Episode 58 - Desiree Fields
How Finance and Technology are Changing the Meaning of Housing
Theme: Cities as Mega-Projects
Published: 26 April 2024
Summary
This episode of SCAS Talks delves into the evolving dynamics of the housing market, featuring Associate Professor Desiree Fields, Associate Professor of Geography and Global Metropolitan Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Desiree Fields, whose research spans geography, urban studies, and economics, examines how financial technologies and investment strategies are reshaping housing's role as both a necessity and a commodity. The discussion analyzes the 2008 financial crisis's impact, the rise of large-scale investors, and the emergence of crowdfunding platforms. Desiree Fields critiques the inherent tensions between housing's social function and its commodification, highlighting the increasing influence of financialization on housing accessibility and affordability. The podcast also explores methodological approaches to researching complex, networked systems, emphasizing the need for interdisciplinary collaboration to fully grasp the multifaceted nature of the housing crisis. This episode underscores the crucial need for interdisciplinary research to address the complex social, economic, and technological forces shaping contemporary housing markets.
Keywords
Housing market, real estate investment, landlords, cities
Suggested Link/s
Personal website: https://www.desireefields.org/ External link, opens in new window.
Transcript of the Episode
Desiree Fields 00:08
There's this, like, very basic role that housing plays for people and for societies, and at the same time, in many places, especially perhaps in the United States, housing is also a way of building wealth. It's a way of accumulating capital. We treat housing as a market commodity. And so there are, to me, some kind of obvious inherent tensions in the role that housing plays in our well being and in societal well being, and the role that housing plays in kind of accumulating capital. And so I think it's important to study housing, because housing won't be able to effectively serve the first purpose of supporting life and well being if we are really concentrating mostly on on its ability to kind of accumulate capital for the few.
Natalie von der Lehr 00:56
Welcome to SCAS Talks, a podcast by the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study. My name is Natalie von der Lehr, and in this episode, I talk to Desiree Fields, Associate Professor of Geography and Global Metropolitan Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Desiree Fields is a fellow at SCAS during this academic year, 2023/2024. Her research revolves around the role of housing and capitalist urbanization, focusing on how finance capital and digital technologies are shifting the terrain of the housing question in the 21st century, and this is also what we will talk about in this episode, which is the third episode in our theme, "Cities as Mega-Projects”. Very welcome to SCAS Talks and the studio, Desiree.
Desiree Fields 01:43
Thanks, Natalie, great to be here.
Natalie von der Lehr 01:45
Would you like to say a few more words about yourself?
Desiree Fields 01:48
Sure, I think your introduction captured my current interests pretty well. I guess I would also like to mention that while today I'm known as an economic geographer and an urban scholar, I actually started off as a psychologist. I studied psychology as an undergraduate and worked in the mental health field for a few years after finishing university. And it was actually that work that kind of set me on my trajectory of research, in a way I was working as a counselor with homeless, mentally ill people, and from that vantage point, I was able to observe the role of systems of care, of institutions and policies in creating housing precarity. And it was through those observations that I decided to go to graduate school, and that's how I ended up in environmental psychology as a PhD student. So I've identified as a psychologist, as an environmental psychologist, as an urban scholar, a geographer and a, you know, a political economist. So I've really kind of undergone a lot of disciplinary changes in identity over my career.
Natalie von der Lehr 02:48
Very broadly then, what is your research about?
Desiree Fields 02:51
At the broadest level I would say that my work is about how, why and with what consequences housing systems and housing markets undergo change, and I've studied that in a variety of ways, but I would say I'm always really interested in the institutional arrangements that produced the lived realities of housing. Currently, I'm focusing on FinTech companies that allow for regular people to invest in the real estate market. So I'm interested in how changes in technology are kind of opening up real estate investment for the masses. I'm studying a company called Fundrise. And I'm really focusing on how Fundrise investors are kind of thinking about property and wealth, and, you know, kind of thinking about this company which sort of frames itself as disrupting the status quo of real estate investment. What I've observed is that they're actually pursuing really mainstream real estate investment strategies. And so I'm curious about, kind of about, like, the benefits and the harms potentially of these kind of popular real estate investment strategies.
Natalie von der Lehr 03:58
And Fintech is short for?
Desiree Fields 03:51
Financial technology.
Natalie von der Lehr 04:01
So why do you think it is important to study the housing market?
Desiree Fields 04:07
Well, I've always been interested in housing. And if I think about why that is, I think housing is a site where big political, economic and social changes come together with our intimate, material, everyday experience, right? And for me, housing is just like something that really brings those things together in a very vivid way. And of course, housing is really fundamental to human survival, to flourishing of individuals and families, but also to the functioning of society, right? So there's this, like very basic role that housing plays for people and for societies. And at the same time in many places, especially perhaps in the United States, housing is also a way of building wealth. It's a way of accumulating capital. We treat housing as a market commodity. And so there are, to me, some kind of obvious inherent tensions in the role that housing plays in our well being and in societal well being, and the role that housing plays in kind of accumulating capital. And so I think it's important to study housing, because housing won't be able to effectively serve the first purpose of supporting life and well being if we are really concentrating mostly on on its ability to kind of accumulate capital for the few.
Natalie von der Lehr 05:25
So you're looking at the structural changes in the housing market. You mentioned 2008 what happened there and after that?
Desiree Fields 05:34
The sort of broader narrative about what happened in 2008 is familiar, probably to a lot of listeners, but in 2008 or really, from 2007 to 2009 there was a massive uptick in mortgage foreclosures, mortgage defaults and mortgage foreclosures. And what we saw is that a lot of people lost their homes to foreclosure, so there was a massive destruction of housing wealth that also created a lot of discounted housing assets that needed to be absorbed somehow. Mortgage lending tightened up quite a bit after 2008 so that it was quite difficult for a lot of people to get mortgages after those new requirements were put in place. And at the same time, interest rates had been slashed to near zero. So we had this kind of macroeconomic policy change that was meant to sort of promote liquidity in markets during the crisis. And this happened not only in the US, but you know, in a lot of kind of advanced economies around the world, and so the combination of a lot of discounted property that needed to be absorbed and low interest rates sort of created a lot of investment capital that was looking for yield. So we saw private equity firms that sort of started to buy up this housing. And in the US, this looks like actually going to the monthly foreclosure auctions that happened on the steps of courthouses. And in this way, investors like Blackstone, Tricon American Homes, Waypoint Homes, began to build up portfolios of 1000s, and then tens of 1000s of single family homes that had once been occupied by homeowners, and they turned these homes into rental properties. So single family rental homes have been around for a really long time in the United States. They make up maybe around, like a third of the market. I grew up in a single family rental home. So it's not that renting single family homes was new, but typically, the landlord for a single family home would be just a small scale owner, someone who owns one or two, maybe five properties. It had never been done at this scale before. This was a massive structural change in the market, right? Suddenly, you have a class of landlords who are competing with regular people to buy homes, and that just had not happened in this market before. So that was a big change. And then what I learned in my last project was that technological changes like really were sort of like the key to being able to acquire these homes and manage them effectively, right? So these investors created sort of bespoke algorithms to help them hone in on and find the right homes and to sort of bid at the price that made the most sense for their investment model, and to sort of manage them, right. To sort of manage the whole process and make it almost like an assembly line of acquiring a home, renovating it, getting it leased, and then kind of doing property management. Things like mobile technologies, where an inspector from the company could sort of walk through the home and tick off a checklist on an iPad, cloud computing being able to upload that to the cloud so that people in the investors office could look at the data and then create a budget for renovation and so forth, right. So those kinds of changes became really important as these companies branded themselves as landlords, then for prospective tenants to be able to sort of look at online, what properties are available to rent. How much might it cost, all of that. So it was sort of like these technological changes which took off right at the same time as the as the market was at its lowest. It was the kind of ascendance of digital technologies and the sort of popularization of them in our everyday lives that really sort of accelerated this structural change. Also, as all of this played out, it sort of also was like a process of changing ideas about what was possible and acceptable in terms of investment in real estate. In the 1990s we had seen a kind of big transformation in big investors owning and operating apartment buildings. There's always been, you know, malls and office real estate and all of that, right? But those processes hadn't really touched single family homes. And so as much as this was about interest rates and house prices and technology. It was also about, I would say, changing societal ideas about what was acceptable in the single family market, which historically is like the foundation of the American dream in the US owning your own home, right? So big investors coming in here was also doing something new. Yeah? There was this idea that began to circulate when I was doing my research of the rentership society and that potentially America was heading to sort of a post home ownership society that would be dominated by renters. This idea was really useful, of course, to big investors who start sort of spreading this idea and saying, you know, Millennials don't want to own homes. They want the flexibility of renting and all of that. So it was about these kind of foundational economic factors. And it was also about kind of like changing social ideas about housing.
Natalie von der Lehr 10:37
So we have these big companies buying up properties to rent them out. But you mentioned also other forms of how technology can influence the housing market. One of them was crowdsourced investments. How does that work?
Desiree Fields 10:52
Yes. So we have seen the emergence of a host of digital platforms, some of which style themselves as FinTech, like Fundrise does, and others who don't use that sort of designation. But we've seen the emergence of a host of digital platforms that, in various ways, are attempting to quote-unquote disrupt real estate investment and to open it up to what are called retail investors, which are just regular people who don't have super high incomes and super high net worth. And so these platforms work in various ways, but they all rely on aggregating equity, or sort of investments from regular people to acquire and operate housing, and so some of them do this at the scale of the individual property to allow for fractional ownership. Arrived Homes is a good example of this. They say, we have opened investment in this property in South Carolina, and it will cost this much to acquire, and the monthly rents on it will be this much. So they do this both with long term and short term rental properties. So they open up investment in a specific property, and they take two or 300 investors into the property, right? And so the idea is that no one investor controls a majority of that home, and it's a fractionalized ownership. And so then the investors get a little bit of the rental income as dividends, and then when the property is sold, if it's increased in value, they'll also get some capital gains. So they'll get a share of the profit if the home is sold for more than it was acquired for. So that's at the scale of the individual home. There's another company that's similar, called Lofty which does the same thing, except they use the blockchain to acquire and operate the property, and all of the owners make decisions collectively as part of something called a distributed, autonomous organization, or DAO . So if you can imagine being a tenant and needing a significant repair in your home, and a collective of 200 landlords then voting on on whether they're going to undertake that repair.
Natalie von der Lehr 12:57
Sounds complicated?
Desiree Fields 12:58
Sounds complicated, yeah. At the other end of the spectrum, you have companies like Fundrise, which, rather than investing in individual properties, are launching funds to develop, build for rent communities which consist of dozens of properties, to acquire portfolios of single family homes, to acquire apartment buildings. And so the investors in Fundrise are not owning individual property. They're owning part of a pool of property depending on this investment priorities of the retail investor, they can choose a long term growth fund or a supplemental income fund or a balanced growth fund, and each of those has a sort of like different risk profile and might be comprised of different kinds of properties. So we have this spectrum of platforms that are making it possible now, not only for kind of big investors with lots of capital to invest, but for people who have as little as 5,10, 20, 100 dollars to also invest, either in an individual home or in a big pool of properties and to enter then kind of earn dividends from those investments.
Natalie von der Lehr 14:12
But what do these crowd source investments - what does it mean for the housing market? You mentioned the need for repairs and these kind of things that might be put off or complicated. But what else is there?
Desiree Fields 14:26
So I guess one thing I would say is that I'm still relatively early in my research. I don't have, like, really hard data on the consequences of fund drives for the housing market. I would say that, in general, these kind of real estate investment strategies can be seen as part of the shift that I studied with my last project, the ownership and operation of housing by asset managers. So when you have investors who are directly owning and controlling housing or infrastructure, which is also, you know, another sort of area, big area, of investment for these actors, you necessarily have a kind of direct relationship between the commercial strategy of the investor and the sort of everyday home life of the resident of the housing. And for most asset managers, their objective is, of course, to maximize their returns, and they do that by increasing income and reducing costs and trying to avoid any capital expenditures. And so what I learned from my last project is that large scale investors are pushing rents up every year for current residents. And when a property is vacant and they need to re-tenant it, they're trying to push up rents even more than they would for a continuing resident. They are trying to, of course, cut maintenance costs in any way they can, and to avoid any sort of like big projects that might need to be carried out. And so I would guess that similar kinds of objectives would be true for the owners and operators of investment funds that are targeting everyday investors. I think another really important point about what this means for the housing market - I think it is likely to mean more churn and the housing more sort of like rapid changes in ownership, because most of these investments, yes, they're trying to kind of get rental income and to pass on some of that rental income to investors as dividends, but they're also predicated on appreciation, and the only way to realize that appreciation is to dispose of the property. And so I think most of these investments have a, you know, 5, 7, 8 year sort of timeline before they're sold off again. And it's more likely that it would be sold off to another investor than it would be to - in the case of a single family home - to an owner-occupier. And so I think what's likely to happen is that this housing stays under the control of investors and that it gets turned over and turned over and turned over.
Natalie von der Lehr 17:03
So quite the change in, yeah, how you think about housing and what it means.
Desiree Fields 17:08
I think so, yeah. I also think that change has a lot to do with with technology, there's sort of like a weird dynamic at play. On the one hand, I think technology makes ever more abstraction possible. So you can look at a pool of properties and you can kind of analyze it in a quantitative way, you can create financial instruments that are sort of based on the rent from a pool of property. So it's like removed from the physical home itself. So you have this kind of ever greater abstraction of housing that is made possible in large part due to technology. And then at the same time, it creates a feeling of immediacy. As a sort of popular investor, you can go into Fundrise or Lofty or Arrived, and you can look at your news feed and see, ah, like, we've acquired this home in this market, and it's going to rent for this much. And like, here's a picture, and I can see it on a Google map, and it feels, of course, not actually tangible. You can't actually touch it, but it's a way of, like, bringing that experience to, like, a more immediate level. And to me, it's kind of a strange paradox. Yeah, I think that's a big part of what I'm trying to understand.
Natalie von der Lehr 18:35
I think a little bit about your research methods. How do you study all of this?
Desiree Fields 18:40
So my case study right now, as I mentioned, is this company called Fundrise, and it's, you know, it's quite challenging because it's networked in different directions. So it's networked at the level of investors. So you're not looking at like one big investor, you're looking at almost 400,000 individual investors who are located all across the United States. And it's also kind of networked at the level of properties, right? So they're investing in all kinds of different residential and commercial real estate, and then some more kind of like abstract financial instruments as well. So they're investing in shares of real estate investment trusts and so forth as well. And of course, the properties are scattered all across the country. So it's really challenging as a researcher, because it's a question of entry point and like, where and how do I choose to enter and so I'm approaching this in a few different ways. I tried to figure out a central place where I could find Fundrise users and try to understand their perspective on what they're doing and why, how they're thinking about property and then building wealth. And I discovered that there's a very active subreddit community dedicated to Fundrise, and initially I just began to try to recruit participants for interviews in this way, getting the moderators to allow me to post information about the project, and recruiting people in this way. So I was able to interview almost 20 Fundrise investors to get a more in depth understanding of how long they've been investing with the company, what their experience has been like, and trying to ask them this question of, like, what makes it tangible for you? If you're an investor based in upstate New York and you're invested in this fund that is largely focused on the south of the United States, how does that feel real to you? Through recruiting on the subreddit, I found, like, it's really active, like people are posting here all the time. There's 1000s and 1000s of users. It's in the top 6% of subreddits. And so I thought, let me try to figure out if I can somehow analyze these conversations. However, I'm a qualitative researcher. I do a lot of stuff by hand. I talk to people, and because the subreddit is so active, I realize there's no way that I can just sort of scroll through by hand. So I'm partnering with a geographer who has really strong computational skills, and we're using structural topic modeling, which is a computational technique that allows you to group the data into different topics. The challenge is, it doesn't tell you exactly what the topic is about, but it sort of gets it gets all of the posts into buckets, more or less. And so now I'm reading through all of the posts dedicated to each bucket in our model, and trying to understand, so what is everyone talking about in this bucket? And sometimes they're talking about, like, fine tuning their investment strategy, and sometimes it's novices who are coming and asking for advice. Sometimes they're talking about something that Fundrise is doing as a company that they don't like. Sometimes they're talking about the sort of current economic context. And so the idea is that using this computational technique gets the data into a manageable form that I can then use just more traditional qualitative techniques to analyze. So that's the side of the work that's kind of looking at, how are people imagining, thinking about investment, and what it's for. And then the other side of the project is going to be looking at, what are the sort of like concrete operations of this platform. So what are the assets they're buying? Where are they? How much are they worth? How long do they hold on to them for? And so for that, I'm really just turning to the information that Fundrise makes available about itself. So they list all of their assets on the website. So I'm now creating a database of of all the assets they own as a way to try to eventually put together the kind of subjective experience of investment that their users talk about with the sort of concrete reality of what they're doing. And hopefully I'll find something interesting in the intersection there.
Natalie von der Lehr 22:37
You mentioned the discourse. How has that changed during recent years? I'm especially thinking about before and during and after the pandemic.
Desiree Fields 22:46
Well, of course, the housing market has changed tremendously since the pandemic. What we saw in the years leading up to 2008, in the years leading up to the pandemic, there was a real housing shortage in the United States. And that had a lot to do with the kinds of decisions that took place after the 2008 crisis. A fair amount of multi family housing was built after the 2008 crisis, but most of it was sort of luxury, catering to more affluent people, and not that much single family housing was built. We saw the emergence of this movement called the YIMBY movement, which is the "yes in my backyard" movement, which is based on the idea that we can sort of build our way out of a housing affordability crisis, and sort of opposes itself to NIMBYs, which are "not in my backyard", and are typically opposed to new development. Fast forward to the pandemic, and all of a sudden, of course, despite concerns that we would see a sort of repeat of 2008 and people not being able to pay their mortgage and another big foreclosure crisis, what we actually saw was like a huge demand for housing, right? People want more space. They want zoom rooms. They want backyards. We're all at home, and interest rates are incredibly low because of concerns about the economy during the pandemic. And we see this rush to buy housing, not only by sort of owner occupiers and regular people, but also by investors who see this is another opportunity for us to acquire housing. We can continue to sort of push up rents. And so during the pandemic, we see this like crazy housing boom. And just so much home equity created, a lot of it going to investors, but some of it going to owner occupiers. And then inflation hits, and we start seeing interest rates go up. And so we're in a strange situation in the US, where you have a lot of people who are basically like, stuck in their homes, right? Because their home might be worth an incredible amount. Their home value might have gone up quite a lot in the past few years, but they're paying mortgage payments on a, you know, two or 2.5% interest rate. And you know, interest rates have gone up to 5, 6, 7% now. So that's sort of like a big change in in the housing market, in the US. And I'd say in terms of the discourse, there's a lot more awareness about the role that investors, particularly large scale investors, there's a lot more awareness about the role that they are playing in the housing market. When I started doing my research on "the automated landlord" way back in, you know, 2014 I would talk to housing organizers about these corporate landlords, they're buying up foreclosed homes. And, you know, it didn't feel immediate to them. To go back to this idea of abstraction and immediacy, right? It didn't feel like an immediate threat to them. They were talking about eviction. They were talking about gentrification, changes that they could see in an immediate and tangible way. So if we fast forward to the pandemic, not only did investors like really step up their acquisition of properties, because they saw housing demand is increasing, and that means that we should also be acquiring more housing. We saw a lot more public awareness about this process, right? So tons and tons of investigative journalism on the topic, like really deep dives by incredible investigative journalists. We saw a lot more research coming out. But importantly, I think we also saw more organizing. So we saw more activism about corporate landlords, and we also saw policymakers starting to pay attention to this, and I think this has to do less with the impacts of corporate landlords on tenants, and more with the idea that they might be interfering with the opportunity for home ownership. So we saw hearings in the Senate, hearings in the House talking about the role of private equity in the housing market and what we should do about it. And so I think that is a really big and fundamental change in the discourse about housing. I think we've reached a point where the idea of housing as an asset class has been like really solidified, and not just for kind of big corporations, but also for regular people. The same time, there's also more public awareness about the process of real estate investment and about how it's playing out in local communities. And so I think this really illustrates my point that housing is, on the one hand, like a way to accumulate capital, and is also like, really important for society and for individuals and households, right? And so I think you see this kind of collision of ideas about what housing is and what it means happening right now.
Natalie von der Lehr 27:16
We touched, or you touched a lot on financing, and the financial market And financing is often described as a black box. You don't really know what's going on there. Do you have any thoughts on that, considering your project?
Desiree Fields 27:30
I guess I would say two things about that. One is, I think there are political reasons why it can be useful for society to think that finance is a black box. The idea that finance is unknowable or really complicated, it's actually useful, because if we think that finance is unknowable or too complicated to understand, then we won't try to study it. We won't try to understand it and build knowledge about it, and considering the role that finance plays in all of our lives, whether it's you know, the role of investment firms in owning the homes that we rent, or asset managers owning the roads that we drive on, or owning the care homes that our parents live in. It's actually like really important to understand all of this, and so to think that finance is a black box cuts off opportunity for understanding these things that are actually playing a big role in our lives. So I'd say that. And then the other thing I would say is that there are so many ways of understanding finance that don't necessarily have to do with studying investment prospectuses or securitized debt or, you know, these things that we think only bond traders can do that, or only economists can do that. I actually like to find data that may or may not be, you know, financial. It might be a transcript of an investor call between a real estate investment trust and sort of the media, right? And you can learn a lot about finance through reading through those kinds of transcripts. So I think opening up our understanding of what counts as financial data can shed a lot of light on these, you know, supposedly complicated and unknowable processes that are affecting our everyday lives. Sorry, I said I would only say two things, but maybe just one last thing about that, it's also important to, sort of like, reassess what we mean by financial literacy. A more traditional way of understanding financial literacy is like learning about your credit score, or knowing, in the old days, knowing how to balance a checkbook, making a budget and so forth. That's like a very traditional way of thinking about financial literacy. I think we should be moving toward a more critical and collective understanding of financial literacy that tries to understand the role of things like real estate investment in our life chances and the possibility for us to live close to our community, to stay in the places that we want to live, and so forth. That is less about knowing your credit score and more about understanding institutions and kind of like wider scale social transformations. I think we should be making space for that more critical and collective financial literacy in order to better understand, you know, what's shaping our individual experiences of housing and home.
Natalie von der Lehr 30:36
So you're a fellow here at SCAS during this academic year. What is your experience of the multi- and interdisciplinary environment at the collegium?
Desiree Fields 30:44
It is such a difference from being embedded in an academic department, so all of us are academics, and you know, we spend most of our professional lives around people who, if not studying the same things as we do, have some concepts and theories and understandings in common, and that comes from working In the same discipline. So I work mostly with geographers, and we study wildly different things, but there's some kind of common set of language and ideas that we have. And I think as an academic, you get used to operating in that kind of environment. And you know, the gift of SCAS is really being like wrenched out of that disciplinary silo and being put into conversation with people who are not only working on different projects in the same discipline, but who are in fact working with totally different frameworks, and who have completely different projects using wildly different methods, theories, understandings about, you know, what counts as knowledge production and so forth. For me, I think this really comes alive at the seminars. The gift is really like coming to these Tuesday seminars and not only hearing a talk that I otherwise probably, you know, wouldn't have a reason to go to, but then the conversation that happens afterwards, like the question and answers and like seeing the perspectives that people are encountering your project from, I think is so rich, because as a speaker, as you know, someone who is doing research, it really forces you to turn your own project inside out and challenge sometimes the most basic assumptions of what you're doing in your project. But I think also the questions that are coming from our colleagues at SCAs also help us understand how to communicate the importance of our work. It's very easy to communicate the importance of your work to another specialist who's working in the same field, we care about the same things. It's much more challenging to communicate the importance and significance of your work to someone who lacks any of the same assumptions and approaches, sometimes they can be uncomfortable, I'm sure, both for myself when I gave my seminar and whoever is the speaker that week, but I think the value of stepping outside of your comfort zone really helps advance the work.
Natalie von der Lehr 33:15
Thank you very much for talking to me and to our listeners, of course.
Desiree Fields 33:19
Thank you so much. This was a really great conversation.
Natalie von der Lehr 33:28
And thank you for listening to SCAS Talks, a podcast by the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study. This was the third episode in our theme "Cities as Mega-Projects”. And I have talked to Desiree Fields, Associate Professor of Geography and Global Metropolitan Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, and fellow at SCAS during this academic year, 2023/2024. In the previous two episodes within this theme, we heard Carol Uphadya, visiting professor at the National Institute of Advanced Studies in Bengaluru, about the rise and fall of the megacity project Amaravati in India. And we have also heard Jennifer Mack, Associate Professor of Theory and History of Architecture at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm about modernist suburbs and their missing stories. And these were episodes 54 and 55 respectively. Our regular listeners know that SCAS Talks features a broad variety of topics, and this is a reflection of the multi- and interdisciplinary research environment. We are sure that there is something of interest for everyone. Tune in, find your favorite topic or surprise yourself with something new. And as always, we are very happy if you can recommend SCAS Talks to your colleagues and friends. Subscribe to us and you won't miss any new content. SCAS Talks is available on podbean, Apple podcast, Spotify and most podcast apps. I would like to thank Desiree Fields once again for talking to me, and thanks to you for listening. Bye for now.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai