ategically important — so if one side conquered a city and occupied it while you were doing the negotiations, what would you do?

Well, you might reflexively say, "I'm walking away. I'm not going to negotiate with you darned stealers of land. You're not taking it seriously." You could do that, but that would also be the end of the peace process. If you wanted to get a peace deal done but this happened, how would you handle it?

I'm going to give you a persuasion trick that somebody like Trump and probably somebody like Witkoff, but not many people could pull off. You ready for this? It's a little bit of a fake, but not exactly. Here's what I would say in the negotiations: "Well, I understand that you took a new city today. We're adding to the negotiation a new point, which is that anything captured after we started negotiating has to be given back."

And the Russians would say, "Yeah, no. We lost a bunch of people. We've been fighting for months to capture the city. We're not going to give back the city." And then you look at them and say, "That's a requirement. You cannot take any land after we started negotiating." Now, is there a reason for that? Not really. No, there's no reason for it. It's a purely emotional request. But you just stick to it and you never change.

And at the end, if Russia and Ukraine agreed on every other thing and then you say, "Just one more thing. Just one more thing. Got to give back everything you took from the time we started negotiating seriously till now. Every bit of it. That stuff just doesn't count." Could you get them to back down on that? Well, it would depend how much they wanted a peace deal, and I don't think they want it badly enough yet. But if they ever got to the point where it looked like Russia really seriously for the first time wanted an actual peace, you could use this irrational reason. No, we're not going to give you anything that started after we started talking peace because that's not even a fair fight. We were barely trying.

Yeah. So as illogical as it is, you could probably get away with it, but you would need just the right negotiator saying it just the right way, inserting it at just the right time. But you could get away with it. It's doable.

Venezuela's leader Maduro apparently is not dead and he has not escaped the country. So he's been spotted doing some public thing like chanting. He was somewhere in the country giving away prizes and singing with the locals. What do you think's going to happen there with Maduro? I feel like something has to happen pretty quickly, but they've kind of given him two choices. You can stay and get killed or maybe jailed because we're coming in hard, and probably he believes that land forces are ready to strike and they probably are. Or he can leave the country.

Apparently Trump has said, you know, we won't stop you from leaving the country, but we're also not going to pardon you and we're not going to protect you. So you're sort of on your own. You just have to get out of here. And then Venezuela can have a new start. Don't you think the odds of him being killed or captured is pretty high if he leaves Venezuela? Like how in the world could he be protected unless he went directly to China and lived there forever or went directly to Russia and lived there forever? But short of those two countries, is there anywhere he could go that he wouldn't be captured and killed no matter what?

So I've said this a million times, but we need the retired dictator island. An island where all the dictators that know they have to leave because otherwise they'll get killed, they want to go somewhere where they won't be killed. We should have one island with nothing but dictators and their servants. No military, just dictators and servants. They can even take their stolen money to support themselves and nobody will bother them. They just can never leave. And maybe you prevent them from communicating so they don't start a coup. Yeah, like Ela Island. Exactly. Cuba.

You know that's a possibility, right? Venezuela's been a big supporter of Cuba. So I guess there's a possibility that Maduro could go to Cuba and be protected, but I wouldn't feel very safe if I were in Cuba so close to the United States. I feel like we could get to him if we wanted to. So we'll see where that goes.

According to the Brussels Signal, which I know you all read, the Brussels Signal, the head of France, Macron, has proposed labeling news outlets for their reliability. What do you think of that idea? It's almost funny that he's even floating the idea. So Macron wants an official media label that would tell people if the news site was trustworthy. Doesn't that sound like that can't be real? That can't be real.

In 2025, are there people who don't know that if the government tells you a site is trustworthy, that's the last thing you should trust? I mean, even in a democratic type of