The Future of Stuff Podcast Ep. 4: Ending Modern Slavery with Technology & Social Movements, with Helen Burrows

How can we effectively combat slavery in global trade when policy and governments fall short? Human rights lawyer and activist Helen Burrows joins the show to discuss how corporations and consumers can bring an end to slavery and labor abuses through better technology and social awareness.

Episode Notes:

On this episode, I’m joined by Helen Burrows. A human rights lawyer turned activist, in recent years she’s focused on combatting slavery in the supply chains which give us the clothes on our backs, the phones in our pockets, and so much more.

We discuss the scale of this dark facet of material culture, how it flourished with trade globalization, how governments have failed to do anything about it, and how a combination of technological innovation and social action between corporations and consumers can create a better path forward. There were some technical difficulties during recording, so please forgive the audio quality. Nevertheless, I hope this conversation illuminates your understanding of the real costs of our stuff and how we can make it better, for everyone.

All music courtesy of Zoe Keating. Track: “Optimist”

Episode Outline

1. Introduction [00:01:09]
2. Our Slavery Footprint [00:02:41]
3. Corporate versus Social Action | Satyagraha and Holding Firmly to Truth [00:04:13]
4. Breaking Open Corporate Silos with Blockchain [00:08:45]
5. Removing the Veil of Ignorance [00:12:05]
6. Hacking the Profit Mindset for Social Good [00:19:44]
7. Mattereum: Satyagraha-as-a-Service [00:21:42]
8. Understanding as a Prelude to Change [00:23:29]
9. Automated Morality [00:28:25]
10. The Flaws of Trade Globalization [00:33:05]
11. On Helen’s Work with Mattereum [00:35:45]

Introduction [00:01:09]

Garrison: All right. Let’s just get into it. Cool. Would you like to introduce yourself to the listeners?

Helen: My name is Helen Burroughs. I am a lawyer by training, but for the past 20 years, I’ve worked in legal and judicial reform with around 50 countries around the world. On anything from access to justice, to anti-corruption, human rights, to human trafficking.

In the last five or so years, I deepened my interest and work in the anti-slavery field. Considering the work I’ve done on that and related areas for a lot of years in lots of countries, I’ve seen how completely ineffective governments have been doing anything to eliminate this, currently impacting around 40 million people around the world and realize that it’s companies and consumers that are the answer to this issue, I think, and that we can see more traction in less time by focusing in that direction, rather than on relying on governments to get the law and its enforcement right.

So, my interest has been in, how do we increase the capacity or decrease rather the capacity of supply chains and make them more transparent, so we know where our stuff comes from, how it’s made and what harm or not it may have done along the way to our doorstep.

Our Slavery Footprint [00:02:41]

Garrison: Anti-slavery work, on the supply chain front is something I’ve been aware of for a few years now. And you hear a bunch of stories. You hear a bunch of pilot programs from basically every supply chain company under the sun, but you never really see any sort of a huge fundamental shift in how people do things.

Before we get into the weeds, I want to relay something and something I would suggest listeners do is there’s a website called slavery footprint dot org. And it has, you know, information on the subject in terms of the scope of it. And it also has a survey that you can take. It’ll ask you about your diet and the overall kind of composition of your household. How many cars do you have? How many bedrooms or home office, your wardrobe composition like whether or not you have leather shoes , electronics, and it gives you a projection of roughly the number of slaves that are working for you to secure your lifestyle.

When I took the survey, it projected 26. Instantly in my head, I imagined what about like my neighbors and then everyone else in the town and then in the state, in the country. And then I just imagine that number just like just rocketing up. It is quite striking.

Corporate versus Social Action | Satyagraha and Holding Firmly to Truth [00:04:13]

Garrison: Something I planned on talking about like later in the conversation. But I liked that you mentioned it right off the bat, which was that you lost hope, unfortunately, that government would enact the necessary policy to get more transparency out of the corporate supply chain, have it be a mandated thing, an industrial standard, and that you think it’s gonna come down to consumers and awareness and like social movement from the consumer side. I think that kind of difference between corporate action and the action of people as a whole is a really interesting thing cause it’s very different. And it’s very difficult.

There are instances of this happening in the past very effectively.

There’s a concept I like called Satyagraha, which was Gandhi’s driving philosophy in terms of how he conducted his social movements. And it was a direct influence on the civil rights movement with Martin Luther King and also with Nelson Mandela, fighting apartheid in South Africa.

And what Satyagraha means is “holding firmly to truth,” or it’s an insistence on truth. You show that institutions of power, like what they’re actually doing to people, and then it’s on them. You know this without a doubt. It’s irrefutable. What are you going to do? And it could be remarkably effective. So I wonder, do you think that would be possible now, like that kind of very thorough systemic change?

Helen: I think we’re sitting on the cusp of it. And I dunno whether that’s a kind of wince answer but I don’t think we’re there yet. I think that the movements that you’ve mentioned, this is a little bit different because it’s often been the oppressed rising up and not taking any shit anymore. Whereas slavery by its nature is hidden. Slaves cannot get out in the streets and voice their concern about the status quo and demand emancipation. That’s not how the mechanics of this industry functions. So we’re not looking at the same type of movement, but the same type of energy is absolutely required.

The same type of commitment is required because obviously it wasn’t just Martin Luther King and his people. The movement was massive and included people from everywhere of every color. And so it’s not just that, but the nucleus of those movements is different to the nucleus of this movement. And I don’t think consumers, society, are there enough in enough numbers yet to produce any kind of tipping point to transformation. So I think it’s also gonna take the convergence of industry saying, “We don’t want to do any harm. We’re trying our best not to, but we actually don’t know the harm that we’re doing and we don’t know a better way of doing business.”

Holding onto the truth, holding firm to the truth, is what we want to do is provide that truth because at the moment that the truth is, you know, a little bit colored in here and there, but there’s plenty of gaps that we don’t know. So it’s the democratization of truth, actually, to be able to see it on a broader scale.

So companies can say, “We’re not done with that. We want to be sustainable environmentally and as regards to social labor standards. And we’re not okay with this. So we’re going to change how we operate.” But being upfront about that and consumers saying, “Now I know where my product comes from and how it’s made at every point along the way, I can now make an informed choice about whether or not I want to buy that thing.”

So I think the movement is coming, but we have to preempt the movement by providing the foundations for this democratization of knowledge and therefore truth to put more fuel underneath the energy that exists. But I mean, we have seen different movements. The vegan movement for example is fundamentally different to civil rights movement, for example.

That’s one that’s done great things. So it’s not like it’s the only type of movement that can succeed absolutely, but it depends a lot on the commitment and the energy of the people at the nucleus. So yeah, I think that we’re not there yet. We’re on the cusp of it

Breaking Open Corporate Silos with Blockchain [00:08:45]

Garrison: On this aspect of kind of putting it on the otus of industry to adopt these standards into like really put an effort into doing this. You’re interested in blockchain technology in the application of this. Would you care to go into that in more detail?

Helen: Ah, so I think the benefits of blockchain technology offer themselves in a couple of different realms in this space. One is I think, philosophically again, the sort of democratization of information, access to it, and the concept of the disintermediation of information and the breaking down of silos because that’s been a huge problem across the board. But, you know, as it relates to slavery, the company will keep its information about its supply chain and what it makes might have found in terms of labor abuses. They’ll keep that really secret, of course. And then this government department keeps its information secret and the NGOs don’t have outlets to communicate what they know and workers themselves don’t have outlets to communicate. So by breaking down all of those kinds of barriers, and I’m not talking about blockchain technology itself, but the philosophy behind removing silos is something that is uniquely innovative about the approach. And in terms of the technology itself: the immutability of information. So obviously, if you put junk in, you get junk out, like we always and so it’s a case of ensuring that we have adequately robust sources of triangulated, checked, verifiable data that goes in. And as long as that process can be assured, then what then ends up on the blockchain can not be changed obviously. And that’s a radical departure from what we’ve ever been able to do before in terms of the collection and presentation of information about this side of how things work.

Garrison: Yeah. In some sense it’s yeah. A clever hack for truth or I guess consensus is a better word. It’s not capital T truth in this sense. But one thing that I’ve noticed, being active in this space for about four years now is there’s been so many supply chain blockchain projects. So many of them. Entire consortiums have been formed and they do these track and trace pilot programs, but they don’t go anywhere.

Helen: No, they don’t because track and trace is so two-dimensional. It just tells you that this flask that I’m holding, that nobody can see: where it originated and then it was tagged and then we can trace it as it travels all over the world. And so it ends up being recycled I thought. It doesn’t tell me anything about the labor conditions of the people who manufactured the aluminium. It doesn’t tell me where the paint was made and who painted it and how noxious it may be. It doesn’t tell me where the plastic came from. It doesn’t tell us anything that we need to know about this product in order to make ethical choices about whether I want to buy it.

Removing the Veil of Ignorance [00:12:05]

Garrison: In some of the writing I’ve been doing for Mattereum, I describe it as a zero history problem. This concept of zero history in our stuff is really problematic. Cause like you said, we don’t really know where it comes from. We don’t know about the labor conditions that brought it into the world. And it’s just kind of part of this larger systemic problem of managing production and consumption in society. Like that cycle is so bloated. It’s just a ever-hungry machine that keeps churning.

Helen: Exactly, it wasn’t that long ago that there were four seasons in the fashion year. Now there’s 52. So, you know, just the exponential increase of what we’re told we have to buy. And I’m just using fashion as one example of how it is across the board. We have to have this schedule and we have to have that, this will make our lives easier, quicker, faster, whatever. And we get caught up in it certainly.

It’s really in our faces. It’s a gluttonous consumer and level of consumerism that we don’t even realize that’s what we’re a party to fueling. We ripped off too. There’s lots of products out there that will have lovely green labels on them and tell us that um their cotton is organic, but it doesn’t tell us whether that cotton was picked by child slaves in Kazahkstan. The cotton’s organic so that’s all right. Or, it, it might say that this tuna was caught without a net or these prawns were sustainably farmed, but it doesn’t tell you that the guys on the boat doing the fishing have been on vessels for the last 25 years, passed on the high sea from boat to boat, completely enslaved, and their only chance of escape is to get sick and die and be thrown over the board. It doesn’t tell you anything like that. So as consumers, we don’t even know what we need to know. Because we’re not being told, we’re being told the cotton’s organic, there were no nets involved in his fishing and we think done deal, that’s it.

And we’ve been greenwashed and whitewashed. And we don’t look underneath the curtain. We’re not interested in looking underneath the hood enough to know more, to find out more, but I don’t really put the faults of that at the feet of consumers necessarily because we do rely on authority, including governments to do the right thing.

Even in the UK where arguably they’ve got one of the strongest pieces of anti-slavery legislation in the world, the level of dilution that was required in order to get that piece of law over the line meant that all companies have to do is pop the hood and have a quick look to see if anything looks out of place. And if it is then that’s fine. There’s no obligation to delve right down to the top or up to the top of your supply chain and tell us exactly what’s going on in micro detail. There’s nothing like that. So, you know, we rely on government to tell us what the standard is and what the requirements ought to be and what we need to know, but they’re not doing that job because of the various divergent pressures on them that pull them in a different direction. Then we get this sort of green, white-washing layered on top of that inside this sort of grotesquely, huge consumerist society that we are. And it’s just a recipe for continued disaster.

Garrison: And the culpability here is multi-dimensional. Like at a fundamental level, there’s also a part of it where our desire, like our capacity for desire, what we desire. Our desire as a function is being kind of manipulated. But there’s a self awareness on corporations that have multimillion dollar marketing budgets to sell us things or using algorithms to get us to market things to ourselves in the weird feedback loop. But the idea that, oh, people want things that are green. They want things that are sustainably sourced. Uh, Let’s give it to them. Even though there’s been plenty of cases where that was actually completely false. It’s a fancy packaging that looks organic and earthy, but there’s still in fact horrible stuff happening.

Helen: Often they don’t know. I remember having a conversation with the person who was at the time the head of sustainability at McDonald’s and of 80,000 supply chains that they had to keep an eye on. They said that their their due diligence was really comprehensive and robust. And in the last 12 months they had found one case of labor exploitation among 80,000 supply chains across multiple countries. You know, If you only find one case of exploitation in that many supply chains and loads of countries, your system doesn’t work. That’s the only explanation.

So companies often don’t know. And companies don’t have access at the moment to the capabilities that they need to get right down there in supply chains. If you think a mobile phone, how many components are in a mobile phone, trying to trace all of those diffuse supply chains around to their source, and then you get to the cobalt. And you’re like, we got as far as the smelter and then we were screwed. We didn’t know where it came from. There’s lots of really logistical, legitimate, as well as illegitimate reasons why companies don’t actually know, but instead of facing up to that and saying we’ve got gaps here in our knowledge, they just stick a label on and say, “Our cotton’s organic.”

And we go, oh, great. Organic cotton. I can sleep at night now I bought that organic cotton and I didn’t buy that rubbish pesticide laden one. Or 10% of the profits from this company goes to help women rescued from trafficking and prostitution in India. Great. I can sleep well. We rely on that one box tick, whatever their marketing people choose that box to be.

I think it’s the whole story. But again, we don’t know what we don’t know. And it’s getting out there, what we do need to know about these products. And in the environmental space, that’s incredibly complicated because it vastly depends on the product and its processes. Consumables in the anti-slavery space are a little easier in some respects, given the standards sort of universal of how you should treat people who work for you.

And you know what international law says about all of that. But not easy in terms of accessing the information, because this is a. $200 billion class a year industry. There’s a lot invested in the status quo and they will take a lot to deconstruct all of that. So there’s a lot invested in making sure that people don’t know what actually happens in various parts of various supply chains, because it is terrible.

So it’s not an easy thing to try and deal with. We need to start and lots of project, as you said, with the track and trace work is there’s just lots of anti-slavery and environmental protection work going on globally. As of course, we all know, but what’s missing is that straight line truth. That complete knowledge, or where there isn’t complete knowledge, the courage to say these are gaps and who can fill them for us. We’d like to know, and then whatever the result is, we’ll work with it and we’ll do what we can to make it better. And, you know, with that level of commitment and consumers behind them, then that’s what could produce this change.

Hacking the Profit Mindset for Social Good [00:19:44]

Garrison: Yeah, absolutely. I also wonder. Corporations operate under certain incentives. Profits are what they optimize for. So I wonder if there’s a way to almost like Trojan horse this insistence on truth at the systemic level by saying like, “ You’ll have all these incredible efficiency gains that it’ll actually be more valuable for you to do this.

Helen: Yeah. Yeah. There’s a number of ways that this is financially at a level of value attractive to companies. Obviously we’re not going to go and start by trying to twist the arms of companies. You’d start with the companies that are really making, have made great inroads and demonstrated great levels of investment and commitment. You’d start there cause they’re the ones that want to do the right thing, but yet there’s massive efficiencies to be gained.

Look at all of the money that’s wasted in supply chains because time wastage, lags. So much goes wrong in the supply chain that could be massively tightened up to create huge time and cost efficiencies as well as anything else. And also, the other side of it, the flip side of it is that, what is it about 98% of a company’s value is its reputation. And when companies like like Zara get called out because the machinists have sewn notes into the hems of coats saying, pockets of coats saying, “Please help us. We haven’t been paid.” That wipes a lot off the slate in terms of that company’s value. And a lot of companies get called out. Obviously there’s a risk analysis to be done about whether you allow that risk to be on the table. That has the capacity to wipe a lot of value off of companies.

So for companies wanting to manage that risk, manage their risk, and also increase cost and time efficiencies in how they do business, then absolutely having a comprehensive line of sight down their supply chain is a very smart thing to do.

Mattereum: Satyagraha-as-a-Service [00:21:42]

Garrison: Absolutely. This podcast is presented by Mattereum. So listeners who may not be aware of Mattereum, but will probably be curious as to how we approach this kind of challenge.

So one of the kind of core inventions within the project is the Asset Passport. So just as you know, people have passports in order to travel freely internationally and cross borders, it’s a digital identity for an object instead. So this identity, this passport has very detailed information about the object, where it came from, what it is, weight. Is it vaulted somewhere? Any other kind of manufacturing or production data that’s necessary to have a very firm grasp Identifying this item. And also legal guarantees baked in so that there’s access to recourse if there’s like a commercial fallout. There’s arbitration and dispute resolution and stuff like that, all baked into an object that’s attached to this global marketplace by default.

We could have these digital identities created with supply chains at the point of production. So as soon as something is built before it’s, before it goes into the vast machinery of commerce, a provenance making sure that there’s no zero history there, like from the raw material to the finished product there’s this history that you can follow.

So in, in a way Vinay described it recently in a way that I like. He described as Satyagraha as a service: you’re seeing the truth of the objects that you produce as a company or that you consume or buy as a consumer.

Understanding as a Prelude to Change [00:23:29]

Garrison: There was a book that I I didn’t, I wasn’t able to read the whole thing before the call, called Blood and Earth (by Kevin Bales.)

He gives a really kind of clear description of him kind of seeing this thing. Actually going to the source of like where they’re mining minerals that ended up going into cell phones and seeing it in person. And it’s just there. And these operations are just simply operating. And just parts of the world as if there’s no, without a care in the world. But one thing he said that I think is the key to this is that once you know this, once you’re aware of this, you can’t forget it. You can’t ignore it. Or at least you can daydream all you want but once the facts are presented to you, you have to do something. And I think that idea that if people knew without a doubt, that that there were literally millions of slaves existing in the world today. We think of slavery as a bygone era like this dark past but it’s happening in either similar or in different ways. It’s kind of obscured, you know, in the giant machinery of trade.

I think one of the challenges with kind of driving awareness of this and trying to get a traction on the social front is you know, with social media and the way like the media landscape is nowadays we’re just constantly bombarded with information. Everything is happening all at once. Being connected as we are: it is both a beautiful and terrifying thing, depending on how that manifests. So do you think there’s a concern of effectively reaching the necessary number of people? Social awareness to the extent that actual change could be implemented.

Helen: I don’t think access with people will be the problem. It will be the approach that needs to be different from any approach that’s been used before. Because the approach that we often see is the picture of poverty, the physical child, woman, in a distressing situation. And that’s meant to tug on our heart strings adequately for us to take action.

All it does is make us feel bad and disconnects us because we don’t know that person is one of 40 million. Which is too big for us to contemplate in terms of how can I make a difference to 40 million people. We have to connect it, human to human, and have it resonate between your life and their life. My life and their life. We have to make the connection. Also, most people don’t know that 80% of the stuff they buy has been touched somewhere along the line by a slave, at least one. They don’t know that, but even if they did know that they would, we would still say maybe this one was the 20% that wasn’t touched by a slave and I can still sleep at night.

So we’re so disconnected from the reality, but it happens to someone, somewhere else, that I can’t influence because it’s too far, too disconnected from my reality. And just too big. We get overwhelmed and we disconnect. So the approach must be different in order to engage people. Because I think we now have the platforms where we can reach people with the right message.

We can do it very quickly and I think more effectively than before.

Garrison: Yeah. It’ll certainly be a challenge. You’re dealing with complexity on the business front, the technology side of things, the social dynamics. It’s a genuine mission. And it has to be compelled by a desire to see things become better for people and just reducing suffering in the world. That has to be the north star that people —

Helen: It does.

And I think that the vast majority of people are not bad. They don’t want to do harm. And I believe that many businesses that do harm didn’t mean. The exegencies of businesses and the logistics of operation forced them down a road. Maybe, obviously they agreed to it, but maybe they didn’t set out — I don’t believe that people set out to do harm. So I do believe that there’s enough of us, both as consumers and businesses that do want to do the right thing and with the right tools in our hands and the right information in our hands, we can and now we have the capacity to be able to provide that, but I don’t pretend that it’s a quick fix.

This is generational attitudinal change that is required. But I do believe that we’re very close to having enough people on board as consumers and businesses, to be able to start making a dent.

Automated Morality [00:28:25]

Garrison: And I think showing people what’s possible is really important. Even as design artifacts. Being able to show people like here’s what this would be like in practice. It’s really difficult for people to change how they do things, how they operate in their daily lives. But one example that Vinay gives: the concept of automated morality. What if you could configure through some mobile app — you have it integrated with your payments or your payment card or whatever it is — make it to where it’s able to detect if there’s lack of transparency or even just actual documented evidence of bad labor conditions or slavery. And it tells you, it notifies you before you make the purchase.

Helen: Yeah, exactly. We have the capacity now to predict when slavery may be more likely to occur. Imagine, for example: As a few years ago happened with the conflict in Syria, mass migration into certain parts of Turkey. That was very auditable. We already knew, for example, that there was some dodgy factories close to the border in Turkey. You’ve got desperate people fleeing across the border need to earn money: bang.

I know that’s a very simplistic example, but still the fact remains that you can use the knowledge we have to predict when things are going to go south, when things are going to go wrong. And when things could result in human or environmental harm. And we can begin to do that so people could be warned like you say, when something actually happens or when the sort of geopolitical socioeconomic indicators start showing us red flags. But we can also automate morality by building in buttons into our Amazon whatever search is saying, do you want slave free tech? Do you want an environmental harm-free tech? And then you get your products filtered by those things as well. So there’s definitely ways of making it super easy for us as consumers to make the right choices. But obviously then what sits beneath that needs to be robust and comprehensive. It can’t be that the picked cotton was organic, but we know nothing about the 99% other parts of that product.

So we have to be really on point about everything that sits underneath the water of that iceberg.

Garrison: And that integration has a very clever side effect. If you did this and it prevented people, like people’s willingness to purchase from them because of the obscurity or whatnot at that point. It’s like, okay, well then prove it and then you’ll be one of the most, you know, a more popular brand.

Helen: Exactly. And I think a lot of the approaches that have been taken today to been finger pointing at company is going your bad. Like Zara, when it all came out about notes sewn into coat pockets. You’re bad. You’re a terrible company. And so companies felt backed into a corner, not wanting to be forthcoming with information that they have about their supply chains, because they’re scared of being ridiculed. And, you know, I totally understand that. Whereas if we come from the perspective of we don’t know exactly what’s going on, but we want to find out and when we do find out we want to deal with it. So we’re going to just be upfront and open. And that’s real transformation of culture that is required in order for businesses to feel confident to do that, to air their dirty laundry.

Garrison: There’s like a consumer literacy there like just knowing and understanding things. Everything is so complex these days. Like no one understands how the global financial system works. It’s incredibly important. It drives how resources are allocated around the planet, but not even the top top professionals in global finance could tell you how exactly does it work because there’s so much automation. There’s so many automated tooling from like high-frequency trading systems and such where like it’s all these processes that are just happening often autonomously and that’s happening further. So the thing we need to do is to automate this insistence on truth and sustainability so that these kind of darker aspects of supply chains that exist now isn’t just automated and further kind of optimized to the flow of goods, as it is.

The Flaws of Trade Globalization [00:33:05]

Helen: Yeah. Yeah. I think that underneath all of this is a fundamental restructure of global business actually, and ceasing of our current approach, which is let’s just go and find that from a country where we can get cheaper labor. That whole approach that is adopted pretty much universally. We have to shift that culture. We have to alter that culture, that approach because otherwise we are going to go and seek out and exploit the most vulnerable and with already existing socioeconomic pressure, you know, in whatever context those people live in. If you’ve got added to the international commercial pressure on that, it becomes unavoidable.

It’s the culture of how we do business internationally, that also needs to be considered. That’s the bigger picture.

Garrison: And there’s definitely a connection between resilience, economic resilience and scale of commerce. Like globalization a few decades, like rapidly scaled commerce around the world. But because of that, because it had to fracture and spread into this complicated matrix of distributors and manufacturers. It became less centralized within a certain region or like a state in the United States, for example, it became this global machine and it’s very easy for things to slip through the cracks.

Helen: Exactly. And that’s the problem is the complexity is just in so many cases, seemingly impossible to uncover. Global trade liberalization was marketed to us as a really great thing for countries to make friends and be closer. You know, we never were told about well, this is the flip side of that, that we’re going to go to China where we can get labor for X or India, or this country in Africa where labor’s less so we’re going to make them work really hard for not very much money so we can bring in cheap stuff. We were given the good news story about global trade deals or international trade deals and the like.

A chain is only as strong as its weakest link. So even if you’ve got one corruptible feeling dodgy state involved, that is the only opportunity that is required for you to sour and taint that whole supply chain. And with the number of countries that we go to and use for the production cycle of various consumables, every single least developed country in the world is being flogged.

On Helen’s Work with Mattereum [00:35:45]

Garrison: I think we’ve covered quite a bit. Is there anything in particular that you’d want to cover? Oh would you like to inform listeners what you’re working now?

Helen: With Mattereum?

Garrison: Yeah.

Helen: So I am working with Mattereum to develop the approach that we will take to this because what we want to do is add rails of data onto Asset Passports to complement the information that’s currently provided in it to inform people about the environmental and social provenance of particular products or particular articles. So we’re developing the standards, the approach, how we will screen claims and test claims so we’re not going to be part of the greenwashing movement, so we can certainly distinguish ourselves from that and offer something that really is different and much better than has been before. What we need the technology to do for us in order to operationalize that.

Garrison: This is definitely one of the uh, better undertakings that I think anyone can be doing now. It’s a difficult subject to talk about, but I’m optimistic about the future.

Helen: Good. So I think we have to be otherwise reality becomes a bit —

yeah. Yeah. It’s good to be optimistic. I think we have reason to be optimistic.