Did We Actually Go to the Moon… or Is It the Greatest Lie Ever Told?

Bright: So back to back weeks here, it's, just the two of us. I know. I tell you. So last week I thought about naming it. That was the title. Just the two of us, but I came up with something else. Um, and I, know, we were texting with Nilla and you know, I think we got a fun topic tonight and he was all set to join. I'm like, all right, we're back together. The, the three amigos, uh,

Duds: we're gonna do.

Bright: And he just, uh, he just texted and says that an emergency vet situation. So definitely not unless, you know, somehow, somehow everything works out and he can hop on before we're done. I mean, we do run long, you know, we're, we're known for that. Uh, but yeah, it could happen, but this is probably one of those, you know, after our, you're at the 24 hour vet hospital kind of situation.

Duds: So probably not. It could happen. ⁓ yeah.

Bright: ⁓ not that it's that late, but it's not your normal vet at this hour. And I swear, you know, not just, it's not really just Nilla, but dog owners in general. And I know you're a relatively new dog owner. ⁓ but it, yeah, yeah, they cost a lot of money, man.

Duds: Mm-hmm. at two years in now. ⁓ my gosh, they don't tell you that upfront. Like, ⁓ yeah, here's what it costs to buy the dog, but they don't tell you all of the additional expenses that go along with it.

Bright: Yeah, yeah Right. Sure. And you factor in maybe some, know, like, ⁓ we're going to pay this much for food. And, know, every now and then we'll have to take them to the kennel or, you know, vet visits and stuff like that. But it's these emergency situations, you know, your dog needs to be put under that costs a thousand dollars, whatever, you know, ⁓ I think Nilo mentioned on the podcast before that Finley has torn his, his ACL or whatever the equivalent is in a dog twice now, both of them, think.

Duds: Food. Yeah. ⁓ Mm-mm. Right. Like both of them, yeah.

Bright: I'm like that, I mean, that's a lot of money. And I think for one of their dogs, they tried to get the dog insurance and it ended up basically being stupid because everything was a pre pre. Yeah. I know exactly. That's exactly it. Just like us, you know, the insurance companies are out to screw you, but yeah, everything ended up being a pre-existing condition. I'm dealing with that right now in the house.

Duds: Uninsurable. The only ones making money are the insurance companies. Yep. Yeah, I had to take our dog to the vet a couple of weekends ago too, because we got back from that spring break trip and I guess he had been humping his bed or something and his balls were all rubbed raw. So we to get him. No, he has not. ⁓ So we have him scheduled, I think, for a week or so from now. So hopefully all the humping stops.

Bright: Yeah. Yeah. Is it has he been neutered already? ⁓ well, then there you go Yeah. Well, yeah. And that you know what? And that's why I think that's why you get dogs neutered probably more times than not is especially male. Yeah. Male dogs that get neutered is just because it's annoying. You're like, stop this. You know, it's

Duds: Little Mississippi Leghound. Yep. We held out for two years because they say, you know, you'd like them to develop fully, get full grown, uh, have all the testosterone they need to become a full grown male dog. And then after that, you know, can chop them off and a lot less side effects, guess, other than calming down a little bit.

Bright: Sure, right. Adios. Right. Right. ⁓ man. I don't, I wonder if dogs even notice. I mean, obviously they know they're recovering from it. Right. Exactly. What, what am I missing? Yeah. Well, that's it. There's also probably, you know, mental or, you know, physical, you know, outside of just the obvious. ⁓ sure. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. So.

Duds: Like there was something here and now it's gone. I feel different. I'm sure, yeah. you remove those hormones, it's going to make a big, big difference. Yeah.

Bright: I don't know. So back to back weeks we're missing Nilla. Hopefully he'll, ⁓ he'll come back. Although I have a work event next, ⁓ Thursday night. So we might have to figure something out. I don't know. Well, actually the next two Thursdays, next two Thursdays. So I know. So whether we, ⁓ you know, we switch, ⁓ switch a day or something like that record on Friday night, maybe next week. ⁓ I don't know, but, you want to keep the momentum going though. Last week was our most viewed.

Duds: working man. ⁓ boy. Play by ear.

Bright: episode of all time. I don't know why it's incredible. We were up like 94 % over our average views. ⁓ so I, you know, I don't know if it was just the two of us. I don't know if it was our topic. I don't know if it was, you know, happenstance. ⁓ my family got wind of the podcast. Maybe, you know, maybe it was them checking it out. ⁓ maybe, ⁓ maybe it had something to do with city SC posse.

Duds: It's incredible. It's incredible. That's awesome.

Bright: You know, although we didn't record last week because we were on a bi-week. So, ⁓ we'll drop a new episode, ⁓ two new episodes of city SC posse before Saturday night's game. So for any of our SC posse listeners. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I even had to go back and look, I had to go back and even look at our mission statement. I was like, when did I say I was going to release episodes? And it says at or near game days. And I'm like, ⁓ perfect. We didn't need to record last week. Wasn't a game day. So.

Duds: We're just picking up the slack, you They're feigning out there. Ha There you go.

Bright: It was a, it was an off week for us and yeah, makes sense. Right? Yeah. New episodes drop near game days. ⁓ well, it was an international break technically. ⁓ and I have that as a wheel segment team USA, ⁓ yeah, they had, they had two games and maybe if the wheel lands on it, we'll talk about team USA, ⁓ soccer, but my, primary topic.

Duds: Makes sense. Makes sense. So they their buy already, huh? I don't want to jump ahead. We won't jump ahead.

Bright: And I thought this was relevant. again, I kind of thought maybe we'd stay away from politics a little bit, although I do have some in the wheel, ⁓ as well. There's just too much going on not to, not to have that. ⁓ and if Bobcat man would hop on the podcast, man, he was on a rant today about gas prices. I, that take. Yeah, for sure. For sure. You know? ⁓ and I'm sure he'd bring some high entertainment value with that rant. I have no doubt.

Duds: It'd nice to hear, it'd nice to get that, nice to get that rant down. Let off some steam.

Bright: ⁓

Duds: He sounds like he's getting little flustered, a little frustrated with the prices.

Bright: I think so. I'm like calm down, man.

Duds: Yeah, like most like most Americans probably are seeing that crude oil price affect the gas prices in the diesel.

Bright: Yeah, I'm, I'm still not freaking out. Like, yeah, it's a little bit higher, but I think we talked about this maybe last week is like, it's not crazy. It's not like dollars more than it was under Biden. I'm like, we're pretty much right in line. We're where it was most of Biden's presidency. every

Duds: I don't think that's the big problem though. I think the problem is like where we were, and then people are kind of ill informed or uninformed of why they're even going up. Like do people support what's going on? Like we talked about in our thread, you know, if you don't have the backing of the American people, then all they're going to really see is those gas prices going up and

Bright: Right. Yeah. And it's, it's funny because you look at any war or maybe outside of the world wars. That's all that America seems to care about is, is gas prices, right? Like you, you learn about world war two and how the country really came together and how we rationed stuff and how we turned all of these factories into war machine factories. And you know, like right now we're 30. That's what I was telling Bobcat man. I'm like, we're 30 days into this thing. I was like, this is a blip.

Duds: Gas prices. The oil.

Bright: on the US, you know, timeline.

Duds: Yeah, I think you're, you're pointing out a very good, uh, or you have a very good point as far as what happened in world war two, the reason everybody gets behind that and same way thing with nine 11 is being attacked changes everybody's outlook on everything. Right. So right now people are looking at this Iran thing as well. weren't ever attacked and you have, you know, people coming out that are experts that are saying, well, you know, probably shouldn't be doing this. And there's a lot of Israeli involvement and now there's.

Bright: Sure, right, yeah.

Duds: troops on the ground going potentially over there with no Israeli troops. Like, what's that all about? No. So don't think people are as supportive right now for good reason. Yeah.

Bright: Well, you know, I guess we could have waited until they attacked us with a nuclear bomb and then everybody would have been on board, huh?

Duds: I don't know, but that's what they say. But there's experts that are saying that they didn't even have that capability, you know, that they weren't even near that.

Bright: I don't know. Iran came out and said that they...

Duds: If they wanted to go buy a bomb, they probably could have done that from Pakistan. They're friendly with Pakistan, you know.

Bright: Yeah, you know, do wonder that sometimes like, yeah.

Duds: If they wanted a bomb, mean, they have plenty of money. Like they could get one, I think, you know, that this whole, they're researching the nuclear, you know, weapon to me, it doesn't pass the smell test anymore. You know, like if they wanted it, you could go get it. Right. There's a black market for everything. I'm sure there is for nuclear weapons, you know.

Bright: Well, I mean, a dirty bomb or something like that, but a true nuclear warhead. don't, mean, China, Russia. Yeah. But I mean, but if that leaks, then you're, I mean, you're a hundred percent talk about world war three, you know, honestly, take the, take the nuclear aspect out of it. Russia wouldn't stand a chance against the United States military. I don't know that China.

Duds: I mean, you think if China and Russia, if they're friendly with them, you know, Pakistan, all those guys have it.

Bright: China would stand a better chance, but I don't know that they really would either.

Duds: don't think that anybody wins in those type of conflicts though. It's that mutually assured destruction, right? And I think that's the big reason Iran's even looking at nuclear weapons, if they are, is if you're a nuclear power, you have a seat at the table now. If you don't, you can be overthrown. It's happened before.

Bright: Well, yeah, if it got that big, mean, that's true. Yeah, yeah. Well. Well, and that, right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I, well, and I think, I think that's, that's probably pretty accurate. The only thing that you worry about in that sense is Iran was and is the biggest sponsor of terrorism in the world. So, you know, you do worry about something like that. Like they, they are, they are death to America, right? Like China isn't death to America, right? Russia isn't death to America. They might, they're looking for.

Duds: But you're talking about the governments now, the people that are heading of these states, right? So the Ayatollah that was running Iran, right?

Bright: Well, yes, not necessarily the Iranian people. Yeah. Yeah. There were, there was somebody, somebody on the news the other day, they were, ⁓ they're Iranian and you know, they've since moved to America or whatever. And they were like, the Iranian people are obsessed with the United States, with our culture, with like, they want the culture of the West supposedly. That's at least what this guy was saying. ⁓ the Persians, right. But, but the Ayatollah.

Duds: Mm-hmm. The Persians? Mm-hmm.

Bright: Right. And his regime, of course, they have a hold on this. They're living the good life. than the fact that most of them are dead. They were living the good life. I'm sure. And, ⁓ you know, they like being in power, you know, so I guess that's, that's always a thing too. What did the people want? You know, I'm sure you could say that about a lot of what, what are the Russian people want? I don't know. What are the Chinese people want? They eat up American culture, right? Like the NBA, ⁓

Duds: Right. Mm-hmm.

Bright: movies the internet

Duds: Well, I think it's, it's kind of like even here in America, you know, 80 % of the people are probably just normal people. Then you have 10 % that are extreme, right. And 10 % that are extreme left, you know, and if those extremists ever get control, then they can do, you know, an ungodly amount of damage, you know,

Bright: Right, On, right. Yeah. ⁓ A lot of harm and sure, absolutely. If you get...

Duds: I think that's what happens in some of these countries. know, if they get these communists that take over or these dictators that somehow gain power and they're hard to unseat, you know, because they have that. Got the military.

Bright: Yeah. Yeah. Sure. It is, it is crazy to think about, you know, just in, today's world. And of course, you know, the United States has been amazing as far as the democratic process. Forget about current politics, but we've had a, you know, a successful transfer of power. What, has it been 40, 47 times or, know, whatever. Um,

Duds: Mm-hmm.

Bright: You look at Russia, how long has Putin been in charge? And they haven't had reelections, North Korea, China, you know, well, they did vote Putin back in, guess, technically like that when he came back in, that, you know, that was, well, that, that just happened with Kim Jong-un, you know, he went like 99.1 % of the vote or whatever. And the other 0.9 % were all murdered. Right. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah.

Duds: Yeah, but they would just vote him back in. you Anyway, like 99 % of the voters them. The 0.9 % are dead now. What are you thinking? Like you didn't think we were going to find out?

Bright: Yeah. Right. North Korea just did a missile test and who do you think was strapped to those missiles? The other 9.9 % of people were strapped to that missile.

Duds: Well, we joke about it, but that right there is the most important reason for valid elections, because if the elections are rigged, you if they're not free and fair elections, then nobody's going to trust it. And you will end up with a dictator or somebody taking over. That's why it's extremely important.

Bright: Sure. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. yep. You, you see it movies and stuff all the time. All it takes somebody declares martial law or, whatever it is. And, know, we're going to skip just this election. Don't worry about it. We'll skip just this election. We'll be right. Well, I mean, you look at Ukraine right now. That's what Zelensky did. He's hold he's holding onto power. He, his term has ended and he's just like, no, we're in a war. I'm going to stay president. No more elections right now.

Duds: Mm-hmm. Yep. Mm-hmm. No more elections right now. I'll let you know when you can vote me out.

Bright: Yeah, right. Right. I am the best person for this job. Well, says who, you know, and I think that was one of the things that, that we said we were like, okay, like if we peacefully negotiate this peace deal between you and Russia, are you going to commit to an election? And of course, I think he said yes, but, supposedly Zelensky is the one that's holding it up now. I don't, know, you can't make, can't make heads or tails out of all.

Duds: Not so much. Probably. That's that Ukraine war is so old. Like, are we still following that? I mean, come on, we got a whole nother war to look at now.

Bright: Well, and well, that, is of course, that's the thing. And I think Zelensky even came out recently. said something and says, nobody cares about us anymore. Right. Like all the focus is on Iran. So, uh, you know.

Duds: I mean, honestly, what is going on in Ukraine and Russia? Like, are they at a stalemate or anybody advancing?

Bright: Well, it, it certainly feels like they're at a stalemate for the last three years. You know, Russia had that big front at the very beginning, Ukraine kind of pushed them back. And since then they keep talking about every, well, every now and then they'll bring up, you know, a building or a town, but there's been no real advancement in, in either of the lines. I'm. But.

Duds: They kind of just chilled out and said, you know, we're good where we're at right now.

Bright: But supposedly the war is not over. Apparently there's still deaths and attacks and I just don't get it. You know, if you're not, if you're not making any momentum, what's, what's the point? What's the point of

Duds: see, that's the big problem is the information. Like we don't know. We have no idea what's happening. You know, they, they censor a lot of the information leaving and we just get it through our propaganda media.

Bright: Well, sure. and again, it's, it's exactly, it's all the news cycle and their focus on that. And I know we're talking, we're still talking politics, but of course Trump had his speech last night and you know, the market oil prices didn't react great at the time or this morning. So what was the distraction today?

Duds: I haven't been keeping up on the news.

Bright: ⁓ well, I think you heard this. Pam Bondi was, was fired. Yeah. You think that was my accident? Like, like maybe he was planning on doing this, but there is a reason why it was today. And it was to, to take away from, you know, the, maybe the overreaction from last night's speech or whatever the case may be. Like that, that, they didn't just coincide coincidentally. That, you know, that was, that was planned.

Duds: ⁓ that's a bandana, Heard that through you. Yeah, maybe. Right before a yeah, holiday weekend.

Bright: Mm-hmm. You know, yeah, maybe that had something to do with it too, but if they wanted to, if they really wanted, not that that's a big deal, that's not going to fly under the radar, but you know, they'll do a Friday night news dump on a holiday weekend if they really want something to just not get coverage in the press. Like, now this is too big that you're going to get coverage, but.

Duds: You know what I was thinking the other day was just like, there's so much information out there on everything. And there's so much going on. Like nobody can possibly keep up with all of it. How do you, how are you supposed to? I, and really the answer, I guess that I came to was you can't, and you're probably not supposed to. And.

Bright: No, no, no, no, no, no. Well, and you know, this kind of goes back to our topic yesterday with social media, you know, and acts in particular certainly helps, you know, when something's trending or helps, you know, get some of that information out. But social media as a whole is just, it's information overload. And you're right. You're not as as a human. I don't think it's just too much. There's too many depressing stories about young people dying or, ⁓

Duds: Mm-hmm. It's a lot of bad news. Yep.

Bright: suicides or drug overdoses or mass shootings, ⁓ terrorism, wars, rape and other kinds, all of these bad things. And if you're in tune with all of that at the same time, no wonder people are depressed and on drugs, you know, it's just like, so. Yeah, but I was watching Jesse waters, ⁓ the other night and they did their normal spring break, you know, ⁓

Duds: Yeah, your outlook is not great.

Bright: Where, this is what Jesse used to do on the Bill O'Reilly show. You know, and now he's got Johnny and they go to spring break somewhere on the beach and they interview these college kids and ask them, you know, political questions or current event questions and stuff. And, of course they're taking the best of the best for television. But you know, these people are like, I don't even know what you're talking about, man. Like I'm here to party, you know, get laid, drink beer.

Duds: Mm-hmm. Did you ever watch the Jay Leno, Jay Walking that he used to do back in the day? Some of the questions, you couldn't believe how ill informed they were on stuff that we thought in grade school was very basic, common sense type information.

Bright: Yeah, sure. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And, and of course you'd always make fun of those people. Right. Yes. Yes. Yeah. Sure. Now it's one thing to be ill-informed. It's another thing to be purposefully abstaining, kind of like you are from social media, or to take a step back from the news cycle and just say, right, now seek it out. You know what? Yeah, you'll hear about the big stuff, I'm sure. Right? You can't necessarily not know about the war in Iran, which it's not even a war.

Duds: to really not seek it out. Like, I'm living my life right now.

Bright: Operation Epic Fury, you know, like people keep calling it a war. This is not a war, right? mean, we're, we're not going go down that rabbit hole. It ain't a war. know? ⁓ yes, something, but, but you'll still know about the good stuff or not the good stuff, the big stuff. But you, you purposefully are tuning yourself out of the noise and that constant. you barrage of news that you don't need. It's not really, you know, it's not doing anything to improve your life.

Duds: Yeah, I don't know what it is. You know, what's the draw like, but I've even tried to find that in myself. Like what draws me towards like wanting to know so much about what's happening and what's going on, you know?

Bright: I think it's twofold. think it's twofold. One, and this is with the current ⁓ news, it's entertainment, right? It's different than we, know, we as a society, we were probably too young, but back in the day with newspapers and, you know, even the start of cable news or your local news, it was a news source. You wanted to know what was going on so that you could stay up to date, be educated. I think that is important. You know, so I think that's the second aspect is, know, you want to, you want to be in tune with the world, especially your immediate surroundings, you know, you know, us news or your local news, you know, world news is harder to keep track of just because there's so much of it. But I think primarily it's people feed off of it now as an entertainment, they get worked up, they post on social media, they see how many clicks they can get, you know, on their take on the story.

Duds: Mm-hmm. It kind of feeds the whole process. ⁓

Bright: Yeah. And that's the thing. It churns and burns the whole system. So if you truly took the entertainment, the dopamine rush of all of that out of it, and you were just, you know, go back to, you know, go back to your parents or your grandparents, sit down and read the newspaper, I'm sure it'd be completely different.

Duds: Well, I was gonna say, even going to the websites and seeking out the articles and looking up and reading some of the articles or reading the headlines, you don't get nearly as worked up as you do when you're on social media and that stuff's popping up and people are commenting on it, I don't think.

Bright: Well, yeah, well that's another thing you go and you look at the comments and people are well sure P on the.

Duds: It's just a different experience, right? You're reading an article versus getting interpretation and getting somebody's comments on things.

Bright: Yes. Yes. Right. Right. And they're trolling, they're looking for reactions. You know, that's, know, and who knows, who knows how much of it are, are bots are paid or, know, cause certainly there, there are paid engagers. Like there are people that like that's their job is to take a social media post and make sure it gets enough engagement because that's what feeds the algorithm. So if they're a, a troll, if you will,

Duds: trying to get the clicks. Mm-hmm.

Bright: That their job is to get on there, say something that's going to get a reaction, get a lot of comments. gets the comments. Then that post hits the algorithm. It starts getting, you know, and these people are getting paid to do it. So that's why social media is fake.

Duds: Have you seen, have you seen like, ⁓ even congressmen and senators, like they've been caught posting like a, I guess a verbatim tweet that has been posted by 20 or 30 different accounts, all trying to push some narrative. And it's on both sides. It's on the Magus side as well as the left side where you see all these accounts and people will put them all together and they'll show them all like, look,

Bright: Yeah. Sure. Yes. Sure. Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Duds: All these accounts, you're being manipulated on both sides because people are feeding these guys information and they're just pushing it out to their hundreds or millions of followers. Right. And it's just, it's another form of propaganda. You're being fed a line and they're trying to do that through social media because they're losing the hold on the mainstream media. And people, people see that people, think people, some, you know,

Bright: Yeah. Yeah. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, and they are losing the hold on the mainstream media.

Duds: People that are looking at that, they can see that and they put it out there and hopefully inform other people. It's like, don't take everything at face value. Like look deeper into the actual issue too.

Bright: So I'll use an example, an NFNP pod example and city SC example. And I learned this from, ⁓ from the internet, you know, I'm like, how can I get a little, huh? It must be true. I was like, how can I get a little bit more traction? How can I show up on searches or how, you know, whatever and what it said to do. And this is kind of what we're talking about. It said to write a blog post about the top.

Duds: Must be true. It must be true. It's on the internet.

Bright: 10, ⁓ maybe I told you this already, the top 10 podcasts in St. Louis. So I wrote a, I wrote a blog post about the top 10 podcasts in St. Louis. Number one, NFNP number two, city SC. And then I listed out like three through 10 or real podcasts. And then I posted it on my website and then I did all the SEO tags. So somebody would like typed into Google, like top podcasts in St. Louis.

Duds: ⁓ yeah. Hahaha Yeah.

Bright: It's going to link back to this page and then AI is going to go say NFNP, ⁓ city SC. It's all bullshit, man. But I wrote it. I just said we were the best and we were the top, you know, it, and that's more or less what it is. I don't know that it's actually doing anything, but Hey, I was like, it's, it's worth a try. No, no.

Duds: Look at you manipulating things. Yeah, that is funny. It will be funny to see. call this a little social experiment and see how this works out. This isn't an official poll.

Bright: But it would be funny, right? Like if, if that did do something and you think of it, like if I'm doing this, you know, right. You know that the big companies that were doing this and they're doing it at scale, right? You know, and that's, that's what's feeding all this stuff. I'm one, we're a one man show, like Fox news, CNN, ⁓ USA today, any of these big, they're all doing stuff like that. And it's all just feeding into the same algorithm.

Duds: Watch it, it's probably on the nightly news. ⁓ of course. Totally. Well, you've gone to like those websites that even like curate articles from all over the web, right? Like Real Clear Politics does that with their political, you know, they just, you know, I think they do publish their own articles, but then they bring a bunch of links into other, you know, New York Times and The Guardian, blah, blah, blah. Well, going through those websites too, you look at that and you're like, look at all these articles that are being written maybe by AI now, but...

Bright: Mm-hmm. Yep. Yep. Sure. Right. Sure.

Duds: constantly being pumped out every single day. it's like, who's, do people actually sit down and read all these or are they just putting these out to try to put information on the, and on the internet. So now AI can draw from that content and, and now it's like verifying itself through its own content.

Bright: Right. It's just content. Yeah. Yes. Yes. Well, I mean, certainly that could be the case. And that is, that is a concern with AI, right? Because so. All right. Let, let me come back. Let me come back to this point and this will lead into our main topic Artemis. So don't let me forget that. ⁓ and I had a second point, but I probably lost it now because, okay, so I'll just go straight to the Artemis. So I was working with AI to, to prep all of my stuff, ⁓ for tonight.

Duds: teaching itself its own problems.

Bright: And so our main topic, I wanted to talk about the Artemis two launch yesterday. I was like, that's a pretty big deal. And so I'm like, Hey, give me some facts about Artemis one, Artemis two, Artemis three, blah, blah, blah. And it gave me some facts and I was like, ⁓ these are outdated. Like Artemis two launched yesterday. Like go, go research, get that information. And it said, no, it Artemis two didn't launch. No, it said it didn't launch yesterday. It said, I can't do that because Artemis two didn't, didn't launch yesterday.

Duds: Not doing it. ⁓

Bright: And I was like, ⁓ I watched it. It launched, it launched yesterday. Like go, go do some. Yes. Right. So, and I think that, so to that earlier point, I think AI, if they're being fed all this information from New York, like, ⁓ I'm sourcing this New York times article. Well, really to your point, they're just blasting out all of this content.

Duds: You can take this information as fact. Mm-hmm.

Bright: You know, to either manipulate AI or to the, you know, what I thought initially, and probably the old ways of doing it. It's just to drive people to your website, get clicks and, and promote ads, which is how they make money. That was my, that was my second point.

Duds: Sure. I'm sure there's some, some nefarious, you know, trying to manipulate AI, but I don't think it's probably the intent. think it is probably what you said. It's just to drive getting people to click on your website. But I think inadvertently, if people are using AI to curate an article to put out there on the internet and they're not fact checking where that article came from, they could be adding to the potential misinformation that's already out there, you know?

Bright: Yeah. Sure, yeah.

Duds: And then does AI look at that, even though that was an AI driven article from bad facts, know, bad data. And it looks at that and point to that as fact now. Like that's why it's so important going back to when we were in school, having to list all your sources, you know, and, these have to be trusted sources, you know.

Bright: Hmm? Yeah, sure. Well, and that's the thing like AI will list sources, but how many people just say like, ⁓ they have sources. So this must be fact. They're not actually going back and clicking on those sources to figure out if it's, if it's true information or not. Who is the. Yeah.

Duds: You know, what's funny about that is on grok anyway. So I don't know how the other ones are, but I've asked grok to list the sources or it'll show the sources and every, almost every single time I click on it, it goes to a website that's got like a 404 error or. ⁓ yeah. The links are never work right. And they never go to what they say they're going to. So I don't know if that's with other AI's, but I have noticed that a lot with grok.

Bright: Yeah. Chat. Chat does the same. Yeah. Really? I can probably test it right now if you give it a second, because of course all of my research for tonight is, ⁓ is linked and sourced. So I'm not, I'm not just making this up. It's in the shoe. Well, it could be in the show notes.

Duds: It's in the show notes. So the first time I realized this was when I was in the hospital for the, ⁓ for my throat issue. And I was asking Grock to tell me about, you know, all the potential complications and all that stuff. And it was telling me how, you know, there's been these stories of this happening and somebody died or whatever, because it was caught in his throat or whatever. It's like, well, give me this, the source for that, you know, that story. And every time it would do that, it would not be that story and it would be, or it'd be something.

Bright: Hmm. That is a-

Duds: different and I asked that I said, you know, I looked at that, that source and it was not right. eventually it went back to me and said, you're right. You know, that source is incorrect. And it was actually this, and it was something completely different. Yeah. And it was just making it up.

Bright: Right. ⁓ really? Well, in, in, in, yeah, chat did say when I was like, no, it launched. said something like, ⁓ my bad. Like you were right. ⁓ it literally said, here it is. I found it. You were right. I was wrong. All right. So like, here's a, yeah. ⁓ here's a link. Let me, let me click on it. See what happens here. That takes me. No. Yeah. ⁓

Duds: Mm-hmm. Sorry about that. I admit it. I'm not saying all of Wunderbro, but a lot of them.

Bright: Here's chat. like it used NASA for this one. Here's Wikipedia, which we know isn't necessarily a hundred percent reliable. But the link worked. NASA, Wikipedia. ⁓ A lot of NASA, it says NASA plus one. Okay, and then I can click on, no, it's both NASA. Sure, yeah.

Duds: See, and it probably depends on, too, what you're doing with it. Because I was using it today, and I was trying to figure out the way that a material was labeled in a standard. And I asked it, what is this material? What kind of material does this fall under in this table? And it told me it was an S1 material in this table. And I was like, well, show me where that comes from. And it gave me a link. The link didn't work.

Bright: Mm-hmm.

Duds: And I go to the table and that does not call it out in the table. And I, and I said, you know, like, Hey, I lifted this table. It's not in there clearly. said, yep, you're right. But it's assumed to be, you know, in this table because of these reasons. And it gave me some additional information, but you got to watch it, man. It's people take it as a hundred percent fact.

Bright: Yeah. Yeah. Well, you know what I mean? Like, ⁓ I'm trying to get. Yeah. Yeah. I'm trying to get my wife to, to lean into AI a little bit more with her job and whatnot. And she uses it. ⁓ but she'll complain about it. I'm like, you know what? I'm like, AI is not perfect. It's a tool. You have to learn how to use it you have to learn how to call it out. When something doesn't seem right, you have to question it. You have to say like, this is not how I want it. And eventually you can perfect it. Her big thing right now.

Duds: Mm-hmm. And could be your prompts that are the issue, know, the way you set those up.

Bright: Well, for sure. that's kind of what, that's kind of what I tell her. And then I said like, okay, if you didn't have a great prompt the first time I'm like, fix it, you know, fix it in the second prompt or.

Duds: When I think the more, I think the more freedom you give it to the more problems you're going to probably have. want to try and rein it in, you know, as quick as possible with the most detail upfront.

Bright: Well... Sure, yeah. Yeah. And the other thing is, is she'll start a new chat almost every time. I'm like, no, like if, if, if you're working on emails, have an email chat. You know, you put in your main prompt and then you just keep, right. Exactly. She just starts all these new chats and we share now we share my account. So I created a new project for her and she's not using the project. She's I'm like, ugh, and it's just messing up my workspace. So I got to talk to her about that.

Duds: So that remembers the history. Get your own account. This is just crazy.

Bright: Well, that's a whole, that's a whole nother 20 bucks a month. I don't know that we're doing that. All right. Well, we're half an hour in and that was all just bullshit. ⁓ it was good. Good. ⁓ back and forth. Good topic. ⁓ yeah, yeah. I wanted to talk about the moon landing. I wanted to talk a little bit about Artemis and I, I pulled some of the biggest conspiracy theories on did we land on the moon? And that's why I wanted Nilla.

Duds: Well, I don't want to steer you off topic. So let's see what you got going on here. Ooh, this has never been talked about before.

Bright: Never, never on a podcast before. think this is new, new, ⁓ yeah. New frontier actually even better. New frontier. even wore my, my moon landing t-shirt that says, I want to believe. Kind of X files kind of.

Duds: This is new information. Mm-hmm. People questioning this? should have worn my new shirt. got a shirt from the air and space museum. Yeah. I should have worn it. You should have, you should have told me. guess you did tell me, but I just didn't think about that till now. Yeah.

Bright: ⁓ yeah, nice. Yep. I did tell you, you just weren't thinking. Yes. I, I was like, I don't know what to wear tonight. Like it's hot. You know, it's warm in the house a little bit, no ACs on just yet. So I'm like, I need a t-shirt. And so I was like, I've worn this one or like, I can't wear an X-Files t-shirt tonight. We're not talking about X-Files. And then it was like, ⁓ I got it. I wore this to project Hail Mary last week. So, ⁓ it was kind of like my space.

Duds: Nice. So we'll come back to that. But a quick sidebar. How annoying.

Bright: Yeah, I got that on the wheel. I got that on the wheel. And then certainly I posted the blog post. My review is online. If anybody wants to go check it out.

Duds: I will check it out. How annoying though is the weather here lately? You have to literally check the forecast every day to know what to know what you're going to wear.

Bright: All right. It's all over the place. Yeah. It's 90, then it's 50. It's sunny, then it's rainy. It's cold, then it's windy. You know, it's. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It is really nice. Like I took the trash out tonight and everything. I'm like, ⁓ this, this is perfect weather. You know, like this is fire weather. Yeah. Yeah. Now Sunday Easter, sunny, but it's going to be cool until I'm going to be like in the mid fifties, I think. So.

Duds: It's terrible. Wearing different clothes in the morning as you are at 10 o'clock than you are at three o'clock. It's Right. Yeah. When the sun goes down and stops raining, feels pretty nice.

Bright: Not going to like 70 degree day would have been perfect, but I was at cat soccer game last week or practice or something like that. Oh yeah. Last Saturday. was only like 60 degrees. It was cold. Uh, my forehead, which is on the larger side got fried. It's got like burnt, man. Yeah. Yes. I'm like, damn, I should have, uh, should have worn a hat. I should have worn a hat. Yeah. No. So, all right.

Duds: Absorbed all the sun. It's like a big solar panel. You got your vitamin D.

Bright: Yeah. Well, so, ⁓ you know, I, think I told her, went to the doctor labs, came back all good vitamin D. Excellent. Excellent vitamin D probably helped that I was just in Florida, you know, but yeah, yeah, probably. Yeah, definitely. You know, cause even last year I take, I, well, yeah, yeah. ⁓ yeah. Getting healthy labs came on somebody at work even commented, ⁓ today I was on a work call and they're like, Matt, we can, we can really tell.

Duds: Nice. I think so. Yeah, that'll get your levels up. Good for you. That's exciting. Getting healthy.

Bright: that you're thinning out. And of course you're on a zoom call. It's just your face. And I'm like, all right. So you, thought my, my face was fat before. That's what you're saying. Right. Right. I had a fat face. Thank you. Thank you for that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, but you know, it's nice to hear. And when you go to the doctor, you know, I mean, for sure. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah, definitely. It is, it is interesting. So I don't know, but yeah, labs labs came all the way back. Good. I could probably.

Duds: Right. I a fat face, Fat head. It is funny how much weight you carry in your face to your neck, you know, you do thicken up. It's good. You gotta feel better.

Bright: I'm probably in good enough shape now to go be an astronaut. Did you see that? That, that's the segue.

Duds: Maybe if the, if the St. Louis city career doesn't work out the podcasting career, astronauts, right? It's your fallback.

Bright: That's right. Yeah. My podcasting career. Yeah. That's right. Yeah. Easy. Easy peasy. ⁓ all right. So a couple of things here, you know, so Artemis for our listeners that they didn't know that is the new moon landing mission. So kind of like Apollo. So we have three missions here in total Artemis one, which has already happened. So this was kind of that uncrewed test run. launched back in November of 2022 and it sent Orion around the moon. So it was again, just kind of a test run of, of the logistics of it all. They're the spacecraft, the rocket. Yep. Uh, I don't know if it's still called Orion or not actually, but that was the one definitely for Artemis one. So I don't know if Artemis two is also Orion, if it's the same one or if it's a.

Duds: and Orion as what? Okay, so that's the craft that they'll be in though. Okay.

Bright: If it's a different, or I don't know. But so now we're into Artemis two. don't, did you watch the launch yesterday? Lame. So I, ⁓ I did watch it. No, you're lame. mean, luckily the launch was kind of lame in the sense that everything went according to plan, you know, like, I think you kind of watch it almost for that morbid curiosity because of challenger one, right? Which we're, I mean, we don't, we were even alive. If we were, we don't remember it. I think it was an 86.

Duds: I did not. I'm lame or the lunch was lame? And it was like 80, I it was like 82 or 81, 86.

Bright: GROCKET. Yeah, GROCKET real quick. Yeah, I'm gonna guess 86, but I don't, I don't remember. We were either not alive or too young, certainly. But you know, that's of course the last thing that you really want to happen is for something like that. You know, it blows up. mean, there were, there's four astronauts on this thing. So if something goes wrong, you know, it's not going to work out for them. I now I'm thinking it was 82. It was 86 damn, I should have just stuck with it.

Duds: 86. You it right. Did we talk about that on here? The, know, they had that in all the schools going. They had it in all the classrooms. Everybody's watching it. Then it explodes. And then they turn the TV off and they finished the day at school. It's all right. Time to go back to. Yeah. All right, kids, we know we just showed everybody the space shuttle blowing up, but let's get our math books out. And it's like, it's pretty crazy to think about, right? But what do you do?

Bright: Sure. Yeah. Yeah. ⁓ the humanity, you know, kind of like that, right? Yeah. Sure. I mean, yeah, I mean, it sucks for sure. You know what? I mean, that's the thing. What do you do? Um, and that, you know, that was a big news story back then, certainly. And luckily, yes, this is still a big news story, but everything went according to plan and hopefully it continues that way. Um, you know, so they, launched yesterday at 6.35 PM Eastern time, uh, out of the Kennedy space, uh, space center. And this is a 10 day mission and they're going to go around the moon. And it's the furthest that no, this one is manned. This is Artemis two. So there were four astronauts. ⁓ they're in the shuttle now. Yes. So we got Reed, Reed Weissman, Victor Glover, Christina, ⁓ Coke and Canadian astronaut, Jeremy Hans Hansen. So it's the first, it's the first, ⁓ non-American astronaut to go out this far. And it's the first, ⁓

Duds: This is unmanned still. Okay. They're in the shuttle now. They're headed towards the moon. Okay.

Bright: African-American black person of color, whatever you want to say, ⁓ astronaut and the first female astronaut. So of course it's, you know, it's kind of a big deal. And somebody was asked, ⁓ I bet I don't know. ⁓ first woman, first person of color, first non-U.S. citizen to travel beyond low earth orbit and in the vicinity of the moon. So, I mean, that's all pretty cool. And it's kind of crazy. We haven't been out of low earth orbit. Huh?

Duds: So who's driving? Who's the fourth person? Who's the fourth? Just some standard white guy.

Bright: Just white guy. Yes. ⁓ And you know what? He's the one driving. ⁓ Yeah, I bet it's him. ⁓ We kid, we kid. ⁓ This is the first mission beyond low, low earth orbit since when? Take a guess. What year?

Duds: That's what I asked. I said, who's driving this thing? Come on. First mission beyond low Earth orbit. ⁓ I don't know, probably 92. 87.

Bright: Not even close. Nope, not even close.

Duds: Am I like way past it? Okay, so 69.

Bright: Way past it. mean, you, you know, that's the year we landed on the moon. Uh, so 72, 72. Yeah. Cause we went back to the moon a couple of times, you know, so 72 is the last time. So that, that's a, that's a lot. our whole lifetime plus some, right. Plus another 10, 11 years. So, uh, pretty crazy.

Duds: 72, okay. Yeah. Alright, so going back to this. They are on their way to the moon, so they're getting through that radiation belt. Alright, so they've got that all figured out. Van Nuys or.

Bright: Yes. Yep. The van. have that. I have that in here somewhere. Yeah. I'll get to that. have that in our conspiracy. ⁓ a conspiracy talk, but yes, they're going, they're going beyond that. Of course. ⁓ again, around the moon, but further, we've gone around the moon before, but this will be the furthest that we've ever gone around the moon. So the furthest that any human has ever been. So mean, that in and of itself is pretty cool.

Duds: OK.

Bright: Um, so they're spending 24 hours. So we should be beyond that stage by now, um, going in earth orbit to test all the systems. And then they were taken off tonight, I think towards the moon and it's roughly a four day journey to the moon. And then they'll have to come back. Yeah. So four days there, they'll go around it maybe for a day, four days back. And then they had the one day today going around earth. So 10 days, 10 days total. So.

Duds: four days. So are they going to send some pictures back of the Earth being round?

Bright: I would hope so. Yeah. Yeah. I would hope so. All of those people that think we're flat Earthers and we've done that already. There's already pictures of the, earth from the surface of the moon and all that stuff. And there's still people out there that think that earth is flat. Well, that's, that's our next topic. That's our next topic. And before we get onto that, ⁓ and can you grok this or if you got it pulled up real quick, look it up. Cause I didn't do it.

Duds: Are we gonna be able to finally put that one to bed? That was on a set out in Arizona.

Bright: Um, but Artemis three will be at the actual landing. See what the date is or the anticipated, um, window for the Artemis three. So that'll be the first time that we'll actually put boots back on the ground. Um, which would be pretty cool. And boots on the ground on the moon. That's right. Now, 2027. mean, that's not that, so if that all goes well here, we're yeah, we're talking probably this time next year.

Duds: Boots on the ground on the moon. targeted for 2027, mid-27.

Bright: Maybe the end of 2027. Yeah. We're putting a nut, you know, somebody else on the moon. So pretty cool for our kids, you know, for our. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And the science aspect of it all. And, know, Elon Musk recently has talked about shifting his focus from SpaceX, from Mars back to the moon. Um, you know, for a couple of reasons. Yeah. I mean, obviously NASA we've been there. We'll go there again. Um, but.

Duds: That's pretty crazy. ⁓ That's something to get excited to look forward to, We've got to go there first,

Bright: Elon brought up some good points. it's probably easier to kind of figure out some of the logistics of putting like a base together on the moon. And it's a lot cheaper.

Duds: You're going to be working in a space that is going to be very similar to working on Mars, so why not do that local? A little more local. You're still on the moon.

Bright: Yeah. Yes. Right. Right. Now I still love the idea. I still love the idea kind of of, okay, now we figure out the moon thing and we get the base going on the moon, you know, and that's all fine and dandy, but I still like the idea of getting somebody to Mars to say that we've done it kind of like we did to the moon. So even if we do that soon, let's say in the next 10 years, we get somebody to Mars, then we can stop.

Duds: Mm-hmm.

Bright: Right. We don't have to send anybody on Mars. No, on Mars. It almost doesn't make sense to go around Mars because it's just too far away. It's just like, what's the point? Like if you're going to go there, go there, you know, right. That's yeah. Let's stay for at least a couple of days, you know, right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Just enough to you collect some samples, you know, you land on the, the, face on Mars, figure out is this a real face or, or not, you know, do something like that.

Duds: Like on Mars or around Mars? Okay. so far, yeah. You want to stay for a while, you know, if you're going to make the trip. You drive to Florida and then just not get out. You get out for a week. Go find the aliens. Yeah.

Bright: Right. Go find the aliens, you know, just to say you did it. Then you can wait a lifetime. You can wait a hundred years before we go back. Like let us figure out the moon, how to, you know, technology will improve, but let's get there. Say that we did it, plant a flag on Mars. ⁓ and that should fuel just the, you know, fuel just the fun of it.

Duds: But it didn't do that for the moon. You know, it didn't fuel the moon like base.

Bright: Yeah. You're, you're right about that. Um, for a couple of reasons. mean, the main reason is probably money. Um, now I look at it and supposedly SpaceX is well, well, stay tuned to hang in there guys. you're 45 minutes in already hang out for another five minutes and we'll get to the moon conspiracy talk, but SpaceX is talking about going public, you know, and how much money are they going to raise? Like

Duds: Is it money or did we not go?

Bright: If they go public, I'm buying.

Duds: I think they were valued at like 1.4, 1.5 trillion currently. But I think it was all, think it was SpaceX and XAI was like they're combined.

Bright: Isn't that crazy? mean, currently and. Well, so that's the thing. So Elon Musk will Twitter X, right. And X AI that's all built into space X now, ⁓ as is, ⁓ what's the satellite thing that he does for internet star link that's that's space X, you know? So if they go public, I will. Sure. Yeah. Like, so he's going to rain raise so much capital. Not only will he probably be the first trillionaire, which

Duds: Starlink. Everything having to do with going to space, basically.

Bright: In theory is cool. It's a lot of money for one person. You know, we could talk about that, you know, on another podcast, but, uh, but yeah, there's so much money there. It's like, maybe you could actually do something, you know, and when, when, when Elon Musk is 75, 80 years old and he's got a trillion dollars, like you would think he'd just be like, fuck it. We're going to Mars. Right. Like, yeah.

Duds: kinda nuts. I think you could. mean, you have more money than most countries ever dream about. I think he's there now. I think he's, I don't think he cares at all about the money. He's like, he just uses that as a means to an end, right? And the end he wants to go to Mars. So he doesn't really care probably if it takes every dollar, you know.

Bright: Sure, right. Yep, I agree. Yep, I agree. I agree. And he has a bunch of kids, but I don't know. Something doesn't seem right there.

Duds: That's the thing about his companies too, is it's kind of, you kind of come to realize that the, like the investment is really kind of in him. He's the one that is formulating these ideas and these plans. And he's got these companies in place that he's structured in a way that they can, they run themselves and they can take care of these, this business. Right. So he can come in here and he can kind of dream up these new ideas and, and they bring it to fruition, you know? So what more could you ask for as a crazy scientist?

Bright: Yeah. Have you ever, have you ever seen that one video? I know, I know. He's great. Honestly, I think he's great. ⁓ have you ever seen that one video where he's doing a little, I don't know what it is. Somebody's interviewing him. He's on camera and they're looking at a SpaceX thing and, Elon Musk is just talking about the rocket and how he brings it up, brings it down, all this stuff. And this guy who knows nothing about rocketry.

Duds: You know, it's great. Mm-hmm.

Bright: Let's listen to Elon Musk and Elon Musk is like, yeah, we, you know, we do the hydrogen here and we do that to cool it down there. And the guy says, well, do you do that just for the boosters or do you do that for the main rocket? And he goes, well, just the boosters. And then he goes, well, now that you think about it, it actually makes a lot of sense that it wouldn't be just, it should be for the main rocket too. We're going to do that. Go look it up. It is a cr it is. And he's like, he didn't think of it. He was like, I never thought about that till now.

Duds: Mm. That's a good point.

Bright: And he was like, now all space, ECR rockets are going to do that. It was just like some YouTuber that asked a question and he was like, click. It's very cool. Go check it out.

Duds: Yeah, just having a conversation. See, he does strike me as kind of guy who like, you you can put that information out there and he's not like, I guess, what's the word so narcissistic that he thinks he can have all the good ideas, you know, like he, he has all these smart people around him. They have good ideas and he brings that all elevates that, know.

Bright: That's exactly what I was gonna say. Sure. Yeah. Yeah. Sure. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I think he doesn't think that like, he's probably not the best rocket scientists in the world. Not by any means. Right. And he probably knows that he knows that he knows just enough and he is a good businessman. You know, there's no doubt about that. And he's able to put it all together and you know,

Duds: Right. Mm-hmm. You got to know what you're talking about and then hire the smarter people. Yeah.

Bright: Sure. Yeah. Now he collectively might be one of the smartest people in the world as far as general knowledge and stuff like that. Yeah. ⁓ sure. Yep. Yep. And I'm sure he knows things that he ain't even supposed to know and that we could never know because of his situation. Well, all right. Well, maybe he's from the moon. Do you think, do you think we went to the moon back in?

Duds: Oh, for sure. 100%. Yeah. With everything he knows. He is an alien. He's already said it.

Bright: 1969, or do think it was all fabricated? Do you think it was on a soundstage? you, do you believe any of the hype, this conspiracy, or do you think like, no, they're nuts. We definitely meant to the, what's your percentage? Are you like 75, 25, 90, 10? What do you think? A hundred?

Duds: I'd say 50-50 probably. I'm on the fence. Yeah, I'm on the fence. I think it's possible, but I do think we went. Like, I'm not counting it out that it wasn't set up because I know how nefarious the government is.

Bright: You think 50 50, you think you're on the fence. So you think it's possible that the whole thing was fake. So, so probably more like 60, 40, right? Like, so, so you're leaning that we probably went, but Hey, we don't trust the government.

Duds: Yeah, I'm leaning towards it, but there's a lot of, there's a lot of questions that I would like answered, you know, or I think people deserve to have answered, you know, and maybe they have, but it's like, gotta put all that information out there and let people decide. And I'm sure they've answered a lot of this stuff, you know, but it's where do you find it?

Bright: Sure, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I would have, I really would have, I would have loved to have Nilla's take on this. I think he would have had a unique perspective. if we, know, if we, I don't know, I think he just, he probably has a unique perspective is all I think. And I think if we could have gotten Nate dog on this one, I think he would have had ⁓ a unique perspective on, on if we went to the moon.

Duds: Is he a no moon a no mooner? I guess I would say I'm 50 50 because as much as I would like to, you know, I believe that the U S and the people in the U S are good enough, smart enough to do that. And that was a big deal. But I also know that on the other side, there's these agencies and these other people that win by any means necessary type of, you know, motto.

Bright: Yeah. Yeah. We were, you know, we were in the midst of the cold war. The Russians, ⁓ beat us in a lot of respects, ⁓ with, what was the first one that they, ⁓ Sputnik Sputnik. Yeah. Sputnik Sputnik. Not Spock Nick, right? ⁓ yeah. First dog. I actually, I think it was a dog. Yeah. I don't think it made it. Nick was a Cosmo. Yeah. I don't know. He did not. It was, it was a one way trip.

Duds: Yeah. Then they put the first chip into space too. First dog, Cosmo, is it Cosmo? Kaz, we're not.

Bright: for that dog, unfortunately. know, right? Somewhere, somewhere. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. And I think, you know, I think that's where this conspiracy feeds on that. And honestly, I think the conspiracy theorists are just better at social media than the U S government, you know, or NASA in general. So I have the top 10 conspiracy theories as to why the moon landing was faked. And then I do have.

Duds: Poor guy. He's still out there. launch it works firing you into space buddy see ya Probably. It probably is what it is.

Bright: the counterpoint. So I'll run through these and maybe we'll see if you change your opinion. I'm like 95, five, like pretty sure we went to the moon, right? Like, yeah, I think we went to the moon. So of course the claim, the claim is that the Apollo program was, was staged. So we had a total of six successful landings, uh, according to history from between 1969 and 1972 with 12 astronauts.

Duds: Okay, so you believe we got wait wait, okay. All right, let's see if you can change my.

Bright: that landed on the moon. So of course, all of these astronauts ⁓ say that they landed on the moon. But some people have questioned it because they've asked them to swear to God, put their hand on the Bible, and most of them refuse to do it. There's some videos out there on that. And I don't, you know, I don't know. but here's, here's the fact of the matter. You ready for it? Forget about the astronauts themselves or the actors, if you But it would have taken hundreds or even a thousand NASA employees that would have been involved in the Apollo missions. Right. So you would have thought that somebody would have come out and said like, no, no, no, no, no, this didn't ever happened. I know it says I was on this. I wasn't on these missions or whatever it was. Right. So there was a lot of people involved and that's, that's kind of like the main reason against any conspiracy, the aliens.

Duds: sure the more people involved.

Bright: It's like, there's just too many people involved. Somebody's going to leak. There's going to be a whistleblower, right? And there hasn't been that.

Duds: Although I will say that, you know, the government has top secret projects and they basically threaten you, you with their, your life, you know, you come out and you spill the beans on that, regardless of if it's true or not, if you're a whistleblower or not, you go to jail. Like, so I mean, there's a potential that that could still be. I, that's one of the points that I would always lean towards. Also it's like, it's a lot of people to keep it under wraps.

Bright: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sure. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Duds: But maybe they whispered some of this stuff out, you know, Hey, this is why it's not real to these different groups of people. that's where these. Right. Who knows? You know, nobody's going to publicly come out if it's, if it is a top secret thing and publicly say that they were, you know, read in on this and then they were spilling this information. I don't think that's going to happen.

Bright: Yeah. And that's what got the momentum going. Yeah. Well, and that goes. Sure. Right. Right. Yeah. Yeah. You tell somebody here, they tell somebody there, they go to... Yeah.

Duds: Yeah, I think that's what they would do. I think they would probably spill it to their friends and then their friends would talk to friends and that's how it would leak out.

Bright: Right. Yeah. Well, and that's a pretty similar take to, mean, the second claim is that the whole thing was filmed on a soundstage and that it was Stanley Kubrick that filmed the moon landing, ⁓ back to 2001, a space Odyssey, which we talked about last week, ⁓ and that he filmed the whole thing in a studio. So here's the reality to that though. 1969 technology wouldn't have been able to fake the low gravity movements that we saw on the video and the lighting and the shadows match lunar physics. So that's another big thing is the shadows don't match, but they do. You know, I just think people don't understand ⁓ lunar physics. The other, not that I do, I'm not saying that I do, just to clarify, just to clarify that. No, no.

Duds: Thank Okay. You're not a rocket scientist?

Bright: ⁓ also same deal, nobody from the production crew or from the set or set design, nobody's ever come forward and said, I built that or I filmed that, or I was the lighting guy, you know? So like that just as easily could have leaked. So the technology that we have today to fake a moon landing, if you will, didn't actually exist in 1969. Green screens. I don't think green screens, they weren't a thing back then.

Duds: Mm-hmm. You do. You don't know if they existed or not. They didn't exist in the general public.

Bright: Well, I mean, guess there is a little right. It didn't exist to Hollywood, but it existed to the U.S. government. Yeah.

Duds: Maybe, you know, that's not enough. That's another reason not to throw it out.

Bright: All right. All right. Number three, the flag. This is a famous one. The flag was waving in the wind. Yeah. So they're like, how can that be? There's no atmosphere on the wind. shouldn't be waving. Well, the, the fact is, or against ⁓ the debunk, if you will, is that the flag was not waving, that it had a horizontal rods built into it to keep it shape. And yes, and the movement that you see.

Duds: stiff flag. which is what it looked like.

Bright: is simply from the astronauts twisting, twisting it into the ground. They're setting it up and that caused the movement. Yeah. That it's not actually wind or a fan or anything like that. So that, mean, that's that. It was, it was literally Buzz Aldrin spinning a stick. You know, that's, that's how you debunk that one. All right. Number four, there were no stars in the photo. Why weren't there any stars?

Duds: Yeah. Maybe.

Bright: This one actually is pretty easy. ⁓ you know, so the claim is that, yeah, right. It was the photography. The cameras were set for the bright lunar surface. ⁓ so the stars were too dim to show in the exposure settings of the cameras.

Duds: That's a photography thing, right? Yeah, I would imagine that the moon's surface is pretty bright if you're standing on the moon.

Bright: Well, a hundred percent. Yeah. It's reflecting, ⁓ sunlight. It's reflecting light from the earth actually as well. ⁓ so for the same reason that you can't. Right.

Duds: Yeah. Right. So I don't think people understand that, like how, how bright that actually is. And they just expect, you're up there and it's like being outside here, but I don't think that's the same.

Bright: Yeah. It's the same reason that you can't take pictures of stars on your iPhone, right? Like it's just, yeah. All right. Right. ⁓ so back to the quote unquote shadows were wrong. And so the claim is like, this is clearly studio lighting when in reality it was uneven terrain. Plus you have the reflective lunar surface. The sun is the main light source. ⁓ but the surface reflects light both from the sun and the earth. And that's what created all the shadows.

Duds: Right. You don't have enough light.

Bright: So dirt reflects light. Big conspiracy.

Duds: Says who.

Bright: Says who? Right? All right. Here we go. The Van Allen belt radiation would have killed the astronauts. Well, this is, this is a good one. So the reality based on my research is that the astronauts pass through the Van Allen belt pretty quickly. If you stayed in the Van Allen belt, that might be a different story, but they actually pass through it pretty quickly. And the radiation exposure is the same as a CT scan.

Duds: Okay, yeah, let's get into this one. This one's a good one.

Bright: Or a quote unquote space X-ray. So your body can certainly withstand a CT scan or, or space X-ray once. I mean, think about it. This is the old story. Like if you go in for your X-ray, right. You don't necessarily get all the lead stuff, you know, they're X-raying you, but all the people in the rooms, they put on their lead stuff. Well, for one X-ray, one CT scan, doesn't do anything to you. Now for the nurse.

Duds: Hmm. True.

Bright: Or the technician that's given it. they're doing a hundred a day. They need the lead gear. Right. But these astronauts, they're going through it real quick. It's, not a big deal. So I think this is overinflated and overinflated problem.

Duds: Right. I think something else too. I was looking this up. Let me show it to you here. See my picture?

Bright: coming through now. Yep.

Duds: So I think the other thing too is like the shape of the radiation belts and how they launch out from the atmosphere. think they try to take like trajectories that are like through the donut here, right? that's just another thing. I think I had heard that. I don't know about it.

Bright: Right. Yeah. Sure. Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah. So they had, had, head up towards the polls basically. ⁓

Duds: Yeah, I think there's a way to probably limit or like reduce the amount of radiation, you know, the path you take out.

Bright: Right. Right. Sure.

Duds: Cause it also has to do with like the film that they took on the moon and that film having to go through the radiation belt and you think it would get destroyed, right? Did they know? I mean, they knew about the radiation. They had to have known about it.

Bright: Yeah. Yeah. No, I don't know. There's also some shielding. Right. That's the thing. It's not like there's no shielding on the, on the ship or anything like that. You know, now it's not lead. That would be too heavy, but, ⁓ there's some shielding. I don't know. ⁓ number seven, moon rocks are fake. So the claim that these are just fancy earth rocks that, you know, that they painted or whatever, but

Duds: Painted, painted blue.

Bright: The fact of the matter is they collected 842 pounds of lunar samples. That's a lot first off. Yeah. You're coming back a lot heavier than you, than you took off, but we took those rocks and we sent them out to all the scientists throughout the world. Not just, not just America. So if we fake the rocks, we wouldn't have given them to the scientific community on a global level for them to inspect them. We would have, we would have, you wouldn't think, right?

Duds: That's a lot. Mm-hmm. You wouldn't think, No, it's not a good way to keep it under wraps.

Bright: Somebody would have said like, wait a minute. Yeah. Right. Yeah. So we sent it out to the. Right. Yes. Yeah. This is a, this is a backyard pebble. ⁓ yeah. No, no, no, no. ⁓ the other claim is that there's no physical proof that we actually left, but, this, you know, they have this on a, ⁓ a big bang theory, you know, and I know Nilla could have attested to this. He's a big, big, big, big bang.

Duds: This is actually just limestone.

Bright: ⁓ watcher. Yeah. That's a tough, tough one to say a big, big bang, ⁓ viewer. And they, they talk about this. have, we put the reflectors, we installed reflectors on the moon. So that's the easiest way. Yeah. You can, so anybody in theory can do this. If you have the right thing and in big bang, that's what they do. The, the nerds, they shoot their laser to the moon. It hits the reflector and then it comes back and they time the whole thing, which doesn't take that long.

Duds: Big, big, big, big bang. Okay, you like shoot a laser or satellite to it or something. The nerds.

Bright: Cause it's going the speed of light hits the reflector comes back. So yeah, I've seen every episode. think it's hilarious. I haven't necessarily watched reruns or done anything like that. ⁓

Duds: Do you like that show? Maybe watch Young Sheldon.

Bright: No. And I think we talked about this in a podcast because I know you, liked it. Yeah. I've never seen it. Yeah. Yeah. That's probably a good family show, right?

Duds: That show is on at our house constantly. I don't mind it. It's kind of funny. But man, in the first few years are really good. Yeah. I like when, when he's young, you know, he's really funny as like a little kid. But when, ⁓ when he gets older, it's not as not quite as cute anymore, but it's a good show. It's on constantly. We've probably had it gone through about seven or eight times.

Bright: Yeah. Right. Sure. Yeah. Yeah. Well, they're, they're coming out with an, they're coming, I know, right. They're coming out with another spin-off actually. ⁓ I can't, I think HBO maybe. And yeah, but it's not going to be any of the main characters. Now that's not to say that they won't pop in from time to time, but it's going to be the, the main guy is the comic book owner. ⁓ and then maybe, yeah. ⁓ Stuart. Yeah. Yeah.

Duds: ⁓ really? ⁓ okay.

Bright: Um, and then maybe Burt, who was the geologist in the big bang, not young Sheldon, guess they're, they're both spinoffs, but, um, but yeah, so I don't know. Well, we'll just see. It's worthwhile. I like the nerdy jokes. I like all the jokes about, uh, Star Trek and Buffy and, uh, all of that stuff, superhero, you know, for, for a guy, you get that stuff.

Duds: ⁓ you're talking about in the Big Bang Theory. Yeah. Yeah. OK. I just, it's really hard for me to get past the, the laugh track stuff. I, when I, when I start to hear laugh tracks, I just can't stop hearing it. And it kind of ruins the shows for me now. You know, even friends, you know, I watch that all the time, but it's like, I just, it's kind of, is it weird to not have the laughing?

Bright: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. I don't know. That doesn't bug me. Yeah. Now Seinfeld, Seinfeld was filmed in front of a live studio audience. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. A little different. Yeah. Old school, man. Cheers.

Duds: Right. That's a little different. Cheers was the same way. Remember they used to announce that before it film before a live studio audience.

Bright: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It'd be pretty cool to sit in and do something like that, right? If you, you know, yeah.

Duds: Oh heck yeah. I wonder how many takes they do though.

Bright: I don't know. Yeah. At some point does it just get annoying? You got

Duds: Or is it just, Hey, we, do one take. It's like ⁓ a play.

Bright: Well, I doubt they do one take, but there probably are times where they just nail it. Right. And they're like, we don't need to do anymore. Yeah. You know, I've watched like the behind the scenes of saved by the bell and they talk about how they, did four days. Like they do their table read on Monday and then like Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. So I guess it was three days. They, they practiced and then they brought in the audience and Friday they filmed, you know, so was like, how many takes did they really need? And they had multiple cameras set up, you know, so they probably didn't.

Duds: Let's keep moving on. Right. They do a lot of practicing up front.

Bright: Yeah, a lot of practicing and then they do it. And then there's probably some outtakes, I guess, but.

Duds: I think those laugh tracks do. think they like to put those in place because ⁓ we watched a show about that. They talked about how people would, if you had a live audience, they would laugh over the jokes. Like they'd laugh too long and then the next joke wouldn't hit because people wouldn't hear it because they were laughing too much. So part of that laugh track ⁓ bringing that in was so that they could do that. Yeah. And they could try and make it flow better. But anyway, I digress.

Bright: Mm-hmm. Right. Right. Sure. Sure. They can, they can build it out. Yeah. Yeah. Right. That's funny. I digress. All right. Last two, the photos could have been edited. ⁓ the fact of the matter is that these missions were tracked by multiple countries. You think Russia, the USSR, wasn't tracking this. They were, you know, they knew what we were doing. ⁓ also independent observations were made, ⁓ by scientists. There's no credible conflicting information. ⁓ you know, and certainly a cold war enemy would have exposed this if they had any kind of proof that this was fake, they would have exposed it. So the fact that the fact that they didn't. Yeah. Right. Right. Yes. Now here's the biggest one. Why haven't we been back? Right. If, if we.

Duds: Sure. Yeah, yeah, there's space monkey up there monitoring things. because it's not made of cheese.

Bright: Well, right. Maybe. You know, if, uh, and that, but that, that is the biggest, that is the biggest question though. Like we, we did it. What did I say? 12 mission, six missions, 12 astronauts or whatever. We did that over the course of three years, 1969 to 1972. And now we're in 2026 and we haven't done it. Like why?

Duds: There's nothing up here. What's the point? Could you maybe explain that because it is very expensive, right? So that's one reason. But cost to not really like that was kind of the goal, right? Getting to the moon. They didn't have like a further goal. So I like the mission to Mars. You know, let's focus on going to the moon, but the further, like the bigger goal is going to Mars and inhabiting Mars.

Bright: Well, that's, was the main thing. The main thing was cost. It's super expensive. Yeah. Yeah. Correct. Mars. that... yes. Correct.

Duds: So now if you go back to the moon, there's a reason to go back and there's a reason to build and do things because you're not finished with your mission. I think that was probably the biggest problem with the Apollo missions is like we completed the mission guys. We went to the moon. There was nothing up here.

Bright: Yeah. Yeah. I think, and I think you're right. Yeah. Our mission was, was probably twofold. One beat the Russians to the moon to say that we did it. We have the technology. We can do it. Now how we got the technology. Do you know this story? So this, well, kind of project paperclip. Yeah. We, we took all the German rocket scientists after world war two, all the Nazis project paperclip, and we brought them over to the U S to help us with the Apollo missions. ⁓

Duds: Do we steal it? Still from the Germans? Yeah. The Nazis. Why were the Nazis so smart? what, why were there so many smart scientists over there? Albert Einstein, he was a German too, right?

Bright: Yeah, for sure. Now, and of course he ends up working for the Americans and you know, all of that. You know, I don't really know. don't, they were just the hub at the time. Physics, it was a physics hub over there and not, it wasn't just German, Germany, but it was Switzerland, Germany. ⁓ yeah. France, like Europe, Europe was just the hub for all that stuff. And Germany is the biggest country in Europe, give or take. and yeah, I don't know.

Duds: UK I'm sure was involved in other schools.

Bright: I don't know, but they definitely had a lot of them. And if you read, you know, there's lot of great books out there ⁓ that talk about that. I've read several of them, but yeah, that was the whole thing. If they were Project Paperclip, they were all granted amnesty. Yeah. ⁓

Duds: Were they all granted amnesty for that? Yeah. So these were Nazi scientists. This was their field, though, was like physics. And they were studying nuclear bombs and rockets, rocketry.

Bright: Mainly, mainly rocketry. Mainly, yeah, mainly, yeah, yeah. Uh-huh. They were building weapons and stuff like that and yeah.

Duds: So they were Nazis or they were they just German scientists who happened to be under a Nazi regime. know, it's like these guys weren't in the concentration camps, you know, murdering people. were, these were scientists that happened to be Nazis.

Bright: Well, yeah, was probably the latter. No, no, right. Yes. Yes. They were aligned with the now some of them may have had held Nazi beliefs. I don't know. But that's

Duds: Right. Well, but think about how many people in a war like that were Nazis, you know, but at the end of the war, if that party is gone, it's like, well, you don't just get rid of every single person, you know, not anymore. Like, I'm not a Republican. I'm not a Democrat.

Bright: I'm not a Nazi. Right. Right. Like, no, I never believe that. Right. Sure. Sure. ⁓ it's like, yeah, probably after the Confederates lost is like, I was always pro-union. was just stuck down here. You know? Yeah. Poor, poor me. Right. All right. ⁓ so yeah. So the other thing was, was shifting priorities. So yes, we, ⁓ you know, we got to the moon, we beat the Russians, we collected some rocks.

Duds: Yeah. Exactly. Yeah, I wasn't fighting against you guys.

Bright: And then that was probably the end of it. We didn't need to go back. Right. So our priorities shifted the, you know, the cold war ended. We didn't have to prove anything else. You know, now we do have a couple of other, you know, India, China, they're all doing some things with the moon and in the dark side of the moon and things that we haven't done. So this is, is a good way still to once again, show our superiority and, ⁓ and maybe, you know, lead a path to Mars. And if you do that. You know, then, then you're talking. So I don't know.

Duds: So is Elon trying to structure these space missions to be more ⁓ diverse, to have people from all different nations involved in this or not?

Bright: I don't know that Elon is so, mean, so like this is a NASA mission, not a SpaceX mission. Yes. Now they do subcontract some SpaceX stuff. Um, I don't know if this, if any of this had that. So I was reading about the possible going public for SpaceX and they do, don't, I, I'm not going to be able to think of the number, but whatever it is, you know, they do $150 billion a year and whatever. Well,

Duds: This is NASA. Okay.

Bright: 15 % of that comes from NASA or whatever, you know. So they have guaranteed money coming in from the government and then they have all their other stuff that they're doing. I don't know that Elon, I don't think he cares who, I just think he wants people that do it.

Duds: ⁓ Okay. Well, that's what I was hoping. When you were saying who this crew was, it's like, did they intentionally try to make it diverse or are these just the best people for the job? Right.

Bright: I'm sure NASA did. I'm sure NASA did a little bit of both. I'm sure they're all very qualified, but they even asked the crew about that. And, ⁓ the black guy, I don't know which name, I don't know what his name is, but they asked him about it. And he, he honestly said, this is not about black history. This is human history stuff, which is the problem.

Duds: I would hope he would be able to say, I'm the best man for this, this job. That's why I'm on this mission. You know,

Bright: Well, sure. I mean, that's, you know, and that becomes the problem with DEI. You know, I'm sure he doesn't want to think that he's a DEI astronaut. He's, I'm sure he's, I'm sure he's a very quali, he shouldn't want to be, he's a very qualified astronaut who happens to be black.

Duds: Exactly. And you shouldn't want to be, and you shouldn't be, like it shouldn't even be an option. You're talking about life and death.

Bright: Yeah. I mean, it's cool to say that he's the first black guy that made it all the way around. And there's nothing wrong with that. But, but right. We want qualified people. I'm sure he's very qualified. And I think his answer is very good. This is a ⁓ human history moment. Like forget about Canadian history for the other, you know, the other person. Do we, I mean, do we really care? Well, yeah, because the Canadian guy, the Canadian guy or gal, I don't know which one it is. ⁓ but.

Duds: Canadian history.

Bright: Also on the mission is the first non-U.S. citizen. And I guess if it was going to be in, I guess if it was going to be a non-U.S. citizen, Canada's probably the best one. I know we're not necessarily in like the best of relationships with Canada right now, but who are we in a good relationship with? Honestly, you know, we're not in a good relationship with anybody.

Duds: They don't know guys and gals up there either. I'd bring Mexico. Bring Mexico with us. Let's not go there. Let's continue.

Bright: All right, okay. All right, well, that's all I have for Artemis and the moon. I do have some local in the loose stuff if you're ready to move on to that.

Duds: You never ⁓ answered my question about the film going through the radiation belt though. Isn't that a big deal?

Bright: Alright. I don't have that. You're going to have to plug that into Grok. Maybe they put it into a lead. Not for that one. That wasn't on my list.

Duds: ⁓ I thought you had all the answers for these. Well, that's a good one. You should look that up.

Bright: You look it up while I start talking about local in the loop.

Duds: We'll follow up later.

Bright: We're not. Yeah. All right. Yeah. Look, look for our blog posts. Maybe I'll look it up. All right. Local in the Lou. Here's my headline. You ready for this? This might be a good social media headline. Did a neutron bomb, did a neutron bomb hit downtown St. Louis? Yes.

Duds: better be good. a neutron bomb? If I know neutron bombs, would have to say no.

Bright: Yeah, obviously the answer is no, but the question is, why are we talking about this? And so this is going viral right now. And it relates a little bit to the Cardinals. So this was also our local in the Lou segment. Last, ⁓ last week was the St. Louis Cardinals, ⁓ home opener, ⁓ season opener and we won. Yeah. And, we're off to a pretty good start. We're foreign too. We had a walk off win yesterday against the Mets.

Duds: You Winner, winner, winner.

Bright: And we've won both series. So two out of three against the Rays and two out of three against the Mets. But the new, yeah, just keep that up. You're doing good. ⁓ strong start to the year though. That's for sure. But the Mets broadcasters, that's where this story comes from. They said it looks like a neutron bomb went off in downtown St. Louis. And I have the, I have the full, ⁓ I don't think so.

Duds: Do that all season. Nice. So that's a compliment, I guess, ⁓

Bright: Here's, I'll read it verbatim. Here's, ⁓ here's the back and forth between the broadcasters. Well, they want it to look picturesque. You can see a car driving by on the right. That's the only sign of life. No people. No people. But there's never anybody walking around in downtown St. Louis. No, there is not. It's not very often. You're right. It's like, remember the old neutron bomb that wouldn't knock down buildings, but just would eliminate all the people. It's like one of those hit St. Louis. I guess it's just the photo op. So that was the text exchange. They're basically saying that that downtown St. Louis is a ghost town, that there's no people and we just have all these buildings with nobody down there.

Duds: Is that right?

Bright: Well, so here's the thing. got, I got some information on it. One.

Duds: Cause that would seem like it's not that far off in some areas, especially at certain times.

Bright: No, it's definitely not that far off. Now, so here's the thing. This was a Wednesday, two o'clock game for the Cardinals, right? So middle of the afternoon, the game was already pushed back by an hour for a rain delay. The attendance at the game was lighter for that reason. And it's a day game. It's an April day game. It was a little bit colder, kind of rainy, 21,600. Of course, kids are in school.

Duds: Mm-hmm.

Bright: And adults in theory are at work. So, especially at two o'clock, it's not like it's lunchtime. Everybody's right. Everybody's supposed to be at work. Now compare that to New York though. It doesn't matter. Of course, there's people all the time, right? Always. So they did pick the worst possible time, probably to judge foot traffic. Congrats, Mets broadcasters. But there are some facts. They're definitely not completely wrong. So.

Duds: Yeah, you're not going to have very many. No.

Bright: The St. Louis city population 1950 was 850,000 people today. It's roughly 300,000 people. Yeah. Drastically reduced, know, Cardinal, right, right. Cardinals games generally busy, you know, the last couple of years it's been a downturn, but yeah, but that's the thing when a Cardinals game blues game city SC game battle Hawks game. Um,

Duds: 300. Yeah. That's a third. Population spikes when a Cardinals game is going on.

Bright: Fourth of July, something, if something's going on downtown, the population spikes Mardi Gras. Right. Random Wednesday day game. Not so much. So. Yeah.

Duds: Mardi Gras. But from the flip side, it really shouldn't have to be like a big event. If the downtown was flourishing, if businesses were there, people were out walking around, you'd see it. So it's very telling that the business in downtown has gone down big time.

Bright: Agreed. That's... yes. That's my thing. Yeah. Yeah. That is my thing. The city should still feel like a city. ⁓ I think post COVID, you know, people work from home now. They don't have to go downtown. have vacant buildings. You know, these, these offices have, have found, they don't have to house big old skyscrapers anymore. They can go get a smaller office. People work from home or they do ⁓ a hybrid model. Why are they paying their rent on these, you know, big skyscrapers? You look at the AT &T building.

Duds: Mm-hmm.

Bright: the Millennium building, ⁓ know, those, are all things that are vacant or empty or being destroyed. And I don't know. We've seen a lot of businesses leave restaurants. talked about this.

Duds: I mean, we know, yeah, businesses drive, you know, how much is going to be down there. And if, if it's not a business friendly city and they're taxing them to death and the businesses start to pull out, the people are going to leave. It's the only reason that people are there. You don't just have a city full of people with no business.

Bright: Yeah. Yep, and- And that's exactly what's happened to St. Louis. So St. Louis Metro, and we've talked about this in the past podcast is still pretty big. It's one of the larger Metro areas in the country. I mean, it's definitely, I think it's like top 20 give or take roughly somewhere sits around 20, which is we, think we talked about this with the Rams and like, you know, there's 32 football teams where the top 20 market, but we don't have a football team. Like doesn't make sense. ⁓ so the,

Duds: Mm-hmm.

Bright: Metro area sits around 2.8 to 3 million people. It's plenty big. It's just everybody moved to St. Charles, West County, Illinois. Nobody lives downtown. And the only reason they go downtown is for events.

Duds: I can see that.

Bright: So, yeah, now that leads us to a bigger topic and we don't necessarily have to, again, do a deep dive on this, but I did want to mention it because it is in the news. Again, the city county merger debate. Again, yeah. What are we?

Duds: ⁓ God, again, they're talking about that. I'm looking this up too, by the way. And we're not in the top 20. Well, sorry. You know what? It's not taking the metro area. So our metro area, you said it was like 300.

Bright: Yep. There we go. Our city is 300,000 metro areas closer to 3 million.

Duds: All right. Let's see here.

Bright: Yeah, I've looked this up before. We could be like 24. This says 2.8. What I looked up today.

Duds: Is it three? I thought it was like two. OK. All right, where are we? Are we on here yet? It says we're not in the top 20. If you take metro areas, yeah, it says number 20 is Baltimore and they're at 2.8. So.

Bright: We're close though. Yeah, we're close. Well, so we're roughly, we're a great comparison to Baltimore. I bet we're probably right there with Baltimore. ⁓ and they're one of the only cities also that doesn't have their County and their city merged. And they're also one of the shittiest cities when you look at crime statistics and things like that. And I think we've talked about this on the podcast before. Yeah. You know, and, and I think that's the big debate. We're only, we're one of the only cities. So I think Baltimore is one of the other ones that hasn't merged their city and County.

Duds: Okay.

Bright: And we split back in 1876 and it's led to a bunch of problems. We have fragmented resources, know, confusing government, weaker downtown density. So there's a lot of arguments for the merger. And I will say this right at the bat. I'm for the merger. Stronger tax base, more unified planning and more people that are tied to or connected to the city in some fashion. Now what's the argument against?

Duds: Mm-hmm.

Bright: It's a political nightmare. The suburbs don't want it. They think all their tax money will get reallocated to the city and not in.

Duds: Well, that would definitely happen. That's what I think.

Bright: When I'm, you know what, ⁓ I'm okay with that happening to an extent. And then the last thing is that.

Duds: I think, you know what, I would be okay with it if there were some guidelines in place, you know, protecting county residents from the mismanagement that the city has done to itself. You know, like if the city wanted to merge with the county and, you develop a new city county board, you know, the mayor of St. Louis downtown would only have a portion of a, you know, of a

Bright: Yeah.

Duds: of a vote, you know, compared to other, you know, municipality leaders or whatever. I don't know. It's kind of, it's already messy. You know, it's not a great thing right now.

Bright: Right. Right. Yeah, they definitely have to figure that out. I think one of the biggest things is, is even St. Louis city, and we could look this up, but they have way too many wards, if you will. I can't remember how many people sit on the board of aldermen or whatever for St. Louis city. It's way too many. And then if you had to merge that with the County, the reason people don't vote for it is because they'd lose their job. You wouldn't have 30 board of aldermen just for the city anymore. You know, you'd have six.

Duds: Mm-hmm.

Bright: And then then you'd have all the county and they'd sit on one board. So I think that's the part where it's like, it's politically messy. People are just like, well, I'm not going to vote for that. I'm going to lose my job.

Duds: Yeah. Yeah, I kind of think that you, wouldn't do it because I think it would, if you're trying to merge these two fairly large entities together that are already being mismanaged, both of them, you know, they're not being run properly because they're government, right? So then you try to combine them and it's just going to spiral even more out of control. I think the better thing to do is to try and get lesser government and smaller, more local style, you know, and have less of this one

Bright: Whoa. Now...

Duds: big overarching government to take care of the entire area.

Bright: Yeah, I mean, so Yeah. Here's the thing though. So, you know, I don't, I don't have all the answers. The city and the County, you know, the County already has different governments, right? So like Fenton sits in a County, but they have their own government, right? So, right. How do those smaller municipalities work? I'm not sure. My biggest thing with this whole merger is I think as an area, we live or die with

Duds: you

Bright: downtown St. Louis. If downtown St. Louis turns into a ghost town and we're not respected, which I already think we're not necessarily respected on a national level, people aren't going to want to move here. And if people don't want to move here, we're not going to get more jobs. We're not going to get higher paying jobs. If we don't get higher paying jobs, we can't increase the quality of living. Our neighborhoods aren't going to get better. We're not going to have more money to do more things. If we could increase the quality of the city.

Duds: Mm-hmm.

Bright: And yes, that might include diverting some funds from local taxes to improve the city. We're going to attract more businesses, which attracts more jobs, which attracts economy growth, which in turn means more money for everyone. Literally, right. Which again, then it kind of becomes a machine. So that's

Duds: I don't know. feel like you're just bailing out downtown, like all these businesses left because they're being taxed and regulated. You try to pull them back in. mean, the people they vote with their checkbook, they leave, you know,

Bright: Well, so that's going to be, that's going to be the, that's going to be the argument against it. Yeah. Well, and I, I agree with. Yeah. I agree with smaller government. agree with less regulations, you know, like I want all of those things. And then just the city and the county merging would change the crime statistics on the national level. Right. Instantly. And we, I've talked about this. So when you see St. Louis as the murder capital of the world, well, it's not, it's literally one street in North St. Louis that has all the murders. And because St. Louis is its own entity, it doesn't account. So it's like, one person's murdered, you know, for every, we know 1000 people in the city of St. Louis, right? Right. Exactly. But if the city and the county merged, that's instantly improves the crime rates. And then that improves.

Duds: 100 residents, ⁓

Bright: your, your, ⁓ your opinion on the national level, which automatically means more people are going to move here because they think it's a safe city, a nice city, attracts more jobs, means more money. Just that alone. I'm for the merger, just the crime statistics.

Duds: Yeah, but then cost of living goes up and people can't afford anything because there's more people here.

Bright: Well, then you're talking about gentrification and that's a, you know, that's a whole nother thing, but you know, if it benefits the majority of the people, if, know, the majority of the people are making more money. I am not talking communism. I'm talking pure capitalism.

Duds: That starts to sound communism. You're talking communism. It benefits the people. It's for the people. You got to think of the people first.

Bright: ⁓ what is that Seinfeld episode where he works for the communist magazine and, ⁓ or news, the newspaper communist newspaper. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Duds: That was when they were the Santa Claus Kramer and then one guy was the elf. ⁓ they wanted to go, yeah, Mickey, they wanted to go on strike to get their Santa Claus rights. He starts reading the, ⁓ what was that magazine? Do remember the newspaper?

Bright: Yeah, Mickey. Yeah, yeah, ⁓ I try, was trying to, it's a newspaper. Yeah. I'm trying to remember, but I can't think of it. ⁓ well, that's a good one.

Duds: Something like the daily, the daily reader or something like that, or the, the daily worker. think that's what it was. Yeah.

Bright: ⁓ the, the daily worker. That's what I was going to say. Was it the daily worker? Yeah. All right. We've got a couple of minutes left here. We're getting pretty close to the end. We're at about an hour and a half. If you can see my screen here, I've got a couple of topics. ⁓ let's give it a spin. I did less research on the wheel now. It's just too much. I was like,

Duds: I would say, by the way, I'm a no for the merger.

Bright: Ugh, know, we're split here. ⁓ wow, all right. Literature, and this is a callback to ⁓ last week. I ⁓ kinda wanted to call that back up, so I put it on here. I didn't know it was gonna hit, but to dark matter.

Duds: ⁓ that's funny. So I've started listening to that. Yep. Yeah, I'm about five chapters in, I think. It's interesting so far. Yeah. Got through the part with does it? Yeah, I'm not saying it's bad by any means. It's just it's slow to start out, like building the story. So he's that.

Bright: What do you think? Okay. All right. Yeah. Trust me when I say it, it gets better. Yeah. No, no, no, but yeah. Right. Yeah. Okay. So where are you at without any like major spoilers for our listeners here, but like where are you at?

Duds: I don't really think I even have any spoilers, you know, the first five chapters, you know, I really, but I've gotten to the point where he's met up with his obviously alternate reality wife and friend from college. And he kind of just explained to her, you know, what was going on. then, ⁓ she got, she got killed by the guy that like busted down the door. A little spoiler there.

Bright: Right. Right. Okay. Yep. Yeah. Okay. So that's a spoiler. All right. So here's the thing. You say only five chapters, but I think it's only like a 15 chapter book. So you're like a third of the way through the book. It's not like, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. ⁓ and that's, that's a pretty good.

Duds: Probably it's got like seven hours left. Yeah. But so far it's, it's, it's starting to get pretty interesting. There's definitely some, some parts of the story that you can relate to, you know, I think the writing is a little different than kind of some of the writers that I've listened to, but he's doing a pretty good job of, know, like trying to put a normal person's perspective on like, I was just walking on the street and this happened to me, you know, and

Bright: Ugh. Yeah. Right. Right. ⁓ Right, right, sure. Yeah.

Duds: and how to, you know, what that guy would be feeling like if his whole life was just upended, you know, and you see that in movies and stuff, but books are a little different when you, when they put that story together, it's a little better.

Bright: Yes. Sure. Absolutely. Well, and you know, like I said, I was picturing one thing when I was, when I was reading this. And again, I don't want to give away too many spoilers per se, but I was picturing kind of like fringe, ⁓ where you've got like one reality and another reality. And I don't know if you ever watched fringe. It's a great TV show. ⁓ and then I, and I mentioned this last week, so I don't think it's any spoiler to you.

Duds: Mm-mm.

Bright: But it turns out not to be fringe. turns out to be sliders, right? Which is, which is great. And we haven't gotten to that. ⁓ So Caroline and I are now, are we three episodes into the TV show? And it's pretty, pretty much right in line with the book. There's a, you know, a couple of things, certainly that they, that they change, but they, they kind of skipped something the other day. And I'm like, ⁓ I can't believe they skipped that. It's actually right where you're at.

Duds: Multiverse.

Bright: And I'm not, again, I don't want to give anything away with the TV show, because when you're done, you should watch that. But right where you're at, I'm like, ⁓ I can't believe they didn't do that.

Duds: So you said fringe is based off dark matter?

Bright: No, no, no. Dark Matter is the TV show ⁓ based off of the book, Dark Matter. Fringe is a whole nother TV show. It's great. Kind of X-Files vibes. ⁓ Kind of Sliders vibes. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. And, ⁓ and they just did the first season and I'm so that I'm not done with it. I'm only like three episodes in. ⁓ so we'll, we'll have to see, but I highly recommend it so far. So good holds true to the book. And yeah. So I was saying so that I was like, ⁓ I can't believe they,

Duds: Okay. So there's a dark matter TV show already, huh? Okay.

Bright: deviated from the book. I'm like, ⁓ that sucks. And I was like, that would have been the perfect end to episode three. And then they pivoted, but then they came back to it. I'm like, ⁓ and then that is how episode three ends. And I'm like, okay, you know, I'm like, they're, they're on, they're on it. They did a good job. Yes, exactly. ⁓

Duds: Mm-hmm. OK. Did a good job. right, prove of your storyline structure. They didn't air the episodes out of order.

Bright: No, none of that craziness. You know, they're not going to, they're not going to firefly this one. I think it's already been renewed for season two, which is great. And it's got, know, again, Jennifer Connelly in it, you know, Jennifer Connelly. Yeah. She looks great. And I looked it up the other day. So there's this one scene. 55, not even like, I thought she, was like, Oh, she's probably 50. I mean, we're 40. We're 42.

Duds: Yeah, was she mid 40s? 250s? Wow, really? I was thinking 47, you know.

Bright: Yeah. I thought 50 and I looked it up. I'm like, 55. I'm like, that's like, she could be a grandma. And I'm like, damn, she looks good. She looks good in the show. So, uh, I dunno. So yeah. So we're three episodes in and then I started reading, um, his, his other book, and I don't know if it was before or after, uh, recursion. And so this is your net. have to read it the next one. So as soon as you're done with dark matter, go to recursion and.

Duds: Dang. brrr Is this in the series? Is this a series? Okay.

Bright: No, it's just, there are some similarities. ⁓ so you can tell he kind of has a niche, but, ⁓ this is a, this is a mind fuck man. Like I'm like, I'm having, I really have to pay attention. It's it's it messes with you way more than dark matter does. And they're, they're already turning it into a Netflix movie that supposedly is going to be released this year. And I'm kind of thinking like, I don't know how they're to fit all this into a movie. To me, this is also a TV show. ⁓ but it maybe, you know, like, yeah, like it could have even just been like a mini series, right? Or yeah, something like that. Like let's, let's just make it for, ⁓ I think so. Yeah. Well, I think people now with streaming, people are really into that because you don't have to commit long-term. You don't have to wait two years before the next season comes out. Cause that's the new trend. Everybody waits two freaking years. You don't even remember what's going on, but if you can find.

Duds: Yeah, four hour long movie. They should do that more often, honestly, like a six part limited series. Mm-hmm. Right. It's more of a movie divided up into three or four, six episodes.

Bright: Yeah, yeah, yeah. If you can find a six to eight episode, one and done story, ⁓ then you're like, all right, I can get behind this.

Duds: And I think people really like that. I like that. I like a beginning and wrapping it up, you know, like six, eight episodes.

Bright: I do too. Yeah. Well, and I think that's the other, the other thing you get invested into some of these shows and then they cancel them. And then you're like, well, I didn't. Yeah. Right. Yeah. I, I've got too many, too many of those shows. ⁓ sliders was one of them ended on a cliffhanger. ⁓ the O a is one of my absolute favorite shows. If you've never seen that, that is a, we're not on Netflix.

Duds: Right. They never tie up the loose ends. Yeah. That just becomes annoying. Mm-hmm. OA.

Bright: And, ⁓ and they, you froze on me here, unfortunately, maybe you come back. ⁓ but they canceled it. They canceled it after, ⁓ after two seasons and they left it on a huge cliffhanger. And I'm like, I can't believe they did that.

Duds: You still there? Yeah, that's no bueno. We watched this funny show for a while. It was really good. It had Drew Barrymore in it. It was called the Santa Clarita Diet. Did you ever hear of that one?

Bright: Yeah. Yeah. Santa Clara Diet, yeah, it's on Netflix. I never watched it. Luke, Bobcat Man, ⁓ watched that one. It's like vampires, right?

Duds: ⁓ dude is so funny. It was good. And they stopped. didn't renew it. They are. Yeah. I think they're vampires. ⁓ and it's just hilarious. She there she's like dead and just funny things start happening. And they've got a guy that's a headless vampire that works in their little call center. It's her in their phone forum. And it's just, it was really funny and it was like original. And I think it went for like

Bright: Right. Yeah.

Duds: two seasons and then they didn't renew it. And it was like, it might have been three, but it just kind of ended abruptly, you know, and just kind of sucks. You know, you have these good shows that, yeah, but what are you going to do?

Bright: I thought it was more like four or something like that, but I don't know. I never watched it. Yeah. Right. Right. Yeah. That that's always a bummer when that happens. Yeah. Yeah. And that's the nice thing. You know, they do. ⁓ I can think of a couple. mean, the beast in me, ⁓ that was just a big one on Netflix. ⁓ that was like an eight parter, ⁓ behind her eyes. That's one. That's a good one for you and Jenny, you and your wife. ⁓ go watch that one. It's a six parter, eight parter on Netflix. And that's a. You think it's about one thing and then there's this big twist and you're like I did not see that coming There's just no way there's just no way you could see it coming And then there was another good one Yeah, you know we talked about this last week, you know, I don't like to be on my phone, know My wife she'll she'll be playing a game on her phone while she's watching and I yell at her all the time I'm like, are even watching? No No, I hate it. I hate it

Duds: These are shows you probably have to focus on a little bit more, Mm-hmm. ⁓ you can't. You can't pay attention. You can't pay attention. It's impossible.

Bright: So when I watch a show, I usually watch the show.

Duds: I actually got called out by my daughter tonight. We were watching the show and, ⁓ told you it was that limiting Snicket's, ⁓ what's that called? It's a serious unfortunate events. And I was watching it and probably 10 minutes left. And for some reason I picked up my phone to look at something and then it was over. And she's like, why it turned it off. She's like, why didn't you watch the show? I was like, I was watching the show. She's like, well, what happened at the end?

Bright: ⁓ yeah. Yeah. Still, still, huh? Series of unfortunate events. Yeah.

Duds: And I was like, damn. I was like, hold on. I was like, come here. And I turned it back on. was like, we're to watch the last 10 minutes because you're right. I completely missed it out. And I felt pretty bad about it. So I was like, you're right. Not doing that.

Bright: Yeah. ⁓ Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Zoned out. Yeah. Well, we know you weren't... What were you doing on your phone? You weren't on social media. You're still on your,

Duds: No, I was just, I don't know what I was looking at. Probably looking at articles. Yep. Just scrolling, stupid stuff.

Bright: You don't even know. Yeah. All right. Well, let's wrap it up with this, a little bit of a segue. So we're going into Easter weekend. I think you're on a, are you doing like a four day fast?

Duds: 88 hours. And let's see, I set a timer. Let's see how many hours I got left.

Bright: ⁓ my God. Now you've done, you've done this before. You did this once before. Was it last Easter? 61 hours, 61 hours, 52 minutes. Yeah. So now what are you, you just drink water?

Duds: Yep, 62 remaining. Yeah, drink water with like element tea, drink coffee and tea. Yeah. No salads, no food, no, alcohol, no nothing.

Bright: Coffee, yeah, but no solids. Right. Yeah. I had a, I had a feeling. I was like, you ain't drinking beer tonight. I knew that much for the pod. ⁓

Duds: Nope, no beer. felt, I didn't really feel hungry when I woke up this morning. And I, but I did realize I was in the bathroom brushing my teeth and I was like, ⁓ what am I going to eat? And I was like, ⁓ man, it's, it's Thursday. I'm on my fast now. So just kind of hit me. And then, ⁓ I was fine probably all through lunch. I went and worked out. And then after lunch started thinking about food a little bit more. And then on the way home, I picked up.

Bright: I ain't. Yeah. Yeah.

Duds: ⁓ Jamis took him to gymnastics. I was like, man, I'm just constantly thinking about food and what to eat. And like, it's just kind of hard. It's all mental, you know, it's like, wasn't feeling hungry, but every time I would think about food, I would want to go eat something, you know? So just drink more water. It, the mental aspect of it is the hardest part.

Bright: Yeah, yeah. Well, sure. Yes. Yeah. Right. Yeah. And then that'll certainly. Yeah. Yeah. I get that. And everybody else is eating. You want to eat, ⁓ whatever it may be, of course, the social aspect of it all. So.

Duds: You really don't realize how much of your time is spent dedicated towards finding, preparing, eating, and cleaning up food.

Bright: ⁓ sure. ⁓ I think about it all the time. I think about it all the time. Cause that's all I do. feel like from like four to seven, you know, I'm either prepping dinner. That's probably, it's probably more like five to seven prepping dinner, cooking dinner, eating dinner, cleaning up from dinner. I do all of those things. Sorry. Sorry, wifey. She doesn't do those things. I do those things every day. And that's just one meal. Right.

Duds: cleaning it up. Yep, every day. And that's one meal. You got multiple meals a day.

Bright: Yes, a hundred percent. You know, I get the kids breakfast every day. You know, maybe on the weekends, sometimes my wife will cook breakfast. That's her meal. ⁓ but if it's not, if she's not cooking French toast or something, then I'm getting the kids food, you know, lunch. Yeah. Sure. Yeah. But you need it. So.

Duds: So think about how much additional time you would have if you never had to think about food. So you do it fast and you don't want to think about food, but you do think about food and it makes you hungry. So it's always in your mind.

Bright: Yeah. Now. Do you start wearing down towards the end? Like you just run out of energy or do think you just, have enough to get through? All right.

Duds: No, yeah, pretty good energy throughout the whole thing. think actually day two might've been a little bit harder, ⁓ last year, but I think by day three, was like, I was good to go. Saturday was pretty easy. Friday was a little tough because we would go to fish fry and I would sit there at fish fry and not eat, but entertaining.

Bright: Right. All right. Yeah. Sure. Right. Well, we have our fish fry. We're hosting fish fry tomorrow. ⁓ So catfish, carrot cake, all that good stuff. ⁓ And then, so when does it end for you? like, I'm assuming it's Sunday.

Duds: Mm-hmm. Well, yeah, we'll go to church on Sunday and then I'm going to my parents for brunch. So be like 11 noon. Yep.

Bright: Yep. For brunch. Okay. So Sunday brunch. Yep. Yeah. And that's what we're doing. Normally we do Easter brunch, but we're kind we're doing more of like a lunch, you know, so we'll go over to my parents at 11, do Easter baskets for the kids. And then we'll go into like lunch and beer and stuff like that, which will, which will be good. ⁓

Duds: You should try the fast, the three days. It's a good amount of time and, know, clears your head.

Bright: I mean, think I, I think I could, I could do it because I can easily, my intermittent fasting is, don't even think about, I can go 16 hours. No question. But I like, I don't, I'm not even hungry, you know? And then even today, my lunch got delayed and I was just like, I'm fine. I could breeze right through. Now I think, I think your point, I think you could do one day, problem. think day two becomes like, you're like, oh, I want food. I'm hungry. But then once it gets past day

Duds: You feel good.

Bright: Two, then you're like, okay, I just got one more day to go.

Duds: I think it was actually like day one morning was tough. know, Dave or not day one day, two morning day one. If you can make it through the first day, you're usually, you know, you can go all day. So then you wake up the next day and your body's like, okay, time for breakfast. But if you don't eat again, then you kind of get past it. As long as you keep yourself busy and you keep drinking water, keep yourself hydrated. You know, if you, every time you're hungry, you just drink some water and it helps out.

Bright: Well, yeah. Day two morning, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, and I've heard... Yes. Well, and I've heard a lot of good things about what it does for your body and your cells. And I don't know how much truth there is to all of that. ⁓ the guy, right. Exactly. Right. Yeah. Yeah. ⁓ the guy from King of Queens, ⁓ what's his name? I think Kevin James. Wasn't he on Joe Rogan and he said he went on like a 40 day fast. Look that up. I think he went on a

Duds: tells you start to break down some of that old fat that's been in there for a long time. Kevin James. I thought Jesus did that. I didn't think anybody else did that.

Bright: Well, I know. ⁓ I think he did it. I look it up real quick and then we can, we can end the pod. I think he did it. Yeah. Yeah. He, and he said he did it for his daughter or something like that or for his health. And he was only drinking water pretty much maybe coffee too. But I think he went on some kind of crazy long fast.

Duds: You know, now that you say that, I do think I remember something about that. Let's see. That said, he did an extreme 41.5 day water fast and he claimed to have lost 60 pounds.

Bright: Yeah. Well, that'll do it. I'm surprised it ain't more. mean, 41. Yeah, that's, yeah, that's what it was. A little salt, a couple of pickles, little bit of pickle juice. Yeah.

Duds: Yeah, only water and a little salt for electrolytes. Yeah, I think I did listen to that episode. kind of remembered that after you said it. Yeah, so I'll drink the have you had element tea packets before they're like salt electrolytes. I like them, so I'll drink two or three of those.

Bright: Yeah, yeah, yeah, pretty crazy. Yep. Uh huh. Yep. Yep. Yep. I switched. I switched to a pickle juice and I only, cause I didn't know that you could do this. You could just buy a jug of pickle juice from the grocery store. I found it. And, I usually only do it when I'm drinking or if I'm going to be drinking more than a couple of beers. Cause I now I'm drinking so much water, you know, I'm drinking 120 ounces of water, roughly a day, give or take. Now today I'll be a little light. I'll only be at 90 because I started, I drank a couple of beers. had three or four beers. ⁓ I won't need pickle juice cause I'm hydrated enough, but let's, let's say I'm going to drink like six, eight, maybe 10 beers. Let's say it's a, you know, something, something like that. Then I'm going to drink. Yeah. Yeah. I'm going to, yeah, exactly. Then I'm going to drink some pickle juice.

Duds: Dang. Time went on, yeah.

Bright: And that's got a lot of salt, a lot of electrolytes in it. But I think for the most part, I probably get enough salt and sodium in my normal diet ⁓ to keep that up. And then I'm flushing it with enough water that I'm not holding on to that water weight because I'm drinking enough. you know, that was another thing.

Duds: Right. Something else I'll do is I'll just take like salt crystals from our grinder and eat some of those just to give your tongue some flavor, you know, get some salt taste. It's kind of nice.

Bright: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, if you're on a three day fast, four day fast or 40 day fast, might need that, but you need something. Yes, yes, Yeah. Yeah. Well, yesterday.

Duds: You need something. You need something. You really start to crave, you know, just some type of food, you know, something to chew on. It's weird that it's that big of a part of a human's life or any animal is just like food, food, give me food.

Bright: Yeah. Sure. Yeah. Yesterday we had soccer practice. It was ugly. It was rainy. Got the kids home and then I wasn't cooking dinner. It was too late. So I had one cup of cottage cheese with some hot sauce. That was it. That was my dinner last night, you know, and it started good. It was probably good for the first half of it. I'm like, all right.

Duds: Mmm, sounds good.

Bright: The second half, I'm just like, ⁓ my God, but I needed it because I wanted to hit my protein targets for the day. And, ⁓ I didn't want to munch on food later in the night. So I was like, gotta, gotta knock out this one cup of cottage cheese. It wasn't the fanciest meal, but.

Duds: It's funny when you get into that mindset that you're kind of in where you're looking at macros like that, and you stop thinking of food as like an enjoyable thing to eat and more of like, this is just, this is a certain, you know, amount of protein and carbs or whatever fat that I want to put in my body. And I don't really care. I'm just, I'm eating that.

Bright: Right, right. Yep. Yep. Yeah. I mean, certainly you want it to taste good. ⁓ I do look, I still look forward to, you know, the fish fry tomorrow night and all of that. ⁓ tonight we did just chicken thighs and, and vegetable medley. Wasn't anything fancy, but it was pretty good. And I made a little low Cal, low carb sauce to go with it, but seasoned it up real nice. Put it in the air fryer, little bit of olive oil, which that was the only thing that came back in my labs.

Duds: Sure, of course. Mm-hmm.

Bright: cholesterol, need a little bit more olive oil, a couple more avocados in my diet. But I don't know. Something like, no, it was a cholesterol thing. You know, I don't know. There's good. Yeah. There's good cholesterol. There's bad cholesterol. I can't get, well, yeah, sure. You know, but it was still better than where I was last year.

Duds: What's that for? The Omega 3s? cholesterol is good for you. You're going to have higher cholesterol if you've eaten mostly protein. Now that whole thing about the good and the bad cholesterol thing is not 100 % fact. There's a lot of that. Yeah, it's a misnomer.

Bright: Yeah. I've done some, I've done some research on that too, that people with higher cholesterol, you know, are living longer than they're supposed to. As long as the rest of their diet is good and healthy. I don't know. Yes. Try glycerides. Yep.

Duds: Mm-hmm. What's? Yeah, think the triglycerides are what, you know, is a big indicator. And the there's like, there's another one, they one see, I think, and then your triglycerides. So if you manage in those, a lot of people that are like on the carnivore diet or keto diet will have high cholesterol, the good and the bad, but that doesn't mean anything. If you have like low a one C and low triglycerides, you're perfectly healthy. Your body uses cholesterol, so you need it to live. It's brain energy.

Bright: Yep, A1C, Yep, yep. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Right. Yeah. Exactly. Right. Right. Yeah. When I looked it up, it was like a little bit more fiber in my diet. That was one of the things, but I was like, I think I'm doing pretty good on that. You know, I pay attention because that's one of the things with this high protein diet. You're not always getting enough fiber. So I was like, I haven't paid attention, but I don't know. We'll see.

Duds: Mm-hmm. What are you going to do? Just try to do better.

Bright: What are you going to do? All right. Maybe that'll be, maybe that'll be the name of this week's episode. What are you going to do? ⁓ maybe we got to, we'll figure out next week. Hopefully we'll see you guys back here next week. I know we've got some more conflicts, hopefully Nilla. Man, you never know. You never know these days. So, and then definitely city SC, ⁓ pod coming at you on Saturday before the game. So check that out too. Give us a like, give us a follow.

Duds: Might be two of us, might be three of us, might be four of us.

Bright: Biggest viewership we've ever had last week. So let's see if we can make it two weeks in a row.

Duds: pump those numbers up. Happy Easter.

Bright: Yes. Happy Easter.