is why. You know, when I built my own house, the one I'm in, it took way too long to get the approvals in my opinion. Now, in my case, I could tell you the actual person who was holding it up because we had one person in charge of approvals.

Now, if that one person woke up every morning and thought, "Hey, I got to get help Scott get his house built," probably I could have got all the approvals in two months, but I think it took well over a year. But there was a name to it. There was one person who if they did not have as many tasks as they have and it was mostly because they were overworked but that would be a very fixable problem. I would say all right this guy Bob can't do this in two months which we should be able to do it. It's going to take him a year. So can we get two Bobs? Can we get six Bobs? How many Bobs do we need? Can we borrow them from another place just for a year? Is there a way to unretire some people who for a little extra money?

Can we get a private entity, let's say a builder to pay the approvers with some kind of oversight, so it's not completely under control? Why is it we never hear the people? I want to know the name of the person who's not getting it done. Doesn't that feel like that's missing? It feels like it's missing to me.

So if I don't know the person who's not doing the job, and I'm not talking about politicians, like we can yell at Newsom all day long, but it's not like he's sitting in an office with a stamp and he refuses to stamp something. But there is somebody sitting in an office with a stamp and they're not stamping something. Why? Now, if you ask them, I guarantee they have a good reason. They're going to say something like, "Well, it wouldn't be safe because there's this inspection that hasn't happened." Well, who is that guy or gal? Who's that person? Who is it who doesn't have enough time to inspect it? Why don't I have 10 more of him? What would it cost me to bribe somebody who had the right skills to come in and work for a year?

I just feel like there's a whole layer here that's missing. And if we treat it like it's just a regular process and we're just yelling at it for being slow, we're not really trying. You know, if this were Elon Musk's property, do you think it would take a year to get anything approved? I don't think so. I mean, if he had full control of every part of it. No. He would just move more resources where you need them and get rid of people who weren't doing the job and next thing you know it would be a two-month approval instead of a year. That's what I think.

Well, the Trump administration is doing what they call a whole of government approach to try to lower beef prices. Now, beef appears to be something that is so important to the American psyche that it's different from other food. Would you say that's true? That if your beef is too expensive, it just feels like food is too expensive. So it's not like, oh, our broccoli costs too much because then you just eat some other vegetable. But if you really like beef, and that would describe a lot of Americans, if you can't get that at a good price, that just feels like food is too expensive. So I can see why that would be a big priority.

It's just hard to go from, well, if beef is expensive, I'll just get chicken and I'll be just as happy because you wouldn't be. We just wouldn't be just as happy. You could substitute almost any vegetable for another vegetable and people would say, "Well, you know, I prefer broccoli, but Brussels sprouts are fine."

You know, what are you yelling at me? Let me see if I can look at that comment. Very thing at the FDA, it's a bureaucracy, right? Okay. Imagine if we had an all of government approach to just get rid of bureaucracy. We kind of have that but I'd love to see it even bigger.

All right. Anyway, so the whole of government approach to make beef less expensive. Now, what would be the first question you would ask in that domain? The first question you would ask is why is it more expensive? Like what happened to it? Well, I didn't know. How many of you know why beef got way more expensive? Is there even one of you in the comments? Don't look it up. Don't look it up. Without looking it up, do you know why it's more expensive?

Well, some of it is the normal reasons. You know, energy is more expensive. Everything's a little more expensive. But apparently Mexico which was one of our bigger sources of beef they had some kind of disease. So we're working through that. It might be a year or two before we have some non-diseased Mexican cows. I don't know the details, but there was some kind of Mexican disease. And the only thing they could do is just shut down the Mexican supply until that's completely under control, and it probably will be in a year or two. But you just have to wait because it just takes a while to grow a cow.

So you're saying it's a screw worm? Is that what it is? Screw those worms. In the comments, people are yelling screw worm. So maybe that's the name of the bug.

All right. But we also could increase the amount of beef we get from Argentina. I don't know if it's as good, but that's another source. The government's also doing an anti-competitive probe to find out if foreign suppliers of food in general, I think. But beef specifically, they're trying to see if there's any anti-competitive thing going on because if there is, that would be an easy way to lower prices. Well, I don't know if it'd be easy, but it'd be possible, I guess.

And so it looks like—so work with me here. If we knew or we thought there was a high likelihood that beef would just drift down to a lower cost simply because two years from now we'd have a lot more cows, a lot more non-diseased cows. Does that not—so this is a real nerd question. Nerds, step to the front of the class. This question is for nerds only, who I love, by the way. You know, I love my nerds. I am one.

Would it be possible to use some kind of futures market to lower the cost of beef today if you felt confident that the price would be lower in the future? Did that make sense? So right now, you can't take the average cost of beef today and then take the average of it tomorrow, which would be lower. But if you could, it seems like you could lower the price today with not a 100% chance that it would be lower in the future, but you feel kind of confident that it would be. Don't you think you could get enough people to invest in that kind of a futures beef market that we could take advantage of the fact that with a high likelihood of being right, beef will probably be, I don't know, 40% cheaper in three years.

And so what you do is you start charging people less today with some kind of insurance or protection that the beef farmers would never lose because they're going to get some minimum payment. All right, nerds. Is there some reason that would or would not work?

Somebody's saying a 10-month gestation. So it's about two years to grow yourself a proper cow for eating. You think it already exists? You know, I was wondering about that. But if it already exists, would the prices be lower? So the comment I would look into first is does it exist? We obviously have futures markets for all kinds of commodities, but I don't know if we have them for beef. And I don't know if you could find some way to average the future and the current to lower the price. I don't know. I'll just put that out there.

According to Israel, there are still 100 to 200 Hamas fighters in tunnels in Gaza and they're not coming out, but they also don't have any hostages to trade and they're running out of food and water. What do you think Israel is going to do? If you were in one of those tunnels, would you come out or do you know that the minute you come out, you're either going to be in jail for the rest of your life or immediately murdered? Not murdered, cuz let's take the opinion out of it. You'd be killed. Whether you want to call that murder, that would be a whole different story. But you'd be killed or jailed forever. You're not going to walk away.

So what's going to happen? I think that they'll have to probably just wait it out and then a year from now there won't be anything left. We'll see.

So Pete Hegseth, Secretary of Defense, he's announced that there's going to be this federal investigation into Mark Kelly. You know, maybe they'll reinstitute him as in they'll bring him back into the military so that they can court martial him because he's one of the seditious six. And I've got mixed feelings about that. So I'm just going to give you my human opinion and my citizen opinion.

We don't treat people in the military like regular citizens. And most of us are okay with that, right? We acknowledge that the people in the military have or will have greater risk. You know, they've got more in the game and we sort of allow them an extra, let's say, privilege in society. And I'm okay with that because if they take an extra risk and I'm the beneficiary of that, I think we owe them. No. I guess that's the wrong word. It would feel appropriate to me that they get more privilege in society than I get because they're doing more. That fits for me.

So then when I watch the Mark Kelly and the seditious six, I don't like it. I don't like it, but I also don't like punishing them. Is anybody having that same feeling that there has to be some way we can deal with this that doesn't take a member or multiple members of the military, past or present, and punish them for what I consider really somewhat outrageously bad behavior. But because I think it's outrageously bad behavior and I live in a world with at least allegedly free speech, I don't have to say that they did the right thing. I don't have to say I approve of it, but sometimes you just can't leave somebody on the battlefield, so to speak.

So what I'd like to see is something that's short of punishment, but is long on education. I do like the fact that the entire public has been now accidentally educated on what is too far and what is appropriate behavior for the military and what is a crime in that context and what isn't. I feel like educating us should be enough. Is anybody having the same feeling? Because as soon as you get me in the business of punishing members of the military for what they said, you know, unless what they said is giving away secrets or something, but as bad as I think their behavior is, I'm just not cool punishing members of the military for that kind of behavior. There's got to be something in between. Anyway, that's just a feeling.

I guess Leslie Stahl of 60 Minutes was talking to Marjorie Taylor Greene and here's an interesting reframe if you want to call it that. So Marjorie Taylor Greene says she's not MAGA, she's America first. What do you think of that? Some of you saying no mercy, no mercy. Really? I don't think mercy is the right—I think that's the wrong frame. You know, we should be looking out for our own good as well as members of the military. And you know, maybe it's good for us that we're not punishing members of the military too aggressively. You know, there always has to be some kind of guard rails.

But anyway, back to Marjorie Taylor Greene. That's a pretty good reframe. Now, independent of what you think of her or her opinions, it's a pretty good reframe because MAGA, as she says, that's more