LIKE SAND THROUGH AN HOURGLASS, MY THOUGHTS AND MEMORIES PASS BY

Sometimes I have the most brilliant ideas. Mostly I am impressed by the simple brilliant ideas of others, but they inspire me to have brilliant ideas myself. The trouble is that, while they are coming up with these ideas from their memories, I forget mine.

Today, I went for a run and I brought headphones and started my podcast app to distract me from the heat and pain. The speakers were spontaneous, and funny, and brilliant, and some ideas galvanized for me. But as I sit down to try and recreate my thoughts, I am stumped.

I can't even really easily retrace my thoughts, because, in order to keep free data space on my phone, I have the podcasts that I have listened to erased.

I usually end up listening to one of two shows: Planet Money or 99pi. I think that it's funny that my favourite show is about money. It's so far from my focus, but I think I like the logic and math of it. It is also amazing that it talks about most topics in life, and so many shows seems to be spontaneously "lightening in a bottle".

So here is what I remember:

Warren Buffet made a bet for $ 1 million dollars to invest over 10 years, which he won by investing in the first index fund that ever existed: Vanguard in 1976. The index is a great argument for being average. 

This was juxtapositioned with an article about the notion of average ended up leading us to the sizes of S M L clothes. The clincher idea was at some point fighter pilots were making mistakes, and it turned out that the one-size-fits all cockpit fit no one. So that's how we came to adjustable seats that now come standard in our cars. 

Then there was an unusual economist, in that he was also socialist, who explained the problems and the common misconceptions about capitalism. Essentially, the common fear about socialism is that it is confused with the authoritarian models that no one likes. But the idea of socialism was finally put forward in a reasonable way, and the Spanish company of Mondragon (after the name of the town) is a fine example. There are still pay differences, but the highest to lowest paid is within a ratio of 8-9:1 and not the capitalist current rate of 224:1.

There was even the argument made that with capitalism, we have disparities and injustice in our capitalist society, and that the way to even this out is to broaden our use of socialism and have less employees, and more fair employers.