retary, Trump's thinking about making everybody who earns under $150,000 a year pay no federal income tax. Now that's a stretch goal. I don't think that one's going to happen right away. But it would include, I guess it assumes that we'd be making more money from other countries as in tariffs etc. And here's the idea of forcing countries to pay a membership fee to sell in America. Now I don't think that that's going to happen but the fact that Trump would say you have to have a membership fee to even sell stuff in America, that's kind of awesome. It seems like such a big idea that my first impression is oh you're never going to get away with that. Then my second impression is but why not? If America is the best economy to sell into, you know we've got the biggest consumer base so people actually spend money, then maybe there should be a cover charge. I think you should have a two drink minimum and a cover charge for getting into the American markets. Two drink minimum. Yep. So we'll see if he can get away with that. I don't even know if he's getting away with no tax on tips but this would be a pretty big deal.

Let's talk about Russia and Ukraine. So as you know Ukraine agreed to a ceasefire and Russia said that's crazy talk because the ceasefire just allows Ukraine to regroup. And since Russia thinks it's winning, they just recaptured a town in Kursk so they think that they're winning. They say no we'll talk about a big peace deal you know where everything is included but no ceasefire.

Now if you remember my prediction it was that he's going to have to agree to the ceasefire even though he doesn't want to, to keep his relationship with Trump productive. Because if Trump puts his reputation on the ceasefire, which he's doing, and then Putin is the reason it doesn't happen, Trump's not going to be happy. And when Trump's not happy you know it's not going to be a silent, well in my head I'm unhappy. No. Trump's already talking about massive sanctions on Russia. I don't know what's left to sanction but seems like they would have sanctioned everything sanctionable by now. But Trump is already talking about essentially putting the screws on Russia.

So I'm going to double down on my non-standard prediction. If I were making a standard prediction I would say huh this ceasefire looks like a bad idea for Putin. Putin's very smart. He knows it's a bad idea because Ukraine will just put together their forces and come at him harder. And so logic says that Putin would reject this, which he has. But I'm going to go with my feeling that the only chance Putin has of getting a good outcome is to work productively with Trump. And Trump's making a very small ask. It's a very small ask to take a month off of fighting. I think Putin might cave and I think he has to do it to maintain the relationship. And that's something that Trump brings to the table. He makes sure that you don't get anything until you're dealing with him respectfully and seriously. That's really powerful.

So if you had to bet on it you should bet against me because like I said it's a bad deal for Russia. Russia knows it. Putin's no idiot. But I think the keeping the relationship with Trump productive, I think that has a greater value than even whatever advantages Ukraine got by the ceasefire.

Now speaking of Ukraine, apparently their drone warfare is really making a difference. So something like 60 percent of all the destruction that Ukraine is doing on the military of Russia is with drones. And I guess they're using a lot of AI drones that are way better. So even when they get jammed they can just sort of look at the ground and say well I'm jammed but I know where I'm going because I'm just looking at the ground and I've got these landmarks and I know what to attack.

But what's not working apparently is swarms. You know how all of us non-experts said oh it's going to be swarms. Yeah there's going to be these giant swarms of drones. Turns out that these swarms don't work too well with current technology because the signals interfere. So there's just too many signals in too small a place. So weirdly swarms haven't worked yet. One assumes they'll figure that out eventually. But it's more like individual drones with AI and they're tough to stop.

All right. So let's talk about science journals. Here's something I didn't know. So you probably know I've talked about a bunch of times how science has a reproducibility problem where if somebody gets a peer-reviewed study into a science publication, later if somebody says let's see if we can reproduce these results, and usually they can't or at least half the time they can't. So that suggests that a lot of what we think is science is literally just probably half of it. Some would say more. But I didn't realize that there's a structural reason for it. And the structural reason, and I was just learning this today, did you know that it used to be that the scientific journals were basically a bunch of well-meaning scientists who would say well if you couldn't come to the conference here's a little newsletter basically that says what got presented at the conference.

Now that was probably a mostly honest system where people were doing honest science. Not right every time but at least they were honestly doing science. And