's pretty good. It doesn't I don't think it makes much difference to the United States whether they get away with it or not. But if somebody actually figured out how to thwart the US Navy by painting a poorly produced flag on the side of the ship, I would have a little bit of respect for that in the bad guy way.

Well, there's a story that says, according to Marjorie Taylor Greene, who's now out of politics, she says that when she tried to get Trump to agree to release the Epstein files, that part of that conversation involved Trump saying, and remember this is Marjorie Taylor Greene. She's the one who heard it, that if they release them, quote, his friends will get hurt. Now, that needs a lot more context, doesn't it? Because if the only reason that Trump doesn't want the files released is because his friends would get hurt, that might not be a good reason. But if he also knows that his friends are innocent, then you would care. I think you would care if your friends got hurt. And I don't disagree with that impulse to protect your friends if you know that they're not guilty of anything. I suspect though that's not the one and only reason he doesn't want them released. I suspect that the intelligence agencies are behind some of the suppression. I think so. So it seems likely to me that the CIA would suppress anything that was bad for them forever, but they would allow anything that was bad for Trump's friends to be released. So if Trump says it would be bad for my friends, he might be leaving out the part that says you're not going to learn anything useful because the CIA is definitely not going to show you that and they do have the power to block anything. So I would wonder if there's more context to his comments. So I do agree that if he knew, he probably does that nothing good can come out of it except for it would hurt his friends but in return nothing good could come out of it. What are you going to do? What would you do if you knew nothing good could come out of it except it would hurt your friends? I don't know. I might block it. I don't think that's the worst impulse in the world.

Anyway, I guess January is the month where we have to worry about the government shutting down over health care being continuously funded or not. But pollster Frank Luntz thinks that it would be bad for Trump if it doesn't get funded. I guess that means bad for Republicans in general because Trump won't be running again. But do you believe that? Do you think that if the Republicans say no, it's a waste of money, we're not going to fund it for another three years? Do you think that that would hurt the Republicans more? The polling seems to suggest yes, but I wonder if that's real because I think people just always just defer to their side. So if the Republicans shut down things, I don't know. I can see how that would be bad for Republicans, but not guaranteed.

All right, one more sip of water. One more short story. And it looks like I got through it today.

So there's a former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev who's now on Russia's security council who said about Zelensky. He was talking about the attack on Putin's residence. He said that Zelensky was quote trying to derail the settlement of the conflict. And then Medvedev said that Zelensky he wants war. But here's the provocative part. Well now at least he'll have to stay in hiding for the rest of his worthless life. How would you like to be Zelensky and allegedly, but we don't know. Allegedly tried to assassinate Putin in his residence and knowing that Putin is the most assassinating guy in the world, maybe not counting Israel. So Israel does assassinate anybody they can get to, but even Israel didn't assassinate the Supreme Leader. So if you were going to try to assassinate somebody and it didn't work, the most dangerous person you could miss would be Putin. He would definitely chase you to the end of the earth to assassinate you back. Am I right? Especially if Zelensky is out of power. The minute that Zelensky is no longer the leader of Ukraine, which has to happen someday, I think Putin is going to give the green light to all of his assassins to throw him off a balcony somewhere. So when Medvedev says, "Well, now at least he'll have to stay in hiding for the rest of his worthless life," that's probably true. I don't think there's enough security in the world that could protect Zelensky from Putin. And maybe even the Ukrainians would kill him first for making a deal. I don't know. But if you were Zelensky, the only way you have to survive is to stay in power. So that's a problem.

That's my advice. Never assassinate or attempt to assassinate the most revenge-assassinating guy in the world.

Now, my other question is this. Apparently we know that Putin has not lived in any of his residences for three years specifically because they're harder to defend and that he's been using an apartment in the Kremlin because it's easier to defend. Now, do you think that Ukraine was not aware of that? So