Trump tech czar slams OpenAI scheme for federal 'backstop' on spending — forcing Sam Altman to backtrack



OpenAI is under the spotlight after seemingly asking for the federal government to provide guarantees and loans for its investments.

Now, as the company is walking back its statements, a recent OpenAI letter has resurfaced that may prove it is talking in circles.

'We're always being brought in by the White House ...'

The artificial intelligence company is predominantly known for its free and paid versions of ChatGPT. Microsoft is its key investor, with over $13 billion sunk into the company, holding a 27% stake.

The recent controversy stems from an interview OpenAI chief financial officer Sarah Friar gave to the Wall Street Journal. Friar said in the interview, published Wednesday, that OpenAI had goals of buying up the latest computer chips before its competition could, which would require sizeable investment.

"This is where we're looking for an ecosystem of banks, private equity, maybe even governmental ... the way governments can come to bear," Friar said, per Tom's Hardware.

Reporter Sarah Krouse asked for clarification on the topic, which is when Friar expressed interest in federal guarantees.

"First of all, the backstop, the guarantee that allows the financing to happen, that can really drop the cost of the financing but also increase the loan to value, so the amount of debt you can take on top of an equity portion for —" Friar continued, before Krouse interrupted, seeking clarification.

"[A] federal backstop for chip investment?"

"Exactly," Friar said.

Krouse further bored in on the point when she asked if Friar has been speaking to the White House about how to "formalize" the "backstop."

"We're always being brought in by the White House, to give our point of view as an expert on what's happening in the sector," Friar replied.

After these remarks were publicized, OpenAI immediately backtracked.

RELATED: Stop feeding Big Tech and start feeding Americans again

— (@)

On Wednesday night, Friar posted on LinkedIn that "OpenAI is not seeking a government backstop" for its investments.

"I used the word 'backstop' and it muddied the point," she continued. She went on to claim that the full clip showcased her point that "American strength in technology will come from building real industrial capacity which requires the private sector and government playing their part."

On Thursday morning, David Sacks, President Trump's special adviser on crypto and AI, stepped in to crush any of OpenAI's hopes of government guarantees, even if they were only alleged.

"There will be no federal bailout for AI," Sacks wrote on X. "The U.S. has at least 5 major frontier model companies. If one fails, others will take its place."

Sacks added that the White House does want to make power generation easier for AI companies, but without increasing residential electricity rates.

"Finally, to give benefit of the doubt, I don't think anyone was actually asking for a bailout. (That would be ridiculous.) But company executives can clarify their own comments," he concluded.

The saga was far from over, though, as OpenAI CEO Sam Altman seemingly dug the hole even deeper.

RELATED: Artificial intelligence is not your friend

— (@)

By Thursday afternoon, Altman had released a lengthy statement starting with his rejection of the idea of government guarantees.

"We do not have or want government guarantees for OpenAI datacenters. We believe that governments should not pick winners or losers, and that taxpayers should not bail out companies that make bad business decisions or otherwise lose in the market. If one company fails, other companies will do good work," he wrote on X.

He went on to explain that it was an "unequivocal no" that the company should be bailed out. "If we screw up and can't fix it, we should fail."

It wasn't long before the online community started claiming that OpenAI was indeed asking for government help as recently as a week prior.

As originally noted by the X account hilariously titled "@IamGingerTrash," OpenAI has a letter posted on its own website that seems to directly ask for government guarantees. However, as Sacks noted, it does seem to relate to powering servers and providing electrical capacity.

Dated October 27, 2025, the letter was directed to the U.S. Office of Science and Technology Policy from OpenAI Chief Global Affairs Officer Christopher Lehane. It asked the OSTP to "double down" and work with Congress to "further extend eligibility to the semiconductor manufacturing supply chain; grid components like transformers and specialized steel for their production; AI server production; and AI data centers."

The letter then said, "To provide manufacturers with the certainty and capital they need to scale production quickly, the federal government should also deploy grants, cost-sharing agreements, loans, or loan guarantees to expand industrial base capacity and resilience."

Altman has yet to address the letter.

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GAMBLE: In huge new deals, ESPN and Google cave to the online betting economy



A simple Google search stopped being simple a long time ago. With sports scores, flight costs, and news articles being integrated into the engine over the years, it seemed the search giant could not pack any more ways to push its verticals into the engine.

But it's still trying.

If 2024 was the year of the small modular nuclear reactor — which were approved en masse to power AI — 2025 may be the year of the gambling partnership.

'Just ask something like "What will GDP growth be for 2025?"'

Google and Disney's ESPN have both inked new deals with gambling websites that will further increase the visibility of betting into everyday life.

Why not gamble?

Google announced in a blog post on Thursday it will integrate both Kalshi and Polymarket into its engine "so you can ask questions about future market events and harness the wisdom of the crowds."

The pleasant descriptors for the American trading websites can be further summarized by noting they are simply platforms for gambling on nearly anything.

At the time of this writing, Kalshi's feature bet is who will be nominated for Best New Artist at the 2026 Grammys. On Polymarket, users can bet on when the government shutdown will end, who will win the Super Bowl, or on the price of Bitcoin.

Google says, "Just ask something like 'What will GDP growth be for 2025?' directly from the search box to see current probabilities in the market and how they've changed over time."

RELATED: Trump DOJ ends battle with Polymarket after Biden's FBI raided CEO following 2024 election

Photo by Adam Gray/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Popular gaming (not for kids)

ESPN decided to end its partnership with Penn Entertainment early, just two years into a supposed 10-year deal. ESPN provided a $38.1 million buyout, according to Sportico, and then turned around and linked up with DraftKings immediately.

Where Penn operates casinos and slots in addition to its online sportsbook, DraftKings is not your father's gambling dynasty. Instead, the brand is fully immersed in the culture, consistently appearing as a sponsor on popular YouTube channels that target a younger demographic.

What started as a company meant for fantasy drafts has evolved into a gambling empire that tends to skew younger and has a more lenient platform in terms of what types of sports bets are allowed.

Interestingly, Penn Entertainment previously owned Barstool Sports before selling it back to founder Dave Portnoy, who would also later partner with DraftKings.

RELATED: Alex Stein: A third dildo has hit the WNBA court — now sports fans are betting when the next will strike

Photo by Erica Denhoff/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images

No Escape

DraftKings has previously partnered with professional sports teams and leagues in the past, including those in the NFL, MLB, and NBA. Now, after also announcing a deal with NBCUniversal in September, the company's ads will appear across every major sports league's broadcasts.

This includes NFL, PGA Tour, Ryder Cup, Premier League soccer, NCAA football, NBA, and the WNBA, as well as Super Bowl LX, NBA All-Star Weekend, and the 2026 FIFA Men's World Cup.

On ESPN, the integration will be more betting-based, with the network saying it will roll out DraftKings in ESPN's full "ecosystem" to offer at least three DraftKings products starting in December.

With search engines, networks, sports leagues, and YouTubers all jumping on board with the gambling revolution, it seems a betting culture is being fully immersed into all facets of the economy ... and life itself.

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Threads is now bigger than X, and that’s terrible for free speech



Move over X! The public square has a new mayor. The latest user metrics show that, for the first time ever, Threads surpassed X in monthly active users worldwide, and it’s on track to rise even further. At the same time, X continues to decline, spelling disaster for the world's free-speech platform. Will censorship run rampant on the global stage, or is there still hope that X can bounce back? Let’s find out ...

Threads has more daily users than X, but it’s not what you think

In a graph compiled by Similarweb, September shows that Threads just barely eked ahead of X in monthly active users, coming in at 130.2 million daily users compared to X’s 130.1 million users. The difference between them is razor-thin, but it’s still significant for one big reason: September 2025 marks the very first time that Threads surpassed X since the platform launched on July 5, 2023.

Graphic by Zach Laidlaw

Another quick look at the graph outlines a second alarming stat — X, marked in orange, is on a clear downward slide, while Threads, highlighted in blue, is climbing upward. Now that both have intersected, it’s likely that they will trade places permanently, giving Threads the crown over X in active monthly users worldwide.

Threads stands to gain it all and shift the political narrative back in favor of the left.

But it’s not all bad news. Threads may be king around the globe, but X still leads on mobile in the U.S. market with 21.3 million daily users over Threads’ 16.2 million daily active mobile users. The disparity is even larger for website visits, with 140.7 million daily active users flocking to X.com versus a paltry 7.7 million daily users on Threads.com.

So why worry if X is still ahead of Threads in the United States? There are several causes for concern:

The great social media reset

Now that Threads is the new worldwide digital town square, it’s only a matter of time until the U.S. market takes a hit. The first major paradigm shift will come from brands as they pull advertising dollars from X and invest in Threads with its wider global reach. Advertisers have already dropped X in the past, and Elon Musk sued to reverse it, though there may not be much he can do if brands simply decide to prioritize a more active platform.

Next, users will continue to drop off in favor of Threads’ growing community. They’ll follow their friends and relatives to Meta’s platform, further hitting X’s bottom line. If X loses enough traction after that, it will either recede into obscurity or worse, it could dissolve entirely.

The end of online free speech

As a bastion of free speech, X is the premiere open platform with the least amount of political censorship. While Americans can exercise these rights on X, the rise of Threads opens the door for greater censorship around the world, especially in countries where X is already banned.

If X topples entirely, no U.S. citizen is safe from the next Democrat president reinstating the oppressive censorship tactics from the Biden administration. Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg claims to be a proponent of free speech these days, but does anyone trust him to keep his word in the next administration? I’m not holding my breath.

The echo chamber wars

Just as pre-Musk Twitter was a left-leaning echo chamber for liberal ideas, X could become the same thing for the right. More left-leaning users will undoubtedly flee to Threads to shore up their online political stronghold, and X will morph into a right-wing haven primarily for conservative values.

It might sound like a good idea to give both sides their places to gather online in peace, but the truth is a little more grim. Echo chambers of any kind have consequences, and society is better off without them. We need an online space — like X — where the two sides engage in civil debate, a fact that the late Charlie Kirk knew well. In Charlie’s own words, “When people stop talking, that’s when you get violence ... because you start to think the other side is so evil and they lose their humanity.”

X is more than its user metrics

Looking at raw data, the graph is clear: X has been on a steady decline for years dating back to Elon Musk’s acquisition. At the same time, Threads has continued to grow month over month, and it doesn’t show any signs of stopping. If the trend plays out, X is at real risk of losing its power in the social and political landscape, while Threads stands to gain it all and shift the political narrative back in favor of the left.

RELATED: Zuckerberg's vision: US military AI and tech around the world

Photo by Alex Wong / Contributor via Getty Images

That said, X’s U.S. momentum is still going strong, providing enough engagement to keep the platform relevant, at least for the time being. X is also so much more than a social media app — it’s a hub for xAI and Grok, a PR machine for SpaceX, a launchpad for the new Vine, a budding financial platform, and more. Musk is betting big on X as a holistic lifestyle product that transcends its social roots. The new strategy provides multiple engagement points to grow the userbase outside of X alone, keep users locked in every day, and make sure they come back for more, Threads be damned.

Welcome to tokenization, where everything under the sun (and the sun) has its digital price



In a recent appearance with Glenn Beck, Whitney Webb lays out her case that the Great Reset did not end with the election of Donald Trump. Elites, ever given to schemes involving central control, reallocation, and number-go-up, are planning to tokenize everything they possibly can, including natural resources.

Webb draws a connective line between BlackRock CEO Larry Fink, the World Economic Forum (not exactly a freedom-oriented outfit), digital ID, and this process of so-called tokenization. This term is new to many people. Essentially, tokenization refers to the process of placing a metric, a mark, an identifying code on an object. The identifying marker is then pumped into an aggregating and analytical machine.

There is, no doubt, some obscurantism in the tech community, intentional or otherwise, as well as some heavy cognitive dissonance playing out for the rest of us as we watch the real, actual economy withering at our feet. How does giving (or selling) rights to natural resources like water help you and your neighbors pay bills, raise families, live in some semblance of accord with God?

The coming system is intended to solve for the management of not just anything but everything.

Neither Larry Fink nor the WEF are working on our behalf by digitizing water. Then what are they up to? Dropping in recently on CNBC, Fink said, “I do believe we’re just at the beginning of the tokenization of all assets, from real estate to equities to bonds, across the board.”

Through the implementation of natural resource assets, the plan is to mark, meter, and digitize water, trees, air, and animals of every sort, then pin their existence, in the digital tokens' monetized form, to the shared economy. That unlocks foreign investment and, one imagines, perpetuates some modified version of the ever-unstable and unsatisfactory financial enclosure of benefits and retirement that has, so far, kept enough U.S. citizens satiated to keep it rolling.

Any and every AI is designed or able to adapt to the tokenization process. It needs be automatic and fast enough to keep up-to-the-minute record of millions or billions of transactions, sales, shorts, liquidations, and so forth. Rather than a system of streams or channels, the need is for computing to move like water itself. For Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies hoping to participate in the tokenization bonanza, that means their encryption and storing of information (through so-called hashes and ledgers) needs to flow at the speed of the global digital economy.

Indeed, we’ve seen for years that some lesser-known cryptocurrency companies, like Hashbar as one example, have been building their hash, as it were, to function within an AI-controlled global marketplace. These hash-products, not too dissimilar from Bitcoin in terms of their ledger-keeping properties, are meant, in a stupefying sense, to mark individual drops and tranches of liquid or digitally liquified assets.

RELATED: Can anyone save America from European-style digital ID?

Photo by Sean Gallup/Getty Images

It's hard to visualize such unnatural and invisible arrangements, so here's a real-world example: Say you have 10,000 board feet of Douglas fir trees on a lot in Washington state. If the Fink version of tokenization goes forward, you’ll be able to “digitize” those useful board feet of wood and sell portions, as opposed to the whole lot. Now picture that process for, well, anything you can imagine and much that you can't.

In simple terms, the likely outcome of all of this BlackRock-WEF-AI machination is immediate dissociation between the human and the trees, the fir needles, the smell of the soil. All of that, given enough backroom dealing, political sloth, and diabolical Wall Street ingenuity, will be erased.

Are we talking about selling public lands? Theoretically, yes. Although major legal, regulatory, and political hurdles remain, the principle of leaving at least some portions of the created world exempt from actionable financial valuation is already eroding away. The accelerating logic of digital terraforming has no conceptual limit. Granting the premise that tokenization is good, not only should private property be tokenized, but all water, all minerals, and every possible other item with unexploited value rooted in human experience. The coming AI, digital ID, hash-rated system is intended to solve for the management of not just anything but everything.

The disturbing undercurrent of plans, outcomes, and inertia around this improbable intersection of technologies gets more disturbing when you accept that it is, in fact, a long-term plan nearly realized.

In her chat with Beck, Webb outlines another piece of the puzzle, termed “natural asset corporations.” This is pitched to the mainstream as a way to invest in conservation, ensure biodiversity, and so forth. But if we recall the century-long technocratic play, the current AI inertia, and the bipartisan support for anything to keep the fiat economy limping along, it’s easy to see how those natural assets under ownership might be subject to changes in any legal stipulation barring sales to other corporate or government entities. Those interlocking directorships have a knack for change.

We haven’t even mentioned energy, but we must, because this scheme ultimately needs to take into account the sun itself! Who owns the sun? Well, BlackRock, of course. Or some quasi-tech giant/WEF version of BlackRock.

Actually, no one owns the sun but God, and we have to remember this fact. By way of the wholly God-given system, we see that the sun feeds the grass, grass feeds the animals, we eat the animals.

The technical details on the capture of energy are intense, involving data centers to run the AI, political control to rubber-stamp the terraforming for the electrical inputs, and, at some near point, the encrypting of energetic inputs into a digital (hashing) ledger to be monitored, metered, and controlled.

You can probably see here how necessary the personal digital ID is to the entire panopticon. But if not, consider it unlikely that your or my interests are going to be taken into consideration by third-country customer service agents employed by the electrical company to manage our dissatisfaction in the event that a neighborhood brown-out is required while grid power is shunted over to the local data center.

Coca-Cola doubles down on AI ads, still won't say 'Christmas'



Coca-Cola has responded to criticism over its AI-generated commercials with even more AI-generated art.

Following backlash for its AI-generated 2024 "Holidays Are Coming" ad, the company says that this year consumers should react more positively, as AI generation is "going forward."

'Real hard work writing some prompts for AI.'

For 2025, Coke has not only doubled down with its commercial, but tripled down amid criticism. The recent ad, created with Real Magic AI, depicts hosts of anthropomorphized squirrels, rabbits, dogs, and the brand's traditional polar bears. While the ad showed significant improvements since last year, it still has the usual AI follies of non-spinning wheels on Coca-Cola trucks and overdrawn hairlines that could still fool the naked eye.

However, Pratik Thakar, Coca-Cola's head of generative AI, says not to believe the haters.

"Last year people criticized the craftsmanship. But this year the craftsmanship is 10 times better," Thakar said, per Hollywood Reporter. "There will be people who criticize — we cannot keep everyone 100% happy."

Thakar added, "But if the majority of consumers see it in a positive way, it's worth going forward."

One place Coke was certain to receive positive reinforcement was from its own team, which it showcased in a behind-the-scenes video praising its own hard work on the ad.

RELATED: AI can fake a face — but not a soul

The commentary video praised five of Coke's AI specialists for parsing through 70,000 video clips in just 30 days to create the ad. Production used programs like OpenAI's Sora, Google's Veo 3, and Luma AI.

"It really feels like this work is, you know, actively shaping how storytelling is evolving. It shows Coca-Cola really reimagining the creative workflow, especially in this AI era," a female voiceover said.

"They landed on this super expressive hyperrealism, really cinematic scenes," a male voiceover added.

The video poured praise over Coca-Cola's team, which wrote prompts into AI programs about generating a "hyperrealistic panda animation," for example, scouring through generated videos. Refinements and filters were then shown as further examples of the hard work.

"Post-production is the new pre-production. Advanced reasoning models let artists plan and solve them early and making scenes feel real before production locks in," the female voiceover continued. "Combining human creativity with AI to turbocharge expression and imagination, giving creatives more freedom, speed, and control than ever before."

Viewers did not respond with the same positivity, though, even accusing the voiceovers of being AI themselves.

RELATED: How H-1B hires broke USAA’s bond with veterans

"Real hard work writing some prompts for AI," a viewer wrote.

"They're acting like this is something they should be proud of," another said.

One viewer called the idea of an "AI voiceover praising this ad compared to the actual human comments who dislike it" the beginning of a dystopian world.

Lost in the criticism of Coca-Cola's shift to nonhuman artists is its continued refusal to mention Christmas. Despite depictions of Christmas trees, Christmas lights, and, of course, Santa Claus, the word Christmas is never displayed or uttered.

Both videos happily displayed all the Americana related to the holiday but were careful never to mention the forbidden words: Merry Christmas.

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Without these minerals, US tech production stops. And China has 90% of them.



On October 20, 2025, in a room scrubbed clean for statecraft, the leaders of the United States and Australia announced a pact. The numbers were large, commitments of $1 billion each, a pipeline worth $8.5 billion, and another $2.2 billion in letters of interest. The language was of strategic reassurance: “securing critical minerals,” “building an allied supply chain.” They spoke of a gallium plant in Western Australia, of the Nolans project in the Northern Territory.

What was stated only in the careful argot of diplomacy was the anxiety. The pact was not a gesture of optimism. It was a $10.7 billion hedge against a future held hostage. The objects of this anxiety are the rare-earth elements. They are the “vitamins” of modern technology, a group of 17 soft, silvery metals that, while not strictly rare, are rarely found in concentrations that make extraction anything but a geologic and chemical trial. We seldom see or think about them, yet they are the invisible underpinning of the contemporary world.

For all our talk of the virtual, our civilization runs on materials.

We carry them in our pockets, these bits of refined earth. Neodymium and praseodymium form the tiny, powerful magnets that make an electric vehicle motor turn and a wind turbine spin. Lanthanum and cerium provide the optical clarity for a camera lens. Europium and yttrium are the phosphors that make a smartphone screen vivid. They are virtually indispensable to the high-tech, high-speed, high-definition life we have constructed for ourselves. They are also indispensable to the machinery of modern defense: the precision-guided missiles, the jet engines, the radar systems.

There is a profound cultural dislocation at work here. We have come to believe in the immateriality of our age. We speak of the “cloud,” of data, of software, as if these things were weightless, existing only as light and logic. The rare-earth scramble is a reminder that the most ethereal digital experience is tethered to the physical crust of the Earth. The cloud has a body, and that body is dug from the ground, often with toxic solvents and radioactive tailings.

China has become the center of this industry, not by accident, but by design, and by a failure of Western imagination. Decades ago, Beijing designated rare earths as “protected and strategic minerals,” while the United States, under the sway of environmental regulation and market efficiencies, allowed its own production to atrophy. The Mountain Pass mine in California, once the world’s leader, went dark in 2002, while China embraced the dirty, complex, and unprofitable “downstream” work: the refining and processing of these rare earths.

The result is a near-monopoly.

RELATED: This city bought 300 Chinese electric buses — then found out China can turn them off at will

Photo by VCG / Contributor via Getty Images

By 2025, Chinese firms controlled perhaps 90% of global rare-earth refining and 93% of magnet manufacturing. And with control comes leverage. In 2010, a territorial dispute with Japan was punctuated by China’s abrupt halt of rare-earth exports, sending global prices into panic. By 2025, the mechanism was more refined: new export rules targeting high-performance magnets, rules that, when briefly tightened, shut down supply chains for automakers. This is the power to turn off the assembly line. This is the power to ground the jets.

We have seen this story before. We call rare earths “the new oil,” and in doing so, we betray a certain exhaustion. We are merely rerunning the script of the 20th century. The 1973 oil embargo revealed the strategic peril of relying on a single region for the nonnegotiable fuel of the economy. The current scramble, the U.S.-Australia pact, the Pentagon-funded reopening of Mountain Pass, the talk of “urban mining” to reclaim neodymium from old hard drives, is the same reflex. It is the belated, frantic effort to diversify, to stockpile, to rebuild what was lost, to avoid being held hostage.

The script is older even than oil. It is the story of the Bronze Age, defined by the desperate, sprawling trade networks required to secure tin. It is the story of the Iron Age, where mastery of a new metal conferred dominance. It is, as Plato observed in the Republic, the inevitable story of the “luxurious city.” A simple society, Socrates argued, a “city of pigs,” lives in peace. But the moment a society desires more (fine furniture, luxuries, or, for us, a high-speed data plan), it must expand. It “inevitably goes to war to secure resources.”

Our digital city is the luxurious city. We crave the wind turbine and the EV motor, what we call the “green” transition, but we find it relies on the same “rare green.” We crave the vivid screen and the smart missile. And so we are compelled to scour the globe, to make pacts, to engage in resource diplomacy.

This quest is not a move into a new technological future but a return to the oldest imperatives. It is the hard reminder that for all our talk of the virtual, our civilization runs on materials. The hunt for rare earths forces us to confront the weight of our lightness, to see the shadow that our digital lives cast upon the actual, finite earth. It is, and always has been, a scramble for the dirt.

FDA gives therapy OK to trendy toad-inspired toxin, paving the way for mass-market hallucinogenic nasal spray



At first glance, it seems insane that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has granted breakthrough therapy designation to a nasal spray derived from the super-powered hallucinogenic excretions of an internet-famous desert toad. The experimental compound falls among an emerging class of market-extant and incoming drugs synthesized, inspired, extracted, or otherwise manipulated out of natural hallucinogens such datura, which gave us scopolamine, or simply drugs that have previously only been associated with recreational and illegal usage.

The Colorado River toad produces for its defense a highly toxic form of DMT, dimethyltryptamine, which you may have heard of from Joe Rogan, Miley Cyrus, or, if you live in Oregon, your dentist. While the toad has ties to many a celebrity comeback and is implicated in popular culture (see “The Simpsons” episode “Missionary: Impossible”), the Bufo, as the amphibian is often called, is now apparently the inspiration for a serious advance toward Aldous Huxley’s famous vision of a society teeming with, mediated by, and dependent upon a particular mind-altering substance.

It’s just a little bit close to Huxley’s ‘Brave New World,’ where drugs are state-issued.

Huxley called his fictional drug “soma,” but Atai Life Sciences project, which is producing the toad-venom derivative, calls their contribution “mebufotenin.” Note that Atai Life Sciences valuations among speculators shot up with the announcement of the FDA designation.

In a public release from the company, Atai states that the designation “is granted to expedite development of drugs targeting serious or life-threatening conditions where preliminary clinical evidence suggests that the drug may demonstrate substantial improvement on one or more clinically significant endpoints over existing therapies.”

In the wild, the toad produces the compound 5-MeO-DMT, substantially different from the drug most associated with recreational psychedelic endeavors such as those popularized by Joe Rogan and others. Among experienced “psychonauts” (psychedelic explorers), the toad-derived variety of DMT provides a radically more intense experience even than the already supercharged but standard-issue DMT experience.

In 2019, a ketamine-based nasal spray sold by Spravato, owned by Johnson & Johnson, hit the market. It’s hard at this point to quantify, but there was an impact. It was shortly afterward that ads for the drug swamped social media. We learned that no less a winner than Elon Musk was a big proponent of the drug. (The wave of interest slowed when “Friends” television star Matthew Perry died unceremoniously in his hot tub, evidently after a ketamine overdose.)

RELATED: LA County Medical Examiner reveals drugs that caused Matthew Perry's death

Photo by Jason Krempin / Contributor via Getty Images

Is there a wink-wink nod aspect to all of this public systematizing of what were once compounds reserved for wild nights behind closed doors? Well, the nebulousness of the medical application customary to BTDs (“conditions ... suggest the drug may demonstrate substantial improvement”) is hard to miss. Harder when it seems to contribute to a recurring theme among many of these drugs which isn’t so much “license to party” as it is “license to self-isolate.” Or, as the PR campaigns will have it, “The establishment is now cool, they get it, and it’s OK to smother (anoint?) your difficulties in drug miasma. We’re all doing it.”

Scopolamine, the datura-derived compound, is unpatented and sold in low-dose patches over the counter. A higher-grade dose is offered via prescription, ostensibly for various vertigo and travel sickness-related issues. And in the case of esketamine, the justification is “treatment-resistant depression,” said to afflict 300 million people globally. Pretty nice market.

It was a well-accepted fact that for many years, the “prescription” of medical marijuana in Oregon was just a cover. In the case of medical-to-legal marijuana, Big Pharma managed to extract, patent, and control the marijuana cash cow, or least control the market on a few sub-compounds or aspects of it. It’s Big Pharma money pushing all of these drugs through; nothing gets through the corporate-government-legal machine without great globs of financial, incentivizing, and buy-off grease. Celebrities, too, have an interest and, presumably, a price for their imprimatur.

It’s just a little bit close to Huxley’s “Brave New World,” where drugs are state-issued and, curiously, often understood as a combination of hallucinogenic and anti-depression compounds.

As with any other social category or special interest group in America, psychonauts aren’t in any sense monolithic in their opinions, alliances, or wisdom. Dennis McKenna, the legit-scientist brother of late author and psychedelic exponent Terence McKenna, long ago raised objections to the intermingling of Big Pharma and the psychedelic “community,” such as the former may be. For McKenna and others, it was a self-evident fact that the bottom-line logic native to corporate operation was antithetical to the perceived sacred nature of these hallucinogenic compounds.

Old-school psychonauts, whose informal and decentralized psychedelic church ideologically opposed “the establishment,” were convinced psychedelics would usher in utopia (even though LSD was invented by Swiss pharma giant Sandoz). They considered LSD and MDMA their sacraments. Yet, for them, combining LSD with mescaline, the active compound in peyote, was sacrilege. Yesterday, the internet crossed the streams of the establishment and the renegades with unnerving effects. Tomorrow, the same is about to happen with hallucinogens. After all, as Timothy Leary famously put it, “The PC is the LSD of the ’90s.”

The linchpin of America's economy wants you to use it for porn



The big economic headlines about OpenAI are unlike any in history, and so is the company's performance: Sam Altman's behemoth is eyeing a monster IPO at up to a trillion-dollar valuation, off the strength of the unprecedented circular money pump it has built with Oracle, Microsoft, Nvidia, and AMD, the tech firms at the core of America's all-in strategic bid for global AI dominance.

The abstruse details can make OpenAI seem to ordinary Americans like one of several titans forging our destiny in the sky. But down here on ground level, the main touchpoint in our everyday lives — ChatGPT, on track for a billion users by year's end — is being rebuilt to extract value from billions more in the lowest of ways: pornography. In December, OpenAI will branch into erotica, allowing adults to generate sexual content through ChatGPT.

We don’t need another sermon on smut. Everyone knows what porn does to a mind, a marriage, and a man. But what does this shift mean for a company that once vowed to benefit “all of humanity”? It began with talk of productivity and progress. Now it’s about pleasure on demand. The future of work has become the future of want — degraded, automated, and alienated from true human connection.

Mass automation and mass lobotomization are two sides of the same silicon coin.

It’s easy to call it moral decline, but it’s really market design. When automation stops astonishing, appetite becomes the next asset. When machines can’t wow us with intellect, they woo us with instinct. The shift from algorithms that think to algorithms that tease goes from detour to destination. A company built to conquer productive labor, it seems, must pivot to fruitless longing.

OpenAI’s machines mastered our spreadsheets more quickly than any normal person anticipated. But the real acceleration is now aimed straight into our subconscious. The same technology that writes code can now whisper sweet nothings — or worse, learn exactly which nothings you’ll pay to hear. That debilitating kink you never knew you had is ready to become your life. Every click a confession, every prompt a prayer, the machine rapt with the attention of a priest and the greed of a pimp.

For all the talk of progress, automation has mainly made life easier for corporations than for citizens. Big business can't really optimize for your liberation. Its ideal is lubrication: systems so smooth that people stop noticing they’re the raw material. Machines handle the manufacturing while humans are trained to consume, scroll, sigh, and occasionally remember to shower.

The human brain, once a tool of invention, is now a target for invasion. Mass automation and mass lobotomization are two sides of the same silicon coin. The first replaces our labor; the second replaces our longing. The rise of the robots is a perfect excuse for the humans to retreat — first from work, then from will, and finally from wonder. When every craving can be coded, curiosity becomes a casualty.

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In doubt? Look around. Men who once built bridges now build playlists. Women who once raised children now raise engagement metrics. The world hums with productivity, yet feels profoundly empty. This is what happens when an economy stops serving people and starts sculpting them.

AI was supposed to free humanity from drudgery. Instead, it’s freeing humanity from ... humanity. OpenAI’s move into digital desire is only the latest proof. What began as an effort to improve efficiency has morphed into an enterprise to perfect escape. A machine that can mimic love makes us forget what humanity feels like. And once that happens, we're ready to surrender our very existence to the machines.

Of course, the pitch will sound noble: connection, expression, inclusivity, all the buzzwords that sell bondage as belonging. The same pitches that sold social media will sell the new and "improved" synthetic intimacy. Beneath this sweet talk sits a steel trap. If you can automate labor, you can monetize loneliness. If you can predict consumption, you can prescribe desire. The human heart, the real core of who we are, becomes just another input field, our smut of choice the last echo of our identity.

How long can it last? In this brave new marketplace, pleasure is both a product and a punishment. It numbs the pain it creates.

Sure, it's tempting to laugh it off — what’s a little digital flirtation among consenting adults? But this isn’t really about sex. It’s about surrendering real, embodied intimacy for a shadow. The more we hand our inner lives to machines, the less we remember how to live without them.

A new AI economy built on reducing us all to skin suits will not build monuments or miracles, but mirrors — endless, glowing screens that feed our urges until we forget what restraint ever was. It’s extinction by pacification: the calm convergence of technology and tranquilization.

Ten years from now, the American workforce may be remembered, not relied upon. Its labor automated, its pride outsourced, its purpose repackaged as “upskilling.” Politicians will preach "resilience," corporations will promise "retraining," and millions will sit through their days bone-idle, with nothing to do and nowhere to go. They’ll be told the future is full of "opportunity," yet find themselves waiting for a purpose that never arrives. I might be wrong — I hope I am — but every sign points one way: toward a nation drifting into digital dependency, where the only thing still working is one big machine.

In his prophetic book "Amusing Ourselves to Death," Neil Postman warned that societies don’t collapse under tyranny but triviality. AI offers malevolent opportunists the chance to make that death spiral a business model. It can memorize your wants, mimic your worries, and leverage them all in a blink. OpenAI’s porn pivot is the hook, line, and sinker of this new economy of control: desire the lure, data the hook, the soul the catch. As Adam and Eve remind us, what begins as curiosity ends in captivity.

And this is why all Americans should care, whether or not they understand AI. Because AI doesn’t need permission to know you. It already does — your habits, your hungers, your hesitations. And in the hands of power, that knowledge becomes possession.

This city bought 300 Chinese electric buses — then found out China can turn them off at will



A city had a rude awakening when it tested its electric buses for security flaws.

Some cities have gone all-in on their dedication to renewable energy and electric public transportation, but discovering that a jurisdiction does not actually control its own public property likely was not part of the idea.

'In theory, the bus could therefore be stopped or rendered unusable.'

This turned out to be exactly the case when Ruter — the public transportation authority for Oslo, Norway — decided to run tests on its new Chinese electric buses.

Approximately 300 e-buses from Chinese company Yutong made their way to Norway earlier this year, with outlet China Buses calling it a "core breakthrough" in Chinese brands' global reach.

Yutong offers at least 15 different types of electric buses ranging from 60- to 120-passenger capacity.

As reported by Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten on Tuesday, Ruter conducted secret testing on some of its electric buses over the summer. It decided to look into one bus from a European manufacturer, as well as another from Yutong, to address cybersecurity risks.

The test results were shocking.

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Photo by Li An/Xinhua via Getty Images

Investigators discovered that the Chinese-built buses could be controlled remotely from their homeland, unlike the European vehicles.

Ruter reported that the Chinese can access software updates, diagnostics, and battery systems remotely, and, "In theory, the bus could therefore be stopped or rendered unusable by the manufacturer."

The details were described by Arild Tjomsland, who helped conduct the tests. Tjomsland is a special adviser at the University of South-Eastern Norway, according to Turkish website AA.

"The Chinese bus can be stopped, turned off, or receive updates that can destroy the technology that the bus needs to operate normally," Tjomsland reportedly said. He additionally noted that while the buses could not be steered remotely, they could still be shut down and used as leverage by bad actors.

Pravda Norway described the situation as the Chinese government essentially being able to decommission the buses at any time.

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Photo by Lyu You/Xinhua via Getty Images

Norway's transport minister praised Ruter for completing the tests and said the government would initiate a risk assessment related to countries "with which Norway does not have security policy cooperation."

Ruter's CEO, Bernt Reitan Jenssen, said the company plans on working with authorities to strengthen the cybersecurity surrounding its public infrastructure.

"We need to involve all competent authorities that deal with cybersecurity, stand together, and draw on cutting-edge expertise," Jenssen said.

As a temporary fix, Ruter revealed the buses can be disconnected from the internet by removing their SIM cards to assume "local control should the need arise."

There was no word as to whether the SIM cards are upsized for buses.

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Nvidia becomes first company to top $5 trillion valuation amid AI boom



The Big Tech boom around artificial intelligence shows no signs of stopping as several companies continue to climb in value. And Nvidia is leading the charge.

AI chipmaker Nvidia became the first company to reach a $5 trillion market valuation this week, just three months after it climbed over the $4 trillion threshold, the New York Post reported.

'The market continues to underestimate the scale of the opportunity, and Nvidia remains one of the best ways to play the AI theme.'

Nvidia, now in the $5 trillion club by itself, has seen outstanding growth in the last three years since the start of the AI boom. In June 2024, Nvidia reached $3 trillion; in July 2025, it reached $4 trillion.

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Photographer: Kent Nishimura/Bloomberg via Getty Images

"Nvidia hitting a $5 trillion market cap is more than a milestone; it's a statement, as Nvidia has gone from chip maker to industry creator," Matt Britzman, senior equity analyst at Hargreaves Lansdown, told the New York Post.

"The market continues to underestimate the scale of the opportunity, and Nvidia remains one of the best ways to play the AI theme," Britzman continued.

Some estimates pin Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang's stake in the company at roughly $179.2 billion, making him the world's eighth-richest man.

This week, Apple topped $4 trillion, joining Microsoft and Nvidia above that mark, according to CNN.

This rapid growth in the tech industry, however, has sparked concerns that this could be a bubble waiting to burst.

In an August interview with The Verge, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said, "When bubbles happen, smart people get overexcited about a kernel of truth."

"If you look at most of the bubbles in history, like the tech bubble, there was a real thing. Tech was really important. The internet was a really big deal. People got overexcited," Altman said.

Return reached out to Nvidia for comment but did not receive a response.