Made to Be Broken

 The first act followed the story of Jerome Ellis and his experience with temporal expectations. The podcast highlighted the difficult life of a person with a stuttering problem. The most intriguing and admiral aspect of Jerome's personality is his fearlessness. Even though he has severe stuttering he still decided to regularly partake in public speaking, hence as the title suggests, breaking the rules of societal expectations. Overall this section of the podcast made me reflect on my daily life and process of thinking. Seeing a man with the odds stacked against him, facing an enormous amount of anxiety every-time he steps on stage, continuously expose himself to this uncomfortable situation opened my eyes of what it really means to step out of your comfort zone. All my life I've heard the saying of how a person will never grow if they stay in their little bubble of comfort. I would like to think that I make an effort to step out of my comfort zone every day, but after hearing Jerome's story I'm sort of motivated to step it up a little bit and push it a little further. Some of my friends, specifically Samir Khed and Navneet R, have told me that I underestimate myself. They told me this about a month ago, when we were discussing my decision to take AP Calculus AB instead of AP Calculus BC, and it has been constantly ringing in my head ever since. They're not wrong, what they said is completely true. A prime example of this is if you look at my course rigor throughout my time at Troy High, its decent but not spectacular. Its alright, but it definitely is the weakest part of my application in my opinion. So I'm kind of mad about that, but whatever it's out of my control now. Just know though, when I get into Umich, best believe I ain't underestimating myself.  

The second act of this podcast followed the mischievous story of Tone Bell as he robs an imaginary bank. A standout line from this part of the podcast was "who's the greater criminal, the man who robs a bank or the man who founds one?"-Elna Baker. This got me thinking about the motivations for committing crimes and breaking rules. To what extent is breaking the rules justified? In Bell's case, the unfair Jefferson economy was enough for him to uncharacteristically rob a bank. I just want to say that Tone Bell will forever be respected by Trevor Nguyen just because he attempted to do this. In elementary school my class had an almost identical system set up (minus the extra recess time part). However, I was a terrible child literally looking for ways to be a nuisance like it was a game. Consequently, I did not get a whole lot of "Beaver Bucks", but just like any other troublesome (or innovative) child I was stealing them from my peers. To this day, they still have no idea I even did this. My whole process of thinking was that if I'm going to steal, take just a small amount of money so no 4th grader would notice. Another factor I had to rule in was the intelligence and awareness of the person I was stealing it from. If a person is known to be really smart at math or just slightly care about their fake money, I wasn't going to steal from them. However, if a relatively careless person just leaves their Beaver Bucks on their desk or drops it on the floor, best believe I'm snagging that. I thought about going behind my teacher's desk and just taking a couple hundred Beaver Bucks bills on multiple occasions. Literally being in class, anyone can see me death staring the "stash" as I would like to call it. I came close to executing this plan, somehow convincing 3 of my closest friends at the time to help me out. The idea was that we were going to fake a fight between two of them at recess, and then me and my other buddy will swoop in for the finishing blow. We agreed on splitting the money evenly, but I had other intentions. Wanting to keep 2/3 of the money, I argued with them for a whole week. At the end of the day, the plan was never executed because of conflicting egos and my friends being wusses. Alright getting back to the podcast, I found it interesting how so many negative externalities arose in Tone's classroom-to the point where a literal black market formed. In a way, Ms. Jefferson set up a social experiment which could have been used for a psychological study to observe people's motivations, which I thought was really cool. Humans are opportunistic and corrupt creatures is my main take away from section 2 of this amazing podcast.