Thomas Hübl: Welcome back to the Collective Healing Conference. My name is Thomas Hübl. I’m the convener of the conference and I am so happy to be sitting here with Loretta Ross. Loretta warm welcome to our Collective Healing Conference.
Loretta J. Ross: Thanks for having me on.
Thomas: Yes. I’m very curious to learn from you because you embody many years and a lot of experience of activism being a voice for change in society, and I think many people, I think also many people that listen to us here at the conference, but many people that are working on very important topics in society. We need passion, we need fire, we need to really care. But sometimes in the activism work, we create a lot of polarization ourselves. So I’m very curious to learn from your experience, so how you see that and where you are today in your work in the world, but maybe we can start with your own journey. So given all the work that you did, where do you feel it developing your work at the moment is the most interesting for you, given all you have seen? So what’s your leading edge, so to speak?
Loretta: Thank you for that question. I’m one of the 12 black women who created the theory of reproductive justice 30 years ago, and so my current passion around reproductive justice is a concept that I’m calling reproductive justice futurism. I’m actually trying to project into maybe 50 or a hundred years ahead of us right now. How will all of the genetic and reproductive technologies that we’re seeing experimented with now really going to have an effect on our present day inequalities and structural problems? I mean, will the benefits of science be equally and fairly distributed or will they be only reserved for the people with the money to pay as they go, for example? And so reproductive justice futurism takes the human rights space, reproductive justice of analysis and said, well, what will happen when designer babies aren’t desired to be brown or black? What will happen, will there still be treatment only or for those who could afford the thousands and thousands of dollars to manage their reproduction? What will happen when we start doing gene selection and then deselect for things that the rich and powerful see as undesirable? We have to ask those questions now because the science is moving far ahead of our moral ability to anticipate the unintended consequences and maybe the consequences aren’t unintended. Maybe they’re working out the way they want them to work out, but we should be questioning all of that.
Thomas: I completely agree. So how do you work on that practically? How do you address those topics practically in your everyday work? How can we make those changes or build that awareness or build that kind of ethical code to relate to science in that way and equality?
Loretta: Well, I’m one of those people who definitely believes in collective liberation. So whenever I see a problem, I always think that the first thing to do is to bring like-minded people together to talk about it, that I don’t have the capacity or the desire to think that I can singularly solve or address these problems by myself. So for example, on reproductive justice futurism, I’m organizing a conference next March at Smith College where I work bringing together the leading scholars and activists and scientists that will accept my invitation to come talk about what would human rights based scientific advancements look like? How can we in fact put some guardrails up so that we don’t deny the possible benefits of these scientific developments, but that we also don’t over promise through them or upgrade present day inequalities. And so that’s my first step is to always bring together people to discuss and bounce ideas off each other and learn from each other and share their knowledges so that we can then begin to see, well, where are the gaps? Gaps? What is known? Where are the gaps? Where’s the leadership coming from? What leadership needs to be developed? Those kinds of questions. I always believe in working in collective ways with my people.
Thomas: Yeah, I do too. And so how do you relate this work? You’re creating awareness, you’re bringing people together, and then there is this capitalistic race for profit that is a big motivator in scientific progress. So there is a very fast train moving that’s looking okay, how do we fund research? How do we fund new scientific breakthroughs and how can we make use of them to generate revenue? And so what is your experience? How can we work on or same we see with AI at the moment. So there is a big race and once that train is going, so it’s very hard to stop it somewhere and say, listen, by the way, here is an issue that we need to be aware of. So how do you see the awareness building and what you just said in relationship to that fast moving economic train that has a lot of power to drive things forward? Maybe you can speak a little bit to that.
Loretta: Well, I tend not to group all people with economic power in one bucket. There are certainly ideological differences between what we call the 1%. I think that there’s portions of the 1% that are amoral, that are just about pursuing profits, but I think there’s portions of the 1% that have social consciousness and that are trying to do the right thing. And so I don’t assume that just because somebody’s rigid and immoral in an unhealthy unsustainable way that there’s not a way to talk to them, to reach them, to enlist them into understanding how you can’t play around with all of our humanities. You just can’t do that. And so I tend to individualize people regardless of their race, class, identity. I tend to see where their hearts are. And so obviously I can’t stop capitalism from capitalizing because that’s what it does, but at the same time, I’m rather kinesian in thinking that it doesn’t have to do it in such a destructive way. There are choices that we make all along the past around who is valued, who is seen as disposable, who is exploited, who are the exploiters. We can make choices along all of them. There’s nothing inevitable about oppression, that is always a choice.
Thomas: Yes. Beautiful sentence. Do you want to share with our listeners a little bit, what are the topics that you worked on as an activist or policy or in your work so far? What are the core topics that are dear to your heart?
Loretta: Well, before I do the historical backdrop, I just want to bring into focus another thing that I’m working on that is a leading edge in August of this year, which is 2024, I’m co-organizing the which the Anima Leadership Institute a compassionate leadership project meeting. In other words, there’s a lot of practitioners like [inaudible] and myself and others who are really working on how do we build a more united humanity around the use of compassion and kindness. I frequently say you can say what you mean and mean what you say, but you don’t have to say it mean that’s a choice. And so there’s a lot of us who are now working on this problem of [inaudible] relations and our families and our workplaces and our politics. And so I’m bringing together a group of them in a think tank type of meeting in August in Washington DC to compare methodologies to see what works, to see what doesn’t work to address the attack on DEI and other kinds of ways of solving our problems.
That hasn’t happened before. I don’t think a lot of us have been in the same room together to compare what’s working and what’s not and what needs to be developed. So I actually have two competing leading edge, probably my third one is calling in, which you’ll get to in a minute. But I entered social justice, human rights activism as a teenager. I went to college at 16 Howard University. It was there I got tear gassed in my first demonstration against the police. For some reason, I didn’t think tear gas cannisters could reach me if I was on the seventh floor of a building and I was wrong. But my first job in social change was as executive director of the DC Rape Crisis Center, which I took that job in 1979. And the DC Rape Crisis Center had been the first rape crisis center in the country.
It was founded in 1972. So I see myself as having been on the ground floor of the movement to end all violence against women, which again expanded to all violence against other people. After I left that job, I became active and reproductive politics because I’d been sterilized when I was 23. And of course that’s a big wake up call that you need to pay attention to your plumbing when people are trying to take your right to reproduce away from you. And then I ended up in the women’s movement, but by the 1990s I was working against hate groups. I was running a research department, that opposition research department that monitored hate groups like the Ku Klux Klan and the neo-Nazi movement. So I ended up de-programming white supremacists, found myself having the most improbable, unlikely conversations in the world, and then I started a National Center for Human Rights Education because the population of the United States is abysmally ignorant about human rights.
Intentionally, by the way. Our government has never made a full-throated commitment to educate its population about human rights. And a survey that we did showed that only 7% of the American public, the US public had even heard of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. So 93% of our country is unaware of these global agreements that we should be honoring and respecting and implementing. And so for a decade, I ran the Human Rights Education Center doing human rights education to over a million people. Then most recently in 1997, I helped co-found an organization called Sister Song, which is a women of color reproductive justice collective, and been working on reproductive justice for a long time, co-wrote three books on the topic and then my most recent work is on calling in. And I’ll just let that go right now because we’re going to talk about that, I’m sure.
Thomas: Wow. First of all, it’s impressive to hear all the things that you already did, and it’s also impressive to hear how that formed you over the years more and more to who you are today and all the wisdom that generated for you and that you pass on to everybody you work with. So thank you for all the work that you have been doing, such an important work. And so how does this all relate now to calling in, calling out? I mean, we are living in a time where the cancel culture, be saying the right thing at the right time calling, you said you can say what you mean, but you don’t have to say it mean. I think that’s how you said it before. I like that sentence. It’s great. And so can you speak a little bit to how we create a cancel culture? Why then how we can move on from that? So the whole calling in, calling out, maybe you can speak for us a little bit to what that means for you.
Loretta: Well, I think people have been calling people out and canceling each other as long as there’s been human history. So it’s certainly not anything new. Whenever we want to criticize what’s going on either in individuals or with the government. I mean, Martin Luther faced his things on the Wittenberg Chapel. I mean, we have all of these instances where people call out the abuses of power and they want to hold them accountable for it. So it’s certainly not anything new. What is new is the virality of it the way that instead of one person saying something negative or criticizing an individual or a government or a corporation, now I can get 10,000 people to do it in a matter of hours. And so there’s been a real democratization of how you can amass power and use it to affect or influence people. And that can be very positive, but it also can be very negative.
And so I’m more interested in is unintended negative consequences. Obviously I love the fact that people with a person with a keyboard can bring attention to an unnoticed or unmarked unacceptable harm. We shouldn’t just be passive in the face of injustices. We should be able to speak out against them and call attention to them and organize people who are experiencing that injustice to take action. So that’s the good uses of calling out. But the destructive uses of calling out are actually what I’m more concerned about because it is used to divide people who should be working together. That’s where I’m really concerned that we have this false theory that if everybody doesn’t see the world exactly like I see it and use the words I prefer that they use and in the tone that I prefer that they use than they by definition are causing harm to me and should be treated as an enemy.
But woah, wait a moment. I mean because in my opinion, when many different people think many different thoughts, but they move in the same direction, that’s how you build a human rights movement. But when many different people think one thought and the thought you think they should think and they move in the same direction, that’s a cult. And so why are you using cult-like behaviors and not recognizing that’s what you’re doing when you’re putting on all of this unnecessary pressure on people to totally agree with you totally align with you, see everything through your lived experiences, not theirs when it’s unreasonable, unnecessary, and is creating a lot of harm. And so I am really concerned mostly about the progressive wing of the human rights movement, self-destructing, cannibalizing each other, focusing on purity politics, just treating people we should be in solidarity with as if we were auditioning to marry them or something. They had to be very perfect or I can’t work with them. And it’s really led to a lot of unfortunate callouts and caused a lot of movements to splinter. I think it’s caused the movement against fascism to become weaker while the people who are imposing authoritarian thinking and regimes on people, they have a discipline that is very focused on gaining the power as a minority group to overwhelm and dominate everyone else. And those of us who should be in resistance to this authoritarian bent are turning our best weapons on each other.
Thomas: That’s right.
Loretta: Remaining singularly focused on this existential threat that we’re dealing with. And so I have a book coming out, called Calling In on February 4th, 2025, published by Simon & Schuster and in it, I lay out not only the theory of calling in, but some practical advice from how to do it.
Thomas: Oh, beautiful. Great. So congratulations on your book and tell us a little bit more. How can we practically, you said practices. How can we practically meet the calling out culture? How can we change our own organizations? How can we deal with it when we are in the middle of it? Maybe you can speak a little bit about the practical steps or what we can do to improve that or make it better.
Loretta: Well, one thing that I teach, because I also teach it online in classes, but what I teach is that first we’ve got to analyze the patterns of callouts because you can’t really deconstruct something if you don’t know how they’re constructed in the first place. And so I talk about my five C continuum where there’s calling out, canceling, calling in, calling on and calling it off. You have that many choices when you are getting ready to engage in a conflict and you need to calibrate which tool is going to be the most effective for you. If you want to continue a conversation instead of a fight, don’t assume that you always have to default to calling people out or canceling them when you have many other options available to you. When you call people in, it is an accountability process just like calling out is. But instead of doing it with anger, blaming and shaming, you’re choosing to do it with love and respect.
You’re choosing a different methodology, one that is more likely to engage someone in conversation instead of condemnation. And that’s so important I believe, because we’re not supposed to automatically agree with each other. We’re supposed to have the lively debates of a pluralistic society. That’s our strength. It should not be seen as a weakness. And so that’s the first thing. But then I teach people simple techniques. For example, one of my participants in my online class told me that she was blind and every time she has to walk through a door or step up there, this hand comes from nowhere and tries to guide her to help her. And she said, because I can’t see it coming. I go into instant nuclear reaction because it feels like an assault to me. And she said, I’m tired of people touching me and I’m tired of going off on ’em.
What else can I do? I said, well, first of all, why don’t we reframe that as bad kindness? They were trying to be helpful, but they were doing it badly. You don’t want to discourage people from being kind, you just want to show ’em how to do it better. So the first thing you do is thank them for their attempted kindness, validate that kind impulse. You don’t want to discourage that. And then the second thing you do is set a boundary where you say, I don’t like people laying hands on me because I’m blind and I can’t see it, but if you want to help me, here’s step three. Let’s talk about what you could do to be helpful. That’s how you turn a call out into a call in. You don’t give a pass to what offends you or what is oppressive, but at the same time, you don’t dehumanize the person and that you see them as an equal partner into doing things better together.
Thomas: That’s beautiful. That’s beautiful. So there’s a lot of reframing of some of our own mindsets when that happens. And so when we open our own minds to a different way of looking at situations, we can build some deeper bridges or better bridges with each other. That’s what I heard right now, when I listen to you
Loretta: Absolutely. And these are learnable by anybody. I mean, I’m right now working with someone to develop calling in lessons for kindergarteners. So it is imminently learnable at any stage and at any age, they’re basic kindness lessons, but not self-effacing lessons. In other words, you’re not going to fail the whole accountable people who do harm, whether it’s intentional or unintentional. It’s not about just a civility lesson or a niceness lesson. It’s a strategic choice to be more effective in creating change. But it’s also a philosophical choice of envisioning the kind of world that we’re fighting to create, not just organizing and just the world we don’t like.
Thomas: Exactly. That’s beautiful. That’s beautifully said. How we envision a world that we want to live in and how to create it, not just cancel the one that we are in. And so how can we apply that? For example, I mean something that’s very hot right now is the political divide, the political polarization and the rifts in between different camps, political camps. So how can we apply that when we feel we disagree with the values, we disagree with some values, but we still want to create bridges because some people say, oh, if I’m creating a bridge, I agree to whatever I disagree with, I have to agree with you. And so how can we work this that creating bridges doesn’t necessarily mean agreeing to a different value set, for example, or a political agenda or any kind of behavior.
Loretta: Well, agreeing to listen to someone doesn’t mean agreeing to believe ’em or agreeing with themselves. Obviously that’s basic conversation one-on-one kind of thing. But a lot of us live in echo chambers where the only information we’re getting reaffirms what we already know or believe so that we’re not developing the skill to have conversations with people who think differently from us. So I use in my trainings what I call my spheres of influence model, for example, I think that most of the people that I encounter in my political and work life are what I call 90 percenters people who agree on so much of a worldview that we are intelligible to each other. So I say something like capitalism or homophobia or racism, we know what we’re talking about. We don’t have to stop and explain those terms to each other. And I call us 90 percenters because that’s the high level of unity we have. It’s not that we’re 90% of the population, but we have a high level of immunity. And the problem we have is 90 percenters I see, is that we’re spending entirely too much energy trying to turn 90 percenters into 100 percenters. That last 10% disagreement is the most urgent thing to resolve. And once we get that resolved, then we’ll get to the other people like [inaudible].
Why do we have to be a cult in order to attract other people? And so outside of the 90 percenters, I see what’s called the 75 percenters. These are people who share large portions of our worldview, but they don’t use our 90% ingroup language. As a matter of fact, when we start talking about heteronormativity, their eyes glaze over like we’re talking Russian to them because it’s an ingroup language of a 90 percenter. That doesn’t even make sense to someone that’s not in the 90%. And so obviously I’m an ardent feminist and I believe in abortion rights, but my 75%, it would be the Girl Scouts where they may not need a troop to defend an abortion clinic, though I wish they would, but they still believe in girls and women’s empowerment. And so they are definitely my allies, even if they don’t like this language that I would use within the 90%.
And when I’m talking to them, I don’t use 90% language, because it’s unintelligible to them. Outside of that are what I call the 50 percenters. They’re 50 percenters because they could go to the left or the right depending on who most influences them. I certainly would put my parents in that category. My father was a very conservative military man, hyper-patriotic National Rifle Association. My mother was a Southern evangelical Christian woman, so they had very conservative values. I’m not quite sure why they were still in the Democratic Party because they were more conservative than both. But I found that when you’re dealing with a 50 percenter, if you go underneath their words and speak to their values, you can find a lot of common ground. So after I say the Pledge of Allegiance at my father’s American Legion, I talk about how the American Legion led campaigns to feed homeless people.
And then I say, but as a human rights activist, I question why they’re homeless in the first place. We have common ground. And generally they say, yeah, yeah, we’re going at the same problem, but in different ways. That’s how you talk to 50 percenters. The reason I call them that though, because they could easily go to the right and say, well, the homeless are homeless because of their own bad choices or lack of personal responsibility, which is the right wing drum that you hear outside of them are the 25%. These are the people who basically have drunk the Kool-Aid on individualism in the United States. They’re the MAGA people the make America great. People who vote for Donald Trump and everything mean and fascistic about him. We probably, as 90 percenters have very little purchase to have a conversation that’s productive with the 25 percenter because my definition of liberty might be freedom from oppression and their definition of liberty is a freedom not to wear a mask and to carry a gun.
So we’ve got vastly different world views that can’t be bridged in casual conversations generally. And then outside of the 25 percenters of the zeros, the zero percenters are like, we have nothing in common. And I’m very clear that because you are a proud card-carrying member of the neo-Nazis or the Ku Klux Klan or the Patriots or the Proud Boys or whatever formation, you are dedicated to my elimination and destruction. And honestly, I’m dedicated to disempowering you. I don’t want to destroy you, but I’m got to make sure that you’re in a position to do the least amount of harm you can do. And so what I believe is that we as 90 percenters can have our best impacts on the 75 and the 75’scan best impact the fifties, and the fifties can best impact the 20 fives. And the 20 fives can have an impact on the zero. So it’s about working strategically. It doesn’t mean that you can’t have a conversation with a Nazi. I’ve done that, but that takes a particular skillset, it takes training. You’re not going to do it – and the real question I ask is, why would you overlook your 70 fives and fifties to pursue a zero? Because that’s just your ego and you were talking. That is not a strategic choice. We have to build the power to overwhelm the zeros and the 25 so that they’re not in positions to cause harm.
Thomas: And it’s beautiful. In my work I call this, let let’s go where the water flows and let’s not go through the wall where the water doesn’t go through.
Loretta: That’s a beautiful metaphor.
Thomas: Right? So that we go where the doors open up. And I think what you just described, it makes a lot of sense to me also in my body when I listen to you, why to try to overcome hard walls when we can have much more influence where the water flows, which doesn’t mean that we ignore the other side of where it’s, it’s more difficult or harm can be done. This needs to be stopped. I agree. That’s a lovely thank you for explaining the whole chain of influence that you just mentioned. How in your experience, because you said it before, I mean just at the beginning of our conversation, you said you had conversations with neo-Nazis or people from the KKK. I’m a bit interested how you felt or what was the outcome of these conversations? Because if you already have this experience, I mean, what was your experience being in that and what was the impact that that had? Because you said also one thing just now, you said if you have these kind of conversations, you need to have the appropriate training. And so maybe you can speak a little bit for all of us that are listening now that are in more, let’s say, tense or difficult conversations. What’s the training we need or what are the skills we have to have to be in these conversations maybe in a more effective way?
Loretta: Well, you have to have different techniques for different people in relationship to you. So a conversation you have with a family member or a loved one that’s contentious, is going to be handled differently than if it’s a stranger in a clan group. So you’re certainly not going to use the same techniques, but you’re going to use the same philosophical orientation, and that is they’re members of the human family and you’ve got to respect their human rights even if they’re violating yours. I think that calling in is going to be as important to the human rights movement in the 21st century as nonviolence was to the Civil Rights Movement in the 20th, a statement of how we value the work, how we value our opponent, and how we value our own integrity. So that’s very important. Now, generally speaking, by the time someone defects from the white supremacist movement and calls on a person like me or my organization for help, they’ve already had their own personal epiphany because they stayed in the movement if they hadn’t had a change of heart. So the question becomes how believable are them – are they, what are we going to do to help them? Do we want to help them? And I have to honestly say when I first had to deal with defectors, I didn’t give a damn about what happened to ’em. I was like, okay, you joined a hate group and you got burned by it. So what I mean…
It’s very safe for a black woman to say she hates the Ku Klux Klan. No one’s going to criticize me for that except the Klan. But once I got to know them, I learned that my opinions of them were always informed by my own fears and unhealed trauma. So I wasn’t able to see them as the hurt human beings that they actually were. Fortunately, I had mentors like Reverend CT Vivian who was my boss. He’d been an aid to Dr. Martin Luther King, who really told me, he said, Loretta, if you ask people to give up hate, then you have to be there for ’em when they do. Wow. When he told me that I was angry because I couldn’t curse out a preacher, I couldn’t say to him what I actually thought. And so I walked away from that conversation so frustrated, and yet his words moved me in a way.
And once I started talking to the ex Klansman, ex neo Nazis ex, whatever, I started to see that the motion that what motivated them wasn’t hate for the first part when it started out it was rejection, loneliness, getting bullied themselves, feeling like no one took their pain and suffering seriously. There were a lot of emotions there, but hate was something they had to learn to embrace. It didn’t start out as hate. And so once I started understanding that about them, I began to see how people who are alienated from their families and from societies can easily be sucked into these alternative universes and do a lot of damage. But that’s because they’re damaged people to begin with. And so we have to take their suffering as seriously as we take our own. But that’s what I’m talking about, learning that skillset. If you’re not at peace with your own trauma and your own pain, then you’re not going to be able to offer anything to someone who’s still dealing with their trauma and pain.
Thomas: That’s very powerful. You said so many powerful things that touch me deeply. Just in this last answer when I want to highlight just the last part that you say, if you’re not in peace with your own trauma, you cannot offer that to somebody else who is in pain. So I think that’s a very powerful sentence. I also heard you say that once, that sentence also touched me. Once somebody gives up hate, you need to be there for them. It’s a very powerful sentence. I like the sentence, it touch me deeply.
Loretta: I just wish it weren’t true because I took a lot of fuel from hating people who hurt people. It was a very motivating thing. And once I had to give up hate, I had to find another motivation for continuing to do the work. And it was not easy, but I began to appreciate the power of love, the power of hope, the power of community in a way that I had not appreciated as long as I was motivated by hate, anger, and revenge.
Thomas: Yeah, that’s very powerful. I mean, this transition is also something maybe we can, the next question I have, I will come back to this, and then you said something very powerful before that when you started to answer that stayed with me too. You said, we need to respect human rights, even if the other person doesn’t. You said it in your own words, but that’s how it landed in me. And I think that’s also such a profound sentence how we, because then we joined the same camp basically, and these are all, I think, very powerful human transformation sentences. I think if we take that deeply into our heart and just stay with those three sentences for some time and see how that relates to us. Maybe if you want to speak a little bit before we close about what you just said. When hate was my fuel, it gave me a lot of fire. But when I felt that was melting or that melted, I needed to find a different fuel. Maybe you can speak a few words to that change that you experienced in yourself and how the new motivation or the new fuel is now operating in your life.
Loretta: Well, I try to pay attention to my elders and my ancestors, and they always offer wise advice, but it doesn’t always sink in first, what I hear. And so I had people like Audre Lorde talking about the power of love, Martin Luther King talking about the power of love, Malcolm X talking about the power of Lord. I’m like, yeah, but I’m never turning the other cheek. I mean, really? Yeah, yeah, that’s good for you. But no, I’m not doing that. And it wasn’t until I realized that my anger and trauma were incinerating me inside. They weren’t even protecting me. They weren’t even helping me, that I realized I’m holding onto a whole lot of stuff that ain’t even helping. And so why am I choosing to do that? Can I make different choices? And it turns out that a lot of it came from our childhoods.
I mean, if we made a mistake as a child and we were really punished for it or humiliated for it, then we think it’s normal to punish and humiliate others if that’s what we were taught. But if we made a mistake and someone taught us self-forgiveness and loved us despite making a mistake and showed us what we could learn from the mistake, then we learned the power of self-forgiveness. And we’re not so hard on others because we’re not hard on ourselves. And so all of that kind of cascaded together in my mind when I was doing these deprogramming of these white supremacists, and realized that I could be stronger than I thought I could be. I could actually be more compassionate than I thought I could be. And the best part of it for me was that I can live my life showcasing my integrity the way I want to instead of worrying about my reputation. The reputation is always based on what others think of you, but your integrity is based on what you think of yourself. And so I want to spend all my time protecting and guarding my integrity and demonstrating my integrity by how I treat other people.
Thomas: Wow. It’s so deep. I feel very touched just by listening and what you just shared with us. I think there are so many pearls in this last part of the conversation that I think are deeply transformational for us as human beings. If you want to hear you, as you said, sometimes you listen to elders or teachers in society and it doesn’t really go in. But if we want to, so we can learn from what you just said, I think there’s a lot of deep human transformation for ourselves and also what we pass on to others. That was really beautiful. Thank you, Loretta.
Loretta: Thank you for having me.
Thomas: It was really a great conversation. Thank you for giving us your time and your wisdom, and I’m sure many people can take a lot away from this conversation. So thank you very much, Loretta.
Loretta: Alright. Thank you for having me.
