283 - Timothy Snyder: Donald Trump and the End of America

30:20I think I would put it more in terms of trying to prevent politics as such, that if you're in a world where you you can't do anything without considering how it will be perceived and recorded um that that means that there's a kind of you know evil super ego or like negative super ego in your mind all the time which makes it hard for you to be political and this is i mean for me this is where the east european dissidents come in because a lot of their thinking preemptively or was about this stuff like They were worried in the 70s and 80s precisely about this kind of scenario. And their prescription was that one has to have one's own set of values and not internalize the way that you think you're going to be rated and judged all of the time.

31:10So it's an interesting way in which sometimes stuff which seems out of date can turn out to be very much up to date. I'd like to return to a moment for a moment when I said I alluded to illicit conspiratorial thinking. And I think my use of the term illicit was a bit tongue in cheek, just because, I mean, the mention of conspiracy theories was once a major faux pas in an academic discussion, which I kind of think of this as a bit of an academic discussion. And I'm wondering just more broadly how you think of, quote unquote, conspiracy theories and conspiratorial thinking in today's conversations, because I don't think discussing Jeffrey Epstein is off the table or I mean, the DNC conspires, Trump conspires.

32:06Conspiracy theories seem to be a very important aspect or a topic to discuss today. So I'm going to make, let me just step back and make a structural point. The more wealth is concentrated in fewer hands, the more we are going to engage in conspiracy theorizing. Because we're going to have the feeling, correctly, that decisions are being made by a few people to whom we do not have access and whose actions we cannot see. and so in the more democratic broadly speaking the society is and by democratic i don't just mean that there's voting but i mean that there's a social welfare state and rich people are also taxed and there's redistribution the less likely we are to engage in it not that we won't i mean but we'll feel less pressure towards that kind of explanation and so i just want to make that sociological point that it's not surprising given that, um, you know, for the last 50 years, basically the middle classes and below have gained nothing.

33:16And in the United States and all of the, all of the increases in wealth have been, have been monopolized by the very top, not just the 1%, but something much smaller than that. It's not surprising given that, that we are inclined to think in that way, right? And second point, some of the conspiracy thinking is going to be correct. So, you know, why did we invade Iran? Was that the result of, or why did we attack Iran? Was that the result of deep planning and public discussion and like some kind of consideration of U.S. interests? You know, no, like the one person, the president had some emotions and, And, you know, another person, the prime minister of Israel had a few slides that he showed.

33:59And, you know, like it probably and other people around the president could see how they can make money. You know, it probably isn't any more complicated than that. And that is a conspiracy. They leak, of course, which is why I can say the stuff I just said and with some confidence. But it is a conspiracy in the sense that it's a few people making decisions that affect lots of other people. Or, you know, why did Russia invade Ukraine? Like, was that about some consideration of the interests of the Russian nation or the interest of the Russian state? No, there was a guy. He had a few hundred billion dollars.

34:31He had kind of kooky views about the past. And, you know, he had a few people around him who tended to support what he thought about the past and feed him archival documents. And, you know, and like it really wasn't a result of some kind of broader process. Nobody even knew, like the number of people even knew that Russia was going to invade Ukraine before they invaded Ukraine in 2022. It's very limited. And so things happen, which are the result of decisions being made by a few people. The problems come in where we tend, some conspiracies are happening, right? That doesn't mean that every conspiracy theory we like is true.

35:06That's where things get problematic, is that the overlap between the conspiracy theories and the actual conspiracies, like a Venn diagram, there is an overlap. But there's a lot over here, you know, in the conspiracy theory oval or whatever, which is not over here in the actual conspiracy. Like there's some actual conspiracies that we're not even theorizing about probably going on right now. But the problem is that like conspiracy theorizing, I don't like as a historian, there's nothing wrong with like imagining that people get into a room and make decisions like that happened. That's part of history.

35:37What's wrong is when we're sure about a pattern of it, right? So, for example, if I think it's always the Jews who are doing the conspiring, okay, there's something wrong with that, right? I mean, aside from it's naked anti-Semitism. The problem is that if there are conspiracies in the world, even at the level of conspiracies, they're going to be made by different groups of people in different clusters. And the conspiracies that exist in the world are not going to line up with my prejudices about what the conspiracy should be, right? And so another problem with conspiracy theory, aside from the fact that most of our conspiracy theories won't be true, is that once we accept that stuff is taking place in a dark and visible place, that dark and visible place can start to overlap with the dark and visible places in our mind, and we can get locked into certain ways of seeing the world and not brought out of them.

36:26your sociological point about us having good reason to have to formulate conspiracy theories when wealth is concentrated in fewer and fewer hands does that mean that we that it's more likely that these conspiracies are in fact happening when the people with have when people have wealth concentrated in their hands? And should we then be thinking more about people like Elon Musk, Donald Trump conspiring and thinking about what they might be doing to further their self-interest? Or how, I guess I'm asking, how do you entertain conspiracy theories today in today's environment? I mean, I guess it's, I don't, I think we're still in a position where we can combine evidence and historically informed pattern recognition to make decent guesses about what is in fact going on.

37:33So I guess I would try to break free from the frame of conspiracy theorizing, because when we talk about conspiracy theorizing, we're talking about the possibility of real conspiracies, but we're also talking about habits of mind. And I worry about habits of mind, right? So when I say that wealth concentration drives us towards conspiracy theorizing, I'm noticing, as you say, I think a kind of sociological reality, but it's not that we have a license to believe in whatever conspiracy we want to, right? So I would put it in a slightly different way. I would say that the politics of small numbers is different than the politics of big numbers.

38:16So if a small number of people hold more wealth and power, the form of analysis you use to try to predict outcomes is different than if a large number of people. And so it's legitimate to put more emphasis on issues like psychology or mood or biography or personal relationships or the ability of an individual to make money when it's the politics of small numbers. When it's the politics of big numbers, those kinds of factors are less relevant because they tend to cancel each other out, right? Because he's making money on this, but she's making money on that. And he feels this way, but she feels this way.

38:54But when it's a smaller number of people, you're more likely to get some kind of alignment of emotions and the ability to make money. And so I would just put it that way, that like the politics of small numbers and the politics of big numbers are different. Another effect that's worth drawing attention to is that is patron-client relationships. So if, and this is an old argument about how democracy has failed and why oligarchy is bad, that goes back to the Greeks, that if you allow the money to be concentrated into a few hands, what happens is that those very wealthy people form their own pyramids of patron-client relationships.

39:33and those pyramids are basically bits of the society which have been knocked out of the republic. They don't really, they're no longer, you know, loyal is maybe the wrong word, but they're no longer participating in the politics of the republic. They're loyal to this extremely rich person. And at the extreme, you know, they're armed and loyal to that person. We're not there yet, but that is one way this can go, is that the very wealthy people start to create their own little states around themselves, including armies. We're not there yet, although eventually you do get there. But the patron-client relationships that I can form, if I have$250 billion, those patron-client relationships, because they're vertical and only vertical, clash with the kind of horizontal politics that's necessary to eco-democracy or republic only.

40:19And that's not a conspiracy. That's just a fact, right? And it also applies to the kind of institutions that are on the edge of civil society and capitalism, like law firms or universities or whatever, that those things can be pulled into the tractor beam of patron-client relationships and then no longer be interacting with the rest of society in the same way. Well, this has been a really interesting portion of conversation for me, just because I don't often get to hear what scholars think about conspiracy theories. But I'd like to shift back to something you said a little bit earlier. And you said, Putin does not think Ukraine is real.

41:01And when I hear that statement, I think, how could Putin, who I think of just as an ignorant American, as this super competent mastermind, not think that Ukraine is real? And it just makes me wonder, how competent is he? if he does not think Ukraine is real? And what do you mean by he does not think Ukraine is real? So just to make a connection with what we've just been talking about, when you get to the politics of small numbers and the politics of tyranny, then personality starts to matter more. And certain kinds of analytical black spots start to matter more. So I'm going to answer your questions, but I just want to kind of set this up structurally.

41:57If we're looking at the Trump invasion to attack Iran or the Putin decision to invade Ukraine, part of it is the structure where the decision is being made without inputs coming in from other places, without a public discussion, without a journalist discussion, without a discussion in parliament without even a broad-ranging governmental review in both cases, right? And so the politics of small numbers means that an individual can make these kinds of decisions, and we are justified in asking, okay, if the individual can do it, what is it about them which leads them to make these weird decisions?

42:37And so that's leading me to the second point, which is that individuals have mixed talent sets. So again, to start with Trump, which is the more familiar case, it's undeniable that Trump is talented, I think. It's undeniable that he has certain kinds of talents. He has a certain kind of charisma. He has a certain way of dealing with media. He has a set of talents, and one can be impressed by him. And I mean, I think too often, one can just be bowled over by him. But the fact that he has one set of talents doesn't mean he has other sorts of talents. So he's not patient. He's not good at listening to people.

43:13He's not good at imagining second and third order effects of his actions because he's always thinking, I can just move on from one entertainment to the next. And so that's just an example of a mixed talent set. And so that's just helping me, I hope, to move over to Putin, who is extremely cynical and hard-headed. But what I have found, and this is a conclusion that I came to when I was paying a lot of attention to these guys and writing a book called Roadtown Freedom, reading Putin very carefully and reading the people around him very carefully. What's interesting is that these people who appear to be infinitely cynical, they always turn out to have some kind of naive soft spot.

43:57Like to the point where I think that like there's almost a necessary dialectical relationship that the more hardened and cynical and skeptical and nihilistic they seem to be, the more likely there is there's some kind of weird metaphysical soft spot in there somewhere. And that's, I guess, how I'd present Putin, that he has a mixed talent set. He's capable of being very good at judging humans and manipulating humans. and he's very good, for example, manipulating Trump, but he's not aware of his own soft spots. He doesn't see that he has any soft spots, but his big soft spot, it turns out, and he developed this in the last 15 years.

44:38He hasn't always thought this, but his big soft spot is his notion that Russia has this history that lasted for a thousand years, which is totally absurd. And that in that history, Russia and Ukraine have always been together and that Ukraine, therefore has never really existed as any kind of autonomous thing. And insofar as it seems to, that's just the conspiratorial work of Russia's enemies who have put false ideas in our heads and so on. So that's how I would put it. The people who seem to be incredibly nihilist, they often have some kind of soft spot. And for Putin, it's precisely Ukraine.

45:10So the way he talks about Ukraine is very different than the way he talks about other things. He presents it as a metaphysical truth that Ukraine and Russia have always been together. and it's probably actually believes this. And so then you get into this, into a basic problem with what I've been trying to analytically call the politics of small numbers that people end up making strategic decisions on the basis of these wild things that they actually deeply believe in in some way. And that leads to these consequences which they don't expect. And I wish I might add to this point that I think particularly when we're in a world like ours where power is more and more concentrated in fewer hands, it can help to make the jump from, let's say, positive social science and or analytic philosophy, sometimes over into the world of art or of tragic drama or novels, forms of intellectual activity which try to capture the contradictions in us or the flaws that we have or these things I'm calling soft thoughts.

46:18Because I think that part of us is necessary to understand this part of us. I don't think you can explain our general subject of the descent into tyranny just by talking about rational choice and interests. And I don't think you can explain a Trump or a Putin that way either. And I think like I think poetry and tragedy and novels and like the forays that we make from the more literature and artistic side to try to get after our internal contradictions. Like I think those things turn out to be analytically very helpful. It's interesting to me that Putin's soft spot is this almost naive nationalism, a nostalgia for a Russia that never was, because Trump doesn't strike me as nationalistic at all, despite, of course, the like the huge parades and this big arch he wants to put in D.C.

47:19i'm wondering how you would characterize his his biggest soft spots yeah one way that i would put that is that like i think we're we're in a world in which oligarchical fascism is a thing and it's not it's not the same as the fascism of the 20s and 30s precisely because it's oligarchical you know the fascists of the 20s and 30s in general there are a few exceptions but in general they were not in it for the money. You know, of all the things one can say about against them, they were not in it for the money. Whereas quite a few of our guys are in it for the money, in an obvious way, they're in it for the money and successfully.

47:58But I think between Russia and the US, the balance between oligarchy and fascism is different. I think Putin, as you say, unlike Trump, actually does believe in some world beyond the visible world in which what is truth, what is true as will and in which there's a mystical past and that mystical past contains the essence of the nation. And by taking violent action in the present, we really can return to that mystical past. I think Putin actually believes stuff like that. And in that sense, he's more of a fascist than Trump. I think for Trump, he says fascist things and he does fascist things and he certainly has people around him who are fascists in my view.

48:39But for him, the balance is different. Like it's much more about like, I need to make more money. In fairness to Trump, Putin already has, you know, 200, 300 billion dollars. And so whereas Trump is going to die a kind of petty billionaire by that scale. Right. So maybe if Trump had 300 billion dollars, he would also have wild fantasies. But anyway, in the world we're in, that's a difference. The balance between the oligarchy and the fascism is different in Russia and Russia and the U.S. And I agree that for Trump, it's much more about using white supremacy, appealing to people's sense that they've been overlooked, appealing to the pleasure that people take and seeing other people hurt, appealing to all of that in order to create a secure, happy place for himself.

49:32right i think that's i think that's really the way the dynamic works and so and so and so and so it's different and i want to point out that there's a there's a kind of weakness to this because trump not that i'm saying it would be better if we had more fascism i'm just i'm just trying to point out that there's a there's a weakness in this oligarchical fascism balance in the u.s which is that trump is happy to have people hurt and he's he's happy to have us be happy that people are hurt but he's not willing to do some of the things that putin is willing to do Right. So Putin has been willing to watch easily a million of his people, you know, probably well over get killed and maimed in a war that Russia is going to lose.

50:11Whereas Trump is willing to watch, you know, five people or 10 or 15 or 20, you know, maybe 100. But there's no way that Trump has the wherewithal to say we're going to have a full scale invasion of another country and hundreds of thousands of you are going to die. But that's going to be worth it. He doesn't believe in anything enough to demand that other people believe in some cause like that. And that's a weakness in the sense that his ability to control his own political future by starting foreign wars is, I think, limited because his ability to fight foreign wars is very limited. because, you know, he's willing to cause pain, but he can't stomach that much pain.

50:51And he can't imagine, he can't really imagine that other people would. Whereas Putin, I think really does think that other people are going to care about Russian glory. Trump doesn't care about American glory. And I don't think he can really imagine that other people can care about American glory. And so I think in his case, the oligarchy, like his desire to be a rich oligarch is the dominant factor. And it actually constrains his ability to use the more militaristic stuff. You know, I think I may not have answered your question because I was so interested in my distinction between. So, like, help me out if I didn't.

51:23I think you did. You did well enough. But at any rate, I'd like to move on to something else. Just something that I noticed from speaking with you is you take you pause to say, OK, I want to make this structural point or highlight this in the analysis. And from both reading and speaking to you, something else that you do that I notice a lot is you come up with these very pithy, useful phrases or words like soft spots in our conversation or politics of small numbers or in your writing more recently, superpower, suicide, baby in a bulldozer, or like the military dictatorship budget that we just talked about.

52:09And I have the sense that you do this very purposefully. And I'm wondering just as a speaker and a writer and a thinker, I mean, why you use this as a tool so much and to what effect do you use it? When you need to build up your team to handle the growing chaos at work, use Indeed Sponsored Jobs. It gives your job post the boost it needs to be seen and helps reach people with the right skills, certifications and more. Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Listeners of this show will get a$75 sponsored job credit at Indeed.com slash podcast.

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53:00so i'm gonna i'm gonna start by returning to the point about tragedy and poetry and you know literary genres i still read a lot i mean i i try to read not just outside my field but just in wildly different areas and genres. I read a lot of poetry. I've been reading a lot of Greek tragedy. I've been reading the Roman Stoics lately. And these are all areas like towards which, like I have some kind of pretext or excuse or someone is pushing me there. So in the case of the Roman Stoics, in the cases of Marcus Aurelius and Seneca and Epictetus, the impulse actually came from Ukraine where it turns out that the Roman Stoics are undergoing a renaissance for, I think, understandable reasons.

53:52But that impulse then led me to read them. And then, of course, when I read them, I get my own things out of them. And so I just want to say that part of it is that, that when I'm talking, whatever we're talking about, I'm talking about it. I'm trying to, I'm not just, I'm not trying to, it's just a matter of fact. Like I'm talking at it as a person who isn't just reading about, you know, Trump and the political science of regime change or whatever. I think it's in order to survive, I have to read like this. But I also think that you crystallize not just the language, but also the concept better if you're kind of out there in the language in a more adventurous way.

54:36So that's the first point that if it's happening the way you describe, you're describing it in a very nice way, although there is a bit of a sting in the question, I understand. again, it's because I'm doing that. And like, I would kind of urge people to do that, like to read, to read in ways which seem to be not directly related to the present moment, because some of the stuff in the present moment, I think you can only grasp by taking certain kinds of distance. Second thing is that I, we're, we're in a moment where we're overwhelmed both by data and by choices among data, you know, like the word, or I should say information where there's, you know, you can, you can have any amount of information about any topic and then what information you get about any topic is often guided by, um, inhuman algorithmic judgments about what you want to hear on that topic.

55:30And so we're like, we're, we're, we're waiting, we're constantly waiting, you know, into this landscape. Like we take a few steps in the landscape and the landscape just keeps getting bigger and bigger, right? Like it's not so much a rabbit hole. It's more like, it's more like this opening fractal landscape, which just keeps opening in front of us. And, and, but all of the things in this landscape don't necessarily hold together and make any sense. And so I'm conscious of the need to try to conceptualize. So like, I'll buy your premise that far. I do think it's important to try to conceptualize, to put names on things.

56:04And so politics of small numbers and soft spot, like I just those are things other people have said a million times. But for me, I just said those things in this conversation because like they were I thought they helped to bring stuff together that we were talking about. So that's the other thing. I think that we do, like we want for concepts. And I think it's helpful when people who are having public political discussions try to bring concepts in, because I think the ratio of concepts to information is way off. And then I think concepts also help us, whether we agree or disagree, to focus on what we're trying to talk about.

56:41So superpower suicide, I was having a conversation with someone I respect immensely, Anne-Marie Slaughter at the Council on Foreign Relations. And she was very well prepared. And we were talking about what I wanted to talk about. And I realized, well, what I really want to talk about is superpower suicide. Like, that's what's actually, why don't we start with the wrong term? Because then people will have a sense of the thesis, you know, and then we can, and then they can react to the thesis. So there's, you know, there's that too. And it's also, it's a way of not being reactive, right? Like, one of the things which I think has gone wrong, you know, in the New York Times and in other media is that the other side is, I mean, sorry, I'm talking about sides, but like the that trump constantly is framing everything right like going back to the discussion of mixed talent sets that is one of his talents like he he's good at framing stuff he's good at setting things up and then making everybody else operate within the frame and we're still doing it to a large extent whereas i think okay it's not like resistance including intellectual resistance isn't just about, it's not even about being inside the frame.

57:55It's about having a different frame, which maybe pushes the other frame aside, but also which is more honest and captures more reality, right? So I feel like that, like in terms of intellectual resistance, that's one of the things that we ought to be trying to do rather than just constantly like counterpunching from below. But he gets to draw the boxing ring. I mean, as he's literally doing, you know, he gets to draw the area of combat And then we all have to kind of function within that area of combat. But I think we should be trying to generate our own frameworks and our own zones of discussion, just as a matter of everyday politics.

58:33Given how effective the other side has been in framing things in a way that makes it impossible to talk about them, we should be working on ways of framing things that makes it possible to talk about them. I appreciate the connection to Trump's framing just because when you think about it I mean Crooked Hillary or Sleepy Joe or my favorite low energy Jeb Bush they really do just set the tone and it's kind of hard to escape it it kind of locks you into this way of of viewing things and while that is obviously too kind of nefarious self-serving uh intense and I don't think that's at all what you're trying to do, but your phrases are very powerful in that way.

59:17In just these last couple of minutes, I wanted to ask about one or two of the other ones that you didn't mention. So what is the idea of the super loser? And it kind of connects maybe to some individuals we've been discussing. I want to say another thing about the framing and then I'll answer. It's okay to be funny. Like, I'm not saying all my friends are funny, but some of them maybe are a little bit funny. And I think it's okay to be funny, like, or maybe more than okay, maybe necessary. That, like, there's a, the East Europeanist in me has the strong, has the strong intuition that, like, there's a relationship between tyranny and comedy.

1:00:04And, like, democracy is not really very funny, but authoritarianism is funny. And then you get down to a totalitarianism and then it's not funny again. And like, while you're in the zone where it's funny, like you should probably, it's okay to be funny while you're in that zone. Because you can be, but also because it's a kind of tool because it can, it can shake people up a little bit. Right. So like my, my children would definitely say, I'm not a good judge of what's funny. But like baby in a bulldozer, like that's an image which just came to me and I've been carrying it around for a long time.

1:00:38And I don't think I wrote about it. I think I just talked about it at some point and you must have kindly watched it on, on subsac or somewhere, but like that image just came to me and it just like, it captures, and I've spent a fair amount of time, you know, with Europeans and others who are trying to react to Trump. And the, the idea of Trump as a baby in a bulldozer captures something that any notion that any, any framework that begins with state interests or national interests or whatever isn't going to capture, right? the that like the he didn't the baby didn't build the bulldozer he couldn't have built the bulldozer the bulldozer was already there but the baby can kind of get back there and move some of the controls at least for a while you know and that is like that is where we are right and the baby is impatient the baby has moods you know but you've got to respect not the baby per se but you got to respect the bulldozer and so long as the baby is it is running the bulldozer you know you can be like china and you can wait for the bulldozer to go to a ditch it can be like the europeans and you can humor the baby you know but like that that image i think it captures something um and it is it's in like so you asked about where this stuff comes from and how calculated i am but like mostly it just comes to me and then i think okay is that going to be useful for other people or not does that capture something about the world that isn't being captured or not and i think baby in a bulldozer does and i think super loser does as well because we are witnessing a precipitous decline in American power, which again kind of echoes a precipitous decline in Russian power.

1:02:06And they are based on bad choices by individuals who, on the one hand, had the skill sets. I'm going back to the idea of a mixed talent set, who had the skill sets to get themselves in power, but the very same skill sets that allowed them to get themselves in power were often perilous for the power of the state, which they now controlled. So Trump in 15 months or whatever it's been, 16, 17, has managed to destroy more American power. I mean, it's like there is no comparison. You have to go to the Civil War, I mean, to pick a year where more American power was destroyed than under Trump. It's, you know, no one counts on us anymore.

1:02:50Our cultural soft power is gone. just to take a trivial a trivial trivial example but it's something that kind of hit me i was in i was in Prague the other day um for a book festival and when i was in when i lived in Eastern Europe in the 90s i was always kind of annoyed like people were always wearing American stuff right real American stuff fake American stuff all across Eastern Europe it was just this fashion and i thought like okay people like just don't do this you know like you've got your own stuff. I mean, I was kind of like trying to be more, you know, local than the locals or whatever.

1:03:24This is really a story about me being a small probably. But I didn't like it. You know, I thought, okay, like wear your own, you know, don't American flags, you know, don't, you know, don't, you know, fake NFL jerseys. Don't do it. You know, just do something else. And then it's an interesting example of like not really wanting what you wish for or being careful of what you wish for because now they don't do it anymore. That's all gone, right? Like it kept going for years and years. It went on decades, decades, but now it's gone. Now it's gone. And why is it gone? Because Trump, right? Like the conditions of the absolute obliteration of American positive cultural influence have now been met and they've been met by Trump and Iran, right?

1:04:07But now it's gone. Like now they all think we're just morons. And, uh, and sad to say, I mean, that's the first approximation. I wish I didn't use that kind of language, but that's kind of where we are now. So like reputation, predictability, but also what people think of us as a people. And then lack of alliances, financial instability, the choice to undo science, the choice to back the wrong technologies, the choice not to have immigrants that you need in order to advance science and technology. All of this stuff combines into just a calamitous vortex of power destruction. And so that's what I mean by super loser, that you have to start from position of superpower, but you have to have very specific loser talents in order to crash it.

1:04:54And so, again, we're doing in fast motion a bit what the Russians did in slower motion. The Russian decision to invade Ukraine in 2014 was calamitous for them. And it's unrolling at a slower pace, but it's going to lead to Russia. It has effectively led to Russia being a kind of satellite or client of China. They didn't have to do this. They chose to do it. They could have been a much greater power if they had stayed between China and the West and been a balancing power. But instead, they chose to line up on one side, alienate the West, invade Ukraine. And so the result under Putin has been, although people see Putin as a strongman, Russia is much less powerful than it could have been.

1:05:32And likewise with Trump, like it's all in a way hidden or disguised or veiled, at least for his followers, by the fact that he presents as like some kind of strongman. But what he's done is he's made the power of the United States much, much, much smaller. So that's what I mean by super loser. Like you start at the superpower level, but because of your specific negative skill set, you can collapse the level of power very, very, very quickly. well tim you're an absolutely gripping i mean speaker and writer and scholar thanks so much for this hour it's been really enjoyable for me well thanks i mean i i i put your dog to sleep which i'm going to take as a good thing i mean i'm going to take it that it means that like my cadences were very relaxing and like the the deeper philosophical echoes were like you know appreciated by your dog's more sensitive hearing and everything was very copacetic um as well anyway thanks thanks for thanks for having me it's been great talking to you and i'm glad we could do this