The Listening Tube with Bob Woodley--John Graham on peace and negotiation with Iran.

SPEAKER_02 0:00

This is the listening tube.

SPEAKER_00 0:08

Hello. Thank you for putting your ear to the listening tube. I'm your host, Bob Woodley. On this episode, I'll have a conversation with Dr. John Graham, former Navy SEAL, professor at UC Irvine, and co-founder of the Center for Citizen Peace Building. We'll talk about peace and the art of negotiation.

SPEAKER_02 0:35

But first, not the headlines.

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While affordability seems to be the new buzzword being tossed around by politicians and policymakers, all kinds of ideas are being suggested to make everyday expenses more accommodating and less painful for the American consumer. Ideas like a temporary suspension of gasoline taxes, both state and federal, ending the conflict with Iran as soon as possible, and even some more radical ideas like price freezes and rent control. It's not just the retail prices of everyday items that puts pressure on budgets, but also the wholesale prices of things that retailers often feel forced to pass along to the consumer, even if they don't want to. Even if they know they'll sell less than they would if they absorbed some of the costs of getting goods to the market. But there's another factor that doesn't seem to be getting any attention, even though it adds to the price of just about everything. Credit card swipe fees. There was a time when you paid for the convenience of using a credit card to make a purchase through the interest on your balance, or an annual fee to maintain a credit card. Now, in addition to those costs, you also have to pay a small fee every time you make a purchase. Not everywhere, as large retailers either absorb the cost themselves or work it into the price in another way. For smaller establishments like restaurants and other retailers, as well as service companies, the fee is tacked on to the bill, usually about 3% of the purchase. That can add up over time with many small purchases or rather quickly with a large purchase. Either way, it's a sort of a tax we now have to pay to swipe a bank card instead of paying cash. Even if it isn't a credit card. Yes, you also get charged for using your own money, but with a debit card. Now you might be thinking, but Bob, it can't add up to that much, can it? Well, does one hundred ninety eight billion two hundred fifty million dollars a year sound like a lot? Because that's what banks took out of our pockets in two thousand twenty five through swipe fees at the cash register. And it was one hundred eighty seven point two billion the year before that. So an eleven billion dollar increase from one year to the next. All nickel and dimed from the American public. There are some people who are sounding the alarm and asking for government intervention. A publication called Hardware Building Supply Dealer quotes a man who's a member of both the Merchants Payments Coalition and the National Association of Convenience Stores as saying it's time for Congress to make America affordable again by ending the swipe fee ripoff. His name is Doug Cantor, who adds swipe fees set a new record by taking more of our money every year and the impact on American families and small businesses is devastating. The average swipe fee for Visa and MasterCard purchases is two point three six percent. Most merchants that add a swipe fee to your check want three percent to cover their cost of the transaction. So they almost always overcharge for the fee. Congress has been looking at the issue for at least a couple years. A report on Congress.gov from 2024 explains the entire credit card ecosystem and how the fees are created by the banks and the credit card networks in conjunction with merchants. But it's only a summary of the cycle of a credit card transaction and doesn't offer any ideas for relief. There have been slightly different rules for debit card transactions since 2010, and a bill called the Credit Card Competition Act is being talked about in Congress. The bill calls for slapping Visa and MasterCard on the wrist by making banks with more than one hundred billion dollars in assets enable credit card purchases to be processed over unaffiliated networks, thus increasing competition for swipe fee rates. It's estimated it would save a measly seventeen billion dollars a year from the highway robbery that's going on. Seventeen billion out of almost two hundred billion. That's money we're being charged just to make a purchase with a credit card. Not the price of the item, not the sales tax, if you have one, not the interest on the credit card when the bill comes due, but just the privilege of using the card in the first place. If you want more affordability, you have the power to keep a lot of the money you earn simply by using cash instead of a credit card when you make a purchase, dine out, or just grab something at the convenience store.

SPEAKER_02 6:17

Sincerely, the listening to.

SPEAKER_00 6:23

A recent debate among the candidates for governor of California was called off for a very surprising reason that made me ask.

SPEAKER_02 6:32

Who's the racists here?

SPEAKER_00 6:37

As it turns out, the debate among six candidates, four Democrats and two Republicans, was called off because all of the candidates are Caucasian.

SPEAKER_02 6:49

Bob didn't believe it.

SPEAKER_00 6:52

Yes, you heard that correctly. The debate, which was to be held at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, was canceled because it wasn't diverse enough. Four candidates who weren't invited to the debate were all non Caucasian. The invitees got on the list by the results of a formula that determines which candidates have a realistic chance of winning. The formula is a product of a USC professor. The four candidates who weren't invited to the debate claimed racism. They called for the other candidates to boycott the debate. None said they would. But outrage and demands of minority groups and the candidates themselves to include any Thomas, Ricardo, and Harry who filed to run be allowed on the stage. USC didn't think that was such a good idea. Plus, they had to stick up with the professor whose formula they used to determine who to invite. While the left argues over who should be on the debate stage, the top two candidates for governor are both Republican. Because of how California runs its ballot for governor, we may know before the votes are cast that the next governor of California will be a Republican.

SPEAKER_02 8:23

Let's go back through the listening tube for this week in history.

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This week in 1966, the Soviet Union launches Luna X, which later becomes the first space probe to enter orbit around the moon. Just over three years later, American astronauts would walk on the surface of the moon and return home again. Then we drove Dune buggies on the moon three times, each time leaving the Dune buggy behind. Americans have even golfed on the moon. Then we left and never went back again. No one from any other country on Earth has been on the moon. The American flag is the only flag stuck in the ground on the moon. Finally, sixty years later, Americans will again head to the Moon. Along with one Canadian. Artemis II launched on April first on a mission to go around the Moon and back without stopping. Baby steps all over again, but NASA had to relearn how to do it all. And how to use today's technology to help. Famously, the Apollo missions that put men on the moon the last time had about as much computer power as a pocket calculator.

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The listening tube will return at the speed of sound. Send email to thelistening tube at outlook.com.

SPEAKER_00 10:06

My guest today is John Graham. John is a former Navy SEAL and is now a man of peace and an expert on international negotiations. He spoke with me from his home in Irvine, California. I would like to talk to you mostly about war and peace.

SPEAKER_03 10:27

Okay. That's uh one of my favorite topics.

SPEAKER_00 10:32

That's what I understand. Now, John, what's the best barometer for measuring how much peace there is?

SPEAKER_03 10:46

Oh, well, that uh the uh best barometer is the Swedes publish statistics going back to the year 1400. I can give you the uh exact sites. Uh we put that information in our textbook on international marketing, and I use it a few other places, but they're very good about that. And what the particularly going back to the 1400s, we're basically the world is the most peaceful it's ever been. Particularly if you look at uh the early 21st century, the first few years, we basically had global peace. There's some conflicts going on, there were horrible conflicts, and the people were dying. But I think the best measure is uh people dying from violence per capita. And so in that time period, uh in the late 90s and and um early 2000s, the numbers were very small. The wars were still awful, but the numbers were very small. And in that time period, uh human beings enjoyed uh the safest planet that humans have experienced in 300,000 years of history. The Swedish folks at Uppsala, and uh also there's another organization.

SPEAKER_00 12:08

Is America closer to peace now than it was a month ago?

SPEAKER_03 12:15

No. Uh we're involved in an active war, and that wasn't true a month ago. But uh yeah, it's uh this is particularly a bad time from my perspective for peace.

SPEAKER_00 12:29

And uh from from what we're led to believe uh by the Trump administration, this is uh a war of necessity that's been going on basically for the past 47 years. And the attempt now, or the the invasion of uh Iran by the Americans and by the Israelis is an attempt to end this war and bring about a more peaceful uh Middle East and therefore the world. Do you have any optimism that that will happen?

SPEAKER_03 13:03

Um you can make that argument, uh, and certainly the Trump administration does. It also talks about a lot of other reasons for doing it. Dan, the nuclear program, for example. I I don't think this is uh near effective as what we were doing in the Obama administration, where we basically reached an agreement and had started implementing the nuclear uh arms production issue. And uh, you know, now we're we're killing people over all this, and it really doesn't make a lot of sense, and it's a very dangerous time. The worst prospect is boots on the American boots on the ground. I should also say it it's becoming more and more clear that the Israeli objectives and American objectives are different. And so that uh even complicates things further.

SPEAKER_00 14:00

Yes, they certainly are different. And I think they're different in the uh, first of all, in the in who the targets are, really. I think is what it basically what it comes down to. How do you see them as different?

SPEAKER_03 14:15

The Israelis have always worried about nuclear weapons being used on them. Um and that's uh a long-term kind of thing. The interesting thing is historically, at different points in time, the Israelis and Iranians have gotten along well as we have worked with Iranians as well in World War II. Um, so we all have experiences of working together, but most recently, um the problems in the Middle East have uh gotten worse with the different terrorist groups and the support of the Iranians and the Israeli uh aversion to the two-state solution, which to most of us around the world think makes sense. But anyway, that's uh that's kind of what's going on at the moment. But the history is important. Uh the uh we have gotten along. What hasn't come up at all in the discussion of Iran and the United States in the last 40 years is what we did there in 1953. The uh CIA and the British intelligence agencies caused a coup to happen. And at that point in time, uh there was a Shah, but the Shah was basically uh like the king of England. Uh, he had no political power. And they had a democratically elected president, and uh the coup that we spent money on and participated in threw him out of office. Part of the claim then was he was leaning toward communism. But that was uh that was still the argument that the Republicans use. It's the commies that are the problem. But that part of history is important because that explains the uh Iranian dislike or hate, however you want to describe it, of American interferen interference.

SPEAKER_00 16:11

Let's j let's call it mistrust. How's that?

SPEAKER_03 16:14

That's not strong enough.

SPEAKER_00 16:16

Okay. All right, no.

SPEAKER_03 16:21

We have a uh article, and we quote uh an Iranian who writes about international negotiation, and he calls uh one side Satan and the other side evil. And those kind of words are used in you know protests and things like that. And certainly uh George Bush talked about uh the axis of evil. So the animosity is worse than distrust. It's a bigger problem than that.

SPEAKER_00 16:51

Now, when I was a young man, I was stationed in while I was in the Air Force, I was stationed in West Berlin, back when it still had a wall around it. Things seemed a lot simpler than the worldwide situation we've had more or less since the beginning of the of the current millennia. Is it it just feels like we were safer than. I mean do you miss the Cold War?

SPEAKER_03 17:21

Do I miss it? No. I my biggest worry is not uh uh the war in Iran in Iran right now. My biggest worry is nuclear weapons and the proliferation. And I publicly have made a suggestion uh that goes something like this both uh the Russians and the United States have 5,000 nuclear warheads and delivery vehicles, more than 5,000 each. Uh that's enough uh weaponry to kill everybody on the planet. That's real clear. The Chinese are building out now. Now I can't remember the exact numbers they have, but the Chinese manufacturing of uh capability is tremendous for building nuclear weapons and uh reaching parity with the United States. You know, I don't know what the estimates are, but 10 years seems about right. And there's another way to reach parity among the three main nuclear powers. That's China saying to both Russia and the United States, we'll slow down our production of nuclear weapons if you people begin dismantling the pieces of junk you still have. In both Russia and the United States, the weaponry is old and uh needs to be refreshed, if that's the right word to use. And it's an interesting argument. It's not in China's interests to uh add another 5,000 nuclear weapons, but they're trying to get to parity. So I think there's a real opportunity here to start talking about eliminating nuclear weapons or at least reducing them dramatically. And if you go to inventive negotiation and uh click on Paths to Peace, one of the things we've done is, for example, we've picked 16 different conundrums worldwide. Iran and the United States is one of them. But one of the things we look at is nuclear disarmament, and we ask AI to make suggestions for solutions and ideas that might lead to solutions. AI isn't very good, it makes a lot of mistakes, but it's very good at putting ideas on the table and doing that dispassionately. In all cases, we asked AI to take a look at the cultural, the economic, the political circumstances, and make suggestions. So we think it we hope that's very useful for building peace. And that's what we're trying to do at the website through inventive negotiation.

SPEAKER_00 20:06

Is China the new threat now that Russia seems to be busy with Ukraine and Iran is seemingly been neutralized for a while?

SPEAKER_03 20:18

Well, if you go back to the year 2000, the Republicans' intention was to uh given it to develop an issue that they could use against the Gore campaign. Gore had they had video of Gore at a uh Buddhist temple in Orange County, and that's close enough uh to uh to China. So uh they one of the elements of their platform was Chinese espionage. We have to stop it. Now, after the Cold War, which you have wonderful experience or horrible experience uh in Berlin, after that ended, we had this great peace for a while, but then uh the Bush administration uh and the uh weapons industry in the United States that Eisenhower warned about argued for a pivot to toward China. They needed a big enemy to justify all the terrorists, and so the whole military approach was pivoting toward China. Now, the big problem with that, we were preoccupied with spying on the Chinese, as they were spying on us. We were using airplanes along their coast while you were in the Air Force, so these were uh Navy airplanes, P uh P3s, I think. And uh one of them uh touched a Chinese jet. The Chinese jet crashed, the pilot was killed. Our plane landed on Hainan Island, then we got the crew back, it landed safely, but it was an emergency landing. We got the crew. Back pretty quickly, but they kept the airplane because that was a treasure of our technology at the time. And we were playing that game, uh, the Chinese espionage battle, if you like, when 9-11 happened. And I think the Bush administration was um irresponsibly distracted because they had good information about the possibility of something coming from the Middle East, but they weren't paying enough attention. So this distraction of China has been a long-term thing. I'm I've uh always advocated, I have a book called China Now, and it's about uh China as an opportunity. I wrote it in 2008 with a colleague. And um at that point in time, China and the United States were getting along pretty well, uh, except for things like the Cox Report. Then Peter Navarro's book came out, which said China's getting ready to attack. And um, unfortunately the Trump people picked that up and have had fun talking about it uh the whole time. Peter Navarro's a colleague of mine uh at uh UC Irving at Irvine at the business school. And uh we used to argue about a bunch of things, but I told him our books came out at the same time, and I told him, Peter, this is great. We completely disagree. We can do seminars together. Um, you're saying China's a threat. I'm saying China is an opportunity, and if we uh do things together and argue about it, we'll sell a lot of books. And he said, No, I'm not doing that, because he really didn't know much about China. Um anyway, that's where we have you know this pivot to China, and they're still being called commies. Uh, it is true that they use communism and they could are led by the uh Communist Party. But if you've been to Shanghai or Beijing, you know, it's uh free enterprise is uh real important in China. So this communism claim is is kind of outmoded.

SPEAKER_00 24:08

There's been a lot of talk recently uh from the Trump administration about uh talks between the United States and Iran. What kind of diplomacy do you think is happening in the background right now?

SPEAKER_03 24:24

Are you talking about just between those two, or are you talking about other folks and for now?

SPEAKER_00 24:30

Yes, just between the United States and Iran, but I I will follow up.

SPEAKER_03 24:34

Okay, so my main area of research for the last 40 years has been international negotiations. We studied how people negotiate in 22 different cultures and countries, and we compare them. And two of the cultures or countries that we studied are the United States and Iran. And um, for some important reasons, we don't get along by nature, and let me describe those reasons real quickly. What we find is the Iranians are interested in building relationships. Americans are interested, to use Donald Trump's words, in making deals. That's a different goal. We advise America, the best American negotiators are interested in relationships. The other quirky thing about if you've got an American sitting with someone from Iran and they're negotiating, the American negotiation style is one person talks at a time and the other person listens. In Iran, the uh conversational style is both people are talking at the same time, interrupting each other a lot. That makes Americans angry very quickly. We teach our kids don't interrupt, don't interrupt. And in many countries around the world, but Iran is interruptions are just part of the conversational style. So we have trouble just getting along for those very brief reasons, let alone this history of uh uh of the 1953 coup combined with their holding of our uh hostages, uh their of our uh hostages in the American embassy. What's going on in the background, uh it's completely unclear to me. What is clear to me is the Iranians are going to keep up with the violence. And I base that on how they handled the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s. Saddam Hussein thought if he bombed the hell out of the military uh forces of Iran, particularly around uh Tehran, he'd be able to take over the country and particularly the oil fields in the south in a couple of weeks. That war lasted eight years and killed a million people. And that was the last time that there were foreign boots in Iran. So I, dear God, I hope that Trump has enough brains to look at that history and not take that literal step with American boots on the ground, because uh the the defense will be relentless, human wave, ugly, and it'll take a long time.

SPEAKER_00 27:30

I think a lot of Americans I think a lot of Americans also draw that line at boots on the ground.

SPEAKER_03 27:36

Yeah, yeah, I and I'm I'm quite happy about that. Uh and I'm they may be talking about that, but I don't think the Trump administration has the diplomatic horsepower to develop to start taking steps towards building a positive relationship with Iran. There's all kinds of reasons to collaborate, but uh I don't see that that's gonna happen in the short run. I can't tell you where it's gonna go.

SPEAKER_00 28:05

Are other countries bidding for Iran's mineral rights and energy infrastructure right now?

SPEAKER_03 28:15

Well, uh Iran supplies a lot of oil to both China and India and other countries. And uh they have the capacity to supply a lot more. Their capacity has really been uh cut dramatically. Back in the 70s when the Shah was in power, we got along great with the Shah. They at that point in time had the fifth biggest uh army in the world and some of the best weapons because we had uh we supplied weapons, they supplied us oil. Now we don't need the oil anymore, which is a good better situation to be in. Yeah, they'd so they would be supplying oil to a lot of different places. Hopefully, if I go back to the US and China, what we should be collaborating on is uh the Chinese should be selling us solar uh power cells very cheaply. And uh yes, that doesn't mean manufacturing jobs in the United States. Those have kind of left about 20 years ago. But what that does mean is there'd be uh the services associated with putting um solar cells on every roof in the country. I don't know how that would work during the winter in uh Pennsylvania, but out here in California, I I don't pay an electric bill anymore. We've got uh uh solar powers. In fact, the electric company owns owes me $1,800 to never get paid.

SPEAKER_00 29:45

That's a pretty good deal.

SPEAKER_03 29:47

Yeah, that's the kind of collaboration that could happen. The other, in my writing about how the United States and Iran might collaborate, Iran has two important resources besides oil. One is they have sunshine, and so you can imagine all kinds of solar power being developed in the desert areas or just everywhere. The other thing is they're really centrally located and would make an ideal distribution hub for American products, if you like, in the whole area. And that's how we got along during World War II. We delivered weapons to the Soviets through Iran. And so they were that's why they had the meeting at uh uh in Tehran at the end of the war. Uh so we got along great then, and they're in a geographical position to take advantage of that if we can get over this other animosity that's been built up historically. The key is particularly in the Middle East, people tend not to forget and tend not to forgive. And that's part of the reason why there's this constant turmoil there.

SPEAKER_00 30:59

Uh you touched on this a little bit earlier, and I wanted to ask you about it. Um inventive negotiation. Now, you you explained briefly that you use artificial intelligence. Is that is that what it's based upon? Or did this style of negotiation that I guess I I'm going to credit you with, did that happen before AI?

SPEAKER_03 31:23

No, don't yeah, don't credit the AI we hope is useful, but that's not the concept of inventive negotiation is new in the United States. It's not new in places like Japan and the Netherlands. That's the way they've been operating. But here's the difference. What we teach in the business schools and law schools in the United States is something called integrative bargaining. In integrative bargaining, if you and I were negotiating, I have to ask you, what are your interests? And you would ask me, What are our interests? And we talk about that and try to develop a common uh good solution. My favorite way to explain it is uh uh the metaphor of the pie. So there are two guys and one pie. What are we going to do about that? Well, if you're Vladimir Putin, you're gonna bludgeon the other guy and take the whole pie. That's one approach. There are three other approaches. The second approach is the Trump approach, and that's making a deal, it's a transaction, and it's making offers and counteroffers. And uh you don't worry much about the other side, that's up to them. And that's good, that's called competitive bargaining in the business or lost classroom. For competitive bargaining with a pie, you just split it right in half. That's fair. In the case of integrative bargaining, uh, you can get to better outcomes because I can ask you what part of the pie do you like? And if you happen to like the fruit and I like happen to like the crust, then we can split the pie differently and we can both get more than half. So that's integrative bargaining. That's what we teach. Inventive negotiation depends on long-term relationships and creativity. So in that case, what we say is instead of splitting the pie up, why don't we build a pie factory? And we can have plenty of pies, we can even sell some of them. And that involves a long-term relationship of collaboration and invention. Collaboration, a long-term relationship.

SPEAKER_00 33:35

Is the goal to have all parties benefit in some way?

SPEAKER_03 33:39

Yes. Yes, that is the goal.

SPEAKER_00 33:42

What is the ultimate goal of a negotiation? Does there always have to be a winner and a loser?

SPEAKER_03 33:49

Um there shouldn't be. Uh one of the things I talk in our book on the uh negotiation, and in the book on envenim negotiation, we talk about how our ancestors out in the uh South African deserts uh used to work and they used to solve problems. They lived in small family family groups, 25 or 30. There were hunter-gatherers. If they had a problem, they sat around the campfire and discussed it. Everybody participated, and everybody uh benefited because of that collaborative approach. It's also what the Japanese do. But the idea is what makes us humans different is we have an alternative to punishment. The primordial persuasion was punishment, but the first sophistication has been exchange. We can exchange things, and that makes life better for everybody. And this works currently. I I mentioned I have a textbook, I think I mentioned it, on uh international marketing. And international trade is the most important cause of peace worldwide. And it works in three ways. It's one is it creates interdependence. So we're not going to have a war with China ever. We have too much trade, and neither one of us can afford that war because we're interdependent technologically. The second thing is it promotes international interaction. So people from other countries meet each other, get on jet planes and fly and hold discussions. And so both sides learn about other values. And but the most important part of international trade is the creativity, the invention that happens, and the borrowing of ideas from around the world. Trump's approach to international relations is punishment. And, you know, punishment may work in the short run, but what's happening right now in the Middle East, Israel is developing generations of hate. They may be uh destroying the short-term threats, but they're they're um creating generations of hate, and we're doing the same thing.

SPEAKER_00 36:08

John, as a peace builder, where are you focusing your efforts right now?

SPEAKER_03 36:16

What uh we're trying to do is try to tell as many people as possible about our book, Inventive Negotiation. And one of the ways we're doing that is we're we're it's for free. If you go to the website, you can download it for free. You can buy it at Amazon, but you can download it for free. Anybody in the world can do that. And we've already translated it. Uh and it's now available in nine languages. So far, the two countries where it's the biggest seller are China and Russia. Uh, over when I say seller, the downloads um in both countries are greater than 5,000. And we've really just started this effort. But we hope to take this approach. Um, if we can get Iranians and Americans to think that way, then the outcomes will be very different. And we think it's appropriate. It's what our ancestors used to do, it's what the Japanese do have always done. So that's what we're trying, that's the main effort. I also, some of my other books, I have a book uh uh trying to teach peace uh in a historical novel. And in that book, um uh the main character is a woman and her brother, her husband, and her son all go off to war, three different wars. And it runs from uh 1938 to 1972, and it goes into a lot of detail. What I'm proud about that book is one of the quotes in the book, which I uh posted on um Instagram, is about uh one of the characters refusing to obey an illegal order. And I I don't know, I'm sure in the Air Force they taught you about disobeying illegal orders. They did in the Navy when I was in the service in the 70s, and so we have uh taken some dialogue out of that where the character uh disobeys an illegal order and is willing to face a court martial because of it. We posted that on uh Instagram, and so far uh this year it's received 3.9 million views. So we hope that kind of thing is making a difference. And that comes right out of our book, uh Charlotte's War. The abridged edition is called The Hidden Front Line. Um, part of the argument is uh, you know, for a young man to go off to war, join the military. Uh it makes a difference if you're married and have kids. And when you're in the military, I don't know if you were married and had kids, but when I was drafted in 1970, I did. And that gave me a lot different view of things from my cohorts and the and the SEAL teams.

SPEAKER_00 39:13

Is there anywhere in the world right now where you're kind of just keeping your eye on in anticipation of some type of flare-up where your peace-building efforts might be needed?

SPEAKER_03 39:26

Uh, that's a good question. What I'm afraid of is that we end up with violence over Taiwan, which uh there's no reason. You know, China's interested, of course. Uh I had a bit of an argument with a Chinese scholar um a couple of weeks ago about it. We don't understand what it's like to have 2,500 years of history, but uh, I'm really afraid of that one, that it'll go to violence. Just recently, there's been talk now about the two sides are talking um in new ways. And uh so I hope that gets settled. Because if you think the Hormuz Strait is going to be a problem, if uh Taiwan blows up, um, that's gonna change the economy as well. Right in a bad way.

SPEAKER_00 40:16

Well, John, thank you very much for spending some time with me in the listening tube today. I I really do appreciate it, and I have enjoyed the conversation thoroughly. I hope you have as well.

SPEAKER_03 40:26

Me too. I I was talking a lot, but Bob, I appreciate your interest in the topic.

SPEAKER_00 40:32

John Graham has written many books. Nonfiction as well as a history-based novel. You can learn more about John at gramsbooks.com. Thanks to John for sharing his insight with you and me in the listening tube. The Listening Tube is written and produced by yours truly, copyright 2026. Shout out to some new places checking in Helsinki, Finland, Salem, Connecticut, and Jacksonville, Florida. Follow the listening tube at thelistening tube dot com. Thank you for putting your ear to the listening tube. I'm your host, Bob Woodley, for Val at Infinitum.