Humans Make Mistakes Too

Hey you want to do podcast? I guess so. Hi everyone. Welcome back to Cheap Talk. Just before we begin Jeff. Yeah. Do we have any ideas of what we're going to talk about? Hi everyone. My name is Jeff Kaplow. I'm an associate professor of government here at William & Mary. And joining me, as always, is my esteemed colleague, Marcus Homes. Hello Marcus. Jeff, how's it going? It is, it's UN. UN Week. I always look forward to this. It is the week of Marcus Homes. I just want to say every every year when this comes around, we have all the international visitors coming to the UN General Assembly to give speeches and engage in some serious face-to-face diplomacy. I always think like, what a good week for Marcus. Are you enjoying your your week of Marcus? It's like my Super Bowl. You know, other than so, so UN General Assembly Week is my Super Bowl, but also there are other Super Bowls. Like when a surprise kind of summit, you know, like the Alaska summit last summer with Putin and Trump, like that's also kind of like a home Super Bowl, but those are sort of ad hoc and you can't predict. Like this is every September, I know what I'm going to be doing, like in that like third week of September or whatever are in, it's like that's UN General Assembly Week and I can look forward to it. It is like the Super Bowl. It's like every February, you're going to have a Super Bowl. Every September, you're going to have a United Nations General Assembly. And I have to say Jeff, this one in particular has been very interesting in the sense that a lot of these tend to be, you know, just sort of like the formal speeches, right? We've covered it on the pod before. Trump's many General Assembly speeches where he sometimes is quite serious. Sometimes he's more jovial. Sometimes the audience like laughs with him. Sometimes they're laughing at him. Sometimes he's, you know, sort of trashing the UN like while he's there. Sometimes he's talking about the UN being like a good force for peace and stuff like that. This one has had all of that, of course, like the speeches. But there's been this, these other sort of like off to the sides kind of like serendipitous face-to-face encounters that leaders are having with one another, which have actually kind of dominated some of the the story. So people are watching the speeches. All of the other kind of interactions like around the UN have gotten a lot of attention. And it makes sense. It's like these guys are, you know, and they are mostly men, but these guys are here in New York in the same place. Let's talk. Like, let's have a quick meeting. Let's sit down for 45 minutes and talk about what's going on. So it's been really interesting to see, you know, have the kind of formal institutional stuff has been happening alongside these kind of more informal encounters. And it's all, of course, on the on the whistleward I'm looking for here, the sort of like before the big summit, which is occurring today and the rest of the week with Xi Jinping in Washington, D.C. with Trump. So lots going on, lots of diplomacy. One of the best times of the year, Jeff. So first, let's just say so we're recording this on Wednesday, September 23rd. That is going to talk. Yeah. We're going to talk about the big Trump Xi meeting. I hope that's happening tomorrow, as we record Thursday, the 24th. But we won't know what have happened. But by the time this gets out, it will have already happened. So maybe this is a terrible way to do the podcast. But this is what we're doing due to our very busy schedules. It's hard to find a time to chat with you. But before I want to get your detailed take on everything that's going on in the world of diplomacy and elsewhere, but before we do, I just want to say that the opinions expressed on this podcast are solely our own and do not reflect the policies or positions of our employer, William and Mary. So let's just keep that in mind as we speak, because I know how they feel about face-to-face diplomacy and it may not be the same as how you feel. Marcus, let's start with the president of Iran. So one of the fun things about UN General Assembly or Marcus Week or whatever you want to call it is that we have leaders coming to New York to give speeches in front of the assembled masses. And some of these leaders, sometimes if you ran into them in a different place in a different country, they would be like a target of military attack, right? And we have the situation now with the president of Iran giving a speech to the UN General Assembly today, I believe. And you mentioned before we've talked about the UN General Assembly about its role as a forum that allows leaders to come safely together to speak. And I think that's nowhere is that more apparent than when you have leaders who are engaged in armed conflict against each other in the same building in New York. This is someone who in another place, Netanyahu might have tried to kill, not personally, but with military force. But here, we have both of these leaders kind of in the same place in New York. And I just think that's kind of an interesting phenomenon. How do you think about the UN's role in terms of providing this forum for leaders to speak? Does there really substantial difference between the president of Iran issuing a statement or coming to New York to issue that statement? Yeah, that's a good question. And I should say this sort of phenomenon of not being able to do it in other places is definitely real. I mean, it actually came up earlier last week with Netanyahu traveling to New York, and there were some discussion among some politicians saying, should he be arrested? Should we take this opportunity to arrest him because he's been accused of war crimes. And some people were like, this decision would be allowed to go to the UN. It shouldn't be allowed to go to New York. So there is sort of like this weird dynamic where you want to have the UN as this sort of forum for people to speak, and you want to share ideas, and you want to be able to communicate with one another. But there are these sort of awkward situations from time to time where you have, like you say, like two leaders in the same room who represent states at war with one another. And so the question is, why is that allowed? Why is that a thing? Why don't they start fighting kind of like physically or at least rhetorically with one another? And I think there's a couple different reasons for that. One, the UN is very much sort of like a club like atmosphere. You know, so like when you go there and you like are participating in the club, there are certain rules that you kind of follow. Now, Trump and other leaders sometimes will try to push the boundaries of those those rules. But one of the rules is that we're going to have, you know, civil discourse. And this is a place of, you know, being professional and talking about, you know, solving the world's problems. And so for that reason, you tend not to see any type of like, you know, demonstrations, you tend not to see people getting up and leaving the room. There's been, you know, criticism that you went along those lines, which is, you know, if you are representing a country that's committing a genocide or you're representing a country who's had, you know, very sort of aggressive recent actions, maybe people should stand up and leave. Like so it's not really whether this is right or wrong or good or bad, but that is kind of one of the rules. And one of the other rules is that you allow everybody to speak. Anybody that wants to get up representing a country is allowed to kind of say their piece. And again, some people have said that that's actually not a good thing. And we should be limiting speech and all that kind of stuff. But that is one of these kind of informal, you know, written non-randown rules that people tend to follow. But I agree, it creates this kind of weird dynamic where states at war with one another will have their leaders, you know, sometimes passing each other in the hallway, like literally, or going up an escalator, like Trump's going up, and somebody else is coming down. Like that, that kind of thing is quite bizarre. Trump hates those escalators now, man, at the UN General Assembly. Well, what's funny about that is that today, one of the reporters evidently yelled out to him, like watch out for the escalator or like, you know, watch out for the stairs or something like that. Like it still comes up because Trump keeps talking about it. Like even before he got to the UN last week, he was talking about how the UN doesn't like them, you know, they turned off his teleprompter didn't work, the escalator didn't work. He's like, they're out to get me, you know, he's not bringing it up. And so it continues to be a story. So Jeff, I think the way I think about the United Nations also, in terms of General Assembly week or Marcus week, is that there's a difference between the sort of public facing types of speeches that you're seeing and then what's happening, you know, more privately. So with Trump's speech in particular, I think a lot of these kind of dynamics were on display. So he got up there and gave a speech where he talked about lots of different things. One of the things he talked about was the situation with Iran and the sort of quote-unquote choice that he has to make, which is, you know, pursue diplomacy and try to make a deal or just like annihilate them and just destroy the entire country and civilization, like he's kind of threatened to do in the past. So that's the kind of public, you know, threat that he's making. It's a bargaining position that he's holding at some level, but it's also just a threat. He's threatening to annihilate an entire country. And then we find out privately that behind the scenes, there is actually talks that are going on between the United States and Iran, like literally like, as Trump is like giving this speech. So, you know, you had US officials and Iranian officials, you know, get together, evidently, the talks went pretty well based on the reports that, you know, US officials have said anyway. They made some progress, maybe towards some type of solution to this war. But it's just the disjuncture between kind of what's happening on the front stage, like the stage that we all see as an audience. And then what's happening on the back stage, the differences are sometimes quite stark. And I think that's a good example. The speech that Iran president, by the way, gave also was pretty forceful at times, basically saying we're not going to surrender, we're not giving up, like this is, you know, we're willing to negotiate, but, you know, the United States just can't push us around, et cetera, et cetera. I would imagine that the talks that were happening behind the scenes were more measured, a little bit calmer, more, you know, probably technical, uh, in nature. So, you know, when there's always, you always got to keep in mind, like, this is a show, there's an audience and that, you know, it's also a forum for people to get together. So, sometimes the public and private, there's a little bit of a disjuncture between what's happening there. Yeah, but just to clarify, I mean, you don't think that what the Iranian president says in that speech makes any difference, right? I mean, the same way what President Trump says in that speech, doesn't really have any, any impact on outcomes in international affairs that we care about, but what's going on that matters is, And in your mind, Marcus, is the presence of these people in the same place. The side agreements that happen, or the side discussions that happen between the Iranian delegation and the US delegation, but it's not like the president standing up there talking is making a difference in some outcome, right? I mean, I don't know that for sure. I mean, I think it depends on what kind of outcome we're talking about. I don't think that the Iranian president or the US president giving a public speech is going to move them needle that much in terms of finding a settlement to the war. I think that's true. But I think these speeches sometimes, the symbolism of them can be pretty important. So if you think back to the famous General Assembly speech where Trump got up there and just completely was talking smack about the UN, in front of these people, talking about how he won the election in a landslide and people were laughing at him and stuff like that, we still remember that speech because of what happened rhetorically. Like, I don't think it changed anything with respect to the United States' relationship with any of the countries that were present at that time. But it was stark because of the venue, the publicity that it got. But Trump says a lot of things that a lot of observers will say is sort of over the top or it's crazy maybe or whatever. But when he does it on a true social post, I do think it's different than that versus at the United Nations where you have everybody kind of assemble. So I don't think substantively it changes like the way you would think about this, like bargaining positions or it's not sort of revealing any information necessarily that we didn't have previously. Like, I didn't see anything in the Iranian president's speech that was surprising to me. I think Trump said anything that was particularly surprising. He wasn't sort of revealing anything. But I do think the symbolism of it does kind of make it stand out somewhat. Depending on what's said. - Yeah, I mean, the content of the Iranian speech was very standard. You know, we don't want nuclear weapons, but we want to have the right to develop our civilian nuclear capability. The Iranian president held up pictures of Iran's former supreme leader, Haminae, who was killed in the air strikes, held up pictures of Iranian school children who were killed in U.S. air strikes. And maybe there's like a persuasive element that the Iran's president is trying to tap into there. But I would have a hard time imagining a situation where making those statements at the UN versus making them, as he has before, on TV in Iran, or in international meetings, has any different impact just based on the venue. Maybe there's more publicity associated with the UN General Assembly meeting that gets the message further than it would have gone otherwise. But it's hard for me to take what people say in these public statements very seriously. It's cheap talk to me. - Yeah, cheap talk, but it's also, I think about sort of like we sometimes refer to people who don't pay much attention as like a low information voter, you know, it's sort of like there are not really information leaders out there, or low information, you know. But you know, like for the person who, you know, sort of is in and out of paying attention to the Iran war, they like having their head, you know, these are a bunch of terrorists and the Trump is right, we need to defeat them and they can never have a nuclear weapon. And then you're, you know, watching the nightly news they throw in CNN and you see the president of Iran in a speech that like you wouldn't, like no one's gonna travel, CNN's not traveling to Tehran to cover like the Iranian president's speech, but because he's at the UN, like CNN might cover it. And you might hear him and say, - He's still, are they allowed to go in the UN? - They're allowed to be in the UN. - They're allowed to be in the UN because Trump can't control that. Although he said yesterday when CNN saw him in the lobby of the UN, he was like, you shouldn't be here, you know, the Caitlin Collins was like, well, the UN let us in. Like, this is not, you don't, you don't get to kill the UN. But, you know, a low information voter, a person who's not paying a whole lot of attention who sort of has relied on coverage of, you know, the Iran conflict from Fox News or something like that might see this speech from the Iranian president who he very clearly says, we are not the aggressors here. We are not terrorists. We're not trying to kill anybody. So like refuting rhetorically all of the information that this, you know, person who hasn't been paying a whole lot of attention has received, that could potentially have them, you know, say to themselves, maybe I've been thinking about this incorrectly or maybe I should look into this a little bit more. You know, again, it's not changing anything at the state levels in Iran and the United States necessarily. But I do think the prominence of the UN and the coverage it gets. Like I do think those types of things might matter for some types of outcomes. So I'm not going to say that they don't matter at all. But yeah, I don't, I don't think that's necessarily about the kind of core issues that we've been going back and forth about. That's for sure. Before we leave the UN, Trump and Zelensky are, there's a planned meeting between the two of them happening at the UN while Zelensky is there. He's going to give his general assembly speech later today as we record and then there's a plan to have a meeting. Do you have any sense of, you know, Trump's Zelensky meetings have sometimes have gone very poorly from everyone's perspective and sometimes gone a little bit better? Do you have a sense of what's going on here just in terms of the overall context? This comes as there were pretty extensive drone attacks on Moscow last week. And then there were follow on Russian missile strikes on Kiev that were happening like today, yesterday and today. So things are continuing to escalate in this conflict. President Trump has said recently that he would like Ukraine to stop attacking oil industry targets in Russia because he's worried about the price of oil. And of course, that's one of the few ways that Ukraine can really cause pain in Russia is by attacking oil infrastructure targets. So, you know, that may be as an area where some persuasion on the part of the United States might have an impact on Zelensky. But I mean, do you see this as a good opportunity to push forward? I saw Zelensky said something like he would like President Trump to solve this by the winter, if at all possible. - Yeah, I mean, this meeting definitely was around 40 minutes long and anytime they meet and it's not sort of Trump yelling at Zelensky, it's good, right? So like we have all these horrible examples of, not many, but we have these examples of Trump and Zelensky meetings going very poorly. So I think any sort of, you know, cordial discussion that has some sort of substantive, you know, piece to it is actually a good thing. And so I think this is a piece of evidence that things are at least, you know, a little bit moving in the right direction. My read of it though, Jeff, is exactly what you alluded to, which is, I think what Trump is really concerned about here is the price of oil, it's price of gas, the midterm elections that are coming up. And so I would imagine that the focus, as it's been reported, it's true, but the focus of this meeting from Trump's perspective, I think was to get Zelensky to agree, not to strike these, you know, energy refineries, which they had been doing, because he's worried, like you said, about the price of energy. And so, you know, I don't know exactly what that means in terms of the overall conflict in being able to end it, because I suspect that that Trump's aims here were more kind of limited. I did see a report that Zelensky said that he would be up for a trilateral summit with Trump and Putin. And if that ever happens, and we've talked about this a little before, like that would be, I think a really, you know, important step in getting, you know, to some type of resolution here, but I look at this more about the cost of gas than anything else. I mean, maybe I'm, it's a smaller, you know, I'm being too minute, am I thinking about this, but I think I just think Trump-- - Well, you've domestic politics on your mind, right, because that, but I think, but I think so does President Trump, so you may not be so far off. - Well, on that, so I actually wanted to ask you, Jeff, 'cause in the Trump speech, he said a couple different times that Iran, you know, is gonna make a deal after the midterm elections. Like, he said, there's waiting, they're gonna see what happens in midterm elections. And he was saying, like, that's stupid, because I'm not on the, I'm not on the ballot, I'm not up for a re-election. This is midterms, you know, he's sort of like, the way he was talking made it sound like he, he didn't think the Iranians understood, like, what the, it's where elections were all about, and who was actually, like, what was happening here. But I, and then I saw some people talk about this, and they were like, actually, Trump is not, you know, that what he's talking about in terms of like, the bargaining strategy that Iran might be thinking through, this sort of like, game trade, is actually not all that nuts, because what the Iranians want to do is they want to see what happens in the midterm. So if Democrats somehow take over both the House and the Senate, presumably, that'll put a lot of pressure on Trump to end the Iran conflict. He's going to be more constrained. And so therefore, the Iranians might be thinking to themselves, well, if that happens, then we're going to be able to get a better deal because he's going to be constrained. The flip side is if Republicans, you know, somehow miraculously retain the House, keep the Senate, then he's going to have more latitude and be able to do more of what he wants. And so that might be bad for Iran, because they're thinking like, well, okay. And if that's happens and they might want to make a deal now, before the election happens, because they'll get a better deal now than if they would with an emboldened Trump after the midterms. They also might be thinking the last thing that Trump wants between now and November 3rd is some type of escalation. And so we might be in a good position now to kind of like, you know, try to make a deal or try to maybe not make a deal, depending on how you do. So in other words, Trump is sort of like alluding to a certain logic. I'm not really sure what the logic is, but I'm curious if you think that there's logic there. And if so, what are the Iranians thinking about these midterm elections? - No, I think there is a logic there. And it's the same logic that we talked about during the change over from the Biden to the Trump administration and Russia's behavior. And this thinking that, you know, Russia just wanted to wait until the Trump administration came in, thinking this would be a more favorable administration toward Russia's invasion, you know, removing support from Ukraine and all of that. And so yeah, like I think there's absolutely the kind of mere image [BLANK_AUDIO] But here, the way he said it though, I almost wonder if this is like an intelligence assessment that Iran is waiting to sign a deal that they're unlikely to do so before the midterm elections. That might just be common sense, but it also could be something that somebody told him that it may actually be a logic, right? Because if you imagine Democrats in charge in control in the House and the Senate, you're right. I mean, they could absolutely make it more difficult to continue to prosecute that conflict. And it becomes at least the Iran War becomes a bargaining chip where Trump might be willing to trade escalation for some other thing that he wants to do and that that would be something to throw to the Democrats to get a deal done. So yeah, I mean, I don't think that's wrong or illogical at all. It makes sense, but it also makes sense for Trump to want to do something in advance because he knows he'll be in a worse position later. This is a classic commitment problem, right? We have a power shift that's occurring in November that everyone anticipates that people anticipate will happen in November. And so everyone is kind of the shadow of the future looms over us and everyone is making their decision with that in mind. I think Iran would be right to think that an increased escalation on the part of the United States now with the resulting volatility in oil prices and the economic backlash. It bad in advance of the midterm. On the other hand, the administration has not shown much interest in backing off of Iran for political reasons so far. So they might be surprising if they did so now. But I think the president wouldn't mind having a foreign policy win in advance of the midterm. So all of these things are in the air and I think it's an interesting. But it goes to the president kind of repeating his internal dialogue out loud. It'll sound a deal but it'll be out to the midterms, it's like a thing that's in the air. He's just expressing out there. I am still a little surprised that Trump has not just proclaimed victory. He's already claimed victory many, many times. But I'm a little surprised that Trump has not just said we accomplish what we want to accomplish. We're going to stop, we're leaving, you know, and then tell the Iranians like, look, you want to open the straight or not? That's fine. We're done. We're leaving. And so, you know, the United States, you know, is out. And at least even if the oil prices don't go down and gas prices don't go down, at least to sort of like the visual or the rhetoric, like Trump can have his mission accomplished moment with a big banner in the back. And in the head of the midterm say like, if you were worried or you were going to vote against the Republicans because of the Iran war, well, I've taken on it off the table because the Iran war is now completely over. I'm just surprised he hasn't tried that. Like, I don't, I know there's many reasons why that would not work and there'd be like lots of different, you know, sort of problems with it. But I'm just surprised that he continues to talk about the war in ways that suggested it's still going on. Like, if I was him, I would just say we won and, you know, leave it at that. And people have questions about it. That's fine. But we won the war. The war's over. Yeah. Well, that's what we predicted like a couple of weeks in that the US can leave anytime and just say, okay, we do what we need to do. We decimated their nuclear program. We destroyed their top leadership. We made this impact and, you know, now it's up to Iran to pick up the pieces and behave like a, like a good global citizen. And we expect them to. But like, nothing is served by continuing to do this. I, if anything, we have shown Iran in this time period how much leverage they have over us, which is, you know, not the message that we would generally want to send. So yeah, I'm with you. I think that we could have declared victory on this one a long time ago and gone now. It seems like the president wants something else out of this. He wants a real deal. So, you know, I guess that's good in the sense to be good to have a more permanent, a durable piece. But the chance of getting that with this posture toward Iran seem, seem low. I guess we'll see how that plays out. But we do have another very important meeting coming up with President Trump. Meeting with President Xi tomorrow. This has been a much anticipated summit meeting between the two leaders. One interesting element of this story that I want to get your take on Marcus is that there's been some reporting about the summit strategy of the Chinese side. This is from a New York Times analysis saying that Mr. Xi appears to have calculated that the best way to manage the United States is to engage Mr. Trump in high profile summits, rich in optics, but then in substance. And the idea here is we're going to have this pomp and circumstance around summit visits, leader to leader talks, but we're going to kind of try to continue the status quo in the background. It's not going to result in any real policy change, but it's a way of handling President Trump, making him feel like he's being taken seriously and listened to and that his concerns are on the table, but we're not actually going to budge on a policy policy wise. And this strikes me as like the opposite of the theory of international relations that I associate with Marcus Holmes, that is that the summit itself is going to do work on the policy side. And this is almost the opposite. It's like you have the policy and you're doing this summitry to try to like prevent any progress from happening. And I wonder like, do you see this as a as a full on attack on the homesian perspective on face-to-face diplomacy? No, and in fact, I actually, this is sort of a nice example of what I've started calling court diplomacy. You know, like the kings and queens, like the court, like you go to, instead of going to the palace of Versailles, you go to Mar-a-Lago now, you know, and it's like all about kind of like the optics and our Nate, everything is. And the performance is both, you know, sort of like what happens in the actual conversation, but also all of the sort of pop and circumstance around it. So I think that this is a very nice example of that. And I think what G is referring to is actually with Trump true. Like the best way to deal with Trump, it seems to me, is through high profile, a very visual, very public engagement where Trump thinks that he's important, thinks that G likes him, thinks that they have a good relationship, and fundamentally, all of the kind of substantive issues will fall like from there, right? So it's like it's relationship first and then Taiwan, AI, whatever is going to be later. So I think the way answer for G's sort of thinking on this is that let's get that relationship part going first and give Trump exactly what he wants in terms of, you know, the optics and things like that. And then once that's accomplished, if there is room for negotiation, if there is a way for me to a G, maybe put a little pressure on Trump when it comes to say Taiwan, or if I'm G, maybe I say, you know, look, things in Iran are not going that great for you, we can help there, we can put some pressure on Iran, but in exchange, we're going to want to see, you know, some type of statement about Taiwan, or we're going to want to see, you know, you cut back on these arms deals or something like that. So I don't think it's an affront to the homesy inferior of diplomacy. I see it more is about creating the structure under which those, those face-to-face interactions are going to take place. And so they're saying to themselves, we need to get the first part right, we need to get the setup of this right, we need to get the relationship part right, and then we can see what happens after that. The other thing, Jeff, is that, you know, as we've talked about, like the pop and circumstance often doesn't actually do a whole lot. So one of the reasons the Alaska, you know, summit, then it wasn't great, was because Trump thought in his mind, if I have the red carpet rolled up for Putin, I'm going to be able to engender what he thinks is a good relationship with him, and then substantively, you know, he's going to, he's going to make concessions to me, or whatever. And it turned out, what he learned was that Putin said, thank you very much for the red carpet. I really love the, you know, F-15s, like guiding me into land in Alaska or whatever. But my positions are my positions, and they're not going to change. And so I think the truth is the same here was she. I don't think that China, if Trump is expecting China to sort of, you know, moderate its positions or make concessions based on the relationship, I don't think that's going to happen. I think she might be right though, that Trump will be like potentially a little bit more malleable on his side, if we're able to get that, you know, structure kind of set up. So I see it as summits, and then embedded within the summit and the pageantry and all that, the important face-to-face interactions that happen after this been set up. It's interesting to me, because there was a lot of this controversy, I don't know if you remember, back in the first Trump administration, President Trump met with North Korea's leader. This was like a big thing at the time, because a meeting with Kim Jong-un was seen as like a carrot for North Korea. It was like something that was a concession, was even having the meeting, having the US president be engaged directly with the North Korean leader. But it was something that Kim Jong-un really wanted, and President Trump was willing to do that because of his deep belief in homesy and face-to-face diplomacy. That's forward to now, and it's almost like she is offering this carrot to President Trump every few months. Like, you know, I'm not going to actually change our policy to comply with these agreements that we've made, but what I am going to do is meet with you very frequently. So this is like meeting numbers three this year. There's going to be a fourth coming up, maybe a fifth now. There's a lot of these meetings. This new, but it seems to be a thing that China has decided, well, we can give him this. This is cheap, right? Like, the visit is the thing that he actually wants, and we can give him the visit. And then we don't have to change our policy because he's happy because he got the visit. And it feels like a reversal of that North Korean dynamic as well, that this argument that a lot of analysts had at the time was like, why are you giving him something he wants in exchange for nothing. And here we have G deciding, well, we can give him this because it's low cost and in exchange for not doing anything on the actual policy that the US wants from us. Yeah, no, I think that that's basically right. Although I would say that if it sets up the conditions for which they have meaningful talks and like at some point. But the point here is that there hasn't been meaningful, well, there have been talks, but there haven't been meaningful policy changes. And there's almost like just a truce, which is not the same thing. Everyone kind of stood down in terms of the big trade war. There were some agreements, you know, China's going to buy this much in agricultural products and then they just didn't do that. And then there were things that the US was going to restrict and didn't. So there are like little things on the margin, but I think the point of this reading is like really what's happening is just optics and no substance. It's possible that the big breakthrough is right around the corner of Marcus and we'll find out tomorrow the dangers of podcasting before the actual meeting. They may have this new AI framework that they're going to implement between these two countries. I'm going to say right now I strongly predict that there will be no comprehensive AI framework agreed to at this meeting because the character of these meetings so far has just been like nothing, no actual substantive results. And you know, you might be right that they're setting the table for some future breakthrough, but we certainly haven't seen evidence of that yet. And all the reporting suggests that there isn't really much agreement on what the table should look like. I would submit to you, Jeff, that your your sort of outcome that you're looking for like some breakthrough or some type of like big movement. It's not the right way to be thinking about like the value of these summit. So the relationship between United States and China is so bad. Like you just think about it structurally where we've been with China, you know, over the last couple of decades, it's horrible, right? Like we don't trust them almost at all. I don't think they trust us at all when you have balloons that are flying over Alaska. We call them. They don't pick up the phone. Like this is a bad relationship, right? We don't trust them. So the sort of like success can't be out of that. You expect some type of like, you know, grand bargain where like, okay, Taiwan is settled. And you know, we got all these different things happening in a productive way. I don't think that's that's right. I think at best what you can hope for is to start dissolving some of that like distrust or mistrust that exists between the two. And that's where the value is. It seems to me at this point. Like if this were two different countries that had, you know, resolved a little bit of their distrust and that they, you know, sort of were in conversations about some of the things like AI precisely because they started to trust each other a little bit. Then you might say, okay, fine. If they get a breakthrough like that might be something that could happen realistically because they've been able to build up at least a modicum of trust. But from my perspective, there's a so little of that right now. So the idea that they could come away with any type of breakthrough. I think it's just like fantasy. So I agree with you from that perspective. I just think that that's not the way we should be judging what happens here. I would also submit to you, Jeff. There have been some movement on the Trump side with respect to China. So for example, we stopped those military exercises in South Korea. Now you might say that has nothing to do with China. That was about the South Koreans and other guys. But if you're thinking about this objectively and like looking at the moves United States as a state as a country has made, that's not actually inconsequential. That's a costly signal of a type number one. Number two, you know, we do have evidence to suggest that Trump, you know, it's not necessarily going to back away from Taiwan. But there's been some reporting that there he's been like a little bit more malleable on that question about some of these, you know, arms packages and things like that that are the Taiwanese very much want to go through. Xi Jinping has said, look, historically, you guys have said that these arms transfers to Taiwan are going to stop at some point. They're just supposed to be reduced if they not only have they not been reduced, but you're actually like, you know, moving ahead with them and doing even more. And there's been some reporting that suggests that Trump is a little bit sympathetic to the argument. I mean, you go back and look at the 1982 joint communicate between the two countries that Ronald Reagan signed with China. It does say, you know, as long as China has been working towards peace, now you can sort of argue about whether or not they're pulling a bat end of the bargain. It does say that the United States is going to reduce the amount of military support for Taiwan over time. And so if you're Xi, you're looking at this and saying that was like 45 years ago, I don't see a whole lot of evidence that that's happening starts to put some pressure on the United States from that perspective. To me, Jeff, this is about this dissolving distrust before you start building trust and the meetings are helpful in doing that, I would submit. I think that the Chinese side is right to do this high profile symmetry as a mechanism for engendering those meetings. And I think we should be judging the success of the talks, not on major breakthroughs, but on one, are there follow-up talks and then also the iterative, maybe small improvements in their relationship that aren't going to be a big breakthrough. But are better than the status quo and better than we had before the talks began. That's the way I'm looking at this. I think these summits have become opportunities for foreign leaders to persuade President Trump to do things. And so Taiwan has got to get in there. Like the answer to what China is doing is to schedule a summit meeting, which is tricky for Taiwan, to schedule a summit meeting to meet with President Trump to get their case in, because this seems to be the way you can bring your case in your court diplomacy example. This is, you know, you get to bring your issue before the leader and have them adjudicate, right? And so, you know, if only one party is visiting an attending court, then the other party is at a tremendous disadvantage. So I think, you know, the solution I guess to this Chinese summitry strategy is Taiwanese summitry strategy. It'll be interesting to see whether that's what happens. And if I am looking for some breakthrough outcome here, Marcus, it's because I have been conditioned to look for those outcomes by the diplomatic theorists in my life who are constantly regaling me with these carefully chosen might even be, you might even say cherry-picked anecdotes from Reagan and Gorbachev and like the end of the Cold War and like face-to-face diplomacy brings about this great piece. And, you know, every time we talk and you talk about face-to-face diplomacy, that's what I hear. You don't tell me about the times when things got a tiny little bit more trusting on this meter that runs from distrust to lots of trust or telling me about the times war was averted and peace came to the world. And so, you know, you can forgive me if that's now my expectation for what face-to-face diplomacy will bring us. But, that's, but see, I'm actually really happy you brought that up because that those those examples and breakthroughs are instructive here because they didn't happen overnight, right? Like Reagan and Gorbachev didn't wake up one day and say we're going to meet for 30 minutes. Hold on a minute. Reagan and Gorbachev had far fewer meetings than you and Trump has had this year. My friend, like, this is not, what are you waiting for? Like, it took two, three meetings for Reagan and Gorbachev of breakthrough. We're on meeting three in the last several months, Wiggy. That's true. I can't predict the timing. I can't predict, you know, what any particular meeting is going to produce. But what Reagan and Gorbachev decided in that first meeting, which was really important, was, like, we need to try to resolve the suspicions that each side has of the other, right? It's like, I think you're being aggressive. You think I'm being aggressive. Let's figure out a way where we can start to resolve that. I don't know what Trump is saying to, I don't know what G is saying to Trump. Are they getting, like, anywhere close to that type of mutual recognition that we're contributing to the other's insecurity? I mean, fundamentally, if you think about it, if that is the core problem here, right? It's like, they have to recognize that they are part of the problem. When I say they, I mean, both China and Trump, the problem is they have to put themselves, that's their own self-implication that they have to start to understand. Like, China needs to realize when it does whatever it's going to do, and it's out trying to see, for example, the United States interprets that as aggression. And what China sees is that the United States being aggressive with respect to Japan, South Korea, et cetera, right? But the self-implication part needs to happen because they need to say to the other side, like, I understand that I'm part of the issue. And what we haven't seen to your point, what we haven't seen is that kind of self-implication recognition coming out of these discussions. It's possible it's there, but we just don't have, you know, the transcripts and things like that that we will have at some point. It's possible they've made that kind of move to suggest that they understand that dynamic. But until that happens, I don't expect any type of meaningful kind of improvement, like, they need to get to that point. And it might take ten meetings for them to do that. They might never get to that point, but it strikes me that they're moving at least in the right direction. And these things do take time, particularly in this relationship, like I said a second ago, it's just so bad. It's so bad. And you know, that's going to take not just a couple meetings, I don't think. It's going to take a lot. And so I'm happy to see them, you know, continuing to engage. Well, on the topic of diplomatic breakthroughs, Marcus, seems we've solved the Greenland crisis of 2026. So all the parties, Denmark, Greenland, the United States announced there's a new security arrangement, a new deal that will take a fact and resolve US concerns about the security of Greenland going forward. This was a big deal partly because US designs on Greenland have been a continuing concern, particularly for NATO unity. So here we have a NATO country in Denmark that controls the territory of Greenland. There are concerns about US dispute within NATO and potentially driving a wedge. In NATO, this was seen by European allies. is not a good move by the United States for Alliance unity and so it's nice to see this resolved. The actual resolution here seems like very close to the status quo currently where the US has the right to build military bases, which we kind of already had. We already have a military base. It kind of affirms that other countries will be allowed to build military bases, which kind of was already the situation. So it seems like this might be a way for the president to save face, I guess, signing this deal. There are some small changes in the arrangement that are built into this deal, maybe not so many that it would require an international crisis in order to get them. So there's some discussion of whether all this was worth the cost in terms of Alliance unity to bring about very small changes in the agreement with Greenland, which we probably could have had just by asking nicely, but we didn't we didn't try that. So what do you make of this resolution of the great Greenland crisis? It sort of validates, I guess, the perspective that people had when back in the Windsor when he was talking about taking over Greenland, that this is sort of Trump classic bargaining strategy. You make this like very maximalist demand and what you're hoping for is some outcome that's far much further down the line than that and much worse in terms of what you stated that you want, but it approximates basically what he wanted all along. So if you buy that logic, then Trump was a genius here. I'm going to take over Greenland. I'm going to get everybody upset at me, but you know what? That's going to cause them to come to the negotiating table and voila, we have now this agreement a year later, which basically gives me everything that I was planning on getting anyway. I don't think that that's a great, if that was what the plan was, I don't think that's a great strategy for the reasons you alluded to, which was in the process of doing that. It seems to me that the United States paid lots of costs to get this agreement that might not have been paid at all. In particular, you know, sort of the situation to create it with our allies. I think a lot of the, like even the Canada stuff that we're seeing now can be linked to, you know, just in general, this sort of like denigration of allies and they don't do enough, and you know, so it's not just the Greenland story. It's about all the allies that we have, particularly in Europe and, you know, in Canada. So I don't know. It's a weird agreement, also in the sense that you sort of alluded to, which is it doesn't seem to change a whole lot necessarily with respect to like what the United States security, like if you were worried about the Greenland from a security perspective, you were worried about Russia and China, then, you know, what this does, it doesn't seem to me as like really increase our security that much, you know, in a meaningful way over what we already had. It's also as historians have pointed out, like a lot less of an cooperative agreement that we have had previously, like during the Cold War, where the United States had all kinds of different, you know, bases and military and Greenland. So it's sort of, I guess, giving us, getting us back to a point that was, you know, like what we had in the Cold War, but just not nearly as much of it, I suppose. But I just think that the whole thing is actually kind of sad in the respect that, you know, it took us, you know, having poorer relations with our allies in order to get this agreement, which on paper anyway, doesn't seem to be a whole lot better than the status quo. There's also, you know, some, I think, parts of this that might be more relevant in the future, like access to minerals and, you know, it's like an economic kind of piece of this as well as not just about security. So maybe that's what some of the logic that the Trump administration had. But I don't know, I think it's a weird kind of Coda to this whole Greenland situation, which seems to, you know, have been an unnecessary situation from the very beginning. The way I would look at it. Marcus, quickly, the AI apparently almost caused a war with China. I just want to touch on this because several listeners sent us this story that was reported out by CNN that there was an intelligence report, military intelligence report that assessed that a Chinese ship in the Middle East was transporting components of a nuclear weapon program, I guess, to Iran. According to CNN, the US military, I'm quoting, the US military swung into action with plans to intercept the vessel. According to four sources familiar with the episode, according to two of the sources, armed members of the US military were preparing to board the ship. Military planes were in the air. One of those sources and another source familiar with the incident said. And then they discovered that the special operations command analyst who put together this intelligence report had relied on an AI-generated analysis that was wrong about what the stuff was that was being carried on this vessel. So it was a case of the report, according to one of the sources, was entirely false, but it also, quote, almost started a war. I just want to say, I don't, I don't, I don't, this seems well sourced, right? But I don't believe, I don't believe this. I don't, I believe that there was a report, an intelligence report that used bad AI analysis to come to the wrong conclusion, right? I think that that's plausible. And the military in particular, this is a military analysis, a military intelligence report, according to the story. And the military in particular has been very aggressive in integrating AI analysis tools into intelligence workflows. So this is not shocking that we would see AI analyze something and some analysts not doing due diligence on that thing and putting it in a report that goes out to some senior leadership. What I find very surprising is that this would result in a military operation before somebody else checked this report, someone at a different intelligence agency or a different agency altogether or someone at the White House and the National Security Council. The idea that we would board a ship, board a Chinese vessel without double checking this, that this would be approved. This strikes me as pretty out there and surprising. And so I'm quite skeptical of this report. People emailed us, so I feel like we should say something about it, but I don't believe it. And until it is confirmed by a reputable news source, CNN, by a reputable news source, this is coming from a news source market that's been banned from the White House. How can we believe anything they say? This has not been picked up by anyone else this was five days ago. No one has no other news source has corroborated this report. I'm skeptical. I think that I believe that there was the intelligence analysis piece that seems plausible. The idea that we would start a war based on that would no double checking. That strikes me as very unlikely. What is your take on this? All right, Jeff. I'm going to assume for a second. The way I looked at this, it seems like one of those kind of like war gaming kind of exercises, like what would you do in this particular situation? You're getting this report AI, this nukes on this boat, it was all very dramatic. So for that reason alone, it kind of struck me as unrealistic. But I'm going to assume for a second the story is true. Let's just assume that everything that has been reported is accurate. I think it speaks to one, something we've talked about on the pod before, which is the importance of having human beings and any type of AI system. So whether it's launching nuclear weapons, whether it's responding to some type of attack, whether it's a report that there might be nukes or nuclear material on a boat, having a human being actually look at the intelligence and use their own faculties is really important. And so I think if if this is true and a human being kind of looked at this and said, "This doesn't seem right to me," then that's good. That's what we want to have happen. And I speak to the importance of having the human. Two, I also think if true might make it more likely that we do see, as we're talking about before, kind of mini breakthrough with the Trump and G summit, because one of the things that what's his name, Besson, said over the weekend was, we're going to propose or we need some type of kind of like hotline for AI. Like we need like the equivalent of like the red phone, you call up the Soviets if you're worried about a nuclear incoming attack. We need something similar with China with respect to AI because the United States at the moment, if you believe reports, is the number one in AI, China's number two, we're evidently we're evidently trying to be the number one and make sure the China's number two. And so there's going to be this competition. And so if you ever are in a situation, anything related to AI that you don't know what's happening and you're a little bit worried and you're concerned there might be a misperception, you pick up the red phone and you call the Chinese counterparts or they call us and they say, hey, before we board this boat and kill everybody and take these nuclear, this nuclear material, is this real, right? Now China could lie, the United States could lie, like you could have all kinds of further complications, but the very least you want that sort of like communication technology. So I would not be shocked Jeff. At the end of this week, we see some type of commitment for the United States and China based on the discussions that Trump is going to have with G, to institute some type of system or start to think about what sort of system would look like for having kind of like a hotline or an incident. I think the turn of the fancy turn for this is like AI incident notification mechanism between the two to be Washington and Beijing could could talk. Third, my third reaction to this, Jeff. And this is gets back to one of my favorite topics. Is this an example of good luck? Is it, is it that we just happened to have a human being that was capable and like looked at this and said, maybe we should not be boarding this boat? Or is this an example of bad luck because we got this AI garbage information and we started to act on it. And so therefore it's bad. We just looked into having this bad outcome because LLM just produced something out of the blue that we almost acted on. I find the luck stuff so tricky, Jeff, because I don't know if it's good luck or bad luck. Help me sort out what type of luck is going on here. But those are my three reactions to this story. All right. I have three reactions to your three reactions. Okay. So the first reaction is that humans make mistakes too? Sure. But we don't see the military intervening and boarding Chinese ships very often because whoever made the mistake, the idea that you would act on it without someone else checking it is ridiculous, which is why I don't believe the story, right? Like the idea that we wouldn't attempt to call China or have some human being double check this analyst report, I mean, can't do anything without having like somebody else double check it. But random memos to a middle manager at the State Department are double checked by somebody. The idea that you would like, oh, let's start a war over this one and never check it is crazy. So I don't think the answer is humans in the loop because like humans make mistakes too, the answer is like double check in your intelligence and good analytic trade craft. And the military commands not well known for their intelligence trade craft. So I think that that might be part of the issue here. I mean, human intelligence error could start a war the same way, eh, intelligence error could, but we tend not to see that happen very often because there are double checks. Reaction number two, we don't need a hotline for everything, right? You just need one hotline. And then whatever the problem is, use that hotline. We have a hotline. We have a mechanism for reaching out to the Chinese military leadership in case of issues. We have mechanisms for reaching out to Chinese civilian leadership in case of issues. Those exist. We don't need a hotline for AI. We need people to use the hotlines they already have, okay? Because we're going to get in the situation where there's like 18 phones in the White Hat in the Oval Office and there's an emergency and the president's like, wait, is this a shipping emergency or is this a trade emergency or is this a nuclear emergency or an AI emergency? I don't know which phone to call, right? And it doesn't make sense. We just need one communication mechanism. And so this idea of a hotline for AI is just window dressing. It's a way of like saying we're doing something on AI. We already have the means to communicate. We should just use those. Reaction number three. This is not luck either way. This is just like good intelligence work. You get a bad report. Yes, I guess you're unlucky that AI gave you the wrong answer. But if you do enough intelligence reports, sometimes you're going to get the wrong answer. And so the way you respond to that is not like you hope you don't, you hope you don't get bad luck. Instead you double check the report. I don't know, this doesn't strike me as a situation of luck in either direction. It strikes me as like we should have a mechanism by which if someone says China is giving nuclear weapons components to Iran, someone else reads the original reporting and verifies that assessment. That should just be the way we do it. And then we're kind of helping to remove luck from the equation. Yes, both of those analysts could be wrong. They could use the same terrible AI to make that assessment. But at some point you would get to someone who might have a different view. And there's a big issue in the intelligence community norm of trying to surface dissenting views. So the policymakers are aware of the uncertainty surrounding any particular report. When you have a report that is entirely generated by an AI analysis, the uncertainty around that report should be quite high until you have other humans that look at it that reassess the level of uncertainty. And then uncertainty should be communicated to senior leadership before they scrambled the jets. So I think there is a process here that I hope functioned and that this reporting is just incorrect. Those are my three reactions to your three reactions. Jeff, I'm going to go on the record. I am for hotline proliferation. I think we need more hotlines. You want more hotlines? Just use the hotlines. Not just hotlines. I want to see holograms. I want to see that not just a phone, but I want the ability to be present in Beijing if I need to be actually show up in the office there in a sort of hologram way, because I think more communication is better. So I'm happy to have more hotlines. I do think more phones does not equal more communication. There must be listeners out here listening to this who have a work phone and a personal phone. There are a number of job categories where that's a thing, where you have your work cell phone and your personal cell phone. And every one who has one will attest. I've had this in the past. Will attest super annoying. You occasionally pick up the wrong phone to make a call. It's really annoying. Why not just make all the calls with one phone? That's my argument. We need more phones. We need more holograms. We need more text-based communications. And I think what Xi and Trump might come up with is they probably have this incident in mind, but they're also thinking about the sort of doomsday scenarios that everybody's been talking about where AI kind of takes over. It would be nice if you had a phone you could pick up and say before we have an indication that your China-based AI, or they have an indication that our US-based AI has gone rogue, or intelligence suggests that we're in a really bad situation, I'm just going to notify them that that's happening. I don't think the defense department is necessarily the right phone to be calling. I think you need an AI center. You need people on standby that can help deal with this. You need kill switches. You need all that kind of stuff. And I think AI-specific is going to be super important. Kill switches, what do you even, do you even know what that means? I think it's like-- What are we killing with a kill switch, Marcus? It's like when I'm in a Zoom call and I want to get out of it, I pull the plug. I kill the electricity. And then it just looks like my internet went out. That's a kill switch. That kills AI. I'm pretty sure I read this one. There should be a giant plug in the Oval Office. Yes. And whenever we have an AI incident, the president just pulls it out of the wall. 100%. 100%. Alongside, they'll be the plug and be the phone. So we have the China AI phone, and then we have the big plug. Or it could be a switch. But something a kill switch that allows us to just turn AI off. I think we solved it, my friend. Thank you so much for joining me today. We covered a lot, Jeff. It's been great. Again, September, the United Nations General Assembly week. It's great. I'm hyped. I'm excited. I'm pumped. Yeah, maybe we'll have some follow-up on the Trump Xi meeting next week. This is an exciting time to be studying face-to-face diplomacy for sure. Absolutely. And institutions. People who like institutions and international organizations, it's all taking place in one time. Face-to-face, international organizations, institutions. I love it. It's exciting. If you want to hear Professor Holmes' take on the Xi meeting, you should subscribe to the podcast. You can do that in Apple Podcast, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcast. If you have questions about anything that's going on in that world, send us an email at [email protected]. And we'll try to answer those questions. Can't respond to everybody, but we do always appreciate your emails. Go to our store, cheaptalk.shop. Marcus, we should get some summit merchandise. I think right enough of our merchandise is symmetry. We have a face-to-face diplomacy t-shirt, I think. But it's people wearing headsets. Virtual reality headsets. You know what I took out of the laundry the other day was the down with the header arki. T-shirt? Can I wore that around? Got some interesting looks. I got some interesting looks. I like that one. Yeah, but check it out. We're at cheaptalk.shop. You can find all of the merchandise there. Marcus, thanks again. Folks, we'll see you next time. OK, you're frozen on my end. But I can hear you, which is frozen on my end. And I can hear you. I can hear you. So, but now you're back. Now you're back. Oh, now you're back. Hey, welcome. I didn't get your internet as unstable. Yeah, well, I was at the office today and I got internet as unstable. If you can't count on William and Mary's infrastructure, what can you count on? Did you see the story that in the Northeast, like a bunch of airports had to ground flights because there was a construction crew cut a cable by mistake? Does that one happen? I didn't see that. There was a fiber cable. They were digging. They cut it. That fiber cable went to the FAA or something like that. And it led to all these airports having to shut down. The chaos that that-- you can check these flights. These transatlantic flights coming into the East Coast. They all were diverted into places. Some of them had to go to Canada because all of the airports in the Northeast were all messed up. And so, you know, it's a chaotic mess when that happens. We keep pushing Canada around. They're not going to accept our flights from our airport crisis. I think the relationship would have to be pretty bad. I think before they started turning away our flights. But the problem is, if you have a flight destined for the United States and you land in Canada, what do you do with the people who don't have visas for-- you can't get out of the plane. You know, also, you have to fly those people back to the United States or to the United States because that's where they were-- their passports were checked and visas were checked and all that before they even boarded. It's tricky. It's a mess. Yeah, it's tricky. But the Canadian people are welcoming people. I love Canadians. Yeah. They're the best. And I like their food. I like the poutine. You ever have poutine? The french fries with the gravy and the cheese curds? Delicious. I have-- I don't-- I don't love a soggy french fries. I got to say-- They're like we've talked about this on the pod before. Yeah. It sees it too, maybe. It is soggy. It is soggy. I think part of what I want in a french fry is the crispiness. And so, I understand the appeal of having like all this stuff, like the nachos of french fries. I understand the appeal of that, but the soggyness of it is off-putting to me. But that's a cultural thing. You grow up with it and you start to like that sort of thing. And unlike nachos, I feel like in nachos, there's a way to do a good nacho where it retains the crisp. And you can't really do that with the gravy. Because the gravy is just going to smig everything kind of soggy. But those are the nachos I like are the ones that are like-- you half the chip is free and alone in crispy. And half the chip is submerged in whatever it is. And then you get all the things, right? You get the crispiness, you get the toppings. It's very hard to do that with poutine because there's not enough like exposed surface in the same way that there is. And the other thing is, it's sort of like a fat overload. The french fries bring enough kind of like fat to the table. And then you have the gravy and the cheese. It's a little rich, like it's a little heavy. You really have to be hungry to dig into something like that. Achilles, the nation. wide chain used to do really good nachos. They would have like, do you remember going like in the early 1990s, what chillies and ordering nachos, they would do it individually. So each chip was like structured individually and they put a little refried bean on there, some cheese, some sour cream, a couple other things, but they were like, they were presented like as discrete units. And so everything was perfect because they didn't get mixed together and you sort of take one at a time and like they were still crispy, delicious. And then they moved to some other like way of doing it and it was horrible. Yeah, you know, sometimes progress is, it just takes us in the wrong direction. I agree with that. If anybody from chillies is, what I would like to do is get somebody on here from chillies who can explain that decision making. Like why was last time you were in as chillies, Marcus? Probably at the O'Hara airport, there's like one in the, in terminal C or B in Chicago or here. In Chicago, yeah. Yeah, they saw the chillies. There's one in Richmond Road, I've never answered it. I don't think I have. I think I have, but it's really, I think we have a chillies park. Pretty sure we do. Are you sure? We did when we moved when I moved here in 2014. I don't go up that far in Richmond Road, I just know. I mean, it's, I'm not lining up to go. I have no problem with chillies. When I, I remember back in the day, I was, it was delicious, right? Yeah, delicious. It's been a long time for me, I think. But I, but I would like to talk to somebody who knows, you know, can talk about the inside, the decision making that went on to change their nachos. You know what? I've never, I never ordered, but it was famous for the chillies baby back ribs because they are delicious. Oh, yeah, that's great. That's great. Never ordered that. Speaking of which, I don't have a smoker, but I'm, I'm contemplating trying to do, I've never cooked ribs like in my house. I've never, never done it. But I was watching on YouTube, this method where you put them in like saran wrap and then you wrap them in tinfoil and you put them in the oven for like four hours or something like that. And then you finish them on the grill. So I'm thinking maybe this weekend, I'm going to, I'm going to try that. I'll report back. Then I can taste as good as chillies, OG in the 1990s, but I'm, I'm curious what I can do without having a smoker. That sounds like a ticket to microplastics in your food, man. You're going to wrap them with, with plastic wrap. But I learned, I, I learned recently, like I always thought that saran wrap would melt like an egg. So I've never, the idea of like putting saran wrap in the oven, which is foreign to me because I just assumed it, but it doesn't sound right. It doesn't melt. I mean, probably like a thousand degrees it does, but it's like the 275 or 300 that they want you cooking these ribs, you know, for all day. It's not going to melt. I don't want saran wrap like touching my food really when it's being heated because I, um, my understanding of microplastics, which is based on decades of research, it all is, is that like when you heat the plastic, it's like, you know, shedding the microplastics. I mean, that said that my intuition would suggest that that's probably true. But we actually recently switched out, we had these kind of plastic jellyboard, like cutting board things, and we recently switched them out for wood, which is annoying because you have to like hand wash the wood and you could dishwash the plastic. But, um, but I do feel it, I don't know, it may not be actually like any better, but it, uh, it definitely feels more civilized to have a wooden cutting board. You know what I don't like about wood? So in addition to that, you can't put them in the dishwasher, although we have them in the past and eventually they crack and they get all like disgusting, but you can do it, you know, a few times. I just, I get grossed out by the idea that like the juices are like seeping into the wood. It's somehow in like the residual kind of contamination and you can wash them and stuff like that, but like if things are kind of like seeping in with the plastic, I don't think they're like seeping in the plastic. It's like, and you put it in the sanitary rinse on the dishwasher, and it's like taking care of the problem. I just worry with wood, like stuff is just getting in that wood, you know, it's kind of seeping in. All right. This should be the pod. We should just be talking about a set of news stories. Oh, this is it. We should talk about, we should just talk about recipes and microplastics. I can do a full 45 minutes on microplastics and food safety. So it would, that would get started. We did 45 minutes. I would find it hard at the end to becoming up with good content, but I'm willing to try.