Dr Pippa Malmgren

Susan Freeman

Hi I am Susan Freeman and a huge welcome back to our PropertyShe Podcast Series where we will be hearing from some brilliant personalities that I think make a massive difference to real estate and the built environment.

Today I am very excited to welcome the amazing Dr Pippa Malmgren. Pippa is an American policy analyst and trend spotter. She advises investors and Governments on their macro-economic policy and their investment strategy. She was an economic advisor at the Whitehouse to US President George W Bush. She has ranked in the top 25 Most Influential Economists in the world and one of the top 10 Global Experts on Geopolitics and she was also ranked in the top 5 in the Most Powerful Women in Finance List and that was all in 2017. She co-founded H Robotics, a company that makes commercial use drones and was recently named one of the top 50 Most Inspiring Women in Tech and hot of the press, she has just been named one of the top 100 Women in Tech for 2018. Among many roles Pippa is a non-exec board member of the Department for International Trade advising on Brexit, she is also a bestselling author and we will be discussing her latest best seller, The Leadership Lab, which really shines a spotlight on understanding 21^st century leadership.

Pippa Welcome.

Pippa Malmgren

Thank you for having me.

Susan Freeman

It is fantastic to have you in the studio and you are known for having a unique ability to read the mood and spot the signals, you forecast the 2008 financial crisis, the credit crunch, the slowdown in China, Brexit and the rise of nationalism and Donald Trump. So reading the signals, what’s ahead for Brexit?

Pippa Malmgren

Well interestingly I get to talk to the biggest investors all over the world and what they are saying is whatever the outcome in terms of the specifics, Britain is still one of the strongest economies anywhere in the world, it’s leading in artificial intelligence, it’s highly competitive, some Brexit paths might be smoother than others but at the end of the day, they still find it very difficult to make money on the continent and so I think that the amount of foreign direct investment coming into the UK will not only still be fine, it will increase as we get more certainty about the Brexit path and most of the foreign investors have been quite delighted with the outcome. I mean Britain really is competitive and I say that as a manufacturer you know, I have a company I co-founded that makes aerial robotics or commercial drones so I am smack in the middle of the manufacturing space that everybody talks about, I don’t know why the British always say that we are not competitive in manufacturing anymore, the British are very competitive in many areas, creative industries too so I am very confident that Britain is going to be fine.

Susan Freeman

Well I think the Brits do have a tendency to beat themselves up…

Pippa Malmgren

Yeah.

Susan Freeman

…when actually there isn’t the need so okay that’s encouraging. You manufacture commercial drones. We are obviously having conversations about drone super highways in the sky, what do you think? How quickly is that going to happen?

Pippa Malmgren

So we think that we are not going to see those highways in the sky, we think the regulators are going to basically, they have real trouble with retail consumers using what are basically toys and flying them quite often totally illegally, like above the 400 foot limit etcetera. Frankly they are not really useful except for limited delivery exercises because the batteries are still limited and usually they are too small to withstand wind or weather or rain so we could see maybe organs being delivered from one hospital to another but the idea that they are going to be dropping Amazon packages in your backyard is just so not happening and I can tell you having tested like hundreds if not thousands of hours, children and dogs when they hear that buzz, they absolutely will not only go toward it but leap into the air higher than you have ever seen them leap before and they are all going to end up in the A&E so, we decided to make a commercial drone system that is designed for corporate use mainly on corporate commercial properties where you have control over the environment and we think that’s the big growth area and frankly that’s not about delivery, that’s about data gathering and you can transform how companies interface with the planet, how productive and profitable they are by having that data.

Susan Freeman

Interesting, it’s all about data isn’t it?

Pippa Malmgren

Yeah.

Susan Freeman

So how are you seeing your drones used primarily at the moment? Are they are used for surveys?

Pippa Malmgren

Yeah, well right now we specialised initially in African mining sites, we thought let’s start with the most difficult challenging environments first. I mean if it is going to break it’s going to be in that kind of situation and they are used for totally different things. We made a platform you can attach pretty much any camera, any device, any new sensor to so it is an open ability for a company to deploy whatever the cool new thing is. So our client’s use them for security because people try to steal from mines in the middle of the night, they also use them to manage the toxic run-off so that we don’t have as much environmental damage. We are able to tell the volume of fluids for example and we also use them for valuing the mine because if you have an aerial view of the dirt or the aggregate you’ve pulled out of the pit, it usually is correlated to whatever the asset is, diamonds or platinum and you can literally value the mine from an aerial view. So we do all of these things.

Susan Freeman

That’s fascinating.

Pippa Malmgren

Yeah.

Susan Freeman

And will we be doing the same thing with real estate assets just…?

Pippa Malmgren

Oh I think so, most definitely and I think using aerial robotics to do surveying, monitoring, measurements, any kind of a assessments, I mean, basically they are designed to allow us to stop using human beings in dangerous places and I am very confident, robotics and automation are all about getting rid of the dirty, dangerous jobs that really aren’t smart for humans to do and vastly increasing your understanding of the assets that you own so, yeah I think that’s where we are going.

Susan Freeman

Okay, that’s, that’s really good. Now I mean one of the things that we talk about a lot is the language gap between the world of real estate and the built environment and technology. Is that something that you see because you bridge, you bridge both. Is there a better understanding now for people who aren’t tech as to what tech can achieve and help them improve their companies or is there still that language gap?

Pippa Malmgren

Oh I think it’s more than even a language gap, it’s an understanding gap and I think there is so much technology that could be put to work but people don’t fully understand it yet. I know in the space I am in, we are having to teach people about what these aerial robotics can actually be used for. People don’t understand the use cases. I’ll give you an example, it’s not in property per se but off-shore platforms for oil and gas. They currently hang men, it is usually men, off the side of these platforms in the middle of the North Sea to go look at how much rust is occurring on the side of the platform and some of these rope works are literally only able to hold a man for nine minutes and the tenth minute he is dead. Literally. Because of what happens to the blood flow while they are hanging in this harness. Why are we putting humans in that kind of danger? For urban areas, for property, 3D imaging so that you can now have a crystal clear down to one millimetre 3D projection of what is happening in an urban space and we work in VR as well so now you can put your VR goggles on, let’s say you are trying to sell a property asset to an investor in Australia, they can put the VR goggles on and viscerally walk through that building, that neighbourhood and understand what is the true situation on the ground and we think that’s where property is going to go, much more than the augmented reality, virtual reality understanding.

Susan Freeman

It’s interesting and I know one of the things you’ve said is that in order for the UK to remain up there following Brexit, we’ve really got to be leading in innovation so compared to what’s going on in other parts of the world, how are we doing?

Pippa Malmgren

Incredibly well. I mean Britain is the number one in artificial intelligence in the world now. There is a new start-up in China called SenseTime which is now the most valuable artificial intelligence start-up, it’s worth six billion US dollars last time I looked and they do facial recognition but very specifically they can identify the micro facial movements that indicate when you are lying, when you are talking on say CNBC Squawk Box so I don’t know what is going to happen to politics when they bring this in but that is only one but frankly generally speaking the British are very much at the forefront of AI but they also are in other areas, innovation in everything to do with bio-medical huge centre here in the UK, the triangle between Oxford, Cambridge and Kings Cross. There is a reason all of the big silicon valley companies like Google are here in the UK too so I think Britain is very strong. Add the creative industries and finance as well, by the way I don’t think finance is going to suffer post- Brexit at all because money is a lot like water and it will move to wherever it faces the least resistance so unless the British are going to raise their taxes and regulatory red tape to be higher than EU levels, which personally I think is such a heavy lift they couldn’t do it even if they wanted to, as long as that isn’t where we are going, the money will flow this way.

Susan Freeman

I think perhaps we don’t shout enough about all the positives, it gets back to this British thing that we tend to dwell on the things that aren’t so great. Getting back to the facial recognition point, I mean we are all looking at the Government data collection in China and that, that’s interesting.

Pippa Malmgren

Yeah.

Susan Freeman

And I think you made the point that actually in the West it tends to be the private companies that are collecting all the data and where is that, you know, where is that going to end up, but with our smart buildings, I mean, do we need to be concerned that our buildings are collecting data on us that we might not want them to have?

Pippa Malmgren

Well let’s look at an example of a company like WeWork. Their valuation which I haven’t looked at lately but it is absolutely massive, is it because they are so good at leasing office space? No they are the first ones to say, no it’s because we have camera’s placed throughout our properties and we gather the date about how humans use the space and then we sell that data so when Amazon goes to build their new double headquarters in the US, in New York and Crystal City Virginia, they will buy that data so they know where to put the coffee machine and where to put the sofas and how many desks per person, that information is coming from WeWork’s extensive understanding of how humans use that kind of space and that’s where valuation comes from. Now when I talk to people who are in WeWork buildings and I say ‘you realise you are on camera 24/7’ they are like ‘what, I didn’t sign up for that’ and I am like ‘well you did and if you look at the fine print you did’. So what’s funny is that it is happening and people don’t realise that its happening and I think that maybe is the problem. The data can be used for incredibly positive ends but people haven’t registered how much data they are emitting and how much is being gathered all the time.

Susan Freeman

Yes I think, I think that’s true and I wonder if there is going to be a bit of a backlash when people realise because you made the point about the data that’s being collected, how it’s going to affect insurance and sort of health insurance and that sort of thing so it will be interesting to see how that develops.

Pippa Malmgren

Well you know people say ‘well I don’t mind as long as I get better quality advertising’ so you know, if I look at a plane trip to the Bahamas then I am going to get better you know, prices on plane trips to the Bahamas but then I say ‘yeah but what about the fact for example, banks are already using artificial intelligence and buying independent streams of data’ for example, about your credit card spending and your physical whereabouts because even through your clothes now emitting where you are because you have RFID chips which are literally one third of the size of the dimple of a golf ball in the seams of your clothes, they add it all up and what they are able to tell is when a divorce is coming in the household, so they know, the bank knows you are going to be divorced before you do, how do they figure this out? I don’t know, one of the parties is spending money on lingerie at Agent Provocateur but not in the size of their spouse right. This is simple to add up. Anyway the point is, they drag down, they cut the credit limit of the lower earning partner in anticipation of the divorce that they don’t yet know about. Now when you say that to people, they are not so excited about having their data.

Susan Freeman

Is that already happening?

Pippa Malmgren

That is already happening, absolutely.

Susan Freeman

Wow, well I am shocked.

Pippa Malmgren

Yeah.

Susan Freeman

So we are living in uncertain times and there is so much change, so much innovation and your latest book, The Leadership Lab, is absolutely fascinating because you are suggesting that we need a completely different style of leadership for the 21^st century and the sort of things that have been accepted and we have expected from our leaders, our business leaders and our Government leaders, no longer wash. So you talked about Alpha Zilla male role models and greed is good and actually we’ve moved on now, it’s not about the leader its more about the team and the ship. So it would be really interesting to hear from you how you see leadership changing, how people running companies are actually having to change their style to adapt to that?

Pippa Malmgren

Absolutely. Well part of it is this new technology driven world we are in which has created radical transparency and so a lot of leaders haven’t clocked how visible they are to the world. You know you look at the scandals that have happened in different categories of leadership like the emission scandal in the auto sector. Really? They didn’t think anybody would notice about fudging the data? So Chris Lewis who wrote Too Fast To Think was my co-author on this book and here’s what we concluded: 20^th century leaders were all about top down, I’m going to tell you what to do. It was very much the cult of the iconic leader you know, Jack Welsh was like the figure and he didn’t even have to write on his autobiography Jack Welsh, he just had 'Jack' right like he’s like, its sort kind of jokingly, it’s the Jesus Christ model of the infallible leader. This is not working the 21^st century where everybody is equipped with more computational capability in their mobile device than we needed to get a man on the moon so people are questioning leaders saying are you right? Is that correct? Especially since so many of the decisions have been wrong and ended up in bad outcomes. So one of the things we say is 20^th century leaders were also very, not only talked down but analytical, they thought all the answers are in the data, if I just dig deeper into the numbers I’ll get the answer. But 21^st century leadership requires parenthetical thinking in addition to analytical. What that means is the ability to look across, connect the dots between previously independent silos. It’s one thing to measure the math but you also have to understand the mood. You can say ‘but I see the facts’, yes but how do people feel and this is a whole different way of leading and as you say, I like this idea that leadership in the 20^th century was all about the leader and leadership in the 21^st century is all about the ship.

Susan Freeman

What also particularly resonated with me, you say for capitalism to succeed it needs permission, permission will only be granted when the benefits are shared and just looking at what’s going on in real estate development, that does you know, things are changing. Do you think people have clocked the fact that the old ways of capitalism and the old ways of leadership just don’t work anymore or is it taking them time?

Pippa Malmgren

I think it’s taking the generation that’s in charge time and that’s why I say, you know, this book is a bit of a knife to the throat of the current generation of leaders to like you know, open your eyes and see what is going on and it’s an invitation to the next generation to hurry up and bring all your stuff to the table because we are having some big problems. In property I was on the judging panel this year for the EG Property Awards and what was really interesting is what a high priority all of us placed on sustainable development, on community involvement, on consideration for basically the life of the people who would be living or working in these properties and what we all concluded is the developers are not being creative enough. They are not being imaginative enough. They are still stuck inside their conventional notions of how things are done and we tried really hard to reward imaginative unconventional thinking and I would like to encourage the entire property market to go further because in property now, my gosh, the changes are huge. For example, the fact that we can now build properties where the walls move. So you can change the configuration of interior spaces, where you can build residential property in very tiny spaces and you literally move the kitchen depending on whether you are using the living room or the bathroom because it depends, do you want a big bathroom, you move the kitchen over and now you have a huge bathroom space or if you have people over you have a tiny bathroom space. I mean it sounds crazy but this is all totally real or farms that are urban in urban buildings because now you can grow all kinds of produce incredibly cheaply and easily in urban buildings so why don’t we do that? I mean it makes sense you know, look at Brexit, has raised all these questions about food shortages. Well why aren’t we growing more food right in our urban buildings, it’s not hard to do with technology these days but who thinks of urban farming? And the people who give permission, the sort of local Councils, I don’t think they’ve really got their head around the fact that really we are going to be building buildings where some floors are residential, some floors are urban agriculture, some levels of the same building are going to be office buildings and this is a whole new way of conceptualising about what is property and what purpose it serves.

Susan Freeman

Absolutely right and in fact I think in that is a clue to what we have to do to regenerate our town centres and high streets…

Pippa Malmgren

Absolutely.

Susan Freeman

…because it’s absolutely that – re-imagining it and putting some really interesting uses together, some of which we probably haven’t thought of yet so.

Pippa Malmgren

Not only that but I am really interested in the use of VR and AR to revolutionise shopping and obviously shopping is such a core component of property development, there’s an amazing new development being built right now in Las Vegas, just outside Las Vegas called Area 15 and it’s going to have in it a company called Meow Wolf which everybody ought to look at. Meow Wolf is all about highly interactive physical spaces that you walk into that will have augmented reality and virtual reality and literally like illuminated walls when you touch them you will change the way the wall looks and feels and any rate this is going to be what the shopping mall of the future is going to be like and the placing of virtual objects in public spaces, so if you just hold your phone up if you are sitting in Sloane Square, you just hold your phone up and suddenly its populated with all these things being advertised to you. This is a completely different way of understanding where is the consumer and how do we reach them and where do you physically go to shop and finally I think this concept of pop-up stores and pop-up restaurants, its only just begun. We are about to have this on a much bigger scale.

Susan Freeman

I think Ross Bailey and Appear Here will be very pleased to hear that. So we are going to need more imagination and I think one of the themes in your book is diversity of thought, whether it is diversity of gender, different backgrounds that we are not going to be able to come up with these new ideas by just having the same old people sitting round the table. So how are we going to, how are we going to achieve that?

Pippa Malmgren

Yes so diversity of thinking is what Chris and I really emphasise in the book and I know from experience when I said Trump is going to win, Brexit is going to happen and I could be in front of a very diverse audience who all said ‘don’t be ridiculous’. So this is the key thing to understand when the team of people that you are either working with or surrounding yourself with, if they are all in agreement we have a problem, especially because of the incredible magnitude of change that’s occurring around us. So the first thing is to stop focussing on prediction like Brexit will or will not happen or Trump will or will not win. This is a mugs game anyway. Focus instead on preparedness. Preparedness for a multitude of scenarios that could potentially play out and when somebody says, ‘you know I think that maybe Trump could win’ instead of shooting that person down, say ‘let’s play with that’. Also imagination is just probably the most underrated requirement of modern commercial life. I love the quote from Mark Twain where he says ‘The eyes cannot see clearly if the imagination is out of focus’. This is exactly right because the thing that fills the gap between where we are today and where we are going to be is just one thing. It’s imagination. So we want to cultivate creativity, playfulness, the willingness to consider the absurd, the outrageous and I think that would better prepare us for the outcomes that we cannot predict but we must be prepared for.

Susan Freeman

And how far does the gender question actually play in this because obviously in real estate it is something that we have talked about a lot, we have had adverse press over the last year, it is seen as a male dominated industry – do you see things changing?

Pippa Malmgren

So well first of all in the book are very careful, we don’t just talk about gender diversity although it is a high priority, we also talk about diversity of income, diversity of life experience, neuroplasticity in diversity where you have people on the team who have higher and lower EQ, emotional intelligence skills. Some companies now are actively hiring people who are autistic on the spectrum because they are brilliant problem solvers but in unusual ways, so but gender diversity kind of comes at the top because it’s you know, 50% of the population who are currently not present and I know, you talk about property, well I talk to audiences across almost every sector of the world economy and I tell you what I see is a sea of not only middle aged male faces but no colour either. I was actually at an interesting event recently, the We Are Tech Woman Event here in London. I was very privileged to be one of their top 100 Women in Tech and I stood up in front of that audience and you know what I saw for the first time in years – colour – and interesting you bring women into the room, minorities and people of colour are suddenly there too and all of them, they bring something new and different to the table that we should embrace so yeah I think there is a problem and you know, I spoke to a law firm not long ago and they said ‘we are very diverse, we hire from five different law schools’ and you are like ‘oh boy, mmm that doesn’t really cut it’ right. So this question of what is it to truly be diverse and also what is it to pander to the notion of diversity versus actually achieve it. So I will give you one little thing we say in the book, if you want more gender diversity you have to change the way you hold meetings. Most meetings are held on the basis of whoever talks first and loudest wins right, we all know that, we’ve been in that situation. But if you say no we are going to do equal time, everybody gets five minutes or seven minutes or whatever, suddenly the quiet voices that have been reluctant to come forward are compelled to, they have to say something and the blow hards have to shut up and suddenly you get coming out on to the table a whole bunch of stuff that normally never came forth. So it’s not just saying we have got to have more women here, you have to change the structure of how you do things in order to accommodate the quieter voices because the females, the women who are in the room typically for a variety of reasons, they are not as confident and they don’t speak up as freely.

Susan Freeman

I think that’s true because women, you can’t generalise, but women will tend not to say something unless they are 100% sure that they, that they are right about it.

Pippa Malmgren

Yes.

Susan Freeman

So they might think well perhaps they are not going to say unless they are absolutely sure so that cuts out quite a lot of input.

Pippa Malmgren

Well this is a key point we make in the book. There is a marvellous psychologist whose name I always darn well get wrong, P***** is his name, he has been teaching at Harvard and he says what we do is we confuse confidence and competence and for whatever reason and it sounds sexist but the surveys are crystal clear, men will put their hand up with the ‘I know the answer’ or ‘I am ready for the job’ when there is somewhere between 40% and 60% ready and women won’t put their name up or put their name forward or allow their name to go forward until they are at 100% and as a result we say ‘well this guy is confident so he must be competent’. No, it’s not true, and females by the way interestingly typically double check their homework, they do their work several times to be sure. Well if you believe that confidence equals competence, someone who double checks their work is a psychopath you don’t want to promote and yet it is absurd, you want to promote the person who is quietly becoming more sure and triple checking – so how interesting.

Susan Freeman

It is interesting and the awful thing is I think whether it is a political leader or somebody, a CEO of a company, if somebody says something with enough confidence, people will actually believe them.

Pippa Malmgren

Not only that but there is research just out from Princeton that when people look at a male face and a masculine male face versus a female feminine face, they automatically attribute more leadership qualities to the masculine male face. They don’t even have to open their mouth, that’s how inbuilt the bias is.

Susan Freeman

So Pippa what are we going to do about all that?

Pippa Malmgren

Well there are lots of cool things happening, there’s an amazing women out in silicon valley running a company called Blendoor who I met, she is very short, quite petite, African American, graduated top of her class, the number one from MIT in caltech with a PHD and she was the only person in her class who was not hired and you are like now how is that possible and she asked that question and she concluded that the inbuilt bias against being an African American and a woman at the same time in the tech space was creating the problem so she has come up with algorithms that blind the personnel function to the ethnicity and the gender of whoever they are looking at and guess what, once they’ve started using Blendoor’s algorithms the hiring of minorities in woman has gone dramatically up so it is just humans, you know, people we like to hire people who look and sound like us who we feel comfortable with so what that ends up being is people all in the same club but business is not a club, it isn’t any more and it can’t be and that’s another point we make in the book, you know, people have treated Boards of Directors as like a golf club, no, now it’s the conscience of the company. You cannot hire people just because they you know, feel comfortable and they won’t challenge you. You want people who actually are going to say ‘excuse me, but why are we doing this? Why is this on the balance sheet? Why is this our policy?’

Susan Freeman

Yeah so everything, everything gets challenged. But on the sort of male/female issue, sometimes women actually don’t help other women. I was horrified, I was researching something a while back and there was some interesting Israeli research that they couldn’t understand why attractive women just weren’t getting through the job applications and they found out that the women in the HR Departments, when they saw the photograph of a woman who was attractive, they just binned it so you know, one’s got that to contend with as well.

Pippa Malmgren

Yeah, well attractiveness particularly female attractiveness is another fascinating subject. The, again the surveys and studies show that women who are wearing visibly wearing make-up are immediately considered less competent. Amazing. And yet I mean, if I think of myself, I am speaking on very large stages, often to groups of as much as five thousand people in the biggest auditoriums in the United States. I have to wear substantially more make-up in order to project under these massive screens that are often entirely encircling the room and yet the studies show that that make-up makes people feel that I am less competent, less leadership material so what is that? It’s basically because it’s what you are used to you know, if you have seen that and associated with a certain thing and so what we have to do is start showing images of women who are in leadership and powerful positions who look like they look, whatever way that is, with or without make-up, whatever that is and that’s why I like this wonderful movement, the kind of meme going around of… I think it’s called ‘An Engineer Looks Like This’ because there was a young woman of colour who was applying for some role in engineering and was saying how she built a bunch of things and a bunch of people on the internet questioned her – you don’t look like an engineer – and so she wrote this wonderful placard saying ‘This is what an engineer looks like’ and that has just grown and influenced. This is the thing, to change your visual bias. People say to me all the time, ‘you don’t look like an economist’ and I take that by the way as a very high compliment because you know, most of the economists are pretty boring guys in grey suits but you know, this is what an economist looks like. That’s how we are going to fix this.

Susan Freeman

Yeah and that’s also how to, how to stand out. I was just wondering has anybody been a huge influence in your life who you’ve looked up to and has sort of been responsible for you going in all the interesting directions that you’ve gone?

Pippa Malmgren

Yeah you know my dad, my dad. Extraordinary man, he worked with seven Nobel Prize Winners, he is literally one of the world’s leading mathematicians. He worked on game theory with Tom Shelling, who won the Nobel Prize but he also served four Presidents, he was in charge of the missile trajectories during the Cuban missile crisis and then he was the trade negotiator for the United States under Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon and Ford and my dad has always been amazing at helping me stretch beyond whatever my core competency was at the time so he gave me this life where I have no fear of where the boundary is and the ability to leap across boundaries, you know, so there was a point in my life where I was a trade policy specialist and then I went into the City and I ended up as the chief currency strategist because I thought ‘how can you understand trade if you don’t understand the money’. Then I ended up in the White House as the President’s advisor and fast forward today I am manufacturing robotics and you know people are like ‘What? How did that happen?’ and the answer is just this ability to leap across those imaginary boundaries and he gave me that.

Susan Freeman

So Pippa, what boundaries are you planning to cross over the next year? What’s happening in 2019?

Pippa Malmgren

Oh I have a bunch of them. Well one is I am going to be talking a lot more about what I call the holographic economy which is this ubiquitous gathering of data, creates almost imagine a holographic space of data points and almost three dimensional space that contains almost like a doppelganger of all of us, an image of me that exists in that data cloud that actually is more accurate and precise reflection of who I am then I know myself and this space I think we are all going to be operating in and we have to really think about, it is literally like a crystal ball, you can conjure forth answers from it that are much more accurate than by looking at reality directly and so I am very interested in how we leap into this new dimension of reality and I am looking forward to writing a book in fact on that subject. I am also personally really interested in the use of a language and art, I mean I talk about imagination in the book, how do you spur your own imagination so I am spending a lot more time in art galleries, reading novels – people are like ‘how do you have time to read novels?’ and I am like ‘well you know, I don’t have time not to read novels’ because if I want to inform the way I talk about the world economy I need better metaphors, I need more elegant language, I need to grip people more you know, you talked about uncertainty at the beginning of this podcast and I saw this week someone from the FT wrote a beautiful review of a film and he said ‘why do we always seek certainty which is so elusive anyway when uncertainty is the real seductress sexy thing that makes our lives interesting’ now that is about literature and words and emotion.

Susan Freeman

I think you can see why Pippa Malmgren has earned a reputation for being able to read the signals and join the dots and I have to tell you she is generally spot on so my recommendation is to continue to follow her very closely as we navigate our way through uncertain times. So that’s it for now, I hope you enjoyed it, we certainly did. Please join me for the next PropertyShe interview. In the meantime make sure you check out our PropertyShe website on mishcon.com/propertyshe for programme notes from all our interviews. The podcasts are also know available to download on your App or Podcast App, that’s the purple button your iPhone or on Spotify. So carry on letting me have your feedback and reviews and most importantly your suggestions for future guests. Follow me on Twitter @propertyshe.

Dr Pippa Malmgren @DrPippaM is an economist who explains the world economy in bestselling books and through public speaking, shapes the world economy by advising governments and builds it by having founded a robotics firm.

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