559: Capitalism's Crisis Deepens, Global Economic Meltdown by Dr. Richard D. Wolff

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It's my pleasure to welcome Professor Richard D. Wolff. He's a Professor of Economics Emeritus at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and a visiting professor at the New School in New York. He's the number one best selling author of Democracy at A Cure for Capitalism and the Capitalism's Crisis Essays on the Global Economic Meltdown and the new book Understanding Marxism. And Richard, as I told you before we started, I would mostly really pick a fight with a guy like you, but I watched a few of your videos and I found myself strangely agreeing. I've told my listeners before that Karl Marx is the most influential economist in world history. I don't think it turned out very well the application of his principles. But what do you think? I mean, you wrote a book about understanding Marx. Was his stuff just applied wrong and that's why there was so much travesty or was it misunderstood? I mean, what happened?

No, I think it, you know, he is one of those people that come along historically for reasons we never quite understand. I'm sure it had something to do with his mother and his father and the community and all the rest who's just ahead of his time. I mean, he sees things, he pulls together different strands of understanding and comes up with insights that we keep going back to. You know, he was deeply respectful. Marx was of Adam Smith, for example, wrote great detailed analyses of Adam Smith's work. And I would say Adam Smith's another one, another one of these people that comes along and for whatever complicated reason they get it. They see things that other people don't see or don't see for a long time. And then periodically others get a glimpse and realize that he saw it already back then. And it's not that it doesn't change. It's not that we can't do better than Marx. We can. We should and he would have been the first one to agree. But it's an enduring level of insight. And the way I would explain it to people is that there's no great mystery here. If you think of Adam Smith and David Ricardo, they're usually the people considered the founders of modern economics. They had something in common. They thought capitalism was spectacular. They loved it, they welcomed it. They thought it was an immense progress over feudalism. And so they were. Call them this way. They were analysts who also celebrated. But Marx was coming after them. What Marx was, was a person who said, I agree that capitalism could have and should have brought the wonderful things that Smith and Ricardo thought they would. They thought capitalism would bring in the slogans of the French and American Revolution. Liberty, equality, fraternity, democracy. Marx loved all of that. But he felt, coming, you know, 50 years later after them, that capitalism had come, but it hadn't brought the gifts. It didn't bring the liberty, equality, fraternity and democracy from. And he felt that capitalism. And he used this phrase once.

We're saying he is Karl Marx.

Yeah, he is Karl Marx. His view was that capitalism had somehow not delivered the goods, not delivered on its own promises. And he posed himself the question, why not? And again, make a long story short, his answer was that inside capitalism are the reasons, the blockages, you might say, for why it couldn't deliver on the promises that it made. And his life's work was to show how and why capitalism prevents the achievement of liberty, equality, fraternity and democracy. So, again, long story short, what you have in Marx is the critic of the system. What you have in Smith and Ricardo are the lovers, the celebrants of the system. And, you know, a balanced education in economics should include both.

Yeah, fair enough.

Of course.

Yeah.

Like, if you want to. If you want to study, I don't know, French literature, read people who think it's the greatest thing, you know, ever, and read people who are critical of it and then make your own conclusion.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

The only thing that motivates Americans like me to have a little bit of an edge when we talk is that we were denied that. Look at me. I'll speak very personally. I'm a product of America's elite education. I went to Harvard as an undergraduate, then I went to Stanford to get my master's degree, and I finished up with a PhD from Yale. It's like a joke, right? Here are 10 years of my life, and hear me now, I was never assigned a word of Karl Marx in those three institutions. In terms of his mature economic analysis, I'm not talking about the Communist Manifesto. That's a political document written in the heat of a revolutionary time. Sure, it's worth reading, but that's not where you go to get the core analytics of a person. So I feel kind of ripped off by American education that they were so frightened by the Cold War when I was a student that they almost took pride in not having anything to do with Marxism, socialism, communism, any of that stuff. It was all disloyal somehow. It was all scary. And so we as students were protected. I like to use the analogy. It's like if you protect your children from learning about sex, you're not doing them any favor at all because they're going to discover it later. And where you could have helped them have a healthy attitude about now it's going to be. And that's a little bit. A little bit of the edge you sometimes pick up from people like me because we had to learn it on our own. We had to go and find the books and all the rest. We could do that. They were in the library. The censorship wasn't 100%. But, you know, if you asked a question about Marx, the professor looked at you as if you had forgotten to wear your pants that day. You know, you were odd.

But not in a modern university today. Some on the right would arg. Anyway.

Just a footnote on that. I am occasionally confronted by that and it's one of those moments where you say to yourself, do we live in different planets? I mean, I've been a professor all my life in half a dozen American universities. I've given lectures, at least 50 universities in my life. The notion that Marxists have any kind of significant presence in American higher education, I mean, that's nuts. That's not the case. They were weeded out. If there were very many, and I don't think there ever were, but if there were a bunch, the Cold War did a number on them. What you do have is you have a lot of liberals, but you got to be careful. A liberal and a Marxist are not the same thing.

Well, tell us about that. But then I gotta fire some questions at you, but tell us. Explain that one that's worth. A liberal and a Marxist are not the same thing. When you say that, what do you mean?

What I mean is that a liberal is part of the consensus of support for capitalism. Liberals and conservatives, in my judgment, are both, like Adam Smith and David Ricardo, celebrants of capitalism. They have some disagreements about how you best support and help and endorse capitalism. The conservative tends to believe a laissez faire, that the government should keep minimum position, a minimum role, interfere as little as possible. Either not at all if you take it to libertarianism, or minimally maintain the currency and courts and police and military, but that's it.

The infrastructure.

Yeah, right. The liberal says, no, no, no, you leave capitalism to its own devices. It produces business cycle, Coll. It produces inequality.

You gotta regulate it and redistribute a little bit. Yeah.

And you have to control it, you have to limit it. The only agency capable of doing that is the government. And so the proper support for capitalism is to have a judicious, targeted interference by the government in an ongoing way, in these sixth manner and periodically.

So if we've got that spectrum from libertarian to conservative to liberal, then what's a Marxist? Complete redistribution.

No, no, no, not at all. That's a liberal.

Okay, okay. Workers of the world, unite. What? You know, where. Where do we put Das capital in here?

Okay, preface. Capital is a very rich piece of work.

Yeah, it is.

And it is interpreted in different ways by different writers. Just like Adam Smith. Just like the Bible. Just like.

Just like anything. Just like Ayn Rand.

Yeah, exactly. All right, so I'm going to answer the question the way I understand it, but I'm not claiming that everybody who calls themselves a Marxist would agree.

Okay?

But for me, the critique that Marx offers, particularly in volume one of Capital, but in other places too, is a critique that says the root of the problem. Why you have an unequal distribution of income, why you have instability, business cycles. And all of that has to do with the organization of the workplace, the enterprise. We in capitalism organize it in a fundamental way with which Marx disagrees. And the reorganization, the changing of that organization is the root problem, which, if it isn't solved, renders all the efforts to solve capitalism's other problems unsuccessful. So Marx would argue, for example, that the reason we are worried about poverty today in capitalism is the same as the reason that we 20 years ago worried about poverty and 40 years ago worried about poverty. That as long as we've had capitalism, the gap between rich and poor has animated an immense array of social criticism. Ditto our business cycles. Everything we've tried to do to deal with those problems has failed. Why? Why has it failed? Why are we now, as I speak with you, experiencing one of the worst collapses of capitalism in its history? And why have we had three of them in this new century?

I've got a question to illuminate that. That's my next question area. But Finish up with that. Yeah, yeah. Okay.

Marx's answer, long story short, as usual, given the constraints of time, Marx's answer is capitalism didn't make the break from feudalism and slavery that it thought it did. That break still has to be made, and Marx is the analyst who explains to us what it is. And here's the summary.

Okay.

In slavery, you divided the people involved in production into two master slave. The master had all the power, literally owned. A slave controlled the situation, amassed great wealth. In feudalism, you divided people again in the production of goods and services into two groups, lord and serf. Same story. Capitalism criticized those systems, criticized them for their inequality, for all that, and it promised to break from that. That's what the French Revolution and American Revolution slogans were about. But it failed. And the reason it failed is it replicated the split, only now it wasn't lord and serve or master and slave. It was employer and employee.

It's labor and capital, basically.

That's right. And the solution, the Marxist critique of that goes right there and says you could organize the economic life of a society, meaning the micro level of the enterprise, in a radically different way, a democratic way. Because capitalism is not democratic. The owner does not consult the workers as to what it is he's going to do. The board of directors doesn't either. But you could have an alternative. Wait a minute, let me just finish. You could have an alternative in which it was run as a worker co op. In other words, everybody has one vote and you decide collectively what you're going to produce, what technology you're going to use, where you're going to do it, and what you're going to do with the profits collectively that all of you have helped to produce. Marx's argument is that turning the enterprise into a community, hence the word communism, is the way forward, has nothing to do with the state. Marx didn't write about the state, wasn't interested in the state. So when you asked at the beginning about misunderstanding, yeah, people made some decisions that the way to get to a communism was by seizing the state, either with elections or with revolution. And then they got a little bit waylaid along the way. They got really entranced with the state and you got this peculiar 19th and 20th century aberration, I would call it, in which they focused on how you get to rather than what Marx said was the place you were going and ended up stuck in the middle with a very powerful state. But it couldn't make because they didn't understand how to do it, the transition. So they Ended up with what we would call state capitalism and not a transition.

Right, so I'm guessing then you would say that the former Soviet Union was, was not Marxist. It did not have a Marxist system then. Right?

That's right.

Okay. Because the government administrated all of the co op, if you will, versus the workers with the company. Now just to answer that one objection or that one statement you made about, you know, the workers, unless it's an employee owned company, it's not really a cooperative or a community or a commune. Right. And that is rare. Okay, but it does exist out there.

It does.

But the argument any capitalist would say to you is look, it's a free market. The employee can just go somewhere else. They don't have to work there. So they're not a serf or a slave or they're not indentured either. Right. But rather than get off on that tangent, which we could discuss for three days, I want to ask you. So we determined, and I agree with you, that the Soviet Union did not really have true Marxism. Fair enough, I agree with that. Did any country, did China under Mao have that or no, I don't know.

What pure Marxism is. I would rather use this language. They interpreted Marxism in their way. Look, Karl Marx dies in 1883. So we are basically 150 years since Marx died. In that time, his writings have become important in every country on the face of this earth. The spread of Marxism found in every corner of the planet. People excited, buy it, absorbing it, using it.

Sure. Like I said, he's the most influential economist of all time.

One of the things, you know, if you like the bad news, it goes with the good news. You spread very fast in 150 years to every. It means you're entering Marxism is entering countries with very different economic situations, political situations, historical trajectories, cultural institutions. Of course you're going to get umpteen different interpretations.

Of course. Of course. No, no, yeah, no, no, no problem there.

I would rather say that what you had in the Soviet Union was an interpretation of Marxism different from mine. I'm critical of theirs. There probably would be critical of mine in which you gave a kind of peculiar priority to the state and I would call it state capitalism in which the state hires people, you know, and okay, but you haven't then broken the employer employee, you've just added the state as another employer alongside private. Okay, so by the way, slavery and feudalism did that too. We would never have thought of saying it isn't slave because the government had slaves. Or it is feudal because the government had served. Why do we say it's socialism or not capitalism if the government also employs people?

Okay, so we agree that the former Soviet Union did not really have Marxism. But do you say that the United States of today has capitalism?

Yes.

Really? Okay, so I disagree. And here's why I think we live in this. And I interviewed the professor who wrote the book with this title, the Winner Take All Society. You probably know who that is. Forgive me, I can't remember his name. But that's what we have. We have this winner Take all society where just because of the way public markets work and Wall street, which is not capitalist. That's a crony. We have a crony capitalist system. I mean, it's an insider's game and it's all so rigged. And these certain companies get to be huge and control everything and everybody else is just a little peasant. This is not capitalism. It's been totally perverted.

But they give the same answer that you a minute ago wanted to give me about work. A worker can quit and become a capitalist, right?

Right.

Well, if you really.

Well, they can become an entrepreneur, sure, yes, they can quit and they can do their own. Their own side hustle or whatever, even while they're working. But the point is, we still have these giant companies that had massive access to capital that other companies don't have.

So their answer to you is the same one you just gave me. You can go out and borrow. You can go out and issue shares of stock. If you're. Here comes the punchline which no one wants to say because it's ugly. If you weren't stupid or backward or incompetent, you would have been Amazon, too.

Yeah, right.

Jeffrey Bezos wants us all to believe that he's just smarter than we are. And he got there. We could, but we didn't make it. That's like telling the worker, you could be a capitalist. There's a reason why a very small number of people are capitalists and a very large number of people are workers.

It sounds like when you say capitalists, you mean entrepreneur. Those are synonymous, right, in your lexicon?

Employer. I like the word employer. For me, there are structural reasons that keep the capitalists, the employers, a small number, and the employees large. I don't attribute that to smarts. I don't attribute that to personal differences. We have differences, but that's not the explanation. The explanation is a system that reproduces these divisions generation after generation. Just like we have Monopoly powerful companies on the one hand and a mass of junior partners, of those big guys on the other. And for me, capitalism is what it is that reproduces these divisions. It's the set of institutions that makes a few people, employers and a few among them giants who are able over decades, sometimes even longer than decades, to hold on to what are effectively monopolies, as we call that in economics, like Amazon or Facebook or Google or a whole bunch of others that you can name. And they push back. They hold onto their monopolies by constantly spending a ton of money.

Yes, lobbyists to keep the laws in place that secure their monopoly, but ideologically to tell us that they are just smarter and quicker and better equipped and they're getting their reward for their superior performance. In economics we teach this absurd theory called marginal product and we explain that one worker gets more than another because he or she is more efficient or more productive. I tell you, as a mathematical economist, that's complete nuts, that there is no way to measure that. This is make believe. But it's very powerful ideologically, like many make believes in your human history have been.

So where do we go from here? I think we'd all agree that things are pretty messed up. Unless you're Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, whatever. We would all agree that it's, you know. And in Lou Dobbs book, which I quote often, war on the middle class from years ago, he talks about how the rank and file worker versus the C level execs, the pay, it's astronomical. How out of proportion that is nowadays compared to how it was years ago. I mean, it was in line. The head honcho always gets paid more, we get that, right. Nobody would object to that in principle, but the proportion is staggering. What Jamie Dimon makes versus one of his serfs, right? So how do we solve that? I mean, we gotta redistribute wealth, right? That's the only way you do it.

A few months ago, maybe it's a year ago I was on a Fox News town hall and they had two of us on the sort of the left and then they had their four big shots on the right, one of which was Lou Dobbs. And after the last, an hour of the show, after the show was over, Lou Dobbs was eager to talk to me, which I found interesting.

Yeah, Lou Dobbs would not disagree with.

You, completely taken with, obviously, and it was very friendly and all that. But that's what he wanted to talk about. He was, he and I both, I think I had made some comment about how back in the 1960s, the CEO got 50 or 60 times.

Yeah. Now it's like 400 times.

That's right. 400 is where it is now. And there's no rational basis. You're not going to argue he's that much more productive? I mean, it's just silly.

And he and I agreed on that. And I said to him, you know, if you had a democratic way of deciding on salaries, the workers themselves could be counted on to pay more to people they thought were more crucial to what the company did, had maybe some skills, had to go learn for a while in the university to get to acquire. They wouldn't give everybody the same amount of money. They get that.

I agree that they do get that. Yeah.

He looked at me with this funny look. I don't want to put words in his mouth. He didn't comment on what I was saying one way or the other. But you know, being a teacher all my life, I look at the student's eyes, I looked at his eyes. I don't, I mean, I don't mean this to be critical because I had a nice talk with him. I don't think he had ever thought of it that way. I mean, he, when he asks himself.

The question, well, that's the co op idea, right? The company, the employee owned company concept, right?

No, no, no, no, no, no, no. Not ownership, okay. When I say co op, I'm talking about what the better word would be directorship. The workers become collectively their own employer, their own board of directors. This is complete. You know, you can have an employee stock ownership plan and we have many of those in this country where workers get X percent of the shares or something like that. The problem with that is whatever you think of it per se, is that the workers are usually either in fact incompetent or unsure of how to run a company. So what they do as owners is the same thing anybody does as owners. You basically vote for, turn over the company to your delegates, your board of directors, that you elect each other.

Representative republic concept. That's right.

And so they do that too. And then what? They look at the shares the way most small shareholders do. This is a source of a quarterly check. Beyond that, I don't give a damn. I don't know what's going on in the company. I'm not involved. I bought it because my broker told me it was a good deal or something like that. So I'm talking about when workers literally become the collective directors, designers. They run their own business, they don't even have to own.

Can a company with 80,000 workers really do that. Is everything voted on?

Sure.

The problem is in those employee stock owned companies that you mentioned a moment ago. We have that all over the place. And because of the separation of the C level executives and the boards of directors and what's known in law as the business judgment rule, you know, it's like Congress. They can just give themselves perks endlessly and you know, there's no accountability for that. Yeah, they could maybe vote them out, but that's harder than it looks. So how do we do that? What's the real mechanics of that?

Let me answer it by describing to you a company that has done it so that we don't have it in the realm of me. I don't want people to imagine I'm suggesting how it could be done. I prefer to be the messenger who tells you how it's already being done. Probably the single most powerful and successful worker co op in the world is called the Mondragon Corporation. It's based in Spain and in the city of Mondragon, which is a small city in the north of Spain in the foothills of the Pyrenees Mountains. In 1956 a Catholic priest gave a famous talk in a little church in Mondragon. And he said to the workers there, very, very poor part of Spain. If we wait for someone to come here and give us jobs, we will all die of old age before that happens. And everybody laughed. And then he made his pitch. He said, let's become our own employer. There are six of you in this room who are carpenters or whatever the hell they were. Let's start a co op. We will employ ourselves. So he starts in 1956 with six workers and the Catholic priest. Today that company has about 130,000 employees. It is the seventh largest corporation in all of Spain. It is organized as a family of about 200 to 250 individual worker co ops doing manufacturing, services, a whole range of activities. And they organize each of those businesses as a worker co op where all the decisions are made Collectively by the 50, the 500 to 10,000 employees depending on what it is. Give you an idea of how they've succeeded. Six people in 1956, 130,000. That would be the envy of any capitalist corporation. Such a level of growth. Number two, along the way they competed with many capitalist enterprises and they out competed them. Eventually ended up absorbing them. Their workers, their used materials, their equipment. Number three, they have a rule that the highest paid worker in a co op across 130,000 cannot get paid more than eight and a half times what the lowest paid was. They have no inequality like the United States in those parts of Spain, mostly in the north, where they are located. Okay. Once a year they have an assembly where the workers vote on the supervisors, not the other way around. The workers vote whether to retain a supervisor or to let him or her go. It's an extraordinary development. I have gone there myself. So I'm not only talking about reading about it and all that. I visited the place. Blows my mind. Very well organized. Okay.

All right. Yeah, that's great.

It's doable.

Okay. So I've got to ask you, though, when I asked you the question a moment ago, where do we go from here? We've got this as people, especially on the left, like to talk about this wealth inequality gap. And I don't disagree with it. It's, you know, and it's not just. It's not just like inequality. It's much more nuanced and complicated because, you know, it's this percentile and that percent. You know, it's. It's very complex. Right. But the fact is the rich have become ultra mega, mega rich. And I saw you on the interview with Stuart Varney and you were saying Jeff Bezos is giving away some money. That's a drop in the bucket. Bezos has got to be the least charitable scrooge of any. I mean, he is so wealthy now. Bill Gates is like the opposite end of the spectrum. He's got his agenda, too, but whatever. At least he and Buffett are actually doing something philanthropic for real. But Bezos is. It's like a trinket, okay? And it took him forever to get around to it, by the way, too. So I'm pretty critical of Bezos. He treats his workers like crap. I mean, what do you do? The only power that is able to change anything like this is government. Government has to say there's a law. And hey, Jeff, if you don't do this co op thing or if you don't give some of your money away, here's a gun and a jail cell. I mean, that's it. That's what a law is. Right? So what do we do? Where do we go from here?

Well, you have to look for me. I've always had this disagreement with my libertarian friends. I understand that the government, in my view, the government is complicit with big business and it has been for a long time. And I understand why. If you're going to have a tiny group of people sitting at the top of society with the kind of obscene wealth you and I agree have. If they're stupid, they will imagine that that's something they can simply assume will last for a long time. But I don't think they're stupid. I think they understand they have a problem. If you're going to be wildly rich in a society that allows universal suffrage, everybody gets a vote, then you have a risk. And the risk is that the mass of people who are being screwed by.

They'Ll get the pitchforks eventually. You know, we have this plutocracy or kleptocracy now.

And before they get the pitchforks, they have the vote. And they can use the vote to undo the economic consequences of what the rich are arranging for themselves. So the rich have understood, and I know this because I'm among the people that are occasionally approached by them for advice, they have understood they have to manage the political system or else it will undo them.

So they hire an army of lobbyists, which is much more powerful than our votes.

That's right. And so for me, the only solution is you have to mobilize the working class of people, those who are excluded from this wealth, those who are excluded from the role of the employer, and say to them, you have to organize yourself. You have to mobilize yourself. Then and only then will you be able to shape what the government does so it can do the kinds of things you and I might agree would be good for the government to do.

What does that look like? Does that look like a labor union? Does it look like Elizabeth Warren? What does it look like? Well, or nothing we've seen.

No, it could be. Could be something new. I'll give you in a minute an example of something that might be the beginning in. Traditionally, in the last 150 years of capitalism, it has basically taken two parts, two forms. Labor union, organized labor and political parties. Labour Party, socialist parties, Communists, all of that. It's taken those two. Now, there is something which I find very interesting called the yellow vest movement in France over the last year and a half, which is neither. It's not a union, it's not a political party. Its leadership is very determined not to do that, but it wants to constitute itself as an ongoing social change engine. And in France at least, and granted, France has its particulars, but in France at least, it is stunningly powerful. It has endured now for a year and a half, which is itself a major achievement. It is constantly approached by the unions and the political parties, by the way, not only on the left, although it's mostly the left. Marine Le Pen, which is the far right in France, also is trying to get a place in the yellow vein. So they keep all of them at bay. They don't exclude them, but they do not let them take over, which is in a way what they want. So you may be seeing there the beginnings of another form in which. But the success of the yellow vest, I think, is what you're talking about, because despite having no infrastructure, no treasury, no accumulated cells and all the rest of it, they were able to mobilize people in France to the envy of both the labor movement and the left political parties in terms of the number of people, the commitment, et cetera. So that's right now in process. They've been quiet because they can't get together because of the corona. But France is now opening up faster than the United States. And so we may re see that. But I see a variety of efforts. I see them coming in this country as well to try to figure out how to mobilize and organize the mass of people, because I think everyone recognized that's the only hope to have some real change. Otherwise, whether we have a Trump or a Biden, this is. Neither of them is going to change any of this.

Well, that I agree with. It's just moving the needle a little bit. There's no dramatic change. Yeah, interesting. Well, Richard, give out your website, your capitalist website.

Yes, we have two websites and we also are you can.

And why are your books free? Why are your books free.

On YouTube? You can find us at Democracy at Work. That's our channel on the YouTube. We have a weekly radio and TV show every week for half an hour. It's been going for a decade.

90,000 subscribers.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, no, no, 150.

I'm looking. Oh, I'm looking at Richard D. Wolf. Maybe that's a different channel.

Okay, yeah, different channel. Yeah. Democracy at Work is the one you want to look at. Our website is Democracy at Work. Again, all one word, democracyatwork.info and you can also find me at rdwolf with two Fs.com and that will be the easiest way. And we welcome people to look at all this stuff to communicate with us. We have a very active Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, you name it, we're doing it.

Good stuff.

And here's the best part, that you might be intrigued. I've been a critic of capitalism pretty much my adult life. Over the last 10 years, I have done more invited public speaking than in the previous 40. The United States has become open and interested in These critiques in a way I never thought I would live to see. So you're talking to a person who is being carried along by a current that is very strong that I did not think would last. But it has. It's a heady time for people like me. We're back in the political reality and conversations of America in a way we haven't seen for a long time.

Well, that's what happens when American workers don't get a pay raise for four decades. Okay. And listen, I don't agree with you in the sense that I like capitalism. I just don't think we have capitalism, you know, but, you know, the, you know, the Soviets. The Soviets could argue we don't. I like Marxism, but we don't have Marxism. So I get it. You know, this is very nuanced. There's a lot to it, obviously. But, Richard, very interesting. Yes, the millennials, they definitely love. They lean socialists, they lean modern monetary theory and all that kind of stuff, which I'm sure there's a big demand, like you said for you. So good stuff. Thanks for joining us today, folks. That's Richard D. Wolf. Thanks so much for coming on.

Thank you very much. And I look forward to doing this again because our conversations should be part of what the evolution of our society now needs and will benefit from.

Workers, the world, unite.

Never thought I'd say that on the show. Thanks, Richard.

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