 Our keynote speaker this afternoon for our event is John Tamney. I'm sure many of you know his name. He is executive director of Freedom Work Center for Economic Freedom. But I think for our purposes, more importantly, I consider him maybe the best financial journalist in the United States today. He knows his economics, very well read, which is actually surprisingly rare in his profession. You probably know his writing from Forbes and Real Clear Markets, where he's an editor. He's written several books, including one in 2016, which is interesting on the Fed. But his most recent book just came out earlier this year. It's called When Politicians Panicked. And I think it's the most important chronicle of what's happened politically over the last 16, 18 months. It's a very important book. I had the opportunity to read it a couple of months ago and interview John about it. I recommend it to all of you. And I recommend that you read his columns at Forbes and Real Clear Markets to keep up on everything he's writing and unheralded an important voice in financial journalism today. John Tamney. Thank you very much, Jeff. And let me first say what a treat it is to be here today. I'd like to point out a few people. Joe Woodford is in the audience. Joe turned me on to Henry Haslett many years ago. And it was transformative. And he keeps doing this for people around the country through his foundation. So thank you very much. Thank you also to Bill Brennan for putting on this event, for sponsoring it. What an excellent event. Thanks to all of you for being here and supporting such an important organization. If you came to my office or you came by where I live, you would see books by Mises everywhere. And what's important about this is that they're not there for show. If you picked them up and you looked in the opening pages, all the blank pages are full of tiny notes. And very often I actually had to add blank pages to the front of the book to add all that I wanted to take down. And so to read a book by me is to see numerous direct references, quotes to Ludwig von Mises. But to read me more broadly is to see that he's had a major, major influence on me. And so what a treat to get to speak at a Mises Institute event. And what a treat to get to know so many of you in attendance who are involved with such an essential organization. And it's also a big deal for me to get to follow Ryan McMakin and Jeff Dice. They've been so good to me over the years, so open to my ideas. Even when they've disagreed with me, which further speaks very well of the Mises Institute. So thank you very much for this opportunity. I'm here, of course, to discuss my new book when politicians panicked, the new coronavirus expert opinion and a tragic lapse of reason. I'm very interested in discussing this and I hope that what you hear today proves fruitful in a way that causes you to tell a friend to talk to other people, not just necessarily about my book, but to have this discussion. It's essential that we win this argument. It's essential that we influence the narrative. Because if we don't, if we stay quiet, history books will indicate that a virus caused a global economic contraction. Now, the virus had been spreading for months and people had been responding for months. What happened was that politicians panicked. And in panicking, they substituted themselves, narrow, very limited knowledge for the knowledge of the marketplace, as in the knowledge of the people. And they did so in disastrous fashion, which is what happens every time politicians start biting their nails and put themselves in front of the great marketplace that is humanity. So we must, once again, win this argument. We must discuss it. We must talk to people because we don't want history to tell something that's false. And what would be false is that the virus was the source of so much global economic carnage, that the virus was the source of easily the biggest human rights tragedy of the 21st century. And so in talking about this, I think it's important to begin with some of the excuses, some of the justifications used in March of 2020 to explain why the lockdowns were necessary. Easily the worst arguments made for the lockdowns were made in March of 2020. Many of you remember them. Many of you remember the argument made that we have to take away your freedom. We have to take away your right to work. We have to take away your right to run your business. Because if we don't, you, the people will act so irresponsibly that you'll get very sick and overwhelm hospitals that are not ready for you. We must stop the spread to protect hospitals. Have you ever heard of a more absurd line of reasoning? If politicians don't tell you what to do, you will engage in behavior that will cause you to be hospitalized. That you have no incentive as individuals to protect yourselves, that you need to be led around. It's quite the insult, but it was passed around by very respectable people. I think we know people in our world who said, well, you know, sort of justified it first, which brings us to what has to be an even more dense argument that they made. Well, you know, the Imperial College in England predicted deaths of 2.3 million. They had to take away our freedom, don't you get it? That has to be, if possible, an even more foolhardy argument. The notion that without politicians hand-holding, we would just go out and engage in behavior that would lead us to die. The reality is if the deaths had piled up, any political force would have been wholly superfluous because we would have figured out ways to avoid the virus or avoid getting sick that politicians could never come up with. I mean, think about it, what if they'd said 30 million are going to die? What that would signal is that any political force would have made no sense at all. The more threatening something is, the more superfluous is political force. Because we're going to engage in behavior that politicians could never dream of to protect ourselves. We love our lives so much. But see, politicians said back in 2020 that we didn't, that they needed to save us from it. No, it's usually politicians that get us into wars. Politicians engage in behavior that caused death, but they actually had the arrogance to say that, no, they needed to save us from behavior that would cause death. And so the very excuses defied basic common sense, but it became dumber and dumber because, see, the lockdowns happened and then they had to justify the carnage. So they point to the Chinese. Well, see, the Chinese covered up the virus. They covered up a spreading virus. If they had just let us know, we could have acted sooner and contained it. Oh my gosh, they must think voters are intensely stupid. Wait, the Chinese covered it up? How could you possibly cover something up? Now think about this in economic terms, because while most people rely on emotion in making decisions, most here follow market signals as they should. And so I understand that there are deferring views about China and the audience. But what you cannot deny is that China is the second largest market in the world. For the most valuable companies in the world, those would be American companies. And so Apple sells a fifth of its iPhones in China. GM sells more cars in China than it does in North America. Starbucks has 4,100 stores in China on the way to tens of thousands. There are 3,700 McDonald's in China. It's the second largest box office for the movie theaters, second largest market for Nike. The list goes on and on and on. If the virus had been an indiscriminate killer of Chinese people, if it had been an indiscriminate cause of sickness, we would have known this months before March of 2020 and we would have because US share prices would have been in stupendous decline. It would have been the mother of all stock market crashes to reflect the loss of the greatest market in the world, not the United States. Yet US shares continued to hit all time highs. Those companies I described for the most part did. If you go to March 18th, 2020, that's when Brett Bair of Fox News interviewed Fred Smith, the founder of FedEx. This is important because he asked him about the spreading virus. This was right as the lockdowns were beginning. And Fred Smith had a very important perspective on this because Wuhan is a very major economic city in China. And as a consequence, FedEx has a very big presence there, 907 employees. And so Fred Smith said, you know, we've tested all of our employees at this juncture, four tested positive, two are false positives. What's important is that all of our employees are in good health. This truth also explains why Elon Musk was always a skeptic. He had a big operation in China. And so he knew from his employees that the virus was spreading, but it wasn't something that wasn't an indiscriminate killer. Fred Smith and Elon Musk couldn't lie about these things. As public companies, you have to report material information like this. And so he knew from the markets that the virus was many things. It was real, it'd be foolish to deny it's reality. But we knew from China that it was many things, none of them terribly lethal. Because if it had been, we would have known this months before. Looking at the smartphones that fit in our pocket, China is one of the most smartphone dense countries in the world. We just saw a few weeks ago that even out of an economically primitive country like Cuba, that footage of the protests traveling via the internet made it around the world. Does anyone seriously think that the Chinese government could have hidden in a smartphone dense country like that, massive evidence of people dying and getting sick? Good luck, not to mention that we have intelligent services around the world. Does anyone think a spreading virus would have somehow not been noticed? Again, the cover-up is an ex, the blame of China's the cover-up is a loser excuse that ignores the fact that China was our surest evidence that the virus was real. But again, it wasn't a major killer and it certainly wasn't a major cause of sickness. So we knew long before the lockdowns that there was no justification for them. Furthermore, if it had been very lethal in China, the more lethal something is, the more threatening something is, the less justification there is for taking away freedom. And the basis for that is economic growth is easily the biggest enemy that death and disease have ever known. Whereas Jeff alluded to earlier, poverty is the worst state of mind for people. Poverty is the biggest killer mankind has ever known. And just to give you an idea of the health meaning of this, it's worthwhile to travel back in time to the 19th century in the United States. In the 19th century, if you broke your femur, you had one in three odds of dying. But if you lived, your only option was amputation. And let's be clear that pain killers back then weren't as advanced as they are today. Let's just leave it at that. If you broke your hip in the 20th century, you were going to die. When you were born in the 20th century, you had as good of a chance of dying as you did living. If you got cancer, forget about it, you were going to die. But see, most people never got to cancer. That would have represented healthcare progress. And they didn't because tuberculosis and pneumonia, pneumonia was the captain of man's death, killed you off much sooner than cancer could get to you. If you travel forward to even the early part of the 20th century, 1910, cancer was still a distant eight among American killers. And it was because once again, tuberculosis, pneumonia, yellow fever, it was the terror of Western civilization, they were all getting us first. World War I was the first war in the history of mankind in which more people died of gunshots and bombs than they did from just routine disease. And so what changed? Well, what changed was economic growth. In the 19th century, Johns Hopkins made a fortune from the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad and directed 7 million of it to what became Johns Hopkins University. It was the largest donation ever of its kind. Johns Hopkins would start the first real medical school. See, before that medical school was kind of a night school, trade school concept that wasn't about saving lives. There was no way to save lives. It was really about protecting people, easing them into their death. Well, so Johns Hopkins would be the first place where they would study how do we cure what kills us? Doctors and scientists match with precious capital born of wealth creation, which brings us to John D. Rockefeller, arguably the richest man who ever lived. In his lifetime alone, he gave away $530 million. 450 million of it was directed toward healthcare studies matching doctors and scientists with capital so that they could find cures to that which used to readily kill us. And all of a sudden, people who used to die once were living, people were suddenly able to die once, die twice, die three times. By that, I mean, what used to kill them no longer was killing them because they had access to advances born of economic growth. Even in 1950, the biggest line item on hospital budgets was bed linens. And it was because they didn't have answers. Whereas more and more, what can easily kill us, we can come up with answers for. And this is important in consideration of where the debate went. And let me stress in writing when politicians panic, I made sure to read the New York Times every single day. And I did because I wanted to check against my passion from day one against the lockdowns. I wanted the other point of view to moderate mine. What you find is that when you read deeply into the New York Times, they report excellent information. My book would be a fraction of itself without the Times. And so you read deeper into these alarmist headlines and the Times kept reporting something that was interesting in consideration of what David Brooks, one of the columnists said. David Brooks said, well, this spreading of the virus is a stain on the United States and national embarrassment, all these things. But see the newspaper kept reporting routinely that of those who had died with the virus, over 40% of them, those deaths were associated with very old, very sick people in nursing homes. That's not to minimize very old, very sick people. But it's a way of saying, if anything, the virus showed the immense progress of healthcare in the United States. People are dying of old age. Does anyone realize what a modern rich country concept that is? People never lived into old age, but now we do. And it's because economic growth has been matched with doctors and scientists on the way to curing things that used to kill us. And so when we needed economic growth most because politicians said the virus is a big threat to us, our health and ability to live, they quite literally chose economic contraction. Historians will marvel at their abject stupidity, which brings us to Anthony Fauci. That's not fair to laugh. It was not meant to be a laugh line. It was not. From the looks of everyone in the room, most of you remember the AIDS scare and it was a very real scare. Anthony Fauci first came to prominence back in the 1980s and he very famously, as I point out in the book, wrote a paper in 1983 saying that AIDS was a communicable disease that could be passed around within households, just from people being around each other. Turned out that he was wrong and does not indict him. Science is all about doubt and learning from presumptions that don't turn out to be true. What indicts Anthony Fauci is that he didn't recognize the limits of knowledge, that knowledge rarely ages well, that we want to learn. And to be fair, it wasn't just Fauci. England's National Health Service, they put up signs in Great Britain in the 1980s saying that one in five Brits was going to get AIDS for which there was no cure. Many of you remember the television show Dynasty and you remember that episode where Rock Hudson made out with Linda Evans. He died soon after it and there was a great scare among people that Linda Evans had gotten AIDS. Rock Hudson went to his death worrying that he had given her AIDS. How little we knew, which is the point. It's why free people aren't just essential because freedoms of virtue. They're not just essential because they produce the economic growth that creates cures for that which used to kill us. Free people are arguably most important when a virus is spreading because they produce crucial information. As Jeff said earlier, you wanted 330 million kind of competing with different ideas. I come from the libertarian world yet I know libertarians who didn't go into a restaurant for over a year. I know libertarian types who never left their houses. Well, you need people like that. You need people testing that who are just avoiding all human contact altogether to see if that works. Now, we know from New York in May of 2020 that maybe that doesn't work because two thirds of those hospitalized in New York had been sheltered in place but you need the people taking full precautions. You also need people like my only occasionally exasperating wife who in her defense, she had delivered a child in March 1st, 2020. And so suddenly we'd be walking down the street and someone would be walking past us on the sidewalk and she'd jump off the sidewalk. I couldn't, my rage was endless for a brief time but you need people like that taking big precautions. Whenever I'd come home, she'd say to me, if you wash your hands, you wash your hands and she'd make me wash my hands. She was nervous and you need people like that too. You need people taking immense precautions to find out what you get from that. You also need people like me. For me, the highlight of my day during the lockdowns was going to the grocery store. I loved being around people so much that I would purposely forget things at the grocery store so that I could go back. Well, you need people like me. You need people who are just very skeptical of what's happening. You need people like my science denying parents in Southern California, 78 and 80, who had grown up with polio and a lot of things that they thought were truly scary and they said, we are not going to stop living our lives because of expert opinion. We are going to continue. They figured they were reasonably healthy and they were going to continue living as they did to the extent that they could and so did their friends. You need people like that. And most of all, you need young people. You need those young people hitting every bar and every party and making out with every girl and guy they can. They're the most important producers of information of all precisely because they reject expert opinion. And that's not because experts are always wrong but you need people, you need a control group. You need a group that says we are going to do the exact opposite of what the experts say because from then you find out what really causes the virus to spread? What is the behavior most associate with getting sick, with dying? Yet when we needed this information the most, politicians locked us down and in doing so blinded us. Same with businesses. It's not unreasonable to speculate that a company like Disney with very good access to capital markets might have locked down its parks anyway. Just because brand risk associated with becoming a super spreader locale, they may have closed things down. Again, they had the access to capital to do something like that. Whereas small businesses didn't necessarily have that kind of ability to go to the market and basically pay for a shutdown. Well good, you wanted businesses trying all sorts of different things. You wanted some restaurants to say, we're gonna charge surge pricing at 6.30, we're gonna charge half price at four, half price at 10 o'clock. You wanted others to say we're not gonna have any limits because people will respond to a crowd by maybe avoiding a crowd. You wanted businesses that are miracles on their own for succeeding to come up with myriad ways to meet the needs of a customer base that had clearly changed. But instead, we had the very people that gave us the DMV and the post office deciding what businesses could do. Making it even more incomprehensible. Think about this, politicians and experts said that the very humans who driven all economic and personal and cultural progress were suddenly a lethal menace to one another. So they wanted to separate us from one another. And so their solution was, we will pick and choose the businesses you can go into. We will basically shoehorn you through a limited number of businesses rather than allow come one, come all. And so it didn't make sense based on their arguments that we should be separated from one another, but also when you lock down businesses, when you limit their ability to innovate, you blind them. And most of all, you blind the most important businesses, your largest ones to how to reopen. Again, historians will marvel at the abject stupidity of the political class and the expert class, but this is what you get when you get, when you substitute narrow knowledge for that of the marketplace, which brings us back to Fauci. As all political types do, and let's call him that because that's what he is, Fauci is a baseball fan. It's invariably, it's baseball. He loves the nationals. And so imagine Fauci going to a nationals game next year, full crowd, 40,000 people. And let's assume something that many here wouldn't believe that Fauci was the smartest individual in the stadium. That may well be true, but let's also agree that Fauci's knowledge would be a microscopic fraction of the combined knowledge of the stadium. What I've just described for you is the free marketplace. Markets work and they work brilliantly precisely because they combine the decentralized knowledge of everyone. It's not that the Soviet Union didn't have experts. It had brilliant people in power. It's not that North Korea and Cuba don't have experts now. But whenever you substitute the knowledge of the few for the marketplace, you invariably get crisis. And so this is what we get. Politicians and experts said, unless we take away your freedom, unless we lock you down, there is going to be a crisis. Now, what they did not see, given their scarily limited knowledge, is what they were describing is the crisis they were about to create for us. Because anytime you substitute political knowledge narrow for the marketplace, crisis is the inevitable result. And you think about what this meant, not just for the US, but think about the rest of the world. Never again allow yourself to be told by someone on the left that we care more about poor people. This had to be the biggest injustice to the world's poor that we've ever seen, at least in modern times. Because as the US took a break from simple economic reality and said, we're just going to shut things down and run from the virus as though it's going to curl up and fall asleep, the rest of the world, according to the New York Times, 285 million people around the world were rushing towards starvation. As rich people in the developed world decided they were just going to take a break from work for a time. In countries like El Salvador, they started putting up white flags on their shacks and huts. And what that means in El Salvador, that's a signal that there is starvation going on here. That's what we did. When we stopped working in the United States, when we put tens of millions out of work, suddenly remissions around the world dry up and people around the world starve, not to mention the hundreds of millions around the world who were rushed back to poverty, because when Americans stop producing, when they stop working, jobs around the world start to vanish. Which brings us to the job loss in the United States. People know the numbers, the tens of millions of jobs lost where politicians said, some of you are no longer essential, some of you businesses, some of you businessmen who've spent your lives building this, it's no longer essential, it's not convenient for us. Imagine that. I mean, in my case, I'm a writer. And so luckily, my work was not taken from me. I can't imagine what I would do without my work, but I got to continue doing it. And I think of the people around the US for whom work is the animating feature in their life, what gives them dignity and pride. Suddenly they were told, you can't do that anymore. You're a lethal menace if you continue to have a job that gasp as a destination. And so we're gonna give you $1,200 for your trouble. Have you ever heard of something more insulting than that? Have you ever heard of something more insulting by what they told businessmen? Don't worry about that. We just have to shut you down for a time as though market share, which is so hard won, can so easily be regained. Let's give you a check for your troubles. Which brings us to the basic truth that this can never happen again. And how we have to make sure that it never happens again is an argument that many of you probably won't agree with. But I think it's very dangerous that we make statistical arguments against the lockdowns. Even though the statistics may support our skepticism, once we make statistical arguments about, well, the CDC said that 90% plus of the deaths were associated with very old people and all sorts of communities. Once you do that, what you're saying, what you're implying is that there's a rate of death that allows politicians to take away our freedom. No, no, no, they should never take away our freedom and furthermore, we should never allow them to. Never ever again give up your freedom so cheaply as we did this time. And in making statistical arguments, we are setting the stage for future lockdowns because one thing we know is that pathogens are a part of life and because they are, there will be more viruses. And if we make statistical arguments, we're setting it up whereby experts go to easily gold politicians to say, you know, this time is different. This virus is going to hit young people. Well, again, the more threatening a virus, the more essential freedom is. Never give your freedom up ever again. See what it did. Let's win this argument now so that we never have to ever again. Thank you very much. Thank you, sir, Mr. Tammie's agreed to take some questions and answers. We have a couple of mics which will be circulated. Please raise your hand and wait for a mic so that we can get the audio. And we asked for a nice short, pithy questions of Mr. Tammie. So, Hanson, for anyone who has a question. I agree pathogens will always be around, but what about the implications of bio warfare? What do you think, what would be your takeaway on that subject from this current crisis? It's a good question to be clear. I don't presume to know much about the bio warfare angle, but it always interested. My dad had always said to me that if it's so easy to spread something that could kill lots of people, wouldn't they have already done it? And so I kind of feel like there's all sorts of scary things out there. There's all sorts of scary scenarios that we can imagine, but I think it's easier said than done. And my concern always is there's always some really terrifying scenario that politicians use to take away our freedom. And so one of my favorite ones was, well, we're gonna have to shut down flights because, you know, the virus is spreading. For once can it be that something might be out there that potentially threatens us that does not aggrandize government? Why does government always get to grow in response to alleged threats to us as though we're too stupid to take precautions on our own? And so no doubt there's bio, there's all sorts of potential scares out there, but I think as humans, we're pretty wise and I'd rather leave it up to us. The Fifth Amendment prohibits the taking of private property for public use without the payment, without due process and without just compensation. That seems to have been the first casualty of the coronavirus. What do you recommend in terms of protecting those rights given that we walk away from them at the slightest threat of a crisis or of some public harm? It's a great question. And I actually, Jeff and I were talking about this last night because Chapter 17 of When Politicians Panicked is an experimental chapter where I talk about are there constitutional implications? And I feel as you do, I've had that there was a takings. I talked to business owners who basically said, I woke up one day and my business was no longer mine to run. Yet I've had lawyers tell me, oh no, it's not a takings thing. And then I've had other lawyer libertarian types say, well, you know, states have police power and everything. I don't know the answer to this, but I feel like there was a property, there are all sorts of property rights violations at work. Furthermore, I would add, and yes, what I'm gonna add is easier said than done, at some point, we just have to resist. I take you out to Carlsbad, California last early January of this year. Finally, the business owners out there just put up signs. We're in peaceful protest. And basically they realized either we can go out of business or we can start serving our customers again. And so they basically gave a big middle finger to the political class. And I just think that we have to get, yeah, we have to get, that's right, we have to get, take energy from this and recognize that they can't arrest us all. And we need to support the businesses that want to stay open. We need to stand guard around them, whatever it takes, we need to embarrass political types who would take away the right for someone to run a business. And so I bring you also to California, you look at it last July 4th, it was kind of a beautiful thing. Remember on July 4th of 2020, no fireworks shows. And so the people, the state basically put on their own big fireworks show and we could see it on the internet the left said net neutrality was gonna basically cause to vanish. Americans are the wrong people to take to lockdown. We are truly the wrong people. Never forget who we are. We descend from the crazies. We descend from the people who love liberty so much that they crossed oceans and borders to get a taste of this. And so we're the wrong people to do this too. But we've got to remind politicians. I think you made such an excellent point about not making statistical arguments, but how do you talk to individuals who value supposed security over freedom if you know, freedom's not one of their objectives? That's all. Look, it's a great question. All of you, I'm probably speaking to a group that maybe at some time had someone say put your mask on or how selfish that you're not wearing a mask. As Jeff said earlier, we're kind of the minority, aren't we? Well, my reaction has always been, wait a second, I'm not being the selfish one. If you are really fearful of me being out in the world spreading a virus, then go home. Don't foist your fears on me. The selfish people are the ones who basically wanted to take away the freedom of others so that they could feel secure. And so we need to feel secure in making that basic argument. No one, I don't think anyone here is saying that the virus didn't exist. And I don't think anyone here, I would disagree heartily with anyone here who said, people shouldn't be allowed to lock down. What we're against is force, where everyone had to go with a one-size-fits-all solution. And actually that would be my one disagreement with Jeff, agreed with you on states' rights, everything. I love your optimism about more states' rights that there were different responses. But I've got a slight tweak to that. What if Donald Trump had remained obstreperous, impossible to get along with Donald Trump? And this is important from a states' rights perspective. What if Trump had reacted, had stuck to his guns of, wait a second, the virus is no big deal. But oh, by the way, those states that think it's a big deal, they have the right to lock down, but guess what? Any governor so foolish as to take away businesses and jobs as a virus mitigation strategy is going to have me in his or her state every day of the month, right up to election day, I'm going to embarrass you for doing something so abjectly foolish. Well, so imagine if Trump acts like Trump and does that. He's still president today, but what's more important about this is this would have kept him from doing what was so damaging, which was signing the $2.9 trillion CARES Act. I reject the notion that there were states' rights. You see, if there's no federal response, if Trump says, wait, what does the federal government have to do with this? The only answer to this is not to lock down in states the lockdown can face the consequences for doing so. Once you do that, California's lockdowns end in March of 2020. Florida realistically never gets to lockdown because remember, they didn't do this until April 1. Texas was March 31st. The federal response subsidized immense cruelty from governors and mayors. So yes, there were different state reactions, but what we didn't see were city and state reactions if the federal government stays out of the way. What do you do about corporations and educational institutions that are insisting on vaccination as a condition of employment? It's a great question. Like I said, a long time, the Mises supporter, Hall McAdams, ran a very successful banking company. He's always told me when you get a call from the federal government or when you get a call from a regulator, you're really in a tough spot because if you disagree, you'll get a call the following day saying, we don't like the looks of your balance sheet and we're going to do something about it. And so there's the argument that businesses feel forced to force vaccinations that are afraid of the federal response. No doubt that's true, okay. But broadly, I would much prefer if corporations were the ones mandating or nonmandating vaccinations if my employer says, hey, that's a condition of your employment, fine. They're making an economic decision. I may disagree with it, but I have the right to move. The problem is when politicians force a one-size-fits-all. So while I would like to think that corporations wouldn't force this on it, I think that's a much better place for there to be discussions about vaccines. Let a thousand flowers bloom, let different corporations try different things. School's kind of the same idea. If a private school, if that's the condition of going there, I suppose that would be certainly a better answer than governors and national politicians. Would you say that you're optimistic about the near future or more pessimistic? So I mean, is there a silver lining to this in your view? Or should we brace ourselves for just more of the same? No, I'm very optimistic. I'm first of all optimistic based on what Jeff said today. While I think there was less states' rights at work than perhaps he does, I love his point that America saw up close different reactions in cities and states across the country. And so maybe you can see that. So that's a source of optimism. I'm also optimistic because I saw Americans start to revolt. So that makes me optimistic for sure, after which I can't not be optimistic about the United States. Never ever bet against the United States because anything that you think's bad today, oh, come on, it was much worse in the past. Show me the time in life in which you'd like to return to. The 1970s, when it was illegal to own a phone, they had rented from the government's preferred monopoly. When airline routes were planned by the civil aeronautics board, do the 60s get you hot? Vietnam War was that kind of a great time. The 30s, 40s. The only constant in American life is progress. So I can't not be optimistic. And even more so when you consider capitalism is getting quicker and quicker and outrunning politicians in ways that they can't begin to imagine. So I refuse to not think that me, be jealous of the young people in the room. What I would give to be your age because what you're going to enjoy, the living standards you're going to witness will make some of us older people in the audience if we're around to see it be staggered by its grandeur. So never, never bet against the United States. We are full of the most remarkable people on earth. And that didn't change with these lockdowns.