Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Hey there, it's Ramsey here. We're at the first milestone of the journey, and I want to tell you all about it. What's worthwhile? It's a question that every person needs to answer for themselves. If they pause to ask it, what should we focus upon? Spend our time and energy on, consider, and believe? I feel like I've found some clarity on how I'd like to focus and organize this effort to ask, ponder, and seek to answer these questions. You with me? Announcing the what's Worthwhile podcast Deep Dive series over the coming weeks, I will be posting my thoughts on five topic areas of great interest to me and great relevance to the world today. Each of these deep dives will frame up some specific issues, challenges and potential solutions worth focusing on. I'm no expert on any of this, so I'll be highlighting the insights and great work that many individuals and organizations are doing. My hope is that in the near future, I'll have many of these folks as guests on the podcast to tell us about it in their own words. In the meantime, the what's worthwhile deep dives will lay the groundwork. Wait, now I'mixing metaphors allow us to fathom the immediate depths of the issues at hand. Yeah? Which issues? Well, I can organize my interests into five big categories. Health and fitness, sustainable energy, political reform, bridge building, and christian spirituality. You know, light and easy topics that everyone agrees on. Okay, we'll start with an easy one. Health and fitness. We all agree that we should get and stay healthy and fit, right? Maybe. But what does that mean? What does that look like? There's a million different diets and a million different exercise regimens. Further, people are built differently. Different metabolisms, chemistries, heights, weights, shapes and sizes. There can't be one single best way to eat and be fit. And what about staying healthy? Meaning not getting sick? We've had an obsession these past few years with illness. During the COVID era, were the vaccines our ticket out and back to normal? Or were they part of the whole experience that we are still recovering from? How could we boost our immunity apart from vaccines through things like vitamins, supplements, nutrition, and lifestyle? Maybe that topic is not so easy after all. Next. Sustainable energy. I've been professionally involved with sustainable energy for nearly 30 years. Back in the day, we were showing people the benefits of double pane windows and basic recycling. Solar panels were just becoming widely available, and we were only dreaming about electric cars. I watched wide eyed as Al Gore broke the Internet, which he, of course, invented with his inconvenient truth we didn't know at the time that that movie would be the silent spring of the climate change movement. People have been fighting about it ever since. Now, where are we with sustainable energy in the US? Coal fired power plants are well on their way out of the energy mix, having been replaced by natural gas and increasingly by wind and solar. The downside of wind and solar, of course, is that the wind is not always blowing and the sun is not always shining. That means we'll need energy storage on the grid. Batteries. Big ones, lots of them. The technology for grid scale battery energy storage systems is coming along, but still emerging. Likewise, we now got a couple million smaller batteries scooting around in electric cars. Boy, do people either love or hate electric cars. But they're here, and we need to make and recycle those batteries. Lots to do, lots to think about, and lots to talk about. The next big thing I'm interested in is political reform. I don't consider myself a Republican or a Democrat. I'm politically non binary independent. I have a sneaking suspicion that lots of other people don't identify with one or the other major U. S. Political party anymore either. But this political system we have is built on the two party system. And what is up with these two parties today? I used to always lean and vote left with my background and environmental training, but I don't even recognize the democratic party anymore. So I began to lean and vote more to the right. But I can't say that the republican party has become any more desirable to me. So where am I to go? I gotta say, in the past few years I've gotten pretty excited about some people named Yang, Tulsi, and Bobby. But how can they ever win? The cards are stacked against them and they're basically just spoilers for one side or the other. Can we evaluate and try and implement some alternative voting procedures, like open primaries and ranked choice voting? On the topic of voting, how do we ensure that every citizen gets to vote once and that their vote gets counted, tallied, never manipulated or changed all the way through to their desired outcome? We need trustworthy elections to elect the candidates we choose. As the system is now, we just fight about everything and no one really wins. That leads me into my next topic of interest. Bridge building. I mean, building bridges between groups of people and individuals. I guess it's human nature to be tribal, to have a group of people that we associate with belong to. Maybe it's a family or a race or a political group, a religion or even a sports team. The problem is the downside is that it sets up us versus them. Us is great. Them is the problem. Tribalism is a great way to pull together the USS, but a great way to demonize and alienate and offend the thems. Maybe tribalism is worse now than ever. Maybe it's always been this way. I don't know. Happily, there are efforts by many to bridge the divides, get people talking across and between groups. I want to support those efforts. I'm convinced that if we take the time to talk, we'll rediscover that we have more in common than we have indifference. My fifth topic area of interest is really my greatest christian spirituality. Faith is the belief in something that cannot be decisively proven. I have faith in God. I can't prove to you that God is like this or like that, or that he even exists. I'm not going to try. But I'm a believer and I'm interested in thinking about and discovering and practicing ways to connect with God. I do a lot of reading and praying and meditating. I believe that I can talk to God and hear from him. Many people have their own practices and ways to connect with God. I'd love to hear all about how people go about doing that. Assuming that there is a God. He's got to be a big God, creator of the universe. He's got to have many ways in which he makes himself available instead of just using one platform. Right? Okay. Is your head spinning yet? I know it's a lot and kind of all over the place, but that's the whole point of this podcast. What's worthwhile? What should we invest ourselves in at this point? I don't have many answers, but at least my questions are organized and I see a path ahead for this journey and for today, that is enough.
