The Jackpod: Making America safe for cancer
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I'm Meghna Chakrabarty, and this is The Jackpod, where On Point news analyst Jack Beattie helps us connect history, literature, and politics in a way that brings his unique clarity to the world we live in right now. Hello there, Jack. Hello, Meghna. Episode 79. What's your headline for this week? Making America Safe for Cancer. Okay, tell us more.

Well, I'm referring to Lee Zeldin, the new administrator of the EPA. And I'm channeling here Senator Adam Schiff, who put a really a stinging remonstrance to Mr. Zeldin in testimony last week. Zeldin, under the EPA, he plans to repeal dozens of major environmental regulations, including protections of wetlands, limits...

on tailpipe emissions, smokestacks, and he's even preparing, wants to challenge the legal basis for regulating greenhouse gas emissions.

And so he appeared before the Senate Committee on the Environment and Public Works. And Senator Adam Schiff, the Democrat from California, issued this stinging remonstrance. You propose cutting America's environmental agency by 55 percent, meaning that in your view and that of President Trump personally,

More than half of the environmental efforts of the EPA, more than half of the efforts to make sure Americans have clean air and clean water are just a waste. They're just a waste. Meaning that Californians and people all over the country, when they breathe the air, thanks to your good work,

It'll mean there's more diesel and more other particulate matter in the air. This water that Americans drink is going to have more chemicals like PFAS, forever chemicals in their water. Your legacy will be more lung cancer. It'll be more bladder cancer. It'll be more head and neck cancer. It'll be more breast cancer. It'll be more leukemia and pancreatic cancer. More rare cancers of innumerable varieties.

That will be your legacy. Wow, Jack. So again, that was Senator Adam Schiff of California, what, last week in front of the EPA minister, Lee Zeldin, that proposal to cut the EPA by 55 percent. That's a lot. It's incredible.

It is, and it's in keeping with the "cut the government" ambition, first of Doge, but continuing with Trump. Doge is gone, or at least Musk is gone. That impulse remains. Schiff went on to ask why it was the EPA had canceled a contract to study lead poisoning in children in Santa Ana, California.

With that wind-up, by the way, I understand that you were an aspiring fiction writer. I see why. Oh, yeah. Well, I understand your view that you can cut half of the agency.

It won't affect people's health or their water their air that to me is a big fiction. Mr. Zeldin you and For and about if I have to think mr. Zeldin's I think mr. Zeldin if your if your children were drinking water sewage crisis if your children were drinking water in Santa Ana Mr.. Zeldin, maybe you wouldn't be so cavalier about whether there was lead in their water and

Maybe you would give a damn instead of coming in here and suggesting that any grant that takes lead out of the water must be waste, fraud or abuse because you need the money for a tax cut for rich people because you're totally beholden to the oil industry. You could give a rat's ass about how much cancer your agency causes. Oh my.

Yes. Wow. Honestly, hearings can be kind of contentious places, but that seemed to bring out a new level of passion from Schiff.

Oh, it sure did. And, you know, people keep saying, when are the Democrats going to stand up? Well, he certainly stood up there. That's as strong a statement as I've heard a senator make and a sobering one in a long time. And, you know, he said, why are you doing this? Well, you're doing it because big oil wants it. Well, there's some truth to that. You know, big oil gave over 200 million dollars to the

GOP last year for its campaigns. Sheldon Whitehouse, the Democratic senator from Rhode Island who's investigated the oil industry, he calls the director of budget,

Management and Budget Russell Vought, a fossil fuel stooge. And so it's no secret that the GOP is the grand oil party. Just to give voice to what EPA slash Zeldin says about one of the reasons to cancel these studies on lead is I'm looking here from a bit earlier this month that water utilities, those utility companies are saying, well...

We already have to replace lead pipes. That's been mandated in order to be sure that there's no lead in water. It's going to essentially raise the water bills for users and residents, and so further regulation would only exacerbate that.

Well, I'm glad to hear there's some rationale. Well, that's coming from the utilities. From the utilities, yes. One has to wonder. I mean, they have complained at every step, at every move the EPA has made over the last 50 years. You know, here is Zeldin. He's an affable 40-something-year-old man from Long Island. And as I say, he makes a good public appearance. He's laying out the EPA's new mission.

EPA's mission is to protect human health and the environment. There are many laws on the books that give EPA core statutory obligations to fulfill under the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, Safe Drinking Water Act, Toxic Substances Control Act, CERCLA for Superfund sites, and much more.

Under my leadership, EPA will no longer view the goals of protecting our environment and growing our economy as binary choices. We must and we will choose both. That's why I announced our Powering the Great American Comeback initiative.

Under the Trump administration, we will continue tirelessly in our work to ensure clean air, land and water for every American, while simultaneously driving economic growth by unleashing energy dominance, pursuing permitting reform, making the U.S. the AI capital of the world, and bringing back American auto jobs.

Jack, so I have to say my undergraduate degree is actually in civil and environmental engineering. So I know a little bit about EPA history. And first and foremost, I never knew that bringing auto jobs back to the United States was part of EPA's purview. Perfect.

Or AI dominance. But this tension between environmental regulation and economic growth has actually always been there. But that's a tension that we decided was worth living with because of the importance, the long-term, multi-generational importance of

to link it back to what you were saying earlier, on human health from having clean air and clean water. I mean, that goes back to the founding of the EPA. Oh, it does. And it was the mission of the EPA. And the origin story really goes back to the 50s and the 60s. In the 50s, there was a smog event in a Pennsylvania town that killed, I forget, a score or more people.

There was a similar – something similar happened in New York City in the early 60s. And then in 1962, really there was a historic achievement, the publication of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, first book.

serialized in The New Yorker. And people think that book played in the history of environmentalism, roughly the same role that Uncle Tom's Cabin

played in the abolitionist movement. Oh, there's no doubt. There's no doubt about that. Sorry, I'm just like, again, a lot of my years in school were spent studying exactly this issue. And Silent Spring is, I think, the number one quoted book as what galvanized the environmental movement in the 70s, you know, Earth Day and everything that followed. It was really powerful work.

Yes, and it appeared, and of course it was about pesticides and killing birds and so on. And it sold over a million copies by the time of her premature death in 1964. And then in the late 60s, there was just a sort of tattoo of awful environmental events. There was a big oil spill off Santa Barbara.

President Nixon went there to look at it. The Cuyahoga River, we've talked about that in other programs, in Cleveland caught fire. Time magazine in a special issue wrote about the relentless degradation of a once virgin continent, pointing out that

St. Louis, quote, smelled like an old-fashioned drugstore on fire. The Potomac itself reeked of human waste. And in this context of supermajority interests that demand, really, that something be done, President Richard Nixon said this in his 1970 State of the Union address. The great question of the 70s is...

Shall we surrender to our surroundings, or shall we make our peace with nature and begin to make reparations for the damage we have done to our air, to our land, and to our water?

Jack, what alternative universe did that come from? Reparations? Wow. Yes, yes, that's how people talked then. Environmentalism was as American as apple pie for that moment. And that was in early 1970 on April 22nd. 20 million people took part in demonstrations for the first time.

Earth Day, and then through that year, Congress passed the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, other acts. And in December, President Nixon created the Environmental Protection Agency to administer the environmental legislation that had been passed in response to public demand that something be done.

And the EPA was born, and under its first administrator, Bill Ruckelshaus, 35 years old, I think, at the time, he earned the cognomen Mr. Clean for his zeal in pursuing President Nixon's program promise, really, to make reparations to nature. Yeah. Well, so, Jack, just...

This is so interesting to me because within every ideologue's assertion of an alternative reality, there's always that kernel of truth, I think, that is enough to get a lot of people nodding their heads and saying, mm-hmm, yeah, I hear that. And I think that that kernel within what Zeldin has been saying

about EPA is that, of course, it's far from a perfect agency. There's no such thing as a perfect agency. And EPA, over the decades since it was founded, has had its host of critics from both the right and the left. And frequently from the left, it's that EPA is actually quite slow in enforcing or instituting regulations, that the rulemaking process takes too long. Cleanups, I mean, we could spend days talking about

how Superfund cleanups take decades and decades and sometimes are not even done to the satisfaction of the communities that have had to live with the contaminants in their water and soil. So the idea that it's an agency that could use some

reinvigoration or efficiency is not out of the realm of, you know, reasonable expectation. And I'm, you know, the same kind of, I guess, similar sounding critiques in terms of the outsized impact that EPA can have on businesses usually comes from corporate America, from the right, or from communities that have had major industries just shut down because of EPA regulation. Yeah.

Oh, yes. Yes, there's no question about it. And the sort of conservative attack...

on the EPA began early on. And really, you know, the straw in the wind for the future was, of all things, a political ad in the 1976 Wyoming Senate race. That pitted a Malcolm Wallop, a challenger against Lee McGee, a longtime Democratic incumbent and strong defender of the EPA.

And Wallop was losing by 20, 30 odd points in the polls. And then an ad appeared that turned, it seemed magically, to turn all that around. And Wallop went on to win the election as senator from Wyoming. And the ad that did this, it showed a cowboy getting ready to ride the range.

And he's saddling up his horse and he's starting to ride the horse out on the ranch. And you notice there's a rope tied around the pommel of the saddle and it leads back, but you don't know what it's leading to until the very end of the ad. Meanwhile, the cowboy is saying, oh, this regulation, it's too darn tight. You know, you just can't even do your business anymore.

today without the EPA looking over your shoulder. And sure enough, at the end of the rope, you see a pack horse with a porta potty, carrying a porta potty. The cowboy has to take the porta potty out onto the range if he has to do his business out there because the EPA is saying you can't follow the environment.

I give full credit to political advertising mavens for being really good at completely misconstruing the truth. But wow, that must have, but it's effective, right? That one sounds like it was super effective.

It was super effective, and it showed there was a politics here. This had been a supermajority public interest, environmentalism, but zeal, overdoing, all the things you mentioned, gave an opening to conservative politics. And behind it, of course, was huge money and, as we know now, a huge campaign of

disinformation sponsored by the oil companies. And then there are debates, you know, has the environmental regulation hurt the economy? Well, you know, one early look at it, 1987, it found that, yes, it did hurt the environment. In fact, the decline in productivity in the '70s, this study, it was in the American Economic Review,

They said about 30% of that decline in productivity was owing to EPA regulations. Serious charge. Well, then a study 30 years later in another economic journal, well, what do they find? Environmental protection and economic growth and job creation are complementary and compatible values.

It creates jobs and displaces jobs, but the net effect on employment is positive. And they pointed to 5 million jobs in environmental protection in 2006. Today, there are nearly 10 million jobs in environmental protection, contributing about 7% of GDP annually. So the debate goes on whether it's helped or hurt.

But it's also become itself a field of – a growth field of employment. So this is the other thing about environmental regulation, right? Because you could look at it from the macro view like you just did with economic analysis. But I keep thinking about the people in these communities or in these natural spaces which EPA has sought to –

To protect, right? You mentioned Rachel Carson at the beginning, and I just was looking up some of the more wonderful passages, wonderful in terms of stirring passages from Silent Spring. And she asks in the book, she says, how could intelligent beings seek to control a few unwanted species by a method that contaminated the entire environment and brought the threat of disease and death even to their own kind?

Right. I mean, like, I feel like that at the heart of it is we're not just protecting the environment through, you know, when EPA is successful. We're protecting ourselves. Right, Jack? I mean, there's a human self-interest in here. And that's the part I don't understand that why, you know, people like like Zeldin and those who wish to strip EPA down dramatically, why they don't really understand that.

Well, they do understand, and I'm going to show you how closely Zeldin does understand the importance of environmental regulation. But, you know, their interests are other. Their interests are in doing what big oil wants. Big oil wants a rollback of all kinds of regulation across the board, but especially environmental regulation. And for all the talk of Trump as a populist, he's

It's Pluto populism. It's Pluto populism. The oil industry gave 88% of its contributions in the last election to the GOP, and they want to keep that going. So interest, yes, they understand the health, but you know,

The benefits are so diffuse. They're just out there vaguely. Whereas the harm to the industries, well, that's concentrated. And they can say, oh, look at the harm. Look at the people who are going to lose their jobs. Look at the slowdown in economic growth. Meanwhile, there's this diffuse macro benefit that's helping us all, but hard to measure, hard to quantify, right?

and almost invisible protection. Yeah. Well, plus ça change, right, Jack? Because again, I'm looking at Silent Spring and Carson points out that when she wrote the, well, the pieces, which later turned into the book, she said, it's an era dominated by industry in which the right to make a dollar at whatever cost is

is seldom challenged. So, you know, that table keeps turning round and round and round and we don't seem to make much progress from there. But you said you were going to convince me of how Lee Zeldin himself understands the particular self-interest of environmental protection. Well, he does. And there's a kind of history repeating itself here. In the first Trump administration, the EPA administrator, Scott Pruitt,

At one point, he purchased an ornate desk for his office, and the desk, when it arrived, reeked of formaldehyde. Well, he had recently changed—his EPA had loosened regulations on formaldehyde. So essentially, he was saying, "Well, we can let more of it go out into the environment. It's not going to hurt anybody."

But his own people came in and they measured the formaldehyde on this desk and they said, "You really can't keep this here. Let us go out and put it in a warehouse and keep it there for six weeks until all the formaldehyde evaporates and disappears into the air." So to protect himself, he allowed this remediation of the formaldehyde.

But he said he didn't care what happened to the public. They had a deal with formaldehyde on their own. Well, that irony is repeated with Lee Zeldin. He has said, quote, "We are driving a dagger through the heart of climate change, religion, and ushering in America's golden age."

So he's an opponent of climate change regulation. The necessity of protecting the environment comes home to him every time he returns to his home, which is in Shirley, New York, on Long Island. That's a hamlet in the town of Brookhaven, about 60 miles north.

east of Manhattan on Long Island's south shore. That is the shore of Long Island that is open, exposed to the full brace of the Atlantic Ocean, the most vulnerable part of Long Island, which was battered

by Superstorm Sandy just some years ago. Oh, I'm looking at it on Google Maps here. All that's protecting it from the Atlantic is this tiny, tiny, tiny little thin spit of sand. Yes, that's Fire Island. And the Army Corps of Engineers is mounting a nearly $3 billion program that Zeldin, when he was in Congress representing that area, fought for.

And the program is to put more sand on Fire Island, try to plant things out there that will hold back

or at least give some promise, hope of holding back the tides. And that's one side of it. And the other is to do a demonstration project on land in Shirley, where he lives, and in Maastricht, which is the neighboring town where he went to high school. And the Corps of Engineers is paying to raise up on stilts around just 4,400 houses, private houses,

because even now the bay between the fire island and the shore

At least twice a month now at full moon, the tide comes in. It floods the streets. It floods the people's septic systems. They can't drink the water for a while until everything calms down. And the Army Corps of Engineers identifies the most vulnerable area of this within a walking distance of...

Lee Zeldin's own home. So the future of this town, surely, in a warming world, depends on the federal support.

So he wants this grant of the federal government to protect him because it's protecting his house against the rising tides. But boy, he's cutting every other kind of environmental protection he can find, just like his predecessor Pruitt, who was all for letting formaldehyde seep out into America while he was taking every precaution against formaldehyde in his own office.

You know, the Department of Irony has a voluminous record. And this is another one of its moments. Wow. Well, folks, what do you think about Lee Zeldin's new mission for EPA, as Jack described it, and, you know, the possible irony behind it?

in Zeldin's leadership of the nation's premier environmental agency. Let us know. You know the routine. Pick up your phone, get the On Point Vox Pop app, and send us your message. That way, obviously if you don't already have it, look for it wherever you're

Thank you.

Well, Jack, this was a really good one, and I have to say it stirred my memories of reading all sorts of books and textbooks when I was in college on environmental protection, including, let's see, we talked about Silent Spring and Civil Action. It's a very rich genre. Yeah.

Oh, Civil Action. That's a very good book. Yeah. Gosh. It's excellent. And by the way – Made into a good movie, too. Made with John Travolta, of all people. Yes, he was excellent. But what I'm going to do before we jump to this little quick break here is I'm going to give us one more beautiful quote from Silent Spring just because it was also just beautifully written. Carson was quite a writer. She said,

She said, why should we tolerate a diet of weak poisons, a home in insipid surroundings, a circle of acquaintances who are not quite our enemies? Who would want to live in a world which is just not quite fatal? Rachel Carson from Silent Spring. We'll be right back.

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Support for this podcast comes from Is Business Broken? A podcast from BU Questrom School of Business. A recent episode explores the potential dangers of short-termism when companies chase quick wins and lose sight of long-term goals. I think it's a huge problem because I think it's a behavioral issue, not a systemic issue. And when I see these kinds of systemic ideas of changing capitalism, it scares me.

Follow Is Business Broken wherever you get your podcasts and stick around until the end of this podcast for a sneak preview. Well, Jack, we're back. And last week you talked about Mr. Mars himself, Elon Musk, and what the long term legacy of Doge and Musk might be in Washington. It actually appears that his tenure in the Trump administration is coming to an end or has come to an end.

Let's listen to what some jackpotters thought about Musk. Here's Jeffrey Young. He reached out from Angeles City in the Philippines. And he served in the military for six years and worked for the Veterans Administration for 10 years, all told the majority of his working life. I've seen a lot of stuff. I've seen dysfunction, depression.

nepotism, abuse, literal fist fights, a lot of inefficiency. On an intellectual level, I'm okay with what Doge is trying to do. However, on a personal level, I live off of VA disability checks and I'm hoping to get my social security disability as well. I'm very, very nervous that my check will stop coming. And I think that's how most Americans feel. I think they feel

On an intellectual level, the system does need to be shook up a little bit. But on a personal level, we hope our benefits won't be taken away from us. So, Jeffrey, first of all, thank you for sending your thoughts from the Philippines. So glad you're listening. And also, Jack, I actually think he's hit the nail on the head. I mean, intellectually, it's hard to argue against trying to improve the functioning of government, right? I mean, who would argue against that?

But if those improvements, quote unquote, come with a substantial negative impact to people's actual ability to live, that's no improvement to support at all. No, no, no. And, you know, he's a witness. I mean, surely I bow to his authority. He's seen what he's seen, inefficiencies in the federal workforce.

And, you know, this has become an issue in Democratic politics. I mean, Big D, the party, Abundance, the new book, you know, by Ezra Klein, they cite in there the Biden infrastructure bill, which called for spending billions. I forget how many billions, but considerable money there.

to give broadband to the whole of America, you know, Wyoming. Let's get everybody connected to the web and that important development. Well, that was three years ago that it was passed and nothing, according to these authors, has been done. Nothing.

And why? Well, they looked into it. We will work this way. The government was going to give out a contract to a provider of internet service and they were going to start installing it, putting up the towers and so on.

But there were 13 steps they had to go through. Each step was justified. You looked at it and you said, well, that makes sense. We don't want to have, you know, we don't want to be unsightly. Each single one of the 13 steps made perfect sense. But in the aggregate, it paralyzed.

the implementation of this worthy program and hurt the Democrats' politics because they had passed the bill and promised rural America broadband and nothing happened. So that's an example of inefficiency at the macro level built into federal regulation, and you would have to argue over-regulation.

Well, here's Scott Durham. And Jack, I have to say, he was taking a big road trip last weekend. And I hope, I think he might have been doing a jackpot listening binge because his comment brings together something that you said about OMB director Russell Vogt in a previous episode and also about Elon Musk.

and how both of them seem to reject the idea of America as a pluralistic society. When Russell Vogt and Elon Musk reject what I presume they think is some kind of woke, liberal notion of a pluralistic society, that they are actually in fact rejecting the vision of America.

While we may have never necessarily succeeded at being a pluralistic society, it's the aspirational goal of becoming a pluralistic society that has, in a way, held us together and allowed us to feel that out of many comes one.

So, Jack, before I turn this back to you, I have to say that, you know, he's echoing. It was what? President Obama who kept talking about a more perfect union, right? Pursuing the more perfect union. So he's in good company there in his thinking. But I

I disagree a little bit with Scott because it's how you measure success in comparison to, well, I should say the few other countries out there that are attempting to be as pluralistic as the United States historically has been. I think this country has done an amazing job while also continuing to struggle towards that more perfect union.

Yes, Gunnar Myrdal really called that the American dilemma. We have this vision and in the Constitution we have guarantees of a pluralistic society, no discrimination here, no discrimination there, and so on.

That's the vision. And then there's the reality, the struggle to reach that. And of course, that idea of America as visionary and then the American reality. F. Scott Fitzgerald really put that beautifully in The Great Gatsby, where he has Gatsby courting Daisy when he's stationed in Alabama. And there's a sentence that reads this.

He kissed her and wed his imperishable vision to her perishable breath. America.

I don't know how I come back from that one except to say that I believe that, you know, the imperfection of reality is absolutely the thing that both gives birth to the vision and the vision is what gives us something to aim for in terms of how we choose to improve what our reality is. So I don't actually see the two things in Fitzgeraldian terms.

All right. We have two more here for today. And both of these jackpotters wanted to talk about Americans' perception of the federal government. So here's James Utt in Minneapolis, Minnesota. And James says that Doge's work will create a federal government economy.

that is inefficient and ineffective. And he says that has actually been the goal of the conservative project for decades. When the citizens no longer believe that the government is of any positive value to them, they will be completely ambivalent and unconcerned about anything that the government leaves them with.

James, you're reminding me of that very famous sentence from President Reagan about the most dangerous, seven most dangerous words in the English language about what was it, Jack? I'm from the government and I'm here to help.

Well, here's Jason Tucker from Clearwater, Florida. And Jason says that half of the country has come to believe that anyone working for the federal government is anti-American or wasteful. And he thinks maybe watching what Doge has done will actually change that attitude. I think maybe people are finally seeing that the people who

Sign the checks, the people who inspect the food, the people who protect the parks, the people who maintain the interstates and waterways and dams and levees. They're just people, people who could be being paid a lot better.

if they work in the private sector, but instead chose to serve their country. And what we give them in return is we give them good jobs with pensions and we take care of them. And this other side of the country has been trained to believe that those are excess, that those are, that they're taking advantage of the smart Americans. And so we had to watch.

these last four months as people's jobs were upended in stupid flash emails. Hey, Jack, I will turn this back to you, but I just have to say, like, Jason is reminding me of this hour that we did with federal workers on the main On Point hour. It was really good because the thing that really shone through in that is federal workers are just like everyday average Americans. They are very diverse. I mean, newsflash,

Some are Republicans, some are Democrats, some are independents. Like, there's no, like, one definition of what a federal worker believes. And the thing I found most moving that I hadn't known prior to when we did that show was that every single federal worker...

takes literally has to raise their hand and take an oath to protect the Constitution of the United States. Obviously, the president does, too. But I didn't know that your local USDA food inspector has to do that, too. And yet they do. And that's the level of service that this job, these jobs do entail. It's like a moral service. But Jason just got me thinking about about that show. But I'd love to hear your response to what he says, Jack.

Well, James and Jason both make very strong points. And James's point about it's a deliberate effort to, you know, the Doge chainsaw to wreck federal services and therefore make people despair of the government and more receptive to demagogic calls to cut it down to the size of a bathtub, to use that storied phrase.

And, you know, the tradeoff with federal workers was, you know, maybe you could do better in the private sector, but at least in federal work, for one thing, it's meaningful. You're doing the people's business. And for another, it's secure. You've got civil service protection. You've got a good pension. Hang on and, you know, you can get compensated that way. Well, now all that is up in the air with Trump's plan to, you know, purge the civil service of what, 50,000 employees? Yeah.

So that the one thing that federal, you know, the one sort of compensating material benefit, security, has been taken away from federal employees. And now they're, I suppose you could say, like the rest of us in the economy of insecurity. Well, Jack, thank you as always. Thank you. I'm Magna Chakrabarty, and this is The Jackpot from On Point.

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Support for this podcast comes from Is Business Broken? A podcast from BU Questrom School of Business. How should companies balance short-term pressures with long-term interests? In the relentless pursuit of profits in the present, are we sacrificing the future? These are questions posed at a recent panel hosted by BU Questrom School of Business. The full conversation is available on the Is Business Broken podcast. Listen on for a preview.

Just in your mind, what is short-termism? If there's a picture in the dictionary, what's the picture? I'll start with one ugly one. When I was still doing activism as global head of activism and defense, so banker defending corporations, I worked with Toshiba in Japan. And those guys had five different activists, each one of which had a very different idea of what they should do right now, like short-term.

Very different perspectives. And unfortunately, under pressure from the shareholders, the company had to go through two different rounds of breaking itself up, selling itself and going for shareholder votes. I mean, that company was effectively broken because the leadership had to yield under the pressure of shareholders who couldn't even agree on what's needed in the short term. So to me, that is when this behavioral problem, you're under pressure and you can't think long term, becomes a real problem.

real disaster. Tony, you didn't have a board like that. I mean, the obvious ones, I mean, you look at there's quarterly earnings. We all know that you have businesses that will do everything they can to make a quarterly earning, right? And then we'll get into analysts and what causes that. I'm not even going to go there. But there's also, there's a lot of pressure on businesses to, if you've got a portfolio of businesses, sell off an element of that portfolio. And as a manager, you say, wait, this is a really good business. Might be down this year, might be, but it's a great business.

Another one is R&D spending. You know, you can cut your R&D spend if you want to, and you can make your numbers for a year or two, but we all know where that's going to lead a company. And you can see those decisions every day, and you can see businesses that don't make that sacrifice. And I think in the long term, they win.

Andy, I'm going to turn to you. Maybe you want to give an example of people complaining about short-termism that you think isn't. I don't really believe it exists. I mean, you know, again, I don't really even understand what it is. But what I hear is we take some stories and then we impose on them this idea that had they behaved differently, thought about the long term, they would have behaved differently. That's not really science.

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