ey didn't do anything wrong because it's just the association.

What does it do to modern black Americans if when you're thinking of black Americans you're thinking of slavery because it's just in your mind and it's really part of the narrative? What does that do to how you feel about black Americans and how they feel about themselves and how they fit in? Well since being a slave would be a horrible association, you're taking modern black Americans and you're making people think about their existence as slaves. That is the worst association you could ever put on anybody if you want them to be successful in the modern world.

So from a history perspective, yeah if you're just trying to describe what happened of course you want to include as much of the history of slavery as makes sense of course. But if you're trying for people to be happy and successful then persuasion and how people feel about things and associations and the psychological impact of things has to be a big part of the decision. And I can tell you for sure that black Americans would be way better off if there were some device that you could hold up to everybody's head to make them forget that slavery ever happened. If you could make everybody forget that slavery had ever happened then black people would wake up in the morning and say, "Huh I guess anything's possible." And they would just work toward their best life and they would have the best outcomes that are possible in the real world.

But will that ever happen? No that will never happen because there are people who make money by emphasizing the negative parts. So as long as there's a business to be made in emphasizing the negative, people will do it. Yeah. So that's what I think.

Elon Musk has denied on X the Wall Street Journal's report that he's decided to scrap his third party idea. He has not decided definitively to scrap that in favor of supporting JD Vance. So Musk told us to not believe everything you read in the Wall Street Journal. So we won't believe that until we have some confirmation if it ever comes.

Well the University of California in San Francisco reports that at UCSF they discovered a protein that reverses brain aging in mice. How many times have you seen a story in the news that somebody reversed aging in a mouse? I feel like this story has been coming out for 40 or 50 years every few weeks. Hey we discovered something that will reverse aging in a mouse. Now how many things have reversed aging in human beings? Zero. Is there any pill that I could buy that would reverse my aging? And yet every freaking week for 50 years we figured out how to reverse aging in a mouse.

You should not believe anything that is reported about success with a mouse. The percentage of those that translate into a real functional human medical process is really low. It's very unusual but the way the news reports it it makes you think, wait it worked on the mouse and they wouldn't bother testing it on the mouse unless it would tell you something about whether it would work on a human being. So wow this is promising. No it's not. It's not promising. The odds of any of this ever seeing the light of day and turning into a pill that will reverse your brain's age is really really low. Like really really low. So low don't even think about it.

Anyway so I've noticed that Ukraine and the Ukrainians have what I call a sunk cost problem. So in economics a sunk cost is money you've already spent. So what you should never do is say, "Damn it I've already spent so much in this project that I have to keep spending more to finish it." No you don't. The amount that you've already spent is just gone. You should make your decision as if it didn't make any difference at all.

And gamblers would do the same. If you're gambling and you've lost a million dollars so far. If you say to yourself I can't stop now because I've already I'm down a million. I got to win it back. That's sunk cost. You should look at every bet as if it's a new decision independent of anything you've already done.

And likewise the Ukrainians often are saying stuff like we can't give up any land to Putin because so many Ukrainians have died trying to keep that land. To which I say that's a sunk cost. Those people are not going to pop back to life no matter what you do. They are just gone. And while you can respect their sacrifice you should not be making your new decisions based on the fact that they died. And it looks like they are doing that and that's a sunk cost fallacy.

Now I don't know if the leader