And for, for my listeners right now who are not familiar with the story, Alan, who was Ralf Friedland, and what was life like for him growing up in Berlin?

Ralf Friedland was born on the 26th of May, 1920.

At the age of six, his parents, who were a prosperous Berlin family and are living in the prestigious neighborhood of Berlin, Schöneberg, decided to send him to a, uh, a boarding school.

Wasn't terribly happy there.

Uh, the first one was right in the south of, uh, Germany in Bavaria.

He then moved to one, uh, just outside of Berlin where there's a famous bridge, Kleine Glienicke, and, uh, he stayed there, uh, until just after 1929.

In 1929 was the great crash.

Okay.

I th- do they say Europe is a sufficiently existential, uh, threat, fascist or otherwise, uh, that, uh, Russia is, uh, thinking about actually militarily retaliating against, uh, NATO countries themselves, anywhere from the Baltics to, uh, the German arms manufacturers and, uh, the, uh, American bases in Germany that are coordinating the Ukrainian bombings?

Well, what I would focus on is not what Russia is gonna do because as you and I know as economists, or I was certainly taught, never, never forecast anything, especially the future.

[laughs] Um, and I'm not a military expert, and I'm not one of the people who probably are better informed than you, I, or Radhika about what Russia's intentions actually are.

What I will say is this, is that the level of support for the idea of undertaking such action is hardening very rapidly.

W- I remember when the SMO started, very leading socialist figures said to us, "America should not e- sorry, Russia should not even have started the invasion.

They should have waited for Ukraine to invade because they would then stand on the moral high ground." That, that was their view.

It w- it was, it was not that it was necessarily wrong, but it, it put Russia in bad standing in the world.

Exactly.