 Welcome to Economics and Beyond. I'm Rob Johnson, President of the Institute for New Economic Thinking. I'm here today with Margaret Heffernan, a former CEO who's written six books, which include Willful Blindness and her most recent book Uncharted, which will be released in the United States in September, and I believe is out in the UK right now. She's a professor at the University of Bath. She's been a good friend of Inet. I remember her speaking at our 2015 conference on finance and society, and also doing breakfast with our board and Global Partners Council. And I'm very excited to have you here again today in the context of this world. Thanks for joining me, Margaret. Well, thank you for inviting me, Robert. It's great to be talking to you again. Yes, well, we are at a very, very challenging time to be talking and thinking. The pandemic here at the latter part, latter 3rd of July in 2020, has shaken the world and the world of ideas and the world of action and practice to its roots with the spread of disease, with the unmasking of the failure of some of our social organization and systems of the unsettling nature of things like the 8 minutes and 46 seconds as we watch George Floyd be killed by a policeman, murdered without opposing. There's a call to action in our society now. And I couldn't think of anybody better to bring on with me to talk to my audience about what it is that you see, what it is that you think we must now do, what you see people doing that you're inspired by and what is missing, or what is happening that you find dreadful. But how do you envision the challenge that we all face at this point? Well, I think we've had a big moment of comeuppance, I have to say, and I don't say that with any pleasure. I mean, I started work on Uncharted probably about four years ago, because I was very, I suddenly became very sensitive to the fact that the way people were thinking about the future struck me as all wrong. They would come up and ask me what's going to happen about Brexit or Trump or something. And the implication was that I would know, and I used to think, well, why do you think I'll know? I mean, the future hasn't happened yet. So how could I know about something that hasn't happened? And I guess as I sort of started thinking about this, I realized that we have a lot of ways of thinking about the future, which, to put it bluntly, none of them really works. But we believe in them because we can't tolerate the idea that we don't know the future. And so we become rather addicted to prediction and a kind of magical belief that some people or some organizations or some tools or some gadgets can show us what doesn't exist. And it was a kind of interesting inverse from my work on Welfare Blindness where I was thinking, why can't people see what's there? This was thinking about why do people think they can see what isn't there? And so I think when I was working on the book, I really felt, wow, this is going to be an uphill struggle because I'm taking one of people's most comforting fantasies, namely the idea that we can know the future, and I'm taking it away from them. And they're not going to like me for this, and this is going to be an uphill battle. I do have this really passionate belief that you have to write what you believe to be true. So I thought, well, everybody may hate me, but I'm going to persevere because I believe this to be true. And then kind of out of the blue, absolutely unpredictable, most of all by me, the pandemic hits and everybody gets a crash course in uncertainty. And so I don't think it's quite such a hard sell anymore, this notion that we don't know the future. But I think people are still rather confused about why not. And I think it's important to understand why not, because otherwise we risk collapsing back into our kind of comforting fantasies that no, no, no, with enough data we could know, or if we find the right pundit we could know, or if we use the right technology we could know, or all these kind of palliative delusions. And so I think this is a really chastening moment. I mean, in so many ways, of course, but specifically, you know, relative to INET's mission, specifically around this need to understand why we can't see the future and to start having deeper, better conversations about in the light of that if we can really, really absorb that, how we can not be passive, but start to think much better about where we are and where we could be going. The tradition and economics of the mathematics of dynamic programming and all of these things I think contribute to the illusion of certainty. And I've often, I've often talked about how I thought economics had some critical flaws. The first one I always said was the sins of commission where you do your, you're actually like what the economist models, the price incentives gets you to do marketing rather than truth telling. Yeah. And I think of omission. When you know what the powerful want to hear and you hide from challenging it with the, what you might call your honest vision of what is the public good. Yes. There's, go ahead. I think, I think willful blindness was about sins of omission. And I think uncharted is about sins of commission really. Yeah. Yeah. And then, but I would also say there are two other dimensions. I call dancing in the monastery where people play games with tools to demonstrate their dexterity and avoid questions. That's, that's part of the sins of omission. But the other sin of commission actually involves the audience. And you said it in the, in the opening, which is people yearn for certainty. Yeah. And that appetite is there. And to get up and say, I'm an expert and I honestly don't know. Often leaves you shoved aside where somebody who dogmatically asserts to know. Yeah, provides more gratification in the short run. Until they are exposed to have been false. And I find it very treacherous, particularly for young economists who are trying to, which you might call build a career to develop the discipline of resisting, which you might call becoming that dogmatic filler that provides false gratification. And the famous philosopher John Dewey wrote a book, The Quest for Certainty, where he pointed out some of these pitfalls. And I mean, even Jeremy Bentham wrote a book called The Theory of Fictions. And so there are all kinds of people who have touched on this, which you might call temptation to be of value in the moment. But, you know, in a way that's false or will be unmasked as is worse than neutral, but actually quite harmful. Yeah. And I sense, like, like I said, this has been a big thing with Frank Knight and Keynes's treatise on probability and so forth being the text cited. But I think, I think at this juncture, you're taking it into a world that is demonstrating what statisticians would call the ridiculous notion of ergodic stability. Yeah. Well, I think that's right. And I think that, you know, from my perspective, economics has always suffered from physics envy. You know, this desire to be able to come up with laws that work with the same degree of predictability as the law of gravity. And of course, you know, physicists themselves will say, well, you know, even the law of gravity or the theory of gravity is only good until we disprove it. You know, so even they don't have this kind of, you know, intransigent belief in certainty, they say, you know, laws are just the knowledge we have so far. But it seems to me, I mean, and I've written about the kind of early history of the forecasting industry where there absolutely was this ambition and desire to be good enough at forecasting to have enough data that it would be like physics. One of the early fathers of forecasting was, was Roger Babson, who collected the biggest connect collection of memorabilia by Newton in America. So he was convinced he was Newton when it came to economic forecasting. Sadly, he was completely wrong. But that didn't stop him sounding very certain and persuading millions of people that he was very, very certain. And I think, you know, the, I think there are quite a lot of, you know, kind of obvious inheritors of that guys in the, in the world of punditry. But I think a new addition to this is the world of big tech and the degree to which we have, you know, not just economists, but all of us have been persuaded that we as individuals are only a collection of data. And with enough data, everything about us can be known. And everything about all of us can be known and therefore we can know the future. And therefore you get these preposterous forecasts about, you know, driverless cars are here, you know, going to be here in 2017 and 2018 and 2019 and so on. And, you know, tomorrow, you know, this is the year of virtual reality and, you know, we hear it see it now, you know, this is the year when everybody stops using offices. I mean, just the morass of data driven propaganda is everywhere. And what's so dangerous about it is that people without a significant amount of technological confidence are deeply intimidated by this and think, well, it must be true. And equally, they invest in technology, a kind of authority and objectivity, which is absolutely not justified. It's just, I mean, they're just being sold snake oil. And so I find this really alarming because it suggests that, well, okay, somebody knows the future. It's not us. So we may as well let them get on with it. And I think this form of surrender is tremendously dangerous. Yeah. Remember a quote I read in a book about rock and roll music by a man who was quite controversial, I believe in the Middle East named R.C. Zainer at Oxford. And his quote was, loss of faith in a given religion does not by any means imply the eradication of the religious instinct. It merely means that the instinct temporarily repressed will seek an object elsewhere. Yeah. And I think there's a gentleman from the Pennsylvania professor, I believe it Villanova named Eugene McCarraher who's recently written a book called The Enchantments of Mammon, how capitalism became the religion of modernity. And I see so much, like you say in this Silicon Valley presentation of all knowing and big data and new patterns that feels like magical thinking and it kind of reminds me of the scene in the Wizard of Oz, where Toto pulls back the curtain. Yeah. And you find that the wizard, you know, when Dorothy says he's a very bad man, he says, No, I'm a very good man. I'm just a very bad wizard. And maybe the economics profession has to go to confession right now about the quality of its wizardry. Well, I think that's right. But I mean, I have to say, you know, that scene in Wizard of Oz has been in my mind quite a lot. You must have been reading my mind. You know, in Silicon Valley, because my goodness, you know, that's exactly what's happening there. And, you know, and something very, very interesting has happened in the tech industry, which is, you know, from, I guess, the mid 90s until maybe five years ago, perhaps the whole notion of internet technologies was based on this notion with enough data, we can predict everything. And I think what's really fascinating is that there's been a very subtle super quiet transition as people have actually come to understand that they can't, that it doesn't work, that we are more than data. And so what's happened is that now instead of trying to predict our behavior, now what you find is technologies trying to drive and dictate our behavior and cloak that under the guise of prediction. And this, I think, you know, it's implicitly authoritarian. It's extremely frightening. And it is about taking away from people their sense of agency and their capacity for action. And so essentially what it is, is it's an exploitation of the lust for certainty by those who want to give us the certainty they believe we ought to have. Mm hmm. Yeah, and we see a lot of arguments side effects. I know my friend Naomi Klein is talking about what she says we've gone from a green new deal to a screen new deal. Yeah. That with the pandemic now the centralized control and the security state and the invasion of individual privacy is a very, very daunting prospect for the next phase of civilization. I agree with her. And I think, you know, Shoshana Zuboff has done a spectacular job of collecting the evidence to that effect and to the, you know, the evidence that not only is that what's happening, but that is the plan. In your book, you, you take on many of the, you might call practices of economics, the use of models or historical analogy, or the ability to what you might call use evidence based analysis based on micro data. That it's like people are reaching for more and more and more ways of convincing you that they can find that. Yes, yes. And some of them are kind of ludicrous. I mean, there's an app out there that promises it can predict your child's future. And, you know, so that you could know at an early age, you know, whether your child's going to win a Nobel Prize. I mean, this is so preposterous. It's, it's, you know, you have to laugh at it, except the people fall for it because they do want to know if their kids win a Nobel Prize. You know, at a slightly but not much more serious level, you still have people using, you know, things like the Myers-Briggs personality typing tool, even though it has no statistical test retest validity. I mean, it is deeply shocking when you start looking at the intellectual flakiness of many of the tools being used in major corporations around the world. I mean, it's just, you know, you sort of, it's a little bit like, you know, children discovering that their parents aren't perfect. You think, oh my God, all these serious, well-paid grown-ups running the major institutions are depending on an awful lot of stuff that it just is not at all what it purports to be. And, you know, and I think that should be a moment of reckoning for all of us who pretend to manage or lead organizations, you know, to think about, well, is this good enough? Is this good enough for the people we manage, for the customers we serve, for the world that we impact? And I think in terms of thinking about the future, I think most of the tools that we use are woefully inadequate. And in some cases, deliberately so, and in other cases, I think, you know, there's a serious bunch of people working hard to make them better, but perhaps a little reluctant sometimes to call out their vulnerabilities. I remember in trying to understand, particularly the insurance industry, I'm not remembering the name, there was a professor of history at Princeton who wrote this book, and it was about how in the early 19th century, in an agricultural economy, what people had to predict was the crop cycle. Yeah. But as we moved on with durable capital goods, the horizon of what you might call of the yearning for forecast, beyond the crop cycle, into long extended periods, and many of the practices adopted in the forming of actuarial tables and other things were exactly like fortune tellers. We're exactly like poem readers. And yet, they had this veneer of science, and that somehow, what you might call long dated business decisions could be made with confidence. Yeah. And I wish I remembered, I'll have to find that, that study and not only share with you, but with our audience when we publish this podcast, but it was, it was uncanny. And it's interesting because the forecasting industry at the turn of the 19th century, you know, when it is when it's born is consciously modeling itself on farmers almanacs. So, so there is and Babson talked about his forecasts being a business barometer. So there is, from an early stage, this analogy with weather. And it's interesting because of course, weather forecasting is absolutely hands down the most sophisticated form of forecasting that we have. And, and of course, because it's all to do with things that are measurable, you can put probabilities against it, which helps a lot. But as we all know, weather forecasts are good to the degree that they're short term. So a five day weather forecast is really pretty accurate. And one day, weather forecast is very accurate and a kind of, you know, 12 hour forecast is very much more accurate. And exactly the same is true in all sorts of economic, financial and business forecasting too. And I think, you know, one of the things that really kind of sort of nerdy date point is stuck in my head was Phillip Tetlock's work into forecasting per se. And, and the sense and his sort of sense that actually, if you wanted good, solid, thoughtful, well informed forecasting that was as reliable as it can be. Probably the furthest out you can look is 400 days, if you're really, really good at this stuff. For the rest of us, it's about 150 days. And that made me think, well, hang on a second, what about every business in the world doing its three year and five year plan? You know, this is, this is on one level absurd. And it's especially absurd having sat in many boardrooms where these things were being scrutinized. It's especially absurd the degree of certainty, which is invested in these documents. You know that there is something about numbers that persuades us this is real. And therefore, everybody has to make the forecast, which is if you like quite an elaborate narrative fiction, the mission becomes to make the fiction true. But what people think they're doing is they're taking the truth and following it. And the distinction is pretty important. Because, of course, when something happens, a new discovery or a new virus, then the plan is revealed for what it is, which is a very complex hypothesis and no more. In the, how I say, history of grappling with these longer dated plans. I remember Peter Schwartz, the art of the long view where to use a economics analogy from Frank Knight. You tried to build scenarios team together, explore what you might call the range of potential outcomes that one could imagine. And I found that to be a useful exercise, especially with, you know, when embraced with humility. But it was useful to to stretch yourselves, but take your imagination, take your creative intuition into the game and explore. But, but the thing that as Knight emphasized is, you really can't assign probabilities. And as I look at, for instance, climate change coming on, I don't know how insurance companies can have any confidence in writing policies about things that are unprecedented and therefore not embedded in what we might call the bell curves of their actual But I think, you know, this really speaks to where we started, which is around uncertainty, which is, you know, we can be, we can be certain that certain that particular things are real. So we know we're confident that climate change is real. We're confident that epidemics are always with us. But specifically, the details are tremendously ambiguous. So we know climate change is real, but we can't predict which forests are going to catch fire next year, which areas of the country are going to flood and ruin crops. You know, with epidemics, we, because every epidemic is different and there's no profile of an epidemic. We know they will happen, but we cannot say when we cannot say where they'll start and we have no idea what the pathogen will be. And this means that you can't plan for them. But I would argue that that doesn't mean you can't prepare for them. And so I've written quite a lot about how do you prepare for these things which are generally certain and specifically ambiguous. And I think what becomes quite difficult about this for people is that preparing means accepting the enormous amount of ambiguity in the real world. And nevertheless, taking action, some of which will turn out to have been a waste of time, effort and money. And therefore in dealing with uncertainty, you have to accept the fact that you cannot afford to be efficient. Because it's in the nature of complexity and in the nature of uncertainty. That if you can't know everything, if you're too efficient, you erode all your capacity to respond and adapt. You need margins. You need quite significant margins for the surprises which you understand you cannot predict with the accuracy that you need. And this is a very different mindset completely at odds with the forecast plan execute and the efficiency mindset that has dominated business really since the Industrial Revolution. Let's explore. I think you're really hitting the nail on the head and this debate I hear within economics about efficiency versus resilience is the kind of phraseology that's used to convey awareness of that notion. And we've talked earlier about the tension or the anxiety of acknowledging uncertainty. What human actions, interactions related to stories, narrative, working in teams, you've got a lot of experience in the business world. What would you coach people to do with this challenge? Well, so I think this comes back to, you know, what your reference to Peter Schwartz and the art of the long now and the development since the 1970s of scenario planning. And I think, you know, there's several things interesting here. One is that scenario planning has never gone away. But it has morphed as you'd expect it to into very into different variations. And there's one variation which I think Pierre Wack who really led the kind of development of scenario planning at Shell would have been horrified by, which is the notion of scenario planning becoming entirely data driven and comprised of computer driven scenarios. And this would have horrified him because, you know, from the original concept, the whole point of scenario planning is that soft data and hard data have sort of equal status. So you're not just thinking about all those obvious factors which you can measure. You have to start thinking imaginatively about the factors that you can see but which aren't meaningfully quantifiable. So you have to think about trends in social mores, for example, you have to think about, you know, trends in transparency. You have to think about the spread and perhaps retreat of globalization. And these are things which you can weave into a narrative, but you can't really weave into a computer simulation. And I think that I did, you know, I talked to a lot of people doing all kinds of scenario planning around the world at the moment. And I found a couple of things. One is that in many corporations, senior executives find it almost impossible to do. Partly because they find the future too frightening and because they are absolutely ill equipped to deal with ambiguity. They simply can't think their way through it. And what I was told was actually the people who were very good at this are the younger people in the organization who play a lot of computer games because in computer games, ambiguity and choice is fun. But it's where all the pleasure lies, in fact. And so making choices and seeing what happens is part of their attraction. So they've kind of kept a much more nimble way of being able to imagine a whole range of possible outcomes. I think also, you know, to your point about teams, the very best scenario planning requires a very radically diverse group of people. And I wrote, I wrote at length about a scenario planning exercise in Mexico with probably the greatest diverse or most greatly diverse group of people ever assembled. You know, so this was terrorists and police chiefs and bishops and government ministers and indigenous women and business people and a lot of women working with victims of domestic violence. I mean, it was astounding, both in terms of experience and in terms of ethnicity and in terms of age. And I think for everybody who took part in it, it was an absolutely life changing experience and what they, you know, they came away with a great deal. One of the things they most came away with was a very clear understanding that there is no one story that can be told about Mexico, that the lived experiences of people in Mexico are so diverse that you get into a trap the minute you think that your experience is the experience. And of course, the minute you think that that one scenario is the outcome of the future, you're you're trapped. And so the critical thing about scenario planning is that you have a range of possible futures against which you do not put a probability rating. And where you aren't choosing, right? This isn't a menu. You're thinking about with each one, what would I do to prepare for this? What resources, abilities, capacities, would I need if this future were to happen? And so this goes back to this notion of preparedness, having to have, I think, a different place in status than planning. And I think the other thing I would say is I think the point of preparedness is, yes, I think it import parts resilience. But resilience is about the capacity to recover from shocks and surprises. I think if you do preparedness really well and if you do scenario planning really well, you get something better, which is what engineers call robustness, which says that even when terrible things do happen, you're still okay. And that, if you like, is the kind of gold standard of creating a truly robust organization, which is you have prepared well enough that when the thunder clap comes, the house stands firm. And you see this, for example, in the design of aircraft, which are over specifically over engineered to be robust, they're designed as robust systems. So they have more engines and they need and they have more operating systems than they need so that they don't have to be resilient, because they're over engineered for specifically for uncertainty. But that over engineering is just, it's anathema to a whole generation of business thinkers and leaders brought up on the theology of efficiency. You talking your book about a different way of seeing, well, I'll call it the artistic mind and how the artistic sensibility or grappling with the unknown and uncertainty differs from what you might call the methodological scientific mind. What is it that you're seeing in that artistic persona that you found inspiring? Well, the first half of my career I spent as a radio and then television producer working with a very large range of, you know, world-class artists, writers, directors, actors, designers, musicians, visual artists. And one of the things that struck me very early on was their exceptional sense of zeitgeist, that they were always ahead. And in a way that, you know, you just defied analysis, really. You know, they would write a play or a movie or a book about something that seemed exotic, except then it just happened. And, you know, of course, you know, a famous example of this, of course, is Margaret Atwood's Handmaid's Tale. But I can remember also, you know, in the United Kingdom, you know, films and plays coming out that somehow, although the production cycle of films and plays is two or three years. So these things would have been in production for two or three years, and yet they would come out at exactly the moment that this was exactly where the country was. And I just marveled at this for a long time. And so it led me to start watching how do artists think? How do they live? How do they experience their life? What is it that they're picking up on that we miss? And I think quite a lot of it is that they're exceptionally comfortable with uncertainty. So they will gestate for periods of time, kind of wandering around mentally and often physically. So Dickens, Virginia Woolf, Samuel Beckett, you know, these people walk all over the place and they're not walking to anywhere, right? And they're doing this mentally and physically. They're just looking, they're absorbing, they're just collecting stuff. And they don't know what it's for and they don't know what it will lead to, but they have confidence it will lead to something. And over time, which is not predictable, some ideas fall away and others remain. And something becomes an idea or the germ of an idea on which they want to start working. And when they do start working on that thing, it is an absolute risk because choosing that one topic means that all the other ones aren't going to get attention. And there is at that point, absolutely no evidence or guarantee that this is even going to be doable, never mind successful. And yet they do it. And when it's done, they rarely have any sense of whether it's successful or not. And public acclaim usually isn't the persuasive marker for them. They typically have a sense that actually they failed and therefore have to start again. And this patience with ambiguity is really something I was talking to the filmmaker, Mike Lee the other day, and reminded him that when we were talking about this, he came out with this beautiful sentence which was, what's happening is something happening. So these are people who who are even looking at nothing thinking what's underneath the nothing. What is this silence mean, for example. And I think we have an enormous amount to learn from this and that isn't because I think we can all be artists at all. I think that's sort of disrespectful. I do think that we could learn a lot about how they experience the world in order to teach ourselves how to be more aware and alert to what's going on. Yes. When several years ago, I was asked to make a speech in Calgary in Canada. And I often like to use references to people from the country or the region. So in that case, Joni Mitchell and others. But on the night that I was getting ready. I watched a film called stories we tell by a wonderful filmmaker named Sarah Pauley. And it was a documentary with a little bit of docudrama in for places where she didn't have film footage from her childhood. She quoted Margaret Atwood, who I've had the good fortune of meeting on several occasions from her production called amazing. Oh, excuse me, alias, grace. And the epigraph of this film was Margaret's statement. In the middle of a story, it isn't a story at all and only a confusion. A dark roaring a blindness a wreckage of shattered glass and splintered wood, like a house in a whirlwind, or else a boat crushed by the icebergs are swept over the rapids, and all aboard are powerless to stop it. It is only afterward. When that it becomes anything like a story at all. And you're telling it to yourself, or to someone else. I just thought that was such a beautiful way of seeing. It reminded me of my childhood I did a lot of sailing my father was a big sailor and we would do expeditions and there was a lot you didn't know, and you felt very small in relation to the world and the seas and the storms. And yet you had to function. You couldn't just go down and hide, or everybody would be less safe. But but the cohesion, the notion of a story never occurred until you got back to the bar. Yeah, had breathe the sigh of relief, and then could try to piece it together. Yeah. And I think. Yeah, it's funny. It's funny because I wanted at one point to call my book. The path is made by walking very much to articulate that idea of my publishers thought it was too poetic. But, but it is that sense you can't see the path until you finish and look back. In the middle it's exactly as your wonderful longer outward quote implies, you know that in the middle it just feels like a horrible storm, the end of which you can't see. And I think that's sort of how we feel in the middle of the pandemic right now. Right. Yes. Yes, that's where the context of our lives. Has forced us what you're not called to reject or move beyond the kind of mindset that people were using as crutches in the in the most in the recent past, or for maybe for a long time. Yes. And I do really think, you know, we are better off without the crutches. I think we can only really start making good sound decisions when we own up to what we can know and what we can't know. I absolutely appreciate that disabling people's comforting, comforting fictions is is a is feel you know it's a terrible thing to do. I mean, it's a very hard thing to lay aside the fantasies that have comforted you since childhood. I do feel really strongly that it's a kind of essential sacrifice, if you're going to then be in a position to see, actually, what are the other better, more powerful tools that you have to create a better world that acknowledges reality. You know, I feel particularly that, you know, in popular rhetoric that you can either have the solace of prediction, or you're just passive. And I think, you know, I feel really strong and strongly know you can get rid of the solace of prediction. I think you can start saying, actually, you have a lot of choices. You have a lot of opportunities. There are multiple places to intervene. And there are multiple allies to the left and right of you. But as long as you cling to this fantasy of certainty, you will not see any of those things. Yes. And in the human context, I'm very fond of a old adage. Abstraction enables cruelty. It doesn't necessitate cruelty. But abstraction and adopting false consciousness and false certainty moves you away from humanity and tenderness and sensitivity. And I think that that how how do I say has been the price of some of how we've organized our society and economy in recent years. I would agree with you and I would suggest that the abstraction of shareholder value has enabled enormous cruelty. I think your, your new book Uncharted, which I've had a chance to go through is what they might say just what the doctor ordered for an exploration of how we deal with anxiety and the inspiration and build a channel, build a place, build a way, I should say a way for moving forward and engaging in the learning and in the redesign and in the fortification of confidence. And I think it's an expertise, but very much in each other and the social institutions that are necessary to propel us forward rather than leave us in the ditch of despondency. So Margaret, I want to thank you for being with me today. I don't know if you have final thoughts you'd like to share with the audience, but this has been a great, great conversation. It always is with you Robert. I think, you know, one of the many things you and I have in common is for all that we're prepared to look at the bleak and the failing. I think we're both fundamentally optimistic. And I definitely am. I think we have the intellectual imaginative capacity to address the problems in front of us. The only thing that will hurt us is thinking that we can't. That's right. That's, that's a very good, very good insight. And many, many forms of legitimacy have been shattered. And the question is what that is inspiring and legitimate must be undertaken now, and to what you might call neglect. That call to action would be would be a tragedy. But I don't think we're there and with people like you providing us a compass. I'm And young people more and more invigorated and active all over the world. I mean, I'm a spellbound. When I see George Floyd protests in New Zealand. I just think there's a reawakening. Or an awakening in some cases that contains the seeds of hope. But you understand the process of channeling that energy into healthy design. And I think that's that's an extraordinary gift. Well, thank you for the opportunity to to discuss it with you. Well, we'll have to watch for a couple of three months or whatever and then meet here again and take it to the next. How you say address address the next round of challenges, but but for today. This has been great. And I want to I want to thank you again and encourage everybody to get your book uncharted even if you got to have a friend fly across the ocean and bring it to you. But I really think it's it's a it's it's stunning because you didn't write it in response to the pandemic. You wrote it in the pandemic illuminated. It's true. I started writing it four years ago. So there you go. Excellent. Excellent. Well, thanks. Thank you. We'll talk again soon. Bye bye. And check out more from the Institute for new economic thinking that I net economics.org.