Nation And Teams Rant - Part 2

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00:00-49:01

There Rambling about the danger or 'team' thinking leads me over an array of topics I know little about, but it seems like I'm not alone there.

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TitleNation And Teams Rant - Part 2

AuthorGeoffrey Bailey-Gates

CategoryPodcast

Duration49:01

FormatAUDIO/WAV

Bitrate2304 kbps

Size847.24MB

Uploaded3 Apr 2023

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The speaker discusses the challenges faced by sociologists and the lack of interest in funding their research. They also touch on the complexities of the banking industry and the questionable value it provides to society. The speaker suggests repurposing old factories for nuclear power plants to create job opportunities and reduce reliance on fossil fuels. They also argue for a more reasoned approach to nuclear power, highlighting the risks of other alternatives, such as nuclear war. Additionally, the speaker emphasizes the need for government intervention to address the consequences of failed private companies and the ongoing battle between corporate interests and the well-being of humanity. So, just as an addendum to the other, I was just talking about IQ, and it touched on a lot of other things that really needed their own reins. And I might have spoken in a way that was assuming people knew certain things. And so I feel like that even though these are not areas that I'm like an expert in, some of them are areas that there are no experts for. I mean, there's people who cover everything I'm going to talk about, but there's not a person who, there's not a discipline that covers all of them combined. I mean, maybe the closest thing would be like sociology, I guess. Sociological experiments are very hard, and it's not an easy discipline. I think it's gotten a bad rap as being like an easy thing. It wasn't when I was in college. It was seen as like an easy way to get a major and to get out. And the brain joke at the time was that you would never get, how do you get the sociologist off your front porch? You pay him the money for the pizza. I mean, I heard that so many times that, yeah, it wasn't even funny how often. I repeated it myself. It was just something that people said. It's kind of interesting. Why? It's not easy. And there may not be that much work for them, but why do you think that is? Why would moneyed interest invest heavily in studies that are going to most likely conclude that moneyed interest shouldn't exist? So yeah, they don't get very many grants, and it's hard for them to get work. But it's actually an incredibly complicated topic. And to do it well, there's a lot of people who have attempted, that do attempt it with mixed results, and some are not great. I'm just going to say it. There's a lot of bad sociologists out there, but there's a lot of bad everything out there. There's a lot of bad doctors out there. There's a lot of bad bankers out there. There's a lot of bad lawyers out there. There's a lot of bad teachers out there. There's a lot of bad everything. It's easy to make any given discipline look really bad if you want to, especially when the evidence is not as strong as it is for medicine. It's harder to make doctors look bad because there's such strong evidence in their favor. But it's not as easy to accumulate that kind of evidence for sociology. It's not as easy to reproduce those kinds of experiments. There's not that many ways you can do experiments, frankly, that would be ethical at all, or even moral. So they're mostly retrospective analyses, meaning that there's just people who look back on our records, put some things together, and then come up with a hypothesis and just throw it out there, and then people talk about it. There's no mathematical proofs involved. But there's things that just seem likely, and they just feel correct, and other things that don't feel as correct. In some cases, they are reproducible, and they do keep showing the same things. And when they do, that's when you have to take notice, because there's something there. Anyway, I didn't want to get too sidetracked on that, because that really wasn't the point. The point isn't to try to point out some conspiracy against sociology. I think there's no one at the wheel. It's just not in people's interest to pay for a sociologist to research for them. And that's just how it is under our system. There's just no one directing that. And that's how we've been, essentially, that's what's happened ever since the repeal of Glass-Steagall. Yeah, I mean, that's why Bank of America, and a lot of other banks more bigger than them even, suddenly appeared in the investment banking industry, I guess you could call it. I am very hesitant to call it an industry, because it doesn't produce anything. It can contribute to the production of something, sometimes. And that's the idea, I think. That's the idea was that you get money together, you fund a corporation, that corporation produces a product or service of some kind, and then if it's successful, then people who invested the money get a return on their investment, right? But it's completely complicated and silly now. There's so many different ways that the people who are already in positions of power, meaning in corporations that have already been successful for some time, there's so many ways for them to cheat, essentially. Just make money from nothing, do these little magic tricks instead. Bank of America is not interested in our petty little checkings accounts anymore. That's why those fees started happening. Because it's just like, we're not making any money from these guys, really. We really make a lot more money over here with these little magic tricks that we're doing. So why don't we just try and phase that other part out? It's actually kind of annoying. And we started seeing all these fees. I remember a time when there were no fees. You actually got money by putting money in a bank. That was the original concept, was you put money in a bank and they gave you interest on it. Even if it was a small amount of money, you still got interest on it. Because they turned around themselves and they lent it out themselves at a higher interest rate. The whole profit margin is just the difference between the two interest rates. And that's their profit. They don't do... There's a certain amount of organization that has to happen for that. So it's not a nothing service. Is it so valuable to our society that they should be able to just... They're too big to fail. And they should be able to drag us all down with them. Every time they collapse. When do you bail down? I don't think that they are. I don't think they're that valuable. They don't perform a function that's that useful for us. It's just... It's not helpful. More often than not... I mean, yes, there is... It's always a good thing when a new company starts and it starts hiring people. And people have jobs all of a sudden. And people are doing stuff. That's a good thing. But how often have you even seen that happen? I don't know. I look around and I don't see that happening that often. It is happening. It's happening in certain industries more than others. That's for sure. There are certain industries where it's just not happening at all. There's a big portion of our country in America that still thinks the auto industry is going to come back. Most of the auto industry left. But they don't seem to understand this. It didn't leave. Well, yeah, it did leave. But a lot of it just left. It got automated. Even if it was back, their jobs would still probably not be back. Only a few of them would be. Because a lot of those jobs were lost to automation. So it would not be the boom that it once was. We have all these closed factories just sitting around in Cleveland and Detroit just doing nothing. It's sad. Why don't we repurpose that industrial power under a better grade, under nuclear power? Or we can temporarily just use fossil fuels just to make the nuclear power plants and then start using them. And we can use all these old factories that are not in use. And wouldn't that make a bunch of jobs? I think that would make a lot of jobs. What would be so terrible about that? Then we could be finally done with fossil fuels. At least our country. And if we did that, I think a lot of countries would follow. A lot of countries had been moving in that direction more so than us. It was very disheartening to see Germany go the other direction, too. Because they had been going towards nuclear power. And they had quite a lot of it. After Fukushima, they had a reactionary response and they just took them all down. So, great, we're going in the wrong direction there. That was a reaction. That was not a response. That was not a well-calculated response. We can't behave that way when it comes to issues that are this important. We have to stop, take a deep breath, think about what just happened, try to understand it, reason it out, talk about it like adults, and respond like adults. Yes, there are risks involved with nuclear power. Chernobyl doesn't count. I've already gone into Iran about that. It just doesn't. They were cutting corners everywhere. Fukushima, I've already gone into Iran about all this. It's such a small risk compared to the other thing. And we all know what the other thing is. The other thing could lead to a nuclear war. A couple of Fukushima's would not lead to a nuclear war. We can use the fissile material in the missiles. We wouldn't even have to dig any up. They have such a huge reservoir of it. We might as well. Why aren't we doing that? The government should just step in. Whenever a factory closes like that, capitalism doesn't clean up after itself. Whenever it contracts, you just see all the areas where people used to be, buildings and factories, and they're just empty and decaying and falling apart, and catching on fire. Detroit has a serious problem with fires in these neighborhoods where people used to live. But don't anymore, because there's not enough industry there to support them. It's sad. But the industry that they want to come back is never going to come back. So we need to make new industry. And that actually isn't a new industry made for their power. I know there's not going to be any money in it, and that's why it doesn't happen. But that's why I think the government should do it. If a private company fails, and rather than letting a city contract, that would be a good time to step in. Instead of like, oh, you guys tripped on it and fell again, and you brought the whole world down with you because of those tricks that you do with money, your Ponzi schemes, and just hiding bad debt, whatever. They're still doing that, and they're going to do it in different ways. They're going to keep cheating. It's like a cold war between the interests of humanity and corporations, basically, which are just teams. Corporations are teams, too. And they're trying to beat each other. And that's why it's all in the name of competition. So that's why they're so desperate, because if they lose, I mean, it is kind of life or death in a way, especially in this country where you don't have health care if you're not employed. If you don't have money, period. Yeah, we have a very high life expectancy on average. Not the highest, not even close. Well, yeah, there are a number of countries ahead of us. But when you take away the top 50% in terms of wealth, people who are wealthy in the country, and just look at the bottom 50, worse than other countries. They're like 10 or more percent less than other countries for the same socioeconomic. Many countries, not every country, but a lot of countries have figured out ways to take care of themselves in a slightly more fair manner. But even in those countries, there's a disparity. So they're not doing it perfectly either. I don't think that, I don't expect us to do it perfectly. Not everything has to be exactly 100% fair. It can't be. But life's just not fair, right? I get that part. But that's not an excuse to behave like a freaking asshole. And to just cheat, lie and cheat and steal and drag everything down with you over and over and over again. And use your freaking, your personal medias to dispel this nonsense instead of talking about issues like this one, or anything fiscal in nature at all. The growing inequity, all that, nothing. It's never talked about, ever. No one ever talks about it. Have you noticed that? Like on the news, or in any of these pundits? Not on television, is what I mean. People talk about it, but they talk about it in obscure YouTube channels like mine. The places where they don't have a snowball's chance in hell to ever be hurt by anybody. And not many people anyway. That's a strange coincidence, right? But that's exactly the kind of thing that sociologists would have to try to demonstrate. But how do they go about doing that? It'd be very hard to prove that. There's nothing really to prove. It's just that there's groups of people that are acting in their own best interest and are favoring their own interests over the interests of the rest of the planet. That's basically just the long and short of it. How are you going to design a sociological study to prove that? Good luck. I mean, we have proven certain elements of it, though. Nothing's been proven, because nothing can ever be proven. That's a philosophical argument. I'm not a philosopher. Maybe someone who studied philosophy could come up with an easy counter to it. But I haven't heard one. The whole concept about whether or not it's even possible to actually know something for certain, or whether or not we even exist. How can we know that? That's kind of Descartes and what the empiricists kind of inferred from some of his musings. They never answered the question. They just kind of batted it about for a little bit, and then just sort of gave up on it. Because I guess, I mean, you could argue it's kind of an impossible to answer question. And I would argue that, in fact. We're never going to be able to get an answer to that one. We're operating under the assumption that everything is what it appears to be. That was that total offshoot from the main point. Because there's nothing to it. Everything else we're talking about. But, yeah. It does seem very interesting to me. That, after the repeal by Siegel, and the switch to supply-side economics, we are now in a state where there's so little regulation. Regulatory capture is another thing I mentioned that I'm not sure everyone would understand. It wasn't that long ago that I learned about it. I think it was Maureen that taught me about it, actually. She taught me things all the time. No one knows everything. You have to learn. And just because you went to school and you got a bunch of degrees doesn't mean you know more than someone who didn't. It means you know more, probably, on those topics, that while you were doing that, they were learning about something else, maybe. Or maybe just having different life experiences and coming to different conclusions. There's something we can each learn from everyone. And that's one reason why all life is valuable. Because all life has information and lessons to learn. That's one. I didn't say that's the only reason. There's also the moral component that we are life. It's like the golden rule. Whatever happened to the golden rule? Treat others as you would like to be treated? Does that really seem like what we're doing? Do we reward people who do that? Is Bezos treating his employees like he would like to be treated? Is Elon Musk? Is anybody? And not to single out just them. It's true for probably every corporation, with maybe a handful of exceptions. Those being worker-owned co-ops probably are the only ones. There might be one or two that just happens to be owned by a really benevolent CEO majority share. Or maybe they never went public. They still have a majority share of the private stock. There's still stock, right? They don't always call it stock when it's internal. But people have shares of a business before it goes public. And if you have more than 50% of that, then you have the most say in what goes down. You can name yourself CEO over and over and over again. And you never have to worry about losing your job. I'm not saying that that's bad. I'm just saying it's a small business. And it's only just like three people doing something. And one of them happens to have more say than the other two. But the other two are okay with it because maybe it was the one that has more say's idea or something. So just sort of out of respect for that, that the other two are willing to let that person have the final say, then that's okay. That's a justifiable hierarchy. Because the person who thought of the idea is being rewarded by their friends slash employees slash partners by having a slightly larger share of the say in the final call. That doesn't mean that they probably have some say. But maybe if the two of them agree to something and the other one doesn't, I don't know. I mean, that's just something that has to be worked out between any group. But when corporations get big enough, especially after going public, which means suddenly their shares get to be owned by anybody with money, then everyone who has any share suddenly now has a say in who to hire for CEO. I don't know if that's even true technically. If you just buy stock and have stock in some company, but not very much, just to sliver five shares of Apple or something like that out of I don't know how many, that would be, I don't know, probably not a small amount of money. I don't know what their stock is going for right now. But a lot of them go for hundreds of dollars before they split sometimes. So maybe you've got a couple grand in Apple, which is not like an insane amount of money to have invested for a single person to have. That's like a pretty reason. Probably a lot of people have that much money. A lot of people don't, but a lot of people do. Not a lot of people would invest that money in shares of Apple because you never know. Something might happen and they might suddenly just start tanking. We could have another duck con bus or another 2008. Wouldn't that be terrible? So if you have any money in stock, if that was your life savings, sorry. You don't generally get your money back unless the company is too big to fail. And then you're fine. But yeah, unfortunately what those companies were doing that were too big to fail was taking other people's money and investing it in very irresponsible ways. And yeah, that money didn't get paid back. The people who lost the actual money, the money was never the banks. It came from other people. Other people that gave it to them and said, hey, invest this for us. And they said, sure, we'll do that. And we'll guarantee you this much interest. They'll come up with some agreement on that. That's where they were making the bulk of their money instead of the little single accounts that many people have. I have one. It's never got very much money in it. If you fall below a grand, they start charging you money. They actually charge you money for not having enough money because it's just that much of a bother to them. They're just annoyed at you. It's like, oh, God, this person only has a grand. He's charging $20 or $50 a month. You're really not adding to their workload in any way, but whatever. They're just doing it because they can. And they know that you're not powerful enough or influential enough to do anything about it. So you just have to sit there and suck on it. But when enough money gets accumulated into a fund, like a pension fund, or maybe another corporation comes together with some serious money and they want to invest it, then their interest perches. Because now they're not looking at a singular individual. They're looking at a huge collection of people's pensions or a very large profit from a very successful company. They might own the very profitable company. That's not illegal now. That's what Glass-Steagall is about. They can be the banks and the companies, but at the same time, they can give themselves loans, very favorable ones. That's what that whole thing was about. I'm sure it's more complicated than that, but that's what it comes down to is something sort of like that. And there's a lot more that went into 2008. This is reductionist. Of course it is. Everything is reductionist. I hate it when people make that statement. That's what words are. They're a reduced version of an idea that we can throw around as little packets of data and then kind of catch and then interpret and go, oh, yeah, and kind of re-expand it, almost like zipped information. That's what language does. We reduce things to simpler things and then speak them or write them and say them and then receive them, and then we just have to use our brains to put them together again in a way that matches the way that the person who expressed them was thinking about them. We don't do that last part so well. We just get the data and we don't know what to do with it. We're not sure what people are saying. No one listens to each other. People just say things like, oh, that's incredibly reductionist because we're all so goddamn competitive about everything. Everyone is just constantly trying to show off how much they know about crap. I'm not afraid to admit that I don't know crap about economics. This is all stuff I've learned by just watching different people who do know something about, or at least claim to, and they have serious credentials to support it. Richard Wolff, the MMT people, others. Anyway, Maureen had been looking into that kind of stuff more than me while I was off getting screwed by my own med school and we asked to the tune of over a couple hundred thousand dollars. It's now approaching half a million. Because if an individual takes a risk and it doesn't work out, they get screwed in this country. That's it. Sorry. But if a company takes a risk and it doesn't work out, then they get bailed out. It depends on where you live, right? There are states that have social services for you if you do fail. But you're the subject of scorn and mockery. No one has respect for you anymore. And you're just like a loser. These are not things that people will say to your face, but you will get that impression the moment you fail in life. Even if the reasons for your failure are largely out of your hands, or even any proportion out of your hands. It doesn't matter. People don't care. We just keep praising these people who are already successful and don't need praise. Most of us don't mock poor people. But people who have homes, how often do you just go around and just find some homeless people and just bring them over and have lunch? And it's not something people do. Not that often. Certain organizations do that. And I'm not saying that we all should. There's a certain risk to that now isn't there. They might be mentally ill. They might have problems that they're not prepared to or trained to handle. And I think that's the obvious reason why that doesn't, that's one obvious reason why that doesn't happen. But that's what we're doing. We're leaving it up to philanthropists to just sort of like, yeah, there's charity. We have charity, but all these charitable organizations. And how about all of them do something, I don't know, like many of them are, there's quite a few, that it's just like a small sliver of what you give them that actually goes to the cause that they say it's going to go to. And it's disappointing to learn that, especially if it's one that you thought was a good cause and then you find out like, oh, they're only passing on 20% of what I give them. That's stupid. Oh man. I haven't really had that experience. Because I've never had enough money to do that. I've never had any money. I was a student for a long time. And when I did work, it was not a high paying, it was a very, that was in the chemical dependency field. And I wasn't even a full counselor yet when I decided to go back because I saw what a dead end career that was going to be and kind of what a shit show that field was. What a shit show that field can be. It isn't always. There's a lot of very good rehabs out there, but there's some that are just real shit shows. And they're not evidence-based in the slightest. It's like they're casting spells on each other. They're doing stuff that's just literally, we know for sure. If we haven't tested the other things, what other people do. Just because something doesn't have evidence behind it, doesn't mean it doesn't work. It just means it doesn't have evidence behind it. And we need to do the studies to show it. So it could be that it works, but yeah, we have to do those studies. That's all that means. I think we should favor evidence whenever there is any. Whenever there isn't, we should try to accumulate it if possible. And those should be two basic freaking values that we have that are at the core of any society, any modern society, should have those concepts at its core. The pursuit of truth, whatever that means. Truth is not really the right word there. But yeah, pursuit of evidence. The refinement of an idea that will never be perfect. Because we're never going to know everything. But we can just sort of keep refining it, and keep refining it, and keep refining it. It's about the progress. It's about getting there. It's not about being there. We're never going to be there. No one knows exactly what... I don't like the current... Almost certainly, it's just a local trend that when looked at by someone in the distant future, they'll just see, yeah, we had a dip, and then we went back up, and then we dipped and back. And that's what a lot of human history looks like, is these sort of ups and then dips. A lot of it was kind of a flat line, frankly. And then these kind of rising sort of sine wave-like things started happening. We reached new heights, you know, it seems like every time. Then it seems like we reached new depths, too. World War II was freaking... I mean, it was terrible. It permanently scarred our world's psyche. Just what happened? What the hell happened with that? Like, what the fuck happened there? How did we do that? How did we do that to ourselves? And now we have all these nukes. And what do you think World War III is going to look like? Did you notice that II was significantly worse than I? Yeah. Yeah, it was a lot worse. What's III going to look like? I don't think we're going to survive it. I think that's at the heart of a lot of people's fear. It's just a sense that we're kind of fucked. But we don't have to be. All we have to do is just start thinking and talking and making some basic changes. And just get over your stuff. Get over it, okay? No one's going to take all your stuff. If you're rich now, you can still be rich. No one's going to take all your stuff and kick you out of your house. But you don't need to have leader jets. And you don't need to have multiple mansions. And you don't need to have a fleet of cars. That kind of stuff, yeah, I think there's going to have to be a certain amount of redistribution. But I'm mostly talking about the money, not the stuff. In some cases, maybe the stuff too. I mean, it's just not fair for people to have that many properties. When it comes to property, I think that's one thing that really does need to be equalized. Because what the fuck? Why do you get to call dibs on some structure that you don't need, don't use, never have needed, never have used, you don't live there, you're never going to live there, you don't store things there, or whatever, you just happen to buy it, and it happens to be the case that other people need it. They have a really big need for it. Oh, well that's neat. Well, their need is so strong that they're willing to just change huge amounts of cash every month just to live there. And that's a fucking job? That's not a job. That's not a job. Okay, that's being an opportunist. I can say that's being something much harsher, and it would not be incorrect, at least not in terms of a, you know, it's just what the word means. I think I've said it in other rants. That's not the point. There's just another symptom, or another side effect of a diseased culture, a diseased society with the wrong values. So it's not their fault either. It's not one group's fault. Okay, we can't just, that's just doing the team thing again. If we just select a group and just say it's all their fault, well actually we're kind of just being fascists. I mean, that's a huge part of what fascism does. So that should never be, like, no solution to our problems is ever going to look like that. Just finding a group and then blaming them, and then, you know, making them fix it, or killing them, or something horrible. No, obviously that's never going to, that should not be a part of any fucking solution. I mean, I didn't even mean to make that connection to the final solution. But that's, you know, because that's where it'll go. It'll go there. We know that about ourselves now. We have that potential. That's how bad we can get. Because of teams, because of nations, because of whatever, cultures. I mean, I think cultures are great. Cultures should remain, of course. There shouldn't be just one. But if you identify with your culture so much that it causes problems, and you're going to go to war about it, yeah, then suddenly culture becomes a kind of harmful idea. So we have to be wary not to let it do that. And religion is culture. Religion is part of culture. And we weren't very careful about that, were we? We let it cause a lot of wars. But nothing has caused more wars in recent days. In the last, I don't know, I'd say since 1800, at least. Nothing's caused more war than the idea of nation. So it's not religion anymore. Maybe it was once. I'm sure it still is in some places. But the cause of the really serious wars recently has been nation. If we're going to blame anything, one thing, then we should blame the idea of nation. And it's just an idea. It's not a person. No one has to die for having that idea. We have to come up with a different idea, a better one to replace it with. I've got some ideas. I'm sure other people do, too. I don't want to be the leader of this new idea. I would not like to be. My idea would not have a leader, not a single person that has that kind of say. It would have to be more collective in its thinking. And that's what democracy means. It means collectivism. It means everyone decides. So this whole idea, this whole individualistic streak that we have is very cute and everything in America. But it's gotten so bad where it's really not helping us anymore. We're too big to be individualistic now. There's too many of us. We have to acknowledge that, yeah, we're kind of like everyone else. We all have something unique about us. And no one is exactly like everyone else. No one's exactly an individual either. We're something in between. And we need to just get over this, like, I'm the best. I'm the smartest. I'm the most, you know, whatever. I'm the richest. I'm going to die with the most green paper. That means I win, right? No. People are not going to remember you fondly just because you died with a lot of green paper. Look at how we look at people from the past. Are we praising the Sun King when we talk about him? No, we're not. Do you want to be talked about like we talk about the Sun King in the future? Because that's how they're going to talk about you. If you have a billion dollars, they're going to talk about you like you were the Sun King. And there's many people that already are. If you're just too surrounded by, you know, people that are just like you or and or, it's also very likely that you're just kind of a psychopath, meaning you don't have the ability to really value intimate relationships or have empathy for people. That's what psychopathy means. It's not a mental illness. Psychosis is also not a mental illness. It's associated with mental illnesses. And so is psychopathy. But they're not related. Psychopathy is not related to psychosis. And schizophrenia, you get psychotic. It's not the correct, it's not the best word, but that's what we call it. We call it psychosis. When you're having hallucinations, when you have a delusion of some kind. With schizophrenia, it's usually kind of a bizarre one. Effectively, it looks like our understanding of it is demonstrating that they're kind of caught in a state of being awake and sleep at the same time permanently. So they're just kind of dreaming while they're awake. And they can't really tell the difference between. It's usually just auditory things that they're hearing. Because their visual, you know, sensory apparatus are full of actual info. If they're seeing what you're seeing, for the most part, usually. They might be misinterpreting that too. And many times do. But usually what they're, in terms of like positive symptoms, it's meaning like stuff that's happening that's not happening. Well, it's not the only thing that positive symptoms means. It doesn't matter. The point is that psychopathy is involved here. And that's another reason why I think they don't care. I think many of them probably know what they're going to be talked about. Like, you know, the sun kink. They just don't care. Because they don't believe in anything. They don't believe in whatever. And I'm not saying we should, you know, religion is going to be the fix to this. Because, I mean, clearly a lot of people have used religion as an excuse to justify their unjustifiable hierarchy. It's not going to be a simple solution to this problem. We do have a lot of problems that do have simple solutions, actually. Well, relatively simple. I mean, like the war on drugs. The solution to that is so simple, it's not even funny. I mean, it should be patently obvious what the solution to that is. We've already done it before. I think we all know what it is. But we're just not doing it. It only took us like 10, 15 years to learn the lesson with prohibition. It's over 40 years now, and drug war is still raging. Anyway, I'm not going to... I need to do a whole separate rant about the drug war. And I'll lose my voice on that one. Because that one, it's gotten to infuriating levels of just frustration for me. I mean, it's affected me on a very personal level now. It's always been an annoying issue for me. Because it's just so obvious. But now it's personal. If I have any enemies in my life, they're not people, they're ideas. And the biggest amongst them, for me personally, I'm not saying the worst in the world, but for me personally, it's the drug war. That's the one I hate the most. Even though I know it's not the one. This rant has been about a nation more than anything else. Or teens in general, really. And I am passionate about that idea. But I'm not nearly as hopeful that we're going to just toss that one aside anytime soon. I mean, God, no. A post-scarcity utopia? Who wants to live there? God, no. Heaven forbid. So clearly we're not ever going to live in a post-scarcity utopia. Because, yeah, it's appalling what that could be, right? If everything was awesome, and everything worked, and people were kind, and, yeah, that'd be porn. So, yeah, that's not going to happen. But we could end the drug war, okay? They used to be legal. They were legal for thousands of years. The whole concept of making a chemical illegal, it just seems insane. It just seems insane. Someone from the same time period as our freaking founding fathers would probably think that we were batshit crazy for even conceiving of that idea. I mean, they were all about freedom to do whatever, right? How free are we now? In what ways are we free? We're not. We're all striving to either A, maybe come up with some new novel idea, and then make it big, and be the next Bezos. And, yeah, that'd be great. But how often does that happen? Pretty fucking rare. I mean, you're not going to be the next Bezos, okay? Most likely. And even celebrities, they don't make nearly as much as you think they do. They're not anymore. They're certainly not musicians, not like famous singers. They really don't. The record labels make the money. Sometimes some of them manage to start their own labels, and then they do great. How likely is that to happen for you? Not so likely. So we're all in this conveyor belt towards this point in our lives where we suddenly get ejected. We just have to hope that during the time that we were on the conveyor belt, we properly armed ourselves and got into a good enough situation where we can kind of, you know, it's basically everyone versus everyone else. I don't think that's a great system. Everyone's just competing with everyone else all the time. It's not just in politics. It's in families. It's in friendships. It's our way of thinking. It's our way of life. It's just flawed from the get-go because it's built on this idea of teams and being the best. We twist every idea into something, some version of it that matches our Western kind of way of thinking about our competitiveness, our individualism, and all that. It's all in favor of competition now, isn't it? We tend to just mold everything we certainly see and interpret in a way to match that kind of shape. And guess what shape that is. It's a big fucking gun. We're in the shape of a mushroom cloud. There's a lot of different metaphors you could use here. But it's not good. It's not a happy, you know, ending. We're walking off into the sunset. It's two suns in the sunset. That's what Pink Floyd was thinking about, the second sun being like an nuclear bomb going off, like a very powerful one that involves like a fusion. It really kind of is a little bit like having a sun briefly, you know, a second sun in the horizon. Because they're not fusion bombs per se, but they do a certain amount of fusion using the fission energy, and then that somehow multiplies the rest of the fission. I don't know. I don't know how atomic bombs work. I don't want to know. I think we can all safely just forget that one. You know, that's not a useful skill set. But nuclear power, yeah, we should probably do that, at least until we have something that can replace it that doesn't have the same risk that nuclear power does. Let's not forget, when we're talking about the waste, right? So when everyone talks about, what about all the waste? Okay, well, the waste breaks down into two parts. The fissile material itself that wasn't completely, it's still radiating, ionizing radiation. That's what radioactive means, essentially. When someone says that, they're talking about ionizing radiation. Radiation is just a form of, that things move through space. It's a way of, like, movement. It's a kind of movement. It's not always bad. It's not always good. It's just a way of movement. But one is the radiation of a type of particle that can damage your DNA. Well, then it's ionizing radiation, and it's very, very, very bad. We all know this. We're constantly being bombarded by other types of radiation from the sun that are also very bad, carcinogenic. They fall in the UV spectrum. We don't call that ionizing. Some scientists do, but we don't call it radioactivity. The point is, the sun's a carcinogen, okay? So when we're talking about these waste products, we have to keep in mind that we're being bombarded by one, too. Also, even more than that, the oxygen we breathe. Free radicals are probably responsible for a very large portion of our cancer, or at least a good chunk of them. It's from oxidative stress, from oxidative damage, and that's what ages us, too. Whether or not it causes cancer, whatever, but it is the other component of age. There's two components to age. The telomere problem, which is actually potentially fixable, but there's never going to be a fix for the oxidative stress problem. So fixing the telomere problem is kind of pointless because all you're doing is you're lifting the hard cap that we have, which is like 125. Maybe we should try to do that. I don't know. But we're still going to degrade and probably die long before then because of oxidative stress. The very air that we breathe that's keeping us alive is also killing us. We made a deal with the devil when we switched over, during the great oxygenation event, we switched over to using oxygen, probably without capturing another little organism. There's duality and competition built into us down to the cell, down to the cellular level. That just happened to be a symbiotic relationship, though, now, didn't it? It started out as loss of competition. But you could argue that the single most successful thing that life has done was that it captured another little life form and they worked together symbiotically. And now we have animals and we have multicellular structures. We have working together. We are superorganisms that are like massive co-ops. That's what we are. Why don't we try to match our society to what we look like, how we work, at least in its concepts, instead of the idea of we're acting like prokaryotes, you know, the bacteria, which is constantly fighting each other. But even they actually couldn't get along. They form biofilms and actually one person's waste is another person's food and it ends up becoming incredibly efficient. I think we're acting even worse than microbes. It's hard to say what's the most intelligent life on this planet if you're looking at it truly objectively. Oh, yeah, because we have lots of neat toys and technology. That's because we have opposable thumbs. And we developed writing, language first, oral tradition, and that got us so far. And then writing took us a lot further. And then the printing press took us a lot further than that. And then the Internet took us, well, telegraphy, the telephone, radio, whatever. I mean, there was stuff happening. There's a reason why we keep notching things up in terms of our tech getting better and better. And it has to do with how good we are at posterity, at passing things on. But we're not doing that so much either anymore. To go to college, we are still doing it. There's going to be a certain subsection of us that have educations. That's great. But we're making it harder and harder for that to happen. That should be something that is just everyone has the right to know, in my opinion, whatever everyone else knows. It shouldn't be like this certain group of people that know all the stuff that we've learned. I mean, why do they get to know what many, many, many hundreds of generations of people have come up with, and yet they get to hold on to it, that knowledge, like they have some right to it. No, it should be free. That information is not yours to own. You don't get to be the gatekeeper of that knowledge. You don't get to hold the, no, sorry. If anyone who wants that knowledge should be allowed to have it. No, not too long. I kind of wandered way off. I need to do more rants on some of these things just to sort of flesh them out. This is a nation rant part two, and the TV continues.