Old Coot van adventures. Selecting the van that you want. Hola woodworkers, Paul Croson here. This is our new channel called Acva OCVA. Old Coot van adventures. It'll be a playlist on the Small Workshop Guy channel. So doing a van conversion. Promise people I'd film some of it. Let you follow along. Be a little adventure. This is not going to be a precise, very detailed, how to van build. There are lots of those on YouTube and I don't see going to the effort to try to duplicate that. I just want to bring you along on the adventure of doing a van build. So you can call this van build 101 which is about doing it. Not how to do it. We'll show you some things but not a lot. All right. Well the first thing you got to do if you decide to do this is really realistically think about is it something you want to do. I've done a number of virtual workshop tours with guys across the country. I haven't done any gals yet. Looking forward to that. And one of the things I want to do when the pandemic is kind of over, since I can't go traveling overseas anymore, is to visit some of those workshops and do a filming where I'm in the actual workshop. The other ones were done through software with a guy holding up an iPhone or something to go around his shop and I would question him and he would answer me. So I want to visit those people because I've made pretty good friends out of a lot of them. So that's why I need it.  So that will be coming up some time in the future.  Now I didn't want to choose an RV. Originally I was going to get a Ford F-250 or something and then pull a small airstream behind me. But then I realized now I'm stuck pretty much with going from RV park to RV park because a combination of the length of the truck and the airstream is super long. It wouldn't have to be an airstream. It could be something a lot less expensive. And I wanted to be able to go in and park in somebody's driveway and not stick out in the middle of the street. I wanted to be able to maneuver easily. I wanted to get around on small roads and I want to park in the city. A lot of time I'll be using this van relative to my woodworking in the city and so I wanted it to fit in normal city spots. Now you can look at primarily there are a lot of things you can look at but the primary ones that people use to do a van conversion would be this Mercedes Sprinter either 144 or 176 length of wet of a wheelbase. I think 176 is right. Mine is a 144. You could look at a Ford Transit of several different lakes. I think whatever you look at you would definitely look at a high roof not a medium roof because by the time you put in the flooring the insulation the roof panels and so forth even if you could fit in the van when you originally buy it if it's a medium height you won't fit in it after you have to do some work on it. And so unless you're 5 foot 5 I'd recommend getting a tall van. So Ford Transit is something you could look at getting pretty popular. The kind of the original one that a lot of people did was the Dodge ProMaster and I prefer the look of the Mercedes. It's a little hard to find vans. You know you think oh I'll go buy a $30,000 used van you know with 15,000 miles on it. Well good luck the van conversion people bought those up two years ago so you're not going to do that. So probably going to have to maybe get new maybe not. There should be a lot of people burning out having done their van conversion a couple years ago and now deciding to do different things with their life so you want to be very active on the used RV market to see if you can find something but I don't know if you want something already built out by somebody else. The big manufacturers Winnebago, Airstream, they produce class B vans as well but they're loaded up to the hill with all the bells and whistles and they're very expensive. There's I see a neighbor in my neighborhood here who's got a Winnebago revel and I looked it up but I have no idea when people say MSRP right now in January of 2022 whether class B vans are going somewhere near MSRP or if you go to a big RV show are you able to get one for $30,000 less. But anyway the MSRP base on his van is at least $203,000 so I'm not ready to spend that kind of money and and if you spend that kind of money and then drove it off a lot then you get depreciation you probably never get back when somebody else buys it from you used so depends on how much money had how much skill level they have whether or not you're going to buy a raw van and convert it yourself or or buy one already completely done or do kind of what I'm doing which is buy the raw van do what you can yourself but then use a van conversion company to do some of the things that either you can't do because you're in a homeowners association and you're not allowed to work on your van in the driveway or other reasons and so I'm doing a hybrid approach so I'm using a firm out of Santa Cruz California which is where I live called Levity vans fellow named Jimmy Gray he's got a staff of about eight right now he's built about 10 or 12 vans and worked on a lot of DIY vans helping people out he's awfully awfully busy a little hard to get in and get your van scheduled for stuff but really really nice people and the pleasure to work with so I'm using that approach as I give you a tour of my van I'll tell you what I've done and what I've hired to be done if you're going to be a family or maybe even a couple I've heard a lot of people highly recommend that you get the extended wheelbase because you're going to start to feel claustrophobic with all of the things that you want in there the spouses if they're gonna travel you they probably want the built-in shower if you're a 20 year old 25 year old you're doing this in lieu of renting an apartment you're gonna travel around the country and go snowboarding and mountain biking then you may not want the extended wheelbase but that's a big decision for you to make like a shorter wheelbase therefore less room inside the buildings or you're going to do the extended wheelbase which makes it more comfortable less claustrophobic and give you more room for for your build out so those are considerations the Mercedes comes as a diesel and I was a little hesitant for that originally but I've gotten over that once you buy something you start rationalizing and say well that was the best decision so so this is a diesel with a small diesel engine there's larger ones available I basically got lucky and went to a Mercedes lot to look at one that was listed in inventory that I didn't really want and then found out that a lady had ordered one eight months ago it had arrived and then she had denied or or declined to go ahead and buy it so it happened to be on the lot that the day I was there so I got really lucky I didn't want a white one because most of the you know the commercial vans for the plumbers and other people are all white for some reason so I wanted this I got a gray one white it's best for really for heat and for insulation because it's going to be cooler when you go into the deserts and stuff if you get black you can count on it being you know maybe 10 degrees hotter when you're out in a hot environment and so but of course maybe it'll be a little bit hotter when you're cold environment so there's trade-offs but I I wanted to get something I guess middle of the road so I went for a silver I got it August the 1st of 2021 worked on some things basically took out the factory floor took out the factory panels they do these little bitty panels that cover all of these openings it's good to have a little pry tool for popping off those little plastic pins that hold the panel up so I stripped it of the panels and I stripped it of the factory floor did some insulation on the floor I'll talk about in a separate video put in some more insulation on top of that put in Baltic birch half-inch Baltic birch plywood as my basic permanent subfloor I decided not to glue that down yet I'm gonna come back and do it down now that I'm happy with what's going on and then I put the factory floor back in just to protect things while doing the build out now I can't I have to take that back out when I'm start working on the inside because it's thick and that would throw off all of my cabinets and everything well that is my very very brief introduction to van selection I will put some links down below whenever I do these short videos to resources that I have found in some of these areas and so I'll put a link to one called far out ride and then that's a website faroutride.com and over there he's got all the dimensions of the various vans and some layouts and so forth so I recommend that to go see what the differences are in the sizes and so forth well I hope you will enjoy these if you think you might then please give me a like a comment and a subscribe and we'll see you in the next old Coot van adventures van conversion build series small workshop guy signing off


What do you think was going on with the social media accounts of those people who stormed Capitol Hill on January 6? What do you think they were posting about? And if there turns out to be a correlation between posting about allegations of voter fraud or posting about QAnon and other right-wing conspiracy theories and then anti-social behavior, is it any wonder that some people want to stigmatize this type of expression in effect to use a broad generalization that many people want to effectively ban Nazis from the public square? So here's a story out of UCLA. So this UCLA student, he stormed Capitol Hill on January 6.  And the LA Times' story headline, before far-right UCLA student stormed Capitol, he faced a few roar over incendiary tweets.  And I believe that for every 1,000 people posting incendiary tweets, fewer than 0.1% of them will ever commit a crime related to their posting. So I don't believe there's some sort of inevitable connection between posting incendiary material on Twitter and participating in criminal behavior. On the other hand, I don't believe that the online world and the real world are completely separate. I believe that the online world is part of the real world. And what you do online does affect how you behave in real life. So March 2020, there was a UCLA student, a leftist, Matthew Richard, went on Twitter. I value truth immensely. I also value freedom and equality. And I think that we have a lot of norms of public speech and behavior that reinforce kind of oppressive structures of domination and exploitation. And that in order to give people the kind of dignity and respect as democratic equals that they deserve. OK, so this is philosopher Will Wilkinson talking to Robert Wright, essentially making the case for censorship of Nazis and white nationalists and the like. You have to enforce certain norms about what's OK to say in public. And that's actually a condition for all of us to have meaningful freedom. Now, I disagree with him. But what I want to investigate here is why do people believe as he does? So I don't think it's necessary to have these norms to stigmatize discussion of certain controversial issues to maintain freedom in our republic. But I want to investigate why people like Will Wilkinson think this way. So in March 2020, UCLA student Matthew Richard went on Twitter called for the university to investigate and expel fellow undergraduate Christian Sikor. And he posted a thread with 21 recent tweets from the account of Christian Sikor who founded America First Bruins, a far right student group. Anyone else cop the Hitler sneakers one tweet read and another tweet, can ICE just cough on illegals or something? Outrage followed. Students complained to administrators more than 30,000 people liked a Twitter post by one student who asked, you all think UCLA can expel someone for xenophobia and wishing death upon undocumented people during a pandemic? Well, UCLA can't. Now, Christian Sikor was arrested on Tuesday last week charged with federal crimes for his ledgerall in the US Capitol Hill riot. So he was identified as having sat in the chair that Vice President Mike Pence had just vacated. He was 22 years of age and he stirred up tensions over free speech at UCLA. So a president of UCLA's undergraduate students Association Council Naomi Riley said, this was not some random act that occurred. Him showing up at the Capitol was not out of the ordinary. He was very in line with what has been going on with that organization. So if there's a type of politics that is associated with anti-social behavior or low achievement or just icky behavior that may not be criminal, then it's not shocking that there will be widespread opposition to this type of thinking. Christian Sikor's Twitter feed offers a window into the increasingly explosive topic of free speech rights and extreme a speech on American college campuses. So apparently Christian Sikor was a follower of Nicholas Fuentes who hosted the America First podcast. He practices white nationalism under a mainstream gift wrap. The now defunct America First Bruins Twitter account had as its background a benestating communist art people. His Twitter account called fascism epic and quote, valorizes the 2017 Charlottesville Tiki torch march in Virginia, which featured an anti-Semitic chant. Jews would not replace us. Free speech experts who reviewed the thread Richard Oppost had said Sikor's tweets were a protected speech. And in an interview published last May with the conservative podcast host, Christian Sikor discussed his own views on free speech. I don't support complete free speech. He said, I don't think communism should be legal. He says anarchists and communists are the proponents of hate speech. So Christian Sikor once belonged to Bruin Republicans. Then he left it and started America First club and got a lot of blowback. This is extremely dangerous what this student is promoting, said Richard, who belongs to several leftist student groups. I was scared. We had a lot of events and we had a lot of agitators at our events on campus. So America First Bruins and the Bruin Republicans endorsed an open letter asking then President Trump to institute an indefinite moratorium on immigration to the US due to the pandemic and to rededicate his efforts on the US-Mexico border wall. Sounds reasonable to me. Grayson Peters published an op-ed in her arm. That's a UCLA Jewish newspaper that began. Fascists are organizing at UCLA. All right, so what exactly is the case that these people want to make for essentially banning Nazis from the public square? So there's an economics blogger, Noah Smith. And he wrote, I think Americans dramatically underrate how much better life would be without Nazis around.  So let's just allow him to make his case and try to understand where he's coming from. By Nazis, I do not mean Republicans or conservatives or Trump supporters or people with racist attitudes in general. I specifically mean hardcore, passionate white supremacists for whom white supremacist activism is a lifestyle. This is a relatively small fringe. Most racists don't make a lifestyle out of it. So the old sore about white nationalists in the United States is that they are one third criminals, one third homosexuals and one third Nazis. So when you've got a group, let's say that what it's standing for is completely rationally defensible. And you can make a good moral defense for it. But the overwhelming majority of people who participate in the movement or who publicly represent the movement seem to be disreputable characters, people with criminal backgrounds, people with antisocial personalities. Then is it any wonder that normies want nothing to do with them?  Fractal, that's a mighty big word.  Fractal, fractal. Okay, it's a curve or geometric figure. I'm not sure that fractal here really helps us understand, but I think what he means is that they make a lot of noise. So I'm not sure the word fractal really helps us though. So they branch out and ramify. Well, there's another big word, ramify. I believe that's to make... Ramify. To form branches or offshoots. They spread and branch out, they grow and develop in complexity and range. Okay, so mighty big words here. They branch out and ramify and flow into any space that allows them. The 1980s, the Nazi fringe tried to be part of the punk subculture.  Nazis have tried to be part of the black metal subculture. Black metal fans responded by systematically excluding them. Game of culture has also tried to kick out infiltrating Nazis with less success and Nazis successfully infiltrated and destroyed 4chan. So if all you know about someone is that they post on 4chan, you immediately assume that they are pro-social, anti-social, or you make no assumptions. Seems to me that probably most people who post spend a lot of time reading 4chan, most likely anti-social. Noah Smith writes, the lesson is that Nazis will relentlessly infiltrate anywhere the powers that be failed to expel them with extreme prejudice. They will infiltrate your web forum. They will infiltrate your blog comments. They will go anywhere where they're not forcibly expelled. Once they are allowed in a space, they will make it awful for everyone else in that space like a single rat turd floating in your jar of cereal. And here's an argument that any movement that preaches intolerance and persecution must be outside the law. As paradoxical as it may seem, this is defending tolerance. Defending tolerance requires to not tolerate the intolerant. This is Noah Smith's line of argumentation. The lesson the punks and metalheads learn is ban the Nazis, things just get better. Yes, it can feel intolerant, but that's the paradox of tolerance. He concludes, I suspect most people vastly underestimate how much better America as a whole will get when our current crop of Nazis finally gives up and goes away. And I think that this doesn't harm. The search for truth because more. Now that's absurd to say, oh, if you say anything that might cause some group to feel oppressed, right? Feelings of oppression, these are entirely subjective that that doesn't harm the search for truth. That's an absurd argument here by Will Wilkinson. Gallitarian norms that make it easier for people who haven't had the same chances as, you know, Anglo white guys like us, or I don't know if you're Anglo, maybe you're German, I don't know. The Irish part of me is the non-angle part. Yeah, I just don't, I think a lot of woke norms or what people think of as political correctness, I see as trying to elevate people who've been pushed down. And for me, as somebody who cares a lot about the discovery of new knowledge, technological innovation and economic growth, I think one of the biggest tragedies in the history of the world is hierarchical social structures that have prevented everyone from contributing, from developing their capacities and contributing all of their talents to the enterprise of the discovery of knowledge and the invention of new technology. We would be vastly richer. You know, if you get the compounding logic of economic growth in your head, if we... Okay, I think that's absurd to believe that the primary reason that underachieving groups of underachieved is because of free speech.  And I see the norms that some people see as oppressive as being conducive to the kind of equality that brings the best out of everybody and lifts everybody up. And even in my market fundamentalist way, even if like you're just thinking about it in terms of like, I want people to do science so that they can figure out how the world works so that they can make technologies that are gonna make us rich, right? Like that means I want like black girls to get an amazing education. That's what that means, right? And if they are gonna feel demeaned and demoralized if people can talk about them in certain ways and that's gonna keep that from happening, I think that's an outrage. And like, so I don't actually see my... So like, I don't think that what they think is oppressive and a threat to freedom is. And I think that's a big part of the disconnect but they're very sure it is. And they think because the New York times represents a certain viewpoint that they think tends to suppress the kind of diversity of thinking that they think is necessary for free flowing debate and discovery. Like they have an antagonistic attitude towards those kinds of institutions. Yeah, it's funny. Well, Matt Iglesias in his newsletter piece on this talked about the tension between the kind of attitude the rationalist want to cultivate and the kind of read the room sensibility, right? These guys are like against reading the room. And I got to say like Robin Hansen, I kind of inferred that he was not capable of reading the room, but maybe, I mean, you know he has said some things that it's like, no, no, no, you know, Robin stops. Let me say the amount of trouble you're gonna get into. I don't know if he's, and I think some of them may actually be like that. I mean, there is a certain amount of this kind of in Silicon Valley in particular, not that that's where he is, but a kind of non-room reading. But I think Matt was also talking about a kind of an intentional opposition to reading the room. I mean, for example, like, you know, Charles Murray, if I happen to agree with Charles Murray on something unrelated to race, I would probably just to stay on the safe side, find somebody else I agreed with on that subject to site instead of Charles Murray, right? That's kind of like, in a way, some would say a hypersensitive reading the room sensibility, but it's what a lot of people would do. And I think, you know, Matt was saying these people are very against that. And I think for some of them, not reading the room becomes an end in itself, right? Yeah, like, and that's how you get this kind of like, a kind of slippery slope from just completely anodyne, good-hearted, absolutist, liberal toleration for an unfettered marketplace of ideas to a kind of like bad faith right-wing shit-stirring where they like will be like, you know, like, they'll say something overtly sexist or at least just like, it's clear what they're getting at but they just have enough possible deniability.  Like, and they're doing that not because they're actually being shut down, right? Like they're consciously provoking a reaction so that they can blame the other side for being sensorious and repressive because they actually do have bad illiberal ideas and people who can delegitimize those ideas get in their way. So if they can delegitimize them first as the people who are hostile to free speech and open discussion, then their path is clearer. And I think like a lot of just like really earnest people don't grasp this dynamic and see how they are exploited by some bad people to give them. Okay, let's have our simultaneous sip. This is a crystal light orange banana strawberry. So good. Now, this Will Wilkinson philosopher, journalist guy, he has often been a proponent of cancel culture. He's been glad to see people canceled for saying things that are politically incorrect like that Jason Guy who did a PhD at Harvard on immigration and IQ, Jason Richwine, Will Wilkinson was glad to see him canceled. And ironically Will Wilkinson got canceled for a joke that didn't land right a couple of months ago. And cover for genuinely shitty stuff. Yeah, and I think you'll want to emphasize that you're not saying that Scott is one of the actors. But I think his platform has been. Okay, and when he says genuinely shitty stuff, I think if he was being philosophically sound, he would have to admit that, that which he regards as genuinely shitty is entirely a subjective leap of faith on his part. There's no objective standard for what is shitty. Exploited by people with some really dangerous ideas. And I think it's like a lot of critics of the piece, no, I don't think it's a great piece, but like, look, think about it for a second though. Like this dude wanted to write a story. No, Will Wil, he talks to Scott Alexander.  And he's like, I wanna be anonymous, can't use my name. And he's like, the rules are that I have to use your name. Now it seems like nobody actually knows what the rules are. Like that seems completely true. And I think it's hard to know because there are so many different kinds of circumstances. I think it's hard to have a general rule about when you should accept. Well, Will Luke Ford accept the DNA altering vaccine, stay tuned, the answer may shock you. And the answer is yes, yes, I will accept it. I will accept it today. Then drink the crystal-knocked light. Ford never disavows a supplement, bro. Boy, it's tough checking in on the left. A subject's request to remain honest. Believe me, it's worth it.  Like you can't do your job if you're not using people's names. And the thing is like also, Scott's real name was super easy to find. So he hadn't concealed it that well. So it's not like it was like a really secret. So he wanted to write the story.   And his followers go absolutely apeshit. And some of them like literally freaking, like try to cancel Cade Metz, right? He's getting a world of shit, right? Like if you saw those quotes. Okay, so Cade Metz is the New York Times journalist. Scott Alexander Siskin is the psychiatrist who wrote the blog, Slate Star Codex. And then in July of 2020, Scott Alexander deleted the whole blog because the New York Times wanted to write an article about him. He thought that if he just deleted the blog that it would remove the incentive for the New York Times to write an article about him. So here's the basic timeline on the Slate Star Codex controversy. So in June, New York Times journalist wants to write an article about Scott Alexander and Slate Star Codex and this online community. Then Scott Alexander doesn't want the repercussions of that. So a lot of the loathing of the media and the loathing of journalists is simply a loathing of reality. That you've been publishing all sorts of things which, if more widely known, would threaten your wellbeing. Well, is that really the fault of those who would bring to more public attention things that you have already decided for years to make public, right? Sometimes just fear and loathing of journalism is just fear and loathing of reality. They are going to bring to more public attention things that you've already decided to make public. So you don't wanna face that you feel threatened. Your own wellbeing feels at risk because of your choices. And so you externalize your anxiety and say, ah, it's all the fault of the New York Times. They won't assure me that they won't use my name. Well, we don't have much of a basis for demanding that other people don't say our name, right? If you fear that exposure of your choices, of your performances in the public square will reveal some things that many people won't like. So I've been blogging for 22 years. I've been blogging almost daily for over three years. I've said some things that would get me in trouble if they were published on the front page of the New York Times. But that's not the fault of the New York Times. That's my fault if I'm saying things publicly that I can't handle the repercussions of. So Scott Alexander's community reacted by viciously going after the New York Times. And so the New York Times there would be logically and morally justified in a suspicion that there are dark sides to you and to your community and then writes that as part of its story. I have some responsibility for how you behave, certainly in the chat, because I can ban you if you become anti-social. When people freak out about exposure for things that they've been doing publicly, they create a self-fulfilling prophecy where the exposure becomes incredibly damaging and they fueled that. So there's an easier route. No, it's Elizabeth Spears, you used to write for Gorka. It's an easier route than summoning an army of bots, opposition researchers, dark enlightenment warriors to go after journalists whose work you don't like. Said, pay careful attention to what is it that you're afraid that people are gonna write about you and ask yourself why you would not want it made public. Then apply some rational thinking. Have some understanding of why you wrote what you wrote. Have an ability to explain it to say those who don't have a strong opinion. There are obviously always gonna be people who hate what you're saying and nothing you say will ameliorate it. But I try to perform my work, my vlogging, my blogging with the perspective of the public interest. So I try to do things that are in the public interest and if I'm asked why did you say this and do this, that's gonna be the explanation. That's the motive. What's from, you know, Balaji, I'm gonna try to pronounce his last name. He's a really powerful person in Silicon Valley and he's like basically saying like, we can try to make life a complete nightmare for people. That was a creepy quote. I am prepared to say that unless that was a complete misquote or taken out of context, that guy has some apologizing to do. I don't remember his name either, but it was a creepy quote about how we, you know, basically like we can stick our dogs on reporters we don't like and make their lives miserable. He's a really, really important person in Silicon Valley. Is it Srinivasan? Something like that. It's in the New York Times piece. It's not a quote I want to add to the name. But that's not fake.  Funny thing, Scott's kind of initial post in his, you know, in his new incarnation of his blog, what's it called again? Astral Codex Tannen. Astral Codex Tannen. People shouldn't go there and read his reply in the New York Times piece. But before that, read his initial post, which gets into the original story. And this is why Scott's so great. He effectively acknowledges that that Kate Metz didn't do anything wrong, that he overreacted because he was afraid of what would happen to him. And he just like did, like he took a huge, you know, he knew to site, but nobody was asking him to do that. Like he, like nobody was actually threatening him. It's just like a journalist. He wrote this before this New York, the four guys he signed came out. So in 2006, Will Wilkinson said positive things about Steve Saylor. He wrote, Steve Saylor is a smart, challenging thinker. I find benefit from reading him even when I don't agree with him, which is often thinks Saylor is right that many psychometric studies are simply ignored and the results are politically inconvenient or can be interpreted hurtfully. He's wrong on methodology or in the inferences he draws from studies. And I think that's worth arguing about. I also think Steve Saylor understands the high sensitivity of questions of race. And I think the enterprise of seeking truth through discussion would be better served with less iconoclastic posturing from him, which is what I think many find aggravating, but he's worth taking seriously and seriously engaging. So that's Will Wilkinson December 10, 2006. Now Scott Alexander had many views on human biodiversity and the dark enlightenment that they were very different privately compared to publicly. So publicly he was always condemning near reactionary movement, but privately he sent off an email where essentially he argued that he agrees with much of this dissident perspective. And so his emails were made public in the last few days. So Scott Alexander publicly condemning much of human biodiversity, the Steve Saylor perspective and Curtis Yavin mentions board bargain and that near reactionary perspective, but Scott Siskin is simply not being honest about his history with the far right. So Tofer Brennan posts a branch of the online far right. They call themselves near reactionaries and Scott responded by saying, oh, I agree the people you're thinking of don't have much to value to say, but here are some better examples of near reactionary thought. But what he was saying publicly and what he was saying privately were very different. So publicly he was saying, near reactionary HBD, that's a lot of nonsense, but privately he was saying human biodiversity is probably partially correct or at the least very non-approvably not correct. And there are all sorts of interesting HBD hypotheses which should be strongly investigated. And he adds, I will appreciate if you never tell anyone I said this, not even in confidence, but I appreciate, I mean that if you ever do, I will probably leave the internet forever or seek some sort of horrible revenge. This is in a private email. There's a great discussion of how complicated the name issue is and you can see that he understands it. He came to be able to see it from the other guy's perspective, like he's overcoming some biases and it's a great pose. But the upshot of it is that he owns some responsibility for what happened. He flipped out about somebody trying to do their job who wasn't doing anything wrong and got that person in kind of a lot of trouble with a lot of people. But his reaction to the piece that actually got written, that was just released, was that again he characterizes it as a hit piece because he somehow thinks the Times has it out for him for making them look bad, which again is the same kind of like they don't care. Like if you've ever dealt with this like gigantic bureaucratic institution, it like it literally couldn't think more of itself. It like it's kind of unhumiliatable. And like they're certainly not going to be mad at a pseudonymous psychiatrist. I mean, I don't think- Okay, so once again, Scott Alexander would say very different things privately than public. And so in this email where he expresses great interest and respect for HBD and near reactionary thinking, he adds, I will appreciate it if you never tell anyone I said this, not even in confidence. And by appreciate, I mean that if you ever do I will probably either leave the internet forever or seek some sort of horrible revenge. He's imagining that this was kind of a negative piece. I think it was. It's not flattering. And I think like- But what happened to Kate Metz? That's the thing. Like that is what shows you what the community is actually like. So people in the community who are complaining about like something that didn't seem that positive after Scott Alexander massively overreacts like whether or not he intended to his fans dogpiled to this reporter for no reason, completely unjustly. And you expect the guy who's writing a story about you to not think that that doesn't reflect on the nature of the community. That's crazy.  Right, so I- Right, if you watch this show and you go out and behave in an anti-social way and say you use some of the rhetoric I use on this show but in a different context and with a different emphasis and it looks absolutely horrible, I'm gonna get pilloried for that. I kind of agree with that. I mean, Scott has the theory. Somebody put this in his head. He says somebody who's like in the now and understands these things said, well the Times is gonna retaliate now because you embarrass him. It reminds me of how when I was at the New Republic Mike Hensley was the editor and we would laugh at how we would get these letters positing these theories about why we did things. I was like, oh, I see you ran these three pieces. It all fell into place. And we're like, wait, one piece was voiced on us by the owner. The other piece came in in the transom and we had a hole to fill in them. There was like no connection but people would always do this. And I think on the one hand he's wrong to think the New York Times was reacting to the original controversy and ordered up this hit piece. On the other hand, it wouldn't surprise me if the author of the piece had his attitude toward this group soured by the encounter and may have even without being conscious. I mean, maybe what you said that he just logically concludes that, hey, these people aren't great. It could also be that at a kind of unconscious level this is retaliation because they made his life miserable and even if he's doing his best to be objective that still came through. That's possible too. The thing I don't think- I think he's just partly trying to explain why this is the kind of group that would make his life a mess because Scott Alexander overreacted. That could be. I would say it's definitely not a favorable piece. Sounds like Scott may have legit gripes about individual sentences but I think that it was not ordered up by the New York Times. That would be very, very unusual. Well, there's a great story about all of this in the New Yorker this summer by Gideon Lewis-Crowes. And he says the exact right thing that he's like, I used to work for the New York Times magazine and just like the idea that somebody would be like, here's this guy who's popular in Silicon Valley, like get him, is just very, very weird because you know how stories get written. Is that a reporter gets kind of interested in something and wants to poke around and ask their editor, hey, I think there's something here. Should I check it out, like write something up? Okay, let's have a look at the chat. It's like when 10 Oat Riders with 10 followers talk about optics and Dennis Prager says, near reactionary over the alt-right, Ford star codex, Luke de-radicalized me, Luke star codex absurdum, Luke put me on the right path, thanks 40. And yes, Keith Woods just premiered a stream with Josh Neal about his new book, Unextremism. Half collision notes, Luke radicalized and de-radicalized me all within one show, the path of Panassa. Doovid has shown us the way it is up to us to follow. So the New Yorker did a piece on Slate star codex and it notes, the Scott Alexander asked his supporters remain courteous. So this is important. So if I fill you with incendiary perspectives and then say, but please remain courteous, that's disingenuous. It's like, let's say I try to convince you that the 2020 election was stolen by voter fraud. And then I say, well, please remain courteous. Okay, if I make the case that abortion is murder, and then I tell you, but you should treat people who perform abortions with courtesy and civility, that's absurd, right?  That part of the message simply doesn't translate. Once you make the case that voter fraud determined the 2020 election or may have determined the 2020 presidential election, then all moral restraints are gone. If I can convince you that the performance of abortion is murder, then all moral restraints in reaction to those who perform abortions is gone, right? So I can say, oh, be civil, be law-abiding, be courteous, but that's pointless once I convince you that murder is taking place. Once I make the argument that the election was stolen, then all moral restraints are gone. You're in a victim community and there is nothing that you can do that is morally illicit once you believe that abortion is murder, or once you believe that the 2020 election, presidential election may have been stolen.  Please just explain the situation, ask them to stop doxing random bloggers for clicks. You are some sort of important tech person who the New York Times technology section might wanna maintain good relations with, mentioned that, right? So this kind of plea to remain civil after you then give incendiary reasons for people to be outraged just doesn't work, right? We're all sending mixed messages and it's confusing, but some messages that we send out into the world are far more powerful and overwhelm other messages. So this plea conformed with the online persona, Scott Alexander's publicly cultivated over the years at Slate Star Codex of a gentle headmaster preparing to chaperone a rambunctious group of boys on a museum outing, but just lens plausible deniability to what he surely knew would be taken as incitement. So saying that the 2020 election may have been stolen is inciting to extreme lawless, anti-social and criminal behavior saying that abortion is murder, right? Once you make the claim that abortion is murder, then there is no response that is off the table. So Scott Alexander's appeal listed an immediate reaction from his followers in Silicon Valley and elsewhere. In a few days, a petition collected gathered more than 6,000 signatories, including the cognitive psychologist Stephen Pinker, the economist Tyler Cowan, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, cryptocurrency Vitalik Buterin and the quantum physicist David Deutsch, the philosopher Peter Singer, the open AI CEO Sam Altman. People just loved Scott's writing, former venture capitalist and cryptocurrency enthusiast Balaji Srinivasan. That's the Balaji Srinivasan, that's the guy that Will Wilkinson had a great deal of trouble pronouncing his name. As a quarrelsome Twitter personality, tweeted three hours after Scott Alexander's post appeared that this example of journalism is the non-consensual invasion of privacy for profit as courtesy of Cade Metz, technology writer, ordinarily given over to enthusiastic stories on the subject of artificial intelligence. And as you can imagine, Scott Alexander's plea for civility went unheeded. So we're always putting in mixed messages into the ether, but some messages are gonna be much more powerful than others, and we're gonna be much more effective in life when our messages are not at war with each other. You can't incite with your right hand and then plea for civility with your left hand and be effective. It's like slamming your foot on the accelerator and the brake at the same time. So Cade Metz and his New York Times editor were flooded with angry messages. Srinivasan turned to address Silicon Valley investors, entrepreneurs and CEOs saying, the New York Times tried to dox Scott Alexander for clicks. Okay, just mentioning some guy's name is not doxing. It's like Ben Shapiro complaining that Breitbart had doxed it and they simply linked to his California state bar page where Ben Shapiro was responsible for all the information that was on it.  Ben Shapiro chose to list his home address on his California state bar page. So Ben Shapiro doxed himself. But does Ben Shapiro wanna face that reality that he doxed himself? No, it's much easier to point the finger at somebody else. So Srinivasan tweeted, what will work is freezing them out. Please commit to not talking to New York Times reporters or giving them quotes. Other prominent figures in Silicon Valley, including Paul Graham, followed suit. He says, it's revealing that so many worry that this will be a hip piece. So more dangerous time for ideas now than 10 years ago, the New York Times is less to be trusted. So this atmosphere of danger, mistrust gave rise to a whole spate of conspiracy theories that Scott Alexander Siskin was being doxxed or canceled because his support for Michigan State professor accused of racism because he'd recently written a post about his dislike for paywalls because the New York Times was simply afraid of the independent power of the proudly heterodox slate star Codex cohort. And the others like, yeah, sounds good. And then they go poking around.  Like, because again, in journalism, the subject doesn't stay still. The subject has interest in being presented a certain way. In this case, it was Scott had an interest in not having his identity revealed and he was, you know, reacted to that danger. But like, and... And the chat says, did the bully not have a right to fight back? Of course they do. But how you fight back is going to make all the difference in the world. Let's say your boss says something bullying to you and you respond by punching him in the face. That's probably not an effective way of fighting back, right? So they're effective and ineffective ways of fighting back. And sometimes the best thing to do is absolutely nothing. So I was in situations where someone was harassing me and I went to my therapist and I said, should I do this or this? My therapist suggested, why not do nothing? That turned out to be the best advice. This guy who was bothering and harassing me turned out to be a valuable friend who found me a job when I desperately needed a job. So sometimes just doing nothing is the best and often doing nothing is better than doing something that is self-destructive. So people often can't stand just sitting still. They want to lash out to protect themselves and they act in anger and they don't think about the repercussions of what they're saying and doing. But once he reacted this way, he created a newer, more interesting story. And so like, I totally get why he'd wanna remain anonymous or, but the thing is like, I don't think it's this journalist's responsibility ultimately, right? Like if you are doing something that you think could get you in huge professional trouble and you've also done a terrible job of concealing your identity, it's not somebody else's fault if somebody comes out and says who you are. And the times you- Right, if you were doing things publicly, online, that you don't want the world to know about, then the problem is not the New York Times wanting to write an article about you. The problem is how did you end up doing all these things that you wanna hide from the world? And where do you think that there'll be no consequences for actions and words that you perform publicly? It hold off on the piece until he- And it didn't publish anything. And it may be that the journalist was in a worse mood than he was the first time around. I wanna read Matt Iglesias in his assessment of this. I think you will not buy this. You've read it, but Matt says that implicit in the New York Times piece is a kind of syllogism. Scott Alexander's blog is popular with some influential Silicon Valley people. That's point number one. Scott Alexander has done posts that espoused views on race or gender that progressives disapprove of. Therefore in the third part of the syllogism, therefore Silicon Valley is a hotbed of racism and sexism. I don't think you'd put it that way. I think you'd say the Times accurately picked up on the idea that there were some people in this community who manifest racism and sexism. And then Scott Alexander was kind of tarred by association with him. Yeah, and the thing is like, I mean like, it's not like, you know, Scott is definitely not woke. He has, you know, a very common kind of like anti-woke hostility that is very common with a lot of liberals who think it's best to just argue things out loud. And but like, I don't think, yeah, I don't think Matt is right about what's going on in the story. I don't think it was that kind of syllogism. Like you just have to get inside the mind of the reporter, right? Like what? Like you might think, okay, this weird thing happened. Yeah, reporters are people too, looking at the uncensored D-Live chat. Tolerance of the intolerant paradox is junk, bro. How long do our boomers intend to perpetuate this denazification program? I really think they should have given up the ghost in the 1990s. You think they ever asked themselves if they are responsible for causing the cringe dead Nazi bouncers that they then catch about? I know it isn't actually a vaccine. The WHO says there's a lack of evidence that any of the gene therapies offer vaccine protection. I'd hate to be labeled a kook. I'm feeling pretty unrestrained, bro. The 2016 election was stolen. Happening to me. I just wanted to write a simple story, just inoffensive. I was initially interested in like, why this guy was right about coronavirus early on. Right, like that just seemed interesting. It seemed like an interesting community. It was interesting that he's popular with all these influential people. And then he tries to start writing this story and he creates this giant controversy that like gets his whole blog nuked and this entire. It's a good idea, particularly if you could be turned into a public figure to never say anything in an email or a text message that you would not like scrolled across the scoreboard at Dodger Stadium or across the front page of the New York Times. Our community incensed at him. And he's like, what happened there?  Right, if you're incredibly scared that comments you've made online are gonna come back to haunt you, then you should ask why. And you should try to come up with an understanding or an explanation that will make the most sense to people who don't have a strong position one way or another. So the New Yorker wrote, the proliferation of such elaborate conjectures, conspiracy theories about this ordinary run of the mill New York Times story is hardly commensurate with the vision of sleet star codex as a touchstone of patience and disinterest, right? This is the rationalist community that they claim to explore things rationally, yet that they reacted to the possibility of a New York Times profile in an irrational manner that completely escalated the situation. And it was Scott Alexander's initial account of his exchange with New York Times journalist, Kate Metz, that ceded this escalation. So sleet star codex prioritizes semantic precision, meaning using your words carefully. But Scott Alexander's account is to be taken at its word, Kate Metz did not propose to dox Alexander but simply to de-anonymize him. Seems difficult to fathom that a professional journalist of Kate Metz's experience in standing would assure a subject, especially at the beginning of a process that he planned to write a mostly positive story. So that was Scott Alexander's supposition and it was incredibly naive. The business model of the New York Times is very little to do with chasing codex and no self-respecting journalists would conclude the pursuit of codex was best served by the de-anonymization of a random blogger. And the author of this New Yorker, he says, until recently I was a writer for the New York Times magazine, the idea that anyone in the organization would direct a reporter to take down a niche blogger because he didn't like paywalls because he promoted a petition about a professor or for any other reason is ludicrous. Stories emerge from casual interactions between curious reporters and their overtax editors. So this story emerged simply because Cade Metz got an email suggestion that he should write on Slate Star codex. And so this is just another story for Cade Metz. But the rationalist, despite their fixation with cognitive bias, read into the contingencies a darkly meaningful pattern. Scott Alexander, who's taken on the role of trying to help explain Silicon Valley to itself, was taken up as a mascot and a martyr in a struggle against the New York Times. He was enlisted as a, New York Times was enlisted as a proxy for the elite gatekeepers, the arbiters of what is and is not okay to say, what is allowed and who is allowed by virtue of their identity to say it. So Scott Alexander is long fretted over the likelihood that the presence of these fringe


First, hear about WebAssembly. Personally, I started in the early days with Adzim.js. I actually came from the website of the world. And I wanted to create a data visualization library that ran really well on the web, taking stuff that was running and many other portable devices and was part of the portability story. But I'm super interested in you, because you guys have been following tech for a really long time. I want to start with Renee. Sure. Yeah, I was actually probably a little later in the game, but it was actually Solomon's tweet, which is the now famous tweet. And basically, he was saying something like Docker wouldn't have existed. And so obviously, from an investor's point of view, if the founder of Docker is comparing a new technology to Docker and saying it could be equally big, it was something I knew we had to understand really deeply. So that's really starting from the server side. Yeah, yeah. And then I went back and then did the client side. And then I need to talk deeper into the mic. Sorry, I'm new to this. Michael? Yes, sure. So I heard the term, but I didn't really sort of dig into it until I shared a cab with a VC at KubeCon in Valencia. And that's really quite late to the scene. But from digging in further, I was really impressed. And I realized I really had to see what's happening, because this was really hot. So that's really what it really took off for me, I have to say. Can you share who you were with in the cab?  Oh, it's a mystery person. Yes, indeed. Yeah, and so this was also from the server side, basically. Well, he was basically asking me what's happening with Wazem and who are the hot companies. And there was another analyst in the cab, so there was the three of us. This just died. And so yeah, he was trying to pick our brains. But I was learning. OK, very cool. Alex, how about you? I was just looking to see when we wrote our first story about WebAssembly. And it's dated November 7, 2017. And we come across new stuff all the time. And so we'll pick up on something very, very new, very early. But really, really didn't start writing about it to any extent until 2020, 2021, and accelerated. And I think by now, 2022, and into 2023 and 24, 2021, we'll really push this topic. But back in 2017, it was Joe Jackson, our editor-in-chief, wrote about the dream of WebAssembly. Are you ready for the WebAssembly Revolution? That was 2017. He had heard about it from J-Films, senior software engineer who was at Netflix at the time. I don't know where he is now, but that was at the all things open conference. OK, so that kind of leads me perfectly into my next set of questions. WebAssembly, is it a fad or is it hype? Or is it the future? Is it going to revolutionize the technology space? You know where I stand on this. So I'm a little biased. Be careful what you say, because I am standing next to you. No, I really want to hear. Renee, I saw you doing your pre-work. This is very similar to another question that was already asked and that you threw back at some of the folks from Docker. So I'll start with you. Yeah, and I can just answer the Docker question, too. I'm not sure I have the answer, but one thing that we spent a lot of time looking at was could WebAssembly be the next primitive, meaning could it be really similar to containers? And we saw a few similarities. I'd say one container succeeded because of the microservices shift, so we looked for big platform shifts. And what we saw happening alongside with WebAssembly is the shift to edge computing. So whether that's IoT or things like Cloudflare and Fastly. So we saw this new shift, and so we thought, OK, there's this new replatforming happening. Certainly it won't be as big as the cloud, but we do believe things are shifting to the edge. And so WebAssembly could be a core primitive. I think containers and Docker also had a lot of big companies backing them. I'd say not exactly Docker, but Google was pushing Kubernetes. And I think similarly, Wasm has a lot of big companies that are really interested in it with the bytecode alliance. And I think sometimes if they're just enough smart people who really care about a technology, it tends to succeed. And then the third thing is I just don't think it's always either or. And I think Matt Butcher had said this to me. But when containers were coming out, people thought VMs were dead, and that it was either or. And that didn't happen. In fact, both became bigger. And so we're expecting something similar here, where Wasm will be one primitive that succeeds in a number of different use cases. And these markets will be huge. But other things like VMs, micro VMs, containers will still exist. So that's a very long way to say that, yes, I'm very bullish. And I do think that this resembles Docker in a lot of ways. Great. Michael? Right. So I've been covering the application development space since 2003. And I've seen a lot of waves in technology. There's bound to be a certain amount of hype with Wasm. But the real crunch, and as Shareen just said, does it fill a gap? And if it fulfills that need, then it will go beyond the hype. So it was interesting to talk to Adobe. When Flash was killed, if you guys remember, the days of Flash. And it was very common, but it also had its issues. Every day you had to do an update because of security. And then Adobe killed Flash. But the day they killed it, they started to look at what's going to come next. And they had these conversations with Mozilla. And that led to Wasm. So Wasm fills a lot of needs. From my perspective, I see that it is going to go beyond the hype in a nutshell. I'm glad to hear it. Alex? I'm working on a story on programming languages and how they're shaping Wasm development. And one of the themes you hear about, and I think it was actually one of the first things I heard today, I think it was actually in the keynote and the initial statements about how really it's, with the programming language development, you'll see more people in the ecosystem. And you'll see more people developing with Wasm. That being said, I'm quite skeptical of this interchangeability thing. I don't really think that's it. I'm starting to wonder if WebAssembly is going to be something like RSS, where RSS is a fundamental technology for the web. It really did usher in our thoughts and perspectives about PubSub, syndication. It ushered in some of the initial concepts, conceptual frameworks around social networks. It really did have an impact, but when people try to make it into a product, it didn't work. You could develop newsreaders with RSS, but that was the newsreader. It wasn't necessarily WebAssembly. So the way that I am starting to see WebAssembly, and I'm going to be just watching it closely to see this, is does WebAssembly just help bring shape to larger matters of interest to people? So does it provide shape for edge-based architectures? Does it provide shape for other ways that we're thinking about virtualization overall? So my mind is not quite made up. Can I add some more thoughts to that? So there's a huge, huge amount of Java legacy. And Java is only just now catching up with Clownnative and with new products like Liberty that's open source and is making Java a lot faster and able to be used in the Clownnative context. They've only just now caught up, and now suddenly there's WebAssembly. And Rust is one of the foremost languages for WebAssembly. Can we make Java run with WebAssembly? So there's a need to address the legacy. So that's one thought. And the other one is I'd love to see an end-to-end wasm. And that means also widgets that allow you to create the interface. So that's one for me to watch. I think if we get that complete end-to-end, wasm will take over the world as far as I'm concerned. But yeah, it needs to address Java because of that massive legacy. And I'd love to see an end-to-end wasm. And yeah, it's really exciting. That's the other thing is talking to people. They're moving away from Clownnative because they see that it's done now. And it's only now what's happening in the KubeCon world is just filling in the details. And the really bleeding edge work is being done in WebAssembly. And people are moving from Clownnative to wasm because they want to be at that forefront. So that's another sense that I get about what's happening in the developer community. Yeah, so I want to give a shout out to Joel Dias who showed off his work with Java and WebAssembly earlier today. And then in Luke Wagner's keynote, he talked about basically this flywheel where once we start having programming languages and tools and real applications that are doing this end-to-end work, we're going to just keep seeing this iteration go and in your words, take over the world, which I loved. Alex, it looked like you wanted to jump in there. Yeah, and you know what's interesting about TVM, Joel I think is an independent developer, right? He works for Fermion. He works for Fermion, okay. But what has Oracle done actually in the open source community with Java over the past 20 years or so? I mean, has it been deeply involved in actual open source development? Yeah, there was a lull with Java. I think the Oracle people have owned up to that, I think if I can say that. And a lot of the community around Java has opened up as a result, and there's other teams now really taking up the slack and the lull. And IBM is one of them, I'm seeing them do with Liberty doing some really interesting things, Red Hat. So I see a new momentum with Java, but they're only now just really catching up with Cloud Native and now we're in the wasm world. So, you know. And the other thing I think about is, and the research I've done is like, a lot of the existing programming languages are now really taking up that slack. And a perspective from a very well known technologist who I spoke to recently said, Java was that universal compiler for many, many years. And that almost gave a window to a lot of different programming language, such as Rust. Yes. And so then now we have Liberty with Java, but now we're seeing things like TVM, but the question I think is, we're in that kind of space in the market where there's a lot of chaos, right? Yeah, I mean, the end-to-end bit really mattered because people were coming to us and asking us, what do we build on the interface? Because that whole interface world just fragmented and it was really difficult. You had all these different footprints for your desktop, your laptop, your tablets, your mobile especially. And then that gave the opportunity for this, you know, the W3C standards and JavaScript, but it really fragmented the world and people really wanted one platform to do everything. And JavaFX could have done it, but it was really late. And although it does exist, it doesn't have the mind share. So I think that that's an area, that's an opportunity. I'd be interested to see how Wazim addresses that. Actually, this is a great point to jump in because we've been asking for questions all day and we got one from Mikkel, which is very relevant to this topic, which is, you know, what are some good initiatives that we should be doing in the WebAssembly ecosystem? Like what do we need to take on to improve awareness about WebAssembly among developers? You know, all three of you have been following tech for so long, what do we need to do, especially maybe what could we do differently from some of the other initiatives that you followed in the past? I think the biggest thing to get WebAssembly awareness out there is just to really show the community that we're solving pain points. So I think to Alex's point, like in 10 years, if we're still talking about WebAssembly as the headline, I actually think we all failed because I think WebAssembly is the best technology to solve real problems around portability and speed and data transformations and UDFs. But it should be behind the scenes to the actual developer pain points that this technology solves. And I think right now, and this is a really common question I get, is WebAssembly seems cool, but what pain points does it solve? Does it solve things that are incremental or is this really gonna change the world? And so even if somebody did like a map of, these are the 10 best categories and these are the 10 pain points that WebAssembly could solve, I think it would make it a lot more palatable for the developer community at large. So when Lynn Clark, who works for Mozilla, she wrote a really good article in 2018 about how WebAssembly at that point in time was an MVP and what it needed to do. We're now 2022 and that momentum is being taken up by the Wasm community with companies like Cosmonic and others and really building out that ecosystem that's absolutely necessary for Wasm is gonna be a success. So I think you just need to continue that momentum. I think when the big players in the industry, you've got, you had Docker on the stage today. I mentioned Adobe. When these big players start to become part of the Wasm community, I think that'll just increase the momentum and when those players engage, you're gonna get a growth of the community. I remember going to KubeCon, the first KubeCon meeting had about 300 people. Now it's what, 12,000. Here is Wasm Day, about 100 people. Yeah, we'll see what happens. I wish it success, really. We'll see. So I don't know about you. I keep a pretty large Rolodex of all the things that are happening and I feel like every day it gets updated. I've seen some other people's Rolodexes. I've seen Liam's, for example. And everybody here has at least once seen the CNCF cloud landscape. It is a big thing. I wanna know, because I need help, how do you manage all of that? Who are you following? I mean, do you have any tips for us that are trying to figure out what is happening? I'm gonna jump to you, Alex, because it seems like you're on top of it. I use Twitter quite a bit. I have a, I use TweetDeck and I have a keyword there for WebAssembly. I'll interchange it with Wasm. I'll look for the people then who are mentioned. I'll look those people up. I'll add them to my WebAssembly list of people that I follow on Twitter. It's actually a list I keep for myself. So those are some of the ways I'm looking at it and so I've been able to discover and to find people who are doing interesting things and so that's how I'm trying to keep up with it. For me, it's writing as well. Like that helps me just understand it better. I think one of the things that we really could, there's a few things I think about based on your other question too. Like, what's the open source governance right now for Wasm? How is that developing? And what have we learned from other open source projects out there that can get either Balkanized or even with big companies, they start to reflect more the interest of those larger institutions, right? So that's one thing I'm thinking about is what about the education? How well educated are, how good a job we do in educating people to help explain these topics? Like it's only through like side conversations. Can I understand what a WITZ is and how it relates to world and how that relates to component models, right? And how component models relate to Wazi and how Wazi relates to WebAssembly, right? It's like those kinds of things I think are gonna be really important for people to understand just those basic fundamentals. I also think it's important not to get, this is hard to do because excitement just is captivating to people and like getting really excited about something and there's nothing more fun about it. And I haven't felt this kind of like energy for me since 2014 and when the containers were really kind of like shaving how we felt about the new stack. So, but I'm also being wary because I know I remember things back then that happened and they could, and I'm sure they'll happen again but it's just to one degree. Sort of on that note, getting back to that feeling of 2014, is there anything happening here that feels different? Like is there anything that Wazim is doing that's on a very different path from containers? Renee? It's a good question. I'm thinking about it out loud. There's not a lot that, I mean there's small differences I'd say but nothing is major. I think the biggest thing we saw in 2014 that was spitting out a lot of the great technology including containers was stuff started at big companies. So, we actually track internal tooling very closely and like the first set of companies was Google and Facebook and Google made Kubernetes and then those projects started to spin out and they became mainstream. And then the second class of companies was sort of Uber, Airbnb, Stripe. They were on the cutting edge of cloud native microservices and for example, there was an open source project out of Uber called Cadence which did long running state and workflows and it became a company called Temporal and now it's decently widespread and that was something we invested in and so now I'm kind of looking at what the next class of companies are that are gonna spin out tooling and technology in the Wazim space and I'm actually kind of looking to the Cloudflare and Fastly and a lot of people that are in the Byte Code Alliance right now and so I mean that is like the probably the clearest similarity I see. I think that this environment actually the difference is that this environment actually feels a lot more collaborative. Like the Byte Code Alliance is so collaborative whereas the Mesosphere, Kubernetes, Battles from back in the day, it didn't feel like there was this alliance that was keeping everybody together. Very cool, Michael. Yes, so sort of joining this question and the last one, I actually had this conversation with KubeCon about that huge landscape growth and trying to navigate that and they said to me, look, we are a maintainers conference. We're not here for the enterprise. We're not here to hold their hands. There is a certain element of navigation and but the emphasis is that it's an event for maintainers and in a way that gives us an analyst firm an opportunity because that's what we do. We help and Alex here writes about it and so on but to address your question and what you can do different, you have to decide if this event, Wasm Day is going to be, is it about the community and getting them together which is really important but do you also want to help the enterprises? Do you want to have an enterprise track? A lot of conferences do have that. They have an executive track for and I think actually KubeCon does have that an executive track for enterprises. So that's something you need to think about but yeah, at this sort of cooperative stage where rival companies are getting together to build the foundation, I think there's a very good ambience and I think it's great that you have these companies work together so that's a good field. Yeah, I personally love it. I no longer feel like I'm trapped on a single place. Ralph, were you raising your hand to ask a question? Ooh, I can't wait. Yes. Things like language ecosystems along some are more difficult to carry different promises. How do you all assess those various ecosystems as we go forward? I'm gonna summarize that really quickly so many different language ecosystems have a different path onboarding into WebAssembly. How should we address that going forward? Something like that? They heard it, so. I'm Renee, you want it too? Yeah, I mean I think there's a little bit of a chicken and egg which we think about too because I think some language communities have believed in WebAssembly a little bit more but even as WebAssembly has picked up in the last two, three years I've seen more languages putting effort into support and I think this has been true for a lot of different things in the wasm ecosystem. For example, three years ago, nobody really wanted to work on wasm debugging because there were like no one's using wasm in production but now that people are, we're seeing better debugging solutions come out. So I think languages will be the same but also and I don't know this is true as fact but I see that the languages that work well with WebAssembly are becoming more and more popular. Like Rust's growth is obviously explosive. I don't think it's a coincidence that Rust compiles to WebAssembly and people love the language. So maybe this is like a little bit Machiavellian but if WebAssembly really takes off and the language doesn't compile to wasm easily maybe that language will slightly decline over time and those that do compile to wasm will be more successful. And we're very excited about Rust and Zig and some of the other ones. Michael? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think it's up to the language communities. They wanna see their language grow and WebAssembly is where they need to work with. So they need to put that effort in. And Java is the case in point and I'm not seeing, I mean, unfortunately I missed the keynote this morning so well but I'm not seeing a huge amount with Java at the moment. There is, I know there's work being done but I think they're a little bit behind the curve and they really need to keep pace because they'll suffer. And people have talked about the death of Java so many times and I always poo pooed it because Java, as you just said Alex, Java is a platform, it's not just a language and it does so many things but there's gonna be a pivot point when another language takes over and if Java doesn't catch up with WebAssembly it could be another language like Rust that begins to grow bigger so yeah. I'm pretty excited about the conspiracy theory that Rust is exploding because of WebAssembly. I'm into that but I also love the idea that that's a threat for other languages. But there's also Mozilla, right? It's true, it's true. Go ahead Alex. So Mozilla, you know, it's really behind Rust and also behind WebAssembly too in many ways. So I think there's that. One thing that I would note is that I mean if you look at units of efficiency, right? And how more efficient architectures have become over the past 30 years from mainframes to physical computers to virtualization to containers and now onto wasm and so if you look at that continuum and much to Matt's point which you pointed out which he talks a lot about like that continuum actually builds on top of things. We heard Justin this morning saying, Justin's a unicolonial fan and he's like wasm kind of reminds me of unicornals. Well wasm and unicorals remind me of micro virtualization which again speaks to those units of efficiency. So the question is what are these programming languages? How are these programming languages gonna be adapt to those units of efficiency, right? And so like Go is a great program language for the container ecosystem and worked well with containers. Now how we see and go kind of emerge when we see tiny Go but it's not, there's no kind of main way but that's just a little bit different, right? Then you just leverage and go itself. So that's gonna be my question is like, are we gonna start to see programming languages emerge for WebAssembly, right? And how will those existing programming languages continue to maintain and grow and those kind of factors that I look at. I'm gonna give a shout out to Grain right there for programming languages that are designed for WebAssembly, that's one of them. There are many others. Yeah, actually I was just gonna mention a few of them. Alex is over here citing his sources. Yeah, what were they? A few that actually Fermion talked about, there's assembly script, right? Which we know about, Grain. And another one, you know, Motoko and then we have Motoko which is built for internet computer interestingly enough. It's a type safe language that utilizes an actor model. I've heard that cited as an interesting kind of factor is the actor model and how important that could possibly be. I mean, Erlang is an actor model, correct? And so, but there's also Blazor and Python shows some of the biggest gains, you know, last year. So we're seeing a lot of, there's no question to me that the ecosystem story is building and programming languages about WebAssembly. No question. Yeah, actually I'm glad you mentioned Python because when AI and data science grew and Java wasn't really the appropriate language, it gave an opportunity to Python and Python just took off. But as you all know, Python is not a very performant language.  And I just wonder if Wasm can address AI and data science, that would be really interesting. So yeah. I would love to see that. Well, Michael, a second story, I think I'll probably speak to that. I mean, he's really, I mean, he's the one who kind of helped me open my thoughts like how in edge architectures could be like that bridge between ML and AI, isn't that right, Michael? And I mean, also shout out to the earlier talk today that Carl gave where he's running, you know, simple AI, but AI running inside the database. So you can do real-time analytics, imagine real-time AI and data science and all those different things. Python comes online, then you've got WebAssembly there running across the entire ecosystem and stack, which is what you all want. I have to say also I'm really happy to see Docker's pushing forward its commitment to WebAssembly. I just found Docker in those early days as such an inspiration for me to write about because they really believed in that developer experience.  I mean, that was kind of like the big goal there. And I mean, if that could be like a dream and kind of a passion for the WebAssembly community, that'd be great. I think that's kind of like when you hear someone, can you hear people talk about the interchangeability to be able to use multiple programming languages, that's a dream of the developer experience. And but there's a lot of skepticism about it because we've seen it before. But Docker helped, I think of anything, Docker showed that we can have that great developer experience.  So you mentioned how there's an ecosystem and the right tool for the right job. And I'm trying to get my head around wasm and container because a lot of people talk about wasm versus containers, but it's really coming to that point where you have to choose the right tool for the job. And if it makes sense to run wasm in a container, then that's the right thing to do. So you need that capability to give you that choice. That's really right. But on the counter to that Fastly and other companies, they're not running containers on the edge. Right. They're running while, right? And that gives the shape then to a whole different kind of perspective about cloud services overall. You must be loving this. I have liked what's happening. And yeah, at some point I'll tell the group my current investment ideas in wasm. So someone here can start. Oh, what are they? They're on those spaces. That's your secret, right? Are you gonna share the secrets also? Yeah, no, I'm happy to. I write about this on Twitter. Actually, the limiting factor right now for web assembly companies and startups is people who wanna go start web assembly companies. There's no shortage of ideas. And so the two places I'm most keen on making a new web assembly investment and I hope everyone here will take notes cause it's probably gonna be started by one of you is actually one is just on the client side piece. So I actually think server side has gotten a lot of attention and that's great and historically budgets are on the server but we haven't seen as many client side startups. And it's still non-trivial for developers to build a Figma-like app in the browser. And so if there were some easy framework to do that I would certainly be very interested. And then the second piece and Bailey this is related to your work at single store actually is just in the database. So that's both on the server side and on the client side. I think we're seeing so much interesting stuff with databases in the browser compiling to web assembly. That can make much more sophisticated applications in the front end. And then also things like DuckDB which are OLAP databases but still can be run in the browser. And then obviously the server side stuff has been talked about a lot today but a database that is sort of redone with wasm in mind and maybe that's transformations built in or machine learning but basically wasm modules literally running inside of the database and just thinking through what pain points that could solve. So those are the two areas that I'm currently most excited about. So client side and database? Large, yeah broadly client side and database largely. So because the wasm logic can run inside the database. That's right. And then what about the client side then? So a lot of like there's been work and I'm sure you've seen this of Postgres compiling the wasm in the browser and so I think that that type of work in the browser. And widgets, I'd love to see an abstraction that makes it really easy to create. You don't care about the intricacies of Android or an iPhone. You just want an abstraction that makes it really easy and that's what I mean by that end to end. So I'm waiting for that to appear. My hope for that is components. But so what I've heard now is that WebAssembly is likely to influence new programming languages that target directly and new databases. I find that extremely exciting idea. So kind of a different twist on the question that you're just prompted with which lines up with another one that we've gotten for our audience is that with the investments which have been made in container-centric systems over the years, what do you think the WebAssembly ecosystem needs to provide to be able to be competitive with containers? And I will say that we also can run side-by-side with containers given the talk today but let's say what makes wasm better. Go ahead. Well, hell, I mean, you've got microservices. That's the cloud native paradigm, right? So that's really taking over and that's gonna be the dominant paradigm. So wasm is always gonna be a little bit behind that. Cloud native is just sort of taking over that monolithic legacy. So we're gonna see that growth in cloud native that that's just gonna happen. And so yeah, you need to be able to compete with that world and just make it, born on the cloud, companies invented that paradigm before people started using the terminology of microservices and so on, Netflix, Twitter, you know, all of those cloud companies, they created that technology, they open sourced it and you're gonna need to compete with that but do you need to? This is what we said at the beginning that it's an ecosystem and it's the right tool for the right job and wasm has so much going for it in terms of performance in being able to be used on the edge, on the server, on the client side. So yeah, it's watched this space. If you get that end to end, I think you'll get a lot of developers moving to wasm simply because you'll be able to provide that abstraction and you're gonna reinvent what made Java applets in their days and visual basics so attractive and it was a huge, you know, it had its day and you'll get that mind share so that the opportunities are out there. You just have to have the right pieces in place so I'm hoping it'll happen. Renee? Yeah, I think that, I mean, we heard a lot about the component model this morning and obviously that's a big one that the wasm ecosystem is looking forward to but I think to really compete with Docker, the developer tool chain hasn't been done so it's not just about the Docker container itself, it's observability and there are container-centric observability companies. It's CICD, it's build tooling and there's this whole ecosystem that makes using containers very easy and I don't think there are necessarily equivalents yet for the wasm community. Certainly you can use some of the existing tool set for wasm, it's not gonna be totally new but generally when we see these paradigm shifts and I'd say wasm is one, there is a new tool chain that's built just for that. I'd say orchestration is another one that I think could be big for WebAssembly and so I think once those things come into place we'll see a much greater proliferation of WebAssembly. I was gonna quote a story from our editor and chief, Joe Jackson, who wrote about, actually it was related to Cosmonic and he writes that the current cloud native approach for running even minimal applications can be a chore to developers. Even a few hundred lines of simple business logic must be compiled and then packaged into a container and then scheduled on Kubernetes and so that's definitely a factor there that's scheduling and it speaks to the strength of Nomad in addition but it's hard to kind of talk about who's gonna win the war because there is no war. There's this perception of this conflict and you might see it as very real but in another dimension you could say that Docker in the container community have done a fantastic job of establishing of the open source standards, container D, OCI, right? Those are here to stay and they're gonna still remain very, very important so that's, but if you look at the lightweight capabilities and just the cost of setting up Kubernetes how much does it cost to set up a Kubernetes cluster? I mean it's like basically a network of servers, right? How much does each server cost to set up? A thousand bucks or something like that and do you have to keep those servers running all the time? Well, pretty much, right? At least some of them, you can't turn the container, you can't turn it off because the containers will go down and then it takes a long time to bring them back up, long time kind of relatively speaking, right? So, you know, so there's, so they're gonna be working together and there's no doubt about that. Don't forget about serverless because that's also part of the cloud native paradigm. But it's also part of the wasm story, right? Well, that's gonna be, yeah, exactly. But you always have to keep the containers running. Yeah, I mean, yeah, to keep them warm, you need at least one running. But you talked about war, but don't forget, we're in KubeCon, so it's not a war, you're right. That's not, well, it's not. Talking about other types of competition, there are also micro-VMs. You know, they are other things that let you, you know, run small, let's say is the goal because we can write software all day, we can talk about really cool academic things that we find really interesting and exciting and it has to solve problems to be real, but it also has to take into account costs and costs is something that we don't often talk about. But micro-VMs is one of those that it helps solve the cost vector. How do you see wasm working with micro-VMs or their paradigm and, you know, I guess, you know, a personal fear of mine is that, you know, unicolonial path and trajectory might look pretty similar to wasm, Renee? Yeah, I mean, I am personally very excited about micro-VMs as well and I've looked into the Firecracker project and I know that I believe micro-VMs are powering lambdas, right? You can fact-check me, okay. So I definitely think there's like a time and a place and certainly micro-VMs, again, have certain properties that make them appealing. I believe one of which is security, again, fact-check. But I still think that wasm alone has much more backing, much more funding, much more mind-share that I actually haven't seen as much competition from the micro-VM community yet. Very interesting. I mean, outside of the Firecracker folks who are all fabulous, I actually can't think of a really large project that is sort of thinking about micro-VMs. Obviously, Firecracker powers a lot of stuff but for WebAssembly, that's just not true and so it already seems like WebAssembly is the front-runner but a lot of people are very excited about micro-VMs and I know a lot of people feel like it's more of the near-term solution whereas WebAssembly is more maybe of the long-term one. Did Unicernals just get too cloaked in their early days because they were so important to the defense industry? And that's kind of one thing I think about like that history of Unicernals and how they were used really by the three-letter acronym organizations out there and the open source development of Unicernals wasn't as great. I know Justin Cormack and his key came out of a Unicernal world and so I think he has a great degree of interest in it but to me, Unicernals then became, micro-Virtualization became the new Unicernal and now you could argue that WebAssembly is the new micro-Virtualization and if you think about it, isn't Wasm at its core using virtualization as a portable in its portable capability? Yeah, Wasm is a portable VM. Well, Wasm is a W3C standard and I think that's really, really crucial. Yeah, yeah, it's a standard and I think that's gonna make all the difference. Yeah, an open standard is really like a contract between all the players to play along, right? And once we have that base, we can build so many incredible things on top of it and building the base is slow but I think it's so, so necessary to be successful so that is one key difference. I'm kinda curious, Renee, if you had to pick one thing, like what's the most important or valuable reason for why you invest in Wasm? I mean, we're in the business of massive, albeit potentially binary outcomes and so we are basically excited about things that could be $4 billion businesses or potentially less but the upside is really what gets us exciting and I don't think we've seen a new primitive since containers that has been as exciting as WebAssembly or has the potential to be as massive and I think that is just how technology typically goes. You typically have a big shift and maybe that's the shift of microservices or containers and then the solutions for the next five years tend to be a little bit more incremental and I don't, that's not a bad thing, like the tooling needs to come and then you have another big shift and then for the next five years you have more incremental solutions and so we were getting to a point three or four years ago where we would look around and ask each other and just say what's the next infrastructure primitive or what's the next big thing in infrastructure and we just couldn't figure that out and then when WebAssembly came along, we felt like wow, this really could be it. So it is for me really about a trend and a new way of working that's driven by edge computing, IoT, compute much closer to the user, data everywhere, that's where I feel like the market is going and WebAssembly is squarely in the middle of that and that to me feels, that's what's driving this massive wave. Here, here. Here, here. Yeah, I love that. I think that's right on. I think what Renee is talking about to me is like that shape that I was talking about earlier. I can see a shape now with WebAssembly kind of in terms of like edge architectures, right? More so than I ever could before and that's gonna change a lot, right? I mean, how many data centers are there in the world? There's, I mean, thousands, I don't know how many there are, right? But how much of the world really actually has access to really good internet and to be able to build developer platforms on top of things, not just a major cloud service, right? So that to me shows some promise of what's to come. Yeah, there's a lot of fragmentation on the edge and wasm could be that technology that sort of brings communities and vendors together around the standard. So yeah, that's a big opportunity. I mean, Alex has been here keeping us on the edge throughout the talk. I consider a phone an edge device. So I mean, it really is. And if we can get wasm running there, that means we've won, right? Yeah, sure. So I think that is most of the questions that we've gotten from the audience. I am sort of wondering from Michael, am I gonna see a wasm, forester wave, some new magic quadrant that I have to shoot for and talk about, what do you think? Well, right now I'm writing a serverless, we have our equivalent of the magic quadrant. We have the Omdia universe. I'm writing one now on the serverless services and Cosmonic is in that because you have a serverless solution. So yeah, watch this space. I'm looking very eagerly to see another opportunity to cover wasm, absolutely. Okay, I'm gonna stop there since you said what I wanted. No, I'm kidding. Watch the space is the note that I wanna end on and thank you to our panelists. You guys did an amazing job. It was a blast and I actually learned a lot. So thank you very much. Thanks very much. Thank you.