Episode 54: Michele Wucker on Identifying and Confronting the Obvious Risks of Gray Rhinos

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Loop.Com hi, I'm Matt DeVoe, the CEO of OODA LLC and you are watching the Oodacast and today I am incredibly happy to be joined by Michelle Walker, who wrote one of my picks for the top 10 security, business and technology books of 2020 with the gray how to recognize and act on the obvious dangers that we ig. And I will put a link to the book down below. So Michelle, welcome and thank you for joining us.

Thanks for having me.

So always like to dive kind of into your background. So can you step us through kind of your career progression and what you're doing now and how you came to write the book?

Sure. Well, I started out as a financial journalist writing about the restructuring of all of the defaulted debt from the 1980s and, you know, chopping all the loans up into bonds and trading them and all of the political risk that came with that and the sovereign credit risk. And from there I went into think tanks for a while and then I finally decided that it was time to do my own thing. I was kind of slotting books in here and there and it's not really a great way to have work, life balance. It's kind of exhausting. So one of the things that I wrote about in when I was Latin America bureau chief for International Financing Review was the contra was the Argentinian debt crisis, where in early 2000, 2001, the numbers were very clear. It's like the debt was going up, reserves were going down, the economy was going down. It was pretty clear where things were going. And in spring of spring of that year, there was a proposal on Wall street to do a haircut to cut, you know, reduce the debt. And of course Argentina didn't want to do it. They wanted to save face. They were just dedicated to being darling of the emerging markets. And the bankers, of course, were getting huge underwriting fees by restructuring and restructuring and restructuring. And of course, the chance to get out of the way was something nobody took. And so Argentina collapsed. The currency collapsed, they defaulted on the debt. The proposal had been to do a 30% haircut. And people ended up losing 70% of their money, except for the people who fought and fought in the courts for 15 years and got their money a long time later. So in 2010, you could see a very, very similar dynamic in Greece. And in spring of 2011, I wrote a paper saying, Greece, learn from Argentina, don't do what Argentina did. There's a big scary thing at you, you've got a chance to do something about it. Please take it. And what was very interesting to me was that when Argentina was happening, after I wrote about this haircut proposal, a bunch of bankers called me and said, we think that's what needs to happen, but we can't say it publicly or we're going to be fired. And with Greece, people were talking about it very publicly. My proposal was one of the early calls for a preemptive restructuring. But people were out there talking about it finally. And of course, in spring of 2012, down to the wire, they prevented a default, they came to an agreement. And that's really about the time when I started thinking very seriously about what my next book was going to be. I'd been running a think tank for too long and it was just time to be doing my own stuff. And I wanted to know what was the difference. Here are two countries that saw a big scary thing coming at them. One of them fixed the problem, the other one didn't. What makes the difference. And I knew that the world was not as enthralled by sovereign yield spreads and, you know, geeky things like I was. So I wanted to find a way to talk about it. And that's where I came up with the gray rhino. This metaphor of the big two ton thing coming at you, the horn is the danger, it's coming straight your way. It's gray because I went back to my sixth grade trip to the zoo and realized that there are actually black rhinos, that's a formal name for one of the species, and white rhinos, which is a formal name, but neither one of them are the color that they're called. They're actually both, they're both gray in reality. So that seemed to me to be a great metaphor to help to communicate how likely we are to ignore the obvious thing. And it's different from the elephant in the room, which is something that by definition nobody does or says anything about. And the gray rhino is something that's, that's dynamic, that gives you a choice. So I introduced the topic at Davos in 2013, the annual meeting, 2016, the book came out, the Gray Rhino, which involves a five stage framework that helps you to understand where you are in a gray rhino event and why you are or aren't dealing with something and how you can do a better job. So that's what I focus on full time now. I do a lot of keynote speeches around the world. I do workshops, helping companies and trade associations and policymakers to apply this framework to Help to come up with better strategies. And I've just finished a new book, you Are what yout Risk, which is coming out in April, which is really about the psychological reasons why you stand up to a gray rhino or don't. So your innate personality, your experiences, organizational culture, your government, your society, the cultural influence, values. What are all the things that really shape your gray rhino response? It's much more personal than the first book, which was much more about business strategy and policy, sort of 30,000 foot stuff. And this one really carries the concept forward into using this gray rhino concept, using how you see risk and how you relate to risk as a way to understand yourself and to improve teamwork, to improve negotiations and to make much better decisions.

Excellent. Thank you. Can't wait to read the new book. So, April 2021, around the corner, around the. That'll be here soon. So you gave an example with regards to Greece and sovereign debt as a kind of gray rhino. Can you provide a couple of other examples that maybe give some context around the idea of a gray rhino that's been confronted?

Sure. Well, one of the first ones that came up when I was researching the book, you know, every time I went to lunch or dinner with my friends, I asked them, you know, what's a big obvious problem that's not being dealt with or that more accurately, some people are dealing with, but not enough are in Climate change just all over the place. And in fact, this past spring, when I started getting a lot of questions about pandemics as gray rhinos, a bunch of reporters called to ask about climate change as a gray rhino and how to apply the framework there. You know, this is something that's, that's very, very big. Everybody sees it in their own way. You people in Australia with the wildfires or on the west coast here with wildfires, don't see it as something far away. You know, they see it as something that's right on top of them. Although there's some people who are still in very, very active denial about it, other people who don't live in places that are so immediately affected might see it as a rhino that's a little bit farther down the road that's not quite as close. And that's an important point, that everyone sees a gray rhino differently. It's a different perspective. And it's so important to me that people really own the concept for themselves and say, hey, this is my gray rhino, because everybody can have a completely different one. I get lots and lots of questions about, you know, what's this gray Rhino. What's that? You know, is that a gray rhino? What do you see as the gray rhinos? And obviously, I've got very strong opinions about the things that I see, but I've gotten a little hesitant about how I answer that, because I really want people to ask the question for themselves, what's the gray rhino that I see coming at me and what am I doing about it?

Excellent.

So we've had a little back and forth on Twitter about COVID 19 as a gray rhino. Can you share some of your thoughts around that?

Absolutely. And I wrote a piece for the Washington Post almost a year ago about this when everyone was coming out and saying, oh, black swan. Nobody could have seen it coming. And my head wanted to explode because I'm like, Bill Gates had that fantastic TED talk in 2015 about one of his biggest fears being a pandemic that nobody was prepared for. World Health Organization had warned about how unprepared we are. Number of think tanks of public health organizations also warned. In 2019, there was a scenario planning exercise within the Trump administration itself, saying, hey, you know, we're not prepared. We really need to deal with this. And instead, we were taking funding away from the Centers for Disease Control. And once it started rolling out, the response was very, very sluggish and slow. And so we can look back at it in hindsight, at all of the ways in which people ignored it. But as I said, I'm a little bit nervous about how I talk about this because when people talk about black swans, they only talk about it in hindsight. And I get asked a lot of questions these days about gray rhinos in hindsight. But the concept is really meant to be looking forward to. And so with COVID now, I see some people coming out and saying, hey, this is just a test run. You think this is bad, it's going to be worse. And we're, of course, seeing now lots of news stories about new mutations and strains and not sure how much the vaccine is going to cover, how long it's going to be valid. You look at all the consequences as a result of COVID 19. You look at this increasingly yawning inequality gap. You've probably heard people talk about the K shaped economy, where the rich are getting much, much richer and the poor are getting poorer. If you're on the top arm of the K, you're doing great. If you're on the bottom leg of the K, not so much. And that, I think, is tying into some of the social problems that we're increasingly seeing you're also seeing an unequal impact of the virus. People who can work from home are doing great, less likely to get sick, frontline workers who don't have the option of working from home and you know, doing great. Zoom conversations like we're having, you know, they're out there, they're getting sick there. There are disparities in health care. So we've really got to step up to the economic and social consequences that are coming at us in the future. The sort of, you could call it the, you know, the gray rhinos that Covid spawned. Although inequality was there already, our financial fragilities were there already, social tensions were there already. I think in a lot of ways Covid has just made them more obvious and made more people open their eyes to them.

Interesting.

So, you know, going back and I know in the conversations we'd exchanged a little bit, kind of briefly, I'd mentioned I was part of something called the Defense Adaptive Red Team that was looking at all risks for dod and we had multiple red teams on pandemics. And coming out of that, there were plans that were put in place, there were procedures, there was stockpiling, there was all sorts of stuff that happened. But then it seemed to trail off. Obviously we had some pandemic type risks associated with sars, et cetera. But is there an issue, and I would relate this also to my experience in cybersecurity. Do you have an issue if you have a gray rhino like that, which is obviously coming but for which you don't have the evidence? This potential for people getting fatigue and not taking action? Because you said year over year this is coming and then it doesn't happen.

Yeah, it's a very, very serious issue. And there's so many gray rhinos out there. A lot of people have said that once they read the book, they started saying, oh, there's one, there's one. I see them all the time. So obviously you've got to prioritize. One of the things about pandemics that really struck me in thinking about Ebola, which is mentioned in the, which was being written while that happened, was that one of the big takeaways from Ebola was that if you want to prevent pandemics, you have to have a robust day to day health care system. And we're already aware of the problems in the US overpriced system that doesn't work very well. Unequal access places like Africa and Latin America where you don't even have access to a bottle of Tylenol or some of the most basic Healthcare issues. And so one of the points is that by dealing with some of the day to day things, you actually improve your resilience when the big thing comes along. It's just like in personal finance, you have a rainy day fund, you work on that day to day, you don't take big crazy financial risk, go chasing down some hot stock tip that you're cousin got from their car dealer. So daily habits are a very important way of preparing yourself for the gray rhinos when you don't know exactly when they're going to come and exactly what they're going to look like. And it's so important in so many areas because a lot of people say, well, yeah, yeah, you say the stock market is in danger, what day is it going to fall and by how many points and what's the exact catalyst going to be? I don't know that. And so they say, well, if you don't know anything to that degree of detail, when, then it's a black swan, nobody can predict it. And there's a big, forgive me, gray area in between being able to predict exactly when and where and what it's going to look like and having no ability to predict anything at all. And so a lot of gray rhino thinking involves looking at what you can control, looking at the smaller problems that you can deal with, looking at the systems that you can put in place for making good decisions, for making sure that there's an appropriate safety net there, not one that's so cushy that you're not worried about falling at all, so you don't care what risk you take, but one that's strong enough that you can make calculated, smart risks. So part of gray rhino thinking is being comfortable with the fact that you don't know precisely what's going to happen. The other part is that if you see a big scary thing coming at you and you do the things that you need to do to get out of the way to turn it around, nobody's going to praise you for doing that. You know, in our culture we praise people for cleaning up messes. We don't praise them for preventing messes because those counterfactuals are very, very hard for people to get our heads around. So that's something else we need to be aware of and really look for ways to celebrate the things that people do to prevent things. You look at say, the USAID budget, which right now doesn't have good provisions for preventative investments in resilience. And we need to be doing a lot more. We need to be doing a lot more accounting, scenario planning. If we prevent this, how much will that save us? If we don't take this opportunity, how much will that cost us? Requires a little more imagination and analytical thinking than this whole black swan world where you just say, well, we're not going to plan because we don't know exactly what's coming, so we're not going to bother to plan.

Excellent.

And I love the fact that the concept can be at the macro level.

Which we've been primarily talking about. But it sounds like the book might also focus on the micro level. There are some personal strategies that I can deploy or ways that I can recognize these gray Rhinos just in my day to day existence. The obvious one that comes to mind, and I recall, I think you had some discussion of it briefly in your book is just texting and driving. You know that there's a higher probability of being involved in an accident, but unless you make that acknowledgment and adjust your behavior, you're operating from this. Well, it's not going to happen to me until you're ultimately confronted with that actual risk.

Yeah. And you know, it's funny you bring that up because one of the biggest surprises for me from the Gray Rhino and actually one of the big reasons why I wrote you are what you risk is that people really applied the book to personal ways, personal lives, in a way that I hadn't imagined. You know, there are a couple small personal examples. There's certainly, you know, information about cognitive biases and things like that that are very relevant to personal lives and how you think about things. But I wrote the Gray Rhino as someone with a background in policy and in finance and in business and in strategy. And I was in Shanghai in 2017. The book had just come out in China in spring of 2017 and was a huge bestseller immediately. And this super hip kid in a black T shirt comes up to me and wants an autograph and a selfie of course. And thank you so much for helping me with my life. And I talk about this kid all the time because it's still really moves me the way he took the ideas and concepts and really applied them. I keep finding these blogs. There was a guy in Indiana who blogged about health care. A friend of his had breast cancer and she took very, very aggressive treatment steps and then he went and ran a marathon to raise money for breast cancer research and wrote about it all in the context of the Gray rhino. Or, you know, my best friend who was was working in a program at A college in Wisconsin that was funded by the state. And you know, Scott Walker came in as governor and you know, the budget slashing was, was clearly coming. So she was like, whoa, I need, I need something, I need a plan B. So she actually went back and she got her library degree. And it was very much in the context of these conversations we were having about, you know, big scary things coming at you. So she changed careers because she saw it. And then, you know, her mom got Parkinson's. And in making all of the end of life decisions and the caregiving and where she was going to live and all of that, she applied Gray Rhino thinking to it the whole way along. And then she actually wrote about it. And I've used it with other friends of friends who hadn't, was way behind on taxes years and years and finally went to the accountant, caught up a couple years, not the whole way. But I've taken to sort of saying half joking, but not really to my friends and family who are putting off something. I'm like, haven't you read my book? It actually works sometimes.

Excellent.

So if I'm, you know, a lot.

Of our viewership are executives and corporations that are specifically interested in kind of decision making and decision making strategies. So if I'm an executive and I recognize this Gray Rhino and I want to take action, what are some of the strategies that you highlight that are going to be effective in helping to address the gray Rhino?

Sure. It's a great question and I love it because obviously something I thought about quite a bit. The first thing is to just regularly ask yourself, what's my Gray rhino? What's the big obvious thing that's coming at me? And then you go through what am I doing about it? And an analysis of where you are, but also where key stakeholders are. And that can be quite broad. It might be members of your team, people in your company. It also might involve customers, people in the community, government, regulators, all sorts of stakeholders, some people who can affect the outcome and people who are affected by the outcome. Do they recognize what the problem is and are they dealing with it or not? I've got five stages which are inspired partly by Elisabeth Kubler Ross and five stages of grief. The first one of which is of course denial, which is what it sounds like usually when people are talking to me, they're past that already. But some of their stakeholders might not be muddling is the second one. That's when you know there's a problem. But you have come up with all sorts of reasons why you can't deal with it. And what you really want to do is understand what the obstacles are. The third stage is diagnosing. That's where you switch your mindset from this here's why we can't fix it to what does it take to fix it? Who do we need on board? What resources do we need? What actions do we need to take? You know, coming up with a real plan. And that also involves analyzing the gray rhino right in front of you. You know, how far away is it, how big, prioritizing. Sometimes you've got to deal with a couple of different gray rhinos at once, because if you deal with one, the other one's going to come, you know, come from the side. The fourth one is panic. And it's been kind of funny. At some of the workshops I've done, people said, how do we just like skip that stage? And someone else says, well, what if you're so far in denial that the panic is your first stage? You really don't want that to happen. But panic is a double edged sword. It's the time when you're more likely to do something, although sometimes that actually involves freezing and just being paralyzed. But it also means that if you do something, you are more likely to do the wrong thing, which may be freezing. Economic cycles are a great example of this. You see these economic booms when at the top, everyone's just chasing the very last dollar at the top. And then when things start going down, they start pulling in the purse strings and pulling in the belt and that actually accelerates the trip down. And governments don't seem to understand how important countercyclical economics are and frankly for companies as well. So panic, what you really want to do is get people to feel a sense of urgency. And then there are ways to create that, to set deadlines. I have a friend who was writing a book and she was having trouble with writer's block. So she gave me $1,000 and the book was 10 chapters. And she said, every time I finish a chapter, will you give me $100? I said, okay, as long as you promise it's just 10 chapters, then we're good. And so that kind of created a sense of urgency and a reward for her to finish the book. And you can use that tactic on much bigger levels. And the final stage is action, which is what you think. It usually starts with a small number of people, the gray rhino spotters or the wardens. And then the question is, how do you get more people to amplify their efforts? And the other part this is really tricky because a lot of people do something and they're like, okay, well, I did something, so that's done. I'm like, no, you have to then ask yourself if it worked and how well, and if you need to adjust. And then at some point, you need to kind of look back and just check to be sure that it's not popping up again. And you also need to then look onto, you know, what's the next Gray Rhino that I need to be on top of? So those five stages, very simplified, what I've told you now, but going through those really helps you to come up with strategies to change your mindset, to do the communications and the outreach that you need to other stakeholders to really diagnose the problems properly and to move forward with it. So it's a whole analytical framework, which is another way that the concept is very different from the Black Swan. I mean, you know, people read that book and then they just go around looking behind them saying, oh, that was a black swan. That was a black swan. That was a black swan. But there's not a lot more analysis beyond that. This is more than just a catchphrase or a term. It's a metaphor that's designed to give people the emotional connection to the things in front of them and then to help to step them through the strategic analysis that they need to do to fix it.

Is there a role for wargaming and red teaming? I've done a lot of red teaming.

Also in the cybersecurity space, where what we try and do is get folks to induce to that panic point so they understand kind of what their action options are or what their level of resiliency is. Do you see a role from a Gray Rhino preparation perspective even to be engaging in red teaming?

Absolutely. Absolutely. And part of it goes along with a trick I like to play. I've given a number of talks where I've got a video of a. Of a rhino that's actually charging right at the photographer. And it's great when I do it in a really big room because everybody goes. You could just feel this collective gasp in the room, and that's actually creating this emotional connection and this feeling of urgency. And so some of these war games and red teams, I think, can do something similar. It hits the right neurons and gets them to fire to put you in this panic urgency state without the circumstances actually being as dire as that. Because policy and strategy, business decisions are so much on one level about spreadsheets and numbers and facts and data. And I love all that stuff, I geek out on it. But the actual decisions, the actual motivating people, not about that at all. It's about the emotions. It's about getting people to care about something and to connect with it. And so the question is, how do you make that bridge from, you know, from the scenario planning team to the rest of the organization to other people who need to do something? I have a friend who set up a risk management system at a. At a company, and she's used the gray rhino concept as a way to get other people to be much more aware. And she talks about, you know, running down the hall, and people are like, I got a Gray Rhino for you. Here's a great rhino. Yeah. So to get people to think about it in a way that's relevant to them. And, you know, with cybersecurity, of course, so much of it has to do with individual decisions. You can set up all these big systems and plans and have all the experts that you need, but, like, one person who is clueless about what phishing is can take the whole thing down. And that's something that risk management, I think, has missed, I don't think intentionally. I've talked to so many people who struggle with this very question. You know, how do I get it out of this silo and into everybody's mentality and get people to think about this kind of stuff? Which is one of the things that. That really I tried to do with the Gray Rhino, and that I'm hoping that you are what you risk does even more of, because it is written on so much more of a personal level.

Excellent.

You mentioned in the book, you know.

The potential role for tripwires and autopilot and helping you address gray Rhinos. And the question that came to mind for me when I was reading that is, is there a technology role here? Is there a role for AI downstream or something that would allow you to put those tripwires or even the autopilot mechanisms in place?

Absolutely. And I think that there are some efforts at that already, even some of the efforts on social media to try to analyze what's a problem and what's not. And a lot of times those misfire, you see on Facebook someone posting something that's fairly innocuous, that gets banned because it's given you a false positive. But absolutely. There's just so much data now. And with machine learning, you've got areas that machines can figure out something's problem before we even know to tell it what to look for. So there's definitely a Lot of possibility there is. It's a double edged sword, you know, because there's some things that we don't even know what happens. You look at some of these high frequency automated trading systems, which on one hand are very smart and trying to figure out price discrepancies and arbitrage those, but there are also unintended consequences of those, is that they can make market swings even more volatile. So I think you need to always be thinking one step ahead, particularly with AI and algorithms. What are the things that, that I'm missing? What are the biases that I have or that my team has that are being amplified in this system? So I think you need the solutions and you need the meta team around it, the unintended consequences team to manage it.

Almost within that, I mean, it gets.

Back to the feedback loop that you're talking about is that you need to be constantly iterating and it obviously is near and dear to us because our whole company is named after the OODA loop, so can relate with that.

But one other thing that I really.

Like too, that struck a personal tone is the dialogue around this isn't just about managing risk, that some of these threats represent opportunities. So can you kind of step us through that perspective? How do you turn a threat into a potential opportunity or a case study in which you observe that in writing the book?

Sure. Well, it's, you know, I'm one level, it's such a cliche, you know that, you know that the crisis, what is it? Crisis is a terrible thing to waste and things like that. We've, you know, we've heard all of those, but there's actually a lot of truth, which is like why we hear those all the time. One of the things I ask people to do is, you know, when you're imagining this gray rhino coming at you, you've got three options. You stand there and you get squashed. You get out of the way, someone else might get squashed, or you run around, you hop on the back of the rhino and use that strength and that power for you. And that's obviously where you want to go. It's really similar to one of the core principles of human centered design thinking or of the first question that VCs want to know that you should have at the front of your pitch deck, which is what's the problem that you're solving for? And you look at social enterprises, whole organizations that exist because there's a problem that needs to be solved and there are ways to solve it that create a business opportunity and Even the whole cybersecurity industry is actually a really, really good example of that. When there's a problem solving, it is a service to other people, it's a contribution and it's really what gray rhino thinking could get you towards. It's a way to catalyze innovation. And I really want people to feel a sense of agency and power to do something about some of these problems instead of just succumbing to this learned helplessness and saying, oh well, you know, somebody else's responsibility, I can't do anything, you know, even yes, I recognize it's a problem, but what am I going to do? I'm one person. So thinking about how you as one person can get together with a business team, with, with a community, with a nation, with a planet, and do what you can to help to solve some of these problems, because when you get everybody together, you can do it.

Excellent. Very cool.

So each year we put together something.

That we kind of call the OODA Almanac, which is based on the old concept of the Farmers Almanac, which didn't predict the weather on a day to day basis, but it did pretty good at a macro level, enough to guide at least where I grew up in the northeast corner of Vermont, some of the farming activity that took place. We included a section in there this year on gray rhinos and one that came up that I would love to get your perspective on is what we had at the macro level entitled American Civil War, but really is about the risk of domestic terrorism based on the societal divides that exist. Would you put that in the category from your perspective of a gray rhino?

Absolutely. And you would not believe how many emails I've gotten over the last week about that question. It's something that's been out there again with a caveat that, that talking about the warnings we've had already is more of an example than an I told you so and that what we really need to be doing is looking forward. But there have been lots and lots of reports. In a former life I focused a lot on immigration and particularly on security and immigration. And so over the years paid fairly close attention to the, you know, the odds of being killed by a refugee who becomes a terrorist or by a foreign born terrorist. And all of those studies consistently have shown that the homegrown sort of white supremacist, the sort of racist, anti foreigner terrorism is actually a much bigger risk in this country. And over the last couple of years, looking at the increase in hate crimes, the increase in some of this hate language, very, very Obvious. At the same time, you see this huge and widening gap in wealth and in income and a lot of people are falling behind. And I think for some of these groups as well, the fact that there are some non white groups that are starting to catch up because people recognize that that's not a good thing either, that they are left behind, you know, feel, feel threatened. In a lot of my work on immigration, it's really been baffling to see how the anger from the groups like near the bottom are not, is not directed at the people who are making the policies that create the problems, but at the people on the rungs below them on the socioeconomic ladder. That it's actually really a misdirection of anger and of pressure. I mean, you really need to be focused on the people who can solve the problems. These are big systemic policy decisions and issues. But the potential for more unrest is very, very high. I've been amazed by the number of tweets and articles over the past week about this. Has all been planned out in the open. There's continuing to be planning for more unrest going on into the future. And it's very, very real. Political scientists, social scientists have been looking at the consequences of inequality for quite some time. They've been looking at the consequences of the dysfunction of government. And those are all very real. And it's really scary. I think Americans are facing some challenges and fears that we've been very, very lucky. Many of us, although I think some Americans have had those fears all along. But I think we've been very lucky not to have to face them in the way that we are now. And my hope is that the silver lining is that this is really opening people's eyes to some of the, the deeper structural problems that need to be solved for, you know, for all groups, you know, not just, you know, all the solutions have been for the, you know, for the 1%. And I think a lot of people are realizing that that's not sustainable either. You look at stock markets and the fact that prices are just so far above valuations of companies. And the truth is that at some point, just like the, you know, the Dutch Tulip mania, people are going to realize that what they're paying for these paper profits for these securities is so far out of touch with what they're worth that that's going to come crashing down too. So you might put it in moral or altruistic or touchy feely terms, but the truth is it's actually in the interest of the 1% and the 0.1% as well, because those paper profits in the stock market are going to evaporate as well. You might have heard about the uncertainty tax on businesses. Well, a lot of businesses have spoken out over the last week saying, hey, this chaos is not good for business, it's not good for economic growth. And you look at the calls for stimulus payments and part of that, I think is recognizing the reality is that if people at the bottom of the ladder don't have money to buy what they need and much less what they want, the economy is going to just seize up. It's like an engine without oil. So you really need to address these problems to keep the economy going. And the rich will keep, get. They'll be rich if people have money to spend on their products. But if people don't have money to spend on their products, they're not going to keep getting richer except on paper. And you're going to have social unrest that makes what we've been dealing with recently look like pity play.

Yeah.

From an opportunity or maybe like a.

Risk perspective, would you say that the emergence of non fiat based cryptocurrencies is a gray rhino or is that too speculative?

I think that's something that really depends on the direction that you're looking at it from. I mean, I think central banks certainly see it as a gray rhino. They see the horn part of the rhino. I think people in the industry themselves are seeing it as something that can grab onto the tail and hope that it pulls some forward. Central banks are starting to think about their own alternatives and there's a lot of opinions and a lot of confusion. Is this a speculative bubble thing? And there's certainly some of that going on. There's certainly sorting out which of these cryptocurrencies is legit and which is not, and how do you tell. Lots and lots of very unclear things. And I think even for people who are in the industry there are lots and lots of unknowns. But I think the emergence of it is, you might want to call it actually. Not to imply that it's poop, but rhino poop is the way that rhinos tell the other rhinos where they are. It's like it's a symptom, it's a, it's a sign. So in that sense, not a comment on the quality, although some of them may be that quality. I think that this whole discussion and flows of money into cryptocurrencies is a very, very clear signal that what central banks have been doing has a lot of unintended consequences. That there's lots of instability in the system, that people are looking for alternatives that are better than just sticking it under your mattress. So lots of unresolved issues and I don't consider myself an expert at all in cryptocurrency or that field. But in terms of the bigger picture, it's definitely a signal that's telling us.

That there's an issue.

There's an issue. Exactly.

Excellent.

I'm an avid reader, so I always.

Like to close out these interviews by asking, what are you reading right now?

I'm actually really looking forward to a new book coming out. Mariana Matsucato, who's written just amazing stuff on the value of everything, on this sort of mismatch between value and price. She's got a new book coming out shortly and I'm actually looking forward to reading some fiction again. You know, just sort of finishing the most recent book. It's been reading things that are related to risk and things that are book related. So I'm actually looking forward to some kind of dumb reading. I actually caught up on a couple of Carl Hyacin books recently, which is what I, you know, the beach reading, the winter reading, the fun stuff. So. So yeah, there's a lot of stuff.

Excellent.

That's how I was over the Christmas break.

You know, I read a good old fashioned, you know, high paced kind of spy novel because that's what felt best with a glass of scotch sitting by the fire was the have something that's just pure fun.

I love that. I love Scandinavian noir. It's very sad to see the news about John Le Carre. I think I'm gonna pick up some of the other things of his that I'm behind on that just hadn't gotten around to. I love his stuff, like just the depth of the characters. It's not just the plot, but the psychological stuff that's going on.

Yeah, absolutely.

Well, thank you so much for joining us. This was fabulous.

I always love these interviews because I learned so much and I know that the audience. Well, we'll definitely put links to the Gray Rhino. And is the new book out for pre order yet or is it still too early?

It's out for pre order.

Okay, we'll link to that as well.

You are what you risk the new art and science of navigating an uncertain world.

Excellent. We like to make it easy for folks. We'll just give them the link to click on. So thank you so much. This was great. Thanks for replying to the Twitter message asking for the interview. I'm glad we were able to get you on the show.

My pleasure. Say what you will about Twitter, I've met so many awesome people on Twitter that I hope that they preserve that part of the platform because it's really, really great that way.

Absolutely. Thank you again.

Thank you.

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