eir own economic interest. If you said oh we're going to go protect this country on the other side of the world that doesn't have a direct impact on us even if we meant it it's not terribly persuasive. But if you say we're not going to give up a trillion dollars in mining operations which are critical to our most important industries like AI and self-driving cars and robots, we're not going to give that up. So if you move your armies in we have to stop you. And you wouldn't even have to put it in writing because Putin would know that these are critical mineral rights. They're not these are not ordinary things. It's not mining for fun. It's critical. Survival depends on it. We need to nail down some sources that we can mine preferably in other countries anyway.

Elon Musk was saying this about Zelensky. He says as distasteful as it is Zelensky should be offered some kind of amnesty in a neutral country in exchange for a peaceful transition back to democracy in Ukraine. Now how many years have I been talking about dictator retirement island? We always have the same problem that if there's a dictator we want to depose there's not really any path for the dictator. They kind of have to fight to the death including killing all of their own country people by sending them against your machine guns. So I don't think there's a practical way to solve this but if we had just one good island and we said here's the deal if you decide to retire to this island we'll give you an American passport and you can live there. You'll have a mansion. You can keep the billion dollars you stole. You can live in luxury and we'll guarantee then nobody comes over and tries to kill you from anything you did before. You'll just live with your neighbors who are also retired dictators. Be kind of cool. It's not my best idea but I agree with Musk there needs to be some way that the alleged dictator can make a clean escape in a way that would just be good for them because we don't need to punish them so much as we just need them gone sometimes.

All right here's my idea for what to do to negotiate who owns what land on the eastern part of what used to be Ukraine but now seems to be totally occupied by Russia, just the eastern part. I saw a map of where Russian was the main language. I didn't realize that something like, is it over half of Ukraine, Russian is the dominant language and people might even call themselves Russian. Not all of them but a lot of them would call themselves Russians even though they're technically Ukrainians. And so I thought well if let's say you did a vote and you said all right all these little regions that are disputed that Russia controls right now, Russia would you agree to do a vote? Well nobody's going to trust the vote. We would just assume that would be rigged so you can't really have a vote. But could you do a survey? I'm guessing that most of the people over there still have cell phones right? Could you do a scientific enough, and I would get at least three separate pollsters to do it and then compare them so that they would do their work blind then the three would compare to see if there's any major differences in what they got. And they would just call people they say all right if do you want to be owned by Russia or owned by Ukraine and then you just figure out what they want.

Now what if Ukraine said we don't agree with that then you have to wonder what is their motivation. If what the people who live there want isn't the main thing then what are you? Are you a dictatorship? Shouldn't the people who live there be the primary ones who decide? Now we also have the problem that some of that area is depopulated so I don't even know what's left so you might not even be able to get any kind of representative sample because it might be just people who haven't died yet you know old people and children and stuff. So maybe impossible but I would at least look at the idea of polling them and you'd have to have at least three polls o