bvious to me that I would never sell that many books. But the advance was so good that of course I said yes. It was their risk to take. So I took their money. They took the risk. And do you think that they sold enough books to justify the advance? Probably not. Probably one or two of the books yes, but probably the entire five-book catalog, probably not. But they said directly at one point that they like to have big names in their stable. And as long as I came close to break even then it was a marketing thing and they went. So I heard that directly. So yes, Biden might have been overpaid because there was something sketchy going on, but he could have been overpaid just because that's exactly how publishers operate. They overpay for the big-name books.

All right. Home costs have doubled since 2019. At least the affordability of a new home has doubled. Wait, no, your dollar goes half as far as it did at the end of 2020. Yeah, so basically same story. Wow, wow.

All right. Here's a little story that I have to wonder about. You'll probably wonder the same thing. So Trump has a new video out, campaign video, in which it shows people being brainwashed by Hillary and uses, and even Trump did a truth post on it in which he said brainwashed. So they're using the word brainwashed and they're using the video of Hillary saying that she wants to deprogram Trump supporters. Trump is going directly at the brainwashing propaganda part of the Democrat engine, which is pretty interesting. I don't know that anybody's going after that directly before, have they? But it's exactly what's happening. It's a brainwashing operation. And if he can convince anybody that it is, that's an interesting line of attack. And the beauty of it is you don't have to argue about policy if you're arguing about whether there's a brainwashing operation, because the brainwashing operation you can simply point to it. It's like, well, here's another example. And it also creates a confirmation bias trap. Have you ever seen him do that before? It's classic Trump. When he nicknamed Hillary Clinton as Crooked Hillary, it was because he knew for sure that during the campaign there would be new things to come out, allegations that you would say to yourself, huh, that sounds like Hillary did something crooked. Oh, of course she's Crooked Hillary. Makes perfect sense. And then your brain stores all of her crooked deeds under his framing Crooked Hillary. So he's literally changing the real estate in your brain with these nicknames that make all the information seem like confirmation. But it could be confirmation bias, right?

So now when he calls it brainwashing, every time you see something that looks like it's in that domain you're going to say, instead of that's a lie, which you would have said otherwise, you can say, oh, that's what Trump's talking about. There's that brainwashing. So he's created another little rental property in your head and he calls it brainwashing. Now every time you see something that you would have interpreted as just a lie or just politics or something like that, you're going to say to yourself, hey, are they trying to brainwash me? Who are they trying to brainwash? So this is probably brilliant. Probably brilliant. The gaslighting thing never worked because everybody's gaslighting everybody and nobody knows what the word means exactly. But everybody knows what brainwashing means. Yeah, everybody knows what brainwash is. So that's the perfect Trump frame. A word we all know that's a confirmation trap for the future. He's so good at this.

I have a way to spot the brainwashed which annoys me because I think that I've used it myself. So I'm going to tell you how to spot brainwashed people. But you don't need to tell me, but Scott I feel like I've seen you do that. To which I say I have done that. Was I brainwashed? If you're not at least asking yourself that question, you're brainwashed. Let me say that as clearly as possible. If you're not continuously asking yourself is somebody brainwashing me right now, you know when you're looking at political stuff, you're being brainwashed. The only defense is if you're asking yourself every single time something happens, which I do. That doesn't, it's not a complete protection. You know, smart people, well-informed people could be brainwashed, but it's at least a little bit of something. It's not nothing. So I'm asking myself this about this.

But here's the tell. Saw this today on the X platform. A user named James English. So he was in a back and forth debate with some folks about what is true or not true about something Trump related. But he ends with this, responding to someone else not to me. He goes, no it means I follow facts, you follow beliefs. You should seek help. There it is. You should seek help. It truly is a sickness. Or maybe you are a child because only children follow beliefs. Adults follow facts. Now that's a brainwashed person, right?

So let me break it down. So here's somebody who believes that the person they're talking to is the only person in politics who doesn't think facts matter and that they're just operating on belief as just one person, and you know not just one, but and that that's the only problem here is that one of them doesn't believe in facts and they're following beliefs. Now that'