Season 5

Do billionaires deserve our empathy? We passively mention the Brian Thompson murder, and Jim’s portrayal of The Vengeance in his books. Do we need the profit motive to create new drugs and medical treatments? Cialis, Viagra, and Ozempic all started out as drugs for different things than what they were intended. It’s the Bell Labs situation in another instance. Were the inventions from those labs worth paying ridiculous long distance rates? We don’t know. We talk about China hacking our phones and the relationship to aging networks and the search for spies. This leads into a discussion about the breakup of Ma Bell and international call-back systems in the long forgotten past.

We come back to billionaires and their carbon footprint, and more importantly, how it’s becoming not cool to be rich. What if we taxed everything over 1B? Who takes it? Is that unAmerican?

We break off from this line of thought to talk about the book 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus by Charles C. Mann as well as 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created. We discuss both books in broad terms.

We end up talking a little about Dune Prophesy and the better and worse use of canon, Sackler Alley, and The City and The City again.