Susan Pendergrass speaks with Jim Epstein, director of the documentary Escaping Venezuela and executive editor of Reason magazine, about the film, the rise of Hugo Chavez, what happened to Venezuela’s grocery stores and oil industry, and more.
Episode Transcript
Susan Pendergrass (00:00)
I’m so looking forward to this conversation. Thank you so much for joining us, Jim Epstein, from Reason magazine, and most importantly, the director of a movie that was just released called Escaping Venezuela. And I just have to tell you right at the top here, I absolutely found it to be so compelling and, full disclosure, cried at the airport scene. So I don’t know if that’s what you’re going for, but it worked on me. It was amazing.
Jim Epstein (00:21)
Thank you. It is what I was going for, but I’m glad it worked out, yeah. Thank you.
Susan Pendergrass (00:26)
I don’t think that many Americans have any connection to the experience of having to leave the country they were born in and grew up in and that they identify with, and having their family separated from them. You just presented it in such a compelling way. And before we talk about the movie, how long did you spend making this movie?
Jim Epstein (00:45)
Oh my God, Susan, so long, so long. Yeah, and
Susan Pendergrass (00:47)
Like so many things happened during it. Like you were in real time.
Jim Epstein (00:53)
I made a lot of rookie mistakes. There were points where it seemed like I was writing a Russian novel and not making a film. I was following, you know, there’s a family at the center of this film, but I also spent a lot of time with a couple of other families too. And there were so many things that happened in Venezuela during this stretch of time, very important things that I just had to cut out of the film. But of course, unfortunately, I didn’t realize that at the outset. So my editor and I constructed these elaborate scenes, and then at a certain point we pulled them out of the film. So there’s a lot on the cutting room floor, some of which is actually gonna show up on our YouTube channel, Reason, fairly soon. But you asked about the timeline. What happened is I started this film right before COVID. And then I shot a couple scenes, set it aside, and then during the pandemic, we couldn’t really travel. Nothing was really happening. So I worked on other projects. I used that time to get my Spanish skills up to snuff for what I needed to do interviews and so forth. And then as the pandemic was winding down, we picked it up again.
And it was kind of a slow burn for a long time. I don’t know if you have a project where your friends say, “What have you been working on?” And you’re kind of embarrassed to say, “That’s, yeah, that’s still that documentary.” “Really? Still, huh? Okay.” You know, it’s like the documentary or the book that’s never gonna get finished.
Susan Pendergrass (02:25)
Yeah, your opus. Yeah.
Jim Epstein (02:26)
You know, and yeah, in the end we all need deadlines. And what happened on January 3, 2026, was that the US government did this crazy
Susan Pendergrass (02:36)
Bananas.
Jim Epstein (02:37)
military operation, went in, captured Nicolas Maduro, and suddenly Venezuela was in the news in the way it hadn’t been before, and I thought, this is my moment, I must finish this film, and I did.
Susan Pendergrass (02:45)
Okay. Get it out.
Was it dangerous to make for you personally?
Jim Epstein (02:53)
Well, the film was not dangerous because I’m really telling a story. I’m not telling a story about contemporary Venezuela during the making of this film. When I started it, I was told, do not go there, because there are criminal gangs that will kidnap you for ransom. It is not safe for an American to be in this country. And then actually the economic situation became so dire that the criminals sort of left. The crime problem reduced a little. And then the issue was actually that the government will kidnap you and trade you for American prisoners, which happened. So that was unsafe. It did not happen to me, but that was a reason why I wasn’t
Susan Pendergrass (03:33)
That happened to you? Okay, yeah.
Jim Epstein (03:38)
going to Venezuela. My story that I’m telling is really like an archival story. It’s about what happened in Venezuela starting in the sixties and seventies and through the Chavez years. So it was not dangerous. I went to the Mexican border, but nothing was dangerous there. We’re going to Venezuela. Germania, the film’s narrator, and I are actually planning a trip to Venezuela in December where we’re gonna make another maybe 25-minute documentary about the country since January 3. And that’s not going to be risky because things have changed to some degree there, and we could talk about that. It’s kind of a complex situation.
Susan Pendergrass (04:14)
Yeah, I want to.
Jim Epstein (04:16)
But yeah, no, there was no real danger in making this film.
Susan Pendergrass (04:19)
So then you release it this month at a time when socialism is cool again, right? So you have this film about the utter collapse of a country that was doing quite well in the sixties and seventies. The utter collapse of that country, I guess due to socialism. I want to talk about the movie specifically, but I’m just thinking in terms of timing. And now we have a number of candidates in the United States that are just proudly socialist.
And people are into it. And what do you think, after working on this film for so long, what’s your take on that?
Jim Epstein (04:52)
So the timing worked out in that sense as well. Just to clarify, the film, when you say “released” is a tricky word. I mean, we’re hosting some screenings. We had one in New York last night.
Susan Pendergrass (04:59)
Okay.
Jim Epstein (05:02)
It’s not available for streaming yet, and people can go to reason.com/escaping and we’ll give an alert as to when you can stream it. The world of documentary distribution, particularly for a very libertarian film, is a whole topic unto itself that we probably don’t want to get into. But in terms of the timing, yeah, absolutely. And you know, I live in New York City and we have a socialist mayor, and there’s a scene in my film where Hugo Chavez is at a grocery store holding food up. And we recently had a very similar scene in New York of Mayor Mamdani holding bananas up because the city is opening some government-run grocery stores.
And you know, I don’t think the United States is about to turn into a socialist country in the way Venezuela was. However, there are a lot of specific policies that are actually being implemented in cities that were tried in Venezuela and led to catastrophe. So there are actually a lot of policy lessons that Americans can learn from Venezuela. And you know, at Reason we sort of see the DSA and some aspects of the MAGA movement as being similar. This sort of horseshoe effect. And there are also parts of the film, such as where Hugo Chavez pulls a broadcaster off the air because he doesn’t like their coverage, which is somewhat reminiscent of Trump. So I think it’s also relevant to some degree.
Susan Pendergrass (06:31)
Yeah. 60 Minutes. Yeah.
Jim Epstein (06:35)
Relevant in that sense as well, yeah.
Susan Pendergrass (06:36)
Yeah, so oftentimes, well, in the last six months when Pew has released polls and Gallup has released polls and Cato has released polls showing a more favorable view of socialism and a less favorable view of capitalism, I’ve talked to folks who are generally from the baby boomer generation, like, my God, do they not know what happened in Venezuela? Do they not know what Stalin did? My reaction has been, no, I don’t think they do.
Right. I don’t think the schools are teaching it well. And I don’t really think people do know. So I will say I learned a lot from your film as well, but I think just tracing, because this is kind of the recent past. This isn’t Stalin a hundred years ago. We are talking since the year 2000, Venezuela has essentially collapsed. So can you just take us quickly through, I mean, I believe that my opinion is a lot of their Achilles heel is the oil that they have underneath Venezuela, right? But can you take us through how Caracas went from this thriving modern city to basically a third world country?
Jim Epstein (07:33)
Sure, yeah, and I appreciate that that was your takeaway. I think more than anything, what motivated me to want to make this film was, when I started, there was this mass migration out of Venezuela. A quarter of the country, eight million people, fleeing. And to me it was absolutely clear that this should be a potent symbol of socialism’s failure. This was the direct result of this grand experiment in socialism started by Hugo Chavez.
And that was not the way it was being interpreted in the media. It was, look at the mismanagement, or look at, you know, an authoritarian government. And I felt that, you know, to truly honor the tragedy of what these victims are going through, we need to learn something from this experience and put this into context. Now, Venezuelan history is fascinating and long and complex. And in 1998, a populist socialist president by the name of Hugo Chavez was elected in a free election to become the president of Venezuela. And he is the man responsible for the catastrophe that ensued. He was very closely aligned with Fidel Castro. A lot of people believe he was a Cuban spy. And he was effectively bringing Cuban-style socialism to Venezuela, which he did, effectively.
Now, of course, the story does not begin with Chavez. And I do touch on some earlier aspects, which is that Chavez was elected because the country was in a terrible place in the 90s. Starting in the 80s, too, actually, there were years where the economy was contracting, growth had stopped. And in the film I tie it back to a president of Venezuela in the 1970s by the name of Carlos Andrés Pérez, who nationalized the oil industry, tripled the size of government, and corruption just skyrocketed. It was just this idea at the time that Venezuela’s oil riches could be centralized in the hands of the state and used to catapult Venezuela into becoming this first world powerhouse. And it was an experiment in central planning that failed miserably. It didn’t fail as miserably as Chavez’s socialist revolution did, which went much further. But it was really that change that began in the seventies that set the stage for what would happen with Chavez.
Susan Pendergrass (10:13)
So then, before Chavez got elected, we get to the eighties, this End of History and the Last Man period where the Berlin Wall comes down and countries are moving away from socialism and Marxism towards more liberal democracies. And in the film anyway, you go, Chavez is like, no, we want to bring the wall back and we reject that premise and we’re gonna be the best. So he just says “socialism” so much. He’s just like, socialism, the socialism, man, the socialism. He really leans in hard. Yeah, yeah. He really
Jim Epstein (10:41)
“Socialism was never really tried.” He uses that famous line. Yeah.
Susan Pendergrass (10:46)
leans in on it. Why do you think that message resonates so much with people?
Jim Epstein (10:53)
Yeah, I mean
Susan Pendergrass (10:54)
I think it’s kind of intoxicating, right? You’re gonna have free government, I mean, I’m sorry, free health care and free housing and free childcare and everyone’s gonna have a job and have an income. You know?
Jim Epstein (11:03)
Absolutely. I mean, if you go back to Venezuela in the late 1990s, where there had been this stagnant growth and there was a lot of inequality, there were people who were living a high life, very much like a first world life of luxury, and then there were people living in these shanty communities that you see dotting the mountainsides of Caracas, in desperate poverty.
Of course, everything Chavez did ended up making that situation far worse. And we have more inequality than we ever did before in Venezuela. It’s profound now. So the socialism made that problem far more severe. However, if you go back to the nineties and you look at this issue, you can understand how people would logically think, well, the wealthy people are taking all the oil money and we’re getting shafted. And of course, that’s not how economies work. The problems in Venezuela were actually indicative of central planning, effectively. But some of the ideas, these classically liberal ideas about free markets and how they lead to prosperity, are somewhat counterintuitive and hard to convey. So if you have a brilliant populist politician like Chavez, who was just this singular political figure because he was both a master communicator, he looked like no other president of Venezuela looked before. He grew up in a house with a dirt floor. He had dark skin. He did not look like these tall, handsome, slick, European-looking presidents that you’d seen in the past in Venezuela. And yet he was also an intellectual who was extremely well read and thought in these grand terms about what had happened in the Soviet Union and the fall of the Berlin Wall, and saw himself as this historical figure who was going to revitalize the socialist movement after the fall of the Berlin Wall. And through a movement that was called socialism for the twenty-first century, we’re gonna do it right this time. It didn’t work out that way.
Susan Pendergrass (13:23)
So let’s go to the grocery stores, all right, ’cause that is being floated by Zohran Mamdani. It’s happening.
Jim Epstein (13:29)
More than floating. Yeah, they’re underway. Yep.
Susan Pendergrass (13:33)
Let’s step through what happened when Hugo Chavez created their own grocery stores and set the prices. How’d that go?
Jim Epstein (13:39)
So yeah, this was one of Hugo Chavez’s missions. He had a series of missions. It’s called the Misión Alimentación. It was like a mission food mission. And what he did was he took over, nationalized a lot of private grocery chains, and started a chain called Mercal. There was actually later a few other government grocery chains as well, and the idea was, we’re gonna sell food at basically the price that it takes to manufacture. We’re gonna take the profit out of grocery items, and therefore it’s gonna become much cheaper for the people to come and buy food. It’ll just lead to a more dignified life for the poor because you won’t have these voracious capitalist store owners who are trying to make money off of a basic thing like food for your family, a can of tuna fish or, you know, rice and beans. And it didn’t go as planned. Of course, people who understand the grocery business know that there are extremely low profit margins in the grocery business. What happened with the government-owned grocery stores is the same thing that happened with all the industries that Chavez nationalized, which is that they became heavily politicized, run by incompetent political operatives who had no idea how to actually run a grocery store. When prices are set below the market clearing rate, what happens is people line up and buy everything off the shelves. So it’s like a basic economics lesson in real life.
Susan Pendergrass (15:23)
Sure.
Jim Epstein (15:24)
And unfortunately there were human lives at stake here. So you had, you know, people loading up pantries. You’ve seen images of pantries just packed with food. You had people carrying groceries across the border to Colombia and reselling them at the market price. You had a phenomenon
Susan Pendergrass (15:41)
That kills me. Yeah.
Jim Epstein (15:43)
called bachaqueros, who were black market sellers who would buy up everything and then sell at the market price through a black market. In later years there were these social media networks, WhatsApp networks, where you’d put your grocery order in secretly via WhatsApp to get the food. Because these grocery stores, there was nothing on the shelves after a while. That’s what happens when you set prices low. So now Chavez, who wasn’t getting the results he wanted, tried to impose fines, prison sentences. There’s a scene in the film where he says, “I’m sending the military to the street to enforce this rule.”
And it’s one example of how socialist policies, people ask me why does socialism lead to authoritarianism? And there’s a couple answers to that question, but one of the answers is because the plans don’t go like the government thinks they will. So in order to correct for that, there’s gonna be another government intervention. And then when that doesn’t go as well, there might be another government intervention. It’s a phenomenon that the Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises talked about, which is another government intervention, another government intervention, and that sort of is the road to serfdom, so to speak.
Susan Pendergrass (17:00)
Well, I loved how Carlos, the man you followed, who I want to talk about, said that there’s greed in capitalism and there’s greed in socialism. It’s just which system is better at handling that greed, whether it’s the invisible hand or the hand of the government. And I think it’s clear, but you know, it’s such a good example of how it falls apart. I mean, the oil industry fell apart. That I am not clear on. I understand the mechanism was government takeover, but how did they get from a functioning oil industry to a nonfunctioning oil industry?
Jim Epstein (17:32)
Right. So the oil industry was actually nationalized in the 1970s, long before Chavez. But they did it in a way where the oil company is called PDVSA, and it was called a state within a state. So it was this powerhouse state-owned company with all of these legal protections between the company and the executive branch, because they realized that you didn’t want the president running the oil company, you wanted the technocrats running it. And that’s how it went. And PDVSA had issues, but it was not a disaster. You had highly capable engineers and people in charge. So just because it was state-owned didn’t mean that it would necessarily turn bad. However, what the formation of PDVSA did do is it set the stage for what was going to happen inevitably, which is a president like Chavez who would come along and say, “Hey, I want to launch all these social programs. I want to fix, you know, all this inequality in the country. And look at this giant pot of money. I need direct access.” So one of the first things he did in office is break down that barrier between the state-owned oil company and the executive branch. So the oil revenues become just a personal piggy bank for him, that he can write blank checks, whether it’s financing a Hollywood film or paying for heating oil in the South Bronx, which he did as a publicity stunt. There were no controls on Chavez’s use of that money. However, one thing they weren’t doing was reinvesting in capital maintenance in the oil industry. So the industry starts to fall apart.
Also, a lot of the highly capable engineers and executives within the oil industry did not like what was going on. They went on strike and Chavez fired them. I think it’s about 17,000 who were let go. So you had this loss of expertise, this decline in quality. And it doesn’t happen immediately. You know, when you stop reinvesting in something, it’s sort of fine for a while, but over time, oil output just begins to collapse and there were deadly accidents. And it’s gonna take, you know, maybe a decade to rebuild because of the negligence of what took place.
Susan Pendergrass (19:59)
So then Hugo Chavez gets cancer and dies, and Nicolas Maduro replaces him. And was he worse?
Jim Epstein (20:08)
Yeah, he was worse in the sense that he was what you might call the mafia stage of socialism, which I think happens inevitably. We see it in a lot of countries, we’ve certainly seen it in Cuba. At first, Maduro was trained in Cuba, he was a socialist, and in fact when he first comes to power, he sort of doubles down on Chavez’s socialist policies. But he wasn’t an intellectual, and ultimately, ideologically, he was just more of a petty criminal who was gonna enrich himself. He and his wife were going to basically build a mafia organization to enrich their friends and connections and put their family members in positions of power. So Chavez was a dangerous figure who is primarily responsible for the catastrophe in Venezuela, but he did have a set of guiding ideas.
And Maduro, because he was a petty criminal, he really took the country much more in the direction of the authoritarian dictatorship that we ended up seeing, where they captured people, they tortured people, they had targeted murders. There’s a terrible case of a city council member in Venezuela who was outspoken against the regime, had just been in New York speaking at the UN, trying to get attention for the situation, comes back to Caracas, is picked up at the airport, killed, and his body’s thrown out the window. There are so many cases like that of just, it’s a mob. It’s
Susan Pendergrass (21:39)
The Supreme Court, right?
Jim Epstein (21:40)
a criminal organization. At one point in the film, I tell the story of an attempt by the opposition to appoint a legitimate Supreme Court, because Maduro had co-opted the Supreme Court. And then Maduro declares that he’s gonna seize all their property and throw them all in prison, which he begins to do. And then it connects to my story, because the Mora family, who are the protagonists of the film, end up helping those justices escape the country.
Susan Pendergrass (22:11)
‘Cause he was always a part of the political opposition, or Carlos Mora was brought into the political opposition to Maduro.
Jim Epstein (22:18)
Yeah, Carlos Mora was really not a political character at all. He was a businessman who ran an apparel business with his wife and was living a quiet and prosperous life in a border town called San Antonio del Táchira, which is right near the border with Colombia. And what he found, he was eventually contacted through a cousin of his who is political, who actually is associated with María Corina Machado. His cousin helped to bring him into these operations where he would help people escape. And what Carlos was really bringing to the table is that it was a small town and he was this beloved figure. Carlos, you just walk around, even New York, with Carlos and he’s striking up conversations right and left. Everyone in this town knew him. Went to high school with him, et cetera. So including the border guards. So if Carlos went to the border, no one asked him to show an identification. “Hello, hello,” you know, and then he would just walk right on through. So what he realized is that if there were people like the Supreme Court justices who were not allowed to flee the country, they’d had their passports taken away, the guards were looking for them, Carlos could get them through because of his contacts, and that is really what he and his family brought to the table, and how he ended up getting involved in politics.
Susan Pendergrass (23:43)
And ultimately going to prison or being picked up and tortured.
Jim Epstein (23:46)
Ultimately imprisoned and tortured, and then makes his own escape. Yeah.
Susan Pendergrass (23:52)
To Miami, as so many Venezuelans have done.
Jim Epstein (23:55)
Yeah. That’s right.
Susan Pendergrass (23:56)
And so then, as you mentioned, ten months ago, the United States grabbed Nicolas Maduro and his wife. They are sitting in a jail cell, as I understand it, in New York City. And there was an opportunity to then replace Maduro with, is it María Corina Machado, who won the Nobel Peace Prize? Correct me.
Jim Epstein (24:15)
Yes, well, yeah, like everything in Venezuela, it’s so complicated. María Corina Machado, who did win the Nobel Peace Prize, is the leader of the opposition movement and someone who would be elected president of Venezuela hands down if there were a free election. Trump has sidelined her, and there’s a big battle over her fight to return to Venezuela right now. But yeah, so
Susan Pendergrass (24:43)
So instead
Jim Epstein (24:44)
right now, instead, we have Delcy Rodriguez, who was a member of the Maduro criminal network, ran the secret police, was in charge of a fake congressional body that sought to displace the legitimate one. I mean, her brother is also a central figure, Jorge Rodriguez, in Chavismo. So she now, there have been some positive reforms, and she realizes that if she doesn’t want to end up in a jail cell next to Maduro’s, she needs to make some movements towards releasing political prisoners and lightening up on the political repression we’re seeing. But this is still a dictatorship, and I think what many observers think, and what I agree with, is that she’s sort of waiting it out. When Trump leaves office, who knows if the next administration will have any interest in what’s going on in Venezuela. So maybe there will never be elections. What they’re paying lip service to is the idea that this is a transition period, elections are coming, we need to do it in a managed, safe way. I hope that that’s true. But
Susan Pendergrass (25:58)
Yeah.
Jim Epstein (25:59)
don’t count the Chavistas out. They’re like, you know, mice and cockroaches, really hard to definitively get rid of. And they’re smart, and we’ve constantly underestimated them. So there’s a lot to be worried about.
Susan Pendergrass (26:16)
So I just think that this is such a fantastic example in recent times, since the year 2000, of yet one more experiment in socialism, right? This is not the first experiment whatsoever. This was going to be the one that worked, according to Hugo Chavez. And you can see that now Venezuela, like I said, or you’ve pointed out, is a third world country, more or less.
It is a little surprising to me that people continue to romanticize this idea that with socialism it’s just a matter of getting it right. Like, it’s been tried, but we haven’t found the right way to try socialism. Does that surprise you?
Jim Epstein (26:52)
I think it’s to some degree a mystery why people still use that word. We’re talking, whether you want to call it communism or socialism, this Marxist ideology, I think there’s convincing evidence that it led to an estimated hundred million deaths in the twentieth century.
Susan Pendergrass (27:12)
Sure.
Jim Epstein (27:12)
So why is it acceptable in polite society? You can’t go around calling yourself a fascist. So why can you get away with calling yourself a socialist? And I think it’s because socialism is an idea that has always been popular, most popular among the intellectual class and within academia, and people don’t learn their history. You know, when Soviet history is taught, it’s not clearly taught that it was an experiment in Marxism and in state ownership of the means of production, and that it turned out to be a disaster. So unfortunately, because of that ignorance, we have to relive this nightmare. And something that I try and show in the film is just to convey the human cost. I mean, there are millions of stories. Carlos’s story is emblematic, but there are many people who were tortured, many people who were murdered, and even more people who saved for retirement, worked hard all their lives, and are now penniless in their old age with food insecurity because their savings were wiped out by inflation, or they built businesses, or they are working in delivery or in restaurants, even though they are doctors and lawyers in Venezuela. And it’s easy to look past them and look past that tragedy and not notice it, particularly if you don’t speak Spanish, if you don’t know the history. And I think that’s what I’m trying to do with this film, is to highlight this tragedy and explain why it happened so that we can learn from these mistakes.
Susan Pendergrass (29:00)
Yeah, I think people, you know, health care’s extremely expensive in this country, and for a lot of folks who even have health insurance, if they break an arm or have a car accident, God forbid, get diagnosed with cancer, they’re gonna have medical bills they can’t pay. And I think that that is troubling to people in such a wealthy nation. So then when politicians who are socialists say we’re gonna have free health care, they’re like, if that’s socialism, sign me up, you know? And then without knowing the consequences of those kinds of decisions and where they lead to. And again, what I think is so great about this film is we don’t have to try it again. We can see this. You can see what happened in Venezuela. And it, you know, I don’t know if people like Hugo Chavez are born or created when they get into a position of power, but you can see what happens when the wrong person
So socialism leads to authoritarianism and almost leads to tyranny, right? Like, it’s hard to break that.
Jim Epstein (29:58)
I absolutely agree. And I
Susan Pendergrass (29:59)
It’s not the right person.
Jim Epstein (30:00)
like your example of health insurance because it’s an example of a system that has a lot of problems. The health care industry in the United States has a whole lot of problems. A lot of those problems are actually tied to the fact that it is in no way a free market system. It’s distorted in all kinds of ways. The US government pays more than half the health care bills in the United States. It’s a heavily regulated industry, more regulated than any other industry. We have this third-party payer system through our tax system where consumers are shielded from feeling the actual costs of the things that they buy. And yet, if you ask the average Joe, this is a market-based system, and all the problems of health care have to do with the free market. So that’s, I think, another answer to your question of why are socialist ideas so seductive? It’s a misunderstanding. In the same way that in Venezuela in the 1990s, so many of society’s problems were a result of government intervention in the market, and yet it was understood, and Chavez certainly depicted it, as the failure of free market capitalism. Thus, we need more socialism and more socialism in order to fix it, which, needless to say, misdiagnoses the problem.
Susan Pendergrass (31:20)
Well, I think a lot of folks are gonna wanna see your movie. Do you have any sense of when it will be streaming?
Jim Epstein (31:26)
So I hope soon. I hope so. Yeah.
Susan Pendergrass (31:29)
Whatever that means.
Jim Epstein (31:31)
It’s such an interesting and sort of new thing to me. You know, I work at Reason and almost all the work I’ve done at Reason goes out on YouTube, which I love. And so this is a little different. This film may end up on YouTube. We’re trying to sort it out. If you do a screening or a festival, you’re also prohibited from having it online streaming. So the timing is very difficult. However, if people are interested in this film, what I hope they’ll do is go to reason.com/escaping. There’s a redirect page. Put your email in there. As soon as it’s available, I promise we’ll let you know. And yeah.
Susan Pendergrass (32:10)
It’s fantastic. I really enjoyed it, and thank you so much for making it. It was fantastic. And thanks for joining us.
Jim Epstein (32:14)
Okay, well, thanks so much, Susan.
