Episode Transcript
[00:00:14] Speaker A: Hello.
Welcome to the call it like I see it podcast.
I'm James Keyes, and in this episode of call it like I see it, we're going to take a look at the politics of Star wars as seen through episodes one through six of the Skywalker saga, as well as the 2008 Clone wars television series. And we'll just compare that to how it looks in real life and so forth and how realistic some of this stuff is. Now, as part of this discussion, we both checked out an excellent video from Arkin the American, the Arkin American account on YouTube. It's titled how liberty dies, Politics of Star wars, which we'll have a link in the show notes.
And later on today, we're going to take a look at when discuss some of the efforts going on by some billionaires in the world, in this world to achieve immortality and the science that seemingly or may stand in their way.
Joining me today is a man who is one with the force, and the Force is one with him, Tunde Ogo and Lana Tunde. Are you ready to show us the light today?
[00:01:18] Speaker B: Of course, man, I can't. I got no comeback to that one.
[00:01:24] Speaker A: All right. All right. Now we're recording this on December 23, 2023. And as a brief primer, the overall arc of the Star of Star wars generally picks up at a time when the Republic, protected by the Jedi, has been in place for a thousand years. And the story goes into how democracy and liberty, which is in the form of the republic, falls, and in its place rises an empire, which is a police state with all the power held at the top by an emperor.
But to get us started, Tunde, what was your biggest takeaway from the video and how it talks about the politics of Star wars and how it illustrates how a democratic society can slip into a dictatorship?
[00:02:07] Speaker B: Yeah, I thought it was excellent, actually, the way that the creator of the documentary just woven the kind of, like you said, primarily the first, as you said, it was the first six films of the Star wars saga. It made me sad about how bad the last three were not even included. Like, you can have the whole Star wars without a third of the actual produce films.
[00:02:32] Speaker A: Well, those were coherent. You know, those were George Lucas also. The Clone wars, you know, show was the George Lucas.
[00:02:38] Speaker B: Exactly. So, so that's a whole nother Star wars nerd out discussion for another show, why they were so bad. But, but, but, no, so it, in breaking it down, I think the, the documentary did a great job of breaking down the transition from democracy to autocracy into five parts. So it's basically, how does Liberty die? And so. And I'll read them off. It first started off, part one was a republican decay. So, you know, I know we'll discuss some of what that means. Part two was a galaxy divided. So then the divisions within kind of the society. Part three was the beginning of the end.
Then the twilight of the Republic is part four, and then how liberty dies was part five. And in each of those parts, I felt it kind of mirrored certain things we've seen not only historically on planet.
[00:03:28] Speaker A: Earth, through humans in this society in this time.
[00:03:31] Speaker B: Exactly, but also kind of, I think, what a lot of us in democratic societies have been kind of the kind of orwellian state. I think a lot of us fear that.
We've been taught to fear this kind of authoritarianism, yet it's something that's always at risk of creeping up within a democratic society. So I think from all those kind of angles, it was a great analogy, the way the gentleman made the documentary between Star wars and our real, like you said, real earth world, Milky Way galaxy situation. Yeah, yeah.
[00:04:05] Speaker A: I mean, I thought that in pointing to specific factors, you know, particularly like, starting with the republican decay and how things like corruption and the inability for the Republic to deliver on what it's supposed to be delivering on, really set the stage for someone to come along and pull strings behind the scenes to actually bring the Republic down or to take over the republic, essentially. Like it wasn't where there was an exterior force. Like the Star wars starts with a battle between the republic, so to speak, and the separatists. But the separatists framed as the bad guys who are trying to take out the republic, so to speak, or to separate, to harm the republic. But what it ends up being is that the defense of the republic ends up being what? Or the quote unquote defense of the republic is what takes down the republic. So it happens because of the things the republic is doing on its own, or the things. Things it's not doing for the people, so to speak, and then the things it's doing in the name of some other greater good that has been determined or whatever, so that it points out how it's actually the republic, while there was a big bad actor, so to speak, who was pulling strings and so forth, which makes it easy for an audience to focus on and say, oh, that's the bad guy. It was the actions of a lot of people, and the actions, I should say, and inactions of a lot of people that set the stage for the big bad to come in. And end the republic, so to speak, as we know it, or as it was known.
[00:05:40] Speaker B: Yeah, and I think that's a. That's a great point about the figure, let's say, in chief Palpatine, who was the senator at the time. When you're saying at the beginning of this story, if you started at the phantom menace, he's. He's a great representation, to your point, of some of what we consider in our real world. Some of the darker, powerful forces behind the scenes. And I think what's interesting, when you look at that, depending on your angle politically and just how you believe and whatever you believe in, in our society, those different forces are represented by different people or different actors, depending on who you are. So some people in our country consider kind of the deep state, right, the bureaucrats and all that are some nefarious actors behind the scenes. Others think it's. You know, it's the anti Semites, thinks the Jews and the globalists are somehow these nefarious groups that are controlling everything. And some people think it's these capitalists. So I think you're right.
[00:06:41] Speaker A: Is that it is actually the decay in the system which is on everyone's hands that allows whoever nefarious actor you point to. It's not the nefarious actor that's driving, or that is the driving cause of the main thing of the concern. The nefarious actor is an opportunist.
It's the.
[00:07:02] Speaker B: Hey.
[00:07:03] Speaker A: It's the fact that when people go into power, they become more consumed with maintaining power and growing power than actually serving the people, which is the lifeblood of a representative type of government form.
[00:07:15] Speaker B: No, that's a great point. And I like the word. You use the term decay. Because the documentary did a great job of saying that. Kind of like you're saying it said that palpatine, like it was already. That the situation was already primed for someone like him to manipulate it. It's not like he came into a perfect system and then somehow manipulated it. And I thought that was a very good analogy. Because it also helps us understand that, unlike. Because it's interesting watching this. And then just kind of living through our modern political era, both domestically and globally, watching what's going on. I kind of was thinking in my head, maybe this is how Rome fell, right? Like we always are waiting for some story about how there was some clash of civilizations. Or it was these barbarians from outside.
[00:08:01] Speaker A: When you learn. Yeah, I was gonna say, when you learn about it in elementary school, in a more simplistic form, it is the barbarians at the gates that ended the Roman Empire, so to speak. But again, a more sophisticated understanding is that, well, Rome, what the republic ended centuries before that, and then even the empire had decayed to a point. You know, by the time that the quote unquote barbarians were at the gates that decayed so much, at that point, it wasn't even recognizable to what it was with the time when it was at its peak and when at a time when those bar, the barbarians that took it down at an earlier time when had a shot at taking it down.
[00:08:36] Speaker B: Yeah. And I would think that, you know, the emperors that we've heard of historically in Rome, like Nero or Caligula, the ones that had some bad reputations, again, you're right, that was more towards the tail end of the empire, and they probably were, you know, a symptom of it, of the continued decline and the nail in the coffin and not necessarily the cause. And so the thing is that I found interesting about this beginning part of it is it mirrors the story, mirrors so much our real world. I mean, one of the things, if you look at the phantom menace, the whole movie starts on the premise that the trade federation, which, like you're saying, is supported by the separatists, are having a blockade of the planet Naboo, you know, Princess Queen Padme.
And so the idea is that they wanted her to sign a treaty because they didn't want to have taxation of the space lanes. I mean, it reminded me of, we just heard on the news recently that the british petroleum is no longer gonna move its ships through the Red Sea because of the tensions in the Middle east right now and the fact that shipping lanes are being attacked by houthi rebels that are supported by Iran. So in a sense, it's like they would be considered the separatists in our view. But just like in Star wars, in their mind, they're actually fighting for some cause that they feel is noble. Just like.
[00:09:58] Speaker A: Yeah, the established order is so corrupt, whether it be, you know, from a corporative stamp, corporative standpoint or whatever, that they have to do this in order to shake up the established order.
[00:10:08] Speaker B: Yeah. And I think that's why the Middle east right now is an interesting analogy to some of this, because I think, you know, similar to how the clone wars was kind of the setup for looking at the republic as maybe not always being holier than thou because of some of the actions that the clone troopers were taking in the various systems and planets. I think that's kind of what you hear sometimes, kind of, since, let's say, Vietnam, the Vietnam war, I should say, even though we in America feel like we're the beacon of democracy and we're that shining city on the Hill, we know that we've had Americans internally criticize how we've used our military, for example, on a more imperial.
[00:10:56] Speaker A: Well, I want to get into that specifically because. Yeah, like, we're looking at it from the american perspective is always that, well, when we're showing up, we're showing up in order to increase liberty somewhere, because some big bad has taken over your area or some big bad is threatening. But in terms of the conduct of the actual troops on the ground and the operation that the conducting of a war. But also just sometimes the motivations are. Sometimes the motivations are driven by a corporation or something like that where americans have shown up. And so what I wanted to ask in specific or I wanted to get into specifically with that is just kind of getting into what stands out or what has stood out. And the video talks about and these themes come up in the movies, things like corruption, populism, and also perpetual war in terms of, again, setting the stage for a republic to no longer really be what it says that it is, at least in terms of the eyes of the people that are supposed to be served by it, like it's not. And so one of the things that in the video that was talked about is how this trade federation dispute ends up leading to the Clone war, so to speak, you know, and battles between droids on. On the trade federation and then the separatist side. And then you had the. The clones, which ends up being the stormtroopers later on, but then they're battling and the clones are fighting on behalf of the republic. And you in this. Enter this state of perpetual war. And in this state of perpetual war, fighting a war, generally speaking, oftentimes will require compromising of values, compromising of. Of resources. And so diverting what you talked about, diverting of resources from helping the public, helping the people to the war effort or saying, okay, well, we need to. We show up, and we have now the republic showing up with troops and occupying areas in the name of helping those areas, but it's still, to the people being occupied, it still looks like occupation. And so just, you know, what kind of was your. The things that stood out to you in that or, you know, in terms of looking at, again, any of those three, and then we'll probably touch on all of them. Corruption, populism, and perpetual war.
[00:13:02] Speaker B: No, I wrote them down as we were talking because I wanted to make sure I could address all three. I think there's, it's interesting, the documentary which covers like, you're saying that the whole arc of the story in terms of the films, the canon films and the Clone wars did a great job putting this arc. But then it got me thinking of just, let's say the last, let's just say the last 25 years or so. Cause I can think of things. Corruption, what other things that we know of just in general, right? Lobbying rulings from the Supreme Court like Citizens United, and that allows unlimited money from corporations to lobby our government officials.
[00:13:42] Speaker A: Just real quick, one of the things that was pointed out in the video and that's present in the movie is that the trade federation, the ones that blockaded Naboo, had political representation in the Senate. They had their own representation like, well, hold up. That's very similar to citizens.
[00:13:56] Speaker B: That's exactly what I was.
[00:13:57] Speaker A: Corporations are people for the purposes of freedom of speech and spending money.
[00:14:03] Speaker B: Well, actually, you're right. And it's fascinating that these stories, in terms of the films, and obviously they were written before the films came out, were actually written just like a decade before Mitt Romney actually said that while he was campaigning for president.
Corporations are people. So it's kind of mirrored the direction of our own society, Justin. That's what I mean, the last 20 years. Because we could think of things like, I mean, think about the erosion of trust by the public in many spheres. I mean, just in the last 20 something years, I'm saying, starting with the Supreme Court deciding the 2000 election. Again, that's not, that's something we've kind of forgotten as a society. But, you know, people want to talk.
[00:14:43] Speaker A: About, and that means the Supreme Court going out of its way to do.
[00:14:45] Speaker B: So and overriding the Florida state supreme Court. Right? So number one. Number two, the lying of WMD, getting us into the war in Iraq and the youth, let's say this, the use of the real emotional fear that Americans have that was genuine after 911, the use of fear as a way to motivate the population to go in a direction that then the population learns was a lie. Right? No one's really, we haven't really accounted for that in our culture and all that kind of stuff. So then you fast forward then populism, right? I'm thinking of things like the great financial crisis in 2008, which kind of woke up the population that, hold on, what's going on here? And all these guys in Wall street and Goldman Sachs and these bankers that caused a lot of this. They get to now help with the bailout, and they're getting all this tarp money. And will remember.
[00:15:36] Speaker A: You can take a step back, though, for the populism, though, because that the populism was leveraged to start the Iraq war and so forth and with us or against us and nativism and. Yeah, so, like. And then it. It picks up you. It picks up the financial and economic component, or at least that component is put in play with, like you said, with the financial crisis. And it's only picked up since then.
[00:15:59] Speaker B: No, no. And I mean, this is kind of adjacent to it, but on the side, we have all the demographic shifts post 1960. You know, it's been a couple generations of that. So that also kind of grates on the culture and creates more populism. And then, like we discussed, right, all those things were in motion.
And then in 2016, for the first time in uni's lifetime, we have a president who is elected on a populist kind of message. And then when you talk about the last one, which you mentioned, which is perpetual war, I'm thinking this all happens on the backdrop of 20 years of kind of combined Iraq and Afghanistan activity that we are engaged with. Again, we feel, and again, we were sold this idea that we were going to bring democracy and freedom to these regions who are living under authoritarian regimes, which is true. But in the meantime, we did kill around a million civilians over that 20 years. And so that's what I mean by the comparison of the clone wars, where the Jedi and the republic feel that they were liberating these outer rim planets and these societies. But yet from the view of some of those societies, like, well, you know, you know, you guys dropped bombs just like the other guys did. And again, I'm not trying to knock our military. I've got some close friends that have been in infantry and all that stuff. And to a man, none of them were ever trained to kill civilians. Well.
[00:17:25] Speaker A: But the point is about perception. The point is about perception, how it's felt for the people who you are showing up to, like the Jedi and the Republic, that when the people that were on the ground, the boots on the ground, legitimately felt that they were helping the people there, but they were surprised, oftentimes, to learn that the people there did not distinguish them too much from the separatists, the bad guys, so to speak. And so. But one thing was interesting to me about this, and looking at that in 2023, was that, you know, we, the United States, just got out of Afghanistan. And so it seems like, the idea of perpetual war is one that we are actually winding down against now. We still spend money in the military. Like there's going to be a professional war. And I mean, that's, that is what it is, you know, but ultimately, it seems like that's one that our society has diverged from this arc. Some, the corruption piece. Unfortunately, I can't say that we've diverged from this. It seems more corrupt. I mean, like, this is where, you know, like you do have, and I know you have some numbers on this in terms of how, for example, ineffective. Our congress has been in the United, in the US this year, the 2020, the congress that took power in 2022. And it is about it.
The body of Congress seems to have become more about maintaining your position or growing your power, then trying to serve the people. And what's really interesting to me about this is because the movie doesn't get into this as much, but, or the movie and then also the Star wars, the Skywalker saga, but how that type of an effort is sold to people because you, you, Star wars, it's just like, okay, yeah, you got the corruption amongst the, the lawmakers and so forth, and they're, they're interested in taking bribes and growing their power. And if somebody else is wielding a lot of power, they'll kind of, you know, try to side up next to them even if they agree, whether they agree or don't agree with the person because they want to be in close proximity to the power. And so, but what, the way that's justified in our society is, what we get to see is that you condition the people a certain way. You present. There's these, so that, like, things are so bad right now that we have to, we can't worry about making it easier for, put people, for people to put food on the table. It's so, you know, that we're going to lose the country and so we have to. And now it's all about just us getting more power so that we can protect the country from this or that. And so to me that's very interesting because you can see, we didn't see the justification piece on why are all these senators still getting elected if all they do is go there and try to increase their power. But here in the United States, we're able to see, oh, what they were doing on their home planet is saying that, okay, there's some big threat here, some big abstract threat that is so crazy that you just have to put me in power. And then when I go there, I'm just going to try to increase my power because I'm doing, I'm trying to increase my power to keep you safe. And so, you know, you get to see that kind of justification because otherwise it doesn't make sense. Like, why didn't they vote in somebody who wouldn't try to just increase their power the whole time? And it's like, oh, I get it. It's, you condition the population so that all they're doing is worried. They're worried. They're so worried about this is going to happen. That's going to happen. You know, culture wars things. Again, abstract, I think abstract things that remove any kind of accountability from the leadership.
[00:20:40] Speaker B: Yeah. And I think what Star wars does a good job of is because you're dealing with, you know, the fictitious world where you have, let's say, humans like us, but then you have all these other different alien species, and especially they have their own worlds and all that.
It's a good contrast in terms of how separate we can be as humans on our own real planet Earth from a cultural level and how we look at each other as almost like aliens, like the movie does, and say, man, they're so different from us. And like, you're saying that then people can be the right or wrong leader, however one looks at it, can come in. And that's what we're saying, that these guys, like palpatine, aren't necessarily the ones that change the entire nature of the society. They recognize that there are these opportunities for them to divide and create fear so that they can then be the sole one standpoint.
[00:21:37] Speaker A: They can create the fear and then be the solution, present themselves as the solution and saying, okay, you should be afraid about all this stuff now that you're afraid of all this stuff here, I'm the one that can protect you from it.
[00:21:48] Speaker B: Yeah, no, and that's what I was going to say. I think as we segue through this kind of story, I mean, you're kind of making me think of things like in Revenge of the Sith, order 66 and revenge of the Sith, I think, was a very important film within the overall, I guess. In fact, it's in the middle of the whole movie for a reason, because that's when it kind of the real transition takes place, where Palpatine finally usurps power, becomes the emperor in one way is by making sure that the story about who could be the hero, the Jedi, the ones that are supposed to be the peacekeepers and all that at this point, like we've, like we've built up in this discussion, the Jedi had. There was enough suspicion about their. The Jedi's motivation and all that by the, you know, from the population that palpatine was able to create a lie that the Jedi attacked him and then use that as a way to usurp power even more and say, this is why I alone can fix it, and you need to hire me because we got to go get these Jedi. And they, you know, and they're such a threat to the galactic order.
[00:22:58] Speaker A: And so just to add on to that, it was that is becomes believable, easily believable, because over the years in the clone wars, and this is talked about, the Jedi had compromised their values many times, and instead of becoming, resetting, just being peacekeepers, they were generals, quote unquote, in a war. And it becomes very believable, much more believable that generals in a war can decide to take out, can try to execute a cute coup than it would be for peace. Meek peacekeepers who only show up when somebody else is causing a problem, they put the problem down and then they leave, and they're not, you know, trying to hang out there. So, you know, it's that the Jedi and, I mean, and this stuff was recognized by them a little too, too little too late, but that they were. Had already compromised their own image and their own values to such an extent. They became an easy target for that. But it wasn't necessarily palpatine that made them compromise themselves. It was themselves that made decisions along the lines that compromise themselves. And then Palpatine took advantage of that, you know, as part of the storyline. And just to wrap that up, all of this, the corruption, the perpetual war, you know, and the populism is presented as a solution to this. So I'll frame these together. The perpetual war and the corruption create the conditions where people lose faith in the representative government to deliver for them. And as a result of that, it's the populism that is presented as the solution to that. And because ultimately, the people are very less ideological than one would think. And so, or, you know, one might want to think, I should say. And so if representative is not taking care of them, representative type of government is not taking care of them, and somebody offers a solution to all of their quote unquote problems, whether they've big those problems up or made them more afraid of those problems than they need to be in the form of populism, then we've seen throughout history that that's something that many people will grab ahold of and say, yeah, yeah, I mean, there is a simple solution to the immigrants or to, you know, this minority group or, you know, whatever. We'll just get rid of them or we'll just exert control over them, and then that'll solve these problems that we've been led to believe that we have.
[00:25:07] Speaker B: Yeah. And I think the, you know. Cause as you talking about the populism, I can't help but think of things like the idea of idolatry.
And that's what palpatine represents as well, right? Like this, treating one man like an idol, that he's gonna fix it. And I think, to your point, right, that's right.
[00:25:25] Speaker A: He can do no wrong, you know?
[00:25:26] Speaker B: Yeah, well, and that's why there's a kind of cascading order of this, right. Because you're right, the corruption is needed first to break down the public trust in the system. And that's what really happens is once people lose faith in the actual system, then it's easier for humans. Cause this is how we're kind of wired emotionally than to fall into an idol, right? I mean, this goes back to Moses coming down from the mountain and being angry about finding a golden calf because the people didn't believe in the system. They didn't believe in the.
[00:25:56] Speaker A: Cause. They were in the middle of the desert.
[00:25:57] Speaker B: You know, it's like, yo, man, and you're right once. And we've done, I mean, in past shows, we've done, like, on anger, right? Once people are in a place of stress and anger and fear, their rational brain, I mean, it's all been studied by science. It turns off people aren't sitting there trying to game out think, oh, you know, I wonder what would happen in three years if we make this decision. When they're angry and stressed and scared, people are more quick to act. So that's part of the.
[00:26:20] Speaker A: And respond. When somebody points the finger at somebody, they're not gonna sit there now like, well, is it really that person's fault? It's just like somebody points the finger compelling in a compelling way. It's like, oh, yeah, that's it for sure. You know, you don't question or, you know, people are oftentimes won't question it in that type of scenario.
[00:26:36] Speaker B: Yeah, no, and that's why I feel like, because as we're, as we're discussing this, I'm thinking of things because it. Then we're like, going back to this, how we got into this part of the discussion, this kind of order 66, this need to make someone else look like the really boogeyman so that you can do your own thing as the.
[00:26:53] Speaker A: Autocrat, you know, and a key piece about this is this is happening as the existing big bad, the trade federation and separatists. Excuse me, the separatists. They were. That part is winding down at this point. So you need a new big bad at that point. Or at minimum, the society can handle a new big bad.
[00:27:11] Speaker B: Yeah. And I'm thinking of things like, you know, when. When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, we learned that, you know, Vladimir Putin told his population that, you know, he stole this idea that Ukraine was being run by Nazis. And maybe to us, that kind of sounds a little bit hokey and all that, but Russia and Germany, if, you know, world War two history, I mean, that's a lot of animosity there. So if you want to get the russian people in fear and get them these kind of memories of, it'll be like us saying that al Qaeda has infiltrated the government. You know, they say that, you know, for Russians to believe that Nazis are on their.
[00:27:48] Speaker A: Well, yeah, if somebody wanted to try to get the United States to invade Mexico, then, yeah, like, you'd say, oh, okay, yeah, al Qaeda.
[00:27:54] Speaker B: Talking about fentanyl and MS 13 and all the negative.
[00:27:58] Speaker A: Or al Qaeda. They could say al Qaeda, you know, took over the government. Or if somebody wanted to get the US to turn against immigrants, you know, say, oh, there's al Qaeda integrated into these people that are coming across the board.
[00:28:08] Speaker B: Well, that's what's being said. I mean, and that's where I was getting. That's where I was getting at is domestically, it's things like BLM and CRT and. And these other woke ism, right? Like, think about it. All these topics that we've been inundated with for the last three years, from about 2020 to 2023, I mean, ten years ago in 2013, no one ever heard about it. No one ever heard about CRT. No one ever heard of. Unless you were some professor in a law school. No one ever heard about woke ism. So all these things that are just magically invented on the last three years have actually worked, absolutely to disturb our population enough that we have now populism more than we've had in our lifetime. Right. And we have authoritarian type figures ascending to different parts of our leadership and government. So I'm not just talking about one position. I'm talking about, you know, Congress, Senate. The way people are behaving that are ascending to leadership is more authoritarian. So it's an interesting mirror with the Star wars in the real world, I.
[00:29:10] Speaker A: Feel like, and I want to get to the last part of this discussion, but there's one thing, just one distinction I want to make because I find it to be helpful, is something we talked about offline. And just that, you know, like, you look at what Palpatine did in terms of the efforts he took at various points to actually sabotage the operation and the faith in the government, in the Senate and so forth, in the representative government, the democratic government, the liberty from the standpoint of liberty and egalitarian and so forth. So he took steps to actively sabotage that, whether it be telling people half truths, things that they wanted to hear and so forth. But then you also had the corruption, and that's what the government officials did. That wasn't necessarily aimed at undermining people's faith in the institutions. You know, they were just trying to enrich themselves or increase their power. But what you end up having, those are two sides of the same coin because you have the corruption on one hand is more of an unintentional taking a part of the system and then the sabotage, which from Palpatine was more intentional taking a part of the system. But they both result in taking apart the system. And so that's why, and a lot of times in, in societies like United States and these societies that are built on a representative type of government, you know, an equality type of system, corruption is equally, if not more corrosive as any type of sabotage. Sabotage, though, is more, you know, for the, for the imagination. It's more like, oh, yeah, there's somebody pulling strings and so forth. But run of the mill corruption is something that when, when people start accepting that, and again, a lot of times they start accepting that from someone, either because of idolatry, you know, oh, he can, he can steal a little bit because he's there to do something else for us that's more important. Or, no, excuse me. He can do that because he's so important. He's so important to the movement, or it's just trade offs. And people are willing to trade off, say, oh, well, that guy steals a little bit, but, you know, he's doing stuff that we want him to do that. But once you let corruption in, and this is specifically said in the video, it's almost impossible to get it out, you know? And so that's, that's where the people really come in and say, you, you cannot allow, no matter what side you're on, of some issue. Once corruption gets in, we all have to be hostile to corruption or else we will all watch our system fall apart, because corruption is sabotage. It's just not. It's not intentional sabotage in the same way that somebody actively pulling streams behind the system to bring the system down is.
[00:31:36] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, it's. It's interesting, as I wrote down here, norms versus laws. And I think this is where the difficult part is for any large society like ours that considers itself, you know, welcoming of certain individual freedoms and all that. And we have things like freedom of speech, for example.
So, yeah, it's. It's. Corruption is a combination. Right. We recognize legal corruption as the form of, you know, I think this year was Senator Menendez from New Jersey, who was caught with a bunch of gold bars in his house and cash stuffed into his coat pockets.
[00:32:10] Speaker A: Well, that's. That's illegal corruption.
[00:32:11] Speaker B: Well, that's. That's why I was going.
[00:32:13] Speaker A: That's what we have legal corruption as well.
[00:32:16] Speaker B: Yeah. And that's where I'm going, is. Is. That's the traditional form of illegal corruption we think of, you know, the politician getting his coat pocket stuff with cash. Legal corruption will be what we've already brushed on and touched on, which would be like lobbying. The fact that the Supreme Court changed laws by Citizens United, saying that corporations, through super pacs, can give unlimited amounts. And so now we have recorded, you know, that, you know, certain people that are billionaires and multimillionaires giving 1020 million of their own money per campaign cycle. And so that, to me, seems to be an unfair advantage to go court one person for 20 million, then they need to court, let's say, 20 million people for a dollar each.
[00:32:57] Speaker A: So the corruptive aspect of that is the quid pro quo, you know, is saying, okay, well, I'm gonna. I'm gonna fund your campaign, and then when you get in power, you're gonna serve my interests. And so that's the concern when you have money in politics. But if the money is more dispersed, it's harder for one person or one entity to exert a level of control. But as we've concentrated the money and large sums of money coming from certain individuals or certain interest groups, it. There is a level of control that is being exerted, which is in our system. And because the people who would make it illegal are the people who are getting the money, it's something that they've made legal. But that doesn't change the fact that it is. It is a corruption of lobbying, in many respects, could be trying to persuade people. It could be people showing up in your office and showing. Showing you charts and making arguments as to you should vote for this because it's good for this or good for that. Lobbying as we understand it now, is somebody showing up with a check, giving you a check and expecting you to vote a certain way. That's not the normal way. That's not a natural way of things. That's just.
[00:33:58] Speaker B: Well, I would say this, I think in the last, this year, let's say what to me is the big symbolism of that is what we've learned about the Supreme Court, that level of corruption, where we have a Supreme Court justice named Clarence Thomas whose mother's home is owned by billionaire, and that same billionaire paid for one of his kids, full private school tuition and all that.
[00:34:19] Speaker A: And this is a guy who brings cases to the Supreme Court, correct?
[00:34:22] Speaker B: Yeah. And he has not recused himself from cases that this gentleman has brought to the Supreme Court. So that clearly appears, and there's other justices as well that things have come out on, but that clearly appears to be corruption. And that is the type of corruption that corrodes public confidence in the system. So that's the example of, just to.
[00:34:41] Speaker A: Be clear, that's bad for the system in its operation because it goes away from rule of law, it goes away from the idea of equality under the law. So it's bad there and then it's doubly bad because of what you just said, because it also erodes the public confidence, which as we see, that's one of the ways that you sabotage the system unintentionally, is by eroding public confidence due to that type of corruption. But I want to keep us moving, man.
[00:35:05] Speaker B: Well, let me just, I just wanted to say the second thing adjacent to that would be norms. So, for example, we have freedom of speech, but we now have, for the first time in our lifetime, a former president who's breaking norms by not being silent and allowing his maintaining constant campaign.
[00:35:25] Speaker A: Mode throughout the entire.
[00:35:26] Speaker B: And that's what I mean, that's not illegal. Right. But that's a break of norms which caused disruption within now our democracy because you've got a certain block of voters who can't now let go of that past one, you know, and allow the system to just continue its perpetual motion.
[00:35:43] Speaker A: Yeah, perpetual campaigning is bad for the system because you are trying to say that the government is, if you're campaigning and you're not in government, you're trying to say the government's not working. Well, but the government needs to get to work at some point and not be over there trying to defend itself or whatever. And, like, actually just get to work. And what was the number you had that you had? Showed me, like 27.
[00:36:03] Speaker B: 27 laws passed. These are where you're going.
[00:36:06] Speaker A: 27. What was it? Versus every other Congress passes hundreds of laws.
[00:36:10] Speaker B: No, this is the crazy thing. It's the lowest amount of laws passed since the Congress that was in the civil war, when they were actually war. So this is like the lowest, but.
[00:36:20] Speaker A: It'S lowest by a lot, too. It's like it's in the twenties, like you said, whereas the next lowest is in like four or 500, isn't it?
[00:36:27] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, no, I think, like, you know, it's in the. Yeah, some of the high twos or low threes, but yeah, the high twos. Congressional class of 2022 passed, like 300 laws. That's what I mean. Like, it's not like we're going back to some time when everybody was Kumbaya, which is never existed. But we're talking about with all the tension that we've had in our domestic politics in this recent era, this year was the lowest. And it goes back to, like, saying, because right now we've got, again, what the people in Congress are doing when they talk a certain way is not illegal. But to your point, we now have people who are filling our halls of government as elected officials that are campaigning against their. The government that they are working for.
[00:37:08] Speaker A: And all they're doing is increasing and maintaining their power.
[00:37:12] Speaker B: Like, so they're not trying to govern to fix whatever. They're.
[00:37:17] Speaker A: They get into power and then just essentially camp start campaigning for their next election. And it's like, well, hold on. You know, you're supposed to do some stuff. You still pick the campaign back up, you know, like a couple months before the next election. Not just doing that the whole time. But I do want to move.
The last question I have for this and I want to discuss. We can touch on this. Do not spend too much time on it. But is there a natural entropy that we're observing here? Whether it be in the video and in Star wars, it was 1000 years of a republic is a long time.
That's pretty remarkable in itself. We're only in a couple hundred years, but so is it possible just in that story and not necessarily right now in the United States, but at some point in the future, it's just time that there is time for the Republic and the Jedi to fall, you know, like, so to speak. As we looked at in there, like, the things that we're observing about the decay was something that was part of just a natural entropy, and it had to fall in order for the people to appreciate it again and to demand that their public officials, not, no matter what their justice, their supposed justification was, you can't be corrupt. You know, it doesn't matter. I know you're telling me the other side is so bad and they want to do this, but look, how about you don't take money on the side? How about you work and actually try to do law passing instead of just campaigning the whole time? I know the other side is bad. I got like, does that need to happen for people to kind of wake up in that sense?
[00:38:41] Speaker B: Yeah. As I'm getting older and observing all this, I am starting to come that conclusion. I just think it is a natural entropy and that we have these cycles, and I think things that we've discussed in other podcasts, like living memory and all that is so important. And so, you know, I think, you know, this is where Star wars clearly is fiction. The fact that the Republic could last.
[00:39:00] Speaker A: A thousand years, that's probably the most far fetched part.
[00:39:03] Speaker B: Yeah, that's what I mean, that's the fictional part, because as we sit here and talk about, you know, at least, what, 8500 years of recorded human history in terms of when they found cuneiform and all that kind of stuff and can go back, we are the oldest republic, democracy, whatever you want to call the United States in world history that's been recorded. And we're, like you said, less than 250 years old. So, you know, what does that tell us? That tells us that the natural state of human societies is less republican, less democratic than probably most of us appreciate and want to believe. And I think, to your point, the idea of entropy, this idea that you can go, you know, states go from order to disorder and then kind of form an order again over a period of time, I think is appropriate for societies, which is more like that's, that's.
[00:39:57] Speaker A: Oftentimes discussed more from a physics standpoint.
[00:40:00] Speaker B: Yeah. But I think, again, it's almost, if you want to get really galaxy brain for an appropriate term for the show with it and really esoteric and abstract. I mean, we are represent humans, right? We are made up and we're representation of the natural world.
[00:40:16] Speaker A: Yeah. We're part of the laws of physics apply to us, too.
[00:40:21] Speaker B: That's what I'm saying. String theory from molecules to thermodynamics and all that. Meaning that, yeah, maybe that's how our brain chemistry and our societies work as well, is that you just can't go forever because you have these competing forces that at all times are in the society and at some times more than others, some rise up and overtake others. And over time, we do have this corrosive effect of corruption within all societies. And democracies, by design, allow for certain freedoms which can allow then those who want to take advantage in the door. And I think if you look at societies like China or Russia, for example, they are authoritarian, they republican. Throw in Saudi Arabia, North Korea, Iran, the way that they deal with those type of opposing forces in their societies is they just crush them, period.
[00:41:19] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:41:20] Speaker B: So that's. That's kind of what the whole Star wars arc is about, is how does a society go from one like ours that has relative freedoms and relatively open society, which has these norms of certain levels of respect and decorum, then morph into more of a Saudi Arabia style autocracy where you have Palpatine, who's an emperor equivalent to NBS, or the saudi king, and then you have the stormtroopers who are like the religious police, you know, or the Gestapo in Nazi Germany or the blackshirts in Mussolini's Italy. They're the ones that control the population so that none of those forces which.
[00:42:00] Speaker A: Are represented violence enforced, by the way.
[00:42:02] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. And in episode four, like a new Hope, and episode five and six, I would say the rebels represent, you know, the people like Han Solo and Leia and Luke. They represent those forces that are trying to rise up against the autocracy. So they are the ones that are, you know, they will be seen as, like the young lady in Iran who got killed for showing her hair from the hijab. They're seen as the kind of the terrorists of that, you know, society.
[00:42:33] Speaker A: Yeah. They're pushing against the established order. I think that's it is. There is a necessity for. And there's quotes about this. The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time. And I'm not going to complete the rest of the quote, but essentially, there is something to the idea that each generation becomes less connected to whatever struggle that led to the creation of a state with a certain level of liberty and representative government. Because that's not the, as you pointed out, most, when we look at history, most governments that people have operated under have not been ones based on liberty or based on democracy. It has been based on somebody in control, you know, whether that be for a religious reason or just because they were the ones with the biggest stick or the biggest guys with the group of sticks or biggest group of guys with sticks, you know, like, so that's been the norm more than anything. It is. The american system is exceptional because it is an exception. And so it's naturally going to be something that's more difficult to maintain, which is illustrated. Well, other than the thousand year thing illustrated in the Star wars story, I think there are ways to combat it. Now. We've seen throughout the history, United States things that have like, have refreshed it on its own, you know, in terms of like the civil war, in terms of kind of the Great Depression into the New Deal civil rights movement and so forth. And so these things did kind of break apart the existing order and then reform the order into something that was a little different. Even under the same framework. It still refreshed kind of the tree of liberty, so to speak. So I think that there is some level of breaking apart and reforming that does need to happen. And so ideally you have a system that is designed to allow for that, which is. That's the nature of the constitutional system the United States had. And in Star wars, what happened is that the. As these, these things started happening, that led, that were the embodied the decay. Nothing was happening basically to keep the system or the people that were in place in power at the time. Nobody was operating to refresh the actual system. It was all about, okay, we need to keep. Go back and say, we need to put in place what was not looking forward and saying, okay, well, here's the struggles that we're having. Let's now reform things and refresh things to be ready for what's happening next. And so the looking back is the fatal mistake in that sense. And said, okay, well, we have some disorder now. How can we put the toothpaste back in the tube as opposed to saying, okay, we have some disorder now. What changes do we need to make in order to direct the toothpaste that's out of the tube into a place where it can be used properly, so to speak? I think that's part of it. The other part of it is that I think, and this is going to be in the real world, I think education is very important. And I sound like you saying that that's usually one of your refrains. But I'm going to say I say it in a different way. The education piece, the part that's most important isn't necessarily the teaching of what happened.
The teaching of history is important, but the most important actually is to, within each generation, you need to impress upon them the importance of allegiance to the system over allegiance to a man. Because when you see the populism and the idolatry, a lot of things that come out of that is that people start being, having more allegiance to a man than the system. If the man and the system come into conflict, they choose the man over the system and say, no, no. Well, if this person is accused of breaking this law, then that law shouldn't be there. It becomes people thinking like that. And so I think the only way to combat that is with education is to make sure that, to try to, I mean, and it's, it's almost, you know, kind of like you got to propagandize your own people. With the system being the most important thing, we have to keep trying to. And again, that's what will allow people to, when there's friction in the system, look to refresh the system. And not necessarily, and then particularly in the, in the documentary, talked about how in that the, the Jedi were so dogmatic that they couldn't even think, they couldn't even think of ideas on how the system could be refreshed. It was all about maintaining what had been done for 1000 years from them. So I think that's a big part of it, is having the system dynamic and then also having the people dynamic enough to refresh and then also having the peak. The people value teaching the people to value the system over any one man that will come along and seduce them.
[00:46:54] Speaker B: I agree. And I think, I mean, you pointed to some very interesting things there, one being the education part. I mean, I wrote down Hitler, NATO, and not as a joke, but as a serious thing. You know, we have now politicians, we have groups like moms for liberty that openly quote Adolf Hitler. We have entertainers like Kanye west that sing his praises. And what it tells me is the fact that there's enough people that actually follow these people. I'm not saying it's a majority of Americans at this point. I would have never thought that I would watch in my lifetime people publicly quoting Adolf Hitler and not being publicly kind of reprimanded for that. Right? And so that tells me that, wow, we must have enough Americans now. Like you said, we're past this. A lot of, unfortunately, people are dying that were alive, you know, in World War two and survived it and all that on all sides. You know, we have american gis that went and saw the concentration camps and came back and told the stories of what they saw, and they're no longer alive. So it tells me how removed we are now from that history. And then even something like NATO, you know, the amount of Americans that question NATO and its importance in maintaining at least our dominance and global economic stability, which keeps us on top as well. And that's where I do see these analogies, because when I begin to talk like this to some people, they begin to point out in their mind why America has all these faults and why we are an imperialist nation and why NATO should, you know, and they start taking talking points from people like the russian president that, you know, we're all imperialist, and somehow people like him aren't when they invade. So, so, so what I'm saying is it's very interesting because it's very similar to, like, we're saying, the breakdown of the republic in Star wars as. And the sad thing is that I'm talking about it. We're clearly living through this now. And then the other thing, as you were talking, I couldn't help but think, as we're talking about the need to learn history and all that, so you. So that the population can have the knowledge of this past and say, wow, this is how these things happen. We're banning books in our state, right?
[00:48:59] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:48:59] Speaker B: We're having a debate in the United States right now about not teaching history and not having tough conversations.
[00:49:05] Speaker A: Because of the way it feels.
[00:49:06] Speaker B: Yeah. Because it doesn't feel good. And so. And so, yeah.
[00:49:09] Speaker A: That's why, true or not, if it feels a certain way, let's just not teach it. Like, that's. Yeah, that's pretty crazy.
[00:49:16] Speaker B: So that's kind of. That's why I think it's. It's a very interesting.
[00:49:20] Speaker A: I'll say this, and I want to topic up, but this is the disorder that either leads to the refreshing or that leads to.
[00:49:30] Speaker B: That'll collapse it.
[00:49:31] Speaker A: And so what? So I think the key piece, though, is you don't want to make the mistakes that were made by the Jedi and the people who were trying to preserve the Republic. And looking back and saying, okay, for us to solve the disorder we have now, we have to go back to something that was. Because that's just not the way the world works. What has to be done is you have to see the disorder, identify where it's coming from, but then look to refresh the system by figuring out how to address the needs of the people, moving forward, not looking backwards. And so I think that's what. That's where we are now. That's the lesson you can take away from Star wars if you don't want to go the way of the Republic. And, you know, with Palpatine taking over and also just looking back throughout history like that, our own history has shown that when we hit the Great Depression, if the goal of FDR would have been to go back to the way things were in 1900, we wouldn't have built the biggest middle class in the history of the world, and then by the 1950s. And so you have to figure out a way how to move forward, and that's going to be the key. And ideally, that's something that we as Americans will be able to do again.
But I do want to move on.
Nothing lasts forever, including that discussion and presumably including human life. But there are people who right now, are looking to try to define immortality. We have billionaires that are doing different things, taking 100 pills a day or doing all the technology they can do with doctor scientists. And our science is pretty good to where this is something that seems less religious intent and more scientific in intent. So what's your take on this? Is this something that's even possible?
Should we be careful saying things are impossible? You know, like, going to space was probably impossible to people before. So what's your overall, you know, reaction to this. These efforts? And, you know, kind of the science behind. Behind what some are saying makes it impossible now.
[00:51:27] Speaker B: You screwing me up because I don't want to be an absolutist. Because I know that's. I know that's dangerous. I'll be the Sith.
[00:51:33] Speaker A: I'll be the Sith.
[00:51:34] Speaker B: Yeah, no, I know that's dangerous, but I would. I will. I will. People venture to say that immortality for humans is impossible.
And actually, this article helped me come to that conclusion, because you're right. I mean, number one, the article was about these billionaires that are spending, you know, crazy amounts of money. And not only. I mean, look, I appreciate we live in a free country, and I don't have to agree with everyone's lifestyle, and they don't. I got to agree with mine. But I feel like it's another example where certain people in our society just have this constant anxiety about needing to control something. And in this case, they got to control their own mortality for some reason. And I feel sorry.
[00:52:19] Speaker A: This is a human impulse, to be fair. Like, we have stories of, like, for sure, people in ancient world, you know, like in mercury.
[00:52:27] Speaker B: Yeah, Ponce de Leon, you know, trying to find all that, you know, the. The fountain of you wellspring of life and all that. But that's my point is saying that. I realize, number one, it seems like usually it's those of us in first world countries and then those of us in first world countries who have excess means that usually are thinking of these things, right?
[00:52:47] Speaker A: Yeah. People that are just trying to survive day to day aren't worried about.
[00:52:50] Speaker B: Yeah, they aren't. And. But also, if you. I mean, I've seen this myself. I mean, I've been to some third world countries and situations where I actually walked away feeling like, man, those people are actually happier than we are.
They just smiling more. And it's not. I'm not gonna say that everybody in poverty is happy. I don't want to be making that scene. I'm just saying that even watching documentaries about hunter gatherer tribes in the Amazon or in the Congo, those humans actually look happy. They don't have the same stresses. They're not sitting there with type two diabetes and worrying about working three jobs. And it can't, you know, the department.
[00:53:26] Speaker A: Pills to keep their deductible on their.
[00:53:29] Speaker B: Health insurance because they don't have the cash, you know, that's all I'm saying about true happiness. They look like they're living in the moment and they're not worrying about how they look and that their hair is going gray and all that kind of stuff.
[00:53:39] Speaker A: And so I think, go hunt some animals, chew some cocoa leaves, and, yeah, you all good.
[00:53:43] Speaker B: Go have sex. Go look, you know, go chill out, right? And go smoke a little pipe and chill. That's. That's what hunter gatherers do. So, so, so what I'm saying is, I read these things and it's like, yes, interesting. And, you know, these guys are trying to manipulate their bodies. And then I think, man, these people also seem so unhappy because, I mean, maybe they are happy. That's why I don't want to project. But I just feel like when they say these guys don't eat pizza, they don't drink, they don't do that, they don't go in the sun because of the corrosive effect that some kind. And I was thinking about it, like, you know, we live in South Florida, and, you know, I'm a boater. And I was thinking, like, man, the amount of times I've been in a sandbar and had a nice time with my family and all that, and then literally sit there. Now in a middle age, I appreciate certain things in life different. And I look at a sunset and I think, man, that's just beautiful. You know, like, I'm just, like, happy to be alive. And I think, I'm reading this article, I'm like, man, these guys never experienced something like that because they don't want to be in the sun because the sun's gonna, you know, that the radiation is gonna hit their air, create more antioxidants themselves.
[00:54:44] Speaker A: It makes you ask the question, well, what's the point of all of this life?
[00:54:47] Speaker B: That's what I mean.
[00:54:48] Speaker A: He's not gonna live the life. It's like, oh, well, yeah, I'm not gonna do a lot of fun, fun stuff, but I'll just be around a lot longer.
[00:54:54] Speaker B: Like, it's like, well, sometimes, like, we ask about money. When you see people that are, let's say, billionaires or 100 millionaires and they look absolutely miserable. Like, they don't look happy. They don't like.
[00:55:05] Speaker A: Yeah, like, look super stressed. You know, we talk sometimes.
[00:55:09] Speaker B: I mean, again, I don't want to assume. Right, but I mean, again, not for the audience, but James and I sometimes enjoy going out on the water and in Fort Lauderdale here. Right. We'll drive by yachts that are like you. It's like a personal cruise ship. Like, it's literally 80, $90 million vessel. And I'll see that same boat sitting for two years.
[00:55:27] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:55:28] Speaker B: That no one use. And sometimes I wonder, like, you know, wow, this, this person spent all this.
[00:55:31] Speaker A: Money on this yacht, and they're enjoying. Yeah. They're still spending money to maintain it all.
[00:55:36] Speaker B: Yeah, but they don't enjoy it. So. So what's the point in a sense? I mean, I get the tax write offs and all, but it's just. So what's the point of living forever if you're gonna constantly be stressed out.
[00:55:46] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:55:46] Speaker B: That you can't, like, move because you might hurt your ability to live forever.
[00:55:50] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:55:50] Speaker B: It's almost like a prison.
[00:55:52] Speaker A: That's an excellent work word for it. It's like you make your kind of your body this prison, and you're putting all this effort into continually refreshing it. And I think that there's the effort piece. You know, what you will, what you have to do in order to try to follow these programs that they've come up with and what you can't do. There's also just the. Again, this impulse being something that humans have obviously had for a long time, it makes, it lets you know that it's coming from somewhere deeper, though. And I think the bigger thing is certain people probably are just wired like this. And then the people, certain people who are wired like this have the resources to do it. Like, every pharaoh wasn't concerned about either the afterlife or trying to extend his life, but the few that were had the means to go about really trying to do it. Like, act like, making it honest based on whatever tech they had at the time to do it. And so it's same thing you hear now, every billionaire doesn't do this, but the ones who are wired that way, and I'm sure there are people who aren't billionaires that are wired that way, that if they had the means to, they would. So there's some of kind of. I think there's just some people wired like this. And then if that overlaps with people who have the means and opportunity to do so, then you're going to see this. You'll always see this. I was, I thought the physics of it was very interesting. And talking about how, they talked about how, like, there's a certain level of decay that's going to happen in your body just from a nature, just from physics, you know, like the. And so unless there's a way to overcome the laws of physics, you know, the second law of thermodynamics, then you're going to run up against something no matter what. And that piece I find to be very interesting because, you know, laws of physics, these are, they haven't been broken yet. But that's not to say that they never, like, we never will learn additional context, which may reframe these laws of physics. You know, like, in turn, like, Isaac Newton had theories and so forth. And Einstein came along. He didn't overturn those theories, but he added more information, which recontextualized him a little bit. So that's always possible. But it's like you're going up against the physical world.
Your villain in this story, so to speak, is the world around you and everything that's around you. And so it's like, it's really, when you look at it bigger than yourself, in that sense, it's like, well, hold on. Stars don't live forever. Like, nothing that we know in the physical world lives forever, so to speak, that nothing that is active, not just actual space itself, but nothing that is active. So if we're going to say that, we can accept it, be an exception to that. It just seems, it seems like more religious thinking, more wishful thinking than anything. You know, you might as well be saying, I'm going to live forever in the afterlife. In my mind, that's what it's comparable to saying. It doesn't seem like it's really grounded in any type of reality in terms of the way the world or the universe works.
[00:58:31] Speaker B: Yeah. Well, let me jump in. You said something profound, which is the villain is the world around you. So I think that's actually a profound statement and observation, because therein lies the perpetual misery that this type of mindset creates. Because it's almost like, I mean, I've heard this kind of analogy where, um, there's certain groups, again, going back to more like, uh, the. When people were hunter gatherers and all that, they looked at these natural world around them as an extension of themselves.
[00:59:03] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:59:04] Speaker B: And so almost like, if you remember the movie avatar, like, those species looked at Ewa, the earth, as they were all part of it. Remember, they could put their hair and kind of plug in. And then. And then. But they.
[00:59:17] Speaker A: Which is. That was an analogy to many cultures. Yeah.
[00:59:20] Speaker B: And then, and then the more once we got into agrarian and kind of agriculture, then we. We humans began to look at the natural world as an adversary.
[00:59:30] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:59:30] Speaker B: You know, you got to control the land, you got to control these animals and all this. And what has that done to us in the long run? It has, unfortunately, we've begun to destroy our natural world, which kind of is a blowback in our face. Right. The pollution, the climate change, all this. And I. As you said that, it made me realize, like, yeah, I mean, imagine the emotional state from. From, like, almost a psychological and emotional turmoil if you're constantly attacking yourself like your own. Because that's why. I mean, I'm glad we're on this part of the discussion because now this. This is why I said I think it's impossible. I didn't want to be absolutist. But after learning what you just said when we're reading, because I didn't know this about the thermodynamics aspect, it also reminds me of when we did the discussion and about the environment and discussed plastic recycling. There's the first time I learned that you can only recycle plastic only so many times. Why? Because at some point, the chemicals break down the bonds.
[01:00:26] Speaker A: Yeah.
[01:00:26] Speaker B: And you can't. Yeah. You can't recycle the same plastic bottle 50,000 times. It only has a recycle life above about four or five times. And then the actual plastic itself is unusable. So. So I get it like that. Like. Yeah, because of the entropy within the molecular structure. They said we have 37. Approximately 37 trillion cells.
[01:00:49] Speaker A: Yeah.
[01:00:49] Speaker B: And each of those have their own breakdown and entropy and all that. So. Yeah, so, really, like you said about stars, black holes, you want to get all into the galaxy stuff again.
We are within this physical universe and physics, I guess, the study of physics has shown us that entropy is real. Things will break down so our bodies are no different over time. So maybe one can live 500 years, 300 years, but immortality may be actually impossible.
[01:01:20] Speaker A: And that actually is my thought, really, when I read this. I think it's properly recaptured cast as slowing aging more than eliminating aging, you know, so if you can slow, and this is something we know about, like, if the more toxins you expose yourself, the less you expose yourself to, the less, the harder you strain your body to continue. Your body is built to regenerate itself, you know, but it can only do that as we're talking about so much. So the less you force it to regenerate, the less harm you cause it and its ability to regenerate, then presumably you can slow the aging process down. And humans already, you know, like it was talked about in the piece, and again, we'll have this piece in the show notes talked about how they kind of based on our size and how, you know, size is proportionality to how long to lifespan in the world in many respects, you know, in terms of elephants live longer than mice and so forth. And so our kind of natural in that framework is around 40. So we've already been able to extend beyond, and that's 40. Around that age is when a lot of ancients would live, too, a lot of times, you know, from an average, again, average standpoint. And so now that takes into account, you know, like, not necessarily all natural causes when you're talking about that average, but nonetheless, we've already extended that. So it's very conceivable that we could extend it further. I don't know if big food would allow us to do that. I mean, there are some, you trying to talk about some adversaries to a longer life. I think we're looking more at, you know, like, the capitalist impulses of certain companies that want to sell us stuff in excess would be one of the bigger adversaries. But I think aging, slowing it as possible. And the other thing I'll mention, I know we want to get out of here is just that it lets you know kind of what side of the coin you're on when, just looking at our previous discussion, a person that was interested in extending life and living beyond the kind of natural way was palpatine. He was really interested in that, too.
So I don't know. It just seems like perhaps, and I know you've mentioned this in shows before, just from a psyche standpoint, like, I don't know that it would be pleasant to live for 300 years and go through 300 years of stress and ups and downs of the world and seeing, you know, you know, like your loved ones seeing 300 years worth of loved ones pass, you know, Im saying, and all that kind of stuff. Like I dont know that thats kind of, thats what we would want to sign up for anyway.
[01:03:37] Speaker B: Yeah, well, I mean, look, we dont know if these guys are trying to do these billionaires on them, experiments on themselves so they can now disseminate it to the rest of us so all of us can join them for the 300 years of life.
[01:03:49] Speaker A: But so then with 300 billion people in the world, that's where I was gonna get. It seemed like a very pleasant experience either.
[01:03:55] Speaker B: No, and that's where I was gonna get at. Well, number one, as you alluded to, Palpatine wanting to live forever, it's an interesting, I didn't think about this until you said that analogy also with Anakin, remember?
[01:04:05] Speaker A: Yeah.
[01:04:05] Speaker B: He turned into Darth Vader. Yeah, because he was trying to stop Padme from dying. He couldn't accept, he couldn't let go of this fear he had that drove him, that drove Darth Mater to become the most evil character in the history of movies next to his boss.
But no, but it's interesting because the article says here that we must grow old and die to make way for a new generation. In that case, the fact that our bodies stop repairing themselves at a point isn't a design flaw but a feature. And I thought about that because I thought about this. If there's a certain level of narcissism, if you're saying I want to live forever and make sure everyone, you know, people I care about, whatever, live forever, because again, like you said, what we're going to do, have a hundred billion people on this planet and suck all the reason, you know, basically sucked earth dry of everything, and then we're going to be extinct anyway because we can't, you know, we're not going to go to some other galaxy when they least anytime in the near future. So let's just accept that. Right? And so, and so, um, that's really what I'm thinking too. Like, like the, that's why I love the way I said the point isn't it is designed, you know, aging is not a design flaw, it's not a disease. It's a feature. All of us age and we all die because you got to make way for the next, you know, humans coming in and all that. So it's really about, again, the egalitarian, are we all in this collectively or the hierarchy?
[01:05:38] Speaker A: Do I get so important?
[01:05:40] Speaker B: Correct the eject button and I'm gonna live for, like you said, like King Tut, as you were saying about the pharaohs, I kept thinking, yeah, look at King Tut. I mean, I'm glad they packed his tomb with all that stuff because we found it, but, you know, he's still dead.
[01:05:56] Speaker A: I wish I would have found it.
[01:05:58] Speaker B: No, no, I know humanity found it. But the point is, it's not like King Tut was sitting there bored, just waiting for Howard Carter to find him, like in 19 whatever, that they opened a tomb and this kid sitting there like 2000 years old, like, guys, what took you guys so long? I'm just running out of oxygen.
[01:06:15] Speaker A: What can I do with all this gold now?
Yeah, and whatever's next is next, you know? So, I mean, like, that's kind of. You're saying you want to stay on this plane forever. You don't know what's next. And so. Or some people, you know, think they know what's next, but nonetheless, it's. It's just like, I agree with you. The level of narcissism and then the level of I. What I know now is all I need to know. So to, you know, and that's a dangerous way to be, so. But I think we can wrap from there. We appreciate everybody for joining us on this episode of Call. Like I see it. Subscribe to the podcast.
[01:06:46] Speaker B: Hold on. I want to say that I appreciate this show in the topic because I got to do it from my star destroyer, wearing my family Guy Star wars shirt and drinking out of my stormtrooper mug.
[01:06:57] Speaker A: Hey, man.
[01:06:58] Speaker B: Now, normally, will ever do a show that allows me to get all that?
[01:07:02] Speaker A: Well, normally when you do that much promotion, you're supposed to get paid for it.
[01:07:06] Speaker B: No, no, I'm a big enough fan that I don't be paid for to promote Star Wars. George Lucas, if you're watching, just, you know, find me later, you know.
[01:07:15] Speaker A: All right, well, now, we appreciate you all for joining us. Subscribe, rate us, review us, check us on YouTube. Until next time, I'm James Keys.
[01:07:22] Speaker B: I'm Tunde Romana.
[01:07:24] Speaker A: All right, we'll talk to you next time.
