That's Kevin Watkins, the Chief Operating Officer at the AIA.

That space from the before times has just been transformed and it's amazing to see how it was transformed and how it worked and how it makes you feel.

I recall prior to when the building shut down, you would go down there and it's dark and quiet and you know, you felt like you were lurking around the corner a bit.

And now it's just so open and modern, a space where you really want to be and where you feel the outside come in.

And I would say now it has that adaptability and scalability to flex as you get different people in.

The open space allows us to collaborate in person and also a bit more off script, right? But then also takes into consideration that some folks might enjoy that private space and might need some time to really focus in on some things.

Just yesterday, we had maybe about 50 people here.

And the space was really being used.

[laughs]

... and this is one of the really big questions.

Look, I, I, I think, uh, obviously the, the multilateral system that we have today is the product of a different era.

And I would say to anyone who's working on international development or international relations, go and read the opening speech of Henry Morgenthau, who was the US Treasury Secretary at the time of the Bretton Woods Conference, which led to the creation of the IMF and the World Bank, and indirectly to the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade and what became the World Trade Organization.

Now, you know, you can read that speech, and when you read it, you, you can see they were dealing with very immediate problems.

You know, their big concern was how do you avoid a rerun of the Great Depression, where protectionism dragged the entire world down? How do you manage global economic governance in ways that don't give rise to extreme right-wing and nationalist movements? How do you reconstruct Europe? How do you respond to the mass displacement that has happened during the war? And, and these were the questions they were grappling with And what they came up with was clearly imperfect.

You know, it was imperfect for the 19- mid-1940s.

Yeah.