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So, so good.
Well, it's Saturday, and as tradition requires, there will be a spaces event after this podcast.
So a few minutes after I'm done here, Owen Gregorian will fire up a spaces.
And you can have an after party if you've enjoyed talking to each other in the comments, especially.
And all you have to do is go to X and search for Owen Gregorian.
And you'll find the feed right there.
Well, I wonder if there's a science that didn't need to be done because they could have just asked me.
Oh, here's some.
According to Cy Post, Vladimir Hedbear is writing, that if a couple is nice to each other with lots of positive things and it's mutually positive, that their relationship will last longer and be stronger.
Is that a big surprise to anybody that if you bring positivity to a relationship is more likely to be healthy?
Hmm, huh?
Well, it's nice to know that that would work, but I have a feeling that it doesn't work if one of the people is male and one of them is female.
Because it seems to me that the model that's been developed over time, you know, evolutionary time, is that women can maximize their gain by complaining because men will do anything they want to make it stop.
So complaining and being negative has tremendous utility to women, but really not a lot of utility to men because then it just makes a woman hate you.
And that's about it.
But if you act positive, if it were possible for both of you to act positive at the same time, it would be really good for you.
Well, Christy Noam, the head of Department of Homeland Security, says that she had to move into military housing because she has so many death threats.
I guess her address got doxed for the second time.
And you know what I'm wondering?
Every time I read a story about somebody being threatened or somebody being hurt Or some kind of fight.
It's almost never white supremacists.
Have you noticed that?
How long ago was it?
Maybe three or four years ago, when the news was literally trying to tell us that the biggest risk in the entire country was white supremacists.
Well, they're awfully boring and lazy and quiet.
If they're dangerous, they're really not doing a good job of it, because I'll bet it wasn't the white supremacists who were threatening Christy Noam.
Just guessing.
I don't feel like there were a lot of white supremacists jacking cars in Washington, D.C. It feels like whenever we hear stories of violence and crime, there's almost never a white supremacist in the story.
And I'm disappointed because we were all told that that was the biggest threat to the nation.
I don't know where they went.
Maybe they all got locked up.
Okay.
Well, China is developing the creepiest product that you could ever imagine.
It's a robot surrogate to carry a human child.
It would be like a, I guess, based on the brief news report, it would be built like a regular robot with arms and legs.
And it would have sort of a womb.
It would have an artificial womb.
And so the robot would walk around with your baby in it.
So that's coming.
If you can think of anything that would be creepier than raising a baby in a robot's womb, let me know, because that's pretty darn creepy.
Tough to top that.
Well, per the Financial Times, Melissa Heckela, I believe I pronounced that right.
He say the A with the two dots over it.
The umlant.
Is that an umlat?
Well, okay.
So Melissa Heichel writes that the art of persuasion, apparently the AI chatbots can change your mind, and they can do it pretty quickly in 10 minutes.
So if you have a discussion with an AI, it can, the study found that it can change your mind very quickly and very effectively.
Now, not every person every time and all within 10 minutes, but if they measure a larger group of people in a study, a lot of them will change their mind based on the AI trying to convince them what's true and what isn't.
Now, why is that?
Have I. Hey, look who visited.
This is Gary the cat.
He will be joining us on the show today.
If you'd like to look at Gary, I'll tip the camera down so you can look at the cat instead of me.
Sort of an upgrade.
Come on.
Gary, get over here.
All right, that's better.
So why do you think it would be true that AI would be persuasive?
Let's see if I have taught you enough that you would have known that without this study.
Number one, it's the documentary effect.
If it's just you and the AI and the AI is one point of view, which typically it would, and it's trying to convince you that one point of view is right, and you spend 10 minutes with it, there's a good chance it'll change your mind.
Number two, there are no egos involved or less of one.
If you're dealing with another human, you're feeling like you don't want to seem less than them or dumb compared to them.
So you don't want to change your mind because a human talked to you for 10 minutes.
That just wouldn't feel comfortable.
But if you felt like the AI wasn't a person with an ego and it wasn't going to hold it over you if it was right and you were wrong, you'd never hear about it again.
Well, then you would feel like you're just doing your own research and changing your mind on your own.
So if you can get people to think that they're changing their mind on their own, It'll happen a lot easier than if it's like one human versus another human because you put your shields up in those cases.
So, yes, it does make sense that AI would be super persuasive.
Now, here's the troubling part.
That super persuasion, I believe, happens without it knowing how to do persuasion.
It happens just because it has a good argument and has good facts, and people tend to believe the computer.
So, that's all it has.
And it can already, with no real persuasion technique, you know, just presenting arguments basically, it can already totally change people's opinions.
What is going to happen when it starts using the techniques of persuasion?
Because, you know, it knows them because it got trained on all the bodies of work in the world.
So, yeah, it knows what to do.
But presumably, it is not programmed to maximize persuasion.
But it wouldn't take much to do it.
So, that's one of the biggest problems in the world coming at you, which is AI persuasion.
All right, let's talk about the biggest story.
I think everybody is streamed in here now.
We got a full house.
Putin and Trump met in Alaska because it's sort of right in the middle there.
And Alaska, of course, has some historical value because it is a time when the U.S. and Russia played well together.
So, in terms of setting the table, as Trump likes to say, is a good persuasion to bring Putin and Trump into the one place that's maybe the most famous place in the world where Russia and the U.S. have gotten along well and they made a deal and it was just business.
And, you know, they were on our side for some stuff, and we were on their side for some stuff.
Yeah, it's perfect.
Whoever came up with the idea of Alaska, that was a home run.
That was just a home run.
So, good job on that.
I will just run down the list of things that people talked about with this meeting.
First of all, the body language looked very positive, as in both leaders did not seem to be acting when they were acting positively toward each other.
Their smiles looked real.
Their body language seemed to be, I'm totally into this meeting.
And it wasn't creepy.
I mean, it wasn't that good, but it was really good.
And I don't think any of that was acting.
Could have been, but it really looked genuine to me.
Trump, of course, tried to give Putin the Trump handshake, and it was a great build-up to it because Trump stood in one place and made Putin do this long walk down the red carpet to him.
So it also made it look like Putin is the one who came to him.
That's good.
Very good persuasion.
But Trump puts out his hand for the handshake, and he does the classic Trump thing, which is easy for him to do because he's so much bigger than Putin, where he grabs his hand and then he pulls him in.
So that Trump's entire body, that Putin's entire body is immediately controlled by Trump because he doesn't want to have his hand sticking out too far.
That would be awkward.
So he kind of follows his hand as Trump pulls it in close to his body.
And it puts Trump immediately in command of Putin's body.
He makes Putin come to where he wants him to come.
He makes him walk the way he wants him to walk on the red carpet.
And then when he gets within a hand distance, he moves him specifically where he wants.
And then he says, you know, follow me, basically.
And he makes Putin do what he wants them to do, which is go wherever they're going.
Now, obviously, as the host, it's not surprising that Trump was leading the way.
But everything about that put Trump in control.
He's taller, he's sort of more popular.
He's more of a star, just everything.
So, in terms of the setup, the choice of locations and all that, just perfect.
Now, I suspect that the traditional media, since they don't deal on the persuasion level and they have a meager understanding of how negotiation works at this high level, they're going to say stuff like, well, he just made a star and Putin will talk about that.
But if you look at it purely from a setting the table, which is the phrase that Trump actually used, he wasn't trying to get an agreement today.
He said he was setting the table.
Everything I just mentioned is setting the table.
So, what else happened?
Weirdly, and I'd love to know more about this, when Putin and Trump first met and then they were doing the long walk together down the red carpet, it appeared that they were chatting and joking and that they knew what the other was saying.
And there was no interpreter there.
So, I saw Jack Pasabek say that it must have been Putin was trying to speak a little bit of English, but he doesn't do that in public on camera.
So, it makes me wonder how much English Putin actually knows.
And then I've got a second observation.
Just hold this in your mind for a moment.
What do you think would be the state of relations between the U.S. and Russia if we were dealing with a leader that spoke perfect English?
Think about it.
I feel as if that language barrier just sort of prevents you from ever having, you know, like a really good deal.
Now, correct me if I'm wrong.
Modi in India speaks perfect English, right?
Can you give me a confirmation on that?
I think so, right?
Which, and then it's no surprise that India and the U.S. get along great.
And then you've got President Xi, and we've got kind of a tense adversarial relationship, and he doesn't speak English.
Now, I'm not saying everybody should speak English because English is awesome, but imagine how different things would be if they all spoke perfect English.
Is there anybody who speaks perfect English who is an enemy of the US?
All right, there's a good test for you.
Who is an enemy of the U.S. who also speaks perfect English?
There might be some Hamas leader in that category, but that's a special case because that's a religious kind of a problem.
But North Korea doesn't speak English.
It feels to me that if something happened to Putin and he were replaced by somebody who spoke really good English, like Lavrov or one of those guys, I feel like everything would change.
It just feels like everything would be different almost immediately.
And we wouldn't know why.
We would assume it's because, oh, this new leader in Russia, hypothetically, is just saying the right things.
Well, maybe.
Or maybe it's just that if everybody's speaking the same language, they come to an understanding just more naturally.
I believe that's true.
Well, let's see what else is happening.
So Putin said, next time, maybe meet in Moscow.
He said it in front of the cameras.
So Trump was on the spot.
And Trump goes, ooh, that's an interesting one.
I don't know.
I'll get a little heat on that one.
I can see it possibly happening.
Thank you very much, Vladimir.
So that was clever of Putin because he had, as I just described, he was the one who came to Trump and Trump had all the setup just right.
So Putin was probably thinking, because he's smart, that if he could get Trump to agree to go to Moscow, it would somehow erase this little level difference that Trump had just introduced with his setup of the Alaska visit.
And then Putin says it in front of witnesses so that Trump has to react to it immediately.
And he wasn't really going to say, no, I'll never come to Moscow.
So he sort of had to give it a maybe, didn't he?
And Trump gave it a maybe.
And that elevated Putin back up to, oh, we must be roughly peers because I go to you, you go to me, you just haven't come yet.
A lot of chat has been happening over the fact that Trump also organized a flyover of the B-2 bomber and its escort jets, which is pretty impressive.
They timed it perfectly.
So it came over just as Putin and Trump were getting together.
And it was an impressive show of force.
I wouldn't make as much a deal about it as some of the observers are who are happy that they found the persuasion lesson.
That one is so obvious that I don't know if it's really persuasive.
I mean, not a lot.
Because Russia has big weapons too.
So it's so heavy-handed.
It's so obvious that that was to influence him that probably didn't have quite the impact you imagined.
Anyway, I guess the press was kind of adversarial, as it often is, and was rudely yelling at the two leaders when they got together.
And there was some opinion that Putin was kind of put off with it.
And at one point, they said he said enough.
And then he and Trump had a laugh about how bad the press is, blah, blah, blah.
So that was just an interesting moment.
Let me give you some other impressions from other people.
Speaking of Jack Poseubic, he said that Trump, after the meeting, Trump was up for, what do you say?
He'd been traveling for 19 hours.
Does that include both directions?
I don't know.
And that he was making phone calls until 2 a.m. with the other leaders to catch him up.
I'll tell you, having a president who doesn't need much sleep is really underrated.
It really is like having two presidents.
He just doesn't sleep that much.
It's kind of amazing.
Well, I guess Zelensky is going to come to the White House on Monday.
So he'll be brought into it.
And then there's some bullshit about Trump saying that everybody determined that the best way to end the war is to go directly to a peace agreement and skip the ceasefire.
Does that sound like something they really all agreed on?
Because it seems to me that Trump would have gotten a lot of credit if he'd gotten a ceasefire.
Now, a ceasefire probably wouldn't hold.
So maybe there was no point in trying because it wouldn't have held anyway.
But it feels a little bit like maybe Trump didn't get the ceasefire that he wanted and that he's reframing it as, well, the ceasefire is not important.
What's important is a larger agreement.
Maybe.
So apparently we've decided that an imaginary peace deal is better than an imaginary ceasefire because neither of them were going to happen.
They were both imaginary.
Now, does it seem to you like we're having some kind of weird theater?
And the theater is this.
Unless Ukraine decides to give up its valuable land that Russia has already conquered, which I don't see there's any chance of that.
There's not going to be any kind of peace deal and there's not going to be any kind of ceasefire.
And doesn't it feel to you Like the odds of a peace deal are close to zero.
Does anybody have that feeling?
Now, Trump is the magic peacemaker.
So if anybody could do it, he would be the one I would bet on.
So it's not zero, not really, but it feels like it.
Can you imagine any scenario in which Ukraine changes its mind on that land exchange?
What scenario would allow them to do that?
Here's my best estimate.
Suppose the U.S. offered the following idea.
Hey, instead of the Russian government and the Ukrainian government deciding who gets what land of the part that's already conquered by Russia, why don't we leave it to a referendum?
Now, you might say, there's no way you can get a legitimate referendum.
You can't really assume that you would get a legitimate vote from the population.
But you could poll them, couldn't you?
Or couldn't you?
Maybe you can't.
Maybe that'd be too hard.
So suppose you said, since there is no legitimate way that the governments will agree which land should change hands, why don't we turn it over to the populations?
Now, I would think that Russia, and you might take Crimea out of the mix because Russia might say, all right, there's no situation in which we're giving up Crimea.
So you might want to take that out of the mix.
But if you said for the other stuff, if we could figure out what the population wants, then we should craft our end agreement around that.
Now, there are a lot of Russian-speaking people in those conquered lands, right?
So it might be that Russia would get what it wanted.
And how much would Ukraine want to keep territory that was full of people who would rather be Russian?
Would they be losing a lot in that case?
I don't know.
Maybe be fewer problems.
So the only way I could see that a big deal could happen is if they take away from the governments, or at least they pretend they're taking it away, the question of who gets what land.
It's just got to go to somebody independent and/or the population of the people there.
And then what?
I think Ukraine mostly wants American guarantee of security, but they would stop short of demanding that they be in NATO.
So my guess is that we'll promise that NATO is off the table, but the U.S. will say something like, but you're going to have to get through us, Russia, if you want to take over what's left of Ukraine.
Probably something like that.
Well, what was the reaction over at MSNBC?
Did they say it's a great step forward?
Trump really set the table?
No, they had Susan Rice on and says that Putin walked away with a, quote, big victory because the event made him seem like an equal as opposed to the isolated dictator that he is or should be.
And Nicole Wallace says that she was more prepared to meet with Vladimir Putin than Trump was.
Now, do you notice the mind reading?
When the people, the anti-Trumpers, run out of good points, which happens kind of quickly, they go to mind reading.
Now, how in the world would anyone, especially Nicole Wallace, know how prepared Trump was or wasn't for this meeting?
Correct me if I'm wrong, but the topic of Ukraine has been one of his top topics for the entire time he's been in office and when he was running for office.
And if there's something he doesn't know about that situation in order to be prepared, I would be really surprised.
He might be the most prepared person you've ever seen.
Now, I'm not reading his mind.
I'm just looking at the situation objectively.
Is it really possible that the thing that he probably thinks about the most, the thing that would get him a Nobel Peace Prize, you think he hasn't put enough thought into it?
That's such a dumb NPC comment that he wasn't prepared.
There's no indication that he wasn't prepared.
In fact, he probably was super prepared because he seems to be able to handle a great many topics without too much pressure.
That's just one more.
The Wall Street Journal said: for all the pageantry, President Trump leaves Alaska with little to show while Putin got the recognition he has long sought.
Now, is that the case?
Well, I would argue that we cannot judge in the present whether this was a plus or a minus, because the setting the table thing is all about preparing for the move after.
So if you don't see the move that follows, which would be the larger peace negotiations, if you don't see how that turns out, I believe it's ridiculous and stupid, it's just stupid, to give it a grade midway.
Well, that would be like if you were going to grade a heart surgeon by only watching while he opens up the front of the chest to get access to the heart, you stop there.
You go, oh, oh, look at that patient.
That patient used to be all together and now he's got a big hole in his chest.
I guess that's a big old failure.
Wouldn't it be smarter to wait till the operation is over and then judge whether your operation was a success?
You can't judge it based on they met and they had a good time and they smiled at each other and they said some things you would expect them to say.
Anyway, I would argue this way: that how many times have you seen, and I've mentioned this a number of times, and then I see other people in the press mention it, that Trump likes to create assets out of nothing and then trade away that asset as part of his negotiation.
He just did that with Putin.
And most people won't be able to see this, but I think I've trained most of you that you can.
It goes like this.
Before Putin came to this meeting, according to the Walls Street Journal, according to MSNBC, he did not have the respect of the international community the way he wanted it.
So we all agree with that part, that he had a, isn't he like indicted or something by the National War Crimes Communal or something?
We're not a signatory to that, so he was safe in U.S. territory.
But he was sort of this outcast, demonized leader, and should have been for good reason.
And that this put him up on a level where he's more like an equal to the United States leader.
So that, on the surface, that would look like a mistake, right?
It would look like Trump gave him something for nothing.
But if you know a little bit more about persuasion and you know that Trump routinely creates assets out of nothing for the purpose of trading them away later or threatening to take them away later, even better, here's how you would see it.
Putin just gained, as critics rightly point out, he just gained status.
Trump can take that away anytime he wants.
The status that Putin gained is completely provisional.
He doesn't get to keep it.
Because if a week from now Trump says, all right, well, we gave you a chance, you little pissant.
You came over here and you smiled at me and you laughed and you tapped me on again and you had no intention of settling this thing.
So now I'm going to destroy your economy and you're a lying piece of shit.
And I want the rest of the world to know that.
Do you see how quickly Trump can take that away from him?
So Putin started with none of that respect that would put him on the same plane as Trump.
Trump quite deftly elevated him up to just below him, just below him, but in the same universe, just a little bit below Trump.
That was creating an asset out of nothing.
Now Trump can take that away.
So Putin goes home and he's like, yeah, I think I really gained something in world opinion here.
No, he didn't.
Trump owns that world opinion.
He can yank that back in 30 seconds.
He can write one post on Truth Social and absolutely pull the rug out.
So that's Trump.
Now, Putin, also being really good at persuasion, but they each have different cards to play.
So it doesn't mean they'll have an equal outcome.
It just means they're both really good at this.
So as much as I say Trump is amazing at persuasion, and he is, he's the best, Putin's right up there.
He's not a peer, but he is right just behind him.
So Putin knew that he could make Trump want to keep playing with him if he said the things that Trump would want to hear.
One of the things he said was that the war never would have happened if Trump had been president.
Now, I don't know if that's true, but boy, does that fit what Trump wants you to believe?
Because it's exactly what he says twice a day, every day for months.
So Putin just goes out and backs him.
Oh, yeah, there wouldn't have been a war if Trump had been in charge.
Now, it doesn't matter if that's true, because we can't go back in time and test it out.
It only matters that he said it, and it was so perfectly, you know, strategically formed so that Trump would have to say, yeah, I do agree with that.
So that was masterful of Putin.
And Putin also said, didn't he also say he thought the 2020 election might have been rigged?
Which, of course, Trump would want to hear.
There was something else he said.
Oh, yeah, he said the election.
Oh, listen to this.
I think this was Trump quoting Putin.
So it's not something we heard from Putin directly.
But Trump said that Putin said, your election was rigged because you have mail-in voting.
He talked about 2020 and he said you won that election by so much.
It was a rigged election.
Said it was impossible to have fair elections with mail-in voting.
Now, seriously, if Putin sat down and he said, I'm going to make a list of the things that Trump would most want to hear of all the things in the world, what would he most want to hear, especially from Putin?
It would be the things he said.
All right.
So if you're grading them on how they did, A plus from Trump, A plus from Putin, but I'll give the win to Trump.
Trump gets the win because he had the location advantage.
Not because he had more skill, but he just had an advantage before the game started, and he played his advantage correctly.
So the other thing that's happening here is they have to know that the other one is their sort of Sherlock Holmes and Professor Moriarty.
They are each other's biggest challenge and each other's most capable other.
Xi is pretty capable, but Putin's more fun.
I think he's just more fun.
President Xi looks like he's not much fun.
But Putin, even if he's evil all the time, he's still kind of fun.
He's got sort of that impish smile and stuff.
And you can imagine that if in a different situation, you could easily imagine Trump and Putin being buddies.
I don't believe Putin golfs.
Am I right?
They've never golfed.
So it's too bad.
If Putin spoke perfect English and golfed, we'd be in good shape.
All right.
So then the European leaders have backed Trump, so they seem happy about what's happened so far as long as the Europeans and Zelensky get involved and they are now.
And apparently the U.S. is prepared to give security guarantees to Ukraine, which is what Ukraine wants.
I don't know what that would look like.
Let's see, Bill Maher had his show last night, and I continue to marvel at the fact that he's becoming more and more of a Republican right before our eyes, but probably never will get there.
But it's just fun to watch the gravity.
It's just pulling him so hard that just a little by little, he's like, well, okay, maybe he has a point on that thing.
But let me tell you all these other things I still disagree with.
And then he'll mention some hoaxes and some things he doesn't understand.
So I guess it was Friday night, last night, Bill Maher said that Trump wasn't wrong on tariffs, and he wasn't wrong on forcing NATO to pay more.
And then he gave Trump some more credit, kind of weirdly.
He said, I'll tell you one thing about him, about Trump, that I know.
I'm not going to tell you how I know.
That part's weird.
He goes, but a lot of people have seen the same thing.
And Maher says he really does hate war.
He really does not like it when people die in war.
Now, how would Bill Maher know that?
Would it be the same way that every one of us knows it?
Because it's the most consistent thing he said since he's been in public life, that he wants the war to stop, he wants the killing to stop.
Yeah.
And the other thing that people say about Trump, even his critics, is that he's exactly the same opinion in private as he is publicly.
So if publicly he's been saying consistently and loudly and often as possible, he doesn't like people to die, doesn't like war, avoiding war is sort of his greatest accomplishment, and he should be proud of it.
Yeah, so why would you imagine that he says something different in private?
Do you imagine that in private he says something like, you know, I really don't care if those people from other countries die, you know, as long as it doesn't come over here.
I doubt it.
If every other topic in private is the same as it is in public, yeah, he doesn't like war.
That's the most obvious thing you could possibly say.
But Bill Maher is acting like the rest of us didn't notice.
And he has some insider knowledge that Trump doesn't like war.
Okay.
And then Bill Maher also notices, because how could he not, that the Democrat leaders like Hillary and Kamala were too afraid to come on his show.
But the Republicans generally say yes.
And as Bill Maher says, they take their beating like men.
I don't know if they take a beating, but they do go into an environment that's not in their favor.
And they do it easily, regularly, without hesitation.
Now, that is a really fair observation.
That is a real good observation.
There is something fundamentally different about the Republican and Democrat approach to something like going on his show.
Now, obviously, he gets a lot of left-leaning people on the show, more than right-leaning, but not the top leaders, not the ones that are afraid of saying something wrong, like Hillary or Kamla.
Anyway, and of course they do get invited all the time, as he points out.
But he says Democrats appear to be afraid of everything.
Morris says they're afraid of COVID, they're afraid of their own kids, which he overlaps with the trans topic.
But then he has to say some negative stuff about Trump, because he just has to.
So Morris says that Trump was overly friendly to Putin for a very long time, considering that Putin is a thug.
Now, does Bill Maher really not know that international relations work better if you don't demonize the person that you're forced to negotiate with?
Is he the only person in the world who doesn't know that?
I mean, that's what's left of his criticisms of Trump are stuff like he was overly friendly to Putin.
That's it.
That's not even a flaw.
That's just somebody who knows how to do his job really well.
Anyway, Walter Kern, I guess, was on the show and pointed out that in 2015, Obama met with Putin and nobody said anything about it.
And then Bill Maher says he met him.
He didn't praise him.
He didn't say he's the greatest guy in the world.
I could read 20 compliments that Trump has given to him.
He said he's a fun guy to be with.
Oh, he's making an Epstein joke there.
But again, how does Bill Maher could be the only person on earth who doesn't know that complimenting the person you're trying to influence is good form and that insulting him makes it much more less likely you'll get anything?
How does he not know that?
I think he's pretending not to know.
Because there's no real possibility he doesn't know that, is it?
I would say every adult with an IQ over 110 would know that.
I don't have to explain it to you.
Anyway.
And of course, Putin is running the same play on Trump.
P.O. Flat Rigged when he can.
Then the funniest thing I'm watching is that MSNBC always has all these anti-Trump critics who have to be on every day.
And one of them is Molly Jong Fast.
And I like watching her because she's so bad.
She's just so bad at it.
But the lowest level, I'm going to say the lowest level of pundit analysis is that the new thing is primarily a distraction to the old thing.
Now, I know both sides say that, and I've even talked about it myself.
But it's the lowest level of clever analysis because the world is full of things that are new news every day.
Isn't it more likely that there's new news every day?
Isn't that far more likely than, oh, this new thing is a distraction from the old thing?
And the old thing was a distraction from the thing before it.
I think the better way to say it is that Trump floods the zone, doesn't allow you to focus on one thing too long, fills up all the shelf space with things he wants you to think about.
So that part's true.
But this whole one thing is a distraction to the other thing, that's such a low level of analysis.
David Axelrod, you might know as one of the more famous Democrat advisors, he says that Trump's red carpet embrace of Putin may enrage a lot of Americans.
I would say that literally everything Trump does enrages the theater kids.
Is there anything Trump could do, including golf?
They get enraged if he golfs.
Oh, we don't pay him to golf.
Well, you don't pay him at all, bitch.
He doesn't even take pay.
Let him golf.
Anyway, yeah.
Yeah, we have to worry about Democrats being enraged by things Trump does.
That's just everything.
Hillary Clinton said some good things about Trump, and then there's one part of it that's fake news.
Hillary Clinton gave Trump credit for the NATO spending going up to 5%.
She gave him credit for Ukraine buying weapons from the U.S. instead of us giving them to him.
And she thinks we have a better working relationship with Europe lately, and she's actually encouraged by that.
So you might say, well, wait a minute, what are all these good things that Hillary is saying about him?
And she goes on.
And she said she'd support a Nobel Peace Prize if Trump got a peace deal without giving up any Ukrainian territory.
Now, what did the news do with her quote?
They find people hoaxed up.
They cut out the last part, so it's a completely different message.
If you leave in the whole quote about if he can do it while not giving any previous Ukrainian land to Russia, that's the part that can never happen in the real world.
Literally, not one person in the world, not one, not one person, believes that this will end with Ukraine getting back all the land they had before it started.
So when she says conditionally that she would nominate Trump for a Nobel Prize, if he could get a peace deal while Ukraine got back all of its land, that she'd do it.
And then the news, the fake news, reported that she would nominate him for a Nobel Peace Prize if he gets a deal.
That's not the deal.
Brennan made the same mistake because he will get fake news too.
So Brennan was on the MSNBC and he boosted what Clinton said.
He said, yeah, I would agree, essentially, that if he could do it without and also get back all of Ukraine's property, that even he would nominate him for a Nobel Peace Prize because that's impossible.
It's just not going to happen.
And anyway, so I wonder if Hillary Clinton will try to soften her approach to Trump because Trump now has his Department of Justice looking into all of her crimes.
Is it possible that Hillary has decided to vastly soften her approach to criticizing Trump because she doesn't want him angry at her at the same time he has the goods on her in the legal system?
Because once Trump decided not to go after her, it was his first term.
So she would know that it is within the realm of possibility that he could have the goods on her and decide not to pursue it or tell his people to stand down.
So you might be seeing her softening her anti-Trump approach to keep herself out of jail.
That might be happening.
Well, I guess there were some protesters up in Alaska.
I guess it was Ukrainian protesters, funded, their signs were funded by somebody who used to work for Kiev's Soros Foundation.
I guess Data Republican found out who the funding came from.
Data Republican on the X platform.
You should follow that account.
She's amazing.
And I will propose to you again the following fact.
There's no such thing as organic protests in America.
Maybe nowhere, but there is no such thing as an organic protest.
If you saw the signs of the protesters, it's just all these old white retired people who must be doing it for $100 because they got nothing to do and they could use $100.
None of it looks real.
And I don't know if we've now completely defanged the whole idea of the fake protests.
Because once you know that they're all fake, do they still have power?
Black Lives Matter had a lot of power.
But if you knew it was fake from day one, would it ever Have had that much power?
I don't know.
We may be past the point where these big protests have the same impact.
we'll all just go bullshit fake Soros so So, do you remember the 2018 Russia summit?
So, that was the first time that Trump met with Putin.
And according to the Federalist Hans Menke, who's writing, that Tulsi Gabbard has released two emails that show that just two days before the Trump-Putin summit, well, hold on.
In late 2016, DNI James Clapper pushed for a fraudulent narrative that Russia had hacked the DNC.
And the timing, apparently, some of this Russia hoax was timed to make it impossible for Trump to get a good outcome in 2018 with Putin.
So, and as Hans Menke points out, Special Counsel Robert Mueller indicted 12 Russian nationals on charges of hacking the DNC.
And this is something I noted at the time too.
The indictment was designed to create political chaos, but Mueller knew that the 12 Russians were located in Russia and would never stay on trial, meaning we'd never know for sure, would we?
We'd never know for sure if Russia was behind it.
Probably was, but we'd never know for sure.
So the Democrats have been using Russia as their club for a long time.
According to CNN's Harry Enton, Americans trust Trump and the GOP on crime way more than they trust the Democrats.
He said that, well, that's a pretty big deal.
I mean, if Trump and the GOP are favored by quite a bit on the topic of crime, it'd be kind of hard to beat them in the midterms.
But midterms, I think, could go anyway at this point.
Peter Schweiser points out, he's an author, he wrote the book Clinton Cash about the Clinton Foundation and the alleged bribery and money laundering, I guess.
Pay to play, pay-to-play and bribery, it was not money laundering.
And although it's a form of money laundering to do the pay-to-play and the bribery.
But he points out that we now know from the new classified document releases that several FBI field offices were planning to investigate the Clintons for the pay-to-pray and pay-to-play and bribery potential of the Clinton Foundation.
And the Obama, Obama Department of Justice told them to shut it down.
And I think that Peter Schweiser assumes that, and I assume, I can't read his mind, but I would assume he assumes it, that if there's something going on right now, some other kind of FBI investigation into the Clinton Foundation from then, that they're going to find stuff.
And it might be a real big deal.
And I think that too.
So there's nobody to tell them to shut it down.
And I don't think you'd get multiple FBI field offices involved back in 2018, unless they had some kind of actionable intelligence.
Well, Trump is deploying 4,000 Marines around Latin America waters to stop the drug dealers, the cartels.
And apparently that's a pretty big military.
So that would include warships, a nuclear-powered sub, spy planes, and a Marine expeditionary Force.
Wow.
And some say it's just a show of force.
It might be more than that.
And then the Mexican government has confirmed that they have approved and they knew about U.S. government drones flying over Mexico as part of the anti-cartel stuff.
So I don't know if Mexico is just trying to cover their butts.
by saying, oh, yeah, we knew about it and we approved it, or if we were just doing it anyway.
And, you know, maybe they approved it.
I don't know.
And then there's Newsom, Governor Newsom, is still becoming crazy and crazier in his anti-Trump stuff.
And Newsom actually said in public that he believes that Trump is serious about running again in 2028.
And partly he believes that because he received a Trump 2028 hat in the mail.
And he just reminds all the Democrats that they must fight like hell.
And that UCLA, who is one of the entities that the Trump administration is going after for being racist, he says that UCL will not sell its soul.
So believe it or not, Newsom is siding with racists and siding with racism because the alternative is to sell their soul.
So I assume their souls are disgusting racist souls and they don't want to sell them to be less racist like the Trump administration would like them to do.
So they are stuck in that fight-like hell frame with nothing else.
Well, Trump told us, and I don't believe this for a second, but he says that President Xi of China told them that China will not invade Taiwan as long as Trump is in office.
Quote, he told me, this is Trump saying that, I will never do it as long as you're president, but I'm very patient, and China is very patient.
Do you believe that Xi told Trump that he would never do it while Trump was in office, but he plans to do it?
Well, that's what you say when you're trying to get elected in 2028.
No, I don't think he.
My guess, since I can't read minds, is that Trump is not taking seriously running in 2028 because the Constitution would not allow it.
And I can't imagine it would ever work.
But on the other hand, he probably is attracted to the idea that it's even an idea.
Yeah, how would you not love that?
That there are people seriously who would want to change the Constitution to keep you in power.
That'd be nice.
I don't think he's taking it seriously, though.
Well, the mayor of New Orleans, La Toya Cantrell, according to the Gateway pundit, a grand jury is charged her with dozens of felony counts, including conspiracy to commit wire fraud, wire fraud, conspiracy to obstruction of justice, making false statements, etc.
And it makes me wonder, given that the problem with local government is that the way it's designed, it guarantees that the leaders will be corrupt.
It guarantees it.
It doesn't guarantee any specific leader, and it doesn't guarantee that it will happen on day one.
But it guarantees that people who know that they can exploit that office for financial gain are going to find ways to win that office and then exploit it for financial gain.
So it makes me wonder if there's any way that the feds could have a regular audit function to audit local governments just for their spending, just to make sure that they're not paying their boyfriend bodyguards to go on vacations with them, that sort of thing.
Is there any reason we couldn't do that?
Now, I know that the states have all the power that the federal government doesn't have, but maybe you need a, would you need a constitutional change or how about this?
How about the federal government funds people in cities that are a problem, the ones that have a lot of crime and probably a lot of corruption?
If funds a what would it be a petition What do you call it when you have the public vote on doing a thing as opposed to just electing a person?
What's that called?
But anyway, whatever that's called, the federal government could fund somebody to just see if they can gather enough signatures to post something on the ballot.
And that thing that could be put on the ballot is, would you say yes to a no-cost referendum, thank you, a referendum?
Would you say yes to a no-cost, because the federal government will pay for it, occasional auditing of your elected officials?
Now, how many people would say no to that?
It will cost you nothing at the local level.
Federally, your taxes will pay for it.
But we'll be checking your politicians to make sure they're not wasting your money.
Would you vote for that?
I would.
I'd vote for that in a heartbeat.
So there might be some way that the Trump administration could get involved in getting rid of the criminals in the cities.
Because to me, that's the biggest problem.
Too many criminals.
And I'm not talking about the ones on the streets.
I'm talking about the elected criminals.
All right.
I've got an observation that you're not going to like at all.
And I believe I've been a hypocrite on this topic.
And you're welcome to call me out on it when you see it happen, because I'm sure it'll happen again.
And the topic is this.
How do you know that the new experts got it right and the old experts got it wrong?
Take, for example, anything in the health domain.
A lot of people send me, hey, this cancer doctor has this solution that the rest of the world doesn't know about, and this will fix you up.
It will cure your cancer.
And then I look at it, and it's somebody very qualified, you know, definitely qualified.
And their argument sounds good to me, but I'm not any kind of a medical doctor or anything.
But my question is this.
Why would you believe the new guy?
If you don't believe the old guys and gals, if you don't believe the old experts, the 98% of them, why would you believe the one who says, no, they're wrong?
So there are several people in this category, and they're all persuasive.
And it's because of the documentary effect.
If you take any one of these doctors, these rogue doctors who make claims that are different from what the mainstream doctors are claiming, if you put them on a podcast, let's say Joe Rogan, and Joe Rogan, he knows what questions to ask as an interested viewer would ask.
But it's going to give that rogue doctor sort of a documentary level of time to make a one-sided presentation that there would be nobody in the room who would have any way to doubt it.
So unfortunately, the rogue doctors are super persuasive because they often get invited on podcasts.
But how would you know they're right?
I mean, I could watch three hours of some expert on Joe Rogan, but I wouldn't know if they're right.
I would only know they're saying something different than other people are saying.
So here's my caution.
If you believe that the new rogue expert has figured out how to cure cancer and the rest of the world hasn't, I would say you have no reason to believe that just because you watch somebody say stuff you don't understand on a show that didn't have a way to check them in real time.
So be careful of the rogue experts.
Likewise, I would say the same thing about climate change.
So Steve Malloy of Junk Science is pointing to a new study.
Where's it coming in?
And of Athens, Greece, Department of Water Resources and Environmental Engineering, blah, blah, blah.
So they did a study in which they're claiming that the CO2 as a greenhouse gas is not really having much of any effect on weather.
Now, if you believe that 98% of the climate scientists are lying, or it's really not 98%, but why would you believe this?
What do you know about the National Technical University of Athens?
Just because there's a study that came out of there that says, oh, climate change is not real.
At least man-made part is not real.
Why would you believe it?
Now, I believe it, kind of.
I don't believe this specific study, but with my own powers of, let's say, experience and logic, I'm pretty sure that the models are bullshit.
And that's because nobody can do that kind of thing.
It's just not a thing anybody could do.
So it doesn't take much of an expert to say, I don't think somebody's doing the thing that's impossible to do.
It's just not possible.
That's a lower level of expertise.
But I wouldn't believe any one study that debunked climate change.
If there's lots of them, then it starts to get more, a little bit more believable.
But remember, there are lots of them on both sides.
I guess there's a rumor that RFK Jr. is trying to squelch, that he's really preparing himself to run for president in 2028.
He says absolutely no way, that people are just trying to drive a wedge between him and Trump, and there's nothing to it.
I believe him.
I believe him.
I feel like RFK Jr. has earned trust on stuff like that.
That if it were someone else, if it were Adam Schiff, I'd say, it's probably a lie because he lies all the time.
But I don't think RFK Jr. lies.
He might be wrong sometimes, but I don't think he lies about stuff.
So I believe him.
A new federal judge, Obama appointee, is again blocking Trump's plan to end DEI in colleges.
Big surprise.
And part of the reason was people didn't want to sacrifice their personal values to get rid of racists and sexists in their college.
What exactly would their personal values be that they wanted to maintain racism in their college?
Why would you want to maintain it?
That's a weird argument.
Well, Charles, not Charles, Davos founder Schwab, you remember Schwab, Klaus Schwab?
He was accused of some financial misconduct after he left the World Economic Forum.
Well, he's been cleared.
So he's been cleared of all wrongdoing.
And since I was one of the people who talked about that story, I feel an obligation to say he's cleared.
All right.
The runaway Texas Democrats who are trying to avoid a vote that would redistrict are hinting that they're coming back.
They pretended that they're waiting to see what California would do with the redistricting, but that sounds like a fake reason.
I think they just knew that eventually they had to return to their jobs.
So to me, what's happening is the inevitable.
So it's not like it was going to go some other way.
Of course they were going to come back to their jobs eventually.
Apparently, according to Newsmax, the White House is trying to get the Indiana Republicans to do some redistricting so they would get a little bit more advantage in case California does it too.
And then in other news, Reuters reports that the U.S. government could shed as many as 300,000 workers under the Trump administration just this year, in one year.
And that would be a 12.5% decrease in the federal workforce since January.
You know what?
That impresses me.
Now, I suppose we'll hear about all kinds of stories of, oh, if we hadn't decreased this workforce, this would not have gone wrong.
But a 12.5% decrease in government workforce in six months, if we actually get that, it's not what we have yet, but it looks like what could happen.
That'd be pretty impressive, I'd have to say.
Sam Altman of OpenAI agrees that AI might be in a bubble.
Not necessarily his company, but there are a lot of startups that are getting ridiculous valuations.
So he thinks AI is in a bubble.
I agree.
It's definitely in a bubble.
I think two things can be true: that it will be the biggest thing ever.
And there's a lot of startups that are still going to fail.
So there's a bubblish quality to it, but it's based on some real.
According to No Ridge, red meat in a healthy diet could benefit your brain.
I think this is all part of the understanding that your gut health is directly related to your brain health, your mental health, and your brain function.
So again, I would throw this in the category of why would you believe anything that science says about nutrition?
Science has been wrong about nutrition every day I've been alive.
It's the wrongest science ever is about anything.
So, yeah, I mean, there's a study, and I'm tempted to eat a steak today to see if I feel any different.
But just so you know, there's some people who think steak's good for you.
I'm sure there are people who would say it's not, and that will probably change back and forth forever.
Well, there's a social media company called Gab, which I believe is sort of like an X clone, right?
It's a messaging kind of thing.
And they're a little more controversial, so they have more users who are provocative, let's say.
And their payment processor just cut them off.
Now, I'll tell you, I feel like I would like a list of all the banks and payment processors who have cut off people because they didn't like what they were saying.
Because the rest of us need to cut off those banks and payment processors, assuming that there's competition in those areas.
I'd love to know who did it so that we could do it back to them.
Well, in Oak Brook, Illinois, police now have a fully autonomous drone.
So apparently they have a drone that sits on the police department building, and they can activate it to go check out a crime scene before the humans on the ground can get there.
And most of the time, it would be able to get there before the humans could.
So at least you'd have some witness.
Maybe you could break up a fight or something if they thought they were being filmed.
I don't know.
But to me, this is a great idea.
It seems to me that there should be police drones in the sky or nearby, you know, everything.
I kind of like that idea.
I know it's going to feel like a violation of privacy and blah, blah, blah, but that's already gone.
You lost your privacy a long time ago.
Well, I saw a post on X that's been fascinating me all morning.
You've heard about people who don't have an internal monologue, right?
So they don't hear voice in full sentences in their head.
Now, I do, and always have.
I don't know what the percentage breakdown is, but to me, there's just like a demon in my head who's talking to me all the time.
I don't think of it as a demon.
I think of it as myself.
But apparently, some people don't have that.
But on top of that, there are people who don't imagine things visually.
And I don't even know how you could live like that.
How many of you do not have a visual imagination?
So, in my case, I can produce an entire movie just like a Netflix film and run it in my imagination.
I don't even have to close my eyes.
I can see every part of it.
I can see all the detail.
I can move the camera angle around so I can see the movie from any angle.
And I can replay it and change the dialogue and just change the movie.
Now, can any of you not do that?
Is there anybody here who can't produce a full motion picture in their head and then just watch it?
It makes me wonder how much of it is practice-related and how much is natural.
I feel like it's always been the same for me, but I also practice it every day because a comic strip is basically a little scene from a movie.
And the way you do it is first you imagine it.
And then when I draw the comic, I'm projecting the image onto the page and I'm tracing it.
So drawing for me is sort of like tracing.
I'm not finding out what it looks like when it's done.
I'm seeing it done and then I'm tracing it.
I don't know what you do.
I would assume that if you don't have that visual thing, that you would not be able to draw and do art.
But if you could, and maybe you can, that would be fascinating too.
But it really tells you that as similar as it seems that we are, we are so different on the inside.
The internal life, you know, the real one, the one that matters the most, we are so different.
I mean, that is such a fundamental difference in how you see the world.
Anyway, that's all we got.
So in a few minutes, Owen Gregorian will be hosting a spaces event on the X platform.
To find it, you can either find my X account.
I reposted it, the link, or you could go to Owen Gregorian and see the link there.
And you should be following him, by the way.
All right, ladies and gentlemen, I'm going to say a few words privately to the beloved members of my locals group.
But I'll be short so that you can make it over to the spaces event if you want to.
All right, everybody else, I'll see you tomorrow.
Same time, same place.
Hope you had a good time.
Hope you got your exercise done or cleaned your house or whatever it was you were doing while I was yapping away.
