to it. If you're on social media there's a very big uptick in relationship experts telling you don't bother because everybody's broken and if you marry a woman she's just going to take your money and monkey branch to another guy.

So on one hand you've got all these experts telling you that traditional marriage with a human being is a losing proposition for men and they should just not do it, keep their money and just serial date or find some woman who's willing to have no financial interest and still be married to you for some reason.

So if you start combining these two groups you've got one group saying that our human method of having children is way too expensive and the colleges are making them idiots and they'll grow up to hate you because they'll be all woke and they might die of an overdose etc. Or you could have an AI that satisfies all your basic instincts. It gives you a mate that doesn't hate you. It gives you immortality. There's going to be a whole bunch of people who would have had children and then regretted it because you know they got divorced and they lost custody and all the bad things that happen. Those people are just going to say you know what I don't think marriage would work out for me so I'll just take this other AI option here.

And you don't need to take reproduction down to zero to end humanity. You only have to take it down lower than 2.1 I think. 2.1 reproductions per couple. So if you get below replacement rate AI is a future and I think we might be headed that way.

Born Lorg points out a surprising bit of information and this does surprise me. The United States is producing more oil than any country in history right now. Right now the United States is pumping more oil than any country in the history of the world. Did you know that? I had no idea. I knew that we had the potential to be number one but I thought Biden was clamping down on it too hard.

Can I make a confession? You know I like to point out when people on the left are brainwashed by their media. I appear to have been brainwashed. I appear to have been brainwashed. Because if you had asked me to write an essay about the energy situation in the United States I would say well number one the main thing you have to know, because I've been watching conservative media too much, the main thing you need to know is that our oil production is way down compared to where it was under Trump. It's higher than Trump just a little bit but it's higher than the highest point of Trump.

How many of you knew that before you heard it today? How many of you knew that the United States was pumping more oil than anybody in the history of ever? Some of you knew it. Good for you. Good for you. But those of you like me who didn't know it, no I knew it was a lot. I knew the US was potentially the biggest producer. I've known that for a long time. But I feel like I was brainwashed and when I read this story I felt like I was coming out of it. Like I had the experience of recovery a little bit. Are any of you having that experience right now? Is there anybody here who is saying holy I watched the news every day and I had no idea? Yeah some of you were having that experience. But like you said a lot of you already knew that so you were ahead of me on this one.

If I could give you one piece of useful advice about the news, never assume that the one who's brainwashed is the one disagreeing with you. Do not start with that assumption because it's just too often wrong. Just assume that it could be you and then reason from that point on. Right? Don't assume you're right and then reason from that. That makes no sense. Assume you're equally likely to have been brainwashed and go from there.

Here's an interesting post by Billy Oppenheimer on creativity and genius. Well let me just make one more point about the gas prices. So gas prices are being held lower than they normally would be except the US is producing so much that we're exporting now. So do you think it's an accident that in an election year we just hit our peak oil production? Kind of feels like an election year thing doesn't it? That makes you wonder what is true. Has Biden been lying to his side and telling them that he was going to be the climate change president while doing everything he could to boost production? Or did it just happen on his own? Could it be that the free market was still free enough that there were no restrictions that held them back enough and they just kept drilling?

So I don't know. My suspicion is we wouldn't have been here in a non-election year but I don't know about that. If I were a Republican how would I handle this if I'm running for president? Would I say oh got to drill more? Because then you're susceptible because then Biden says I drilled more than Trump. You know we're at a high new level. So that do