Is Therapy Culture Making Gen Z Worse? | Pierre Valentin

The way we act in a therapeutic session has its legitimacy within that session. What has happened is that a lot of attitudes, which was once restricted to the therapeutic moment, have sort of invaded the public sphere. Once you have, I think it's Jean Twain, who says 42% of Gen Z have had a mental health diagnostic. - And it more so among liberal women? - Yes, of course. So if we take that niche, young liberal women, their niche with a therapeutic culture is the strongest. It's stronger in the young than in the old. It's stronger in America than in other nations. And it's stronger within the females than in the young men. If liberal white women in particular want to engage in therapy culture and want to have mental health crises, and that's where they're comfortable, so what? Let them, let them, let them emiserate themselves. Well, I mean, who, who we externally to say, well, I think this is where it leads back to the first question, which is, they do end up killing themselves. I mean, this is the culture they create for themselves. I do still feel compassion for them, and I do still think we have a duty to try and help them. So they would look at that as patriarchal, inintrusive, engineering, and they're very active helping them could make them worse. I think that should give us courage, exposure to other people's perspectives, moving us in a good direction. Why is Gen Z killing themselves? Well, I think there's six reasons, and one of them is the very counterintuitive reason. So, easiest one that's often cited is COVID, COVID moment sees a spike from 2020 to 2022, where you have a rise all over the West in depression, mental health issues, suicide. Then you have the question of the social fabric breaking down, so feelings of isolation, which are very strong predictors of suicide. When social breakdown happens, there's often this lack of feeling needed. The need to be needed disappears, 'cause you feel useless, you don't connect with people. A third reason is future seems to disappear. It's very tricky now to predict how things will be in a couple of years, and when you're a young man or a young woman for that matter, it's very tricky to sort of imagine where you're going, and that's a very strong predictor for anxiety, for instance. Then there's also the question of screens and social media, which Jonathan Hyde, of course, has documented in a great depth. The tricky thing with that is it started before, like there's clearly a bump when the smartphone becomes socially mandatory, but for instance, in the UK, anxiety and depression skyrocketed in the 2000s before. And then the most counterintuitive one for me is the response we're increasingly getting to in the anglophone world, but also in France, is therapy culture as a kind of response to the mental health crisis. And that's a predictable response, but I don't think it works. And there's this feeling that you end up with therapy culture, with the overuse of the word trauma to describe a young child losing his goldfish, for instance, and not simply physical trauma, which is where the term originated. There's this feeling that you end up eroding individual responsibility, and not feeling responsible for your destiny, for your fate, for your future, is a very strong predictor of depression, which is in and of itself a strong predictor of suicide. So the paradox with the young generation, is that they're the most radically individualized generation we've ever seen in that you can customize your hair, your gender, like a video game character, more so than anyone before, your job, people change jobs all the time compared to their great-grandfathers and great-grandmothers, for instance. And despite that, there are also the generation which doesn't feel like they're in charge of their life. This is what the social scientist call external locus of control, which means they feel like they're controlled by exterior forces and not by an internal locus of control, which is I have my goals, I have things that motivate me, I have lists I can check off, and things I can do, they feel like they're passive, and that's one of the strongest predictors of depression, for instance. And so they're told that they need therapy, that there's something wrong with them or to ask people, yeah. Yeah, well, of course, some people actually do need therapy. What worries me is the way we act in a therapeutic session has its legitimacy within that session. What has happened is that a lot of attitudes, which was once restricted to therapeutic moments, have sort of invaded the public sphere. So, for instance, non-judgmentalism. So, you know, who am I to judge? Let's not, you know, get more realistic about this. This whole idea can go too far. And something Christopher Lash, which was a historian, had pointed out decades ago. In 1977, he criticized the ideology of mental health. So that seems crazy now, but he was quite pressing on this, and he said, when you tell a child or anyone for that matter, you are not guilty. That seemed like, you know, a very sort of progressive and generous thing to say. But he says, once you say that, you're also saying, you're not responsible for your actions. And he says there's a very tight link between the erosion of competence on one side and the erosion of guilt. So when you tell someone, you're not guilty, you're also saying you're not in charge of your own life. And that's, I think, the tricky bit of therapeutic culture where it becomes permeating in a whole culture. As I said, the word trauma. So when you look at Google Engram, which is something on Google, which helps you quantify the frequency of certain words in, like, American books, French books, English books, et cetera, you see the word trauma has exploded in use in the '80s, for instance. You see, also, who am I to judge? A phrase like, whatever floats your boat, live and let live, where people, seemingly in a kind of progressive stance, don't want to judge each other. But Lash has this incredible quote where he says, "The suspension of ethical judgment condemns us logically to solitude." There's, from one to the other, because we have no common grounds on which to judge, on which to, you know, be-- Why would that be solved, too, though? Wouldn't it be, you wouldn't it be that you fall in with other people who also suspend their judgments or make certain judgments? Hey, did you know only half of you watching are subscribed? If you're enjoying the content, hit the subscribe button to keep the videos coming. Thanks. Well, let's take a concrete example. If you have a friend who happens to have strong alcohol problems and he starts drinking, but what point is it compassion to not intervene and to say, hey, man, you do you, whatever floats your boat? Past a certain point, it's not compassion, it's indifference. And I think that's a clear distinction, because once we don't expect things like, you know, expect common moral standards among even a group of friends at a microcosm level, or then what ends up happening is sort of common indifference where there's no strong bond. Like, for instance, what Lash says is there's a shift from sin to sickness. So we used to see things in the words of sin, and then that became too judgmental, and we basically secularized. And then his point is to say, you end up replacing the priests with the psychiatrist, and you end up replacing a moral language with a psychiatric language. And what happens from one to the other is that, whereas everyone used to kind of have access to the same moral codes, when you go from the shift from sin to sickness, then it's a psychiatrist who has the power in sense that it's a certain kind of authority, a certain kind of expertise, a certain kind of expert who knows what's right and wrong. For instance, if you take a child that doesn't want to finish his place, so that's happened to every single child ever. The way it used to happen was the father would say, come on, you have to finish your plate, or stand up straight. And now the father now doesn't feel like he has this legitimacy, so it's sort of transferred to the psychiatrist. So then you'll say, remember what the shrink told you. You said, you don't have oppositional defined disorder. We'll have to place a boundary here. How does that make you feel? And so he excuses a kind of position of judgment. And he tries to get authority from outside, which is the scientific authority, which is the psychologist, which is a figure of authority capable of having the authority, the father, in a sense, no longer has. So this shift is also a shift from a super ego figure, which is no longer the super ego of the father. It's a super ego of psychological expertise. And so it's also a sociological shift of power, in a sense, from the family unit to bureaucracies, institutions, like the NHS in the UK, so it's a transfer of competences, in a sense. So you've written and spoken about the quote-unquote, it's OK to not be OK. What's wrong with that slogan? Give me a little bit of the history of that slogan, please. So I was in-- just before COVID, I was a student in the University of Exeter, and in the forum, which was symbolically and physically the central place of the university, there was this hashtag that would come up over and over again that they would sort of plaster on the walls, which was hashtag, it's OK not to be OK. And when I first saw that, I had a kind of reticence that I couldn't quite explain, and couldn't quite put my finger on, and unease with the tone, feel free to come and talk to us, and all that kind of compassionate kind of speaking. And I end up with a question. writing this book in French. So, Malay is on a generalization Z to try and solve what I didn't like intuitively with this sentence. And when I found out that in the US, for instance, 72% of Gen Z females believe, agree with the statement, mental health challenges are an important part of my identity. I started to grasp slowly what the problem was in that once you have that, once you have, I think it's Jean Twain, who says 42% of Gen Z have had a mental health diagnostic. More so among liberal women. Yes, of course. So, if we take that niche, young liberal women, they're the niche where the therapeutic culture is the strongest. It's stronger in the young and in the old, it's stronger in America than in other nations, and it's stronger within the females than in the young men. That niche is now building its identity around mental health labels, basically. And that creates, because we keep on saying we stigmatize those who talk about mental health. I think in those niches, we've reached the opposite point where we stigmatize those who don't talk about mental health. And there was this interesting story from someone under pseudonym on Twitter a couple years ago, probably worked for Facebook, although he didn't say it explicitly, who talks about what a meeting would look like during the COVID era in the morning. So first of all, a lot of it was remote work, so people didn't really need to be there. And then they'd go around the table that each had to share their story of the moment, how do you feel? And every single one of them basically had to say they weren't going well. And then the talking stick, if I may say, arrived on this guy, he says, well, actually, I'm fine. And then there's a kind of silence. And they look at him in a sort of weird way. And that's not really what was asked of him. He wasn't meant to say that. He's almost becoming judgmental just by being fine, in a sense. And that's when I think the slogan, it's okay, not to be okay, ends up flipping and necessarily becomes, it's not okay to be okay. And for instance, you have, in some of these niches, places where every, or a strong majority of people have a mental health diagnosis, which flips normal and abnormal the other way around. Because now you have people who are fine and are sort of looked upon as in, well, almost what's wrong with you. You don't have a label. I don't know if you see what I mean. Yeah, what's wrong with that? If a lot of people think they have mental health diagnoses and they gain meaning from that in their lives, then can't we say, oh, good for them? Well, it's certainly a temptation because we live in an era where identity matters so much because it's no longer given. So people try to build an identity. However, building an identity as the American Gen Z is doing now around a mental health issue could discourage you from trying to actually get better. That's the tricky thing. Because depression isn't meant to be a kind of stable state. People live in. It's meant to be a horrible moment in life where ideally you can try and get better and get away from it. For some people, it ends up being a sort of permanent state, but that's not something we can wish on the youth. And so a lot of people are building their identity around this thing, which means that getting better is seen as sort of betraying your past identity. Let's take an example with the child that doesn't want to eat his plate for instance. If the child becomes labeled oppositional defined disorder or eating disorder by a psychologist, in some cases, you may understand that his parents actually like that in that it de-responsibleizes them. It's no longer their fault that he's poorly educated. That word "de-responsible" has to start using it. It probably isn't an English word, it perfectly encapsulates the problem. Then it can be a source of pride in some parents. The child, of course, is hardwired to sort of get that and understand that implicitly in the parents. And then it becomes betraying his parents to actually get better on this element. Is that related to queer theory's idea of dismantling what's normal? Well, I think it's very linked to this idea that any kind of norm is arbitrary and assured. So I guess my original question holds if liberal white women in particular want to engage in therapy culture and want to have mental health crises and that's where they're comfortable. So what? Let them, let them, the, the misery it themselves. Well, I mean, who, we externally, to say, well, I think this is where it links back to the first question which is they do end up killing themselves. Yes, well, I have to admit, I do still feel compassion for them and I do still think we have a duty to try and help them, you know, if someone. Somebody would look at that as patriarchal, and intrusive, and garnering, and they're very active helping them, could make them worse. I'm not saying, I'm not making a moral judgment, I'm just making a factual how they would look at this. Who are you as a white man? Of course, but if, you know, it's the eternal example of the person drinking when he's an alcoholic, you know, he'll say, "Leave me alone, I, I can choose." But the difference is they haven't created conditions that make the intervention almost impossible, whereas these white liberal women have by referring to the patriarchy and thinking everything is race-based. It's true. Yeah. So they've created the conditions that they're most comfortable in. There's a psychological space for them. And so if, and I'm just pushing back, because I'm trying to figure out, because all the time people create communities in which they, I don't know, thrive would be the right word, but they successfully navigate those communities, which to me are completely insane. I'm thinking of niche friends, religious communities. Why would this be any different? Well, I think, of course, it is there right to create any kind of culture they want. I do think, however, that when you create a culture, that culture echoes and permeates beyond yourself, and that ends up creating kind of vacuum where you have people that weren't initially mentally handicapped or didn't have any disorder, for instance. Yeah. And they get sort of absorbed into this vacuum, where it becomes trendy to psychologically comfortable. Exactly, fair to say. Psychologically comfortable. As in, well, they're psychologically comfortable thinking that they're aggrieved all the time. Yes. I knew many of my former colleagues were most comfortable thinking that they were victims of some of course. But this is where, in the long run, the problem with this systemic thinking is that it demotivates, and that you end up having this idea of an external locus of control, which Gene Twinger has mentioned frequently, and that in the long run leads to depression, leads actually to conspiracy theory mindset, because you know, you have these impersonal forces which actually govern your life, and that's the patriarchy, that's the Jews, that's how a lot of people, both on the left and the right, but the therapy culture in and of itself is much stronger amongst the left today, and it's created a kind of, they stigmatize resilience. I think that's the way I'd phrase it. Yeah. Hierarchy, competence-based hierarchy, meritocracy, all of those things are not only an enactment to them, but they're kind of cognitive and social poison, which is somewhat ironic, because those things allow them, the luxury beliefs, to paraphrase Rob Henderson, that they have precisely so they can live in these delusional states. But I guess my position still holds, is that often people create religious cultures, they create all kinds of cultures without any intervention. Why should this be any different as a culture that these people have created? Why should anybody intervene in that? I mean, I have my own answer to that. Yeah, I think the way I'd phrase it is, if someone's drowning and doesn't want to be saved, yes, you still have to save them. Do you? That would be my position, because I think people can change their minds later on once they're dead they can't. So in that case, life trumps freedom. Yeah, I guess in one sense it's not just an individual, but it's a whole group that has comfort in drowning. Yeah. Maybe the commoner example to what I'm saying is that people on the left, they just read a study are eight times more likely to endorse violence against political opponents. So maybe the idea is if they're all in their little group of crazies, vulgar term, but one that's applicable nonetheless, and it didn't spill out, that would be one thing, but the fact that it's spilling out and destroying society as a whole and maybe even leading to the murder of figures like Charlie Kirk or have you, I mean, I'm just thinking like maybe that's the problem with other than the people seeking psychological comfort from voluntarily believing that they're crippled. Which is why I think what we're doing here is important because we're criticizing a culture and that can help sway people who aren't already in those niches and those who are hesitant and just as it seems like there's a kind of pushback on workers and that happened because of that kind of discourse. Yeah. And probably other reasons. We can help engineer a vibe shift on the question of the therapeutic culture. And I think in liberal world, as in a world of, live and let live and we'll have our own values, the least intrusive way of convincing people that your ideas are correct is by example, because then you become magnetic or attractive. People think, "Oh, what does he got right?" Yeah, I wonder about that, because if that were the case, then the body positivity movement never would have taken shape. Yeah, it's a good question, but I think I do think there is a vibe shift rightwards in respect of the well-built, sort of stable guy that seems to be, you know what kind of, in a way, what Charlie Kirk embodied, you know, like relatively normal guy who was willing to debate, like not a arrange crazy that would insult people. And I do think that helped sway a lot of independence, for instance. And I do think in the long run, everything, without being too sort of Darwinian, everything ends up costing if you do things wrong, like you can't get away with anything. So I do think cultures kill themselves that way. Like literally, it's the first question you asked me, I do think that culture is killing itself. Now the important thing is, well, hoping and praying that people who are already absorbed in these toxic niches can somehow break out of them, although that is highly unlikely, but more importantly, sort of walling that off culturally and saying, this mentality, this therapy mentality, this systemic thinking, this, the patriarchy is responsible for everything wrong with my life thinking, which also exists with, well, we worry people are slaveholders. Exactly, it's like this. The way Nietzsche defined resentment was to say, someone, somewhere responsible of, how you translate it in English, my ills basically. Someone is responsible for my lack of happiness. You have to find someone to blame psychologically. And that's very easy, it's very tempting, but in the long run, it's like a straight slide to sort of madness and despair. And I think that's what we're seeing in sort of the therapeutic progressive culture by launch today. Yeah, I have two comments on that. The first comment is that the whole thing is such a cesspool. It is such an ideologically driven echo chamber that whenever there are instances young children, for example, who someone puts in their head that they're born in the wrong body, people say, well, they need therapy, but the problem with that is that all of the therapists or virtually all of the therapists have been indoctrinated themselves into a deranged ideology. I remember at university where I used to teach one of the graduate students who was getting a degree in, I think, clinical psychology or something like where she, she's a practitioner where she goes in the field. She was taught that when she's dealing with homeless people, the first question she was asked, the first question was, what are your pronouns? For the homeless person, not like how do you seek shelter or where can I get some food or I need a bath or whatever, whatever else. So I think that the whole culture itself, Abigail Shreye is written about this, bad therapy, the whole culture itself is built upon a self-replicating ideology in an echo chamber which traps people into therapeutic modalities that do not lead to their flourishing or well-being. But if you say that, you sound like a crazy man. And so here's second thing that I've been thinking about, and I increasingly use these conversations to bounce my own ideas off of them. So I've been struggling with this idea of letting people devolve and not intervening. I never used to think that until recently. Like if somebody wants to go down the crazy train, if a group of white liberal women want to voluntarily and intentionally think that they're somehow emotionally and epistemically damaged and crippled or have you. Yeah. Well, I think there is something to be said for letting people having to face their own consequences because there is, by and large, people do have to learn by themselves a lot of hard truths. You can tell them, you can try to warn them. That's what parents do with children. Oh, well, if you do this, you'll hurt yourself. No, no, I'm sure I can do it. Oh, now you've hurt yourself. What did I tell you? But it's only with the hurt that people like hurt is the best way to memorize something. In the sense, it's when you really screwed up that the image sticks, rather than being forewarned, which is not as strong as actually having lived the experience. Yeah. And so the interesting way I think we could look at this is Theodore Dalorimple, so Alias Anthony Daniels, he still is a psychiatrist who works in the poor areas of Birmingham. And he would get, for instance, women who would have abusive husbands or companions. And his posture, which today would often sound not compassionate, would be to say, well, you have my number. You can call me, but I'm not going to like forcibly book our next meeting. And I've told you everything you need to know about the guy you are with. Here's why you should definitely get rid of him and find somebody else. But now, I mean, you're free. You're not a child anymore. You are free of taking stupid decisions. That's your progressive. See, that's the question. That's precisely the question. Can I take a quick story? Sure. So at a university, I will not name where I was once teaching a young woman came into my office and she said she wanted to close the door and talk to me. She was fully veiled. I mean, she couldn't, you could see her eyes and that's it. And I said, no, I like to keep the door open. That just makes me more comfortable. She said, no, I, I really need to shut the door. I was like, honestly, fuck. I just did not want to deal with this. And so finally, I said, okay, so she shut the door. She took off the face thing, but she, the face covering, but she kept the head covering. And she said, I have a serious problem. She's coming, won't name the country. She's come from a country. She's here with her brother. Her brother makes her veil. Her brother makes her do all these crazy things. She doesn't want to do these crazy things. And I'm like, well, we can go to the police. I'm more than I'll walk you, I'll physically walk you to the police station right now. Not a problem. I cancel mine. We'll just go to it. She said, no, I can't do that because if he finds out, and I, I wasn't really sure what to say, like, because I said, well, I can, I can call the, my boss. He's like, no, you cannot tell anybody. Because if you tell anybody and he finds out, he will kill me. And she didn't mean like he'll be mad at me. Actually, she meant he will kill me. So then I'm like, what? I'm like, like, then I'm really trapped in a difficult, because if I tell someone in at least, and I know how people are, then I'm indirectly responsible for her murder. But I think part of the point is that the questions, are they free? And you know, the mayor of New York tweeted out this thing now. Worldwide hijab day. Worldwide, like, I just think that there's, in the one sense you want to give adults freedom to do what they want to do. But again, I'm thinking this out a lot, but you don't know if they're actually free to do those things. Of course. Well, I think this is where we have a tricky situation in the West, because our conception of freedom basically comes from John Stuart Mill, which is freedom from constraints, you know. And the tricky thing with that is there's quite a lot of sort of dead ends it can lead to, if you only strictly define freedom that way, which is what we do with addiction. So I give the example of, you know, the alcoholic. What we do with the girl you just talked about, you know, she's free. Like, maybe she didn't choose to join Islam. Maybe she was born into it. That's a bit different, but like, once you join, how free are you still within this culture? Not very because of the management for apostasy is death. And for instance, in France, the way we try to fight back against Islam is by trying to say, did the girl who put on the veil decide to do so or not? Or is there like social pressure when she comes home to wear it? So it's a very tricky line of argument, because, you know, how do you measure that? Like, oh, at nine, there was no, there was no one around us. She decided to put it on. Yeah, but then what resources do you provide her if she says, this, my brother's lunatic, he's a religious maniac, he's forcing me to. No, I, I mean, what are you going to do? I provide her own house in the south of France. I mean, would, of course, the way what I was trying to get at is a different avenue of pushing back against all the things we've mentioned is just to say, as a culture, this is not who we are and these are our norms, but that would seem, for us, in a sense, too illiberal or too restrictive on individual freedom, in a sense. But that's why we're still going route one, which is the really tricky one of, is he really addicted? Is she really free and trying to measure that? And I think that's, it's put us in a really tricky situation today. Yeah, I don't know. I sincerely, I wish I could sit here and tell you that I have figured this out, but I haven't. I give you, if I may, another example. I had a guy, I gave a talk at UW University in Washington in Seattle. And a guy came to my talk, who saw an event. Do you know who Billboard Chris is? - Yes. - Yeah, so he's a good buddy of mine and reads. He came to my event, and he posted this on Twitter, so you can see it on X. It was the first time in his life, he started questioning and challenging the idea that he was born in the wrong body. Unfortunately for him, he went to Thailand, and I met this guy, he came to my thing, so it was a real person. And he, they cut off his penis and testicles, and he was there with his girlfriend when I gave this talk. And I struggled because I don't know like, what are the limits of personal sovereignty of your own body? What are the limits of autonomy? What are the limits of what the state should do and how it should control and regulate that? Like you've see with the WPATH files, like the accepted or standard guidelines. What are the, and you have, you know, it's a walk between liberalism and illiberalism, authoritarianism and non-authoritarianism, and I don't know, I don't know, I don't think that those lines are as clear, I'm not saying you think this, but I don't think that those lines are as clear as I used to think that they were. - I agree, and I think one intriguing thing is to go back to the mental health crisis. It's the nations that have been the most philosophically liberal, classically liberal that have suffered the most. Like if you look Canada, UK and the US, they have a worse mental health crisis than like quite a status country like France, and that's quite intriguing. Like I wouldn't-- - Certainly Hungary, Poland. - Yeah, exactly, like, you know, stronger knit communities. Because one way of seeing this is you have two sort of conceptual extremes, which is like, the group doesn't exist, there's only the individual, and the individual doesn't exist, there's only the group. And it seems that we've had this social experiment where for the first time in human history, we could experiment what happens when the group doesn't exist. 'Cause that almost was never tried, you know, we've tried it for a couple of centuries and we've pushed it to a limit, perhaps, where there's a kind of, you know, the social scientist Barry Schwarz talked about the paradox of choice. There can be such thing, at least for the human psyche, as too much choice, apparently, where-- And that sounds really, once you say that, people think you're gonna say Stalin was great in the next phrase, you know, that's not at all my point. But when there's loads and loads of choice past a certain conceptual peak, people regret the choice they made much, much more easily. And also people take much longer time choosing, which is really tiring. And what ends up happening, and I think we've reached that point today, is you see this with young people and chat GPT who basically say, this is what I've got in my fridge, now make menus for me for the whole week. 'Cause I'm sick of choosing. And that chat GPT can be like the state. You know, it can be, I'm sick of having to choose, I don't know, you choose this for me. And so there's this thing where, if you kind of like a bell curve of choice, you know, where if you land on the other side of the bell curve, people are out here, the young people, seeking ways of getting rid of their responsibility. Like, oh, it's not my fault, it was a trauma. Oh, I don't want to choose chat GPT, choose the content of my fridge for next week. I don't want to choose, I want an authority figure like an Andrew Tate influencer to give me orders on how I should live my life. And so we have this young generation, which is, as I said, the most individualized, it's also the generation which is seeking out ways of giving away its freedom and its choices. And they're also having sexual outlasts. Yes, as well. Which is another paradox of like, you know, the sexual revolution, you think, you get rid of all these apparently useless constraints and sex, which is boom, once rid of them. And it's not the only reason, but there's a huge sex recession which has been well-documented in pretty much the whole of the West. And that's also another intriguing sort of counter-intuitive resolution. Yeah, why do you think that is? I think a lot of it is screens, where screens invade like the bed, basically. It's one place where they used to not be there. Because, you know, people have to talk to each other, it creates intimacy. Nothing kills intimacy better than screens. I think also the social fragmentation means that young girls and young boys don't see each other as much. Like on a sheer sort of weekly basis. They don't see their friends as much. Then when they see their friends, it's sort of same sex meetings. And they don't even know how the opposite sex functions. It becomes like a foreign agent, you know. They try to decrypt and understand a different whole language. Like there was this funny tweet, where this girl said, "Remember, ladies, when a guy shows you a YouTube video, it's a sign of respect in his culture." And I thought that was quite funny, but that's like it's almost an anthropological investigation. No idea how the other side functions. And so we've been in this positive feedback loop, positive here as a negative, which is that young men and young women don't see each other as much. Which means they don't understand each other as much. Which means that when they do see each other, misunderstandings create resentment and chaos, where they don't understand that if a girl does this, it means this, boys don't understand, they should speak this way. There's no sort of map to interact between these two different parts of the human species. And then that resentment sort of fosters digital clicks for stuff like Andru Tate or the far left work stuff. And then that creates a divide which is becoming very difficult to bridge. And that means less couples and that means less babies. And so I think that's part of the crisis we're in right now. - Yeah, you know, one of the things I've learned when you, I see your married, your young guy, I'm gonna give you an unsolicited secret of how to deal with a woman. When you say you're gonna go out to the store to pick up some food, maybe for dinner, anyone ask your wife if she wants anything? If she says no, what she really means is yes. What she really means is she wants you to be thoughtful enough to pick up something for her. So that is one of the few times where no actually does mean yes. So I hope hopefully that will help you in some capacity. But so I do think about this idea of the therapy culture, the kind of people who go into therapy and the kinds of things about which they're indoctrinated. And then I think of the manifestation that has on people and the obvious one is trans. The idea that somehow everybody is a victim or somehow they've been aggrieved and it's okay not to be okay. And I've often challenged this, and I remember someone filed a complaint against me for saying this in class once, but is there any evidence that shows that definitively shows voicing your problems to someone who's good? I mean, why not just keep your problems inside and fucking deal with it? - So there's two different things, and I think here as well, we have two sort of conceptual extremes. I think maybe to some extent our great-grandfathers could have real traumas like from war and stuff. - Oh, for sure. - Like for sure. - And would have benefited from at least having like a shoulder to cry on one person alive. - For sure. - But now clearly we're on the other side of the bell curve, and we've stigmatized those who don't speak about mental health in a sense, and we've stigmatized resilience. That's the other extreme that we're in. Like white knuckling it. Like the term white knuckling is used overuse, like we were in sale, 'cause it was so sort of reticent to someone sort of working through it themselves that we find it like unexplicable or odd choice. And there's also this meme going on often from actually females mocking males, saying men hate therapy so much that they're literally, and then they'll say like literally go to the woods instead of they'll literally build an army instead of going to therapy. They'll literally, and as you can see, it's a very sort of female coded criticism of male, which shows the divide on the question once again. And I think a lot of times they say something that actually would help males in that like walking in the woods is actually a very good thing against depression, for instance, seeing exercise outside with people. So like playing football or soccer as you incorrectly call it in America, outside with friends is like one of the best natural remedies against depression. And to answer your question more directly, what has actually been demonstrated to be negative on mental health is what they call rumination, where you just rehash your problems every day, every moment. And I think, for instance, if I were to tell you, do not think about holding your breath, then that's counter-performative or do not think of a black cat. If I tell you, think about your mental health and it'll get better, it's a contradiction in terms. And the interesting thing is we can take the most progressive states in the US and see how far they've pushed this. Totally. I'm literally just thinking that. So now you have these surveys for sort of 12, 13-year-olds that this is something Abigail Trier mentioned her book, where they would ask children monthly, maybe weekly, or why not hourly, if you're really serious about trying to help mental health, did you ever think about killing yourself? Did you? You mentioned being able to take questions hourly? Something? Yeah, exactly. And if every hour I were to tell you, did you ever think about killing yourself? It obviously been, it be sees a kind of like harassment or like psychological torture. But that would be, I don't think we've ever reached that stage anywhere, but that would be the logical end-game of where we're going. And they're often more precise, like, did everything about cutting yourself? Did you ever think about burning yourself? And then they sort of explain how to do it. And something Jordan Peterson pointed out about that, actually, was to say, you don't realize the number of assumptions that you're just telling the kid. You're saying, this is so frequent that we have to mention it to you. - Yeah, see, I disagree. - Other people do that. Yeah, I disagree with Peterson. I take me, he uses take on that. She's the woman who did meticulous research on the WPath files. I mean, unbelievable. Like, talk about people who have done their homework. But anyway, one of the things that she, she was going to use a turn of phrase, but I caught myself before she was going to say, turned me on to, or introduced me to, was that for a lot of these people, this is a sexual fetish. So when these kids hurt themselves, asking them is a kind of weird sexual compulsion that they have. Like, the people whose their body is more fear when they think they're limbs. They need to amputate their limbs. But that, those are sexual. So I wonder if it's not the same phenomenon is pedophiles going into the priesthood. You know, it's in what sense? Well, it's just that people who are basically mentally ill, sick, want hurt children, sadistic, they go and they write these guidelines. I mean, I wonder if it's not a kind of similar phenomenon that's analogous. Well, I don't have an answer specifically to that. But what I would say is I think a lot of it, a lot of what's happening is you have sort of psychological school counselors that now sort of float within the school system that can, as, as, try a, recounts, can now excuse children not having done their homework if they just quote mental health as a reason. When I was in the UK, actually, almost on demand, like on trust of what I would say, you could theoretically get like extra time on your exams. You know, and I could have argued I was French and I would, I'd need some, you know, and it was, it was almost that easy, you know. You could have a disability. You could have a French. You could remember that. You know. They took Greenland from us. Oh, my God. Exactly. And what happens is you have these psychological counselors within the schools. Yeah. They're the ones who push not only like national guidelines or even state level guidelines. They push for these surveys. And then what happens is surprise, surprise. You end up having kids saying, well, actually, it's the 50th time I've, I've, I've been asked, maybe I do want to kill myself. And then the numbers go up. And then you use those surveys within the school system or even within like the, the local federal system saying, oh, well, look, we maybe, we need more surveys and more school psychological counselors because now we're at 50% depression. It means we haven't had enough psychological counseling and surveys. You see sort of the loop. So I think it could be read somewhat cynically as a power ploy to sort of generate the legitimacy and more recruitment of sort of bureaucratic instances, instances that deal with psychological trauma and things. Reminds me two things. In prison, if there's a woman phenomenon, if someone is not an inveterate criminal, if they just do a bad thing, et cetera, you shouldn't put them in prison because then they start thinking that they have a promise is a well document from phenomena. I'm also thinking about listening to what you're saying. It gives credence to the postmodern idea of, well, it's all kind of, we don't really know what it is and these institutions, they kind of create their own power and they're operating to increase their. But I guess it gets back to the fact of whether it's and maybe thinking also in the car station to keep thinking about the WPF files because that's the paradigmmatic example for me of mental health. It's like a lunatic asylum, a bunch of people who should literally be in a mental institution have hijacked and taken over institutions and then those therapeutic modalities are primarily operative. And they trickle down to the operating room. And so I'm thinking when you're speaking to me in this conversation, I keep thinking about if we only had evidence-based evidence-guided policies, but we're humans and we can't have that. It's like, it's just literally beyond us. And I think that the last, and you've written about this extensively. I mean, I think that the last 15 years have shown us that there is no like formula at your beliefs in the base of evidence. I mean, the whole skeptical movement, the whole atheist movement, was hijacked by total, I mean, complete insanity, like demonstrably stupid things, your mom's a woman. That's what it is. You want to look at your mom, the person who gave birth to you, there's a woman. So I've lost profound confidence in the ability of people to make reason judgments and that seems more pronounced among people who profess to be able to make those judgments. And it just, again, to ride my little hobby horse, it's fascinating to see that in the discipline of philosophy, because these people have beclowned themselves. They served as a voice for the dominant moral orthodoxy, for what is morally fashionable. So as I published in article, the gatekeepers of reason have fallen. So I just thinking about that this morning, this whole idea that these people have spent so much time trying to figure out what's true and reading this and reading that. But yet, they were actually more susceptible to moral trends and fashions. I think we haven't begun to really pay for that yet, because I think it's created a distrust in the elites. God, I can't wait till we pay for it. I am so excited about that. I do think it's going to get worse in that. Oh, yeah. You've created something where, well, not you, we've created, in general, a discourse arena where. Yeah, so excited. What do you think that's going to look like? Well, I think it's going to take a long while before any kind of authority is seen as legitimate. And I think, especially for, like, conservative types, that's very tricky, because you can't really have a conservative ecosystem without well-respected institutions. Correct. But we've criticized institutions so much because they failed that now the idea of. They've really failed. They've done the opposite of what they wanted to do. If they failed, that would just fail. They could be fixed. But the thing is, this is why we have people who are sort of in love with Andrew Tate, because you create these kind of guru figures who. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They're postures. Yeah, exactly. They're postures to say, "The proof that I am telling the truth is that I'm telling you that they are all lying to you." I don't know if you see this sort of slide at times. Well, of course, they're all lying to you, but that doesn't mean he's telling you the truth. Exactly. But that's how it's played. And the audience rarely sees the sort of tension within them, because he says, "Well, they're all lying, which means I'm telling the truth. That's the central. " And that's because the elites and institutions have failed so terribly that there's an audience for that discourse. And how do you get out of that? How do you get it to building something, you know, with how do you get out of resentment? Okay, so that's. I'm so happy you mentioned that, because yeah, it's great to criticize, and yeah, it's great to. And I'll be the first to admit, I am in live and enjoyable at the destruction of our institutions, not because they're institutions, but because they have betrayed the public trust, and they're getting. I completely agree with you. They will get exactly what they deserve to the degree to what they deserve it. Case in point, Claudine Gay, serial plagiarist, still at Harvard, retained her title, $900,000 a year. That institution has. I mean, so I'm hoping that every time I say the institutions should. The university should be burned to the ground, people say, "Oh, you don't literally mean that." I think. You should pull the fire alarm before doing it, but other than that. Yeah, I mean, I think what's to come, and I am going to make every conceivable contribution to the destruction of our institutions, as possible. But only to the degree that those people have already damaged the institutions. A thing that I've been thinking a lot about lately, and you tell me what you think about this. I think truth has become a far-right concept. And the people who advocate for truth, it upsets a good ideology. It upsets people getting along. It upsets a diversity ideology. And again, it upsets any kind of ideology. So whenever anybody states facts and evidence, that by definition is right-wing, if it upsets another preconceived maybe first principle that people have. Yeah, I think one potential way of explaining it is in a strong social trust context, you know you can have disagreements and still have a social life. When you're in a weakened social context where maybe you have one friend at university, you don't see your family too much, you're a young student, you're far away from home, or then maybe the disagreement you'll have will be the end of your social life. So there's this kind of inverse relationship between I think strong community and censorship, or self-censorship, you kind of need a strong community to speak freely. That's kind of the way I'd phrase it. And so that, and the fact that in philosophical modernity, the good seems sort of individual and arbitrary. However, even in the in early political theorists of modernity, like Hobbes or Machiavelli, evil is kind of, it seems a bit more obvious and less arbitrary. And so if you combine these two things, public morality becomes not being associated with evil people or not seeing as being part of the universe. Exactly. And so, for instance, in Europe, we've built our public morality in a sense of, if this is the opposite of what Hitler would have done, then it is good. Which is, I guess, a good starting point, but it's not enough like a public morality. And it didn't work in the long run in that, you know, the Claudine Gay Harvard incident was very telling, like, you have people saying, could I say exterminate the Jews on a campus and they say, well, it depends on the context. The very sort of ideology you've built yourself against, I'm not saying Harvard is Nazi, but on some aspects, you have, in a very red, weird, unexpected way, a resurgence of the things that were precisely meant to fight. You have Brown, MIT, I mean, not all the ivies are like that in the institutions. That's what I think the only solution is, I mean, they've done this to themselves. Yeah, yeah, completely. But the interesting thing is, it's the most progressive institution. So those that were apparently the most opposed to fascism and Nazism, that simply, by a way of having that as only as the only sort of moral agreement, which is we all agree that that was bad. And there was no such thing as, here's what we can agree on as a good goal, as a common objective, as a unifying narrative. Without that, you end up going full circle. And I think this is something actually all well points out in animal farm, which is the political revolution becomes a sort of mathematical revolution that you go 360 degrees. If you don't have a common goal. So in an animal farm, just quickly, you have pigs who are kind of like the vanguard, intellectual vanguard, and then you have the rest of the animals, which are the proletariat. And they seem kind of objectively oppressed by the farmer, but their whole revolution is get rid of humans, get rid of farmers, and get rid of their way of life, and then life will be fine. And the goal posts end up shifting ever so slightly, and the last scene of animal farmers, incredible scene, where the pigs, who made, whose whole legitimacy was being anti-human, end up acting exactly like the humans. And I think all the way I read animal farm is, once you define all your common goals in negative terms, you end up reproducing them upside down. Yeah, that's a far more sophisticated way than I was going to think. I was just going to think it's the iron law of woke projection. Never fails. It's true. Antifa is the fascist there, the fascist there, and it's amazing how that plays itself out. I mean, it really is a law of woke projection. Just a couple more things. We started talking about therapy culture and what's become a therapy culture. Do you think there's any reform to that? Because you have people who are tenured now, like you have entire bodies that have been ideologically captured. I think I'm somewhat more optimistic for France than for the Anglo world on that. For some reason, we're doing our best to follow in your footsteps, but we haven't reached it yet. It's still quite a strong divide. I think it goes back to what I was saying about trying to lead, by example, of showing what does the good life look like when it's not therapy culture, and is that not attractive? Do you not want to live like this guy that you find cool and who doesn't buy into any of that therapeutic language and try to get your house in order so that people look up to you thinking, "Oh, that looks like a great guy," and then only in that set scenario can your words have any kind of weight in any kind of meaning in our current culture. Unless you've valued the wrong things, epistemological, unless you've valued the weak, the sickly, the morbidly obese, the green hair, the new Star Trek where they have all these technologies, the fixed things and the people in the wheelchair that eat their combats or retarded lesbians. Unless, as a statement of first principles, you've put the wrong things forward, which it clearly seems that we have, and one more thing, it's interesting that the very people screaming against colonialism, et cetera, do not realize that they're victims of American neo-colonialism. Yes, of course. Yeah, that's one of the craziest things is we have a kind of a left-wing subculture where they see the CIA behind any kind of geopolitical events, and so very anti-American. And they adopt George Floyd, Blacklight. The very people screaming about how bad America it is and coins have adopted, they've been colonized themselves. I mean, they've been colonized by our shops, by Starbucks, which they've been colonized by these ideas, and I wonder if they're just so indoctrinated that they haven't been able to figure that out. The alternative is less palatable that I find more difficult, because I think that there is a symmetry between the right and the left, is that they're just dumb, they're just stupid. Well, I think a good example of this indoctrination is the hands-up don't shoot slogan in the UK context. Yeah. Well, the UK police doesn't have weapons, which is crazy. But so you're saying hands-up don't shoot to people who can't shoot, and that was an American slogan they import and it works on like this on many different cases. And there's actually, I think, an interesting kind of social experiment, which is the Latin X, the way that they write that to be more inclusive. It's interesting to see this ideology from the US trying to fit itself on all the different languages in Europe, because some languages have a neutral, others don't, some have feminine, so you have in German we have all this, which is great for neutral, except I think it has many other politically incorrect implications, which is it's usually like for objects or animals or something like that. So, are we progressive enough to call like non-binary people objects? Yeah. So you have all these problems, and you have the French language where we have this inclusive writing, which is kind of like Latin X, except it insults less Mexicans, and it's like Lizzy Tudion, so the students, and you have a.e.s at the end of the word, which is visually horrific, but is colonized so many universities and in Switzerland, they've gone a step further. I learned this about a year or two ago, to add non-binary, they would write Lizzy Tudion, so the students.e.x.s. And so there's the intriguing thought of what point do you have to fit the entire alphabet at the end of each word, where you've effectively destroyed communication, because there's no way of doing it, and you can't speak that way. So it's like, ideologically, I'm so impractical that you kind of have to back off at some point. So usually you have a kind of virtue signalling in the first word of like a university email, the first thing, and then it sort of subtly disappears within the text. Yeah, they want to decolonize everything except the fact of their own colonial thoughts, which are themselves the parenting American talking points in ideologies. Yeah. Is there anything I should have asked you that I didn't ask you, and is there anything you want to ask me? There's loads of things I want to ask you. Go ahead. Shoot. How do you view the rift within the right on the evolution, on the kind of whole left by the kind of fragmentation and disappearing of what was once named the Intellectual Dark Web, which isn't in the same sort of state it was in 2016, ish. Sure. How do you view that and why did it evolve and how did it evolve? How did the Intellectual Dark Web evolve? Yes. I think that, you know, basically it was a group of thinkers, public intellectuals from around the political spectrum, and they didn't have any coherence around certain ideological precepts or first principles, so wide-tense. Yeah. It was so wide that it was inevitable that it would fall, but the core principles, free speech, open discourse, dialogue, non-ideological capture adjacent to that kind of against forms of broad forms of corruption, I think that it's decline and inevitable collapse, it couldn't have been any other way. But now I see a fragmentation on the right now that the left is weakened. And the whole far right, I'm not even sure, I've had so many people on the show, I've said this to people, I'm not even sure what the far right means anymore. Yeah, that's the tricky thing. What advice do you have for Americans? What can Americans learn from the French experience, from what's been happening in France, on any issue you want? Any lessons Americans can take, problems they can avoid, mistakes they can avoid, mistakes they can fix. Well, I think the way I see it is the sooner you act on these problems, then the more nuance in moderation you'll be allowed to implement. For example, well, on the question of illegal immigration, Many people seen, many serious people, a far more serious than I am, seem to say we're going towards a lot of very strong civil unrest intentions, if not a civil war. There was actually someone from King's College, I think, about a year ago who did a very serious work, saying when there's a kind of civil war on like ethnic grounds, then with the current state of European demographics that could spread from country to country, not all of them, but you could imagine a kind of wildfire scenario. And I can't remember the percentage you gave, but they were really high. In the next five years, I think he says, above 50% chance that you'd have at least one in a major European nation that could spread to others. So I think we all agree that's not a great scenario. How do you avoid that and how do you act so as to never get into that situation? Well, the first part of the answer has to be now. - Right, it's certainly not too late for us. - Yeah, exactly. - I don't mean to offend you. - Yeah, we're slipping behind. We're not in a great scenario, of course. And so people think I can either be a moderate or a radical and I'd rather be a moderate, but that's not the question today. Is if you want to be somewhat moderate, even a tiny bit, you have to be quite radical now. And I think once you frame it that way. - And what does that mean, radical, how? Like radical, what way? - Well, radical is in shifting quite far away from the acceptable consensus of what needs to be done. - In terms of what? - In terms of, well, the way I'd phrase it is, maybe one source of optimism is that in Europe in general, and I think this is where Americans could screw us up and directly is the question of expulsion of getting people out of your country is becoming slightly more centrist, in that we've had a big debate over the past few years in France, only OQTF. You may have heard of this acronym, which means "ubligation de quitter du territoire français", which is basically you are legally obliged to leave the country. And almost none of them are actually enforced in practice. And that question has become something centrist politicians actually have to at least pretend to take seriously, which was not the case a couple years ago. - I'm advocating for that for you. I'm looking at the French people in the room. I've advocated for that for France and people look at me like I'm completely insane, but I think that will be normative. And well, either that or the fatalism will deeply-- - Well, signs of hope is that we finally, with a few centrist votes, there was a renegotiation of the deal we had with Algeria, which was basically a massacistic deal, where it was clearly written at a time where we felt apparently France deserved no better, psychologically culturally speaking. It was, and from what I gather on the Algerian side, they were quite, they knew they'd gotten the good end of the stick on that deal, and they were just waiting for us not to touch it. - So what can Americans do? - The mayor of New York wants more Islamic immigration. I'm not going to render an opinion on that, but what can Americans do? They keep voting in the people in Minnesota, they're voting in the mayor of Portland, just a lunatic. I mean, what can they, what, what, I mean, what are the lessons that we can learn from the French situation? Or maybe there are no lessons, I don't know. - Act sooner rather than later, and one, a cynical way of being optimistic would be to say there will be nations, probably Belgium. I was just thinking of them. - I once spoke to Michelle Wilbeck, who told me that if you were to film, to choose a nation, to film a post-apocalyptic scenario, - Yes. - you have to pick Belgium, because you have many symbols, you have the European symbol, you have a city that is kind of dead inside. They don't have much of a, like Brussels, sorry, but in Belgium in general, that they really don't have much of like a will to live as a people. - That's so true. - It's like, even Russ, they're broken, yeah. - I couldn't believe it when I was there. - They don't, they seem dead inside. - They're a broken people, because they're a conquered people, and I just think they need to accept that. - And I think what will happen is, to a large extent, it'll be so bad in neighboring or semi-neighboring countries, that you won't be arguing on a kind of a slippery slope fantasy basis, you'll be arguing saying, well, it has happened to them, not it will happen. - Yeah. - And to be honest about the fact that they can't do anything, 'cause what are they gonna do at some point? They don't have the, I wanna say indigenous people, but they don't have the local population to deal with the extremist element. There's nothing they can do. - I mean, so I mentioned the Overton window, I've mentioned for years that the UK should surrender. And only now is the Overton window moving on that. - Surrender, in what sense? - Well, they should surrender to Islam, it's their manifest destiny. - Well, I hope. - But even the fact that you're considering that now, we're not thinking I'm a lunatic. - We're not aware. - Sure is that the Overton window has moved on the question. - But I think, I do think the Overton window is shifting in that, as I said, French elites have lost confidence in themselves, and are waiting for others to act. And I think the domino effect can go quite quickly in the sense of regaining some amount of confidence and trust in what needs to be done. - I don't think that's true. - Not to offend. - Of course, I'm not offended at all. I do think, like, there's been many examples in the French political landscape of the center shifting rightwards in terms of immigration insecurity. Now, does that mean that they would do it in practice? Does that mean that they have the correct stance today? I don't think so, but it has shifted in France. - All right, let me ask you, I keep, this conversation keeps going 'cause I'm really interested in it. So let me tell you, my condition of hope for Western Europe. And you tell me if this is reasonable. What are you gonna do to stop illegal immigration? You give me the answer to that question, and I will think that there's some hope for the whole continent. - Well, this is where we're getting too deep in public policy stuff, which isn't really my era of expertise. What I would say is, if you are, for instance, in an African country, and now it's often quite sort of almost bureaucratized or like standardized, you have people who help you get from one side of one continent to the other. - Sure. - And they'll say, well, here you have better healthcare, here you'll have this. And what can happen is a strong vibe shift, and a lot of measures being taken like benefits and stuff, where all of a sudden, the decision made is no longer to go to France. - There are free hospitals here for people, for instance. - For instance, so you do? - For, I mean, for legal migrants, that's a very sensible thing. - Do you do foresee your people shutting down those free hospitals? Do you foresee, we were in the slums, we were in the slums and we were talking to a teacher. In fact, I had a conversation with her in a live stream. In which she was telling us a story of a 14 year old boy and I, from the bottom of my heart, I feel terrible for this kid, like truly terrible, who his parents died and the French put him up in a, he's no fam, no mother, no father. He's alone, he's single, he's 14, and he's in a hotel. I mean, I don't know how many people are like this. Again, this is not a point of not being compassionate. I feel terrible for this kid. I'm not quite sure what that has to do with France. He's from Afghanistan, but I don't know if you lack the will, if you can't do anything about illegal immigration, then that number has to go up. Because even if you solve the healthcare problem, you'd still have people on dinghies coming over here if nothing else to rob. I mean, I have a friend who has a place in the South France and she was telling me she's terrified to go to her parents place, she can't go there anymore. But anyway, I'm not fearmongering or skimming. I'm just saying that I think that these are very serious problems and I don't speak French on extremely limited in my understanding, but from what I've understood, I don't see the most important conversations happening about social mobility for young people. I don't see an honest conversation about that. I don't see an honest conversation about illegal immigration and I don't see an honest conversation about Islamic immigration. And as long as you're not willing to have an honest conversation about that, you're not gonna solve the problem. The problem is simply not gonna solve itself. So keep not talking about it or obfuscating or talking about Greenland or whatever you want to talk about, but you have to talk about those problems. It's just, again, and I'm saying this from, and as an outside point of view, in the same way that there are totally legitimate criticisms of the United States healthcare system, whatever the problems are, Where can people find your work? So I have a Twitter account Pierre Valentin and PIERE and then Valentin like Valentin's day without the E at the end and on YouTube transmission or transmission it's a French podcast with a couple of figures maybe your audience will know but in French so Jonathan Pajot. Oh sure, I've done Chelsea's friend of mine. Theodore Darrymple, Psychiatrist and then some of the French intellectuals Pierre Manon, Libraig, Chantel Del Sol and Marcel Gouche and I think El Côte who sometimes an Anglophone audience may know who the goal is to try and get a new generation of French intellectuals in the public sphere by sort of using the legitimacy of these older figures and having an old, old, sorry, not young brilliant thinker and then a younger one the next time. That's a great, that's great, I could not support you in more, I think that's fantastic so I'd urge people to check out his channel. And the book Mélage de la Génération Zéid, which will probably be out by the time this is published I guess, so perfect, 23rd of April, perfect, youth, Gen Z and mental health crisis. Perfect, thank you very much, I appreciate it Pierre, thanks. [BLANK_AUDIO]