 I've taken four days off of live streaming to engage in acts of contemplation, introspection, meditation, piety, good works. And now it's great to be back with a little self-aggrandizing. So the Surgeon General of the United States has come out with a six-point plan to combat loneliness, which is fascinating, and on the Facebook I think a great idea was the top story on Apple News a couple of hours ago. Now I notice for myself the more lonely I feel, the more intense my desire for grandiosity and admiration. So I've often felt lonely throughout my life and so I've compensated for it by retreating into fantasies of grand accomplishments. My longtime therapist on and off for ten years she said I should call my autobiography the uninvited. Look, you're still invested in the I-Series bond or is that a joke? Yes, I'm still very much invested in the I-Series bond. It's a government U.S. Treasury bond that guarantees a rate of return above inflation. So yeah, I'm still very much into the I-Series bond. I think it's a terrific investment. But I know in my life when I've not been lonely, when I've been connected with people, that my need to act out in attention seeking grandiose and bizarre ways is considerably diminished. So this is an anniversary of Waco. The rate dropped to 4.6 from 6.0. Yeah, but they're still guarantee over inflation. You're never lonely when you've got the internet or God. Well, I think there was a Protestant minister who said that the lesson from one of the early books of Genesis is that God is not enough. So God says to Adam, right, it's not good for man to be alone, but Adam has God. So God is saying there, God is not enough. God says God is not enough. So God is saying to Adam, it's not good for you to be alone, even though he has God. So yeah, God is not enough and the internet is not enough. But I think when people get lonely, they then become much more people like me, become much more predisposed to bizarre and marginalized attention seeking. And that leads to people like David Koresh and people on the political and religious extremes. David Koresh could have been a regular Seventh-day Adventist minister. I remember very much the Waco thing, because David Koresh came from Seventh-day Adventism, I came from Seventh-day Adventism. But David Koresh wanted to feel incredibly important. Every post on social media seeks a reader. But unfortunately the incentives are that the more inciting your post, the more engagement it's going to get. So the more you enrage with your posts on social media, the more likely you're going to get engagement. But that then ingrains habits which spill over into your real life that diminish your ability to connect with people normally. So David Koresh, he could have been a regular Seventh-day Adventist minister, but that didn't feed his need for importance. So lonely people who strive to feel important, they tend to go to extremes like David Koresh. And it doesn't really work out so well. And then there's something that, what's with the invasion of the chat by multiple user names? No idea. But I think Thomas Sowell had this great saying, there are no solutions, there are only trade-offs. So when the government went to investigate the branch Davidians at Waco, they could have arrested David Koresh without incident. When he left the compound, but they chose to go in with a massive display of force. And so as a result of the government's massive display of force at Waco, not only did 60-plus people die, but pretty much every militia member since then has named Waco as incitement. So you do something, you don't think about the repercussions. So the result of the government overextending its power in Waco is that you now have thousands of militia members that inspired Timothy McVeigh, who blew up Oklahoma City, federal building, costing over 150 deaths. So the Columbine killers were inspired by what happened at Waco. Like Waco has been a calling card to the radical right, which then sets off the radical left. The more people talk radio and on the right talk about we're in a civil war, the more it inspires people in Antifa. We're in a civil war, we're in a fight to the death against fascism. And so you've got the hiking up of the rhetoric on both sides, the people desperate to feel important, pouring more and more of their lives into marginalized political and social movements. And this results in a lot of unnecessary death, a lot of unnecessary unhappiness. On the other hand, it's a lot harder to engage than to get a big following. If you say there's a wonderful world out there, politics isn't that important. Who the next president is is unlikely to have a significant effect on your life. It's hard to get much engagement on that in social media on cable TV. So the incentives are somewhat misaligned between what's good for individuals, what's good for society, and what gets the most attention. So that's a great saying by Tom Sowell. There are no solutions or only trade-offs. So using mild rhetoric and placing politics in this proper perspective, placing problems in the United States in 2023 in their proper perspective, right? It's not exciting. It's not nearly as exciting as, say, we're combating demons, you know, going to war against the devil. That's very exciting. So you use milder rhetoric. And there are consequences for that too. People won't get us fired up. They won't be as dedicated. They won't be as selfless. They won't throw themselves into the cause. You know, whatever political, cultural change you want to make. But the people who are most likely to devote themselves to politics or to making, you know, social, cultural change, usually going to be marginalized people because normal people are primarily going to be devoted to their family and to their friends and to their careers and to their church and synagogue community and their interests. So they're not going to have a lot of time and space and money and energy left over for politics. But if you can fire people up, all right, you will get excited. They'll get excited. And so you'll fire each other up. So you see this in marginalized movements with extreme rhetoric and, you know, apocalyptic visions, right? It's a mutually reinforcing dynamic where everyone gets more fired up until they're either they, you know, grow up or come to some very unfortunate end that causes them to rethink everything. But all these new books coming out on Waco, two new TV series, they have an absolutely profound effect in American history. Imagine being so empty that you drive excitement from repeating the same foul, purile attack again and again. Yeah. But if you can do it and get social support for what you're saying, right, even if you go marching, all right, you go marching with people you will feel happier and more energized. You go to disco dance with people. So there was an article in Time Magazine about the only effective way to combat burnout according to the writer was some group activity. So you could do all the different things, meditation and journaling and you could paint your feelings. You could, you know, learn to dance from YouTube. But the only activities that seem to work to help people overcome burnout are group activities, whether it's, you know, a group cooking class, a group poetry class, a group jazzercise class, a group, you know, dancing class, a group, you know, Bible study class, a group exercise class, right? Something you do with a group of people with whom you can get on the same page and join in, right? If you overcome burnout, right, you all get together at seven in the morning and you pray shakari, the morning prayer service, right? You will feel consistently happier than if you spend that time alone.