 Well, James, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me today and to join this conversation series that we have at King's College London. I thought I might start the discussion by going back to the eve of the 60th anniversary of the United Nations when the Secretary General endorsed and presented the report of a high-level panel on threats, challenges and change. And one of the things he said in there, that the sort of six kind of clusters of threats that we really need to be concerned about now and in the future, one of those was transnational organized crime. Now I'm wondering, when you see things like that in a document, you obviously wonder why it was included at the time, but also whether that was just, as it were, the fashionable thing and the right thing to do. There has been a lot of emphasis since the early 90s on human security and so on and so forth. So what I'm getting at is what was new about the nature of that particular threat. But also, I think the other thing I want you to perhaps to get on to later is how that threat has evolved and changed. And in particular, perhaps draw on some of the work that I know you have done and are still doing on the relationship between criminal and political power. So why did the SG include it at the time and how has the threat evolved? Great questions, Matt. And just to begin, thanks so much for including me in this series. It's great to be part of it and to have the chance to talk with you again about this topic that we've been noodling away at for a while now. I think your question is helpful in that it places the high level panel report in its time. And we have to treat the document on those terms. I think the short answer, I'd say, as to why organized crime was included in there was as a reminder. But I mean that in a particular way. And so let me actually just step back further in history back to the early 90s to give a sense of how we got to that moment in 2004 and why the SG and the panel felt it necessarily to have that reminder. Of course at the UN, the early 90s were a period of high optimism about the potential of multilateralism. Cold War was over. The stalemate in the Security Council, the blockage had been removed structurally. There was a chance now for new world order. There's a very positive feeling about the potential of international cooperation and globalization. But then as the 90s unfolded, we also saw particularly in places like Italy with the mafia posing a direct threat to the state killing Falco and Amgos Alino, that there were emerging actors on the international stage and some in fact saw corporations in this regard, which seemed to be beginning to show signs of agency at the international level, of acting independently of states, of contesting their power, of controlling violence, deploying violence in interesting ways, and increasingly across borders in Eastern Europe, in Latin America, to some extent West Africa, there were there were at least in the minds of some Western intelligence analysts growing signs of the emergence of these transnational groups. So we get to 1999 and the US and Italy pushed for the creation of an international framework to deal with organized crime for the first time, the so-called Palermo Protocol. But then just as that's beginning to be implemented, we have 9-11. And suddenly terrorism takes over as the bogeyman on the international stage. So the focus is no longer on organized crime as the shared other, apart from states, the enemy of all mankind. Now it's on terrorism. And organized crime pretty rapidly recedes into the background. People who worked on organized crime in all the bureaucracies at the time have told me they essentially had to frame everything they were doing in terrorism terms to get any access to resources or to policymakers' attention. But the contrast between the way the UN dealt with organized crime and the way it began dealing with counterterrorism was quite strong. So the organized crime framework, the Palermo Protocol, was a classic treaty, is a classic interstate consent of all involved approach to dealing with this external actor. Whereas the approach that the UN began to adopt on counterterrorism was really quite different. Many of your viewers will know all about the tendency of the Security Council to adopt a more legislative approach to dictate norms that member states would have to internalize. And that began to be seen quite quickly as a sign of UN overreach. And then, of course, we had the slide into Iraq, the tragedy there, the very strong sense that the West had melded the concept of or really adulterated the concept of counterterrorism for quite different and distinct purposes. And then all the very difficult issues with the relationship between the US and the NAN, I think, and the NAN was really at a low point in his secretary of generalship at the time the panel was working. It was seen as an opportunity for a reset, a reframing and a reminder that there was this other way of doing business. So I think it was partly about reminding the international community that had become rather preoccupied with terrorism that if we were thinking in long-term trends, the changing threat posed by organized crime was worthy of attention. But I think it was also a gentle way to remind the community of states, of members of the United Nations, that there was this other law-based way of cooperating to deal with these external non-state actor threats. That's how I see it really as an opportunity for the SG to remind the membership of the potential of the UN in that way. I wonder whether, I mean, if we take the story forward and how the nature of the threat has evolved, and I wonder also whether the potency of the threat and the ways in which it has been affected by technological change, and we didn't discuss that now, but 2004 it makes us or me at any rate begin to look old because that's quite a long time ago and quite a great deal has happened already since then. And I wonder whether there is another dimension to, I mean, I totally share your understanding of this partly being a reset and drawing attention to the non-going threat. But what other developments, perhaps already at the time, but even since then have given sort of add and urgency to the ability of transnational organized criminal networks to operate and pose a threat? Yeah, I think you're absolutely right, Matt, to start with this idea of technological change. So already in the Palermo Protocol and the focus on transnational organized crime, there was a recognition that organized criminal groups that had traditionally been seen as fairly parochial and a problem for individual states to deal with were tapping into the mechanisms, the technological infrastructure of communications of lower cost transport, the regulatory infrastructure around globalization to transnationalize. And that's a very important empirical part of the story. But when you look back at the depictions of transnational organized crime in those days, to be frank, they seem a little quaint. And the way that we treated this issue in the zeitgeist, you go back and watch the blockbusters of the 1990s. And the villains in those movies tend to be essentially classical organized crime writ large on a global stage. And what I think we missed in that story at the time was the way that organized crime tapping into that global system of globalization would actually change the relationship between the actors in those quote unquote criminal groups and elites, political and business elites, because many of the things that the organized criminal groups wanted to get out of globalization, in particular, the disembedding of capital from local territorial control. So tax havens, the ability to move capital offshore, the ability to work through shell companies. All of that infrastructure was equally something of interest to political and other, in some cases, for example, military elites around the world. So it led to the emergence of this kind of dislocated disembedded to use John Rugby's term, or to turn that on its head, neoliberal globalization, where elites were existing on a transnational plane, but not necessarily anchored into local tax structures or local security structures to control governmental power. And so it's that shift in the nature of the governmental system that comes with globalization that I think we missed in our earlier narratives around this, and that has had a pretty profound effect for our understanding of what this means from a security perspective. Now, I don't mean by emphasizing this transnational aspect to suggest that this doesn't have a local aspect. What we see you and we look at organized crime is that, like politics, it's all very, very local. It's often about control down to the level of city blocks and the provision of services. They might be very simple social or market regulation services. It might be the provision of violence itself, that's the key service that's needed, or the control of violence. But what we see time and again from, for example, Kingston in Jamaica, through to Afghanistan, through to some of the conflicts in Africa is that local armed groups, when they get access to the infrastructure of globalization to transnational trafficking networks for arms, in some cases for people for drugs, they can tap into those flows and their control of territory allows them to extract rents from controlling the passage of goods or value through that territory. And it just transformed the game and allowed them to move up the value chain to develop wealth and power and military capability that they hadn't previously been able to develop, making them rivals to states in many places for the control of legitimate violence. And I say the control of legitimate violence because it's not just control of violence, they often compete in the sphere of legitimacy. And this is where, in a way, paradoxically, we actually come back to the transnational story, because I think our failure earlier on to foresee the convergence of criminal methodologies with the methodologies of state controlling elites, and indeed with intelligence services has meant that we weren't prepared for the convergence of statecraft and criminal activity, particularly around subversion and the use of information operations, the use of compromise and blackmail and extortion are on a really industrialized scale, and often working through criminal actors. Now, this has a long history where we can go back, as I did in my book Hidden Power, to look at the way that, for example, the US worked through the mafia to achieve both military and political objectives offshore. And in fact, we have some evidence from the archival record that some of those techniques were directly learned by the CIAM before at the OSS from the British and the French who were using the same techniques in the Middle East. But I think it was tactical at that point. And what we see now is a more strategic convergence of strategic thinking and methods between some of the criminal groups and some of the, some states in their development and deployment of power internationally. But I think that, in a way, you sort of mentioned your book Hidden Power. And of course, what you just mentioned goes to the heart of that, which I think is one of the most significant and important contributions that hold relationship between criminal and political power. And in a way, you're challenging sort of very traditional notions of crime being fundamentally essentially about profit making, that there is a much more complex relationship. I think another aspect of that, which you do bring out though, that if this is the nature of the problem, and of course, we're talking a little bit in generalities, we haven't mentioned any countries or groups or anything, but if the nature of the problem has changed, then some of the traditional state-centric law enforcement mechanism for dealing with that, treaty-based legalistic approaches are themselves going to be difficult and of limited value and problematic. And I wonder whether what you are suggesting, not necessarily how to deal with the problem, but how do we adjust, how do the UN, for example, adjust to the reality of the changing nature between criminal and political power? And again, I think we are very careful, as opposed to the two of us are not mentioning specific names, but there are certain countries that have key member states of the United Nations, not just the United Nations, but permanent members of the Security Council that are often been drawn into the debate about the interface between criminal and political power. Indeed, your book and your thesis opens with a wonderful quote from the former director of the CIA, which I can't remember at the moment, which goes right to the heart of the problem. So I wonder what you think the broader implications of this shift really are? Yeah, that's a penetrating question. The quote that you reference is a wonderful quote from an appearance, as you say, a former CIA head before Congress, an inquiry, talking about how if you run into a certain well-dressed gentleman in a hotel lobby on the banks of Lake Geneva and have a conversation, and he essentially makes you an offer to do X or Y, you may leave that conversation not really knowing if you've dealt with someone in the commercial intelligence business, in the state intelligence business or the criminal intelligence business, or indeed if it's one person playing all three roles. And he being American, he's talking there about a Russian adversary. But I also made the point, I think fairly early in the book, that if you look at the five permanent members, we can actually find, with fairly high confidence, episodes in their fairly recent past for each of the five permanent members, where they've worked quite deliberately through criminal groups to develop and project power internationally. So I don't think it's just empirically, it doesn't necessarily make sense to see this as emerging from a particular national or even bureaucratic culture. These techniques, it's a bit of an arms race to develop and deploy these techniques between different security intelligence services. But what I do think is interesting and is going on now is, to come back to the earlier part of your question, Matt, is this challenge that the emergence of criminal methods in fairly nakedly in the politics of some countries, and I would argue, even in the last four or five years in the United States, the challenge that poses to our conception of a liberal international order. Now, some people would argue that the UN Charter is not a particularly liberal document, that the human rights agenda frankly came along later and has been in some ways overlaid over what is essentially a fairly realist and balanced and power spheres of influence-based document. But it's quite clear now that if we're going to accept an intertwining of political and criminal methodologies internationally, it is a real challenge to our conception of a rule of law, both domestically and certainly internationally. And we now have certain powers, and I'm thinking openly here of China, that are projecting a vision of legalized international relations that certainly western scholars say translates better as rule by law than rule of law, and which has at its core a vision of common humanity of mankind or humankind that is very much based on the horizontal relationship between states and not interfering in the vertical relationship between states and their citizens. And that's a fundamentally different proposition, I think, going forward, including for how we regulate the relationship between states on the one hand, non-state armed groups using criminal methods on the other hand, and people. If foreign states are not, if it's not legitimate for foreign states to look inside that triangle, then it leaves much greater space for people to be exploited and ruled through criminal and or violent means. I wonder whether I might move on, although it is very much related because you touched on it, to look at, and it isn't really discussed at length in the high-level panel report, but how the sort of operational environments and settings into which UN have found themselves thrust, either as peace-building missions or peacekeeping missions, have often been distinguished by the presence of criminal networks engaged either in opportunistic criminal violence of a more systematic kind. Now, you have written in the past, I think, very interestingly about the kinds of challenges that poses for the UN or for UN field operations, one of which, I mean, you mentioned earlier the competition for legitimacy, particularly in very weak and fragile states where the state is unable or never has, perhaps, provided sort of fundamental public goods that you and I expect from the state, that void has been felt by criminal networks and therefore they enjoy a degree of legitimacy. I wonder whether you can sort of spell out a little bit the nature of the challenge faces facing you and UN in some of these missions, but also, I mean, you know this much better than I do, how they have sought to respond to it, I mean, generating reports, thinking it through, and just what options there are. I mean, I think you have mentioned in the past that the root of combat, as it were, might not be the right one simply because you don't have the resources to do it, but also if you do decide to combat organized crimes in these zones, you are actually provoking a reaction locally because they enjoyed legitimacy and destabilizing the mission and making things more difficult. I wonder what your thoughts are on the way that whole debate has evolved. You fell out there, James. Can you hear me? You froze briefly, James. Matt, hello. Hi, James. That's fine. I can hear you again. Can you hear me? Yes, sorry about that and sorry to your listeners. So to come to your question, I think the challenge here is twofold. The first is actually a challenge in terms of the ability of the UN to compete with these groups in conflict environments. And I'll come to that in a minute, but where I want to actually start is the second part of the challenge, which is really a challenge of perception. That it's going to be hard to compete if you can't actually see the adversary and understand its capabilities and indeed its intent. And when I started working on these issues in the UN context, I'd previously worked as the head of the Transnational Crime Unit in the Australian Attorney General's Department. And when I came to the UN context, it was around 2005, so soon after the high-level panel. And what I realized at the UN very quickly was that this issue was actually deeply marginal in the sense that the state representatives, and even I would say many, if not the vast majority of UN officials in the secretariat and certainly funds programs and agencies, saw organized criminal groups, saw organized criminal activity as really peripheral to the central issues of the day. And what I came to understand fairly soon was that the UN is a club of by and for member states. And these aren't member states. So just as the UN is kind of reluctant to take corporations on their own terms, it was reluctant to take these groups on their own terms. Everything was seen through the lens of seeing like a state. And so there was a lack of awareness, I would say, of the reality on the ground of the actual governing power that many of these groups exercise, particularly in or even in because this is where the UN does have eyes and ears and boots on the ground, even in organized crime, sorry, in armed conflict contexts. And in those contexts, what we often saw was groups that might have a political manifestation or agenda or be perceived by the UN as fairly classical insurgents or non-state armed actors were because of this same logic of globalization that I talked about before, increasingly being drawn into organized criminal activity. Didn't mean they were necessarily giving up their political face or the political aspirations, but parts of the group would be increasingly sucked into the criminal activity. Those parts would become richer, more powerful, more important for the military capabilities, the access to munitions and weapons, and begin to dominate, as we saw, for example, in Northern Ireland, begin to dominate the agenda, the internal agenda, the organization of the armed group, even as the outside was ostensibly still a political military framing. And in the high-level panel, this was framed in terms of state failure. So I think that tells you the extent to which it's all seen from the perspective of the state, and there's a vacuum here, there's nothing there. Therefore, the policy prescription is to project the state back into that space, not recognizing that there might actually be a governing entity or an entity. That's fine, James. Can you hear me? You're coming back in again. I've lost your sound. No worry, I can hear you. Can you hear me? Okay. Yes, I can now. No problem. So I apologize. No worries. Something's clearly unstable here. I was just saying there's a great new paper by Chris Blatman and others, looking at what happens when a state projects power into a space that it believes is ungoverned or potentially right for criminal governance. And classically, we might think if the state projects power, then the criminal actor is going to back off. But what they find is actually the opposite. Amongst them, there are many, many rich findings in this hugely important paper. But they find that this is what I want to pull out here. They find that actually that's the moment when the criminal actor, if it's looking to exercise governmental power, and it may not want to be the top political dog, but it might want to exercise influence from below as a hidden power, as I say in my book. That's where it ups its game and it increases its service provision. It increases its security provision to remind the customer base, the citizens of what it can do for them. When the state's not there competing for that customer base, often it neglects those people to some extent. It just does the minimum necessary to maintain their loyalty. But so the UN wasn't necessarily expecting that kind of pushback when it projected power into these places. And what we find time and again is that it really struggles to read that strategic environment. It literally does not have the staff with the skill sets to understand what's going on in the illicit and informal economies and to read who has power in those economies in situations which the state and formal markets are not well established. So it really struggles whether it's in Afghanistan, in the connections between insurgents and the drug trade, or in Eastern DRC understanding the relationship between different armed groups and informal and illegal trade in minerals and later in wildlife, or in Haiti looking at the way that local armed groups engage in criminal activity, extortion, kidnappings. It really struggles to read who is who, what is what, and to project a strategic dynamic scenario where to war game it out. If I go in with this much power, then now come back with this. It just struggles time and again and misses I would say a big part of the game of what's going on in those places as a result. The one place where there is a really interesting experiment is in Haiti between about 2004 and 2008 where the UN does actually seem to learn. And this has a lot to do with the command structure and the force structure at the time with a big Brazilian presence that had learned from a pacification of the favelas, in particularly Rio, not a great track record necessarily. A lot of harm projected onto civilians in some of those domestic operations. And that is repeated, some would say, in the bidonville of Haiti, that there are overly heavy-handed military operations. There's actually a UN special rapporteur, Philip Alston, who at the time looks into whether there are civilian deaths caused by the UN operation in Haiti. But there is internal learning within the force and they do develop a more sophisticated plan of operations, including use of criminal informants to develop criminal intelligence, a fusion centre within the force to combine different forms of intelligence, use of aerial surveillance to understand what's going on in these very dense favela like bidonville. And there is a more successful military intervention, highly revealing about what it takes kind of investment and capabilities required to achieve success militarily against these groups. But then, no follow-up. Well, that's a little unfair. There is follow-up, there's some work around decommissioning of these groups, attempts to adapt DDR methodologies. But they're not successful and frankly, they don't receive the same kind of resourcing and follow-through as the military effort achieved. And my article on this is called the futility of force to make this point, that you may be able to develop an effective military intervention against these groups. But ultimately, they do operate, not just on a military, but on an economic and indeed a small P political level. And if there is not a political strategy for winning the loyalty of the people in those places back to the state, then over time, these groups or new groups using the same methods will emerge that occupy that space, that develop the governmental power that that gap offers. Well, I think your point that you made initially about the UN being a club by and for member states is critical. And I think it remains a sort of fundamental obstacles to thinking and getting a grasp of the strategic environment you just sketched. I mean, you might find willingness among some members of the secretariat and some evidence within missions that they realize the situation is more complex. But that fundamental membership nature of things, I think, is always going to be a bit of a challenge. I wonder, James, thank you so much for spending all this time. I do want to bring us up, if I may, to your current work. Going back and having looked again this morning at the high level report we mentioned a few times, in terms of specific examples, it does actually refer to human trafficking. It doesn't say all that much. And I think the recommendations for how to tackle it are very sort of limited. But you are now involved in working specifically on this issue, trafficking and modern slavery. And as you suggested in a separate conversation with me, you do see elements of sort of criminal governmentality shaping trends here as well. And I wonder whether you could say a little bit about that work. I mean, the scourge of modern slavery is a horrific one, and it certainly does deserve attention. I wonder whether you could give us a sense of your current work on this. Yeah, happily, Matt. I was one of these people who sort of found their way sideways into this issue. And only when I really grappled with its scale did I have a sense of how it dwarfed some of the other things I've been dealing with. The ILO estimates that 40.3 million people were enslaved in 2016. And just to give you a sense, that's roughly one in every 185 people alive today. When you think about that, that's basically the size of the high school class that I had when I went through high school. It's pretty astonishing. Now, it's not, it's very unlikely that any of those 185 people I went to school with have been enslaved, which means that in somebody else's high school class, two people were enslaved. It's not distributed evenly around the world. It's somewhat uneven, but it's also pretty astonishing just how ubiquitous it is. In the UK, for example, the official estimate from the government is that there are 10 to 13,000 people in modern slavery at any given time. And some estimates actually suggest that that might be an order of magnitude too low. So it might be up over 100,000. And what we mean by modern slavery is essentially that one person is being controlled as if they were owned by another. So it's a total loss of agency. The great theorist of slavery, Orlando Patterson, described that as social death. Now, the UN comes at this from multiple different angles, depending on the particular framing of different funds, programs and agencies. So the main frame for the last 20 years has been around trafficking in persons. Seeing this as a form of exploitation conveyed by transnational organized crime, the connection to the issue we've just been discussing. But for many, many decades, the ILO has been working on the related problem of forced labor. And also in the in Geneva, in the UN human rights infrastructure, we have a whole separate set of mechanisms dealing with slavery per se and slavery, slavery like practices is the term of art. And the danger here is that you have different parts of the UN holding different parts of the elephant and not necessarily seeing the big picture. So when you start to look at that big picture, you begin to realize that while there is no doubt there are very powerful, dangerous transnational organized criminal groups involved in both people trafficking and people smuggling, the difference being that smuggling doesn't necessarily lead to exploitation. There's also deep structural drivers, particularly in the way we organize global value chains, supply chains, that allow the wholesale systemic exploitation of vulnerable people in weak institutional environments. And it might not be organized crime that's generating this outcome, it might actually be legitimate business. So legitimate business that is looking to offshore work down through long global supply chains, again, a product of globalization to go back to what we discussed earlier, and is increasingly disarticulating the structure of that supply chain so that the large parts of profit are captured at the top. And most of the risk falls to the workers at the bottom of the supply chain, who work often in very precarious conditions. So, for example, the iPhone, you know, 40% of all of the profit goes to Apple, everything else is divvied up along the supply chain. But the people who mine the coltan and other precious minerals in eastern DRC, back to that actual UN intervention case we're talking about earlier, are getting in some cases literally nothing, they're often working off a bonded debt, and in many other cases, next to nothing. Or take the case in the UK of Boohoo, the online fashion retailer, you know, that's an interesting case, because it's not a case where we have a long transnational supply chain. It's the internet and internet sales that have been the technological change, driving exploitation, just within the shores of the UK, but still the same situation of weak regulation, allowing exploiters to exploit vulnerable people. In the UK case, they're often migrants with limited language skills and working in informal and poorly regulated work contexts. So, when as a social scientist, as I began to understand the scale of these problems, you know, it was quite a magnitude different to some of the issues I dealt with previously in terms of the scale of abuse and its ongoing nature. And then as a policy researcher, I began thinking, well, what are the levers that we're not pulling to achieve change here? And one of the things, when I was at the UN University of Centre Policy Research, we identified two levers that we thought needed to be brought into this discussion. One was high finance. So, when we look at how abolition has been achieved at scale, historically, high finance has played a key role, including in the UK. Abolition in the West Indies was only achieved through the largest syndicated loan in history at that point, organised by the Rothschild Bank, which was only paid off by the UK taxpayer about eight or 10 years ago, the last interest on that loan over 180 years. And the money, of course, didn't go to pay off or compensate the slaves or the victims. It was to buy out the slaveholders, to give them enough income to move them away from that business model and into one based on free labour. So we worked at UNU to develop an initiative called Finance Against Slavery and Trafficking, which works with banks and investors and governments all around the world. We have an initiative in Asia Pacific where institutional investors with around six trillion US dollars under management are working with companies to address these issues. And then the other big lever that we didn't see being pulled was the development sector. When you look at the practice of development actors, it's kind of back to what we were just talking about with the UN and the high level panel. Organised crime and trafficking and forced labour are seen as very peripheral issues, not central to key questions of productivity, GDP growth, labour force participation, things like that. So we've just published a report called Developing Freedom, which shows how slavery actually impedes development. We identify 10 different vectors, 10 drags on development. And of course, the corollary of that is that if you tackle those drags, if you remove them, they're actually going to unleash significant growth by giving people back their agency, their control of their own labour and how the money from that labour is consumed, spent or invested, you have all of these beautiful knock on effects that run not only throughout the economy, but actually, we have strong empirical evidence through multiple generations. In Africa, for example, one Harvard economist has identified that 72% of the income disparity between African countries and other developing nations is directly attributable to the participation of that country in the transatlantic slave trade, because there's enough diversity in Africa that you can see how much the participation for how long in that transatlantic slave trade affected its multi-generational growth, innovation, productivity, female participation, population growth, all of these things are factors that tie into sustainable development over time. So it's been very eye-opening for me and really, again, goes to this central point that when we're thinking about organised criminal activity at scale, we have to be very careful not to see the problem just within the narrow confines of our traditional mindsets and our state-based approaches. In this case, it's all about seeing how the system develops along the global value chain and organising responses along that value chain, which requires not just interstate cooperation, but working, for example, with business in a pretty profoundly new way, a real challenge for the global development system. That's an extremely good note on which to end. I think I will get from you the detailed references of that report, which I know is about to come out if it hasn't been released yet, because I think there'll be a lot of interest to what strikes me as fairly path-breaking work on the challenge of modern slavery, looking both at high finances that have a development side contribution to it. Thank you. It has actually just come out. It's at developingfreedom.org, if anyone wants to visit. Excellent. I'll put that up on the site as well. James, thank you so much for taking time to do this. I thought it was absolutely terrific and will be of great interest to students and others who watch this, partly because it ties into so many of the different sort of weekly thematic issues we've been looked at from specifically organised crime, but also to efforts at peace building and state building, the political economy of conflict, and how these things are tied together. As you rightly said, one of the challenges we face is to try to step outside the tendency to look through traditional prisms of analysis, and particularly a state-centric framework, which is still very powerful, at least because the UN is set up that particular way. But once again, James, thank you so much, and we will no doubt ask you back again. Hopefully, you can come to London and we'll be there in sort of physical presence after this wretched pandemic is all over. I would appreciate that. I'd enjoy that. And, Matt, before we sign off, just a thank you not only for this opportunity, but for your guidance and mentorship over quite a long time now, I guess, that's part of a decade. And it's really been a pleasure. And to anyone out there who's ever thinking of trying to convince Matt to be a PhD supervisor, do it. He's fantastic if you can get him. Thanks so much. Thank you very much.