Episode 28 Can Democracy Survive When Billionaires Hold So Much Political Power?

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[00:00:18] Kevin: Today's topic is can democracy survive extreme concentrations of wealth?

[00:00:23] Emanuel: Hi there, and welcome to yet another episode of the Curious Pundits podcast. I'm one of the co-hosts, Emanuel.

[00:00:30] Kevin: I'm the other co-host, Kevin.

[00:00:33] Emanuel: And before we dive in into today's topic where we have a very special guest again, make sure to go to curiouspundits.com where you will find links to today's episodes, previous episodes, future episodes, and to your platform of choice where you listen to podcasts because we're on all of them.

[00:00:50] Apple, Spotify, Stitcher, YouTube, you name it, most likely we're there. That being said, Curious Pundits podcast, now on to today's episode.

[00:00:59] Kevin: So I'm gonna let today's guest introduce himself. His name is Scott Leckie. So Scott, over to you.

[00:01:05] Scott Leckie: Hey everybody, I'm Scott Leckie. I am an international human rights lawyer who has worked all across the world in more than 80 countries written lots of books, and currently these days I write novels mostly. Recently published a novel called Killionaire, which is all about the potential end of billionaires, and I've just finished my second novel, which is all about the end of dictators.

[00:01:31] So, if you can imagine a world without billionaires and a world without dictators, you can read about them in these novels. And the third novel's well underway too, which is all about the end of the fossil fuel industry. So I have seven novels lined up.

[00:01:44] Emanuel: And we'll put links to all of them in the description and where people can find more about you.

[00:01:49] Kevin: For what it's worth, in preparation for today's episode, I read Killionaire, and it's a very interesting premise. I enjoyed the story very much.

[00:01:57] Today's topic is very broad, and I'm going to reveal some of my own personal bias, and I'm becoming more and more convinced that extreme concentrations of wealth and democracy are fundamentally incompatible.

[00:02:16] And the reason is people who are incredibly wealthy have extreme access to our political leaders. So you get into an environment where the political leaders no longer serve the voters, they serve the donors. And extreme concentrations of wealth reduce the number of donors that the politicians who pass laws have to deal with, have to please, have to serve, have to attend to.

[00:02:48] I don't know what the right word is, right? So I'd like to start with a question for you, Scott, because I know that this is a a theme of your working life. What does extreme wealth concentrations mean in scale? And I ask because I'm convinced that people don't really know how rich the richest are.

[00:03:07] Scott Leckie: That's a great question. And, there's so many different ways to look at this question. But let's just start from the simple premise of the world's poorest billionaire. We hear the word bandied about all the time. We even hear trillionaire now in recent months. But no longer by the way, the world's first trillionaire is no longer a trillionaire.

[00:03:27] So we can think about that however we want, but there are three thousand four hundred plus or minus billionaires on the planet right now. Their numbers increase by about one a day on average. In a year's time there'll be thirty-eight hundred or so if current trends continue. So what is a billionaire?

[00:03:46] What does that actually mean? The world's poorest billionaire is quite literally 125,000 times wealthier than the median person on planet Earth, the person who's right in between at the 50 percentile mark. Half the world's richer than them, half the world's poorer than them. It's around 8,000 or 10,000 US dollars these days.

[00:04:07] 125,000 times. So just imagine that in any other category in life where some person is 125,000 times whatever it may be more than another person, and you start to begin to see the absurdity of the system that we have enabled this small number of people to benefit from, such that they reach such stratospheric levels of wealth, very much has a highly negative impact upon the very foundations of the democratic system that all of us really, in the end, have a right to. And they make the fair and free functioning of democracy essentially impossible, not only because of their incredible financial power to influence those who eventually end up governing us, but simply in terms of the way they influence the creation of new laws, the way they influence the manner by which wealth is taxed or not taxed.

[00:05:11] And they have constructed a system globally with virtually no oversight by anyone that completely facilitates the continued accumulation of ever-growing amounts of wealth. And if you understand the nature of the capitalist system, and whether you read Thomas Piketty and others or not, the basic premise that those and others have put forward is simply that wealth always beats labor. If you have wealth, your income, your net worth is going to increase at a significantly faster pace than any wage increases you might get if you're a worker or somebody living on a wage.

[00:05:54] So wealth always wins. Labor vis-a-vis wealth always loses, and that's the world in which we find ourselves now. And it's not simply the political power that these people have, there's so many stats I can spew out, but, basically, a billionaire is something in the range of 3,000 or 4,000 times more likely to be involved directly in politics than the average person.

[00:06:19] That's another statistic which is almost impossible to fathom. But, what does democracy mean if the people holding power, who are meant to be democratically elected, are beholden not to the public on whose behalf they're meant to be working, but are essentially bought off by the world's wealthiest people?

[00:06:40] 88% of whom are men, by the way. 12% of billionaires are women, 88% are men. Average tax rate paid by the average billionaire in the world is around 3% to 4%, 5%. Significantly lower than average people pay, no matter where you're living on the planet today. So We have a real problem with this growing concentration of wealth, this ever-expanding but tiny number of people who hold a higher and higher percentage of all global wealth in their hand, and that has dramatic impacts upon you, dear listener or viewer.

[00:07:19] It's not something that's happening somewhere else. It happens to everybody everywhere. It affects our environment. It affects our economy. It affects... Whatever sector you may look at, it has an impact. And, in the overall scheme of things, we really need to think about ways by which we can systematically improve democratic decision-making processes and the institutional frameworks that are needed to make that happen in a way that promotes greater equality rather than this extreme state of inequality in which we're living today.

[00:07:56] Emanuel: I love it that you also provided a solution at the end. I wanted to ask you this, but this year, I finished a series called The Men Who Built America that was discussing JP Morgan, Rockefeller, Vanderbilt and whatnot, and telling their stories and how they influence what essentially the today's society is, the modern Western society that's influenced by the United States.

[00:08:19] And it's not uncommon that politicians were bought by wealthy individuals. We can see the case of JP Morgan, Rockefeller and Carnegie that got together although they were like competitors just to put a president in place. And one of them have Teddy Roosevelt has come up to, try to go after them.

[00:08:40] Two things I wanna mention and kinda ask you. One, why is it different this time around? Why does it feel different than, let's say, 100 years ago? The other topic I wanna mention is, I read this year Slobodian Quinn's Crack Up Capitalism which talks about essentially what the billionaires want.

[00:08:57] Essentially capitalism without democracy. So this common I don't know, a narrative that or fallacy I knew the other day that, you know, everybody that build their wealth in capitalism, in democracy actually enjoys and embraces that system which kinda turns out not to be that truth. Again, I'm not a billionaire myself so I don't know exactly what they think.

[00:09:19] I suspect that I wouldn't be much different myself if I were to be there although I acknowledge right now that, it's not okay what's happening and they're only gaining more power. So six months ago they were less powerful than they are today, right? And it's happening at a tremendous speed. So two questions here or just one.

[00:09:37] Why does it feel this time around different? I haven't been around 100 years ago but somehow it feels different. Does my question make sense?

[00:09:46] Scott Leckie: Yeah, it makes perfect sense because it is different now, and the world has literally never been more inequitable than it is today in 2026. You might not immediately recognize that, but it is a factual statement. We have never had a higher concentration of wealth in a smaller number of hands than we have in 2026, and that is because the system has enabled that, and the system has allowed that, and the system has tolerated that.

[00:10:15] And that system that I'm speaking about is not some nefarious, nebulous, conspiracy-based thing. It's simply the economic system and the political system that we have chosen as humans to guide our lives, and that comes down to the nation state itself, 195 nation states in the world today. At the time of the founding of the UN, by the way, there were 48 nation states, so this is a constantly changing and fluctuating situation.

[00:10:42] But these nation states have not yet decided that there should be international rules in place that at one level place a cap on individual wealth, for instance. They have also not decided to shut down tax jurisdictions that are used by every single billionaire in the world to one degree or another that enables them to store their money offshore, so away from the tax authorities in the country in which they're domiciled, and a system which enables people to essentially live without a domicile.

[00:11:16] A domicile, of course means your main place on Earth where you are connected to most. And, a lot of the wealthier classes in the world essentially try to create scenarios where they have no effective legal tax domicile because they're just constantly moving from place to place.

[00:11:33] Many countries have rules such that you need to be in that country, for instance, 183 days in order to be taxed in that country. So these guys will stay in a country for 182 days. They'll move to the next jurisdiction, stay there for a while, move to the next jurisdiction. That combined with, I think it's 58 tax havens that exist in the world still today, all of which have been exposed, all of which are fully known about.

[00:11:59] The Panama Papers and other documents showed clearly that these tax havens exist across the world. A very high percentage of these have the Union Jack in their flag, however, so there is a concentration of Britishness to a lot of these tax havens, and that allows people with huge amounts of wealth to stash their money into places that cannot be traced linked to shell companies which have no beneficial ownership known to the outside world, and they are able to continue and move on and on.

[00:12:30] One movement that's underway now, it seems to be growing rather quickly, is for lack of a better term, they call it the limitarians. And the limitarians propose that there should actually be a wealth cap on every single human alive over which you cannot surpass, and if you do, you are taxed at a rate of 100%.

[00:12:52] So whatever the cap may be, some people in Europe are proposing 10 million euros as the wealth cap for everybody. Others are proposing 35, 38 million US dollars. There's a range of numbers going around, but the main premise, the main point to make is, do we want to live in a world where this unlimited level of wealth can end up undermining democratic systems, give immense power to a very small number of people, or a fairer and more equitable world, which is designed in a way to ensure, at the very least, the basic needs of all of humanity are met?

[00:13:32] And I would certainly find myself in the second camp, being a human rights guy who's worked all around the world, who have seen, very many thousands and thousands of times, the misery and impoverishment suffered by the majority of the human race. And it's another simple fact to make.

[00:13:48] It's very easy to ignore this. You don't see it often on television, you don't see it often in movies, you don't see it often in the newspaper. But the majority of the human race in 2026 is poor. They are one paycheck or less away from total destitution. So people are eking out an existence, including in the United States, where you both are, I presume.

[00:14:10] I know Kevin is. I'm not sure where Emanuel is, but I think he's in the United States.

[00:14:13] Emanuel: I'm in Canada.

[00:14:14] Scott Leckie: Oh, you're in Canada. Okay congratulations. It's a little bit better there income distribution-wise, but it's not perfect, that's for sure. But,

[00:14:22] Emanuel: It depends who you ask.

[00:14:24] Scott Leckie: Yeah, that's true. But, I know the figures for the United States, where around sixty, maybe seventy percent of the population is literally one paycheck away from poverty, but there's also a thousand billionaires at the very same time.

[00:14:37] So you have two hundred and forty, whatever, two hundred and sixty million people who are just on the edge of almost not making it in the wealthiest country on Earth, and then you have a thousand people who have more than a billion dollars in their bank account. I think viewed from any ethical or moral or reasonable perspective people will automatically come to the position that we need to do something about this, and then the question is, what?

[00:15:02] So There are a whole series of very concrete measures that can be put into place today by governments across the world to greatly make the world a more equitable place, but they refuse to do so because of the impact and the power that the billionaire class and others around them have on the political systems of the world.

[00:15:23] And if you boil everything down to 3,400 billionaires, and you combine those with the 79 plus or minus dictators that are essentially running 79 or so countries today we have a pretty big series of problems on our hand, and yet there are ways by which these things can be tackled, and I think that's the important point to make.

[00:15:47] And there will be challenges to do this, of course, political ones above all else, but practically speaking, there are laws and policies that can be put into place tomorrow that would very quickly end this. And another, I'll just throw another As my friend Reed Brody, the dictator hunter always says, "If I murder one person in the streets of New York, I'll be arrested immediately and put in Rikers Prison for life. If I murder 100,000, I'll end up getting asylum in some other authoritarian dictatorship." And that's, unfortunately, the state of the world today. That very low level by comparison of crime tends to be enforceable at a much higher, more brutal level they get away scot-free. One out there besides the limitarian question.

[00:16:34] Basically, we could talk for hours about this too, but, should the ultra-wealthy be allowed to be participants within the political power structures at all? Or should you basically have to make a choice? Either you choose wealth or you choose politics, but you can't choose both.

[00:16:51] And I think there's a lot of reasons by which we could justifiably impose a wealth limit on those seeking public office, for instance. Because even in Australia, which has clearly one of the best democratic systems in the world, we have mandatory voting, we have ranked voting systems. It generally tends to push things towards the moderate middle and so many other factors.

[00:17:19] It's a very strong democratic system. At the same time, whether left, center the politicians in power in the Houses of Parliament here have a substantially higher percentage of outright home ownership than the population at large. So can we expect that political class to implement measures that systematically reduce substantially the price of housing in a country when they're gonna make decisions which undermine their own financial position?

[00:17:49] Probably not, and that's in a very strong, healthy democracy. So imagine how it is in countries that are on the edge of falling back into authoritarianism or ones that are already there. We're not anywhere near. And one final stat, which was really one of the most shocking to me, the average billionaire in the world spews out more than 1 million times the average amount of CO2 per person.

[00:18:15] So billionaires are worsening climate change at a dramatically higher rate than ordinary people.

[00:18:23] Kevin: I have one clarifying question for something you said, and then a more open-ended question. I just wanna clarify. If I understood you correctly, income and wealth inequality today is greater than during the Gilded Age of the 1890s to the 1920s.

[00:18:41] Scott Leckie: Yo, you bet. You bet. Yeah, absolutely.

[00:18:45] Kevin: Anyway, the next question is, and I think I have knowledge of the answer, but you are closer to this issue than I am, but exactly how do these guys wield political power?

[00:18:58] Scott Leckie: Oh, okay. In countless ways. The number one way is, of course, just by money, and they, when you have a political system, as you do in the United States, as we do to a certain extent here in Australia much less, but still it's very easy for the billionaire class to become involved in politics.

[00:19:15] In a country like the United States where you have the Citizens United Supreme Court decision, which treats money as a form of political free speech which to the rest of the world looks very suspicious, I have to say unlimited amounts of money can be given to an unlimited number of political candidates, and whoever makes it to the top makes it to the top, and whether you like it or not, they are beholden to their donors.

[00:19:41] And that's the number one way, I would say, in which this happens. Number two, of course, is that any country which attempts to reduce the political and financial power of billionaires is always threatened by those very billionaires that they will leave the country if new measures are imposed. It's happening right now in New York City, right?

[00:20:03] In the run-up to the election for mayor of New York City, some time ago, it was very clearly on the platform of the present mayor that they would institute a tax on pied-à-terre apartments and houses in New York City, second homes that were owned by obviously very wealthy people, and they've done it.

[00:20:24] And almost none of the billionaires or other wealthy people have actually left. So the threat is always there, but most countries that impose measures against extreme wealth accumulation do not tend to see in the end a mass outflow of people who have that money or the capital that they contain.

[00:20:43] So that's another kind of sword of Damocles that's always held over the head of politicians that, "If you try to do anything to reduce our wealth, we're all going to leave." And then, look at California now. California's attempting to impose I think it's a one-time billionaire tax.

[00:20:58] So there are all sorts of measures across the world which are starting to happen, but we really barely scratched the surface. And I think what we really need in the end is, there is a significant proportion of billionaires who actually want to be taxed more, and they're very public about it, and they've joined different movements and different groups saying, "Guys, please tax us more. We're happy to pay it." And still the politicians don't come through in the end and don't do it. It's a minority, of course, but there is at least some, and I hope movements like that can end up growing. But in the end we have to remember there's a psychological dimension to all of this.

[00:21:35] It's not simply the power thing or the prestige or, you know, beating your rival. There's something in the minds of the extreme wealthy. I'm not a psychologist, I can't necessarily explain it, but there is no cutoff level. There's no satiation level. There's no satisfaction level. It have to always be more. Tomorrow has to be more than today, and next year most certainly has to be more than this year, and a decade down the road has to be 10, 20, 40, 50x as they always say, 50 times more. There's no cutoff point where they just go, "Okay, I have enough now. This is good. I have 27 million, that's fine. There's, whatever 392 million, that's good. I'm stopping."

[00:22:20] It's this constant obsession with more, and working within a system that facilitates that and encourages that and does all that. And this is not to say that every billionaire is evil or every billionaire is some horrible person or anything like that.

[00:22:38] It's just that when you get into that position, as Emanuel was alluding to at the beginning, imagine that you had a billion dollars, and it's very hard to do, but imagine you did. You probably wouldn't like it that much if the government said, "Hey, buddy, you're gonna be taxed, 100% if you make more than whatever, 10 million."

[00:22:57] You probably wouldn't like it. But at the same time, we have to all do a lot of things we don't like in life, there's rules in place, and laws in particular in place, to constrain human behavior. There's all sorts of things that people would do if certain things were not illegal. But let's face the fact.

[00:23:16] And, unfortunately, in the human rights realm of that, it's far too easy to get away with it. As my friend Reed Brody, the dictator hunter always says, "If I murder one person in the streets of New York, I'll be arrested immediately and put in Rikers Prison for life. If I murder 100,000, I'll end up getting asylum in some other authoritarian dictatorship." And that's, unfortunately, the state of the world today. That very low level by comparison of crime tends to be enforceable at a much higher, more brutal level they get away scot-free.

[00:23:51] And it's very much the same in the financial world. And we need to find ways to simultaneously, of course, increase productivity, increase global wealth, but in a way that's much more equitable than today, because we're just creating the conditions for the next crumbling of the system, so to speak, the more you have a concentration of wealth on the wealth pyramid.

[00:24:16] And when you look at a wealth pyramid, UBS Bank always publishes this annual report on global wealth and things like that. There's over I think now 80 million millionaires on planet Earth, and that 3,400 billionaires. But very soon they're gonna have to not show this wealth distribution in the world in the shape of a pyramid, that there's gonna be a pyramid which is much more broad, broader than it is today at the base, with a lightning rod shooting out the top going hundreds of kilometers up to accurately capture the scale of this inequality.

[00:24:50] I've been trying to come up with all sorts of ways to show ordinary people who don't think about this stuff very much what it actually means to be a billionaire. If we go back to that world's poorest billionaire scenario, one billion and one dollar and you compare that to the average person on Earth.

[00:25:06] If you do it by using the metaphor of height, if you take the average height of somebody in the world is around 170 centimeters five foot six or seven or so, the billionaire would be 220 kilometers high, and his height would be compared to this one meter 70 person.

[00:25:25] If you took weight, the average weight of the average human, if you added them all up, it's probably around 70 kilos or so, 150 pounds or... around there. The billionaire would weigh the same as 58 blue whales, the biggest animal ever to live on planet Earth. And finally, if you took the 100-meter dash, you took Usain Bolt, who ran it famously in nine seconds and 58 hundredths of a second, 9.58 it would take the average person more than 14 days to travel the same distance.

[00:25:55] So you can see the scale of it somehow. It's just so ridiculous. If you view the world as I 100% do, as one human out of 8.2 billion humans, all of whom are irreplaceable, all of whom are precious, all of whom are endowed with rights and dignity, it's impossible to justify the continuation of this incredibly skewed economic system that puts so much power in the hands of so few people.

[00:26:23] Eight billionaires who you could fit around your dining room table tonight have more wealth than the poorest half of humanity. Just imagine that. These 4.1 billion people who all want exactly the same things as we do and everyone else does, 4.1 billion, that's like 15 times the population of the United States, for instance, have almost nothing, and this small group of eight guys, all men, by the way hold the same amount of wealth.

[00:26:54] How can we possibly allow the continuation of a system like that in a world where we're all meant to be born free and equal?

[00:27:01] Kevin: There's a story I saw on the Internet, and I think I heard it from Scott Galloway, and it's an aspect of, "If you tax me, I'll leave New York City." And he pointed out that... So Mayor Mandani did-- I think he was candidate Mandani at that time, but he did a video in front of someone's $30 million condominium, and that video became very popular.

[00:27:27] And what Scott Galloway, I think it was Scott Galloway, pointed out is that's the guy's second home. He can't leave New York City because he doesn't live there, right? It's an empty threat.

[00:27:41] Scott Leckie: Yeah, that's right. Literally empty threat, yeah.

[00:27:44] Kevin: Yeah, literally, right? And then this is another story that I think I also heard from Scott Galloway at a different time. So if you go back to the Roman Empire as they were transitioning from a republic into Julius Caesar was being set up to be the first dictator, Octavian became the first dictator, blah, blah, blah, right?

[00:28:03] When these guys rode into Rome in a triumph after military victories, a slave would be positioned in their chariot to whisper into their ear, "You're just a man. You're just a man,"

[00:28:17] to instill a sense of humility relative to the extreme achievements that they were being celebrated, right? And we don't do that.

[00:28:26] There's nobody whispering in Elon Musk's ear, "You're just a man." And you spoke about what I'm gonna call a mental health component of it, and I'm gonna say Elon Musk is the poster child for becoming incredibly wealthy seems to induce mental illness. It just does. I don't really understand the psychology, the dynamics of it, but I can see us putting forth an argument that putting an upper limit on how rich they can be is for their benefit.

[00:29:01] Emanuel: I might wanna add something. Not only that they don't have somebody whispering in their ear, "You're just a man." No, they actually have not just one more people whispering in their ear, "You're a god. You're made to rule this world. You're made to rule this world and Mars and the moon and whatnot." And fairly said, that's actually true.

[00:29:20] That's actually true. I often tell people, all these guys, even Bezos, even Musk, which by the way are very intelligent and probably one of the smartest people on the planet, right? They wouldn't have been in my friend circle, and I think that's why they ended up being who they are. That's one thing.

[00:29:37] One thing I don't wanna forget is what's the guy's name? Gary Stevenson, a former what was it? Trades person from, UK. Young fellow, proposed a tax. I saw another documentary about taxing 2% on everything after 10 million pounds, whatever that equivalent might be.

[00:29:53] Which might sound a little bit more humane, more realistic, more something that probably more billionaires will at least consider more. But what is important for me and what I don't want to not leave this conversation without having it and getting your thoughts on it. Unfortunately, I don't see a shift in the direction unless something violent will happen.

[00:30:17] And whatever led , in human history to a change of regime was not just one thing, okay? The economy being in toilet is one thing. Having a pandemic and keeping you in, at home and ruining basically a generation of teenagers and whatnot, that's another thing. But usually there's a few things that happen that will lead to something like that.

[00:30:37] You have a war here, war there, Ukraine, Israel, Palestine, Iran. That influences now more than ever the global economy because we're more connected than ever and we depend on each other more than we would like to think. Also, on top of that, there is something either a natural phenomenon that usually pulls the trigger or, gives away either a drought or, we're a few days away from a famine.

[00:31:01] We don't realize how much the Canadian and much of the American market depends on the agriculture of Saskatchewan or whatnot. I didn't know myself up until earlier this year how dependent Massachusetts and some other states close to Canada depend on Canadian produced electricity and whatnot.

[00:31:19] So I don't see something happen without something violently happen. And usually it's within. Two examples. One more moderate, Teddy Roosevelt, who came from wealth but decided to go after his own kin, for example, and pulled apart Standard Oil. That actually made Rockefeller richer than he was with just one company, nevertheless.

[00:31:40] But something more recent and at least worth discussing is Luigi Mangione , UnitedHealth. So a young fellow that decided that his life is over and decides to murder somebody from the UnitedHealth, the CEO of UnitedHealth. Again, somebody from wealth that did from political reasons. I think this is an isolated incident, nevertheless, does bring up some sentiment that's worth at least looking for.

[00:32:05] So I guess a question for both Kevin and Scott as well, because I know, Kevin, you were telling in previous episodes that we all should get $1 million or something like that. I always forget the you how it's called, the thing that you propose, that every billionaire should give a million dollars or something like that.

[00:32:23] And then, where Scott, do you see this how do you see this? Is not violence a solution? Am I exaggerating or is a possibility, or where do we sit? I don't have not necessarily a specific question, but I think you get my where I go with this.

[00:32:39] Kevin: Let me clarify that comment I make first and then over to you, Scott. So the comment I make over and over again, and I believe this 100%, if we changed the laws so every billionaire became a thousand millionaires, we would all be better off with the exception of the billionaires, but they'll be fine. If they transition from being billionaires to millionaires, they'll still be fine, right?

[00:33:06] But it would be hugely beneficial for everybody if we did that.

[00:33:10] Emanuel: And here I was in my mind, I was thinking they, they should give us $1 million. Naive.

[00:33:17] Scott Leckie: Right.

[00:33:19] Kevin: When they transition from billionaires to millionaires, that money will go to people. We just don't know exactly who. But allowing the extreme levels of wealth concentration we have is causing all kinds of problems, which I just firmly believe, even for them.

[00:33:36] Scott Leckie: Absolutely. Back to your original question there Emanuel, about, what it takes to facilitate change... obviously, as a human rights guy, my fervent hope that I have worked for forever is that political evolution in which whichever form it takes, is done in a completely and entirely non-violent manner.

[00:33:59] And that comes about with the change of minds and our own personal individual evolution from I to we to us. And it's that jump that all of us have to make over time that will help us in our next phase of global political evolution to ensure that it's done for once in a peaceful and loving manner.

[00:34:29] And that's certainly the spirit that I attempt to create wherever I am working all across the world. And yet, when we look at just recent history, the last century or so, the very first effort to bring all the world's nations together in a somewhat reasonable manner was the League of Nations, of course, which came about on the tail end of World War I, most ridiculous war that was ever fought in the history of humanity for nothing and millions killed.

[00:35:01] But at least it created the foundations for, "Hey, wait a minute, we can't do this again, so let's create something, a platform by which all of us can participate." And this is obviously, 1917, the world was a very different place. Colonialism was fully intact. The United States, by the way, Woodrow Wilson was behind, of course, the League of Nations, the driving force, but the US Senate never ratified the League of Nations treaty.

[00:35:25] Most Americans don't even realize that. They refused to participate. And then that only lasted a short 20 years, and then we had World War II, which ended in the United Nations. I've worked with and within the United Nations for decades, when you look at what the spirit was at the time in 1945 and you read all the documents at the 10 weeks founding meeting that took place in San Francisco in the run-up to the establishment of the UN, the amount of hope and incredible sophistication of thought that that went into forming this new way of governing the world, it was staggering.

[00:36:02] That happened because of the horrors of World War II that no one ever wanted to happen again. And the current generation now, 80, 81 years later, is forgetting historical facts that led to the creation of an institution which was meant to bind the world together. So my hope, and it may be totally pie in the sky, esoteric wish... but my hope is that as flawed as the UN is, and I know that it is, it also does countless good things that you never hear about. But it is time to begin reconsidering the way in which the world is put together and the way in which the world is governed.

[00:36:42] And my very fervent hope is that we can do this in a sophisticated, peaceful, respectful manner that leads to the next stage in our collective political evolution, which is one that moves away from the nation state defining everything towards our shared humanity determining everything. To me it's the most obvious thing in the world, and nothing anyone can say anywhere can convince me that the value of a life of someone in Senegal is any different than the value of a life of someone in Argentina or somebody in Cape Verde or somebody in Canada or the United States or Australia, wherever it may be.

[00:37:23] It's the same. And yet our political organization, the way we've decided to organize ourselves on this single planet on which we are all completely dependent, without question, we have done it on the basis of difference rather than the basis of commonality. And that difference is reflected in the little borders that we've created, all these manmade borders.

[00:37:44] All borders are legal fictions, ladies and gentlemen. Nothing is set in stone. Countries come, countries go, regimes rise, regimes fall. Change is the only constant. But other than change, what we have and we are ensured to continue to have is our shared humanity. So why not begin to start thinking about ways by which we can craft a system that is premised on that?

[00:38:11] Not on the differences of our languages, on our skin color, on our religions, our culture, on our food preferences, whatever it may be that led to the nation states that we have today, but something that truly reflects the shared humanity that we all have. And my view on that, of course, is you have to build in a structure whereby wealth is managed better than it is today.

[00:38:35] But one where we simply accept the fact that we're all born on the same planet, we're all going to die on the same planet. Why not unify ourselves and focus on the similarities that we all have, and then push beyond the limits that these borders and these legal fictions called nation states impose upon us, where some of us feel compelled to kill in the name of our country somebody from somewhere else simply because they don't share your same passport.

[00:39:04] That's just in a situation of total insanity if you ask me . because I guarantee you that person that you're trying to kill over on the other side of the world, guess what? When they went home last night, they were hungry, and they made a meal or somebody made it for them, and they sat around with their family and they laughed and joked, and they had a great time, and they're looking forward to tomorrow And you can apply that across the world.

[00:39:27] And it's that sense of shared humanity that I think we're increasingly losing. And when you add AI into the mix, not just the technological side of it, but the sociological impacts that this is going to have, I'm not sure we're necessarily going in the direction that I would like us to.

[00:39:45] But I would again emphasize that peace and harmony and love are not weird things like that famous Elvis Costello song. Peace, Love and Understanding, what's so funny about it, right? That's the world that I want to see. I know that we have it within us. One of the most moving things that I ever see when I'm working all around the world is to see someone who was once a truly hateful person, like a self-avowed Nazi, who suddenly realizes the error of their ways and asks for forgiveness and atones for this horrible worldview.

[00:40:22] And I've seen it happen countless times. And it could be somebody who was horribly sexist or somebody who was totally anti-Muslim who just finally saw that, "Hey, that Muslim guy's just like me. I can't believe it, we can actually get along." And when you see that happen, that always gives me hope that there is a way to push beyond the differences that we use to define ourselves and embrace this larger entity, which is this miraculous thing called life on this planet that is completely alone in the universe, this basic fact that we all too often forget.

[00:40:56] There's two trillion known galaxies in the universe, and precisely one that we know about that has life on it, and yet we're still killing each other, allowing incredible inequality to exist, incredible poverty, incredible human suffering that could be prevented, all in the interest of what? And so that's what I'm hoping that everyone everywhere, in their own way, at their own speed, hopefully quickly can discover again the virtues of seeing ourselves as all the same, rather than trying to convince ourselves that we're somehow different.

[00:41:32] Emanuel: Speaking of trillions, right? I remember The Little Prince, one of the planet he visited was one of the businessmen who was busy. Busy what's the name? Counting dollars or counting stars in the form of billions as well.

[00:41:46] Scott Leckie: That's right.

[00:41:48] Kevin: I'd like to, add to the conversation. So as laudable as your goals are I'm skeptical that people all over the world are ready to go there quickly. And if you look at political processes, we tend to move slowly. Heather Cox Richardson is an American historian who puts current events in a historical context.

[00:42:09] And in a video of her, she pointed out that the last time that wealth and income was so concentrated in the United States, that led into what's called the Progressive Era, because extreme concentration of wealth changed the minds of enough people that they were able to affect the, I'll call it the political agenda or the agenda of the political leaders.

[00:42:34] And she says there's inklings of that starting to happen now, and one piece of evidence is that candidates who run under the banner of Democratic Socialism are winning even though socialism is a politically loaded word in the United States. But I perceive a piece of evidence in that in Luigi Maggione murdering that guy, or allegedly murdering that guy, although I don't think anyone's actually claiming he didn't do it, right?

[00:43:05] And allow me to like ramble on this for a minute, because I don't see people talking about this enough. So here's my understanding. He lay in ambush early in the morning, in daylight. Lay in ambush, I mean he was standing or crouching between cars, right? The target appeared. He came out of his little hiding space in front of multiple witnesses, shot the guy from a very short distance, and then left.

[00:43:34] And I don't think anybody's disputing those events. But what happened next really shocked me, and that the Internet is rooting for the guy who pulled the trigger, right? Like I'm seeing comments like, "Why is murder by bullets worse than murder by spreadsheet?" I'm seeing people on the Internet immediately start talking about jury nullification. In the entire history of what I'm gonna call British-occupied America, to the best of my knowledge, jury nullification has happened only twice. Once in colonial America, and once in a drug case where a woman on a jury is like, "I know what the law says, but the law is wrong."

[00:44:17] And she was able to convince the other members of the jury that they should do jury nullification. And just to explain, here's my understanding. Jury nullification is when the jury says, "We recognize that the defendant is guilty, and we recognize that the law requires a certain punishment. But in this particular instance, given all the context, the law is wrong.

[00:44:42] The punishment is too extreme. We're not gonna go for it." And juries have the right to do that, right? So right off the bat, this guy murdered someone in broad daylight in front of multiple witnesses, and people on the Internet are immediately talking about jury nullification. We know he's guilty. We know he did it.

[00:45:02] But in this particular case, the law is not doing it, right? And I was just blown away. If a lot of people are immediately going to, "I'm on the side of the guy who pulled the trigger," that's evidence that our thoughts about extreme income and wealth concentrations are changing.

[00:45:23] Scott Leckie: Yeah, but it goes to show , so many of these impacts of wealth inequality are so deeply entrenched in the system in not just the United States but all across the world, that people very rarely draw the line between all of these different things. And, when you have a system like in the United States where such a huge number of people are unable to access healthcare insurance and so many people go bankrupt because of being unable to pay a medical bill.

[00:45:56] Like to people in Canada, which has socialized medicine , or Australia which has the same, or the United Kingdom, and pretty much every country in the OECD has it except for the United States because it's a very reasonable thing to have, right? It should be a basic birthright of everybody in all countries, but particularly ones that can more easily afford it, that you should never, ever have to go bankrupt or be financially threatened because of the state of your body in terms of its health.

[00:46:28] And I think more and more people in more and more countries where this is a problem are realizing that something structural needs to change, and the whole international human rights legal system is really set up to create the conditions in every society in the world that prevents all of this bad stuff from happening.

[00:46:49] That's basically all it's about. It says everybody should have an adequate house. It says that everybody should have access to the highest attainable level of health, that everybody should have the right to form a free trade union if they'd like to, that everybody should have Social Security, that everybody should have the right to vote and the right to a fair trial.

[00:47:07] All these basic parameters of what it means to have a strong democratic society. It's pretty straightforward and pretty simple, and also universally agreed upon. This is not anything radical. So we already have the ingredients of what we know will create a stable, solid society in which crime is less, in which equality is better, in which job security is better, in which wages are higher, in which et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

[00:47:36] Discrimination is less. But we're losing sight of that as a society. And I think another trend, by the way, that you can notice is that many of these countries in recent years, including the United States, that have very much embraced and toyed with this extreme right-wing ideology, almost always ends in failure, right?

[00:47:59] And this is the thing that people that get so enamored by it don't realize, that they're just selecting for a very brief period, hopefully, generally it is the case, some extremist ideology which in the end never, ever comes anywhere near achieving the promises that they spout off at the beginning of the process.

[00:48:19] And you already see that happening now in the United States. The, clearly, as you mentioned, this... I'm not sure how widespread it is, this, this move of towards the progressive edge of the Democratic Party, the Democratic Socialist angle. I don't know if that plays so well in South Dakota or Utah or Kentucky or West Virginia, some of the real conservative places.

[00:48:42] But clearly those candidates are winning, and very proudly and very unashamedly saying they are Democratic Socialists. Whereas I don't think they would've said it as blatantly and obviously as that in recent years. So I think there's so many words that are imbued with horrible sentiments in the United States in particular.

[00:49:02] All you have to say is somebody's a communist and therefore they're completely discredited, right? Or even on the other side, somebody's a fascist, they're immediately discredited. Somebody's a socialist. Socialist, communist, much more so in the United States in particular where those words have, really taken on a sort of poisonous essence.

[00:49:20] But I think that's changing, and as you have said, the more extreme things get the more large scale the opposition to those things is going to eventually be. It doesn't happen overnight but, politics is always a pendulum, and it always goes back. And, in a way, that's a good thing.

[00:49:38] Let the lefty guys... I live in a country where, we have a very strong labor government, center-left. Let them spend too much. Lefty governments always spend too much. And then let the conservatives come in and be a bit more fiscally sound and get things back into the middle, and then let the lefties come back, and then let the righties come back.

[00:49:59] Just let it swing back and forth and infuse it with some Green Party essence. We have, 14, 15% of our senators here are from the Green Party, et cetera. And then you can move on your merry way. But it's so seductive to so many people, these simple solutions which are based on hatred and difference, right?

[00:50:18] And division. And it's the time-tested strategy of despots everywhere, "They're gonna get you. They're gonna get you. You better be careful." And, it can manifest in the form of a migrant, it can manifest in the form of a religion, it can manifest in the... whatever form. But creation of this evil other somewhere outside, dark, nebulous, horrible force that's gonna take everything you've got.

[00:50:40] And then that will convince you to vote for the despot or the aspiring despot, and they alone can protect you. And they even speak in those words. So we need to move beyond that, and unfortunately, I have to say Australia has largely avoided this phenomenon. Most European countries, it's fully there.

[00:50:58] AFD in Germany, the PVV in Holland, the Reform Party in the UK, Orbán's party before it was ousted from power in Hungary, and so many other places. United States of course, Canada to a certain extent, in certain provinces in particular. But Australia has largely avoided it until now, and right now, this is the big challenge to Australia's democratic system.

[00:51:21] The extreme right-wing party here, they're called One Nation, they've been around forever, but they usually poll 1% 2%. They're now polling sometimes higher than the Labour Party or higher than the Conservative Party which is a coalition. I don't think that will play itself out in electoral terms, but nonetheless, we're experiencing it here.

[00:51:41] And so hopefully, people... I think people will... there's an essence of egalitarianism that still is deeply infused in the Australian mind, collectively, right-wing or left-wing. There's a sense of "You gotta give everybody a fair go. We're all the same." It's called the tall poppy syndrome.

[00:52:00] I don't know if you guys know what that is, but, you don't wanna be the poppy that rises above all the others, because then everyone else will come and chop it off, right? So there is this sense of egalitarianism here and where everybody talks to everybody, and that's still very much the case.

[00:52:13] Of course there's class differences, as there always are, but to me, as a new immigrant here pretty new, like 15 years I really see it much more deeply than the average Australian sees it, because they're so used to it. And there really is a sense of this kind of shared identity in a really good way, where you hang out with your painter as an equal, even if you're an investment banker.

[00:52:37] And, your rubbish bin collector guy hangs out with the lawyer as if you're equal, and they get along, and they speak, and it's cool. And that's what you have to hope, that collective sense of we're all in this together can be the force that rises above this new emergence here of an extreme right wing.

[00:52:57] And I think that plays itself out in all countries that have toyed with this doctrine. In Holland, the PVV, Geert Wilders, this extreme right-wing... You know, I'm a Dutch citizen too, by the way, speaking as a Dutchie. Holland was always the most progressive country out of many progressive countries in Europe forever, in the '60s, '70s, '80s, '90s, and then it all of a sudden started embracing this extreme right-wing anti-Muslim party.

[00:53:24] But they were voted out of power in the last election. And Orbán's party in Hungary, after 16 years of very clear authoritarian intentions, was voted out of power. There are many positive cases of people seeing the extreme nature of that extreme right wing and not liking it, then seeing that they're actually failing in achieving their objectives, and then rising to the occasion and voting for the reasonable middle.

[00:53:50] And that's what I hope can happen in countries across the world, because we haven't even dealt with the question of that really close interrelationship between authoritarianism, autocracy, dictatorship, and wealth accumulation and billionaires. And it's the collective unity of those groups and forces in society that we really need to see as one and the same when we're looking at the next stage of our political evolution.

[00:54:17] Because, the fear, I know, Emanuel, you're from Romania. I was older than you when the change happened in 1989. I was 27 and very politically active and already, human rights guy I remember the very day... actually I knew a lot of the Romanian opposition figures, because they were doing stuff at the UN even though they were linked to the regime.

[00:54:41] And they were suddenly on stage, yelling against Ceaușescu and so on and so forth. But seeing the way that regime ended, it's a kind of a case study in extreme concentration of power, extreme concentration of wealth, extreme concentration of PhDs. I remember his wife ... I forget her name.

[00:55:01] Madame Ceaușescu...

[00:55:02] Emanuel: Elena...

[00:55:03] Scott Leckie: Elena, of course, yeah. She had, I don't know, whatever, 27 PhDs or some extreme amount of PhDs.

[00:55:09] But look how that ended, and that's kind of the classic textbook case of the end of a dictatorship.

[00:55:15] The people rise up. They basically lynch the leadership, and then a new democratic phase begins, and it's difficult and so on and so forth.

[00:55:24] But no dictator should be allowed to emerge in the first place, and that's the lessons that we should learn from history. It always comes down to one guy, almost always a man, sometimes a woman, but almost always a man, who is able to create a system that enables them to rise above all others.

[00:55:43] And they then, of course, entrench themselves as long as they possibly can. They enrich their own family members. They try to create a family dynasty. And then it almost always ends horribly, and this is the thing. It doesn't always end horribly, but it's usually just a matter of time. We should prevent it from emerging in the first place, and that's a big challenge that we face as humanity, because we're right now, we're really at the crossroads.

[00:56:10] If you grab all the world and look at it together, ... a majority of people on planet Earth this minute do not live in strong democracies. In fact, the criteria of strong democracy and then weak or fledgling democracy... in that strong democracy category, it's only around 10 or 15% of the human race, right now. It's a small minority.

[00:56:32] The majority lives in a flawed democracy or an outright authoritarian or authoritarian-aspiring political system. And to me, that is not the recipe for the continued survival of our species in a prosperous and egalitarian manner. And, I think that's a big component of what's missing in the lives of so many of these billionaires and others is...

[00:56:55] I've done all the calculations for what it would take, because I work a lot on the issue of climate displacement, for instance. So people who are losing their homes because of climate change. I work on this issue all across the world, and I've calculated how much it would actually cost to rehouse the entire global population of climate displaced peoples using an average figure of around 500 million people, because that's how many people will lose their homes because of climate change and rising sea levels, et cetera.

[00:57:22] Cost about $1.7 trillion to rehouse all of these people. That sounds like a lot, but the global economy is about 125 trillion right now, so it's less than 1% of the global economy. You could tax every billionaire in the world 1% of their wealth for 25 years, and that would fully pay for the rehousing of all of the world's climate displaced people.

[00:57:46] That's just one calculation. There's thousands that I've done. But just to make the point that, what I would hope would happen in the world's billionaire class is that they would get at least an equal amount of satisfaction, if not much more, knowing that their wealth can be used to reduce the suffering of fellow humans.

[00:58:07] Build a hospital every year, guys. Build 50,000 houses each every year, guys. Plant a trillion trees. Do what you can to make the world a better place, knowing, as they all do, that in many respects the world is dying. Our planet is dying. One-third of all land on the face of our planet, we have about 35 billion acres of land on planet Earth, right?

[00:58:34] One-third of that is officially classified as degraded land with virtually no commercial value or human habitational possibilities. All man-made, all done by humans, not very much being done to restore that land. That's just one example. And when you add in... we're the dominant species, we have 15 or 20,000 nuclear weapons all pointed in all sorts of different directions.

[00:59:01] We have more than 50 active conflicts going on right now. We have this extreme accumulation of wealth. We have unrestrained AI entering the picture at a very rapid rate. We have this extreme levels of poverty. The list goes on. Climate change worse than anyone predicted. Far worse than the IPCC reports of the last 30 years.

[00:59:23] Not a single country has basically achieved the Paris targets under the Paris 2015 Climate Accords. The list goes on. The hottest year registered in human history this year. Last year was hottest. The year before that was hottest. It just keeps getting worse.

[00:59:39] Going back to your original question about the rise of progressivism came on the heels of rising economic concentration. We have more than enough criteria to do the very same thing at a global level. The problems are severe and substantial and ubiquitous enough to hopefully convince even the greatest skeptic that we need to come together and unify and start applying the solutions to these problems, all of which exist.

[01:00:12] There's not a single problem that we've talked about today that doesn't have a workable, viable legal policy, programmatic, or monetary solution to it. But what's lacking, of course, is the will to do it. And so we need to generate that will in more and more people. And there are hundreds and hundreds of millions of people in the world that are ready, I believe, to go very strongly in the direction of a much more unified global political structure and global society, which is fairer and more equitable.

[01:00:42] But we still don't have that gathering point yet. There's still not that place where all these like-minded people can come together and form sort of a global movement. Little, spots of it here and there but we're not yet at that point where enough of us have pushed forward in saying we want democracy for everybody, everywhere.

[01:01:02] We want everybody everywhere over the age of 16 to be able to vote, for instance, using their iPhone. Just experiment with it. It might not work the first time, but it'll work better the second time. What if we had a globally elected world parliamentary assembly? Not just the UN, which is just a glomeration of 195 nation-states, each representing their own national interest.

[01:01:25] But what if we had a world parliament whereby in order to be a member of that parliament, you had to basically take a vow that you're acting on behalf of all of humanity rather than on just your nation-state where you happen to be born. And the list is endless for these types of things. We can have a...

[01:01:44] I don't know if you guys have read this great book by Kim Stanley Robinson called The Ministry for the Future, which came out a few years ago. Excellent book, all about that. The UN essentially creates a ministry for the future, and their task is to basically save humanity from its own excesses, and they succeed, right?

[01:02:03] Or, maybe Ecotopia. You might have heard of that, Kevin, that book from 1975. A guy called Ernest Callenbach wrote this all about the emergence of a new society called Ecotopia on the West Coast of the United States. It was San Francisco up to British Columbia, basically, and they formed this nation-state called Ecotopia, and they didn't let anybody in for 20 years, and they built this ecological paradise.

[01:02:25] And then a skeptical New York Times reporter comes in the year 2000, which was way in the future, and initially came in thinking it was terrible, but he, of course, fell in love with it. So those kind of visions, of something better than what we already have that can be done in a peaceful manner for once.

[01:02:42] That's the way we need to do it. We need to move towards this next stage of our political evolution in an entirely peaceful and non-violent manner for once, and then see what's possible. because we all know, I think that's really one of the missing links in all of this, everyone knows the world can be far better than it is.

[01:03:01] Everyone. You could be extreme right-wing and you know that the world can be better, or extreme left-wing and you know it can be better. But we have to actually implement that vision of making it better together.

[01:03:13] Kevin: For what it's worth, I have read Ecotopia about 30 years ago and it was a good story. I really enjoyed it. Anyway, I think it's appropriate to end on an optimistic note, and I think we're on an optimistic note right there. I'm afraid if we continue the episode, and maybe we'll continue the episode in a few months, but if we continue the episode today we're gonna end on a downer. So we're on an upper right now. I think there's things we can do. I think there's things we all know we should do, and like you said, it's a matter of having the political will to do it.

[01:03:47] Emanuel: If people want to learn more about you, Scott, and get more of Scott Leckie, did I pronounce the name correctly?

[01:03:54] Scott Leckie: Yes, did

[01:03:55] Emanuel: is the best place for them to do so? Probably Googling your name should pop up your profile on more than one, but is there like a specific place where you want people to know about you?

[01:04:04] Scott Leckie: I run two international NGOs now.

[01:04:08] One Is called Displacement Solutions, so we work on resolving cases of climate displacement around the world. So you can look at displacementsolutions.org.

[01:04:18] We're right now working on two major feature documentaries, like Hollywood-style big-time documentaries with a Oscar-nominated director.

[01:04:27] He's hopefully gonna be an Oscar-winning director with this film that we're doing with him. So we do a lot of work along those lines. So you can look there. displacementsolutions.org.

[01:04:37] I also have another organization called Oneness World, which is all about a lot of the stuff I've been talking about, bringing forth a new political system in which we all participate as equals at a global level. It's called onenessworld.org. And then my personal website is scottleckie.com.au, which is more my writing side, my author side, which has descriptions of all my different books and, updates on the different things I'm doing around the world.

[01:05:05] Kevin: Thank you. I want to Thank you for your time, Scott. Incredibly big and interesting topic. I enjoyed the conversation. Yeah, thank you for taking the time to be with us.

[01:05:14] Scott Leckie: Yeah, my pleasure. I enjoyed it too. It was great.

[01:05:16] Emanuel: And hopefully you'll join us again soon in a different episode, maybe on a different tone to see what the state of our world would be at that time.

[01:05:25] Scott Leckie: Yeah. Maybe when my next book... You'll like this title hopefully Emanuel being from Romania. The Killionaire is about the end of billionaires, or the aspiring end of billionaires. It's a political thriller. The next one is called Psychotic Despotic, and it's all about the end of dictators.

[01:05:44] So hopefully that will intrigue listeners and readers. And if you ever read Killionaire, it's reasonably wild. I really let loose on novel number two. No restraints. So...

[01:05:58] Kevin: I look forward

[01:05:59] to that one. Yeah, send me a copy. I look forward to reading that one. I enjoyed Killianaire.

[01:06:03] Scott Leckie: I will. Oh, I'm glad. I'm very glad. Very glad. But the sometimes you have to, as Crosby, Stills, and Nash used to say, you gotta let your freak flag fly. I really let my freak flag fly on Psychotic Despotic. The reason I write novels now is because I've been trying to create a world without extreme income inequality and without dictators and without human rights violations forever. But as I get older I realize I didn't succeed.

[01:06:32] Maybe a teeny bit, but generally not. So I create in my novels the world I want to see sooner than later.

[01:06:40] Emanuel: Anything happens here before it transitions to reality. So...

[01:06:44] Kevin: Yes.

[01:06:45] Scott Leckie: That's right. You have to be able to say it or think it before you can make it happen. So that's what I'm also trying to do, that sentiment, get that sentiment out there.

[01:06:54] Say it and think it, and then we can make it happen.

[01:06:57] Emanuel: That being said, thank you for being with us on another episode. Curiouspundits.com is the website. You'll find links there to this episode's recording, future episodes, previous episodes. If you like or even if you dislike our topics, our guests, or what we say, feel free to send us a message.

[01:07:13] And obviously share, follow, and leave us a five-star review because that will help us propagate the word out there. Until the next episode, my name is Emanuel.

[01:07:24] Kevin: My name is Kevin, and thank you for listening.