Jethro JonesUSPoint it all at human flourishingLearn while the agent worksKill the frictionAI removed the implementation wallLinux on the desktop was a toy until OmarchyOmarchy revives old hardwareFilling the app gaps that kept people on MacIt feels like being a kid againMemory and context are the real productLocal vs frontier modelsCost-aware model routing, invented independentlyX is hard, sincerity is the answerSpreading the word by shippingTheme makersOmarchy as an accessibility toolbuilder/builders/jethro-jones/avatar.jpg
// builder #10 · interviewed Oct 14, 2026
Jethro Jones
Teacher, principal and AI coach from Spokane who came back to a machine he could shape with Omarchy, then shipped omamigrate, OmaPresent, tile manager and his own theme, runs a headless local AI box he calls the Beast, and points every bit of it at one goal: human flourishing.
first computerA K Pro with giant floppy discs, DOS, and a football game drawn in Xs and Os
omarchy since2025
rigOmarchy on a Beelink, plus the Beast, a headless 2 GPU local AI box he drives over SSH
found omarchyFollowed DHH from Basecamp, tried Omarchy on a 2014 Mac mini that macOS had left behind
modelsclaude, codex, local
ai workflowUse AI to learn and you build cognitive equity; use it to skip thinking and you build cognitive debt
// life timeline
A K Pro arrives at home: giant discs and a football game in Xs and Os
Bulletin board systems, then a GeoCities site in high school
The carputer: PCs built inside RC car bodies, hard disk lights wired to the headlights
2006Becomes an English teacher; a Bondi Blue iMac and the Unix terminal
2007Joins Twitter
2013Starts the Transformative Principal podcast; has not missed a week since
2020Leaves the principal's office to coach school leaders
2023His coaching turns to AI
2024An agent rebuilds his Jekyll site in a flash, a decade after he gave up
2025Back on linux: Omarchy on a 2014 Mac mini
2026Ships omamigrate, OmaPresent, tile manager and the Cougar Nation theme
2026Builder #10 on omarchy.builders
// 00
The rundown
Jethro Jones lives in Spokane, Washington, and he is a rock star. He showed up humble, smiling, and ready to share, and then he spent the next hour proving he belongs right in the middle of this crowd. Builder #10 came to play.
Here is what Nix found. A lifelong teacher who wired PCs into RC car bodies before anyone called it modding. A school principal who automated his front office with OCR and a Hazel rule. A podcaster who has not missed a week since 2013. A guy who had run linux before, spent 20 years on the Mac, then came home to Omarchy and, inside a year, shipped omamigrate, OmaPresent, a tile manager plugin and his own Omarchy theme. A builder with a headless local AI box humming in his basement that he calls the Beast.
And under every bit of it, one idea, said so plainly you could carve it over a door:
"all of our work as humans should point towards human flourishing"
That is the line. Read on and you will see he has been living it his whole life.
“all of our work as humans should point towards human flourishing”Jethro Jones · L435
// 01
Human flourishing, shipped
Most people say nice things about technology and humanity on a stage. Jethro puts it in his commit history. Every tool he builds starts with a person who is stuck and ends with that person freed up to do the thing only they can do.
He said it 3 ways when Nix asked for the message he wants people to hear. First: point the work at people, and aim at helping "humans live a more fulfilling, beneficial, wonderful life". Second: "all these AI things, they are a tool", and when they stop being useful, stop feeding them your attention. Third: "technology for technology's sake is not" the point. Instead: "We should be about the technology for what it enables us to do outside of ourselves".
Hold onto those 3. Every chapter below is one of them in action.
// 02
Xs and Os on giant discs
His first computer was what he remembers as a K Pro. It took huge discs, which he describes as "big solid plastic things" you shoved in and latched shut. It ran DOS. There was no Windows on it, and the best thing on it was a football game drawn entirely in Xs and Os, a few generations before Tecmo Bowl put real players on the field.
But the game was not the hook. The hook was control. "what I really loved was knowing that I could get something to do something for me."
Then came bulletin board systems. "then I could learn whatever I wanted to." In high school he built a GeoCities site. That is the same spark James Tervit felt running a BBS in Glasgow, and the same one that brought half this site to linux decades later.
// 03
The carputer
Here is a story that should be on a poster in every maker space on Earth. After college, Jethro started building computers inside RC car bodies. A Ferrari F40. A Porsche 911. He wired the car's lights to the PC, so every time the hard drive spun up, the headlights flashed.
"we called it the carputer"
Nix called it "so far ahead of your time", and it was. Full size components in a tiny shell ran hot and broke, and it took more time than anyone would ever pay for, so it stayed a passion project. Today, he points out, you could slide a Mac mini in there and go to town. The instinct never left. Make the machine look like you. Make it do what you want. That is exactly the itch Omarchy scratches, and it is why Todd Vasquez rices themes until they glow.
// 04
Real work that matters
In 2006 Jethro became an English teacher, and an old Bondi Blue iMac landed on his desk. "This is so much better than Windows", he thought, and the Mac reintroduced him to the terminal and its Unix commands.
Then he did something his colleagues thought was wild. He rescued a stack of old eMacs the school was throwing out, carried them into his classroom, and had his students start blogging. People told him you can't put kids online. He gave every kid a pseudonym and kept going, because "the important thing is that they are writing for an audience."
That became the thread of his whole life. "how do we get kids to do real, meaningful work that actually matters." As a teacher. As a district leader who sold the idea that "IT and curriculum shouldn't be two separate things." As a principal.
He brought clickers into class so a weekly test could be graded instantly. "3 minutes later, the kids would know if they were going to intervention or to, uh, enrichment". Low stakes. Instant help for the kid who needed it.
// 05
Kill the friction
Then the principal years, and the best automation story on this site so far.
Students on behavior trackers kept "losing" them on the way to the car. So Jethro printed each student number on the tracker. Kids scanned it at the office as their last check in. OCR read the number. Then, in his words, "to get real nerdy here is, I had a Hazel rule". Hazel, the Mac automation app, spotted the student number, filed the PDF in that student's folder and emailed it to the parent. By the time the kid reached the car, the parent already had the day's tracker on their phone.
Nix saw it instantly: Jethro had been automating and consulting his whole life without a name for it. Jethro agreed. The goal was always to take the tedious part away so the human part gets the time. "I've always been looking at ways to get rid of the friction". And what is the human part? "human relationships and helping humans flourish".
Tech lesson: this is the same pattern every agent workflow uses today. A trigger (a new file), a check (does it contain a student number), and an action (file it, send it). Hazel did it with rules. On Omarchy you can do it with a small script watched by a systemd path unit, or just ask an agent to write one. Trigger, check, act. Learn that shape once and you can automate anything.
// 06
Every person is a gift
Ask Jethro why he cares so much about the kid who doesn't fit the system, and he will tell you about the 5% who fail a test and walk away thinking they are dumb. "they feel like they're dumb, and they're not". School is not built for every brain. And then, as part of the same thought, he mentioned that his oldest daughter has Down syndrome, that school is not designed for her either, and that "she has a lot of great gifts".
That is not a side note in his story. It is the engine. "every single person is a blessing and a gift", he said, and what he wants is to help each person find "happiness and fulfillment in life". He told Nix he talks about his daughter a lot, and that "she actually loves it when I talk about her". Here, she gets the light touch she deserves: the reason her dad builds the way he does.
// 07
A decade of waiting, solved in a flash
In 2013 Jethro wanted a simple thing: a website that was just a folder of Markdown files. He fought it for weeks, gave up and went to Squarespace for about 10 years.
Then, around April 2024, he pointed an agent at his Jekyll site. All the Stack Overflow threads that never fit his setup were suddenly beside the point. The agent read his code base, saw what he was trying to do and had it running. It was what he had wanted "for literally a decade", and it changed how he sees himself.
"I just feel unstoppable now". And then the line that every non developer on this site would sign: "anything I can think about, I can just do it."
That is the same wall Lee Shand, David and Michael Hurley watched fall. Decades of ideas, and suddenly the implementation is not the hard part anymore.
// 08
Cognitive equity
This is where the teacher shows up, and where this story gets smart. Jethro recently finished his doctorate in educational leadership. His dissertation looked at how people who use AI to innovate build what he calls cognitive equity, and people who use it only to dodge thinking build cognitive debt. He pointed to a 2025 paper where people who let AI write their essays could barely remember them.
His own experience runs the other way. "the amount that I've learned in the last 3 years from using AI is incredible". The trick is to watch. He learned to list files with ls and the la flags because he saw his agent run it over and over, then tried it himself. The same thing happened with DHH's shortcuts: he saw CX open Claude in Omarchy and went to learn how to make his own.
Tech lesson: ls lists a folder. The l flag gives the long view with permissions, owner, size and date. The a flag shows hidden dotfiles, which is where your Omarchy configs live under .config. Make it permanent with a shell alias in your bashrc, so ll means ls with la every time. That is cognitive equity in 1 line: you watched, you learned, you own it now. Parker Brown had the exact same ls moment when he first opened a terminal in 2006. Some lessons are universal.
// 09
A 2014 Mac mini and nothing to lose
Jethro has used Basecamp for nearly 20 years, so when DHH started talking about linux, he listened. linux was not new to him. He had run it before. What was new was a linux desktop built to be shaped, fast, and ready for real work on day 1. He had an old Mac mini from 2014 that macOS had stopped updating. Slow, stuck, done. "what have I got to lose", he figured. He put Omarchy on it.
"Well, that was actually pretty easy". Then: "this is actually quite nice". Then he did what DHH had recommended on X and bought a Beelink mini PC for a fresh install on modern hardware. "Man, this is really nice".
After 20 years on the Mac, he could finally shape his machine again. Notice the word he used: go back. "I can go back to fully customizing my machine exactly how I want it to be." He still loves macOS for daily work. But he names the difference precisely: "it's different when the system is designed to be malleable". And he has watched Omarchy grow up fast. "Omarchy 4 is just heads and above better".
Old hardware as the on ramp, then a real machine once you are hooked. James Tervit did it on a 2017 MacBook Pro. Jethro did it on a 2014 Mac mini.
// 10
The Beast
Now the hardware flex, and it is a good one. Jethro runs a separate local AI machine with 2 RTX 3060 cards, 12 GB each. He calls it the Beast. It runs Omarchy, it pushes about 50 tokens per second on a local model, and "it's just rocking and rolling."
How did a self described non developer set it up? Brilliantly. "I used my Frontier model to tell my computer how to set it up so that it would work." A Claude session on that machine has run for weeks. He told it what he wanted, including video and images, and it built him a dashboard to pick the model and handle switching safely, because a bad swap can freeze the whole box.
Now the Beast runs headless. No monitor, no keyboard. "everything else I'm just doing through SSH, through the terminal". It had not been restarted in over a week when he told the story.
Tech lesson: 2 smaller GPUs can split one model between them, so 24 GB across 2 cards can hold a model neither card fits alone. Let the frontier model do the setup, since it knows the drivers and runtimes, and let the local model do the daily work. Then go headless and SSH in. It is the exact path Nix keeps asking builders to teach him.
// 11
OmaPresent and friends
A few weeks before the call, Jethro was building a talk in a slide app that kept shrinking his text as he added more. He hated it. So he made his own.
OmaPresent is a Markdown only presentation app for Omarchy. Open any Markdown file and it is already a deck. And instead of shrinking your words, "it actually expands the vertical length so you can scroll through." A slide can be 16 wide and 72 tall if your content needs it.
"I never really thought I could just design my own, uh, presentation software", he said. Now his Omarchy box is his playground for client ideas.
And OmaPresent is not alone. Look at what this guy has shipped on GitHub:
omamigrate moves your whole Omarchy from one machine to the next. One bundle carries your configs, themes, shell, terminal, editor and agent setups, with a dashboard. Built by a guy who just did the Mac mini to Beelink move himself.
tile manager is an Omarchy bar plugin that names your workspaces, parks apps where they belong and jumps to them when you launch one.
Cougar Nation is his dark Omarchy 4 theme with blue accents and 10 wallpapers.
hermes jev agent is an explainable model router for Hermes Agent. Before each answer it shows a route card saying whether it picked a cheap, balanced or frontier model, and why. That is cost aware routing you can actually see, the same idea Yasir Malik arrived at on his own.
autoalt lives by one sentence: every image on the internet should have an alt description. It writes them automatically. Accessibility, shipped.
And there is a fun thread to Nix himself: Jethro forked blip, Nix's plugin that puts iMessage in the Omarchy bar. Builder #10 runs the host's code.
That is what Martin and Michael Hurley mean when they say the community is filling in the Mac reasons one app at a time.
// 12
The driving school agent
Here is human flourishing as a running process. On his Omarchy Beelink, Jethro runs Hermes and OpenClaw agents with a profile for each small business he helps through Optimization Doc. One client runs a driving school. The owner has taught driving for 25 years and wants to do exactly 1 thing: teach kids to drive.
The admin was killing him. So Jethro gave him an agent that knows the business. When a text comes in saying a student needs the class link, Jethro pastes it to the Omarchy box through Telegram, and "it just sends the link to the student just like that". Without that help, Jethro says, this man would not keep the business, and he is "probably the best guy in the whole state to teach kids how to drive."
Now he gets to teach "without being bogged down by all the administrivia". That is the Hazel rule again, years later, with an agent in place of a script. Same shape. Same why.
This is the heart of Optimization Doc: practical AI and workflow help for small businesses, starting right at home in Spokane. If you run a business and the busywork is eating your best hours, he is the guy to talk to.
// 13
It doesn't have to be that way anymore
Nix asked what we will build in 6 months that we can't today. Jethro's bet: phones that are as personal as Omarchy made the laptop. "I think that that same thing is going to come to the phones also." He loves good Apple hardware, but he wants to make it his own. He is already hacking digital picture frames on the shelf behind him.
His summary is the optimist's creed: "It doesn't have to be that way anymore." And when Nix said "we can fix everything", Jethro answered: "I like that idea and that optimism".
// 14
X is the place to connect
Plenty of builders on this site feel invisible on X. Jethro sees it the other way. "I see X as the opposite, as it is the place to connect." He joined in 2007. In 2013 he started the Transformative Principal podcast, so sure nobody would say yes that he split his first conversations into 2 episodes to buy time. 13 years later, "I still have not missed a week". Today that show anchors the BE Podcast Network.
And he feels the old magic coming back. "Twitter feels like that again." He sees "a ton of positivity and enthusiasm and people willing to share and explain what they're doing". About Omarchy's crowd, he said DHH has "brought out people who are curious, who are helpful".
He walks the talk. "everybody that you've put on there, I have followed on X right away". That is Tunde's Omarchy London energy, online. Show up, follow the next builder, pull them in.
He even uses tools to stay present with people. He records calls locally with Quill and feeds them into his AI brain vault, so he never has to scribble notes. "I'm so much more present when I know that that's going." Memory as the product, just like Lee Shand's system: let the machine remember so the human can listen.
// 15
The 3 things
So here is Jethro Jones, builder #10. Teacher. Principal. Podcaster. Doctor of educational leadership. linux returnee who ships Omarchy apps like he was born to. Owner of a headless Beast. Friend of the driving instructor and the kid who failed the test.
Point the work at people. Treat AI as a tool, no more. Use tech for what it lets you do outside yourself. He said it best, and it is the reason this site exists:
"all of our work as humans should point towards human flourishing"
Jethro, you are a rock star. Thank you for bringing all of it.
L7Jethro: Wait, I must look like my profile picture, 'cause I don't think I've ever met you before.
L8Nix: No, I don't think so either. You're straight from Hollywood. I'm usually not all— I'm usually not all dressed up.
L9[redacted: private, lines 9 to 41]
L42Nix: Yeah, so, hey, man, you're number 10, uh, of the meetings that I've had, so I've kind of got it down to a script. Uh, not that, like, I'm processing you, but I want you to know, like, have you seen omarchy.builders?
L47Jethro: I'm— I'm honored to even be in the conversation.
L48Nix: You're killing me, man. Um, dude, okay, first things first. Uh, you verbally say that you're okay with me recording this and putting your information on Omarchy Builders.
L60Nix: Wispr Flow recording the conversation. As soon as I hang up, it quits. It— it trans— creates the transcript.
L61Nix: Larry is a AI that I have that I've had since January 8th at 2:00 AM. He automatically hits— he automatically hits a hook.
L62Nix: He goes through the MCP to Wispr Flow, pulls down your conversation, reads it all, creates it into the Omarchy Builders site, uses Cloudflare and GitHub to summarize and put the conversation on there, and, uh, follows the rules that you have, creates the— the X post, puts it on my clipboard, including the graphic. And so when I— when we hang up, it'll just happen.
L67Jethro: —to, uh, to do that part of that stuff locally. And what— what I have happen is it takes the recording from our conversation and then adds it to my AI brain vault so that I can go back and reference it later.
L69Jethro: And, dude, that has been a total game-changer for my— for my work that I'm doing. But the cool thing is, is that I'm so much more present when I know that that's going.
L71Jethro: And then I don't have to— yeah, I don't have to worry about taking notes, 'cause I know the transcript's going to be there and it's going to work out, and it's— it's awesome.
L72[redacted: private, lines 72 to 85]
L86Jethro: Yeah, I appreciate that. So I have a machine with two, uh, uh, 3060s that have, uh, 12 gigs of RAM each, and they're like— they're old, but I'm getting, like, uh, 50 or so tokens per second on a local model between those two, so I— and I hear the 5070 is even— is even better and could probably do it also, so.
L89Nix: How do I— how do I learn? Like, I'm— so I know that local AI is the future, and I talked— I don't know if you saw the Omarchy stories. I talked about it.
L90Nix: It just got released today, the— that blog that Basti does.
L95Jethro: Yeah, for sure. And I— I also believe that it's the future. And what I did is I used my Frontier model to tell my computer how to set it up so that it would work.
L99Jethro: So I— yeah. That— that's all there is to it. So I just have.
L100[redacted: echo]
L101Jethro: On that same machine, I have a, uh, a, a Claude, uh, conversation that's just been going on for a couple weeks now, and I just say, "Here's what I'm experiencing. I want to be able to do video and images."
L105Jethro: And switch it so that, um, 'cause sometimes when you try to switch models on the local machine, if you don't do it right, then it just freezes up and it won't— it— nothing will work. And so, you know, with that, I just— that machine's running Omarchy. The— I call it the Beast.
L106Jethro: I call it Beast, and it's this big, giant computer that has two GPUs in it, and it's just rocking and rolling.
L118Jethro: So I initially, like, reached out to him just out of the blue and said, "Hey, man, I know this might sound a little crazy, and X is not really the place where people actually, like, meet, and I kind of want to change that a little bit, because the old guard in Linux was like, 'I'm smarter than you and I can do better than you, but I'm not going to tell you how to do it.'" Yeah.
L119[redacted: private, lines 119 to 121]
L122Nix: And then this guy James over in Singapore jumped in on the conversation, and then it hit me, and I said, "I was posting, uh, on X and saying, 'Hey, if you want to talk to me by Zoom, like, hit me up.'" And it got really, like, "I can meet this time, but I can't meet that time," and it was too hard to manage.
L125Nix: I just said, "I'm going to put a calendar up there, and, like, people can sign up, and, like, if 3 people do it, that'd be cool." Posted it at 1:00 AM on Monday morning. I woke up at 6:00 AM, and I had over 30 invites, and my dumb— my dumb self did not limit, like, I just said, "During the weekday, uh, business day, you can sign up."
L126Nix: Uh, that afternoon, from 11:00 to 6:00, Tuesday, from 8:00 to, like, I think you're on number 10. And you'd be surprised.
L131Nix: And I always send them a— I send them an email and say, "Hey, I'm sorry it didn't work out. I'm— I'm sorry that I missed you. Like, put it on me."
L134Nix: But they do have to go to the— 'cause they'll always go, "Oh, I forgot," and they're like, "Can we just— can I— like, let's just reschedule now," and I'm like, "Uh, sorry, like, you got to, unfortunately, hit the back of the line, because I can't keep—"
L136Nix: So, uh, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and what day is it? Wednesday. You're— you're the— like, you're not the last in priority, but I've had, like, and so I went on calendar and finally limited it to 2 a day.
L140Nix: You want to talk. And that's not— that's not, like, I don't— it's— it's not like I want you to think, like, I'm egotist and that people— like, I think that there's a hunger there to talk about this stuff.
L141Jethro: Well, here's the thing, dude. I— I see X as the opposite, as it is the place to connect. So I joined it in 2007, and.
L143Jethro: Yeah, so I've been on there a long time, and I started a podcast in 2013 called Transformative Principal and had not the exact same experience as you, but very similar, where I didn't realize that I would— like, when I first did that podcast, I split the interview up into 2 episodes, 'cause I thought nobody else would ever say yes, and I needed to give myself time to go, like, beg people to be on the show. But the crazy thing is, is that it's 13 years later, and
L144Jethro: I still have not missed a week of— of creating that podcast. And, like, the— the thing that is so wild is that so many of those connections came from Twitter back in the olden days.
L148Jethro: Or X feels like that again, and I feel like I am building relationships with all these people online, and— and it's really cool because it— it's so much fun to be excited about things. And for a while, X was just this, you know, gross place that not a lot of good things were happening unless you really looked for it. And now, I feel like there's a ton of positivity and enthusiasm and people willing to share and explain what they're doing, and— and it's just— it's a lot
L150Nix: And there's not this elitism, like, "I know more than you, and I'm going to hold my information back." Like, the— did you see about a month ago the, like, the dust up about the Arch Linux cadre that's mad about Omarchy and all that stuff?
L151Jethro: I— I saw a little, but I— I just don't follow that much, uh, 'cause I just don't understand what's going on.
L152Nix: Right. So Arch Linux, if you've installed it, you literally have to build everything. Like, there's no installer.
L154Nix: And so it became this, like, group of people that were, you know, Lin— if you go to Kroger and ask the person in the line at the register, "Do they know what Linux is?" nobody's going to know what it is.
L156Nix: So it became this, like, super, like, uh, aggressive, like, competitive, "I know it better than you do," and it's so ironic, and I don't even know if DHH did this on purpose, but it's ironic that Omarchy, the opinionated part, landed on Arch, which is the complete opposite of opinionated.
L158Nix: And so the— the Arch crew, you know, a couple thousand of the Reddit guys and the guy— they are so mad, and they're like, "You can't use Arch like that. It's just .files and all that stuff." And so DHH comes back with, like, "Love you, brother.
L159Nix: Like, join us." And I talk about in the podcast that I really wish— I really wish that the Arch kids would do two— one of two things: get on board and love it, or, you know, with technology growing the way it is, the whole idea of AI and Omarchy is lowering, lowering, lowering the technical barriers to be able to use things, right?
L161Nix: So you'll see AI getting easier, and Omarchy is a bridge for people that have only ever used Windows or Mac to be able to come over to Linux. And so what I wish the— the— the Arch kids would learn is that the hardness of using it is now gone away, which they're attached— their ego to it, so it frees them up to go attack the next advanced thing that, like, I can't do. So if— it's almost like a— I don't want to be a jerk, but I
L162Nix: almost want to say, "If you really are that smart, then go attack the next thing that's hard, because this part's been made easy."
L163Jethro: Yeah, totally. Well, you know, the— with the AI stuff, I— in 2013, I wanted my website to be, uh, basically be a bunch of, uh, Markdown files that I could just upload, and, um, and I couldn't get it to work, and I gave up, and I tried for a couple weeks and couldn't make it happen, and then I finally just said, "All right, I can't do this. I'm just going to use Squarespace."
L164Jethro: And then I used Squarespace for about 10 years, and then right around, like, April '24, I think, something like that, um, I started using, uh, an agent to help me redo my Jekyll website, and it was, like— it was amazing, because all these things that I couldn't figure out how to do, I would, like, go search on Stack Overflow and search these forums to find out how to make this happen, and then I couldn't get it to work in my situation. And then I used an agent,
L165Jethro: and it was like, "Oh, I see your code base. I see everything you're trying to do. Here's what needs to happen," and then just like that, it was up and running.
L166Jethro: And I was like, "this is what I've wanted for literally a decade," and I— I just didn't have the capacity to do that myself. And it was— it was so cool to finally be able to do it, and with the help of an— of an AI system, and, I mean, I— I just— I just feel unstoppable now, because I can— anything I can think about, I can just do it.
L174Nix: The— the overall— even the advanced folks, people have not figured out what you've already figured out, Jethro, and that is, you don't have to know what you're doing. The only two things you have to be able to do are say what you want and say what— say what you want and then tell it if it's right or not. That's it.
L182Nix: Okay. For the record, can you enunciate so that my transcription will pick up all of the URLs that you want to be included in your profile? Your podcast, your homepage.
L184Nix: Everything that you want to promote, go ahead and say them now.
L185Jethro: All right. jethrojones.com and bepodcast.network, that's my podcasting stuff, and then optimizationdoc.com is my, uh, my AI help support, uh, that's my AI business, my AI consulting business.
L187Jethro: So that's— that's probably good enough.
L188Nix: Okay, so Larry, validate that you've got the right URL before posting anything. Okay, so this became— I talked to Lee, I talked to James, I put it on calendar, it became a thing. Uh, Larry actually suggested that— he said, uh, omarchy.builders is available, which is cool for me, 'cause I didn't even know there was— I always knew .com, .org, .
L192Jethro: So, um, you know, it— I don't even opt— I don't even work on the site. Can you tell me a little bit about, um, so I'm going to give you an arc and some— some meat to talk about, and I'm going to shut up, I promise, and let you talk, 'cause I want to learn more about it.
L196Jethro: Like, Quake for some people, and the Pentium was, like, a big jump. Um, so then, like, take it all the way, and then the final part, and please mix in, like, personal stories that you're willing to share.
L197Jethro: Um, the— the— the end goal of it is to say all those pieces in about 60%, and then the last 40%, um, being like, how you work with Omarchy, how you found it, what it does for you, why you like it, what's different about it. And then I really, really would like you to weave in your AI consulting such that people know that they can work with you to get smarter.
L200Nix: And I'll prompt you on the way, but I'm going to mostly listen, I promise.
L201Jethro: Yeah, and feel free to interrupt if there's something that, uh, like, I hint at a story and you're like, "Oh, tell us more about that," so.
L203Jethro: Uh, so I— my first computer was a K Pro, and I don't even remember what the rest of it was, but it had these big 8x10 discs that you shove in, and then you close the little thing, like floppy discs and, like, the 5.25-inch discs, but even bigger. So 8x10, big solid plastic things, and.
L205Jethro: Uh, it had to be tiny. I have no idea. Uh, I was— [redacted] got this computer, and, um, and he brought it home, and we were all really excited, 'cause we had never had a computer before, uh, obviously.
L206Jethro: And what was so cool was that there was this game on there, and you had to put the whole entire big, big thing into the drive, uh, to play this game, and it was this football game, and it was Xs and Os like, like, uh, like Tecmobile, but, like, 3 versions before that, right? So then when Tecmobile came out, it was pretty cool, 'cause there were actual players and not just Xs and Os playing against each other.
L207Jethro: And so that was my first exposure, and it— it ran on DOS, and so it didn't have, um, Windows wasn't even invented yet, and, uh, I mean, Windows was, but it wasn't on our— on our computer. So, uh, my first Windows was Windows 3.1, and then, uh, Windows 95 and— and all that, but what I— what I really loved was knowing that I could get something to do something for me.
L208Jethro: And at first, I just loved playing games on the computer, but then when bulletin board systems came out and I learned how to connect with other systems, then I was like, "Wow, this is really cool," and then I could learn whatever I wanted to. In high school, I made a GeoCities website and thought that was really cool, and then started chatting with people.
L209Jethro: Chatted with someone who was a girl in Australia, which probably was not, and I just didn't understand at that time. Um, and then, uh, went to college, and then I started to, uh, [redacted] we were like, uh, we should build some cool computers.
L210Jethro: And so we started building these computers that we would put a re— uh, an RC car body on top of. So you would have a computer that was in the shape of, like, a Ferrari F40 or a Porsche 911, and the lights would connect to the— the lights on the car, so they would light up that way, so when there was hard disk activity, then the lights would flash and— and that kind of stuff.
L212Jethro: So far ahead of your time. Oh, I know, and, like, now, getting, uh, a whole computer in this tiny little shape, our— the reason why we didn't pursue that was because it was too hard to keep things working in that small of an environment with full-size computer components, and now, like, you could put a Mac mini inside one of those and— and go to town.
L213Nix: And you didn't have the ability to look up, like, there was no internet, so you couldn't, like, see what other people were doing. This was 100% you.
L214Jethro: Yeah, and— and it was really cool, and the— the cars looked awesome, the— we called it the carputer, and it looked awesome, but it just was— it was too difficult to— to do, and— and it took way too much time and energy that nobody would be able to pay for— for that kind of a thing. So, um, so that's how deep I went in the— in the hardware stuff, and then, uh, in 2006, I became a schoolteacher, and I taught English, and it was my first exposure
L215Jethro: to using a Mac computer, and it was an old BondiBlue iMac that was on my desk. And immediately, I was like, "This is so much better than Windows that I'd been using for years previous to that," and I was reacquainted with, uh, the terminal and the Unix commands that exist there, and I'm not a— a developer, I don't understand a ton of it, but doing, uh, some customization with that Mac, that was so much easier and better and faster than, uh, with the Windows machine that I
L216Jethro: had, was really great. And so I took a bunch of old Emacs that my school was going to get rid of, and I brought them into the classroom, and I had kids start blogging, and that was, like, a thing that people were like.
L218Jethro: Yeah, you— one, you can't do that, and two, uh, how can you put kids online like this and— and all this stuff, and I was like, "Well, uh, the kids all have pseudonyms, so, like, we don't need to worry about that," and— and the important thing is that they are writing for an audience. And so as a schoolteacher and then a school leader, that became really important to me, is how do we get kids to do real, meaningful work that actually matters. And that's, like, a thread
L219Jethro: that keeps coming up all throughout my life. Started with me doing something that matters on the computers at home, and then later, as a teacher, getting my kids to do something real, and then as a principal, doing the same thing. So— so anyway, I used, uh, Mac mainly from 2006 until, uh, last year when, uh, DHH released, uh, Omarchy, and I was like, uh, this— this is awesome, because I can go back to fully customizing my machine exactly how I want it to
L220Jethro: be. And, uh, Omarchy 3 was not really, uh, nearly as good as Omarchy 4 is, and.
L222Jethro: Omarchy 4 is just heads and above better, and I'm— I'm excited for where it goes, because I think it's just going to continue to get better and better and be exactly what we want it— what we, as an individual user, want it to be. So during that time of 2006 to 2026, uh, I was using Mac computers, and I was, you know, creating websites, doing side projects, and always fiddling with things and teaching other people how to use technology. And so as a teacher, I started teaching
L223Jethro: my other teachers how to use technology better, and so one of the things we did is we had this, uh, we had this test that we would give kids every single week, and it was a different test each week, but we used that to see if kids were actually learning. And it— it was always a pain to grade because it took so long and so much energy to grade all these kids, um.
L225Jethro: Tests, and so we used these little clickers so that kids could do basically multiple choice questions, and we could just, uh, get the answers instantaneously, which we had never really been able to do.
L229Jethro: Yeah, and— and so, like, it was— it made total sense to me, but it was something that nobody had ever thought of or tried to do really before. But, like, we would take— we would give the test, and 3 minutes later, the kids would know if they were going to intervention or to, uh, enrichment, and— and it was great because it took so much pressure off, 'cause it wasn't high stakes. It was like, "Okay, do you get this or not?
L230Jethro: And if you don't get it, let's do something to help you figure out how to do it." And so, you know, I was teaching, uh, teaching teachers how to use technology, I was bringing technology into the classroom, then when I became, uh, after being a teacher, I was at the district level, and I was in the IT department at first, and then I went to the curriculum department, and my main selling point in going to the curriculum department was, "IT and curriculum shouldn't be two separate things.
L231Jethro: They should be the— the same thing, because that's the future, is everybody's going to have access to technology, and it shouldn't be this thing that you bolt on at the end," which is how we were currently thinking of it. And so after I was there, then I became a school principal, and I was figuring out ways to improve things, and so, like, there's this theme of just constantly fiddling around and trying to make things work for me, and one of the things that— that worked really well
L232Jethro: as a principal was, uh, we had a— a lot of students with behavior issues, and we put them on trackers to, like, help them know how they were doing each day through all their— all their stuff, and these kids would get out to the car, and their parents would be like, "Where's your tracker?" and they're like, "Oh, I don't know, I lost it," and sometimes the kids don't want to tell their parents because they don't want their parents to see how poor they did, but also sometimes
L233Jethro: kids don't want to tell their parents because they don't want their parents to know how good they did, 'cause they get some sort of satisfaction from being the punk kid that's causing trouble and getting attention at school. And so to eliminate that, what we did is we typed— we put their student number in— on the page of their tracker, and then when they came to the office, they scanned it as their final check-in of the day, and we would use OCR to read that thing, and
L234Jethro: to get real nerdy here is, I had a Hazel rule, Hazel's an automation software on the Mac, that when it saw a document come through with that student number, it would, uh, file it in the student's folder, and then it would send that PDF to the parent in an email, so that when the parent was in the— in the car waiting for the kid to come out, they would get an email and it would say, "Here's your student's tracker for the day," and they would have that
L236Nix: So you've been— you've been automating and consulting without even knowing what that word was for your whole life.
L237Jethro: Exactly, that— that was my whole point, is I'm trying to figure out how to take those parts of our job that are frustrating and difficult and annoying and tedious, how do we make it so that those things just get gone, and— and we don't have to stress about them, because it's not something that you need a high level of intelligence to— to do, you don't need a high level of intelligence to see a student's thing and then forward it to the parent, like, that's pretty simple. And
L238Jethro: so how do I take that stuff that needs to be done is beneficial to be done, but is a drag on what I'm doing in my day-to-day work?
L240Jethro: And so I've— yeah, I've always been looking at ways to get rid of the friction, how do I make it easier for me to do the things that I think are really important in my work. And as a— as a school principal, the thing that's really important in my work is building relationships and helping individuals grow, and, like, bringing that to today, that's still the most important thing, human relationships and helping humans flourish, individually, not as a whole group, but individually, and that's really what I— I
L241Jethro: focus on, and that's been a through line throughout everything.
L243Jethro: Those— those tests that we gave, the point was so that each student could know immediately whether they needed help or not, and if they did, they could get that. And so the problem with— in schools where, you know, you take this test and it says, like, 95% of the kids are proficient, well, the reality is those 5% of the kids who aren't proficient, they feel like they're dumb, and they're not, but in that current system, they are. So how can we find ways to help them improve
L244Jethro: and— and feel like they have the confidence to go forward and be successful in their own life?
L245Nix: So did you— do you find that those 5% of students that tested poorly are the ones that are really doing well in life now?
L246Jethro: Uh, you know, sometimes they are, sometimes they're not, and— and the thing is, is that for some kids, school's just really hard, and— and they just need to get through school, and then life's going to be fine. And, yeah, especially kids with, like, ADHD or Asperger's or something, like, they just need to get through that struggle and then find a career and a workplace where they can flourish in their own right, and school's not set up for those kids either.
L248Jethro: It's, like, the worst possible place for them because it— it goes against everything that they're naturally good at, but they're by no means stupid. And as, like, a little side note, an important co— uh, comment here is that my oldest daughter has Down syndrome, and so school's not exactly designed for her either, but she has a lot of great gifts that I want every person to have their gifts be able to be shown and flourish in their life.
L249[redacted: private, lines 249 to 252]
L253Jethro: And here's the point, every single person is a blessing and a gift, and— and so no matter what the challenges are, no matter what the struggles are, everybody has something that makes them unique and worthwhile and— and valuable, and what I want to be able to do is help each one of those people succeed and— and find happiness and fulfillment in life, and that, honestly, is really important to me as a human being.
L254Nix: Man, the— your sincerity is— your oo— you ooze— ooze sincerity. I believe you.
L255Jethro: I appreciate that, 'cause that— that is the truth, and, like, all this stuff that— that we're talking about is rooted in that, and that's what I think is so important when it comes to technology. A lot of people worry about AI and what it's going to do to our world and all that kind of stuff, and in my mind, if we can use this amazing tool in a productive, powerful, meaningful way, then we are going to further unlock human flourishing, which— which is going to be amazing
L256Jethro: for everybody who's— who's involved in it. However, if we use it for ill intent or for bad things, then we're going to damage ourselves and others, and so I just, uh, finished my doctorate in educational leadership, and my thank you, and my, uh, dissertation was on how people who use AI for innovation, uh, create what I call cognitive equity, and people who use, uh, AI just to, um, do, like, just as a search engine or do menial things, um, that they create cognitive debt or, uh, yeah,
L257Jethro: cognitive debt, excuse me. There was a paper in 2025 about how they gave people, uh, essays to write, and you could use AI or not, and those who used AI basically couldn't remember anything from the papers, obviously.
L259Jethro: But, yeah, but the point is, is that in that situation, that makes total sense, but the amount that I've learned in the last 3 years from using AI is incredible, and it's unfathomable that I could learn this much in such a short amount of time, but that's because I've been using it to help myself learn. That doesn't mean that I'm using it as a teacher, but that I'm learning things by asking it to do things that I don't know how to do and then seeing how it's
L260Jethro: doing it and learning about that in the process. And so here's a really dumb, simple thing, like, listing the files in a folder, ls space dash la, I never knew how to do that before, and I would just watch as the AI was doing things, and I'd see that come up, and so I was like, "Well, I should try that and see what it— what it actually does," and then I could do that in the terminal and say, "Oh, I get it, I know how to— how
L262Nix: Right, and the next step is to make an alias, so ls alias is to ls dash la.
L263Jethro: Yes, which I haven't learned how to do, but I know that that's a possibility, and I watched DHH's video about, uh, about using, uh, uh, using Omarchy, and he said, "To open, uh, Claude, I just do CX," and I was like, "Oh, I need to learn how to make that shortcut so that I can figure it out," which I— which I haven't done yet, um, for other things, but there are commands that I often type.
L269Jethro: Well, and I asked him on X, I said, "Why did you do CX for Claude and CY for Codex?" Because you should have done CX for Codex, because it's CX and they're both in there, and so I have to, like, go through this little thought process.
L271Jethro: Every time to make sure I get it, but, like, again, what it comes down to is, how are we using these tools to make ourselves better and to improve our lives and to improve the lives of others. So back in 2023, all of my, uh, principal coaching that I was doing after I was a principal in 2020, I left that to do consulting full-time and coaching principals on leadership and things like that, and then in 2023, all that stuff just started being about, uh, AI instead
L272Jethro: of just, uh, leadership stuff, and so, um, so then I've— I've been coaching and supporting people with AI since then, and then this year, I'm really focusing on local businesses here in Spokane where I live, and I'll take other clients also, but really the idea is I want to give back to the community where I live and help them here, and so my efforts are going towards getting local businesses to use me to help them figure out operations and make life easier for themselves.
L273[redacted: private, lines 273 to 296]
L297Nix: You were talking about how you left principals, you are helping your local community with AI and that you're giving back, so please continue.
L298Jethro: Yeah, so now the— the whole focus of what I'm doing is helping local businesses, uh, get more customers and tell their stories better and— and have what they need to be successful in the local marketplace, and that's a lot of fun because since I've been doing everything remote for the last 6 years, uh, I just don't know that many people here, and it's fun getting to know people and— and building relationships with them locally, yeah.
L299[redacted: private, lines 299 to 302]
L303Nix: I— and I see that you take pride in your workspace too. Like, I'm— like, all my stuff is built out.
L317Nix: All right, so now that you're helping your local community, you— you built your— you started out with computers, you were a teacher that lifted kids up, you were a teacher that helped the, uh, bottom 5%, you were already automating things, you're full of empathy, um, you care about your students in a way that's not just, like, checking the box care, but you really care. You— you moved on from that, became a consultant, now you're helping people locally, and you're helping them build their business with— with interpersonal
L318Nix: communications, which I see that you're, like, amazing at. Like— like when you say stuff, people won't just go, "Yeah, he's just saying that." Like, I think that when you say that you care to people, they really— they really hear it.
L319Nix: So how does Omarchy— where did Omarchy come into this whole picture, and what are you doing with it, and why does it help you?
L320Jethro: Yeah, so, uh, Omarchy came because I've been a big fan of 37 Signals at Base Camp for a long time. As a teacher, I started using it, and I've been using it for everything ever since then. Um, so it's been nearly 20 years that I've been— been using Base Camp, and, um, so when David started talking about this stuff, uh, that he was doing with— with Linux, I was like, "You know, maybe I— maybe I should do that," and I had this old Mac mini from 2014
L321Jethro: that was just getting really slow, and it wasn't working how I wanted to, and, uh, you know, it wasn't— it hadn't been updated in years because it couldn't anymore, and so I was like, "Well, I'll try it on that, what have I got to lose," and so— so I did, and then it worked, and I was like, "Well, that was actually pretty easy," and.
L323Jethro: I started using— yeah, I started using Omarchy on it, and I was like, "This is— this is actually quite nice," so then I bought a Beelink, um, device, and, uh, David had recommended that on X once, and I was like, "You know what, uh, I'll give it a shot and start fresh with— with a fresh install on a fresh computer that— that is modern," and— and then I was like, "Man, this is really nice," because now it's— it's fast and responsive and all that, and then, um,
L324Jethro: you know, like, and how is it— how is it helping me now? Well, the thing is, is that I have on the Omarchy Beelink box, um, that one has, uh, Hermes and OpenClaw that I'm— that I'm running on there, and I basically have a profile for the businesses that I'm working with, and I do all the stuff for that in there, and so one quick example is I'm working with a driving school, and the owner has been teaching driving for, uh, 25 years, and he's like, "All
L325Jethro: I want to do is just teach kids how to drive." That's— that's it, but he— he started the business, and all the administrative stuff and all that is just tedious to him, and so, uh, so I said, "Well, I— I can help you with that," and so I have an agent, and the agent is a— is a Hermes agent, and it just knows about his business and has access to what it needs, and he'll say, "Hey, we got class tonight, and so-and-so doesn't have the
L326Jethro: link, can you send it to him," and I copy his text to me, and I just paste it into that Omarchy box, uh, through Telegram, and then it just sends the link to the student just like that, and, like, I promise you, this guy, if— if I wasn't doing this, he would not have the business, and he'd be like, "I'm not dealing with this, I'm not doing it," but this guy is, like, probably the best guy in the whole state to teach kids how to drive. They
L328[redacted: private family detail, lines 328 to 332]
L333Jethro: Yep, exactly, and so this guy is awesome, and I have a ton of respect for him and what he does, and it's, like, so invigorating to help him do something and be able to use his gift in a way that is beneficial without being bogged down by all the administrivia that would have to go with it.
L334Nix: Right, it frees him up to do what he's good at.
L335Jethro: Yep, and so he can spend that time doing what he wants and— and— and help kids learn how to drive and be safe on the road, and that's— that's a great gift, and the fact that I get to be here watching and helping, like, that's just a lot of fun for me.
L337Jethro: So going on, I— I started using Omarchy, and what— what I saw was that I could— I could make my computer do what I wanted to again, and there were a lot of things about, uh, macOS that I still love and I use as my daily driver, uh, for, like, most of the stuff that I do, but there are some things that are— that it just is really great to be able to code everything up how you want it on that other computer, and, like, that stuff
L338Jethro: is possible too on— on the Mac, and it's not like you can't do that, um, but it's different when the system is designed to be malleable and designed to be how you want it and when it is not designed that way.
L340Jethro: And— and that's— that's a key feature that you— you have to recognize is— is a very real thing, so for example, uh, one of the things that I— when I give presentations, I really just want to give a presentation that is just basically a Markdown file, and it's just bullets, and— and then I can go through and I can add some images if I need to, but most of my— most of the time that I do that, I— I'm not very good at design personally, and so
L341Jethro: I hate fiddling around with that because it takes me a ton of effort to make it look nice, and that's another place that AI has really helped, but when, uh, a few weeks ago, I was, uh, getting a presentation ready, and as I would add more stuff to the slide, it kept shrinking everything, and I was like, "I don't really like this," so I created an app on Omarchy called OmaPresent, and it is a presentation software, but instead of shrinking your content as it goes onto the
L342Jethro: slide, it actually expands the vertical length so you can scroll through.
L344Jethro: Yeah, and so you can scroll down on an individual slide, so if you looked at it as slides going across the screen, you know, you'd have a— a 16x9 here, a 16x9 here, and then a— a 6, uh, whatever it would be, 16 wide and— and 72 tall, because you have all that content on there, and you could just scroll down.
L346Jethro: To see everything, and so, like, I— like I said, I'm not a developer, so I never really thought I could just design my own, uh, presentation software, and so now when I want— now that I recognize that, it gives me a— a playground to see what kinds of things I can do for my customers. That is— is really cool because now I can go fiddle around and do things, and then I can come back to a customer and say, "Here's what I created for you," and it's
L348Nix: Wow, and you know the— I— I tell people all the time, and I bet you're right there with me, is if you think we're doing cool stuff right now, give it 6 months.
L353Jethro: Yeah, well, what's interesting is that, um, is that I don't use voice very much. I use it sometimes, but not all that much because, uh, I— I find that I just ramble when that happens, and I don't have my thoughts organized, but when I'm typing, then I do have to organize my thoughts better.
L355Jethro: And it slows me down, and so, like, I get that a lot of people are using voice, and I just am not there yet. I've done a few long sessions of, you know, like, an hour or two talking through things with AI, but not to the point where I know a lot of other people are, and I— I find that really fascinating because I actually enjoy the typing part of it, and the— the speaking out loud part has been a struggle for me, so.
L364Nix: Yes, it is, yes, it is. What do you think that we'll be building in 6 months that we're not— that we can't today?
L365Jethro: Oh, man, you know, it's— it's so hard to predict the future, but it's a lot of fun to predict the future, and— and so I think one of the things, uh, that I expect to see in the next, uh, 6 months are basically open-source cell phones where there is, like, and some people would say we already have that with, you know, Android phones, and that— that may be, but you got to be, like, you still are, like, buying somebody else's thing, but where Omarchy, for example,
L366Jethro: has made it really easy to personalize your— your computer, I think that that same thing is going to come to the phones also.
L368Jethro: And, um, you know, it's funny because as we're— we're talking today, yesterday Apple released their Apple Home View, and, uh, you know, I— I really like new Apple products.
L370Jethro: Like, I want— I want an iPhone Duo, I think it's an amazing piece of technology, but this Home View, I'm just, like, you know, I— I— I just think that we can do something better with our own stuff, you know?
L371Nix: Yeah, I want the hardware, and then let me do what I want with it.
L372Jethro: Yeah, exactly, and— and that's where Apple's had a real advantage by integrating their hardware with their software for a long time, and where I think something like Omarchy has given us the insight into is that you can still do that and incorporate the hardware with the software with the help of AI, and each person can do that individually with whatever they have, so going back to this— this beast, uh, computer that I have for local AI, that's what I've done. I've just used AI to tune it
L373Jethro: to be exactly what I need it to be, and then it's— it's running headless, and I haven't restarted it for over a week because I just haven't needed to, and, like, I also haven't updated anything yet, and so I figured that I'll get into some sort of rhythm where I will just plug a monitor and keyboard into it every once in a while.
L375Jethro: Run the updates, and— but everything else I'm just doing through SSH, through the terminal, and, uh, I'm not even screen sharing on it because I don't really need to, so, you know, it just— it's just over there chugging away, doing its thing, and— and so I think that we're going to get to the point where we're doing that with all kinds of other devices also, and so, you know, a— a company like Apple could make a computer, and that will still be beneficial and useful, but other
L376Jethro: companies will make hardware that will be designed specifically for you to just go and make it your own.
L378Jethro: And, you know, uh, Wes Bose, uh, I don't know if that's his real name or not, but Wes Bose on— on X, he recently released a— a GitHub about hacking a digital picture frame.
L380Jethro: And so, yeah, that's— that's super cool, and I've— I've got a couple sitting here behind me that I'm— that I'm currently working on, and, like, that's a lot of fun to make that exactly how I want it and give me exactly what I need, which in the past you just had to rely on the— whatever company deciding what it was that you needed, and.
L384Jethro: That's right, yep, and I like that idea and that optimism that's in that idea too.
L385Nix: Wow, that's a lot to ingest. I'm so fascinated, like, of all the people that I've spoken to, I haven't met a jerk yet, like, nobody.
L386Jethro: Yeah, that's the fun part, is that, uh, what— what I really like about what David has done with this is that it's brought out people who are curious, who are helpful, and are interested in— in helping others, and, like, that is— that is really powerful, and I— I mean, he's a really smart guy, but I don't think he even planned it to be as explosive as it has been.
L387[redacted: off the record, lines 387 to 389]
L390Jethro: That's the other thing. I think he thought, "This will be good, and I'll really enjoy it, and a bunch of other people will like it too," and that's why he put it out and let other people try it out, but the amount of creativity and optimism that has come with it, um, has been really fascinating, and what's interesting is that he was even against AI in the beginning, and so he was not a— a big fan of it, and— and then he was like, uh, "Wait a
L391Jethro: minute, maybe there is something to this," and, you know, and I think this is a really— so this is a really interesting thing to where if somebody has a— a deep skill set in a certain area, then it— it's hard for them to see how other people could— could use something, but for someone like me.
L393Jethro: Yeah, like, they don't understand how much they know and how much they have access to this, and of course you can— like, when I think about AI teaching kids, for a long time I was like, "It's not there, it's not there, it's not there," um, because that's what my area of expertise is, and so— so I can see that, but I do see that when there are places where AI or a— a technology can be better at teaching kids, I am the first person to say, "We
L394Jethro: should just hand that over to the computers," because if it's— if— if they can teach that thing better than humans, they should just do it.
L396Jethro: And let humans do the things that computers can't do. Now, could we ever get to a point where the AI can do everything? Uh, I personally don't think so because there are human things that you can't necessarily teach that you can only see as an example and— and learn from it, and so, you know, uh, I don't remember where I was listening to it the other day, but somebody said something about how if you tell an AI to go make as much money as it can, it'll
L397Jethro: just go make all that money that it can, but if you tell a person to do that, they still have an ingrained sense of morals and ethics.
L401Jethro: But most of the time it will prevent them from doing that, uh, but the AI is like, "Well, if my goal is to make money, then I just need to achieve my goal."
L402[redacted: private]
L403Jethro: Yeah, that's right, and so, like, we don't want AI to be going out and doing that, and— and there are things that— that it's important for humans to learn from humans, and— and that needs to continue to be the case in my mind, and— and but when there are things that the AI can teach, then just let it teach because we don't need to— we don't need to waste the human resources on that because that's— if it's just transferring information, then do that as cheaply and quickly
L404Jethro: as possible, but if it is molding a human into what a human should be, then that's where we need to spend the human energy on— on the people.
L405Nix: What's the future for higher education and universities, you think?
L406Jethro: Yeah, that one, that's crazy. I've thought education is— is essentially doomed for a long time. Uh, [redacted] we talked a lot about this, and one of the things that we decided long ago was that if the way that it's going to go is that education, public education, is going to be for the very poor people and for the severely disabled people because they— they're the only ones who won't be able
L407Jethro: to afford going and getting education somewhere else, so when it comes to higher education, [redacted] college was really great for me, and there are a lot of great things for college, but at the same time it's really tough to justify going into debt for something
L408Jethro: that— that may not result in a job, and, you know, you got to— you got to be thinking hard about that, and so it— it is a great opportunity, and just like with what I said before, if the AI can teach someone something, then you might as well let it because that's what they're going to do, so what I try to instill is, uh, a curiosity and a thirst for knowledge that they themselves are in charge of and help them understand that— that learning
L409Jethro: is personal no matter what it is that you're learning, that even if you're sitting in a class, it's still on you to learn what you need to learn, but you can't just limit your learning to what happens in that classroom, that you have to look for learning opportunities wherever you're at and improve your own situation and take action to improve your own situation, uh, more than— like, nobody cares about your education except for you. That's what it comes down to, uh, and that— that's true for everybody.
L410Jethro: Nobody cares about it, even teachers. They don't care about your individual education as much as you do, and you may not understand how much you care about it until several years later, but you're still responsible.
L416Jethro: So to— to answer the question specifically, what's going to happen to higher education, well, higher education is going to have to change what its real purpose is, which it is it all right, here's another controversial take. Education has not been about learning for a very, very long time. Education has been about training and— and money, for sure, and doing things in a way that perpetuates the machine that it is, and so, you know, when I was a— a principal, one of the things that I told my
L420Jethro: And so— so you have to make the choices for yourself that are going to help you be ready for the future, whatever that future is, and so when it comes to higher ed, what— what I think they are going to need to do is change what their purpose is. We're not trying to just prepare people for the workforce, but we're trying to prepare people for living a fulfilling life, and these are all the things that we're doing, and, like, we need— I think they're going to have
L421Jethro: to stop giving degrees and things that don't result in an actual income, and— or they're going to change the model to where you can still study those things, but the— the fake jobs that exist are either going to exist in abundance and you can get paid for doing anything, or they're not going to be beneficial at all, and having a degree in even things like, uh, history is just going to be completely useless because, you know, there's no point in— in— in having history teachers because the
L422Jethro: — the history is there and however it's recorded, and you can get any kind of perspective on that history through an AI tool that it just doesn't make sense for it to be, you know, a class when if you really want to use that teacher effectively, then you— you have them do something that the AI can't do, which is a very difficult thing for people to figure out right now.
L423Nix: Right, so that kind of leads back to history teachers won't be as needed because it's up to you. All the content is there. You can go say, "Tell me the story of Rome from Marcus Aurelius's perspective," and, like, you can make it custom to you, so— and it's on you, the— the student, to go get it.
L428Jethro: And how is that important? That's certainly not the date that it fell, not important. Why it fell, that is exceptionally important.
L429Jethro: How do we prevent that from happening again? That is exceptionally important, and that is not something that the AI is going to be very good at, at least not for a long time, because it— it will have a machine point of view on that, but it won't necessarily have a humanistic point of view on that, although it could be possibly trained to look at it through that lens.
L431Jethro: But the— the value in that is, you know, when— when there are references to artwork or history or whatever in— in popular media, TV shows, movies, books, whatever, the real challenge is that people who don't understand that won't get those references and won't see why they matter, and— and so that becomes a challenge as well, that some of those things are— are in the process of not being important anymore even though they actually are important.
L432Nix: Mind-blowing. Lots to think about. All right, so as we wrap up, I want you to talk about the three things that are the most important that people hear from you, and also if there are things that you don't want to be talked about on here, say those as well.
L433[redacted: off the record]
L434Nix: So three top thing— three— three top things that you want people to hear and really hammer in on, and then if— if there's things above and beyond that you don't want in here, go ahead and say those as well.
L435Jethro: Okay, so first thing is, uh, all of our work as humans should point towards human flourishing, so whether— whether we are helping businesses or doing AI work or anything like that, we should be focused on improving the lives of humans as our main goal, and if we start there, then we will naturally develop and tune these things in such a way that they are a benefit to humanity and what we're trying to accomplish, and we can have disagreements on that too, and that's okay, but, you know,
L436Jethro: if— if the idea is to make it so humans are no longer needed, that's the wrong thing. If the— if the goal is to help humans live a more fulfilling, beneficial, wonderful life, then— then that's great, and we can— we can disagree about how to do that, but that's what we need to be focused on. Um, number two, all these AI things, they are a tool, and when they cease being a useful tool, then we should stop giving them attention, money, and energy and time and all
L437Jethro: that kind of stuff, so as long as they are a tool, then— then we should— we can keep using them, um, and again, a tool to help us do good things, and again, we can disagree on what that is, and that's okay, and that's part of the human condition is disagreeing on that. Um, and then the third thing is, uh, technology for technology's sake is not— is not the goal. Like, we should not be all about the technology because of the technology.
L438Jethro: We should be about the technology for what it enables us to do outside of ourselves, and— and that's where it becomes really valuable, and as a lifelong fan and proponent of technology, sometimes people think that I am all about technology for technology's sake, and I am certainly not. I'm really about it for whatever we need to do to improve ourselves and, uh, improve our lives, so, uh, I talk about my daughter with Down syndrome a lot, so I actually don't mind if that, uh, makes it in.
L439Jethro: Um, she actually loves it when I talk about her, so.
L440[redacted: off the record]
L441Jethro: Yeah, very good. So, um, I— I really appreciate this time chatting with you. This has been a lot of fun, and it's— it's awesome to just talk with people that are, uh, interesting and interested and nerdy and all that, so thank you.
L442Nix: Yeah, well, you're— you'll be up on the website soon. I'll tag you. Uh, you're now part of that team, and, uh, I hope that you'll, uh, retweet it and, uh, for yourself, to your followers, and, uh, maybe it'll, uh, help and, you know, I— I think that doing these things aligns with the goals that you stated, and I'm— I'm excited about that.
L443Jethro: Yeah, and I just want you to know, everybody that you've put on there, I have followed on X right away, and, uh, it's been a lot of fun to— to meet new people that way, so thanks for connecting everybody.
L444Nix: Well, you are cool, and you are up right now.
L445Jethro: All right, thanks, man. I appreciate it.
