The Eric Metaxas Show - Heather Mac Donald (Encore)
Episode Date: January 30, 2024Eric's Socrates in the Studio conversation with Heather Mac Donald. https://socratesinthecityplus.com/ ...
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It's amazing.
Welcome to Socrates in the studio.
Today, my guest is the brilliant public intellectual, Heather McDonald.
Heather McDonald has written innumerable books.
She is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.
She is a contributing editor to City Journal.
Her recent books include The Diversity Delusion and, most recently,
when race trumps merit, which we will be discussing.
right now at Socrates in the studio.
Hey there, folks.
Welcome to Socrates in the studio.
I am thrilled to have as my guest,
someone who identifies as Heather McDonald, Heather.
Welcome.
Yes, you're assiduously gender neutral on that.
I want to be very, very clear.
That's how you identify, and I respect that.
And I'm going to, the pronoun I'm going to use as you.
Uh-huh.
No.
You.
You, singular.
You people.
or use for the plural?
I don't usually identify particularly female, but in this case I will.
Okay, thank you.
But I certainly don't have fun of his mail.
Well, look, Heather, you have written many books.
The new book, which I've read recently, is called When Race Trump's Merit,
how the pursuit of equity sacrifices, excellence destroys beauty, and threatens lives.
Unfortunately, quite literally, when you read the book, that becomes clear.
I want to talk to you about the ideas in this book.
and the ideas in the diversity delusion.
The problem is, where do we start?
Well, we can start with some recent news that the FAA is considering
diversity-making race and gender a qualification for doing air traffic control,
which is showing that the diversity cult is now a death cult.
Well, we already knew that.
This is just a new level of death.
Yeah, right. It's the death in the air. Like mass death from the skies. Exactly, exactly.
Right. Not just the death of standards, but yeah, the death on the roads. We're going to get that as well.
And we're also going to get death in the emergency rooms.
Okay. Just to begin this, you know, as broadly as possible, state up front the thesis of the book so that I don't have to.
The thesis is that there is a dominant narrative in our society today.
that is threatening Western civilization.
And that narrative says that any racial disparities in any institution is by definition a product of racism.
No other explanations are allowed into the public discourse.
So let me give you some examples.
If a medical school doesn't have 13% black students or black faculty, 13% being the population of blacks in the nation at large,
that is by definition a racist medical school.
The reason there's an underrepresentation of blacks is racism.
If a big tech company doesn't have 13% black nanotechnologists or computer scientists,
that is a racist tech company.
And it works in the other direction for overrepresentation.
If blacks are more than 13% of the prison population,
they're actually a third nationally,
that's because we have a racist criminal justice system.
And the solution to these racial disparities
is to tear down any standard
that is resulting in the underrepresentation
of blacks in meritocratic institutions.
So let's say a hiring exam or a skills test
or in the case of the criminal law,
tearing down the criminal law itself,
if that results in putting more than 13% blacks in prison.
What you're not allowed to say is, well, actually,
there's an academic skills gap which we should think about and worry about
that results in the under-representation.
And there's a criminal offending gap,
which is really difficult to talk about,
which results in over-representation.
And tearing down these standards is hurtling us very fast
towards at best mediocrity and at worst
extinction.
Civilization of excellence and civilizational extinction.
Well, I think that says it all. We're done here.
First of all, I want to say that
the level of preposterousness of much of what you write about
in the book, when race Trump's merit,
is such that it is often comedic.
In other words, it's entertaining on some level
because it is so wildly preposterous.
And it begins to eat,
it's the snake eating its tail.
In other words, it gets to a point where
what you just said about air traffic controllers, you know,
because the standard thing would be to say,
like, look, I don't need to agree with the theology of my pilot
or with the politics of my pilot,
pilot. I want him to be a good pilot because I don't want to die. That's his job.
The idea that, I mean, it's one thing for this craziness, you know, to creep into, you know,
humanities at places like Yale where both of us have the fortune and misfortune of having spent time.
That's sort of at least understandable. But when you're talking about medical schools,
when you're talking about air traffic controllers.
It's hard to process that people are,
I guess the way I always phrase it is that I'm on team reality, right?
Like I care about reality.
But these folks, it seems to me, and this is not to get too wiggie,
but they don't seem to believe in reality.
Everything's a social construct or everything is in their head.
They don't seem to even believe in the idea of metrics or numbers
or whatever. They're just in the ether, 100% in the ether. That's the only way I can process
that they would have these opinions. Well, I think they would say we have a very strong understanding
of reality, which is the reality of America is endemically white supremacist.
Yeah. And that's why we'll never elect a black president, much less for two terms.
Exactly. It never, not possible. It's not going to happen. And no Republicans have had
love affairs with black politicians like, you know, Alan Keyes or Alan West or Colin Powell or Condoleez
racist. Impossible. It will not happen. Right. They're way too racist ever to embrace somebody like
Clarence Thomas. Exactly. Yeah. That'll never happen. So we have to joke because it's just, it's madness.
Yeah. And I have to say, I mean, you and I can say, I told you so because we've been warning
about the insanity on campuses for 30 years, 40 years. And everybody's laughed at it.
off. You know, you'd write these articles, say, look at, you know, back in the early 1990s,
you'd have freshman orientation segregated by race or dorm graduation ceremony segregated by race
on the theory that integration was somehow psychologically injurious to black students.
And people said, oh, you know, let these people graduate into the real world. They'll
toughen up and they'll see that there's competitive standards and merit and accomplishment matters.
And in fact, it was the students, the products of this hate-filled university that changed reality in their image.
Right. The university finally bled over into the quote-unquote real world and made it not real.
Exactly. As Andrew Sullivan said, we're all on campus now.
And after George Floyd, the mass psychosis that followed the race riots, this idea that racism defines American reality and explains everything that we see about,
our institutional structures became absolutely ubiquitous.
And you had our most elite institutions preposterously blaming themselves and blaming everybody else for phantom racism.
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And why does my appearance seem to have a somber tone?
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It's everything that John 1010 tells us about,
where it's the enemy has come to steal and destroy,
and Jesus has come to give life and life more abundantly.
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What we're talking about is an anti-rational worldview.
That it sees rationality itself as West.
patriarchal, something to be demonized. I mean, that to me seems at the heart of a lot of this.
And you're absolutely right, that that is their language. And they will say that mathematics is
racist, that science is racist, that objectivity is a function of white privilege. And yet,
on the other hand, I'm always reluctant to use the usual conservative arguments, say, well,
it's anti-common-sense or anti-reason.
Because I'm not sure they would cop to saying, well, I'm against common sense.
Like, I think this is commonsensical, but I'm against it.
Or I'm not using my reason here.
I think we have to, we can't just, right, charge them with wrong procedures.
I think we have to get to the empirical claims that are being made.
And so the trans thing.
is like in a class by itself. That is truly bizarre. But on the other things, they would still
argue that they have evidence on their side. And so that's why it's very important to provide
alternative explanations for why we have these disparities. Well, your book, and this is why you're
you and I'm me, but you have the talent to write a book loaded with evidence to support this
in all these fears. And one is more entertaining than the other.
whether you start with medicine and science, then you get into the culture and then finally into the law.
But some of it, as I say, is just comedic.
I mean, when I read your chapter about the French, the 19th century French bust,
I'm glad you thought it was funny to me.
Like, I was enraged.
That was very hard to write.
But it is both.
Yeah, I know.
It is beyond enraging.
I mean, I went to the Metropolitan website.
you know, to Metro...
I live near the Metropolitan Museum
here in the city in New York.
And I just thought, let me see what they say.
The first of all, let me see what the bus looks like
and let me see what they say about it.
And you just want to do backflips with rage of...
You can't believe...
I know.
So nobody knows what we're talking about.
So do everyone a favor and describe what we're talking about.
We're now talking about the world of art.
Yes.
We're talking about the Met here in New York.
but talk about the two acquisitions, the terracotta and the marble original.
Just talk about this, because to me it sums up in some ways everything you say in the book.
Yeah, let me back up. This is the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which is one of the great encyclopedic museums in the world that has been given the privilege, its director, Max Holane, has been given the privilege of curating a collection that was created
over a century by these wealthy, generous donors
who gave him works from across the world,
and they are beautiful.
And all we ask of Max Holine and his curators is one thing.
Tell the public why they should be grateful
to be able to see these works
and why they are brilliant
and why they expand our knowledge
of human experience and how to see the world.
That's all we ask.
It's a really good job.
So there was a 19th century French sculptor named Jean-Baptiste Carpoe,
and he's probably the second greatest French sculptor after Rodin.
And if anybody has ever seen the works of Bernini in Rome at the Borghese Gallery,
Bernini has this amazing capacity to show flesh on flesh,
the pressure of a Saturn's hand on a nymph's arm.
As he's taking away, in marble.
In marble.
Carpo achieves very, very close to that.
He's a brilliant sculptor.
He was absolutely central to the renovation of Paris in the late 19th century,
the creation of the Grand Boulevard under Hausman and public monuments.
He did a wonderful freeze for the Paris Opera.
He created a bust in the 1860s, or 1873 actually,
called Why Born Enslaved?
Clearly, he created this beautiful sculpture as an abolitionist statement.
Exactly.
In art.
Exactly.
Clearly.
Exactly.
Okay.
His goal was to move the viewer if the viewer needed prodding to understand the
inhumanity of slavery.
So it's an African woman with a rope around her chest,
one of her breasts is bare, which is typical for all sculpture, sculpture at the period.
It is not voyeuristic or sensational.
And she's looking over her shoulder with the most poignant piercing expression of dismay,
just defiance, lack of understanding what is going on.
And as you say, it's patently a work with an abolitionist message.
But even if you didn't look at it,
we just know that
I mean we know historically
that is absolutely why he
created this. Exactly. Like we know that as a
fact. Exactly. Okay. So the
Metropolitan Opera first bought a terracotta
version of this in the 90s
and it had in the 2014
it had a whole show around
Carpo. It was a fantastic
retrospective. I was fortunate enough to go
not knowing that I would be writing about
him in another seven years
or so
and
it shows
It shows it's this wonderful benchmark of the Met in 2014 pre-George Floyd mass psychosis.
Right.
And the Met in 2022.
So in 2014, it could say Capo is a fantastic sculptor.
This is the terracotta version of Whyborn Enslaved.
Fantastic work, poignant, moves the viewer.
So then the Met gets a new curator of its sculpture, European sculpture department.
And George Floyd happens.
And they decide, okay, we're going to buy the marble bus.
and we're going to do an entirely different show that will correct the blindness and the racism of our 2014 show.
And so they build an entire show around the marble bust, which is a much more elegant and finished version of this.
And the show is called The Fictions of Emancipation.
This already is a clue.
So Emancipation is a fiction.
It never happened.
And the thesis of the Mets show of 2020, of 2022, the Fictions of Emancipation, is that because Carpo was a white sculptor, in him creating an ostensibly abolitionist work, actually the purpose of that work was to argue that blacks are inherently slaves and will always be so.
and that it was actually not an abolitionist's work
what was in favor of the enslavement of blacks.
And every other abolitionist work like Josiah Wedgwood,
who was a British, had a porcelain factory,
though we all know the Wedgwood lines of tableware.
He did a famous medallion called,
Am I Not a Man and a Brother,
of a black man with chains
begging for
recognition of his humanity.
Wedgwood campaigned against slavery.
The Metz thesis and fictions of emancipations
Wedgwood was a racist.
Okay, I know, I mean, I knew about the Wedgwood
art because I wrote a biography of William Wilberforce,
the white guy who led the battle for the abolition of the slave trade,
and he partnered with people like Wedgwood and others
to use the arts and culture
to help people.
people understand the wickedness of the slave trade.
So there's no doubt that Josiah Wedgwood created that image, which was widely disseminated,
for the very purpose of ending the slave trade and ultimately slavery,
and was in fact very successful in that.
There's no doubt about that.
That's historical.
That's the record.
but the Met
perversely
decides
somehow against all facts
I mean there's there no facts
it's just they
impose this crazy subjective view
on the bus to which you were referring
the sculpture and then on Wedgwood
which is even a more dramatically clear example
of somebody using his gifts
to free blacks from slavery.
Yes.
And that is nonetheless called racist.
There's no way out of that conundrum,
the paradox that they're basically saying that
no matter what a white person does,
even when advocating for black people
as fully human as people who should not be enslaved,
even in that act, you're being racist.
And you just think you have to hold your head.
Yes.
because they're saying this today at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and across institutions throughout the West.
They're doing this, but they don't have, and we know this, they have absolutely nothing to back up that position.
I'm convinced that the American Church,
has arrived at a significant moment of truth.
The parallels with where the American church is now
to where the German church stood in the early 1930s
are unavoidable and grim.
Churches need to understand really what Marxism is,
which is to destroy the church,
to destroy the word of God.
So if you capture the seminaries, you capture the pastors,
you capture the laity, you capture the soul of the world.
This is the hour of the American.
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The catalog copy, which I wrote about, it's exclusively academic jargon theory.
It is they mindlessly vomit forth the usual phrases from academic deconstruction, feminist theory, anti-colonial theory.
And they think by endlessly repeat.
you know, intersectional themes of the enslavement of the black body and whatnot,
that they have made an argument.
You're absolutely right in this case.
I'll concede it.
They do not have facts.
They do not have reason.
But yes, your viewers should understand, Eric, the degree of hatred that went into the creation of this show.
Self-hatred, but also hatred for what Max Holine and his...
as curators believe is the unwashed masses,
that they hate Western art now,
they hate our civilization,
and they will engage in the most counterfactual narratives
to continue this amazingly counterfactual discourse.
And it involves in making their argument about the Carpo bust,
they have to turn on every aspect of Western art.
So, yes, one of her breasts is revealed.
You mean turn against?
Turn against.
Well, no, I mean, you said it correctly, but just to be clear, they are, yes, they, go ahead.
They have to take every, some of the most longstanding and noble traditions within Western art
and argue that those are racist in order to try and argue that this bust is racist.
So, for example, yes, one of the citadel.
breast is revealed.
Well, so is the famous
delacois portrait of the
French Revolution of Liberty.
I believe both busts.
Both breasts in that case.
And the nude,
there have been millions of
nudes created.
Like 99.999% of those nudes
have been white.
There have been very few black nudes.
But somehow, because this one,
model is black and one breast is exposed, this means that the portrayal of the nude is racist.
Well, as far as they're concerned, everything is the hot and tot Venus. There's just nothing
else to discuss. It's just, it must be because she's black and that's the end of it. And we don't
need to talk anymore. And it's obviously silly. But what's, what's creepy, Heather, is the
the seriousness with which they take themselves.
In other words, these are like, you know, it's like being in Mao's cultural revolution.
Yes, yes.
You cannot have any real conversations.
You are guilty, and you must say that you're guilty.
Right.
What do you think accounts, this is broader than the subject of your book, but because you back it up so magnificently in so many fields,
what do you think accounts for the hatred in, among,
the elites in the West of the West, of our civilization. And it does seem to be only the elites,
only the people running places like the Met or Yale or whatever. They somehow feel that this
is their version of nobles oblige, that they have to do this mea culpa, self-flagellation on
behalf of everyone because they're in the lead. But what might account for their, let's call it,
self-hatred or the hatred of the greatness of the West?
I may distinguish between the university and then the non-academic world.
And within the university, the impulse of self-critique in the part of Western universities
is very longstanding.
I mean, you can even say, because I do ask myself, like, more broadly, only the Western
civilization is committing suicide right now.
Okay, hold on.
See, now that right there, you do write about this a little bit in the book.
that is very telling because you are i don't mean to cut you off i just want to make sure we don't like
lose this that is the beauty to some extent of the west in other words there are values within
the western tradition exactly which are not afraid of self-criticism yep which seem to believe in this
idea of objective truth and justice and goodness and beauty and therefore are free to criticize
themselves. So that's beautiful, but what's happened here is it's gone too far. Right. Well, see, I ask
myself this all the time, why the West? And, you know, to just bring it back briefly to the art
issue and then make sure I don't forget my train of thought and bring me back. But in
Western art museums now, particularly in the United States, but it's also in Europe at the Rice
Museum in Amsterdam, they will write wall labels that are deconstructing the subtext of these
works so that if you see a beautiful still life from the Dutch golden age of Baroque art,
the still life will not tell you, you know, make sure you understand what has been created here
with this translucent grape skin and the beautiful cut pewter and the ability to portray light on glass.
but instead see this as simply a product of colonialism and slavery.
And, you know, you don't see any slavery here, but it's really all about slavery.
The museums will only do that about Western art.
They will, meanwhile, you'll go into the African art wing,
and it'll celebrate aesthetically the way it used to be,
you know, talk about formal elements or the creation of a Benin-Bron
celebrating a warrior king. And it will never say that what you're not seeing here is the slaughter
with which this king got power and the tribal genocide that brought him there. They will never
say that about Chinese art, you know, that also you had a deeply misogynist culture here,
footbinding of women. Instead, it will be, this is beautiful, you know, appreciate this landscape.
the West is only criticizing itself and no other civilization is criticizing itself.
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4th, you can see the videos, it's amazing. When we talk about the concept of this thing that both of us
would see as very healthy, the ability to be introspective. Socrates, obviously, famously said
the unexamined life is not worth living. Right. He merely asserts that, but we all know that,
yes, that's, we agree with that, that we ought to be introspective, we ought to be self-critical.
I would argue that that's a biblical, well, I wouldn't argue. I know. I know.
that it's a biblical worldview, this idea
that we are fallen, and therefore we
need to check up on ourselves
and not to drift into some
utopianist madness without
being aware of where that can take us.
And so these are Western ideas, whether
you get them from
the Athenians, or
you get them from
the Hebrew Bible.
But these are what
gave us the greatest
civilization in the world.
and it's interesting to me that the seeds of destruction are there.
People argue the same thing about Luther.
You know, Luther did all this stuff,
but then it leads to madness and whatever.
And I think what you're ultimately talking about
is the downside of freedom, right?
That freedom can sometimes lead to people, you know,
using their freedom for ill ends.
But that seems to be really clear right now
that this self-critical aspect has gone crazy.
Well, and I would, so I think, as I said,
there's a long tradition of that type of critique in academia.
I would, then I add to this race.
Because that, to me, when I look around the world today,
leaving the trans madness aside,
it is racial issues that are having the biggest impact on our culture.
And Americans came very late to an understanding of how deeply they were violating their fundamental ideas.
Obviously, there were people who understood it from the beginning and were fighting and were articulating arguments against the very real white supremacy that characterized our culture
and the gratuitous nastiness with which North and South treated.
blacks and it's heartbreaking to read that history. And it took a very long time to become
fully cognizant of that. And so that, a guilt, an understandable guilt, I mean, you can argue
whether it's ultimately self-defeating or not, but an understandable guilt is driving a lot
of what's going on now. But to the point that to, again, contradict myself and support you,
means, I think, a failure to see facts before one's eyes.
Tragically, you know, we're like ships crossing in the night.
It breaks my heart to see black entertainers and black thinkers and black civil rights activists
from the 40s and 50s conforming to bourgeois ideals.
You know, Ella Fitzgerald dressed to the Nines and Duke Ellington and Nat King Cole
and the protesters with suits and hats
and at a time when America in the South especially
was still, as I say, gratuitously
asserting white supremacy over them.
So they were conforming, and then civil rights revolution happened
and America finally became ready to say,
we will accept you,
and then you had the rise of an oppositional culture
in the black community that now,
celebrates dysfunction, celebrates criminality.
And so that moment where both sides were willing to accept the other has passed.
And so right now we have these racial disparities and our only allowable explanation is racism,
whereas in fact, as I say, the reason for racial disparities today is not racism.
it's an academic skills gap if I can just put these numbers out
and they're very uncomfortable to talk about.
And I would ordinarily believe that racial etiquette would keep this off stage,
but it's too late. It's too late for that now.
But can we talk about the roots of that?
Because to me that's the real issue.
In other words, when you talk about these gaps, you say, why?
What has happened?
And it is, you've just said it.
I mean, there was, in previous decades, a kind of paradigm about how we
deal with this inequality, with the injustice, and it had to do with dignity.
Yes.
It had to do with showing our moral superiority through dignity.
And so when you think of Dr. King, telling the people on the buses, we will not fight back.
In other words, we will not participate in this.
We will not allow them to demonize us.
we will act so nobly that they will be ashamed.
And that is what happened.
That is what happened.
It worked.
When you think of Rosa Parks, you may know the story I've written about it,
but I mean, Rosa Parks was chosen specifically because she was so morally upstanding,
such a fine Christian woman, that they knew that when people would try to attack her,
it would be very difficult.
So they took that stand.
A lot of obviously the civil rights movement came out of the churches.
And it was when they embraced the thinking of Malcolm X and pulled away from Dr. King's fundamentally kind of Christian perspective on how we deal with this.
It changed everything and it led ultimately to where we are today.
but I still think there are many, you know, people in the black community who would agree with us on this and who are troubled by this.
But the media narrative only talks about what we're talking about.
Right. And the message was, rather than meeting standards, tear down standards on our behalf.
We, you know, we won't meet them, just lower them.
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Use promo code Eric. Folks, welcome back. I'm talking to Robert Netsley right now, who is with Inspire
investing. Robert, I can't help but get excited about what you've created an opportunity for people
to find out if their money is funding wicked things, if they have money in a 401k or retirement
fund, whatever it is, that is invested in companies that are doing evil things, that is promoting
pornography, promoting abortion, promoting any number of things or ideologies with your money,
folks. So Robert Nestle has created something where you can get a free report that tells you
where your money is and they will help you get your money into companies that are doing good
things. So you have to go to inspireadvisors.com slash Eric. Inspireadvisors.com slash Eric. You get a
free report. But this is something I, you know, Robert, I guess it just gives me hope that it's
possible to turn things around in America. Because when I think of how.
how much money people have invested out there.
If they would understand what's going on and shift that money to good stuff,
it's just huge.
It's just absolutely monstrous.
It's enormous.
It's enormous.
And we are seeing fruit from that labor.
It's remarkable.
It doesn't have to even be trillions of dollars to change things.
I've been on the phone, you know, in recent weeks, you know, with investor relations and CFOs and whatnot.
We regularly engage with companies that,
we invest in or are like to invest in or kind of just speaking biblical truth, the corporate power.
And, you know, one of the things we hear is often that, number one, these people have never heard,
they tell us they've never heard from a faith-based investor before.
They've been doing their job for 20, 30 years, you know, executive major organizations,
never heard from a faith-based investor.
So number one, they need to hear our voice.
Number two, they're thankful to hear it.
Even in some of these sort of, you know, woke businesses, you think that this don't care,
there are people in those businesses of influence that actually do care about what we have to say
and oftentimes have enough influence to change things. So for instance, Costco stopped giving money
to gay pride parades. Chevron stopped giving money to Planned Parenthood. There's a laundry list of other
organizations that have changed things. That is unbelievable. That is unbelievable. Robert Nelson, that is
unbelievable. It is so wonderful. I want to tell people, folks, what you do and don't do, you can change the world
if you take an interest in this.
When I hear that a company like Costco would stop giving money to something like that,
or Chevron, these are huge, huge companies.
And you shop there, your money may be invested there.
When we get involved in these things, we can change the world.
So I want to say the action point is go to invest.
I'm sorry, inspireadvisors.com slash Eric.
inspire advisers.com slash Eric.
You'll get a free report that will help you figure this out.
And I know, Robert, that you guys will help people if they want to transition to invest in companies that believe in their values.
But this is a gigantic thing that we have.
I mean, it's to me scandalous when we have power and we don't use that power.
It's like when I say, I'm not going to vote.
I'm not going to do this.
I'm not going to do that.
When you don't do those things, people who don't share your values, who share opposite,
who have opposite values, they're going to prevail.
So I just want to say to you, Robert, thank you for taking this on because it is game-changing.
Like you said, it's a movement.
The more people that do this, it's an amazing thing when we think of the money that is out there,
that many people of faith with traditional values have invested in woke companies.
Ladies and gentlemen, you've got to do something about it.
You've just got to do something about it.
This is like a mandate that we've got to live our faith out in every sphere and where your
money is.
That's a big deal.
So please go to InspireAdvisors.com slash Eric.
This is a free report.
InspireAdvisors.com slash.
Eric, Robert Natsley, thank you.
Pleasure. Thank you, Eric.
