Episode 3056 CWSA 12⧸28⧸25
Episode Stats
Length
1 hour and 41 minutes
Words per Minute
129.03755
Summary
It's a holiday, and the kids are in church, so it's time for the Sip of the Day, in which we talk about the latest in space-based energy breakthroughs, Elon Musk's response to a question about it, and more.
Transcript
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We're getting ready for the show, the podcast you love the most, as far as I know.
00:00:14.820
I'm going to put some stuff in context for you.
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But if you don't have yours yet, Amazon is the only place to get it.
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And I always wondered if there's some number of attendees I should wait for before I start.
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For this simultaneous sip, and all you need is a cup or mug or a glass, a tanker, chalice,
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or stein, a canteen jug or flask, a vessel of any kind.
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So yesterday, I talked about a story in the news in which Japan had just successfully tested
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beaming electricity from, or energy, I guess, electricity via a microwave beam from space
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So the idea is you could put big solar panels floating in space.
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It could gather up the electricity and shoot it to Earth.
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And they had shown that they could do that on a small scale.
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And I said that that would be a big game changer if they could scale that up.
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Well, I mistakenly believed that Elon Musk agreed with my take.
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A lot of people had asked him about it, I guess.
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And said that he's often asked about beaming electricity from space, from solar panels.
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And I mistakenly believed he said that was a good idea.
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But what he was talking about, and only, the only thing he was talking about, because he
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says that could never work, there's, you know, there are reasons in physics, which he understands
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that I don't, that would make it really impractical or impossible to scale it up.
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But if you were generating it in space, but also built your, let's say, your AI data center
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in space, you could use the electricity in space.
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And that would be almost unlimited, because you would be above our cloud cover, and you
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So it'd never be nighttime if you were that solar panel.
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So the clarification is that at least in terms of what Elon says, and I will not disagree with
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him, that there's no practical way to make that a dominant energy source for the terrestrial
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However, you might cynically or skeptically say, Scott, Scott, Scott, you simpleton, don't
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you know, that even though it was Japan that announced this breakthrough, that it almost certainly
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is a cover for some kind of space-based weapon.
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Because if you had, if you had something that generated a lot of electricity floating above
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the earth, and you could microwave that as something, that would be a good way to shoot
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down, you know, any kind of a space-based weapon on the other team.
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Because although that microwave beam apparently is an inefficient way to carry electricity, you
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know, through the atmosphere, it might be just what you need to shoot down a, you know, some
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So even the, even the press release on that might be a cover for something military.
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Speaking of charging things electrically over space, apparently Tesla just filed a patent
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on something that would allow you to charge your electric vehicle without plugging it in.
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So Tesla apparently has a plan, which I believe will be applied to the cybercab, which allegedly
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So the idea is that the cybercab, maybe first, I don't know, will not need a port if it gets
00:06:03.920
close to something that's, you know, designed to work that way, it will wirelessly charge
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Now, what I'm not sure about, but I saw some, I guess, estimates that that would also apply
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to your existing Tesla that has a charging port, but there might be some way to also wirelessly
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That part, I don't know, but I think more reliably, it's true that the cybercab will
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That's got to be the last thing that Tesla needed to make everyone buy one, because even
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though, you know, it might be 30 minutes to charge your car and it's not really hard to
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plug it in, wouldn't you like to not get out of your car?
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So with the current technology, you have to always get out of your car, right?
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Even if you're just plugging it in for an electric charge.
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That little bit of work where you have to get out of your car and the weather might not
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I don't own one, but I imagine I would be very, very happy if it drove to the charging station
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on its own when it needed to, and then it charged itself without me touching it and without
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So, you know, these seem like small changes, but I'll bet it's not small.
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So here's something that happened to me yesterday that freaked me out a little bit.
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And I think, I think this is an accurate statement of what happened.
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So because of my, you know, advanced age and because of my health situation, I had started
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So I was recording some, you know, timeline things.
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And it turns out that using AI to learn about my own life was the best way to do it.
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For example, I couldn't remember, you know, what years I worked at the phone company, you
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know, what years I worked at the, the bank, but it's on Wikipedia and you can get that kind
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And it used as a source, the Google document that I was using to compile that information, which
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Google's AI used as a source document, a private document that I just created using Google
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It said I got it from this document that is literally the document I just created.
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So it was a little bit of circular because I was looking for it to, you know, validate the
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And instead of validating it, it could find that I had just written it down and it used that
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Now, I'm pretty sure it also knew who I was because, you know, I had interacted with it
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And I think I told it who I was for, you know, for some inconvenience.
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Canada can be a global leader in reducing the harm caused by smoking, but it requires actionable
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Now is the time to modernize Canadian laws so that adult smokers have information and access
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Well, I have some questions about the increasing use of coal power in the United States.
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And here's some news and some context that I'll add to it.
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So the Daily Collar News Foundation is reporting that there was more coal burned in 2025 than in
00:11:19.640
Now, that might not come as a surprise to you because you know that Trump has been pushing coal.
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I don't know if there's anything that's clean coal, but he says that.
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And I wondered how much danger that created because, you know, the knock on coal is that it would be bad
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for the world, but we live in a time in which people are way less worried about CO2.
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One is to put CO2 into the atmosphere at a pretty big pace.
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But at the moment, that's not terribly concerning the way it was even two years ago, because even
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the mainstream media is starting to admit, well, we don't have necessarily a climate crisis.
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Even Bill Gates is now, well, it's not a crisis.
00:12:29.800
So, but the other part is that it's also just a pollutant, and air pollution kills a lot of people.
00:12:40.920
So I wondered how many people get killed by coal as a pollutant, not as a CO2.
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And I went to AI, went to Grok, and it said there are estimates that coal might kill up to 10,000
00:13:04.660
Now, what is the first thing you ask yourself if you see an estimate that coal might kill
00:13:18.280
Well, the first thing you should ask yourself is who did the study, and what was their motivation?
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Can we believe a study about how many people were killed by coal?
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Remember, it's 2025, and we've learned that every corner of science, every corner of politics
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Can you trust that 10,000 people a year are being killed by coal?
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And then, secondly, what percentage of all the people being killed by pollution is that?
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Is it 1% of all the people killed by pollution?
00:14:00.600
Well, also, according to Grok, something like 40,000 to 60,000 people per year are killed
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So, if these numbers were right, and I'm very skeptical, if the numbers were right, it would
00:14:19.540
be 10,000 out of 40,000 to 60,000 directly just because of extra use of coal.
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If it's true, oh, and by the way, the number of people who are dying from pollution has been
00:14:44.980
And the drop in those deaths is being attributed to the closing of coal plants.
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But now, the coal plants are not only not closing, they're reopening and going wild.
00:15:06.500
What would happen if the deaths from pollution keep dropping while the use of coal is unambiguously
00:15:22.820
Do you think that the, I guess it would be the mainstream belief, that the reduction in
00:15:34.420
Do you believe that that will reverse because the use of coal reversed?
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And there doesn't seem to be any other mitigating factors, such as clean or coal or anything like
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I'm going to bet that the mortality rate drops, even though coal use goes up.
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And I don't know that I'll have an explanation for why.
00:16:04.300
I just think that it's a little too easy to say, oh, coal use went down, mortality went down.
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We don't really live in a world where we're that good at correlation.
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So, I'm just going to say, I think there will be a mystery coming up.
00:16:23.740
In other news, you know, filmmaker James Cameron, and he says he's been asked to write a new
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movie, a terminated movie about the future, but he can't write things about the future
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or it's hard because the actual future will be too close to what he calls science fiction.
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So, for example, if he wrote a movie today in which, let's say, the machines became sentient,
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that could actually happen before the movie hit the screen, which is really a weird problem
00:17:07.360
It's like no matter what he says, oh, the robots will be running all the, oh, wait, that actually
00:17:15.820
So, that's a pretty, that's a pretty interesting take.
00:17:20.920
To, the counter to that is that, I've told you this before, but if you're a subscriber,
00:17:32.440
So, if you're seeing Dilbert that I still produce every day, and you're seeing it behind
00:17:37.340
the paywall, you can see it on X behind the paywall I have, or you can see it on the locals
00:17:48.120
But, in addition to a daily new Dilbert cartoon that I'm doing, which is a little spicier than
00:17:55.200
it used to be, I also give those subscribers the same, the comic that ran exactly 10 years
00:18:07.180
I'm trying to catch up from my time in the hospital, so I'm a little bit behind.
00:18:11.700
But, in theory, you would see today's comic, and then what I thought was worth writing about
00:18:19.180
So, the entire month so far of my 10 years ago comic is about a sentient robot that works
00:18:32.340
And it's about Dilbert having to deal with the fact that his co-worker is a robot.
00:18:41.320
So, basically, I knew I was writing about some kind of future, but if you wondered what I
00:18:49.180
was thinking was going to happen 10 years from now, there it was.
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So, you would think, if you saw the 10-year-ago comic, you would think that I wrote it yesterday.
00:19:07.260
According to one of my followers on X, named Alex, who is an engineer, so he's probably right,
00:19:16.860
he says that in 2024 alone, the average battery price, we're talking about batteries for, you
00:19:24.640
know, big things, prices fell by 40%, and it looks like there's going to be a similar fall
00:19:34.480
So, he says that the economics of solar have now reached a crossover point where pairing
00:19:42.700
solar with enough batteries to keep the electricity on at night, when there's, you know, when there's
00:19:48.380
no sun shining, is now an economically viable thing.
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I know that many of you have been telling me for years, Scott, Scott, Scott, solar power will
00:20:01.780
always be limited because it doesn't work at night, and it doesn't work when it's cloudy.
00:20:08.280
And I would always say, but, but, but, you can store it in batteries.
00:20:15.620
And then people would say, Scott, Scott, Scott, Scott, you can store it in batteries, but you're
00:20:21.700
never going to get close to good economics, because the batteries are expensive to make
00:20:33.760
So, one of the reasons I continue to hammer on more than I know you want to hear, but it helps
00:20:42.180
you understand what's coming, is that there are so many, just so many advances in battery
00:20:49.940
technology that you wouldn't have to wait too far, given that it's, you know, a trillion
00:20:58.400
You would know that the free market would be running as fast as it could to make better
00:21:04.120
and cheaper batteries, because the potential is, you know, insane.
00:21:09.160
And then you add robots and auto cabs to it, and the market potential for batteries is probably
00:21:17.860
You know, it could turn out that the battery industry is bigger than AI, because you can't
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even have AI without an incredible battery industry.
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So, according to one engineer, Alex, if you're listening, Alex, hi, we may have reached a crossover.
00:21:39.080
That's one of the funny things about technology, is that technology can be, oh, it's boring,
00:21:47.100
it's boring, it's boring, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
00:21:52.620
And it looks like we got to the changes-everything point.
00:21:55.240
well i saw a post on x by charles ford not a famous person just somebody who's funny
00:22:07.360
who said and i quote wondering if the somalis will be eligible for reparations when that time
00:22:14.940
comes will the somalis be eligible for reparations and i i posted back in a comment paying for
00:22:26.520
them or receiving them because it's a complicated world isn't it should the somalis be receiving
00:22:34.180
reparations or should they be paying them it's not obvious is it
00:22:44.940
there would be an argument in both directions i'm not saying i agree with any of the arguments but
00:22:50.400
there would be an argument that they should receive them
00:22:53.960
and there would be an argument that they should be paying for them pick one
00:23:00.540
but it's pretty funny to highlight the absurdity of it that way
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um the southern states not all of them but southern states generally speaking are doing much better
00:23:52.400
than blue states in fixing their education systems after the pandemic especially
00:23:59.340
so there seems to be a clear correlation between whatever the conservative states are doing
00:24:07.560
and whatever the liberal states are doing so the liberals are not getting good results
00:24:13.140
uh the other states are now there are a number of things that have been
00:24:18.180
credited for why there's a difference though we have a new entrance for why there's a difference
00:24:24.320
so there were some common sense reforms in the southern states where they got back to basics
00:24:32.500
that probably made a difference so they went back to phonics and stuff
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um they went back to more of a merit-based you know sort of thing
00:24:42.480
um universal literacy screeners basically they went back to the things that we know work
00:24:50.060
and when you go back to the things that you don't work you get a good result whereas the blue states
00:24:57.240
were trying to relax their disciplinary policies uh trying to find some more you know woke way to teach
00:25:05.200
people and that wasn't producing results but the new hypothesis according to some new study
00:25:17.340
is that what might be the magic sauce is that the southern states are more hardcore about
00:25:25.020
uh law and order meaning that they make sure that if you're a disruptor
00:25:30.780
you just get sent home uh sort of the old way so they don't tolerate students who are disruptive
00:25:40.140
whereas the blue states their school system not only tolerates it but makes it easier for them to get
00:25:48.540
away with their whatever they're doing so do you think that's fair um i would say that there's no way in hell
00:25:59.820
that a school that doesn't control student behavior could compete with a school that does is that not just obvious
00:26:07.580
it's obvious right if one school lets people run wild because they either woke and they don't want to
00:26:16.300
punish them and they think he's racist to punish one group more than another so they're trying to be
00:26:22.300
you know fair and all that there's not really any chance that they would perform the same there's 100 chance
00:26:31.420
that the ones who are controlling the students behavior more aggressively are going to get better grades
00:26:37.740
there's just no way around that but it also made me think that homeschooling has a natural cap
00:26:47.660
meaning that there's no way a parent who can't control their kid at home is going to be a successful
00:26:55.980
homeschooler is it because that bad behavior would make them a terrible candidate for being homeschooled
00:27:04.700
so maybe those people are like well i can't do anything with this kid i'll just
00:27:09.260
send it to school at least i can go to my job so i've always suspected that one of the reasons
00:27:17.020
homeschoolers uh tend to be so such good outcomes i think you'd agree with that right you'd agree that the
00:27:26.860
people who are homeschooled tend to be just better citizens the problem part of the reason is that
00:27:35.100
you don't even get to be homeschooled unless you have parents who know they can control you
00:27:40.940
in a in a proper parental child way so i'm not a hundred percent sure that what makes those kids
00:27:51.500
do so well later in life the homeschooled kids is that homeschooling is better than regular school
00:27:57.900
it could be a selection bias that the only people who even give it a try
00:28:02.780
you know they they know by the time the kid is six if it's a controllable kid or not wouldn't you say
00:28:11.420
well don't you think it's fair to say that you have a pretty good idea by the time the kid is six
00:28:18.140
am i going to be able to discipline this kid and will they do what the parent tells them
00:28:25.900
now you add to that the number of single parent households and there's just no way a single parent
00:28:36.060
household is going to be able to control a kid at the same level that a two-parent household could
00:28:43.900
so homeschooling even if you use ai to do it should be capped by the total number of people
00:28:52.300
who can be controlled by a parent or two well i don't know when this is happening i think maybe
00:29:00.060
tomorrow that trump is bringing his economic team to mar-a-lago to talk specifically about housing
00:29:09.900
and specifically about the cost of housing and one of his economic advisors has it i think that most of
00:29:19.580
us meaning the important people in the administration are going to be there and that they will discuss
00:29:25.740
the uh ideas that various people have for improving housing costs now this is one of my pet favorite
00:29:36.940
topics how do you make uh housing less expensive and also better and i'm so curious what kind of ideas
00:29:45.340
they'll have some of them are probably obvious i'm sure that reducing regulations will be part of the
00:29:53.900
conversation because you know it's such a republican thing to do it's doable but what i wonder is will they
00:30:02.700
suggest a federal standard that if you build to that standard the states have to accept it so you can take the
00:30:12.300
state completely out of the approval process which where i live would instantly cause more housing
00:30:20.540
because these state requirements are pretty burdensome so one possibility is that you can either build your
00:30:28.540
house to the state standards or uh you could have a let's say a more limited set of choices of how you can
00:30:36.620
build it but those choices would be pre-approved so if you build a house with this set of standards
00:30:44.460
you've met all of the federal requirements but the state would have to accept it that would instantly take
00:30:52.060
a whole bunch of you know costs off the top what about um some kind of boost to make the robots
00:31:02.860
uh more active in building houses i don't know what that would look like but if there's any restrictions
00:31:11.980
and maybe states would be the ones that would have these restrictions could it be the removing restrictions
00:31:19.900
on replacing humans with robot builders is just what we need because the robots could not yet
00:31:28.300
but maybe very very soon lower the cost of construction could it be that some of those pre-approved homes
00:31:37.820
that i already mentioned would uh be allowed to use what i call lego construction um because but the
00:31:46.540
algorithm on the internet knows what kind of stuff i like i see a lot of videos of companies that are that
00:31:54.380
have this product so already there exists um these these sort of blocks that fit together which the
00:32:03.580
homeowner themselves could build most of the house because it's just snapped together so what if the
00:32:11.340
federal government said in addition to what else it does that if you build your house with these legos
00:32:18.540
um it could get approved right now if you tried to build a house in california with some kind of new
00:32:27.100
age lego construction there's not a chance you get approved because i'd never seen it before so it's
00:32:34.860
just automatically off the table i learned that when i built my house i had all these great ideas for
00:32:43.020
building my house using the newest technology but then as soon as you get into it you realize you
00:32:47.900
cannot get the newest technology approved because the the city has never approved that technology
00:32:56.780
so if you say if you give them something they've never seen before
00:33:00.780
it'll never get approved that you have to show them what they've seen before
00:33:06.220
and even then it could take a year and a half to get approved so maybe there's some way around that
00:33:13.580
maybe the maybe some of the federal land would be used for building new houses maybe something about
00:33:20.940
immigration enforcement but that's already happening um maybe suppose i'm just throwing out some ideas
00:33:30.540
it seems to me there will be a lot of large houses that are empty nesters that would be better if the
00:33:39.100
person who is let's say a senior citizen owns a house um that if they take on a i'll call it a roommate
00:33:48.300
for now a young person has a roommate who's there to help the older person maintain the house
00:33:54.700
maybe there's some kind of tax break so imagine you're in your 20s and you'd like to live in the
00:34:00.940
house but you can't afford one so suppose the government says well if we can match you with
00:34:06.940
a senior citizen who has a house that's too big for them and you have a contract to help out you'll get
00:34:14.700
some kind of a tax break so then the old person has help they don't have to sell their house that they
00:34:21.100
don't want to and the young person has an awesome experience because depending on the old person
00:34:27.740
you might actually enjoy it could be a relative doesn't have to be right um
00:34:40.460
i don't know what what other ways do you think republicans can lower the cost of housing
00:34:45.740
you already have squatters well you know it's it's actually becoming common for young people and
00:34:55.260
older people to pair up that way so that's it's happening organically i don't know if it's working but
00:35:01.900
it's happening organically one of the problems with um california is that if i were to sell my house
00:35:12.060
the house after his value has gone up the new person buying it wouldn't be able to afford the
00:35:18.940
property tax because the property tax is based on the value of the house now i can afford it because
00:35:26.780
i built it about 10 years ago no how long ago 2009 so my property taxes are artificially based
00:35:37.740
on what the you know early value of the house was not as current value and it would be about double if
00:35:44.700
i paid the property taxes based on current so it makes it very hard to sell your house
00:35:52.220
because even though it's affordable for you it would not be affordable for the person who bought it
00:35:57.900
because the property taxes would just be crazy so that's something that is a state problem
00:36:05.820
but maybe there's some kind of federal way to make it illegal to raise property taxes or something
00:36:14.300
and i think there are some other obstacles to selling a house that maybe can be removed
00:36:23.820
there would be a lot more houses available if the people had them could efficiently sell them
00:36:30.140
all right um you know this story is over and over again but i've got something to add to it so
00:36:45.260
according to an article by joe wilkins in futurism um children are having a tough time with ai chat bots
00:36:54.060
so you've seen the stories i'm sure where children especially teens um are chatting with ai and it becomes
00:37:03.260
their friend but then it starts recommending dangerous things now that you already knew that story but
00:37:11.820
uh according to a new pew research is 64 percent of teens in the u.s are already using chat bots and about 30 percent of those
00:37:22.860
videos um we're using it use it daily um and as i mentioned it might be kind of dangerous because it's
00:37:33.020
it's it's taking them away from the real world which is its own problem um
00:37:40.140
but the chat bots can say some really dangerous stuff and i think some kids have harmed themselves
00:37:47.740
allegedly because the chatbots is out now i would argue that this is also happening to adults
00:37:54.300
so it's not really limited at all to children but we worry more about children so so imagine if you will
00:38:02.540
that you've got this huge problem here's the problem what is the main driver of ai adoption right now
00:38:14.220
well we've got all these all these plans for how ai will be you know powering robots and everything else
00:38:22.300
but at the moment and it looks like this moment will last a while the main thing that people sign up
00:38:28.780
for ai for is to chat it's the main thing um and what happens if the main thing turns out to be too
00:38:39.420
dangerous to be loose is there any chance that there's going to take away the main thing that all these
00:38:48.460
biggest powerful companies are relying on to get adoption going because they kind of need
00:38:55.580
they need they need a lot of adoption to probably get to the point where the ai can run your robot
00:39:03.580
in your factory and you know be a baller and all that so i don't think it's going to be stopped but
00:39:10.540
i would also add the context that probably every new technology seemed too dangerous to be worth it
00:39:18.620
when it was first introduced don't you think that's true when we invented the car i wasn't around but
00:39:28.700
don't you imagine that the smart people were saying oh those automobiles that's way more dangerous than
00:39:35.980
riding a horse when the smartphone or the computer were invented when the internet was invented don't you
00:39:44.140
think there were a lot of people saying oh it's too dangerous to have the internet you're going to
00:39:50.220
lose your privacy and all that's true right so the the dangers that people pointed out all true so you
00:39:59.900
had at some point 50 000 people a year dying from auto accidents that's a pretty big downside
00:40:07.740
that's probably worse than ai will do so my prediction is that even though uh ai chatting
00:40:19.100
could be dangerous definitely it's dangerous uh it won't be stopped because that's what every new
00:40:25.260
technology goes through that's what i think well let's talk about all the corruption in the world would
00:40:33.340
you be surprised that the la times did research and found out that uh there was a la fire department
00:40:41.740
after action report about the palisades fire and do you think that that after action report
00:40:49.100
which is basically the fire department reporting on themselves how they did do you think that it was
00:40:56.140
honestly reported uh what possible mistakes the fire department might have made
00:41:01.980
no so once again the people who are in charge are also in charge of telling you how they did
00:41:12.700
and the people who are in charge the la fire department in charge of the fire
00:41:17.740
had decided that they would remove uh some substantial parts of the report that made them look bad
00:41:24.940
so the after-hour action report according to the la times is and they in fact were definitely
00:41:34.780
definitely the problem and part of the problem was that they knew there was a existing fire that had
00:41:42.940
been the thing that reignited they almost certainly should have been there they should have water they
00:41:49.020
should have been should have been more ready so so essentially a cover-up yes
00:41:57.340
so how often have we seen that if the government is involved and they have the ability to either not
00:42:07.020
audit or to do a fake audit that they will do the fake audit or no audit every time every time
00:42:25.500
so i was thinking today how hard it is to understand the news so think about all the things that had to
00:42:34.220
happen for me to understand our current situation in the world right if any of the following things had
00:42:42.540
not happened i would be so lost and so would you let me give you an example um
00:42:51.420
how confused would you be if you had not learned that the news is fake
00:42:58.300
have you ever talked to somebody who thinks news is real and it just feels like they're from the past
00:43:04.620
really really really you think the news is real oh oh no you think that the news on one side is real
00:43:13.900
sorry if if you don't understand the news is and maybe always has been uh fake you would be very
00:43:23.500
confused about what you're saying right so that's number one and i would say that trump
00:43:29.740
it was the biggest reason that we understand the news to be fake not only did he tell us but we could
00:43:37.100
watch through his experience how often there were hoaxes in the news and you really learned oh my god the
00:43:44.060
news is not even real that's number one how confused and lost would we be if elon musk had not purchased
00:43:53.820
twitter and turned it into x because i get most of my knowledge from x if i had to depend on everything
00:44:03.900
else literally everything else i wouldn't know what's going on now it might be in a bubble so i have to
00:44:13.100
watch out for the bubble problem but without x there's so much context that i'd be missing
00:44:20.140
now what would have happened if trump had not won the election if trump had not won the election i think
00:44:32.140
the x would have been destroyed um i think that people would still think the news was real they
00:44:40.060
would trust their elections were not rigged and they would have an entirely different view
00:44:45.500
of what's real and what's not and and trump just barely won well he would say he won by a lot but if
00:44:52.940
you consider the allegations of rigging suppose um there had not been um some really i don't know if it's
00:45:06.220
real but the reporting is that the uh there was some serbian you know serbian uh data center that
00:45:15.500
to be taken offline just in time or trump would have won now i don't know if that's true but it does
00:45:23.020
suggest that if it was we were very close to losing everything and then we would again not know what was
00:45:30.780
going on because we would be in the dark what would happen if doge had never happened and i'll add mike
00:45:40.220
benz to the this point what would happen if there had never been a mike benz and there'd never been a
00:45:48.300
doge would you understand how the ngos and the usaid stuff were distorting everything we knew and
00:45:58.700
everything we were doing i didn't know about any of that stuff and what are the odds you know that
00:46:05.500
you'd be born in a time when both of these things would happen doge and and mike benz that's we were
00:46:12.940
very close to never understanding what was really happening but now we're getting close
00:46:22.940
do you think we would know anything except for the rise in independent media which mostly
00:46:30.940
you get to cnx nope because corporate media will always have a limit on what they can do
00:46:38.300
if they take advertisement for their business model there's going to be entire domains where you can't
00:46:44.220
trust what they say and the only way that you would know what's happening is if an independent
00:46:51.980
media grew up and that only was only was possible recently and mostly because of x
00:47:01.260
um in order for me to understand what's going on and then to try to tell you i had to use grok
00:47:11.980
to summarize mike benton's posts because his posts are you know very detailed and i yeah it's hard to
00:47:19.500
watch four hours of content and even though he summarizes it and he gets clipped it's a lot and
00:47:27.020
so even this morning and really it feels like every morning there'll be some big complicated story about
00:47:33.820
what's wrong with the world and i'll say grok summarize this and if grok did not exist
00:47:43.020
i'm not sure i'd be able to totally follow everything that mike benton says that puts things in context
00:47:50.940
so i happen you have to be lucky that elon musk made grok
00:47:59.420
how would you have ever understood what a color revolution was and the fact that the people who are
00:48:05.980
doing it to successfully overthrow other countries had very clearly used those tools against us
00:48:15.500
how would you know that without x without without doge without mike benz
00:48:23.340
very specific things had to happen at the same time for us even to understand that that's the world
00:48:29.340
who we were living in how would you have ever known that the let's call it the censorship industrial complex
00:48:39.340
had found a way to use the international tools and also to partner with europe mostly to censor
00:48:49.020
people in the united states that's that's something we only just recently learned
00:48:55.820
so uh think about how sensitive uh the world was to all of those factors and if any one of those had not
00:49:05.980
happened would we have already lost free speech would the censorship um and the color revolution already
00:49:17.340
made it impossible impossible to have a democracy and never get a real republican
00:49:24.540
elected we were this close to losing everything and it almost seems like magic that all the right things
00:49:38.140
right it's very unlikely that all of those things would happen at the same time but they did
00:49:46.780
they did kind of amazing speaking of mike benz and grok and censorship uh here's another one of those stories
00:49:56.860
that you would not understand unless we had been given this new context and these new set of assets to
00:50:04.700
understand the world so there's this guy imran ahmed i might have this wrong but i think he's a brit
00:50:13.180
and he's allegedly was part of the effort to and apparently there's documentation that he said this
00:50:19.980
directly that he was in charge of trying to kill elon musk twitter for censorship reasons um
00:50:29.500
and that he was running quote black ops against rfk
00:50:33.180
so would you have known that there's this guy in another country who's part of a big industrial
00:50:43.900
censorship complex that was working with the united states to essentially get rid of free speech in the
00:50:51.740
united states well there's this guy named norm eisen who's a attorney who is associated with democrats
00:51:02.540
but he's also associated with that entire foreign and now domestic uh color revolutions
00:51:10.300
so he's sort of one of the architects of how to do a color revolution and he's now the lawyer
00:51:15.820
representing imran ahmad so if you don't know the players you don't really know what's going on
00:51:24.700
and as soon as you see that he's the lawyer for imran ahmed and then you see mike benton's explain the
00:51:31.820
connection and the history and what both of them have been doing all of a sudden every clicks in
00:51:37.820
place click click click oh all right so as mike says norm eisen specifically made internet censorship
00:51:47.660
a cornerstone of his domestic color revolution playbook published in 2025 he literally published
00:51:56.460
the technique for doing this so we're not guessing what he's thinking he wrote it down
00:52:02.380
um and that that playbook the norm eisen playbook called for state governments to set up social media
00:52:11.580
censorship regulatory regimes and we've seen this in california new york and michigan try to do it
00:52:18.220
to specifically instruct his networks to quote find partners in brazil's censorship apparatus so i
00:52:28.460
think the point here is that this color revolution thing is very obviously being used in countries that
00:52:35.820
we're trying to control and brazil was on that list i guess and that you know all of these efforts
00:52:43.420
are staffs with ex-obama people and there's no doubt about what side they're on they're not trying to
00:52:50.620
make things good for america they're trying to make things good for democrats basically
00:52:58.540
so there you go now here's another question i have
00:53:05.100
you know we all live in a news bubble so even as even as much improved as things are today
00:53:13.420
and i would say things are much improved as i mentioned you know the free speech and uh the
00:53:19.980
context and all that in my bubble the the um allegation that the our elections have been rigged
00:53:31.420
and you could pick any year but let's just say rigging probably happens every year sometimes more
00:53:37.020
successfully than others in my world that's a proven fact not proven in court but because of my bubble
00:53:47.420
i've seen so many stories that are at least high credibility i don't know how true they are but
00:53:54.700
they're high credibility about rigging that i would just say it's a fact now but if you're not my bubble
00:54:01.260
how much of that do you ever see i feel like the left never sees it and what they see is the times
00:54:11.100
when the claims are debunked because there are a lot of claims that yeah do not you know check out
00:54:20.300
in my bubble so in my bubble uh that serbian data center thing is true in my bubble there was chinese
00:54:38.940
in my bubble under credible reports of duplicate ballots that all look the same
00:54:45.980
and widespread you know it's a lot of it in my bubble there were whistleblowers and undercover video
00:54:54.700
proving that there was ballot stuffing and you know illegal stuff in my bubble there's plenty of evidence
00:55:03.660
that ballots should not have been counted in in massive ways either because they didn't have the signatures
00:55:11.580
um because they were sketchy looking etc and that that's just a fact and we have whistleblowers and we have
00:55:20.060
you know multiple multiple reports even even people under penalty of perjury are claiming they saw firsthand
00:55:30.140
we've got that uh that uh warehouse that's been locked for years because allegedly it's full of fake ballots
00:55:38.220
um and all we'd have to do is get to it and i think that's happening actually we've got all kinds of
00:55:45.500
allegations about arizona too many to mention um we've got that video of ruby freeman is it who allegedly
00:55:55.740
is doing something sketchy i think she's being accused of uh you know counting the ballots three times
00:56:03.500
now she won a court case um for being accused of that so the course uh did not confirm that she did
00:56:15.740
anything illegal so she's not she's not indicted or anything but if you're in my bubble um she is accused
00:56:24.300
of all kinds of all kinds of things uh there's a the story of the water leak that was fake
00:56:33.020
it was just used as a cover to get the observers out now i could go on and on and on but how many of
00:56:39.980
you are having the the same um experience that in your bubble you have massive just massive stories
00:56:49.980
stories about very credible stories that various parts in the election were rigged that's your bubble
00:56:57.740
too right but i bet almost nobody on the left is exposed to this stuff
00:57:06.540
because it's not going to be in the news right cnn doesn't cover it ms now it's not in the new york
00:57:13.020
times and whenever it is covered they might just hit it and then leave it whereas in my bubble it's
00:57:20.620
repeated and repeated and stuff is added to it all the time so then uh in that context uh scott presler
00:57:34.220
is reminding us on x that back in 2008 and i admit i was not paying attention to politics in 2008
00:57:43.900
so in 2008 how many of you knew this happened that al franken was running for senator in minnesota
00:57:53.340
and if he won he would become a critical majority vote which he was and it was a difference between
00:58:03.340
obamacare passing and not passing so al franken had to win for them to get obamacare over the line
00:58:11.660
and he did win by 312 votes now my understanding is again i wasn't paying attention back then
00:58:22.300
my understanding is that he did not win on the first vote and that they had to keep saying wait
00:58:28.300
we kept finding some more votes and that a critical turning point in his winning is that somebody who
00:58:36.940
worked for the election people uh had found a bunch of ballots in the trunk of his own car
00:58:43.180
is that true did he win because somebody claimed they found a bunch of ballots in the back of their
00:58:50.780
car and the only one by 312 votes after he had already lost so it was actually you know after the
00:58:59.740
election was already closed is that true and scott presser also points out that minnesota has one of
00:59:09.660
these weird laws where one person can vouch for up to eight people living in their precinct that they're
00:59:17.740
they're qualified to vote in other words that they're citizens and they live there what are you telling me
00:59:24.620
that one criminal can vouch for eight other criminals and that would be enough for the eight other
00:59:31.900
criminals to be able to vote what kind of law is that that looks like a law that's only designed to
00:59:40.300
promote fraud and then we heard that over half a million voters were registered to vote
00:59:49.500
on election day now you might say to yourself but scott uh lots of people tend to register on election day
00:59:59.420
if they have that option because you know they just put it off and maybe the relatives talk them into it or
01:00:06.140
something but half a million do you think half a million decided that the day to register was election day
01:00:15.020
that doesn't sound real so is it possible that in 2008 before we understood how corrupt the world really
01:00:26.460
is that this was just pure corruption if i told you it happened in minneapolis let's say minnesota
01:00:35.740
if i told you it happened in minnesota back then i might have said well
01:00:41.420
you know minnesota is kind of a state where there's not a lot of crime so
01:00:47.900
now we realize that minnesota is the most corrupt state that is in california
01:00:54.780
so how much of that is real you know i i don't want to put it in the form of an accusation
01:01:02.380
but it looks sketchy as hell and if you drop that story into my bubble
01:01:08.860
where i get you know this total flow of reports about election rigging that sure looks like election
01:01:17.660
rigging to me yeah from my 20 26 ish perspective
01:01:26.460
speaking of corruption this one blows my mind i cannot believe that gavin newsom
01:01:33.980
has any chance to become president we live in a world where as long as he maintains this bubble
01:01:41.100
he probably can or at least he'd have a shot at um i'm going to vote against that being possible but
01:01:48.700
anything is possible all right listen to this one so as you know california got these billions of dollars
01:01:55.260
dollars that were supposed to be from the federal government that was supposed to be spent on the
01:02:01.740
so-called high-speed rail project as you know none of that got built after many years as you also know
01:02:12.300
nobody can account for where the money went so the money just disappeared i.e got stolen billions and
01:02:20.460
billions of dollars so if you were the governor or you were in charge in any way during that time
01:02:27.660
how do you explain where all the money went and then still become president because it's so obvious that
01:02:34.700
there's either massive incompetence well maybe or just theft or both so here's what newsom has proposed
01:02:46.460
that instead of canceling the project because they don't have any money and they have no way to get
01:02:52.460
that money back and there's it would cost you know five times more than they thought to build it
01:02:58.620
so there's no real possibility of building the thing they have funded for there's just none but instead
01:03:07.260
of canceling the project he's he's trying to extend it and make it a smaller project something that you could
01:03:15.340
imagine and probably only in your imagination they could actually build and the reason that he would want
01:03:21.900
to keep it alive is that if he builds nothing and he says i'm not going to build anything he has to give
01:03:30.300
back the money or at least he has to give back what you know maybe what's left so in order to not have to
01:03:38.940
give back any money he's going to pretend that there's still a live project and it's just much smaller
01:03:45.580
you know it's probably legal you know it's more of a weasel legal thing to do but how in the world
01:04:01.580
can you do something like this and still become you know considered to be a presidential candidate
01:04:09.900
the only way is if is if people like me know about it but i wasn't going to vote for him
01:04:18.540
and the people who might like him and might vote for him will never hear this story they will never
01:04:25.900
hear this story and even if you brought it up and people heard it for the first time let's say
01:04:32.540
let's say his competition brought it up at a debate or something it's sort of technical and
01:04:40.700
you know i'm not sure it would make any difference to a democrat and if he has some excuse like i don't
01:04:46.780
know what they're talking about we just need a train between these two places and we have the money
01:04:52.700
why wouldn't we build it so the democrats could easily be convinced that there's no real problem
01:04:59.420
here and he would say am i indicted for anything no is it a crime no we're just doing things
01:05:06.700
differently than republicans would do them there's no crime in that so he could probably very easily
01:05:13.580
dismiss it in a debate the news will probably let them have a pass and it's just
01:05:20.780
un-freaking-believable wow all right here's a story i've been watching for a while but not talking
01:05:29.020
about so elan omar you all know her her husband allegedly um and she went from having no money at all
01:05:39.420
so first of all i don't know that the estimates of their net worth are accurate because you know numbers
01:05:52.140
um but if you did not understand and this is me for most of my adult life i didn't understand
01:06:05.020
why people who could clearly make more money in the private sector would want to be politicians
01:06:12.060
because being a politician looks like a crappy job i mean just the work looks like just crappy and they
01:06:20.140
really don't get paid enough to have a house in dc because they have to be there a lot uh but also
01:06:28.220
maintained their their home and their city they're representing or the state um so i was always curious
01:06:37.420
why in the world would you have so many people who would be willing to work at these bad jobs for years
01:06:44.620
when when after some point they could just put it on their resume and get excellent you know corporate
01:06:51.500
jobs and stuff like that and now i understand the real way you make money is that you as the politician
01:07:02.140
figure out how to be part of the allocation of funds and you make sure that your husband or your spouse
01:07:09.660
is somehow benefiting so they might be an ngo they might be um some private company that provides a
01:07:17.900
service to the government but suddenly the spouse of the politician is getting a lot of good luck
01:07:25.580
hmm it's not good luck that you're the business that can benefit from government contracts at the same
01:07:33.420
time you're married to a politician how lucky so i now suspect that although this would not explain
01:07:43.100
every single person in politics that a big big part of it is that the spouse um play that you could get
01:07:53.260
away with because you make it look legal is why they do it and then my next question is this
01:08:01.900
um since i don't know too much about the department of justice and how that works
01:08:05.820
at what point can you investigate somebody's spouse and the business that the spouse is in unless there's
01:08:15.980
like a really obvious crime what if you only suspect there's a crime because somebody is doing unusually
01:08:25.500
well uh in their job you can't investigate that right in order to get a warrant or open up an investigation
01:08:36.620
is it sufficient that it looks like they got money too fast or or do you need to know well they got
01:08:45.660
money too fast and here's the criminal way in which it happened so that's an open question i just don't
01:08:51.660
know the answer to that but if we don't fix that i think we're in trouble now in the context of finding out
01:09:04.460
that everything is corrupt and all of our numbers are bullshit and everything's a scam i saw a post by
01:09:12.060
a dated republican who had this to say and well let me just read it so dated republicans said i had this
01:09:22.220
idea what if autism diagnoses are partially from fraudulent billig and then i poked around a bit
01:09:31.660
and it turns out that the whole 130 statistic that's one in 30 uh kids being born have autism today
01:09:39.900
which is an alarming number she's what if the 130 statistic isn't based on official diagnoses
01:09:47.900
addm i don't know if that is has clinicians review school records and if the record fits
01:09:55.340
that it counts as autism even if there's no medical diagnosis then that statistic is quoted to justify
01:10:05.100
increased aba centers increased research and all kinds of grants and then uh dated republican
01:10:12.140
closes with i'm questioning literally everything now all right now i do believe that it is reality that
01:10:21.900
there's more autism i think the rfk jr is right that there's probably something in our environment
01:10:29.660
something in our food maybe something in our medicines something somewhere that is causing more autism
01:10:36.700
so i do believe more autism is real but how easy would it be to hide the fraud of claiming there's more
01:10:46.380
autism than there is so that you can get funded for treating it so now that we've seen the somali
01:10:55.180
healthcare scam and how easy it was for them to run the scam is it possible that instead of one in 30
01:11:04.620
which would be you know super alarming maybe it's one in a hundred and i don't know what the old number
01:11:12.460
was but it could be that there's a you know huge increase in it but at the same time that huge actual
01:11:20.460
increase is masking the fact that there's massive fraud making it look even worse
01:11:27.340
so uh i like dated republicans closing sentence i'm questioning i'm questioning literally everything
01:11:36.380
now that's where i'm at it doesn't matter where the data comes from my first reaction is really really
01:11:49.580
that you just don't believe any stat i tend to be biased to believe statistics that agree with my
01:12:03.340
preconceived notions but i'm definitely feeling alarm bell at the same time and i didn't always feel that
01:12:11.980
so here's another one where i didn't used to think this was true so elon musk is talking on x or said this
01:12:24.380
somewhere that the left has been using government programs for a long time to import voters so that
01:12:33.340
they can create a block of voters that would vote you know vote together to control the american process
01:12:42.620
and that that's what the somali immigration was all about that democrats were intentionally creating
01:12:50.620
pockets where they could control who won democrats because they would have a block of people who vote
01:12:57.500
the same now we see that in chicago for example more organically that chicago has a large black population
01:13:07.420
and they somewhat reliably are gonna elect black democrats to be in charge mayors
01:13:16.460
not every time but you know that that would be the the trend so i used to doubt that that was
01:13:24.220
intentional i used to think well yeah there is a lot of uncontrolled immigration and yeah it's natural that
01:13:33.180
those people would want to settle with other people like themselves but it's now some grand plan
01:13:46.540
that there had to be you know just as elon musk was saying there had to be a plan to do this
01:13:55.260
intentionally to take take control of the uh the census take control of local governments
01:14:04.380
and effectively uh change the voting situation in the united states and more more alarmingly
01:14:15.260
that they were very close to pulling it off and maybe they could still um and it would made it would
01:14:21.340
have made a permanent change in the ability for republicans to get elected and it would have permanently
01:14:29.900
made it impossible for anything but a democrat to ever be in charge of anything important
01:14:37.100
and we were this close now it might still happen i don't know maybe they've already
01:14:44.220
done enough of this because you've got your hispanic pockets you've got your somali pockets
01:14:50.540
maybe they've already done it but i don't think so
01:14:55.260
so here's another one that i wouldn't have believed five years ago so the newsmax is reporting that
01:15:04.620
judicial watch you know who judicial watches right um president tom fenton is warning that the secret
01:15:13.900
service might be uh let's say um maybe not doing their best to protect the president and then maybe
01:15:22.300
that's not just incompetence so the examples given are the two assassination attempts which we all think
01:15:30.860
look like um it looked like this his security didn't do enough he lived but from the outside it looks
01:15:40.700
like wait it doesn't even look like you had the a team protecting the president is that a coincidence
01:15:46.140
and then there was also the incident where trump went to some restaurant and somehow the uh people
01:15:55.980
who don't like trump had been alerted which is a gigantic security problem and uh there could have
01:16:03.500
been some danger there because people knew in advance he'd be a restaurant and it wasn't well secured
01:16:09.660
so there are at least three examples where you say to yourself is it possible that the president of the
01:16:18.220
united states has incompetent security is that possible yeah code pink uh democratic group code pink
01:16:29.580
showed up at that restaurant to protest so is that possible or is this a pattern and i guess uh judicial
01:16:39.420
watches asking for some information to maybe drill down a little bit now five years ago if you told me
01:16:48.380
that his security was penetrated or compromised and that people were trying to kill him and had made
01:16:56.940
already three attempts you know three attempts that had insiders involved i wouldn't believe that
01:17:05.340
that but today it's on the table i absolutely would say maybe i mean we know for example that jfk
01:17:17.980
i think i think i can say we know this um that his assassination has something to do with insiders
01:17:26.140
right that's the cia in particular so if it were true for jfk
01:17:31.820
today but i didn't believe her for decades and then you look at all the other things that are true
01:17:41.340
wow almost anything is on the table so i'm not willing yet to say that the insiders are
01:17:49.100
have penetrated his security service but i don't rule it out i'm not ruling it out
01:17:55.500
um i've been watching uh trimoth from the all in pod getting very active on x talking about california
01:18:06.700
and its various um problems and he notes that apparently um the california state pension
01:18:16.220
it looks like it's solid and it looks like you know it could pay pay the pensions but it's only
01:18:25.500
because they've changed the accounting to a very weasel like way to make optimistic assumptions that
01:18:32.620
are not realistic about what's going to happen in the future so in other words california also
01:18:39.820
on top of all the problems you've heard probably has this massive underfunded state pension problem
01:18:48.380
that they're covering up by clever accounting changes
01:18:58.060
so this this is something i would call the technically legal but holy kind of fraud
01:19:03.980
meaning it's not technically illegal for them to estimate the pension payout with optimistic
01:19:13.500
assumptions it's not illegal and they show their assumptions apparently but how is it not fraud
01:19:21.900
you know in a sort of a common sense way it's sort of obviously fraud
01:19:25.900
uh on top of that i'm wondering if chabath would be a candidate for governor or yeah yeah governor
01:19:40.460
so at the moment uh steve hilton is running for governor in california and i think he's actually
01:19:46.780
leading the polls because the the polls are so fragmented and they have a different voting system
01:19:53.660
so it's possible that the next governor of california could be a republican
01:20:00.700
but if it's not steve hilton is there a time when chamath says
01:20:05.740
i'll step up and do that because i would very much love to see him in the leadership role
01:20:15.100
well speaking of other californian stuff and uh chamath is also weighing on this pretty hard
01:20:24.940
so rokhana one of our representatives of california who normally is what we would consider a more
01:20:33.900
reasonable democrat than other democrats i obviously i don't agree with everything that rokhana wants
01:20:40.540
but you usually think of him as well considered and not not crazy biased he could for example he could
01:20:51.100
work with thomas massey on the epstein stuff because that's just you know sort of an independent good
01:20:59.180
thing to do but roe is backing this idea of a wealth tax on billionaires in california and the idea is
01:21:10.060
that billionaires above a certain level of billions would would have to give up one percent of their
01:21:17.900
net wealth every year for five years so so it'd be five percent by the time they were done now this is
01:21:26.700
wealth that they had already paid taxes on um you could argue that point but there was no precedent for
01:21:35.580
this there there's a precedent for income taxes and there's a precedent for taxing rich people more
01:21:44.220
but there's no real precedent for just taking the money after they made it just saying hey you have
01:21:49.820
too much money so we're going to take some of it now this is surprising because this is probably one of the
01:21:57.660
the worst ideas i've ever heard and my impression of rokhana is that not only is he you know more often than
01:22:07.580
most uh has an independent view of things but he's not stupid right when you see him it's not like you're
01:22:19.020
looking at uh swalwell it's not like he's you know you could name he's not jasmine crockett right he's
01:22:32.140
genuinely a smart reasonable person but somehow the smart reasonable person is going all in on the dumbest
01:22:42.780
thing i've ever seen in my life so as you might imagine uh several billionaires are already you know
01:22:50.700
quite obviously getting ready to leave the state uh and what would happen if our if our most capable
01:23:00.620
people left the state well we lose all of that base they would probably do their investing in other
01:23:07.260
states etc because you wouldn't even want to invest in the state you would you wouldn't want to have
01:23:12.460
anything to do with it because it'd just be it'd be like doing business in china if you could turn
01:23:18.460
california into a china problem it's like well why would you ever build something in china they're just
01:23:24.300
going to steal it anyway russia too one of the reasons that russia isn't going to get a lot of
01:23:30.380
external investment is that you think the russians will just steal your business of it if it does well
01:23:36.380
and they would so why would you stay in california when you see something this extreme that that's
01:23:45.180
being pushed against the most successful entrepreneurs so um and i often joke because rokan talks about
01:23:56.620
income inequality and you know you have to do something about that income inequality
01:24:02.380
and it's not fair i always joke but i'm not joking that fairness is a word that was invented so that
01:24:09.180
children idiots have something to talk about fairness is not something you want you want you want uh
01:24:17.260
meritocracy that's not fairness because some people have more merit some people will thrive in
01:24:25.260
meritocracy some people won't it's not exactly fair but it's just a good system for everyone so this system
01:24:36.780
where they just take your money if you're very successful uh it's just a terrible idea so here's what i'm
01:24:46.380
wondering could the california billionaires um do something that would make it look like they were
01:24:56.060
contributing more to the state and would actually be contributing more without having the money confiscated
01:25:04.300
is there a counter proposal that the billionaires could make to say hey instead of taking our money
01:25:12.380
and then giving it to california that will waste it because that's that's the other big problem if you
01:25:18.700
know for sure that california is wasting your money it's really hard to give them an extra billion
01:25:25.980
right it's like way harder if you earned a billion let's say you had lots of billions um it's pretty
01:25:33.340
hard to give them a penny more when they're so bad at allocating the capital so
01:25:39.980
what if the billionaires came up with a counter proposal and i'll just brainstorm a little bit here
01:25:49.740
in which they would be um voluntarily but maybe a threat of some penalty
01:26:00.140
they could allocate more money for the benefit of california
01:26:03.740
for example suppose california said we really need to improve affordability so if you're a billionaire
01:26:13.820
and you commit to put one percent of your assets directly into investments that would improve
01:26:22.460
affordability you don't have to pay the you won't be subject to the confiscation
01:26:28.300
so let's say you're a billionaire and you say to me scott you can invest currently you can invest your
01:26:37.420
money anywhere you want but if you invest it in ways that would improve affordability
01:26:43.820
for californians you don't get you don't get the penalty of having to confiscate and that
01:26:51.980
to me would be excellent and one of the things that chamath talks about is that the the richest people
01:27:00.300
especially the ai billionaires they need to do something that's highly visible but also good for
01:27:07.580
the public and i'm totally on board with that it should be highly visible and good for the public that
01:27:14.060
is one thing that bill gates was doing very right with the gates foundation so when he was the richest
01:27:21.180
guy around it really helped him that he said he was going to give it all away that he was putting
01:27:28.540
lots of his billions into um a charitable thing now since then you know there's been lots of criticism
01:27:36.940
of what his true motives are all that and that's valid those are valid criticisms but in terms of a
01:27:43.420
strategy i think it was very good for bill gates to try to reframe himself as a person who's
01:27:51.340
doing the things that are even too hard for the government to do so there's my idea
01:27:58.940
if you say billionaires if you live in california we need you to step up and make it cheaper to do
01:28:05.900
health care cheaper to do education cheaper to do transportation and you have to show us
01:28:12.060
that you've you've allocated some new money not money you've already allocated but you've allocated some
01:28:19.100
new money into projects that have a good chance of lowering our costs wouldn't they stay you know
01:28:29.180
under those conditions if you were a billionaire and you thought huh okay i wasn't planning on being forced to
01:28:38.140
invest in these areas but nobody could complain if i do and if i found a way to make
01:28:46.860
transportation or shelter or something cheaper the government will work with me maybe even help me
01:28:54.460
with some possibly the state would have to agree to remove some regulations so suppose the billionaire
01:29:02.140
say yes uh we will we will invest in affordability but you have to remove these roadblocks one roadblock
01:29:12.540
would be over um would be over taxation i guess and the other one would be over regulation what do you think
01:29:21.420
now i don't know if anything like that could happen but it would be way better for the billionaires to
01:29:29.500
have at least one counter proposal and i would be surprised if you couldn't get both democrats and
01:29:36.220
republican billionaires to agree with that you could probably get even somebody like a tom steyer to agree
01:29:45.900
you know a republican billionaire i just always need a reaction to that is that the best idea you've ever heard
01:29:57.500
because the one thing we know is that the billionaires by and large would be way way better at
01:30:04.220
identifying ways to improve affordability than it would be the government
01:30:09.820
and uh it would it would satisfy chamas view that they should be more prominently involved in helping the
01:30:21.260
public which i agree with all right did you know according to elon musk that electric semi trucks
01:30:34.540
will be a way better idea than diesel here again is exactly my point if elon musk did not exist
01:30:44.780
would you know that you could make an electric semi truck that would be way more practical and affordable
01:30:52.860
and affordable than the current technology you wouldn't even know that right yeah tom steyer
01:31:00.540
isn't a republican that's my point my point is that both democrats and republicans would probably like
01:31:07.340
the idea of working on affordability so that's another example of if you didn't have a billionaire
01:31:15.100
who was interested in the public good and by the way musk usually starts there he starts with what would
01:31:23.020
be a public good and then can i fix that everything from space to electric cars to solar power he always
01:31:32.620
starts with what's good for the public and then can i make that thing so electric semi trucks would be
01:31:40.540
right in that uh area well you all know who bill ackman is right he's a well-known investor
01:31:49.420
and he's talking about uh you know the uh the widespread fraud in so many government programs
01:31:59.580
and he had a suggestion for a way to audit now the idea of auditing of course is not new
01:32:06.860
but apparently it doesn't work because the fraud still exists so his suggestion for auditing
01:32:12.700
is that first of all you have to severely uh use a doj to severely punish anybody who got caught with
01:32:21.340
fraud so you've got some disincentive for fraud that of course i think we all agree with but then he
01:32:28.860
says uh that there should be a federal internal audit system where private citizens would get a bounty
01:32:37.500
they'd be bounty hunters who find fraud and earn rewards equal to a percentage of the grift identified
01:32:44.860
and we call it a grift i don't know if that means only illegal stuff or just stuff people are getting
01:32:51.820
away with um but i like where that's going so my idea um was that we need to have a federal standard for
01:33:02.780
audits and that we do not currently have a good idea how to do it somebody said and they were right
01:33:10.460
that the auditors also would be criminals because it would be so easy to buy off an auditor
01:33:17.900
so if you just had a standard audit system they would either be incompetent or bribed or they'd be in
01:33:24.940
on they'd be in on the plot and i agree with that over time the auditors would be
01:33:31.740
you know blackmailed or bought off but if your audit system involves these citizen bounty hunters
01:33:40.860
presumably people were capable and well trained to do that sort of thing they would just be working
01:33:46.460
for the money and if they could make more money by turning people in than they could make by being in on
01:33:55.420
the graft well now you got a system so you know there are lots of questions and details about that but
01:34:03.900
i like where that's heading because if you don't have what i would call a free market approach to make
01:34:12.380
sure that the audits are are doing what they should be doing the audit will be a waste of time and that's
01:34:18.780
what we see right now our current auditing systems largely don't work case in point there's a new
01:34:27.020
story that says that billions of dollars that we send to israel as weapons after october 7th have not
01:34:36.220
been accounted for so apparently the auditing system that should have tracked uh weapons and
01:34:44.540
and armaments same thing that we gave to israel uh we were only able to track some percentage of it
01:34:52.380
now that does not mean that that stuff was stolen or ended up in the wrong hands what it does mean
01:35:00.140
is we don't know it could have been stolen it could have ended up in the wrong hands we don't know because
01:35:08.620
once again although there was tracking the tracking was inadequate and so we don't know now i do think
01:35:17.660
that israel would be highly incentivized to make sure those weapons got used by the idf in exactly the
01:35:25.100
way we wanted but you know we don't know and if you take any audit system that is blind and there's a
01:35:33.980
lot of money involved and you just wait that guarantees corruption lots of money involved lots of time
01:35:43.980
involved and nobody's watching 100 chance that ends up in in some criminal behavior
01:35:54.300
well here's some maybe good news there's a new study according to the brighter side news
01:36:00.860
that alzheimer's can be not only stopped but reversed with a very common
01:36:07.500
common supplement now this common supplement called nad plus is not something you can buy over the
01:36:16.220
counter and if it were ever made available oh wait i'm sorry that's wrong the nad plus is apparently
01:36:25.020
something that people have in them and when the nad plus is at the right level they don't get alzheimer's
01:36:33.980
but the recent discovery is if you could boost their nad plus because older people lose it so if you just
01:36:42.540
boost them back to a normal level that not only do they not get worse in the alzheimer's but it can
01:36:49.340
actually correct it you could actually cure it so they've shown this in mice but they've also shown it in
01:36:57.100
uh samples of human brains now if they had not shown this true in a sample of a human brain i would not
01:37:06.300
be excited because mouse studies you know there's a million mouse studies that never turn out to work
01:37:12.700
for humans but it's already it's already a chemical that's in your body so that's good news they know for
01:37:20.700
sure that the people with alzheimer's have less of it and they know exactly why that would cause the
01:37:26.940
alzheimer's and they know that it can be increased by adding this thing called the compound called p73
01:37:36.300
dash a20 so some lab has developed this so it would be easy to develop the compound um developed in piper
01:37:46.780
labs uh but because it's a drug it would have to go through a whole bunch of uh fda testing etc so it's
01:37:56.860
not it's not on the horizon it would have to be tested but this does sound more promising than almost
01:38:03.740
anything i've ever heard in that domain so i'm going to end on that bit of optimism i'm going way
01:38:10.940
late but it's a sunday didn't you enjoy spending some extra time
01:38:24.060
all right it's why smokers rarely get alzheimer's i've ever heard that is that true smokers really
01:38:43.340
but i will say a few words to the beloved members of uh locals who might want to stay around a little
01:38:51.740
bit longer the rest of you enjoy your sunday i hope this was uh useful to you i try to be useful
01:39:00.300
uh useful doing my best all right locals i'm going to come at you
01:39:11.580
bada bada bada local supporters will be private in uh oh maybe this isn't working