 at the library, I am thrilled to have a Branching Out presentation here. My daughter is three, and was in the first class of Branching Out many years ago. So I love it that Bruce is here to present his Branching Out. And I want to introduce Karen Lieberman, who will talk about Branching Out, and introduce tonight's speaker. So please help me welcome Karen Lieberman. This is a real treat. As Rachel said, I had the pleasure of helping her daughter do an authentic presentation in the community when she did her work. So the essence of Branching Out is writing an opportunity for students who have a passion to learn something that they can't learn in school, either because it's not offered or you're not allowed to do it in school because it's blacksmithing or something like that. So you start with a student who has a desire to learn something that they haven't yet been able to fit into their school day. And then we find a mentor in the community who has expertise or shared interest in that area. And then I try to provide just enough support to keep the whole thing going. And then it all unfolds. And there are many ways it can unfold beautifully. Sometimes it's a super academic journey, and sometimes it's a journey of great personal growth, and sometimes it's both. And in the end of the year, we were in the season of presenting. And I always try to offer kids the chance to do something other than present in a classroom. And in the beginning of this year, when Bruce was scheming what he wanted this learning experience to be, he said he had a long-term interest in the history of US foreign policy in Latin America. And I said, well, wouldn't it be great if you could do something like give a talk somewhere, maybe at the library. And then he's sort of all delighted. And I shelf that idea for nine months. And here we are. And so it is so delightful to have a genuine audience gathered, some of whom Bruce knows and some of who he doesn't, to hear, to let him offer his ideas and his perspectives. So thank you so much for gathering to support this whole concept. Bruce? I want to start by thanking, I want to thank Todd Olson for his support in writing and helping me with improving and editing. And I want to thank Amanda Garces for her mentorship over this sprenching out program. It's been invaluable. And Karen, and I appreciate everybody coming out today to hear this talk on US foreign policy in Latin America. And yeah, thank you. And I want to start out by acknowledging too that right now the jury is deliberating in the felony trial of Scott Warren, who is facing federal charges for leaving humanitarian aid in the desert. And I think we should all just keep that in our mind that somebody is facing decades in prison right now for saving people's lives as they make the journey to the United States. And so I'm going to start off by talking about a guy named General Smedley Butler, who was the highest ranking member of the Marine Corps at the time of his death. He kind of, I guess, he shattered the idea that opposition to destructive foreign policy moves is born out of naivete or that it's born out of ignorance. He was the highest ranking, as I said, the highest ranking Marine Corps, the highest ranking member of the Marine Corps at the time of his death. He was a major general. And he started out with service in the 1890s in Haiti and Cuba and Philippines, very dedicated to the militant expansionism that we saw going on in that time. He participated in rigging elections in Central America. And domestically, he was quite authoritarian. He was the public safety commissioner for Philadelphia. And he kind of turned Philadelphia into a bit of a police state, enforcing prohibition until it was firing a year later. But then in the 1930s, he had kind of a shift. And he began to kind of chart more of an independent mind on issues of foreign policy. And he was actually the first member of the military to be court-martialed and placed under house arrest since the Civil War after he publicly insulted the fascist dictator of Italy, Mussolini. And he kind of retired very bombastically with an article in Liberty Magazine title to hell with the Admirals. We kind of express a little bit of dissatisfaction with the way that the Marine Corps was being run. But then he published a book, which was the title, which was the basis for this, for the name of this talk, which is called War is a Racket. And in War is a Racket, he essentially said that he had worked in Latin America and that he had worked in Asia and that he had worked all over to secure profit. And he called himself a racketeer. A racketeer for capitalism is how he described himself. So I think that that's kind of an interesting figure. And I think that people like him are some of the most valuable that we can talk about when we're discussing this topic, because he was inside the apparatus that was carrying out military operations all over. And he ended up with essentially a militant opposition to it. But we should also acknowledge that foreign policy isn't just history, because this is present day. And the trends of US foreign policy have continued for decades. And we still support and we have supported dictatorial regimes all over. We continue to support fascistic regimes and leaders who very well and very much want to become dictators like Bolsonaro in Brazil. So we need to acknowledge that to be critical of any other governments' actions and activities, we have to first examine our own and how they have affected those governments and how they have affected their lives and then how they have affected history. So I want to start with United Fruit. United Fruit was formed in 1899 as a merger between three of the largest fruit companies in the world. We were controlled at that point 75% of the export market of bananas to the United States. And they quickly became a monopoly and began buying up large swaths of land in Latin America. By the early 30s, they were the single largest landowner in Guatemala with 3.5 million acres of land. So this essentially allowed them to consolidate political power and allowed them to extend their hegemony and their monopoly through the continent. And the leader was a man named Samuel Zemurna who operated United Fruit from New Orleans. He had, by the point that he became ahead of United Fruit, it was essentially unchallengeable. There was no company that could compete, no person that could compete, and basically no government that was willing to end the kind of total acquisition of land all over. So they used their influence in large part to change the course of US foreign policy. Honduras was occupied for years due to leaders being hostile to the United States and leaders who did not want unfair contracts with United Fruit. The workers were treated absolutely brutally during the 1928 banana massacre. An estimated 3,000 striking workers were killed by the Colombian army after several weeks of strikes that failed to produce positive outcome for United Fruit. We're going to return to them later, though, because their role doesn't end, and their story doesn't end. And even today, it still continues. And even today, their successor, Chiquita, continues to fund, essentially fund paramilitaries all over. I think one thing that we have to recognize, too, is that violence isn't and force is not always done by committed by military means. And that we have to move to the kind of understanding that sanctions as well, economic sanctions, and cutting off nations from the world market is violent. The United States uses economic measures as a tool to bully and coerce and control nations all over who do not capitulate to them. In 1959, they imposed Cuban embargo, which still runs today, and has made it difficult to import vital necessities like medicine and food stops. And they continue. They have strengthened it. The Helms-Burton Act, where it was codified in the 1990s, where it was strengthened and codified, is now being applied fully as of earlier this year. So we have to recognize that a lot of US foreign policy has been based on this idea of soft power, the idea that even though they do not have, even though in some cases they're not sending a military or a paramilitary into another nation, they're still committing acts of violence in Latin America. And one of the nations that I focused on early in my research was Chile. And I think that it's certainly worth speaking about, some of the actions of the United States have been in Chile historically, and how they've affected the political life, the economic life, and how they have changed and ruined and ended people's lives. So we start off in 1973 when Salvador Allende is elected as president by the Senate in a three-way race. He was candidate for the Popular Unity Party, which promised to nationalize all large copper lines and initiate a redistribution of land and resources in Chile. And this was called the Buscovich Plan, and it was implemented. And they saw positive economic results. But even before he could take office, even moving back to before there was any policy in place, the CIA was communicating with members of the Chilean military who wished to stop the inauguration and prevent him from taking office and install a military government which they said would then hold the elections now. Declassified documents show that they spoke about core years, about CIA core years, transferring things like unmarked weapons and gas grenades to coup plotters. On one occasion, President Richard Nixon ordered that CIA director give Allende the hook, and they were essentially ready for a violent military takeover in Chile. But there was a stumbling block, and there was a place that they had to address first. René Schneider was commander-in-chief of the Army, and he was a strict constitutionalist. And they knew that as commander-in-chief, he would not allow any subversion of the democratic process, the democratic process, which was described by the New York Times in 1964 as one of the best in the world. So their plans turned to kidnapping René Schneider, and then going on with the coup. So on October 25, 1970, René Schneider was ambushed while he was driving in his car with his family. He pulled out a weapon to defend himself, and the gunman shot him and abandoned the scene. But that put an end to that plot. After multiple gunmen were apprehended and allegedly linked, we'd be reported in the New York Times that they had a lens that they had links to the CIA. And a peaceful transition of power would occur the next month. But there is still the amount of peaceful transition of power talk in the CIA about a coup. And they began to influence the media for killing. They began to write editorials for their largest paper. And they began, essentially, to stoke fears and to stoke aggression and resistance along in conspiring with the opposition parties. So even after the inauguration and the implementation began of the Vyskevich plan, which was written by economics minister Pedro Vyskevich, and was intended almost as a compromise because it had a large amount of provisions had been supported by the Christian Democrats. So essentially, the CIA continued. And they continued to instigate. And they continued to plot. And they continued to subvert. And they continued to fund opposition parties and write for the major media outlets. And they opposed what's now known as the invisible blockade against Chile, where, essentially, foreign aid dropped significantly to the point that you can see the decline. They dropped by hundreds of millions of dollars. They were cut from the World Bank and the IMF. And in 1972, I had to go to the UN, and you would say, I'm quoting here, last July, the world learned with amazement of different aspects of a new plan of action that ITT had presented to the US government in order to overthrow my government in a period of six months. I have with me the document dated in October 1971. It contains the 18-point plan that was talked about. They wanted to strangle us economically, carry out diplomatic sabotage, create panic among the population, and cause social disorder so that when the government lost control, the armed forces would be driven to eliminate the democratic regime and impose a dictatorship. Now, in 1973, that became reality. And his words, we now know, are 100% factual. On September 11th of 1973, a CIA-backed coup would begin in Chile to overthrow the government and install a dictatorship. Salvarna Ande committed suicide before he could be captured by the military who were bombing the presidential palace and a triumvirate dictatorship. It was a triumvirate, in theory, made up of the heads of the armed forces, in theory. But in reality, it was a dictatorship which was completely run by Pinochet, I guess, a Pinochet who had been a close friend of Allende's and who had been an ally to him. He would rule the country brutally for the next 17 years, resulting in an estimated 3,000 deaths by most estimates, committing torture and extradition executions and disappearances. And the United States would continue to support him. And its highest officials, like Henry Kissinger, would praise him and would say that he had brought democracy to Chile. And this continued until 1990, when he finally resigned. But I think that we have to acknowledge again that the United States played a pivotal role in destabilizing and ending democracy in Chile, which is a pattern, which, if we go even further back before 1973, if we go back to 1954 in Guadalajara, Nicol Goubert-Benz was elected in 1951 as president in their second democratic election. He began an ambitious program of land reform, which is where we return to united fruit. And essentially, his goal was creating more equitable distribution of land in Guadalajara. So they said that unused land will be expropriated and the owners will be compensated with the values, with the value that they've stated, the land to be worth. And united fruit didn't like this because united fruit had lied about the work of their land and the value of their land when they had lied to the authorities and they had undervalued their land intentionally and they did not want to give it up for what they had stated it was worth. So they went to the United States and they went to the Congress and they presented a report about communist infiltration in Guadalajara, a report that we now know to be completely fiction, but it worked. And the United States began an operation titled PB Fortune, which had the aim to overthrow the Guadalajara government. One element would be to claim that there had been communist infiltration within the government of Guadalajara. And I'm quoting from their declassified document here relating to PB Fortune, the urgency of effecting change in the government of Guadalajara well, effective opposition still exists. And before the cancer of communism has spread and established itself further in the hemisphere, they say. So then they enlisted Castillo-Armas, who was funded, trained and supplied by the CIA, to commit a coup and install a business-friendly government. By June 18th of 1954, he invaded with a small 400-person CIA trained army. Earlier, the United States had bombed Guadalajara and enforced a blockade against them. And our bends resigned on the 27th, declaring that the coup was an act of vengeance by the United Fruit Company. And our masks would take power, and he would rule for three years as a US-backed dictator until his assassination in 1957 by a member of his presidential guard, who was a black sympathizer under his rule, thousands were murdered and had their land confiscated, land that had been distributed to them. And the CIA spent years following our bends as he traveled to Cuba and traveled to countries in Europe and they infiltrated his closest relationships, noting his accelerated psychological deterioration essentially. There's a document which describes our bends' mental state by the CIA, which described him laying for hours in irritation and interrupting it only with screens. And he died in January of 1971, alcoholism at the age of 57. And this would, in Guatemala, more crews would follow. And this would culminate in the beginning of the Guatemalan Civil War in 1960, which lasted until the 1990s and resulted in hundreds of thousands dead, mostly indigenous people. And the United States made their first official apology in the late 90s after they had funded numerous military governments responsible for carrying out brutal massacres against civilians over those 30 years. And 90% of the people who died in the Civil War were indigenous people. And I know I'm jumping around a little bit, but I want to talk about trade, about trade agreements and supposedly multilateral trade agreements. Essentially, I'm being one-sided and benefiting the United States. Deals like NAFTA have caused losses to Mexico's job market. Small farmers were unable to compete with large US-based farmers who were flooding the market with cheap products. And the Mexico family farmers alone lost 4.9 million jobs. So this, along with other things, has driven people to leave their homes and attempt to immigrate to the United States. And then when they arrive here, they're treated brutally. And they're treated as criminals. And they're treated as if they had any other option. But I'm going to move now to the School of the Americas. Because not only is the United States supporting brutal regimes, but they are actively training people who are involved in atrocities. So the School of the Americas is a Department of Defense institution to which trains a lot of people and trains a lot of members of various militaries. Human Rights Watch noted in a report on human rights violations by Colombian paramilitary groups. At least seven of those involved in human rights abuses, in one case, have been graduates of the School of the Americas. But the School of the Americas assures everybody that they teach human rights courses to all those who attend. Now we move now to Nicaragua and to Samosa. The Samosa family ruled Nicaragua essentially as a kind of despotic hereditary regime beginning in 1936, funded back by the United States. So Anastasia Samosa came to power in 1967, continuing the line of succession. He was tremendously wealthy due to his embezzlement and his family's decades-long crime spree and embezzlement in Nicaragua. And a quote famously attributed to him. He said, I don't want an educated population. I want oxen. In 1979, he was overthrown, popular revolution. And a New York Times article from directly after this noted that the US intelligence reports put his wealth around $900 million. High estimates placed it close to $1 billion. And the national treasury was reported to be close to $3 million. It was that depressive. But the United States began to fund rebel groups, known as the Contras, committed massive human rights violations systematically, where tens of thousands were killed in opposing the Sandinista government. A critical study of human rights abuses alleged to have been committed by the Sandinistas found that there has never been a credible accusation of systematic government condone death squads or genocidal military attacks on armed civilians under the Sandinista government. Despite this, the United States continued to fund the Contras illegally at points and claimed that the Sandinistas were the human rights abusers and that the Contras were the freedom fighters. I apologize for this shuffle in favor. And I think that we should bring it back to 2019, or rather bring it back to the late 2000s in general. Return to Honduras when in 2009, democratically elected President Zelaya was attempted to issue a non-binding referendum on whether he should be allowed another term as president, a move which was entirely constitutional and was explicitly allowed under the Constitution, the power to run non-binding referendums. He had begun a hugely popular program of land reform in Honduras, which benefited many people who were able, who were now able to own land for the first time. And in 2009, he was overthrown in a coup by the Supreme Court of Honduras, backed by the military. And the United States immediately began to support the new government in Honduras, which has now caused thousands to flee their homes, preferable prizels, as well as reversing all land reform and initiating a mass privatization program, which has been disastrous and has now thousands of people protesting it. But the United States has continued to voice support for the under-in-government in their actions against civilians. And decades of US policies are now fueling the crises that they have manufactured, essentially, the massive amounts of violence and massive amounts of inequity have been very exacerbated. And when people flee and people leave, they are met with an immigration system, which tells them, essentially, that they have no right to be there. They have no right to be in the United States. And now we can tie that back to the issue of humanitarian aid. Because the reason that groups distributing humanitarian aid is necessary is because of border control strategies, which force people to immigrate into very, very dangerous, deadly areas of the deserts, which have left thousands dead and which have caused a huge humanitarian crisis. The militarization of the US-Mexico border and the subsequent recent policies, obviously, are detention of asylum seekers. It's all a continuation and a rapidly escalating war against refugees and against immigrants, when the United States contributes hugely to creating these immigration crises. So I think what we need to think about here is why we allow and why we condone such hypocrisy, essentially. The United States is now supporting Brazilian President Paul Sonaro, who has professed his intention to expel all indigenous people in the Amazon rainforest, who has expressed his intentions to become a dictator, and who has already begun cultivating a personality at home and attempting to consolidate his power. So we have to ask, essentially, where is the democracy? Where is, in Latin America, our democratic regimes being supported by the United States? And my answer to that would be nowhere at present and in the past decades. But I think that if you take anything from this, should be the fact that Latin American nations have the right to sovereignty and that they have the right to control their own destiny and that they have the right to be free of aggression and interference, which has continued for decades and decades. And returning to what was briefly mentioned to the Cuban embargo, the Cuban embargo has been in place for decades because after the Cuban Revolution, the government decided to nationalize and seize property that was owned by business interests. But we have to look at who they were opposing. And the United States, for decades, had supported brutal regimes in Cuba when they weren't in, and that's during the time that they were not directly administering the government of Cuba. There's a quote by an embassy worker or by a US ambassador who said, I ran before the revolution, I ran Cuba from the sixth floor of the US embassy. And we have to look at who they were opposing. And they were opposing a brutal dictator, Batista, who was hugely beneficial for business interests and was hugely beneficial, therefore, for the United States. So we have to acknowledge that these, that not only is the United States contributing to and engaging in anti-democratic actions, but in cases where their favorite leaders or their puppets or their hand-picked leaders are overthrown, they react by restricting medicine and food stuffs and restricting aid. So I think we should acknowledge the hypocrisy there. And I think that we should talk about the fact that this, that many of the things that we in the United States benefit from and many of the products that we buy are directly linked to an exploitative process. And that we all kind of benefit from that. We in the United States almost reap the benefits from this kind of neocolonialist enterprise, which has wreaked havoc in one of the most populated continents in the world. So I think in kind of a closing and in a conclusion, I would encourage everybody to read the book, the story of the death foretold. I would encourage everybody to read a lexicotic terror about the Argentine military dictatorships. And I would encourage everybody to think critically about their government's actions and think critically about how they have wreaked benefits from those. Thank you. Oh, in Venezuela, well, what's going on in Venezuela is that the United States is supporting, as they did previously, supporting a coup. And in 2002, they supported a coup against Chiva Chavez, which failed after a few days, but which had, I would say, probably meant in the same attributes. And I think that one thing that's going on there is that the United States has imposed sanctions on Venezuela, which by one estimate have killed 40,000 people for lack of food and medicine. So I think what's going on is the humanitarian crisis, which is largely the fault or largely the responsibility of the United States. And I think that the United States should stop committing regime change. So now I've got a follow-up question. It's going to be a devil's habit. So not just the United States, but 60, 70 countries are agreeing with the United States. Is it the present leader of Venezuela should be over the front? Do we have that kind of system of like, is there any kind of mechanism? I don't feel that a consensus among countries that a leader should be that a leader is not fit to rule the nation is sufficient to legitimize a regime change action or a coup in that nation? No, just not very much about it. What's your feeling about how once the regime change happened and then leaders like Ortiz and the dictators themselves? What do you think about that? I think that we can probably acknowledge that leaders have ended up to be authoritarian or dictatorial. But I think we should also acknowledge that the reason that they are in power in the first place is because there was another dictatorial regime in preceding them. So I think that I wouldn't necessarily go through a list of leaders that I would say are not dictatorial or authoritarian. I would just say that it's still a reality that the reason that, no matter what their nature, that the reason that they, a lot of their power is because of these regime change actions. I have a similar question. What did this happen with Daniel Otega and San D'Avista? It's been a lot of promise when they started and it was a supporter and totally against the Contra. But after they got overthrown and when they tried to come back, it seems like they'd fallen into this trap. Or am I a victim of propaganda against the current enemies? No, I think that there's probably a fair argument to be made. From what I know, there was kind of a sectarian split. And there are members who are supporting Otega and those who are not. So like I said, there's innumerable leaders who I could say are good or bad. But specifically with regards to Otega, there's a fair bit of opposition I know among members of the original San D'Avista revolution. So I think it's probably a complicated situation. And a complicated kind of political dispute which I couldn't make a final value judgment. Can I just talk a little bit about your research process? Because I know when I first saw your paper, I scrolled directly to the bottom to find the end notes because that's just how I do. And I found them and I kept scrolling and I kept scrolling and kept scrolling. And they were like, I don't know, I can't remember like six, seven pages of footnotes before you get a paper. And so I know that you love this process because I saw how your eyes lit up when I first asked you about it. So can you talk just a little bit about where you found sources? Yeah, well, obviously a variety of sources. I found a lot from the National Security Archive which hosts kind of declassified documents relating to these things. And also from books, including one that I got from the book sale here called a lexicon of terror. And from the place where I originally started my research which was shot doctrine by Naomi Klein. So a variety of kind of, I guess I just found a lot of sources and a lot of sources of information and just kind of consumed them, I suppose. A lot of primary sources, so straight from the, you know, many were showing me memos from meetings that were partially redacted and very cool. Thank you. I'm really nice, so I can just say that on the face of it. But in all of the work that you've done, if you put an eye to the future, do you hold any hope for one organic change that might render an outcome that would help avoid humanitarian strikes? Yeah, that's huge. I think it's hugely difficult, especially right now as the United States ratchets of sanctions and talk of war in Venezuela. I think that there is, I don't know if there's one place or one thing that I would put hope in right now, but I would say that, you know, just, I think that the first victory right now would be that the jury would find Scott Warren not guilty for leaving humanitarian aid in the desert and that we can stop imposing further penalties on people who are seeking asylum. That needs to be done. The, I mean, the horrific kind of conditions for asylum seekers need to be ended. And people participating needs to be held accountable. But as for prospects, I don't know how much I would, how much I would stake right now. So where are you going next? Where am I going next? Yeah, like, I've watched that mind of yours since fourth grade and now I'm watching it now. And I'm just curious, so what, where are you going to wander through next? What's the next subject that you're going to really zero in on? I wish I knew. You know, I'm interested in things like journalism right now, so I would probably, I'm probably going to wander, I suppose, but I'm certainly going to keep a focus on Latin America and a focus on continuing the paper that I've started on Latin America, hopefully, but I guess it remains to be seen. Yes. You're obviously very interested in international politics and I'm just curious, how did that start? What was it seen? You know, well, with regards to foreign policy, it certainly, what started kind of, what started me with kind of researching and reading about foreign policy was, as I mentioned, the shock doctrine by Naomi Klein was probably the biggest precipitant, but I guess just a growing, just kind of a more expansive idea of the world and more, and more willingness to, and more interest in consuming information as well. Bruce, after you run for president, can you talk a little? How about right now? So next, after you run for president now, can you talk to folks here about what you're going to do next year at U32? Yes. I'm going to be doing the pilot program at U32, so I'm going to be able to dedicate time to a subject or topic that interests me and that I value in, to earn my proficiencies that way. So I'm considering I might keep the focus on Latin America for pilot, but it's on the side of right now. Any questions? Yes. I have a question for you. When you did your research, did you conclude that taking a job someday at the State Department would be the worst thing to do? Because it's a hotbed of everything you find has been created, because there are some political appointees. And of course, there are people that are career diplomats who are often frustrated with the political appointees who come in and will say, let's take this guy out. Let's put that down. Let's do this. Let's do that. So journalism is one move. And would you ever think of joining the State Department, the Latin American Department, and doing something? You know, I guess I have mixed feelings on that. On that. But I see the value in it. But I think that that would be, it is considerably difficult to affect real change when the State Department, it would be considerably difficult to affect real change when the State Department has their apparatus and their policies and has had them for decades and decades. So I would have to think about that. I'm not going to put my application in yet. I would have to consider. I think you'd enjoy being a rabble browser more than anything else. Bruce, I just want to acknowledge the journey that you came in with a lot of information and a lot of knowledge already. And one of the beautiful things that happened was that it would be able to talk to the man down top. Right. Todd, you had other opportunities to speak and connect with people. This is a good culmination. Yes. But I just appreciate the opportunities you've taken to speak out about what you believe in different contexts. This is also not a flash in the pan either. Last year, at the beginning of the school year, you were doing the same kind of research. Right. You were bringing in the same books. Right. You were bending over backwards because your backpack was so packed with books that you were reading four books at a time. Yep. You were having conversations with people and they were walking away from you because they were going, what is he talking about? And I was sitting right there with you every single second because you had me right at the start. If the interest you've had from the beginning, I'm eager to see where you go. Thank you. I appreciate that. Something to that, when I started working with rooms, they were like, is it interesting that I'm in America? So that was a 65-page paper. So I just want to acknowledge that he made this happen. That he has been the one that has the interest and the questioning and the conversation that we had for very critical of the time. He wasn't making any information at all in the contrary of the book. You know about this? And he's like, oh, yeah, ooh, ooh, I'm sorry. So what am I named for? Anyway, so that's his brand. For you guys to be here and support him and his growth is not something that he needs to have this community. This is really his color one day. Would I be really useful? It's my last parting shot. Yeah. So you will like this in fourth grade. So I was just mental about it. So we had several years together. I would watch him in fourth grade. And you probably don't remember fourth grade, but I very remember. You were going to like this in fourth grade. But back in fourth grade, the other fourth grade is what's going on here. And maybe at times your mother was doing the same thing. And I was the same way as just spoken, but at an early age. So now we leap ahead. And now we're watching this guy. Now we're going into sophomore year. I'm going into my junior year. OK. And so the great part is now I'm watching this thing evolve. And I'm watching this people appreciate this guy's cerebral major. And it's great. It's great. And one more 30 second story. I taught him how to play chess in fourth grade. I beat him recently. Well, yeah. I'm going to get to that. That was the match, of course. Back in fourth grade, he's trying to figure out the pieces. And he didn't like losing much. And at one point he says, when am I going to beat you? When am I going to beat you? And I said, oh yeah, oh yeah. There's going to come a time. Not only are you going to beat me, I'm never, ever going to beat you again. That's what's going to happen. And sure enough, you started reading your times, maybe chess stuff a little bit, maybe. And so we played the last time. Beat you the first time. You didn't like it. You didn't like it. But then that second time you played this great game. I could see it happening. And all of a sudden he says, check. You never said that before. And he went, check. And I went, no, it's not check. He was, it's check. I said, it's not check, it's checkmate. So he went, what do you mean checkmate? And I said, yeah, let's see why it's checkmate. And then he had the biggest smile. Anyway, that's that work story. Thank you. Thanks for your time. Thank you.