ermits have been given regarding the Pacific Palisades and Altadena fires. That only 500 permits have been given out of 16,000 structures lost. Now you've already heard that, but what's interesting is that CBS is reporting it and going after a blue state. So I haven't been following too closely the whole Bari Weiss running CBS News and how that's affecting things. But is this one of those changes? You know, you don't expect CBS to go hard in the old CBS. You didn't expect them to go hard against the blue state, but CBS News is going hard against the blue state. So that would be a good sign for independent media, meaning not being biased to one side too much. It's not independent per se.

Well, let's talk about Russia and Ukraine. Can you remind me why Russia and the United States are enemies? It's kind of confusing because with other countries we don't play a zero-sum game, right? When we're dealing with our allies, we're generally happy if they do well. They're happy if we do well. And because we have this free market situation, both of us could do well. So it's not a zero-sum game where if we win, Britain loses. If France wins, we lose. It's not really like that.

But why is it like that with Russia? And yeah, tradition. So one wonders if it's just a leftover habit, you know, something that's been with us for decades and we don't know how to get out of it.

I've often speculated that the CIA has a lot of anti-Russia people because historically you needed them. But then if it came to a point where we didn't need a lot of anti-Russia assets, would they be able to take down their efforts or would they be sort of "I don't want to lose my job. The only thing I'm an expert at is anti-Russia, so we'll just try to be as anti-Russia as we can." Or is it about seizing Russia's assets? Is that a real play that the world is run by energy lords and the energy lords think, you know, if someday we could take down Russia or turn them into a puppet, we get all that money from their energy. Is it that? Is it a little bit that or is it none of that? How do we know?

Is it over Ukraine? Because Ukraine looks like the current problem and it is but we were at Russia's throat and they had ours sort of trying to be frenemies long before that, right? So is this really because the US essentially did a coup of a country that Putin wanted to have control of, but it kind of took away his option to have that control over all of Ukraine? It can't be all about Ukraine, right?

So I wonder what I would do if I were in a situation where I were trying to solve this. The hypnotist in me believes that you could hypnotize Putin with just ordinary language, meaning that you could ask him the same questions I'm asking. If you didn't want to dominate them and overthrow them, so you'd have to make this case. I would ask the following question. Why are we against each other? Like I know we do things to you, you do things to us, but why? What's the point of it? How do you possibly win if you're looking at it as a win-lose scenario instead of something where both sides could win?

Could it be that we so distrust Putin that we can't let him have any power more than he has because if Russia grows it would be more dangerous than it is? That's not what I would say to Putin, but that's an aside.

So I think that as long as we don't know what Putin's base motivations are, and I think I don't know. I think I don't know what his basic motivations are. Some of it is obvious. If you get into a war, you want to win the war. If a country is doing bad things to you, you want to push back so that maybe they do less bad things to you. So some of it's kind of obvious, but I don't think that we've drilled down to the important points.

Is it possible that Putin is most interested in his legacy? Is he most interested in leaving Russia stronger than when he found it? Is he driven by history? So those would be things th