Hope Is A Verb - Ada Palmer - A History of Saving the World

Episode Date: August 30, 2024

Meet Ada Palmer, a historian and science fiction author who believes that when we zoom out to a centuries scale, humanity has a lot to be hopeful about. This conversation is a time-travelling adventure, that explores how far we’ve come since the1600s, where we might end up in 2454 and why Shakespeare was worried about fake news too.  Find out more about Ada: www.AdaPalmer.com www.ExUrbe.com  Twitter: @Ada_Palmer Metaverse: @[e-mail] Bluesky: @adapalmer.bsky.social This podcast is hosted by Angus Hervey and Amy Davoren-Rose from Fix The News. Audio sweeting by Anthony Badolato at Ai3 – audio and voice.

Hope is a reminder. It's the fuel of your soul. It's so much more infused with action. Ability to see a much better future. You really have to earn it to have it. Hope is happiness. Welcome to Hope is a Verb, a podcast about what it takes to change the world through conversations with the people who are making it happen.

I'm Amy. I'm Amy. I'm Gus. And in each episode, we shine a spotlight on the ordinary heroes who are stitching our social fabric together, mending our planet, and creating solutions to some of today's biggest global challenges. In this episode, a history lesson on hope and why the past is the best roadmap we have for navigating our way to a better future. I think that's the story of the last 150 years.

We saved the world. We saved the world a couple of times. Now we have to save the world again. And it's going to be really hard. It was hard every time. But we did it. And we will did it. And we will do it.

Today's conversation is about as big picture as it gets. From where we were in the 1600s to where we might end up in 2454, historian and sci-fi novelist Ada Palmer is the ultimate travel guide. She's also the history teacher that you'll wish you had. She has this gift for bringing the past to life, especially the Renaissance, and she's passionate about teaching her students that history is far more than facts and figures. It's the ongoing story of humans changing the world. Instead of keeping history in the past, Ada uses it to create utopian futures. She's a time traveller,

equally at home in the murky corridors of power with Machiavelli and Medici's, as she is in an imagined world where global peace has reigned for 300 years, climate change has been solved, and everyone gets around in hypersonic flying cars. Like any

back cover blurb, we don't want to give away too much up front, except to say that if you've ever wondered whether Shakespeare worried about fake news, or if it's all been downhill for humanity since the Renaissance, well, you're going to love this conversation. Ada, welcome to the podcast. It's great to have you on the show. Is there anything good happening right now? There are a lot of bad things happening,

but there are a lot of good things happening. And I have to say, when I have to answer that question for people two-thirds of the time, I say something that Fix the News shared in the last newsletter. But there's a lot of other good things happening, except that a lot of them are things that are happening on the multi-century timescale rather than on the year or month time scale. And as a historian, I'm very comfortable with zooming way out. And I think it's one of the reasons that I tend to feel less panicky than a lot of people around me,

because I'm used to thinking about, well, are things getting better in terms of multi-centuries? Are the social projects that we as a species are working on advancing? And there the answers are so often yes. Do you think that people are kind of feeling more panicky now than usual? Is there something unusual about the time that we are in at the moment as opposed to maybe the fact that people are always feeling panicky, but maybe that's just the given? It's true that people are always feeling panicky, but maybe that's just the human. It's true that people are always feeling panicky.

I think that our current moment has a pair of things that are the reason it feels panicky. One of them is that it's always alarming to live or be in the time in which is the most chaotic within your own lived experience. Even if you're told, well, actually, 20 years before you were born, it was way worse than this. It always feels very alarming when there hasn't been anything of a comparable degree of crisis in your active, what I sometimes call politically aware memory.

And I spend a lot of time with undergraduate students. And this is absolutely the scariest time within their living memory. And when they say this is the worst it's ever been, the answer is yes. Within your experience, you're 100% right. I remember during the Hillary Trump final stages of the U.S. election, and a lot of my students saying, you know, sexism today is worse than it's ever been in history. To which the answer was, it is worse than it's ever been in your lived experience because the poison is coming out of the mud and showing itself. But boy, do I have things to tell you about 1820 and 1920. And did you know that your own grandmothers couldn't have a credit card or

take out a loan? And I think one of the things that everyone struggles with is that our emotions only judge based on our lived experience. Is this worse or better than what I have felt? And so I think that's half of why we have this sense of panic emotionally. I think the other half is the information revolution in which we exist right now. And there's always a sense of panic during an information revolution, which is one of the things that makes fixing the news so important.

And it always makes me think about Shakespeare because Shakespeare has multiple rants about fake news and news media accelerating and spreading bad rumors and politics being destroyed by it because Shakespeare was living through exactly what we were living through, which was an information revolution. In his case, it was the saturation of the printing press creating the first fast-paced news media world that his generation had known. And just like us, his generation had known. And just like us, news started moving faster. And every time news starts moving faster, it feels as if the world has more and worse events in it, because the news is getting to us faster. So Alison Gopnik, who's a professor of psychology and philosophy at Berkeley, I think

she calls these things like the printing press, but also the internet and AI, cultural technologies. It's not just about communication, it's about something larger. But she also says that we normally tend to figure out a way of handling these cultural technology revolutions. Are we going to figure this one out? Both yes and no. The answer is we always do figure out a way to handle them. And historians of information technology can confirm that ever since the printing press in 1450, we've been in a constant sequence of information technology revolutions. We've been doing this for 500 years. By this point, we are a species native to information revolutions. And every one of them has indeed had a point that the society catches up with it. But then if there's a next technology within the same lifespans of the same people, it takes first networks of news runners develop who take news from town to town, working with the printers. And so even though there wasn't a technology change, there was an infrastructure change.

The question of are we going to deal with these things, the answer is yes. But if they keep transforming rapidly, it's possible to never get to the window in which there isn't a new one that's in emergency mode. Because if they come fast enough, there'll always be one that feels like it's in emergency mode. Ada, you said when you zoom out on a century scale rather than decades and years scale, that things are not as bad as we think they are. Can you tell us on that scale, what's one thing that's going right for us at the moment? So I know a very classic one to talk about is disease. You know, everybody on earth can confirm that we're very proud that we eliminated smallpox and that we're close with polio and these other things. But there's a more fundamental step we've taken in terms of disease in that we really

understand what it is and how it works. And we understand how it's transmitted. And even if we don't handle it competently, right, let's imagine the scenario much like what we had, where we handled the COVID pandemic mediocrely. Nonetheless, we understood what it was. We understood how it worked. We understood what the steps were. And there is so much less fear and horror facing something where we understand what it is and can describe it and can feel that action can be taken on it. My big history specialty is the Italian Renaissance. During COVID, I found myself rereading Black Death materials. As one does. I do.

Partly because every journalist on earth was contacting people who worked on the period to say, if the Black Death caused the Renaissance, is COVID going to cause an economic boom? Which is a really terrible question with a long and complex answer. But it made me revisit, and some things are very much the same. There's an amazing letter between Machiavelli and his brother Toto, where Machiavelli is like, oh God, I was on a boat with a guy and I got exposed because I found out two days later that he had the plague. Now what do I do? And then his brother writing back with all the sort of dumb superstitious things you're supposed to do when

you're exposed and you're in that window that you don't know if you have it yet, which was exactly what it was like when we had tracing exposures. Notably, Machiavelli, of course, is not alive during the Black Death. We're talking about a century later, but much like COVID, the disease became endemic and constantly came back. Unlike COVID, they had no idea why. They had no idea how it worked. They had no idea whether this would change, and they really didn't know how to take any steps about it. So the difference between living in a world where we just don't understand, you know, they didn't understand why lightning strikes some houses and not others. Why do

diseases happen? Why do these foods make us sick and not other ones? The degree of fear that we escape through just having knowledge of what in the period they used to call the secret motions of things is enormous. And it's very useful to look at the history of philosophy of happiness and how often philosophers from ancient Greece through to the Renaissance, who was very interested in this, talk about how ignorance is a form of pain. And that's a form of pain that we have really, really moved forward on in a profound way. are imperfectly implementing disease control. Boy, do we understand. And boy, does that make our lived conditions so much less filled with terror than in a world that didn't understand. As I was doing the research for this interview, what struck me is that you are something of a time traveler. So you are a historian and you are a science fiction author. So you straddle both the future and the past. How do you do that? And how does that play out? Yeah. So one secret of science fiction is that actually nothing is more similar to the future than the past. It's a long period of time in which technologies show up, societies change. And in many ways, history is the secret handbook for

science fiction, because it's what gives us the tools to think about what are other ways societies could be set up? How would they change? How might technologies disseminate? Lots of fellow science fiction writer friends, even who don't formally have history degrees as I do, use and read voracious amounts of history because nothing prepares you better for imagining and thinking through the steps of how a future could be connected to our present. perfect preparation for that. And in fact, I chose to be a historian because I wanted to be a science fiction writer rather than having become a historian and then becoming a science fiction writer. I started writing science fiction fantasy when I was a tiny, tiny child and had to stand on tiptoe to reach the Heinlein juveniles on my dad's bookshelf in the most classic SF way. But history seemed to me the perfect way to study what I loved, which is the question of change over time and people over time and how we live not only in different moments,

but in different worlds, because what we believe is true changes over time. One of my favorite undergraduate professors, Alan Kors said, if you were a time traveler and you got stranded in the past, you'd be able to cope with learning the language. You'd be able to cope with figuring out a way to make a living and, and enter into the society. The hardest thing to get used to would be the fact that people think differently and they make their decisions about what is true or false or right or wrong on different criteria.

about what is true or false or right or wrong on different criteria. And the difference in mindset makes most historical eras much more alien to us than pretty much any alien that has ever appeared in Star Trek. So I love history because it's full of aliens. All right, I've got a question about that. I've read Terra Ignota and the societies in those novels think about gender in a way that was pretty alien to me. But I also thought there was something deeply human

about the way they were reacting to gender issues. When you're talking about a utopia, there are people who say that more gender fluidity doesn't count as progress. So how do you account for that? And more broadly, maybe here, could you talk about the role that science fiction plays in tackling social issues?

So in the terra ignota 25th century, one of the subtle complicated things that I'm doing is that it's a society that believes it has perfect gender equality and believes it's mostly worked gendered stereotypes out of things and doesn't use gendered language for everything but hasn't actually deeply done the examining and so there still is an enormous amount of gendered perception, making more men be powerful in politics than women and making people judge people differently based on perceived gender, which is an example of a future that has botched this. I think we can agree that no matter what form of gender

one believes is correct, it's progress for us to move toward a version that is more examined, more thought through, more consistent. I think the biggest contribution science fiction makes is that when we think about how bad a thing can get, we have a whole lot of dystopias in addition to the real terrible ways things have been so that we can be on guard against more things than just things that have been real. And it also means that we fight a lot of moral battles before we get to them. So we had stories about cloning and the ethics of cloning and the disasters of cloning going badly for about 50 years before Dolly the Cloned Sheep was real. And it meant the instant Dolly the Cloned Sheep was real

and this technology was real, people were already equipped with enormous numbers of, okay, what are the ethics of organ farming a clone of yourself? Because we had explored those things so much, right? We have think tanks now for discussing questions of civil rights for artificial intelligences. And that's a debate that has started many decades before there are real artificial intelligences. Japan issued a birth certificate to Astro Boy in 2003, partly to celebrate how much Astro Boy is great. But

Astro Boy was originally written as a civil rights story and is about robots campaigning to have civil rights and trying to get the vote and trying to get liberty and to not be enslaved, not be chattel. And one of the reasons Japan issued an official birth certificate to him in 2003 was to say in advance, when there are real artificial intelligences, they have citizenship. That's one of the things that science fiction does, is it means that we get this going in advance. And we don't anticipate the exact scenario that will happen, but it means that we've discussed several hundred scenarios and are already on guard against the worst before

we get there. Okay. I have a question, Ada. As a historian and as a writer, if you were to pitch the story of the world right now, what would it be? Coming to terms with the fact of the world right now, what would it be? Coming to terms with the fact that the world doesn't stay saved. And I think that is a big defining characteristic of right now. It's a story of how easy it is to think that when you saved the world, you're done.

How easy it was when World War I ended to think, okay, we did it, the war is over, we saved the world, the world will be okay. The second war came, and it felt as if it could be a victory in which we were achieving a permanent peace, and there was a lot of discussion of end of warfare. But then the nuclear bomb came, and a new generation faced a new way in which we could wipe ourselves out. We then got to 1989 in which it felt like, OK, we've actually successfully navigated this. We're not going to wipe ourselves out to then face climate change. No, no. We won. We did it. We saved the world.

We got the happy ending. Sauron isn't supposed to come back. Right. We did it. And Like, no, it did come back because the world is under threat again and the world doesn't stay saved. But we do have the power to save it over and over. But it's also going to be hard work every time. And it's very difficult to accept the fact that the world doesn't stay saved. And we tell ourselves so many stories that have, we defeated the evil and we blow up the bad guy's secret evil tower and we won, end of movie. The hard part is building the new world afterward,

putting it together, figuring out how to make it be better than the earlier one, and then facing the next crisis that it's going to have. And the world doesn't stay saved. I think that's the story of the last 150 years. We saved the world. We saved the world a couple of times. Now we have to save the world again. And it's going to be really hard.

It was hard every time. But we did it. And we will do it. it and we will do it. I think this is such a good way of describing it that the world is constantly collapsing but the world is constantly being saved and both of those things are actually happening simultaneously. It's not really up to us to decide which one of those is true. Only future generations will be able to decide that for us. What we do have a choice over is which one of those stories we want to be a part of. Do we want to be part of the story of collapse or do we want to be part of the story of renewal? The surprising thing for me is that this actually

makes me feel relieved. There's something weirdly comforting about knowing that saving the world is simply part of our contract as humans. It's almost like it's hardwired into our DNA and that we all have this evolutionary muscle to show up and do what needs to be done and to leave the world a little better for the next generation. I would like to change direction just a little and with your permission, read something from one of your essays that really resonated with us. So it's progress is not inevitable, but it is happening. It is not transparent, but it is visible.

It is not safe, but it is beneficial. It is not linear, but it is directional. It is not controllable, but it is us. In fact, it is nothing but us. How do you define progress? One of the things that I think is often not in people's minds when we think about progress is that there was a moment when people first thought that progress was a thing. Progress as a concept was invented. This happened just after the year 1600, which is the first point at which people

look around themselves and say, hey, wait a minute, what if people intentionally and systematically observing, studying, experimenting, learning things and sharing it with each other, would put that information together to then create inventions and innovations that would improve the human condition. And that this could be done systematically and deliberately as what we can call anthropogenic progress. Progress as we understand it in the present, of course, has always been happening ever since the earliest days of humanity. Every single era, even ones people like to claim were stagnant, like the Middle Ages, were filled with innovation after innovation, making small and constant changes. In 1600, they thought they had just

invented it. They go, hey, the world has not had progress so far. What if we could progress? Which is such a lovingly sort of innocent thing as we look back on it. But it was an incredible ambition to believe that the human condition in the past was something over which humanity had no influence, and that was determined by providence or chance, and that starting in this moment, we're going to use our native capacities to reason and understand to try to constantly transform the human condition. They really thought this is something that people have to choose to do. If we choose to do it, it will happen. If we don't choose to do it, it won't happen. Right now, we're much more used to thinking of progress as the giant cog wheels of the modern times machine with Charlie Chaplin being helplessly drawn into that, we imagine this very

inhuman, distant progress that we cannot escape from and over which we have no control. And the important thing we have to remember is progress is actually just people. It's just people doing things and making something happen. And it's innumerable tiny changes, but every single one of those changes is done by a human being. There's no such thing as progress that is inhuman. All progress is the collaborative effects of a lot of human beings making intentional and deliberate choices. And I think a lot of the time when people see progress having negative side effects, which it absolutely has had and absolutely still does sometimes have, people think of having negative side effects, which it absolutely has had and

absolutely still does sometimes have, people think of it as, yes, because it's this dangerous, uncontrollable force. But even when it has those bad side effects, it's because a human being took a choice that had bad side effects. And we all have taken choices in our lives that had bad side effects. So the thing to do isn't to say, oh, I'll never make a choice again. The response should be, I need to do what I can do to repair the damage that has been done. And I need to learn from that mistake and that bad side effect and do better in the future.

And the fact that progress is so big and the bad side effects can be so big, I think sometimes scare people into not realizing that it's just innumerable grains of sand, each one of which is a human being making a choice, each one of which can learn from the bad side effects and make better choices. I have so many kind of directions that I could go in. Maybe the first is there are a lot of people who argue very convincingly

that maybe this entire project of progress since 1600, and especially since the Industrial Revolution, has come at the cost of our ecology and our climate, and it's all going to end in collapse. And therefore, if we zoom out to a 600-year time period, this was all a massive waste of time. There's certainly no arguing that our environment is in big trouble. We've seen massive species decline.

We've seen huge environmental degradation. These are all serious, serious side effects to the point where they could, well, some people are saying they could undo all of the progress. One of the things I think it's important for us to understand is that the human population was always growing slowly. And let's imagine that we didn't have industrialization. Let's imagine that it was possible for our species to stagnate technologically. We would still have been growing in population.

And we would still have been gradually consuming more things. And we would still have been disrupting ecosystems and transforming them, which we always were. And I think it's not a good thing to let that go on without us also learning more about how it works. Because then if we reach the crisis point where it is unsustainable, we also don't know enough chemistry to say what carbon is and to understand why the atmosphere is changing and to understand what we can do about it. The vital thing was for us to have enough understanding that when the point that our species could no longer keep on the increase, increase, increase,

and has to do the adapt to filling the space we're in, we understand it enough to try to do that in ways that have less catastrophic effects on us. It is much better for our species that has been multiplying to get to this point, knowing how it works, knowing what is causing this, having the ability to study species, having the ability to study environment. Imagine if we hit this and didn't know, because it's not as if we wouldn't have hit it. We would have hit it later, but we wouldn't know. And so we couldn't do anything about it. It's vital that we have the power to act because if this were the same situation, but we didn't have, hey, let's make solar power

and we've realized how carbon operates, then we would just have an enormously worse version of the crisis that we're going to have a medium version of. Okay, that makes sense. That's a great answer that I haven't heard before, actually. And maybe kind of try to sum it up as sort of, you know, science gave us both the tools to overcome the crisis, but it accelerates the crisis as well. Exactly. We've hit it sooner than we would have, but we've hit it with the ability to act on it. Because on the one

hand, yes, we are the source of what's accelerating the threat. But on the other hand, you know, all of these other species that do not understand the science are not going to be able to take the steps that we are. If we weren't here taking those proactive, let's protect this species, let's protect that species, it would be so much worse. The fact that there is a powerful species here armed with deep scientific understanding is the only thing that's going to mean that the crisis is a crisis but not a catastrophic mass extinction in which all of the species just face it sort of powerlessly. We've spoken about progress, we've spoken about the past, we've spoken about the future,

and then we've spoken about a whole lot of concepts in between and kind of tried to weave that all together. Can I bring us back to the present day? In 2024, what does the word hope mean to you? Certainly for me, the hope punk movement has very much made me think hope is resistance because we have had so much doom that often to say, actually, I think we can solve this problem and it is worth working on this thing, is an act of protest against a gloomy consensus. We're all aware of how much negative news there is and how negative news is shared more than good. But think, for example, about how when someone is a movie reviewer or a critic, we tend to think of them as smarter and more sophisticated when they give

everything a terrible review. But when we encourage people to admire those who are negative about things and voice things in negative ways more so, that has an effect. Science fiction has had a big effect. Dystopia has been a big fad in science fiction for a solid couple decades. And as a result, you know, a lot of the students I get as undergraduates now think of dystopia as the default of science fiction. Actually, I was chatting a couple years ago with the head of our creative writing program. And I asked him, how many of your students are writing sci-fi fantasy as opposed to realistic fiction? And he said, oh, practically 100% of our students are writing dystopia.

But that was the only thing that they were writing. One of my favorites is that the last 12 Pulitzer Prize winners of nonfiction have all been disaster, death, war. You have to go back to like 2011 or 2010 to find something that is halfway optimistic. Yeah. And so, you know, I remember when my own literary agent was talking about shopping Terri Aiknoda and that all of her fellow agents were complaining about how depressing it was reading the books that they were shopping because they were all so grim.

And she was like, I'm reading about this actually pretty nice future. And, you know, hope is the expectation that, yes, if we keep working at it, we can make a future worth having. We're not going to make a future where things are perfect because change is constant. But we can sure make a future that is better than if we don't work hard at fixing it. And so many people are going straight from climate denial to climate despair, that they're forgetting, actually, you need to work hard to protect things in the middle, which is where, again, I like to go back to the Renaissance, not to zoom out, but to zoom in. I work a lot on Machiavelli and the decades right around 1490 to 1500 or 1510. My favorite,

favorite ever Renaissance document is a letter Machiavelli got from a friend of his who was a mercenary captain. They had worked together in the wars. Machiavelli had just written the first half of a history of that decade. This was 1506. And the friend wrote to him after reading it and said, Machiavelli, you need to finish your history because without a good history of these years, future generations will never believe how bad it was. And they will never forgive us for having lost and destroyed so much so quickly. They're talking about the decade in which Michelangelo carved the David

and Leonardo painted the Mona Lisa. Wow. Which to us look like a golden age because we see in museums the amazing fruits of what happened. To actually have lived through the Renaissance, they felt like it was the end of the world. But it was an end of world in which they worked hard to mitigate that chaos and to mitigate those problems. problems. So from listening to everything that you've said, the thing that I have gained is that we are at this point where we have more knowledge and understanding about how things work. This is a power. So what is the opportunity here for us? How can we move the story of humanity forward? I think a big part of it is to keep telling stories about

the successes we've had and pair them with the humility of reminding people that we haven't understood how the world works this well for very long. And when we look around the world and notice the potential disasters we haven't caused, that's huge. So for example, one of the things I often think about, we now have this genetically modified mosquito that if we release it, we'll wipe out all the mosquitoes. And we haven't released it. Because we know that if we wipe out all the mosquitoes, it's going to cause enormous ecosystem problems for species all over the place. If we had had that even in 1950, we would have released it in two seconds. And we would have caused all of those disasters. Instead, we said, well, malaria

is causing a lot of deaths, but the malaria vaccines are doing well. They're pretty close. We'll probably have them within a few years. That's actually probably going to be ethically the right choice. And we didn't release that mosquito, right? We understand that we need to look at the second order and third order consequences of things. And that's a new piece of knowledge for us as a civilization. We shouldn't be too hard on ourselves for the fact that we did badly before we had it.

We need to judge ourselves based on the kinds of things we're accomplishing right now and the kinds of things that we have the chance to accomplish now that we do understand it. There's no such thing as a complete failure or a complete victory. And so many of our stories fail to tell the fact that partial victory is victory. In fact, practically all victories are partial victories. We almost never tell stories about partial victory. We still tell tragedies and we tell stories about complete success. And we don't tell very many stories where we made incremental progress and things were 30 better but it's not what we're taught victory should look like and so when victory comes people don't recognize it and they think victory is defeat we need to embrace partial victory and

we need to understand that the fact that we won't completely stop the climate crisis won't completely stop the climate crisis isn't a binary question. The climate crisis is something that has a how bad it can be and how unbad it can be. And we're going to be somewhere in that spectrum. And everything we do affects where it is in that spectrum. It's not a complete victory or complete failure, just like World War II, just like the Black Death, just like the fall of Rome, just like all these famous disasters. Despair is easy. Despair, you get to relax and go home and you don't have any responsibility. Hope is actually a very stressful condition, and I understand why a lot of people shy away from it. It takes a lot of courage and a lot of hard work to say, OK, there is going to be a disaster.

courage. I had a lot of hard work to say, okay, there is going to be a disaster. I have the power to make that disaster less, and I have the responsibility to wield that power, but it needs to be done. It's hard to hope. And that's something that history, I think, can teach us, is that Florence is still there because Machiavelli hoped, and he worked hard, and so did his peers, and they succeeded, and the city was not destroyed. And we have to do that and we can do that. Despair is the less courageous path. Admitting that hope is real and that we have a responsibility to act and what we do matters, that progress is in fact just us, that's very brave and very difficult.

We talk a lot about progress at Fix the News, and one of the reasons we started this podcast was that we wanted to highlight people who make it happen. What I love about Ada's work is that she reminds us that progress is made by people. As she says, it is us. And that although there will always be forces working against us, we all have the power to do the work and to make the difference. If you want to know more about Ada, we've included some links in our podcast notes. And if this conversation has made you a little more curious about the Renaissance, keep an eye out for Ada's new book that will be coming out early next year.

We'd like to thank our paying subscribers for making projects like this podcast possible. If you're interested in finding out more about our work, check out fixthenews.com. There are a lot of podcasts out there. It means a lot to us that you chose this one. This podcast is recorded in Australia on the lands of the Gadigal and the Wurundjeri and Woiwurrung people. If you enjoyed this conversation and would like to support Hope as a Verb, make sure you subscribe and leave a review.

Thanks for listening.