My name is Inigo Jones. Prepare for rain.

Before we knew about El Niño, La Niña and the other patterns scientists now use to make long-range weather forecasts, there were men like Inigo Jones, whose prediction methods owed more to astronomy than to meteorology. Farmers, construction companies and brides-to-be all turned to these unorthodox weathermen, who charted the cycles of the planets and the spots on the surface of the sun. Today, producer Jess O’Callaghan tells Matt about the wild west of weather forecasting, before we really knew how to do it. Follow If You're Listening on the ABC Listen app https://radio.abc.net.au/help/apps. Check out our series on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLDTPrMoGHssAfgMMS3L5LpLNFMNp1U_Nq

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:07Speaker 01

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• 0:37Speaker 02

  This podcast was produced on the lands of the Iwabikal and Gadigal people.

• 0:48Speaker 02

  G'day, Matt Bevan here. This is If You're Listening. In our latest episode about the Super El Nino of 1982, 83, I mentioned a guy named Inigo Jones. In the middle of the 20th century, he ran a long range weather prediction service, which was very popular among Queensland farmers. They would pay for his predictions and prepare for drought accordingly. But his methods were very strange by modern standards. To me, they seem to have more in common with a newspaper horoscope than the kind of stuff that the Bureau of Meteorology does. So who is this drought charman? And did he actually think that the

• 1:28Speaker 02

  movements of the planets could predict the weather? Producer Jess O'Callaghan is here. She has been reading all about Inigo Jones. Hi Jess.

• 1:39Speaker 03

  Hi.

• 1:48Speaker 03

  First, Inigo Jones. Amazing name.

• 1:52Speaker 02

  Amazing name.

• 1:52Speaker 03

  Really good name.

• 1:53Speaker 02

  I thought immediately when I learned his name, the Princess Bride, my name is Inigo Jones, Saturn is in retrograde, prepare for rain.

• 2:02Speaker 03

  My name is Inigo Jones. A hot summer is coming. Your sheep must die. It's so easy. It's so good. He has an amazing name. So he was born in 1872 in Surrey in South West London. His dad is a civil engineer and yeah, he's actually named after his ancestor, who was like a famous British architect who was alive in the like 1500s. He's the intellectual descendant of this guy who's credited with introducing classical architecture, you know, from Rome and Italy to Europe. That's sort of how his family thinks of him and how he thinks of himself. And then they wind up in Kangaroo Point in Brisbane.

• 2:39Speaker 02

  How did they end up in Kangaroo Point, Brisbane?

• 2:42Speaker 03

  So they migrate when he's two, but young Inigo, very cluey, very smart, young descendant of philosopher scientists, you know? And so this is why I'm telling you this is because when I'm telling you this story, it seems like crackpotty to us. Think about those scientists and farmers at the conference in the El Nino episode, right? Where they have no idea what's coming. Like, we've always lived in a time where we get these warnings about, oh, it's going to be a bad fire. Like, you and I have never lived in a world where we're not getting those warnings, where we're not like, oh, let's do more burn offs this year because it's going to get bad. That's the context I want you to have in mind when we're, it's easy to go, oh, they're crackpots, oh, it's weird. But like, that's how they see themselves as these sort of like philosopher scientists, even though they are in eventually rural Queensland.

• 3:28Speaker 02

  Absolutely. Okay.

• 3:29Speaker 03

  So when he's 15, smart little Inigo Jones, he's noticed by the Queensland government meteorologist Clement Lindley Rag.

• 3:37Speaker 02

  W R A G G E, by the way, not rag, R A G.

• 3:40Speaker 03

  W R A G G E. Who says, don't go to uni in Sydney, stay here, stick with me and I will teach you everything I know about meteorology. You're going to be a meteorologist. So he does that entrants under Clement Rag. Have you ever come across Clement Rag?

• 3:54Speaker 02

  No, I've never come across Clement Rag.

• 3:55Speaker 03

  Clement Rag is amazing. You're going to love Clement Rag. So a lot of this weird business about planets and sunspots and all of this starts with Rag.

• 4:05Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 4:06Speaker 03

  So he was a meteorologist around the time of Federation. That's sort of when he gets really famous. He's another one of these guys who sees himself as a descendant of sort of Galileo. This guy is, he gets a reputation because he is a real jerk.

• 4:22Speaker 02

  Oh, okay.

• 4:23Speaker 03

  He has a very short temper. He has very big ideas about himself. They start calling him Incliment Rag because of his name, and also because he predicts the rain and also because he's just a jerk. He's such a jerk. So he's really good at like what on LinkedIn now would be called job crafting, where you like have a job and then you do whatever you can to make sure that it turns into the job that you actually want.

• 4:44Speaker 02

  I have absolutely no idea what that's like, Jess. I definitely didn't have a certain job and then now I just read weird facts in my basement for work.

• 4:55Speaker 03

  Yeah. If Rag was reading the headlines on the radio at breakfast hours, Rag would definitely think, I'm going to start a podcast about the things that I really want to talk about, for sure. So he gets this sort of like little job in the post and telegraph department. He quickly starts calling his bureau in Brisbane, the Chief Weather Bureau, comma, Brisbane. Can you think about why that might be pissing people off at the turn of the century?

• 5:20Speaker 02

  Brisbane was quite a small city, particularly in comparison to Sydney and Melbourne. Around about the time of Federation, everybody was pretty keen on being very definitional about where the centre of various things were.

• 5:34Speaker 03

  Yeah, they're not happy. If you're the head meteorologist in Sydney or Adelaide, this guy sucks. He sucks so much. And he found a private organisation of meteorologists, but he calls it the Meteorological Society of Australasia.

• 5:46Speaker 02

  I really respect this in a person. You can actually just go out there and say where the national whatever, national or central or Australian or Australasian, they're not protected terms. If there isn't already a National Dance Academy, you can just call yourself the National Dance Academy, even if you are in Kandoblin, you can just do that.

• 6:09Speaker 03

  He did and he, there was nothing that any of the others could do to stop him. So he spent some time in South Australia and so he really had an enemy in this guy, Sir Charles Todd, who kind of has his job but in Adelaide. He would have often in the paper for each city, there would be sort of a rival forecast from Rag next to there.

• 6:29Speaker 02

  Oh, so you're reading the Adelaide advertiser and it's like, this is what the government says. And then Clement Rag says that it's totally going to be different.

• 6:36Speaker 03

  Yeah, this guy Todd does not like Rag and he records these forecasts and outcomes from both of their columns for 12 years.

• 6:44Speaker 02

  About who would be more accurate about Adelaide's weather?

• 6:46Speaker 03

  Yeah. And then the eve of his retirement, after those 12 years, he writes these figures speak for themselves. He puts a table in the paper showing the forecasts and marking right, partially or wholly wrong, and then announces that he's been correct 83% of the time and Incliment Rag has only been right 62% of the time.

• 7:07Speaker 02

  And that's still not bad considering he was in Brisbane. Better than a coin flip.

• 7:12Speaker 03

  Better than a coin flip, which not all of the predictions to come are better than a coin flip. So yeah, there's one more story that gets told about Rag's temper that I need to tell you.

• 7:21Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 7:21Speaker 03

  This is why I'm so fond of Rag. You know how we name tropical cyclones?

• 7:26Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 7:26Speaker 03

  He is the guy who first named tropical cyclones. He is why they get their names. So you know, other disasters don't get named.

• 7:34Speaker 02

  No, earthquakes don't get named. No.

• 7:36Speaker 03

  Earthquakes don't, bushfires don't, they don't get named. And it's actually such a useful thing. So there's a real push at the moment in disaster fields for heatwaves to get named because we don't remember bad heatwaves. We're just like, oh yeah, it was really hot that year, but like a bunch of people died from a heatwave that year. We just don't, it doesn't stick in our head, the bad heatwaves.

• 7:54Speaker 02

  I should say that bushfires do have names. They're just really badly selected because what they're named based on is where they were first reported from.

• 8:04Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 8:05Speaker 02

  If you've got like a little fire that starts on a sheep station, you know, Billy's Flat Fire, and then the Billy's Flat Fire might burn the entire Blue Mountains down.

• 8:17Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 8:17Speaker 02

  And, you know, start to burn into the western suburbs of Sydney, hundreds of kilometres from where it started, but it's still the Billy's Flat Fire.

• 8:24Speaker 03

  Yeah, this is why I started naming the cyclones. It was the exact same problem that you're describing, but on like a cyclone scale, right?

• 8:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, right.

• 8:32Speaker 03

  He starts giving them quote unquote, soft, pretty Tahitian names.

• 8:35Speaker 02

  Oh, I was gonna, I thought you were gonna say he was going to name them after his personal enemies.

• 8:40Speaker 03

  And then he starts to name them after his enemies. But mostly politicians that he hated. There was in 1902, there was a series of cyclones named Drake Barton and Deacon.

• 8:53Speaker 02

  The most dominant political figures at the time. Yep.

• 8:55Speaker 03

  They say that he hated a local member in Brisbane and he named cyclones after his name and electorate. And, you know, there's all of this folklore around all the people he hated. But he named so, so many cyclones that it's impossible to tell who he hated and who he was just paying homage to, don't they?

• 9:12Speaker 02

  I think we should just let people do that. Just, the meteorologists just keep naming it after people that they hate. I think that would be fun.

• 9:20Speaker 03

  It would be way more fun.

• 9:21Speaker 02

  That'd get people into meteorology.

• 9:22Speaker 03

  This should be an argument with the heatwave naming. You will name heatwaves and the way to sell it is you get to name them after anyone you want, anyone you hate. So 15 year old Inigo is Rag's apprentice for the next five years. And it's around this time that Rag's ideas on long range weather forecasting start to develop as well and get bit woo woo where we're going. He goes to a meteorology conference in Germany in 1891 and he's introduced to the work of a European researcher called Bruckner, who says that planets have effect on the climate. And Inigo Jones has his own ideas separately to Rag about sunspots and how they affect the weather. So he starts to pull all these threads together to get what becomes this like weird tradition of Queensland weather

• 10:05Speaker 03

  prediction, which continues all the way up to the year 2000. So he really sees himself, encouraged by Rag, I'm sure, as part of this like long lineage of guys doing this thing. You know, they have their weather instruments at his home in Kangaroo Point in Brisbane, but they also have their telescopes and they're looking up to the heavens and they're trying to decide what's going on.

• 10:29Speaker 02

  Exactly. What is it about the movement of the gas giants that is affecting the weather in Queensland?

• 10:35Speaker 03

  So there's five cycles, predictable cycles. There's Bruckner, that's three orbits of Jupiter, 35.586 years.

• 10:43Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 10:44Speaker 03

  There's Saturnian, which is two orbits of Saturn or five of Jupiter.

• 10:49Speaker 02

  That's the conversion ratio.

• 10:50Speaker 03

  That's the conversion ratio. There's the main cycle, that's 71.1 years, six orbits of Jupiter.

• 10:57Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 10:57Speaker 03

  There's Uranian, that's 84 years or one orbit of Uranus.

• 11:01Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 11:02Speaker 03

  And there's the grand cycle. There's 164.7 years, that's one orbit of Neptune.

• 11:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 11:08Speaker 03

  When you really boil it down, what he was doing was keeping a ledger. He would look up what the weather did 35, 59, 71, 84 and 165 years ago. He would chart those old seasons side by side and the records are really patchy, right? Because of colonisation.

• 11:25Speaker 02

  There is certainly no, you know, readable weather records for Queensland until. A reasonable distance into the 19th century. If you're sitting in the 1940s, I'm sorry, but you can't look at what the weather was like in the 1760s in Queensland.

• 11:40Speaker 03

  Basically, if all periods indicate rain, that's the forecast.

• 11:44Speaker 02

  Oh, you've got five out of five indicators. All the cycles say rain, so it's gonna rain.

• 11:47Speaker 03

  It's gonna rain.

• 11:48Speaker 02

  That's such a terrible way to predict these, but yep, all right.

• 11:51Speaker 03

  And importantly, when he misses, he doesn't think of it as the method being wrong. He just thinks it was correlated with the wrong cycle. An example I found online is the flood of 1870. He thinks it will repeat in 1941. And when he doesn't, he's like, oh, it must have been on the Uranian cycle instead. One orbit of Uranus. So he rebooks it for 1954 on the 84 year cycle. He's like, oh, wrong one. So he's never wrong. He's just not, it's just a misread of the cycle.

• 12:21Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 12:22Speaker 03

  So when he's 20, he moves to his family's farm up in the Glass House Mountains. So his apprenticeship with Rag is up. Farmer's at a place called Cromhurst. So he's farmhanding on his dad's farm, but he's also diligently recording rainfall. And he's taking weather observations from the farm and collecting the weather. And he's using it on his dad's farm. And then in 1923, he predicts that the drought will break based on the Brookner cycle, that shorter cycle.

• 12:45Speaker 02

  That's Jupiter.

• 12:45Speaker 03

  That's three orbits.

• 12:47Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 12:48Speaker 03

  Specifically three orbits of Jupiter.

• 12:49Speaker 02

  The first orbit, that does nothing. The second orbit, absolutely nothing at all. It's only the third time.

• 12:54Speaker 03

  That's when the magnetic field affects the rain. So he tells the Council of Agriculture and he tells the media, and this forecast is published widely. And then it's borne out, the drought breaks. So all the farmers who bet on that in some way, make decisions based on his prediction. Think he's brilliant. They just think he's a genius. They all say to him, please, like, come do this for us all the time. Stop being a farmhand and devote yourself to predicting the weather. So he researches these cycles, records the weather. He moves to Brisbane for like five years to sort of drum up support, organised building and observatory at his family farm in Cromhurst. The farmers, they love him. They start giving him money for his predictions. He builds his observatory.

• 13:36Speaker 02

  Why does he need an observatory?

• 13:37Speaker 03

  The sunspots. Because if your prediction is off, if every one of those five years has a different type of weather in your location, you gotta check the sunspots.

• 13:47Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 13:49Speaker 03

  And the farmers, they start to campaign for official recognition of his methods. So much that in 1954, the Federal Minister for the Interior establishes a committee to investigate his activities and claims. And it finds that Jones's forecast had only a 50% chance of being correct.

• 14:03Speaker 02

  The federal government.

• 14:04Speaker 03

  He has columns in papers all around the country. There's people paying him for this stuff all over because it works anywhere, right?

• 14:11Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 14:11Speaker 03

  That method.

• 14:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, you don't even need to know whether it rained yesterday. You only need to know whether it rained three orbits of Jupiter ago.

• 14:18Speaker 03

  And this is where I'm torn. He kind of knows all this and doesn't care. So there's this paper he writes in 1944 where he's kind of saying, here is my method. It's the best I've got. It's been useful for me. Here's how I predict things. It's a scientific inquiry, but I am torn because he is selling all this stuff to farmers. You know, if it's scientific inquiry, but then you're

• 14:37Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 14:37Speaker 03

  earning money off it.

• 14:38Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 14:38Speaker 03

  Anyway, he, same year as that inquiry dies, 1954. But his work is carried on by his assistant Lennox Walker. And Walker is the guy who's doing this forecasting at a very interesting time for us personally, because it's after the ABC gets good at archiving things, but before the Bureau is really serious about seasonal forecasting.

• 15:00Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 15:01Speaker 03

  So those sort of 30 years between the 50s and the 80s, Lennox Walker actually gets quite a few runs on the board.

• 15:08Speaker 02

  Quite a number of interviews on the ABC. Okay.

• 15:11Speaker 03

  We're produced a lot of radio. Imagine it's the 1970s. You have this guy's number in your little book of people you can call up at a moment's notice. When are you getting him on without fail every year?

• 15:20Speaker 02

  Uh, I don't know when.

• 15:22Speaker 03

  The week before Christmas.

• 15:24Speaker 02

  Oh, I see, of course. Yes, you need to know whether it's gonna be sunny at Christmas. Yes.

• 15:29Speaker 03

  Everyone's gone on holiday. You need someone to chat to.

• 15:31Speaker 02

  Oh, the worst time of the year to make radio. Yeah, you can definitely call that guy. Yeah.

• 15:36Speaker 04

  Hillary Roots talked to the long range weather forecaster Lennox Walker.

• 15:39Speaker 05

  At the present juncture, I'd say that storm rains are indicated between the 21st and 24th. And over the Christmas period should be overcast and unsettled with further rain on the 31st of December.

• 15:53Speaker 03

  The one that cracks me up is when they call him on Christmas Eve. Because I'm like, you could just use the real weather guy. Like, was the real weather guy on holiday?

• 16:01Speaker 02

  Yes, yes.

• 16:02Speaker 03

  The real guy. Like, once you're within like a couple of days, like, I know they couldn't predict more than a couple of days in advance, but Christmas Eve and you're asking Lennox Walker, what's the weather like tomorrow? Like, why? Why did someone say, just call the Bureau?

• 16:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, they love that.

• 16:16Speaker 03

  Oh, I don't know. I'll just check the planets. I'll just, just let me check the sunspots.

• 16:20Speaker 02

  All right, just one second. What was Neptune up to 164 years ago? Rainy, rainy tomorrow.

• 16:27Speaker 03

  You better move Christmas lunch inside. I mean, it made good radio. It made really good radio. He takes over after Jones dies and he makes a name for himself really soon after because he predicts there'll be fine weather for the Melbourne Olympics. So that's two years after 1956. The rain stops before the opening ceremony, which he predicted would happen. Points for, points for the sunspots. But now it is really a business. So there's none of these donations to run the observatory. It's like a full business. So first of all, I just want you to watch and describe the mise en scène. What can we see?

• 17:00Speaker 05

  This is determined by the planetary revolutions around the sun. It's purely an elementary matter. Look up your old manac and say, righto, where are the various planets in relation to these?

• 17:10Speaker 02

  He's a very sharp dresser. I mean, he's dressed very much in sort of 50s and 60s Queensland attire. He's in a sharp shirt and a tie, but no jacket, of course, because it's Queensland. He has got brill creamed hair and he's sitting on the most chintzy 1960s plush, plush, plush, plush, plush couch that you've ever seen with multicoloured cushions in the background.

• 17:38Speaker 03

  It is so 60s and 70s. It's like, you can feel the sort of velvety velour of that couch, like sticking to you.

• 17:45Speaker 02

  Oh, and I can see smoke coming up from the ashtray as well. That's great. Fantastic.

• 17:51Speaker 03

  This interview seems to go for like at least an hour and the whole time, all three of them are just puffing on their cigarettes the whole time.

• 17:57Speaker 02

  Over to a different guy and he's smoking. Yeah, wow.

• 18:00Speaker 03

  The hosts, the guests, Lennox, like they're all just puffing away.

• 18:04Speaker 02

  I think they're having beer as well.

• 18:06Speaker 03

  I think you're right.

• 18:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 18:07Speaker 03

  Science has given us a lot of innovation in weather prediction since 1970s. But they've also given us a lot.

• 18:13Speaker 02

  A lot of, you know, censorship. We're just not allowed to do anything anymore.

• 18:17Speaker 03

  Oh, I was gonna say, health, health also come along.

• 18:19Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, as far as, yeah.

• 18:20Speaker 03

  But yeah, we're also just not allowed to make fun TV.

• 18:22Speaker 02

  Go to a guy's house in Queensland, have a couple of beers with him and ask him about the weather. Yeah.

• 18:27Speaker 03

  So what Lennox does, which is maybe this has developed a little bit from Inigo's time, but he gives us a really good idea of who is buying his predictions.

• 18:37Speaker 02

  Great.

• 18:37Speaker 03

  By 1974.

• 18:38Speaker 05

  I'm completely dependent for my living, my livelihood, on the degree of accuracy of my forecasts. As you know, probably I service every major business organisation in Australia of any note, possibly a lot of brides, holiday makers, clubs, racing clubs. I don't think there's any, probably none that I know of, construction organisation of any note in Australia that's occurred in the last 20 years anyway, that I haven't serviced and handled, starting with the Snowy Mountains scheme and going through Moonee Pipeline.

• 19:07Speaker 02

  Oh, no.

• 19:08Speaker 05

  I think I've handled this over the years.

• 19:11Speaker 02

  That's killed me a little bit inside.

• 19:12Speaker 03

  I know. He's like, yeah, every major business organisation.

• 19:16Speaker 02

  Every bride is calling up this guy in Queensland and being like, is it gonna rain on my wedding in Geelong? Oh my goodness.

• 19:22Speaker 03

  And apparently he's just ad hoc charging them whatever. He's like, oh yeah, bride, the big, I don't know for sure, but it'd be a couple of dollars. And then it's like, what about the big organisations? Oh no, that would be a lot more.

• 19:32Speaker 02

  I mean, unless, unless he did the whole wedding markup thing, you know?

• 19:35Speaker 03

  This is what I thought. I thought, because you're not meant to tell them that it's for a wedding if you want the cheaper price. This guy's doing the opposite. I'm like, I'm from the Snowy Mountains scheme and I'm calling up and I'm like, hello, I've got a wedding for the next, what, 15 years in the Snowy Mountains. What's your best rate?

• 19:54Speaker 02

  Discount for cash?

• 19:55Speaker 03

  Yeah. He also has what sounds to our ears now, and I think to the host at the time, a truly nonsense explanation of how the weather works. But before I play it, I want you to remember the context. We don't know about El Nino. Lots of weather patterns are a mystery to us. Here's his explanation for how he does the predictions.

• 20:13Speaker 05

  Look up your old manac and say, righto, where are the various planets in relation to these points in the sun? The particular point is the 18th hour of bright ascension, which sounds terribly scientific.

• 20:22Speaker 02

  Terribly scientific, yeah.

• 20:24Speaker 05

  Which means the point exactly in front of the sun. So if you're utilising a cycle based on Jupiter, which shall we say is in front of the sun at the moment, that'll be a 35 and a half year cycle or a 71 year cycle if you have two of them. Now, what we do, we must also find out how our sunspot activity is in relation to that year that we're saying 35 years ago and this year. If the sunspot activity is reasonably the same, well, the forecasts

• 20:51Speaker 02

  Will be reasonably the same. No, they won't.

• 20:54Speaker 05

  But if your sunspot activity, shall I say, in that year was less and is higher than this year, you would have to intensify your forecast. For example, if Brisbane had

• 21:02Speaker 02

  It's just fascinating watching this guy who has no idea what he's talking about, speak in a, well, it's quite simple. This is how it all works. I mean, it's so interesting. And I mean, something obviously that still happens so much. People just confidently saying something that they probably believe to be true. I mean, I, I can't tell just by watching him, how much he really believes what he's saying here.

• 21:31Speaker 03

  I can't tell either if he really believes it or not. And I think by the time they do start to make these discoveries like El Nino and other things, I think he starts to incorporate some of that. Like, he keeps going until 2000. Like, he keeps this up for a really long time. And you know, there are still some who are using those methods today and really believe in them, the planets and the sunspots. You can find online different businesses still selling that.

• 21:55Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 21:55Speaker 03

  And I think the thing is like, these farmers are just desperate for, they just wanna know.

• 21:59Speaker 02

  Of course.

• 22:00Speaker 03

  Like, the weather is so unpredictable, they just wanna know.

• 22:02Speaker 02

  And it's so annoying, the idea that you can't do anything about it. The idea that there's something that is unpredictable and you literally can't do anything would be so frustrating. And even if you just kind of go, oh yeah, well, Lennox Walker, he's, he's almost never right, but you'd almost rather just have it so that you can just look at it because you've got something.

• 22:20Speaker 03

  Yeah, you've got something. And I mean, as long as you're not paying too much money for it, maybe it's nice to have something to base your decisions around.

• 22:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, as long as you've called up with the bride voice and got the discount, yeah.

• 22:29Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 22:30Speaker 02

  I'm having my wedding 246 kilometres north west of Charleville. What a story. Fascinating. Thank you very much, Jess.

• 22:39Speaker 03

  Thank you.

• 22:47Speaker 02

  On Thursday, we are diving into the bond market and I promise it's not boring, even though everybody often says it is. The US government owes the rest of the world trillions of dollars and somehow that's the thing holding the entire global economy together? Your mortgage, your super, the price of your groceries, they're all tied in some way to US government debt. It's a very, very strange story and it's one that affects all of us. And that's coming up on Thursday.