I did get an A on that test. I did. Thanks for noticing.”

So I don’t know if I was mentally deficient or just some kind of weird narcissist, but I recall that I was teased, but I don’t recall any damage whatsoever, like ever. It just felt like I was winning the whole time. And that’s how I played it. Anyway, I don’t know if that advice will help your low-income kid survive the brutal situation, but it’s also true that the town I grew up in was a little closer to Good Will Hunting than it was to like an inner city. The citizens of my town were rooting for me from the time I was very young and it was obvious they were rooting for me and helped me escape just like Good Will Hunting. So I don’t know if having a complete immunity to humiliation would help anybody else, but it helped me.

Here’s a story that I don’t know if this is true. This is a story about the agreement that Trump and Putin are going to meet in Alaska and talk about maybe ending the war in Ukraine. And you’re probably telling yourself that they wouldn’t have the meeting unless they thought there was a pretty good chance of something positive coming out of it. And then what we hear somewhat surprisingly is that Putin would be willing to simply take some of the but not all of the territory that he’s conquered and just say all right I’ll keep this and we’ll just part company.

Now, you probably said to yourself, “Really? Really?” Because it didn’t seem like Putin had ever offered that before, and it didn’t seem like he was losing so badly that he’d have to change what his position is. So why would Putin suddenly go from, “Nope, there’s no real reason to talk,” to “Oh yeah, let’s talk next week.” Now you may say, well, it’s because Trump threatened those sanctions on the Indians buying Russian oil or something else.

There is a report in a German publication, Bild. Now, I don’t know if it’s true, but this is their version of what’s going on: that Steve Witkoff misunderstood Putin and where Putin said something about those occupied territories, the ones that Putin’s already conquered, that Steve Witkoff misunderstood Putin’s willingness to negotiate a deal. And so that what you’re seeing is a whole bunch of people operating under a misunderstanding of how close they are to an agreement. Now, I’m not going to say that’s true because it’s just some German publication, you know, it’s not being widely reported that way in our press, so probably not true. But it does explain everything and it would be a Dilbert world kind of thing where they just heard each other wrong.

But you know what’s even funnier? What if the reason they’re having the meeting is because that Witkoff, there was a translation problem and that he literally misunderstood Putin. What if that’s the only reason they have the meeting? And then what if having the meeting leads to them actually ending the war? There’s a nonzero possibility that the meeting was a complete mistake. But once you get there, you know, they know the war can’t last forever. So maybe Putin will say, “Well, as long as I’m here, you know, it’d be too stupid to come here and then just walk home.” Not walk home, but you know, so there’s a nonzero possibility that the most Dilberty thing in the world happened, which is they accidentally scheduled a meeting that they should not have and that once they’re there, they’re like, “Wow, I might as well end this war.” Maybe it’s possible. That’s the most optimistic thing I could say because I do not see any way that under normal circumstances this will lead to any kind of an end to the war. Unless there’s something we don’t know about. Maybe Russia has a bigger problem in some domain than we’re aware. Maybe, but we haven’t heard about it.

And then of course Zelensky is trying to be the turd in the punch bowl and he’s saying that he’s ruling out any kind of deal that the US and Russia make for Ukrainian land. He’s ruling it out. Okay. But apparently there’s also some Ukrainian legal problem that would make it impossible for Zelensky to agree to give away Ukrainian land. He wouldn’t have the power to do it. There’d have to be some kind of national referendum or something, but it’s doable. He just have to do it and it wouldn’t be instant.

Anyway, according to Breitbart News, Oliver Lane is writing that there was a poll, I guess it was a Gallup poll of Ukrainians and how many of them want to keep fighting and how many of them don’t. It turns out that, well, maybe you could tell me what percentage of Ukrainians want to fight to quote the bitter end. What percentage want to fight until they’re all dead? Let’s see if you can guess the percentage. 25 says Texas Hogammer. 25. 25. Excellent guesses. The answer is 24, but I will accept 25. Oh, we got a 24. Iro, good for you. All right. So have I demonstrated once again that I have the smartest podcast audience? They knew the answer to the question just intuitively, 24 percent.

According to Radio Liberty, Ukraine is expected to make 4 million drones this year, almost all of them will be the low-end inexpensive drones. Russia is also expected to make millions of similarly low-end drones this year. So between Ukraine and Russia, maybe I don’t know 7 to 10 million drones will be created just by their own countries. That doesn’t even count the number that they’ll buy. So the United States of course being the powerful superpower that it is, if those countries can make millions of drones, how many do you think the US can make? Because we now have an estimate of that from the New York Times. Well, the answer is maybe 100,000 units. Yeah. So while the war-torn, poverty-stricken country of Ukraine is making 4 million per year of drones, we might be able to make 100,000. We’ve got a problem because whoever makes the best and most drones gets to run the world. And apparently that’s not us. That’s not us. So we better get going on that, President Trump.

Israel is planning to, as you know, take full control of Gaza, and they’re going to start by taking full control of Gaza City. But at the same time, the US and Qatar are talking about some kind of grand proposal that they’ll have in two weeks. The grand proposal for, I assume, the grand bargain is what makes it more than just Gaza. So maybe the grand part is the Abraham Accords get expanded, but in return there’s a lot of support for the Palestinian people who got relocated, etc. So I don’t know what that’ll be, but I would like to offer a reframe for Hamas and all the children who were victims of the war. It seems to me that the right way to frame Hamas is that they’re involved in child sacrifice and it’s their own children. So they are literally sacrificing th