Today I'm tackling something a little different: taxes. After spending years writing my book Love Quotient and other projects in physics and math, I funded that work through earnings in the tech sector, specifically long-term capital gains. That led me into a maze of federal versus California tax treatment, amended returns, and a frustrating \"screw you letter\" from the IRS demanding paperwork they could have processed themselves if they'd just shared their own software with taxpayers. I talk about why that doesn't happen, who benefits from keeping it that way, and the surprising silver lining: California's tax agency was actually reasonable to deal with, which genuinely surprised me.
Then I shift gears completely into something I've been working on for the past year: a new way of understanding scalar and vector quantities in physics. I unpack why \"scalars\" like mass, temperature, and length aren't really scalars at all, but one-dimensional vectors tied to units, and how units themselves function as bases for these vector spaces. From there, I show how ordinary vector quantities like force and velocity are tensor products of geometric vectors with these one-dimensional magnitude spaces, and how this framework recovers the classic magnitude-and-direction picture of physics in a cleaner, more unified way.
In this episode you will learn:
(00:00) Why I ended up filing amended tax returns after years of writing my book and research projects
(03:43) Why government tax agencies don't give taxpayers access to their own processing software
(04:18) How political incentives keep tax prep companies like H&R Block and Liberty Tax in business
(06:00) Why \"scalar\" quantities like mass and temperature aren't actually scalars
(09:27) How units function as bases for one-dimensional vector spaces
(10:00) Why changing units works exactly like a change of basis for vectors
(10:47) How to recover both magnitude and direction from this unified framework
Let’s connect!
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