TrueLife - Transitions, Origins, & Rituals - Benjamin C. George

Episode Date: August 3, 2022

The world we live in is complicated. Try to pay attention to the transitional stages, the origin of ideas, & the ritualistic properties of our lived reality. https://benjamincgeorge.com/product/no-absolutes-a-framework-for-life/ Ladies and gentlemen today we talk with Benjamin C. George. We talk about the world, possibilities, and his new book No Absolutes. We will get into the way we see the world through choice, possibilities, and the idea of how to create a better reality for ourselves.

Darkness struck, a gut-punched theft, Sun ripped away, her health bereft. I roar at the void. This ain't just fate, a cosmic scam I spit my hate. The games rigged tight, shadows deal, blood on their hands, I'll never kneel. Yet in the rage, a crack ignites, occulted sparks cut through the nights. The scars my key, hermetic and stark. To see, to rise, I hunt in the dark, fumbling, fear. Fearers through ruins maze lights my war cry born from the blaze.

The poem is Angels with Rifles. The track, I Am Sorrow, I Am Lust by Codex Serafini. Check out the entire song at the end of the cast. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the True Life podcast. We are here with the one and only Mr. Wizard, Benjamin C. George, no absolutes. a framework for life. How is it going, my friend? Another day in paradise, brother.

How are you doing? I am living the dream. I'm living the dream. I wanted to ask you. Actually, I have something I want to to read and get your thoughts upon. I was, you know, I really enjoy

following up with Google Moonshot. These guys are always on the cutting edge of doing things that make me go, hmm, I wonder, that's amazing. It's crazy. I don't know about that. But I guess it's tech in general that are doing things on the cutting edge. And there was this particular excerpt I read that made me want to.

And of course, now I can't find it. I should have bookmarked it earlier. You were doing really good on the filler there as you were looking now. Wasn't that nice? You know, it's almost like I've done this. Like you've done it before, yeah. Okay, so just bear with me for a moment here. And I can kind of find it.

Well, you know what? Let me just go ahead and try to freestyle it. So it goes, it's along the lines of this. Should man become more moral? True Patriots, what's up, buddy? So we had a comment coming in here. Thank you for spending time with us. If you have any questions, put them in the chat.

And Benjamin C. George and I will get to him. I promise you. So should man become? more moral or should man become more spiritual? It seems to me that in the world of technology, that technology is pushing it to become more rational. And my question to you, Benjamin C. George, is that let's just pretend that that premise is actual. Maybe you don't see it that way. Maybe you do. But my opinion is Big Tech is pushing us to become more rational because of the language that they use. and specifically the ones and zeros, the binary language used in tech,

seems to me to be almost like an absolute framework, like a language of black and white. Now, I'm not a coder. I don't know that. I know you're a systems guy. And I know that, but what I do know is that the way, the language we use paints the reality we see.

So my question to you is, is the language of tech, binary code, ones and twos, is that a language that constrains us? That's an interesting question. because, you know, from one perspective, you do have just the zeros and the ones, which is just an on and off of one or two, you know, but at the same time,

when you put enough of those together, all of a sudden you have a video stream live across the internet. So, you know, how restrictive, I think, would have to be a consideration of what it's capable of. think from, you know, just from what we've already created, there's, you know, it's blown everybody's mind. I mean, you couldn't take anybody from 1975 and be like, hey, let me give you a snapshot of

2020 and you tell me if this is real or not. You know, no one would think it would be possible. Everybody looks like Dick Tracy, except they got a phone, you know, I mean, they're talking into their watches you got you got you got all of these things walking around that in you know screens the size of buildings you got everybody has their own you know flat screen television that's the size of a wall you got all these things that would just be so beyond the realm of the thought of possibility but all of those were derived essentially from you know ones and zeros yeah i i guess you could say that you know ac tg like the genetic building blocks for life you know i i think It may be a, that could be a simplistic language, too.

You know, it's interesting to me. You know, the reason I thought about that is just when I see the big projects being made at some of the tech companies. And maybe this is due to financial gain or maybe this is for financial reasons. But it seems to me it ends up in the long run being something that constrains us. It seems that it's usually something that takes away liberty instead of, providing liberty for us. Now, I know it doesn't have to be that way. What, what is that? Is that a monetary reason or is that a control reason? Or is that just inherent in the in the product? Well, I think it's definitely a monetary reason. Most all of these things, you know, when,

and it wasn't always that way. Before you had the dot-com boom, before people, you know, I remember back in the day when the internet first came around, you know, my, nobody would put their credit card on the internet because they're like, why would I ever do that? So that seems like the most absurd thing ever. Fast forward to the, you know, the dot-com boom and all of a sudden you got everybody is using the internet for commerce. That change of time before that, you know, people were just building things to build things because this was just like a brave new world of just ideas and, you know, collaborations and

information. I remember finding the anarchist cookbook on a BBS back when I shouldn't have had access to the anarchist cookbook. You know, I mean, the world opened up and people were, you know, sharing things openly. And to an extent, you know, there's

a big chunk of the community of the developer community, programmer community. That still, you know, adheres to that. That's all your open source project. but as soon as there was big money to be made, all of a sudden, you know, it became about capturing market share, attention, you know, how can we, you know, show people more ads, how much real estate of the screen can we use to show ads

without detracting from the overall product, you know? And then so born from the motivation of profit, you have the epicenter of control. now all of a sudden when you have control now you know just like everything else like begets like so once there is control now you want more control because control becomes the solution to enable your profit if you can control these market shares if you can control the attention span if you can control the screen real estate by however whatever means necessary and you you can thereby generate profit. And so it kind of all, you know, all of those are true in a certain sense. It just depends

how you look at it, when you look at it, and, you know, how you want to break it down. But that's definitely where we are. Yeah, I get the idea. In my mind, I have a mental image of like, you know, blocking up like a stream or even like a little gutter and then the water comes flowing around it. And then that's where all of a sudden all the opportunities is at. And you know, or squeezing a balloon. Like people are like, it's not going to pop out, but then you squeeze it just a little bit and like something pops out like that.

Which, you know, oh, sorry. No, please go ahead. You know, it's also akin to cool. You know, what's cool. You know, kids always know what's cool is because kids define what's cool. And, you know, marketers spend tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions of dollars

trying to identify what cool is. But yet the kids know what's cool. When I was a kid, I knew what's cool. I'm not cool now. I mean, but I know that. You know, I can't, you, you can walk around to high school and you realize how uncool you are pretty quick. But cool, cool is never the mainstream thing. If you were to take an objective analysis of what's cool.

Yeah, it changes all the time, but what things are consistent between all the change is cool. Well, it's never the in thing to do. and it's definitely never the thing that everybody else is doing. It's the outliers that, you know, make people seem add value to the situation, whether that be, you know, the sense of danger, adrenaline, or rather that be, you know, just the ability to stand out in a crowd

or to be seen or heard, you know, especially these days. Being seen and heard is, you know, kind of an underpinning of cool. just because you are able to garner that attention, hence the rise of the Kardashian, right? Yeah. Yeah, it reminds me, when you said the word outliers,

it made me think of Malcolm Gladwell. And I believe it was in that book, Malcolm Gladwell told the story of Airwalk shoes. When I was growing up, Airwarks were like these super cool shoes, all the skateboarders had them, and you could only buy them in like certain little boutique shops. And in the book out, yeah, all the skate shops.

Yeah, all the skate shops, right? And like all the kids wanted them, they were pretty expensive. They're like 50 or 40 bucks. Yeah, yeah. And you couldn't get them at like, you know, obviously you couldn't get it at pay less or you couldn't get them at Sears or the mall. You had to go to these little shops. And it was this idea of exclusivity that made them cool. And in the book he goes to talk about how Airwalk went from being the premier cool shoe to just being another shoe on the floor.

And what happened was the Airwatt company, They were so heavily lobbied by the big brand name stores to get their shoes in there. They made them a deal they couldn't refuse. And as soon as they did that, they lost a cool factor. And they became just another shoe. Just another brand. Yep. Yeah.

And you see that with all sorts of trends throughout clothing, right? You know, eventually it all comes back around too. You know, bell bottoms are, you know, I wonder if those Janko pants will ever come back around, though. Those things are pretty wild. They fit all your spray cans in there because you want to paint a train. You could put anything in there. You can put another human in some of those, man.

Yeah, that's hilarious. You know, I like the idea of language. And I got one for you. On the topic of language, I was listening to a lecture the other day. I think it was Terrence McKenna, who was talking about geography as language. And he said the same way a human being moves their arms,

a river can change its estuaries. And if you just think about that for a moment, like on a grand scale as the planet being alive, like, wow, this particular planetary being is alive and it's talking to us in a language that is so titanic, you have to look at it from up above, almost from like a little space station or a satellite. But once you begin seeing it

from a third person point of view looking down on it, You can see it talking to you through the way the streams flow, through the way the mountain passes work, through the way sandstorms can grab a hurricane and bring the water towards it. What say you about geography and language? Well, I would say that that's beautiful what you said. And I would add in addition is when you're seeing that river, you know, changes estuaries. you know, that is the conversation between, you know, that system and, you know, all the other systems that are impacting it. Just like, you know, the mimosa plant where the leaves shrivel up when you get close to them or, you know, the pheromones that come out when you cut into an orange. You know, these are all, you know, all of those things can have the same kind of core constituent to it where it is a language.

in a communication that's occurring when these things are transpiring. You know, some of them are definitely much different scales than others. You know, being able to understand the, you know, why the river is changing its estuaries, being able to understand that communication is something that probably once upon a time we had a pretty good understanding and grasp of. these days, I think there's a small perspective of the population from like, you know, when we realize that, oh, we just can't plow everything. We create dustballs and have floods everywhere.

So there's some people who realize that there is, there is a communication to be had there. But by and large, most people don't see that. Most people don't have, you know, I would, I would argue you couldn't take a random sampling of 25 people and more than three of them would know what the dust ball was. And I bet you you would struggle to get one who knew what caused it.

Meanwhile, you know, we're rapidly approaching food problems all across the world and we're doing the exact same thing that led to that dust ball. Fast forward somewhat 80 years later. Yeah.

It's mind-blowing to me. And I, on some level, it's infuriating, infuriating. It's infuriating. Thank you. Thank you. I hate that. On some levels, it's that. But on other levels, I find it incredibly beautiful and heartwarming.

And what I mean by that, what I want to break down is, like, I think the answers to all our problems are all around us. And I think if you can just, you know, whether it's through inspiration or desperation, you can find those answers around you. I've been looking at, I was talking to Dan Hawk yesterday about our earth as a classroom. And, you know, we'd already spoken a little bit about language and geography. But if you can look at the geography and understand the ecosystems around it, then I think you can also understand the, sorry about that. I think you can also... Old school rig.

Yeah. I tried to make it sound like a phone. You know what I mean? I think if you can understand the geography around you, then you can better understand how your life works. You know, it just gets back to the nature of being. Like, if what... I'm kind of birdwalking here. However, when I was talking to Dan yesterday, we were talking about man, climate change.

And it seems to me that that term is so loaded. And, you know, is it manmade climate change or is the magnetic sphere changing? But the point I wanted to get about is when we, I guess when we change the course of rivers personally, like when we dam up a river, we fundamentally change the ecosystem below it, above it, and the land surrounding it. When we change, you know, when we plow all the ground and we take away the lowlands and build up a foundation for housing units, we change the ecosystem. around it. And I don't think even our best civil engineers have gone back and seen what the possible consequences for the next 10 or 15 years are going to be by changing the way a river flows or by changing a dam. And that to me is the climate change that people should be thinking about or at least defining that term when we talk about it. That's kind of all over the place,

but what do you think? I'll work backwards from that. Thank you. No, I, you know, that is a very interesting aspect of, I would say, it's almost like an ecological responsibility. Yeah. You know, and it's not to say that you can't damn something and create a great ecosystem around it, but there does have to be the knowledge that you are going to at least disturb, if not destroy another series of ecosystems by doing this. Now, you know, that becomes just a pro and con thing, and that's when you have, you know, models come into play. But a lot of the models that are used are, you know, some of them are outdated. Some of them are, you know, ran by regulatory bodies that, you know, update only every so many years.

Some of them don't include, you know, certain sets of data while over-emphasizing others. I mean, you just have a litany of the same kind of litany of problems you have. in like the peer review system you end up it kind of ends up you know almost expanded upon when you're looking at all these different modeling systems that that people use to try to figure out what sort of impact these things would have and so you know to that point i would agree with you nobody really comprehends that nor is there any sort of really public will from a you know a money point of view to really investigate those things. You know, and this kind of harkens back to a couple conversations ago, but, you know, by and

large, all of the things that people are talking about and get their, their 240 Twitter characters and their headlines all on ruffles and feathers is, you know, just these, these little attention caption, clickbaity headlines that may or may not represent what the actual reality of what's going on, but certainly don't represent the need for something like a long-term study. And nor is, you know, the person running for office that's only going to be there for, you know, potentially two years while they move up the ladder in their career, nor do they want to champion something that's going to take a, that's going to be a 10-year project. You know, and you can see these things just, you know, example, example, example, example, example.

And so eventually it gets to the point where we probably could, but we don't. Yeah. Yeah, it's fascinating to think about that. That brings it back to the idea. And you're a systems guy. So it kind of brings us back to the idea that the way systems run. You know, it's, it may be the best model we have, but it could definitely be better. It's just that no one really wants to take responsibility for restarting a model.

No one really has the ability to stop something so huge. Right, right. And that's always a factor. A lot of money involved. Yeah. And the thing is, these things aren't cheap, right? If you're talking these multi-year studies, I mean, the equipment, the personnel, the location, these are multi-million dollar project.

it doesn't fall off trucks, you know, at least not in this country. Yeah. Yeah, it's interesting. You and I were talking before the show started, you know, for me, it's easy for me to sit in here and talk from an ivory tower or a high horse. But imagine being a multi-national,

multi-million dollar corporation, and you fund this study because you want to make things better. And the study finds out that you're a horrible piece of garbage. you know, do you really want to publish that? Is that really something you want to get out there? Hey, guess what? I'm responsible for it. The guy doing the study.

You know, you're taking even the most, I would say, a fair representation of that. You know, we have plenty of evidence to suggest that, you know, like the salt demonization, right? You know, they didn't just say, hey, here's money to do this study. They said, hey, here's money to do this study. And I hope we really find this conclusion. right you know so so i think it and i think it tends to be a bit more in that category than the other i think yeah unfortunately simply because there is so much money to be made and money is the arbiter of society i think you're you just end up with those scenarios

replete throughout all institutions uh at all different hierarchies of of society Well, can you, let's go back from it. What do you mean when you say money is the arbiter of society? Can you break that down for me? Sure. I mean, you don't have to look too far. You know, everybody from when you're a young kid, it's what do you want to be when you grow up? And what do you want to be when you grow up while, you know, typically it's started with, you know, what you're interested in and, you know,

being a good help to society, oftentimes by the time it gets realized, it's how much money can I make? Because I have to pay for a mortgage or rent. I have a car payment. I have insurance payment. I have a phone payment. I have internet. I have food that I need to have. Oh, I would like to have a life too. So, you know, well, yeah, it's really nice that forestry is my passion, but I'm going to get twice as much. being an accountant in the city. And so money becomes the arbiter, it becomes the decision making factor for, you know, not

just those types of life decisions, but also how I'm going to operate if, say, I do have the advantage of, you know, gaining a whole bunch of market share by taking this step. Yeah, it's going to be, it's kind of a duplicitous thing, but I'm not really going to

you know, get hurt for it. So I'm going to take that step. And, you know, and you see the same kind of similar situations play out throughout different industries. Yeah. It's interesting to think about. I've often heard money defined as a tool. I've heard money defined as a system. And I've heard it defined as a wedge. I guess that would sort of be a tool. And I could think of multiple cases where both of those definitions are accurate. And if those definitions are accurate, it seems that the tool known as money has become blunted in the last 20 years. It seems that this tool of division or this system which we operate under being the monetary system is breaking down. And that's why you're, at least in my opinion, that's why you're seeing so much chaos right now,

is the tool we have to hammer the nail no longer has a head on it. The tool we're using to build the future doesn't work that well anymore. And I don't know if that, maybe that's what these cryptocurrencies are about. Maybe that's what this awakening is all about. But it seems to me that we're on the cusp of a transition to a new system or a new tool. What do you think about that particular premise? Well, you know, from a from a guy who's worked on automation for a while, there's legitimately not too much I could not automate giving a bit of a budget and a little bit of time. All of the tools to do so, all of the programming languages, all of the things that you would need to automate just about anything, any job that someone would do in this life are pretty much existing today.

Um, you know, and stuff that you would think would be a hard thing to do, you know, that would have some human factor. Those are the ones that are still the outliers. Like, you know, uh, like a truly a quality social worker for insane. You're not going to replace that with, with a robot anytime soon. Um, but anything in your, in your white collar jobs, all of it. There's not a single thing. I mean, from everything's so digitized. and everything is so categorized in databases and marked up in such a way and cross-categorized with all sorts of other information that you can you can you can build systems that will do anything at any time based upon any sort of triggers and when you have all of that kind of potentiality coming down the fight and we're already seeing it you know you got McDonald's rolled out there all fully automated

McDonald's Hutch or whatever it was. You know, I keep seeing an advertisement for an automated pizza oven company. You know, so you like the red box, but except for pizza. So you just go down instead of ordering from Domino's, you just order your pizza from the pizza box. And I think we'll see, you'll continue to see a lot of that happening to the tune where there's going to be a point of a job problem. And there already is. And this is where you get into the things of,

you know, well, what happens when everything's automated? And it doesn't cost me anything to have this system that I already paid for once, running 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year. Why should I hire a guy or a girl?

Or why should I hire the three guys? eyes and girls that it would take to make up the amount of labor that this thing's doing because it's working 24 hours a day and doesn't take holidays and I don't have to pay sick pay and I don't have to pay work on some and I don't have to do all these things so eventually it becomes an economic imperative in order to compete in the business play in the marketplace to adopt these systems and that'll take us to the point where you know jobs will be a scarce thing um and you know jobs will be a scarce thing and you know things like and even things like your trade skills uh you know much of the more simple ones you already have you know things that are pretty printing houses you have and you know complete with

inline electronics and plumbing and air conditioning right and those will continue to get better and better yeah you know what let me push back on that a little bit like i i i i've read plenty of articles that tell me about automation. And they, and they, they, they, they talk about this coming job crisis, but I don't see it in my neighborhood. Like, I don't see the robot flipping burgers or I don't even see the long, automated trucks. Yeah, you won't for a while.

But, but all of these things are being tested in the wild right now. Right. You know, there was, UPS just got busted a little while ago because they had a fully automated truck running the stretch of highway from Phoenix to, um, somewhere else in Arizona. You know, so that's, you know, people are testing these things out in the wild. It's just going to be a matter of, you know, just like everything else when you look at it on a graph in terms of how long it takes to get market adoption. About 10% as soon as it gets to that level, it shoots up to 90% pretty dang quick.

You know, we're not even close to 10% market penetration of what automation can do in most industries. But once you get there, you'll see it take off dramatically. All of a sudden, you know, in order to open up a new franchise of Subway or McDonald's, you will have to sign an agreement that you're going to use the technology package provided by corporate. So, you know, so then you'll see those rollouts start to happen with new businesses. And then eventually new businesses will be so much more profitable that old businesses will adopt the automation scheme. another reason you don't see a lot of the automation now is because it is super expensive to implement it from you know it's just like the initial companies before the dot com boom they were paying hundreds of thousands of dollars for a database right and then all of a sudden you know now after the dot com boom you have people you know they're still getting good money and good salaries but you weren't getting these massive contracts to build us a you know a monolith of a data. database. It was much more, how can we build things that are scalable, that are duplicatable,

and, you know, and it kind of takes the marketplace and, you know, economizes it a bit more. You know, similar thing with 3D printers. Yeah. With $250,000, now they're $250,000. Now they're $250.000. Yeah. I've seen something similar on the topic of UPS where I, I talk to some people who used to work in HR at a UPS facility. And they, in this particular facility, they wiped out the entire HR team. Like, you know, they supposed to have probably, it was a smaller place, probably like 50 or 60 people.

And then one day they all just got cut because they outsourced the entire HR team to a database and some call centers. And if you look at that from a business decision in a boardroom over the United States, I'm sure it saved multi-millions of dollars. It probably didn't do very much for the employee service. However, you could see that being a move to automation. And, you know, coming up the ladder to white collar jobs where, okay, well, we don't need need to pay somebody $120,000 a year to fix these people's sick days. We can just automate that to a call center right there.

Like you said, the database is an automation coming that way. In some ways, I wonder, yeah, please. No, no, no, no, go ahead. In some ways, it sounds to me, if we're barely seeing the penetration of automation now, and the graph does work the way slow at first and then all at once, and people are forced to take these technology packages, it's almost like we're seeing the beginning of a Luddite movement. And I don't use that as a pejorative like so many people do. The way I read the Luddites was you have a group of skill.

somewhat skilled artisans that want to work on their own turf and work from home, which kind of sounds like today. And they're being forced into these centers where like, get in here and work on these machines, you dummies. And then they were like, no, we're going to work from home. In some ways, you can kind of see that happening now. If you have this automation coming in, but now that there's no, the supply chain is broken.

You can almost say the new movement has broken the supply chain or the existing powers have destroyed the supply chain so that the new automation can't move forward. You can draw some parallels there, I think. I think so. You know, it's interesting you brought that up. I wrote a premise for a fiction book quite a few years ago. And the idea was that they're basically a dystopian kind of future thing where humanity had fractured into three different segments. One was basically a cyborg like mechanistic assisted group of people who were more of the laborers and workers and builders. And then you had like, you know, the elites, the people who were. were lived up in the sky. They were all the rich people who, you know, escaped all of the cataclysms below. And then you had, you know, kind of like the Luddites or, you know, a group of people who lived by the old ways who, you know, were, were all about, you know, just, you know, sustainable

agriculture and, you know, ancient traditions and things like that. Yeah. I think you could see that kind of playing out today in a way. Like if you, you know, I'm sure that we could go to an island somewhere, you know, in Papua, New Guinea or something like that, and observe culture the way it was a thousand years ago. I'm sure there's places like that. And if you went to Dubai, you would be like, wow, these guys live in the future, you know, or to New York, you went and lived in the future. It's kind of weird to think about, too, time as a factor. Like, have you ever thought about, we're talking about science fiction and the way the world works? Isn't it interesting that the different calendars around the world, like in, if you go to the Middle East, their calendar is still like in Middle Ages.

And you can argue, I mean, it may not be, it may not be polite to argue this, but you can argue that some of the methods they use in the Middle East seem to be out of the Middle Ages. And then you have us, you know, while we're far from perfect, you know, you could look at some of our cities and say that we are in the 2000s. We're in the future. You can go to China and see the different calendar over there. And it's almost weird how those dates of these different calendars almost line up to the dates of our history and the way people lived. There's some weird similarities there. It's interesting. Yeah, it's almost like this idea of time traveling or different dimensions in which we live can be, you know, you cross the international date line when you get on a plane.

You know, you're traveling through time. It's interesting to think about our concept or our lack of ability to thoroughly explain the place where we live. Well, you know, that's kind of been one of my underlying goals my entire life is to understand the world around me. And then, you know, it was funny because when I was a kid, I thought the world around me, everybody figured it out. And then as I got older, I realized that less and less people had anything figured out. And then I got older and I realized that nobody had nothing figured out. Right. So, you know, it's, it's been quite the journey.

But, you know, what you bring up that whole idea of time, it's fascinating because when you start to look at like how time is associated with the human brain, for instance. You know, they've done multiple studies that showed that, you know, we're kind of on a delay. Even though for us, this seems real time. like if there was some like you know like a nuclear bomb went off it would take four seconds for us to kind of process all of that data that comes in

uh you know even though we're in real time here we're on like a four second delay real time like a Twitch stream that has a little delay on it uh and you know and then there's when you start to look at things like flow states um and

psychedelic experiences you have these time dilations that you know, become really wild. You know, like, you know, people will, you know, traverse through the woods for 20 hours and they'll blink and like, huh, how long has it been? And it's, you know, we have an incredible way to manage time dilation from, you know, like a neurochemical perspective.

And then, you know, when we, and then also when we build things, it's interesting how timing comes into the play of that. And, you know, when you look at some of like the theories of everything out there for physics, you know, you know, people start talking about multiple time dimension. Yeah. Like you have these things called these time crystals right now, right? And the idea is that it's in a constant state of oscillation in phase, even though it's still a crystal. And, you know, we define crystal as being, you know, a repetitive matrix that's, you know, consistent and connect. but yet this kind of just almost like a metronome morphs between two different time phases.

So depending on when you would measure it, you would get a different, you know, a different response from this crystal depending on how you measured it. Which is pretty wild stuff. And then, you know, you have things like Eric Weinstein, his, you know, his potentially, his theory of everything potentially has seven time dimension. So, you know, you can get pretty wild with time. And but I think, you know, to your point, the takeaway being that we really have no idea what the heck time is. Yeah. Yeah, it's such a fascinating topic. And it's, you know, think about leap year.

Like, why don't we have this thing called leap year because we can't measure time accurately. We can't measure our calendar so messed up. We've got to move in an extra day every four years. Which leaves me to this idea of. of, you know, if you look at this from an objective pattern, you'll often hear people in the media or even people around you say, wow, this summer is getting, the summer seems like it's getting colder and the winter seems like it's getting hotter. Well, might that be because we measure time wrong? Might that be because, and we can, we can know for sure because we have leap year, so we know for a fact we're measuring it wrong. We know that we go around the sun in an ellipsis.

That is, you know, it's not a perfect circle. It's an ellipsis. So maybe what's happening is that we're not calculating time, right? So all of a sudden, October is becoming November, it was becoming December, is becoming January. The same way the hemispheres have different or flip-flop. And the mic-share. Right? Maybe we're slowly losing a month to month and summer's becoming winter.

Winter's becoming summer. You could definitely, I mean, I could see where that statement, you know. I don't think we're measuring timing correctly as much as we're misrepresenting time when we use it to relate to other things. You know, the idea is that, oh, we have four seasons because, you know, we decided in every elementary school kid, it's taught, you know, there's the wobble to the earth. It travels around the sun.

As it does this, there's more sunlight here, less here, blah, blah. blah, blah, blah, blah, and this is how we get our season. And this happens from this month to this month. And, you know, so it becomes these facts, these hard lines. Yet we're not actually accounting. Our model is not actually accounting for all of the things that's happening in the system. So when you don't, when you have a model, you know, that doesn't account for all of the, in all the factors, yeah, it could be a useful model even, you know, to a certain

degree, but eventually you do wind up in situations like this, where all of a sudden, hey, last year in Colorado, it was 60 degrees all December almost. Meanwhile, you know, there's, there most definitely is an explanation for that if we were to have the proper model of what's going on on Earth. And that includes the entire composition, you know, what's going on in the core, what's going on in the mantle, what's going on in those transition zones, what's going on in the interplay between the earth and the sun and the other planets and the heliosphere and all of these other things. And we still probably wouldn't even be able to build a perfect model because we still don't

even know what we're looking at when we look out there. We have good evidence to suggest that we have some decent guesses. But we're still far, you know, we're still missing, you know, some 90% of the matter in the galaxy from being detectable. So how close are we? That might be the greatest clip ever. We have, we have some good evidence that we have some good guesses. That's what it is. That's really what it is. Which is fine. I, you know, I'm a science guy. I love science and the scientist. And that's, and I love great evidence. But at the end of the day, it's just supporting a good guess. Yeah. Because eventually,

you know, if you were to rewind 100 years and present some evidence that said there's going to be these things called computer chips that do all of this stuff, you know, somebody, you might get strung up as a witch. Yeah, absolutely. You know, so it's interesting how that changes over time, too, that perspective of, you know, the potentiality of what's possible. Yeah, it brings up the old maximum. How can you manage what you can't measure? And you know what? None of our, none of our, at least not to my knowledge, not too many of our scientific models factor in time. Hey, what you did this study? What day was it on? You know, like what time of day was it on? Like, that's never, that's never, ever incorporated. This study was done on a Thursday at 4 p.m. Why? Like, that's never in the literature. Like, maybe that should be.

Maybe the temperature should be there, you know? Well, it should be much more than that. I mean, if you really wanted to get precise about. it should be it was measured at this time and this is our geolocation right on the planet this is our heliosphere inside our you know the heliosphere where we're at right now this is our galactic position you know where we are in the galactic plane because all of those you know with all of what we know you know think we know about physics you know all of our good evidence and good guesses tell us that all of those things are, there's an interplay to them. So if we really were being serious about how we're recording all of this stuff, we would take that into

consideration and time and all of those different spatial locations. And, you know, there's spatial dimensions of time really because you know, when we're looking at where we are in the galactic plane, for instance, we're always experiencing novel space. Yeah. You know, we're moving through a new part of space every moment that passes by.

We've never gone through this part of space before because the galaxy is moving, the sun and the heliosphere is moving around the galaxy. And so wherever we're traveling now is a new point in space that we've never, ever, ever been before.

So even if we were to start doing it, what we would get is just a series of connected lines of data. And you wouldn't even get a recycling of that data for some 250 million years, but then it wouldn't even be recycling. It would be helical as it went out. Yeah.

Yeah, you know, that's, in some ways, I look back to the maps of the past and they always had like, we were in the house of Scorpio. It seemed that there was a lot of maps in the past that did a meticulous job at explaining to the future where we were at in time. and space. You know, that's, right. Yeah, exactly, exactly. And you can see, you know, there's, there is a certain frescoes on Egyptian rooftops where

people were buried that show, you know, hypothetically, this person was buried here when, you know, Aquarius was in the house of Leo or whatever. You know, it's, and it's amazing to think on a couple levels. The first level is that no one today even really takes. Well, I shouldn't say that. It seems to me that astronomy, even astrology, both are not really given the due importance that they were once given. They used to be the, yeah, they used to be the central, you know, figures of society. Those were the pillar of society.

That's kind of how society was, I mean, it was all originated around that. And, you know, when, even when you go back to ancient indigenous tribes. Yeah. You know, their whole theology, their whole system of contemplating and figuring out how the world works was all related to that as well, which makes a lot of sense if you think about it. I mean, you know, you're outside at night when there's no night pollution and you look up and it's intoxicating with how beautiful that is. And if that's your everyday experience, well, gosh, every day I'm looking up at this magnificent thing. I would like to understand more about this magnificent thing. Hey, look, I noticed something consistent in this magnificent thing.

I wonder if there's any more consistency. And then, you know, all of a sudden it becomes, well, now we're eating and surviving to observe more of these consistency. And you could probably make the argument that that could be a foundation of society. Yeah. the need to understand something greater than the individual, and so much so that it bands together the group of individuals to accomplish the goal. That's really well said.

I want to add to that. I think that even today, I think that, you know, there's a great quote from the red hot chili pevers that says, space may be the final frontier, but it's made in a Hollywood basement. But that being said, yeah, it's, It blows my mind because I don't know what young man or what young woman doesn't love the idea of space. And I could understand it from a propaganda point of view. I could understand it from a point of view of scientists.

And I could understand it as something that should unite everybody. It has in the past. The example you just gave about looking up into the sky and being intoxicated by the sheer magnitude of it, maybe one of the problems I see right now is that we're trying to use space to unite us, but instead of looking up, we're always looking down. We're looking at space through a two-by-two screen instead of looking through space through the lens of the Milky Way. And those two things, they don't seem congruent to me. Like you can't get a picture of space by looking at the ground.

You should be looking up at the air. Even though the mirror you look at is in your hand, I don't think it does it justice. It's just a crude representation of the real thing. It's the same idea about us having this conversation. Yeah, we're both causal, happy, good, good, good lucky guys. And so, you know, we make it work pretty well, but it would be romp roaring if we were together. Yeah. Right.

You know, it's a different, it's a different animal. You know, the idea is, the sad part is, is you can't even see that sky anymore. where I would say probably 90% of the world's population lives. You look up at the night sky, you'll be lucky to see a handful of stars just because of light pollution. So, you know, we've moved so far away from, you know, that being our central focus, which I think it captured our attention and always has, to your point, because there's an inherent desire in everybody I've met in all of my observations, studying of the past, for exploration.

Humans just have this innate desire for exploration, whether that be the exploration of going out into the physical world, the exploration of self, the exploration of distant things that we need lenses and telescopes to see, you know, that there's an innate desire for that. And I think from an evolutionary biology perspective, you could argue that, you know, obviously if you expand more, you can grow a bigger population and procreate more and yon, yada, yada.

So I think, you know, it kind of really aligns with everything that we, you know, all of the studies of what we studied to, of what makes a human a human. but it is fascinating to me that I would say it's right next to procreation is that desire to explore. I mean, they're pretty closely connected, so much so that usually once people are done exploring, they definitely like to procreate. Yeah. Yeah, you know, and you can even take it another step. Like, sometimes I think about, okay, if you talk about procreation, you think about the sperm penetrating the egg, right?

Doesn't a comet seem a lot like a sperm and the earth seem a lot like an egg? And you can argue. Panspermia, right? I mean, it's right there in the literature. And, like, you could argue that, that I haven't proven this yet, but I like to think that, you know, if you look at where theoretically the giant comet hit the Yucatan Peninsula that wiped out the dinosaur, isn't it interesting that that's where like a huge portion of mushroom starts? are growing. You know, like, boom, right there. And otherwise, there's that, like, you can argue that that is a form of alien intelligence,

which you and I have done so before in this particular program. And exploration, procreation leads to more exploration, needs to more procreation. You know, you can see the cycle. And it gets back full circle to the idea that the answers are all around us. We're living in this world in which everything we do, is a potential pathway that we've been. I think there's this weird phrase or this weird idea that phylogeny recapitulates ontology or ontology recapits phylogeny.

So have you, I'm probably saying it the wrong way, but like every step of, and I think it's been disproven. And I think our friend Hank Foley will probably call me out on this. But I think there's this theory that says, in the womb, a human being goes through every part of its evolution. You think about a tadpole like a sperm, meaning the egg, and then all of a sudden it becomes like a little salaman, and it grows legs like a frog. You know, you could, it's very similar to Darwin's idea of us being, you know, moved

through evolution. It's crazy to think about that. And then you factor it in with the panspermia idea. It is, it is pretty wild to think about that. you know, I would say I disagree with that. I would disagree with that too because, you know, just from recent studies, our genetics continue to change as we're traversing through life. It's going to be, you know, it's the underlying factors between many different things in our life.

Some of them change much faster than others. Right. But, you know, if you're in a certain environment exposed to simply, you know, the same thing on a daily basis over an. over again, you will have a genetic change in response to that stimuli. So I think we've shown that there's, you know, from an evidence perspective, that, you know, there's a little bit more to it than that. But it is a fascinating idea that, you know, we've also shown, you know, a thing like a mushroom

sport could definitely survive in space on a rock and could definitely survive reentry to the planet as it would just kind of slough off and be in the atmosphere and settle down wherever it wanted to be. You know, and, you know, we have things like tardigrade that we've shown that can survive space. And, you know, and we're just talking about terrestrial stuff, let alone, you know, who, you know, we haven't even measured the, like, volcanic vent critters, you know, what sort of hardiness they have to extreme environments, which one would expect would be immense, given that they

live in one of the most extreme environments that we can have on this planet. So I think, you know, the idea is that you could have life seated throughout the, throughout the galaxy that way is makes a lot of logical sense. It is, you know, and then, and then you broach the concept of, well, where did we come from? And, and, you know, there's that old saying that, you know, we're all stardust, which I love. especially, you know, upon researching the sun more and more over the years, you know, it really seems that, you know, suns go through series of nova events. And when they go through these nova events, that's when they create the higher order elements on the throughout table.

And that's when those get deposited onto rocky planets or, you know, in gaseous atmospheres and whatnot. So I think, you know, there's a lot to be. impact in that, if you will. Yeah. Yeah. There's so many fascinating ideas. This, when talking about this reminds me of this,

there's these guys I've been paying attention to, and they've been around for a while, but it's called, I think it's called the Electric Universe. Yeah. Have you seen this like Wall Thornhill, the Thunderbolts Project, and this idea of that? I'm pretty familiar with it, yeah. Oh, beautiful. Yeah, what were you going to say about it? Go ahead.

So I think it goes back to Velikovsky. I've read a couple of his books, but and correct me if I'm wrong. And I don't know a little bit about it, but I don't know a whole lot. But this idea of the electric universe or purple dawn theory, the way I read it, says something that the Earth was part of a binary planetary system with Saturn and Jupiter being the binary stars. And this system came into contact with the sun and a few perimeter planets. And then there was this huge collision.

And all of a sudden there was all this jumbling around. And the sun being more powerful pulled the binary system into its orbit. And then that's why we have the elaborate orbitals planets that we have today. But we were once part or a moon of Saturn. and then there was a when we were part of Jupiter and you know they they postulated that maybe life grew up under Saturn being our sun being like a a different type of sun and we evolved that way and like I said I'm not doing it justice but it's a beautiful and unbelievable idea to think about and if you do think about it makes a lot of sense probably not the way I described it but you read it better well you know that gets to the the the the black Saturn worship, right? Yeah, the, yep.

Yeah, I think it's an interesting hypothesis. There's a lot of evidence to suggest that, you know, there should be binary systems everywhere we look when we're talking about what we think we understand about astrophysics.

And then for us to observe, you know, not just our sun, but quite a few other stars, too, to not have this is kind of reworking what we think about astrophysics. and the evolution of stars and planets. And, you know, I think there's what we're going to find in the coming years is we're going to see a lot of data that says, oh, the massive effects that we would expect from a binary star system that, you know, we say are responsible for having all of these, you know, big, you know, geological effects,

depositing all of these, you know, the massive amounts of resources, you know, all of these higher level elements and whatnot. I think it's going to come to find out that a lot of it's more generated by recurrent novas on singular stars. And these recurrent novas are driven by, and this kind of filters into the electronic universe theory, by a current sheet that kind of propels dust from the central galactic core outward. And every 12,000, 13,000 years, that is kind of the wave cycle of that galactic. the current sheet. And that in the change in that current sheet is also a change

in charge. So you're getting a whole bunch of charged dust, charged particles that now are impacting a system. And you get and you're getting spikes of it wherever you have your crests and your dips in the wave. And those correlate very,

very well to geological record of magnetic excursions on this planet. When we're talking about, you know, huge events that caused ice ages, removed us out of ice ages, you know, things of that nature. You know, kind of a lot of the stuff that Randall Carlson would talk about, like the Younger Dryas, but all of those things that could happen from a comet

can happen from impactor events from clasmid discharges from a nova on the sun. And so, and now we're seeing a lot more of these novas be recorded in, you know, our telescopes that are pointing into various places around. you know, around the universe now after we've had, you know, 10 years to look at him a few times, right? We're seeing that this is a much more active and prevalent phenomena than we, it has been given credit for it. And there's a lot of papers coming out about that, too. So I expect to kind of see a transition moving more in that direction of, you know, astrophysics and evolution of star systems. Okay.

Just a guy. Just the good. No, it's beautiful. It's beautiful. And I think that that puts things into perspective as, you know, if even a little bit of what you're saying is accurate, it throws science as we know it today on its head. You know, all this stuff that we know. It throws the narrative, the mainstream narrative on its head. And it just goes back to show that maybe we don't know what we're talking about so much.

We got a, Benjamin, we got a. a request from our good friend, True Patriots over here, who asks this question to you and me. He says, let's talk about what it will take to go to Mars. So I pose that question to you, my friend.

Is what we're seeing possible? Are these drones out there surveying the parts of Mars so we can find a good landing spot as there water? What's going on? What do you think is the potential of going to Mars here? What is it going to take? So, I mean,

Going to Mars is we can go to Mars. Not a damn problem about going to Mars. Do you want to come back from Mars? Do you want to live there? Yeah. Well, okay. Well, do you want to live there and do you want to come back potentially? Those are two additional questions that are much more good luck type answers.

You know, roughly depending on when you launch, you can get to Mars and, you know, like a six-month window. otherwise it can take up to I think two years it's been a while since I played Curval Space Programming. But so we can definitely get there. You know, Mars as a on the surface

is completely inhospitable to human life. There's no atmosphere, so to speak of, which means that the amount of radiation that you're going to be exposed to from the sun would basically melt you in a day but you won't even get that far because you would exfixiate and wouldn't be able to breathe. If you ever seen the movie Total Recrawl, they do a pretty good comic idea of what this would look like. Did you ever see that one? I did.

Fascinating movie. Fascinating movie. Yeah. So, yeah. So then the idea becomes, well, could you potentially live on Mars? And we have detected, you know, ice subsurface on Mars. And there are things like lava tubes that people, you know, said that we could build, you know, colonies inside of. But at the end of the day, it's going to be the shittiest experience of your life.

It might be the last one of your life. And probably the last one. Now, you could, we can definitely do it. You know, now something I could see happening is you could have, like, like this excursion to Mars where, you know, we can create some sort of like maybe geostationary or some sort of low orbit hotel, Martian Hotel, right, where you can go observe the planet type thing, you know, kind of like you would be on a cruise ship in the ocean. You're not jumping off the cruise ship. You're just on the cruise ship type idea.

So it's kind of like Martian tourism. I could see, we could do something like that, but, you know, like surface adventures and things like that. I don't think so. But at the same time, you know, you could also have something where it turns into a reality television event, right? Surviving on Mars. Yeah. How else do you fund the trillions of dollars to set up something like that? Yeah.

I like to take sometimes, like, I want to believe that it's possible. I do. And I think that if we came together, it may be. But you could do it. I don't know. I don't know. Can we? Oh, sure. Sure. We could do it. We have, you know, we've made massive advancements in things like metamaterials and, you know, refactoring and cleaning of carbon dioxide and oxygen and all these different types of systems. You could do it. There's enough resources that you could do it. It would be a miserable, terrible existence, even with the best technology that. that we have right now, but you could, could do it. You know, it was, there was quite a few years ago,

there was a company that was actually called Mars One. Did you ever see that? No, I never saw it. They, they were actually trying to do a reality show of the first trip to Mars. And so they had people sign up and I wanna say they had something like 2.5 million or something like that, People sign up for what they advertised as a one-way trip to Mars.

So there is the public will to do so, apparently. You know, 2.5 million people willing to do it is, yeah, that's not a huge number, but it's not a small number of people either. So, you know, combined with that and the technology that we have, it could be done. Should it be done? I don't think so. I don't think so. Let me just take a different angle here.

Like I feel like we're already on a spaceship. I feel like we're already out. We're already out as far as we're going to get. And like we're on a spaceship. Why would you jump off a spaceship? Like we, you know, we, have you ever gone skydiving? I never have. People do it all the time.

Why would you jump off a perfectly good plane, damn it? Yeah, I know, right? Sometimes I shoot note open. And you're, you're just going to fall back to earth. You know, no matter how high up you go. you're going to fall back to earth. And I just, I look at the past to see the possible future.

And it seems to me, it seems to me that a lot of what's going on in space right now is a big laundromat for money. Like, hey, let's have this space program, but it's really just a weapons program. The same way that Werner von Braun created the V2 rocket is the same way that Elon Musk created his new satellite system. oh yeah this is going to be for space however it's really just a space-based weapon in low orbit

earth it already it already got co-opted for for war right oh without a doubt without a doubt you know so yeah go ahead sorry now that's all right i i i just think that you know we can't even get back to the moon we're talking about mart like we can't even get back to the moon and and then when i think about the moon like why don't we don't we don't we're going to the moon like why don't we terraform Antarctica? Why don't we terraform Greenland before we start terraforming these other planets? Like, but there's no money there. There's no money in

changing our, like we have an atmosphere here and we can't even live on spots. Why don't we go under the water, live down there before we start trying to go out into space? And when you look at it from that angle, to me, you begin to see the cracks that are the propaganda minefields of

just, it's all bullshit, man. Like, we probably can't. There's probably, we probably have technology that we have no idea about, but I just don't see it being possible in my lifetime or my kids' lifetime. It just doesn't, it seems like bullshit to me. Well, you hit the nail on the head. The reality of the situation is we do have the technology to do it. Where's the money to do it?

Where's the money to do it? You know, who's getting paid? The reason that space is, you know, in industry is because weaponizing space gives you you a tactical advantage. Having the ability to have global communications gives you a tactical advantage. Having the ability to have global positioning system

gives you a tactical advantage. That's why it was funded from that perspective. The other side of space funding is, hey, if we get this right, we can go off and mine the asteroid that's worth $60 trillion. So that's

the motivation behind the, like, SpaceX, is they don't want to take people to Mars they don't want to they don't you know they're happy they're happy getting NASA contracts to you know get by right now but their real goal is space mine right and that's you know

that's the real goal of any real space company because that's how you pay for that right without that you know yeah you have things like dinky things like space tourism and shit that you know I think Virgin wants to get involved in but those are going to be limited market and those, you know, those aren't, those aren't enough of a market to justify the investment.

Meanwhile, a $30 trillion asteroid floating around between Mars and us, now there's something we can get to talk about. But how do we get the public on our side? They don't want us to just go mine stuff. Oh, wait, that's right. We just talk about how we're going to go to Mars. Because if we can go to Mars, we can get to the asteroid field. If we could get to the asteroid field, we could probably bring one of those,

back and we can make a lot of money, folks. Yeah. Yeah, it's the same way we built the internet. We tell we get the public to privatize the research. Like we get the public to pay for all the research and then once we've got it, then we privatize all the profits. And the same way they built the internet through different methods is the same way they get all of us to fund their projects and then they spin it off into their own private company once it starts working.

And that's why there's this idea of, look, we're going to money. Like that not only is it for that, but it is on some level something that can unite people. And it's just too bad that we don't continue to go down that road of being united. You know, like, well, that's the shame. That's the, that's the shame of things when you, when you have these, these profit motivations for all of this stuff. When we define everything as profit and money is the arbiter of everything, then this is what you end up with.

This is, doesn't matter how many times you set the chessboard and run the game. this is what you end up with because there's only a certain set of options there's only a certain set of choices because the players who take the choices to expand profit at the cost of everything else always win this game every single time

and then yeah you can say oh well there's regulators and all there's all these other things yeah but at the end of the day that doesn't influence the end result of the game right because eventually they make enough money to buy the regulators. They make enough money over generations to change the game back into their favor. It's always going to be the end result of that game is that once you determine that profit

is the ultimate arbiter of the game, that's always the direction it will head. And yeah, you can have, you know, people who stand up and have some altruistic things and some philanthropic ideas and all this stuff. But at the end of the day, they're beholden to the sharehold. They're beholden to the investments. They are beholden to the people, the infrastructure that allows this to happen. And eventually they must answer for that. And if you don't answer for it, somebody else will answer with better profits and you will be out of business.

Yeah. Yeah. It's all about the money. Like our friends, okay, so let me ask you this. Perhaps what we're looking at is a goal-oriented game. and the goal would be money. What if it was a process-oriented game? What if we focused on the process instead of a goal?

You know what I mean by that? Like instead of it having, instead of the world or instead of a government, be it a Dow or be it something, what if it wasn't a goal that was the ultimate achievement, but if it was the process that was the achievement? So we shift our focus from achieving this thing up here to achieving the thing now, which would be the process.

I think that there's something to be said about that. I think there's something to be said about it, but I think you could also say that it kind of runs counterintuitive to just what it means to be a human. I think there's a reason that goals are so defining for us, right? Is because there is that action of reward. And when we get that reward, we have a biochemical process that kicks off in our body that reinforces all of the behaviors that led to us to receive that reward so that we're more inclined to go out and do that behavior again to receive that reward again yeah so in that context i think you know it runs counterintuitive to what a human is but from what you're talking about from a societal or cultural probably

contact you know if we removed ourselves from the almighty dollar and instead you know the people who were celebrated in in in life and let's be let's be honest anybody who's celebrated they're celebrated but they're also celebrated with everybody knowing and aware of that they're making the money too i think that's a great point dude that's a great point so you know so yeah you can say oh yeah we celebrate the heroes or whatnot, but yeah, you know they're making the cheddar. I mean, even when you have these pop up and there's a lot to be said about this, but like a Greta Thurnberg or something like that.

Right. How much money is she making right now? She's getting rolling. Her whole family. Hey, her whole family is paid. So, you know, the reality of the situation is that whenever you see that, there is a, there's a dollar tag amount attached to it. and if we can divorce ourselves from that as a society,

even if we did it at just the communal level, that could be something that would be, that could be a grassroots movement. You know, it gets you, then all of a sudden, instead of focusing on, you know, the new iPhones,

you're focusing on the new innovation that changes, you know, people's lives, allows people to spend less time doing, you know, farming or allows people to spend, less time, you know, having to commute, you know, or what have you. And I, so I think, you know, you kind of get to the point where, you know, that would kind of be the utopian Star Trek ideal,

right? Where kind of everything, everything works, that everything exists, everything that you could want is available. And then anything addition to that, you have a credit system, which is kind just like a funny money system. Right. I think that's kind of like if you play out that game, I think that's what you end up with. You know what? This reminds me you had a,

you have a brilliant idea. Can you maybe share some of your idea about the difference between universal basic income and a universal basic standard of living? Sure. Well, you know, I think the most fundamental difference to the whole thing is equality of opportunity

versus equality of outcome. If you think that equality of outcome is going to solve the problems of what we see in society and what we've been talking about, you know, job vanishings and all these things, then you probably haven't done too much

understanding of people in economics and how these things work out. Equality of opportunity is where you get innovation is where you get motivation to be better. It's where you get the kid who all of a sudden in his basement develops the next breakthrough in quantum physics and allows us to build quantum computers. When you have a universal income, you're not taking care of people's base needs.

You're resolving that everybody's just going to have X. You can't get really better than X just because everybody else has X. And when everybody else has X, it's just like, you know, we were talking about cool a little while ago. You know, when everybody else is cool, it's not cool anymore. When everybody else has X, nobody wants X anymore. Somebody wants to be different. But if there's no opportunity to be different because you are forced into an equality of outcome, then what's my motivation for,

wanting to be different for for wanting to innovate for wanting to grow for wanting to solve a problem you know and that's not to be said that people should be greedy right it's just saying that if there's an investment of time and energy then you know there should be an export of that and if that's kind of how our entire existence is structured right you eat some food you get some energy you can go on for the day. You know, everything around us is structured in a similar manner. And so when you have, you know, inequality of opportunity, now you can take, you know, this, this foundation and everybody can then go out and explore what makes them passionate, explore, you know, that, that solution to the problem that they see. And then they know they're going to be rewarded for

it on the opposite end. you know, whether that be the recognition of their peers or, you know, greater opportunity in the marketplace, jobs, etc. Yeah, I like that idea. I think it really allows us to get to the heart of motivation for people. You know, I really think that there's such a negative outlook on, on how intelligent people are. I don't think people get enough credit for what they're capable of

if they had the means to operate in a world that if they just had their needs met, they could probably become a lot greater than they've ever dreamed of. And most people are held back by their limiting beliefs. Well, or their limiting circumstance. Or exactly, exactly, exactly. You know, why the hell do I care what a thousand fifty-four divided by 20 is when, you know, I know after school I'm going to have to run home because those, you know, those kids or, you know, those drug dealers or whatever on the corner beat the shit out of me every single day that I don't make it before three o'clock.

You know, I don't care about your math problem lady or guy. Like, why are you talking to me? You know, I have other worries in life. Or, you know, and, you know, kids are well aware of the economic and financial disposition of their parents. You know, they're like, oh, I wonder, you know, maybe we get some spaghetti on tonight. You know, I grew up in a pretty poor situation. I understand what that was. And I understand that part of my day was being taken up as a kid thinking about, well,

what sort of impact would it be to my parents if I go on this field trip? You know, and so imagine removing all of those stresses, all of those anxieties, all of those little things from someone's life. Now they have the mental capacity of the bandwidth to give a shit about your math problem and then and thereby you know enlighten themselves and expand their their own prospects in life but without that without the removal of all of that BS they're never going to care about the math problem and then they won't have those those opportunities to to grow and expand and become a better person than they could be do you think that sometimes I think that that is the purpose behind

you know, some forms of state takeover. You can hear people saying like, look, we got to save the kids from these parents over here. And I can agree with that on a lot of levels. However, it is a slippery slope. It's like how long before that becomes, okay, well, I'm going to take your kid because you can't provide versus I'm going to take your kid because you didn't pay your taxes or, you know. Well, yeah, who's the judge? Yeah, great point. Yep.

I mean, you know, with all these things, who's the judge of all of this stuff? Who's to decide when is enough and what's enough and why it's enough? And do you agree with that person? Do you even have the opportunity to voice your grievance in a situation like that? And the reality of that question is most often no. And I think that's why we're seeing a lot of the blowback that we're seeing now. because, you know, from a, from a parent's perspective these days, hey, we're both working full-time jobs or, you know, a single parent, hey, I'm working at least one, if not two jobs. And then all of a sudden I found out you're teaching my kid, what? You're telling them what? Like, you know, and this, you know, it doesn't matter what that what is. The, the, what matters is that I didn't have a say as a parent in, you know, and this, you know, it doesn't matter what that what is. The, the, the, what matters is that I didn't have a say as a parent in.

what that what was. You didn't, you know, you're supposed to be teaching my kid arithmetic, reading, comprehension. You're not supposed to be teaching them these things about this, X, Y, and Z, you know, about life when you don't even teach them how to balance a checkbook. You know, I don't know about you, but when I got out into the world out of the public school system,

it was foreign to me. Nobody, there was no class about taxes. There was no class about starting a business. There was no class about getting an LLC started up. There was no class about talking to lawyers. There was no class. I didn't know what the hell of notary was. Yeah.

You know, all of these things that in order to participate in the wider world of things, you have to have some sort of knowledge of. And yet all of the, you know, 12-some years of education I was thrust into taught me zero about any of it. And now I think it's even worse. I think it's even more deplorous state than it was then. So, yeah, I think from a parent's perspective, you know, that what is going on and what are you teaching my kid is, you know, I think that's a lot of what we're seeing right now. And I, you know, and it's not just at that level either.

It's, you know, you're seeing it at, well, especially with COVID, right, like how all the governor's reacted. Before, before COVID, nobody cared what a governor was. and nobody even knew what a governor's job was. Then all of a sudden, COVID comes out. Now everybody really cares about who the governor is. Yeah. Yeah. In some ways, I think, you know, COVID has been a blessing because it has ripped the scales from people's eyes.

And it has, you know, pulled down the dam of the damned. Well, yeah. I mean, for me personally, you know, I saw this coming down the pike. a long time ago. Probably 20, you know, shortly after the 2008 recession, I had just gotten into really studying, you know,

kind of the greater societal systems. And I saw this coming down the pike. But at that time, you know, if I were to talk about it, oh, you're crazy. It's 2013 in the United States of America. Nobody gave a shit. And nobody thought it would ever change.

Yeah. We're just ramping up. It's just getting better, folks. here we go and now and now people you know they see the the facade underneath the

the show you know they see the cracks in the stage they see the you know the the machinations of the machine that doesn't care about them and I in I think we're

you know we are seeing a lot of the the wolf being removed from people's eyes yeah it's it's it's both liberating and scary

I mean, maybe this is what freedom looks like. Maybe what you're seeing right now is this turning point where we need to make a decision, okay, are we going to be a nation of citizens, or are we going to continue to just slap on the blinders and have our children told a history that is more fiction than reality? Are we going to continue to go down this road of make-believe and follow the breadcrumbs to the wicked witch's house? or are we going to put on our big boy pants and our big girl pants and start making the laws in which will create a better society for us? I think now more than ever we have an opportunity to live a life worth living if we have the courage to stand up and do what is right, not only for us, but like you said, a few conversations, we have an opportunity to become the giants for children to stand on. Like now is the time.

Like we can do it. And the, the, the possibilities are there because it's, it's a blessing and a curse to see the house of cards. Like, oh, no, it's all crashing down. We're going to lose everything. But at the same time, it's like, hey, perfect. That stuff sucked. Let's go ahead and do this now. Right.

And, you know, I, I think there is a large discussion to be had about if it's possible within the realm of what's available to. us within the confines of the system that we inhabit. Because, you know, a lot of these things are now roadblocks in order to stop any sort of movement like that happening. You know, you know, the 17th Amendment was pretty much gutted. We still have, you know, the, you know, the constant or the Congress of States, right, which I think is gaining momentum of trying to be passed now. But still, you know, that's only, the ability for that is only for state legislatures to come together to limit the power of the federal government.

Right. Which is a great first step and needs to happen in a lot of fronts. I mean, I think it's, you know, most people can agree that Nancy Pelosi being the greatest Wall Street investor or her husband being the greatest Wall Street investor in alive currently, probably says something about the state and the nature of the system that is currently existing. And I think a lot of people, especially from an individual level, are very happy to change that, as long as there was a path forward that would change it and they understood that. I think the big problem is getting that amount of attention on one thing with all of the things that are of distraction today. how do you how do you garner so much attention for something that needs to be a serious and a long conversation that's a rough one and so i and i think that's when you when you when we start to

examine a lot of this i think we will we we find ourselves in similar waters which is how many people are really listening how many people really care about something like this how many people are thinking about the future for the children how many people actually care about that statement, you know, and, you know, are they actually, are they voting with their dollar? Are they voting with their feet? Are they using their votes? Do those votes even matter in the scope of what we're talking about? And I think those are very challenging questions. And I think sadly, sometimes the answer to that question is, is no, they do not. I mean, you know, otherwise you wouldn't have an answer to close, right? You wouldn't have that situation. It wouldn't have that situation. It would, wouldn't exist. So the reality that it exists indicates that there's a grand breaking of that system. And

you know, can you, can you find a, can you find a way to build a bridge? Perhaps. How much money and time and effort is that going to take? And what sort of will behind the people who actually have that money do they have to

make that a reality? And, you know, I think if we look out, a lot of the companies out there, a lot of the people who do have the money, a lot of the billionaires, a lot of these old money, they're invested in so broadly that it doesn't matter for them. They're invested on both sides of every conflict that's existed for as long as we've been recording conflicts, right? So now all of a sudden the question is, is, well, does the public will outweigh that economic will?

And I think that's the question we're answering right now. Man, that is deep right there. Yeah, I mean, if you got your bet hedged, like, who cares? I mean, you're going to come out, kind of like these guys to win, but I'm a win either way, so it doesn't really matter to me. And we know that's the game of the military industrial complex. We know that's the game of the banking structure that has grown around the world. you know, so, yeah, I mean, that's, if they're, if they're invested on both sides of win or lose,

and they're not really invested in winning or losing. They don't really care. They're invested in the conflict itself. God, it's such a great strategic position. It is. I mean, you have to take your ad off to it. I mean, you know. Tush. You did all right. You know, not a lot to argue with in terms of strategy. man I see it you know I see it on a for me the way I began to see exactly what you're saying started off on a personal journey and that journey is as as a like a a shop steward and as a union guy I have argued on behalf of so many awesome young men and women who I felt were getting screwed by the by the management team and there's been so many times. times where, you know, I started off as like a hardcore union guy. Like, yeah, fine. You know,

these guys right here. You guys are greedy and selfish, you know, and just full on one side. And then there's been times where I spent days preparing like a good argument where I sat down and I just had the argument in my head. Okay, I'm going to go into this room. There's going to be three guys. They've already thought about this situation. There's three of them. There's one of me. They're probably going to say X. If they say X, I'll say Y. If they say Y, I'll say Z. And I've just, you know, I've sat down for like three days and figured out, okay, they're going to come at all these angles. Here's an argument, and I've got it figured out if A, then B, if C, then D. I'm ready. Let's go in there. And so it's the day, it's the day of the debate I go in and then the young kids like, I don't want to do it anymore.

I'm talking about like two days ago, you were so upset and you got screwed here. I just spent three days. I'm going to crush these guys. Let's go do it. Oh, no, no, I don't want to make trouble. What do you mean you want to make trouble? It's going to get worse for you, you know? And then like, I got to to respect the guy's wishes, okay, all right, fine. I guess I just wasted three days, you know, and my wife was upset that I was spent all this time doing it, you know, and then that happens a few times, and then you're like, what am I doing? They don't really care, or they do care, but they're too scared. So you put so much passion in trying to make things better, and then it feels like the person

you're trying to make things better for, doesn't even really care. Or you go in and you have the argument, and then they tell you, you didn't do a very good job, I spent four days doing this, man. You know, and so if you, that, that to me made me begin to see the world differently. And it's, it's, maybe it's just growing older or maybe it's getting in a position from seeing a third person point of view. But it does. And then that brought me about to what you were saying is about this being so big. How much time do you want to put in?

How much are you willing to understand how big of an operation it is? and that it's very possible you could give a big chunk of your life to a cause and have it not amount to anything. Those are real possibilities that you have to be willing to accept if you want to make change. So there's so many moving parts in there, man. It is operative. So I guess what I'm saying is this situation we're in, brought about by COVID, brought about by the destruction of the financial system, brought about by people not caring about their enables, brought about by whatever ism you want to put on there,

it is opportunity, but it is also a lot of liability. And there's, it's very difficult. There's a lot of moving parts, man. Right. I mean, you know, you're always,

the times of greatest opportunity throughout history are always in the times of greatest conflict. Yeah. Because that's the time that people are riled up enough. that means that their daily lives are so upended that they feel the need for conflict. Because by and large, to your point of the guy who's like, I don't want to do it anymore, man, it's a big task to be a David going up against the Goliath. And just the thought of it is so daunting that oftentimes people will back down. just because, you know, even if they don't have a direct implicit threat or risk, you know,

just the potential perception of it can be enough of just, you know, completely dismantling anybody's, you know, judgment about the situation and the fairness of it and all of the things that they were so passionate and fired up about, you know, a day ago. Yeah. Yeah. It makes me sad. I'm sorry. Go ahead.

No, no, go ahead. It makes me sad because I, I, I think a lot of us have been through that fight where you go through the fire and you get burned. And sometimes you win and sometimes you lose. But after you go through it enough, you realize that it's worth going through even if you lose. It's worth going through and you might get burned and you're probably going to hurt. But if you do it enough, pretty soon you get the scars that the calluses and then people don't want to put you through the flames because you've been tested. You've been tempered by it.

Well, you know, I think probably, I would say for me personally, more importantly, you learn more about yourself in those moments than you will spending years trying to figure something out. Because, you know, being able to, you know, there's a lot to be said about perseverance. And nobody really talks about perseverance anymore. It's kind of wild. But, you know, and perseverance especially, in the face of, you know, abject admosity, where people are like, you're never going to make it, you're never going to do that,

you're never going to be that thing. Walking through those situations, that's what makes you who you are. And also, likewise, you know, backing down from those situations, makes you who you are. And, you know, there's definitely a lack of bravery and perseverance in the world, these days. But I would also

say that there's a lack of adults walking around too. And I don't think children have the real the capacity to embody those characteristics. You know, I think there has to be the understanding of the adversity of the

world, the potential for defeat, the risk of failure, the, you know, the liability, the cost. There has to be a perspective of that in order to you know to really identify and underlie and ratify the that the choice to move forward in those instances yeah this is a this is a great transition into the world of rituals and education because I think we are in some ways training out or specifically discounting the

the beauty of hardship and education. And I, oh, yeah. Right, like, there should be rituals where the older kid, and maybe this is what kind of bullying was in a way. It was like, there was always the one kid that beat up the bully. And that guy became awesome, you know. But there can be rituals where this is an example that I gave to my kids' school that I wanted, and I'm working with the art teacher now.

Like, imagine a group of first graders. And we go to these first graders and we say, class, we are going to erect a statue. And the kids are like, yeah, we're going to do this statue. And I come in and I say, do you want to do a statue of an ice cream cone or a statue of broccoli? And the kids like, ice cream, of course, right? And I'm like, okay, everybody says ice cream, great, we're doing broccoli. He's like, what? What do you mean? You know? So then we erect this statue outside of the class of broccoli. And we would have maybe one, a teacher or maybe it would be the second graders come to

that class of first graders say, okay, look, I know you guys didn't like the statue of broccoli. So here's what we're going to do. We're going to dress up that statue of broccoli funny every third Friday. You know, like this, there's this ritual of not defacing something, but mocking it in a way of rebellion. You know, and you could teach this class. And then I would come in on that third friend, like, hey, who dressed up my broccoli like this? This is ridiculous. You know, the kids would snicker and laugh, but they would learn, hey, there's things in life you can't control and there's people that aren't very nice, but you can get back at them. And you can do it in a way that is

funny, that makes a point and doesn't deface anything. But there's these ideas of ritual or symbolic gestures that can be presented in society that can change the way kids operate in life. And then next year, guess what? Those kids would become the mentors to the new class and we would let them in on the joke. Okay, guess what? You guys see what happened there, right? Now it's your turn to do this symbolic ritual to these kids and you teach them. What is it going to be?

It's going to be ice cream and broccoli. Is it going to be a teddy bear and something else? but I think that these types of rituals should be placed in education centers and these kinds of forward guidance thinking of operating in life should be presented in our schools. So, you know, later in life, they understand how to deal with, oh, this dummies, this, I say we dress them up, you know, but I think it gets back to maybe not religion in school,

but at least some sort of rituals in school. I think we're missing that. so so george monte the all-father trolls yes you know I agree with you I've said it for years once they started giving every kid a trophy

that was a big problem because it removes that it removes the essence of what you're talking about yeah you know if if the idea is that there's only one first and only one trophy, there's a motivation to figure out how to become first, how to get that trophy. And it doesn't just have to be a physical thing, you know. And then additionally to your point, you know, there used to be that ritual in school.

There used to be the senior prank. And then they started arresting kids who committed senior pranks, you know, which was a very strong hallmark of the direction that society was heading. Yeah, very fortuitous, right? Like, here's what happens. Yeah, it's, but yeah, I think the idea that, you know, that was the whole idea behind being a kid. Yeah. You know, whenever you're a kid, no kid wants to be their parents. Like, that's just, that's just the reality of the thing.

And while the apple doesn't fall far from the tree at the end of the day, you know, that tree is a pretty expansive tree and you can have a lot of different branches. And, you know, to not have the ability to rebel against the structure, to rebel against, you know, the status quo, you lose, you lose a perspective of thought of, you know, well, why should I do it your way? You know, I find it kind of funny, you know, there was rage against the machine, the band. And now all of a sudden it seems like they rage a lot for the machine. Exactly.

It's kind of interesting. Yep. So, you know, I guess all these things, you know, they all seem to be connected. There's a lot of interplay between all of this. But, you know, the removal of the ability to question authority, especially without consequence. See, because when you could do those prings, there was no consequence. They weren't hunting people down. They weren't, you know, they weren't having, you know, trials and putting people on, you know, you know,

expulsion sentences and all this crap. No, it was, ah, ha, ha, they got us. You know, next year, we're going to make sure we lock the science lab on, you know, May 28th or whatever it is. So, but, and that is a learning experience for everybody involved. And yeah, while people in positions of authority really tend to hate having their authority question, which is a consequence of this as well. well, it should be at every stretch of the imagination.

I mean, you know, even if you look at the Constitution of the United States, it's right there in the First Amendment, the ability to protest. Like, you know, that, and say whatever you want, because without that ability, there's, you know, you pigeonover yourself, you end up in bad position. And, you know, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to see that. It doesn't take great foresight to see that. it just takes an examining of your surroundings of society, of watching different groups of people interact. And you can see that happen on a daily basis. And so, yeah, we are missing those rituals. They should be, you know, even back to indigenous tribes, they always have that,

they even have a dedicated person to always be a detractor, typically, to always be an outsider. or a character, you know, somebody who disagrees with the chief. You know, it's what gave rive to the royal gesture. You know, it's what bred into our modern day comedy.

And, you know, comedy has always, you know, been at odds with the power structures. That's just the nature of comedy. And without the ability to have that expression, you know,

we lose a fundamental aspect of, I think, what is needed to make a healthy society and a healthy culture. Yeah, the emperor's got no clothes on. Someone's got to tell them. That's amazing. Benjamin, I have so much fun during these conversations, and I know they're wide-ranging topics,

but I feel like our, I feel like I'm getting a lot out of them, and I really enjoy the conversation. I'm so thankful to our friend, True Patriots over here. It's been banging some questions on us, and everybody else in the chat, chat. It's really becoming awesome for us to Bruce. Thank you. Charles. Everybody who's been chiming in, I really appreciate it. And we got some big things coming in the future. Yeah.

So I do have one more here from our friend. He would like to know your opinion, Benjamin. Why did Pelosi go to Taiwan? What's going on with that in your opinion? well uh you know one take on it is that there there was an investment of to the tunes of millions and millions of dollars that happened in chip manufacturing companies uh particularly in vdia which i think she's going to go take a tour of uh which is really funny because i thought it was her husband's investment so you would think he would be taking the tour but you know uh you know details right So, you know, from a geopolitical standpoint, I think there is, you know, you can't deny that there is a contention with China and how that's going to play out, especially with Taiwan in light of what happened with Russia and Ukraine. And, you know, I won't pull out my crystal ball and say what's going to happen there or what Nancy Pelosi's motives were. but I don't think it's a hard stretch to say that they were definitely motivated by money, and there was probably some political spice thrown on top. Yeah, I would have to agree.

There's been a, like, I think you mentioned just a few short minutes ago about her being one of the greatest traders of all times, you know, and if you just take a cursory glance through the headlines, you can see that there was maybe a deal that's not really going the way her and her husband wanted to roll right now. You know, and maybe there needed to be a meeting of sorts. You know, maybe there needed to be some more publicity over here in order for the trade to go a certain way. Publicity or some glad handing some delivery of certain things.

I mean, you know. Absolutely. I ran a fishing business, a luxury fishing business that had, we had some high profile people come through from time to time. And you get a different perspective of the world. The way they talk, especially how they talk about certain. things that you or I, if we were involved in such a fiasco, would be like, oh my goodness, we're not allowed to do this. We can't even talk about this.

Meanwhile, these people are like, oh, yeah, this is a Tuesday. This is my Tuesday, folks. We're not even a Friday yet. Wait until I tell you what happens on Friday. So, you know, these things that happen in the world, there's definitely a lot more of meets the eye. You know, from the horse's mouth, from my perspective of what I've heard from people who are in those positions. So, yeah, there's definitely some glad-handing and, you know, political maneuvering going on while there.

You know, the existential threat of China, I'm sure, adds to all of that as well. You know, it allows us to negotiate at a different level. You know, like, hey, you know, the price of that chip, if it comes down two cents, there's an extra 200 artillery, you know, canons on the way from company X, Y, N Z. You know, those types of things, which is, you know, once you get into the details of those 5,000 page bills that they enact through Congress, those are the types

of line items that you see and you go, huh? Oh, okay. Right. So yeah, see what those. Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's a lot more than meets the eye. It's usually a look here, not there, type of thing.

And, you know, with, I would also add that if you look at what's happening in China right now as far as their economy imploding, potential bank runs happening. You know, you're probably looking at some sort of high level, you know,

treaty or some sort of negotiation that's happening there while there's this, hey, look over here, there's something happening behind closed doors that people don't want you paying attention to. And, you know, the fact that it costs 90 million just to go there when having all these fighter jets and

which is wild. It really is. Which is a wild thing, right? You know, like, it's, it's how can we, how can you justify that? The only way you can justify that is if there are some other, and goals for this. If there's some, some, some, some, you know, pressure being put. If there's something to be extracted. That's, that's when it's justified.

And even then, you know, it's still a hard justification because who's benefiting from from that situation because it's usually not the it's not the individual taxpayer it's not the Chinese people and it's not the American people but there is an exchange of technology happen in there you know there's exchanges all right

so true awesome Benjamin I had an absolute blast and I am looking forward to next week and other conversations that we'll probably have so where can people find you what do you got coming up on deck until next week.

What do you want to leave people with? Benjamin C.George.com, as always. Coming up on deck is I will be doing a podcast myself inspired by you, George. And so that'll be coming down here in the pipeline probably the next couple weeks. Fantastic. Ladies and gentlemen, thanks for spending time with us today. Thanks for the comments and questions. Go check out Benjamin's book, No Absolutes.

Check them out at Benjamin C. George. and we'll talk to you guys next week. That's what we got. Aloha. Let's see if I can do it for two weeks in a row.