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So, here you are.
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Born on Planet Earth.
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You spend a few years with your parents, but you won’t remember;
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you are too little.
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You grow up and start kindergarten.
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You learn a few songs and a few animal names,
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and that’s pretty much it.
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Your parents are at work for most of the day.
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You get to see them for a few hours daily when they come home from their jobs,
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and you from yours.
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A few years pass and you go to school.
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You learn that the school schedule
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is something you MUST respect and follow, or else...
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and that competition is the basis of the world.
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You start to compete.
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The more you grow the more things you become obliged to learn.
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You don't question.
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You listen,
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memorize, and perform.
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You spend more time studying than with your friends.
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You see your parents less often.
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They must continue working.
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You finish school, and now a sheet of paper that proves you are ready for the world
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is the only thing you have.
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You feel that the training lasted too long,
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but you are still optimistic.
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A few years pass and you get married with one human being from billions of others.
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You swear of your love and have a few kids.
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You are forced to find a job.
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You and your family depend on it now.
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Some more years pass,
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and you realize how old your parents have become.
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They had finished their duty on planet Earth.
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Now, they are too old to do anything.
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They wait.
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They die.
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You become them.
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You follow in their footsteps.
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What happened?
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Why are humans spending all of their life training and working?
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What is this race all about?
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Is this journey of life even worth the effort?
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What did you really achieve?
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TROM: www.tromsite.com "Valuable Without Value"
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We live in a world where people value money
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more than mostly everything you can imagine.
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There are amazing people, with amazing ideas and projects with great potential,
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that are never discovered or given credit to
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because of the money based world we live in.
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On the other hand, there are humongous amounts of money
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being pumped into almost only nonsensical ideas and projects.
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When I created TROM, a 14-hour documentary,
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and provided it for free on the internet,
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everybody around me asked how much money I made out of it.
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They weren’t even interested in what the documentary is about,
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but only its money value,
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although the documentary presented ideas about how to improve everyone’s life
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through the application of science and technology,
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and attracted many thousands of online viewers.
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I come across similar situations all the time.
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For most of my life, I was that guy who repaired your computer.
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If you had a problem with your computer, you called me
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and I would come and fix it for you, for free.
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From such small gestures to projects that reached hundreds of thousands of people,
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I’ve always done everything for free.
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As a result, I’ve suffered when I needed money
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because, well, I had very little of it
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and in this world everything has a cost.
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If I go to a dentist, he won't say,
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“Ah, you are that guy who made that documentary/website/etc, your treatment is free!!”.
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No, that will never happen!
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Nor will I be exempt from taxes because of my good deeds.
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These kinds of actions, that we all do in our lives,
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are not paid in the society we live in.
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Meaning, from a monetary perspective,
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or let's say from the society’s perspective,
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they are not ‘valuable’.
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This is one of the major problems with the monetary system we live in.
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It will not value something that is valuable for people;
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it will only allow some “valuable actions/ideas” to be sold,
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if properly marketed.
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If I help people by repairing their computers,
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maybe I should sell that service and ask for money next time they ask for help.
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This not only makes me an awful friend
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by not helping my friends without asking for a monetary profit,
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but it would also destroy my kindness and motivation
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by shifting my purpose to an egocentric pursuit.
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You will never be paid for being a good parent,
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a good friend, or just in general a good human being.
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If I create a documentary and then try to value it in the monetary system,
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how can I do that properly?
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How could I measure the books I’ve read my entire life,
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documentaries I’ve seen, articles I’ve read,
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people I’ve interacted with, all of which helped
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form who I am and helped develop my ideas towards making this documentary?
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Trying to value human creativity in the monetary system
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is like trying to map the entire universe by taking a single picture of the sky.
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You will not be able to do that just by picking a single snapshot of a particular moment.
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In the monetary system, a mother is not rewarded for taking care of her kids
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for the rest of her life.
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The little interactions, acts of kindness, sacrifices, and so on.
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I know of nothing in the monetary system that rewards such acts.
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If you watch illegal content online,
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download pirated movies or other digital downloads,
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or even access websites that are supposedly illegal,
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you can be accused and prosecuted of piracy or possession of illegal content.
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There are many people of law who are actively hunting you down for that
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and spying on people to search for that kind of behavior,
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which they punish drastically.
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Do you ever wonder why there aren’t people spying on you
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to see if you do acts of kindness,
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and then reward you for that?
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Or spying on you and, if they see you watching many documentaries about space,
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they come to your door saying
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“Hey, we see that you are interested in space.
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We are offering you a free education to this university to study it even more!”.
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After all, if they catch you downloading pirated movies,
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they will label you as a “pirate”,
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and come to your door to arrest you.
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Then why aren’t they labeling you as an “astronomer”
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if you watch many documentaries about space?
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It seems that they are only looking to punish people,
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but not reward them for good behavior.
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Being paid to do something is such a normality in this world
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that the word “volunteer” seems to be more of an antonym.
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This is why people will look odd at you
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if you say that you are doing things for free.
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In addition, because volunteering is such a rare act among ‘normal’ citizens,
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it emphasizes the false importance that money appears to give to things.
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This is why the documentary that I made had no value for my friends;
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because it made no money.
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I am sure that if I had a huge money revenue coming from it,
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a screening in multiple cities, red carpet and all,
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they would have been extremely impressed.
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It actually had around six thousands viewers on the day that I released it.
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Imagine if all these people would have come to an opening in the town I was born...
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and of course, paid a ticket fare to be there.
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Man, wouldn't I have been a documentary producer and a big money maker?
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This is why, if an asteroid dangerously approaches Earth in the future,
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I suggest to NASA that they make a short 3D movie,
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with cool special effects and great background music,
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to let people know about it, otherwise people won’t pay attention to it.
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We live in a world of eyecandy,
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used in nonsensical movies, music, shiny colors, 3D images, brands,
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and pretty much everything about the package wrapper,
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but not what is inside the package.
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Is it any wonder why science is so often regarded as boring and not cool?
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I mean, people are more interested in Matrix (the movie)
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rather than their own life movie,
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which is at least one trillion times more complex
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than one billion Matrix movies combined.
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This is a result of “what sells best, sells best”.
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It has nothing to do with the real value of things.
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People pump lots of money to promote anything that can produce more money,
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and the more money they produce, the more “cool” and “known”
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what they sell becomes.
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Unfortunately, this is also why people like those things.
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Because they are exposed to them for so long
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and learn to think of them as ‘great’, ‘fashionable’, and ‘entertaining’.
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That explains why many people are not impressed
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when they see news about a new treatment for cancer,
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a new exoplanet discovered,
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or a new type of material invented,
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and are instead more impressed and curious when they see a “celebrity”
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doing or saying something stupid on tv.
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It all depends on what makes more money and,
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therefore, what is promoted more in the media.
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You know…there are so many homeless people who are great human beings,
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yet they starve in the streets because they do not fit in an obsolete system.
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[Danny McGlashing]
Brother you got to tell them the story man about where you're from.
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[Maurice Johnston]
Oh If you want
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[Danny]
Oh my buddy is from Cleveland.
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[Maurice]
I live in Ohio.
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I came to Boston to start a new job.
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When I got here it was given to someone else.
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So now I'm staying in a homeless shelter.
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I've been looking for work since November.
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And I've come very close several times
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but they usually want someone younger
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and probably not black, but I don't know about that.
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Never, not in Boston
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but Boston... it's not a surprise.
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I'm finally getting some responses to my resume
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and I got 14 voicemails on my phone right now.
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Hopefully some of them are job offers so...
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But you have a PhD in Aeronautics?
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Physics.
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PhD in Physics.
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From Dartmouth College and a Masters in Electric Engineering from Purdue University.
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How does someone who has that end up...
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It gets blown me away!
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darn it
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It was the sacrifice I did to take care of my parents
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And one of the problems was when my father died
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my house was going to be foreclosed
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so I had to liquidate everything I owned to save the house.
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My mother had Alzheimer's.
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The last thing she needed was to buy a new home.
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We found a new place but she didn't know where she was at that time anyway.
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So I said...
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They paid my way through school.
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If it takes 10 years I'm gonna make their final years safe and comfortable.
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So I sacrifice everything I had.
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All my electronic stuff, my car,
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all my savings...
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And I paid off the house.
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So when I paid for their house and they passed out,
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I was set to go back to work and the economy tanked.
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And that's what happens.
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Where I used to work there used to be 30,000 engineers
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I worked for Lockheed in California.
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Now there's 3,000.
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So where are they going?
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Boeing's laid off, Northop laid off,
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so where do we would go?
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I had a friend that worked for NASA in Texas.
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He got laid off too.
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Yeah...
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I applied for a NASA contract when I was in Cleveland.
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Then the contract was canceled.
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That was like three months ago.
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So it was just simply bad luck
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and when you have no money...
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...it's very difficult to start over.
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Yeah it is.
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And frankly staying at the shelter's been an experience
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I don't want to repeat ever in my life
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for a lot of people too...
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I'm hoping to find something very very soon.
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I've got some contacts so I'm very...
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I know it's going to be tough in the winter.
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No one hardly hires in the winter.
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And now that warm weather is coming...
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things are beginning to happen
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but it's frustrating.
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I had a position here teaching at a school near northeastern
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teaching mathematics four months...
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they only offered a thousand dollars for the four months!
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I can't live off of that.
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Another company in San Francisco begged me to come out there
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a startup company who are developing a product, which is great,
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I've done that before.
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They only offered 15 hours a week.
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I said "In San Francisco?
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That's the most expensive city in the country outside of New York."
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Thousands to rent there.
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They said "Well, you can have to come out here on your own
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or interview out here someone else and hitch a ride..."
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I went "go away...
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that's not going to happen"
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So with the economy this bad it's difficult.
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The politicians aren't doing anything about it?
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They just get reelected get their big salaries
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and they sit there and do nothing.
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But I just want a chance.
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Science would be great, teaching to be great.
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There's nothing greater than teaching.
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Teaching physics would be a blast!
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So I'm available.
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Let's see what happens.
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Brother thank you so much.
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I appreciate the insistence.
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Absolutely!
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Today, with the use of the internet and its billions of users,
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we are all doing things for free
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that are not rewarded in the global monetary system.
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From comments, to posting videos and sharing thoughts & ideas,
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the internet is a huge place where people do stuff
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and get few or no monetary reward.
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I have seen many YouTubers who make great science shows,
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but are desperate to make money because they can’t continue their work otherwise.
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Of course, they are just a random example out of millions out there.
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This system is like a pair of underwear that doesn’t fit anymore;
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they are too small and they crack every day.
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We try patching them and it seems to work, but it feels damn uncomfortable
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and you know that one day they will crack to the point of no repair.
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I think it’s time we get a new pair of underwear or wear none at all.
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In today’s monetary system,
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you can have great ideas and come up with great inventions
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that could improve everyone’s life,
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and yet starve to death if you don’t know how to sell them.
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In a saner no-trade worldwide society,
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no one has to sell their ideas.
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Their ideas are a direct, immediate contribution
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to the global society and themselves.
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All acts of kindness, all the small help you provide to others,
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everything you do is a direct value
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and does not need a ‘worthless’ price tag.
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[One Day - Matisyahu]
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Sometimes I lay
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Under the moon
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And thank God I'm breathing
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Then I pray
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Don't take me soon
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'Cause I am here for a reason
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Sometimes in my tears I drown
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But I never let it get me down
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So when negativity surrounds
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I know some day it'll all turn around because...
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All my life I've been waiting for
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I've been praying for
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For the people to say
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That we don't wanna fight no more
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There will be no more wars
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And our children will play
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One day, One day, One Day
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One day, One day, One Day
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It's not about
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Win or lose
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'Cause we all lose
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When they feed on the souls of the innocent
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Blood-drenched pavement
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Keep on moving though the waters stay raging
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In this maze you can lose your way (your way)
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It might drive you crazy but don't let it faze you, no way (no way)
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Sometimes in my tears I drown (I drown)
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But I never let it get me down (get me down)
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So when negativity surrounds (surrounds)
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I know some day it'll all turn around because...
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All my life I've been waiting for
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I've been praying for
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For the people to say
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That we don't wanna fight no more
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There will be no more wars
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And our children will play
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One day, One day, One Day
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One day, One day, One Day
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One day this all will change
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Treat people the same
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Stop with the violence
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Down with the hate
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One day we'll all be free
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And proud to be
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Under the same sun
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Singing songs of freedom like
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One day, One day
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One day, One day
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All my life I've been waiting for
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I've been praying for
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For the people to say
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That we don't wanna fight no more
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There will be no more wars
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And our children will play
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One day, One day, One Day
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One day, One day, One Day
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Sometimes in my tears I drown (I drown)
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But I never let it get me down (get me down)
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So when negativity surrounds (surrounds)
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I know some day it'll all turn around because...
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All my life I've been waiting for
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I've been praying for
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For the people to say
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That we don't wanna fight no more
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There will be no more wars
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And our children will play
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One day, One day, One Day
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One day, One day, One Day
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One day, One day
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All my life I've been waiting for
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I've been praying for
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For the people to say
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That we don't wanna fight no more
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There will be no more wars
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And our children will play
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One day, One day, One Day
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One day, One day, One Day
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Discover a new kind of world at:
www.tromsite.com