Jonathan Reiber

AI will never replace humanity

Once hunted to near extinction, humpback whales are rebounding. "We've stopped killing them," said wildlife photographer Chris Fallows. "Since the late 1960s, the population that was reduced to just a couple of thousand animals has come back to several hundred thousand animals." Fallows said the whales give him hope. cbsn.ws/4tJNcit

This feels like a tipping point in the history of war, the Agincourt of the 21st century.

Studies show that watching a beaver eating cabbage lowers stress levels by 15%

Humor is key Ernest Shackleton, while stranded in Antarctica, sustained his men with humor They held soccer matches on the ice, performed skits, and held mock trials for things like missing rations Keeping the spirit alive helps keep the body alive

Just in case you’re having a bad day, remember this is how they weigh koalas 😍

‘Bradley was revolted; Patton withdrew to vomit; Eisenhower, his face frozen white, forced himself to examine every nook and cranny of the camp’

he was confused about forced demand through the core, but she got it

@dank Agree!

Pretty great tbh

I would urge everyone to listen to this marvelous, heartbreaking interview. Thank you to @BenSasse and @DouthatNYT.

Ben Sasse: "What’s really happening is these superdevices in our pockets — the largest tools any median individual’s ever had access to in all of human history — allow our consciousness to leave the time and place where we actually live, the places where we break bread, the people who are living next door to us, the people that you can physically touch and hug, the small platoons of real community, and we allow our consciousness to go really far away"

Living legend… youtube.com/watch?v=88b1Lt…

Exceptional interview with @BenSasse, a great American thinker and politician. What’s happening to him is devastating — for his family and friends and for him. We are fortunate to have his wisdom and good thinking now. What a guy. nytimes.com/2026/04/09/opi…

If there is one good thing that can come out of having my health issues exposed to the world, it’s raising awareness for complex chronic conditions like POTS, MECFS, Long Covid or EDS. 🧵 businessinsider.com/what-is-pots-f…

Everyone has their own way of solving problems..🦙😅

To win the future, you need a plan. It's why I joined as a co-chair for the National Security Commission on Robotics for Advanced Manufacturing. With advanced manufacturing and AI rapidly evolving, we cannot fall behind adversaries like China. I look forward to working across government, academia and industry to strengthen our national security, protect workers, and boost advanced and robotics manufacturing in Michigan and across the nation.

When threatened, the pope can spray holy venom up to fifteen feet.

I had not heard this part of the bin Laden raid. From Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mike Mullen.

George Lucas traded $350,000 in directing salary for something Fox executives thought was worthless: the right to sell Star Wars toys. It was 1976. Over 40 studios had already passed on his script, including Disney. Fox only greenlit the project because they wanted Lucas for other films. Nobody at the studio expected to make money on a space opera with no stars, so when Lucas offered to cut his directing fee from $500,000 to $150,000 in exchange for merchandising and sequel rights, Fox said yes on the spot. Movie merchandise was a dead business. Fox had lost money on Doctor Dolittle lunchboxes a decade earlier. They thought they were getting the better deal. Lucas couldn’t even find a toy company that wanted in. Kenner, a division of cereal company General Foods, finally bought the licensing for a flat $100,000. Then Star Wars opened. Between 1977 and 1978, Kenner sold $100 million worth of toys off that $100,000 investment. They couldn’t make enough for Christmas ’77, so they sold empty boxes with IOUs inside, promising to mail the action figures later. Parents paid real money for cardboard and a promise. Nobody around the production saw any of this coming. Alec Guinness, who played Obi-Wan, privately called the script “fairy-tale rubbish.” But he was shrewd enough to negotiate 2.25% of royalties instead of a flat fee. About 20 minutes of total screen time earned his estate somewhere between $50 million and $100 million. Lucas himself was so convinced the film would flop that he offered Spielberg a bet while visiting the Close Encounters set: swap 2.5% of each other’s profits. Spielberg took it. That handshake has paid him around $40 million. And then the money started compounding. Lucas poured his Star Wars profits into ILM, the effects house he’d built for the film. When its computer graphics division got too expensive to maintain, he sold it to Steve Jobs in 1986 for $10 million. Jobs renamed it Pixar. Disney bought Pixar twenty years later for $7.4 billion. Then in 2012, Disney came back for the rest, buying Lucasfilm itself for $4.05 billion. Total franchise revenue today sits around $46.7 billion, over $20 billion from merchandise alone. The filmmaker 40 studios passed on is now worth $5.3 billion according to Forbes. Fifty years ago today, cameras rolled on a desert in Tunisia. The $350,000 pay cut that made it all possible might be the best trade in business history.