Demetri Kofinas Returns to the Show!

Welcome to the Puck Venture Capital and Beyond, the show that examines the changing landscape of our world. We'll have candid conversations with VCs, entrepreneurs, and thought leaders grappling with our current challenges and providing solutions to key problems we face as a nation. I'm Jim Beer, president of CMG Advisors. This podcast brings change makers to the table to discover the inner workings behind their decision making strategies and ultimately how they got to where they are today. The 1950s and the cultural transformation that happened with the baby boomers, who felt stifled by the cultural norms of their parents.

And I feel like what we now have done is we've you know, gone in the other direction. There's nothing abnormal about that. It's normal. Societies aren't static. Culture isn't static.

And I feel that, what we need is we need to arrive at a place where we can begin to create more structure in our society and structure in a way that isn't, again, doesn't jump the shark. That's the challenge. Today in the Puck, we are circling back with a guest from last year, Dimitri Kofinas, a media entrepreneur and financial analyst whose podcast, Hidden Forces, looks at the pivotal patterns and concealed forces shaping our individual lives in society. Today, we discuss the past year in terms of political and technological shifts, and how we can begin to understand the road ahead. A quick note, this conversation was recorded a few weeks ago before the presidential election, so there may be references to events that have changed since this discussion.

Without further ado, let's get to it. Dimitri, welcome back to the Puck. A lot's changed since we had you on. And I am curious Yeah. From your perspective doing your genius dinners, and in general, what what are you seeing out there and how are things going from your perspective?

Well, as you know, a lot of the of what I cover on the podcast goes beyond markets. In fact, some of the recent episodes I've done, two of the most recent ones were on the, this phenomenon, the unidentified anomalous phenomena, what we used to call UFOs, but I think is not actually a a very, is no longer, I think, an appropriate term. To what extent that that might have an impact on markets? It's more of one of those tail risk things, how do you calculate it? But it's an interesting question to ask.

Obviously, the breakdown of the global security architecture, I think, is one of the most important trends that I think continues. We continue to see a deterioration there. And I think, you know, one of the important economic questions for investors in The United States long term is, what does that mean for The United States, given that it is a it runs chronic current account deficits, that it allocates more and more money towards interest payments, that it's got a huge outstanding debt, that it's a huge importer of finished goods and its economy depends on a globalized supply chain architecture. What does that mean for this economy and for others in a world where that global security architecture is breaking down, where we continue to see escalations in the relationship between The United States and major great powers like China and Russia? The situation in The Middle East continues to deteriorate.

So that's, I think, a really important story. Obviously, the the political violence in in The United States is something that, is deeply concerning. I actually just recorded an episode yesterday with, an expert on terrorism and assassinations. And the trend objectively has been a rise in assassination threats in The United States specifically. Apparently, the data internationally is a bit more difficult to come by, but we I think we forget just how many people have been either assassinated or have experienced assassination attempts on their lives, like Steve Scalise in 2017, who would have been killed and he and other members of the senate and congress who were there at that day would have been killed were it not for the fact that Steve Scalise was, I think, minority whip and therefore had Capitol Police on him, and so they shot back.

Shinzo Abe was assassinated. The president of Hungary had been an attempt on his life. Again, in The US, we've got Gabby Gifford. We've had attempts against Nancy Pelosi. So this isn't actually new, and we have a second attempt on Donald Trump's life.

We also live in this world where you have dual use technologies, which are basically consumer tech that are used in operational warfare scenarios that are increasingly becoming modes of kinetic warfare, one immediate example is this incredible supply chain attack by the Israelis. I mean, these pagers that are used by not only Hezbollah fighters, but in some cases, even Iranians who, as we know, Hezbollah is a is a a a offshoot organization of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps. The Iranian ambassador to Lebanon, I believe, was blinded in one of these attacks. I mean, this I think it is important to see how sophisticated this was. I mean, when I heard about this, I immediately thought of Operation Olympic Games, the Stuxnet attack against the Iranian nuclear facility and their nuclear program, which was so sophisticated, both sophisticated and creative.

And this is this falls in that category, sophisticated and creative. At first, I thought, how on earth did they generate so much force from this battery, from the from these small batteries in these in these beepers? But what we found out later was that what seems to have happened is the Israelis intercepted a one or or series of orders of pagers placed at a Taiwanese company somewhere along the supply chain. They intercepted these pagers and must have very quickly, very quickly, because, obviously, these shipments were delayed. Hezbollah would have caught on to it, very quickly intercepted them and swapped out existing batteries, the existing batteries in in the beepers with ones that they had themselves manufactured and inserted explosives into.

And then let those bat those pagers just sit on the belts and on the pockets of these Hezbollah people for months. And eventually, when they made the decision, and we could sort of talk about it. I don't know if it's relevant to talk about it here if we have time, eventually made the decision to actually ignite them, and they did it by remotely overheating the battery. And before they it got to the point where it exploded, because they used this as an incendiary device of what was effectively an an IED, an Improvised Explosive Device, the beeper, they sent a message to the beeper so that people were actually taking the beeper in their hands and looking at it, which explains why so many people came in with blown fingers off and blind. And I think this is just one of the most sophisticated attacks I've ever seen.

It was done with a consumer wearable, a consumer device, whatever you wanna call it, this beeper. And these are very small devices, and they it was a bit more complicated because they interceded the supply chain. But if you think about it, the target was very hard. Now we're all walking around with cell phones. Lots of us are driving electric vehicles.

Almost all of us are driving cars that can be hijacked through the Internet. So and these are just two examples I've given. We live in a hyper connected, very vulnerable world, and so we have to really think about what that means if things continue to escalate because a World War three is not a place where you have pitched battles. It's not a world where we're gonna, you know, declare war and a year later, we're gonna land on Normandy. This is a world where everyone becomes a combatant.

So I think that's also very important to think about. And those are kind of, like, you know, mostly what I've been thinking about and as well as, I think, something that I've talked about quite a bit on my show, which is the need for a new set of regulations that attempts to regulate what is, you know, broadly called the fourth industrial revolution. And that means things like Internet platforms. And when I say regulation, I'm not talking about anti business regulation or regulation that's built around monopoly pricing, but rather dealing with the fact that let's just take social media. We have private companies that have enormous power.

We have three letter agencies, FBI, CIA, etcetera, that station people within these companies. And so people are increasingly living their lives online on the Internet, which was supposed to be decentralized, but which has increasingly become centralized in these choke point platforms. And so how do we build an economy in this new world that is consistent with the spirit of the constitution? Because the point being that there's so much power nested inside these platforms, and we don't know when it comes to things like the news cycle and, you know, figuring out what's true and what's not true. People have a very hard time doing that.

I don't have an easy answer to that question, but it's an important one to ask because at the limit, we move into a world of the matrix. And so these are all, I think, some of the most important questions that I think I'm asking myself these days. So it's interesting. I mean, when you talk about the power of these social media companies and potential regulation, do you have confidence that the agencies charged with passing and adopting these, you know, regulations can, whether or not section two thirty or otherwise, come up with a balanced approach to free speech rights with also yelling fire and a theater. Do you have confidence that we're gonna make progress in these areas?

Yeah. Actually, I I literally just talk I mean, I've talked about this a lot of times on the podcast, but I I've spoke about this most recently in the second hour of my recording, which happened a few days ago and comes out next week. I would answer that question by first making sure that we're clear on what it is that I'm suggesting here, which is not that the FBI or CIA or any people from the executive branch should be able to be stationed at these companies, or that the government in any way should be, quote, calling balls and strikes. That it should be deciding what is and what is not true or making decisions that could be interpreted as political or be colored by political bias. What I'm talking about is very high level regulation.

A good analogy that I I lean on, it's not perfect, but is Glass Steagall in the banking system, which was not a a piece of regulation that made a decision about who gets credit and who doesn't. And so in this case, for example, one could imagine I'm not saying this is the correct strategy, but one could imagine that a very simple bipartisan regulation would involve stating that these companies have to be transparent with their algorithms. Our response might be, well, these are still black boxes. Well, that's true. But what we do what we can know is what are you targeting?

What is your objective function? So social media companies, by and large, they target engagement with the goal of increasing ad revenue. We wanna understand what those goals are, and maybe those goals aren't consistent with creating a more truthful engine. Right, something that arrives at a more factually accurate view of the world. Now again, this raises further questions and philosophical questions, but these are all things that require congressional hearings.

It's not gonna happen overnight. This is something that first, we have to focus on understanding what the scope of the problem is, and then we have to have hearings, and eventually regulation will be crafted. And I don't think we're at a place in our society today, we unfortunately, where we are able to begin this process or get it further along than what it's already been. But I do think that under the right circumstances, we could. And I give one more example.

It's one I gave on my recent podcast because it's simple and it's not the best. It's not I'm sure we could come up with much better ones. But let's say we had a ten second delay on a tweet. Right? We have a delay on live video.

So if you put a ten second delay on a tweet, one could imagine that some tweets that shouldn't have been sent because they weren't very good or they weren't, you know, for whatever reason, they they didn't help us move towards this larger target of creating a a good information environment wouldn't be sent because people had some time to think about them. And it's not a political decision. So my point is to really get people thinking about how we can begin to make this either solve this problem or improve upon it, not by telling people what's true or not true, which is what's been going on, you know, up until now and getting into these partisan debates, but rather focusing on what do we want from these from these platforms that we are living with? We don't I understand we don't want to attack capitalism, but we are also in a situation where we're increasingly living our lives online. So how do we protect our core rights, and how do we do that in the way that creates the least amount of damage possible?

And I think that, there's an opportunity to do that. And if we don't do that, I think we are it's we're gonna be worse for it. You had talked, if I am if I'm not mistaken, about treating social media platforms as public utilities or or discussions. I mean, is that something that's evolved? Do you still believe that's a good idea?

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, I've used that as a maybe I've stopped using that term because it connotes or it's associated with other forms of regulation, like utility regulation. It's something that a lot of advocates of reforming section two thirty or the or or stripping section two thirty from these Internet companies have made.

But I think the the general direction of travel on that statement is correct, and I still believe it, which is that these are public goods. They are intrinsic to how we live our lives today. And just because they are private companies doesn't mean for example, let's say let's say 90 and it is. What is it? 90% of it of searches happen through Google.

We're in the midst of a revolution with AI and some of these large language models. But let's just imagine, just to simplify things, that we're living in a world where the vast majority of search queries go through a particular search engine. That private company is a position to manipulate those results and sway an election or sway a market outcome. And so what we have basically, and this is important for people to understand the context of of the the post New Deal paradigm, is that we lived in a world, and also Theodore Roosevelt's trust busting, we lived in a world in the nineteenth century where we saw a vast accumulation of private power on a scale that the founders hadn't really had to contend with because the Industrial Revolution made it possible to scale power in a way that previously wasn't. And so we're going through a similar period today, and a lot of the frameworks and regulations that we have in place don't address that.

And so I think, you know, there there's there's this immediate resistance that comes up when you start talking about this in America, either because people are concerned about communism or social socialism or government overreach, or they're concerned about free speech in this case. And I think that it's fair to be concerned about that. You would need to be concerned about that, but that doesn't mean that you have to necessarily make significant compromises in that direction. And I think we we need to be able to start thinking about these things because in the world that we're moving, what we get in the strictly economic sense from economic textbooks of what fascism is, we're moving towards a fascist world, a world where big business and government work together very tightly, and we, we would we would endanger the freedoms that we are seeking to protect here. Yeah.

It's certainly I I don't disagree. You know, when I think back to how I grew up in certain ways, things were a lot simpler in this sense that there was ABC News and CBS News and NBC and there was Walter Cronkite, for instance. And because of the fairness doctrine and because advertising was similar like, you know, business today, people are trying to maximize revenue, but because both Republicans and Democrats watch the same news, the content was more moderated because the advertisers did not wanna alienate either group, and that was how it worked. And essentially, it pushed people more towards a balanced news cycle, but now we've got millions and millions of people going to these echo chambers. It's fascinating to me as as as a parent and is also someone that's lived through this, when you had all these rules because our children, right, were gonna be affected by this.

Mhmm. Now you've got completely unregulated, essentially, social media all over the world where these kids are getting exposed to everything in the world. There's no regulation whatever, and it's all in the eyes of, oh, you know, capitalism. But at the end of the day, if everyone is getting their news from these sources, Houston, we we've got a problem if we don't figure out a way to have a narrative that brings people together as opposed to designed to pull people apart. Yeah.

Totally, man. And I I mean, you probably know this. It's it's an issue that I brought up quite a bit because I feel like it's the one place where we should be able to find broad consensus, which is protecting children. And it shouldn't all fall on parents to try and regulate the assault of these technologies and their ability to enter the home and enter the lives of their children and convey messages. And these are two way communication platforms.

It shouldn't fall only all on parents because the difficulty, of course, becomes, well, so and so down the street, his parents give him a cell phone when he's 10 years old, so why can't I have one? And we need to be able to I don't know how this happens mechanically, where society has a has a broad consensus about what their values are, but I feel like that's also a problem. We don't seem to have as clear and deep a consensus when it comes to, like, you know, what's appropriate in society, what is the role of men and women, what What is the when I say the role of men and women, fathers and mothers, like, what is our what is our job as parents? What are we you know, how are we we should be we should be protecting. I mean, I shouldn't just be concerned about my child.

I should be concerned all about my neighbor's child and my neighbor's children. We We all have a role to play, and that's that's otherwise, I feel like you know, what does that say about our society if we can't protect our children? That's sort of where I fall on that one. You know, when you look back at the fifties where it was like one size fits all and and we pigeonholed people, And then the sixties came along, and we realized, wait a second. People have to be able to individuate and have their own styles.

And, you know, we're seeing all sorts of different types of family formations. And I think that's very healthy for a society to be able to figure out Mhmm. What values they want and how to have that balance. But we do, I think, have to agree that at some point, once the one value that we all have in common, and that is protecting children Mhmm. There's so much depression and unhappiness in young people today.

And I think as adults, you know, if if we can agree on anything, it's how do we make our children safe and happy. Yeah. No. These are great I mean, I love that you brought up the nineteen fifties and the cultural transformation that happened with the baby boomers who felt stifled by the the cultural norms of their parents. And I feel like what we now have done is we've, you know, gone in the other direction.

There's nothing abnormal about that. It's normal. There's no static societies aren't static, cultures aren't static. And I feel that, what we need is we need to arrive at a place where we can begin to create more structure in our society and structure in a way that isn't, again, doesn't jump the shark. That's the challenge.

But, you know, again, I think we could I think, I know we can accomplish all these things. The question is, what will it take for that to happen? What form will it take? And that's what, you know, we're we're living through today. That's what we're trying to figure out.

So in terms of the biggest issue on your mind these days or what you're really focusing on, if there was one thing that you'd love people to focus on or that you think could help us take the next level, what would it be? Oh, I'm not prepared to answer that. Man, that is so tough. Well, I have made a big deal of social media regulation, and let's broaden that. Let's just say the regulation of these powerful technology companies that basically control the space in which we congregate and experience reality.

And I think this is why the free speech framing is incorrect when it comes to this subject, I think, because people, you know, really don't take into account that we're this is not a situation where we're coming into a room and some people are getting muzzled. This is a situation where increasingly everything about the room is subject to the manipulation of private companies and also factions of the federal government because this is not a regulated space and there isn't public oversight of it. And that's very dangerous because the proper functioning of our democracy is premised on the expectation that people are not just informed, but that they also are able to objectively assess to the objectively, you know, within their own subjective biases, the environment around them. And, you know, we without even talking about deepfakes, everything increasingly becomes a deepfake if you cannot verify something. And I think what what ends up happening if we don't wrap our arms around this this problem is not that people are necessarily going to be convinced that not necessarily, like, you know, these companies are gonna convince people of a particular narrative, that in other words, propaganda isn't necessarily the concern I have.

But rather the concern becomes at what point do people just lose trust in everything? Right? I mean, you know, I brought the deepfakes. If people are able to watch videos of Donald Trump or Joe Biden or Kamala Harris or Eric Schmidt or whoever saying one thing and then watching an exactly then watching watch another video where they're saying the exact opposite thing and they can't tell which one is true, I feel like the the response of society is gonna be is to largely distrust everything. And at that point, that's a that creates anarchy.

And in this world, with the technology that we've talked about, with the ability of foreign actors to participate at a local level in creating distrust and discontent or even actually conducting attacks through the Internet, I just don't know I think that there really is a risk at some point. I don't know what it is, and I'm not just, you know but I think at some point, we run the risk of seeing a kind of fracturing of society in a way that we just couldn't have conceptualized in the past because people weren't so siloed mentally and emotionally. Yeah. Look. It is scary when you, as you said, you you watch these videos.

And I I go out and I try to look at all sides of these issues because of our podcast. And I'll go into TikTok, and I will see a brilliant characterization of what somebody said, and then I'll go verify it. And and and let's say half the time it's accurate, and half the times it's completely made up. But I'm going somewhere to validate that video. Mhmm.

And I'm making the assumption that the place I'm going to validate that video is, in fact, the accurate place for information. But what about what about if I then find out that the place I go to get the information is not accurate? Accurate. And when does that, you know, work its way through the system? I mean, I'll I'll give you an example with with zero trying to have no bias here.

When Donald Trump came out and said that the Haitian migrants were eating pets. Right? There was all sorts of I mean, and by the way, you can imagine in a country of 300,000,000 people, somebody eating a pet. Right? I mean, it it is absolutely possible.

But then you had people like JD Vance come on, Meet the Press, CNN, Face the Nation, and basically say the story was not made up because he had constituents send him videos, which by the way, he did not independently verify. He then said, I created this story out of that because there were 15,000 Haitian or, you know, immigrants to this small town. It was overwhelming the town. No one was taking it seriously. So I created, we created this story and we got your attention.

Okay. There are so many areas to dissect there because again Mhmm. He got real video from people. Right? But he didn't verify.

They then said it was a fake story because we called the police, and they said it wasn't really happening. As somebody listening in that story, yes, it it appears that there is a problem with the infrastructure and the number of children entering these schools, and that there that this town of 40,000 has somehow been having a dip of time absorbing all these migrants. But the levels of complexity and the levels of ability to manipulate people and confuse the issue is just it's it's staggering. Yeah. So let me just say a few things.

I'm gonna comment on something you said, and then I just wanna follow-up on something I said, which is that the truth problem or the problem of attestation is a central creates a centralizing tendency for the digital world, unfortunately. Because in order to currently, my hope had been that with some of these decentralized protocols that we would be able to find ways to authenticate information without necessarily having to use a DRM, like a digital rights management system like Apple uses. Unfortunately, we don't have that yet. So that further exacerbates the problem. By trying to fix the problem of attestation, you end up centralizing the Internet even even further.

And that's another problem that needs to be understood and sort of thought about. But to your point about, JD Vance, JD Vance's comments, I didn't watch them. In fact, the details of that were just I just learned about them now by listening to you. But what I would say from that and what it makes me think about is that it is consistent with something that I have been talking about for years and I have been watching grow beginning in the crypto space, but it has grown broader. It's part of the larger phenomenon of financial nihilism that I've talked about, which is this belief among so many people that it's all, quote, just a narrative.

And I think this also speaks to an element of nihilism around the quality of or verifiability of information. So it sounded like from what you said, that Vance was basically saying, yeah, like, I don't know if this is 100% true. I kind of took the story because I wanted to bring your attention to the larger issue that I think is important. So basically, I created a narrative in order to get you to pay attention. And I think this this, I think, makes sense.

It makes sense in what we're talking about before, which is that in a world where it's difficult to verify information, people are will increasingly were willing to believe anything, and therefore, the actual facts become less important. What becomes more important is something else that we've heard a lot about recently, which is the vibes. Right? Like, I may not know what the truth is, like, you know, empirically, but I know what the truth is. Like, I know what's really good.

So I think that that's, you know, maybe that's the world we're moving into, and if so, I'm not entirely sure how we navigate it, but, I think it's a different it's a difficult challenge. Well, the one thing, you know, summing this up and because, again, listening to the work you've done and all the issues in terms of your audience, in terms of, like, how do we make economic decisions. And you think about the social media issues we've talked about. We talked about the deficit. To me, there's a common theme, and the common theme is restraint.

And America is all about freedom. What goes on in my house goes on in my house. But the concept of self discipline and the concept of boundaries in terms of how we spend money, how we drink, eat, talk to each other. I think we live in this world of kind of everything goes. Like, we just don't want limits.

We're gonna go to Mars, the AI is gonna just solve every issue in the world, we've got unlimited financial abilities, we can communicate, And it's like we've lost this ability to sacrifice and to really focus on that the middle way requires balance, and whether or not it's our economy or it's in our environment or it's how we our discourse. And so I I think we are in this environment where I'm very optimistic because I think it's gonna blow. I think that at some point, this economic spend our way to prosperity. I think what's going on in China is coming here. The housing crisis started here, and it went to the rest of the world.

And I remember at the time thinking, what? This doesn't make any sense. Well, guess what? If China is in a deflationary environment right now, guess what? I think the world's in a deflationary environment.

I mean, and again, I may well be wrong, but we have had physics for thousands of years, and no one has been able to print their way to prosperity. It's always come back to the middle. Mhmm. And so I I think that the economics, people vote their pocket. I think it's whether or not social media lack of regulation, whether or not these companies that are too powerful, whether or not it's Mhmm.

A failure, you know, any you can say anything. I think, ultimately, what we will start to have happen in a very positive way is what is the middle way? What is a way to get back into balance? Yeah. I agree with that.

I I agree with the spirit of that. It really also depends on whether or not the Chinese government is prepared to reverse its policies that have suppressed domestic consumption. Those deflationary pressures would be abated if, in fact, China decided to prioritize consumer spending, consumer welfare. However, whether that's boosting retirement, state pension retirement plans so that people spend less money, put less money to retire from themselves and spend it on the economy, whether it's health care, whether it's something else. That could be a radical game changer, and we did see a big about face during COVID with China's policy, the lockdown.

Right? They reversed that very quickly. So is it possible that they may at some point choose to do the same here? I don't know. But, yeah, that was just my only specific thought with respect to putting a what's it what is it called when you when you a contingency flag on on your comment?

I mean, look. The one thing that's inevitable is there's gonna be change. And if we go through a deflationary environment, we'll come back to an inflationary environment. I mean, change is inevitable. We saw what happened with Japan in the nineties with all, you know, and and all the real estate that went up.

And at one point, real estate in Tokyo was or whatever it was was worth all the real estate in America. I mean, like, just crazy statistics. And China built an awful lot of second homes. And there's an awful lot of empty real estate over there, and I think that has to work its way through the the system. I think we have run up huge, huge amounts of debt in this country that I think has to work its way through the system, and I think we will end up getting to a much better place, but I do think we've lived in this, you know, environment of easy money for twenty years.

I mean, I've never seen anything like it, and I do I've been saying this for a long time, but I do think we're coming to the end of that easy money cycle, and it'll be interesting to see how the world adapts to that. Yeah. I mean, I think that's totally that makes a lot of sense. I also think that will be influenced by the extent of the deterioration of the security architecture that we talked about. Because if, in fact, if we were to imagine a scenario, I'm not saying it's gonna happen, but where the world completely deglobalizes, I think that would be an inflation it would be, in real terms, deflationary, but in nominal terms, inflationary.

For sure. And so to the extent to which the international system remains together, that would also have an impact on it. So there are a lot of variables, but I I mean, I take your point. Yeah. You know, in the deglobalization, I had an interesting conversation a while ago where we were saying, oh, we pulled back from China, but yet, we're we're doing a ton in Mexico right now.

And so there's a lot of manufacturing and things going on south of the border that I think has had will have positive effects in terms of avoiding that inflationary. But it it's unknowable. I mean, as you said, the global order right now is being challenged whether or not it's the Houthis or what's going on in the South China Sea or what's going on in Ukraine. I mean, we when we look back ten years from now, it'll be interesting to see what we call this period because there is a lot of flash points going on right now. And as you pointed out with the pagers, I don't know.

Right before this interview, there was a story, could be fake news, that the next thing that was happening was that they had That the Israelis had done something? Yeah. Walkie talkies were blowing up. Currently, at this moment, the walkie talkies were blowing up. Yeah.

Well, I'll tell you what. I will tell you what the Israelis I mean, first of all, I have said this to people that the Israelis are the equivalent of, like, their intelligence services and, I guess, the entire apparatus of national security is kind of like the equivalent of, like, a superstar team in the middle of the playoffs with playoff level conditioning because they are operating they have you know, there's as high level technologically as The United States, more or less, and yet they operate in a persistent wartime environment. So they're constantly experiencing wartime innovation, the kind of which we have not experienced since World War two. Right. And not only that, but I think it's much easier to pull off the kind of conspiracy that would be required to have infiltrated this Taiwanese this supply chain from this Taiwanese company without anyone.

Because think about the number of people that would need to have been involved actually swapping those batteries out. If we have talking about 4,000 pagers, opening these things up, taking the batteries out, putting it everything, putting the backs boxes back in, doing all of that in a way that you don't get caught fast enough that no one grows suspicious that the shipments arrived late. And what the Israelis have done, which is truly remarkable and I'm I'm gonna say, the thing I'm about to say right now is I don't mean this in a political sense. I mean it quite literally. This was an act of terrorism against Hezbollah because what has happened is, yes, they it's it was a combination of assassination and terrorism.

Yes. They assassinated a lot of important people. Absolutely. But they've also terrorized the organization, and they've done the same thing to to the Iranians time and again when they murdered Hamas's leader in Iran when he arrived at a house, and the story was that the bomb had been planted long ahead of time. Same thing with these pagers.

They had been infiltrated months ahead of time. I think that we've been told about four months. So the point is that these organizations have lost complete confidence in their internal security, and they don't know they they really they're probably fully paranoid. They have no idea where the leaks are coming from, and it makes it very difficult for them to operate psychologically. So I think this is not only has this been an actual military operation where they've taken people out, but they've also conducted a psychological operation.

And, it's just truly remarkable. It's, like, it's the most remarkable up there with Olympic games that I've operation that I've ever seen. Interesting. Yeah. Well, it'll continue to play its itself out.

Well, Dimitry, I continue to listen to your podcast religiously and continue to hope and root for your continued success. Thank you, Jim. I appreciate it. Have a wonderful, wonderful day. Thank you very much.

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