By A Midwestern Doctor
Recently, Elon Musk unveiled Tesla’s humanoid robots (which in full disclosure are not yet ready for public use). As I watched his presentation, a few things suddenly clicked to me about the direction Musk and Trump want to take the country in, and the immense implications they have for everyone. In this article, I will explain them and how all of that relates to the current state of medicine.
Creating Wealth
Throughout history, there have always been two ways to accumulate significant wealth:
- By producing things of value.
- By stealing wealth from someone else.
In turn, I believe almost all empires follow a similar cycle—initially an empire creates its own wealth (allowing it to rapidly ascend as a superpower), but gradually, transitions to using its newfound power to steal wealth from others until eventually, the foundation which underlies the empire (e.g., its ability to create wealth) becomes unstable, the empire crumbles and its replaced with a new empire in its ascendancy phase.
While the above is a simplified description of wealth accumulation, I believe this paradigm very much describes the current state of our society. For instance, many of our institutions have transitioned from having to earn their value to simply being given it either through government subsidies (e.g., a key reason why education is so bad now is because the government gives unconditional student loans to everyone to attend college which in turn incentivizes colleges to focus on retaining as many students as possible rather than on ensuring they get a worthwhile education) or by them having a market monopoly that prevents competition from forcing them to produce something of value.
One of the best illustrations of this has been the relentless promotion of diversity equity and inclusion (DEI), where rather than selecting applicants or employees on the basis of merit, it’s done on the basis of their race (or sexual orientation) and their commitment to social justice. Because of this, many corporations and institutions are producing lower and lower quality outputs, but thus far they have gotten away with it due to the monopoly they (and by extension the US dollar) have.
Medical Monopolies
Consider that as the years have gone by, medical education has had a greater and greater focus on DEI. Because of this, I have seen numerous unqualified diverse applicants be admitted to medical school over more qualified non-diverse applicants, and numerous poorly performing diverse applicants be retained by their medical schools so that the graduating class has diversity. Despite the fact this lowers the quality of the graduating class, nothing has been done to stop it as the accreditors place immense pressure on the medical schools to maintain DEI in their classes.
Likewise, originally, medicine “earned” its reputation on doctors being the pinnacle of what society could produce. However, as the years went by and a medical monopoly was established based on the prestige afforded to doctors, medicine became more and more about forcing doctors to follow standardized protocols (that could not get to the root of each patient’s issues but could sell a lot of products for the medical industry). As such, having substandard medical graduates isn’t actually an issue for the medical industry because they simply are cogs in a system where there’s now minimal room for doctors to make independent decisions.
If you take a step back, it’s clear our medical system has failed disastrously as the cost for it keeps going up (on average 4.8% per year), but the quality of care gets worse (e.g., despite spending far more than any other country, currently we rank 69th in healthcare outcomes)
Most versions of these charts start in 1970, which I suspect is done to hide what happened immediately prior to that.
I would argue that this trend is a result of the fact there is no incentive in medicine to produce a good outcome (e.g., consider how many diseases like Alzheimer’s we’ve spent billions on research for over decades yet still have no cure for—despite proven ones already existing, and how many diseases we manage with decades of costly therapies which do very little and often create far more problems). Rather, the “incentive” in medicine is to produce expensive products that can get an approval to be sold within America’s medical monopoly, which lobbyists can then get insurance companies to subsidize.
To a large extent, I believe this resulted from a misguided attempt by Congress in 1962 to prevent toxic drugs from entering America where they not only gave the FDA the power to block anything they deemed unsafe, but also gave the FDA the discretion to determine what constituted a pharmaceutical being “effective.” In turn, the FDA decided that extensive and costly (and not necessarily relevant) data needed to be compiled, which resulted in the cost of drugs skyrocketing and the number of new drugs reaching the market grinding to a halt.
Note: as best as I can tell (as I have to infer the number from incomplete data), the 1962 law caused the cost of bringing a drug to market to go up roughly 1000 times and take almost 10 times as long.
This was a huge problem as (due to the immense cost of developing new drugs) it effectively created a “pay-to-play” system that:
•Encouraged pharmaceutical companies to doctor trials and bribe drug regulators to get their drugs approved (as otherwise they could not afford to risk sinking that much money into developing them).
•Encouraged pharmaceutical companies to doctor trials and bribe drug regulators to get their drugs approved (as otherwise, they could not afford to risk sinking that much money into developing them).
•Encouraged pharmaceutical companies to pursue drugs that were likely to get approved (e.g., by being very similar to an existing drug or by having a very minor specific benefit that could be “proven”) rather than maverick ones that could significantly improve the standard of care (particularly since doing so would displace other costly drug franchises and hence motivate their manufacturers to lobby against the novel drug’s approval).
•Changed the pharmaceutical business to revolve around sales rather than drug efficacy, as this was something that could be reliably implemented (regardless of how ineffective or unneeded the drug was) and hence made the business remain sustainable.
•Incentivized the pharmaceutical companies to spend a lot of money eliminating “unapproved” competitors from the marketplace (e.g., by lobbying the government to target those who didn’t pay to play).
Note: I tried to summarize the corruption that pervades the medical regulatory process here (e.g., the NIH invested 162 million into remdesivir, and then the panel that was appointed to chose the COVID-19 treatments was comprised of people who’d taken money from remdesivir—and not surprisingly kept on voting for it to be the treatment for COVID-19 despite it being far more unsafe and ineffective than the off-patent options) .
In turn, if you compare the pre-1962 era to now, there are far fewer drugs or medical therapies entering the medical field that change the practice of medicine or significantly improve healthcare outcomes. At the same time, many (if not far more) dangerous drugs are hitting the market. As a result, many of the therapies we use (e.g., numerous remarkable cancer therapies) actually were developed prior to the 1962 law being passed—which is insane as the scientific capabilities we have now are incomparable to what existed back then and hence should be producing far more impressive medical treatments and tech now.
Likewise, the key point I’ve been trying to illustrate with DMSO is that not only does it produce dramatically better results for illnesses than almost any therapy we’ve developed in the 63 years since it was discovered, but the results it produces are immediate and obvious (which is why it spread like wildfire across the country and such a national uproar occurred when the FDA banned it).
Because of this, I believe that the FDA’s primary responsibility should be to regulate safety, not efficacy (unless the drug is so dangerous it needs to have a clear benefit to justify its risk) and that the market should then select for the most effective therapies because patients will rapidly adopt the things that work and reject the ones that are ineffective. However, rather than do that, a very creative ideology has been erected that tells us we can’t trust our own “biased” observations and instead must let “the science” tell us what is safe and effective.
Note: the 2018 Right to Try Law was an attempt to fix this issue by allowing patients in certain cases to take medications that had only undergone safety but not efficacy testing (but unfortunately did not go far enough to actually address this issue).
In DMSO’s case, this logic is particularly astounding as the FDA was confronted with thousands of cases of people, who within minutes had their issues (e.g., decades of chronic pain or a recent sprain) improve from DMSO, yet in each case, claimed those improvements were “anecdotal” and likely instead were due to the placebo effect or would have happened anyways.
Note: in 1899, allopathic (conventional) medicine was rapidly falling out of favor due to it being unsafe and ineffective). The American Medical Association (AMA) decided to rescue allopathy by unconditionally promoting industry products (e.g., cigarettes) in return for cash, using the media to aggressively go after every competing school of medicine (e.g., by labeling them as quacks) and blackmailing each new medical product to sell out to them or be branded as quackery. Due to the media’s complicity, this worked. Before long, numerous promising therapies (that owing to their remarkable results were rapidly being adopted across America) were told they could either sell their rights to the AMA or be buried—and then, again and again, were systematically canceled. (e.g., I’ve summarized how the AMA did this to ultraviolet blood irradiation once hospitals across America began using it to rescue numerous hopeless cases and how they likewise they did it to the cancer cure Krezbiozen—but sadly there are many other examples too, the most recent of which was the AMA attacking ivermectin’s use for COVID-19).
Media Monopolies
As the years have gone by, the mainstream media has been gradually transformed from something that tried to inform the public about topics the government didn’t want the American people to know about (e.g., Vietnam’s Pentagon Papers) to a state mouthpiece which only presents the political establishment’s talking points.
In my eyes, one of the most significant changes was Clinton, in 1997, legalizing television pharmaceutical advertising (something that every other nation except New Zealand has banned). This allowed the pharmaceutical industry to become the largest television advertiser and then leverage that sponsorship to have television stations no longer expose the dangers of pharmaceutical drugs. In turn, over the years I’ve heard numerous journalists testify that once this happened they stopped being able to air criticisms of pharmaceutical products (e.g., Sharyl Attkisson provided one of the most clear-cut illustrations of this in her memoir, and here RFK Jr. shares how his friend, the CEO of Fox News [along Jake Tapper of ABC News], wanted to air RFK’s program on the dangers of mercury in vaccines but nonetheless was forced to not to air it).
Likewise, here Megyn Kelly discussed with Nicole Shanahan how the leaders of our regulators are now throughly corrupt (making them sabotage public health rather than uphold it) and how on television, she was banned from ever airing any criticisms of vaccines:
In turn, there is a remarkable contrast in what was aired on American television before and after the 1997 advertising change went into effect, as beforehand, serious exposés on the danger vaccines would occasionally be aired on national television, whereas now, despite the majority the Americansbeing outraged over the wave of injuries (and deaths) from the COVID vaccines, excluding a few mentions by Tucker Carlson (e.g., this segment that aired immediately before he was taken off air) nothing has appeared in the mainstream media.
In contrast, consider for instance, this scathing 60 Minutes program on the government’s role in the 1976 Swine Flu Vaccine disaster (which injured far fewer Americans than the COVID vaccines):
Or this 1982 NBC program on the dangers of the DPT vaccine (which frequently caused brain damage and infant deaths):
Or this 2002 CBS program about the significant risks and questionable benefits of Bush’s plan to vaccinate America for smallpox “terrorists were going to unleash upon America” (which before long was canceled because it caused too many injuries—but nonetheless featured many of the same vaccine promoters we saw 20 years later during COVID-19).
Note: one of the most amazing things about this sales campaign is that it featured the line “their sense of urgency is, they don’t want their children getting destroyed the way the World Trade Center was destroyed,” and mainstream networks aired it.
Similarly, in a recent article, I also included a 60 Minutes program that aired in 1980 about the miraculous benefits of DMSO that exposed the FDA’s unconscionable decision to stonewall it for decades and a 1964 television program about how they did very something similar to a remarkable cancer treatment promoted by the most one of the most prestigious doctors in America (e.g., the AMA sent him as their representative to Nuremberg and he co-wrote the Nuremberg code).
Note: there is more and more public awareness about the problems with the pharmaceutical industry being allowed to pay off the mainstream media into not covering the dangers of their products (e.g., recently Joe Rogan discussed this problem with JD Vance), and a real chance this may at last change in the near future.
Overturning Monopolies
With both the mass media and the medical industry, a very similar pattern has occurred. Initially, they had immense trust from the public that they to some extent had earned, but gradually, they shifted from producing results that made the public want to support them to simply trying to enforce their monopolies. As such, as the years went by, dissent against them gradually increased, which in turn was met with harsher and harsher monopolistic tactics—which in many cases ultimately backfired (e.g., the suppression of effective COVID-19 treatments and mandating dangerous and ineffective vaccines has made a large segment of America no longer trust the medical system or the media that relentlessly promoted these talking points).
Because of this, those industries have effectively been stuck in a downhill spiral where to cover up the loss of trust which results from their lies (e.g., the COVID vaccine mandates were justified by the fact the vaccines would prevent you from getting COVID or giving it to anyone), they have to make even more audacious lies, and in time, the absurdity of those lies eventually hits the point each successive one makes the public trust them even less
Note: I believe the hostile media coverage Trump received throughout his presidency was the primary factor responsible for this rapid decline in public trust in the media, and had it not cemented that mistrust in the public, the global resistance against the COVID-19 vaccine mandates would have likely never occurred—which again illustrates the downhill spiral the propaganda apparatus has found itself trapped within.
In my eyes, one of the most remarkable illustrations of this came from the Washington Post’s recent decision not to endorse a candidate for president because its owner (Jeff Bezos) overruled the paper’s left-wing editorial board. This in turn, led to three editors resigning and a wave of subscribers canceling, after which Bezos published an editorial that stated he did not think an endorsement was appropriate because it would not have a meaningful influence on the election (e.g., the only people who would listen to it were people who were already voting for Harris). Rather, it would further erode the public’s trust in the paper’s objectivity, which was a bad idea since public trust in the mainstream media was now at a record low.
What I found fascinating about this (reasonable) position was that it received 25,000 comments, and in the couple hundred I skimmed, they were allincredibly hostile toward Bezos’s position. Four days later, the Washington Post then aired one of the most remarkable media exchanges we’ve seen in recent memory:
Note: I’ve witnessed election fraud occur throughout my lifetime (especially after the electronic voting machines were introduced). The earliest documented example I know of was “Bleeding Kansas” (the event which arguably started the Civil War). There, as a compromise on the slavery issue, it was decided that the legality of slavery in Kansas would be decided by the settlers there. However, pro-slavery forces in Missouri crossed the border to flood the election with illegal votes, resulting in a pro-slavery legislature being elected (which everyone knew was due to fraud). Following this, that legislature outlawed any criticism of slavery, kicked the anti-slavery legislators out, and began arresting or covertly killing anti-slavery citizens. The anti-slavery forces that resisted this encroachment were labeled as insurrectionists. Before long, the pro-slavery government mobilized the army against them to eliminate everyone who would not submit to them (along with destroying pro-freedom newspapers). This spiraled into a year of violence (a mini-civil war), and less than two years after it concluded (but minor conflict still continued), the American Civil War began.
Astroturfing
One of the most common tactics the propaganda apparatus uses to gaslight the population is to flood them with messaging that implies anyone who questions the narrative is insane and completely alone, as this is a fairly reliable way to bully the population into compliance (alongside making public examples of anyone who speaks out). In turn, again and again, we’ll see any widely used media platform gradually get monopolized so it can only present the orthodoxy’s narrative (and simultaneously have it be put on a pedestal by all the other monopolized news sources). Hence, it becomes harder and harder to find the kernels of truth we need anywhere (e.g., most recently we’ve seen this with Google and Facebook’s relentless censorship).
More importantly, this principle doesn’t just apply to the standard media. For example, the academic publishing industry is essentially monopolized and will not publish anything that threatens the pharmaceutical industry’s interests—but simultaneously, any journal that does is immediately attacked as being an “uncreditable source” (and often effectively buried since Pubmed, the source almost everyone uses to find journal articles, won’t index any articles from the journal). As a result, it’s often immensely difficult to find research that actually answers what I want to know about a topic, and I have to make use of a lot of creative approaches to find it.
Note: one of my simple rules for evaluating academic publications (which I detailed further here) is to take findings they report which agree with the prevailing narratives with a grain of salt, whereas if they report something I would not expect a journal to want to publish, I place a heavier weight on them (as in almost all cases, those claims are held to a very high standard of proof and an immense of work went on behind the scenes to get the journal to be willing to publish them).
On the internet, a different tactic is taken to flood the audience with a specific message—ban or censor any account that posts information that challenges the prevailing narrative, while simultaneously mobilizing large numbers of accounts to (which are often bots or a group working together in coordination) all work together to push a very specific message.
This tactic is known as “astroturfing” (in reference to making large amounts of fake grass), and if you have a basic sense of pattern recognition, it’s very easy spot (e.g., I could immediately tell that vaccine injuries were being censored and astroturfed away even though it took months for proof this was occurring to emerge). In turn, when you are on a media platform (e.g., Wikipedia) that is astroturfed, you essentially can only use it for the information you don’t expect would be worth anyone’s time to astroturf (e.g., concise explanations of well-accepted scientific principles), whereas for everything else, the only value it has is to inform you of what the orthodox position on an issue is—not what is actually true.
Note: search engines like Google do a related form of astroturfing by primarily showing websites they know consistently support their biases.
In turn recently, two of the best proofs I’ve seen that astroturfing is a widespread phenomenon emerged:
•First, a group was created by the Harris campaign, which would flood large numbers of Reddit pages every day (and Twitter community notes) with messaging that supported Kamala’s campaign, after which someone who joined that group leaked everything in their private server, clearly and and unambiguously proving that the Harris campaign astroturfed a lot of the content being seen by the users of Reddit. This is important because while many users on Reddit suspect much of the platform is astroturfed (due to the widespread biases that occur there), this is the first time I’ve seen it so concretely laid out.
•Second, a large part of Harris’s campaign materialized out of thin air from the entire media apparatus collectively, suddenly saying she was a fantastic candidate. Over the last few days, influencers (e.g., this one, this one, and this one) have come forward with proof showing that the Harris campaign offered them a lot of money (they rejected) to post favorable content about Harris. Likewise, a key part of the Harris campaign strategy has been to have celebrity musicians perform concerts at campaign rallies (so people want to attend) that are juxtaposed with the celebrity endorsing the Harris.
On Friday, something remarkable happened—Rapper Cardi B (who a year ago had stated she would not endorse a president because she could not support America funding two overseas wars) headlined for Kamala Harris. However, at the start of her speech, the teleprompter broke, leading to her stumbling for 90 seconds (utterly unsure of what to say), after which a cell phone was rushed to her, and she read her entire speech (which was written to sound like it was her authentic voice) off of the cell’s screen.
In my eyes, this is noteworthy because it’s essentially the most straightforward proof I’ve ever seen that many of the things experts and celebrities say are astroturfed and completely fake.
Note: similarly, a massive issue with journal publications is that pharmaceutical companies will often write ghost-write scientific articles and then pay “expert” academics to put their name on the papers as its “authors” and thereby lend significant credibility to what would otherwise be rightly dismissed as biased marketing.
Monopolies vs. Value
As you take a step back and consider each of the above examples, you will see that each one keeps raising a similar question. How can we be generating wealth if so much of our resources are devoted to creating garbage that only exists to manipulate people and maintain an inferior product’s monopoly rather than actually creating things of value that people would want?
Note: to illustrate, America now spends almost 1 trillion dollars each year on research and development, yet much of that goes into “non-threatening” topics that have minimal actual value to the country.
Bill Gates for example, epitomizes this principle, as once he created the Windows operating system, he rapidly moved to prevent competing software companies (with better software) from using Windows. Since this monopolistic behavior was illegal, Microsoft was sued for antitrust violations. Throughout the court process, Bill Gates was revealed to be a nasty individual who was doing everything he could to bury his competitors. To address the negative public perception of him (at the time, he was one of the most disliked individuals in America), Gates founded the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to recast himself as a philanthropist, and through this PR stunt was able to successfully remediate his public image.
Since that time, he continually repeated these same tactics. He gradually monopolized the field of public health (e.g., he changed public health from helping people’s legitimate needs to selling as many vaccines to them as possible and replacing their sustainable farming with corporate agriculture that requires continually buying expensive agricultural products).
Likewise, during COVID-19, his network bought out major media stations around the world, Gates was able to dictate the global COVID-19 response, and simultaneously, he made “remarkable” investments as a result of how the COVID-19 response played out (e.g., Pfizer’s vaccine was developed by BioNTech, a company Gates invested 55 million into two months before COVID-19 emerged in China and then made at least 500 million off of).
In short, Gates was able to leverage his monopoly to make a vast amount of money off of a technology which was incredibly unsafe and ineffective (and would not have ever been approved had there not been immense political pressure behind it). More importantly, it not only didn’t work, but also has been immensely costly to the world (e.g., in America alone, it’s killed hundreds of thousands of people, disabled more than a million, and likely cost America well over 100 billion dollars).
In short, as he has done throughout his career, Gates leveraged his monopoly to extract wealth from everyone else rather than create something of value.
Elon Musk
I (and many others) have noticed that autistic individuals (e.g., those on the spectrum) often have the ability to see things for what they are (and say as such) rather than feel compelled to alter their perceptions to agree with what the herd does. As such, they are much harder to manipulate with the current propaganda model. In turn, as I began noticing how Elon Musk would consistently have that way of looking at the problems we faced, I checked if he was, and found out he’d publicly admitted it:
Additionally, in this talk it’s emphasized that:
•His primary goal is to seek the truth of the world.
•He has the ability to see technological possibilities and understand what needs to be done to make them economically viable.
In turn, that’s exactly what he’s repeatedly done. In January 2021, he became the world’s richest man (whereas shortly beforehand, Jeff Bezos and then Bill Gates—both individuals who built their wealth through monopolies—were the wealthiest people in the world).
Regarding Musk’s business approach, two things jump out at me.
The first is that he’s very effective at recognizing the useless waste in organizations everyone else takes as an unquestionable needs. For example, when he took Twitter over, he fired 80% of the employees, yet after doing so, Twitter (𝕏) actually became more efficient. This was due to the fact he was able to recognize which jobs had minimal value to the company, and to see which parts of the company were working in harmony with the overall goal (which he terms “aligned vectors”) and which were not (and effectively canceling each other out). Having worked in numerous organizations, I (like many doctors) can attest to how frustrating it is that they are laid out in a manner that creates immense amounts of extra work for everyone and constantly sabotages getting the essential things done. Remarkably however, I’ve never encountered any manager besides Elon Musk who “gets” this and then structures the organization to be as efficient and effective as possible.
The second is that anytime he wants to get something done, he will think through each step that needs to be done to accomplish the goal and then structure the organizational process to make the goal happen as quickly as possible. In contrast, every other organization I’ve worked with takes forever to get things done and rarely, if ever will take the necessary steps to make important things get done in a timely fashion (instead their focus is typically on protecting themselves and preserving the status quo—something they can afford to do because either their monopoly of government funding provides a guaranteed source of revenue for them regardless of their results).
As a result, Elon Musk has become extremely wealthy by generating numerous (often paradigm-shifting) products with significant value. In contrast, almost everyone else has simply found ways to take wealth from others (which in turn is reflected by more and more of the society’s wealth concentrating in the wealthiest members of society while everyone else keeps getting poorer—a trend which greatly accelerated during the unjustifiable COVID-19 lockdowns).
Overall, I believe there are two important takeaways from this discourse:
•The first is that if our society isn’t creating intrinsic value, its shelf life is limited, and eventually what we have will collapse once we no longer have the power to maintain our monopoly (e.g., imagine how much money Bill Gates would lose once the world loses its blind faith in vaccines and begins rejecting them).
•The second is that if we aren’t fundamentally creating economic value, the only remaining option is to make everyone fight over an ever shrinking pie (which for example is what much of the DEI movement boils down to).
In my eyes, both of these are very dangerous and highlight why the monopolistic model of wealth generation is highly detrimental to society.
Becoming Interplanetary
Since he was young, Elon Musk has been fascinated with space and more and more wanted to get human beings to Mars (which he has publicly worked towards since 2001).
When I saw his announcement of the Tesla Optimus robot humanoid assistants, it suddenly clicked that he had laid out a comprehensive blueprint to make this vision possible. To elaborate:
- For humans to get to space, we needed to radically improve our rocket technology. NASA (which had a fixed budget not tied to its performance) had essentially failed to do this for decades. As a result, Elon Musk was gradually able to take over the space launch industry (by having a better and cheaper product).
Note: the proof of the value of SpaceX’s product is the fact that it is still able to get government contracts despite the Biden administration being politically opposed to Musk (demonstrated by this frivolous DOJ lawsuit against SpaceX) and that SpaceX recently was needed by NASA to rescue its astronauts who were stranded on the International Space Station.
More importantly, by having this company and the money it receives for space launches, it’s been possible for Musk to have the funding to be able to develop significantly better rockets (which are necessary for us to be able to reach Mars but for decades no one created). Likewise, he recognized that unless it were possible to make reusable rockets, it would be almost impossible for us to afford to get humanity into space (which was a major obstacle NASA’s entire space program faced), and as such, he had SpaceX make significant investments into making what was thought to be impossible become possible a few weeks ago.
•Initially, the only viable energy source in space is solar power. As such, to make an effective space program, it would be necessary to radically improve our solar technology and the electrical systems (e.g., motors and batteries) that went with them. In turn, beyond being an incredibly successful business, Tesla was also a way to fund the creation of that technology.
•One of the major barriers to any type of off-planet colony (either on the moon or then on Mars) is that a critical amount of infrastructure needs to be built there before a functional enough colony exists that humans can live there and further expand it. One potential solution to this dilemma would be to create solar-powered robots that could survive in space and build the initial infrastructure (or assist humans living within the colony by building infrastructure outside of it). While an idea like that initially seemed inconceivable, that appears to be exactly what Musk is doing with the Optimus robots, where he is once again both having the marketplace fund the creation of the technology we need to get Mars, and simultaneously having the Earth function as the initial testing site for it.
- For robots like that to be created (and likely many of the other technological systems necessary to get us to space), a highly functional AI system needs to be created. In turn, by buying Twitter, Musk got access to one of the best data-gathering systems for developing advanced AI. From the start, he’s emphasized that his goal is to create “maximum truth seeking AI” rather than biased AI that only presents a certain preferred narrative (which is the case for every other AI system). If his goal was to create the most effective AI system possible (rather than just one that functioned as part of the propaganda apparatus and was a tool to monopolize wealth), that is the only way it could be done. In turn, as best as I can tell, Twitter’s AI system is superior to any of the other available systems, both in the scope of information it provides and its ability to engage in essential critical thinking for solving problems—traits that again will be necessary to enable an interplanetary society. Likewise, Tesla has also created the best existing technology for autonomous driving (which essentially is what also needs to be developed for many of the technologies we’ll use in space).
•For advanced AI to function in space, a highly effective communication network would need to be created that could get it the data it would need to process all the complex tasks that would be encountered in space. In turn, a crucial part of SpaceX’s business model has been to create that network through the Starlink Satellites, which coincidentally have the ability to provide internet in space and are planned to be able to provide internet to Mars.
If you take a step back, it is quite something that a blueprint of that scale could be created.
Note: oddly enough, this makes Musk almost identical to the main character of a cartoon my nephew loves to tell me about, as that character is a scientific genius who dreamt of going to space since childhood and can always plan out the ten-step processes he needs to realize each scientific goal.
However, while it’s technologically feasible, it’s not necessarily politically feasible. As such, Elon Musk has spent years doing everything he can to use his position to inspire others to want humanity to go to Mars, and simultaneously sought out political allies who could make his mission feasible.
For example, Musk has highlighted that the current regulatory burden faced by SpaceX makes it incredibly difficult to do anything (e.g., he’s currently having to sue California over them illegally blocking rocket launches for purely politically motivated positions). As such, the only way the Mars program could happen is by America electing a government that wanted Mars to happen and was opposed to excessive regulation.
In turn, during his presidency, Trump (who was a very anti-war president) made the unusual move to create a new branch of the armed forces—the Space Force (which at the time didn’t make sense to me). Looking back on it, if the goal were for humanity to begin becoming interplanetary, in addition to the US government being supportive of what Musk wanted to do, it would also be necessary to make sure infrastructure was developed on our end to facilitate it and that Musk’s endeavors could be protected. The recent endorsement from Buzz Aldrin supports this argument (the second man to walk on the moon) of Trump, due to the remarkable efforts Trump made during his first presidency to revitalize our space program so that we could again go to the moon and then to Mars.
However, to create the political climate necessary for us to be able to go to space, the existing media apparatus would need to be scrapped (as for countless reasons, it will oppose doing much of what needs to happen). Musk in turn, chose to use his wealth to buy Twitter (the social media platform I believe was best designed for creating rapid cultural shifts) and ever since then has used it to aggressively displace the mass media by highlighting both its deception and its inability to ever produce accurate information as quickly as citizen journalists who are being fact-checked by millions of other users (and as a result, Twitter is now the world’s number 1 news app).
Similarly, a few months ago, he began seeding the idea that a much greater degree of efficiency is needed in the government in order for us to be able to accomplish our larger goals, and two months ago, it was announced Trump would let Musk do just that in the federal government.
Note: one of the most significant challenges in doing business in the United States is the immense cost of healthcare (which American employers are largely responsible for paying). As much of these costs are due to the monopolistic practices within medicine, it is my sincere belief that one of Musk’s primary targets for shrinking the Federal budget would be to make healthcare more efficient and affordable—something RFK Jr. (another member of the team Trump assembled) is uniquely suited to do as he is aware of many of the costly and ineffective (or harmful) practices in medicine and likewise of many of the effective and affordable therapies the medical cartel has kept off the market to maintain its monopoly.
The FDA’s stonewalling of psychedelic therapies to treat PTSD in veterans is particularly tragic.
Conclusion
A British general and historian made a remarkable observation about empires throughout history—all of them lasted for approximately seven generations, and consistently went through the following stages:
The Age of Pioneers (outburst)
The Age of Conquests
The Age of Commerce
The Age of Affluence
The Age of Intellect
The Age of Decadence.
The Age of Collapse
Essentially, empires would suddenly emerge out of nowhere, and be characterized by audacious people with immense creativity and bravery who would find a way to overcome the existing (stagnated empires) and before long, use what they captured from those empires to become much more efficient at conquering the surrounding nations.
This would give rise to immense wealth (because they took other people’s wealth and because free trade was created within their vast territories), which in turn would make the society begin revolving around accumulating money rather than advancing the nation.
This in turn, would lead to the society investing in academia and the society becoming extremely intellectual. At that point, they’d become disconnected from reality and lose touch with what built up the empire. Then to find some new sense of purpose, they would begin to fixate on the importance of mental ideas (e.g., winning their side’s political arguments) and begin slipping into a variety of decadent behaviors.
Once this fully entrenched itself within the society, the empire would rapidly weaken and begin to fragment from the inside (e.g., previously oppressed immigrants would no longer feel loyal to their past conquerors because the empire had nothing of value to offer them and citizens of the empire would blame each other for their declining wealth). At this point, the empire was ripe to be taken over by a newly unified nation that was not mired in a stagnant way of doing things (or the delusional idea the world’s wealth would always be freely available to it), and the seven generation cycle would begin anew.
Recently, this theory has gained popularity because of how accurately it describes what is happening in America. However, I would argue it also describes the same process that plays out in so many other areas too (e.g., here I argued it perfectly encapsulates what’s happened to America’s scientific apparatus). More importantly however, I believe it is part of an even more fundamental principle that applies to almost society throughout history:
What we watched happen throughout COVID-19 was appalling and almost impossible for most to believe could ever happen here. Yet, in my eyes, it was simply a sign of the ever increasing corruption in our society, and could not have happened if each preceding version of it (discussed further here) had not been able to establish itself and gradually worsen.
In turn, my great hope was that the shock of what happened would be so immense that it could reverse the downward trajectory we were stuck on and begin addressing the corruption throughout the medical industry, which was threatening the entire country.
Note: to illustrate, in the case of COVID-19, I am certain that if RFK or others of like mind had been in charge of the COVID-19 response, almost all of the costs and deaths from it could have been avoided. However, many (myself included) who proposed rational policies similar to what I would have done were instead blocked by a corrupt bureaucracy, that had been bought out by people who instead wanted to profit off the pandemic. As a result, trillions were wasted, our country came very close to experiencing a catastrophic depression and we now are stuck bearing the immense human costs of the unjustifiable vaccine program that was pushed upon the country.
In my eyes, the immense political shifts we’ve seen over the last four years (e.g., RFK’s positions becoming the mainstream views of the Republican party) illustrate that the reversal into the upward direction of that society cycle (institutional buildup) is indeed happening. However, more importantly, I can see a real potential for that to happen on a much broader scale.
For example, if we indeed can begin colonizing space (and do things like mine asteroids or create new civilizations), that would create a new immense source of wealth that could enrich the entire country (and quite possibly the entire world) rather than just following the current paradigm of gaining wealth by stealing it from others. More importantly, it could create a unifying vision that America (and quite likely the world) could get behind, which would move us beyond the current era of division where rival groups attack each other because they lack something greater to aspire to.
At this point in time, I believe the fundamental thing that characterizes the era we live in is that longstanding paradigms are becoming able to change at a faster and faster pace. As such, I believe it quite likely what we’ve seen over the last eight years is just a prelude of the things to come, and that if the upcoming election shifts the balance of power in this country, what will see unfold over the next four years will greatly exceed what most of us ever believed could be possible (e.g., recently RFK Jr. announced their plans to immediately end fluoridation in this country—something which has needed to happen for decades but I always thought would be impossible to implement).
However, like many other things, now that we are entering the era of independent media, longstanding indefensible public health policies no longer can be propped up by the media refusing to discuss them.