and let's jump straight into it almost a kind of a a direct continuation from our episode our free episode last week we were talking about the the the the god-awful alpha schools i mean still truly one of the most horrific things that we've ever read on this show. A direct continuation from there. Also in Wired, this is one of Ed's beats. This is really an Ed's specialty here. But Wired has a piece that came out a little bit ago titled, Vaping is Everywhere in Schools, Sparking a bathroom surveillance boom. So, you know, we got alpha schools, right? These charter schools that are taking, you know, structured around personalized AI authoritarianism. But, you know, the normal public schools are not to be left out by the proliferation of punitive measures with surveillance as the stick being used against the kids. But this time, it's the scourge of vaping. What are you going to do when kids are... Hey, and vaping is a scourge. It is truly an ungodly thing that is taking off around kids, right? It's a public health nightmare. It's insane. It's bad. It's terrible. So what are you going to do in reaction to the fact that, you know, you got kids in middle schools and high schools, maybe even as low as elementary schools, right? Sneaking off, hitting vapes in the bathroom you know getting addicted to you know bubble gum flavored nicotine you know doing it because they feel peer pressured into it whatever it might be what your reaction going to be Is it going to be all right well we got an addiction problem a drug problem, right? We need to figure out what are the underlying causes here and how can we address them? We need to get counseling in there. We need to get education in there. We need to help kids out, you're going to do that? You're going to go down the golden path or you're going to go down the satanic path and say, well, we got kids hitting vapes in the bathroom. So that means we got to put surveillance in the bathrooms, right? We got to put sensors in the bathrooms that are, you know, recording conversations, taking measurements of air quality, you know, doing everything possible to crack down on these kids smoking vapes. And what happens when we catch them smoking vapes, kick them out of school, right? Boot them. Say, you know, one and done. What do you think that the great nation of America has decided? Have they gone down the golden path, Ed, or have they gone down the satanic path? We've gone down the satanic path. That needs to be a drop for TMK. I just need that on a soundboard. so every time I introduce a story I can just click add going we've gone down the satanic path we have you know Shaitan is alive and well here okay if I had control for a day I don't even know whatever I would send a malware to every single vape in this country to make it brick or melt you know maybe not melt because it would hurt the children who are hitting the vapes but But I mean, it's really insane. I feel like for years, people have been trying to, not trying, I mean, it's documented. People have been and by people I mean you know vapers themselves public figures policymakers industry experts have been gaslighting us insisting that vapes are one of the most important smoking cessation tools that we have in our hands and that concern over vapes is a moral panic that is motivated by unfamiliarity with the empirical studies and research of what vaping can do to help people stop smoking. But you spend any amount of time either talking to people in schools either looking at surveys and studies of people that are focusing on schools that are also studying smokers and seeing what happens to their smoking behavior when they try to use vapes, looking at the distribution of vapes themselves, thinking even about the design of vapes. I mean, when we're talking about vapes here, you just sit down and think about what are the design principles around vapes. The design principle around vapes is that you want to provide an alternative to smoking that does not have the organic and combustible material of tobacco, right? And as a result also is not going to be associated with it because why? Because cigarettes are associated with a company going out of its way to poison you so that it can engineer the uptake of nicotine to the maximal effect, adding arsenic, adding formaldehyde, adding all these other ingredients that will ensure that you get as much of it is possible, which is beneficial because it's an incredibly addictive substance, right? And so the idea being, okay, well, you know, if we're going to design something that doesn't have any of those combustible materials and also doesn't have the organic material, we also have a new benefit, which is that, you know, there are some limits to how much nicotine you might be able to put in a cigarette. Or maybe another way to put it is that there are limits to how many additives you can put in a cigarette to amplify the effect of the nicotine. But if you have a vape, one of the things that emerges, it seems, is that you can put in more and more and more nicotine. And you can also put in other additives that we haven't had sufficient research on. So immediately one of the things that you see with vapes is that they just and look at them and you see they just have too much fucking nicotine They have much more nicotine that you might get than a cigarette Why is that a problem Well it a problem because as we see it as we'll talk about here, vapes are so consciously and so intentionally designed and marketed for children to make them into lifelong smokers and lifelong users, as they were before. We know that the companies do this. They did this the last time and then we did even less than nothing. You know, we did an even worse compromise than what we did with the tobacco companies when we took them into, you know, the fucking dwarves. You know, what is the name of the tobacco? The eight, they call them what? The eight dwarves or the eight princesses? I can't remember the nickname that they gave all the tobacco companies. You know, when we took them all to trial and, you know, bled them, you know, prick them for a few billion, you know, even though it was, you know, the largest trial settlement for at the time and, you know, felt commiserate with the sort of crime, they got off, right? They got off and they were able to avoid any sort of future litigation or blame for, you know, the harm that they were doing. And I would argue that the harm that was calculated that they needed to pay was substantially, substantially underpriced, right? But whatever. All it is is a sidebar to say with vaping, right? What are the concerns that we have with vaping? And what we'll talk about in the story. One is that it's so obviously designed to market towards children. They're also maximizing the amount of nicotine as much as possible in children. And even if we're not even talking about children, just on baseline smokers on adults, I mean, I don't even have to tell you. If you have a friend that vapes, take their vape away and hide it. Hide it in the couch and see what happens. I know what's going to happen. You know what's going to happen, right? They're going to be screeching. Yeah. Or just count how many times they do that and count how many times they ask you for it, right? Thank you.
