once you leave the FDA, you can go work for Pfizer and they'll pay you a million dollars a year, whatever it is. But if you continue working for the government, we will also give you a million dollars a year. We'll match it. But you'll be on our side. So you'll do extra work and you'll go extra deep, and you work with the FDA. You won't be on the FDA, but let's say you work with them or for them or something.

Now, that's the bad idea because it's anti-DOGE. It's spending more money, not less. But I just wonder, is there any systemic way to fix that? Because you'd have to outbid the pharma. Now, the gross way to do it is just say you can't go get those jobs. I just don't love that. I don't love the lack of freedom that that implies. So maybe somebody have a good idea.

Let's talk about Ukraine. So Trump has suggested yesterday that he's willing to revive economic relations with Russia. And then Putin has offered, hey, why don't you work with us, America? Why don't you work with us to do a joint partnership to exploit rare earth minerals in the Donbass region? What? Did you see that coming? And then Putin also offers — and I'm going to talk about this in terms of persuasion, not in terms of economics — then Putin also said that Russia is ready to supply the US with 2 million tons of aluminum, which will help stabilize prices. And apparently we're the biggest importer of aluminum, so it actually would drive down some of our costs if we work with Russia on that.

And so here's the thing. Let me say up front that if you believe that I trust Putin and that he just wants to make money and stop all the fighting, I don't. It would be foolish to say that he has no ulterior motives or anything else. But think how historic this is, that Trump and Putin have changed the frame. They've changed the frame from how to kill each other to how to make money for both of us.

Now, maybe this won't come to anything. Maybe there will be no joint partnerships. Maybe it's a bad idea. Maybe trusting Russia is just always a bad idea. And you know, even if it looks good on paper, maybe it just never works. I'm open to all those arguments. So I don't know that we should do it. But the fact that — I've said this before — I generally think that Trump is the best public persuader we've ever seen, just ever. But Putin's in the same weight class. I don't think he's quite Trump-like, but he understands the whole persuasion thing.

And so what Putin's doing is he's reframing Russia as a potential economic partner, which is following the lead of Trump. Trump is the — again, Trump's the better persuader — but Putin can take punch for punch. He knows persuasion. And this is brilliant. It's brilliant. I hate to say it. And again, I'm not suggesting that we get into partnership economically with Russia. I'm not against it and I'm not for it. I would have to know a lot more before I had an opinion. But from a persuasion perspective, Putin's really nailing it. He's nailing it, because he knows that Trump needs economic wins, and he could offer him some easy economic wins. So that's really good negotiating.

So again, don't take this as me loving Putin, and I don't want him to be my girlfriend, and I don't trust Russia, you know, without a lot of guarantees. But you have to appreciate that the way Putin is handling this is kind of impressive, just from a persuasion perspective. You can call it evil persuasion if you like. I won't argue. But it's very effective at changing the frame to how do we make money. I just love that. I just love that. We'll see where it goes.

All right. Again, another story that would have been the biggest story except that there were so many stories. All right. Apparently James Comer told Breitbart tha