EP29 - ESOPs as a solution for wealth inequality - discussion with Thomas Dudley - CEO of Certified EO.

Welcome back. Thanks for tuning in. I am the ESOP guy and we are continuing on this journey to an ESOP. So for those that are just tuning in for the very first time, I wanted to say welcome to our podcast. And if you have an interest, what, what we're doing with this is really just building a resource library for, for folks that are interested in employee stock ownership plans, how they work, um, if it's a, if it's the right fit for you. So, if you have an interest in those, please go to our website at journey to an ESOP.com and you can find all of our episodes. Um, today, I'm excited to get to interview Thomas Dudley, who's co-founder and CEO of Certified EO, our certified employee owned companies. Um, they provide membership for ESOP companies and other type of companies, um, to provide educational resources to really help strengthen the culture of their businesses, um, that that represent them. Um, the big benefits of employee ownership is an article that was recently written by, um, by Thomas Dudley, and we're gonna talk about that was published in the Harvard Business School, and it's all about ESOP. So with that, I wanted to welcome, um, Tom back to our podcast for the 2nd time. So welcome, Tom. Thanks Phil. Glad to be glad to be back. Great. So, so let's just plunge right into the article that you had written and um what it, what it does is it really references, and I think really well, the social issues we have in this country. And what we're doing is we're talking a little bit, you're talking a little bit in the article about the wealth inequality and really. The idea behind the possible underlying solution of, of how employee ownership might really help solve that problem. So, with all of that, um, can you kind of talk a little bit about your, you know, thinking as far as writing the article, what you've seen, um, what was your inspiration to kind of just start the, the process of putting that together? Yeah, that's a great question. So I think the idea for this article goes all the way back. So if people listened previously or if they're familiar with us, they'll know that certified employee owned came out of some research I was doing as a PhD student at Stanford Business School, was working on a PhD in organizational behavior, got very interested in employee owned business, and so the idea, this idea really kind of comes from from even, even those days just thinking about what would happen. America with wealth and equality of every business became employee owned, right? And what's the real broad impact that the work that we're doing here is having on some broader, broader trends? Not something I was able to explore though early on, just kind of focused on getting things started with certified employee owned and building this up, but actually this winter. My wife and I had a child, so I was kind of over the winter and so had a little bit more downtime, wasn't doing any sort of certified work and so I had a little downtime to just kind of think about things, you know, obviously up late at night and everything. You're taking care of the baby, yeah. Yeah, that was number one, but there's a little bit of downtime, ma and stuff and so I started thinking about some of these questions and ultimately fortuitous timing, the Federal Reserve came out with This updated version of the survey of consumer finances which we'll talk about, but it's basically one of the best, if not the best looks at household wealth and income in America and generally just a very comprehensive survey of finances of Americans. And so that had just come out and that data is kind of what was required to do this study and really answer that question of what if every company in America was employee owned, what would happen to wealth inequality, for example, so. Started poking around that data, found out there was enough information there to really take a good look at this, started kind of plugging away and then kind of found some very interesting stuff which we'll get into. But basically, once I found that reached out to a friend of mine from the PhD days who's now a professor at HBS, talked to him, he connected me to Professor Ethan Ruin, who who's another professor there in the accounting department, and Ethan teaches this class. Reimagining capitalism, so very interested in like like us and like me kind of these alternative options for for for the US economy in ways that business can be used to to kind of impact some of these broader trends. So he was very interested in this. I talked to him about some of the early research we developed that together, co-wrote this article, and now we're actually working on a on a white paper as well, kind of diving more just into the technical details of what we did. Excellent, yeah, so. Um, it's interesting, like, and I've been looking forward to our interview because I just did a podcast with another guy and we, we talked about ESOPs as a capitalistic tool. And so we're kind of like going through spectrums of like, from an economic standpoint, how, how it can be really supportive of capitalism at the same time, you know, address something that we, we all kind of see in different ways in our country. And so let's talk about the wealth gap for a second, because I think it's different for everybody, you know, depending on geographically where you are. Um, maybe even in so different parts of the country maybe are struggling in different ways. Um, I know I see it sometimes when we go travel to different cities and you just see home, it seems like homeless populations are, are, you know, at an all-time high, and that's not because I've done any research just going and you kind of drive around, you look, look at certain things. Um, when you talk about the wealth gap, go into that a little bit in deep in more detail as far as the research that you've done, um, and help kind of explain what that really means to kind of listener, like, I know that we all have an idea what that means, but kind of put it into some context. Yeah, I know, that's great. Um, I think for, for me and for us when we talk about wealth and equality and why that's even, even a problem that that people need to be concerned with. Um, I think there's kind of two, there's two ways to approach it. You can think about the top end of this, the distribution. Where a very small number of people have record amounts of wealth in America and some people may not think that's a problem, some people might. If you do, it it kind of for me at least what resonates is thinking about democracy in America and what it takes to have a functioning healthy democracy, and I think there's a very long, long tradition of a school of thought, at least that. A threat to democracy is concentration of power, and if a few people have too much power, you cannot have a functioning democracy in America. And I think we, you know, maybe are getting near a point where that that is really coming, coming to be potentially, right? And so on the one end, it could be you could think about wealth inequality as creating this broad-based prosperity as kind of placing some limits on on the concentration of power, um. But I think the thing that resonates the most is maybe more thinking about the low end of the distribution, right, and really providing opportunities to everyone to have an ownership stake in society, and that's the thing that really inspires me and motivates motivates Cert idea. I was really thinking about how can you create this true broad-based access to ownership and that's also something that has a very long tradition in our country, right? I mean there there's many. Instances maybe in the 1800s it was land ownership that was very important and there was a whole big episode of our history thinking about how we can get broad-based land ownership. It's kind of more the post-war post-World War II era, it's more home ownership and the foundation of the middle class being the ownership of a home and that being the biggest asset for many, excuse me, many households. So with us we're thinking about the ownership of business and how can we get Every American working at a private business, an ownership stake in their workplace, and a meaningful ownership stake that can can impact people's lives. So for us, that's kind of, that's the main, the main thinking around wealth inequality is broadening that ownership. Yeah, I think that when you, when you think about it from a, from the standpoint of what you did really well there, it's like explain the history of our country. Transitions. We're, we're always going through another transition and, and you can kind of see it when you just look back at, it was an agricultural society where land was everything. And then industrial revolution, and then, you know, everybody had jobs, but we got, you know, homes and then those homes accumulated value and, and now, you know, as we go into this next question, it's just like, now it seems like a lot of the wealth is tied up in, in businesses, you know, that as we, as we give it fairness, I mean, it, you know, from a business standpoint. The founding members of the business created the business by taking a risk and taking a step of their own capital and some of those businesses work out, some of them don't. Um, but clearly, and you mentioned this in, in terms of business being primary wealth driver in the country, um, talk about that a little bit like, and I, and I kind of, I kind of know this again, I don't, I don't, I have not done any of the research you've done, but Um, looking at that, why is that true? Why, why are people with business ownership have, have more wealth in general than people that don't have business ownership? Yeah, that's a great question, and I think that's one of the things I learned doing this is is is just driving, diving into so this is where we start talking about kind of the data and how we how we know these things. And so the primary data source in this analysis trying to answer that question of what would happen to wealth ownership, wealth and wealth inequality and the distribution of wealth if every American business was employee owned. The primary source of information here is called the survey of consumer finances, and it's a survey done by the Federal Reserve every 3 years, survey about 5000 American households, and it's extremely comprehensive. It goes into their income, all their assets, debts, and these sort of liabilities, just extremely thorough and comprehensive survey. And so it has a very good picture and of course it's national representative and it's weighted and then they do all the, all the great really smart things that the Federal Reserve those those the big brains that the Fed are doing. So they do this, this very good work and um it gives us a really good look at what American households own. And so the first thing that I did with this data is just try to understand distribution of asset ownership kind of by by net worth, um. Quantile basically right looking at like bottom 50%, top 1%, that sort of thing. And what's interesting is you see two things about business ownership. So the first is that among all the different types of assets that people own, business ownership is more or less the most concentrated, right? So if you look at business ownership versus home ownership or business ownership versus just having cash, things like that, business ownership is just it's the most concentrated more or less. Um, so just to kind of drive that point home, the richest 1%, so the households with 1% of net worth, so basically the richest 1% own a majority of all business wealth, and the top 10% of households own 90% of business wealth. So it's extraordinarily concentrated in terms of of the business ownership and then if you start looking at at the um The portfolios of, of, of these, these wealth um quantiles, then what you see is that what, what do the wealthy people own? Well they own businesses, right? So if you look at that top 1% average household net worth is $28.4 million. Or I think that might be actually the amount of assets that they own. 10.8 million is held in private companies, right, and 5.1 million on average in public. So you basically have about 16 million of 28 million. In business ownership, it's over half the portfolio, right, and it's also the largest asset and so basically what you what you start digging into this, when you start digging into this, what you start finding is that wealthy people own businesses and business ownership today is very concentrated among among the wealthy households. Right, um, no good data and, and I was taking some notes. When we, when we look at the problem itself, um, and I think you're, you kind of touched on this a little bit, the democracy, the issue related to that. Um, when it comes down to solutions, we're not going to get to the solution yet. We're going to talk about that in a second. What are some things that you have seen our country try to do, um, already to bridge the, the wealth inequality gap that we have? Yeah, I think there's a few things that come up quite frequently. One is a wealth tax, right? Like we have an income tax, just have a wealth tax, like tax people based on how much wealth. Another is an inheritance tax, right, or some other people call it a debt tax, right? It depends, kind of depends on your political orientation there. But basically the idea is that when someone passes away, tax 1% of their their their net worth is they passed on to the next generation. And then kind of related as people talk about income inequality. Obviously income inequality and wealth inequality are very related because Most people get wealth through through income, although not, not everyone and a lot of people actually get a lot of their wealth through, through inheritance, especially the very wealthy, but um those are kind of the three things that I think I see out there. I'm not an Academic expert on this sort of thing, right? I'm not 100% up to date on all the academic literature and everything like that, but I have an academic background. I've kind of read, I read and keep up on these things, so I feel like that's what I'm seeing is the major, the major trends, but I think there are challenges with these. Um, one is they are very politically polarized and I think they do not have broad appeal, which is not the case with employee ownership. I think is something new that is a little bit, it's outside of our current political paradigm and as a result you see people supporting it all across the political spectrum, which I think is amazing and fantastic, but these kind of status quo situation solutions are not, I do not believe that's the case. The other issue obviously is something like the wealth tax is all or nothing. You basically need an act of Congress to create this in a very polarized environment in order to actually do anything. Um, and so I can talk about more about why I believe in implementership is, is the way forward, but as you know, we've already had a lot of our enabling legislation passed, right? And you can do something about employmentership today. You can go buy that product. After you listen to this podcast, right, you can go get a job at an employment company. As a business owner, you can convert, right? You and I, we can go out there. We can make incremental day to day progress as regular people. It doesn't come down to another act of Congress. Of course Congress can do a lot to support the development of an employee owned economy, but there's just a lot that normal people like us can go and do today to support employment economy that is not the case with the kind of classic solutions that are out there right now. Yeah, yeah, and I, and I, I think when we get, because we're going to get, I want to really get into the employee ownership idea and get deeper into that because it's, um, I, and I agree totally, like as we get to that level, I think there's so much about that, that makes total sense. Um, I, I wanted to spend a little time on, uh, because I do think that when we look at this, um, I would, I would say that you're, you're probably gonna agree like the trends are going continually going in the wrong direction. So what that would infer is that we have the, the solutions that are on the table right now, which is, um, you know, tax. You know, estate tax or as you said, wealth tax or different inheritance taxes, um, obviously aren't working, right? And You know, and they're not working. And I, I don't know, I, I come from a background where we represent a lot of clients that pay taxes their whole time when they were in a business, and then they have to pay taxes when they die. It's like, OK, now we've been double taxed, you know, um, and so there's a lot of, you know, not, there's not a lot of high appeal anyways, when you, when you kind of talked about the polarization politically. Um, for more taxes, and I, and I, I would say just, you know, and I guess in a little bit at the risk of being critical of the government, I don't see them using that money to solve the problem in any effective way at all. So, for the government to get the money. And you know, and have a program, you know, or whatever their programs are. I'm, I'm pretty skeptical about that only because the processes of programs, the welfare programs, I mean, we have more poor people than we did before. So that's not helping people, more homeless people and all that. So, So I do think, and I don't, I'm not doing this section to kind of like, I just want, I want to kind of like make the point that with all the solutions that are on the table, there really hasn't been anything that makes any sense logically to um if we, if you agree that there's more wealth inequality, which is a problem, we agree on that. Um, I think that is, uh, you know, that's what's exciting when we get to when we turn the corner here and talk about employee ownership. I think I wanted to set the stage correctly, like, hey, we've been working on this. There's a lot of things that are happening and and a lot of people, you know, um, are sharing what they have in different ways. That it still keeps widening and there's still bigger problems with it. So, so with all of that, now let's kind of get into like employee ownership and um you know, and at the risk of being kind of redundant about what employee ownership is, let's just, let's just make sure we state the the clear aspect of this. So this means a company sells their stock um to the employees, but the employees are not buying it directly with their money and And I, and I know people that listen to this podcast all the time, they're gonna, of course, we know that already, but some people don't and they're starting, they're just starting their journey of listening or looking at an employee stock ownership plan. Um, what happens is the, the selling shareholder is selling it um to a trust and the trust itself, which was called an employee stock ownership trust, holds the stock um on for the benefit of the employees and is releasing that stock over, over a period of time. Again, without the employee having to invest any of their money into the equation. So the employee isn't at risk at all. The selling shareholder gets the fair market value of what that stock is worth in the marketplace, and then the employee over a period of time, if they stay with that employer can build some um a retirement asset, just like a 401k. And that asset has the potential to be um worth a lot more. And, and really the reason is is because a small privately held company. That is sold at a certain dollar amount in year one, it can grow a lot more and appreciate more in value um in comparison to a 401k account where you're diversifying your, all your investments. So, so that has the, the engine of creating a lot of wealth for that employee. And so, Um, one of the, one of the things I wanted to kind of touch on in that definition is, is the misnomer that hey, the employees have, you know, um, gotten this for free or they bought in or did, you know, and just to make sure that everybody understands it's, it's a very fair process and the employees are benefiting not only from the selling shareholders seeing this is a good option for them, but also the Department of Labor being involved, ERISA, the IRS and everybody kind of is, is in there watchdogging to make sure that that retirement account is set up correctly. So, So I wanted to kind of spend a second on just that's what employee stock ownership plan is. And now let's talk about like how that then affects, you know, the issue of wealth inequality. Yeah, that's great, great context and background, um, and I think you hit the nail on the head in terms of the key, one of the key features here is that employees earn their shares, they don't, they don't buy them, um, and because you earn your shares and you don't put your own money in, it's kind of there's a lot of upside, but the downside is obviously limited if you're not putting anything. Of your own money in there, but at the same time employees earn this right and really almost thinking about the broader project of building this employment economy is redefining norms around work to include that ownership stake as a standard part of employment. Obviously with the caveats and kind of the distribution rules and all that. One thing I love about the ESOP, so getting back to kind of our study and our article. Basically what we are trying to accomplish here is to understand what would happen if every business in America was employee owned, right? And so in order to do that, you need to, you need, you need a few things. You need to understand the distribution of wealth and income, which we get from the Federal Reserve data. Then you also need some, some way to basically some hypothetical of like, OK, well if every business was employment, what would that mean, right? And so we use um Kind of our our broad definition of employee owned and certified employee is really about 30% of the business owned by employees in a broad-based way, right? So we use that 30% threshold, um, which we've set based on community conversations, best practices in, in, in kind of in the world and among the companies and then also um. Historical legislation like 1042 for example. Um, so that's where our 30% comes from. And then you also need a distribution rule, right? You need some way to allocate this among people and so we use the ESOP distribution rules because as you know, ESOP is not the only kind of employee owned company. out there, but definitely the biggest in terms of companies that are out there, a number of plans, that sort of thing, and also proven history, right? We're coming up on almost 50 years of history of the ESOP with ERISA in 1974, so. So that's that's exactly it is we use those distribution rules and basically what we do is we get this distribution of wealth and income and then we say, OK, well what if 30% of the private and public business wealth was actually distributed the way that the ESOP distributes wealth, right? So everyone working in a private business gets some stake in that. It's proportional to their income, right? So if someone's kind of not everyone, it's not, it's not like um. Everyone gets exactly the same ownership stake right that does reflect kind of your your inputs to the company and we use the wage, but there's a cap, right? Like ESOs have that cap around, well, it changes every year, but I think somewhere around $285,290,000 in income, exactly which which in effect creates kind of a very flat distribution right, because if you look at the typical company, people need to work 1000 hours to participate in the ESOP. tends to be a lot of people, these companies are maybe more full time and so the ratio of max to min and an ESOP is it varies obviously, but 10 to 1, 15 to 1, maybe 20 to 1. But if you compare that out in the world to like a public company CEO to average kind of worker income, it's actually about 300 to 1. And so that's part of it is is the reason I might be getting a little too into the weeds here, but the ESOP has all these really nice features that that kind of help accomplish this broader distribution of wealth. Everyone participates after 1000 hours, right? The distribution of benefits is not the same for everyone, but it's capped, and so we basically use the ESOP rules in our in our hypothetical because that is the proven structure. And so basically we apply that kind of thinking about the whole private sector which is privately held and publicly owned companies, right? Thinking about that whole sector is basically like one big business for the purposes of simplicity in terms of making an actual estimate here. Um, and so that's basically what we do in terms of, in terms of the research is around that hypothetical analysis. So, so, may I ask you a few questions to make sure I understand the analysis. So we we're answering the question is if every business was is an employee owned business, then that the answer like that would solve the wealth inequality issue in America, kind of like, and you're assuming. That just to make sure I understood it right. You're assuming that those um all the businesses here um that we're using are not are private entities or public entities, or does it matter? You know, it doesn't matter. I mean, public in the sense of listed on a public stock market, right, not public in the sense of like owned by like the government like in Scandinavia or something like that. Yeah, yeah, I mean like publicly traded, right? Yeah, OK, yeah, that's right, that's right. Yeah, that's right. So what we look at just to kind of maybe take another swing at it from a different angle, the question is basically what happens to wealth inequality if every business is employee owned and specifically 30% of every business owns kind of in the ESOP. Rules basically right that's basically what we, what we do to figure that out and obviously 30% is important right because we're not advocating that 100% of every business be owned by employees, right? Like you identified the founders of businesses, entrepreneurs take risks and should be rewarded for those risks, right? Investment investors play a very important role in business ongoing operations and often will have an equity stake. Like there's plenty of room for all these other stakeholders in the with the 30%. Um so I think it's a very good, very good number for that reason as well. Basically what we find is dramatic, right? So just kind of getting into the results, um, status quo, so we basically find the The bottom 90% of households in terms of wealth all do much, much better, and it's very dramatic, most dramatic at the kind of the bottom of the wealth distribution, right? So the bottom 50% status quo, their share of wealth is about 1.4% of the total net worth. So the bottom 50% own less than 2% of all the all the of the net worth. If in an employment economy that share goes up 4 to 6.4%, right, if you kind of look at groups who are often excluded from from or have been excluded from from the kind of the growth of the economy historically, right, like black households, for example, their net worth quadruples, right, people without a high school degree, households headed by someone without a high school degree, those households. Also increased their net worth by about 4x, right? So the benefits of this are disproportionate at kind of the bottom of the wealth distribution and among groups who basically have not shared in the prosperity of maybe the past economic growth. The 90 to 99%. Basically doesn't really have much of a change at all. The only group that's worse off is that top 1%, right, and their net worth is going from like $28 million to $24 million right, the only cost here is that if you have $28 million you're going to have $24 million which is what it is. People can decide if that's worth it or not. Yeah, I mean again it comes back to, you know, but I think that. You know, when you address the top wealth in that way, it's like, yeah, that doesn't seem like a lot. Um, quadrupling somebody at such a low base anyways sounds like a big number, but in the end, it's really not huge when you get down to 4 times something um that was small is not as big, right? Do you have any, go ahead. I can put some meat on on that too, right? So for example, if you look today in the survey of consumer finances at black households, you find a median net worth of about $24,000. That means kind of like if you're the middle black household, you'd have $24,000 worth. And in the employership scenario that median goes up. $106,000 right, so to your point, it's not like, well, that's that's the change, right? That's the change. And so you see kind of that order of magnitude generally, right? But if you think about what that does, having on average 24 or kind of the median $24,000 to 100 $6000 I mean that can change. The whole family's future, right? Yeah, yeah, all kinds of opportunities opening up, you know, yeah, exactly, exactly, and we just see that generally kind of across all the different demographics that you can do all the different groups, all that, you know, and so playing devil's advocate and again I'm I'm a huge, obviously big employee ownership and for this, not just for this reason, for a lot of other reasons because I think it's very for Selling shareholder for obviously the employees, um, I, I think for even the customer, uh, everybody involved, I think wins. Um, but if I was devil's advocate, I would say, hey, well, Tom, what about, you know, these people didn't do anything to get this, this wealth, you know, and how would you address that if, if somebody came at you with that like criticism of the idea of wealth inequality? Yeah, no, that's, I mean, I think that gets back to what we talked about in terms of redefining what our expectations are in terms of the work because they did do something to earn this wealth, right? They showed up every single day to work and worked hard and um and that's in my mind that is. Enough to deserve an equity stake in the business you work at, right? I think that's something that everyone should get. Um, and, and I would add to what you're saying. I mean, the reality is, as you talked about the terms of an ESOP are very fair because you're you're getting allocated based on your compensation, typically, which means if you are in the company and you're the lower earner, your allocated share of that is going to be lower, as opposed to the higher earner. So it does have it already kind of equates like your what value proposition you might bring to the company. Um, and then secondly, I think too, you have to be there over a period of time to for it to have any weighted weightiness because typically a leverage transaction is you're going to allocate those shares over 2015, 2025 year period. So, Um, it encourages you to stay there and work hard at that company too. So I think there's, there's certainly a balance. It's not a give me and that's why the point I wanted to make. It's really not a give me away, give away this wealth. It's really they're earning it, and it's just giving them the opportunity to earn it. Meanwhile, paying the selling shareholder a fair market value proposition. I agree with that. Yeah, I know you're obviously very familiar with the nature of the transaction and all that, um. Yeah, I think, I think what you said is great, right? Now, our analysis kind of assumes it all happens in one go, but that's not how it actually plays out in real life, right? That's just more to some assumption you have to make to actually kind of get the estimate um in a in a reasonable way. The other, I think the other point to make too, um. Is that in our analysis we basically assume that ESOP or employee owned companies, we basically assume that everything continues the same, but as you know and as research has demonstrated, employee owned companies are often much better performing businesses because those employees showing up now have a stake in. success of the business. If the company does better, their wealth grows, right, and so really I see employership as a kind of a win-win for everyone, right? The employees build wealth. The company often performs better and has employees who are more committed both in terms of motivation, in terms of participating in like any sort of high output management type system, idea sharing system, open book management type thing. Um, also you have like longer term, that long term commitment, right, be there for a while. And many of the selling owners benefit as well in terms of building their legacy, right, having this great secession option if they are trying to exit the business, or we have many owners who stay involved on the day to day but open up maybe 30 or 40% to employees as well. So in that case, and obviously also very good for local communities now you have a business tied to the community. who's not necessarily going to you know move move the headquarters because they got a better offer down the road or that sort of thing. So I feel like there are all these aspects to these kind of positive aspects beyond just the wealth building piece and the wealth inequality piece as well that don't show up in this paper because that's not the point of this, right? But I think when it comes back to it. I'm sure there are people who for whatever reason don't don't buy into this, but a lot of people really get kind of that win win win nature of this and how it's good for the people, it's good for the company and it's good for the broader community. Yeah, and that's that's what's great about it if we finish on this, it's like, it's very holistic for it's a healing thing for the community, the people. Um, everybody wins. And, you know, I don't think and and to have, this is why it's interesting because we do have bipartisan support. It's, it's politically everything, everything works for it. So, um, in the end, I think your research is great, Tom, and I didn't I I add, I added those questions because I do, I do think when people listen, I want, I think they're going to ask those kind of questions, so. Um, but at the end, as, as we land this thing, it's, it's just very interesting how um this could really do a great, and I think people are starting to see it and they're aware of it, and it can really do a lot for our country, so. I agree with that. I mean, the way I, the more I think about this, the more I come to understand that I feel like it's just off the current political spectrum, right? Like I think the model that's out there for politics right now is it's kind of like a line and you're on the left or you're on the right, but actually politics isn't the line. That's just an abstraction, right? And what's interesting about employership is that I think it's often in some other new direction, right? And that's why I'm so excited about it is I think it presents a viable path forward. On many issues and where today the status quo we're just kind of stuck. We're not making any progress. Things are getting worse, but we don't have any viable solutions other than just kind of keep doing what we've been doing and that's, you know, keep doing the same thing, you're not going to get a different outcome. And so what's so cool about this is it's like it's this different thing that works, right? It works for people, it works for the companies, it works for communities. There's a long history here, right? And so what's what I'm excited about with this paper is that it shows. The magnitude of this change, right? This, this really is not, this is not at the margins in terms of a major social problem. Like this is really right at the heart of it um in a historical context, the one way to look at wealth inequality is the Gini coefficient, which is basically this measure of of a of a distribution to understand how concentrated it is. And if you look at the Gini, basically we, we kind of do 30% ownership be back in like the 70s or the 60s somewhere there like much more, much more kind of egalitarian um. Distribution of wealth, right? And so basically it's like itsoric low if you look back at the US. And so what's cool is that and what I'm so excited about with this paper is it shows and really reinforces that point, at least for me, that this is a new thing. This is a different direction to take things that would be transformative. And that's also why I think it's viable because it kind of breaks some of the gridlock and barriers that we're running into with a lot of these other ideas. That's good. Yeah, great points. Um, so I would just kind of say as we close out, if you're OK with this, Tom, I'll put the article on our website if people want to access it and read it, because I think it's really good. Um, are you allowed to do that? I don't know. I think posting on the website, we might want to post a link to the Harvard Business Review article. I know it goes back and forth behind a paywall, which is, which is what it is, right, we'll, if you're OK with that, we'll post a link just so if they have an interest in reading it because I think it's an excellent article and Um, or we can just send, send an email, we can send it to you or whatever, but just something that people, uh, maybe want to read deeper into what you wrote, because I think it's really, it's, it's, it's very, very good. I think we'll look back in 10 years from now and say, wow, that you were right, you know, assuming this all kind of works out and we have a lot more, exactly we're all back in 10 years being like, wow, can you believe how small this was back then and look at where we are now yeah, that'd be great if you want to learn more. I mean, you can email me. My email is thomas at certify.com. Uh, Professor Ruin and I are working on this white paper as well, which will have much more of the details. So some of the numbers I went through today are in the Harvard Business Review article, but we'll have like an actual kind of white paper write up of of the research that goes into more of the technical side. Um, and if you if you're looking for an article and you're having trouble, send me an email and I'm happy to talk about this with people or do follow-ups that way. Awesome. Well, Tom, thanks for your time today. I think it was really, it was a really interesting topic and I think it really helps people. To, um, you know, to to kind of think about this in, in relationship to all the other things we talk about. So yeah, thanks for having me. Great. So with all that, have a great day. We'll look forward to our next step on this journey.