 Hello, everyone. Welcome to Fence of Politics. I am with Christian Watson. I am your host, Christian Watson, and today I have with me a very special guest, Mr. Yaron Brooke, chairman of the Einran Institute, bestselling author, speaker, public intellectual, one of my favorite public intellectuals of this day, actually. And so I'm just, I am a avid watcher of his podcast of his show, and I think that his message of objectivism, whether, whether I entirely endorse it or not, I mean, mostly I do, is still very important for a lot of minds to hear and all minds to see. So Mr. Brooke, how are you doing today? I'm doing well. Thanks, Christian. Thanks for having me on. Before I get into the deep questioning and everything, how are you handling or dealing with the coronavirus pandemic? Well, I'm kind of under under lockdown have been for a long time because Puerto Rico is one of the first places to really lock people down and it's been, it's been, I don't know, six weeks now or something since since middle of March. It's difficult. I have to say I've been working harder and longer hours than than usual. Because there's just so much to do. And I haven't been traveling at all, which is very strange for me as you know I usually last that last travel was March 13, when I when I flew to Denver to give a talk, but haven't been traveling Sam and travel since then so that which is very strange for me very strange but I've been doing a lot of things like this a lot of lectures online and I manage a hedge fund and it's been a pretty intense time in the financial markets so absolutely. That's been intense but overall, I'm doing we're doing well we're doing well get a little frustrated I wish the restaurants would open already I'm, I'm eager for a nice sit down at a nice restaurant. I can finally recall you saying that since you believe in the division of labor and services to those who specialize in that you prefer to get stuff from restaurants as you can get yourself. Difficult in a lock down. Absolutely. Absolutely. Well, so I think objectivism and going to the topic which we're going to talk about objectivism and this pandemic and the idea of public health and capitalism. Objectivism in this time is more needed than ever, primarily because the core objectivism even if you don't endorse the entire system of objectivism the, the, the, the systemology the aesthetics or what have you. The core objectivism is a reliance on the individual and a focus on the individual and it was on the individual and during this pandemic. I would dare say that a lot of individuals are being, their potentials are being smothered unduly by heavy handed government action, for example, a lot of people in Michigan have been quite, have been quite rebellious against the governor, Governor Whitmer, who was plainly said I want to protect life, which would make you believe if you're from the natural rights tradition that she has an actual interest in preserving liberty as well because those things are indispensable. But in all reality, she has no interest in doing either of that. The interest that she has is simply using her arbitrary definition of, of, of life and essentializing categories and categorizing all of that and doing something that will appease her base. So my question for you is all of that and this is several other governors have done this on the basis of a very foul foul presupposition in my opinion the idea of public health. Now, when they say public health to me that is a misnomer, because health to me is a very personal thing. It is a very individual thing. Right. You don't get when you go to a doctor they do not estimate your way they don't estimate your blood your history on the basis of everyone else. And so, objective as I'm being interested in ideas about the individual. How, how does objective as an answer the folly ice I would call of public health. How does it view public health. Well, I think as a governmental function, public health for the most part is an illegitimate function of government. I think there is a there is one function of government when it comes to health and that is when you are threatening me because of your health. When you have a contagious disease that I might get. Then it's the government's job to protect me. It's the government's job to isolate you. And of course, it's tricky because what constitutes a infectious disease how bad. We obviously don't want the government intervening when we have the common cold or even the flu. But when do we want it to intervene and these are tricky political questions these are not easy to answer. The only area I think so called public health and I agree with you I don't like the term is a government function is in times like this when it's when we're talking about infectious diseases but of course, what has happened is the government has defaulted on its actual responsibility which is protecting individual rights. Even as South Korea surprisingly, it is the model for how to deal with a pandemic in a way that actually respects and protects rights, no lockdowns, no even travel bans really for very minimal travel bans. But what they did was they did what a government should do during a pandemic. They tested and testing can be done privately doesn't even have to be the government doing it. But then what the government needs to do is isolate and trace trace who you've interacted with warn those people, potentially test those people, but prevent but then isolate you right if you test positive. That's all the government should be doing right. It should be engaged in the activity that isolates the threat. And the threat is you carrying the disease. It's not me, who is just going about my life, and who doesn't have that disease yet. Let me push back a little bit on that because I think you've you've just postulated the idea of contact tracing and contact tracing has been a very controversial point for many people, especially in America, especially those who are the more patriotic vein. And because primarily because it gives it gives government, well, private firms visa V the government governments blessing and leeway into someone's life in a way that might be obtrusive or might be or they can consent it to. But I think the point you're touching on that it to protect to protect to protect general public health or to protect the general protect individuals and individual right individual health. Yeah, you know my view is, at a time of pandemic in a in a rational society. Congress would actually convene and declare a state of emergency, not the president. This is not the executive branch. This needs to be a legislative. You might even consider given that we're talking about trade tracking and tracing and things that that could potentially engage the violation of rights and we're giving the government special powers during an emergency. You could even imagine the Supreme Court having to come or state Supreme Court or federal Supreme Court coming together. So it's not politicized to say yes, given the given the data. This is truly an emergency. And we're granting the executive this very narrow band of permissions in terms of what to do, not to lock people in their homes, not to punish but to be able to see who an effective person interacted with now. And we think, by the way, that somebody who is innocent but who interacted with an infection person would want to know it because it's valuable to their life to know that they interact with somebody who has the virus. So I don't, I don't consider this a violation of rights. It is in an emergency. I think it is to protect your rights. The whole point of this is to protect your rights. And it has to be delimited. It has to be finite in length. And the whole point of declaring an emergency has to be here's the criteria about which it goes away. An executive branch has to burn all the information it has and it and the whole function has to disappear. So very important to the limit emergency measures are fine. Under extreme circumstances. I'll give you another example. I'll give you an example where lockdowns are legit. Right? Here's a real, right? Imagine that in your neighborhood. Imagine in your neighborhood the government discovers that there is a terrorist cell that is about to execute a terrorist act. And they somewhere in your neighborhood and let's say it's within a square mile or two square miles. And they have deployed special forces teams to try to catch these terrorists. And if people just came out of their homes and walked around, it would be, you know, their lives would be endangered. They might be crossfire. They might be put, you know, for the period of hunting down the terrorists. There is a decree that says within this mile, that's it. Not the whole city, not the whole state, but within this mile. We are locking people down. You cannot leave your home, stay home while we execute this police activity. So again, it's delimited. It's finite. We know when it ends when the terrorist are caught and it can't take longer than X number of hours. And it's to protect your rights. It's to protect you and it's over. Right? So it again, emergency situations do require emergency actions by the government, but they have to be objective. They have to be delimited and the threat has to be real. Yes, so that's very interesting. And I think all of that is correct. If there was a terrorist cell in my in my general proximity, I would, I would want the police or people who are better equipped than I am to come in and help me because I don't want to fight terrorists. You know, and that's why governments are interested upon among men, if you believe in the classical liberal tradition. But the primary problem that I see is the fact that a lot of these things are predicated upon government knowledge, right? The sort of extent of this virus has literally been predicated upon a few agencies, the CDC, the WHO and everything and it's subordinates. Well, remember the WHO is not a U.S. government agency. It's not, but it is. I would actually argue that it has. If our politicians, yeah, if our politicians actually listen to the CDC would be in much better situation today than we are. That is, I think that it's the politicization of this crisis. And the incompetence primarily of the FDA, which has prevented the testing tracking isolating which the South Koreans are so good at. We delayed primarily because we have no political leadership. And because our political leadership is much more focused on being elected or in posturing than they aren't actually protecting our rights. Because if you look at the CDC plans for a pandemic before this pandemic, they were pretty good and they did not involve lockdowns. There's no plans in the CDC inventory in the past that involves locking people down by force. And yet they were never allowed to execute those plans. Would you say that by the nature of government acting on something, the matter automatically becomes political because politics is that which concerns government. So I think that anytime a bureaucracy or government numbers are moves to fix situation or to address it, it automatically becomes political. So I think that it's a little bit hard to avoid. Political in a different sense. That's true. I mean, by definition, that's a tautology. By definition, it's political. But political in a sense of today as being about getting re-elected and being about slamming the other side. And are you a Democrat? Are you a Republican? Is it a red state? Is it a blue state or so on? That's very different. And that has become worse and worse and worse in America over the last 100 years. And the bigger the government, the more truce of the government, the more power the government has, the less engaged it is in protecting individual rights. And the more it engages in political posturing in seeking re-election in attacking the other side, the more tribal it becomes. And I think over the last two administrations primarily with Obama and now with Trump, we have become tribal and our government has become a government that is more about appeasing its base. It's more about feeding its base and particularly with Trump, more than any other president, and I think in American history. It's become, you know, are you a Republican? Are you a Democrat? That's the measure of truth now. That's the measure of loyalty. Not what does the science say? What is the best plan? How do we save individual rights? What's good for America? Right? If you really believe you make America great again, it wouldn't matter if you were Republican or Democrat. You would just be focused on what is good for the individuals within the country. This administration, past administration, so it's big government, expanded government, unlimited government really. It's really the unlimited nature of government that causes the problem in the crisis and in particularly in the health crisis. The fact that the government is so involved in our health, in hospitals. Do you know why we have so few hospital beds in the United States? Because in order to add, let's say I want to build a new wing in my hospital, add beds. Let's say I want to do it for just emergencies, just for pandemics or something. I need to apply to the state in order to get permission. And I have to apply what's called a certificate of need. And I have to say why this is needed for the community. I don't know why this is needed for my business. Why this is good for my business. But why I need this for the community, so-called collectivized. And then other hospitals who are competing with me get to file to say why they don't think I need it. And the state decides how many hospital beds I will have in the end. So the reason we have seen a shrinking number of hospital beds is because the state has purposefully shrunk the number of beds in our system. And because remember, the U.S. government is the biggest buyer of healthcare in the U.S. Of every dollar spent on healthcare, probably over 60% is spent, 60 cents are spent by the government. So we already have socialized healthcare in the United States. And that has crippled our ability to respond. It's crippled the ability of hospitals to prepare. It's crippled the ability of insurance companies to be prepared for pandemics and things like that. And we become more and more dependent on government. And therefore, government finds itself in a position where it has to act because the private sector can. Because the FDA is banded in the state, governments are banded in the health. So we're in a position where government has to do something because nobody else is allowed to do anything. And that's what's the real evil that has been revealed in this pandemic is how dependent we are. When it comes to health perspective, when it comes to medical perspective, on government, and we know how incompetent government is when it comes to things that it's not doing. And indeed, if I might add, you've had several instances in notwithstanding government dictates the contrary of private individuals manifesting their own wills and power to assist heartbroken and sick and lethargic people during this time. And you've had charities, you've had a, there was this lady, a professor in New York who actually caught out to China, to the east, or our contacts over there in Hong Kong. And she got a bunch of face masks delivered to New York. So you've had, I mean, prior. Do you know how the first cases of the virus in the US of community transformation of the virus in the US were discovered? I do not know. So it was a woman, I think her name was Margaret Chu in Seattle. And she was doing a study on the flu. So she had this testing kits and she was having people test for the flu. And she discovered people who were testing negative for the flu but had these flu-like symptoms. And she had heard about what was going on in China. And she suspected that it had COVID-19. And she went to the government and said, look, what I'd like, these people have not traveled, they're just in Seattle, they haven't gone anyway. But I think they have COVID-19. I'd like to take my test equipment and modify it to test for COVID-19. And the government came back and said, well, no, I mean, we gave you a grant to study flu. We didn't give you a grant to study COVID-19. So no, you can't change. And she went, she said, look, there's a pandemic. It's in China. I'd like to see if it's, no, they wouldn't allow it. So in the end, and this went back and forth for a while, and then she said, to hell with you. And by breaking her contract, breaking the law, if you will, she revised her testing equipment to test for COVID-19. She went out and tested. And she found the first positive cases of community transmitted COVID-19 in the United States. And she changed, you know, I think she saved Seattle and Washington from a horrible, horrible outcome. So it's people taking their own initiative in spite of government obstacles. Look at the testing. Private companies, as soon as they were asked to device testing, did it like this. But from weeks in February and early March, the government did not allow them to develop tests. It was only going to be a FDA CDC test. There wasn't going to be a private testing allowed. And as a consequence, we fell behind by at least a month. In our testing capabilities, our testing capacities, which explains a lot of the negative outcomes that have happened. The awful deaths that have happened in this. So it is, we, you know, this country and the world, the world relies on private initiative in fighting these kind of things. It's only capital inherently, actually save us from inherently. Yeah, inherently before any government or instituted and all we did was private. Absolutely inherently. Absolutely. Let's, let's go back to concentration for like a few moments because I just want to touch on that a little bit more. So you say it should be the limited. It should be confined to a particular circumstance and bound by criteria. My question would be, would you include in this theoretical criteria or to have you if we were to, if we were to introduce institute this nationally. Would you include a undiluted deference to the infected person's desire to be to disclose their status or not? Because it could theoretically be argued that a matter of individual privacy, the government and a lot of people around around the person don't want to have an information revealed for either purposes of winning social stigma, stigmatization purposes of winning shame. I don't think so. I mean, again, if you infected and again, you'd have to decide how deadly a disease was to in order to implement this and so on. But if you infected and potentially could be killing people or putting them in hospital or damaging them significantly, you lose in a sense that right for privacy. And because no fault of your own granted, but you are infected and you have interacted with other people. And I think it's completely legitimate for the court to issue, let's say a warrant to access your phone to figure out who you interacted with or who you've been or flight you flown on recently. Again, not as a not as a form of punishment, but as a way to protect other people from the potential that you have infringed on their rights. All right. That's a very interesting viewpoint. Absolutely. And amongst amongst the limited government folks amongst the natural, not much rights but individual rights folks imagine if this was a disease that killed 30% of the people that that were infected by it. And that if you caught it early enough, you could save people's lives. But the longer you waited, the more likely was that you would absolutely I think there's a you know, then then I think there is absolutely somebody says, I don't want you to know where being the last month. I mean, first of all, it's not public information. We're not letting the whole world know where you've been law enforcement officers would get that information and then or officers responsible for this particular activity would then trace the people you've interacted with and then destroy the information. That would be the mandate. It wouldn't be put it up on a website. Let everybody know where you've been and who you've been with. How do you find all those people? What's that? How do you find all those people? If someone is a speaker like you and then in a month they've had several speaking engagements that have yielded over a thousand look at South Korea. They've done a phenomenal job at it. They've found the people, they've asked them to self isolate, they've asked them to quarantine, and they have managed to quell this coronavirus completely. It's almost non-existence in South Korea because they managed to do it. To some extent, Japan did the same thing. Certainly, Taiwan has been brilliant at this and had done a very good job. And again, without the kind of travel bans and without the kind of restrictions and lockdowns that we have seen, without the real violations of rights we've seen in the United States and in Europe, they have managed to crush this disease in ways that we haven't by exactly doing this, by tracking, isolate, by tracking and isolating. Look, if I spoke at an event, we know who was at the event. Maybe there was a sign up sheet. We asked the organizers of the event to email all the people who were there telling them, hey, Yuan was infected. You might have gotten this. Please self isolate. Go see a doctor and get tested. Everybody has their self interest to do that. It's pretty straightforward. It's pretty easy. If I was on a flight, we know who was on the flight. They all get an email. They all get the same thing. People try to go to them and get them tested. We do all this. It requires a lot of manpower. It requires a huge infrastructure. But that's what the government is for. It's the, you know, look at war is the same thing. Big infrastructure. A lot of people and the government, you know, puts in the resources and does that. These are the only things we should have government for. They focus just on this. They'd be good at. Fair point. This is quite an iconoclastic view as I'm sure you know amongst the individual rights folks, but no, I appreciate it because these are the kind of conversations that folks who genuinely care about human liberty need to be having in my opinion. So let's talk about capitalism is a role in all of this because as I mentioned before, the mischo in Seattle and the person who lady who reached out to her Hong Kong contacts to get face masks from the government when New York hospitals are begging for the government for face masks and the government said, Nope, our stockpile is limited. We're going to give you about 50 when we have about 1000 patients are dying on the bed. And not only, I mean, they may that is those are interesting of the capitalistic spirit, because in my opinion there is a sort of spirit or essence behind the idea of capitalism, even if it doesn't manifest in the form of transactions or, or or profit producing the idea of the entrepreneurial motive to go out and do things on your own on your own to benefit other individuals and also benefit yourself in my opinion captures the essence of capitalism so free in your opinion. What this not to the rational person convey that that the capitalism that has been vilified and attacked and arraigned lance by so many in the telegencia, so many quote unquote intellectuals who rely on straw man and so on to attack capitalism that it is actually working in it manifest independently amongst each of us individually and especially during times of crisis. We have the ability to tap into that power and exuded outwards to to to you know help further individual rights across I mean absolutely and it strikes me as as bizarre that we need types of crisis to see this because all the values we have are products of individual initiative everything from you know we're zooming now I mean this video conference could not be possible without zoom a company and an entrepreneur and a venture capitalist and and people work for that for that company and their individual initiative in creating the different features that zoom has and so on. And that's true of the camera I'm using and the monitor I'm using and the, and the microphone I'm using and the light that we have where would we be without Edison and Westinghouse and competition between them and and to electrify the country I mean it's all about, and you go and the only reason socialist and communist countries can survive even a little bit is because they steal either the products that and the ideas that have been created in the West or they live off of the legacy of the products and and creations of their own country from before it's parasitic communist and socialist the government doesn't create produce anything and I mean it might fund a university where good things are created my fund a lab where good thing is created, but it in and of itself as a a collectivistic enterprise guided by a gun guided by coercion of force doesn't produce and create and innovate. So, all of our lives around us is a product of some individualistic spirit some entrepreneurs but now wouldn't call it quite capitalism because capitalism is the system, but it is the self interested entrepreneurial self driven spirit that makes, you know, the guy who came up with fire and figured it out and figured out how to, how to harness it. The Prometheus of the story of Prometheus absolutely every single one of these individuals who had a mind who thought for themselves were independent individual independent thinkers who cared about their own life and extension human life. So, capitalism is just the system that leaves us free to do all that capitalism is a very simple system it simply says, we're not going to intervene in your ability to live your life and your pursuit of rational values. And hey, if you pursue irrational values. That's the cost, leaving you free to do that is the cost of allowing people to pursue the rational values. Yes, some people are going to make mistakes some people are going to screw up. But the only way we can let the people who are going to achieve be successful. The only way we're going to allow them to be free is by letting everybody be free. Absolutely. And I think, I think this pandemic has shown that a lot of that the capitalistic spirit I would say and I know when I say that I simply mean the initiative in the drive behind producing things for value. The capitalistic spirit has been shuttered by a lot of we're not sure it's been it's been greatly inhibited by a lot of government. Oh, absolutely. A lot of state governments include here in Georgia where I currently reside I mean my governor Brian Kepi has been better than most governor she actually has caught a lot of heat for opening up the state a lot of the president has attacked him and everything. But I personally I am I am largely pleased with a lot of what he's done. But even even he is still banning buffets he is still doing a lot of things. But businesses and creators they are they are quickly that they are strategizing re strategizing and changing their ways. My question, my question is this though. If even if we didn't have if we had if we didn't have a lockdown, can we not presume that value creators businesses firm owners have an interest and not getting their customer base sick, and therefore would take actions to the contrary of getting them sick. And force distance rules have people wear masks and they come in and maybe have a fever test and or he don't need the government to actually come in and say it's a free society right but we don't live in a free society unfortunately but yes, I mean if you think about it the first companies to ask people to work at home and actually acquire most of their staff to work at home were Microsoft and Amazon, and they they did that voluntarily because they got a call from the people in the health department in Washington state saying look, there's this virus out, you know, you know, it's just beginning. But we need, we need to keep people home and it would be helpful if you took the lead on this and Microsoft and Amazon called their employees and said stay and that was and I think as information would have gotten out there. Some restaurants would have closed. Some restaurants would adjust to their seating areas and they and their behavior, but some would have closed because in some customers wouldn't have gone to restaurants I mean there's no question that the consumption of restaurants the consumption of different products would have dropped. Many are still close to many are still closed despite the lockdowns being you wouldn't have gone to malls mall owners would have. I mean, there were all mechanisms by which voluntarily we would adapt it and the structure of demand in our society would have changed. And the supply would have adjusted. Yes, so. Yes, all of this could have been done voluntarily. But more than that, if the government would have done the testing and tracking and the isolating. If we, we had a private health care system that actually was allowed to ramp up to take New York where this this thing hit really, really hard. And we're literally, you know, where this was a real catastrophe in way, maybe they would have had to have had the lockdowns, given the failure to do this to do the testing early. But if New York hospitals would have been prepared if New York hospitals would have had more beds if New York hospitals would have had more Pp&E, and were allowed to buy more Pp&E in the market and pay the market prices, if people were allowed to gouge, I mean, one of the essential things that has to happen in a crisis is price gouging price gouging is good for a crisis 100% if all this was allowed to actually happen, then you would have seen that the response of capitalism to this free people free initiative, and the price mechanism and the system of supply and demand, the adjustment of supply and demand would have been a beautiful thing and it would have coped with us. Yes, far far better than the pathetic centrally planned response that we have seen throughout this country and really throughout the world. A cat a casualty of the of the capitalists, not not the capitalist of the of the of the subversion of the capitalistic system, in my opinion, was the oil prices I'm sure you as a hedge fund manager you know the oil prices dropped to $0 and that negative Yeah, precisely. I want to talk about that. So, and this will be our last question before we wrap up. Sure. It was funny to me not the effects of it are certainly not funny. They're not funny at all. But what was funny was that you had these firms trying to subsidize people to get the oil off off of out of their storages by subsidizing the cost of shipping and all that kind of stuff. But, in my opinion, that absolutely rejected the fundamental idea that undergirds every single interaction that is personal values. Right now, from what I understand firms don't really value oil right now they value the health of their employees and their safety. And so that is this fundamental sort of misrecognize inability to see that value matters undergirds interactions is that has that been magnetized and amplified under the coronavirus situation. And if so, do you think that firms who are who endeavor to get oil off the off their storages should should what should they do in your opinion. Well, look, I think that the whole way in which we approach economic issues, including oil today is collectivized in his view to collective lens, not the view of individualistic lens. The whole oil crisis, there would have been an oil crisis anyway but the whole oil crisis was exacerbated by the fact that much of all supply is provided by states and not by a competitive, you know, corporate driven market. The fact that Saudi Arabia and Russia and OPEC can negotiate and rather than have imagine a Saudi Arabia was owned by a variety of different private companies as it should be. Imagine if Russian oil was owned by a variety of different Russian enterprises, then you know the market would determine what actually happened in the market what actually happened in the market because of coronavirus and because of the shutdowns and because of everything else is the man for oil plummeted. That is how the value of oil to us today basis decline because we had no use for it. I'm not driving anyway. Right. And, you know, so it's, it's actually and of course there's less production going on so there's less need for energy to drive the economy. So the demand plummeted. And instead of the supply adjusting, which is what usually happens right demand plummets prices go down. People shut down production supply so supply is reduced and then prices bounce up until they reach equilibrium. Right. Something like that typically happens what happened here is for political reasons for reason and have nothing to do with supply and demand. The Saudis and the Russians kept pumping and kept lowering the prices lower and lower and lower makes no sense the wall of what demand actually demand. And that what that happened then is because there's no demand, but people are still producing, which is not the way our market works. What happened was inventories kept going larger and larger and larger storage facilities kept getting full and it reached the point where people were expecting delivery of oil and they had no way to put it. They couldn't take delivery of it. Right. So they basically said the people who are going to deliver it, keep it. I'll pay you to keep it because I don't have any way to put it. Now that is an example of a market breaking down, but not breaking down for any market driven reason breaking down because of the wall. And remember, this is also the time where Trump is trying to negotiate a deal with the Saudis and and the Russians. And for somebody who is being hyped as a great deal maker, he's one of the most pathetic deal makers. Oh my Lord. He used to the Democrats every single time. I know you're correct. He used to the North Koreans. And in this case he caved to the Saudis and the Russians. So all of this politicization of oil, you know, created a situation where the market couldn't price oil well. It created this this breakage of the oil market. But that's politics. That's not economics. Absolutely. Absolutely. And I think that if these, if these governments recognize the fundamental nature of human value and that humans tend to value things that are proportional to the circumstance that they have, they this situation would have been well they would have shot themselves because they are both Italian governments that are anti human life, anti individualism, anti markets, anti capitalism. And if they actually valued human life, the first thing they would do would be to commit mass suicide because they're very existence, the King of Saudi Arabia. I thought we got rid of King's hundreds of years ago or the or the dictator of Russia should not exist. Capital, you know, they should privatize the economies and get out of the way they should disappear into the sunset. Give back the money they stole from their people, by the way. I appreciate your very irreverent views, Mr. Mr. Brook. They are always nice and they're well needed in this in this time. Thank you so much for coming on the show. I hope I can get back in the future. Thank you so much for having me on and stay healthy and stay safe. Absolutely. Have a nice day, everyone. Thanks. Bye.