need to get one too.

All right. Well, I'm going to start with the best story of the day. So CNN had ex-CIA director Brennan to talk about the Ukraine situation, and he notes that Russia seems to be losing everything and it's all falling apart for Russia. And he believes that Russia sabotaged the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, which is Russia's own pipeline. Now it had been turned off already, so they had turned it off so it wasn't delivering any gas. So although it was not delivering any gas, John Brennan thinks that Putin blew it up to really send a strong signal to the West. And I think it did.

Now a lot of people don't know where Putin got that strategy of blowing up his own assets. It originally came from a military genius who came up with this first. It's sort of non-obvious, right? You're like, why would you blow up your own valuable asset? But no, it came from this. It's actually a military doctrine. There was a famous military strategist named Mel Brooks, and in his military treatise it was called, I believe it's called *Blazing Saddles*. And there's a scene in there in which we learn if you hold a gun to yourself and you threaten to kill yourself, sometimes using unpleasant language, if you threaten to kill yourself, then people won't kill you. Like, okay, I'm gonna kill this person. Okay, Mel Brooks used different language. So I think it really looks like the Mel Brooks play. I think Putin is threatening to destroy all of his assets, maybe one at a time, if we don't give him what he wants. So that seems quite reasonable.

John Brennan — now talk about a credible guy. John Brennan was one of the people who helped collect the 50 intel prior and current intel people who said that the Hunter Biden laptop was Russian disinformation. Yeah, he's also the same John Brennan who pushed the Russia collusion hoax. But there's no reason to believe that he's lying this time when he says that Russia attacked itself to teach us a lesson. And let me tell you, I feel a little bit closer to maybe Ukraine will have to surrender. I mean, if Russia keeps bombing its own assets, I don't know if any of us are safe. I mean, what if Putin decides to bomb Moscow next? What are we going to do? Would Ukraine just surrender? I mean, the strategy looks pretty strong. So yeah, Russia will be attacking itself because attacking Ukraine didn't work out at all.

I think Putin needed to win. He's like, okay, have we attacked anything successfully lately? The news from the Donbas, not so good, not so good. Okay, we need to have some kind of a win. Can you please attack something successfully? I need to be able to say we attacked something and we got the win. Well, you know, the Ukrainians are really dug in. Don't tell me what you can't do. I need a win. You need to blow something up and I need to be able to say that I got that thing. You know, we're running out of weapons and our soldiers are not really — well, no, no, I need you to blow something up and give me a win. Well, you know, the only thing we could actually blow up would be our own stuff. I don't need to know the details. Just give me a win.

So then the Russian general said, all right, what's the least protected thing we own? And they thought, our pipeline. We could blow that damn pipeline up. So Putin gets the win for a successful military operation against his own pipeline, according to John Brennan. Has he ever lied to us? I mean, you can trust John Brennan, right? I mean, just because he ran an organization whose entire job is lying to us and he's documented as the biggest liar in American politics, bar none, bar none. But this time he's totally telling the truth.

But the funniest thing was watching, I think it was Brianna Keilar on CNN, who asked Brennan why he thinks that Putin blew up his own pipeline to teach the West a lesson when the pipeline — they could just turn it off. She was like, you could just turn it off. You have to blow it up? Then I saw some speculation that really it was a clever trick and that Brennan is right. And here's why they blew it up. Because if Putin had not blown it up, he might be legally required to turn it on later to fulfill legal contracts. So to get out of his legal contracts later, he blew up his own pipeline.

Now, if there's one thing that we know is true, Putin is very concerned about his legal agreements and he would be willing to bomb his entire country so that people didn't think he'd be the kind of guy who'd say one thing and then do another. Because that's not the kind of reputation you want to have out there. Perfectly reasonable, perfectly reasonable. Because prior to knowing that Putin was bombing his own pipeline, according to John Brennan, I didn't know if Putin was trustworthy or not. You know, I didn't know if you could depend on him to keep a deal. But now that I know he would be willing to bomb his own assets to get out of a deal, well, I trust him more. And I think that's what he was going for. He was going for some kind of a business credibility kind of a play. And I think when you see somebody blow up their own assets so they don't have to deliver what they promised, that makes me trust them. So I think this hypothesis that Russia is behind the blowing up of their own asset is completely feasible. Completely. I buy it. Yup, totally believable.

Now, as a backdrop to this, and don't make too much of a big deal about this because we know what the story is. We know Russia blew up their own assets because John Brennan would never lie to us on CNN. That's something we know for sure. But some people, you know, there's always some rogue, there's always some goofy bastard who's got some conspiracy theory, right? So here's the conspiracy that's going around now. There's a video of Joe Biden before the Ukraine invasion saying in public — I know it's ridiculous — but saying in public in the clearest possible terms that if Russia invaded, those pipelines were no longer going to be functional. Now some people say that matters. And the fact that Biden directly said if you do this, we're going to take care of those pipelines, and he gave a smile that looked exactly like he meant blowing them up. Because there's a smile that says I mean blowing them up, right? You have to see the video.

Here's how you talk if you don't mean blowing them up. "Mr. Biden, are you saying that you're going to shut down those pipelines?" "Yes, we'll use whatever means we can. We're going to shut down those pipelines." That's how you say it if you don't mean we're going to blow them up. Here's how Biden said it: "So how will you do it?" "I promise you we can do it." Now that's pretty much the blow-it-up face, isn't it? I mean, I think he told us he's going to blow them up, and then they blew up.

Now to me this looks like nothing but giant energy companies manipulating our government to reduce the competitiveness of their competitor. That literally is all I see here. Do you see anything except a giant energy company has control of our military and the military is doing the bidding of some energy company in the United States? That's what it looked like to me. It looked like it literally was a commercial operation to increase the profits of American gas companies. Now I think that's the reason it happened. Also maybe it has some military, you know, homeland European protection, whatever. I mean that might be good too. But you know, when follow the money works this well, if you can follow the money this directly, I don't know if you need to ask any other questions. I mean to me this doesn't even look like a national interest so much as just an energy company interest.

Now you could argue — and I'm going to argue this — that when the United States supports its energy industry, even doing things that you might think are over the line or sketchy or too far or whatever, that the United States does better. You know, there are a lot of smart people who say basically look at the energy situation of any country and you know everything you need to know. That's pretty close to true, isn't it? If you've got a country that has cheap energy or is a major producer of energy, they seem to always be doing fine. So if you take care of your energy business, your country is going to be a strong country. If you don't take care of your energy business and you have to buy energy from other people and that's all you have, you're just a buyer of energy, you're going to be very vulnerable.

So I'm not sure that it is wrong for the country to do things that are literally just good for big energy companies in the United States. No, it's creepy and it's unethical and it's not free markets. You could find a hundred ethical and moral reasons why we shouldn't do it easily, right? It wouldn't take any effort at all. At the same time, having our government and our energy companies basically being one entity and working for each other's benefit actually kind of works. Kind of works. Yeah, I mean I don't like it, but strangely it works.

All right. Can we do this next conversation without some of you just flying out of control? Okay, see if I can just get through this next two minutes without somebody just going nuts on me, okay? So there's a trending hashtag for face masks. No, I hate face masks. I am anti-face masks. I hate them. And we're not going to talk about the science. However, it is trending again because cases are up and people are pushing for face masks again.

Now in this context, some doctor tweeted the studies that he says support face masks. I retweeted it with a comment on just the messenger. Now the way you should take that when I say I'm just the messenger, that means I'm not endorsing it. That's how you should interpret it. If I say, hey, look at this, this looks pretty solid, then I'm probably endorsing it or at least I think there's nothing wrong with it. But if I say I'm just the messenger, you should very clearly see that I'm just telling you what other people are saying.

Because I had always wondered why it is that the people on the right say there are no studies that support masks and the people on the left say there are tons of them, they're all over the place. Have you ever wondered about that? Like why could it both be true that there are tons of studies saying they work at the same time there are no studies that say they work, and both be true? So I think maybe I have something close to an answer, which is this list of studies. It was sort of a study about other studies of masks. It took about 10 seconds for, you know, various people who know about data to just rip it apart as ridiculous. So apparently this study happened at the very beginning of the pandemic when all of our data was bad, and basically it was just a bunch of useless studies. They were summed up by another useless study.

Now if you were non-critical and you saw that there were a whole bunch of studies in the same direction, what would you do if you were not very sophisticated about how people lie with data? I think it would be pretty convincing. Now let me stop again because I know a whole bunch of people are flying crazy at home. No, I'm anti-mask and I have been from the start. But the conversation about it is part of the context of America, so I can't avoid it.

So I think the entire thing comes down to this. I think the entire thing comes down to the people on the left believe the studies because there are lots of them, but the people on the right don't believe the studies because when you look at them they don't seem credible. You know, they just don't seem to be from a time period and it doesn't look like they could untangle all the confounders, you know, all the variables that could affect them. I mean the most obvious thing is that the people who are likely to wear masks have something in common with each other, right? And the country is most likely to do it. They probably have something in common as a country. So I just don't know that you can sort it out. I also don't believe that they would have kept in the study anything that said the opposite, right? Because when you do a study of studies, let's say a meta study or even just a study of studies which would be different, you're deciding what's in and what's out. What they never do is throw everything in because they always say, well, you know, this one is so big you don't want to put this one in there,