Top 10 Hiring Mistakes - #6 - The Warm Body Problem

Summary

Manager Tools
Episode: Top 10 Hiring Mistakes #6 – The Warm Body Problem
Date: May 4, 2026

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Episode Overview

This episode of Manager Tools dives into one of the most consequential hiring mistakes managers make: "the warm body problem." Hosts Sarah and Mark dissect what it means to hire a "warm body"—that is, bringing someone on board simply to fill a gap without truly meeting the role’s standards. They explore why this mistake is tempting, the predictable cascade of negative outcomes that follow, and—most importantly—how to avoid falling into this trap. The episode is practical, candid, and rich with both experience and actionable advice.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. Defining the "Warm Body Problem" ([03:34–04:58])

• The warm body problem occurs when a manager, faced with urgent need for increased productivity (due to a workload spike or losing a team member), lowers hiring standards to quickly fill a vacancy.
• Mark’s definition:

  "Hiring someone by lowering your standards because there's an immediate need for significantly greater productivity, such that the manager believes that the time it would take to conduct a thorough Manager Tools-recommended search and interview isn't worth the time." (03:34)

• This solution is presented as quick and temporary but almost always results in regret.

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2. Causes of Warm Body Hires ([04:58–05:59])

• Common triggers include critical workload spikes, sudden departures, or the belief the team can’t absorb additional work.
• The thinking is reductive: "We lost a productive body, so we just need another body." (05:59)

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3. The Sterile Nature of the Problem ([06:46–09:02])

• Mark classifies the warm body mistake as a “eunuch” problem or sterile problem—one so painful most managers swear never to repeat it:

  "Once you do it one time, you will never do it again." (06:57)

• Contrasted with “peccadillo” (small, repeatable) management problems, this is major and career-shaping.

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4. Cascade of Negative Outcomes ([11:15–21:05])

a. You Now Have a Poor Performer ([11:18–12:46])

• Warm body hires tend to underperform, draining manager time and attention at the exact moment that capacity is under strain.
• "Even if all you say you really need is a pair of hands, this is the least competent pair of hands that you possibly could have found." — Sarah (12:27)

b. Diverting Resources from Top Performers ([12:46–14:17])

• Effort spent on the underperformer comes at the expense of supporting your best team members.
• Mark:

  "If you have additional time to invest differentially in your team, that time should be spent on top performers versus bottom performers." (14:02)

c. Eroding Team Trust and Retention ([14:17–16:39])

• Top performers may leave out of frustration if they see low standards (and preferential treatment for underperformers).
• Trust within the team erodes:

  "There's going to be everybody else and there's going to be the new person. That's going to erode trust. Your new hire will not be a true or accepted part of the team just based on performance." — Mark (15:41)

d. Damaging Hiring Process Credibility ([16:39–18:35])

• Skipping a tough, fair process signals to others that standards don’t matter, which devalues everyone who worked hard to earn their place.
• Sarah:

  "If the process stays the same, if it's tough, if it's fair, and everyone on your team went through that tough process, then a typical new hire...would have earned their place." (17:28)

e. Long-term Problems—HR and Reputation ([20:03–21:05])

• The quick fix often means eventually having to terminate the hire, which is much harder (and more reputationally damaging) than never hiring them in the first place.
• Mark:

  "You'll have spent political capital in a losing battle. HR will take control. If you want to fire somebody after three months…good luck." (21:05)

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5. The Only Solution: Just Don’t Do It ([21:05–23:37])

• There’s no process fix, just a hard rule: Never lower your hiring standards, no matter the pressure or who suggests it.
• Mark:

  "You never lower your hiring standards, no matter how desperate your needs are." (21:18)

• Take the tactical pain (missed deliverables, stretched team) over the strategic disaster the warm body hire brings.

Scripted Communication ([23:37–25:29])

• When communicating with your team:

  "We, as a team of people, have to get creative about our priorities and processes...Not going to bring in somebody who's not up to our standards...What can we do better? What can we do differently?" — Mark (23:57)

• This approach involves the team in problem-solving, aligns everyone on standards, and boosts trust rather than undermining it.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Immediate vs. Long-term Consequences:

  "You don't want to exchange a short-term problem for a long-term problem that includes HR. You just don't." — Mark (15:24)

• On Dehumanizing the Process:

  "If we define our problem so reductively, the first thing that would come to anybody's mind is, well, we lost a body. We need more bodies. And that is where the warm body name comes from." — Sarah (05:59)

• On Team Trust:

  "If you doubt that this happens in warm body problem situations, think for a second about how it would affect your team if you hired a friend of yours whom your team didn't know at all and there was no full interviewing process." — Mark (18:35)

• Advice, Nike-style:

  "And as even Nike would say, in this situation, just don't do it." — Mark (26:52)

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• [03:34] — Defining the Warm Body Problem
• [04:58] — Common Causes of Lowered Standards
• [06:46] — Why It’s a ‘Sterile’ Management Mistake
• [11:18] — Immediate Result: You Now Have a Poor Performer
• [14:17] — Retention Risk and Trust Issues
• [16:39] — How Lower Standards Damage Team Credibility
• [20:03] — Terminating a Warm Body Hire—Harder Than It Looks
• [21:05] — The Only Solution: Never Do It
• [23:37] — Sample Script for Team Communication
• [26:52] — Final Summary & Main Takeaway

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Takeaway Summary

• Never lower your hiring standards—not for a spike in workload, not for a sudden gap, not even if your boss or HR says it's okay.
• Short-term fixes almost always become long-term headaches.
• The real solution is to face the tactical pain with creativity, strong communication, and by harnessing your team—not by undermining your standards or your team's trust.

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If you remember nothing else:

"Just don't do it."
– Mark (26:52)

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Transcript

[A]

Welcome to Manager Tools.

[B]

This is Sarah and I'm Mark.

[A]

Today's podcast, top 10 hiring mistakes number six, the warm body Problem.

[B]

As always, our content has been crafted by humans and we are now certified by Proudly Human. The question this cast answers are, what is the warm body problem? What are the risks of hiring a warm body? And how can I avoid the stupid mistake of hiring a warm body?

[A]

If you want answers to these questions and more, keep listening. Managing managers is fundamentally different from managing individual contributors and almost no one prepares you for it. The Effective Senior Manager conference covers the systems, rhythms and communication tools you need to lead at scale. For directors and senior managers ready for the next level. The next in person Effective Senior Manager conference is in Chicago on June 4, and I hope to see you there. For more information, Visit us at manager-tools.com ESMC all right, there's a three body problem in classical mechanics.

[B]

There is?

[A]

Uh huh. Do you want to talk a little bit about it?

[B]

Yeah, sure.

[A]

Thank you.

[B]

You have to be kind of a geek to understand it, but basically when the earth goes around the sun, that's a two body problem. But when you add a third body into a rotating system, it becomes mathematically impossible to predict what they'll do. Whereas we know exactly where the earth is going to be, you know, in three months or two minutes or whatever. But three bodies makes it really, really hard in classical mechanics. And basically it can't be solved. And I just thought it was interesting since we were talking about warm bodies that I would mention three bodies and three bodies is impossible to solve. But warm body is easily solved.

[A]

Yes, exactly.

[B]

If you know what it is.

[A]

If you know what it is, which some of us do. Perfect. Awesome. All right, so folks, this is a podcast about one of our top 10 hiring mistakes. And this problem, specifically the one we're addressing today, happens a lot. So the situation as it's laid out, a manager needs to hire for a role or a set of tasks that are pretty straightforward. No special skills are needed, just a person. Just somebody to add a pair of hands to the outputs of the team. They love their existing team. The manager loves their existing team. I mean, they're special. But this new hire just needs to follow the instructions. They don't need to be beloved, they just need to get along. Nothing fancy. All we need is a warm body.

[B]

Yeah. And so we hire a warm body, we lower our standards, we think this is fine, it's short term or maybe they'll turn into something else. But we lower our standards and we hire a body that's warm as opposed to a body that's cold, which usually cold bodies aren't very productive and basically everything falls apart and everybody wants to blame the warm body. But in fact, since professionals don't talk about blame, what we talk about is responsibility. The manager is the one responsible because he or she fell prey to the warm body problem.

[A]

Yeah, absolutely. All right, so our outline today is pretty straightforward. We're going to start by defining the warm body problem, then discuss the cause of the warm body hire and, and how to avoid it. So start by defining the warm body problem. Well, folks, the warm body problem is hiring someone by lowering your standards because there's an immediate need for significantly greater productivity such that the manager believes that the time it would take to conduct a thorough manager tools recommended search and interview isn't worth the time.

[B]

That might be the longest definition we've ever put out there.

[A]

Yeah, it's deserving of a lot of words. It's not complex. It's not complex, but it is deserving of a lot of words. And folks, this mistake, though it isn't ever obvious at the time, is then followed by a reckoning that the person you hired does not meet your normal standards. I mean, why would they? They were brought in under a different set, a lower set of standards. And this leads to the ultimate conclusion that you have to fire them, accompanied by all of the requisite guilt and shame associated with having created this situation that you then had to go ahead and solve for yourself later.

[B]

Yeah, and just to be clear, to make this thing even longer definition, the need for significantly greater productivity that Sarah mentioned can be caused because of workload spike. Right. You're on an integration team and two comp. You're integrating two companies at the same time. Or you lose a team member at a crucial time, which you could have been fine with if they'd have stayed. But when they leave, you have immediate deadlines and you can't go through a three month process. And either one of those things, either the spike or the loss of somebody, is tied to your belief, if you're the manager that's going to make this mistake, that, that the remaining team can't adjust to the loss of somebody or the additional, the spike to meet these new relatively higher demands on your team. And so that's when people start thinking, I just need a warm body.

[A]

Exactly. And folks, if we think of it as the loss of a body that had been productive, which it could potentially be. Right?

[B]

Sure.

[A]

If we define our problem so reductively, the first thing that would come to anybody's mind is, well, we lost a body. We need more bodies. And that is where the warm body name comes from. I mean, hinting at the darkness of the fact that this individual is warm. Because, I mean, if you just needed a body, like a literal body, a cold body would be fine. If the problem was really the physical anatomy of the body. The body, exactly. But no, no, managers, in that moment, we, we know we don't just need arms and legs. We, we actually need a person. So we apply a much higher, higher standard and we make it then a warm body. Very smart.

[B]

I mean, we're like, we have a high standard. The body must be warm. It's so smart. Yeah. And actually, I, I, I'll just make an aside here that you might have figured out. When you think about the warm body problem, once we've defined it now, Sarah defined it so well. It's in the class of managerial problems that I have always called privately a eunuch. Because it won't replicate. It's a sterile problem. It won't replicate. Once you create a warm body problem with a misguided hire, which overly simplified, you lower your standards and you say, I just need somebody to do some menial work kind of thing. Once you do it one time, you will never do it again. And that's why it gets its own podcast, because it's still happening. And I never did it. But some of that was a function of the hiring process, certainly in the army where I didn't have any hiring process, and then also Procter and Gamble. But I can't honestly say that I would not have done it. And once I learned about it, I'm like, oh, my gosh, that's so true. But I have seen people do it. And the purpose of this cast is for you to not have to learn the way your boss or your boss's boss learned. Learn from us and don't ever do it. Don't ever succumb to people suggesting we just need somebody temporarily. It'll be fine. It'll work out. It'll be great. No problem. The outcome is almost always painful enough but that those people who have done it wouldn't wish it on you. Even if there's one of those people who believe I learned the hard way, you should learn the hard way too. That's not a good recipe for organizational or professional growth either, by the way. So just ask around to those managers near you about the wisdom of hiring a warm body. They'll probably have stories if they don't have stories. They'll still make it clear to you how stupid it totally is. It's a very bad idea.

[A]

Mm. Exactly. Now, Mark, do you want me to talk next about your other classes of problems? Do you want to continue this piece since they're your definitions? Yeah. You, you. You created these definitions. I don't want to. I don't want to jump in here on you.

[B]

Yeah. So again, the unit class of problems is one that won't replicate. You won't do it again. Sometimes that's about severity, sometimes it's about uniqueness. Usually I think of it about being uniqueness. But we'll call them different from the other type of problems which I see of, and I call them peccadillo problems. Peccadillo is Spanish for small sin, a venial sin, rather than a mortal sin, perhaps because they are repeated easily and frequently. In other words, these are the mistakes we make all the time. Again, you're only going to make the warm body mistake once, and that's what this cast is about. Don't do it. Just don't do it. And frankly, if you're a high D and you trust Sarah and I and the manager tools team, you know enough, you can stop. Stop listening. Just don't ever hire anything that feels like it's a warm body and you're good to go. But just to be clear, there are other types of problems. I call them peccadillo problems. You know, an example of a peccadillo problem would be a manager who continually doesn't give feedback. Right. And. And he or she doesn't get any particular negative feedback from that other than they don't see their employees improving as much, or they don't have a staff meeting because they're too busy or they don't have a comms plan, you're not going to die from those mistakes. But it's still a miss if you think about the standard repertoire, the standard basket of skills that an effective manager has. So again, the pain and suffering of a warm body rehanging problem are well known. But the reason this cast exists is because they may be well known, but they're not necessarily well shared. And we hope we can convince you here now to avoid this unique problem. If we don't convince you to avoid it, you'll do it, and then you'll avoid it and hopefully be somebody who can tell other people about it.

[A]

Managing managers is fundamentally different from managing individual contributors, and almost no one prepares you for it. The Effective Senior manager conference covers the systems rhythms and Communication tools you need to to lead at scale for directors and senior managers ready for the next level. The next in person effective senior manager conference is in Chicago on June 4, and I hope to see you there. For more information, Visit us at manager-tools.com ESMC so now let's talk a little bit about what the warm body hiring problem causes. Well, folks, warm body hiring problems cause, I mean, all sorts of other problems, all of which are seasoned with regret, making them especially unpalatable. And for those, again, those managers who've gone through those experiences before, as they will tell you, you never want to have this happen again. And the first thing is that now that you've hired this individual, this warm body, you now have a poor performer on your team. And poor performers, they're not easy at the best of times. They're not, they're really difficult to have on your team. Anyone who's ever even not hired their own but inherited one will tell you it was awful. But now, because you've hired this person and the goal here was to plug that hole right to, to somehow get some sort of something done, you've got a person that you're going to have to take more time to train. Even if all you say you really need is a pair of hands, this is the least competent pair of hands that you possibly could have found. I mean, the hardest to train pair of hands that you could have located. Yeah.

[B]

And so you're going to have to spend more time with them, by the way, if you keep your existing team and there has been a spike, the idea that somebody new who's a pair of hands is going to take more time at a time when you need time back is painful to think about and to remember if you've actually done this before. And if you think about it, you're going to have to spend more time with this person, this pair of hands. Okay? The warm body. That means taking time away from your best performers to handle the problem you yourself created. Now, some people would argue with me, well, Mark, I'm handling a problem, but it's less of a problem than not having anybody contribute. And what people who are more experienced than you would say, including me, I would say, no, no, you're only measuring the amount of work that's getting done. You're not thinking about the creativity your team could have brought to the table or other possible solutions and so on. If you can get a wreck, managers will hire. And by the way, if your company makes it hard to fire somebody, you're going to be stuck with this person for a long time. And, and you will have hired them under false pretenses where they think that they're going to be able to get away with a lot less performance than everybody else. And if you take time away from your best performers to handle the problem that you yourself created. Our guidance in the Coaching Dilemma podcast makes it totally clear. If you have additional time to invest differentially in your team, that time should be spent on top performers versus bottom performers.

[A]

Yeah. And folks, if your top performers start believing that the squeaky wheel gets the grease, not only do you increase your retention risk, you create a differentially among the performers that you most want to retain, which is a disastrous outcome because you've hired this person, this, this, this warm body to solve a short term problem. And then if it causes your top performer to leave, you've solved a short term problem. But you've now created for yourself a long term and a much, much larger problem that will in turn then need solving. And it's just, it's, it's, it's the beginning of a really long chain of dominoes that you don't want to tip over.

[B]

Since we just announced in things, we think, we think that dark mark is coming back. Maybe it's a good time to have to mention a dark mark kind of thing, which is not only have you created a long term problem out of a short term problem, but the long term problem involves hr.

[A]

Exactly.

[B]

I love you, hr. Saeeda. I love you. Melinda Kerrigan, Love you. But sorry, you do not want to exchange in your life, in your career. You do not want to exchange a short term problem for a long term problem that includes hr. You just don't.

[A]

Absolutely.

[B]

So you're going to also create a schism on your team. There's going to be everybody else and there's going to be the new person that's going to erode trust. Your new hire will not be a true or accepted part of the team just based on performance. You'll have less trust in them and their colleagues will too. And yes, trust is between two people, but everyone else has a sense of how much everybody else trusts each other and they make that into an overall trust score. And the new person is going to lower that trust score. And that's going to create friction in relationships if I make the mistake, if I report, if Sarah and I are peers and I hire a warm body in my part of the department, she and I have a trust score over time. But the fact that the person I hired is a problem that's going to affect Sarah's and my trust, and it's kind of viral. It's not. It's not good.

[A]

Exactly. And, and folks, hiring a warm body inevitably means that you're lessening your interview standards. And if you remember our podcast on interviewing hiring, or if you've been to one of our effective hiring manager conferences, you'll know that a robust professional hiring process has both an internal process goal as well as an external validation goal. And the internal process goal is obvious. To hire a candidate that can excel in the role. What we're talking about is that external validation goal that exists by causing our candidate to have to go through the same tough but fair process that everyone else on the team went through. I mean, if the process stays the same, if it's tough, if it's fair, and everyone on your team went through that tough process, then a typical new hire being brought into the organization would come in and immediately be given the respect. They would have earned their place on the team. And because they would have earned their place on the team, they don't have to spend their first two, three, six months trying to prove to everyone else on the team that they earned their spot. The team knows they earned their spot. They went through a tough process. But if you created a less tough process for this new hire, now you've got a new individual, an individual that already has less skills than the others who already. Or, sorry, who now has to earn their credibility. So they're not just not as good at their job, they're not as good at their job, and no one trusts them right off the bat.

[B]

The example of a good, robust, tough, but fair hiring process is what's designed to keep nepotism out, right? You can't hire that person around the system because it affects trust internally. If you doubt that this happens in warm body problem situations, think for a second about how it would affect your team if you hired a friend of yours whom your team didn't know at all and there was no full interviewing process. You say, hey, by the way, guys, I brought in a friend of mine. You know, he or she is going to report to me, he's going to appear with you guys, blah, blah, blah. I sent out an email with his resume on it. Every other person who's a director of yours went through 6, 8, 10 hours of interviews, behavioral interviews, resume screening, HR screening, phone screening, virtual interviews, and then in person, and suddenly this guy just shows up. I mean, that kind of lack of external validation is essentially the same thing that happens when you hire a warm body. If you see that. If you could see that hiring a friend without going through the process is questionable relative to the trust that's built up among the team. All kinds of problems and long term ones. Again, to Sarah's point earlier, you're turning a short term problem into a long term problem. In one case, it involves hr. In this case, it involves trust among all the team. So not good.

[A]

Absolutely. Absolutely. And folks, here's the real pain that the short term thinking of the warm body problem creates. You may have to fire your warm body at some point, and all terminations are hard. But firing someone who you knew didn't fit your true criteria is even worse because you're gonna want to do it soon, which makes it a lot worse. HR is not gonna be on board to fire this person that you just brought in a few months ago because you, you didn't even give them a chance. And yeah, you could make the argument that no amount of chances will ensure that this individual can make it, but you were the first one to have given that chance. And now you're beholden to them. And your reputation is going to be damaged within the organization, amongst your team members with hr long after you finally get rid of your warm body.

[B]

Yeah, exactly. You'll have spent political capital in a losing battle. HR will take control. If you want to fire somebody after three months. Yeah, good. Okay, so now we get to the important stuff, which is how do we avoid this? Right? And I would love to give you a seven point program that you would completely understand and go. Yep, I'll just follow the seven steps and I'll be at the top of the ladder and I'll be king of the hill and everything will be fine. Now, the way you avoid the warm body hiring problem is you don't do it. Don't even think about it. Okay? You never lower your hiring standards, no matter how desperate your needs are. When HR comes to you and says it's okay, when your boss comes to you and says it's okay, when some of your peers come to you and say it's okay in this situation, like it's okay, you can be a little pregnant. Fine, don't do it. Take present tactical pain and missed deliverables. And you know what? If somebody left your team, you didn't do a good enough job retaining people. Okay? You're going to have to pay the piper, no question. Okay, Take that short term, tactical, misdeliverable stuff rather than making possible strategic pain in the form of lost trust on your Team lowered retention, and again, potentially have to fire somebody.

[A]

And folks, part of the way that you can do this successfully on your team is first by telling your boss what you're doing. I mean, communicate to them. If your boss tells you that you should go ahead and hire a warm body, tell your boss exactly why you don't want to. And if you're a licensee, we encourage you to sign up for emailed show notes so that you can email these show notes to your manager as a. As an example of why. I mean, an explanation of why. Don't hesitate to use them to create words to say, if you like a script, if you will, but by all means, send them this white paper. And also then it's not just about communicating with your boss, it's also about communicating with your team and asking them for help. So you're going to want to lay out the situation for the folks that are essentially what amounts to dealing with the missing individual. The. The gap here that you're trying to fill or you're. You. You were considering and now are no longer considering filling with a warm body. So you're gonna have to communicate to them this is why we're doing this thing and that it is the right thing to do. So, Mark, give us the script.

[B]

Yeah, so it might sound like this. You had everybody. It might be a zoom call, a teams call, could be a staff meeting, it could be a specially called meeting. You'd say, hey, folks, we've got an immediate problem here in terms of productivity. I think it's obvious, right? We don't have enough hands to get it all done. We could all certainly spend some extra time here, but that isn't sustainable, as you and I both know, based on this, how high this spike of workload is, and it won't get us where we need to be. One solution, you've probably seen it, you may have been involved in it in some way, is hiring a warm body. In other words, bring somebody in here that isn't up to our standards but can make a dent in our productivity gap. Problem with that is that we're left with someone that will not be a trusted member of this team when we get back to some sort of steady state, as we inevitably will. So I just want to be clear. I don't want to do that. I'm not going to do it. I don't want to make a strategic mistake trying to fix a tactical problem. But what that means is that we, as a team of people have to get creative about our priorities and processes. And, and figure out together how we're going to get through this. Not going to bring in somebody who's not up to our standards. Now, if magically we can find somebody that's up to our standards, great. We'll put them through the entire process and everyone will have trust when they start. But lacking that, I'm all ears. What can we do better? What can we do differently? What can we do faster? How can we align differently? What are some of the things we can get away with for a little while, not doing it all that technically we're supposed to do, but probably nobody will notice. And if they notice, they'll be mad. But not as mad as us not getting through this spike of workload that's come our way. I think we can figure out a way to do it rather than starting to tear down this team by bringing in people to the team that don't meet our standards.

[A]

And again, folks, that script, the one that Mark just said to y', all, is in the show notes for this podcast. So if you'd like those show notes, by all means, become a licensee on. And I gotta tell you, if we heard that from our boss, we'd feel supported and encouraged and even protected and would then do our very best to get creative, to meet the challenge and to help them and ourselves, frankly, avoid the warm body problem.

[B]

Yeah. So let's. I'll summarize, folks. It does sometimes make sense in the short term to consider hiring a warm body, but when you do, if you go through with it because you don't think it through, you don't remember this cast, the story always turns out the same, and that's tragically. Don't do it. If you do it, you're going to have trust problems. You're going to increase your retention risk among your entire team. You're going to spend your time with the wrong people and the wrong issues. Get creative, work with your team. Take some pain from your boss or the org to avoid extending the pain and damaging your reputation. And as even Nike would say, in this situation, just don't do it.

[A]

That's a good one. I like it. Thanks so much for joining us, folks. We hope this helped you. Now help us help others and tell your friends. And of course, follow rate and review our podcast. And remember, five stars only, please.

[B]

Five stars only, please.

[A]

Bye, everyone.