The Eric Metaxas Show - Hampton Sides (Encore)

Episode Date: May 29, 2025

Author Hampton Sides rounds out the week, joining Eric to talk about his new book, “On Desperate Ground: The Marines at The Reservoir, the Korean War’s Greatest Battle.”

Noble Gold Investments is the official gold sponsor of the Eric Mataxis show, a company that specializes in gold IRAs and physical delivery of precious metals. Learn how you can protect your wealth with noble gold investments. That's noble gold investments.com. Welcome to the Eric Mataxis show. Did you ever see the movie The Blobs starring Steve McQueen? The blood-curdling prep of The Blub. Well, way back when Eric had a small part in that film, but they had a couple of is seen because the blob was supposed to eat him, but he kept spitting him out. Oh, the whole thing was just a disaster. Anyway, here's the guy who's not always that easy to digest. Eric the Texas! I'm here to have a serious conversation. As you know, if you listen to the program, I've written many books.

I value good writing. I love history. And I have the privilege. is today of speaking with a celebrated author about his new book on the program today is Hampton Sides. Some of you know him from his previous books, Ghost Soldiers, Blood and Thunder, hell out on his trail in the Kingdom of Ice. And I'm holding the new book in my hand by Hampton Sides. It's called On Desperate Ground, the Marines at the Reservoir, the Korean War's greatest battle. Hampton Sines, welcome to this. program. Well, it's so funny. I don't know if you're aware of it, but I have been following you your career since you were an undergraduate. Did you know that? You know, the Paleolithic times.

The Paleolithic. You and I were in the same class at Yale, 84, correct? Yeah. Yes. We were in the same class. I was the editor of the Yale Humor magazine. I wrote poetry and stuff for the quarterly, but you, my friend, not only did you write, you founded a magazine. Tell us about that. This is going back 400 years to the 1980s. I worked on a magazine called The New Journal, which was just a long-form magazine that tried to do journalism in and around New Haven and get outside of the campus confines. And, you know, looking back on it, it was kind of my training ground for becoming a journalist and a historian. I probably spent more time doing that than studying, I'm afraid.

Actually, I think that was probably a good thing. Yeah, I mean, you learned to question everything. You learned, you know, it's a great training for being a historian because you end up being skeptical of everybody and everything. And you start to really piece together what really happened. You start locally and, you know, it's kind of launched me on this career. Where did you grow up? Do you think when you were a kid that you would be writing books as you've been writing them? Well, I'm not really sure what form the writing was going to take, but even as a kid, I knew that I wanted to be some kind of writer.

I grew up in Memphis down in the south, and one of my best friends, his father, was a very famous, a narrative historian, the Civil War historian Shelby Foote. Holy cow. You know, amazing dude. If I'd grown up around Shelby Foot, I'd probably be writing exactly the same books as you've been right. That is, seriously, there's nobody greater than Shelby Foot. Oh, my gosh. Yeah, I mean, you know, not only he's writing the Civil War trilogy that he wrote, but lyrics, too. You know, he had the beard, he had the pipe, he had the wonderful Delta accent, and I, you know, I was sort of eyeing this guy.

I cannot believe you got to grow up around something like that. That is truly, what a privilege and what a gift of God, because he is somebody. And, you know, go ahead. He was a narrative historian and took me forever to figure out that's the kind of writer I wanted to be. I tried to be a journalist, and I was a magazine journalist, did some radio, did some documentaries, but eventually gravitated to this kind of popular history that is deeply researched and takes a long time to do, but it's meant to be read by a generalist audience, not an academic audience. And that's certainly what he was doing and doing so well, you know, back in the 16th.

season 70. Right. Well, that's, I mean, again, that's one of the reasons I wanted to have you on is because that's the kind of writing I do. I'm not an academic. I never got anything besides my BA in 1984 in English. And I think that we need more of this kind of writing because people need to know history. We need to know history. It's so important. And when I think of the Civil War series that Ken Burns did with Shelby Foote, the funny thing about Shelby Foote, since you knew him personally, maybe you can tell us, I mean, he acts like he was there when he would say that, you know, and there was a Chickasaw, Chickasaw Brave, kind of gave a little whoop like a whoop, whoop. And I thought he acts like he heard it with his own ears.

He's the kind of person who brings history to life. And I know it's what you aspire to do as well. Right. Well, I mean, you know, so much history that we read is so deadly dull. It's like chloroform in print. You know, it puts people to sleep. Right. The way academics, you know, the way I was.

taught to write history in college was, even though we had a great history department, a really great history department, the writing of history was pretty dull and, you know, argumentative. You're always arguing instead of telling a story. Right. And in the old days, you know, cavemen telling a story about how they killed a mastodon or something, I'm sure, you know, they put some color into it. They put some life into it. They wanted to describe the terrain, you know, the day. What was it like? You know, how did they bring down this animal?

You know, they try to make it interesting as they told the story around a campfire. And so it would live on in legend. And then I think there's an element of that that historians, professional historians, somewhere along the line forgot about. Like, you've got to tell a story. You've got to make people interested. They're just going to set the thing down. and it's kind of the reason why I think there's, you know, a lot of people are turned off to history at an early age.

Well, you are, as I say, you're singing my song even in the same key in which I sing it. I am in violent agreement with what you've just said, and I've lived my life to some extent along those lines in my own writing. But I want to get to your book. I mean, this book I'm holding in my hand right now, on desperate ground, the Marines at the Reservoir, the Korean War's greatest battle. If ever there were a war about which most people are mostly ignorant, it would be the Korean War. I mean, it's an amazing thing. It was a police action. Many people in our generation, we lionize the figures of World War II.

We talk about Vietnam. But the Korean War tends not to get the attention that it does. What led you to this topic? To my books, it really started out by meeting someone. You know, I met some veterans. I met one particular veteran who told me about the reservoir, this battle, the reservoir. Going back to Shelby foot, I had always remembered that Shelby said, make yourself an expert of one battle, that a battle is a character.

A battle has its own beginning, middle, and end. It has its own sort of concentrated energy. It has a timeline, and it has a fixed geography. just find an interesting battle and you've got the makings of a great story. So when I heard about the chosen reservoir from this one veteran, and I heard about how it was fought in 35 below zero weather, and 85% of these guys suffered from frostbite and that they were outnumbered in places on the battlefield 10 to 1,

the red Chinese and, you know, the impossible terrain in which they fought it in, and the huge egos that sort of put them in this impossible place. By that, I mean, MacArthur and Mao and Stalin and Truman. You know, it just seemed like it had all the, had all the right elements, but combine that with the fact that it is our forgotten war, and these are the guys, these veterans, or the guys that we're really saying goodbye to now, this is my parents. This is our parents' generation. Right. It just seemed like a very auspicious time to tell the story.

And, you know, I was looking for one battle that really captured the essence of the Korean War because, of course, it goes on for three years. And this one was the one I chose. Well, you did an interview on the book, and when you're asked, who is the antagonist in the book? You say, that's easy. Douglas MacArthur and his staff. They ignored clear evidence that vast numbers of Chinese had entered North Korea to spring a trap and prepare a surprise attack. MacArthur was a megalomaniac and a glory hound.

He had a lot of blood on his hands. He presided over to one of the most egregious intelligence failures in American military history. And once the intelligence came in loud and clear, he and his staff of psychophants chose to ignore it, suppress it, or willfully misinterpret its import. In so doing, they needlessly put misinterpret it. many tens of thousands of Americans in harm's way. That's staggering. When we come back, I want to talk about that. We'll be right back, folks, talking to Hampton Sides on Desperate Ground is the book. There's been a national focus on eating only the healthiest of foods, and that's

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Hampton, just before we went to the break, I read your takedown, really, of General McCarthy. You say that he had blood on his hands. He was a glory hound. Tell us about that because so many of us are really ignorant about these things. He's lionized. He's celebrated, you know, the great Douglas MacArthur. You don't have such a wonderful view of him. I do not. I do not. And, neither do any of the Marines that I interviewed, you know, who think they were put into this situation by MacArthur's ego and his, at this point in his career, especially with reality. He ran this war from Tokyo, and he was an absentee general. He never slept a single night on Korean soil during the entire Korean War, and he had surround himself with all these people who

just told him what he wanted to hear. I think these were all tendencies that he had earlier in career but you know by this point he's 70 years old he's perhaps a little past his expiration date he has been running this occupation of Tokyo of Japan and perhaps it's all gone to his head so when he when he hears things he doesn't want to believe or doesn't fit with his vision of the way things ought to be he tends to either ignore it dismiss it doctor the evidence or rather his people, his lieutenant's doctor the evidence. So, you know, trying to figure out early in the book how this enormous intelligence failure happened because it's truly one of the huge ones.

You know, it's like how do you miss 300,000 Chinese? And it happened mainly because of this peculiar setup that MacArthur had over there in Tokyo. And the enormous power that he wielded, I think certainly one of the takeaway. from the book is we should never have that much power concentrated in anyone, I don't know, that we ever have since in terms of military, because he was ahead of all the UN troops, is ahead of the Army of the Far East. Wow. He ran the occupation, and it was almost like Asia was his domain.

And we, you know, the chairman of the Joint Chief of Staff and Truman, just let him run it like his own flight from. And that's sort of contributed to this. It was an era of those things. I mean, you have Jay Edgar Hoover running the FBI in a way that no one did before or since. You've got people like Robert Moses remaking New York in his image. And, you know, people can go to hell if they disagree with him. You have these giants. It was a different era.

And I do think we've learned many lessons from them. It's real old. It's old school. It's kind of like before Watergate, before we were aware of what. abuse of a power of abuse of power could look like, you know, in our time, you had these giant figures and they were super old school, arrogant. I mean, it's funny because when you look at somebody like a MacArthur, you think if you've got trouble with Donald Trump, Trump is like Obama compared to General MacArthur.

I mean, there's nobody. He felt like he was Napoleon, you know, he had this kind of, he walked into a room and had this aura about him, and he had the corncob pipe and, you know, just the, you know, just the, entourage around him. They said he didn't have a staff, that he had a court. That's pretty sick right there. That's warning sign number one, two, and three, yeah.

Yeah. But, you know, I have to say, from a writer's point of view, he's like an amazing, you know, he's an amazing character. And he's, he's a gift that keeps on giving because everything he says is quotable. He's full of all these vulnerabilities. He is brilliant at times, truly

brilliant. And, you know, he's just a great study and kind of a conflicted character, but also kind of a study of hubris in this case, because he got greedy, he had some early success at Inchon and Seoul, and decided to grab all of it, you know, the ultimate prize. Isn't that always the issue, in other words, that if you really are amazing, if you really are a genius, if your character can't sustain it, you're going to get into trouble. In other words, people like this really are right many times.

and they blow people's minds with their instinct and their ability to see what others don't see. And so if they don't have any sense of humility, they just, they get this outsized ego that eventually, you know, lands them. Yeah. It's like the Greeks almost. Yeah. It's like, you know, we can see it coming. The readers can see it. Right.

The hubris and, you know, pride go with before a fall and all of that. but he can't see it, and then he has, then it happens. And, of course, this ultimately leads eventually to his being fired by Truman. Yeah, that's, I mean, that's a story. We've got time here, but let's, before we, I want to get to that, but let's go back. This battle that you tell about, the Korean battle, the Korean War's greatest battle at the reservoir. Tell us about this battle. For people who know nothing, and I'm one of them, what is this battle?

When did it happen? What's the context? Well, this is the moment when the Chinese infiltrated North Korea secretly finally show their full presence around the shores of a frozen lake in the mountains of North Korea, about 80 miles inland from the coast. On this narrow, twisty road, the first Marine Division had advanced. They were on the way to the Yalu River, the border with Manchuria, as part of this ill-advised pool. to the north that MacArthur and his men were behind. And, you know, this was kind of the spearhead of that force, the First Marine Division. And they're camped around this reservoir, solid. It's 35 below zero.

The commander of the First Marine Division, who was Oliver Prince Smith, a very underrated general, is, you know, he can smell a rat. He knows that he's surrounded. He may have captured some Chinese. They've interrogated. They know that MacArthur doesn't want to believe it. And so he believes that there's going to be, Smith believes there's going to be a battle, a big battle. And he begins to take precautions.

And he built an airfield up in the mountains in the middle of nowhere. I mean, I can't even believe what we're talking about. We're talking about 35 degrees below zero. Just that alone, the very idea of functioning on any level at 35 below zero is. is staggering. So in the middle of this, he builds an airfield? Yeah. I was going to say, you know, in the old days, like when we got that cold outside, the armies would just lay down their arms and say, you know, look, we'll see you in the spring. Yeah, yeah.

Gentleman's agreement, go to Valley Forge or wherever and regroup. But, no, they kept going. And, of course, it affected everything. It affected their vehicles and their weapons and their medical supplies. I mean, gasoline freezes. at 35 below zero that's a fact right i mean we never turn their um engines off because if they did they couldn't get them back on right and you know they didn't um like the medics their their plasma and then their morphine would turn to slush or freeze and um you know weapons wouldn't fire and grenades wouldn't detonate and it just took their breath away and and it instill a certain

amount of hopelessness just you know when you're out there camping in that And, of course, many died, many froze to death, or certainly were exposed to frostbite, serious frostbite that they've suffered from for the rest of their lives. So, you know, they always say there's three enemies, three combatants, I should say, three combatants in this battle, the Chinese, the Americans, and the cold. Yeah. And it leads us, I mean, all this leads us to where we are today with North Korea being this just hard. horrific, you know, dictatorial state where people don't have a – they have less freedom than an anywhere in the world. And all of this – I mean, when you look at a battle like this, to think that that's – if you lose, that's where it's going. So how did the battle proceed?

Four or five days, the Marines basically just dug in and held on for dear life, you know, trying to figure out, well, could they sustain these waves after waves after waves of Chinese soldiers? The battle almost invariably happened at night time because the Chinese didn't want to deal with American airpower. So at night, they were undercover of darkness. They would proceed, and they'd come about midnight bugles and shepherds horns and be the way the Chinese army, you know, communicated. They didn't have radios. Hang on a second. We're going to go to another break, folks. They're talking to Hampton Sides.

The book is On Desper. ground. Stick around. I want to ask you a question. Are you rethinking your child's educational path? If you're thinking about this, you're not exactly alone. The Herzog Foundation is here to help. With the Trump administration working to abolish the Federal Department of Education, hurrah, and return control to the states, there's never been a better time to explore Christian education. For too long, federal overreach has dictated how children learn. But now, parents have a greater say in their kids futures. This is very, very important. So the Herdsock Foundation, you can find them at Herdsock Foundation.com. Herdsug Foundation.com. Hey there, folks. It's Eric with Taxus Show.

I'm talking with Hampton Sides about his new book on the Korean War. It's called On Desperate Ground. Hampton, you're saying that basically the Chinese did not have radio. That's hard to believe that in 19, what is this, 51 or 50? In the military kind of crude army, they've been fighting this prolonged civil war in China. Mao's troops had prevailed, and this was really their first intervention in a foreign conflict. They had overwhelming numbers of men, though. The main thing that they had was numbers and experience in guerrilla warfare. They were really good a camouflage.

They only moved at night. They were very difficult to spot from the air during the daytime. And they had flexibility of movement and the element of surprise because they never, because they had no vehicles. They had no tanks or anything like that. So they were able to move overland, over the mountains. And in fairness to MacArthur and his lieutenants, they were difficult to spot from the air. and that contributed to the intelligence failure.

But they were there down there all right, and they had surrounded the Marines at the reservoir, and when they descended upon them on the night of November 27, 1950, you know, the Marines were holding on for dear life. It was just hell for leather fighting for about four or five days, until they were able to regroup and begin to plan this, great, you know, breakout to the sea, about 70, 80 miles to the sea, they knew they were going to have to fight every step of the way and kind of plan this very complicated endeavor. You know,

the Marines don't like to use the word retreat. They will not use the word retreat. They called it an advance to the rear, various euphemisms, a retrograde maneuver. General Smith said, we're just simply attacking in another direction. But they were. It was a, you know, it was a battle every step of the way, every mile of the way. And so the battle went on, he said for four or five days, it might have concluded that we did lose this battle? In terms of we were ejected from the field.

We moved to the coast where we could defend ourselves and where there was an enormous evacuation taking place. But the Marines were, yeah, absolutely determined to come out fighting and to come out as an intact division with their vehicles and with their equipment and with their wounded. And that's what they did. And while doing so, they inflicted astonishing, stunning casualties on the Chinese. More than 30,000 Chinese were killed during this breakout, whereas the Marines lost about 1,000 men. Wow, wow, wow. This is a little like the way George Washington would fight.

I mean, the idea that you're retreating, but you're still fighting, and you're taking tremendous casualties. Right. Right. And you're inflicting, yeah. The only reason that Mal, you know, can claim a victory is that he was willing to sustain a casualty rate that we would never tolerate. Well, obviously, the worldview of the communists is that human life is not sacred, and who cares, as long as we prevail.

It's really horrifying. I guess I have to ask you, why do you call it the greatest battle of the Korean War? Because it certainly seems horrifying on a number of levels. Well, I would. Epic, huge, the scale of it, the incredible conditions that they were fighting under the terrain. And the fact that the extremity of this situation really brought to the fore, to an unusual extent, this ferocious survival instinct. They were fighting for their lives.

It's a military survival story, really. And consequently, men all along this battlefield did just exceptional things. Of course, this happens with all battles. But Battle of Chosen Reswar is the most decorated battle in modern American history, certainly since World War II. You know, I don't know how many, you know, silver stars and congressional medals of honor. I mean, if you add it up, it's stunning, and it's almost a narrative, you know, it's like a narrative embarrassment of riches. There's so many of these individual stories of courage and survival and, you know, men going beyond the call of duty to save each other in these unbelievable conditions.

And so when I say greatest, I mean greatest in all senses of the word, you know, harrowing, terrible, epic. But ultimately successful, because that's certainly the way the Marines view this. This is one of their great battles that they talk about at their National Museum in Quantico. And the Marines view, their three greatest battles are the Battle of Iwojima, the Battle of Bella Wood in World War I and this one. Yeah. So, you know, they call it a victory in return. or whatever you want to call it. But they did regroup.

They made it to the sea. They were evacuated, and they returned to the battlefield in a matter of a month or two to great success. Well, it's extraordinary. You have gotten phenomenal reviews on this. Douglas Preston called it a masterpiece of war history, and no less than Douglas. Brinkley has raved about it, folks. We'll be right back with the author of On Debt. Desperate Ground by Hampton Sides.

It's the Eric Mataxis show, and we're talking about history, the Korean War and the book on Desperate Ground, brand new book by Hampton Sides, who is my guest. Hampton, let me ask you, do you see any parallels between what was happening then and what's happening now on any level? It's fascinating to me that we're dealing with the grandson of, you know, the North Korean figure at the time. it's strange. In some ways, it's not such a long time ago. Oh, yeah. Certainly there's a lot of parallels. And of course, you know, the war never officially ended. It kind of, after this battle that I write about it, it kind of went through various iterations. The battle lines moved back and forth a bit, but eventually ended up more or less where it all started, which is the 38th parallel, which is, you know, basically where the DMZ is now.

And Armistice was signed, but not an official formal treaty. And so consequently, you know, a lot of issues were never resolved. Everyone is in a state of acute readiness. You know, when I went to the DMZ, it was just you've never seen a more militarized place. It's not demilitarized. It's a militarized zone. Of course, both nations are fairly permanently on edge. And it's a scary, scary place, although we have seen, you know, some improvements in that relationship.

And when I was over there, you could feel it. People, you know, especially young people, there may be a break in that ship. And that these sometimes, you know, these families that have never seen each other and have been separated for all these years, they have a chance to actually connect again, things like that. So there's a little bit of a feeling like before the wall came down in Berlin. Yeah. You know, there's that feeling of, you know, any, you know, this place should never have been divided in the first place. It's sure it's one language, and it was just kind of a figment on a map.

Someone said, hey, there's that 38th parallel, more or less divides the country, Let's just make that the place where the Soviets will govern the north, we'll govern the south, we'll figure it out later. Well, guess what? We never figured it out. Yeah. Well, it's always horrifying to me, just because my folks grew up in Europe and they, you know, schooled me as a kid on the evils of communism. It's a horrific thing when you think that even giving over Eastern Europe to Stalin, you're turning people over to things that we in America, simply cannot imagine a level of oppression that is so foreign to us.

And I think it's important that we be reminded. There are people suffering the tortures of the damned in places like North Korea. While we talk about it on the radio, there are people whole families suffering really nothing less than evil. And so war is not something that we like, but these people need to be freed. I don't know what's possible. I don't know to what extent Kim Jong-un is open to anything. I mean, when you're a dictator who's literally worshipped by his brain-washed people, I can't imagine what looks like a compromise to him.

Do you have any sense of that since you've studied this? Well, not really. You know, I mean, you know, if you go back to his grandfather, Kim Il-sung, he learned from the master's himself, the great master of totalitarianism, and that's Stalin. He was a puppet of Stalin, and he, you know, even early on when he took power in the 40s after World War II leading up to the Korean War, he was starting to employ all these tactics, you know, the enormous billboards and creating this elaborate mythology about himself in which he would say things like he could make himself invisible in battle.

Crazy legends that got started, like that the Kim family, like, they don't defecate. They don't have bodily functions like, you know, you and I. They, every time he plays golf, you know, the current leader, or perhaps it was his father, it was supposedly a hole in one every time. Yeah. And, you know, you and I would say, well, this is just crazy. This is delusional. This is fake news taken to the ultimate extreme. But, of course, a whole generation of North Koreans have grown up with these stories, and they tend to believe them, or at least they say they believe them.

So, yeah, I don't know. There really is no difference. There was no difference between North and South Korea, culturally. But now, after all these years of living under these two very different kinds of regimes, they probably are very different people. Yeah. It will be really interesting to see if they could ever assimilate with each other again after all this. I've seen this in my own family. My mother grew up in what was East Germany.

And when the wall came down and all that, to this day, when I visited my relatives in what was the East, it's depressing. It's depressed. It's going to take a very long time because, yeah, you have entire generations of people that, you know, the must. of liberty atrophy. They don't even know what it means to think for themselves, and it doesn't bounce back in five minutes. Meanwhile, you go to South Korea, and you see Seoul, and you see Busan and these other cities, and, you know, this is the 13th largest economy in the world, and it's not a perfect place, but it's a democracy. It's vibrant, it's pluralistic. It has all the things that, you know,

you want in a society for it to grow. and it's so exciting, but the contrast between that and just across the DMZ what's happening in North Korea is probably nothing more stark in contrast than that place. Yeah, there's real evil in the world, unfortunately, but there it is. We're going to be right back, folks. I'm talking to Hampton Sides, the new book, On Desperate Ground, the Marines at the Reservoir, the Korean War's greatest battle. stick around. Hey there, folks. It's Eric with Taxis show.

We're talking to Hampton Sides. His new book is on Desperate Ground. The Marines at the Reservoir, the Korean War's greatest battle. Hampton, I've got to ask you, we both were at Yale at the same time. We both wanted to be writers. We both grew up to be writers. Let me ask you, what is your life like at this point? Do you teach writing?

Did I get that right? I do some teaching up at a great little college called Colorado College. And, you know, I do some lecturing around the country, some guest lectures. But really these books take most of my time. I do some magazine journalism. I kind of have a variety of things I'm interested in. But the books really is the main thing now. And it's a joy to be able to do the thing I always aspired to do.

And to make a living at it, it's, you know, I'm having a ball. Well, it's good to hear that. You're obviously doing it at the highest level, the accolades. for your work are tremendous, absolutely tremendous. So I'm just thrilled to think that you've gone on to do what you care so much about it doing. Do you ever get to New York? I was going to say, I want to have you in the studio to talk to you about some of your other books, particularly in the Kingdom of Ice.

I'd love to do that. If you ever get to New York, for any reason, give us a warning because it's fun to kind of sit down and to go over these things. You have a number of books that I think are important. stories and since you're such a good writer. And my standards for writing are very high. So I don't say that lightly. Good writing is important because people don't want to read something if it's not well written. And I think that's why your books have been so successful. Do you have any idea at this point of what's next? What appeals to you to take on?

I actually am doing next. The last two books have been set in really cold places in Siberia and the Arctic and in North Korea in the winter. So I'm moving out of the cold weather phase, and my next book is going to be set in Tahiti, Hawaii, and the South Sea. It's a book about the third and final and the fateful voyage of Captain Cook. Oh, my gosh.

And, of course, he rediscoveres Hawaii, first Western are there, and things don't go so well for him in Hawaii. But that's my next book. I'm already planning trips to New Zealand and England, where the archives are, and, of course, the South Seas. That, there are very few things people could say to make me feel a frisson of jealousy. That, to me, sounds absolutely amazing. I was going to joke.

I said, where are you going to go? To Hawaii, Tahiti, and that's exactly where you're going to go. It's time for me and my wife, too. She's like, can't you pick a place? It's a little warmer. So, yeah, it's time to warm up a little bit. See, wife's nagging can be wonderful. My wife has just a comment can change the course of our lives in a good direction.

So that's how it's actually, you know, it's not nagging. So you can just say that, but it's not nagging. It's called wisdom. That is absolutely terrific, my goodness. Well, if you do come through New York, give us some warning. We'd love to have you in this theory talk about these different things and talk about how we never met at Yale. I just find it amazing that we graduated in the same class. and that I've never had the joy to meet you.

But good to meet you on the phone. Congratulations again on the book. And to be continued, please. Thanks again. Absolutely. It's a real pleasure. I enjoyed it. All right.

That's it, folks. Thanks for listening. Get a copy of On Desperate Ground.