and one poorly defended area. And if you take out the bridge which seems totally doable right, Ukraine can take out a bridge. They've got missiles, drones and whatnot. And then apparently the Ukraine military is actually pretty good. They have better equipment. They according to this expert they win their firefights. So when it's something like a fair fight the Ukrainians almost always win because they're better trained and better equipped. It's only when they're overpowered by artillery or something that they get crushed.

So the thinking is that the Ukrainian military could take out not only the thin connection between the main Russian forces and Crimea. They could take out the bridge and then they can just take Crimea because it would probably be poorly defended because the strongest defenders are where the fighting is and the fighting is not happening in Crimea. And I'm thinking that would be a shocker. What if Ukraine just tried to hold the line and just keep the main Russian army pinned down and just take Crimea back? What would that do to the Russian psychology? It would look like Russia lost the war. I mean the war wouldn't be over. Russia could maybe just take it back. It wouldn't be easy. But what would that do to the whole balance of everything? I mean that would be a great at least a diversion. I mean at the very least it would be an interesting diversion.

And the idea is that Russia would have trouble equipping and resupplying Crimea because they could get cut off. But that Ukraine would because they have a border there and stuff they'd break out. The tactical nuke if that happens. Somebody says would they? Because it seems to me that a tactical nuke would guarantee that Putin is taken out of office. What do you think? I would say that right now it looks like he might be at great risk. Maybe 50-50 proposition. But if he used a tactical nuke I think that's the end. Am I wrong? There's no way he could survive it politically if not his life, right?

Because don't you think that there's somebody who's like number two or three in the potential takeover chain that the CIA has already said, "You know, I know you're only number fourth or fifth in the potential chain of command but if the other people disappeared and we made sure that you were well treated do you think you'd like to step up to the number one job?" I know. I think that if a tactical nuke got used it would be easy to turn people within Russia really close to Putin against him because they would say, "Okay this is a clean win if I take Putin out under these conditions. I'll even have internal support." Because I think you could overthrow Putin and still have public support in Russia if he used a nuke.

Or the other possibility is that Russia is now so pro-Putin that they'd say, "Oh that's strong. You know we like it that you were strong." Maybe. I don't know how to read the Russian mind but it would certainly turn enough people against Putin that he'd be in physical danger much more than he is now.

Now here let me throw something into the mix that feels different. So you know the Biden administration is asking for, correct me if I'm wrong, 33 billion more for Ukraine which is a gigantic step up in military support. Do you know what that sounds like to me? It sounds like the administration is planning to win. As in win the war. It doesn't look like they're playing for a stalemate. It doesn't even look like they're playing to just push them out of the east or something. I feel as if the Biden administration feels like they could win. Because every day that the Russians don't have some crushing victory on the east is a day that you say to yourself, "Huh, maybe that Ukrainian defense is better than we thought." And the Ukrainian defense isn't going to quit now because the good equipment is just coming in and apparently they don't have any manpower shortage. They had more volunteers to fight than they had equipment to give them.

So if Ukraine doesn't run out of people to fight and they're getting more equipment not less, does the 33 billion signal that the Biden administration thinks they can win outright? Because I feel like it does. Now I don't think that means that they think it's a sure thing or anything like that but I feel like they went from, "Let's see how we can make this painful for Putin" to "Let's finish off the Russian army." I think they want to finish the Russian army or at least take it down by 50 percent because Putin's down 25, right? I never understood that if that's his entire military 25 degraded or that was just what's in that area. I've not heard that clarified.

So about 20 billion to replace the weapons we gave them from the army. Okay I see. So we'd be replacing our own weapons with a 33 billion. Okay that does look a little different. Those numbers are wrong. Which numbers are wrong? They're 33 billion. If all it is is replacing our own equipment then it doesn't look like a step up does it? So give me a fact check on that. That replacing our own military equipment would not look like a step up. So he says not true. Are we giving it directly to Ukraine? All right. Well I guess we'll look into this. But the point is if it's a major escalation if that's what that budget is telling us then I think the Biden administration actually feels they could win. Define win: put Putin out of power and or get the Russian military to completely get out of Ukraine completely.

Now of course nobody wins because everybody lost in this situation but that would look like a win to me.

All right. I was asked to tell you about how we're entering the golden age. Well someone's asked me why I didn't have kids and do I regret it. Let me ask you that one first. I don't regret it. But the reason was I just didn't want to bring somebody into the world because there are plenty of people in the world and I never felt a need to propagate my DNA. Now does that make me weird? Because I feel like there's some kind of basic human impulse that people have to propagate their DNA but I don't have that. Because I didn't enjoy my childhood enough that I would take any chance that I could put anybody through that again.

But if there's somebody who's already having a tough childhood and I could help them have a better one that feels like that's an easy win. Like to me that would be satisfying. But to bring somebody into the world and then have them have a bad life I couldn't handle that. Like I'm just not built that I could ever handle that. So I take the sure thing of definitely helping humanity extend the light of consciousness I guess.

So he says what a load. There's somebody who thinks that I'm either lying. Do you think I'm lying to you or lying to myself? It could be the one right. I guess there's no way for you to know is there? But the thing I thought about the most is that I'd rather support the people who are already here. That's how I thought of it. It could be that that's a rationalization of some sort. That would be pretty normal. But your child wouldn't have a tough life. Yeah no I don't think we're not talking about tough life in terms of economics. If it were just economics I wouldn't have worried. But in terms of mental health and that sort of thing I'm not so worried about climate change ruining the world. I just look around. I don't see a lot of happy people.

Now here's the golden age part. I'm pretty sure that we're about to wake up or we are waking up now to this whole what drugs to put in your body and whatnot. And maybe the pandemic helped with that because it sort of changed how we see the medical community. Changed our opinion about maybe having to make our own decisions and not depend on the experts so much. Which could be good or bad I guess. That could go both ways. But yeah I think a big, I would go with Elon Musk's thing that the ketamine maybe. And of course don't take any recommendations from me. I'm just saying that these are things that are being talked about. I'm not recommending them at all.

And the psychedelics I do think have the potential to be civilization changing absolutely. And because they don't cost much it's, yeah. Let me ask you this. Imagine everything that we do now to make the world a safer place right. We've got the United Nations and we've got the hotline to the Kremlin. So we've got all these systems and things to make things safer and avoid war. But we still have the damn wars right? So I guess those systems are better than not having them but they're not really getting it done.

But imagine this. This is purely speculative and it's just a mental experiment. Imagine that if instead of all that stuff whenever there was a dispute or even before there was one the heads of state would get together and do mushrooms together. That's it. And then replace everything else with just that. Now of course that will never happen. Of course it will never happen. I'm not suggesting that's even remotely possible. I'm just saying if it did it would probably end war. Do you think? I mean honestly if you just imagine, it doesn't work if your leader is 100 years old so forget about Trump he won't take a drug and forget about Biden he's too old. But imagine DeSantis who I imagine is anti-drug so again this wouldn't happen but it's at least he's young enough.

So imagine a President DeSantis someday doing mushrooms with a President Putin who's 70 or so and not that old. And they just bond and see the world differently. And the next thing you know just war is a lot harder. Like it doesn't make sense suddenly. Because it would be so much easier to say, "You know wait a minute are you saying that if Russia and the United States simply had to just make friends that the same way that Germany benefited by being friends with and Japan benefited and basically everybody every country that said hey can we be your friend has benefited substantially."

Can you imagine sitting in a room and having the right kind of chemical incentive and you just look at Putin and say, "Why are we even doing this? Do you want to be the greatest leader that Russia ever had?" And Putin would be, "Well I thought I already was." They say, "Okay okay but you want to continue being the greatest leader that there ever was?" And Putin would say, "How do you do that?" He said, "End war and war would go to space with us. How about that? How about end war and help us go to space and we'll get some good asteroids. We'll mine some stuff. We'll free your economy to do what it can do. We'll share our technology with you. It'll be awesome. You'll be the best leader that Russia ever had. You'll quadruple your GDP. There'll be statues of you everywhere and you will have ended war."

It, I'm telling you, the golden age. You just have to accept it. It's right there. It's right there. The hard part is getting people to just pick it up. It's like here it is. Here's all of your solutions. All of your solutions. We have all the answers now. Here they are. And people are like, "I don't know. I don't trust those solutions."

So here's where the golden age I think is going to happen. I think that the energy shock will cause us to be pro-nuclear in a way that we had to be. So our energy thing is now on a course for full correction. It's going to be slow but it's now on a very definite course towards full correction. It's going to be nuclear. Energy will go nuclear and through Tesla-like activities it will be also electric. I'm seeing solar. So it's going to be solar and pretty much just solar and nuclear. So I would say those two things solve climate change or at least they're likely to be enough to mitigate the worst problems as long as we're also mitigating things as we go. It's not the only stuff. So that's better.

What about the pandemic? Horrible, horrible thing right? But don't you think we got a lot better at handling the next pandemic? Like a lot better. And I feel like even though you think these new vaccinations are killing people, some of you think that, I feel like what we learned from that could create a platform for everything from vaccinations for cancer to vaccinations for all kinds of stuff. Or we'll find out there was some problem with it. Can't rule that out. I'm giving you the optimist view that look at the Ukraine Russia war. Does it forever end the idea that it's a good idea to attack your neighbor with tanks? Fairly not. Well I mean up till now I guess Putin still thought it was a good idea to attack his neighbor with tanks. And at this point don't you think this will always be the cautionary tale? It's like okay all right it doesn't work.

I think Afghanistan is as bad a situation as it was at least it will always remind us of what kinds of things not to do again. But Ukraine didn't look like Afghanistan. They looked like such different places that maybe the lesson didn't transfer. But now you've got an industrial country. You've got a backwards country. And neither of them could be conquered by the Soviet Union or Russia. That should mean something. If you couldn't conquer either kind of country and they're so different maybe the whole country conquering thing isn't for you.

All right. What else is good? So we're going to solve energy. I think we're safer from pandemics. And I think war looks less likely. I think the biggest problem is inflation.

All right let me give you the ultimate economic safety thought. Are you ready? Yeah most of you have some concern I would think about inflation and GDP going down and maybe food shortages and everything else. Most of you starting to have a little anxiety about that right? And gas prices. Not a little, maybe a lot. So some of you having a lot of anxiety. I'm having anxiety about it and I'm rich you know relatively speaking. I can't even imagine how this would feel if I was just squeaking by. This would feel like insanely bad.

But let me give you the one positive thing that I can give you. I've told you before that economics is really complicated stuff. I have a degree in economics and I'm confused half the time. But there was one rule that I always look to that tells me where things are headed. There's just one metric. If you get that one metric right all the other things can work themselves out. But if you get the one thing wrong nothing can work itself out. Do you know what the one thing is? Employment. Employment rate. Not even raises. Not even cost of living adjustments. Not unions. Just the pure number of people who have jobs compared to the numbers who want them.

And the fact that we have labor shortages now so we could actually use more workers. Even immigrants are in demand apparently. With all the immigration we have it's still hard to get the harvest picked I think. So we're actually understaffed. I don't know of any situation where you had close to full employment where you couldn't work out the other stuff. You know what I mean?

And here here's the math of why that is so important. The difference between an unemployed person and an employed person is a gigantic drag on the rest of the people right? If somebody is employed and they're taking care of themselves and maybe adding something to the taxes then that's taken care of. But if they're unemployed not only are they not adding but they're subtracting. You have to pay them to live or they die. So one unemployed person is really really expensive compared to almost any other problem.

So if you get that one thing right the other stuff can be really painful for a while but the odds of it working out in the long run are real good right? So when you're seeing people who seem to be the most knowledgeable and experienced about economics and they see all the things you see, you know they're seeing the inflation, they're seeing they might get worse, they're saying everything, supply chain problems, China problems, blah blah. They see all that but they don't look like they're panicking do they? Have you noticed that there's no tone of panic even though all the metrics are sort of awful? Because that one thing is right. The jobs. And I think the people who know the most are sort of just looking at that one and saying, you know, probably much like I do, say okay as long as that one thing's okay at least our foundation is in good shape right? The foundation is strong then you can work out the rest.

Mushrooms is tulips? Yeah I see what you're saying. Labor participation yes that's a big one as well. Total employment is still below pre-pandemic but it's still good. How do we fix BlackRock buying all the single family homes? The solution for housing is better housing. Not building the same kind of homes and reselling them over and over again. There is definitely a way to build a home for 10 percent of what it costs to build a home. So I think that's going to be another part of the golden age.

I think that if you got rid of fees, you got rid of zoning and you turned it into a kit. Just I've talked about this before but imagine designing homes in which all the parts are an even amount. In other words a room in this house of the future could be 10 by 12 but it could never be 10 by 12 feet and two inches. And the reason is so you'd never have to cut anything. So if you're putting in the floor you buy one foot squares and you put in as many as you need for the squares and nothing gets cut. And maybe it's a kit form so everything snaps together so you could unsnap it and move a wall if you needed to etc.

Now I think that's where it has to go. It's just that nobody has a business model to make money from making that. The old Sears kits. So I know there's some historical examples but those kits I believe you still have to cut didn't you or not? I think those were if you imagine what we could do now compared to what they could do in those days I imagine that we could make a kit that would be way better. Just way better.

And then if you make the homes with you say here's how I do it. I design perfect rooms and then you could design a house that used as many of those preset rooms in whatever configuration they fit and then you can build almost any kind of a house but you never have to cut anything. You just get a kit and snap it together. So I think that's where it needs to go. The tough part would be I mean I think you could even do the plumbing. In fact I'll bet you can make a house that's self-aware. Imagine a house that comes as a kit and then each part has a camera in it so every part you put becom