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Speaker 1: This is Monks and Maryland hosted by Michael Monks and Chris Merrill. This is Monks and Meryll.
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Speaker 2: Fund demand on Michael Monks. That's Chris Merrill. So glad to have you with us. There are some leaders out of Orange County who are spearheading this idea that there is an innovative drug therapy for people suffering from what you know as post traumatic stress disorder or PTSD. Okay, I read in the Voice of OC that President Trump, you know, recently signed an executive order that opens up this path to alternative treatment. Congressman Luke Carea Chris, who represents Central OC, has said he's working with local veteran and labor leader Nick Bernardino to create an advisory committee for companion US House legislation that he's co sponsoring, which would confid does that mean Trump's executive order and create guidelines and funding for the initiative. Okay, that's a lot of words to say. Why don't we get a translation with it? I mean, that's the Voice of OC. Do you a very fine publication, but let's break it down. Congressman Korea is with us. Congressman, thanks so much for taking the time for KFI.
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Speaker 3: Well, thank you for your interest, and yes, what does this all this mean? All this gobbled gook. We just had Memorial Day, the veterans who sacrifice their lives for this country. Every day we have twenty to forty veterans committing suicide because of their PPSD. These are the invisible wounds they've ropped back on the battlefield. We still have veterans dying for our country. They need help. They need a cure for this end, for this PTSD that haunts them. Psychedelics promises to be that cure. Presidents sign in an executive order. We just want to make sure that as we move forward that the next guy doesn't come along and reverse that order with veterans need it.
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Speaker 2: I understand what psychedelics what I mean that conjures an image? I think in folks mind, what do you mean.
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Speaker 4: Psychedelics? You know exactly what it means.
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Speaker 3: It's a lot of a lot of images. Psychedelics, magic, mushrooms, the war on drugs.
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Speaker 4: I begain.
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Speaker 3: Yes, all these things that are illegal today, classified as Class one, that are illegal are actually curing veterans. That's why the President's signed the executive order saying hey, knock it off. FDA move ahead with the trials. VA move ahead with additional testing of this cure for veterans. That's where we're act right now. Veterans are paying five to seven thousand dollars each.
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Speaker 4: For a cure.
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Speaker 3: It's illegal in the US. So where do they go. They go to Tijuana, Mexico, to Mexico get their cure. The ones that have a little bit more money, they go to Cancun pay twenty thousand dollars. This is a shameful situation. Our veterans need to leave the US to get cured. It's crazy. We want to fix that. We want to make sure veterans get their psychedelic treatment in the US.
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Speaker 2: You want to codify this, the President says, FDA, you got to do it. You're saying, we want to make sure that future presidents don't come through and undo what President Trump is doing.
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Speaker 4: The executive order right right.
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Speaker 2: I'm just I'm thinking about who would be opposed to this, and honestly, honestly, God, Congressman Karrea, I'm thinking of my father, a guy who grew up you know, Vietnam era drugs are bad. War on drugs. Everything we did in the in the sixties, the seventies, the eighties. I mean, he hates the idea of the grass being legal. He keeps talking about he keeps calling grass. That's how you know he's old school. And I'm just thinking he's going to be the one out there, old school Republican who's going to be saying this is terrible. We we're letting we're legalizing drugs. We're legalizing these psychedelics. And this is what I was afraid of. When we legalize grass. What do you say to somebody like my father.
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Speaker 3: I would say to him that the war on drugs are based on politics, not on science. Today, I have members of Congress that serve in Congress, veterans that we're going to commit suicide that went to Tijuana got cured with this medication psychedelics, and their normal members of society. Okay, why do we dispute this cure? We have evidence. My colleague in Washington right now, General Jack Bergman, three star Marine General, highest ranking officer to ever serve in Congress, is my co league in this legislation.
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Speaker 4: We're trying to save lives.
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Speaker 3: Why would your father object to saving lives, to stopping veteran suicides.
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Speaker 2: To your point, Congressman Carrera, I think he would take a look at this and say, you're working with a labor leader. This Nick Bernardino, you're working with a I'm working.
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Speaker 3: With I'm working I'm working with a general Jack Bergman in Congress, a Republican on My Path Caucus, which is a psychedelic caucus, which by the way, has more Republican members than Democratic members. We have a president, a Republican president that signed an executive order. We have a Texas former governor, Okay, Governor Perry also who got treated by psychedelics, who also is leading the charge in Texas fifty million dollars of Texas tax bier dollars to research this, along with the federal government another fifty million dollars.
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Speaker 4: And what we want to do in.
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Speaker 3: California is push California also to get on board and help cure veterans. This is not a treatment, This is a cure. And once you cure veterans or PPSD, this cures people who are alcoholics. I have evidence, I have people that have also been drug autic that have been cured. This as a revolutionary magic cure.
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Speaker 4: Is it really a cure? Well, let's find out.
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Speaker 3: Let's see the research, so your dad can get on board and say, you know what, this is a cure. We messed up sixty years ago with our war on drugs. Now you've got to come back and see what LSD, the psychedelics I begain, what are they good for and what are they not for?
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Speaker 4: Kylas Steimer's maybe as well.
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Speaker 2: Yes, Congressman Luke Carrera is Korea, excuse me, is joining us right now and he's talking about this initiative. And again President Trump signed the executive order. His measure would make sure that a future president doesn't come through an undo that. And I think what you said there at the very end is probably where the uphill battle probably lies, and that we've had sixty plus years of being told all drugs are bad, drugs are bad, drugs are bad. So I mean, is this something that can be that public sentiment can be overturned that quickly?
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Speaker 3: You think, I don't think so. I don't think that public sentiment is going to be. Like you talked to you about your father, who who is dead, said, I got a lot of people in my district who said no way. And then I have veterans that came back who are close to taking their own lives.
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Speaker 4: This was their last.
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Speaker 3: Solution, last hope, and they got cured. I'm not doing it because I want to do psychedelics. I've never done psychedelics. But if I have a veteran who says, help me, this saved my life, help me save the lives of other veterans, you know what I'm going to do it. I'm going to work on this issue. And that's why Luke Correa, General Jack Bergman, other members of Congress who are veterans who have been cured are on this quest.
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Speaker 2: Congressman Lou Correa, a Democrat from Orange County. Congressman Korea. We do appreciate you taking some time for us. I know we had some difficulty trying to connect last week. You guys were busy, but thanks for checking in with the the day to talk about this. It's something we're curious in following, and please keep us updated. We'll check it again. Thank you, sir.
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Speaker 4: Do me a favor.
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Speaker 3: Stay with us, say keep an open mind, stay with us and follow the fact.
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Speaker 2: I got an open mind, but that's mostly because I just disagree with everything my father says, and I've got an open mind because I do drugs.
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Speaker 4: You guys, are you well, gentlemen?
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Speaker 2: Very good.
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Speaker 1: You're listening to Monks and Merrill on demand from k f I A M six forty more stimulating talk.
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Speaker 2: It's Monks and Meryl. I don't want to interrupt you. Raise your hand if you just got a text message from someone with a star on Hollywood Walker Fame. Okay, so you're raising your hand. What's going on? Buddy just texted me Bill handle it handle god? Can you imagine how takes him to do a text? No, Shotgun Tom Kelly, friend of mine? Who is that?
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Speaker 4: You don't know?
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Speaker 2: Shotgun Tom Kelly from k Earth one on one. Come on, Jesse, you're gonna have to turn on Heather's microphone now I know. And congratulations on that. Yeah, that's very cool.
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Speaker 4: Is he listening? I don't know?
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Speaker 2: He said, Uh, he just sent me and I knew this too.
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Speaker 4: Yeah.
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Speaker 2: He got into the into the Radio Hall of Fame. Oh that's great. Yeah I saw that. Yeah cool. So while I sent him a text to earlier this month and I said, hey, I saw the KTLA Route sixty six segment he does the open for Andy Reestmeyer's segment on the root sixty six times. I said, I just saw that was really cool seeing you, and so I just told him he's my favorite and he said I'm his favorite talk show host. Well that's great, isn't that nice? We'll call you bb Gun Merrill. That's funny. Actually, Heather, come on, that was quick. I have nothing to come back on. That was pretty good.
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Speaker 5: And we're going to call you Flair monks Flair.
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Speaker 2: See that Feld? That feels insulting.
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Speaker 5: Yeah, it wasn't, though. That's the one that's like.
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Speaker 2: Heather Brooker is you want to guess? She's CAFI reporter and host of KFI Live with Heather Brooker Sundays at Noon, as well as the award winning podcast Entertainment on the iHeartRadio app. Normally we invite you in here because you are, you know, specializing in entertainment reports. But on occasion they toss you some real news and so I'm so glad you were able to step up to the plate on this one.
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Speaker 6: I tossed myself this story.
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Speaker 2: We give Heather grief, but you are working a great story and I love this. It's about AI and the election, and Michael and I have discussed this numerous times how Spencer Pratt is sort of elevating some of these different tweets or these these shorts, these AI created shorts where he's Batman fighting off Karen Bass and Gavin Newsom's two Face and the Joker and these sorts of things. Right, But how much more AI are we going to see in the campaign trail? Is this going to be the new norm?
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Speaker 4: Now?
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Speaker 6: Well, I think we're going to see a lot more, and a lot of the experts and people that I've talked to said that it's going to definitely become the norm moving forward in actions and campaigns.
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Speaker 4: You know.
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Speaker 6: Sort of how all this story came about for me is that I when I'm looking online and I see these videos just like you guys do everybody does, And you go to the comments sections of any political campaign, but specifically for Spencer Pratt's campaigns or anybody who opposes him, and there's this discourse and the comments of people saying, if you're supporting Spencer Pratt, you must be a bot.
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Speaker 5: Like, oh, this person is a bot.
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Speaker 6: This isn't real, you know, there's no way this many people could possibly be supporting him. So I started looking into it, trying to figure out is he using bots to kind of inflate his popularity. So I spoke with Katie Harbeth's she's the founder and CEO of Anchor Change, and she's also a former Facebook public policy director who's worked on election integrity issues for many, many years. And I asked her. I was like, is there bots being used one in Spencer's campaign or any campaigns that you can tell? And she was like, I've not seen any widespread evidence of candidate's u using these bots to sort of flood the comments sections, you know, whether it's artificially or boosted.
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Speaker 5: But social media.
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Speaker 6: Platforms since twenty sixteen are much more aggressive in detecting and removing spammy bot activity. So she's saying that it's all.
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Speaker 2: Still happening all over them. That's why we have Russian and Chinese bot farms and.
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Speaker 6: Right and that, you know, And that was really my point is it's like, well, it's happening. It's got to be happening at some point, because some of these literally look like they are fake accounts. They have no followers, no photo, like the things that we're sort of told to look at for signs of not being a real of numbers name, yes, right, yeah, not an actual person, not an actual like user name. She says, Now, what people might be seeing our AI powered tools to help campaigns manage like large volumes of communication, like auto replies to dms and auto replies to comments. But AI is being used in campaigns, and she says it is not going anywhere. What's going to I'm gonna know what. I'm gonna let her tell you, guys what she had to say.
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Speaker 7: I think we will see AI used more and more. There are some states that do you require for political ads that there is a label that says it's been AI generated. I think what will start to get tricky though, is I think those laws were made with thinking about deep fakes in mind, right, like the AI version of your opponent saying something they may not have actually said. But again, there's a lot of versions of the AI that I think campaigns are going to want to use when they want a particular backdrop of a certain farm at sunset with a certain colored barn, right, Like, it takes a lot of money to go and find that physical space versus you could be able to create that with AI or be able to do editing. And it really does level the playing field. For some campaigns that don't have that much money, they can create a lot more content.
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Speaker 6: So basically she's saying AI isn't going anywhere. We are going to see it maybe in different forms and shapes over the years and especially in elections. But where that gets really tricky is how this sort of AI is influenced seeing voters and whether or not they're being transparent about their use of AI.
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Speaker 2: So who's looking into this? Because it does seem like we know AI is a big issue in Hollywood, don't use AI stuff. That's why it's been interesting to see AI stuff platformed in the LA Mayor's race because we know Hollywood is like one of the number one issues that the candidates been talking about and folks don't want AI. There are there attempts to regulate this or perhaps Bannon, I know you mentioned maybe ensuring that there's a reference to the fact that it was created by AI, But is there any attempt to prohibit it altogether?
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Speaker 6: Well, I mean, yeah, you're absolutely right. I don't think we've ever seen such egregious and in your face use of AI like we have, you know, in videos coming from Spencer Pratt's campaign, specifically, which is interesting because he's in Hollywood, where creators are actively and vocally against the use of AI. So that's been an interesting choice, you know, on his part two to utilize that to support him. But I think what what Katie was saying is that there are some states right now that require disclosure, yeah, for any AI use. California is not one of them at this point. So I think that, yeah, moving forward, maybe some there may be some regulation required. There may be some people who may propose something to be more clear about any AI use. But I think the real issue is that people need to look at who is using the AI, who is using influencers. That's another big problem. Candidates are using influencers.
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Speaker 2: Yes, Tom Syer's got yeah, you.
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Speaker 6: Know, there's been casting notices that came out for a people. He's paying people like twenty dollars an hour to create videos for him for his campaign, and people are like, you're a billionaire, why are you paying twenty dollars an hour to somebody to create a video? Will do it, because somebody will do it, And a lot of people did, and they had almost the exact same script that they were using because they were cast to create these videos. So the big issues that you know that she says we need to look for is, yes, the use of AI in terms of like any videos or campaign promotions, commercials. And also there is some use of bots, but it's not as rampant I think she says as we think it is.
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Speaker 2: You know, so even if we disclose though Heather Brooker, host of KFI Live with Heather Brooker on Sundays, we had to give her the show because it was named after h and also one of the great reporters we have here at KFI. What is the what does disclosure do?
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Speaker 4: I mean?
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Speaker 2: Does that really clean up the election campaign at all? And and and what is what needs to be disclosed and what doesn't need to be disclosed? Where is my freedom of speech limited? Is it generative AI? Or is it when it's helpful AI? Do we have to disclose this when we use AI? Say you've got somebody who's helping to write legal briefs, we had need to have something at the bottom of a legal brief that says portions of this legal brief. Maybe we run that that that the spots portions of this of the program may have been recorded. Yes, that's because we'll play something we pulled off of uh you know KTLA, or you just played that recording of somebody, so we have we have this disclosures, portions of the program maybe recorded. Yeah, we just ignore those disclosures. It goes back to that.
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Speaker 6: Whole idea of c ya cover your can we say ass no, allright, we can't.
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Speaker 5: Really I feel like I've heard other people say it. Anyway, It's that's.
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Speaker 2: It's that Shannon's allowed to she she used up the whole allotment for the day fair.
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Speaker 6: Okay, it's that whole idea of c y A. That's why you're seeing some people who are coming out and they're saying.
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Speaker 2: Then it gets thrown away like Prop sixty five.
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Speaker 5: Yeah, sure, But so what's the point.
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Speaker 6: That's their risk that they're running that they're going to just put it out there and see if anybody notices and try to get away with, you know, whatever they're doing. But at the end of the day, it is up to the voters at this point to ask the questions to and Katie says she says, look at all political content with inquisitive curiosity rather than just assuming something is true. My mom, who is eighty kind of bucks, the mold on all of this in terms of like, she's an older person that's chronically online.
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Speaker 5: She loves her YouTube, she loves TikTok, she loves all of it.
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Speaker 6: I've gotten her to the point now where if she sees a video or a candidate making a statement or something that feels funny, she'll send it to me and say is this real or is this AI? And I have to be like, that's AI or unfortunately, always go.
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Speaker 2: To the backyard trampoline and have an evening and jump on it and have fun.
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Speaker 5: Umber that weird it's the talking puppies.
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Speaker 6: No, it's never quite that egregious, but it's some stuff you know that is a little like, oh, that's a little funny.
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Speaker 5: And one thing I have to remember.
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Speaker 2: Too, there is Spencer Pratt really Batman.
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Speaker 5: And I had to say, yes, she is.
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Speaker 4: He is.
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Speaker 6: But one thing I have to say too is that a lot of these videos that are being made are not always made by the candidates themselves. They're made by fans and.
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Speaker 2: It's a choice on whether you platform them. And I guess that Spencer Pratt's campaign hasn't created these AI videos that have gone viral and great songs and the comic book style storytelling that they're not made in the house, they're made by supporters. And then he retweets them and he's got a big following, so.
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Speaker 6: He's a big following. He reshares it, he reposts it. Same thing on the national level too. So it's just something everybody needs to be aware of, keep an eye out for, don't be afraid to ask questions and look at things with a critical eye, as we should do with everything that we see online.
00:19:28
Speaker 2: You want to stick around or you gotta get going.
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Speaker 5: I can stay all right.
00:19:33
Speaker 2: Oh did I say that out loud?
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Speaker 6: Oh?
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Speaker 2: I have more AI questions because I feel like we're also we're also tripping on a again. I brought it up a little bit. I think we got a First Amendment issue going on when we talk about this. Please and not only that, but as you know, AI is using all the water and power and sure, it's leading to an explosion of misinformation that's being used by bad actors to influence our social norms. And of course there are a select few people that are poised to become billllionaires. While you still can't afford the foundations of the American dream, But have you considered how cute some of those AI animal videos are. I say it's worth it. Seems like not all of you feel the same way though, the billionaire backlash. Next, Monks and Meryl KFI AM six forty. We're live everywhere in the iHeartRadio app.
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Speaker 1: You're listening to Monks and Meryll on demand from KFI AM six.
00:20:23
Speaker 2: Give a tappy tap tap on that podcast on the iHeart Radio app to subscribe to it, and you'll never miss a moment of Well Meryl. Because Monks has been suspended for next week because of the way that you were treating Elmer. Well, I think you'll be able to hold down the fort I apologize to Elmer, and I look forward to serving my suspension with dignity. Good luck with the election. That felt, Yeah, was that intentional that you did that? No, I just scheduled a vacation. It's my spouse's birthday. Incidentally, Tuesday we go to Carmel and then about a week after, it dawns on me, wait a second, wait a tick, And so you thought I'll just double down here and I'll make sure.
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Speaker 3: No.
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Speaker 2: I ran to the bosses like we've made a mistake. Be terrible to Elmer. I'm not gonna be here on election Day.
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Speaker 8: And they're like, this is Deanna. I love Elmer. You guys gotta be nicer to him.
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Speaker 2: We will.
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Speaker 8: He was a little upset by yesterday, I know, so let's rectify that.
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Speaker 4: Have a good weekend.
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Speaker 2: We both kissed him on the way out. So for those unfamiliar, Elmer is the tech director for Gary and Shannon prior to this show. And then we have Jesse. Jesse had jury duty yesterday. By the way, did you hang anybody yesterday? I hope so? Did you convict anyone? Did you send an innocent man to his death?
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Speaker 5: There was someone with the last name Monks, So I didn't listen to the case.
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Speaker 2: I just convicted him.
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Speaker 4: Good.
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Speaker 2: That's my cousin, and he deserved it, not listening to Monks. That's basically all right. We weren't mean to Elmer. I think they were making a fun stink about it on Gary and Shannon and it did get some people defensive, but we basically said we're not cool enough for Elmer because Gary and Shannon are cooler than we are, and he's playing music for cool people. Jesse knows we're dorks.
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Speaker 5: Well, he just played like robot rock.
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Speaker 2: Which I think he's trying to raise us to his level rather than sync to ours. Heather Brooker is joining us right now because they wouldn't let her on Gary and Shannon again. She is a KFI reporter, host of KFI Alive with Heather Brooker Sundays at noon and also the award winning podcast Entertained Me on the iHeartRadio. But we were discussing AI in politics. Let's go the other way around. How about politics in AI. I'm fascinated by this. And now you're going to talk more about the AI this weekend right on your Sunday show.
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Speaker 6: Yeah, CAFI Live, We're going to have that full interview with Katie Harboth really interesting stuff.
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Speaker 2: So I was reading this article from Axio so about basically the billionaires are trying to figure out how they can hang on to their billions of dollars that AI is going to bring them because many of them. In fact, there was a quote here too, and I want to say it wasn't who's the guy from a mooday from ananthropic They do the claude, the AI claude. He says, if they don't support a good version, they're inevitably going to get a bad version designed by a mob. In other words, legislation controlling the AI. Elon Musk called for universal high income, not a universal income, a universal high income. So I wonder how that plays with the Elon Musk fans that kind of jumped on board with him when he was part of the Trump administration. That now he's calling for something that is not only liberal, but uber liberal. When you talk about a universal income, he's talking about a universal high income, all based on the advancements of AI. In many cases, you've got these billionaires who are in charge of the AI looking to become trillionaires. And there is massive concern that we could be seeing a repeat of history. Michael, you're a student of history, and I know you and I have had long, boring conversations about the Russian Revolution? Are we setting ourselves up for? Are we setting ourselves? I mean, I can talk to you about it. I know you can, please do I know I called Bolshevik on it a long time. Oh I love the Roman Okay, So, but what we saw there was such inequity that you had the bourgeoise in the proletariat, and finally people rose up, and we've seen this play out through history, and to their credit, these these tech giants are saying, we're actually going to have to figure out how to redistribute our own wealth before people come at us with pitchforks. Do we think that at some point the government is going to try to put some guardrails on this AI because it seems like every time somebody approaches it it gets shot down as being anti capitalistic our current government.
00:24:28
Speaker 5: No, well it's not likely.
00:24:31
Speaker 2: I mean, this stuff was was early on. The fledgling stuff was there when when Biden was in office.
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Speaker 6: Rich people want to be richer. They always will keep pursuing whatever avenue they can to get more money to stockpile their with wealth.
00:24:45
Speaker 7: I would.
00:24:45
Speaker 6: I'm curious to know which billionaires are wanting to say, oh, we got to share some of this before you know, people come after us, because that is not a very billionaire mindset.
00:24:55
Speaker 2: Jeff Bezos, you could double the taxes I pay and it's not going to help that teacher and queen.
00:25:01
Speaker 3: Yeah.
00:25:01
Speaker 2: So he's arguing that the tax code should help lower income earners more directly, not just punish millionaires. He actually wants redistribution. Sam Altman from chat GPT. He says universal basic compute the idea that people should access AI's productive power, not just a government check. So basically, here's a tool. Everyone should have access to our tool. But did you hear him say recently that it should be treated like a utility. He could envision AI being a utility. He should see it basically we'd get a bill for how much AI we use, which I guess, I mean, I'll listen, what do you mean? People want to use it, and it does use our resources, It's going to take some costs. But that kind of scares me that that kind of utility would be owned by another corporation. I think we really lost control of our utilities when so many of them became private.
00:25:48
Speaker 6: I think that is something that is going to be more viable than the tax code situation and any redistribution of wealth in any way. I can totally see AI becoming so ingrained in our society, in our day to day life, because so many people already use it and rely on it. Sometimes they may not even know that they're using AI, and it is such a drain on our resources that I can absolutely see that happening, more so than you know, redistribution of what.
00:26:19
Speaker 2: We're already seeing people that are blowing the whistle. We got to break here in a moment because Jesse's getting mad at me. But if we already see people who are upset, they're saying, look, you've got billionaires looking to become trillionaires, all at the cost of the resources, and right now they're sort of being dismissed as you know, your typical environmental wackos. But I do think that's going to continue to grow as more and more places are going, wait a minute, now there's a data center in my backyear. We're seeing pushback on data centers. They're going, there's a water for this, how do you get that power? I mean, I feel like there's a lot here that the government really does need to be involved in basic government functions, directing the infrastructure, making sure that things stay on a path through success. What is the end goal? What is the envision? And they're the organizational We should just replace the government with artificial intelligence. I bet the streetlight should get fixed. I would take any intelligence at this point.
00:27:10
Speaker 5: Terminator.
00:27:10
Speaker 2: Heather Brooker is the host of KFI Live with Heather Brooker Sundays at noon you'll hear more about this with her special interview on that day. Heather. Always good to see you, Thanks for the chat in have a good weekend.
00:27:21
Speaker 5: Thanks guys. You to enjoy your vacage.
00:27:23
Speaker 2: I'll do my best, all right. Think about this. You drive past a wall, a fake building, a vacant lot, maybe even a school campus, and you have no idea what it is underneath you. Well, East La just got that reminder the hard way, and so did some birds. The dangers, hiding and plain sight are next. On Monks and Meryll.
00:27:42
Speaker 1: You're listening to Monks and Merrill onder the air from kf I AM six four.
00:27:48
Speaker 2: Available anywhere on the irt radio app. It's Monks and Meryll and Michael Monks. That's Chris Meryl. Happy Friday to you. There is a mountain lion sighting in Santa Monica. I don't know if you saw this, but I did. It's very cute. Well, I saw the video. That's an adorable the mountain lion. Yes, I saw some mountain lion kittens. You know that they're track They tracked mountain lions here and one of the ones that are tracking they posted some pictures and they are really cute. Like you could pet them. Yes, the claws are very long already though very scary. But yeah, there was a cat spotted around eight this morning, later seen hiding in the bushes of a home near fourteenth Street in Montana Avenue, and the resident of the home snapped a photo of this lion just resting in the yard. So if you thought tourism in Santa Monica was down, you're wrong. A few other things here. Oh did you want to just oh was that your Was that your bridge into the animal story? Is that what you were doing?
00:28:39
Speaker 3: No?
00:28:39
Speaker 2: No, no, no, no, Well, because I wanted to bring up this Riverside apartment company, you should have done that first, because that's a bigger story than the lion. Yeah. So it's complex fire Riverside, it's near you see Riverside, and there are fire trucks all over that scene right now. So if you're seeing smoke Inland Empire, that's that's what's going on. If you live near U see Riverside's insurance. That's where Jesse's from. Is that your did you say, go Highlander?
00:29:05
Speaker 4: Is that what you said?
00:29:06
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's right right now? From oh, good job graduations. See Jesse's done things I haven't graduate. Really that's fun. Well, look at us. I have an advanced degree and you and I have the same job. So that's what we're not tell us too, what I keep saying. We do have another animal story though, because I'm fascinated by this oil leak in uh East La. This was earlier this week. You saw this was happening at the same time as the evacuations in Garden Grove and the fires that were going on all around. I mean last week was a lot this crazy week, This one didn't get as much buzz because of everything else that was going on. There were no real eminence. This was more of an inconvenience for people. It did become a crisis in the bird world, yeah, I mean dozens of birds covered in oil because of this East La oil spill. I did see today they finally reopened the intersection where this had happened. It had been down all these days. So it was disruptives of folks in that area, no doubt about it. But this was a crude oil pipeline. That is it's a long one. It's a long one. It flows to the is it the La River where this thing kind of yeah, it's all over well I know this thing. Yeah, yes, it rupture. Let me just say yes. And it's more than two thousand gallons of oil flooded the streets, the storm drains and the La River. And so that resulted in a cleanup. Oh, all the way down to Long Beach. This is a big, big it's a big pipeline. Pipeline, yeah, okay, And dozens of birds had to be rescued. Official say, responders kept the sheene the oilchine from reaching the ocean. But the bigger problem is the one that residents keep running into across southern California. Old industrial hazards do not disappear just because we've built around them. Now, so you got eighty oily birds all out there looking for some down dish soap right now? Yeah, and if you find some, you should, I don't know, call authorities and then sprinkle it with some down platinum in the meantime. Jesse, who of course is a graduate, this is probably something he learned at the UC Riverside, was all the different hidden wells all over the south Land. And did I put the I didn't put the link in it. I had a link. I should pull this up for you. I had a link that shows where all the wells are, capped wells, active wells, all these different things. I'm blown away at all the hidden wells that are happening all over the place, because I be honest with you, I hear and for some of you, you're gonna go, yeah, everybody knows that. But I hear this about how California's got all this oil and we you know, we used to pump so much oil. We're just not refining it the sort. And I go, where's this oil coming from? Because if you drive up the coast, you don't see it. So I guess in my head, I was thinking, I goes Baker's Field has a lot of oil or something. No, it's right here. Yeah, and they're pumping it next to your mall. It may be under this building. It's not. I looked at the map. It's not. No, but there is. There is a capped one just a mile away. It's all over the place, including let me see Packer Well along Pico looks like a windowless office building, Cardiff Tower, Pico and DONI, how do you say that name? Dohaney? I apologize it was built to resemble a synagogue. And I pulled that up and I was like, oh my gosh, that's an oil You wouldn't know it. It looks like a synagogue. It just looks like a building, don't there. Yeah, the Beverly Center. He's got oil wells behind some walls with foliage. So you're out there and you're just cruising around Sephora and they're pumping oil right under your feet. Is this the col G E. M Well Finder website that you're looking at. Yes, that is where folks can go if you're interested. Cow Gem well finder that lets people search for oil and gas wells by address coordinates, the well number if you've got that information, or the oil field name if you know that as well. But apparently, according to the La Times and the Center for Public Integrity Investigation found nearly a thousand deserted wells across the city from Ladera Heights to Echo Park. And they say that this comes with risks like toxic gas exposure, great redevelopment complications. This is one of the reasons why building is difficult in Los Angeles. And they're also rare but very serious explosion hazards if the wells are not properly plugged. So this this came to mind because of this garden grove stuff that I thought, we've got oil leaks popping up, We've got people living next to explosive tanks with the plastic chemicals that are in them. How many dangers around is that we don't even know? And the more I started looking into it, the less I actually wanted to know. I really didn't. I got to that point where I thought, you know what the ignorance was was better for me. A conservation dot CA A dot gov will take you to the cal gem well finder. Incidentally, when I when I started looking at all these different things, I went, I'm driving by this and this and this. This in this neighborhood, this is in that neighborhood. This is a caped well, this is an active well, this is an active well, this is There's so many different classifications, and yeah, I know those things can be explosive. We've got natural gas stuff, you've got liquid oil thing. I just went back to going, you know what, just put my head in the sand, and if things blow up, I hope I go quickly. That's all I want. I don't want to sit here and worry about it. Just keep me up at night. I can see to that. I don't have enough lexapro for this. I got none, got none left?
00:34:27
Speaker 3: All right?
00:34:27
Speaker 2: You got World Cup, you got Super Bowl, you got the Olympics. It's gonna be a lot of visitors coming to the south Land over the next couple of years. How in the world are we going to move them from point A to point B on time without being accosted by our feral human street zombies Metro's very expensive stress test. Next, Monks and Meryl KFI AM six forty Live everywhere in the iHeartRadio.
00:34:47
Speaker 4: App KFI on Demand.
00:34:51
Speaker 2: You've been listening to Monks and Merrill. Hear the show live weekdays from noon to three on KFI AM six forty at anytime on demand on the iHeartRadio your app
Speaker 1: This is Monks and Maryland hosted by Michael Monks and Chris Merrill. This is Monks and Meryll.
00:00:10
Speaker 2: Fund demand on Michael Monks. That's Chris Merrill. So glad to have you with us. There are some leaders out of Orange County who are spearheading this idea that there is an innovative drug therapy for people suffering from what you know as post traumatic stress disorder or PTSD. Okay, I read in the Voice of OC that President Trump, you know, recently signed an executive order that opens up this path to alternative treatment. Congressman Luke Carea Chris, who represents Central OC, has said he's working with local veteran and labor leader Nick Bernardino to create an advisory committee for companion US House legislation that he's co sponsoring, which would confid does that mean Trump's executive order and create guidelines and funding for the initiative. Okay, that's a lot of words to say. Why don't we get a translation with it? I mean, that's the Voice of OC. Do you a very fine publication, but let's break it down. Congressman Korea is with us. Congressman, thanks so much for taking the time for KFI.
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Speaker 3: Well, thank you for your interest, and yes, what does this all this mean? All this gobbled gook. We just had Memorial Day, the veterans who sacrifice their lives for this country. Every day we have twenty to forty veterans committing suicide because of their PPSD. These are the invisible wounds they've ropped back on the battlefield. We still have veterans dying for our country. They need help. They need a cure for this end, for this PTSD that haunts them. Psychedelics promises to be that cure. Presidents sign in an executive order. We just want to make sure that as we move forward that the next guy doesn't come along and reverse that order with veterans need it.
00:01:54
Speaker 2: I understand what psychedelics what I mean that conjures an image? I think in folks mind, what do you mean.
00:02:03
Speaker 4: Psychedelics? You know exactly what it means.
00:02:05
Speaker 3: It's a lot of a lot of images. Psychedelics, magic, mushrooms, the war on drugs.
00:02:13
Speaker 4: I begain.
00:02:14
Speaker 3: Yes, all these things that are illegal today, classified as Class one, that are illegal are actually curing veterans. That's why the President's signed the executive order saying hey, knock it off. FDA move ahead with the trials. VA move ahead with additional testing of this cure for veterans. That's where we're act right now. Veterans are paying five to seven thousand dollars each.
00:02:42
Speaker 4: For a cure.
00:02:44
Speaker 3: It's illegal in the US. So where do they go. They go to Tijuana, Mexico, to Mexico get their cure. The ones that have a little bit more money, they go to Cancun pay twenty thousand dollars. This is a shameful situation. Our veterans need to leave the US to get cured. It's crazy. We want to fix that. We want to make sure veterans get their psychedelic treatment in the US.
00:03:08
Speaker 2: You want to codify this, the President says, FDA, you got to do it. You're saying, we want to make sure that future presidents don't come through and undo what President Trump is doing.
00:03:17
Speaker 4: The executive order right right.
00:03:18
Speaker 2: I'm just I'm thinking about who would be opposed to this, and honestly, honestly, God, Congressman Karrea, I'm thinking of my father, a guy who grew up you know, Vietnam era drugs are bad. War on drugs. Everything we did in the in the sixties, the seventies, the eighties. I mean, he hates the idea of the grass being legal. He keeps talking about he keeps calling grass. That's how you know he's old school. And I'm just thinking he's going to be the one out there, old school Republican who's going to be saying this is terrible. We we're letting we're legalizing drugs. We're legalizing these psychedelics. And this is what I was afraid of. When we legalize grass. What do you say to somebody like my father.
00:04:02
Speaker 3: I would say to him that the war on drugs are based on politics, not on science. Today, I have members of Congress that serve in Congress, veterans that we're going to commit suicide that went to Tijuana got cured with this medication psychedelics, and their normal members of society. Okay, why do we dispute this cure? We have evidence. My colleague in Washington right now, General Jack Bergman, three star Marine General, highest ranking officer to ever serve in Congress, is my co league in this legislation.
00:04:43
Speaker 4: We're trying to save lives.
00:04:45
Speaker 3: Why would your father object to saving lives, to stopping veteran suicides.
00:04:52
Speaker 2: To your point, Congressman Carrera, I think he would take a look at this and say, you're working with a labor leader. This Nick Bernardino, you're working with a I'm working.
00:05:00
Speaker 3: With I'm working I'm working with a general Jack Bergman in Congress, a Republican on My Path Caucus, which is a psychedelic caucus, which by the way, has more Republican members than Democratic members. We have a president, a Republican president that signed an executive order. We have a Texas former governor, Okay, Governor Perry also who got treated by psychedelics, who also is leading the charge in Texas fifty million dollars of Texas tax bier dollars to research this, along with the federal government another fifty million dollars.
00:05:39
Speaker 4: And what we want to do in.
00:05:40
Speaker 3: California is push California also to get on board and help cure veterans. This is not a treatment, This is a cure. And once you cure veterans or PPSD, this cures people who are alcoholics. I have evidence, I have people that have also been drug autic that have been cured. This as a revolutionary magic cure.
00:06:05
Speaker 4: Is it really a cure? Well, let's find out.
00:06:07
Speaker 3: Let's see the research, so your dad can get on board and say, you know what, this is a cure. We messed up sixty years ago with our war on drugs. Now you've got to come back and see what LSD, the psychedelics I begain, what are they good for and what are they not for?
00:06:26
Speaker 4: Kylas Steimer's maybe as well.
00:06:28
Speaker 2: Yes, Congressman Luke Carrera is Korea, excuse me, is joining us right now and he's talking about this initiative. And again President Trump signed the executive order. His measure would make sure that a future president doesn't come through an undo that. And I think what you said there at the very end is probably where the uphill battle probably lies, and that we've had sixty plus years of being told all drugs are bad, drugs are bad, drugs are bad. So I mean, is this something that can be that public sentiment can be overturned that quickly?
00:06:59
Speaker 3: You think, I don't think so. I don't think that public sentiment is going to be. Like you talked to you about your father, who who is dead, said, I got a lot of people in my district who said no way. And then I have veterans that came back who are close to taking their own lives.
00:07:16
Speaker 4: This was their last.
00:07:19
Speaker 3: Solution, last hope, and they got cured. I'm not doing it because I want to do psychedelics. I've never done psychedelics. But if I have a veteran who says, help me, this saved my life, help me save the lives of other veterans, you know what I'm going to do it. I'm going to work on this issue. And that's why Luke Correa, General Jack Bergman, other members of Congress who are veterans who have been cured are on this quest.
00:07:49
Speaker 2: Congressman Lou Correa, a Democrat from Orange County. Congressman Korea. We do appreciate you taking some time for us. I know we had some difficulty trying to connect last week. You guys were busy, but thanks for checking in with the the day to talk about this. It's something we're curious in following, and please keep us updated. We'll check it again. Thank you, sir.
00:08:06
Speaker 4: Do me a favor.
00:08:07
Speaker 3: Stay with us, say keep an open mind, stay with us and follow the fact.
00:08:11
Speaker 2: I got an open mind, but that's mostly because I just disagree with everything my father says, and I've got an open mind because I do drugs.
00:08:22
Speaker 4: You guys, are you well, gentlemen?
00:08:26
Speaker 2: Very good.
00:08:28
Speaker 1: You're listening to Monks and Merrill on demand from k f I A M six forty more stimulating talk.
00:08:36
Speaker 2: It's Monks and Meryl. I don't want to interrupt you. Raise your hand if you just got a text message from someone with a star on Hollywood Walker Fame. Okay, so you're raising your hand. What's going on? Buddy just texted me Bill handle it handle god? Can you imagine how takes him to do a text? No, Shotgun Tom Kelly, friend of mine? Who is that?
00:09:00
Speaker 4: You don't know?
00:09:03
Speaker 2: Shotgun Tom Kelly from k Earth one on one. Come on, Jesse, you're gonna have to turn on Heather's microphone now I know. And congratulations on that. Yeah, that's very cool.
00:09:12
Speaker 4: Is he listening? I don't know?
00:09:15
Speaker 2: He said, Uh, he just sent me and I knew this too.
00:09:18
Speaker 4: Yeah.
00:09:18
Speaker 2: He got into the into the Radio Hall of Fame. Oh that's great. Yeah I saw that. Yeah cool. So while I sent him a text to earlier this month and I said, hey, I saw the KTLA Route sixty six segment he does the open for Andy Reestmeyer's segment on the root sixty six times. I said, I just saw that was really cool seeing you, and so I just told him he's my favorite and he said I'm his favorite talk show host. Well that's great, isn't that nice? We'll call you bb Gun Merrill. That's funny. Actually, Heather, come on, that was quick. I have nothing to come back on. That was pretty good.
00:09:50
Speaker 5: And we're going to call you Flair monks Flair.
00:09:53
Speaker 2: See that Feld? That feels insulting.
00:09:55
Speaker 5: Yeah, it wasn't, though. That's the one that's like.
00:09:58
Speaker 2: Heather Brooker is you want to guess? She's CAFI reporter and host of KFI Live with Heather Brooker Sundays at Noon, as well as the award winning podcast Entertainment on the iHeartRadio app. Normally we invite you in here because you are, you know, specializing in entertainment reports. But on occasion they toss you some real news and so I'm so glad you were able to step up to the plate on this one.
00:10:19
Speaker 6: I tossed myself this story.
00:10:22
Speaker 2: We give Heather grief, but you are working a great story and I love this. It's about AI and the election, and Michael and I have discussed this numerous times how Spencer Pratt is sort of elevating some of these different tweets or these these shorts, these AI created shorts where he's Batman fighting off Karen Bass and Gavin Newsom's two Face and the Joker and these sorts of things. Right, But how much more AI are we going to see in the campaign trail? Is this going to be the new norm?
00:10:51
Speaker 4: Now?
00:10:51
Speaker 6: Well, I think we're going to see a lot more, and a lot of the experts and people that I've talked to said that it's going to definitely become the norm moving forward in actions and campaigns.
00:11:01
Speaker 4: You know.
00:11:01
Speaker 6: Sort of how all this story came about for me is that I when I'm looking online and I see these videos just like you guys do everybody does, And you go to the comments sections of any political campaign, but specifically for Spencer Pratt's campaigns or anybody who opposes him, and there's this discourse and the comments of people saying, if you're supporting Spencer Pratt, you must be a bot.
00:11:22
Speaker 5: Like, oh, this person is a bot.
00:11:23
Speaker 6: This isn't real, you know, there's no way this many people could possibly be supporting him. So I started looking into it, trying to figure out is he using bots to kind of inflate his popularity. So I spoke with Katie Harbeth's she's the founder and CEO of Anchor Change, and she's also a former Facebook public policy director who's worked on election integrity issues for many, many years. And I asked her. I was like, is there bots being used one in Spencer's campaign or any campaigns that you can tell? And she was like, I've not seen any widespread evidence of candidate's u using these bots to sort of flood the comments sections, you know, whether it's artificially or boosted.
00:12:06
Speaker 5: But social media.
00:12:07
Speaker 6: Platforms since twenty sixteen are much more aggressive in detecting and removing spammy bot activity. So she's saying that it's all.
00:12:15
Speaker 2: Still happening all over them. That's why we have Russian and Chinese bot farms and.
00:12:19
Speaker 6: Right and that, you know, And that was really my point is it's like, well, it's happening. It's got to be happening at some point, because some of these literally look like they are fake accounts. They have no followers, no photo, like the things that we're sort of told to look at for signs of not being a real of numbers name, yes, right, yeah, not an actual person, not an actual like user name. She says, Now, what people might be seeing our AI powered tools to help campaigns manage like large volumes of communication, like auto replies to dms and auto replies to comments. But AI is being used in campaigns, and she says it is not going anywhere. What's going to I'm gonna know what. I'm gonna let her tell you, guys what she had to say.
00:12:59
Speaker 7: I think we will see AI used more and more. There are some states that do you require for political ads that there is a label that says it's been AI generated. I think what will start to get tricky though, is I think those laws were made with thinking about deep fakes in mind, right, like the AI version of your opponent saying something they may not have actually said. But again, there's a lot of versions of the AI that I think campaigns are going to want to use when they want a particular backdrop of a certain farm at sunset with a certain colored barn, right, Like, it takes a lot of money to go and find that physical space versus you could be able to create that with AI or be able to do editing. And it really does level the playing field. For some campaigns that don't have that much money, they can create a lot more content.
00:13:44
Speaker 6: So basically she's saying AI isn't going anywhere. We are going to see it maybe in different forms and shapes over the years and especially in elections. But where that gets really tricky is how this sort of AI is influenced seeing voters and whether or not they're being transparent about their use of AI.
00:14:05
Speaker 2: So who's looking into this? Because it does seem like we know AI is a big issue in Hollywood, don't use AI stuff. That's why it's been interesting to see AI stuff platformed in the LA Mayor's race because we know Hollywood is like one of the number one issues that the candidates been talking about and folks don't want AI. There are there attempts to regulate this or perhaps Bannon, I know you mentioned maybe ensuring that there's a reference to the fact that it was created by AI, But is there any attempt to prohibit it altogether?
00:14:36
Speaker 6: Well, I mean, yeah, you're absolutely right. I don't think we've ever seen such egregious and in your face use of AI like we have, you know, in videos coming from Spencer Pratt's campaign, specifically, which is interesting because he's in Hollywood, where creators are actively and vocally against the use of AI. So that's been an interesting choice, you know, on his part two to utilize that to support him. But I think what what Katie was saying is that there are some states right now that require disclosure, yeah, for any AI use. California is not one of them at this point. So I think that, yeah, moving forward, maybe some there may be some regulation required. There may be some people who may propose something to be more clear about any AI use. But I think the real issue is that people need to look at who is using the AI, who is using influencers. That's another big problem. Candidates are using influencers.
00:15:36
Speaker 2: Yes, Tom Syer's got yeah, you.
00:15:39
Speaker 6: Know, there's been casting notices that came out for a people. He's paying people like twenty dollars an hour to create videos for him for his campaign, and people are like, you're a billionaire, why are you paying twenty dollars an hour to somebody to create a video? Will do it, because somebody will do it, And a lot of people did, and they had almost the exact same script that they were using because they were cast to create these videos. So the big issues that you know that she says we need to look for is, yes, the use of AI in terms of like any videos or campaign promotions, commercials. And also there is some use of bots, but it's not as rampant I think she says as we think it is.
00:16:20
Speaker 2: You know, so even if we disclose though Heather Brooker, host of KFI Live with Heather Brooker on Sundays, we had to give her the show because it was named after h and also one of the great reporters we have here at KFI. What is the what does disclosure do?
00:16:36
Speaker 4: I mean?
00:16:36
Speaker 2: Does that really clean up the election campaign at all? And and and what is what needs to be disclosed and what doesn't need to be disclosed? Where is my freedom of speech limited? Is it generative AI? Or is it when it's helpful AI? Do we have to disclose this when we use AI? Say you've got somebody who's helping to write legal briefs, we had need to have something at the bottom of a legal brief that says portions of this legal brief. Maybe we run that that that the spots portions of this of the program may have been recorded. Yes, that's because we'll play something we pulled off of uh you know KTLA, or you just played that recording of somebody, so we have we have this disclosures, portions of the program maybe recorded. Yeah, we just ignore those disclosures. It goes back to that.
00:17:13
Speaker 6: Whole idea of c ya cover your can we say ass no, allright, we can't.
00:17:19
Speaker 5: Really I feel like I've heard other people say it. Anyway, It's that's.
00:17:21
Speaker 2: It's that Shannon's allowed to she she used up the whole allotment for the day fair.
00:17:26
Speaker 6: Okay, it's that whole idea of c y A. That's why you're seeing some people who are coming out and they're saying.
00:17:32
Speaker 2: Then it gets thrown away like Prop sixty five.
00:17:35
Speaker 5: Yeah, sure, But so what's the point.
00:17:37
Speaker 6: That's their risk that they're running that they're going to just put it out there and see if anybody notices and try to get away with, you know, whatever they're doing. But at the end of the day, it is up to the voters at this point to ask the questions to and Katie says she says, look at all political content with inquisitive curiosity rather than just assuming something is true. My mom, who is eighty kind of bucks, the mold on all of this in terms of like, she's an older person that's chronically online.
00:18:07
Speaker 5: She loves her YouTube, she loves TikTok, she loves all of it.
00:18:11
Speaker 6: I've gotten her to the point now where if she sees a video or a candidate making a statement or something that feels funny, she'll send it to me and say is this real or is this AI? And I have to be like, that's AI or unfortunately, always go.
00:18:26
Speaker 2: To the backyard trampoline and have an evening and jump on it and have fun.
00:18:30
Speaker 5: Umber that weird it's the talking puppies.
00:18:32
Speaker 6: No, it's never quite that egregious, but it's some stuff you know that is a little like, oh, that's a little funny.
00:18:39
Speaker 5: And one thing I have to remember.
00:18:40
Speaker 2: Too, there is Spencer Pratt really Batman.
00:18:43
Speaker 5: And I had to say, yes, she is.
00:18:45
Speaker 4: He is.
00:18:47
Speaker 6: But one thing I have to say too is that a lot of these videos that are being made are not always made by the candidates themselves. They're made by fans and.
00:18:55
Speaker 2: It's a choice on whether you platform them. And I guess that Spencer Pratt's campaign hasn't created these AI videos that have gone viral and great songs and the comic book style storytelling that they're not made in the house, they're made by supporters. And then he retweets them and he's got a big following, so.
00:19:14
Speaker 6: He's a big following. He reshares it, he reposts it. Same thing on the national level too. So it's just something everybody needs to be aware of, keep an eye out for, don't be afraid to ask questions and look at things with a critical eye, as we should do with everything that we see online.
00:19:28
Speaker 2: You want to stick around or you gotta get going.
00:19:30
Speaker 5: I can stay all right.
00:19:33
Speaker 2: Oh did I say that out loud?
00:19:34
Speaker 6: Oh?
00:19:35
Speaker 2: I have more AI questions because I feel like we're also we're also tripping on a again. I brought it up a little bit. I think we got a First Amendment issue going on when we talk about this. Please and not only that, but as you know, AI is using all the water and power and sure, it's leading to an explosion of misinformation that's being used by bad actors to influence our social norms. And of course there are a select few people that are poised to become billllionaires. While you still can't afford the foundations of the American dream, But have you considered how cute some of those AI animal videos are. I say it's worth it. Seems like not all of you feel the same way though, the billionaire backlash. Next, Monks and Meryl KFI AM six forty. We're live everywhere in the iHeartRadio app.
00:20:16
Speaker 1: You're listening to Monks and Meryll on demand from KFI AM six.
00:20:23
Speaker 2: Give a tappy tap tap on that podcast on the iHeart Radio app to subscribe to it, and you'll never miss a moment of Well Meryl. Because Monks has been suspended for next week because of the way that you were treating Elmer. Well, I think you'll be able to hold down the fort I apologize to Elmer, and I look forward to serving my suspension with dignity. Good luck with the election. That felt, Yeah, was that intentional that you did that? No, I just scheduled a vacation. It's my spouse's birthday. Incidentally, Tuesday we go to Carmel and then about a week after, it dawns on me, wait a second, wait a tick, And so you thought I'll just double down here and I'll make sure.
00:21:04
Speaker 3: No.
00:21:04
Speaker 2: I ran to the bosses like we've made a mistake. Be terrible to Elmer. I'm not gonna be here on election Day.
00:21:08
Speaker 8: And they're like, this is Deanna. I love Elmer. You guys gotta be nicer to him.
00:21:14
Speaker 2: We will.
00:21:14
Speaker 8: He was a little upset by yesterday, I know, so let's rectify that.
00:21:19
Speaker 4: Have a good weekend.
00:21:20
Speaker 2: We both kissed him on the way out. So for those unfamiliar, Elmer is the tech director for Gary and Shannon prior to this show. And then we have Jesse. Jesse had jury duty yesterday. By the way, did you hang anybody yesterday? I hope so? Did you convict anyone? Did you send an innocent man to his death?
00:21:34
Speaker 5: There was someone with the last name Monks, So I didn't listen to the case.
00:21:38
Speaker 2: I just convicted him.
00:21:39
Speaker 4: Good.
00:21:39
Speaker 2: That's my cousin, and he deserved it, not listening to Monks. That's basically all right. We weren't mean to Elmer. I think they were making a fun stink about it on Gary and Shannon and it did get some people defensive, but we basically said we're not cool enough for Elmer because Gary and Shannon are cooler than we are, and he's playing music for cool people. Jesse knows we're dorks.
00:22:02
Speaker 5: Well, he just played like robot rock.
00:22:04
Speaker 2: Which I think he's trying to raise us to his level rather than sync to ours. Heather Brooker is joining us right now because they wouldn't let her on Gary and Shannon again. She is a KFI reporter, host of KFI Alive with Heather Brooker Sundays at noon and also the award winning podcast Entertained Me on the iHeartRadio. But we were discussing AI in politics. Let's go the other way around. How about politics in AI. I'm fascinated by this. And now you're going to talk more about the AI this weekend right on your Sunday show.
00:22:29
Speaker 6: Yeah, CAFI Live, We're going to have that full interview with Katie Harboth really interesting stuff.
00:22:33
Speaker 2: So I was reading this article from Axio so about basically the billionaires are trying to figure out how they can hang on to their billions of dollars that AI is going to bring them because many of them. In fact, there was a quote here too, and I want to say it wasn't who's the guy from a mooday from ananthropic They do the claude, the AI claude. He says, if they don't support a good version, they're inevitably going to get a bad version designed by a mob. In other words, legislation controlling the AI. Elon Musk called for universal high income, not a universal income, a universal high income. So I wonder how that plays with the Elon Musk fans that kind of jumped on board with him when he was part of the Trump administration. That now he's calling for something that is not only liberal, but uber liberal. When you talk about a universal income, he's talking about a universal high income, all based on the advancements of AI. In many cases, you've got these billionaires who are in charge of the AI looking to become trillionaires. And there is massive concern that we could be seeing a repeat of history. Michael, you're a student of history, and I know you and I have had long, boring conversations about the Russian Revolution? Are we setting ourselves up for? Are we setting ourselves? I mean, I can talk to you about it. I know you can, please do I know I called Bolshevik on it a long time. Oh I love the Roman Okay, So, but what we saw there was such inequity that you had the bourgeoise in the proletariat, and finally people rose up, and we've seen this play out through history, and to their credit, these these tech giants are saying, we're actually going to have to figure out how to redistribute our own wealth before people come at us with pitchforks. Do we think that at some point the government is going to try to put some guardrails on this AI because it seems like every time somebody approaches it it gets shot down as being anti capitalistic our current government.
00:24:28
Speaker 5: No, well it's not likely.
00:24:31
Speaker 2: I mean, this stuff was was early on. The fledgling stuff was there when when Biden was in office.
00:24:37
Speaker 6: Rich people want to be richer. They always will keep pursuing whatever avenue they can to get more money to stockpile their with wealth.
00:24:45
Speaker 7: I would.
00:24:45
Speaker 6: I'm curious to know which billionaires are wanting to say, oh, we got to share some of this before you know, people come after us, because that is not a very billionaire mindset.
00:24:55
Speaker 2: Jeff Bezos, you could double the taxes I pay and it's not going to help that teacher and queen.
00:25:01
Speaker 3: Yeah.
00:25:01
Speaker 2: So he's arguing that the tax code should help lower income earners more directly, not just punish millionaires. He actually wants redistribution. Sam Altman from chat GPT. He says universal basic compute the idea that people should access AI's productive power, not just a government check. So basically, here's a tool. Everyone should have access to our tool. But did you hear him say recently that it should be treated like a utility. He could envision AI being a utility. He should see it basically we'd get a bill for how much AI we use, which I guess, I mean, I'll listen, what do you mean? People want to use it, and it does use our resources, It's going to take some costs. But that kind of scares me that that kind of utility would be owned by another corporation. I think we really lost control of our utilities when so many of them became private.
00:25:48
Speaker 6: I think that is something that is going to be more viable than the tax code situation and any redistribution of wealth in any way. I can totally see AI becoming so ingrained in our society, in our day to day life, because so many people already use it and rely on it. Sometimes they may not even know that they're using AI, and it is such a drain on our resources that I can absolutely see that happening, more so than you know, redistribution of what.
00:26:19
Speaker 2: We're already seeing people that are blowing the whistle. We got to break here in a moment because Jesse's getting mad at me. But if we already see people who are upset, they're saying, look, you've got billionaires looking to become trillionaires, all at the cost of the resources, and right now they're sort of being dismissed as you know, your typical environmental wackos. But I do think that's going to continue to grow as more and more places are going, wait a minute, now there's a data center in my backyear. We're seeing pushback on data centers. They're going, there's a water for this, how do you get that power? I mean, I feel like there's a lot here that the government really does need to be involved in basic government functions, directing the infrastructure, making sure that things stay on a path through success. What is the end goal? What is the envision? And they're the organizational We should just replace the government with artificial intelligence. I bet the streetlight should get fixed. I would take any intelligence at this point.
00:27:10
Speaker 5: Terminator.
00:27:10
Speaker 2: Heather Brooker is the host of KFI Live with Heather Brooker Sundays at noon you'll hear more about this with her special interview on that day. Heather. Always good to see you, Thanks for the chat in have a good weekend.
00:27:21
Speaker 5: Thanks guys. You to enjoy your vacage.
00:27:23
Speaker 2: I'll do my best, all right. Think about this. You drive past a wall, a fake building, a vacant lot, maybe even a school campus, and you have no idea what it is underneath you. Well, East La just got that reminder the hard way, and so did some birds. The dangers, hiding and plain sight are next. On Monks and Meryll.
00:27:42
Speaker 1: You're listening to Monks and Merrill onder the air from kf I AM six four.
00:27:48
Speaker 2: Available anywhere on the irt radio app. It's Monks and Meryll and Michael Monks. That's Chris Meryl. Happy Friday to you. There is a mountain lion sighting in Santa Monica. I don't know if you saw this, but I did. It's very cute. Well, I saw the video. That's an adorable the mountain lion. Yes, I saw some mountain lion kittens. You know that they're track They tracked mountain lions here and one of the ones that are tracking they posted some pictures and they are really cute. Like you could pet them. Yes, the claws are very long already though very scary. But yeah, there was a cat spotted around eight this morning, later seen hiding in the bushes of a home near fourteenth Street in Montana Avenue, and the resident of the home snapped a photo of this lion just resting in the yard. So if you thought tourism in Santa Monica was down, you're wrong. A few other things here. Oh did you want to just oh was that your Was that your bridge into the animal story? Is that what you were doing?
00:28:39
Speaker 3: No?
00:28:39
Speaker 2: No, no, no, no, Well, because I wanted to bring up this Riverside apartment company, you should have done that first, because that's a bigger story than the lion. Yeah. So it's complex fire Riverside, it's near you see Riverside, and there are fire trucks all over that scene right now. So if you're seeing smoke Inland Empire, that's that's what's going on. If you live near U see Riverside's insurance. That's where Jesse's from. Is that your did you say, go Highlander?
00:29:05
Speaker 4: Is that what you said?
00:29:06
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's right right now? From oh, good job graduations. See Jesse's done things I haven't graduate. Really that's fun. Well, look at us. I have an advanced degree and you and I have the same job. So that's what we're not tell us too, what I keep saying. We do have another animal story though, because I'm fascinated by this oil leak in uh East La. This was earlier this week. You saw this was happening at the same time as the evacuations in Garden Grove and the fires that were going on all around. I mean last week was a lot this crazy week, This one didn't get as much buzz because of everything else that was going on. There were no real eminence. This was more of an inconvenience for people. It did become a crisis in the bird world, yeah, I mean dozens of birds covered in oil because of this East La oil spill. I did see today they finally reopened the intersection where this had happened. It had been down all these days. So it was disruptives of folks in that area, no doubt about it. But this was a crude oil pipeline. That is it's a long one. It's a long one. It flows to the is it the La River where this thing kind of yeah, it's all over well I know this thing. Yeah, yes, it rupture. Let me just say yes. And it's more than two thousand gallons of oil flooded the streets, the storm drains and the La River. And so that resulted in a cleanup. Oh, all the way down to Long Beach. This is a big, big it's a big pipeline. Pipeline, yeah, okay, And dozens of birds had to be rescued. Official say, responders kept the sheene the oilchine from reaching the ocean. But the bigger problem is the one that residents keep running into across southern California. Old industrial hazards do not disappear just because we've built around them. Now, so you got eighty oily birds all out there looking for some down dish soap right now? Yeah, and if you find some, you should, I don't know, call authorities and then sprinkle it with some down platinum in the meantime. Jesse, who of course is a graduate, this is probably something he learned at the UC Riverside, was all the different hidden wells all over the south Land. And did I put the I didn't put the link in it. I had a link. I should pull this up for you. I had a link that shows where all the wells are, capped wells, active wells, all these different things. I'm blown away at all the hidden wells that are happening all over the place, because I be honest with you, I hear and for some of you, you're gonna go, yeah, everybody knows that. But I hear this about how California's got all this oil and we you know, we used to pump so much oil. We're just not refining it the sort. And I go, where's this oil coming from? Because if you drive up the coast, you don't see it. So I guess in my head, I was thinking, I goes Baker's Field has a lot of oil or something. No, it's right here. Yeah, and they're pumping it next to your mall. It may be under this building. It's not. I looked at the map. It's not. No, but there is. There is a capped one just a mile away. It's all over the place, including let me see Packer Well along Pico looks like a windowless office building, Cardiff Tower, Pico and DONI, how do you say that name? Dohaney? I apologize it was built to resemble a synagogue. And I pulled that up and I was like, oh my gosh, that's an oil You wouldn't know it. It looks like a synagogue. It just looks like a building, don't there. Yeah, the Beverly Center. He's got oil wells behind some walls with foliage. So you're out there and you're just cruising around Sephora and they're pumping oil right under your feet. Is this the col G E. M Well Finder website that you're looking at. Yes, that is where folks can go if you're interested. Cow Gem well finder that lets people search for oil and gas wells by address coordinates, the well number if you've got that information, or the oil field name if you know that as well. But apparently, according to the La Times and the Center for Public Integrity Investigation found nearly a thousand deserted wells across the city from Ladera Heights to Echo Park. And they say that this comes with risks like toxic gas exposure, great redevelopment complications. This is one of the reasons why building is difficult in Los Angeles. And they're also rare but very serious explosion hazards if the wells are not properly plugged. So this this came to mind because of this garden grove stuff that I thought, we've got oil leaks popping up, We've got people living next to explosive tanks with the plastic chemicals that are in them. How many dangers around is that we don't even know? And the more I started looking into it, the less I actually wanted to know. I really didn't. I got to that point where I thought, you know what the ignorance was was better for me. A conservation dot CA A dot gov will take you to the cal gem well finder. Incidentally, when I when I started looking at all these different things, I went, I'm driving by this and this and this. This in this neighborhood, this is in that neighborhood. This is a caped well, this is an active well, this is an active well, this is There's so many different classifications, and yeah, I know those things can be explosive. We've got natural gas stuff, you've got liquid oil thing. I just went back to going, you know what, just put my head in the sand, and if things blow up, I hope I go quickly. That's all I want. I don't want to sit here and worry about it. Just keep me up at night. I can see to that. I don't have enough lexapro for this. I got none, got none left?
00:34:27
Speaker 3: All right?
00:34:27
Speaker 2: You got World Cup, you got Super Bowl, you got the Olympics. It's gonna be a lot of visitors coming to the south Land over the next couple of years. How in the world are we going to move them from point A to point B on time without being accosted by our feral human street zombies Metro's very expensive stress test. Next, Monks and Meryl KFI AM six forty Live everywhere in the iHeartRadio.
00:34:47
Speaker 4: App KFI on Demand.
00:34:51
Speaker 2: You've been listening to Monks and Merrill. Hear the show live weekdays from noon to three on KFI AM six forty at anytime on demand on the iHeartRadio your app
