t like him being an authoritarian strongman dictator will completely understand that none of this would happen without him being that person because he pushed everybody. He scared everybody. He shook the box. Nobody else could do that. Nobody else could do that.

So at the same time that all that goodness is happening, maybe peace breaking out everywhere. You know, on Friday that China scared us with this threat of restricting the rare earth materials, which would destroy the entire economy of the world if they did that. I was not so sure that was real, but I don't think I committed to it one way or the other. But according to Trump, it's probably just a negotiating position and not really that different from what it was.

He goes, "Don't worry, you know, truth." He said yesterday, I guess, "Don't worry about China. It will be fine. Highly respected President Xi just had a bad moment. He doesn't want depression for his country, and neither do I. The US wants to help China, not hurt it."

Do you see how much technique is built into that? Just that little message on Truth Social. Don't worry about China. It'll all be fine. So that part's probably true because China doesn't want to destroy the economy of the world. They don't really get an advantage if they do that. So probably won't do that.

But when he says that respected President Xi just had a bad moment, that really gets to his face. That's kind of putting him down a little bit and showing that he lost face by creating this little brouhaha. Now, what that does is if Xi doesn't decide to nuke us for insulting him, in theory he just got negged. Do you know what negging is? Neg. It means that he got sort of a complimenty insult. It's a complimenty insult. It's what you do if you want a woman to like you if you're one of those dating guys.

So, President Xi, if it's not so bad that he'll never talk to Trump again, then it probably isn't. Just the fact that he had a bad moment, he's going to have to recover from his bad moment. So that's the position that Trump has put him in. He's like, I'm not criticizing you. I'm just saying you had a bad moment. Do you think Xi wants to be known as the guy who had a bad moment and almost destroyed the economy of the United States with a statement that probably should have been vetted a little bit better? Oh, I think Trump's completely right. He had a bad moment. He totally had a bad moment.

So now he's got something to make up for. And that's the genius of Trump. This is just perfect persuasion. Push Xi in a little box with just a little bit of discomfort. And wouldn't he like to get out of that box by not being a person who's trying to hurt the economy of the world? So setting them up for negotiations.

Scott Bessent says the idea is to give China time to meet and talk. So mostly it's about showing some respect for China and giving them the time to work things out, and then probably things will be fine. Stock market seems to be happy about it.

I saw a long post by Sahil Patel who wanted to look into the semiconductor supply chain because as you know if the semiconductor supply chain breaks then all of our technology breaks and then the whole world falls into a coma. But it turns out that our semiconductor supply chain, not ours, but the world's is really, really brittle. And I didn't have any idea how brittle it was, but that's what Sahil did.

So TSMC, the Taiwan company that produces 90% of the world's most advanced chips. So problem number one, there's only one company that makes 90% of the chips and they happen to be on an island that is likely to turn into a war zone. So that's the first thing to worry about. Secondly, TSMC relies on a Dutch company for lithography machines, meaning that there's probably no other place you can get them, meaning that if something happened to that one company, maybe TSMC couldn't make any new chips just if that one company has a problem.

But they depend on a company called Carl Zeiss that does optical stuff. It's the only firm in the world capable of making the mirrors that are precise enough for the high-end chips. Only one company. If that company had a problem, no more chips. There's a light source. I need a EUV machine that's produced by one company in San Diego. If something happens to that one company in San Diego, no chips for you. And it goes on and on like this about the other parts that are only available in one place ever.

Now, in theory, somebody else could make them, but I know that the mirror stuff is so amazingly hard that probably there's a good chance that nobody else will ever be able to do it possibly. Anyway, so it goes on like that. There's a whole bunch of pieces that you can only get from one place. So if that one place went down, no chips if any one of them go down. So that's pretty scary.

Meanwhile, over in Ukraine, where the Ukrainian drones are attacking Russian energy sources, they attacked a bunch of energy sources on Crimea and did quite an attack with the drones. But the update on Trump is he had been talking about sending our Tomahawk missiles to Ukraine because they go long distance. They would go deep into Russia and they would be very accurate and hard to stop. I thought he had already agreed to give them to Ukraine with some restrictions on how they use them, but it sounds like he is not. He still needs to talk to Zelensky.

And what he said was Trump said that he may send Tomahawk missiles to Ukraine if Russia doesn't settle its war. So it looks like he might be using the threat of Tomahawks to get Putin to say, "I don't want any Tomahawks hitting myself." Now, of course, Russia said that if we did give them Tomahawks and they got used that they would retaliate in some unspecified way that we wouldn't like. So I don't know, would they? Or there's something psychological about the Ukraine war where both Russia and Ukraine decide not to attack the neighboring countries that are helping. Yeah.

So we're, you know, they're not attacking the United States for providing weapons or not attacking Europe for providing the funding. They're just treating it like it's a war between two countries when clearly there are a lot of countries involved. So if Putin continues to do that, to treat it like it's just them against Ukraine, then the Tomahawks wouldn't be that big a deal, except that, you know, they wouldn't like it. But if Putin decides to change the frame and reframe it and say, "Okay, this is a war against the United States. You're just laundering it through Ukraine." Well, then all bets are off.

But I would think that Putin would not want to do anything that looked like a direct attack on the United States because there's this guy, you may have heard of him, Donald Trump, who's the president, and what his response would be compared to any other president, what his response would be to any attack on the homeland or our military assets. Putin can't predict that. That's unpredictable. And you don't want to get into militarily unpredictable waters. So that's another thing that Trump brings, that unpredictability that does keep people away.

Anyway, so we'll see what happens with those Tomahawks. Seems like a good play.

So JD Vance was on ABC talking to George Stephanopoulos, and Stephanopoulos was trying to get him to talk about the story that may be completely fake about Homeland Security guy Tom Homan, allegedly before he was in this job, accepting a $50,000 bag of cash on video, allegedly for helping some company get a border contract. Now, I don't think that was illegal because he wasn't working for the government then and he was consulting. So I don't even know if there's a crime involved.

But so JD Vance was asked about that to comment on the bag of cash and Tom Homan because ABC News needed to find something to talk about that was not the tremendous success that Trump is experiencing at the moment in the Middle East. So they had to find something. They got to find something to talk to JD about that'll sound bad for those guys.

And JD had a very interesting response to the accusations about that bag of cash. He said it's a fake scandal and he didn't know anything about that video. And I said to myself, what do you mean you don't know about the video? Everybody knows about the video. It's been a top headline. We all know about the video. And then I thought to myself, wait a minute. I haven't seen the video. Have any of you seen a video of him or anybody else accepting a bag of cash? And then I thought, wait a minute, is this whole thing just made up?

If you haven't seen the video, I don't know that there's a video. Do you believe there's really a video of him accepting cash? It's been a while. You think that bad boy would have leaked, right? Or at the very least somebody would say, "I have the video in my hand. I just can't show it to you." So we don't know who has said video and nobody that we know has seen it. I feel like JD had the right answer, which is you treat it like it's not real because they can't prove it's real. I don't know if it's real. You know, my guess is if it was real, if it were real and it was real bad that probably more would have happened. So my guess is that's not that real. Just my guess.

So Reuters has an article today that looked like it came from the past. The title was "Climate Tipping Points Are Being Crossed, Scientists Warn Ahead of COP30." So I guess there's some big climate change meetup coming up. And Reuters wants us to know that we're past the tipping points where climate change is going to kill us all. We're already past the tipping points.

Now, isn't there something wrong with this? Why would that just be a little bit of an article around other articles that just is keyed off of a meeting coming up? Wouldn't that be the biggest problem and biggest story in the world that we would cross all the tipping points and now we're definitely dead? They couldn't possibly believe what they're saying. They could not possibly believe what they're writing. That's where we've gotten to, right? Where they couldn't possibly believe it because you wouldn't act matter-of-fact about it. It's just like a little article on Reuters. Yeah, we're past all the tipping points. Looks like there's nothing we could do. It's the end of the world. But they got a big meeting coming up. Like what?

If I believed that the world was past the tipping point, I'd be recommending that you have sex with a stranger. No, I wouldn't. Maybe I would, but you would act completely different. There's no way you would act matter-of-fact if you really believed we had crossed the tipping points and the climate's going to just disappear.

Now, they had some claims about, oh, we're past the tipping point for coral and it said, you know, all the coral is disappearing and therefore the oceans will not be sustainable, etc. And I thought, what news are you looking at, Reuters? All the news I've seen in the past six months told me that the coral has recovered when people didn't expect it. Did I imagine that? Was that fake news? Or does Reuters not know that the current news is that the coral seems to have come back or it's coming back powerfully and probably there's no tipping point at all. Yeah.

Anyway, so that just seems so out of date.

Meanwhile, several, this is also Reuters, several pharmaceutical companies, I think there were like maybe 10 of them or so, quite a few of them are now saying that they'll sell their drugs directly to patients in the US. Now, that would be in response to Trump trying to get them to lower their prices. But what's interesting here is, have I ever introduced my idea of the confuseopoly?

The confuseopoly is when you're in a business that's just like somebody else's business and it's sort of a commodity like a cell phone or some kinds of insurance. You know, they're exactly the same. So you have to pretend that yours is different by making it confusing. Well, what does this cell phone service cost? Well, it depends. Do you have your relatives on it and did you use the extra minutes and did you roll over the minutes and then you can't really compare it to anything because you don't know exactly what minutes you would use and what you would roll over and if you rolled it over would anybody use it.

So if they make it confusing then each of the cell companies will sort of get their share. If they made it not confusing, then everybody would know which one was the good one and all the others would be out of business instantly. So confuseopolies are the only thing that keeps complicated commodity-like businesses in business. It prevents you from knowing which one is the better one.

And that is clearly something that's happening with these pharmaceutical companies who have agreed to sell drugs direct to patients because they're all going to do it a different way and they're going to do it with different platforms. So some of them have their own website, some of them are going to work through somebody else. Some of them are going to cut some drugs but not others. They'll probably come up with complicated formulas like, well, under these conditions, we'll cut them for these people, but under these conditions, we won't.

So I feel like the pharma companies are going to have to make it really complicated so that they can say they're doing things without doing things because I'll tell you what they can't do. They can't lower their prices and give us the same price that they give to third world countries, which is the ask. That's what we're asking for. They can't do that. That would be their entire profitability. So they have to pretend they're playing along because Trump is too powerful right now. So they have to act like they're playing along. Well, I don't think they are playing along. I think they're going to throw a bone. You know, maybe some drugs that are almost generic but are not their big profitable drugs. If they throw a few sacrificial drugs for lower cost, they can keep their profitable ones at their current price. Probably try to get away with that.

So I'm not ready to speak optimistically about where that's heading. I think the big pharma has got a lot of game. They know how to protect themselves.

Well, Trump has suggested publicly that who he calls corrupt Senator Adam Schiff could be the next person who gets lawfared. Says he's so dishonest. And of course that causes people to say, "Wait a minute. You're the president of the United States. You can't be identifying enemies and then telling the Department of Justice to go lawfare them. You can't do that."

To which I have mixed feelings. If these had been innocent people or just people who were doing their own thing that didn't affect Trump and didn't affect me and didn't affect the government, I might say, "Yeah, don't lawfare them. That's just going to create more problems." You know, even though they lawfared you, don't lawfare them. But because these specific people were literally trying to overthrow my government and they were trying to destroy the guy that you and I and the other supporters were trying to support to the point where he could get to do things like this, you know, ending wars. That's what we wanted him to do. That's why we hired him. That's why we voted for him. And we wan