Do we need democracy?

Transcript

Transcribed by machine from the recording.

Scott Chris, good morning, my friend. Well, it's afternoon for you. Yeah, good morning and good afternoon.

Chris Good relative moment.

Scott How are you, Scott? Yeah, good relative moment. I'm doing pretty well.

Chris You've got some dance party music happening in the background?

Scott I've got some dance party music in the background. I like it. I like it.

Chris Let it go.

Scott We're rocking out here in the background. Never quite know what to expect, Shay Scott. Exactly. It's never a dull moment here in the new In the new parsonage here. Ah, parsonage. Such a great word.

Chris It is a great word. You know, one of the things that's fun about living in England is there seems to be this deep-seated need in the British dweller to label their abode. And so you walk into these small villages and, you know, so many houses have names, like the old parsonage. The Old Mill. The Something Inn. This creative profusion of labels. It just does a little bit more than having a street number, which is kind of our North American way of doing things, to identify the place that is home as this distinctive location in space-time, which is really fun. I love it. I love stuff like that.

Scott The dance music in the background. This is by Reinhold Niebuhr, the great American theologian, theological ethicist, and political theorist. How did I know you were going to hit me with a theologian? Okay, I'm sitting down. I mean, Niebuhr was a guy, like in the middle of the century, they would have this guy come and testify before Congress and stuff. But he has this great quote, man's capacity for justice makes democracy possible. But man's inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary. What do you think of that?

Chris It's interesting to think, so the first place my mind goes is just to reflect on how much morality there is in our notions of government. It is this kind of almost rollercoaster connection of the personal with the societal, with the population level. And to, like, to offer that kind of connection is, I mean, it's, I mean, at one level, it's like, yeah, of course. And on the other level, like, wow, that is a giant statement. Like, to connect the micro and the macro in such a way that at the same time also says, like, and, like, it is so clear that there can only be one order of things. I suppose the first thing, like the other thing I'm thinking about is, you know, I saw I'm a bit of a political junkie, obviously, and I've been watching the U.S. Democratic primaries just because it's the best political TV on TV right now. And, you know, there were these moments in the campaigns and in the debates where Bernie Sanders, sort of the Democratic frontrunner, as we're recording this, Thank you very much.

All of my intuitions, everything I've been raised with, connect me to that statement. And yet, I lived in China for half a decade. I studied Chinese politics. I really tried to get inside the head of just a completely different moral and political framework. And to some extent, I did. And so, that life journey has left me... has left me in some ways like oddly afloat and really curious about statements just like the one that you sprung upon me because I can both totally get it and I could probably totally blow it apart as well. And I'm terrified at the potential of doing so. Those are my initial thoughts. Where do you want to go?

Scott Yeah, I think what's interesting here is that

Chris By the way, this background music is totally doing it for me.

Scott I know, it's fantastic, right? Basically, Niebuhr's grounding his defense of democracy not on the myth of progress or perfectibility, but on the sense that the human condition is both something that's full of hope and full of tragedy. And so he thinks that, like, because he's just a robustly traditional sort of Augustinian Christian here. So he wants to say that... Basically, human beings have the image of God in them. They have this sort of spiritual dimension that allows them to go beyond is to ought. And yet we're also sinful. Not evil. We're not evil. We're fundamentally something good, and yet with this tragic flaw. And so democracy enables us to sort of share the goods we have in common and use our power together, and yet also distributing it in a sort of Madisonian sense, right, in the American sort of style with all these checks and balances also deals with the sinful, tragic nature that inevitably...

Chris Insights into the human experience there at the heart of that is this notion of is and ought. Really, this notion of ought that That we have the capacity to form, I guess the term is a normative relationship with the world. What should I do? Or what should I have done? I mean, everybody can relate to that as being a rich question. Anyone can hear that question and it makes you go, hmm. And it kind of makes you search inside yourself. It makes you think outside yourself at the same time. There is something in just how we are aware of our existence and aware of the nature of our reality that that word ought, that word should, does work. And one of the reasons that it is such a powerful word in our understanding of reality is that every time we invoke it, we know that we're talking about some kind of distance from what is. We know that there is this imperfection and imperfectibility. In whatever the demands of that word should put upon us and what our evaluation of ourselves, either what we're planning to do or what we've just done, tells us. So if that's sort of like the personal human condition that we all occupy, that we can articulate a should, either looking forward or looking back, and we're always going to be in some kind of relationship of distance from the should, What does that mean in terms of how we should organize with one another?

If that's true about me and if that's true about everyone, then it's true about the people with power. And so we've got to do something about that or we've got to think about that. And it's really interesting, really, really interesting then to kind of bring this back to my China experiences, how in the Chinese political culture, There is like the mythology is that there is no distance. Between the is and the should at the central leadership level. There's a kind of moral perfection of these are people who are imbued with the will of the people and are pursuing the will of the people. The imperfections are at the local level. At the local level where people encounter the corrupt individuals that are imbued with authority. There's all sorts of bad shit happening. But it's because they aren't the morally perfect beings.

And he's talking about all the things that it is possible for mayors to do, but that Washington can't do. And why? Because we are closer to the people. And he's actually making this argument that it's the local political leaders. And that's then the corruption that we need to fight against. Now, can you make sense of that for me? Why is it that in the democratic political system, the higher you go up, our instinct is that there is a greater corruption from the should? And in authoritarian political systems, the thinking at the grassroots is exactly the opposite, that the higher you grow up, the closer we're getting to kind of having the is and the should occupy the same.

Scott Yeah, that's interesting. I wonder if the founding myth is sort of in kind of America, especially like, I mean, there's David Brooks and other people have written about this, like that there's this, the Hamiltonian versus the Jeffersonian spirit in America, right? And the Hamiltonian wanted a sort of strong federal bank and central government and stuff. And the Jeffersonians thought, oh, no, no, no, no, no. We're at our best locally governed, you know, the government that governs best governs least. And Jefferson had this, you know.

Chris Yeah, this tension between center and local.

Scott Yeah, and I think that, like, oftentimes in our Jeffersonian moments, we look at the central power as out of touch, as corrupt. Now, there are times, I think, where we are Hamiltonian when, like, something big, you know, like Eisenhower, FDR, or some other moments where Lincoln, I mean, you know, where... We need to be, what is it, e pluribus unis, through many, one. There are seasons where we emphasize our unity, like when we need to do something big as a country. And other times, especially when it seems like government isn't working, then we go to the pluribus, the plurality. I think that we look to the local level and we see it thriving. I would guess the opposite is for the authoritarian regime. You find your identity not locally, but in the one, in the thing that connects us all and gives us a sense, a reason for being collectively. I guess it's different founding mythology.

Chris There's a few threads I want to pick up there. Maybe the second one being, it seems that in the The authoritarian mythology, one of the senses is that the ought, the should, expresses better out of a group process. When it's a very individual evaluation, you're not likely to land close to the should. But when it's a kind of large group evaluation, Then those individual motivations and irrelevancies get sort of dissolved away, and what remains and what's real is sort of the public interest, the public good. And I think that that is somehow part of the... Just the difference in authoritarian versus democratic worldview is how do we get closer to the should? Is it about really identifying with that piece of divinity inside ourselves, like a very introspective self-honesty kind of thing? Or is it a more outward identification with the needs of the people? And when you stand high enough and you can

see far enough, then you're best placed to connect with that? And whatever truth it is that you're grasping from that privileged position is going to be more reliable than the limited vision of the people who don't have that privileged position.

Scott I think that's part of it. Yeah, it's interesting, too, because I think this is another quote from a book Niebuhr wrote called The Children of Light. But here he's talking about the virtues you need for what you need to practice democracy. And you don't need this in autocracy, right? He says, democracy requires something more than a religious devotion to moral ideals. It requires religious humility. Every absolute devotion to relative political ends, and all political ends are relative, is a threat to communal peace. But religious humility is no simple moral or political achievement. It springs only from the depth of a religion which confronts the individual with a more ultimate majesty and purity than all human majesties and values. And so here he's thinking that, you know, and he's not arguing you suspend all judgments, you know, regarding relative good, you know, in particular ends, because you have to do that to have political communal life. But rather, he wants you to acknowledge that, you know, while you can vigorously pursue what you think is true, You can also gracefully tolerate your opponents, realizing that they could be right, even though you don't think they are.

And you go into this in good faith, and you're not judged necessarily, he thinks, by the effectiveness of things, but by your good faith, in that you really do believe you're serving the common good. And also, you're acknowledging the relativity of all political ends.

Chris I guess the ultimate faith of democracy is faith in the process. Trust the process. And the process will lead us to the good. Whereas in authoritarian systems, the process isn't imbued with any particular value. It is the ends. Thanks for joining us. We'll be right back. These long, tortured conversations of people who don't get the science and crap like that and just, in a technocratic way, do what needs to be done on a big scale. What's interesting, I haven't looked this up myself, but there was a public lecture at Cambridge University a couple of weeks ago for the founding of the Center for the Future of Democracy. So, I mean, sounds like something I wanted to check out, have to check it out. Anyway, and they had a Canadian academic of, I guess, political theory there, Michael Ignatieff. Don't know if you've heard of Ignatieff. I don't think I have. I mean, so he was at Harvard for a number of years and like, you know, big sort of political ethicist, stuff like that. He's now... Michael Ignatieff And he pointed out, so I don't know where he pulled this data from, that if you look at countries of the world where carbon intensity is flatlining or declining, i.e. where, you know, not necessarily like total emissions are falling, but emissions per sort of unit of GDP, let's say, are falling, where the most progress is being made is in the liberal democratic countries.

So, and he was, he's an older guy, so he's talking about, like, in the sweep of, you know, the last couple of generations of democratic politics, and his starting point was about 1970, he said this, is like, the whole conversation, the political reality of the environment... Thank you very much. Thank you very much.

Scott Yeah, and it's the mirror conversation here, the blue and the red states. In the United States, it's the mirror conversation.

Chris So his argument is that this is the process. And if you look at how far we've come since 1970, and you look at how well the liberal democracies are doing versus the authoritarian countries right now, the process is apparently working. So you have some voices saying the process is not working. We need to suspend the process and just... These consequences are going to fall on people. I feel like climate change is maybe that example that supports Niebuhr's original point that there is something in the process that helps us to zig and zag. I also have this fear that we just keep telling ourselves. We have this very strong mythology about democracy, that it's the worst form of government except the alternatives, or that the arc of history bends toward progress, or I think Obama talked about we zig and we zag, we kind of move forward. We do have this strong faith In a progressive narrative through this process. And I wonder if, I wonder, you know, is that right? Or is that the story we like to tell ourselves?

Scott Yeah, I think it's interesting. I think that that is, I mean, well, part of like, you know, our Enlightenment legacy is the kind of optimistic sort of human progress. And I mean, Niebuhr is critical of that. I mean, he thinks that, you know, that that is kind of naive, although he's hopeful, but he's not sort of an Enlightenment kind of optimist. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the New York senator, is such a fascinating figure. He said once, the central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society. The central liberal truth is that politics can change a culture and save it from itself. And I think he's right on there. And I mean, this is one of these things where, like, I listen to a Republican millennial pollster, Kirsten, I forget her name, but she was talking on a podcast about how millennial Republicans, conservative Republicans, are so environmentally conscious now. You don't think of just throwing out a plastic bottle and not recycling and stuff. Even if they're... Thank you for having me.

That it's in the zeitgeist. But again, I think the flip side is true that there are these times for collective intervention that saves the culture from itself on civil rights and other issues where there was, or you think of the New Deal, where there were instances where it needed, where government did need to sort of reorient the culture in ways without controlling the culture. You know, it's not as though it's autocratic necessarily, but there is a sense that government action does save the culture from some of its shortsightedness, but it can't do it all the time. And that's not when I think cultures, democratic cultures, are thriving best, when the big interventions are happening all the time.

Chris Like this kind of, you know, these two causal variables, you know, is it politics or is it culture? And which is the driver or the safeguard? It's funny you bring that up because if I can be a total geek, so this is the book that I'm reading right now. Rethinking Social Movement. I like that. It's a book only for geeks because it's an academic book. It's basically like an edited collection of essays on sort of the political science of social movements. And having sort of read this book, you come to the The scholarly and also quite simple conclusion that the answer is both. That culture shapes so much of just the political opportunity space and political action. And similarly, politics shapes so much of culture. And you look at the The civil rights movement, for example. So people who feel like they don't have strong representation within sort of existing political structures, they have to recruit other ways, right? So you have like Martin Luther King, who's like wrapped in sort of Baptist Christian legitimacy around ideas of justice to argue for greater participation in mainstream political structures.

And people who are already part of those political structures, they tend to rely more upon and kind of exhaust the opportunity spaces of being a participant in these existing political processes before saying like, oh, no, we got to reach outside of these processes for something that gives us a lever against them.

Scott Yeah, I think that's absolutely right. It is this both-and. I think you're right, too, that when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail, right? That's good. I've got to write that down. It's just true, though, right? Oh, absolutely, yeah. I mean, there are 14 golf clubs in a bag for a reason, right? Like, you know, you don't need to hit the 7-iron every time. But that's how we tend to work as human beings, right? We tend to gravitate towards our skill set, what's readily available, and that sort of filters how we view our reality. I think this is... That's helpful that, like, hey, and this is part of the democratic humility thing and thinking through, okay. And again, it's interesting, too, because one of Niebuhr's points, too, is he's like, okay, you might be oppressed and have the moral high ground because there's a legitimate injustice against you. But if things were situated differently, it wouldn't take long for you to be the oppressor in the power group, you know, because he just thinks human nature is tragic like that. So one day, the oppressed will...

If given enough unchecked power, become oppressors in a different way. And this is part just the nature. And this is kind of what keeps him with this idea that democracy is great on our hopeful end because it allows us to have a shared sense of the good we have in common and seek reasons together to build a better site. But also it's necessary for the shadow side because it takes the power and makes it more diffuse, which allows, mitigates some of the damage power can do when it gets too concentrated.

Chris You know, just listening to that, I'm thinking, the other thing that is, the other nuance to explore is, do we, and the answer is yes, do we, you know, kind of over-essentialize the difference between, say, democracy and authoritarian, between democracy and other forms of governments? And I think that we do. And, you know, I don't, there is something, Universal.

Scott You're saying the difference is less kind and more degree. Cultural differences definitely are real. We have a universal humanity, and yet it doesn't mean the same thing to all of us.

Chris I think of a lot of examples where there's a real difference, even to the point of just as an aside, like language. It tends, you know, Chinese, for example, such a metaphorical language, so many kind of ambiguities and contradictions that if you look, if you do kind of a systematic study of like favorite idioms, Chinese idioms versus American idioms tend to be far more kind of, I can't think of a good example at the top of my head, but they're all about contradictions. You know, it's both apple and orange kind of thing.

Scott And yet we're still able to talk about idioms.

Chris Right. And so, you know, I think about, like, there is this sort of, you know, this intuitive sense of the spark of divinity inside me. There is this sense of I can articulate a should to myself. And that is, I think, universal. And however society is ordered, you got to kind of find a place for that to go, right? So in, you know, kind of classic imperial China, there's always an office. I forget the formal name of it. Basically, there's an office So if I feel like, you know, whatever, maybe everybody's been following the law, but it hasn't done justice to me, I can go to that office and petition for kind of, you know, the wisdom of the imperial court to see this injustice and correct it. Like, you had to have that kind of way of saying, yeah, that spark of should, that you feel like there's something wrong here. It has to be able to go somewhere. It exists. In the current Communist Party system in China. There are all sorts of corruptions about the suppression of the capacity to do that. But the idea is still there.

Even in the way that power in authoritarian states is legitimized, you do have practices like elections. Whether we consider them free or fair is a totally separate thing. But there is somehow this process of There is this spark within individuals and there is an accumulation of those sparks into a kind of mass validation that, okay, you're going to do this and you're doing it on our behalf. There's a kind of delegation of that spark, but that spark has to go somewhere.

Scott There's at least a symbol of the consent of the government. Even if it's largely symbolic, symbols are powerful. Even if we wouldn't think it's real consent, even symbolic consent, what did TS Eliot say? Even illusions have reality. They have illusory reality.

Chris That's interesting. That seems to me to be the kind of... Go back to... Can you reread the... The quote that we began this with?

Scott Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. The quote we began with was, Man's capacity for justice makes democracy possible, but man's inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary.

Chris See, I feel like I understand what he's saying a lot better now. This idea that our capacity for justice makes democracy possible. This capacity. Justice is a very grand word. More simply, our capacity to articulate an I should makes democracy possible. We have meaningful content to work on together, which is my perceived gap between should and is. If I have no capacity to see that distance, to be aware of such a distance, The work is that gap. And then the strong form of the statement is to say, and it's also what makes democracy necessary. In some ways, now that we think about it, I feel like that's the more contentious piece of the statement. I mean, again, I fully subscribe to it, but I can imagine embodying a view that says, well, it may not be the only way to solve that gap. And I guess we can go...

If we think of the broader sweep of history, empires with priest-kings, Their job is to resolve the difference between should and is. And actually, probably we have a shared mythology that the should really isn't something that we can see as an individual. You need some kind of access to heaven or to the gods in order to understand how what is isn't what it should be. And then the scale of that, the implications, requires that kind of god-king-priest figure to say, right, okay, we need to build a giant temple over there. Or we need to sacrifice this percentage of our production in order to put things back in balance, in order to reorder the Earth to kind of fit with the cosmos.

Scott But don't you think the priest-king or the king, the ruler, the monarch, the emperor is a sort of – on some level, it's an evolution, right? Like if you're in tribal society, right? And things are probably a little more democratic on one level because everyone's a hunter-gatherer, everybody's something. There's a lot of shared power because power's diffuse. And yet, you're a lot more vulnerable, right? You can try to trade with this tribe. They could come in and slaughter you. There's not a lot of recourse to hire any higher authority because everybody's tribal. So then the king comes in and says, look, you're going to give up some of your autonomy. But in exchange for that autonomy, I'm going to give you some more order. Right? And so we'll all be, you know, I'll protect this confederation of tribes and groups. And together, you'll have recourse to, you know, the justice of the king, of the sovereign. So on some level, right, that allows more trading, it allows other things, and it allows protection from outsiders. And yet, it does, you do diminish some of that local freedom. And then when you get to sort of an Enlightenment, you know, participatory democracy, you're saying, well, what if we all were the sovereign? What if we had the protection of the central figure and yet without it all concentrated in one figure? And I think what happens a little bit, like with say someone like Donald Trump and populism, when we're anxious, we go back, we regress a little bit into, all right, let's take a little more of the power and responsibility out of the collective and put it into one.

Which is kind of like, you know, I mean, the way he thinks politically is kind of like a pre-modern sovereign. It all should be about me. I need loyal. I need royal account. I need people that are loyal. It's much more like an old school. But, you know, that's where I think that, like, it's interesting because it is this sort of, you know, it is this balance of how do we get this centralized thing, security, ability to make things happen societally with also preserving individual power, freedom, and dignity.

Chris Yeah, I mean, I guess, you know, the way I summarize democracy is it's saying, let's, you know, let's be fueled by, I guess, trust and hope and goodwill to form democratic society. In order to explore complex pathways to a world of collective prosperity that we've never seen. And the alternative is let's be fueled by fear and anxiety to follow the strong leader down a divisive pathway to a world we understand. Yeah, right. I mean, I think that that's kind of the, there is a, you know, a radicalism to democracy. It is, in some ways, you know, it always has been. We've just kind of become habituated to it, but it is a completely radical idea. And it is, you know, always reaching towards some imagined better future of, yeah, shared prosperity, which no one has ever really seen, unless, you know, I guess it's fashionable right now in, you know, democratic U.S. circles to talk about Denmark, apparently, is the latest paragon of liberal democracy. I love Denmark.

Scott Hey, I've never been, but they produce Kierkegaard, so it can't be all bad.

Chris But there's definitely something about, you know, you said like, you know, when you've got a hammer, everything looks like a nail. And I guess part of what is, you know, part of what separates us from, you know, let's say ancient Egypt 5,000 years ago... Climate. Yeah, well, yeah. But, you know, is... What is real? 5,000 years ago, some of the dominant facts were things like the annual cycle of the seasons, the planting and the harvest, early civilizations that grew on the backs of domesticated agriculture, these agrarian civilizations. That annual cycle was far more real than Any kind of notion of linear progress of sort of breaking that cycle and five years from now being very far ahead from this year? And we've kind of, you know, so as just our way of approaching the world has moved from recurrence to progress, I think that that has had a, is part of what has had a real difference of kind of breaking the myth of that strong god, king, priest, breaking the myth that the should comes from some like transcendent understanding of governing cycles of things and the need to do like, We got to change big shit to align with heaven, to

almost kind of a much more like the universe and microcosm in each one of us. And how are things going to be better for my children or for me in 10 years? That's the level of reality that we care about now, right? It's very different.

Scott This is where I appreciate Niebuhr because he was able to speak in transcendent terms across, I mean, from his tradition, but to a broader... It's funny, I think there's still a group at Harvard that meets called Atheists for Niebuhr. Okay. I'll just conclude with this.

Chris You got to join that group.

Scott Oh, yeah, I love it.

Chris That would be awesome. You know, Niebuhr really reminds me of, you know, kind of an Augustinian Christian ethic.

Scott Well, he was. He rediscovered Augustine. But he also wrote the serenity prayer. You know, God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference. You see that all the time. He wrote that. Oh, okay. You should have led with that, and then I would know who you're talking about. But he says this, though. This is a great, complete thought. The final wisdom of life requires not the annulment of incongruity, but the achievement of serenity within and above it. Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime. Therefore, we must be saved by hope. Nothing which is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history. Therefore, we must be saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone. Therefore, we are saved by love.

No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as it is from our standpoint. Therefore, we must be saved by the final form of love, which is forgiveness. I think this goes back to some of the ideas we were talking about last week.

Chris The kind of, you know, scientific materialism of the last couple of centuries where we, you know, in the Industrial Revolution, we reordered our whole societies around the notion that, you know, what is real is kind of the material productive processes of the economy. And everything else is kind of unreal. You know, religion is, you know, basically a form of spiritual entertainment. Like, you know, it's... But what is real, what is matter, what is concrete stuff worthy of public interest is our material production and how we go about it. And it seems that the invitations are sort of all around us now to say there is a lot that is real and which is outside of that net. You can pick your point on the spectrum. You can be totally New Age, you can be just totally secular, head down, want to get work done. Either way, you're starting to recognize the imposition of larger truths upon a way of encountering the world that has become very atomistic, very isolated and disconnected.

And it's everywhere. I mean, again, hammer and nail. I talk to my friends in public health and all that they can see in front of their faces is mental health disorders. People who feel atomized, disconnected, disaffected. You talk to urban planners and all that they can see is the kind of contradictions Between the individual household choices people are making and what would make more sense at a It's the disconnect between your individual behaviors and collective outcomes. We see it in our political science. All that we can talk about is this kind of struggle between our personal either hopes or anxieties and what happens when you magnify those across the whole of society. So it's like it's staring us right in the face that this is the work. I wonder if, you know, now, Niebuhr is, I assume he's no longer with us, is he? He's deceased. He is deceased. Because I'd really like to, now that we've kind of really worked through some of his thinking, I'd really like to...

When he talked about the necessity of democracy, where was he at? At the end with that, is the necessity of democracy because, you know, in a kind of utilitarian way, that's how we're going to ultimately, you know, mediate between the wins and the losses across society and find the productive path forward? Or was he, you know, at the end of life, did he reach a kind of almost more spiritual place? He's like, the necessity is that only when we are all sovereign does it really become necessary to kind of You know, all of us put our hammers, put our individual tools that we've been using to kind of chip understanding out of reality on the table together and say to one another, okay, like, this is what I've figured out. This is what I've found. This is what I've found. And reach a kind of integrated understanding.

Scott His understanding was not like, although he thought it was practical, it wasn't rooted in mere pragmatism. It was really he thought that, he thought this kind of anthropology that he thought he got from the Bible and places like St. Augustine really gets humanity more right than wrong, and that the democratic project does the best to do justice to the dignity and creative freedom of the human being, also building in safeguards for the shadow side and the tragic nature of human beings. And so while, you know, his political positions, I mean, you know, obviously were different because he's the guy that was writing from the 30s to the 70s. You know, the issues and things change. But that fundamental conviction that the democratic project is rooted not in some sentimentality, but in a realistic view of what human being is. Yeah, I mean, that's what he thought. Well, my friend, it's been great again. And next week, maybe we'll try to bring a big tool belt and not see everything as a nail. I'll bring my golf clubs. Yeah, exactly. I'll bring it.

Chris And then you have more to laugh about. Absolutely. Thanks, my friend. Take care, Scott. See you.