smenor/tangents
Sweetgrass-Online
Descripción
A close-up of Sweet grass from the Sanctuary Ecovillage in Grand Forks, BC, Canada https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/ https://patreon.com/smenor EPISODE TRANSCRIPT Hey there I'm Scott and this is Tangents. Well, my mom and sister just left for her by E. They're going to Kauai`i and they'll be there for the week. So I will have the place to myself for the week. I'm going to try to bank up some episodes. I don't know if I'm going to put them out or if I'll bank them. I should I know bank them up and push them out slowly over time. But the way that I operate I probably will just release them on the day of or shortly thereafter either way. There should be more coming in the nearest future than there have been for a while. So got that out of the way. I could have gone although I have no job, I have no money. And the little bit of money that I do have left over is going to completely evaporate in about early December mid-December that the current rate. And it's kind of something because I have done so much to reduce my burn rate. I had the car that I couldn't get rid of. I had the apartment that I did eventually get rid of, but obviously made a place to the live. So I'm living with my sister and I rent free. Which is complicated, but you know I appreciate it very much. It's a place to be. I definitely definitely miss having my own space and being able to control like the temperature and the light and all that kind of stuff. Just having a place to work and just sit and you know having control of some stuff. I miss that very much and I would like to have that again soon. I don't know. I don't want to talk too much about that, but it is it has been difficult. Let's just say that. But it's working. It's nice spending a lot of time with my mom and her cat is slowly warming up to me, which is he has PTSD. His name is Snoop and after Snoop Dogg. But he's a cute cat that he is definitely traumatized and you can see like if I if you stay still he will come to you eventually kind of, but he is so skittish and he's so freaked out and any kind of noise or anything. Anyway, I don't want to I don't want to talk about that. That's not what I'm here to talk about. The thing I am interested in saying of courses, I reduced my burn rate so much, so much. I'm working in the last little bit of, well other than credit card debt, which is massive and then student loan debt, which makes the credit card debt look like nothing. The credit card debt, the annoying thing about it, I'm going to talk a little bit about this, I guess. Then I will get to the subject at hand. But like three years ago, three years ago, I had a company and it seemed like everything was going well, a little bit like the summer we had a retreat and we had I think like eight, maybe ten employees, I don't even remember, but it felt fucking good. If everybody had to Sonoma and sit at a nice hotel and got you know, it felt really good. It felt like things were on the upswing. Finally, I was getting paid pretty decently and you know, it seemed like things were converging and I will say and I don't blame my business partner. I should have been paying attention to the numbers and all those kind of stuff. But I got sick of doing the business stuff, I'm not a finance guy. I don't even understand the concept of money. I've mentioned that a couple times, I think, and I mean that seriously. I mean, every time I talk about this, I think it's necessary to say. I have an undergrad degree in mathematics. I have a PhD in physics. I understand what the concept of money. I even have an undergrad minor in anthropology and I could have done a major in anthropology. If I would have gone another semester, I understand the idea, you have taken economics courses, I've taken finance. I understand what money and currency is supposed to be. But it's not real. It's fucking unreal. Even the story that people tell about it, how like, oh, once upon a time, people used to barter for things. The thing is, the bartering was inconvenient. Instead of trying to do like three layers of bartering to convert from one thing to another thing, we just got a currency. It's bullshit. If you actually go to indigenous populations that you look at historic human societies, the way that they actually operated almost entirely were gift economies, which is to say, I have extra of something. You need it and so I'll give it to you. And the reason for this, it makes a lot of sense. If you have ever known somebody who has like a fruit tree, like, you know, somebody who has a great fruit tree, that thing produces so much more than one person or even one family can consume. If you're a fisher person, you can go out and fish. And on one hand, this is a little different now because we've got overfishing and all those kind of stuff. But if you are in sort of a more natural state and you go fishing, it's easy to catch enough fish relatively speaking for yourself and your family. And the incremental cost of catching a lot more and being able to give fish to other people is not that much. And so people used to do it and the incremental cost of growing a little bit of extra grain or growing a little bit of extra whatever the fuck is that that much. So it's much easier. I mean, you look at like anything. If you talk to people who grow fucking cucumbers, they are annoyed by how easy they are and how much they propagate and how many fucking cucumbers they have. And it's like a problem. It's like a disease because you need to get rid of these fucking things. Well, that's how a lot of stuff actually is. This is something like we treat the people who grow our food, who harvest the food, all of this kind of stuff. So fucking horribly. And I remember it's been years now since I saw this. But I was watching something and I checked this out. It's actually true. It's not bullshit. And basically this thing was saying that if you wanted to double not not like increment by 10% or 20%. But if you wanted to double what the people who are picking lettuce are getting paid, all it would cost is to add about one penny per head of lettuce. It's not that much. You could make these jobs much less miserable. You could make them actually pay well. You could make them actually be good jobs that are comfortable to do, that you don't even have like each person instead of working them to death. You let them do it kind of freely. And you don't have to make it fucking miserable. And you could make a fuckload of lettuce and have plenty for everybody. So anyway, they did going back. They gift the economy thing. Once you start learning about this, it gets really irritating because it's like, okay, well that's that whole storyline that people tell all bullshit. And then you think about economics. Like, if you talk to economists, you talk to people who do this stuff or, you know, they're actually at PhDs or degrees in the stuff. They treat it as though they're talking about like something like energy or mass, something that is fundamental and real. And what really is true about currency and about money as it exists today is that this started a long time ago, too. A bank would take a certain amount of money, you give them a dollar. And that bank would use that dollar and lend out $10. And that scale is about right by the way. The bank would lend out a multiple of what they've taken in. And of course, all the people that are borrowing those $10, they put it in a bank and now the bank has $10. And they can lend out $100 because it's $10. And it's a fucking fantasy. It's completely disconnected from any kind of reality. All the stuff that, you know, your bank accounts, those are literally as real as scores in a video game. I mean, and again, I know it sounds like bullshit and you have this whole idea that, oh well, if we just gave people money, then it would just drive up the cost of it. No, it wouldn't. And even if it did, you know, if you just, I mean, if you want to get extreme with this, give everybody $100 trillion. Now, all of a sudden, all those billionaires, those people with hundreds of billions of dollars, inflation basically nuke them. They're their net worth has gone to a rounding error. You know, everybody has way more than they had. And they have way more than they used to have to. But now we have inflation and things kind of renormalize. And it's sort of, you know, now of course, if you keep running the game as it is, you're going to end up getting some kind of like some people when and some people lose. And then over time, because you're running the same system and you're playing the same fucking game, you're going to end up with some people accumulating more and more. And you have the same problem. It's just delaying it. You have to do something else. You can't, you can't just operate that way. But if you did that, it wouldn't hurt anything. It wouldn't change anything fundamentally. It wouldn't, it's not like if I suddenly gave everybody a credit card. And every credit card that I've given you, it just has $1,000 on it, or what, you know, $5,000, whatever it is. And it has that much. And at the end of the month, it just zeroes up. Like your credit card, you put, you can put, you can use it, you could not use it. It doesn't matter. But you go out to dinner, you buy groceries, you do whatever with it. And I'm not talking about, you know, you be I here exactly. But you could just give everybody a credit card, like that, and zero it out. And it would literally not hurt anything. In fact, what it would do ultimately is massively stimulate the actual economy. It would, because all of a sudden, a bunch of small businesses can thrive. A bunch of businesses like restaurants start doing massive amounts of business. They start doing really well. Any kind of thing that is currently in some kind of constraint is no longer. All of a sudden, if you want to just work on something and make art, for example, or whatever, you could do it. You could magically do it. And if you have a shitty job and that job is pointless and it's like torture, you could just tell your boss to go fuck up yourself. You could just, I assumed a little bit of sex there. But you know, you could tell your boss to go fuck themselves. And it really wouldn't, like the only thing it would hurt is the people who have arranged the system in such a way that they are on top and they get everybody else to work for them and they get to be lazy asses. Like it's the most frustrating thing, because you have these people who have, and I don't mean to pathologize it, but it really is like a disease. Like there's not enough, it's this insatiable hunger to constantly have more and more and accumulate. It's essentially like a form of hoarding and you get these people and they get a hundred billion dollars, two hundred billion dollars. You have the amount of money that allows you to have your own fucking space program. You know, you have that much money. You have the amount of money that you could end up individually by yourself and poverty and hunger and you don't do it. That's the amount of money these people have. And it's not enough. They're fucking poor. They are the poorest people on the planet. Our people like Elon Musk and like Bezos and all these fucking assholes, they just will never have enough. They will never feel like it is enough. And they have more more of everything than anyone could ever use in a thousand lifetimes. It's disgusting. It's truly disgusting. So anyway, I don't want to, I don't want to ramble too much about that, but when you, I say, I don't understand the concept of money. I genuinely don't. If you change numbers in a fucking database, it wouldn't hurt anybody. It would actually help things. And because of those numbers in a database, people starve to death. People kill each other. People do all kinds of horrible things and people suffer. Like most of the suffering on the planet now that is not stuff like, you know, did it get a stuff that can't be stopped? There's stuff that's very difficult to stop at least. Diseases. Like, you, somebody has cancer. Maybe we don't have the technology to do anything about it. Maybe they have some kind of an anatomical issue that is very difficult to correct. Anything like that. Those kinds of things are very difficult to fix. But when it's like, you don't have enough food. Well, more than enough food rocks on this fucking planet, then it would take defeat to everybody. Like, everybody who starts that off is a deliberate choice. It is absolutely violent. It is absolutely fucking horrible. It is absolutely unnecessary. There's zero reason. Any human being in this day and age should ever start to death. There's zero reason. Anyone should not have a fucking house. And I say a house. I mean, I don't think people should have a house because dense living is much better generally speaking. Now, in I don't mean like living on top of each other in this horrible situation. And yeah, there are ways to do it that are much better. Like, you go to Tokyo. And I'm not saying Japan is great. There are obviously lots of problems with any place. But you go to Tokyo. And this is a place where you have, I think the population is like 20 million people. I don't remember exactly. But you have this huge population and it literally feels like a garden in a lot of the places that you are. It literally feels now it's 14 million people. Sorry. It's not 20 million people. I was exaggerating. But so it feels like a fucking like walk in the park in a lot of places. Now there are places which are kind of like a city. Anyone who says city, I mean they built up in a lot of buildings and very industrial and all this kind of stuff. But most of this stuff, you walk around and it's like parks. It's like trees and little paths and it's awesome. And it does not need to be like a fucking nightmare. Like you could have that many people in that kind of dense population. And in doing that because you have that density, you could have all these businesses. You could have, you know, you want to eat something. You could just walk around, not have a plan, not know where you're going to go. And you'll stumble by a bunch of restaurants. You can go to a bakery. You can go to a coffee shop. Now not every neighborhood has all that stuff. But you could find the lot of it. And the thing that's ridiculous about it also is like, I've wandered around that city, fair bit. And you go to even the sort of like suburbish areas, you'll find a fucking ramen shop or a soba shop. And it will be like for five bucks. And I'm not even exaggerating on the prices. For ridiculous, it'll be like five bucks and about the best soba you've ever had. If you're coming from the US like I am. And that's just like a normal lunch. That's not a big deal. Now you can, you could certainly go, like, I, there are restaurants there where it'll be sushi and it's hundreds of dollars. But you could get pretty good food and pretty comfortable situation and live in a situation where, and I'm not saying go to Tokyo, please. But I am saying, you know, like, you can have a place where it's actually nice and livable and you have public transit and all those kind of stuff. That's how it should fucking be. You can have a place where you have universal healthcare. Like, nobody needs to die because they don't have fucking health insurance or because they don't have enough money to pay for healthcare. It's ridiculous. It's, again, just like food. It's not a real scarcity. The only real scarcity that is there at all is that we don't have enough doctors. And the reason we don't have enough doctors is not because of how enough people who are qualified and capable want to go to medical school. It's because all of the medical schools deliberately create scarcity. They don't want to have too many doctors because if you have too many doctors, then the amount of money that a doctor can command is not that much. It's not like a massively rare profession. It's something, and of course in doing this because they've done that because they've created this artificial scarcity. And yeah, it's not like you could just turn this on. It just to be clear. You would have to open the, you know, you grow the programs slowly over time, get more and more people in medical school. And then the residency programs you have to deal with, you have to fund them somehow. There are, there are logistical programs. It's not like a trivial thing, but you could have suddenly, in five or ten years, a hundred times more surgeons and doctors. You could have all these people, not only having, you know, that many more people that are capable and qualified, they could be working 30 hours a week and doing a much better job. Imagine what you could, like, I understand you're a doctor, you're like, oh, I need to make $500,000 a year. I need to make $700,000, or whatever the fucking, you know, and it's never enough. It's not, again, this disease of our culture, of our society. And I'm not trying to pathologist it, but it is kind of a disease that you can never be sight, satisfaction. You can never be satiated. If you just did this, you would have so many more doctors, anyone who needs medical care could get it. And not just from a person who chose a profession that they thought was going to pay them well, but from a person who wanted to be a doctor. Like there are so many people who want to be doctors. Their aspiration in life is just to help people just to do medicine. Like that is a thing. There are so many people I know, personally, who, like their aspiration was to work in research. Like I know a bunch of people who went to my fucking, that got PhDs with me, people who, and I don't mean they like, I knew one guy, almost said his name, I'm not going to say his name, but I knew one guy who started the program with me, and then he washed out. Maybe there were other people, he's the only one that I know of specifically. It wasn't a surprise that he washed out, but he didn't make it through. But most of the people in my program who started got PhDs and not many of them actually got academic jobs. A lot of them wanted to do research, a lot of them wanted to do stuff, but they couldn't do it, because there's no funding. There's not like a lie, it's frustrating because these are people who would have been very good researchers. They're not like incompetent people. They're not people who are incapable, or they're not people who are not hardworking. They're not people who aren't going to do a good job, or don't want to. They're not people who are lazy, although, again, being lazy, you should not preclude the ability to have food and shelter and medical care and all that kind of stuff. But these are people who would actually make massive contributions to society, and they can't. And I think about this all the time, because though, that's physics, right? But there are lots of people who would do that kind of stuff for say, drum discovery. And drum discovery, it's like one of the things about all of this kind of basic research is you don't know which particular line of research is going to lead to something to a met a massive discovery, but you do know if you do enough basic research with absolute certainty, some of it will strike gold. Some of it will actually work out. And so I think about this drug discovery thing, if you had thousands more tens of thousands more PhD researchers working on drug discovery, we would have so many better drugs. And I don't mean, you know, like hallucinogens and things like that, although I'm probably, but I mean also like antibiotics. We'd probably have much better antibiotics. We'd have other classes of antibiotics that don't exist now. But the most important one that I think about a lot is my mom is on blood thinners. And prior to being on blood thinners, she used to have, I guess it wasn't aspirin. It was IVU pro from, but she used to take that every day. And her back was actually manageable. She could walk and be comfortable and not be in pain. And she said chronic back pain, since I was, I think in like third grade, because she fell and broke her back and was in a hospital bed in the house for like six months. And since then has had chronic back pain. That was a long time ago. But she was taking IVU pro for every day. And her back pain was actually pretty good. It was, you know, it was still there. But it was manageable. It was tolerable. And then she got on these blood thinners and you can't be on IVU pro for any more. So now she's got the pain again. But you think about this, there are absolutely no. I am certain that there are things that you could find drugs that would work. Simple, small molecule drugs. I don't mean like complicated. You need 15 things. Oh, maybe those kinds of things also would exist. But you know, a single small molecule drug, there is some chemical that you could take that would help her pain and not conflict with those blood thinners. There's absolutely also some small molecule you could make and take. That would, for example, stop pain in general. Like, you know, give you not like an opiate where you can tolerate the pain, but just shut off pain, shut off burning, shut off whatever, you know, sensation. There are drugs like that that are in the space of possibility. And I say that and obviously like you don't know, you can't prove that something exists. I would say the probability of it not being the case is roughly, you know, it's that zero or it's that it's not guaranteed not to be zero, but it's so close to being zero that it might as well be zero. I can't say that it's I can't say it absolutely exists, but it almost certainly exists. Now it almost certainly exists. And if it doesn't exist, there's something else that would work and be able to do about the same thing. Maybe there's some other, maybe there's some way to treat the stuff that she's got. Maybe there's something that you could do that would make her feel better and not just be like a chronic sort of drug that you have to be on the rest of your life, but actually could help you. Those kinds of things absolutely potentially exist. And we're missing out on them. There are so many things that just are unnecessarily worse than they have to be because we don't have people working on the stuff that they might be working on. And it annoys the shit out of me to think about it. Like I think about, I started when I left ASU, and when I worked at ASU before, also, I don't want to get into that originally, but it was frustrating that I was trying to build towards something. And part of it was because I wanted to be a director, although I didn't really want to run stuff, but I kind of wanted to. But also partly, I just wanted to build something, like a statewide super computing partnership kind of thing. And I was trying to get an infrastructure grant that tried to do some stuff. And then some Jackass, who was fucking incompetent, and was already a professor making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. Tenured professor, asshole, making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. He weasled his way in, got to be the director, and sailed that fucking thing that I was working at into the ground, which is why I quit that job. I quit that job because I was fucking miserable in it after he started doing this. And I still, I took like nine months, I wound down the stuff I was working on. You know, it wasn't like an abrupt, I quit. But I did that, and then I started thinking about what I wanted to work on. And I came up with an idea, and I still have this idea, and it's annoying to me, because this was like 2013. If I was working on this shit from then till now, and when I say working on it, I mean, you have been tinkering with it in the background, but if I was actually like seriously working on it, I had the resources, and especially team, and all those kind of stuff to do it, I would be so far along by now. But instead, I spent that time trying to find other ways to like make money, trying to find other ways, and I worked on like just the most ridiculous shit for people, designing products for people who have terrible ideas, and all of these people that have these terrible ideas, it's not like they're not inventors that are like, I have this problem that I need to solve. This is why they're terrible ideas, by the way. They're not people who are going like, this thing really fucking bothers me. And I'm sure, even if you don't know that a bothers other people, it probably does, because if it bothers you, you're not unique, you're not a snowflake. So if a bothers you, it's bothering a lot of people. And you think about it, and you're like, I need to fix this. That's how you get good ideas, right? These are people who are working backwards, and they're like, oh, well, I really badly, you know, and they're all people with a lot of money, like a lot of money compared to most people, but not like a lot of money, a lot of money, like doctors, they have tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, and they're like small millions of dollars, but they want to be like, they want to ten exit, they want to be a hundred millionaire, and then the hundred millionaire wants to be the billionaire, and the billionaire wants to be the hundred billionaire. They're all like, nobody's fucking satisfied in the system. And these people are looking at that, and I'm like, oh, I just, if I just make up something, then I can become super rich, and then I'll be happier. I don't know what the story is that they're telling themselves, but they come up with these fucking terrible ideas. And the problem is, of course, I was in a desperate place. I needed to work on, or I needed to work on stuff. I wanted to work, I had plenty of stuff to work on. This is the thing that fucking pisses me off as much as anything, because I am not a lazy person. I'm somebody who's actually quite motivated, and I'm able to, I'm quite capable. I'm not the be, like, sucking my own dick too much, but I'm actually pretty capable of doing a lot of stuff. I'm pretty good at some of the stuff that I do. I'm not, you know, like, I'm actually, I would hire me. I might not, because I'd be a pain in the ass. I really would, and I'm not saying the, yeah, I'm not saying I'm a bad worker if a bad attitude, but I definitely, I have, I will work on stuff if I find it interesting and if I find it, like, valuable and meaningful. And when it's stuff that is just, you know, like, doing some turn-and-crank for a paycheck, I'm much less motivated. I'm much less happy about it. But, yeah, I would still probably hire me for a lot of stuff. But that being said, I would work on a lot of stuff that would be much more valuable to people. I have, I have less crappy ideas than these people. And part of it is because I am bothered by things, and I know how to fix them, and I know what you can do, and I know how you get, I have, like, a road map to it, and I can actually do some stuff. And it pisses me off that I have been working on these fucking ridiculous shit, these ridiculous ideas for people. I'm not going to specifically go into them, because I, I think the NDAs have probably actually lapsed on most of the stuff already, but they're terrible. Like, pretty much everything that I've worked on in the past that was for somebody else was not a good idea. It was not something that was worth putting time or effort into. And it was literally just somebody wanted to be, they wanted an invention. They wanted to make more money. They wanted to get like a little bit bigger, nesting, and, you know, they wanted to have a second house. They wanted to have whatever fucking luxury that they, but whatever it was, that drove them to come up with, okay, well, I've got to think of something. Here's this terrible idea that I have, and they're not going to pay enough to actually develop it. This is the other fucking annoying thing about this. They're not going to pay like the cost to actually like make a product to make something that is a consumer product that has all the certifications you need, that has all the stuff that you is expensive. It's fucking expensive. Like companies spend regularly to develop new products, millions of dollars, and they'll have a team of people, and it's not just the team of people, but it'll be a team of people who've done it over and over and over again. They're not people who were just like one-offing stuff. And so you're coming in, and you're like, I have this terrible idea, but I have $10,000. Here's $20,000 for you. Here's even $100,000, which people don't want to part with, but like $100,000 sounds like a lot of money, and it is a lot of money, but when you start going into actual product development, it's enough to make like a for a simple mechanical or electrical device. It's enough to get to like some prototype stuff. It's enough to maybe make a small pre-production run or something. Depending on what it is, you might be able to get someplace, but it's probably not going to get you to a volume product. It's probably not going to get you to something that is actually cheap to manufacture, that is reliable, that is durable, that is a quality product. And if you look at companies like Apple, that make things, they'll spend $10,000,000,000 dollars, billions of dollars working on new product development. And even then, even then, the thing that comes out will be like the Vision Pro, which is, I will say, there are some things about it that are kind of magical, and then there are some things about it that are terrible. And it's fucking annoying that you can spend that much money on this thing that is kind of a not great idea. You can feel with that product. I can't talk about the people that I've developed so far, but I can talk about the Vision Pro. And the watch, frankly, these are products that I feel like Tim Cook thought that, you know, like, Steve, and I have mixed feelings about Steve. I'm not saying Steve is a great guy, but Steve had some kind of capability. He doesn't play the instruments, but he's playing the orchestra. I don't think that's a completely bullshit thing. I don't want to give him too much credit also, but I think that there's something to be said. He's actually pretty good at this kind of stuff, or was. But, you know, you have Tim Cook. And Tim Cook is not. Tim Cook is not really, he's very, as far as I know, as far as I understand, as far as I've heard from people, he's extremely good at operations and supply chain. And, you know, he was, I don't want to say magical at it, but really great at it. In terms of great by the metric of making a lot of money, having things be efficient and quick in all this kind of stuff. He was good at that. And he's not a product guy. He's not a, like, idea guy. And so he tried to come up with some shit. And he's got the watch, which, it's just like, why? It's just, I don't understand the point of this product. Like, why do you have this product that you spent, again, they probably spent into the billions of dollars to develop it. I haven't looked at the history, but I would say, over the course of many years, certainly over the course of all the versions of it that they've had, they've spent that much. But even for the initial product development, they probably spent a ridiculous, ridiculous amount of money developing that thing. And you can tell because you look at all of the, like, just the assembly of that thing, which is not great for disassembly or, you know, maintainability or, any, anything like that. But the assembly of it is a lot of complex tiny pieces that are very dense. You have circuit boards that are very dense. You have ICs that are very dense and custom. And everything is just like so. And you have these mechanical modules that kind of go in there and they all click together. And it's, it's a pretty, you know, you think about the number of teams, not just individual people, but teams that worked on that thing. And then don't even, don't even get into the fucking software. Like, think about how much work went into the software and then also, I mean, you're like, the, the, the OLEDs. So you've got contract work from other companies doing this kind of stuff and figuring out the bezels and figuring out how do you do the CNC milling on the glass and how do you, how do you do all this, all of that kind of stuff easily billions of dollars, billions of dollars to make that thing. And your idea is to make some little crappy product. And you want to spend a tiny amount of money on it, which, you know, and again, I'm pretty good. I'm pretty efficient. But I can't magically, you know, I'm one guy or we had a small team at one point. Couldn't magically do like too much. And again, these people would not want to pay enough money, would not understand. And part of that I understand is your fault, my fault being that you're not explaining to people like you. This is how this is going to go. This is what you need. And this is how far this is going to get you. This is how far you have to go. And never mind also, like, you get people that want to do like medical devices and things like this, because a consumer product with a battery in it, just doing that, even if you're using pre-built modules, everybody wants to make it really tiny, everyone wants to make it, and if you make it tiny, you have to do custom stuff. And if you make custom stuff, you have to get like the battery certified and tested. You have to do, you have to know how to design a battery, so it's not going to burst into flames, or just expand and push things apart. And, you know, because there are a lot of things that can happen to lithium ion batteries that aren't just burning up. All of burning up is definitely not a thing you want to have to happen. But having all that stuff work, understanding how to integrate it, understanding, oh, well, you know, like 95% of these batteries are going to be within these this volume brandar. But some of them, just because of process controls, are going to be a little bit bigger. And some of them are not going to fit in the module that you made. Now you're going to either waste them, or you're going to have to design around that, or you're going to have to do. And you start figuring stuff like this out when you start scaling it up. And you think about, like, that's the battery. That's the fucking battery. And that's going to be something that depends on, like, whatever product you're making. How much, how much are you trying, or how big is the battery? How much are you charging it? How many cycles is it supposed to work for how much current draw or power dissipation is there? What is the environment that it's operating at? And, you know, you think about, you got that, and then you look, the simplest fucking thing. You have a battery. You have a simple control board, which has the battery charger on it, which has microcontroller, some kind of sensors, or actuators, or whatever. And then you have the enclosure housing for all that kind of stuff. And your options are, you can get pre-built modules that are, even if they're dense, they're not going to be, like, this was another thing that annoyed me. We worked on this project for one group of people. And because they wanted, they actually had decent budget, but not a great budget. And they were people who were coming from a company that understands something about, like, what is involved in this kind of stuff? Because of all that kind of stuff, the thing that we made was a pretty big thing. It was, I was not happy with it. But we did considering the fact that we're using off the shelf parts, off the shelf actuators, off the shelf, everything, and then you know, making our unboard and enclosures and all that kind of stuff. We had it about as small as you could make it with those constraints, but it was still too big. It was still kind of foggy. It was not great. We had to do, like, two part molds for stuff. And yeah, you just look at that and it's like, it's not great. It's annoying. It's annoying. When you look it stuff that is really highly consumer-polish kind of stuff. That, like, the amount of time and money and effort that goes in to just figuring out the enclosure, or figuring out how things get assembled, that figuring out how they get flashed, and how they, like, all of the steps, figuring out how you do all the QA on this stuff. All that kind of stuff takes a lot of money. Building a test chick. This is another thing people never want to fucking pay for. But designing the test systems for your product probably costs as much to make as the product itself that if you're going to do it well, especially if you're doing it for volume production, it's your essentially designing a second product. Now, there are things where people who do this they'll, they do it a lot, and so some of it is kind of, you know, just cookie cutter stuff. But when you're really, like, if you're building something and you want to make sure, you can actuate it mechanically, or do, like, some kind of simulated test, or whatever, it is. That kind of stuff takes time. It takes effort. It takes money. And nobody wants to pay for it. And again, this is all for a product that is probably in most of these cases. There were some things that I worked on that actually I found kind of interesting, and I thought were good ideas. But for the most part, shitty idea, not enough money, and you're not going to be happy with whatever we get to. And then you're certainly not going to pay, you know, at 10 times more than you already gave, to get from there to a final product. And you're also not going to pay, you know, I mean, just doing the engineering and design work for something is expensive. But getting the tooling, if you want to make, like, people aren't like, I want to make this volume product. I'm going to sum millions of them. Okay, when you're making millions of something, just getting a fucking tool cut to do injection molded plastic for it. Not fucking cheap. You get a steel tool cut. It is expensive. And that will, you know, have a certain life to it. And also, as you shoot more and more parts out of that, especially if you're using, like, glass filled nylon or something, that's going to wear, you know, even if you're using just anything, thermal cycles, all this kind of stuff is going to wear it down over time. It has a finite life. And the tolerance is going to get sloppy over time. And you want to build stuff and you want to figure out, it's like, everything has to fit just together, and everything, it's all hard, it's all expensive. And nobody wants to pay for it. And again, the idea is crappy, and most of these cases, because you're not building something to solve a real problem. And you look at just this, it was so frustrating. I spent so much time. And to be fair, I figured out how to do a lot of stuff pretty cheaply. I figured out how to, like, I'm not saying it was a complete waste of time and effort, but at the same time, all that time that I spent on those projects, if I would have worked on my own shit, I would be done with so many things that are so much cooler by now. I would have products out that would be like, I would like to say, pretty high volume products, things that people would actually be using and finding useful. And even if they weren't, you know, they even small volumes for some of these things, it'd be enough that I could just live comfortably. And which is really fundamentally, this is another, I haven't even gotten to the sweet press. This is, it's funny. I'm 40 minutes into this. I haven't even gotten to the thing I wanted to talk about, I will, I will get to do it, but I'm gonna, I'm gonna talk a little bit more about like venture capital and private equity in this kind of stuff. I'm gonna make this like the super abbreviated version. I will make one of these on PE. I'm gonna make it note to myself about that right now. But because PE is a whole fucking topic of itself. And I guess, in some ways, I'm glad that I was never able to raise a mass of the amount of money because the VCs will push you to do just ridiculous shit and it'll be terrible. And, you know, it's different if you have enough of a resource to do development. Like the stuff that I want to make for the most part, it'd be years of development. It would be a significant amount of time and effort invested in it. And, and, and, and, expense to, to get parts made and, you know, like doing, doing stuff that's not cheap. Um, but anyway, getting, getting back to that. Um, I, I'm just thinking, I'm gonna, I'm gonna, I'm gonna leave that subject for now because it's, it's, it's annoying me just to think about. But, the amount of stuff that, uh, they're not just looking back at how many things I did to, to make shit for people that never ended up converging because they would, again, you know, I'm, I'm working for this person who's not gonna pay enough to, to get it into any kind of volume production. They're making something that nobody's actually going to buy. And, you know, it's just, like, just that end shit that was a waste. And it's frustrating. It's very frustrating. It's making me sad. It's like so much fucking time spent on building shit like that. I, I should have been, I should have just been figuring out how to do it myself. I, I, you know, I don't even know what I could have done. I don't know how I could have gone a different path and made that work. But what I do know is actually, like, things should just be such that, you know, you can, you could just live. You could just have a place. And I, like, I don't need a fucking mansion. I need a kitchen that's decent. That, like, extravagant. But, you know, like, I can cook there. A fridge, a stove, a sink, a place to the sort of chill, a bed, a bedroom. And a little place to work. Yeah, I could, I'm, I'm in my sister's place right now. And I'm in the, I'm in, it's a three-level place. The level I'm in, if I had this much space as an apartment, and it was kind of partitioned a little bit, I'd actually probably be fine. I, it would be nice to have, like, maybe a little bit more, but I could, yeah, you have a bedroom, a bathroom, all that stuff, and you could just be comfortable. That's, that's the stuff that I want. I don't need, I mean, it would be nice to be able to fly. I like flying, but also, you know, what flying is kind of silly. And I, I, I thought a lot about this. I don't think that it's a great thing for anybody to be doing. Even if it was completely, like, you have micro-nuclear reactors or something, and flying doesn't have a huge environment, the limping, or whatever it is. Even if that was the case, and it was safe, which it's not. I mean, it's relatively safe, but, you know, flying a small airplane, there's a lot of stuff you could, they could go wrong with a small single-engine plane. Like, you know, even if, even if it was perfectly safe, even if it was free, even if there's no really environmental cost, I don't know that it's a great thing for people to be flying, really, not unnecessarily. It's nice to have clear skies. It really is. Anyway, but, you know, I'm just saying, like, I would want to travel a little bit, traveling is nice, but, there, I don't need, like, massive extravagances. I don't need ridiculous luxury stuff. I want the stuff that I need to work, the stuff that I need to be comfortable. That's kind of it. And there's this thing, that this is going to be the end of this part, but there's this idea that people in VCE and NPE look at very derisively, and this is what they call the air quotes lifestyle business, which is a business that is actually a productive, profitable business. This is what the people in private equity think is terrible. It's a business that is, you know, like, paying you a comfortable salary, paying maybe a small team of people, a comfortable salary, having, you know, whatever, what it pretty is, it's like a mom and pop shop, or a little engineering company, or a little whatever, and, you know, you're actually doing good stuff, and you have enough money that you're comfortable, and that people are comfortable. That is a lifestyle business, and, you know, the people who are VCEs, who mostly are terrible, you know, like a horrible judgment, they don't know what the fuck they're doing. A lot of these people, you know, VCE is a derisive term, I had to me, and I'm not just sour grapes, I think that there is just my opinion of the people that have met in that domain, not fucking grape, but anyway, coming back. That lifestyle business actually is a fucking good thing. It's, you know, like, mom and pop shops are a good thing. At this idea that you have to have one guy, one guy who's at the top of, like, all of the money that was going through a hundred thousand lifestyle businesses, and that's all coming into one person. Jeff Bezos doesn't need that. Think about all of the stores. Think about how much nicer it is, to have all those different stores, to have all those, like, local grocery stores, to have local specialty shops. They, you know, that's something that you should put money into. We should put resources into, like, Paris puts money into bakeries. And it's good. It makes it nice if you are in Paris, you can walk around, and there's a fucking Petisserie, and a Boulangerie within a couple blocks of wherever the fuck you are. And it's probably pretty good. It's probably, it's probably actually pretty good. It might not be great, but it's not going to be terrible. And, you know, even if it's not the best, there's going to be another one in a few blocks. And yeah, it's just, it's, it's a much better place. It's a much better way to make things work. It's a much better way to live. So this gets, anyway, coming finally back to this week grass. The thing that, I'm going to give you a little motivation for this, a little explanation of what got me to this. And I feel like I'm, I don't know if anybody's going to get 47 minutes under this thing and actually keep listening. But now I'm talking about this week grass. I should put chapter markers on it. But I need to figure that out. I really, I tried putting them on one, and it didn't work. And then I kind of temporarily, at least, gave up, but I will work on chapter markers one day, but probably not today. The thing that got that gets me, and this is something that I've thought a lot about for a long time. But it's not that expensive. Like, if you want to have a personal website, you can get certainly obviously do like square spaces, or something like that, which is not cheap. It's, I think, you know, 30 bucks a month or something. I don't know how much, I know there are hosting things that are cheaper. But, you know, you're paying 10, 20, 30 bucks a month. And the traffic that you're getting, isn't that really that much? It probably doesn't justify it for most people. So you're, you're not using that much worth of storage or capacity or anything. And you could, you could do co-hosting, you could do a lot of stuff. But, I'm just saying, there are ways that you could do this under the current circumstances that you have your own thing. And it's not that expensive. It's attainable, attainable to one person or a small group. And even if you have a decently busy sort of thing, it's tens of bucks or a hundred bucks or even two hundred bucks a month. That kind of hosting, you could probably pay for. That kind of hosting, you could kind of manage. The problem is, say you make something that's really popular. And if you make something that's really popular, you get a lot of traffic. And if you get a lot of traffic, that takes a lot of bandwidth, that takes a lot of resources. And as it gets more and more popular, the bandwidth requirements, the costs of operating that, go up and up and up and up. And so as, you try to make a Facebook essentially or a MySpace. MySpace is probably closer to what I'm thinking about here. But anything like that, if you're building a small version of it, it's not that big of a deal. You can totally do it. And you can even like, it's hard to build things that are scalable, but it's not that hard. It's stuff that is well understood. It's stuff that, you know, especially if you have people who are experts at it, you could figure it out. So you could build stuff that can scale. The problem is the cost of its scaling. And if you start getting to the scale of like a Facebook, that's literally hundreds of millions, billions of dollars a year, just in operations. Just in the stuff to host that shit is very, very expensive. And this means that somehow you have to pay for it. And if you're paying for it, well, there are a lot of options. There are a couple of things you could do. One is you get people to pay. And the individual, like the the cost of hosting Facebook, per Facebook user or Twitter or whatever, not that expensive, you know, it's like low single digit dollars per month. If even that, order of that. So in principle, you could probably get people to pay that. But the problem is, you've established, you've grown based on doing something for free. And there's a thing where people, like if they get something for free, and all of a sudden, you start charging for it, they're not too excited about it. They're not, they're not really happy about that, generally speaking. And so you have this issue that people don't really want to pay for it. And somehow you have to make money. And of course, somehow, because you live in this society that we have, you probably want to make a lot of money. You probably don't want to just have the team that is because you could develop something like Facebook with tens of people, hundreds of people, maybe even thousands of people, even for global scale. You need a lot, like for moderation and things like this. You probably need a lot of people. But to do this software development, to do like just managing stuff and making things work, you don't need that many, that many people. It's something like that kind of thing is a low fixed cost. And the operations are a growing cost that scale with the number of users. Maybe even scale worse than the number of users, because it's not just the number of people, it's the number of connections that you have that you have that you have to deal with. And so each person you add to the network, you're kind of getting some kind of a, at least the quadratic sort of thing if not worse. But you can kind of think, like as you get more and more users, it gets more and more expensive. And however it does it, whether it's linear or not, it's not great. Even if it's logarithmic, it's not great. But especially if it's not. So anyway, it's more and more expensive. How do you pay for that? But there are a couple of options that people always land on. One of them is ads, and ads are fucking terrible. I think ads are one of the bans of modern society. And also, I watch a lot of YouTube, and I'm probably, I probably should stop it because I can't fucking stand it. And I look at the stuff that I watch, the stuff that I want to watch and that I continue to watch, I have maybe a dozen people that I follow, like Blondie Hacks, this old Tony, trying to think of Blanco-Lario, Blondie Hacks again. I came back to her. I didn't need to do it twice, but you know, she popped in there. EEV blog. Yeah, there, I can't think of his name, federal, the guy who does all of the. There are a number of people like this that I watch, and I enjoy their stuff, and I find it useful and interesting. But I don't want to watch just random shit from random people. And most of it's serenotics, she's great. Most of it, Anne and Reburn. I love her. She's great. But most of the stuff on here that it's filling it, is just this AI-slop crap. Now, an audible air quotes AI, I should, you know, I don't like that people call it AI, but never mind that now. It's just garbage. It's just fucking garbage. And it's just like this thing that they keep expanding. University day, Fraser King. He's great. I like it. But it's just more and more garbage. And it's the thing that, you know, and then you watch stuff, and you get your options, if you're a consumer, or to pay for the premium, which in principle, I kind of like I paid for premium for a long time. It's not that much a month. I think like half of what you're paying is going to the people that are making stuff. I wish it was more, but yeah, that half is not bad. And I felt good about it. But then Facebook or Facebook, then YouTube started doing this shit where instead of showing me this stuff from the people that I was following, they kept mixing shit in there. They did, actually, I mean, mixing stuff and wouldn't be so bad, but they're not showing me stuff from the people that I'm following. Like I had to go to people's pages to see when they put new stuff up. And this happened for a long time. And it got so annoying to me that I stopped paying for and also like I lost my job and things got paying for premium became, it went from being like a no brainer like we in this lock to like, oh shit, that's a lot of money. I don't really want to be spending that much amount. And so I go back and I get the ads. And the ads on there are so fucking horrible. Like I don't think that they're selling anything. I don't think, I really increasingly think that modern ads are a scam that are being run against, yeah, it's like layers of scam that are being run against the people who are doing the advertisements. So there's a agency that's taking money, that the people that are making the thing that producing the ads, they're taking money from people. There are a lot of people like the network, YouTube, whoever. They're taking money from people. They're pushing the stuff out. And they don't really give a shit, who sees it? I mean, this is one of the things that's striking that like I'll get ads for shit that I'm never ever, ever, ever, ever going to buy. Or I wouldn't even consider. I mean, if I see the ad, I'm not going to buy it anyway. But even without seeing the ad, it's not a thing that I would consider buying. Yeah, it's fucking horrible. And I think part of this also is they deliberately, you know, in addition to all those scams, they deliberately want to show you stuff that's annoying so that you'll get the premium. Because the premium, if you look at the recurring revenue, the ad revenue per user, Arbu, from those ads, it's actually smaller than what you get from having somebody on premium. So they want you to be on premium. They're incentivized to get you to not see the fucking ads, which is probably not a great situation if you're one of the people doing the ad, like you're paying them to do ads. Probably not great. So anyway, they do this. And it sucks. It's terrible. And so your options are, again, ads get people to pay, or I guess you can sell user data somehow, or manipulate people for money. That's the sorts of things you can do. None of them are good. None of them are things that I think anyone should be subjected to. So the thing that occurs to me, or I'm sure a lot of people have had this realization, but something that I've been working on. Individually, if you want to have a website, most people are not really getting a lot of traffic. Most people have a website up and you might, you want it to be there. You want it to be able to, like somebody goes to it, they can see stuff, but they're probably not, you're probably not getting tens of people watching it. You're probably not getting hundreds of thousands of concurrent users for sure for most things. You're not getting that much. So you get a lot of excess capacity with your website, even if you're paying for it. And then you have other people who are putting up stuff like freezer came, and they're getting a lot of stuff where it's kind of very expensive. And if their thing gets super popular, then you're paying a lot more. If you're building something that's a Facebook competitor, you're paying an intractable amount of money. And so the thing that I was thinking and kind of seems to me like an obvious thing is that what you should do is build sort of a peer-to-peer network that essentially does the stuff that AWS does, but in a way that it's kind of abstracted away from any of these particular providers. And if you do that, you can get the hosting, both for data and for communications and all this kind of stuff. And you can share it between people. Think about that share it between people. And so this idea is basically you build this infrastructure. And this infrastructure is such that I can have a managed version that I'm running for people. Somebody also, if they want, they could start a business that's just doing management for these kinds of things. It's going to be open-source and they could be in the same network. Or people, if you want, you can have your own fucking thing and you just pay for it. You could just host it wherever. You could, you know, if you went a monkey with it, you could do that. And all of these things, you have a couple of problems. So you don't want to just host everything. I don't think that's a good thing. And I don't think you, you don't want to platform Nazis. You don't want to build the Nazi bar. So one of the things that I think is very important here is to have a sort of explicit social contract. I've had a lot about moderation for a long time. And I get really annoyed with the way that most people implement it. I think the reason that it sucks in most cases is a lot to do with the, basically, people don't really, I mean, if this is just my general problem with the way education is today, but education has become vocational training. And when I say that, I mean, even like PhD level education, but especially, if you're just doing undergrad, people go to business school, they never take a fucking ethics course. They never take a philosophy course. They never take an art course. They never take art appreciation or anything. And so they don't appreciate this stuff. And so you get people at the same with computer programming. They never take a fucking ethics course. They're, they're going to see us degree. Never take it in a fucking ethics course. Never have taken philosophy of law or justice. And so you have a bunch of people with business degrees, these finance bros, and tech bros who don't know anything about justice. They don't know why it's important to have transparency. Why it's important to have due process. They don't know why it's important to actually be able to muster a defense for yourself, or to be able to face your accuser, or any of the other things that we just, you know, are just kind of general principles. And they also don't understand things like having a social contract. And the social contract to me is sort of, I don't know, I used to think a lot about this idea of the paradox of tolerance, or quote, it's paradox of tolerance. And it seems like a thing where it's like, it's kind of hard to square. There's a reason it's got paradox in the name. But the idea is basically that if you have a free and open society, then fascists will take advantage of that free and open society. And do the things that end up pushing basically what we got today, which is fascism, and that ends the freeness and the openness of society. And to see you think about it, you're like, how do you, how do you square these things? Because I used to, I used to listen to the people who told me, well, it's got, it's very important. I remember this as a kid, because even as a kid, it was like, that seems fucked up to the ACLU is defending Nazi parades and things like this. And I hadn't people tell me, like, Scott, you know, Scott, poor, simple, young, do-ey-eyed, Scott. What you have to understand is that it's very important that we protect the freedom of speech for the worst speech, because that's where it starts getting eroded. And the problem with this idea, and I actually bought it into it for a while, I was at one point briefly, kind of kind of free speech absolutist. It thought I really started thinking about it. When you think about it in that way, it sort of makes sense, right? This is one of the things where the frame that you're operating within, really dictates the, just ideas that are available to you. Because if that's the frame that you're working in, it does sound like, yeah, okay, we can't we have to protect everybody's freedom of speech, because if you infringe on anyone's, then you're opening the door to infringe on everybody's. And it sounds actually like it makes sense, right? But the problem is, that's the wrong frame. And I'm not saying this is the right frame, but this is a better frame. If you imagine that we have a social contract. And that social contract is if you do certain things, if you, you know, it's a contract that has like consideration and you give something and you get something. So if you participate in society and you don't undermine things and you're not attacking people and being horrible, then you get freedom of speech. And when you start thinking about it in these terms, it's no longer a paradox. It's no longer, because the people who are to tell a terrarians, the people who are fascists, they are fundamentally violating that social contract. And so, if you think about it that way, to me, it's quite simple. This is a thing that I think needs to be, I could go into that more later on. But I think, yeah, already do our already an hour. And so, I'm going to try to close this up pretty soon. That sort of social contract and explicit social contract can be a thing that you set up in here. And you can sit there and go, okay, well, if you agree to the social contract and you can set up how you decide that and all of this, there are a couple of ways you could do it. I've thought a lot about different ways to do it, but one of the easiest ones is just I have my resources and everybody kind of has their own resources. And you can decide whether or not you want to syndicate people. And you can do that either by explicitly letting them in or letting them out, or you could decide to trust somebody else's judgment for it, or you could have something where they kind of agree to it. And then you have some kind of a judicial system that determines whether or not they're violating it. There are lots of different ways you could do it. And I think it's important to build all of these for some extent and have it sort of set up so that it works and people have some options. But you have this social contract and if people are in whatever way you think is right, satisfying it, you can share your resources with them. And like if somebody's not shitting in the water, why not let them have some of your extra grapefruit? You got way more grapefruit than you need, probably. And unless you're maybe somebody who has a restaurant and you're just, you need more grapefruit than you have. So you need the grapefruit from somebody else, but other people have extra grapefruit they can share with you. So having this kind of a system, I think is a good way to do this. And you do this and individually, you could have something where individually, like again, the costs of running these big systems per person is not that great. And especially, it gets worse because people run big algorithms and they do a bunch of ad stuff and they do all kinds of stuff that is very computationally expensive, very storage expensive, very network intensive. And those kinds of things cost a lot more to run. And so if you don't do that stuff, which is almost all annoying and horrible, it actually is pretty cheap per person to host a lot of stuff and to store a lot of stuff. And when you think about that, if you imagine that some people who can afford to pay a little bit mo
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