The Jab

The Jab

Image: Popularity of the first name Coral correlates with The number of biological technicians in Missouri Spurious correlation #3,596 https://www.tylervigen.com/spurious/correlation/3596_popularity-of-the-first-name-coral_correlates-with_the-number-of-biological-technicians-in-missouri Note: « every sequence has equal probability » is true but things are a little more complicated when you factor in entropy and the fact that some sequences are more « special » than others which matters when you consider say the probability of getting N heads and M tails after N+M tosses Note: I did not create the section / chapter labels; I need to figure out some way to turn that off because I don't care for them; I'm also not responsible for the captions which Apple is auto-generating ( and ignoring any that I put in so I stopped bothering to try with those ) Transcript Hey there I'm Scott and this is Tangents. Well it is the 7th of December 2025 as I record this. Not quite sure when my last one was but it's been a while. I'm I'm in Phoenix and just the last day when I have a little bit of opportunity to record something. Usually I'm back at my mom and sister's place at least recently and I've talked about this before but very happy that I have a place to stay all those kind of stuff but I will say very difficult to do stuff like this. I don't have a lot of time and space and all that kind of stuff. It's interesting to see what the things that I really miss are and like the the big ones from having my own place. Obviously you know controlling the temperature, controlling little basic things like that. Not having yeah not having somebody always there kind of nice. It is nice to be able to spend time with my mom and those. But the big ones that I miss the most more than anything like that are just having a place to work. Like I don't have I don't really have a comfortable chair there which I there are a bunch of chairs. There is that one that I can sit in that doesn't hurt me. I don't have a place to stand. I don't have my standing desk. I miss that really badly. And then I don't have my whiteboard and having like a little space, little desk. Nice cheer that I can sit in if I want to and push away and stand if I don't and then having that whiteboard where I can just offload short-term memories onto the board. It's it's all really nice and I have really miss it. But anyway I have this opportunity I'm going to record a couple today or at least that's my plan. It's already 1842. I've been working on some stuff and I'm really getting close to releasing something but I have a couple things that are just just frustratedly. It's one of these things. It always feels like you're 90% of the way there and then you keep chipping away at a chip away chip away chip away at a week later it's like you're 85% of the way there. That's that's kind of where I am. I think I'm going to make it converge soon-ish but it's it's been frustrating. Anyway anyway the thing I wanted to talk about today is something that it's something I talk about a decent amount. I've spoken a couple of times on it. I don't think I've made a specific episode at least in this iteration on this but this is particularly anti-vaxxers and I'm calling this one the jab and the reason I'm calling it the jab is I don't know what happened with language why people use this term when they're anti-vaxxers but for some reason they do and you know if you're from the UK okay jab that's what you call it. Any US calling an injection calling a vaccination a jab it's weird it's just weird and this is coming from somebody who like this room is you know the climate control I've set to the Celsius set to grid. I do that. I set the speed and a car to kilometers per hour. I do 24 hour time and things like that. I'm not saying that you can't do things that are not typical but why are you doing it? And the fact that this is so correlated I need I've talked about this before. I need to make one of these on literacy and when I say literacy it's not just the ability to directly like read and write that's a factor of literacy and end of numeracy as well you know understanding basic things in math and things like this but to be really literate doesn't just include being able to directly read the words on a piece of paper it involves being able to critically analyze them being able to understand what's behind them and there's a lot more to that than just literally directly reading word by word what's there. One of the things that I think I've talked about this many times as well but I have been online for so long and especially like in forums and things like that there are a lot of things that are extremely extremely obvious to me that you see somebody's somebody says something I just immediately glaringly and I'm not saying that I have some special power ability here it's not you know it's very developable and a lot of people have this too but I've spent enough time that I really can recognize tone in text you can see a lot of the authorship like whoever says something you could feel it you really can and it's something like I had a good in an argument with somebody I don't know a week or two ago and it was a white woman it's relevant here but I shared something that was about the sort of Malcolm and you know the whole idea of the sort of white liberal being a bigger impediment than air quotes conservatives to progress and I shared that and I'm explaining some stuff and then you get the almost as though you needed an example white woman comes in and talks about how you know well I think this is also power imbalance and yeah like there are a lot of factors in public a you don't need to be centering yourself like this was not this was not a space for you to come in and do that but also this whole idea and I am not an expert in this domain but I know enough to know just simply saying oh you know these other factors there are these other explanations or it's this thing that affects us all and you're trying to pull race out of the equation it doesn't it's actively harmful it really is and the thing about this is like what she said was just such an archetype of a pattern that you know it's like you're glaring with sunburn right I look at you and you're just glowing and condessantly it's obvious right and she is insisting like oh you don't know me you don't you know how can you jump to and I was I will say I was being extremely I would say diplomatic and trying to be helpful and I kind of I said you know like maybe go check out Rebecca the the white woman whisperer who I recommend to anyone I think she's got a lot of good stuff especially if you're your skin color looks like mine in your you don't say you totally don't think that your racist at all I kind of stuff you're probably doing a lot of harm that you don't realize and there are places you can go so I'm just saying go there you know maybe look maybe think about it but anyway she was extremely not having that and got really upset and weirdly you know unfriended me this was unfaithful unfriended me and then I said something we we we did some back but she says something I said something about you know how it's odd the you know this obviously offended you enough the you unfriended me and then she said she didn't unfriended me and then we went back and forth and then a couple of steps later she's like well I unfriended you because and why don't you just fucking tell the truth why don't you just accurately I don't understand this thing that people feel compelled to especially when something is just obvious why why are you lying about it like it's just weird but yeah and then she was explaining oh we met and we talked so many years ago when you were running for office and you seemed really intelligent and a lot of complimentary stuff and then she's like oh but I must have misjudged you and no you didn't misjudge you didn't I mean I'm not trying to suck my own dick here but you know I have a certain amount of insight and a certain amount of intelligence and awareness on in this domain and you know the the fact that you don't like what I'm saying doesn't necessarily invalidate what I'm saying but anyway I don't want to talk about that that's not the the point of this episode what I want to talk about here is anti-vaxxers and I'm not even gonna talk specifically about yeah because this is a subject that you could go you could write full dissertations on you could do your long research projects or multi-year research projects and it still wouldn't be complete but I want to talk about some things that I think are relevant there and the end up being a problem in other areas and these are these are things not not coincidentally this also has something to do with politics and with people's inability to just recognize and accept basic I would argue obvious things and instead they're trying to come up with just ridiculous epicycles on epicycles non-persononious answers for things because they won't accept what is obviously the case but anyway coming in focusing on this I got a message and it may have very well been sock puppet or I don't think it was a pot but you know it was not somebody actually using their own government name it was not somebody who's you know like representing themselves directly so somebody using a fake account or an account with you know just some random pseudonym or whatever and they come in they pop up and I should have it pulled up so that I could give you the full context doesn't matter too much but I said something and then they said something about how you know I should look it up just to remember exactly okay I should have actually obviously just done this yeah at the beginning but I I posted something or ski did I should say waiting for the doctor there's an antivax or that this was Monday last week on time flies it's almost a week ago today is Sunday I was at the I doctor getting a retinal file or follow up and while I was waiting which took a very long time I'm waiting and the doctors in the next room and I'm sitting there listening overhearing and there's a woman in the other room not that that's relevant but yeah or or someone with a femme voice I should say I don't know if it was a woman but in the next room somebody is sitting there and they're blaming vision loss and then they're talking about it in the way that it's like oh that thing that we're not supposed to talk about the yeah and she's obviously talking about the the COVID vaccines and it's just like this thing that was pissing me off so much because she's explaining I like I don't you can't read necessarily what somebody's intentions are but the doctor was letting her roll with a lot of stuff that was just out there and I I don't know maybe he's an antivax or or you know you just didn't want to accept the yeah and I don't think that to be clear I don't know what her situation was I have no idea but it sounded like it was some kind of idiopathic vision loss and you know so like no real explanation there's obviously some underlying something that caused it but it didn't sound like something that was like you did this and then that happened and I don't think it was his fault but he's sitting there and I think letting her roll with this idea which is actively harmful for everybody because it's you know fostering and fomenting antivax notions but he's letting her think and be convinced and then go off and tell her friends all the doctor kind of agreed with me that you know like maybe getting this vaccination was part of what precipitated her vision loss and I will say you know first of all and this whole discussion I'm going to be I'm going to try to be as deliberate and nuanced about it as possible it's it's a very complicated subject and it touches on you know medical ethics bodily autonomy capitalism statistics a bunch of different domains and I definitely absolutely I'm not going to be covering everything exhaustively and you know like I'm going to touch on a few things and there's no way I can I can do it full justice but I'm going to try to do as decent of a job as I can and so first of all it is true absolutely nothing that we do is free of risk there's nothing that we can do there's no choice we can make including the choice not to make a choice you know not choosing is also a choice everything has a risk associated with it and that risk may be you know like a one in a quadrillion chance of you know you stand up in the morning and something happens in a localea like anything you do there could be an extremely extremely rare unlikely event or series of events that causes that to end in all kinds of different ways and that that's important to acknowledge I think you don't want to say something is risk free because nothing is risk free absolutely nothing and then this is of course true because it's true for everything is true for any kind of medical intervention or treatment vaccination procedure whatever people people die from you know drinking water like literally drink water aspirated and you could die there are more you know is that the most rare most ridiculous kind of thing in the world you can die from just sun exposure you can die from pretty much anything that you do on a daily basis you cross the street you can very easily die you can you could just be sitting in bed and immediately right could just fall from the heavens and kill you there's there's nothing again that you can do that is not got some risk attached to it and those risks could be mortal risks for everything again and so it's certainly possible absolutely possible that somebody gets a vaccine and then that causes some kind of adverse reactions and and I will even go so far as to say we know there are certain things that will happen for sure add to some you know it's some rate low rate but you know you can be assured that there are certain risks one of those risks that is very well known and understood is that for people who have immune issues immunological issues such as autoimmunity the things like the hedge events in a vaccine can cause some kind of a flare-up or reaction so those are things that can happen and this is also just a little editorial aside this is one of the reasons why it's so important that as many people who can be effectively vaccinated get vaccinated because there are people who genuinely have reasons like actual medical reasons where either they can't get vaccinated because it could cause a flare-up in their autoimmune disease or they're on some kind of immune suppressant therapy or they just have some other immune suppressive state or immune suppressate and so they can't be effectively vaccinated the only way that they can be protected is if the rest of us are vaccinated and if enough of us are vaccinated and enough of us take precautions and do these kinds of things now you have this thing where all of those chains of infection get broken and you know things stop propagating and this is herd immunity is basic but I'm trying to describe without actually calling it that but annoyingly people have sort of stolen this term and twisted it into something else but what herd immunity is is basically even if you're not effectively vaccinated or immune to something if enough people around you are immune to it then you could get infected and then you can't give it to somebody else or if somebody else gets infected they're not surrounded by enough people who are susceptible and it sort of fizzles out and so that can protect other people you know you're not able to give it to somebody and so they're not able to give it to somebody else and then that other person which it can be you is protected by everybody else being protected this is one of the reasons why even not great vaccines where they're only giving like 60 70% protection if you get enough people vaccinated in the population you can actually use those to eradicate diseases because what really happens ultimately is based on the number of people who are vaccinated have current they are completely the vaccinations and in fact if they are all kind of stuff based on all of those kinds of things you are adjusting the basic multiplication factor so you're adjusting like I'm using things a little bit sloppy here because this is this is a very deep I put it being a logical in a area that for the lay person when you get sick there's some number which is like how many people you are likely to infect and if that number is above one then that means that each person that gets sick gets more on average than the replacement number of people to get sick and that means that you get amplification and that means that you get exponential growth if you in fact you get sick you infect two or three people now you have an exponential thing where every time you get sick you infect two or three people every one of them infects two or three people and so on and so forth and very quickly you get massive massive growth if you understand anything about exponential growth you know it doesn't take that many steps to get the huge numbers so that is this this replication factor and as you're getting more and more of the population vaccinated you're lowering that as you're doing other interventions you're lowering that and at a certain point if you do enough interventions you've got it below one and as long as that you know like each infected person is infecting on average less than one person and it's something that you can actually combat less from so if it's something like HIV where you get it and you're not going to recover or in enough time yeah you're not going to get rid of it you can to have this this work but for something where you actually get sick and then recover and then ideally you have convalesced and you're no longer sick no longer infectious now if it's below one that means you're not replacing yourself which means that you get exponential decay and if you get exponential decay then things will very quickly fizzle out it's the same kind of property of exponential growth into decay so basically the the thrust of all of that is you adjust that number we do interventions which generally are public health interventions and enough of those give you the ability to eradicate or at least greatly reduced diseases and even you know even if you're still above one and you have exponential growth there are good reasons to dial that down like for example if something is going to use a lot of medical resources the care for people if you dial that down even if it's still a problem it's under a more controlled kind of regulated growth to be useful but you especially would like to have things actually be below one anyway rambling on that's not what I want to talk about here but it is a thing that I think people have to understand that just because vaccines are not perfect doesn't mean that they're not extremely useful and I think also like I'm going to get back on track in a second though one thing I really constantly have to say and I blame Biden for a lot of this because you know you had this idea at a certain point well it's it's a very complicated thing in general but it's very simple to understand a certain aspect of this which is Swiss cheese this is to say if you have any kind of intervention any kind of layer of protection and it's not perfect it has holes if you have one of those then you have holes and things can get through if you have two of them and you stack them some of those holes are not going to overlap which means even though you have two imperfect layers of protection you get better protection then you might expect because some of those holes are not overlapping that's that perfect again but you get you know it's improving and you can do three or four multiple layers of Swiss cheese and you get fewer and fewer of these passageways that things can get through and this is also you know in other domains they call it defense and depth or you know this Swiss cheese model is extremely extremely simple extremely well understood and I think you can explain it to a little kid so that is how vaccines and masks and all these other things work you have a vaccine that's not perfect but it does a good job that's one layer of Swiss cheese you wear a respirator that's another layer of Swiss cheese you avoid situations where you're going to be in you know places that are like closed and you're going to have like a lot of people with them that's another layer of Swiss cheese you improve ventilation you improve their filtration you add in other public health interventions or or say rapid early detection and then when somebody's you know you detect somebody's infected add-in contact tracing add-in the ability to quarantine people yeah do a quarantine for a little while and tell people come for us and you add all this kind of stuff and then you get your contact traces you get quarantine if you've been exposed to somebody and then you get tested after whatever the incubation period is and you're negative now you're free to go if not you get to be quarantined yourself until you recover you know you do these kinds of things and each one of these layers of Swiss cheese adds more and more protection you don't need that many layers of imperfect protection to get pretty good protection also so the problem is of course Biden just like Trump is an extremely lazy student doesn't understand stuff doesn't really care the sort of philosophically is a big cheater I would say the kind of person I mean obviously know he literally cheated on stuff and undergrad in law school and then it was a big plagiarist got drummed out of the 1998 presidential pride primary for plagiarism yeah he's not a great guy but because of that sort of underlying ethos and way of looking at things he saw this problem like you have this pandemic and wanted to address it in the sense that he wanted to get credit for it didn't want to actually talk to people who know what the fuck they're doing and figure out how to actually address it which incidentally would not have taken that long like if you if you had a test trace isolate program and especially you know you did like a six to eight week paid sort of pause you know you can make it voluntary you don't have to like lock people down so to you know you have a pause preferably you stay home preferably you don't do this but you don't even have to make it perfect you do that and then you add to that ideally vaccinate people improve and improve filtration improve ventilation all of these kinds of things very quickly you could reduce this stuff to essentially just a trickle it would be very difficult to fully eradicate it because there are reservoirs and nonhumans like other animals but you you could get it down to very low levels and when it does crop up you could detect it very easily isolate and then prevent it from spreading those are things that you could very easily do which is frustrating because yeah if you if you've taken epidemiology like this is not some ridiculous complex unsolved problem we understand how to deal with this stuff and you could within again six to eight weeks basically be done with it you know you'd still have again these outbreaks and you'd still have surveillance but you'd basically be done and instead of doing that um he took kind of the shortcut which was okay well we're not gonna actually do this and instead we're going to say you get vaccinated and now you're magically protected and the vaccine is a magical personal shield that's completely effective and blah blah blah blah the problem is vaccines are not magical personal shields they are a component in a comprehensive public health plan and again at best at best they will protect you from getting infected like eighty ninety percent of the time is a really good vaccine there are some that are better than that but you know but it's not like a magical personal shield again it works mostly from herd immunity it does protect you it made you know it's it's always good to be vaccinated now well I guess unless you're talking about uh I something like say dengue fever where if you if you're infected one time it's not that bad it's not great but it's not that bad but then you get infected again and uh it's a much worse much worse disease uh dengue fever if you get vaccinated against it and then you get infected is actually not a thing that you want to do. The only time that it makes sense to the really get vaccinated is if you've been infected once now you've already got some immunity and then you get vaccinated and that protects you a little bit from subsequent infection but for most other diseases that's not the case most diseases getting vaccinated will make the course better don't get the outcomes better and again all of these things are statistical on average just so on and so forth so again I would like I I am somebody who looks at vaccines is kind of modern miracles and there are things that if you can get them very generally as long as they are protective I think it's ridiculous not to now and then they're I guess as long as I'm talking about this our immune systems have very broadly two different ways of approaching things so we have something called the Nate immunity and an adaptive immunity and innate immunity is stuff that just works in general it's not necessarily specific to anything but it's sort of a shield and it could be literally like in Tagument your skin it's a big part of the innate immune system just keeping stuff out of your body we have a lot of mechanisms for detecting viral viral replication in ourselves so a lot of viruses end up producing double stranded RNA and so we have things that detect double stranded RNA which our bodies don't generally produce and then there's this whole series of innate anti viral things and these kinds of things that that's not the only mechanism that that's one these kinds of things give you kind of non-specific protection and then we have adaptive immunity which is sort of a learned immune response and the way this works it's complicated but the general gist of it is that your immune system has the ability to recognize things called antigens and these antigens are they're usually proteins it doesn't matter what they are but they're parts of infectious agents that have a specific shape to them you could think of it it's a little more complicated than that basically now when you've seen that thing first you have that innate immune response that's very non-specific this brings up a whole slew of immune cells they get exposed and then the ones that happen through this process it's actually evolution of real time in your body but basically you produce this huge set of completely random abilities to recognize things and then some of those are going to just by chance be better at recognizing any kind of antigen so you get exposed to that antigen the ones that can recognize it get in there they get angry they multiply and then they you know fine tune and they get better and better at recognizing it and now you have this population of memory cells that will be kind of at some places in your body and then if you get exposed to that same infectious agent again those memory cells get you know get recruited they get the tech you're able to detect this again and then they're ready to respond so you have a much faster immune response and much more specific immune response much more effective immune response if you've been exposed and this is again Danny fever it's a little bit different there are other things that are immune invasive that there are complications that get added to this but that's the general way of work so vaccinations just expose your body to a specific antigen or a set of antigen and now they've gone through this process of doing the adaptive immunity and now you're no longer naïve you're able to muster a response that is specific to whatever that antigen is very quickly that's the whole point of vaccination that's literally all it is and it's it's one of these things it's it's not complicated again just like just like Swiss cheese is not complicated you can explain these things to little kids and I see this as a massive it's an educational feeling but it's a public health failing that we don't teach people these kinds of things we don't teach people what mRNA is for example like mRNA messenger RNA is just single stranded RNA ribospolyc acid doesn't matter what that is but it's basically a string of bases a string of little pieces and each one of these things is like a letter and you've without getting into the chemistry these will be AUG and C and the way it works is in your DNA so in the nucleus of yourselves or your mitochondria and various places you have these double stranded sequences of paired letters these will be ATG and C and the T and the U are sort of swapped in the DNA and RNA but don't worry about that out but basically you have this long sequence of letters and a sequence of complementary letters and then those find to each other and then you have this double stranded letter that's your your genome and there are ways that that can replicate itself you can imagine you unzip it you make a copy now you've got two copies you fill in the other you make the complementary strand basically now you've got two copies but you can also unzip it and turn DNA and RNA and when you do that you've expressed the mRNA for a gene there's more stuff to it like you can do editing after this and like change things a little bit basically comes out of your DNA and you've got mRNA and then that gets that's called the transcription that gets translated into protein and again you don't need to know what protein is you don't need to know it's like a sequence of amino acids and three letters of the mRNA code for each single mall or single I'm trying to train that to get too much into the chemistry video each three letter sequence codes for a specific amino acid just think of it as like a building block at the protein and the particular string of amino acids that you make determines the structure of the protein and then that in turn determines the function of the protein and things can be structural proteins they could just be like collagen or last and they're adding like stiffness or flexibility or rigidity that kind of stuff they can often be enzymes so they're like specifically speeding up certain chemical reactions or lowering the activation energy for them um a little more complicated in that but um yeah those are common things and so if you you go DNA mRNA protein for most things that's how genes are expressed and so you know to say keep saying mRNA and they're I haven't touched viruses or vaccines or anything like that mRNA is just how your body makes protein it's how your body does basically you know the vast fast majority of things that it does and viruses also make proteins and turns out some viruses there are lots of different I'm I'm going to go off on a little tangent of a tangent I'm sorry that's what I do viruses for their genomes can have single or double stranded DNA genomes or RNA genomes there are some that are double stranded RNA there are some that are single stranded RNA there are some that are plus-sense single stranded RNA and a plus-sense means the coding RNA which means they're basically mRNA as their genome happens to include the COVID coronavirus is there are ones that are minus-sense and these have to be first uh you have the non-coding version replicated the coding and then that codes for proteins there are others that don't go through proteins they're just uh yeah and then there are things where they're like double stranded or single stranded DNA then you have to go through RNA or sometimes there are even things like retro viruses where have there's the where the genome will be RNA and then it has to go back into DNA gets encoded or incorporated into the host genome there are lots of complications but in the case of coronavirus is the genome itself is essentially mRNA if you get infected by a coronavirus you're replicating that viruses genome which means you're replicating massive amounts of the mRNA that comprises the genome so it's kind of weird that people get strange about this because it's just like if you understand what I just described which which again is stuff that you know like is like biology 101 level stuff or molecular biology no one but it's stuff that anyone could understand again and if we would teach people this kind of stuff then all of this nonsense about mRNA being somehow like a big deal or you know like something horrible or shocking or whatever which is go away like it wouldn't get traction because there's nothing to have traction it's just simply you know like it's like obsessing about a bolt you know like somehow a bolt is a bad thing there are bolts and everything yeah bolts are just kind of an essential component of how things are put together and you know it's not like there's something magical or evil about a bolt at similar way mRNA it's just mRNA and when I would when I took a virology the first time and going to date myself here a little bit but it was in the 90s it was I think about 20 years before mRNA vaccines became a practical reality and the professor incidentally Dr. Brooke Jacobs who I really like one of my best professors when I'm probably my favorite professor ever when I took a class certainly up there annoyingly he was also a good researcher and got yeah that did decent job with the funding so he was able to escape teaching and then now yeah because he was so good at research they pulled out of that and they let's somebody also it was not that very good at it teach the class but don't worry about that it's just it's kind of annoying the way the academia really like looks at teaching is the secondary thing this kind of annoyance nuisance that you're trying to like you have to do it but you don't really want to and it's kind of punishment if you're not successful and the other stuff so it's it did totally irrelevant but the thing is when we're when I was taking this class he was explaining you know like one day maybe if we're really lucky and we really work hard we'll figure out how to make an mRNA vaccine that was the goal and the reason that you want to do it is because if you know most vaccines if you're using some kind of a organism to to vaccinate people you either use a live attenuated organism which is to say it's a weaker version of the original and sometimes those attenuations are not great but you know it's less bad or you take the original one and you kill it and then you use a dead slash inactivated version and that is the way that we've vaccinated people for the longest time you know like up for for the first vaccinations for smallpox we're basically just taking post-struals drying them out grinding them up and then like blowing that shit up somebody's nose and because of how it was inoculated and on a bunch of other things people would end up getting a different kind of infection and sometimes getting some protection out of it but you'd still also kill people with it you know it's not a it's not great to get exposed to live virus especially when that is something that kills you so then you try to either kill it deactivated and sometimes when you deactivate it it doesn't all work like you'll get some leaks through or there's some process issue there was with a lot of air with a killed polio vaccine this happened actually it wasn't properly deactivated and then some people got polio from it that was you know but again like one thing I want to say is every time I talk about something like this that happened one time got detected got fixed and then it was not it was it was not like an ongoing thing and also also this is true with all this kind of stuff once it happened got fixed but even even with it happening at some low rate the protection that the vaccines gave was far far better than the risk of getting an actual infection from getting vaccinated it's one of these situations where you just end again I understand were terrible at understanding relative risks were terrible at understanding like you know some things like I said everything has risk associated with it but even if you have a vaccination that could cause you know it's like bad it could even kill you at a low rate if the rate at which that is killing you is less than the rate of getting killed by an actual infection then it still makes sense to be vaccinated and by far even in that worst case scenario with the polio virus where there is that one fuck up even then it actually was more protective than harmful you know that the relative risk was in no veriner like complete no veriner now so anyway that the thing that's cool about mRNA vaccines and the reason that we're working on them for so long is that you don't need to have the whole organism you can just take the part of the organism that is going to elicit protective immunity and you can just replicate that really quickly and not only that you could say okay here's this new organism I've never seen before and part of this is also you know 20 years ago it was a much bigger deal to get sequences but now you can get sequences for almost nothing like it's 100 bucks easily yeah most things probably like 50 bucks or significantly less it's not a big deal getting there are certain things that cost a little bit of money like building a genetic library and you but to get a sequence for an awful organism is not that hard today and not that expensive and once you have that sequence you can actually depending on how novel it is but if it's like a coronavirus you know because these are all related and you have a bunch of other examples of them you can kind of look and you don't you're not going to see like exactly the same parts of the genome and everything but you'll see sort of in the same sense that you have you know similar bones and you know the digits you have phalangees you have parcels and metotarsals and femurs and phobias and phobias and all of these kinds of things they're conserved so if you look at those in an orangutan and you look at those in a human they might not be exactly the same but you can kind of tell what they are you can look at the genomes of these viruses and kind of tell okay this is the spike protein that's going to be involved in recognizing you know like binding to the target cells and performing an infection this is going to be the DNA polymerase or RNA dependent RNA polymerase or whatever you know you can kind of look at these things and understand from the sequences what they do and this actually ends up being a really cool thing because if you have developed a mRNA vaccine against any kind of organism that's even closely related you can know what the targets are and this is how we were able to get such yeah for a novel vaccine every novel virus get these vaccines so quickly because we already had coronavirus vaccines that were mRNA based we already had targets once you have those targets you get the new sequence you put that in and printing up mRNA is is that quite the same as putting a thing into a printer and then printing it but it's so close now we have things that are literally called the DNA printers and you can just make whatever the sequence says that you that you want to you can make that and you can update it really quickly so you're able to go from something that we've never seen before you get the sequence takes almost no time and then you can say okay well these are the targets you can make the you can make several different vaccine candidates for different targets and then you know just go into testing test for safety and efficacy all is kind of stuff and you're there you're basically there and this is you know it's magical because you don't have the full organism you don't have anything that could revert you don't have to develop and attenuated version you don't have to spend a long time figuring out how to make an effective vaccine against whatever whatever you're trying to make it vaccine against you just sort of take the cookbook of this is how we make or at least a certain kind of immunity from mRNA to a protein to an immune response and this will be an effective immune response for whatever this agent is and so you can go from something that might be a many decades long process to something that you could do realistically in six months to a year potentially significantly faster and you know just it's hard to explain it's hard to convey just how amazing that is versus what we used to do but it is a ridiculous improvement orders of magnitude better so anyway of course the the main thing like I'm trying to explain enough there to get you to understand there's not like a reason to be particularly nervous about these things and also it is a just scientific and medical miracle that we were able to develop them as quickly as we were and similarly also all the all of the standard vaccinations that we have all of these are against diseases which are necessarily massively lethal but they definitely have a lot of morbidity and mortality associated some of them killed like if you look at not that distant of past before the era of vaccines and antibiotics most kids used to die like if you had a kid the odds were strongly in favor of them dying like they would be the die of what is now a preventable disease or you know often like you get an injury or something and oh you have an injury which leads to an infection which kills you now take some antibiotics and you survive oh you have a appendicitis that would have killed you and you can get a pretty easy medical procedure that saves you and again all these things have risk associated with them but they you know if you look at the relative risk it's massively better to to have these interventions than not so anyway the thing that I really want to focus on here is just that humans are in a lethal at perceiving or understanding relative risks are intuition against sort of what is dangerous and what is safe is terrible absolutely terrible yeah and you always hear the example of air travel is the safest or flying is the safest way to travel and driving is much more dangerous and yet people when they're driving and especially when they're driving themselves they feel like they're at much lower risk and you know this is just one example of what you think is the reality being completely opposite from the actual reality and similarly you're getting and an occupation you're getting jabbed to use the word with a sharp scary needle and not only that but it has you know who knows what kind of chemicals are inside just probably die hydrogen and oxide in that needle that's getting injected into you that's kind of scary right your perception of what that risk is associated with that is one thing and then the reality of that risk is another and you have to consider like what is the actual risk which is again very very low not zero nothing is zero risk as I said a couple of times here but it's a very low risk of a few things versus a very real and much larger risk of getting an infection and not being protected from it and you also have to factor in you know it's you're not here alone like there's the chance of you getting that infection and not being protected but there's also the chance of you getting an infection and transmitting that to other people and whether something is going to kill you or not whether it's going to permanently injure you or not if you go out and you're part of a chain of infection it might not kill you but is it going to kill one of the people that you infect or is it going to kill one of the people that they infect and if you look at the the case mortality rate for COVID because obviously that's one of their things I'm talking about here it is in the low single digits of percentage and the basic replication factor again depends on the variant and the bunch of other stuff but it could be as high as a 18 so you get infected it's very contagious you're infecting a bunch of people but even if it's say you know imagine it was something that's not that infectious and you're infecting like a handful of people you infect five people let's just say this is an abstract virus or something like this is not a specific one but you infect five people you get infected each one of those five people infect five people so one hop out five people are infected two hops out 25 people are infected and then 25 times five and then so on and so forth and very quickly you've gone from one to five to 25 to 125 to 125 to 625 and it just keeps going and going and going if the case mortality rate is one percent that is the same one percent of infections kill somebody then all you have to do is go out three hops and now you are like even if you were fine even if the people you infect that are fine now you've at least killed one person and if you wouldn't have infected people if you would have broken the chain of transmission at yourself that person would still be alive you go out one more step it's going to be five times that and so on and so forth so to me and I know this is controversial but we live in a society and we have a responsibility to each other and so you have your own personal protection and you also have to think about like what is the contribution of you taking measures to keep from getting infected and keep from infecting people and it is I mean I'm not going to say it's quite the same as like taking a gun and pointing it at a crowd closing your eyes and shooting it but it's not that different you know if you are letting people get infected then and they're going to let people get infected a couple of hops out somebody's dead now if you point to a crowd and pull the trigger versus you sneeze one seems much more proximal one is much easier to understand the causation but both of them you as surely lead to somebody's and of course also because everybody who gets infected in fact more people it's not just one death it's tens or hundreds or thousands of deaths a few hops out so you couldn't I don't know to me it seems like a no-brainer especially when the the cost is extremely enough or low and it has a benefit to you and you're also protecting other people so anyway I guess I wanted to say we're also terrible just in general and it really fits in here as well but we're terrible at understanding causal relationships with things it's not just that we're bad at understanding relative risk but it's very difficult for us to actually know a cause to be and there are a number of things that I think complicate this but fundamentally a lot of it is sort of the way that our brains work and we have a tendency to kind of overlearn and I would say it's sort of a tendency towards superstition so it's not to say that you're not learning things that are actually happening but I think I'm speculating a little bit here and why this is but I think probably for ancestors if you did something and then that almost killed you you don't want to do it again or if you saw somebody died from something you don't want to do that so it was probably better to see something and then notice something happens afterwards and just avoid that behavior and think that that might be the the thing that caused it probably more important than actually delving into what actually was the causal agent or what was the the causal chain so you know if there are three things you see somebody does somebody sneezes and then they die and somebody takes a walk over here and then they die or somebody flips a coin and then they die it might be well I didn't use good examples and then somebody runs toward a cliff and falls off the cliff you see those four things three of those four things there's nothing you could do about that they're not they're not actually causing somebody to die one of them they are but the problem is you want to have a learning model that catches the one where you know it is actually going to kill you and it's probably better to have false positives there like you learn things that are not really the case than to not learn things and then be killed by them or you know something else that's going to cause you know not necessarily your death but you know consequences that keep you from being able to reproduce or keep you from being able to reproduce as effectively or whatever so that is I think why we're bad at perceiving causation but ultimately the the consequence of that is we're very very prone to superstition and especially you know when something happens I mean this is true just in general if you notice patterns your brain will associate you know this happened and then that happened and you can go I always I was I was always liked this but there's a Tyler Viggin VHEN Tango Yankee Lima Echo Romeo Victor India Gulf Echo November TylerViggin dot com go there and there's this thing called spurious correlations and what this is is basically it's something called data dredging or p hacking which is you're looking this is an interesting thing I think and it gets to one of the reasons why like we don't we don't understand statistics as a general rule like even if you've taken statistics epidemiology is full of things where they're very counterintuitive or there's something that is very easy to misunderstand or draw the wrong conclusions from I've taken epidemiology a few times and that was the biggest takeaway I had which was it's just fraught there's I don't have a good example offhand but there are so many things that you learn about where you'll see it and there's something that seems like obviously this is you know obviously this is the conclusion you would draw obviously this is how stuff works and then you actually look at the statistics and it's something that's much more complicated or it's misleading or anything like this it's it's fraught I would just say so understanding that is one reason why I generally don't I don't wait too much into epidemiology other than the things that I'm pretty confident about and I'm much more of an expert at the topic than a lot of people who you know tended to say a lot of stuff about it and then even if you don't condemn epidemiology statistics is fraught and and again like you know you could be very strong in statistics and you're going to fuck up a epidemiology similarly you could be pretty good into which they're at intuition but you're gonna have terrible intuition about statistics there are lots of things yeah and you can just go through they're not really paradoxes but things that are surprising of often be called paradoxes that are things that are just very simple statistical things that are very easy to prove or demonstrate and they're just really really counterintuitive like the birthday paradox if you have more than not even that many people the odds are that you're going to have two people that have the same birthday you don't know what the birthday is going to be but you have 20 people in the room it's very very likely that two people have the same birthday shockingly likely even though each birthday is going to be one day out of 365 days of the year another one that's is the Matty Hall problem you have the three different doors two of them have nothing and then one of them has you know some big prize if you have somebody open the door at random and your choice is to take whatever is there or to reject it the odds of you succeeding in the next round are much better if you reject it that's very counterintuitive like it's very it's one of these things I don't want to get like deep into it but you can go through and do a lot of research on these things and there are shockingly many of them and there are just things that you know you will think they work a certain way and they just don't or or someone will really like coin tosses if you have a perfect fair coin and every time you toss it there's a 50 50 shot of it being heads or tails you would expect it in and I don't mean like maybe you have enough intuition that you don't expect that to go heads tails heads tails but you kind of kind of still do you kind of think oh it's going to be like half the time heads it has the time tails which means it sort of alternates or balances out the odds that you'll have any particular sequence are all equal which means that getting a hundred heads in a row seems very unlikely but there's nothing magical or special but you know keeps that from happening there's nothing like that's a perfectly reasonable sequence that is just as likely as heads tails heads tails tails or any other you know low and drop or any any other sequence that doesn't just look sort of random so to speak there there are a lot of things like this that again are just not intuitive and if you go to this site that I sort of mentioned before Tyler bigan.com and look at these various correlations you can find that if you look at one measure of fitness which is fitness and the sense of sort of how you're measuring I guess you could you'd call it a figure of merit but how you're measuring like two things are connected and this is the correlation coefficient so basically if two things are changing in a way that one goes up the other goes up one goes down the other goes down and so on if you guess a pattern and then you see it and you see a strong correlation that tells you one thing but if you pick a correlation and you have a large collection of patterns it's very easy to just sift through and find things that will be spurious correlations and those two things sound very similar but the difference is monumental this is one of the reasons why you know like you can almost be guaranteed that if you have enough patterns you'll find correlations of any level like if you if you have you in fact you can do some statistical analysis and figure out how many things you have to find in order to get some level of correlation so if you want like a 90% correlation you need this many samples you need 95% 99% correlation you just need this many and so on and so forth and it's a large number but it's not that large and if you get enough you can pick any level of correlation and find it you can also figure out any kind of p value I don't want to do what that is but it's a figure of what the odds are that something happened by chance and if you misapply this statistic then this is called p hacking if you misapply it by judging through data and looking for something then you can get something that looks like it's very good by that statistic but the problem is you're sort of circularly applying that statistic the find the thing that fits the statistic you're not using the statistic as it was meant to be used if that makes sense so this kind of stuff this is also actually why and I see this one all the time but for like audible air quotes AI bullshit somebody also say oh this has a 90% success rate or 90% accuracy or something like this what does that actually mean I mean if you're the way that these things are trained and the way that the things are are working here you're kind of misapplying a figure of merit in such a way that you're going to find something that looks like it's much better than it is also 90% is not great but you can find something that is going to fit 90% of the time especially especially if you're not careful about how you put in the data and how you do the analysis and you're not overfitting or overtraining or anything like this you can find something that works 90 or 95% of the time but it's completely wrong and it's just that it happens to work in the data corpus that you have that you're looking at similar what you can find something that doesn't look great and it's actually pretty pretty good it's just there's a lot of noise or there's some other but you have to I think the general thing that I would take away is your intuition is terrible at epidemiology even if you're really good at statistics and your intuition at statistics is really terrible guaranteed even if you're you've spent a lot of time studying these things and especially if you never have and it's very easy to to mislead yourself to to come to bad conclusions with things like this and especially like when something is a very simple explanation or answer especially to something that is really horrible like somebody dies you want an explanation for that you don't want to just oh they just like shit happens you want to go like what caused this or or your kid gets injured gets leukemia gets whatever any kind of thing like this you really want an answer and you know it's it's not only do you want an answer you want that answer to be something like so and so did something and it was somebody's fault it's not oh this cosmic rage just happened to land here and then this other one happened to land here and you know you had this weird free oxygen radical that happened to do this thing and the combination of those things caused this problem or you know you had just a random congenital heart defect and then something happened and you had heart attack that a very young age you want there to be a LA this was caused by a person who did something foolishly and I think I don't know if that's a cultural thing or if it's just an in a human thing but it definitely is a common thing and so the problem is you have a brain that is sitting there sitting there basically designed to be a superstition machine did just designed to look for patterns whether or not they're real and you have some kind of a correlation and though that correlation could be by chance it could be not by chance but you know it could seem really good but especially you know you filter out all the thousands or millions of things that something could be and you filter out all the things that have either complex causations or multifactorial causations or yeah and you come up with something where something happened that was easy to identify and then at some point in the future something all happened and you want there to be a simple explanation a causal explanation and so you come up with that and I think this is how you get to a lot of people with these sort of anti-vax beliefs because kids get a lot of vaccines that's just how it works that's the normal thing and that's not I'm not saying that that's you know like that's just how it should be frankly you have and you could just say like let's take something that's less charged kids are going to be exposed to the sun many many times you know you get exposed to the sun every day for your life probably just about and so there's something like you're going to get exposed to this thing many many times which means that if something else happens if something bad happens it's very easy to say well you know every kid that died of a bike crash was exposed to sunlight like isn't that interesting every single kid who has ever you know died from from bicycling was exposed to sunlight and if you had somebody sitting there trying to give you a bullshit answer and pointing a finger at you know it's like big sunlight is causing your kids to get these bike racks and you should avoid have your kids avoid that sunlight because yeah you don't want your kids to die it sounds ridiculous but that is where you are with these vaccinations because you have this thing this treatment that a lot of kids most kids almost all kids are getting a lot of and then something happens which a lot you know things like childhood leukemias or injuries or you know different things happen a lot during childhood enduring development also you have a lot of things where you might not have noticed something and independent of anything else that was going to come but because your brain is looking for these patterns you see oh this happened and then days or weeks or months or whatever later this happened they must be correlated they must be not only correlated but causal the the thing caused this other thing and especially you know you take that that's your kind of innate leaning and then you have somebody who's whatever reason maybe they have a financial interest or maybe whatever but for whatever reason they're pushing the narrative that a causes b now you get that and you're in that situation and you get really convinced that a causes b and this is one of these things like I'm not it's certainly possible obviously that a did cause b I'm not throwing that out I'm not dismissing it out of hand but the odds are that it didn't and how do you know if a caused b well it actually for an individual is very difficult to like the tease out causation they there are certain things where you know if if somebody shoots you and then you get killed you could probably probably connect those two things somebody takes a knife and chops off your finger and then you don't have a finger it's pretty easy to come up with the causation there but when it comes to something like getting vaccinated even the efficacy of a vaccine you are a single data point you're not something that you can't take a million copies of you and take half of them and randomly not apply the treatment and half of them and apply the treatment and then see what happens you can't control you can't conduct a control experiment you're just one path through reality and because of that it's actually fundamentally kind of impossible for things that are subtle the detect and determine causation and an individual basis now what you can do is look at populations and there are some very powerful statistical methods that are that are common in epidemiology that will help you tease out causation from correlation and detect these kinds of things and then there are also like the the gold standard would be sort of what I described you just like create a controlled experiment and you have two different populations which are as similar as we can make them half of them we apply a treatment half of them we don't and then you see what is the difference in outcomes that that would be something that is not necessarily ethical when it comes to medical or medical stuff but that's sort of the gold standard you can do it without that too but it gets more big it's heavier it's more complicated and then I don't even want to get into like we for for vaccinations we generally don't do that anymore because what we discovered for most of these is that it's not ethical to do that kind of a controlled experiment because we know going in for most of these things being vaccinated is actually going to be very protective and if it's something that you know it's something that you don't want somebody to get in the consequences of getting it really bad it's just not ethical not the treat them and we also know that the risk is very low and we know the probability of efficacy probably decent and just from past experience like this is not like we just decided it so there are reasons why we don't do that but that is the gold standard and so you know like even in yourself like the the kind of example that I would give here because it's something that I hear people jump to a lot but somebody that say say even you got a vaccine you were vaccinated and then something happens and because I'm kind of on topic here let's let's say you got a rash now did the vaccine cause the rash that's a complicated question and it's going to be you know I would argue it's actually almost impossible to know definitively now you can say like okay well it's focused around wherever you were vaccinated well is that from an immune that like an allergic reaction or is it an infection is it that there was some kind of chemical contamination and it's just an irritation and this is another thing also like people do not have a great training in what an allergic reaction looks like this is this is one of these things I wish you know we should teach people early and often obviously like CPR or basic first aid stop the bleed kind of stuff but you should definitely also teach people to know the difference between say food poisoning and infection you know food poisoning rapid onset you eat and then 30 minutes 60 90 minutes later you're vomiting you have diarrhea it's very fast versus an infection usually more than 24 hours often 48 72 hours kind of incubation period and then it's growing and then you get sick after you've been exposed. Understanding the difference and those kinds of things understanding the difference in course understanding the you know like influenza generally speaking is like a two week hellish kind of course you get exposed 48 72 hours later you present with symptoms and then for like 14 days you'll feel like complete shit you'll have a high fever and you'll have like phone and muscle aches and you have a bunch of stuff and it's fairly characteristics stuff although flu like symptoms are going to be common for pretty much any viral in fact most infections just in general because innate immunity is the cause of a lot of these things and adaptive immunity is also but you know like understanding that kind of stuff understanding that you know like if you get a cold or what you would call a cold not the same as the flu and if you haven't had a definitive test for influenza you probably didn't have the flu and if you had the flu you probably would know because again hellish two wee

Agnostic

Image: Thomas Henry Huxley in the 1860s. He was the first to decisively coin the term agnosticism. By Ernest Edwards National Institutes of Health public domain [https://ihm.nlm.nih.gov/images/B11455] Full transcript: Hey there I'm Scott and this is Tangents Well, today is the sixth of I was going to say December for some reason, but November 2025, it is kind of hard to believe They're like a blink ago, I started my job, my last job at ASU, and that was in like two years ago, basically, a little bit more And then I blink ago after that, that job ended I was planning on going to Japan, South Korea, China, Vietnam, and Thailand, and then I did that, and then I was back And I've been back like two months now, and it's disturbing how fast time goes I mean, I know this is not the most profound observation that anyone could make But I remember when I was a kid, I was a kid, and like a week seemed interminable It seemed like forever And kind of in a bad way, in some sense, I mean, it wasn't a terrible experience, like I wasn't always complaining, but there would be things where you'd be looking forward to something, and it'd be a week away And it just seemed like a forever And now, I blink my eyes and years have gone by I've been, like, I'm back on Facebook, don't feel great about it, but I am And because I started my account there, I'm still connected to the people I was connected to before And there are a bunch of people that I'm connected to there who, and didn't link them as well, who I knew in graduate school And I look at these guys, and they're like, what the fuck happened to you, you're old now And, you know, so many of them also, the dudes, obviously lost their hair, they're bald And you're seeing these bald guys, and you're just like, what the fuck happened? And then of course, the weird thing is, I didn't actually, like, they're very old now I'm not, I don't know how that happens But no, I mean, like, we're all kind of the same age And it's just weird, it's just fucking weird I was just talking to somebody I used to work with after my PhD, and his wife is the sister of someone I used to date And her kid, who she had, after we broke up, less than a year after we broke up, not mine But, I have a history for some reason of being with people right before the end up getting pregnant, like, you know, just a month or two, and then they get with somebody else and have a kid In her case, I guess I don't want to talk too much about it, but I was not in a great place to be in a relationship that was sort of long term then There was someone in grad school who I really liked And I don't know that she ever would have considered me as even a potential partner But she definitely was very flirty, let's just say, and was very hot and cold Like, the first time we started talking online, this was back when we had the Google talk, or so I think that was what it was called She talked And it was Friday night, and she just message me out of the blue And we had, I guess that the transcripts are probably someplace, not that I want to go back and look through those, but we had a really good talk for hours and hours that night And I would kind of see her every once in a while, and we'd hang out a little bit, and then she'd get fucking weird, and then she'd be hot again and cold again, and it was, we'd never, we'd never, to be clear, dated or anything like that But it was just weird It was, and, you know, I was quite infatuated with her I was, it was one of my last real, like strong, lemurance kind of experiences I've had, don't give me wrong I've had a few sense, and not a few before But somehow with her, just was extremely, extremely interested And, you know, I knew that that wasn't gonna work And so, you know, ended up in a couple of other relationships But I wasn't really, I don't know, hadn't really let go of the idea of maybe And also, like there was this thing that, you know, with my ex-wife, I mean, it's not that I wasn't, like, didn't care for her, but we weren't, you know, she was the first person I was ever really with romantically, or physically, for that matter I kind of, like, soft-dated a couple people before, but then, you know, nothing had all serious One of, one of those actually, also, she had a kid, not long after we sort of soft-dated And, I don't know, soft-dated as the rape, but, you know, not really quite dating, but that, whatever it is Not, you know, not dating, per se, but, you know, like, fault-dated ish in the vicinity of a date, or several But, anyway, we sort of parted ways, and then she got with some English guy who, I think they were only together very briefly, but got pregnant, had a kid And that kid, I mean, years ago already, this is, you know, not the date myself here, but years ago, that kid was already 18 And I think maybe going to school, I say going to school, I mean, university And then you just think about, like, the time and the, it's just wild So, and you think, also, like, if I would have had a kid with her, not that we were going to have a kid, but you know, it's like, at that time, just for time scale, I would have a kid who is probably could have a PhD by now for all I know It's wild, it's hard to wrap your mind around, how fast time goes And especially, like, it just keeps accelerating And I think about, like, how fast it must go for my mom, you know, like, it goes faster and faster for me, and she's had decades more So, it's just like, you And, I don't know, I think about that, and then I think, getting back to this person that I was with, was actually with We were together And I, of the people that I've been with, I think probably, you know, that, I guess in the scale of, like, if you have the perspective of all the relationships that you've been in, probably the one that I would have stayed with, except, like, a couple of things With one, again, I was still not really completely letting go of this other one That wasn't really even a relationship But, you know, and it was very, I don't know, she was, I don't want to get too much into that But it was, like, I've not had many people on Facebook where I've been disconnected and reconnected, disconnected and reconnected, even once And with her, it was, like, a half dozen times And, like, I wouldn't see her for nine months, and then we get chummy again, and then wouldn't see her for a little while, and then it'd be, like, every day we're having coffee in our office for a while And then it was just fucking weird It was just in retrospect and in perspective, it was just weird, and unfortunate But, I don't know, like, if she ever was interested, I don't know how that would have gone Yeah, it's one of those things, like, maybe the idea is better than the reality I don't know, I really don't But, I was with this other person, and I think, I think it would have been actually kind of okay, but her sister was, yeah, she got married, she was pregnant, she was having a kid, and there was, like, we weren't together that far or that much at this point And she's already really interested in having a kid and getting married And it's just, like, the weird thing is now, at this, at, by current, big age, not that big of age, but, like, in my current age, looking back, like having a kid doesn't seem like the worst idea Now, I can imagine, I'm not exactly jealous of people with them, but I do see, like, I watch a lot of pilots on YouTube And there's one that I don't really watch that much, but occasionally, and he has a couple daughters, and he's taught them to fly, and they fly together, and all those kind of stuff, and actually, I see that, and it's like, that kind of, yeah, I see some appeal to that I see some, I think that I have some things, some qualities, and I don't mean, like, in the sense of passing them on genetically, but just like raising somebody with them, I think they would actually be good qualities to the past on, and to maintain, and I think they would actually be, that I think they would be good I think they would be good They're the things that the world would be a better place with more people, with certain things that I have And, you know, like I'm saying, I don't know, maybe I'm just, everybody thinks too highly of themselves, or whatever, but I do think I have some things I think, like, one of them, and actually, this is the thing I wanted to talk about today, that's the title of this, is agnosticism, or agnostic, I think is what I'm gonna call it And the funny thing is, I'm not agnostic I'm absolutely not, I don't think at any point in my life, I have ever been anything that I would call agnostic I've basically always been non-religious I was raised without religion, and frankly, I am, I've talked about this a few times, but I'm very thankful that I was raised without it I'm very thankful that it wasn't really imposed on me, that I didn't, the thing here is I just, I see people who were raised with it, and it's just very difficult for them, especially, I mean, you know, like, I'm not saying like day-to-day, always they seem to find some community and comfort in it, sometimes But you see people where they lose a kid, or have some kind of tragedy before them, or whatever, anything, anything like that And you have this problem that you have to sort of resolve with yourself, especially when I talk about religion, I'm here talking primarily, like, Judeo-Christian sort of traditions But, you see people with these things, and they have this idea of a single deity that is all loving, and good, and powerful, and all those kind of stuff And then their kid died, and how do you deal with that? And it tortures them And I'm not saying like, anything could make that a okay thing, but I just, I find great comfort in not being religious Or for a lot of reasons, I think, you know, but one of the biggest ones, I did at one point when I was kind of like in high school, I sort of thought about like the age of the universe, and I was just, it was keeping me up at night, thinking about like how long a human lifetime is, and my perception of time at the time, especially And so, you know, you think about that, and then you think, on the planet at the time, I don't know how many billions of people there were, they were like six, less than probably less than seven, time is wild, another or over eight But, you think about that, that means every year, that obviously have people going to sleep, so it's not exactly, say, six billion, seven billion years of experience of, I mean, really, if you think like a third of your life, you're asleep more or less, that means it's really like, say there were six billion people at the time, I don't know how many it was, but just like, rough numbers, six billion people, and two thirds of that is actual subjective experience, it's time And so that means, what does that, four billion per year? That means that every few years, you've got the lifetime of the universe, worth of subjective time And you think about that And then on top of that, you think about like, well, that is a few years, the duration of human, like the extent to which humans have lived on the planet, even though the population was long ago, much smaller, do you add all that time up? And then you think about all the other is sentient beings on the planet And you add all that time, I'm up And it just, it really fucked with me And I was just thinking about how long the universe has been here, and that really fucked with me And then you think also about the heat death, or anything like this And it just things like that kind of mess with me And I don't think I ever really came to a durable transferable conclusion about all of that stuff Like it didn't resolve in a way that I could tell you this, and then that is going to comfort you But in going through that exercise myself, it's sort of at first overwhelmed me And then I sort of started accepting it And then I started being okay with it, and then more than okay with it And I, the universe that I inhabit in some sense is sort of chaotic and random, and there's no, I'm not saying like, it's just some extent to agnosticism But as far as I know, there's no higher power Now, the reason I say I'm not agnostic is agnostic implies, I think it basically is that you don't have any understanding And it's even impossible to know the nature or existence of airports God The problem with that is of course it assumes the context of there is a God or there isn't a God And it's specifically that sort of monophistic today of Christian type of God, especially Christian God And so you kind of think about it, and it's like, it's still like Pascal's wager, which it sounds, it's one of those things that gets sounds like a reasonable deal if you're coming from that tradition if you were raised with it And this is one of the reasons why, again, I'm very thankful I wasn't raised with it, because I think when people are raised with certain belief systems like these, even the ones that I know who have left them, that the people who have become atheists in time or agnostic or whatever, they never really fully sing to escape that framework that was laid out for them that they sort of like, God, when the cement in their brains was wet, they got the sort of spiritual understanding of the universe, like the universe works in a certain way And even when they take away the sort of formal religion or anything like that, they still have this sort of spiritual thing that they talk about and all those other stuff That the way that I see the universe does not have any of that And in fact, to me, that stuff doesn't make sense And like, I mean, part of it is also, and I don't mean to get all like super, oh, I'm a physicist, but I am a physicist And you think about what would be, what would it even mean to have a spiritual plane? And you can't see it, but I'm doing giant novelty ear quotes, or anything, what does that even mean? Do you have, because you could have something, let me really just do the exercise with me You could either have something that exists outside of the universe or, you know, and essentially like, in a way that you can't couple two, you can't connect to And then does that even have a real meaning? Or you have something that exists that somehow is connected to reality, and then how is that different than an electromagnetic field? Or, you know, in any kind of like the Higgs field, or whatever And so you think about that, and so it just sort of, it doesn't make it like there, it doesn't exist But to me, basically, it says, if it does exist, then it's amenable to scientific method and to the epistemology that, and I mean, obviously there is the good-o incompleteness theorem that says, you know, any logical framework has unanswerable questions within the framework and this kind of stuff So you could use that in way of your hands But you know, basically, as I see it, either that stuff exists in a way that is not really special, or it doesn't exist in any meaningful way And similarly, and this probably comes, I really kind of blame, obviously, like a lot of different things But I think our track, the next generation, really sort of did the nail on the head for meaning on this It just kind of eliminated the chance of me even ever thinking about any of this stuff as a real thing, or in a meaningful way Because in there, they have this character cue And cue comes from a civilization, which is basically from the perspective of humans omnipotent omniscient And you know, essentially very godlike in terms of, again, the sort of Christian god or the Judeo-Christian god, trying to be careful between, I don't wanna just munch all the stuff together because I know there are a lot of, a lot of details, and then if you go to other god systems, another religious systems, things get very complicated It's a problem, it is definitely also a problem It's one of the reasons that there are a lot of reasons why I also don't call myself an atheist Because atheists, agnostic says you don't know and you can't know, atheists says that you know that a god doesn't exist And my non-religious says that the concept, that it's a statement that doesn't have any meaning Like, what does it mean to say that a god exists or not? Because if you have an endothical, like, back to this Q thing, but what properties would your god have or gods have that really or distinct from something like that? Or even, you don't even have to go that far I mean, you imagine if you're a human being, you can get a pound of sugar and take that to an ant colony And that is like so much, they can inconceivable amount of resource for them that they just couldn't, it basically makes you on netizen If you wanted, you could pour molten lead into their colony That's so much energy compared to what they have access to It's so much material, it's so much destruction It's just, and you think about that sort of thing except now you're the ant And there's somebody else with a technology, whether it's an individual or a species or civilization or whatever, some kind of technical ability to muster that kind of level of energy, or that level of mass or whatever You know, they certainly with a flick of the wrist could flatten you I mean, you don't even have to get that advanced because humans already have, like, we've got thermonuclear weapons, right? They're not, they're not huge They're not like destructive on the scale of the planet going away But you can make a city go away in a blank, like literally you could make a building go away And you think about, from the perspective of being just an individual human, if you were trying to dismantle, it's an interesting thing actually because if you go back, I think it was the Assyrians They raised cities and had to just do a quick search to make sure I was not attributing this to the wrong person But yeah, it was the ancient Assyrians would raise cities And when I say raised cities, I mean, they would salt the earth, they would destroy everything And essentially, like a nuclear bomb went off But you think about the amount of time and effort it would take or a bunch of people to do that, versus the flash of light and explosion from compressing plutonium or whatever And yeah, especially if you have, do a little fusion after that or boost some stuff and do fusion fusion vision or whatever you want to do Any of that kind of stuff And that is our level of technology now If you imagine you have the ability to, with a snap of your finger, muster orders and orders of magnitude more than that, literally just Zarbama's all day, every day across the whole surface of a planet And that's not a big deal to you That's very god-like Now that's in the disruptive sense, but you could imagine also staying in the framework of Star Trek If you have replicators and phasers and all this kind of stuff, you can carve mountains You could build a building Or some intricate detailed artwork that would take a thousand artisans a thousand years to build You could do it in minutes And that's not that hard to imagine someone with that kind of technology Even if you don't have like actual replicators or not, something that you could have, you could certainly have like 3D printers that are very efficient and very fast, or something that's like that, or nanofabrication on a massive scale, or you could just sort of imagine and having that level of technology, how is that different in a meaningful way from something god-like, or something that you might call a god? And in fact, you might even say, if I have that technology and I wanted to impersonate a deity, how would you know the difference? Especially if you are coming from a civilization where you're like the ant If you want anything, you want a million tons of gold, it's like, okay, I mean you And it's there Just no effort It's not a big deal for me And to you, it's the biggest deal in the world Yeah, or whatever it is, whatever resource it is, you're in the desert, you want huge amounts of water, and I can snap, I shingers, and all of a sudden there's a massive lake in the desert You just imagine that sort of thing Somebody who's coming from a primitive society might very well think that is very god-like And you start thinking practically what would be, this isn't really where I wanted to go specifically but this is just part of why I'm non-religious again instead of agnostic But what would it take to say, okay, this is something that only what you're calling a god could do or could be? And I guess this does get into, if you're agnostic, you don't know the nature of that being You could say, well, there's something unknowable about it And I guess you could go to like Hindu traditions where deities are sort of outside of time and space and then things get a little bit more, yeah, there are things you could talk about that sort of maybe are a little bit different but how is that necessarily different, even? I mean, if you imagine, you're a super advanced technology or a species that just happens, yeah, you're not even that advanced, you just happen to exist outside of what we think of as space time and you exist in a different way What does that really mean? So I'm not questioning the distance or the existence of such a thing I'm not denying it, I'm not saying it exists I'm just saying, I don't know that that's any different than saying there's an alien technology and alien species that's just vastly more powerful than us, maybe And, you know, what does it really mean? So I think part of the thing that people need for that agnosticism is the structure where you have a specific kind of God or religious system in mind Because, I mean, if you take it seriously, like you don't know the nature, and part of not knowing the nature would be you don't know even what that is And so it doesn't, it almost means you wouldn't have that system, but what people really mean, I think when they say agnostic is they don't know about the specific, you know, basically the God that they were raised with, whatever that happens to be, with some small variations, you know, they have an idea of what that is, and they just don't know And this gets to, again, I started talking about a bit of Pascal's wager This is a thing that I noticed, I do, sometimes I go off on tangents and I don't complete the thought Even when I have notes, I have notes now I almost always let that thread hang But the Pascal's wager thing, if you have, the idea, I guess if you don't know it, is basically if you, whether you believe or not, if you believe, then, you know, maybe you get eternal reward And if you don't believe, then you get eternal punishment And so the wager is basically saying, well, okay, well, if that's the case, then you might as well just believe just in case And I guess that's very compelling, if, if you think that there's only one possibility The problem is it really falls apart badly when you start realizing, well, there are just on this planet, thousands and thousands in human history of different religious systems and different deities who are in many ways mutually exclusive So if you're gonna be doing Pascal's wager, you can't even, if you wanted to, believe in them all, just in case So now you have to start picking and choosing And now you're gonna really pick pickle because if you believe in, you know, the Christian God, and it turns out that it's actually the invisible, all-powerful bunny who doesn't like people who believe in that other one, now you fucked yourself, you know, your Pascal's wager, and then you can think they're endlessly many, not only incompatible, but like different things that if you believed in all the other ones, they would even just in case They would, yeah And then also there's that just in case thing, because there's like, if you imagine some kind of omniscient, this is something that actually gets to me about, and especially in Israel, there's this thing where they have a lot of technologies that basically, because I'm unsure about, you're not supposed to, you're not supposed to do certain stuff, right? You're not supposed to like flick switches and watch, turn on TV or turn on machines or any, you're not supposed to do certain kinds of work, basically I'm being very high level there, but you know, you're not really supposed to do stuff But there's a lot of like lawyer and God kind of stuff, so it's like, well, you're not supposed to do this, but what we'll do is we'll make a machine that randomly flushes the toilet, so you're not flushing the toilet, but you're getting the benefit of flushing the toilet And a certain point to me, it's like, I don't know, if you really think that there is a God and they have these rules for you, for whatever reason, and you're sitting there trying to game the system, I don't think you're gonna fool that being I don't really don't If you think that there's a God and you're just believing just in case, it's another problem with the pastels, what do you do you think? They probably know, and is that really believing if you're doing it just in case shit? And it also gets to another thing that gets to me, which is like, in grad school, there was a guy, he's, I think he's now an atheist actually, which is wild, but he was a young earth creationist He was getting his PhD, I think in chemistry at the time, and he, so young earth, so he understands chemistry, understands a lot of stuff that would tell you the earth is ancient, and when I say ancient, I mean, like a couple thousand years old, but because if his religious upbringing believed the earth was like 10,000 years old, or whatever, whatever they believe And yeah, believe also that people who don't believe are going to suffer eternal damnation This is one thing that, when I started realizing this, started really getting to me, because if you really genuinely believe that and you're walking around with that and you see people, how fucked up is it? Like, truly, and I'm not saying I want you to really proselytize to me or try to save me or anything, like this, I don't But if I thought that you were going to burn and pain and fire and torment and all this kind of stuff forever, I think I would probably try to at least tell you, like I try to go like, you know, maybe you should think about this, but they never do They never pretty much never do the only ones that occasionally would do that is like you get the proselytizers that come out to your door, or you get these people who are like hanging out just on campus or whatever And the watch tower drove as witness people And they're not even, I don't think that they're really, I don't know what their religious system is to be honest, I don't know anything about them specifically, other than the fact that they're out there and they proselytize And they don't seem to mind the fact that they bought a two-letter domain, which two-letter.com domain, you fucking expensive I brought this up, I've talked to them a couple of times I brought this up to them and it didn't really register, but somebody spent a lot of money, a lot of money on that And I don't know how much they spent actually, but I'm sure it was not cheap A four-letter domain is expensive, three-letter domain is expensive, a two-letter domain is fucking expensive, it has to be And they bought that And you just think like, how much fucking money did you waste on that? Maybe it's two-letters.org, I don't even know Whatever it is, it doesn't matter And don't follow it and don't go to their, the cult, but yeah It's just, I look at that and the whole idea It also also actually, as long as I'm talking about this, there are always in pairs and just like the Mormons, the LDS people who are going out and proselytizing to you, too, who, you know, like, I lived in Gilbert, Arizona And in the neighborhood that I was in, there would be kids doing their missions And they come out and they're on bikes, and they're always together, always in pairs, it's very important They say that it's for safety, I'm sure, or some other bullshit, but what it really is for is a bonding experience Because you're going out into the world and you're facing a lot of people who are not in your cult And for them, you know, some of them are going to be assholes Some of them are going to be hostile And even the ones that are nice, they're not probably going to entertain you and you're not in sense too much So that sort of stuff you are getting hardened by that, you're getting isolated And even if not that, they're just sitting out there, like you drive around Gilbert now, they're like seven again There are two fuckers out there sitting at a bench, either talking to each other, or sometimes they would not be talking to each other They look, some of them even look kind of like they're a couple, and they're just nothing to say to each other, which is weird to me But whatever it is, it's like, it's a bonding experience This is why they do it This is why cults send people out to recruit people Because a recruiting people is the thing that's at a cult grows, but also part of that is indoctrinating you further It's partly hardening you It's partly showing you, like, oh, see how hostile the world is, see how uninviting, see how rude people may be, or any of this kind of stuff And then people kind of have that experience, and then suddenly a little bit more inclined to stay in the fold You're more inclined not to go out and venture and escape, and all this kind of stuff Incidentally, also not to keep harping on this stuff, but I knew, I don't want to say anything specific that's going to identify people, but I have known in my life people who were in these cults, who I'm pretty sure, you don't know, but I'm pretty pretty pretty sure we're gay And you think about it also, if I was gay, my parents would have been fine Like it would not have been a big deal It would not have been like the end of the world, certainly I wouldn't have gotten excommunicated from my community and all this kind of stuff But some of these religions, if you are, either you do the conversion therapy, which is fucking ridiculous, or, and horrible torture, or, you know, like, the people that leave, whether it's that they're gay or just like, I've known people also who've left, and the people who've left, especially, and I'm thinking on the Mormons a lot, because I know several people who either, they weren't Mormon, and they lived in a Mormon community, and they were just shunned, and it was shitty, or they were Mormon, and they were gay, and fucked up their shit, or they were Mormon, and they didn't want their kids to have to be polygamous, so they had to move, or they were Mormon, and they decided that they weren't religious, and then they lost their entire fucking social network Like, not just the community members around, but like, they're fucking family, other than, like, one or two people abandoned them, and, and that I have some animosity toward people that are shitty like this And also, like, there's a certain, I don't mean, again, I don't mean to pick on a specific religion I'm not a fan of most of the major religions I'm not a fan even of the ones that are, I would say, warp in high, but especially like the, especially the Christian Catholic, all those kinds of derivatives, somehow, particularly not my thing And, because there are a lot of, it's that thing, you know, I like your Christ, but not your Christians, they're, that guy, they talk about, that they have the stories about, seems a clinical guy, seems like a pretty, you know, he's like, appreciates sex workers, is cool with people, likes immigrants, feeds people, very charitable, you know, turn the other cheekets, all of these things, they're, they're all fairly, I would say, noble attributes, but you actually look at the people in these religions, and they're fucking horrible people, and a lot of them also, I'm just thinking about Republican Congress people here, but you know, like, they're, they're supposed to be loving and caring and all this shit, and I swear, like, I don't think these people, I'm convinced a lot of the very religiousy people that you see, especially in government, if they really believed, I don't think they would act in the ways that they do, I don't think they would do the things that they say, and I really think a lot of them are more non-religious than I am, they just pretend, which is weird and gross, like it's worse than, I would rather they actually be genuinely like true believey kind of people, or really I would rather than that, you know, but never mind that Getting back to, uh, getting off that tangent and trying to get back to what I'm talking about here, the agnostic thing came up, because I was on, I'm on the loose guy, not a huge fan of the people that run the place, they are techno-libertarian, uh, giant air quotes on this, free speech, absolutist, and I always remember, I've talked about this a few times, sorry if I'm repeating myself, but I always remember when I was a kid, and I remember ACLU was defending Nazis, and I think it was my dad that I was talking to, I don't even remember who I talked to about it, but I talked to somebody about it, and I said, what, why, why, why are they defending them? And then I'd hear the story, which is what the free speech absolutely does always say, which is like, well, they have the whole marketplace of ideas nonsense, and, and then they have this thing where it's like, well, you know, Scott, it's very important, it's most important that we protect the right for people to have terrible ideas and speak about those, because if we allow their speech to be abridged, then in time that will just open the door to a bridging ours And the thing that's funny about this is this is the argument, this is actually a good argument, if you're talking about, you should not allow the government to strip people of civil rights You should not allow, I don't even think you should allow the government to detain people indefinitely I think that's actually probably pretty fucked up They certainly should not be allowed to deprive people of life, like premeditated murder by the state, is wild, the fact that anyone's okay with that is just absolutely ridiculous beyond ridiculous But also let the ability to take away people's right to vote, if you give the state the power to take away the right to vote Think about what that means Think about what that means That means there's something you could do, you don't even have to do it, just somebody can decide you did something And now you cannot vote, you lose your representation in the state And I always talk to people about this, and it's one of those things that people, I don't know if they just not thought about it or if they really are true believers in this idea, but I think it's one of these things I think that what it is, I think maybe I'm just being overly charitable here, but I think what it is is they never really thought about it, and then you talk to them about it And instead of really interrogating it, they kind of just default the trying to defend this position that they have, that it's okay to do But you should never, never, ever, ever, ever give the state that ability And you think about it also, it's like, well, I talked to people about that and they're always like, well, what about somebody who, and they come up with some horrible crimes that somebody might have committed, and also like, this gets actually to, I'm not, again, agnostic, but in my epistemology, my way of understanding what is and how things are and how you know stuff Basically, you don't know anything with absolute certainty You don't know anything definitively one way or another Everything is kind of an approximation And you could be really, very, very confident about something, but there's still like a sliver of doubt, no matter what And you could be very uncertain about things In fact, the default position is you just don't know This is a thing, I wish more people were just okay with, I don't know, as an answer And like, I don't know is the greatest thing that you could say, and the second greatest thing is I was wrong, I think Those are, if more people would be able to say those things, and we're comfortable with them It would help so much This is a weird thing I was at a coffee shop this morning, and there were two women talking, this is not related to that, but this is also a thing that I think, they were talking about one other kids was having issues with constipation And it was like, I guess, really, I'm not, there's no way, like, I don't even know who these people are, so I'm not developing private information about somebody that anyone would know Just some kid has constipation, very embarrassed about it And the fact that we are like, we're trained to be ashamed of just basic bodily functions and issues Like, it's, it's fucking weird, it's fucking weird, because we all have bowels, right? I mean, unless you're very unlucky, we all have physiological needs, we all have, you know, like, processing of food and things like this, and we don't talk about that shit You know, and it never mind talking about, like, reproduction and reproductive health and sex ed, and all that kind of stuff And if you wouldn't even get into that, this gets to, coming a little bit back full circle, the grad student that I was super infatuated with, you know, our culture doesn't teach you at all, like, how to deal with, and I'm not even going to say rejection, but just like relationships in a really good way And it's not just, we don't, like, sex, you just have this idea that, oh, you just know how to do it basically And you don't talk about it very much, and it's kind of very ashamed There's a lot of shame around it There's a lot of weirdness around it And you think about, like, relationships, too, like asking for consent is such a weird thing in our society Like, I mean, I'm not saying, you shouldn't do it I'm just saying that the way that our society is, asking if, you know, we can kiss or can I touch you or something like that? Can I hold your hand? It's weird And I don't mean that it's actually weird It should not be weird But we're trained to have some weirdness around it We don't have that protocol We don't have the social construct around it And it's just, like, the way that you have that, the way that you have this idea, like, there's so much stuff If you look at movies and, you know, it's interesting Actually, like, I think Romeo and Juliet was making fun of this more than anything, because I was just listening to somebody talking about this And in the thing, I'm terrible with names But in the beginning, Romeo is with, I guess, Juliet's cousin or something And she's not into him or something Something is happening It's not going very well And then he jumps He's like super-infatuated And she's the son all this stuff And then all of a sudden, he's into this Juliet, who is also, I think, like, 13, which is, you know, fucking, I might be off on the age, but, yeah, definitely too young They're definitely way the fuck too young They've known each other for no time at all I think Shakespeare's making fun of it I think he's, like, pointing out how fucked up it is But if we have this idea, this hyper-romantic idea that, A, you don't know if somebody and you should be super, you know, like, love it for sight or whatever, like this And then also, you know, there's this idea of, um, the airport's friend's own stuff And it, which is kind of ridiculous Because the, the relationships that I've actually had, especially the good ones, they started out, like, it wasn't, you have this social idea that you're supposed to ask somebody on a date And then it's, it's all weird And it's kind of like, there's a lot of pressure to it And then you have this stuff where everybody's kind of pretending to be somebody else And you're making a, a different version of yourself And then you, you get to know each other there And then you get more relaxed And then now you become, like, now you have to know that actual person The relationships that I've had that have actually been good and the, the way that I've preferred to, to get into a relationship with somebody is not, like, it's not even the friend's own thing It's like, you meet somebody And you get to know them And, you know, like, things just kind of progress Or they don't And we don't talk about this stuff We don't really have great models of it We have a lot of models, especially in pop culture of terrible versions of this You have a lot of models of, like, oh, somebody gets drunk and then they get taken advantage of And, you know, I mean, to, I say take an advantage of, I mean, that's, that's code for raped Basically, or, or, you know, I'm not saying that every time you have sex under the influence of drugs is rape But there's a lot of, like, really transgressive stuff in our pop culture And people just don't fucking, like, they take that to be normal They take, I mean, it's one of the reasons I think that they're stalking And it is also, like, you get to the whole bullshit, uh, I, again, with the air quotes that you can't see I need, I need a, a way to, like, end the thing I've, like, robbing air quotes Um, you know, because I'm like, I don't want to actually say something and have it sound like I'm actually saying it, uh, without the giant air quotes around it But, uh, and I got so, and I got so hung up on that, I forgot what the fuck I was going to talk about The, the whole idea of, like, not taking no for an answer, love it for sight, um, you know, that dealing with for you actually, that was it That was it That was it The mail along the, uh, Linus epidemic, air quotes, air quotes, air quotes Um, that whole bullshit thing I mean, I think about it Also, like, I, I was, uh, according to museum culture, I was kind of a late bloomer I never, like, I, I, I never, and there, there was somebody, my sister's friend had a sleepover, and we kissed, uh, like, 14 or something That was very consensual, and very sort of driven by her I didn't have been younger than that I don't remember But we're both, she might have been a year younger than me or something, but that was, that was a thing And then didn't go anywhere And I wasn't really, other than that, like the next time I, and I was not a very social person, like, in high school, really didn't have any friends I've been in talk to people, and you had, but that's not really any friends And then undergrad, for the first couple of years, I had, there were a couple of TAs There was one TA that I really liked There was, uh, there were a couple of TAs that I kind of got to know a little bit, but in terms of, I was never really very comfortable with people my age And I don't mean that in the relationship, like romantic relationship way I just mean, especially with the little kids I didn't, I never really felt that comfortable with them I never really felt like when I was a little kid, I always got along much better with adults I didn't, um, I didn't feel like one of the kids, so to speak And, you know, as I got older, I sort of grew, well, I don't know if I grew into it, or I just like, the people around me got to be the age group that I was, you know, feeling comfortable with And then sort of like the end of undergrad, I start connecting with people a little bit, getting to graduate school, and connect a little bit more, and then after I finished my masters, gotten to my PhD, and, you know, start connecting with people more, and also, and I don't know how you can engineer this I don't think it's a thing you can control, but I'm at somebody who every introvert should meet, uh, you kind of need one of these people, uh, socially extroverted and sort of person connector, uh, who has a lot of friends and does a lot of stuff and plans a lot of stuff, and you get, you get somebody like this in your life, and you suddenly, I've had a handful of them, and it's just like night and day It went, in fact, like from my, there was one point in time where I never, just never really was that social, and I kind of, I felt bad that I wasn't getting included in stuff, and then it almost overnight, I mean, it wasn't overnight, it was, you know, months, but at, at some point, it kind of flipped, and it was like every fucking weekend, I had shit to do, and in the weekdays, I had shit to do, not every day necessarily, but, like, too much, and then it started being like, I was invited to stuff, and at first, I was getting invited to stuff, and I was like, I have to go to fucking everything, and it was partly because I didn't want to not get invited, and partly because it was just, like, for so long, I never gotten invited to shit It wasn't like people excluded me, it was just to, like, nobody knew me enough to do it, but, you know, and I kind of felt like I wanted it, and then it got to the point where I was like, okay, this is not, I need time to myself, and now it's like to the point where almost to an unhealthy extent, I get invited to stuff, and I just don't want to, you know, but basically never want to do it, and this is not that I don't do stuff, and usually if I go out and do stuff, I actually enjoy it, but pretty much, like, even if I'm going to enjoy it, somebody invites me to something anymore, and I'm just, you know, there are some rare exceptions for the most part, hey, I get that, and I'm like, oh, it seems, it's not a thing I want to do It's a weird lip, and, you know, because there was a time where, like, anyone could have invited me to anything, and I would have absolutely done it, and, you know, I don't mean in the sense of being susceptible to social pressure and that kind of stuff, but, you know, like, to get to go someplace with people, I would have been, I would have been way down Anyway, rambling around here, the thing getting back to this agnosticism, I'm on blue sky, the people who run blue sky, I started talking about those, but they're left, they're not left, they are techno libertarians, and, again, with the giant air quotes, free giant air quotes, speech, giant airports, uh, absolutists, and I got the ACLU thing, defending Nazis, and all this kind of stuff, I am increasingly convinced that when people say they're free speech absolutists, what they really mean is that they want mid-white dudes to be able to say the inward and the f-word, I don't mean to fuck there, and, you know, just to be very unrestricted, it's kind of weird, because it's like, you're, you're a white dude, you could do anything you could talk about anything, you have a lot of stuff, you have a lot of privileges, and any kind of little limitation is unacceptable It's like, you know, you, you, how dare you not allow me to say, like, I mean, people literally basically talk about stuff like that, it's the most fucking ridiculous ass and I should, but these techno libertarians are like that too, and they're also not to get too much into the blue sky bullshit, but the second, like they did not want to implement blocking Blocking was part of the design of at protocol, which is the thing that they claimed that they were trying to build, and then you bunch of bullshit, but anyway, they did that, didn't want to implement blocking for the longest time, and then they finally implemented it because some asshole, I don't, I don't even want to say his name because he's a massive troll piece of shit He's, he's a journalist who is known, journalists is not the right word, he's like a writing entertainer or something, great shitty articles, and his main thing is, his whole shit is easy, but I think all themselves heterodox bullshit thing, you know, I'm a contrarian, and the contrarian part is like you're just an asshole troll, and basically his whole, his whole thing, and they're, they're a bunch of people like this is saying shit that is either transgressive or inappropriate or you're just fucking wrong, and then stirring up a shit storm, and then the shit storm gets him a lot of attention, and you know, it's how trolls work, and it just increases his profile, and then he's got more people, and then he gets to do it more, and he's just, I'm sure he gets paid really well for it, he probably comes from, I don't know his history, but anyway, the point is he got on here, and people started shooting on him correctly, but he got upset about it, and then he finally finally, people who were making the site into implementing blocking, so he could block people, that's why they implemented blocking They also, as part of that, I don't want to make this up loose cracking, but as part of that, they did it in a way that was kind of, they didn't want to do the blocking, so they made it in a way that just broke stuff, like it would block stuff, and it just disconnected threads, like if somebody, and if somebody blocked somebody in the thread, it just nuked everything, every interaction thereafter, and people, it actually, they called it the nuclear block, they didn't, not the blue sky, people, but the people using it, and it was, it was a nice, accidental feature, it made it, like if somebody was shitty, the trolling, all it took was you block them, and they no longer have your mentions the game traction, and it's magical, because people would just, there's a lot, people came on there, tried their anti-social bullshit, which works in other social media platforms, because most of them are designed so that, as my ex-wife used to say, negative attention is still attention, and so they would give people a reward for being shitty, because you're shitty, you say shitty stuff, and then you'd have a lot of interactions, and more and more people would see you, and people would start following them, and because they had a lot of followers, there's a thing, it's, it's, I guess it's this bandwagon thing that people do, but it's, it's still fucking annoying, people will follow people just because they have a lot of followers, you see, somebody's got like a million followers, well shit, I'm gonna be one of the million, I don't know why, it doesn't make sense to me, I see that and I'm like, yeah, I'm good, but just not to say, I don't follow people with a lot of followers, but you know, it doesn't, if anything it discourages me, but for some reason, for a lot of people that is attractive, it's an interesting thing, but, you know, they, they do that, and then they get interactions they get seen, and that means that some of them, because they're getting a lot of interactions, people will follow them, because they're being shitty, sometimes there will be people who are attracted to the, to the shittyness, and they'll follow them, and it just keeps building on itself, because they, the more people they've got following them, the more interactions they get, and then, you know, it's this exponential growth thing, and it's just, it's one of the things I really hate about the way these things are structured, that it just absolutely rewards the worst people, the people who, because it's negative stuff, not that there's negative embossed emotions and all that's going to stop, but, you know, the stuff where it's people being shitty and trolling and all this stuff, I guess you could call it negative, if you like, I'm, I'm not sure that's the right word, but whatever it is, anti social counter, you know, bullshit, that kind of stuff, it lights up people's amygdala's and gets much more traction than the, the good stuff, and it's annoying, because these people, I mean, it's like the, the right wing media stuff being more popular than the more boring stuff, it just builds and builds and builds on itself, and it's annoying, and I hate it, and it, you know, it's a terrible thing, that nuclear block, more time, prevented that, because trolling is no fun, being an asshole is no fun, if you do it, and then you get no pushback, you do it, you don't get anything out of it, and so people would do it, they disappeared, I mean, they, their interactions would just go away, and then they'd get no traction, and they'd have like a small number of followers there, and they had a lot of followers on Twitter, and so they just go back to Twitter Anyway, the, the thing that I'm getting to, with all of this, I'm on blue sky today, somebody came up with something about agnosticism, and it was, I wish I could remember the context, actually, now because I, it's the whole point of this episode is based on this little interaction that we had, and we went back and forth a few times, and they were explaining how silly they think agnosticism is, and I'm sitting there saying, like, I personally am not agnostic, and it is not something that would be within, within me, really, but I can understand that if you have a certain epistemology, like a certain way of knowing things, and you have a certain sort of framework for how the universe works, which basically puts you into this idea of a specific kind of God and religious system or non Then agnosticism is probably probably almost the correct answer subject to those assumptions, and we went back and forth, or I don't want to get into the logic of that, although I do think like philosophy of science is a, it's a course that I've taken, I think it's worth in, you know, studying empiricism, studying epistemologies, not just that one, but you know, like other ones too, to learn about other ways of thinking about stuff I think it's kind of important, I think, I really think like, I've never had a class that, and I don't want to get into the like the Steve Jobs sat in on, on type setting, and that's why you have post script and all those bullshit, but I do think every class that I've ever taken, whether it's Native American religious traditions or dating myself again at the time it was called the Women's Studies, now it's called Gender Studies, that kind of stuff, it's all been very beneficial to me going forward I can't think of a class optics Actually, undergrad optics, there was the only class, not even that was probably useful, but the professor for that class who, I guess you could probably look up, I think he's retired and we're just now, it doesn't matter It's probably pretty hard to figure out when I was there and who was teaching all that kind of stuff So it doesn't, I don't think I'm embarrassing somebody or talking shit about somebody specifically, but worst professor I've ever had, truly, in terms of teaching, because the way that he taught, especially, my memory is not as good now as it used to be, but it used to be if I was paying attention in class and I could understand how stuff worked, I just owned it And it's still true, if I understand something now, I just understand it Like I just, yeah, it's, I'm not saying it's easy, but it just like just sticks It's why I can, I could not use calculus for a couple of years and then figure it Like it might take a little bit of time to brush up, but it would come back to me pretty quickly, because I understand it Even like, reman versus lip egg integration and all that kind of stuff, I probably couldn't write some proof, so it would take some time, I'd probably have to do some work to figure it out, but I could get there But I'm not doing like a complex analysis proof right now that it's not going to happen But the stuff that I really understand, it kind of understands it And so if you understand it, you kind of own it I think that is, I know people think differently and they learn differently and all that's going to stuff But for me, especially with physics, like in all of the exams, there would always be this thing, the ones that I taught and the ones that I took, they'd always let you take a cheat sheet and a cheat sheet and air quotes, which was like a bunch of page or, yeah, one page both sided and formulaes or whatever bullshit And there are always people that would have like microprint, full both sides, dense text, like how to fuck did you write that kind of stuff? And in reality, you know, most of the stuff that you needed to know either, one of the better professors I had, the guy that I took a differential apology with and general relativity and advanced algebra, which was a very cool class I've talked about him before, but he, he's actually one of the few people that I'm like my professors that I'm actually still connected to on Facebook But he always said this thing, which was like, yeah, you, to do the proofs, what you want to do is learn how to garden and take a pack of seeds with you and the seeds are like the little things that you start with and then you learn how to, you kind of know where you're going and you take those seeds and then you can kind of work from them And he was right, it really, especially for the proofs, like that that we would do, it really worked I'm sure, like if you're trying to do like format's last theorem, it might be a little bit challenging, but for the proofs that we were doing in that class, it worked Yeah, that was a good class, rings and fields and groups and all that kind of stuff I miss, it was talking to a friend about this a couple of days ago or so, I miss undergrad And I mean, obviously, like part of it is just a year at a certain time, it's like a moment in your life where things are a certain way And I'm not saying like, it was not socially for me It was not a great time There were a lot of things that were not great about that But one thing that was awesome about undergrad for me, especially one semester I was working and working while you're going to school sucks But most of it, I was getting student loans living at home and so I didn't really have that many expenses I had a little bit of not disposable income, but I could go to movies or eat or stuff like that And I could just go to classes And some of the classes were not great Some of the classes were things that I wasn't that excited about But most of the classes were pretty interesting And most of the classes also, I almost forgot, well, I do kind of regret I would have liked to have taken more literature classes or history or a few languages, but it would have been nice to take more languages It would have been like undergrad if money was not an object And I was going to live indefinitely I always used to say that I would, and I would still would do this, like collect alphabet soup after my name I just get a bunch of doctorates and get a JD and get an MD I would do that for sure I don't think I would ever get an EDD It's kind of a weird thing That's interesting I don't know that I would get an MBA I might do it just like, if I was really going to live like hundreds of years and just be like essentially, you know, as healthy as you are biologically, you're like you're 30 and money's no problem and you can just do whatever Okay, I probably get an MBA just to just do it I PhD in psychology I would definitely do that and practice for a little while I probably practice surgery for a little while But then you think about the MBA, the business degree, you can't see the whinsing on my face, but it's not a pleasant look It's not like, it's more like it you Maybe I would do it just out of curiosity, but I don't know that I can tolerate it I probably get sick of it Probably not be a thing But anyway, getting rambling around here, rambling is what I do I guess if you're listening to this, you hopefully like the rambling because if you don't, you know, listen to either the wrong thing It's kind of the thing that you need to, I don't have an, or I don't have like a massive audience, but if you're cultivating an audience, you probably want to not perform too much that's too difficult or too far outside of who you are because if I was doing like a song in dance or if I was doing like jokes, imagine, imagine that you'd make a podcast and your whole thing is just jokes, just like material that you're working out And on one hand, you can get pretty efficient at, you know, taking stuff and understanding how to grab a garden and picking up the seeds and growing the jokes and all that kind of stuff You could do that too, but it's going to be hard Unless you're just naturally like, that's the thing you do And I do, the weird thing is actually, I do, I do joke around a lot, but it doesn't really come out in this setting It's more situational and in terms of relationships with people and you're like, I'm in a situation things happen and then I comment on them and it's kind of fine And or I do something weird, or whatever it is, or somebody else does something weird and I error mark on it That kind of down, if you're doing it and you're the people who start listening or the people who want that, and now you've got to deliver it and you just think about like, how miserable that must be if it's not your thing I can imagine like, I, today, I wrote an outline and I think the outline is actually not too bad as a thing for me to do Like, it gives me at least some kind of structure to hang on and some things that I'm like, okay, I want to say this and this and this and almost always when I listen to one of these, there are things that I just skip over or I'll like introduce something and then get side tracked and never come back and say the thing that I wanted to finish with or I wanted to finish up and it's kind of annoying to me And that even happens with the notes, but if I don't do notes, then that definitely is fucked But you think about like you could be doing this as something where you have a script, but you've written stuff down and you're just reading it And I guess for a certain kind of person, Simon Wissler, that works for It seems to be like a thing that he really enjoys and part of it is also, it's not just that he's reading the script, but he also, as he's reading the script, comments on it and it's kind of stuff It's interesting, it's entertaining For at least somewhat, I listened to one of his things with my mom and sister, they were not impressed And it also like, it's interesting, I guess it's a human thing, but when you're in an audience and stuff falls flat, even if you would normally like it, it makes you like it less And so I did not enjoy the one that I was listening to with them And it's kind of had a lasting effect I think also like I've heard maybe too many of his things, but never mind that now But you know, if you're doing something where you're putting in a lot of work, I understand why people get burnt out Because especially like I don't edit this this that or that much, and it's so much work just to edit it a little bit And especially like when I was trying to do videos, I think there's something nice, I do think like the, there's something nice about the video I like TikTok for the videos, but the problem is also at the same time, it's just like, I do, yeah, I don't know, do you really, do you really want to put in that much time and effort? Like if I had somebody to do the editing and all that kind of stuff and I could just record the video, I guess I'd probably do it, but even even like a minimal amount of editing on a video is so much time It's so much effort And if you really want to do like you make it, like I've done somewhere, I've put in a lot of time, did a lot of, did a lot of cuts, and you put in some figures, and you put, and you start doing that, and it gets like so much more time than the actual duration of recording it and putting it out there And you just think about like, yeah, I don't, I would not, if I had to do that every time, even if I had nothing else I wanted to do, like, nothing on my plate I don't think I would, I don't think I'd want to, and, yeah, I don't think it would be sustainable What I'm doing here, I somehow can sustain it, as long as I have time and opportunity to record these, it's something I keep doing I don't know why that is, it's been, and it's been something I've been doing for decades You know, again, I was my, my ex, who was the sister of my friend's wife who I just talked to today She and I, well, her kid is 14 So we broke up 15 years ago, which is fucking wild And you just think like, when we get the knowledge other, she was listening to my podcast So, and that was not like, I just started it It was one that I was doing for years Before that, I just think about like, I've been doing this for a long, fucking time, and it's kind of ridiculous And the thing is also, like, I have zero interest in, I don't have a real interest in building an audien

Density

Image: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Road_Space_Requirements.png Road Space Requirements 30 people in 20 cars 30 people on 30 bicycles 30 people in 1 bus by Transformative Urban Mobility Initiative (TUMI) Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International [https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en] Hey there I'm Scott and this is Tangents. Well it is the 4th of November 2025 as I record this and when I've to talk about a few things and as I generally do I guess the last one of these I recorded on the first thought it was gonna be doing these like daily and it's been a few days but yeah we'll see we'll see how things go so I just watched I will get into this stuff I want to talk about but just a little purpose I just watched back to the future one two and three which are things that I saw when I was a kid and I remember very distinctly watching them really liking them all that kind of stuff and they're actually I'm kind of surprised how well they hold up and I think part of the time travel thing takes them out of time in a sense that you know like the 1985 stuff I you don't think about it being out of time because it exists in 1985 so you know it makes it a little bit more durable in the 1955 30 years prior to 1985 also works 2015 is a little rough and it's it's interesting to me I was just thinking about this as I was microwaving my my dinner I got pizza today microwave a couple pieces of that and if you look at like a kitchen from 1955 and you went to a kitchen in 1985 the differences at least in that kind of respect would be pretty stark like having a microwave it's a pretty big big thing it's not something that existed then and I guess convection ovens are kind of a thing although you know not really as a special more of an incremental improvement but when you look at sort of what they imagined 2015 to be a decade ago now and what it actually was it's and I know like predicting the future is hard it's very difficult and there are things like you tend to overestimate certain kinds of things and you underestimate other kinds of things so like the stuff like the flying cars obviously that was ridiculous overestimation there's there's no plausible path to something like that right now Mr. Fusion we don't have anything that could possibly like there's not even a nascent technology that could plausibly get there there are things like the I mean you could do like a new electronic excuse me a new electronic fusion and maybe you could you know but you're probably not putting just random garbage into the fuel light you're probably gonna have to put tritium or other like yeah they did anyway and then you know you think about like how are you gonna contain that and how you're gonna make it's we're nowhere near where like maybe and some at some point in the distant future they probably have some kind of a power cell that's very compact and very dense and essentially like a compact fusion reaction or reactor that could make your cars fly and they could do all kinds of stuff like that yeah we're not we're not anywhere near that you could get your 1.21 jigsaw from something like that maybe but we're again not really not really gloves and they have this rehydrateer thing which is just yeah you put a pizza in and like three seconds later you have a fresh hot pizza pretty pretty pretty far from anything that we could plausibly have anytime and anytime soon let's just say that now it would be cool I mean it would be cool to have like a replicator it would be cool to have something where you say tea or a gray hot and just like appears out of thin air but again no real plausible path to something like that anytime soon so it's just it's just kind of interesting to me how both the predictions are pretty pretty out there and I don't give you a wrong I enjoy I enjoy the like power laces and the self-drying jacket thing that's self-sizing and all of this kind of stuff it's cool but I don't know it partly and I'm not trying to say that things have stagnated because obviously on a long time scale things have not and there are a lot of technologies that for example they just did not predict like the cell phones that we had in 2007 did not even come close to anything like that some things look radically more advanced than that and other things just not even it's like I started watching like a year ago the old original series of Star Trek and when you look at some of the stuff that they imagined like warp drive and transporters we don't have anything like those things we don't have any real plausible engineering path using not just existing technology but like we can't really envision something that could be in principle engineered to make those things work yeah at least in unless you go sort of like the most abstract sense just couldn't do it maybe and I'm not rolling them out as possible it is although there are pretty good reasons to suspect that warp drives at least that are super-liminal probably unfortunately don't exist or maybe it's fortunate I don't know it depends on your perspective but yeah because the way relativity works if you can travel faster than light you basically instantly get a time machine and when I say a time machine I mean like you can go to the past you can make clothes to time like loops and then all bets are off the the traveling across the the galaxy or the universe at super high speeds is about the least interesting thing that happens when you have a warp drive but anyway getting from getting from that I did them drifting way out of where I wanted to talk about the thing I wanted to talk about here is the reason that I brought that up is there was the word density you are my density destiny in the first one and the density thing and I know this is just this is completely random and disconnected but the density thing made me think and I'm in LA right now and I lived in Phoenix for many years and in both of these cases like I spent I've spent some a few months in Tokyo I've spent like nine months in Paris and it's really striking to me and I've lived other places I've visited a lot of decent number of places it's really striking to me how density works in terms of like cities and in particular like if you look it's it's dark out now as I'm recording this but if you could sort of look around the neighborhood I'm in it's a bunch of single family homes and each one of these single family homes has a pretty big footprint in terms of like the actual land use now maybe it has a little yard or something but it's a few people in a fairly decent amount of square meters and you know it's that next to that next to that next to that and this big just vast not quite endless but if essentially it feels like endless in all directions I could walk for hours and hours and hours and it'd be just more of the same and you look at the same stuff and if you imagine like you just picked these houses up and you stack them on top of each other don't don't do anything else just took these houses somehow stack them on top of each other like I don't know in a big building the amount like without changing the density of the city the amount of free space that you have for parks suddenly magically becomes enormous like you could have instead of having this thing that feels like there are a couple trees and they don't give me wrong there are a decent number of trees it's not like zero plants or vegetation but it feels very far from wilderness if you stacked people on top of each other you could build parks and it would essentially feel like you were in wild space like on you know not not not really I don't want to say civilized it's not the right word unspoiled space and similarly also you could look at that and then say well what if we do that and then we move some places together so now you still have the same stacked buildings but you have it arranged in a way that now you have a little bit more density you still have also these parks and the reason I talk about these parks in Tokyo it's really striking like if you there are cities where you walk around the city and I mean New York has obviously central park but there are a lot of places in New York where it just feels like dead and barren and I'm not saying Tokyo doesn't have that as well but there are a lot of places in Tokyo for example where you have these big parks or big like walking paths and they're next to a river and it just kind of feels a little bit more natural I'm not going to get I'm not using Tokyo is like the best example of this but just it sort of shows you a glimpse of what might be almost kind of possible if you did a really good sort of rational design for a city and especially if you had a way to quickly I obviously this is tricky because you have a bunch of existing homes and you have to get people to be willing to relocate or move their shit or whatever but if you had the ability to just take you know a big chunk of LA and convert it into stacked buildings you could get so much so much more and another thing that comes from that density if you do it well aside from just being able to have these kinds of unspoiled spaces is now you can put in and again New York has a decent subway not great but it's decent LA in some places has kind of surprisingly not terrible subway and in fact if you go on the subway itself it almost feels like a real city you don't get the same feeling like where you can and again I'm not not the whole Tokyo but Tokyo or Paris or New York you could just kind of walk around in a lot of areas and if you get tired you just go okay well fuck this I'm done walk over to a subway station hop on a train and then take the train and maybe do a transfer and then you're back wherever you're wherever you're going if you're here or if you're in Phoenix which is even worse than LA and this regard you could walk in some direction and first off in LA is at least like there's some green there's some density some things are not terrible like this Phoenix there are islands of that but for the most part it's just this vast suburban sprawl that just goes on in every direction and you could drive for an hour in almost every direction if you're in central Phoenix literally you could head in a direction go an hour and it's just suburban sprawl continuously and it's this low density everybody gets their own private house which means everybody has to figure out maintenance which means everybody has to have their own lawn mower because you know a lot of people have ridiculous lawns that don't really belong in the desert everybody has or you have to hire people to do it everybody has there's just so much duplication of resources it's such an inefficient way to organize things and so wasteful as well in addition to just being like a terrible use of space and I talked to some people about this I posted something on no I guess in LinkedIn and Facebook about it and somebody said something I don't remember where but basically said you know like oh I can't can't stand being stacked at the idea of having somebody on top of me is terrible and blah blah blah and it's so annoying and I will say I had I lived in an apartment in Phoenix that was like a four story apartment building and I had to move because the upstairs neighbors had ridiculously heavy feet and yeah I was at any time I was in there yeah I hope that's didn't I don't hope that didn't just blow out your speakers I'm sorry but it was a terrible thing it was a horrible experience but the thing is a socially you know like you don't need to walk like that it's something it's definitely something that you can learn to not be an asshole it's it's not like intrinsically I'm trying to like to am sure there are people that can't regulate that but I'm always part you could do something about it but also more importantly than that it's possible to build things that are insulated well and this is one of the things that Phoenix really fucks up there are places I had another friend that said something about you know like well they they thought the same thing then they moved to an apartment in Scottsdale and it was just silent and of course if you live someplace that's well built and it's well insulated it's very quiet even if you have neighbors you don't have to like my sister's place not super well built expensive but not super well built and she has a neighbor that's not even attached and in her I'm standing in the kitchen right now and for some reason the neighbors right next door I don't know what they're doing but they're walking or whatever it literally sounds and that this is a three story building literally sounds like they're above me like it's it's the weirdest thing and I can I suspect probably what it is is the you know it's like some kind of resonance thing or like the structure of their place is similar enough to this that the frequency that things happened to to click at over there are similar over here and then if they're stepping in a certain place that distribution of frequencies resonates over here and then it sounds like the same kind of thing I don't know if that's the case or not it could be you know making up the story but it kind of makes sense to me there's something definitely going on because it really does feel like there's somebody above you even though obviously there's not but it's it's weird I don't know what it is but again you can build things that are not like that you can build things with proper insulation and another advantage that you get with this kind of structure is like if you look at the volume to surface area the more surface area you have for unit volume the more heat dissipation you have so the more either heat coming in or heat going out that you have so that means more insulation more climate control it's it's less efficient just in general and so if you stack things on top of each other and you do it well you could have things where you have less insulation or you use less power to maintain a comfortable temperature that's that's not that complicated you could do a lot of things and I just like the way that all this stuff is done and the thing I think that fundamentally it comes down to is like everybody is optimizing for themselves personally without consideration of anyone else and when you do that what that ends up doing is making things fuck for everybody including yourself incidentally I've talked about this a few times but like I'm a pilot and being a pilot is kind of cool it's kind of fun but a it's ridiculously expensive like in practical and unless you make a fuck ton of money it's very expensive and it's kind of weird actually I follow people on on YouTube who for example have a serious SR22T turbo it's it's like a over a million dollar plane and I don't know how I don't know what these people I mean I do kind of like know what they do for a living I don't know how they're making the money that they're making but they have enough money to pay for that and it just doesn't it doesn't almost add up it's kind of weird like they the and I understand also like the amount that some people make is just so unfathomable and that you know you see like a glimpse of that and that the person that has like a million dollar claim they're poor compared to the person as a 10 or 20 million dollar jet who is poor compared to the person as a 50 million dollar jet who is poor compared to the person that has a multi-hundred million dollar jet you know it it stacks up pretty badly and of course when you start getting into that territory you start seeing the people that are a way above you and so the stuff that it seems like a ridiculous luxury to standard plug-in and in those circumstances it's like oh that's that's pathetic that's sad like they they see the serious as sort of like a poor person you know like oh that's that's cute right you know that's or maybe it's a hobby thing but it's not really a thing that you would want to do and I understand that because it's yeah and this is kind of what I'm talking about if you fly that a it's it's let it gas which is fucking weird the fact that we haven't gotten rid of let it gas and they're they're slowly phasing it out and there are there technical like there are good technical reasons why they haven't I'm not trying to say oh you should just do it in that you know there there there is a reason that stuff is the way it is they're phasing it out slowly over time but it's it's it's obscene that we've got let it gas still in 2025 and knowing the damage the tetraetha lead does to people it's it's just wild and then yeah the piston small single engine piston aircraft and again like a serious it has the cap system the service the airframe parachute it it makes it relatively safe relatively but that engine fails and you're kind of fucked and you know like the best case scenario and you're coming down and you use the parachute you're in a situation we're using the parachute as viable are you gonna land on somebody's house are you gonna you know like what happens there and then it has this crush stuff underneath which keeps you from getting really badly injured but still yeah you're getting a few G's you're getting enough G's to do some damage it's not great for you and then yeah you're probably not gonna be in a fire but you could be good there was a I don't know if it was FedEx or UPS or DHL or something something just I can't remember what it was it was like Louisiana to Hawaii just literally today had a failure this is a jet plane by the way so it's not like a single engine plane had an engine fire and a failure and then took off and immediately crashed and crashed full of fuel to go all the way to Hawaii so pretty bad outcome and that's that's a jet engine that's a thing where you have more reliability of ideally more maintenance although I I do wonder with stuff like this you know if you don't maintain stuff well and it's expensive to maintain it eventually things fail and because it's expensive and because people are trying to cut cut corners and cuts costs and all those kind of stuff and again they're optimizing for short-term personal benefit without sort of long-term or collective benefit in mind not certainly not optimizing for the crew they don't care about that they just want to pay the least amount of money for things and certainly not for the people that are gonna be endangered by this stuff or any of this stuff because of that problem I think a lot of companies are not maintaining stuff at the level that used to or they should be certainly but anyway going back you have that even if you have a jet like the serious is like puddling around in the sky you can go like if you're going from Phoenix to say Sedona it's a nice kind of half hour 45 minute flight it's not too bad you can go to the grand canyon you can even go to Colorado and it's not that bad or even LA is not that bad expensive but not that bad but when you start going on anything longer distance than that it's really annoying because you're gonna have to land you don't have a bathroom on the thing so you gotta pee if it's if you're single pilot even if you had a bathroom on the thing and people do have like urinal kind of they I mean they I can't even remember what they're called but it's like a thing that you can pee into they have that sort of stuff and if you oh look at this mom Donnie was just elected mayor of New York city so I just got a text message saying this and fuck yes hell yeah and it's fucking like fuck chuckles by the way shumer I will get back to this thought I wanted to talk about it just the number of fucking Democrats vote blue no matter who who would not endorse this motherfucker and I'm not like I don't think endorsements are really I have in effect I have very serious problems and doubts about electoral politics and especially like the popularity contest stuff and all that I've talked about this I think the last time and a couple other times but you know that I and I don't think endorsements are that big of a deal but it is the standard thing to do and chuckles I'm pretty fucking sure voted for the sex pest voted for the asshole who should not have even been running should not have been like the fact that you let people like this run like the fact that that motherfucker had any kind of career at all at all after the shit that he did it's just it's just fucking ridiculous it's laughable it shows how low your fucking standards are just like the main Nazi guy like the fact that that guy didn't get drummed out the fact that there are people defending him it's fucking wild and ridiculous it fucking bizarre and anyway I'm gonna take a minute now and just enjoy this and message some people and then I will resume so hopefully it won't be too much of a disruption but you won't even notice the time passing okay I'm processing this and I gotta say it feels fucking good it feels fucking good I needed I'm not saying I needed a win I mean you know obviously things are okay for me I'm not like in a terrible terrible position I have you know a place to stay I have a roof over my head I have food I have you know relatively comfortable situation even though it's not ideal but I will say this motherfucker winning and all the fucking assholes like oh we're gonna leave New York if he wins and all these fucking islamophobic like openly openly islamophobic things about how it's like in 9-11 kind of fuck you fuck you fucking people you absolutely big assholes get the fuck out get the fuck out leave the keys behind that you know New York is not your city go fuck yourselves it just irritates me it fucking irritates me don't get me wrong also it's fucking beautiful like chuckles today literally fucking today said he voted for somebody and he'll something something like whoever is the mayor wouldn't even didn't have the fucking balls to say that he didn't vote for Mombani obviously didn't vote for fucking Mombani did like fucking asshole fucking asshole needs to resign asshole needs to fucking resign and he's not the only one like so many these just you know like you guys you have had so much fucking given to you so much shit you have the ability to retire you have like think about how many people in the US could retire and you could be so fucking comfortable I don't even know what his net worth is but it's comfortable enough he could retire his is fucking retirement plan which most of us like he's got a fucking pension you know what a pension is you know what a pension is like pensions this is how pensions exist anymore my dear they're about there my dad worked 29 years and 11 months for national steel and that's that's kind of an odd amount of time it almost sounds like 30 years but it's just not quite 30 years you know why because this the company got acquired and there was a bunch of other bullshit I'm not I don't want to get the details too much but the basic thing is at 30 years you would have found his full pension and because it was 29 years and 11 months and you know like basically got fucked out of the full pension deliberately so by design and now like a pension is just not even a thing people can you you can't even conceive of the notion of it people in the fucking government they have them and when I say people in the government I mean the fucking senators have them and it's just irritating it's fucking irritating it's one of the things that really pisses me off about the main Nazi guy because this motherfucker A he went to private school he's not a poor kid he went to private school could have gone to a nice university but instead volunteered the join-up and went off and they did a tour and they did another tour they did another tour and they did another tour that I think that was for right and then he worked for fucking black water as a mercenary like it it's just it's just disgusting and that motherfucker could potentially be a senator which would mean not only does he get a almost 200 thousand dollar a year salary which is not going to be his only salary but you know like plus staff which would be into the millions of dollars plus a lot of travel benefits plus health care plus retirement plan and six years of job security and all this did you just do not let this motherfucker get into the goddamn sent do not there are other people there are hundreds literally hundreds of thousands of people at least by my math based on demographics and the number of registered Democrats in Maine it's order of 200 thousand people who are eligible in Maine to be a senator and you're picking this guy with the fucking coat and cough for 20 years with the black water mercenary who like I mean like the more I learn about them too like oh he the one thing that sounded like halfway good about him it's like oh he said he was a socialist or a communist once well yeah except he completely disavowed that it took a bunch of brow-beating before he said anything about the Nazi tattoo or anything about it but without any prompting the motherfucker went off in disavowed and you could just search for this but there's been a bunch of articles disavowed being a communist and being a socialist which would have been like the one nice thing about him and no he won't do that it's just it's just like the guy could go fuck himself and the fact that people are sitting there saying like oh you got it we got it we got to take what we can get no one fuck you fuck you I'm so fucking tired of that bullshit it's so I'm not like I'm not a great politician by any means I would not want to be in elected office to be honest but I ran I've run a couple of times I ran as a green in within Andy Biggs's district so Gilbert Arizona a little bit of a right-wingingish kind of place but I ran openly as a very lefty green candidate wearing a mask and I swear to God the only reason I didn't come close to I mean I still I still did pretty well I have to say I feel pretty good about how I did but there were two seats three candidates no Democrat even running bothered the I mean there was one person who kind of like half-est ride but and and to her defense the signature requirements for running for these offices are ridiculous so you know she didn't put in the time in the effort the money to get them but also they are exorbitant there to be fair but she didn't get ballot access I had ballot access so it was like green Republican Republican two seats if you mother fuckers would have voted for me like you know that the the house and the Senate in Arizona are like two seats from tipping do you know what one or two seats would do and especially like if it's one or two seats that somebody like me instead of just a Democrat that's a powerful fup in position to be in it's not like I'm yeah anyway I don't want to the main reason I don't think I won is if there don't lot of Democrats didn't vote for me because they saw a green and they're like fuck you there's no you know you should have voted for me if you guys it would have sucked for me I would have done the job but it would have sucked I wouldn't have been too excited about it but I I know with a lot of confidence because I talked to a bunch of people granted I didn't do I didn't didn't do polling so maybe I'm just speculating here maybe I'm not right I think I'm right I am pretty fucking sure that a bunch of Democrats did not vote for me bunch of Republicans voted for me because these two Republicans were assholes I met them both their garbage people they're both in the state house now of course terrible people fucking horrible people but a bunch of Republicans and independence voted for me I and quite confident of that and these are the independence also like the Democrats are always talking about how oh we got to go for the independent you don't know who the fuck the independence are like this is I hate all this shit this middleing bullshit like oh well we have to go in the in the middle the air quotes middle between the Democrats who are right of Reagan just to be clear they are right on many issues of Ronald fucking Reagan who was the the example of terrible right wing politician and then you have between that that's the the leftist point that they're starting from and the guy damn fucking white nationalist crystal fascist and our go capitalist radical Republicans someplace between those two is where they're going to try to put themselves that's why they abandoned trans people that's why they abandoned immigrants that's why all this other bullshit and they did all that stuff and completely alienated people like me who otherwise would have been you know and you know they like the funny thing is it doesn't even look like Harris lost because of the genocide which is pathetic the genocide should have done it for but even with that she could have won but she did all this other shit chasing after people who were never going to vote for her never going to vote for her nobody wants for public and light she's chasing after them giving a middle finger to anyone even left of Reagan and the of course you lost a fucking course you lost it's pathetic the only thing she had to offer was marginally better than Trump and even that is generous because like in the fucking debate she and Trump got in an argument over who is more pro-frakin in a time when we're in like a pivotal point in the climate catastrophe or we could actually still do something to not be in like a horrible fucked up position and you two are arguing over who can get us their faster like fuck you fucking pieces of shit anyway I'm I'm just enjoying this I really am I'm not I'm not trying to be like better and giving too much of a middle finger here and obviously you have to reach across the island and there's everybody's mayor and I think it's still fuck all you people fuck all you people who are sitting there talking about how and they don't also like the Islamophobia the red scare bullshit all this other shit this stuff like oh we can't have socialized medicine every other in fact I'm not even going to say every other because they say every other developed country implies the US is a developed country every developed country has universal health care every developed country has some form of if not like free education the amniere free higher education or very inexpensive higher education every developed country has like social safety nuts of some form and the United States is not a fucking developed country this is how you know this is like they're they're the tells if you look at safety for example the US is not close the US is ridiculously dangerous now it is true like even being ridiculously dangerous it's not as dangerous as people imagine but compared to a lot of places it's fucking dangerous it's fucking ridiculous your the life expectancy here is decreasing and it's not that great your healthcare sucks your healthcare and it's like it's people will always say oh we have the best healthcare in the world if you can pay for no even if you can pay for it even people who have money they can pay for now if you have a certain amount of money I will I will give you like if you have so much money you can have a private doctor and like real concierge career maybe you're in an okay position but even then it's dubious because pe private equity taking over everything and they're doing the concierge stuff they're not they're not your friends they're not taking care of you but if you're a normal person and when I say a normal person I mean even if you're making like hundreds of thousands of dollars a year and you have air quotes good health insurance your experience if you ever needed if you ever get really sick if you ever have a bad accident or your kid gets cancer or whatever the fuck you're gonna find pretty quickly that shit sucks that fucking shit sucks you will have millions of dollars a dead very easily or it'll certainly drain whatever savings you have and you know it never might also like if you get if you age in this country they will do all of this stuff that will just rob you of your money rob you of any assets you have and then you know you're just fucked it's not gonna really extend your life it's certainly not gonna improve your quality of life but maybe maybe you'll live like an extra six months or a year or something but it'll suck it'll be miserable and it will completely eliminate any good experiences that your your family has with you and anything you can hand down to them and it's just it's just like it's so fucked here it's so fucked does not need to be this way it does not need to be this way this is one reason why I do wish and I understand like people don't have the resources to travel which is kind of a fucked up thing about this country I do think the right to roam which includes having an ability to do it and I'm not saying everybody should be flying around the planet all the time but there should be ways like high speed trans for example and you know maybe electric or nuclear boats that let you travel places without having a huge carbon impact and with those things you should be able to see other places and if you see other places and you learn about other stuff you start looking and you're like why is it so fucked up here if you go I talk a lot about Japan because I've been there a few times but you go there or you go to China or you go to France or Spain or you know like most other countries most other air quotes developed countries the actually developed countries there's fucking high speed train like high speed train powered by nuclear reactor so it's essentially carbon neutral they travel thousands of kilometers across China in hours it's it's wild it's wild how fucked up and shitty it is here but anyway I'm I'm kind of I'm simultaneously like really enjoying this and also just unloading a little bit because I'm fucking irritated with all these people but keep making things worse the keep you know like truckles needs to fucking retire and when I say truckles I'm focused on him because he is one of the more prominent Democrats but I mean even even even the guys that I like even even like a Bernie needs to retire even the only Democrat that I can think of at a national level who I even feel like a little maybe she could stay is Rashida and I'm a little nervous even about her just as I'm as much as I'm talking about mombani and I like him I'm technically notice I'm not I'm mostly talking about other things that are negative but you know there's a lot of positive stuff about him he's pro cop right he's not my favorite kind of position on that let's just say you know Rashida is a Democrat and the fact that she's a Democrat even with all the party going against her even with them trying to primary or all this other bullshit I still worry but I've never seen anything specific from her that gives me pause and I've only seen good stuff from her so you know maybe she's okay but I just I just remembered Katie Porter that fucking video of her chewing ass out of a a staffer though I don't know if I talked about that before but if you haven't seen it and this is one of those things also like you could tell and I I'm going to talk a little bit about literacy because there's there's a literacy that people like there's the obvious literacy which is you can pick up a piece of text and read it that is a sort of literacy right but there's also a literacy which is you could read between the lines you can understand more than what is just there at the surface level you can read a piece of work and understand like what is the author trying to say kind of understand what is the context in which this exists what is it mean what is what is the significance and and it's not just written material it's also things like that video and you can see like there's a difference between somebody is just somebody who is like stressed out and somebody you know like pushes a little too hard at the wrong time and they snap at them that's the thing that happens right that's a that's a thing that could happen to all of us but when you do that you catch yourself pretty quickly you apologize pretty quickly if you watch that Katie Porter video what you actually see is her being just completely shitty to her staffer who just got in the shot and the staffer corrects her on something that she was bad and mistaken on and she choose them out completely and the way that it comes off there to me is this is a person who has a nice kind of mask that she puts on in public and that's not who she is she's the person who like the actual Katie Porter I'm pretty sure is the one chewing other stuff and it's also like you you look at that there's other reports of stuff like this it's not like there's not the first time that you've heard about this is just the first and worst video that I've seen of redoing it and you look at that and it's just like this is your fucking governor and your governor to real candidate who's good and like again California is not a small state right you have lots of people who are eligible to be governor here first off we don't really need and I'm not saying that you can't have white people be in office but we fit we fit we've don't we don't have harm you know there's there's something like this state has plenty of other people who could be in office maybe maybe give them a chance and of course also I'm not saying that just because somebody happens to be black or brown they're automatically good like have a fucking threshold because there are plenty of people who are terrible who just happened to look a certain way I will say actually the mayor of Los Angeles I'm pretty fucking pissed off at and I I'm so irritated with myself here because I should have known I should have known that she was a piece of shit but you know like I Coruso terrible person he's a Republican Rianna's a Democrat this is the problem because all these fucking things and this gets back to that main fucking Nazi guy you get you you have so many people who could run for these offices they make it very difficult the access requirements for running for office are huge this is one of the reasons why a lot of people don't do it because in addition to not really understanding civics and not learning about it getting ballot access is a giant fucking pain in the ass if you have resources and you're plugged in it's not that big of a threshold it's not that big of a hurdle but if you're just a regular person and you want to run for Congress or for mayor of Los Angeles or for mayor of New York for that matter it takes so much effort just to get on the ballot it's ridiculous and then once you're there it takes so much money and effort in time that you you basically have to be a little bit rich you have to have something going for you you have to be very known in advance or be extraordinarily charismatic or have you know a few things kind of in your pocket that are helping you otherwise it's just not a realistic thing or you have to have so much time there's a reason that a lot of people like the people who actually end up getting on the ballot who are not in the sort of normal sort of path they're either people like Andy Biggs who won the fucking lottery like you look up how he got well it wasn't the lottery I guess it was the publishers fairing house or whatever so some kind of you know basically won the lottery equivalent he did that and he's like well I've got this money now I'm going to run for office that will get you in you can pay to get ballot access absolutely you can pay to have people do an image for you and make all your your stuff and get you the point where you're kind of presentable and that the threshold is low right if you're somebody who's extremely like you're retired and you have an extreme amount of time and a lot of energy and a lot of ability to do stuff that can get you in yeah you can convert a little bit of you know sort of horsepower elbow grease so to speak you could convert that to the equivalent of money you're going to spend a lot more time in effort than somebody with money or who's plugged in but you could still do it and the other one is like if you're a deadbeat dead cinema kind of person a guy ego or you're a space cinema kind of person like Mark Kelly and your wife was was she a senator or she I think she was a representative I don't even remember what the fuck she was it was before my time but whatever her's wife was you can you can get in to the party and then they set up this thing where it's like okay well the second that you go you're going to have all these donations and you're going to look this is I'm sure what happened with this so sparking may not see guy do a bunch of stuff so behind the scenes all of a sudden you come out of the gate and you look like you're an explosive just overnight sensation because you had a lot of help and you had a lot of people kind of pulling for you and doing stuff for you um you know it's not real let's just say that and then you can get on there and that's that's one way to get it and what it should be and in Germany in other places it's a little bit better on this random people should be able to go in fact it should be random people running for office and in fact also if it's I've said this in the last one or maybe two ago if you recognize the name of somebody on the primary ballot and there's somebody else you don't recognize the name of by default you should vote for the person who's name you don't recognize if somebody who's name you don't know asks you to sign their thing their petition to get ballot access probably sign it there only hesitation I have there is that the way that it's set up which is fucked up is at least in Arizona you can only sign one for each so you can't sign like five different petitions you should be able to you should be able to say okay you want to be secretary of state sign years old sign years old sign and in fact also you shouldn't even have to it should be like if you want to be secretary of state or senator or any kind of statewide office you personally and you can't send a proxy to do this you can't pay people to do it you can't it has to be you you have to go around to like each district or whatever and get signatures it doesn't have to be a lot of signatures it could be five signatures from each county or something like that or maybe it's 20 signatures I don't really care there's some threshold that is reasonable it's like enough that it's not going to be like everybody doing it but it's not ridiculously intractable right that should be the threshold and then each time there's a primary should be a lot of people right and personally I talked about this before but I think certification is the right way like it shouldn't even be people deciding that they want to run because the people that decide that they want to run probably are you know like almost by definition not the people who should be in those positions and I include myself there like the fact that I even thought that me running is a good idea probably a red flag and certainly like if you look at like Trump or Hillary or genocide Joe or or Harris or space cinema or deadbeat dads cinema or the main Nazi any of these people none of these people should be in office none of these people should be anywhere near the levers of power chuckles nobody should you know he should have been at most like a one or two term or and then go off and do something else it's ridiculous that he is in the position he's at it's ridiculous that Pelosi is able to decide she's not going to run again and just keep running and going until then that's that should not be the fact that that happens the fact that you have people that just do this their whole lives I just hear my mom's cat is just staring at me right but the fact that you have that should be a red flag that's something like it's a problem it means you don't have an actual democracy he's he's really staring in totally at me it's very distracting in which I had a picture of this I don't have my phone with me it's over in the other side and if I move over there to get it he's going to he's going to bolt so there's no way I'm going to get a picture of this but it is funny and it's distracting but anyway hey Snoop what are you doing what are you doing um totally blew my mental stack I have no idea what I was going to talk about next I guess what am I what was I going to talk about I have the I'm looking at my notes I had the Trump thing in back to the future I thought about talking about that I don't really want to talk about that I'm much more excited about on Donnie right now and uh don't really want to think about that I do think one thing I do want to talk about actually is I was reading this shit um I don't know why I'm on fucking LinkedIn I I know I don't kind of why I'm on LinkedIn but I should be on LinkedIn isn't there's nothing good that comes from being on LinkedIn if I'm if I'm being completely honest it's just a waste of time it's just a terrible place to be but but but I come to I come in here and they have the like trending stuff and in the trending stuff you know one of the things they have uh today was this thing by the CEO of Google and he's like our our TPUs are heading her tensor processing units are headed for space inspired by the history of moon shots from quantum and reading this because it's yeah from quantum computers to autonomous driving project sun catchers exploring how we could one day build scare scalable machine and it's ML but machine learning compute systems in space harnessing more of the sun's power which in its more power than a hundred trillion times humanity's total available like any moon shop level one and so they they talk about these you know early research so shows that our new TPUs uh survived without damage when tested in a particle accelerator to simulate uh low earth orbit levels of radiation which I I'm really yeah either they're using very large features or I really might my suspicion is it's like what what is the dose and what is the duration when you talk there's a lot that goes under radiation testing and you like you could put anything you could stick your head in a particle accelerator and if it's a brief enough blast and the doses in that much you might be fine you could also you know sit there for hours and hours and be cooked um you know if you put chips in space and you have cosmic rays it's not good for you it's not good for the chips the chips will fail there's a reason that we use technology in the space that is very like the features are large the stuff is like decades old it's rad hard and all this kind of stuff but never mind that one now never mind that now the thing about being in space the thing the reason that the stuff is ridiculous completely fucking ridiculous is like you look at all these um and I I'm that word is escaping me for some reason you look at all these data centers and they're extremely extremely thirsty they take ridiculous amounts of water what do you think they're doing with that water what do you think that they need that water for it's per cooling and for the cooling like all the power that you put into the thing is going to come out as waste heat that's that's just how energy works that's not like that's the basic thermodynamics that's night somebody who's taking you don't even have to take a semester of thermodynamics you should just kind of know that but you put energy in and even if you do work that's useful with that it's going to eventually just be waste heat so what do you do with all that heat and space you don't have lots of water and even if you had lots of water you are stuck with radiate of cooling and I mean I guess if you had a ridiculous amount of water you could do evaporative cooling with it that's not a very sustainable way to do stuff because it's just like evaporating off into nothing but if you're just doing radiative cooling you look at the space station you see all those solar panels and then they have these other things that are about as big as the solar panels those are to radiate away heat and the space station doesn't have like huge amounts of power that it's using I mean that the I guess it depends on what is your scale of huge amounts of power but compared to like the power density of say a data center not a huge amount what are you going to do with all that fucking heat there's just it's is that feasible there's no way you can have a huge data center lying in space in a sun synchronous orbit they're talking about so that's it's in it's at least somewhat radiation protected because it's not in like higher but it's still it's going to be in a place where it's in the sun all the fucking time the sun is putting in a lot of energy now you make get a lot of power out of that you get a lot of heat coming in from that you got to balance the heat off somehow and you got to radiate away all that extra heat so you gotta have like it's just I don't know the whole thing irritates the shit out of me because it's just and then he says however significant challenges remain like thermal management and onboard system reliability I just kind of like wave those you know just just kind of like casually throw those out thermal management is a complete deal breaker for this it's it's not like a trivial thing it's a thing that is going to kill it or I guess you can I mean certainly you can have processing on the edge and you can do like small amounts of compute for certain things but you're not putting the fucking data center in sun synchronous orbit it's certainly I guess if you have like massive amounts of space infrastructure and you can build huge radiators you could do it but we're not there we're not anywhere near there and if you're launching shit you're just it's just that feasible it's not fucking feasible and it irritates the shit out of me because this kind of also like you look at him the fact that he's CEO fucking pisses me off but never mind that now he's CEO he has he went to the Wharton School at an MBA from there yeah that's just like fucking but he also has a masters in material science and engineering from Stanford and then batch physics and technology from IIT so the masters in material science and engineering you would think would cover thermodynamics and the thing that bothers me is like if you understood the least amount about thermodynamics you would know this is not fucking feasible and it's just like I don't know you think about also the amount of power like the amount of money that is going to go into this the do space kind of stuff making chips and going you're like launching them I don't get me wrong I do support and like general interest kind of stuff I like basic research it's very important to do it's very useful to do and you know I completely support that that's not what they're doing though they're doing this air quotes moon shot to put server farms in sons and granos orbit and it's just pretty much ridiculous and the fact that you have people running companies like trillion dollar companies allocating tens hundreds of billions of dollars for these projects it's just so misguided it's the opposite like I'm sitting here at the beginning talking about how you know if you rationally designed a city and you did it well you could put in a bunch of density you could have you think about like just looking around here you could have all these people in smaller homes currently with a lot more space and that space could be much more comfortable you could have gardens and parks and all those kind of stuff around them you could have a bunch of restaurants and shops all over the place within easy walking distance and highly accessible so if you're a wheelchair user you can get right to them you can go like five minutes from wherever you live and you're on a fucking train and then you go from that train to a train state and you know like a little local light real kind of thing or better get a subway you go from that subway to a train station and then you get to that train station and you can go a couple thousand kilometers away in you know a day and you're doing that on sun power that mean literally in Phoenix or an Arizona weather you could power trains going up and down the state with solar going a few hundred kilometers per hour and it would be like I took this bus I think I talked about this I took a greyhound from Phoenix to the flag staff a couple of months or two ago and it was okay it was fine not my favorite thing I wouldn't do it again ended up taking a car back with some other people that were there wouldn't do it again and you think about the experience of doing that like the frequency it was two two greyhounds a day do that trip if you go from like say you live in Tokyo or Kyoto and I'm sorry I could go back to Japan but if you are there during the normal days especially like a weekend every five minutes literally every like three to five minutes there's a fucking high-speed train a shinkansen going from Kyoto to Tokyo and like or Osaka and you're just like every fucking five minutes that's there you don't have to go through security you just get to take it doesn't cost that much it's not like cheap cheap but it's pretty cheap it's powered by hot rocks or in Arizona it could be powered by the fucking sun there's a place where fucking solar is a good thing because you have like heat dissipation you could actually do something with it you have sun falling on the ground anyway the heat is still there no matter what you're doing and you know like the if you look at the US power consumption you could put a solar farm and I'm not saying that this is a thing that you do practically because but you know in terms of the actual energy used by the US it wouldn't even be that much of Arizona like there I've seen maps of this it's a shockingly small amount of Arizona could give you the power that it would take to power the whole fucking country and you think about also like in Arizona the time that you have peak demand is exactly the time that it's the brightest out which means exactly the time that you get the most solar and people sit there and they're like oh well you have to what have what you do when the sun goes down you have batteries first of all but also when the sun goes down you don't have to run the air conditioning as much you don't have to use as much power the time when you need the most power the time when they have like the biggest loads when they spin up the fucking coal fire of plants is during the hot summer sun sunny times and that's when the solar does the best and you know like you think about like they started putting solar on the Jimmy Carter's not perfect but solar panels on the fucking White House which Reagan of course took off in one of the many ways that Reagan's a piece of shit but you know you put those fucking solar panels on every house in Arizona and you don't even need a grid necessarily now the grid is nice because it can act as a battery and you can have centralized batteries and things like this so instead of having like individuals having to maintain their own systems you can have that for everybody or you can have like a small battery at home and then you have like the grid that you know but if you would have done this decades ago Arizona would be a net power producer instead of you know like a place full of dirty power full of natural gas and full of coal plants still and all this kind of shit it's just it's so fucking annoying that we don't do that it's so annoying that you know like you look at that greyhound it was like two or three hours to get from Phoenix the flag staff and you know not very comfortable and everybody's coughing and it's gross versus again like shit constant or TGV kind of thing or the Chinese bullet trains a few hundred kilometers per hour you do that math and it's like less than an hour you go from Phoenix to flag staff and of course also you have a train in both ends so you're not like you have good public transit and you just look at like that that could be there and it's powered by the sun and it could be frequent and it could be automated you know like automated cars or thing you can do automated trains or a technology that we've had for decades and decades and it's only better now and if you want to make them even better still you can easily and we don't have it it's just so fucking annoying the place that we are and this is and I guess this is actually I'm going to be wrapping up because you know I'm about an hour seems like a good place to break the thing about Maldani that I really just want to tap off here is just better things are possible and I'm not again I don't think he's perfect the cop thing bothers me you know all this kind of stuff but the faculty one I hope launches a thousand other campaigns you know how it starts like making people realize what's possible realized what they fucking should have and he's going to be the mayor and he's not going to get everything that he wants he's not going to be able to do everything he wants but he's going to fucking try if he even does 10% of the stuff that he's setting out the deer and people start seeing what you can do what is possible what else is possible you know what else can you do and this is this is also why I get so fucking incensed with the Democrats because they do shit like you know we're going to do a 5% solution we're going to you have the student loan crisis which is trillion's of dollars and we're going to help you know a few hundred billion dollars of that in such a small amount that actually it gets washed away by interest almost immediately which is fucking beautiful and it's not to say that it didn't help people but it doesn't help that many people that much and it could be so much fucking better it does not need to be like this and you start seeing the possibilities I just hope that people will start understanding how fucked they are and I don't mean an permanent way but I mean just in the way that we're like there's no reason to spend hundreds of this is one of the reasons I talk about cops all the time we spend hundreds of billions of dollars a year on fucking cops in this country on law enforcement for nothing it doesn't make us safer they don't even really solve crimes you know like only 5% of what cops do has anything to do with violent crimes and most of that is after the fact and most of that doesn't actually help anybody and certainly doesn't prevent anything and it's like you're spending all this money you know what actually does reduce crime giving people money making people comfortable giving people education giving people a safety net giving people better lives that shit makes you safer that shit keeps people from doing crime because people don't need the fucking steel people don't need like there's there's no point to it at a certain point if everybody is comfortable you're not like why why would you do it it's just silly like it's not to say that crime goes away completely but it can mostly go away it would be like a weird anomalous thing like this good anyway and I don't even want to get into that it's just better things are possible let's do better things let's imagine more and again like everything that exists in the world that people have made it never it wasn't like handed down by God in that way everything around us is somebody's shitty idea or a good idea but you know somebody's idea some confluence of ideas some confluence of stuff that people did together we hit the world is what we make it make it better so congratulations again Mamdanee and if you're thinking about running and you're not a shithead please do and again I don't even want to talk about like beyond electoral politics and all that kind of stuff but it is important it does matter I think it's not there are other things that need to be done that are probably bigger in the long term but in the short term and it's also one of these things where I think you know you have to you have to press all the buttons and hit all the levers that are around and that's one of them that we have so anyway with that thank you for listening congrats again Zijian and one thing this is the last thing I'm going to say I looked at the transcript that I have a lot of generated from my last one and it always fucks up that Zijian Zijian is like see you later basically in in Chinese it fucking pisses me off and I can't add my own transcripts for some reason like it doesn't it doesn't accept my transcripts when I add them in I'm sure it's something that I can work through and figure out but I have like a dozen other things I'm trying to do it's not a really big high priority for me to get you know because the transcript is good enough but it irritates me it's said bye bye at the end I didn't say fucking bye bye I said Zijian so Zijian anyway sorry seriously thank you fuck Tim Cook 再见

Sweetgrass-Online

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

0.000003%

Water_drop_001 by José Manuel Suárez Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 License [https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en] https://patreon.com/smenor EPISODE TRANSCRIPT Hey there, I'm Scott, and this is Tangents. It's been at least a week since I did one of these. I warned last time, it's gonna be infrequent, at least for the foreseeable future, just because I'm saying it my mom and sister's place, and just getting time to myself and space and all of this to have a chance to do this. It's a little more challenging now than it has been. But still wanted to make one, and this one, I'm calling 0. 00003%. And I'm calling it that for a reason, specifically, because it is a ridiculously, ridiculously small number. And that is basically, you know, when you look at the population of the United States, 340 million people. And then you consider, I mean, let's be fair. We'll say, okay, the registered voters in the United States, there are something like 210 million people. And if you wanna limit yourself even further to Democrats, 49 million people, something like that. I'm ballparkier, but basically. And the thing that I really want people to understand, then I guess you have to consider, the constitution does put some constraints on who can be president. So not just anyone can be president, there's an age requirement, and you have to be an air quotes natural born citizen. When you take all those things into account, there are still at the very least tens of millions of people in the United States who could be president. And when I say it could be president, I mean, tens of millions of registered Democrats. Like, I'm not even just talking about people in general, who, if you look at that, it's into the hundreds of millions of people. It could be president. And yet we're told, time and again, and increasingly so, and more ridiculously so, that we have to pick this one person. And we can't, in any way, undermine that person, we can't contradict them, we can't say, this is not the best thing about you, this is not maybe, maybe you should be better, maybe I don't personally like the fact that in the 1970s, I'm gonna pick on Biden here just because he's done. But in the 1970s, dude said, you didn't want his kids growing up at a racial jungle, right? He got drummed out of the 1988 Democratic primary for over the top over plagiarism. And he has a very long history of this incidentally. It goes back to his undergrad, there's a lot of stuff where it looks like he plagiarized large passages in things that he turned in, in law school, he made claims also about where he was in class, like what it standing was. He was really like, mid-middling at best, but he kind of implied that, you know, I got all these degrees and I was way at the head of my class and I thought, bunch of fucking bullshit, bunch of fucking bullshit. And the thing that I think you have to understand and I think it's important to really point out is just like Trump, this is a old, middle, yeah, I'm trying to call him, middle. Old mid, white dude, who is racist and I understand, you're like, oh, he's not a racist, he was, he was the vice president under, he was uncle drone, you know, dude's fucking racist. To this day, racist, I don't mean that you have to go back into the 70s to find his racism, he's fucking racist. But never mind that now, he fucked over and needed a hill and gave us clearance Thomas, you know. He is instrumental, proudly instrumental, in passage of the crime bill, which oddly enough, just like Harris, he made a bunch of his political career, a bunch of his bones on putting mostly black men arresting them, imprisoning them, stripping them of civil rights, stripping them of the right to vote. And thanks to the 13th of men's little asterisk, insulating them, literally fucking insulating them. This is genocide Joe, before he was genocide Joe, by the way, before he was the nominee in 2020. And it's just fucking ridiculous that people, like, just decided, you have to vote for him, you have to, but before he was the fucking nominee, you can't point out how much of a fucking piece of shit he is, before he was the fucking nominee. And the reason that I'm talking about this now, you get, like, fast forward to 20, 20, 40. And we didn't have a primary, and we should have had a fucking primary. Biden himself said that he was gonna be a one-termer, should have allowed it, instead, he's, like, clenching on the handles of power, the reins of power, didn't wanna let go. And he only finally let Harris go, after, it was so obvious he was going to lose. He was, you know, that the polling was not looking good for him. He was, at this point, genocide Joe. He was nuclear, it was toxic. He also spent four years downplaying the pandemic, which is still ongoing, pretending, you know, Trump said, in his first term, if we just stop testing for it, it'll magically go away. But he didn't stop testing. You know who stopped testing? Fucking genocide job, fucking eugenics job. Biden thought that his wife, Dr. Jill, and I say, Dr. Cercastically, not because, you know, obviously, if a woman has a PhD or in her case, a EDD, Dr. of Education, by all means you have earned the right to call yourself Dr. And I'm very hesitant in, I'm very hesitant in taking that away from any person, especially a woman, because, you know, there's a lot of misogyny is kind of like deeply ingrained in our society, just as much as racism and ableism. So in that sense, but the problem is, when you're speaking in a medical context, if you call yourself a fucking doctor, people think you're a fucking doctor. I mean, I'm not just my speculating on this, what'd be goldberg thought that she should be the attorney general, or not the attorney general, the surgeon general. I'm my eyes are rolling back, sorry. But thought that she should be the fucking surgeon general. So it's not that it's not confusing. It's absolutely confusing that she calls herself doctor. And she's sitting there giving a speech, I mean, I mean, picking on specific things, but this is a pattern. Give a speech takes off her mask and she's like, doesn't the air just smell sweeter without a mask? Which incidentally, again, prior to this, I thought that at least some people actually understood when you're in a fucking airborne pandemic, wearing a respirator, or at least wearing some kind of a face covering, but especially wearing a respirator is helpful. It's good, it's useful. Waring one is an imperfect layer of protection. Vaccines, you'll find very few people who are more pro-vaccine than I am. I've had basically every other than, I haven't had the updated Govid one, because I can't fucking afford it. And I've had flu yet, no, the season. Again, because I can't fucking afford it, the flu is like 60 bucks, and the COVID one is like, almost 200 bucks. And yeah, it's a lot of money. I don't have health insurance and at the moment, I don't have a lot of surplus by what you're meeting really in. But I've had pretty much every vaccine that I'm eligible for. And I would have other ones that I'm not eligible for, if I was eligible for it. And part of it was, I did some travel. I was thinking about going places. I mean, I still went places that have endemic things that are not great, but I was thinking about going maybe to like, sub-Saharan Africa places where there are a lot of a lot of the endemic diseases that probably would be real wise to be vaccinated against. I had yellow fever. I had, well, I'm not meant to be able to go through the list, but I've had a lot of fucking vaccines. And I would take more vaccines are magical. They're great, they're fantastic. But the thing is vaccines are not magical shields that perfectly protect anyone. The point of a vaccine way that they work is that they are an imperfect layer of protection that when you put them in concert with other mitigations, which really means comprehensive public health, surveillance, testing isolation when you had outbreaks, this kind of stuff, you combine all of these things, you layer the Swiss cheese, and you get pretty good protection. You get herd immunity, you get enough people vaccinated, you have enough of these other mitigations. And instead of things being able to propagate through society, they just, there's a lot. And that's how you protect everyone. That's how you protect all of us by all of us doing stuff. And even though they might not work perfectly, with all of these layers of Swiss cheese, with all of these things together, you get enough of them and you basically, instead of having one person infecting more than one person, so you have an amplification and exponential growth. Instead of that, you have exponential decay, things puzzle out. It's not a complicated thing. Like I can explain that stuff and Swiss cheese literally to a kindergarten, probably a preschool, but certainly a kindergarten, and certainly somebody with the most basic bit of math. And yet, these fucking people sat there and acted like, vaccine, they're get vaccinated. Now you can take off your fucking mask. We don't have to actually do anything else. We can stop surveillance, we can fuck with the maps. This is another thing that he did that I fucking hate. Fucked with the maps, changed the, and this sounds like conspiracy theory stuff I understand. Although I can treat pictures of it. I have another episode on it, I'm not going to go into depth on it, but he changed the coloring on maps, or rather his CDC director, but basically, his best. Change the coloring on maps, change the metrics to make things look better. And then really stopped testing and stopped reporting and shut down a lot of the mitigations that we did have. And this kind of stuff got us to the point where basically people had this idea, you get vaccinated now, you're not going to get sick. But that turns out to be bullshit. And when you help people something like that, that turns out to be bullshit, and then we knew was bullshit, what ends up happening is people now start looking at all vaccines, including those vaccines, and thinking, well, those vaccines don't actually work. Because they don't, they don't work. Nothing works the way that they were pretending that they did. The only thing that would work as they're pretending vaccines did is basically if you were wearing like a full-on BSL4 suit, you know, you're wearing a proper fucking respirator, you know, separate air supply, and just an impermeable suit, like, you know, like outbreak kind of suit. Other than that, nothing is perfect. And when you tell people, you have this perfect thing, people say, oh, you know, John got sick. He was vaccinated, he said, so that's it. I guess vaccines don't work. I guess all vaccine, and this fed in, do the already growing anti-vex sentiment, fed into the anti-vex relationship. And it got us to the point where now we have things like the fucking measles coming back. We have things like, we're losing herd immunity. We're losing, you know, and it's just physically horrible. I don't want to get deeply into that. This is not what I want to talk about this episode, but that's, it's wild how bad it is. And again, we were told, head to vote for him. And then he finally thought that he was going to lose. And even when he saw he was going to lose, didn't want to withdraw. And it took Nancy fucking Pelosi, who is not a person that I'm a fan of, and I would not give her much credit for anything other than, I mean, she's good at manipulating stuff and she's good at, she's definitely technically good at being the speaker of the house, the majority leader of all of this kind of stuff. I'll give her that, but I don't like her. I'm not a fan of hers. I don't think she's a good person. She saw that Biden was going to lose. She saw how much he saw. And she pushed him out. And then, you know, unfortunately, he finally did this. And he finally threw Harris over the glass cliff at the last minute in a time where she wasn't, you know, and I will say, like, I know there are a lot of people who say, oh, we could have, she couldn't possibly win because she didn't have enough time. She had plenty of time. She had plenty of time. He did do this when he saw that he was going to lose and it was, you know, she was against the odds, but she could have easily won. The problem is she sat there and we're told, again, with no fucking primary, you have to vote for her. You can't criticize her for anything. Meanwhile, I'm watching kids get burned alive in front of this screaming mother. I'm watching, you know, like a little girl's body blown up and dangling from a fucking wall. And I'm hearing her talking about joy, how she's feeling joy, and I'm speaking, and people going into the Democratic convention, walking past people who are reading the names of kids who've been murdered by bombs and bullets from our fucking country, defended by our country and our ambassadors to the UN, blocking vetoing resolutions. And people are just walking by and laughing and sticking their fingers in their ears and going, la, la, la, la, la, yeah. That stuff is seared into my mind and it fucking has ruined your party for me. I mean, I don't think there's any recovering, honestly, for me, for that. I would, I'm not, I can't imagine ever voting for a Republican, but I could imagine the Republican party getting redeemed more easily in my mind than the Democrats. And I'm not saying that because I think that the Republicans are going to be redeemable or get redeemed, I'm just saying that that's how fucking far gone the domestic rats are for me. That's how, I'm just, I'm done. I'm fucking done with your party. And this was before this reason thing, which is what I want to talk about today, which is, yeah, it, like it's before I get to this, but I just wanted to say like the US population, the number of people who could be president, it's so large. It's not like there's one person who's just the anointed by God individual who has to be the candidate. You have so many fucking people to select from. The primary is supposed to be a time where you weed out shitty people and where you find the best people and where you test ideas. And also, I mean, as we saw in like 2020, you have people who kind of push each other a little bit. You have, you know, it wasn't just that Bernie was pushing for a form of universal healthcare, which incidentally I think wasn't, you know, given my drillers, we would be working towards the National Health Service, you know, actual like, not the current one, but what it was originally, where you actually have university medical school covered, you have things like, we've, we actually have, you know, doctors paid for by the state, medical, you know, it's not just medical insurance. It's the providers are paid for. Yeah, and which is not to say you can't have extra insurance on top of that, but everyone gets that. Everyone gets good health care. And also, well, if I was doing that, medical school is massively expanded. Probably do some stuff where you have, we have this problem. My sister is a doctor, she does a lot of lobbying for this. But there's a problem with like nurse practitioners and nurse anesthetists trying to push into anesthesiologist roles. And what I would do, instead of just fighting them, is take these people and send them to fucking medical school. Send them to, you know, maybe make an accelerated program, but have them get a medical doctorate, have them go to some kind of residency, expand the residency programs, and then get them to be actually doctors. And then you don't have the situation where doctors are too expensive and rare. And so they have the need that, you know, the private equity who are doing healthcare and only care about money. End up hiring people who are not qualified and who are going to get people killed. You don't do that. So the thing that, the thing that, sorry, I just got a message, I got distracted. The thing that I wanted to actually talk about today, now that I'm 17 minutes in, this is a chronic problem. I have, if you're just catching this now, understand this is who I am, this is where I come from, but if you understand where I, I got another message and, you know, who did my, I need to turn off messages when I record these, or I should go back, but I'm not going to go back because, yeah, there's only forward. Seriously though, the thing I wanted to talk about today is this motherfucking asphalt candidate, and I can't, I use the term candidate incidentally very loosely, because I want to say he's going for Senate against the Collins and Maine, and she's, she's fucking terrible. She's one of these people, like in some, in some ways, I would say that Collins is actually worse than Mitch. Not that Mitch is, obviously also Mitch is kind of well past his prime, but Mitch is obviously, like ontologically evil, just terrible person. But she, Collins, sits there and pretends to be kind of okay, and just consistently does the Lucy in the football thing, looks like she's going to make the right call, looks like she's going to go against her party, and then she does, at the last minute, you know, like pulls it out and doesn't do it. He's terrible, she's fucking horrible. She doesn't need to be replaced, have to, absolutely. The next thing that I wanted to talk about though is, there's this candidate there, and again, getting to this candidate thing, is he actually the candidate? Well, no, because in order to, like first off, their actual primary election in Maine is, I think, the second of June. So that's a little ways away. As I'm recording this, it's predated, 24th of October. It's the second of June, I think. I'm trying to see if, yeah, I'm just confirming that I'm reading a right thing. Second of June, so more than six months away, and they can't start collecting signatures, just to get ballot access for that primary until the first of January, 2026. Again, it is October, 2025 right now. There's November, there's December, there's two months before you can even start collecting signatures just to get ballot access. This guy has raised a lot of money. He's got a name for himself, which also incidentally fucking annoys me, because he is, I'm not even gonna get to the next part yet, but I want to say he is a guy who decided after 9-11 to join the US military. I have friends who are veterans, I'm not trying to say like everybody who's a veteran, is a fucking horrible person. But I am saying, going out of your way to join the military and murder fucking brown people, it's pretty bad. And the people that I know who are veterans, they went in, they've got suckered in by a recruiter when they were like 18 or something. Didn't see a lot of paths forward. Took that, got in, did their time, got the fuck out, and they regretted it, and they regretted it ever since, and they've tried to make up for it and they've talked to the people about, like how this is not a good thing. And how you're mortgaging your body for this and all of this other stuff. But this guy got in there, and then he became a fucking mercenary for, you stayed longer than he had to, became a mercenary for fucking black water, which, that could be, that just is fucking disqualifying. I don't care about anything else. I'm not ever gonna vote, I probably won't vote for a Democrat again. I don't know. I'm not completely rolling it up, it's hard to imagine, but I'm definitely not gonna vote for somebody who is a veteran. I'm definitely not gonna vote for somebody, unless they've been a long time repentant. Like I have a friend, Viven, I'm not to pick out people in particular, but I have a friend, and he's a veteran, but he went through, and he's like, this is fucked up, he's been working in the right direction. I actually have a bunch of friends now that I almost regretful that I mentioned his name. But I have a bunch of other friends that are veterans, and they're very vocal about it, and they're very much work on making things better. This guy in Maine, you know, all his terrible stuff, all his horrible stuff. And then you think about the thing that came up recently, the reason I'm talking about him is he had a tattoo. And I have tattoos, there's nothing wrong with having tattoos. He got a tattoo, and some people are like, oh, it's just a skull in crossbones. No, it's a fucking, I'm gonna fuck up the name, but I think it's called the Totencom. And this is basically, literally just means like skull and crossbones in German, but what it actually means, if you go through, is, and the particular one that he had, is a Nazi logo. And, you know, is it obvious not to logo? It's something that I have associated a long time ago, like I don't remember when I first recognized it or first saw it, but it's one of those things like asphastica, where I've just known, as long as I can remember, that was a Nazi symbol, and again, it's so ingrained in associated with Nazis that I don't remember when I first learned about that. He had this, and he had it for like 20 years. And the dude is like in his 40s now. He's not like a 28-year-old guy. He's in his fucking 40s. He's had this thing for 20 years, and certainly, it is just beyond him plausible, that he didn't know what it was when he got it. The claim is that it was flash, and they just got, I find it extremely, extremely unlikely. Especially the guy, you know, he was a shit poster. He was probably on the chance, like four-chand kind of stuff. I would bet he knew when he got it. I would bet he thought it was Ig in cool, and all those kind of stuff. Whether he's an actual overt Nazi or not, which I find dubious, I think, I would not rule it up. I don't know that he's not a neo-na Nazi. Yeah, I find it very, is at least neo-na Nazi adjacent, that's the best case scenario. It'd be very best interpretation of all of this, is like he just didn't know, and he was so in curious. He had it for fucking 20 years, and never did anything about it. Nobody ever told him about it for 20 years, really? Nobody ever said, like, you know, dude, maybe that's like it. No, I just don't buy it. I don't fucking buy it. And the only time he finally, like he finally covered it up. He covered it up with stuff that's also, I'm not like, there's certain dog whistle stuff. I think I made one of these on dog whistles if I haven't, I'll have to make one. But there are dog whistles, these are things that look fairly innocuous, but to the people in the people that you're targeting, they say something. And they're really nice, big, well nice, and a horrible way for people in this area, because they let you do stuff that is plausibly denialable, and that even kind of goes over most people's heads. I think a lot of people know, like 88 is the 8th letter of the US or the alphabet, which is NH. So 88, H, H, what do you think H, H stands for in the context of Nazis? Yeah, so they use that. They have the 19th letter of, I think it's the 19th. Yeah, the 19th letter of the alphabet is an S. And so you have 19 19, which incidentally he also has a tattoo, that says 19 19, the claim is that it's something else that's completely innocuous. But to me, I'd say you have one overly Nazi tattoo. And then you have another one that's at least due to some suspect. And there are a lot of people with a lot of tattoos. I know people covered in tattoos. They don't have anything that's even adjacent to this. I find it like you've exhausted your benefit of a doubt with the first one. And so anyway, I saw people claiming, oh, they didn't know, they didn't know. Well, he did get it covered up, again, with, this is the thing I wanted to say. I don't get to the thing I was starting to say. You got it covered up, with something that is also kind of a dog whistle, with some stuff that, it's not necessarily, like it's not overtly, it's not like the level of 88 or 1919, but it's on the cost of it. It's stuff where you look at it and you're kind of like, this is pretty, pretty sauce. This is pretty like, especially given the context, I don't know that it's better. He did that after there was this massive outcry, after 20 years of having this thing. And it's like, oh, well, I've covered it up, so it's fine. It's not fucking fine, it's not fucking fine. And it just irritates the shit out of me, that in the state of Maine, and I want to see if I've got these things here, yeah, there are, I think, 1. 4 million people in Maine, out of those, there are something like, 370,000 registered Democrats, and something like two thirds of them are over the age, I think 30 is the requirement in the constitution for being a senator. So something like two thirds of them are eligible to be senators. That means you've got easily into the hundreds of thousands of people in Maine, who could be a fucking senator, and who could be a Democratic senator. And you're picking this one guy, this one guy, and this one is actually, I think, 0. 003% of the population or something like that, I don't remember the exact number. But it's of that order, maybe even an order of magnitude less than that. You're acting like this one guy is the only fucking guy that could possibly be Collins, the only guy who you could possibly have is your nominee. Again, they can't even collect a single signature to get ballot access to run in the primary until January, two months from now. It's ridiculous, it's fucking ridiculous. And then you put this in the context of, there are Democrats who, you know, they have this whole vote blue no matter who thing. There are Democrats who will not vote for Mombani, who have been speaking out against him. He is the duly elected Democratic nominee in New York City. He is the guy who is on the ballot as a mayoral candidate. He's not a guy who is even in the primary. He's certainly not a guy who hasn't even collected a fucking signature. He's the candidate. If people who are sitting there saying, like, oh, he's not really a Democrat, we're not going to vote for him. Vote for this sex pest guy who got a lot of old people killed and didn't, it just is a horrible person who should have, honestly, should have just been flushed out into the ocean and never heard from again, along with so many other people. And he's running against this guy. It's ridiculous. And he got Democrats like anti this guy, again, who is the nominee. And the same people, the same fucking people are sitting there falling over themselves to talk about how important it is that we continue to support this guy and how you know, everybody has some youthful indiscretions and oh, maybe he didn't know about the Nazi tattoo and the significance of all this stuff. And he's like fucking bullshit, fucking bullshit. And again, again, again, even if it was true, even if he didn't know, which again, I don't buy, even if he didn't have it on himself or fucking decades and didn't think to do anything about it for decades, which again, I don't buy, even if all of that stuff, you completely ignore that. The blackwater thing, you're done, you're fucking done. And if you worked on, if you were a blackwater contractor 20 years ago and you spent the time since then talking about how horrible blackwater is, maybe we could talk. I still think, again, you have hundreds of thousands of people who are eligible, we have the ability, we have some room, we have some capacity, the pick somebody who's not problematic, give some capacity, the pick somebody who's not fucking terrible. And you're gonna do this. And then also, like I saw somebody say, we have a socialist that has a Nazi or a suspect of a Nazi tattoo and so we're gonna flush them out. No, he's not a fucking socialist. He's not a, it's kind of weird actually how people are inferring that he's a democratic socialist. And again, I'm significantly left of DSA, I'm not a huge fan of DSA, but it's just ridiculous that people are calling him to this. Now he did say, I guess in a deleted Reddit post that he was a communist, which I know for some people sounds bad, to me that would actually be an advantage, although the Nazi thing and the blackwater thing completely ruined it, I think he was an edgy guy, like an edgy lord kind of guy, and he just said shit, which includes like getting a Nazi tattoo, which includes saying you're a communist. I don't think he ever actually said all cops are bastards, although they are, but he definitely said, like cops are bastards, all of them or something like this, something like that, again, deleted. Again, another thing that I would like, but he's disabouted that. He's since then said, he's not a communist, he's not a bunch of articles you can easily find, said he's not a socialist, that he's not a communist. So, let's be clear about who he is. He's a fucking blackwater contractor, military guy, who had the judgment that thought, you know, like, oh, I'm gonna get a Nazi tattoo, I'm gonna have it for 20 years. That's the guy, that's your fucking guy. This is the guy that you have to have to have. You can't have somebody else. There are other people by the way running in that election. Plenty of people could win, plenty of people who are better than Collins, they just whole idea that you have to pick people, this is, I was spoken that length about too, but this whole idea that you have to pick people who are just intrinsically terrible, you have to pick people who are Nazi adjacent, you have to pick people who are, like, going back to Harris. I'm trying to deliberately not to pick too much on her, I'd much rather pick on mid-white dudes, but, yeah, to pick on Harris a little bit. She ran as, maybe not openly transphobic, but she definitely said, you know, I'll follow the law, given the fact that she's an attorney who has taken, I'm sure, legal ethics and a bunch of other things, and there was that, just because the thing is legal, does not mean it's ethical, and not the same thing. But following the law, in the case of states where they have anti-trans laws, means you're following anti-trans laws. That makes you anti-trans. At least, tacitly, she was pretty overtly anti-immigrant. This is another thing that actually fucking pissed me off. I think it was, it was either yesterday or maybe it was today and pretty sure it was yesterday, though. They came popular today and they came down today. Bernie fucking Sanders, who, again, like, I, Bernie got me into politics, got me to do a lot of door knocking and hauling and messaging and all those kind of stuff, I think he's done. I've lost the things that I liked about him, I kind of lost. But Bernie fucking Sanders said, Trump is better at defending the border and that we need strong borders and I'll ask you, fuck you, fuck you, I need it's just wild. Borders are arbitrary lines drawn by people, bars on the earth. I flew down by the Mexican border once and took some pictures or my friend, I didn't take the pictures. My friend who I was flying took the pictures. And you just see this line going across the desert. And there's nothing that makes that line there. Anything, you know, like the belongs there, it's just people decided to put this arbitrary fucking line there. And that line determines, you know, like, what side of it you're born on determines a lot of shit about your life, it determines what rights you have, it determines what you can do, where you can work, all kinds of shit like this. It's ridiculous. And then I see people, like, this is one of these things very much like this idea that when you have a felony, conviction you should be disenfranchised, which is completely ridiculous and obscene, that you should never ever give the state a legal way to disenfranchise people, because it gives people, it gives the state an incentive to disenfranchise certain people, right? It's an obvious thing. There should be, whether you're convicted of a felony or not, you should be allowed to vote in jail and in prison. Remember, jail also is for people who probably haven't been convicted, there are people who have been charged, but they're being held, not necessarily convicted, and then prison would be for people who have been convicted of something, but there should be polls in prison. You should never be disenfranchised. You should be able to vote. You should also, your counted in the census in the areas where the prisons are, you should be able to vote there. You should absolutely be able to. You should have that right. But people will defend this idea of disenfranchising people, as though it was a thing that was natural and makes sense. People defend this idea of like, whoa, let's not get crazy here. I'm sorry for the ableless language. It's English fucking sucks with this, and I'm working on it, but it's very hard to avoid. But let's not get wild and ridiculous. Let's, like borders where you totally need. No, you know, you don't fucking need borders. And maybe you have borders in some nominal sense, but I can go to fucking, I can work in California, I can work at Arizona, I can work in Oregon, there are borders between those places, but I don't need a fucking passport to go from one to the next. I don't need the papers to work in one when I'm from the other. You could just do that. You could easily just do that. If, you know, I'm currently working on getting Spanish citizenship, and if I do, I could live and work not only in Spain, but in France, or in Belgium, or any place in the EU, you go to Italy, you could, that's how it should fucking be. It should be like that for basically the entire world. You should certainly be able to go, you're born in the US, you should be able to work in Mexico, you should be able to work in Cuba, you should be able to work in Australia, or in New Zealand, or Japan, and it should be reciprocal, like people from those countries can just come over. And, yeah, you have it set up so that you pay taxes and you get the rights of citizens and all those kind of stuff. And also, incidentally, you should be able to vote wherever you live, whether you're a citizen or not. This is a thing that used to be the case in the US long ago, but somehow people have been convinced that, you know, you have to be, not just a natural born citizen, but you have to be like, you have to put all these boxes around it. You can't have these, it's wild and ridiculous to have to not have borders. I can't even imagine not having a border. That's the level of propaganda, the level of ignorance, the level of just thoughtlessness, because a lot of it is also thoughtlessness. It's just, you have never considered these things. And you're just taking things the way they are and as you're used to them, and considering those to be the way they have to be and the way they always should be. And you're considering that, you know, like, oh, well, people in prison can be enslaved. The 13th Amendment banned slavery, except for in prison, except as a punishment for crime. Which, of course, just like disenfranchising people, gives you an incentive to criminalize certain people. It gives you an incentive to make things, to give people, to get people into the system, to make them slaves to enslave people. It gives you an incentive to disenfranchise people. You don't vote in. Yeah, and this is another thing like you talk to people, and it's like, oh, imagine if a convicted murderer was able to vote, what the fuck are they gonna do? What the, like, seriously, what do you think one person's vote? This is like the cost benefit analysis you should be doing. Imagine the worst possible person in the world. The worst, most evil malicious person in the world. They have one vote. And you have an election, like a presidential election, and the vote is decided by millions of people. That one person's vote, you're going to say, it's worth taking away the rights of everyone who has a felony conviction to vote, just because that one person's one tiny drop in the ocean vote is somehow so bad, it's somehow so terrible to give them, it's like fucking think about what you're saying, fucking think about it. Why is it so essential that you have a border at all? Honestly, it doesn't make any sense. It's something that I just wish people would think about. And anyway, the mom donny thing also, I talk about this. I talk a lot about how vote blue no matter who and the lesser of two evils and all this kind of stuff is all bullshit, and you should have fucking standards. And having the standard that, you know, I'm not gonna vote for a fucking Nazi. I'm not gonna vote for somebody who even looks like a fucking Nazi, and who might be a Nazi or is not a Nazi adjacent, or who even has a fucking Nazi tattoo or had a recently had a Nazi tattoo that, you know, like maybe he didn't know about it. Like they're, okay, he's disqualified because he didn't fucking know. He's disqualified because he knew and didn't do anything about it. He's disqualified because he got it in the first place. He's disqualified because he was a black quarter, contractor, you know, like he's disqualified for like a dozen reasons, at least. And also like, you know, and don't even get me started and you don't need people that look like me being in office. We got plenty of other people. Maybe, maybe, maybe, cis-hept white dudes that are made as fuck, don't need to be in fucking office. Don't need to be running for office. Maybe we should support other people. Yeah. And I'm not saying that that means that no one like me can ever run for office again. I've run for office personally. I might do it again, although I'm not sure anyone. I know it would be, I would do the job, but I would not want the job. But I'm not saying I wouldn't do it. But there are lots of other people who probably should be ahead in the line. There are lots of other people who have been underrepresented, who have been systematically disadvantaged and marginalized. They should probably get a little bit of a head out. They're heads up a little bit of a leg up, especially again, when you're talking about in one state hundreds of thousands of people we could pick from. You could pick somebody who's not him. You could easily do that, the longest before anyone collects the first signature. And yeah. But again, going to Mumbai, he is pro-cop. Pretty openly pro-cop. I'm not. I don't like that. He has a lot of other things that he said that I find a little bit problematic. But I will say this, if I was in New York City, and I was voting, I did absolutely the fuck vote for that guy. Absolutely. It would not be even a question. I'm not going to vote for somebody who supports genocide. I'm not going to vote for a person who looks neo-Nazi adjacent at least. But I'll vote for somebody who aligns with me on a lot of things. And maybe has some things that I'm a little dubious about. I didn't even vote for AOC. And I find AOC, I used to love her. I used to think she was amazing. And now I find her a little problematic, pretty problematic. But if I was there, if I was a constituent, one of hers, and it's between her and someone who's not better, I would pick her, I would pick her, I would vote for. Those are the lesser of two evils kinds of calculations you can do. Those are the lesser of two, like, you know, the lamus to the limit to the end, the perfect is the enemy of the good. Those are the kinds of calculations I will do. I'm not going to vote for fucking genocide. I'm not going to do it. And the thing that annoys me also is I keep seeing people saying, well, oh, you know, Democrats have this thing where any tiny little infraction is just, fuck you, that's not true. It's like saying me too completely, like went overboard. It did not, it did not. People, like, hardly fucking Weinstein was out, was a crowd of people around him at a comedy club, months before going to prison. And people knew exactly, like, it wasn't like it was a mystery. You know, some woman who was a comedian there spoke out about it and she got ejected. She got ejected. This is, like, you know, this idea that the bar is too high, the bar is in fucking hell. The bar isn't fucking, like, you have these people who will vote for genocide don't think that genocide is disqualifying. They don't think that being a neo-Nazi is disqualifying. And they do think that being, like, actually, kind of a democratic socialist, like, Mamdanie, that's disqualifying. You know, that somehow is horrible. It's just, it's just, it's just, it's just fucking annoying. And I'm here to tell you, if you had standards, if you had standards, you'd have candidates who could actually fucking win. Like, if you didn't just go for the fucking genocide candidates who are the Nazi candidates, you'd have candidates who would be better and who could fucking win. But also, like, I could vote for the, like, maybe I'd think about voting for them if you picked better people. Like, again, like, I mean, if I was in New York City, I would vote for Mamdanie. And borrowing, like, some new information that I don't know about, easily, easily. And I would advocate that you probably do it, too. Barring, again, like, maybe something horrible comes out of them. But I can't imagine. I can't imagine. And it's just, it's so annoying that people sit there and they talk about this. Like, you have tens of millions of people who could be in these offices. And somehow, you have to pick somebody who, and again, like, when you look at Harris, when you look at Biden, when you look at Hillary, when you look at, and I'm even going to say Obama, I did. Obama, when you ran, seems much better. But even when you ran, if you picked a random person, how do the population, completely at random? You know, close your eyes, picked somebody randomly. Almost certainly, you'd pick somebody better. Almost certainly, you would get somebody who was not as shitty as this guy. Like, and when you start going to, like, Harris, or fucking genocide, Joe, crime bill, Joe, Jim Crow, Joe, the, these are people, or Trump, who is the mirror image incidentally, again, of Biden, racist, old white dude, who have fucked up massively in their lives, many times, never faced any consequences for it. And they just keep falling upwards. Both of them got to be president. Both of them are the perfect avatars for the United States, the second republic. They are. This is another thing also, like, I've been obsessed with recently. I'm not saying that the republic is over, but kind of looks, kind of looks a little, yeah, maybe, a little bit, maybe. I mean, just here. But you look at that, and you're like, okay, the United States is 250 years old. And one of the longest lasting democracies in blood mobile, has a lot of obvious intrinsic flaws in the system. First off, it should be, like, having a presidency, pretty bad, prime minister is much better. Having votes with no confidence, having things where you have to organize a government, having things like proportional representation, much, much, much better than any of this stuff we do. And increasingly, also, you know, I think this is part of the problem with all of the stuff that I'm talking about, but I think sort of is the way to go. Fertition is this random selection of people, like, you have to be careful about it. You want to do stuff, like, say, okay, you have to opt in and then you have this, the people that opt in, we have some way, maybe, of removing people of their bad. Although you probably have, like, one person per, this is kind of arbitrary. Something like one person per 100,000, end up being the, so you have a massively bigger, so equivalent to the house, one person per 100,000, or so, get randomly selected, become the representatives. And then they make all of these decisions. And probably what you would do is you have that, like, staggered, have to be, like, a four or six-year term. Two years of that, you're, like, an apprentice. We probably voting, but you're sitting there and you're, like, shadowing somebody who's already been there, learning stuff and all of this. And then the next two or three years, you're teaching somebody. And you've probably, probably have some things like, while you're there, you don't have to use money. You, you're basically, in fact, you're forbidden. I'm not, I don't think you should be allowed to use money. I think while you're there, you probably, you have a uniform, you can, you can opt out of this if you want to, by the way, but you have a little tunic. All your meals are provided for you. You can get good food. All your health care is provided for you. You can get good health care. But you're not, you're not going on expensive trips. You're not going to luxury dinners. You're not getting people to buy you expensive gifts or any of those kind of stuff. And also, you probably are not getting it for at least five, 10, 15 years afterwards. In fact, given my drill, there's you probably have this thing where it's like, if you get this, it's like winning the lottery. You're going to be taking care of the rest of your life. You're going to get a nice comfortable house. You're going to get a nice comfortable pension that you'll have the rest of your life. Everything will be covered. But you're not allowed to have any assets. And when I say assets, like you can have your toothbrush, you can have your computer, you can have little stuff. But you can't have massive expensive things. You can't have five vacation homes. You can't have billions of dollars, certainly not even millions of dollars or hundreds of millions of dollars. You're just, you're done. And they don't worry about the details. But something like this, I think would be a lot better. And the reason I think it would be better is like, I used to be very pro approval voting. And approval voting is the system where it's basically like, you have all the candidates and you vote either, I approve of this person or not. It's like, in some sense, it's like ranked choice because you're picking the ones that you like and the ones that you don't. But ranked choice, you're picking the order. And here you're explicitly not picking the order. And I understand like people want to have the order and all of this kind of stuff. Turns out, having the order doesn't really add anything. It doesn't let you get around errors and possibility. There are a bunch of things in social choice theory. I'm kind of assuming that you know, but obviously probably don't. There are a bunch of things in social choice theory, which basically prove or are able to be proven that you essentially can't have a good voting system for collective decisions. And unless you have two options, ARB. As soon as you get three in there, there are all these problems that are made immediately arise. But what you can do is kind of get okay,ish. And again, approval voting, better than ranked choice voting, easier to implement, easier to understand. You either vote for against people or in option. And then you pick the one that has the most votes. You still, unfortunately, it's still subject to things like strategic voting. Again, it's not perfect. But it's a much more democratic system. And I'm pretty sure actually compatible with the Arizona Constitution and probably a lot of other state constitutions. You could make the change with legislation rather than a Constitutional Amendment. I'll probably want to do a Constitutional Amendment to make it better. But independent of that, all of that stuff, even if you had a perfect system, even if you had a magical system where you could make the absolutely best collective decision possible. And we're going to pick the person everybody likes the most. And not accidentally pick somebody terrible. The problem is it's still popular already contest. It's still something that rewards people for being known, for being cool, and for being like having a vibe to them, having a rap and a slimeball face, having the stuff that knew some and Buttigieg. And frankly, Biden thrived from then this guy, this fucking main guy. These are all people who are terrible who are like several standard deviations from the norm of being terrible. And yet they're the ones that are in the running area, the ones that are in people's minds, they're the ones that people will fight each other over. They're the people that will be defended, tooth and nail by people who really barely pay attention, but they like that, you know, I just like the way he makes me feel. You know, like, what the fuck is wrong with you people? And then they also think that they're going to win something that they have a better chance, based on nothing, based not on statistics or, you know, evidence or anything like that. But they think because they like them, because they find them appealing, somehow magically that means something, and it does not. But anyway, I personally am really on this sortation train. Now, I think it eliminates any of the popularity, it gives you a representative government, it gives you something where it's actually democratic. And it gives you something where you don't have things like, picking some state that just because of arbitrary lines that you've drawn on the sand, some state gets more power than another state. You don't have to do that, you can get rid of it. And it also, also, if you do that, and have a system where you're, for example, able to, I don't know, pick either by sortation or you could have an election out of those people, have them pick someone like a prime minister, have them have a thing where they have to form a government, do it with proportional representation, would be kind of cool, like you could have everybody say, you know, like I'm, and again, you could do this by sortation. You say, I am aligned with this group in this group, and this group, and not these, and then you have the candidates, and they say they represent this group, you know, the group actually has to prove them. But they're in the pool for that group, and now you could proportionally pick people. I don't think that you'd want to complicated that much. I would personally just pick people at random completely, but either way, you'll get a statistical representation. You do that, and then you've got something where you completely eliminate career politicians, you completely eliminate the advantage of having wealth and connections, you completely eliminate the advantage of having name or a new nation, or any of this kind of stuff. And you have so many people that now, you know, it's not like, it is just not a thing where you can easily target a few people. You can just grease the wheels on a few people. If you want to really change things, and you've got thousands of people in the house, it's a little bit more of a challenge, you know? Anyway, I just like the situation that we're in where people are so convinced of all this shit, and where they're making defenses, for again, people like this fucking main Nazi. I just, I don't like it, I don't get it, I don't fucking, you know? It has got me to the point where I aside from just thinking that the second republic probably should be over, it's not just that it is kind of over, whether you want it to be or not. But again, 250 years, it's a long run, lots of flaws in the system, we've seen these, France and less than the same time is that their fifth republic already, five, and they were, I think in the 60s. So even less time, they were to five, were to number two. You got the articles of consideration and you got the current constitution. Maybe, maybe, do another one. Maybe, even, you know, like, do another one, and then you're probably gonna fuck it up the first time or two. Do another one and plan on 10, 20 years down the line, doing another one still. You know, just do a pay-to-one regret, do it a couple times, figure it out. And, you know, although I will say, in order to actually have this work, you probably, unfortunately, need a much more educated population than, you know, I might currently have. So like, if we let people make a constitution now and people don't know the philosophy of law, people don't know the history of, like the theory of justice or anything like this, you might end up with some bad stuff, but it almost couldn't be worse, honestly. And if you did it well, I think it could be better, especially if you were picky about, so, you figure out good ways of finding the right people though. To make the thing, maybe it's probably not bad. And if you did it just, again, by chance, probably still wouldn't be that bad, but anyway, I just, I think you're, you know, the little turkey bump thing is popped out. I think for, I think you're ready to do the next thing. I think it's ready to, to go someplace else. And definitely, like this popularity contest, self is done. This stuff that, you have people who are terrible, who keep getting into these offices, it is just like, how do you not see that this is not what we need to be doing? How do you not see that we need to fucking improve the stuff? And this is also incidentally part of the reason why people found Trump appealing, because, again, Trump is fucking horrible, but he's at least different. And now, different now horrible way, but people are just desperate for change and they know that things are fucking, you know, just they suck. And so they saw something that was different. Are they grasping at that? And they also saw Obama promising, hope and change, and then not delivering on it and becoming the reporter and chief, the guy that was drowning a bunch of kids, all this kind of shit, not a great thing. They saw Bernie come up and then get tanned down by the fucking party in favor of genocide, Joe, you know? That's what we got. You can understand why people might, not like this is something, they might think that maybe we should do something else. Maybe maybe, let's try this. I would like to get out of the current regime and maybe we try something else. Maybe we find something better, you know, or you could just keep going down this path I never get anywhere and just, you know, perpetually circle the drain. I don't like that idea, I think you should do something else. But I don't know, I don't really know other than just the way things are, are not good, they need to change. And all of the shit is just crap that people made up. Like, you know, the founders were not people that came down from heaven, they were like 20 year olds who were rich and highly privileged. And, you know, like, you look at that situation, like, any or also, like, you can see how many ways and just I feel like I'm doing a lot of likes, but you could see so many different ways that these people stalked and the things that they put in their system stalked, they have checks and balances kind of, but the checks and balances obviously don't work, they have things that are like the enforcement and I'm using a lot of likes, it's a problem. We're gonna, but the enforcement, there's an off. The enforcement is nothing. It's essentially based on vibes. It's based on, like, the idea that people will do the right thing, which is ridiculous, and shouldn't be the case. Another thing that's interesting that I think should have been a giant red flag a long time ago is, for example, this idea, there's an home, this idea that the Supreme Court gets to pick and choose what laws are constitutional. There was nothing in the constitution that decided that. There was nothing, it was just a right that they judicial review is something that they just asserted that they had and made up, because there was a hole and somebody needed to do something, and so they did it. That's a sign that your fucking constitution sucks. The fact that you have a 13th amendment that bands slavery within Astros is a sign that your fucking constitution sucks. And then, the fact that you have freedom of speech that allows for people to just lie brazenly and do all kinds of horrible things that turns money into speech and all of this stuff. It sucks, it's fucking sucks. You need to change that thing. You need to rewrite it, you need to think about it a lot. And you probably need not to have the people who have been trying to rewrite it for a very long time. It's not a good thing in terrible ways. The federalists and all these people have been working on this. When they've wanted this constitutional convention for a long time, probably don't want them doing it. You probably want to think about it. You probably want to be ready for it. It's one of the reasons why it's super important to have people in the state legislatures who are good and why, honestly, it's one of the reasons that I ran, because I'm very well aware of this being a thing that they've been trying to do. And if they ever succeed, you have a bunch of state legislatures that are run by Republicans. If they get the right-and-new constitution, that's pretty bad. That's not the thing that you want. So maybe you should work on that. Maybe it's a thing to improve. And this idea that somehow the institutions as they exist have to exist and always existed, 250 years is nothing. It's nothing at all. It's too long to have stuck with that. I mean, imagine that you wrote software 250 years ago. How shitty it would be. And especially if that was the first pass at software like that, you would not want stuff running on that anymore. You probably have to rewrite it. Even if you sat there and you're like, well, okay, it was in cobalt and it was in the 80s. Even then at a certain point, you'll end up being forced to rewrite it, because you're scheduling system just won't be able to take the capacity or something will happen and something breaks. And now we have to change it. We have to, something is broken. You have to change it. You should have recognized this a long time ago. And as always, the best time to plan the tree was 10 years ago, the second best time is now. I think with that, I'm not gonna keep, I'm not gonna keep rambling, but I think that's a good place to stop. As ever, thank you for listening and excited. 再见