question. Let's say you're dealing with an already approved drug that's being used for a different purpose. So it's approved and is safe and the safety profile is excellent. So you know for sure that it works in the lab. You already tested it that it works in animals. And you know for sure because it's an approved drug that's been around forever that it won't hurt you. Now what are your odds that it would be approved for a human? Works in the lab, works in an animal, definitely doesn't hurt anybody. What's your odds now? The answer is nobody knows, which is weird because it seems to me that would be a really important thing to know if you were in that line of work.

What percentage of drugs do you think work even in a human but at the end they go, oh damn, it works, it totally works, but you know 10% of the people who took it died so you know it can't be approved? I don't know. But you have to assume that some amount of the drugs are only rejected because they hurt humans but they didn't hurt the rat.

All right. Now suppose you knew also that since it was an approved drug it had a good ability to sort of become bioavailable. In other words, it's already something used in humans so it must be able to get to the good parts of a human. But depending on what your new use for it is, it might need to get into the brain versus the heart versus the, but so maybe there's a difference there. So let's say you knew it was bioavailable in general for some other purpose, worked in a lab, worked in an animal, definitely is not dangerous, and is bioavailable meaning it gets to the right parts of the body for some other use. Now what are the odds that that would work?

If you want to know what the reason I'm asking for is that ivermectin works against cancer in a lab and apparently it's worked against cancer in some animals. And ivermectin is known to be safe for human use. I mean nothing is 100%, but in terms of meds it's one of the safer ones. And we know it's bioavailable because it works against not only what it was meant for, some kind of parasites or whatever, but it also seemed to have some related benefits for COVID, which would be a whole different thing. So it can get to a worm or a bug in your body, whatever it is, and it can also get to whatever is affecting a virus.

So now what are the odds, knowing all of those things, that the lab tests of ivermectin would translate into human success? Does anybody have a guess? Well I don't. But it would be really interesting if that's the sort of thing that science could sort out. Because wouldn't you like to know what the odds of a specific drug is versus what are the odds of drugs in general? So if you say to me we developed this thing and it works in the lab and it works in an animal and then you calculate the odds from that alone, I feel like that's not treating it as individual enough. I feel like each specific drug, probably scientists could come up with an estimate for that kind of drug. You know, more like, well this one's 80% but this one's more like 10%. So anyway, we should know that.

All right, so let's get into the politics. So according to Ars Technica, the advertisers who may have been hesitant to advertise on X before because of politics or because of their own preferences or whatever, maybe looking to moderate that and maybe get back to advertising on X. Do you know why? Because the advertisers are concerned that if they don't advertise on X, Elon Musk might have a bad opinion of them for not advertising on his platform. And he might have the ear of the president and the president controls the government which has a lot of control over companies. So if you were a company that ever wanted the US government to do something in the future that would help you, might be good to know that you had advertised on the only free speech platform.

Now how much do I like that? Not at all. You shouldn't be happy about that because what is being described is essentially bribery. Am I right? I mean it wouldn't be illegal, but if the reason that somebody's going to advertise on X is so that they can preserve their options with the government, that's not good. That's not the country you want to live in. You don't want people choosing their advertising space based on revenge from the government. So no, not cool.

Now I'm also not sure that it's real. Ars Technica says that people are thinking this way and it would be consistent with everything we know about how money works. We do know big companies will move large amounts of money to whatever is influential, you know, whether it's lobbyists or anything else. So I don't think they're wrong in terms of a prediction, but I don't love to see it. As much as I love everything about X and I love seeing Elon Musk involved in the government exactly the way he is, I don't love that this is the way X would become profitable. Although I want it to be profitable. So anyway, it's not exactly the right incentive structure.

Meanwhile, in news that it took me 30 minutes to believe, the first 30 minutes I thought it was a joke, that Alex Jones's InfoWars, all the assets for that company that went up for auction because of the Sandy Hook issues, was purchased by the company that owns The Onion. So obviously I didn't believ