 We're back, one o'clock show on Friday with Peter Hoffenberg and he's in the history department at UH. Hi Peter. Hello again, as always, nice shirt, as always. Okay, disclaimer as always. Disclaimer as always, I'm here to represent one of my personalities, but that's it. No institution, no family member, so I'm quite happy to be employed by UH Minoa, but I do not want to in any way ruin my colleague's reputation, so I can do that privately. We've had so many wonderful discussions, but before we start our discussion today, which is about history in the 21st century, I just want to do a book review, or rather a movie review with you about the boys. Can we talk about that for just a minute? Our boys or the good boys? Our boys. Our boys. Of course, yes. We've only seen the first episode. Okay. And you've seen both, right. And the idea there is that three Israeli kids are kidnapped and killed in, what, in the West Bank. Mm-hmm. Hebron starts. Right. They're kidnapped on the road. The city of Hebron. Right. And the Jewish settlers there, call them settlers, I'm not sure which term they would pick. Settlers are picked off about that, and they, you know, they're on the streets and they're really angry, and there's a vengeance killing of an Arab boy who was 16 years old who hasn't done anything bad in his life. And it's really, it's in Hebrew, but there are subtitles. You know, sound on my television, I'd rather have the subtitles if you'd like to know. And it is a very interesting, introspective view of the West Bank, of the way the Arabs work, the way the Jews work, their relationship together, and how they operate in a crisis. It's a very interesting examination of how the police work in the West Bank, in Israel. It is really a study of modern-day Israel. What did you think of the first episode? The first episode, again, I've only watched the first one, Sobring. Your viewers probably know, but just to remind you that, even though they're dramatizations, the events are true, the three kids were kidnapped. There was a very long time in which some police knew that they had been murdered, but they kept alive the hope, which is part of the story, right, that all of this hope and God will return them, of course, as one policeman reminds us, and true everywhere, not just in Israel, if you pop the bubble of hope, the consequences are actually much greater. And that's when things he fears, right? You hope he's alive, you pray to God, you have large rallies, you get people all worked up, and then, of course, when they're not alive. You're really angry. You're in big trouble, as the policeman knows. The depiction of the Islamic family was, I thought, not just nuanced, but really very honest, because sometimes in the media, Jews and Palestinians and Arabs take on almost these cartoon images, the good Jew, the bad Jew, the good Arab, the bad Arab. And, of course, it showed a domestic scene, which could be seen around the world, but made more difficult, of course, by curfews and employment and how, like many young Palestinians need to do, they need to go into Jewish areas to work. I don't want to spoil for anybody, but the subplot is, of course, that the kid who is kidnapped. I may or may not be kidnapped because he works in Israel. Right, he may or may not be kidnapped. I don't want to destroy everything for your viewers, but here's clearly a kid who is able to, when things are fine, go to this other area, but is vulnerable as a young boy. And I think it shows that, like in places such as Northern Ireland, Sri Lanka, parts of the United States, the zealots and extremists are on both sides. And sometimes the police in the state are caught unprepared in the story. On the Jewish side is about a unit in the police department, which is supposed to be watching for Jewish extremists, that's what they do. They don't watch for Palestinian extremists, they watch for Jewish extremists. Just think of all the pressure on a policeman like that, right, who is responsible for targeting, surveilling, arresting fellow Jews, not Muslims, Palestinians. And remember, of course, a lot of Palestinians are Christians, so Palestinians are Arabs as well. And also just as television is superb. There's good dialogue. There's time where nothing is said, which is perfect. The young Jewish boy who's searching for himself, you see this in his eyes. You see he's lost in searching. It's a very well done show. I wouldn't say for the emotionally squeamish, because there are definitely ups and downs and yanks here and there. But the violence is not visible, except in the crowd setting. Right. But that's one of the powerful things about that film. It's a lot of the violence we never see. We as individuals very rarely ever see the violence, yeah. And what makes it interesting too is that this is a CIS kind of thing. The Israelis are using technology, all kinds of advanced technology to solve the crime they don't know. And they're using psychology too to solve the crime. So it's good police work. And ultimately, I don't know the end of the story yet, but ultimately I'm sure they did solve the crime. They did. And the culprits, again, not to spoil it for everybody, were who you thought they would be. It was a revenge murder. And revenge is almost on people's lips the minute the kids are reported missing, not just killed, but the idea of revenge. One of the characters makes a comment is they were not kidnapped to be returned. They were kidnapped to be killed, which is sad. It is sad that the Israelis are equally accustomed to the opposite. It is Hamas kidnapping an Israeli soldier and using the soldier as an exchange or something like that. This was outright murder. Worth seeing. It's on HBO, as I recall. Right. We're not allowed to advertise, so it's on a cable network. OK, if you wish. Well, it's a good segue to our discussion today. Our discussion today is looking at it from the point of view of a history professor. We are in a time that's different and that you can disagree. You may very well disagree. Partially different, sure. A time that's different in my observation than any time in the past, at least in modern civilization anyway. Here we are in the 21st century and there are things that are happening that were really unpredicted and unpredictable. And they are moving so quickly. And you wonder whether this can be a straight line. Maybe history is never a straight line. Where do you think we are on the continuum? Moving rapidly towards extinction, I would say. Extinction. Extinction. No, not at all. I'm not a pessimist. I'm a realist. So I would agree with you and disagree with you. As we're old friends, we can do both. I think that it is fully rational and fully acceptable to think that things are very different. They certainly seem to be very different and to think that they could not have been predicted. And I think that is a truth. The other truth is, and they really co-exist, that most people cannot predict. Remember, economic companies that do well predict successfully 25% or 30% of the time. So to look back and say, well, the election of Barack Obama should have prepared us for this or Iranian Revolution or whatever should have, at least historians and most political scientists are not really in the business of predicting one answer. So I would agree with you. It seems to be very different. And part of that's for good reasons of technology, et cetera. And two, it is difficult to predict. Now, on the other hand, and they can class. They're not fighting. Their hands are clasped. Much of what we are experiencing has been part of modern history, at least. And modern is a very problematic term. But certainly, it's much of history in the last two, 250 years. And of course, there were people who predicted these kinds of cataclysms. But often, when you predict something like that, you're often predicting it based on speculation or based on a single hard theory. So if one wanted to say Marx predicted it. And he ended up predicting a lot of things correctly, but not everything correctly, right? But the criticism of Marx would have been in part that he had one simple theory. That simple theory could predict everything. Or George Orwell. I mean, we all are quoting Orwell these days. These days we care more about him than we did before. Right. But he would also remind us that if we simplistically care about him and simplistically swallow what he said, we're actually guilty of what he was worried about. We need to be as critical of Orwell while appreciating Orwell as critical of the things that we use Orwell to criticize. So as usual, and I apologize again to your audience, I can't say everything is new. It's not. Some things are new, most certainly. And some people remind, for example, Verne predicted spaceship and Verne predicted helicopters and airplanes, but they didn't turn out to be the way he thought. And he didn't know all the science, right? So you could go back well to, if I had read Jules Verne, would there never have been aerial bombing in the same way they had in Vietnam, we might have not had. That's kind of an absurd little exercise. Now, I think what you're asking me in part is what's new, right? And what's not new. I'm asking you about vectors and factors and influences that we could identify now, which never existed before. I'll give you two of them that come to mind for me. And maybe these are two of the most important. One is we have technology now that was unpredictable 20 years ago, not necessarily in the technology or in the function of the technology, but in the effect of the technology. If I told you 20 years ago that everybody would be strapped together, not only to be able to talk to each other, but that would have an effect on mass thinking, on group thinking, on global thinking, on global action, you might not have seen that coming. So what we have is speed and we have influence of the technology. The second one, we could go one by one here. The second one is the decline of the planet environmentally in terms of climate change, which a lot of people resist that and reject it and all. But that is little by little, if not every day and soon enough every hour. We're all going to figure out, this is going to change our lives on the planet. Yeah, we're doing this show with Storkle about 15 years. And that means a lot of people are going to die maybe in the billions. That will change things. And this could be coming relatively soon. The way is sort of logarithmically increasing. So those two things come to mind. So let me ask you, were those things predictable? Were those things happening before and influencing the way humanity worked? OK, again, let me give you the first answers of philosophical one. Because when one asks, did it happen before, was it predictable, et cetera, you're asking a certain degree, is there an equivalency? No. We saw this in the recent debate over what to call the migrant center. They're not equivalent. So were there catastrophic environmental events or similar events? Yes. Were there technologies, which as you say, had unprecedented speed and influence? Yes. Now, they were not equivalent, but we could say they were similar to analogies. What a historian would say is everything's unique. Some things are precedented, some things are unprecedented. But how they play out depends upon the two things. And this is one third thing I would add to your list. One is the context, which we always have known, the time and place. And your viewers will be familiar with that. I think the third thing I might add to your list is the use of the past or the significance of memory. And Orwell did worry about this. So when I say how we think about the past, well, we often think about the past in light of the present or what we think we've thought happened in the past, fake history, like fake news. OK, I would add that. So of your three, let's go to the first one. I think this computer age, so we go back even 25, 30 years, is unprecedented. But the way in which you phrase those very important problems are not unprecedented. The middle of the 19th century, in which there was a telegraph, an explosion in the west of literacy, daily newspapers. The response would be actually very similar. Look at the speed. 150 years ago, when there was a rebellion in East India colonies, it took six to eight months for British troops to get there. See point mutiny of 1857, the British knew what was happening in two days. But that's because of the technology. Now it's not, I can pick up my phone and know what happened a nanosecond ago, that's true. But there are societies which have had to deal with quantum leaps in the speed of information. And then very much in how the information is used, should somebody in the 19th century read the information privately and reflect upon it? And or should the information be expressed publicly at a meeting, read out loud? Today is the anniversary of the Peter Lou Massacre, where a newspaper was read out loud. And that is similar, if we can see, in a way to social media. Different effect, different effect. And the effect, the feared effect was, using the language of the time, irrationality and hysteria. In between is a very significant moment in history. And that's the 1920s and 1930s, where radio was used. Every significant leader, every significant political movement used radio. And radio is kind of the middle ground between the iPhone and the newspaper. It was radio for a fireside chat of reflection. The political leader is entering into your home, telling you there are only four fears. And or, right, is the radio to be used to rally people, to act? There was those in Germany who did that. Of course, in India. Gandhi, a father coughed in here. If you ever, I'm sure you've seen it, but if you see it again, please see The Great Dictator. And the penultimate scene of The Great Dictator is Charlie Chaplin, who has been mistaken for the dictator. He's the Jewish barber. That was the most time. Right, using the technologies of radio and mass assemblies, not to get people to kill, but to get people to stop killing. And so there's a brief moment where he realizes that he's using the same technology that the fascists and authoritarians are using for a democratic purpose. But how are you going to turn that off? How are you going to turn off FDR's cry for war from stealing your Japanese-American neighbor's property? And Chaplin, excuse me, is a brief moment where he looks at you with his eyes. And he says, basically, boy, boy, I'm doing what my enemy is doing, or world peace. But how am I going to be able to make sure? It's like Lincoln in a second inaugural dress. We're at war. How am I going to make sure the end of war will mean an absence of malice? I've turned on the spigots. And what we know is the spigots are very difficult to turn off. But that's true of any technology, the power of it all affects. The second one you asked me about, an environmental cataclysm. We could look back and look at, for example, the Great Leg, the Bubonic Leg, which was not strictly environmental, but it was demographic. Now, we can begin to understand that great massive fires in the Middle Ages and the early modern era, which turned the skies of London, for example. We wouldn't want to exclude, however, mass disease in the 21st century. It's not just environmental. Humans have experienced mass disease before. Right. Absolutely. Lincoln in 1918, was it? A huge flu epidemic killed hundreds of thousands of people. More people died from the influenza after the First World War, probably than died during the war, at least it's very close. And we could have, you know, that was worldwide. That was global. Some other kind of highly infectious disease. I think probably, though, I certainly would not. I mean, and I fundamentally agree with you. I'm just tweaking at the edges as historians try to do to say that not everything is quite new. Probably, though, considering the knowledge we have of the animal and plant world, I don't think humans have ever stood at the precipice of such natural extinction. I'm not necessarily talking about water and glaciers per se, but the United Nations declaring that 25% of birds will die or what have happened to the bees. I would have to talk to my friends in the environmental history and animal history, but that seems to be, first of all, we have much more knowledge now of the natural world than we ever did before. And that seems to me to be one of those moments where, no, we don't really have precedent that I know of for the extinction, the significant extinction. They've always been extinctions, but I mean, a massive extinction. It's almost as if you were at Croma and Neanderthal and you're looking at the last Wally Mammoth. What would be your reaction? And we are eating on that edge in some cases, most certainly. I'm thinking that one of the elements that goes into that, you say we have knowledge, we have knowledge of the environment, of water, of food, what have you. More so, I think, than humans have ever had. Which is not to disparage other societies, but we just. There's not a problem in acting together. There are more of us. And the political will seems elusive. Not only here, but elsewhere. Governments come apart so easily, make the wrong decisions to affect everyone so easily. And so the question I'm left with after that is, okay, so we have the technology to provide water, to provide food. This goes back to Flint, Michigan, and it goes back to Detroit in the news this week about clean water. And newer. And thank you. And newer. It's a shonda. Yeah, I don't know if you're in the audience. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We see it is. Let's just get it. Yeah, they're all Swedish speaking. Nothing technical, they're just speaking show. You know, it's a shonda. It's a kind. So with a lack of political will, you know, you cannot apply the technology and you get lead in the water. You know, this is really tragic that we have it, but we can't use it. It's biblical even, you know. So I think that's a factor we have to consider. Absolutely. Response is, and again, in complete agreement with you, that has always been the case. That people, no, but I mean, I want to twist a little bit so that's, because that's, but no. I always watch out when you say you agree with me. Right, I know. Everybody back home will remind me not to. I'll wear a T-shirt next time. Unfortunately, historically, that these kinds of shondas happen to minority groups and low-income groups. Now, but that's a banal claim. The non-banal claim is that the modern world is one in which there's supposed to be a social contrast. That even if you were a minority, even if you were poor, basic resources, and the basic human condition, I mean, what FDR says, you know, you should be free of want, or is that I apologize? Free of want, so regardless of your race, your freedom, your ethnicity, your income level. So I agree with you. I agree with you in Saturday evening posts. Right. Norman Rockwell. Okay, but it is a shonda when people in this world, this country, world even can go without water, but certainly, so I think the difference is, and the difference has fueled what we might want to talk about some other time, you know, populism and authoritarianism. It's been fueled by a social promise and a social pact, which has been ignored or broken. Gellner, a very famous sociologist, in his usual bold, non-apologic terms, all this social bribery, right? I'm going to participate in this society, and I'm going to participate in this polity, not as equal, right? I mean, it's not as equal, we know that, but as having at least, right, at least a floor of human decency, right? So I know that I'm never going to become Bill Gates. I know that I am of a privileged race. I know all that. So the responsibility is to recognize that there are minimum standards, and we have seemed to be having a difficult time. Housing should be a minimum standard. Healthy food, clean water, not just a job. We seem to be obsessed with the job, and it doesn't have to be a decent job always, but a job that pays, you know, health insurance. These are basic, and if we go back in history of the Cold War, these were all the things that Khrushchev and Kennedy and Nixon and British would fight over because the Soviet Union would say, of course, we do all that, which they didn't, of course, but they could say they would. So interesting, and one factor that's in play here is that we had a pretty high moral standard during the Depression, you know, freedom from want and Norman Rockwell and FDR, and those guys raised up the country in their own way to a higher moral level of decency. Now we reject a lot of that. I mean, or the government does anyway. I don't know how. Well, that's part of the difficulty. There's always been a populist anti-elite, anti-expert tone. Hofstetter wrote a lot about it as kind of a politics or culture, resent, right? Resent New York, resent Hollywood, et cetera. Resent the guy who seems to be successful. But people inside of government generally were not like that. I mean, unfortunately, in a lot of our governments around the world now, we have people who resent all of that science and that management in government itself. You can understand the gap between the best and brightest as David Halbersturm would say and the rest of common people. You can understand that. But what happens when the best and brightest wield power and wield money and deny violence, deny rationality, deny the enlightenment of equality. And that's not reserved. Again, probably most listeners and naturally so would think of the United States. That's not reserved, the United States. That's part of an authoritarian populism that's India, Hungary, fuels Brexit. I mean, really what? You can dislike being part of the European Union, but the idea that you can go it alone. That's a great segue. Yeah, because what we have now, and by the way, this all reminds me of Herman Wolk's book, The Winds of War. In the movie, it was actually a TV serial with lots of episodes, Robert Mitchum and Ali McGraw and how they traveled around Europe in their respective roles. Like, she was a student and he was a naval officer, US naval officer and they brought it into each other once in a while. But mostly, you followed the decline of Europe, the decline of decency and the imminence of war. It was different than World War I, the way it came about. At the end of the day, nobody liked each other, and at least the Germans didn't like anybody. Nobody liked the Germans either. Nobody liked the Germans, okay. Still probably the case. Sorry about that. So, but the bottom line is you can tell it was coming. And right now we have countries like Russia, we have Trump who like to divide people, like to make them angry at each other in this thought. I mean, there's a method about the madness in the thought that they will be stronger if the people they're dividing are weaker. So if I go to Sweden, for example, an article about Sweden with various groups of liberals and not so liberals in Sweden arguing with each other about migrants, and clearly, and they found evidence to suggest that Russia was fomenting that divisiveness. So what you have is that some people like to create divisiveness on the part of other people and get a leg up on them and undo the functionality, the effectiveness of their longstanding society. I don't know if that's happened before. That seems like a new one for me. And it seems also that the hate, the racism, all that stuff, it seems like that is a introduction to the winds of war. That means that people aren't getting along. They're not looking to collaborate. They're not looking to make friends and do things in collaborative groups. They just all mad at each other. Populism, nationalism, what do you call it? So the problem I get with that is I think that's as much a relevant phenomenon right now as immigration, by the way, is involved in that as climate change or technology going to muck or some of the other things we've talked about. That is a factor that can change the world pretty quickly, where I think we're on the brink of war in various places, not to say that each place will go to war, but one of them, all we need is one of them. And the situation is such that a mistake can cause war now, I think it's so intense. I think the unprecedented nature of that is that we have dismantled an imperfect, admittedly imperfect international order after 1945. And I'm not here to extol the virtues of the World Bank or the IMF, the United Nations, they can do that themselves. But there was a structure, there was a structure, a Keynesian structure, and a recognition that that really revolved around the United States and the Soviet Union. Again, imperfect, not equal by any means at all. That has been dismantled. It's been dismantled in part because again, it didn't fulfill all of its promises. It's been in part dismantled because of the rise of other wannabe great powers. Again, I'm not picking on anybody, but China plays a major role in this. In 1945, remember, there was a week in China, there was really no China in the sense of being a political entity. After 49, there became China's at least. So the participation in China, and again, not to blame China, but that's clearly influenced things. The failure of larger, multi-ethnic states, also part of that, 1945. I think we'll look back, my grandchildren will look back, and they'll see really the end of Yugoslavia as one of the warning signs. And we don't talk about it too much anymore. It was a multi-ethnic state. It was not held together by a Democrat, by any means at all. A populist, authoritarian figure who did practice social bribery, though. The Croatians and the Serbs, and he was able to play off the U.S. and the United States, he had a mixed economy, which is not to say I have a Tito T-shirt, by any means at all. But I think we'll look back and see the failure, the failure of Yugoslavia, which also had Russian and American intervention in it. Russians came to help their Slavs, their fellow Slavs, which they had done for centuries and centuries. That was kind of prescient about what was happening. The question would be, and that's happening all over the world. The question would be, though, whether that happening all over the world will, like in 1941, become a world event. A world or two is not a world war until 1941. 10 years of vicious violence and all the different theaters. So that's, as a historian of the 20th century, that's what I look at. Do you see this as a phenomenon, a course of events that's repeating itself? After all, you know, we have North Korea shooting missiles and Trump's discussions with them are meaningless. We have rioting in Hong Kong at a level we've never seen before, such a threat to China. And China, you know, organizing its armed forces on the border in Shenzhen. We have 65, 70 million people now in homeless camps, you know, migrant camps around the world behind barbed wire. We have a general decline, I would say, of law and order, if you want to call it. We look at this country, we have a shooting every few days, most recently at the police themselves. So, you know, what I get is we're in a process. And as you say, it may not result in a war or a debacle, a global debacle tomorrow, but it shows you a trend, doesn't it? The trend is there. I don't see right now the equivalent, say for example, of Pearl Harbor or the Soviet invasion of, sorry, excuse me, the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union. Boy, that was a... I forgot to mention, you know, we have we're tearing up nuclear treaties. Right, now I was going to say, apropos your previous comment, that does endanger the world. And of course, one of the things that held the world together between 1945 and we hope forever will be the only two tragic uses of nuclear weapons. Now, I would be worried about that. I would be worried about India and Pakistan, et cetera. But as I say, which is not to be an optimist, by any means at all, I don't see the trigger mechanism. You don't see quite the competition between China and the US as exactly equivalent. Remember, we're talking about equivalencies, not analogies to the tensions between Japan and the US in the 30. And that helped trigger, of course, World War II. And I don't see the tension between a significant expansionary central or western European power and the Soviet Union. And that's, of course, what triggered the invasion in 1941. Just as a historian trying to find what's the same, what's different. I'm as depressed as you are with your description, you've made me even more depressed. I'm going to go home and finish my bottle of slivvits. But my depression might be. I'm going to get a bottle of slivvits. Yeah, my depression might be even deeper. And I also don't see a pollution. In other words, Syria, if we look at Yugoslavia, we're also going to look at Syria. All those years, really, nobody did anything. And in the end, what's happened? In the end, the dictator has won. Well, I know we didn't like all the opponents of the dictator. I understand that. It's kind of off the end that way. He's won. He's won with the sort of the assistance of Russia and Iran. And his victory and stability now in some ways has made it at least more recognizable or Netanyahu to deal with Syria. But think of the dead. That Syria used to be, you know, in the 19th, yeah, late 19th, 20th century, just like Beirut. These are great, these are great cosmopolitan. Beirut was the Paris of the Levant. And so I worry, but I don't, I neither see a global conflagration. I don't see that. And I hope that I'm right on this one. But I also, even though I'm generally a hopeful person, I don't see a resolution to a lot of these issues because I think that the political world and the institutional world have failed. It was gonna take something that I used to never talk about or even think of that important, but I'm changing my mind about it. It's going to take society, not government. In the Middle East, it's going to take NGOs and families who cross the border and have their kids go to school with each other. Here in the United States, it's going to take, I don't wanna discourage people from voting by any means at all, but it's going to take, like I'll show you a video a friend of mine sent me, this wonderful black musician who didn't even understand racism until he returned from Germany and he has spent his entire life, his non-professional life, meeting Klans members, talking to them. Guys, Brave, he's big, helps being big. Brave and bright, and that's not a government program, right? That's not an institution. It's a brave person who has decided I'm going to make this effort, and let's be honest, equally brave Klansmen. We're saying, all right, you know what, maybe all this stuff is stupid. Maybe I don't need this, maybe I'd like to get along with this guy. It's going to take both sides, right? I mean, it's going to take Israelis and Jews, making some concessions, but I think what the bottom line is, is people have to be able to, as Adam Smith wrote a lot about this. You have to have the right. So if the African-American musician goes into the guy's house and he knows there are weapons in the house, he has to trust that the person will not use them, right? The Palestinians are going to have to trust if I go to the Jewish section of Jerusalem, I'm not going to be kidnapped. Or to the police station. Right, and that gets back to some of your earlier points that social media would have it differently, right? Social media would say, oh, the kid's there, let's go get him, right? Or the authoritarian populist would say, he or she is different. So it's going to have to take trust. There used to be more trust in government. There was always reason to be, you know. Would you agree with me for a solution? If you were king, I mean, in the full capacity of that, you would want in this country to reform government, major reformation. Because government right now doesn't work. Government doesn't regulate, government doesn't, you know, doesn't support decency. Government doesn't do anything right now. And furthermore, if you were king, and I made you king soon, you would have a certain number of things to do. You would get back on climate change. You would ease up on this immigration. You wouldn't do anything to create hatred in the country. You would support relations with other countries and you would support other countries in the same sense of decency. You would do a bunch of things. And I think we have learned in the 21st century, or in the 20th, that a leader, a negative leader can have huge effect on people. That the stories of decency, the stories of courage that you described, they're anecdotal. If you want to have them happen on a large scale, involving hundreds of millions of people, billions of people, people look naturally to a leader. However he got there. And so we need leaders, you know. So if you were a leader, don't you think you could find a solution to our current predicament? I would hope so. First of all, I'd get rid of the designated hitter rule and all of AstroTurf. No, I think I don't disagree with you. Although I think that being the son of two people of government, there are a lot of good people in government. A lot of people. There are institutional questions, but certainly everything you said is a floor, right? A decent leader. A leader who unites rather than divides. But I think you've seen with the current, authoritarian figures, be they kings or want to be kings, we got to take a step back. Because either one looks up to them, the wrong reasons, right? For example, should we look up to a leader because of his or her race? So we kind of have to step back, right? If we're going to have a democracy and you're going to vote for people. And that means trust. It means seeing that everybody's identity is very complex. It can't be reduced to religion or race or gender. It's very complex. Every society is complex. And that's a step before voting, or a step before politics. Does this mean, Peter, that we can come back and have this conversation again? And I'll have many different identities for you. Yeah, absolutely. And maybe you'll agree with at least some of the things. And we'll talk about it. I've agreed with a surprise. I know you haven't. I didn't have sleep last night. I know. I make a little glow with it. He agreed on this. I know. The contanker's chew is gone. Yeah. Anyhow, thank you. Always a pleasure. Yeah, I can get my voice back next time. Peter Hoffner. Thank you. Historian extraordinaire. Thank you.