It’s freaking me out. What happened to summer?

I just walked out the front door to get the mail and not only was the light yellow instead of white, there was a nip in the air, at least by California standards, I’ve been wearing a sweatshirt all day whereas just last week I was wrestling with Felice how low to set the A/C.

The seasons change subtly in Los Angeles. When you’re a newbie you think it’s all the same, but it’s not. Live here long enough and you’re hip to the subtleties. There comes a point when you’ve got to have an extra layer at night. And that happened this week.

I was out hiking and the temperature was in the low sixties and I had to wear another layer. And usually during the night it does not get too cold down by the beach, where the trail I hike starts. The water… It keeps the air from getting too hot in the summer and too cool in the winter. Although my last few years in Santa Monica I was thinking I needed to buy an air conditioning unit for the window. Used to be there was only a week in Santa Monica you needed A/C, now it’s almost the entire summer. Your house starts off cool and then it doesn’t cool down until almost daybreak. So sleeping ain’t easy.

But I no longer live there anymore.

In my present abode I’m just a tad over the ridge, in the dreaded Valley. You couldn’t be any closer to the Westside and still call it the Valley, but it is. In the seventies the Valley was taboo. Now there are residents who rarely ever go over the hill. Then again, there are people who rarely leave their house anymore. There’s the traffic and then the communication methods. You used to have to leave your house for meetings, appointments, now you can even see the doctor in the privacy of your own home. And for decades there hasn’t been a reasonable music space in the Valley, the Country Club’s been gone for eons, now even the Universal Amphitheatre is gone. Action takes place downtown, or in Silver Lake or Echo Park, and the truth is they might actually be closer than they were in Santa Monica, especially since all the hip companies decided to decamp to the coast, never mind all the tech bros who can’t live too far from the beach. Santa Monica is gridlocked. All of L.A. is gridlocked. But the truth is all the action is on our screens, despite oldsters telling us to get off of them. Everywhere I go people want to talk about streaming TV, and we’re all constantly scrolling, catching up with our feeds on our smartphones. It’s a conundrum. Because they’re personalized, and we stay in constant contact with our buddies, but oftentimes we only see them once or twice a year, if that. And the truth is as you get older no one just drops by, you become ever more isolated. As for those people who are aged and single, good luck. It’s hard to live the life of a singleton as an oldster. Going to bars, hanging out. What did Chris Rock say, you get married because you don’t want to be the oldest guy in the club? I feel that these days. In my eyes I’m not a day over fifty, younger in fact, but to everybody else? There are the lines in my face giving it away. Now when there are more photos than ever before you’re confronted with this on a regular basis, how people are constantly changing, it’s subtle, but you can see it.

Well, that sounds like a march towards death. Which is what fall really is. But to tell you the truth, I love the winter, that’s when the snow falls, when you can go skiing, my passion. But before that…

Growing up in Connecticut fall was reasonable until the end of October, when Daylight Savings Time ended. November brought low temps and rain, utterly miserable. In December it starts to snow. But they don’t get the kind of snow they got when I grew up. Hell, with Zoom they don’t even have snow days anymore, I can’t imagine not waking up listening to local radio as they call out the towns where school is canceled.

The leaves don’t start to change color until October sometime. And you drive down the street, especially on a Saturday, and you see piles of leaves smoldering, that’s what you used to do, burn them. But my father never made me rake the leaves, sometimes we did it for fun, but my dad was cerebral, not physical, if he tried to fix something he broke it, I could give you numerous examples.

And on the east coast you’ve got a fall jacket. And a spring one too. They’re part of your wardrobe. They don’t exist in L.A. You’ve got your cold weather covering, as if the temperature would go down into the twenties, which it never ever does, and then light wraps for the rest of the year, but it does turn to fall, even winter.

When I went to college in Vermont, the first week of school was often warm. You occasionally had classes outside. But then the temperature dropped pretty rapidly. The leaves started to change halfway through September and peak was the first weekend of October. Now it’s later. Then again, it depends where you are in the state, Southern Vermont is about a week later than Northern Vermont.

And I go to the Vail cams every day, and the Aspens are starting to go gold. It’s an interesting effect, doesn’t hold a candle to Vermont foliage, but it indicates death. Even the grass has gone from green to yellow. The snow will start to fall soon. It won’t stick, but it’ll come down. And after losing its connection to A-Basin, Vail is having its earliest opening ever, on November 12th, think about that, it’s not even two months away. If you’re on the east coast, seemingly anywhere but the deep southwest, drink up the atmosphere, the weather, because it’s all downhill from here.

And the truth is we all have good memories of the fall. That slight nip in the air, having a hot drink outside in the afternoon, you feel invigorated. And too many people hate the winter and do their best to stay inside. They see living in the east as a burden, they want to decamp to Florida. We never did this. Furthermore, I have no problem fighting the cold weather, it makes you feel alive. That’s one of the upsides of Alaska not that I’ve been there in the winter. And did you see how much it snowed in Greenland a few days back? Actually, I read a book based in Greenland just the other week, entitled “Phase Six,” and I don’t wholly recommend it, but it’s interesting to put your mind in that place, with only a handful of people fighting the elements far from the infrastructure of the city. Then again, the phone works everywhere these days. It’s confounding to us who grew up when this was not the case, when even long distance phone calls in the U.S. were expensive. I spoke for an hour with Ralph in London yesterday and it was like he was a few blocks away. Then again, it’s always interesting to get a firsthand take, if you read the news you’d think shelves are bare, as a result of the trucking/infrastructure/Brexit situation, but Ralph said a chicken chain ran out of birds, but otherwise the markets are full. Not that your experience isn’t different. Today everybody believes they’re entitled to have their opinion heard, everybody’s always correcting the record, and as a result there is no accurate record, you can hear yourself speak but does anybody else? You can post to Instagram and no one sees it. And everybody wants to grow their audience online, even kids in the single digits.

Now on the east coast summer is fully defined. There comes a week in April when you realize winter is history and you start going out in shorts and a t-shirt even if it’s in the sixties, the fifties. And then Memorial Day is the start of summer. And Labor Day is the end of it. So you’ve got to squeeze your time in. If it rains on the weekend you’re pissed. Here it never rains during the summer, there’s no need to squeeze in activities, we can pretty much do everything all year long, but that does not mean I’m not shocked, positively shocked I tell you, that we’re now on the verge of fall. Technically it’s still four days away. Then again, next week it’s supposed to get hot in L.A. once again. It’s gonna work its way up into the nineties. But the days will get shorter and soon it will be in the low sixties or fifties every night, despite a few more burning hot days, and then it will be done.

As for fall activities…

When you’re an adult they’re a goof at best. Going to the corn maze. As for Halloween…it was little more than a blip on the radar screen when I grew up, it wasn’t about costumes but candy, and older people wanted nothing to do with it. Now Halloween is a national holiday. Hell, I saw decorations at the end of August. Soon I’ll be seeing Santa. Sure, there’s the spirit, but also the commercialism, the corporations love it.

But the sun used to set at 8:11 PM. I checked it on the first day of summer. Today it’s 6:56. And once it’s dark, it’s a completely different mind-set. I actually like the dark, it’s when I get most of my work done, when I can truly get into it. Then again, it’s depressing. The days get shorter, you drive home from work, traffic is heavy and it’s already dark. That’s weird.

And especially since L.A.’s hottest days are at the end of the summer you can fool yourself into thinking the warm days are gonna last forever. But then, pfftt! They’re gone.

Then again, if you’ve got any bread you can always fly to where the weather is better. That’s another thing that’s hard to fathom if you grew up in the sixties. Most people hadn’t even been on an airplane. A vacation was within a couple of hours’ driving distance, at least on the east coast. The rest of the world was exotic. No longer.

The world is getting smaller.

Then again, Mother Nature is immutable. You can’t hold back the shortening of the days. It’s gonna happen no matter what.

And as Don Henley sang, there are only so many summers, and so many springs. Used to be the change of seasons was almost a surprise, but you get older and not only do you expect them, they lose a lot of their meaning. It used to be that the change in seasons meant you were jumping through the hoops of life. Going to school, graduating, and then you get to the point where you can see the end. Nobody lives forever. And you don’t want to, all of your friends are dead. And so when the seasons change you think of how the time you have left is dwindling. And for those of us who want to accomplish things, to go places, time is running out. You realize you’ll never get to certain locations, that you’ll never get back to others. And although you want to keep enough money in case you do live long, you don’t want to cheap out either, because there’s so much stuff you’ll be unable to do while you’re still alive. Like physical activity. First you can’t do sports, then you can’t even travel, and then many people are just waiting to die.

Not that an elementary school kid thinks about this, but I do.

All the clichés are true, it goes by in the blink of an eye, but you still don’t believe it’ll happen to you. And you’ll never get a chance to go down a different path. It’s too late. You don’t want to get a divorce and go back into that pool of singledom referenced above. You can kill time in your twenties and thirties, but get over sixty and every moment is precious. Sometimes you waste time and you’re mad at yourself, there are only so many days and years left!

You want to grab hold.

But this big wheel keeps on turning, the sun hits it at different angles and you can’t turn back the hands of time, isn’t that what everybody says? There’s even a song about it.

But sometimes I want to.

“Your Song” wasn’t the only legendary ballad released at the end of 1970, although it took longer for “Wild World” to become a hit.

Not that Cat Stevens was new. Like Elton John he’d been kicking around a while, released music previously, but suddenly the stars aligned. To the hoi polloi they emerged fully formed, it was nearly a miracle, where did this music come from?

Now the truth is Cat Stevens had actually had a bit of success previously, it’s just that most people were unaware of it. Those who needed more bought imports of Elton’s “Empty Sky” and were disappointed. But when you went back and bought Cat Stevens’s earlier LP, “Mona Bone Jakon,” you found something darker than “Tea for the Tillerman,” more uneven, but with highlights just as good. It was kind of like “Hunky Dory” before the breakthrough of “Ziggy Stardust,” although the truth is “Ziggy” was nowhere near as big as either “Elton John” or “Tea for the Tillerman” in the U.S., Bowie had to make three more LPs before he had the giant hit “Rebel Rebel” off of “Diamond Dogs,” then again those paying attention, living for music, already knew who he was, it was only the johnny-come-latelies who were surprised, who now had to see Bowie in arenas instead of theatres.

But although the early successes, the earlier artistic peaks, of both Elton and Bowie were high, they continued to crest again and again over the years, Cat Stevens did not. Would Stevens have found the magic once again if he hadn’t retired? Possibly, but his albums kept getting worse. “Teaser and the Firecat” had three big hits, but it was a less satisfying listening experience, and a step down in quality. Then, despite making six more albums, Stevens only had two more hits, “Oh Very Young” from “Buddha and the Chocolate Box” and the non-album single “Another Saturday Night” and called it a day. It was big news, Cat’s religious conversion, because despite the internet today in the seventies music was the dominant cultural force, far exceeding television, and by the latter half of the decade the blockbuster era had flowered in film, and although there was corporate rock at the same time, there were still monumental albums, too many to list, and “Rolling Stone” had the impact and gravitas of a major newspaper.

Now the truth is Cat Stevens woke up a couple of years back and went on tour and if you didn’t see him you missed something special. And then he rerecorded “Tea for the Tillerman.” This should never be done. Artists are clueless as to what makes their albums hits, why the public gravitates towards them. Unless, of course, you’re going for a hit, but despite radio action those cuts rarely resonate throughout history, it’s the ones when you’re deep in your hole, doing your own thing, not worrying about the audience, that connect. And as Steven Wilson, the best remixer out there says, you don’t want to mess with the sound fans know. Acts are constantly telling him to tweak, to “improve” the sound. But Wilson says these remixes are for fans, and he wants them to sound identical, but clearer, that’s what they want. Despite reams of hype, nobody wanted a reimagined “Tea for the Tillerman,” but the original…

And speaking of originals, not only did “Mona Bone Jakon” precede “Tea for the Tillerman,” but “Matthew and Son” and “New Masters,” and Cat’s previous work, gained notice and at this point one must say “The First Cut Is the Deepest” is a standard, covered by many.

Also, in the seventies the film “Harold & Maude” became an art house classic and “Trouble” from “Mona Bone Jakon” played in one of the best scenes in the movie so if you look back at the era, the decade, the seventies, Cat Stevens was a big star.

But it all started with “Wild World.” That’s when most people got their first taste of his music. After all, the initial two LPs were on Deram and most people were completely unaware of them.

Now if you listen to “Elton John,” despite some raucous numbers, many of the greatest tracks are dark. With rich production from Gus Dudgeon and strings by Paul Buckmaster. But “Tea for the Tillerman” was different, the songs might have been dark at times, but the production was not, the album had a sunny tone, and as a result ultimately got played out and discarded, well relatively. People kept spinning those early Elton John albums but “Tea for the Tillerman” had been so overplayed, embraced by both casual fans and diehards, that you didn’t hear it. And now, decades later, revisiting it is jaw-dropping.

Now the truth is “Wild World” was the hit, but it’s not my favorite song on the album. I bought the album based on reviews, I was living in the hinterlands, far from commercial radio, I knew every cut on “Tea for the Tillerman” before I ever heard “Wild World” on the radio, and I remember exactly where it happened, April 21st 1971, on the way back from a gorgeous day at Stowe, in a parking lot in Burlington, a guy had the side door of his van opened, and the song was emanating. A connection was made in my brain, this song really is that big. But ultimately my favorite cut on the album was the final one, a minute five long, the title track.

“Oh lord, how they play and play

For that happy day, for that happy day”

It was just Cat and his piano. Quiet. And then the song built to a flourish, all excited, with backup vocals, and then it was done, and this was long before CD players, if you wanted to hear it again you had to get up and lift the needle. And for a one minute song you rarely did, so hearing “”Tea for the Tillerman” at the end of the LP was a treat, back when we listened to complete sides anyway.

Now strangely, fifty years on the biggest cut off of “Tea for Tillerman” is track 10, deep on the second side, “Father and Son,” now that the boomers are parents, at this point even grandparents.

And if I were going track by track, I’d have to singe out “Miles From Nowhere” and “Longer Boats,” and most especially “Hard Headed Woman,” never mind “Where Do the Children Play.”

But right there in the middle of the first side is “Wild World.”

“Now that I’ve lost everything to you

You say you want to start something new

And it’s breaking my heart that you’re leaving

Baby, I’m grieving”

This used to be the basic paradigm of songs from the blues era on. Broken relationship. Man on the losing end. How we got to this macho turnaround I’ll never know, actually I do know, but I can’t say, because of the woke police, I can’t be politically incorrect, I risk getting canceled, but whereas you could identify with the music of yore, today you often end up feeling inferior, kinda like surfing Instagram. And never forget, despite the bravura, men take breakups harder than women.

“But if you want to leave take good care

Hope you have a lot of nice things to wear

But then a lot of things turn bad out there”

Now wait just a minute here, he’s starting to sneer, turns out he’s angrier than he let on, he’s not only licking his wounds, he’s biting back, despite the pleasant “la la” music.

“You know I’ve seen a lot of what the world can do

And it’s breaking my heart in two

Because I never want to see you sad girl

Don’t be a bad girl”

He’s wiser, he’d protect her, but now she’s out on her own without his direction, he’s warning her she’s gonna take hits, get into trouble, even worse don’t encourage men, don’t change your personality, don’t go down the wrong roads.

“But if you want to leave take good care

Hope you make a lot of nice friends out there

But just remember there’s a lot of bad and beware”

This is just a spin on “You don’t know what you’re losing, you’re gonna miss me when I’m gone, you’re never going to find anybody better than me.”

“Oh, baby baby it’s a wild world

It’s hard to get by just upon a smile

Oh, baby baby it’s a wild world

And I’ll always remember you like a child girl yeah”

The truth is you can get very far just upon a smile. And the singer knows this. He resents this. The doors opening for his ex while he’s home licking his wounds. He’s warning her what’s out there, the bad to come, and says he doesn’t want to know what happens to her, when she grows up, when she loses her innocence, he’s going to remember her how she was with him, a child, who he probably tried to control. The guy in this song probably caused her to leave, by coddling her, trying to clip her wings. Then again, young love rarely lasts. Then again, it’s hard to get over your first.

Not that you know all this at age seventeen, when I was listening to “Wild World.” Your whole life is in front of you, you’re inexperienced, despite thinking you know it all. And the funny thing is I was brought up in an era of freedom, to be who you wanted to be, you could get by on minimum wage, you didn’t need a “career,” you also didn’t need to stay with someone if you were unhappy, and therefore it’s hard to find a boomer who isn’t divorced. And you’ll also find aged boomers who are alone, many with regrets, but there are no do-overs in life. Even worse, the one you fantasize about, who left you…unlike in the song most did quite well, had relatively happy lives, they were looking for the one before they settled down, they wanted to make a good choice, not stay with their first. Then again, not all stories have good endings.

So what you’ve got here is a legendary hit, a bedrock song, that plays all sunny, that people smile at when they hear it on the radio, but the truth is despite the lilting music, it’s really a downbeat number. Casual listeners think the singer is accepting the loss, wishing his ex good tidings, when the truth is just the opposite. But how many lovers scorned don’t have resentment.

And one thing is for sure, as we grew up we realized Cat was right, it was definitely a wild world out there and we’d give anything to be a child once again, with our hopes and dreams, our wherewithal still intact. But we’ve still got this music, which is why they call it classic rock. Is today’s music classic? I’ll let you decide.

TheFatRat is the king of gaming music. He’s got over 5.5 million YouTube subscribers and over 2 billion streams on YouTube and Spotify. Find out how a musician from a small city in Germany conquered the music business, going from Berlin to America and ultimately back again, signing to Universal and then leaving, finding he makes more money independently and can do whatever he chooses artistically. Want to know how to make it today? LISTEN!

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-fat-rat/id1316200737?i=1000535518029

https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/9ff4fb19-54d4-41ae-ae7a-8a6f8d3dafa8/the-bob-lefsetz-podcast

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Elizabeth Holmes said she was too pretty to go to jail.

Needless to say, Holmes is on trial as we speak, blaming her heinous behavior on her old boyfriend Sunny Balwani, claiming abuse and ultimately PTSD as she attends Burning Man and galivants around San Francisco as if she had not a care in the world.

If you think you know everything about this story, you probably don’t.

Start by reading John Carreyrou’s book “Bad Blood”: https://amzn.to/39aYp4E The most memorable part of the book for me is when attorney David Boies, who heretofore had an impeccable image, comes in with a team to threaten Carreyrou at the “Wall Street Journal.” But Carreyrou and the WSJ stand their ground.

And now the WSJ is investigating Facebook. You’ve probably seen the headlines.

Carreyrou single-handedly brought down Theranos, will the WSJ series have an impact on Facebook? Definitely, although how much is yet to be seen.

So if you’re into nonfiction, after reading “Bad Blood” be sure to read “Red Notice”: https://amzn.to/2Xw3VfR an account of finance in Russia and so much more. As a matter of fact the Magnitsky Act, which Bill Browder, author of “Red Notice,” fomented, is in the news seemingly every day.

Both of these books are easily read. As a matter of fact, you’ll have a hard time putting them down. If this were a class, they’d be assigned reading.

But before you read those books I would first make you listen to Roger McNamee on Kurt Andersen’s podcast: https://apple.co/2XfFwKZ 

I know Roger, I’ve even done a podcast with him myself, but in this hour he details the history and landscape of Silicon Valley, as well as the history of government intervention against bad actors and monopolies so well it’s like a master class.

Bottom line… Roger thought tech was a tool for good. Isn’t that what Steve Jobs famously claimed, that he was just making tools?

And McNamee was the first to blow the whistle on Facebook in the last election cycle, 2016, and he even wrote a book about Facebook, “Zucked,” but his message still has not gotten traction outside a small coterie of thinkers. That’s where the WSJ comes in.

But start with McNamee first.

When Roger puts it all in context, talks about how the government regulated meat to the benefit of the public, broke up the phone company, you’ll start to see a way through this mess.

Bottom line… Facebook and Google are on both sides of the transaction, they both host and sell, and he says they must do only one or the other.

And they colluded to control online advertising. This has been well documented in the news, but it’s not flashy enough to gain ubiquity , despite state attorneys general suing the company. But there is one smoking gun after another, evidence, it’s not just a theory.

But wait, there’s more! McNamee delineates the difference between the boomers and the millennials. The boomers grew up in an era where it was about the common good. The millennials grew up in an era where it was all about the individual, every person for him or herself, the common good be damned. Think about this, the Reagan revolution has paid dividends, and so many are not positive, the culture was changed, and too many people bought in. So Roger posits when Mark Zuckerberg makes heinous choices to benefit Facebook he thinks he’s doing a good thing, he doesn’t know any better. And now the details are coming out in the WSJ.

But staying with McNamee… Roger says how when they broke up the phone company, it stimulated advancement. That if you break up Google you’ll end up with fifty new companies. If you break up Facebook you’ll end up with a hundred. As for innovation, these evil twins are only trying to maintain their audience/customers, there’s no real advancement being made, it’s like a case study for the dearly departed Clayton Christensen, the old companies waiting to be disrupted.

So McNamee lays out a blueprint to go forward. And acknowledges that government is always behind, but that does not mean government shouldn’t flex its muscles.

But going back to the WSJ series on Facebook, the quote in today’s paper is priceless:

“A now-former executive questioned the idea of overhauling Instagram to avoid social comparison. ‘People use Instagram because it’s a competition,’ the former executive said. ‘That’s the fun part.'”

I’d provide a link but either you subscribe to the WSJ or you don’t, you’re either in the loop or you’re not. You can gather misinformation on social media, most especially Facebook, or you can go to the source, but the source costs money and Americans are cheap, even worse, they oftentimes can’t even understand what is proffered. I posit a significant segment of the population won’t even follow and grasp what McNamee says, even though it’s far from boring, they just don’t have the education to be able to analyze, to comprehend, many just believe a man in the sky will save them.

So the above quote is from the second WSJ installment on Facebook. Turns out the Facebook owned company Instagram is wreaking havoc on the self-image of today’s young women. They just can’t live up to the images online. Almost nobody can, unless it’s your full time job and you’re willing to starve yourself and get plastic surgery. Instagram is for bragging, and too many end up feeling like a loser.

But that’s not as bad as tomorrow’s segment, which went live on the WSJ site this morning:

“Facebook Tried to Make Its Platform a Healthier Place. It Got Angrier Instead. – Internal memos show how a big 2018 change rewarded outrage and that CEO Mark Zuckerberg resisted proposed fixes.”

Turns out the execs are not in the control of the platform, they keep saying they’re putting on band-aids when they’re not, or they do so with unintended negative results. The goal is just to keep people on the platform, that can’t be sacrificed, that metric is king. So despite having studies detailing the deleterious results of Facebook’s platforms the company ignores them. Even worse, it says they’re taking action when they’re not. It’s obfuscation all the time. Zuck testifies in Congress, he keeps saying he’ll provide backup and then does not. And then he just goes on wrecking the world. You see Zuck is the most powerful person in the world, but this doesn’t sit right with elected officials and titans of old school industry. Rupert Murdoch has taught us the power is in the ink, the press. And in truth, Zuckerberg has got a stranglehold on the press, his sites are where people go for information, and his goal is to raise your emotions so you’ll stay connected and participate. Like, respond, forward, it’s gold to Facebook but lead for our society.

In the first WSJ installment on Facebook it is revealed that the company has a whitelist. That if you’re famous, in the public eye, have enough followers, they give you a pass, no matter what you post. Because they’re scared you’ll fight back and the company might not look good. And the truth is they don’t have enough people to police behavior and the algorithm is far from perfect, which is why the hoi polloi are constantly complaining that they post innocuous stuff on Facebook and Instagram and it gets taken down and they might even get blocked while a whole tier of society gets a free pass. Once again, Zuck was confronted with this, what did he do? HE LIED!

Newsom won yesterday. You’ll see all these learned lessons in the media today. I’m not sure I believe all of them. Bottom line, California is a Democratic state, and the only reason Schwarzenegger won was because he was famous, a celebrity, a movie star, and in the last fifteen plus years the state has moved even further left. So is California a harbinger for the 2022 elections? I would certainly hope so, but I don’t believe it, look at how many votes Trump actually got last November, they far exceeded what all the pundits prognosticated.

And where is this cult’s word spread? Online. ON FACEBOOK AND INSTAGRAM!

An for TikTok, the WSJ says there’s a distinct difference:

“‘Social comparison is worse on Instagram,’ states Facebook’s deep dive into teen girl body-image issues in 2020, noting that TikTok, a short-video app, is grounded in performance, while users on Snapchat, a rival photo and video-sharing app, are sheltered by jokey filters that ‘keep the focus on the face.’ In contrast, Instagram focuses heavily on the body and lifestyle.”

So what is going to happen? Roger McNamee posits a way out, so maybe we can have hope, but Zuckerberg has so much power…

As for Theranos, I highly recommend the podcast “The Dropout, Elizabeth Holmes on trial”: https://apple.co/3ziDNlk

You can ignore the previous season. Just start with the August 31st episode “Where Have You Been, Elizabeth Holmes.”

But listen to Roger McNamee first.

And know this is the story of our day. I mean who is going to listen to musicians when superstar Nicky Minaj says she heard from a cousin in Trinidad that his friend got the covid vaccine and his testicles swelled and he ended up impotent. Of course Fauci and every reputable outlet denied this could possibly happen, but none of them have the reach of Ms. Minaj, who has 22.6 million followers on Twitter and 157 million on Instagram, talk about the power of the image over the written word… Used to be the titans of the “Billboard” chart were educated and smart, no longer, which is why they can only move the uneducated rearguard, anybody with a brain ignores them.

But don’t ignore the news. And get it from the source, not handed down via a game of telephone like Nicki Minaj, like so many do on Facebook. In the eighties celebrity gossip culture and top-tier culture merged, this has been the story of the past few decades, but it’s no longer the truth, if for no other reason than we’re no longer sure who the stars are anymore. The movie stars have been revealed to be two-dimensional and out of touch and everybody at home believes they’re a star so you end up with an elite running the world and…those following music and gossip aren’t even members, they have no impact. Hell, look at the music business in Britain. They believed Boris Johnson was in their corner, but not only did Brexit make touring the Continent light years more difficult, time-consuming and expensive, despite this now coming to light the government still hasn’t negotiated a reasonable settlement. And why would the government listen to the music business anyway, when oldsters like Eric Clapton are issuing falsehoods and the stars of the chart are mostly television nitwits?

We are in a fight for democracy. But even more we’re in a fight for society, for culture, for state of mind. Turns out these social media outlets are killing our world, they’re beyond the control of our elected officials.

And why should they take action, when a healthy part of the population won’t get the vaccine and keep talking about it on social media platforms, raining down coin for their owners?

Think about it.