Podcast 390

Midnight Run To Waukesha. The Bob Davis Podcasts are back on the road, with a trip across Wisconsin to Waukesha, where Governor Scott Walker will make his announcement that he is running for the Republican nomination for President, Monday, July 13th. This is a short trip which starts ’round midnight, in a blinding thunderstorm. It’s time to cover politics by getting in the story, rather than read what others are writing about candidates, and react. So we’ll be covering Walker for a couple of days; The announcement in Waukesha and a rally later in the week in Davenport Iowa. Special attention will be paid to the media gaggle which inevitably follows these candidates. This podcast features some impressions prior to the announcement at Waukesha’s Expo Center. One of the biggest problems with the growing ‘presidential’ race is, all of these candidates aren’t necessarily running for president, which is how their campaigns are portrayed. In fact they’re running in scores of individual primary elections and caucus ‘straw polls’; which is a nice way to say some people sit at a table in a high school gymnasium and write their favorite candidate’s names on scraps of paper, which are then gathered up and ‘counted’. In fact, the score of candidates on the Republican side, and a few on the Democrat side are competing for delegates. What comes after the primaries and caucuses are the political party conventions. On the GOP side, the danger is a bruising floor fight due to the possibility several candidates will win just enough delegates to stay in the race. The mainstream media covers this circus as an national ‘election’. The real question is how many of these candidates have the money and organizations to stay in the race through the conventions. Live from the Wisconsin Dells, in the middle of the night. Sponsored by X Government Cars. 

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Podcast 389

Black Swans. What is a Black Swan Event? By definition, its not necessarily predictable, but we try in this podcast. We’re at the end of an era in the United States. You could say the same about the west in general, and maybe the rest of the world. While things seem on a relatively predictable path in the present time frame one thing we can all be sure of; Something will happen. Things will change. Perhaps significantly. What then is the event that introduces the pivot point that changes politics, society and history? We can only speculate. A financial crisis in China that leads to chaos. Disruption in the Euro Zone triggered by Greece that upsets the balance of power and destabilizes the Balkans. A nuclear weapon in the hands of ISIS. An EMP attack that turns our our technological wonders into junk. Disease. Earthquakes. Comet strikes. Aliens landing. Pick your poison. Or, Black Swan Events that end up being really good. The discovery of a stable anti or reverse aging drug. A way to increase intelligence in human beings. Manageable Machine Intelligence. A breakthrough in agriculture or energy that provides a stable source of food and power. The development of anti-gravity capabilities to lift huge payloads into space, revolutionizing space travel. A really good powdered milk! (JK). The key with these events isn’t necessarily predicting the event itself; It’s being prepared for, and predicting the reaction of mere mortals to the event. It wasn’t the stock market crash of 1929 that caused the depression, it was the government’s lame brained reaction to it. It wasn’t the assassination of Arch Duke Ferdinand that caused World War I, it was the secret pacts and misunderstood capabilities, coupled with irreversible mobilizations that caused World War I. And so on. It’s fun to speculate on the future. Sponsored by X Government Cars. 

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Podcast 387

Noise and Unconscious Thought. What do you think about when you don’t know you’re thinking? Everyone has an unconscious stream of thought. It’s never ending. Most of the time we don’t even realize our brains are running, our minds are talking to us. Truth is, that unconscious stream of thoughts is often the well spring of good ideas and insight. It can be a gold mine of creativity, or a window into a person’s deepest motivations. Yet, everywhere we go these days is a video monitor, music playing, or a TV hooked up to one of the twenty four hour news channels. With all that ‘content’ being delivered everywhere, we don’t get a chance to experience silence long enough to actually experience our thoughts moment to moment. One could ask, ‘Do you ever listen to your thoughts’? Thing is, its near impossible for people to hear themselves think, because whether you’re putting gas in your car, going into a coffee store or restaurant, sitting at a bar, even doing your laundry at a laundromat, ‘content’ is always there. What they don’t tell you is, all that content is designed to use your emotion to persuade, or to hook into emotions to cause you to listen longer, watch longer and remember. With celebrities, politicians, even terrorists playing into the media for attention and persuasion, our thought streams are manipulated, and we don’t even know it. So for this Independence Day weekend in the United States, hopefully people can get a little slice of silence long enough to hear themselves think. What will you think about? Sponsored by X Government Cars. 

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