 This is the Reason Interview with Nick Gillespie. All right, thank you so much. And my guest right now is Coleman Hughes, a 27-year-old. I don't know what you are. You're like you're a jazz player. You're a trombonist. You're a podcaster. You're an author. You are a cause celeb. You're kind of an instigator. You've done it all, right? I suppose so. I don't think I instigate, but people seem to disagree. Yeah, wherever you are, trouble follows, which is pretty good. You went to Juilliard for a while, as well as and then you graduated from Columbia. Yep, I was at Juilliard for a few months and then decided nobody really learns music in school and no one really learns anything in music school. So I decided to pivot and I still play music to this day. Did you learn anything at Columbia? I don't know. I mean, I guess you learned how to pull things off of poles and things like that, right? I learned how to pull down hostage posters and lost puppy dog posters and all the rest. You were also, you know, his podcast is Conversations with Coleman and we're going to talk about that in a little bit. But he's also got a book coming out in February called The End of Race Politics, Arguments for a Colorblind America. Let's start with that. What, you know, briefly, what is the case for a colorblind America? Well, first of all, I'm very happy to be here. I'm happy to be in front of a libertarian audience. Years ago, I remember seeing an article which said that libertarians of all political factions have the highest IQs. I don't know if that's true. Yeah, I don't think it is. It's not true, yeah. As somebody who I've spent 30 years hanging out with libertarians, I don't know. Well, I was hoping I wouldn't have to dumb myself down, but I, I... Yeah, please, for our sake, speak slower, sure. So what is the, what is the case for colorblindness? In a nutshell, we are human beings and despite the, you know, despite the philosophies of people like Michelle Foucault and others who I know you have some admiration for, there is such a thing as human nature. One of the uglier elements is tribalism. The tendency to form tribes based around, you know, any variable really, but ethnicity and race to devalue the lives of others, to compete. And this is played out in history, everything from, you know, genocide at the worst end to just everyday social mistrust at the low end. In America, unlike most places which have defined the concept of a nation around an ethnicity, whether people will admit it or not, America has tried to do something different where you can come to this country, be any race, color, creed and define yourself as an American. This is a fragile experiment. It's not an easy experiment. It's something without precedent. And one of the challenges that result is that we all have to figure out how to live with each other and trade with each other and befriend each other and so forth without succumbing to our worst tribal instincts. Some of it's inevitable, but the question is, how should the state minimize this? Now, the answer that arose during the civil rights movement from people like Martin Luther King, Byrd Rustin, going back to A. Philip Randolph, was essentially that the state should not make any laws that take race into account. One way or the other, you should not try to discriminate against people really for any reason. You should not try to discriminate to repay people for past discrimination. There should be something which I borrowed from David Birdstein, which is called the separation of race and state. And in long run, this is the best way to govern this fragile experiment. So two things. One is, when you say, okay, so year zero starts now because it is kind of just a brutal irony and a paradox of America as a country that's founded on a creed rather than an ethnic identity or commonality, and it also has the worst version of slavery, where from my readings, which I think are accurate, I'm not sure, but American slavery, the really unique contribution was that the children of slaves were also slaves. Like in most other societies, that was not necessarily the case. But what do you do with that? That is a brutal, horrifying paradox, right? That on the one hand, you have people talking about, finally, this is a place where all men are created equal, et cetera, et cetera, and by the way, we have instituted the worst form of kind of race-based caste system known to history up to that point. Without getting bogged down, I would quibble with the worst form because the Arab world took some 14 million slaves from Africa into the Middle East. The reason there's no black people as a sub-population is because they died. They were castrated, they didn't leave offspring. Brazil, unlike America, had to repopulate itself with more and more slaves each generation because they died off and they didn't bring family. So it's a complicated story. I believe that in the transition from the old world, where slavery was normal everywhere on earth, there was no such word or concept as racism really until about 100 years ago because it wasn't a pathology, it was just the norm. In the transition from the old world to the new world that we all prefer to live in, which is a world of human rights, classical liberalism, and so forth. Individualism. I think there's bound to be a period of hypocrisy. So there's no other way to make progress, such massive progress without there being a period of hypocrisy in between and I do not hold that against the American project. A lot of people now will say and we'll get to this in a second talking about colorblindness as the goal of somebody like Martin Luther King or a generation of leaders in the civil rights movement. People now reject the idea that colorblindness is even possible. Where you obviously don't agree with that, maybe you could explain why and where does that come from? The idea that we will never get to a place where we are actually dealing with individual, each other as individuals. We only ultimately see each other as markers of some group identity that overwhelms whatever particularity we might have in any specific instance. Well, first I would concede that most of our ideals are unattainable. If I were to sit here and say I want a peaceful society, no one would mistake that for the belief that we will actually get to a society with zero murders per year. It's never happened, right? We take that as a kind of North Star that guides us when we are choosing between A and B, whether in life or in public policy. I view colorblindness the same way. I'm under no illusion that humanity will completely eradicate the racial tribal instinct or racism or bigotry itself. But I feel that colorblindness, it's the North Star that we should use when making decisions about public policy, interpersonal and so forth. As for the second question, where does this idea come from that it's no longer the goal? In the 60s, there was a consensus for a short period of time that colorblindness was the way to go. This was the high era of the high classical civil rights movement if you want to call it that. Shortly after that, the country experienced massive rioting, the likes of which was basically not seen again until like Rodney King and then 2020. And in the 70s, something started brewing in the academies called critical race theory. The brainchild of Derek Bell and Kimberly Crenshaw, which basically agreed with the white supremacists on the fundamental idea that race is always going to be everything. These naive people that think we can aspire to something higher than being obsessed with race are exactly that, they're naive. And the only thing you should do in life is hunker down into the tribe in which you were born and try to get as much power as possible. And as Logan Roy from Succession said, life is a fight for a knife in the mud. Yeah. So that's what life is except. I was really hoping if you were gonna quote HBS series, you would have gone with Sex in the City, but we're not there yet as a society, right? I heard this was a PG show, so yeah. You talk about, so race-based affirmative action or race-based policies are definitely out. Anything that is based on that kind of immutable characteristic, I guess. But you do talk a lot about class-based programs that will help level things out or help people who don't have opportunities get opportunities. Can you sketch out what are those programs? What do they look like and what justifies that as opposed to, color blindness is out, but class consciousness is it? Yeah, so fundamentally, I think that, and I overuse the word class, it's not really precise, socioeconomics in general. How much money you make, income, wealth? This is a much closer proxy for disadvantage than racial identity is. In other words, if you pick 10 people from the country at random, from Kansas, from New York, and you want it to rank them by privilege, which is a little bit of a, you can question the project to begin with, but if we're going to do that project, it's wiser to use their socioeconomics than to assume that the black people are at one end, the white people are on the other, to lump in a white guy from a proverbial trailer park in Arizona with a black kid like me that grew up in a wealthy suburb of New York. Whereas using socioeconomics, you're getting closer, imperfect as well, but much closer to what we mean when we say someone is disadvantaged. So then what are the kind of benefits that somebody would get, say if, I don't know, they're lower middle class or they're low income, what are the types of programs that you envision that would be helpful to make society better? So this is, I mean, as a philosopher, I have the luxury of painting the abstract picture without filling in all the details. But look, there are already social programs that are far more widely subscribed and popular like earned income tax credit and need-based financial aid in colleges that not gonna argue that they're perfect, but they're based on a scheme that is generally more correctly identifying the people that have less advantage than the regime of race-based policies that has become normalized over the past 50 years. Do you, how do you define yourself kind of ideologically or do you? And then what is kind of, what's the theory of government? Is government there to help? You know, is it a night watchman state where it's just there to maintain kind of property rights and to adjudicate disputes between people? Is it there to make sure that all people participate or can participate? Could you talk a little bit about that? It's a good question. Truthfully, I found every theory of government to be insufficient, so I'm not a subscriber of any particular theory. I liked Tyler Cowan's idea of quote, state capacity libertarianism quite a bit, which was basically the idea that markets are fantastic. They are the source of the world's wealth unlike many people would want to acknowledge, but a lot of our problems today necessitate having a very functional state that's capable of occasionally doing big things and doing them efficiently. And helping out, I mean, you know, somebody who grows up below the poverty line and may not have both parents available or anything, like we can give them a little to kind of so that they can participate more fully. Absolutely, have a safety net. Yeah, let's talk about TED, okay? The conference, you famously, and I say it's famously, it's a fascinating story. I suspect that many of you are familiar with it. It's partly famous because you've talked a lot about it and you have, but you were asked to give a talk at TED about colorblindness. What happened? So I don't know if you've all heard of the stri sand effect. You've heard of that? I think it was, I may begin the details wrong, but I think someone took a picture of Barbara Streisand's house or something. Yeah, it's more complicated. Yeah, she tried to get the California Coastal Commission not to put her a picture of her property on a website that was available to the public. And then by kicking a stink up about it, it went from having been viewed by like five people to hundreds of thousands of people. So TED is the Barbara Streisand of, and I don't mean the singing voice. So basically Chris Anderson invited me to come give a talk along the lines of what I've just been talking to you about. I gave the talk and immediately on stage I saw a few people that were visibly upset by it sort of in the room, but largely the crowd thought it was within the bounds of acceptable conversation. The next day I start getting some messages saying there's a group called Black at TED which is upset by my talk, hurt I think is the word that was used. And I offered to talk to them and they didn't want to. So on and so forth in a nutshell, what happened is that rather than release my TED talk normally like they would any other, they asked me to agree to a series of kind of strange release strategies where they would tag a rebuttal to my talk to the end of my talk in the same video or a debate that I participated in with someone else would be combined into the video, all of which I thought was unfair since there were no factual errors, nothing like that. So eventually we agree that they would release my thing normally and then two weeks later I do a debate with somebody. So I did the debate with Jamal Buie of the New York Times which you guys can all check out. And that was staged by open to debate which I sometimes guest moderate for and it's a great debate. I mean, it's very good. Open to debate did a great job as they always do. And it came out but I'd put the whole thing behind me but then Tim Urban who's a great blogger also happens to have given the most view TED talk of all time on YouTube. What is it about? Procrastination. Okay, I knew I keep meaning to watch it. So he tweeted that he's pretty sure TED was intentionally sandbagging, not promoting selectively not amplifying my video because every other TED talk had minimum 400,000 views, maximum 800,000. Mine strangely had 70,000. It was the only outlier in the whole batch. And so at this point I went public about this because I had kept up my end of the bargain and they hadn't and it ended up bringing much more positive attention to my video and negative attention to TED. And there's also an interlude where Adam Grant, University of Pennsylvania social psychologist. Yeah, big social psychologist said that my talk was inaccurate using a meta analysis that really made no sense. And then he got upset when his name was outed as having tried to sort of deep six my talk. And it was a whole fiasco which ended up bringing more attention to the whole thing. But details aside, the crucial thing that happened is that TED, like many organizations, is caught between a faction that believes in free speech and viewpoint diversity and a faction that believes if you hurt my feelings with even center left, center right, or God forbid right wing views, you need to be censored. These are the same kinds of people who say that speech is violence, who say that they were actually hurt or felt unsafe because of my TED talk was the language that was used. These are the same kinds of people right now that see Hamas slaughtering children in front of their mothers and say that that's not violence, that's resistance, right? But a poster of a hostage on a telephone pole hurts them. Yeah, or my recycled Martin Luther King is an attack on their identity, right? So this whole language, unfortunately, Chris was not, he didn't put his foot down with his staff in the way that he ought to have. And I think he's taken a lot of heat and TED has taken a hit from the outside world as a result. Do you, I mean, it's a lot of extra work and things like that, but do you feel like in the end it worked to the benefit of your point of view and your ideas? I think it did, you know, truthfully, I was engaged in good faith with it the entire time. I was very happy to be invited to TED. I felt great with 90, literally 99% of the TED community of all colors came up to me after the talk and they thought it was interesting. It's really a situation of a heckler's veto. There's a tiny minority of people that do not believe such a view should be heard and they have outsized power and when people are willing to stand up to it it can make it seem like they're everyone. Yeah, did you experience that as a student at Columbia as well? I mean, you were active and outspoken person. I mean, it's incredibly impressive as an undergraduate you were already becoming a public intellectual. But what was it like being at Columbia? Cause that was kind of maybe or maybe not we're past peak wokeness but you were an undergraduate there at a moment when college campuses were really into shouting people down, cancel culture and things like that. Holy yeah. I remember in college and probably my second year 2017 I had a conversation with someone and we kind of realized that there was this moment in college where you sort of come out of the closet with a friend as not woke and you just, you put yourself out there and you hope to God that they're also not woke and they're usually not as a thing. Most of the time, almost the vast majority of kids on these college campuses are not hook, line and sinker, woke in the sense that they believe speeches, violence that they believe asking somebody where they're from is racist, all of this stuff. But there's a radical, let's call it 5%, I would really call it 5%, maybe 10% but there's a radical fringe that is very loud and very confident. Why do you think in college campuses it seems like the administrators are totally, oh yeah, like those 5% speak for everybody or it just seems like the adults in the room or in the system have given up and they're like, okay, yeah, we're scared too. Where does that come from? I think you said it, I think they're scared too. You know, they have a, in this culture they have quite a bit to lose, especially the administrators. The administrators have everything to lose if they get a reputation as a racist. The R word that could, if not in their career it could derange the next five years of their life to have a single article on the internet calling you a racist for any reason. Doesn't have to be a good reason. I know there was, I can't remember which school in California it was, maybe you'll remember, but there was the example of the college professor, the Mandarin professor who was teaching the word Naiga, Naiga which is like a, in Mandarin it's like saying that, it's like saying um almost, you'll hear, if you go, well, we're almost in Chinatown but you'll hear people say it all the time. If you say it quickly. You know, when I walk through neighborhoods I don't see race. It's all little, little late at night. Anyway, he got suspended for saying a normal Mandarin word that sort of sounds like the N word with a soft A in English. Most people, they see things like this happen over and over again and they think, look, I have a family, I have a life. I don't, I can't lose all of it. Like, so, and they're not necessarily responsive to donors, administrators I mean. So, they do a cost benefit and this is how a small group of people can take over a culture or impose taboos over a whole culture that some 90% of people disagree with. You mentioned a couple times Martin Luther King Jr. He's obviously one of the most important people in your kind of intellectual firmament. What, you know, what draws you to Martin Luther King? Well, he's really a rare figure for a few reasons. One is the depth and breadth of his knowledge. He has a great essay called My Pilgrimage to Non-Violence where he explains in detail what it is that he learned from Plato, what it is that he learned from Kant, from Marx, why he rejected Marxism, how he integrated all of the Western European canon into his line of thought and then also brought with it the, the kind of Baptist preacher element, integrated all of it in a way that was rigorous and inspiring to blacks and whites alike and not only that, successfully implemented a political program which is a totally different skill set. He gave the country goosebumps and changed the country as a result fundamentally. It's something very few people could accomplish. Are you religious at all or Christian at all? No. Because that is like a huge part of his rhetoric, right? I mean, and the figure of Jesus, forgiveness, salvation, things like that. I mean, he offered a deliverance from sin whereas it seems like part of the woke narrative or woke rhetoric is that we are all sinners but there's no way to get past that. So I'm a secular person. I'm an atheist. I can't bring myself to believe in any of the man-made books. But it's a big but. I believe that secular and secular people want to sanitize the Christian element of Martin Luther King because to admit that his Christianity was a core part of his success would cast doubt on the hope that secularism can stand on its own two feet. What do I mean by that? I mean, when Martin Luther King got up there and said, in Christ there's neither Greek nor Jew, black nor white, bond nor free. That made sense and gave goosebumps to the black public, to the white public, et cetera. He was speaking a language that people understood not just in their prefrontal cortexes but in their hearts. There's no secular equivalent to that statement that really resonates with people to such an extent. And that's a problem for someone like me who is trying to update in many ways MLK, which is that I'm not a Christian. I can't speak that language honestly. And even if I could, the country isn't Christian enough to resonate with it. In the place of Christianity, instead of rational enlightenment, liberalism completely filling the void, it has filled that void. But what has also partly filled the void is woke social justice ideology and Robin D'Angeloism, which as John McWhorter and many others have pointed out, is a kind of replacement Christianity. Instead of original sin, it's white guilt. There are different ideas, but they're the same shape in the puzzle of the mind. And it's a flaw that you could never get rid of, but you have to make weekly visits to whether it be church or a DEI session in order to constantly fight. In other words, you can never get rid of it, but you have to fight it your entire life. Another person that you've mentioned is Bayard Rustin, who was one of King's kind of leading lights, is a fascinating figure. And I forget when it was years ago, you did a video op-ed about Bayard Rustin for the New York Times, which is tremendous. There's also Netflix. I can't remember now if it's a documentary or a narrative film about Rustin. Yeah, but who was Bayard Rustin and why does he matter so much? Bayard Rustin is one of my great intellectual heroes, probably more so than King, even. He was born in Pennsylvania, raised by his grandparents, who he thought were his parents for most of his life. He was a communist very briefly and then a socialist and civil rights organizer in the 1940s. And this is one of the interesting things. Rosa Parks is remembered for refusing to give up her seat on the front of the bus and go to the back. Many people had done this before Rosa Parks. She was not the first to do this. Bayard Rustin did this 13 years before she did and got beaten to a pulp by the cops because of it. Rosa Parks was just the one lucky enough to make the history books. The country was ready, in other words. So he was right there from the beginning. He ends up getting involved with Martin Luther King and helping him start his organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, though he omitted the word Christian initially because Rustin was a Quaker. He organized and led the March on Washington, at which Martin Luther King gave his famous I Have a Dream speech. He read the list of demands at that event. And he was just a beautiful essayist throughout the entire period that very few people know about. An important fact about why he isn't known more is he was openly gay. And he was arrested for being caught in a car with a man. And in fact, Dr. King was blackmailed by Adam Clayton Powell, to this day a boulevard named after him in Harlem. He was blackmailed by Adam Clayton Powell who threatened to expose a fictional gay affair between Rustin and King if they didn't cancel a planned protest on the DNC. Rustin is incredible because he's unapologetically black and gay at a time when those were really dangerous. He refused to fight in World War II as a country. He wouldn't even register to get conscientious objector status because he thought the state did not have that claim on him. Although that's not really what I admire about him. And he later rescinded his hardcore pacifism. What I really admire about him is that he was more active and more passionate than anyone. You could name an American history about getting black people full human rights. But he was also completely clear about the fact that race is not what's important. And when the black power movement came along in the late 60s and started saying that actually we don't want equality, we want more. We believe black people are not just equal to white people, but better. He was very clear eyed in saying that this is evil. This is not just something for radical chic white liberals to sort of pay lip service to. This is an evil on the horizon if we allow it to fester. And he drew that line very clearly in a way that too few people have courage to. One of the attributes of these salons that we're doing here, we like to talk to people who are trying to make good faith arguments regardless of what your commitments are and things like that. And with that announcement, I want to talk a little bit about your podcast Conversations with Coleman, which is remarkable for its equanimity. You have people on that you agree with. You have people on that you disagree with. How do you, where did that come from? Because this is rare. Most people, when you have a podcast, you have somebody on who you completely agree with or else it becomes a kind of Bill O'Reilly kind of shout fest. Where does that model come from? I guess I always like to think as a consumer, I prefer to hear people disagreeing in good faith than two people agreeing in good faith. Most of the time it's more interesting. It's also scarcer. So when done well... That's a marketing ploy. No, actually, I think it's scarce because it's so rare to get two people in public conversation when the cameras are on that are willing to strongly disagree about something without constant interruption and following kind of like the rules of argument, if you will, which is I'm going to steelman you, you're going to steelman me. I don't do it enough on my podcast. I would like to do it more, but it is actually difficult to find the right partners. It's like... Because a lot of times you talk past each other or it's almost like you're not listening to one another. Yes, and all of that's amplified when the cameras are on. Turn the cameras off. Often you find someone is a totally different person. Not me, buddy. Not you. That's true. Some of the recent episodes that you've had on or rebroadcast after the Hamas attacks in Israel on October 7th, one of the things that I find... You re-ran an older episode with an Israeli historian, Benny Morris, who is an interesting figure because among certain Israelis, they hate him because they think he's too critical of Israel. Among non-Israelis, some people think he's an apologist for them. Can you talk a little bit about his message and why he's like a really interesting person to be talking to or with at this point in time? Absolutely. Benny Morris is a rigorous and beautiful historian of the Israel-Palestine conflict, in particular the war in 1948 and the lead up to it. He, more than anyone, is responsible for unearthing what we would now call Israel's war crimes against Palestinians in the 1948 war. For this, he was blacklisted or at the very least denounced by the majority of the Israeli Academy at the time. And by the way, I kind of put war crimes and scare quotes here because not to trivialize them, but because the concept of a war crime was not really a thing in 1948. The Geneva Convention, to which we refer now, didn't happen until 49. So he unearthed with brutal honesty what Israel did in the 1948 war vis-a-vis expelling some 70, possibly a little bit more, 70,000 or so Palestinians from their homes. But as he has gone on, he has not seen that admission as synonymous with saying that Israel is in the wrong. He has a very bracing honesty about the fact that the alternatives facing Israel at the time were expulsion of its fifth column or genocide against its own people. Those are the alternatives that were being faced at the time. The reason he's hated or criticized at the very least by both sides, he's hated by some on the Israeli side because he's exposed some of those things that many Israelis have not wanted to admit, but he defends them as the only realistic option that Israel had. And that's why he is called the worst possible names by people sympathetic to the Palestinians because at the end of the day, and I think he's right about this, Israel has always wanted peace more than Palestinians have. There are atrocities to be found on both sides, but there's not an equivalence to be found on both sides in terms of wanting a practical solution, wanting a peaceful solution. So he has been very clear that Israel is on one side of that while at the same time being very honest about the uglier parts of the history. I think the figure that is usually given for displaced Palestinians is 700,000, right? Not 70,000. 700,000 are displaced, 70,000 were expelled. I see. Okay, thank you. So the myth on the Palestinian side has been that they were all expelled. That's not true. The old myth on the Israeli side was that none were expelled. Many more has done the most careful research that roughly one-tenth of those that were displaced were expelled. You also... And I want to add context to this because I think it's important. Millions and millions of people were displaced and expelled by wars in the 1940s. Millions of Germans were expelled from Poland after World War II when Poland took a chunk of land. Of those millions, the only people that maintained that they still have a right to return to the places where their parents or grandparents lived in the 1940s, the only people are Palestinians. So I think it's very crucial to understand the context of what war was in the 1940s before we had our modern concept of war crimes and the alternatives that people actually faced at the time. You know, I found that episode particularly really informative and challenging and just kind of mind-blowing. You also did a two-part episode with a Brit named Andrew Gold about antisemitism and whatnot, which is fascinating. I highly recommend people check that out. And then you... And this is part of what makes the podcast great, is that you asked your audience, like, who is a good person? Who's the best person I should talk to who would present a pro-Palestinian point of view in the current situation? And you talked with a guy named Yusof Manare. How do you think that episode went? And, you know, again, how did... Did your audience respond well to that? Because it was a charged kind of dialogue, but I also found that incredibly, you know, kind of mesmerizing and enlightening. It's hard for me to know what the reaction is. I get comments that say things like, you know, Yusof didn't acknowledge any of your points. I get comments that say things like, Yusof was right about everything and you're ignorant about history. I don't know how to balance these two at the end of the day. But I get many comments that are just glad to have heard a debate where both sides at least got a decent amount of airtime. A debate that felt a little bit better than cable news. That is the soft bigotry of low expectations. It really is. I'd like to do more of those in the future and I'd like to challenge myself to, you know, handle it better as well because it's a difficult skill. I feel maybe it's been atrophied by underuse in our society where we are less and less talking to people that disagree with us. But Yusof is someone that he doesn't even believe in a two-state solution. He believes in a one-state solution with a right of return. Again, this is something that no one would take seriously for any other group of refugees from the war in the 1940s. A right of return for every Palestinian whose parent or grandparent lived somewhere on Israeli territory in 1948, which would create a demographic majority of Palestinians in Israel. And in my view would lead to an instant attack on the Jews of Israel, a bloody civil war that would be horrible for both sides. But he feels that, and I don't think I'm strawmanning him, that if that were to happen, what would result would be a happy society where people hold hands and there's no violence and everyone has rights. And I think that this is profoundly naive. I think it's profoundly naive and that was the crux of our disagreement. You know, he didn't really want to talk about October 7th. I tried to get him to talk about October 7th and the war. He didn't really want to talk about it. Every time I brought it up, he would go back to the history, which is fine. But I also feel it betrayed a bit of embarrassment because how do you defend? How do you defend the dismembering of children in front of their families, the burning of entire families? This is not the behavior of freedom fighters. This is the behavior of barbarian jihadis bent on genocide. So I think it was a bit telling that he didn't want to go there. Are there, you know, either from race relations in the United States or elsewhere, are there models for, you know, the intensity of the Israeli-Palestinian situation, particularly now, but really for the past 60 or 70 years, are there examples of good resolutions to this kind of, you know, seething conflict? I don't know that there are any good resolutions, but there are livable ones. The partitioning of India and Pakistan was absolutely bloody and brutal. The atrocities committed on both sides were, in the partition, were akin to what Hamas did on October 7th. But that was a two-state solution. That was a two-state solution. And my point to Yousef is that the only realistic solution is a two-state solution. But unfortunately, Palestinian public opinion has not been able to let go of the dream from the river to the sea that all of Palestine will be there. So this is the core of the dispute in my view. Hopefully, you know, that may not be true. There was a foreign affairs piece that was written by people who run what's called the Arab Barometer, which had just, it's an ongoing set of surveys in public opinion polls of people in various Arab countries, and they had just completed a survey of people in Gaza. And there, a majority of people actually were, you know, said they were in favor of a two-state solution, and only about 20% said they believed in a one-state solution that meant getting rid of Israel. So we don't know. And of course, that's, you know, that's a thousand years ago now. Yeah, I mean, I've seen a million polls. It's hard to pick any one of them as representative, I think. All right. Well, I, for one, am a huge admirer of what you're doing. So thank you, Colman Hughes, for talking of reason.