Speaker 1: What's going on. Thank you so much for listening to
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smartphone or tablet. And again, thank you so much for
your support. One of the things that I have learned
in this Trump era, and I impart the advice to
everyone pro Trump, anti Trump, whatever it is, simply this,
just give it a minute, right, Just give it a minute.
Just be a little patient and see what happens. Right,
if you are migrating illegally or legally from one outrage
to another, okay, if you are just bouncing from you know,
one Trump truth social posts to another, or one mean
tweet to another, and one executive order to another. If
you're just hopscotching around getting outraged or trying to defend
every single thing in real time, you're gonna miss. You're
gonna miss sort of the larger picture. So you just
have to kind of slow down. I know they're going
very fast. Trust me, Like this is this is an
issue for everybody in media right now, because they are,
as Elon Musk said, moving fast and breaking things. But
he says, as he said today at the cabinet meeting,
which is still going on, and they've allowed the media
to come in and ask questions, that things are moving
very fast. It's difficult for media to keep up. And
so you're getting just this constant stream of reaction, and
the reaction is largely based on prior biases. So if
you hate Donald Trump and you are suffering from Trump
derangement syndrome, you're just in this constant, perpetual state of outrage.
And here's a really good example of it. Ukraine, Ukraine Zelenski,
the president of Ukraine is coming back to America. He's
going to be visiting soon again. It's coming back. He's
going to meet with Trump. Why. Well, apparently they have
struck a deal. So whatever you thought about Donald Trump's
comments from the last week, and you know, why is
he going after why is he saying these things, and
why is he coosing up to Putin and all of this?
What is the outcome? What has it yielded? According to
the Associated Press, Ukraine and the United States have reached
an agreement on a framework for a broad economic deal
that would include access to Ukraine's rare earth minerals. So,
in other words, the very thing that they were trying
to negotiate that Zelensky blew up and he did, right,
he did. That. You always have to keep in mind
with these types of things also is that you may
not be the target audience. That there may be somebody
else that the message is designed to impact. And I
got to tell you, like when I saw, you know,
Trump talking about Putin and people were like, oh, I
got see, he's a Russian asset. No, he loves Putin,
He's a dictator to an all. All of this my
read on it is And I'm no master negotiator, but
I've I've read over the years some tips from people
who do negotiations, and I've also read some stuff about psychology,
and it seemed to me at least that maybe this
is stuff he has to say Trump that he has
to say. Not somebody's forcing him, but he has to
say this stuff in order to get Putin to the table.
And if you go in there as an outspoken ally
of one side of the negotiating table. Then you don't
have any credibility with the other side at the negotiating table.
And so, you know, you fluff Putin a little bit there,
and you make them you know, you puff them up,
you make them feel like, oh, this guy might be
on our side. Oh he's receptive to us. He might
be a neutral arbiter. And meanwhile, you know he's saying
what he's saying about Zelensky. Oh he's a dictator, no
elections and all of this. And so you got this
war of words going on. But in the background that
we don't see is that a deal is being hammered out.
And is it possible that the performance that we see
is not actually meant for us to see, it's meant
for Putin to see. And again I'm no expert on this,
but if I can see this as a potential explanation,
you know, the Russians see it as that you know,
Putin would even if they dismiss it as not true
or they you know, they don't want to believe it
or whatever, they think that it's not designed for him
or whatever, but you know that they have obviously thought
about it. They have to. You got to see as
many angles as possible. Right, unchallenged ideas are easy to hold, right,
And if every single thing that Trump says or does
prompts the same reaction out of you that m Trump bad,
then you're not a neutral observer any longer. You've abandoned
any kind of critical thinking ability. So three senior Ukrainian officials,
they are not named, but they talk to the Associated
Press reportedly, if you can believe the AP, the officials
who were familiar with the matter, I don't know what
that means, spoke on condition of anonymity because they were
not authorized to speak publicly. And now with that out
of the way, now we can totally believe them. No,
you shouldn't totally believe them either, Right, you have to
keep open the idea that they don't know what they're
talking about, or that they are planting information in the
media for another reason. You got to keep that in
your That's another angle that you have to keep in mind.
One of them said that Kiev hopes that signing an
agreement will ensure the continued flow of US military support
that Ukraine urgently needs. Now, if you think about this
in logical terms, right, it makes a bit of sense,
and that if we have a deal to get all
of these rare earth minerals that you know, Ukraine will extract,
they can sell them to us, or give us a
discount because we did send them hundreds of billions of
dollars in all, or give it to us for free
for a little while whatever. But strengthening an economic tie
like that is going to be good for Ukraine, and
it's going to be good for us because we get
the rare earth minerals that we also very much need
for you know, supercomputing and all of that to build
the high tech stuff. So it seems like a pretty
good idea for this deal to get done, especially for
the Ukrainians, because if they are out or access for
these rare earth minerals, that's going to make us more
likely to want to protect that supply chain right. The
agreement could be signed as early as Friday. Plans are
being drawn up by or for Ukrainian President Voladomir Zulensky.
He's got two wis at the end of his name.
That's why I do that, so to travel to Washington
to meet President Donald Trump. Another official said the agreement
would provide an opportunity for Zelensky to Trump and Trump
to discuss continued military aid to Ukraine, which is why
Kiev is eager to finalize the deal. Right. That's the
thing about deals, Both sides have to feel like they
get something. According to one Ukrainian official, some technical details
are still to be determined. However, the draft does not
include a contentious Trump administration proposal to give the US
five hundred billion dollars worth of profits from Ukraine's rare
earth minerals as compensation for its wartime assistance to Kiev.
Right now, how about this is not an unreasonable ask either,
By the way, we have given them a whole bunch
of stuff. And I understand that the vast majority of
the military aid that we have quote given to Ukraine
is actually the money has gone to fund defense contractors
in America. Right Those are contracts that American companies have done,
and then the products have been sent over to Ukraine.
But there's still Ukraine is still deriving that value. They're
still getting that stuff, the finished product, They're still getting
that for free. So you can argue and negotiate over
the actual the actual figure there, but I think the
concept is sound right. We're giving you a whole bunch
of military stuff, so maybe you should give us some
of your rare earth minerals as compensation, whether that's five
hundred billion, three hundred billion, two hundred billion, whatever. All right,
if you're listening to this show, you know I try
to keep up with all sorts of current events, and
I know you do too. And you've probably heard me
say get your news from multiple sources. Why well, because
it's how you detect media bias, which is why I've
been so impressed with ground News. It's an app, and
it's a website, and it combines news from around the
world in one place so you can compare coverage and
verify information. You can check it out at check dot ground,
dot news slash pete. I put the link in the
podcast description too. I started using ground News a few
months ago and more recently chose to work with them
as an affiliate because it lets me see clearly how
stories get covered and by whom. The blind spot feature
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only helps my podcast, but it also supports ground news
as they make the media landscape more transparent. I have
a couple of tweets here from Dina or Dinah. I
don't know they are Pete tweets. The mineral deal with
Ukraine is fair because Ukraine agreed to pay back most
of Europe's assistance, but not ours. Even if part of
it is returned to US in military contracts, the remainder
may be in mineral rights. It's fair based on Ukraine's
other payback agreements, And didn't Zelensky admit that he could
not count account for nearly half the money the US
had sent. Maybe some of that money went to payback Europe.
That's possible. I don't know, but I remember seeing the
quote a couple of days ago, and then I saw
that there was some you know, cleanup of the quote
as well. But you know, regardless the what is the
number like three hundred or three hundred and fifty billion
dollars that has gone to fund Ukraine, you know a
lot of that has been actually going to US military
defense contractors. I want to say more than half. So again,
whatever the numbers are that you guys want to tweak
in this negotiations, fine by me. Okay. If they don't
want to give five hundred billion dollars worth of the
rare earth mineral profits to us, fine give me another number.
You know, that's part of the negotiation. Like I said
at the outset, when it comes to Donald Trump and
the Trump administration and what they're trying to do, just patience,
Just give it a minute. Let's see what happens. Right,
the US and Ukraine would have a joint ownership of
a fund. According to this AP report, Ukraine would in
the future contribute fifty percent of future proceeds from state
owned resource including minerals, oil and gas. One official said
the deal had better terms of investments, and another one
said Kiev secured favorable amendments and view the outcome as positive.
The deal does not at this time include security guarantees.
One official said that this would be something the two
presidents would discuss when they meet, right, So that's a
positive development. I think that's a positive development, and it's
why I wanted to see how it would shake out
with whatever it was that Trump was trying to negotiate
with Zelensky. Here's another one. Let's just give it a minute.
The House Republicans passed their own BBB, not the Build
Back Better but the Big Beautiful Bill actually could be
the BBBB, the Big Beautiful Budget Bill, Okay. With a
push from President Donald Trump, House Republicans sent a GOP
budget blueprint, a blueprint to passage yesterday, a step towards
delivering his Big Beautiful Bill quote unquote, with four point
five trillion dollars in tax breaks and two trillion sorry
four point five Did I say that? Four point five
trillion in tax breaks and two trillion in spending cuts.
And that is over a decade, okay, so that's not
one year. That's this is the way they do this
stuff in the DC budgeting process. They make all these
projections and it's like, oh, these are things that are
gonna materialize down the road, so like, yes, we're adding
to the deficit next year, but in like nine years,
it'll be fine. And then, of course everybody forgets that
with the next cycle or the next continuing resolution, and
you never see the savings that they say are going
to come. So that's always something to keep in mind
here too. They passed this despite a wall of opposition
from Democrats and discom among Republicans. It's just a blueprint.
Right now. The Senate has its own version. The Senate
is doing something also. The House has passed one thing
and the Senate has passed another thing, and now they're
going to hammer out some differences. The vote yesterday was
two seventeen to two fifteen. All Democrats opposed it and
one Republican opposed it. I believe that was Thomas Massey
from Kentucky. Passage of the package is crucial to kickstarting
this process. See so it's the beginning of the process.
So let's give it a minute. Here's a great idea.
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that'll last a lifetime. All Right, So the House GOP
pushes through their budget blueprint last night, to two fifteen
was the final vote. The Associated Press reporting quote. Passage
of the package is crucial to kickstarting the process. Trump
wants the Republicans who control Congress to approve a massive
bill that would number one, extend the tax breaks that
he had secured during his first term but which are
expiring later this year. Think about the timing of this right.
Had Trump done two terms back to back, he would
not be here to extend the tax breaks that were
put in place during his first term. I mean, I
guess maybe they could have tried to extend them with
special legislation, but they are expiring. And that is an
average of like fifteen hundred dollars or like more than
one hundred dollars per month for the average American that
you are keeping of your own dollars. The Senate where
Republicans pass their own version and will now take up
that bill along with theirs. Right, More big votes are ahead,
including an unrelated deal to prevent a government shutdown when
federal funding expires on March fourteenth, and those talks are
also underway. It's all unfolding amid emerging backlash to what's
happening elsewhere. Is billionaire Trump advisor Elon Musk is tearing
through federal agencies with his Department of Government Efficiency, firing
thousands of workers nationwide. Again, he is not empowered to
fire anybody. These are things that the department and agency
heads are doing. And then the AP throws in that
angry voters are starting to confront lawmakers at town hall
meetings back home. Okay, those are Democrat angry voters. Those
are Democrats that are showing up at the town halls.
This has been a common tactic the left has employed.
They actually stole them tactic from the Tea partiers, which
I think yesterday was like the anniversary of the first
Tea Party protest which occurred under Barack Obama. And you'll
remember it was about spending lo those many years ago,
Rick Santelli on the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange
saying stop spending, stop spending, stop spending, because that was
their response to the mortgage collapse, right, which was a
byproduct of government policies. So the Tea partiers were showing
up at these town hall meetings and just grilling lawmakers,
and this was seen as an effective tactic because Tea
Party candidates won a bunch of races, and so Democrats
started doing it as well, because like, that's right in
their wheelhouse, like showing up and throwing tantrums. You know,
the performance they really have it perfected. You know they
really do. And so now you've got these these performances
occurring at town hall meetings back in Republican districts where
a bunch of Democrats got there like, oh, you know
I'm a moderate or you know I'm a centrist, Like
you're not. How dare you cut the spending? Hakim Jeffries
never won to exaggerate things, said, quote our very way
of life as a country is under assault, which might
seem a bit like hyperbole. Even as they press ahead,
the AP reports Republicans are running into a familiar problem.
Slashing federal spending is typically easier said than done, with
cuts to the Pentagon and other programs largely off limits.
See again, for now we don't know. This is what
DOGE is doing. These agencies and the Congress as they
are looking at their funding levels, they are going to
be relying on the data that is collected by DOGE,
and so they're going to be able to say we're
going to make a certain amount of cuts. They all
understand the mission. The mission is to keep us out
of bankruptcy. Right talking about our way of life is
under assault. Our way of life is unsustainable. It has
to change. And if you don't address it, it certainly
will change. This is inevitable, Okay. History is full of examples,
from Argentina to Venezuela to Rome. Right, when you devalue
your currency, by the way, do you know why if
you look at a quarter, for example, and the dime,
do you know why the edges are ridged? Right, Because
like the penny, it's a smooth edge, like the not
the big flat circle part with Lincoln's face on it,
you know, but the edge, the real thin edge around
the sides. It's because throughout history, when you make coins,
people shave off the coin, and if it's a smooth edge,
it's harder to detect. But if you make ridges around
the edge and somebody starts trying to shave the precious
metal off of the edge to cheat you when they
buy something from your store, for example, right, they're going
to short you a little bit because the coin isn't
worth the full value because they've shaved a bunch of
it off. And you collect enough of the shavings and
then you can turn that into something else of value,
but you're shorting somebody else. That's why they put the
ridges there so you will know if somebody is shaving
the edges off of the coins. You cannot beat the
free market. Okay, these rules, these principles of economics, they
don't change when you print more money, when you devalue
your currency. You end up in the same place every
single time. And you can deny it all you want,
but that doesn't make it so. You are going to fail.
Failure is simply your stupid projection running into reality, and
that's why you failed. Several Republican lawmakers worry that the
scope of the cuts being eyed, particularly some eight hundred
and eighty billion dollars over the decade to the committee
that handles healthcare spending, including Medicaid, for example, or two
hundred and thirty billion to the Agriculture committee that funds
food stamps, will be too harmful to their constituents back home.
So they're afraid of the messaging here because everybody is
now talking about they're cutting medicaid, they're cutting medicaid, and
they haven't cut medicaid, and in fact, the exact opposite
has been promised. You can agree with that or disagree
with that, like whether or not you believe the promise
from Donald Trump, but that's what they have said They're like,
we're not cutting medicaid, but that's going to be the narrative.
And that's what Republicans are most worried about, is the
narrative that, excuse me, the narrative that the Democrats and media,
but I repeat myself, are going to promulgate ahead of
the midterm election and that's going to cause their defeat.
But even if it does cause your defeat, that's worth it.
It's worth it because again, we are racing towards bankruptcy
and the complete collapse of our economic system. And when
we lose the dollar as the world world reserve currency,
our standard of living will be cut. I've seen various estimates,
but somewhere in the neighborhood of twenty twenty five percent.
Immediately overnight that happens. We are the world reserve currency
and there are direct benefits in all of our lives
for that. We are the solid currency, and when we
cease to be, our standard of living will immediately decline.
That is something that I think is worth protecting. Now
you may not agree, that's fine, But if you do agree,
then whatever political price is to be paid in order
to protect our status as world reserve currency and to
protect us from going into economic bankruptcy. It should be
worth it to you. That's what being a leader means.
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a pet tweet. Gary says, the left and some in
the GOP have pushed the idea of MMT, which is
modern monetary theory, I believe, or just endlessly spending and
printing money and that doesn't matter. Deficits don't matter. That's
quote MMT. Like they dress it up with this fancy
name modern monetary theory. But all it means is just
keep printing more money and it doesn't matter. It'll all
be fine. But the Democrats, through Biden especially, was but
the Dems, through Biden especially, was faking a good economy
through government jobs and spending. Yeah, they keep coming out
with these revisions to the economic forecasts and number not forecasts,
but the reports, the numbers, like you saw it with
the unemployment numbers. They had to revise them, like, oh,
I know, we said we created you know, a billion
new jobs, but it actually upon further review, it turns
out we lost one hundred thousand. Right. They've come back
and they've been you know, adjusting all of their earlier
reports now that we have the actual data. I know,
he said this one thing that made Biden look good
before the election, But now it turns out that the
numbers weren't so good. I was watching Piers Morgan uncensored
his YouTube program and he's got this leftist quote influencer
Jojo from Jers, Jojo from Jersey and Ben ferguson talk
shows they were debating, and Taylor Lorenz was in there,
as was Kevin O'Leary. Like the four guests, which is
I think he should just stick with like fewer guests.
He brings in like four people at a time and
then they all yell over each other and you can't
really hear anything, but they're attacking Trump for the price
of eggs. Have you like this is every Democrat now
is talking about the price of eggs because that's what
was being cited during the campaign, which was let's see
uh Jenuary December, and it's four months ago, four to
five months ago. During the campaign, the price of eggs
was used as an indication of the health of the
economy and the cost of inflation, right, the upward pressure
on prices for essential foods and stuff. So now you're
seeing and I saw it the other day. We went
out to eat and there was a place that was like,
we're charging temporarily a fifty cent surcharge on every egg.
So if you get a three egg omelet, it's an
extra buck fifty because why because Donald Trump? Because Donald
Trump in four weeks has created a spike in the
price of eggs. This is the same crap they pull
with al any Republican president and gas prices. Right, they
have all the explanations in the world as to why
the gas prices shouldn't be held against a Democrat in
the White House, but as soon as a Republican comes
and now it's a big deal. And you know, George W.
Bush is in there at his keyboard like entering in
the price for a barrel of crude or something. It's
just it's dishonest. It's gaslighting. And the same thing we
are seeing with eggs. Do you know why eggs are expensive?
There's a thing called the avian flu, the bird flu.
Now I'm no farmer, I don't raise chickens, but I
think there may be a bit of a logical breakdown
in our response to avian flu in that if they
detect av and flu in your herd, your flock, they
murder every single one of your chickens. Like that's the protocol. Apparently,
did you know this. I just found this out. Some
farmer did a YouTube video and he's like, why don't
you just kill the ones that have the flu? And
then the ones that don't have the flu they may
have some level of immunity, and then they would survive,
they would breed, and then you would have a herd
or a flock that now is better able to survive
another round. But when you keep murdering every chicken, you're
not building up herd immunity. How is it that we
are this stupid? It continues to boggle the mind. Did
we learn nothing from COVID? No? We actually we did it. Now,
we did it because we don't want to learn anything
from COVID. All right, that'll do it for this episode.
Thank you so much for listening. I could not do
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