 in this time, things are changing dramatically. My own view in the United States, it is the inequality that has led us here. It isn't, and certainly the elite have benefited from that, but we also have in the US a political class that is completely out of touch, in my view, with the American people, and an ethos in Washington that is very power-centric, fueled by legally corrupt money that have in their main goal is to stay in power. And I've seen it, and this isn't the last three years, I've watched this grow over the course of certainly the last 20 or so when I was in Washington. And I think that is at the core of the resentment on the part of the people in the United States, the disappearance of what we used to call the American dream, where everybody sort of had an equal shot, and the complete lack of accountability. We've heard accountability multiple times here, the complete lack of accountability in the part of anybody in a position of power. I grew up in a world in which income inequality in my country, Canada's, and I think the United States is saying, very sharply compressed, there's a period between 45 and 1973 when income inequality basically keeps reproducing the pattern of compressed inequality that we saw in the Depression and the Second World War. And my parents' generation came back from the Second World War, professionals in their fields, deeply affected by the solidarity of the Second World War, emotionally affected by a sense that we were all in this together. My father, my mother had this passionate sense as liberals that it was one society, we were gonna build it, we were gonna rebuild it. I think we, and then from the 70s onwards, the numbers are remorseless. We begin to see an upward tick in inequality. We don't understand all of its drivers, some of its new technology, some of its self-dealing, some of its liberal professions doing better out of the economy than they really should. I mean, there's some self-dealing, there's some technological change, but it has fractured. I think you're quite right, it's fractured the society. A glaring moral dilemma will, at some point, emerge having to do with global inequality. So, say you're sitting in a hotel bar and you decide to order a bottle of wine for 100 euros after a busy day, and in the time that it takes for the bottle of wine to arrive on your phone, you can research through vaccinations in the third world or something of this nature how much it would cost statistically to save one human life. And say it turns out to be also around 100 euros. And what do you do? Do you say, I'm just gonna put this out of my mind because I wanna drink the bottle of wine, or which would be by any standard in the moral decision? Or do you accept that this state of perfect information we're going into that gives you this kind of information at your fingertips, wherever you are, you accept that I'm not gonna ignore this and I'm gonna sort of press the one-click button on my charity app and not, and you don't have just like a glass of water instead. And if once you do accept that though, then you're really on a slippery slope basically because where does it end? Over the last 30, 40 years, one of the challenges has been as the wall came down and the new world has emerged is that Western countries have become more like feudal states because the incentives for elites to acquire wealth and position of power and to retain those have meant that right now, according to research done in Sweden, in the United Kingdom and the USA and Holland will not be far behind, the chances of you staying if you're born in the bottom 20% are significantly higher than if you're born today in Sierra Leone or Niger or Kazakhstan. And that means that you have a trap where the people who are poorest in society will start to make demands about the fact that they are not being heard and those demands could head towards the hard left with perfectly good reason or towards the hard right and the ban on who is talking about things that are real, you know, inequality is real, the elites are not listening, they are failing you and that's why it's so dangerous. We should be paying a great deal of attention to why it is that we in the West think we're at a loose end because as far as I'm concerned, Afghanistan, Iraq and certain countries around the world not excluded, but I feel a great deal safer today than I did as a child of a Cold War where every Friday at my school we had a drill to hide under a table in case there was a nuclear attack where we had three-day weeks and energy shortages, we had problems about food supply, you know, we had the PLO, we had aircraft hijackings all the time, you know, the safety of our world and the prosperity we've come to take for granted because we have no perspective, right? And if you don't pay attention to history and in my particular view, not just European history and history of the West but to this much bigger picture, then you lose the ability to look in the right direction. So the West is at a crossroads for this reason.