← Unlearn16: Class is in Session
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Class is in session. Hey everybody and welcome to Unlearn 16. Class is in session, guys, today I'm going to take you back to school. Today I've been thinking. Hold on, I got to adjust the camera. That's Anna's clothes for. She just stacks them up here to get ready for a trip. I've been thinking, first of all, how does my hair look? That I'm going to do some segments or I might switch all together and do a whole other line about classroom lessons and I'll go through my politics curriculum, my history curriculum, literally. I'll just teach you lessons on here today. I'm going to start with one and I'm going to see how you guys like it. So feel free to chirp me in the comments. Chirp is Canadian for make fun of me. FYI. I'm going to talk today about the existence and the creation and the, I guess, linear process of becoming a democratic country. And what I mean by linear is everything is on a scale. You know, if you think of any country having a hundred percent democracy, it doesn't exist, right? There's always elements where we can do better. There's always elements where we become more free, more representatives, more, all of those things, no matter what you can imagine in your head, there's trade offs. And so what I want to talk about today in a very real way because obviously we're struggling with this right now. We're struggling with what does a democracy look like. We're struggling with how much freedom should we have, should there be any limits, how we balance representation versus interest and all of those kinds of things. So I'm going to go over the, the indicators that make up democracies and I'm going to then talk about their limitations. And, and then if you want me to dive into each individual one, maybe do a whole podcast about it, I can do that as well. All right, so first and foremost I am going to talk about indicators of a full democracy. The folks, the funny part right now, just so you know, it's like I have my, my note, my school notes right on the left here and I can talk to you guys here and I can read over here, number one, are you with me? First indicator of full democracy, majority rule. Now here's the funny part. Most people's dead stop there. Most people go majority rule. That's all it's about. Whatever the majority wants goes. But that's only one of eight indicators. Now this is very simple. If 51% of the population or of the voting population, because that's also a. An issue. Right? Who gets to vote? Who doesn't get to vote? 51% of the voting population wants a certain thing. They should get it. Now, philosophically, that makes sense. Completely makes sense. Unless 51% of the population, you know, wants to enslave the other 49%. I'm going to get to the. I'm going to get to the limitations in a second. In a democracy, it is genuinely generally understood that a 51% or more want one something. You know what? Somebody's going to correct me and say, it's not 51%, Joanna. It's 50 plus one. You and your math. Stop it. It's not the point of this video. Well, it's a little bit of the point, but you get carried away. 51%. Now, here's the key number two. You have to support and protect minority rights. So in order to have a democracy, 51% of the population can actually voice their opinion and get what they want. As long as. As long as it doesn't interfere or infringe on minority rights, whether they be language rights, religious rights, sexual orientation, gender rights, it doesn't matter. Okay. That 51 doesn't get to weaponize its power in order to enslave in any way, shape or form, other parts of the population. I know all of you guys are sitting at home going, oh, my God, Joanna, but what about this? What about this? I'm going to get to limitations. Okay? This is the nice list. This is the Santa list. We'll get to the naughty list later. Number three, rule of law. In a democracy, you have to have rule of law, which means you have the creation, a constitutional framework that you have created that is the actual supreme and final judgment of the nation. Right? And this rule of law ensures that everybody is equal under the law. As soon as you have inequity under the law, as soon as that happens, you pull from democracy. So rule of law, everybody is equal under the law. It applies equally no matter who you are or where you stand. I know, I know. Your heads are. Just walk with me for a second. All right. Rule of law is incredibly important. Now, of course that's incredibly important, because if you don't have rule of law and you don't have this basis of application of law, then very, very quickly, it degenerates. Right? I need to be able to, you know, and as society still stands, I get a lawyer, I get my day in court. The law, as it applies is supposed to sort of be, you know, blind from all of those Other things. It is not supposed to be classist. I could barely get that out. It's not supposed to be sexist, not supposed to be racist. There are not supposed to be these foundational underpinnings. And if you find those issues within the legal, the laws are supposed to be rectified. Number four, interest groups. A lot of people hate interest groups, but. And they'll talk about the rising power of the interest group, like for example, the nra. The only time they talk about interest groups in a negative way is when they don't like the interest group. Right, but interest groups are incredibly wide ranging. You have things like the wwf, not the World Wrestling Federation, but the wwf, World Wildlife Fund. You have Mothers Against Drunk Driving, they got mad. You have obviously groups in the United States like the nra. You have environmental groups, you have women rights groups, you have racial justice groups, you have all of these different interest groups, animal rights advocacy groups. You have all these different interest groups. And what these interest groups are trying to do and, and how they add to the democracy is it's giving a voice to every particular interest that goes on within that society. Now on the face, having a multitude and a diversity of interest groups only adds and magnifies levels of democratic freedom and a democratic voice. So your vote that happens, you know, once every four years is then not supplanted. That's the wrong word. But it's bolstered and you get to use your voice throughout, in between election periods using these interest groups. Do they have too much power? How much power is too much power? That's all a question of how they get implemented and how they take effect. But again, this is the nice list. So let's focus right now about what is democracy. And everybody loves to talk about people's interest group. Why do you talk about that? This is more important. Why do you talk about that? You should be talking about this. Here's what I'm going to say about interest groups. Start your own in a democratic form, right? There is no limit to interest groups being able to be formed within a society in order to argue for and support different new pieces of legislation, in order to create public awareness, in order to raise money to help the cause externally to government as an ngo, a non governmental organization in order to better understand issues that are facing society. I think if more people got involved in the things they were passionate about, stop complaining about what everybody else is doing, we'd all get a lot more done and there'd be a lot more voices at the table, a lot more Voices at the table means more democratic representation, right? Democracy is very simply. I didn't even define it. Heaven help me, I'm not very good teacher today. The will, right, the majority and the will of the people. However, democracy, in order to have a level of freedom, a level of access, a level of diversity of thought, you need all of these different things in place in order to manage and balance all of those opposing forces. So interest groups, incredibly important. Number five, judicial independence. This one's clear. The judges, whether they be in Canada, provincial or federal level judges of the Supreme Court, or whether they be different levels within the United States. The point of these judges are to be independent in personnel and in power to the legislative, executive branches of government. If they're not separate from power, then they cannot function to do one of their primary function, if not the most important functions, which is. I'm going to sneeze in one second. Please stand by. I like the hesitation there. You know, it says you can look at lights and it stops you from sneezing. It's never worked for me a day in my life. So you have to have an independent judiciary because their sole job is to keep the government in check. The Supreme Court's primary job, well, they have two primary jobs, deal with inter provincial or interstate issues. Who has jurisdiction, where and what they should be allowed to do and not be allowed to do in the way government runs. And they are to protect the civil rights of the citizenry. From who, you might ask? The government. So their job is to put the government in their place, whether it's via an executive order of the executive branch in the United States, whether it's a law that's been created, they all go through and get funneled through and can be challenged through the Supreme Court. That is the final say right there. And if they weren't separate in power and personnel, obviously you could then have an onslaught of a specific mandate and a political mandate getting pushed through the legal system. Again, we're talking in utopia land, right? This is an indicator of democracy. Also, please. It's fluid, right? It's a range, it's a percentage. There is nowhere that has 100% democracy. None, zero. You can't even think of one. And I'm going to explain all the ways you can't in a second. Number six, Civilian control of the army. The army is there under. Under the control of politicians who are elected representatives. And what they do and how they do it should always be made available to public criticism and control. We need to know what's going on because if they are using, if the government is utilizing our military in an unjust or, or aggressive, in illegal international fashion, the public should have the right to say no more. Now obviously we get things like it's national security. I mean those two words are the most asinine words that are thrown around left, right and center to make sure that the it doesn't actually know what's going on. That would be a limitation. I am not at that list yet. Number seven, politically diverse. You don't have a democracy if you don't have a diversity of candidates standing in front of you with a diversity of ideas, of ideologies, both economic, social, political, environmental. You need choice. If you don't have choice, you don't have a democracy. That's why I would argue the two party systems a complete and abject failure. There's not enough choice. Right. I would also argue that in Canada, even though we have choice, right. Because we have first past the post system, which again I can explain later if you want me to compare the U.S. to the Canadian system. I would love to do that in another, in another podcast. But when you have that a lot of minority parties that should garner some degree of control and say empower, they just get, get completely shifted out and thereby eliminating the, the benefits of having a multi party system. Now is there such thing as having too many voices in the room? Sure, but that goes the other way. But you need to be able to be politically diverse. The funny part is we consistently pretend as though other countries aren't politically diverse because they're all, let's say a lot of people love to condemn China because they all have to be a part of the Communist Party of China. Well, the, the hilariousness of it all is every party running in the United States and Canada, they're capitalist. Do we have any Communist Party members? No. Some people are going to say we did. But at this very moment, right. Our economic options, even though some may be pushing to socialism, are still capitalist based. And number eight, and here's the hard one. Individual civil rights, freedom of information, freedom of the press, expression, religion. Every individuals in a true democracy should have as wide of limits as conceivably possible. They are our civil freedoms should push as far as they push. Until my freedom interferes with yours. Until what I want starts interfering. Then there has to be a natural limitation, right? You are free to have a house. You are free to buy a car. You are free to practice whatever religion you want. You are free. You cannot go take somebody else's house. You're not free to do that. You should be as free as you can be as long as your rights don't interfere with somebody else's rights or somebody else's safety. Now this gets mucky, right? This gets very confusing very quickly, especially when we start talking about parental rights over their kids rights. When we talk about the, the battle between faiths within one particular civil society, it can get very, very tricky. Again, this list of democratic features or indicators are giving you the hundred percent like this is what we, if we could do this, we'd have close to 100% of democratic freedom. Now when you throw people in, let's be honest, we muck up all good things. So now let's talk about limitations of full democracies. Number one, the benefit of the rich. As soon as we have a capitalist system, you are going to have people with a lot more money. As soon as you have a wealthy class, they are going to have more power. And I'm, and I'm not just talking about oligarchs, okay? I'm just talking, and I'm going to get to that in a second. I'm going to talk about what having money. Not even crazy money, but what having money in a, in a democratic society, how it will skew democracy. For example, I teach at a private school. The kids that can afford and the parents that can afford to send their kids to my school, not just my school. Although I do think it's pretty amazing. They will have in inherent benefit, right? A kid in a smaller class sizes with more attention, with more access, with more technology, with more travel. All of those things will give that student an inherent benefit to start off life. The more money that people have gives them the ability to run for elections. A lot of people, a lot of my students have asked me why I don't run and I jokingly say, well, I can't quit teaching for a year. Who's going to pay my mortgage? But that is part and parcel of the issue, right? Who can run for government? And then you start looking at the United States and you look at who gets like big donations and who can really give it a run. And what happens when you're against the side of the super pac? How do you get, do you get crushed? Do you still have a shot, right? When, when you see benefit of the rich being able to access healthier foods, being able to access doctors and, and more medical treatments and more access to information, let alone education, you start to see that there's a group of people and again, I'm not talking about the ultra rich right now, I'll talk about oligarchies later in my list, but you start to see a group of people that are disproportionately benefiting from a system and then you might say, well, they've earned it. Yeah, but the next generation hasn't, right? If democracies are supposed to be inherently based on merit, that's fine for first generation. Is it fair for second? As soon as I can transfer my wealth to my children or to whoever I deem important enough or have value enough to transfer my wealth to, don't they then start with a huge, huge step forward. And once they start with a huge step forward, I am now interfering in the basis of am I judging by merit or not? That gets blown apart. You have a kid and a lot of people talk about this because they hate things like affirmative action or they hate things like quotas in universities. However, I have a kid that works 25 hours a week at a part time job in high school and they get an 80 average. And there's another kid who stays at home, goes to private school, has tutors, has all of this extra help and gets like incredible and does incredibly work, works incredibly hard. I'm not taking any value away from either student, but this student has the potential of spending 110% of their time. I hate it when people say 110. I mean a hundred. On the subject matters at hand, in order to garner the highest marks and the greatest understanding, let's say 80 and this kid, let's say, gets 90. I'll even do a 10% difference. Who is smarter, who is better, who deserves to go to university, who's going to do better at university, even more so, who's going to do better in the real world? All of those things come into play because we've created the illusion, the pretense that education is somehow objective, that skill and capacity and potential, we can measure it objectively, which we cannot. And more money you throw into that pile, the more you can no longer judge objectivity and merit within that particular ball. Number two, not everybody can vote. Listen guys, I have 15 year olds that know more about the Canadian electoral system than most people I know who are 50. They can't vote. Why not? Somebody who is homeless can't vote. The, the, the one person that is facing the most significant and most horrific problems that our society has to throw at a person and they can't even vote for policies that might help. We're constantly asking wealthy people how to fix the homeless situation. Meanwhile, They've never been homeless. Right. A lot of people. And I'll go another step further. I realize you're all supposed to get three hours to vote. We know perfectly well that doesn't happen. Please stop it. If I'm having to work, let's say, two jobs to make sure my family's taken care of, there's a lot less ability for me to step away from that in order to go vote. And, and we have no idea where I'm working and where I'd have to go vote. I know there's early voting. It also, it also separates, right? There's this disconnect between working class and very hard working class individuals and voting. And the more we can separate that, the more that people with money in the upper middle class tend to vote. Number three, this is a doozy. Multinational corporations have power lobby groups. So I said interest groups are incredibly important. What happens when these interest groups have more money than governments? We have interest groups donating hundreds of millions of dollars because they've created super PACs under the illusion of this donor sort of money. And by the way, even if. Because one of my goals is to take money out of politics, but it's really frustrating because I can take all the money I want out of politics. I can say that you cannot donate more than a hundred dollars to any politician. There's no more super PACs. You cannot donate any more money. And a company, any company from Nike to Tesla to, you know, I don't know, NBC. It doesn't matter what company. Any company with a boatload money or with somebody with hundreds of millions of dollars can create social media channels, can create podcasts. Hell, they can buy social media apps and they can wield them however they choose to because they purchased it. And when you can purchase that much power, right, and initially we're talking about big corporations, but when you can purchase that much power and you can purchase that much influence and that much airtime, you really do attempt to negate or eliminate the way a democracy can actually function. And that's a huge problem. Number four, elections don't always represent the public. The United States and Canada alike. There tends to be a difference between the popular vote and how many electoral college votes that a president got, or the popular vote in Canada and how many ridings the politicians or the, the political party actually won. Right? There's a difference there. We're not doing. It's. It's not straight representation. It. Sure. Sex, not proportional representation. And there's reasons for that. And the only reasons I Can see for that is in order to mitigate and in order to, to mitigate smaller groups from gaining any power and to maximize and consolidate power in the hands of old school political parties and old school political ideals. Right. I mean in 2000, everybody talks about January six and, and that thing and everybody talks about how Trump won this time after Musk was saying, and then don't worry, we don't need to worry about the votes. Don't worry guys, we got the votes weeks before the election. And you're kind of like, what do you mean? And he'd say things like Elon really knows computers. What? Let me be very clear. Fraudulent elections have been going on since the dawn of time, right? Everybody and their brother, we love to talk about JFK and elevate him to the, to the heights of kings. However, everybody knows his dad who was a criminal. Bottom, that election, that election was fixed. If you were around in 2000 and you saw Gore versus Bush, Gore won the popular vote and Bush won with a couple hundred thousand votes in Florida, by the way, in Florida, guess who the governor of Florida was at the time? That's right. Jeb Bush. George Bush ever ends up winning because they challenge every ballot. Because on the ballot in Florida, instead of marking an X beside the person's name, they put a hole punch through a piece of paper beside the person's name. It is the hole punch, by the way. The hole punch that falls out is called a chad. If you weren't around in 2000, you don't know this, but if you were, it's it forever ingrained in your head and people holding up ballots to the light to see where people have punched that hole through. So there were some ones where, there's some ballots where they didn't punch it through and it just indented. They didn't count them. Well, they fought it in court. There were other ones that they punched it through and kind of half was hang hanging in there. They didn't count that. That wasn't all the way through. Another of them they punched and it's dangling. It was the dangling chat. What do we count that? Another one, they punched it and it wasn't perfectly lined up. Have you ever tried to use a single hole punch? It never works out the way you think it's going to do anyways. All of these votes were contested, all of them. They refused to do a, a new vote. They should have had a new election in Florida. And in that election it came down to Florida. Whichever presidential candidate won Florida would win the presidency. And it came down to Florida and a dangling chad to indicate who gets to have that particular state and win the presidency of the United States. And shocker, not to ruin the end of it, but Bush wins. What a coinky dink that his brother's the governor. What a coinky dink that his brother is the one that nominated the judges. I mean, it's all very, very. But you can understand how incredibly frustrating that is. And, and Gore gives up. He doesn't challenge. He, he concedes the election. And now you have, you know, challenges for every election. Donald Trump still says he won when he obviously lost, even after people stormed the freaking Capitol. But elections don't represent the public. And the more that we believe that and the more that that is found to be true in a significant way, and the more that we're. It's very, very hard to contest, the more frustrating it becomes. Because if you really poke at it too hard, if you really push it too far, and we say, well, no election's perfect and there's always fraud, why would we ever believe another election again? If we can't believe another election ever again, how the hell can we ever have a democracy? Do we all do it on computers? Do we all do it by hand? Well, if we all do it by hand, who's counting it? Who's mandating who? Somebody's videotaping all of that. Who's going to go through all those, all of those ways? What about AI? As soon as you put it all gets very, very confusing and very, very fraudulent. From the hop number five, this is an interesting one. You can't compete with globalization. Now, I know, I know the United States is really trying, right? Super, super high tariffs. But the mere fact that you have to put super, super high tariffs and you have to threaten your allies and you have to talk about taking over more landmass, and you have to talk about pulling out of this alliance and going into this alliance and what does that alliance mean and stopping them from using their own dollar. The more you're doing that, the more you're proving that you don't control your own sovereignty unless you try to attempt to control the world. Because the world is interconnected economically, we are interconnected culturally, we are interconnected environmentally. For the love of God, we are interconnected. The more that individual countries try to pretend as though there's nice little bubble over top of them and they can do or not do sort of environmental legislation and it's just going to affect them is ridiculous. Canada has been trying to push forward, a healthy environmental piece of legislation and, and, you know, a way of life in Canada. But let's be honest, we live beside one of the biggest producers who in this administration say they don't care. What are we doing? Can we put a bubble over top of them? What. What happens when there's a strong gust of wind from Michigan? The world now has a say. And you can pretend as though you can go about your day, but if there's an international global recession or depression, it will affect us all. You can pretend as though it doesn't. But we are all interconnected. And that interconnectivity should be emboldened and strengthened and balanced rather than pretend as though. Rather than ignored. Because the more we ignore and pretend as though whoever's in charge of our country has full and complete control and sovereignty, the more we will be victims of that external power and those shifts and those, those earthquakes, if you will, both real and metaphoric. Number six, discrimination against minorities. Look at what's going on across the world. Democracy doesn't get to happen. It doesn't even come close to full democracy when you allow the majority rule to be mob mentality. That's it. And Aristotle always argued against it, right? You would have a polity and then you would have the degenerate form, which is democracy, which he always thought would be mob rule. And that mob rule doesn't have to be educated. It doesn't have to be aware. It doesn't have to be right. It doesn't have to be just. It just is the majority of people. And if the majority of people want something, they should get it as soon as. That's your mentality, you've destroyed democracy because you're not protecting the people within the society that deserve protection and their own civil rights. Number seven, limits on freedom. This is a hard one. Every. And this is the one that I find the most interesting to discuss and debate. And again, any one of these. You guys want any one of these to be its own podcast? Because I could go on for a very long time about each individual segment of both limitations and indicators. Just put it in the comments. Limitation on freedom is really, really difficult. There have to be limits. I'm allowed to sit. And we know the rational ones, right? Freedom of expression. You're not allowed to shout fire in a movie theater. Metaphorically and literally. That my words have power and there have to be limits to that. So then we start talking about things like censorship. What are you allowed to teach? What are you not allowed to teach? What are you allowed to speak to? What are you allowed to say? What are you allowed to encourage? How am I allowed to relay my ideas to other people? Which other people am I allowed to speak to now? Both sides. Both sides have limits to this right. I don't care if you're talking about the left or the right. I'm definitely more of a believer of let them talk. If all other things being equal, okay, people would stop buying social media sites and skewing algorithms. If all other things being equal, I am a huge proponent of let them talk. Write the book, make your argument, stand on that pulpit and let society judge you. Because I do believe that in an educated. That's a big, big expectation. In an educated, empathetic, intelligent society, better ideas win. However, those better ideas can only win when everybody's playing on the same level. When everybody has, you know, the ability and the capacity to have the same dogs in whatever race. But once you start pouring billions of dollars from this side or billions of dollars from that side and you skew that public forum and you skew what's capable or what people are capable of saying and how they get their voice out and how many more voices and what they get to do with that mob mentality, well, then you get something different. I think everybody would agree that, that we should not be using our voices to promote violence. Where we disagree is what kind of verbiage and what kind of voice and what kind of ideas are actually promoting violence. You have freedoms, but you don't have complete freedom. If I'm. And you start to get into conversations of this. If I. I am a particular religion and I don't believe in blood transfusions, but my 6 year old just got into an accident. That 6 year old is not going to make it without a blood transfusion. Does my religion get to supersede their right to life? They haven't chosen my faith. They're not old enough to know, but they're my kid. Well, if they're my kid, is that my property? Or do those children now have inalienable rights upon them that supersede what I believe? Do you see how messy this gets? These are all great conversations to be had if people would stop trying to win and start trying to get to better answers. Myself included. Myself included. It's also in this gauge that the government loves to use their two most favorite words, which are national security. Stop it. I don't ever want to hear those words. I'll give you an example. Canadian government or the Canadian military with our airborne division, our airborne division is similar, let's say, to the United States Marines. It's our top ranking, very elite militarized force. They are there to go lots of places internationally and do some pretty hard horrible things that the military is asked to do. Well, this group was tapped when we were all out of peacekeepers to go to Somalia and act in a peacekeeping manner. Now, they're not trained peacekeepers, they're actually quite the opposite, but they were sent anyway and they secured sort of an area within Somalia in order to operate a base in Somalia to operate from. And what they found very quickly is things were getting stolen from the base. Not guns, guns, not tanks, not planes, tools, things that had value. Why? Because poverty surrounded the base and people would come in, predominantly young kids, and steal something and get out. Well, they caught a kid and they caught a kid and they tied him to a chair and in order to send him a message. And this was given from the top down. As we all know, that's the way the military works. Nobody does anything without being given an order. They tied this kid to a chair and over the next four days, they decided to beat him to the point where he lost his life. At that moment, the airborne division was called back to Canada and put on trial. But that trial wasn't public, of course. That was now a military trial. And as. And as the. The. The responsibility was going higher and higher and higher and up the chain of command, it all of a sudden was shut down altogether. The airborne division was. Was completely torn up. And by the way, they just created another division in another, different way. They were all disavowed. They were all fired. It was all the but. And then these kids in the airborne were like 20, 21 years old. They were all. They were to blame. It was all gone. But somehow it didn't go all the way up the chain of command and everybody shut it down. What. How can we have democracy without control of the army? How can we have control of the army if we're not allowed to know what the army is doing because of national security? See my problem? And finally, the last one I'm going to talk about today is the oligarchy of the wealthy. And this is a different level. When you can buy. Buy social media agencies, when you can buy a team of lawyers, the justice system works differently from you. For you. When you can donate millions of dollars and sit at the right tables and know the right people, the system works differently for you. And it's as soon as the system works that differently for a small finite group of people, that small, finite group of people end up running the show. And everything else, everything else about democracy ends up being puppeteering because those individuals are the ones that are going to get you elected, get you re elected. Those are the individuals that are going to allow you to do any you want to do. Those are the individuals that have big government contracts and corporate contracts. Those are the individuals that have connections all across the world that make having national democracy incredibly problematic because they're all sitting, metaphorically, of course, at one very big table for the.01% in this world who are really running all of the show. When I look at this picture, a lot of people will say, well, Joanna, you just hate capitalism. They're not wrong. They're not wrong. I get it. I get what it's brought us. And people are going to say it's brought more wealth and education. I get all of that. But it's gone to a very, very bad place. If it ever was in a good place to begin with. I really have no idea. But I do know that it is capitalism and it is an oligarchy and it is the acquisition and the accumulation of mass, mass amounts of wealth at the very, very top end of this spectrum. And it has changed over the course of the last 50 years to, to shrinking the middle class, eliminating that mass body of people who feel. You want to know why voting turnout is so small? That's because we destroyed the middle class. We've destroyed them economically, we've destroyed them emotionally and culturally. We destroyed them because they all know in somewhat of a gut that that oligarchy is pulling the strings. And if they're pulling the strings, what the hell are they going out to vote for? And everything about that, that shrinking of the middle class and that economic power as it's been shifted to the upper ranks, in my opinion is the most destructive aspects that face capitalism or, sorry, that face democracy today. We can't have a system that is under the pretense of the people, when the people don't even come close to having the same power as the oligarchs. However, I will end on this. I really like that movie Ants. Have you guys ever seen it? Cartoon movie, right? The ants work for the grasshoppers and the grasshoppers get very nervous and they say, whoa. Hopefully the ants never realize that the only reason we have what we have is because they keep doing the job the way that we think and we tell them to do the job. Thank God they don't talk to each other. Thank God they don't revolt. Thank God, they all don't put down their jobs for the day and put down their tools and put down everything that all the cogs in the wheel, they let go and say, today we're not doing it. Because it would all crumble. And if those ants realize the power they have in the revolution they would start, it would change the world and reset all of the ideas that we once had idealistically of what democracy could bring. And on that note, guys, have a great week. I'll see you next Tuesday. Same bat time, same bat channel dismissed.