November 06, 2025

Agnostic

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1 hour 49 minutes

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

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 audience per se

I don't have a real interest in monetizing this

Just the idea of

monetizing the hobbies is so gross

It's such a weird fucked up thing about our society

And the

thing I also did sucks about it is, like, if I find out, like, I keep myself doing this deliberately,

but I have a thing because you raised in this just gross society that when somebody starts talking

about something that they do, you try to turn it into a fucking business for them

And you're like,

oh, you could, you could actually, maybe you could make some money

And I'm not saying I do that,

but there's a part of you

And it's like, oh, you do those

You could, you know, no, like art should not be,

it's not to say that you can't do stuff for money and for commerce and all that kind of stuff

to come in here

Going back to Star Trek, you have Cisco's and the this restaurant from the father

of Captain Cisco

And I don't think they exchange money

I don't, maybe they do, maybe they don't,

I don't think they have to

But he loves to cook

He just likes to cook

He likes having a restaurant,

he likes the social aspect of it, likes the prop and all that kind of stuff

And it's essentially

post scarcity future

So you could just do that

And it does get to this thing, like, you see

so many people who think you have to have a gun near your head to do stuff

I know, it's like,

nobody pays me to do this

Nothing comes of this

Nothing, there's no, you know, but I just do this

This is a thing that I do because I like it

And I think that's good

I think if you like making paintings,

you shouldn't have to make a painting that you're selling or even thinking about selling

You just make fucking paintings

You do sketches

You write poetry

You do equations on a blackboard

I used to, I used to love when I was, when I was in high school and undergrad, I used to like

get pieces of paper

And I would just, especially, and I was, this came up recently,

this gravitation book by, I'm, I'm Myesner Wheeler and Thorne took a second

I was like,

was that coming to me? But this, they call it the phone book or the telephone book

Same,

same professor that I was talking about before, that it did differential topology with

Was, he is the one that called it the phone book for me

But it's this big black, mine was a

soft cover

I think the soft cover is better

I miss, it's the one physical book that I got

rid of when I moved to France that I miss

I had, you know, I had a box full of books

And there were some that I liked

There were, I had like a cow field theory one

I had,

guy who else did I have

I had, I had a few other books that were, that were pretty good

But I, the gravitation one, I miss

I got that in high school way before I ever took

calculus or anything like that

And that book, it's, maybe I'm just overly romanticizing it

But I'm going through the book and it starts out just like with a description of stuff

And it introduces tensor calculus

It introduces like vector transport

And it, I will say,

like it didn't get into like tensor bundles and, uh, I didn't get into a lot of like modern

stuff

But, you know, it's, it got me to a certain point with a lot of this stuff that I could,

I could certainly, um, you know, like writing down, uh, the field equations and solving like the

circular symmetric

Uh, I, I, I didn't, I don't know how I would do on it now

But, you know, I did,

at the time, like I would sit there and I just take a piece of paper and you write down the

coordinates and then you like solve the fourths child equation or something like that

And, yeah, that was fucking cool

I enjoyed that

Or just like figuring out and thinking about,

uh, relativistic path lengths and doing, you know, what was you learned integration, um,

and especially you learn metric spaces and stuff like this

And now you can start integrating path

lengths

And you can, you realize that like, oh, well, in this metric where you have space,

the space or one, one direction

So plus plus plus minus signature minus minus minus plus,

depending on how you want to do it

Uh, minus minus minus plus gives you like three spatial ones

are negative and the time is positive

And then also, you can, you can put Cs in there, but

there's this geometric coordinates thing where time is just, you know, I'm going to try to see

as one

You use a unit of length in the unit of time that are the same

So the speed of like

becomes just one

You could do that for all, pretty much all of the units, or most of the major units

But anyway, you do that

You the integration, you figure this stuff out

And, you know,

I learned so much about, you know, like, just like the twin paradox and all this stuff,

not not really a paradox

But, you know, and it built a lot of intuition and it was fun

And there's that, you know, that, but that was a hobby

It wasn't like I didn't need to be paid for it

I didn't need to be paid

I mean, I guess I did pay to go to classes

But I would, if I, if money

was no object and I was essentially retired, I just take, take classes

Just take some, you know,

and it feels like obviously at a certain point you take, you go through the course catalog of

a university, you'll take all of the classes that you're interested in, given enough years

But it would take a long time

Like, you know, you can take, because you just think about

like the languages

How many languages could you take? And the languages each take, you know,

you're probably not taking five different languages at a time, or maybe you are, but I think

you probably want to take like one language at a time and kind of work on it

Take another language, work on that, get better at it

But I'm put the front say,

I'm a bit of a Spanish, uh, John Gwen, Choto Nyongo, you know, you play with those stuff a

little bit

And, yeah, you, um, that would be interesting

I think that would be cool

Learn,

architecture, learn art, learn mixed media, learn, you know, like take a fucking drama class,

take take several drama classes

I mean, I wouldn't want to do that as a career

It's a thing that's horrible about the, again, it gets to the society in the way that things are

But, you know, like, people have this idea that education has to be vocational training

And, I mean, obviously, like, you need somehow to pay your way through life and always kind of

stuff in the structure that we have, shouldn't have to be that

I do think, you know,

I really think, like, if you made the world in a better way where people didn't actually have to work,

um, people will find stuff that is productive and useful

And that there will be people,

yeah, again, you don't have to have a gun to somebody's head to go out into the fields and harvest crops

If you made it not miserable, like, I mean, think about it

Wouldn't you,

yeah, it's like, you spend like an hour or two a week

You can go out there and just like chill in the

fields and at a reasonable pace, do some picking in a comfortable set setting

Doesn't seem like that big of a deal

Are you getting enough people to do that?

And now you've got an essential thing to, I'm not saying you'd probably want to do that with,

like, cleaning the sewers or something like that

There are things where you'd probably

have to compensate people or do, like, figure out some structure to get people to do it

But you don't need to have this thing where, like, if you don't do it, you're fucked

You don't have to have this thing where if you don't do your shitty job,

you're not, you're going to not eat, you're going to be out on the street

You're going to be just miserable if you, if something goes wrong and, you know, you need surgery

or you crack a tooth or you'd have an impacted molar or you, you know, whatever that you're just

fucked, that you don't need that

And I think really, it's kind of fucking annoying,

because you think about, like, how much, there's also this aspect of, like, how much stuff do you

really need? Because you don't need, it can't capitalism

We have so much variety

You have 20 companies

and a bunch of people who duplicate all the same shit

They're not, like, making, it's something

that really annoys me, actually, between, my perspective on it has changed over time

Like,

the iPhone and the Android copying each other

Part of, part of what's annoying about it is

because you have this capitalistic competitive system

Everybody wants to, you know,

the race to the bottom

Everybody's trying to duplicate the same shit that everybody else is doing

There's not a lot of room for creativity in that

And then you end up with, like, look at cars

and they're all the same

You look at, you go to the serial aisle and they're all the same boxes

of the same shit

Basically, like, in terms of composition and, you know, ingredients,

all of those fucking cereals, including the boxes, including the ink, are basically the same

shit with the different shapes and slightly different chemicals to the flavor them and color them

and the coloring on the packages is slightly different than yelling

But they're all very,

very similar

And, you know, you start going through that and you get, you go through the

usey and grocery store and we have so much shit and so much fake variety and also never mind

the, you know, like, everything, everything is, is like, just had the life cost optimized out of it

Like, you have stuff that is, everything is, is made now to be just, there's something

I don't know what it is

I feel like I hear like people talking like in the background

but like super muffled and in the distance, but I stopped talking and I, I don't know what it is

It sounds maybe like it's just an electric hum or something behind me

Whatever it is, it's very

distracting

Maybe it is people outside, but whatever it is, it's like, if I could actually hear

what they're saying, it would be not so distracting because you can get to filter it out

But the way my brain works, if I sort of like half hear it, I start focusing on it and then I'm like,

if there's a problem to solve my brain in eightly wants to do that, which also goes to that

thing that you're like, you don't have to pay me to do that

You don't have to pay people to make

like 15 different phones that look exactly the fucking same

You don't have to, it's annoying

think is also like you think about like Apple cranking out these giant air quotes AI processors

and then they go to this iOS 26 shit just using really complex filters and all this processing

shit super super processing intensive stuff that they do because the chips are getting too fast

and you know it's like you keep making the chips fast here and so you keep making the stuff

need more power and then it's just the reason that this annoys me is another way to do it,

a better way to do it would be let's make an operating system that does look good and we keep

refining it, but it's efficient, you know like it looks good but it doesn't have to be

requiring like a fucking you know care of lobster machine running at full bore to render the

screen, you know you could do something that's like nice but not that ridiculous and if you did that

well then the processor from 20 years ago might still be fine and then you think about that it's like

well okay what could you do that because we you still keep pushing the envelope and you have the

three nanometer process or one point whatever nanometer extreme ultraviolet process and when you're

doing that one thing that you can do with it is make really fast pretty efficient processors

but another thing you can do with that is take those same processors from 20 years ago

and make them use so little power that like if if you imagine you have a phone UI from 20 years ago

and you can you could refine it a little bit but you have a processor that is the processor from then

updated to a modern process so you don't have like 15 20 billion transistors in there you might

have hundreds of millions maybe you have a billion or two doesn't really matter but you have a

smaller number or maybe you have all of those but a lot of them are dark most of the time

not actively processing if you did that you could get the processing down for your UI to next

you could get to the point like with current technology if the software was better you could have

a phone that would be charged once a week and it would just work you could I mean yeah

obviously the radio is probably probably difficult for that but can you could do something like that

if you didn't really crank it it's annoying to me actually because you can if there are certain

things which are nice to be able to have a lot of processing power for compiling stuff is kind of

processor intensive especially because the the compiler just keep getting better and better

it's stuff and that's more intensive and you know like but you know for the most part for for

day-to-day stuff you could have it really like I mean I'm just looking at my Mac right now

if this was like a Linux machine from 15 years ago and it worked pretty well but you made

something that just would last and instead of like doing planned ups and blessings you just make

better and better versions of things and with the goal that it's gonna last a long fucking time

be you know you focus on power battery life and yeah I mean you make it look again you make it look good

you make it work well you keep refining it not optimizing it but you don't need to you don't need to

build shit just to waste cycles you don't need to build the iOS 26 what do they call it liquid glass

interface or some clone of that you don't need to build all the bullshit fake audible airports

AI shit and and just waste cycles and cycles and have to build these fucking I talked about

this last time but they're the fucking idea that you're gonna build just it's so it's so ridiculous you're

gonna put data centers in some synchronous orbit I can't it actually really pisses me off I saw

something else today that was oh I know what it was this is this will be the last thing I

talked about because it's already an hour and a half and I'm kind of like fading I need to go

for a walk but my mom sent me an article today from BBC and it was like it wasn't even quantum

computers it said oh I just saw it and then I just scrolled the fuck off it said look quantum

be bigger than AI that's the BBC news title and there's a picture of a person there holding

some kind of quantum processor and the answer is now it it's not gonna be bigger than AI and

the also audible air quotes AI the shit that they have now is bullshit it's just fucking bullshit

and it's it's annoying in this case also that in like in both of these cases what is quantum

mean like they mean cube it like quantum processors isn't there it's like what is nano tech

mean to me when you say nano tech it means nano assemblers and like things where you have actual

nano scale or you know sub nano scale features like single atom kind of things and machines

that are at that scale it doesn't mean that you have titanium dioxide particles that are

10 nanometers yeah it doesn't mean like quantum stuff I don't think people mean when they say

quantum quantum encryption or quantum teleportation that's used in networking or stuff like this

or you know like used to do phase arrays like optical phase array kind of stuff I don't think

that's what they mean generally speaking now that's not to say that those aren't real things that's

not to say that you know like there's room in astronomy you know if you're making a super powerful

telescope to build an optical phase array and to have quantum teleportation for taking the phase

information from photons and combining it someplace and having photonic and quantum processors

that kind of stuff is real that's the stuff that you could actually do but this idea that

some how quantum processors are going to be magical it's kind of bullshit it's kind of like we

already first of all that the one thing that they would have been a little scary for is if you could

build like a general purpose large enough like enough cube it's kind of processor we could

attract old crypto systems very quickly very easily with them in principle at least you know

like you could use shores algorithm and factor large numbers and the thing is now we've already

got these post quantum cryptography things so even if you had that kind of a system it wouldn't

magically solve that problem anymore these are these are things that just like even if you have a

processor as far as we know there's no no algorithm it's not I don't think it's provable yet

that you can't make something but so far as far as we know you can't solve and you just think about like

okay well what are you going to do with that shit and you start going down the path and it's like

there's it's not like a magical much faster version of a classical computer and also like you

can't build because you have to have coherence over a large number of cubits to have them do

useful stuff unless and unless you're doing like large processors that are just sort of repeating

the same small problem over and over again many many times you could do stuff like that but like

I mean you look at this picture that's in this article and I don't know how many cubits there

are in the the thing but it's it's a pretty big fucking chip that probably has to be kept at

cryogenic temperatures and I would bet it doesn't have that many cubits and again like that I'm

sure there are applications for it and I'm sure there are applications for getting a couple

orders of magnitude more than that but it's not really it's not going to be a very useful thing

for most people for most you know it's not like you're going to play like kickass video games

on that like I mean maybe maybe you take that technology decades out and you get to the point

where you've got like phototic processors that can do real-time rendering that's indistinguishable

from reality or or something like that but you know like in terms of the stuff that people are doing

now and that they're going to do with these things in the foreseeable future there's no magical

like application for them just like also like and I get I'm a guy who has been for a very long

time in the machine learning and do like thinking computers and autonomous and semi-autonomous

systems and that kind of stuff the stuff that people call audible air quotes AI now and again just

like the quantum thing just like the nanotech thing they munch a lot of stuff together so like you

have all of these things like people have been working on face recognition for decades but I

in the 80s people were doing back propagation and doing neural networks and they were already

starting to do stuff to like recognize characters and optical character recognition kind of stuff

and handwriting and the in principle like faces and stuff and you just look at like the technology

has incrementally advanced to the point where like we had I look up to eigenface paper I don't

remember when that was but that was already pretty good pretty good I'm actually just looking

it up now eigenfaces from the AT&T Bell library and show me the year show me the year somebody show

me the year I'm gonna go see awesome maybe um eigenfaces 2002 so this was already pretty good

in 2002 and identifying faces and things have gotten incrementally much better since then

and like independent of having really good deep neural networks face recognition pretty fucking

recognition has been pretty good for a long time and is that is that AI I don't think so I don't

consider it so it's I guess if you call up machine learning or something but a lot of that stuff

is not even learning in any kind of meaningful sense like learning and thinking those are very

different than anything that these things are doing and yeah like you look at these these large language

models and transformers and all this kind of shit um they're they're very good well

not actually I was gonna say they're very they're okay at like language translation like

the very good I I've spent a lot of time recently the last couple of years and I know a lot of

people have spent a lot of time and doing like irrevict to English translation um it it sucks okay

it actually kind of sucks it's it's pretty good but it sucks if the thing is like they feel

pretty good because you don't know the language as well but when you start really trying you know

and they're fine for like oh I'm gonna write a letter and you have two people who basically are

in the same domain and you're talking about stuff that's kind of similar and yeah it's okay it's

okay but when you start really trying to have like a deep conversation with somebody in another language

with big cultural differences and it's kind of stuff it pretty much is shitty and that is the

best case that is what transformers were developed for and it's kind of like and then you know

you have this whole thing with like all of this um I don't know the thing that really

fucking pisses me off is like people work on these stuff like Sora and you know generating images

and video that looks pretty good uh that's it doesn't look great still like yeah I mean things

are incrementally improved but they don't really look great but they look pretty good and you know

you can do text to video and that that's cool I guess but it also is like what is the what is the

fucking point and for the most part like the amount when you think about especially like the resources

that have gone into just just like the sheer amount of technical and compute resources like

when I say technical I mean like engineering like people figuring shit out all that kind of stuff

so that you could make videos that do a pretty good job of fooling people and then you get the

point where or you can make a text that's just like those shooting people that's that's a great

like that you have to understand this is not a good thing this is not something it's not really

helpful all that really does is sort of confuses and confounds people you got like congratulations

you got stuff where you can make just a fast corpus of bullshit like that's that's really

like your goal is to be able to make something that is a thousand times bigger than Wikipedia

and that kind of sounds like Wikipedia but it's all completely full of shit you could do that

that's a shitty goal it's not a good thing that's not something that you should do it's not

something anyone should want to do your goal is to make video that you could just say George

Bach or George Bush humping a lamp post and then you get a video out of George Bush humping up

but who thinks this is a good idea who really and it goes back to again education versus

vocational training and in this whole problem I think a lot of it is like you get

fucking computer science people who went in and they they weren't even interested in computer

science they're just it's the same problem with fucking doctors they're not people who are like

want to be a doctor that people who like really want to cure people there are a lot of people

who want to make money and so they have some you know that if they found out that making widgets

was the best way to make money they'd be making fucking widgets they don't give a fuck

and so they went into medicine to do that or they went into computer science

they just take computer science courses never take a fucking ethics course never take a philosophy

course never take a fucking art course and you know or they were going to business because they

want to make money you notice actually the problem with all these people the common thread

is this bullshit like pursuit of making a shit set of money for no reason but you have like

people do that and then they don't really study these other things and they never really ask

questions like what is the fucking reason that you're doing this what is what is it good for what is

the it's the most ridiculous thing also because like I for a long time I've tried to work

on some robotics stuff and I've never been able to put together the resources and

time and all that stuff to get very far but I I have a lot of applications for it you know

I have a lot of stuff that it's like and when I say that I don't mean like you know oh that would

be kind of cool I mean I can come up with a lot of stuff that would be really fucking helpful for

a lot of people and then you see these people making this shit and first off they they make these

ridiculous humanoid things with so many unnecessary degrees of freedom and also like you got

something that looks like a person it's creepy because it doesn't work like a person you know it

doesn't quite feel right person is not really a great form factor like evolution got us to this

body plan but it's not it's not really great is you if you're just kind of like starting from

especially like if you don't have a great control system and especially especially if you're doing

this shit that they're doing which is just you know like throwing processing at it and then just doing

high dimensional curve fitting like it really like it I say this in the most disparaging way possible

what they're doing fundamentally is just very high dimensional curve fitting and the same sense

of like if you ever took physics 101 and I mean at that level you do like some kind of thing where

you you drop a ball and you you calculate or you roll a ball down and incline plane and you do

timing stuff and then you you make a plot and you get that plot and you have 20 points right now you could

do a order 20 polynomial and hit every single one of those points and you'll have something that's

kind of a model for your thing you probably don't need that and that's what they're doing is like

that there that got so many extra parameters you can fit stuff very easily if you have enough parameters

and I say very very easily it's computationally expensive but you can do it

it doesn't really tell you anything it doesn't really have any insight to it

and it's just like this whole thing that they're doing is like why what the what the fuck are you doing

what the what the fuck are you people doing and what they're doing essentially is like wasting

so many resources so much time chasing after some bullshit idea building stuff that like what

what are they what do they do they're trying to take away the the fun stuff that people want to do

as hobbies they're like oh we're gonna make stuff that you know fuck you doing photo shop here's

a thing that just does photo shop for somebody this shitty version of it doesn't come out

great but now somebody else who doesn't have that and you just killed somebody's career like

yeah they they're not not even that you're doing it well but you know there are people who

have careers that are nice and graphic design and now you've kind of eliminated that there are

people who have I mean it's it's it's like the same thing it really is like an

in-stage capitalism kind of thing because it's it's the same fucking thing where you had to

all the little mom and pop shops and you make Amazon and Walmart and now you have the

Walton's have all the money that would have come to all the little mom and pop shops in all

these fucking cities you have Jeff Bezos getting all the money that would have gone to all these

little shops and all these little like you think about all the little industries it's because

it's not just the shops it's also like manufacturing it's also like distribution it's also

having like and and you just like copy stuff make cheap burdens of it race to the bottom

and you know everything is garbage and you're selling it and it's just it's just sucks it's just like

the most unsustainable thing and it's also like there's no good reason for it there's no

like I guess if you want to have a world full of wasted shit that people wasted time and money

on but Amazon like everything my mom and sister get a lot of Amazon shit it annoys me actually

what I'm here but you know like it's just this constant constant influx of crap and one of the

things you really notice about it is no matter how small it is it always comes in a giant ridiculous

box or packaging that's like excessive and this is the whole they it is absolutely emblematic of

what it is it's just like garbage it's just garbage waiting to be garbage it's somebody somebody made

it somebody moved it somebody's a picker they picked it they put it on a truck somebody had they

take that shit out of me you think about all the people that had to do shitty boring jobs

so that you could have your little piece of shit it's just garbage that's going to go into the

recycle bin eventually or just take up space and you know like it's just like what are you

guys doing what are you doing just stop that shit like find better shit can do we don't that you

need food right we need food we need to grow food somehow we need sanitation it's very important actually

we need running water we need shelter there's these are things that you actually need

think you're on how to solve those problems and figure out how to like let people be

able to do like the stuff like pursue stuff that's interesting and do worthwhile stuff

and you know build a society around that kind of shit think you're on how to make cities that

don't suck you know figure out how do you and make cities where it's not just a bunch of people

in traffic constantly figure out how to organize society in a way where people aren't just

fucking sitting around dying in a car every day for hours every fucking day and to go to a place

where they're going to do a job that they didn't really need to do that if you stopped doing

that job the world would keep spending and you know it wouldn't matter and then the thing that's

most ridiculous about all this stuff this is this is actually going to be the last thing I say

but you know like the jobs that are actually essential like taking picking up the trash we do

have way too much trash in this country specifically that we make too much trash but if somebody

didn't pick up the trash I thought about this before I was in Paris I was living there during

a trash strike and I visited New York during a trash strike and in both cases you know like you

don't pick up trash for a week it adds up fucking fast yeah if you don't have plumbers fixing

shit things get literally shitty if you don't have somebody you don't have surgeon surgeons are actually

doing yeah to some extent useful and important if you don't have people doing public health

people get sick if you don't have people doing food safety if you don't have people making food

growing food people die people start to death and and you think about like all the stuff that you

actually need all the stuff that is is nice too I mean like there are little treats that you can have

that are nice to have but you know you could make good treats and you could make those in a way

that's not just crap made at the cheapest possible way and with people at every level as miserable

possible you could have stuff where it's like all artisanal it could be it made it scale too but

it's all like artisanally done and nice and people are having fun and they're enjoying it and then

you get a question that tastes good and not like you know some goddamn box full of 10 of these

things that are all just crap and tastes like shit and they're still bad for you or they're worse

for you than the regular one you know it's just like what are you doing what are you doing do

figure that shit out it does it's not even that hard it's that's the frustrating thing because

genuinely speaking not that hard you know to figure this stuff out just like it's not that hard

to figure out how to make a city that's a lot better than the stuff we're doing you know and

just just do it just fucking do it please because it's doing it the way that we're doing it now

we're going to end up so fucked in so many different ways and it is not like you know we're

going to dodge this bullet or you know like some magical technologies a lot of people are going

to die yeah a lot of people are going to die very badly because people wanted to have too much

shit and not even not even good stuff not even like stuff that made them feel good just to have

shit for the sake of having shit and it's just like it's frustrating just like you think about

we could have high-speed trains that are powered by the sun or by hot rocks and they

wouldn't really cause that much damage and we could you know also you could have them set up so

that they're wildlife paths around them to get across the train so you're not killing things

in the process and you're not fucking up the environment and yeah you could you could make a

better world you could make a much better world and you don't and because you don't and you have

all these people trying to have like private jets and doing doing really carbon intensive stuff

and having like a big fuck you truck on the street you're killing little kids and you're also

like burning so much more gas like you could you could even if you're having private cars you could

have so much more efficiency and like why not why not do that why not why not have a car that's

powered by the sun that's actually kind of decent to drive gets you from where do you where you are

to where you want to be and doesn't fuck everything up massively like you could do that you don't

need to fucking giant ass truck with the bed that I was talking with my friend about this also

but you know like he is an old truck and he likes it and he doesn't want to get a new one

and I think he's very right for that and these new fucking trucks that giant can't see the kids

they're a tank and when I say they're a tank I mean like literally the trucks rolling off the

off the line today they're bigger than tanks from World War II like truly like heavier than

and usually it's like why what the fuck are you doing you're going to the story you're going to

fucking go to add here someplace you don't need that you don't and it's it's not even that you don't

need it it's like why wouldn't you even want that why don't you get out of that what is your

you're you're working now so that you get in this giant fuck you truck versus you could have a really

nice car that's kind of comfortable and fast and gets you there fast and you know it doesn't

waste a shit kind of resources you could have one of those Chinese electric cars that cost

$8000 and is nicer than the the luxury ones that we have here you can you could do that

and we don't and it's just like what the fuck why why why do you better think better imagine better

imagine better you could do it with that as ever thank you and

再见

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smenor/tangents

By Scott Menor, PhD

November 06, 2025

Agnostic

Listen Later

1 hour 49 minutes

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

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 audience per se

I don't have a real interest in monetizing this

Just the idea of

monetizing the hobbies is so gross

It's such a weird fucked up thing about our society

And the

thing I also did sucks about it is, like, if I find out, like, I keep myself doing this deliberately,

but I have a thing because you raised in this just gross society that when somebody starts talking

about something that they do, you try to turn it into a fucking business for them

And you're like,

oh, you could, you could actually, maybe you could make some money

And I'm not saying I do that,

but there's a part of you

And it's like, oh, you do those

You could, you know, no, like art should not be,

it's not to say that you can't do stuff for money and for commerce and all that kind of stuff

to come in here

Going back to Star Trek, you have Cisco's and the this restaurant from the father

of Captain Cisco

And I don't think they exchange money

I don't, maybe they do, maybe they don't,

I don't think they have to

But he loves to cook

He just likes to cook

He likes having a restaurant,

he likes the social aspect of it, likes the prop and all that kind of stuff

And it's essentially

post scarcity future

So you could just do that

And it does get to this thing, like, you see

so many people who think you have to have a gun near your head to do stuff

I know, it's like,

nobody pays me to do this

Nothing comes of this

Nothing, there's no, you know, but I just do this

This is a thing that I do because I like it

And I think that's good

I think if you like making paintings,

you shouldn't have to make a painting that you're selling or even thinking about selling

You just make fucking paintings

You do sketches

You write poetry

You do equations on a blackboard

I used to, I used to love when I was, when I was in high school and undergrad, I used to like

get pieces of paper

And I would just, especially, and I was, this came up recently,

this gravitation book by, I'm, I'm Myesner Wheeler and Thorne took a second

I was like,

was that coming to me? But this, they call it the phone book or the telephone book

Same,

same professor that I was talking about before, that it did differential topology with

Was, he is the one that called it the phone book for me

But it's this big black, mine was a

soft cover

I think the soft cover is better

I miss, it's the one physical book that I got

rid of when I moved to France that I miss

I had, you know, I had a box full of books

And there were some that I liked

There were, I had like a cow field theory one

I had,

guy who else did I have

I had, I had a few other books that were, that were pretty good

But I, the gravitation one, I miss

I got that in high school way before I ever took

calculus or anything like that

And that book, it's, maybe I'm just overly romanticizing it

But I'm going through the book and it starts out just like with a description of stuff

And it introduces tensor calculus

It introduces like vector transport

And it, I will say,

like it didn't get into like tensor bundles and, uh, I didn't get into a lot of like modern

stuff

But, you know, it's, it got me to a certain point with a lot of this stuff that I could,

I could certainly, um, you know, like writing down, uh, the field equations and solving like the

circular symmetric

Uh, I, I, I didn't, I don't know how I would do on it now

But, you know, I did,

at the time, like I would sit there and I just take a piece of paper and you write down the

coordinates and then you like solve the fourths child equation or something like that

And, yeah, that was fucking cool

I enjoyed that

Or just like figuring out and thinking about,

uh, relativistic path lengths and doing, you know, what was you learned integration, um,

and especially you learn metric spaces and stuff like this

And now you can start integrating path

lengths

And you can, you realize that like, oh, well, in this metric where you have space,

the space or one, one direction

So plus plus plus minus signature minus minus minus plus,

depending on how you want to do it

Uh, minus minus minus plus gives you like three spatial ones

are negative and the time is positive

And then also, you can, you can put Cs in there, but

there's this geometric coordinates thing where time is just, you know, I'm going to try to see

as one

You use a unit of length in the unit of time that are the same

So the speed of like

becomes just one

You could do that for all, pretty much all of the units, or most of the major units

But anyway, you do that

You the integration, you figure this stuff out

And, you know,

I learned so much about, you know, like, just like the twin paradox and all this stuff,

not not really a paradox

But, you know, and it built a lot of intuition and it was fun

And there's that, you know, that, but that was a hobby

It wasn't like I didn't need to be paid for it

I didn't need to be paid

I mean, I guess I did pay to go to classes

But I would, if I, if money

was no object and I was essentially retired, I just take, take classes

Just take some, you know,

and it feels like obviously at a certain point you take, you go through the course catalog of

a university, you'll take all of the classes that you're interested in, given enough years

But it would take a long time

Like, you know, you can take, because you just think about

like the languages

How many languages could you take? And the languages each take, you know,

you're probably not taking five different languages at a time, or maybe you are, but I think

you probably want to take like one language at a time and kind of work on it

Take another language, work on that, get better at it

But I'm put the front say,

I'm a bit of a Spanish, uh, John Gwen, Choto Nyongo, you know, you play with those stuff a

little bit

And, yeah, you, um, that would be interesting

I think that would be cool

Learn,

architecture, learn art, learn mixed media, learn, you know, like take a fucking drama class,

take take several drama classes

I mean, I wouldn't want to do that as a career

It's a thing that's horrible about the, again, it gets to the society in the way that things are

But, you know, like, people have this idea that education has to be vocational training

And, I mean, obviously, like, you need somehow to pay your way through life and always kind of

stuff in the structure that we have, shouldn't have to be that

I do think, you know,

I really think, like, if you made the world in a better way where people didn't actually have to work,

um, people will find stuff that is productive and useful

And that there will be people,

yeah, again, you don't have to have a gun to somebody's head to go out into the fields and harvest crops

If you made it not miserable, like, I mean, think about it

Wouldn't you,

yeah, it's like, you spend like an hour or two a week

You can go out there and just like chill in the

fields and at a reasonable pace, do some picking in a comfortable set setting

Doesn't seem like that big of a deal

Are you getting enough people to do that?

And now you've got an essential thing to, I'm not saying you'd probably want to do that with,

like, cleaning the sewers or something like that

There are things where you'd probably

have to compensate people or do, like, figure out some structure to get people to do it

But you don't need to have this thing where, like, if you don't do it, you're fucked

You don't have to have this thing where if you don't do your shitty job,

you're not, you're going to not eat, you're going to be out on the street

You're going to be just miserable if you, if something goes wrong and, you know, you need surgery

or you crack a tooth or you'd have an impacted molar or you, you know, whatever that you're just

fucked, that you don't need that

And I think really, it's kind of fucking annoying,

because you think about, like, how much, there's also this aspect of, like, how much stuff do you

really need? Because you don't need, it can't capitalism

We have so much variety

You have 20 companies

and a bunch of people who duplicate all the same shit

They're not, like, making, it's something

that really annoys me, actually, between, my perspective on it has changed over time

Like,

the iPhone and the Android copying each other

Part of, part of what's annoying about it is

because you have this capitalistic competitive system

Everybody wants to, you know,

the race to the bottom

Everybody's trying to duplicate the same shit that everybody else is doing

There's not a lot of room for creativity in that

And then you end up with, like, look at cars

and they're all the same

You look at, you go to the serial aisle and they're all the same boxes

of the same shit

Basically, like, in terms of composition and, you know, ingredients,

all of those fucking cereals, including the boxes, including the ink, are basically the same

shit with the different shapes and slightly different chemicals to the flavor them and color them

and the coloring on the packages is slightly different than yelling

But they're all very,

very similar

And, you know, you start going through that and you get, you go through the

usey and grocery store and we have so much shit and so much fake variety and also never mind

the, you know, like, everything, everything is, is like, just had the life cost optimized out of it

Like, you have stuff that is, everything is, is made now to be just, there's something

I don't know what it is

I feel like I hear like people talking like in the background

but like super muffled and in the distance, but I stopped talking and I, I don't know what it is

It sounds maybe like it's just an electric hum or something behind me

Whatever it is, it's very

distracting

Maybe it is people outside, but whatever it is, it's like, if I could actually hear

what they're saying, it would be not so distracting because you can get to filter it out

But the way my brain works, if I sort of like half hear it, I start focusing on it and then I'm like,

if there's a problem to solve my brain in eightly wants to do that, which also goes to that

thing that you're like, you don't have to pay me to do that

You don't have to pay people to make

like 15 different phones that look exactly the fucking same

You don't have to, it's annoying

think is also like you think about like Apple cranking out these giant air quotes AI processors

and then they go to this iOS 26 shit just using really complex filters and all this processing

shit super super processing intensive stuff that they do because the chips are getting too fast

and you know it's like you keep making the chips fast here and so you keep making the stuff

need more power and then it's just the reason that this annoys me is another way to do it,

a better way to do it would be let's make an operating system that does look good and we keep

refining it, but it's efficient, you know like it looks good but it doesn't have to be

requiring like a fucking you know care of lobster machine running at full bore to render the

screen, you know you could do something that's like nice but not that ridiculous and if you did that

well then the processor from 20 years ago might still be fine and then you think about that it's like

well okay what could you do that because we you still keep pushing the envelope and you have the

three nanometer process or one point whatever nanometer extreme ultraviolet process and when you're

doing that one thing that you can do with it is make really fast pretty efficient processors

but another thing you can do with that is take those same processors from 20 years ago

and make them use so little power that like if if you imagine you have a phone UI from 20 years ago

and you can you could refine it a little bit but you have a processor that is the processor from then

updated to a modern process so you don't have like 15 20 billion transistors in there you might

have hundreds of millions maybe you have a billion or two doesn't really matter but you have a

smaller number or maybe you have all of those but a lot of them are dark most of the time

not actively processing if you did that you could get the processing down for your UI to next

you could get to the point like with current technology if the software was better you could have

a phone that would be charged once a week and it would just work you could I mean yeah

obviously the radio is probably probably difficult for that but can you could do something like that

if you didn't really crank it it's annoying to me actually because you can if there are certain

things which are nice to be able to have a lot of processing power for compiling stuff is kind of

processor intensive especially because the the compiler just keep getting better and better

it's stuff and that's more intensive and you know like but you know for the most part for for

day-to-day stuff you could have it really like I mean I'm just looking at my Mac right now

if this was like a Linux machine from 15 years ago and it worked pretty well but you made

something that just would last and instead of like doing planned ups and blessings you just make

better and better versions of things and with the goal that it's gonna last a long fucking time

be you know you focus on power battery life and yeah I mean you make it look again you make it look good

you make it work well you keep refining it not optimizing it but you don't need to you don't need to

build shit just to waste cycles you don't need to build the iOS 26 what do they call it liquid glass

interface or some clone of that you don't need to build all the bullshit fake audible airports

AI shit and and just waste cycles and cycles and have to build these fucking I talked about

this last time but they're the fucking idea that you're gonna build just it's so it's so ridiculous you're

gonna put data centers in some synchronous orbit I can't it actually really pisses me off I saw

something else today that was oh I know what it was this is this will be the last thing I

talked about because it's already an hour and a half and I'm kind of like fading I need to go

for a walk but my mom sent me an article today from BBC and it was like it wasn't even quantum

computers it said oh I just saw it and then I just scrolled the fuck off it said look quantum

be bigger than AI that's the BBC news title and there's a picture of a person there holding

some kind of quantum processor and the answer is now it it's not gonna be bigger than AI and

the also audible air quotes AI the shit that they have now is bullshit it's just fucking bullshit

and it's it's annoying in this case also that in like in both of these cases what is quantum

mean like they mean cube it like quantum processors isn't there it's like what is nano tech

mean to me when you say nano tech it means nano assemblers and like things where you have actual

nano scale or you know sub nano scale features like single atom kind of things and machines

that are at that scale it doesn't mean that you have titanium dioxide particles that are

10 nanometers yeah it doesn't mean like quantum stuff I don't think people mean when they say

quantum quantum encryption or quantum teleportation that's used in networking or stuff like this

or you know like used to do phase arrays like optical phase array kind of stuff I don't think

that's what they mean generally speaking now that's not to say that those aren't real things that's

not to say that you know like there's room in astronomy you know if you're making a super powerful

telescope to build an optical phase array and to have quantum teleportation for taking the phase

information from photons and combining it someplace and having photonic and quantum processors

that kind of stuff is real that's the stuff that you could actually do but this idea that

some how quantum processors are going to be magical it's kind of bullshit it's kind of like we

already first of all that the one thing that they would have been a little scary for is if you could

build like a general purpose large enough like enough cube it's kind of processor we could

attract old crypto systems very quickly very easily with them in principle at least you know

like you could use shores algorithm and factor large numbers and the thing is now we've already

got these post quantum cryptography things so even if you had that kind of a system it wouldn't

magically solve that problem anymore these are these are things that just like even if you have a

processor as far as we know there's no no algorithm it's not I don't think it's provable yet

that you can't make something but so far as far as we know you can't solve and you just think about like

okay well what are you going to do with that shit and you start going down the path and it's like

there's it's not like a magical much faster version of a classical computer and also like you

can't build because you have to have coherence over a large number of cubits to have them do

useful stuff unless and unless you're doing like large processors that are just sort of repeating

the same small problem over and over again many many times you could do stuff like that but like

I mean you look at this picture that's in this article and I don't know how many cubits there

are in the the thing but it's it's a pretty big fucking chip that probably has to be kept at

cryogenic temperatures and I would bet it doesn't have that many cubits and again like that I'm

sure there are applications for it and I'm sure there are applications for getting a couple

orders of magnitude more than that but it's not really it's not going to be a very useful thing

for most people for most you know it's not like you're going to play like kickass video games

on that like I mean maybe maybe you take that technology decades out and you get to the point

where you've got like phototic processors that can do real-time rendering that's indistinguishable

from reality or or something like that but you know like in terms of the stuff that people are doing

now and that they're going to do with these things in the foreseeable future there's no magical

like application for them just like also like and I get I'm a guy who has been for a very long

time in the machine learning and do like thinking computers and autonomous and semi-autonomous

systems and that kind of stuff the stuff that people call audible air quotes AI now and again just

like the quantum thing just like the nanotech thing they munch a lot of stuff together so like you

have all of these things like people have been working on face recognition for decades but I

in the 80s people were doing back propagation and doing neural networks and they were already

starting to do stuff to like recognize characters and optical character recognition kind of stuff

and handwriting and the in principle like faces and stuff and you just look at like the technology

has incrementally advanced to the point where like we had I look up to eigenface paper I don't

remember when that was but that was already pretty good pretty good I'm actually just looking

it up now eigenfaces from the AT&T Bell library and show me the year show me the year somebody show

me the year I'm gonna go see awesome maybe um eigenfaces 2002 so this was already pretty good

in 2002 and identifying faces and things have gotten incrementally much better since then

and like independent of having really good deep neural networks face recognition pretty fucking

recognition has been pretty good for a long time and is that is that AI I don't think so I don't

consider it so it's I guess if you call up machine learning or something but a lot of that stuff

is not even learning in any kind of meaningful sense like learning and thinking those are very

different than anything that these things are doing and yeah like you look at these these large language

models and transformers and all this kind of shit um they're they're very good well

not actually I was gonna say they're very they're okay at like language translation like

the very good I I've spent a lot of time recently the last couple of years and I know a lot of

people have spent a lot of time and doing like irrevict to English translation um it it sucks okay

it actually kind of sucks it's it's pretty good but it sucks if the thing is like they feel

pretty good because you don't know the language as well but when you start really trying you know

and they're fine for like oh I'm gonna write a letter and you have two people who basically are

in the same domain and you're talking about stuff that's kind of similar and yeah it's okay it's

okay but when you start really trying to have like a deep conversation with somebody in another language

with big cultural differences and it's kind of stuff it pretty much is shitty and that is the

best case that is what transformers were developed for and it's kind of like and then you know

you have this whole thing with like all of this um I don't know the thing that really

fucking pisses me off is like people work on these stuff like Sora and you know generating images

and video that looks pretty good uh that's it doesn't look great still like yeah I mean things

are incrementally improved but they don't really look great but they look pretty good and you know

you can do text to video and that that's cool I guess but it also is like what is the what is the

fucking point and for the most part like the amount when you think about especially like the resources

that have gone into just just like the sheer amount of technical and compute resources like

when I say technical I mean like engineering like people figuring shit out all that kind of stuff

so that you could make videos that do a pretty good job of fooling people and then you get the

point where or you can make a text that's just like those shooting people that's that's a great

like that you have to understand this is not a good thing this is not something it's not really

helpful all that really does is sort of confuses and confounds people you got like congratulations

you got stuff where you can make just a fast corpus of bullshit like that's that's really

like your goal is to be able to make something that is a thousand times bigger than Wikipedia

and that kind of sounds like Wikipedia but it's all completely full of shit you could do that

that's a shitty goal it's not a good thing that's not something that you should do it's not

something anyone should want to do your goal is to make video that you could just say George

Bach or George Bush humping a lamp post and then you get a video out of George Bush humping up

but who thinks this is a good idea who really and it goes back to again education versus

vocational training and in this whole problem I think a lot of it is like you get

fucking computer science people who went in and they they weren't even interested in computer

science they're just it's the same problem with fucking doctors they're not people who are like

want to be a doctor that people who like really want to cure people there are a lot of people

who want to make money and so they have some you know that if they found out that making widgets

was the best way to make money they'd be making fucking widgets they don't give a fuck

and so they went into medicine to do that or they went into computer science

they just take computer science courses never take a fucking ethics course never take a philosophy

course never take a fucking art course and you know or they were going to business because they

want to make money you notice actually the problem with all these people the common thread

is this bullshit like pursuit of making a shit set of money for no reason but you have like

people do that and then they don't really study these other things and they never really ask

questions like what is the fucking reason that you're doing this what is what is it good for what is

the it's the most ridiculous thing also because like I for a long time I've tried to work

on some robotics stuff and I've never been able to put together the resources and

time and all that stuff to get very far but I I have a lot of applications for it you know

I have a lot of stuff that it's like and when I say that I don't mean like you know oh that would

be kind of cool I mean I can come up with a lot of stuff that would be really fucking helpful for

a lot of people and then you see these people making this shit and first off they they make these

ridiculous humanoid things with so many unnecessary degrees of freedom and also like you got

something that looks like a person it's creepy because it doesn't work like a person you know it

doesn't quite feel right person is not really a great form factor like evolution got us to this

body plan but it's not it's not really great is you if you're just kind of like starting from

especially like if you don't have a great control system and especially especially if you're doing

this shit that they're doing which is just you know like throwing processing at it and then just doing

high dimensional curve fitting like it really like it I say this in the most disparaging way possible

what they're doing fundamentally is just very high dimensional curve fitting and the same sense

of like if you ever took physics 101 and I mean at that level you do like some kind of thing where

you you drop a ball and you you calculate or you roll a ball down and incline plane and you do

timing stuff and then you you make a plot and you get that plot and you have 20 points right now you could

do a order 20 polynomial and hit every single one of those points and you'll have something that's

kind of a model for your thing you probably don't need that and that's what they're doing is like

that there that got so many extra parameters you can fit stuff very easily if you have enough parameters

and I say very very easily it's computationally expensive but you can do it

it doesn't really tell you anything it doesn't really have any insight to it

and it's just like this whole thing that they're doing is like why what the what the fuck are you doing

what the what the fuck are you people doing and what they're doing essentially is like wasting

so many resources so much time chasing after some bullshit idea building stuff that like what

what are they what do they do they're trying to take away the the fun stuff that people want to do

as hobbies they're like oh we're gonna make stuff that you know fuck you doing photo shop here's

a thing that just does photo shop for somebody this shitty version of it doesn't come out

great but now somebody else who doesn't have that and you just killed somebody's career like

yeah they they're not not even that you're doing it well but you know there are people who

have careers that are nice and graphic design and now you've kind of eliminated that there are

people who have I mean it's it's it's like the same thing it really is like an

in-stage capitalism kind of thing because it's it's the same fucking thing where you had to

all the little mom and pop shops and you make Amazon and Walmart and now you have the

Walton's have all the money that would have come to all the little mom and pop shops in all

these fucking cities you have Jeff Bezos getting all the money that would have gone to all these

little shops and all these little like you think about all the little industries it's because

it's not just the shops it's also like manufacturing it's also like distribution it's also

having like and and you just like copy stuff make cheap burdens of it race to the bottom

and you know everything is garbage and you're selling it and it's just it's just sucks it's just like

the most unsustainable thing and it's also like there's no good reason for it there's no

like I guess if you want to have a world full of wasted shit that people wasted time and money

on but Amazon like everything my mom and sister get a lot of Amazon shit it annoys me actually

what I'm here but you know like it's just this constant constant influx of crap and one of the

things you really notice about it is no matter how small it is it always comes in a giant ridiculous

box or packaging that's like excessive and this is the whole they it is absolutely emblematic of

what it is it's just like garbage it's just garbage waiting to be garbage it's somebody somebody made

it somebody moved it somebody's a picker they picked it they put it on a truck somebody had they

take that shit out of me you think about all the people that had to do shitty boring jobs

so that you could have your little piece of shit it's just garbage that's going to go into the

recycle bin eventually or just take up space and you know like it's just like what are you

guys doing what are you doing just stop that shit like find better shit can do we don't that you

need food right we need food we need to grow food somehow we need sanitation it's very important actually

we need running water we need shelter there's these are things that you actually need

think you're on how to solve those problems and figure out how to like let people be

able to do like the stuff like pursue stuff that's interesting and do worthwhile stuff

and you know build a society around that kind of shit think you're on how to make cities that

don't suck you know figure out how do you and make cities where it's not just a bunch of people

in traffic constantly figure out how to organize society in a way where people aren't just

fucking sitting around dying in a car every day for hours every fucking day and to go to a place

where they're going to do a job that they didn't really need to do that if you stopped doing

that job the world would keep spending and you know it wouldn't matter and then the thing that's

most ridiculous about all this stuff this is this is actually going to be the last thing I say

but you know like the jobs that are actually essential like taking picking up the trash we do

have way too much trash in this country specifically that we make too much trash but if somebody

didn't pick up the trash I thought about this before I was in Paris I was living there during

a trash strike and I visited New York during a trash strike and in both cases you know like you

don't pick up trash for a week it adds up fucking fast yeah if you don't have plumbers fixing

shit things get literally shitty if you don't have somebody you don't have surgeon surgeons are actually

doing yeah to some extent useful and important if you don't have people doing public health

people get sick if you don't have people doing food safety if you don't have people making food

growing food people die people start to death and and you think about like all the stuff that you

actually need all the stuff that is is nice too I mean like there are little treats that you can have

that are nice to have but you know you could make good treats and you could make those in a way

that's not just crap made at the cheapest possible way and with people at every level as miserable

possible you could have stuff where it's like all artisanal it could be it made it scale too but

it's all like artisanally done and nice and people are having fun and they're enjoying it and then

you get a question that tastes good and not like you know some goddamn box full of 10 of these

things that are all just crap and tastes like shit and they're still bad for you or they're worse

for you than the regular one you know it's just like what are you doing what are you doing do

figure that shit out it does it's not even that hard it's that's the frustrating thing because

genuinely speaking not that hard you know to figure this stuff out just like it's not that hard

to figure out how to make a city that's a lot better than the stuff we're doing you know and

just just do it just fucking do it please because it's doing it the way that we're doing it now

we're going to end up so fucked in so many different ways and it is not like you know we're

going to dodge this bullet or you know like some magical technologies a lot of people are going

to die yeah a lot of people are going to die very badly because people wanted to have too much

shit and not even not even good stuff not even like stuff that made them feel good just to have

shit for the sake of having shit and it's just like it's frustrating just like you think about

we could have high-speed trains that are powered by the sun or by hot rocks and they

wouldn't really cause that much damage and we could you know also you could have them set up so

that they're wildlife paths around them to get across the train so you're not killing things

in the process and you're not fucking up the environment and yeah you could you could make a

better world you could make a much better world and you don't and because you don't and you have

all these people trying to have like private jets and doing doing really carbon intensive stuff

and having like a big fuck you truck on the street you're killing little kids and you're also

like burning so much more gas like you could you could even if you're having private cars you could

have so much more efficiency and like why not why not do that why not why not have a car that's

powered by the sun that's actually kind of decent to drive gets you from where do you where you are

to where you want to be and doesn't fuck everything up massively like you could do that you don't

need to fucking giant ass truck with the bed that I was talking with my friend about this also

but you know like he is an old truck and he likes it and he doesn't want to get a new one

and I think he's very right for that and these new fucking trucks that giant can't see the kids

they're a tank and when I say they're a tank I mean like literally the trucks rolling off the

off the line today they're bigger than tanks from World War II like truly like heavier than

and usually it's like why what the fuck are you doing you're going to the story you're going to

fucking go to add here someplace you don't need that you don't and it's it's not even that you don't

need it it's like why wouldn't you even want that why don't you get out of that what is your

you're you're working now so that you get in this giant fuck you truck versus you could have a really

nice car that's kind of comfortable and fast and gets you there fast and you know it doesn't

waste a shit kind of resources you could have one of those Chinese electric cars that cost

$8000 and is nicer than the the luxury ones that we have here you can you could do that

and we don't and it's just like what the fuck why why why do you better think better imagine better

imagine better you could do it with that as ever thank you and

再见

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