Peak Prosperity - The Whole System Needs To Be Burned Down

Episode Date: August 9, 2024

The collectivist mindset cannot be reasoned with. It is immune to logic and resistant to any countervailing facts on the ground. Join Peter Boghossian and I as we struggle mightily to grasp a mindset that might as well be alien to us.

I think that the worst elements of the left are mentally ill, and the worst elements of the right are mentally retarded. Hello everyone, welcome to this Off the Cuff. Very excited to have my good friend Peter Boghossian back with us today. We're going to be discussing a lot of things, but of course we just had the Trump assassination attempt, and we're going to be talking through that. So it's always good to hear a couple of minds come at it, and we'll see what we can do. But here's the rules. Peter, my ground rules are we are very clear when we're talking about facts. And I've got a lot of facts. And then when we're conjecture and speculation, let's separate those because I've got some of those as well.

But I just like to be really clear. For me, this is how I roll what do i know what am i what am i sort of piecing together and guessing yeah 100 i agree to the rules excellent so um i'm interested because i've been in deep on this and i've been doing daily reporting and i probably have 100 hours in on it and it's only been five days six days so tell from your what do you know? Where are you at? What have you heard? Where'd you get your news from? Wow, those are huge questions. Okay, so I know there was an attempted assassination on Trump. I know, let's see if I can answer those questions and take take note of them chronologically, but I got my news I first started on Twitter. And then I subsequently looked both independent sources

and legacy media to see what their take on it was. And then I dug deeper. And I read I put in nowhere near the number of hours that you have and you asked me one more oh so um what do I know so I I put out a tweet I don't know if you can put it pull it up on your page where a seating senator made quite an extraordinary comment about people knowing yeah there there it is. This is it, Mike Lee saying, at some point before Trump walked on stage, seated senator, Secret Service knew there was an armed gunman on that roof

and they let Trump walk onto the stage anyway. Correct. And you said, what'd you say? That is quite the claim. In fact, if it were true, it would not only warrant dismantling the entire Secret Service and replacing literally every agent, and I were true, it would not only warrant dismantling the entire Secret Service and replacing literally every agent, and I think you and I would agree on that,

but incarceration should follow. I think you and I and every sane person would agree on that. I hope, sir, you have ample evidence for this statement. That seemed like a very irresponsible thing for a seating senator, say. Yep. Unless it was true. No, even if it were true, because he wouldn't have sufficient justification, because there wouldn't be an independent inquiry. I just think it's irresponsible to make statements like that

without an independent inquiry having come to a conclusion about the problem. I mean, that would stoke not only a potential national panic, and we're already as a nation on edge in so many ways, but it would also further undermine trust and confidence in law enforcement. That's my opinion. That's not a fact. But I think we would agree on that. So I'm going to question that, but let me just start at the beginning.

So there's also a thread of people out there, I want to dispense with this early on, who think that the whole thing was staged, that Trump had a squib of fake blood and that the whole thing was faked. Okay, I agree. So we can both rule that out as crazy talk. Crazy talk. Real bullets, flu. Absolutely.

Exactly, yeah. So we got that. The idea to me, which is speculation, but not really, I'm pretty heavy on this, that somebody within the Trump administration or Trump himself would have said, hey, take a winger at my head, I'll turn my head at just the right moment and nip my ear if you could.

It's insane. OK, so we don't have to talk about that because that's just crazy land. Good. OK, so now we're down to the substance of it, though, which is that I have lost, Peter, complete faith that the FBI can investigate things appropriately because and I can give you lots of data. Right. We have the Hunter Biden laptop, which they sat on for years. Right. We have just the Whitmer thing, you know, where apparently they full on got tossed out of court because they had just entrapped some people on and on and on.

I have I have lost faith in the FBI as an independent investigative arm. So who would be investigate who would be providing the investigation that you're saying we should rely on? OK, before we say the Secret Service should be dismantled, who is that body? OK, so that is a crisis of confidence. Jürgen Habermas calls this a legitimation crisis. There's a crisis of legitimacy in the institution. No one trusts the institutions anymore, almost nobody. So let me step back from that question and let me ask you a question.

I've never understood why it's not good to answer a question with a question. But you didn't say that's not one of your rules. I can't ask. Nope, it wasn't part of the rule set. That's on me. I'll eat it. Okay. So would you agree with me that if you had trust in the system, and I realize that that's a big if, because you don't and I don't, but if we trusted the system, and I realize that that's a big if, because you don't and I don't, but if we trusted the system, would you agree that the senator putting out, a seated senator putting out a response like that was irresponsible until after an independent investigation came back? I do, and I also think that, I do, okay? Yes. because i am a big believer that the the investigation has to run however i get really annoyed when i watch the investigation being run in such a way that i can

see it's already being tilted right so the fbi came out one of their first statements was this gun this was a gunman acting alone they hadn't even secured the scene yet they didn't possibly know if there were more people out there. They couldn't actually make that statement, but you could see them wanting to go forward on a PR basis with this narrative that this was a lone gunman. Obviously, it would take time to resolve what actually the circumstances here were. Okay, so there's a lot there. So we both agree that in an ideal world, if we had a wand and everybody was sane and rational and not beholden to ideology, and there was a competence hierarchy and that people achieve their positions from genuine competence as opposed to diversity initiatives or what have you,

we would both agree that an independent investigation should be conducted and we should really drill down and figure out what the answer is in such such a way that there's a univocality to those answers in a in other words independent people of different political persuasions and ideological commitments could come together and agree upon what the facts were yes that's a lot of it and that's the world that's the. Yes, that's a lot of it. And that's the world I want to live in, by the way. That is a lot of it. Right, right.

No, it's the world we both, every sane person should want to live in. And certainly every person who loves this country and America should want to live in. Okay. But we don't live in that world. And we live in a very different world. Now, can you go back to something

that you just said before this, immediately before that? Say what you said again about, like, you didn't use the word deep state, but can you just repeat that point that you made? Yeah, let me frame it slightly differently and see if I get there. If I haven't, just I'll try again. So we can put boundaries around this incident right and one end of the boundary set is wow this was just comedy of incompetence just stacked on top of itself that's where i was going with it yes right and on the other end we say oh that's too many comical errors and we have data or evidence that suggests that perhaps it was more than that, that this was actually, there was some inside help or other enablement that allowed this thing to

happen or actually encouraged it to happen. Okay. So let's, let's, let's talk about that for a second, because I think this is extremely important. And this is good that you and I are having this conversation because we both understand the ideology at play, and we both understand the kinds of people who deploy the ideology. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. So my response to you, and Michael Schirmer put out a good tweet about this about most most of these circumstances the gunmen are actually lone gunmen but my response to you would be and again I think you're this bears repeating I think you're one of the few people who actually understand this

the very idea that someone would say we don't put a Secret Service on that roof because it's a slope and we don't want people to get hurt. Okay? That is so... Can I swear on your show? You sure can. That's fucking insane. That is a fucking crazy town.

Okay? It is. So that is not somebody who is, you know, wants Trump to die, or maybe she does, but that is someone who's beholden to an ideology, right? That is someone whose safetyism has overridden the primary mission of the organization, and they discharge that mission by protecting people. That's literally what the Secret Service is tasked to do. So it seems to me that and I believe her. I believe that she's sincere that she didn't want to put an agent on the roof because of the slope.

No, I believe. I mean, it's the other. The other two is crazy. The other two snipers that we all saw just off behind Trump were on a steeper pitch. They were on like a 312 pitch. Those other guys were on a 1.15 to 12 pitch. By the way, Peter, just to put, just to put, let me put a point on this. This is awesome.

Your ADA compliant ramp for wheelchairs can be steeper than the slope of that roof. Okay. Okay. But Chris, I'm going to tell you what, um, Ronald, I'm going to say to you what Ronald Reagan said to Walter Mondale. There you go again. There you go again, assuming that there's a kind of rationality to the people. Because I think at base,

you're still presupposing that there's a competence hierarchy. You're still assuming that the people who got to where they got to, got to because they possess some degree of competence that helped them discharge the primary mission of the organization. You might the primary mission you might you might be overthinking it you might be overthinking it because what appears to me is that as I raise children this is a four-year-old they've got a cookie behind their back and they're coming up with a wild excuse about a gremlin that forced them to do something that's what I hear I hear her flailing about for anything to explain why they didn't have

a team on a roof that was 140 eyeline straight area yards away because i peter i spent an hour on the phone this morning with a guy who ran teams like this 30 20 30 years right whole professional career and he said their perimeter was always 400 yards and they would never outsource that to scrubs but you, and they would never have left that roof on exposed, but okay. They also wouldn't have picked that spot in the first place. Right. Okay.

Oh, but, but Chris, and I say this in a very friendly way, but there you go again. I mean, you're assuming that the people you're assuming that she's competent. You're assuming that, that, I mean, that, that is not an assumption that you can make. What you, but you're saying that incompetence must have gone all the way down because we have under her that would have been the special agent in charge of the site. That would have been all the other people. I'm saying that I don't believe that anybody in the federal government, in the Biden administration in particular, or in a university setting or any place in which these. These initiatives have been implemented. I don't believe that the people, that positions people occupy are even remotely related to

their competence or degree of ability to fulfill their job requirements. I think it's a crisis of legitimacy to such a profound extent that the trust that no, the reason that no one trusts the system is because the system isn't trustworthy. But to extend from that to there was some kind of a conspiracy, I think incompetence is the far better explanatory mechanism. Well, hold on, hold on. So I'm going to connect it back to something you said earlier, because this is such an important point. Within that vacuum of incompetence, right, there's a lot of loose play. This is a steering wheel that has a lot of play before it moves the wheels, right?

Incompetence gives you lots of crevices for things to happen. Okay? Yes, correct. Okay. Second, we know that there are ideologues really powerful ideologues i saw people calling trump hitler hitler hitler hitler like a mind programming wasp hive mind virus thing hitler hitler hitler is it unthinkable that somebody within that power structure would go you know i might be a hero or be looked upon kindly or even rewarded. If

I was the one who took killer out. That no, but there's a I think there's a mistaken assumption in the question. But no, not only would that not be unthinkable, in fact, you'd almost have it would almost have to be the case that you'd have someone in there who who would hold that belief. I mean, remember the whole punching Nazi thing a while ago? It always amazed me, and I said repeatedly, if you actually believe someone was a Nazi, you wouldn't just punch them.

Like, if I believed that someone was hauling Jews or whoever off to the gas chamber, I would do far more than punch them. But what you would need in that is, so you would need a bunch of people to get together. Because again, you're not talking about just a one off. You're talking about like, if that tweet, again, is correct. You're talking about an actual conspiracy. You're talking about treason. You're talking about. I mean, I'm not I'm not an attorney, but something I don't know what the the the legal term would be, but you're allowing somebody to be murdered. Mm hmm. Yeah. So we actually have a bunch of people now. Yeah. Okay. So I don't. Okay. So in order for that to be true, you would have to tell me what your idea, how your-year-old who somehow magically avoided everything and found an unsecured roof, 140 easy chip yard shots away from the president, and nobody saw him, but they actually did see him on the roof 20 minutes prior, et cetera.

You say, OK, that's just stacked incompetence. It happens. Yes. stacked incompetence, it happens. What if I could prove to you that there was a second weapon firing at Trump in the crowd and prove that to you, then what would happen? What would that mean to me? It wouldn't mean to me that the Secret Service was in on anything. Well, would it imply that there was a conspiracy because the conspiracy is when two or more people come together to commit a crime? Not by necessity, but likely, because there could have been two people, independent actors

who wanted to assassinate Trump at the rally. That's possible. It's highly possible that the second guy could have shot and gotten away if i can prove to you that the that the that they those two sets of shots that coming from two weapons were only seconds apart and only yards apart from each other okay so in order to prove that i would assume that that event was unbelievably well videoed videoed video recorded unfortunately we actually have we actually have data we have audio data proves it flat out can i show you something here let me show you because it i don't you have video data

okay i want to show you something okay so first this comes from cnn all right so we're talking mainstream right and so they said here that in yellow the first three shots are consistent with This comes from CNN. All right. So we're talking mainstream. Right. And so they said here that in yellow, the first three shots are consistent with alleged weapon A. The next five were consistent with alleged weapon B. OK. And the final acoustic impulse was a possible weapon C. We all think that's the sniper weapon taking that headshot that took crooks out okay this is an audio analysis by um uh catalan uh griardus their director of the national center of media forensics at university colorado denver and her senior professional research associate cole whitecotton and as well another dude robert mayher down there also confirmed that there was a second um set of how far away this all was now um that so we already have two weapons firing and i can show

you this this piece right here which shows all eight shots coming towards trump and i can show you that the second set of shots i'll just skip ahead to what i i put out for everybody this right here we have a video recording and these people are back by the building where Crooks was on. And from this audio recording, you can hear two separate weapons clear as day. One is muffled and goes took and it has no audio echoes. It sounds different. And then there's one close crack, crack, crack, crack, crack. Two weapons. Totally different. OK, so. Let's take a look at that um so i think we need to be parsimonious in our understanding and our explanations of this so i i would assume that that to go back to an earlier point first

before i make my second point i would assume that that event was unbelievably well recorded from multiple levels so we would have the video of people somebody would be i would also assume unless the unless people are just completely incompetent beyond any conceivable understanding that people would comb through the footage and look for another shooter. I mean, has that been, like, that would be, okay, so if you did that, that would be evidence to me. That would be overwhelming evidence.

My strongest evidence right now, because of the muffled nature of those first three shots and where they are and they have no audio echoes off of solid surfaces, I think they were inside the building that crooks was in and therefore you wouldn't have seen that person on video that's the best guess i'm just guessing that's that's speculation no i'm giving you the data the data is we have two sets of shots one two three and then one two three four five separate weapons and i can show you the audio signature that those are snapping by the microphone down at trump's position and in landing on people two weapons we know that their weapon like it can

so i don't trust anything from cnn by the way and that was a thing yeah thank you thank you i just i did that because you know sometimes people think oh well if they put it in it must be so true that they couldn't ignore it yeah yeah okay so so um and by the way the news coverage cnn in particular right after the assassination was disgraceful oh but that's a that's a that's a conversation another day but it is worth mentioning okay so then so then you should actually have schirmer on your show he'd be a perfect person to talk about this with okay so then if you could show me and we know that those are um bullets we know that those are gun gunshots excuse me um and we have that from multiple independent recordings because there must have been literally 500 people recording

yeah i'm looking to get more but but i have two independent. They line up perfectly. I lined all the signatures up. And by the way, just to get wonky, bullets traveling at over supersonic speed, right? The first thing they leave is a crack, the supersonic crack. And then later you get the report of the gun. It's called the crack boom. And in sniper language, if you want to find out how far away somebody is who's shooting at you you the crack boom gives you some information it's not perfect you have to know how fast the bullet's traveling and this and that but all things equal if you assume your bullets traveling 2500 2600 feet per second the crack boom tells you how far away it is okay so the crack boom of the first three that they come over trump clear as day

because nobody's screaming yet it's just you can hear the crack boom crack boom crack boom 140 yards away give or take a couple yards we got that locked down perfectly consistent with the building that crooks was on yeah and then the next five though oh things get a little spicy there um the crack booms are slightly different lengths from the other ones and they're in a different location and they sound different everything's different about them so i'm i'm this guy peter's like look you give me data that data now has to be explained and it can't be explained by the humidity suddenly changed or we think that you know the gunman was firing in a totally different direction which would have changed the sound signature because we have the this audio signature near the building he's shooting from and the

Supersonic crack of those bullets all going over the microphone this recording downrange. So both of those line up Okay, so again, I'm trying to Look at secondary or tertiary pieces of evidence that support the claim. So did he have an earpiece in this kid i you know we don't we have one picture of his bloody head that's it we don't have any pictures of like spent shell casings exit wounds we don't have anything we got nothing we got nothing i got a picture of an fbi guy hosing the roof down the next day and washing it all away i got a picture of that yeah i mean because i'm thinking of if the, if it really was timed,

he would have to have had a headpiece and without a headpiece. I think we could rule that out. Oh, no, no, no. What if he was on the roof and the, and the first three shots were taken by somebody below him,

he would have heard it clear as day. I mean, it would have been very loud. Yeah. I thought the claim was that the, they, Oh, so it wasn't that they timed the shots together. No, there was one, two, three, about a three second gap, and then one, two, three, four, five. So where did the other shots go? Wouldn't we have the bullets?

Well, you would hope we're going to get the bullet tracings of every single shot accounted for. I don't, I'm not holding my breath. But we know that pause, pause, pause, this is very important. So you're not holding your breath because you think that I'm trying to say this without conspiracy, but I don't I can't think seem to think of a way to frame it. Because there's a conspiracy that people don't want to know there was another shooter or because these people are just so incompetent they can't carry out a basic investigation? It's probably the first one, and I'll tell you why. You remember, so there's a lot of a lot of weirdness around the Las Vegas shooting. video of fbi agents with fbi on their back in their white coveralls actually applying ceiling tar over bullet holes all over that that parking lot surface right exactly you just can't make it

up you know and i'm like shouldn't they be calculating trajectories and glance angles and things you know yeah uh and and by way, they're not in the construction business. And if you ever get involved in a murder, unfortunately, and the police are there and they take the body away and then you say, hey, what about this blood? That's on you. We don't have the, that's on you. They don't do the blood clean, they don't do cleanup. But the FBI does in these examples. So it's, yeah.

So loss of trust. I've lost Peter. My trust is so profoundly damaged by those things I've just told you. you a few things. Vivek Ramaswamy was the candidate who's now endorsed Trump, who is really behind the idea of the deep state and as Trump used to say, draining the swamp. So I want to comment on that, and then I want to comment on things I've been wrong about in the past. So we have term limits for the President, we have term limits for the senators, we have term limits for Congress. It seems not only reason we have

term limits for Congress, wasn't aware of that, or Senate. Don't we? No, I thought he hanging on. Oh, no, no, no, no, no, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. It was at Senate, Senate, Senate. Sorry, my bad. There's no there are no terms. Sorry, my bad. There are no term I meant to say there are no term limits for the Supreme Court. Right, right. But I wonder if I wonder if some of the some of this could be cleaned up by imposing term limits for federal employees. I don't know, I'm just throwing it out there.

So one thing that I will tell you that has shaked my, my confidence in the system is fairly low. But I will, I think it's important, Chris, when you move in the public space, and you make a mistake that you should own up to that and be honest about that. So I'm I was hoodwinked by the Hunter Biden laptop story on two accounts. The first account I was hoodwinked on, I believe that was at 5051 signatories on the letter from, you know, FBI agents, former NSA agents, intelligence officials. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I thought to myself, well, okay, these people move in this space. They know what they're talking about. They certainly wouldn't lie.

And in order for them to sign a letter like that, they would have to have just an extraordinarily high degree of certainty based upon their competence areas. So I trusted them. I was wrong to have trusted them. And I will not make that mistake again. The problem now is that I don't trust anybody. I trust Michael Schellenberger.

He's one of the few people I trust. He's a good friend of mine. Yeah, he's good. And I trust Michael Schellenberger. Two Michaels. But, you know, I trust other people, independent journalists, and I can other people, independent journalists, and I can think of some independent journalists I like,

which are different from, obviously, opinion columnists, et cetera. But the problem is it's very hard to have a functioning democracy if nobody trusts the system. It's very hard to know. And that's the other thing. Like when I read these studies of, or these exit polls, excuse me, when I read these surveys of people who these exit polls, excuse me, when I read these surveys of people who trust or don't trust the university systems, I see like, you know, 20, 25% of conservatives

don't trust the university system. And I'm thinking to myself, I am shocked, like flabbergasted that it's that high. Like if these people actually knew what it was in the universities there was no possible way that that number would be 20 like so i've seen firsthand at my institution that i will not name a kind of i don't even know a kind of like a lunatic asylum of people who held certain beliefs that were completely divorced from reality i see that that spread out. And, you know, I go all over around the world and I talk to people about this toxic American export instead of, you know, Miranda rights or freedom of speech, freedom of assembly. My buddy Reed and I will be out of the country for eight months this year. And a lot of that is just helping people who don't know how to deal with critical social justice in their

organizations and institutions. And it is a ne colonial export on the part of the United States. So but but my point being that I have been hoodwinked, I have made mistakes. We don't trust the system because the system is not worth trust trusting. We need to think about how to get this back. I will say one thing. Chris, it's easy, but go ahead. I get but I got to follow up to that. Well, I really, truly try to not make things political, because I

don't think that the right left access or access or the the Republican, Democrat or the liberal conservative is useful anymore as it was when even while I was gonna say when we were even 20 years ago, I did this interview that just completely blew my mind. Reid and I traveled to Dallas to interview this guy, Eton Haim. Holy shit. This was the most crazy.

So this guy, just briefly, because it speaks to the point. So this guy is a surgeon. We haven't released the interview yet. This interview is one of the most insane things I've ever heard in my life. And he blew the whistle on a hospital. The people were lying about what they were doing to children, this care. The story is so crazy. But again, I'm trying not to make a political crisp, but I don't see any other way because it is inherently political the biden administration has used their complete authority administrative authority and they've come after this guy

they've come after his wife they've come after his lawyers and they're he's it's looking like if biden gets in again this guy is going to do 10 years in prison for exposing. It wasn't even a scandal. It was. It's not even malpractice. It doesn't even rise to the level of malpractice, like to the reporting of mutilating people's genitals, children's after they said they weren't doing it but my point is that not only is there no trust in the system but there are departments within the system have been weaponized against people who whistleblow like they're using the administrative state to punish people and

threaten this guy who should be going before Congress to receive a medal for what he's done. So, again, my point to you there. Let me expand that. Yeah, please. Because it's such a great point. So it's not just that they're weaponizing people who whistleblow, right? They're weaponizing it against people who do things that embarrass or derail their narrative.

A hundred percent. That's what this guy interviewed. That's what came right in this interview yeah so it's about that intimidating whistleblowers yes yeah they want to intimidate whistleblowers yeah so they want to they want to pursue this this narrative so so let me connect so so you you already know and you have firsthand experience that when it comes to something I'm gonna say I know this is important to this guy and I'm not diminishing it but something is small as a single guy going against their narrative, they will bring the machinery of state down on this dude. Right. Right. Totally.

Imagine a bigger threat to their narrative worldview than somebody like Trump coming in and cleaning house and kicking all their sorry asses out of power. Now, what would they be willing to do? Okay, so I, while I disagree with you, fundamentally, I'm going to argue, I'm going to give you a data point that supports your position. Wait, wait, wait, what are you disagreeing with? I disagree with the idea that this cannot be explained by grotesque incompetence. I didn't, I didn't say that.

I said very clearly that it's the transitive rule. If they're willing to bring the machinery of state down on a lowly doctor for having run against their narrative in this small case, and they're willing to weaponize lawfare against Trump at a higher level, right? Yes, they are. But you're drawing a line somewhere. you're saying, but they wouldn't do that. Right? I'm just wondering, how do you draw that line? How do you get your worldview for that? Yeah, well, because it's categorically distinct to allow someone to be a presidential candidate to be assassinated.

That's like another level of that, that that's just that, well, first of all, it's illegal, so there's a legal component there, whereas it's not a legal component because the physicians claim that they're doing these surgeries on the basis of the best available evidence, the WPATH stuff, but that's been debunked and disproven, so that's not true. So there's a legal thing, and allowing someone to be murdered when it's explicitly your job to prevent them from being murdered.

That's very different. Like that seems to me you'd need the burden of evidence on you in that case would be far greater. Well, I would have thought that doctors whose job it is to heal and improve people's lives wouldn't be hacking genitals off for a few bucks. Right. So so it's pretty clear, Peter, there's where are we drawing these lines? So you're saying this act of political violence, which involves a bullet to the head, is too far. But I'm I'm suggesting that the violence has already been the way they burn the cities down. The violence has been in the language. So we've had social violence, cultural violence. They've had people kicked out of their jobs, that deep platforming.

Peter, they wanted to ruin your ability to make a livelihood. They wanted you under a bridge and to die from some disease in the cold and on some rainy December afternoon, right? This is who they are. So that's violence. So I see these as violence, cultural violence, social violence. And you're saying, but Chris, violence, violence is just a line too far. And I'm wondering how you draw that. No. So let me, let me say what I agree with you with. So, but Chris, violence, violence is just a line too far. Okay. And I'm wondering how you draw that. No. So let me say what I agree with you with. So, you know, I left Portland because I was literally hunted out.

And once I was surrounded by the street, by these people who in no uncertain terms told me they were going to kill me. I can't prove they're in Antifa, but I strongly suspect that. So I left Portland. And I will give you a point of data that supports your point. And then I'll tell you why I don't think it's true. So I just spoke to Eric Kaufman, the political Canadian political scientist who lives in the UK and he's like, he's a he's a he's a good guy. And he's a data

driven guy, like us. And he did a survey of among democrats 30 i can't remember the exact phrasing of the words but 30 percent of democrats um again i i know the wording is important but the sentiment here is what i'm after 30 percent of democrats said something like, it's too bad that the bullets missed. Right. So if Democrats are like, what, 45 percent of the country and Republicans are 45 percent of the country and 10 percent is kind of whatever they are, then you're looking at a non-trivial percentage of people who wanted Trump to die, which is just horrifying, horrifying on multiple levels. Okay.

That's different. And some of them work in the government. Statistically speaking, some of them work in the government. Of course they do. And I would bet extremely large numbers of those are academics. I would bet that a disproportionate number of those people are academics, but that's a hypothesis. You said separate opinion from fact.

Okay. So, you know, the duty, you should pull up the mission of the Secret Service and put that on. Like the mission of the Secret Service is to literally protect people. Pull that up for a second. I'm looking for it right now. Okay. Hang on.

Keep going. So the mission of the Secret Service is, oh, and I lost, I was looking at the tab. There we go. The mission of the Secret Service is to protect people. So you would, so the people whose job it is entrusted with, they would have to be, yeah. So what is it?

Integrated mission of protection and financial investigations to ensure the safety and security of our protectees, key locations, and events of national significance. Okay, that's it. Okay, so they would have to go against their, I think their sworn officers. I'm pretty sure they're sworn officers. And I'm pretty sure up until recently, you don't just become a Secret Service agent. Like, a lot of those guys are ex-Navy SEALs or, I mean, they're like serious people. Like, you don't just walk into the Secret Service. Until DEI got in there and that obviously, that went back.

That bolsters my argument though, right? So those people would have to not only betray their oath, but they would have to do it in the most egregious of manners. And that's very different from thugs hunting me on the street or the average Joe or even an academic or what have you wishing Trump that the bullet hit Trump. Like, so that's just another level of, again, we're facing the same problem. Like I would call every single one of those people before Congress, but the problem is the whole system is corrupt. So we're like becoming a banana republic.

We just don't trust anything because they're not worth our trust. There it is. So I've had lots of conversations with people who are in the biz. Are you aware, Peter, that the United States has run thousands of missions per year on other countries, many of which involve what we would call extreme measures. You know, you know, the renditions. No. Well, you could rendition. I mean, extreme measures is wet work. I mean, you go and you take somebody out. It's just simpler than, you know, picking them up and hauling them off to Guantanamo and doing some. That's hard work. But are you aware that that happens all the time?

Pretty, pretty much. I haven't I've been out of that space for a while. But my understanding was certainly in the Obama administration, and subsequent to that, it happened in the Trump administration, the early Biden administration, but I haven't been following it in the last couple of years. But it's a thing, right? We have national security interests, and their teams go out and do things on our behalf, you know.

You can't handle the truth, right? So they shield it from us and it's all rationalized just did that in somalia and it was just discovered sure yeah yeah you know and obama was called assassin in chief because he ordered the drone strike killing of over 4 000 people of which 90 were innocent right wedding party 16 year old american kids on and on right it's pretty gross so the idea then is you're saying okay but there's another line chris sure we do that to other people but we would never bring that sort of technology home and apply that same sort of practice here. We draw a line that doesn't happen.

No, no, I'm not saying that. I'm not saying never. I'm saying that the burden, the burden of proof is on you. And it's's pretty high because you're talking about sworn agents who would who would break the law and allow someone to be murdered that's a pretty high well i mean now we're in deep speculation territory but first there's there's there's a bunch of agents who are out on the field right and there's like the inner ring and their job is to dive on trump or their protectee you know and then there's another layer and you got your two sets of snipers which were placed totally inappropriately for this different story. But then there's a special agent in charge. So this is my speculation.

It goes something like this. They just need to know that some one person, a sniper that they have placed needs to be able to get a shot or two or three off. Right. So unfortunately for them. who's the they in that sentence it's going to be somebody somebody that they've brought in a wet work specialist somebody who shoots people secret service the secret yeah the special agent in charge yeah one person right who reports directly to kim cheetle who then reports directly to me orcas right it's a very short chain. Hey, you know what? It would be awfully good if we could take care of this. And I think it's a lot easier than you suspect.

But by the way, this was bungled so badly, Peter, that we have evidence all over the place that this had to have been allowed to happen, or it was the worst incompetence we've ever seen ever, ever, ever ever ever right in which case cheetle auto have resigned already at a minimum just like out of embarrassment let alone the japanese concept of seppuku right she ought to and you get mayorkas came out the next day and said he had 100 confidence in her and i'm like 100 99 not 93 it was really it was really interesting that she said the buck stopped with me i take responsibility but that's just verbal behavior if the buck actually stopped with you and you take responsibility you'd resign that's what taking responsibility means it doesn't mean

that you just verbally signal to people that you you mother you utter certain vocabulary words it means that those words have to have meaning that has some kind of lawful tethering to reality. And in this case, resignation. Yeah. So in earlier, you said,

Hey, would this fix it? You know, having term limits or the equivalent of on federal employees. You know what we need, Peter accountability. We need consequences, consequences,

right? Remember on nine 11 from that. we're so allegedly you know we had four planes flying through highly protected airspace and somehow none of them got intercepted well the guy who was in charge of NORAD that day really shouldn't have been promoted he really ought to have been fired you know what I'm saying Chris Chris this reminds me he got promoted yeah this is this reminds me of a conversation that I had with my father years ago when he was alive. And I told him, I think that we should teach epistemology to children in schools. And he laughed at me and he said, how about we teach him how to read?

So we're so far from the conversation about accountability we're just not there the system is broken at so many levels because the meritocracy has been sufficiently demeaned and the values that enable us to get to where i call them for example legacy values being on time showing up for work all of those values you can look at the famous sign from the smithsonian have been labeled white values colonialist values etc yeah although nobody terrible everybody wants their surgeon to be on time so we're we're talking about the idea that we would hold people accountable is so far... I mean, we don't even fire plagiarists.

I've always said that, you know, James Lindsay said that claiming that two plus two is the hill to die on, right? And all these lunatics or these complete ideologues claim that, you know, two plus two doesn't equal four. Okay. And of course, they're coming out of Harvard, etc. But we're not even at the point of holding people accountable. And again, just in the space in which,

one of the spaces in which I move academia, the litmus test, the gold standard for that would be fire plagiarists, but we won't fire them, and I'll be extremely blunt with you, because they're African Americans. That's why we don't fire them. That's why Claudine Gay kept a $900,000 a year salary. That's why, you know, half more, I think half or more than half of Rufo's exposed and others,

the DEI bureaucrats have plagiarized and nothing happens to them. And lest anybody think it's at Harvard, that's not true. It's at seven other schools, universities in the United States. So I don't think we're ready to have a conversation about accountability. Wait, wait, wait. So I'm going to, I'm going to, that's way down the line.

Okay. But let me, let me put a point on that again. Cause I think this is true, but maybe I'm making stuff up. If you were, I'm going to make a supposition. If you were a plagiarist, but you were a conservative plagiarist, I bet your ass would be fired instantly so yeah there's no accountability we don't have examples within the narrative structure so again like if you you can commit all kinds of sins as long as they're kind of

directionally correct for whatever this current narrative is right now which i don't get because i'm not a collectivist i'm a very individualist libertarian kind of guy like you know you be you i'll be me you be personally responsible i'll take personal responsibility if you say something that pisses me off that's my problem no it's kind of guy it's a very reasonable it's a very reasonable supposition the problem is that we can't we don't have evidence for that because nine out of ten roughly nine and ten academics are very very left-leaning what would be really interesting to see is if a black conservative plagiarized, what would happen to them. And if you look at black conservatives,

like my friend, Jason Hill, that DePaul, what they're doing to him is just shameful. So it's not that they're black. What are they doing to him? I don't know the story. I should have him on your show. Dude, his books are awesome. That guy is pulling no punches. His books are phenomenal. Jason D. Hill is his name. So I'll connect you guys. I'll look into him.

He'd be a great guest for your show. He's gay. He's Christian. He's black. He's an immigrant. He checks all the boxes. But that doesn't matter because he doesn't yeah because he doesn't adhere to the ideology in fact he despises the ideology

so but but my point is you'd have to find someone like that so i i just think that in this crazy crazy world in which we're living and then i want to say one thing chris that i think is so important um i think we should look to the easiest explanation, which is grotesque incompetence. That doesn't mean we rule out conspiracies de facto or a priori. So I do want to say something that I think is important. You know, you see all of this stuff, and I know people are going to be listening to this, and they're going to think, oh, you know, there's a hammer looking for a nail. But I think part of the problem with this, you know, the female, I can't remember the Secret Service agent, I don't even

want to say her name. But the problem is when you hire on something other than merit, people will naturally assume if something happens, it's because you weren't hired on merit and because you're a woman or because you're black. And the problem is that that is incredibly demeaning to competent women, competent black people, et cetera. Glenn Lowry, John McWhorter, Thomas Sewell, you know, this is not my point. This has, this point has a long pedigree, particularly among contemporary black intellectuals, public intellectuals. But the problem is, you know, people are showing these photos over and over this woman and saying, look, DEI incompetence, but these people. I mean, look, I don't know the first thing about, I'm not a sniper. I've never been in

the military. I'm not qualified to speak. And my guess is that the overwhelming majority of people haven't also, and all of a sudden they're experts. So when you show all these people protecting the president and she's looking the other way, I'd be looking the other way. I'd be like, geez, maybe someone's coming from behind us. Someone's going to look the other way. But it's not what my opinion is. It's not what your opinion is. It's like, what's the protocol, and did this person follow the protocol?

And if they did not follow the protocol, you can't assume they didn't follow the protocol because they're a woman. You may make a reasonable assumption that the protocol wasn't followed because you put somebody in a position who didn't earn the position, but that person's name was forwarded because of some exogenous characteristic,

like they have a vagina or the color of their skin, which is, you cannot run a society like that. That's completely crazy. I guarantee you the Chinese do not do that. You know, the Gaokao, the standards, they do not do that. Like this is a unique dysfunction to the West at this time, and we're exporting that all over the world. It's actually in a weird kind of way good that we're exporting that because, yeah.

At a minimum, right? At a minimum, though, we can say that the DEI ran amuck so that this exogenous characteristic, oh my gosh, she's got a ponytail and a vagina, so let's put her up there. Look, you can't protect a six-foot-three guy with a five-foot-three body. It's just not how it works. In a ring, those are bullet catchers, right? Stoppers, right? And they have good body armor on and all that.

Like, the whole idea that we've gone so far off the rails that we can't even collectively you know remember that it's a bad idea to try and protect somebody with somebody else who's a foot shorter that's not the correct role for them maybe she's an incredible driver there's a good role but the idea of having your or an incredible shot or maybe she's like a super marksman or something which is fine did you ever watch the game of thrones i can't remember that woman, that huge woman. Yeah, I remember that woman. Yeah, Breanne, that's right. So, you know, if she were protecting Trump,

then it wouldn't be about being a woman. In fact, a size difference. Yeah. And then people would say to you, well, that's unfair because if you look at the Gaussian distributions of men and women, they overlap at those tails. So that more men are taller than more women, and that even peaks out in the top 1%. But the larger point being that people would then claim, well well you can't invoke that criterion because that would be inherently discriminatory against women but my response to that would be that's ridiculous

because the goal that's the goal isn't to get enough women in there the goal is to protect the person you're trying to protect so what difference does it make if there's a man or a woman or what their autonomy is or who they sleep with like these things are completely irrelevant to protecting the guy on stage they have literally nothing to do with it yeah but so you see that is so we have these arguments and also like this should be easy right but peter and you're you're deep in this you'll know more i never i maybe you have i have never had anybody come to me and say you know what there just aren't enough white dudes in the NBA.

Or there just aren't enough people with cerebral palsy represented in the major leagues for baseball. I haven't heard these arguments yet, right? You know, because they would be patently absurd. You're like, oh, no, that's total meritocracy. You want the guy who actually can get the ball in the hole and hit the ball and run, right? Yeah, okay. So there's a few things. There it's clear, right? Yeah, okay. So there's a few things. Like there it's clear, right?

Yeah, I tweeted about that years ago. If you really want diversity, you'd put a midget on a basketball team. People lost their fucking minds about that. Or if you really wanted diversity, you'd put someone who doesn't know how to add or has literally no math skills whatsoever as chair of the math department.

But you don't want those things and so it's obvious that when you place when you look at something other than competence or merit and you promote people to be surgeons for example the inevitable consequence of that is that people are going to die i think we can agree i think that's a fact because it's a merit-based skill. Maybe creative writing or something would be different. But the other consequence, and I put this as a fact and not as an opinion, if you do that long enough,

people aren't going to want to go to black doctors because they won't think that they've earned those positions. I also put this as a fact. If we accept that premise is true, then what follows from that is that that will have a detrimental psychological effect on black doctors, because they'll think that people in mass, they just won't accept, they won't think that they've gotten, even though they could be an incredibly talented physician the problem is that when we look at some characteristic i mean that's the other thing this these conversations are just so stupid i mean this shit is just so obvious it's just so stupid

that it's ridiculous we have to have this conversation i know it's like we should be talking about far more interesting things but this is the situation that we're in so you know it's like that i just watched the other night um you know that show with denzel washington i think the equalizer you know and he's sitting across from this guy and the guy is like in some italian town the guy's like you need to mind your own business and denzel washington's like you know i, man. I am really trying. But you people are making this very difficult for me. I am really trying to talk about other things.

I'm really trying to get out of this space. But you people are making this very difficult for me. This is not a complicated thing. If you put someone, if you let people into, like pilots, obviously this has to be merit-based like this is not complicated and when people die if you accept the fact this gets back to your point like you never heard anybody say you know you need i can't remember majors or whatever on the

nba that's not what you said but um if you let people die and you know that death is the inevitable result, it has to be the inevitable result, then what you are saying is we think diversity is more important than saving someone's life. And the moment you do that, that's why this is a universal solvent. It corrupts everything it touches because it corrupts it at the point of origin. It corrupts it at the mission statement. It bastardizes and almost is antithetical to the mission of what they're trying to do. Make sure the plane lands safely. Save a person's life.

Not let some dude get assassinated. But if they would just come out and say it, we think it's more important to have black doctors or, you know, secret service agents who possess. What do they call the vagina bearing than it is? This is truly an idiotic conversation. We think that's more. We think that's more important than discharging the fundamental mission of the organization, then you can say, Okay, here's a person who's honest, here's a person I can have a conversation with. That is not the same as

the people who say, Well, there will be no negative effect of this. That's clearly false. It's demonstrably false when you undermine the hierarchy. Yeah, I mean, that's it. That's the way that's the only way the society survives if because it's if it's not that it's cronyism it's tribalism it's hereditary the way i've started i'm always looking for patterns you know i'm trying to make sense out of things peter so one thing is obviously you know you've got the collectivists and their ideologies versus sort of the individualists, how they think about the world. The way I thought about it that makes sense to me was that the people who we were talking about,

they live in the world of abstraction. So the abstract is very important to them. Abstractions like how many black doctors are there is an abstract thought, whereas a concrete thought is how good is that doctor and how could I objectively know that, right? So here's one thing I know about humans. You know, we don't do abstractions. Well, we're bad at them. Right.

And so the people who are kind of sort of on the Trumpy side of things, if we could say a lot of them, maybe lean hue a little bit blue collar and the people are on the Biden side, maybe hue a little to the university educated side, maybe just a little. It's really abstraction versus reality right people who live they live in different worlds and there's nothing wrong with either or all that but you need it you need to have a little blend so the theory I'm working on is that it goes like this I call it one step removed where if you just put one tiny step Peter between the consequences of something and the person's action that's all we need to give ourselves an amazing amount of something and the person's action that's all we need to give ourselves an amazing amount of moral runway so here's an example um pg and e dumps hexavalent

chromium into the water supply and kids end up with cancer somewhere down the watershed okay now the the engineers would never have taken a vial of hexachromium, hexavalent chromium and fluoride and poured it into a child's cereal bowl and watched them eat it. I guarantee you none of them would have done that. But put it down the hole, one step removed, off it goes, right? And so that's why when you hear like Sam Bankman Freed, you know, Tucker made a great point about this. He said when you hear the words, what do they they call it effective altruism like run yeah like that's like that's when you know you're just dealing with a charlatan because they don't actually care about the people they're trying to help they care about the concept what the heck is effective altruism right it's a concept

it's abstract but you can get a lot of people in on those abstractions and i think that's where we're breaking down here is that we have people who lived in a world of abstractions and the abstract becomes more important and you can justify anything when you are untethered from reality and live in a world of abstraction anything this is where the cars come in. Yeah, I think my suspicion is that is it like most things, it's either a recipe or you need a unified field theory to explain it. You need something that brings together unique forces to explain the phenomenon. And let me run something parallel to you. You've just given a potential axiom in the unified field theory to explain what's going on. I'll give you another one. I was always fascinated by the fact that when I taught at Portland State, they would protest, you know, police having guns on campus or whether

should police should not be on campus but at the time isis was taking yazidi women literally selling them as cattle raping them institutionalizing it like they had a little a literal slave market and you don't have to believe me you can those video people have leaked those videos you can see those videos i did not see a single protest for that the entire time and i was trying to make sense of myself because no one would speak to me. I approached people and I said, like, well, why aren't you protesting this? And I think the word activist or some variant thereof was on the Women's Studies web page seven times, if memory serves me correctly. I remember that because when I was brought up on one one of my charges, I mentioned

that by the diversity office, a good buddy of mine, I won't name him said something to me, he said, what you don't understand is that you you're thinking in terms of globally, but these people have no global experience, they just think hyper locally. And thinking locally isn't bad, but it's in one sense it's a failure to morally triage because it's far worse that women are being literally raped and sold than it is that whether or not the campus police have guns. And so my suggestion to you is if the explanation that you gave is a useful part of it, it would be kind of like quantum physics as one part of explaining reality when you still have what happens inside of black holes, et cetera. Maybe there are other pieces

that are some grand explanatory narrative for the problem. Well, what I'm speaking of, the world of abstraction, and thanks for putting it that way. I hadn't thought of it as a grand theory, but it's just an idea I've had. But it's this. You know, I had a lot of the way I grew up. I grew up in the world of reality. Like me and my buds, I would leave the house whenever I did,

and then I wouldn't be home until dark, you know, and sometimes maybe a little later. And my parents had no idea where we were or what we were up to. And I'm so thankful to have 10 fingers. And we did some stuff. Okay. We blew things up. We started fires. We, we, we did very dangerous things, you know, relatively speaking to today, but we had that physical embodied experience of reality because sometimes our plans didn't go like we, like we were hoping were hoping you know and you had to deal with it right um so so i see a lot of people today that are cut off from that reality and they live in that world of abstraction they're very very upset they're upset with with trump as an abstraction right and i run

into this all the time because i very carefully as i can they're like oh he's hitler i'm like oh what tell me give me an example and that's usually a showstopper. That's a stumper right there. He's Hitler. Right? And so you say, well, why? I'm curious. It escalated quickly.

Yes. So where did that come from, right? And it's an abstract idea that they got from somewhere else, and it's not their idea. So they can't defend it, which upsets them. So they walk away, usually. Like, usually that's the end of the conversation how dare you ask me for data yeah they're they're they're and just to be crystal clear i am absolutely not a trump fan in any way whatsoever and i think it's a disgrace that these are the two guys that we had in this country i think it's a sign of the end of empire

personally but that's another conversation i don't i don't know i don't know i i often think about how to dig ourselves out of this problem and you know when you were on my show we talked about what the the one of the problems that we're facing we both agree that the debt is a problem increased polarization is a problem nobody trusting our institutions is a problem so getting back to what I the tweet that I put out in the that started the episode off. Yeah, I mean, we do need an independent investigation. But the problem is that nobody trusts any institution to do the

investigating. And so what are we left with? Right? We're left with it just, there's there'll be a proliferation of conspiracy theories there'll be a prolifer and that they won't agree with each other and there'll be a proliferation of i don't know i mean these problems they're both so complicated and they're so simple they're so complicated in that there's an entrenched ideology at play and they're so simple and like we know what to do fire plagiarists we know what to do balance the budget and if you don't balance it you should like you know we talked about on my show i think it was um what's it berkshire Hathaway guy's name? Not Charlie

Munger. Yeah, Warren Buffett. Like, well, you know, you don't serve another term like that's it. It's done for you. Like we know the solutions to these problems. But either we don't have the political will to do it, or everybody's just too wrapped up in their own lives trying to make money dealing with inflation. And I don't know know it's incredibly frustrating to me chris well it is to me too and and and i also am frustrated with the with the current menu of choices that we have right now um because what we really need is we need adults back in the room and we have to make some we're gonna have to make some hard decisions right so yeah we face some problems the border is a problem right problems have solutions we also face some predicaments which just those are things you

have to just manage the outcome of right you know it's like is aging a problem or a predicament well it's kind of a predicament it's a thing you can manage it as best you can but guess what we all grow old and die it's the that's the that's the nature of the the deal so we have some predicaments right now we got to deal with the debt being one, right? The absolute collapse, fourth turning style collapse of faith in our institutions. How do you rebuild whole institutions? Can it even be done? Do we have to raise them and start over? I don't know. But we need adults in the room at this point in time, not ideologues. I'll tell you something else that very few people are talking about. Peterson is talking about a little bit, but in my opinion, not as much as he should have. We have a crisis among young men in this country.

We have a crisis, particularly among young white men. Almost no one is speaking to them, but the people who are speaking to them, I would argue to you, are overtly toxic, like Tate. toxic like tape. So, you know, blatant conspicuous misogynist. So we have multiple crises, we have a homeless crisis. You know, when I was in Naples, I was always struck by how clean and civilized that place was. In comparison, every time I go to a blue city with a blue in a blue state, I'm always struck. It just doesn't even look like the same country. And, you know, Elon Musk just moved out of his offices out of, I think it was at SpaceX out of California because of Gavin Newsom's, quote unquote, gender affirming care policies or the idea that you don't have to inform your parents, the child's parents. So I think we're becoming so polarized as a country. I don't think that's good for anyone. I think we should be looking at it in terms of supraordinate identities, where

we kind of go up instead of down. That's what all this nonsense does, this mad nonsense. It teaches us to find ever greater divisions among us as opposed to commonalities. It's just really the most divisive and dangerous ideology. But it's funny how conservatives are now using this DEI issue when, even if it's not an issue of DEI, it still clouds the perception of the event because you don't know if the people who were there were there because of their own merit. So even if you can't point to somebody and say they're competent or incompetent, and I'm not qualified to make that judgment, the very idea that people could be in those positions like biden said that he he wants a you know he was going to pick a black female vice president okay so what are the odds that that's the best

person you know in law school only two percent of the black only two percent of the graduates from law school are black women he said he wants to put a black female in the supreme court i mean you know you nobody trusts the system you mean to tell me that i mean this is so stupid like it just i can't even that's the problem when you when you don't train people how to think when you don't train people and conservatives have overlooked and not just conservatives almost everyone has overlooked the problem that very few people are talking about, and that's K-12 education and how teachers get certified and trained. They're all coming from the same cesspool. They're coming from the same ideological cesspool, which, you know, it's Paulo Freire schools. My writing partner, James Lindsay, writes about this, that we're

teaching to overcome oppression as opposed to teaching, like, well, you know, how do you figure out what's true? How do you be less wrong more often, you know, any kind of a truth-based educational system. So we've geared to society in a way that I'm, I'm, I don't want to say I'm not hopeful, but I think unless we take some immediate changes, things are only going to get worse. And Eric Hoffman in my show today said that the number of people who self-identify as woke in this younger generation is 25 to 35%. Like you couple that with some other factors, like 30% of Democrats wish the bullet had hit, wish the guy had better aim. I mean, that's just, or maybe I'm myopic, and maybe I'm not taking into account, like, this phenomenon has existed in other periods of time, but we just didn't have, you know,

data collection or the internet, or we didn't really know what crazy people thought. But I'm not, I don't think that that's true, because I never remember that, you know, when I was a kid growing up. I think that we possess some unique difficulties now Then unless we get a hold of these things immediately and that starts I would argue Maybe we'll disagree on this but that starts with k-12 education and the reform of that the educational system and again I mentioned the fake he wants to get rid of the educational of the Department of Education entirely unless we start making so nobody nobody would Notice right nothing would happen. They could go some changes to the system. Nobody would notice, right?

Nothing would happen. They could go away for a whole year. Nobody would even notice. Yeah, many on the left want to do that. I'll be in Argentina for three months, and, you know, they've, afuera, you know, they've gotten rid of the famous thing, these ripping off,

they've gotten rid of many of their departments. So it's an interesting, it's the Chinese curse. What an interesting time to be alive. And I hope that we can come together as Americans and really act sanely to solve these problems. I do too. And to get to solution space a little bit, so again, to connect it back to how you and I probably grew up,

I'm projecting on your childhood, but I know mine. So if we think about the idea of the snowflake, right, it's a precious, unique thing that melts easily. Right. And I was talking with Brett Weinstein a year or two ago, and he said that the turning point for him was three years prior to the whole thing breaking down with Evergreen. When when he got a call in from the provost or whoever saying, you're making people uncomfortable in your class. And he said, that's how you know it's working, right? Correct. Learning and opening your mind is an uncomfortable process. It's not supposed to be comfortable.

Like one of these things, like your mouth work, you can't quite form the words because you're like, are we even having this conversation? Like you can go back to Aristotle. This is education. People have an entrenched point of view. They have a belief system, and your job is to open that up. It is, by definition, uncomfortable.

If it's comfortable, it's not working, right? So it's like, you know, I'm sorry. I thought our job was to help educate people here. It's an odd assumption. It's an odd assumption that people should always be comfortable. I mean, if you're never uncomfortable, exactly. Either you have a weird disposition. So so I wrote a published paper a few years ago about when people become perplexed by by ideas. When they become perplexed by ideas, the

goal of a good pedagogy, you know, good teaching instruction isn't to perplex people. But perplexity will often be the result of some counterintuitive phenomenon being demonstrated to them. Like I used to drop eggs out of second story windows onto grass and they used to not break. Buckminster Fuller designed the geodesic dome after that. And people would always be shocked.

But, you know, I'd ask them beforehand, what do you think will happen? And they would laugh and they'd say, well, it will break. But it actually won't break. You can test it. I've done it many, many times. But the idea then isn't to induce perplexity. And I'm only mentioning this because often the consequences of engaging difficult ideas are that you become upset or you become offended. But is the goal of the institution so that people will, is it to replicate the dominant ideology in which people are already

indoctrinated into K through 12? If that's the goal and you look at their kind of emotional safety, if you look at words as violence, then that's a naturally, that's a natural offshoot of that. The problem, and I've said this repeatedly, and some people freak out about it, but it's true. I just think the whole system needs to be burned down. The whole academic system needs to be burned down. And if this is true, that these people actually knew about the Trump, and I'm not saying it's true. I just want to say I'm not saying it's true.

I'm saying if this is true every single one of those people even people who had nothing to do with it need to be fired and the people who had something to do with it you should try them and if they're found guilty whatever the maximum punishment is but in that case you would have to reform the whole institution you know i don't know why i'm think coming up i think i'm coming up i keep talking about this because it's the context of conversation but i think if memory serves me correctly vivek also wants to do away with the fbi i i don't know how feasible that is i mean it would seem that if there is a deep endemic corruption in the fbi then you'd have to, I don't know how you could function as a society,

as a 50-state society without an FBI, but if there is an endemic deep state corruption, then you would have to fire a tremendous number of people and then hire people with term limits right from the get-go. I mean, so again, I'm not saying these problems are insoluble, but if we don't do something and we don't do something fast, the trust of the American people and their institutions is going to continue to corrode. And once it corrodes, other things will naturally fall with it.

Like the rule of law is already falling in many blue cities and blue states, and it's even made worse under Newsom. And I think there's a wonderful person to look into. This is Balaji. He has some fantastic stuff about blue cities, gray cities, which are like internet cities and red cities. Again, we know broadly what the solution to these problems are. And we just, we need to act isn't it kind of

maybe you know aa 12 step step one recognize you have a problem right i think we're just getting so i think what just happened with the whole trump thing a lot of people woke up and said oh like listen whether it was planned or incompetence it's so far off the reservation of what should have happened. It shouldn't have happened. Right. It's just one way or the other. Like like like at a minimum, if Trump and RFK are being smart, they're like, thanks for thank thank you very much. We'll take some Secret Service agents. But I got my own team. Right. Because I can't trust you guys at a minimum. We know like full stop. That's that's the case. OK, so this is broken people open enough that I think we can begin to have the conversation because I Liberty Lockdown, Clint Russell, he nailed it perfectly in a tweet the other day.

He said he said, are we really at the stage where we're arguing over whether this was an inside job or incompetence so severe we couldn't tell the difference. Yeah, that's great. He was on the show. He gave a terrific interview. I think he ran for the vice president of the Libertarian Party. He did, yeah. Yeah, and I learned from him that Libertarians run for the VP candidate. But getting back to what you said before, recognizing there's a problem.

Yeah. I'm not sure that's the first point, because you'd have some people who would say that the problem is we don't have enough African-American surgeons. So like we need to put more African-American surgeons in. So I don't think that recognizing the problem, I think that there are some priors. I think one prior that I'll throw out, and again, this is going to make me sound like the master of the obvious because this is truly one of the stupidest fucking things that one could say,

but that an institution should discharge an institution's mission. Crazy idea. And if you think that's not true, or if you think that's true, but you think that the mission should be diversity, then you should change the mission. You should write into the mission, our goal is to have as many black pilots as possible. And then you don't even have to say to not successfully land the mission. Our goal is to have as many black pilots as possible. It's and then you know, you don't even have to say to not successfully land the planes. It's just put in black pilots.

Okay, well, then we know exactly what your mission is. Like, we know what your mission is. And then we can decide whether or not we're going to fly in your airline, we can decide whether or not we're going to go to a surgeon from UCLA. I don't know if you've seen the medical stuff from UCLA, but yeah. And so with that, I think another, something else that's prior to recognize the problem is that we have to be honest and we are not being honest about our problems. And the Eton Haim interview that the hospitals lied. They said they weren't doing the surgery on minors. They were doing the surgery on minors. They were doing the surgery on minors. He exposes it. Instead of getting an award, the Biden administration is coming after his whole family and his lawyers.

His lawyers, they were coming after his lawyers. So I think we just need to be honest about the nature of the problem. If you, whatever you believe, you know, and I used to catch mad grief when I was in the atheist movement when I said, if you're talking to somebody who's a radical Muslim and they tell you that the punishment for apostasy should be death, you should thank them. Not that they want to kill apostates, but that they're being honest with you. You should always thank someone when they're being honest with you. Because that's a person you can have a conversation with. Yeah, right. So nobody's lying, nobody's obfuscating, you know exactly what they believe. And then you can agree or disagree

accordingly. Well, now now you're this is a big issue for me. So I'm a Virgo. And what that means is I like stuff to be fair. And I hate hypocrisyisy and I do everything I can to just operate fully with integrity. I don't have a public persona that's different from who you would find if you came to my house. I'm just I am who I am and I put it out there. And so one of the things that drives me nuts, right, is is like is seeing like I used to think, Peter, that I could get along with everybody. I could always find that common ground. There's listen, we all want safety. We love our children. We don't want to be mugged on the way home i mean there's always some common overlap over this past year i've realized i don't have very much in common with some of my fellow

americans and that scares me because i don't know is that an organic thing that i just arrived at because i finally woke up is that a a non-organic position that somehow the twitter ai bots have shoved me towards like is this somebody creating? But I understand civil wars now because I'm like, okay, I'm getting to the point, Peter, where I'm starting to think, you got to put a jersey on and gray isn't one of the colors. You don't get to stand this one out. Yeah, so my response to that would be I don't have that issue, and I think it's because I have kind of diverse,

I don't want that issue, and I think it's because I have kind of diverse, I don't want to say diverse interests, but my two passions are jiu-jitsu and science fiction TV. I don't know, weird passions, but those go right together. Those are pretty ordinary. But I find people that those two things cut across lines, although there aren't many woke people, and jiu-jitsu as a general rule and there are reasons for that but i find when i do meet people who do those things i have no problem having conversations with them and then using that as a glue to cement something greater but if you don't have anything to cement or any kind of commonality then you have to manufacture one like an ersatz commonality and then those relationships are

always built on something that's fleeting or or illusory yeah my problem peter is is i i don't i i'm just this is wrong this is just how i'm built and it's it's a character flaw yeah but i have a problem if somebody insists on that they have a version of reality that's that's equivalent to mine and mine's based on facts and provable facts and theirs isn't i don't they're not equivalent to me yeah well so i went through this yeah i went through this with covid over and over and over again right so may 20th may 4th 2020 i put out my first thing i'm like hey here's all the genetic evidence this thing came from a lab, right? Conspiracy theorist, yada, yada.

Years later, they're like, oh, yeah, that's probably all true, right? But they weren't using facts to say, here's why you're wrong. The Mean Girl Virologist Club, this is Andrew Rasmussen and Eddie Holmes and all those characters, right? They swarmed as a mean girls tribe to just say, you know, ad hominems, appeals to authority, all these logical fallacies, right? To say you're wrong because you're not one of us, right? Or you don't, this is what happens when non-experts wade into our territory. So they did the gatekeeping. But the problem was they never came with facts and they wouldn't debate the facts.

And I don't know how to overlap with those people. I just don't. Well, there's a deeper, there's a deeper concern there. And the concern is not that they don't come with facts, which is clearly a concern, but it's that they demean the role of evidence, period. So they've made, in philosophy, we talk about a subjective turn. They've made a subjective turn in their thinking. They've gone from an objective, independent, knowable world through a world of subjectivity, which is fine in certain matters, like matters of taste, what kind of music you like, you know, like oat milk or my iced coffee. I like iced coffee rather than hot coffee, which is fine. But I'm not claiming that you should like

oat milk in your, or even that you should drink iced coffee and if you don't you're a bad person or a conspiracy or what have you and so the problem is that I see it as less that they have different conclusions and more that they've demeaned the role of evidence and and not to be overly esoteric here but it's one of the most important things one can do in one's intellectual life is place their epistemology before anything else. And we've not done that. We've placed our morality before other things as opposed to our epistemology. Like we have to figure out what are good ways of knowing things and then see if that maps onto the terrain of reality. And if it doesn't,

like you're, like you know, that when we were at FCC and that guy stood up and started yelling me about Jesus. Oh, and I had a subsequent conversation with a Christian about that. It's that we have to agree upon the rules of engagement and the rules of engagement are not that one person gets to stand up and go crazy at someone at a conference. And I probably gave him too much time. But we have to agree on some priors, some basic things that are necessary for the functioning of civil society. And just because my team is in power, your team or someone's team is in power, or they control the academies, for example, that doesn't make those principles less important. In fact, if anything, it makes them more important that we hold on to and adhere principles that enable the society to flourish. And we know what these are, freedom of speech,

freedom of the press, independence. But, you know, I would argue two things to you. One, those are rationally derivable principles, and I guess that's argue two things to you. One, those are rationally derivable principles, and I guess that's my enlightenment tradition. And two, the fact that you don't have commonalities with people, it's not because they have different conclusions than you, it's because they have different ways of engaging. And those methods of engagement are fundamental to relationships and friendships. Well, you call it engagement, but the thing I was sort of isolating here was that, to me, one of the things I love to do, and I do this with everybody who works for me at

my company, is I like this idea of captured territory, right? So if we resolve that we're going to put thumbnails like this on a video, and we always do it in this sequence, and then they get encoded like this, and they go we work that out it's captured territory that's how we do it we don't every day arrive with a whole new way of doing it and just sort of wing it right um so this is how i feel i feel like some of the people i call them you say not to be partisan or political but there are people out there kind of leaning left or intellectual or from the university side. Dude, they're winging it. They make stuff up and they just seamlessly, if that thing they just made up doesn't work,

they drop it and they make up another thing. And so I'm just, I don't know how to engage to your point. I think if you're saying they're making things up, that's really one of the most charitable things you can say about them. I don't think that they're making things up. I think that they are deep deep into the ideology. I mean, yeah, I guess they are making things up, but they're not winging it. That's what's interesting. It's because they don't need faith. They have these, in an academic sense, they have these

canons of knowledge, quote-unquote that they've they've linked themselves to so the question of how to be friends with them I will admit is a very very difficult issue apart from finding commonalities and common interests because I don't believe that they're good faith actors I don't believe for example like if I said something to you I'm trying not to talk about about jujitsu, but it's very difficult. Like, let me just give you an example. If somebody comes into any, like probably any jujitsu studio in the world and they say, listen, man, I have this great technique. I'm going to knock this guy out with my pinky.

This is going to be great. I don't think you would find a single person in a jujitsu studio who owns a studio. I mean, I could be wrong. Maybe there's one hold off, but who would not say, oh, really? That's great. Show it to me. Show it to me. In other words, prove it.

What's your evidence for that? And so because if they know something you don't know and it actually works, which it won't obviously, but if it works, then they would want to know it too. So they wouldn't want to use it because they would want to increase the likelihood that they could win a fight. But that's not operative. That mechanism of understanding reality of engaging with people is not operative among people who share this ideology. That's a commonality among rational sane people. That's a commonality among people whose activities have a corrective mechanism. That is, there's something you can be wrong about. Playing a musical instrument, for example.

Speaking a foreign language with a native speaker. Doing Jiu-Jitsu. There's something there to be wrong about. You can make mistakes. But with these people, when you live in the world of the subjective, that's not the case. Everything is your subjective experiences are there's a kind of primacy to them. So how do you be how do you friends with those people? Again, the question there is not that they have different conclusions.

I would much rather associate with people who have different conclusions, but strong justifications. It would make the conversation that's fine interesting oh that's fine i yeah i'm independent like i listen i you people can include whatever they want and i'm okay with that because i change mine all the time when the data changes you know evie and i were watching um monty python's holy grail haven't watched it in a decade at least you know and you got king arthur rides up and there's the frenchman and they have this argument over where he got the coconuts from, you know. And I realized, Peter, watching that, that these two Frenchmen started having a logical, rational argument or debate about African versus Capistrano swallows and how fast the wings might beat and, you know, how much a five ounce bird could carry. And I realized I was like like that's actual logic that was that's what a logical conversation as absurd as it was actually stood out to me because i hear so few of those now

right actually that's why our age is right that's why our age is so dangerous yeah right that's why our age is so perilous you can't go from a to b to c without somebody arguing that we never discussed a right you're like, that's captured territory. We established gravity is 9.8 meters per second squared. And therefore, you know, like you just can't like build off of that. It's like, I don't know. It's like terra infirma. I don't know what it is.

It's very bizarre. It's perilous times when people don't do that. I remember I had a guy in a class. At the end of every class, the last day, I had a section called voice your superstitions, because I used to teach critical thinking and skepticism. And if they thought that I was unfair to one of their superstitions, or if they thought I didn't cover superstition enough, or they thought I had superstitions. Anyway, so one guy got up there. I gave, there was supposed to be a five-minute max, and he just kept going on, and I let him go on.

But basically, his superstition was, because I had mentioned in class that people don't walk on water. And there's just no evidence that people have walked on water. And so he mentioned, he just went off about his superstition he did a good job laying it out and someone from the class asked him keep in mind chris this is not me this is someone from the class this made me so happy because i've taught them the whole question the whole semester about defeasibility how to probe people's beliefs respectfully how to ask them you know what how could your belief be wrong?

This is a good counter example, etc. Someone said, well, what about the Neanderthals? How do you explain the Neanderthals if you don't accept the facts of evolution? And his response blew my mind. It truly, it almost, it will not, you know, it really changed the trajectory of much of my intellectual work. His response was, I choose not to believe in the Neanderthals. And it just completely blew my mind. Like, it never occurred to me ever that anybody could just choose not to believe something that was true. Like, the whole idea of believing something that was true. In fact, there's a mountain of literature. It's called doxastic volunteerism.

There's a mountain of literature saying, you know, asking the question about whether, like, I can't choose to believe that you have a sombrero on your head right now. I mean, I can imagine you with a sombrero, but there is something about the moral mind that is so potent and so powerful that it can override rational deliberations,

calculations, and considerations. And I would argue to you, that's all the more reason that we need to help people understand the value of changing their mind, the value of being trustful of reason, the value of how evidence, that that evidence should play in one's life in general. And we're not teaching those things. I guess I get back to what I said to you earlier in the discussion with my father saying, you know, me saying, I want to teach epistemology, and he's going to teach him how to read. You know, we have a crisis in which these things are not particularly complicated.

We know, you know, as Michael Schirmer says, nobody questions the value of the role of physics when you're 30,000 feet in the air. Nobody questions engineering with their cell phones. Nobody questions these things that have... And so how do we get back to this point where we can start talking about the sparrows like in Monty Python? How do we get back to this point where we can have conversations in which people are

listening to each other and they're allowed to present their evidence and that evidence can be picked apart and evaluated without it seeming like the other person is Hitler or that they're bad people. That's what I've spent most of my adult life working on, those questions. Yeah. Well, one piece that occurs to me around that, and that's just, I think this is fabulous, because this is what we need to bring back. So my kids had already been raised, and so they were adults. And I'm so sorry that they were by the time I'd heard this.

And I heard RFK talking about what it was like being around the dinner table in his house. Right. And back in the day, and he's a lad. Right. And so you got his uncle and his dad and that his dad was really hard ass about this. He would sit down, the whole family's at dinner and he'd say, Peter, I need you to argue against heroin being legal. Chris, you have to argue for heroin being legal. And you would go at it and then he would stop and switch places. Right. And I just thought that is a training exercise right that you have to be able to argue both sides you know so so I analyzed the bejesus stuff right and and I get to a conclusion and then I call my main guy Nick up it works with me and I say how do I have this all wrong let's let's tear this apart like like where it like

is this is what I did this as a scientist right you have data you have hypothesis your first job is to prove yourself wrong, if you're doing it right. You know, and I don't know if we do enough of that, you know, the disposition has to precede the skill set. Like you had a disposition to do that. If you don't have the disposition but have the skill set, you're going to drive yourself further into delusion because you're going to convince yourself, like you're going to pick pieces from your epistemic landscape

and just convince yourself that the things are true because you don't have the disposition that it's a virtue to change your mind. And so when we go around the world and read and I go around the world and do spectrum street epistemology, people stand on these match, you know, strongly agree, agree, slightly agree, neutral. And then the other side. And then sometimes if we get people on the strongly agree or agree,

we ask them to switch sides. Or if we get two people on the strongly agree or agree, we ask them to switch sides. Or if we get two people on the strongly agree, we'll flip a coin and have one go to the other side and defend the issue. And it's really interesting to hear what those responses are. And again, so okay, so even even that is fascinating to me. So we use this thing called spectrum distributed responsibility, literally anybody could do actually we did it, We're releasing videos from the FLCCC conference pretty soon in which we basically ask people questions. They come up with claims and we ask them questions about to help them match the evidence they have for the claims for the confidence in the claims. What's so interesting to me is that this is free.

It's part of my nonprofit. Literally anybody can use it. It's an incredibly potent pedagogical tool and nobody uses it. So the question is why? It's not that they don't know about it because many people have asked me about it and I've spoken to educators. They don't use it because the goal, getting back to what you said that Brett said to you about uncomfortability, they don't want to make people uncomfortable when they challenge their beliefs. They don't want to make people uncomfortable when they ask them to provide evidence for their beliefs. And I remember people would become incredibly uncomfortable with me when I would ask in a

university context of my colleagues, not my students, like, why are we institutionalizing these policies? Like, what is the evidence for this? And people would clam up or get mad at me or what have you. But it's fascinating to me that that process, that free pedagogical method hasn't caught on because, not because it's not useful or it doesn't help people see the other side or talk across divides, but because the goal of education now is not to do any of those things. It's to indoctrinate people into the dominant moral orthodoxy. That's the goal. So if that's the goal, then you need a different kind of pedagogical model to do that. You know, the turn towards subjectivity again. You know, you need there, I can talk about the pedagogies, the methods for doing that. Again, my own own this could just be my own personal bias

but I think it has to start with colleges of education it has to start with teacher training programs that's where we need to that's the way we break the spell we break the spell there do we have time okay so now this is speculation so I've talked I'm in an incredibly privileged position to talk to people who are far smarter than I on a regular basis

and I've asked them similar questions I think that there may be an AI revolution coming that wipes out the laptop class within a few years I think that there may be an AI revolution coming that wipes out the laptop class within a few years. I think that AI may supplant that. So when you say, do you have time? There are a lot of variables that we don't know. I would be surprised, I'm hesitant to say this

because I don't want people to freak out, but I would be surprised if there were not, I'm really... Maybe you should... I'll say this, but maybe you should cut this out of the interview. I would be surprised if in the next few years there were not nuclear weapons or dirty bombs snuck into Western cities. Two or three targeted the United States to end the empire.

I mean, there are these X risks. They're called existential risks. These are kind of like micro X risks. Do we have time? Yeah, I do think we have time. I think we have a tremendous number of problems. I don't, I will say it takes time and money to build new institutions.

I don't think we can just clean the stables, borrow a term from the Greeks. I think that this is going to take...this is not an easy undertaking. But the main problem as I see it is this ideology, it's spread memetically among people and it's very difficult to get out it's very difficult to uproot this to extirpate it from institutions but the problem is that you have someone put out a tweet about something i've been saying for years i think that the worst elements of the left are mentally ill and the worst elements of the right are mentally retarded. And so you have different extremes manifesting different symptoms.

Like I think Candace Owens is quite something. I think Kamala Harris is, I think she's a moron. There's really no politic way to say that. I think she's a moron. There's really no politic way to say that. I think she's a disgraceful DEI hire. I'm looking forward to the debate with Vance. So do we have time to do what? I don't know.

I don't know if we have time. I know that the road ahead is fairly clear for what we have to do. I know that there are markers and signposts for success. I know that inertia road ahead is fairly clear for what we have to do. I know that there are markers and signposts for success. I know that inertia is against it. I also know that a lot of people are sick of this. I'm hopeful long-term, but I'm super bearish short-term on the U.S. I don't think that these problems are going to resolve in time soon. And if you don't believe me, my evidence for that would be look at the two candidates. Look at look at Biden Trump, like we should

not be in this situation right now. That's Do we have time? Yeah, I think we have time. But every moment that we waste is a moment that we delve further into madness. Microsoft just did away with its DEI team. But again, DEI is only one faction of a much, much larger and more entrenched problem because you still have people who participate in the orbit of the ideology. Yeah, DEI is definitely on its heels right now.

John Deere also just like stopped that. And, you know, anyway, it's not in the numbers and corporations exist to make money and it just didn't work out and now they now they can say that publicly so it's that's obvious that's a foot i mean that that's the other thing i always thought the capitalism would kind of self-correct or not even go down those idiotic routes i mean it's clearly obvious i guess i'm a freedman at at heart then you know the social responsibility of business to increase its profits. It's not to put in more females in certain positions or more, I don't know. It's just as the responsibility of

business is to win. Well, that was the part that scared me, Peter, because I had grown up in a country where we had a religion. I'm sorry, sports was to win. Yeah. Right. So I grew up in a country where we had a religion, powerful, and it was the religion of money. Right. And that was it. That was the whole thing. And then suddenly I saw DEI come along where it were Disney's cranking out horrible movies and it's losing money and Bud Light trashes a multi decade brand and on and on. And I was suddenly like, how did this thing become more powerful than money? That's a religion that supplanted the religion that I'd grown up with. It was as if I grew up Catholic and all of a sudden you said I'm Muslim. I just didn't understand what was happening. It was very weird. Disorienting. It was scary actually. Yeah, that's correct. And I think understanding that, you understand the power of morality. You understand the power of... that's one of the few things people want more than... Oscar Wilde said, the only thing people like more than

sex and money is praise and recognition. The only thing people like more than capitalism... We used to think that we could, through soft power, and I still think we can, influence the world, movies, TV, music, then this hideousness came along. I think

we're in the tail end of that but I think we're gonna have to deal with it for quite a while and if you want to know what to do, the answer is pretty pretty obvious, is to just be forthright in your speech about the problem and to you know one of the consequences we haven't talked about at all and then I've got to go I have a meeting pretty soon but one of the consequences of things we've not talked about is the problem with friendship like so many people myself included have lost friends and the ideology is even toxic to our personal relationships and our interpersonal relationships.

So I think we need to do some healing here. I don't mean that in a spiritual woo-woo way. Right. I'm totally in agreement. Well, Peter, we're going to leave it there because I have to run as well, and you've been very generous with your time. But first, how can people follow you? I know Twitter, at Peter Boghossian. Yep, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram.

I don't know, we're on everything, at P-E-T-E-R-B-O-G-H-O-S-S-I-N. And we'll be out of the country eight months this year doing fireside. I'm trying to get away from debate, but fireside chats, et cetera. And again, I'm trying to move out out of this space but the space is just it i i'm trying very hard but it's not making it easy for me i'm trying to i'm trying i'm trying not to have this conversation yeah i'd love to revisit the the uh trump conversation in a year and we'll see where we are, and we'll see what evidence comes out, because I would be really interested in seeing what happens there. Yeah, me too, me too. Well, I've put my stake in the sand, because that's what I do.

And my superpower is I can assess volumes of information very quickly and come up and be pretty close to right. You know, that's what I do. Excellent. So we'll see. You know, one of these days I'll get it all wrong and then I'll have to reevaluate and it'd be great. Well, then, yeah, then you'll just do what reasonable people do and say, hey, I made a mistake.

That's it. I made a mistake. I appreciate the work you do and I appreciate our friendship. Thanks, Chris. Thanks. Likewise. In return. All right. Thanks, Peter. Bye. Likewise. In return. All right.

Thanks, Peter. Bye, everyone. We'll see you next time.