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Gavin: Hello, and welcome back to The Lancet Voice. It's May, 2025. I'm Gavin Cleaver, and I'm joined once again by Richard Horton, editor in chief at The Lancet and Jessamy Bagenal, senior executive editor at The Lancet for another in-depth conversation. This episode, we've set ourselves the quite sizable goal of discussing human flourishing and purpose spurred on by a recently released piece of research on the topic and also the funding problems facing universities and researchers currently in both the US and the uk.

Thanks so much for listening. Please leave us a review if you're able and enjoy the conversation.

Welcome back to the studio, Richard and Jessamy. We're here to record another. They're not bonus episodes by this point, are they anymore? They're part of the ebb and flow of the Lancet voice, but thank you for joining me once again. The table is heaving with notes. So we've clearly got a lot to get through.

Richard, I think you wanted to start us off on a more optimistic note, and you wanted to talk about flourishing and wellbeing, which sounds far more positive than what we've been talking about recently. 

Richard: I, yes. This is all based on, this incredible study that's been done across 20 odd countries called the Global Flourishing Study.

And it was written up as a, as an article in nature, really a call that all societies, all governments should be gathering data. On flourishing and the reason why it caught my attention was partly because it's an amazing enterprise to try and gather data on something like this metric across so many countries, but it also because it caused into question the meaning of health.

And we have this very. Reductive idea of what health is. There's the WHO definition about physical and mental and social wellbeing and so on. If you think about the health of a person in a much broader way this article points to things that we don't conventionally talk about, like the meaning of your life.

It's that you're smiling, but It's true, isn't it? If you feel your life has purpose. That is a CO that contributes to the way you feel. In your society and your community, and that surely has to be an aspect of your health your life satisfaction. Thinking about it over a period of time, do you feel that you've made some sort of useful contribution, whether it's with friends or family or job?

Where does income fit into all this? What this article in nature points out rather neatly is that in high income countries, people ascribe a high value to material endpoints and rather less value to issues around meaning and purpose. If you go to a. A lower, more middle income country. It's exactly the opposite.

So I just think that what I liked about this study of work, we often talk about health and wellbeing and put the two concepts together, but we do so in a, not in a very intelligent way, because we don't think about what is it we mean when we say wellbeing. And I and all these. Clinical trials that we publish with these endpoints of mortality or disability adjusted life years.

All these metrics I was gonna mention, disability 

Gavin: adjusted life years. It's such a reductive 

Richard: way of, but what it is. So why not have a metric for the meaning of your life? Or your life's purpose or an evaluation of all your relationships. That is as can often be just as important in terms of your personal health and is more likely to lead to ill health.

For some people, not all, but for some people than some crude measure of whether you have a disease or not have a disease. It's a hell of a 

Gavin: statistical goal to aim for, isn't 

Richard: it? It's, but I think it is, and perhaps it's asymptotic and you'll never reach it, but I think that to explode this idea of health and just think about it in a more complex way than we do, the sanitization of health, which is what the Lancet.

Stands for in a positive way, but it has a big negative side as well, because we don't, we, we simplify the meaning of health and actually we need to, it's not a word, but we need to complexify the meaning of health and make it much more interesting. Don't you think? Just me. I 

Jessamy: totally agree. And what I found really interesting about that, paper, that study, which was written up in one of the smaller journals in a sort of fuller form, was this very interesting discussion that they had about wellbeing and flourishing and that, flourishing is about the sort of interplay between the environment and the community and the individual.

Whereas wellbeing is about the individual. And actually it's such a much broader and interesting concept to think about flourishing because it does therefore expand the conversation into many of the things that we discuss about planetary health, about climate change, about public health issues. So I think that's absolutely right.

Hope. Hope. 

Richard: Hope. Where's hope? Absolutely. Where's hope? My God today. Don't we need some hope? I don't care about my health. What I want is some hope. Yeah. To wake up in the morning and feel that there's somebody out there who's trying to do some good instead of destroying everything we've spent the last 30 years trying to create.

Yeah. Health, forget it. Give me something else. 

Gavin: That, that brings me nicely on to the areas for growth mentioned for the United Kingdom in this paper, which I found quite entertaining. The areas that. The UK could be doing better at our optimism, freedom, and purpose. But we're very good at charitable giving, education and volunteering.

Jessamy: Optimism, freedom and purpose. Yeah, I like that too. The bit about service attendance in childhood was very interesting that there's some sort of association between service attendance and religious attendance. Yes. And then, and I thought, how fascinating 

Richard: Religion. We need to be going to church more than twice a week.

It's one of the major conclusions of the study isn't it's major conclusion. The people who went to a religious service more than once weekly had a one point higher measure on this flourishing index. So I, and maybe 

Jessamy: that's hope because it's something 

Richard: It's spirituality, isn't it?

Spirituality, there's something about spirituality and. And it's true that if you, I don't know about you, but if you walk into a church, especially an empty church, there's, there is something rather, there is something beautiful and grand and you feel as if you're in a special place.

Yeah. I'm not sure I feel better when I come out of it, but I can see that, the, that, how that might work. But maybe that's the great. Mistake in Western civilization that we have. Wow. We've taken out, we've, we have, we've taken out that spiritual element, which is all about purpose and meaning 

Gavin: optimism 

Richard: and optimism and freedom, and and we've destroyed our community as a result.

Know, but you actually 

Jessamy: have some funny wording about that, about the religious aspect. It's something like we, this is thought provoking result. I. 

Richard: Or as pseudo scientists. That's what we're programmed to think. We're supposed to be in somehow set up in opposition to religion, but that's, I, some years ago we tried to forge this alliance with the Catholic church.

We've just got a new Pope and. Under Pope Francis we made an overture to the Vatican and we said, look, you've got 1.5 billion or so Catholics in the world. Wouldn't it be fantastic if we could mobilize you for health? And so we all tripped over to Rome and we had this meeting and stayed where the Cardinals were all staying a week or so ago.

And we had breakfast where. Pope Francis as he was, went alive then would have breakfast. 'cause he was such a modest kind of guy. And we met with the cardinal responsible for science. And there is a cardinal responsible for science. In fact, in the, if you go to their building, they have a bust of Galileo.

In the Vatican because they feel so guilty about what they did to poor old Galileo centuries ago. Wouldn't it be fantastic if a medical journal could forge a collaboration with an institution like the Catholic Church? Sadly, it was completely disastrous and we failed, but nevertheless.

It was. It was the invitation. The remains open. This was the value. The invitation is open. This was the value of life. It. The Copley 

Gavin: 14th is listening to this podcast. Exactly. The invitation is open. 

Richard: Exactly. We need, this is the moment to try and rebuild our relationship with the Vatican. 

Gavin: I did enjoy that.

We have a weekly meeting at The Lancet, and most of the time it's photos of various Lancet staff members attending various conferences. And then one week there was a photo of Richard meeting the Pope, which was, did that go into Lansing? I think it went into our weekly internal magazine. Okay. But it was more in the issue meeting when someone just clicked through to it.

And there was a photo of you meeting the Pope. I was a, 

Richard: yes. I did shake his hand actually operating on a different level.

Gavin: Anyway, how do we get onto the Pope? We were talking about optimism. Oh yes. Religious freedom, purpose. That's right. 

Richard: We're all going to feel much healthier and happier 

Gavin: and flourishing if we. There was one final thing in this study that I wanted to pull out before we move on, which was quite a lot of discussion that talks about young people.

And how versus previous iterations of this study or things akin to this study, they're just simply not doing, they're not flourishing as well as they used to be. It used to be there was a u-shaped curve of flourishing. You were you felt that you were doing very well in your early years.

It bottomed out roughly my age 

Jessamy: when you have children.

Gavin: And then past the age of 49, you start the, you 

Richard: have me again. So for people like me, we're living on a plane of ecstasy. Are we? Pretty much, yeah. That's the conclusion of the study, but Okay. I'll try and 

Gavin: remember that this version of it suggests that a consistent finding is that young people simply aren't doing as well as they used to be, which I think is a very interesting conclusion.

It suggests that, it is just that because of social and economic conditions, it is simply more difficult to be young today. 

Jessamy: And that's Jonathan Haights. Anxious generation. Yeah. Least flourishing generation. 

Richard: Yeah. Next week we are next week is the World Health Assembly in Geneva, and we are launching our commission, our second commission on Adolescent Health.

And wellbeing word wellbeing I think is in there. And that is a big focus of the commission, in fact, that I think if you look at the number of young people who fall into the definition of adolescents, so up to the age of around 24 or so you've got several billion people on the planet.

So it really. This is not a small problem, but do we ever talk about, do we talk about adolescent health as much as we should? The answer is we really don't. So this is a hugely neglected topic and I think certainly in the global north, so to speak the idea that young people would be materially.

Wealthier than their parents. That's ideas died some years ago. And it's not just the great American dream, it's the great western dream that every generation makes some sort of progress. I'm afraid that's a myth. And so what happens with children, it's as they grow up there's no job security.

There's no income security. It's pretty frightening actually. 

Gavin: I know, and so many of them are going to university, getting into huge amounts of debt, and then finding that the graduate jobs simply aren't there anymore at the far end. 

Richard: This is also a gendered issue. Young women and young men have some shared predicaments, but also very different pred predicaments.

We have a, an, a war against women at the moment. And I'm not thinking particularly or exclusively about the Trump administration. There's been for some years. A growing conservative tide that's tried, that's been trying to, and succeeding in taking away sexual reproductive health and rights as we wrote about in one of our editorials.

Exactly. Exactly. Access to safe abortion services remains a challenge and has been rolled back in many countries. And then of course there's now this attack on gender. Ideology, not my words, but the Trump executive order words. That's a terrible situation. But also for young boys and for young men.

And when you see young men, the only role models they have to. Follower, Andrew Tate and the likes of those men. How have we created a situation for young men growing up? That those are the role models that they follow. And if you look at the mental health of young men, that's a particular challenge and is getting worse, not better.

And given that generation is gonna be the future of our society, why are we not spending more attention on it? 

Gavin: I think that's I completely agree with that. One of the other things we wanted to talk about, of course, is university funding. I think you wanted to highlight a particular piece on how the United States became a science superpower with its funding of universities and research and what it means now that this reimbursement of indirect research costs is potentially being cut so heavily by the Trump administration.

What it means for not just the US but actually. Research and progress worldwide. 

Richard: Yeah. Progress is not inevitable and indeed it is highly reversible and the assault on. Institutions of knowledge which we're seeing predominantly in the United States, but it's not only in the United States.

There are many countries where universities are seen as subversive, and freedom of speech needs to be curved. But it is worth reflecting on. And this was also an article that was in nature on how the US became a science superpower in the uk. The UK's done very well, but we diverged was the argument in this paper, after the second World War, we invested our focus on centralized government laboratories, whereas in the United States, they invested in.

University research, which was completely independent of government, not directed by government. And then as they came up with innovations, those innovations then became commercialized. And so you had this amazing triangle of government, universities, and private sector that created the alchemy for tremendous success.

And I must admit there was one, it hadn't occurred to me actually in quite the same way. As it should have done. But, we had Bletchley Park in the uk. We started the science of computers in the uk, the Modern Science of Computers, and yet Silicon Valley isn't, in the. Some parts of England, we made a mistake, we took a wrong turn.

And it's quite interesting to, to reflect on how and why that happened and what lessons there are from that. But yeah, we're, we are seeing that constriction of the university as a space for freedom of speech, but it 

Gavin: means this virtuous circle of innovation and progress is actually going to be.

There's a chance it'll be broken by this one. Relatively obscure sounding change in how the government funds universities in the us in the, in terms of the indirect 

Richard: costs, yeah. Yes, exactly. It sounds incredibly boring and dull and in some ways it is, but it is a, it has allowed universities to thrive and to grow and be the powerful institutions that they are and I'm afraid to say, it's not, it's definitely not a clash of civilizations and it's not a war between cultures, but if you, I knew there was a but coming up but if you look at, if you look from a global perspective, Western institutions of learning are. I don't wanna say on the decline, but they're being pushed to one side because there are other parts of the world, and I'm thinking of Asia in particular, where they understand that investing in universities giving freedom to academics, that is a source of enormous.

Economic strategic power and also in our small corner of the world provides a foundation for improving health. Juste, you've got a, an appointment I know at the National Union of University of Singapore. Seriously, Singapore is a. Is a nation state that is pivotal as a centered, not just for science, but for communication.

In Asia, it used to be Hong Kong. But I think to be honest the chilling effect of of what's taken place at universities in Hong Kong has made that territory a less attractive place to invest and to hold conferences. But Singapore has managed to retain that 

Jessamy: and we met with that U University recently from China and we were also blown away by the scale of their faculty.

When you've got a faculty of 10,000 and a student body of 60,000 and you are backing that up with investment. I think it's interesting to reflect on the compound interest that you get from some of these investments. You spoke about what happened in the second World War and the divergence between the UK and the us.

And obviously, many of these policies might be reversible hopefully if we are able to get to the next stage. But there will be compound interest on these negative impacts. It won't just be that for the next 2, 3, 4 years, things are bad. This is a, these impact generations of scientists and the way that science is done in a really meaningful way, I think.

Would you agree? So 

Richard: that's what you are, I think what you're saying. Is that it's gonna take decades, not years, to reverse the damage that's been done. That is being done now. And I, and that's for sure because after four years, nobody's gonna come along and reinvent U-S-A-I-D or restart pepfar or Reinvent unaids.

Or give. The Global fund or Gavi Yeah. The money that they're not getting and that compound loss as you say. That's pretty catastrophic for those institutions. But, on the other hand, let's have hope on the other hand. On the other hand, I'm trying to, we need more optimism.

I'm trying to be optimistic because, these bureaucracies in the United Nations. They are bureaucracies. They're very they do a lot of good, but the incentives that they create are not always good incentives. I ha have had a very good friend at WHO. Really good friend from an excellent country, not in the West.

And he came to WHO and he, and thanks to the United Nations funding, put his three children through private school in the United Kingdom, which meant that for him, big success for his family, all three. Children off doing professional jobs, wonderful. All paid for by the United Nations taxpayer.

Meanwhile, he had a job at, in Geneva where the primary concern every day he got up, was to do absolutely nothing. Because the most important thing for him was putting his three kids through private school in Britain and he didn't want to raise one hair on his head above the parapet of gene in Geneva.

And so he cruised through his time in Geneva and was phenomenally invisible. And a great successful around, sounds like a dream. How do I get this done? No, it was and WHO. Wonderful place, inspiring. It's our agency and we love it and we defend it and we write editorials about it, and I would die for it.

But it's full of people like that. 

Jessamy: Yeah. 

Richard: And the It's because the incentives are skewed. To do nothing. And that's can't be right. 

Jessamy: I think that's where it comes with getting, engaging with the issues that have led us here. That we can still, it, it doesn't have to be between people who believe in institutions and people who don't believe in institutions and want to tear everything down.

It's about thinking about getting it right. Getting it right. Yeah. Focusing on the outcomes rather than the processes and all of those types of things. 

Richard: Exactly. And when you, when your benefits package is so great and you've got too much to lose, if something, if you lose your job there, then you know that inculcates a culture of conservatism.

Gavin: Do you not think though it's a good opportunity to remake the health world order? I was really struck by a quote from a anonymous European parliament source recently who said that Europe can no longer depend on the whims of a hundred thousand people in Wisconsin getting the correct information every four years.

We have to rebuild in a way that does not rely at all on American politics and the back and forth and the polarization there. So do not think that maybe this is a. Good opportunity to take the institutions that have relied so heavily on America and just work out a different way of managing things. 

Richard: I think that's exactly the way we have to think about it.

That this is an opportunity for us to go back to, in the sense of ground zero in global health and rebuild from there. I would hope that would enable certain countries to step up and to take a part in global health governance that they haven't necessarily taken part in in recent years. I think my worry is that those countries are not doing so because they are retrenching.

There was a time back in the middle of the MDG era, so in the two thousands where countries like the United Kingdom and France and Norway and Sweden were really dominant voices in, in global health and those countries have stepped back. The UK has cut its 0.7% commitment of GNI on. On aid.

They're not around the table in those global health discussions that they once were. And the same for many other European countries. And as for some Asian countries which really should have a much stronger voice in global health, I don't see them stepping forward either. So the Withdrawal of America, in a sense could be a good thing because it allows that rebalancing.

And I've heard people actually. Celebrate the fact that America has cut U-S-A-I-D because it's the end of the hegemonic imperialistic aid culture. And that we've had developing for the last 30 or 40 years. Fine as long as. We don't destroy partnerships and we don't destroy collaborations and that there's somebody else who can step in to nurture those collaborations.

But I'm not sure that there will be. So unfortunately, nature bores a vacuum, but I think it may have to endure a vacuum in this particular case. 

Gavin: The other point I was gonna make is as well as this being an opportunity to rebuild. The health world order. In a sense, what was interesting in this particular nature article that you picked out was talking about how countries are just it, it seems such an obvious open goal for countries to put together packages for those US scientists who suddenly find their research budgets slash to find themselves out of work, their grants cut, all that sort of stuff.

It seems that a bit of an open goal for places like China or Europe. 

Richard: Yes, China has this project called a thousand Talents Program where it's tried to bring talented scientists in particular to begin with their own scientists who often were trained in the United States or Western countries, and then stayed in those countries and then offered them.

Tenured positions and grants to come back. And that's been phenomenally successful. And we've worked with some of them actually pun go was a professor of geosciences at the University of Berkeley, then went back, set up his own lab at at Shinga University, and we've. Did a commission with him on healthy cities.

He's now in Hong Kong at HKU and we're doing a commission with him on eco civilization. It, so he's one of many people that China's been very successful at attracting back to the mainland. Why are we not, where's our thousand talents program? Why are we not finding ways to unfortunately too often the signals we send are that we want to shut people out rather than bring people in.

And the rhetoric from government, even governments that you think might be more pro-science and pro. Building a Flo flourishing culture of science. The signals are no, stay away. We don't, yeah, we actually don't want you. And that's not the way forward actually.

Gavin: Especially given the current major opportunity to attract US scientists.

Exactly. You could almost do a sort of reverse operation paperclip. Operation Paperclip being the the Amer the American attempts to attract German scientists after World War ii. I say attempts to attract. The American exportation of German scientists to all of their major programs after World War II as I think a reverse flow could very much be a brain drain from the US could very much be on the cards.

Richard: But we need a program, don't we? To do that? We do. We need a program and we have nothing. No. In fact, it's very weak. We are recording this. The signal from our current government is very much you know what, we wanna close the doors. Boards up. Yeah. Borders up. Close the doors. Stay away. 

Gavin: One further thing that requires a bit of a signal from our government, I think is the financial crisis of higher education in the UK at the moment.

There was a new survey published and this survey is run every single year and they go to every university in the UK and ask. What current cost cutting measures are you putting in place and what do you hope to look at and the results are striking? I'll just read out some of the stats. Half of all the respondents have been forced to close courses to reduce costs.

That's 49% of them a figure that's more than doubled in the last year. Course consolidation has jumped to 55% from 23%. 46% of institutions have cut optional modules up from 29%. 18% have closed entire departments up from 9%, and 88% said they may need to consider all of the above in the next year. It's looking pretty dire in UK higher education at the moment.

And it it partially ties back into the immigration optics that we were talking about just then, but UK institutions have based so much of their funding recently over the last few years on attracting international students. And now that we're partially putting the drawbridge up to international students, or at least making it harder, 

Jessamy: seems to be a focus of what they're.

Hoping to do, doesn't it? 

Gavin: Which is odd, isn't it, because it's getting graduates over here and then having the graduates have a connection to the UK and then having these high, highly trained graduates working. It's the same with the 

Jessamy: us. When you look at the data, and obviously the data isn't great, but when you look at the data of what's happening at universities for students, and then the economic benefit that they cause the surrounding community.

It's, there's a very clear association there for international students and then increasing economic activity around that university and location. So it's totally counterproductive. 

Richard: But our universities are bust in, it's certainly in the UK financially. Pretty much every university is in some sort of financial crisis as one.

Nameless head of a of a of London based institution said to me recently, even before the current government was elected, they were in a fin financial pre-crisis, and now they're definitely in a financial crisis. And he expressed the view that he wasn't sure that. They were going to survive, his institution would actually survive this current financial crisis.

And I hear this from many colleagues and friends I have across universities that and I think that one of the difficulties has been that. The university, of course, has to be solvent. They lost their sense of purpose, their sense of flourishing. To bring us back to the, where we started with this word, flourishing, but this word purpose.

When the university had a very clear purposes and institution of knowledge for social good, then. It could make strategic decisions about which knowledge areas, what kind of social good, what were academics there to do, what was the purpose of teaching and education? And it was almost like it, yes, it was in the very, very best sense, an ivory tower in the best sense that it was an institution that was in society, but was also outside of society, able to conduct.

Thinking in a completely free way with the enlightenment ideal underpinning it, which was that at some point it would bring some benefits to the community and then the university took the wrong turn and decided it wanted to become like a business and. Then it all became about profit and loss. It was all about spreadsheets, and I remember, I won't name the university, but I sat on the council for some years of one university and we'd have these meetings every couple of months and we'd sit around this big table and the chairman of council and we'd have this thick.

Book of papers, and the first thing that you had to look at was all the money that the university had made since your previous meeting. So it was all the grants that had been won. And of course, medicine always came first because. It was getting the highest, yeah, it was a lot of money that was coming in.

So they got poll position and then poor old arts and humanities, and the Department of Latin Studies was down at the very end because they got, 50 pence for a stamp to submit a manuscript to some. Impoverished journal. And there was absolutely, there was a clear hierarchy of what mattered, and it were medicine and science mattered more than arts and humanities.

We would have this meeting for two days, every two months, and for the whole of the two days, we never spoke about any of the products of the university. Who'd written an interesting book, who'd done a remarkable paper, who'd made a huge discovery. None of that, it was totally dominated by money and the corporatization of the university.

And when that happened, when that turn was taken, hope was lost for the university. And I hope that one could bring it back to, I'm sure one can bring it back. But it is, it needs the kind of visionary. Courageous leadership, which we haven't seen a great deal of in universities. And now vice chancellors and provost get knights for their contributions.

And their contributions have nothing to do with the institution of learning that they've been presiding over. 

Gavin: I'm amazed more hasn't been made of it by the UK government because. Our university sector is probably the thing around the world that the UK is most renowned for. 

Richard: Absolutely. It's our big comparative advantage.

Yeah. And we do punch above our weight in terms of knowledge production per unit of human beings. Yeah. In our country, we are amazing at what we do. We really are. We are the land of Newton, but. We've, we squander that heritage. Yeah. At our peril and we're squandering it at the moment. Yeah. 

Gavin: And the point I was gonna go on to make is that it seems very odd that we balance the entire sector on international students in the first place.

Really. 

Richard: Yes. I think what happened was and you can see it that you've got your p and l statement in front of you, and then somebody says how do we increase our revenue? Exactly. And we increase our revenue by charging some ridiculous sum of money to, for overseas students to come and do.

A course here, and so you then open the floodgates in. They come and the money goes straight to the bottom line and you incentivize your academics to come up with courses for these students and the money starts rolling in and then something twists in the geopolitics of the world order. And the summers of money dry up.

But by then you've built new campuses across the city and places, and you've got fixed costs and you've got all these academics that you're paying salaries to, and then the whole business model collapses. 

Jessamy: I think that's right. And there does seem to be a slightly incoherent. Policies that we've had over the last 20 years.

When you look at increasing the percentage of people going to university, increasing the number of universities, and then no kind of provision for people who want to take other types of education, which is becoming more, more important. And now we're in this kind of very precarious stage where we've totally, we are vulnerable and over.

Over exploited really in some of these areas 

Richard: completely and who says bigger is better? Yeah. Who says a bigger university with a bigger student body and a bigger faculty is a better university? I just don't buy that. Of course. I want to see more people. I. Get better education, but it doesn't mean to say that the individual institution has to keep getting bigger and that because it will then fall over you.

Back in, I don't know, the twenties or thirties, there was this amazing scientist, JBS Alain, and he wrote this famous essay called On being the Right Size, and he started off with biology. Why is the fly the size of a fly in the elephant, the size of an elephant? It's not an accident, there, there is a.

A structure, function relationship. That means that the fly operates very well at its particular size, given its particular function. And the elephant at its size, given its function. And if you had the fly the size of an elephant, it wouldn't work. And equally, the elephant, the size of the fly wouldn't work.

And then he takes this idea, a basic principle in biology and applies it to institutions in our society. And it is true that institutions, when they reach a certain size. They are optimal. And then if they become bigger than that or too small, smaller than that, then they are suboptimal. It's not complicated.

And so these and you see it, you do see it, we've seen it in our careers. I'm sure that hospitals and research centers and other places that we've worked at have got too big and then they lose the essential element that made them successful. And I think that's. Definitely happened to certain universities, not a million miles away from where we are here.

Jessamy: Basic principles for life, 

Gavin: I think 

Jessamy: flies and elephants. 

Gavin: It feels like this podcast has reached the optimum size big, not too small. I think that's right. Let's end it there. Richard Simi, thank you very much. Thanks. Very nice, Kevin. Thanks Jess. Thank you. Thanks for listening and hopefully you'll join us again next time.

Thanks again for listening to this episode of The Lancer Voice. We'll be back again in two weeks with another installment, but until then, stay well, and we appreciate you listening. Take care.