Chapo Trap House - UNLOCKED - Amber Interviews Aaron J. Leonard

Episode Date: August 16, 2018

Amber interviews author Aaron J. Leonard to discuss his book "A Threat of the First Magnitude: Counterintelligence & Infiltration From the Communist Party to the Revolutionary Union — 1962-1974" You can find A Threat of the First Magnitude here: https://repeaterbooks.com/product/a-threat-of-the-first-magnitude-fbi-counterintelligence-infiltration-from-the-communist-party-to-the-revolutionary-union-1962-1974/

Hey there, Gray Wolves. This is Amber Lee Frost here with a very special episode of Choppo Trap House. We have here with us Aaron Jay Leonard, one of the authors of A Threat of the First Magnitude, FBI Counterintelligence and Infiltration from the Communist Party to the Revolutionary Union, 1962 to 1974. Aaron, thank you so much for joining us. Oh, thanks for having me, Amber. It's great to finally get to talk. So this is, first of all, an incredible book because it's just an incredible story. I think most people who are familiar with left politics know something about Cointel Pro. They know a little bit about counterintelligence. I'm not sure if people know the exact scope and

comprehensiveness of the sort of government interference in left organizing from the very beginning. So I was wondering if we could start out with just a definition. What is counterintelligence and what is Cointel Pro and what is the difference between the two? Well, counterintelligence is a doctrine based, essentially a military doctrine where you're trying to undermine your enemy. Your enemy is operating in the United States. You could have forces operating as a foreign agent or as domestic subversion and counterintelligence is trying to undermine that through secret means. It's not a declared adversarial relation. It's operating in the background. Cointel Pro itself was a program that began in the

50s by the FBI aimed at the Communist Party, USA. It was a discrete program aimed at really undermining and destroying the party. It evolved as the 60s kind of started to get more dynamic and more threatening to the standing authority to be there was a counterintelligence, lack extremist aimed at groups like the Black Panthers, student nonviolent coordinating committee at individuals like Martin Luther King and James Foreman. There was also a counterintelligence, new left aimed at groups like SDS and later groups in the new Communist movement. Another aimed at Puerto Rican independence advocates. I think it ended up being like six or seven different Cointel Pros. This is what most people know. They know about the poison pen

letters that were sent to Jeff Ford and his street organization in Chicago to try to rile them up against the Black Panthers in Chicago. They know about the secret letter sent to Martin Luther King encouraging him to essentially kill himself because the FBI was on to his having extramarital affairs. King didn't know the FBI was writing to him. It was written as an outside exposure. There are different things. The FBI has engaged the counterintelligence program, the kind of broader thing more overall under the cover of something called internal security investigations which were kind of the currency in the 50s, 60s and 70s. Cointel Pro, the actual named organization, is a lot of what people know. Unfortunately, it's

where things start and stop. I was a Maoist for many years and kind of fancied myself kind of up on this stuff. I had read this, but when I stopped that, I stopped being a Maoist. I'm not quite sure what I am today. I'm a writer, if anything. I reexamined what it is that a group like the FBI actually does. It just kind of led me further and further to want to get deeper and deeper to understand it because I think people today who are from whatever stepping off point, looking for social justice, looking for a better world, it's really in their interest to understand how this works actually versus a lot of received wisdom or a lot of shorthand. Sure. I read that the kind of big counterintelligence

programs started with COOVER in 1919 to target left-wing immigrants mostly. The CPUSA was the biggest target and it was because they supported the Soviets, correct? It evolved. The Russian Revolution kind of created the FBI to try to undermine people in the United States who would support it. In the 1920s, there were these mass roundups of radical, mainly European, I believe, immigrants in something called the Pomerades. Pomer was the Attorney General. Hoover was a young lawyer working for him. Beyond the 20s into the 30s, the Communist Party started to become the major radical force in the United States. They did support the Soviets. The FBI, with the support of the president, people like

Roosevelt and the Attorney General's in the Justice Department, they countered that. They countered it aggressively. The 30s and 40s and the 50s, the FBI became much more sophisticated in trying to undermine the Communist Party USA. The Communist Party in the United States had something like 80,000 people by the end of World War II. It was kind of on the way to becoming something like a Euro Communist Party. Then in the 50s, the U.S. set everything it could against that party, both in the media and by unleashing the FBI to undermine it. To be a Communist in 1950 was probably worse than being a pedophile as far as social acceptability. Then the FBI met this new challenge in the wake of the Civil Rights Movement and then

the Black Freedom Movement. This whole new thing emerged, which inevitably, or not inevitably, but one of the biggest organized forms to come out of the 60s was the new Communist movement, which Maoism and Castro communism and the FBI. They had the Black Panther Party, which was kind of a mixed bag of pro-China, pro-Cuba, black nationalist. They had all these other threats and that became the big thing. It was kind of the rock that smashed them, too, because by the mid-70s, a lot of reorganization had to go on. We talked about that some of the FBI's had decades of experience. They weren't always as good as they became, but they became very sophisticated. That's one of the things we get into in the book is

it's not like every FBI agent was sophisticated, but they had a small cohort who actually took the time to understand the groups they were targeting. They understood geopolitics and this made them very effective at recruiting informants and attempting to undermine these groups. Sure. CPUSA was the biggest target, but you mentioned that they branched out into infiltrating groups that they refer to as black extremists, the Socialist Workers Party, the New Left, in the Klan. That seems like, let's say, a grab bag of organizations. What exactly sort of qualified you to be considered a threat by the Bureau of Investigation later the FBI? Well, that's a good question because there actually is a method to it. The FBI is fundamentally

tasked with protecting the internal security of the United States. The CIA has a more international scope. Aside from the kind of euphemistic language they package themselves in, it's pretty brutal stuff, what they do. The FBI was concerned with organizations that, particularly organizations with ties to foreign countries. The Communist Party was generally, by and large, their biggest target and the biggest target of their co-op operations, their informant penetration, because they had ties to the Soviet Union. The history at the last half of the 20th century is the struggle between the capitalist West and the Communist East, such as it was. This was real stuff. The Soviets, even though the Communist Party

in the 60s was dwindling and almost insignificant in terms of its effect in these larger movements, it still was directly aligned with the Soviet Union. The FBI had an informant in the Communist Party who was essentially like the secretary of state for that group. Gus Hall led the party in the late 50s into the 60s, but he had this guy, Morris Childs, who was his liaison, who went to the Soviet Union. He talked to Khrushchev. He met with Mao Zedong. He met with Brezhnev. He figured out payments that the Soviets were underwriting the work of the Communist Party USA. From the Soviet standpoint, they needed an agent in the United States. I'm not saying the individual cadre of the Communist Party were aware of this. This is at the very top of the

organization. They recruited Morris Childs from the party in 1952 when he was sick and vulnerable. They sent this FBI agent from Chicago, this guy, Carl Freeman, to go to Morris Childs' apartment. He was sick in bed. He had a heart trouble. He kind of left the party. His wife had left him. Yeah, yeah. They literally found him when he was recovering from a heart attack and his wife had left him. He had been made a pariah by the party, too. It was interesting that the guy, Browder, was the name? Yeah, Browder was kind of his mentor. Yeah, Browder was disgraced. So his mentor disgraced. He got pushed out. I'm sure he had a lot of bitterness towards the party and his life was really miserable. It seems like one of their all-time most useful

informants, someone who literally had practical and useful conversations with Mao, was a former, very committed and formerly trusted party member. Yeah, the guy had keys to every office metaphorically. But the way he even said that, it's just cold-blooded, right? It's like, let's get this guy who is most vulnerable and then let's go to work on him. That's exactly what they did. But beyond the kind of that moral problematic there is, it was a strategy. They had this program in the 50s called Top Left. The Communist Party was like in a mess in the early 50s. Their leaders had been sent to jail for sedition under the Smith Act. They were playing with taking part of their organization underground. They had lost thousands of people. They were an

internal turmoil. Then the FBI said, well, this is a good time to go interview leaders and try to flip them. They had this campaign called Top Left for top level. They systematically went after everybody they could identify as leaders of the group to quote-unquote interview them. When the FBI interviews them, this is not a passive thing. It's either trying to intimidate people or trying to kind of beat the bushes to see if there's the potential to turn somebody into an informant or just try to garner information that otherwise wouldn't be available. This doctrine, we kind of discovered this is what they did. I mean, not just with the Communist Party, but then into the new Communist movement and the Black Freedom movement is they really tried to get

people in the top of organizations because that gives them the most initiative. They were recently successful with this, but Morris Childs, like he said, he was the most successful. The guy was an agent for 25 years and it never got exposed until the academic David Garrow discovered in researching Martin Luther King that the FBI had this thing called Operation Solo. Morris Childs was him and his brother were Operation Solo, the top informants in the Communist Party USA. One of the weird things to me is just the density of informants they had. You mentioned at its height, I think in 1968, and just going to SDS for a second, they had 300 chapters and they said they had an informant in every chapter and some chapters had more than one informant.

Now that, I mean, I can see it was an insurgent movement. It had grown massively from like 300 people to 300 chapters in like five years. But for CPUSA, I mean, you said they had like 80,000 members in 1944. By 1962, they were down to like 5,000 members and they still had the same number roughly of informants, like 431 informants. And assuming those informants were dues payers, that's 8.5% of the membership of CPUSA. How would you justify that number? It's a pretty rough legacy for the CPUSA. I guess, I'm still understanding this, but one of the things we discovered in writing the book is there's a quality to it. There's informants who give casual bits of information and then there are informants who

actually operated the very top level of organizations. SDS, like you mentioned, I think at their peak, they claimed 100,000 people. How many of them were actually committed day-to-day activists would be a good deal less. But yeah, the FBI had informants in all those chapters. And I suspect most of them were just quasi-casual members, but the FBI did exercise a certain control over them. I mean, one of the things we discovered is that the FBI, excuse me, SDS had a huge schism in 1969. They had this kind of conventional Marxist-Leninist group called Progressive Labor trying to exert influence in the group. And then they had the national office, which was much more radical, would go on to become the weathermen. And then there was a larger mass

of kind of radical students, not inclined to either pull, but more tactically aligning with the national office. The FBI actually instructed its informants to vote with the national office. And the rationale was, look, these people are going to go off and do political violence. They're going to break laws. And we can go after them full force. If this group Progressive Labor Party takes charge, they're more savvy politically. They're not going to charge off and do kind of reckless things. And in the long haul, they're going to be more dangerous. That was their assessment at the moment. But they actually instructed their considerable cadre of enforcement to vote with the national office in that case. But the point is, you know, there is informants

at low levels. And then there's kind of an elite who go in and operate for as long as they can. And do consider, you know, they have been influenced. And, you know, from the standpoint of the organizations can do a good deal more damage. Sure. Yeah, I think it's interesting the contrast at one point, there's an anecdote where the FBI paid two, in their own words, vagrants, a dollar each, I believe, to just go into a May Day crowd and distribute flyers. Yeah, that was wild, right? Yeah. That was in a document. And, you know, you can see that's easy. And, you know, they got away with it as near as I can tell. Actually, what was more interesting to well, not so much more interesting, but that reminds me of another thing that happened is

how blind the left can sometimes be is the FBI was circulating this phony document in the ranks of the Communist Party, which pretended to be a pro Maoist faction within the Communist Party USA. And they circulated this thing called the ad hoc bulletin for a scientific socialist line. And the leaders of the Communist Party discovered that this bulletin was circulating. The idea was Communist Party members would read the bulletin and become all riled up against the Soviet policies, you know, and the FBI leveraged that dissent to create dissension in the group. You know, quite a number of people were kicked out of the Communist Party for adhering to this ad hoc bulletin. But the thing is, so this ad hoc bulletin is circulating. And the first thing the

Communists think is, oh, my God, the Trotskyists, they're the ones that have done this. They're not thinking it's the FBI. They're thinking it's another left set. Yeah, one of my favorite lines in the book is they did not assume there were forces more hostile than than the Trotskyists. Yeah, right? Right, right. Well, let's back up a little bit. Why don't you tell us what the ad hoc committee for a Marxist-Leninist Party is? Oh, it's a trip. And this is where I start to sound like Glenn Beck with his convoluted organization. I know, I know. It's really hard to read this book without feeling insane. But I assure you, one of the best parts of it is that half of it is primary documents. So you can go and look at

all of these things so you know that you're not just losing your mind. Yeah, well, I was trying to cover my back a little bit because, you know, it does sound a little out there, you know, without actually, if there's no grounding. The ad hoc committee in 1962, it's the brainchild of this guy, Herbert K. Stallings, who's a special agent in the Chicago Counterintelligence Office, whose main task is to undermine the Communist Party USA. We discovered the ad hoc committee through the work of this guy, David Sullivan, who was a revolutionary union member who had left and was briefly researched in 1980. And kind of he stored a few files in the NYU Tampa Met Library that we discovered. He wasn't able to fully resolve, you know, what the ad hoc

committee was. But through the efforts of an academic art ex team, we got hold of a document that permanently had the name of Herbert K. Stallings that also seemed to be associated with the ad hoc committee. So I googled ad hoc committee and Herbert Stallings. And what appeared was the personnel file of Carl Freeman. Carl Freeman is the guy who recruited Morris Childs. Carl Freeman is the Chicago FBI supervisor of the counterintelligence program. In his file is a clearly stated articulation of what the ad hoc committee is. And it says that it came out of the imagination of SA Herb Stallings. And its idea was to be a promo as construct in the pro-soviet Communist Party USA. I'm paraphrasing the last bit, but it spells out in meticulous detail that

you know, we're going to build a fake Maoist sect inside the Communist Party USA. Just to give you a sense of that, it would be like a pro-Trump faction in the Democratic Party. These things are irreconcilable. To be a pro-Maoist in 1963 in the Communist Party USA is, I think the word is an epitome. This was also right after this. Because they're passing polemics back and forth and they're really hating each other. But they, you know, this guy Stallings starts to produce these bulletins, you know, and they're reasonably sophisticated. And as time goes on, the bulletin gets more and more sophisticated. The group is around for, I think, 10 or 15 years. And they changed their name to the ad hoc committee for Marxist Leninist Party. Never once make any effort

to actually build a Marxist Leninist Party while other people are doing it. But they weigh in. And they're kind of respected among, you know, those in the know, even though they're super secret and nobody really knows what the deal is. But they intervene in all kinds of stuff. And like we write in the book, there are 15 to 17,000 pages on this group that are slowly going to get released. I should be getting 200 pages in a year. I mean, I'll be dead when all this stuff finally comes up. But I strongly suspect when the full program of the ad hoc committee is written, you know, it's going to probably change our conception of some of the stuff of the 60s. Because, you know, we know they were involved in the Revolutionary Union. We know they were

involved in the Communist Party USA. We have evidence that they were involved in progressive labor parties. So they were amid and among some of the major players doing devious work. Right. I mean, it seems like the Bureau had done things like this before on a smaller scale before just to like they would make fake organizations like the, you know, whatever red people's Union of Louisiana or something like that. And so that they could write recommendations for people so that they could say, this person is on the up and up. And that way they could embed themselves because they have a reference from a supposedly legitimate organization. But the ad hoc committee for a Marxist-Leninist party, it was a massive undertaking. And it was

huge. And it wasn't real. And it completely threw everything into chaos. Now, they were able to do this because of the Sino-Soviet schism, correct? Yeah, it's a puzzle because it, you know, nobody ever, and this is a thing with the FBI is they're really good at keeping secrets. I mean, some of the stuff they were forced to disclose. I mean, everybody knows about the Co and Tel Pro Black Panthers. But, you know, we started researching the Maoist Revolutionary Union. We've got thousands of pages. I think we might even have 10,000 pages on that group. And that says to me that, you know, progressive labor party, there's got to be thousands and thousands of pages. This is massive. And the way something like the ad hoc committee

reaches into it is, you know, look, it's cause for speculation. But we do know, you know, we discover my collaborator, Connor Gallagher, he's actually working in China. So he's not always available for interviewing. But, you know, he got the notion to go look through the papers of Morris Childs. Morris Childs, again, is this secretary of state for the Communist Party and an FBI informant to see if we could find anything about the ad hoc committee in his personal papers. And sure enough, he's got a full catalog of all the papers. And the suspicion is that he helped write the later versions. The later versions are very nuanced in Marxism, Leninism, especially in what Marx is called the black nationalist question. And they do these flips in their political stand,

you know, one year they say this and two years later they say the exact opposite and nobody even picks up on it because technology is such as how do you compare all these documents unless you're, you know, keeping a file and they're distributed secretly. So it's hard to keep that file. But and it's, it's only because they had, you know, Marxist or former Marxists on staff as informants that they were able to imitate the language of like, I mean, it looked, it looks legit. That's how that's how communists talked back then when you read these, you know, like these ad hoc kind of newsletters, you know, they were speaking to like kind of legitimate factionalism that already existed on some level among the left. You had people, you know, supporters of the Soviet

Union suddenly in contention with people who are moving more towards Mao. And it was very, you know, on a case by case basis, it's very believable. But like you said, it was kind of inconsistent. If you were able to see all of them at once, it starts to look a little shaky. Like for example, they switched positions entirely on black nationalism, correct? Yeah, they did. And at a point when it was becoming very volatile, I mean, you know, we doc, I mean, one of the most extensive parts of the book deals with this effort by a number of organizations, the Black Workers Congress, Young Lords Party, which had become something called the Puerto Rican Revolutionary Workers Organization, the Revolutionary Union and I work here along with

this group, the October League and the Guardian, they were all trying to come together to form, you know, a new Communist Party, you know, that was pro-Chinese and pro-Mao. And the ad hoc committee took the position that the time was not right, that black workers should lead black workers, Puerto Rican workers should lead Puerto Rican workers. So they took that position in a letter to this newspaper, the Guardian, the head of the Revolutionary Union delegation in the committee that was trying to get this merger with this guy named Don Wright. Don Wright had joined the RU and his political bona fides were, he had been in the ad hoc committee, and he put out the same position. It was the opposite position of what his organization was

actually, you know, telling him to put. And the end result is the union never came together, you know, the Revolutionary Union went on and formed a party by itself, but they totally, you know, the whole thing was derailed. And it seems like the ad hoc committee and Don Wright played a significant role. I mean, look, these were big questions in their contentious and complicated questions, and we see that today. So that was definitely an effect, but there was something secret going on in the background. I didn't want to say one thing, though, because, you know, your characterization of the sophistication of these documents, it's really important. I mean, there's two things. Actually, I talked recently in one city and somebody came up to me after and

said, well, you know, it's really interesting what you're saying, Aaron, but it's also depressing. You know, I mean, you know, sure, it is. But then, you know, and that kind of counterposes, I know from having been a Maoist, we proclaimed this thing that line is key. And I think there was a spoken and unspoken notion that somebody in the FBI or a police agent could never be that sophisticated politically. You know, that, you know, if you really believe this stuff, it was hard to speak it, you know, unless you were really steeped in it. But I think our book proves that, look, if you just study the documents and the literature, you can get pretty good at it. You know, when there's no mysticism to it, it's kind of like learning algebra in a sense. But

getting back to the point of being depressing is, no, it's a lot better to know what's going on instead of just kind of being victimized by it. And I think that's one of the things, you know, this book and our first book is trying to do is, you know, to kind of let people know that there is a methodology behind it. And it works a certain way. And, you know, it's worth understanding that. And people can do with that what they want. But if you do that, it's not as depressing. You know, it does mean that the terrain is a little bit more, you know, a good deal more dangerous than maybe a thought, but at least you know what the terrain is. Right. I mean, I think it is a little depressing to me. It's more like mystifying. Because from the very first ad hoc

committee bulletin, it was immediately disruptive. I mean, like people started, you know, being ejected from the party and people were put under scrutiny, people quit out of solidarity with other people being ejected, etc. People defected to other organizations. And it didn't seem like anyone thought, Hey, maybe someone is fucking with us. And I yeah, that's a good way to put it. It's nobody asked kind of fundamental one on one questions. Who are these people show your face? Oh, no, they thought maybe it was Trotskyus, which is, you know, fair, fair guess. But they, they seem to not be too concerned with how, or maybe they were, I don't know, but they were just so easily manipulated into chaos. It's very surprising. And I think the book starts out with

an anecdote about an informant that even fooled Lenin. And it just makes you wonder how, how does this stuff get passed to people? Well, you know, that's the thing I was thinking about this before we got on the phone to is, is the there's a legacy that gets passed down. And people are hesitant to confront their past as a result, they're going to be victimized by it again. You know, so Lenin had this guy, Roman Malinowski, who got on the elevated to the Soviet, the Bolshevik Central Committee, he was one of three people charged with ferreting out spies. And he was a czarist agent, and he ended up getting exposed. I was just reading to around the same time this group, the socialist revolutionaries in Russia, you know, the, they had a committee that undertook

political violence. And this guy, Yevno Azep was one of the three leading people on this committee, and he too was a czarist agent. So, you know, there's these people who get elevated historically to do damage. And then it gets exposed, and then nobody wants to talk about it, because it doesn't quite fit into the political narrative. I mean, Lenin famously, in a left-wing communism and infantile disorder, says, well, you know, this guy Malinowski was a spy. On the one hand, he sent thousands of good comrades to prison or even death. On the other hand, because he allowed us to operate legally and distribute cropta, you know, he recruited tens of thousands of Bolsheviks. And it's kind of a rationale. I mean, the logic is if you strip away the logic is, oh, well,

jeez, maybe we ought to have a lot more informants at the top of the organization. We need to see state power. He does not want to admit that he got tricked and that it was bad. And then privately, he admitted that- Maybe on a personal level, Lenin did confront it. But I think for political expediency, they passed down, well, you know, it's all good. And it's not all good. And a lot of the left kind of have this, to this day, this view that Malinowski was not a problem. I mean, Malinowski sent Stalin to Siberia. That's kind of had an effect on Stalin, right? Right. And how he viewed people and stuff. But that's another book to read, I guess, or write.

Right. Well, Lenin privately said, I never could see through that scoundrel Malinowski. But I think there's just some, there's some amount of shame to have, to, you know, having been a mark. But it's, you know, the stuff is very real and it's been historically very consistent. And it does seem like you have to keep your eyes open about it. At the, and the intro to the book, actually, you have this final paragraph that says, as for the groups that were FBI targets, their response is instructive. Beyond the combination of disbelief, denial, and even acceptance of the bureau's assaults, was a mistaken view that a correct political line, the supremacy of their ideals, was sufficient to withstand the attacks, if not in the short

run than in the long run. How that worked in practice is a lesson in repeated failure, one with historic precedent. There's just no way to avoid it. It's one of those hard truths. Yeah. And, and the thing is, is you can either confront it, or you can continue on. You know, we talk about Richard Aoki, who was this FBI informant for, from like the late fifties, up into the mid seventies. And, you know, when it was exposed, he was an informant, and a couple thousand pages of his file came out. The first reaction was, was, no, it's not true. And then the second reaction was, oh, well, even if he was an informant, he was a piss poor one, because he did more good than bad. But, you know, if he

actually look at his record, his record is he actually did more bad than good. You know, the statement doesn't stand on its own. And some of the people defending him actually deserve the accolades that he had. You know, these were folks who had fought for Asian American studies and social justice for, for, you know, Asian people. They're defending this guy who had sold out or, you know, betrayed those interests at every point. I mean, it's a hard thing to confront, and you're dealing with people who, you know, you're dealing with complicated people who are really sneaky. And, you know, of course, they've got the advantage. They know they're lying. You don't, you know, it's, it's on you to, to sort out truth from fact without making yourself crazy

or torpedoing your political agenda in the process. But, you know, yeah, they've got an advantage. But the bigger sin to use that religious term is, is even after the fact not excavating that ground, I think that's, I mean, I can make quite a few allowances for, for what people, you know, were subject to. But what doesn't make sense to me or what, what I don't think I, I would accept is, is that people have just let it go and acted like it never happened or let's not reexamine it. I don't think that's helpful. Sure. Sure. Especially moving forward, we've seen that this stuff is effective. And if we don't learn from it, it's going to happen again. But I remember the Aoki thing very vividly because I remember a Japanese American friend of mine just did not believe it.

And then I think a Times article in like 2015 came out and she was like crying because this was a very important, you know, figure to her. And it's a really ugly truth to have to confront. At the same time, like if you're not being infiltrated, it's probably because you're not a threat. And if you are a threat, you're probably being infiltrated. Oh, Jesus, that's, that's a good point. Yeah, it's a badge of honor. I mean, don't get crazy about it. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Results matter a little more than your infiltration level. But thank you so much for coming on. It's a really wonderful book. I recommend it entirely. I think one of the most fascinating things about it is that you have all of these amazing documents at the end that people

just get to pour through. And the utter just scope and pervasiveness of these programs is completely shocking. I'm relatively interested in this stuff. And I had absolutely no idea to the extent to which the left has been infiltrated. Alright, Aaron Jay Leonard, thank you so much for coming on. You can find a threat of the first magnitude out from repeater books in the show description. Go out and buy it. It's really fascinating. Thank you for having me. It's a lot of fun. Fun is probably not the right word. I always look forward to the opportunity to get into this with folks. So thank you. Alright, thank you.