You know, there's a phrase the Swedish Academy
used when they handed out the Nobel Prize in
literature back in 2001. They talked about incorruptible
scrutiny. It's a powerful phrase. It sounds almost
heroic, doesn't it? Like a kind of superpower.
It really does. It sounds like x -ray vision
for the soul or for society. But today we're
looking at a man who, well... who arguably turned
that superpower into a weapon. We're talking
about Sir V .S. Naipaul. Exactly. And the deeper
you go into the sources, and we have a lot of
them, the biographies, the critical essays, his
own wife's personal diaries, the more you realize
that this scrutiny, it wasn't just about writing
beautiful sentences. No, it was about dismantling
things, dismantling people, places, entire cultures.
Including his own. And that right there is the
heart of the tension we're going to explore in
this deep dive. It's a massive paradox, isn't
it? A huge one. On one hand, you have this absolute
titan of English literature. I mean, the accolades
are staggering. Knighted by the Queen in 1990,
Booker Prize in 71, the Nobel in 01. A man who
wrote prose so clean, so precise, it's just intimidating.
But on the other hand. On the other hand, you
have a man who is described famously as a witness
for the Western prosecution, a figure just hammered
with accusations of racism, misogyny, incredible
cruelty in his personal life, and what seems
to be a shocking lack of empathy. And our mission
today is to try and figure out how those two
things can possibly coexist in one human being.
We've got a huge stack of materials here. There's
Patrick French's authorized biography, The World
is What It Is, which is just incredibly revealing.
Almost uncomfortably so. Deeply uncomfortable.
Then you have the critical takedowns from intellectuals
like Edward Said and Robert Harris. And, of course,
the intimate, absolutely heartbreaking diaries
of his first wife, Patricia Hale. And the books
themselves were trying to map what Naipaul himself
called the topography of the void. That's the
key concept, the void. Naipaul was obsessed with
societies that he felt had been hollowed out
by history, by colonialism. But to understand
why he saw voids where other people saw home,
you have to understand where he came from. So
let's start at the very beginning. Let's go to
that void before he tried to fill it with words.
We need to go to a small... sugar plantation
town in Trinidad in the early 1930s. Chaguanas.
This is where Vidya Harsaraj Prasad Naipaul is
born, August 17, 1932. And if you look at the
history of that place at that time, Naipaul is
part of a very specific and very traumatic slice
of the British Empire's history. He's a descendant
of indentured laborers. Yes. Can we just pause
on that term, indentured laborers? I think a
lot of people hear that and they either gloss
over it or they just think immigrant workers.
But the context is much, much darker and more
specific to the machinery of empire. So much
darker. This was the system the British Empire
pivoted to. after they abolished slavery in the
1830s. The sugar plantations, especially in the
Caribbean, they still needed bodies. They needed
cheap labor to cut the cane, but they couldn't
legally use slaves anymore. So they looked east.
They looked to India, specifically to regions
that were being devastated by things like the
Great Famine of 1876, and they would sign people
up for these five -year contracts. It was basically
a desperate trade. You escape starvation in India
to do this back -breaking labor halfway across
the world. That's precisely it. Naipaul's grandfathers,
from both sides of his family, came over on those
ships in the 1880s and 90s. So he's born into
this displaced community. They're culturally
Indian, specifically Hindu Brahmins, but they're
geographically stranded in the West Indies. And
you mentioned they were Brahmins. Now that's
the high caste, the priestly caste, right? Theoretically,
yes. In the Hindu caste system, Brahmins are
the priests, the scholars. They're at the top
of the spiritual hierarchy. But here's the irony.
And it's an irony that I think haunted Naipaul
his entire life. In a muddy plantation town in
Trinidad, that status means nothing. It's invisible
to the outside world. To the colonial overseers,
they're just... Laborers. Exactly. They were
just another group of workers. They're living
in what Naipaul later described as a destitute
society. The sources describe this really vivid
sensory transition happening during his childhood.
It feels like you're watching a culture just
dissolve in real time. The indiness is fading.
It's the created self emerging from the ruins
of the old world. You can see it in the physical
environment. They go from living in traditional
mud huts with earthen walls to, you know. Timber
houses on stilts, you see it in the diet. Right.
They were historically vegetarian Hindus. And
suddenly they're eating chicken and fish because
that's what was available and it's what the surrounding
Creole culture ate. The old rules were breaking
down. On the clothes, too. That's a huge signal.
Massive signal. The men start wearing Western
trousers. The women start wearing heels and belts
with their saris, which creates this sort of
hybrid fashion. But the biggest shift, the one
that really defines Naipaul's entire career.
is language. Hindi is disappearing. It's evaporating.
English is taking over completely. And right
in the middle of this cultural slipstream is
Naipaul's father, Seepersad Naipaul. He feels
like the most important character in the first
act of this story. He's the one who sets the
whole trajectory. He absolutely is. Seepersad
is the seed of everything. He was a journalist
for the Trinidad Guardian. which was a very rare
achievement for an Indian in that era. But he
didn't just want to report the news. He revered
the writing life as this almost holy vocation.
He worshipped literature. There's a detail in
the biography I love, but it's also kind of sad.
It says they lived in an ordered fantasy world.
It's deeply sad. To survive the reality of this
plantation town, they built a fortress out of
books. Seepersad would read to his son. V .S.
or Vito, as he was called, from Nicholas Nickleby
and Julius Caesar. They were looking at their
muddy, tropical world through the lens of high
European literature. So you have this young boy.
He's the eldest son. He technically has all these
traditional Hindu duties. He's supposed to be
performing the rituals, being the good Brahmin
boy. But his dad is training him to be a Victorian
gentleman writer. It's an incredible contradiction.
It must have created a total split personality.
Seepersad basically transferred all of his own
thwarted literary ambition onto his son. He looked
at Vito and said, you will do what I couldn't.
He essentially drafted his son into a war for
literary recognition. And the main weapon in
that war was education. Yeah. Specifically, a
school called Queen's Royal College. QRC. And
it was modeled strictly on a British public school.
The curriculum was all about... Metropolitan
values, standard English, Latin, French. It was
an education designed to make you British, even
if you were thousands of miles away from Britain.
And the goal of every bright boy at QRC was singular,
right? The island scholarship. That was the golden
ticket. Literally a ticket out. It was the escape
hatch. Yeah. If you won, the government paid
for you to study anywhere in the British Commonwealth.
It was the only way out of the sugar economy.
And I, Paul, of course, he wins it. And he doesn't
choose something sensible like medicine or law,
which you'd think a family trying to lift themselves
out of poverty would push for. No, he chooses
Oxford, specifically University College. And
he's very explicit about why. He wrote later
that he chose Oxford in order at last to write.
He wasn't going for a degree. He was going for
an identity. There's that anecdote from right
before he leaves in 1950 that I found really.
It's touching, but it's also kind of terrifying
in terms of the pressure he was putting on himself.
The pencil? The copying pencil. It's such a perfect
writerly detail. Yeah. He goes to a shop in Port
of Spain and buys a pad of paper and a copying
pencil. And he notes that he bought them because,
in his mind, I was traveling to become a writer
and I had to start. He's 18 years old and he
believes that buying the stationery makes the
identity real. He's willing the writer into existence.
Completely. It's an act of faith. So he gets
on the boat. He travels across the Atlantic.
He gets to Oxford, the intellectual center of
the universe. You think, OK, cue the montage
of success. He's finally made it. And it was
the complete opposite. The sources paint a picture
of just profound disillusionment. It was closer
to a horror movie for him. Really? A horror movie?
How so? Well, he lands in 1950. And socially,
he's a ghost. He is totally isolated. He's poor.
He's on a scholarship. He doesn't have the right
clothes or the right accent. He feels like a
complete stranger in England. But he also knows
he doesn't fit in back in Trinidad anymore. He's
in limbo. Exactly. He's caught between two worlds
and at home in neither. And the writing, the
whole reason he went there. It was a disaster.
It just wasn't working. He felt everything he
wrote was contrived. He couldn't find his voice
because he was trying to write like a proper
English gentleman, which he wasn't. And about
a year in, he just spirals into what he later
called a mental illness. I read he blew all his
money on a trip to Spain. That seems impulsive.
Every last penny. In 1952, it was totally impulsive,
completely irrational. He called it a nervous
breakdown. He spent his entire savings just to
get away from Oxford, to get away from the failure.
It was basically a cry for help. But in the middle
of this breakdown, he finds an anchor, Patricia
Hale. Pat Hale. She was a history student, and
they met at a college play. And she becomes...
Well, she becomes everything to him. She's his
emotional support. She's his career planner.
She's his first reader, his editor. But it wasn't
some kind of fairytale romance. Oh, not at all.
Her family was openly hostile because he was
Indian. His family was, let's say, unenthusiastic
because she was white. But she stood by him.
She was the one who saw the genius when nobody
else did, when even he didn't. And then, just
as they're graduating in 1953, the hammer drops.
His father dies. This is a pivotal trauma. Sieper
said the man who built that whole fantasy world
of literature, the man who pushed him to Oxford,
dies of a heart attack back in Trinidad. And
V .S. Naipaul, as the eldest son, is religiously
obligated to light the funeral pyre. But he can't
go. He can't afford it. Because he's broke. He
didn't have the boat fare. So he's sitting alone
in Oxford, imagining his father's cremation,
while his younger brother Shiva, who was only
eight years old at the time, has to perform the
sacred rites. That is just a staggering burden
of guilt to carry. You're the eldest son, you've
left the family, and you fail in the final, most
important duty. Naipaul later wrote that this
event marked Shiva with a private wound. But
you have to imagine the wound it left on V .S.
as well. He had left to become this famous writer
to make his father proud, and his father died
before he published a single word. He had nothing
to show for the sacrifice. And to add insult
to injury, his academic career falls apart right
after that. Total collapse. He fails his postgraduate
degree, the B -Lid. He blamed the professor,
a man named F .P. Wilson. He even accused him
of racial prejudice. Yeah. But the result was
final. His scholarship money was gone. The academic
door slammed shut. He later said he hated Oxford
and the solitude it brought. The dream had completely
soured. So it's 1954. He's stuck in London. He
has no money, no degrees. His father is dead
and he hasn't published a book. This is absolute
rock bottom. It is. But then salvation comes
from a very unlikely place. It comes from the
BBC. The Caribbean Voices Program. Exactly. He
gets a part -time gig with a producer named Henry
Swansea in late 1954. And this introduces him
to the freelancer's room in the old Langham Hotel.
The way the sources describe this room, it sounds
like the Harlem Renaissance, but for the Caribbean.
It sounds like this incredible hub. It was literary
alchemy. You have all these writers, Sam Sullivan,
George Lamming, just hanging out, smoking, trading
stories. And for the first time, Naipaul isn't
the isolated other he was at Oxford. He's among
his peers. He's hearing the rhythm of Trinidadian
speech again, the banter, the calypso voice.
He's reconnecting with the very thing he tried
so hard to escape. Yes. And that atmosphere is
what unlocks Miguel Street. Which is the first
book he actually wrote, right? Even if it wasn't
the first one published. Correct. He wrote Miguel
Street in just five weeks. It's a collection
of linked short stories about a street in Port
of Spain. It's funny, it's lively, it perfectly
captures that specific street energy he was reabsorbing
in the BBC room. But, and this is classic publishing,
the publisher didn't want it. Not at first. It's
the eternal struggle. Andre Deutsch, his publisher,
basically said, this is great kid, but short
stories don't sell. Go write a novel first. So
he just churns one out. He writes The Mystic
Masseur, and he writes it almost cynically. He
just wanted to get it done to satisfy the publisher.
He wrote it without much enthusiasm, he said.
He got 125 pounds for it. But it launched him.
He got his name in print. Now during this time,
he finally marries Pat. But they do it in secret.
They married in 1955. and didn't tell their families
for a while. It just shows how precarious their
whole position was. For a long time, Pat was
the main breadwinner. She was working as a teacher
to support them while he worked part -time at
the BBC and tried to get his footing as a writer.
In 1956, he finally goes back to Trinidad. He
hasn't been back since he left with that copying
pencil and all those dreams. He goes back on
a banana boat, the TSS Covina. And this trip
is absolutely crucial because it cements his
role as the outsider. He's not returning as a
son of the soil. He's returning as a critic,
an observer. He writes these long letters to
Pat describing the other passengers on the boat,
and they are just ruthless. This is where that
incorruptible scrutiny starts to get really sharp.
It does. When he lands, he sees a political awakening
happening. It's 1956. Elections are going on.
But where other people saw liberation and the
birth of democracy, Naipaul saw. Tribalism. He
saw racial lines hardening blacks versus Indian
Muslims. He realized the fluid, chaotic society
he remembered was gone, or at least changing
into something else. But that chaos gave him
the material for his next book, The Suffrage
of Elvira. It did. He went campaigning with his
uncle, saw the assertity and the comedy of the
whole election process, and turned it into this
brilliant satire. But all of this, the comedies,
the early success, it was really just a warm
-up. He was building the skills he needed to
tackle the big one, the book that would finally
fulfill his father's dream. A House for Mr. Biswas.
The Masterpiece. Published in 1961. Now, for
any listener who hasn't read it, this is a big
book. It's dense. It's detailed. But at its core,
it's a very simple, very personal story. It's
an act of resurrection. Naipaul spent three years
writing it in a small house in Streedom Hill
in London. He later said these were the happiest
years of his entire life. He took the tragic,
broken, incomplete life of his father and reimagined
it into the character of Mohan Biswas. And the
plot is so simple, really. A man just wants a
house. But the meaning is absolutely massive.
Mr. Piswas is born with bad luck, he's physically
weak, and he gets trapped by his powerful in
-laws, the Tulsas. They live in this sprawling,
chaotic, communal house called Hanuman House,
and they demand conformity. They want to just
swallow him up into the family, collective. And
all he wants is a little piece of his own. He
wants a house. A house is independence. It's
a claim to his own existence. It's about not
being a footnote in someone else's story. The
book just tackles so much. The crushing weight
of colonial society, dependency, the search for
autonomy. Patrick French, his biographer, compares
it to Tolstoy or Dickens in its scope. It creates
a complete world from scratch. It really does.
And there's a quote from Naipaul about the writing
process that I've never been able to forget.
He said that writing the book destroyed memory.
What does that even mean? He meant that the fiction
he created became more real to him than the actual
events of his childhood. He essentially overwrote
his own hard drive. The art completely consumed
the life. He claimed he knew the book by heart
by the time he finished it. And he dedicated
it to Pat, eventually. Posthumously. In 2011.
Which, as we'll see when we get to his personal
life, is, well, it's a very complicated gesture.
So Biswas makes him a literary star. He's done
it. He's only 29 years old, and he's written
what many consider one of the great novels of
the 20th century. But then in the 1960s, something
shifts. He moves away from fiction and into travel
writing, and the tone changes dramatically. The
humor starts to curdle into something much, much
darker. The shift really begins with the Middle
Passage in 1962. And the irony is that it was
commissioned by Dr. Eric Williams, who was the
premier of Trinidad. He wanted a book about the
Caribbean by its most famous literary son. He
probably expected a celebration of independence.
I bet he regretted that commission pretty quickly.
He got a hand grenade instead of travelogue.
Naipaul looked at the West Indies, his home,
and delivered one of the most devastating sentences
in literary history. He wrote, history is built
around achievement and creation. And nothing
was created in the West Indies. Nothing was created.
That is just brutal. It's a complete negation
of the people living there. It's an annihilation.
Naipaul's thesis was that slavery and colonialism
had engendered such deep self -contempt that
the people there were incapable of true creation.
He didn't see nationalism. He saw mimicry. He
didn't see culture. He saw confusion. He argued
that without the rigid structure of the empire,
these societies were just drifting in a void.
And this idea of mimicry, this becomes a central
obsession for him for the rest of his career.
It leads directly to his 1967 novel The Mimic
Men. Can we just define mimic men for the listener?
Because it sounds like a sci -fi term, but it's
really a sociological critique. Think of it this
way. Naipaul looked at the politicians and the
new leaders of these recently independent countries.
in the caribbean in africa in asia and he argued
that they were just play acting they were mimicking
the structures of the western powers that used
to rule them they wore the suits they used the
parliament buildings but he believed there was
no substance or real power behind it so the idea
is that they believe real life real history is
something that happens in london or paris or
new york so their own governance is just a kind
of performance they're hollow men that's the
idea and what's Remarkable is that Eric Williams,
the very politician he was essentially critiquing,
read it and said the term was harsh but true.
It struck a very deep nerve. It validated a certain
anxiety that was floating around in the post
-colonial world. Naipaul then takes this same
scrutinizing gaze to India, the ancestral homeland.
You'd expect his book An Area of Darkness from
1964 to be about finding his roots, a kind of
heartwarming return. Instead, it was about finding
his nightmares. He said that when he arrived
in India, he was overwhelmed by two things. First
was the anonymity in Trinidad and in England.
He was special. He was the Indian in the room
in India. He was just another face in a massive
crowd. He lost his distinctiveness and he absolutely
hated it. And the second thing, the physical
reality of poverty. But it wasn't just the poverty
itself that horrified him. It was what he saw
as the Indian reaction to it, what he perceived
as a kind of resignation. He saw people defecating
in the open. He saw crumbling ruins. And he felt
this mix of rage and panic. He couldn't understand
why people weren't angrier about it. There's
that story about him visiting his ancestral village
that is... just it's so bizarre it captures his
detachment perfectly he finally goes to the village
where his grandfather came from a relative comes
up to him and asks him for aid for money because
they're struggling and nipal doesn't just refuse
he flees he literally runs away from the village
He called the experience hysteria. He couldn't
handle the demand of the place. It's that tension
again. He wants the idea of India, the fairy
tale village. But the messy physical reality
of it just repulses him. It's the topography
of the void all over again. He goes looking for
a center, for a history. And in his view, he
finds only darkness and decay. Yet at the same
time, he writes about falling in love with the
landscape. He's constantly torn between this
profound attraction and this profound repulsion.
This worldview that the post -colonial world
is essentially chaotic and hollow, it really
culminates in his Booker Prize winner in a free
state from 1971 and later guerrillas in 75. These
books are where that label, Conrad's Heir, really
starts to stick. He travels through Africa, Kenya,
Rwanda, Uganda. He witnesses the chaos of decolonization
firsthand. He sees coups. He sees violence, displacement.
And in a free state, he focuses on these young
white liberals who've come to Africa. And he
is absolutely merciless with them. Oh, he despises
them. He portrays them as these rootless, naive
people who come to Africa to find themselves.
But they are totally oblivious to the real danger
and the real politics around them. They have
no skin in the game. He actually contrasts them
with the old white colonial settlers. Who are
often brutal racists. They might be brutal. They
might be racist. But in Naipaul's view, at least
they understand the land. They're committed to
it in a way the liberals aren't. Naipaul had
zero patience for liberal sentimentality. He
thought it was actively dangerous. And gorillas,
what was that based on? That was inspired by
the Michael X killings in Trinidad. Michael X
was this sort of charismatic black power leader
whose commune turned into a bizarre murder cult.
For Naipaul, it was the ultimate proof of his
mimic men theory. All this revolutionary rhetoric
was just masking empty, brutal, pointless violence.
Joan Didion wrote a famous review of that book
where she talks about the pink haze of bauxite
dust. It's such a great observation. She notes
that in Naipaul's world, the idea never wins.
The physical fact, the dust, the heat, the humidity,
the rotting vegetation always dominates and suffocates
the idea. The world is what it is. Which brings
us to the most uncomfortable part of this deep
dive. Section seven of our outline is titled
The World Is What It Is. That's the title of
his authorized biography. And we have to turn
that scrutiny on to Naipaul himself. We do, because
you cannot understand the work, especially the
later work, without understanding the man's behavior.
And a lot of this new information comes directly
from Pat Hale's diaries, which were released
after her death. For decades, Pat was sort of
the silent saint in the background. She edited
his work. She managed his life. She soothes his
ego. How did he treat her? Horribly. The sources
describe him as ill -humored and infantile. He
was relentlessly demanding. He would visit prostitutes
and then come home and tell her about it in detail.
He complained to her face about his sexual dissatisfaction.
He essentially treated her more like a staff
member than a spouse. And then there's Margaret.
In 1972, he met a woman named Margaret Murray
Gooding in Argentina. And he began a decades
-long affair with her. He would leave Pat in
their cottage in England and go travel the world
with Margaret. It was very open secret. And this
wasn't just an affair. It was abusive. It was
violent. And Naipaul actually admitted this to
his own biographer, Patrick French. He's on the
record. He described beating Margaret for two
days to the point where, in his words, my hand
was swollen. He admitted that. He put that in
his authorized biography. He did. He spoke about
it with this terrifying clinical detachment.
And Patrick French's assessment is just chilling.
He noted that for Naipaul, Cruelty was part of
the attraction. It fed something in him. And
meanwhile, Pat is at home and eventually she
gets sick. She's dying of cancer. The timeline
here. Yeah. Honestly, it's very hard to read.
She died in February 1996. Within two months
of her death, Nat Paul ended the affair with
Margaret. He just dumped her. And he married
Nadira Alvey. a Pakistani journalist who was
20 years his junior. Two months. He just swapped
out the entire support system. It's brutal. And
it raises the question, was Pat just a resource
to him? Was she just a tool to get the books
written? It suggests a man who viewed people,
even the person closest to him, as utilities.
It really complicates the legacy. Here you have
a man who demands that we look at the unvarnished
truth of societies, but he seems to lack the
most basic human empathy in his own life. And
that lack of empathy, that sort of cold analytical
view, bled directly into his later political
views, especially his views on Islam. This is
from his books Beyond Belief and Among the Believers.
Right. In those books, he argued that Islam was
a form of Arab imperialism. He believed that
when a non -Arab country like Pakistan or Indonesia
or Iran converts to Islam, it is forced to reject
its own pre -Islamic history and adopt Arab history
instead. He called it a cultural lobotomy. Which
naturally critics just tore apart. They pointed
out it was a massive sweeping generalization.
Fuad Ajami and others rejected it completely,
noting the rich diversity of Islamic cultures
and how they blend with local traditions all
over the world. But Naipaul wasn't really interested
in that nuance. He was interested in his overarching
thesis, colonization destroys identity. Whether
it's British colonization or what he saw as Arab
colonization, he saw the same destructive pattern
everywhere. And yet, despite the accusations
of racism, despite the revelations about his
misogyny, despite all the controversy... In 2001,
he wins the Nobel Prize. He does. And the Nobel
citation is fascinating. They didn't praise him
for being a nice guy. They praised him for his
united perceptive narrative and incorruptible
scrutiny and for compelling us to see suppressed
histories. They compared him to a modern philosopher
in the tradition of Voltaire. But the critics
didn't let up. Robert Harris called his portrayal
of Africa racist and repulsive. And Edward Said
had perhaps the most famous critique of all.
Sed called him a witness for the Western prosecution.
What was his argument exactly? Sed's argument
was that the West loved Naipaul because he validated
their deepest prejudices. He was a brown man
from the colonies telling them, yes, you were
right all along. These third world countries
are hopeless and chaotic without you. Sed felt
Naipaul was punching down, using his immense
talent to confirm colonial mythologies. And what
was Naipaul's defense against all this? How did
he see himself? He had a great line for it. He
said he transforms rage into precision. That's
a hell of a quote. Rage into precision. It implies
that the anger isn't just an emotion. It's a
tool for seeing clearly. He genuinely believed
he was the only one brave enough or perhaps damaged
enough to tell the ugly truth that everyone else
was trying to ignore. So as we wrap this all
up, how do we synthesize this man? We have the
boy from the sugar plantation who conquered the
literary world. We have the so -called truth
teller who might have just been blinded by his
own trauma. We have this man who is essentially
a man without a home. I think Naipaul's legacy
is one of brutal aliveness. He absolutely refused
to sentimentalize the world. He refused to pretend
that the empire didn't leave deep, permanent
scars. But he also refused to pretend that the
victims of empire were somehow automatically
saints. He looked directly into the void and
he mapped it, inch by painful inch. He forces
you as a reader to look at the things you'd much
rather ignore. But here's the final provocative
thought for you, the listener. Something to chew
on after this. If we accept that Naipaul spent
his entire life obsessed with mimic men, these
people who play act at life because they feel
they're hollow inside, we have to ask the question.
Did he ultimately become one himself? What do
you mean by that? I mean, did his ruthless, single
-minded pursuit of the idea of truth, that cold
attachment that calculated cruelty, did it eventually
turn him into a man who was just mimicking humanity?
Did the scrutiny eventually corrupt the scrutineer
to the point where he couldn't actually feel
for the real physical people closest to him?
That is the ultimate paradox. The man who saw
everything, but in the end, maybe felt nothing
at all. Precisely. And the value of reading Naipaul
today isn't about agreeing with him. It's about
engaging with that tension, what Joan Didion
called the unbearable tension between the idea
and the physical fact. A complex man, a very
difficult legacy, and a fascinating deep dive.
Thank you for listening. We'll see you on the
next one.