you could say I'm rational about everything but honestly I'm going to point out this one thing and I'm going to tell you as directly as I can I'm not going to be rational about this and here's why. If you could make that case you almost win the negotiation from that point on. You have to sell your own irrationality. That sounds backwards doesn't it? That if you're negotiating with somebody you have to convince them that you are irrational. Doesn't that sound crazy? Nope. It's what Trump does all the time.

Do you think that when Trump said I might nuke Moscow, do you think that sounded rational? Nope. It didn't sound rational. So Putin couldn't be sure that that was something he could negotiate because it wasn't based on something rational. Who the hell would nuke Moscow? It would literally be crazy. So how do you even deal with that? What do you do with that? Well the first thing you do is you say all right I can't deal with crazy so I'm going to have to work with whatever I can work with. But I know I can't change crazy. And then Trump won because you can't deal with crazy. You can't negotiate with an irrational component. Doesn't mean the person is irrational in general but there might be an irrational component.

Let me give you an example from my real life. When my syndication contract which was originally a 15-year deal expired, I thought to myself, hey I'm a free agent. I'll go negotiate a better deal than I ever had because I can negotiate with other syndication companies. The syndicator is who sells it to newspapers and you split the money. So I thought I would do that. But then my syndicate company reminded me, hey there was a clause in your original contract that says even at the end of it if you go work with somebody else we still get a portion of your money. And I said what? Yeah, after 15 years your new work we would still get paid for even if we have nothing to do with you if you've gone to another company. It says that right in your contract. And I said it couldn't possibly say that. There's no way I would have signed that contract. And they looked at the contract. It was there just like they said. And I don't know why. Did I forget it? Like I actually don't know why I didn't know it was there.

So here's what I could do. I could either take a big loss and go with the same company that I went with for 15 years, which had been a really good relationship, but I would leave a lot of money on the table if I couldn't go to the free market and negotiate my actual value. So you know how I negotiated out of that clause? Irrationally. Intentionally irrationally. I looked the head of the syndicate in the eyes over lunch and I said basically in these words, your contract is very clear. I will quit the business before I'll sign it. Now I was at the height of my powers and quitting at that point would have been absolutely stupid. And I looked them in the eyes and I said this is so fucked up that I'll quit the business before I will agree with this. Now if he believed I would not quit the business, which would have been the more rational thing to do obviously because all I had to do is sign up with them again and they would just start throwing money at me like they did before and everything would be fine. So the most rational thing to do was say, oh damn I made a mistake. I never should have signed it but I did. And my life would go on. I'd still make a lot of money. They'd be happy, etc. That would have been the rational thing to do. So to get out of that I went fully irrational and I had to sell that I would myself up and down backwards and forwards. I would kill my family. I would break a law but I wasn't going to sign that contract. In the end they were convinced that there was nothing they could do to get me to sign it and then I reached a very good deal and I ended up, I did sign with them but not until they gave me a much better situation. And in the end I ended up going to another syndicate from just a business combination that happened later.

Now let's go back to Biden. So you see that? You see the idea, right? And the irrational negotiating position is actually your strongest one so long as you seem to be rational in general. Putin seems to be rational in general. And then he gave you that long weird incoherent history lesson. What was the only thing he needed you to know? Do you remember the dates and the names and who? No. Nope. Does he need you to remember the history? No. Nope. Does he need you to think that the history is a valid reason for whatever he's doing? No. He doesn't need you. Does he need you to believe that the history is accurate? No. Nope. Doesn't need that. Does he need you to agree with him about the history? Nope. No. He only needs one thing and he got it. He only needed one thing to win the negotiations that are upcoming because he knows they're upcoming. And he got it. And the one thing he needed was for the West to believe that he would burn down Europe before he would give up on this. And he did. He sold it. He sold that. Now he didn't say it in those words but he sure sold it. He sold that the Russian heart is what has to be satisfied. We can't do that. We have no tools for that. We can't rebuild you a pipeline. Hey we'll put your pipeline back together. No that doesn't help my heart. Not even a little bit. Well we'll negotiate. You know you keep this we'll keep that. Doesn't help my heart. What are you going to do?

He may have successfully established that there's part of the negotiations that are off. They're just off the table by simply telling us we're not going to be rational about this in the way that you and I would think would be rational. But in fact he's hyper rational. It was kind of brilliant. The fact that he used, and I'm going to say used because you know Tucker was using Putin but Putin was using Tucker. As long as it's transparent I don't mind it a bit actually. You know that was transparent. It was right in front of us. Like the entire intention of it was to show you all of it. How could I be mad at that? Transparency is the best we can do folks. If you have full transparency you could wish it were better but it can't be better. That's just the best you could do. And that was full transparency.

Am I such an idiot that I think Putin told me the truth? No, no I don't think Putin told me the truth. Not even a little bit. Do I think that Tucker asked every hard question that he wanted to ask? No, no because he still had to survive. So my take on this is that Putin won the interaction in the sense that he established an irrational point of negotiation that will help him in the future. And at some point the West will back down because he sold it so well. The whole incoherent part, the whole fact that he made you listen to it first before he'd even ask that, the way he handled the whole thing is all supportive of the fact that he has an irrational connection to it. And that was the sale and we all bought it. Nicely done Putin. Nicely done.

Now it is possible he's just a crazy babbling old guy who talked about history. That's not impossible. But given that everything else he does seems to make sense it would be weird if this is the one thing that was completely accidental. So I do believe that his belief about history is probably real. I think he's motivated by it. But far more important than his motivation is that he sold the fact that he's not going to be dealing with that like rational things. Very well done negotiator.

Now let's talk about the opposite. So one of the things that came out of that interview with Tucker and Putin was the claim that there was some movement toward negotiated peace that Boris Johnson killed and talked Zelenskyy out of it. Boris Johnson is very angry at that interview. And among the things he says are that Tucker was a quote foreign-going and had a slack-jawed happiness at having a scoop. And Johnson says that Tucker betrayed his viewers around the world. He said he didn't ask tough questions, didn't ask Putin why even now he is using the most brutal means of modern warfare to murder innocent Ukrainian civilians. And then he said Carlson acted like a fan of Putin and quote boneheadedly accepted Putin's mixture of semi-masticated Wikipedia and outright falsehoods. Johnson said. And he went on. He said not since George Galloway, I have no idea who that is, but not since George Galloway went to Baghdad and hailed the indefatigability of Saddam Hussein have we seen such a display of bum-sucking servility to a tyrant. And said Carl was just the medium, the sewer, the hose for Putin to spread his message to America.

So is that good persuasion? How did Boris Johnson do defending himself against the accusations? Did you hear the part where he said the accusations are not true? He left that part out. He left out the part about the accusations are not true. Shouldn't that be first? Here's what I would consider a good response. Well you know Putin's a liar and the thing he said happened literally didn't even happen. That never even happened. And Tucker should have been more critical about that because he's you know just fake news. But instead he decided to destroy Tucker's personal credibility. Who does that if they can just go after the fact? Nobody does an ad hominem first if they can just say the thing didn't happen. Now if you say the thing didn't happen and then you go on and insult the person then you're just Trump, right? But when Trump insults people it's usually over a thing like a policy, a thing, right? It's not just a whole bunch of insults and he looked a little unhinged. And I think if you do a full-on personal attack and you don't do more of a just a matter of fact denial of the facts behind it you can't really fail harder than that. To me it looked like another Putin victory over the West.

My current thinking is that everything the West did in Ukraine was wrong and that you know I'm not going to support Putin but I can just talk about my own side. Everything my side did looks wrong from the 2014 coup to today. It all looks wrong to me. So I don't have to say Putin's good or Putin's right or anything like that. But when Johnson says that what Tucker should have talked about is how there's maiming and murdering of Ukrainians by Russia. Really? I mean that's so transparently just trying to change the topic that it's like almost like a confirmation of the accusation that he denied a chance to have peace. I don't know if it's true but the way he's reacting to it is as if it's true.

All right. So apparently the House Judiciary Committee is going after this district attorney Fani Willis who's after Trump as you know. So it's not a coincidence that they would go after her because she's after Trump. But what are they trying to get? They're trying to figure out if she used federal funds illegally for her boyfriend or whatever. Now I would like to suggest the following strategy. Does it seem to you that a lot of these Soros-backed prosecutors and DAs, does it look like they're all corrupt? That they're all using public money for their boyfriends or something? So would it make sense for the Republicans to, since they have that big legal fund that Stephen Miller's doing, wouldn't it make sense to simply investigate every one of the Soros DAs, to target them for lawfare and just take them out with lawfare? Because you could actually take down the whole Soros network by targeting them one after another and just really go hard at them.

Now keep in mind under a situation of normal politics I would never suggest this. I don't think you should be going looking for crimes. That's the worst freaking thing you could do in America. But the Soros prosecutors I consider an invasion. To me that's an unfriendly force operating domestically. It's almost like domestic terrorism. So under the sense that it's not almost, it is domestic terrorism. It is. They're operating as domestic terrorists because they're hunting Republicans and I'm literally afraid of being locked up for not doing anything illegal. So that's exactly terrorism. Making people afraid to do legal things in their world because they think this horrible person will put them in jail. So this is, I would put a billion dollars behind this if I had a billion dollars to fund an absolute investigation of every Soros-funded candidate. And anybody who takes money from a Soros entity should know that their underwear is going to be turned upside down and that the Republicans will target them only because of the Soros connection, not because they're Democrats. If this were happening just because they're Democrats, absolutely no. Absolutely no. I do not approve of just looking for crimes because somebody's a Democrat. No, no, no, no, no. Don't do that. But because they're Soros-funded and they seem to be fitting a pattern of domestic terrorism in the sense of misusing the legal system, I think that they are completely legitimate targets for lawfare. Completely legitimate. And I wouldn't use lawfare in any other situation unless it was something that looks like literally terrorism or an attack on our nation. So yeah, lawfare it up.

Kamala Harris was talking to some folks, some class of future leaders, and she said this and it is so brilliant it will probably be quoted much like the Martin Luther King you know I had a dream. Possibly like Abe Lincoln, four score and 20 years ago. Maybe like Kennedy, ask not what your country can do for you. But somewhere in that category is this. The brilliance of this inaugural class and its leaders is the ability to see what can be unburdened by what has been and then to make it real. I don't know. Has anybody ever said that before? Yes. It's the only thing she says every time she goes anywhere. Because if you haven't heard it before it sounds kind of awesome. If you've heard it over and over again it gets less awesome every time you hear it.

So I would like to suggest that the funniest th