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JUST JOSH: Why 2024 Will Rock · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

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Can I hear him and welcome to the safe space for dangerous ideas.
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Here's a dangerous idea for you.
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2024 may not be as shitty as everyone thinks it's going to be, or at least it might be
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shitty in the way as they fear it's going to be shitty, but you should feel good nonetheless.
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I say this because many a listener has hit me up over the course of these holiday season,
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southern summer here in Australia.
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Say in a zepsol buddy old pal, they says to me, they says to me like that, they says,
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why didn't you give me like a wrap of 2023 and a prediction of what's going to happen
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in 2024?
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Everyone else does it.
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Why don't you?
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So at the risk of being a Johnny come lately in this final week of January, can you believe
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we're almost one-twelfth of the way through 2024?
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That means it's practically February.
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And then before you know it, 2024 will be over.
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And then we'll be a quarter of the way into the 21st century.
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And where are my flying cars?
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Nonetheless, I have some thoughts about 2024, some predictions, and some positivity to
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inject into your little noggin there.
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A lot of people have been talking like this piece, take a look at this, the world should
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fear 2024.
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And if you're listening to this on the podcast, you can watch it with my beautiful
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visage beaming at you, including images of the articles that I'm referencing on the
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old YouTube, if you're just Google YouTube, and then Josh Seps, S-Z-E-P-S, or S-Z-E-P-S.
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This is Aras Rusinos riding the world should fear 2024, escalation lurks on every battlefield.
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And let me quote a little of Aras here.
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Like an ailing mammoth weakened by a succession of individual spear thrusts, the hegemon, he's
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talking about the United States here, staggers bleeding across the global scene.
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Though stronger than any individual competitor, America is not capable of sustaining the simultaneous
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major conflicts that may arise.
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The United States has already shifted into a defensive mode, Aras writes, attempting
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to preserve its gains of better times against resurgent challenges, and delaying the grand
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political re-ordering of global affairs for as long as possible, yet unlike Russia, Iran,
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or China, America's domestic, sorry, democratic system incentivizes short term planning.
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And Aras goes on to say, over the course of the coming year, America will likely be
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roiled by its internal political dysfunction in a way we have never yet seen, and the rest
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of the world will live in the shadow, cast by the contested imperial throne.
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Not just the fate of Ukraine, but also the NATO alliance will be determined by the battle
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for power in Washington, Aras writes.
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He goes on to say that Iran and Hezbollah and China may take this opportunity to pounce
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and that the world is living through its most dangerous moment in many decades.
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The logic of events writes, Aras, and many wise people agree with him on this.
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In every theatre, leads towards further escalation over the year to come.
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Last year was a hard year, drenched in blood and human misery through global conflict,
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and in retrospect, he writes, we may view it as the last golden summer of our world order,
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with the troubling storms still distant on the horizon.
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The coming year will be a historic one.
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We are right to dread its approach.
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Well, wait a cheer me up, Aras.
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Thanks a lot, old buddy, old pal, there's a lot of this going around, and you know,
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there's probably some justification for it, let's be honest, something's going to happen
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in Ukraine, something's going to happen between China and Taiwan, something's going to happen
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in the US election, something's going to happen in the Middle East with Gaza and Israel,
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nonetheless, I want to clarify or emphasize that in terms of the reality on the ground
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in Western liberal democracies, we have it very good, and the reason why most of us are
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depressed about the state of things is because the kinds of people who speak to us repeatedly
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and the kinds of people whose voices are amplified by algorithms on social media and the kinds
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of people who swim in the circles of progressive journalism like to be exercised about a particular
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set of problems that they continue talking about, and I include myself here as well, I'm
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not flawless in this, you know, I have my own hobby horses and we bang on about them a lot.
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I just want to take this opportunity to breathe with me a little bit yoga like, let's just
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do a bit Namaste and enjoy the reality, the good upsides of the reality that we also live
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in. A lot of talk about the election, of course, and here's something from Nate Silver on
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Twitter, he says this, you have the whole electorate basically screaming, Biden's too old,
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Nate Silver is a master, pollster, polling expert, there's a year's worth of campaign
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to go, very likely some reversion to the fundamentals, Trump's legal issues, probably
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a larger liability than they seem now, but still, Democrats can't say they weren't warned.
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There's a lot of talk about this, Biden's too old, Trump obviously has liabilities of
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his own. Some people say that basically any average Democrat could beat Donald Trump and
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any average Republican could beat Joe Biden, but we don't know which if either of them
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is going to beat the other because they both have such massive glaring liabilities.
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What Nate Silver is ignoring, or perhaps, oh, I could say he doesn't know it, but of course
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he knows it, is that in the United States of America, there is no party political system,
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the way that there is in a parliamentary democracy, like my homeland of Australia, or like in
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the UK or Canada, where a strong party decides on who its leader is going to be to take to
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the next electorate. I mean, the United States, you have primaries, presidential primaries,
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where stupid voters get to use the dumb tools of democracy to pick idiots, and there's
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no one to boot Biden out except for Biden, and there's no one to boot Trump out except
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for Trump. Surprisingly enough, they themselves are not keen on being booted out. That's
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why they're not doing the booting, so why they're not sticking the boot into themselves.
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So you could basically draw any incumbent Democratic governor from a hat and run him against
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or against Trump and expect that they would win. The reason they don't do that is not
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because Democrats are idiots. It's because there is no party system that has the ability
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to remove Biden from the ticket the way they would be in a parliamentary democracy. This
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is a point brought to my attention by a new book, which I'm really excited to read, which
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I haven't read yet, because I can't get my hands on it. It's called The Hollow Parties,
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The Many Pasts, and Disorder Present of American Party Politics by Daniel Schultzmann and Sam
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Rosenfeld, who I hope to have on this show, because it sounds fascinating. Basically,
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they say voters actually say they don't want Biden and say they don't want Trump, vast
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majority of voters, and yet they don't actually do the things that would be required because
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they're not that interested in politics. They don't want to sift through ranks of random
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governors and senators trying to identify which one of them suits them and their communities
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and which one is going to be better placed electorally. They don't want to go and volunteer
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for campaigns. They don't want to get involved in grassroots politics. They don't want to
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go door knocking. They don't want to give them money. What they want is a strong party
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that will pick somebody who they like and then they can go, I want A or I want B. That's
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basically what voters want. The American political system doesn't give them that. Hence, that's
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one, I thought, intriguing reason for American political dysfunction. But there's another,
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which is we're being deranged by our misconceptions about how bad things are. Take a look at this
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article. We've got climate change enters the therapy room in the New York Times. Ten years
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ago, psychologists proposed that a wide range of people would suffer anxiety and grief over
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climate. Skepticism about that idea is gone. It relates the story of a therapist named
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Dr. Doerty, Thomas J. Doerty. He's a psychologist in Portland who specializes in climate change
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anxiety. Of course, he's in Portland. Big hello to all of my beautiful Oregonian listeners
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and viewers out there. Doerty says, this is the New York Times. I'm quoting. So many people
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now come to him for this problem. He's built an entire practice around them. An 18-year-old
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student who sometimes experiences panic attacks, so severe she can't get out of bed. A 69-year-old
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glacial geologist who is sometimes overwhelmed with sadness when he looks at his grandchildren.
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A man in his 50s who erupts in frustration over his friend's consumption choices, unable to
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tolerate their chatter about vacations in Tuscany. While I empathize with him, I'm unable to
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tolerate my friend's chatter about their vacations as well. But that's just because hearing about
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other people's vacations is boring, not because I'm terrified about climate change, but I am terrified
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about climate change. But hang on, this is not healthy. This isn't right. Like my father was born
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in a refugee camp in 1943, a Jew, while a Nazis were stampedeing across Europe. When his mother
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got pregnant, do you think the world looked like a good place? Do you think she could have looked
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around and gone like, oh my goodness, I'm going to look at my grandchildren and what kind of
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world are they going to be in? Of course, she was being hunted by people who wanted to exterminate
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her entire race. She still had kids. She still looked at her grandkids with a certain level of
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optimism and hope. I mean, a thing's worse now than they were in 1943. I am worried about
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climate chaos. I'm worried because it's going to be expensive to fix. I'm worried because it's
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going to cause huge disruptions to agriculture and therefore to human populations. It could disrupt
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them on soon. It could lead to millions or hundreds of millions of refugees across South Asia.
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It could put enormous pressure on already fragile liberal democracies that will be dealing with
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social media and artificial intelligence and a whole bunch of other challenges this century. We
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don't need the additional hassle, essentially, of being constantly buffered by droughts and wildfires
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and cyclones and hurricanes and refugees pouring across our borders. It's going to be really,
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really disruptive, really annoying and really, really expensive and we're idiots for not having done
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more about it and we're idiots for not doing more right now. But to dwell on it as if it's
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the end of civilization or to think that your grandchildren, you know, the fate of your grandchildren
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is so dire that it makes you weep is perhaps to be consuming a little bit too much doom scrolling.
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Well, look at this, for example. Here's another piece. This is eco-anxiety. It's real. Here's how to
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cope. It's okay to feel stressed out and worried about climate change, but there are ways to work
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through your emotions. Here, a mental health professional breaks it down. And this, the climate crisis
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is worse than you can imagine rights pro-publica. Here's what happens if you try. If you try,
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if you try, here's what happens if you try to imagine how dire the climate crisis is. If you just
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try, you don't even want to know what happens. If you succeed in imagining how about the climate
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crisis is, then you just explode. You just evaporate. You're like the wicked witch of the west
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dissolving. You cease to be. The space-time continuum folds in on itself and you are no more. But if
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you just try to imagine the climate crisis, here's what happens. They have a whole piece about this.
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Pro-publica. Pro-publica or pro-publica. It sounds pretentious to say pro-publica,
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like a minitaliano or something. A climate scientist, this is pro-publica speaking,
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spent years trying to get people to pay attention to the disaster head. His wife is exhausted,
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his older son thinks there's no future, and nobody bit him. We'll use the outdoor toilet he built
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to shrink his carbon footprint. Good for him. Did he really build the outdoor toilet to shrink
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his carbon footprint? Or did he just want to get away from his wife? It's hard to know.
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It doesn't say, but if you even imagine what the truth is, pro-publica will write an article about
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how dire it is just to try. Here's another one. This is a peace in nature. These are academic
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things now. We're not just talking about clickbait. This is an academic journal, Nature Climate Change.
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A socio-ecological perspective on climate anxiety in children and adolescents.
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So now we're actually getting into clinically disturbing areas. Did you know that US climate
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emissions have fallen to the lowest level in over 30 years. Take a look at this. If you're watching
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the YouTube's United States Environmental Protection Agency, EPA, this is climate change indicators,
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and it's got a little graph where you can see emissions per capita going down steadily since 1990.
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Emissions per GDP going down even more sharply and even absolute emissions are on the decline.
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They're lower in the United States in over 30 years. Oil and gas production has soared to all time
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levels at the same time. So there's partly a technological good news story.
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And it's worth understanding also that the Doomsday scenarios about climate change,
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where we're in a kind of Mad Max Hellscape, where everything disintegrates and you know,
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you can't, there's no arable land and we're all just fighting over water.
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These are mostly predictions that were made about the possibility of there being
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an RCP, a representative concentration pathway of 8.5. This was the nightmare scenario of climate change.
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You don't read a lot about the fact that that eventuality is now incredibly unlikely.
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Thanks to the falling cost of solar power, improvements in lithium ion batteries,
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surging sales of electric vehicles, closures of coal plants, under economic pressure
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from cheap natural gas, which is not perfect, but a lot better. We could be doing more,
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we could be investing in nuclear power. Oh my goodness, he said nuclear power. That's not very good
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if you're a greenie. It should be. It should be on the table. But we don't hear a lot about the
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fact that the worst case scenarios for climate change are becoming so improbable that we seem
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to have dodged the bullet on those. And B, the more mild things that we should be doing and we need
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to be doing them a lot faster are actually happening in the background. So by all means,
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let's keep pushing for it. It's crazy that we're not doing more. But there's good news.
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There's this. So we're not only releasing less emissions. Here's a piece of US utility scale
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solar and storage prices drop more than 12% in the past year. Why didn't you see this article?
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Why didn't you see this article? I bet you didn't see that the installed cost of solar photovoltaic
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and battery storage systems continued to drop and that utility scale solar systems are 12.3
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percent down in cost. This is a new report from the National Renewable Energy Lab. Why don't we
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see that because it's a bit boring, isn't it? I mean, even as I was just reading it, I was thinking,
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am I going to lose listeners and viewers when I talk about this? It's a bit dry. Blah blah blah.
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Good news. Can't I see some footage of a black person being shot by police? It'll be a bit
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more exciting. Here's another one. America's carbon emissions. Take a look at this.
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Fell for the first time since COVID. We're back to emitting like it's 1991. Even though we have
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a much bigger economy, that's from heat map. These are not like right-wing places, right? This is
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an article by Robinson Meyer, who's the founding executive editor of heat map. He was previously a
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staff writer at the Atlantic where he covered climate change, energy and technology. One reason why
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I find this whole news about climate change particularly heartening is because
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taking action on climate change is not actually very popular. Like you ask people in a poll,
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do you want to do something about climate change? They go absolutely for sure. We need to do something
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about climate. I'm going to write a big banner that said climate action now. And then you say to
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them, how much more would you be willing to pay on your electricity bill to fight climate? They go,
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oh, I wouldn't pay them more. Would you pay $10 a month? No. What? $10 a month. Are you kidding me?
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That's Netflix. I could have an extra Netflix. I could have two ice creams for that price.
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So you ask people, this is literal. I mean, this is a true. I'm not making that up. You ask people
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whether they would pay $100 a year to fight climate change. Only one-third of Americans say yes.
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That's when you say would you be willing to pay $10 a month more in electricity bills to fight
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climate change? Most people say no. And the problem with that is not just that people are stingy.
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They're not because they're willing to spend money on all kinds of things. The problem is that
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it gives you an understanding of just how shallow people's commitment to climate change,
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at least in America, is they'll say they want to do something about it because who wouldn't?
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It's like asking them, you know, well, do you like kittens? Do you want to do good things for kittens?
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Of course I do. Do you want to spend $10 a month on kittens? Fuck no.
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Let the kittens starve and get taken by eagles and just kittens.
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So the fact that the government of the Biden administration and the Democrats are actually doing
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quite a lot on climate change and the Biden administration, if you're not aware, has been the
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most aggressive climate change administration in history by far, gives a good indication that
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quietly in the background, you know, good things are happening. We just don't amplify them
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because they're not sexy and they're not click baity. It's wise that we don't amplify them,
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by the way, because the things that parties really care about doing that aren't very popular
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should be done on the slide. It's a little bit like Republicans cutting taxes for rich people.
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You don't hear them talk about it much because it's wildly unpopular, but at every opportunity
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they can, they cut taxes for rich people. Similarly, if you're a Democrat, if you're on the left,
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you really want to do something about climate change, you should just do stuff about climate change
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and don't talk about it terribly much because it's not very popular. Another good news story that
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I wanted to bring to your attention for 2024, and this is good news from a partisan perspective
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because I want to give credit to the Biden administration where people don't seem to be giving
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it credit in this American election year, is there are all kinds of things that have been done with
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Medicare in America that I'm not sure you know about. There's a lot more attention to things
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like student loan relief, for example. Why? Because conservatives and Fox News like talking about
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student loan relief because they like talking about the fact that money is being stolen from hard
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working plumbers and given to kids to do stupid degrees in gender studies. They don't like talking
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about these rich fat cat old people who are getting wealthy off the public teach by getting too
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much health care, which is a story they could also run but wouldn't be terribly popular. The Biden
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administration has done a few big things relating to Medicare and prescription drugs. They've
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negotiated down the price of 10 big prescription drugs. This is all part of the inflation reduction
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act, by the way. You know how like nothing can get done by Congress in America unless you do
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everything in one huge act and you call it the we love kittens act and everybody signs onto it
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and then you just stuff it full of all the things that you want to get done. Well the Democrats did
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that with the inflation reduction act negotiating down the price of 10 big prescription drugs,
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putting a cap on the amount that you can pay for prescription drugs. I mean that's huge every
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year so you don't have to pay more than a certain amount if you're on Medicare. Introducing a tax
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that discourages companies from raising prescription drug prices and importantly given that Americans
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are so bloody fat and so many of them are getting diabetes, the Biden administration
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kept the price of insulin at $35 a month. They've also undertaken these student loan forgiveness
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initiatives which you hear a lot more about partly because as I said folks news and the
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conservatives like talking about them because they can demonize them but also partly because the
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chattering classes like me, the sort of you know general lefty, journal kind of a little bit
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woke journalism people love talking about student loan debt because they have student loan debt
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and they're not old people on Medicare. If you looked at the coverage of especially on Twitter
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and social media things that the Biden administration has done, you'd hear a lot and see a lot
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of blather about student loan forgiveness and not a huge amount about the much more important
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reforms that they've made to Medicare. In spite of the fact that a much bigger share of the
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population is on Medicare than has student loans, 50% more Americans currently receive Medicare
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than have student loan debt. Not to mention the fact that 100% of Americans who survive
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into old age will be on Medicare whereas you know only a fraction of people will ever have
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student loan debt. So this is just one phenomenon one way of looking at the phenomenon of the
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way that things land for you because of what you see on social media and what you see online
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is filtered of course through the prism of the biases of the people who are doing the
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reporting. So let's look at some good news, some other good news shall we? Here's a good one.
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This is a story about the San Francisco barge, the Bay Area Rapid Transit Authority. This is
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2024, January 2024. It has a new project which is called the Fleet of the Future
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Cars for San Francisco's Metro. It has come in under budget and faster than they expected.
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It'll cost $394 million less than when the contract was awarded in 2012. This is hilarious
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that it takes the 2012 is when it started. Wow, you talk about like imagine China or like Saudi
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Arabia announcing an upgrade to their Metro in like I don't know Dubai or Shanghai. Yes, I know
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Dubai is in the UAE, not Saudi Arabia. You get my point. It would be done in four months and it
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would cost whatever they want it to cost. But here it was 2012, what was announced? This is 12 years
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later. But $400 million less and the Fleet of the Future is a success story, 775 cars. It
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only cost $2.5 billion instead of $2.5 billion and now San Francisco is the better for it.
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Why didn't you see a story about that? Why is this the first that you're hearing about that?
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Because you haven't been listening to all zeps. That's why. Not that I've been talking about it much
24:44
either, but I am now redeeming myself. These are the sorts of stories that if you actually wanted
24:51
people to think that the left is sane, you would spend time talking about. Here's an example
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of public transport being run by a city in a way that is delivering results for commuters and is
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keeping pace with the latest technology and is coming in under budget. That should be the good
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new story that MSNBC and lefties that I don't know the Guardian and the New York Times are talking
25:18
about all the time. Instead, they're talking about their hobby horses, student loan debt and
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cultural war stuff. Here's another good story. I like this one too. Insurance is coming back to
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healthcare. The rate of uninsured people in America has dropped dramatically since 2021.
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The enrollment in the Obamacare marketplaces is up 25% compared to 2023 compared to last year
25:45
and nearly 80% compared to 2020. The number of uninsured people in America who don't have health
25:51
insurance is at an all-time low. Here's another good news. USA Today, do you need an urgent operation
25:58
or prescription? Your wait time for approval just got cut down. This is a new federal rules,
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another Biden administration rule, which was just unveiled last week as of the time of recording.
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Mid-January, doctors are cheering this new federal rule, which will speed up health insurance
26:15
company decisions on whether to authorize or deny medical care or treatments for millions of
26:19
patients. It basically means that the health insurance industry can't drag their feet
26:27
anymore. Things are getting better for healthcare in the United States. I'm just offering these
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things not necessarily as a way to say that everything's fine and dandy, but as little jigsaw
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pieces, little mosaics, shall we say, in an overall tapestry of things getting generally better
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in incremental ways for people. I'm specifically talking about America, but you could take the
26:53
analogy for pretty much any Western liberal democracy when center left parties are allowed to make
26:58
incremental change. It's not sexy and it's not glamorous and it doesn't grab you by the scruff
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of the neck and shake you around and it's not exciting. But this is the bread and butter, this is
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the meat of good governance. The problem is that most of the people who talk about governance,
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who talk about politics and who discuss the political horse race are a type of sort of left-wing
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young, educated, urbanite. They are part of the democratic party or they are part of the center
27:29
left, but that doesn't mean that they actually reflect the views of what left-wing voters are
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particularly interested in. They're not representing the views of Hispanic union members
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or elderly church-going black women. They are young, largely white, university-educated lefties
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and they are the ones who are deciding what the left-wing narrative tends to be, which brings
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me to my real point here. There's a fascinating paper by Catherine Gimber and Lisa Bates,
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Seth Prins and Catherine Keys. It's entitled and I'll show it to you here if you're on YouTube,
28:08
the politics of depression diverging trends in internalizing symptoms among U.S.
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adolescents by political beliefs. This is in the Journal of Mental Health. This is a survey
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about the divergence in depression by political ideology and also by gender. It finds that young people
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are, let's just say, they're not upbeat at the moment. You may have noticed this. The youngsters
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aren't okay. I think everything is shitty. This paper basically affirms the reasons why and
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says how could you expect them to be upbeat? We're basically in Nazi Germany in 1943, aren't we?
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I'll allow me to quote from this paper. They talk about this period when the adolescents of
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today were coming of age and they say structural racism, police violence against black people,
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pervasive sexism and sexual assault and rampant socioeconomic inequality became unavoidable features
29:25
of political discourse. That is, they're talking about over the past five years or so.
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Now, that's true, but a very interesting point was made by one of my favorite analysts who,
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if you're a regular listener of this podcast, you'll have heard me bang on about before. Matt
29:44
Iglesias, it was a great blog called Slow Boring, which if you're going to subscribe to anyone
29:50
in addition to me, you should subscribe to Matt. By the way, if you're just listening to this or
29:55
you're just discovering me for the first time, you're just watching this go-to sub-stack and at least
30:00
join the community on the free plan in sub-stack where you can get our newsletter, weekly newsletter
30:06
about things that we're talking about and you can keep in touch with me and you can comment on
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on the podcast and so on. We're going to be doing more and more episodes of the podcast. The main
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flagship show here is Uncomfortable Conversations where every week I have an uncomfortable conversation
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with one of the most interesting people in the world about some provocative issue and we talk
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about it in ways that are free from bullshit and so on and that will continue to be free
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and you can just subscribe to the podcast for that. But now that I have more time on my hands and
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I'm making this my full-time career, you will also be getting at least one, if not two additional
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pieces of content which will be chats and banners with interesting people and celebrities about the
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the week's news kind of a panel show and then have things like this which I'll just call our
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just Josh segments where I'm trying to analyze something for you in hopefully useful way or maybe
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showing the ways in which the media is having conversations wrong and the way in which
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through my uncomfortable conversations prism I believe we should be having conversations in a
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more constructive and more empathetic and more optimistic and truer, more constructive way.
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So for all of that stuff go to substack.uncomfortableconversations.com or is it the other way around?
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It's one of those things just Google Uncomfortable Conversations substack and also for I think it's
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5.99 or is it 6.99 US a month you will get all of that audio you'll get your own private feed
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which will give you absolutely everything that we release otherwise some of those things will
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be behind a paywall if you're subscribed to the free thing but either way subscribe and you'll
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get lots and lots of great free stuff and and you won't just be getting stuff for yourself I should
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also add that you are making a vote essentially for independent media. For those of you who aren't
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familiar with my career I've just left the public broadcaster the ABC where I had a daily three hour
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talk radio show and just felt like I was too spicy for that place and there were not there were
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conversations that I couldn't have there that I want to be able to have and there was no financial
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reason to not be doing this independently but that financial ability for me to operate independently
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is contingent on and dependent on you good people bothering to get out your phone and go to
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substack and click on the subscribe button and throw some production money away I promise I'm
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not going to spend it on hookers and blow and three trips to Rio it will be reinvested back into
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this operation and you can consider it something of a vote I just sort of have for me I have a pool
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of money that I put aside you know it might only be you know maybe it's 50 or 80 bucks a month
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something like what you used to pay for a cable television subscription and that is the money that
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you spend on voting for independent media and in voting for fighting out about the world in ways
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that you can don't now that you might want to spend that on Alex Jones you might want to spend
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that on wild-eyed communists and revolutionaries or if you're listening to this and you're still
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this far into the episode maybe you like the cut of my jib in which case make it possible for
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people like me to do what we do throw some some shackles and subscribe and then you get the
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benefit as well by getting all of this great content nonetheless that's not my point
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although that was a lovely and self-serving and secure this diversion I must say
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so Madaglaceus talks about this piece this this this journal article analyzing the depression
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of young people and attributing it to structural racism police violence against black people
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pervasive sexism sexual assault rampant socioeconomic inequality becoming unavoidable features
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of political discourse and Matt says that sounds to him less like a causal explanation of why
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progressive teens are more depressed than it does like listening to a depressed liberal
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given account of recent American politics he says note for example the negative framing of the
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fact that progressives have used their agenda setting power to make structural racism
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and pervasive sexism and rampant socioeconomic inequality into unavoidable features of political
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discourse one could instead write Matt say this is what the path to victory looks like progressive
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activists and intellectuals have succeeded in getting more people to pay attention to what they
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think are the most important problems just notice that just notice that when you're scrolling
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around on social media and you're listening to blowhards bang on about the woes of the world
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they are talking from perspectives that reflect their biases they are talking about things that
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they wish to amplify that they wish to disseminate and they're often talking through a filter of
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an algorithm that is selecting things that will agitate you that will either reinforce things
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you already believe or that will demonize positions that you don't agree with that will trap
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you more and more in an echo chamber so the fact that we're talking a lot and paying attention to
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the dispossession of people to racial injustice to white supremacy to whatever else might be getting
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you down is itself evidence of progress of the fact that we are shining a light on things that
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previously didn't have a light shown on them and when you know an asteroid is headed towards the
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earth and there actually is a concrete real and imminent threat to humankind then we can all
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focus on that but until then let us enter 2024 with a spirit of optimism aware to the challenges
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that exist up for being big enough to defend Western liberal democracy against Putin against
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Xi Jinping should they try anything further but let's also be proud of ourselves for what we've
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achieved and grateful to the people who have bequeathed us with the goodies that we currently enjoy
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so I'm going into 2024 excited for myself excited for my family full of gratitude to the people
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around me full of gratitude to you for allowing me this exploration and I invite you to do the same
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for all of its faults it is still a beautiful world enjoy it I'll see you next week