The next panel is What Technologies Will Shape the Future of Warfare? For those of you that don't know me, I'm Peter Singer. We're here at both organizations represented in Arizona State and New America. And we've got online major general. I can't see them, but I hopefully can. Give me a thumbs up if you can see them there. We're going to ask them to run and go tell the books in the back that we don't have. Can you give them a heads up? Thank you. So for those of you in the room, I'm going to go ahead and introduce you to is Phenomenal, Ph.D., Chief Technology Forecasting Office for DEVCOM Army Research Laboratory. As I was explaining to folks in the back, he's basically the point man for thinking through Army futures and some of the key technologies that it needs for the organization. And so, Troy, we're going to use this time for folks in here before we go with our full audience. I'm going to instead of having them stare at us, ask an unexpected question for you. Certainly. One lesson you've learned in your career. I think the biggest lesson that I've learned through my career is to embrace flexibility. I'd say that starting my career, I was at the bench for about 10 years. I did research and a range of things from detection of biological threat agents to nanomaterials to the development of novel sensors and high performance data processing techniques. And about halfway through my career, I made the transition to go more into science and technology advisory roles where I at one point served as the Acting Basic Research Portfolio Director for the entire Army in leading the direction of science and technology and also served in some roles in terms of technology strategy development for not only the Army Research Laboratory, but also the whole Department of the Army. So I think you have to really kind of embrace this ability to reinvent yourself. And some of my scientific heroes, I think of folks like Linus Pauling or perhaps less or no, but equally deep folks like Twan Vodan had the ability to be able to reinvent themselves to pivot into a new technical area as it presented itself to master that technical area and push that technical area to the envelope and then do it two or three times throughout their career. I used to have sort of a saying early in my career that if you're working on the same thing the day you retire, that you worked on the day you started, then you probably haven't really moved the technological stakes for your fall. That's awesome. And I love you. One, providing great advice to both the policy audience, but we've also got some students because this is a joint academic and that's pure gold in terms of life advice, but also for how you helped us fill a moment as we get our own technology set. So now I see our other guests joining, hopefully they're hearing us. We've got Major General Mick Ryan, a close friend who has had a distinguished career in a variety of roles within the Australian military, including leading their defense college. He's now an adjunct fellow at Center for Strategic International Studies and also a author of a variety of nonfiction as well as a new fiction book, the most recent War Transformed and White Sun War. And then we've got Laura Grego, who is Senior Scientist and Research Director of the Global Security Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists, as well as a distinguished researcher in her own career. So thank you both for joining us. So I'm going to begin with a first question and why don't we start off with Laura first, which is what technology do you see as the most important but simultaneously least understood and its significance for the future? Well, thanks for the invitation, Peter. I think probably many of us are going to include artificial intelligence as the most importantly least understood. And I think what we see now are the fruits of the previous generation of AI, which can do really good pattern recognition, make inferences, absorb large amounts of data. And that can really be a boon, of course, it can aid in verification, it can provide pathways for controlling technologies. But some of the concerns though I have about it, I think one of the, I worry that decision makers will use AI as a decision making tool. And this may not necessarily always be better. Would AI have been better at predicting whether Putin was actually going to invade Ukraine when it did. I'm not sure. Are there things especially in the realm of human behavior where AI might just reproduce our own biases and cause us not to question our information sources not to have enough skepticism. And the other place I'm concerned about with respect to decision making is that AI will enable and reinforce our desire to move quickly and respond rapidly. I spend most of my time thinking about nuclear issues and that is one place I worry, you know, nuclear weapons are currently postured to be launched at a moment's notice and many of the strategic technologies increase the tempo. I worry that AI will only further increase the tempo. We're starting to include maneuvering glide missiles, anti satellite weapons and novel long range nuclear delivery systems and many of them are ready to be used at a moment's notice. So I do worry that AI can increase confidence and compress time scales. And then of course the part that we don't understand is that we're kind of looking at the current version of AI. But what can it do in the future and we already see how well it can do shaping and manipulating the information environment when coupled with social media. What what what will that look like in the future. I mean, even currently we had it amplifies our expressions of racism sexism other kinds of bigotry and can even social media can do that even when it's not being manipulated by AI but as that becomes more useful and powerful. I'm not sure we have a great way to deal with that. So those are some of the concerns and the things I think we don't understand about AI. So what technology do you see as in that space of most important, but simultaneously least understood. Peter was that a question for me. That was a question for you. I'm going to ask it again. Because we are having tech issues. Very appropriate to the topic. What, what technology do you see as most important, but least understood. For me, I would have to say it's democratised access to battlefield command and control systems. I think there's been a lot of focus during the Ukraine war on things like autonomous systems and even the meshing of civil and military sensor frameworks and analytical capability but I think one of the transformative elements of this war is that at least on the Ukrainian side they've democratised access to systems that were previously secret kept in unit command posts. We now have individuals that now have access to input and receive location data targeting data in a way that we just haven't seen in previous conflicts before. It kind of replicates what we've seen go on in society with the Internet in the last 30 years. Now it's on the battlefield. And I think what that's doing is having a couple of impacts. Firstly, it's kind of enhancing the survivability of people on one side of things, but it's also closing the detection to destruction gap that is continuing to close on the battlefield. But it also closes the gap between when things happen and when people find out about them. Not just on the battlefield, but in these things such as the strategic strike we saw in Sevastopol in the last 24 hours already seeing battle damage assessment from multiple open sources. So, you know, I think that democratisation of access to data to people at the edge on the battlefield is something very new. And we're really at the very start of, I think. I'd really like to echo what Laura and Mick said. I think they covered those topics pretty well. But I'd like to add probably the one that I think of most often is synthetic biology. It holds the greatest promise. It's a sort of emerging science. But it holds significant promise to be able to do things like fuel point of need manufacturing to address logistics challenges that go along with any sort of tactical operation. It has the ability to cover so many, going so many different directions from materials to sensing modalities to even into computer processing realm. And I think we're just at the beginning of the area where we can really just starting to understand this. How do we really manage and engineer the genome to really realize downstream processes and downstream materials that are going to be can be used for myriad of things that really kind of. I often think of it as sort of the third leg of the synthetic molecular synthetic triad. Whether you do your classical stepwise synthetic approaches or you do things like combinatorial chemistry to get to those materials and thirdly leveraging biological systems to be able to produce things for you. And again, those things could be electronic in nature. They can be optical in nature. They can be even energetic in nature. And I think it really starts to change the way we think about national security warfare in the sense that you can start to do some of those things where you need them, which is significantly different than the way that we've done them traditionally where you produce the materials in the rear and then have to move them forward. So that really gets you into the point of need manufacturing and advanced manufacturing, which is really important. So wars are contests of arms and political will. But they're also learning laboratories of a kind, both for the forces within as they move as they back and forth. But also everyone else watching and thinking about the lessons and how they might apply to their own plans for the future. So I'd like to look at the Ukraine war and through that lens. What are the lessons that you have taken from Ukraine and why don't we go in the same order again. So, Laura, what are some of the lessons that you've taken from Ukraine. That's an interesting question. I know we're talking about future technology, but I think to the big ones that that came to mind are more human lessons and one is just a reiteration that leadership is so important and that strong institutions matter. Probably President Putin has ruined Russia's future with this decision and you know I'm, I'm very glad that in the United States we have an experienced president with a good temperament and a really solid team behind him that's been able to navigate a lot of these dangers and a lot of the brinksmanship in this conflict and and I think the administration has done a pretty good job of managing that while continuing to help Ukraine. I mean, you can imagine though a different personality could have led us in really different and dangerous directions. So, just I think a reiteration that strong democratic institutions are so important and strong civil society institutions are so important. The ability of citizens to dissent productively when you have these, if you have a personalist or narcissistic leader, you end up with an information bubble. Yes, yes and no man they personalize conflict. I think that increases the existential threat. And the other thing that I thought is was interesting was, you know, the news in the last few weeks about the role commercial interests have played, you know, specifically providing communications broadband internet by by the Starlink system. I hope that as we go forward we make sure that our decisions are made by people who are accountable to populations and not accountable to their companies. You know, not that elected officials always get things right but that by design they're accountable. So I do think that strategically we really need to think about making sure that that those things are in place. You know, it's it's not a good idea to have commercial entities have that much decision making power. So I think it's a good thing to keep an eye on in the future, especially as humans consider moving into space with more, with more resources we definitely need a strong governance system that's accountable to people. You've actually traveled multiple times to Ukraine. And so your observations are both as an analyst but also bringing in some first person side so what are some of the highlights of what you've learned from Ukraine. Thanks, Peter. I mean, there's a lot of observations we can take. I'm not sure anything yet is a lesson learned. I think there's some way to go yet and a lot of institutions are struggling with what they observe in Ukraine and whether it's relevant to them or not. Not every lesson might be, but a couple of things I think are important. Firstly, is this notion of the adaptation battle. It's, as you noted, wars are also a learning opportunity. And at every level, whether it's a tactical, operational, strategic or political, there's an adaptation battle going on as each side struggles to gain some kind of kind of advantage to learn what's going on to to learn how they're learning about the conflict and then constantly change, adapt and evolve. And we've seen both sides adapt and evolve their strategy, their tactics, their equipment, their external relationships throughout this war. So I think that's a really important thing. And, and what that says to me is what is the organizational learning culture of whatever institution you belong to, how do you nurture the foundations for adaptation before you go to war. So if you do find yourself in one and you're not able to deter it, how do you best learn and adapt? I think a second observation would be that there are very few, very few new things in this war. I mean, this most wars are an aggregation of every idea, every technology and every organization that's gone before it with a couple of new things added. So this, this war features, you know, mass warfare. It features the mobilization of people and industry. It features alliances. It features things like trench warfare and alien combat. But the couple of new things I think are pretending a change in the character of war, be they the mass influence and mass autonomous systems that are being deployed. The ability to gain and sustain awareness in the battlefield to a degree we haven't before. It's not transparency. And it's not always wisdom, but it's certainly visibility. And what I think that drives and I think the Ukrainian offensive in the South is a great case study of this is that many of the ideas, the doctrines and the organizations that we think work in modern warfare are actually half a century old. And we need to evolve them, expecting the Ukrainians to breach through minefields with technology that's 50 years old doctrine that's 70 years old and an environment where, you know, you can be seen and brought under fire in minutes was an intellectual failure on the part of NATO in the West, and we can't afford to have those kinds of intellectual failures in the future. So, so I mean the lesson is new ideas and new organizations need to be layered over the top of many of the old aspects of what we're seeing in this wall. And there's some pretty careful judgments that will need to be made about that. I think Laura and make again really hit this pretty, pretty well. I would probably reshape the question slightly different and bring in a couple other events that happened Nagorno-Karabakh and also date back to 2020 Libya. And what I take a take from those classrooms as it were is this idea of attributable systems. I think we are now in a new realm where attributable systems will become more and more important. Historically, if you look back the way that we typically have prosecuted or we had exquisite systems that we protected at all costs, whether you think about this as an aircraft carrier or a tank or what have you, those are certain systems that we really tried to protect. I think we're in a different realm now where we have systems that are to some degree have some disposability and are able to work collaboratively with other systems and the ensemble, the network continues to work even if you lose some. So this whole idea of attributable systems and graceful degradation I think are really big building blocks that we can leverage as we move forward. And I think as we, from the work that my office does, there are significant investments in science and technology, not only in the U.S. but around the globe that are starting to move in that direction to be able to realize attributable systems, whether they are aerial systems or ground systems or sea systems that you have many of them, none of them are as expensive as your exquisite system. And so you can lose some of them. And if they're designed in a proper way and integrated properly, then you can have the ability to still have collaboration scale or swarming or things like that and still prosecute the mission while losing a few of the elements that you would leverage to do that. These are all great points and I think in many ways it's important to think about the difference in the phrasing of in the U.S. context we say lessons learned, but in, for example, the British military and others and maybe Australia, there's the lessons observed, which means, you know, I didn't actually, a lot of these the question really is will we implement them in our systems and actually we were having a conversation out on the hallway related to your last point Troy of you know you've got an example of the launch of the replicator initiative, but what would it look like does it get funded what's its scale, you know so we've we've observed lessons but will we actually implement is open ended right now. So with that, I'm someone, I'm a worrywart. So make my life worse. What worries you the most when you peer into the future. So Laura and you have a responsibility. I mean, look, you literally it's the concern scientists so that's not just what concerns the scientists but what worries you personally, the most about the future of technology and conflict. Okay. Yeah, a professional concerned person. Well, I am definitely concerned about the future. And it sometimes it feels like the future is coming faster than you imagine I mean looking, looking out at the storms that have just happened this past week that the climate emergency is upon us, and we're seeing enormous disruption. It's going to be free for our most vulnerable and it's going to come for everyone. If we don't really do a better job of grappling with this and that is going to create incredible pressures with mass migrations economic systems are going to be more fragile so just the context for conflict, I think will be. You know the pressure is ratcheted up as you know pandemics and wars. Of course, I spend most of my time thinking about nuclear weapons issues and in that is a central concern for me of course because we have such a hard time grappling with low risk and high consequence events. And at times in our history we've, our guiding principle has been trying to how do we de center these weapons which can not only kill hundreds of millions of people, almost immediately but could threaten billions with climate and economic disruption. Again being centered. We have the fraying of arms control agreements and the destruction of that whole edifice that has been our been guy rails for decades. We are all almost all of the nuclear weapons powers are refurbishing and expanding their nuclear arsenals and creating new delivery systems bespoke delivery systems, trying to finesse deterrence and increasing the different types of weapons that can be used, we're building more and more ships with missiles now we can do intermediate range missiles and anti missile systems and they're going to be moving in the same spaces, increasing the, the, the supporting technologies like using space, more, more in depth with all of these technologies proliferating them and, you know, inviting anti satellite weapon development, again providing another short tempo use it or lose it type of pressure so I, I, I think I guess the question is, what are the things we should be doing right now that we wish we had the in 10 years we wish we had the guts to do and some of those things I like that part to be part of the question which how should we be thinking about the future and what are we supposed to be doing right now to to ensure that that looks as good as possible. So, Mick, you've actually played in both these realms of thinking about the future how do we adjust to it, but you've also in a recent book whites on war painted one of those scenarios that's quite scary what would a war in the Pacific look like so for you personally. What do you worry the most and then that's, let's take insight from Laura, what's something we can do to keep your worry from coming true. My main one is we don't take seriously the, the idea that a major war could, could emerge in the 21st century I think in the lead up to the war in Ukraine there were a lot of countries and a lot of politicians who didn't take seriously the fact that there are still people out there who think that large wars are a valid option in the 21st century to achieve their national priorities. And I think that if we just assume that she or people like him are rational actors and would never go to war.  The kind of catastrophe I painted in white sub war is what I'm trying to prevent. And it's what we should all be trying to prevent so in some respects it's an anti war novel, and if it's read that way that that's wonderful so we need to take seriously the fact that large scale war it's still possible. This series just don't true humans for 5000 years of fought and probably going to fought fight again in the future. And therefore we need to invest in deterrence but we also need to invest in the kind of dialogues that we're seeing the PLA issue at the moment to ensure that there are guide rails and things don't escalate unnecessarily between potential belligerence. I'd like to say that my colleagues here have hit a lot of the points I would have hit but there's a weapon system that is emergent, specifically hypersonic weapons give me pause. And I think of them that there are three levels of threat. First speed, we're talking about systems that go at a minimum Mach five, that's 3800 miles an hour, or faster, combined with the ability to maneuver, which sets them apart from intercontinental ballistic missiles which also go about that fast but they really ICBMs travel in a parabolic trajectory whereas hypersonic systems are maneuverable and can change direction. And thirdly, one when they get above about Mach seven in an oxygen atmosphere you have ionization of oxygen, which, concamely goes along, applies to them this cloak that makes it difficult to be able to sense them. So you can't get, say, an active radar being through because the plasma cloak that surrounds the system makes it invisible to radar. So you have a system that's traveling nearly 4000 miles, miles an hour can maneuver in his heart to detect. And if you could get that to operate in a collaborative way that is a very stark system to contend with. And to Laura's point that demonstrated these types of systems can not only carry conventional warheads but also nuclear warheads. So that is really a significant challenge. I'd say that after thinking about this a while, I think the thing that the biggest bang for the buck would probably be in sensing is there a way to be able to efficiently sense these systems. Because that's really the first step in the kill chain to be able to know where the system is in order to be able to counter it. So I think that's where the initially where most of the investment in focus on. So I think we've got time for a question from the audience. So if you've got a question, go ahead and raise your hand actually right there in the back and quickly introduce yourself as well. Hi, I'm Bridget. I'm the program manager for our cyber security fellowship here at New America. This is not my area of expertise, but this is something that I've been curious about since my graduate studies. So in the past few years, as kind of Laura touched on, we've seen private companies or the private sector kind of weighed its way into military operations via technology. So I'd just be interested to hear from you about how that would impact military planning operations innovation. Thanks. Great. So let's see. Actually, Laura, why don't you weigh in? I'm going to put you on point on that, but also as well, then we'll go in the same order. So you mentioned one, the problem of having a what action to be used mercurial would be a mercurial multi-billionaire have control over a communications network. What what else when we think about the role of the private sector and conflict via technology is a point of concern. So that's a really good question, Bridget, and I'm interested to hear it. My co-panelists say, I think, of course, the other place where the center of gravity is in the commercial space is in AI. And they have enormous resources there. And, you know, it's challenging to self regulate, and especially for technologies that are that are moving so quickly and are inherently sophisticated and difficult to understand. I think commercial space is a little bit easier because it's sort of more obvious what it does and how it does it. And it's a matter of investing and innovating and engineering really, but I feel like the AI is an edge. So what we use to produce as my as Dr. Alexander said, you know, their novel biological synthetics, it may be great at quickly creating new materials that that could transform industries such as room temperature superconductors. So I think, you know, when the center of gravity kind of moves in commercial space, those partnerships with government really have to be in place. You've taken in terms of the role of the private sector related to conflict. Well, I think it works both ways. It can work for us, but potentially can can work against us. And we've seen this meshing of civil and military sensors and analytical capability throughout the war in Ukraine. And whether it's using NASA firms or microphones on smartphones to track missiles, you know, we've seen this into deeper integration of military and civilian and government collection frameworks. Now, I think there might be some interesting interpretations in law about the participation of civilians in conflict at some point, we're probably not there yet. But just as we've used it to to find targets to do analysis to do battle damage assessment so might a future adversary use it better than what the Russians have done. I think we need to be prepared for that environment where all sources can be meshed and used by an adversary against us, not the traditional military and government sources of information and analysis. I think there's an area that that I always give me a little concern and that's electronic components. You know, when you think about electronic components that integrate circuits and things like that, we often acquire them and integrate them into systems. But understanding where they originated and who actually made it made them is has been a challenge because there really are no secure foundries that I'm aware of that have the ability to have the throughput to really kind of fuel the major militaries around the globe. And to pull that thread a little bit for you, is that when those components are made, they may be made by someone in the ferries intent that put components on board that can be engaged turn off through a backdoor through cyber connectivity that really could compromise the final systems that are based around them. So really, I guess a mitigate would be, could we really kind of envision the development of a secure foundry or an ecosystem of secure foundries that will allow us to make those components that we would then use to build the systems that we leverage. And so that's where I think there's this kind of interplay between the industry and really kind of national security that we have to navigate there. Really, you know, industry has been the real player there because we really just acquired those components and then integrate them and then we trust that they are not, that they're sort of clean and pristine, nothing hidden there. So like so many of the other discussions here, we go on and on, but we actually have to come to a closing point. So I want to thank all of you for sharing your insights and so please join me in a round of applause.


Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Circular Metabolism podcast. I'm your host, Ari Steed, from Metabolism of Cities. In this podcast, we interview researchers, thinkers, policymakers, and practitioners to better understand the metabolism of our cities and how to reduce their environmental impact in a socially just and context-specific way. In the last episodes, we explored some alternative societal and economic models, such as degrowth, living well within limits, perma-circularity, and we continue our quest by looking into post-growth. Today is a special day. I have the pleasure to talk with Tim Jackson about his new book, Post-Growth, Life After Capitalism, which I had the opportunity to receive from a political press. And I wanted to introduce Tim, because you are, of course, a very versatile person.  Since 2016, you have been the director of the Center of Understanding Sustainable Prosperity, so CUSP. And you have degrees in mathematics, in philosophy, in physics, so quite a happy mix that I'm very curious to talk about later on. I'm glad you think that's a happy mix, Ari Steed. It's perhaps a rather strange mix for an economist. Well, I think this tells a lot about how you write, as well. And you are the author, of course, of Prosperity Without Growth, which is a book that has influenced a lot of people, including me. So I read it 10 years ago, back when it was a report before it was a book. And it helped me kind of explore with the relationship between material flows, GDP, prosperity, and how they're interlinked. And so I had the pleasure to read this book, which it's a mix between history of economy, capitalism, science, philosophy, and a manifesto of how to build the next economy. So it's a really inspiring book. And you can find quotes of the Beatles, of Boltzmann, of Aristotle, Shakespeare, Stuart Mille, and many others in order to better understand what the good life is and what motivates us. So with all that being said, thank you very much, Tim, for being part of this podcast. And congratulations on your inspiring book. Thank you. Could you perhaps just give a short introduction of yourself, tell us a bit more about the rationale behind this book? Yeah, I guess in a way, I started out with secular economy and writing about secular economy, I guess kind of back in the late 1980s, early 1990s. I wrote a book in the mid 1990s called Material Concerns, which really tried to draw together a lot of the technological understanding of a secular economy and situated it in our sort of search for the good life as well, if you like. And it was really out of that work and out of my sort of exploration of the limits of technology that I began to question the economic model more and more. And I found myself in the early 2000s as economics commissioner on the Sustainable Development Commission, which reported to the UK Prime Minister. And I sat down very with the chair of that commission and said, you know, what should I best spend my time on while I'm in the commission? And the results of that actually was prosperity without growth. It was kind of, we both decided it was a good time to have a serious look at the most obvious tension that we face as a human species, which is an expanding economy into a finite planet doesn't go. And it's almost so simple, you know, that kids can understand it and certainly lay people can understand it. It's generally harder for politicians and economists. Because of the devil by somehow, yeah. Yeah, but also because economists have a very different view, they're not rooted so much in the physical world and they think that economic value isn't necessarily rooted in the physical world either. And they do points up to a point that's true. Value is not the same thing as material throughput. And therefore, if you can continually dematerialize your economy, make it lighter and lighter, then you do have a chance in principle, you have a chance of expanding your economy without trashing the planet. The difficulty is we've never done it. The challenge of doing it is absolutely enormous. And almost all of the triggers of the economy push in the wrong direction. And so that's really, you know, when I came to write Prosperity Without Grace, that was kind of the analysis that I developed during that. I had lots of mathematics in there, lots of looking at statistics, lots of thinking about the data, lots of empirical work. It was written as a policy report for a prime minister. Now, I'm not saying that prime minister was very happy to receive the report. He wasn't at all. In fact, just before it went out, I had a phone call from someone close to the prime minister's office. He told me that he'd gone ballistic. So it was not a welcome report at all. But nonetheless, it set out a, it began a sort of conversation actually. I think that people have been wanting to have. So even though, you know, our policy paymasters, if you like, were not very pleased to see the report and kind of wished it would go away, there came an enormous audience for that report suddenly out of nowhere after a week or so of complete dead silence, deafening silence in which the policy makers tried to pretend it wasn't there. And after that, it just got downloaded, you know, over and over again by all sorts of people all over the world who wanted to have that conversation about whether a growth-based economy is really the right direction of travel. What else is there? How do we manage that tension and really think differently about the kind of society that we want to have? But as I say, it was a policy report to policy makers. And so it was written in policy language. And a few years ago, a couple of years ago, I had a conversation with someone for whom, like you, that report had been very influential. He sort of said to me, that Tim is absolutely great. This kind of changed the way I think about my work. In fact, he left his job because of, not sure he thanks me for that, but he left his job from having read the book and sort of said, but I think you need to make this more accessible to more people. And so post-grace is partly about that. It's partly actually a response to that conversation and a sort of recognition actually that the policy language is not always the most accessible for ordinary people and that actually there's another job to be done, which is to think about our lives from the perspective of ordinary everyday people who don't think in policy terms, don't want data. I remember my mum saying to me at one point, well, there's a lot of graphs in it, aren't there, Tim? And I was like, yeah, mum, that's the point. But actually, for someone who was an intelligent human being who could understand the philosophical points, actually those that way of talking gets in the way. And I wanted to bypass that. I wanted post-grace to be a book which talked about ideas and talked about philosophies, but did it in a way that told stories that people could understand and that connected them therefore to what I think is actually a long, long train of thought that there are better ways to live. There's a different way of organising society that it isn't just all expand, expand. And neither is it all fight, fight, fight. It's not all about competition. And I wanted post-grace to really to draw those together and to present, if you like, a portrait of a different way of thinking about society. But it's funny, yeah, I think that the prosperity without growth also helped people like me which were very data oriented, very dry to get a glimpse of hope out of, because we have reports since the 1970s with limits of growth and all of that that tell us that we're, well, we cannot continue in the same way. So that was a given, but you added the word prosperity. You added the word wellbeing. You added some extra notions that give us hope that tells us, well, we're fighting for something. We're not just fighting for, well, we're fighting for survival, but we're also fighting for the good life and we're fighting for something optimistic at the end of the day, which I find very reinvigorating. And I think in this, you also help people that are not interested into data, as you said, to understand that there are figures behind this. It's not just wishful thinking. It's not just an optimist writing a manifesto to do civil disobedience. It's more, well, even if you kind of call for it because we are stuck in within a system, there is science behind it. And I think- No, I think that, I agree. I think that's really important too. I think it's, to me, it's sort of, and it is partly because of what you said about where I come from, I'm a kind of mathematician on the one hand, but I'm a playwright on the other. And actually, I think you kind of need both those things to kind of make progress and to deepen our levels of thought about where we're going. So where did your obsession with growth started?  I'm not sure how obsessed I am with growth. I mean, actually, I'm a big fan of the GDP. It seems a really weird thing, but I think it's a clever construct from an intellectual point of view because it brings together so many different parts of our economy, fits them into a puzzle. And if you wanna understand how an economy works, then the GDP can tell you something about it. And I think what's gone wrong is the idea that the GDP and the growth in the GDP is the only thing that we should be aiming for. And I suppose, you know, in my early work, interestingly, in some of the early work, I remember a report that I did very, very early on for Friends of the Earth. I basically hinted that we had to present our solutions in the context of a GDP that was growing.  It was a piece of work on the relative carbon intensities of different energy technology.  And so I did start out accepting that dogma. And it was really only when I began to think about why things weren't changing that I began to question the dogma. I began to go back to that and say, you know, is that correct? And then one day, you know, I stumbled on the index of sustainable economic welfare, which Daily Herman Daly and John Cobb had put together with Clifford Cobb in their book for the common good. And it really, it was to me, I mean, I am someone who likes those kind of pictures and responds to those graphics. And it was a very, very clear picture. It was a picture of GDP going up and up and up over 50 years. And of the index, which they had constructed to reflect welfare going up for a certain time and then beginning to flatten off and actually decline over the years. And it was such a graphic illustration, that division of those two lines. Yeah, GDP can go up and up and up, but actually wellbeing is not doing the same thing. And so one of my first instincts was, you know, I wanna do that for the UK and I did it for the UK. And then we did it for Sweden and we contributed to a collection of indexes of sustainable economic welfare. Lots and lots of lovely graphs, Mum, which began to show the same thing that although we were getting more GDP, we're getting bigger economies, that wasn't making the world a better place. And that I think was the point at which I began to then understand that we had to confront that as a societal challenge and take it seriously, not just to say, you know, that's it, we don't need growth anymore, forget it. But because that's not a solution either in an economy in which everything is built around growth. So we have to in a sense see it as a task, as a task to unpick our own dependency on this growth in the GDP and to figure out how to do things better. A lot of that actually was in prosperity without growth and the kind of thinking about the economy, thinking about enterprise, thinking about investment, thinking about the money system itself, thinking about all of those things and how you do them differently. That was kind of laid out in principle in prosperity without growth. And it's part of what CUSP, my research center, is pouring in all sorts of ways, economic ways, philosophical ways, sociological ways, psychological ways, political science research that we do there. It's all dedicated to this task of actually teasing us out of this gross dependent society and thinking about a different build things. And then post-growth, the book is a kind of homage to that idea written hopefully. And, you know, from what you said, I've been partly successful at least in a way that people can grasp it as a story, as a meaningful story and as the beginnings of a conversation about a different kind of society. And so in a way, kind of, if you like, it was never an obsession with growth. It was, first of all, it was, yeah, growth is kind of the frame in which I have to do my work. Second is why is it the frame I have to do my work? Third is actually we're in a really difficult societal challenge here. And fourth is, you know, a place where, even though I've called the book post-growth, actually it's a place of flight where we can flee from the assumptions of the past and free ourselves to imagine a different kind of future. It's funny because I really enjoyed also the side stories kind of things that you have all around the book. And so you start with the story of, was it Robert? I always forget. But Kennedy, yeah. Yeah, Robert Kennedy. And it was in 68, of course, at the same time in France, you had a massive movement as well. And he was a proponent of post-growth, which was mind-blowing for me that someone from the US would be someone like that. And as someone running for president. Yeah, exactly. I mean, I was just, you know, I remember very distinctly, we were in the middle of doing, I think it was the UK index of sustainable economic wealth. Somebody discovered a recording of that speech at the University of Kansas. And it was, you know, for us, as working on it, it was just, it was extraordinary. And we kind of, you know, almost had not known until that point that that recording was unearthed, that actually someone running for president of the US had made the same point 40 years before, or it wasn't 40 years at that point, but it's now 47, 48, so. Of course, unfortunately, he was assassinated. So we never know what would have happened in case he was 50. I'm sorry, my maths, you know, obviously I'm not being, it's for those listening and paying attention. 1968 is not 48 years ago. It's 53. Actually it's 53 almost exactly when he made that speech 53 years ago.  And then the advisor, you know, the PhD advisor or Herman Daly is Galbraith. If I understand correctly. And so there is not quite, but the, but he was, Galbraith was very, very influential. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. Herman's PhD supervisor. No, no, you're right. So yeah, yeah, no, I was fascinated. I mean, it was like, why, where did this come from in 1968 when gross rates were four and 5% per year? How come this guy comes along says actually, you know, great, not all is made out to be folks. And so I was really fascinated by the ideas that I came from. And in some ways, thinking about it now, I think I was a bit arrogant about it because, you know, we have an arrogance that in us about our own modernity. We think we are the most modern, most progressive, most forward thinking part of society because we're at the cusp, we're at the forefront of it. So we must be the ones who are thinking best. But actually, and that's one of the things I suppose about the stories in the book, the more you look, the more you find that actually these ideas have a legacy. And that legacy is the legacy of incredibly thoughtful, intelligent, poetic people who've been there before us. And that's a part of what I wanted to do. And it's, you know, when I began to discover the sort of roots of that speech that Robert Kennedy made, it really reinforced that point for me that we are sort of engaged in a kind of ongoing conversation about the kind of society that we want. And yes, people have been there before us. They have talked about those things. There's enormous knowledge locked up in history books, which is bad because not many people like history books that much. But it's, you know, if you can bring that alive and tell those stories, then we can connect ourselves not just to a future that we want, but to a past that's already been supporting us even though we didn't know that we were being supported by these long dead people. Yeah, and even, I mean, it seemed like a crime investigation when you went down this path. And it's funny that, well, Herman Dahlio was writing his article at the same time, more or less of the speech, and these were not correlated, and it's, that's also a human tradition, yeah. It's almost like we're living inside a program, do you think?  Soon, wait for it, yeah. Yeah, wait for it. But it's, but it is, you know, there were moments during that, during the writing of the book and during this exploration of ideas when I, when I, it felt so connected those ideas across time. And, you know, through accidental occurrences of the same thing at the same time like Herman Dahlio's paper and Bob Kennedy's speech. And I asked Herman himself, because I was fascinated, because I met him a couple of times and I know him reasonably well, because of the work that we've done. And so I asked him, you know, did you, did you know about the speech at the time? And he said, no, I have no idea. Which makes it even more extraordinary in a way. But there is a kind of sense, of course, in which, you know, ideas have their time in history and appear in different places. And so, you know, maybe something like that was going on. And then, of course, there were common sources. So the most obvious one was Rachel Carson's Silent Spring. And John Kennedy, he was Robert Kennedy's brother, was a huge supporter of Rachel Carson. So already in the DNA, actually, of the kind of Kennedy presidency, there was this care, this concern for the environment and a reflection on the kind of economy that we had and the kind of society we were becoming. And a lot of support for what I would now call, and you would probably now call, post-growth ideas. So that was, you know, it was a part of the kind of fascination of looking at these different people.  And that is it, it exists for a long time. There are philosophical values or economic values. There's a number of values that have existed. And we just need to reshape them, remake a puzzle out of old pieces, more or less, and make sense of our current contemporary challenges. Because the challenges are similar, you know, over the ages, we had environmental challenges. We had societal challenges. But we kind of keep on pushing, trying to change more or less what is happening with more or less success.  It's not new all of this. We were really, I think you also had the lockdown and the pandemic at the epicenter of your book as perhaps a trigger or perhaps a revival of some old instances. I don't know how. It was impossible really to write that book at that time without at least partly anchoring it in the pandemic. Partly because most of it was written in lockdown, but also because it is, of course, the most extraordinary thing to happen, not just to our economy, but to our society as a whole. You know, definitely in our lifetimes. My lifetimes, which is a little bit longer than yours. And indeed, you know, almost anyone alive has not really been able to kind of remember anything quite so extraordinary. And our kids, you know, they're gonna be living through and hopefully prospering after one of the most extraordinary events in the certainly in the last century. So there was no sense in which I could kind of write the book without thinking about the pandemic, even though I started writing before, it sort of inevitably seeped into the way that I was thinking about the book. And also because it's had some really extraordinary lessons for the way that we think about the economy.  First of all, most obviously I suppose that, you know, when push comes to shove, it's not wealth that matters so much as health. And that's a change in viewpoint. You know, it's a real switch in viewpoint. And it happened a year ago. We stopped prioritizing wealth and we began to prioritize health. And governments did what they had to do and they did it more or less overnight. And they did it without any restrictions and they paid for it through mechanisms that they denied had ever existed. And so we kind of in a way, in a way it was giving us lessons about the post-growth economy in a way that no book ever could. And that was so inevitably, you know, I think there were lots of very key influences there. And then there was also this other thing which about the pandemic I think which is that it's taught us something at least about ourselves as human beings. And, you know, not just about the things that matter but also about the things we struggle with. The lockdown in some sense is a kind of, you know, huge metaphor for our own mortality and the temporality of our lives. And that there are certain kinds of limits on us. And the way that we respond to those limits is really almost like our existential task. You know, it isn't an accidental thing that comes just because we have a pandemic and because we have to suddenly deal with an unexpected situation. There is a sense in which, and this was kind of, I mean, this is obviously my learning out of the pandemic. It's not everybody's, but it was certainly, it sort of reflected back at me in a sense that, you know, ultimately our battle against limits is an existential one. And we have a choice in that. We either sort of try to bounce our way out of it and bound free, you know, in one bound he was free and pushing at the frontiers of, I don't know, anything from overseas holidays to Mars if you are of a certain kind of understanding about the frontier of human ingenuity. And yet there are still limits to that and there are limits to how many people can participate in that. We might get, if we're lucky, a few people to build a colony on Mars, but that's not about the lives and livelihoods and health of eight billion people on planet Earth and it's not about the quality of our environment. And so if we retreat from that frontier mentality and draw our sights back towards Earth, towards ourselves, towards the inner part of the human psyche, what do we find there? And it's one of the most extraordinary things is that we've lost sight of that journey, that inner journey, it seems to me. You know, we've been so focused on that outer journey. We've been so focused on that innovation. We've been so focused on the outer frontier that we've neglected parts of what it is to be human. And in a way, I think it's the same process that we've neglected our own history. If you're continually innovating, if you're continually searching for the new, you're not looking back anymore. You're not looking at the understandings of our grandparents and therefore we're losing the wisdom of the history itself brings to inform our lives. And there's sort of two sides of the same coin in a way, those things, that continual innovation loses sight of history and continually bursting for the frontier loses sight of the inner game, if you like, one of the books that I cite in there in pursuit of a kind of equality which in psychology is called flow. The ability to really focus on something and concentrate on something and be carried away from it. And I was first introduced to that interestingly through playing tennis. There's a wonderful book called The Inner Game of Tennis. And it says a very obvious, very straightforward thing to someone, anyone who plays any kind of sport that most of it is happening inside your head. Your sporting ability is partly, but very partly about the physical and about what you can physically achieve.  And that's where the battles are being fought. That's where you fall apart when everything goes wrong. And that's when it goes right. You really can achieve these kind of states of mind which go outside of the ordinary. So in a way, it's almost this bizarre in a way that by coming back from the frontier and focusing in what's inside us, we actually burst out way further than the imagination of that frontier that we had in the first place. This is not physically going to Mars. And hands up to the people who have landed Perseverance Rover on the surface of the red planet. It's a stick achievement, but there are other achievements that are more accessible to all of us. And it was a part of what I wanted to do is to lay before people the possibility of that inner journey. It doesn't cost anything. It isn't material intensive. It doesn't give you instant gratification, but it's a part of our, almost a part of the soul of society. And it connects us to other people in ways that are competitive materialistic, hedonistic lifestyle. Well, it depends if you're teleporting to Davos, as you've mentioned. I have to say, that's got to be a blast, isn't it? That's got to be a real... But we're not going to do it because it's so bad. Not all of us. Not all of us, that's true. There's not room for 8 billion people on clusters. But I find it funny that I wanted to address this flow state because I think it's the point that I connected most with your book. I'm really happy to hear you say that because there are some people who think, what is this guy on? Actually, some people who know me quite well found that flow stuff quite difficult to take. So I'm happy, Ariste, but go on. Well, I'm an avid surfer. Exactly, so you know. I experienced this, going to the mountains as much as possible. I experienced this. Also how difficult it is to learn something when you're in your late 20s, 30s, to discover from scratch and to battle your own youth behind you in order to... And I find the happiness... Your youth is not behind you. Ariste, believe me. There's nobody else listening. Your youth is not behind you. Mine is. I have friends that learned skiing and surfing and all that. I know what you're saying. You're not going to do that again. And I feel I've learned so much through it and it's except... Well, perhaps it's the moments I'm the most happy when I'm with family and when I'm in the ocean and feel alone. It's the only times where you can disconnect with the vanity and writing a paper or whatever. That's the interesting thing to me. It's not... I introduced it and it emerged in my life in relation to a very specific thing which was tennis. But actually when you go looking for it, you find it in all sorts of places. And as you say, family and social environments is one of the places where people do experience flow. Actually some of the work we've done in CUSP has kind of identified some of those areas where you can achieve that flow. Some of it is physical exercise. Some of it is craft and being absorbed in a task. Some of it is social and in the presence of other people. Some of it is meditative, contemplative. And so I guess in a way there's something in there for everybody. Yeah, certainly. And that's kind of... I mean, in a way, isn't that what we're looking for? We're looking for not a good life. One size fits all. Do this, do that, do the other. But actually something that is free to everybody, available to everybody that can create opportunities for everyone. And I think that's why that concept is in there. And it's investment to yourself as you mentioned it in this which takes a lot of time.  You say that more is not always a virtue. Struggle is not only basis for... the only basis for existence. Competition is not the only response to struggle. And then you say that productivity doesn't exhaust the return to work. Investment is not a meaningless accumulation of financial wealth. This denial is not the only response to our mortality. And so are these the precepts of post-growth or if you had to give some pointers towards the... I think they're the foundations of post-capitalism in a way. They kind of... All of those things really were saying were kinds of things that... If you like, they opposed the dogma that capitalism imposes on us. That work is a form of slavery, that productivity is all that it's about. Investment is a kind of casino where we gamble and the winner takes all... The structure of late capitalism has imposed a set of dysfunctionalities on human society. And in that phrase, in that passage that you just read, I'm just kind of pointing that up really, that the journey of the book shows actually what a poor conception of work, for example, lives inside capitalism. And that there is actually one and it's the one that I draw from Hannah Arendt in the book and her philosophy. There is one which actually is very much about the enrichment of the human soul and the security of our sense of self and our participation in society. And we've given these goods up to the service of a capitalism that just sees rapacious growth as its output and efficiency as its only core driver. And so I guess by the time you're reading that at the end of the book, I guess that's what I'm hoping people will understand but understand not in a kind of intellectual here's my argument way but in a sense of all of all of that history of ideas and the ways in which that's been explored in our very own cultural history. We're not trying to necessarily reinvent the whole world. We're actually drawing the threads of a different kind of narrative that already exists and has been laid down with extraordinary elegance by some of the most intelligent people. And that you know I think as you mentioned at the beginning is to me is a kind of it gives me this sense enormous sense of support the moments in thinking about grace and challenging grace and when prosperity publish where you kind of think I'm putting my head up above the parapet here and I'm just about to be shot and that's not the case that that legacy of thought exists in our own culture and in other cultures actually the grounds not just for thinking about writing about post-gross society and not just believing in it either but actually sensing it feeling it and and living it. Well it feels very poetic of course so we're really looking forward to this post-gross society this podcast is mainly focused on cities so I was wondering if you can find or how do you envision a post-growth city given that cities are really the hub of consumption so and the place of accumulation the place of you know the surplus all of the surplus is cities exist through surplus so have you ever thought of what would a city a village would it be a city would it be a village what would be this post-growth territory or how would it look like do you have any idea I think it can exist in different places am I allowed to say that I don't really know the answer to that question I see I mean I kind of have some inkling of it and I think in a way there's there's a lot of creativity at the moment about visual visually imagining those places and if you go to some of the some of the people who have begun to do that and this sort of richness of imagery of the way that nature and city merged together the way that people and function work the way that work and life are put together the energy dependencies of the city that I think you know those visual images actually to me are incredibly powerful and they answer your question a lot better I think than I could do in practice you know in practice we know if you like to the sort of instruction manual of prosperity without growth and say we have to know what the limits are we have to fix the economics we have to change the social logic all of those things are broken this is what you do with enterprises what you do with investment blah blah blah and I think all of those things are true in relation to rebuilding cities but I think in a way to me a lot of the really interesting work there's two bits of interesting work one is the people on the ground you are actually doing it at city level and then there's the visionaries if you like the people who are imagining that giving us stories visual stories and cues about the kinds of places that we might be living in and that's I think those are tasks which actually other people do much better than I do what I hope I've given to that in a way is that that re-envisaging of the cities of the future is supported by a rich history of ideas which actually is enormously liberating even though it starts from the idea that we might be living within certain limits so two last questions before I leave you now that you gave birth to this book 2021, what's your next I have a very specific task actually which I'm working on with some research I have to go and talk to them kind of right now which is it seems to me that if we're right that one of the messages from the lockdown is that health is more important than wealth then we have to make an economy of care work and it's been difficult because of the structures of capitalism and most of the economics of care is not working properly so that's a quite specific project and it involves it goes back in a way sadly it tears me back into the mathematician and the philosopher and the policy maker and so on but it's a task actually that is absolutely essential and when you think about the people who basically saved our lives over the course of the pandemic many of them were working in the health sector and yet they had been living under deprived conditions, precarious lifestyles productivity targets that made their work more and more difficult and all of that is driven by the structure of the economies that we have and so there is a kind of urgent task it seems to me which is to find an economics and an economic structure of care and that allows us to create not necessarily at this point just a post-growth society but a post-pandemic society in which the people who matter most are never again neglected in the way that they were in the time running up to the pandemic. I do enjoy graphs so don't be shy with graphs and it's good you know Herman Daly has a wonderful thing which he calls misplaced concreteness and it's just fantastic I love it you know when you're sitting in front of a spreadsheet or a computer model the time goes by you're in flow and you never really have to worry too much about reality as long as you can produce some pretty graphs at the end of it. Just the last question so you already mentioned a great variety of books of authors of the films as well is there anything that either one book or one article one video that you would like to recommend that embodies post-growth? I'm not sure really. I mean you know it's really interesting to look at that video of Robert Kennedy you know the beginning of that video where he talks about the limitations of the GVP. Is that available now somewhere? Yeah there's a link in the references of the book and I did do that actually there were kind of the points where I just felt you know actually the notes are as important as the book for those who really want the detail because there's lots of notes and there's lots of links and actually almost as I think about the way that I wrote the book it was by reference to a lot of visual material so stuff that you can go that is well archived and that you can go hopefully the links from the notes in the book but if you go there and there's a couple of moments so that moment with Bobby Kennedy was one and then there's this moment which I actually tried to write about in the book because it's just an extraordinary moment to me of three days after Martin Luther King was shot Nina Simone gives a wonderful concert and in the middle of this concert it was just a sort of tribute to King and in the middle of it she just stops and she just this total mad lib comment on where things are on society and life on immortality and it's you know to me particularly as I was kind of looking at that in the middle of what emerged last summer of the kind of Black Lives Matter movement in particular and realising that the history of these ideas, the history of these struggles is not one thing at one time but a continuous story that we are all engaged in and each of those visual moments for me was part of what anchored me to that idea that we're sort of living in a chain of being and the chain of ideas within that chain of being and we're not individuals and we are and we're not you know on one hand we can play wonderful tennis or surf in extraordinary ways but at the same time a part of our well-being an enormous part of our well-being comes from our connection to other people and so I chose I think I chose I chose lots of those videos to almost act as a kind of inspiration for me as I was writing and hopefully there'll also be a kind of resource for other people as well. Thanks so much for all your time Tim it was wonderful. It's been a pleasure, thanks. I hope we're going to meet for some tennis or some surf in the future. Are you going to teach me to surf really? Sure. I've always wanted to but I've never actually stood up vertically on a surfboard. You don't need to to have fun. Thanks everyone as well to listen until the end. If you like this episode please make sure to share it with your friends and colleagues and I'm looking forward for your new report Tim. Thanks a lot.


Jason Peters the offensive tackle. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Straight out of East Texas where I'm from. Shout out to Jason Peters, baby. That is my best friend in this world. Hey, tell it. Hey, they bought them ball shoes off the truck coming from this stove. Oh, man. Man. Yeah, we on Boss Talk 101. Tell us a little bit about who, who, who is, who is Sir Charles Jones? Well, Sir Charles Jones is one of the youngest living legends. Okay. That was brought through the tool that you've all of the older legends and paid respect and they gave me their blessings and now I'm blessing all of the new young comers now and continuing the legacy of blues and Southern soul music. Man, you know what? You, you helped me out a lot and don't even realize, baby. I know you hear that a lot. Yeah. I hear it a lot. You know what I'm saying? A lot of people come to me and tell me I saved their lives. I stopped them from drinking. Say, man, they made their babies out.  You took over Keith Sweat's spot actually. You know what I'm saying? You bridged the gap. Bridged the gap, you know what I'm saying? And it's kind of like getting a lot of the tool that you know, ideas from Keith Sweat. Oh, yeah. You know what I'm saying?  Watching the bag for it. You know what I'm saying? You got the bag for it. You got the bag for it in a little bit, man. So, so tell us how you got the music. Just, just run us down through that a little bit. Well, getting off into it from my parents, you know what I'm saying? My mom, she was a preacher 25 years and then my father was the lead singer of a gospel group called the Christian All Stars.  When I thought, when Blues was really, you know, I was, I was set on Johnny Taylor and I remember when, when, when I was set on Johnny Taylor, I was set on Lil Milton. I was set on, like I said, Clarence Brown. I was set on all of these different folks before you came. I'm just gonna be real with you. I'm a older cat. So, and then when I, and then I was setting out here, this dude, man, and I'm like, this dude too young. When it first popped up, I said, this dude too young to be singing Blues to me. You know what I'm saying? I'm used to hearing them growl like Bobby Bluebland or something. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I had to have a snorkel or something. Now, then I looked around and in the song that really just took me by storm was this Friday because I used to have Lil Milton. You know what I'm saying? Everybody got a holidays, so I'm got Christmas and New Year, but every Friday's mine. I got 52 a year. And then I turn around and this guy comes with his Friday. The Save the Day because it's like almost, what made you think, what made you think to do that song? Well, you know what I'm saying? I hadn't really, in a long time, had heard a song where I said I wanted it to be a classic, you know what I'm saying?  And after that clock out, it's Friday. I go get my whiskey, man. I ain't got to worry about going to work tomorrow. I'm afraid to get ready for the club or whatever dude. I said that. So I wanted to put all of those entities into one song and then at the same time when I was making it, I wasn't really thinking about that. I was just making a song called Friday and didn't know the magnitude or how this was going to blow up. Now I'm getting invited to NFL football games and big time. Chagani NFL starts inviting me, flying me up to look at them in practice in the locker room jamming Friday. I'm like, this song is real heavy. You know what I'm saying? Friday is a bigger record than anybody lonely. Listen, man, anybody lonely bad though, don't play now. I know, but when you need that thing, it'll scale up on a bad time. It'll scale up now.  Friday might be bad. Now Friday is a good time, but is anybody lonely or scale up on it? Anybody lonely, like far as the fan base, it'll, it'll, it'll, it'll, it takes the cream. You know what I'm saying? Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I would say Friday far as an international record that somebody from Saudi Arabia might walk up on you and sing your song to you, stretches out a little bit. It goes all the way over to the country. It goes all the way over, man. And like Jason Peters, the offensive tackle, Philadelphia Eagles. Yeah, yeah. Straight out of East Texas where I'm from. Shout out to Jason Peters, baby. That is my best friend in this world. Tell it, hey, they bought them ball shoes off the truck coming from this stove. You know, I'm gonna, I'm gonna, I'm gonna call him when we get finished. And man, when he flew me up to Philly and I always been a Philadelphia Eagle fan. I got to get him on here. I just thought about it. Hey, it's a, it's done. It's done, man.


Are you interested in learning how to make the most of your scientific website, database or software tool? Would you like to learn how to transform users' feedback into valuable insight for new development in science? I am Chiara Gabella and here with Sefine DuVaux, we will show you the process that led to the new version of ExPASY, the Swiss Bioinformatics Resource Portal. The redesign involved dozens of users and allowed the transformation of the website from a resource catalog into a comprehensive discovery tool. In the end of this presentation, we will also show you in a demo how this brand new and intuitive website works. But first of all, what is ExPASY? ExPASY was created in August 1993 and was the first life science website and among the 150 very first websites in the world. It was initially a server focused on protein analysis and proteomics and in 2011, it became a catalog of bioinformatics resources developed by C-groups and other international groups. The latest version of ExPASY was released in October 2020 after an innovative redesign process. We will describe you here the key aspects of this work as an example of how users are fundamental for the success of your product. For a more comprehensive description, you can refer to the recent publication available in NAR, of which you can find the link in the description. In this work, we follow a user-centered approach, anticipating that optimized user interfaces and efficient organization of information are more conductive to scientific discoveries. Yet, professionals usually tend to wrongly assume that end users share their same views and behave in a similar way in a given situation. In reality, users have their own ways which do not necessarily correspond to the initial developer's vision of the product. In order to make sure that the tool will be usable and used, the user's expectation have to be taken into consideration at the very beginning of a project. That is where user-centered design, also referred to as user experience, comes into play. User experience encompasses all aspects of the end users' interactions with a system, namely websites, web or desktop applications in our case. User experience or UX follows one simple principle, put the users need in the first place in the design. In general, putting the user at the center of the redesign or the creation of a website allows to improve his satisfaction, leading to an increase of the website's frequency. With this in mind, let's see together how the redesign process was carried on. It all started with the definition of the strategy. In its last version, Expasi was a catalog of bioinformatics resources. In reality, resources at seed form a wide ecosystem of data resources and tools with significant dependencies and connections among them. They form a solid ground on which the life science can rely. The goal of the redesign of the website was to put forward the added value of Expasi by providing the users with an up-to-date discovery tool for bioinformatics knowledge and interconnected resources through a new website that would be user-friendly and also responsive on mobile devices. In user experience, the preliminary phase is essential for making informed decisions. In this phase, we run analysis, workshops and user interviews in order to assess the old Expasi according to usability, usage statistics and user behavior. We also evaluated a series of well-established portals in the world of life science, the so-called competitors. This allowed us to gain a significant insight into best practices and user experience improvement, leading to the creation of the first version of the so-called Warframe. A website Warframe is a visual guide that represents the skeletal framework of a website. The Warframe depicts the page layout or arrangement of the website's content including interface elements and navigational systems and how they work together. It has very limited typographic styles and graphics since the main focus lies in functionality, behavior and priority of content. In other words, it focuses on what a screen does, not what it looks like. A Warframe is employed in user tests, allowing for early feedback on products. Usually a Warframe is iteratively enhanced at each user test to produce an optimized prototype used by developers for implementation. The first version showed some important features, a unique search bar at the top, resources represented as small cards, identity cards, various filters to explore the resources, a detailed view with more information at each resource. You might also be interested in section, allowing to broaden the scope to similar resources. And finally, the results page in which the user could simultaneously see the results of its search with a regular search on the left with the results of the query across the resource description and a so-called cross resource search on the right, a feature that was already present in the previous versions that allows to query a subset of accessible databases in parallel. Because some of the design questions were still open for the elaboration phase, we organized an interactive workshop bringing together software developers, scientists, and communication and training specialists. The goal was to refine the Warframe before presenting it to the users. During this workshop, we made three major decisions. First, we agreed on the different categories and subcategories to be used to filter the resources. We also decided to stick with only one filter. Then, it was decided to provide all resources with expert-curated annotations managed by the resource providers. This ensures the quality and provides continuously up-to-date information on the website. And finally, it was decided to use an ontology called EDAM to link the resources. We'll describe this in a while. The iterative phase consists of meeting the users, showing them the Warframe and iteratively modified based on their feedback. It produced the final Warframe improved compared to the first version, with the unique search bar always on top of each page. The filters reduced to the categories placed on the left, a detailed view for each resource. The bottom part to browse other resources with similar topics. A single results page with on top the so-called cross resource search, the search of a biological entity into the selection of the subset of databases. And at the bottom, the regular search of the terms in the resource description. Finally, we launched the implementation phase. This phase includes the design with the creation of the new logo, the development of the user's and administrator interfaces, but also the updating of the re-annotated content. So let's have a look at the new Xpazee website. First, the home page. In the home page, we found a new logo and a single search bar at the top, filters on the left, and all resources listed as cards. By clicking on each card, we access the resource detail view, in which we can find names, descriptions, and useful information on the resource. We also have two boxes on the right with the keywords associated to the resource. Those keywords belong to the Edamontology, which classifies terms in bioinformatics into format main categories. Data, format, operation, and topic. Each term belongs to a tree of various subcategories that allows interconnect the resources on the border. Those categories are used in the right panel. Operations describe what the user can do with the resource, and data, format, and topic give searchable keywords associated to the resource. The bottom part you might also be interested in lists all the resources that share at least one keywords of type topic with the resource to which the page belongs. And finally, the results page with the two types of results. The cross-reference search results on top, that is the query into the database is in parallel, and then below the regular search result displaying the resources that have the query term in their name, description, keywords, or category. Now, to see Expasi in action, Severini is going to give you a little demo. Let's imagine you are a senior scientist interested in muscle development. You are looking for a general overview of information on the MF2C gene, and instead of searching info in each single database that you know, you want to quickly gather all data available in values databases. Expasi does the job for you. By typing MEF2C in the search bar, you can access the cross resource search that digs into a subset of sieve databases to provide direct information to the user. The results page returns the number of hits for the gene MEF2C that were found in the selection of databases. By clicking on the number of hits, the user is redirected to the query results in the respective databases. For instance, BG gives you information about its expression in tissues of value species. Uniprot KB allows you to access functional information on the proteins related to the gene, whereas Swiss model provides annotated 3D protein structures. Let's now imagine you are a junior biologist who is just starting a PhD in bioinformatics. You don't know much about bioinformatics resources and would like to explore the existing areas in the domain. You are also eager to discover tools and databases in life sciences. Let's say that your field of expertise is glycomics. In Expasi, you can browse the existing resources related to your field. There are two ways of doing this. You can either filter the resources by category through the filter bar on the left. Another way to achieve this is to type glycomics in the search bar. The list of relevant resources can be found in the second part of the results page, the so-called regular search part. You can then navigate across the various resources, discover what we can do with them, and be suggested a bunch of resources of potential interest for you. Those two searches work in parallel. A user searching information on COVID-19 gets two types of results at the same time. Information on COVID-19 are available in four databases and was found, for instance, in two entries in Cilosaurus and six entries in NexPROT. Also, the portal indicates that 19 resources are related to COVID-19, such as Procite, Swiss model repository, Virazone, NexTrain, GlyConnect, SIPCOVID-19, Integrated Knowledge Base, to name a few. The user can click on their names to find out more about them. The new version of NexPROT was released in October 2020. Since then, an increase of 15% in the number of daily users compared to the same period last year is observed, and the traffic from mobile devices has increased from 6% to 10%. NexPROT provides up-to-date, high-quality, interconnected resources that form a solid ground on which the life science community can stand. The portal is a gateway to bioinformatics, available to expert users, beginner researchers, teachers, students, and more. The new version of NexPROT aims to create a satisfactory user experience. Our user-centric approach was successfully applied in all phases of development and proves that user experience is a valuable asset also in science. Developers are highly encouraged to involve their users from the very beginning of their projects. A paper has been published in NAR. It acknowledges the entire process of this innovative approach. We encourage you to read it. We also encourage you to visit Ecspasy and leave us your feedback. Thank you for listening.


Good morning, dear learners. I'm Dr. Satish Visambalakade and I'm working as an Aston Professor of Communication Skills in the Department of Humanities and Sciences, Volchin Institute of Technology, Sholapur. And I welcome you all for this session on Nouns Part 2. As I said earlier, I have divided this session on Nouns in two parts, that is Nouns Part 1 and Nouns Part 2. In the previous session, that is Nouns Part 1, we have dealt with three types of Nouns, that is the Common Noun, Proper Noun, and Collective Noun. Now in this particular session on Nouns Part 2, we will be discussing the remaining types of Nouns, that is Abstract Noun, Material Noun, Countable Noun, and Uncountable Noun. So let us proceed to the next slide, the learning outcome. At the end of this session, students will be able to use appropriate noun forms in their communication. Dear learners, this is the learning outcome. At the end of this session, students will be able to use appropriate noun forms in their communication. So we'll be discussing about Abstract Noun, Material Noun, Countable Noun, and Uncountable Noun.  And the question is, what is an Abstract Noun? So I would request you to pause this video for some time and write the answer for this question in your course journal. And then you can resume the video. Welcome back. Now here is the answer for your question, what is an Abstract Noun? So the definition of an Abstract Noun, an Abstract Noun is usually the name of a quality, action, or state considered apart from the object to which it belongs. So goodness is the example of Abstract Noun which relates to quality. Hatred is the example of Abstract Noun which relates to action. And slavery is the Abstract Noun which relates to state. In this way, Abstract Nouns refer to ideas and qualities that we cannot see or touch. Most Abstract Nouns are formed from adjectives. The following example will make it quite clear. So the example is safe. So the Abstract Noun safety is formed from the adjective safe. In majority of the cases, as I said, Abstract Nouns are formed from adjectives. So let us do an exercise based on Abstract Nouns. So in the first sentence, you have to fill in the blank by using the word strong, which is an adjective. So the answer is strength. As I said, most Abstract Nouns are formed from adjectives. And so the Abstract Noun which we get from the adjective strong is strength. So the answer is she is a woman of strength. And in this sentence, strength is working as an Abstract Noun. Second, the honesty is the best policy. Now in this particular sentence, there is an error. And the error is the use of article the here. Normally in such sentences, we do not use definite article the with abstract nouns like honesty. In such sentences, abstract nouns like honesty do not take definite article the. And so the right sentence is honesty is the best policy. Sentence number three, the love is God. As I said earlier, generally abstract nouns do not take definite article the before it. So here in this particular case, love is an abstract noun. And it does not take definite article the before it. So the right sentence is love is God. Let us proceed to the next category, that is material noun. Let us define what a material noun is. So the definition is like this. A material noun refers to a material or substance from which things are made. So the following example makes it quite clear. Sentence number one, this chain is made of gold. In this particular sentence, gold is material noun because it tells us about the material from which the chain is made off. So the chain is made of gold. And so gold here is working as a material noun. Likewise in sentence number two, this shirt is made of cotton. So cotton is a material noun because it tells us the material from which this shirt is made off. Let's do a small exercise based on material nouns. So look at sentence number one. This ring is made of the silver. Now there is an error in this sentence and the error is the use of definite article the. So here generally in such sentences like this ring is made of the silver where silver is working as a material noun. We do not use definite article the before such material nouns. So we need to remove definite article the from this particular sentence. So the right sentence is this ring is made of silver. So let us discuss sentence number two. This wall is built of stones. So here there is an error in this particular sentence and the error is the use of the plural material noun stones. The right sentence is this wall is built of stone. So we should use the material noun stone in the singular form. Now why so? So whenever you use a material noun to refer to the material from which a thing is made off that particular material noun should be in the singular form. This particular wall is made of stone and so stone here is working as material noun and so we should use it in the singular form. So whenever material nouns are used in such sentences they are in the singular form. So this wall is built of stone. Sentence number three. This table is made of woods. Again the same rule woods here is used as material noun and so it has to be in the singular form. So the right sentence is this table is made of wood. Here in sentence number three woods has a different meaning. Plural woods means it refers to forest. Here the meaning is of material noun and so we need to use it in the singular form that is wood, W-O-O-D wood. So the right sentence is this table is made of wood. The next category, countable noun definition. Countable nouns are individual people, animals, places, things or ideas which can be counted. Example, anything that can be counted first whether singular, a dog, a house, a friend, et cetera is a countable noun or plural that is a few books, lots of oranges, et cetera is a countable noun. Uncountable noun, the definition. Anything that cannot be counted is an uncountable noun. Even though uncountable nouns are not individual objects they are always singular and one must always use singular verbs in conjunction with uncountable nouns. Examples, there is no more water in the pond. Sentence number two, please help yourself to some cheese. Sentence number three, I need to find information about Pulitzer Prize winners. Now here water, cheese and information all these are uncountable nouns and they are always in the singular form. Now let us do an exercise based on countable and uncountable nouns. Sentence number one, there is few water in the tank. Sentence number one is wrong because water is uncountable noun and with uncountable nouns we use little and not few and so the right sentence is there is little water in the tank. So remember the difference between few and little and their relation with uncountable nouns. So it's very simple, few is used with countable nouns and little is used with uncountable nouns. Sentence number two, he gave me few informations. Now here there are two mistakes in this particular sentence that is informations is uncountable noun and it is always in the singular form. So we need to remove the plural s from the spelling of information and error two is the use of few with information. As I earlier said few is used with countable nouns. Here information is an uncountable noun and we need to use little. So the right sentence is he gave me little information. Sentence number three, a little members were present for the meeting. Again there's a mistake in this particular sentence. Members is a countable noun. I repeat members is a countable noun and as I said with countable nouns we use few and not little and so the right sentence is a few members were present for the meeting. So this was all about countable and uncountable nouns. So these are the references for this particular work. Thank you very much.