ntleman who's trying to live forever figuring out how to maximize human life, but he mentions in a post today that alcohol is the highest margin product that restaurants sell. According to his numbers, he said food has a 28 to 35% margin, beer 75 to 80, wine 65 to 75, and cocktails and spirits have an 80 to 90% margin. So that would mean that supply and demand doesn't work, right?

All right. I used to own a couple of restaurants and it was a competitive restaurant environment, meaning that if you wanted something like California cuisine and you wanted to sit where there was table service, there were quite a few choices in a 5 mile radius. You had all kinds of choices. Do you think that the people who went to my bar were unaware of what our prices were compared to the alternatives? The answer is people who go to bars and sit at a bar if they're doing it more than once, they absolutely know the cost of drinks at different bars. How do I know? Because they talked about it continuously. They would talk about it all the time. Well, Scott, it seems that your drink is $8, but if I go across the street, it's $7.55, and I don't know why I'd pay $8 for a drink I could get across the street for $7.55. I'm just making that up. But yeah, they were hyper aware of the cost of drinks and beer and wine and stuff.

So what do you think in that competitive environment? What do you think was the margin differences between food and alcohol? No real difference. The margin for food, the margin for alcohol in my restaurants were about the same because do you know why? Supply and demand is real. Supply and demand. The only way you could charge like a 90% markup on well drinks like cocktails and spirits is if the people had no idea what your competition was charging for the same thing because somebody would lower the price. You have all that room to lower your price. Somebody would have done it for competitive reasons.

So one of the most basic things you've believed all your life is that you could charge a big margin on alcohol and that's how you make the real money in a restaurant. The only way that could work is if supply and demand doesn't work in this one place, but only this one place in all the world. In all the world, it's the only place that supply and demand doesn't work. I don't know. I'm not sure what's going on, but I do not believe the supply and demand stopped working in one place. And it didn't look like it to me.

All right. There's new news on Ukraine. So Trump says the Russian economy is in big trouble. He said a lot about Ukraine yesterday. He thinks the Russian economy is in big trouble and that there are gas lines. We don't know how big the gas lines are. And he says the Ukraine with our help is in a position to win the war outright. So suddenly the tone from Trump has changed from, you know, we're going to hang in there as long as possible and try to make a peace deal. Apparently that just makes you look weak and makes Putin say, "Oh well, if the only thing you can do is hang in there and we can chew away at you, we'll just keep chewing away because it doesn't look like you have any offense."

Well, Trump is now saying that Ukraine is nearing a position, now remember this is Trump hyperbole, so you have to put it in context, nearing a point where they could take back the territory that Russia has already gained. Nobody says that's possible. Trump says it now. What does Trump know that you and I don't know where he would change from the most reasonable position, which is well, you know, the front line isn't really going to move. He's gone all the way to it looks like they might be able to take back all that territory. But wait, because he's Trump, he went further than that and maybe take some of Russia's land. He went all the way to yeah, they might get a little extra. They might take more than they lost while they're at it. I mean, so of course that's the most provocative thing he could say, but he said, and then he said Russia's fighting three and a half years in a war that would have taken a quote real military power less than a week to win. Ouch. Is that helping? Does it help to mock Russia's military prowess? I don't know if that helps. It might. I mean, Trump has good instincts, so maybe it is the right play. I don't know how, but maybe it is.

Zelensky is saying something positive. He said that Trump possesses very important information regarding the situation at the front. Trump possesses it. What does Trump possess that the rest of us don't possess? What does he know about the front? Because the way he's talking suggests that Ukraine has some kind of military advantage we're not aware of.

Do you remember what I've been telling you? That this will very rapidly turn into an all robot war. If you ask me what could possibly be what Trump is referring to, it could be that some massively well-capable set of robots and drones is heading toward the front line and some of it's already arrived. So it could be that you're going to see a robot drone war really fast and it's going to be massive and it's going to be in the front lines. So that's what I was expecting. I didn't know when, but I can't imagine that there would be anything else that would change Trump's position because nobody's talking about sen