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Back to episode — Episode 3040 CWSA 12/08/25

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dy and when. Don't you think that that's going to have an immense impact on your health? If you knew, oh, this medicine works, but not if I eat a potato within an hour, because there's a whole bunch of those things where there is a difference. So imagine when AI can actually wrap its little head around that. How many of you have ever heard of a thing called synesthesia? Synesthesia. I've talked…

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ing like an Elon Musk farming—what would you call it—experiment. I know that Elon's brother has been working on indoor farming, so I think they understand the potential here, but I'd love to see it go to the next level.

Here's what I think it's going to look like. If I were trying to solve all the problems of farming being too expensive so I could bring down the cost of food, I would build it underground. So first I'd have the Boring Company. They can do underground tunnels really inexpensively. So once you have a way to inexpensively build a tunnel, then you could also redirect the sunlight from above into it so you get all the free sunlight. You could just do it by mirrors. I'm pretty sure you get all the goodness of the sun even if you redirect it through mirrors. So you'd have all the free sun, but you wouldn't have any weather related problems.

In theory, you could create your own seeds, couldn't you? Why is it so hard to create your own seeds? I feel like that wouldn't be the hardest thing, but I don't know about that domain. So maybe seeds would be a different problem. But if you could get—oh, and you'd also have essentially free land. So if you're doing your farming below ground, it's basically free on top of owning the above ground.

So the other thing I would do is do the food processing directly above the underground farm. So it doesn't have to go very far. And then along the same lines, I'd make sure that your underground farm is really close to the store that's going to sell the food or close to the consumer. So you want to get rid of almost all the transportation. You want to get rid of all the risk of weather. And then, correct me if I'm wrong, but if you're underground and you have a controlled environment, you're not going to need fertilizer because you just keep the bugs out in the first place. And you're not going to need too much extra water because isn't it true that you can recycle your water? It's basically hydroponic. Couldn't you just—yeah.

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

Fertilizer isn't just for bugs. Well, that's true, right? It's not just for bugs. It's for growing more efficiently. But if you want to go organic, you still might prefer a smaller vegetable without any fertilizer. So I'm not sure about that trade-off. Anyway, I don't want to obsess about that, but I think we don't know how to do it cheaper at the moment, but there should be similar to how we're doing nuclear power. So the government finally figured out, hey, if we can figure out how to iterate nuclear power, we can get to something that works faster. So that's what the government's doing. They should do the same thing with indoor farms and they should be underground.

By the way, if you put it above ground, then it can still get ripped up by weather. So I think underground farms are the future. And then, of course, you'd obviously have robots doing all the work. So you wouldn't have labor, you wouldn't probably—you could get rid of 80% of all the costs. That's just my guess.

All this farming talk means people have to do something. Well, nuclear plus hydroponics is a paradise farm.

All right, let's move on. You may have heard of this already, but there's some company made an AI version of an actress called Tilly Norwood. So it's an AI actress that's been created. They haven't quite fully commercialized it yet, but the idea is that it would be a hirable actress and they would try to turn it into a star so that your AI star would be not eating up all your profits.

And weirdly, the smartest thing I've heard about this was a quote by George Clooney, who of course is a movie star. And what he said about these AI actresses and actors, he said, quote, "AI is going to have the same problem that we have in Hollywood, which is making a star is not so easy." And I thought, "Holy cow, that's the smartest thing I've heard about this topic." If you can't do it with real people and it's really hard and it's somewhat accidental because nobody knows exactly why one person becomes a movie star and one person doesn't—I mean George Clooney is a seriously sexy guy, I'm told. So you can say to yourself, "Oh, he's very sexy." But aren't there millions of super sexy men? Aren't there lots of people who could probably act as well as he can? But why did we decide that this one person is the extra sexy person?

Well, some of it is the media. Meaning that if People magazine puts you on the cover and says you're the sexiest person, it just sort of becomes a thing. Would they be able to do that with an AI? And I believe that the problem with AI art will be the same problem here that on day one if you hear that it's an AI you might be interested, you'd be curious how it works, but eventually you just feel like it wasn't real and I don't know if you could ever get to the point where if you know it's not real you can have the same emotional connection that you would with a real person in a movie. Even though the real person in a movie would not really be real because they're acting, but I do feel like George Clooney has the right take on this that if it's super hard to do it with a human, it's not going to be that much easier just because you have an AI.

So I would guess 99 out of 100 companies that try to make an AI movie star will fail. So it's not good odds.

All right. According to Axios, President Trump is betting his presidency and the future of the Re

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publican party on lightly regulated fast expansion of AI. First of all, do you buy that summary? Do you think that the Trump presidency will depend on how well he regulates AI? Now, regulating it well might mean not regulating it much and getting the states out of the way and giving the feds primacy over the regulation and then getting out of the way. So I kind of agree that that's true, but I do…

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