How Fragile is American Democracy? With Archon Fung

Valerie: I’m pleased to welcome Archon Fung to Transition Lab. Dr. Fung is the director of the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation and the current Winthrop Laughlin McCormick Professor of Citizenship and Self Government at the Harvard Kennedy School. He’s been at the Kennedy School since 1999 and has authored five books, edited four collections and written dozens of articles for a wide variety of journals and publications. We’re so excited to have him today for a discussion about the current state of democracy and how we can strengthen transparency and trust in the federal government and the presidential transition process.

Archon, thanks for being here.

Archon: Thank you so much for having me, Valerie. Really excited about the conversation.

Valerie: And one thing our teams didn’t know when they were setting up this, conversation is that I got to take your class on ethics in 2006 at the Kennedy School.

Archon: Yeah, it’s a great class and we’re still teaching versions of that class and I’m really glad that, ethics is in the MPP curriculum.

I feel like it’s maybe more important now than ever.

Valerie: Extremely topical. So, I would love to start by asking something that I didn’t think to ask my professors back in the time, which is what interested you in public service and political science? How did you get started in this field?

Archon: Well, so I, was an undergraduate at MIT.

So, I thought like everybody, most, many people at MIT, I was going to be a scientist or an engineer, but then I came to think that the problems that people have are more interesting and more important than the people than the problems that matter has. And so, I switched over to politics. And, when I was a graduate student in political science, my, I went to Chicago to write my dissertation.

And it was about community policing and school reform as kind of two different topics. And this was back in the 1990s. And Chicago did a couple of really interesting public policy changes in which they tried to get people in neighborhoods into direct conversation with people, the police who patrol their neighborhood and the policing program.

And they actually gave power to parents and community members to help run their schools on an individual basis, in the school part. And I was really inspired by, uh talking to a bunch of people and looking at the neighborhoods in which public servants and public officials on one hand, and then the people they serve in this case, the residents of the neighborhoods could really put their heads together and solve the pretty serious problems of some of those neighborhoods and make progress together.

And I’ve always been inspired by that general idea. And in all of my research, I’ve tried to find places and policies and people that are trying to make that magic combination happens, which for me is the heart of democracy.

Valerie: It’s really beautiful that you turned your heart towards the problems people are facing instead of the problems and matter.

And then turning it to Chicago, it occurs to me, I think the Obama foundation is really focused on issues specific to Chicago right now. So, you must be keeping a little idea on what they’re up to.

Archon: I haven’t actually, I’ve been out of Chicago for a long time, but a friend of mine recently, pointed me to a book, that is written by Tony Bryk, who’s an education scholar and, and a few of his colleagues that looks at the Chicago public schools over maybe the last 30 years.

And I think this is one of the best kept secrets in public service and education reforms is that the Chicago public schools have just been getting better and better year in and year out in terms of teacher quality and graduation rates and lowering dropout rates and number of people, number of students going to college.

It’s just been the steady increase, despite the fact that there’s been huge turbulence, as your readers may have heard of at the city, at the mayoral level and in the headquarters of the superintendent and everything. And how they managed to do it is that, initially students in Chicago public schools became teachers and some of them became principals and they worked with local foundations there and just developed a whole set of practices for really focusing on the kids and on the quality of teaching and a quality of principal leadership just year in and year out for decades.

And despite all of this kind of public policy static at the top of the show. So, it’s really inspiring to me.

Valerie: That’s fantastic. And I do feel like we should all be talking about that nationally. Maybe I’m not paying enough attention to education trends lately, but I think a lot of places want to unpack that secret and learn from it?

Archon: Yeah. You know, this may, this is a kind of maybe a painful lesson from that. But one lesson I draw is that so many leaders and policymakers really are after a silver bullet, you know, in the school case, whether it’s charters or high stakes testing, or we’re going to get the magic CEO to lead our school system. And, the Chicago experience is no, it’s not those magic bullets. It’s just a whole set of people, hundreds of people in an organization and outside of the organization, because it includes parents and people. Teaching, training teachers in colleges that really work year in and year out to make it a little bit better every single month.

So, part of the lesson I take, so there’s some like out of Silicon Valley. Some people look for the 100 X solution where you’re going to invent some like Facebook and everything’s going to be different overnight. So, there’s a hundred X people. I’m kind of a 1.1 X person. As we know, we want organizations to just get a little bit better, like every single day for a long period of time, which oftentimes doesn’t sell that, well, political domain because like, that’s, that’s not very sexy.

Valerie: It’s a lot easier to sell catchphrases than a 1.1 X improvement every day, but that’s a good philosophy. Okay. So, maybe we can take these principles about education in the country and, and broaden them to more of our institutions.

Because in much of your work, you discuss the current state of democratic fragility, both around the world and in America. And I would love to kind of start by asking about politics and political discourse today. Can you help diagnose why they’re so challenging today and how we got here?

Archon: Yeah, so there’s many, many reasons, just on the, the political discourse dimension.

I think a lot of people are right to say that the volume has turned up. It’s become a lot more coarse and so coarse that, I think that there’s even violence in the United States in the background in a lot of these cases. So, I’m super privileged to be doing some work with secretaries of state and other election administrators who are, you know, of course, in charge of running elections in, all over the United States and many, many of them, have received death threats to them and their families.

Some of them have had to move house. Many have much larger security details than they did before, and it’s not just them. You go all the way down in the organization. I was having a meeting with some town clerks in Madison, Wisconsin, and in Wisconsin, it’s the local officials, the town officials who run a bunch of the elections.

And, you know, these are people who signed up to figure it out. Who should get the water contract and collect your trash bill? And they have to run elections every now and then. And since 2020, many of them have just gotten horrible vitriol on the phone and email and social media. And so, it’s really kind of terrifying.

And so, I think the coarseness of the discourse has really increased, and there are, I think there’s a couple of different diagnoses. And so, one diagnosis is that, well, things have gotten worse because there’s a few bad actors, or because there’s the woke left, or whatever it is. And in the good old days, when you were in grad school and I was learning about politics, it was all better, and it just wasn’t like this, right?

So that’s one idea. And I kind of don’t think that’s the idea. So. Or what, that’s what’s happening. I don’t have a great kind of catchphrase for it, but what I think has happened since roughly, the second term Obama administration is that the levels of disagreement in society have just gotten a lot wider than they were.

In the prior decades. So, you know, when you were in my class in ethics at the Kennedy school, right in the kind of first decade of the two thousands, there wasn’t Rashida Tlaib and there wasn’t a Marjorie Taylor Greene. In the sense that the political spectrum, at least at the public level of, of politicians and Congress, et cetera, was just much more narrow, right?

So, for most of our lifetimes, I would say between Reagan and the first term Obama administration, The difference between capital D Democrats and capital R Republicans was actually quite narrow. They agreed on more than they disagree. I mean, the fights felt intense at the time, no question about that, but I think they agreed on more than they disagree.

They agreed on globalization is good. The right kind of immigration is good. We kind of want the welfare state to be smaller, even, you know, capital D democrats. So, a lot of and we want a racially inclusive meritocracy even right. And so, we agreed on a lot. And, you know, I make fun of it sometimes.

I say, look, back in those days, the difference in a presidential election is a little bit like the difference between vanilla and French vanilla ice cream. I mean, they do taste different, but, you know, not that much. Right? And if you lose an election and the other people get French vanilla and you wanted vanilla, It’s not the end of the world.

Tomorrow is pretty much going to be like yesterday, but now the spectrum of differences is so, so big that tomorrow is absolutely not going to be like yesterday if your side loses the election. And we just haven’t developed the civic and the political muscles to deal with those intense kinds of disagreements.

Valerie: That’s fascinating. And that does feel very true to my experience. It’s something that I, I’m careful about what I share. And so, I, it feels risky to say on a podcast, but I was able to work for the Bush administration and the Obama administration and carry through in that transition.

And my impression at that time was that, yes, there were differences in approach by the teams, different priorities, but to a large degree, I felt that the people in each administration had more in common than was publicly understood because they were all good people who were trying to do good things on behalf of the country.

So, I think that’s a really sort of helpful way of thinking about how, like, the spectrum has gotten larger in terms of

Archon: I think it’s gotten much larger.

Valerie: That’s fascinating. So, can we talk about this concept of democratic fragility that you’ve raised? Is that related to this, broadening of the spectrum of actors or is that something else?

Archon: It is. And a lot of people use the term democratic fragility, I think, for good reason. And what it means is, is, well, part of what it means is that democratic institutions are more vulnerable than we kind of thought they were up until the mid-2010s. And, what it means to be vulnerable is that comparative people study comparative politics say, well, there’s the possibility of democratic backsliding these, these practices in democracy that we think of as characteristic of a vibrant democracy, like the toleration of dissent and losers’ consent and agreement to majority rule and, the peaceful transition of power that all of those things can be rolled back more easily than we thought.

And so that’s, that’s the idea of democratic fragility. And I think democracy does feel quite fragile now for a bunch of reasons. And let me just start off with two of them and then we can go to different sources of democratic fragility if you want. So, this is an exercise for, for your readers.

I’ve been doing this in audiences around the school. I’ve done it probably six or eight times now. It works better if it’s a big group and people are on zoom, but I’ll just do it in podcast form. Okay. So, I want to ask you and the audience two questions, and it works better if you really, really do this for real.

So, the first question is think of three issues that you really care about. And write them down on a piece of paper. So it could be, you know, a woman’s right to choose. It could be the idea that life begins at conception. It could be, we have to prevent gun violence. It could be, we’ve got to defend the right to bear arms.

It could be, we’ve got to do something about climate change now. Or it could be, no, no, it’s okay. We’ll innovate our way to a more green, um, state in the future. Could be any, you know, write down three things. Whatever those are. So that’s the first question. And then the second question is, for how many of those three things, zero, one, two or three, would you be willing to say if, if there were a fair democratic process, whatever that means to you, and you didn’t get enough votes, you lost in the fair democratic process, how, for how many of those things would you be willing to say?

Zero, one, two or three. Okay. I lost in a fair democratic process. This is my fundamental commitment. But I will actually be okay with going along with the majority, even though I lost, and that’s not because they have more guns, etc. It’s because my allegiance to democracy is more important even than my commitment to these three issues, zero, one, two or three.

And, you know, I’ll convince more people next time to adopt my way, and hopefully I’ll win in four years or whatever, but I might lose too. Right? That’s what that’s how democracy works. And then so that’s the second question. How many issues zero, one, two or three? And in most of the audience, all of the audiences that I’ve talked to the number of people who answer zero or one is between 50 and 70 percent of the audience.

So, that’s like a lot of people who say, yeah, you know, majority rule, not so much. And so, I think that, and these people know that I’m there to talk about democracy and I’m a big fan of democracy. Right. And so, I think that one real reason for democratic fragility now that has to do with the broadening of the debate is.

There’s not enough small-D Democrats on either side. And, you know, I think democracy doesn’t fare well without Democrats. That is small-D Democrats, not capital-D Democrats. So that’s one. That’s one. But why don’t I pause there and see if you have any thoughts about that.

Valerie: Yeah, I am having a reaction to that one, which is, it’s fascinating and very alarming.

And we, the Partnership for Public Service did some polling almost two years ago now about, asking a national representative sample of Americans, how, whether they expected a peaceful transfer of power in 2024, if a new candidate won and 44 percent said they didn’t think there would be, or they didn’t know, which felt like a red alarm at the time.

So right now, our research team is kind of conducting this polling again to see if the number has changed. And they’re also asking a question about, if the candidate that you don’t prefer, wins, how important is it to you that that candidate represents the interests of all Americans and how important.

Is it that government services continue in an uninterrupted way and we’re very curious to see the results. Which is a slight, it’s a little bit of the mirror image of what you’re saying, but, just very concerning. Okay. So now I’m interested and even more worried to hear your second.

Archon: Yeah. So, before I go on to the second one on, on that point, I think that, for me at the Kennedy School and you at the Partnership for Public Service, we are both of us and many of our, all of our colleagues. I would say it’s fair to say are very committed to the idea of public service and public leadership.

And I don’t know if you agree with this, but, it’s a lot harder now something partially for these democratic fragility reasons, to get a lot of people to be in favor of that. And so, here’s, here’s what I mean, is, when John F. Kennedy, the namesake of, my institution was born. 75 percent of people in the survey said, you know, we can trust people in Washington do what’s right all of the time or most of the time.

And now that number is down to maybe 20, 25 percent on a good day, right? It’s very, very low. And one way in which this cashes out is that part of the idea of the Kennedy School and probably the Partnership for Public Service is that we support honorable public servants and public leaders who are doing good for their societies.

And what that means is like, almost all of society and, and we, it used to be a world in which you would ask society and they would say, yeah, you know, these are honorable public leaders. I might not agree on every single political position, but they’re good people who are trying to move society forward and you could get large percentages to agree on, on who those people were.

And I fear that in this moment, I would have a hard time writing down the names of five to 10 people that 80 percent of Americans would say, yes, this person is an honorable public servant and public leader. That’s trying to do good for all of America. And I think it, it, it puts the, us, maybe personally, and then our organizations in a different moment that we need to figure out and feel through.

Valerie: Yes, we’re very focused here on trust in government and what the exact challenges are and how to improve it. And your point about interest in leadership, I was thinking about our, we have a public service leadership model that we put together a few years ago for training for government leaders.

And it includes skills on sort of the outer edges of the, of the diagram about engaging others and leading change. But the core of it is engagement. It’s stewardship of the public trust and commitment to the public good is the core of what leaders and government should be thinking about.

And I think one of the challenges is, you’re saying most Americans don’t believe that most leaders in government have that focus right now.

Archon: Or that they disagree about which ones the ones on their side they think so, but yeah.

Valerie: Yeah, you could get 40 or 50 percent agreeing on but they’re not agreeing on which ones.

Archon: Yeah, but 70 or 80 is a lot harder on particular people, right?

Yeah.

Valerie: That’s an interesting way to think about the problem.

Archon: Yeah, you know on the trust issue trust has been declining for a long time, right? So, some people think of this, and it sure, you know, kind of changed character, recently in the last, you know, six or seven years, but it’s been declining gradually, roughly since Watergate, which was a long time ago, trust in government, right?

So, it’s a long-term pattern. And I think that, you know, my two cents on this, is, well, first of all, we don’t really know how to increase public trust in institutions or leaders. But I think a big part of the key to solving the puzzle is more direct engagement. And so, I do a lot of work with public leaders and public officials at all different kinds of levels, from city levels to federal agencies, and one thing that many people working in government are uncomfortable with is talking to the public and engaging with the public because it makes perfect sense because usually the experiences you engage when people are really mad at you for something that you’ve done or something that you might do, it is not typically a positive experience.

And so maybe you’re a little reluctant, right? But I think that there’s a huge premium now in public leaders, even, who aren’t. Especially for people who aren’t in the political branches to gain the skills and habits and dispositions of engaging with the broader public, especially the public that distrusts them or the parts of the public that distrust them or are mad at them.

And so, again, with this, sometimes some of the work with election officials, there’s some election officials who see their job as pretty administrative and technical, right? Like, I choose the right voting machines, and I make sure to print up all the ballots, and I make sure there are enough poll workers to staff the polling places, and I count the mail ins in a reasonable time, like I’m supposed to.

And among some of them, their idea is if I do that job well, and I make the election process in my jurisdiction more trustworthy, that is technically solid, then people will trust the process and trust me. But in this day and age, I see no real reason to think that the trustworthiness of elections will bring trusted elections.

Archon: I think those lines kind of diverge and, you know, from quite a different sphere from several decades ago in policing. Most of policing was about increasing the trustworthiness, that is reducing the amount of crime that occurs, the assaults, the burglaries, the murders, the rapes, et cetera, and then kind of a paradigm shift among many, many police departments is no, no, we should be worried about the fear of crime as much as we’re worried about crime itself because fear of crime doesn’t necessarily track real crime.

So, you’ve got to work on both things at the same time. And now in an America where 30 to 40 percent of the voting public just does not believe that Joe Biden won the 2020 election. I feel like we’ve got to really put our shoulder into increasing the trust part in addition to making it more trustworthy.

Valerie: So, the government needs to do both, increase its trustworthiness, or make sure that it is, that it earns that trust. And also do direct engagement to communicate about it, and I’m curious about all of the complex topics that government officials are managing, how can they. There’s, there are so many issues, and maybe there are things like federal grants to state governments about infrastructure, where the technicalities on how the budget processes work together are very complex.

I’m wondering, like how can the government communicate key ideas without losing nuance and gaining trust? Is it important to get into the details? This is more of like a PR question, I guess, than a trust.

Archon: Yeah. I mean, I think there’s a lot on the PR side about how to communicate effectively and, you know, how to present information and, how much to emphasize.

One of my two cents on that is that it is more important or, not more important, but as important to emphasize values as it is to emphasize policy details. So not just how much money and where it’s going, but why we’re doing this. Who’s it supposed to help and why is it really important to do this thing?

So, there’s a lot of people who know a lot more than me about how to communicate effectively in that venue. But then I also think we should be experimenting with many more different kinds of venues. So, a couple of colleagues of mine, Dave Lazer and Mike Neblo, they’ve been, experimenting with a mechanism that is, that are basically deliberative town halls in which if you Valerie are a member of Congress, Mike and David would come up to you and say, hey, are you game for talking to your constituents in this slightly different mechanism that we’ve created called a deliberative town hall?

And if you had a couple of hours or an hour on Zoom, you’d say, yeah, I’ll give it a try. What do you guys want to do? And they say, okay, well, you show up on a Zoom or in your constituency and we will randomly select maybe 100, maybe 150 people from your constituency to come and talk to you and ask you questions.

And you can have a conversation with them. And then so, and then maybe we’ll get it written up in the paper or whatever. And so, this is a very, very different venue for communicating, right? Because usually who does a public leader, especially an elected politician, communicate with directly? Number one, it’s interest groups or donors, right?

That’s like a large share of it, not a randomly selected part of the population. But then when they do, do direct constituency stuff, who shows up? It’s people who have a deep, deep interest one way or another, either they’re for or against the issue that they’re talking about. Also, not a randomly selected group of people.

And so, the Neblo and Lazer work has, shown they interview people and the people who go are just, just really moved by the experience of actually being able to talk with their elected representative. They often walk away with a much more positive represent, image of their representative.

And then conversely, the part that might be surprising is that the representatives often walk away with a much more positive impression of their constituents. Oh, they asked really good questions. These are important issues. I didn’t know these issues were so important. So I would urge people, to experiment at the agency level and at the political level with many different ways of connecting, we’re relying on 20th century ways and the 21st century ways that we’re connecting are, have some serious downsides, like social media, like what are the small-D democracy positive ways that we can bring Constituents and public leaders, either again on the agency side or on the political side in closer contact.

I think increasing trust means rebuilding that bridge that’s really, really broken right now between government and people.

Valerie: So, I am responsible to try to draw a connection between that really good point and, and presidential transition planning. And part of the reason is one thing we hear from people is it’s not something they think about at all like theirs, but our CEO has talked about how prior to kind of pulling together this library of resources and network of experts that, it was Groundhog Day every four years, the candidates would win elections and that actually managing federal agencies and the trillions of dollars and millions of personnel is actually much more complicated than like the Robert Redford, quote from the candidate, like now what?

And so not only do candidates have to do a lot to prepare, but federal agencies have nearly a year-long process of preparing information about their personnel, their budgets, their ongoing policy issues to help brief a potential new group of leadership. So, I’m wondering if we should learn anything from the deliberative town hall model or the things that, that we’ve been discussing about communicating in general to, to help increase trust in the transition process. That’s kind of a hard question to log to use since you don’t spend all your time on transitions.

Archon: It’s, I guess it might be trust of whom by who else, right? So, I’m sure many secretaries and assistant secretaries. Are great at building trust in organizations like they probably come in and they do lots and lots of meetings with rank and file at in lots of different units and, to build that relationship and show that they really care about the experts and the decades of work that many of those people have done in those agencies.

And some are probably a little bit more nonchalant about it and treat the workforce with somewhat less respect, right? So, I think that that is a whole, that’s on the organizational side and there the trust is, is I guess both ways between the new secretaries and assistant secretaries, the new appointees, and then the civil service workforce that in EPA or DOJ or whoever that’s been in there day in and day out.

And, you know, leaders in all sorts of organizations. Some of them do it very well and some very poorly.

Valerie: Well, I’m at risk of turning that into a commercial for some of the things we do for training new appointees and, and career government leaders about, leadership. And I didn’t really intend to do that because I think it’s both about, the, the leadership qualities exhibited by government officials within their teams.

But also, increasing that sense of trust with the public and the transition process and the things we were talking about at the beginning of this conversation about why, people should feel invested in the outcome of the election, no matter who wins or no matter what their top three issues of importance are.

Archon: You know, much, much more about this than I do. And, and I’d love to learn more from you on this, but my sense is that, building that sense of trust is more difficult in federal agencies, especially now, but, you know, I think this is a decade or two going because many federal employees, at all levels, even fairly high levels are, there’s a, a morale issue.

They, many feel misunderstood by the public and not appreciated and not respected. And, you know, in some of the executive training that we do with senior executives and in the federal government, just raising that issue in a session creates very moving conversations about how people experience their jobs.

In these federal agencies and they’re just doing amazing, amazing work and sometimes at best aren’t appreciated for it and at worst are abused and criticized for the work that they do. And the last thing that workforce needs is a set of political appointees who doesn’t respect them either, right? And so, I guess, my gut actually not, you know, not working on federal workforce issues is that a really important first move for new leaders is to show great respect and appreciation for the expertise and the work and the dedication and to really listen and try to understand the work that these people are doing as the even as they solve the substantial challenges of leading their agencies.

Valerie: I can’t tell you how much I love that point. As a, as a former career and political official in government, I do think that’s the, the recipe for government effectiveness is for appointees and civil servants to both do everything they can to be a team together and take the wisdom experience of the career officials who’ve been through trying, the approaches to solve the same problems over and over again with different administrations and just connect that knowledge with the urgency that political appointees are feeling to create change.

So, you put that very beautifully. Thank you.

Archon: Yeah. Well, thank you for doing, doing the actual work to make that happen.

Valerie: Well, I should wrap up by asking a fun question and you are at the Kennedy School of Government working with our nation’s future leaders. Maybe I’m biasing your answer a bit, but I wanted to ask you based on all the research you’re doing, the people you’re working with, what you see as you’re working with secretaries of state and others, other officials around the country, what gives you hope for the next for the next, this political cycle and beyond.

Archon: Well, I think two, two sources of hope. One is a little bit more nerdy kind of answer is I think that you look around the world and even in states and localities, a little bit less in the federal government, but maybe that’ll change, is that there is bold experimentation to try to create things that will make government and politics better.

And so, people are taking things like rank choice voting seriously, and they’re establishing redistricting commissions that are just kind of more or less ordinary citizens who get to draw the lines and, you know, I would trust a hundred percent. People drawn out of a phone book to draw the political districting maps more easily than a sitting legislature pretty much any day of the week.

And there are citizen assemblies happening at, in different cities and all over Europe. And so, there’s, and then there’s online innovation in politics and political discussion. In different places. And so that gives me great hope and optimism. And it’s a lot of fun to see those things developing and to try to learn about them and try to be helpful when it’s possible.

And then the other thing that gives me hope is the many people of great opportunity principle and compassion and commitment that I’ve met. So, you know, I say, this may come as a surprise to you, but there are more people from the center left than the right at the Kennedy School. So that’s who I talk to a lot, just because.

Valerie: Not a surprise, but.

Archon: Where I work. But lately, you know, I had the, the IOP is a great organization, and it brings together, leaders and political actors from all sides of, the, aisle. And I’ve had the great opportunity over the last year or two to talk to some of them on the right side of the spectrum who, lived through the 2020 transition and some of the year, the years after and, you know, if I look back on those years, I think it was probably in the breach stand up institutionally committed center, right?

People working in government who did the right thing, whether it’s in the Georgia election or in the Department of Justice or so many other places that really brought American democracy back from the brink. And so, I’m just really grateful for those people in particular, but the many like them who have a great deal, whose political views are at some distance from mine, but who and who have just an incredible, well, first of all, bravery.

I don’t want to underestimate the bravery, the courage of it, but then the commitment to public service and the commitment to American democracy surviving and the thriving, whatever, our political and policy differences may be. And I do hope I share a little bit of that with them, but it’s been an enormous privilege and gives me great, great hope to meet the people like that because, you know, these political institutions and democracy itself is no better than the people who make it up. And so, we’ve got to make sure that really, really great people, not just great capably and technically, but in terms of their morality and compassion and commitment to democracy are right there.

Valerie: So, Dr. Fung, you previewed your first answer of what gives you hope as nerdy, and then you went into talking about bold experimentation in solving problems for people, and I would say that is not nerdy at all. That is extremely powerful, as is your point that there are people of principle across the political spectrum who are trying to solve the nation’s problems and the world’s problems.

And so that is a very powerful note of optimism to end on, and I want to thank you for joining us today on Transition Lab.

Archon: Well, thank you very much for this conversation. It’s been very enlightening and a lot of fun. It’s a privilege to be able to talk with you.