iOS. It's really interesting, actually, things you could build with servers on phones. It's actually quite exciting.

So one small example, I built a very simple, let's say, app store or installer of apps called Dat Installer, which essentially serves, sort of seeds the apps that you can install. So kind of seeds and leeches, kind of like in torrent. And then you can get app updates through that. And it's also one way how I publish the new versions of many of us. You can install it through that installer or the play store.

So that's kind of what's going on in many of us. There's a server running there and it talks to other phones which are also server servers and yeah i mean there's a lot of more details going on there but that's the that's very that's the heart of the technology and the ui is react native and my own framework called cycle js very cool we will link up the repo i'm looking through your package json as we speak and i guess i could have answered the question myself. React Native there under the hood.

Lots of cycle projects, as you mentioned. Interestingly, I guess maybe this is noteworthy, maybe not. But hosted on GitLab, is this a ideological decision or just a convenience? What's your thoughts around GitLab here? Well, a little bit of both. I try to sometimes spread out things. So instead of putting all my eggs in one basket, you know. Yeah.

I use GitLab sometimes. I use GitHub sometimes. I don't have like a structure when do I use which. But in this case, I actually explicitly wanted to have the GitLab boards and also service desk. It's quite useful. So for instance, the bug reports that we get right now, they come as email. So people send an email to sort of address

that GitLab provides, and then it reaches this thing called service desk, which becomes essentially confidential issues. So I can answer those issues and it's confidential. I don't think GitHub has confidential issues so i can answer those issues and it's confidential i don't think um i don't think github has confidential issues that come through email you know it's quite nice yeah i mean gitlab just has a bit more features and i i like it and it's it's also a bit more um let's say like um future proof in the sense that i could also self-host my GitLab instance if I wanted to.

I don't think I can do that with GitHub. Right. I think it's also open source to a big degree. Yeah, that's essentially the motivation behind. That's a cool feature. So is that email address, is that integrated into the app? Like you can submit those things through the app in emails or are they just, you just pop up a mail to, how does they actually get those issues sent in they're just you just pop up a mail to how does

they actually get those issues sent in yeah it would pop up a mail to i mean one of the difficulties of not having analytics in the app is well sometimes you need to know what's going on right sometimes when bugs happen yeah and because there's a big focus not maybe a primary but a big focus on privacy people who want to use this app they would be concerned of analytics so i think it's just more sort of respectful that of course as an email the users explicitly giving like their data as the message right like consent basically yeah yeah explicit consent yeah very good andre hey any questions that we forgot to ask or things you've been waiting just why have they not asked me this yet and you want to get out there

about miniverse or scuttlebutt or anything else that's on your mind um well nothing that can be answered in 10 minutes okay well that sounds like we gotta have you have you come back for some more deep conversations around these things because i know you have lots of thoughts i think actually i'm looking back through the stories link on scuttlebutt website the different use cases and people writing about it and i think actually your post a year or so ago was my introduction to it so you definitely have influenced many through your writings uh what's good places for people to keep up with you if they don't know you personally can't get you on many verse because they don't know how personally but maybe you're on twitter it seems you write around the web do you have a home page

we can send people to yeah my web page is staltz.com and i do tweet quite often but like i do post a lot of my you know personal insights and personal stories on scuttlebutt so there's more that you can learn about me on scuttlebutt i wish i could mention a scuttlebutt. So there's more that you can learn about me on Scuttlebutt. I wish I could mention a Scuttlebutt server that's open to get my data so any stranger could get my data on Scuttlebutt. I just don't want to do that publicly yet. Fair enough. Because there's some technical details to solve

with this kind of server that, you know, if it would go viral, it would probably make life more difficult. Yeah. Yeah. But at some point, what make life more difficult yeah yeah but at some point what i'm trying to say is that at some point it will be very easy for any stranger to get my date on scuttlebutt well one thing you said earlier was that you're doing this from what i can understand solo but you do have the opportunity to become a backer which is

donating either money to buy the project and or you more time as you mentioned up and collective earlier in the call but also the option to contribute. So are you looking for contributions to this? Where are some of the projects needs? Where, if someone's listening to this, could you use additional help on certain things? Oh, absolutely. There are some issues that I tagged as, you know,

contributions are welcomed or something like that. And I think the difficulty is that the technical stack is is quite advanced i mean it has rack native it has android it has no js on mobile it has typescript and psycho js it's such a unique combination that is not easy to get started with but i definitely do value contributions i would actually i was actually expecting that people would have been sending prs already but that hasn't been the case actually i haven't gotten that many prs so i'd definitely welcome uh such especially if they're like small and easy to review and merge and also like i i do explicitly mention that once let's say i am fully funded then i would start welcoming um these

contributions on a paid basis and then once the donations are big enough then possibly hiring another team worker i mean that's definitely where i want to go next and it could be possible if we get some bigger grants and we're sending some grant applications once in a while and yeah is this accurate then on your up and click of where you've got sort of the budget laid out? I love this about open collective, by the way, where you can say, you know, for example, there's like a budget timeline, so to speak, from left to right. Yeah. There's a green portion, which is your actual, your estimated annual budget seems to be in pounds. Is that correct?

Is that euros or pounds? No, that's euros. Euros. Sorry about that. Obviously, there's 36,000 euros to have you full time per year plus contract 50 000 a year but you know there's quite a distance between left green to right in blue yeah if you're looking at the open collective so you know hey if you're listening to this and you want to contribute one way is through donation through the collective or via contribution via open source

pick your you know pick your flavor right or both Or both. Why not? Yeah, and also just tweeting about it also helps. Oddly enough, that's on the grid. Yeah. I love how there's always these ideas to go off the grid, but there's never a complete disconnection. As you mentioned, you tweet quite a bit, too. No, yeah.

And it's actually not about rejecting the grid. It's more about complementing it. Right. Yeah, options. Yeah, yeah. Thank you so much for your time today. It's more about complementing it. Right. Yeah. Options. Yeah, yeah. Wander, thank you so much for your time today. It was awesome talking through Scuttlebutt, the off-grid, as we just mentioned, kind of notions. Great big ideas you have, especially around open source. I love that.

So thank you for your time. Yeah, and thanks a lot for inviting me. I think ChangeLog is a really good podcast for this. Great. Thank you. Awesome. Thank you very much. All right. Thank you for tuning in Thank you very much. All right.

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As humans, one of the things that separates us from any other animal out there is the fact that we have language, we have words, and we have super powerful words that truly change how we feel and how we make other people feel. If the words we say have so much potential to influence ourselves and the world around us, how do we begin to understand the power of words? So words really are the thing that separates us from all other animals because, right, sharks, bats, dogs, lizardsards they don't talk and this is really critical when it comes to managing our moods and our feelings one of the things um that i sort of talk about or even i mentioned earlier about the way in which we file things in our mind according to feelings this is

exactly how we differentiate it too thinking Thinking about an example like with professional athletes, you might say that they get anxious like before a race or before a run or a dive. But using that word, it's not really a threat, right? But their brain would be like, oh, I'm nervous. And now I start this whole sequence of events in my body. Whereas if I just change the word to like I'm anticipating or I'm nervous and now I start this whole sequence of events in my body. Whereas if I just change the word to like, I'm anticipating or I'm excited, it creates a different sort of rollout of emotions as well as physiological responses. I mean, I'm anxious about going to Disneyland is not usually what we say, right? I'm excited. Exactly. Exactly. So it then puts a lid on or files things

differently in our mind, which then changes how we feel about it. So in my field in psychology, I would say, we all say, name it to tame it. The better I can name different feelings, the more I can tame whatever emotion that is. And so then I'm not really stuck living in this sort of mammal and reptile lane where I'm always just flipping my lid, I'm reactive, I'm angry, or I'm sad, but rather I can go, I recognize this is how I'm feeling, or like I'm afraid of some other threat,

like losing my job. And I can go, you know what? Here's the words I can use to talk to myself about that fear so that I'm not just stuck feeling afraid of a possible threat, which has never occurred yet. You use this concept too to say customized thinking. I'm not sure I fully understand what you mean by customized thinking. What do you mean by that? Well, because we are human, we do have the power of choice, which is super powerful. Like nobody has to tell you how you need to think or how you need to feel, right? And like your version of success might be very different than mine, which is going to impact my choices and the direction I'm headed.

And so when you think about customized, right? I mean, you can customize a car, you can customize your order at a restaurant. It really is tailored specifically to you and going, how do I want to think and how do I want to feel? One example I consider is I want to always, I want every day of the week to feel like I do on the weekend. Because to me, the weekend feels great. I'm with my family. I'm not sort of running things with such a tight timeline. And there's just a different sort of ethereal vibe to the weekend.

And I think, why does that only have to exist on the weekend? I want that every day. Why is that? I want that every day too. Well, and I think part of it is really our attitude and our expectations. I mean, there are legitimate threats all around us, but it doesn't help me do me or do my life any better if I am only focused on threats. So I want to practice changing the channel in my mind that says, hey, yeah, I see that potential job loss, but I also see I'm with my family right now. And right now, nobody can take sort of what I've been through and how I feel away from

me. I'm in charge of how I feel. So I'm going to do things that actually contribute to feeling better. How do we apply this name entertainment idea to this model then? Because maybe if you name the week, the weekend, can you change how you feel about it? Because that's really what it's about. It's like, how do we take you know the labels we apply things to things the names we give things the words we use the choices what i think we might call nuance i'm not really sure how you how you put that into play with the power of words but

the difference between like you said before being anxious or being excited you know fundamentally it's almost the same feeling, but, you know, from a nuance level, it's very different. You know, it's one direction or the other of excitement, you know, negative excitement potentially or positive excitement. How do we apply that to customized thinking? Well, I think that's a great way to say it, Adam. I really like that nuance because what we're looking for, even as I talk about the different brains, we want a symphony. I mean, I'm not going to fire the woodwind section because I don't like a violin, right? So I don't want to fire a certain part of my brain like, you're not

really helpful. I don't need to see that. But what we need is a sense of congruence. And so sure, not every day of the week can feel exactly like the weekend. So I'm not going to say this is how I feel, but I have to actually believe it for it to impact my mind, my brain and my body in the way in which I desire it to. And so I might use the words like, I strive for every day to have a feeling that reminds me of exactly how I feel on the weekend, so that I don't lose sight that like every day really is a gift, and I get to enjoy every day of my life to some degree. And so another example might be, I'm living out in the Pacific Northwest, a lot of people have negative feelings about the weather. Imagine that. But so if someone were to say that they just need to learn to love it, that's going to create what we call cognitive dissonance. It doesn't fit.

So it doesn't matter how much I'm like, oh, I do love the gray. I do love the clouds. It's not going to jive with me. And so it won't stick. So instead, I can say, I love the way in which the rain creates the green. And in the summer, when it is green, it is amazing. This idea of learning to live with it, though, get over it. It is what it is.

Like there's so many phrases we use to say just that, like just learn to live with it. What is it called again? Cognitive dissonance. What does that mean when you play it out? It doesn't go together. So that if you're like, oh, just just do it. You just need to get over it. Like that really isn't helpful either because your

body's giving you a signal and your brain is telling you, I don't like this sensation. I don't like how this feel. I mean, a lot of people will say, oh, I just hate the gray and the gray is just overwhelming. And so we have to go, well, what's my emotional buy-in? Like, what do I like? How does that even allow me to enjoy something else? And so, I'm going to look at going, you know what? I really like that I get to wear warm clothes, or I really do love my coffee because it's, for such a long time, it's gray and rainy. I want to be inside by a fire drinking my coffee. And so how can I look for going, you know what, if I do these things I might not want to do, I do get some more of what I do want to do. And so it's really almost like a bartering system in your brain of saying, if you

do this thing you don't like, you get this thing you do like. Or, you know, I know you don't have to make yourself do this thing unless you can see a way in which it actually benefits you or speaks to you emotionally. Everything, Adam, really has to have this emotional buy-in. no good emotion no really the primary neuro neurochemical in our brain is dopamine for feeling good i don't get some hit of dopamine my brain's gonna be like it's not worth it and i'm not gonna do it period that's a preview of brain science if you love where we're going with this send us an email to get on the list to be notified the very moment this show gets released. Email us at editors at changelog.com. In the subject line, put in all caps, BRAIN SCIENCE with a couple bangs if you're really excited.

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