In this episode of the RISKGAMING Podcast, host Danny Crichton sits down with columnist Michael Magnani to dissect the explosive rise of legalized sports betting in America and its far-reaching consequences. The conversation then pivots to broader geopolitical topics, including the role of open-source intelligence in modern warfare and how technology is changing the defense landscape. They wrap the episode up with a look at Japan’s election results and the shifting political dynamics that could alter the balance of power in the Indo-Pacific.
Transcript
Danny Crichton:
Hello and welcome to the Riskgaming Podcast. I'm Danny Crichton, and today we're trying something new. We're doing a news episode with Michael Magnani. Michael, you have been a longtime columnist, now, unintentionally longtime columnist. You had no intention of working with me more than once, which is actually how most people respond to working with me. But you have stuck around for more than a year. You've written six columns. Your most recent one was one on America's economic security proposing a new Office of Economic Defense. So welcome to your first show on the Riskgaming Podcast.
Michael Magnani:
Yeah, Danny, thanks for having me. Super excited to be here.
Danny Crichton:
There's so much news to talk about, and the first thing I wanted to discuss is actually something that we have not brought up in the Riskgaming world in a couple of years. Two years ago, I wrote a piece called America's Gambling Fetish, which was a piece about crypto, the obsession with Robinhood, the obsession with sports betting, and how much we were all sort of engaged on our devices betting all the time. And since then, we've seen this massive skyrocketing of betting, of sports betting in particular, we've seen the rise of Polymarket this election between Harris and Trump and people being able to bet on it. And then recently, over the weekend or over the last week, there was an article by Charles Fain Lehman, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute, an article in the Atlantic titled Legalizing Sports Gambling was a Huge Mistake. Subhead, The evidence is convincing: The betting industry is ruining lives. Michael, did you have a chance to read the article?
Michael Magnani:
I did. I will say it kind of hits home. Being a sports fan, watching a lot of football, a lot of baseballs, and being amongst my friends who sports-gamble all the time, it's kind of sucked a lot of the... And this is before you get into the stats that are mentioned in the paper, but it sucks a lot of the enjoyment out of it for me personally, because instead of maybe rooting for your team or looking for a good play, you're just so hell bent on, "Is my bet going to cover? Is this guy going to rush for 10 or more yards? Is this guy going to hit a home run today?" Instead of just being a sports fan, just for being a sports fan, there's a financial element that's in there and it's kind of ruining the viewing of sports. And then you take that and you have every single commercial break has five different sports betting commercials. Every single drive, every single pitch is sponsored by some sort of sports betting company. I know I'm not the only one who thinks this. I see people complaining about it on Twitter a lot.
Danny Crichton:
Well, this got launched a week ago, and it did blow up. It blew up on Twitter, blew up on Reddit, Hacker News a bunch of other places. The discussions were extremely long and detailed and it kind of fell into a couple of buckets. One is, to your point, there's just an immense amount of advertisement around sports betting. Every single commercial break saturation, every time there's a commentary from the commentators, and the commentary at all of it is about what you can do on betting and try to get involved in this. But then that leads to your last point there, which is around the statistics.
And Charles in the article really highlights a couple of things. One is, in states that legalize betting, we can actually do a discontinuity design in terms of econometrics, different states introduce betting at different times. And so we sort of have a independent variable that allows you to sort of show causality. Bankruptcies go up significantly in states that legalize betting. That was one. And the two, one that actually shocked me is that when a sports team loses and someone has bet on it that domestic violence, violence against a partner, and that's mostly probably male on female domestic violence, goes up something like 10 or 12% in the weekend after a sports team loses, which blew my mind.
Michael Magnani:
That stat I think was specifically concerned with NFL home teams losing, which just goes to the NFL teams play once a week if you're really a diehard fan or you got a lot of money on some of these games. It was just absolutely shocking seeing that and seeing that on paper with evidence behind it.
Danny Crichton:
And one of the things that it's interesting as well is there's a little bit of a power law here. We see this in alcohol sales, we see this in marijuana, we see this with most spices, is that a couple of people are the majority of the particular category. So with alcohol, something like 3, 4% of the population drinks 70% of all the liquor in the United States. But when it comes to sports betting, and this again from Charles' article in the Atlantic, a small number of people placed a large majority of bets, about 5% of bettors spent 70% of the money in New Jersey in late 2020 and early 2021 based on government data. And so you're talking about 5% of the bettors, not even population, but 5% of the bettors are 70% of the cash flow through the gambling system. And so these problems are really concentrated on a handful of folks going on. Now the question is, does that mean that we have to regulate for all the rest of us who either don't bet or bet very little because there's a couple of bad apples in the system?
Michael Magnani:
Yeah. I mean, it's interesting. I know a couple of people who work for some of these gambling companies and there are entire departments that their job is to keep these high stakes bettors, high roller bettors who are betting constantly betting five, sometimes six figures, keep them hooked. It's easier given that it's so easy to access on your phone. No longer is it like you have to go to the grimy part of your city to go to some off-the-track sports book. No, you could be sitting in your cubicle, you got five minutes before your next meeting. "Oh, let's see, who on the Phillies I think is going to hit the first home run tonight?" And this is just a quick aside, if you know anything about baseball betting on who's going to get the first hit, the first home run is like a fool's errand. It makes no sense, but people for them, it's like, "Oh, I think Trea Turner's going yard tonight." And the easy access to it, the over-inundation of ads is definitely playing a key role here.
Danny Crichton:
Well, and it's interesting, we had Kelly Clancy on as a guest on the Riskgaming Podcast a few weeks ago who wrote a book focused on playing and betting and games in history. And one of the things she really emphasizes is that betting goes back thousands of years in basically every society around the world. It doesn't matter; East Asia, Africa, Middle East, the Greeks, all the way to the Americans today in New Jersey in 2024. We all love to get into bets. We all like to have that control and believe we have fate and destiny in our hands. But [inaudible 00:05:41] peculiar about sports is that people believe it's a game of skill versus a game of chance. This is not a slot machine where you're sort of pulling the lever. To your point, people believe, "I know which player's going to do well, and in my case, Shohei Ohtani probably is going to have the first hit in the game," so to speak.
But nonetheless, you have this belief that I have some knowledge, I know the players really well, I know my home team, therefore I'm able to bet and win against the house and wins against others that others won't be able to do. And the reality is, it's not as true. It's actually very hard to "lose." And that was always the definition of the difference between a game of chance and a game of skill is, "Can you purposely lose?" If you can purposely lose, it's a game of skill. If you can't purposely lose, then it's a game of chance. But it seems to me like it's actually in many cases, hard to lose.
Michael Magnani:
Yeah. I think the way these gambling apps keep you from feeling like you lost is by you get your first time offer, you get $20 free on them when you sign up, or let's say you have a six leg parlay. If after four of the six legs have been completed and your parlay is still good, you can cash out. This way, you'll get some of what your money is, but you won't lose it if the fifth or the sixth leg doesn't actually come to fruition. And I think so much of it is people are playing with small amounts of money or house money in some instances and they feel like, I'm not actually losing money. "Oh, I only put $20 in initially and I'm still playing with that $20." Well, eventually you're going to add more money because eventually that $20 is going to go away. You might win a couple of times, get yourself up to 100, but there's some negative regression incoming there. You're going to end up losing it and it'll be like, "Oh, what's another $20?" And eventually, that kind of keeps spiraling.
Danny Crichton:
Well, I think what we are seeing here is this sort of instant gratification, right? We're bringing gamification, which was this theory around mobile apps since 2010 of make things fast, make them exciting, have points, streaks like you have in Duolingo, make it engaging. So things that are boring, like learning a language become exciting. And now we're applying it literally to gaming, to gambling. And that's creating this really hyper fast loop.
When I look back at the article I wrote two years ago, America's Gambling Fetish, I mean the huge part that I was emphasizing was this attention span issue that we're increasingly going into a YOLO model of, "I want to make a bet in the morning, make cash in the evening, I go out and drink. I had a great time. I don't need to make income. I don't need to have a job. I don't need a plan for five, 10 years of a career. I just need to ride the market waves, feel good about the vibes and everything is off to the races," and in reality, we need the complete opposite. America at a time when infrastructure is in challenge, we have defense issues, government issues, you name it, we have that issue. Certainly, in New York City we do. How do you create a culture of long-term investment, a culture of stewardship? Embedding seems to me to be the complete opposite of that.
Michael Magnani:
The attention span issue is a funny one too because now people can have the excuse of, "Oh, I'm going to sit through this sports game that I otherwise wouldn't watch because maybe it's not my favorite team or it's just not important to me," but, "Oh, if I have a couple of bets on this game, that makes it more interesting to watch." People are watching more sports, which is good for these companies, and they're gambling more. So these gambling companies are getting more out of it and their attention spans are lessened because instead of focusing maybe on the whole game and what's actually happening, you're like, "Oh, that just happened. Let me lock in another bet quickly based on what I'm seeing here."
Danny Crichton:
Well, what's interesting to me is the games are changing to adapt to gambling, and people are not just changing the rules, they are changing how it is presented on television. I remember when I was applying to Google, there was an interview process and we had to come up with, "What is the most innovative product or project you've seen that has changed something that has been there a long time?" And I said, "NFL RedZone." And I said, "Traditionally linear broadcast, you just watch a game start to finish. With RedZone, the idea was you would just show the best parts of all the games simultaneously on one channel." And I said, "This is actually relatively brilliant. This is showing that you know what the customer's looking for." And then I got rejected from the job and they were like, "We don't understand that at all."
And then I was like, "The Kindle was amazing and is a better book." And they were like, "We totally get that. You're hired now." True story. But I always love this idea of adapting media to different types of forms. What's interesting is this is the first time we've seen, in my view, a change away from presenting the sport as best as it can be on its own, but rather saying like, "Look, if people are just fundamentally betting, if their second screening, as you might call it in the media industry, then let's just make the primary screen a better way to go bet on the second screen, focus on the pieces that people want, show the statistics on that screen and try to maintain attention."
And that's a totally different type of product that's being offered than just traditional sports broadcasting. Well look, obviously, a lot of bets are sinking, but it's not the only thing that's sinking in the world today because we also learned from around the world over in China and the Yangtze River China's new Zhou-class submarine, the first of its kind, its debut ship sank in the river a couple of months ago, and that's a big deal because you don't want your new-fangled nuclear submarine to go down to Davy Jones's Locker. Doesn't make a good look for a great power competitor. But the interesting thing here to me was less about the sinking itself, but how the sinking came together. Maybe tell us a little bit about that story.
Michael Magnani:
Yeah, so I believe around some point this summer a gentleman named Thomas Shugart who works for the Center for New American Security, he's a good follow on Twitter for anything Navy-related, just as a quick aside. He was looking at commercial satellite images and was like, "Something's happening in this port where a lot of the Chinese Navy submarines are based. There's floating cranes in the water out of nowhere. I think a sub might have sunk." This was a nuclear, one of their nuclear submarines, Zhou-class, no idea if there was live nuclear material on there, if anyone died. We don't know the details of that, but you'd have to assume, and Shugart mentioned this, that the thing was entirely filled with water. So that was a couple of months ago. This is a process that's going to take a while to get that sub seaworthy again. And I think that is a perfect microcosm of these commercial satellite images and open source technology and how taken over certainly a lot of defense world, but just the world in general.
Danny Crichton:
Open source intelligence obviously coming on the last 10, 15 years, companies like Planet Labs, a former Lux company, scan the earth every single day and have their technology and imagery available for researchers who are looking to do this sort of work. And we've now seen it in the case of China's nuclear weapons system, so we can actually see them building additional missile silos on the western side of China. We see this all the time in North Korea studies where the regime is hermetically sealed, and so open-source researchers are using satellite imagery to identify specific nuclear sites or whatever. And then this was a sort of a rare case in which it was not just bases and land-based infrastructures, buildings, roads, highways, et cetera, but it was actually tracking a submarine that sank and then the four or five cranes that came down a couple of weeks later start to haul it out of the water again. And so I thought it was a really interesting example of the power of technology, the power of some of this satellite imagery, the power of this open community to be able to figure this stuff out.
Michael Magnani:
Another example of this that fascinated me, and this was a couple of years back, I believe, people have been able to use this commercial satellite imagery to see ships that are going into North Korea and they're able to kind of make a good assumption on what their oil consumption is because these are a lot of ships that are bringing oil from the Middle East, bringing it from China, and these, they're called ghost ships because they're not on a register. They shouldn't be going to North Korea, they're evading sanctions. But because of this commercially available satellite imagery, there's analysts whose job and who have a good idea of what North Korea's consumption might be like for something like oil.
So, it's just revolutionized the way intelligence is gathered and analyzed and also has made it available to the wider world. All these OSINT analysts on Twitter, some of whom aren't super great, but some of them were really good and they figure out a lot out of really interesting stuff. The Xinjiang concentration camps, seeing those get built out, that was a big OSINT project. The lead up to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, people are like, "Oh, wow, they're amassing a lot of forces here." That was a lot of OSINT that was commercially available stuff. And then the US government came out and said, "Yeah, our secret assessments agree with that." So yeah, it just kind of revolutionized this space.
Danny Crichton:
And the other example of this, obviously over the weekend I think was on Friday technically. Nasrallah, the head of Hezbollah in Lebanon was assassinated by the Israelis and there's now been a lot of reporting and we're trying to figure out what changed from 2006 when Israel attempted to assassinate him three times, missed all three times, almost 20 years later, they sort of fit the pieces together. What changed? One of the arguments was basically signals intelligence plus satellites that I believe the unit was unit 9,900. This was in the Financial Times.
There's basically a unit within the IDF, which is exclusively focused on using satellite data and very, very high precision satellite data to identify changes to buildings, changes to the shutters, the gutters, the fact that new Summit Pylon was built and that shows reinforcement of a building versus another. A gas can or a trash bin on the side of the road might innovate a improvised explosive device and IED. And so to me, it's very fascinating that we're combining better and better satellite data, better and better AI and machine learning algorithms, and that's connecting together to actually create kinetic force opportunities for Israel, the United States, and other governments.
Michael Magnani:
Their classic example of that is how the US got Bin Laden. We got him, he was so esoteric, he was very concerned about operational security for legitimate reasons, and we were able to kind of surmise through a courier like a hand courier, "Oh, he might be here. And what did we do?" We ran a bunch of satellites, secret satellites at the time over the compound in Abbottabad, and we were like, "We think that guy who comes out onto the balcony twice a day is him because they weren't even putting out any trash. They were burning everything. They were to talk about getting maybe samples from the sewer to see if there was any excrement that they could analyze. But basically, what was the overarching intelligence, what led them to go in and say, "We think he's here and we're going to go get them," is satellites. And these were the secret ones. This was what, 2011? Obviously, the commercial satellite industry wasn't a huge thing then, but yeah, they've always been a part of this kind of intelligence gathering apparatus.
Danny Crichton:
What do you think is the sort of future for open source? I mean you were at a master's degree program in international relations. Obviously, this is one route to have that sort of career path. Were people excited about OSINT in terms of graduate students and people you work with?
Michael Magnani:
Yeah, people are excited and part of that is compounded by everyone's online. Everyone loves putting a lot of stuff online. I always say the greatest open source gold mine is LinkedIn because LinkedIn is a combination of people bragging about everything that they do and people love to brag and not be humble and everyone engages in it, but LinkedIn is just a treasure trove for OSINT. If you need to find somebody what they do, where they went to school, your first step is probably going to be LinkedIn. The downside of all this is sometimes too much data is a bad thing. Because you know, "Oh, I have all this data. What can I take from this that I'm actually going glean actionable intelligence from?" Going through all the data and being like, "Well, this isn't important, but this actually is." So when you have a lot of this open source data, so much of it might not even just be usable. So getting kind of cutting through that is the hiccup that I think a lot of people with OSINT are facing.
Danny Crichton:
Well, it's interesting, so two sides. One is, there's been a lot of coverage obviously of the Russians. Bellingcat and others do a lot of OSINT work around this. What's been fascinating to me reading these stories repeatedly over and over again is how many Russian special agents post all their photos to Instagram, they post it every place they go, they're here, they're here, and then you can actually track all of their movements down to the day, down to the hour. They're not just posting it three days later. They're literally live posting photos like, "I am in front of the Vienna Opera."
And it's like one hour later we know that they were at the Vienna Opera. It's amazing to me how much data is just out there on the web. And to your point, I do think the biggest challenge on the OSINT side is the algorithmic aspect. Most people don't have access to the data centers, the clusters you really need to do to process huge amounts of imagery, and that does tend to be, to me, where the cut line is between that citizen journalism, citizen investigatory work, versus the state-driven actors who, clearly, have the data centers to process petabytes of information.
Michael Magnani:
At the end of the day, it's human nature. People like to show off where they are on Instagram, whether you're an intelligence agent or just a tourist, that's always going to be the downfall. As Nick Rhys talked about, it's the human node that's going to be the one that leads the downfall of whatever. It doesn't matter how secure your network is.
Danny Crichton:
Well, let's pivot to one last topic here. So it's three topic show. Number three was a major watershed election over in Japan where Shigeru Ishiba has surprisingly come out ahead in a two-stage race. In Japan, the Liberal Democratic Party has been in charge most of the post-war era with a couple of intercessions in between, but there was a major race that we have not seen in decades. Basically, nine candidates running for the leadership office. Usually, there's two, maybe three. And so, as a wide variety of policy positions, three people ended up in the poll position.
Shigeru Ishiba was the person who won obviously, and he was one of the three, Jun'ichirō Koizumi, the son of a former prime minister from the 2000s, and then Sanae Takaichi who represents the Post-Abe faction and the hard right wing of Japan politics. And she actually won the first round of the election, so it was a runoff. She was number one and Shigeru Ishiba was number two, and he managed to reverse it in the second round and come out ahead and that was a huge, huge surprise. Michael, how much do you focus on Japan and how interested were you in this whole dynamic?
Michael Magnani:
My knowledge of Japanese domestic politics is something I need to focus on a little bit more, but-
Danny Crichton:
That's your way of saying, "I don't care at all." Yes.
Michael Magnani:
No, no, but from the perspective-
Danny Crichton:
US Treaty Alliance partner, we have no idea what's going on over there.
Michael Magnani:
From the perspective of the US-Japanese relationship and the geopolitics of the Indo-Pacific, it's definitely an important race. Like you said, it was surprising Ishiba, one, it seemed like he was the surprising candidate, and the more I read about him, the more I'm just like, "How does this look from a US perspective?" Because again, that's where I'm coming from. He is a big believer in this idea of an Asian NATO, which I think would raise a lot of trepidation in Washington. At the same time, he wants to renegotiate the status of forces treaty in Japan. He was saying how in Italy and Germany, post-war, those have all been renegotiated since they came into place, but in Japan, it hasn't. So I think that would also get a lot of trepidation in Washington. On top of that, he has said that Beijing is a strategic competitor, but we need to engage with them, which the Biden administration is basically saying as much, but I think him being a little bit more cushy on it might not be something that Washington also sees.
And just because he's an unknown, he's got this populist streak. If you look at his background, he grew up in the rural communities. He's very much interested in forwarding rural interest throughout Japan. I don't think Washington just has any real idea of where this is going to go. I think if we see it on the Trump administration, that could be potentially really interesting. You have a very transactional Washington who's a lot of, "You should be paying us for having our forces there." With a Japan who could be like, "Well, we want to renegotiate this entire treaty." It's just going to be a really interesting couple of months to follow here.
Danny Crichton:
Yeah, I've seen some lines describing him as the Bernie Sanders of Japan, which is wrong. It's one of those things where I think when you try to put people in American political boxes, it just doesn't really apply to other countries. And so you kind of have to build up from scratch from different domestic contexts. Ishiba has been around a very, very long time. He's a very experienced, mature politician. This is, I believe, his fifth or sixth run for the Premiership. So he is not an unknown candidate. He's never been gotten into government in that way. He has been a foreign minister of defense and that sort of the argument is he knows the foreign policy, understands the economy, and to your point, is very focused on rural issues, which is a huge issue in Japan. Very small country, very urbanized, but there's a massive, massive urban-rural divide, not so dissimilar from the United States, but one that is much more obvious because the rural areas are only an hour or two hours out of the city in a way that the US, it feels like everything is so far away.
I would put it in much more of the context of Europe's strategic autonomy. What he wants is to have more control over Japan's destiny, which both means to militarize harder, increase the amount of GDP, build its own alliance with Asian NATO, while also continuing to build closer contact with China. And that is the part that I think is very hard for folks to unscramble in the US context of, "Japan sees a better relationship with China as part of, or at least Ishiba does as part of a better, stronger, and more strategically autonomous Japan." And so, those are not necessarily in contradiction to each other, and that is going to be very hard to navigate for either administration that comes in the next couple of months.
To me, you could imagine to your point around Trump, you could imagine him dovetailing and saying like, "Look, we meet your bed. We will double down, but in exchange, we're going to do certain things to Futenma's Marine air base in Ginowan. We're going to make changes to the status of forces agreement. We're going to get all these things in exchange for us boosting it, and Trump might actually accept that. I don't actually, it's hard to know. It's always hard to know with Trump, and I don't know if we know exactly how Kamala Harris will shape that up.
Michael Magnani:
I am curious because I know he's now called an election for later this month for the rest of the diet. Being a little bit more knowledgeable in this area, how do you see that playing out? Do you think that could take away from some of his bargaining power as Prime Minister, depending on the election outcome there?
Danny Crichton:
The key thing to understand about that... There's two facts. One is he's very popular, so he actually has political... Popular among the people popularity. And that is an important consideration that generally doesn't affect your Japanese politics. It's kind of amazing. As much as it's a democracy, the reality is the party elders and both parties sort of get to determine what goes on. And so this is an unusual moment where he sort of is this populace who made it to the top, and so he is taking advantage of that. That's A. B, the fact that he was the surprise winner means that his competitors, both within the Liberal Democratic Party as well as the competing parties in the diet, don't have time to organize around the fact that it's him and not Takaichi Sanae. What you can see is for the opposition, he actually aligns with the opposition very, very well.
He's actually... There's a huge amount of overlap, whereas with Takaichi, Sanae being a little bit more far right, very focused on nationalism and reform of the Constitution, the Yasukuni's shrine issue, there's much more divergence there. And so it would've been easier to win an election and say, "Look, we're a different voice compared to what she would've been." So, he's just seeing the opportunity to take advantage of the moment he can double down. And there is an opportunity to sort of switch out particular legislators and you say, look, I want to get these representatives out. I want my team in. I think he should cruise to victory. We don't know that. But as someone who is among the most popular at election to the Premiership, it's a little unusual to be able to run to election four weeks later.
Michael Magnani:
I was reading that he's generally a good thing for this kind of burgeoning better relationship between Japan and South Korea, which is of key linchpin of US policy in the Pacific. He's not as hard with the whole shrine issue. It could have come up that South Korea would take offense to that because of the history in World War II. But with him, that issue might not come into play as much, and the Japan and South Korea can continue to collaborate just as the US has wanted them to over the last couple of years.
Danny Crichton:
Yeah. And on that issue, that is where the Asian-NATO comes in. So there's been a lot of building up with Yumi Sukida and Yoon Suk Yeol, the president of South Korea over the last couple of years to build that relationship up. That has been both, I think a relatively Demurred Japan as well as the South Korea that's willing to be much more flexible than has traditionally been on some of those issues. I don't know if that all holds together, and that's always sort of a risk in that trilateral. I think it'll be interesting to see when we're talking about this Asian-NATO issue is really the future of the Quad. So the Quad is this new alliance that's been built over the last couple of years between the US, Australia, India, and Japan. And it's meant to be this bedrock in the Pacific. And when you think about those four countries, it makes sense Australia, but who's not there?
New Zealand is not there. South Korea is not there. You don't have the Philippines there. And probably Taiwan is not there, although they're unlikely to ever be sort of an arrangement like this. And so there's this huge gap. And one of the big questions has been, "Does the Quad become some other... Instead of a quadrilateral, does it become some other shape, some other polygon, the Polygon."
Michael Magnani:
A. Quint.
Danny Crichton:
A Quint, depends on how many... The hexagon, we can't call it the Pentagon. It'll be very confusing. So we need to have at least two and get the numbers up. But I do think that there is a question of what's the future of that alliance as we go into the second decade of the pivot to Asia going into the future.
Michael Magnani:
Yeah, there's been a lot of talk that South Korea should join the Quad, be that fifth member, especially because of this new relationship with Japan that the Biden administration kind of pushed through over the last couple of years. But yeah, then you get into that whole idea of Asian-NATO. "What is the overlap with Quad?" Quad is not necessarily a mutual defense treaty. It's a dialogue. And then the US has mutual defense treaties with all these countries.
Well, how do you absorb that into an Asian NATO? So then that becomes then a mutual defense treaty. So it has some teeth to its al organization, which I've talked about with NATO. And then you have countries like New Zealand where the whole reason the ANZUS treaty fell apart was because, well, New Zealand didn't want any nuclear submarines coming into its ports. So the Mutual Defense treaty there gets a little sticky too. So yeah, it's an interesting idea. I think a lot of these countries already aligning towards that path, but the formality of it might be more elusive.
Danny Crichton:
Well, on that note, Michael, thank you so much for joining us.
Michael Magnani:
Yeah, thank you for having me.