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- [00:01]
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- [00:31]
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- [01:04]
Mike Pesca
It's Thursday, June 26, 2025. From peach fish Productions, it's the Gist. I'm Mike Pesca. We talk today another update on the advisory committee on immunization practices. Yes, RFK Jr. He fired all 17 experts on the committee about two weeks ago, filled the committee. And by filled, I mean half filled the committee with eight members. One quit before today's meeting. So now most of the members of the committee are what you call vaccine skeptics. They're opening up the vaccine schedule, the pediatric vaccine schedule, and today's big recommendation was to take aim at thimerosal, a form of mercury that is sometimes added to vaccines for sterilization. But the Marisol is not added to pediatric vaccines because it has been criticized and feared for many years. Unwarrantedly feared, but feared. It's sort of like the chemtrails or, let's be fair, the fluoride of the vaccine space. It's a bit of a bogeyman. Many, many experts time and time again have declared it safe, unharmful, benign, does what it's supposed to do, preserves the vaccines, doesn't do anything else like cause autism. And like I said, not even using the pediatric vaccines. But it's sort of the trophy of the anti vaccine movement. And now the trophy is mounted on the wall. Will this allay fears? Will this embolden fears? I can't predict because the only science at stake is psychology and this one's a little bit beyond me. I am better informed on another initiative of RFK Jr. The mayonnaise. Yes, this one was in the gist list today. You can subscribe at Mike Pesca that substack.com we talked also about, you know, that better that bottled is better water. Turns out it doesn't have a certain quality that would allow them to justify saying bottled is better. And just to cut to the chase, it's just not better. That's what we're saying. But on the mayonnaise, other health fears abound that instead of egg yolks, you can't really put egg yolks in shelf stabilized mayonnaise, so they use a chemical that approximates egg yolks and RFK Jr and the MAHA movement does not like it. So they want to ban the mayonnaise that we all use. They're into more chunky mayonnaise. So I ask you, my only insight here is remember a couple of years ago when Donald Trump was ripping into the National Football League because of the national anthem and some clever person said who thought in our national divorce the liberals would get football? I had another similar thought when it came to the Mayo, who thought in our national bonfire battle mayonnaise would be tossed in mayonnaise would be under attack by of the two parties, the Republicans. The Republicans, the gym teacher, short Hummel figurine collecting, pronouncing Italian. Italian Americans. They would be the one to blow up the mayonnaise. May, oh May, oh, daylight coming. I want to go home. On the show today, the cost and benefits of bombing Iran are just beginning to be understood or to the most passionate people in this debate, misunderstood. But first, David Zweig is back. He's the author of An Abundance of Caution, American Schools, the Virus and A Story of Bad Decisions. Not sure if the abundance agenda has helped or hurt his book sales. I I'm going to do a little self critique. I don't ask him that question, but I should have. I ask him many other questions. There's a Peska plus at the end of this segment. David Zweig once more. Up next. Hi guys. Is Ed getting you down? Do you not? If literally here imagine the crude crescendo of the slide whistle. You know the one. Let's get other things like your confidence back up with Hims. Hims provides you access to treatments that could help you last longer so you can be ready whenever the mood strikes. If you're feeling stalled out in the bedroom, Hims is the solution. It's changing men's health. By providing you access with affordable sexual health treatments from the comfort of your couch, Hims provides an access to a range of doctor trusted ed treatments like here are some you may have heard of. Viagra Cialis so this isn't some weird off brand version of Cialis. This is the Cialis, the one with the tubs on tv. And you get it from hims. You fill out a form. A medical provider determines the right treatment for you. Your medication ships directly. Shipping's free. No insurance is needed. That's really important. HIMS has been doing this for a long long time. They're very trusted. Is very important area for men from what I understand. And HIMS is the one who can help. Start your free online Visit today@hims.com the Gist that's H I M S.com the Gist for your personalized ED treatment options. Hims.com the Gist now here's the part I speak fast.
- [06:27]
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- [06:52]
Mike Pesca
David Zweig is back. He is the author of An Abundance of Caution, American Schools, the Virus and A Story of Bad Decisions. And and among those bad decisions was the decision to keep schools open far longer than other comparative countries did and far longer than, as David argues, than the science would dictate. So on that point, David, I would like to ask you about the phrase when reasonableness became unreasonable, because that, and we talked about this in part one, that is a lot of what you put put your finger on as having happened. Do you have a timeline for that? Is it earlier than exists in many people's minds? When did that happen?
- [07:37]
David Zweig
It became unreasonable once you had millions of children in school throughout Europe. And I and this was the end of April, beginning of May is when they began reopening their schools and when you had an official determination at the meeting of the EU ministers in late May when they said we've observed no negative consequence of this and you don't even need that meeting. You can just simply look at a graph of case rates throughout Europe after schools open, cases went down. Now I'm not suggesting opening schools causes cases to go down, but the point is certainly with millions of children, thousands and thousands of schools open, if this was a real sort of like catalyst for launching the virus, you would have seen some sort of signal and we simply didn't this information was available. It was known and it was credible. And this was known very early and in the spring, and it was ignored. So that's when things became unreasonable. And you touched on something, Mike, that's interesting. You know, thinking about studies showing sort of lack of benefit or studies showing harm in medicine. We all know the phrase first do no harm that you, you. The default is not the intervention. The default is to do nothing. The FDA approves drugs based on if they are safe and. And effective. You would never go to a doctor and say, I don't, you know, you have some sort of illness. And the doctor says, okay, here are 10 different pills. You're going to take all of these every single day for the next year. I don't know which one of them work, maybe none, but you're going to take all of them and they're going to be side effects that would never happen. But that's exactly what the approach was by the public health authorities in the pandemic. Again, there might be a case to be made that that was reasonable for a few weeks very early on, but you would never just give someone a whole bunch of pills without knowing what the possible effects would be. And certainly that's the same thing with these public health interventions. When you flip a master switch in society, it's not just about, well, it's better than being dead. That's not how things work. You know, you drive on the highway, the speed limit is not 35, it's 55 or 65. Why? Because as a society, we're willing to tolerate some amount of death in order to get places faster. We have all sorts of things in our society.
- [09:54]
Mike Pesca
The fact that there is a highway itself speaks to that. Yeah, right.
- [09:57]
David Zweig
We have all sorts of things that are not structured around how do I avoid death at all costs. Otherwise, you know, I could avoid getting hit by a car for the rest of my life if I just never leave my home.
- [10:07]
Mike Pesca
But when the politicians ask the epidemiologists or the public health community, the public health community will default to how do we limit or eliminate death? They won't talk about Anthony Foushee's job is not to talk about learning loss, except maybe in the abstract form, how it somehow plays into, you know, future download down the road portion.
- [10:31]
David Zweig
The incentives for Foushee, the Anthony Fauci's incentive. And I'm not ascribing ill will to anyone, but we need to think through and have an awareness of what people are incentivized to do. Anthony Fauci Deborah Birx and more broadly the public health establishment in the US we're not going to be graded on what happens to a mom and pop business that goes bankrupt because no one shows up. They're not going to be graded on a high school senior in the Bronx who's from a low income home, who was a football star and was counting on his senior year season in order to get accepted to college. And then schools closed and the season is terminated or never begins and, and that kid doesn't go to college and his entire life trajectory is now changed. They're not graded on that. They're only going to be graded on these specific metrics, you know, particularly cases and then if you think about hospitalizations and so on. So they have no incentive to think through. And Anthony Fauci admitted as such, he said, I don't concern myself with economic things, but economics is part of health, of course, particularly over a long term. We when you are having these really, really major interventions imposed on society. So one of the things I talk about, Mike, a lot in the book is the idea that the directors of our response were from a very narrow lane of society. One could even argue that Anthony Fauci was not the appropriate person. He doesn't have an expertise in sort of non pharmaceutical interventions and he doesn't. So he has some expertise related specifically to viruses and to infectious diseases. But that's different from having an understanding about the functions of mass. That's different from having an understanding about what happens when you close schools. So even that was very narrow. And people, health economists, educators, other people who can sort of game out what are the effects of doing these interventions. Those people were largely excluded from any sort of, you know, serious component of the decision making. And not only were they excluded, but, but oftentimes maligned and dismissed. So someone like Emily Oster, who's an economist at Brown, who is trying desperately just to gather data because the government didn't care enough to bother doing it itself. So she's just pulling together data from schools. And I was at a party a little while after the pandemic began to wind down and there was a New York Times reporter there and she was like, Emily Oster, why would we listen to her? She's an economist. I only listen to epidemiologists and I'm like, you are describing the exact problem with everything that happened at the New York Times is that you had a few people on speed dial and, and everyone else was ignored. So anyway, side point, but so as.
- [13:29]
Mike Pesca
Far as the public Health messaging. To take the mask example, Foushee first comes out with the statement that you don't need to wear them and then they endorse the wearing of them, even cloth masks. And this is seen as, and I think you even describe it as something like a noble lie or the ultimate aim is to keep enough PPE for the first responders. But you say that the communication should have been different and you know, you're right. It's hard to overstate the damage from the episode of the toing and froing of whether to have the mask mandate or not. And a lot of people say that ruined Foushee's credibility. And you're right. Had Foushee and the CDC said there is no evidence this will help, but we ask everyone to give it a try. I don't know. Is that really how public health could possibly penetrate the public consciousness? Aren't public health communicators in retrospect? When we get. When they get it wrong, we could criticize them for being too certain. But does public health messaging even have a chance if most of it is so conditional and wishy washy and always shot through with the idea that. But we could be wrong.
- [14:37]
David Zweig
Well, there's, there's a gradation there, but I think we saw that going in the other. If you're making a case for the idea that they need to present a degree of certainty which is unwarranted in order to get people to act, that's incredibly dangerous and damaging. And that's exactly what happened.
- [14:54]
Mike Pesca
That's right. Just think a year or two ahead. What if you're wrong like that? That would be a question to have asked all these people who came out with these pretty stark pronouncements. Ok, what if you're wrong? What happens to you the next time you ask people to do something right.
- [15:06]
David Zweig
And what they might say is well, better safe than sorry type of thing. But that doesn't.
- [15:12]
Mike Pesca
That we're just good people trying to do the best. Also, have you seen the vote of Candle of me?
- [15:17]
David Zweig
Yeah, right. So that. That's the reason why I think honesty really is the best policy when it comes from public health and from medical professionals that you can't BS the public for forever. You could do it for a little while, but eventually people start to see that things don't work. They saw, for example, when the school was closed, but for your kid, but the other kid who lives down the street who's in some private Catholic school that's not doing mass mandates, not doing anything Else, and they're fine, and the kid's in there month after month while your kids locked in their bedroom. Eventually, people start to lose faith in the public health establishment when they make pronouncements with such degrees of certainty. Everyone must do six feet of distancing, for example. And instead of saying, this is early on, the American Academy of Pediatrics had a pretty measured and reasonable guidance for schools. Very early they said, look, I don't know if it was in the guidance or then in a subsequent interview, which was the next day after the guidance came out, but one of the people from the aap, but the guidance said, no matter what, get the kids in school. That was the message. And they also said, don't worry about six feet of distancing. If you do three feet, that's, you know, that's good enough. There's not good evidence that these additional feed are going to make a difference. But once Trump tweeted, like a week or two after that AAP guidance, once he tweeted, schools must open in the fall with all caps and a bunch of exclamation points, that was it. Within days, the AAP reversed its guidance. Gone was the idea that you don't need to worry about six feet of distancing. Gone was the idea that no matter what, let's get kids in school. Instead they said, just listen to the experts, and we need a massive amount of money.
- [17:08]
Mike Pesca
Right. And you even quote an expert who says something like, if Trump's real design was to get people to do the opposite of what he seemed to be advocating, he played that perfectly. Yeah, because of Trump is and how we regard Trump and how he communicates and how at each other's throats we are in our polarized society.
- [17:27]
David Zweig
Trump, you know, was such a hated, maligned, odious figure to people on the left that no matter what he said they were, they had to oppose it. And in particular, we saw this with his pronouncement saying school should open. Once he said school should open, he ensured that schools in half the country would remain closed.
- [17:48]
Mike Pesca
Yes. And this, I think, is the fundamental reason why. If the question is why did Sweden have a better response, it wasn't because of their response. It was because they are Sweden and we are America and they are a high trust society and we are a low trust society. We're always going to fracture around these polarized lines. You have a great stat in there. The Gallup poll in 2020 showed Democrats thought the share of COVID deaths for people under the age of 25 was 87 times higher than the actual stats because we're so polarized and we go so overboard to oppose our rivals that we come to totally unscientific, but also really, oftentimes really harmful conclusions just in the name of. Well, if that guy says it, I'm doing the opposite.
- [18:37]
David Zweig
Right. But for me, what I focus on is, and I appreciate your describing this in a sort of nonpartisan, neutral manner, and you're right, this happens on both sides of the spectrum, of the political spectrum in the States. However, what's of interest to me and what I think is really important is that the people who control might be too strong of a word, but the people who have the most influence within the legacy media, which itself has an enormous amount of influence on decision makers in society, and the people within our public health establishment, almost to. Almost to a 1 uniformly lean left, with some rare exceptions. And these are the people. You know, it's very easy for us to sort of complain about Trump or complain about QAnon. They're getting misinformation. To me, what's important is what I critique and go through in my book. And what's hard for, I think, a lot of people to accept is people on the left, and not just the left, but the most sort of elite and trusted members of our society. The people with PhDs, the people in public health, the people who went to Yale and Brown, who write at the New York Times and so on. They also deeply, deeply misled the American public. And for no small part, that was as a sort of reactionary positioning against Trump. They admit this out loud. I have the example of the AAP reversing its government guidance that I just mentioned. There are many, many others, other examples of this. So to me, Mike, that's what's actually interesting. People, why aren't you writing something against Trump? Well, that's boring to me. It's easy. Yes. He says false things all the time. And QAnon or whatever else. What's far more important is for us to question and understand why is it that the people who are supposed to trust these people, the quote, unquote, good guys.
- [20:36]
Mike Pesca
Yeah.
- [20:36]
David Zweig
Why is it that they failed so spectacularly and it's a bit convenient. It is a reason. When we talk about reacting against Trump, that is not an excuse. And that's what's deeply problematic, is that even the smartest people among us are ostensibly the smartest, are still incredibly tribal, incredibly beholden to sort of fitting within their social and professional team, so to speak. And what we see is that Most people, regardless of their education and their credentials, rarely, very rarely are willing to tolerate going against the accepted narrative.
- [21:19]
Mike Pesca
Well, it's okay, I would say if these institutions lean left, there are probably plenty of reasons. And if you become a scientist, are you going to in the 1990s or you're going to align yourself with the party that's trying to stamp out teaching evolution in school and denying climate change and so forth? But I would say so you know, these institutions like, and you listed a couple and one was Brown. Emily Oster came from Brown. New York magazine is a left leaning institution. They published David Zweig. The countries, these are the exceptions. The countries, the countries of Europe are all more left leaning on almost every measure than the United States. The problem isn't so much the inclinations, the political inclinations, the worldview of the experts. It is in my opinion, an institutional clampdown and reaction, thermostatic reaction to perceived threats from the right and Donald Trump, etc. And especially during the pandemic, I hope we have the wisdom to see we got into a never ending eddy where it just spun tighter and tighter. And the more that the right or someone associated with the right said this was bad, the more dug in the forces of the left said no, it must be good. And I fault our institutions for not relying on the usual or traditional ways of truth seeking. So in journalism it's as you know, going to the evidence or not relying on narratives. And in the institutions of higher learning and Liam Macedo said this, it's self analysis, it's not always perfect. But as they write, there are no, there were no discussions, there were no big panel discussions, there were no big events on college campuses still aren't asking how we got wrong. So I think that you could be, since people will have a left or right lean, you have to trust your institutions to have some game plan and to have some theory of knowledge that get gets past these human inclinations. That's what I think part of it, you're right.
- [23:24]
David Zweig
But it also depends how we're defining the left. And if we think about what a traditional sort of liberal position is, it's one of inquiry and of critical thinking or at least in an ideal situation that's not what we saw. So I don't care about the political leaning of a particular scientist or academic or newspaper reporter. I care about what they're, as you said, their truth seeking process is. And you know, one of the things I talk about in the book that I find fascinating is, you know, it's not Just about the political leaning. There also is some degree of self selection who of who ends up at these elite institutions like a place like the New York Times or you know, Brown or the CDC with PhDs and these types of institutions. And also particularly so medicine self select for people who tend to be rule followers. They tend to not want to stand out and be an iconoclast. If you're a resident, you cannot question the attending. That's like not generally tolerated. You must learn from your superiors. There is a whole. Now these people, many of them are very smart, they're very dedicated, they work very hard. So I'm not questioning that.
- [24:39]
Mike Pesca
No, their personalities are high in agreeableness. Nate Silver's write a lot about this.
- [24:45]
David Zweig
Or if not agreeableness, you know, in an interpersonal sense, then certainly from a sort of self preservation sense. Like how do you get to be a really well paid, successful person in some of these fields? To some degree or a large degree, it's. You get that way by understanding how to play the game. I mean these people, how do you go to Yale? Well, you have to get straight in through all of high school. You have to know how to sort of be an insider. So you have these institutions with a lot of influence all sort of almost uniformly leaning one way politically, which is not necessarily a problem unless they're also composed of a certain personality type where they don't tend to go outside the lines where they had their success by following the rules, by not challenging norms. So that's to my mind a large degree about why people. You weren't going to see some editor. Because I had people talking to me, Mike, you know, editors at the New York Times. And I had plenty of people, you know, at elite sort of medical institutions like Columbia or UCLA and so on where they were questioning what was going on. But everything they talked about with me was off the record.
- [25:56]
Mike Pesca
Of course, because the back channel. Yes, right.
- [25:58]
David Zweig
Because they just institute or I should say constitutionally for themselves. They didn't want to be cast out among their peers. So that's a really important thing that the left, I think in particular just because again, at least I used to associate these institutions. I had no reason to think that the CDC weren't like incredibly learned and critical thinking institution that, you know, they're not going to steer me wrong, you know, where we might have more skepticism for the Defense Department or for, you know, the NSA or whatever else. When you think about public health. I used to think of them in a far more neutral manner. And I no longer do, and I think my book makes a persuasive case why none of us should view them in that neutral manner.
- [26:46]
Mike Pesca
David Zweig is the author of An Abundance of Caution, American Schools, the Virus and A Story of Bad Decisions. Thank you, David Thanks Mike and Zweig and I David and I talk for a while and you can be privy to that and also support the show if you go to subscribe.mike pesca.com so this is a Pesca plus segment. You also get the show ad free. Or you could just subscribe to ad free and not get all the extra content to price tiers available for the best supporters of the show at subscribe.mike pesca.com foreign.
- [27:28]
David Zweig
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- [27:38]
Mike Pesca
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- [27:47]
David Zweig
So give it a try@mintmobile.com Switch up.
- [27:51]
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- [27:58]
David Zweig
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- [28:00]
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- [28:31]
Mike Pesca
And now the spiel. The initial assessment of the bombing of Fordeau obliterated. Then came the leaked first assessment. Perhaps not quite obliterated. Some bliterated Obliterated. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth opened up a can of rhetorical whoop ass at a press briefing today. Decimating, choose your word, obliterating. Destroying Iran's nuclear capabilities. And here was Trump at a NATO summit yesterday.
- [28:59]
David Zweig
We blew it up. It's blown up to kingdom come.
- [29:04]
Mike Pesca
Kingdom come. High heavens, the sweet hereafter. The big penthouse in the sky. No, it's actually on floor 67, not 65. We don't count the first to choose your euphemism. The president did. But did the strikes really do all of that. Dan Kane, chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, briefed the press, asserting in slightly more technical language that they done gone bloated up.
- [29:28]
David Zweig
In this case, the primary kill mechanism in the mission space was a mix of overpressure and blast, ripping through the open tunnels and destroying critical hardware.
- [29:38]
Mike Pesca
The mission space will never be the same and I feel that I hold space for the mission space. But what does it all really mean? It is too early to know. But by what does it all mean? I mean what is knowledge? There are assertions, there are impressions, there is received wisdom, there are lessons learned. But how much of them actually account for and add up to knowledge? They call it intelligence. Is it? I don't mean is it stupid. I just mean isn't it all narrative? One narrative was that this didn't work like they said it would. You heard the vehement counter narrative there from the members of the administration. The Israelis, it's been reported, found not total destruction. But they also say that the strikes had set back the Iranian program for years with the Israelis. Laugh Course the Israelis would lie. That doesn't mean they are lying. But if they say they're setting it back years, I would say they'd be in a tough situation if six months, nine months from now they go asking for another kill mechanism in the mission space. So all this adds up to a cost benefit analysis where the benefits are debatable, certainly some, but most likely not total. We can use words like significant. There was significant benefits. If we're being fair now, on to the costs. The day of the strikes, I monitored different media and I held on to this tape from the Breaking Points podcast. Breaking Points, whose main hosts are Sagar and Jetty and Crystal Ball, are a blend of the far left, the anti interventionist right, and they provide their audiences with messages that America is a horrid imperial power that usually makes the world worse off for its involvement. Some of the people like their listeners. They're okay, but most aren't. They are Trump skeptical, but they definitely hate the mainstream media more than Trump. Their analysis was an interesting artifact of exaggerating the costs as an instinct. This is just what they do. It's why they have an audience. Somewhat of a spasm now. I want to be very fair to them. A lot of what they were saying could happen could have happened. And it's worth monitoring what what might have happened. These are exactly the things that should be taken into account when planning these missions. But on Talking Points, the worries weren't framed as coulds. But woods here was Sagar.
- [31:59]
Sagar Enjeti
I'm struck by, in my opinion, just such a foolhardy decision given, I mean, the consequences that are unfortunately very likely to come. We have thousands and thousands of U.S. service members. You know, the Straits of Hormuz is at risk. We have the naval base in Bahrain. We have air bases and US Military bases in Iraq. And yeah, I mean, I spent my whole career and I've met so many people who've suffered in the global war on terror. And it's, it's, it's really just terrifying, you know, to think that we're right back.
- [32:30]
Mike Pesca
One co host talked of imminent, potential imminent, but imminent deaths.
- [32:34]
David Zweig
We are looking at the imminent, potentially the imminent deaths of American service members.
- [32:40]
Mike Pesca
Sagar made a prediction about the price of oil.
- [32:43]
Sagar Enjeti
We have to look to the Straits of Hormuz. The barrel of oil price could go to $100 per barrel.
- [32:47]
Mike Pesca
And Kristol emphasized again how the Iranians weren't even pursuing a bomb.
- [32:54]
Ollie Ad
I really want people to think about this. We have not been offered one shred of intelligence that suggests Iran was close to or developing a nuclear weapon. Our own intelligence community says they're not. The IAEA says they're not.
- [33:09]
Mike Pesca
So oil's at 65 a barrel. The IAEA in their last full report. I'll read the AP headline from that earlier 2025, Iran accelerates production of near weapons grade uranium. IAEA says as tensions with US ratchet up. And Tulsi Gabbard, who you heard mentioned, she posted the day before that discussion was had. The dishonest media is intentionally taking my testimony out of context and spreading fake news as a way to manufacture division. America has intelligence that Iran is at the point that it can produce a nuclear weapon within weeks to months if they decide to finalize the assembly. President Trump has been clear that can happen. And I agree. I am ambivalent on the question of who's dishonest. Is it the media? Is it a member of the Trump administration, this specific member of the Trump administration, that specific media outlet that we've been quoting Breaking Points, who treats Gabbert as practically sainted. But what's going on here is that no serious or informed person thought that Iran literally had a nuclear weapon or was two days away or two weeks away from building an actual nuclear weapon. The entire concern consistently expressed by everyone all over the spectrum was that Iran could very easily build one. And that is what Gabbard was saying, even though in her testimony she emphasized other parts of that. But that's also what Grossi of the IAEA is saying everyone knows that there is no reason to have uranium enriched to 60% except for a bomb. There is no civilian purpose of that. This is at the crux of all the negotiations which the Breaking Points Memo crew likes. Negotiations that you have 60% enriched uranium is so that very quickly, this called breakout time, you could turn it into a weapon. So this whole thing, they never had a weapon. It's throwing sand in the eyes of the viewers and the listeners. The concerns of Breaking Points were, as I said, not illegitimate, but they were expressed to a cartoonish extreme to play into the fears of an audience that thinks the US is flat out imperialistic and has never conducted a military action that didn't turn into a horrible quagmire. But that seems that quagmire part that seems very much to be not what's going on. I mean, the US might be imperialistic, you want to use subjective terms, but if you're going to be an empire, I say at least be an efficient one. And this does seem could change, but does seem like it was the one time, I don't want to use the word surgical, but one time strike that had more or less. And we could debate that the effect that was intended. The cost of the Iran bombing days later, as we are now are seemingly less than were feared. The benefits of the Iran bombing at this point also seem less than were promised. But I look at it this way. We have a dangerous foe and that foe does not have a gun cocked to our skull. But the parts of the gun are right there on the table. They know how to build the gun. They won't give away the gun or give it up. And they have sworn to see us dead. Also our friends. So we slammed a fist down, we scattered the pieces and we made our foe chase around these parts, maybe hide them in a hole. Not a horrible result for a barely bruised hand unless you know, there might be a stress fracture we're not picking up. Or unless on the other hand, the good one that's not bruised, this all scared our enemy from ever reaching for the gun again. And here's a phrase that doesn't play well in today's media. We will just have to patiently wait and see. And that's it for today's show. That just is produced by Cory Wara. Our development officer for the Virginia territory is Michelle Pesca. The same thing further south for the Florida territory is Astrid Green. The production coordinator is Ashley Khan. Kathleen Sykes co edits the gist list. Or maybe she edits and I co collaborate. Not really sure, still working that out. But she's on the gist list which you could go to Mike pesca.substack.com Do Peru and thanks for listening. The gist is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Fiscally responsible financial geniuses. Monetary magicians. These are things people say about drivers who switch their car insurance to Progressive and save hundreds. Visit progressive.com to see if you could save Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Potential savings will vary. Not available in all states or situations.