September 01, 2025

The Crazy [ sic ] Ones

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1 hour 43 minutes

Image by Matthew Yohe, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=82773576

Episode Transcript

Hey there I'm Scott and this is tangents. Well, it is as I'm recording this actually the

31st of August, 2025, planning on putting this up on the 1st of September, which is tomorrow.

I'm not 100% sure that I won't get it up today, but it's probably just to be safe.

I'm in Bangkok, it is 1521, and I'm looking outside of my window, and it is dumping out,

and I fucking love the rain.

I love the fucking rain.

I don't like being in it, mind you, if I'm not like protected from it obviously, but I just, there's something about it,

and maybe it's just that I spent so much of my life in Phoenix.

And in Phoenix, like where I was born in Indiana, there is a gray sky for literally like

2,000, literally 2,000s of the year.

And for that time, when I say gray, I don't mean like

differentiated.

There are not clouds that you can see.

It's just grey. It's just a sheet of grey.

And that sheet of grey is undifferentiated and unwavering for months and months and months,

and it is relentless and it is horrible.

And by the end, when you start seeing blue again,

it feels like just a huge relief.

That is, like I understand why somebody who spent a lot of time

in that circumstance would find just blue skies with no clouds most of the year appealing.

But I'll tell you also, like for me, blue skies without a cloud in the sky,

and the independent of just being like, you know, in Arizona, it gets up to 50 degrees,

122 Fahrenheit.

It gets fucking hot.

Now it's not as humid as it is in a lot of places, but it is hot.

And much of the summer, it is like in the 40s, at least like 41 42

with the, and that the worst part is not like how hot it gets during the day. When you're walking around

and your iPhone is overheating, just trying to, just trying to like look at web pages.

Never mind trying to have like a zoom call or something on it.

It is just melting down

and then complaining and then telling you, you're like, I'm overheating, you need to turn me off,

you need to go inside.

That's the phone.

It can't be good for me.

But, you know, there's a problem then is, it's not even cold at night.

Like there's a certain point where you can't go out at night without sweating.

I like to walk.

I need to walk.

I need to walk.

I really do.

It's almost like a compulsion, physiological compulsion that I have.

And if I can't walk, I just lose my mind.

And for a big chunk of the year in Phoenix,

it's so fucking hot.

I cannot walk.

Or I mean, I will still do it, but I'm just miserable.

And then I need to take fucking shower twice a day, three times a day.

Because I'm melting.

I'm just covered in sweat.

And at least in Phoenix, I'm like places where it's humid.

You know, they do say dry heat and all of this.

But at least they're, you're not like stopping wet from the sweat,

which I am getting a little bit here, which is a little bit annoying.

But they're, you're just kind of like sticky and you have a film on you and it's just gross.

It's just gross.

But that undifferentiated blue sky for me is very much like the undifferentiated,

gray sky that I had when I was a kid.

And the best for me, well, I guess not the best.

I'm somebody who likes things from different places.

I, for me, I love like a thunderstorm.

A thunderstorm is the best weather.

But I don't want thunderstorms constantly.

They're miserable.

If it was dumping like it is right now all the time,

I wouldn't like this.

I mean, I'm looking at the street and it is,

it's only been raining for like 10 minutes.

And there's so much water, like all the cars are looking like boats.

If it was like this all the time, I would not be happy.

I would not enjoy this.

But, you know, going from mostly nice and you can walk

to getting a little bit of this every day.

Fucking awesome.

Getting some thunder and lightning.

Fucking awesome.

Getting, and it's the variety.

It's the variation that really I need more than anything.

I need the dramatic like crashes of thunder and wind and rain.

And then I also need like, you know, I can just go outside and feel comfortable.

And I definitely need, I can be outside and eat and not be miserable.

That's, you know, I'm going to eat outside no matter what,

but I was like that as a thing that I could have almost every day,

whatever I live.

If I could live anywhere I could live.

You know, if I could choose.

So, five minutes then, I want to make this one about advertising.

And the reason I'm doing this is this is something,

like I have never been a fan of advertising.

I've never really enjoyed it.

I've never really found it to be something that is particularly compelling.

And it's something though that, like I watched a lot of YouTube videos.

And it is getting ridiculously over the top of noxious.

And yeah, I could technically get YouTube premium and not have to sit through the ads.

And in fact, I'm, I'm convinced increasingly convinced that these ads that they have on their,

are not actually meant to sell anything.

They're kind of a scam being run on the advertisers by YouTube to get people to pay for premium.

So that they don't have to see the fucking ads.

And in fact, I think the people doing the ads themselves are probably,

I don't want to point to say it's like a form of money laundering.

I'm not sure exactly how the economics work.

But the people who are getting their self-advertised,

I don't think are being critical, I think they're just giving somebody money.

And when somebody's pretending to make ads for them.

And the ads are not selling anything.

They're not actually compelling.

They're not actually targeted.

I mean, they have all this targeting ability.

Almost all the ads that I see are definitely not meant for me.

They're definitely not selling to me.

They're not something that I would ever want.

They're not saying that I would ever even think about buying.

And I would say like, you know, Paramount Plus is the worst master of this because

I watch Star Trek Strange New Rules.

I have a lot of criticisms of that.

I'm going to cancel my subscription there as soon as the season is over.

Incidentally, because it's kind of fucking pissing me off.

I'm glad they're only two episodes left.

And I'm looking forward to the end of that show.

It's kind of depressing.

But all the fucking ads that are on there are for like hobby lobby and other things

that are basically equivalent, which are like these right wing stores.

I would never, never shop at hobby lobby.

I would never go to a Chick-fil-A.

Like it would not.

I went there once or twice at the Memorial Union at the ASU before I knew about them.

Then they were shitty.

I was not impressed.

If you want waffle for eyes, AZD8 in Scottsdale, massively better.

And they're not particularly more expensive.

Although they've changed suppliers a number of times and they've emptied.

But they're still better.

But they're awful for eyes of shitty.

They're chicken sandwiches.

They're not particularly good.

You can get a much better chicken sandwich, a lot of other places.

All the stuff that they're supposed to be great at.

I just don't get it.

I don't see the appeal.

And like if it was just a regular restaurant and not an actual transphobic nightmare,

I wouldn't support them.

But they're terrible.

They're like objectionable.

The only time recently that I've ever gone there is I was a advisor for the NAACP Youth Council in East Valley in Phoenix.

And for some reason, people wanted that for a thing that they were doing, which annoyingly also had cops at it.

That there's a whole lot of things I don't get into.

But I'm not a supporter of police, but they were there.

And they wanted to do want to check full up.

So I got it for people.

I kind of regret it.

I kind of given my, given my brothers, I would not have done it.

But I foolishly said that I wouldn't get lunch.

Not thinking that I should put constraints on that.

And that was what people wanted.

So I kind of backed myself into a corner.

Would not do that again.

Anyway, the ads, the fucking ads.

The ads on YouTube.

And the reason that, you know, there are several reasons why I don't get YouTube premium.

The first one, and the reason before, like right now, it's an extra expense.

And I'm trying to cut that kind of things.

I'm not trying to expend a lot of money on shit that I don't need.

Otherwise, not like that, that expensive.

But the reason I first canceled my subscription was, you know, I subscribed to, like,

university day and Marcus House and what about it?

And about a bunch of other things on there.

And at some point, the main feed went from actually showing me the shows that I subscribed

to when they came out to just a bunch of random shit.

And recommendations for stuff that I would not, like, does not interest me.

It's not stuff that, like, the targeting was terrible.

The targeting on, for whatever you say about TikTok, especially when it was really good,

the targeting there was amazing.

Like, it was getting stuff that I wouldn't really want to see.

The targeting that I've seen on YouTube, it's comically bad, just novelty, novelty bad.

And they're showing me a bunch of this stuff at the expense of stuff that I wanted to see.

Like, I was not even seeing notifications for new episodes of the shows that I wanted to see.

I had to go to their pages just to see them.

And as far as I know, it's still like that.

And then, you know, there is a thing where you can go, which is, like, subscriptions only.

But if I go there, then it's full of, like, Go, France, Funcat, France, 24.

And things that are high frequency posters.

And so it's, like, the, the algorithms to some extent are useful to filter out, like, the extra noise.

But they've got them, like, you know, show me the fucking shit that I actually want to see.

This is, I don't know what it is about every social media platform.

Now, I mean, I kind of have some ideas, but one thing I really am frustrated about.

Especially, like, meta slash Facebook, but it's generally true.

They won't let you just have the fire hose.

That's, that's what I want.

I want to just see whether it was TikTok or Twitter or Facebook.

The thing I wanted to see was all the people that I'm connected to.

Just show me all of their fucking posts.

Just have to be in a timeline.

I don't need stuff filtered out.

Or if you want to, you know, like, if somebody's posting over and over and over again,

you want to, like, just show me some representatives stuff and then let me drill into their stuff.

Maybe.

But I don't want to see, like, the same five people over and over again.

At the expense of, you know, I, on Facebook, I'm connected to thousands of people.

And before I stopped, like, before I discontinued my account there years ago,

I was seeing only stuff from the same five people and never seeing stuff from anyone else.

And now it's even worse because it's like, I will see stuff from a handful of people.

And then most of the feed is crap that I'm not subscribed to.

I'm not connected to.

I'm not, you know, it's just like inserted random garbage.

Mostly from bullshit meme accounts that I would never be interested in.

I just, it just annoys me.

And then, of course, they're also, like, super full of ads.

So, I mean, it's the problem whenever you build any kind of social media,

platform or site, you have to host it somehow.

And if you scale past a certain point, the data storage and the bandwidth and all that stuff,

which might be very nominal to begin with, becomes enormous.

At some point, like, you're, you're talking about four billions of people,

using a billions of active users, billions of dollars a year.

Like, you know, it's a significant amount of money, hundreds of millions at the very least.

And you can't afford that without finding some way to pay for it.

And it's true, like, if you were getting somehow like a dollar or two from each one of your users every year,

that would cover it.

But the problem is you've established from the beginning that it was free.

And people will just, a abandoned ship if you start charging for it,

especially if you start charging for it and you've turned it to ship.

So, you have this problem.

And the, the answer to this problem is always, like, how are you going to pay for it?

Always ads, always selling user information.

Like, that's just what they always land up.

It is the most frustrating thing because some kind of social media.

And I do think given enough time, something like that will exist,

but something that is like what Facebook used to be,

where you have all your information, the timeline of your life,

eventually from birth to death, and you have, like, all your photos,

all your connections, and disconnections, and relationship history,

and all that kind of stuff, and a plate like a hub to connect to people.

That kind of thing is really useful.

It's really, like, it's a whole that exists now.

And it's something that, you know, it's just such a shame that it doesn't exist.

Just as a service, like, as a free public service.

And the fact that now it's just like these horrible private corporations,

massively enriching some of the worst people in the world,

that's, that's what we've got.

It's, it's fucking shitty.

Anyway, now I'm, like, 15 minutes in.

Getting more back to these ads.

The ads, I mean, like, when I was a kid,

and I, I'm not, I'm not an astrologer guy.

I always feel bad about saying, like, when I was a kid.

Back in my day, it might be.

But, you know, when I was a kid,

well, they did, they let's just think about what it is.

And ad is essentially some kind of paid promotion that is there,

like it exists to inform people about a product or service.

That's somebody is presumably trying to sell you.

And, like, when I was a kid,

they were, you know, that they actually seem to be trying to sell you stuff.

They seem to be, like, they didn't have individual targeting.

They were just things tossed on TV or in newspapers or magazines.

So you had some targeting from that, but it was very, like,

broad geographic kind of stuff or general demographics.

But, you know, they would have things like empire carpet.

And in the ads for that, five, eight, eight, two, three, hundred,

and five, like, it is seared into my, like,

barring considerable brand image.

I will have that phone number in my mind, the rest of my life.

They've successfully embedded it in there.

And I haven't heard that commercial and probably at least 20 years.

Maybe more.

I don't know how long ago, but a long fucking time ago.

And it's just there.

Four or seven W Disney.

I called before recording this and checked.

And it's still the number.

And their ads got that number in my brain as a kid.

And I still have it.

I still have it through this day.

If you want to go to a Disney resort,

I know how to call them without Googling them without searching.

Now, I'm not that I would Google anymore.

With a doctor going or whatever ends up being the one that you use.

They all kind of suck.

But it is just ridiculous.

Like, there are so many slogans.

So many company names and all the stuff.

Where's the beef?

They're just like seared into my head.

Seared into my mind.

Apple's 1984 ad.

Or here's to the crazy ones.

The mistlets, the rebels, the troublemakers.

The round pegs and the square holes.

The ones who see things differently.

They're not fond of rules.

And they have no respect for the status quo.

You can praise them, disagree with them,

quote them,

disbelieve them, glorify or vilify them.

About the only thing you cannot do is to ignore them.

Because they change things.

They invent.

They imagine.

They heal.

They explore.

They create.

They inspire.

They push the human race forward.

Maybe they have to be crazy.

This is not the actual version of this.

I think it's part of it.

And then it's like a extended version or something.

It's kind of bugging me.

The actual one is more like here's to the crazy ones.

The mistlets, the rebels, the troublemakers.

The round pegs and the square holes.

So that part is the same.

The ones who see things differently.

That part seems to be the same.

Well, some may see them as crazy ones.

We see genius.

Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world

are the ones who do.

And then think different.

Not differently.

Because you know, like think Apple think different.

That it's, I'm not saying it's great.

I'm not saying that it actually lives up to what they claim.

I'm not saying anything like that.

It was something you're swinging for something.

They are like selling you something.

And when I say selling you something, I don't mean like just some guy,

like telling you stuff.

But they're really conveying like this is who we are.

This is what you're buying when you buy an Apple product.

This is, yeah.

It's just so fucking weird to me to watch these modern ads.

Where like if you go to YouTube,

I finally have just installed Firefox and you block origin.

I used to have that on my computer.

And then for some reason, I'm sure some security things are whatever.

Apple disabled the ability to install that for Safari.

And I still use Safari.

I don't like a lot of other browsers.

But you block origin.

Like without that, you have ad block and all these other ones.

They still don't really do a great job of getting rid of the ads.

You block origin seems to work.

But I've installed it because I can't,

I'm losing my mind watching these fucking ads on YouTube.

And they are obnoxious.

There's like, there's no way that I'm going to be convinced

that any of these are actually trying to sell you anything.

Anything at all.

Like, and they're also so badly miscarbiding.

Like, again, selling people shit that I'm never,

never going to buy Grammarly.

I didn't want to use Grammarly to begin with.

But now I'm seeing all this fucking fake,

audible air quotes AI bullshit for Grammarly.

No way at hell.

No way at hell.

And the ads are like some obnoxious.

Sean Williams Scott.

Like, what he used to be when he was a kid.

Like kid being in his 20s.

Kind of dude talking about how he likes to,

you know, like, the tone of what you write is,

what?

Fuck you.

I don't care.

I don't want your bullshit.

I don't want your fucking fake ass AI giant air quotes.

Environmental, ecological catastrophe.

Resource and intensive plagiarism based bullshit factory.

I do not want that.

I will never pay for it.

I will never use it.

It's just, you know, like, fuck you.

Fuck you.

And they're incessant.

They just keep going over and over again.

And it used to be, like,

they used to be a reasonable amount of ads.

Like, it wasn't just continuous.

They weren't.

They would do mid roles and things,

but they weren't, like, always constant.

Like, you watch something in a minute later,

bang bang bang.

That's that's that's.

They're so frequent now.

They're so obnoxious.

Like, the only way that I can make any sense of these at all.

Is that the entire intended purpose of them is to sell YouTube premium.

Like, to sell you, we will spare you from these ads.

And in fact, there are even ads where they're like,

they're selling ad bloggers on YouTube,

which, to me, seems a little bit sketchy.

It's like, why would YouTube sell you an ad blogger

to stop you from watching and having to sit through the ads on YouTube?

It seems, it just raises some questions.

You know, it's just like, you look at that and you're like,

something doesn't add up here.

Something is weird.

And, you know, like, I understand,

like, there is the Saturday Night Live problem,

which is, it's easy to look back on,

you know, your memory is of the best skits,

the best episodes.

So you remember going back, like,

oh, it used to be so good.

And then you see the current stuff,

and you're seeing all of the stuff.

And so you go, like, well, now it sucks.

There is that.

I don't think that's the case here.

I don't think I'm just remembering the good ads.

And I do remember, like, there were terrible commercials

back when I was a kid.

There were always, like, you know,

some guy who owns a store,

not the, the Wayne's world,

that the Noah from Noah's arcade,

advertising his thing was an hope business

at all selling anything on TV.

Like, you, you look at that and it was just,

it was weird.

There were things like that.

But there was a balance, right?

There were, like, things that were actually

good and compelling.

At least trying, like, even that guy

was trying to sell something.

He was maybe not doing a great job of it,

but was doing it.

And now it's like some jackass.

When I talked to my team,

I remember my team first talked to me about

making a titanium pan.

A titanium cookware is not a great plan.

Like, titanium is a really cool

refractory metal.

It's very, very lightweight for the strength.

Very thermally resistant.

But it has a very low heat capacity.

And the thermal conductivity is not great.

And especially, like, you know,

volume of torque heat capacity.

So it's like, you wouldn't,

I don't want to get into the technical details,

but it just does not seem like a really great choice

for cookware.

Other than, it's like, oh, it's titanium.

It's like, oh, it's titanium.

I mean, I guess it does make sense

if you're making cookware for camping,

because you want to make something that's light.

Like, strong and light,

and still is not going to burn up.

They're fine.

But for your kitchen,

it just doesn't make fucking sense.

And yeah, I see these ads.

I see these ads for the stuff.

And, you know, like,

one of those ads, that the key

harping on this one,

but one of those ads is a bald chef

talking about how it's going to blow your hair back.

And I am much more distracted by, like,

watching this fucking ad with this guy

with no hair talking about how it's going to blow your hair.

And I understand it's metaphorically

going to blow your hair back.

But if you see me talking about hair,

it is evoking something in you.

And it's not good.

It's not like, oh, yeah, this makes sense.

This is just an expression that he's using.

Yeah.

No, it's like, something is off-putting about it.

Something is drawing your attention

at a very negative way.

And I just, I found it weird.

I found it annoying.

And I think, like, I know I'm a broken record

on this, but just like, capitalism

and especially, like,

the agglomerative nature of all these things

and venture capital and private equity.

Really ruined things.

They're really, like, take the essence.

Like, anything that's actually an improvement,

anything that's actually good.

They don't like that.

They're going to cost off the miser.

They're going to replicate it a million times.

And then you have, you know,

you have basically, like, the American

using grocery store where you go in

and it's 50 different kinds of cereal.

It looks like variety.

But they're all the same fucking shit.

They're all the same material

in the box, like, with slightly different

coloring and flavoring.

They're all basically the same boxes.

Like, you can see that the boxes are being made

at the same fucking place.

And the printing is maybe different

that the boxes are the same.

And you have maybe two or three different kinds of boxes

because they're, like, two or three different

mega corporations making them.

And, I mean, they've all been destroyed.

Like, even, yeah, and again,

they're not saying, like, things were good.

20 years ago or 50 years ago.

But there was a time when they were

at least time to try and to make food

that was maybe that good for you,

but at least taste it good.

And now they're just, like,

oh, we can shave a quarter of a cent off

of each unit if we replace chocolate

with something that kind of looks like

chocolate and vaguely resembles it

in terms of taste.

And it tastes much worse.

And it smells bad.

It's just weird and off-putting.

But, yeah, on scale,

when you multiply that over millions of units,

that actually ends up being a material amount of money.

And, yeah, it's just, like, everything is being ruined

by the finance bros with a fucking spreadsheet.

And the spreadsheet doesn't have any connection

to reality.

It's just, like, somebody's manipulating numbers

in a fucking table.

And they go, oh, if I change this,

then that I can get another,

I can get an extra bonus and get a new house.

I need a fifth vacation home.

You know, I need an extra yacht

or I need another private jet

or whatever the fuck.

It's just, like, this is,

it's one of the things also

that I just lose my mind about because

the entire system there.

And I talked about this a little bit

in a previous one of these,

but I think

Bangkok has some, probably Thailand in general,

but certainly Bangkok has some stuff

that really reflects the extreme

of this sort of,

everyone for themselves,

self-optimization, self-maximalization,

kind of, I'm going to advance myself

in any expense and, you know, all of this.

And you end up with stuff, like, you do end up with stuff

that looks nice.

They're like, I'm staring at a bunch of buildings

that look cool.

I'm staring at a road that looks nice.

I'm staring at trees that are lovely.

But you also, like, you kind of dig beneath that

and you go down the other way

and there are people

in object poverty

living in essentially improvised homes.

And there are people

just, you know, like, desperate

begging for money on the streets.

There's not, like, a social safety net per se.

And you look at, you know,

like, did just that disparity.

And also, like, there are so many things,

this is one of the ones that really gets to me.

But this whole thing where you're going to optimize,

the problem is what you're optimizing for

is not, like, making your customer happy.

Is that even that you're trying to make something

where you're like, okay,

I'm going to make a good product.

I'm going to make a company

and people will know

if they buy something from my company.

It's made well

and somebody actually gave a shit about it

and somebody was trying

and all this kind of stuff.

If you do that right now,

what will happen is some other asshole

will copy your shit

and make a cheaper version of it.

And people, and this is, like,

it's not just the people on that side,

the people who are not discerning

as customers, just buying, like,

the cheapest version of something

without looking at, like, does it taste better?

Does it, you know, does it whatever?

They end up buying the cheaper shit

and they put out the, or put the

better one out of business.

And you have this race to the bottom

and it's just, it makes everything suck.

It makes everything fucking suck.

Everyone has to have a car.

This is a thing, like, I haven't gotten rid of my car.

I've been trying to do this for a long time

and I don't know, like, as I am right now,

on my, I don't know if I would call this a vacation,

on my travels that I'm doing right now.

Not having a car is not a big deal.

You know, not having a car

being here, like, in walk, it's not, it's easy.

It's actually quite easy.

But I get back, especially if I go back to Arizona,

not having a car will be annoying,

which to me, like, my conclusion there is basically

I want to be someplace where I don't need a car.

I want to live someplace where I can just walk.

I want to live someplace where I'm like a five-minute walk

from a metro station.

But, yeah, this thing where everybody

in the US has to have a car.

You have to have your own car, and it's freedom.

If you have your car, it's freedom,

and that you can be part of traffic.

And you just look at, like, there's, well,

one of these things also a bunch of people have copied it,

and so there are a million different versions of this,

but somebody at one point made a cartoon,

and it's just a picture of a road

and a bunch of individual people

each driving a personal car.

And then the same number of people

if they're in bicycles, or on a train,

or walking, or whatever,

and you just look at, like, how much more densely

people can get packed in,

and how much more efficient it is

in terms of use of space, and time, and energy,

and any metric that you want,

including comfort, by the way.

Having a comfortable public transit system

with high frequency trends,

and when I say high frequency,

I mean, you know, like, a good public transit system.

If you're in the US,

and unless you have spent, like, a significant amount of time in New York,

or maybe DC, or maybe,

I'm trying to think of other cities that have,

like, there are some,

the need to Chicago,

Pittsburgh, they have, like, some stuff.

San Francisco has some stuff,

but it's not really, like,

there's a metric station,

and I mean, the contrast to that,

and I'm not going to say, like, Paris is perfect,

because Paris, it's not very accessible.

It's not built.

It's definitely not built

for people with, you know, like, elderly people,

or people who have trouble going up and down stairs.

There's another thing about here,

like, it would be very difficult for my mom.

The streets are fairly,

well maintained, although there are bumps,

but if you're going to walk any significant

difference, they're distance.

You're going to have to go up and down

a bunch of stairs here,

which somebody with limited mobility

is going to have trouble with.

Somebody elderly is going to have trouble with that.

My mom, in Paris, like, a decade ago,

had trouble getting up and down the stairs.

Not at every metro station, like,

some of them have elevators, a lot of them have escalators,

but some of them are just stairs,

and some of them are really a lot of stairs,

and, you know, like, I am, in okay shape,

I like running up and down stairs,

and I'd get winded sometimes,

and, you know, for somebody with limited mobility,

it's not a great situation.

But you can build metros that are built well for that.

You can build cities that are not just built

for walking and cars,

but for people.

And when I say people, I mean, you know,

people in general, people

whatever their abilities are to get around.

But, the module of that, you know,

like, you fix that one thing.

In Paris, there are all of these lines,

and you know, if you live, like, way off

on one line, and you're kind of out in the,

the suburbs, it's different.

But if you're someplace like in the heart,

in one of the big, around these months,

the sort of main areas of the city,

you're going to have a couple lines

that you can walk to.

Almost anywhere you are, you can walk

like five minutes in almost any direction.

You'll run into a metro station,

or airway or VR station,

or something like that.

And the train will come,

depending on the time of day,

every couple minutes,

maybe every five minutes.

Some of the really infrequent ones

would be like every seven minutes,

or maybe off hours, every ten minutes.

But even ten minutes,

it's annoying, but it's not like terrible.

But when it's like every two minutes,

it's such high frequency.

You don't really have to plan.

Even though it's every ten minutes,

you don't really have to plan,

because just on average,

you're going to be waiting there probably

like five minutes tops.

And you do that,

and you can just get around so much easier.

You don't have to park.

You can get almost to wherever your destination is.

And then when you're there,

you can just walk around.

You can just, you know,

I cannot convey.

I really would like,

you know, if you're listening to this

and you haven't traveled,

I'm kind of like you to travel a little bit

and go someplace.

If you can,

where this is a possibility,

and just to experience it,

because it's so much better.

It's so much better.

It's not just that, you know,

places in the,

or quotes developed world that

doesn't have universal healthcare

of some sort.

And then, you know,

you can, you can go into medical bankruptcy.

You get in a crash

or your kid gets cancer

and it destroys your life,

financially destroys you.

It's not just that it's like that.

It's not just that, you know,

like going to university there,

destroys you.

Like I,

I'm very glad I have a PhD.

I loved spending all the time

that I did in undergrad and grad school.

But at the same time,

I have a house.

Well, I guess now houses have gotten

so expensive.

Not quite anymore,

but I have hundreds of thousands of

dollars in student loan debt

that barring,

like a ridiculous salary.

I'm never going to be able to pay off.

Like,

maybe someday I do something

and it's extremely,

renovated,

but short of that,

it's just going to be dead

that I'm settled with

for the rest of my life.

And, you know,

that side of it,

like just to get an education

getting that fucking sucks.

Being in a place

where like the difference,

not having my car.

Now granted,

I had an expensive car

and insurance for it was

expensive and all that stuff.

Although,

now cars are just kind of expensive

and it's easy to

easy to end up having a pretty high

monthly payment for them.

But,

yeah,

even if you're kind of

working on that,

you're trying to be

cost-efficient,

you're going to end up with something

where it's either

direct expenses,

where you're just paying

the lease,

or the loan,

and insurance and all that kind of stuff.

Or,

you know,

you have an older car

maybe a cheaper car,

but it means a lot of maintenance.

And then the maintenance

is this kind of random,

stochastic thing

where all of a sudden one day,

you might not have a car that works.

And you just have to,

you have to roll the dice

all the time you might have

no air conditioning that works.

Or,

you know,

and when it doesn't work,

who knows how much you're going

to have to pay to get it fixed.

Now, this is a massive problem.

Versus,

and everybody has to have that.

Every single person has to figure out

their own transportation.

Versus,

build a city

where we have good public transit,

where you can walk around

where you can wheel around

where you can get from point A to point B

without having to have your own vehicle,

without having to figure it out yourself.

You have,

I mean,

it's such a ridiculous idea

that you're going to have

millions of people solving the same problem.

Versus,

we have a problem that millions of people have.

Let's just solve it once.

Let's just figure out how we can

solve this,

because there's just no way

that it's going to be cheaper

to have everyone individually

doing it their own way,

doing it differently.

Then it will be to figure it out once

for everybody

or figure it out two or three times.

You could have like trains

and buses and some kind of exotic

people move very kind of stuff or whatever.

And you have some options.

You know,

you have ways to get from one place to the next.

And it's just,

I don't know,

it's such a frustrating thing.

And of course,

in the US,

if you are poor,

it's become a luxury

to live in places like New York City

where there's actually a walkable city.

And there's actually a good public transit.

A good by relative terms

because they haven't really invested in it

in a long time.

It's kind of a decay.

But still,

I would take,

I would live in New York

way sooner than almost any other US city.

Like if I had the money.

And you think,

but also,

and again,

I never want to go back

and say like,

oh, things used to be better.

Things used to be.

I don't like that idea.

I think generally speaking,

well,

there's no directionality

to stuff necessarily.

But I do think

on almost any metric.

Yeah,

you go back.

And it's like some things were better.

Some things were worse.

But on average,

things tend to improve.

But you could definitely say,

like, you know,

you watch all the 80s movies.

And there are people living in New York City

that are just artists.

And they're living pretty decent lives.

And even granted movies are not reality.

They're not like a direct

replication of

reality.

But they're kind of vaguely based in reality.

It's not like the people in

friends

were all,

you know,

actually being able to live in

the conditions that they are presented in.

But you could have at one point in time

lived in New York City

and not been rich.

And I had to have like a thousand roommates.

And now you just can't do that.

And it's fucking sucks.

Especially if you're poor.

I mean, this is one of these examples of just

poverty tax.

Like if you're poor,

you get much higher interest rates on everything.

You know,

if you're rich,

if you're wealthy,

especially,

you can get tax breaks

on buying a private jet.

Like it is completely ridiculous.

And this is one of these things that sounds

made up.

It sounds like you're just

come on.

Come on.

But if your tax liability,

like what you owe in taxes,

is $50,000,000,000 a year,

or your company's tax

liability because mostly that's not people.

It's people have a corporate structure or something for it.

If you are making enough money,

or taking enough money,

so that you would owe that much in taxes,

you could instead of paying that,

go,

I'm just going to get a private jet.

And I'm going to buy the jet

and step me to appreciate it.

This is in the new tax,

the big, beautiful bill.

And it was kind of in there before,

but they made it even worse.

It was also,

I don't want to make it sound like

this is just a Trump thing.

This was bipartisan,

and it's been,

to some extent,

it has existed for a very long time,

but Trump is definitely taking this to a new extreme.

But again,

totally bipartisan,

and for a very long time,

it's been like this.

You can pay for that jet.

You can pay for the fuel,

the operating expenses,

all of that kind of stuff you can pay for training,

or whatever you want.

As long as you're using it,

you can give vaguely for business,

which means,

whenever you fly someplace,

you spend 10 minutes in a meeting with somebody,

and now it's a business plate.

You can pay for it instead of paying those taxes,

but it's the most fucking ridiculous shit.

Like,

it actually,

like the way things are structured,

it's not a rational decision for somebody that's making a lot of money

to also pay for transit,

but in addition,

just write it all off and get your own private jet,

and now you don't have to deal with security,

or any of this other shit.

Now of course,

your carbon footprint is completely ridiculous,

and you're making the world a materially worst place,

and also,

you're concentrating all of that,

you're depriving the public of those resources

that could be used to make transit better for everybody,

and you're also,

like,

it's just worse for everybody.

I've said this before,

but it's kind of worse for you,

because you do have this thing where you have to,

you have to get to the airport,

how do you get to the airport?

Well,

you have a really nice car,

you have a private driver,

and all that kind of stuff.

Okay, so now you're at the airport,

and you fly someplace.

When I had you get from the airport,

now you have to rent a car,

or you have to,

if you really rich,

have a car at the airport you're going to,

have a driver there who's flying with you,

or,

you know,

who just lives there or whatever,

it's just like,

versus,

you know,

especially like,

high-speed trains,

but the difference between,

that kind of flying,

and say,

I talk about this particular way,

but,

it just annoys me,

I'm,

you're in Tokyo,

and you take a 10-minute ride to Tokyo Station,

and then you buy a shinkansen ticket,

and you can buy a shinkansen ticket,

almost certainly for a lot of the,

the destinations that it,

like the Kyoto or Osaka.

There's a train going every 15 minutes,

maybe every half hour,

most of the day,

you buy a ticket on that,

does not cost that much,

hop on the train,

and then it's like a two and a half hour ride,

and you're going the distance that you would be going from,

say, Phoenix to LA,

but in Phoenix,

if I want to,

if I want to get on a train

and ride a train to LA,

it's a, it's a fucking joke.

It's,

it's expensive,

it's slow,

and getting two and from the station,

and both ends,

it's a pain in the ass,

and they're not frequent,

it's just,

it's a miserable experience,

versus,

you know,

again,

you,

you walk five minutes to the,

the metro station,

you go to Tokyo Station,

and you get on the train,

get the ticket,

you don't even have to plan,

it could be an impromptu thing,

and you get there,

and then when you're there,

oh,

there's a train that you can take,

and you hop on that,

you may be changed,

and then you walk five minutes,

and you're wherever you're going.

It's,

it's like,

I cannot convey,

how much nicer that is,

how,

and how much cheaper it is,

too,

and how much easier it is,

and less painful.

Versus,

like,

all the extra coordination you have to do,

all the extra expense,

all the extra,

like,

dealing with traffic,

and dealing with all the,

these other things,

and no granted,

if you're really rich,

you can pay somebody to do it,

and that's something I guess,

but,

you know,

it's just such a better experience,

for,

for the average person,

you know,

I guess you have this veil of ignorance,

concept,

which is,

you should organize society,

so that if you become a random person in that society,

your life is okay,

like,

maybe it's not amazing,

but,

you know,

you're going to be comfortable,

and we,

we have the resources,

we have the space,

we have all the stuff,

to basically give everybody housing.

This is a thing,

like,

I get really upset,

I talk a lot,

like,

if you look at my,

my Facebook interactions,

if it comes anymore,

is,

well,

okay,

people who,

like,

one cluster of people,

are very,

aware of the current pandemic,

and so I interact with them.

I then you have a bunch of people also,

with a lot of overlap incidentally,

who are very aware of what's happening in,

in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in,

and in,

and we talk about that kind of stuff,

and then I'm connected to a lot of,

you know,

and I'm talking about a bunch of loads,

and a lot of what I'm doing there,

and this is,

it's kind of thankless,

and it is a deliberate act that I'm,

you know,

I think some people think that I'm trying to control people,

but what I'm really trying to do there,

is actually like inject a little,

you know,

there are other things,

there are other options,

there are other ways to see things and do things,

besides what you've been told,

and these people,

very, very commonly,

think, you know,

like if you're criticizing the Democrats,

then you must be a Republican.

You must be a Trump supporter.

The frequency with which I get somebody,

that's like,

you know, I say something that, you know,

like, I'm really criticizing the Democrats

from the left,

clearly,

I'm not making,

you know,

there's no reasonable way you would look at whatever I say,

and go like,

that guy is definitely the pro-fascist.

I'm sitting there saying,

like Gavin Newsom is a transphobe,

and he is a transphobe,

that is unambiguous,

absolutely is.

He's anti-homeless,

unambiguous,

absolutely is.

You know, if you look,

I mean,

he just had this thing where,

you know, he's like clearing out homeless

and campments,

clearing out,

not getting rid of them by giving people homes,

which would be fucking easy,

but he's taking people's homes from them.

And, you know,

somebody who had gotten an argument with there,

and she's like,

oh, well, you know,

he's, you have 48 hours notice.

For first off, she was like,

oh, why is he a fascist?

And I completely incredulous.

Then I explained the transphobia,

and I explained the anti-homeless stuff,

and then she comes back with me.

Well, the things are,

which is kind of weird,

because it was like,

obviously you kind of seemed to know

about this or at least you did research on it.

But, you know,

like, oh, you have 48 hours notice.

Where the fuck are they going to go?

Somebody has no home.

They have no resources.

And they just have improvised housing.

What are they going to do?

Like,

I don't know what the fuck people think.

Like,

how do you think somebody is going to move someplace?

And where are they going to go?

Where are they going to move?

They don't have the resources.

And the best thing that they can do,

maybe,

is go to a shelter,

but the shelters

are like designed to cram a bunch of people together

and warehouse them,

and dehumanize them and be miserable,

and have their shit stolen,

and have them be under physical thread.

And even then,

it's not like you can just,

like,

all you have to do is give people fucking space,

give people a little studio apartment.

And I don't mean,

like you put all the studio apartments in one place,

you know,

that I hope you can understand

why that is not a good plan.

But you have,

literally,

like every block,

you could have a couple of social housing

things,

and they could be things,

you know,

don't make them just for people

who are coming off the street,

make them things that,

you know,

like if you are living in a city

or you're visiting,

you could just go there.

You could just,

now,

exist there.

And you could have a scale price and things,

so it's like,

if you have no money,

it's free.

It's,

you know,

and in,

I know that sounds ridiculous,

but you could do it.

It's not a bad thing.

It's a good thing.

And then if you make more money,

or you have more money,

you can pay a little bit more.

And if you have a lot of money,

you know,

make them nice.

Make them things that people

with a lot of money might actually

want to stay in,

and have enough of them.

And, you know,

like give people space to

store their shit,

give people space to be comfortable,

give people space,

so that if you don't have a job,

you're not going to be,

like this is one of the things

that I really was struggling with

in my last job was just,

you know,

first off,

my medical care,

the biggest stresser for me.

I had this eye thing,

and,

you know,

I had stuff that was ongoing

that had to be done that took

between last November,

which is coming up on a year

from now,

or a year ago now,

wild.

I guess maybe it was October.

Whenever it was,

from the time that I had

because I had detached

right now,

to the time that I got

the lens installed,

you know,

the trek to me,

and recovery from that,

waiting,

and then getting,

if they're getting,

the cataract surgery,

and all that kind of stuff.

All that stuff,

needed insurance.

I could,

there's no way you could pay

for that without insurance

and without some kind of resources.

So if I would have lost my job,

I would have been fucked.

You know,

like,

I would have,

and technically,

okay,

I've got, like,

my sister,

I have friends that I could probably stay with.

But I do,

I really want to impose on somebody else.

And if I am staying there,

do I have my own space?

Like,

what?

I,

I realize,

from traveling and all this kind of stuff.

I need,

I don't need that much space.

I don't need that big of a space.

But I need,

like, a desk.

I need a place to,

to be comfortable.

I need a place to store myself.

I need,

you know,

like,

it'd be nice to have a couple

square meters of flat space.

Where I could put some papers and,

and some things.

I need a comfortable chair.

Having a window with a nice view.

It's really nice.

And it kind of sounds,

something,

but it's nice.

And you could do that.

You could totally make things like that for everybody.

I need a shower,

and a bathroom.

And I want those things to be mine.

Like, I'm not saying that,

yeah,

and again,

I'm sitting here talking about how,

it's good to build things.

Communally,

and all this kind of stuff.

Communally stuff doesn't mean you have to share everything.

You can have shared resources,

and still have nice housing for everybody.

Have an apartment for everybody.

And one of these people that I was getting

in this argument with,

she mockingly,

derisively said,

like, oh,

well,

as soon as you're born,

we should just give everybody a home.

And yeah,

as soon as you're born,

as a human right,

you should be a thing that everybody has.

It doesn't mean that you are handing people mansions.

It doesn't mean that you're handing people,

you know,

selling them expensive houses.

But you should not have to worry about being on the street.

You should not have to worry.

But if you need,

if you get sick,

if you need surgery,

if you can't work for a little while,

if you get burned out,

you should just be able to show out for a little while.

If you want to write a book,

and you don't want to work for somebody else for a while,

you should be able to do that.

If you want to do research,

if you want to,

yeah, you could just go through the list.

If you're an artist,

and again,

I'm not saying that you're getting like a massive artist's loft

in Manhattan, right?

Not every,

there are things that are finite resources,

and we can't just do that for everybody.

But you could give everybody who wants it,

a little, again,

a studio apartment,

with a little space to do,

to work on some stuff,

whether that's art,

or writing,

or whatever.

We can,

you know,

put those things all over the place,

and have to be something where you can go to any city,

and you could just chill there.

You could just,

and have the stuff be dense enough,

that you can have,

like,

around where people live,

you can have restaurants,

you can have shops,

people don't need to have a fucking car,

so they don't have to pay for that,

have good public transit.

Yeah,

just,

that's the way it should be.

Obviously,

it should be that way.

And also,

like,

you should be able to,

and again,

I'm not saying,

you're going to,

like,

Michelin star restaurants,

every meal,

but you should absolutely be able to have,

like,

food.

And when I say food,

I don't mean just,

like,

something that's pastless and shitty,

but I have good food,

like decent food.

You should be able to have some indulgences.

You should be able to,

like,

and again,

I'm not saying,

you're getting, like,

massive luxury shit,

but,

you know,

you should just be able to,

enjoy yourself,

and have a comfortable life and existence,

independent of,

having to work for somebody else.

That's just the way it should be.

And the way that things have structured,

where you're essentially,

like,

like, you have a gunnier head,

and it's like,

you have to,

you have to work,

and you have to work.

Not just one job,

in many cases,

but like,

a lot of people have to work so much.

They have to do so much

in order just to scrape by.

It's,

it's miserable.

Like,

and I know,

like,

part of it is,

you have people paying rent,

just to exist,

and then somebody is,

is making money from that.

That's,

fucking brilliant.

Somebody that doesn't have to work

to live,

by the way.

Somebody who does have essentially

a post scarcity living.

You know,

like you look at the people who are born into money,

and they essentially,

they,

they don't have to work to live.

They don't have to work to pay for shit.

They don't have to do anything.

They can just chill out.

And,

and again,

if this is like the,

do you have that for,

a tiny,

minority of people,

based on a genetic lottery,

or do you do that for basically everyone?

And again,

like,

I'm not saying everyone needs to have a fucking private jet,

but everyone should have the ability to get around a city.

Everyone should have a place to stay.

Everyone should have,

you know,

like if you want to have coffee every day,

you should be able to have that.

If you want to have nice food,

you should be able to have that.

If you,

if you get sick,

have medical care.

Have,

and not just medical care,

but yeah,

like,

just say,

a cold,

or flu,

or COVID,

or whatever.

You could have a place to stay,

and kind of be taken care of.

And not have to sit there and,

the end for yourself.

Like,

the way that we've made society.

I was,

I was talking to a friend here,

in Bangkok.

And he was pointing out,

in a couple of weeks ago,

when I first came here.

It's mild that I've been here.

Pesipin' a couple of weeks,

or is it just one week?

I don't know,

I guess it's just one week.

That's wild.

But,

it feels like a couple of weeks.

I have another week more.

But anyway,

I was talking with him last week.

And,

you know,

he's talking,

he is a kid.

He's talking about how hard it is to raise kids.

And part of what makes it hard

is again,

we're not solving this as a community,

like sitting there going like,

oh,

we have this problem

that everybody has that wants to have a kid.

Let's figure out ways to make that work.

Let's figure out places that people can be.

Let's figure out,

like common ways to take care of each other.

You know,

have a bunch of parents get together

and the kids can all kind of hang out

and you trust people because you're in a community.

And so,

if you want,

you can go out and do stuff on your own.

You don't have to be sitting there

taking care of your kid constantly.

And you can trust that the kid's going to be okay.

And, you know,

if you get sick or they get sick,

somebody's going to take care of them or you.

And, you know,

like,

it's just like basic shit.

And yet,

today,

the way things are,

everybody's got to solve this shit for themselves.

And so,

it's wildly expensive

because you're,

it's like everybody buying a private jet,

versus having

shun constant,

and having a metro.

And it just doesn't make any sense

in terms of efficiency.

There are things like having your own space,

having your own toothbrush.

Don't,

you don't have to shit with toothbrush with people.

But it's silly for everybody to have a fucking car.

It's silly for everybody to have their own jet

if you want to go to an extreme with that.

Like,

it's just ridiculous.

And that's the way things are right now.

And at some point,

you can just tell,

I think,

assuming that human civilization

continues past,

yeah,

we don't completely collapse.

And people are still here in a hundred years,

or a couple hundred years.

There will be a time

where people will look back at this stuff,

in the same way that you look back

at medieval Europe.

And, you know,

under feudalism,

you're just like,

how the fuck was it like that?

How did people think that that was an acceptable thing?

How did people,

you know,

I mean,

including up to the point where,

like, you know,

throwing literally throwing shit out under the street,

that's kind of what the world is.

Now, people are just poisoning the air

and the water.

And, you know,

sometimes literally,

with shit,

but also,

you know,

just pollution.

Or, like,

everybody's got their own fucking motor.

This is,

you know,

I'm talking about Bangkok specifically,

but,

any place where you have a lot of,

like,

everybody's got a little scooter.

And the scooters are not electric.

So,

if you get on the road,

and it has,

like,

one of the benefits of raining,

it's going to be clear out now.

But,

get rained,

and now it's going to be clear air.

But,

you go out to places,

and it will be smoky,

and smoky.

Either,

you know,

the emissions,

controls,

obviously,

on some of these things,

they're not,

I'm not great.

It is an interesting thing,

you know,

when you look at,

and again,

I'm pretty anti-car.

I,

I'm going to say,

like,

I know people who will

get on me for,

like,

oh, you're so ableist for,

like,

I'm not saying that you should,

nobody should ever have a car.

I'm not saying that there aren't

reasons that you might need a car or

might want a car.

But things should be built and organized,

so that,

even if you have limited mobility,

you can get around,

and if that means,

you know,

having a private car occasionally,

now,

then that's different.

Yeah,

but it doesn't mean that every single human being

on the planet has to have their own private car.

And also,

like,

you can have car shares,

like,

why does everybody need to have

their own car all the time?

You can,

you can share them.

And if you build things right,

and you build things,

so that you don't need the car every day,

then it's not a big deal.

It's not,

it's just,

it's just frustrating.

It's like,

so,

somehow,

it's just,

it's just frustrating.

It's like,

so,

simultaneously,

so easy,

and such a,

for the moment,

and track the whole thing.

And the frustrating thing for me more than anything,

is that they don't get how ridiculous it is,

that you're on the freeway,

and you are traffic,

and you go into,

like,

you go into LA,

and you see the 405,

and everybody's like,

they're bumper to bumper,

and everybody's got to drive themselves.

Everybody's got to have their own fucking car,

and fuel those and all this.

And just,

the difference between that,

and solving the same problem

in a way that makes more sense,

like a fucking train,

train would be,

I'm very pro-train,

in case you can't talk.

But you know,

train,

you can have one,

even if you don't automate it,

which is trivial,

like,

they've had automated trains

for,

I don't know,

when the,

the number one line in Paris was automated,

but it's been decades,

at least,

and they've been able to automate stuff

for a very, very long time,

that way.

Yeah,

it's not like new technology.

It's not like self-driving cars

that were kind of like on the cusp

of being able to manage that quite.

This is stuff that you've been able to do

for decades and decades.

And even if you didn't do that,

you could have one conductor

driving the equivalent of how many cars

worth the people.

And,

of course, you put automation,

and you put all this kind of stuff,

and you could have stuff

scheduled,

you could have a high frequency.

And it's just,

in any way,

you want to look at it,

it's more efficient,

and frankly,

more comfortable.

Yeah,

and if you build it right,

and you think about it,

you don't make it

actively hostile to people,

then,

and you don't do the thing that,

like,

oh,

yeah,

we have the light rail in Phoenix,

but,

first off,

they only come every,

I don't know if it's seven minutes,

or 15 minutes,

whatever it is,

it's too long,

the frequency is not there.

But also,

it's so fucking slow.

It's like,

I can,

I could certainly drive

from Tempe,

by ASU campus,

the downtown.

I can drive faster than I can take the train.

That's not how it should be.

Public transit

should and could be faster,

or at the very least,

has fast.

Now,

granted,

you have to park,

and all those kind of stuff,

and to end.

So when you add that in,

the public transit's may be a wash,

but,

you know,

and again,

I'm glad that Phoenix has a light rail.

I'm glad that there's some progress in that direction.

But you just look at it,

and it's like,

I,

I guess I would feel better about it

if human lifetimes were a lot longer.

But I look at it,

and I'm like,

I can imagine,

I can squint and see,

maybe in 50 years,

Phoenix will be like a city

that actually,

assuming that it's still high,

but I've all of those.

It'll be a city that has,

a kind of,

okay, public transit system.

And it might have a few other metro lines,

and I can imagine that,

like,

Bangkok will have,

all of their metro systems interconnected,

and the stations,

not like,

forced people to walk,

a ridiculous,

and like,

it really is kind of funny,

how you have these stations,

that are like,

two stations will be adjacent to each other

on the different systems,

but it's still a good 15 minute walk

from one station to the next,

and then, of course,

you have a different card on the two lines,

and it's just like,

why, why do you guys do this?

And I do know,

you know,

part of this,

unfortunately,

is just things happen on a very long time,

scale compared to human experience.

And you look at Tokyo,

and they,

they still kind of have separate private systems,

but it's also sort of interconnected,

and you get a squeaky card,

and it just works.

They'll have that,

I would assume,

and eventually,

inevitably here,

eventually,

inevitably,

Phoenix will be okay.

LA is working on it.

Like,

I,

I'm not saying that I want to live in LA,

but I can imagine,

a time where,

like,

the public transit there is actually,

not so bad,

and there are,

there are places already there,

now that you could live,

without a car,

but,

I can't,

and I,

I think,

I think a lot about this,

like,

where do I want to live,

what do I want to,

I,

I feel so much better,

so much better outside of the US,

and it's not just the walkable city

and the public transit,

it's just like everything.

I don't even know,

I don't even know what it is.

And I know what part of it is kind of like,

oh, you're sort of quasi on vacation,

in some sense,

like,

it's different than,

or quotes real life,

but,

I think a lot of it is just,

like, there's something about that country,

that it is,

you think about,

like,

guns are so easy to come by there,

like,

getting healthcare is not easy,

getting all of the things that you need in life,

is not easy,

getting,

you know,

food is kind of expensive,

and it's unreasonable,

and if you want to go on,

if you want to point,

you click murder device,

A,

you can do it all over the place,

and it's pretty cheap,

and also,

like,

you'll get people arguing with you that,

oh,

guns don't kill people's guns.

Why are you calling it a point,

because it is a point,

and click,

murder device.

It is a remote control

that lets you,

and somebody's life,

at a distance,

that's literally all it is.

And yeah,

you might be using it for target practice,

or whatever other wankery you're using it for,

but it's design intent,

is to kill people,

and to kill other animals.

And you can sit there and say,

oh, you can kill people with a car,

or you could do it,

but the car is not designed to kill people.

The car is not,

like,

it's not,

like,

engineers have figured out the best way to murder people with a car.

Like,

that's not how it works.

And it's,

like,

it's frustrating to me,

just dealing with that kind of stuff.

You know,

I know this is kind of a global thing,

but the US is really just so full of it.

So full of that.

And,

you know,

you have the Trump people,

the mega,

the red man of people.

And if you also have the blue mega people,

and it's just,

like,

there are people there that I'm,

comfortable talking with and hanging out with,

but if you just deal with a random person there,

there are so many people

that are just not anywhere near,

you know,

it's not that I think they're bad people.

It's just,

they've been so propagandized and they're so,

Balkanized,

that they,

they just are,

are not,

like,

you have to tap dance around certain subjects,

or it's going to be painful.

And it's just not fun to me.

It's not enjoyable.

I don't like that,

you know,

for as much as I criticize this place,

for having a lot of poverty.

I don't like that if I'm walking around L.A.

the frequency of places that are nice,

like,

here there are places that are uncomfortable.

I don't mean that I feel any way in danger,

but it's just like,

this is really impoverished.

But you still like you walk around

and there's stuff there that you might want to do,

you feel like,

then it feels okay walking,

right?

Like you're weird walking.

L.A.

is more walkable than then Phoenix

for as much as people say,

like, you know,

walking L.A.

and then laugh at it.

It's kind of a walkable-ish city

and there are nice areas around it,

but you very quickly will get into areas where you're like,

this just feels crappy.

It's just,

it's not pretty.

It's not like,

not that aesthetics is the whole thing,

but you know,

you don't want to be walking in a lot of places.

You don't feel great in a lot of places.

The sidewalks are covered in literal shit

and God knows what else.

And it smells,

and it's just weird and gr-

and yeah, I mean,

I know you go like,

go on New York smells like piss too, Scott.

Yeah,

but it's different.

It's really,

and I know,

I'm not saying New York is amazing,

but you know,

it's true,

like New York and Paris have poor people,

and they have a lot of things that are not ideal,

like being in LA,

and being in Phoenix especially,

you feel like a fucking weirdo when you're walking.

If you're outside of a few small areas in Phoenix,

it's literally a desert.

And when I say that,

I don't mean like in the sense of a climactic desert,

where it's like dry and all this kind of stuff.

I just mean,

nobody's walking there

and you'll go a full city block before you get anywhere,

and run into anything.

And I'm just looking like now,

like I see people walking on the street,

as they're passing a lot of apartments,

the passing stores and restaurants,

and there's stuff that you might want to do there.

I'd even if there's not right immediately

where you are,

there's stuff a little bit ahead and a little bit behind,

wherever you are.

And, you know,

I mean,

Paris is,

and again,

there are some places that are nicer than others.

If you go to the suburbs,

it's not my favorite place.

But if you're inside of the city,

you could just walk and walk

and walk all day and wander,

and it's nice.

It's pretty.

It's just,

and I understand also,

part of this is just,

it's an older city that's kind of had more time to sort of stew.

And they did have,

this is one of those things,

where he owns,

and my perspective on it has changed over time,

that Housemen did the layout for the city,

and this sort of master planning,

so to speak,

that's probably not the greatest word.

But,

which I used to really like,

and I still like it,

because ultimately it makes it a nice city,

but then there are certain things there,

where it's like,

when you set it up so that,

it's very difficult to have a revolution there.

There's,

there's stuff that people have done,

that,

on the surface,

kind of seems nice,

and then you think about it,

and it's like,

that's actually not as cool as you think.

But still,

I would not try to live there.

I would not try to live someplace,

where it's nice to walk.

I would not try to live someplace,

where there's nice stuff to look at.

And there's like some density.

Like, I know people that like,

it's just weird how much the United States has sort of twisted ideas about what is freedom,

and what it's like to have a good life or anything like this.

And their ideas are generally,

you're going to be isolated from everybody else.

You're going to be going from inside of your personal home

to inside of your car,

to inside of your office,

and barely interact with people,

and not have any kind of community,

or any kind of real community,

certainly not going to run into people on the street,

that just wandering around.

You're certainly not going to have like,

social interactions with people that are not just transactional,

customer service,

kinds of interactions.

And it's,

it's,

it's very soulless,

and it's kind of gross,

it's just not,

it's not fun, it's not great.

It's sort of like,

the,

I don't know if Similac wrote is like exactly the right word,

but it is kind of,

it's a little bit of that.

Like,

you have things that sort of seem like social interactions,

but they're not,

and it's,

even in the moment,

you know that they're not really real,

but you kind of feel it.

And just the difference in like,

being a regular someplace there.

And you know,

you have these interactions where you kind of feel like your friends,

with people that they're not really friends.

This is,

I,

I've always kind of been aware of this,

and I always felt,

you're about some of it,

but,

really came into focus when my,

French former roommate after grad school,

was talking about this,

and it was just,

in,

in France,

you're not,

and again,

I'm not saying like,

France is,

is great.

I,

I really want to say like,

there are a lot of,

a lot of problems,

right?

But,

one thing that he was commenting on is,

and a lot of people like being in the US,

because you have these sort of,

very friendly interactions,

and people will randomly talk to people,

and all of this kind of stuff.

But at the same time,

it feels good,

but you also have this thing where it's like,

oh yeah,

it feels good,

and you feel like you're having a social connection with somebody,

but in reality,

it's not,

it's not real.

It's, it's very superficial,

and it's very,

ephemeral,

and there's no substance to it.

Like,

it's,

it's the simulation of,

something that kind of vaguely resembles,

friendship,

and connection.

And it's very hard,

like,

shockingly hard,

I found,

to really connect to people,

there,

connect with people there.

And I'm not saying that there's

another country that's like,

amazing at it,

but you know,

they're just going with France,

because I spent some time there.

What you can do there,

if you,

like,

again,

it's not easy to connect with people,

but if you start making connections,

you start getting,

like,

much deeper friendships,

and it,

it's,

it's real in a different way,

then,

you know,

the US,

and you'll,

you'll find the,

you know,

there are people you can count on more.

There are people who,

seeing,

genuinely,

like,

interested in spending time with you,

versus the US,

like,

you get people who seem very friendly,

and they seem like they're,

a friend,

and then,

you know,

you'll stop making any effort,

and you just never talk to them,

and it's just,

it's fucking,

it's, it's weird,

and gross,

and it's,

it's kind of,

and I don't,

I don't blame people for that,

specifically,

I think it's just like,

how we're raised,

and the kind of,

culture,

like,

that we have,

but it's,

it's very alienated.

It,

it feels very,

very bad,

you know,

it doesn't feel great.

And,

again,

I'm not,

I'm not saying that,

like,

any places amazing,

but there are places that are much better than that.

Now,

the public transit thing is huge.

The lack of health care,

it's,

it's huge.

It,

like, I mean,

you think about,

like,

just how different your life is,

when you know,

like,

if you live there,

you know,

all it takes is a moment,

and,

you know,

what happens,

and your life is destroyed.

Whether it's your car,

especially,

especially if you're not rich,

if you're rich,

then it's different.

But if you're not rich,

and I mean,

when I say this,

I don't mean like,

you're like,

you're like,

fairly normal,

averageish person,

person,

your car breaks down,

and it will fuck your life,

or you get another expense

that was unexpected,

and things are completely fucked up for you,

or you get sick,

or,

and you just go through the list,

you know,

like,

oh, you lost your job.

Now,

what are you going to do?

Do you have friends or family that you can stay with?

Now,

you can be a burden on them,

and kind of feel uncomfortable there,

and feel like you're,

and maybe have a place to say,

or if you don't have that,

through whatever reason,

it might not be your fault,

it might just be bad luck.

You don't have friends and family that you can stay with.

You end up on the street.

That's that's super easy in that country.

And, you know,

it's,

and whether you're in that situation directly immediately or not,

I think most people there know at some level

that that is in the cards,

like,

there is a series of things that could happen,

that would not be through any real fault of your own.

And then mostly,

could just be like random,

you know, like just shit happens.

A couple of things go wrong,

and then your life completely unfolds,

and,

or are you going to be able to retire?

Are you going to have to work for the rest of your fucking life?

And,

you know,

I talk about this a lot,

but there's,

who works in facilities at the place that I work today,

as you.

And she's like,

my mom's age.

She's like,

in her 80s.

But she's cleaning the place.

And she's,

I'm sure she's worked very hard,

physical stuff for whole life.

And through,

I would say,

no fault of her own.

She's just in the situation where,

like,

probably can never retire.

Probably can't really afford to get sick.

You know,

like,

how does she even have time or money,

a socializer to do anything other than work?

And you just look at that,

and it's just like a fucking dystopia.

And that's,

I mean,

I think about myself personally,

unless I somehow make,

like,

something happens,

and I make a ridiculous amount of money.

I currently have no plausible path

to ever retire.

And I'm very interested in,

well,

I mean,

it's an interesting thing.

And I see,

this will be kind of like,

I'm starting to wrap up.

Uh,

the next 10 minutes should be about the last,

but I see Robert Reich talking about how,

people are,

people are saying,

you should retire and you're,

you know,

you're older and you should,

and this guy's,

what he's doing is,

basically retirement.

For at least my idea of retirement,

like this idea that,

I don't think,

like,

sitting on your ass is a thing that appeals to most people.

I don't think it's something that,

anyone really wants to do.

It's different if you're not able to do it,

but,

you know,

if you're physically and mentally able to do,

some stuff,

and make a contribution to,

to the world and,

you know,

enjoy things,

and maybe add some value to society.

I think that's,

that's actually not bad.

The problem is like,

having to work.

And,

what he,

like his,

his entire career,

compared with,

say that woman,

who is just cleaning,

you know,

like emptying trash bins and vacuuming,

and all this kind of stuff,

his entire career is basically retire,

compared to her.

And he could,

actually not work,

that he'd be fine.

He could just chill for the rest of his life.

If he wanted to,

we're as she never could.

And,

just,

I don't know,

I get annoyed with the sky,

because it's like,

I,

I do have enough of the lid brain

that,

you know,

or recovering lid brain,

that the stuff that he does,

kind of appeals to me.

Just like Obama.

Like,

I have that professor real tone,

the,

just general vibe and the coolness,

and all this stuff about him,

the aesthetics, all of that.

It resonates with me.

It feels good.

I like it.

I'm embarrassed by it,

especially knowing,

knowing what I know now,

about how he was,

well,

I can't,

I can't claim that I didn't know this at the time,

but he was blowing up weddings,

and kids,

and,

you know,

like drowning people,

and all this kind of stuff.

I don't,

not a great guy.

Not a great guy.

He made sure that W and his administration

wouldn't face consequences

for gross violations.

Of human rights,

making torture cool again.

Yeah.

I mean,

I remember,

this is a total fucking mind-fuck,

but like,

when I was a kid,

you don't even have to go back that far.

There was a time where

the idea of somebody being a Nazi

was just obviously a born,

and a terrible,

and punching Nazis was like a no-brainer, of course.

And now,

it's not so clear.

There was a time when I was younger,

where torture was a thing that you didn't fucking do.

Now, it wasn't,

to be fair,

the US has,

it's not new that the US is torturing people.

It's just more open about it now.

It's obviously a dystopian hellscape,

and all of this kind of stuff.

But,

there was a time where at least people thought

that it was a bad thing.

Like if it's generally accepted,

that was not something that you wouldn't want to do.

But now,

it's pretty,

pretty widely accepted.

It's very disturbing how that's changed,

and in short order as well.

And,

you know,

I don't know,

it really,

it really gets to me,

actually,

like so many things like that.

But Obama contributed to that.

Bill Clinton really contributed to a lot of the stuff

about like destroying,

not that we had a great social safety network,

or so social safety net in the US,

but completely decimating

to the extent that it did exist,

what we had,

and making it,

you know,

the euphemistically called welfare reform,

turning that into a situation where it's like,

oh,

you know,

if you can work,

you have absolutely,

that's not how this should be.

And,

and also like,

and understand,

especially for you,

unfortunately,

this isn't just a US thing,

but a lot of people are brainwashed,

and then propaganda is then

to thinking,

everyone desperately,

absolutely needs to be working.

And when I say working,

I mean,

like,

in the sense of,

you have a boss,

you have somebody who can tell you what to do,

you have somebody who can fire you,

and ruin your life.

There's a thing,

like,

the amount of stress that you have,

when you're in this situation,

where like,

somebody,

if they don't like you,

they can destroy your life,

just utterly destroy your life,

on a whim,

and based on personal stuff,

or if they like you,

they can,

and you have to do the dance,

and especially for somebody like me,

that is not,

you know,

I am not a political creature,

I'm not somebody who,

is comfortable,

naturally,

like sucking up the people,

or,

you know,

dancing for people,

and,

but I think nobody really is.

I think that's something like,

some people have developed the ability to do,

but I don't think it's a thing

that people are just innately,

like,

oh,

I'm graded just, you know,

like,

pretending in all of this kind of stuff.

I think,

like,

honestly part of,

well,

I don't want to wrap up,

I don't want to get into another whole line of discussion there,

but,

that's something I'll talk about later.

Just,

no.

It's kind of thinking about how,

I think,

which people understand at some level,

that it's all a charad,

and they're sort of like,

fraying that they get found out,

because they know that it's not a meritocracy,

and they don't want people to realize,

and they're,

just,

especially on the US,

but in the same sense,

the other people,

like normal people are afraid of the game being,

being called out and ending.

Um,

anything.

And it's not just rich people,

but especially, like,

you look at career politicians,

for example,

you can see that they really,

really, really don't want to go into the air quotes for real world.

Um,

but,

that the real world is not what it should be.

The real world,

like you think about it,

if you have an existence,

where,

you are going to be okay,

where you're,

no matter what,

that you're going to have shelter,

you're going to be comfortable.

You're not going to have like,

opulent settings,

but you will be comfortable.

You'll be in a situation

where you can actually relax

or work on your own stuff.

Um,

and you'll have a place to stay.

And you have food and all that kind of stuff.

And you don't have to,

worry that,

you know,

like if your boss is asking you to do

unethical or horrible things,

or,

you know,

if you're a politician,

you don't have to worry that,

um,

if you lose the election,

then you're not going to have all this nice stuff.

And you're going to be,

out on the street with other people.

It's,

frankly,

it's one reason why politicians have

a direct personal interest

and improving things,

because,

um,

I understand that they think.

They want to make things better for themselves,

but making things better for the average person

would make things better for themselves,

and it would,

uh,

get them into about,

anyway,

because,

I don't want to go down that path,

but it's a thing that I just,

I get annoyed with.

I think about a lot,

um,

but,

but anyway,

um,

Robert Wright,

just looking at him,

talking about this retirement stuff,

and I keep seeing him talking about this,

and you're empatheticating about it.

And it's just so out of touch,

it's such like this boomer shit,

where it's like,

um,

you are a person who your whole life

has had so much

relative privilege,

and I'm not even saying,

like,

I'm not saying that I wanted him

his life to be shitier,

uh,

but more people's lives

should be easier

as kind of what I'm saying.

Um,

you know,

like,

and you just don't have a perspective,

I think this is part of the problem.

People who think that the economy

was amazing for the last four years,

they don't even know

they don't even know what the fuck

it's been like for people.

Um,

they don't,

and to be fair,

also,

like,

I've been relatively privileged to do.

I just have,

like,

but I,

I haven't been working on a roof,

and a situation where,

you know,

if I get something happening to my eye,

and I need to be in a prone position

for like a couple months.

It destroys me.

It completely destroys me.

I had money to get my eye fixed.

I had insurance for it.

I had some degree of freedom to do it.

Um,

and then I had the ability to do,

you know,

I don't have like a lot,

but I was able to take,

uh,

the tiny little bit of,

uh,

a pair of quotes for retirement that I have,

and travel a little bit,

and do the stuff that I'm doing now.

And,

you know,

a lot of people don't have that.

A lot of people don't have,

even that.

And everybody should have more.

And everybody should just be,

you know,

it's just frustrating.

Everybody should be okay.

Like,

that should not be a controversial statement.

Like,

you should not have the situation where it's like,

you know,

things could happen where you are just an absolute,

destitution and desperation.

And things could happen where like,

what,

what are you going to do?

How are you going to eat?

How are you going to survive?

How are you going to have shelter?

How are you not going to be out in that rain?

When it's raining?

Um,

or out in the sun?

You know,

you think about like,

Phoenix?

Like,

just the amount of heat?

When it's hot in the summer there,

um,

it's so miserable.

And there are people living on the street

with no air conditioning in that heat.

And,

and of course,

fucking cops like pushing them down on the ground

and giving them burns

from the asphalt is a thing that happens.

Anyway,

I don't know how I got from advertising to this.

Um,

I,

I think,

I think the,

hopefully that was coherent.

But,

it's kind of,

it's kind of,

I don't know.

I'm always,

I just,

I know there's too much meta here.

But I'm always interested in just sort of the thought process

and sort of how I go from one thing to the next and where I end up.

And I've never,

somehow I've never been able to make one of these,

uh,

with like an outline or a plan that I really stick to.

I always,

look,

I definitely hit the,

the points that I wanted to hit,

but then I kind of meander off.

And it's just what I do.

It seems to be the thing that I like.

But it's,

it's interesting to me how it,

it wanders and where it goes.

I hope it's interesting to you.

Um,

but anyway,

with that,

I think,

I'm going to go try to get something to eat.

And hopefully don't get rang on again,

but it looks,

it actually looks like it's pretty clear,

and I don't think it's going to rain again for a while.

So,

I will enjoy the cooler and cleaner air.

With that,

I will talk to you soon.

And I don't know.

Well,

I'll probably record one more of these in Bangkok,

and then I'll have a friend in Tokyo and Kyoto,

uh,

for the following week.

Might not record one then,

uh,

but I will record another one from Japan,

and probably two.

And then I'll be back.

It's wild.

I'm down to like three more weeks,

and I'll be back to the US.

I have to say,

like,

uh,

if I was in a position,

I wouldn't quite say that I would never go back.

Like,

my mom and sister are there.

I would go back to visit them.

But if I was in a position,

I wouldn't just,

like spend most of my time outside of that country.

I,

I just,

I don't like it.

I feel so much better.

I don't remember peating myself here,

but I feel so much better.

Outside of it,

and not in it.

And, you know,

like seeing it from a distance,

it's disturbing.

I don't like it.

I feel like I probably should use my privilege

to try to make things better for people.

But also,

it's kind of like,

like looking at the,

Gaza,

like,

you see this shit,

and you know it's terrible,

but you also,

like,

what can you personally do as an individual

about it,

other than,

like,

there's something that I could do

physically by being there

versus just speaking about it

and doing what I can from a distance.

I don't know.

I don't know.

I know,

like, you know,

the people who are doing

the freedom of hotels

and all of this kind of stuff

they're doing something.

But at the same time,

like,

are they,

they do they really expect

to do anything that's not

similar to what?

And, you know,

it's just,

it's so wild

that that,

I mean,

this is another thing.

Like you know,

with the perspective of history,

but you don't even need it.

You can see right now,

but certainly with the perspective of history,

people are going to look back

and think like,

what,

how was this a thing?

How was this a thing that people

allowed to happen?

How was this a thing

that the entire rest of the world

let happen?

And didn't stop?

Did not get food in there?

Didn't,

in the embargo?

Like, didn't end the blockade?

Didn't do something?

And there are so many people

who could do something.

There are so many countries,

certainly mine,

but not just mine,

who could do something

and are not doing something.

And the best we have right now

is just like,

yeah,

people,

like literally just fucking people

doing the freedom of flotilla

or you know,

like talking about it,

raising money

for individuals there

or for groups,

and you know,

like trying desperately

to do what we can,

if there's not a lot you can do.

And it's so frustrating,

it's such a mind-fuck,

that that is a thing

and people can see it.

And it's,

you know,

I don't think it will go on forever.

I think it's like apartheid.

It's like,

the show,

you know,

it will end,

but it will end

after a lot of people are dead,

and it will end after so much

unnecessary suffering.

And it's just like,

why do we have to go through this exercise?

Why can't we just get to the end?

Why can't we just get to the fucking end

and fix this shit?

And it's,

I think eventually,

assuming again,

the human civilization doesn't collapse

and all this kind of stuff.

Eventually,

I think there's absolutely no doubt

that whatever exists

where the U.S.

is now

will have

a social safety net

and will have universal health care

at some point,

and will have cities

that are actually quite livable.

And it's just like,

why do you have to go through all the bullshit

before you get there?

Why can't we just short-circuit that

and get there?

That's my general,

it's just so frustrating.

It's like all this fucking bullshit

audible air quotes,

AI crap.

Like,

you can see

that it's just a sham.

You can see

that it's not going to end well

for any of the people that are

throwing ridiculous amounts of money

and destroying companies

and destroying people's jobs

and lives

of chasing after it.

You can see where it's going,

right?

You don't have to be that fucking smarter

that is not that deep.

But we have to go through the fucking exercise

and it's just,

it's so tedious and so annoying

and frankly, so boring.

And in addition to just being like awful,

it's so fucking boring.

It's like,

why can't we just skip this part?

Why do we have to make people suffer

and have things be terrible

and waste so much energy

and so many resources

on something that ultimately

is going to amount to nothing?

And like,

I was on the,

this will be the last thing I could talk about,

but I was on the Metro a few days ago

and I'm there

and some dude is there

speaking English to I assume his girlfriend

and he's just explaining like apparently

they're heading to the airport to go to Vietnam

and he's explaining that,

oh, I thought that I didn't need a visa.

Of all places that I went the only place

that I had to get a visa in advance

was Vietnam.

I got the 10 day

or you have a 240 hour thing

you can do for China

if you're from the US

so you don't need to get a visa in advance for that.

If I was going back,

I'd probably stay longer

but the 10 days was not bad

but Vietnam

you need to get one of the advance

and maybe there are countries that don't need to

most of them there

and so he talked to chatGPT

and apparently chatGPT told them

now you don't need one

because you've got a green passport or whatever the fuck

and it turned out he didn't need one

and I don't know how he finally figured it out

but he figured it out on the train

and he's talking to her and he's like,

oh, shit, I can't go to Vietnam

and she's incredulous

and she obviously had her

but it's just

people are going to remember this stuff

whether or not I don't know that Sam Altman

will face direct personal consequences

for this shit.

He certainly should.

He certainly should be

he is committing mass murder

at scale

and he is also committing mass

mass of amounts of fraud

and mass of amounts of theft

and wasting so many resources

and how many people have been fucked over

like that who believed

the nonsense that this thing is telling them

how many people have been killed

because they're talking to that shit

and it's advocating it

or it's telling them, you know

just being like super abusive

and saying like, oh yeah you're right

you're absolutely right

you're blah blah blah

and then you know how many people

how many people

and you think about it

like whether or not

there are consequences

whether or not

people decide

or eventually people will decide

that statistical mass murder

is mass murder

as it obviously is

and there will be consequences

for people directly

but whether or not that happens

anytime soon or to him

people will remember

people will know

like this guy I hope is learning his lesson

and is never going to stop

fucking trust that shit again

and the thing that's annoying about it

also is actually like if somebody actually did

invent genuine AI at some point

like genuine AI

people are going to be so biased against it

because of all this fucking fraudulent shit

that these just bullshit factories

and it's just going to ruin things

for so many people

and it's so fucking annoying

and yet these people

they're just dumping toxic waste

into the river

right upstream of

where people are getting their drinking water from

and they don't care

because they're making money

doing it

and they have zero so far responsibility

but they're ruining things

for so many people

and fucking things up

and it's irritating

with that

don't use that shit please

I say I use

what is it called?

I do have a deep seek

is that what it's called?

Occasionally, I've used it

and I've been using it

I've completely convinced myself that it's completely

fucking worthless

like it's something

I've met in arguments with people

I guess I do have one more thing to talk about

this is

I've gotten into arguments with people about this

and they're like oh well I could never

use Google or

search stuff

because it just never worked for me

but this stuff does

and this is a youth thing

this is a fucking youth thing

you don't know how to do research

and you never learned

and

now you have this fake friend

which is really dystopian

by the way it's like a fake friend

with no perspective

and no actual

doesn't care about you just pretend

and it's just like

a literal stochastic parrot

sitting there talking to you

and pretending to be your friend

but your fake friend

your automated bullshit factory

that is extraordinarily

resource intensive

and based on plagiarism

that thing

it may make you feel

like you're getting answers

this is part of the problem

it makes you feel

like you're getting answers

but in reality

like if you literally put in the same prompt

and then not that you need a prompt

like figure out how to do search

and do an actual search

but if you put in that search

search terms

you'll get basically the same answers

from

.go

it's

or some other search

like Ecosia

or even bang

or Google has a fucking gym

and I think that you can't turn off that

but back when Google

didn't suck

it had that

and I really am increasingly convinced

that there's just no point

to this shit

other than if you want something

to just lie to you

if you want something

to pretend

like you're so isolated

and you need a fake friend

that's literally the only utility

of the shit

and that is not good

that's sick

it's fucked

you need

actual human connections

not fake connections

to a fake machine

as no intelligence

but anyway

with that

don't use it

thank you very much

it's a joke

...more

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smenor/tangents

By Scott Menor, PhD

September 01, 2025

The Crazy [ sic ] Ones

Listen Later

1 hour 43 minutes

Image by Matthew Yohe, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=82773576

Episode Transcript

Hey there I'm Scott and this is tangents. Well, it is as I'm recording this actually the

31st of August, 2025, planning on putting this up on the 1st of September, which is tomorrow.

I'm not 100% sure that I won't get it up today, but it's probably just to be safe.

I'm in Bangkok, it is 1521, and I'm looking outside of my window, and it is dumping out,

and I fucking love the rain.

I love the fucking rain.

I don't like being in it, mind you, if I'm not like protected from it obviously, but I just, there's something about it,

and maybe it's just that I spent so much of my life in Phoenix.

And in Phoenix, like where I was born in Indiana, there is a gray sky for literally like

2,000, literally 2,000s of the year.

And for that time, when I say gray, I don't mean like

differentiated.

There are not clouds that you can see.

It's just grey. It's just a sheet of grey.

And that sheet of grey is undifferentiated and unwavering for months and months and months,

and it is relentless and it is horrible.

And by the end, when you start seeing blue again,

it feels like just a huge relief.

That is, like I understand why somebody who spent a lot of time

in that circumstance would find just blue skies with no clouds most of the year appealing.

But I'll tell you also, like for me, blue skies without a cloud in the sky,

and the independent of just being like, you know, in Arizona, it gets up to 50 degrees,

122 Fahrenheit.

It gets fucking hot.

Now it's not as humid as it is in a lot of places, but it is hot.

And much of the summer, it is like in the 40s, at least like 41 42

with the, and that the worst part is not like how hot it gets during the day. When you're walking around

and your iPhone is overheating, just trying to, just trying to like look at web pages.

Never mind trying to have like a zoom call or something on it.

It is just melting down

and then complaining and then telling you, you're like, I'm overheating, you need to turn me off,

you need to go inside.

That's the phone.

It can't be good for me.

But, you know, there's a problem then is, it's not even cold at night.

Like there's a certain point where you can't go out at night without sweating.

I like to walk.

I need to walk.

I need to walk.

I really do.

It's almost like a compulsion, physiological compulsion that I have.

And if I can't walk, I just lose my mind.

And for a big chunk of the year in Phoenix,

it's so fucking hot.

I cannot walk.

Or I mean, I will still do it, but I'm just miserable.

And then I need to take fucking shower twice a day, three times a day.

Because I'm melting.

I'm just covered in sweat.

And at least in Phoenix, I'm like places where it's humid.

You know, they do say dry heat and all of this.

But at least they're, you're not like stopping wet from the sweat,

which I am getting a little bit here, which is a little bit annoying.

But they're, you're just kind of like sticky and you have a film on you and it's just gross.

It's just gross.

But that undifferentiated blue sky for me is very much like the undifferentiated,

gray sky that I had when I was a kid.

And the best for me, well, I guess not the best.

I'm somebody who likes things from different places.

I, for me, I love like a thunderstorm.

A thunderstorm is the best weather.

But I don't want thunderstorms constantly.

They're miserable.

If it was dumping like it is right now all the time,

I wouldn't like this.

I mean, I'm looking at the street and it is,

it's only been raining for like 10 minutes.

And there's so much water, like all the cars are looking like boats.

If it was like this all the time, I would not be happy.

I would not enjoy this.

But, you know, going from mostly nice and you can walk

to getting a little bit of this every day.

Fucking awesome.

Getting some thunder and lightning.

Fucking awesome.

Getting, and it's the variety.

It's the variation that really I need more than anything.

I need the dramatic like crashes of thunder and wind and rain.

And then I also need like, you know, I can just go outside and feel comfortable.

And I definitely need, I can be outside and eat and not be miserable.

That's, you know, I'm going to eat outside no matter what,

but I was like that as a thing that I could have almost every day,

whatever I live.

If I could live anywhere I could live.

You know, if I could choose.

So, five minutes then, I want to make this one about advertising.

And the reason I'm doing this is this is something,

like I have never been a fan of advertising.

I've never really enjoyed it.

I've never really found it to be something that is particularly compelling.

And it's something though that, like I watched a lot of YouTube videos.

And it is getting ridiculously over the top of noxious.

And yeah, I could technically get YouTube premium and not have to sit through the ads.

And in fact, I'm, I'm convinced increasingly convinced that these ads that they have on their,

are not actually meant to sell anything.

They're kind of a scam being run on the advertisers by YouTube to get people to pay for premium.

So that they don't have to see the fucking ads.

And in fact, I think the people doing the ads themselves are probably,

I don't want to point to say it's like a form of money laundering.

I'm not sure exactly how the economics work.

But the people who are getting their self-advertised,

I don't think are being critical, I think they're just giving somebody money.

And when somebody's pretending to make ads for them.

And the ads are not selling anything.

They're not actually compelling.

They're not actually targeted.

I mean, they have all this targeting ability.

Almost all the ads that I see are definitely not meant for me.

They're definitely not selling to me.

They're not something that I would ever want.

They're not saying that I would ever even think about buying.

And I would say like, you know, Paramount Plus is the worst master of this because

I watch Star Trek Strange New Rules.

I have a lot of criticisms of that.

I'm going to cancel my subscription there as soon as the season is over.

Incidentally, because it's kind of fucking pissing me off.

I'm glad they're only two episodes left.

And I'm looking forward to the end of that show.

It's kind of depressing.

But all the fucking ads that are on there are for like hobby lobby and other things

that are basically equivalent, which are like these right wing stores.

I would never, never shop at hobby lobby.

I would never go to a Chick-fil-A.

Like it would not.

I went there once or twice at the Memorial Union at the ASU before I knew about them.

Then they were shitty.

I was not impressed.

If you want waffle for eyes, AZD8 in Scottsdale, massively better.

And they're not particularly more expensive.

Although they've changed suppliers a number of times and they've emptied.

But they're still better.

But they're awful for eyes of shitty.

They're chicken sandwiches.

They're not particularly good.

You can get a much better chicken sandwich, a lot of other places.

All the stuff that they're supposed to be great at.

I just don't get it.

I don't see the appeal.

And like if it was just a regular restaurant and not an actual transphobic nightmare,

I wouldn't support them.

But they're terrible.

They're like objectionable.

The only time recently that I've ever gone there is I was a advisor for the NAACP Youth Council in East Valley in Phoenix.

And for some reason, people wanted that for a thing that they were doing, which annoyingly also had cops at it.

That there's a whole lot of things I don't get into.

But I'm not a supporter of police, but they were there.

And they wanted to do want to check full up.

So I got it for people.

I kind of regret it.

I kind of given my, given my brothers, I would not have done it.

But I foolishly said that I wouldn't get lunch.

Not thinking that I should put constraints on that.

And that was what people wanted.

So I kind of backed myself into a corner.

Would not do that again.

Anyway, the ads, the fucking ads.

The ads on YouTube.

And the reason that, you know, there are several reasons why I don't get YouTube premium.

The first one, and the reason before, like right now, it's an extra expense.

And I'm trying to cut that kind of things.

I'm not trying to expend a lot of money on shit that I don't need.

Otherwise, not like that, that expensive.

But the reason I first canceled my subscription was, you know, I subscribed to, like,

university day and Marcus House and what about it?

And about a bunch of other things on there.

And at some point, the main feed went from actually showing me the shows that I subscribed

to when they came out to just a bunch of random shit.

And recommendations for stuff that I would not, like, does not interest me.

It's not stuff that, like, the targeting was terrible.

The targeting on, for whatever you say about TikTok, especially when it was really good,

the targeting there was amazing.

Like, it was getting stuff that I wouldn't really want to see.

The targeting that I've seen on YouTube, it's comically bad, just novelty, novelty bad.

And they're showing me a bunch of this stuff at the expense of stuff that I wanted to see.

Like, I was not even seeing notifications for new episodes of the shows that I wanted to see.

I had to go to their pages just to see them.

And as far as I know, it's still like that.

And then, you know, there is a thing where you can go, which is, like, subscriptions only.

But if I go there, then it's full of, like, Go, France, Funcat, France, 24.

And things that are high frequency posters.

And so it's, like, the, the algorithms to some extent are useful to filter out, like, the extra noise.

But they've got them, like, you know, show me the fucking shit that I actually want to see.

This is, I don't know what it is about every social media platform.

Now, I mean, I kind of have some ideas, but one thing I really am frustrated about.

Especially, like, meta slash Facebook, but it's generally true.

They won't let you just have the fire hose.

That's, that's what I want.

I want to just see whether it was TikTok or Twitter or Facebook.

The thing I wanted to see was all the people that I'm connected to.

Just show me all of their fucking posts.

Just have to be in a timeline.

I don't need stuff filtered out.

Or if you want to, you know, like, if somebody's posting over and over and over again,

you want to, like, just show me some representatives stuff and then let me drill into their stuff.

Maybe.

But I don't want to see, like, the same five people over and over again.

At the expense of, you know, I, on Facebook, I'm connected to thousands of people.

And before I stopped, like, before I discontinued my account there years ago,

I was seeing only stuff from the same five people and never seeing stuff from anyone else.

And now it's even worse because it's like, I will see stuff from a handful of people.

And then most of the feed is crap that I'm not subscribed to.

I'm not connected to.

I'm not, you know, it's just like inserted random garbage.

Mostly from bullshit meme accounts that I would never be interested in.

I just, it just annoys me.

And then, of course, they're also, like, super full of ads.

So, I mean, it's the problem whenever you build any kind of social media,

platform or site, you have to host it somehow.

And if you scale past a certain point, the data storage and the bandwidth and all that stuff,

which might be very nominal to begin with, becomes enormous.

At some point, like, you're, you're talking about four billions of people,

using a billions of active users, billions of dollars a year.

Like, you know, it's a significant amount of money, hundreds of millions at the very least.

And you can't afford that without finding some way to pay for it.

And it's true, like, if you were getting somehow like a dollar or two from each one of your users every year,

that would cover it.

But the problem is you've established from the beginning that it was free.

And people will just, a abandoned ship if you start charging for it,

especially if you start charging for it and you've turned it to ship.

So, you have this problem.

And the, the answer to this problem is always, like, how are you going to pay for it?

Always ads, always selling user information.

Like, that's just what they always land up.

It is the most frustrating thing because some kind of social media.

And I do think given enough time, something like that will exist,

but something that is like what Facebook used to be,

where you have all your information, the timeline of your life,

eventually from birth to death, and you have, like, all your photos,

all your connections, and disconnections, and relationship history,

and all that kind of stuff, and a plate like a hub to connect to people.

That kind of thing is really useful.

It's really, like, it's a whole that exists now.

And it's something that, you know, it's just such a shame that it doesn't exist.

Just as a service, like, as a free public service.

And the fact that now it's just like these horrible private corporations,

massively enriching some of the worst people in the world,

that's, that's what we've got.

It's, it's fucking shitty.

Anyway, now I'm, like, 15 minutes in.

Getting more back to these ads.

The ads, I mean, like, when I was a kid,

and I, I'm not, I'm not an astrologer guy.

I always feel bad about saying, like, when I was a kid.

Back in my day, it might be.

But, you know, when I was a kid,

well, they did, they let's just think about what it is.

And ad is essentially some kind of paid promotion that is there,

like it exists to inform people about a product or service.

That's somebody is presumably trying to sell you.

And, like, when I was a kid,

they were, you know, that they actually seem to be trying to sell you stuff.

They seem to be, like, they didn't have individual targeting.

They were just things tossed on TV or in newspapers or magazines.

So you had some targeting from that, but it was very, like,

broad geographic kind of stuff or general demographics.

But, you know, they would have things like empire carpet.

And in the ads for that, five, eight, eight, two, three, hundred,

and five, like, it is seared into my, like,

barring considerable brand image.

I will have that phone number in my mind, the rest of my life.

They've successfully embedded it in there.

And I haven't heard that commercial and probably at least 20 years.

Maybe more.

I don't know how long ago, but a long fucking time ago.

And it's just there.

Four or seven W Disney.

I called before recording this and checked.

And it's still the number.

And their ads got that number in my brain as a kid.

And I still have it.

I still have it through this day.

If you want to go to a Disney resort,

I know how to call them without Googling them without searching.

Now, I'm not that I would Google anymore.

With a doctor going or whatever ends up being the one that you use.

They all kind of suck.

But it is just ridiculous.

Like, there are so many slogans.

So many company names and all the stuff.

Where's the beef?

They're just like seared into my head.

Seared into my mind.

Apple's 1984 ad.

Or here's to the crazy ones.

The mistlets, the rebels, the troublemakers.

The round pegs and the square holes.

The ones who see things differently.

They're not fond of rules.

And they have no respect for the status quo.

You can praise them, disagree with them,

quote them,

disbelieve them, glorify or vilify them.

About the only thing you cannot do is to ignore them.

Because they change things.

They invent.

They imagine.

They heal.

They explore.

They create.

They inspire.

They push the human race forward.

Maybe they have to be crazy.

This is not the actual version of this.

I think it's part of it.

And then it's like a extended version or something.

It's kind of bugging me.

The actual one is more like here's to the crazy ones.

The mistlets, the rebels, the troublemakers.

The round pegs and the square holes.

So that part is the same.

The ones who see things differently.

That part seems to be the same.

Well, some may see them as crazy ones.

We see genius.

Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world

are the ones who do.

And then think different.

Not differently.

Because you know, like think Apple think different.

That it's, I'm not saying it's great.

I'm not saying that it actually lives up to what they claim.

I'm not saying anything like that.

It was something you're swinging for something.

They are like selling you something.

And when I say selling you something, I don't mean like just some guy,

like telling you stuff.

But they're really conveying like this is who we are.

This is what you're buying when you buy an Apple product.

This is, yeah.

It's just so fucking weird to me to watch these modern ads.

Where like if you go to YouTube,

I finally have just installed Firefox and you block origin.

I used to have that on my computer.

And then for some reason, I'm sure some security things are whatever.

Apple disabled the ability to install that for Safari.

And I still use Safari.

I don't like a lot of other browsers.

But you block origin.

Like without that, you have ad block and all these other ones.

They still don't really do a great job of getting rid of the ads.

You block origin seems to work.

But I've installed it because I can't,

I'm losing my mind watching these fucking ads on YouTube.

And they are obnoxious.

There's like, there's no way that I'm going to be convinced

that any of these are actually trying to sell you anything.

Anything at all.

Like, and they're also so badly miscarbiding.

Like, again, selling people shit that I'm never,

never going to buy Grammarly.

I didn't want to use Grammarly to begin with.

But now I'm seeing all this fucking fake,

audible air quotes AI bullshit for Grammarly.

No way at hell.

No way at hell.

And the ads are like some obnoxious.

Sean Williams Scott.

Like, what he used to be when he was a kid.

Like kid being in his 20s.

Kind of dude talking about how he likes to,

you know, like, the tone of what you write is,

what?

Fuck you.

I don't care.

I don't want your bullshit.

I don't want your fucking fake ass AI giant air quotes.

Environmental, ecological catastrophe.

Resource and intensive plagiarism based bullshit factory.

I do not want that.

I will never pay for it.

I will never use it.

It's just, you know, like, fuck you.

Fuck you.

And they're incessant.

They just keep going over and over again.

And it used to be, like,

they used to be a reasonable amount of ads.

Like, it wasn't just continuous.

They weren't.

They would do mid roles and things,

but they weren't, like, always constant.

Like, you watch something in a minute later,

bang bang bang.

That's that's that's.

They're so frequent now.

They're so obnoxious.

Like, the only way that I can make any sense of these at all.

Is that the entire intended purpose of them is to sell YouTube premium.

Like, to sell you, we will spare you from these ads.

And in fact, there are even ads where they're like,

they're selling ad bloggers on YouTube,

which, to me, seems a little bit sketchy.

It's like, why would YouTube sell you an ad blogger

to stop you from watching and having to sit through the ads on YouTube?

It seems, it just raises some questions.

You know, it's just like, you look at that and you're like,

something doesn't add up here.

Something is weird.

And, you know, like, I understand,

like, there is the Saturday Night Live problem,

which is, it's easy to look back on,

you know, your memory is of the best skits,

the best episodes.

So you remember going back, like,

oh, it used to be so good.

And then you see the current stuff,

and you're seeing all of the stuff.

And so you go, like, well, now it sucks.

There is that.

I don't think that's the case here.

I don't think I'm just remembering the good ads.

And I do remember, like, there were terrible commercials

back when I was a kid.

There were always, like, you know,

some guy who owns a store,

not the, the Wayne's world,

that the Noah from Noah's arcade,

advertising his thing was an hope business

at all selling anything on TV.

Like, you, you look at that and it was just,

it was weird.

There were things like that.

But there was a balance, right?

There were, like, things that were actually

good and compelling.

At least trying, like, even that guy

was trying to sell something.

He was maybe not doing a great job of it,

but was doing it.

And now it's like some jackass.

When I talked to my team,

I remember my team first talked to me about

making a titanium pan.

A titanium cookware is not a great plan.

Like, titanium is a really cool

refractory metal.

It's very, very lightweight for the strength.

Very thermally resistant.

But it has a very low heat capacity.

And the thermal conductivity is not great.

And especially, like, you know,

volume of torque heat capacity.

So it's like, you wouldn't,

I don't want to get into the technical details,

but it just does not seem like a really great choice

for cookware.

Other than, it's like, oh, it's titanium.

It's like, oh, it's titanium.

I mean, I guess it does make sense

if you're making cookware for camping,

because you want to make something that's light.

Like, strong and light,

and still is not going to burn up.

They're fine.

But for your kitchen,

it just doesn't make fucking sense.

And yeah, I see these ads.

I see these ads for the stuff.

And, you know, like,

one of those ads, that the key

harping on this one,

but one of those ads is a bald chef

talking about how it's going to blow your hair back.

And I am much more distracted by, like,

watching this fucking ad with this guy

with no hair talking about how it's going to blow your hair.

And I understand it's metaphorically

going to blow your hair back.

But if you see me talking about hair,

it is evoking something in you.

And it's not good.

It's not like, oh, yeah, this makes sense.

This is just an expression that he's using.

Yeah.

No, it's like, something is off-putting about it.

Something is drawing your attention

at a very negative way.

And I just, I found it weird.

I found it annoying.

And I think, like, I know I'm a broken record

on this, but just like, capitalism

and especially, like,

the agglomerative nature of all these things

and venture capital and private equity.

Really ruined things.

They're really, like, take the essence.

Like, anything that's actually an improvement,

anything that's actually good.

They don't like that.

They're going to cost off the miser.

They're going to replicate it a million times.

And then you have, you know,

you have basically, like, the American

using grocery store where you go in

and it's 50 different kinds of cereal.

It looks like variety.

But they're all the same fucking shit.

They're all the same material

in the box, like, with slightly different

coloring and flavoring.

They're all basically the same boxes.

Like, you can see that the boxes are being made

at the same fucking place.

And the printing is maybe different

that the boxes are the same.

And you have maybe two or three different kinds of boxes

because they're, like, two or three different

mega corporations making them.

And, I mean, they've all been destroyed.

Like, even, yeah, and again,

they're not saying, like, things were good.

20 years ago or 50 years ago.

But there was a time when they were

at least time to try and to make food

that was maybe that good for you,

but at least taste it good.

And now they're just, like,

oh, we can shave a quarter of a cent off

of each unit if we replace chocolate

with something that kind of looks like

chocolate and vaguely resembles it

in terms of taste.

And it tastes much worse.

And it smells bad.

It's just weird and off-putting.

But, yeah, on scale,

when you multiply that over millions of units,

that actually ends up being a material amount of money.

And, yeah, it's just, like, everything is being ruined

by the finance bros with a fucking spreadsheet.

And the spreadsheet doesn't have any connection

to reality.

It's just, like, somebody's manipulating numbers

in a fucking table.

And they go, oh, if I change this,

then that I can get another,

I can get an extra bonus and get a new house.

I need a fifth vacation home.

You know, I need an extra yacht

or I need another private jet

or whatever the fuck.

It's just, like, this is,

it's one of the things also

that I just lose my mind about because

the entire system there.

And I talked about this a little bit

in a previous one of these,

but I think

Bangkok has some, probably Thailand in general,

but certainly Bangkok has some stuff

that really reflects the extreme

of this sort of,

everyone for themselves,

self-optimization, self-maximalization,

kind of, I'm going to advance myself

in any expense and, you know, all of this.

And you end up with stuff, like, you do end up with stuff

that looks nice.

They're like, I'm staring at a bunch of buildings

that look cool.

I'm staring at a road that looks nice.

I'm staring at trees that are lovely.

But you also, like, you kind of dig beneath that

and you go down the other way

and there are people

in object poverty

living in essentially improvised homes.

And there are people

just, you know, like, desperate

begging for money on the streets.

There's not, like, a social safety net per se.

And you look at, you know,

like, did just that disparity.

And also, like, there are so many things,

this is one of the ones that really gets to me.

But this whole thing where you're going to optimize,

the problem is what you're optimizing for

is not, like, making your customer happy.

Is that even that you're trying to make something

where you're like, okay,

I'm going to make a good product.

I'm going to make a company

and people will know

if they buy something from my company.

It's made well

and somebody actually gave a shit about it

and somebody was trying

and all this kind of stuff.

If you do that right now,

what will happen is some other asshole

will copy your shit

and make a cheaper version of it.

And people, and this is, like,

it's not just the people on that side,

the people who are not discerning

as customers, just buying, like,

the cheapest version of something

without looking at, like, does it taste better?

Does it, you know, does it whatever?

They end up buying the cheaper shit

and they put out the, or put the

better one out of business.

And you have this race to the bottom

and it's just, it makes everything suck.

It makes everything fucking suck.

Everyone has to have a car.

This is a thing, like, I haven't gotten rid of my car.

I've been trying to do this for a long time

and I don't know, like, as I am right now,

on my, I don't know if I would call this a vacation,

on my travels that I'm doing right now.

Not having a car is not a big deal.

You know, not having a car

being here, like, in walk, it's not, it's easy.

It's actually quite easy.

But I get back, especially if I go back to Arizona,

not having a car will be annoying,

which to me, like, my conclusion there is basically

I want to be someplace where I don't need a car.

I want to live someplace where I can just walk.

I want to live someplace where I'm like a five-minute walk

from a metro station.

But, yeah, this thing where everybody

in the US has to have a car.

You have to have your own car, and it's freedom.

If you have your car, it's freedom,

and that you can be part of traffic.

And you just look at, like, there's, well,

one of these things also a bunch of people have copied it,

and so there are a million different versions of this,

but somebody at one point made a cartoon,

and it's just a picture of a road

and a bunch of individual people

each driving a personal car.

And then the same number of people

if they're in bicycles, or on a train,

or walking, or whatever,

and you just look at, like, how much more densely

people can get packed in,

and how much more efficient it is

in terms of use of space, and time, and energy,

and any metric that you want,

including comfort, by the way.

Having a comfortable public transit system

with high frequency trends,

and when I say high frequency,

I mean, you know, like, a good public transit system.

If you're in the US,

and unless you have spent, like, a significant amount of time in New York,

or maybe DC, or maybe,

I'm trying to think of other cities that have,

like, there are some,

the need to Chicago,

Pittsburgh, they have, like, some stuff.

San Francisco has some stuff,

but it's not really, like,

there's a metric station,

and I mean, the contrast to that,

and I'm not going to say, like, Paris is perfect,

because Paris, it's not very accessible.

It's not built.

It's definitely not built

for people with, you know, like, elderly people,

or people who have trouble going up and down stairs.

There's another thing about here,

like, it would be very difficult for my mom.

The streets are fairly,

well maintained, although there are bumps,

but if you're going to walk any significant

difference, they're distance.

You're going to have to go up and down

a bunch of stairs here,

which somebody with limited mobility

is going to have trouble with.

Somebody elderly is going to have trouble with that.

My mom, in Paris, like, a decade ago,

had trouble getting up and down the stairs.

Not at every metro station, like,

some of them have elevators, a lot of them have escalators,

but some of them are just stairs,

and some of them are really a lot of stairs,

and, you know, like, I am, in okay shape,

I like running up and down stairs,

and I'd get winded sometimes,

and, you know, for somebody with limited mobility,

it's not a great situation.

But you can build metros that are built well for that.

You can build cities that are not just built

for walking and cars,

but for people.

And when I say people, I mean, you know,

people in general, people

whatever their abilities are to get around.

But, the module of that, you know,

like, you fix that one thing.

In Paris, there are all of these lines,

and you know, if you live, like, way off

on one line, and you're kind of out in the,

the suburbs, it's different.

But if you're someplace like in the heart,

in one of the big, around these months,

the sort of main areas of the city,

you're going to have a couple lines

that you can walk to.

Almost anywhere you are, you can walk

like five minutes in almost any direction.

You'll run into a metro station,

or airway or VR station,

or something like that.

And the train will come,

depending on the time of day,

every couple minutes,

maybe every five minutes.

Some of the really infrequent ones

would be like every seven minutes,

or maybe off hours, every ten minutes.

But even ten minutes,

it's annoying, but it's not like terrible.

But when it's like every two minutes,

it's such high frequency.

You don't really have to plan.

Even though it's every ten minutes,

you don't really have to plan,

because just on average,

you're going to be waiting there probably

like five minutes tops.

And you do that,

and you can just get around so much easier.

You don't have to park.

You can get almost to wherever your destination is.

And then when you're there,

you can just walk around.

You can just, you know,

I cannot convey.

I really would like,

you know, if you're listening to this

and you haven't traveled,

I'm kind of like you to travel a little bit

and go someplace.

If you can,

where this is a possibility,

and just to experience it,

because it's so much better.

It's so much better.

It's not just that, you know,

places in the,

or quotes developed world that

doesn't have universal healthcare

of some sort.

And then, you know,

you can, you can go into medical bankruptcy.

You get in a crash

or your kid gets cancer

and it destroys your life,

financially destroys you.

It's not just that it's like that.

It's not just that, you know,

like going to university there,

destroys you.

Like I,

I'm very glad I have a PhD.

I loved spending all the time

that I did in undergrad and grad school.

But at the same time,

I have a house.

Well, I guess now houses have gotten

so expensive.

Not quite anymore,

but I have hundreds of thousands of

dollars in student loan debt

that barring,

like a ridiculous salary.

I'm never going to be able to pay off.

Like,

maybe someday I do something

and it's extremely,

renovated,

but short of that,

it's just going to be dead

that I'm settled with

for the rest of my life.

And, you know,

that side of it,

like just to get an education

getting that fucking sucks.

Being in a place

where like the difference,

not having my car.

Now granted,

I had an expensive car

and insurance for it was

expensive and all that stuff.

Although,

now cars are just kind of expensive

and it's easy to

easy to end up having a pretty high

monthly payment for them.

But,

yeah,

even if you're kind of

working on that,

you're trying to be

cost-efficient,

you're going to end up with something

where it's either

direct expenses,

where you're just paying

the lease,

or the loan,

and insurance and all that kind of stuff.

Or,

you know,

you have an older car

maybe a cheaper car,

but it means a lot of maintenance.

And then the maintenance

is this kind of random,

stochastic thing

where all of a sudden one day,

you might not have a car that works.

And you just have to,

you have to roll the dice

all the time you might have

no air conditioning that works.

Or,

you know,

and when it doesn't work,

who knows how much you're going

to have to pay to get it fixed.

Now, this is a massive problem.

Versus,

and everybody has to have that.

Every single person has to figure out

their own transportation.

Versus,

build a city

where we have good public transit,

where you can walk around

where you can wheel around

where you can get from point A to point B

without having to have your own vehicle,

without having to figure it out yourself.

You have,

I mean,

it's such a ridiculous idea

that you're going to have

millions of people solving the same problem.

Versus,

we have a problem that millions of people have.

Let's just solve it once.

Let's just figure out how we can

solve this,

because there's just no way

that it's going to be cheaper

to have everyone individually

doing it their own way,

doing it differently.

Then it will be to figure it out once

for everybody

or figure it out two or three times.

You could have like trains

and buses and some kind of exotic

people move very kind of stuff or whatever.

And you have some options.

You know,

you have ways to get from one place to the next.

And it's just,

I don't know,

it's such a frustrating thing.

And of course,

in the US,

if you are poor,

it's become a luxury

to live in places like New York City

where there's actually a walkable city.

And there's actually a good public transit.

A good by relative terms

because they haven't really invested in it

in a long time.

It's kind of a decay.

But still,

I would take,

I would live in New York

way sooner than almost any other US city.

Like if I had the money.

And you think,

but also,

and again,

I never want to go back

and say like,

oh, things used to be better.

Things used to be.

I don't like that idea.

I think generally speaking,

well,

there's no directionality

to stuff necessarily.

But I do think

on almost any metric.

Yeah,

you go back.

And it's like some things were better.

Some things were worse.

But on average,

things tend to improve.

But you could definitely say,

like, you know,

you watch all the 80s movies.

And there are people living in New York City

that are just artists.

And they're living pretty decent lives.

And even granted movies are not reality.

They're not like a direct

replication of

reality.

But they're kind of vaguely based in reality.

It's not like the people in

friends

were all,

you know,

actually being able to live in

the conditions that they are presented in.

But you could have at one point in time

lived in New York City

and not been rich.

And I had to have like a thousand roommates.

And now you just can't do that.

And it's fucking sucks.

Especially if you're poor.

I mean, this is one of these examples of just

poverty tax.

Like if you're poor,

you get much higher interest rates on everything.

You know,

if you're rich,

if you're wealthy,

especially,

you can get tax breaks

on buying a private jet.

Like it is completely ridiculous.

And this is one of these things that sounds

made up.

It sounds like you're just

come on.

Come on.

But if your tax liability,

like what you owe in taxes,

is $50,000,000,000 a year,

or your company's tax

liability because mostly that's not people.

It's people have a corporate structure or something for it.

If you are making enough money,

or taking enough money,

so that you would owe that much in taxes,

you could instead of paying that,

go,

I'm just going to get a private jet.

And I'm going to buy the jet

and step me to appreciate it.

This is in the new tax,

the big, beautiful bill.

And it was kind of in there before,

but they made it even worse.

It was also,

I don't want to make it sound like

this is just a Trump thing.

This was bipartisan,

and it's been,

to some extent,

it has existed for a very long time,

but Trump is definitely taking this to a new extreme.

But again,

totally bipartisan,

and for a very long time,

it's been like this.

You can pay for that jet.

You can pay for the fuel,

the operating expenses,

all of that kind of stuff you can pay for training,

or whatever you want.

As long as you're using it,

you can give vaguely for business,

which means,

whenever you fly someplace,

you spend 10 minutes in a meeting with somebody,

and now it's a business plate.

You can pay for it instead of paying those taxes,

but it's the most fucking ridiculous shit.

Like,

it actually,

like the way things are structured,

it's not a rational decision for somebody that's making a lot of money

to also pay for transit,

but in addition,

just write it all off and get your own private jet,

and now you don't have to deal with security,

or any of this other shit.

Now of course,

your carbon footprint is completely ridiculous,

and you're making the world a materially worst place,

and also,

you're concentrating all of that,

you're depriving the public of those resources

that could be used to make transit better for everybody,

and you're also,

like,

it's just worse for everybody.

I've said this before,

but it's kind of worse for you,

because you do have this thing where you have to,

you have to get to the airport,

how do you get to the airport?

Well,

you have a really nice car,

you have a private driver,

and all that kind of stuff.

Okay, so now you're at the airport,

and you fly someplace.

When I had you get from the airport,

now you have to rent a car,

or you have to,

if you really rich,

have a car at the airport you're going to,

have a driver there who's flying with you,

or,

you know,

who just lives there or whatever,

it's just like,

versus,

you know,

especially like,

high-speed trains,

but the difference between,

that kind of flying,

and say,

I talk about this particular way,

but,

it just annoys me,

I'm,

you're in Tokyo,

and you take a 10-minute ride to Tokyo Station,

and then you buy a shinkansen ticket,

and you can buy a shinkansen ticket,

almost certainly for a lot of the,

the destinations that it,

like the Kyoto or Osaka.

There's a train going every 15 minutes,

maybe every half hour,

most of the day,

you buy a ticket on that,

does not cost that much,

hop on the train,

and then it's like a two and a half hour ride,

and you're going the distance that you would be going from,

say, Phoenix to LA,

but in Phoenix,

if I want to,

if I want to get on a train

and ride a train to LA,

it's a, it's a fucking joke.

It's,

it's expensive,

it's slow,

and getting two and from the station,

and both ends,

it's a pain in the ass,

and they're not frequent,

it's just,

it's a miserable experience,

versus,

you know,

again,

you,

you walk five minutes to the,

the metro station,

you go to Tokyo Station,

and you get on the train,

get the ticket,

you don't even have to plan,

it could be an impromptu thing,

and you get there,

and then when you're there,

oh,

there's a train that you can take,

and you hop on that,

you may be changed,

and then you walk five minutes,

and you're wherever you're going.

It's,

it's like,

I cannot convey,

how much nicer that is,

how,

and how much cheaper it is,

too,

and how much easier it is,

and less painful.

Versus,

like,

all the extra coordination you have to do,

all the extra expense,

all the extra,

like,

dealing with traffic,

and dealing with all the,

these other things,

and no granted,

if you're really rich,

you can pay somebody to do it,

and that's something I guess,

but,

you know,

it's just such a better experience,

for,

for the average person,

you know,

I guess you have this veil of ignorance,

concept,

which is,

you should organize society,

so that if you become a random person in that society,

your life is okay,

like,

maybe it's not amazing,

but,

you know,

you're going to be comfortable,

and we,

we have the resources,

we have the space,

we have all the stuff,

to basically give everybody housing.

This is a thing,

like,

I get really upset,

I talk a lot,

like,

if you look at my,

my Facebook interactions,

if it comes anymore,

is,

well,

okay,

people who,

like,

one cluster of people,

are very,

aware of the current pandemic,

and so I interact with them.

I then you have a bunch of people also,

with a lot of overlap incidentally,

who are very aware of what's happening in,

in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in,

and in,

and we talk about that kind of stuff,

and then I'm connected to a lot of,

you know,

and I'm talking about a bunch of loads,

and a lot of what I'm doing there,

and this is,

it's kind of thankless,

and it is a deliberate act that I'm,

you know,

I think some people think that I'm trying to control people,

but what I'm really trying to do there,

is actually like inject a little,

you know,

there are other things,

there are other options,

there are other ways to see things and do things,

besides what you've been told,

and these people,

very, very commonly,

think, you know,

like if you're criticizing the Democrats,

then you must be a Republican.

You must be a Trump supporter.

The frequency with which I get somebody,

that's like,

you know, I say something that, you know,

like, I'm really criticizing the Democrats

from the left,

clearly,

I'm not making,

you know,

there's no reasonable way you would look at whatever I say,

and go like,

that guy is definitely the pro-fascist.

I'm sitting there saying,

like Gavin Newsom is a transphobe,

and he is a transphobe,

that is unambiguous,

absolutely is.

He's anti-homeless,

unambiguous,

absolutely is.

You know, if you look,

I mean,

he just had this thing where,

you know, he's like clearing out homeless

and campments,

clearing out,

not getting rid of them by giving people homes,

which would be fucking easy,

but he's taking people's homes from them.

And, you know,

somebody who had gotten an argument with there,

and she's like,

oh, well, you know,

he's, you have 48 hours notice.

For first off, she was like,

oh, why is he a fascist?

And I completely incredulous.

Then I explained the transphobia,

and I explained the anti-homeless stuff,

and then she comes back with me.

Well, the things are,

which is kind of weird,

because it was like,

obviously you kind of seemed to know

about this or at least you did research on it.

But, you know,

like, oh, you have 48 hours notice.

Where the fuck are they going to go?

Somebody has no home.

They have no resources.

And they just have improvised housing.

What are they going to do?

Like,

I don't know what the fuck people think.

Like,

how do you think somebody is going to move someplace?

And where are they going to go?

Where are they going to move?

They don't have the resources.

And the best thing that they can do,

maybe,

is go to a shelter,

but the shelters

are like designed to cram a bunch of people together

and warehouse them,

and dehumanize them and be miserable,

and have their shit stolen,

and have them be under physical thread.

And even then,

it's not like you can just,

like,

all you have to do is give people fucking space,

give people a little studio apartment.

And I don't mean,

like you put all the studio apartments in one place,

you know,

that I hope you can understand

why that is not a good plan.

But you have,

literally,

like every block,

you could have a couple of social housing

things,

and they could be things,

you know,

don't make them just for people

who are coming off the street,

make them things that,

you know,

like if you are living in a city

or you're visiting,

you could just go there.

You could just,

now,

exist there.

And you could have a scale price and things,

so it's like,

if you have no money,

it's free.

It's,

you know,

and in,

I know that sounds ridiculous,

but you could do it.

It's not a bad thing.

It's a good thing.

And then if you make more money,

or you have more money,

you can pay a little bit more.

And if you have a lot of money,

you know,

make them nice.

Make them things that people

with a lot of money might actually

want to stay in,

and have enough of them.

And, you know,

like give people space to

store their shit,

give people space to be comfortable,

give people space,

so that if you don't have a job,

you're not going to be,

like this is one of the things

that I really was struggling with

in my last job was just,

you know,

first off,

my medical care,

the biggest stresser for me.

I had this eye thing,

and,

you know,

I had stuff that was ongoing

that had to be done that took

between last November,

which is coming up on a year

from now,

or a year ago now,

wild.

I guess maybe it was October.

Whenever it was,

from the time that I had

because I had detached

right now,

to the time that I got

the lens installed,

you know,

the trek to me,

and recovery from that,

waiting,

and then getting,

if they're getting,

the cataract surgery,

and all that kind of stuff.

All that stuff,

needed insurance.

I could,

there's no way you could pay

for that without insurance

and without some kind of resources.

So if I would have lost my job,

I would have been fucked.

You know,

like,

I would have,

and technically,

okay,

I've got, like,

my sister,

I have friends that I could probably stay with.

But I do,

I really want to impose on somebody else.

And if I am staying there,

do I have my own space?

Like,

what?

I,

I realize,

from traveling and all this kind of stuff.

I need,

I don't need that much space.

I don't need that big of a space.

But I need,

like, a desk.

I need a place to,

to be comfortable.

I need a place to store myself.

I need,

you know,

like,

it'd be nice to have a couple

square meters of flat space.

Where I could put some papers and,

and some things.

I need a comfortable chair.

Having a window with a nice view.

It's really nice.

And it kind of sounds,

something,

but it's nice.

And you could do that.

You could totally make things like that for everybody.

I need a shower,

and a bathroom.

And I want those things to be mine.

Like, I'm not saying that,

yeah,

and again,

I'm sitting here talking about how,

it's good to build things.

Communally,

and all this kind of stuff.

Communally stuff doesn't mean you have to share everything.

You can have shared resources,

and still have nice housing for everybody.

Have an apartment for everybody.

And one of these people that I was getting

in this argument with,

she mockingly,

derisively said,

like, oh,

well,

as soon as you're born,

we should just give everybody a home.

And yeah,

as soon as you're born,

as a human right,

you should be a thing that everybody has.

It doesn't mean that you are handing people mansions.

It doesn't mean that you're handing people,

you know,

selling them expensive houses.

But you should not have to worry about being on the street.

You should not have to worry.

But if you need,

if you get sick,

if you need surgery,

if you can't work for a little while,

if you get burned out,

you should just be able to show out for a little while.

If you want to write a book,

and you don't want to work for somebody else for a while,

you should be able to do that.

If you want to do research,

if you want to,

yeah, you could just go through the list.

If you're an artist,

and again,

I'm not saying that you're getting like a massive artist's loft

in Manhattan, right?

Not every,

there are things that are finite resources,

and we can't just do that for everybody.

But you could give everybody who wants it,

a little, again,

a studio apartment,

with a little space to do,

to work on some stuff,

whether that's art,

or writing,

or whatever.

We can,

you know,

put those things all over the place,

and have to be something where you can go to any city,

and you could just chill there.

You could just,

and have the stuff be dense enough,

that you can have,

like,

around where people live,

you can have restaurants,

you can have shops,

people don't need to have a fucking car,

so they don't have to pay for that,

have good public transit.

Yeah,

just,

that's the way it should be.

Obviously,

it should be that way.

And also,

like,

you should be able to,

and again,

I'm not saying,

you're going to,

like,

Michelin star restaurants,

every meal,

but you should absolutely be able to have,

like,

food.

And when I say food,

I don't mean just,

like,

something that's pastless and shitty,

but I have good food,

like decent food.

You should be able to have some indulgences.

You should be able to,

like,

and again,

I'm not saying,

you're getting, like,

massive luxury shit,

but,

you know,

you should just be able to,

enjoy yourself,

and have a comfortable life and existence,

independent of,

having to work for somebody else.

That's just the way it should be.

And the way that things have structured,

where you're essentially,

like,

like, you have a gunnier head,

and it's like,

you have to,

you have to work,

and you have to work.

Not just one job,

in many cases,

but like,

a lot of people have to work so much.

They have to do so much

in order just to scrape by.

It's,

it's miserable.

Like,

and I know,

like,

part of it is,

you have people paying rent,

just to exist,

and then somebody is,

is making money from that.

That's,

fucking brilliant.

Somebody that doesn't have to work

to live,

by the way.

Somebody who does have essentially

a post scarcity living.

You know,

like you look at the people who are born into money,

and they essentially,

they,

they don't have to work to live.

They don't have to work to pay for shit.

They don't have to do anything.

They can just chill out.

And,

and again,

if this is like the,

do you have that for,

a tiny,

minority of people,

based on a genetic lottery,

or do you do that for basically everyone?

And again,

like,

I'm not saying everyone needs to have a fucking private jet,

but everyone should have the ability to get around a city.

Everyone should have a place to stay.

Everyone should have,

you know,

like if you want to have coffee every day,

you should be able to have that.

If you want to have nice food,

you should be able to have that.

If you,

if you get sick,

have medical care.

Have,

and not just medical care,

but yeah,

like,

just say,

a cold,

or flu,

or COVID,

or whatever.

You could have a place to stay,

and kind of be taken care of.

And not have to sit there and,

the end for yourself.

Like,

the way that we've made society.

I was,

I was talking to a friend here,

in Bangkok.

And he was pointing out,

in a couple of weeks ago,

when I first came here.

It's mild that I've been here.

Pesipin' a couple of weeks,

or is it just one week?

I don't know,

I guess it's just one week.

That's wild.

But,

it feels like a couple of weeks.

I have another week more.

But anyway,

I was talking with him last week.

And,

you know,

he's talking,

he is a kid.

He's talking about how hard it is to raise kids.

And part of what makes it hard

is again,

we're not solving this as a community,

like sitting there going like,

oh,

we have this problem

that everybody has that wants to have a kid.

Let's figure out ways to make that work.

Let's figure out places that people can be.

Let's figure out,

like common ways to take care of each other.

You know,

have a bunch of parents get together

and the kids can all kind of hang out

and you trust people because you're in a community.

And so,

if you want,

you can go out and do stuff on your own.

You don't have to be sitting there

taking care of your kid constantly.

And you can trust that the kid's going to be okay.

And, you know,

if you get sick or they get sick,

somebody's going to take care of them or you.

And, you know,

like,

it's just like basic shit.

And yet,

today,

the way things are,

everybody's got to solve this shit for themselves.

And so,

it's wildly expensive

because you're,

it's like everybody buying a private jet,

versus having

shun constant,

and having a metro.

And it just doesn't make any sense

in terms of efficiency.

There are things like having your own space,

having your own toothbrush.

Don't,

you don't have to shit with toothbrush with people.

But it's silly for everybody to have a fucking car.

It's silly for everybody to have their own jet

if you want to go to an extreme with that.

Like,

it's just ridiculous.

And that's the way things are right now.

And at some point,

you can just tell,

I think,

assuming that human civilization

continues past,

yeah,

we don't completely collapse.

And people are still here in a hundred years,

or a couple hundred years.

There will be a time

where people will look back at this stuff,

in the same way that you look back

at medieval Europe.

And, you know,

under feudalism,

you're just like,

how the fuck was it like that?

How did people think that that was an acceptable thing?

How did people,

you know,

I mean,

including up to the point where,

like, you know,

throwing literally throwing shit out under the street,

that's kind of what the world is.

Now, people are just poisoning the air

and the water.

And, you know,

sometimes literally,

with shit,

but also,

you know,

just pollution.

Or, like,

everybody's got their own fucking motor.

This is,

you know,

I'm talking about Bangkok specifically,

but,

any place where you have a lot of,

like,

everybody's got a little scooter.

And the scooters are not electric.

So,

if you get on the road,

and it has,

like,

one of the benefits of raining,

it's going to be clear out now.

But,

get rained,

and now it's going to be clear air.

But,

you go out to places,

and it will be smoky,

and smoky.

Either,

you know,

the emissions,

controls,

obviously,

on some of these things,

they're not,

I'm not great.

It is an interesting thing,

you know,

when you look at,

and again,

I'm pretty anti-car.

I,

I'm going to say,

like,

I know people who will

get on me for,

like,

oh, you're so ableist for,

like,

I'm not saying that you should,

nobody should ever have a car.

I'm not saying that there aren't

reasons that you might need a car or

might want a car.

But things should be built and organized,

so that,

even if you have limited mobility,

you can get around,

and if that means,

you know,

having a private car occasionally,

now,

then that's different.

Yeah,

but it doesn't mean that every single human being

on the planet has to have their own private car.

And also,

like,

you can have car shares,

like,

why does everybody need to have

their own car all the time?

You can,

you can share them.

And if you build things right,

and you build things,

so that you don't need the car every day,

then it's not a big deal.

It's not,

it's just,

it's just frustrating.

It's like,

so,

somehow,

it's just,

it's just frustrating.

It's like,

so,

simultaneously,

so easy,

and such a,

for the moment,

and track the whole thing.

And the frustrating thing for me more than anything,

is that they don't get how ridiculous it is,

that you're on the freeway,

and you are traffic,

and you go into,

like,

you go into LA,

and you see the 405,

and everybody's like,

they're bumper to bumper,

and everybody's got to drive themselves.

Everybody's got to have their own fucking car,

and fuel those and all this.

And just,

the difference between that,

and solving the same problem

in a way that makes more sense,

like a fucking train,

train would be,

I'm very pro-train,

in case you can't talk.

But you know,

train,

you can have one,

even if you don't automate it,

which is trivial,

like,

they've had automated trains

for,

I don't know,

when the,

the number one line in Paris was automated,

but it's been decades,

at least,

and they've been able to automate stuff

for a very, very long time,

that way.

Yeah,

it's not like new technology.

It's not like self-driving cars

that were kind of like on the cusp

of being able to manage that quite.

This is stuff that you've been able to do

for decades and decades.

And even if you didn't do that,

you could have one conductor

driving the equivalent of how many cars

worth the people.

And,

of course, you put automation,

and you put all this kind of stuff,

and you could have stuff

scheduled,

you could have a high frequency.

And it's just,

in any way,

you want to look at it,

it's more efficient,

and frankly,

more comfortable.

Yeah,

and if you build it right,

and you think about it,

you don't make it

actively hostile to people,

then,

and you don't do the thing that,

like,

oh,

yeah,

we have the light rail in Phoenix,

but,

first off,

they only come every,

I don't know if it's seven minutes,

or 15 minutes,

whatever it is,

it's too long,

the frequency is not there.

But also,

it's so fucking slow.

It's like,

I can,

I could certainly drive

from Tempe,

by ASU campus,

the downtown.

I can drive faster than I can take the train.

That's not how it should be.

Public transit

should and could be faster,

or at the very least,

has fast.

Now,

granted,

you have to park,

and all those kind of stuff,

and to end.

So when you add that in,

the public transit's may be a wash,

but,

you know,

and again,

I'm glad that Phoenix has a light rail.

I'm glad that there's some progress in that direction.

But you just look at it,

and it's like,

I,

I guess I would feel better about it

if human lifetimes were a lot longer.

But I look at it,

and I'm like,

I can imagine,

I can squint and see,

maybe in 50 years,

Phoenix will be like a city

that actually,

assuming that it's still high,

but I've all of those.

It'll be a city that has,

a kind of,

okay, public transit system.

And it might have a few other metro lines,

and I can imagine that,

like,

Bangkok will have,

all of their metro systems interconnected,

and the stations,

not like,

forced people to walk,

a ridiculous,

and like,

it really is kind of funny,

how you have these stations,

that are like,

two stations will be adjacent to each other

on the different systems,

but it's still a good 15 minute walk

from one station to the next,

and then, of course,

you have a different card on the two lines,

and it's just like,

why, why do you guys do this?

And I do know,

you know,

part of this,

unfortunately,

is just things happen on a very long time,

scale compared to human experience.

And you look at Tokyo,

and they,

they still kind of have separate private systems,

but it's also sort of interconnected,

and you get a squeaky card,

and it just works.

They'll have that,

I would assume,

and eventually,

inevitably here,

eventually,

inevitably,

Phoenix will be okay.

LA is working on it.

Like,

I,

I'm not saying that I want to live in LA,

but I can imagine,

a time where,

like,

the public transit there is actually,

not so bad,

and there are,

there are places already there,

now that you could live,

without a car,

but,

I can't,

and I,

I think,

I think a lot about this,

like,

where do I want to live,

what do I want to,

I,

I feel so much better,

so much better outside of the US,

and it's not just the walkable city

and the public transit,

it's just like everything.

I don't even know,

I don't even know what it is.

And I know what part of it is kind of like,

oh, you're sort of quasi on vacation,

in some sense,

like,

it's different than,

or quotes real life,

but,

I think a lot of it is just,

like, there's something about that country,

that it is,

you think about,

like,

guns are so easy to come by there,

like,

getting healthcare is not easy,

getting all of the things that you need in life,

is not easy,

getting,

you know,

food is kind of expensive,

and it's unreasonable,

and if you want to go on,

if you want to point,

you click murder device,

A,

you can do it all over the place,

and it's pretty cheap,

and also,

like,

you'll get people arguing with you that,

oh,

guns don't kill people's guns.

Why are you calling it a point,

because it is a point,

and click,

murder device.

It is a remote control

that lets you,

and somebody's life,

at a distance,

that's literally all it is.

And yeah,

you might be using it for target practice,

or whatever other wankery you're using it for,

but it's design intent,

is to kill people,

and to kill other animals.

And you can sit there and say,

oh, you can kill people with a car,

or you could do it,

but the car is not designed to kill people.

The car is not,

like,

it's not,

like,

engineers have figured out the best way to murder people with a car.

Like,

that's not how it works.

And it's,

like,

it's frustrating to me,

just dealing with that kind of stuff.

You know,

I know this is kind of a global thing,

but the US is really just so full of it.

So full of that.

And,

you know,

you have the Trump people,

the mega,

the red man of people.

And if you also have the blue mega people,

and it's just,

like,

there are people there that I'm,

comfortable talking with and hanging out with,

but if you just deal with a random person there,

there are so many people

that are just not anywhere near,

you know,

it's not that I think they're bad people.

It's just,

they've been so propagandized and they're so,

Balkanized,

that they,

they just are,

are not,

like,

you have to tap dance around certain subjects,

or it's going to be painful.

And it's just not fun to me.

It's not enjoyable.

I don't like that,

you know,

for as much as I criticize this place,

for having a lot of poverty.

I don't like that if I'm walking around L.A.

the frequency of places that are nice,

like,

here there are places that are uncomfortable.

I don't mean that I feel any way in danger,

but it's just like,

this is really impoverished.

But you still like you walk around

and there's stuff there that you might want to do,

you feel like,

then it feels okay walking,

right?

Like you're weird walking.

L.A.

is more walkable than then Phoenix

for as much as people say,

like, you know,

walking L.A.

and then laugh at it.

It's kind of a walkable-ish city

and there are nice areas around it,

but you very quickly will get into areas where you're like,

this just feels crappy.

It's just,

it's not pretty.

It's not like,

not that aesthetics is the whole thing,

but you know,

you don't want to be walking in a lot of places.

You don't feel great in a lot of places.

The sidewalks are covered in literal shit

and God knows what else.

And it smells,

and it's just weird and gr-

and yeah, I mean,

I know you go like,

go on New York smells like piss too, Scott.

Yeah,

but it's different.

It's really,

and I know,

I'm not saying New York is amazing,

but you know,

it's true,

like New York and Paris have poor people,

and they have a lot of things that are not ideal,

like being in LA,

and being in Phoenix especially,

you feel like a fucking weirdo when you're walking.

If you're outside of a few small areas in Phoenix,

it's literally a desert.

And when I say that,

I don't mean like in the sense of a climactic desert,

where it's like dry and all this kind of stuff.

I just mean,

nobody's walking there

and you'll go a full city block before you get anywhere,

and run into anything.

And I'm just looking like now,

like I see people walking on the street,

as they're passing a lot of apartments,

the passing stores and restaurants,

and there's stuff that you might want to do there.

I'd even if there's not right immediately

where you are,

there's stuff a little bit ahead and a little bit behind,

wherever you are.

And, you know,

I mean,

Paris is,

and again,

there are some places that are nicer than others.

If you go to the suburbs,

it's not my favorite place.

But if you're inside of the city,

you could just walk and walk

and walk all day and wander,

and it's nice.

It's pretty.

It's just,

and I understand also,

part of this is just,

it's an older city that's kind of had more time to sort of stew.

And they did have,

this is one of those things,

where he owns,

and my perspective on it has changed over time,

that Housemen did the layout for the city,

and this sort of master planning,

so to speak,

that's probably not the greatest word.

But,

which I used to really like,

and I still like it,

because ultimately it makes it a nice city,

but then there are certain things there,

where it's like,

when you set it up so that,

it's very difficult to have a revolution there.

There's,

there's stuff that people have done,

that,

on the surface,

kind of seems nice,

and then you think about it,

and it's like,

that's actually not as cool as you think.

But still,

I would not try to live there.

I would not try to live someplace,

where it's nice to walk.

I would not try to live someplace,

where there's nice stuff to look at.

And there's like some density.

Like, I know people that like,

it's just weird how much the United States has sort of twisted ideas about what is freedom,

and what it's like to have a good life or anything like this.

And their ideas are generally,

you're going to be isolated from everybody else.

You're going to be going from inside of your personal home

to inside of your car,

to inside of your office,

and barely interact with people,

and not have any kind of community,

or any kind of real community,

certainly not going to run into people on the street,

that just wandering around.

You're certainly not going to have like,

social interactions with people that are not just transactional,

customer service,

kinds of interactions.

And it's,

it's,

it's very soulless,

and it's kind of gross,

it's just not,

it's not fun, it's not great.

It's sort of like,

the,

I don't know if Similac wrote is like exactly the right word,

but it is kind of,

it's a little bit of that.

Like,

you have things that sort of seem like social interactions,

but they're not,

and it's,

even in the moment,

you know that they're not really real,

but you kind of feel it.

And just the difference in like,

being a regular someplace there.

And you know,

you have these interactions where you kind of feel like your friends,

with people that they're not really friends.

This is,

I,

I've always kind of been aware of this,

and I always felt,

you're about some of it,

but,

really came into focus when my,

French former roommate after grad school,

was talking about this,

and it was just,

in,

in France,

you're not,

and again,

I'm not saying like,

France is,

is great.

I,

I really want to say like,

there are a lot of,

a lot of problems,

right?

But,

one thing that he was commenting on is,

and a lot of people like being in the US,

because you have these sort of,

very friendly interactions,

and people will randomly talk to people,

and all of this kind of stuff.

But at the same time,

it feels good,

but you also have this thing where it's like,

oh yeah,

it feels good,

and you feel like you're having a social connection with somebody,

but in reality,

it's not,

it's not real.

It's, it's very superficial,

and it's very,

ephemeral,

and there's no substance to it.

Like,

it's,

it's the simulation of,

something that kind of vaguely resembles,

friendship,

and connection.

And it's very hard,

like,

shockingly hard,

I found,

to really connect to people,

there,

connect with people there.

And I'm not saying that there's

another country that's like,

amazing at it,

but you know,

they're just going with France,

because I spent some time there.

What you can do there,

if you,

like,

again,

it's not easy to connect with people,

but if you start making connections,

you start getting,

like,

much deeper friendships,

and it,

it's,

it's real in a different way,

then,

you know,

the US,

and you'll,

you'll find the,

you know,

there are people you can count on more.

There are people who,

seeing,

genuinely,

like,

interested in spending time with you,

versus the US,

like,

you get people who seem very friendly,

and they seem like they're,

a friend,

and then,

you know,

you'll stop making any effort,

and you just never talk to them,

and it's just,

it's fucking,

it's, it's weird,

and gross,

and it's,

it's kind of,

and I don't,

I don't blame people for that,

specifically,

I think it's just like,

how we're raised,

and the kind of,

culture,

like,

that we have,

but it's,

it's very alienated.

It,

it feels very,

very bad,

you know,

it doesn't feel great.

And,

again,

I'm not,

I'm not saying that,

like,

any places amazing,

but there are places that are much better than that.

Now,

the public transit thing is huge.

The lack of health care,

it's,

it's huge.

It,

like, I mean,

you think about,

like,

just how different your life is,

when you know,

like,

if you live there,

you know,

all it takes is a moment,

and,

you know,

what happens,

and your life is destroyed.

Whether it's your car,

especially,

especially if you're not rich,

if you're rich,

then it's different.

But if you're not rich,

and I mean,

when I say this,

I don't mean like,

you're like,

you're like,

fairly normal,

averageish person,

person,

your car breaks down,

and it will fuck your life,

or you get another expense

that was unexpected,

and things are completely fucked up for you,

or you get sick,

or,

and you just go through the list,

you know,

like,

oh, you lost your job.

Now,

what are you going to do?

Do you have friends or family that you can stay with?

Now,

you can be a burden on them,

and kind of feel uncomfortable there,

and feel like you're,

and maybe have a place to say,

or if you don't have that,

through whatever reason,

it might not be your fault,

it might just be bad luck.

You don't have friends and family that you can stay with.

You end up on the street.

That's that's super easy in that country.

And, you know,

it's,

and whether you're in that situation directly immediately or not,

I think most people there know at some level

that that is in the cards,

like,

there is a series of things that could happen,

that would not be through any real fault of your own.

And then mostly,

could just be like random,

you know, like just shit happens.

A couple of things go wrong,

and then your life completely unfolds,

and,

or are you going to be able to retire?

Are you going to have to work for the rest of your fucking life?

And,

you know,

I talk about this a lot,

but there's,

who works in facilities at the place that I work today,

as you.

And she's like,

my mom's age.

She's like,

in her 80s.

But she's cleaning the place.

And she's,

I'm sure she's worked very hard,

physical stuff for whole life.

And through,

I would say,

no fault of her own.

She's just in the situation where,

like,

probably can never retire.

Probably can't really afford to get sick.

You know,

like,

how does she even have time or money,

a socializer to do anything other than work?

And you just look at that,

and it's just like a fucking dystopia.

And that's,

I mean,

I think about myself personally,

unless I somehow make,

like,

something happens,

and I make a ridiculous amount of money.

I currently have no plausible path

to ever retire.

And I'm very interested in,

well,

I mean,

it's an interesting thing.

And I see,

this will be kind of like,

I'm starting to wrap up.

Uh,

the next 10 minutes should be about the last,

but I see Robert Reich talking about how,

people are,

people are saying,

you should retire and you're,

you know,

you're older and you should,

and this guy's,

what he's doing is,

basically retirement.

For at least my idea of retirement,

like this idea that,

I don't think,

like,

sitting on your ass is a thing that appeals to most people.

I don't think it's something that,

anyone really wants to do.

It's different if you're not able to do it,

but,

you know,

if you're physically and mentally able to do,

some stuff,

and make a contribution to,

to the world and,

you know,

enjoy things,

and maybe add some value to society.

I think that's,

that's actually not bad.

The problem is like,

having to work.

And,

what he,

like his,

his entire career,

compared with,

say that woman,

who is just cleaning,

you know,

like emptying trash bins and vacuuming,

and all this kind of stuff,

his entire career is basically retire,

compared to her.

And he could,

actually not work,

that he'd be fine.

He could just chill for the rest of his life.

If he wanted to,

we're as she never could.

And,

just,

I don't know,

I get annoyed with the sky,

because it's like,

I,

I do have enough of the lid brain

that,

you know,

or recovering lid brain,

that the stuff that he does,

kind of appeals to me.

Just like Obama.

Like,

I have that professor real tone,

the,

just general vibe and the coolness,

and all this stuff about him,

the aesthetics, all of that.

It resonates with me.

It feels good.

I like it.

I'm embarrassed by it,

especially knowing,

knowing what I know now,

about how he was,

well,

I can't,

I can't claim that I didn't know this at the time,

but he was blowing up weddings,

and kids,

and,

you know,

like drowning people,

and all this kind of stuff.

I don't,

not a great guy.

Not a great guy.

He made sure that W and his administration

wouldn't face consequences

for gross violations.

Of human rights,

making torture cool again.

Yeah.

I mean,

I remember,

this is a total fucking mind-fuck,

but like,

when I was a kid,

you don't even have to go back that far.

There was a time where

the idea of somebody being a Nazi

was just obviously a born,

and a terrible,

and punching Nazis was like a no-brainer, of course.

And now,

it's not so clear.

There was a time when I was younger,

where torture was a thing that you didn't fucking do.

Now, it wasn't,

to be fair,

the US has,

it's not new that the US is torturing people.

It's just more open about it now.

It's obviously a dystopian hellscape,

and all of this kind of stuff.

But,

there was a time where at least people thought

that it was a bad thing.

Like if it's generally accepted,

that was not something that you wouldn't want to do.

But now,

it's pretty,

pretty widely accepted.

It's very disturbing how that's changed,

and in short order as well.

And,

you know,

I don't know,

it really,

it really gets to me,

actually,

like so many things like that.

But Obama contributed to that.

Bill Clinton really contributed to a lot of the stuff

about like destroying,

not that we had a great social safety network,

or so social safety net in the US,

but completely decimating

to the extent that it did exist,

what we had,

and making it,

you know,

the euphemistically called welfare reform,

turning that into a situation where it's like,

oh,

you know,

if you can work,

you have absolutely,

that's not how this should be.

And,

and also like,

and understand,

especially for you,

unfortunately,

this isn't just a US thing,

but a lot of people are brainwashed,

and then propaganda is then

to thinking,

everyone desperately,

absolutely needs to be working.

And when I say working,

I mean,

like,

in the sense of,

you have a boss,

you have somebody who can tell you what to do,

you have somebody who can fire you,

and ruin your life.

There's a thing,

like,

the amount of stress that you have,

when you're in this situation,

where like,

somebody,

if they don't like you,

they can destroy your life,

just utterly destroy your life,

on a whim,

and based on personal stuff,

or if they like you,

they can,

and you have to do the dance,

and especially for somebody like me,

that is not,

you know,

I am not a political creature,

I'm not somebody who,

is comfortable,

naturally,

like sucking up the people,

or,

you know,

dancing for people,

and,

but I think nobody really is.

I think that's something like,

some people have developed the ability to do,

but I don't think it's a thing

that people are just innately,

like,

oh,

I'm graded just, you know,

like,

pretending in all of this kind of stuff.

I think,

like,

honestly part of,

well,

I don't want to wrap up,

I don't want to get into another whole line of discussion there,

but,

that's something I'll talk about later.

Just,

no.

It's kind of thinking about how,

I think,

which people understand at some level,

that it's all a charad,

and they're sort of like,

fraying that they get found out,

because they know that it's not a meritocracy,

and they don't want people to realize,

and they're,

just,

especially on the US,

but in the same sense,

the other people,

like normal people are afraid of the game being,

being called out and ending.

Um,

anything.

And it's not just rich people,

but especially, like,

you look at career politicians,

for example,

you can see that they really,

really, really don't want to go into the air quotes for real world.

Um,

but,

that the real world is not what it should be.

The real world,

like you think about it,

if you have an existence,

where,

you are going to be okay,

where you're,

no matter what,

that you're going to have shelter,

you're going to be comfortable.

You're not going to have like,

opulent settings,

but you will be comfortable.

You'll be in a situation

where you can actually relax

or work on your own stuff.

Um,

and you'll have a place to stay.

And you have food and all that kind of stuff.

And you don't have to,

worry that,

you know,

like if your boss is asking you to do

unethical or horrible things,

or,

you know,

if you're a politician,

you don't have to worry that,

um,

if you lose the election,

then you're not going to have all this nice stuff.

And you're going to be,

out on the street with other people.

It's,

frankly,

it's one reason why politicians have

a direct personal interest

and improving things,

because,

um,

I understand that they think.

They want to make things better for themselves,

but making things better for the average person

would make things better for themselves,

and it would,

uh,

get them into about,

anyway,

because,

I don't want to go down that path,

but it's a thing that I just,

I get annoyed with.

I think about a lot,

um,

but,

but anyway,

um,

Robert Wright,

just looking at him,

talking about this retirement stuff,

and I keep seeing him talking about this,

and you're empatheticating about it.

And it's just so out of touch,

it's such like this boomer shit,

where it's like,

um,

you are a person who your whole life

has had so much

relative privilege,

and I'm not even saying,

like,

I'm not saying that I wanted him

his life to be shitier,

uh,

but more people's lives

should be easier

as kind of what I'm saying.

Um,

you know,

like,

and you just don't have a perspective,

I think this is part of the problem.

People who think that the economy

was amazing for the last four years,

they don't even know

they don't even know what the fuck

it's been like for people.

Um,

they don't,

and to be fair,

also,

like,

I've been relatively privileged to do.

I just have,

like,

but I,

I haven't been working on a roof,

and a situation where,

you know,

if I get something happening to my eye,

and I need to be in a prone position

for like a couple months.

It destroys me.

It completely destroys me.

I had money to get my eye fixed.

I had insurance for it.

I had some degree of freedom to do it.

Um,

and then I had the ability to do,

you know,

I don't have like a lot,

but I was able to take,

uh,

the tiny little bit of,

uh,

a pair of quotes for retirement that I have,

and travel a little bit,

and do the stuff that I'm doing now.

And,

you know,

a lot of people don't have that.

A lot of people don't have,

even that.

And everybody should have more.

And everybody should just be,

you know,

it's just frustrating.

Everybody should be okay.

Like,

that should not be a controversial statement.

Like,

you should not have the situation where it's like,

you know,

things could happen where you are just an absolute,

destitution and desperation.

And things could happen where like,

what,

what are you going to do?

How are you going to eat?

How are you going to survive?

How are you going to have shelter?

How are you not going to be out in that rain?

When it's raining?

Um,

or out in the sun?

You know,

you think about like,

Phoenix?

Like,

just the amount of heat?

When it's hot in the summer there,

um,

it's so miserable.

And there are people living on the street

with no air conditioning in that heat.

And,

and of course,

fucking cops like pushing them down on the ground

and giving them burns

from the asphalt is a thing that happens.

Anyway,

I don't know how I got from advertising to this.

Um,

I,

I think,

I think the,

hopefully that was coherent.

But,

it's kind of,

it's kind of,

I don't know.

I'm always,

I just,

I know there's too much meta here.

But I'm always interested in just sort of the thought process

and sort of how I go from one thing to the next and where I end up.

And I've never,

somehow I've never been able to make one of these,

uh,

with like an outline or a plan that I really stick to.

I always,

look,

I definitely hit the,

the points that I wanted to hit,

but then I kind of meander off.

And it's just what I do.

It seems to be the thing that I like.

But it's,

it's interesting to me how it,

it wanders and where it goes.

I hope it's interesting to you.

Um,

but anyway,

with that,

I think,

I'm going to go try to get something to eat.

And hopefully don't get rang on again,

but it looks,

it actually looks like it's pretty clear,

and I don't think it's going to rain again for a while.

So,

I will enjoy the cooler and cleaner air.

With that,

I will talk to you soon.

And I don't know.

Well,

I'll probably record one more of these in Bangkok,

and then I'll have a friend in Tokyo and Kyoto,

uh,

for the following week.

Might not record one then,

uh,

but I will record another one from Japan,

and probably two.

And then I'll be back.

It's wild.

I'm down to like three more weeks,

and I'll be back to the US.

I have to say,

like,

uh,

if I was in a position,

I wouldn't quite say that I would never go back.

Like,

my mom and sister are there.

I would go back to visit them.

But if I was in a position,

I wouldn't just,

like spend most of my time outside of that country.

I,

I just,

I don't like it.

I feel so much better.

I don't remember peating myself here,

but I feel so much better.

Outside of it,

and not in it.

And, you know,

like seeing it from a distance,

it's disturbing.

I don't like it.

I feel like I probably should use my privilege

to try to make things better for people.

But also,

it's kind of like,

like looking at the,

Gaza,

like,

you see this shit,

and you know it's terrible,

but you also,

like,

what can you personally do as an individual

about it,

other than,

like,

there's something that I could do

physically by being there

versus just speaking about it

and doing what I can from a distance.

I don't know.

I don't know.

I know,

like, you know,

the people who are doing

the freedom of hotels

and all of this kind of stuff

they're doing something.

But at the same time,

like,

are they,

they do they really expect

to do anything that's not

similar to what?

And, you know,

it's just,

it's so wild

that that,

I mean,

this is another thing.

Like you know,

with the perspective of history,

but you don't even need it.

You can see right now,

but certainly with the perspective of history,

people are going to look back

and think like,

what,

how was this a thing?

How was this a thing that people

allowed to happen?

How was this a thing

that the entire rest of the world

let happen?

And didn't stop?

Did not get food in there?

Didn't,

in the embargo?

Like, didn't end the blockade?

Didn't do something?

And there are so many people

who could do something.

There are so many countries,

certainly mine,

but not just mine,

who could do something

and are not doing something.

And the best we have right now

is just like,

yeah,

people,

like literally just fucking people

doing the freedom of flotilla

or you know,

like talking about it,

raising money

for individuals there

or for groups,

and you know,

like trying desperately

to do what we can,

if there's not a lot you can do.

And it's so frustrating,

it's such a mind-fuck,

that that is a thing

and people can see it.

And it's,

you know,

I don't think it will go on forever.

I think it's like apartheid.

It's like,

the show,

you know,

it will end,

but it will end

after a lot of people are dead,

and it will end after so much

unnecessary suffering.

And it's just like,

why do we have to go through this exercise?

Why can't we just get to the end?

Why can't we just get to the fucking end

and fix this shit?

And it's,

I think eventually,

assuming again,

the human civilization doesn't collapse

and all this kind of stuff.

Eventually,

I think there's absolutely no doubt

that whatever exists

where the U.S.

is now

will have

a social safety net

and will have universal health care

at some point,

and will have cities

that are actually quite livable.

And it's just like,

why do you have to go through all the bullshit

before you get there?

Why can't we just short-circuit that

and get there?

That's my general,

it's just so frustrating.

It's like all this fucking bullshit

audible air quotes,

AI crap.

Like,

you can see

that it's just a sham.

You can see

that it's not going to end well

for any of the people that are

throwing ridiculous amounts of money

and destroying companies

and destroying people's jobs

and lives

of chasing after it.

You can see where it's going,

right?

You don't have to be that fucking smarter

that is not that deep.

But we have to go through the fucking exercise

and it's just,

it's so tedious and so annoying

and frankly, so boring.

And in addition to just being like awful,

it's so fucking boring.

It's like,

why can't we just skip this part?

Why do we have to make people suffer

and have things be terrible

and waste so much energy

and so many resources

on something that ultimately

is going to amount to nothing?

And like,

I was on the,

this will be the last thing I could talk about,

but I was on the Metro a few days ago

and I'm there

and some dude is there

speaking English to I assume his girlfriend

and he's just explaining like apparently

they're heading to the airport to go to Vietnam

and he's explaining that,

oh, I thought that I didn't need a visa.

Of all places that I went the only place

that I had to get a visa in advance

was Vietnam.

I got the 10 day

or you have a 240 hour thing

you can do for China

if you're from the US

so you don't need to get a visa in advance for that.

If I was going back,

I'd probably stay longer

but the 10 days was not bad

but Vietnam

you need to get one of the advance

and maybe there are countries that don't need to

most of them there

and so he talked to chatGPT

and apparently chatGPT told them

now you don't need one

because you've got a green passport or whatever the fuck

and it turned out he didn't need one

and I don't know how he finally figured it out

but he figured it out on the train

and he's talking to her and he's like,

oh, shit, I can't go to Vietnam

and she's incredulous

and she obviously had her

but it's just

people are going to remember this stuff

whether or not I don't know that Sam Altman

will face direct personal consequences

for this shit.

He certainly should.

He certainly should be

he is committing mass murder

at scale

and he is also committing mass

mass of amounts of fraud

and mass of amounts of theft

and wasting so many resources

and how many people have been fucked over

like that who believed

the nonsense that this thing is telling them

how many people have been killed

because they're talking to that shit

and it's advocating it

or it's telling them, you know

just being like super abusive

and saying like, oh yeah you're right

you're absolutely right

you're blah blah blah

and then you know how many people

how many people

and you think about it

like whether or not

there are consequences

whether or not

people decide

or eventually people will decide

that statistical mass murder

is mass murder

as it obviously is

and there will be consequences

for people directly

but whether or not that happens

anytime soon or to him

people will remember

people will know

like this guy I hope is learning his lesson

and is never going to stop

fucking trust that shit again

and the thing that's annoying about it

also is actually like if somebody actually did

invent genuine AI at some point

like genuine AI

people are going to be so biased against it

because of all this fucking fraudulent shit

that these just bullshit factories

and it's just going to ruin things

for so many people

and it's so fucking annoying

and yet these people

they're just dumping toxic waste

into the river

right upstream of

where people are getting their drinking water from

and they don't care

because they're making money

doing it

and they have zero so far responsibility

but they're ruining things

for so many people

and fucking things up

and it's irritating

with that

don't use that shit please

I say I use

what is it called?

I do have a deep seek

is that what it's called?

Occasionally, I've used it

and I've been using it

I've completely convinced myself that it's completely

fucking worthless

like it's something

I've met in arguments with people

I guess I do have one more thing to talk about

this is

I've gotten into arguments with people about this

and they're like oh well I could never

use Google or

search stuff

because it just never worked for me

but this stuff does

and this is a youth thing

this is a fucking youth thing

you don't know how to do research

and you never learned

and

now you have this fake friend

which is really dystopian

by the way it's like a fake friend

with no perspective

and no actual

doesn't care about you just pretend

and it's just like

a literal stochastic parrot

sitting there talking to you

and pretending to be your friend

but your fake friend

your automated bullshit factory

that is extraordinarily

resource intensive

and based on plagiarism

that thing

it may make you feel

like you're getting answers

this is part of the problem

it makes you feel

like you're getting answers

but in reality

like if you literally put in the same prompt

and then not that you need a prompt

like figure out how to do search

and do an actual search

but if you put in that search

search terms

you'll get basically the same answers

from

.go

it's

or some other search

like Ecosia

or even bang

or Google has a fucking gym

and I think that you can't turn off that

but back when Google

didn't suck

it had that

and I really am increasingly convinced

that there's just no point

to this shit

other than if you want something

to just lie to you

if you want something

to pretend

like you're so isolated

and you need a fake friend

that's literally the only utility

of the shit

and that is not good

that's sick

it's fucked

you need

actual human connections

not fake connections

to a fake machine

as no intelligence

but anyway

with that

don't use it

thank you very much

it's a joke

...more