The Obligations of American Citizens, With Richard Haass

LINDSAY:
Welcome to The President's Inbox, a CFR podcast about the foreign policy challenges facing the United States. I'm Jim Lindsay, director of Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. This week's topic is the obligations of American citizens.

With me to discuss what obligations Americans have as citizens is Richard Haass. Richard is, as I suspect most listeners to The President's Inbox know, the president of the Council on Foreign Relations. He is an experienced diplomat and policymaker, having served under four presidents, three Republican, one Democrat, in a variety of positions in the Defense Department, the State Department and the White House. He is also a prolific author, having written or edited sixteen books and more articles and essays than I can count. His newest book, The Bill of Obligations: The Ten Habits of Good Citizens, hit the bookstore shelves today. Richard, congratulations on The Bill of Obligations, and thank you for joining me.

HAASS:
Thank you, Jim. But just in case there's any confusion, the show is called The President's Inbox, not this president, the real one.

LINDSAY:
Correct. The President of the United States. And let's talk a little bit about American democracy, and I'm curious. You have spent your career studying, practicing, writing, and speaking about American foreign policy. My bookshelves are groaning under the weight of the various books you have written. Some have been bestsellers, like The World: A Brief Introduction and A World in Disarray. I would've thought that your newest book would've been about something like great power competition with China or how technology is rewriting world order. So why write a book that's fundamentally about American democracy?

HAASS:
What you thought would be the case, that makes two of us. If you had asked me five or ten years ago would I ever write the sort of book I've just written, I would've said no. I would've been surprised by the question. What led to this was the fact that when I do go out and talk about the sort of stuff you would think the president of the Council on Foreign Relations would talk about given the books I've traditionally written, the question inevitably would come up after I'd done with my opening remarks. And people would say, "Well, what are you most worried about? What most keeps you up at night? Is it China? Is it Russia, North Korea? Al-Qaeda? Climate change," what have you. And increasingly, my answer was, "Look, all those things bother me. All those things worry me. But what really keeps me up is us and whether we are going to be sufficiently united as a country in order to act effectively both at home and abroad."

And if you think of national security as a coin with two sides, one side is foreign policy, one side is domestic, it's maybe not as far-fetched as it sounds. So I said, "Look, if I'm giving that answer to that question about what worries me most, then it seems to me incumbent on me to write the book about, well, how did I come to that conclusion? What might we do about it?" So that explains how I got here.

LINDSAY:
Well, let's talk about that, then, because you write in the preface, and let me quote you here, "Our democracy is in peril." Is it? I ask because it was only a couple of months ago that we had congressional midterm elections. In the wake of the elections, I read a lot of positive, upbeat pieces about how American democracy was doing well. The candidates who lost conceded the election. In a variety of critical races for Secretary of States and at the state level, those candidates who denied the election and wanted to suppress voters' rights all lost. So isn't it the case that we had a storm but we've now weathered it?

HAASS:
The short answer is no. I think what happened at the midterms measured by what you raised in terms of the implications for this country's democracy, I think it was a good day. And that's not a policy or partisan comment. It's simply that, as you pointed out correctly, most of the election deniers lost at the polls. But my take on it was more that American democracy would live to fight or be challenged another day. If you look at what's happened subsequently in the House of Representatives, it was not a reassuring spectacle. Some of the people being assigned to some of the more important committees, including Homeland Security, were involved on January 6th. So no, we're not out of the woods. We used to say, Jim, when I would study or write about Latin America that it took at least a generation, multiple rotations of power, where the military would stay in the barracks in order to feel pretty good about a Latin American democracy.

I'm not suggesting the military's going to come out of the barracks here and get involved in politics. To the contrary, I actually think the military's emerged as one of the principal guardians of American democracy. But I think the larger point holds that it's way too soon to feel sanguine, way too soon to basically say the worst is behind us, what happened on January 6th was a one-off, way too soon to think that Republicans and Democrats are going to be able to govern effectively. I would think somewhere in the next few months, we're going to face serious challenge, say, on the debt ceiling. We could face serious challenge on aid to Ukraine. It's a long list of questions. So I have a set of concerns from our ability to govern ourselves, to put into place the measures that would make us safe, that would make us competitive. But I also worry more fundamentally about whether our differences could, again, bring us to the brink of violence.

LINDSAY:
I want to talk about some of those policy issues like the debt ceiling, Ukraine policy and the like. But before we do that, Richard, I want to drill down on the topic of your book because you have titled it The Bill of Obligations. Everyone's familiar with the Bill of Rights. It refers to the first ten amendments to the U.S. Constitution. Much of our political debate speaks about rights, gun rights, privacy rights, civil rights. Why did you decide to write a book about obligations?

HAASS:
Because as important as rights are, they're not everything. The democracy to succeed must rest on a foundation of more than rights. And don't get me wrong. I say this with some anticipation I will be misunderstood. The situation about rights in this country is not perfect. Abraham Lincoln, who couldn't be with us today on your podcast unfortunately, talked about the unfinished work of this country. Well, it remains unfinished and in some ways always will. And it's healthy that we have these debates about economic rights and political rights and the various ways to satisfy them, but it's also true that it will prove impossible to resolve these matters in a way in which everyone's going to come away happy. How does one balance the rights of the mother versus the rights of the unborn; someone's right to bear arms with someone else's right for public safety; during the pandemic, someone's right to feel healthy or be healthy, someone else's right not to get vaccinated or not to wear a mask? We could go on and on. And my view is that if we only talk about rights, we'll very much quickly get into our respective end zones, if I may be allowed a football metaphor. At best, we'll have gridlock, and at worst, potentially we would have violence.

So I've been thinking a lot about, okay, if the problem can't be resolved by simply talking about rights, what would it take? And that's where obligations kicked in. And there's a whole literature in various religions and philosophy that rights alone are not the basis of a social compact. You have to have a sense of obligations, what you and I owe each other as citizens, also what we owe our country. If you take JFK's inaugural address, "Ask not what your country can do for you, what you can do for your country." Well, my view is a lot of that's been lost. So again, I'm not overlooking the fact that our rights are not necessarily for all Americans what they should and need to be, but democracy can't just be about rights. It's got to include what we owe one another and what we owe this country if this democracy is to work.

LINDSAY:
I take your point that to say obligations matter is not to say that rights don't or that they're unimportant. I'm curious, though, Richard, why you think we've lost sight of our sense of obligations that we owe something to others in our political community?

HAASS:
It's a really good question, and it's one I wrestled with when I wrote the book. I've got several potential answers. Jim, I'd be curious in your reaction because I do think we've become more self-centered and selfish in some ways as a society. One reason is we have fewer and fewer common experiences. There was a time of, say, the greatest generation when everybody went off to war, or in subsequent generations, a lot of people went into the military. But now we don't have that. We have an all-volunteer force, and most Americans never get near it. So there's fewer common experiences there, where people from different classes, different geographies, different religions come together. I think that's part of it. I think we all have also increasingly decided where we want to get our information. So whether it's this or that cable channel or this or that social media site, increasingly, we gravitate towards places we feel comfortable with rather than hear different or opposing views. I think that is part of it.

I think the fact that in our schools, you can graduate from most high schools and almost any university and not be exposed to basics of what made this country this country, our history, our civics, almost our DNA, not be exposed to it. I think that's particularly responsible because this is a country, as you know, that wasn't founded on race. It wasn't founded on a religion. It was founded on an idea. We didn't always live up to those ideas or ideals. I get it. But that was still the basis of this country. And indeed, you referred to the first ten amendments. Well, that's part of it, that we were not going to have a religion established in this country that all Americans had to sign up to. So I think there's any number of reasons from how we live our lives to how we educate or don't educate ourselves to the role of traditional media and social media.

But we've come a long way from a society where we had an awful lot of overlaps, and as a result, we tend not to think of one another. It may also be, one other possibility, there's a lot of Americans are unhappy. They feel the government or the country isn't looking out for them, so they no longer feel obligations. At a time of rising inequality, for example, a lot of people feel that somehow it's always the other guy who's been helped. They haven't been helped, and as a result, there's much less feeling of responsibility to one's brother or sister.

LINDSAY:
I agree with you that it's a complicated dynamic, and it probably has many factors causing it. I do think that we have this self-sorting taking place. We see it most obviously in the intense differences between red and blue states, and there are lots of things driving that whole sorting process. But let's go back to your point about obligations. You lay out ten, and we're not going to have time to go through each and every one of them. Maybe where we could start is where you begin, which is the obligation to be informed. And I guess what I wonder is, what do you mean by that? But second off, how does somebody keep informed when there is just so much information out there? We are considered to be experts in foreign policy. We know a lot more than the average person does, but we're often learning new things that we hadn't seen before just because the subject matter is so expansive. So when you tell people they should be informed, how do they go about doing, and how do they know when they have enough?

HAASS:
It is the first of the obligations I put out, and I think it's because in some ways it is foundational. I want people to be involved, but I want them to be involved in an informed way. And I could go down the list. So I think being informed is essential. Some of it is basic. We just alluded to things like the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Federalist Papers, if you will, at the risk of the founding documents that are foundational. I think all Americans should be exposed to that sort of thing. But in order to stay up on what's going on, in order to say, "What do I think about this issue? What do I think about this policy choice? Should I support candidate A or B, as a result," in order to know, if you will, almost how to vote, how to get involved politically, you've got to be informed.

I would simply say there's a couple of ground rules. One is that there's no one-stop shopping. The best thing people can do is not single source information. A single radio station, a single website, a single cable channel is just a bad idea. When I used to go to the gym and work out on the elliptical, I used to divide my time up. I had ten minutes at MSNBC, ten minutes on Fox and ten minutes on CNN. And if I were feeling particularly ambitious, I'd add a few minutes on ESPN. I read a couple of newspapers every day. I think it's important to get a variety of sources. And also, if you are going to narrow it down and understand most people will need to because they don't have the time they would want, make sure it's a serious source. Facebook is not a serious source of information.

LINDSAY:
But that's also the place where most people get their news.

HAASS:
Facebook, TikTok, but these are places without gatekeepers. These are places without editors. It's called social media. That should tell people something. It is social. It is for fun. It is not a substitute for serious media, for getting information, be it out of a classroom, out of a reputable newspaper, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times out of certain magazines like The Economist. I think, again, social media should be seen as a side thing, not as your main diet. And again, I would say go to more than one place, and it's not a bad idea to go to a place that you don't necessarily agree with, where you're going to hear some ideas that may make you a little bit uncomfortable, may challenge some of your own opinions. There's worse things than being challenged.

LINDSAY:
Well, that gets back to what we were just discussing in terms of this big sore. Technology makes it possible for you to just hear what you want to hear. Twitter now has a new device. It's called For You, which seems to be trying to figure out what you want to hear as opposed to what you might need to hear. And this seems to be an endemic feature of all social media.

HAASS:
It's a terrible idea. It's a little bit like when you go on Amazon and they've seen that you've been shopping for vacuum cleaners and they show you a lot of vacuum cleaners. Okay, well, that's okay because you're probably in the merchandise moment. But the idea that you would be fed ideas that seem to reinforce your own predilections, I can't think of a worse idea. We're all ready too dug in as individuals and collectively. So I think on my scale of pernicious ideas, that might be fairly high.

LINDSAY:
Well, I'm glad you mentioned a particular word, and that's gatekeepers because there is something to be said for people who actually know something about a topic weeding out falsehoods and lies. But I think it's fair to say that there are a lot of Americans out there who are deeply distrustful of gatekeepers. They argue that experts are often certain or always certain, but also often wrong. So how do you tell people to think about expertise because, again, we can all find examples in which the experts got it wrong? In the foreign policy space, the invasion of Iraq might lead the list. And I want to note you worked in the Bush administration. You were not a proponent of the invasion of Iraq. I want that on there for the record. But obviously, as you know, you've been in a lot of these conversations, people will say, "But what about Iraq," as if that's supposed to stop the conversation and discredit an expert.

HAASS:
Look, experts aren't always right, and Iraq is a good example where I think history will show... Indeed, you don't even have to wait for history. It's already shown that many of the experts were wrong, and that's a different conversation for your show about why did so many smart people get it wrong. We're coming up on the twentieth anniversary of that war, so I expect there will be more than enough time to go down that path. But I think for individuals, it's important to distinguish or discriminate between what are facts, what are assessments, what are opinions, what are recommendations, what are predictions to understand exactly what you're dealing with. I think that is a good place to start. And when there is an overwhelming expert position, not on what should be done, but what the facts are, that should tell you something.

For example, take an issue like climate change. There might be, and indeed there are, broad disagreements about what's the right policy, but you can't have a disagreement that the average temperature of the earth has gone up by just over one degree centigrade, just over two degrees Fahrenheit, since the onset of the industrial age. That's a fact. Now, we could have some potential debate, I suppose, about how we got to that point, though I think it's pretty clear from the evidence. I think there are some very real policy choices to be made going forward about what the trade-offs are. But it's very hard in a democracy, if not impossible, to have a serious conversation about policy choices. Let's say the debt. We're coming up on, what, $31, $32 trillion worth of debt in this country. That's a fact. Now, the question of how we ought to react to that, what we ought to do about it, about spending and the like about taxation, that's what politics were invented for, to deal with the very real, very difficult policy choices. But you can't get to that conversation if you somehow don't have a common basis of facts.

LINDSAY:
I'm glad you raised the issue of debt because it leads naturally into one of your other obligations you cite, which is stay open to compromise. And just last week, the United States hit the debt ceiling. There's now talk about what needs to be done to get Congress to agree to raise the debt ceiling. We have Republicans, now majority in the House, saying they intend to use the fact that their consent is needed to raise the debt ceiling to extract major concessions on spending. They argue this is something that is necessary for the country. The response of Democrats and from the White House has been, "We have no intention of negotiating on the debt ceiling. It would be irresponsible to do so. We have already spent this money. We need to pay it." Not raising the debt ceiling would do great harm to the American economy. And I've heard it likened to, in essence, holding the American economy and people's jobs hostage. That doesn't sound like the grounds for coming to compromise. So how do you know when it is that you should be compromising and when it is that you're supposed to stand firm?

HAASS:
Look, it's a question we all have to ask ourselves individually and collectively. My view is you want to stand firm on the big principles, the basics, and you've obviously got to be flexible on the details. Sometimes it's worth taking one slice of a loaf in order to get going on something. Maybe down the road you can get a few more slices, but if you insist on an all-or-nothing approach, you're probably going to have a lot of nothing in your life. And that's one of the problems circling back to what you raised with the debt debate. We do have too much debt in this country. People like me have been saying that for a long time. And we said, "When the day comes, and it will come, that interest rates go up, that's going to suddenly get very, very expensive." And that's a dangerous place to be.

LINDSAY:
It's already getting expensive right now with interest rates going up.

HAASS:
100 percent. So we've got that reality, and we can argue whether there's a case to be made for more discriminate spending. And I think there the question would say, "Okay, well on what?" But as my mother used to say, "There's a time and place for everything," and the time and place for dealing with spending is not dealing with the debt ceiling. We should just settle the debt ceiling because it only deals with past spending. And then we should have a separate serious conversation about taxes and spending going forward. I think there's potentially room for compromise, but I think to hold the country hostage, to hold our economy hostage, to hold our position in the world hostage to this is simply reckless. We'll see how this pans out over the next six months, but I am worried, quite honestly. What is being said and trained is so dug in that we could end up really hurting ourselves and hurting a lot of Americans. And again, don't get me wrong. I'm worried about the debt. I think we need to have a serious conversation about spending and taxes. We never should have gotten ourselves into the position we're in, but there's always the potential I've learned in life to make bad situations worse, and we may be at one of those points.

LINDSAY:
What is it that I've heard you say before? "It's always darkest before it goes totally black."

HAASS:
Yeah, situations have to get worse before they get even worse. We're about to prove that, I fear.

LINDSAY:
Things don't have to get better. Well, let's talk about one other of your obligations, and I raise it because there has been growing concern about this. And it is the obligation to reject violence, and there have been a series of public opinion polls done showing somewhere between 10 percent and 25 percent Americans believe that in some circumstances using violence against government is justified. We obviously have January 6th, which I would describe as an insurrection, but I recognize there are other people who would just say it was a protest that got out of hand. How should we think about this issue of violence in American politics because for much of American history, not all of American history, we have been able to avoid the bane of political violence?

HAASS:
It's actually been one of the great comparative advantages of the United States that, with the principal exception of the Civil War, we've avoided what you might call politically motivated violence. It's hard to say how important that is. The rule of law, the ability of students to go to school, people to go shop, people to go to their businesses, what have you, that's the basics of American life. I spent three years as the U.S. envoy to Northern Ireland, and before I got heavily involved, you had three decades of what were called the Troubles in which several thousand people lost their lives and daily life was for many people in Northern Ireland essentially ruined. I don't want to see that happen here. I'm not worried about a North versus South civil war, a redux of what happened in the middle of the 19th century. I am worried about widespread, increasingly frequent, politically-inspired violence.

We have more than one gun in this country for every person in this country. Even if only a tiny percentage of people began to use force on behalf of political aims, it would be horrific in its consequences. And January 6th ought to have shocked us out of the complacency that it couldn't happen here. Well, the answer is it could happen here. We talked about social media before. Social media became a mechanism where various people could communicate with one another almost as networks rather than as formal groups. So we're vulnerable. I take this seriously. Regardless of your views on policy, this is where religious leaders, teachers, parents and others ought to weigh in and basically say, "It's not justified to use violence on behalf of your political agendas," because if that were to become commonplace, every single American would lose. You know that old line about war? In war, there are no winners. Just some lose less than others. That would be true of American society. So we've really got to de-legitimize any use of force.

The good news in a democracy is you have mechanisms for advancing political agendas. Indeed, when I've been involved in peace processes, one of the principle arguments I used around the world is the resort to arms will get you nowhere, but you have an alternative, whether it's through legislatures or referendum, whatever. We have this established alternative in the United States, and we've had it for nearly two and a half centuries. Now, part of our challenge is to make that alternative work. Americans have to see that the political system is a place where you can get things done. I would say too often it's not, but the reaction I take to that is not to pick up arms. It's to put better people in the political process.

The fact then in the recent midterm elections, Jim, more than half of those Americans who are eligible to vote did not vote, that tells me that there's something wrong. That's the way to fix American politics, not by, again, forming armed militias, but by voting people in or out, who among other things... Let's vote people in who believe in democracy. That ought to be a prerequisite. I tend not to I expect, like you, I don't have a lot of litmus tests when it comes to politics on this or that policy, but that ought to be a litmus test. I will only vote for someone who believes in democracy and is against the use of force to advance his or her political agenda. That would be a pretty good starting point.

LINDSAY:
I want to take us back to a bigger picture question, Richard, and pivot off of something you write in your preface, that a country paralyzed by internal divisions will be in no condition to help shape international responses to global challenges that could define the century, including, but not limited to, infectious disease, climate change, the spread of nuclear weapons and terrorism. How would you respond to people, and I think there's a fair number of Americans who feel this way, that the troubles America has today owe a lot to the fact that we tried to shape the international climate?

HAASS:
I wouldn't be terribly sympathetic to that. I think we've made some mistakes in our foreign policy, Vietnam and the recent Iraq War high among them. But actually, we have benefited dramatically from our involvement and investment in the world. Last I checked, Jim, tell me if I'm wrong, the Cold War stayed cold.

LINDSAY:
That it did.

HAASS:
And the last I checked, it ended on terms that were pretty consistent with our interests and values. Last I checked, we created an international economic system that, among other things, has created a context where the American standard of living has gone up more times than I can multiply. So I can go down a long list. I think we have benefited extraordinarily from stability in the world from an absence of great power war over the last three-quarters of a century. And I think the lesson I take away, and in some ways COVID is case in point, that what happens out there doesn't stay there. For better or worse, it will come here. And this is true of things like climate change or infectious disease. So we've got to pay attention to the world, not as an act of philanthropy, but as an act of self-interest.

My concern is that if we're so divided and distracted at home, we'll have neither the will nor the capacity to do it, and without us, it just won't happen. We can't do things alone, but good things tend not to happen without us either. So what we're talking about is, first and foremost, a domestic issue. It's the quality of American democracy, the functionality of American democracy. But it's very much a foreign policy issue too. If we are at war with ourselves, well, our allies sure as hell aren't going to depend on us. Our foes aren't going to fear us. We're not going to have the bandwidth to take the lead to deal with some challenge, even if it's one that affects us. So I actually think there's a really strong, not just moral case for improving American democracy, but also a very strong foreign policy case for doing it as well.

LINDSAY:
I think there's an important point there, Richard, that's lost in a lot of people. The fact that trying to influence the world around you so it's more conducive to your interests and the fact that it doesn't always work does not mean that if you ignore the rest of the world, things will turn out well for you. In fact, you may discover they turn out a lot worse for you.

HAASS:
Oh, absolutely. It's almost like high school science experiments. Good things just don't happen. The natural way of things is not to be orderly. And I think that in the world, it's true. And the United States through its alliances, through various institutions has done a lot of good work. It's also true here at home. If you read the founders, they were profoundly skeptical. They were conservative, small c, almost in the tradition of people like Edmund Burke, and they were worried about the organization of society. And the question was, how do we build the society? What kind of laws and institutions do we put into place that somehow get the balance right between looking out for the collective welfare, yet respecting the rights of individuals? And they flunked it the first time. The Articles of Confederation, even in today's easy grading environment, would've gotten either a D or an F. They were terrible. So we came up with Constitution 2.0, was what we called the Constitution. And it's worked pretty well. But then, the country had three million people. Now we have 333 million people. Last I checked, the internet didn't exist at the time of Benjamin Franklin.

LINDSAY:
So I'm told.

HAASS:
So you're told. It's a pretty long list of how things have changed. So the question is, how do we get it right, building on what we have? We don't want to throw out the baby with the bath water. Building on what we have, so we want to keep certain things because, actually, I do think there's a lot of wonderful features of our political system. But how we potentially modernize it? I've got lots of ideas, but my point is simply we'll never get to these specific modernizations or reforms unless we create a context in which things like compromise has a chance, where people are trafficking in facts, not in conspiracies, where there's a degree of civility, where people reject violence, where they put the country before their own personal or party agendas. So that's my view, is you can talk 'til you're blue in the face about this or that reform. Underneath that, though, is we've got to get almost the political culture right if we're going to have a chance.

LINDSAY:
Richard, I want to close by noting that President Biden is scheduled to give his State of the Union Address in two weeks. Is there anything he can or should say in this address to address the points that you've just raised and you discuss in your book, The Bill of Obligations?

HAASS:
I hope he will. He's done it once or twice in his presidency, Jim. But I think if I had a voice, if I had maybe the role of Jon Meacham here and I could whisper in the president's ear, I would have him remind Americans how valuable this inheritance is called our democracy, that it's done pretty well by us collectively, not perfectly, but pretty well. And I would remind people both of its inherent value, its proven value, but also some of the behaviors, some of the, to use my word, obligations it takes and that people should be open to them, again, to borrow on something we talked about a few minutes ago, not as an act of philanthropy simply because it's good for others, but also out of self-interest. We all benefit from a functioning American democracy. So I would like him to remind people of its value but also a little bit about what it takes from us citizens to make it work and why it's in our individual and collective self-interest to do so.

LINDSAY:
But is this something that can only be done by a president, or is presidential endorsement insufficient?

HAASS:
To use a phrase that you're painfully familiar with, a presidential endorsement is necessary but not sufficient.

LINDSAY:
Back to math class.

HAASS:
Yes, teachers, religious leaders, but also parents. Ronald Reagan said, the most important room in America is the dining room. It's the kitchen table. It's the conversations we have amongst ourselves as families. So presidents can't do all the lifting here. They can help, but it would also take, again, religious leaders, civic leaders, business leaders and people in classrooms almost throughout our lives, both to talk the talk and to walk the walk. And what's incumbent upon us is get ourselves educated to get involved in the political process and to reward those people who act in ways that we think are beneficial for this country and to penalize those who don't because at the end of the day, if we do that, we will get the government that we need. And if we don't do that, we may get the government we deserve. I hope we get the government we need, not the one we necessarily deserve.

LINDSAY:
On that sobering note, I'll close up The President's Inbox for this week. My guest has been Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations and the author of the new book The Bill of Obligations: The Ten Habits of Good Citizens. It hit bookstore shelves today. Richard, thank you for joining me.

HAASS:
Thanks for having me back, Jim.

LINDSAY:
Please subscribe to The President's Inbox in Apple Podcast, Google Podcast, Spotify or wherever you listen, and leave us a review. We love the feedback. The books mentioned in this episode as well as a transcript of our conversation is available on the podcast page for The President's Inbox on cfr.org. As always, opinions expressed in The President's Inbox are solely those of the host or our guest, not of CFR, which takes no institutional positions on matters of policy. 

Today's episode was produced by Ester Fang with Senior Podcast Producer Gabrielle Sierra. Special thanks go out to Michelle Kurilla for her assistance. This is Jim Lindsay. Thanks for listening.