The Listening Tube Welcomes Clifford H. Brown

SPEAKER_00 0:03

Hey, the listening tube welcomes a guest.

SPEAKER_02 0:06

I'm Bob Woodley from the Listening Tube. My guest today spent nearly three decades serving people in other countries on behalf of the United States. Clifford Brown's role for the United States Agency for International Development was that of a mission director when the agency was terminated early in 2025. He's written a book about his experiences called Inside U.S. Aid, An Odyssey of Foreign Assistance. Clifford H. Brown spent some time in the listening tube for a very candid conversation about his mission, his experiences, and the generosity of the United States and its citizens. He spoke with me from his home in Maryland.

SPEAKER_00 1:01

An interview from the listening tube.

SPEAKER_01 1:44

Well, the last question is the easiest. I certainly have not seen any that are better than ours. I worked in quite a few countries that had formerly been military dictatorships, and some of them have become that effectively, Nicaragua being one, Haiti being one of the others. Most of the countries that you say had people posted in were developing countries, which necessarily meant their governments had serious challenges because most of the development issues that come up are at bottom challenges of governance. And they haven't, you know, the conclusion I came to is that we trust each other in this country far more than most citizens of other countries trust each other. And I I saw time and time again where people would trust the Americans more than they trusted themselves. And trust is such an important part of a well-functioning government that uh, you know, what I'm afraid of now is I see trust in this country breaking down. We are becoming more like some of these developing nations that I worked in.

SPEAKER_02 2:54

As far as these developing nations, and you say it's uh is the lack of a working government the most common denominator for the places that need your type of assistance?

SPEAKER_01 3:10

Well, it's it's hard to say they weren't working at all. They they they certainly were enforcing borders, they were providing at different levels depending on the country I was in, you know, some of the essential public services, police, military, functioning for the most part, electricity and water systems and public utilities. The governments are new in many cases. They're they're relatively young compared to us, even though, you know, ourselves compared to Europe, we're a we're a young, still a young nation, but not nearly as young as many of the newly independent countries, particularly in Africa. You know, when a country is newly independent, it takes a while for a consensus to be built, and they are still struggling with that. They just don't trust each other.

SPEAKER_02 3:57

Is there a common denominator among the countries that need assistance?

SPEAKER_01 4:03

Um, they all need to be better developed economically. That was the essential factor that made USAID consider them eligible candidates for our assistance. But we did work that went far beyond simply economic development. We I tell people now that we were the agency that did anything overseas that that we thought was appropriate that did not require a military response or a uh something that pure diplomacy would accomplish. I used to joke that uh that those people in the state were they have a lot of meetings and they write a lot of cables, but they really don't get things done on the ground. But the kinds of tasks they threw at us were so varied. Now, given we were working in countries that were deemed, you know, to need economic development, but there was all kinds of other things that we ended up working on besides economic development.

SPEAKER_02 4:58

And being away for so long, what did you miss most about not living in the United States?

SPEAKER_01 5:05

I think the thing that I missed the most was the cleanliness of this country in many of these places. Uh the streets are are far more crowded. There's just more chaos. Uh you see public chaos and poverty far more than you do in the U.S. I was not in anything like Europe. Having said that, you know, we were in the womb of the U.S. government. They took care of us. We had a commissary in most countries that brought in some of the essential consumer goods that Americans were used to. In Kyrgyzstan, we had a military base only 30 minutes out, and the military does an even better job of, you know, bringing consumer products for the soldiers. We were able to go out to the PX at the at the air base. And then we got back here quite often. We we traveled back here on R, and our medical was covered by the embassy. They would fly us somewhere if necessary to get adequate medical assistance. So there weren't a lot of things I missed, but the the other than I say the the degree of wealth we have in this country, when you move away from it, you know the old saying, you don't miss your water till your well runs dry. The poverty in this country is nothing compared to what you can see overseas.

SPEAKER_02 6:20

How much access to news and information did you have while you were in other countries? Unlimited access.

SPEAKER_01 6:27

I w I was not limited in my access to media. Shortly after I got to Africa in 1989, the internet became available. But the embassy always had a very steady feed of news from the U.S. And we read that uh in cables. We probably had more news uh shoved on our desks than most Americans have here uh throughout their workday. So I wasn't hurting for information.

SPEAKER_02 6:54

So it wasn't like you were in isolation out there wondering what was going on in the world. Not at all. As for USAID, what are some accomplishments of USAID? And can we learn more about them in your book?

SPEAKER_01 7:09

Yes, I I talk about some of our the biggest successes that I was particularly proud of because I got to work on them, were the cases where we created entire industries. I tell one story we we brought in a contractor to teach farmers how to grow onions up in the mountains of Honduras, and they shipped a container over to Miami as a trial to see if they would sell in the U.S. Because these were not Walla Walla onions, and it were that but they were coming at a time when our harvests here were not uh yielding onions. And 10 years later, half a million people made their living growing onions in Honduras, and then we repeated that with strawberries in Guatemala, with snow peas, with melons, with cantaloupes, with shrimp farms, with flowers in Costa Rica and Colombia. Another thing I was particularly impressed with was our ability to to electrify remote villages. I mean, even in the 20th century or the 21st now, there are villages out there that are not electrified, and that that creates the biggest change in living conditions when you bring electricity to a remote village. And in Guatemala, we we had one project that we we simply signed a guarantee so that investors would feel safe loaning their money to these um intermediary credit organizations in Guatemala. Those two groups went off and made small loans, say $25,000 to various villages, and everybody in the village would have to sign the promissory no. So they didn't worry about what would happen if their debtor got sick because everybody was on the hook. And that financed the equipment, and then the villagers did the work, and 306 villages got connected to the national grid. Every single penny of every loan was repaid. Two of them were late, but all the money was repaid. We didn't spend a nickel of our own money other than the you know paying for the staff that put the thing together, uh, which was not uh insignificant because it costs money to post people overseas. But when 306 villages um get electrified, it changes everything in their life. They they have power to run their sewing machines, their equipment, their kids have lights to study with, they can keep food cold, they can keep medicine cold. It even affects their birth control because they have better things to do at night than go to bed. They they stay up watching television or listening to the radio. It's the biggest change that one can make in anybody's life is to bring electricity to a remote village. And I was I was so impressed with the the results in that case because we didn't spend any of our money. Our budget was not tough. In fact, we collected money from the investors. They paid us for the guarantee.

SPEAKER_02 9:57

So certainly then uh bringing electricity to a society and also teaching them the finer points of agriculture helped raise their economic stature to the point where did they no longer need assistance, or was that just a little bit of a buffer?

SPEAKER_01 10:16

Well, it was quite meaningful for the particular villages that that benefited from those programs and to the farmers and to the and in fact for when you create an entire industry, you certainly take some of the pressure off to migrate northward to the United States if you're talking about Central America. So it was a win-win situation, and it was something that uh, you know, when we didn't cook up our projects alone. We had everything we did was planned far in advance, and it was cleared with the White House and with Congress, and we had a lot of people watching us. And there are cases where countries graduated from our programs. Costa Rica is one, South Korea is another. Going back even further, and this predates AID, but the biggest example of foreign aid that that I can think of is our Marshall Plan after World War II in Europe, and that we helped build rebuild Europe. We did the same thing in Japan, and the whole world is safer and and more prosperous because of that. So when people argue with me about foreign aid, and certainly many people do, um, I respond that you know we benefited a lot from helping other countries.

SPEAKER_02 11:23

Now, were you always welcome by these other countries? Was or was there some animosity or perhaps jealousy? What was what was the the back and forth there?

SPEAKER_01 11:35

Well, initially there's always a bilateral agreement where the two governments sign a treaty that says, look, you we and you are going to uh jointly adopt this program where you will accept a mission. That's what we called our people that went there, you will accept a mission from the from the U.S. and you will allow those people to come in duty-free and and not tax their projects and whatnot. And we will agree to undertake jointly agreed-upon projects. So the host governments always had to agree to what we were doing. There were countries that had second thoughts, and Russia was one of them, they booted us out. Uh, Panama was another example, they booted us out. When we were trying to promote democracy, and I get into this in some depth in my book. I the assistance is useful if the host government wants it. If they ask for help, say, in teaching all of their courts and lawyers how to do jury trials, which happened in throughout Latin America, and we sent down lawyers and other people, judges to train people on what a jury trial system would be like. Or when the Soviet Union broke up, they needed help, you know, writing commercial codes and and setting up capital markets and a proper accounting systems. And we sent in accountants and experts and others to do that. If they wanted it, then it was useful. But when they didn't want the assistance, there were cases where we became unwelcome. And but I never felt where I was, I was welcomed in every country. Uh however, I do tell one story in the book. I was a little too outspoken about corruption in Kyrgyzstan. And uh as a result, my wife was abducted one evening, and then she got loose, and we don't know how whether the government let her loose or not, but um she she got loose the same evening she was abducted, but that was the end of my tour in Kyrgyzstan. They they got me out of the country. Um she was a Kyrgyz, a local Kyrgyz citizen, and then I I had revealed that I had married a local on the on the national television one time. I was interviewed in Russian, and it was my Russian was adequate enough to do the interview. But two weeks later she was abducted. And the reason was I was I was a little too outspoken and not as discreet as I would be now if I were doing it over, but I was telling other donors about high-level corruption, and they didn't appreciate that. So that was the end of my career. They wanted to send a message then. They certainly did.

SPEAKER_02 14:04

Now, uh everybody, or most people anyway, are aware that uh shortly after uh Donald Trump uh was elected to his second term in office, he did away with the U.S.AID agency. And so I I can't help but wonder what could U.S.AID be accomplishing today if it were still in existence?

SPEAKER_01 14:30

Well, the most important thing they could be doing is saving lives. We had a lot of programs that were not continued that were life savings. And there are groups, there's a couple of websites uh coming out of Boston that people are tracking the number of deaths that our programs could have prevented. And that number is north of 700,000 now. That that event in early 2025, to my mind, was a political stunt. It was utterly unjustified, and it was misinformed. Uh I don't really believe that even Elon Musk and Donald Trump think that we were in fact a bunch of crooks, but that's what they said. I think that was a political uh uh stunt to gain traction with people that never favored foreign aid in the first place. You know, Americans always overestimated how much we spent on it. It was less than 1% of our federal budget. And it it benefited us in many ways, and it accomplished things that we wanted to accomplish, like climate change. We we helped preserve the rainforests overseas, like epidemic control. We sent in people to monitor for early epidemics, whether it's avian flu, malaria, uh, ebola. We uh we saved lives in HIV AIDS throughout the world. And uh that is the biggest thing that's lacking. But but I also make the point we don't have this tool that would do anything. I mean, uh in the environmental area. Uh when smoke got up here into Florida and Texas from forest fires in Central America, we got the call. Congressman called us and said, What are you going to do about that? And we immense got busy, you know, bringing in tankers and other things to help put out those fires. But that agency is gone. And we j well, what we have now are just we just have the military and the diplomats. And the idea that we're not going to want to influence events overseas for whatever reason is crazy. We are going to want to influence, and that was the way we did it.

SPEAKER_02 16:34

Now, do you feel that the United States is responsible for those 700,000 plus lives that were that that have not continued since the assistance ended?

SPEAKER_01 16:50

That's a tough question, and it's a it's a moral and ethical question. I think that there's not an adult on the planet, if they this is uh an example given by an old Chinese philosopher. If you see a child sitting on a well about to fall in, virtually every normal adult will find will feel an impulse to run over and try and save that child. And that is common to all humanity. And all of the major religions in the world will tell you that the giver benefits as much as the recipient. Is it legally our responsibility? Of course not. Was it the right thing to do? I think so.

SPEAKER_02 17:27

What programs actually ended, and which programs, if any, were simply transferred to other departments, like the State Department, for example?

SPEAKER_01 17:39

Very few were continued. That's that's the best I can do on that. I don't have a list. There was right after well, they they issued a stop work order worldwide uh on the same day that Trump was inaugurated, and uh and that went out to every contractor and every grantee throughout the world, and they just said, stop work. Now, the grantees and the contractors, they couldn't keep people on the payroll. They let them go. So everything stopped. A week later, Marco Rubio made an announcement that the life-saving programs would be continued, but then they had to decide what it is that they would consider to be life-saving. They, the only thing that made the cut were programs directed at infectious diseases where you could show that the death would occur within the next 30 days. Now, and that story is told in a book that's that's far more uh accurate about the termination itself. I mean, my book was was written, most of it was written years or even decades before the events of 2025. Uh, those events simply inspired me to finish my my collection of stories. But there was a book called uh Into the Wood Chipper, and that's the phrase that Elon Musk used the weekend after he dismantled the agency. He was bragging about terminating everything, and they did that. Now, some of the humanitarian programs have been moved to state, but it's a very small list. I hesitate to even throw out a number, but I can tell you that 95% of our programs are over with and done.

SPEAKER_02 19:14

How does the United States, whether that be the government or the people of the United States, benefit from distributing this this aid and sending people to foreign countries and helping them with their problems?

SPEAKER_01 19:32

Well, as I said before, the most first of all, most of the money doesn't just go overseas. It it actually hires Americans. And so what we're paying for are salaries and travel time and staff time. And and universities uh engage in their programs, the NGO community engages in their programs. And as I said, all of these programs were cooked up with the collaboration of the Congress and the executive branch. So they believe that this was the appropriate thing to do because it would be in our interest, it's not in our interest to have very poor neighbors right next door. That that just inspires more immigrants to come here to use our own system. So, and the world has become such an integrated place now that everybody is our neighbor. So economic development overseas is good for us. They become markets. And Japan, Europe, and North and South Korea are some examples of that. Even Vietnam is an example of that. They become markets for our goods, they become suppliers to us. But the other thing that happens is by engaging with the world, we understand it better. We become wiser people, a wiser society. If you're not engaging with the rest of the world in the way we did, you're just losing that wisdom that that, and I know that many congressmen would visit our projects and they were just blown away by what they learned during these site visits. I hosted hundreds of those when I was in Columbia. One year just in February alone, I had 30 visits.

SPEAKER_00 21:10

Send email to thelistening toot at outlook.com.

SPEAKER_02 21:17

How often did you cross paths with aid workers from other Western nations?

SPEAKER_01 21:25

Daily. We were always seeking to understand what they were working on, and they wanted to know what we were doing. There were virtually every country I was in had a major effort to coordinate among the donors. So there the World Bank or the ADB, the Asian Development Bank, or the African Development Bank, even the IMF at times would convene donor meetings. So donor donor coordination was a big topic and it took a lot of time.

SPEAKER_02 21:55

So then the United States is not the sole entity out there trying to Help these uh other nations, these impoverished nations, uh get on their feet?

SPEAKER_01 22:06

Not at all. We, you know, the United Nations has its own development programs in some countries, not many, but they had a bigger staff than we did. But in most of the places, we were the largest bilateral donor. The Europeans, virtually all of the uh the OECD, the Organization of Economically Developed Countries, have foreign aid programs. So we had Canadians, Japanese, even Chinese. They came to visit me when I was in Guinea. Uh a fellow came over to learn more about our programs because they had an active foreign aid group that was trying to figure out what it was they could offer to Guinea. So Australians, I mean, the list is long, and they were all not in every country. Some of some of them have their favored places. Uh but um the Canadians, for instance, were big in Haiti and in Central America, the Scandinavians were in in all of the Central uh American countries, and and the UN has a big program too.

SPEAKER_02 23:06

So then, according to this website that you cited earlier, did those 700,000 people have to die, or did just nobody else pick up where where the United States left off?

SPEAKER_01 23:22

I can't tell you the degree to which other donors are trying to step into the reach here. But yes, they the those programs, even if they were, for instance, the very week that USAID was destroyed, an Ebola epidemic broke out in Kampala, Uganda. We had already paid for a lot of supplies, the protective equipment that, for instance, the people who bury victims of Ebola need in order to protect themselves and make sure that these people are properly buried. All of those supplies were sitting in a World Health Organization warehouse in Nairobi, and the World Health Organization needed money to transport them. It's about a hundred miles to take it over to Kampala from Nairobi. And they they lacked the money to do that. And Elon Musk and his crew said, no, we're not gonna pay for that, that's their problem. And as a result, it didn't go. The equipment did not get delivered. And and uh that's just one example. But we were by far the biggest budget in the in the international development business, and and that budget is just not there now. So, you know, that there are other donors that are trying to step into the breach in different places. I don't I can't tell you what the details are, but I do know that many of our programs that save lives just ended.

SPEAKER_02 24:46

Certainly some people might have different opinions about what is beneficial and what is not beneficial to the United States. And now the the U.S. is $40 trillion in debt. Is it justifiable to spend taxpayer money on issues that don't advance the interests of the United States?

SPEAKER_01 25:08

No. Um, and yet I'll give you one example that might put this in context. One year in the United States, a B-1 bomber went down in Texas, another one went down in North Dakota. Those two planes alone exceeded all of our foreign assistance to sub-Saharan Africa that same year, all of it in two planes. So, you know, put it in perspective. The assistance we give through foreign aid is done with the cooperation of a lot of players, not just you said. It's done with our Congress, our White House, and others, and it's done because it's the collective judgment of that group that it makes sense it will benefit us in the long run. And it's cheap. We spend probably spend more in one day in that that war in Iran than we do uh that we did in a year of development assistance to South Africa or to Southern Africa, meaning sub-Saharan. Okay, those B-1s are expensive. Yep. No, I I did the numbers that those each of those planes in 1989 dollars cost $312 million. Our entire development fund for Sub-Saharan Africa that year was $570 million. So there's two planes that that exceeded the all of that assistance.

SPEAKER_02 26:26

Now, there were reports of some very unconventional ways American taxpayer dollars were being spent by U.S.AID. And I'd like to mention some and just get a few brief thoughts from you about them. And I want to make it clear that I'm not holding you personally responsible for any of them. If you want to take credit for any of them, please do. And here's the list that I just found with a quick uh internet search. A transgender opera in Colombia, $47,000. Any comment on that?

SPEAKER_01 27:09

Uh doesn't sound like a particularly useful thing for us.

SPEAKER_02 27:13

Okay. Uh tra uh $32,000 for a transgender comic book in Peru. Any value there?

SPEAKER_01 27:24

I I don't see it, no.

SPEAKER_02 27:26

Okay. And and to be clear, you you're not responsible for these either. And you're not part of the part of it. Uh $32,596 and twelve cents for a break dancing initiative.

SPEAKER_01 27:45

Well, youth programs can be quite useful if they're trying to bridge ethnic differences, and and that may have been one of those examples. And even the the earlier examples may have been part of a larger initiative to you know resolve conflict, to get different groups to know each other so that conflict wouldn't be surfacing and causing greater problems later. But I'm I'm just rationalizing after the fact. I don't know all of the all of the thinking that went into that particular example, but yeah, I can see why. We did have programs that we promoted soccer leagues between communities and other things from time to time, so that uh it was an effort to to get communities not to fight each other.

SPEAKER_02 28:28

I can certainly see the benefit in that. And keeping kids busy and occupied is always a good thing. It keeps they stay out of trouble that way. Um let me let me touch on a few more. $50 million for condu distribution in Gaza.

SPEAKER_01 28:45

Well, that is the example that Trump cited. That was a family planning program, and it was not in the Gaza Strip. It was in a province of Mozambique called Gaza, and it was all part of a family planning program. Trump held that example up and said that we were distributing what became water balloons or real bombs in the Gaza Strip. He was utterly misinformed, so I am familiar with that one, and he got his facts wrong. It was a family planning activity that certainly keeps unwanted children from being born.

SPEAKER_02 29:15

So it wasn't in the Gaza of which we are now familiar because of the attack on Israel, but a different Gaza.

SPEAKER_01 29:23

Yeah, it was a province of Mozambique named Gaza.

SPEAKER_02 29:26

Okay, that's that's good to know because certainly you see the word Gaza, you you assume it's Gaza, even though you know you hear Las Vegas, you think Nevada, but there's another one in New Mexico.

unknown 29:38

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 29:38

Okay, diversity and inclusion programs in Serbia, one and a half million dollars.

SPEAKER_01 29:45

Well, again, if they were part of any kind of conflict, Serbia is certainly a multi-ethnic society, and if they wanted it and they thought it would do them some social good, then I don't I don't have a problem with it. But the crew that went in with Elon Musk, anything that had DEI written on it was automatically terminated. Anybody that worked on that program was automatically fired. They didn't ask any other questions. They simply saw those initials and they said, this is worthless, let's end it.

SPEAKER_02 30:14

Now, here's one that kind of caught my eye, and it it may be because of my being misinformed, but two and a half million dollars for electric vehicles in Vietnam. Now, I know I'm probably wrong, but I I still picture people riding bicycles in Vietnam, not driving electric cars. How wrong am I?

SPEAKER_01 30:41

Well, take any you can pull up some videos of Saigon. There's a lot of vehicles there. They're not riding bicycles there. That's a very, it's a very industrialized country these days. And uh I I again I don't know what may have gone into that if it was some effort to save energy or s or or protect the environment. I don't know. Um I'd have to know more about why we were involved in that if we were.

SPEAKER_02 31:07

One more that just kind of made my eyes go a little bit wider. Six million dollars for uh a marketing program to promote tourism in Egypt.

SPEAKER_01 31:20

Well, there's a political reason for our support to Egypt, and it came out of the Carter Accords, and it's it's one way that we somehow balance what we are giving to Israel. In the case of Israel, and it's the only place we did this, or and we're still doing it, they get a cash transfer. It's north of a billion dollars, and they can do what anything they want with it. So there's a and the politicians insisted that there be corresponding benefits to Egypt, but we were not willing to just write a check to the government of Egypt. Therefore, the two countries sit down and they agree on what's going to happen. Now, if the Egyptians said this will help us generate tax revenues, bring in tourists that will benefit our economy and help our economic growth, then that's one of the things they decided to finance with it. But again, the pressure to assist Egypt is a direct result of our assistance to Israel, and it's a compensation to the that side of that conflict, and it came out of the Carter Accords decades ago.

SPEAKER_02 32:24

Okay, well, thank you for enlightening me on that as well. It's just seem it seems to me like, well, they have the pyramids and they have King Tut's tomb and they have the Nile. What more could they need to promote tourism in Egypt? I mean, you'd think they'd be bringing in plenty of money that they could reinvest in that. I don't doubt that USAI did some remarkable things. And on behalf of you, I I certainly feel that you your passion for the mission and uh your your pride in what you've been able to accomplish. And there are certainly effects of the absence of that. But is the United States of America still the most generous country? And are the citizens of the United States still the most generous people in the world?

SPEAKER_01 33:25

I think in dollar terms, we probably give more through our private sector than any other country does simply because of the size of our economy. We were never close to being the most generous in terms of the percentage of our government revenue that was sent overseas. That prize goes to the Scandinavians. With each of them, it's north of 4%. Um But yeah, on a on a just looking at the raw dollars that come out of the private sector in the United States, the faith-based community, the service clubs like Rotary, Kawanis, that sort of thing. Yes, we have the biggest numbers.

SPEAKER_02 34:00

Well, so that's still something we can hang our hat on, then, is it not? It is. It is.

SPEAKER_01 34:06

So we should be proud of it.

SPEAKER_02 34:08

All right. Well, Mr. Brown, we're just about out of time. I just want to ask you, where can people find your book?

SPEAKER_01 34:15

Well, thank you for for this opportunity. It's on a webpage called Clifford Hbrown.com. There's actually two books there. I I had earlier published a book called Dilettante, and I gave it that name because uh I I was able to dabble in so many different topics, and that that's really why I named my first collection of tales, Dilettante. I tried to sell the funny side of what it was like in many countries. There's a lot of very funny stories that that uh I collected over the years, and then there are some very serious tragic stories too. Stories about sex trafficking and body parts trafficking and bride kidnapping in Central Asia. So it's it's a travelogue and a memoir. The second book is a travelogue and a memoir, but it's also a response, in a way, to some of the same kinds of questions you've been asking, like what did you say do? What good did it do? That sort of thing. So it's a policy piece at times. It's a travelogue and it's a memoir. And it's you have to say, you have to use my middle initial because there's another Clifford Brown that's far more famous than me. He was a black American jazz trumpet player, and any jazz fan will know about Clifford Brown. That's not me. I don't play, I don't play the trumpet.

SPEAKER_02 35:31

Well, thank you, Mr. Brown, for spending some time with uh with me in the in the listening tube. I really do appreciate it. I hope you've enjoyed the conversation as much as I have. I have.

SPEAKER_01 35:41

You've asked me very different questions from some of my normal affairs, so I appreciate it. Thank you.

SPEAKER_02 35:46

I get that a lot. Again, you can find Clifford H. Brown's books, including Inside USAID, an Odyssey of Foreign Assistance, at CliffordH Brown.com. Many thanks to Mr. Brown for spending some time with you and me in the listening tube. I'll be taking some time off for the American Labor Day holiday, and I'll come back with season 16, so be sure to keep an ear open for it. And thank you for putting your ear to the listening tube. I'm your host, Bob Woodley, for Thou at Infinitum.