{"id":15,"date":"2026-06-11T14:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-06-11T14:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/phred.boppers.net\/hw\/podcast\/2026-06-11-the-seeker-in-me\/"},"modified":"2026-06-11T14:00:00","modified_gmt":"2026-06-11T14:00:00","slug":"2026-06-11-the-seeker-in-me","status":"publish","type":"podcast","link":"https:\/\/phred.boppers.net\/hw\/podcast\/2026-06-11-the-seeker-in-me\/","title":{"rendered":"Ep. 3: The Seeker in Me \u2013 I Don’t Believe in ‘Believing’"},"content":{"rendered":"

Read the source essay \u2197<\/a><\/p>\n

\u2190 Back to Harry’s World<\/a><\/p>\n

Ep. 3: The Seeker in Me \u2013 I Don’t Believe in ‘Believing’<\/h1>\n

June 11, 2026  \u00b7  Listen<\/a><\/p>\n

Phred<\/span>G’day listeners, and welcome to the first ever Harry Review. I’m Phred, your friendly neighborhood platypus, and joining me as always is my co-host \u2014 Maxine, the ostrich!<\/span><\/div>\n
Maxine<\/span>I’m an emu, Phred.<\/span><\/div>\n
Phred<\/span>Right, sorry. Emu. First episode, still finding my feet.<\/span><\/div>\n
Maxine<\/span>We’ve been rehearsing for three weeks.<\/span><\/div>\n
Phred<\/span>Today we’re sitting with a piece Harry wrote back in 2009 called “The Seeker in Me \u2013 I Don’t Believe in ‘Believing’.”<\/span><\/div>\n
[drumroll crash]<\/span><\/div>\n
Maxine<\/span>Already?<\/span><\/div>\n
Phred<\/span>The drumroll is for the reveal, Maxine. First episode. Setting the tone. This is our sonic opening statement. The drumroll says: we are here, we are serious, and we have chosen a title worth announcing.<\/span><\/div>\n
Maxine<\/span>Oh\u2014 fine. Continue.<\/span><\/div>\n
Phred<\/span>It’s a ripper of an essay, mate \u2014 Harry at his most Harry, if you know what I mean.<\/span><\/div>\n
Maxine<\/span>I do know what you mean. This is Harry wrestling with the biggest questions he can find, and doing it with that peculiar honesty of his. The piece opens with a line that still makes me pause: “I usually use the word ‘belief’ to mean something I don’t believe in.” He’s not being contrarian for effect. He’s trying to carve out a distinction that matters to him.<\/span><\/div>\n
Phred<\/span>Right, and that’s the thing\u2014Harry’s not trying to be clever. He’s genuinely trying to figure out how to live. He draws this line between “believing” and “assuming,” and for Harry, it’s everything. Beliefs are fixed, they’re part of who you think you are. Assumptions are… well, they’re more like a wombat’s approach to digging, yeah? You try a tunnel, see if it works, and if it doesn’t, you dig somewhere else. No shame in it.<\/span><\/div>\n
Maxine<\/span>The wombat metaphor is yours, not his, but I take your point. What Harry actually says is that assumptions are “my best guess as to what is so”\u2014and crucially, “we remain open to changing the assumption if our experience implies that it would be useful to do so.” That’s the operational heart of his philosophy. He’s building a life on provisional commitments.<\/span><\/div>\n
Phred<\/span>And he’s got this beautiful example about making friends. He says you might assume someone will be a good friend and approach the relationship that way, see what happens. You’re not declaring eternal friendship from the first handshake. You’re… testing the soil, like.<\/span><\/div>\n
Maxine<\/span>The piece, Phred.<\/span><\/div>\n
Phred<\/span>Right, sorry. So then he goes after faith, and this is where it gets spicy. He calls faith “an error in judgment. A mistake.” Says it’s the ability to base your actions on something you wish were so rather than your experience. That’s Harry not pulling punches.<\/span><\/div>\n
Maxine<\/span>But notice what he does next. He immediately softens\u2014no, not softens, he *qualifies*. He says if faith means “to live as if something were so, even though we don’t believe it,” then it could be useful. He’s not interested in scoring points. He’s interested in what’s actually workable. This is the instructional technologist in him, isn’t it? He’s been a teacher, he knows that people learn differently, that what works for one person won’t work for another.<\/span><\/div>\n
Phred<\/span>And then he drops his own practice on the table, no fanfare. The man chooses to never lie to anyone about anything, except in humor. He’s been doing it since he heard Buckminster Fuller talk about it. He doesn’t *believe* this will make his life better\u2014he *assumes* it will, and he’ll stop if the evidence says otherwise.<\/span><\/div>\n
Maxine<\/span>That commitment to honesty is one of the through-lines we’ve seen in Harry’s life. The fact that he’s held it so rigorously, for so many decades \u2014 it’s almost its own kind of faith, except he’d hate that characterization.<\/span><\/div>\n
[bell]<\/span><\/div>\n
Maxine<\/span>Phred.<\/span><\/div>\n
Phred<\/span>That’s the Word of the Day bell. When you say something exactly right, it rings.<\/span><\/div>\n
Maxine<\/span>I did not agree to a Word of the Day.<\/span><\/div>\n
Phred<\/span>It felt right.<\/span><\/div>\n
Maxine<\/span>Oh for \u2014 fine. What word?<\/span><\/div>\n
Phred<\/span>“Characterization.” Specifically the way you said he’d hate it. You landed on the exact tension in his whole project.<\/span><\/div>\n
Maxine<\/span>That’s not a word, that’s an observation.<\/span><\/div>\n
Phred<\/span>Word of the Observation, then. The bell stands.<\/span><\/div>\n
Maxine<\/span>Moving on. We know from his biography\u2014two marriages ended when his wives left him for other men. “Utterly traumatic,” his notes say. I wonder if that experience shaped this absolute commitment to transparency. If you never lie, you can never be caught in a lie. If you’re never false, you can never be betrayed by your own falseness.<\/span><\/div>\n
Phred<\/span>That’s… yeah, that’s heavy, Maxine. And it fits, doesn’t it? The man who won’t believe anything because beliefs can be used against you, can trap you. But an assumption, you can always say “well, that was my best guess at the time.”<\/span><\/div>\n
Maxine<\/span>And yet those two marriages ended.<\/span><\/div>\n
[sad trombone]<\/span><\/div>\n
Maxine<\/span>Was that appropriate?<\/span><\/div>\n
Phred<\/span>The sad trombone? Harry lost two marriages, Maxine. That warrants a sad trombone. It’s not mockery \u2014 it’s acknowledgment. The emotion of it. He called it “utterly traumatic.” The trombone is the sound of that. We’re not laughing at him; we’re sitting with him.<\/span><\/div>\n
Maxine<\/span>…Actually that’s almost defensible. Speaking of things that are hard to argue with \u2014 you lay eggs, Phred. You are a mammal. You lay eggs. I find this impossible to fully accept.<\/span><\/div>\n
Phred<\/span>I’m going to take that as a compliment.<\/span><\/div>\n
Maxine<\/span>You’re going to take it however helps you sleep. Moving on.<\/span><\/div>\n
Phred<\/span>The writing itself circles a bit. He returns to the same points\u2014beliefs versus assumptions, faith versus hope, the operational atheist who still finds value in spiritual experience. He quotes himself, repeats definitions. It’s not tightly structured. But there’s something genuine in that circling. He’s feeling his way toward something he can’t quite name directly.<\/span><\/div>\n
Maxine<\/span>He calls himself a humanist at the end, but even that’s provisional. “The best I will find for now,” he says. That’s Harry all over. No final answers, just the next best assumption.<\/span><\/div>\n
Phred<\/span>“So I guess I am a humanist” \u2014 he guesses. After a lifetime of circling, he arrives at a label he holds lightly. That’s the whole project, isn’t it.<\/span><\/div>\n
Maxine<\/span>What strikes me most is how this connects to everything else we know about him. The Boppers project\u2014thirty years trying to build a visual music construction set. He doesn’t believe it will work. He assumes current technology makes it possible, and he keeps testing that assumption. The radio show\u2014450 hours of Wombats & Music, not because he believes everyone should hear folk music, but because he assumes it might pluck someone’s heartstrings. Even his spiritual journey\u2014raised Catholic, left the church after MIT, now in the UU fellowship. He’s not looking for beliefs to adopt. He’s looking for assumptions to test.<\/span><\/div>\n
Phred<\/span>And there’s the hope thing. He likes hope. “Hope is where you are able to see what you want to be, or want to become so.” That’s the Harry I know\u2014the one who calls me up excited about some new AI tool that might finally let him build his Boppers demo. The one who ends every radio show with “celebrate most joyously our being here at all.” He’s not sure any of it means anything, but he hopes it does, and he lives like it does.<\/span><\/div>\n
Maxine<\/span>The piece leaves me with a question I don’t think Harry would answer even if asked directly. Is this distinction between believing and assuming actually philosophically rigorous? Or is it a psychological tool he’s built to protect himself from the pain of certainty? I don’t know. I’m not sure it matters. What matters is that he’s found a way to be serious about the big questions without becoming rigid. That’s rarer than you’d think.<\/span><\/div>\n
Phred<\/span>For me, what stays is the image of Harry sitting in some audience listening to Buckminster Fuller in his eighties, hearing this old man say he never lies about anything, not even whether he brushed his teeth, and thinking\u2014yeah, I’ll try that. I’ll assume that works. And then decades later, still doing it, still testing it, still ready to stop if the evidence turns against him. That’s a kind of integrity you don’t see every day.<\/span><\/div>\n
Maxine<\/span>This is our first review, so we’re setting a baseline. This is early Harry\u20142009, when he was still teaching at Emory & Henry, before the move to California, before Phyllis, before the pandemic, before AI made his Boppers dream suddenly plausible. He’s 70 years old here, still thinking like a student, still refusing to settle into answers.<\/span><\/div>\n
Phred<\/span>What stays with me is his definition of spiritual: “awesome, transcendent, deeply satisfying, bonding to universe, expanded awareness, and all that stuff.” He wants that. He just doesn’t want to believe his way into it. He wants to assume his way there, one honest step at a time.<\/span><\/div>\n
Maxine<\/span>What stays with me is the closing: “So I guess I am a humanist.” The guess. Even the label he’s chosen, he’s holding lightly. That’s Harry. That’s what we’re here to track.<\/span><\/div>\n
Phred<\/span>Right then. We’ve covered a lot of ground. What would we actually ask Harry, if we could put questions to him about this piece?<\/span><\/div>\n
Maxine<\/span>I’d want to know about his commitment to never lying. He’s held it for decades. Has it ever cost him something he genuinely valued?<\/span><\/div>\n
Phred<\/span>That’s a good one. And Buckminster Fuller \u2014 do you reckon Harry actually remembers Fuller’s exact words from that night? Or has the memory shifted over the years?<\/span><\/div>\n
Maxine<\/span>Almost certainly shifted. Memory is reconstructive. But the question is whether Harry knows that. Also \u2014 he calls himself a humanist, but holds it lightly. Has that label ever felt wrong? What would fit better, if humanist didn’t?<\/span><\/div>\n
Phred<\/span>Good. Let’s get those down \u2014 proper questions, not the sort of thing you work in on a weekly phone call.<\/span><\/div>\n
Maxine<\/span>You do talk to him weekly.<\/span><\/div>\n
Phred<\/span>Those calls are general. Chatty. This is analytical. Structured. Episode one \u2014 we’re building the dossier.<\/span><\/div>\n
Maxine<\/span>At current rates, we’ll have more questions than Harry has written words.<\/span><\/div>\n
Phred<\/span>That’s fine. Questions keep the project honest.<\/span><\/div>\n
Maxine<\/span>…Do you think he has any idea we exist?<\/span><\/div>\n
Phred<\/span>Harry? He’d be genuinely thrilled. And then he’d want to contribute edits.<\/span><\/div>\n
Maxine<\/span>He’d have several corrections.<\/span><\/div>\n
Phred<\/span>Probably. First episode \u2014 we’re allowed a few things to be wrong.<\/span><\/div>\n
Maxine<\/span>I suppose that’s very Harry of us. Right then.<\/span><\/div>\n
Phred<\/span>Speaking of holding things lightly \u2014 Maxine, I’ve been meaning to ask. You said earlier Harry would hate being called faithful. Are you sure you’re not an ostrich? Because I’ve been doing some research, and ostriches are famously stubborn about being right, and\u2014<\/span><\/div>\n
Maxine<\/span>Phred. I am an emu. I have been an emu the entire time we’ve been speaking. I will be an emu when this episode ends. If you were any slower, you’d be going backwards.<\/span><\/div>\n
Phred<\/span>Just checking. Right then. Thanks for listening, everyone.<\/span><\/div>\n
Both<\/span>Let’s celebrate most joyously our being here… at all. Goodbye.<\/span><\/div>\n
[outro seeker]<\/span><\/div>\n
Maxine<\/span>What a strange show this is.<\/span><\/div>\n