This is Kamla Bhatt. Today my guest is Tim O’Reilly, who is the founder and CEO of O’Reilly Media based in Sebastapol in Northern California. He also publishes O’Reilly Network and hosts conferences on technology topics. Tim is an activist for open source and open standard. Tim’s mantra is spreading technology change by capturing and transmitting the knowledge of “Alpha Geeks” and other innovators. Labeled as a trend spotter and technology evangelist Steven Levy famously described Tim as a scone baking publisher in a Wired magazine article. By his own admission, Tim loves making jams. Tim has a BA in classics from Harvard University.
His honors thesis explored the tension between mysticism and logic in Plato’s dialogue. Welcome to the show Tim.
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Tim: Hi! Glad to be with you.
Kamla: Before we talk about technology, I am very curious to know what was this tension that you explored between mysticism and logic?
Tim: One of the ideas that has really shaped my life is the idea that the experience of the people, who are first wrestling with a hard problem is very different than the experience of the people who come along later and are rehearsing and replaying that same experience. So in Plato there was a lot of discussion around the idea that there seem to be some kind of tension between the ideas of logic and then these mystical images that are associated with it. And you would see people making arguments and say this was the influence of Orphix or the incluence of the Pythagoreans. I said no, no this is what it was like when people were first thinking about these abstract concepts like justice. These had numenous power. I mean it was a mystical experience. Logic was mysticism then. Now it is dry. But it was not back then. And that was kind of talk that I gave today at the DevLearn conference. I tried to highlight that by showing the progression from the Wright Brothers and their joy and excitement of just invention and then the banality of Airport Security today with people with all their toothpaste in a plastic bag. It was not always banal, and that was really the point I was trying to make in my thesis. If you are rooted your thinking in human experience in how people actually work you would say Oh this is not a conflict. This is actually how those world changing ideas felt to the people who were first exploring.
Kamla: So switch to the 21st century, what is the tension you are trying to explore today?
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