ice, stein, a tankard, possibly a thermos, maybe a flask. Fill it with your favorite liquid. I like coffee. And join me now for the simultaneous sip. And if you haven't learned to do the "ahh" part, you should really get on that because it really makes a difference.

All right. Well, I'm full of good news today. I'm probably going to do more good news and bad news from now on. I'm going to become your source of dopamine, that chemical that makes you feel good all day.

So the first thing we should know is that we're coming into the summer news cycle. What is different about the summer news cycle? There's not much news. So we're going to be entering the period where the news sort of dies. There won't be necessarily, I mean there could be, but chances are there's not a lot happening over the summer. Last summer was so slow that by August the news was so dead that the President of the United States invited me in to have a chat. I'm not even making that up. Yeah, you know, last August the news was so slow, you know, Congress was off doing their summer vacations or whatever, that literally the President of the United States said, "No, it's quiet. Call back that Dilbert guy and we'll chat for a little while." Now he was talking to a lot of people that summer. I think he was just using the time to shore up his base, which was very smart.

But summer is coming and there isn't a lot of bad news for this president. Indeed the only news that is sort of brewing looks like it's maybe more good news than bad news. And so the Democrats are probably just having a cow right now, so to say. Can you have a cow? That doesn't make sense. I need to have a cow. There's that like giving birth to a cow. It makes no sense. I think it's the same anyway. They're going to desperately need some bad news to give them something to talk about for the summer. It doesn't look like it's going to be served up.

If you look at the Middle East peace plan that Jared is looking into, there are two possibilities. One, nothing good will come of it, which would be largely what everybody would expect. So that's not really bad news. That would be, well, we tried again, nothing happened. But there is something different about the Middle East right now that we've never seen before. We have never seen a time in history when the Middle East was as well situated for peace, some kind of a comprehensive peace, in which the Palestinians and the Israelis and the Iranians at minimum made some kind of a deal. And what I mean by that is that everybody is flexible in a way they had never been before. So you have the most flexible group of countries, more flexible than they've ever been, for different reasons. I'll talk about that. At the same time you probably have the strongest leaders and the most, I would say, the most flexible leaders, the people who have the most strength and flexibility at the same time, which is really, really something you don't want to lose.

I mean the fact that Jared Kushner is trying to make something happen, I think he knows that there may never be a better time. Here's why. Saudi Arabia, with all of the issues that we know about with Khashoggi and everything else, has still maintained a good relationship with the United States at great political cost to President Trump. President Trump invested a lot of political capital in keeping Saudi Arabia in our friend circle even if maybe they haven't earned it. That's an asset the president created. He had nothing. This is what he does better than anything. He creates something out of nothing. Because that's something that Saudi Arabia really, really needs: to redeem itself in the Middle East, redeem itself with the world. What could be a better way than some kind of comprehensive peace plan?

Meanwhile, the other big player, the Iranians. You know, if Iran is forced into some kind of a deal, that means that their proxies also have pressure to make a deal. So if you get Iran, you probably make a lot of progress with all the proxies, maybe with the Palestinians as well. And it looks to me like Iran, the way they're talking and the way they're acting, is that they realize they're going to have to do something different to get a different result than what they have right now. And what they have right now is a bad situation. Their economy is getting strangled in a way it's never been strangled before. We've never had this level of economic pressure on them. And to the point where it could bring down the regime in a year or two. If they don't do anything, if they don't make a big change, they're probably going to fail in a year or two. So time is not on their side. And that makes them flexible.

Now they tried flexing their military muscle a little bit just to see if they could change the variables. And President Trump quickly shut that down by sailing much of our naval assets into the area just to say, maybe you should not do this. And it looks like the Iranians decided maybe we shouldn't do this. So I would say Iran is more flexible than they've ever been because there's more pressure than there's ever been. And they're getting close to the total failure point.

Saudi Arabia's got money, influence, etc. Other countries in the region that have worked with us before, they've got money. They're probably getting flexible too. And then you've got Israel. Israel is coming from a point of strength right now. And if Netanyahu continues being their leader, he's got a great relationship with the president. And he's made at least peace gestures towards the people of Iran. And he seems to be the right person, the right set of skills, the right badass personality to make a deal. Because it helps that you're a hardliner if you're trying to make peace, because then the threat of war is still credible. And everybody knows you're doing it from the right reasons. It's not because you're weak.

So I'm not going to go so far as to predict that there will be Middle East peace. I think you'd have to be foolish to make that prediction after a zillion years of no peace. But I will say unambiguously we've never had this set of variables where everybody's flexible at the same time for different reasons. And we have really strong leaders in all those countries. So even the Ayatollah, no matter what you think about him, he's a strong leader and he could make something happen if he needs to. Then maybe he will not be the leader in a year. So things could change.

All right, so there's that. Then of course there's the whole situation with Bill Barr looking into the origins of the Russia investigation. Certainly there will be no good news coming out of that for Democrats. We don't know what will come of it, but it's not going to be good news for Democrats. So they've got a tough, tough summer coming up. It looks like it's going to be a summer of unparalleled economic success, maybe something positive looking in the Middle East. Kim Jong-un remains friends with President Trump apparently.

And by the way, people have joked about this but it's not really a joke. When Kim Jong-un started insulting John Bolton, he was pacing most of the electorate in the United States. It was one of those weird situations in which everybody came together but we didn't see it coming. When Kim Jong-un said that, what did he call Bolton? He called the national security, so North Korea's government called National Security Advisor John Bolton quote a warmonger and quote a defective human product. And most of the people in the United States saw that and they said, yeah, that's not too far off. You know, I'm not going to put up a counter to that argument at the moment.

John Bolton is somebody that largely the people on both the right and the left are pretty wary of. I will go even further and say if we did not have a President Trump to make sure that Bolton's instincts have some kind of a counter, and it's a superior counter, if we didn't have that, I don't know if I would talk about anything else except getting rid of him. Like nothing would be more important to the well-being of the world and the country than removing John Bolton from office if you didn't have a President Trump who I think is a reliable counter to his impulses. You put them together and they're actually a really strong team. This has been said many times but it has to be said again: Bolton is the bad cop. And he does create a useful asset that the president has skillfully used to say, well, you know, it'd be good to be friends with me because I can make good things happen. I can help your economy. I can avoid war. I can do everything you want. I have everything you want and I'm willing to help you with it. But if that doesn't work out, have you met John Bolton? Because he's got some ideas that you might not like so much. So they're a great team.

But when Kim Jong-un insults Bolton, most of the United States says, well, finally we're on the same page with this. Now Bolton does have his supporters so I don't want to exaggerate that. But it is humorous that the worst thing happening with North Korea right now, think about it, the worst thing happening with North Korea in the United States is the president, President Trump, is having fun with it. You know, he's joking about Joe Biden. People in the United States are saying, well, if Kim Jong-un is just insulting John Bolton, Kim Jong-un, he's not dumb. At least he thinks like we do on some things. So that's pretty funny.

All right. I talked about, I did a special Periscope yesterday. Had to do that. You listed about Trump's hilarious tweet in which he said, I was actually sticking up for Sleepy Joe Biden while on foreign soil. Kim Jong-un called him a quote low IQ idiot and many other things, whereas I related to Chairman Kim as a much softer quote low IQ individual. Who could possibly be upset with that?

Now do you remember a couple years ago when people were saying it was popular for people to say, I hope this behavior doesn't become normalized. Don't normalize this behavior. This president cannot be normalized. Whatever you do, don't normalize him. And I look at this quote and I think, aren't you glad this got normalized? I mean seriously, can you tell me you're not happy that this got normalized? This is funny. It's fun. It doesn't hurt anybody. It's just good clean fun. And the fact that President Trump brought in Kim Jong-un as part of the joke just makes it funnier. And you know Kim Jong-un probably saw this and said, okay, that's pretty funny. Don't you think Kim Jong-un saw this and said, okay, well there's two things we agree on. John Bolton's kind of a wild card and Joe Biden's kind of a low IQ individual. So it's probably the healthiest, maybe the healthiest sign you could ever see is that Trump and Kim Jong-un are sort of joking about Joe Biden. There's no way that's bad. You could try to turn that into something bad but it is not. It is whatever the opposite of war is. If you were to make a continuum where you know there's good stuff on this side and all the way to war on this side, we're as far away from war as you can get when you're making jokes. Jokes are a good place to be.

All right. There was a huge thing that happened recently that the news will not recognize as anything. It will be completely, it will never be news. You'll never see a headline. And I feel this strongly by the way, one of the most important things happening in the world right now. And I might be biased because some of you remember I guess a few years ago I had teased on social