The Paikin Podcast - World on Edge: The Most Dangerous Era Since WWII?

Episode Date: July 28, 2025

In the debut episode of “World on Edge,” Steve talks with Janice Stein about why she thinks the world is a more dangerous place than during the Cold War and even the Cuban Missile Crisis, if Israel has become a pariah state, if China will invade Taiwan, the on-going war in Ukraine, and the rising risk to Canada in a world on edge.Follow The Paikin Podcast: TWITTERx.com/ThePaikinPodINSTAGRAMinstagram.com/thepaikinpodcastBLUESKYbsky.app/profile/thepaikinpodcast.bsky.social

Hi, everybody. Steve Paken here, and I am delighted to welcome you to yet another thing that we are introducing here on the Paken podcast. You know the other segment that we do called Everything Political with Tony Clement and Martha Hall-Finley is one offering. And one of the other offerings we're going to be doing every other week is I am so thrilled to be working with her again. We've only been working together for more than 30 years. Ladies and gentlemen, coming right up in this segment we call World on Edge. Here comes Janice Stein. Okay, Janice, Stein, it's so great to see you again. Here we go.

Are you ready to talk about a world on edge? First, let me say how cool this is. Steve, we've been doing this through three different TV shows. It feels like you and I have watched the world change. beyond recognition. Well, that actually was going to be the first question I ask you. And just to fill in the blanks there, yes, we started on Studio 2 back in 1994. Wow.

You and I together doing a weekly foreign panel with your pals Richard Gwynn and Eric Margulies and then Patrick Martin after a fashion. And then, oh, then we had that other show, diplomatic immunity, also at TVO, also a weekly program because you guys were so popular as the foreign panel on Studio 2, we gave you your own show. and then, of course, over the 19 years that the agenda was on the air. So you've been informing our viewers and listeners for a very long time, and we want to continue doing that now on the Paken podcast. But, Janice, before I get to start asking you questions about the state of the world today,

let's take advantage of this opportunity where we have just a couple of minutes here off the top. I've never asked you this question, and I've always wanted to know. You are truly one of the leading international affairs experts in our country today, in the world today, and I guess somebody as smart as you probably could have gone into political science, sociology, I mean, any number of different fields. Why was it international relations for you? It's really a great question, Steve, and I can give you an answer. And now I'm going to be careful.

I'm going to try to hide my age a little bit here. But when I was a kid, and I lived in Montreal, the newspaper came to that house in the morning and it was a big black headline and big letters, war in Korea. And I turned to my mother and I said, what is that mean? What are they doing? Are they fighting and killing each other? And she said, yeah. And I said, well, why are they doing that? Can't they just sit down and figure it out? And she said, I can't answer that question. Well, that hooked me. I was hooked here was something that was such a puzzle. My all-knowing mother couldn't answer it,

and people were not only fighting, like I saw kids my age, fighting the street. They were killing each other. There was a puzzle here. That got me going. That was 1950 to 1955. And there's no doubt in your mind that that planted a seed of fascination for international relations.

That's where it all started. And I was not. somebody who loved school because a whole bunch of rules, right? You had to take this, you have to take that. I didn't thrive in that environment in all honesty. But when I got to high school, oh, my goodness, I could take history. And I could start asking the teachers all about the wars. They were teaching me.

I was, Steve, that was it for me for life. And never regretted it. No, and neither have we. I mean, the chance to work with you and to learn from you over these last few, decades has really been something but you've been watching the world now for okay we won't fill in the blank for let's just say a few years and jesus six decades seven decades there you go it's a long time amazing but i i wonder if you can bring therefore that much background knowledge to bear and tell us there are days when i wake up and i think the world has never been more on edge than it is right now

Now, my hunch is that's not true, but it feels like it. Is it? It is. And I think that's why you and I agree that we would call this world on edge. We've come close to war. We've had some scary times. You probably do not remember the Cuban Missile Crisis, but I do. I was two years old when it happened.

Yeah. So you weren't worried that the world was going to blow up. I sure was. We all knew this was really dangerous. But there was a set of rules in place that came out of World War II. So people who came out of that had one goal. One, and boy, were they committed to it? Never, you know, never going to allow a war of this order of magnitude to sweep the world.

And, yeah, there were plenty of disagreements who were very dangerous times. But even Russia and the United States, it was the Soviet Union. The Russians suffered horribly during World War II. Yeah, 25 million dead. 25 million Russians dead. And I think that people who had some memory of that war understood why we needed some basic rules. That's gone. We have a generation of leaders.

Never had any direct experience with war. their kids are not being drafted into an army, girl, woman, or men. And I think what's really enabled this fundamental historical change that we're living through right now, and I believe it is, one, is the memories of war have faded. Janice, let me just, because one of the things I'm going to enjoy doing here is pushing back on you from time to time. A hundred percent. We couldn't do that always when we actually. I've lived any time on the air, but boy, am I looking forward to that.

Well, okay, here's my gentle pushback then in this case. I remember going to bed as a teenager during the height of the Cold War when there were 15,000 nuclear missiles from the Soviets pointed at North America and 15,000 nuclear missiles from the United States pointed at the Soviet Union. And I can tell you, there were times I went to bed and I didn't know whether I was going to wake up the next day because we thought there might be a geothermal nuclear war that would take out the entire planet. Are you telling us right now that you think today the world is more on edge than back

then? Yes. I am. And so, and by the way, just to recreate the scene for listeners who didn't go to back and weren't scared that there was going to be a war, they were doing drills in schools, right? Duck and cover. Duck and cover.

That's right. Hide under your desk if there's an old work. Like that was going to help you from a nuclear war. 100%. And there were nuclear shelters. Remember they were on the market as a hot commodity that people were buying and people would stockpile water. So this is very real this fear. But what we've now learned looking back on that period, Steve, leaders understood how dangerous it was.

And there's a famous phrase that McKinio Khrushchev used with John F. Kennedy, in which he said, be careful that we do not pull the string of war too tightly. So, yeah, it could have happened through an accident, through a miscalculation. But leaders knew how dangerous it was and remembered how horrible war was. We have a generation of leaders now that have no memories, the kind of mass casualties that we're talking about, and are not preoccupied. with the risk of war. And because they're not, we have a president,

let's talk openly here in the United States, doesn't believe in multilateral rules. Rules are for suckers. All right? He has a view of the United States being ripped off, which others will say, yeah, the United States had a deep interest in rules. because it was the largest economy and the biggest military,

he benefited from the rules. That's not how Donald Trump sees the world. And so he's systematically destroying the institutions, the rules, both at home and internationally. That's a very scary world. Stephen, that's why I'm on edge. Well, let me play devil's advocate here and say, okay, we may not like as member of NATO,

as members of NATO, we may not appreciate, the fact that the President of the United States is calling out members publicly for their refusal to pay what NATO members agree should be 2% of their gross domestic product towards defense. But you have to admit, Trump's embarrassing the NATO membership into hitting that target has worked. So what do you say about that? Yes, he got it done. Let's give him that. I think that's a very fair comment on your party. See, but something else helped too. That was Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine. Trump could have pushed and pushed and pushed, but if that hadn't happened, that was such a shock to the Europeans. And why is that? He broke the rules.

One of the rules, you do not invade your neighbor unprovoked. There's rules for managing arguments with neighbors and sending your army in and occupying, trying to occupy the country and overthrow of the government, that's not the rules. Vladimir Putin broke the most fundamental rules in Europe. And that's why the Europeans are still shocked to their core. And add to that, Donald Trump's saying, push up your spending. Otherwise, I'm not going to protect you. He did get it done. He's not breaking the rules there, go, Steve. He's breaking the rules in the way. He's using tariffs outside any rule, right? He's breaking the rules when he says, to Silva in Brazil, hey, you stop prosecuting Bolsonaro.

My old friend, Bolsonaro, yeah. My old buddy Bolsonaro, or you know what, you'll face severe tariffs. He's saying to the Israeli court system, stop that trial of Netanyahu, or I will do A, B, C, or D. That's a rule breaker who's using power, economic power, coercive power to achieve, where he believes, first of all, are his own interests, and secondly, those in the United States. So we have, to be blind,

and I probably wouldn't say that it's a more formal venue than you and I hope to half here. We have an unleashed president. Usually, he's not constrained. That's scary. Well, that raises a question. What do you do when the biggest kid on the block

decides that he wants to throw his weight around and not be persuaded by laws, rules, treaties, obligations, polytesse, what do you do about that? So what we've done about that in the past, and that's why I am on it, we've gone to war. Other countries have come together in a coalition, they did it to Napoleon when there was somebody in France who just decided, no, the rules don't apply to me. and those who were the target of that got together built a coalition and frankly organized to fight what do you do in the schoolyard team you can tell me whether a bunch of kids in grade one or

two and there's a bully who's throwing his weight around the bully bullies for a while but then what happens a group of kids get together well either the kids get together and intervene and fight back Or they go to the authorities, you know, the principal, the vice principal and say, help us out here, somebody's out of control. Well, there's no principle or vice principal to go to in this case. There's no principle or vice principal. And we don't want to go to war. And we don't, and not only that, when you go to the principal, the vice principal, as you know, there is a reputational cost when you're a young kid for doing that afterwards. Let's all be honest here.

So that's why I consider this. And we're only partway through this transformation. This is early stages because it's not only that we have his president, who frankly feels free to do what he wants. We have China that is probably the most constrained by the rules of the three bigies. Because Vladimir Putin, we know, breaks them. Donald Trump breaks them. There's no question.

China actually benefits from following the rules, so it follows the rules. But it's building out its nuclear. arsenal at a break at pace. It's on track by 2030, the latest 2035, to have as many nuclear weapons as the United States and Russia. It's already the biggest naval power in the world. Okay, here's again where I push back. Not the United States, China. I'm going to push back a bit here and say, okay, how do you know that? How do we know that? So actually, one of the good parts of this world is you and I are able to know stuff like

this without leaks from somebody in government who actually gets to see all the data. How does this happen? See, because we now, as you know, well, have private satellite companies. Not only Elon Musk does this, there's a whole bunch of satellite providers and you pay, some of it is free, it gets posted, and otherwise you pay, you're a customer like me, and I get this up like pictures of stuff I want to see. And there's a whole community of us around the world, some of whom count chips. and can see what's happening in chipyards because there's no card. And so you're getting actually remarkably accurate estimates

of what's happening because these satellite companies are distributing their satellites. So after, you know, it was remarkable for me during the war, the last round of exchanges, missile exchanges between Israel and Iran, you could see the morning after how many missiles. sites for damage. Fascinating.

Yeah, it's satellite pictures and not very expensive either to be a subscriber. So I think journal, this is a great time to be you, Steve, to be a journalist. Because you can get, and me, we can get access to all this information. I don't need to call anybody in Ottawa and say, tell me what's going on. I can tell you. You've got your own. Yeah, you've got your own sources. Okay, let's, I feel no comfort in asking.

this next question, but because there's such a long list of possible answers right now, unfortunately. But as you look around this world of ours that's on edge nowadays, point us to either the conflict or the region on the globe today where you are most scared about the potential for things spiraling out of control. I think there are two for really different reasons. Let's talk about Asia for a moment, because China is flexing its muscles. It has the world's biggest Navy for a reason. It is claiming an extension of its territorial waters in the South China Sea.

It's made Vietnam, very nervous. It's made the Philippines, very nervous, all the neighbors. There's a series, two dotted lines on the map, Steve, further out. The first one closer, the first dotted line, second one will further out. And China really has said this is how far it's extended out what it considers territorial waters. The Philippines, you know, Philippines furious, furious. And there's a court decision which says, no, that's wrong. It doesn't matter to the Chinese.

And so fishing fleets are now confronting militarized Chinese vessels when they're. fish. I can imagine an altercation starting that way. And then the question becomes, how do you go up the ladder? Where are the brakes in the system? The biggest one of all, of course, is Taiwan, which I think everybody knows. China claims as part of historic China, it's, you know, it's China's homeland. It was in 1949, where the communist one. The nationalists fled because they'd lost that war, the civil war in China, and they occupied Taiwan. And I use that word because there was also an indigenous Taiwanese population that thinks that the KMT are Kuomintang, our occupiers, right? But they built a thriving democracy quite late on, but they built a thriving democracy quite late on, but they built a thriving democracy.

democracy. And there's ambiguity about what the, there's a treaty with Taiwan, but, you know, what does coming to your assistance mean here? We have seen war gangs month after month after month military exercises that China now practices where it sends its Navy and its Air Force over Taiwan. What it unquestionably could do right now, tomorrow, Steve, if it wanted to, blockade Taiwan. Cut it off. If that happened, Janice, do you have any reason to believe that the United States, to use your quote, would come to the assistance of Taiwan? So there's one big elephant in this room that we probably don't talk about enough. So let me take us on a a two-second detour, and it's called the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, right, headquartered in town.

It's the final stop for the world's most advanced computer chips. The United States, the economy, wholly dependent on that. So is China dependent. So it's in both of their interests not to destroy that. That's right. Now, look, if China blockaded, the Taiwan Semi-Conductor manufacturing company could send ships to China, but they couldn't send them to the United States. Ooh. Mm-hmm.

And we're just discovering how vulnerable, you know, Donald Trump had a very, very rude awakening just two weeks ago or a little longer now, about how dependent the United States is on China. When China cut off supplies of rare earth metals, it controls 87% of the processing of rare earths, which, by the way, make all the computer equipment that we're using. Make magnets, make advanced chips, and China just shut it down. How long do you think it told Donald Trump to cave?

Because that's what he did. He caved. They rolled him. So what China has done over the last 20 years is way up the value chain in advanced manufacturing. And it now makes, controls the electronic car market. As you know, if there weren't tariffs against cars, see, there would be no European car industry. There'd be no North American car industry. We'd be flooded.

They're cheap, they're good, they work, and put everybody else out of business. But we've seen examples, well, the best example, of course, being Vladimir Putin against Ukraine. They sometimes, these leaders, they cut off their noses despite their faces. Yes, they miscalculate. They make decisions which, given the fullness of time, make no sense at all. The Russian casual, obviously the Ukrainian casualties are horrific, but the Russian casualties are as well. And they were unnecessary. A million Russians killed.

wounded. It's obscene. It's obscene. So we know these things spiral out of control. We know decision makers can make decisions, which redound on them. And, oh, I didn't think that was going to happen. Do you see the potential for that happening in China versus Taiwan? Sure, it can. So I talked about a blockade, which China can do. That's very different from an invasion of Taiwan, very hard to mount a successful naval invasion. You know, Chinese Army has not fought since they had a skirmish with Vietnam, frankly. But that's all. And they have not fought.

Who knows how well it could fight? I can imagine Xi Jinping being misled by his generals. and he could miscalculate for sure. And that's in a sense why having no rules are dangerous. Steve, when there are rules, you just know you don't do certain things. You know the rules. It makes life easier, right? You don't have to think about it.

You just don't do it. It's not an option. Once you come into the world that we're in now, where, frankly, I don't believe we have many meaningful rules, if any, left at all. Everything is on the table. Yet life gets much more complicated when you have to make a choice. You have too many choices, easier to make the wrong one. All right.

We've talked about China versus Taiwan. We've talked about Russia versus Ukraine. We need to talk about the other major hotspot in the world today, which is the Middle East. Yeah. Iran, Saudi Arabia, Israel, Palestine. It's up in flames. Go ahead. You know, I think this is an easy one in one way for us to talk about because all our listeners see these pictures every day.

You know, Gaza is now raised to the ground, virtually all its cities are gone. And let's just start where this, we could, you know, if we wanted to start at the beginning, beginning of the story, we go back 130 years. See, we can't do that, but we have to say this is a long, enduring conflict. And where you start the story on any given day is going to influence what story you tell. But I think we start this one on October 7th, when there was an attack by Hamas, which really stunned the Israel, at least from every perspective. their wanted intelligence, massive, massive failure, which should not happen. But beyond that, this was the largest numbers of civilians killed in one day since World War II during the Holocaust.

And Israel's changed. It's changed. And it's not going back, at least not for a long while. And here's the change. and it was said to me in the following way and I'm going to repeat what somebody said to me in a private conversation because I got it when I heard it even though I disagree

but I got it. They said to me, look, when somebody says they want to destroy us, we're going to believe them from now on and we're not going to wait. And that's what you're seeing of the Israeli Army now. So it's launched literally, it has leveled Gaza to the ground,

There is terrible starvation and hunger in Gaza, and there's no end in sight for two reasons. One because this right-wing government in Israel, which is the most extreme government Israel's ever had, refuses to consider a future in which Hamas is left there for exactly that reason. And Hamas has not changed its rhetoric. It still says, openly we want to destroy Israel, and so Netanyahu and his cabinet say, well, we're not

living next to that anymore. The second reason it's gone on to this degree is Hamas puts its own interests first and sacrifice his Palestinian civilians. It could disarm. It could say enough is enough. This is over. We've lost it. We made a huge mistake.

We've lost it. We're going to hand this over to somebody else. they won't they haven't and that's the impasse which is creating this catastrophe unbelievable humanitarian catastrophe and look see again with respect to rules everybody's broken every rule here let's just say it openly and any we you know we came out of world war two saying never again it's again now that's what we're seeing okay we should do let me do two follow-up questions and then I want to ask about Canada. My two follow-up questions here is, number one, do you believe Israel has now become a pariah state around the world? Yes. Yeah. And look,

that's a complicated question, right? Because I think there were always double standards. different standards were used to judge Israel. And so I just read something this morning that, oh, it wasn't an article in the Globe and Mail this morning by Lloyd Axworthy and Alan Rock, who says, what has happened in Gaza? We should just say two former foreign ministers for Canada. Right. And very experienced, very, very knowledgeable. And Ian, there was a phrase in there that just jumped out of me. And they said, what is happening in Gaza isn't a class by itself.

Well, actually, that's not accurate. Far more people have been killed in the Civil War in Sudan, which is still ongoing. And not on television, so we don't know as much about that. So not on television. Nobody sees it. There are no estimates that come out every day from the Sudanese Health Authority, about how many people have been killed. But by orders of magnitude,

I think the latest death toll is 175,000. Civilians have been killed inside Sudan. Now, I don't like comparative suffering. But that statement, it's in a class by itself, it's just not accurate. And that's been a perennial problem. So there's always been double standards. But there's no question that the suffering that has been inflicted,

on civilian Palestinians who live in Gaza is an order of magnitude of horror. The use of food is a weapon of war, which it is being used by both sides, right? Hamas uses it because when aid was going in, Hamas was sending its armed fighters. They were taking off 30, 40 percent of the aid. They were selling it into the market, into the gray market, and they were financing. and paying salaries with the profits they made from that. So both sides have used food as a weapon of war. You don't hear that story all the time.

It's the perpetrator. It's Israel. And I can understand why any human being of good conscience, watching these pictures out of Gaza, understanding the children are being killed, it crosses every line. Steve, I think Israel's paid a huge. huge price for this. Okay. The second question then on this region of the world I need to ask is,

and I have seen obviously conflicting accounts of this. I see Brett Stevens in the New York Times arguing that, no, there is not a genocide currently happening in Gaza. And I see numerous other columnists obviously saying, yes, this does meet the test for genocide. What say you? Boy, I'd love, you know, I'm going to duck it at least in the first round of the answer and say there is a case before the international, the world court, right? And let me just tell you what the lawyers have said so far, the people who actually know the law and empower to make the decision as opposed to everybody else who's opining, right?

The World Court in South Africa took Israel to the International Court of Justice in the Hague, and the World Court deliberately refused from offering a public. opinion on whether it was genocide or not. It used language like, do not do this, because if you were to do this, it would be genocide, which if anybody hangs out with lawyers, this is the way lawyers thread the needle, and they have refused to make that judgment. There's a more interesting case, which is the International Criminal Court, where the prosecutor charged, actually charged Netanyahu and, you know,

Yo of Golan with war crimes and crimes against humanity did not charge them with the crime of genocide, could have because, you know, remember Milosevic? He was charged by the Syria. Serbia. Yeah, prison. He was charged with the crime of genocide. So he could have done that. So when I look at that, I say, well, he must not have been confident that that the the evidence would have sustained that, Steve. I think we have to wait because it's all about intent. Did, at the start of this war and as this war have gone on, did Israel's leaders and generals set out to destroy the Palestinian population?

Because that's what genocide is. Or did they set out to destroy Hamas and the Palestinian population? was caught in the middle of this conflict. That's really the legal issue, and there will ultimately be a judgment. But I would say to everybody, don't weaponize that word. It's a serious legal issue.

It took us hundreds of years to get the legal system to the point where we are. It came out of 1949. That's when the first genocide conviction was obtained and followed that with the Convention on Genocide. Let the judges do their work. Don't use it as a weapon. Okay, let me use a different term then.

And you mentioned Milosevic and this term goes back to the war in the Balkans. What are we now? 32 years ago. How about ethnic cleansing? Is that happening in Gaza? Again, ethnic cleansing means, and you hear overtone to ethnic cleansing when Donald Trump said, let's ask all the Palestinians, ask all the Palestinians to move out voluntarily and we'll build a Riviera in Gaza, and then they can come back. Well, or we're going to encourage,

in quotes, Palestinians to leave Gaza and we're negotiating with three countries to accept them, which Netanyahu said. First of all, it's not voluntary, although there are some gases who are desperate to flee. And if we in Canada allowed them to immigrate, they would be here in a minute, practically, because they've given up. So there's a component, but that's not what this is about. It's not voluntary.

And when you encourage people to leave, what they consider their homeland, that is ethnic cleansing. Okay. Let's finish up here talking about Canada because we have had over the last decade, that the liberals have been in power. I don't know.

Is it 47 ministers of foreign affairs? Something like that. Anyway, nobody seems to be able to hold the job for very long. It's not 47. It's not 47, but it's a lot. But it's too many. It's a lot. It certainly does not,

the number is high enough to convey to the rest of the world that certainly the previous government under Justin Trudeau did not want to keep anybody in that portfolio long enough to let them actually do anything. Right. And now Anita Anand has the job. she's from the province of Ontario a colleague at the University of Toronto

at the faculty of law so I know okay okay well tell us as she assesses Canada's risks around the world particularly in all of the areas that we've just been talking about for the last half an hour okay if you were to sit down and brief her

what would you tell her? I am a minority voice here okay because I That's all, let's make clear. I speak for me, for nobody else, and most people disagree with me, all right? I think Canada's in trouble. I think we have underperformed. Most importantly, we've underperformed in our economy, and it matters.

Our productivity rate, you know all about it. Steve, I don't have to tell you anything. Nobody disagrees with this. They agree. We're punching below our weight on the world stage. And our economy. Yeah. So no one disagrees with that.

So where are you in trouble? So then let's get real. Let's give up this talk of Canada's role in the world. Let's understand the first thing and by far the most important thing we have to do right now is get our own house in order. I can tell you, because I travel along, Canada comes up in almost no discussion of international issues. The time on ease are not sitting waiting for us. We're not players. No. When you spent time in the Indo-Pacific like I have, I'm the one that forces Canada onto the agenda. It's not there otherwise. In the Ukrainian war, it's different because we have a huge Ukrainian diaspora in this country, the largest in the world, who are so interested. And here we have punched above our way, but in almost no other area. So when people ask me what we should be doing in the world, my answer is, first, focus.

on your most important relationship here and see if there's any opportunity to stabilize it, which is the United States, because of the economy. And then work hard to develop partnerships in other parts of the world where there are opportunities for us to partner in ways that will help us improve our productivity. Because you know what, Steve, if you don't have the money to play, you're not in the game. Our army, as you just said, our military, was a laggard in NATO. We were 27 out of 29 in terms of the increases in our defense. Who's going to take that seriously?

Our aid budget has now been cut, and I understand why, because Prime Minister Carney said, I've got a fund this increase in defensemen. We've got somebody in every international institution, but who cares? Who cares when we're not players? drawing our warrants a focus for a decade on what really matters to us and give up this nostalgia about making Canada great again in the world to use the deliberately flatten for your face. I was going to say that expression's been taken. I don't think you can use that one.

Well, I did it on purpose to provoke you. I get you. It works. It's backward looking. We were great. One more we did. We were great after World War II. Yeah, when all of Europe was on its knees and half of Asia was on its cities.

Well, we were great in the 60s. Well, maybe not great, but we were good. But if you disinvest in all the instruments that you need in the world and then go around, hoping that everybody will like you because you're so nice as your own economy is cratering, I'm sorry. I'm not sure that's a minority view, Janice. If I said that to Foreign Minister of Land, see what look at. and they involve her eyes. I can tell you. I don't know. I'm not sure that's a minority view anymore. I think you're gaining currency with that position across the country. There are more people

coming to that view nowadays, and yeah, we should be doing something about that. Janice, I got to say, this was a great primer on all the hotspots in the world today that we need to know about. I guess we should just tell our viewers and listeners that over the weeks to come, and we're going to do this every other week, it's going to be one-on-ones with you and me. It's going to be special guests invited. We're going to have panel discussions. So we're going to mix it up as we continue this. And I'm so grateful to be back in business with you here on the Paken podcast talking about this world of ours.

That is very much on edge. Can I just say to all our listeners, what fun it is to be with Steve Paken, the best conversational partner. And he pushed back at me, but I'm going to push back at him because we've got the time and the space to do this now and to have fun in a way that we might not have been able to do before. Excellent. Okay, everybody. That's the Paken podcast. Until next time, so long for now.