 Welcome to the FeeCast, your weekly dose of economic thinking from your friends at the Foundation for Economic Education. My name is Richard Lawrence and we are here today with a larger panel than usual, which we'll get to in a moment. We've got Brittany Hunter, Dan Sanchez-Marie in March, and our special guest, Anna Jane Perrell, who has been on the FeeCast before and is coming fresh off of a successful seminar season. So I'm sure you're very energized at this very moment. We're very sleepy. Oh, yeah. No, it's been a very busy summer. We just finished up all of our seminars, which are, I mean, every week of the summer is we are in some city, somewhere in the country, teaching usually over 100 kids. We have entrepreneurship-themed camps. We have leadership-themed camps. We also have economics in your daily life, which is what we do at Fee. We love economics. We love applying it to everything. So yeah, we've finally wrapped up some in our season and I am so thankful. So it's good that you're with four others because that allows you to kind of play off of our energy. Yes. Give me some of your energy, yes. The children have taken it from me. We will direct it in that way. So the fun thing that we're able to announce today is that you are going to be joining us full-time on the FeeCast, which is extremely exciting. That news is, however, bittersweet. And that is because, Brittany, you are going to be relocating to DC and no longer on the FeeCast regularly. No. I will not be on the FeeCast regularly, but I'll pop in every now and then. I can't leave you guys to have all the fun by yourselves. So yeah, but it's been so much fun talking economics with you guys every week. So I will miss you. And you'll be writing for Fee.org quite a bit. Of course. Yeah. In fact, I learned so much from Fee that I wanted to be an entrepreneur. So starting my own writing business and going to branch out and see what happens. That's awesome. We're excited to see all the upcoming writing that you're going to have for us. And then eventually when the time comes for you to rejoin and guest appear. And so, Brittany, you are not the only thing that is being banned out of Atlanta these days. We're going to have a conversation today about other things that are being unceremoniously let go out of our lives banned without any type of real discussion, it seems. And this is all being brought about by, of course, we all know plastic straws. They are, it seems, all of a sudden no longer with us. And there are all kinds of other bans as well. And these are, this is an interesting approach to take when people disagree with something is to just say, all right, let's go to the government, let's go to the local city council and just say no more. It's all gone. Yeah. Well, we're definitely seeing this with Starbucks. They've vowed that in their stores globally by 2020 that they're going to eliminate straws and they're switching over to these weird adult sippy cup plastic lids. And I don't think it's a coincidence that Starbucks is based in Seattle and then Seattle recently banned straws and they, there was like a whole campaign straw less in Seattle. That is kind of clever. I do like that. However, that clever title comes with a $250 fine in Seattle for straw usage. So is it the person who uses the straw who's being found? No one seems to know that yet, which I think is going to be really interesting to see play out in court because Santa Barbara just banned straws, but they didn't only ban plastic straws, they banned the cardboard, the terrible, I think terrible cardboard straws that they're giving people these days. So like cylinders, they're just banning them like such a geometrical game. But it's just a $250 fine, which actually sounds pretty good compared to their $1,000 fine. That's outrageous. They've also added, it's an infraction per straw. So if I give you a straw and I give you a straw, that's $2,000 or six months of jail time, which is actually 12 months of jail time because it's two counts. Are we also outlawing straw bartering? So if I've got a bunch of straws and you have a goat, can I not trade you for the goat? It's not off the table. Yeah. So is the infraction the purchase of, it's literally just the exchange of currency for a straw? No, because they're not purchasing it. This is purchasing a drink and then saying, I want a straw. And it makes me wonder if they're going to start doing sting operations, like a cop going in there and saying, give me a straw. Yes, like with underage alcohol. Exactly. You know this. We've had that. That's what cops do. And so it's unclear as to how this is going to be enforced because it does sound like nothing's off the table. Well, the interesting thing is the difference between banning the straws versus alcohol restrictions are the alcohol restrictions are directly correlated to the breaking of a law. If you, as a server or bartender, serve somebody too much and that person gets into an accident or they drive under the influence, they're committing a crime. Or if you're serving a minor, technically they're committing a crime by consuming alcohol. In this case, there's no crime against drinking out of us. Drinking a drink out of with a straw. Sucking is now illegal. You cannot suck. So do your best. And of course, this is coming on the heels of many, many years. It seems of banning various things like plastic bags, even paper bags. I was up in Chicago a week ago and it's not a full ban, but I was at Whole Foods. I had my suitcase in hand. I'm buying groceries for a few days at Whole Foods. Before they even ring anything up at all, $0 for the total, but $0.14 for tax, for two paper bags. And so of course, that's not a ban, but this is sort of following in sort of a movement of various things that we don't like collectively being abolished by government. Yeah. And especially not just plastics, but single-use plastics, that that's like the big enemy. That's the whole idea here. And I feel like it happened super quick. I literally was on vacation this weekend and it's the first time I had heard about a stainless steel straw because my dad was talking about them and how amazing they are. And then I go into a coffee shop the next day and they're selling them and they don't have any other straws. And I'm just like, what is going on? Like this world, it came so quick. It did. I had to ask a friend earlier today. I was saying, what precipitated this? Why did it happen so very quickly? And it's being written about by many, many different outlets, including by Vox, not as we're banning plastic straws because we don't like plastic straws or necessarily even that it's going to save the ocean, but they're calling it a gateway ban. Yeah. Gateway plastic, gateway ban, basically saying, well, okay, if we can get straws taken out, then we can get the next single-use plastic thing banned. Not realizing these things are not all causing us damage. I mean, there are good things about plastic. So it's very outrageous. Well, and also in that article, I talk about how banning plastics is in vogue. And I thought that that word was interesting in vogue, but it really is kind of like a fat, like a fattish thing. Like eating cottage cheese in the 80s. This is health. This is what health is. Like, oh, this is we're saving the world by not having plastic. Yeah. It's interesting how many strong feelings people have about straws. I mean, there's people who are really concerned about the environmental implications of this. I think we all saw the picture of the turtle with the plastic straw and the snows. The tortoise. The tortoise. Which is sad, I feel, you know, badly for these animals. But it's funny because you have the people like your dad who are really into the metal straws, people who feel opinions about paper straws. Interestingly. I have opinions. You have opinions. McDonald's, similar to Starbucks, announced that they are going to switch over to paper straws in the UK and Ireland, UK and Ireland by next year. Okay, let's not break that news for the United States quite yet. I don't know if any of us could handle that. No, I would love it. Well, that's another debate. I love paper straws. You guys all hate them. I don't understand. They really fall apart. They disintegrate. When you're drinking, we go down to Ted's just down the street. They have these for years. Do you drink or drink? Or do you hang out with them? You're not, like, standing there all day. Come on. You have to hang out with them. You have to drink and drink. You don't hang out with your drink. That's the thing that's kind of infuriating about the statement that it's vogue-ish or invogue to ban plastic straws because are we seriously governing by fashion? Right. And it seems like the answer is yes. Right. But that's the big difference between cottage cheese being in fashion in the 80s. That's your personal choice that is a trend where it's like, oh, well, banning this activity is so trendy nowadays. It's like, oh, we have this fashion, oh, have you seen the latest thing we've banned? That's just ridiculous that infringing on someone else's rights shouldn't be a trend. Yeah. We used to talk about what efforts we could make as individuals towards environmentalism, reusing, you know, water bottles and recycling if you had a plastic device holding your soda cans together that you would cut that plastic piece up so that it doesn't end up in the wild inconveniencing mother nature and animals and stuff. And so we would just cut them up. There's steps that you can do to reduce your impact. Until we went from zero to a hundred all of a sudden with plastic straws. Yeah. They're going to city councils. We were talking about this earlier that the small city council bodies are getting together and urgency meeting, oh my goodness, what are we going to do, straws? But they're able to do a lot of damage, which also makes me think you can do a lot of good on a city council, but we're not seeing that. All these bans are happening at the city level. Has anyone ever sort of considered that, you know, of course because straws are no longer at Starbucks, they've been a market actor in getting rid of plastic straws at their stores? Has anyone ever considered that maybe because they're beginning to offer these flavored straws that there's like a flavored straw cartel that's beginning to actually get itself into the whole market almost by force? The paper straw industrial complex. Yes. They're here. Big flavor straw. Big straw. Out in Washington. Big straw. Yeah. Well now Starbucks is offering sippy cups, so it could be big sippy cup. They do look like sippy cups. So we're going to take a quick break real quick and we're going to get back and talk a little bit more about these ideas in depth right after that break. Hi, I'm Sean Malone, director of media for fee.org. Of course you already know about fees, incredible articles and written content, but did you know that you can also watch our fantastic videos and listen to our podcast at our website as well? Visit fee.org slash shows to get the latest content from the series you love, such as Out of Frame, Common Sense Soapbox, How We Thrive, the Words and Numbers podcast and of course, the FeeCast. Once again, that's fee.org slash shows for more great content like this. Thanks for watching. Welcome back to the FeeCast. We are talking about that most exciting of topics today and that is straws, plastic and otherwise. And the question that I have now is why are we as a society, as citizens, as a culture now banning straws? What is the impetus for this? Well, I think it stems from a concern for the impact that people may or may not be having on the planet. There's a lot of talk about climate change and I think if we think about our own behaviors, yeah, I probably throw away things that I could maybe take an extra step to recycle or to reuse, repurpose. And then, you know, there's a lot of stories about how much plastic is in the water. So I did a little digging before this episode and I found out that according to Time Magazine, there's estimates that we are releasing about 8 million metric tons each year into the ocean of plastic and microplastics. That's everything altogether. That's straws, it's bags, it's junk otherwise, it's the little plastic beads that are inside your exfoliator. Yes. Yes. That's all of it. There's a lot of concern about these patches in the ocean of concentrated plastic debris. A lot of times it's microplastic, but it's swirling around and people even point to a large patch that lies between California and Hawaii. It's about the size of Texas according to these estimates. Wow. And the visuals are compelling. When you see the visuals like satellite images, it's just garbage floating there. Well speaking of visuals, like statistics don't necessarily have purchase on the human heart, but images do and videos do and there was one particular viral video of a turtle with a straw lodged in its nostril. And how much of that do you think plays into the moral panic over straws? So I was thinking that, and again, I said this happened at least from my perspective super quickly. I just found out about it this weekend. When you really think about it, I feel like this happened in response to criticism I've heard of what's called selectivism where you basically just tweet about something you hate or you post it on Facebook or whatever. I think that people are at least now self-aware that that's not enough. So now we're going to take action and this is one of the few ways. We can't solve access to water and developing countries as an individual. That's how it feels. It feels like we can't solve these incredible problems. But if I can be like, yeah, no straws. I can just not use a straw. I can support policy that doesn't use straws. Being small, I think makes people feel good. It makes them feel like they're doing something in a climate where you might be upset who the president is or who's in Congress and you can't do anything about that because the midterm elections aren't told about that. People are just so tense about everything. The world is such a sucky place right now. Literally I see memes about the world's burning down every day. And I think that this little, let's grasp our little straws and let's try to grow like we can change something. And I think maybe because it's visual and because it's something that a change that you can see in just people walking around, it's like, oh, I don't see people with straws walking around like I used to. I've done something. I've made some sort of a change. But then again, what kind of change? How much of a change and is it actually to the good? And what you talk about how quickly it happened also really interests me too is just the psychology of it. It was the same thing with me that I barely heard about it for the first time. And already it was a done deal. Like already, okay, straws are on the way out. Like this thing that was just part of our lives that you just take for granted, then no more straws. It makes me wonder too. Oh, sorry. It makes me wonder what meaning are people missing in their lives? And it is so important to have a purpose, to have a higher meaning. But when your main purpose is taking my straw away or not just not letting me choose whether or not I would like to use the straw, I think that's problematic. I think its marginality contributed to the snowball effect. It's a marginal difference in our lives, but it affects so many of us, like you said. You see people with straws all the time and now all of a sudden they're gone. And it's a minor inconvenience and we all think about it. We all interact with this object so frequently that I think that's what contributed to the snowball effect. That it's like, okay, this is something we can all really, truly grasp literally, figuratively, and save the world. And I wonder if it's because of the inconvenience that people like it. I think there's sort of a puritanical aspect to certain schools of environmentalism where it's like, if you're suffering, then that is a sign of virtue. Suffering for the earth. Yeah. Sacrifice. Sacrifice. Or, you know, go back to like the 80s and 90s or even just like Birkitt's ugly clothing, unfashionable clothing because it's cool to worry more about the environmentalist thing at a friend's rather than cotton because it's cool. It's funny. It becomes more of a fashionable thing. Yeah. Veganism based on resource management too is like, oh, I'm making my life harder and not as fun so that I can do something good. Because of all the cow farts, right? Yeah. That's pretty much it. I don't want to tell anybody to stop trying to be cool, stop trying to be fashionable, but don't tell me how to be fashionable or cool or whether or not I should use a straw. Maybe empower me to make my own choice. You can tell me about how straws can have a negative impact on the environment and maybe I will then choose differently and it'll be more powerful because I've decided for myself and more likely to stick to it in that case. It'll be real. It'll be, you know, Bostia talks about this with false philanthropy and forcing other people to give to the poor, right? If the person they're stealing that money from to give to the poor has no feelings towards the poor, you're not creating a moral person. You're just creating a bitter person by stealing from them. And again, speaking to how quickly it happened, it used to be that when we would have these moral panics, it would take a while for it to build up and it would have to be like a huge portion of the population who got swept in, up in it before something was banned, before like a drug was banned or but but it seemed like, again, we follow the news. Like I follow the news quite a lot as an editor and yet I didn't even it didn't get on my radar. And so just thinking of the average person, the average person has no even opinion one way or the other about this hasn't even thought about it. But already it has been enough of a groundswell just among a certain elite that that it's actually happening. It's actually being banned. And even the corporate policies that Starbucks is phasing it out and that kind of thing. I think a lot of this is because news travels so quickly too. When you're when you can tweet something you're angry about and then hashtag environmentalism and then everybody's following you like it can happen. But again, it doesn't have to travel that quickly throughout everyone. All it has to do is just a few people. Yeah, right. A few people with power. Yeah. And there are a few things to unpack here, right? So there's the dynamic of Starbucks actually making this decision autonomously, maybe getting ahead of a regulation that they sensed was on the way and leading leading that charge, right? And then having these sippy cup kind of holders or tops rather for the cup, they had a little while actually to consider it, you know, they were able to figure out how to procure these sippy cup type tops. So there's the market sort of leading in that way. There's also the local aspect of Santa Monica and other local towns who are deciding to do this through law through regulation, which we're obviously criticizing. But it goes to your point about people feel, you know, without power on the national level. So they're going to the local level and doing something they think they actually have some sort of say in. And I think your point about sort of social media also is great because we're so divided right now. It almost seems to me like, you know, the crowd that went out and said we need to ban these straws didn't care one way or the other what anyone else had to say. They wanted to do it. We're so divided now that there's no sense listening to anyone with opposing opinion. And that's dangerous. Doubling down on what could potentially be miss or not factual just because you want to be so committed to something. And we're saying that I think on all sides of the aisle. Well, it's populism, right? It's governing by fad. It's basically whenever you get a bunch of people together who tend to have a similar grievance, in this case it might be something about the environment. They come together, they speak in one sort of voice of the mob, and they get something done whether or not it's been deliberated on properly. Well, and that's the frustrating part. I think for me, I want to, A, celebrate the beauty of the internet, right, that we could come together. And this could happen so quickly. We want that. We want the spread of information to happen. It's when it informs us, it becomes dangerous when it affects how we govern people because that's taking away people's rights, putting them in jail for six months for having a straw. I'm totally fine with people being outraged about straws as people, but not when they have authority over decisions. Straw shaming should be allowed. Yeah, I agree. I think that's an important point. A podcast that we, another podcast, Words and Numbers, this week's episode talks about what, whenever someone says there ought to be a law, what that means, the fact that every law is enforced at the barrel of a gun, and every law to be enforced, you have to be willing to incarcerate, to cage someone. Then if they're not willing to be caged over that infraction, ultimately, to kill them. And it's important to remember that, that whenever you say that, whenever you say, oh, you can't sell straws, or you can't offer straws, to back that up, that means. Literal imprisonment, like the real threat of violence. Yeah, yeah. That very worst case, extreme. Peer pressure really should be the way that we go about these things. That's how I feel. Exactly, instead of resorting to regulation as the first method of action, as the first resort, it should be the final result, or resort rather, when things are bad, people aren't making maybe the right decisions, we're making ethical lapses, moral lapses, that that then should be maybe the metric by which we evaluate whether we should take some sort of other action, other than straw shaming. Yeah. At least a presumption of liberty. I would have it where banning is off the table, but at least don't have it be the first resort. Dan would ban banning. Before we achieve the total banishment of banning, we're going to take a quick break, and we'll be right back after these messages. Oh, boy, you know, starting out in the music business or just any business, you have to have the carrot dangling. You have to know what your goals are. I think if anybody goes in without a goal, you're pretty much doomed. This is a family business. My daughters, my son-in-law, my brother. We can't walk away from this. This is not something we're going to walk away from. This is something we pass on. I mean, you're always going to run into the wall. It's just, can you figure out how to go under it, around it, over it? That makes for a longevity of a business. You can't give up. You just don't let yourself give up. Watch Mama Gold Tone and more documentaries about women in business in our How We Thrive series at fee.org slash shows. And we're back to the FeeCast. We are today grasping at straws, talking about various regulations and mental models that we can use to evaluate this latest scourge on our environment, which is the plastic straw, and all of the costs associated with that. Of course, at the Foundation for Economic Education, we like to talk about economics, seeing things through the economic lens. And so my question to open up this segment is, what are the costs for actually pursuing bands on certain things such as straws? Well, for one thing, you have to remember that even if you put something into a landfill, that yes, there's a cost to that. But there's also a cost to recycling, for example. Or there's a cost to the sippy cup. I've heard, I don't know for a fact, that the sippy cup uses more plastic than the straw. And you hear that a lot. You hear that, or like, OK, well, the alternative that we've adopted actually has a greater environmental impact than people realize. You mean the sippy cup Starbucks came out with, like the same, the top uses more plastic? We believe that that's a straw. Allegedly, the internet says that that's the case. We have not tested it in our labs yet, Mary Ann. She would be the first person to know. But on that note, if you look at steel straws or whatever metal they're going to make it out of, and we talk about something more than environmental cost, we talk about actual cost, look at the tariff war we're in right now, what's with metals. We don't know how much those straws are going to be cost to produce later on. And the steel straw could be made into a shiv. I mean, think of the children. I think of the children. Well, I think there's probably a short answer to your question that's kind of annoying, which is there are the costs that we know about and the costs that we don't know about. Because when you make a policy, there's going to be consequences. And we maybe don't know what those consequences are. There's an interesting article on the feed website about plastic bags. And it's by Brian Kaplan. It's called How Are Tencent Grocery Bags Creating a Surplus. And it's all about the California policy about charging 10 cents for plastic bags and how that led to a surplus of them wanting to stock these bags. And so in the end, there were more bags than they had intended. More plastic bags as an unintended consequence of trying to lower the number of plastic bags. Which is funny, because that's already an item that gets recycled often. With straws, I'm not reusing them twice. I use every grocery bag I've ever been given as a trash bag or something. Like it's always reused. Yeah, the recycling is there. It's happening. My in-laws always get annoyed when I mention to them the costs of recycling. And so we have a partner group we work with from time to time called Perk. And they focus on environmental issues. And they talk about how when you look at recycling, it actually sometimes is more wasteful to recycle things such as paper, such as plastic bottles. Because we use water and other resources. Exactly. We got a strip. We got to bleach the paper. We've got to take the plastic label off of whatever. The only thing that apparently is worth recycling and is not more costly to recycle than it is to extract new. Is it cans? Is an aluminum can. Yeah, I heard about that. Interesting. And so everything has a cost. When you think you're doing a good job putting all of your paper into the recycling bin, that doesn't come without any kind of impact to our pocketbooks or resources that we have available. And to the extent that we have property rights and we have markets, costs tend to be internalized, owning a landfill, you have to pay the cost for having that straw. And so that should be translated into the market. But when it's virtue signaling, then it's not really about the cost. It's just about the appearance. Wait, can you go back to the point you were trying to? When you were saying that the cost is internalized, can you explain that more? So for example, that someone who's operating a landfill, they have to maintain the landfill. And so when they fill it up with things, with straws, they have to pay for the upkeep of the landfill. And that land could be used for other things. So there are people bidding for the land. And so the prices are how we allocate scarce resources. And prices create a tug of war for resources. And so that's how we normally determine whether something is wasteful or not. But once it becomes like a moral crusade, then you don't have the very subtle price mechanisms telling entrepreneurs whether it's wasteful or not. It's just a moral panic that, OK, well, whether I am following the crowd on this moral panic, that tells whether it's wasteful or not. So you're basically saying we would know whether or not straws are taking up too much space based on how much they cost for us to just use them. So it might be reflected in this example, like Starbucks, their drink might increase if it's going to be a straw-based drink, something like that. Whereas now we've got this external actor, which is morality or values distorting that very simple price mechanism, right? I mean, that's. Well, it's a certain kind of morality and value. It's a very sort of superficial and very sort of. One step above slacktivism is kind of what I'm picturing is like, oh, I can reach for a straw, and that's about it. So for example, in a private market, people would have to pay for their trash service. And it wouldn't necessarily be free. It wouldn't necessarily be subsidized for the government. So if you generate a lot of trash, and you would have to pay more for that trash service, and that's how the cost would reach you. Oh, go ahead. You could even extend this to littering. If I throw a trash into your yard on your private property, you could presumably take me to court or try to extract money from me. Or I could just pay you and say, oh, my bad. Here's $10. Well, I think you're pointing out something, let's say. Because there are certain communities where the government is charging you for more trash rather than just letting you throw out whatever trash. And I think that that speaks to another kind of a way to think about solutions to this problem that are not outright bans. Because I mean, I think that sometimes we, from our perspective, we are a little bit utopian in that, no government, no regulations, let's just all do whatever. But let's talk about all of the gray areas in between that might be, as economists, we truly want to study not what's good and bad, but what's better. How can we improve on this process? Or how can we improve on the incentives? And I think the market is a great signal for that, because what will Starbucks, for example, had every right to ban their own straws. And maybe if I was a hardcore environmentalist, I would buy two drinks a day from Starbucks because I want to support their efforts. But if I'm not, and I see McDonald's is still selling my straws, I'm voting with my dollar. So in a lot of ways, the solutions are private enterprises taking these steps towards whatever moral or whatever you want to call it that they believe in. It gets a little murky when you look at facts, OK, is this really damaging? But the market does wonders when it comes to private charity all the time. To your point, Anna Jane, about economists. Economists really aren't tasked with determining what's good or bad. They're tasked with the science of studying how people act. And I think to your point, instead of resorting to a full on ban, some of the things that economists might suggest is, or one of the things, rather, is adjusting the incentives. So I mean, obviously, we want to preserve individual choice as much as we can, which is why outright bans or regulation can be sometimes unattractive to us. But I think that if we don't want to do a ban, let's try to maybe think about, or let's talk about the mechanism that's involved in one of my thinking, like, vice taxes, for example. Right, syntaxes, yes. Yeah, we can use. That's still a regulation, right? But it might be better than a ban. So let's talk about the different ways we can. If you are invested in a government entity trying to enforce something, there are still better ways to do it than a ban, right? There are better ways to do it than, to me, any regulation that preserves as much individual choice as possible is always going to be better. Because that puts the onus on the individual to make the right decision, instead of being told the only decision that he or she can make. Better in the sense of less bad. Yes, yeah, that's exactly. Well, I think there's also an important point to be made about the impact of economic development and how that correlates with the environment. We've talked about this on the FICAS before, the environmental coups in its curve, which, graphically, if you look at it, on the y-axis is environmental degradation, on the x-axis is per capita income. And it's basically an upside-down smiley face. When you have low income, there's more environmental degradation. When you have higher per capita income, up to a certain point, you have more. But then, past this turning point, your impact on the environment starts to decrease the higher your per capita income goes. And to the extent that these regulations impoverish people, then it keeps them from traveling along that Kuznetz curve. And it keeps them from getting to a point in their life where they value a luxury good, like environmental cleanliness. And I think we've seen evidence of this. So if you look at the four countries that produce the most plastic in the oceans, you're looking at China, Indonesia, Thailand, and Vietnam. Those countries altogether produce more plastic waste in the ocean compared to all other countries combined. And we see these as developing nations. If we can get them past this turning point on the Kuznetz curve, we would probably see their environmental degradation decrease. Well, and so our main lesson to hope to avoid so many of the unintended consequences that you've been talking about is to preserve choice as much as possible through policy. Because we have public policy, whether someone likes it or not, put the onus on the individual. And so instead of resorting to a ban as the first course of action, actually begin to understand why people act. Think through the economic lens, understand the incentives. And maybe then we can accomplish things a lot more effectively and a lot less costly. So we've finished beating up these strawmen here. We do have one final thing we want to be sure to do. And given that this is Brittany's final fee cast as a regular, I'm going to pass it over to you. Yeah, so just to pass the proverbial baton or torch, I'm going to hand or pass my mug over to you to symbolize, I was going to say, the regime change? I don't know. It's somewhat of a regime change, yeah. But welcome to the fee cast. I expect great things from you. Oh, thank you very much. Honor my memory. It is, though you be tiny, it is a large shadow that I am living in. I'm very excited to be here. I think I love talking to you guys. You know that. If only there was a straw in my drink. But yeah. We'll work on it for next time if we can find one. So thank you, everyone. Thank you for watching the fee cast. We'll see you next week.