we’ve-got-to-put-some-discipline-on-it party. So it’s almost certainly going to reduce somebody’s healthcare. How do you sell that to the public?

Anyway, that’s enough on healthcare.

Trump’s in Asia winning big, signing deals. He’s got an almost half-a-trillion investment deal with Japan. And he’s just owning it. And you have to look at his Asian trip as a China encirclement play that apparently is working. And what I mean by encirclement is as he visits all of our allies that sort of ring China and he makes deals with them. The deals he’s making are China’s deals. They’re the deals we should have been making with China, but they’re not getting it done with their trade deals. They’re not giving us what we want.

So China has to just sit there passively uninvited and watching while Trump takes away their business, one deal at a time. Mostly the rare earth mineral stuff. So he signed this big rare earth mineral thing with Japan, but it also included a whole bunch of high-tech investments, the ones you’re used to.

So we got that done and it looks like he’s been treated like a star.

But one of the little vignettes of his trip to Japan just really hit me at home. So when I was a young man, I lived for about 15 years in a relationship with a Japanese-American woman here in America and her extended family—all the older generation—they all came from Japan so it was a very Japanese situation. She was born in America so she was Japanese-American.

So when they would have an event—let’s say somebody’s graduation or marriage or something—they would often have it in the Japanese temple or church or whatever they call it. And I would see there would be a table up front where the aunties—the ants, they call them the aunties—would be writing down what gifts people were giving to whoever was the purpose of the event.

And the reason that they would write down the gifts is that most of them were money. So if let’s say your kid was graduating from high school and somebody would give you a gift, the auntie would write down $50 from this family. And I asked, like why are they writing down the gifts? To me as generic white-bread white boy I was like what’s going on here? Why do you need to write it down?

And the answer was so that the gift giving when it got reversed, people would know, oh, this family gave us $50. Their kid is graduating, $50. So it was just for matching. But the larger part of the story is that Japanese gift giving is next level. They are so good at picking the right gift. That’s what I observed. Right? This is anecdotal so it’s not based on a survey or anything but anecdotally living in that world for over a decade, the level of the gift giving—so smart, so well thought out.

And then you look at Japan and the new prime minister—Japan’s new prime minister, a woman whose name I didn’t write down. You can Grok it. She gifted Trump with the prior prime minister’s old putter because they were golfing buddies. It was his actual putter, not a reproduction. The actual putter.

Now that’s like one of the best gifts you’ve ever seen in your life. The other leaders, they’ll give him a horse or something, you know, like I don’t want a horse. But that putter, you could pretty much guarantee that that meant something to him. So Japan knows how to do that.

Stocks are way up. We’re getting new records today. Bitcoin’s up. All these trade deals are looking good, and they do seem to be moving China in the right direction. It’s always too early to say that there’s going to be a China deal because they’re always pulling the rug out last minute, but it looks like w