not that different from what it was. And they're just trying to make sure it doesn't get used for military uses and you know we'll hardly even notice the difference and other people will say no you liars you're just saying that these export controls are no big deal but you definitely plan to use them for negotiating and turning off our economy if it ever comes to that. So some people are expecting Monday that the market will recover. You know, crypto took a big dump too, but I think it's early, it's sort of early to say that. My guess is this will all get worked out, but don't make any investments based on my guess. It's just a guess. I mean, I assume that China needs things to work out with the US as much as the US needs things to work out with China economically. So given that both sides have enormous incentive to make it work to get some kind of a deal done, I feel like both countries are sane and both countries are capable. So if you're sane and capable and you have the same objective, which is to make sure you don't kill either country, we'll work it out. I just don't know if it'll be Monday anyway. So we'll see what the details are on that.

Kyle Bass, who's a famous China watcher, China critic with me, he said that Trump holds the trump card with China because we can quote remove them from the USD system altogether. So they wouldn't be able to buy and trade with other countries as easily. I'm not sure that we really do have that leverage because again that would be sort of a mutually assured destruction weapon. If we remove them from the USD system, wouldn't they immediately just reproduce a system they could use or join BRICS or however that works? I don't even know how that works. But I feel like that would be a six-month really big problem followed by they would get off the US dollar and then we would have a big problem. So I'm not sure we really have that leverage. That's not as simple as it looks.

Anyway, and then also according to Kyle Bass last night it was revealed that China was blackmailing other countries to not export goods to the United States. And I guess one of the countries shared the letter with the United States. So we know this for sure that China was working against us, blackmailing other countries.

Anyway, and then there was that big crypto meltdown that happened on Friday. That's starting to look like there might be a mystery involved here because apparently some whales, as they call them, big investors, came in and seemed to know ahead of time that there was going to be a big event that would drive crypto down because some people bought unusually large shorts, meaning that if the price went down, they'd make money. And I think one person made $192 million in an hour or something. Somebody put a $23 million short just ahead of the announcements. Like they knew. Now, here's the thing. It's not illegal to do insider trading with Bitcoin. Did you know that it's not illegal? If you had insider information, you knew the government was going to do something and you made your bet based on the thing that you knew that other people didn't know. Totally legal. The exception would be if you're owning Bitcoin indirectly through a fund because a stock fund can't do insider trading. So I've got some Bitcoin directly that I own. I could trade that. But if I traded what was in my stock fund, which is a fund that holds some Bitcoin or it tries to match Bitcoin, I don't know what they hold, but they match Bitcoin. If I did it in there, the exact same trade, I could go to jail. So somebody was smart enough probably to know that they didn't have any risk. They had the information. They didn't have risk. It was just free money. So that's not ideal.

I saw a Mario post. He does these great summaries of the news. So I get a lot of my stuff from Mario. But I don't know how old this is. He says that DOGE just cut $214 billion in government fat, but did they just do it? And does it really get cut this time? I'm not sure I believe anything about DOGE cuts. The one thing I do believe and this is great credit to Elon and all the DOGE people, I think they made DOGE a permanent thing. So if you're looking at the individual claims or the individual wins or the individual cost cuts, you might get too excited about what's happening at any given time. But I do believe this became permanent and that the way the leaders in government are thinking is they're thinking how can I reduce costs and that they've just got DOGE brain now. That's good. I love the fact that people are thinking how do I reduce instead of thinking how do I build my empire? That's completely different. And that's entirely Elon Musk's persuasion that we think DOGE and we think that's the way we get rewarded now. Oh, the way I get rewarded is by cutting costs. Got it. That's the DOGE reframe. That the reward is saving the world by cutting costs. The reward is not you introduced a new project. Oh, look how I did on my new expensive project. Now that's the old way. Now you're going to have to get rid of that project if you want to impress us.

J.B. Pritzker, governor of Illinois, he's out there making noise and now he's complaining that quote another thing that's happened with very few people paying attention is they meaning the Trump administration demanded our voter data. Not just ours in Illinois, every state's voter data. Why? They won't tell us why. So Stephen Miller told him why. The DOJ asked you to remove illegal alien voters from the rolls and you refused. Oh well that's a pretty good reason. That's a pretty good reason.

So here's my problem with J.B. Pritzker and a number of what I call the designated liars. Have you noticed that when Democrats lie they smile? And when Republicans lie, if they do, they're not smiling. And usually I think Republicans are more likely just to tell you the thing. It may or may not be true, but they're not smiling when they lie. But I think that there's genuinely some kind of what do they