at the company Polymarket, that's an online gambling firm so you can gamble on political things happening, stuff like that, it's been cleared for US adoption after some board CFTC ruling. *Zero Hedge* is writing about this. But what's interesting about it is that one of the investors of Polymarket is Don Trump Jr. and he's also an adviser.

So right after, fairly soon after Don Jr. became an investor, they got approved to operate in the United States. Now do you think there will be any pushback as in he got some special treatment? Well, I don't know that he got any special treatment, but don't you think that the reason that he was maybe who they courted to be an investor is because they knew that if he were an investor, maybe some doors would open that wouldn't ordinarily open? It would be a smart thing to do.

So every company tries to put on their board or have investors who have more than just the ability to be on a board or the ability to invest. They look for people who are twofers, that they have some kind of network of contacts or they have some superpower or they operate some other company that's vital to what you're doing. So it's the most ordinary thing in the world to have investors and/or board members who can give you that extra advantage. It's all legal.

But it made me wonder this. If you're Don Jr., isn't every single serious company in the world some kind of a conflict of interest like everything? If Don Jr. had invested in Nvidia or been on the board of Nvidia, wouldn't that look like some kind of conflict of interest? It would look like it. And almost anything you touched, whether it was a defense business or an AI or one of the platforms, just about anything he touched, somebody would say, now that you're involved, the government's going to give them some big contracts and stuff.

And I don't think it should be illegal for a non-elected family member, you know, just a family member to be blocked from doing ordinary things as long as it's somewhat transparent. Like everybody knows who Don Jr. is, right? So and if it's a public fact that he invested in it and it's a public fact that it got allowed to do business in the US, that's probably all you can do. It's probably all you can do is just make sure everybody knows. I don't think you should make that illegal. If he were elected to office, if you were the one in office, then yeah, maybe. But unelected people, even close family members, I don't know. Seems too far if you block them from doing things that are ordinary business.

Well, you know the story of the Venezuelan drug boat that got blown up by the US military and that happened the other day and it made me wonder how much of the ocean can we survey? Do you ever wonder that? Was it pure luck or some kind of tip that allowed them to catch this one particular boat or do they have some kind of advanced technology that they can see everything and they know where all the smuggling boats are and maybe they act on the ones that are actable?

So I asked Grok to estimate what percentage of the ocean around Venezuela they could actually monitor somewhat continuously and it said maybe 70 to 90% of the ocean within 200 to 300 nautical miles of Venezuela. Now that's Grok. So I don't know if it really could make a reasonable estimate, but it did describe to me all the ways in which they watch the water. So they've got a number of aircraft that are flying all the time, but you know there's not an aircraft over every inch of the water all the time. They've got satellites, but again those are sporadic. They've got drones and then they've got the ships themselves and they would have some kind of perimeter that they're watching all the time.

But apparently what makes this feasible is that there are some places that are far more likely to have this traffic. So they're going to put more resources where they know they've got a higher chance of catching somebody. So I don't kno