AI Could Cure Cancer Tomorrow. Would They Let It?

The Machine

They get these AI company heads up on stage and somebody in the audience always asks the same question. What do you tell your kids? What are you worried about for your children?

Of course they are not worried about their kids. Their kids are set. Set for multiple generations. There is so much money at the top that if currency is still a thing in 20 years, those families are golden. The question itself is a mismatch. You are asking a billionaire to empathize with the fear of a person who might not have health insurance next month. Those are not the same species of worry.

And here is the part nobody says out loud. The people running these companies are not relatable. Maybe if they were more like a John Wayne or a Clint Eastwood, people would feel different. But the faces at the top of artificial intelligence are a different breed. The gap between their brain and a regular person's brain is a canyon. That does not make them bad. It makes them foreign. And foreign people making decisions about your future is unsettling no matter how smart they are.

They get asked if AI is going to replace human labor. They never answer it straight. They talk about "some risk" and "not going the best way possible." Then somebody asks the logical follow-up: if there is that much risk, should we keep going? And nobody answers that either. Because the answer is they cannot stop. The money is moving. The compute is allocated. The race is on. Stopping is not an option when you have already spent billions.

The federal government wants to take control of all AI regulation. They are looking at overriding state-level ordinances so that one federal framework governs everything. On one hand, that eliminates the patchwork nightmare of 50 different state rules. On the other hand, it concentrates all AI governance into the hands of people who still cannot figure out email.

Universal basic income is back in the conversation. Elon Musk floated "universal high income," which sounds more like a campaign slogan than a policy. One person says basic. The next says high. The audience votes for whoever promises the bigger number. That is not governance. That is an auction.

And your social media feed is not helping. The algorithm is feeding you things that spike your blood pressure because anger drives engagement. A few negative stories, then a positive one to reset, then more negative. That pattern is not an accident. It is architecture. AI built the feed. AI controls what you see. AI profits from your emotional reaction. We still have that fight-or-flight wiring from the days when a tiger grabbed us out of the bush. The algorithm knows that and exploits it every single scroll.

Cancer research is where this should be pointed. What if we took all this compute, all this intelligence, and aimed it at disease? What if we said forget the image generators, forget the video clones, forget the entertainment layer? Point it at breast cancer. Point it at flu. Point it at longevity. What would that world look like? But that is the genie problem. You open the bottle, you make the wish, but you did not think the wish through. Wish for the richest person on the planet and now you have a palace but you also need a private army. The parameters of the wish matter as much as the wish itself.

The House

The market is in a holding pattern. The war in Iran, interest rates tied to the 10-year bond, and general uncertainty have put a chill on everything. If you locked in recently at 6.1, 6.2, or 6.3 percent, you timed it well. Rates are creeping up. They will keep creeping depending on how long the Middle East situation plays out, what the Fed does, and where that 10-year bond settles. That bond is the number to watch. Almost everything in mortgage rates traces back to it.

When rates eventually come down, the refinance boom is going to be massive. Lenders will make a fortune. You will get flooded with mailers from your mortgage holder, the bank that bought your loan on the secondary market, and every broker who ever had your email address. Here is how to play that. Take the offer from the bank holding your note. Then take that offer to your original lender or broker and say: this is what the other side is offering, can you beat it, and put it in writing. Do not take anybody's word for anything. Get it documented.

If you are selling, price it right and it moves. In any market. The question is how low do you need to go and what can you do to increase appeal. Clean properties with updated systems, proper curb appeal, depersonalized interiors. Perennials along the walkway. Cheap lights for evening showings. Stand in front of the house with your agent and look at it the way a buyer looks at it. Dry rot visible from the street? Deteriorating foam trim over stucco? Those can be touched up by a painter without repainting the whole house. If you are in an HOA, check approval requirements before making exterior changes.

Inside, ask yourself: how does it smell? Is there furniture blocking the entry? Are there 15,000 family photos on the walls? Depersonalize. Go neutral. The property should feel like a possibility, not a museum of your life. If you are selling a multi-million dollar home in the platinum triangle, you dress it for that audience. A $600,000 home in Santa Clarita gets a different treatment. But the principle is the same. The buyer needs to imagine their life in that space, not yours.

And the commission conversation. Sellers Only Agent™ is a fixed fee. $17,000. That is the number. It does not scale with home price because the work does not scale with home price. Your agent fee, the buyer agent fee, escrow, title, recording. Look at all of them. Negotiate all of them. I know escrow companies that will do the first one free just to earn your business. There is leverage everywhere if you know where to push.

The Body

Jason Fung has a new book. The Hunger Code. And it names something we have been feeling but could not articulate. There are three types of hunger. The first is actual starvation. True biological need. Almost none of us ever eat from that place. If you have fat on your body, that is stored food. Your body can access it and burn it. It is not pretty. It is not the magic cookie that lets you eat whatever you want and lose weight. But it works.

The second and third types are the ones that wreck us. Hedonic hunger is pleasure-based. The dopamine hit from food that lights up the same circuits as cocaine and heroin. I have said it before and I will say it again: certain processed foods are as addictive as hard drugs. The stuff in bags. The stuff in drive-through windows. The checkout aisle garbage. It is engineered to keep you eating. That is not weakness. That is neurochemistry being weaponized against you.

The third type is conditioned hunger. Environmental triggers. Mealtime rituals. Social pressure. The smell of food at a gathering. This is the one that hits hardest on a fast because it has nothing to do with biology. It is pattern recognition. Your body expects food at certain times because you have trained it to expect food at those times. Break the pattern and the pattern fights back.

Ghrelin comes in waves. That hunger hormone spikes around the times you normally ate. It peaks and you feel like you are going to break. Then it drops. The wave passes. Then you are fine until the next one. Ride the wave or it rides you. That is the entire game of extended fasting.

If you want proof that this works, look up Angus Barbieri. He fasted 382 days. Water and a multivitamin. Medically supervised. Over a year without food. I have done 14 days and nearly killed myself on the refeed. That is the part nobody talks about. When you break a fast, you have to honor yourself enough to not blow it out with cake and pizza. Bone broth. A couple eggs. Slow. If you are a trigger eater like me, a bored eater like me, an emotional eater like me, the refeed is where you are most vulnerable. Your body has been shut down from food intake for the first time ever. You reintroduce food and your system does not know what to do with the volume. The pain is real. I thought I was going to die twice.

Caloric restriction is a lie. Cut from 3,000 to 1,500 calories and over time your body adjusts to burning 1,500. You plateau. You get frustrated. You go back to 3,000. But now your metabolism is only burning 1,500. Every two and a half days you are putting on a pound of fat. The only way to break through is to stop eating entirely, deplete the liver glycogen, force the switch to ketosis, and let your body eat the stored fuel. Metabolism actually goes up during fasting. Not down. Everything they told us was backwards.

The Anchor

There is a lot to talk about with where the world is pointed. War in the Middle East. Threats to destroy bridges and power grids. And it is never the people running the game who suffer. It is the electricians. The plumbers. The hairdressers. The contractors. The school teachers. The on-the-ground officers keeping neighborhoods safe. Those are the people who pay the price when leaders make decisions from ivory towers.

What if we pointed all of this at longevity? What if cancer was the target instead of entertainment? What if flu, cold, sickness, aging itself became the mission? What if we said: no more image generators, no more video clones, take every GPU and aim it at fixing the human body? That is the wish worth making. But the wish has to come with parameters. The solution cannot include getting rid of human beings because we are messy. That has to be in the programming. The machine has to believe it. And we do not know how to make it believe anything yet.

Same as the genie. You get three wishes. But if you do not define the constraints, the wish destroys you. AI is the most powerful genie in history. We need to agree on what we are asking for before we open the bottle. And we need to agree that the guidelines include protecting the people at the bottom. Not the billionaires. Not the CEOs. Not the people whose kids are set for ten generations. The rest of us.

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