2013-11-22-Andreas Widmer - Doing Business: A Dog-Eat-Dog World? Part II

Concept that is uniquely Catholic and that has to do with our action, that we are a spiritual body, if you wish, that we are as real physically as we are spiritually. So in that way, there is a contradiction there, but it's the both end, and that allows us to look at our actions and what we do from a higher level and from two angles at the same time. And I think that's where, if you're looking at sexuality or in our topic here, you're looking at profit. It's a simpleton approach to look at profit and say, this is good or this is bad. I think what we need to infuse into this debate is the Catholic approach of saying both. And profit is a. Is a good thing. It depends on how much and how you do it and what you do it for.

Thanks, Fernal.

Thanks for eloquent thought.

Wonderful parallel. Finally thought, okay, so if you're creating products you want them to be for the good of the customer, how far along do you carry this sort of internal protective attitude towards your customer? For instance, is it better to produce vitamins than, say, pipe tobacco?

How do you know? I smoke. That's all. I'm outside. He knows me. That's all. That's all.

Let's leave aside the obvious cases. Poison gas, okay. But surely there are a lot of gray areas like you do slot machines, you produce tobacco, you produce Big Macs. And it's in your interest to maximize the profit, to urge people to indulge in something maybe more than it's healthy for them. All your incentives are towards increasing the consumption, right?

Yeah.

McDonald's doesn't profit from people going and getting a salad and tiny burger.

They profit from super size.

Is there anything apart from big intrusive government, paternalistic government nudging people that can reconcile this problem?

Yeah, that's a very good question too. My view of this is that there are intrinsically evil things. There's no useful use for pornography. There is a useful application for alcohol. Therefore, I would say you shouldn't produce pornography, but you have a right to produce alcohol because that can be used well. Right. So we have to distinguish between just intrinsically bad things. A knife. I like to use the knife as the example. You know, this morning I used a knife to butter Eli's bread in the morning. And that's a very good thing. I'm the father, I provide, I give him food. I could have taken that knife and killed somebody. It's not that on that a knife is intrinsically neither good nor bad. It's Me, it's what I do. But there are some products that are intrinsically bad. And that's where I would draw the limit as far as government is concerned. I do believe that the government has. The government is us. If it's done right, the government is us. And what we need to do in an economy, in a society is to create an environment that brings down the hurdle, the transaction cost that brings it down. So it's easy for us to deal with each other. One way to bring down transaction costs is to have to live in a society that enforces. That has laws and enforces them. So we know that if somebody cheats you, you can go somewhere and get a recourse. Right. And so I think that is one of the roles of government to say we do this and we don't do that. If you lie in a contract, you do this. If your contract, if your product blows up inside somebody's face, we will come after you. That stuff is uniquely the role of the government. And I think they have a right to establish laws to regulate how we deal with each other with products and business and so forth. Yes. You make the comparison between theology of the body and entrepreneurship and I know that you never stated that. It's a flawless comparison. You just possess the three goods of marriage. Also in theology of the body would be the idea of contraception. And how would you relate that to entrepreneurship? I don't know. It's a good one. I'm going to have to think about that. I haven't thought about this. I know that you didn't say, but it might make good. Second, I'd like to.

Yeah, I think that's where the church is positioned and you find it in the recent encyclicals. Speculation, which is, you know, has some complexity to it. There are some good uses to speculation hedging. But in Sentissimus omnis, which I was going to ask you, it seems to be that's the first place. As with the evolution of sexuality of John Paul, he has very articulate section of about economic initiative and how an entrepreneur puts together the other factors of business and how this is a good thing that he also talks about making money as a result of non productive activity. It's not a result of creating something. Speculation seems to me similar to pure sexual pleasure for its own sake. That doesn't have the good of the person.

You know Hernando De Soto, I don't know if you know him. His latest book is about the financialization of the economy and he points out that these Derivatives and derivatives of derivatives and funds of derivatives. One of our basic rules in business is that in order for us to do business, it needs to be clear whose chair this is. Otherwise we can't do business with each other. Is it yours or is it mine? Because if it's mine, I'm going to sell it, and if it's yours, you can sell it. And we need to know property rights, the law of property. With these derivatives, it becomes the same chair can be multiplied by eight times, theoretically. And then it becomes not clear anymore whose it is. The financialized size of our economy, De Soto, if I'm not mistaken, says is eight times the size of the actual economy. Eight times where we don't know whose this is anymore. This is like shooting our foot off. And the church would say, when you do this, you're starting to take man out of the center of the economy. The economy, let's not forget, exists for us, not we for it. And by doing speculation only for speculation's sake, we start to lose track or division of who man is and why the economy should serve man and not man, the economy. And I think maybe that's an analogy. It's a really great question. I'm not going to sleep tonight. I'm going to think about it next book.

I have a question because I had a recent dialogue with a friend of mine, younger than me, that after having spent a couple of years in New York in a startup business, was not working well. It was very tired and stressed out. He was from California, so he had an interview. He got hired by Facebook. So you can imagine how happy he was five months ago. So he came two weeks ago in New York. So we had lunch, we were in a diner, and he said, how so how is your work? And he said, oh, I'm very disappointed. So, oh my God, why the world is not challenging enough, you know, I'm bored, work, et cetera. Beside the fact that, okay, my own experience, four months is to a short period just to draw a conclusion. By the way, you're in Facebook, you know, the most advanced place where, you know, everything should be very exciting.

So we had a discussion.

But so what makes your job really interesting so that you are happy? And so we're thinking a little bit. And then he said, well, it's not necessarily money and doing business will not be profit. You know, you can be a competitor in doing business and working business exactly the same thing. So I believe that what makes really a job interesting is the fact that it's challenging my capacity. So we were in a diner. And he said, okay, let's turn and look at the people that are preparing sandwiches all day long doing this type of activity. Would you say that their job is uninteresting? Would you say that their job is not really valuable? Would you say that their job is kind of a curse? That could not be. So my question, and I believe that we really do not have a real profound conception of what does it mean to work anymore. This may be part of the problem, but in your experience, what made your job interesting?

What made my job interesting was my growing in my skills and attaching meaning to my work at some point. There's no job where everything you do is challenging you, because eventually you become good at it or you get a proficiency in it that it's not, you know, get pattern recognition. It's not that challenging anymore. But I think one of the things that makes a huge difference is the meaning of the job. So that when I was involved in a company called Dragon Systems, where we developed the technology that you now have on the cell phone and everything where you can talk to your computer. Yeah. And what was really, in the worst times of it, what we would share among each other in this company, was the customer testimonials of people who were handicapped and could never have typed. And they sent us something saying, look, I can communicate with the world. I can write and everything, even though I have a handicap and I couldn't do it otherwise. And that was enough for us to get meaning out of what we do. To say, you know what? I'm going to go walk. I'm going to do one more round. And even though it may have been boring to do what you were doing that day, it got you that extra. That extra initiative. There's this famous story about the stonemason who sits in the middle of Paris 500 years ago or 300 years ago. And the philosopher keeps walking by and sees this guy every day, and it's sitting in the dirt and chiseling away and everything is just the most horrible thing about this guy goes, has his coffee, and this guy sits in the dirt. And eventually the philosopher stopped and said, you are the most wretched poor dude that I've ever met. Okay, come with me and I'll get you a coffee and we'll dust you off. And I can't even watch you. This is so miserable. And the guy looked back at him and saying, what are you crazy? I'm building a cathedral here. And the philosopher never thought of this. But this man sitting in the dirt Chiseling away had the end in mind. And he knew that what he was working is a cathedral to the glory of God. And that made all the difference. So if you, I know people who clean, who clean the floors, if you clean the floors for the glory of God, then this never becomes boring and it doesn't matter what your job is. That's what distinguishes us. That's why we can work and animals can't work. It's because think about it. Physically, we're very much the same as animals, yet they can't work. So it can't be a physical difference between work and not work. It has to be something that we have that the animals don't. And what we have that the animals don't is the higher stuff, that we can attach meaning to what we do, that we can do something with a purpose, with an intention, with a goal, attaching meaning to our actions. And I think that's when we see that, then we come to the core of what work is really about. Work has to do with meaning. It's the ability, imitation of God.

I have a question.

Could you mind.

Don't turn back a format.

I'm starting an online business and my product is made in the United States. So I don't, since I'm just starting, I'm learning as I go. And I priced it hopefully to, to be affordable for people. But I'm figuring out that, you know, I don't know what a distributor would percentage what they would get. So I may have, you know, not priced my product, you know, fair enough for me to make a profit. But I was talking to somebody who's a friend of a friend of a friend, and she was interested in my product, but she said, you know, we do this, you know, it has to be a product under $40.

And I said, oh, no, you know.

And she said, well, we would make your product in China. And I said, no, I'm sorry, I, you know, I don't, I don't want to deal with China. I'm making it here. And I had a different agenda. But I did say to her, I have some other ideas. Of course I gave her my ideas, but I said, can my manufacturers in New Jersey? I said, let me know with your profit what, what your expectations are to. And if it's something we could do, we could all work together and the product would be made in the US and you know, I'm going to come across this because naturally I have to, you know, it's more expensive for me to buy than it would Be in China. So I don't know.

May I ask what the product is?

Okay, well, I'm a dog animal. I work with animals. But I developed a screen, a litter box to cover a plastic litter box because I am cats and I don't like looking at a. And I thought it would be a good solution if you have a. If you like your apartment or whatever, and it would afford to have also privacy. So that's what I'm doing. But it's.

I'm doing it.

It's all made by hand. Everything is made in the US it's silkscreen and design, whatever. And right away she said, oh, we would do it in China and we wouldn't do it. And I'm like, okay, you know, but there's a person, they can do it. I mean, before I even get started, somebody could easily take the idea, go to China.

God love you for what you're doing. So hats off. This is a great. It's a great initiative and I applaud this effort. What I think is what the person you're talking to is looking at the market too simplistically. They're looking at a market as if it was one blob in front of you. The first thing I would do as an entrepreneur is to segment the market. There are people who will want their litter box from the United States. See, money is created as a function of value. You see, money isn't created by the Fed, even though we behave as if it was right now because they're printing like it's going out of style, Money is created. When I come to you and I say, would you want this product? And it costs me a certain. And if you pay, it's to you, it's worth more than I paid for that value to you is a created money that didn't exist before. That value that is on top of what it costs me is how money is made. Therefore, if we trade, the more we trade with each other, the more money there is what the poor need. I spent the last 10 years working as entrepreneurship as a solution to poverty and places like Africa and so on. What the poor need. And this is also the inspiration of John Paul. What he would say, the poor don't need a handout for economic issues. For humanitarian issues is a different thing. For economic issues. To be poor shouldn't be measured by $1 a day. It should be measured that the poor, he said, are excluded from networks of productivity and exchange. Think about this. Being poor means to excluded from networks of productivity and exchange. Your connection There is a network of productivity or exchange. That's what you're looking for. So what you're looking. So taking a step back, you need to find a customer that is willing to pay that values your product enough that they will pay you. The manufacturer in the United States and the distribution system. That's what you need to do. The way you go about this is to segment the market and start. See, don't. What I think you're doing well is because you own cats, right? You saw a problem and then created a solution for it. What the most entrepreneurs make as a mistake is they create a solution and then they look for a problem to solve, right? But you didn't do that. So I think you stand a good chance to actually. Because this is good for you. There are other people like you and that you care that this is made in the United States. There are other people like you. It's a segment, it's a market segment. The question is, how do you reach those people? And thank God for the Internet because now you can find any segment in the market just doing that. Do you really need a distributor? Just as a question, is there a way to market this to people who want an innovative product for their cats grooming and need this to be in the United States? Maybe there is something that you can sell along with it. See, a lot of the value that we add to a product has to do with branding and marketing and the image of the thing. And if this is something that helps the local economy, there's something you can play there. Don't try to be everything to everybody. That's one. Maybe Walmart can do this, but they can't even do it because the high end won't go by there. So try to find your niche. And if somebody says, well, we won't do that here, great. You know, they're not your customer. Find somebody who values it and set yourself a time limit. I believe that it's very difficult to discern if God wants you to do this product in how long. You're not opposed to suffering if God wants this as a growth. But sometimes entrepreneurs have a tendency to stick to long with something like, you know, when you start, we all know people like this. They just hold on to this idea and will not let it go. Part of being discernful about this is to say, what's a reasonable amount of time that I can do this? I like to challenge God in a sense of saying, look, I'm going to give this this long. If you send me some kind of feedback That I should keep going. I will, but you have to tell me. And so set yourself a. A year or two years or whatever you think is appropriate and then say, this is how long I'm going to give this project. And then I go to the next, the highest one. Another thing that John Paul would say in see, the greatest value in this economy is not that cat litter box, it's your mind that came up with it. And if you came up with the cat litter box cover, there's 50 more ideas in you. I just saw this. Did you see this? It's funny. Did you see the Che Leno interview with George W. Bush where he gave him the painting? And he says, and George W. Goes to Jay Leno, he says, are you a painter now? And he says, yes, I'm a painter. And he says, how did you become a painter? And he says, well, I met this painting teacher and I went to her and I said, teach me how to paint. There's a Rembrandt in here somewhere. Yeah, that's a good approach, but put a time limit on it. Yes.

I think you can bend it down.

Hi, my name is Chika. I'm a graphic designer to launch encouragement reading cards for the emotionally injured. And I haven't decided if I want to go for profit or nonprofit. And on the other day, I was talking to a professor at Baruch College, and she told me that for profit, we usually measure a success can be measured by anybody. And for nonprofit, success can be measured by if we can change people's behaviors. From your point of view, how. What's the definition?

Both end. I myself have a very strong view that I don't really think that anything other than things like the church and organizations, benevolent organizations like that should be nonprofit. And even they are not. There's no such thing as nonprofit. There is something. What are you going to use your profit for? That's what it's really about, isn't it? If you don't make profit, you're going to sink. If this organization here, they make profit by getting donations, somebody has to make this up. Like this costs something. So the question is not are you for profit or not for profit? Are you against profit? No, everybody needs profit. The question is, what do you do with your profit and can you change? How much good did we do at Dragon Systems to help people speak to their computer? Was that. I always say, if those other people are social entrepreneurs, what am I, chopped liver? I mean, we change. Every. Every entrepreneur changes thousands of lives, millions of lives. I think what we need to be able to do is to change to. I don't want to create a special class of business people and say those are the good guys. Because what you intrinsically do then is to say these guys, they're the bad boys. They can they get away with this? No business is supposed to do good, right? We can hold two thoughts at the same time. We can make a product that is good for everybody and creates value because you really value it. The question is what kinds of products do we make profit with? And that's something that we shouldn't that debate. We shouldn't take out of the for profit world and go into the non profit world. We should have this debate in here in New York to say what is a good product and what isn't a good product. Profit is something that profit is what a company needs. Like your body needs red blood cells. Are you thinking about your red blood cells right now? Because if you don't have them, you die, right? But you're not standing there saying where are my red blood cells? Let me produce red blood cells. Produce, produce. No, but if they would stop being produced within two days, you'd be dead. That's profit. That's profit to the company. Does the company exist saying make profit, make profit, make profit? No, because it doesn't work like that. Do a good product, create a good product. Find people who really value your product. Where you create a good product for demanding customers that are willing to pay a premium for it value. When you do that, your company will flourish. What you do with your profit afterwards is something that you should decide afterwards. In a non profit, could I often think in a non profit, how do you determine whether to give somebody a raise or not? In a for profit, if you have profit, you can decide. I take this much, I give it to the investors this much, I raise your salary this much, I invest back into the property and equipment. Every company needs to do that. We need to stop looking at the for profit and not for profit. It's a wrong dichotomy. Every company is for profit, but it's not the essence of what you do. Just like it's the role of your body isn't to produce just red blood cell. Yes.

I have a question.

I noticed that somewhere.

I read on the website. Yeah, Rwanda.

Well, I do have a question, but I just want to let you know.

I went there about a year ago.

With Engineering Ministries International and I worked with Wellspring. Are you familiar with them in the 2000?

A little bit, yeah.

I'm an engineer I'm a civil engineer and we're a group, a team that are going to help this foundation build a guest house to bring people from.

All over the world.

They were interested in. It's an educational foundation. They're trying to raise the educational level of, or they don't want. They want to get rid of road learning and really promote critical thinking. And of course, in Rwanda, that is a very important mission that they have because there is some thought that maybe, you know, random killing of people, maybe you need a society that can.

And.

Start swinging with each other. But my question to you is, when I was there, I, you know, engineers are very pessimistic people. You know, I really admire your enthusiasm.

I do.

And I try not to be cynical. But I wonder if you could talk a bit about how you see that part of Africa recently. I think Vermont is an amazing comeback story. But the thing that is disturbing to engineers especially is that the infrastructure is so lacking. And no matter what you do, if you don't have roads, if you don't have the basic facilities, infrastructure to support, I mean, so where do you see, how do you see them coming out of this constant poverty struggle that they.

Just seem to be clean? Thank you. I did do a lot of work in Rwanda. One of my companies was a business strategy consulting firm that focused on business strategy in post conflict societies. How do you kick start the economy in Afghanistan or in Rwanda, in Eastern Europe, in Macedonia, Serbia and so on. And I think there's a. I have a lot of hope in how this works. Let me first get the genocide thing out of the way. I've been to Rwanda many, many, many times. I spent a lot of times in Rwanda. We had an office there and employees. And I know the president of Rwanda very well, Paul Kagame. I'm telling you, the more I get to know them, you know, I'm Swiss and so the Germans are right next to me. If the Rwandans can do it, if the Germans can do it, the Rwandans can do it, and then the Americans can do it. The line between us and genocide is this thing. These are not savages. These are not savages running around in the bush with machetes. These are very sophisticated thinking people that when we start to make arguments personal rather than theoretical, and we say that the person is what's guilty rather than the actions of the person, eventually somebody gets killed. John Paul would say that what we, you know, a great insight I learned from him is that he says we should stick to the issues rather than people. There is two Approaches to problems in the world. One approach is to see the person, the people as the problem. And the other way is to look at the people as the solution. There's a movement going on around the world that says there's too many of us. People are, we're polluting the world. There's too many of us and we're running out of space. You know, what, what the next shoe, what the other shoe is when the other shoe drops, you know what we're gonna do? We're gonna have to kill somebody. Just, you know, not usually the person who says it, that there's, you know, they're usually excluded. It's the other people and usually it's the poor because they're being regarded as dumb and sub. You know, look at how we deal with poverty. We look at them as sub humans. That's very, very dangerous. And that's in a utilitarian world where we only look at productivity as a value and not dignity as a human value. Eventually we're going to start to kill people. We're doing that here now. It's just, we do it with abortion and not quite with people who are out of the womb yet. So to that genocide is a real threat at any given time in any society if we don't keep things together. John Paul would say there's three things that a prosperous society needs. It stands on a stool with three legs. The first one is a free economy. The second one is a rule of law. And the rule of law needs to be enforced by a participatory form of government. That, that doesn't mean American democracy or Swiss democracy. It's a participatory form of government that you have something to do with how this works. So we have the rule of law, we have the free economy. And the third leg of this stool is what he calls a public moral culture. If we let go of the public moral culture, the other two things set free such tremendous forces that eventually they threaten to self destruct the society. So if we let go of the public moral culture, we are basically condemning ourselves. And that's, you know, in a place like Rwanda, I'm seeing that that's what they're investing in the public moral culture to come out of it. You never see happier people than there. People who want to see the solution, who are positive, who work for change. As far as the area, sub Saharan Africa, I believe that the next great economic boom comes from Africa. I mean, look at Nigeria. Nigeria has as many people as Europe as one country. You know, how many TVs do you have at home? How many times did you fly this year? How many shoes do you have? You have a car, you have a motorcycle, you probably have a bicycle and a car. Well, those people don't. You know, the economy only works when we trade and buy and sell stuff. Well, if we want to go portrayed and buy and sell stuff, eventually we should sell to them. The big fallacy here in the people are. The problem is actually that the people are the solution. Because the more people there are who consume and buy and do stuff, the higher the economy goes. Very soon this is going to turn around and people, countries with fewer people are going to do worse and countries with more people are going to do better. Because the basic principle of economics is that the more people and the more trade we do, the more prosperous we become. Yeah. So then you talk about lack of infrastructure, lack of schooling and everything. Let me remind you that America didn't start with schools. Harvard, Princeton, Yale, all started when America was already prosperous, when this was an outpost of the English empire. And the people who started, you know, our country here, you couldn't go to Harvard. You were self, you had to learn this stuff yourself. It's not a chicken and egg question. We know that prosperity comes first and then the higher education and all of that comes. And I believe that economic activity comes first and then the roads and all of that comes. Look at our own country of how this happened. It always happens like this. People are the solution, poor people. We should look at poor people not as a problem. We should look at them as people with unfulfilled potential. He says John Paul talked about the suffering. He says don't make a mistake. It's okay to fight suffering, but don't fight the sufferer. Don't make the mistake that thinking if you kill the sufferer, you got rid of suffering. Let's not make the mistake to kill the poor and think we solved punishment, poverty.

I'm going to wrap up one question and I want to end with asking you to talk a little bit about the church's document vocation of the business leader which a couple of years ago a distillation in essence of caritas and veritate. And just in terms of this issue of how do we reform the economy and how the document talked about the divided life as Christians living a divided life and not bringing their faith into the economy, into the workplace, as one of the contributors to the type of world economy that leads to a collapse.

The divided life is a critical issue just in the debate that's going on right now. I just want to give you an example of how schizophrenic our society is right now. We have a new health care law and I don't want to talk about the law itself. I want to talk about the logic of how this is being implemented. The health care law exists and it says we give an exception for religious objection to churches, but just to churches in the private sector. That's secular. You can't have any religion in there, so you're not going to get an exemption. Right? That's the theory of how America is trying to implement this law. To say religion doesn't have a place in business, it has a place in the churches. Now let's talk about the public moral culture. Why do we have laws? If we listen to the popular debates around the country, we say that there are some people in business that are just wretched human beings. And what needs to happen is we need to increase the virtue of business people, isn't it? We say the law is just the basis, but we need to go beyond the law. What we need is more non profit companies or something. We need people with a halo trying to do business. There's too much corruption in business. There's too many people who just take it all, who go for the jugular and just are completely only money driven. What we need to do is get people more virtuous. Well, let me ask you, where do people get virtue? What's the common form of how we get virtue? Who teaches us virtue? Churches. Let me get this right now. We're saying that churches have no business doing. Your faith has no business in business. But on the other hand, we want you to be virtuous. It's an oxymoron. We're getting this wrong.

Just a brief comment. I've been very interested in what you're saying. I'm a nurse for many years and now I'm a nurse educator. So I teach nursing administrators. Who's going to be the next generation of nurse administrators? And what you just said in writing an article, and I keep looking at it about virtuoso nursing because I truly believe in health care. You know, healthcare is a business. We see the advertisements on, you know, for come here for your cancer. It's like, you know, sophistication or something. So healthcare is the business and nurses in the hospitals are being really instrumentalized right now. You know, we're given scripts. I mean, I'm not anymore because I'm not a staff nurse. But I hear from my students that they're given scripts of what they can say to the patient, what they can't say to the patient. So their ability to be therapeutic is taken away from them because if they say something one way, we used to say to a patient, like, we're leaving room. Is there anything else that you need? You're not allowed to say, is there anything else that you need? You must say now, is there anything else that I can do for you? Because I have the time. Because if you say to the patient, I have the time, then patient will remember on their evaluation, their hospitalization, and then they'll get a higher press gaining support, and they'll get more Medicare money, blah, blah, blah. But, you know, the nurses have said to me in class, I feel like a liar because A, I don't have the time, and B, if I say I have the time and the patient asks me for something that is not even relevant for nursing, like I need a newspaper, I can't say, well, I'll send the nursing attendant with the newspaper because I just said I have the time, so I must go and get the newspaper. So, you know, listening to what the students are telling me in their own situation, I myself have been thinking for one time about this issue of the expert Nurse. The expert nurse. Everybody wants to be an expert. And I'm teaching in graduate studies. I'm teaching in the doctoral program. I am teaching people who are operating at a very high level of nursing. And the hospitals are kind of pushing us down so that they will be like these little, you know, sublime ivy pump. You know, he'll do what I say, when I say it, the way I say it and the way that I want it. Not that you're a valuable professional and go do that. So what you have just said about creativity and love, I mean, this is what I taught all last spring that I will be teaching again next spring. You are going to be nurse administrators. You have to treat the staff and all the people that you're dealing with with love. You have to come. You have to come with virtues. You have to read St. Thomas Aquinas and find out what those virtues are. And you have to bring that to bear on what you're doing. And as I started to write this article about virtuoso nursing, comparing like six Sigma methodologies which are used in healthcare so that we can get down to the least little defect and get all those defects out. Where is the defect if a person makes a mistake, that's like a defect in that system. Get rid of the person, whereas I'm trying to tell the nurse administrators of the future, if you see that there's a defect in the person, you can't get rid of the person. You have to help the person become a more virtuoso, virtuous person, and become not an expert, but a virtuoso of what they're doing. You know, appeal to absolute. This is really what it's all about. I really we had such a great opportunity to hope and to learn from him, and I've learned from him by reading his writings. But I guess I don't know his writings as well as you do, But I really think this is essential in our society today. So, anyway, thank you.

Thank you. All right.

Well, thank you.

Andreas Wigmer.