The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Espionage and Enslavement in the Revolution: The True Story of Robert Townsend and Elizabeth by Claire Bellerjeau, Tiffany Yecke Brooks

Episode Date: June 19, 2021

Espionage and Enslavement in the Revolution: The True Story of Robert Townsend and Elizabeth by Claire Bellerjeau, Tiffany Yecke Brooks In January 1785, a young African American woman named Elizabeth was put on board the Lucretia in New York Harbor, bound for Charleston, where she would be sold to her fifth master in just twenty-two years. Leaving behind a small child she had little hope of ever seeing again, Elizabeth was faced with the stark reality of being sold south to a life quite different from any she had known before. She had no idea that Robert Townsend, a son of the family she was enslaved by, would locate her, safeguard her child, and return her to New York—nor how her story would help turn one of America’s first spies into an abolitionist. Robert Townsend is best known as one of George Washington’s most trusted spies, but few know about how he worked to end slavery. As Robert and Elizabeth’s story unfolds, prominent figures from history cross their path, including Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, Benedict Arnold, John André, and John Adams, as well as participants in the Boston Massacre, the Sons of Liberty, the Battle of Long Island, Franklin’s Paris negotiations, and the Benedict Arnold treason plot.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times. Because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. This is Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com, thechrisvossshow.com. Hey, we're coming to you with another great podcast.

We certainly appreciate you guys tuning in. Be sure to refer to the show to your friends, neighbors, relatives. Tell them to subscribe at iTunes or any of the other places that you can syndicate the Chris Voss Show. You can also go to youtube.com forward slash Chris Voss, hit the bell notification button. Subscribe to all the different things

we have going on there on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, all the different places. We have multiple accounts everywhere. Just search the Chris Voss Show and you can find all the different groups and things we have going on. You can also see us at Goodreads forward slash Chris Voss to see what we're reading or viewing over there as well. Today we have two amazing authors with us today.

They are the authors of the new book that just came out May 1st, 2021, Espionage and Enslavement in the Revolution. The true story of Robert Townsend and Elizabeth. We have with us today Claire Belageau and Tiffany Yecky-Brooks. And this episode is brought to you by our sponsor, ifi-audio.com. And their Micro-iDSD Signature is a top-of-the-range desktop transportable DAC and headphone app that will supercharge your headphones. It has two Brown-Burr DAC chips in it and will decode high-res audio and MQA files. We're using it in the studio right now. I've loved my experience with it so far.

It just makes everything sound so much more richer and better and takes things to the next level. IFI Audio is an award-winning audio tech company with one aim in mind, to improve your music enjoyment of quality sound, eradicate noise, distortion, and hiss from your listening experience. Check out their new incredible lineup of DACs and audio enhancement devices at ifi-audio.com. How are you ladies doing today? Great. Thanks for having us on. Awesome sauce. In fact, let me get through your bios really quickly so we can give people a lowdown on you. Claire currently serves as historian and director of education at Raynham Hall Museum in Oyster Bay, New York, and has been researching the Townsend family and their slaves for over 16 years,

including curating a year-long exhibit on the Townshend Slave Bible in 2005. Tiffany holds a PhD in American and Dramatic Literature from Florida State University and has spoken and published widely on early portrayals of race in trans-Atlantic performance as well as emerging American identity in the late 18 and early 19th centuries. She was a lead researcher and contributing writer for the New York Times, best-selling George Washington's Secret Six, Thomas Jefferson and the Tripoli Pirates, and Andrew Jackson's The Miracle at New Orleans, as well as Fear is a Choice with Pittsburgh Steelers,

and Limitless with Paralympic gold medalist Mallory. Am I pronouncing that right? Wegman. Wegman. There you go. So welcome to the show, ladies. It's wonderful to have both of you guys. Tell us your plugs so people can find you on the interwebs.

Yep. We've got a website for the book, espionageandenslavement.com. We're on Facebook at Espionage and Enslavement and the Revolution. And I'm on Instagram at Claire.BellerShow. Any other plugs? Yeah, I want to second that. The website's amazing. There's a really in-depth timeline.

So absolutely go and check that out if you're interested after this conversation. You can find me online. My website is TiffanyYeckyBrooks. That's T-I-F-A-N-Y-E-C-K-E-B-R-O-K-S. So TiffanyYeckyBrooks.com. Or you can find me on Facebook at Tiffany Yacky Brooks. There you go. Thank you very much. What motivated you ladies to want to write this book?

You talked about 2005 and the discovery of this Bible. When I was doing an exhibit about that Bible, I discovered a series of letters. And those letters really changed my life. They told me details about this African-American woman named Liss and her story that happened during the Revolutionary War and after the war involving Robert Townsend of the Culper Spy Ring. And when I first read those letters 16 years ago, I honestly could not believe that no one had found her yet, that she had completely vanished from view and been like her story was invisible. And I realized at that time I must learn more. And it took me many years to put all the puzzle pieces together.

But a big part of that was finding Tiffany, finding a person who was such a fantastic writer and understood the Culper spy ring as well. And together we crafted this into a book that anyone would be happy to read, not just scholars, but everyday people too. And what was the basis of this spy ring? Tell us a little bit more so we can lay that foundation. The spy ring itself? Do you want to talk about it or should I? of this aspiring tell us a little bit more so we can lay that foundation the aspiring itself do you want to talk about it or should i sure i can pick it up so george washington wanted a presence on long island was held by the british um during the revolutionary war and he it was very important to him to have an intelligence network based in long island that could feed information to the

his forces outside so nathan Hale was his first attempt to have intelligence established on Long Island, and we all know how that ended. And so after that rather disastrous attempt, he wanted a more calculated effort and network. So he worked with some people who lived on Long Island who were from there. Hale had been an outsider.

So he started working with a man named Abraham Woodhull, who came from an old Long Island family. And Woodhull really built up this network. And one of the men that he eventually recruited for the spy ring was Robert Townsend, who was the son of the Townsend family based in Oyster Bay, a very prominent Long Island family. And Robert at that time was running a shop in Manhattan, which was occupied by the British and had a huge, he had the ability to walk by the water and count ships and hear gossip and get all this information that he was able to pass so that they not only have the perspective of Long Island, but also Manhattan. So Robert was a key part of this network. And so just to pick up on what Tiffany was saying,

you would think the quick way to get a message to Washington would be to go straight across New York, Manhattan, into New York. But the British had made Manhattan their headquarters, and they were checking every single letter, every person who went the short way. So what the Culper spy ring did was they went the long way around. They had couriers coming from way out in Suffolk County, riding a horse into Manhattan, picking up Robert's letters and then hiking all the way back out to the far end of Long Island and taking a ship across to Fairfield, Connecticut. Then they had to have these brave, fast horse riders who, like a relay race, could quickly get it to Washington. But Washington complained that often when he would get

the letters, it was old news because it took them so long to get around. But it worked. Wow. Those early spy days. Early spy novels. Early spy days. Yeah, there was no spy school for poor Nathan Hale. He was

graduated from Yale, so he was very smart. But he was caught within five days. He was tricked by the British into admitting that he was a spy. They executed him the next morning. And what's interesting in our book is that I actually discovered another spy. I discovered an unknown spy named David Maltby. The Rearers hail story exactly. Only he came to Oyster Bay. He was caught, but he managed to escape. That's awesome. Give us an overall arcing thing of the book and the details of it. It really starts out by explaining to people something that they were never taught, that there was a lot of slavery in New York. People are traditionally taught that slavery is something that happened in the South during the Civil War, but that couldn't

be any less true. Of all the colonies in the North, New York had more slavery than any other northern colony. In fact, in 1770, if you'd have added up all of the New England colonies, New York had more than all of them combined. More in 1770 than Georgia. So New York was the epicenter of slavery in the North. And this story takes one woman's experience, which is connected to many figures and events that you already know in the Revolutionary War. And it gives you the point of view of an enslaved African-American woman. How would she have experienced the war? And amazing things happened to her. She actually has the bravery to escape with the British regiment,

the Queen's Rangers, commanded by Colonel John Graves Simcoe. Now, if any of your listeners saw the show Turn, they depicted Simcoe as a villain. But in reality, he was an early abolitionist. He thought slavery was morally wrong, and he assisted Elizabeth in her escape. Later in the war, he also helped a few other African-American slaves escape as well. So escaping with the British was only step one. Then she went into Manhattan and was actually re-enslaved by a British officer. Just as she's entering Manhattan, Robert Townsend is emerging as the top spy in New York City. And we see that the two of them had contact. So there's even the possibility that she aided him because an enslaved person was virtually invisible. She may even be the 355, their code word for lady.

This code word lady spy has been talked about by many authors and we'll never know exactly if she was that person. She's certainly a contender of somebody who could have been in a British household communicating with this spy, Robert Townsend. One of the things that's so interesting that Claire's research uncovered was that Liss actually appears in the logbooks of Robert's shop in Manhattan during this time that she is supposedly has run away. She did run away, but she's supposedly missing. And yet her name suddenly starts to show back up in his logbook. And so it's fascinating to see

that he knew exactly where she was for at least part of this time. And then at the end of the war, her British master was going to evacuate to Canada. She actually comes to Robert and asks him to repurchase her. She doesn't want to go to Canada. She wants to stay in New York. And she's three months pregnant. So Robert takes her into his bachelor's apartment. And six months later, she gives birth to a baby that I believe was a

son named Harry. And now the war has ended. It's 1783. And by the time this child is six months old, another wrinkle has come up. There's a widow woman named Anne Sharwin who wants to buy Lys. And Lys wants to go and live with this widow. So Robert arranged this sale, but tried to set it up so that Lys would never leave New York. He made an agreement with the woman never to move out without letting him know first. She wasn't a widow for long. She got married in just one year and her new husband did something, maybe inappropriate behavior with Liss that caused a derangement and separation in the marriage. So this marriage ended as soon as it started. And then maybe out of spite or greed, this new husband sold Elizabeth South to Charleston

without her baby. Robert didn't find out for two years. And so after he found out, he wrote to people he knew in Charleston to try to save her and bring her back to New York. So her voyage to freedom was long and complicated, but that's the basis of our book. Wow. So it looks like he spends a lot of time, this Robert Townsend, with this gal. So you think she was being used as a spy to go into different places and stuff? It's plausible. Because spies are so sneaky, they never write down that sort of evidence. But it certainly would be a great way to get intelligence. And there's other ways, too. He joined a volunteer company. Think of it like a neighborhood watch for the British. So these were people who said they were loyalists. They put on red coats that they had made at home, and they would stand guard outside of British headquarters.

And so here's Robert. Great way to get intelligence, pretending to be a British soldier. And she could have walked right out serving that British household and given him intelligence. And the timing lines up. So she'd be spying on the household. It's certainly plausible. It's plausible. Wow. That's certainly plausible. It's plausible. Wow. That's really interesting.

Now, you mentioned this female spy that's a mysterious spy named 355. What is that about? Give us a little bit lowdown. Talmadge was our spy master, Major Benjamin Talmadge, and he came up with this code for the spies to use. He literally took a dictionary and wrote out all the important words in alphabetical order and then assigned them each a number. He made copies of these numbers and words and distributed them to the spies so that they could insert numbers in their letters in the place of words. And so the word for lady was the number 355. Now, this only appears once in hundreds of pages of spy information. And it

really should never have appeared because spies should really not write about one another, should they? That's being a bad spy. But it did slip into this one letter and was never mentioned again. And so many authors have postulated that this was a fancy woman, a wealthy woman, or maybe this woman in Setauket. But we assert that it's at least plausible that it could have been Elizabeth. Because all he says is they're the 355, and he says who will outwit them all. Yeah. So this lady has some special advantage. Right. She has some way that will help her be better than others at being a spy. Now, one thing you guys have in your book is it cuts through untrue legends surrounding the Culper spy ring. Tell us about that and what that's about.

This was another major goal of our book. There have been so many books written about the Culper spy ring. And there are very few of them that I can recommend that were written prior to this year. Because they just pick up on old stories that were not true and repeat them. Instead of doing original primary document research the way we did. And so things that were said that were incorrect, for instance, they say that Robert Townsend and his family were Quakers. They weren't. They were Baptists. So all of the idea that he was a Quaker needs to be set aside. Other people say that he was a partner with a printer in New York City named James Rivington. Well, he was never a partner

with that man. And in fact, in one of his spy letters, he speaks out that Rivington might be about to turn them all in as spies. And so if he's warning his fellow spies about Rivington, he certainly wasn't a partner with him. People also say he was a newspaper spy out there named Anna Strong who used clothing on a clothesline to send coded messages to the spies. Unfortunately, though that's a great story, it's simply not true. Not only is there no evidence that legend ever occurred, but it doesn't actually make sense in the way the spies actually operated. They didn't need this third person, and they never left their spy messages in drop boxes. So both the lack of evidence and the lack of it making sense, I would say just forget about that story of her and the clothesline. Even though it's a great story, it's just not true.

One of the things I'd like to say about this book is that the extent of Claire's research really cannot be overemphasized. We relied almost entirely, and when you see in the book, it is so extensively, the end notes are just so pages and pages thick, because Claire really spent years and years going through primary source documents. So what we have are based on what people wrote with their own hand, on contemporary accounts, on newspaper ads taken from. So there's not, legends have, the way they get to be legends are that facts accumulate, and then they get embellished a little bit. And so part of what this book does is it really cuts through all of that. And like she said, there are some wonderful legends and great stories that have grown up around it. But what we did here really gets back to the actual story with the actual facts that we have in those contemporary accounts, in those primary documents. And Claire's access and just her sleuthing is remarkable. She really worked like a detective to reconstruct the story from so many piece parts in different letters and diaries and logbooks. One thing I will say is that

when I went to try to disprove legends, I would often find things that no one else had seen that were much more interesting than the legends. And so sometimes when you actually go looking, you find really neat things. And so the book will be full of surprises for both the casual lover of history and for the real history geeks who want to see some brand new evidence of some new history. That's awesome. You basically spent 16 years preparing this book and bringing it to print. Yeah, there were many times, Chris, in the middle of that when I really gave up. I thought I'll never find out what happened. And then another little crumb would come along and I would be motivated to hang in there. And Tiffany can attest to this. Up until the last second, we were

adding new research. Oh, wow. We went to press. I found a huge new discovery in an archive in England having to do with Nathan Hale. And I just couldn't help it. We had to get that in there. It was a lot of fun, though. So you spend a lot of time talking about Robert Townsend. What's something audiences might like to know about him beyond his work as a spy? He was a full person, just like everyone else.

And so many times when people hear about him, they just think about him as he was a spy. That was it. But people had complicated emotions and beliefs. He joined an anti-slavery group after the war called the New York Manumission Society. This was founded by John Jay. Alexander Hamilton was a member. The spy Hercules Mulligan was another member. And this group wanted to end slavery, but they failed. They couldn't get the votes. And so you can see how heartbroken he was that

he didn't succeed in doing that. And that Lissa's life was really made so terrible. She really ended up in some terribly dark places and so you see him going to dark places too and becoming really clinically depressed as he withdraws from society and doesn't want to be part of this world that's so unfair to all of these people who were enslaved he doesn't. He doesn't do any of the social things that are expected of him. And he came from a very well-known, prominent family of politicians. And he just stepped back from all that. And the irony is he ended up being the administrator of his father's estate, which included 12 slaves. And so now this man who thinks slavery is wrong has to deal with the lives of these enslaved people.

And getting them their manumission, freeing them, was complicated. It wasn't as simple as just saying you're free. You had to prove all these things. You had to show all this proof to a board called the Overseers of the Poor. It was complicated. Wow. So did he have any sort of romantic interest with Elizabeth or did he just, was he supporting her because she was a spy?

That's something that it's, there's no way to really know for sure. And something that we tried to be very forthright about in the book is there are going to be certain issues that we don't know. And so in several cases, in several places, we lay out this may be a possibility. This may be another possibility. And then we let the reader make up their mind. And that's one of those possibilities. Timing wise, it is possible maybe that Robert could have been the father of her child. We only know that he was biracial.

We don't know. And it says she had a child with her then master, which likely was the British officer who owned her, but possibly could have been Robert. And so there are some uncertainties. And so we don't know. He certainly takes a very personal interest in both in lists. He takes her into his home and allows her to have the child there in his home. And he takes a special interest in Harry as he grows up, but we don't necessarily see anything that makes it clear whether he was doing that from a sense of paternal instinct

or just because he felt that it was the right thing to do. So you feel she was being used as a spy in different applications? It is possible. There are some details that Robert conspicuously leaves out. And one of those details is the identity of the man who enslaved her during the war in Manhattan. In these letters that I discovered, he gives the names of everyone. He gives all of these important details. But this one thing he always leaves out. And when he brought Elizabeth or helped get her back up to New York from North Carolina after the war, when she was enslaved down there, it was now illegal to bring her into New York. The very group that he had joined, the New York Manumission Society, had passed laws making it illegal for her to return. So she had to be snuck back in. And so there was a lot of cloak and dagger both during the war and after the war, as he was managing these difficult laws around slavery. And Elizabeth was being caught in almost a net of law. And you see some real kindness in

his letters, though. For example, one of them, them he says i know she's in south carolina right now but it's spring and so please purchase warm clothes for her for the journey if it's cool when she gets up to new york and so you see that the human side of him just in in that that not just the extent to which he dedicated himself to this but that he cared for her as a person so you see that there's some degree of perhaps respect or just recognition of humanity there. We really hope that readers will enjoy reading this book, but also will become educated about all the different laws around slavery in New York in the time of the revolution and just the extent of it. How many runaway slave ads you would see in every single edition of the newspaper. The horrible language used when they would sell slaves who were as young as eight, nine,

ten years old at the auction in New York. There were harsh punishments for slaves that we never learned about in school right here on Long Island and in New York City. There was a law that every town had to have a paid slave whipper. Every town had a whipping post in New York. And we even found evidence in Oyster Bay of a blacksmith being paid to shackle a slave, put a collar on them and wearing irons as they were called. Even to attach a black slave to a wagon tire to be beaten in the public square. These were the tortures that were their everyday life. And it's all been whitewashed out of the history of the North.

That's what I'm finding with a lot of authors that have come on and been digging through history and finding all sorts of different things lately is a real, we're seeing all the whitewashing that was done to our history. How do you feel that your book can heal the culture of racism? We've got to get these voices heard. We've got to make these stories known. When people think of the founding figures of America, a person like Liss has to be one of those figures. An African American woman who was enslaved deserves to be a founding figure of America. And until we can start populating our imagination with these people who literally built our cities, on whose back we grew as a country, we can't heal. And I think sometimes also we make history too easy

and too binary. We think of slavery was something that happened in the South. And it was a little blip in the middle of the 19th century and the Civil War ended it. And that's so completely not the case, as our book shows that it was so much more nuanced than that. It was so much more complicated. And when you look at American history, that from the date of the first Africans arriving in Virginia in 1619, to the Emancipation Proclamation, it's 244 years. But from the Emancipation Proclamation to 2021, it's only 158 years. And so just the amount of time that slavery was part of everyday life in America, and that it was in the North, it wasn't like, oh, it's that

Southern problem that they do down there. No, it was part of the whole fabric. And until we look at that and really understand the scope and the breadth of what we were dealing with, we can't really say that we have an accurate understanding of American history. Yeah. There's so many ways that Northern slavery is minimized. Even in textbooks that children read in school, they say that, oh, people in the North had one or two slaves. The Townsends had 20. They say that, oh, they were treated like family. No, they weren't.

No, they weren't. They had no free will. They were enslaved from birth. When a woman gave birth to a baby, her baby was owned by her master from their first breath. You know, we can't minimize the effect of slavery and how it had a ripple effect through America. crossed Lyssa's path, like Benjamin Franklin, John Jay, Alexander Hamilton, George Washington, the Boston Massacre, the French helping us in the war. All of these incidences are woven into her story. So the readers never feel lost. They know where they are in the history of America. And now they have a new figure to work into that story that they can remember.

And a new perspective to consider of what the war would have meant for someone of Liss's social position. So how does your book enhance the understanding of the Revolutionary War as a whole? It's just all these little personal details that people get to read and understand. They're not just getting that fifth grade overview that and understand. They're not just getting that fifth grade overview that they had. They're really going to feel like they experienced it through the war when people didn't know how it was going to end. They were living on the edge of their seats, trying to make it through this conflict and get out the other side. And our book also deals with the period right after the Revolutionary War, when the economy of America was terrible. People had lost their fortunes in this war.

And how were they going to put all those pieces back together again so that they could go on? Yeah, sometimes Robert Townsend is celebrated as the spy, but that was really only three or four years of his life. And so you see the effects of the war and the impact that had and just the social change in America playing out in this man's life and his relationships with other people, and obviously in Lissa's life, that sometimes we focus that the war, the study of the war on the war years. And that's such a short blurb. And we don't really look at what the impact is not only on the big picture, but on the individuals who lived that story. Yeah. You know, when you read a fictional story, it's got this easy arc and everybody can expect how it's going to go. Yeah. But our book really makes you ask the question, what would I

do? What would I have done when faced with this choice? And we see our main characters making choices that they think are good choices at the time, but that go horribly wrong for them. Over and over again, they're faced with these roads. Which road are they going to take? And sometimes it's got terrible consequences. Anything we haven't touched on the book already that we want to tease out to readers to pick up the book. It's available at Barnes & Noble. It's available on Amazon. You can get signed copies, though, on our website, espionageandenslavement.com, and we'll send them right to you. And we really hope that everyone will understand her story and will remember her.

That's what we want. We want people to remember Liz. She's been invisible and forgotten for too long. And I also want to add just that we had the tremendous privilege. We're so honored that Vanessa Williams agreed to write the forward to the book. Oh, wow. To lend her voice to telling of this story. And Claire, if you want to tell a little bit about that.

Vanessa Williams isn't just the person who wrote our foreword. She's actually deeply and personally connected to the story. Her ancestors lived in Oyster Bay, and they can trace their roots back to the era of slavery. And so I met her when she was in our town to dedicate a cemetery where her ancestors are buried. That's an all-black cemetery right outside of our town. It became a historic landmark, and that was when I met her and told her about LIS. She became so interested, she became involved, and she wrote the foreword. Wow, that's awesome, Sox. We really hope that she'll help us get the word out even to a broader audience, too.

That would be great. More and more, we need to learn more about our history, We really hope that she'll help us get the word out even to a broader audience, too. That would be great. More and more, we need to learn more about our history. And there's this whole thing going on in schools now with, I forget what they call it, critical race theory. And they don't want this history, as far as near as I can tell my understanding of it, is they don't want this history that's been whitewashed, told in its truth. And some of these stories that actually come out of it, how horrific it really was. I just got done reading the book cast a couple months ago and it was a really hard book to read, just heartbreaking. I had to keep stopping because some of the scenes in it are just awful, but you realize how horrible things really were

and how a lot of our history has been whitewashed. So I think this is a really important for people to know the true stories of what went on and some of the different players that were involved. Some people think you have to choose. You're either going to choose the talking about slavery, or you're going to choose the talking about our Patriots in 1776. Our book weds them all together. You don't have to choose.

It's one story of America. And it's plausible because it couldn't have just been, well, we just saw a bunch of white people running around doing good things. It would have had to have been a whole mess of people that were involved in this thing, especially from spying. You've got to have people that can go undercover and do stuff. And no one would suspect a spy, I'm sure, from that era. And I think it just it helps to show how rich the american tapestry really is that it really it is our story every everyone had a part in the story of this history and i think that the book really illustrates that in a beautiful way yeah there you go there you go let's get your

guys's plugs before we go out we hope that people will visit our website espionage and enslavement dot com please reach out to us on Facebook. We don't have enough followers. We need more followers. Espionage and Enslavement in the Revolution on Facebook. And when you go to that Facebook website page, under contact, you'll see a whole lot of virtual book talks that are coming up. And so a lot of them are free. You just have to register. And so people can sign up to hear more. And on the book talks, we actually show a lot of the documents and a lot of images that they'll be excited to see.

There you go. And we got everybody's plugs in. Yeah. Again, if you want to check out this book or other things that I'm working on, I'm at TiffanyYekiBrooks.com or on Facebook at Tiffany Yeki Brooks. But really go to the book's website. The timeline itself is worth just hours of perusing. And it's too short. I would have made that timeline five times longer. I know. Claire had to rein herself back. I did. It's a wonderful aid for reading the book and just learning more about the era.

There you guys go. Well, thank you very much ladies for coming on the show. We certainly appreciate spending the time with us today. Thank you. I appreciate it. Thank you so much. Thank you.

And congratulations on the book. It's my audience. Go see the video version of this at youtube.com. Fortune has Chris Voss ordered the book up at fine booksellers everywhere, espionage and enslavement in the revolution. The true story of Robert Townsend and Elizabeth just out on May 1st, 2021. You want to order that baby up. So you're the one of the first ones to read it at your book club or whatever it is you like to brag about. Hey, I read the book first.

Did you guys see this turning into a movie at all? Oh, definitely. I'd love to see that. We're working on it right now, Chris. There you go. Smithsonian magazine actually named the book. Oh, definitely. I'd love to see that. We're working on it right now, Chris. There you go. I want to add really good. Smithsonian Magazine actually named the book one of its five new books to read for the month of May, which was a great endorsement of the history and what they recognize is the importance of the history being covered here. There you go. So to my audience, go to goodreads.com for just Chris Voss.

And also go see all of our groups on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, all these different places. We certainly appreciate everyone tuning in and we'll see you guys next time.