The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - "How To Fight The Latest Covid Wave"

Episode Date: April 5, 2022

Governments may have dropped restrictions but it's not pretty out there as Covid marches back with a new wave.  What to do not that you are basically on your own for the fight. Dr Lisa Barrett,  now recovering from COVID herself, joins us from Halifax.  Plus, veteran war correspondent Brian Stewart drops by with his weekly Ukraine commentary -- this week with his thoughts on the atrocities and what past wars have told him about how they happen. 

And hello there, Peter Mansbridge here. You are just moments away from the latest episode of The Bridge. COVID, it's making a comeback. Governments tell us, most governments, good luck, you're on your own. Are you? And The Bridge is coming to you from Stratford, Ontario today. Hello again, I'm Peter Mansbridge. As you know, if you've been listening to The Bridge over the last two years, Mondays has been basically COVID day. And we've talked to one of our epidemiologists to give us the latest sense of what's happening and how best to deal with it. We missed yesterday because we had a special program with Ambassador Bob Ray from the United Nations, Canada's ambassador,

and his thoughts on Ukraine, especially on this issue of how you deal with a war criminal. How do you negotiate with one? If you didn't hear that program you probably should listen to it because it's really good it's received a lot of attention already and we will deal with ukraine again on this program today because it's brian stewart's regular day as he drops by on tuesdays to talk to us about some of the things as a veteran correspondent, war correspondent, foreign correspondent that he is, that he's seeing, that he's watching, that he's monitoring, that perhaps a lot of others aren't talking about yet.

He also has some thoughts today on the atrocity question, this terrible, horrific story that keeps unfolding. If you think it's bad one day, it gets even worse the next day. And his thoughts as a veteran war correspondent, having seen atrocities before in different parts of the world, what we should learn from the past about what we're witnessing today. But we're going to start on COVID because the numbers are increasing. Once again, they're bubbling up. You call it the fifth wave or the sixth wave. Different parts of the country are calling it by a different number. And nevertheless, it's there at a time when governments have

basically punted in terms of restrictions. Not 100% and not all provinces, but for the most part, they've punted. And they're telling you, good luck, you're on your own, deal with it. Well, Dr. Lisa Barrett has been dealing with it from a number of different angles. As one of Nova Scotia's top epidemiologists, she's been talking about COVID for two years, offering her advice. And now she suddenly had to deal with it on a personal level because she's just had it. So it'll be interesting to talk to her, which is what we're going to do right now. So what was it like after two years of fighting it suddenly you find yourself having it what was it like could have bowled me over with a feather for a person who works very hard to stay out of covid's way it was shocking to me and my four

unmasked contacts the four days before that i had COVID um all family all testing all the time met for dinner and all negatives and the next morning somehow I'm positive uh even before some symptoms so um yeah it's not the most fun I've had I I of course am fully vaccinated thank goodness that helped but uh lasts a while and I can tell you the fatigue afterwards, it's a couple of weeks now, is still quite marked. So I hope people recognize that if they have sick colleagues, be gentle with them. They may not just be home on a seven-day vacation. So the mild word is

not one you'd use. No, I certainly got knocked down a lot more than I would have expected, given that I saw so many people with very few symptoms, fully vaccinated. I'm a healthy human, not the youngest anymore, but a healthy human. So, and more importantly, when people come back to work, I mean, I'm slower and I'm still very fatigued. So it's really difficult to imagine that everyone is going to be able to come back to work or work from home, even during their illness. The way I hear some businesses and some governmental agencies saying that people should do very tough to expect that you're going to have a healthy workforce for the next 8 to 12 weeks.

What did you aside from the things you've just mentioned what did you learn about this by having it as opposed to dealing with it the way you've had to deal with for the last couple of years? I've learned firsthand that you have a great deal of disappointment in yourself. I think for those people out there who've been really careful about COVID, you kind of feel like you failed at something. And I don't think that's just me. I've gotten a lot of notes from people saying, thank you for saying you had this. I was feeling tough on myself about it.

So I think I learned that, yeah, you do feel like you failed and you had this i was feeling tough on myself about it so i think um i learned that yeah you do feel like you failed and you shouldn't um it's scary to think that you may have infected some of the vulnerable people around you um i knew it before but to experience it is a different thing and the third thing really is that watching that inflammatory response knock you down. And even after the symptoms are gone, you're still very fatigued and slower at your work. I, boy, I got to say, good learning tools for me to have had this. I don't recommend people learn that way. Just trust me.

But it's not an insignificant psychological change either when you get something that's a pandemic virus. Do you do things differently? Do you have a different attitude towards the way you do your daily routine

as a result of having gone through it? No, I literally had seen almost no one for two years and had barely gone back to seeing my older parents. So I don't think I changed a whole lot about my days. I spend a lot of time right now in the hospital in full PPE. But I think I've strengthened my messaging around reminding people that if they have symptoms to kind of stay home and to also, if tests are negative, don't trust them.

It's only the positives that count or else we're gonna really get some of our vulnerables infected. That I've changed. I've strengthened that messaging, but I'm sticking, honestly, all of our capacity limits are gone masking is gone as a mandate and now it's a recommendation in our province at least and i'm really sticking

with that and moderation of contacts i it's a sea of virus out there and if we're not if i'm not careful i'll infect someone else so i i really that's a big thing for me right now i'm very careful about that and if we're to believe those who sort of watch the stats and watch the way this thing has moved across western europe the uk now into north america it's it's not going to be prettier for the next few weeks or a month or so. Things have started to go down a little bit in Europe and the UK, but they're just starting here. And governments are telling us, as you just kind of indicated, that we're kind of on our own here now. It's up to us to decide what's the responsible way for us as individuals to carry on.

Does that sound reasonable, given what we've been through? Not yet. It doesn't. Eventually, 100%, that's the way to go. I dislike, if I've said it once, I've said it a thousand times, I dislike mandates. It's not the way I love to work my world and the people around me or live in a community but right now people are really tired and people need some help making great choices I think especially when there's a huge community and health system risk you know

we didn't you know rare events people are like oh these are rare events. People are like, oh, these are rare events, these hospitalizations. Oh, really? You know, we knew that there were other things like smoking, like smoking bad for people in the air around you. You don't want people to have to make the choice to go outside to smoke. You make it happen because it's hard to make the right choice there. There's stigma. There's social culture. There's all those things. The same is true with masks.

Right now, asking people to make the right choice is a huge burden on many people. It's stigmatizing and it's very hard to convince the people who don't want to wear masks to wear them. And I think right now we still need those very strong messages that a mandate would bring to something, let's be clear, is not a restriction. It's a tool of control of spread. It's a tool. It's not a restriction. It doesn't, it's cheap. It doesn't cause economic harm.

It doesn't harm us as humans. And there is some moderate benefit to it at a community level. So why not do that? What else aside from masking do you think? Obviously, we should ensure that we've had our vaccines and the booster. We should mask if you feel comfortable wearing a mask. And I guess you should be careful about where it is you go. It's literally the vaccine plus plan

you can't do this without your booster at a community level or a personal level so that's a personal thing and a community thing but then it is the masking in public places it's it's capacity limits uh can't can't lie um you know you need to think about where you go and how often you go. And if you have people around you, I can promise you, I know Canada's demographics. It's about one in five to one in ten people that are in that vulnerable group. They either have multiple medical problems, they're older, they're immunocompromised they have cancer any of those things and if you think you don't encounter one of those people every week then i think you may be somebody who just sees no one so because there are so many vulnerable people around you need to plan it out do some of the things some of the time if it's

big capacity spaces and places please do it with a mask on. It's for a few more weeks. You know, it's till the end of the respiratory season. And other than that, stay home when you're sick if you can. I know some people can't. But also, you know, there's provinces where you don't isolate anymore if you're sick. You really, really should stay home if you're sick and if you have access to testing it's really helpful to know if you're positive the negatives may not be as helpful the positives are a definite

indicator for you as a human if you're being pressured to go to work or pressured to do other things that you don't have to and you shouldn't so if you've got access to go to work or pressured to do other things that you don't have to, and you shouldn't. So if you've got access to testing, do that. So testing, moderate contacts, vaccines, and masks indoors till the end of the respiratory season. Not hard. Not hard. Not hard is right. It's good to talk to you.

You sound pretty good to me. You don't sound slow. You sound like you got that Lisa Barrett speed still. So I'm glad you kind of fought your way through this and you're seeing the final edges of it. Take care of yourself. We'll talk again soon. Take care.

Dr. Lisa Barrett, Dalhousie University, one of the leading epidemiologists in Nova Scotia and in Atlantic Canada, in the country. And she's always been so good with her time for us, including right now as she recovers and has recovered from COVID. Although, as she says, she's feeling a little run down earlier in the day than she used to. So that's all part of getting over this. Good luck wherever you are and whatever you're doing and whatever you're choosing to do, because it's still out there. And I don't need to tell you the numbers.

Just look at them. You'll see that they're going up in terms of cases, hospitalizations, ICU beds. You know, it's not as bad as it was in January, that's for sure, but it is going up. And be aware of that. And make your decisions and your choices about how you're going to lead your daily

life accordingly all right that's our that's our peek at the covid story for this week tuesdays has been for the last month or five weeks now a moment for for my old friend great colleague one of the country's finest foreign correspondents, war correspondents. He's done it all. And that's Brian Stewart. And Brian has been monitoring the conflict in Ukraine, the war in Ukraine, over this period, looking for the kind of things that perhaps many of us aren't talking about and trying to understand what they suggest about the big picture and obviously in the last 48 72 hours the story for so many of us has been these horrific pictures that we're witnessing you know from ukraine and uh you know they're they're they're really ugly and they are clearly atrocities

so what is the lesson when we're looking at these pictures as much as we can look at them but certainly are aware of what's what's being discovered there should we, what should we be thinking about in terms of how this happened? Well, Brian, unfortunately has seen atrocities before, and that's one of the things we're going to talk to him about this week. But first of all, we're going to take a quick break.

Right after this, we'll be back with Brian Stewart. And welcome back, Peter Mansbridge in Stratford, Ontario. You're listening to The Bridge on Channel 167, Canada Talks, Sirius xm canada or on your favorite podcast platform and as we always say wherever you're listening from we welcome you to the bridge thanks for joining us all right as uh as promised a few moments ago brian stewart joins us with his regular weekly commentary on the situation in uk, bringing more depth and context and perspective to us on some of the things we're witnessing, some of the things we've heard,

and how perhaps we should be thinking about them. So let's get right at it. Here's Brian Stewart. Well, Brian, the news that's clearly horrified the world this week is the sense of massacres that have taken place in Ukraine, seemingly by Russian soldiers, almost certainly by Russian soldiers on Ukrainian civilians. Now, as awful as it sounds, this isn't the first massacre, and it's not the first massacre in recent time. It's not the first massacres that you've covered, whether they were in Central America, like El Salvador, whether in Europe at Srebrenica in the Bosnian War, and elsewhere in many different parts of the world. You've covered them either on the site or from a distance. What should we know about what happens in terms of massacres as they relate to the leadership of the country that seems to be responsible? Well, it's sometimes hard to tell who's really behind the massacres,

whether they're centrally directed, as they obviously were during the Nazi era, the Weinstein Group and massacres across much of the same territory as Ukraine now, or whether it's just a breakdown of order and a really bad, bad disciplined army. I look at these pictures and, you know, the pictures will never give you that sense of this awful smell and the feeling of cruelty, unbelievable cruelty that one has to be ready to instill in a society to create a massacre. It's just incredibly cruel. But what it reminds me of, it has a stench of the auxiliary, the

military, the part-time soldier. Some accounts coming out of the area of massacres are that the original Russian soldiers that went in were very cold and friendly, but correct. They stole some things, but they weren't into beating people up in massacres. It was later when they noticed some of the voluntary groups coming in from Russian-speaking, the eastern border zone, you know, the Dunbass bass and that's a very all of those areas yeah they're the russians have been pulling in militias and mercenaries and the rest of it it had the sort of stench of that kind of group that comes in following an army gets into thievery and criminality it sees war as a kind of opportunity to make profits and have a sadistic

fun. And they get into the kind of massacre that felt to me like the local citizens were correct in saying it seemed to be a different kind of soldier. Brutal, angry, filled with hate, coming from the Donbass region of eastern Ukraine, working with the Russians. And I think that's the real stench here, I think. It underscores how the Russian invasion is an amazing torrent of bad discipline, poor morale, and breakdowns of law and order.

It's just a horrible scene from start to finish. And I'm not surprised that there are massacres occurring, and I'm afraid there will be more so long as Russia's bringing in mercenaries from Syria, from other countries that have seen lots of horror in the past and are ready to do it again and have a taste for it. It's so hard at times like this to determine who to believe and what to believe, especially when it comes to tracking something like this. I mean, obviously, it wasn't the Ukrainians doing this to themselves,

but it's very unclear, as you say, although you're pointing us in a a certain direction but it's still hard to determine facts and truth in a situation like this it is indeed and that's why it's so valuable are the the long-standing organizations like human rights watch uh you know i declare an interest because i've been backing human rights watch as long as it's been around but it's the kind of organization that knows how to investigate massacres knows how to go in and ask the right question look for the kind of crime scene evidence and and these are the ones that i i think the u.n and that will be looking for particularly for evidence of war crimes and and how to pursue it they'll play a vital role and there'll be other organizations as well

using photography and witness accounts, of course, but all the sort of crime scene evidence that they're used to doing at the site of massacres. It's an area where you want your specialists to go in who know what is a real massacre and what might be just a collection of citizens who were killed during shelling and the rest of it this with people with arms and legs tied has all the evidence of

all the signs of a massacre but it is good to get the established human rights groups to go in there with their experience to really look for all the facts. Give us, based on your experience and expertise, give us a sense of where you think we are in terms of the way this war is unfolding. I mean, I think it's generally conceded that the Ukrainians have done much better than anybody thought they would and probably have the advantage in the conflict at this moment. But what does that mean in terms of where it's going well i think most almost all experts i've been listening to recently say that ukrainians are essentially winning at this stage but so far that's the thing to underline because now that the

russians are pulling back from the north slowly but pulling back uh and moving and regrouping on the east front of ukraine we are facing a period of enormous danger for ukraine you want to without if you don't have a map in front of you to think of that front now forming a giant sea with the sea turned around where the main fighting now will take place in the dunbas region in the middle of the sea, down near the Crimea coast, the Crimea peninsula, and up somewhat to the north. It's like a sea with a downward twist at the top and an upward twist at the bottom. Now, Ukraine has to make a terribly difficult decision to stop the spread of Russians in the east. They have to go in also, if hopefully, to push them back and out of those areas they've also taken. But to move into that, and they've already got 10 brigades in the east, east of the Dnieper River. That's roughly 60,000, 70,000 troops now,

plus auxiliaries that are working with them. So they've got a lot of troops already in that area. And as they push towards the center, try and push back in Donbass, the Russians will almost certainly try to envelop them, moving down from the north and up from the south. In other words, encircling them and bringing off a giant destruction battle, a bit like Kursk was in the Second World War, or Stalingrad to a certain extent.

And this is so dangerous that even French Chief of Staff, Defense Staff, Thierry Burckhardt, warned last week that Ukraine, and I'm going to quote him, faced with the difficulty of holding a stretched position without any operational reserve, could experience a sudden collapse. And I want that to sink in because this is a really dangerous area if the Russians were able to pull off such an encirclement. The Ukrainians would lose a massive amount of their national army and have to really withdraw back to the West at some speed as much as they could. However, you have to then ask yourself, well, why does the Ukrainian general staff seem confident or seem willing to move into the East like this?

One is that they have no choice. They can't just sit there and let the Russians expand in the East. They have to go in to contest this and push them back and push them out if possible. And the second one, and I think this is very strong too, is they don't think the Russians have it in them anymore to pull off such a complex battle of all arms as to encircle a force like that. So they don't think the Russians can do the encircle a force like that so they don't think the russians can do the encirclement so they will move more and more of their forces into the east and we will get a major contest now a major the most perhaps decisive part of the whole war is going to take place in the next few weeks i shouldn't say few the next weeks and perhaps months when this turns perhaps more into a war of attrition where both sides are trying to get the most advantage they possibly can so that at a peace or if a peace agreement

comes down they have leverage to hold on to what they've got and to the ukrainians they have to fight this out and for the russians putin cannot risk a defeat so far he's going to have to go all out there's going to be a danger here that if the Russians appear to be doing particularly bad, we'll start hearing more and more threats of nuclear and chemical warfare coming out of Moscow to up the ante and the stakes and the nerves. And if the Ukrainians do well, we probably will move into a long war of attrition,

which is very hard to stop when it goes on so long. Because once both sides have lost so many soldiers in the battle, it becomes harder and harder to concede elements to give away in a peace agreement. All right. The big mistake that the Ukrainians would make is the same mistake the Russians made when they came in, which is underestimating the enemy. So ukrainians got to be careful about that you know assuming that the russians are are a spent force um as they move in but just before we move on i just want to make sure that everybody gets the picture you were setting up with the giant c and you're talking about the

letter c uh turning it around well no you've got this giant giant sea where the where the ukrainians would move into that from the open side but the danger rests in the russians then coming in from the north and closing off that open side trapping the ukrainians in the middle right from the north and south and trapping them within that right from the north that would be an extreme danger and remember the russ Russians will be then pouring in much more in the way of long-range artillery, cruise missiles, heavy, heavy airstrikes, I would predict. So for the Ukrainians to congregate their forces in any way

is going to be very, very risky because of the attacks that will be coming in at a much more sustained and coherent level than we've seen in the past from the russians okay you mentioned kursk a few minutes ago and kursk was this enormous tank battle it was kind of the last roll of the dice by the germans during the second world war to in their attack on russia things have been going poorly. They decided to try and take over this city of Kursk with a number of Russian divisions, Soviet divisions at that time, in it. Now, it didn't work,

but it did result in one of the last great tank battles. And the reason I bring it up is because you made the point to me over the weekend on the phone that the tanks have really suffered a reputation hit in terms of this war. I mean, tanks used to be the thing. And we just spent millions of dollars on new tanks as a result of Afghanistan. But the tanks have had a rough ride in this war. They certainly have. And they're one of the many reputations that have rough ride in this war. They certainly have. And they're one of the many reputations that have been shredded in this war, starting with Putin's strategic genius. But, you know, the Russians have lost an astounding number of tanks, something like 400 now.

To put that in perspective, that's as much as germany and britain have combined in tanks and they've been torn apart hundreds of tanks have been torn apart in very many cases by somebody firing a shoulder-fired missile that costs 75 000 taking out a tank that might cost four million dollars but that's not the real thing that's undermining the tanks, how easy they're being destroyed. If you look at the Russian figures, it's an amazing number abandoned and captured. And that's because the crews are saying these things are death traps. Tanks are being ripped apart like sardine cans with these cheap missiles coming in from on top and from a straight horizon, from well-concealed cases.

And when the warhead goes into a tank, the Russian tanks have their ammunition inside the hull, unlike the American Abrams, where the ammunition is kept outside in a separate compartment. They just vaporize the crew of three. So a lot of the tank crews are clearly abandoning their tanks and running for it. I should say, too, that Ukraine has also lost 74 tanks, but has more than it started with because it keeps capturing Russian ones. So commanders are finding they can't really move the tanks around in the open without taking unsustainable losses.

You can't take 10, 30 percent your force uh in losses and have it hold together it'll crack as the iranians did and uh sorry the iraqis did in the in the kuwait desert when the americans attacked their tanks were all they're blown apart were quickly abandoned so it looks like you know while world war one saw the end of horse cavalry and World War II saw the end of the battleship after too many aircraft sank too many battleships. And it looked like the Ukraine war is certainly going to cause a lot of questions. It may not cause the end of the tank era because tank theorists now will be working on defenses against these kind of missiles. What kind of electronic shield can they have? But they're not very effective at the moment.

In one part, as you go forward, they have to be surrounded by a ring of infantry soldiers moving out ahead of them to cut off these kind of attacks. And the Russians don't have enough infantry. Most armies to this day don't have enough infantry to guard long convoys like this. So they've really been of questionable use in this war. And I think a lot of people are now entering the debate, has the tank seen its day?

Is it going the way of the battleship and the horse cavalry? And this is going to be a very lively debate in military circles in years to come. And a lot of soldiers are going to take a lot of proving before they're going to trust a tank or want to serve in the tank sir service in future you know it's it's quite remarkable really as it turns out because um just by a fluke over the weekend i watched one of those documentaries on one of the kind of history channels on the Kursk, the Battle of Kursk. And you saw these incredible images of hundreds of tanks rolling across the horizon directly at each other. And it was a fight for everything in terms of tank against tank. Now the picture you paint is like this hugely modern tank up against one guy walking down the street with a missile on his shoulder.

It's quite a difference. It could be a teenage boy or girl walking along, taking their hiding place, waiting for a row of tanks to come up. Then you fire and take out the lead tank, which blocks all the others because they're coming down a street. They can't go into the muddy fields without getting too stuck. And, you know, they not only can take out a tank, but make half the other tank crews

jump out of their tanks and run away, which they've been doing, but also stall the whole convoy. So they get to attack with snipers and different missiles coming in and drones and the rest of it. So tanks have become a curse to many of these convoys going forward because they get blown up and they block the whole way and cause chaos in the convoy. Great conversation.

Thank you once again, Brian, for this. You've given us things to think about that we haven't been thinking about as we follow this story unfold. Thank you. Okay, Peter, my pleasure. Brian Stewart. And, you know, he has really been invaluable for us in our little hobby podcast, as I like to call it,

trying to understand what's happening on the ground in Ukraine. The geopolit to call it, trying to understand what's happening on the ground in Ukraine. The geopolitics of it, we follow as best we can with the advice like yesterday from Canada's ambassador to the United Nations, Bob Ray. And once again, if you haven't heard that one, you really should listen to it because it's a really good discussion about the diplomatic angle to this story and how to try and unwind it at this point. It seems impossible given all the things that are happening on the ground and in

the war. But listen to this conversation. I'd love to know what you think of it. And many of you think of it. And many of you have already written, but keep in mind Thursdays is your turn. It's your chance to enter into this discussion. So don't be shy.

The Mansbridge Podcast at gmail.com. The Mansbridge Podcast at gmail.com. But also the kind of things that brian talks about which is a in a way a kind of behind the scenes look at uh what may be going on here and brian bases his assessments on on a number of things he he reads an awful lot as as I've said before, and he touches not the obvious authors and commentaries that are out there about Ukraine, but he goes back into his deep research in terms of people he admires who write on military affairs in different parts of the world. You know, it's mainly Washington, London, Paris, and he gets a sense from them as to what they're thinking, and it helps add to what he's thinking. And then he shares it all with us. I should give you a snapshot of what to look at in the days ahead here on the

bridge. Tomorrow is, you know, Wednesday, Smoke, Mirrors, and the Truth. Bruce will be by. And quite frankly, I haven't had a chat with Bruce yet, so I don't know what we're going to talk about tomorrow, but there's always something to talk about, as your mail suggests, because we get lots of it every week after Smoke, Mirrors, and the Truth. Thursday is your turn, as I mentioned.

So once again, don't be shy. Tell me what you're thinking. I read all the letters as they come in. I only read some of them on the air. And I tried to get an assortment of different thoughts and opinions. And I love hearing from you and from the different parts of the country. So always make a point of mentioning not only your name, but where you're writing from. And then fire away with your thoughts.

Friday is a bit of a trick this week. Thursday, as you probably are aware, is Budget Day. The Finance Minister, Deputy Prime Minister, Chrystia Freeland, will give the budget speech in the House of Commons late Friday afternoon. Well, as it turns out, late Friday afternoon, I'll be getting on an overseas flight heading over to Scotland for a few weeks.

And, well, I'll still be doing the podcast on an overseas flight heading over to Scotland for a few weeks. And while I'll still be doing the podcast for a good part of the time in Scotland, I am going to take next week kind of an Easter week break off, but there will be encore editions of The Bridge, which will run all next week. But how do we cover the budget for Good Talk on Friday? Well, here's what Chantel and Bruce and I have decided. Good Talk is usually dropped, as they say in this business, at 12 noon Eastern time on Friday. We won't make that because I'll still be making my way up into the highlands.

But there's always a repeat episode on SiriusXM at 5 p.m. And of course, the podcast edition of Good Talk. So we're going to use 5 p.m. Eastern as the guideline for this Friday's Good Talk. At noon on SiriusXM, my friend Andrew Crystal will do a program. And he's pretty excited these days because the Leafs are really doing well. I'm trying to withhold my excitement because it's still early.

Things can happen. Anyway, Andrew will do the noon hour show 5 p.m will be good talk with chantelle and bruce by then i will have got to uh the location in scotland where i can hook up the podcast equipment and we'll do our show and of course it will then be downloaded right away as a podcast and available throughout the weekend. So the only thing to remember about Friday is it won't be available at noon Eastern time, either on Sirius or as a podcast, but it will be by 5 p.m. Eastern.

Got it? Okay, that's great. But back at the point at hand hand the point at hand is promoting tomorrow smoke mirrors and the truth bruce will be by and we'll talk about whatever it is we talk about hope you'll join us then i'm peter mansbridge thanks so much for listening today another in my view very good program talk to you again in 24 hours you