The Pete Quiñones Show - Pete Reads 'Coup D'état' by Edward N. Luttwak - Introduction and Background w/ John Fieldhouse

Episode Date: July 31, 2024

38 MinutesPG-13Pete sets out to read and comment on Edward N. Luttwak's "Coup D'état." In this episode he welcomes John Fieldhouse to give background on the book and its author, Edward Luttwak.Antelope Hill - Promo code "peteq" for 5% off - https://antelopehillpublishing.com/FoxnSons Coffee - Promo code "peter" for 18% off - https://www.foxnsons.com/Coup d'ÉtatPete and Thomas777 'At the Movies'Support Pete on His WebsitePete's PatreonPete's Substack Pete's SubscribestarPete's GUMROADPete's VenmoPete's Buy Me a CoffeePete on FacebookPete on TwitterBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-pete-quinones-show--6071361/support.

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Thank you so much. I want to welcome everyone to my seventh reading, which is Kudaita by Help Me Out. How do we pronounce his last name, John? I've heard Lutvach or Lutwak. You'd probably say Lutfok if you were actually a German speaker, but he's lived in the U.S. in Great Britain for 50-something years now. So let's go with Lutwack or Lutwack. Whatever.

All right. Yeah. Cool. And I am here for this, what we will call part zero, with John Fieldhouse. How are you doing, John? Doing well, sir. How are you doing? Doing good.

Why don't you tell everybody a little bit, how much ever you're willing to tell everybody about yourself? Yeah. So just a real background to the reader, anybody, or the listener who doesn't know me at all. I'm John Fieldhouse. My background to the extent I'm willing to talk about it, I was an Army officer for a number of years. I was medically retired. Thanks to the beauty of the GI Bill,

as well as a bunch of reforms pushed through during the Trump administration. I got to double dick with separate programs on top of the GI Bill, as well as the whole student loan forgiveness for disabled veterans that Trump pushed through. So long story short, when I got out of the Army, like most people I did contracting at various times, which is an on-again, office again thing. So you always got downtime built in between contracts. So because of the different benefits, I would go to college in between because not only do they pay for school, they also pay me to go to school, which is a salary when you're in between jobs.

It's also really cool because sometimes I would make more money going to schools than my day job, which not to brag or anything, but it was a situation where, I end up going a lot longer and a lot further in school than what I would have, or somebody like me would go at any other time in history. So I end up gathering some master's degrees and finishing a doctorate and organizational theory, which kind of got me into, which along the way got me into the issue of how does the leadership and management of insurgencies and military coups and counterinsurgencies, how do those things work? Partly just because, again, organizational theory tends to be run through business schools, which means you tend to get people writing and talking about the same five businesses over and over again. And I like Apple and I like Steve's jobs, but I don't really want to talk about them anymore. So I was the weirdo in departments run through the business school where I would do, you know,

research projects and dissertations on things like Hezbo Law and how do you build an effective military when you have to completely break it down after it's lost a war? and rebuilt it because those are the things that interest me, which is kind of how I got onto the academic subject that we're going to talk about, sir. Awesome. Awesome. All right. So the book is called coup d'etat. Was it through your education that you found out about this book? When did this book come on your radar? Oh, Christopher Sandbatch a number of years ago. I actually turned it, turned me onto it. It was during my academic career.

So that's one of the things I picked up. But yeah, he talked about this is, again, a manual or it's written sort of as a tongue-in-chief manual. The author originally called it a cookbook on how does a military coup function from the view inside out. And that's part of what it turned me on. Apparently, the Netflix special and how do you do a coup was largely built upon this series. there was a TV movie,

Canadian TV movie done in like 78, called PowerPlay, which is basically taking the textbook script, this textbook script, and building a movie off of it. And it's just one of those interesting things out there. I know I'm rambling, sorry. Ready for huge savings?

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buy it, get it tomorrow. Or, you know, fight Brenda. No, that's fine. That's fine. That's fine. So, can you help? I'm going to read this all the way through on the subsequent episodes. And so I guess probably a great thing to do to start would be to give a broad overview of it. So where do you want to start as far as that goes? Yeah. So anyways, when I originally reached out to you, because I've got lots of great ideas,

but have done no work for you. So I thought time to actually help you do. of these and this is probably like the third book I pitched you but uh we're speaking what is it it's 24th july 24th july 24 it's a couple weeks after the attempted assassination of trump in pennsylvania and i remember your live stream that you had the weekend or the week monday after that where you made the point that look a lot of people are getting wrapped around the axle with you know six-dimensional chess ideas about is this a coup or not. And my pitch was, you should go read this book because, you know, this is what a real

coup looks like. And we should take the time to actually look at what the actual exercise of power of politics looks like in the real world. And I actually have a conceptual framework before we actually start discussing, you know, all kinds of minor details that we can't now. Well, I mean, historically, when you look at a coup, you'd have a, you'd have a palace coup. A palace coup, to me, seems to be a, as far as knowing the target and knowing what you have to do, seems to be a whole lot easier than one that would be, I mean, the managerial hell that we live in right now, I assume.

Yeah, and those are things that actually his first, actually his first two chapters get into this a lot. So yeah, historically you tended to have palace coups, which generally meant that the military and or the elected and or the appointed government of a monarchial state forces a current monarch to abdicate and usually forces their son, sometimes their daughter, to go and take over so that they would have a more compliant or more cooperative. figurehead ruler on their behalf. I mean, recent examples of that, I think the two big examples that stand out is number one, the show, or excuse me, the coup against Mossadegh in Iran and the 50s, in which his father, I don't know if his father was removed or the allies or he was, or Reza Shah was in charge at that point. But anyways, they wanted to remove Mossadegh, the elected prime minister.

And they wanted the younger Shaw, or Reza Shah, Shal Palavi, to take over and essentially run as an actual executive monarch, an actual monarch that actually is in charge of the government. And the other big example would probably be the Meiji restoration when a bunch of samurai kidnapped the emperor of Japan in order to force the country to modernize. So those are the two biggest examples. As far as managerial states, that is exactly the issue. One of the things that Lutwak talks about is for a coup to actually happen to actually be effective, you need to have enough machinery estate, enough modern machinery estate, that there's something there to actually grab onto, to hold on to it, to actually run a government. Combined with it not being so modernized, so managerial that it's impersonal,

which could result in a situation where the coup, a new system, a new regime takes over the government. but nobody listens to them. So, yeah, that is kind of the issue, is can a coup happen in a managerial state? I think the very short answer is what we saw this previous weekend with President Biden saying he's not going to run for office anymore. I'm not saying that as a coup, but all of the symptoms, all of what we're seeing from it looks exactly like what would say a modern coup would look like. So I think it's interesting that we look at a managerial coup, we look at a modern coup, and it's so modern that it manifests itself onto a social media platform. Yeah, and one of the things that when we get into reading, so this book was originally published in, was it 19, was it 68? and then the second edition

it was published in 2016. One of the things that Littwegg says in the revised update to the revised version is one of the things he had to take into account was just how much expanded, how much broader communications technology is because you pointed out back in 1968, most African countries,

if you wanted a coup, you had to take over one radio station or network of radio stations and even the smallest country today. probably has a dozen different radio stations. And now thanks to podcasting and digital pseudo-radio systems, you effectively have infinite number of systems to the point that you, you know,

an effective coup looks like something like what Egypt went through with the Arab Spring, where they had to shut up all internet to the country at one point. So, yeah, it's gotten to the point that social media is the high, high ground, which is obviously, or is very much obviously why Congress and the establishment left has tried to use all social media to suppress any ideas, any thought, anything on the spectrum they see as outside of the allowable opinion. What does what does Lutweck say about, like, economics? Because when you look at where we are

right now, you listen to the White House and it's a great, we're in the greatest economy of all time. You look at prices, a little different story. You look at housing, different story, anyone with their eyes open, any real person who doesn't live, you know, within 50 miles of the beltway, probably things, or 50 miles or a couple miles in New York City, things, a different story. I would think that if you said that you need something, you need it to be functioning in order for a coup to be successful, you'd need, some kind of economic prosperity, or at least economic competence, which it doesn't seem we have at this time.

And that's another interesting thing, and that's like the second big point he makes in the, his revised version was corruption, corruption being the second issue. You said the most important thing, and this is something he faulted himself for not seeing in 1968, is obviously there isn't a whole lot of financial difference. between what an army colonel and a president makes in most third world countries. You know, the actual official salary, there's not that much difference. And we talk about maybe the president of the United States as a, you know, a half million dollar salary.

He's also working significantly more than, you know, than probably what a half million dollar salary is. And more importantly, if you're a coup can fail, if at that point, you have to have something significantly more than just salary because losing a coup means death and if you're not killed you're probably going to spend the rest of your life in prison you're probably going to have the majority of your assets

confiscated you're probably going to lose everything and probably be sent into international exile so his point is corruption there has to be a means and a source

of something that can the ruling class can take control of tank possession, and there has to be some means in that society in which they're able to get away with that. One of the most obvious examples is in many, we'd say, third world or developing countries, especially African countries, right, is most aid is funneled through a central government at some point, which means that the people connected to the ruling regime skim some amount off the top. So that's the most obvious way.

I would argue that in the American system, a huge part of that has to be, one thing is obviously the whole speaking circuit that we have after leaving office where, you know, we're either as speakers or as lobbyists, you know, people will make more money in the first couple of years after leaving office than they did often the rest of their life up to their point, meaning there may not necessarily be corruption while you're in. office in the American model, but there's, you know, the corruption kicks in once you leave office. The other thing is campaign donations, where if you have campaign donations, you sponsor a whole industry of consultants and advertisers and whatnot, which means that a lot of the energy

surrounding every campaign for major office is actually who gets the money that comes from a campaign directly or indirectly. So one of the things that came up in the last week, is who are the Democrats going to pick as their option if they had Biden stepped down. And several of us, I think Orton McIntyre said at first that, well, Kamal Harris is the only person who gets to spend the donations they have so far, which means it's almost certainly going to be her because win or lose, you know, every person attached to the Democratic Party as an employee or contractor, you know, they want to get paid. And taking away their meal ticket matters more to them than whether or not.

a win or lose this contract, or win or lose this election, excuse me. So, yeah, the economic aspect, does it have to be prosperous? You can make the case that if it's very prosperous, it's probably harder to have a coup, but yeah, you need to have some distinction between the elites and those lower on the scale, meaning you have some concentration of what wealth there is, and there has to be some means of corruption, some means to skim it off in order to enrich yourself, which creates incentives for people lower in the political chain to take power, if that makes sense. You catch them in the corner of your eye.

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Those people who love going out shopping for Black Friday deals, they're mad, aren't they? Like, proper mad. Brenda wants a television and she's prepared to fight for it, if you ask me. It's the fastest way to a meltdown. I just prepare the fastest way to get stuff and it doesn't get faster than Appliances Delivered.aE. Top brand appliances, top brand electricals and if it's

online, it's in stock. With next day delivery in Greater Dublin. Appliances delivered.orgie, part of expert electrical. See it, buy it, get it tomorrow. Or you know, fight Brenda. Well, let me give you an example and try to apply it to what you just

said. When BLM was taking donations, especially in 2020. They had a button on their website. You pressed it. It basically took you through to Act Blue. So all this money is going to Act Blue. So tie that into how, what do you see there that would, that ties into what everything you just said?

I mean, it's more or less an example of what, what this Lutnik described happening in the United States of America. And again, I'm not accusing there, anybody of having coups or attempted coups in the United States of America. But I am saying that we fundamentally see the same symptoms. And in this case, yeah, that looks exactly like a symptom of what corruption looks like in a third world country. Why did he write this book?

Why does he say he wrote this? Because this, I mean, obviously this book is, it's been, I mean, he talks about how it's been translated into 19 different languages. Like, it was almost immediately. Yeah, one second. Yeah, that's an interesting case. Looking back, not to digress, or just to digress for a short second. Lufig Lutbach was born in 1942 in Romania. He is Jewish.

his family left because of the Soviet invasion, bouncing around Europe. He went to secondary school in the UK. He went to university, and he was working as a consultant for the oil industry when he first wrote this book. He was only 26 at the time. That's a good question. I think, and he doesn't explicitly say, and none of the biographers I've read have explicitly said, I think to some degree it happens to be somebody who comes from like a real politic

background, meaning they have a background in what real world exercise of power looks like. And if you're sitting in a classroom and you're studying abstract theory, very often, if you're just a normal or a person like that who has an interest in what the real world looks like, very often you want to actually write and study about things that actually matter. So I think that's partially what he got into it. Because you later on went back to London School of Economics to get advanced degrees and to build this consulting firm. I think part of it, like I said, is just interest in the exercise of power

and the desire to actually look at abstract things he was learning in school and actually apply him to the world of the world. So that's not too much of a digression. No, I mean, it's interesting because when you think of somebody who's 26 years old and, I mean, educated and intelligent, to write a handbook on who's never served in government to write a handbook as such, it seems, it has to appear odd to people, almost like he was handed a bunch of information that he put together, that there was, how could he possibly know all of this?

I mean, how do you think somebody puts together this kind, you know, it's like when I read Imperium Bayaki. I think 20 people wrote it. I mean, it's like, I mean, I know one guy wrote it, but it appears like 20 people wrote this thing because there's so much in there. You're like, how, how does a human being do this? So, I mean, I ask the same question about a 26-year-old. Yeah. In this case, you know, part of this I can just provide anecdotal information, which is, again, like sitting in class, studying something and being bored shitless of examples you have and actually having, you know, real world work that you've engaged in in the past and wanting to actually apply that material to it. How did you get the material? Again,

it was a lot harder to research things in 1968 than it is now. But if you are working for a consulting firm or working in a major industry that has lots of resources and is connected to those engaged in real world research, it's completely doable. Even if, you're And like the Yaki example, right? No matter what you're reading as a final product, even if there's only one author, understand that obviously there are lots of people involved directly or indirectly in the research, right?

I promise you Yaki had some research assistants to some degree at some point. And I know that because professionally, one of the things I've done over the years is research and been a research assistant is, not to mention, obviously, you have all the people collecting primary sources and whatnot. It requires a really good nose for research and investigation of what you want to look at

and understanding and a familiarity with the topic to know where you're going to go and look for answers and a huge amount of patience to sit through lots of primary sources and read things that are, you're looking for needles and haystacks, you're looking for a lot of for little key details in large materials. So it requires the ability to sit for long periods and sift through things. Exactly the kind of thing like Thomas 777 has talked about that he does. So you're asking, is it possible for somebody to do something like this? Yeah, it's completely possible.

And like I said, I'm sure he had assistance at some degree. And he definitely was relying on primary sources. But like I said, intellectual interest, boredom with what you, You know, it's being written on topics at that time and a nose for where to find research. Yeah, research and just a lot of time and energy to sit down and do those things. So, yeah, at 26, he's exceptional. I have no doubt that he did this, that LutFag actually did this book. But, yeah, those are sort of the combination of things.

And it's, when you're 26 and you're trying to make a lot of money, since most people don't have a lot of money at that point in your country was, or your family's kicked out of a country because of World War II, you probably don't have a lot of money. The willingness to go and do this research when you could be working overtime for other projects. So, you know, those rare combination of traits. Let me ask you this with your background in the military contracting. And, you know, I know that you're friends with people who've worked for like DOD. When a book like this comes out, what is the reaction?

from power. Keep in mind, I'm much lower rungs of power, so I'm not going to pretend that I'm connected to anybody who really makes decisions right now. Of course. Speaking of

the current day, military, and civil servants, today, the reaction normally is no reaction. They won't know about it, period, mostly because they lack intellectual curiosity. I know this is insulting to our people, but

one of the best things I've ever heard about Americans in intellectual curiosity is just understand that what the average American doesn't know about the rest of the world is what makes them the average American. And I didn't say that originally. That comes from Tommy Boy. So that's part of it. But understand that the people in charge today, for a number of reasons, are not exactly in charge of the military, are not exactly what we would think of as, you know, masters of

the universe. So they have, for the most part, the same lack of intellectual curiosity. And to the extent they have it, they tend to mostly have it for, you know, the formally digested material, meaning the stuff that's already in a preexisting manual as opposed to outside information. So, yeah, my long-winded answer is, for the most part, nobody responds to shit because they're not even going to know about it. Yeah, just look at this work. And I think of a bunch of coup d'et tas that happened in Africa since it was written since this was written and um you know you wonder hey were they was this book an inspiration where were were they able to um you know because i mean we may not be uh we may not be curious anymore that doesn't mean somebody yeah yeah yeah um well it's

allegedly it's been found in the remains of the leaders of multiple failed coups. So, what was it? Algeria or Morocco? Anyways, in the intro to 2016 version, Lutback says it explicitly. One of the officers who attempted a coup against the king, they actually found a heavily annotated version in his possession. And my understanding is it's been found in the possession on multiple failed coup plotters

in Africa since then. Keep in mind that what we find out after a failed coup, depending on who they were aligned with, very often, that's what's put out by the American media, which is very often direct propaganda from the U.S. government. So is that true? Who knows? But yeah, I would say there are multiple real-world examples that we can reasonably understand that this manual was used.

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Like, proper mad. Brenda wants a television and she's prepared to fight for it, if you ask me. It's the fastest way to a meltdown. Me, I just prepare the fastest way to get stuff, and it doesn't get faster than Appliancesdelivered.i. Top brand appliances, top brand electricals, and if it's online, it's in stock,

with next day delivery in Greater Dublin. Appliances delivered.org, dot ae, part of expert electrical. See it, buy it, get it. tomorrow or you know fight brander why did you recommend that i read this now i mean i had been looking i had been i've been looking at reading this um i i've known about this book for a while i'm thinking about reading the reading this on the show at complete there's so many books that i've thought about reading on the show and i've completely forgot about and as soon as you brought it up i was like yeah okay i need to do this why'd you why'd you bring it up at this time uh mostly because

like I said, and a lot of our guys, and God bless our guys, there are our guys, after the attempted assassination on Trump, like I said, they were engaged in conspiracy theories. And I'm not opposed to conspiracy theories per se, because again, any time people are colluding for nefarious reasons by high and closed doors is a conspiracy. You know, conspiracy is a term of law. So it's not like it does not mean fake. It means collusion. And a theory just means a conceptual model to explain something where you don't have all the information.

But they were engaged in conspiracy theorizing without a reasonable understanding of power. Like you said, there are people who they immediately thought there were so many plans within plans that this was done by Trump or this was done by, I've had multiple people telling me this was done by people in the Israeli lobby to ensure Trump was in power so that he would pick J.D. Bands, so we would go to the world with Iran. And those are, that chain of events is potential,

and, you know, it is a real risk, I will admit. But, you know, there's no way that any of those things could be centrally planned at one level. And the best comment on that was, Morgas said the other day that we need to be careful to not assume that the powers running the world are omnipotent, you know, masters of the universe that always have the answers. Because if they did and if they couldn't, and if they were always guaranteed success, there would be no reason to oppose them because they're going to win regardless. We need to have a reasonable understanding of power. And like I said, the best place to start with it would be, you know,

the manual written on how you would pull a coup off. And actually, my thought was once we've done the real work of looking at how this would look in the real world, then we can start examining events based on the evidence we had at that point, which are the evidence we have, which at that point the other week was next to nothing. Well, one of the points you made there about their omnipotence, seeming omnipotence, is something I've been saying is like one person, the same person will say that we're in the middle of a competency crisis and the government's incompetent, and this is incompetent. and but the Jews are in charge of everything and they have total control of everything,

but they have what total control over an incompetent society, an incompetent system, and then somebody will say, well, that's the op. The op is the incompetence. And it's just like, how do you argue? How do you argue with somebody who's just like, I mean, has put the Jewish people, Jewish power on a pedestal so high that it's like, well, what are you planning on doing about it? screaming on Twitter? Yeah.

Yeah, and I make the point. If somebody is going to continue to hold a perspective regardless of any evidence one way or the other, at that point you're not discussing or debating or exploring politics, what you're doing is explaining metaphysics, right? They're telling you what their religious beliefs are. And if somebody tells me that a political outcome is guaranteed one way or the other, and I mean like long-term politics is guaranteed one way or the other, no matter what happens or what intervention or what human action takes place,

at that point you're not discussing politics or actions, a state of war. What you're doing is you're engaging in eschatology, which there's a time in place, obviously, for metaphysics in eschatology, but not when we're discussing the exercise of power. And, you know, again, I repeat myself that if you think things are guaranteed, that level, then, you know, why are we opposed? Obviously, it's the will of God at that point, which I don't believe what we're going through is. And absolutely, the issue of the competency crisis, which is just getting bigger, is one of the defining

issues of a civilization and decline. I mean, Spengler wrote, a huge part of Decline of the West on that. Numerous theorists have written about that in both small and large scale, downfall. of institutions. And if we don't acknowledge that competency and the breakdown of effective bureaucracies, that those things happen, then we're not, again, we're not doing politics at that point. We're just intellectually masturbating. What do you think happened from the evidence you've seen coming out and everything? What do you think happened on July 13th? Which one was that? That was, we talk about when Trump's attempted assassination.

Yeah. I will say I've somewhat revised things based upon evidence as it comes out. Because again, I want to start off pointing out that the saying that the first reports of an incident are usually wrong. Because again, fog of war issues, the people on the site, even when they're completely loyal and plugged in and competent, they report as they see them, which is always an incomplete picture, right? By definition, the enemy is not telling you what they do until they're shooting at you normally or acting against. you. So that half of the pie you don't have. So in competence, you know, the breakdown in competency is definitely an issue. And again, I'm not saying that, or I'd make the point, I'm not necessarily saying that the use of women in a security force is always bad. But more than

one person has pointed out that the percentage of women in the Secret Service is so small that the idea that you would have three women on the same protective service detail at the same time is mathematically impossible, which tends to say either there was intentional intervention to make that happen or there's just a breakdown of supervision, which I think there was a breakdown of supervision. The fact that, you know, the rooftop in question was outside of the perimeter, despite being there, the kind of thing that just standing on the objective and looking at would tell you that there is something very wrong, tells me that the person in charge is an idiot,

mostly because I think if you were going to, again, engaging in speculation, if I were actually going to assassinate the president, I wouldn't do it on a rooftop in broad daylight. You want to have the person hypothetically have something that looks like an illness or an accident. That's how you assassinate somebody and get away with it, because, you know, acts of violence are obvious and always have a repercussion and tend to make the target side coalesce around an alternative leader, meaning it tends to harden the loyalty of your opposition. So I don't think, again, anybody in an establishment planned on assassinating Trump, at the same time, I obviously don't think that Trump or his side took, made staged an attempted assassination because we talk about the fact that if he had done. been one inch in the other direction, the bullet would have killed him. You can't thread the needle,

so to speak, with firearms in that way. That's not how guns work. So I don't think anybody would intentionally put themselves in that situation. So I absolutely do not think this was an intentional assassination by any, excuse me, intentional act by anybody on either side, the spectrum, either the establishment or his side. I do think it was a breakdown that allowed this to happen. As far as the issue, whether or not this person was radicalized, the guy who actually fired the weapon, we don't know any information, and I hesitate to say anything about that because we have no concrete details at any point and the total lack of concrete details forthcoming from anybody.

The fact that was that the last two days, the head of the Secret Service, was... There were hearings on Congress, and her answer to everything was, I have to refer you to the FVI. It tells me that there is an intentional cover-up of the investigation that's taking place, which, again, is what an organization in decline because of competency, that's how they behave. Did I answer your question? I'm sorry, I'm rambling. No, that's fine. What I would say is if somebody wanted to, if somebody wanted to, you know,

pop his melon on live TV. They would have popped his melon on live TV. Yeah. It just. Yeah. And again, if I'm opposed to him and I want to eliminate him, I'm not going to shoot him. You know, he's in his 70s, a random heart attack in the engineered. You know, an illness that, you know, suddenly drives him into sepsis.

Look, people are going to be skeptical, but it's easier to engineer. And I'm just saying that looking at what we know about assassination of programs, especially from what came out from, you know, the KGB after the Soviet archives were opened to the West, is those are the things that were sometimes done when they wanted to assassinate Soviet dissidents. So if a competent actor would have done this in a much better way, is my point. And again, you wouldn't even need guns. You could engineer access to them and make it look like an accident. Right.

I think that's why some people are like, oh, this has to be staged in order to do this. And so there was no bullet. And it was, yeah, I mean, it's just I can't deal with it anymore. Exactly. Right. Real politics. I'm interested in real politics. I'm not interested in that.

Exactly, right. And the fact that they killed one supporter, wounded two other, we don't even know the two wounded people are. We just thought they were close and they were hit. in the general vicinity. So this is not example of a good stage film production or, you know, media production. So they would have done a better job in that regard if somebody in Trump's camp we're going to do this. And again, as you said, rail politic.

This whole project I recommended, because, again, that's like, let's do the work of actually looking at what the exercise of real power looks like instead of, you know, endless conjecture that does not forward. needs in any way. Well, I think it's time to wrap up. Is there anything else you wanted to add to this before

the next episode when I start doing the reading? No, I mean, the big thing is just letting the reader know that the 2016 edition, which you can buy or pirate lots of places, get a copy, and I would recommend they go and just read through the 2016 introduction. And

you can go in Google Lutwax's biography and the background of this book beforehand, just an idea of what you're going into before you go in there. And again, Lutvac is not our guy, but he is a professional. He wrote on this topic. And again, we're trying to do the real world of, real work of understanding what rail politics looks like. And, you know, you can do it for free. John, I appreciate you coming on the show.

Hopefully, sometime you can come on in the future. and maybe we'll just talk about like random shit. Yeah, yeah, that'd be cool and definitely and let me know. All right, no problem. Take care. You too, sir.

Bye.