Guests - Kirk Feiler, Cory McGarr, Betsy Smith, Joel Strabala, Jeff Dornik
Kirk Feller Announces Run for LD 17 State Representative
In a significant development for Legislative District 17, Kirk Feller, the current chair of the Pinal County Republican Party, has announced his candidacy for State Representative. Making his announcement on Wind Tucson, Filer expressed his commitment to providing strong leadership in the Arizona legislature.
"I'm going to do it," Feller confirmed when asked directly about his intentions to run. The announcement marks a return to the political arena for Feller, who previously ran for the position two cycles ago.
Strong Republican Leadership in LD 17
Feller's candidacy comes at a critical time for LD 17, which spans parts of both Pima and Pinal counties. The district, described as "a great strong Republican district" by host Kathleen Winn, recently lost representative Cory McGarreese, creating an opportunity for new leadership.
During the announcement, former representative McGarreese called in to offer his endorsement, highlighting the principles and character that make Feller a strong candidate.
"Kirk is a man of principle," McGarreese stated. "In the race when we actually were competitors, you don't always like your competitors, and that was not true with Kirk. I enjoyed speaking with him. He was someone that we agreed on probably 99% of all the topics."
McGarreese revealed that when he decided not to run for reelection, Feller was the first person he reached out to gauge interest. "I fully support it. He's a good guy, he's going to take a principled stance," McGarreese added.
A Vision for Arizona's Future
When asked about his priorities, Feller emphasized the importance of a strong state legislature to support the next Republican governor's agenda.
"There's so many priorities, so many issues," Feller explained. "I heard Congressman Biggs talk at an event in Saddlebrook a week or so ago, and his vision when we win the governor's seat back is to do exactly what Trump did for the United States and go in like a whirlwind."
Feller stressed that implementing such an agenda would require a unified and cooperative legislature. "We need to stop the bickering in Phoenix in the legislature. We need to get together. We do have the same vision," he said.
The candidate also warned about the risks of continued Democratic control in Arizona: "People don't realize how close to becoming a state like Colorado or California or Oregon we are. Arizona is the next step to becoming an Oregon, which is the next step to becoming a state like California."
Pinal County Leadership Experience
As the current chair of the Pinal County Republican Party, Feller brings significant leadership experience to his candidacy. He highlighted the success of Republican governance in Pinal County, noting that "every elected official is Republican" and that they work well together.
"Not only do they get along, but they all work very well together," Feller said. "We have a lot of great things happening. We've got data centers coming in. We've got mining opening up, and we're growing like crazy. We're going to double by 2030-2032... to over a million residents in Pinal County."
Filer and his wife have lived in Pinal County for 14 years, residing in Eagle Crest Ranch just over the county line from Pima County. "My wife and I feel very blessed that we live in Pinal County," he stated.
Law Enforcement Support
Another guest on the program, Betsy Brantner Smith, emphasized Feller's strong support for law enforcement.
"From a purely professional point of view, this guy supports law enforcement. He backs the blue and he puts his money where his mouth is," Smith said. "That will be good for LD 17, and it'll be good to have someone like that in the legislature who can counter this anti-police nonsense that we still see from some of our legislators in Phoenix."
Feller confirmed his commitment to law enforcement, mentioning his personal connections to police officers. "I am a big back-the-blue person. I had an uncle who retired from the Schomburg police force as a captain. I have some good buddies from high school that are retired cops."
He added, "This country was built on law and order, and the vast majority of our population want the rule of law and order."
Teamwork in the Republican Party
A theme throughout the announcement was the importance of Republican unity and teamwork. Filer will be running alongside current representative Rachel Jones, forming what Winn described as "a great team."
"I think an LD 17 today it's Christmas," Winn remarked, "because to have that kind of camaraderie, that kind of professionalism, that kind of leadership - it just underlines what we can be as a party... where there's no backstabbing and no maliciousness and everyone working together for the greater good."
Feller emphasized the importance of building relationships, both with voters and fellow representatives. He recalled his previous campaign experience: "We didn't become enemies, and we ended up becoming friends, but we built a relationship. I think that is important, and I think we need to develop relationships with the voters - not just ask them to get out and vote, but develop those relationships, talk about the issues, why it's important to them."
Jeff Dornick Warns of AI and Pharmaceutical Industry Concerns
In a wide-ranging discussion, Jeff Dornik, founder and CEO of Pickaxe, warned about significant concerns related to artificial intelligence and pharmaceutical regulation that could impact public safety and personal freedoms.
FDA Eliminating Animal Trials for New Drugs
Dornik highlighted a concerning development in pharmaceutical regulation: the FDA has ended the requirement for animal trials before testing new drugs on humans.
"Historically, the FDA has a particular approval process for new drugs and vaccines where the first round of trials would be done in animals. That way you can see: does it cause cancer, is it a carcinogen, are there any unusual reactions to this in animals before we take it to human testing," Dornik explained.
He noted that this safeguard has now been eliminated, with artificial intelligence simulations replacing animal testing: "They're eliminating these animal trials and they're implementing artificial intelligence simulated trials... they'll put into a database everything that they know in general supposedly, allegedly everything that they know into a database, and then they would be able to run simulations of the trials."
Dornik identified several problems with this approach: "We will never know everything and all the nuances when it comes to God's creation in human biology. So they'll only be able to implement what we allegedly understand at that time."
He added, "AI is only as good as the programmer and only as good as the database. As we saw a few weeks ago with Grock going haywire and pushing all sorts of pro-Hitler anti-Semitic rhetoric just based on a very minor tweak to the algorithm, imagine what will be done now when we're dealing with our health."
Pharmaceutical Industry Manipulation
Dornik also raised concerns about pharmaceutical companies manipulating study results to achieve desired outcomes.
"I have a friend that works in the pharmaceutical industry that writes up a lot of the papers for big pharmaceutical companies," he said. "She said what they do is they will start off with what they want to see, and then they will figure out how to implement the test in order to get there."
He provided a specific example from the COVID-19 vaccine trials: "For the Comirnaty vaccine for COVID-19, what they did is they wanted to show that it was 95% effective. So they took 40,000 people in the study... instead of looking at the overall numbers and comparing the two sets of 20,000 people in each group, what they ended up doing is they took a look at only the approximately less than 200 people that actually contracted COVID-19."
Dornik argued that this approach skewed the results: "When you look at it from that perspective, they said that it's 95% effective at stopping you from contracting COVID-19. When in reality, whether you were vaxxed or not vaxxed, you had a more than 99% chance of not contracting COVID-19."
Sunscreen and Seed Oils: Alternative Health Perspectives
During the conversation, Dornik shared a personal health observation regarding sunburn and seed oils.
"I'm a very Norwegian blonde-haired blue-eyed white boy. I would sunburn like I would lather on the sunscreen, I would get sunburn through a black shirt," he explained. "What's interesting is that now, because we've cut out eating seed oils in our house - no seed oils - I no longer use sunscreen and I don't burn anymore."
Dornik claimed research shows "people that consume high amounts of seed oils, which are in everything, that actually contributes to your getting sunburned." He suggested that the conventional approach to sun protection might be counterproductive: "They've got everybody terrified of the sun, and then they've got everybody lathering up on toxic sunscreen, which actually creates the skin cancer at a significantly higher rate than anything else."
As an alternative, he recommended: "We use avocado oil, olive oil, or butter and ghee. Anytime we go out to a restaurant, even if you ask for olive oil, the olive oil is actually cut with seed oil. So we always ask if you can cook our food, if you're going to cook use the oil, use just actual butter."
The Threat of AI to Human Value
A significant portion of the conversation focused on Dornik's concerns about artificial intelligence replacing human roles and eroding human experience.
"The more money they invest in the AI and the more the AI develops, the more centralized their power becomes," Dornik warned. "The artificial intelligence companies are going to end up being more powerful than our own federal government."
He cited comments from tech leaders about AI's trajectory: "If you listen to a guy like Elon Musk and Bill Gates, they're talking about within the next decade that all human workers, not just a handful or certain segments of the population, but all human workers will be replaced by AI and robots."
Dornik expressed particular concern about AI's impact on creative expression and content creation: "Meta is investing $65 billion into developing artificial intelligence for the purpose specifically to replace human beings as content creators on the platform and then have AI-generated content creators. That way they can control the narrative, they can control the story, they can control the advertising."
Child Development Concerns in the Digital Age
Dornik, a father of a three-year-old, shared his perspective on raising children in the digital age.
"We don't let him watch screens. He doesn't play on the phone, not the iPad. He rarely will let him watch something like a show for like 10 minutes," Dornik explained. "Even when he's watching those few times, you can see in his eyes he's zoning out."
He contrasted screen time with reading: "When you read a book, you read a story to him, his mind has to work in order to process the information that we're reading to him. So he has to imagine Winnie the Pooh and Tigger running around the Hundred Acre Wood. But if he's watching the show or watching the movie, his mind no longer has to work because it's all being fed to him."
Dornik expressed concern about the education system's role in child development: "The education system is trying to separate your kids from you at a very very young age. That's why they want you as young as two and three years old to send to preschool."
He suggested this separation has a purpose: "What ends up happening is they want you to send your kids to school at a very early age, and then that way your kids are no longer reliant on you as the authority figure but on them and the system as the authority figure."
Pickaxe: A Platform for Free Speech
Dornik provided an update on Pickaxe, his social media platform designed to counter censorship and algorithmic manipulation.
"We've got the web-based version that's out right now at thepickaxe.com. We're dropping the app for both iOS and Android in the next few weeks," he reported. "We're getting a lot of interest from a lot of people that are actually coming over and joining right now, primarily because of our Rumble integration."
He described new features in development: "I'm actually in the early phases of testing out right now implementing a new email newsletter feature that would put us in direct competition with Substack, to where people can build their own email lists and then they can email their articles or send email newsletters to their subscribers."
Dornik explained the platform's purpose: "We're looking at how do we help content creators and show hosts and writers and journalists break away from having to rely on somebody else, to rely on big tech, and we can open things back up. We're not going to have the algorithmic manipulations. We're going to give you more direct access to your audience, more opportunities to monetize your content."
The Danger of "Unpersoning" in AI Systems
Dornik closed by warning about a disturbing capability of AI systems: the ability to effectively erase individuals from digital existence.
He shared the story of Ted Rawl, "a leftist political cartoonist" who "has been unpersoned by ChatGPT." According to Dornik, Rawl had previously criticized OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
"I went over to ChatGPT and I typed in his name and I was like 'tell me about Ted Rawl,' and ChatGPT started replying and started writing out Ted Rawl. Then halfway through writing out his name, it stopped and said 'we cannot complete this task as it violates our terms of service.' He is unpersoned," Dornik recounted.
He pointed out the broader implications: "OpenAI uses the same language large language model in their government contracts. So does that mean that Ted Rawl is unpersoned in the eyes of the federal government when they're using OpenAI's technology?"
Dornik connected this to employment concerns: "If you're going up for a job, a lot of people will rely on ChatGPT or Grock or something like that to do their research instead of Google search. Well now if you're unpersoned for saying the wrong thing, how can you be searched? Now you are at a disadvantage if you're trying to get the job."