Hey everybody, KMO here. This is the KMO Show, but this is not a numbered episode. I don't have extensive comments that I've prepared. I don't have an interview to share. What I have is feedback from a listener, which was obviously written over a long period of time. And then he expended the time and effort to create a recording of his prepared text. So I'm going to share that with you.
This is JD, also known as Static Warpshell, somebody who has been listening to my podcast for many, many years and somebody with whom I have corresponded extensively. And I've even met in person. He wrote to me asking me to spend three hours on the RFK Joe Rogan interview. I not only declined, but I read his email on a podcast and then explained why this whole topic of conversation is... I'm just allergic to it.
You know, when I first met James Howard Kunstler, he used to say he's allergic to conspiracy theories. He absolutely would not entertain any discussion whatsoever about 9-11. He accepted the official story point blank, including Building 7, which fell on its own, wasn't pulled, wasn't demolished. It just fell on its own. And I remember at the time, you know, I was talking to people about 9-11 from time to time.
I used to make a show, put out a podcast episode every year on the, you know, the Wednesday that fell closest to September 11th, looking into the various conspiracy theories. And I remember, you know, talking to Jim Kunstler face to face and him just telling me point blank, yes, I believe that Building 7 collapsed on its own. That's where I just said, hey, okay, you know, if that's your position, that's very useful information to me.
It tells me there's really no interesting discussion that we can have on this topic. Let's talk about something else. So in episode 16, I read JD's email and I responded to it. In episode 18, I read an email that was about as long. It was equally, you know, well-crafted. I could see that it had been written and then refined and, you know, proofread, probably rewritten in parts before being sent. And it was an invitation to delve into seemingly the same topic matter, you know, the same subject.
The vaccine debate and COVID. But this listener had an opposite experience to JD's. This listener had been ridiculed by people close to him, most importantly his wife, for believing that the vaccines are worth taking and believing any government statements whatsoever about the pandemic, about the virus, about its origin. And this listener I identified as Tom.
Tom's wife, you know, she ridiculed him as a government stooge for believing the official line and then she also adopted the moon landing hoax conspiracy. This is the idea that the United States, you know, the missions which supposedly landed astronauts on the moon starting in 1969 and then a few more times in the 70s, that that was all faked. And Tom asked me to comment on science denialism. Now, I've studied the history of science and the philosophy of science.
I'm not a practicing scientist by any stretch, but I do understand a bit about the scientific method. And I noticed that during COVID, the people who gravitated to the official pronouncements from the government, people who fetishized figures like Anthony Fauci, that they often talked about science the way people who are obsessed with climate change talk about science.
They're saying the science is settled, as if to say that science is this secular god substitute which just offers up these perfect pronouncements, these perfect statements of truth and they don't understand that science is a messy process that often, yeah, it's self-correcting. Often it will reject positions that it held earlier, you know, that it endorsed earlier, but it takes a long time.
It's not a clean process and it is certainly not some secular oracle which just hands out uncomplicated true statements that should be accepted on faith or on authority. That people who say they respect the science, and that's a trigger for me, you know, this phrase the science, are as bad as people who gravitate to a flat earth model or people who say that the moon landings were hoaxed or people who say that the COVID pandemic was caused by 5G phone towers.
And when I say as bad, I mean it irritates me as much. This misunderstanding of science, this idea that science is a god that hands out true statements, only true statements which must be accepted on authority. There's somebody who sends me stuff all the time on COVID and honestly, I stopped reading it a long time ago. And he ends every email with this statement, if you can question it, it's science. If you can't question it, it's propaganda. And I agree.
A statement which cannot be questioned, a statement which cannot be examined critically and with skepticism is not a scientific statement. And if you think it is, then, you know, your scientism is to me as unhinged and as divorced from reality as the person who is advocating a flat earth worldview. So I'm answering in advance a question that JD is going to pose in the segment I'm about to play for you. He asked, you know, why ask for feedback from people and then when you get it, burn it down?
I'm not burning it down. I'm telling you why these topics which you each find compelling but, you know, from Yin and Yang perspectives, I'm not interested. I'm not interested in the conflict. I'm not interested in participating.
And I'm not interested in spending three hours listening to RFK Jr. And to both JD and Tom, I ask, you know, if you're not looking to recruit me, why spend so much time and effort trying to get me to look at and comment on this topic when I've expressed my disinterest repeatedly? What's the goal? What's the desired outcome? All right, with that extensive preamble, here is a message that I received just this morning from JD, aka Static Warp Shell. Hi KMO.
Thanks for your responses via email and in the KMO Show 16. I appreciate your engagement with the discussion. As I listened to the episode, I realized that the intent of my email was not made clear. This resulted in my feedback getting lumped in with that of someone who wants you to join their side of some politico-intellectual battle, namely the vaccine or the COVID debates. I assure you that was not my intent at all.
Like you, I'm pretty sick of the partisan battles being waged over practically everything. Seems there's always something to fight about these days and I want no part of it. Also, I know you don't have a problem with Joe Rogan. I've only expressed that the episodes are too damn long for you. So I knew it was a long shot that you would engage with the material that I recommended. But I recommended it for exactly the reason I said I did.
RFK makes a compelling case for the link between the growth of the vaccine schedule and the utter demise of the working class in this country. And I just watched you say in a video that you were interested in the condition of the working class. As the quote attributed to Freud says, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. I also felt it was a long shot that you'd read my initial email on this topic if I made it too long-winded.
So I didn't get too deep into why I felt you made such a compelling case or why you might be interested in hearing it, outside of the long-standing C-realm affinity for discussion of class in general. Since we've got the conversation started, I'll do so now.
Quick note here, as I wrote this over the course of a few weeks and listened to more of RFK Jr.'s speeches, I realized that my assertion that, quote, RFK makes a compelling argument that vaccines in the material conditions of the increasingly diminished working class are inextricably linked, end quote, was not really accurate. He doesn't link those two things together specifically in any of his talks. I made that link myself, for reasons I'll try to clarify later.
That's the end of this quick note. Presidential campaigns in the US are a time when the Overton window seems at its most pliable. As everyone in the media and politics thinks about what they're unsatisfied with and tries to project their hopes onto one candidate or another, the news cycle becomes pervious to people and narratives that would otherwise be ignored. Folks like Ross Perot get to talk to large audiences about tax reform. Ron Paul got to talk about ceasing war and ending the Fed.
Bernie Sanders normalized the idea of student debt relief. Andrew Yang popularized UBI, etc. The intellectual interest in these candidates for me is not around whether or not they'll win, but in how much they can alter the national conversation. I wish I had an older example than Ross Perot, but I was 8 when he ran for office. If you have any examples of pre-Perot outsiders who influenced the national conversation by running for president, I'm interested.
I've never really paid much attention to the vaccine debate. I don't think most people have. Like conspiracy theory, anti-vax is a very powerful thought stopper. The conventional wisdom is that we used to be really sick all the time from viral plagues and one day vaccines came along and fixed all that. And if we stopped taking vaccines, the whole world would be a plague-ridden hellhole once again. Everybody agrees on that, right? Well, my mom didn't agree with that when I was a kid.
I don't know my total vaccination status, but I know that I don't have all the shots my brother and sister got. This is because they went to a lot more public school than I did. My mom pulled me out in second grade for a number of reasons. And I wonder how much weight vaccine hesitancy had in her decision. I should ask her about that. Even though I'm always willing to hear out or read about a conspiracy theory, I never bothered to look into this one.
My mom never talked to me about the details either. She just said that she didn't think vaccines are as safe as everyone thinks they are. I mention my mom here because that's how RFK found himself in the middle of the vaccine debate. Not because of my mom specifically, but because mothers of vaccine injured children kept approaching him at the end of his talks on mercury emissions from coal-fired power plants.
I found an article from 2018 where he talks about this, and this is essentially how he began the story on Rogan's podcast too. Quote, I was dragged kicking and screaming into this brawl. By the early 2000s, I was fighting multiple lawsuits on behalf of Riverkeeper and Waterkeeper against coal-fired power plants. I was touring the country speaking about, among other things, the dangers of mercury emissions, which by then had contaminated virtually every freshwater fish in America.
Following many of these appearances, mothers would approach me. Their tone was always respectful, but mildly scolding. They said that if I was serious about eliminating the perils of mercury, I needed to look at the demyra-sol. Demyra-sol, as I cut in here, is a mercury-based preservative used in vaccines. Vaccines, these mothers claimed, were the biggest vector for mercury exposure in children. I really didn't want to get involved because vaccines were pretty remote from my wheelhouse.
I'd always been pro-vaccine. I had all my kids vaccinated and got my annual flu shot every year. But I was impressed by these women. Many of them were professionals. Doctors, lawyers, scientists, nurses, and pharmacists. They were overwhelmingly solid, well-educated, extraordinarily well-informed, rational, and persuasive. End quote. When he started telling this story on Rogan's podcast, my brow started to furrow a little.
If what he's saying is true, I said to myself since no one else was around, then the basement-dwelling, tinfoil hat-wearing, anti-vax cranks who want to give us all the plague again are actually a group of concerned mothers whose children have been gravely injured, possibly by vaccines, which are supposed to be safe and effective. I should mention at this point that RFK Jr. is a fantastic storyteller. Where other political candidates have talking points, he has stories.
And as he continued to tell his story about how he came to be a part of this debate, my jaw slowly dropped open, my eyes bulged out of my head, and they stayed like that for the rest of the interview. Save for the times I stopped to blink and say, oh my fucking god. I've seen it had this effect on other people too. This guy at a New Hampshire town hall is wrapped with incredulity as RFK Jr. explains what's happening with everything from pig farms to the border situation.
And here I've got a link to a YouTube video and a incredulous looking man in the audience with his mouth hanging open. The incredulity these folks feel is caused by the true story of agency captures so absolute that the government has not only been allowing big corporations to poison us in the world we live in, they've been actively helping them by shielding them from liability and giving them taxpayer dollars in exchange for royalties and dividends.
This of course goes far beyond the pharma industry. You and I know that. But does my grandmother? Do my younger siblings? Does the general public know about this stuff at all? I don't have to go into the rest of RFK's position on vaccines to justify this regulatory agency capture narrative.
If you're interested in reading his whole story on this, I found a congressional transcript from 2005 where a congressman from Indiana pleads with his colleagues to read RFK Jr.'s article on this topic, which at the time was published in Rolling Stone. In addition to Congressman Burton's sad comments about his grandson becoming autistic after receiving nine shots in one day, the transcript contains the entire article titled Deadly Immunity.
This article is probably a better representation of the argument for vaccine safety than Rogan's interview ever could be. The short version of the rest of that story is that in 1989, the vaccine schedule exploded in this country and we started giving kids 70 plus doses of various vaccines from birth to 18 years of age. All RFK Jr. and the concerned parents that pulled him into this argument have been saying is we don't believe that these are safe.
We have evidence of the vaccine manufacturers admitting that they are quote unavoidably unsafe unquote. We have the evidence right in front of us of our own children being harmed. Make the vaccine safe. It's telling that instead of advocating for vaccine safety on behalf of consumers, the FDA, NIH, CDC, and the media instead scream the anti-vax pejorative as loudly as they can. In the case of the media, then they go on to the commercial break brought to you by Pfizer.
Now, how does this relate to the plight of the working class? Let's consider the general health of this country since 1989. Today, around 72% of adults in the US are overweight, 54% have one or more chronic diseases, autism has gone from one case in 10,000 to one in 166, and allergies have become more common.
There's a strong correlation between these things, especially autism, and the explosive growth of the vaccine schedule that takes some serious intellectual dishonesty to dismiss out of hand. But even if it is one day conclusively disproven that the ingredients and vaccines are to blame for any of this, the working class is still utterly sick and demoralized in a way that they were not prior to that year. This is because it's not just vaccines.
Vaccines just happen to be a very useful wedge to divide people. But since 1989, this sick and demoralized population has been trying to raise a generation of even sicker children while their jobs disappear and the cost of everything goes up. As the Cold War ended and the Soviet Union collapsed, Bush and Thatcher's promise of a peace dividend gave way to the reality and expense of endless war.
This endless war immensely benefited certain oligarchs and corporations at the expense of the blood and treasure of the many. These few externalized their costs onto the people and natural resources of the USA and beyond. They were able to get away with this because they had successfully captured the federal agencies that are supposed to prevent this type of abuse from being committed, at least on US soil.
These few created new forms of media like talk radio and cable news to convince a population which had so recently voted for the anti-war narrative of JFK that the corporations and agencies were not the problem. That war was not the problem. Yes, the problem is over there and we'll drop more bombs to solve it. Moreover, the problem is with the other party and those in it. And so it went for around two generations.
Everyone getting sicker, sadder, more addicted to, and dependent on the chemicals, media, and consumer products sold by the companies in charge. During and even before this time, RFK Jr. was winning cases against the EPA and certain private companies for their role in poisoning the land with mercury from coal-burning power plant emissions and polluting water with runoff from landfills and chemical plants.
He helped run the Riverkeeper and Waterkeeper organizations that changed the Hudson from one of the most polluted waterways in the world into one of the few places in the US where one could catch a fish and eat it safely. And he helped those organizations expand worldwide. He proved in court time and again that big businesses were conspiring with local and federal agencies to break the law and to cover up the harm they were causing in the interest of padding their bottom line.
Proving agency capture in court had become a specialty for him. This is all long before the early 2000s when he published the Rolling Stone article about his findings on vaccine safety and the cozy, profitable relationship between pharma, NIH, CDC, and FDA. Despite the 25 plus years of environmental and social activism that made him famous, that one article changed him forever in the public eye. He was now labeled as anti-vax and summarily banished from the public narrative.
If ever someone mentioned his name or talked with him on their show, the anti-vax spell would be chanted again and again until everyone knew the sad truth about the kooky conspiracy theorist anti-vaxxer RFK Jr. So two generations go by, during which time RFK Jr. takes up the vaccine safety fight and helps found children's health defense. Even though the establishment has successfully discredited him in the public eye, he continues his successful advocacy in public speaking.
Along comes COVID and suddenly the vaccine debate is on everyone's screen during a time where more screens exist than ever. Even those among us who don't normally pay attention to socio-political issues couldn't help but notice that something was seriously wrong with the response to the pandemic and that the COVID narrative presented by the establishment was questionable. Over the ensuing three-ish years, a lot of the claims initially made about the COVID vaccine were walked back.
The escalating number of shots recommended kept rising to the point where more people than ever started to notice that maybe this vaccine thing was, at least in part, a money grab. The vax vs anti-vax issue became a vector that is helping ordinary people figure out that regulatory agency capture is a grave threat to public health. Because of COVID, more people than ever are primed to step out from under the spell of the anti-vax thought stopper.
Some of them will take sides and fight about it online, sure, but most of them will not. They'll begin to live their lives with the knowledge that the FDA, NIH, and CDC have been lying to them about vaccines. They're going to ask themselves, what else is the government lying about? Of course, this won't seem to make much of a difference at first, but calls for truth and reform can only be ignored for so long.
Lots of seemingly intractable situations in this country have eventually changed, and we as a culture now look back on certain times in our history with disbelief that we could ever have been so stupid. CFCs, lead paint, asbestos, cigarettes, etc. were once thought to be perfectly safe. It used to be completely accepted for a doctor to prescribe some bloodletting and a change of air to treat lung cancer.
After listening to RFK Jr.'s recent talks and speeches, I've decided not to be pessimistic about a properly skeptical American people's ability to stand up for themselves and change things for the better. At least in the long run. I'll end this segment by paraphrasing one of my favorite quotes from RFK Jr. Quote, I've been trying to get the mercury out of fish for 50 years. Nobody calls me anti-fish. How does asking for a safe, metal-free vaccine make me anti-vax? End quote.
Now that we have the whole vaccine thing out of the way, I want to return to RFK Jr.'s power as a storyteller. I watched his New Hampshire speech. It was like no other political speech I've seen in my lifetime. He projected a calm and heartfelt concern for the country and the planet. He called on people to put aside their differences, which is a stark contrast to the escalatory rhetoric of the rest of the presidential candidates.
Bringing this back around to the working class, when he's asked about what he'll do to help them, he usually starts by talking about ending inflation and stopping the wars and regime change ops, reallocating the military budget towards rebuilding our capacity to make and grow things here at home, prioritize public health and addiction recovery, stuff like that.
In a lot of these interviews I've listened to, he doesn't get much time to talk about these things because all anyone wants to ask him about is vaccines. Even if RFK Jr. doesn't win, he will have succeeded in widening the Overton window such that ordinary people will become aware of injustices of the type that you and I have been thinking about for decades, injustices that continue to directly and negatively impact the quality of life of the working class in this country.
Most importantly, he seems poised to make sure that within that window is a discussion of national peace and healing. The more that people become aware of this, the more likely it is that some positive change can happen in the future. It's taken me a while to write this and I've since listened to CRV 460 where another listener reacted in agreement with your vehement unwillingness to engage with the topic of COVID. This reminded me even more of RFK Jr.'s story.
Everyone calls him an anti-vaxxer and they say he's against vaccines. RFK Jr. has never said that he's against vaccines, not even once. But it's so easy to misunderstand someone's viewpoint during an asynchronous conversation or misrepresent their viewpoint when they're not around to correct you. It's especially easy to take something they say the wrong way when you're actually reacting to something else or someone else.
I was a little taken aback during the KMO Show episode 16 where you continually asked, why would JD ask me to listen to this Joe Rogan episode? And then you would respond, something like, to get me involved in the COVID fight? To get me to join his side of some battle? What in my email ever gave you that impression? Ask yourself, who or what were you really reacting to there? Was it really me and my email?
These questions are rhetorical, used in my attempt to illustrate a problem with discourse which I myself have fallen victim to. It's easy to misunderstand someone. Easier still to argue with them if they're not in the room and spin a whole narrative around what they said and what they stand for that can turn out to be completely false. And that false narrative can inspire others to jump on the bandwagon.
Here's why this situation reminds me of RFK Jr. He never studies against vaccines, yet everyone believes that he is anti-vax. And they revel in hurling this pejorative at him and putting him beneath them in the hierarchy for his backward, harmful views. But it's not true. And in the face of all that, he's largely unfazed by this, always willing to calmly state his side of the story if someone else will listen. And to listen to their reactions and responses and keep the dialogue going in kind.
This makes him a very different kind of political figure. Regardless of whether or not he wins, he will have, at least for a time, forced the topics of meaningful dialogue, understanding and respecting one another, and finding common ground into our national conversation. A famous person with moral authority forcing attention on the topic of healing the divide in this country could have just as much of a long-term impact on our lives as the next big thing in AI.
I'm not asking you, or at this point the C-Realm audience, to check out RFK Jr. because I have a dog and some ridiculous fight about COVID or vaccines or the presidential election or the daily news cycle or anything else. I genuinely feel that he's an important political figure who will have a lasting effect on the national conversation in this country. And that's worth talking about. Since it's taken me so long to finish writing this, KMO Show episode 18 has come out.
I was again dismayed at hearing the glee with which you associated my name with something I never said. I also got a sense of dread when I saw the episode description. I was incredulous that you were doing another takedown piece on a listener's feedback. There's a lot that you've said about my email that felt personal. You set me up as a straw man, pinned someone else's idea to me, and let the barbs fly. Now I don't want you to think that I take it personally.
Even though some of it hurt, I'm a big boy. I can take it. I know that you're attacking an idea, not me. But this string of episodes seems in conflict with your long-held habit of never scoring points on a guest after the interview is over. Can this be extended to listener feedback as well? You never even gave me a chance to respond, yet my name has been brought up in a self-righteous tone in three episodes now. You ask us for feedback.
Of course there's no guarantee that you'll agree with us or even entertain what we have to say. But it's a very strange and disturbing turn for the show when it becomes more about attacking that feedback than trying to understand it. You're under no obligation to engage with any of it. Why set it up and then burn it down in front of everybody? That said, I was really happy to hear the end of KMO Show episode 18 when you ended on a more empathetic note. I sincerely thank you for that.
I knew that you would, eventually. I think it's also important for me to note that I'm not presenting myself with any moral authority here on how discussions like this ought to go. A few months ago, I had what I thought was a typical intellectual debate with a friend of mine. We've had many such in the past and they at times became heated, but we always found some sort of common ground by the end.
However, at the beginning of this discussion, I noticed that he kept using these talking points and shibboleths that were right out of the resistance propaganda. I knew he spent a lot of time on left-wing Reddit, so I wasn't surprised, but it had gotten to a point where I felt like his ideas were no longer his own and I resolved to help him see that during our discussion.
I presented what I felt was a reasoned, practical view of the situation and tried to highlight how the media he was taking in was weaponizing his empathy against him, using his emotions to sway him to positions which were not in his best interest. I challenged his epistemology and asked him to justify his positions in a way that satisfied me, while at the same time trying my best to do the same for him.
But something was different this time and I didn't realize it until a few weeks later when he hadn't responded to any of my calls or texts. This time, he had a deep emotional connection to the topics we were discussing. They were providing him with something I didn't understand, something he values very much. In my quest to get to the objective truth of the situation, I trampled all over his feelings and emotions.
Instead of butting heads with his ideas, I should have asked him more about why he felt the way he did. I should have accepted his positions as his and simply heard him out before offering my thoughts and trying to find common ground on which to move the conversation into a more pleasant territory. The topic was Kyle Rittenhouse and gun control. Real fun stuff. A couple days ago I did the same thing to another friend of mine and pissed her off as well.
The super fun topic this time was whether or not cisgender is a slur. Before I stepped on all the argumentative landmines I could, she ended by confirming that the other friend I debated with was deliberately avoiding me because of the conversation with him that I described above. The algorithms are severely weakening our ability to find common ground. We're going to have to fight hard to keep it.
Now that I've realized how badly I screwed up, I'm going to apologize to both of them and tell them what I learned. I have to find a way to peacefully navigate these insane conversations I find myself in as a result of algorithmic rage baiting. We all do. I feel inspired to end this with an excerpt I pulled from the YouTube transcript of RFK Jr.'s recent Peace and Diplomacy speech. Since his voice is hard to listen to, I'm going to read it. The full speech is linked here.
It's about 30 minutes long and very inspiring. This is what I love about the guy. The positive, inspiring, practical political message he's sharing with us. President Kennedy understood that peace begins with our basic attitudes and beliefs. He spoke of the futility of passively waiting for the other side to become enlightened. We must examine our own attitudes, he said, as individuals and as a nation, for our attitude is as essential to theirs. He said we should begin by looking inward.
Yes, back in 1963, a politician really said that. A political leader voiced what would be considered today a spiritual maxim or a spiritual principle. Let's take up that call from 60 years ago and ask Americans, all of us, to reexamine our attitude. We've been immersed in a foreign policy discourse that is all about adversaries and threats and allies and enemies and domination.
We've become addicted to comic book good versus evil narratives that erase complexity and blind us to the legitimate motives and the legitimate cultural and economic concerns and the legitimate security concerns of other peoples and other nations. We've internalized and institutionalized a reflex of violence as a response for any and all crises. Everything becomes a war, a war on drugs, a war on terror or on cancer or on climate change.
This way of thinking predisposes us to wage endless wars abroad, wars and coups and bombs and drones and regime change operations and support for paramilitaries and juntas and dictators. None of this has made us safer and none of it has burnished our leadership or our moral authority. But more importantly, we must ask ourselves, is this really who we are? Is this what we want to be? Is this what America's founders envisioned?
Here's another spiritual principle, one that my uncle also referred to when he said, We're both caught up in a vicious and dangerous cycle with suspicion on one side breeding suspicion on the other, and new weapons begetting counterweapons. When we hold others in the belief that they are implacable enemies, they tend to mold themselves accordingly to our view of them. It is a self-fulfilling prophecy or prediction that launches all players into a cycle of suspicion.
My uncle warned against inhabiting the role of an enemy. We empower hardliners in places like Russia, China, Cuba and Iran. We invite them into the drama of conflict, the drama of provocation and counter provocation, weapon and counter weapon. Is it any wonder that as America has waged violence throughout the world, violence has overtaken us in our own nation? It has not come as an invasion, it's come from within.
Our bombs, our drones, our armies are incapable of stopping the gun violence on our streets in schools or domestic violence in our homes. I see the same link here as my father and Martin Luther King saw about the Vietnam War. They saw that war and they believed that we could not have warfare abroad without bringing that violence home to our streets, to our attitudes, to our communities. Foreign violence is inseparable from domestic violence.
Both are aspects of a basic orientation and a basic set of priorities. Waging endless wars abroad, we've neglected the foundation of our own well-being. We have a decaying economic infrastructure. We have a demoralized people, a despairing people. We have toxins in our air and our soil and our water. We have deteriorating mental and physical health. These are the wages of war. What will be the wages of peace? It will be healing of all the symptoms of America's decline.
None of these are beyond our capacity to heal. We can restore America to the awesome vitality of the original Kennedy era. My uncle said it well. He said that no problem of human destiny is beyond human beings. He warned us that too many of us think that peace is impossible. Too many of us think it is unreal. But that is the dangerous and defeatist belief that leads to the conclusion that war is inevitable, that mankind is doomed, that we are gripped by forces that we cannot control.
We need not accept that view. Our problems are man-made and therefore they can be solved by man. How do we actually do that? We start by replacing the vicious cycle of suspicion with a virtuous cycle of trust-building. We reverse escalation. It takes courage to make the first move towards peace. Let's see what happens when we stop the provocation and the escalation and offer instead an olive branch. Each step we take invites those who we call our adversaries to take a step further.
Maybe Russia won't respond. Maybe they won't respond in kind or in any way. But at least we will know that we tried and the whole world will know it too. That step comes from a changed attitude and from courage. Speaking in the midst of the Cold War, John Kennedy asked us not only to see the distorted and desperate view of the other side, not to see the conflict as inevitable, accommodation as impossible and communication as nothing more than an exchange of threats.
Let's take a moment to allow that to sink in. Today America has broken off practically all diplomatic contact with Russia so that communication has indeed become little more than an exchange of threats and insults. FDR met with Stalin. JFK met with Khrushchev. Nixon met with Brezhnev. Reagan met with Gorbachev. Can't Biden meet with Putin? There's more to that speech but you get the idea. You can watch the speech or read the transcript here, I've left a link.
And thank you KMO for the continued discussion. I hope that you'll stay well. All right. That was JD's message. Thank you for providing that. Thank you for taking the time for not only writing it but also recording it so that I could share it with other people in a way that, you know, it'll reach more people this way. That said, COVID's not my issue. It's not going to be my issue. I believe it was Isaac Asimov, but maybe not. Somebody.
Somebody said, "A fanatic is somebody who can't change his mind and won't change the subject." Well, I'm pretty fixated on a subject right now. It's artificial intelligence. And as JD pointed out, I'm particularly interested in its impacts on working people, the so-called working class.
I'm concerned that many people will lose jobs or they'll lose good jobs and then be forced into substandard employment in terms of, you know, what they're paid and the benefits that they get or the status that they have, you know, full-time versus part-time. Typically people who lose a job to technology, they don't stay out of the labor force forever. Some do, but not in the first job loss. But typically they don't go from losing a pretty decent job to getting a great job.
Usually they lose a pretty good job and get a shittier job. That's the direction of the economy. And I don't see, you know, other than feeble cries for universal basic income, which I think even most of the people in the tech world who are advocating this know that it's not likely to happen. And if it does happen, that it's going to go badly. But you know, that's just their way of saying, hey, we understand.
Yes, we're, we're really wrecking everybody's show here, but we're making a lot of money and we can't stop. And they're right. They can't stop. If you are the CEO of Microsoft, it is not within your power to say, you know what, we see that this is a harmful path and we're just not going to, we're not going to be a participant. Well, the CEO of Microsoft doesn't get to say that because he will be replaced by the board with another CEO who is willing to go where the money is.
Do environmental contaminants, do the products of modern chemistry affect our lives on a biological level? Yes. Yes, they do. Not just in vaccines, environmental contaminants, they pervade our environment. They pervade our bodies. Harms certainly come via this vector. And this is really a number of vectors. It's a serious topic. It's a topic I've interviewed people on in the past. It's not a topic I'm interested in right now. You won't hear me talking about it.
So you could say I'm, I'm half the fanatic in that I won't change the subject. I'm interested in artificial intelligence and I'm interested in it in these particular domains. I'm not interested in tales of AI doomsday. I'm not interested in, you know, talk of protecting ourselves from artificial as super intelligence. I think that the damage that AI is going to do it's doing right now. And it is very narrow, but competent AI deployed to the meta task of concentrating wealth.
I think that these, these systems are all excellent at what they do. And what they do is concentrate wealth in the hands of fewer and fewer people. And in the process, they degrade the ability of the vast majority of people to support themselves. And I think that we are early in this process. And if that doesn't interest you, that's okay. If the thing that does interest you compels you to reach out to me and say, you should be interested in this too. I'm just not.
And you could say it's fanaticism if you like, but I'm willing to change my mind on the topic of AI. I approach AI with a number of unresolved questions in my mind, but I'm not changing the subject right now. And if you really want me to broaden my approach to include this thing that you're really interested in my question to you is why aren't enough people talking about that. I'm not just talking to static warp here.
I'm talking to Tom. I'm talking to everybody who keeps trying to get me into this conversation about COVID and vaccines. I'm not interested. My lack of interest is not a condemnation of you. You are welcome to be interested, but why do you keep reaching out to me on this topic? I'm telling you, I'm not interested. All right. Well, my quiet recording environment is about to be disrupted.
So I will just say I recorded a podcast interview yesterday with Kevin Lin of Progressives for Immigration Reform and also with a retired scientist slash engineer with a very impressive career. And we were talking about AI and related issues about the fate of the working class and in particular the fate of men. I have posted a link to that in the description of this episode, which you can find at KMO.show and also on Patreon and also on YouTube.
All right, everybody, thank you for listening to this irregularly unscheduled episode of the KMO Show. I will talk to you again in a more standard fashion this coming week. Stay well.