EP 228: Imagining After Capitalism - Andy Hines

 
 

A return conversation with Andy Hines about his book, Imagining After Capitalism.

Interviewed by: Peter Hayward

References

Audio Transcript

Peter Hayward:   For many people capitalism is the cause of many of our planet's problems, such as climate change, inequality, environmental degradation and species loss to mention a few. And yet is there an alternative to capitalism really, and if there is what is it?

Andy Hines:  The basic argument of the book is that, as we learn in systems thinking, a systems behavior is a function of its structure and the structure produces what it produces.And capitalism produces what it produces and what I say, all right, it produced a certain set of behaviors and outcomes that no longer fit with the emerging future. It's just that simple. it's a system that's outlived its usefulness. It had its flaws, it had its pluses, . But let's not get too much into what it did. One of the critiques that you'll get sometimes when you talk about After Capitalism is what's your plan? We don't have a plan yet. But we have principles and directions and things that we think we should be doing and then we gotta get out there and try it.

Peter Hayward:  That is my guest today on FuturePod. Andy Hines returns to give us the latest instalment of his research into what comes after this current iteration of capitalism. Welcome back to Future Pod Andy Hines.

Thanks for having me, Peter,

almost three years since you were last here. Your third future pod appearance.

Andy Hines: It does seem like yesterday. And I gotta note, my students love this thing. you are doing a great service.

Peter Hayward: When I started this with Rebecca and Mindy it was driven by wanting to say thank you to the people who meant something to me and also to honor some people who weren't around anymore. We're going on for six years now. And I'm not running outta people to talk to.

Andy Hines: That's good news, isn't it? Then that says something positive about the field.

Peter Hayward: I like the fact that it's done, that these interviews will be there for as long as someone hosts them, that someone can find out about this stuff even after, I'm not around, we're not around. These things still exist, like old books.

Andy Hines: Indeed we at the University of Houstonwere. Asked to move to a different building, a new building, but a different building in a smaller space. And so making these horrifically difficult choices of what to keep and what to put in, in my back room, in my back hallway, that didn't fit.

And but going through all that material, it was 50 years worth of stuff. And it, it really raised, it was both, fun and there was a bit of sadness to it too.

Peter Hayward: and I gotta ask you, you've said that your graduate students love it. Again, as an old educator. How are they using things like Future Pod and other materials? Because this wasn't around when you and I did this stuff. We use books and we use, seminars in the classroom,

Andy Hines: books? What are those? those things that come on the iPad, yeah that's been a big change. Certainly the podcast, so sometimes they're incorporated into the actual course assignments, or discussion posts. But sometimes the students use 'em themselves, as resources.

we just finished doing a summer elective, myself and another faculty member Mina McBride, and we rather than a no textbook. We had a few articles, but the, one of the core pieces of weekly assignments was film review. Because, you just gotta keep up with the times here.

Assigning a stack of books, just it just doesn't work. It's not the world we live in anymore.

Peter Hayward: What a podcast be. Could some, could you build curriculum around making a podcast, a curated podcast as actually a piece of assessment?

Andy Hines: Absolutely. That's a, one of the things, that we're doing is, what's the next generation of the program look like?

And as part of that, thinking about what do assignments look like? What do classes look lik4, really going back to as they say turning it down to the studs and building it back up. Or at least thinking that way conceptually. one of the things is, how you deliver an assignment.

Sometimes it's turning in a template, but a lot of times it is, develop your own podcast, do your own, video, do your own simulation game and, so the range of assignments of, if I think back to 35 years ago when I was turning in assignments, it's  different.

it's an evolution, right?

Peter Hayward: Yeah. So I went back and had a read Listen to 1 49, which was called After Capitalism. 'Cause obviously you had a seminar series running for quite a while where this was a live topic, but it's now a book and I wanna start there, Andy. Just on okay. The books come out.

What's in the book? Why the book? Who the book? Over to you. The book is now published. It is now available. What's it called?

Andy Hines: It's called Imagining After Capitalism. There's a nice book put out by David Schweikert called After Capitalism. So I added the imagining, but actually it worked out nice because the imagining is the key contribution.

And one of the things that's really interesting in the three years since we last talked and about the topic, which we call it after capitalism, in general is there's a lot more stuff now. It, was one of those topics that, when I first. Started looking at it in 2012, there was me and a handful of other people, whatever a small number. And then, it started certainly picked up steam and around 2017, boom, then the pandemic, another boom. And now there is the proliferation of ideas, but still not many full blown forecasts. And that's something we ought to be talking about.

There's a lot of, talk about it at varying degrees of intensity seriousness, scholarship. It is a hot topic now.

Peter Hayward: Yeah, I had a conversation with Peter Bishop a long time ago and I was talking about the state of where America was and where it was going, and what came up in that conversation, given of course, Peter being a great historian, was that we were going through the latest iteration of the Gilded Age again, and I could imagine at the end of the previous Gilded age there would've been a debate. About imagining what's after capitalism because it failed. But interestingly, coming out of the Gilded Age, we still have capitalism,

Andy Hines: An amazingly resilient system, and one of the, the brief arguments, I guess are I dunno if argument is the right word, that I make when I speak to people and have a short time, is, the basic argument of the book is that, as we learn in systems thinking, a systems behaviour is a function of its structure and theat structure produces what it produces.

And capitalism produces what it produces – growth but inequality -- and What I try to get away from is demonizing it. It produced a certain set of behaviors and outcomes that no longer fit with the emerging future.. It's just that simpleI literally had a chat with somebody who was at, from the Degrowth community earlier today, and we were talking about Jason Hicke, who hass done some amazing work, with a bestseller, Less is More,

. But he just goes after capitalism as basically responsible for every wrong thing that's ever happened. I'm not sure he's wrong, but it’s not helpful. I see his case. But I don't know where does that leave us in terms of space to talk about what's next?

Because then it's us against them. It's good against bad. It's right against wrong. And those conversations, right? They don't get us anywhere.

Peter Hayward: Yeah. So

Andy Hines: I try really hard to say, look, it's a system that's outlived its usefulness. It had its flaws, ,its pluses, it has its minuses, but let's not get too much into the past grievance, but look forward.

Peter Hayward: us. Yeah. But also Andy, we call it a system,but it's not a system, just people. The fact that you call it a system means it sounds like someone built it. And yeah, yeah. Capitalism is who we are. It's just the mirror. But it's a mirror that then becomes institutionalized and ritualized. There is no person who you could say, designed capitalism. It's people. It's such a

Andy Hines: great point, Peter, and it doesn't come up enough. So thanks. Thanks for bringing it up. 'cause it's like one, one of the critiques that you'll get sometimes when you talk about Ater cCapitalism.

To kind of deflate you, they ask what's your plan? And I'm like there wasn't a capitalism plan. There were elements of a plan perhaps, but it was not, there was never some integrated, detailed agenda. We could get into the discussion sometimes around the, in communism, socialism, with the Russians.Even that even wasn't a plan. If you really study what happened there. They were like shocked as anyone when they won. They're like, what? We won. We didn't do anything. Joking, but not completely. So it even that, and then they said, oh crap, we need a plan. And hastily threw some stuff together and it was, as we saw, the results were, it was it, if it in effect it was too soon.

They weren't ready. I actually try to avoid that word, because it scares the heck out of people. But the same thing about After Capitalism. We don't have a plan yet. No, but we have principles and directions and, things that we think we should be doing, and then we gotta get out there and try it.

Peter Hayward: Yeah. I think the thing for me, Andy, is that we've now got quite a few centuries of data about what our lack of a plan has given us. We can intentionally influence the system. 'cause it is something that we can influence and a new system, if you want to use it, that word or a new arrangement, could emerge out of our intentions and our principles as opposed to just simply letting it be an organic, version of, Hobbs' brutish human system, which is what it is at the moment.

Andy Hines: So one of the things that, one of the themes that is absolutely crystal clear in the research, and it comes out in the book and it's come out in all the conversations I've had since then.. if you wanna say there's a bunch of keywords, it's small, direct, local, direct democracy, participatory, bottom up and all that stuff, which is great.

d I believe in that direction, actually, but I think we underestimate that the coordination of that is gonna be very, challenging. And one of the problems we have, and I called it out as one of the seven drivers, was the ineffective left, which is a little mean to pick on the left, but saying that one of the problems that the left has, --

is  an aversion to any attempt at, hierarchy or big ideas or big plans. And so everything just stays at that micro level, and it doesn't get anywhere. how do you marry that sort of local organic emergence thing with some sort of larger0-scale coordination or direction?

Peter Hayward: Yeah. I think again, just I think from, again, my experience and is looking at my parents and my parents' parents, is that they had a thing called civics. They understood that they had their autonomy. But they also had a lot of social compulsion to simply doing the, serving the Civic.

What, Garrett Harden would call the Commons because there's attention paid to the commons, which is it always often worked against your personal interest. Oh, yes. Yeah. The commons had rights and you had rights. I look at my parents, they operated their limited autonomy with a big commons.

And the commons was church. The commons was government. The commons was what the neighbors thought of you, the commons was class, all that stuff. And then I look at how I operated and then the generations coming, the commons are shrinking and people's individual autonomy is expanding. And I wonder if what you are describing is that diminished commons.

How do we actually grow the commons again and take away some of our personal agency? And can a new form of capitalism do that?

Andy Hines: I think there's a couple,  good points in there. The one, I was thinking about this sort of, how do you lead this?. How does this emergence get guided?

I don'tthink ead is even the right word. Guiding, how do we guide it? And, talking to some of the different groups, and there's a lot of them. How to coordinate?  The other thing that's interesting when I say that there's a lot more interest in the last three years, there are groups everywhere. They're small, there's three people here, five people, but there's a lot of them.

And we were talking about how do we share experiences, and all that stuff. And it's wow, this is a massive coordination effort. And I was thinking like, that being the leader or on a board of a volunteer group or association is good experience. You don’t have your leadership chop yet unless you lead when you can't compel people to do stuff. Trying to make that get people to do stuff is really hard.

Yeah. Even futurists

Peter Hayward: are hard. Lead are,

Andy Hines, Agency and empowerment, which a good things, can also swing too far where there's no, if you will, civic common sense, right?

It can’t be all agency and no commons, right? And a lot of the to me, the big driver, if you will, the major driver, the big lever of after capitalism is this value shift. Now, right now, there's not enough shift to carry the day. But if you look at the long-term trends, it looks pretty good.

But the main thing, and you might remember this from I know you guys used to use Beck's first and second tier spiral dynamic, and he talked about that second tier. 3% of the population, which is that first values type that says, I don't have to have my way. Or my way isn’t necessarily  the right way. I can actually appreciate and embrace and invoke different value systems as fits the circumstance and that.

R ight now what we've got is everybody insisting they areright. And there's noway there's just no middle ground. There's no compromise. There's no discussion. Really. It's just people yelling at each other. So ultimately getting to that second, integral ier is vital Peter Hayward: Yeah,

Peter Hayward: I go back to my parents, I go back to them as the Depression generation, the World War II generation and of course, the generation before that they had to be cooperative because there was such little. Public space that was provided, and they weren't civically minded because they were better human beings. They were civically minded because the consequences of not behaving civically was too serious. There was a consequence if you didn't, if you didn't do your share. Yeah, they were out almost every night.

They were out, at the church and they had to do that on top of working as many hours as they had. And it must have been a pain in the ass. And I think first chance they could, they ran away from it. 'cause if someone, they should do something about it.

You're all familiar with that one? And I go back to studying Victorian England. They used to have these organizations called oddfellows. And one of the things they would do is if you did your share of work for the Oddfellows Association, they would guarantee that you wouldn't be buried in a paupers funeral. And that was it. It was Do your bit and we'll make sure you've got a gravestone. And it sounds crazy, but that was a thing.

Andy Hines: Yes. Oh, it doesn't, it sounds it doesn't sound crazy at all. So what, one of the other things along that line that we're seeing right now, I, it, I, maybe the great ironies, is that if you think of current administration as the ultimate capitalists, they may be actually pouring some accelerant on after capitalism fire? Because they have basically stripped all the clothing covering up the problems with capitalism. There's not even any pretense anymore about trying to be fair/ I think up to this point, we tried to pretend, oh yeah, it's for everybody.

Peter Hayward: Yeah.

Andy Hines: And what you relating to that point about Civics is that what is start starting to form is an underground ofpeople outta necessity who are banding together to do things.

'cause they're like, damn, it's desperate.. Desperation is the mother intervention, right? Yeah. Like then all of a sudden you, you've really got that. So in a sense he may be seeding some of that After Capitalims type activities  'cause people have no choice.

You can't go to the institutions for help.

Peter Hayward: So quickly, for the people who don't know, just quickly spin us through the book, what the book, what's in the book, but also what, who's the book for? How would people use the book? What do you want people to do with the book?

Andy Hines: So the book gives a little nod to my Future's ancestory. So the second book I think I read about the future was Polak’s Image of the Future. I was just like oh my God, this is why I'm here, right? And so I always said SosedayIwould seek to fill the absence of guiding images, and

so finally the after capitalism fit that. There's a nice kind of harmony there. So what are, if you will, what are those positive guiding images? What might they be for after capitalism? And what I found in the research to get there, which took a dozen years, is there were lots of bits and piecesof, what the next system might look like, but there really wasn't a good, clear kind of systemic sense of what that,endpoint looked like? And so what I basically did is using using foresight methodology, was to synthesize out three images, three guiding images of what after capitalism might look like. None of them would really shock you. There's some differences in the details, but a lot of the ideas are familiar, r? There is the environmentally driven circular commons. We just talked about commons. Now, commons ain't just the environment. There's the social commons. There's a political but commons. And I love the circular economy thing, so I thought that's a nice, that's a nice combination there. And so if you're a little more environmentally driven, you might say, Ooh yeah, I like that. Alright. TheNon-workers Paradise is the post-work future. And again, the data is just telling us that, our commitment to work, our actual working hours, except for, exceptions noted, have been going down for a long time. And if you look at automation, we're gonna take away the bad jobs.

Of course, some of them are, gonna take away your livelihood. But, there's so many forces pointing towards we could get to a post-work future in, 20, 30 years.. That doesn't mean we don't do stuff. It doesn't mean we don't do a job in order to survive. . You could see that really being a shift. So that's the second, what's that post-work world look like?. And then the third one, tech-led abundance. Now that's what I blogged about this morning.

Now we're hearing this techno capitalism  And that was the fear of putting together the tech-led abundance image. The promise is if all this tech stuff works, great. what the hell? Let the machines, let the software do the work, and then we people can do what we wanna do, so to speak.

However, that's image could most easilybe  co-opted by capitalism. So you know that, the redistribution part, not a very easy thing. And the kind of, the support for that one would probably be closest to capitalism itself. And there you go. Here come the technical capitalist saying, oh, this is what we're gonna do.

Of course we're gonna, all the benefits are gonna be for everybody. Now there we might be a little suspiciousSo if you step back from that to wrap up the image piece, you say, all right, so we have this  environmentally driven one, we have this  politically and socially driven one, and then we have this tech driven one. And you might imagine the truth is somewhere in the middle of that, right?

They all would fit together. Tech led abundance makes post work a lot easier. If  we use technology to slow down or either reverse or slow down economic growth, that is also a good thing Taking pressure off of the ecosystem. So all those things fit together.

What I thought would be more useful though, instead of just trying to come up with one idea is maybe have an appeal for different groups.

. So I was hoping that we might be able to get a wider umbrella by, organizing that way. And I will note, just to wrap that point up, that theimages emerged from the research.

I didn't come in and say, here's the three images. It's it's literally over a period of 10 to 12 years looking as what's the world telling us?. And they fell nicely into those three buckets.

Peter Hayward: Yeah, I mean they are happening. So you can look in the real world. And I also hear, Andy, that there are also metaphors for how you might look at addressing a problem and is a way that someone could use the book if I work today in juvenile justice and I was looking for models of how we provide a better juvenile justice system, the kind of thinking.

About justice through the lenses of those things possibly help people trying to come up with ideas.

Andy Hines: When I go through the image chapters, there's like tools, resources there's all the sort of the details. And it's not a plan. It's not a here's the five steps to Circular Commons,

ut rather, here's what's happening, here's some of the organizations, here are some of the models. And trying to give a sense of what, as you say, as it's not like the. The after capitalism suddenly emerges five years from now, it's already here. It's just really, as we say, the future's already here, it's just unevenly distributed.

. So what we're, yeah, what're trying to do in the book is say, here's the stuff that's already happening. And then, as you can imagine as that builds and those those crosscurrents start to happen, maybe it picks  up some momentum.

Degrowth, which I chatted about earlier today is one of the maybe controversial aspects. Are we in, are we at a point now where Degrowth is the only answer,? I learned about degrowth finance. I'm like, what? Who knew? There's a guy and  organization that's just doing degrowth finance. Now what a wonderful concept, right?

But if you do degrowth then how do we. How do you send your kids to school? You've got to address these questions as people will think about those things.

It's not just how do we get to this utopia, but how do we be smart about the transition? Because people are gonna ask very blunt questions. Wait a minute, I got a mortgage pay. What are you talking about here? And if we don't have an answer for that, we lost them.

Peter Hayward: So who reads the book?

Who, who maybe should think about sticking a copy in someone's Christmas stocking?

Andy Hines: I would say change agents, right? Activists people who are just, thinking about, oh my God, what is going on? Just, I think there's, that, there is maybe a slight chance that we now have a shot at a broader audience.

But I, I definitely wrote it for people I think, that have some commitment to change in the future. Certainly futurists, but not just futurists. Those the person who's doing Degrowth finance and the person who's doing the solidarity network over here and those kinds of folks.

The basic idea is to arm up the activist, the change agents, and then, say, “hey, can you slip this to somebody who might be on the fence?
 

You've, you put that work out there and those people who are on the fence, you might remember when it came to Australia, we talked about thetaxonomy of future of types the frogs and the rats. and the vultures.. The rats are thinkingwhat's in it for me? Is this cheese or am I getting off this sinking ship If you had said after capitalism 10 years ago, you would've gotten laughed out of the room. Not so much now! .

Degrowth,  the same. Now these ideas, they're in the, stew, they're in the soup now, and we're starting to talk about them. Can those people who are really committed start to bring them to a wider audience.

Peter Hayward: So you talked about LAC and obviously image of the Future being an important framer just for your own entrance to the field. Is your book just in the upper right quadrant or do you get into some of the ideas because. When I read Pollak and I, wrote about Pollak and have ultimately sketched out the Pollak game when I worked with people, Andy, I found it wasn't just people in the upper right that felt they had agency, it agency looked different.

When you stand somewhere else in the world, when the world looks different and yeah, a lot of leaders wanna stand in the upper right and say, I can, yeah, I think we can do a good future. I think the future can be better. People stand somewhere else 'cause their experience of the world is something else.

And they don't necessarily feel hopeless, they just see it different. They see it as a struggle or they see it as about service or, does that, as I said, I, is there something in that, in the book? Is it, is the book for the upper right for people living in the upper right. But if you're in the, if you're in the lower left if you're in the, I don't see agency and I don't see hope.

Does the book give any assistance or help or advice or suggestion or even frameworks for someone down there? Because a lot of people are

Andy Hines: Yeah, There's a lot more dystopia out there.

There's also a lot more written about how do we fix the current system. And  just as a quick note, I didn't come into this thinking, oh, we gotta get rid of capitalism. I got there maybe 10 years later,

And we just talked about this, in an the elective we taught this summer called Activating the Future.

So seven weeks of bringing together everything we've learned about how do you actually make futures change happen, so to speak. And what are our strategies for actually getting the work activated, . We noted there is a group that just doesn't want change to work.

 Being good hearted people we might spend a lot of time on te them. But we’ve gotta recognize we all have limited time, budget and resources and we've gotta be really thoughtful about how we use that.

If you come to someone who just ain't ready to hear it, it doesn't matter. Now maybe you know what you hope is by enlarging the conversation, broadening the conversation.

Tthinking we can convert a vulture is not impossible, but nor it is a good use of time.  Like we. Remember, if you remember, the vulture was the one who was, that

Andy Hines: Haven't got enough time. the thought process there is start from that small core and then expand out.

Peter Hayward: And in the remaining time, because we've already, we've already soaked up most of your time, but again, you, Houston had an important milestone under your stewardship, but also the stewardship of people who came before you.

Do you wanna just talk to the listeners about that?

Andy Hines: I would love to. So 50 years!We're the first one to make it to 50 years. Hopefully not the last. . I took over about 10 or 12 years ago from Peter Bishop, now Peter Bishop hung in there for 30 years-ish, to make the handoff.

And there was definitely a very rocky period in our program's history. And almost any academic futures program has gone through that phase where, you know you might be doing pretty well, you hit the slump for various reasons, and then a lot of times that's the end.. Now we got through ours, but we had a near death experience. We saw the white light. Now we came back from it And Peter got us through thatAnd so At the 50th celebration, Peter came and gave a nice kickoff and  we also brought some of the old timers, like some of the early graduates.

We had a two day event around the past, the present, and then the future that got to the next 50 years. So what's next?

And I think, so there, it was great to just celebrate that, it was a big room. It was nice to see it filled up.

We were the first Master's program to be accredited by the World Future Studies Federation a few years ago. And I just wanted to shout that out 'cause that work has been great. That program, the accreditation program there is just solid.

They did their homework. It's really well done.

So it's great tso see this legacy of, getting a foothold, getting some continuity, make, doing the kind of the field building stuff that hopefully gives us a chance to hang around a little bit longer.

So those are a couple of the, that celebration of the past and those milestones that I think are important, not just for us, but for the whole field.

Peter Hayward: Yeah, you are, yeah. You are a survivor and I'm, I'm. I'm one of those people that, had a. Had a short lived experience and a short-lived program and we took a lot of inspiration and advice from your program, and I'm sure the other big programs like Stel B and others around in Europe and Asia of again take inspiration when they, when they have that conversation over a vice chancellor's desk and they say, show me an example where this has survived.

You can point to Houston saying it's been here 50 years and hasn't gone away, but, and I'm not. This is not a but against, but it's one thing that we talk about is when you talk about the future, it's not that there won't be university programs like Houston in the future, but if we're talking about the field, we're talking about something bigger than just people doing courses.

Yes. So in the kind of coffee conversations that happened in that, and you had a room full of futurists. Yeah. What was coming up about. Just the early thoughts about what people thought the field, the broad continuum of this going forward was gonna be.

Andy Hines: All right. So I got two thoughts there.

So one, I think so one of the reasons that we survived, probably the major reason that a program survives is luck. There's just an element of luck. But there is one thing, and this came out in that activation class that we thought is one of the things we've been so semi-maniacal about is

our approach to futures work in general that insists upon doing all the non-futures backgrou stuff that is critical to keeping the future's work alive.  The nitty gritty admin, political crap that we don't wanna do because we're futurists, we're big idea people And so we have really worked hard on, doing all that stuff that sort of helps you survive in in a hostile environment.

And, we're doing that work now as we think of the next iteration of our program,. What are the kinds of things we need to do to keep this going? I remember when I was or originally took over the program and I did a couple of years worth of interviews and talks to people and say, what should I do?. And almost everybody said, don't do a Foresight Master's program. It's insane. And I'm like, I know it is crazy, but I think we can do it anyway. And I think there's a niche, there's a small niche and maybe 10 programs globally is about right. Maybe it never gets much bigger than that. How many foresight programs do we need?

I don't know. I think it's more than 10, but it's not thousands. So there is a niche. And so let's go after that and let's just take, let's be happy in our little niche and know that, that's what, that's where we're playing and we're happy to play there. And knowing that, I think where you're going in terms of the whole learning about the future, does it need to be through an academic graduate program?

No, absolutely not. That's a way. But there are so many other ways to learn and experience, and we appreciate that. And you see the, all the kind of bootcamps and, mini courses and, masterclass they're everywhere, right? That's good, healthy thing.

And we say, great, we'll, we know what we're doing. They know what they're doing. And I think that's like a, it's like that healthy ecosystem idea. And just knowing like where, where are we in the ecosystem where, where's our strength and where do we let other people do it? If you want the full experience, come to us … but not everybody needs that.

And so I think that's, we've committed to this, to our little, piece of the ecosystem. And even there you still gotta keep looking at it and making sure, are we still doing the right things or do we need to do new things? And we're, so you gotta reexamine your niche, I love the fact that other things are flourishing. That's ideal.

Peter Hayward: And your last question is you've written the book, and I know you're still talking about it, and I know you're still blogging about it, but when I talk to you in another couple of years time, what's the. What's the is there another project?

Andy Hines: Right now, I am seeing  what does the world tell me? Does, is there something here wit After capitalism, or, it somethingselse?

Whatever. So I'll give that a good college try and if the answer is, yeah, would be next is something like a field guide to after capitalism, go visit spots.

I'm like, I gotta go out there and see what these people are, like that. And then telling that story.

Peter Hayward: you're having fun

Andy Hines:  That's very true. You can't beat that.

Peter Hayward:

That's very true, mate. This has been fun. It always is. We don't spend a lot of time together, but the time we do spend together is is definitely memorable and enjoyable from my end. So again, Andy it's been a few years since we were walking around Hawthorne and I was showing you the sites.

I think that's what, 20, 25 years ago. But again, thank you for your support of future pie and thanks for agreeing to come back on and have a chat.

Andy Hines: Thank you so much for having me. And like I say, my students love you. Keep up the good work.

 

Peter Hayward:   I hope you enjoyed the conversation with Andy and that you will check out the book. Future Pod is a not-for-profit venture. We exist through the generosity of our supporters. If you would like to support the pod, then please check out the Patreon link on our website. I'm Peter Hayward. Thanks for joining me today. Till next time.