here and the coffee maker delivered, so it's all good now.

So here's a story that I'm following. I think I may have mentioned this, but it's getting more interesting. So virtual reality apparently can simulate what people are describing as ego death, which is also how people describe a hallucinogenic experience. Now people also say they get all kinds of mental health benefits and maybe even cures from addiction. There are lots of claims from hallucinogenics, from LSD, mushrooms, etc. Now I'm not a doctor so I'm not going to tell you that those are good ideas or bad ideas. These are just things that people report. But they're reporting similar things with virtual reality and they are now consciously comparing the two. And there is some speculation now that you might be able to achieve some form of ego death with VR. And then if you did, there's some hopefulness that you might get some of the same benefits, maybe weaker than the chemical kind but maybe useful.

For example, here's how they do it. If you take a hallucinogen and you feel yourself connected to everything, that's a form of ego death. Because ego is everything's about me. I exist here and then I'm observing the outside world. So the outside world is separate from me. I'm just the observer. But with ego death you sort of merge with the environment. That's your impression of it. And so you're not a distinct individual. You're connected to everything else. And once you feel connected to everything else, allegedly, hypothetically, there's some kind of mental health benefit that could be substantial that comes from that. I don't know exactly why. Sometimes you don't need to know the why. Sometimes you just see it works, use it.

So here's how they do it in VR. In VR you imagine yourself in a space as just a glowing sort of a gaseous glowing form and that represents you. And so you come to see yourself in VR as this gaseous form. And then three other people will appear in your room, just from anywhere, anywhere in the world. So three other people will appear. They will also be gaseous forms. So the first thing that you learn is that your body isn't just what it looks like, right? Your visual sense of yourself isn't all that there is. So when you see yourself as a gaseous form it allows you to get outside your mental model of being a body. You just exist.

But then it gets interesting. Then they have you move your gaseous forms together until you can't tell where your gaseous form and the other gaseous forms begin and end. Apparently, reportedly, you experience something like ego death because you've imagined yourself as this gaseous form, you've merged it with other gaseous forms, and apparently you can feel some kind of experience from that.

Now it's hard to understand it just from having me explain it to you, right? An explanation is always going to fall short. But it's the same problem with hallucinogens. Try to explain a hallucinogenic experience to someone who has never had one. It can't be done. It can't be done. It is impossible to explain. So maybe there's something there. You know, the fact that I can't explain it well might actually be a feature, not a bug.

Anyway, so that's looking good. I think we're very close to the time, to the point where virtual reality fixes all of our mental problems, with the exception of a few that are purely organic. You know, like an actual schizophrenic might have a brain that's differently configured. But for your routine stuff where your programming is out of whack but your brain is still functionally a brain, I've got a feeling that VR will be able to program the hell out of us. I don't think we have any idea how much that will reprogram our entire existence. So that's common. Could be good or bad. Probably both.

Here's something that nobody says out loud, so I'll say it first. If Biden succeeds in getting his army of auditors, who primarily as I understand it would focus on smaller businesses, he's going to learn a very uncomfortable fact. And I don't know if anybody in the Biden administration knows it because administrations tend to be filled with people who have not worked in small businesses. How many people who work in the Biden administration once ran a gardening business where they mowed lawns? Not many, right?

And here's what I think is a problem that they're going to discover, in my opinion. No more than 20