Benjamin Lupton – open-source developer widens perspective through long-term travel and philosophy

The third episode of the Nerd on Tour Podcast is here! This time fellow digital nomad from Perth in Australia is my guest. Ben is cheerful yet contemplating developer and community builder. He dropped NDA work offers at Facebook and Google to stay true to the open-source movement. His travels include long-distance hitchhiking in Australia, truly befriending Balinese locals, and experiencing hippy culture in Berlin. Learn about him and his thought-provoking projects in this episode.

Listen to the Nerd on Tour Podcast with Benjamin Lupton

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The third episode of Nerd on Tour Podcast

I’m very sorry for almost a year of delay. New conversations have been recorded with many fascinating guests but I kept postponing editing and publishing. Pandemic forced me to reorganize my work structure and now I’m fully committed to expanding the podcast. To make it more efficient I moved my hosting provider from Anchor to Captivate. I’m excited about the new possibilities unlocked with the podcast host focused on growth. Both in terms of my audience and in terms of skills I can learn with their resources at Captivate Growth Labs.

Nevertheless, I wanted to create evergreen conversation recordings from the very beginning. The delay doesn’t diminish the importance of topics discussed with Ben. We met in October 2019 in the joyful community of The Hatchery Place. Every Monday folks staying in Kuala Lumpur were gathering at Ben’s rented apartment to enjoy sports, video games, and eating out. Hence we called the gathering – Benday.

In this episode, we explore such topics as living without money, Internet culture, effective altruism, co-living space, building online community, ego, thought experiments, reason, insurance for digital nomads, running a company, and veganism.

Who is Benjamin Arthur Lupton?

Benjamin or Ben is an open-source developer and white-hat hacker. His projects were used by Basecamp, Spotify, Microsoft, Adobe, Atlassian. On the famous online support community StackOverflow, Ben is in the top 10% of helpers for JavaScript, Node.js, jQuery, HTML5, and Ajax. Moreover on GitHub – version control community – Ben is the 4th most-watched developer in Australia.

Few of his projects:

• History.js – one of the most popular JavaScript projects in the world
• DocPad – was the first big static site generator for Node.js gaining over 2000 stars, hundreds of daily users, 200 plugins, and 100 contributors.
• Startup Hostel – the proto concept of co-working and co-living spaces, started in 2011-2013

Bevry – the free-thinking online community

Now Ben is primarily focused on his Bevry community. Bevry means “free” or “to liberate” in Afrikaans and this perfectly describes the open-minded approach of the participants. They don’t shy away from disputes around such topics as ethics of the tech industry, immigration policies, or the fate of civilization. Learn more about Bevry Manifesto or join their official Bevry Discord channel.

To facilitate better methods of collaboration and learning, Ben is developing several projects under Bevry. Once they’ve been tested internally within the community, they’ll be open for public use.

• Bevry YouTube channel with public debates around important topics
• Reading Rehab project – automated online “book club” meet-ups with people who are reading the same material
• Fountain project – Fountain scales conversations into massively collaborative wisdom, through cross-pollination, interactive transcripts, syntopical curation, & creator funding 

Selected links from the conversation with Benjamin Lupton

Go to balupton.com to read all the important details about Ben and his projects. At the end of our conversation, he mentioned he’s active on Twitter, but he decided to cut off from social media. We both share similar views in regard to how toxic social media can be.

First set of links

• Ben’s thoughts after living without money for 6 months in Sydney – moneyless experiment
• Colin Wright – Extreme Lifestyle Experiments – Ted Talk mentioned by Ben
• Lentils as Anything – voluntary-led vegan restaurant in Sydney
• Telstra – Australian nationwide telecom that offers reception even in remote parts of the country
• Pogo the musician based in Perth, Australia
• Ozzy Man Reviews – comedy YouTube channel
• Not Today (2013) – a movie about a young privileged guy facing poverty in India
• Effective Altruism
• Fire in the Blood (2013) – a documentary about intentionally limiting access to low-cost drugs by multinational pharmaceutical companies
• Durian – Ben’s favorite fruit, very popular in South East Asia – Ben’s list of Durian kinds and types
• Ben’s map of recommended places in Bali
• Roman’s Fishing Village Tour – one of the places in Bali that Ben added to Google Maps and it greatly helped the locals

Second set of links

• Ben’s travel tips and notes
• Digital Nomad resources at Bevry
• The 30 day limit for a stay in a hotel may be related to hotel taxes also know as tourist tax. In regions with established tourism, there’s a special fee for people staying shorter than 30 days in an accommodation – French Wikipedia article has a good article about it
• How Airbnb and Travelers are Redefining Travel in 2021
• Hubud – established co-working in Ubud, Bali, where Ben met one of the founders – Peter Wall
• Ben mentioned “Mailpile” creators but he meant “Mailbird”
• IDEO – big think tank design consulting company
• Starlink – the low-orbit network of satellites developed by Elon Musk’s SpaceX to deliver high-speed, low latency broadband internet around the globe
• China busts iPhone smugglers who used drones to get them into Shenzhen
• Life of Pi (2012) – a movie about a boy and a tiger surviving a shipwreck on a lifeboat in the Pacific Ocean
• Moby Dick – The whale can be interpreted as a super-ego that we want to control 
• The Boy and the Beast – anime from 2015
• Albert Camus quote – “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide”
• How to Read a Book – book by Charles Van Doren and Mortimer J. Adler
• Socrates – Ancient Greek philosopher credited as a founder of Western philosophy
• Critique of Pure Reason – book by Immanuel Kant to seek limits and scope of metaphysics 
• “Current president of USA” was a reference to Donald Trump
• Rhetoric – the art of persuasion that started in Ancient Greece
• Manifesto by Christchurch mosque shooter – one of the difficult topics that the Bevry community talked about
• Borderless – 2019 documentary about the immigration crisis in Europe released on YouTube

Third set of links

• Ben and Piotrek discuss Digital Nomadism
• Ben and Piotrek discuss “The Social Dilemma” documentary
• “Think and Grow Rich” Napoleon Hill book
• Why N26 Black is a Scam – Ben’s insurance troubles after having an accident in Bali
• SafetyWing – specialized insurance for Digital Nomads and Remote Workers – both me and Ben use it and recommend it
• Planeta Młodych – Polish insurance company, that limits one trip to 180 days, after that I’d need to come back to Poland for at least one day to keep it valid for the whole year
• Ben started his ventures by registering his Australian Pty Ltd company
• Tony Robbins Firewalk – Ben participated in one of Tony’s events which involves walking on fire
• Tim Cope – Australian Adventurer that traveled 6000 miles on horseback across Eurasia. His book is called “On The Trail Of Genghis Khan: An Epic Journey Through The Land Of The Nomads”
• Domestication of the horse
• Origin of the domestic dog
• Jain vegetarianism (and veganism)
• What vegans and non-vegans alike don’t get about veganism – article by Ben

Join the conversation

If you feel that the above topics interest you – write a comment below. Constructive critique, insightful questions, and contextual thoughts are greatly appreciated.