following them.

So my point is if you name your Pentagon the Department of War, the odds of having a war go way up. Now that's a hypnotist lesson right there. If you said it's the department of making peace with everybody, people would just sort of think that's what they do. And then they would organize all their thinking and their budget and their activities around making peace with people. If you call it the department of war, people will operationalize around that word. The word doesn't just change how cool it sounds or change how you feel about it patriotically. It might do that too, but it's going to change how people act. And if you want more of a thing, put it in the title. Let me say that again. If you want more of a thing, whatever the thing is, put it in the name of the department that's in charge and you're going to get more of that. So putting war in the name will buy you more war. I mean it's not guaranteed but statistically speaking you're going to manage toward that thing that is the word in your head. That's just how brains work. They work toward words.

As you know the Trump administration has taken a 10% investment because they put money into it ownership stake in Intel. And when asked about that Trump says he would take on stakes in other businesses. I want to try to get as much as I can. He said, "Now, if you don't like fascism, where the government and the big businesses were sort of in bed together, then you probably don't like the government owning a private company, even though it's just 10%. But they're not going to be able to control it with a 10% equity." However, we should look at some examples where government has done this before. If you're old enough, you remember that General Motors, the government invested $50 billion in General Motors and got a 61% equity stake when the company was restructuring and going bankrupt in 2009. But eventually the Treasury sold its shares and incurred a loss of about $10 billion. So the investment in General Motors didn't work out. But there was also an investment in Chrysler in which the government put in $12.5 billion, took an 8% equity stake and then sold it later with a loss of approximately $1.3 billion. So that's two examples where the US revived a company and took a loss in doing it.

However, if those companies are paying taxes and the people who work there are getting a salary and also paying taxes, it could be that the US government still made money because the US would get the higher tax benefits if the economy still has these big companies in it. Then there was AIG, big insurance group. They were having problems some years ago and the government took an 80% equity in it and eventually they profited $23 billion when they sold their stake. Let's see where so what are we at? So they're up $23 billion but they lost one on Chrysler and 10 on General Motors. All right. So if you look at the average so far they would be up and then there were banks and financial institutions in which TARP funds were used to prop up some of the big banks and the government I guess received equity in return for that and there was a net profit. So by the way, this is from Grok. So if Grok is hallucinating, don't blame me. Except blame me for using Grok, I guess. So it looks like in some cases the government just gets in, stays there for several years, and then they sell out and get out of it, and they could make a lot of money. If you look at all the deals collectively, they were solidly positive, although a few of them were negative, but overall they were positive. So I'm in favor of Trump strategically helping some big industries when there's a chance we can get our money back, either directly or indirectly. So I'm in favor of it.

Well, MSNBC had George Conway on who's sort of only got one thing he ever says. And you wouldn't believe this, but he compared what Trump is doing cleaning up Washington DC to 1933 Nazi Germany. It's all George Conway can do is find ways to compare Trump to Nazis. So he is an analogy thinker. An analogy thinker is someone who is just reminded of something else. It's not thinking. Hey, I'm reminded of a thing. It doesn't mean it predicts. It means you're bad at thinking. Analogy thinkers, by the way, are an example of large language models or how we're not really thinking species. We just feel like we are because the words fit together. You know, the words, "Oh, this reminds me of Nazi Germany," the words fit together. And once it becomes the thing that the people say the most, then everybody believes it's true and they'll say it even more. So there's a lot of that going on.

There's a senior Chinese trade negotiator who's coming to Washington to talk to us about our trade deals. According to Reuters, I don't think that necessarily means that we're close to a deal with China. It just means we're serious about talking to him, I guess.

Here's a story that there must be more to the story than we know because it doesn't make sense on the surface. Trump has apparently approved up to 600,000 Chinese college students in America. Now, you might say to yourself, "Whoa, you mean he's not going to stop Chinese students? I thought he was going to stop them." No, it's not that. Oh, you mean he's going to let it just go to the same level it was at before? No. No. This is way bigger than the level it has ever been. At the moment, there are 270,000 Chinese students in US universities. He would allow that to go up to 600,000, more than double. 600,000 Chinese students who by their own law would have to report whatever they know to the Chinese government.

Now, the first thing I would ask is, does that apply to every major? Because if that applies to the STEM stuff, you know, the high-tech stuff, I'm a little bit worried. If we don't care how many Chinese students take psychology courses or anthropology and we just say, I don't care, as many as you want. We'll teach you all the anthropology you want because that's not going to hurt us. That would be different. But I haven't seen anything that would suggest that it would be limited to certain colleges or certain majors. So if it's not, why is he doing that? Because it would seem like the opposite of America first. It seems like it would be good for the Chinese students and less good for us perhaps at least in terms of risk.

But the counterargument which is not being made entirely but you can imagine it that we get a lot of, well not we, the universities would get a lot of revenue from those 600,000 students and would be worth over $14 billion so US would bring in another $14 billion and so this would be again Trump monetizing a problem, which the more you see it, the more impressive it is that every time he's got some big hard to handle problem, he just monetizes it and that it doesn't bother you so much. So I like the fact that the Chinese students would be paying so much because they're not going to get aid or anything like that that they would be essentially funding US colleges to which I say, could you really get the funding of the US colleges without really much risk to the country of having all the people from your adversary country in your colleges? I don't know because the thing I don't know is do we end up better off if there are 600,000 Chinese students who have a positive experience in the United States and learn to speak perfect English and learn our system of government and get to compare it to what they had back there. I feel like the more people we educate, again with the exception of maybe some of the high like the more people we educate from any other country the more likely they're going to be a little bit on our side you know not completely but it seems like it would move them in our direction.

And then I guess Secretary Howard Lutnick said that if we don't have that many Chinese students that the bottom 15% of universities would go out of business. To which I say, shouldn't they? But shouldn't the bottom 15% go out of business? In every other industry, doesn't the bottom 15% always go out of business? Is there any industry that has lots of participants in which the bottom 15% don't predictably go out of business? Why would universities be the ones that we have to protect with what potentially could be some security risk? I don't know. But probably the bigger reason is that Trump's trying to get a trade deal and it could be that there's some conversations behind the scenes. It could be that we're going to get something and maybe we'll never know. We could be getting something in return and it might be big. So it's hard to judge this one because I believe that Trump wouldn't do it unless he knows there's something we're getting that's much bigger than the risk of this. And maybe he can't say it directly because we're still in sensitive conversations with China. And maybe we can't say it because we just don't want to say it out loud. Because if the answer is, yeah, this is how we propagandize them to make them more pro-American, that might be the reason, in which if I heard that argument, I'd probably say, I don't know if smart people think that's true. I don't really have a counterargument to that, but I don't think we could say that out loud. There might be some versions of that we could, but anyway, we'll probably never know.

The president of South Korea was visiting, seemed very friendly with Trump. They got along great. And he said, this is what the president of South Korea said sitting next to Trump, "I would like to mention that the only remaining divided nation in the world is the Korean Peninsula." Is that true? The only remaining divided nation. Well, maybe Putin would have a different opinion about Russia. And anyway, but then he goes on, he said, "And I would like to ask for your role in establishing peace." He's talking to Trump, your role in establishing peace on the Korean Peninsula. So I look forward to your meeting with Chairman Kim Jong-un and construction of a Trump Tower in North Korea and playing golf at that place. I believe he will be waiting for you.

Now, of course, there's no plans for a Trump Tower in North Korea, but I do like the fact that the South Korean president has studied our situation well enough to know where all the buttons are and he knows that if he compliments Trump for his peacemaking skills that that will be good. So he does. He knows that if he speaks visually, so you're imagining Trump Tower or you're imagining playing golf, that's really good technique. It's Trumpian technique. If he's talking about the future benefits as opposed to the past negative stuff, that's very Trump. And then the confidence that he's putting in Trump that he alone could make something good happen on the Korean peninsula. And then he also mentions he'd like to play golf. He hit every note. So I'm going to put up the warning flag for you right now. The South Korean president and I understand the South Korean presidents don't last very long. Don't a lot of them end up getting deposed and in trouble and whatever. But this guy he is signaling that he has the entire range of persuasion skills because this was quite capable. That statement is so cleverly and professionally crafted by somebody who really understands persuasion that keep an eye on that guy. He might be, I'm very early, you know, because I don't know anything about this South Korean president, but just based on this one paragraph, it is so smartly persuasion perfect, very rare, you don't see stuff like this, that I'm going to predict he might be the most consequential South Korean president that we'll know in our lifetime at least. So keep an eye on him. He might be a rising international leader, star kind of a guy. I've got a good feeling about him.

All right, ladies and gentlemen, that's all I got for you today. I might have missed a few stories. It's a busy day, but I'm going to see if I can go private and talk to my beloved subscribers. I just saw a funny meme go by. My beloved subscribers and Locals and the rest of you, thanks for joining. I hope you'll be back tomorrow for more fun. All right, let's see if I can go private in 30 seconds.