Hey folks, excuse my absence over the last week. I’m just coming down from a pretty uncomfortable respiratory infection. You know, back when I was a kid, we just called it a cold—or a bad cold. We didn’t really make a distinction between a cold and the flu. Never got specifically diagnosed. But since the stupidity of 2020, everybody seems to want to know: What did you have? What was it like? You know, I have symptoms—I have a runny nose, coughing, maybe a sore throat, sneezing, all that shit. And all I’ve ever done is go out and seek over-the-counter medications that alleviate the symptoms. That’s evolved over the years.

The chief one was always a decongestant, so you’re not all clogged up. But in the last 10 years or so, I’ve added two things that have really helped with symptoms. One is an antihistamine, so I take something like a seasonal allergy medication—one of the popular ones, like Claritin, that seems to work well along with the decongestant. And also the meds that break up mucus. The important thing about that is it drains better and makes your coughs more effective at expelling it out. In the United States, Mucinex is a common one. They have one here in Thailand as well that works pretty well. So I can get symptom relief pretty quick now.

Here’s one thing to keep in mind about this: What I do is basically take not really a double dose, but I just take it more frequently. Where it says 4 to 6 hours, I take them every three hours. It takes 3 to 4 of these doses to build up enough in your system so that you’re pretty much down to just light symptoms after that. Anyway, that’s my story. So what I’ve been doing for the last week is just sitting in, reading stuff, and watching some shit on TV.

But yesterday, I watched a podcast that was pretty remarkable and interesting. It was a Joe Rogan podcast with Elon Musk. You know, they’ve done several, but this is the latest one—about a week old, I think. The episode number is 2404. It’s over three hours, so it’s a big-time investment, but I couldn’t stop watching it. It’s mostly about tech, rocketry, AI, and all these things Elon is involved with—a crazy amount of stuff. But they also spent a good amount of time talking about the whole DOGE effort to clean up the government. And I got insight into why Elon got into a little bit of a tiff with Trump and ultimately just kind of backed away from it. You know, it seems like they have a truce, so neither is saying bad shit about the other. But what I learned from that is Elon’s such a smart guy—he puts rockets up, he builds electric cars, he’s doing robots now, so many different things he does. He actually knows the technical difficulties and how to overcome them.

In politics, he got in there so close—like creating a government agency to look at how fucked up government is, which they did. And I think he came away thinking that it’s way, way, way too fucked up to fix. You’re never gonna vote your way out of this thing. It’s systemic; it’s all baked in the cake. So my takeaway: He’s like, okay, whatever, I’m gonna go back and keep building the shit I build. I hope some of you watch this as I fully recover from this thing and get to posting again regularly. Have a good day.

Here’s the video.

Have a good day.