Transcript of ‘Deep Dive’ interview, 3 July

Transcript submitted by a reader

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GDsJcHxU_uM

Lt. Col. Daniel Davis: 0:00
If you didn’t know any better, you would think from watching the headlines that the war between Russia and Ukraine has kind of devolved into a budget battle. Who’s going to spend the most money? Who’s bringing in the most contractors? Who’s got the most deals to make, et cetera. But as we’re going to see, there is that going on, but there is still a war going on and there is still progress on the ground. There are still people dying that are not impressed one way or the other with whose deal somebody’s making or what they’re trying to accomplish on the on the spreadsheet.

But as we know, of course, war does require finances. And if you don’t have that, then you don’t have a war. We’re going to see how that tails in as well. And to try and help us unpack some of this, we have for the first time on the Daniel Davis Deep Dive, Dr. Gilbert Doctorow, a historian and international affairs analyst and author of the book, “War Diaries, Part One, Russia-Ukraine War 2022 to 2023.”
First of all, Professor, welcome to the show.

Gilbert Doctorow, PhD:
Well, very kind of you to invite me.

Davis: 0:58
Listen, I wonder just because this is the first time you’ve been on our show. I know a lot of our audience is familiar with your work in a number of other different venues, but I wonder if you could tell us a little bit about this book that you’ve written here and especially because it’s called Part One. What did you learn during the publication of this book and where are you going next?

Doctorow:
Well, as I say in the Foreword to it, I thought this would be a thin volume. But then the war started. Russia had such a commanding presence and was threatening Kiev from day one of their invasion, but it looked like this could be over rather quickly. And I don’t think I was the only one who assumed that.

As it’s turned out, we were all mistaken. The war has progressed in surges, various stages of escalation that were not to be anticipated. The risk-taking of the Biden administration was in no way clear as a possibility or a likelihood when the war began. And the Russian way of war was by no means understood in the West, and even today is not clearly understood, since the expectation is the only way you can fight a war is the American way, which is shock and awe. And that didn’t happen.

2:11
The fact is, the American wars have been on territory without any personal presence, that is, without an American presence there before the troops moved in, without an interest in the people as such and in the value of human life in the territories we entered — in the Middle East, I’m speaking about now. In the Russian case with Ukraine, they are, these are two nations or peoples that have lived together and intermingled for 500 years or more. And the Russian interest was initially not to cause too much damage and too much loss of life in the anticipation that these are neighbors and we’ll have to live with them in the future. Moreover, they are, those neighbors are the brother-in-law, sister-in-law, mother-father of many people living all over what was the Soviet Union and today is the Russian Federation. For these reasons, the Russians conducted the war in a rather, in a very different way from what people in the West expected. It was misinterpreted in the West as signs of Russian weakness.

Davis:
Let me ask you, on that topic, I’m just wondering what you may have discovered through the reading of your book, what the US actually anticipated ahead of time, because Biden famously said, you know, “Our intelligence says they’re getting ready to go, they’ve made a decision”, all this kind of stuff. We moved out a lot of our diplomatic personnel, left Kiev, and even offered a ride to Zelensky to get out, and he, of course, had a pretty famous quip to that. But what did the US expect to happen in that initial onslaught?

Doctorow: 3:53
I think it was just what I just said a moment ago: this would be over in a very short time. Then there was a misinterpretation which comes into the nature of propaganda, and say false information or disinformation as to what went wrong and why the Russians didn’t just move into Kiev as going down the rose garden. Here, the errors are not just in Western expectations, but also in Russian expectations.

The Russians had a conflict, a military conflict with the Ukrainians in 2014 in the spring following the installation of the radical nationalist government in Kiev with assistance from the United States, the Russians had a military conflict. In the Crimea, we know there was a standoff, a standoff that ended in complete Russian victory, because the Ukrainian forces in the Crimea, which were roughly the same number, 20,000, on the peninsula for each of the sides, just gave up. The Russians said, :You have a choice. You raise the white flag. You can go home in Ukraine, or you can come and join us.”

5:01
And indeed, some of the Ukrainian forces joined the Russians, and others just went home. There weren’t many gunshots. And the Russians were spoiled about that. They expected that indeed the Ukrainian army would– seeing the vast forces arrayed against them what, 50, 60 miles away from their capital on the Belarus side of the border– that they would again retreat and that the people, the local people would come out in the familiar Slavic fashion with salt and bread to greet the Russian liberators.

That didn’t happen at all. Eight years of work by the American and British intelligence agencies, by the Pentagon, had changed completely the psychology of the Ukrainian army. And it was now a formidable fighting force. Moreover, it was, and this was not foreseeable, it was largely under the control of those same radicals who were behind the Maidan storming and installation of a new government by force.

These people, the Azov Battalion and other radical nationalists had been integrated into the normal Ukrainian armed forces, with the result that the notion of raising a white flag didn’t exist any more. The Russians’ intelligence, it’s quite surprising, their intelligence was very faulty. They did not anticipate that they would have a stiff fight.

What happened when those tanks approached Kiev? Were they really, suffered enormous defeats as Western reports went because of the use of the shoulder-held anti-tank weapons supplied by the United States? We don’t know. I don’t know for certain. I’m not a military expert, as you mentioned correctly at the outset, but there are a lot of open questions that no one has answered satisfactorily about these first months of the war.

7:27
The Russian story is that they were preparing the way for negotiations. Indeed, the negotiations started very soon after the Russian invasion. The Russians invaded about 23rd of February, 24th of February. The negotiations started several weeks later. These were first in Belarus and then moved to Istanbul. And by the end of April, we know that there was a lengthy document agreed by negotiating parties on both sides, for–

Davis:
Actually, I want to ask you a specific question on this time frame. I’m really grateful that you’ve studied a lot of this because I remember very distinctly, I want to say it was the first or second week of March, I think it was the second week of March, that Zelensky was quoted as saying, “Well, I guess I can consider maybe going to an independent, unaligned situation, i.e. no more NATO.” And so he was openly thinking about that, because that’s one of the things that the Russians had said was one of their primary objectives, was to prevent NATO from coming into Ukraine. And then that was leading into the Istanbul arguments or discussions then something a lot happened. I wonder if you have any insight as to what happened with Zelenski that made him say that publicly and then radically changed on the backside

Doctorow: 8:43
Well, I wouldn’t take anything Zelenski said then or any time since as being … the God’s truth.

Davis:
Fair enough.

Doctorow;
The man … is a politician This type of little white lies or even big lies are the small change of politics. Now, you asked what is new in the book or value to the book, and I want to state this is not a comprehensive history of the Ukraine War. The fact that it’s 772 pages does not mean that I was writing a history. I was writing diaries. By that I mean my journalism is a personal variety, that is what I see, very often what I see around me, what I take part in. And in this case, the contribution that is particularly interesting, I think, to readers are the visits I made to Russia during, from the start of the war, at a time when there were almost no Western journalists in Russia, first because they had left during the whole period of CoViD, and then because when it was possible to come back and visas were again being issued, the war started.

And many Western media withheld their journalists, so took their journalists out of Russia, like the “Financial Times”, took them to Riga where they stay to this day because they were threatened by, or they felt threatened by Russia’s legislation against spreading false information about their armed forces, for which you could face a criminal penalty. And reporting with a Western slant could run the risk of that. So there were very few, almost no journalists there. There were very few people who were receiving visas of any kind. I happened to have what is called a humanitarian visa, since my wife is Russian.

10:38
And that was one of the few exceptions which enabled you to get a visa and stay, and come to Russia. And I used that, and I recorded in this book what I saw around me. The book is not about the front. The book is about the rear. It’s about how Russians fared during the war.

And that is, what they suffered or didn’t suffer in terms of the “sanctions from hell” that the United States imposed, and Europe followed up with several months delay. And my reports are that initially, yes, there was a little bit of shock, but very quickly Russia adapted. The financial crisis was averted because they had been taken out of script in the banking system, and things got very normal. In fact, with the change of suppliers, I’m speaking now about food products, tropical fruits and so forth, the Russian supermarkets were very well stocked. And these are the things I report, not just the supermarkets, but the change over commodities in stores and so forth, and life in general, and the feeling of people, people on the ground, not just elites, but people on the ground: how are they reacting? And I record here the surge in patriotism when it took place.

12:01
I just, I’d like to say, coming back to the question you posed, what happened at the start and the change and what was going on during the negotiations in March, April between the Russians and the Ukrainians, between Putin’s team and Zelensky’s team. One thing that came out and surprised me when I went through my material, is that I had almost no notes on those negotiations.

Now, particularly after Mr. Putin, I think it was November, December, stood up in front of journalists and waved this 100-, 200-page document that had been initialed by the heads of both negotiating teams and just needed to have one final signature by the two presidents. After he waved that, and after we know the whole story about Starmer, sorry, about Johnson’s, about Boris Johnson’s visit, which is said to have been the clincher to take Mr. Zelenski out of any thoughts of accommodating Russians on their war demands and to proceed with the war in the belief that he would get full support, military and financial, from the West.

13:18
Well, that is something that doesn’t ring true any more when I look at my notes. And I hope readers will find this and appreciate what it means. The reason why it comes up, and I’ll try to explain it now, is that neither the Russians nor the Ukrainians were very happy about that almost-signed peace treaty. They neither.

So they were– Russian patriots think that Putin was giving away much too much because the territorial side of it was negligible for the Russians. And for the Ukrainians, their patriots would find it objectionable because of the new Trump conditions.

Davis:
Well yeah, and then now then that’s– not a whole lot has changed over that. And the fact, I think that the two camps have almost widened their views where we are now, which is going to have an impact on where this war is going to go here. And I want to get into, you know, kind of the current situation here. And with NATO, there’s an interesting statement made by Tammy Bruce yesterday at the State Department, which I’d like your view on.

Bruce: 14:30
What we do know is what apparently bothers Russia is the fact that NATO is going to be strongly returning to its original roots of being a deterrent. And that is what NATO’s job has been the … advancement of their commitment to defense is remarkable and not only it’s– we of course support NATO completely and their role is imperative for a safe and stable Europe, and that’s the point: being a deterrent. This kind of defense spending helps them achieve that, and of course it is something that would not have happened without President Trump’s encouragement and demand. And so we’re excited about that.

Davis: 15:07
So, you know, for the longest time, going all the way back to 2023, Trump had been talking about how he was going to end the war in a day. And then after he got elected, he said he was going to have it done even before he took office, etc.

And then, well, that crashed into reality. And then he said something about 100 days and then it was, all right, we’re days away from walking. Of course, none of that ever happened. And now that it’s like he’s not even hardly talking about the end of the war at all. Now we’re going into, “Well, let’s just kind of expand NATO here.”

But one of the things she said in there that really got my attention was she said, “We want to return to NATO’s role of being a defensive alliance and setting up for deterrence.” And I’m like, okay, if you’re returning to that, what was it? Because that’s the only thing it’s ever supposed to have been. How do you interpret that?

Doctorow: 15:54
Well, her statement indicates that there are various flowers blooming in this garden. And I’m not sure who the gardener is any more. Let’s assume that it’s Donald Trump. I think she’s not clued in. My own reading of what happened at the Hague summit is that Donald Trump got what he wanted. He got this written, signed commitment by all of the NATO countries, so we’ll put Spain on the side as an exception, but all of the other 26 NATO, sorry, it’s more than 26, [about] 30 NATO countries, that they are raising their budgeting for military purposes to on the hard side, three percent.

And if you want to throw in the soft side, the one and a half percent on top of that, that is allowed to be allocated for infrastructure development of roads and bridges, supposedly, which are said to have a military value. In any case, if they would rate go from, let’s take Belgium, it’s 1.3 percent. That’s all that Belgium has as a military budget today in terms of GDP. To take that to two percent, they will do it this year by the kind of financial fraud that represents the one and a half percent I just mentioned a minute ago.

17:14
And they can’t go further in 2026. There’s no wiggle room. There is no possibility of raising taxes, which are also already the highest in the Europe, if not in the world, and there is no possibility of taking out loans because the country is over-indebted. So they signed to something which they cannot deliver. They signed to it because they expect Mr.– I didn’t see any landmarks in that commitment to achieve this or that at a given date before 2035.

That’s to say, the target is well after Mr. Trump leaves office, and the expectation that his successor will … be more lenient and stand step back from that. There is no intention in Europe to fulfill those commitments, which they cannot do.

18:09
On Mr. Trump’s side, that’s fine. He has no problem with that. They don’t fulfill it, and his Article 5 commitment doesn’t exist any more. Moreover, it gives him the possibility of cutting back on America’s contributions to NATO without anybody [having] a right to complain.

Davis:
Right.

Doctorow:
They don’t they don’t fulfill their end of the bargain, and we can’t–

Davis:
I agree. Yeah, we’ll see how that ends up playing out. You know, one … of the other I guess participants if you want to look at it that way, in this whole issue of NATO saying we’re going to go up to 5% GDP on our defense spending, et cetera, was the Russian side, because they had a lot of things to say in the aftermath of that about how we’re going to bankrupt ourselves and all this kind of stuff. And you have said that you actually find that to be a mistake on the part of Sergey Lavrov and other Russian speakers. Why is that?

Doctorow: 19:11
Well, there’s a general tendency among the backers– most of the American political establishment, to think that people who disagree with the American policies that Biden was following are all stooges of the Kremlin. And that is not just a malign characterization of everyone, but it misses the point that those of us who try hard to be honest, and I put myself in that category, have no hesitation to say when the Russians are doing something stupid. And I characterized the remarks that Sergey Lavrov made as very poorly advised. I’ll give a very good reason. During our elections, particularly the last presidential election, Putin was very careful not to tip his hand as to which side he supported for the obvious reason that that person would be denounced as a friend of Putin.

20:17
Somehow that lesson has been forgotten when Lavrov opened his mouth and started giving advice to Europe about what they should do about their military budgets. That is downright stupid, because we don’t need that help. There are even in the “New York Times”, in its front page, at least in the European edition, which I read two days ago, they had an opinion article, invited a guest author, which said plainly that it is risky, or they said the word he used was delusory, for Europe to think that it can re-industrialize and free itself from dependence on the United States by heavy investment in European weapons industry. That is in the “New York Times” on the front page. So nobody needed a helping hand from Mr. Lavrov or from Mr. Putin, because Lavrov, again, this is another fallacy that many of my peers make from my perspective, to think that Lavrov is an independent personality, political factor. He isn’t. Mr. Lavrov is a very skillful implementer of whatever his boss tells him to do.

He was a strong nationalist when Putin was his boss. He became a very weak, flabby spokesman for Russia when the namby-pamby Medvedev was the president, and now he’s pretty much back in form under Putin, and it was actually– a lead for this information war offensive of this past weekend came from Putin himself. So I don’t blame Lavrov solely, but he should have been more cautious. To say that this would be a catastrophic loss for Europe, for NATO, was not very wise.

Davis: 22:22
Well and then let’s see you brought up Vladimir Putin because one of the things that he did say, which might fall into a different category, maybe something that was pretty straightforward and honest, is that he still says, despite what the West claims constantly that he’s not willing to have a negotiated settlement, he has been saying he’s very much willing to have a negotiated settlement, but he said in this recent comment here in June, there’s an other alternative side.

Putin: 22:50 [English voice over]
It all started with the fact that we were lied to, that we were deceived, that we were swindled about the NATO enlargement to the east, because the entire world is aware that Russia received promises that “not an inch eastward. NATO is not going to enlarge to the east.”

Then one wave of enlargement, the second wave of enlargement. And we keep saying that security of one country or of a group of countries cannot be insured at the expense of any other states. And there are documents signed to this tune. And then they kept expanding and we were told, “Well, you should not be concerned, you should not be afraid, it’s not a threat to you.”

23:33
And when we said that we do believe it’s a threat to us, then they did not say anything in response. They just told us to go far away with our opinions. No one wanted to listen to our opinions, but we know better what is a threat to us. It’s our right to define what’s a threat to us, and how big the threat is from one side or from the other side. But no one was listening to us and they kept on acting like that.

Isn’t that an aggressive behavior? Because that’s exactly what aggressive behavior means. And the West doesn’t want to notice this.

Davis: 24:11
See, now that’s in a lot of, you know, Tammy Bruce, which we just showed you, talking about what all of NATO agreed to is this increase in defense spending, this increase in military capacity. And Russia seems to be saying– and you tell me if you agree with this or not– that look, this whole NATO coming into Ukraine is one of the reasons we attacked in February 2022 in the first place. And so if you’re talking going up now, there’s gonna be a commensurate reaction to it. How do you see that?

Doctorow: 24:39
Well, yeah, of course. The expectation of Russia is an eventual Ukrainian capitulation, which will be enshrined in a document signed by whoever is a successor, a head of state in Ukraine after Mr. Zelensky is pushed aside or suffers some … misfortune.

But that is not the issue. That is something in passing. This war is not about Ukraine. This war is about the relationship with NATO, as was perfectly clear when the Russians presented NATO and the United States with their demands that it withdraw its presence, its establishment from all of the new member states after 1997. The new, those countries as came in the successive waves of NATO expansion.

25:36
This is the primary issue, and it is the one which Putin had in mind when he spoke about the causes of war, we have to resolve the initial causes of war.

Davis:
And so what does that tell you that, you know, this is heading? If we’re, if Russia is saying, you know, that NATO is not something we’re going to be passive to. NATO is saying, and we’re going to keep going anyway, where’s this war going to end up going?

Doctorow: 26:08
Well, I think the Russians can play a waiting game very nicely. I’m fairly confident or certain that Mr. Putin, despite the rhetoric you’ve heard, and certainly despite the rhetoric of Mr. Lavrov, is confident that NATO will not be able to achieve this. They also achieve the increased military spending. And not just that, They are following very closely political developments in Germany.

In Germany Mr. Merz is the lead personality. He’s grabbed the microphone away from Emmanuel Macron who otherwise wants to run out in front of whatever the marching band is and take control.

Mr. Merz, or Chancellor Metz, has that role now. And it is improbable, I think, from Russian analysis, that he will stay in power for long if he proceeds with not just the trillion euros in investment in German military production and increasing the armed forces, but if he looks for the manning, which is critical. We know from the remarks of his defense minister, Pistorius, that the attempts, recent attempts to induce young Germans to enroll in the armed forces have been another failure. They’re going to give this a bit more time, and if it doesn’t produce results then they will seek to introduce a draft.

And there you have the end of the German government, because the German government, coalition government, has a very narrow majority in their parliament, the Bundestag, 17 votes. It’s dependent on support from its junior partner, the Socialists, the SPD. And the SPD is split down– is split, not down the middle, no, it’s true. There are more socialists who back their fellow socialist Pistorius in proposing a draft, but there is a substantial minority, as I’m repeating the words of the “Financial Times”. They call it a substantial minority within the SPD who oppose this, oppose rearmament and particularly oppose the imposition of a draft. They vote against it and Mr Merz is history. I don’t believe he will be a candidate for a further election, because he’s widely hated in Germany.

Davis: 28:52
Well, you talked about Macron, and now trying to take the mic and, or is it Merz coming in here. The other guy who’s vying for that microphone is Keir Starmer and he seems to be focused a lot on continuing to give more British money.

Starmer: 29:08
I told President Zelenskyy at Downing Street on Monday that we will harden our resolve. We struck an agreement together to share battlefield technology, accelerating our support for Ukraine’s defence, while boosting British security and British jobs. We committed to providing hundreds more air defence missiles, paid for not by the British taxpayer but with money from Russia’s frozen assets. And together with Europe, Canada and our Indo-Pacific partners, we announced that we will deliver 40 billion euros of military aid to Ukraine this year, matching last year’s pledge in full. There is a path to a just and lasting peace, but it will only come through flipping the pressure onto Putin.

29:58
His position is weaker than he claims, So I urged all our partners, including the US, to step up the pressure now with more sanctions and more military support to bring Russia to the table to agree an unconditional ceasefire leading to serious negotiations.

Davis:
Now how long do you suppose that the UK can keep going down this path? I mean he talked about how much they gave last year, they’re going to give a same amount of this year. You talked about the difficulties politically with the Merz inside the German government. Do you see any commensurate issues with the British government?

Doctorow: 30:36
I don’t have to see them. They’re on the BBC and British newspapers today. After his finance minister, Reeves, failed in her attempt to introduce a substantial reform in the budget to their assistance to the less well-off part of the population. This was a disastrous failure in parliament. She broke out into tears.

That’s probably the first time any of these alligator lady British politicians has actually broken into tears in parliament. There was speculation first that she wouldn’t last, that she would resign. Now the speculation is that Starmer isn’t going to last. Because he belatedly came out to the press that he supports her fully. And I think he just condemned himself to loss of power by saying that.

31:38
Again, the Russians every evening have, or starting at like five o’clock their time to seven o’clock their time. They have this program, 60 Minutes, which is a commentary and discussion program, which has a very big section, like a third of it, is long video clips and long excerpts from major press, United States, UK, Germany, France, and they show all this. So Mr. Putin is perfectly apprised, as is the Russian establishment, foreign policy establishment, of these deep fissures. They’re also aware of the development today that, with respect to Ukraine and NATO, that the Poles have joined Fico of Slovakia and Orban of Hungary in taking a position against Ukraine joining NATO.

32:45
And of course, they’re against Ukraine joining the EU because it is a big threat to their agricultural economy, since Ukraine has vastly cheaper production costs in things like poultry and in oils, vegetable oils and in grains, than Poland or France or any other European member state has. So the fractures are there, and they’re not the whim of one personality or another. They’re based on real contradictions between the interests of the Ukrainians and the interests of member states of the European Union. So the Russians can afford to take their time. I don’t see that– this is my answer to your your overriding question of how the Russians will respond to this … NATO resolution to raise their finances and become an effective deterrent, as this government, US government spokeswoman said. And I don’t think they expect any of this to happen.

Davis: 33:56
Well, where … does that, where does that tell you that this is going to end up going then, because you have the NATO leaders across the board talking, in my view, just almost fiction that the things that can never come to pass, “just and lasting peace”, as Starmer says almost routinely, you know, “we’re going to help Ukraine for as long as it takes” some of these others and all the things that several these other leaders say, like Emmanuel Macron, etc. But they can’t happen on the battlefield, and so Russia seems to be very patient.

And I wonder if you could in the last bit of time we have here kind of talk about the different approach that the Western world has as opposed to the approach that the Russian world has. You mentioned at the outset that we think that war has to be shock and awe. Russians have a different viewpoint. Where do you see after now three and a half years of war, where’s this going next?

Doctorow: 34:46
They had a different viewpoint. I wouldn’t say they personally are shock and awe, but they become much more destructive. Destructive of civil infrastructure and less careful about avoiding civilian casualties. The Russians in the last two, three weeks have staged ever more impressive, ever bigger aerial attacks on major Ukrainian cities, and they’ve moved into an area that they were very cautious not to touch, lest they raise severe criticism in the West. They have now attacked Ukraine west of Lvov, that’s to say between Lvov and the Polish border, which is a staging ground for all ground-delivered military material coming from the United States and Western Europe.

35:43
They’ve now attacked west of Lvov. So there are attacks on all major cities, daily attacks by precision missile strikes that are set off by their Black Sea fleet. Remember the Black Sea fleet, which the Brits and everyone else said has been has been taken out of the war by these by these wonderful naval drones which the Brits supplied? Well forget that. Those ships, wherever exactly they are in the Black Sea, they are a major launching site for these precision missile attacks on the Ukrainian cities. They are taking out refineries, they’re taking out all stockpiles of parts for drones that they can identify, they are very, very damaging daily.

35:40
And so the Russians have taken off the gloves. They’re being very tough. And the part of that is a result of the benefits they are enjoying from the distraction of all Western media and American attention of the Iran-Israeli war. From page one, “Russian aggression”, in quotation marks, in Ukraine, has moved to page 25, shall we say, figuratively speaking, in our newspapers. Nobody’s too excited about it.

They’re very excited– now, at the same time, the latest issues of the “New York Times”, the “Financial Times”, are admitting openly that the Russians are succeeding and are pushing back the Ukrainians. So they’re preparing the broad public for a Ukrainian collapse. And Mr. Trump’s cutoff of supplies of Patriots and other air defense missiles, his cutoff of 155-millimeter artillery shells and … the offensive missiles that … the United States have been supplying to Ukraine — all of this puts the Ukrainians in a very tough spot. I don’t see capitulation coming tomorrow or the day after tomorrow, but by the end of the summer, it could well be.

Davis: 38:10
Yeah, and that is so ironic if just not anguishing, because if the end is going to come at the end of the summer, then it should come today instead of letting another some number of thousands more people pointlessly die just to drag it out. But that’s where we are. I don’t see anybody that’s going to change that anytime soon. But we’re going to continue to watch this and see what happens and we’ll just call balls and strikes as they happen.

So thank you for coming on today and just remind people of your book there, “War Diaries, Volume 1: The Russia-Ukraine War, 2022 – 2023”. You can find that on Amazon, see right there. Thank you very much and we appreciate you coming on.

Doctorow:
Well, my pleasure. I hope that there will be a final Volume 2. I don’t want to think about a Volume 3.

Davis: 38:54
Right. Yes, yes. Let’s let that be the final one. I agree completely. Thank you very much. And we will see you guys next time on the Daniel Davis Deep Dive.