t. You know, I never thought that eggs would be like a luxury good, but I was in the grocery store the other day and I saw I was going to get some eggs and there was so much activity in the egg section. Like people were talking and it looked like there was going to be a fight. There were plenty of eggs but it looked like there was a whole thing happening and I just looked at it and said nope, I'm not going to be in the middle of whatever that is because it looks like the eggs are going to start flying. So I didn't get any eggs but I'm going to save up some money and maybe get some eggs sometime.

As you know, prisoner Marc Fogel was released from Russia thanks to the good work of the Trump administration and their emissaries. Now the big question is why was that so easy? What did Trump offer in return? Now I don't know the answer to the question and I don't know if he offered anything in return but let me tell you what I think happened. So this is pure speculation and the only thing I'm using as my reasoning is that the best persuader would do it this way, right?

So if you assume that Trump is really good at the negotiating thing, this is how he should have done it and he should do the same thing with the Hamas hostages and it goes like this. Hostages are not a negotiating point. Hostages are not a negotiating point. You return them or nothing good will ever happen to you again. It's the opening ticket to have a conversation. It's not part of the negotiation. It's how you get a ticket to the negotiation. You never ever ever ever ever ever negotiate for a hostage.

Now we always do it, right? We're always trading this for that and you know if you have a straight up trade, well some negotiation might make sense. But if a country is just holding somebody and they're just doing it to be dicks to get a little leverage on you, that's when you tell them you have no idea what's going to come down on you if you don't release them. This is first priority, top priority. You do not hold an American, period. If you hold an American every weight that we can put at you is going to come for that one person, just for the one person. Now that's the only way to approach this.

But there's also a nice way to say it. So here's what I imagine Trump did. Hey Putin, now this could be through intermediaries, not necessarily a direct conversation, but hey Putin, I've been saying some good things about you. I've been telling people that we could work with you to end the war. You want to end the war, we want to end the war, but we're not even going to have a conversation with you unless this guy comes home.

So if you want me to say that you did a good job negotiating, that we got a good deal, that things are working out in some kind of a respectful way, the only way you're going to do it is return this guy right now. We're not even going to have a conversation about Ukraine and you could just keep losing people and losing your treasure. We're going to give them long-term missiles and you just got to fix this and you got to do it right away.

Now the carrot in that case would be to stay on good terms with Trump when everybody needs to be on good terms with him and not take the risk that this one prisoner is going to derail everything. So if Trump does what he usually does, he injected some real risk that Putin said I don't know what the blowback is going to be. But since we do have a chance to end this war thing and in a way that maybe he'd be at least a little bit happy, he's not going to blow it over one hostage.

So I think, and I don't know, I think Trump got him with nothing in return, which is the way it should have been. That's exactly how it should have been. But we'll see. It could be that there was something traded but the country felt pretty good about it and it made us once again remember that