We'll go ahead and get started for our last fireside of the day. We have with us Doug Linde, President and Director, and Mike LaBelle, CFO and Treasurer from BXP, Boston Properties. So thank you again both for joining us. Maybe Doug, and obviously we had this conversation in the CRE panel earlier, but just start with in terms of when, when you look at the outlook, we've talked about office CRE for a while in terms of being under stress, just when you look at the business outlook for BXP, give us a sense of where things stand today versus a year ago. Where are you feeling better versus worse? Okay. So, let me try and answer that question in a slightly different way. So in March of 2021, BXP was trading at $140+ a share. Fast forward to February of 2024, and we're trading at $66 a share. It's been a pretty rough atmospherics, right? So Fed did their thing, significant rate increases, inflation was really popping. Everyone was very concerned about it. We had the whole idea of remote work and work from home, the banking potential banking crisis around CRE, all of that stuff were just, you know, sort of bad headlines that have impacted the perception of our business, not necessarily how we're doing, but the perception of our business. So as we sit here in the beginning of February of 2024, I think we actually feel pretty constructive, and it's sort of, I'd say, a modest improvement from where we were a year ago. So why do I say that? I think we're clearly closer to the Federal Reserve starting to have a less restrictive monetary policy. I think it's pretty clear that the massive inflation that we were seeing in many sectors of the economy have dissipated. I think the supply chain issues around inflation have gone away. I think that there's a more constructive view of S&P 500 earnings in 2024 versus 2023 relative to everyone other than the Magnificent Seven, right? So I think everyone acknowledged that there was actually a reduction in earnings and negative earnings in those other 493 companies last year, and there's a higher, sort of optimism and view on that. And we saw in 2023 an improvement in our expectations for leasing. So we started the year, and we told the street that we thought we would do somewhere around 3+ million sq ft of leasing, which was 750,000 sq ft per quarter. We actually ended up doing 4.2 million sq ft, so a meaningful increase on what our expectations were. And nothing in 2024 on a going forward basis makes us feel any less consistent with how we were in 2023. We saw and have continued to see a migration of organizations looking at premier space, which is what we are in the business of, producing and operating and using as our tool to procure clients. So I'd say we are relatively constructive on the macro environment that we are sitting in today as we sort of begin 2024. So we're optimistic that if, in fact, there is a change in Fed policy and they become more accommodative, and some of these other trends continue, the boat will lift our stock, and the sentiment will start to get better, as we hit 2024. But let's assume that doesn't happen, and let's assume we're just sort of stuck here. That actually provides an interesting opportunity for us. So everybody, I think, acknowledges that there is a clear, re-equitization that has to occur in the commercial office sector in the United States. There are very, very few, if any, secured mortgages on buildings that don't probably have some remargining or significant remargining that has to occur, largely because interest rates are hundreds of basis points higher, which means that valuations have to be lower, a.k.a. there's been an expansion in cap rates. And so as you think about the sort of view on what happens when loans mature or when new capital goes into loans that haven't matured yet, but there's a realization that, putting equity in may not necessarily be the right thing to do for the owner of that asset at this current moment in time, there needs to be more equity in general that's brought into the fold. And so we are looking at this as a really interesting time to be much more acquisitive about what we can do, but being consistent with owning and operating premier buildings. What do I mean by that? What I mean is we think that we are prepared to be an acquisitive acquirer of high-quality assets and potentially think about issuing equity in order to do that. Why would we do that? Well, it would have to be meaningfully accretive. So if, you know, we were unable to acquire assets effectively over the last, call it, six or seven years because cap rates were simply too low and there were too many interested counterparties, today, we don't know what cap rates are, but we're going to see because we're going to, you know, we've been making offers, and we're going to see where things shake out. What is very clear is that there are a whole host of organizations, global asset managers, global real estate operators, who have, for all intents and purposes, had a strategic shift in their desire to own and operate commercial office space, and they have started to exit. So you've seen it with organizations like Blackstone. You've seen it with organizations like Brookfield. You saw it with some of our institutional partners in the last quarter, and Mike can talk about some of the deals that we've actually done where there's just simply been a desire just to get out. And so we are now in the process of getting and responding to and being offensive with many of those same types of counterparties and saying, "Okay, you know, here are assets that we would be interested in acquiring and owning on a long-term basis, and here's our pricing model. And if you really are overallocated to commercial office and you have either, you know, decided strategically it doesn't make sense or you need to do things for portfolio purposes, we are a viable counterparty." And by the way, there are not a lot of us right now that have access to capital and are prepared to put our balance sheets to work. So if you're interested in transacting, we should transact. So from our perspective, if the first one happens, that's great. If the second one happens, that would be great too, and they're not mutually exclusive. So as we sit here at the beginning of 2024, we're pretty optimistic about what the year could bring for us. Oh, by the way, we're going to continue to lease space. We're going to continue to manage our occupancy. We're also going to continue to manage our lease expirations the way that we have always done, which is to dramatically reduce what is coming due in the year that we're coming up to so that we generally have somewhere between 5%-6% of our overall portfolio of 50+ million sq ft expiring in a given year, which is a very manageable amount, and put ourselves in a very stable cash flow position. We're going to continue to focus on the markets that we're in. We're not going to look at the Sunbelt. We're not going to look in foreign locations. We're going to stick with Boston, Manhattan, Washington, D.C., primarily Northern Virginia and Reston, San Francisco, Mountain View, Seattle, and West L.A. And that's sort of, you know, how I think we sort of look at the opportunity set as we move into 2024 relative to 2023. I would add two things to what Doug said. One, our earnings today are higher than they were in 2019, even though our stock is went from $140 to $65. So it's all about interest rate multiples and the perception of our sector right now. The other thing I would add is, you know, Doug mentioned we had 4.2 million sq ft of leasing last quarter. Yeah. So we're leasing our space every quarter to our clients. So we're convinced that they're committed to their space. And what it feels like we're leasing in is a slower economic environment, which is what we've seen because job growth in office-using sectors is much lower. Job growth overall is higher, but it's coming from the service sector. So the kind of corporate America is in closer to a recession. And that's what the leasing environment feels like. Right. Right now. So when the economy improves, I think that our volumes will improve. That's a good point in terms of this, office-going jobs versus services jobs. I guess when in the leasing activity that you've seen over the last several quarters, you talked about the markets that you are focused on, but are there any industries driving that growth? Is it, I know, like, last year we did this. You talked about life science being a. Yeah. I'm just wondering, are there any other verticals? So, it is explicitly obvious what's going on in our portfolio. Financial services defined as asset management, which we think of as hedge funds, private equity firms, venture capital firms, long-only, that are sort of unusual strategies, professional services, a.k.a. consultants, actuarials, law firms, you name it, that's the bulk of our activity across the portfolio. And there are occasionally some large technology organizations that we're transacting with. I will tell you that typically, our technology companies are reducing their square footage, and those financial services companies and those professional services companies on the margin are actually getting larger. And so, we are predominantly being effective at increasing our occupancy in the East Coast markets because that's naturally where the dominant number of those organizations rest. Interestingly, San Francisco is sort of the financial hub of the West Coast, and that is actually a market where we're also seeing a reasonable amount of activity. As compared to West L.A. and Seattle and Silicon Valley and our suburban portfolio in Boston, and our suburban portfolio in New Jersey, which is, you know, in Princeton, that stuff is much less active on a relative basis because the client picture in those locations is much less driven towards what you would refer to as the traditional CBD-oriented customer and client of ours. And, you know, we still see other organizations and other industry groups leasing space, but predominantly, that is where our demand is coming from. Got it. I think it's interesting in terms of your coastal sort of focus into East Coast and West Coast, and you didn't mention Texas and Florida, and like when you talk to folks in terms of where the momentum is, where the excitement is, so just talk to us around strategically in terms of what led you to that we don't want to be here and just the pros and cons of not being in those markets. So, our roots were in what we would define as supply-constrained markets where there is an opportunity for outsourced and outstretched demand. And so typically, places like Boston and Manhattan and San Francisco and Washington, D.C. were difficult places for people to bring on new supply. And so that is sort of how we got to where we got to. And there are geographic constraints as well as zoning constraints in places like Seattle, obviously in Puget Sound and Lake Washington, and in West L.A. where it's just a NIMBYism, right? So those are those types of locations. So that's sort of how we got to where we got to. And what we determined was that in a really good market, those markets will do very well, and in a not-so-good market, they will likely outperform markets that don't have those same kinds of supply constraints. So fast forward to 2023, and if you were to pick up the CBRE state or city review of Austin, Dallas, Houston, Atlanta, Charlotte, Phoenix, you would see availability rates that were in excess of the availability rates in every market, in the country other than maybe San Francisco, and it's pretty darn close, right? So we're talking 30%+ availability in a place like Austin and 35% availability in a place like San Francisco. Why is that? So everybody sort of saw what happened in terms of office demand growth in the last decade, but I don't think they appreciated how concentrated it was. So if you think about where the large demand generators were coming from, in every major city, in this country, there was a very, very tight concentration of users, and they were the Magnificent Seven for the most part. Those organizations were expanding because they had run out of labor, and they were trying to diversify their workforces away from their headquarters towns, which were in Seattle, Washington, in the case of Microsoft and Amazon, and Mountain View in San Francisco in the case of Google, Apple, and Facebook. So surprise, surprise, when they realized that, they were probably overstaffed and they had overexpanded their real estate platforms; they were overstaffed and overexpanded in every one of those cities. So they said, "Stop. You know, we're going to think and re-rationalize what we have." So significant amounts of space were put on the market in all of those locations. So the dependence of every city on those same labor pools in terms of the actual user of the labor is something I don't think people appreciated. People sort of say, "Well, you know, Austin and Dallas are much more diversified." I'm like, "Well, not really." I mean, it's if you actually look at where the growth came from. You know, even Manhattan, on an incremental basis, most of the growth came from those same large companies, right? Amazon took the Lord & Taylor building. Google bought the building down on Washington Street. Facebook took major portions of Hudson Yards. I mean, it's the same concentrated group of user groups that were really responsible for much of the growth. And so as they retrenched, and if you were to hand on heart ask one of these leaders, "Would you rather have your people closer to you or further away?" they would say, "We would rather have them closer because it's just more convenient, and it's all of the things that you get from collaboration are clearly easier to do when you are all physically close to each other." So our view is that, as things recover, the recovery will, you know, probably occur in places like the greater Silicon Valley before it happens in places like Austin, Texas, or Charlotte, or Atlanta, or other places where, you know, these same organizations have come, because of the nature of the availability of labor. If we get to the point again where labor is unbound in these organizations, then they will continue to look elsewhere and diversify their marketplaces in the United States. Got it. And you mentioned San Francisco, and I'm not sure if you talked about its coming back a little bit. Just talk to us. It feels like it's kind of in an island of its own in terms of how distressed San Francisco downtown became. Where are we in the recovery process if there is a recovery? So what I would say is, I think the drama around San Francisco is greatly overstated. I will tell you that, were you to walk around downtown L.A. and you were to walk around downtown San Francisco, you would think San Francisco is miles advanced and better in better shape than downtown L.A. But everyone thinks about all the technology companies that are headquartered in San Francisco and the number of layoffs that they had, and then you add to that the perception of a very progressive political situation and a view that there was a significant challenge relative to crime, which I'm not suggesting there wasn't. But all of those things are slowly but surely starting to heal. I would tell you that, you know, there has been some legitimate sort of pendulum shift in the politics of that city, and the employers are slowly but surely starting to require their employees to come back to work. If you're a believer in the next new technology, there is no question in terms of venture capital investment and growth in employment that the two major opportunity sets for AI labor concentration in the United States are first and foremost the CBD of San Francisco and then second, Seattle. It's happening. We saw almost 1 million sq ft of positive absorption of space from Anthropic and from OpenAI in the third quarter of 2023. There are a handful of 20,000, 30,000, and 40,000-sq ft smaller startup VC-backed AI companies that are now growing in the city of San Francisco. They are not of the same sort of stature in terms of their employee headcount as Anthropic and OpenAI, but they're there. There is an ecosystem of talent. And then interestingly, I would tell you that because of the nature of all of the engineering talent that is in the greater Silicon Valley, that's been there for decades and the opportunity and think about this, the opportunity for those companies to go public and that labor to potentially have a very big payday, it's a really attractive time to go work for one of those organizations in San Francisco. And much of the labor still lives in the city. They were the people who were getting on those buses every day to drive down to Mountain View or to drive down to Cupertino or to drive down to San Jose, but they still live in the city. Now they have an opportunity to, instead of getting on a bus, to, you know, get in get on public transportation or walk or drive to their to, their office. They're being required, by the way, to be in their offices four or five days a week. And they're, you know, sort of on the start of sort of the next potential big thing. We'll see how NVIDIA does in what, you know, 20 minutes or... 30 minutes. But it's clearly where the next likely growth possibility is, for the greater West Coast and primarily for San Francisco. That's helpful. So you mentioned going back to office. Is the debate around work from home, remote work, settled in terms of the industries that had to bring folks back? They're back, and the ones who've gone remote, where do we stand on that? So I don't think it will ever be settled. I think that there is a propensity of management to want to have their people back in their offices, and there is a whole host of ways in which organizations are making those messages clear. Some of them are demanding it and saying, "If you choose not to come back, you will lose your job." Others are saying, "Your compensation will be impacted by the amount of time that you spend, in your office collaborating and mentoring your peers." Others are saying, "We would really like you to come to work as much as possible, and our, our policy is now X days a week or X days a month or X weeks per month." And then there are those that are saying, "Well, it's just going to be our manager's discretion, and depending upon what your manager says, we're going to allow them to do what they want to do." So with that sort of divergence, I don't think we're going to be settled for anything. I think that the trajectory is certainly on a curve upward in terms of people wanting to have their employees be in their offices much more frequently. I also think that it is true that the amount of demand growth that we will see, for office space or for premier office space in the future will have some amount of moderation because of these new patterns, right? So if the typical GDP robust recovery was adding 3% of additional demand to the marketplace on an annual basis, the number is going to be some percentage of that 3%. I can't tell you what that is. I'm not smart enough, but it will be a little bit lower, and so we all have to acknowledge that that is going to happen. Got it. Just on this, I'm not sure if I read this somewhere. I'm not sure how accurate it is, but it's someone mentioned, "Oh, the work from home is a United States phenomenon." Do you agree with that statement, or? Yeah. It's an unequivocal truth that if you go to Europe, the vast majority of employees are going to their offices five days a week. If you go to Japan, the vast majority of employees are going to their offices five days a week. If you go to the Indian cities, the only reason they're not coming to work is because they're not allowed to because there's not enough power or seats for them, but they would they want to be at work five days a week. If you go to Southeast Asia, everyone is at work five days a week. North America because I think the Canadian cities are in a similar nature are the ones that have had a change in attitude. And look, this is, you know, uncomfortable to say, but I think we are losing productivity, particularly because of the nature of what has happened on Fridays. I believe that the acceptance of, "Well, people don't need to come to work on Fridays," leads to a relaxation of what you're doing on that day. And I think it's unfair for someone to rationalize, "Well, I'm working really, really hard Monday through Thursday, and therefore I don't need to put my time in on Friday," and you're still giving the organization that you're working for the same bargain that you had when you were employed. Now maybe the bargain has changed, and that's just the way we're going to be, but I think it's a problem from a productivity perspective, you know, in our country. Our team works equally hard on Fridays and Saturdays and Sundays, so if that's any solace. But the other aspect here is office old office buildings. What do you do with them? I think I wasn't sure if it's Vornado or someone. They were like Midtown Manhattan, create some tennis courts near MSG. Just give us a sense of what happened. I know earlier this morning you said this is going to be decades to get this done. Yeah. But are there any cities that we can look at, "Okay, they're already leading the charge," where the government stepped in or the local sort of mayors have stepped in? Well, I mean, you can look at examples of older office buildings in downtown Manhattan that were converted to residential successfully, you know, post the GFC. And there's actually a, you know, FiDi, right? There's a district where people live now, and they're very comfortable living down there. So it happens. The issue is that the economics are different today because we had this thing called inflation that blew up the cost of doing anything in our major cities from a construction perspective. So the economics of doing that is just not, you know, feasible today, particularly because there's such a focus on affordability, and I'm not suggesting there shouldn't be, but with government assistance in the form of subsidies, there is a sort of requisite, which is you must provide affordable housing, which means you have to have income-capped housing on significant percentages of these buildings. Right now, the economics of that are just not very viable when you have to borrow money from a, you know, commercial bank, assuming you could get a loan at SOFR plus something when SOFR is at 5.25%, and where, you know, instead of buildings being built to 4% caps and sold at 3.5% caps, you know, people need to build to a 6.5% cap, and they're being sold at 5.75% caps. And all of that kind of new math, which is part of the new interest rate environment that we're all in, is not conducive to private capital moving into these locations and taking risk. Got it. And you mentioned earlier that some of the real estate investors, such as Blackstone, etc., were looking to leave. What's where do you see the source of capital coming in? Like, where's it going to be distressed debt, or are there asset owners who are looking at these properties and waiting to step in? So I'd say the sort of green shoots at the moment are coming from very entrepreneurial, long-duration capital, from family offices and private high-net-worth individuals, but they're doing it in very small bite sizes. So if you were to follow what's been going on in San Francisco with some of the asset sales that have occurred in the last, you know, call it nine months, all the assets are relatively small. They're sort of, you know, under $100 million. And generally, they're being bought with mostly cash. There's really no debt available for these assets. And the source of the capital is those types of institutional capital. That's not going to fly for a 1 million sq ft well-leased building in Midtown Manhattan or any other major city in the country. And so that capital is going to have to come from a more institutional kind of capital source. I believe they will be here. At the moment, the issue is many of the traditional real estate investors have a view that they can achieve double-digit returns by making loans at percentages of the value of buildings, and they can get paid on a current basis in many cases to do that. So until those opportunities either don't pan out or they evaporate, you know, because there's just too much capital chasing it, I think it's going to be a slow road for them to be more equity-oriented investors. I don't think that we are in a position right now where there is third-party traditional institutional debt capital from the CMBS market, the conduit market, the life insurance company market, the bank market to finance assets today because most of the players are being either told or shown by either regulators or their investors that there's just not an appetite for that. And so we think that equity is going to need to be the sort of source of that capital, and again, which is why there are relatively few players that we think that could raise that capital in order to, you know, be successful at buying things. Obviously, there has to be a meeting of the minds on price. And again, we're going to test the waters, and we're going to see what we can get. But, you know, we're trading it at an implied sort of cap rate as a company, in the you know, high sevens. And so we need to have meaningful accretion in order to put our capital to work, and which means that, you know, the cap rates are going to be significantly higher than that. And so, you know, that's what it's going to take for us to do it. But again, I believe that there are strategic decisions being made by institutional owners that are saying, "Okay, it's now time to start to move on, and we're going to need to, you know, reduce our exposure to office, and we're a likely counterparty for that. Got it. And just, you mentioned this point about the construction costs have gone up with inflation over the last few years. Is there a way to sort of put some numbers around where were construction costs in 2019? Where are they today? I think that between the beginning of 2018, which is when it started things started to go up, and 2024, there has probably been a more than 50% increase in the material and labor cost component for new construction. And we saw bids that where we were seeing escalation close to 10% in a number of those years. So that's that component of it. And then the interest expense component has gone from if Mike was really good, he would tell me he could get a loan at SOFR plus 200. So we're talking about at the time 2.25%, and you know, his curve probably got him up to 3.5%. And today, that number is for a commercial office building, a minimum of probably 8.25%. It's probably not going down very much because the SOFR curve isn't going down very much over the next couple of years. But that's sort of, so you're more than doubling your interest expense. And then your return on equity, people were making real estate investments, you know, in 2017 and 2018 for new construction probably at yields that were in the mid-6s. And my guess is today, those yields would need to be closer to 9% for someone to feel comfortable taking the risk on something new. So you throw all that into the sausage maker, and you're talking about rents that are probably 50% higher than the best rents, you know, on average in a great building in whatever the record was at city is today. It doesn't mean that there won't be a customer who wants to have that building built for them, but it's not going to be an obvious conversation. Got it. Is there anything from a policy standpoint you're watching in terms of what the federal government might do, or, some of the passages of some of these bills around chips? Does it have an impact in how you think about your business, the outlook? And obviously, do elections matter one way or the other? Yeah. So what I would say is, the stuff that stuff matters in our minds because I think some of the things that are going on are going to be sort of inflationary in their results, right? If you're building chip factories in Albany, New York, and in Phoenix, Arizona, versus importing chips from Taiwan, and you're paying U.S. labor rates, I think that the cost of those chips is going to be more expensive. And unfortunately, that's inflationary, right? I just think onshoring or nearshoring is in general inflationary. We also have a demographic problem. And so if our demographic problem means there's more capital required or more programs that are needed by our federal government in order to maintain our population, that means there's likely to be more borrowing, and more borrowing means there's more interest expense, and more interest expense means there's crowding out of other things. So again, that's sort of inflationary. So those are the things that we're sort of thoughtful about. The short-term issue is why do we not see there that there's actually going to be disinflation? And largely, a lot of these programs that have been put through in Congress relative to the Jobs Act, the CHIPS Act, the Whatever Act, the Infrastructure Act, they're creating construction activity in sectors other than commercial office. And so the same labor pools are being devoted to, and the same materials in many cases, particularly, you know, excavation, concrete, steel, copper, things like that, are all being. Electricians, when you're talking about, you know, doing electrification systems, you know, for the billions of dollars across the country. That's just sucking the same pool of talent that would otherwise not be employed, and that might be much more aggressive about bidding on a new piece of commercial office space. And so you're not seeing a disinflationary experience, which is, again, why I think there's a sort of this perspective that, well, because inflation has gotten much, much tamer, then, you know, costs are going to come down. Well, they're not coming down. They're just not going up, particularly for, you know, for basic material and for basic construction costs. So those things are not. It's not necessarily that they're problematic, but they're just realities that we have to deal with as we think about, you know, the next cycle of stuff that we're going to be developing. Got it. I guess we have a few minutes left. Just in terms of you started out talking about the stock price. I think you said 2001 versus 2023. 2021. 2021 and sorry, 2021. As you think about just the investment proposition from BXP, like, how would you frame it around risks? Like, the risks seem obvious. You could continue to have pressure on the job market, especially sort of the office-going job market. Rates may not go down. I think all of these probably have some negative implications for your earnings outlook. But just give us a sense of, like, what the puts and takes are. Yeah. So, so again, that's why I sort of started with the way I framed things at the beginning, right? So, so all of those things could get better, but let's assume none of them get better. Then I think that that will create many more opportunities for us to be acquisitive. And, I would tell you that the real estate investment trust stocks have always worked best when there has been incremental, both internal but more importantly, external opportunities to grow earnings. In our definition, that's FFO per share. So if we can accretively make acquisitions of fabulous premier properties in our core markets and do it in an accretive way, and by the way, if we're doing it with enough equity, that's also a deleveraging activity, which creates even more opportunity set, you could see a stronger momentum of earnings growth from BXP than you have seen over the last few years where we've really been very unaggressive. We've been, I would say, cautious. We've been conservative. We've been risk mitigators. And, you know, Mike and his team have set us up with a lot of liquidity so that we can now sort of pivot. But again, we've organized the portfolio and positioned ourselves where we have a relatively modest amount of exposure from our existing portfolio for the next number of years so that we can be potentially much more aggressive about growing the organizational assets and growing our earnings per share defined as FFO on a going forward basis if all those things also don't help us on the macro level. It sounds like you can cherry-pick the assets at this point where you're not competing with too many. We hope that that's the case. We are going to cherry-pick the assets because we are not in the eating sardines business. We're not in the trading sardines business. So we want to look for and acquire assets that we view as having a potential infinite hold. That isn't always the case. Our markets change. We have been a very aggressive seller of and disposer of assets over the last, you know, five or six years. Typically, we're selling somewhere between, you know, $700 million and $800 million of assets. But everything that we purchased was with an expectation that it would be an asset that we would hold for an infinite period of time. And it's not unusual for us in this part of the cycle where the capital is fleeing to be acquisitive. I mean, after the GFC, we were very acquisitive. We bought over $4 billion of new assets, including the General Motors Building, 200 Clarendon Street in Boston, 100 Federal Street in Boston. And those are great assets today. And we got them at, you know, prices on a per sq ft basis that we thought were very, very attractive. And those were very accretive acquisitions for us. I mean, so this sounds an interesting time to be in your shoes. Should we tell Jeff Spector to put a buy recommendation on us? So I guess that's the question I was going to ask you is, where's the skepticism coming from when you think about the street or the shareholders or prospective investors? It's so, it's all that negativity. It is so. So Mike and I have been doing a yeoman's work in terms of the number of meetings we've had for the past three and a half years, okay? It is so clear that everyone is looking for a catalyst. That's what they say. So what's the catalyst going to be? And we keep saying, "You tell us what the catalyst is going to be because you're the one who needs to see what the catalyst is. We're all we can do is operate our business," which is, again, why I sort of framed my initial remarks the way I did. So we are now at this position where hopefully, we can actually create our own catalyst by being more acquisitive and doing things on an accretive basis that will be very significant in terms of growing our earnings. And if we can't, if people don't want to buy our stock as we're growing our earnings, I don't know when they will want to buy our stock. But it's those types of sort of conversations that have sort of put us in a position to do the things that we're talking about doing right now. All right. right. Sounds like an interesting year ahead. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you.