Yeah, Iowa was a teenager in South Florida. And at that time, the Reagan candidacy was just incredibly divisive. But let me tell you what, it divided along lines that now make a lot of sense, but as a 16 year old, I was trying to figure all this out. Number one, one of the big issues on the Republican side was the Panama Canal. And in South Florida, that resonated a little differently than perhaps in Wyoming. Because it was a local issue. And what national security was just a massive reality. And so I was in high school and I can tell you what, the Cuban refugee families were adamantly pro Reagan because they believed he was the only man who actually saw what communism was. And the very thing, they'd had to flee in terms of the fall of Cuba to communism. And so, you know, so many things are clear to people now that the Soviet Union is broken apart and is no more. They were not at all clear. You know, even among Republicans at the time, Ronald Reagan actually in hindsight saw the issue clearly and they didn't.

Yeah, you're exactly right. And this is why, you know, one of the themes of my book is ticking Reagan seriously as a man of ideas, right? And how he saw the Cold War as primarily a battle of ideas more than just a great power contest. And those ideas were between the values of the free world, especially, you know, the United States being a market democracy, a belief in Judeo-Christian values. And then the ideas and values of communism, of course, a command economy, a totalitarian dictatorship and state enforced atheism. And again, the contrast could not be more stark. And yet for a few decades up until then, American foreign policy had been predicated on kind of containing that problem of Soviet communism and managing it. And Reagan worried rightly that this was essentially consigning a large swath of the globe's population to slavery under communism. He would use, you know, that's a vivid term, but he absolutely believed it. And I think I think he was right. And in his mind, that was just both strategically foolish and morally appalling. And so when he spoke out so clearly in denouncing communism as a vile idea, it really inspired people who had been victims of communist tyranny, you know, again, you know, Cubans there in South Florida or ones who were still living behind the Iron Curtain in the Soviet Union. They thought, you know, finally, for the first time, there's an American political leader who is giving voice to us and speaking on behalf of us.