A (4:01)

Now, do you think that sounds like a valid scientific study to you? There's a reason that they have, you know, the, the blind studies. This is not blind. And if there's one thing I could, you know, tell you as a hypnotist, if you suggest that somebody's taking a pill to make them hornier, they will tell you they got hornier because people like to be horny and they like to have good sexual function. And that's half of hypnosis. You know, hypnosis works best when it's something that somebody wanted and they have no resistance to it. Nobody has any resistance to that. Everybody wants to have better sexual function. So I would say that the credibility of the study would be approximately 00. But yet, if you knew somebody who needed some extra sexual function and you gave them the pill and you told them it would work, it might, it might actually work just psychologically and that would be good enough. Well, that's not the only spice that's good for you. According to the Pennsylvania School of Medicine.

A (5:18)

The spice or rosemary might help with wound healing and reducing scars. So.

A (5:28)

So saffron is maybe good for you. And, and then the, then the spice, rosemary is good for you. Well, I'll tell you what, this is just my suggestion, but you might want to get some other advice on this. If you find that medical school sounds like it's too tough and you can't get in and you don't want to do all that homework, you could just become a chef. So what I do when I'm cooking is I'll put a little bit of spice on the food, and then just in case, I'll put a little bit on me. Now, I'm not saying this is going to work every time, but if you notice that there's never a study that says if you added this spice to yourself, something bad would happen. Right. So if there's no downside, and who knows, might make your sexual performance better, might make your. Might make you heal better. So it goes like this. Some for the meal, some for Scott, some for the meal, some for Scout. Now, of course, nobody wants to eat dinner with you if you're covered with spice, but that's their problem.

A (6:41)

All right, can you tell us a slow news day?

A (6:46)

Is there anything about the content of this podcast that tells you it's a slow news day? Oh, I think there is. I think there is. What else is in the news?

A (7:02)

There's. Now, according to the Karolinska Instituto and Stockholm University, there's a new drug that looks like it might boost your muscles and.

A (7:18)

Curb your appetite. And it might be better than these weight loss drugs. So if you wanted something that would make you lose weight while preserving all your muscles, they might have something, but probably not.

A (7:34)

What. What are the odds there's something in the news that says this might work. It worked in a mouse. Do you know? What are the odds it will work in a human if it works in a mouse? Not much. Yeah. So it's fun to talk about, but you wouldn't want to bet a lot that it's going to work out.

A (7:56)

Here's one that I thought was interesting. Again, we don't know if this is real. You'd have to have a lot more science before you could convince me. But there is.

A (8:08)

There is some good evidence that the time of day that you give somebody a treatment, a medical treatment, might affect how effective it is. So specifically.

A (8:23)

They found that if you give a. I think it's immunotherapy for cancer. A certain. It's a cancer treatment that if you give it to people in the morning, you get a much better response than if you give it to them at night.

A (8:40)

Now, does that surprise you? Again, remember the odds of this actually passing other scientific scrutiny and. And, you know, five years from now being true is not really that high. You know, there. There's probably a pretty good chance that this won't stand up, but it feels like it would. Like, I, you know, I think your body is different enough at different times of the day that I wouldn't be surprised if. If when you take your medicine, makes a difference. I'll bet you this is the kind of thing that AI could discover. Don't you think once we get to the point that AI will monitor all the things you put in your body and then it can compare it anonymously to all the other people putting things in their body. So some of it would be food, some of it would be time of day. So in other words, it's just. The AI is just measuring everything you put in your body and when. Don't you think that that's going to have an immense impact on your health? If you knew, oh, this, this medicine works, but not if I eat a potato within an hour, because there's a whole bunch of those things where, where there is a difference. So imagine when AI can actually get a. Wrap its little head around that.

A (10:04)

How many of you have ever heard of a thing called.

A (10:08)

Synesthesia?

A (10:10)

Synesthesia? I've talked about this, but not a long time. It's the phenomenon that applies to some people, but not many. So it's, you know, maybe, maybe fewer than 10% they can, they. They have some kind of a crossover effect in their senses. So, for example, some people, if they're listening to music, they can almost feel it. Whereas people like me, I listen to music and I like it, but I don't feel it the same way like a real musician would. So that probably, probably prevents me from being a great musician because I feel like you'd have to feel it in order to be really good at it. You know, probably the Beatles were all. They probably all could feel it.

A (11:05)

But what I would have to add to this is that there's a writer's version of this, so not just musicians. And I definitely have the synesthesia for writers, meaning that I feel words, I just feel them. So it's probably not an accident that without any special training on how to be a writer, I. I managed to have a professional career as a writer. I think that's. That might be synesthesia, because I just feel things when I write them.

A (11:43)

Now, is that a humble brag or is that just telling you what works and what doesn't? All right.

A (11:54)

How many times have you been told that it's good to get enough sleep? Well, believe it or not, there's another study that says it's good to get enough sleep. But they go further and they say that if you get enough sleep, you're far more likely to be as active as you want to be for good health. But they say it doesn't work the other way. So according to this study at Flinders or Flinders University, that sleep first get enough sleep, then you'll get enough activity, and then you have the two things that are good for you, activity and sleep. But I don't believe that it doesn't work the other way. Let's see what you say in the comments. I believe that I can never get a good sleep if I have not been active that day. Do you have the same. Same thing if I've not exercised that day. Now at the moment, I'm on all kinds of, you know, drugs and stuff for my cancer. So it's different now. But in my normal healthy life, if I don't get exercise, I can't sleep. Don't you have that? It can't just be me, right? All right, so we're gonna. I'm seeing the comments that a lot of you are agreeing with me. So I would say that exercise helps you sleep and sleeping helps you exercise, and it definitely works both ways. So some schools are experimenting with drones.

A (13:29)

To protect against school shootings. I'm going to give you a little quiz. How many school shootings do you think happen in one year, let's say not one year since 2008 in just Florida alone. So only the state of Florida and we're talking about shootings in the school since 2008. Give me a number. How many do you think there's been?

A (13:58)

Well, while you're guessing how many there's been, the answer is at least according to this one, one article from the Center Square. Marilee Gasser is writing that there have been 33 school shootings since 2008. So that just feels like a lot, doesn't it? Remember it since 2008. So it's not one year.

A (14:25)

Yeah. Your guesses are closer to a one year guess. Well, that's a lot. But I assume that also includes just one person getting shot. So it's not necessarily mass shootings.

A (14:37)

But what they want to do is they're testing non lethal drones. So if there's a shooter in the school, the drone will come and distract them. So the drone will not be deadly. It won't have a gun, but it might have. Might have sirens or pepper sprays or other distraction devices. Because if you are a school shooter and a drone comes after you, you're gonna have to pay attention to the drone, because that's the thing. You don't know exactly what it can do. And it's. It's going to be in your space really fast. I like this idea. Seems pretty good. You know, it could even be better if you got rid of the humans. You know, if you equip the school with listening devices and then it heard a gunshot. Don't you think it would be useful if the drone immediately went wherever the gunshot was? Now that doesn't mean it should intervene. You probably want a human to decide whether it should intervene, but it should definitely go there like it should. Just as soon as it hears the gunshot, it should pull into that room or as close as it could get. I think this is a. Definitely worth testing. I wouldn't go so far as to say I know it'll work. Definitely worth testing.

A (15:58)

Well, Trump is apparently going to announce a 12 billion dollar farm aid program, Washington Examiners reporting. And it kind of made me wonder because I'm a farm nerd.

A (16:13)

Yeah, I, I worked on a farm, my uncle's farm, he had a dairy farm. So I've spent a lot of time on, on farms and, and working on farms when I was a kid and a teenager. I guess that's still a kid. But here's what I wonder. How do you make farms unprofitable? Like what is it about a farm that would take it from. Well, we've been making money until now, but now we're losing money. Well, some of it's obvious. Some of it would be oversupply. So there might be a year when, when everybody grows too much of one thing and then the price goes down. It might be drought or flood. So it could be bad weather in a variety of ways. It could be the rising cost of seeds and the rising cost of fuel. And I said to myself, are those all solvable problems? And let me give you my prediction slash suggestion. I guess I feel like we should have an ongoing.

A (17:21)

Maybe government sponsored, but it doesn't need to be, I guess it could be private, something like a, an Elon musk farming.

A (17:32)

What would you call it? Experiment. I, I know that Elon's brother has been working on indoor farming. So I think they understand the potential here. But I'd love to see it go to the next level. Here's what I think it's going to look like. If I were trying to solve all the problems of farming being too expensive so I could bring down the cost of food, I would build it underground. So first I'd have the boring company that can, you know, do underground tunnels really inexpensively. So once you have a way to inexpensively build a tunnel, then you could also redirect the sunlight from above into it so you get all the free sunlight. You could just do it by mirrors. I'm pretty sure you get all the goodness of the sun even if you redirect it through mirrors. So you, you'd have all the free sun, but you wouldn't have any weather related problems. In theory, you could create your own seeds, couldn't you? Why is it so hard to create your own seeds?

A (18:41)

I feel like that wouldn't be the hardest thing, but I don't know about that domain. So maybe seeds would be a different problem. But if you could get. Oh, and you'd also have essentially free land.

A (18:56)

So if you're, if you're doing your farming below ground, it's basically free on top of owning the above ground. So the other thing I would do is do the food processing directly above the underground farm so it doesn't have to go very far. And then along the same lines and make sure that your underground farm is really close to the store that's going to sell the food or, or close to the consumer. So you want to get rid of almost all the transportation, you want to get rid of all the risk of.

A (19:33)

Weather. And then correct me if I'm wrong, but if you're underground and you have a controlled environment, you're not going to need fertilizer because you just keep the bugs out in the first place.

A (19:49)

And you're not going to need too much extra water because isn't it true that you can recycle your water height? It's basically hydroponic. Couldn't you just.

A (20:01)

Yeah. So I'm not 100% sure, but it seems like if you iterated underground farms, you would eventually get to the point where they're cheaper than anything we do above ground.

A (20:17)

What do you think fertilizer isn't just for bugs? Well, that's true, right? It's not just for bugs, it's for growing more efficiently. But if you want to go organic, you still might prefer a smaller vegetable without any fertilizer. So that I'm not sure about that trade off anyway. I don't want to obsess about that, but I think we, we don't know how to do it cheaper at the moment. But there should be similar to how we're doing.

A (20:49)

Nuclear power. So the government finally figured out, hey, if we can figure out how to iterate nuclear power, we can get to something that's, that works faster. So that's what the government's doing. You should do the same thing with indoor farms and they should be underground by the way. If you put it above ground, then it can still get ripped up by weather.

A (21:14)

So I think underground farms are the future. And then of course you'd obviously have robots doing all the work, so you wouldn't have labor, you wouldn't have.

A (21:25)

Probably you could get rid of 80% of all the costs. That's just my guess.

A (21:33)

All this farming talk means people have to do something. Well.

A (21:40)

Nuclear plus hydroponics is a paradise farm.

A (21:46)

All right, let's move on.

A (21:49)

You may have heard of this already, but there's a. Some company made an AI version of an actress called Tilly Norway. Norwood. Tilly Norwood. So it's an AI actress that's been created for. They haven't quite fully commercialized it yet, but. But the idea is that it would be a hireable actress, and they would try to turn it into a star so that your AI star would be, you know, not eating up all your profits.

A (22:28)

And weirdly, the smartest thing I've heard about this was a quote by George Clooney, who of course, is a movie star. And what he said about these AI actresses and actors. He said, quote, AI is going to have the same problem that we have in Hollywood, which is making a star is not so easy. And I thought, holy cow, that's the smartest thing I've heard about this topic. If. If you can't do it with real people, and it's really hard, and it's somewhat accidental because nobody knows exactly why one person becomes a movie star and one person doesn't. I mean, George Clooney is a seriously, you know, sexy guy, I'm told. So you can say to yourself, oh, he's very sexy. But aren't there millions of super sexy men? Aren't there lots of people who could probably act as well as he can? But why did we decide that this one person is the extra sexy person? Well, some of it is the media. Meaning that if People magazine puts you on the COVID and says you're the sexiest person, it just sort of becomes a thing. Would they be able to do that with an AI And I believe that there. The problem with AI Art will. Will be the same problem here, that on day one, if you hear that it's a AI you might be interested. It'd be, you know, you'd be curious how it works, but eventually you just feel like it wasn't real.

A (24:08)

And I don't know if you could ever get to the point where if you know it's not real, you can have the same emotional connection that you would with a real person in a movie, even though the real person in a movie would not really be real because they're acting. But I do feel like George Clooney has the right take on this, that if it's super, super hard to do it with a human, it's not going to be that much easier just because you have an AI. So I would guess 99 out of 100 companies that try to make an AI movie star will fail. So it's not, not good odds.

A (24:50)

All right, according to Axios, President Trump is betting his presidency and the future of the Republican Party on lightly regulated, fast expansion of AI. First of all, do you buy that summary? Do you think that the Trump presidency will depend on how well he regulates AI now, regulating it well might mean not regulating it much and getting the states out of the way and giving the feds primacy over the regulation and then getting out of the way. So I kind of agree that, that that's true, but I do wonder if the public will see it that way. You know, people like us, the fact that you're even watching me on this podcast probably means you're in the top, you know, at least 5% of people paying attention to the news. Wouldn't you say? If you're watching this right now, you're probably in the top 5% of just people who care about keeping up with things. So I don't know if the general public will even notice if Trump did a good job or a bad job on AI.

A (26:13)

Do you? And, and wouldn't we just argue about whether he did a good job or a bad job and it wouldn't be so much, you know, something you could just measure. How in the world are you going to measure how well we do on AI? Like, what happens if, you know, Estonia comes up with the best AI because they just have some genius who was working on it? Does that mean we did a bad job, or does it just mean that Estonia had a genius? So I don't know how you'd know if he did a good job or a bad job, unless it was just screamingly obvious, and I don't think it will be. I do think that Trump's doing pretty much everything right, which I attribute to the fact that he's got, you know, sacks and a bunch of smart people advising him. I, I don't think you'll get too far away from something that Elon Musk would say, you know, makes sense and is sensible for the country. So Trump does have just the best advisors for AI. Just the best. Will that be enough? Well, I don't think that Trump is gonna overrule the smartest people in the world in a domain that they know a lot about and he doesn't.

A (27:30)

I, I think that only the Trump haters think he would do that, do that. Anybody who's actually been paying attention, knows that he loves advice from the smartest people.

A (27:43)

All right, whoever is just yelling at me in all caps, maybe that person can disappear, if you know what I mean. All right, so, yeah. Is he betting his presidency on the future of AI? Sort of. But I do think that the Trump administration has an advantage over other countries because with AI, we're not just competing companies against companies, that we're also doing that, but we're competing countries against countries. And let me ask you this. So we've watched Europe is just falling apart under its own bureaucracy. China is somewhat difficult for us to understand from the outside, but it doesn't look like they're super flexible about everything. Sometimes they can be super fast. You know, if the, if the government says, go do this, it'll happen pretty fast. But it's not the same as being super flexible because the United States is more likely to allow certain freedoms, you know, certain freedom of speech. The US Is more likely to allow AI to train on more sources, whereas China might say, oh, you can't look at that. So your AI cannot train on as many things because we want to control it. So I'm feeling that there's something about the United States and maybe this is just me being biased. I don't know. So you, you tell me, am I being biased? I think there's something about our DNA as a country that gives us a huge AI advantage. I mean, just the fact that there could be a Trump who I think is very flexible, business wise, he would be the smartest. I think Trump is the smartest president we've had, business wise. He's here at a time when having the smartest president, business wise, is super important. You know, Bill Clinton was pretty smart, too. You know, got us through the dot com era. But.

A (29:56)

Yeah, I do suspect that the US Is going to have a DNA advantage. We're just more flexible and more willing to take more chances. I think that's exactly where we need to be to win. So that's my optimism on A.I. all right, let's talk about.

A (30:17)

We're all following the story, maybe you're not, of California trying to rebuild after the Palisades fire. Pacific Palisades fire. And I think that here's the good news. According to the Wall Street Journal, there is a house that's been built. Yay, A house.

A (30:38)

So we're coming up on a year, and one house has been built, but you can't live in it.

A (30:49)

So one house has been built, but you can't buy it. And you can't live in it. It's a developer's model. And if you were to go inside the developer's model and walk up to the second floor and look out the window, would you see the paradise that used to be Pacific Palisades or would you see a bunch of burned down wasteland as far as you could see? It would be the second one. So not only can you not buy it, not only is there only one, but if you stood in the second floor, you wouldn't even want to live there. You'd be like, why would I want to be in this, this town? However, it's not nothing, so it's not nothing. So there's a little bit of, you know, motion in the right direction. I don't know how long this is going to take, but, you know, I'm comparing the Pacific Palisades to China's big projects. Doesn't it seem to you like China is building things that are as big as entire states and they can just pound it out? It's like, all right, we got a year. Let's build something that's as big as the entire island of Manhattan. And then you check back in a year and they're done. Now we can't build a house.

A (32:10)

We can't get a house built because, oh, there's bureaucracy. We need approvals. You know, what's wrong with this story.

A (32:17)

Is that whenever I hear that there's a, you know, long delay, the part I always want to know is why?

A (32:26)

You know, when I, when I built my own house, the one I'm in, it took way too long to get the approvals, in my opinion. Now, in my case, I could tell you the actual person who was holding it up because we had one person in charge of approvals. Now if that one person woke up every morning and thought, hey, I gotta get help, Scott, get his house built, probably I could have got all the approvals in two months, but I think it took well over a year. But there was a name to it. There was one person who, if they did not have as many tasks as they have, and it was mostly because they, they were overworked, but that would be a very fixable problem, I would say, all right, this guy Bob can't do this in two months, which we should be able to do it. It's going to take him a year. So can we get two Bobs? Can we get six Bobs? How many Bobs do we need? Can we borrow them from another place just for a year? Is there a way to Unretire some people who, you know, for a little extra money. Can we get, let's say private, can we get a private entity, let's say a builder to pay the approvers with some kind of oversight so it's not completely out of control. Why, why is it we never hear the people, I want to know the name of the person who's not getting it done. Doesn't that feel like that's missing?

A (34:07)

It feels like it's missing to me. So if I don't know the person who's not doing the job, and I'm not talking about politicians, like, we can yell at Newsom all day long, but it's not like he's sitting in an office with a stamp and he refuses to stamp something. But there is somebody, there's somebody sitting in an office with a stamp and they're not stamping something. Why? Now if you ask them, I, I guarantee they have a good reason. They're going to say something like, well, it wouldn't be safe because there's this inspection that hasn't happened. Well, who is that guy or gal? Who's that person? Who is it who doesn't have enough time to inspect it? Why don't I have 10 more of him? What would it cost me to bribe somebody who had the right skills to come in and work for a year? I just feel like there's a whole layer here that's missing. And if we treat it like it's just a regular process and we're just yelling at it for being slow, we're not really trying, you know. If this were Elon Musk's property, do you think it would take a year to get anything approved?

A (35:19)

I don't think so. I mean, if he had full control of every part of it. No, no. He would just move more resources where you need them and get rid of people who aren't doing the job and the next thing you know, it would be a two month approval instead of a year.

A (35:35)

That's what I think.

A (35:38)

Well, the government Trump administration is doing what they call a whole of government approach to try to lower beef prices. Now, beef appears to be something that is so important to the American psyche that it's different from other food. Would you say that's true, that if your beef is too expensive, it just feels like food is too expensive? So it's not like, oh, our broccoli costs too much because then you just eat some other vegetables. But if you really like beef, and that would describe a lot of Americans. If you can't get that at a good price. That just feels like food is too expensive. So I can see why that would be, you know, a big, like a big priority. It's just hard to go from well if beef is expensive, I'll just get chicken and I'll be just as happy because you wouldn't be, we just wouldn't be just as happy. You could substitute almost any vegetable for another vegetable and people would say well you know, I prefer broccoli but Brussels sprouts are fine. You know.

A (36:53)

What are you yelling at me? Let me see if I can look at that comment.

A (37:00)

Very thing at the fda. It's a bureaucracy, right? Okay.

A (37:08)

Imagine if we had a all of government approach to just get rid of bureaucracy. We kind of have that, but I'd love to see it even bigger. All right, anyway, so the whole of government approach to make beef less expensive. Now what would be the first question you would ask in that domain? The first question you would ask is why is it more expensive? Like what happened to it? Well, I didn't know how many of you know why beef got way more expensive. Is there even one of you in the comments? Don't look it up, don't look it up without looking it up. Do you know why it's more expensive? Well, some of it is the normal reasons. You know, energy is more expensive, everything's a little more expensive. But apparently Mexico, which was one of our bigger sources of beef.

A (38:03)

They had some kind of disease. So we're working through that. It might be, might be a year or two before we, we have some non diseased Mexican cows. I don't know the details but there was some kind of Mexican disease and the only thing they could do is just shut down the Mexican supply until that's completely under control and probably will be in a year or two. But you just have to wait because it just takes a while to grow a cow.

A (38:33)

You're saying it's a screw worm? Is that what it is? Screw those worms. In the comments people are yelling screw worm. So maybe that's the name of the name of the bug. All right, but we also could increase the amount of beef we get from Argentina. I don't know if it says good, but that's another source.

A (38:58)

The government's also doing an anti competitive probe to find out if foreign suppliers of food in general, I think, but beef specifically, they're trying to see if there's any anti competitive thing going on because if there is, that would be an easy way to lower prices. Well, I don't Know if it'd be easy, but it'd be possible, I guess.

A (39:21)

And so it looks like. So, so work with me here. If we knew, or we thought there was a high likelihood that beef would just drift down to a lower cost simply because two years from now we'd have a lot more cows, a lot more non diseased cows. Does that not so this is a real nerd question. Nerds, step to the, step to the front of the class. This question is for nerds only. Who I love, by the way. You know, I love my nerds. I am one. Would it be possible to use some kind of futures market to lower the cost of beef today? If you felt confident that the price would be lower in the future, did that make sense? So right now you can't, you can't take the average cost of beef today and then take the average of it tomorrow, which would be lower. But if you could, it seems like you could lower the price today with not 100% chance that it would be lower in the future, but you feel kind of confident that it would be, don't you think you could get enough people to invest in that kind of a futures beef market that we could take advantage of the fact that with a high likelihood of being right, beef will probably be, I don't know, 40% cheaper in three years. And so what you do is you start charging people less today with some kind of insurance or protection that the beef farmers would never lose because they're, they're going to get, you know, some, some minimum payment. All right, nerds, is there some reason that would or would not work? Somebody's saying a 10 month gestation, so it's about two years to grow yourself a proper cow for eating. You think it already exists? You know, I was wondering about that. But if it already exists.

A (41:36)

Wouldn'T the prices be lower?

A (41:39)

So the, the comment I would look into first is, does it exist? We obviously have futures markets for all kinds of commodities, but I don't know if we have them for beef. And I don't know if you could.

A (41:55)

Find some way to average the future and the current to lower the price. I don't know. I'll just put that out there.

A (42:04)

According to Israel, there are still 100 to 200 Hamas fighters in tunnels in Gaza and they're not coming out. But they also don't have any hostages to trade and they're running out of food and water. What do you think Israel is going to do? If you were in one of those tunnels, would you come out or do you know that the minute you come out, you're either going to be in jail for the rest of your life or immediately murdered. Not murdered, because let's, let's take the, let's take the opinion out of it. You'd be killed. Whether you want to call that murder, that would be a whole different story. But you'd be killed or jailed forever. You're not going to walk away.

A (42:50)

So.

A (42:53)

What'S going to happen? I think that they'll have to probably just wait it out and then a year from now, there won't be anything left. We'll see.

A (43:07)

So, P exeth, Secretary of war, he's announced that there's going to be this federal investigation into Mark Kelly. You know, maybe they'll reinstitute him as in the, they'll bring him back into the military so that they can court martial him because he's one of the seditious six. And I've got mixed feelings about that. So I'm just going to give you my human opinion and my citizen opinion. We don't treat people in the military like regular citizens. And most of us are okay with that, right? We, we acknowledge that people in the military have or will have greater risk. You know, they've got more in the game and we, we sort of allow them, you know, an extra, let's say, privilege in society. And I'm okay with that because if they take an extra risk and I'm the beneficiary of that, I think we, you know, we owe them. No, I guess that's the wrong word. It would feel appropriate to me that they get more privilege in society than I get because they're doing more that, that, that fits for me. So then when I watch the, the Mark Kelly and the seditious sex, I don't like it. I don't like it. But I also don't like punishing them. Is anybody having that same feeling that there has to be some way we can deal with this that doesn't take a member or multiple members of the military, past or present, and punish them for what I consider really somewhat outrageously bad behavior. But because I think it's outrageously bad behavior and I live in a world with, you know, at least allegedly free speech. I don't have to say that they did the right thing. I don't have to say I approve of it. But sometimes you just can't leave somebody on the, you know, a wounded person on the battlefield, so to speak.

A (45:24)

So what I'd like to see is something that's short of punishment, but is long on education.

A (45:33)

I do like the fact that the entire public has been now accidentally educated on what is too far and what is appropriate behavior for the military and what is a crime in that context and what isn't. I feel like educating us should be enough.

A (45:54)

Is anybody having the same feeling? Because as soon as you get me in the business of punishing members of the military for what they said, you know, unless what they said is giving away, you know, like secrets or something. But.

A (46:12)

As bad as I think their behavior is, I'm just not cool punishing members of the military for that kind of behavior. There's got to be something in between.

A (46:24)

Anyway, that's just a feeling.

A (46:29)

I guess. Leslie Stahl of 60 Minutes was talking to Marjorie Taylor Green and here's an interesting reframe, if you want to call it that. So Marjorie Taylor Greene says she's not maga. She is America First. What do you think of that?

A (46:48)

Some of you saying no mercy, no mercy? Really? I don't think mercy is the right.

A (46:56)

I think that's the wrong frame. You know, we should be looking out for our own good as well as members of the military. And, you know, maybe it's good for us that we're not punishing members of the military too, too aggressively. You know, there always has to be some kind of guardrails. But anyway, back to Marjorie Taylor Greene.

A (47:21)

That's a pretty good reframe. Now, independent of what you think of her, her opinions, it's a pretty good reframe because baggage, she says that's more like Trump's political opinions. And America first.

A (47:36)

Is more of a philosophical position, I guess, which would have impact on policies. So.

A (47:45)

You may have noticed that I've never embraced for myself the MAGA label. Has anybody noticed that? That I talk about MAGA all the time, but I don't call myself that. I don't have a MAGA hat. I won't be getting one. And I've never really embraced it because I'm not a joiner in that way. I'm just not a joiner.

A (48:09)

What are you saying about.

A (48:15)

Anyway, so you don't have to take sides. I'm not talking about taking sides. I'm just saying that as a reframe. America first versus Mega. It's kind of an interesting frame.

A (48:29)

Yeah, I, I like to think of myself as an independent. All right. Tucker Carlson continues to be interesting. So you might know that people have been accusing Tucker of taking money from Qatar for. I guess they would assume that he's taking their point of view, or maybe he's being anti Israel. And he, his claim is that he has never taken a dime from Qatar, but he's now decided to buy a home in Qatar. And, and apparently he's doing it as just an FU to all the people who are accusing him of taking money. And his point would be, you can't affect my freedom. So if you're going to be mad at me for being friendly with Qatar, I'm going to be even friendlier with Qatar. I'm going to buy a house there. Now, none of us know what he's thinking, so we'd be on, you know, sort of sketchy ground if we assume we know what he's thinking. We're not mind readers. But I'll tell you.

A (49:41)

What I think might be going on here. Part of it might be that spite thing where it is just to make a point. If you tell me I can't do it, I'm going to do it. But here's another reason. Have you noticed that the people who can afford it are all buying an escape country.

A (50:01)

You know, or state. So you've got a bunch of billionaires who have property in Hawaii, which has the advantage of being far away from the mainland in case the mainland turns into some kind of disaster or gets into a war. And if I were going to pick a, an escape country and I had, you know, unlimited money, seems like Qatar would be, or cutter, whatever you want to call it, seems like that would be a good escape country, doesn't it? So every time I see somebody who can afford it get their escape country, I get a little bit more worried about what they know that I don't know it. Could it be they're just, is just risk management and, and they're completely aware that, you know, every country has a risk, even if you're a strong country. I don't know, I, if I had to guess, and I cannot know what he's thinking, my guess is that it's as much about finding a safe place for his family and him because, remember, it's getting very dangerous to be a conservative in the United States. Tim Pool says that somebody shot into his facility the other day like a bullet. And, you know, I don't have to go through the other examples, from Charlie Kirk to Trump getting his ear shot to, you know, all the, all the, what do you call it? The swatting. So if I were Tucker and just imagine the number of death threats he gets. Just imagine it. I'm guessing it's almost every day. And some of Them are serious.

A (51:47)

So if I got that many threats and I had, especially if I had a family or a spouse I'm protecting, I feel like I would be doing my job as, you know, head of the household if I had an escape plan. You know, if it gets too bad, we're going to walk directly over to this private jet and we're going to go directly to, to Qatar and we're just going to stay there until it's safe. Now, that's what I'd want to see from my head of household if they could afford it, and looks like you can afford it.

A (52:23)

So that's what I think is going on. But some of it might be the spite thing. But I think if you looked at the spite of versus the personal safety, probably the personal safety is the bigger variable. But I don't think you'd want to necessarily say that out loud.

A (52:42)

Necessarily.

A (52:46)

All right.

A (52:48)

I guess the New York Times has an article. I haven't read it, but the article is about Ukraine corruption and how all the cronies of Zelensky contributed to the, you know, the corruption allegations. And now they're asking the question, where'd all the money go? Where'd all the money go? Now here, here's a, just a mental test. What do you call it? A mind. There's a word for that, a mind.

A (53:21)

Experiment. A mental experiment. That's not the right name for it, but you know what I mean. So what we know is that when the, the war broke out that the United States funded Ukraine to help them attack Russia, would we have been better off bombing Ukraine?

A (53:45)

Now, I'm not suggesting we do that. I'm just putting it out there as a mental experiment. If we had bombed Ukraine, the whole thing would have been over in a week because they wouldn't have anybody on their side. And we would have killed very few Ukrainians, but we could have taken out all their corrupt leadership.

A (54:09)

Now, Russia would, of course, you know, be the beneficiary, but aren't they going to be the beneficiary anyway?

A (54:19)

So let me be very clear. I am not suggesting that would have been a good idea. I'm only, I'm only doing a mental thing where you can imagine it. And it's actually a little bit hard to explain why we would have been better off getting to the place we are now. Because won't Russia still have its way in the long run? Did we not spend tremendous amount of money? And did, did not that tremendous amount of money go into corrupt Ukrainian hands? I mean, I think we should probably. Oh, can I say this? I might not be able to say this in public.

A (55:02)

I'll say it in the least dangerous way. We should. We, meaning the United States, should be putting a lot of effort into tracking down and bringing a legal process to the people that we think stole all our money, the Ukrainians. And if we're not doing that, somebody needs to tell me why, because, you know, we might. We're talking about hundreds of billions of dollars, are we not?

A (55:33)

Yeah. So.

A (55:37)

I don't know where any of that's going. But.

A (55:40)

Trump. Trump says that. That Russia likes the current version of the proposed peace deal, and Zelensky hasn't read it. And Trump's a little bit miffed that it's only 28 points or maybe fewer at this point. We don't really know. And Zelensky is acting like he's not even interested enough. Just stop what he's doing and read it. What exactly was Zelensky doing that was more important than catching up with the current version of the peace proposal? What? What? Anyway.

A (56:19)

According to Wall Street Journal.

A (56:24)

Russia has a big problem with AI.

A (56:28)

Now.

A (56:30)

What I mean is that Russia, like all the major countries when AI became a thing, wanted to have AI supremacy. How is Russia doing in their AI supremacy? I don't know if you saw their humanoid robot that they unleashed and it just fell on his face. And they don't have a better one than that, than the one that fell on his face in the public demonstration.

A (56:57)

So you've got, first of all, the. The top Russian scientists, if they can get out of the country, are going to do it as soon as possible, because if you're a top Russian AI scientist, the worst place you could be would be Russia or maybe China. But if you could get out of there and go to some other freer country, you. You know, you'll be the richest, smartest, you know, most valuable person in that country. So they're going to lose their best brains. And apparently they don't have much else going for them. Let's say Russian AI companies. This is the Wall Street Journal. The Russian AI companies attracted about $30 million in venture funding last year. $30 million. How much do you think open AI alone? Just one American company. How much. How much funding do you think OpenAI got last year? The answer is $6 billion.

A (57:54)

So the entire Russian. Russian AI enterprise raised $30 million. One company in the US raised 6 billion. And do you think our AI scientists are better than theirs?

A (58:11)

If they're not, they will be.

A (58:15)

There's no doubt about it. So if it's true, here's where it gets interesting. Try to, try to connect these two thoughts and ask yourself why they're not already connected. Don't you think that all the smart people are saying that AI dominance is the future? So if you're not dominant in AI, you're basically toast. But the Wall Street Journal is reporting that if you look at the funding, you look at what they've done so far, that Russia doesn't have any chance of being AI dominant. They might make good drones, but they're not going to be AI dominant. Now maybe the US will be the dominant one, maybe it's China, but it won't be Russia. So if you believe that, your entire country is toast if you're not AI dominant. Does it matter if, if Russia conquers Ukraine or even gets another big chunk of it? Because all the AI people will tell you, well, they're basically, Russia is going to go out of business anyway. It's just a matter of time. Is that true? Maybe it's never been true that if you're not AI dominant, you're going to be toast.

A (59:37)

I mean, it wasn't, you weren't toast when the United States became doom dominant. Right. Other countries still exist. Russia still has an army. So maybe, maybe we've made too much of this AI dominance thing. What do you think it could be that the whole AI thing is just so overrated that there's nothing there. You know, maybe your drones will be a little better, but that's about it. I know. So try to connect the two thoughts. One is that Russia is definitely going to get everything they want from Ukraine. But also, how does that fit with. Russia will be completely toasted in a very short time because they're, they'll never be dominant in AI and they'll never even be good. Probably, they'll probably not even be average good. Can both of those things be true? I don't know.

A (60:37)

Well, there's a company called.

A (60:43)

I'll see it in a moment. Called Biological. Oh, there's a platform called the Biological Interface Systems to Cortex or Bisque. So there's developed by teams at Columbia University and it's a new form of chip for your brain. Now as you know, Elon Musk has a company, Neuro Neuralink, that makes a, you know, brain interface that's been super impressive so far, but allegedly. And there, there's a big, big allegedly on this. Allegedly. This other startup, SL entity, has a super impressive chip that does not need a bunch of connections to your brain. And somehow can control more of your brain for much less cost. It uses much less real estate. So basically, it's a whole other higher level of brain interface. Now, like everything in technology, it's probably overrated, but it does tell you where things are going.

A (61:52)

And if it's true that, that neuralink has a real legitimate competitor.

A (62:02)

That should make things go a little bit faster, right? Even, even if what happens is neuralink buys the other entity and just, you know, takes their technology, we're probably at the point where the, where the potential for these chips becomes mainstream. Because today, if you ask me, Scott, do you want a hole in your skull? We're going to put a chip there and a bunch of good things are going to happen. I would say, no, thank you. Why don't you go first? But suppose this new technology was so good that I knew two or three people who had the chip, and they were just delighted by it, and it gave them a superpower. Well, then I'm going to be a cyborg as fast as I can.

A (62:48)

And it does look like. I have to admit, I wasn't sure this whole neuralink thing had, you know, that much of a future. You know, even if you assume, oh, technology always improves, and, you know, never assume it will stop improving because it always improves. Even with that, I wasn't really sure that we could put a chip on your brain and make it talk to it. But at the moment, I do. At the moment, I think that this is something where the potential is hard to imagine. And, and imagine, if you will, that you had all the powers of AI automatically, and it was just in your brain. You wouldn't need a phone, right? You wouldn't need a phone, you wouldn't need a computer. Maybe you could just see the things, you know, floating in front of you even though they're not there. So that's exciting. It's exciting that there's a potentially a big competitor, Neuralink. Well, here's a story you have to be careful with. There's a. There's. Let's see. This is the Okayama University. Some researchers found that at least in mice, there's a green light. So a certain kind of light that apparently will kill cancer.

A (64:11)

So if I told you that there's a type of light that would kill cancer, what would be your first reaction?

A (64:20)

Well, if you were cnn, your first reaction would be, wait a minute. Why does drinking bleach sound like a good idea? That's a terrible idea. Don't drink bleach. That's what they said when Trump suggested using a different kind of light to battle cancer in your lungs. Now, somebody else said, scott, Scott, you fool. Somebody this morning in the comments said, you fool, Scott, how are you going to get the light inside your body?

A (64:54)

To which I said, same way Trump was. They were talking about a, essentially a. What would you call it, a stent or there's a word for it. But you could put a light device down somebody's lungs and let's say somebody had lung cancer, and let's say if you could look at their lungs from the inside, maybe you could see those cancer things. Yeah. So is it possible that you could introduce a light with an endoscope? Somebody say, could you introduce a light to the lungs? And the answer is, I think so. Here's another one.

A (65:40)

Have you ever heard of. I think this is an existing process where somebody can.

A (65:48)

This is probably a non medical bad analogy, but I'm going to make it anyway. So, you know, if you were doing, let's say, getting your kidneys, what's the word for that, when you run your blood through an external device because your kidneys are not working, what's that called? Anyway, so we know that we can take people's blood, run it through some kind of process, some kind of medical process, and then reintroduce it into their body. Could you dial dialysis? Yes. So dialysis, if I understand it correctly, is taking your active blood out of your body, cleaning it, and then reintroducing it to your body. Is that, is that accurate? What would stop you from taking the blood out of the body, running it through a light, and then reintroducing it to the body? Because it would come. It would come back to the body without cancer.

A (66:48)

Now, I'm not suggesting that would work. I'm just saying it's not crazy that you could, in fact introduce light to at least some specific kinds of cancers, blood cancer and maybe something else. Anyway, I'm mostly bringing this up to Moxie and N for being such a bad.

A (67:13)

Such a bad reporting element or entity that they. That they turned that into drinking bleach. At least when Trump said that, they turned it into drinking bleach.

A (67:25)

All right, ladies and gentlemen, that's all I got for you today. You may have noticed that it's a slow news week. Oh, my God. It's a slow Newsweek. But we had fun anyway, didn't we?

A (67:40)

It's better than nothing.

A (67:44)

All right, I'm gonna talk privately to my beloved.

A (67:50)

Members of the Locals platform. So, Locals, I'll be coming at you in 30 seconds privately. The rest of you, thanks for joining, and I will see you tomorrow, same time, same place, for more of this.