Transcript: Beyond GDP, with guests Justin Van Wyk and Professor Robert Costanza

Onya: Hello Onya Idoko here. Welcome to our new podcast Life of PIE prosperity, innovation and entrepreneurship. Life of PIE is an original podcast from UCL's Institute for Global Prosperity and features research by our MSC PIE students. Our mission is to start a different kind of conversation with researchers, practitioners, entrepreneurs and policymakers doing cutting edge work, rethinking entrepreneurship and innovation to achieve structural and systemic transformation.

 Manolo: GDP, or Gross Domestic product, has become some sort of a universal way in which countries measure their overall progress. It seems as if that metric keeps growing. It means that society is improving. But what are the limitations of GDP? To what extent does it really measure social welfare? Or what can be the environmental consequences of remaining Pixated to these metrics?

Robert: Gross domestic Product was never designed as a measure of economic or social welfare. It only measures marketed activity. So it's a measure of how much activity there is, how much purchasing and consumption there is.

Manolo: On one hand, TVP doesn't take into consideration aspects that are valuable for society, such as volunteering. Meanwhile, elements such as the cost to address crime or the health problems caused by pollution do increase what GDP measures. Moreover, GDP does not consider the distribution of the economic activity. In other words, as GDP grows, the inequality gap could also be widening. But an alternative is emerging GPI. GPI has emerged as an alternative to the GDP metric, considering different variables that are not only linked with economic activity, but with social and environmental aspects.

Justin: We can now measure that impact to a certain extent, actually have a way to monitor the policy and its impact not just from an economic point of view, but also social as well as environmental, and hopefully start tweaking and enhancing the policies as time goes along.

Manolo: GPI has been calculated in different countries. However, South Africa has become the first African nation to develop this method. What does the GPI show in South Africa? What are the implications of this work for policymakers, businesses, investors and citizens? Considering the limitations of GCP, why aren't more countries adopting the GPI metric?

Onya: In today's episode, I'm joining my 2 special guests. Justin van Wyk and Robert Costanza, our first guest, Justin has spent his career within the investment industry. After completing the undergraduate degree in finance at the University of Cape Town. He's currently is Chevening Scholar and has recently completed his MSC in PIE at UCL's IGP. His also an entrepreneur and is the co-founder of Digital Marketing Company in Cape Town called Metis. AI AI works with and invests in SMS to enable them to scale. Using digital channels to identify and attract new clients. Also in this episode we are happy to have for the customers that join us, who is professor of ecological economics at the Institute for Global Prosperity, University College London never leaves one of the Igp's MSC's programmes called: People, prosperity and planet. He is the Co founder and past president of the International Society for Ecological Economics and the founding editor of the Society's Journal of the same name, ecological Economic. Robert is the founding editor in Chief of Solutions, a unique hybrid academic, popular journal and editor in chief of the Anthropocene Review. He is the author and co-author of over 600 Scientific papers and 30 books. His work has been cited more than 145,000 times in Google Scholar, and he has in each index of 139.

Welcome Justin and welcome, Bob. I'm excited that we get to talk about the research that you did just in applying the genuine progress indicator to a context that has not been examined by research, in this case, South Africa. So Justin give us a summary of the problem context and why it's important.

Justin: Perfect. So essentially, if I just give a bit of background, I'm going to economists, and as economists, we look at how economies grow and how that benefits people, the environment, et cetera, right? But there's a big portion that economics cannot take into consideration as a result of economic activity. And that's usually the social and sometimes even the environmental aspect. So one metric or one aspect in which we measure the economy is called Gross Domestic Product or GDP. And the interesting thing is that since it was created, it's become sort of the main sort of statistic used by governments, agencies, even people and discussions to actually just measure economic welfare. So over time, it's gone beyond measuring just the economic sort of activity of an economy and it's been used to actually measure what we call welfare progress. So in essence, as the economy grows, we expect people to get richer, economies to get wealthier, and for people to essentially lift themselves out of poverty. But what we have seen over the last 40, 50 years is that, generally speaking, there are other aspects in the economy that actually stop GDP from benefiting everybody. And aspects can be things such as inequality. GDP isn't actually distributed to people equally throughout the economy, but also some other aspects such as environmental issues as a result of producing goods and services in an economy that GDP just doesn't take into consideration. So as you see economies grow, there's a slight disconnect in some of the social and environmental aspects that we kind of miss along the way. Through my studies, I found this quite interesting and I wanted to understand with regards to South Africa. And South Africa is a very unique country to initiate this type of research on, to actually understand how is society progressing or how is welfare being affected by economic activity. Not just from a numerical or income point of view, but how is income impacting social aspects, but also as a result of US. Producing GDP or us investing in an economy to grow it. How is that impacting the environment and then how is that environmental impacting society? So there's some aspects of economic activity that actually can add and actually detract what we call welfare that comes from that activity, which GDP just doesn't take into consideration.

Onya:  That's really interesting. Justin, I'm not an economist, so for me it's really interesting to see how you highlight the disconnect between GDP and economic welfare. Let me bring Bob back into the conversation. Bob, as you know, Justin's work is focused on the application of GPI. Can you tell us what the GPI is and an example of the work that you have on the GPI?

Robert:  Thank you. And it's really nice to be here. The Genuine Progress Indicator, or GPI, is a version of the Index of Sustainable Economic Welfare which was invented by Herman Daly and John Cobb back in 1989. And their reason for doing that was that GDP, you know, gross domestic product was never designed as a measure of of economic or social welfare. It only measures market marketed activity. So it's a measure of how much activity there is, how much purchasing and consumption there is of marketed goods and services, things that are sold, sold in the market. It leaves out some very important things like the value of volunteer work, the value of household labor, and several other things. And it counts several things that are not really positive as positive things that add to GDP. The cost of crime, for example. There's more crime, you need more police, you need more security devices, you need all those things get added up into marketed goods and services and GDP goes up. So the purpose of the ICW, and subsequently GPI was at least to make the corrections, you know, for the missing benefits and the missing costs that are incorporated in GDP and have a better index of really net contribution of the economy to human well being. So the other major correction between the two is that GDP does not take into account the distribution of income. So if there is a society with massive inequality, most of the GDP that production and consumption is going to a very small fraction of the population. It's not really improving the welfare or the well being of the population. So if you're talking about well being or welfare rather than just income, then you have to make that adjustment for how that income is distributed. And that's the other major thing problem with GDP. It's only measuring income, it's not measuring welfare. How does that income contribute to wellbeing? So GPI has about 26 corrections. It starts with personal consumption expenditures, which is a major component of GDP, but then it weights that by the income distribution. So if it's more equitably distributed, it gets higher, that gets higher weight. If it's less equitably distributed, it gets lower weight. That's a major correction. Then it adds a few things that are left out like volunteer work and household labor. And it subtracts a whole range of things, both social and natural capital components the cost of crime, the cost of family breakdown, the cost of air and water pollution, the cost of climate change. So all of those things are then subtracted.

Onya: That's really interesting Bob. It's very interesting to learn about the reasons for developing the GDP in the 1st place and also the evolution of alternative metrics focused on social welfare and environmental aspects. So Justin, what was the motivation for this study?

Justin: I started my MSc. And I was looking for some topics, it's something that stuck quite close to me, was just how do we reevaluate GDP? When I'm sitting in my economics classes, they always say GDP doesn't take into consideration volunteering, it doesn't take into consideration crime or inequality. So I think after meeting with professor costanza and actually reading his work, because he's actually one of the pioneers in this area, how do we measure the true impact of economic activity? Right, because economic activity contributes to global warming, for example. That's not positive. But where the interest really came from is understanding that they haven't been applied to an African country. In south Africa is a very, very interesting country because of its economic and political past. So for our listeners out there, south Africa gained independence from a system called apartheid. So what apartheid did was actually separate society along races. So we separated south Africa into race classes white, black, indian and Asian. And then another race called colored, which is essentially a mixed race. I mean, what they also did not just separated them according to those racial lines, but also economic lines. And as a result, the social aspects came from that. So that independence, or freedom, we like to call it, came in 90, 94, so quite recent. And what I really wanted to understand is how South Africa progressed. So the whole objective was not to try to understand how South Africa's progress since the Palacek ended. And the reason why I didn't want to look at that is because that social system itself was barbaric. And I think it would be unwise to compare a democratic Iran country where a lot of things are recorded in terms of the social aspects, environmental aspects, and actually compare it to a totalitarian sort of Nazi run government primary to match 94, where there's not a lot of data on how that actually impacted the social aspects of society. So what I actually wanted to understand is, given South Africa's freedom, how South Africans progressed relative to GDP, and could there be some spillover effects from the previous regime that we haven't taken consideration? So I chose South Africa. First, it's my home country. And second, and thirdly, because South Africa has got very good data in terms of tracking, and we could actually look at aspects beyond just environmental and economic, we could actually look at some social data. And that was really something that interested me. Like, how has South Africa grown? Like, for example, South Africa is one of the most unequal countries in the world. So when GDP grows 1%, I know for a fact that not all of the GDP goes through to somebody sitting standing on the street requesting money. It doesn't all go to social grants. And how is that money made? And then secondly, how is that money distributed? And then secondly, how is that impacting the social aspects of South Africa? Because South Africa is known for high levels of crime, we're known for high levels of poverty. So how is economic activity actually benefiting the country? And then we'll talk about the findings, and there's some interesting findings.

Onya: Thanks Justin. I find you quite fascinating how your dissertation project is aiming to rethink how we measure progress. I can't wait to listen to some of your findings in this specific context, but let me go first to Bob. Economic welfare is linked to economic performance, but the relationship is not directly proportional to improved welfare. So why are more countries adopting measures such as GPI?

Robert:  That's a very good question and hopefully they will be in the not too distant future. I think there is a lot of recognition these days that GDP is not the appropriate measure for policies going forward. In fact there's a group of vanguard countries called the Wellbeing economy Governments. Part of the Wellbeing economy alliance that was initiated by Scotland and includes it's New Zealand and Iceland and Finland and Wales and Canada I think has just joined this group but they very clearly say their goal is improving. Wellbeing not just improving GDP. So that's not the primary goal. So I think there is some movement there. A couple of state governments in the US have adopted GPI as one of their official indicators. In particular, the state of Vermont has written it into legislation that the GPI has to be calculated and compared with GDP and other indicators over time. So there are a few vanguard governments, I would call them, that have begun to pick up on this. But I know that there are several national and international agencies these days that are also talking about alternatives to GDP and how do we build a better system. We're actually doing a course or a module this term with a group of about 25 Master's students where we're trying to do a comprehensive survey of all of the alternative indicators to GDP at multiple scales, including some of the things that IGP has been doing at the community scale, but all the way up to the regional and the national scales. And it turns out there are hundreds, literally, of alternatives. So I think there's general recognition that GDP is not the right thing. We got to be including a much broader agenda in terms of what contributes to wellbeing because we know that there are many more things that contribute to wealth, to our individual and our societal well being than just consumption. But what's missing right now I think is the consensus about what to do next. So I think all of these experiments and GPI has been a major one will contribute to that growing consensus that will ultimately have enough critical mass to sort of overcome that the reliance of the overreliance, the miss reliance on GDP as our measure of progress.

Onya: That was very interesting, Bob. Thank you, Justin. Considering the GDP's limitations, meaning that the GDP needs to be balanced out with another measure that pays attention to both social and environmental factors. However, the GPI is not a Universal cookie cutter that can be applied to every country. So is it safe to say that countries or nations it's better to have the GDP and complement it? Is a measure that is more suitable that captures the social environmental factors, but at the same time is suitable for your specific context and it doesn't have to be the GPI?

Justin: Absolutely. And I think GPI highlights this aspect. Some of the social aspects like crime were not taking consideration. In a country like South Africa, that's very important. If you look in Africa and you're looking at Southeast Asia and South America, community work is important, but that's not factored into GDP. Also, parents raising their kids stayed on moms, which is a typical aspect, adds value to society by not actually putting a value, almost diminishes the impact of that to society. Always how society perceives that. I think GPI is a very good indicator in terms of where potential issues could lie as a result of the economic output and for governments to maybe focus on that and going, okay, what you started to realize is crime is really impacting South Africa. Let's maybe focus on ways you can address crime. But then what they can then do is use other wellbeing metrics to go, okay, fine, are people really unhappy? What are the unhappiness levels that are not economically related? From a GPI point of view? Crime, environmental degradation could be something that is highlighted from a GPI point of view. But when you actually go to servers and you actually create and monitor wellbeing in another aspect, that might not actually necessarily be as big an impact to people on the street. So it's also about understanding that going, that the other metrics that the people on the street might actually find that's more important to them adding or taking away from their wellbeing. And there's a Happy Planet Index. There's the World Happiness Report. All these aspects measure different levels of subjective well being. And I think from that point of view, it allows us to, in a way, get policymakers to focus on areas which they might be very strong in. So you get policymakers can actually really understand the social aspect because if we do make decisions and create policies on social aspect, how could this potentially affect the economic well being of the country? And now in a country like South Africa, this is a very important question to actually have. We can't just make a social decision. We need to understand how that impacts economy as well as we cannot just make economic decisions. We need to understand how that impacts social. So it's kind of getting policymakers maybe to start speaking to each other more around the policies they're making and how that can impact cross section.

Onya: OK, great. Well, then, I'll come back to you and ask about your findings, specifically, can you tell us what did you find within the context of South Africa?

Justin: So what's quite interesting in South Africa is that you did find a sort of a breakdown or a low levels of correlation between GPI and GDP. Now, when I ran the the correlation between GPI and personal consumption, it was not necessary statistical significance, so statistically significant. And that positive question is why you would think like South Africa, that every dollar spent actually adds the wellbeing. And when I looked at GDP and GPI, what I found was firstly, over the study period, GDP increased on average about 1.8 to 1.9% per year. GPI only increased about 1% 60% lower than GPI. And we see that as well over, you know, not just in South Africa, but across the board. But when looking at South Africa and you're looking at, for example, some of the top indicators that actually affected GPI, what we found was that in South Africa we've had a large loss in terms of farmland. So food security over the last hundred years. So farmland lost is cumulative. So if I lose farmland, 1 m² farmland today, 1 farmland tomorrow, the cumulative loss is two, right? And it's cumulative over time. So by getting rid of farmland and not replacing it gives long term reductions in food security. What he found was the loss of farmland since 1900. And I looked at it from 1900 or 1950 was about 17%. So that's already reducing the impact of consumption. The cost of crime reduced GDP, personal consumption by about 7.8% using energy. So South Africa's energy, so producing energy itself. South Africa is now the 15th largest emitter globally speaking, in terms of carbon emissions or greenhouse gases, 7th ranked, if you look at on a per capita basis, because we have one of the largest sort of dependencies on coal to generate electricity and one of the largest electricity producers globally speaking. So that impact of non renewable energy depletion and consumption of coal and environmental degradation result of that actually reduced the impact and the benefits of producing electricity by about 10%. So the impact on the economy by 10%. So we're seeing GDP is going up or personal consumption going up. We're seeing massive or quite large negative detractors actually pulling it down. 1s Other aspects that actually contributed to it, which I found was quite interesting and actually really speaks to that, doesn't really correlate to the economy. And consumption is the value of household work. So the value of household work, given the studies that we looked at, undervalued in South Africa by about 27%. So a grange between trading 27 and sort of 30% over the study period, but on average it detracted or it increased, you know, benefits to society by 27%. So the actual rand or dollar value of that household was if you had to concentrate it in GDP terms, GDP understates by 27% if you exclude household work, the value of higher education. So South Africa, what you found was low levels of higher education in large parts of society pre 1994. And that was because of the past eight policies that prohibited people of color from obtaining high levels of education or made it prohibitively difficult. What we found is, over the study period, those level of education started rising. And also what we're starting to see is the services from highways and streets and the government investing, right? Not just investing in the streets, but the benefits of society using those streets that are not captured in GDP was about 4%. So what are we finding is that the elements that both contributed to GPI but also detracted from GPI that were not taken second consideration in personal consumption of GDP, and that in itself reduced the level of correlations over time, which was quite surprising.

Onya: Thanks, Thanks, Justin. After listening to these findings that what comes to mind is: Why haven't we stopped to address this decline? Because when GDP declines, you find countries taking certain measures, whether it's effective or ineffective. But there's a general concern, usually a national concern, about the fact that GDP has gone down beyond national like there's even global concern that GDP has gone down. So, Robert, why have we paused to seeing weight? There's been a decline in GPI. Is it because people are aware or what do you think?

Bob:  No, I think it's because people, policymakers, governments are not aware of that distinction. And like I said, they have been so focused on GDP as the goal 1s from the time when GDP was sort of formalized after the Brenton Woods conference in 1944, and the UN started requiring all countries to calculate their GDP. And that was the measure of progress under the assumption that was all that was needed. I think the problem right now is that we've become addicted to this mode of operation, to this policy goal. And all of the institutions in many countries are so adapted to and focused on reinforcing that idea. And so anything that gets in the way of GDP growth is pushed aside and said, oh, that's just not that important. The environment okay, it's an externality, it's a small little thing, but really we need to focus on GDP. So I think that mentality, that addiction is what's prevented the recognition that, in fact, welfare has not really been improving, and we need to do something quite different in terms of our policies going forward. Hopefully, like I said, that's beginning to change, but I think it fundamentally is going to take changing that fundamental goal away from growth and toward a different vision of the kind of world that we could create if we actually focused on well being rather than growth. And I think the therapy is happening already. I think we are beginning to see the kinds of changes that are required. I think the sustainable development goals process a store example. Is one effort and I think a very unique and 3s the first time in human history, really, when all countries in the world have gotten together and agreed on the set of goals that's much broader than just increasing GDP. And I think those goals all embody the kinds of things that we're talking about. Less inequality, urgent action on climate, protecting the natural environment, eliminating poverty and eliminating hunger. So if we achieved all of those goals, I think we would be in a situation where well being would really be vastly improved. I think the problem is that vision and those goals have not really been broadly communicated. The general public doesn't realize that we have a choice to make and that there are alternative futures that are better. It's not a sacrifice 1s to make the kinds of changes to overcome this addiction. It's not a sacrifice. It's a sacrifice not to stay in. The addiction is going to lead to a much worse situation going forward. And so I think that's where the therapy sort of starts, is to make that recognition. I have a book that just came out that explains all this in more detail, so have a look at that.

Onya: Thank you. The next question is for you. You've been involved in applying the GPS metric in different countries. I'm wondering if you could tell us if there are any similarities and differences between the work you've done in GPI and what Justin did in South Africa?

 Robert: Well, I think Justin's work was very important because it was the first really elaborate GPI study done in Africa. And so I think that's really critical and we need to do several more of those kinds of things. 1s And I think Justin was very good about looking at historically what had been done, 1s what kinds of inputs and what variations there were in GPI studies. And he adapted that to the South African situation and the data that was available there. So I think it's really an important study and I think these GPI studies do tend to learn from the previous results going forward and try different things and do new adaptations. So I think is like the latest and greatest. And the fact that it was done for South Africa, which had never had the GPI study done before, was really important.

Onya: Thank you. So Justin, now what? what are the implications for policymakers, businesses and potential citizens? Looking back at some of the interesting findings that you've highlighted so far.

Justin:  So in terms of informing policymakers, I think it's quite important. I think GDP or GPI can actually highlight in the economy in terms of where the policymakers or government or decision makers need to focus on. So case in point we look at in South Africa, for example, crime is a big problem, but let's unpack the reasons why crime is a problem, right? So, for example, if we were to try to tackle crime in isolation, policymakers may want to increase policing. However, there could be other factors that are impacting crime. And this is what the study kind of looked at. Looked at poverty levels. Poverty affects crime. So if you address poverty and that can be a big sort of an easier way to police crime. And also the impact of having too much police running around may reduce well being because people might think they're in a police state. So it will give them a little bit more of a holistic view around that. Additionally, South Africa is looking to transition away from coal based economy. When you look at the impact of South Africa's electricity on the economy, it's positive. So electricity contributes about 15% to GDP. But when you look at the impact from pollution extracting mineral resources, you're looking at a minimum impact of detracting to wellbeing by 27%. So there's actually negative as a result of producing electricity based on coal. So policy makers can look at, look how we transition South Africa economy from where it currently is, how do we maybe balance out a few aspects in society so that we progress? So South Africa won't be able to transition to renewables, not completely affordable, and we're starting to see currently that renewal is still quite expensive, at least for developing economies. So South Africa will need to come up with a plan, which it currently has done, but it needs to balance the plan up with gains in well being as a result of transitioning to renewables, but also planning in terms of the skills required to handle the new technologies, et cetera. So it talks about the education metric I talk about. So as renewable energy goes up, as economy grows, we do want to start seeing that high education starts benefiting South Africa. So that was one metric and that we used. So policymakers can then look at how they are making or designing policy, but also aspects in the economy to potentially impact, as well as linking it back to the whole premise of the GPI is to quantify that impact, right? To see if we make this policy change, it's going to affect a whole host of aspects within the economy, and we can now measure that impact to a certain extent and actually have a way to monitor the policy. And its impact not just from an economic point of view, but also social as well as environmental and hopefully start tweaking and enhancing the policies as time goes along. So there are about 28 different metrics and there are many more that we could account for, but these are kind of the 28 large ones that we're developing and they interact with one another. And I don't think policy makers focus on the interaction between the metrics and because there's no way to actually compare them from a quantitative point of view. And I think that's why GPI gains are successful, because it gives us a number. Whereas policy, if you look at social aspects, it will be how do we measure the impact of inequality, right? Salvage, growing, but how do we measure the impact of inequality and inequality links with crime and poverty and all these aspects. So can we stretch it back and actually put a number to it?

Onya: Thanks, Justin. That was really good. And I'm just wondering what do you think is the role of other actors that are crucial in bringing a more holistic measurement of the economy and social progress?

Justin: So I think all policies should include sort of an element of top down, but also an element of bottom up, right? Because they need to make decisions on an economy basis. So we need to understand the problems of society. And I think GPI can highlight quite a lot of the problems, but also a lot of the good that society is going. We always look at the negative externalities. Right? It can also encourage policymakers to carry on doing what they did. I mean, in South Africa, for example, we saw an increase in volume volunteering over the period of time, like exponentially. It was large. We want to create environments that encourage that type of behavior, right? Do you want society to start working together and volunteering and giving benefits to society? So I think from a bottom up perspective, I think policymakers and citizens still need to talk what citizens believe their progress should be and how they believe their progress should be measured. Not necessarily just in GPI, but other aspects in terms of other wellbeing, metrics in conjunction with the GPI. But I do think community leaders, even in terms of economists, because I come from the private sector in terms of we always talk about South Africa's GDP in dollar terms has decreased over the last decade and a bit. But actually, what more we're looking at when you're investing in the health of South Africa, so investment manager looking South Africa in the investment for long term now we're looking at long term sustainability. So using a metric like GBI can actually say to investors, listen, this is Lafitter or this is Nigeria, right, this is its economy. But these are the other aspects that you get with along with the economy. And if we want to invest in the economy like South Africa, we don't want to just see the economics being pushed, right? We want to see our triple bottom line being met as well as your triple bottom line being met. Because ultimately we can work together to achieve both the buggles. So I do think private sector citizens need to play a role, but I do think a large portion, a lot of pressure should come from the private sector because that's really where the money is, right, in terms of guiding where the money is invested and how it's invested and how it's implemented. And again, to hold public sector accountable for the money they've invested in the economy, right? Because policymakers, government will say, this is the trajectory of the government or the economy or the citizens, and this is how we measure it and this is what investors will be investing in. And if they're not tracking those measures correctly, investors may not invest in the economy. I'm not just talking monetary, right? I'm talking about volunteering coming from outside, I'm talking about non monetary measures as well.

Well, that was really interesting Justin. Investment and businesses are fundamental to foster a transition. So how is that translating to what they do?

Robert:  I think it's already translating to a certain extent, you know, that many businesses recognize that they have to change what they do, you know, to achieve a sustainable business going forward. And I think that shift in goals. In fact, that's how businesses have changed historically. Once you change the vision of what you're trying to do with the business, that then facilitates and motivates all the internal changes that are necessary to make that transition. So I think business people would understand this at a fundamental level. How do you do that same thing at the scale of the whole society. And I think that's what we're, that's what we're trying to do. And when you say business, I think we tend to lump business into one monolithic group, and it's not that way. It's very diverse set of interests, some of which are very supportive of the kinds of changes that we're talking about and some of which are the opposite. So I think we need to make that distinction clearer as well. In particular, the fossil fuel sector. And evidence is coming out now that their own scientists were telling them about global warming in very explicit and very accurate terms. And instead of acting on that at the time, they chose to not only deny it and ignore it, but but also put a lot of money into obfuscating and hiding those facts. So I think there's a certain responsibility there 1s and we need to separate the business community into the good actors and the bad actors and begin to put some more explicit pressure on the bad actors to allow the good actors to then make this transition to the kind of world that I think we all want.

Onya: Thank you very much, Bob, for joining us. It was such a pleasure having you.

Robert: Thank you.

Onya: And thank you very much, Justin. It was so lovely having you on the podcast and I hope to chat with you some other time and delve deep and some of the new work that you're doing.

Justin:  Thank you very much, Onya, I look forward to meeting and chatting to you again with some other work that hopefully I'm going to be doing in the next few months.

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