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Foreign It's Wednesday, May 13, 2026 from Peach Fish Productions. It's the Gist. I'm Mike Pesca and I'm here to comment is why you turn to the gist on the biggest story in the day, which could of course be the biggest story of our lifetime, maybe any lifetime. And that is the disclosure of UFOs. They call them something else now, but UFOs. The government is behind documents showing we think that there's something out there and it could be UFOs. We wait, that's not the biggest story of the day. When I said biggest story of the day, you thought I was saying Iran or maybe gas prices or I don't know what's going on with Cash Patel's drinking problems. What are they doing? Why are they distracting us from the biggest story of the day? Or is the biggest story of the day a distraction from everything else? On the Al Jazeera podcast the Take, they took a break from documenting all the excesses of Zionism. They couldn't even find a Zionist and angle to the UFOs. Although really if you look at the anti Zionist tracks, there's a lot of UFO stuff out there. They had an expert on, Kevin Hurton and he asked the question that I was asking.
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What are they covering up?
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Right?
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Are they covering up secret weapons programs but also just a larger psychological mass belief system that has been created that may be used to be dialed up and dialed down at different times.
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You also heard the host with the barrow ask in there, what is the COVID up? What is the reverse cover up? Are they covering up the Iran war? I'm still thinking about the Iran war even though stuff about UFOs out there. Maybe the Iran war was a cover up for UFOs. Maybe they're just having gas prices spike to 475. So we don't know about these major releases of fuzzy videos that don't really show anything here. In another clip, Hurton proposes his theories.
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B
This is part of a larger branding operation that's going on that will give the impression that this administration is releasing the truth to the public where it's really a deflection from the so many other things that are happening behind the scenes. Whether that's the dismantling of the EPA to, as I said, insider trading to giving away pardons to, you know, the list goes on.
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Yes. Without the UFO documentation, fuzzy video, you decide releases, we would definitely be looking at the dismantling of the epa. Lee Zeldin would be the name on everyone's lips Glyphosate would be the thing that we were talking about, the substance that we were talking about, and not petroleum. I don't know if there are UFOs out there. I don't know if the truth is out there. I pretty much know that the truth isn't in there with, with anything the Trump administration is releasing. They're saying, have at it folks. They're not actually clarifying about what's being had. I do know that everything is a distraction from everything else. And it's not as if the government is pulling the strings. It's more like their strings are being pulled from forces beyond our own galaxy. On the show today, we'll have a nice little spiel that I think you will enjoy about how much we hate each other. Americans are pretty sure that the worst people in the world are in fact Americans. We stand alone. American exceptionalism, the country that thinks it's more immoral than any other country. But first, Franklin Foer is here. He is a writer for the Atlantic. He's been on the show many times before and what he did in a recent Atlantic series was to assemble profiles of everyone who was purged when Doge and other reckless cuts slice through government agencies. Along with portraits, literally well rendered photographs. We talk about a few of these people and in doing so talk about the expertise that was lost. And then we also talk more about what this means from government and what we want from government and how much we actually pay attention to or appreciate what the government is doing for us. We or to us when UFOs aren't a distraction. Franklin4, who wrote about the purge. Up next, The crumbling of the American state has unfolded as a quiet catastrophe. So writes Franklin4 in an article in the Atlantic called the Purge. Donald Trump's destruction of the civil service is a tragedy not just for the roughly 30000 workers who have been discarded, but for an entire nation. The question is, how do you even begin to chronicle the scope of this destruction for did it through the people who were purged. Frank, welcome back to the gist.
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C
Always a pleasure to be with you.
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Why'd you give yourself this assignment?
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C
I grew up in Washington D.C. like I grew up around well meaning civil servants who were incredibly smart people who were incredibly dedicated to their jobs. And I always felt, I always felt like they were. There were people that kind of, I just, I just knew from my neighborhood and I still live in Washington D.C. and so I still know kind of this generations of these people. And I watched how the Trump administration kind of unfolded. And I saw the panic begin to set in as it was clear that there was going to be mass layoffs. I saw the way in which Doge descended on a lot of agencies. And I felt like, you know, our government is this thing that represents our collective will in theory, and yet it's something that's so disconnected. The people who constitute the government are so disconnected from the rest of America. And as we've watched this purge happen, I just felt like I wanted to people to get a sense of the tapestry of what's been lost. And so I went and I tried to find 50 different people who come from different parts of the government, from different levels within the government, from high to low, to give a sense of the. Just kind of the human face that's no longer there.
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A
Yeah. And there are 50 faces, and they're all photographed very compellingly. Portraits by Dina Latovsky. How'd you find the 50?
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C
So what I would do is I would. I just started to kind of talk. I started to think about what the government was. And so I, you know, I. I knew I needed. I didn't want it to be crammed full of people from the Justice Department, because those are people who are on television all the time, and they're. Because they're lawyers, they tend to be. Have found ways to turn themselves into, you know, celebrities after having gotten fired. I wanted somebody I knew. I wanted somebody from the Veterans Administration. And so I would go talk to veterans groups, I would talk to unions. I would try to find ways in. In that regard. Then. Then I would, you know, because of where I sit, I was able to, you know, ask everybody I know, like, do you know somebody who does food safety? And then, you know, one call would lead to another.
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A
Yeah, food was what I was going to bring up next. That's cutting a department where, I don't know, I guess you could make the case that it's bloated by 8%. I don't know that Doge make the. Made the case. They just made the cuts. But you have in her work shirt, Paula Soldner, the NJC chairwoman, president of the Northern Council. I don't know what the Northern Council is she works out of.
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C
That was. Yeah, that was an interesting one. She was somebody who was. Who was a longtime food inspector. She came out of college. She grew up in Iowa. Her mom said, go get a government job, because that was. That was a source for stability and security. And she applied, and she ended up getting a job as a food safety inspector. And she was going to factories that made bratwurst or, you know, frozen pizza and inspecting them. She, she spent the whole time the Atlantic cut this because people got hung up on how disgusting it was. But she, she would describe how she would go into places where. Into cattle slaughterhouses and, you know, an abscess in a cow would explode on her and she would have to get showered because it was so. It was, it was, is what they call a dirty job. And then, you know, she, she actually became somebody who was high ranking in her union, which is why she needed to be identified in that sort of way. Because even, even though she retired from doing food safety, there's like, if you invoke your union position, you're less likely to suffer various forms of retaliation. And so she asked for that to be mentioned and I agreed.
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Yeah, I mean, we need someone to inspect the cow innards, do we not? We need someone to look at our bratwurst. And I know she ascended to a different position, but did we cut, did the government in our name? So did we cut actual people who are in the factories? Fewer people in the factories looking at the bratwurst these days.
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C
Yeah, exactly. We have, we have several hundred fewer people who are inspecting food safety and expecting food, food plants. And you know, like so much of government, it, it's something where it's harder to, to know exactly what the risks are for the rest of us until those, those catastrophes descend. Because most of the time we don't need our food inspected because people are doing a good job keeping it, keeping their plants clean. They're, they're, they're following best practices. But there are a lot of times when best practices aren't followed and in some of those instances, some bacteria could slip in. And so we had this infrastructure set up and it's hard to connect to something that's a risk like that that's not immediately descending on you. It's something that's off in the future. It's something you're abstractly glad to have, but when it disappears, you're not immediately going to be walloped with the consequences.
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Well, I'm imagining maybe if you were to make the case logically that our food safety apparatus were bloated, you might make the case that outbreaks have declined to levels of safety that we haven't seen. We're fighting the last war. There's also the counter case that that's because we have such a robust inspection regime. Now, I know Doge didn't even attempt to make the case, but is there, I'm just thinking with Food Safety or any of these other counsels, is there a decent enough case to made that even if it's very sad that some of these people were caught and they weren't caught in the right way according to civil service rules, that there is bloat in some of these agencies and it wasn't being addressed by the normal civil service ways of getting rid of people?
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C
Yeah, absolutely. Like, there's no question that, that, that there were parts of government that were ridiculously inefficient and needed to be reformed. And part of that reform would mean clearing out people who were either mediocre or were doing jobs that were basically antiquated. And you know, the irs, I think, is probably to me the greatest example of this, that our system is insanely inefficient. I mean, there's still people who are taking paper forms and punching in numbers into a computer in order to.
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We're a giant cave in West Virginia where we keep our civil service records.
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C
Yeah. I mean, so there's, there's lots of ways. And you know, unfortunately, like, so this is an example where actually the government was in the process of reforming itself. That in the Inflation Reduction act during the Biden administration, there was, there were, there was money that was allocated for reforming irs, for modernizing the irs. One of those. There was this program called Direct File that would allow you to kind of very, in the most simple sort of way, go to a website quickly fill out the, the information and get refunds from the government. Because so much of our, our. The, the. The social, social spending is, is allocated through the tax system in the form of the Earned Income Tax Credit or other tax credits. A lot of people don't end up realizing money that's kind of owed to them that's due to them through the law because the system is so imposingly difficult for them to navigate. And unfortunately there are lobbies also that don't want that system reformed. That H and R Block and turbotax or what they don't want, they don't want the IRS modernized and reformed because they want people using their Pratt for their platforms. I'm sure that there's like, if you were to scan any department in government, you would find that there is, that there is, that there is some bureau within it that could easily be wiped out. And I connect this, you know, I'm just thinking kind of more broadly about universities and other institutions that have taken it on the chin. And I think one of the lessons is, is that you've got to continually reform institutions in order to, just as a matter of efficiency, but also as a matter of their legitimacy. That is something that Bill Clinton understood with his reinventing Government initiative is that you need to, in order for government or university to show that they're willing to adapt to the times, they're willing to do things better, they need to be self critical, they need to, they need to be willing to, to take the ax to the things that are just not working as well as they should.
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Yeah. So by the way, I'll correct myself, it is a limestone cave in Pennsylvania, not West Virginia, Butler County. In fact, that's where the fact checking. Yeah, yeah, okay. And I remember Bill Clinton and I interviewed an Obama technology official who also was dedicated to or tasked with reforming government. But did those reforms go far enough? Yes, in the abstract, you have to keep all of our institutions spry enough and legitimate enough to be trusted. But the forces of, call it the deep state inertia, whatever, are so powerful that when it comes time to butt up against presidential or any sort of prerogatives of the executive, they're always going to overwhelm the people who are entrenched, I do think are always going to overwhelm the ability of the reformers. And so that's why, even though Don haphazardly, carelessly, cruelly. I did think that Doge was interesting and regrettable, but interesting in that I think you might need a chainsaw and not a scalpel to actually get something done. To be clear, Doge wasn't that thing, but all the Democratic presidents who are, you know, maybe technocrats will say, well, we could do what we could do with the chainsaw. Sorry, we could do it with a scalpel. I don't think you can, or at least I see no evidence that you can to the degree where you really get the reform that you need. What do you think? Think?
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C
I think that there is, you know, part of the issue with doing it with the chainsaw is that you have a lot of people who are committed to government careers, even though they're getting paid far less than they could in the private sector. And so if you come in with the chainsaw, the problem is, is that you're going to end up causing the best people to basically flee, which is what's happened here. Like, I think that our, I think that the problem is, is that if you come in with a chainsaw, you have two things. One is you're not really, you're not, you're not thinking about what's necessary and what's unnecessary, you're just blowing it up in the name of creative destruction. But what's going to end up happening is you're going to end up relying on contractors to fill in the voids that you've left, because once you destroy a department, it's never coming back. And then, you know, as it happens, you're going to end up doing something that's even more expensive, even more bloated. I mean, I think contracting is a great example of something that is that. That seems like it's maybe an efficiency because you're getting rid of all these heads, but, like, you know, inevitably you end up spending a lot more on, like, on contractors who are bloated in a way that's just invisible to the people because it's not, you know, in the official headcount. And then, then, then I think what you've seen, what's happened with Doge is that you've just had an exodus of the talented people, and you're stuck with the mediocrity is who are willing to kind of just hide under their desks and hope for the best, and they end up sticking around, and so the quality just ends up diminishing.
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Yeah. And also, the way we'll go over why some of these people were targeted, but for many of them, they weren't really targeted. It was just that they were in a status, like, say, temporary or probationary status, and that allowed an easier firing. So all those people got fired. And then there were others. I was gleaning from some of the write ups that you talk about. Someone who was a diplomat, essentially worked for the ambassador corps, and he was stateside. He was in the US because he has a son in a wheelchair. And I think, am I right, that that status opened him up for firing?
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C
Exactly. Exactly. So one problem with our system, and one thing that distinguishes it from other governments, is that we have all of these political appointees descend every four years, and we have a growing number of them. And so what ends up happening is rather than, you know, most European nations have a civil service corps that's kind of run by just like a small handful of political appointees who come in and say, like, here is what we're. And they respond to that. But when you have so many people coming in every four years who don't actually understand the departments that they're running, it means that they're, They're. They. They do a terrible job of kind of getting up to speed, you know, learning who's, learning who, what's good what's not good? And, and they just, they. They end up constantly switching priorities, learning these. Learning, learning jobs that are foreign to them. And it's just an. It's just an incredibly inefficient way of doing it. And, and you know what? We don't really have a great system of performance review in the government. And, you know, the people who should be doing those performance reviews are usually, you know, would be these appointees. And they're the, they're the kind of. The least. Least able to do it oftentimes because they're the most ignorant of the actual functioning.
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So there are, There are people of your 50 transgender people in the space force. That's why that person was fired. There is a person who work for the part of DOJ that looks at pardons and she chafed it. Putting Mel Gibson on a list. Well, that put her in the crosshairs. She was fired. There was someone in the Health, I think Health and Human Services who objected to the way that Secretary Kennedy was going about assembling the data. He was fired. Were there. I did see a dis. I think I picked up a disproportionate number of African American firings. Is that reflective of just the government workforce or was there any targeting of, if not people by race, the kind of people who would be doing jobs that were associated with something like DEI or even just. There was a Fatherhood fellowship.
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C
Right. I mean, I don't think that it was. So far as I can tell, there was not a. There was no targeting. I think that that would. That's not. It's not a fair criticism of the way that they went about doing this. I do think that they. They clearly did target. I mean, they targeted DEI offices. And so that resulted probably in a disproportionate share of. Of black employees getting fired. I think that. So there's that, but I don't think there's any. I'm not even sure that you could numerically justify the claim that black employees were disproportionately fired. I don't think we have a whole lot of good data about that. It may be true, but I just don't know
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what did. What was the upshot of all of this in terms of. Let's go over this. Savings, monetary savings, what do we know about that?
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We don't know about the monetary savings because as I said, you're going to end up having a lot of contractors step in to fill the void. And ultimately, even though it's a big headcount, you know, budgets continue to grow. I mean, our deficit has not shrunk because of this.
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Right. What about in terms of achieving any of Trump's political goals? There were definitely a bunch of people here who were involved in, in some way, maybe criticized Trump, but also were involved in some aspects of the Russian, Russian negotiation. But what about his other policy goals? Would he look at, or his other personal vindictive goals? Would he look at these firings and say, okay, that's what I wanted?
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C
Yeah, I think he would. I think he would. I think that, you know, I'm not sure that this is actually his intent, but it is the effect that a lot of, a lot of the people who were charged with preventing corruption in government were fired. So you had the 17 inspector generals fired kind of at the offset that you have people like the pardon attorney who were fired. You have people, you, you've a lot of the parts of the government that are, that are most devoted to regulating the financial system that have been cleared out. And so if your goal was to kind of accelerate cryptocurrency, if your goal was to kind of create a system that was kind of looser and more, more, more easy to enrich your, your friends, then you would have created a system that, that would, would, would accelerate that.
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What about, I've heard the argument it will take a generation to replace the people fired or the agencies to the status that they once had or that they need. It seems like generation, generation is kind of loose. Is it 20 years? Is 25 years still a debate? But what about that argument? Will it take so long to undo this damage?
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I don't think a lot of it will ever get undone to be, to be sure. Like, I think so what does that mean?
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How does that show up in the
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livestream, eliminate something like usaid? Like, we could, we could concede. I mean, if, if you think that USAID had no purpose, then kind of fine, then that served, that served your, your served your goal. If you thought that it was just, it wasn't important to have this implement of soft power around, around the world, it's gone. Like, who's going to bring it back? I mean, is Congress going to. You know, I just think that with government being as unpopular as it is that, that there's not going to be a huge motive for the next Democratic president to sink all of this time into reconstructing this thing. And there were, there were whole pipelines of people who populated an agency like that. There was, there was a system for learning how to do those jobs And I really just have a hard time imagining that it will ever be recreated. Sure, some of this stuff can be
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done, can be far is back, right. I mean some hundred thousand because they didn't get their HIV medicine. But that actual program has been refunded.
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Yeah, some of it will survive, but some, but, but you know, the, a program that had the sweep and had, that was as, that had kind of the, the granularity that it had. So when you were in a country like Indonesia was one example, you have, you have kind of professionals in a place like Indonesia who know what they're doing and know how to manipulate, you know, to, to, to, to broker the relationships between civil society, the private sector government to kind of leverage small investments to have outsized returns. That's not coming. I don't, I don't see that coming back.
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And we'll continue with Franklin for tomorrow on the gist. And now the spiel. This is the most amazing survey that I've seen in a long time. It didn't get that much attention. It came out in the beginning of March by Pew. In 25 countries surveyed, Americans especially are likely to view their fellow citizens as morally bad. In fact, most Americans, 53% of Americans say Americans have bad morals and ethics. They don't like their fellow Americans. But since more than half are saying that most of us are bad, logically they must not like themselves. Although what's really going on is there's not one definition of moral. So it is quite possible for a vast majority, even more Americans than that to say no, those other people who I perceive to be most people, they're the bad ones. And if everyone's saying that you get to the place you are now, which is that MAGA thinks the libs are bad and the libs thinks MAGA are bad. And not just different political persuasions, but bad, bad people. Let us not compare this to the other countries in the world. Well, you have heard and this is accurate, the US is becoming a low trust society. The other countries in this poll are mostly OEC nations, but there are some that are considered low trust societies. Kenya, I think Hungary is, those are higher trust. In the United States, they at least think that their fellow countrymen are good people. Let's take India. India is an interesting one. Indians are at each other's throats. Every once in a while they light each other up in train cars. Narendra Modi is said to be and is in fact stoking polarization by being a Hindu nationalist. The Indians love each other. They Think most of each other are good. You might say this is Hinduism, but there are a lot of Muslims in India. Of all Those surveyed, over 90% said Indians are good. All of the countries are better. Higher than the United States. In those countries, assessment of most people being good or bad, I guess maybe you could say some of them are wrong. Wait, the Greeks think most Greeks are good? What's wrong with them? There is not one other country where the majority of the citizens think the majority of citizens are bad other than the United States. Turkey is the closest to the United States in terms of not liking each other. Turkey, a famously oppressive country, a riven society, as is next on the list, Brazil. They have lately had flirtations with authoritarianism. The US can be said to be in that bucket as well. And then you have the Greeks where 55% say we're good and 44% say not so good. Even the French is plus 12. On the we are good versus we are bad question, go down, down, down the list. The Israelis think they're pretty good. 68% of them do. 27% think their fellow Israelis are bad. In The Netherlands it's 80% think they're good, 19% think they're bad. I'm thinking about the countries on the bottom of the list. Sweden. You always have to ask on these lists. Sweden always is doing so well on these lists. And they're doing really well here. They're 88 to 12 good versus bad. And then you get to the Indians. The Indians are really outperforming what we might think of as the Indians. Only 9% say my countrymen are bad. Impressive India. Then there's a country that I always go to, a country similar to the United States. A country that it's good to check in on because it shares a landmass with the United States. It has close to, though not quite the level of wealth of the United states. It has 80 something percent of the same media. It uses all those phones and is involved in social media in the same way. It's Canada. It's Canada. I know that wasn't much of a reveal. The Canadians love each other. And I always say, what about Canada? Because on some things like gun crime, Canada does a lot better. But in a lot of other things, we're neck and neck. Maybe the United States is a little better sometimes. Things like educational attainment of women or obesity. Canada is pretty close to the United States on a lot of those things. Literacy, but not on the self conception of other Canadians. Canadians really like Canadians. Americans really hate Americans. I wouldn't be surprised if Canadians don't dislike Americans more than Americans dislike Americans. Maybe Canadians are such good people that if you ask them, are most Americans morally bad? I don't know if you'd find 53% of Canadians saying yeah, that they do say the whole world kind of hates America. Well, America's right in that group too. I wouldn't be surprised if the most populous country in the world, India, doesn't even hate America as much as America hates America. China, now China number two. They probably hate America a little bit more. They've been inculcated to do so. But then again, think about it. So have we. Now we get to why Donald Trump, obviously, but also he's an epiphenomenon. Our politics are polarized, our media is bloodthirsty, and therefore we get a Donald Trump to worsen are preexisting conditions, which he also doesn't care that much about. Donald Trump deepens and exacerbates all these wounds, as does the fact that our love of nonsense is growing. Did you see the latest results? One in four Americans think the assassination attempt at the White House correspondents dinner was staged, including 1 in 3 Democrats. That just great. I do think a big factor for the resentment and the anger that shows up in thinking that the rest of us are bad other than media distortions and how politics is played is economics. And so we know the United States is a very unequal society. But here is a stat that Moody's put out at the end of the year. The top 10% of earners now account for half of all U.S. consumer spending. And it wasn't always like this. In the halcyon days of the post war period, there were all these restaurants. Just take restaurants like Howard Johnson's or Shoney's or McDonald's. The whole point was to appeal to everyone and know that the median work, or even the maybe slightly below average media worker, median worker can splurge on a meal. Now that market is being abandoned. Sure there are Dollar Trees and Dollar Generals and other stores that will pick up the scraps, but that used to be a huge market segment and now it's that. Exactly picking up the scraps. How is Canada doing on that metric? I don't know what the top percent 10% of Canadians represent in terms of overall spending. I have the 40% number and there is a very good analysis and comparison that shows in Canada, the top 40% of Canadian earners account for 49.2% of household spending. It is really aligned in The United states, the top 40% of American spenders. Now you know the top 10% is already half the spending. So you know, just the top 10% outspends the top 40% of Canadians. But the number is the top 40% of American spenders account for 80% of the spending. So no one cares about the bottom 60% of American spenders. Not really. Which is to say we are not orienting our economy. We're not even trying to sell things or appeal to most Americans. They're not worth it. Bill Maher was talking about this on the show. He was talking, pointed to Disney World, pointing to lots. Vegas. Las Vegas used to be a place where you could go and have the 299 shrimp cocktail. Now all they want is the whales. Disney World costing $10,000 and you could buy the cut the line pass. Everything is oriented toward the elite and I think it adds up to a deep frustration. And another frustration is that the solutions about this are often more crafted in anger than efficacy. Where at each other's throats we say the problem is plutocracy, we blame the billionaires. I think the billionaires. There are 900 something billionaires. That's not 10% of the economy. And sometimes the billionaires really do create tons of wealth even if they keep a bunch for themselves. Most of these anti billionaire sentiments just make us more angry. I don't think economically what China is trying to do will work or can work. But also there's the sentiment, ooh, I hate those billionaires. I support Luigi. I wouldn't have done it myself, but I'm glad that guy stuck it to a billionaire with a rifle. Or Sam Altman or any of the other billionaires or perceived billionaires who do distort and contribute to income inequality. But just addressing the billionaires is the problem is not really going to solve our problem. Again I say what about Canada? There are a couple of lists here. The Forbes list of Canada and the private bank. There's a private bank that estimates how many billionaires there are in Canada. So like I said, 902 billionaires in the US in Canada, Forbes says it's 76 billionaires. The other pretty good data says it's 140 billionaires in Canada. So depending on the count you use, Canada either is very close per capita in billionaires or slightly ahead of the United States in per capita billionaires. Extractive industries being passed down for generations yields this sort of effect. Killing the billionaires or immiserating the billionaires or chasing the billionaires or anger at the billionaires per se probably just yields more anger. I think there are some things that can be done. I think the main thing we have to do is to value pluralism because if we don't, plutocracy takes hold. I do not see how this is getting better. I think I could do my part and you could do your part not to buy into all of the hate and what social media is trying to drag us by the nose to look at. Pre distribution, a little bit of redistribution, better fair tax code. All of that helps a lot. America's always going to have the guns and we're always going to have the fighting spirit. Scott's Irish, Born to rebel. We're always going to have a fair dollop of crazy. What Kurt Anderson talked about in Fantasy land. We're always going to have the rebellious revolutionary blood of the patriots type spirit. These are things baked into our core. But we liked each other a lot more even though all these things were present. One way to hate each other less is just to hate each other less. To recognize that we're hating each other a little too much and do what we can to unplug, calm down, take a breath and see our rivals as rivals, but mostly as people with whom we have disagreements. Then again, if we think they hate us, the natural thing is to mirror that and hate them. So step aside from what Pew is pointing to as the most hate driven society on earth. It's not going to be easy, but the alternatives don't make anyone happier. And that's it for today's show. Cory Warr is the producer of the Gist. Jeff Craig edits the and produces How To. Kathleen Sykes runs the Gist list. Ben Astaire is our booking producer. Michelle Pesca is the COO of Peachfish OOM Peru. G Peru. Thanks for listening.