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Straight, No Chaser
Robert Botha - From Embassy to Family: A Diplomat's Letter to His Granddaughter
Robert Botha, with 18 years in the diplomatic service, shares insights on global challenges and his hopes for his newborn granddaughter's future in a complex world. Beginning his career just before Nelson Mandela's release, he witnessed South Africa's transformation while serving in Mauritius and later Paris during significant historical events.
• Started diplomatic career on February 1st, 1990, days before Mandela's release
• Served in Mauritius when his diplomatic status changed four times as South Africa transformed
• Worked at the diplomatic academy training new diplomats for post-apartheid South Africa
• Posted to Paris during the Iraq War and HIV/AIDS epidemic
• Wrote both a heartfelt letter and AI-generated letter to his newborn granddaughter
• Describes our world as balanced between existential risk and innovation opportunity
• Explains how social media has degraded diplomatic communication to truncated sentences
• Discusses democracy's failures and possible reforms at local and international levels
• Explores leadership pathology and how fear drives support for corrupt leaders
• Concludes with hope that future generations will find beauty and soul companions
Connect with Robert on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/robert-botha-9a974910/ or through his blog at robertbotha.blog. You can also email him at robertbotha127@gmail.com
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Good morning, Robert Buerta. Welcome to the show. It's a pleasure to have you here this morning.
Speaker 2:Thank you very much. Delighted to be with you, Gavin.
Speaker 1:Robert, you are an interesting guy. You have a history in diplomacy and, I must be honest, I obviously move in different circles to you because I don't meet too many diplomats. I'm not sure how many members of the audience of this podcast know a lot about diplomacy. Could you talk a little bit about your background, your involvement in diplomacy, where you've worked, and just so the audience can understand where you're coming from?
Speaker 2:so the audience can understand where you're coming from. So I graduated from university and I joined the diplomatic service in, I think, on the 1st of February 1990, and Mr Mandela was released from prison on the 11th of February. That month and a year later I was a diplomat in Mauritius. My first posting, and of course it was in that time that the uh, the DF Milan Accord basically was signed, apartheid as law was was uh repudiated and scratched and the beginnings of the CODESA process were started and the democratic South Africa was being birthed.
Speaker 2:So I was in Mauritius for four years and my diplomatic post reflected the changing diplomatic landscape. So we started as a trade mission and then we became a consul general, and then we became an embassy, and then we became a high commission. So my business card changed four times in four years and it's quite historic. I also had the privilege of being a consul to the Seychelles and I was in the Seychelles for the first democratic election where South Africans living in the Seychelles, the archipelago, were able to vote. 147 people came to vote.
Speaker 1:And then I came back from Mauritius.
Speaker 2:I spent time in the diplomatic academy where I was a trainer practitioner, got qualified in the UN in multilateral negotiations and the Leadership Academy at United Nations University. And, yeah, I started working on the curricula for integration of diplomats from all the different components to the new South Africa and it was a fantastic privilege to make that. Nothing part working backwards, what kind of diplomats do we need for the 21st century and how do we take the talent and the gifting of what we have in South Africa within the full spectrum of political cultural diversity, and to shape that. And then I had the privilege of serving in Paris at our embassy there from 1990 to 2004. And that was during the war in Iraq, so it was a very historic time, and so Africa and France had had similar foreign policies. We were opposed to the war, so it was a great time.
Speaker 2:It was also the time of the HIV AIDS epidemic was, you know, in full devastation and so and so it was a contested space. I learned a lot in how to manage diplomacy, political international relations and health diplomacy and cooperation. So grade learning came back in 2008. And I was still at the academy and then, I think sorry in 2004. And then in 2008, four years later, I resigned to run a social enterprise that I started working on. So I've had about 18 years of experience as a diplomat practitioner and also as a trainer 18 years of experience as a diplomat practitioner and also as a trainer.
Speaker 1:Rob, you mentioned a couple of different stages, or I'm not really sure how to word it, but you mentioned trading not really a trading post, but different levels of diplomatic mission. You had a consul general, then an embassy. Can you just talk through those three or four different levels of formal diplomatic structure? I mean, I don't know what they mean.
Speaker 2:So a trade office really is your low level. The Mauritian government were waiting for the democratic, elected South Africa government, so we were just a trade. We were waiting for the democratic, elected South Africa government, so we were just a trade. We were setting up the diplomatic groundwork for full diplomatic relations. So, though we were called the trade office, we functioned informally, I would say, also in preparing for the diplomatic transitioning.
Speaker 2:So we became a consul general, which is a lower level than an embassy. So, for example, you may have in a big country a capital in the capital, a full embassy, but you'd have consul generals in the big cities or just a consulate, and so these are lower level diplomatic officers, but they function under the same international convention and legal framework. And if you are a member of the Commonwealth, your embassy is called the High Commission. So South Africa rejoined the Commonwealth. We had been kicked out. So Africa rejoined the Commonwealth. We had been kicked out because of apartheid, and now the ANC government decided to reapply and accept the invitation to return. So now we became part of the Commonwealth and our embassy now became a high commission and our ambassador a high commissioner, but effectively they're the same.
Speaker 1:Okay, great. Well, thanks for that clarity. At least it's clear in my mind and hopefully for the audience. Now I guess this can be pretty theoretical and sort of high-level thinking, but I know you've recently had a granddaughter, so I would love for you this is your first granddaughter, recently born, and how do you see this world that she has now born into with this understanding of diplomacy, which can be quite theoretical perhaps, maybe it seemed to be that way, but it has real world implications and I'd love just to hear what you think. You've spent time in the diplomatic services. We have this world, for better or for worse, that we're in at the moment. You have a granddaughter come into this. How would you describe the world? And if you had to write it down in a letter for her to read one day, how would you explain the world we live in?
Speaker 2:so what we can capture? Uh, some of the. The answer is I have already written. I wrote her a letter on the day that she was born, straight from the heart, and then I wrote her an ai generated letter, and then I wrote her an AI generated letter to capture just this little moment in history. And the AI letter is about welcoming her into a new digital world, and in that I addressed and I was interested to see what level of intuitive sensitivity and emotional mirroring, which is what ai is, what it can do, and um, so the the.
Speaker 2:The content was she is being born into a world that is different, uh, from what we could have imagined, um, and in some ways, disappointing and in some ways, exciting.
Speaker 2:So, as always, there's this tension between existential risk we always seem, as a species, to be on the brink of extinction and great opportunity for innovation, creativity and breakthrough, and that is what she's been born into. She's born into a divided expectation, and I think I was writing to her about that. And the diplomacy essentially is diplomacy is an art, it's a craft set of tools, skills, competencies that basically promote dialogue and discussion and recognition of difference of interests, and it's prepared to frame the dialogue as negotiations to get to some kind of agreement and consensus, and I think that is what I think the world is needing. We are needing more diplomacy because the world seems to be increasingly I don't know. We've got wars going on that we wouldn't have thought we would have had, driven by an industrial military complex that is so powerful that the market for selling weapons into the system is a deviation from the resources needed for development.
Speaker 2:So, as a species, we're spending an awful lot of money on trying to weaponize, using robotics, using drones, using ai, to create a more lethal kind of war system, and that is a divergence from really really a divergence from development funding. So we've got big problems. We've got environmental problems, we've got nation states that are islands that are going to disappear because of rising water levels. We have the risk of an aging population in many, many countries where the decline is irreversible. And, yeah, we're seeing trade being the hostility of trade being weaponized, and so the global system is under threat. Even the United Nations, which was set up to try and manage the New World Order, is under decline and under threat. It hasn't restructured its Security Council under decline and under threat. It hasn't restructured its security council. It hasn't been able to standardize some of the ethics and values that are needed. So you've got inconsistencies that have weakened it. Our international multilateral legal framework is under pressure. Framework is under pressure, and so the nation states are moving towards a much more right-wing, a conservative agenda of self-preservation, self-protection, and in that there is the demise of their interests because we are already interconnected the supply chains and how we function. So she's going to be, she's going to be born into a world that is contested, possible nuclear war.
Speaker 2:There is a real risk of that. You know we've got an increasing criminalized underworld that are operating and if they get access to nuclear weapons, then you know we have got a big lot of trouble and a nuclear explosion can precipitate a nuclear winter where there is devastation for the environment for millennia. So you can't reverse some of these problems. So the risk is real. We've got international leaders that are functioning in a way that's a pathology. You have leaders that are functioning as if they are mafia syndicates. You've got an infiltration of the state by the underworld. You are having a lot of our democratic thinkings and our aspirations and our values for a better world are in contestation.
Speaker 2:And then AI is increasing and AI is important because it's a neutral mirror, but human species can put into it evil intent and if you convert that into robotics, you are seeing a world that we can't imagine and I, I. And yet in that there is a continuity of the divine providence of god. There is the old adage of um there the intervention, the providence. There is the love, the inspiration that we are loved as a species and that somehow we are able to find our way under providence. And so with that, she's going to have to find her way, and identity is a big issue and it's going to become increasingly an issue. So this is an important issue to get to be in dialogue.
Speaker 2:So I'm writing to her and possibly with the knowledge that she will read it long after I'm dead and gone. But it's a kind of archaeology for her. It's a sort of anthropology archaeology archive where she can go back and look at some of the thinking of those who loved her when she was born and had hopes for her and care for her.
Speaker 1:Rob, you said something really interesting about. Humanity seems to always be on this knife's edge. You know, disaster on one hand, hope on the other hand. I always find it interesting that, while you can pass on technological innovation and technical knowledge from generation to generation, the one thing you cannot pass on is human experience. You know, everybody has to have the terror of asking the first girl or boy out on a date, get their first job, have their first child, try and figure everything out for themselves, and that experience you honestly can't pass on to anybody else. You can talk about it, you can write books about it, but everyone really needs to figure that out for themselves. Is this perhaps why humanity always seems to be on the edge?
Speaker 1:Do we keep needing to relearn the same lessons every generation? Or do you think that maybe social media has made people more obnoxious and more sort of hardcore politically divided or ideologically divided, and seem to feel that they can say anything that they want to do? They're not going to get punched in the face anymore, because in the old days you'd have to say that to someone in person and now you can just punch it out on a Twitter note or something like that. But why are we not learning these lessons? What do you think it is? And how is diplomacy evolving? Or maybe it's not, and that's why we don't seem to overcome these hurdles.
Speaker 2:So let's talk about social media. So presidents now don't necessarily work through their international you know, diplomatic, sending out diplomatic notes. They use Twitter, you know, and they send the X notes, not Twitter, but the X podcast or X communique changes from day to day depending on the mood of the head of state, you know. So countries find out what other countries think on X. I mean, it's incredible, you know, the depth and the nuance and the complexity of the communique is now lost in a truncated sentence or two. And I think that that's a good metaphor as diplomacy has migrated into this kind of truncated, few sentences that keep changing, that make for the meaning very superficial. We get into a binary them and us world where there's no real analysis, there's no real depth of allowing for the granularity. So the word is metaxi, it's an in-betweenness, it's a divided reality between the dream and the nightmare, and we live in a very complex, divided world. Now, if you take that into social media, young people are in social, they are in constant social communication, truncated sentences with the meanings, and it can be weaponized relationally and hurt and devastation for lives because of this shallow, superficial way of communicating. So we are as a species. We need communication, we need dialogue, we need relational closeness and it needs time closeness and it needs time. We're also in a very complex, multi diverse environment, and so our interface as a species with technology is accelerating. Angst accelerating. It's diminishing our processing time, time out. So there seems to be no time out and anxiety is heightened and we are moving away from a deeper grey allowing for to a much more kind of fascist type.
Speaker 2:I'm right, you're wrong, I'm powerful. You listen? And in the political spectrum at the extreme right wing and extreme left, they're both fascist. They're the same animal, just with different ideology. But the freedom that we need as a species to choose through sovereign self-will to grow and to mature. We're under pressure. The church is under pressure, Governments are under pressure, Ideologies are under pressure, Corporates are under pressure. Even in the sporting arena they're under pressure. There's a huge amount of pressure. It's a contested space.
Speaker 1:So I remember hearing a conversation between. It was on a podcast with the recent American elections last year, and one of the commentators actually said that he remembers watching presidential debates back in the 60s, 70s, even the 80s, where two opponents would actually be having a debate in public, but they would be pretty civil, you know. They would implore the other person to reconsider their position on this, that and the other, and they would speak quite politely to each other and he said in this day and age it seemed to be one delegate calling the other delegate a moron in public on live broadcast TV and they seem to refer to each other as idiots. And so have we lost just a basic appreciation for the value of a human being, the person across the table that you're talking to, not seeing him for or her as someone valuable, with a wealth of experience and a nuanced understanding that we may not know and through conversation we can understand it and possibly resolve an issue. And why have we moved away from that?
Speaker 2:I think sociologists in the future are going to probably relate social media and media to this. It's the reduction to entertainment. You know where people's ability to concentrate has been impaired by social media and by phones and mobile technology. And you know, there isn't, there's a very, there's the. The neurology of the human brain, for today, can't concentrate very long, it's constantly being interrupted. So in order to keep its focus, it needs stimuli, it needs entertainment, and for that stimuli to compete against other entertainment, it has to be more dramatic. It has to be more dramatic, it has to be more exciting, it has to be more bold, more shocking, um, and so it's a short-termism. It's kind of living for the headline, you know, for the next thumbs up or the next like, or the next uh, you in, you know, uh, the popularity contest. This is, I think, the um, you hired, you fired. Uh, you in, you out. Um, that revolving door.
Speaker 2:It's a pathology and I think that it's a leadership pathology that we need to think about. So we're not lost, because we have as a history, a recorded history. We are a people of the written text. So, just as AI is a language model and it's going to make a big difference to how we integrate knowledge. So, philosophically, it's an epistemological breakthrough with AI, because we've got tools to reframe meaning and we've got tools now to access libraries of knowledge that we wouldn't have been able to before. So ChatGPT's library, that it accesses the internet and its digital library, is significantly bigger than all the other universities in the world and it has a librarian that serves you and a scribe that helps you write.
Speaker 2:I mean it's incredible how knowledge can be harvested. But significantly we go right back to early development of human philosophy and consciousness and recorded thinking. You will see that it's the language that's been recorded. We can now review, we can rethink. You know Church EPT can read a biblical Greek, aramaic, hebrew and other languages. It's got the ability to maybe not be a world expert, but it's pretty good at finding a general level of competence so we can borrow the thinking from the past.
Speaker 2:So, for example, leadership is about virtue and values and it's about serving the common good. It's about character. So these are what the Greeks were talking about. Good, it's about character. So these are what the Greeks were talking about. You know, you go right back thousands of years. You've got a whole history of how leaders need to be formed so that they can hold the tension of a world where there's risk. So throughout the times, from you know, from the very beginning, there's always been great risk. But leaders emerge and they either cause devastation or they can create for order and for peace and development and they inspire. They're not neutral.
Speaker 2:Some of these leaders are not inspired by the common good. They are narcissistic, greedy, short-term, corrupted, compromised, short-term corrupted, compromised. They have a pathology and they have character that is devoid of virtue and value and we choose them. You choose them knowing that they're like that. Why do we choose them? Because we're insecure. We choose the prince that is evil as a peasant because he's going to provide short-term security from the marauding tribes across the street, and so we give him our freedom and our taxes, only to find out that we haven't solved the problem of our security. We're being exploited and abused.
Speaker 2:So I think that we as a society are grappling with this and the disillusionment of leadership and democracy is going to be big issues for my granddaughter's future, because democracy is not working, but there's no alternative, and leadership is not working, and there's no alternative and leadership is not working and there's no alternative. So they, they, she's going, they're going to have to find out, find out ways where civil society must own the electoral process. Voters must own the choice of their leaders. They must have agency and those leaders need to be accountable and they need to be under standards, and they are custodians and stewards. They're not opportunists to enrich for a short term at the trough. And now we have media and knowledge, so we all know what's going on, so we're not surprised. So the thing is at some point the young people are going to rise up and say we're not prepared to accept this kind of society that we've inherited. It's broken at every possible level.
Speaker 1:Rob, you mentioned something really interesting there that I just want to touch on for a second the issue of democracy. So I'm going to ramble on a little bit. Do forgive me, but on the one hand, we have individuals being empowered more today than ever before through technology. We were just talking about AI and social media. We've got this nation state almost on the opposite end of the scale when it comes to democracy.
Speaker 1:Do you think the problem with democracy not working at the moment is the sheer size of the nation states? Do you think democracy would work better in a far more in a smaller context? So just for example example, I've spent a bit of time in the US and watched with interest how local elections were in the US. In the local counties and municipalities there's a person that stands up and he is standing for chief of police. Someone is standing for the mayor of the town. It doesn't seem to be a party political issue. It seems to be an individual stands up and says I can do the job and they have to reapply every year for their position. So if they do well, you reelect them, if not, they're out. And it seems to be that you actually know this person. He's someone in the community. His kids probably go to your kid's school and there's a connectedness there.
Speaker 1:Would democracy work better in a smaller scale environment? Maybe this nation state thing is just actually too big. Where people become numbers, politicians are just a picture on the screen somewhere. Do you think we've gotten too big? Is it time for the large nation states to become smaller nation states, maybe a collection of small nation states? Maybe how Europe was before the European Union or what the United States was before it was the United States. What do you think?
Speaker 2:Sure, it's a difficult. I think it's a combination. So I live in an area where my local representative is a Euro. We get served by our local councillor like we were pure gold. I have never seen such stewardship and such leadership. It's unbelievable and I am inspired by that, that civil responsibility to be a councillor at a local government level. And so I think to your question you want to decentralize representivity, but it has to be intention, with the capacity to manage budgets and infrastructure and collection of revenue and corruption. So it's not a recipe, it's a kind of more organic mix of things.
Speaker 2:So part of me says you need local government, decentralized democracy as much as possible. Another part of me tells me local governments have failed and we at a provincial and local level, and so we need to centralise power at a competent level. We need less bureaucracy, we need less ministers, less expenditure on the civil service, which is inefficient and increasingly inefficient and increasingly corrupt. So society will exist to just. Our societies are existing to sustain civil, to say to sustain civil service. Who is the middle class? They're not there to sustain society. They're not there to sustain society. So that power is lost, you lost it, and there's no batu pele, there is no service. I mean, there might be exceptions, but on the whole, especially at local government level, with exceptions, like I mentioned, my councillor. So it's not an easy answer. Then, whether you should break down nation states. Well, the nation states are colonial kind of. They were drawn up in a way that were not sustainable and they're not workable, and those boundaries create a lot of conflict. I think it's a mistake to go America first, south Africa first.
Speaker 2:You know, I think, when you do that you create the impression that you're dealing with the issue, but you're not really. I think the European Union or the European project has been successful. Has been successful in that they have not had a lot of crisis, tension and conflict among themselves. On the whole, it's pretty harmonious. But the secret to the European Union and the project is that the executive is unelected, not elected by the voters, so there's a mixture of elected representativity and representativity that's elected, so the power is shared there. But the bureaucracy of the EU had created for Brexit. You know, with the size of a cucumber determined whether it could be sold or not, and stuff had to be thrown away because it didn't meet the standard not hygiene standard or quality standard, the size, so that that that that bureaucratic stupidity was it was devastating. And so the british government decided to, uk government decided to. Uk government decided to withdraw, and whether it was the right or wrong decision, history will tell.
Speaker 2:But I think that in Africa we need much more cooperation. We need an African union that basically allows for a lot of trade, but our borders need to be secure because our society cannot cope with the cost of health and education and our water resources and our housing and our unemployment rates. So we have to balance a human rights perspective to people inside our country where everybody's treated with dignity, especially the children, but we need to rethink our budget on securing our borders Because I cannot understand how we could have such porous borders and the levels of corruption in protecting our borders needs to be addressed. This is a strategic crisis that we are facing, but it mustn't be translated into a xenophobic hatred of people, because that is then the demonic on both sides of the fence. You need to have pragmatic policies of protecting the borders and caring for people within the borders and trading as much as possible.
Speaker 2:So you create wealth, so people don't want to leave their villages and their homes.
Speaker 1:Sorry to interrupt. I just wanted to mention that recently I was reading an article and they mentioned that most African countries' largest trading partners are off the continent either China, europe, the US or South America and neighbouring African countries in many cases don't do any trade with each other whatsoever. This seems crazy to me that we have all this natural resource, human capacity. Why does it come back to this colonial thing, original borders? Why is it that Africans are not able to trade but would rather send their goods overseas?
Speaker 2:It's because of the politics of business and the business of politics. So these are decisions not made on the market. They are made on privileged elite that are enriched by these decisions.
Speaker 1:Now these privileged elite I suppose you have a I'm trying to think of the expression about the way to get into power is through democratic election and the way to stay there is through, you know, is not through democratic election. So people get voted into power and then just never seem to leave. That does seem to be a flaw of democracy, that. How do we get around something like that? That, uh, how do we get around something like that where we have a clear a problem in some places, where you, there is a problem in government, but you can't seem to get rid of them?
Speaker 2:well that it's a combination of law, the development of law and policy and compliance with the principles of constitutional law, where you devolve power between executive legislative. You know, and I think that that enforcement must be done through the ballot box, and the ballot box needs to be reliable and not corruptible. And that's with technology and biometrics, and you know, the world that we're in can secure a secure election and it can be enforced. The problem is that power clusters and corrupt power needs to support each other. So your police and your military form a complicit relationship with the corrupt executive and they keep him in power so that they can continue with their privilege. And that's not only an issue in Africa, it is a big issue in many, many parts of the world. Some of the big nation states that threaten world peace are in that category and they have nuclear weapons and they have possibly, you know, the real risk is the proliferation of those weapons within a criminalized, mafia-type world order.
Speaker 1:Now, just on the other end of the scale, from the nation state and maybe a failure to address issues at that level, we have an example in South Africa of a community called Orania. Speak about any personal experience beyond what I've read, but the impression I get is there's a group of people that have decided well, you know, the macro situation is out of our control, but the micro situation is within our control. We're going to go ahead and just build a community that we want to see. Do you think that's sort of what it is? What are your thoughts about that sort of no-transcript?
Speaker 2:well, I think that throughout the world there are communities that live together because of an affinity. What that affinity is, they determine so, you know, and they may not like foreigners. So everywhere you go in the world, you're going to go to the little islands. You're going to go to the little islands. You're going to go throughout the world you're going to find villages and communities where there is a historical affinity for each other and they don't like the sociological bonds that hold them together to be weakened.
Speaker 2:The problem is that when you have a racist philosophy that says we are better, superior and we have a pre-election to something that differentiates us and it happens in many countries we have religious communities that do the same I don't think they're healthy and I think they create a cult-like toxicity, as I would say as a sociologist. I would say that they don't produce healthy society and healthy people. When you create a logger, so people that are manipulative, with power, narcissistic, they cherry pick on the issues that they want to identify with as an ego expression of self political promotion, essentially, and then they use the vulnerabilities in society as an ego expression of self-political promotion, essentially. And then they use the vulnerabilities in society, the gaps in society and they use them as issues and they present themselves as protectors. I will protect you from this.
Speaker 2:Join my lager. And they create an existential risk, them and us. But it's not done because of the real risk. It's done because they have. They have a desire and a and a angst for power. They have a hole in their own soul. That's why they've got to fill it, and so they're dangerous. So when you separate people and you create these demarcated areas because of a psychosis of fear, I think you're in a space of pathology and not healthy space.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that makes a lot of sense, rob. We're sort of getting close to the end of our time and I hope this podcast maybe is attached to the letter that your granddaughter one day has. When she opens the letter, maybe there's a link inside there to a podcast and she can hear granddad talk about, uh, the life that we live in as well. So final thoughts for your granddaughter.
Speaker 2:Yes, I would like to go to the Celtic poet, john O'Donoghue. And he says that life is beautiful, you know, and yes, it's a contested space, but you've got to find the beauty in it. And then he talks about blessing we have to live a life of being blessed and blessing. And, and he talks about thresholds. We're always between one threshold and another, but we need the courage, the faith to frame our suffering, our pain, our dissonance, and we've got to cross the threshold because this is what is required of us to mature.
Speaker 2:And then, um, he also talks about this beautiful concept of anam a n a n a n kara. It means soul companion. So my, my prayer, her, my hope, is that she will find, in a complex world, she will find an echo of sages of the past and she will find life to be beautiful because she will have learned the art of seeing and finding the beauty and managing the distraction, and then to be present with presence, so that she can be a blessing, and then to have companionship and to be a companion. So that is really my hope for her.
Speaker 1:That is amazing. I think that is fantastic People coming together and helping each other out. That's what it is about at the end of the day, rob. Where can people connect with you, follow your work or just if they want to get in touch and ask you some questions, what's the best way to do that?
Speaker 2:yeah, I think the best thing would be. I'm contactable on um on at linked linkedin. I've got a linkedin profile and maybe you can put that on the and I've also got a blog. We are right and ramble and that's robert burter dot blog. Robert burter one. And I've also got an email address which is robertburter127 at gmailcom. That's my sort of public space robertburter, one word with a 127. So it's robertburter127, one word at gmailcom.
Speaker 1:Excellent. I will definitely put those in the show notes and anyone that wants to reach out will connect to you there. Rob, thank you so much for your time. It's been awesome to talk. I think we covered everything from the individual to the community, to the nation states, to conflicting nation states. So a great introductory conversation and I certainly hope we can do this again in the future. Thanks for your time.
Speaker 2:Thank you. Thank you, gavin. Thank you, it's been a pleasure.