#132—Andrew Hill: Decoding the FT and Schroders Best Business Book of the Year Award

Andrew Hill, is senior business writer at the Financial Times and consulting editor, Financial Times Live. He is author of Ruskinland (2019), about the enduring influence of Victorian thinker John Ruskin and Leadership in the Headlines, a collection of Andrew’s his columns.

We were quite lucky to be able to corral Andrew to have a conversation with us, and I'd be remiss not to preface this podcast by pointing out that rather than our typical format of diving into one author's ideas, framework and thinking around business trends, in this episode, we get a chance to glean insights multiple books and from his experiencing curating the best business books of the year for the Financial Times. 

In this episode, we journey through this year's FT and Schroders Business Book of the Year 2024, getting an "insider look" into the year’s roundup. We also get to explore how the best business book lists has evolved over the years and what this means for the present and future of business.  

Andrew’s long tenure made for an interesting conversation into more niche topics, leading even to what John Ruskin—a Victorian Polymath from the 1800s—would have thought of particular trends highlighted in this collection of books in the modern era.  

In this podcast, we discuss: 

• Has the purpose of the coporation changed? Should we move beyond being purely profit-motivated? 
• Whether the relentless pursuit of economic growth is sustainable or even desirable, given environmental and social constraints 
• Could tribalism, which is often seen as divisive, be a force for collaboration and innovation and unity? 
• How the increase in human longevity may require us to rethink life stages and adopt a 'multi-stage life' model, blending careers, education, and leisure throughout a lifetime 
• Andrew's own journey at the Financial Times, and how the Best Business Books list was established and has evolved over time. 

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Episode Timeline:
00:00—Highlight from today's episode
01:26—Introducing Andrew + the topic of today’s episode
03:45—If you really know me, you know that...
05:31—What is your definition of strategy?
06:52—History and purpose of the FT Business Book of the Year Awards 
08:16— Criteria and process for selecting the books 
11:36— Comparing 2024 submissions with previous years and emerging trends 
16:20— Discussion of The Corporation in the Twenty-First Century  
17:58— Navigating the ESG debate and long-term thinking 
21:41—Discussion of Tribal: How the Cultural Instincts That Divide Us Can Help Bring Us Together
24:32—  Andrew Hill highlights Andrew Scott's insights into living and thriving in a longer lifespan
27:48— Discussion of Growth: A Reckoning  
31:02— Connecting the themes and a reflection on John Ruskin's perspective   
_______________________________________________________________________________________
Additional Resources:
Link to book: Ruskinland
Linkedin: www.linkedin.com/in/andrewtghill
X: https://x.com/andrewtghill

Thank you to our guest. Thank you to our executive producer, Karina Reyes, our editor, Zach Ness, and the rest of the team. If you like what you heard, please follow, download, and subscribe. I'm your host, Kaihan Krippendorff. Thank you for listening.

Follow us at outthinkernetworks.com/podcast

Transcript

Kaihan Krippendorff: Andrew, thank you so much for being here with us. I know, especially now, you're very busy and appreciate you taking some time to talk to us.
 
 Andrew Hill: It's a pleasure to be here.
 
 Kaihan Krippendorff: So for me, this is a real treat because I get to talk to someone who looks at lots and lots of business books and concepts, and so we can cover more than 1, but kind of the Constellation. I do wanna start with the same 2 questions that I ask, all of our guests. The first 1, just for us to get to know you a little bit more personally, could you complete the sentence for me? If you really know me, you know that.
 
 Andrew Hill: You know that I have a strange interest in eccentric Victorian thinkers and innovator? Well, I wrote a book 5 years ago about John Ruskin, the Victorian art critic, and social critic, painter, artist, geologists, scientists, photo, environmentalist, and all the facets of his thinking, which is still relevant today. So he's probably the first icon too. But I have also started getting interested in some of the other innovators in obscure areas such as pen shorthand. Something I'm looking at.
 
 Kaihan Krippendorff: Oh, yes. I know. Yeah. You're working on what's happening to shorthand. We'll come back to that.
 
 But I do think it's I don't wanna say comical, but it's fascinating that during the Victorian area, especially, but in general, like, you know, you were a scientist and doctor and artist, and, you know, you were allowed to have many of these professions or areas of interest and expertise, and we seem to be much more specialized now than was encouraged before.
 
 Andrew Hill: Yeah. People were people are a bit suspicious now or polymaths. Tom Ruskin was definitely a polymath. People now think that's just weirdly generalizing and, you know, how could you be really good at all those things? But he actually will
 
 Kaihan Krippendorff: Yeah. Remarkable. This is a podcast about strategy. And so my next question is, what's your definition of strategy?
 
 Andrew Hill: Well, I kind of refer back to Richard Rimmel, who is UCLA strategy professor, and his definition which I've used a number of times is diagnose critical challenges, set a guiding policy to deal with them, and then take a here at action to accomplish your goals. And the thing I really like about his definition is that last bit. That he doesn't say he explicitly says strategy is not just the vision. You have to have a vision and a goal, but you've got to set the actions that are gonna take you in that direction. Even if the goal is way off, he uses the example of the of the moonshot, the literal moonshot of the US trying to land on the moon and how that was set as this great vision by JFK and then became a reality because he already knew from the information he'd got from scientists at NASA and elsewhere that it was possible.
 
 It was a stretched goal, but it was possible. So that I like that combination, really, of vision and action that he laid out.
 
 Kaihan Krippendorff: Love that. Yeah, he was on this podcast early on, and it's highly, yeah, highly influential. You know, strategy is what you do, not what you say you're gonna do. Vision without action is a daydream, and the action without vision is a nightmare, the marrying of those 2. Excellent.
 
 So we wanna talk about the financial times, business book of the year awards, and talk a little bit about those books and what you're seeing in the photo shot of what those books are today and what they've been in the past just if you don't mind, just tell us a little bit of your history about how you came to become the editor of those book of the book awards.
 
 Andrew Hill: Yeah. Sure. Well, we launched the book awards in 2005. They're an annual awards. So this year is the twentieth has been the twentieth edition.
 
 And the aim of the awards remains the same, really, which is the same, if you like, as the aim of the financial times itself, but we are editing the news. We're filtering the news. So busy people read what they need to read. And we applied that to business books, something like 10000 business books published every year. And so we're filtering and distilling and narrowing down those books every year to yield 15 or 16 for a long list, 6 for a short list, and be ultimately the winner.
 
 And I and I came to be involved more or less because I was in the right place at the right time. When the editor at the time said, we bought to do a book award. I was our opinion editor, and it fell to me to launch it. And I've stuck with it ever since. Great.
 
 Kaihan Krippendorff: Great. And what is the criteria or the process by which you narrow them down? I know that I understand that, you know, kind of the objective is if you're a busy person, these are the books that you should read as opposed to this is the most creative book or this is the most well written book or but it's really about the context. So just tell us a little bit about the philosophy.
 
 Andrew Hill: Yeah. I mean, the key the key philosophy, and it's very simple, really, from the start, has been that we're picking or are judges are picking the most compelling and enjoyable book of the year. So compelling is pretty easy to understand, but compelling might yield you a lot of very weighty and rather dull worthy contenders. Enjoyable gives you an additional kind of twist that says, there's nothing wrong if you stop halfway through. That probably means it's not the most enjoyable book on this list.
 
 And you can argue with the choices that we've made over the years, but that has really helped us refine things. And the only real change to the criteria since the beginning is that we added another slightly contentious elements that the book's chosen ought to stand the test of time, which, of course, in the moment, you can't really tell. But I think, actually, our winners certainly have have stood up pretty well. And the process Well, obviously, there are a lot of books out there. We try to use a sort of radar if you like to spot books before they're published, ones that are creating buzz, ones that are, you know, written by notable people, ones that see me quirky or interesting, and the breadths of the books we look at is pretty wide because we're not just looking at traditional business and management books.
 
 We're also looking at books that are biographies, histories. We've even had a couple of novels, contending, they're not excluded. And we start with the with the radar. We then get we then invite entries. We encourage publishers to enter books that we might have spotted that they might not think on contenders, and we usually end up with around 600 entries, which I co ordinate a team of hardworking colleagues to filter that first 600.
 
 They then bring it down to, let's say, about a hundred. At that point, it stops to get really tricky. And, again, I use my colleagues' expertise to try and analyze the books that have been entered and have reached that stage. And, ultimately, it's a small group of us arguing about what should be the 15 or 16 on the list. And those in the long list are the books that are put to our senior judges panel of 10, including led by the editor of the Feet, who narrow it down to a shortlist and ultimately a win.
 
 The long list is 15 or 16, and, obviously, you don't wanna know 15 to 60 old to be books for sake of argument about technology or about economics. So there is a certain amount of kind of getting the mix right in there, but it's very much in an apples and oranges process, which we agonize over for some months.
 
 Kaihan Krippendorff: Sure. Yeah. That's Humans still matter in the process of filtering useful information and Yeah.
 
 Andrew Hill: Sometimes times Please just may even please just may even when we are. I'm fronted with 600 Yeah. PDFs Yep. Unpublish books that we Yep.
 
 Kaihan Krippendorff: Need to go
 
 Andrew Hill: through.
 
 Kaihan Krippendorff: Now I love it's very balanced, very balanced list, and not just the best sellers, but, actually, you can discover pieces of work that you might not otherwise find. I do see interesting commonalities between the books on the shortlist this year, and I know that you've chosen the book of the year already, but and topics that are coming up as of interest to strategy officers and innovation officers. So I wanted to maybe just touch on each of the books very lightly just to talk about what they say about what matters today. But before I do that, maybe just like a as from a bird's eye view, if you compare the submissions that you've gotten and the list that you ended up with in 20 24 with prior years, what are you seeing as that could indicate what the Zeitgeist or interest or challenges are, how they're changing?
 
 Andrew Hill: Well, obviously, you know, publishing is a lagging indicator because books take a while. Even if you push something through rapidly, it takes a while. But over the years, I think probably the winners that we've chosen have shown trends. The first book selected to be book of the year was Tom Freedans. The world is flat.
 
 His break kind of pan to globalization. That was obviously a time when everyone was looking globally, and globalization was the big theme, then we went through the financial crisis and a lot of financial books. And now we're moving into or have moved into in the last 4 or 5 years, if not earlier, into technology. And these are books that, to some degree, have dominated the winner's podium, but also the entries. I mean, there've been a lot of books over that time that have examined daunting with Martin Ford's right of the robots, which, 1, when it came out through to this year when we had a number of AI books on the list.
 
 So technology, I think, has been the leading thing. 1 thing I noticed over the years though was that as the technology books came in, you also have a sort of similar, sort of parallel list of books with human in the title. You know, you had this interesting back and forth, if you like, between the books that were techno to this for the machine versus those that recognized. As I do, I think that probably is the more as the machine rises, you also get a greater understanding of where the human is important. In the kind of setting and strategy, the running of companies, the development of everything that companies and organizations might be doing.
 
 So that that has been something that I've been maybe I'm looking out for that because I'm interested in that and spend. I think it's also true the last few years and not specifically on this year's shortlist, but we have had a lot more books about the commodities, the minerals, the actual substance of capitalism, what goes into things, ship war by Chris Miller 1 couple of years ago. And that's as much a book about semiconductors and US China rivalry and so on. But it's also a book about how do we make the things that go into the devices on which we depend. And we've had a number of books that have looked at that area, which I didn't remember being a feature of the early years of the prize when we were looking at the entries.
 
 Kaihan Krippendorff: Yeah. It makes sense. I think the, like, rapid emergence of new types of products that require very specific inputs. Probably, suddenly, there's, like, surges of demands of these inputs that create this new races to controlling the diamond mines if it's sort of Yeah.
 
 Andrew Hill: And I think from a water point of view, the other thing is that, you know, we're living in a virtual world, 1 of the books on the shortlist. This year, the corporation in the 20 first century by John Kaye, is essentially about how the company has been changed and company's strategy has been changed by the development of more digital services. But that has, I think, that digitization has fueled interest among authors in you know, what does the what are the actual things that we have to still dig out of the ground or they're still from the air around us or make into to use to make into things? An interest in a substance of capitalism and manufacturing in a world when a lot of what is we buy and sell and do is essentially insubstantial and intangible.
 
 Kaihan Krippendorff: Yeah. I guess it's yeah. It's just maybe it's more surprising. We're receiving value digitally, but we don't think about that that's being created by physical things. Interesting.
 
 Maybe we can just, like, touch first on that 1, the corporation in the 20 first century, John k. What was it about that book that you felt warranted it to be 1 on the shortlist?
 
 Andrew Hill: Sure. Well, I mean, first of all, it's certainly enjoyable. He's a very good writer. More than 5 years ago, he used to actually write a column full of financial times. So I'm recognizing now his writing well.
 
 But it's a book that is essentially, as he writes, a book for people who need to understand about business. And so in that sense, maybe not a book for those who are actually well versed in the way business works. But he is very waspish about business, where it goes wrong, where he thinks it's gone down the narrow path towards, for example. He's a huge shareholder value. He's very critical of that, and he points out a number of examples.
 
 About the scandals and problems that arise from not looking at a kind of wider picture for business. It's supposed to be the first of a trillogy, and I think later books will, I hope, pick up this theme and apply it to where companies are going, not just where they've come from. So it's very much a book for those who need to know about what is this thing, the company, the corporation, where did they come from, what is it still adapted to the world we live in? And his central conclusion is, well, it needs to adapt faster because it's becoming difficult to see that as the main vehicle for modern capitalism.
 
 Kaihan Krippendorff: Interesting. Yeah. Yeah, there's so many themes to pull apart there, you know, the, you know, the changing of economics and the theory of the firm and the rethinking of how organizations are structured, externalities, becoming internalities, making, like, profit arguments for doing good, and then this kind of unsustainability of the short termism but versus the long term termism. What what's your sense of I mean, I can see forces pushing us towards I really believe in personally as a human that if corporations take a long term perspective, then all these externalities become internalities, and you can doing what's profitable aligns very closer to what doing good. And so I really wanna believe that.
 
 And yet there is also this sort of counter pressure right now against the ESG and seems to absorb a little bit of a battle. I mean, what what's your sense of where we are right now in this moment?
 
 Andrew Hill: Well, I mean, I'm a strong believer in the long termist view is the right view. I mean, I think you don't need to look very you don't need to go very far down the road of thinking, well, if we agree that certain things we're doing and destroying the planet, destroyed planet is not gonna be a brilliant place in which to sell our future products. But, of course, that can be devolved into an argument about how quickly that's gonna happen. Or counter arguments about technology and how might help us to overcome those kind of constraints. Will Dallas come to another book on the list growth, which looks at that.
 
 Very dilemma by Daniel Suskind. I think the issue that has made this a difficult moment for that argument is that ESG was specifically I wouldn't say hijacked, but it was certainly became captured by a world of investment and a sort of faddish movement that not everyone was able to deliver on. So companies promised, over promised on some of the things they were doing. Some of them, they even have explicitly or sort of May. So I've done that.
 
 But, again, some of them may even have said, I'm going to put an ESG label on here, but I don't actually have to do any of it. And that bread, cynicism, led to a backlash led to accusations of vocalism taking over the world. And that became melded particularly in the US with a pushback against diversity, equality, and inclusion, which fits under, obviously, the s of ESG. And that's created a mess, I think, where ESG is not helping as an acronym, and I don't think in the states, certainly, that it gets used much at all now. III hope that the underlying logic of looking to the long term and behaving more sustainably as a company is sustained beyond this I have temporary temporary backlash.
 
 I think I think it would be dangerous if that weren't the case.
 
 Kaihan Krippendorff: Yeah. It's interesting to see what the other names are that take hold and that movement can adopt a new name, and it's almost sort of a battle of language.
 
 Andrew Hill: Yeah. People in that area do get a bit obsessed with the naming. I mean, we went through corporate social responsibility, sustainability, ESG. But I think, certainly, the e of ESG is so pressing for so many people and therefore for so many companies that actually we can go beyond the naming now and say, look, there's a real impression danger here that if something isn't done, either technologically or in terms of reassessing what the goals are of particular companies that were going to be plunged into even greater jeopardy, and that will be bad for everybody.
 
 Kaihan Krippendorff: And the second bit booking your list sort of offers another tool, I guess, to move us towards that tribal, how the cultural in things that divide us can help bring us together, Michael Morris, sort of as I honestly have not read the book, but read about the book. You know, it sort of argues that humans are collaborative, naturally collaborative creatures. That's how we survived and tribes, and so looking out, you know, looking out for each other is a natural evolutionary habit. Just keep in mind just telling us a little bit about that book and why you chose
 
 Andrew Hill: I mean, I this is obviously 1 that falls into a category that sort of emerged over the 20 years of the prize. To be pretty dominant at 1 point of kind of behavioral science, anthropology, psychology. These are this book is reclaiming tribalism for those optimists among us. Who think that people ought to get on together and pointing out that actually a lot of the great things that have happened in the world are the or 2 human beings. A lot of great things that have happened to you human beings are actually a product of teamwork for want of a better word or tried working together to develop and improve the worlds they live in.
 
 So as you say, it's a sort of counterpoint or at least complement to the discussion of what happens with our environment. And I think an optimistic book, a very timely book, deliberately timed, I think, to offset the idea that tribes are bad, and tribalism will always lead to the lowest common denominator and raise to the bottom. Michael Morris, the author, makes a more positive point that if you can harness those positive aspects, you can actually improve the world. And he takes that across a whole range of examples from companies to governments and, you know, 1 that stuck with me even though it's a very micro thing was know, why do we want to be some of the time least in offices with other people? It's because actually picking up signals and being able to work together as teams is something that humans do naturally, and it doesn't come easy to us if we're stuck remotely.
 
 However, but the technology is that can link us together. So I think a very timely book, really interesting. Lots of members of the judging panel said this was 1 that they wish they'd had when they were CEOs or running teams to other help them to shape the way in which that tribal instinct
 
 Kaihan Krippendorff: Yeah. Was resonating. I recently had someone of the podcast that was sort of about tribalism around brands, and now I've been looking at, you know, kind of tribalism and organizations as culture. I think it's really could can be as with the technology are powerful or not as well. Let's talk a little bit about the longevity imperative.
 
 I think that's really interesting. Andrew, Scott, the idea is that you know, people are living much longer and our education systems are the careers, work, leisure time, are all kind of, like, tied to, I don't know, 70 or your life or whatever that is. Just tells a little bit about why you chose that. What what I'm particularly interested in this idea of the multistage life. I think people would be interested in that.
 
 I know you'd have to author the book, but and you read lots of books, but you just give us a little flavor of it.
 
 Andrew Hill: Yeah. So the as you say, the thesis of the book is that if we are likely more of us are likely to live to be a hundred years plus, particularly, obviously, the younger generation of those being born now stand the greater chance, then that requires a rethink on the part of everybody, individuals, organizations for which they work, policy makers, institutions everywhere. How's a rethink of what used to be your thought of as a bit of a kind of 70 and done or 65 and done if you take a sort of typical European retirement age? Approach because you get to 60, and you could have another 30, even 40 years left. So that changes everything.
 
 And Andrew Scott was a co author with Linda Grafton of a book that was on our shortlist. Few years ago called the hundred year life. And here, he picks he's the economist of the duo. Here, he picks up the economic line, but also the social implications of a life that is lived, as you say, more in a sort of in multiple stages. And how that actually changes when you are thinking about how to educate yourself, when to educate yourself.
 
 You no longer front loading education, so it's done up to the age of 20 25. Finding other ways to reeducate relearn, rescale. It affects relationships. Obviously, it affects health care because 1 of his underlying premises is that we may be living longer, but we need to also be living healthier lives. There's no point in having a 30 year life, which is essentially that of an invalid.
 
 So the issue of how to achieve that and then what to do to make the most of it is right at the heart of this. He posits something called the Evergreen agenda that he calls the Evergreen agenda, which is a way in which policy makers need to think about how to improve the lives of the longer lived. So it's a I think it's a very imaginative and thought provoking way of thinking about a problem. Interestingly, I spoke to some Japanese colleagues, the financial times as belongs to Nikki, Japanese company, who obviously pointed out that in Japan, a company with a country known for a longevity of its citizens. They've already been going through some of these policy changes and addressing having to address some of these issues in order to avoid being caught with, you know, top heavy, unwell population.
 
 And, of course, it's coming to lots of countries now, particularly in in the developed world.
 
 Kaihan Krippendorff: Yes. Yep. Yep. With our birth rates. Yeah.
 
 I wanna go through all of them, but I know we're reaching kind of the top of our time, but it does seem like I'm really curious about growth. A reckoning, Daniel Suscand, and it seems to me if we look we stay with Japan for a moment. Right? In Japan, you have these hundred and 50 year old, 202 hundred and 50 year old companies that it seems like a stark contrast from, hey, Silicon Valley, I'm gonna hyperscale and right. So tell us a little bit about the premise of the book and why you chose this as 1 of the shortlist books.
 
 Andrew Hill: Yeah. And growth Dennis Hoskind has written in growth about how about the growth dilemma. So first of all, he does quite a lot of really interesting history of and we got to the point where growth was even an objective, economically. And he points out that until the industrial revolution, economies didn't really grow at all. You were sort of born, you tilled the fields, or you did whatever you'd been born into for a relatively short time, less than 50 years, probably an average longevity.
 
 And then you died, and that was it. Nothing moved forward. And then the industrial revolution made a huge gave a whole huge jolt to global economies. And growth took off and gradually became the objective for a lot of economies to the point where they were comparing each other's growth rates in the market, pride to be the fastest growing, etcetera. But as he points out, relatively recently, it's become clear that what looked like an easy bet by governments, we just grow faster.
 
 Everyone gets richer. They get happier. They reelect us and repeat, rinse and repeat. Natalie, of course, it's become clear that that pursuit of growth has consequences, particularly on the planet, also in terms of inequality, and this is the dilemma. How do you balance growth, which we recognize to be a very useful way of bringing people out of poverty and into prosperity with the potential harms that growths can create.
 
 And this is this is what he's addressing, really. Both the history and how we got to where we got to and how we might get out of what looks like an impossible, immovable force, and sublevel force meeting, an immovable object. And his answers to that lie, both in the ingenuity of humans, technology, which is some of the things we've already talked about. But also in as he points out, you know, this is something that really needs to go back to the citizenry needs to decide. It's a political decision, a very important 1, how you balance these things.
 
 And that can only be decided by the people because these are tough decisions. No 1 authority can take on its own. And he's also very critical of, incidentally, the de growth is those who would claim that you have to just turn that growth, stop growing, as a solution because although it's gonna ruin everything, he says that's actually not a solution. That leaves us with stagnation, poverty, lots of issues that can only be solved by continuing to grow.
 
 Kaihan Krippendorff: Yeah. Yep. We've built the system to depend on growth. Like, a shark needs to keep swimming. Alright.
 
 So this is fascinating. I mean, each of these, you can start seeing their different topics, but they start rhyming. They sort of build on each other. And we didn't talk about 2 of the books, unit x, how the Pentagon and Silicon Valley are changing the future of warfare, which is about the adoption of Silicon Valley technology and approaches into military and defense and another technology book, which Ultimately, 1, supremacy, AI, chat, EPT, and the race that will change the world by Parmi Olsson. We don't have time to go through those, but, you know, you've got technology, you've got tribalism, you've got short termism versus long termism, you've got growth versus alternative to growth.
 
 All these different perspectives seem to, like, pulling together a maybe a picture, and I'm wondering what would John Ruskin if he were alive today, what would he say about these different perspectives, do you think?
 
 Andrew Hill: So 1 thing that Ruskin was very good at was spotting the connections between diverse things, and in lots of respects his work, his life's work, was making those connections. So spotting, for example, that industrial pollution, which was not something that people were really thinking about, was affecting the weather. I mean, the early spotting of climate change, spotting how human co invitation with nature was changing the shape of the valleys of Italy and Switzerland where he used to tour and connecting together apparently diverse areas, point like a polymath does. And this was to some degree, I used to I talked with him a little bit as a sort of Internet before the Internet in that he was able to link these various things in respect of the arts and crafts movement, his preferred model was small scale craft based, and in the context of the gigantic corporations that were emerging from the industrial revolution, that obviously seemed irrelevant and indeed a lot of the ventures that he tried to back in that of that scale failed. But I've can see that there is an opportunity created by technology actually to energize smaller scale ventures.
 
 And you see that in craft based organizations like Etsy, for example, they're pulling through creators and giving them opportunities in ways that probably didn't exist for the craft based organizations that John Ruskin backed or approved of. And so that is a bit of optimism. I think the danger, 1 which finally also in supremacy points out, is that these bright ideas are very quickly swamped or bought out by the bigger organizations. And so the sheer scale of a Google or a deep mind as part of Google or OpenAI as it's growing or a deep ex AI, even Musk's AI outfit threatens to just suck in all the attention of those smaller organizations even as they're using it, none is able to provide a sort of threat to the to the to the big organizations. But those technology platforms and many others do provide an opportunity for people who want to revert to being this to have that smaller scale to collaborate here where in where in Michael Morris' tribal, to collaborate with others who they might, in previous generations, certainly in Rust's generation, never have encountered.
 
 There's much more ability to discover the people you're gonna collaborate with to discover your pride if you're
 
 Kaihan Krippendorff: almost like if you take the positive and negative flip of each of these, if we put the positive flip, it puts gives you the contours of a really interesting economic form or norm. But as all these books point out, we need to be diligent because the direction in which it evolves is at least partially within our control.
 
 Andrew Hill: Yes. I think that's right.
 
 Kaihan Krippendorff: But we are at the top of our time with you. I really wanna think is really a gift to get to sit with someone who looks at thousands of books until 600 books to 100 books to 15 books to 6 books to 1 book, and get a little bit of a glimpse into the patterns that you see. Thank you for doing that work for us, and thank you for spending some time to give us a little taste of its conclusions.
 
 Andrew Hill: It's been a great pleasure.