e he and Putin are sharing a secret. Ah, you didn't see that coming, did you? That's about the best technique for persuasion you're ever going to freaking see in your life.

Say what you will about Trump. You know, he's not free from criticism, right? I'm not the one who's going to tell you he's the god king and everything he does is right. But you got to give him credit for the things that are just so right that nobody's ever going to match it, in my opinion. I don't think anybody will match him for personal persuasion.

Now keep in mind, I don't know how many of you have ever been in the room with him, but he does have that thing, that thing, whatever that thing is, that x-factor, that charisma, whatever it is. I'm sure Putin has it too. But you put him in a room and he's going to convince you of something. He is good.

Now by the way, I think Biden's probably pretty good at that too or he wouldn't be where he is. So I'm not saying he's bad at it, but the style difference is striking. And I think Trump is the one who played it, who would have played it completely correctly. You want Putin to think you can work with him, that he can trust you.

What is the biggest thing that, well let's talk about that. Let's talk about what Russian people think about all this. So the Russian people, um, let's see, I'm going to skip ahead to that part. CNN was talking about a poll. It's hard to get information about the Russian public, but I guess CNN ran some kind of a proprietary poll or personal poll or something or a special poll. They have some word, forget what word that is. It doesn't matter.

And here's what they found. One out of every two Russians, actually 50% of them, said it would be right. More Russians think it would be wrong than right to use military force to reunite Russia and Ukraine. So Russians don't want to use military force to take over Ukraine. But the Russian public does think that NATO is an offensive force. So Russians believe NATO is an offensive force with plans to destroy Russia and the Russians. But they do think that the Ukraine people and the Russian people are one people, which is what Putin says.

So Putin has managed to convince much of Russia that the Ukrainian people and the Russian people are all one people. But the Ukrainians don't believe that, not even close. So this is one of those cases where you can see the power of propaganda. Because I need a more of a fact check on this, but I believe that the Russian public has access to the internet right now. There are some things that are regulated and some things that are censored, but generally speaking the average Russian can get the internet, right?

And so if you imagine the average Ukrainian and the average Russian both have access to the outside world, you can see the power of propaganda. Because the only thing, it would be one thing like North Korea to keep your people completely walled off from other information. Then you can control their thoughts pretty well. But if people have access to the alternative opinions, you can see how powerful the propaganda is because they've been turned away from accuracy toward inaccuracy.

So look at the difference between Ukrainian and Russian public opinion about this one question: are the Ukrainians and the Russians one people? Only Putin was the one who was pushing the we're all one people thing, and he successfully did it through propaganda. You can see how many or what percentage of the public can be moved by something as pure as propaganda. It's about half. It's about half. You can tell any story if you tell it often enough and you control enough of the media that you know you can get a monopoly on it.

Now he doesn't even have a monopoly. That's my point. If he had a monopoly on information, well then you'd understand how that many people could be convinced. But he did that — this is the scary part — he did that without a monopoly on information. He did that just with persuasion. Just with persuasion. So I would say that the percentage of the public that you can move with pure propaganda is around half. And you know the topic would vary. So I'm sure there are some topics you can get 80%, sometimes 20%.

But I think you could count on getting half of the public, which is enough to start a war. You know, if you've got half of the public on your side, you can kind of go to war. That's about enough. You know, 55% would be better.

So that answered my question. I was just asking the other day on livestream here, what does the average Russian know about the whole situation? The other thing is that there are a whole lot of people in Russia who don't think there's going to be an invasion proper, you know, where Ukraine itself is completely taken over. There are a lot of people in Russia who don't think that's going to happen. And there are a lot of people in Ukraine, like a big chunk of Ukraine, doesn't think there's going to be an invasion.

But if you ask the people in the United States, wouldn't we say 90% of us who were paying attention, what do you think it would be? What do you think it would be in the United States? Now it's different if you ask people who are paying attention to the news versus people who are not. So I guess it's nonsense to ask the general public. They're not even paying attention.

Yeah, so I think maybe 10%. Well let me ask the question here. How many people on this livestream do not think Russia will try to take over all of Ukraine? So tell me if you don't believe he's going to try to take all of Ukraine.