How to Destroy Bad Ideas Without Killing Relationships [The Dionysus Program with Sean Devine]
How well do you "metabolize" change?
Sean noticed the bottleneck is no longer technical skill. The bottleneck to progress is how we process change itself.
Sean has boostrapped an incredibly fast-moving (and valuable) company. To share his secrets, he wrote The Dionysus Program, a book about navigating a world where knowledge is changing faster than identity.
The answer is learning how to destroy bad ideas—without destroying yourself or your relationships with the people around you.
If you manage a team or company, this will unlock massive progress.
Links to Platforms:
Quotes from Sean:
“The half-life of knowledge and expertise started to go down… from years to months.”
“If you are too critical all the time, you are doing harm.”
“We fight over status instead of fighting for the thing.”
“We have to unmake part of who we are in order to make room for what comes next.”
“The philosopher’s stone is real. It just isn’t a physical thing.”
“Trust between people is the thing that allows us to transmute error into new knowledge.”
“We are asking people to reveal their errors before we’ve built trust.”
“What looks like chaos is often just learning happening in public.”
We discuss:
Why the bottleneck has shifted from skill to identity
The “half-life of expertise” and what it does to motivation
Why people don’t know what to want anymore
Runtime vs ritual time: when to execute vs reflect
Why organizations fail when they scapegoat instead of learn
How to metabolize error faster than your competition
The role of trust as the foundation for real progress
Applying ancient philosophy to modern organizations
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Learn more about Sean:
Additional episodes if you enjoyed:
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Learning to Learn, AI Disruption, and the Future of Publishing
The Next Renaissance, AI Reality vs Hype, and a Movement of Hope with Zack Kass
Episode Transcript:
Eric Jorgenson: What problem were you experiencing that sort of sparked these ideas? Because this was an idea before it was anything else and has emerged, I think, over the course of a few years. But what was the problem that this sort of seed grew into?
Sean Devine: A couple, I'd say two. So, one, I could feel the bottleneck shifting from technical competence to something else. And I think that upstream, it was like, okay, I can feel the acceleration in myself and my organization and the world around us. And then I can feel the limit. There's always a limit. There's a limiting factor on how fast one can go. And I saw, especially outside of myself, like if I just expanded the team to any more than me, I saw the limit was usually not technical but was some- it had to do something with like how do we contend with this change, this constant change? Now, I have a lot more words for that feeling now. And so, we can talk about those details. But that's really what started it, is like, what is this bottleneck that I'm detecting that is new? Because previously the bottleneck was much more technical, and I could feel that it was becoming not technical. And so, I went on a mission to figure out what it was. And I think the second thing was I started to get more interested in scaling. Like I had had success at smaller levels, individual level or a company that was small enough that I could just like through force of will and personality still make it a thing that like I could just muscle across the line. But things were starting to get bigger, and I was increasing my aspirations for the kind of difference that I could make. And some of the techniques that I had had success with I also saw were going to hit scaling limits. And so, some combination of those two things, like feeling the bottleneck shift at the scale I was used to and then seeing that that was going to be a bigger problem as the scale got bigger.
Eric Jorgenson: So, okay, you're operating, just for context, you're operating a bootstrapped software company for many, many years. Like we did an episode a few years ago that talked about this and it was kind of at the very beginning, I think it was GPT 3 or 4ish. And you were working through, it sounds like for most of the history of that company, the bottleneck was, when you say technical, do you mean like volume of talented engineers?
Sean Devine: Yeah. And the ability to sort of integrate bigger and bigger problems into a single problem and find people that were able to like load that whole thing in their head successfully and continue to contribute on the margin effectively.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, which makes sense because for the whole, I mean, the last 10 or 20 years, it seems like the whole software industry has been, how do we educate more engineers? How do we recruit the best talent? How do we minimize overhead on their time? How do we get them as much like coding time and effectiveness and tools and leverage as we possibly can? And I think because of how early you were to the AI tools, you were probably early to sensing that bottleneck shifting.
Sean Devine: I think so.
Eric Jorgenson: How did you find where it moved to?
Sean Devine: So what I saw was at various levels, and I'll start with me and then talk about what I observed in others, I could see that the sort of collapse of the half-life of expertise, and I'm going to start to use some language that I sort of developed in support of the book, but when the half-life of knowledge and expertise started to go down, so instead of it being decades or a decade or years, it was maybe in quarters or months, that put a lot of pressure on how people identified, what am I? What am I good at? And if I identify as my expertise, that works pretty fine if the expertise is going to be long-lived enough that... I can amortize the construction of that identity. But when I saw that I would identify, for example, as someone that was unusually versatile, like I'm a good engineer, I'm good at sales, I'm good at pricing, I can write well, et cetera, or well enough. And that used to be very unique. Like there just weren't that many people that could go across all of those domains. And now everyone can go across all of those domains. And I just started to pay attention to like, does that- how does that make me feel? Do I feel like the same person, or do I feel like a different person? And like the extent to which I have changed how I identify, what was that process like? And then I looked to others and that didn't have- that were in maybe slightly more precarious positions than I was on various dimensions and like how were they reacting to the same? And that was sort of like layer one of it was just seeing in myself some feelings, but then it took me a minute to like recognize, okay, if I feel that way, other people have got to feel significantly more so because I've got alternatives I think would be better than average. And then that was thing one. And then thing two was, all of a sudden, there was like an evaporation of like a righteous goal. I’ll give an example. So, talking to like an up and coming engineer, say like a super talented 24 year old that's been super talented their whole life. And like they... went to a great college and they did really well and they got this job and they're doing well. And it used to be they understood where they were going. Like, okay, that's the top of the mountain. I'm going to go for it. And then I saw that they not only weren't sure like what was unique about them now, which I sort of could relate to, but they also weren't sure where to go. In other words, if they were making a list of the things to get good at and the accomplishments to put on their, badges to put on their uniform, what are they? What is the goal, the righteous ends, and what are the righteous means to get from here to there? And... it was an anti-mimetic sort of force, whereas before everyone was striving for the same goal that they could see on the hill. And then all of a sudden, I could see that people felt frozen because they, like on the one hand, they're moving really fast and doing all sorts of great work every day, but when they took a step back at all and they sort of like plotted their life and career, they're like, I don't actually know what's worthwhile because I used to think that this thing I've achieved would create all this option value for me, and now I don't really know, and I don't really know. And like the smartest people I know were like I'm not sure about all sorts of questions like that. And so those two... some of those observations were driving much of this.
Eric Jorgenson: And that's a really- it removes a lot of the intrinsic motivation for why we do some of what we do. Yes, it's to finish the task in front of us, but it's also to sort of compound a new skill and plot another line on that trajectory towards maybe a future vision of ourselves. So it's a very disorienting thing to lose.
Sean Devine: Yeah, especially since... And I think that people have complicated feelings about mimesis in general. But I'm going to, at least for right now, see it as an unalloyed good in some ways.
Eric Jorgenson: Mimesis?
Sean Devine: Mimesis, yeah. In that the fact that we are genetically coded to bootstrap our wanting through the wanting of others is helpful because it helps us orient. You just get dropped on the planet and you look around and you're like, well, the genetics didn't have any idea what 2026 would look like. But in the meta sense, they knew that there would be other humans around who would have figured out what is sort of a righteous goal and the righteous means to get to that goal. And so, I can just get dropped on this planet and look around and say, oh, okay, I guess that's a good goal and I guess that's a good path to get to the goal. And so, we're like genetically wired to bootstrap our wants in a very productive way. And I know it's gotten hacked for sort of less productive means or ends. But I mean, in the first place, it's quite a handy trick. There's a reason that evolution resulted in it. And then all of a sudden, when no one has wants, and I think that that's like this- one of the key observations that led to a lot of the book and has been very valuable to me is to see that people don't want things right now. Like things are fairly satisfied, or they're not sure what's valuable, one of the two. And that sort of just inverted the whole thing, instead of there being hot rivalry, like I want that, I'm going to fight you because there's only one of those things that we want, and there's two of us, so fight, instead of that... it's more of a cooling sensation of I'm not sure what's good. And instead of fighting for the thing, we fight over status. Which is kind of disconnected and probably pretty zero-sum, whereas it didn't have to be zero-sum in the first place.
Eric Jorgenson: So, these are interesting answers because they're much more individual than I had thought that you were going to explain this. In my mind, this is almost a manual for groups to process new information and increase group cohesion. And so, this starting with an observation about yourself and using examples of individuals not knowing what to want I think is pretty interesting.
Sean Devine: Well, yeah, I think that at the small scale, at the individual scale, frankly, what I sort of advocated for in the last episode a few years ago when I was on works, which is you just turn down the identity to zero and run everyone else over. Just like that as a strategy for like an individual, at the individual level, if you're sort of worth sacrificing yourself, is probably the winner most of the time. But like... I started, in the last few years, I started to see that as an antisocial belief that I didn't feel right advocating to others. And I guess here's why. So like most people don't have anything more valuable than their identity. It is the most valuable thing. Because they don't have status and they don't have wealth. Most people don't have status and don't have wealth. And everyone has identity. And so saying like, hey, you should sacrifice of the three- three of the things that could provide value, I mean, family, and there are others too, but like on the list of things that you could do, you're going to take one that for sure has positive sum value for you right now, which is your identity, and I'm going to ask you to give it up in pursuit of status and wealth, it's like that's like a little bit of a- even though most people won't end up with much status or much wealth. It didn't feel- it feels like a somewhat unreasonable demand to put on to people, which is to sort of sacrifice their humanity in pursuit of some other goal. And I started to wonder like, was there a way that wasn't like, hey, good news, you can win at life if you just become inhuman. Like, are you winning? Is that really what I want to recommend to anyone? And so, it sort of started as that individual like, why does what I do not scale? And how can I change that? How can I understand the people that I live with and work with better and see what would work for kind of anyone not just for someone that either had enough status and wealth to say, well, whatever on the identity side or was unusually predisposed to not care about that? And so like looking for a more scalable, more portable, exportable strategy that I thought would work for others was kind of where it started, but that's related to then like only a strategy that worked for everyone would be able to scale for very large organizations, which I became increasingly interested in.
Eric Jorgenson: Okay. That is a very helpful thing. I think it's super interesting. It ties together a bunch of stuff, like identity as most people... Maybe is there an assumption there that identity is not an evolving thing? Like your identity can have sort of beneficial and non-beneficial traits, but like to the extent that it's static, it's getting in the way of you learning new things.
Sean Devine: Yeah, well, you figure that there's a half-life on it. To your point, I mean, at one point, my identity was composed of young football player, hair, a bunch of things that weren't going to stand the test of time. But like I held that identity for some amount of time that was not too short. And so, I think that if the sort of half-life of identity is probably measured in about a decade or something like that, give or take, and if the half-life of your expertise is measured more in like a couple years or months or a few years, it's the disconnect between those two horizons that's the issue.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, because ultimately, this is really about processing new information. It's about discarding old ideas and adopting new correct ones at an individual level, at an organizational level, at a civilizational level. Is that a fair summary?
Sean Devine: Yeah, that's right. It's that you- in order to increase knowledge, to have a better explanation, you must invalidate, like the better explanation is made in part of the dissolved error of your old explanation and that that's always true. And so that means that we don't just get to stack on top of our existing knowledge and our existing identity new things that just help it go bigger and bigger and better, but rather we have to unmake part of who we are in order to make the thing that's going to come next. Because there was something about the old explanation that was not- is invalidated by the new explanation. And so that error as the sort of source of our future good is the key thing, and that's also what causes all of what I call that melt, whereas you can feel whether, it's not just identity, your identity, your process, your advantage, you can feel that coming apart. And that's difficult because a lot's going to be constructed on top of that thing. And so, you have to make sure you've got some way to splint the whole structure that's built on top of this thing that is getting deconstructed and reconstructed from below.
Eric Jorgenson: At one point along this journey, it was when I sort of got pulled into it, you called me very excited and were like, I've been seeking the blueprint to build the solution, and I think I found it, and I think I found it in religion. Talk to me about that, that epiphany.
Sean Devine: Well, I mean, like many, I'm interested in very high Lindy ideas, or like many like us, I'm interested in Lindy ideas, which actually may not be many, turns out. But I've sort of long believed that religion was like the original cable bundle, the thing that solved the problem that we all have, that we all turned against, thinking that we could just put together the bundle better and more efficiently than the cable company did just to realize that it turns out that that's wrong.
Eric Jorgenson: Yes, that we're now paying more than we ever did.
Sean Devine: And it's not as coherent. We're getting less, we're paying more. And it's like, oh, I get it. It turns out bundle economics are like unbelievably effective. And I sort of see religion as the original bundle, like the proof point of bundle economics. And so... I mean, that wasn't actually the reason I called you that day, but like upstream from that call was my pursuit of what all is there to learn through religion as it relates to this moment, which felt like a very human challenge. Because I didn't think religion necessarily had a lot to teach us about Apollo in my language. Like, that's much more of the realm of just straight science, like dead science, so to speak.
Eric Jorgenson: You got to- let's define Apollo, and just if we're going to use the terminology, let's get it defined.
Sean Devine: Yeah. So sorry. So the book is The Dionysus Program. And the idea is that the Apollo program was what sent us to the moon, which was basically saying like humans, we can overcome our mortality, and through math and science, we can sort of solve the world, so much so that we can put humans in a can and shoot us up to the moon and land there and come all the way back and have calculated in advance accurately. So that's sort of saying like we can be godlike. Like we can rationally just figure it all out. And Nietzsche sort of in his first book wrote, as he was want to do, like a sort of scathing criticism of humanity, believing that it could overcome its humanity. And he said, we just think that Apollo can do it all, and we are rejecting sort of our own mortality, our fallibility, the fact that we are very mortal and that we need tools to get us through the pain of loss and error and uncertainty and risk. And so, Apollo is thinking you can math your way- is the sort of the cold, calculated dead science, which is like we can reduce- everything's reducible and deterministic. And Dionysus is the complement to it. It's not really its adversary, but it's the complement, which says that at the seed of it all is uncertainty and that it is not knowable. Like there is a realm outside of us that we don't have access to that has dominion over our lives and our faiths. And so, when I say Apollo, it's the sort of rejection of that idea and thinking we can just reduce all of that entropy and know it all. And the Dionysian or Dionysus side is that no, like actually doing that will always end badly. And we need to embrace the fact that it's not all solvable. We can't understand it all. Like it's not reducible to a fixed sort of deterministic outcome.
Eric Jorgenson: And that we need some tool and process and system for dealing with...
Sean Devine: Dealing with our fallibility that isn't- So typically, what Nietzsche would have said is like, hey, the tool that people will say is, yeah, eliminate the entropy. That's the tool. And he's like, no, dummy, you're doing it again. You are thinking that you are God, that you can eliminate all the entropy, that you are not subject to the uncertainty that you are subject to. And... you will not adopt tools and beliefs and practices that embrace your own mortality because you believe you can overcome it. And so, he said basically, as of Socrates, we completely rejected the Dionysian half of the Greek tragedy because we were on a mission to not need it. And he's like, that's dumb because you are not God. And it is not overcome-able. And I think that one of the- I actually don't remember if it was the call I made to you that day or not, but one of the epiphanies related to this was that it just occurred to me, so there's this great Einstein quote that everyone knows, which is he discovers quantum mechanics and was terribly upset about it and said something to the effective of, but god doesn't play dice with the universe. That was his rejection of quantum mechanics because he's like, it can't be that at the core of it all is uncertainty. Like because he was on a mission to basically reduce all of life into a deterministic equation. And then he did, he succeeded, except that there was an irreducible uncertainty in the core of it that actually was the key thing. And he's like, well, that's not how the story was supposed to end. Like I figured it out, but I figured out the thing that completely conflicts with my belief. And I had like... I could figure out the day of my life this happened, but like a lightning bolt hit me. Like I just felt all of a sudden, wait a second, what if God is the random seed? Like, what if it's not- So what if God is the dice in the universe? Like that, like it squared the circle. Because it's like, no, if God is the dice in the universe, it all makes sense. Because like God, if you sort of conceptualize God as a thing that is beyond, that has an influence over our life that is not understandable by us. So whether it's randomness actually or it just is outside of our understanding doesn't matter. Because a lot of people would sort of describe, again, I'm going to screw up the chapter and verse here in Christianity, but some version of like that God is unknowable fundamentally. And in all the canon at the very root level, that would be true of basically any religion. And what is uncertainty but something that is not understandable. It doesn't matter if it is understandable to someone other than a human. It's not understandable to us. You could call that randomness. You could call that divine power or whatever. But that idea that, okay, religion is a way for us to understand God's role in our life, and if I just copy and replace God with uncertainty, randomness, every one of those- which I think is consistent with- I think it's like you wouldn't- a theologian wouldn't strongly reject that idea, that all of a sudden, the entire canon of all religion is accessible because it is a tool to help you deal with this idea that life feels very arbitrary in a lot of ways and yet isn't exactly. It's just that there's dice in the middle of it that's controlling so much that we can't understand. And how can I live and work in a world that's so arbitrary? Well, that's the job to be done of religion.
Eric Jorgenson: As I'm thinking through, this has been true in different snapshots throughout history. 10,000 years ago, we had gods surrounding weather because we needed to explain the uncertainty of weather conditions which dictated so much of our survival. A few hundred years ago, before we had germ theory, it was like we're praying and bloodletting and making sacrifices in order to ward off threats that were invisible to us that we now understand better. And so, like the frontier of our understanding is moving over time, but there's- or is understanding and uncertainty... are those independent?
Sean Devine: I think that you're right, but that conflates two things that I think are worth teasing apart. So, yeah, it's the case that we use religion as a stand-in for things we don't yet understand. That's true. We also use religion as a way to understand things that aren't understandable, the irreducible part of it. And I think having those- separating those two buckets in your mind to say there are a set of things for which we just don't have good explanations yet, and then there are another set of things for which we do have a good explanation if you accept irreducible uncertainty as an explanation. And then I think that like a very not Nietzsche way to say Nietzsche's point is that we have to acknowledge the second bucket, that... uncertainty can't be solved, that at the core of it all is randomness that does- like, we cannot shield ourselves from it, and being human and having your cells die and all the things we're subjected to in individuals and as societies, it's very easy to access that and say, yeah, right... Well, one, I cannot become a robot, and I don't actually think I want to anyways, that there's a certain beauty in this unknowable part. And so, I think that the mistake that we make is to conflate those two and to think that just because there are explicable things we haven't explained yet, that everything is explicable. Because... that's the paradox of Deutsch or one of them, at least, is that he says that knowledge is infinite, which means that you both- there's no limit to what you could know and you can't know everything. And because at all times, there's infinite things you don't have explanations for. And I think that saying like also- I think that that is consistent with the idea that there, at the edge of that is uncertainty itself, which is always outside of our explanations.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. That's a helpful distinction. So what was it you pulled from religion as being the sort of Lindy source of dealing with uncertainty? Like you identified that so much of what we do every day is Apollo, is rational, is we're trying to build organizations or design lives or engineer a thing, build products with extreme sort of rational right brain focus, and what was it that you sort of took as tools that you thought would solve this dealing with uncertainty?
Sean Devine: So there are a number. I'll start with one, maybe my favorite, which is like what is the role of prayer? I'm very interested in prayer... I think also it's pretty misunderstood. And in some ways, that's fine, because I think even if you're doing some version of it that I don't think is my version, what harm is it doing exactly? But there's a great expression. I'm forgetting who said it right now, but it goes something like this, that I don't pray that God is on my side. I pray that I'm on his. And I think that that idea that we want to organize ourselves and our organizations so that they stand to benefit from uncertainty, like to be anti-fragile. That's basically, even though, I think Taleb would argue that he brought anti-fragility into the world in some fundamental way, that punchline about, I don't pray that God is on my side, I pray that I'm on his, is anti-fragile. That's the book in a sentence. That's like, orient yourself to benefit from chaos. And I think that all of, and I'm most familiar with Christianity, but all of Christianity is to some degree about that idea, about the job isn't to try to get God on your side, but it's rather to sort of know that God exists and to orient, to never forget that. I mean, Christianity kind of goes over the top on that point, I think, but okay. Like do not forget. No, you kind of get it actually. It's like because basically you can just sort of- if you just listen to the Gospel, the Bible or whatever, and you just hear it back as, whatever, the book yelling at you, like you cannot outrun me, uncertainty. You can't overcome this. You need to embrace your humanity because you can't get away from this one fact. That's why basically it's like non-stop like God, like you must remember me. And of course, because people are scared, it's often sort of framed in very loving language, but not in the first place. And I think that that- this will get to your question a bit too, if you go to sort of Old Testament, there was no none of this translation of like making it easy for people to digest. It was just like the straight- it was just the straight information. Like just very kind of right to it. And all of the, or most of the innovations that come after the Old Testament, and I'm not a theologian here so I'm like out on thin ice, but many of the innovations are just about making that core insight accessible to people. So that's...
Eric Jorgenson: User interface upgrades.
Sean Devine: 100%. I mean, you think about what's the most, and I find this very interesting, what's the most core belief within Christianity, or I mean, I guess people could argue about this, but I think the Trinity is like up around the top of that list. And the Trinity is kind of a user interface innovation, in that the sort of God of the Old Testament is like pretty abstract and not exactly accessible. Like it's up in the sky and completely unknowable in every way, which is the point. Like that is- the unknowability was the point and is that great insight that you can apply to yourself, to your organization, etc. But then they're like, guess what, not everyone responds to abstract ideas like this. Like people need to feel it and they need a personal God. And so the idea that at the very core of much of Christianity, certainly Catholicism, which is how I grew up, is this Trinity, which says like God exists in three forms, the God in the sky, sort of the God among us, Holy Spirit, and then Jesus, a person. And those are just like different ways that one could access the same thing. And it's like, no matter where, no matter who you are and what you need, if you want to see God in the butterfly or God in the man next to you, or God as some abstraction, we got you, that's fine. And sometimes you'll need... But like, if we somehow need to then have the paradox be understood that those aren't different things, they're all actually the one thing, even though we're meeting you where you are. And like that idea that much of the innovation that will change people isn't in the core idea itself but making that idea accessible I find tremendously moving. I mean, it's one of the things that I really admire about you. I mean, I like underlined 100 times, by the way, which is like I hope that someday I'm as good as you on your worst day at making things accessible to people. And it's a real gift and a real good too, like a capital G good, that if you look, again, like most of the innovation in Christianity was about making these very powerful ideas some things people could use, not about coming up with better ideas. It's the same damn idea just made more, yeah, made more usable.
Eric Jorgenson: I sort of have, I have that itch that I so often have, but I have it very strongly about like you and this set of ideas, because I feel like... it is such a powerful set of tools, it is such a massive problem. The problem of cohesion, alignment, identity, identity management, if you want to say, meaning, and the destruction of old bad ideas and the adoption of new better ideas, these are the forces of progress. I think you have done a really amazing job of collecting these nuggets from all over philosophy and religion and practice as you've built these organizations and run teams and integrated teams, even across different cultures. This is a really- you say you're a generalist, like people still underestimate how much of a generalist you are across how well read and broad and broadly talented you are across all these different domains. And you have this unique ability to sort of collect this stuff and have a lab for applying it. But it's still very... the TAM for this is everybody. Everyone on Earth has this problem of being better at destroying bad ideas and adopting new ones. Every organization on Earth has this problem, every culture, every language, all of us, and we always will. This is the thing that we can't possibly be good enough at. And I'm very excited to like try to keep breaking this down and sanding rough edges and helping people hear the stories of it, understand the tools and just kind of keep this ball rolling forward.
Sean Devine: Yeah, I mean... I appreciate those words. And it made me think of something that's been on my mind very much this week, which is that I think that it is interesting that when people think about artificial intelligence and how it's coming for our job, they almost always are thinking about the thing they know how to do. And like I know how to make an icon and it's going to learn how to make icons, and now I won’t be needed to make icons. And I think that the- that's all obvious. It's obviously going to make the icons like. To me, that ship has sailed. I think that the scarier part to me that I think we all need to think about a bit more is, you know what it's even better at than making icons, is learning from its own error. It is. So we released XBE, the company that I run, released an agent platform earlier this year called Agent XBE. And in the background, after every session that happens above some level of difficulty, it schedules a session for later where it will go and review how it did and like run a ritual, actually very much inspired by the book. It runs a ritual on itself because it has no identity, or rather we can just inject the identity into it that it has at any moment, like it doesn't care. It'll take a look at what it did and say, what did I get right? What did I get wrong? Why did I get it right and wrong? How do I- what are some alternatives that could have worked better? Is there a way for me to test those things? How do I incorporate those learnings into future me? And then now I'm going to leave this with like the new me reformed. It does that. It does that whole process itself. And it just absolutely smokes people at doing it. Like if you think- I mean, this whole book is about how to get ourselves comfortable with that idea, and here the robot didn't have any trouble getting comfortable with that idea, just tell it what to do and how to do it, and it'll do it. And I think that what that says to me is that like the- It's when I think about the value of having a smaller organization right now... I think that people are focused on like, well, you could have the robot do it for cheaper. And I actually think it's an interesting thought experiment to say, what if the robot costs the same? Like there's no cost advantage. It's exactly identical. What's better, the person or the robot? And then you're like, well, I think that people have a real- could have a competitive problem here against the robots because we metabolize our own error so much less efficiently than the robot does. And when I think about I want to continue to build and run bigger organizations and I think the scaling limit of the organization is the size of a group of people where you could still metabolize error reasonably compared to others, like to your point, figuring out the sort of field manual for doing it and saying like, okay, how do we sync up the sort of metabolism states across those people so that we can leverage what we've got for most of the time and then flip all at the same time into the process of sort of eating our own decay to come up with a new version of ourself that's going to be better in the future... it feels like a morally good pursuit.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, absolutely. So tell me some of like tactically, what are some of the tools that you use in the organization to metabolize the error?
Sean Devine: Yeah. So I think that the single most important one is an explicit toggle between two modes, one I call runtime and one that's ritual time. So, the basic idea is that in order to expand your knowledge over time, you must sort of criticize, again, this is in the sort of Poplar Deutsch line of thinking, you must, through conjecture and criticism, attack your existing ideas to find new ones. But if you are doing that non-stop, you will not leverage what you have. You'll just sort of be in a doom loop of what I don't have basically. And so, the basic idea is very simple. It's that, at all times, you have to be in either run time or ritual time. Run time is where you are accountable to leveraging the good, taking all the assets that you have and making the most of them and that anything that's not doing that is doing bad during runtime. So, if you're the guy that's like criticizing the existing sales materials when you need to be out closing deals, you are actively harming the organization because we are in runtime, the time in which we just make the most of it. And I think all of us, and this has been a very powerful idea for myself and I think for a lot of people that I've talked to, the idea that there's a time and place for criticism and that if you're too critical all the time for various reasons, you're doing harm is a helpful idea to have around. So anyway, that's runtime. Ritual time is where everything inverts. You are accountable to finding the error and unmaking it and finding better explanations to replace it. And so, the opposite of runtime. The job is to see what's bad and to make it better and that every person and every organization needs to explicitly at all periods of time know what state they're in because good is exactly inverted in these two different states. And so if it's the case that, if you don't do that, then I will be critical thinking it's good because I am like over indexed on ritual time basically, or there could be other reasons too but that's one reason, in the time where everyone else is just trying to make the best of what we've got, which will drag everybody...
Eric Jorgenson: Everybody knows. Like yes, we all know it would be better to have better sales collateral, that's just not helpful... quota.
Sean Devine: Like, yeah, you're being harmful. But we know that the secret to getting better is toggling into ritual time where, again, everything is flipped upside down. And so even at the individual level... I think it is very hard to keep that idea straight. Like, in other words, think of all the times in your life, I can think of in my mine, where you're like, I just need to like leverage the good. I just need to make the best of what I have. And any navel gazing about what I'm not or what I wish I had or what Billy has or whatever it is are actively counterproductive to me. Think about how often those thoughts creep into our head about these critical ritual time, what I call ritual time thoughts creep into our head during runtime. Then also think about how often people would benefit from just taking a pause, flipping it around, saying like, what's wrong? What am I doing that's wrong? And I think if I have trouble at the individual level, sort of having discipline to be in the right state, the right proportion and sticking to it, just imagine if you scale to two people, eight people, 80 people, 200 million people. Like, all of a sudden, I'm acting in a way that I think is good, of course, because I'm doing it, I guess. So, I act in a way I think is good that's in direct conflict with what would be good for others, and like all people are doing this all the time. And so, the sort of first tactical insight from the book that I think has been very helpful to people that have used it is to be explicit with yourself and others about runtime versus ritual time at all times. And I think if that was the whole book, it's a success.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. That could be a title in and of itself and would probably be an immediate white collar bestseller. That just feels like one of those distinctions. What is the ratio that you use them? How does that feel? Is that a once a quarter offsite? Is that a weekly meeting? Do you light candles and wear hoods to signify the difference between the...
Sean Devine: Couple of things. So, I think that, I mean, I try to take inspiration back to the sort of lindy religion topic from before. I mean, weird that religion came up with the Sabbath, not exactly different than the idea. Like we all synchronize and it's also interesting that it was synchronized across community. So, the Sabbath is not just a personal idea. The Sabbath is a community idea. No shock. Like I'm telling you, they figured it all out. It's like, again, if you sort of- I think if you have the right goggles to put on, you can see all these amazing ideas. And this is one of them. So, I'm going to start with something like six to one, given that is like a good place to start. But there's no magic answer in that. And also, you have to- The purpose of the Sabbath, so to speak, wasn't only ritual, wasn't only like... Well, it was a ritual, but it served a few purposes. So you also have to fit in time for like a fallow period of rest. I think that that is actually... a decent portion of the responsibility of the Sabbath was just rest. If you think about how much of Sunday are you in church in this conception of the world? Not all day. I think that that idea is right too, that it's like something like six to one, but in the one, it's also something like six to one, where the six is rest and play. And then the one is the time where you're really listening to the homily and reflecting on, and listening to the Gospel and reflecting on what it means or going to confession, list out the various sort of Catholic equivalents. But I think that those ratios are approximately what I think of. Now on the point of like, do you need to put on robes and light a candle, et cetera, I think a couple of things. I think two. So first is rituals are more effective if they feel received, not like that I made it. And so, kind of like you can't tickle yourself because you know that you're the one doing it, and so your brain is like, nah, you're not going to fool me. Same with rituals in that if you are like, well, we must adhere to the cadence and structure of the ritual and you just made it up before you started talking, you just had a meeting before that where you're like, well, I guess this is the ritual, people won't feel like bound by the structure of it. And given that it includes some things that are uncomfortable, like looking at your error is very uncomfortable. If you don't- if it's not a structure that you received, you'll change it. Because you are like, this sucks. I don't want to do this. And so, we want to- and the book covers this in some more detail, but we basically want to use otherness tricks to separate ourselves from the structure so that it feels real to us. So, something like the robes or the incense or the chanting or the whatever, some version of that idea if it's something that helps make it feel like not a thing you came up with is practically speaking quite valuable. Now, it doesn't have to be robes or chanting or incense but just something that you didn't create.
Eric Jorgenson: You being the leader of the organization?
Sean Devine: You being the leader. Now, again, maybe if the leader- like someone had to come up with it, but like if you minimize the size of that group so that they can like Men in Black their way out of knowing that they were the ones that started it, that'll work. It just it can't- Everyone needs to- The larger the percentages of the people in the ritual that feel like the ritual was received authentically, the better, basically. So that's point one. And again, the sort of idea there is otherness. You want the ritual to feel like it came from not you. And there are various techniques to do that. But whatever works, works. The second thing is, ideally, you want it to feel like a gift. You want the ritual to feel like it is a gift given to those that participate because gifts create reciprocity and what we're looking for in ritual time is candor basically and that's what... that's what someone's giving us back. But candor comes with a lot of risk for people generally. There's much more downside in candor than upside in most situations. And so, we kind of create the flywheel of candor by having the ritual itself provide something of value that the person feels obligated to return, and then now we're in the sort of gift giving cycle. And so, what does that mean? It means have these meetings in a pretty place, serve good coffee, sort of go over the top in your generosity and hospitality to make it welcoming, again, church, like... really a lot we can learn just like paying close attention. So that's how it should feel, again because... it's the golden rule, which is we're injecting that generosity in order to create this flywheel of candor back. So, I think that that is thing number two. And I'd say thing number three, which is loosely related to that but I think is deserving of its own category, is that you have to think about beauty itself in like the aesthetics of the experience, and not as a gift, but as a sort of metabolic aid, in that looking at your own error is ugly. So, you're going to get into a meeting, and you're going to talk about all the things you're getting wrong, how this thing you invested all these man years and millions of dollars in is now worthless. And like, if we act like it's worth something, we're going to miss out on the thing we have to do next. That's a tremendously ugly thing to look at. And just like a baby, a baby is a lot of work and babies are also cute. And there's a reason like evolutionarily that that's true. And so, what we want is to make sure that the process of looking at our error is itself beautiful. Because that helps heat up this very cold feeling and allows us to metabolize, just like doing so with food. You can metabolize the food if it's cooked a bit. Same thing. Again, inspiration from all places. We see why are churches- I mean, churches are beautiful for a few reasons, but this is one of them and a primary one. And so, I think those three things are where I'd add, like otherness, gift sort of dynamics and aesthetics for the purpose of heating the coldness of the ugly error.
Eric Jorgenson: So what are some of the things that have come out in your ritual time?
Sean Devine: One of the most interesting... So I sort of like used it on ourselves, like on our processes, first before I get to some product things, so one that came out that I found was very interesting is it caused me to see that our sales, or caused us I guess, to see that our sales process was flawed and in the sense of being very sort of meta, but it's a worthwhile example. So, we make like a system of action that heavy civil contractors use to run their whole business, and a lot of the reason why we're valuable to customers is that we make seeing their error easy. So, everything deep- everything's somehow related to everything else, I think, is the theme, but anyways...
Eric Jorgenson: No wonder you thought so deeply about this.
Sean Devine: Yeah. So, we make the system that makes it very easy to see your own error. And again, meta on the meta here, like in the sales process, we need to, people need to see that they both have error and can't see it, and if they did, they could be better. Like they need to see that whole potential chain in order to see how valuable that we would be. But basically, asking them to admit that is itself an example of what we're talking about. They need to say the future me can only be good if I accept this very large error in my current way that I run things. So the number- I think the maybe the single most valuable insight that we sort of worked out in ritual time that is itself an example of the book's point, which is the extremely meta thing, is that we were asking prospective customers to reveal their error before we had built a density of trust with them. And sort of the key point of the book, which somehow we haven't talked about in all this time, which would be point two of what I was going to say between runtime and ritual time, is that the philosopher's stone of the Dionysus program, so the philosopher's stone is this idea from alchemy, which was that there's this magical substance that sort of enables transmutation and that most of, much of alchemy was the pursuit of how to synthesize the philosopher's stone itself, knowing that if you did that, you would be able to transmute substances into silver, gold, whatever. So the philosopher's stone, like one of the big ahas I had in writing the Dionysus program is I believe the philosopher's stone is real. It just isn't a physical thing. It is the trust between people. The trust between people is the thing that allows us to transmute error, old knowledge into new knowledge, lesser material, lesser knowledge into more knowledge. But that trust which I call ren in the book, so Confucius had this idea of ren and li, and li was the sort of processes and structure, and ren was the container that would hold them, the sort of group trust, and that all of- like the entire process that the Dionysus program creates, it only works if you have trust, because without trust, people cannot be candid. Because when you're candid, you have to make yourself vulnerable because you're admitting both your own mistakes and that you see someone else's mistake. And I don't know which one is more dangerous, but they're both very dangerous, both having error and seeing error, very, very dangerous. And so, if you don't have trust, people will not reveal that they see the error or that they have error. And so, anything that consumes that trust over time will end up with you stopping getting better because getting better depends on the candor to metabolize the error. So anyways... the so-what that we caught in ritual time that I think was unbelievably powerful was that our sales process violated this. We would ask people early to talk about their error, to shorthand the whole thing.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. You're on the first date saying like, here are my deal breakers, which of these do you have?
Sean Devine: Exactly. And it's like, you should have, back to the ratio, like the portion of the time that we're talking about someone's error and the opportunities should be like one seventh of the time we're ever in the sales process with them, that the first three units out of those seven, three or four maybe, let's say three should just be trust building, like authentic trust building, like that I am interested in you, that we have connections in common, that I am credible, that I like know what I'm talking about, that I will do what I... like create a bunch of commitments in those early days just for the purpose of doing them. Like in other words, the commitments themselves don't even necessarily matter, like what you're committing to. It's that you made a commitment that mattered. And it's like, again, back to Confucius on this, he said that the cold winter doesn't make the pine and cypress strong. It just shows they always were. Like that, you want the beginning of the sales process to reveal that you're trustworthy somehow, just by subjecting you to cold that shows that you bend but don't break, like making a bunch of commitments. And then only after, you should then run a readiness test, this is the idea from the book that says can we enter ritual time, run a readiness test on the prospect to say do they trust me? And only if they trust me, and me them, but mainly them me, so do they trust me? Only then do you ask the hard questions that require candor about things that are ugly. That was a, maybe that's like the most obvious insight ever, but it wasn't, it was not obvious to us. And again, the combo of the ideas of the book itself and going through ritual time made it like jump out which was pretty amazing.
Eric Jorgenson: And that was something that once changed had a clear and immediate impact?
Sean Devine: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Because I think for a couple of reasons. One, we sort of had an experience together of seeing that. And then two, we have- I mean, this is the meta point. We have language to describe it that everyone knows. And so if you're like, readiness check, do we have ren to support the li? Like everyone would know what that means and why it matters. And again, that's the meta point, which maybe makes that- I don't know if that makes up a good example or a bad one to give, but nonetheless it was a great example that I lived.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, okay. So ren to support the li roughly translated would mean like do we have enough trust to have a hard conversation to evaluate the awkward and uncomfortable sort of vulnerable, to have a vulnerable conversation?
Sean Devine: Correct. Yeah, I mean, and if you want to make it like quite cold, you'd say like in the calculus of it all, would the customer calculate that it's worth it to take the risk of being honest for the potential upside because we have demonstrated that we do not take advantage of them. I mean, another interesting aside on this is that it's not just trust between us and prospect. It also helped us see that the room that we assemble at the customer, we must also assess the trust between them, maybe even more importantly. Because if I put two adversaries in a room together and then say, be honest, I've just basically like set up a boxing match. And that's, ultimately, we are going to get the brunt of that because they have to live with each other and they don't have to live with us. And interestingly, we sort of saw over time that it became a little harder to sell to new prospects, not easier even though we were obviously much more capable, like in every dimension more capable, and this was the reason, that the more problems we were able to solve, the more the conversations about working with us would create vulnerability amongst people, larger groups of people that were more likely, therefore, to not have trust. So both like the network was increasing and the number of topics that we were talking about, the topics of error that we would talk about was also increasing, and that was hurting the process on two fronts.
Eric Jorgenson: I want to make sure that we don't miss any other, you said like, I can't believe we made it this far without talking about this. So like, why don't we go all the way back to the beginning? All right, Dionysus Program, just like the skeleton of it. What are maybe like the key pillars that we want to be sure to like at least identify at a high level to have an overview? We covered ritual time and runtime. We covered ren and li, essentially like trust. We talked only a little bit about the metabolic rate.
Sean Devine: Yeah. And the metabolic rate is really the output of all of this that's like sort of the measure of how effectively you can convert your error into new explanations. So, yeah, let's sort of speed run other headlines that I think are worthwhile. And by speed run, I mean, not that literally because I've never sped run anything but just... So, I think next I'd say the anti-scapegoat, which is that the subject of ritual time needs to be not a person, and again a lot of this is because you need to make sure that ritual time- one ritual time does not end future ritual times. And so, we're playing an infinite game here, and the point of an infinite game is to keep playing it. And anything that just keeps the error correction loop going will accrue crazy value to us, and anything that ends it is extremely costly, like max costly because in an error of compounding, basically anything that shuts off the compounding loop is a game over event over time.
Eric Jorgenson: This is never multiplied by zero.
Sean Devine: Yeah, this is ergodicity, like infinite games, like all of our favorite books, like that main point. And so one of the ways to avoid multiply by zero game over events, sort of non-ergodic outcomes, is to never make a person the subject of the criticism that's going to stay. Now, I'd say if it's a person that's no longer in...
Eric Jorgenson: Scapegoat away.
Sean Devine: I'd say if it's earned, yeah. I think that if it's cathartic, you shouldn't do it because people will project themselves. Like they're but for the grace of God but I, who's next. But if it's earned, like if actually someone committed a crime against ren, yeah, it's fine. Not only fine, actually, but will be net positive if you error correct that, so to speak. So my point in saying that is that sort of the anti-scapegoat is not to say that people are never a problem to fix. No, they can be a problem to fix. But the problem to fix is almost always that they committed a crime against the trust of the group, basically. That's the thing that you can't stand for. But that a person had error, not that they committed crime against the group trust, but that they made... It turns out there's a better way to do it than they were doing it, well, no shit. Like that's the nature of it all. That's the source of our continuous improvement is that fact. And so we can never put them on trial. We have to put the idea or the artifact, some symbol, some physical symbol of the thing on trial, because to not do that is to sort of violate the hinge of the whole program.
Eric Jorgenson: Hate the sin, love the sinner.
Sean Devine: Yeah. And the hinge, this hinge idea is very interesting, which just says that there is one idea that is not subjected to the Dionysus program. All ideas in the Dionysus program are subjected to itself except for one. And the one is that we get better forever through error correction... that is not subject to any argument. That is the stipulated truth of the myth. That is, by the myth, I mean...
Eric Jorgenson: It's the given.
Sean Devine: It's the given. It's the thing that says- does not explain the world. It explains our relationship to the world. It is the thing that does not operate on the time scale. It is time invariant. It's like that is true. And so, you say that is true. Everything else is subject to this metabolic process. And again, you can't have that be true and put a person on trial for having error and have those two things living in concert, because putting the person on trial for the error will say, I don't believe the hinge, and the hinge is the given. Like that's the mechanics of why you need to like just absolutely make sure and why the anti-scapegoat is so important. Now, why we call it the anti-scapegoat, for what it's worth, is that it's the scapegoat's role in sort of unfulfilled mimetic desire is to be the heat sink for that lack of fulfillment. And in sort of the anti-memetic process we're talking about, we need the opposite of a scapegoat, which is something not to sort of absorb our anger but something to do the opposite, which is to sort of like inflate itself like in the middle and attract all of the good ideas.
Eric Jorgenson: I'm not sure I fully understand that yet. So, the anti-scapegoat is just never wrongfully- no wrongful blame, certainly not an individual that goes on trial. It's an idea or an action or artifact. Then rather than just like blame something and shove it away, is the anti the fact that like it has to sort of yield, like there has to be some sort of change that takes place?
Sean Devine: So two things define a scapegoat. And so, thing one is that the scapegoat has to... everyone has to believe that the scapegoat is guilty. And thing two is they can't be. And the reason for that...
Eric Jorgenson: The definition of scapegoats includes like they didn’t...
Sean Devine: They didn't do it. Yeah. But everyone has to believe they are, or else it doesn't work. And the reason for that, I mean, the reason for everyone has to believe they are is that it wouldn't be cathartic if everyone didn't. The reason why they can't be guilty is they wouldn't be renewable, they couldn't be conjured if they- if you actually needed them to be guilty, you wouldn't have them when you need them. And so, the point of the scapegoat is to sort of be the pressure relief valve for unfulfilled mimetic desire. And so, we need to on demand mint them, say like, okay, too much pressure, need a scapegoat. And everyone must think that person's guilty. But if we depend on that, we won't have it when we need it. So, there we go. That's why. So, an anti scapegoat, we're just going to invert those two things. So, no one can believe they were guilty, or else it's not error. In other words, we're putting on trial the thing that people thought was right, not the thing that people thought was wrong. So that's the inversion number one. And then inversion number two is that it actually has to be guilty. I mean, you don't know that in advance, but ultimately.
Eric Jorgenson: So the things you're putting on trial are not necessarily the most obvious errors in your organization. Interesting. Okay. So what is the selection process like?
Sean Devine: So, you don't entirely know in advance. So... like apply everything probabilistically to what I'm going to say. But the thing that would expand our explanatory reach as much as possible if corrected, that's I think the mathematical way you would do it. So something that everyone knows is wrong is likely more peripheral. It's going to be slightly small in scope or effect, and yeah, maybe people knew, but like the consequences are relatively low. The thing that has like crazy reach is going to be like some core assumption. The reason I gave the answer I did earlier is that how we engage with customers, like every, 100% of our new prospects and like completely helps reorient us to why have certain things gotten harder? What's gotten easier? Like a massive explanatory power, this one idea of like needing to construct the sales process sort of in accordance with what I talked about before. So I think that you want to go to the thing, the ideas that have the most leverage where there's sort of conjecture and criticism brewing, that if true... Big if true. I guess big if true is probably the more pithy answer.
Eric Jorgenson: What's the expected value, if there's a 10% chance of this thing being wrong, but it's a 10X or a hundred X upside of resolving, destroying this bad idea?
Sean Devine: That's right. Yeah, that's right. And so, you're seeking these huge payoffs that are- now, like any barbell, I think it's probably a smarter answer. You probably should barbell it, which is you're going to pick up the nickels and dimes along the way, like these errors that someone- it's obvious that it's error when someone sort of points it out and that it's a good piece of business just to clean it up. And just like any barbell strategy, you want to have lots, like maybe 80% of the things that you talk about should be in that category of just a neat piece of business that's low risk. And then 20% should be foundational things that big if true, where you're only paying the price of the conversation, now those are the taboo things generally, which is why ren is so- I mean, you don't need too much ren to talk about marginal details. You need a lot of ren to talk about foundational things, like lots. But if you've got trust and if you manage the ritual itself in the right way, you won't spend a lot to explore that sort of latent space of possible better explanations down in the core. And if only once in a while you hit on them, well, they have huge explanatory power.
Eric Jorgenson: And you probably build ren by picking up the nickels and dimes and you can't be radically reinventing your foundational views of the business at all times. Like that just becomes discordant.
Sean Devine: Yeah. That's right. And that's why I think barbelling it as your sort of theory of it is right.
Eric Jorgenson: Okay. All right... anti scapegoat.
Sean Devine: Other big things we didn't talk about. So, I'd say binding commitments would be another one, which is at the end of a... So the transition into the ritual has to be marked clearly. We call it the crossing in, which is like, hey, we're switching from runtime to ritual time here. We talked about that, but actually switching back is equally important for two reasons. One, we kind of have to know what the new runtime looks like explicitly. Because like basically ritual time affects runtime. And so, we're held accountable to the expectations of runtime continuously, but ritual time could modify them. And so, you have to be very explicit about how those expectations about what to leverage have changed. That's thing one. And then thing two is you also have to respect and acknowledge and perform almost the process of saying goodbye to the error and that it is an emotional thing to see your identity melt away, and that's at the individual level and at the collective level. And sometimes, like it's not like it's obviously even good for everyone, like though that old period prior to knowledge changing had winners in it, and some of those winners may be winners in the future, maybe they don't, maybe they lose in the future. More likely it's just not clear yet if they win in the future. And so, we have to sort of cathartically experience that goodbye. And so, taking a minute to, perform, I think, is not a bad way to say this, sort of perform that goodbye before we just snap right back to runtime and get on with it is important. I mean, that was, back to the inspiration from Nietzsche and the Greeks, like that was his insight about the purpose of the chorus, which is that the purpose of the chorus in a Greek tragedy is to provide a vehicle for the audience to channel their need to cathartically exhale the sort of capricious arbitrary nature of humanity, of life and that it wasn't to make sense of it. It was to make feel of it, like to make it feel like something. And we also need that same outlet when we take this thing that had given us so much good and changing it is going to hurt or be different at the very least. And we need to just emotionally process that, okay, bye.
Eric Jorgenson: That's a great one. What does that look like at XBE?
Sean Devine: So, I mean, my most fond memory of this at XBE was we did a retreat in India for our developers and like our engineering team. And we put the old job of the software developer on trial as the anti-scapegoat. And like literally people stood up and accused it of all the things that are like no longer valid. It was like 50 something charges against the job description that are just it's guilty of in 2026. And then there's sort of like a mock trial where people sort of like made the- took those charges and argued that we should find it guilty. And then everyone did find it- Like we grouped it up into five charges, I think, or five meta charges and found it guilty of all five. But this is just the setup for your answer. So, then we were having a dinner out on the beach that night, at like a beach restaurant in Goa. And we took the pieces of paper, kind of like the easel pieces of paper that have the charges and like the guilty written on it. And the team folded up the sort of guilty job description as a big paper boat, and one of our team members, Atrea, waded out into the ocean and set the boat, like set the boat out into the ocean and then it sunk. And it was the single best one. It was so on... and I think going through that experience was really- it emphasized to me how right that point in the book is, which is like I guarantee everyone remembers that. Like everyone remembers the mock trial. Everyone remembers him wading out, seeing it sink. And it feeling like well... my job is sunk. Like I mean, like my old job is sunk and...
Eric Jorgenson: A new job is born.
Sean Devine: Yeah, my new job is here and let's make the most of it.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, very cool. How many people participated in that?
Sean Devine: 25 maybe
Eric Jorgenson: Okay, just to like get a picture of kind of the room.
Sean Devine: A couple dozen.
Eric Jorgenson: Is that all of your developers?
Sean Devine: All in India. We have maybe in the high 30s. Well, it wasn't just our developers, too, it was like high teens developers and some other team members over there, and then we have others not in India, but it was everyone that was in India.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, thinking how could this scale, like at what scale did it work there, like how does it go past that?
Sean Devine: Yeah, I think that that idea is... I think that idea scales actually. And I think when I think about the discourse right now, and we could do an unending series of interesting shows about sort of like current events, but when I think about the discourse right now and how there was this tug of war about like the future is great, the future is terrible, and fine, like people can argue either way. But I think that there's like an orthogonal discussion, which is just like goodbye to the past, which is independent of your view of the goodness of the future. Like the future is what we make of it is my take. So if you think it sucks, it sucks. If you think it's going to be good, it's probably good, subject to the randomness of it all. But what we can say is that it's not the same and that things that we have grown used to, value, experience, are defined by are gone, they're going, and that that's hard and we got to say goodbye. Like I'm interested, like it's such an important part of being a human is recognizing your humanity and that nothing lasts forever and giving yourself and other people the ability to transition from one epoch to the next, I think is a pretty big deal.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, I feel like evolution is commonly misquoted. Darwin is commonly misquoted as it being survival of the fittest or the strongest. And it's actually survival of the most adaptable. And that is true of humans, I think, on a long time horizon and a short time horizon. And I see this as a guidebook for becoming more adaptable.
Sean Devine: No question. No question. I mean, I think that the... Do you like the alchemy topic or not? I'm very into this alchemy angle. I think different people have different feelings about alchemy as an analogy. But so, one of the things that I find very interesting about alchemy is that, because my kind of take is that alchemists were onto it. They just were onto the wrong thing. So, they basically had the Dionysus program thought through, except they were- the subject, which was they thought that the most valuable thing was transmuting matter from one form to, like a substance from one form to the other, but that there was this even more powerful substance, which are ideas, knowledge. Nothing's more powerful than knowledge, much more powerful than gold. But their insight was that, or their belief was that transmutation, the observer and the observed were intertwined. Like... the science, the alchemist was intertwined with the matter... So, the alchemist purity actually mattered to the transmutation process. And then science ends up destroying alchemy, for a lot of good reasons. But one thing that science, I think, gets wrong for our current moment is that everything is dead in science. It disconnected the observer and the observed completely. And because the... like, it must be repeatable... and like the observations...
Eric Jorgenson: The [?] activity is the part of it.
Sean Devine: That's right. That's right. But the creation of new knowledge, back to ren being the philosopher stone, the ren, like it requires that the sort of entanglement of the knowledge and the people, the observer and the observed, and that like that means that... kind of the tools of science are only part of what is going to get us through right now, that we need to sort of re-establish our interest in the sort of like moral goodness of the observer, if we can say that trust is moral goodness, which I think is, ren is moral goodness, and I think that's a reasonable way to look at it. And just like the alchemist thought that like the secret to getting lead into gold laid in part in the moral goodness of the alchemists, I actually think that's true for knowledge, that like if we are going to build new knowledge, actually the process of doing that is to do what we've talked about in this conversation, which depends on the trust of people with each other. And that without that, we never will be able to, we will be much more limited at least in our ability to create new knowledge. And so, it feels like a very interesting moment that way to me.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. It's an interesting- and like, you can feel that maybe most acutely as an example in a family, like if parents don't have the moral authority to- that they've demonstrated good values, it's much easier for kids to do as they do, not as they say. And yeah, same in any organization and those relationships. The observer effect like very much changes kind of what actions get taken. If we've roughly sketched between runtime versus ritual time, li and ren, anti-scapegoat, binding commitments, and that sort of all adding up to the metabolic rate of an organization or a person, maybe this is a time to sort of like zoom out even further and look at the applicability of this. Like you have spent most of your time sort of developing and explaining this through the operator's seat, running an organization and a scaling organization. But as with all great and powerful ideas, this seems very generalizable across disciplines, across domains, up and down the scale, size of organizations. Where else do you see it or do you apply it?
Sean Devine: Yeah. Well, I'll give an example that, I mean, you're going to laugh. This is going to seem like a risky example, but I don't think it is. Time will tell on this one.
Eric Jorgenson: Uncertainty’s everywhere.
Sean Devine: Yeah. So I knew that I was onto something on this one when I saw the Dionysus program actually give my wife, Teresa, and me to some extent in that I was involved indirectly here, a framework to help think about and process menopause, which I know seems a little bit out of left field here. But in that, having ritual time to toggle into where you explicitly say, I am going to look at the assumptions I have about who I am and what my role is and like what makes me me as an individual, as a partner, as at the various levels that I exist. And I'm going to see like what parts of that identity, that explanation of my role don't match, are bad now because they're just in conflict with the physical reality of things and are going to harm me, because unless I remake that identity into something that, again, isn't erroneous, that is like more explanatory of the world around me, that I'm going to leverage, I'm going to attempt to leverage my old understanding, but it's not good enough anymore. There's a better one. And it worked. Like it really- The single most effective conversation and weekend that I ever saw Teresa have and I had any sort of relationship to was that like she literally wrapped herself in a warmer blanket and flipped everything around a little bit and then came out of it with sort of a set of binding commitments, and also back to the point of the emotional experience of it all, like said goodbye to some things... I mean, it worked. Like, I mean... that's not even some like cute story. Like it was very effective. I think my parents are getting older and same thing. I mean, it's a different sort of season of life. And my dad's getting ready for retirement. My mom stopped playing- being the music minister at their church, et cetera. And same thing, like everyone's got to go through these periods of transition. And having tools for that, I mean, it may be that sort of is obvious. Maybe it's sort of obvious that this set of tools would be just as effective in understanding the seasons of life as it would be for how to make your software company better, but maybe not. Maybe those seem like slightly different things.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. Well, I mean, to your kind of point previously on the value of religion at helping people deal with so many of these things, there's a lot of problems in life that don't- we don't consider in the domain of those tools, even though, if they were sort of secularized and extended and broadened and simplified, they would be, they are, having distinct time for it. Like that story is interesting. Like, she literally made a cocoon... Like that is just such an interesting thing, like digesting your sort of current identity and reassembling a new one. And you can't do away with the old- you have to do away with the old before the new emerges, but a new will sort of always emerge. You don't always know where that next lily pad is...
Sean Devine: Because they happen at the same time. And I think that that's- like, it's hard. I think that point is really smart and that it's hard to transition to the butterfly, to metamorphize into the next thing, or rather say goodbye to what you were until you- they kind of have to happen at the same time, ideally. And they're just in a little bit of a pupation period between the two. So that's one, like I'd say just dealing with seasons of life as a large category would be one. And I'd say investing is the other, and that I think like a lot of people, I'm wondering where the edge is in investing right now. Like what's scarce? That's always- like what's in demand that's scarce? That's investing. And so I think that this idea that what is in demand and scarce is the ability for an organization to metabolize, and again that could be something an organization is particularly capable of having agents be a larger portion of their workforce, again, because metabolism is basically free. But then to the extent that you've got people on the team that the density of trust needs to be extremely high and they need to be locked into a never-ending metabolic cycle that converts their error just forever into new knowledge. And I think that that is- what's interesting about that is that to the outside, that will often look bad, back to Nietzsche’s insight here, that we see the embrace of chaos as error, as a flaw, as something to be eliminated. But in fact, the Dionysian impulse, like the counterweight is the secret weapon for the next maybe forever now actually. But at some point, maybe that becomes obvious, like once we've fully submitted to our sort of mortality. But I think the opposite is going to happen in the short run, which is we're going to think that artificial intelligence will allow us to be immortal and to ultimately triumph over entropy, which I think is not true, because again, at the root of it all is uncertainty. So, like at the very, very core of the physics of it all is uncertainty. And so, I am interested in doing work in applying Dionysus program to the problem of where is there investment edge, like what looks bad and is good. Because that's what's investable. If it looks good to everyone, it's not a good investment unless you arbitrage it somehow. But arbitrage is a lucrative but short-lived strategy. I'm interested in something that'll endure. And so something that'll endure is a divergence between conventional wisdom and what actually is going to return. And again, I think that we've got over 2000 years of humanity believing that sort of the Dionysian impulse, side of humanity is a problem in terms of getting better and, in fact, I think is the secret to getting better, which means there should just be huge alpha in spotting where conventional wisdom sees it as a problem where it actually is going to increase the rate of improvement.
Eric Jorgenson: I would imagine as an industry investing massively over indexes on Apollo versus Dionysus. It's a lot of spreadsheets and financials and analysis and not a lot of value or not as much value on the intangibles, in particular those that you can't see the outcome of over time.
Sean Devine: Yeah, I think that's right. I think that's right. And I mean, all good investment strategies I think are- like the best investment strategies rather are finding something to bet against that will stay on the other side. Like you want to find a counterparty at the table that is not going to figure out you're onto him or is incapable of figuring out you're onto him. I mean, that's what Buffett is, in my opinion. The reason he can just describe what their strategy is in plain view and it still work forever is that he knows that others are incapable of having the time horizon. He just arbs the time horizon and he knows that people don't have the fortitude to do it. And so, what's a new dimension to arbitrage is probably the way that I think about this, and I think that arbitraging perception of Dionysus is, I believe, maybe the big edge coming up. Because I think it's the single biggest lever over performance past some brief tech arbitrage period we're going to be in for the next few years.
Eric Jorgenson: Then the question becomes, can you accurately or accurately enough observe that? How can you understand the metabolic rate of an organization? It's not super hard for me to believe that the metabolic rate of an organization would determine the quality of its outcome. So, if you could have known how quickly Tesla was making good decisions, making positive change over the last 20 years, it would not have been surprising to you to see where they ended up. If you could have watched them actually deleting parts or removing robotics or increasing their margin or holding their margin while lowering their prices, or you could have, sort of in retrospect, created a scorecard. And then the question was like, could you have filled it in?
Sean Devine: Can I talk about your book for a second? Because I think you make a great point here. Incredible book, by the way. If someone's gotten this far in and not bought and read and gifted this book, what's wrong with you? Just a brilliant piece of work that I love, Book of Elon. But anyways, you make an observation in the book that's related to... One, I agree with that point about Tesla. But why I wanted to bring this up is that... I think that the secret that Elon found is much more... I think it's very interesting in that I think that it is often thought of as some sort of engineering secret. Though, and I'm interested if you agree or disagree with this, I think his secret is much more that he just picked goals that are so intrinsically motivating to people that they created the flywheel of continuous improvement because the prize, not monetary, but the prize in terms of fulfillment of like making the world more interesting, better was so enormous and appealing that it pulled people through the frequent ritual time they had to go through in order to metabolize all that error... So, in other words, like he picked the most compelling problems, and that I think that that is the much- I feel like I've met people as smart as Elon in my life. I really do. But I don't think I've ever known someone that picked and committed to the most compelling problems like he did. And I think that is the headline much more than any engineering detail. Right or wrong on this?
Eric Jorgenson: I think right. It's something that people admire without seeing the interconnectedness of it, without seeing how many other sort of branches that trunk holds up, I guess. I think I'm using one of your terms, like the heat of the... basically the difficulty of the conversations, the amount of pain or discomfort or whatever, I think you call it beautiful heat, that a group of people is willing to or able to endure in order to come through ritual time, be vulnerable, be honest, get through a hard trial, and emerge with new knowledge. The size of the goal and the objective aligned, kind of the magnitude of that goal is I think a big variable in that equation.
Sean Devine: One thing I've thought about a lot, because like I'm kind of- I'm jealous a little bit of how right he got that and do not feel like I got that that right, I mean, granted, I've made a great living and so many amazing friends and collaborators by working on the problems that I've worked on, but they're not like intrinsically motivating in the same way. And so, I've thought a lot about, what do you do if your goal isn't put a person on Mars, like electrify the planet and stop like before we've run out of fossil fuels. Like, I mean, what if it's like make the road faster and better, like not quite as visceral.
Eric Jorgenson: The roads are very important.
Sean Devine: Oh yeah. I mean, there are less viscerally interesting topics, I agree. But I actually think that that problem to solve, which is how do you- because you could say like the combination of what you need to get better forever is some bit trust of the team and some- which makes the cost low. In other words, you can either reduce the cost or increase the benefit. So that's reduce the cost side. But on the benefit side, like how can you make a given goal more attractive? So, one of the things I've been interested in lately is having quality be defined as how much better than it needs to be is it, knowing that that's a benefit. Like basically the benefit to the team starts when you've met the needs of the customer, if the goal itself isn't intrinsically valuable, like eliminate the dependence on fossil fuels or something. So if it doesn't speak to the heart or the degree to which it doesn't, I guess, then you're like we should increase quality above the level that the customer needs, and every ounce that we do that is a benefit to the team because doing good work is itself intrinsically motivating. And it's interesting to me that I haven't- I've read everything or I read a lot, and I don't feel like I've seen that as a tool explicitly as much as I think... I haven't seen it talked about as valuable as I think it is, which is like... you should deliberately create like that extra value and say to the team, not like we are the software that helps people make the roads that the country drives on. Like I feel like fine. But like, is that actually motivating? Not really. Like, it's fine. It's motherhood and apple pie. It's hard to disagree with, but it's not- But like, I get to go to work and... like make things that are better than they need to be because we care. Like, care to just do it better, that's motivating. And like, the reason I'm talking about this is that like... it's fine for Elon to sort of like crank up the sort of like the intrinsic meta melt rate to 100% because there's an offsetting like fix the planet goal. But the degree to which you don't have that offsetting fix the planet goal, like what are the tools at our disposal? And one is just like increase quality beyond requirements as a generic.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. One of David Senra's maxims is a great product needs to be better than it needs to be. Which I think that's attributed to either Dyson or Jobs or whatever, they both sort of exemplify it in different ways. And that does, it calls out like a craftsmanship and an innate sort of satisfaction.
Sean Devine: I think that the so what to me, though, that's interesting about that is like, yes, but it's not for the customer.
Eric Jorgenson: It's for you... it will have other downstream benefits.
Sean Devine: It's for the customer later. It's for you now. And that's the part that I think I was a little late to like articulating that way.
Eric Jorgenson: The other answer to that question I think is sort of the salience, like just making it personal or tangible or emotional in an interesting way. Like Klaus Kleinfeld has sort of got along his way up to being the career ladder that led him to becoming CEO of Siemens, just like Fortune 500 healthcare hardware company. I don't know, they do many, many things. But he told a story about having to give meaning and motivation to these very stalwart rural Bavarian people manufacturing MRI machines. And so, he brought in someone whose life was saved by this work that feels like factory line work that's many, many, many steps away from a human being or a face or a name. And so, he brought this woman in to tell her story of her diagnosis and treatment and care that these machines enabled. And they were cutting edge machines that nobody else in the world was making. And she became this symbol and character that helped people feel like I'm saving Joan's life. I'm saving another Joan every time I make one of these.
Sean Devine: Yeah. I think that, I mean... if I went back to business, like where I went to school and like was a guest lecturer, I think like this idea that leadership is, it is sort of salience... like giving people good to strive through, through their work... and that there are more avenues to doing that, there are more ways to solve that question than one may think. It's like not just pick the most intrinsically valuable thing or convince someone that they care about that thing. It's like you can meet them where they are and just give them a way through the work to generate meaning in their life and have like a kind of like, I don't know, coincidence of aligned interests.
Eric Jorgenson: I think we branched away maybe before we got into the specifics of where we can apply this. Can we fill in the blanks of can you observe the learning rate of an organization from the inside, from the outside like in its applicability to investing?
Sean Devine: I think so. I think also another Buffet-ism on this is that like I don't think you need to- I don't think you need anything terribly exotic to see it. You just need to be looking. Like, I think, and again, I'm not like the world's number one Buffett scholar, but enough, I guess. Like, I think that his technique is approximately that, give or take, which is like he's not doing anything tremendously exotic. He's not using mathematics that are inaccessible to most or information that isn't held by most. He's basically slowing down and reading the publicly available information through the lens of a longer horizon than others and maybe balancing balance sheet, maybe taking the balance sheet more seriously. So, not to not to reduce it, but something like that. And I think that my experience so far is that I think that most companies are- they make their epi-metabolic rate pretty visible. You just have to be looking for it, because oftentimes it would look like chaos or a problem. Because like, there would be evidence of both looking for and spotting error in making changes related to that, which is like, oh, they got it wrong. Like, think about how easy it would be to write the headlines, the negative headlines on the process of ritual time, coming out of a successful ritual time into runtime. So, I think that like if you just pay attention to what the company admits about itself, is it able to speak honestly about its own mistakes? What is its relationship to error? How does it treat trust and culture as the input or as the output? Like if you just like put on the goggles of the Dionysus program and just read all the publicly available information, it's right there.
Eric Jorgenson: That is interesting. When you do have those goggles on, some things just absolutely invert meaning. So like I remember Anduril, I think it was maybe New York Times wrote like Anduril test program blows up again, idiots, was like basically the headline, and all of tech Twitter was like that's what test programs do... you could watch Starship.
Sean Devine: It's right in the name.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, you're like building the box of failures, and the real question is like are they doing the same failure or are they doing different failures? How many changes take place between each version? How many versions have they gone through over what time period? That is actually what shows the learning rate. Not the fact that there's been ten Starship failures, but the fact that the data was the payload and they made it through more milestones each time. And my buddy Max, who's like very close to this, is like they could make Starship work anytime they wanted to now. And post IPO, they probably will. But they have been sort of building this, all of these failure edge cases very deliberately to maximize the throughput, the efficiency of the whole system.
Sean Devine: Yeah. So, I mean, I think that's right and I think that the extent to which you are looking for evidence of a cycle of metabolism and the ability to- that they both have a base of trust that grows over time, that they are using as the philosopher's stone to see and correct error forever, like just look for that and then look- I mean, there are other failure modes that the book goes into that you want to sort of to look out for. I’d say that's thing one. And thing two is to what degree does it matter? Because you could have a high epi-metabolic rate, but if the extrinsic like forces upon you are not too high, it could like not matter a tremendous amount, like it'd be better but like there's a cost to it.
Eric Jorgenson: Is the fundamental business good or not?
Sean Devine: Yeah, but if you're in a situation where the half-life of knowledge is cratering, like then it's going to be the thing. So I think it's just basically those two things, like pay attention to- like I think both are legible. I think that the exogenous melt rate of an industry is legible right now and should be generally reasonably legible going forward. I mean, you can't see the future, but it seems like... and then look at that and then look at the metabolic rate, their ability to convert their own error into better explanations. And like maybe a third is the degree to which the narrative is negative, the opportunity is better. Because it's that spread between the conventional wisdom and the call it Dionysian wisdom, that's what creates the opportunity. And so you need other people to see the strength as a weakness in order to have the biggest opportunity, or you just say, well, I'll just invest in a basket of companies that all have that in common and the rest will sort of wash itself out, including the sort of conventional wisdoms blind spot.
Eric Jorgenson: Is there any end cap you would sort of put on where we've been so far?
Sean Devine: I feel like, yeah, I mean, one, I appreciate you having me on to talk about it. I appreciate the conversations we've had prior to today and how they helped me refine much of the program. I appreciate you writing the foreword, too. So just thanks for all of that. And I think, most of all, I appreciate that you embody the thing I get so wrong and the thing that I'm mostly – I don't know, mostly – I should be mostly focused on going forward, which is how to make it all accessible to people and to myself. Because I actually don't really doubt the core ideas of the Dionysus program much. I feel like, I mean, they'll be improved. It's subjected to itself, etc. But it's much more Old Testament than New Testament, to bridge to our previous ideas. And how do we make these tools that are very needed right now accessible to all of us in the place that we are? I feel like that is just like in the first inning of getting that part figured out, and I feel like you've made a wonderful career and sort of public persona of getting that part very right. And so, I'm paying close attention and hope I get better than bad at some point at that particular part.
Eric Jorgenson: There's an interesting like supply chain of information where people- I think Taleb and Deutsch and Darwin, like all made massive contributions, but it still work to fully install the full complexity of the ideas, in particular in such a way that they're like actionable and useful and have enough conviction that you're acting on them, which I think is, to return the compliment, like I can spend a lot of time in my head and not enough time acting on the new information that's in my head. And another Senra-ism, if learning is changing behavior, closing that loop between acting on reality, that's a thing that I admire greatly and I think I put in the forward that you do – you're one of the highest intersections of philosopher and executor, like applied philosophy, new ideas rigorously tested. This book is an amazing example of the depth of thinking that you have. There's a bunch of novel stuff in here, like how you approach this book, how you wrote it, the appendixes, the fact that it's got this sort of Talebian mathematics and stories and explanations and historical analogies and pieces, there's so much in here to grok and fully understand for investors, operators, or anybody. But yeah, I think it's an extremely important thing and I'm excited to sort of help get it out into the world and install in people's heads however we can.
Sean Devine: Well, I appreciate that. And I mean, on the very personal side, hey, I hope people read it and enjoy it and take something from it. As you mentioned, this isn't, or we implied, it's not my job to do this. I sort of felt compelled and then wanted to finish it. And well, to your point about executor, I finish things.
Eric Jorgenson: You wrote this book in like the time it took me to... you wrote this whole thing in a very short amount of time and iterated on it very quickly and published it... Yeah, you flew through this.
Sean Devine: I dislike when things are not done sometimes. This one needed to be done. But the reason I'm saying that is that if the book causes me to come into contact with people that are interested in the ideas, that want to build upon them and improve them, it would have been worth it times 10 and like if only that, and I actually think that that should just scratch the surface of what's possible.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, I think that'll start and snowball. And I'm very excited to see where these ideas go. Thank you for developing them, organizing them, taking the time to put them down and at least get a start on explaining them to me. I got a long way to go again to fully install it, but I got to process them all.
Sean Devine: Yeah. Well, I mean, hey, we covered a handful of good ones today, so there's that.
Eric Jorgenson: We did, really, really good. Yeah, there's a lot more depth in there for people that want to go check out the book, and I recommend everybody do. Dionysusprogram.com. And is there anywhere else you'd send people for you?
Sean Devine: So on that point, so Dionysusprogram.com. The book is freely available, another bit of inspiration I took from Eric, which I very much appreciate. If you want a paper copy, it's available on Amazon. But if you don't, it's available. So I'd say that to start with. And then I'm @barelyknown on Twitter and/or X and around there if you want to reach out.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. Love it. All right. Thank you, Sean. Appreciate you. We'll have you back soon with more stories and updates because I'm sure this will be a fast moving project.