[00:00:00] Foreign. [00:00:05] You're listening to casual talk radio where common sense is still the norm whether you're a new or long time listener. We appreciate you joining us today. Visit [email protected] and now here's your host. Ler. [00:00:21] You know, I can't express to people enough the loss of value with no longer having newspapers. I have a newspaper subscription. [00:00:33] The mainstream papers are all garbage. So mine is not a mainstream paper. I mean it, it is, but it isn't. [00:00:40] It's epic times for those that are not familiar. Epic times. [00:00:44] I recommend them for certain people, not for everybody because for some people it's kind of like eh, I think they have good content. I do think some of the content's kind of questionable. I think there's an appetite. And of course the modern era has been taught that newspapers are the devil because, and I actually had somebody tell me this because apparently the information is already out of date by the time you read it. Now this is fair and accurate. [00:01:12] My challenge, and this is, this is kind of a 5050 episode today. So the first half has to deal with that. [00:01:19] Okay? We don't like newspapers because the information is already out of date by the time you get it. [00:01:24] My question is why is that a problem? [00:01:27] Which goes to the current mantra, which is that everything has to be immediate, everything has to be a rush, everything has to be down to the minute. That's why social media became a thing, right? I want to know everything that's going on right now. Why and why are you in a rush for some information? Let's take a, as a great example, text messages. The whole thing with text messages that people have is allegedly emails too slow for them. [00:01:54] Even though if you were to time it, and this assumes you have a good provider, but if you were to time it, email's not that much. It may be one second slower than text. Are we really suggesting that text is this much faster? And even if it was, why does that matter? [00:02:09] So let's take political right, Donald Trump and the one big beautiful bill and all that nonsense. Why do you need to know what's happening right up to the minute? Why do you need to know what's happening right now? What does it, what does that do for you? I'll tell you what it does to you. [00:02:27] What it does to you is it sets a false sense of urgency in your mind, which is a fallacy which causes you to then be distracted. [00:02:36] You're not calm, you're not relaxed, you're not enjoying life. [00:02:40] Things are passing you by at A faster pace because you're forcing this. You're not trying to slow time down. And that's okay if you're younger. You know, I remember when I was younger, and I certainly wanted time to speed up, and it felt like it was dog slow. But I see even people that are in the 30s, 40s, 50s, that just. They want immediacy. And I never understand that because that is absolutely the polar opposite of the way I am. And remember, and if you're new, by the way, welcome. But remember, I'm a technologist. I'm surrounded by technology even now. The room I'm in has an aggressive amount of technology, thousands of dollars worth of technology. However the technology is used, I wouldn't say sparingly, but it's not used constantly. There's work, right? That's a different thing. That's a different use case. [00:03:28] There's what I'm talking to you on, which is an infrequent need. There's a fan that's an infrequent need. Ironically, there is a printer. [00:03:36] It's not heavily used, but when I need it, it's there, and I'm glad it's there. There's a typewriter, believe it or not, which is the same model as the one my grandmother purchased that went missing. And I don't know exactly what I did with it, but it went missing one day and I had to buy a replacement of the same model because I like the model. [00:03:53] There's laptops, there's desktops, there's power deals, there's all sorts of stuff, but the technology does not dominate my attention. I don't have text messaging in the traditional sense. I don't have a smartphone. [00:04:07] I have smartphones, but they're not active service. I should be clear. So I don't have smartphones. I have a tablet, but the tablet does not. There's no text messaging. There's no. There's a plan, but it's data only. [00:04:19] And that's only when I'm on the road, which is infrequent, because in my mind I struggle to understand, well, why am I right? Like when I was traveling, when I was on business, it's like, okay, well, you're taught and trained. You're conditioned to just get on a plane and get out there. That's how it was when I was on the grind. And eventually I started thinking, well, why? What am I in a rush for? What's the hurry now? Obviously, our system of trains sucks in the United States, and so I would never advocate trying to take a train from the west coast to the east or vice versa, or from the north and the south and vice versa. I would never advocate that you do that because unfortunately our trains are throttled to the nth. [00:04:59] If they were not throttled, I would consider that the strongest, most viable form of transportation. No tsa, no groping. Did you hear, by the way, just as a divergence, did you hear TSA recently announced that they're going to be removing the requirement that you take off your shoes. [00:05:17] And here's the funny story. So back in 20, I'm pretty sure it was 2016, 2013, I think it's 2013, 2013. [00:05:26] They had announced, right, that they were going to Release Pre Check. TSA PreCheck and Pre check was the only way for you to keep your shoes on when going through the violation scanner, right? [00:05:40] So now billions and billions of dollars over these years grifted out of people who bought pre check solely because they sold that. They were selling it. They were advertising, hey, keep your shoes on and just pay us 80 bucks or whatever it was. Keep your shoes on. [00:05:56] And then some people stopped paying and then they sold you on the fact that you could jump to the front, not jump to the front, but shorter lines and faster service and no X ray scanner and all this that they sold you on the pre check. And then it got to the point where the pre check was no better than the regular, but you're paying a fee for it. See, I did mine through the Nexus program because it came free with Nexus when you did Nexus. Because at, at the time, I was considering taking a trip to Canada just to go see what it was like up there. That's where I got detained at the border because Google nav took me the wrong way. I digress. [00:06:32] But yeah. So now if you paid for pre check, they're basically screwing you and saying you wasted your money all these years in any case. [00:06:40] So the point I'm making with all this now, I had to challenge myself and I would challenge you to think about what is it that you're rushing for. [00:06:48] Your company will tell you that things are in a rush, right? Something happens to a family member. But these are events, right? These are very specific, targeted events. When I drove to my client, when I was in Oregon, I drove to my clients down in California. I took the train. Yes, it takes longer, but I didn't care. I just, hey, I'll just get on the train on Friday and I'll end up there Sunday evening. Who cares? I can relax. I have a Room. I get served room service. I can. You know, there's no Internet. That was actually to the boon. Right. Forced me to bring some books and just relax, enjoy the countryside. I have all sorts of great photos from the countryside when I was doing the train trips, because it just was a vastly superior experience, you know, to check in, get your tickets. You're not groped by tsa. You're not standing in lines. You don't have to wait for anything. You're not. No sardines. It was an amazing experience. [00:07:42] Dedicated bathroom. I have my own bathroom. Just an amazing experience. And it helps you slow it down and enjoy the world and enjoy your books and enjoy your. Your free time, your space. You can think. Yes, it is true that for that brief period of time, you are ineffective. That was kind of the point. And I enjoyed it for what it was. And that told me something's got to change. [00:08:07] So I said, okay, let me build my business and try to work from home, which I've been doing since 2019 now. And to me, it works better. It's less effective for me to be sitting in a cubicle. I'm sorry. Because at the end of the day, what is it that we're doing in the cubicle? It's because they don't trust you. They don't trust that you're doing the work. What I'm trying to convince people is that the trust should come from delivery of results. And that doesn't matter where you are when you do it. So if I do it from home, and you see that I'm delivering at a much faster pace than I can do at work, because I don't have to worry about the safety, security of my home. I don't have to worry about any of those things that the company's not going to cover. They're not going to cover your security. They're not going to make sure that your stuff is taken care of. They're not going to make sure that you're not jacking up traffic or that you're stuck in traffic or that your car breaks down. They're not worried about any of that stuff. They're not worried about you. They're worried about themselves. You do it working from home, you get more control. You can take your car to get it serviced and not worry about it. You can go and grab a bite to eat at your leisure. You know, some companies are a bit picky, but you know what I'm saying, You can make sure security is intact. You can work home improvements. You can meet the Contractors who don't ever work on the weekends. You don't have to take time off, so there's less time off taken that's used to do work for the company. They don't understand that. Mine currently does. But there's those times when they want you to come into the office that's a bit annoying. [00:09:29] Ultimately, there's no rush on things. I control my pace, I control the time, and as a result, I'm more effective, especially now that I can wrap things a lot easier than I could in my younger years. So I thought that was an aha as part of what I was reading. [00:09:47] The other piece that I was reading in this Epic Times, going back to the reason why I had the paper was some of these articles are just really good and I would advocate if you do get a chance. And I know some of you have been trained off of newspapers and you're going to immediately go to Google Search and try to look up it online. I'm going to encourage you to just for one day try to get a paper. It doesn't have to be epic times even, but just try to get a paper and just read the dang thing, right? And try to absorb some of the other content that you would not have known to search for. That's kind of given to you, but it's not trying to sell you on stuff. It's just trying to give a different opinion or a different something about world news and something you didn't know that you would never have gone to look for because those algorithms wouldn't have thought to feed it to you because you never searched for it. That's the other beauty of a paper. It exposes you to other things around the world that you never would have been exposed to otherwise than the paper. And then of course, you can take it to the bathroom. In the Epic Times, they have a great section called Dear Next Generation. It's probably my favorite section of the whole paper. As I wrap up, I wanted to talk about this one that was posted very recently and I don't want to go into details about it. I just wanted to share what it. Some of the stuff it was talking about. [00:10:57] The person was from the. I think he was from like the 50s and 60s, but he was talking about how when he went to school, this is elementary school, mind you. They had what they call bank day every week, sometimes every two weeks, sponsored by a local bank. [00:11:14] And what they were doing was they were actually setting up the young. So this is elementary school. Okay, okay. They were setting up the young Kids with, you know, basically a bank account type concept. Minimum deposits, minimum balance requirements, acting as a bank teller, recording transactions in bank books, you know, balancing your checks and everything it takes to understand about banking. [00:11:39] That's unthinkable now. In elementary school, we had nothing close to that in my elementary school. And I, I wasn't too much off from the 50s. [00:11:48] We had nothing like that. And so then, you know, I grow up, I didn't have anything. The closest I had was when we did a stock thing in middle school. And even that, that was stock exclusive. We didn't understand the banking side of anything that was taught that wasn't even really taught. We were kind of thrown into it, you know, and you're like, oh, I could just write a piece of paper and write down some dollar amount and give it to them and it's free money. No, doesn't work that way. The idea of credit. No, we didn't learn any of these things. But this is great. [00:12:17] And I want young people to read stuff like this. I want people to understand this is what we lost right in our education. [00:12:26] Focus on the wrong garbage now. And we don't focus on the important stuff now. Some of the young folks would say, well, we don't need to understand a bank account. The hell you don't. You need to understand a bank account. Even if your money never, your cash never touches your hands, you still have to understand the fundamentals of a bank account. You might think that you're never going to write a check. I guarantee you if you ever plan to buy a house, you're going to write at least one of them. And you better understand how to do it and not let somebody tell you how to do it. They might be nice enough to allow you to do an electronic transfer. You still have to understand how balances work. You still have to understand how not to overdraw the account. In some cases, they might want to wire because of the timing on closing. So I'm suggesting this kind of thing, and not just this, but this kind of thing. [00:13:11] Education that we've lost, education that's of value, education that's actually useful to our kids. This exposes the modern education system that we used to have. These things that we taught in the school system that we no longer do. And now we teach garbage in the school system that no kid ever needs. And then we question why our young people are struggling and can't properly do math anymore. Why they can't count change at the fast food place, why some of them barely can speak English. Why? Why? Some of them can barely spell. We have to feel, we have to feel that there's something wrong with our society when we have gone so far afoul of the way we treat our kids. Like think of that elementary school and we're teaching them the fundamentals of banking because we understood how important it was. They might not grasp the actual use case because they may not put it into practice for a couple of years, but still to at least expose them to that, then you get to things like middle school where you learn like driver's ed and you learn auto shop and metal shop and I talked about it before, all the different blue collar things, these are of value. Not every single student should be stem. That's just the truth of it. Not every single student should be white collar. Not every single student should be on computers all day long. Not every student's going to be good in Dr. You know, they're, it's just not the reality. So we have to think, we have to accept that some people are just aligned to something different. But we're never going to show that if we don't expose them to it. And instead we try to steer them to certain career paths that are not aligned to the way their brain thinks. That's what's setting them up for failure. That's what's causing, in my opinion, a lot of this degradation of the quality of education that the kids are getting. Because we're trying to steer them to where we think they should go because we see that's the dominant, you know, enterprise. [00:15:03] Instead we need to change the narrative. There should not be a dominant enterprise. We should value all these enterprises and the whole one big beautiful bill and all that cutting green energy and going back to some blue collar type roles and all that, that actually kind of sets us up for failure because we've been so long steering kids away from those kinds of roles and jobs. [00:15:27] I think it's chaos. It's not that we shouldn't have those jobs, but we've not prepared the young folks for it. So my impassion plea to anybody who's of the younger generation listening to me, that rhymes. [00:15:38] The truth is it's kind of too late if you're out of high school, that if that's the truth of it. But what you can do is just go back and refresh on the kinds of things that were taught in school from the 50s, the 60s, the 70s and 80s, from Home Ec to all the different shops that I talked about, driver's ed, banking, stock, all these things. That I'm telling you here that we used to be taught, just on a day to day basis as normal, and help bring yourself up to the value of those things, the importance of those things, so that you can hopefully make a difference in the future when us, our older folks, are not going to be here anymore to try to help guide you. Some of us are not going to be able to tell you that's why my podcast exists, is to fast forward that knowledge to the future generation and it may fall on deaf ears. But I at least can try. I at least can put some effort into telling you what it is that we've lost so we can hopefully regain it at some point in the future. [00:16:47] Oh.