129 – USAID

[00:00:00] David: Hi and welcome to the IDEMS podcast. I’m David Stern and it’s my pleasure to be joined with my co director Kate Fleming today.

[00:00:15] Kate: Hey David.

[00:00:16] David: We’re going to discuss a recent announcement, a big announcement from the US.

[00:00:21] Kate: A hot topic.

[00:00:23] David: It is a hot topic.

[00:00:25] Kate: And very timely, this is literally breaking news as in it’s taken shape over the last day or two, which is the proposed, and currently it’s happening, complete shutdown of USAID.

[00:00:39] David: And this is huge in so many different ways. A lot of our work is in international development. And USAID has always been a big player, not just a big player in terms of the amount of money spent, but also in terms of its influence.

[00:00:55] Kate: Yes. So there’s there are the lived realities of just how it affects people on the ground. I think part of what we are going to speak to, because you’ve lived through it, are the political realities of it, or not the political realities, the political influence, that it has, this is not unprecedented, that it has been subject to the influences of who’s in charge and all those pieces.

It is unprecedented for it to be shut down. I think one of the things that has always been a key part of U.S. policy is the assumption that foreign aid is incredibly important to global stability, to probably, soft power, soft diplomatic influence, all kinds of things. So it’s always been seen as a valuable part of U.S. foreign policy.

[00:01:39] David: Yes.

[00:01:40] Kate: So yeah, part of the reason we’re bringing this up is that you, David, have more experience.

[00:01:44] David: I have historical experiences in the past.

[00:01:47] Kate: Yes.

[00:01:48] David: And I remember U.S. government changes which really were felt on the ground in terms of how the U.S. policy changed almost overnight with the change in power, leading to different opportunities and behaviours of the aid mechanism, which very quickly led to a shift, which was actually quite substantial in places.

And I’m going to speak from my experience, particularly in Kenya, because USAID has been a big funder in Kenya. And it’s not just the funds that they give directly. It’s that they influence what other people do. And that influencing ability, that influential power to be able to guide direction of international development is what in the past I’ve seen very quickly shifting for example, the importance of evidence.

Suddenly coming out as something, which the USAID was insisting that things be more evidence driven and they had put in place processes and to be able to support those who had the evidence versus those who didn’t. And then other funders followed suit and it really shifted the… very quickly the way money was coming in in these environments and what was being funded and what was not.

My experience generally going back has been broadly positive on USAID with some interesting exceptions. Of course, it’s never been the best funder, partly because it’s so big and partly because it does change; one of the criticisms quite often has been that these changes have meant that as a funder, it often hasn’t been great at building institutions.

You go to Scandinavia for that. They’ve been really good at supporting and building institutions. USAID has really all been about projects and good projects. And some projects have been really good. Others have been less good. But it’s been much more project focused rather than long term, slow institutional building.

[00:03:58] Kate: And that’s because the assumption is always that you can’t assume that the funding will be there over time, or has that been the policy, that it’s better to fund projects than institutions?

[00:04:10] David: This is not unrelated to U.S. funding in academia more broadly. In many ways, if you think in mathematics, which is the domain I know really well, the U.S. is known for big shifts in funding very quickly. If you’re a German professor and you’ve got your mathematics area, you keep getting funded for the whole of your career. If you’re in the U.S., you’ve got to stay up to date. What’s the latest hot topic? Because that’s where the funding’s going to go. You want to be at the cutting edge.

And this sort of plays out in the international development funding as well. The slow and steady, that’s not been the U.S. approach, which is looking for the hot topic, the latest thing to make an impact.

And, don’t get me wrong, there are U.S. funders, one of the best funders I’ve ever worked with, the McKnight Foundation, they’ve taken a slow and steady approach, but it’s not generally the culture which USAID and others have bought into. They want the hot topic, what’s your moonshot idea or what’s your big thing you can do? What can we do now? What do we know now that we can do now?

I’m not saying that as a good thing or a bad thing. I love working with patient funders who are slow and steady, but they can also get into a rut and just get stuck. And so this diversity of different types of funders has always been good.

I guess the thing I can speak to explicitly, if USAID were to shut down, as it’s looking like it will, then the only precedence I have for this is really when DFID was basically taken down in the UK.

[00:05:50] Kate: Which is what?

[00:05:51] David: DFID is the equivalent of USAID, in the UK, and as an organisation it was then taken into the Foreign Commonwealth Office. And that meant that it became political rather than independent. And the impact of that, there was no going back. I don’t mean there’s no going back to it being independent, but I mean all the learning, all the institutional knowledge, was lost from one day to the next. If you do now, shut down USAID, there’s no going back. All that institutional knowledge will be lost, for better or worse.

[00:06:32] Kate: I would say it’s somewhat hard to have this conversation and not wade into politics because, I think, one can’t help but feel that is the intention. You break up legacy thinking, legacy knowledge, legacy systems, and then there’s a need that they get replaced. I think in this case, the thinking is by private money, by private interests.

Whether that’s philanthropy or investment or whatever that is, but it is taking it out of something democratic and putting it in the hands of something that is more…

[00:07:08] David: It’s different.

[00:07:09] Kate: It’s different.

[00:07:10] David: And the point there is, in 4, 8, 12, however many years time, U.S. policy on this may change and there may be desires to go back and to have a new institution rebuilt. And the point is, it’ll never go back to being the USAID it was.

[00:07:29] Kate: That might be great. You don’t know.

[00:07:31] David: Exactly. This is what I’m saying. You don’t know.

[00:07:34] Kate: And that’s the point. Yes, that I get.

[00:07:36] David: Don’t get me wrong. I think USAID has done a lot of good things.

[00:07:39] Kate: Yes.

[00:07:40] David: But actually, if it were to restart in four years, and suddenly get the budget back and start from scratch, and I can speak to this explicitly with the Gates Foundation, when the Gates Foundation came into agriculture, it was a wave of innovation, then stagnated. I’d argue its impact in agriculture has been nowhere near as positive as it was in health, in other ways. But when it came in, it funded all sorts of exciting things it wouldn’t have funded as an established organisation.

I’m not saying this is good because I think USAID, as an institution, was doing well. But if you take a longer term arc on this well, it does create, it will create opportunities in the future for innovation, for new thinking, for rethinking.

If you’re somebody now who’s losing their job at USAID and thinking ahead, thinking the opportunity that might be there for eight years down the line, and what might you prepare for so that in that new opportunity space, something which emerges looks different. I don’t know, this could be really exciting.

[00:08:50] Kate: I can see at the systemic level, and I think this is how we both like to think, there’s always new energy, there’s always going to be new innovation, things will change, things will shift, it doesn’t all have to just be dire. But I think in the immediate, at the experienced project level and local level, there is a lot that’s going to be dire.

[00:09:08] David: Let me say something very concrete here, which I don’t know. Does this mean that existing projects that have committed funds now get their funding cut halfway through?

[00:09:20] Kate: As far as everything I’m reading, it is literally funding, it’s the end, stop, fall off a cliff.

[00:09:26] David: And that I’ve seen happen, that happened in DFID in certain ways, and it was disastrous. So the impact of taking committed funds, in terms of the reputation loss internationally, partners have now employed people for three years because you’ve got funding for the next three years and suddenly halfway through that funding no, sorry, it doesn’t exist anymore. That damage, that is immense.

[00:09:55] Kate: Is the damage trust? Is the damage that those programs are hard to restart? I see a lot of layers in that.

[00:10:02] David: So many, and the one I care about most, and I think you’ll agree, is the human damage. This is basically taking people who were planning their lives around work, they’ve maybe just given up a career to take on an exciting project because they believe it can be impactful. And suddenly, it’s gone. What do you mean it’s gone? This is so important. We can’t stop this work. The work’s just getting started.

And it’s not, because it’s done at the political level, it’s not done in a way which is thoughtful. It does just literally from one day to the next, lives can be lost. No, lives will be lost. The human impact of this is going to be huge.

[00:10:44] Kate: And I think you are hitting on layers of impact. So there’s the lost social impact. But then there’s this other layer, which is the people working on the ground actually delivering these, who have families who depend on them, so there’s the employment layer.

[00:11:00] David: Yeah.

[00:11:00] Kate: So that’s lost. And whatever that does, often I think these projects are in regions that don’t have a lot of income coming in. They don’t have established economic systems that are robust. And what I hear you saying is these are really important, their revenue streams.

[00:11:15] David: It’s not just their revenue streams, the thing you’ve got to bear in mind is USAID is not small, you know, there’s contexts they’re working where they are a substantial part of a local economy.

[00:11:28] Kate: That is what I was, yes, what I was trying to get at.

[00:11:30] David: This is like COVID, where suddenly your tourism sector, which might be in some places 20 percent of your local economy, suddenly disappears. That’s an equivalent, but this is creating a situation like that in certain contexts where a whole part of the local economy just disappears.

[00:11:48] Kate: And I think in the U.S., I would say the politics of that, and this is spoken, this is not me inferring, this is explicit, is these people who are working for the wasteful public sector should go get private sector jobs that are productive and contribute to the economy. That’s the case. It might be missing a lot of nuance or whatever, but there is something that’s at work there. Whereas I think what you’re saying is in a lot of these places…

[00:12:13] David: Let me just check.

[00:12:14] Kate: Yeah.

[00:12:14] David: They’re talking about that not globally, but in the U.S.. Because of course the international people, they weren’t in the public sector, USAID for Kenya is a private sector, this is not necessarily the public sector, so they did have a private sector job, and you just created instability in the private sector in that context.

Now, arguably, if you were working in the USA, in the U.S., and they’re wanting you to get a private sector job instead of a public sector, that logic can be. And there’s cases around this, and I’m not trying to argue either way. But, that argument in Kenya, this was the private sector.

In fact, not only that, but USAID often created a layer of the private sector, which was for the local employment, which attracted top talent. This is the thing, that this isn’t getting rid of the people who were okay or whatever, who couldn’t find a private sector job. They attracted the top talent, as the top private sector in certain ways, because this was prestigious, these were powerful roles.

And so, this is disrupting that private sector. This is like losing one of your big players in the private sector. Now, again, that creates innovation and it creates space, because that top talent can now get taken up by other people in other terms, in other ways. This might lead to positive outcomes in certain contexts. But it would be disruptive, without a doubt.

[00:13:41] Kate: And I think there are the immediate harms. There’s plenty that’s happening that can’t just turn from this direction to that direction and have the same opportunity, the same living wage, the same, whatever it is. You’re going to have this void of poverty, of crisis, it is so much money.

And the idea that that won’t have significant consequences. And unfortunately, this is, I think, where we think systemically, where what do those consequences look like? Do they inspire more migration? This is I think the thing that everyone sees is so problematic in this policy. You’re closing your borders, you’re deporting people, but then you’re doing this policy which creates more desperation, which in turn has more people pushing at those.

It’s so devoid. And I will wade into politics here. I’m American. I feel like I get to briefly say that if it were policy that had coherence, I think there is a political case where it’s okay, you’re more conservative, you have different viewpoints than I do, whatever, but there’s a policy here that’s coherent, that’s unified. I think this feels so just like randomly pushing buttons on and off and let’s just see.

And it’s just short circuiting a whole system. It’s not actually producing any impact in any way. Sorry, impact in a, wow, I can see this in a coherent way moving towards something. It’s producing impact.

[00:15:14] David: Exactly. It’s extremely impactful.

[00:15:16] Kate: It’s extremely impactful.

[00:15:18] David: But more than that, it’s not only is it impactful, it is extremely disruptive.

[00:15:22] Kate: It’s disruptive and it is destructively disruptive. It is a nihilistic impact as opposed to a productive impact, which even when you’re not necessarily agreeing…

[00:15:35] David: This is where I’m going to tell you from a sort of systems dynamic perspective, there’s no way of knowing what the long term consequences of this will be. Am I happy with this as a political direction? I’m not part of the U.S. and I can say no, this is very much against what I believe is good politics.

However, will this, in the long term, have this destructive, negative impact on society? Or might this be a trigger which leads to changes which then actually create space for new innovation and new plans? I don’t know. I’m ignorant.

[00:16:11] Kate: No, and I guess we do just, throughout this conversation, have to distinguish between the long term, systemic, what happens, versus the short term effects on people’s lives effects on impact and I think that is more where it’s very easy to see there will be consequences.

And I think like you can look at things that were coherent policy like globalisation was a coherent policy. And now, you know, you can listen to economists who are like, whoops, we got that wrong.

[00:16:37] David: Yeah.

[00:16:39] Kate: So just because you have coherent policy doesn’t mean that systemically pans out the way you thought that it would.

[00:16:46] David: Yeah.

[00:16:46] Kate: So that is where I think we both hold space for you know what, who knows what will emerge from this? But the core reality, and this is the core reality in the U.S. too, is you cannot argue with the fact that in the immediate, the people who are hurt the most are the most vulnerable, the people who have the least, they don’t have safety nets, they don’t have wiggle rooms, they don’t have networks, the lack of resources to step in.

[00:17:09] David: I work, as quite a lot, in some of the poorest environments in the world. I am going to tell you a very concrete instance of this, which was not to do with USAID. This was a DFID project years ago, but this is the realities that will be faced because of this.

This was a DFID project, it was in Malawi, and the consequences of AIDS meant that there was a missing generation. And so you had grandparents with young children who couldn’t realistically get good jobs. You couldn’t help the kids, you couldn’t help the grandparents, they were in a hopeless situation.

So as a small pilot, they instituted this safety net, where for those most vulnerable in society, in that context, they gave them a very small amount of money regularly. And its impact was amazing. The stories that I heard were, you know, now their kids could go to school, they had pride, they were able to be part of society.

All that money that they were given was then spent locally, so the whole local economy flourished, because now the shops were getting this, this income wasn’t then going out to getting external products, no, it was being used to stimulate, it was circulating in the local economy, because it was being spent locally.

And they now held their heads up high in society because their kids were able to go to school. They had school books, they had clothes, they were able to feed them. The basics were covered and they were part of and contributing to society. And then it was cancelled.

We can go into why, we can go into what, but that’s irrelevant here, it was cancelled. And there was a friend of mine, a colleague who was the one who went around and had to tell them it was cancelled. Those families didn’t kick up a fuss. They didn’t go and protest. Who were they going to protest to?

But they did quietly and with great dignity stand up in the room and say, you do realise that you’d selected us because we had no hope. And so by cancelling this, we’re now just waiting to die. And that’s the reality that we’re looking at here. This is the reality. This cancelling, this is cancelling without someone necessarily going around and cancelling.

This is just suddenly what may have been a life changing project for somebody in the most vulnerable situation being stopped.

[00:19:37] Kate: And it’s cruel. I mean, I think there’s a cruelty to it at the experience level that if you are working on the ground, or if you are those people on the ground, it is devastating.

[00:19:50] David: And it’s devastating all the way up the chain, because it’s devastating to the person who is supporting them, it’s devastating to the person who is overseeing that project. The devastation caused by this is going to reverberate for ages.

But I want to come back to the fact that however devastating something is, in that moment, systems react.

[00:20:18] Kate: Yes.

[00:20:19] David: And this is something where actually in the world we live in right now, the systems aren’t working to serve the most vulnerable in society. So having this incredible shock to that system might this lead to something else and to a new system coming out, which is better than the one that was there before? Maybe.

And I want to talk explicitly to the AES. These are Niger, Burkina Faso, and Mali, who have just separated from their regional bloc exactly because of some of these issues of the outside influence, being able to just suddenly turn the tap on and off and affecting their people.

They are the most vulnerable places in the world. And so they’re exactly the sort of people who felt the shock of every policy change, every this, every that. And they said enough is enough. We want to do things differently. We want to do things our own way.

Now, I’m not sure how well that’s going to go, but I have great admiration for the people I know in those countries who are saying, no, we can make this work. We can do this locally. We don’t need that level of outside support. And who knows what’s going to happen?

[00:21:35] Kate: I guess on some level what that’s identifying is that these shocks are not unprecedented. At the local level, at the country level, you fall in and out of favour, you get funding, you get your funding pulled. Already, a lot of countries have already experienced some degree of this. I think the scale of it, the impact of it is going to be unprecedented, but the actual, at the local level, in some sense, it’s oh, this again.

[00:22:01] David: This is the thing. This is not the first time this has happened now.

[00:22:05] Kate: Yeah.

[00:22:05] David: Different forms. I’ve been involved for 15, 20 years in different ways and seen so many of these. And part of what this could be, this is so big, this is so drastic, that part of what this might lead to is actually a statement of wait a second, this instability that the international politics is playing on international development is leading to a process, which is doing more harm than good, we need a different process. At the international level, that’s what we could actually start seeing.

Now, this is something where I don’t know what that would look like, but maybe this is the shock that we need because we’ve been having these shocks time after time, not at this scale.

[00:22:55] Kate: Yeah, no, and I think there, there has been a case and it’s a lot of what we think about and work on is the dependency on the U.S.. And this is in for profit tech or whatever, we look at it in these other spaces. It’s what people are complaining about right now. It’s I want to communicate about these things, but I’m dependent on Twitter and Facebook and they are now not aligned with where I want to be or whatever it is, but there aren’t choices.

Whereas poor countries already were feeling those things in ways where they didn’t have the choices, they were too expensive, they didn’t work, whatever all the things are. So in some sense, it’s just fanning the fire of everything that was already there and maybe we could all just turn a blind eye to.

[00:23:37] David: I think this is the reality. For someone who’s been working on the ground for so long, this doesn’t feel new. This is what I’ve been seeing for years. This is why I want things to work differently. But, for many people, they didn’t understand that. Now, maybe they will. The fact that there is the power to just turn these things off, to have this much disruption on the global scale in such a way.

I’m not saying that the U.S. president shouldn’t have this power. But I am saying that if that power is there, should USAID have been behaving differently in the first place? Given that power, maybe it should have been behaving differently in ways which were, not, therefore, and I would argue the same was true of DFID.

This is when the same thing happened with DFID years back and projects got cut. If this is the case, when you award a project, should you always award it all up front so the project is safe? If your funding is not secured, what are you doing giving people projects for funding which is not secure? That’s just irresponsible aid, given this context.

[00:24:51] Kate: However, that’s how all giving works. At least in the grant in this kind of sense, you get part of it, and then you’re asking people who already don’t have a lot of extra resources to cover the cost until the final chunk is delivered, that’s problematic.

[00:25:10] David: It’s not unreasonable though, it’s problematic to do it otherwise, which is why that’s come in. But what we’re starting to see is that, you know, you can only do that if you as an organisation are giving organisations a stable. Recognising the instability of some of these global players, that’s a shock to the system. A few years ago, who would have dreamt that USAID wasn’t a reliable institution? It’s been such an institution! It’s incredible.

[00:25:43] Kate: I guess that if I had to take a step back and think about what USAID is emblematic of in our times is how much that feels very stable is actually quite unstable. And how much, from our perspective, opportunity there is in that. We’re in a luxurious place, a privileged place to be able to feel that in this instability, whereas a lot of people it’s just suffering. And that is very unfortunate and obviously in an ideal world we would avoid that.

And I think many people feel this, that change is coming, that there are massive realignments that are coming. And it’s not clear at all what they’re going to look like or how they’re going to play out or how long it will take. But there is a lot of opportunity if you are in a place where you can start to introduce new things and step into voids or create alternatives.

[00:26:42] David: Absolutely. And maybe we can get beyond this public sector, private sector dichotomy, because that’s not the only thing that matters. What about a dichotomy between stability and instability? Recognising the value of both. Stability is great for certain things, but it’s stagnating for others. Instability creates innovation. It’s exciting, it’s new, but it’s disruptive and damaging as well.

What if we thought about balancing instead of thinking what’s right and wrong? In the U.S., the public private sector discussion is so divisive, but it’s the wrong discussion because it should be about how much stability do we want? Where do we want stability? Where do we want instability? Where do we want that excitement and that ability to innovate?

[00:27:34] Kate: And I think even your example of the funding that went to the elderly and children, that is what government exists for. That’s what society exists for. Those are the most vulnerable people. They cannot adapt to change. They cannot look in new places. They can’t be, well, children can be skilled, but it’s years in the process and they need funds to make that happen. Whereas the elderly cannot.

And so I think also it’s reframing who the players are, what needs consideration. I think so much of this policy seems to be driven by these people just need to be working or whatever. What is driving policy, what are the frameworks that we’re thinking about, all of those different things, and I think when you’re talking about stability and instability, there are people who just really cannot bear instability. Whereas there are people who can better deal with…

[00:28:29] David: I’m not sure I understand what you’re saying because the most disadvantaged in societies that I know, they are the best at dealing with instability.

[00:28:39] Kate: I’m talking about the elderly or children, like people who just are truly…

[00:28:44] David: Okay. Yeah, so they need stability.

[00:28:46] Kate: They need stability. They need systems that absorb the shocks.

[00:28:52] David: Exactly, that absorb the shocks. Their lives shouldn’t be disrupted from one day to the other. I think we can all agree that, and this isn’t the case in every country, but that kids should be able to get up and go to school, you know, every year to be able to finish their year’s schooling, and so on.

And I’ve lived in countries where that isn’t a guarantee, where there have been disruptions to national or subnational level for kids at a huge scale. And I think we can all agree that that stability to say, yes, you should be able to go through school, whatever that means, be healthy enough to do so, and so on, is something which is desirable for society.

[00:29:35] Kate: I guess I would even say there, is that something everyone agrees on? Especially when it comes to kids I don’t know, I’m sure there are people who think, well, you should just be out there, you should be working, you should be learning to do stuff. I think there are things that we see have advanced civilisation, but quite recently kids were working. They were, I don’t know. I’m just saying there are a lot of things that we might take as given.

[00:29:56] David: Even that, I work in societies where child labour exists and is still active, but even there, there is a question about what age. And there is an age below which there is an acceptance in certain ways. So it might be your definition of kids changes from one society to another. It might be that your expectation of what school looks like and that’s why I was very careful to say that. Are we talking about formal education institutions? Are we talking about informal schooling? Are we talking about homeschooling in different forms?

In certain contexts, kids run freely around the village. And that’s another form of schooling, self learning different ways. So there’s all sorts of different contexts here. But I think there is an agreement across societies that there is an age below which they should be kids and should have the stability and the ability to be whatever kids means for them.

[00:30:55] Kate: Yeah, that was a bit of a side tangent, but I think it is just, what are the things we all agree on? If we’re pushing to a new system, then there is some sort of expectation. There are shared values, there is consensus, even if we have different ideas on how to achieve it.

And I guess the question is, is there a consensus? What are the variables that might actually be really difficult? Like, maybe there’s a whole category of people that just doesn’t think that women should have rights. And I would argue there is a whole category of people who really strongly believe that.

[00:31:28] David: Yeah, I mean, this is Afghanistan and what’s been happening there is terrible.

[00:31:32] Kate: I could look closer to home. But anyway, I guess sometimes these ideas of what will come, I think, are grounded in all sensible people must think this way. And I don’t know that’s necessarily true.

[00:31:49] David: Oh, I hear what you’re saying, yeah.

[00:31:50] Kate: And so I think, when there are institutions, there are some accepted norms and parameters that even when it deviates from administration to administration, there’s still some boundary. And it is, it’s always the thing of this is revolution.

And in that revolution, as much as I’m an optimist, it’s also incredibly dangerous, like, what steps in to fill that space. And yeah, I don’t, honestly, we’re having this conversation, I brought it up just because I think it is so new to everyone and we are just trying to wrap our heads around it.

[00:32:26] David: And I think where I think we can agree and probably it’s a good place to finish the episode, is that it is certainly not something that I would have seen coming. I would have felt an advance is desirable, but it is also something where it will be disruptive. And once you’re in that disruption, as someone who thinks about systems and who recognises the opportunities that disruption provides, recognising that once this disruption has happened, or is happening, whatever led up to it happening, once it’s happening, our role and others roles within this, is to see, okay, what can we do to make this work?

[00:33:18] Kate: Of course, yes.

[00:33:19] David: And to actually find ways that we use the disruption in positive ways, to make it positive. You might not agree with what it was, with who did it, whatever, but if you can turn it around and make it positive, hate it as you might as you like, you know, in 50 years time, the history books might look favourably on this moment.

[00:33:39] Kate: Well, and it is the challenge not to fall into cynicism and despair, but to find action, to find a way forward, find the thing that you care about and work on it. And if not, if you can’t depend on this institution, then what’s going to be your role in stepping in to support something? So I think that is an element of it too, is to be active.

[00:33:58] David: To be active, to be proactive, to recognise. And I’ve learned this from living in Africa. When I was in the UK, you would know a year in advance where I’d be, probably what I’d be doing. That ability to live and embrace instability and turn it around and make it work, turn it into something positive.

I owe so much of my ability to think like that to being embedded in environments which are less stable and see success emerge then. Success doesn’t always emerge from the positive initiatives. It sometimes emerges from negative disruption being turned around into something positive.

[00:34:43] Kate: And that’s a good place, I think, for us to end.

[00:34:46] David: Yes.

[00:34:46] Kate: But yes, I agree.

[00:34:48] David: Thank you.

[00:34:49] Kate: Thanks, David.