Thank you.

So, uh, Mr.

President, on behalf of three-quarters of a million volunteer firefighters across this nation, we want to present you with this helmet.

And, uh, you know, these are people, these are citizens who respond from their homes at night.

They respond from their businesses during the day to protect their neighbors when their neighbors need help the most.

I have my wife with me here today too because our families mean a lot to us.

They are the ones that support us at every step of the way.

This would have been very helpful."

Right.

Uh, you've got Ebola, you've got salmonella.

We've had more foodborne illnesses this year than we've had in, in many, many years.

But if you look back over the past few years, we've had an increase.

For me, I think that, uh, our, our, our food safety, particularly the safety of the food that's coming across our borders-

Yep.

Right.

I just posted today on my LinkedIn account a thing that, five things that people need to do now.

Yep

... for all of our food coming in the, coming both across the border, but also the stuff that we're br- growing here 'cause that's not, that's not completely immune to, to all of this stuff.

We're cutting.

We're cutting, we're cutting, and cutting, and sadly, you can't blame that on any single administration.

Every single administration over the past few decades continue to whittle away at our ability to monitor, our ability to supervise what's going on.

And then the last thing we're seeing now is as they continue to cut all of the government agencies that should be doing these things, what they're basically saying is, "Over to you growers and large corporations selling this stuff.

You need to self-regulate." And that never ends well for humanity, right? Because you then see things, and this is exactly what happened with the lettuce, iceberg lettuce in, um, uh, that was grown in Mexico, right? Lettuce doesn't come out of the ground with cyclospora in it.

[laughs]

It seems that, you know, the recent concern about, you know, AI possibly leading to the end of humanity, death scenario, you know, is out there and around, but it seems that It doesn't even need to get to that level of seriousness, I guess, you know, to be able to wreak havoc with our lives.

That's 100% correct.

And, in fact, when I get asked a version of this question a lot, and it is, look, you know, all of this doomsday stuff, could it be possible? Sure.

You know, part of me is, well, if it's going to happen, I'm not going to be one of those ones who's going to, lose the rest of my days really worrying about it.

I'm going to try to have a good life.

But what I would say is, for me, the bigger threat and the more concerning threat is the one we face today.

And I already rattled off a couple of the things.

Yeah, and on the site they talked about the number of E. coli, Listeria, and Salmonella, you know, for example, other types of bacterial issues that they're currently investigating.

So, so, so what's the state of our national security right now as we speak, in your opinion?

opinion?Uh, in my opinion, I, I think, I think we're probably okay, uh, for national security, particularly when you look at things like intelligence and defense.

I mean, we still have, we still have the greatest intelligence organizations.

The, the CIA, uh, you know, Defense Intelligence, NGA, all of these great places.

They're still far surpass any, any of our allies or any of our, um, adversaries.

Uh, Department of Defense and the Department, uh, of War, you know, you can, you can look at, at how that's playing out in the news.

At, at the same time, we still have a, you know, the best equipment.

[laughs]