r. The hardest thing about being a professional writer when you write dialogue, and I remind you that I write dialogue for characters every single day for 35 years, there is a skill involved in writing dialogue. The main part of the skill is avoiding looking like it's scripted dialogue. Did you all know that? The main thing that you want to avoid to be a good writer, you know someone that people will pay attention to, is your writing has to just be clearly unscripted. You know something that a real person would say. If you listen to the tape as I did and you're a professional writer you will see right away it's scripted. So it doesn't mean it's not true. That's a whole different conversation. It could be that the principals wanted to get it on tape so that it would be believed or something in future days. It might have been a protection thing. Maybe they were protecting their own lives by having a tape that would be embarrassing to JFK or to LBJ. So I do think everything about it was real except that it was in my opinion very obviously scripted. So as a professional writer that was professionally scripted. Do you want to know what the tell is? The tell is how perfect it was and how often they put the person's name in the middle of a sentence so you'd know who was talking. That was a little over the top. So it'd go like hello Saul I hope you're having a good day. Well thank you for that input Saul it's good that we have these. I'm making that up but you can see how stilted it is. Here's what real people talk like. Oh man I got this thing. What? Yeah I got a thing. And then the other one talks over him then he asks a question and then you circle it back and you apologize for saying it wrong and you correct your words. That's what real conversation looks like. This was not that. It was pretty far from natural conversation. Now I'd like a second opinion and remember I'm not doubting the veracity of the underlying claim. I wouldn't know one way or the other. I'm just saying it's scripted. Might be true but it would be scripted. If there are other professional writers who write dialogue specifically I'd love to get an opinion on that.

SpaceX is going to launch two unmanned lunar missions so that I guess there are two rovers and those rovers will be going around on the moon not Mars on the moon. So Elon Musk is launching two probes into my moon. Ouch. So that's fun. I really like having a rover on the moon. I'm pretty much rover fascinated. I'll watch whatever that rover does and takes pictures of.

The December inflation was 2.9. They expected it to be 2.9. So the good news is it's not going up quickly but of course the baseline of our costs are all basically unaffordable. So yeah unless it goes down it's not helping at all. Just staying where you expected it used to be good news. Not anymore.

While Trump has announced the formation of what he calls the external Revenue Service. So instead of collecting money for the government from internal citizens he's going to find ways to charge other companies or countries for stuff. So it would include any money collected from tariffs which you might say that comes from American companies that's the opposite of external. You would be right. But if it's part of the negotiations where we're going to use tariffs as a weapon, using tariffs as a weapon is going to be a whole lot more convincing if we've got an entire department who's dedicated to using that weapon and collecting the money from it.

So here's what I think is coming. It has not been in any way explicitly announced but let me tell you what's inevitably coming. We're going to have such a budget problem that Trump being Trump is going to do the smart thing that nobody's done before and it's basically a mafia play. Because we've got the biggest military and you say to the small countries that have had a free ride because your military protects them basically it'd be a shame if something happened to your little country. Well nothing's going to happen to us. We're part of NATO and you know nobody would attack this hemisphere and you know you don't have to worry. Well that's only because we're protecting you right? Right right. What if we stopped? What if we stopped protecting you? Why would you do that? It's expensive. But you're not actually sending any military here. You're just saying that if something happened you would send military here so other countries will stay away from let's say South America. And then Trump says right yeah that's the way it's been. It's not the way it's going to be. Because if you want a little military protection in advance before you need it why would that be free? When you pay for insurance you pay for it before the disaster. You don't pay for it after the war starts. That's not when we're going to start billing you. You pay now because you're buying an insurance plan.

So Trump appears to be setting the stage for the US military to be everybody's insurance plan which means that you would literally pay for it maybe even based on your population or something just like insurance. Now is that unethical or is it just a smarter way to organize a military? Well if you're another country let's say you're Costa Rica. Costa Rica has no military unless they formed one recently. I don't think so. No military. How hard would it be for a foreign power to take over a country with no military? Easy. Why is it they don't try? Because of the US military. Yeah. Do you think Costa Rica is paying us an annual payment for all that protection literally protecting the whole country? No. Now I think is that fair? No. Now you could argue that we're protecting them for our own benefit and that would be a good argument. It's like oh it's bad for America if Costa Rica falls to an adversary. But it's also true we're protecting them and they're paying nothing or not enough. So I think this might have more legs than you think. And once again Trump is doing that thing that he did with Greenland. Until he creates this department the external Revenue Service you don't really think it's a thing that they would charge other companies or other countries for protection. But now you think it's a thing don't you? You might hate it. You might love it. But guess what it's a thing. It's a thing. Trump does this maybe better than anybody's ever done it which is making the thing that's not a thing a thing. And then if the cost benefit in a purely objective sense makes sense then the thing can go on on its own and become a real thing. But first you have to change the entire national consciousness from that's not a thing to oh that's a thing. Now we can talk about it. It's brilliant. I hate to keep saying things like this because they sound so hyperbolic, so kissing his ass, so hero worshipping. I get how it sounds. But I think history is going to back me on the following statement. We've never seen anything like this. This is a level of understanding of how persuasion and people think that is so unprecedented that there's nobody even close. I know you want to say oh Reagan was the great communicator. Yes very very good. Very A+. Reagan this is a whole different level. So Reagan was A+ in junior college. You know Trump's A+ at the Indian Institute of Technology which is way more than you think it is.

All right. Special counsel Jack Smith's report is indicating that Trump would have been convicted if not elected. That's what everybody's saying. Is that news? I think everybody knew