coe115_reno.mp3

Speaker1: [00:00:23] Hey, everyone. Welcome back to the Cultures of Energy podcast, the podcast that fuels your morning and powers your imagination that I'm just watching a dog start to eat. Oh my God, she's eating your dress. I got it. She's chewing it down. In order to do that, you know the dog get away with chewing a dress.

Speaker2: [00:00:40] I guess it's kind of cheap anyway.

Speaker1: [00:00:43] I don't know. I think dog needs a little bit

Speaker2: [00:00:46] Indulgent and needs a trim

Speaker1: [00:00:49] Anyway. Hey, folks, we're here. We got a terrific show for you today. Yeah, and we've got an exciting announcement to do. You want to make that announcement, Simone? What do you think or do you want to talk about something else?

Speaker2: [00:01:00] Well, maybe we could talk about the announcement. We do have an official debut date for our film called Not OK

Speaker1: [00:01:08] Or Not OK

Speaker2: [00:01:09] Or not, OK. Depending on how you feel about it, depending on whether you're feeling Icelandic language or not.

Speaker1: [00:01:15] And for people listening into the show for the first time today, that film concerns the disappearance of Iceland's first well-known glacier.

Speaker2: [00:01:24] Oh God! Should we give it away? Now we're not going to. Now we're not going to have any reveal in the film, but it's OK. Come see the film anyway. It's going to be in Iceland, though, so you've got to travel to get there.

Speaker1: [00:01:33] It will be in Reykjavik at the B.O. Paradise Theater on August 17th. It looks like five p.m. reception, followed by debut screening of the film and we'd love to see you there. And what we are working on very avidly right now is trying to find some folks in Iceland to help us. So the dog has to get comfortable.

Speaker2: [00:01:54] Oh my God, you're making yourself into the tiniest ball. It's just making yourself into a little ball, as I would say. She do that.

Speaker1: [00:02:02] Well, we are working on now is trying to get ourselves a set of collaborators in Iceland who are going to help us organize the world's first glacier tour. We'll see the screening on Friday, on Saturday or Sunday. Weather permitting, we will hike with you up to the top of this first former glacier and do some kind of a ceremony. We're thinking about maybe doing some kind of a ritual up there or something to mark the passing of this glacier and to think about glacial time and human time. But we haven't worked out all those details yet, and I think we're even open to some suggestions. But above all, we'd love your participation. So this is a first announcement special to you. Cultures of Energy podcast listeners.

Speaker2: [00:02:44] August 17. That's true. This is, I think this is the first official.

Speaker1: [00:02:47] This is the first announcement because we just got locked in yesterday, August 17 are

Speaker2: [00:02:51] The 17th five p.m. event

Speaker1: [00:02:54] Given Reykjavik, and we love to see you there. And because now we're filmmakers, we'll be wearing berets. Yeah, we will be wearing. And somebody is going to have one of those cigarette holders in her mouth and and be wearing starlet sunglasses and maybe some kind of, I don't know, Marilyn Monroe ish outfit. So I had a whole different I will have a black turtleneck on, I will have a beret and maybe reflecting aviator sunglasses. Oh, that's cool. Does that sound stereotypically grotesquely cinematic enough?

Speaker2: [00:03:27] Yeah, actually, it does. It's a that's a fascinating image right there. Black pants, too. Well, it'll be fun and we're going to have a reception. There'll be some wine, there'll be some food. Yeah, it's definitely worth the trip.

Speaker1: [00:03:38] The company will be what it's all about. The company will be wonderful. It's a mere stopover. You can get yourself there, come and celebrate with us and also memorialize the loss of Iceland's first glacier. Mm hmm.

Speaker2: [00:03:50] So speaking of Iceland and melting? Yes, ice that then turns into water. There was actually an interesting news incident. I think it's been a couple of weeks ago now, though, that this first came out, that Iceland is now using more electricity, more energy to power the mining of bitcoin than it is using to power the civilization that exists on the island.

Speaker1: [00:04:18] So even more than the aluminum smelters now,

Speaker2: [00:04:20] I believe so in terms of electricity, well,

Speaker1: [00:04:23] That's what that's what it takes. That's that's amazing because it used to be the second biggest drain on the grid, but now it's the biggest wow

Speaker2: [00:04:32] Beyond household use.

Speaker1: [00:04:33] Speculators got to speculate. They say, Yeah,

Speaker2: [00:04:36] Bitcoin, I don't really quite understand it, except that it's a lot of computation. It takes a

Speaker1: [00:04:40] Lot of no one understands, but no one really understands.

Speaker2: [00:04:42] It seemed like it was cool for a while,

Speaker1: [00:04:44] But I'm pretty sure that this mystique is about like 85 to 90 percent of its value. It's just this idea like, Oh my god, this is so this is so complex computationally. And I don't know. We've got some people on the podcast who can probably explain bitcoin to us. We're going to make them do it.

Speaker2: [00:04:59] Yeah, no, that'd be interesting.

Speaker1: [00:05:00] Next guest, regardless of whether they have any computational background, will be explaining explain to us, please tell. Be our first question.

Speaker2: [00:05:07] Let it rip. That's right.

Speaker1: [00:05:10] Don't be afraid, future guests

Speaker2: [00:05:12] Will be very afraid. Today, we fearlessly dive into a conversation with Josh Marino, who is associate professor. At University of Binghamton and the Department of Anthropology

Speaker1: [00:05:25] Licensed and bonded my first undergraduate student to be tenured. It's a moment that you're mixed with pride and also despair at the passage of time.

Speaker2: [00:05:35] Yeah, I bet. Yeah, that makes you feel old, huh? It makes one feel old.

Speaker1: [00:05:39] I don't really spend a lot of time thinking that I'm old. I actually probably mentally think I'm way younger than I am. That's probably my problem. You're on the side of being like younger than I am. So okay. My behavior follows suit. As they say,

Speaker2: [00:05:53] That sounds like a good way to be youthful at heart. But if you have to be

Speaker1: [00:05:57] And graceful at heart or kind of obsessed with imagining aging, I'd probably take the former. Yeah. But yeah, it's terrific. And Josh has, meanwhile, become, I think, one of the most interesting scholars working in the field of waste studies actually over the years. And so we talked to him a lot about his work, both his work that has just come out recently, as well as his new forthcoming work on waste. And the projects are pretty exciting. And he's just a smart guy. It's just fun to talk to them and reconnect again after all these years.

Speaker2: [00:06:25] Well, we also talked to him about the recent incidents and the politics around guns, and that was kind of interesting to kind of reflecting on Columbine of to Sandy Hook up to this most recent shooting in Florida. So we begin with that. So it's not quite exactly on the topic of energy and environment, but I guess you could say it's a kind of a human environmental question.

Speaker1: [00:06:47] Well, and Josh actually started off his undergraduate thesis, which was hella long. It was, I think, 300 pages long was about the Columbine effect, and he had worked, done a project where he interviewed somebody who had really been involved with the school shooting. But we talk about that. We talk about that and I won't go into it again other than to say he makes the connection between his work on school shootings and landfill in a really interesting way to. I think that that finds a different way to bridge it besides just the kind of temporality of the news cycle. Ok, which is what was on our mind, of course. Of course, today's news cycle filled with all sorts of weird White House news. The piece that's not going to get a lot of media because of the other. The 10 other scandals that I found really interesting was this journalist who had had part of his Newsweek story spiked about Trump's diet pill addiction in the nineteen eighties that have been covered.

Speaker2: [00:07:35] It's hilarious,

Speaker1: [00:07:36] But he was really, really hooked on diet pills. That's hilarious. And I don't remember the name of it, but whatever it was causes hallucinatory effect. So for a good part of the 80s, he

Speaker2: [00:07:45] Was just tripping, just tripping ball. I don't

Speaker1: [00:07:47] Know. I'm not going to say that has anything to do with the current situation other than to say, you know, folks lay off the diet pills.

Speaker2: [00:07:54] They're not good for you. So he was like slamming dexa trim throughout the day.

Speaker1: [00:07:58] Remember, there was something in the 80s, like there was a lot of people doing diet pills, right?

Speaker2: [00:08:02] Right. But I think they were caffeine. There's some kind of stimulant.

Speaker1: [00:08:06] Yeah, I think that's what these were, too. Yeah.

Speaker2: [00:08:08] They were caffeine and maybe some other stuff. I don't know if they did taurine or things like that, but some kind of crazy concoctions. That's hilarious. Now he switched over to Diet Coke. It's a softer sin. I guess. Maybe the man should just have a drink. Did you ever think of that? You know,

Speaker1: [00:08:23] At this age, I think you could probably just have a drink. Yeah. You know, it's not really going to prolong or end your life any sooner or later. So why not? Yeah, why not let loose a little bit, although dangerous advice to that man?

Speaker2: [00:08:37] For sure, he's already pretty loose.

Speaker1: [00:08:39] So what are you up to today?

Speaker2: [00:08:40] Oh, I'm going to go teach class. Ok, we're going to do some feminist stuff all day long in class should be exciting.

Speaker1: [00:08:47] Well, you know what else we should mention? We are going to be at the University of Texas of the Permian Basin. I checked, I thought it was at, but it's of the Permian Basin on Monday to talk about humanities as part of their boom and bust series. And so if you happen to be near Odessa, Texas, and hey, some of you might be out there, come and listen to us talk. We'd love to. We'd love to meet you. Yeah, this coming Monday, and I'm doing a keynote at the Second City Anthropology Conference at the University of Illinois at Chicago the following weekend. And then you're going to be at Columbia the weekend after that. If we could only describe this as being a tour, we would, but we can't, because it's a random assortment of short trips.

Speaker2: [00:09:25] That's right.

Speaker1: [00:09:26] But all of them will involve some talk of energy and environmental issues.

Speaker2: [00:09:29] So and a lot of emissions?

Speaker1: [00:09:31] Yeah, that's right. That is the thing. And again, I'll come back to this. I think that transportation is worth emissions as compared to some other things like industrial agriculture. Oh, true. But that said, we really, really need to come up with some better ways to move people around that will allow us to get to know each other as not just a country, but as a world without creating these massive fossil fuel.

Speaker2: [00:09:57] I think I'm going to take a dog sled out to New York and have shadow pulled me out to New York City.

Speaker1: [00:10:03] Well, that's the thing. Shout out a little shout out to our friend David Hughes, who took the train from Rutgers all the way down to Houston. Yeah, I mean, there is something that is almost mythical about those efforts. I know to to make to make train into your basis of travel in the United States, whose train system is. So kind of hopelessly antiquated, yeah,

Speaker2: [00:10:23] But it's kind of nice, the trains are great, you just had to plan for the time as all because it takes a lot longer.

Speaker1: [00:10:29] Yeah. And maybe, maybe that should be part of travel is is slowing it down. But I also think that, you know, I just don't think we're going to win the battle of convincing people to do that. They're going to want to keep moving quickly. Because of that, we really have to find a way to decarbonize the fuel electric planes. Why not? Yeah. You know what? I did a little this little spot in this past week on electric vehicles in Houston Environment Texas, an NGO we work with at the center, released a report and said that by 2030, there may be as many as 65000 electric vehicles in Houston. In Houston, which I think is conservative, I think it could be more than that, but that's pretty exciting. And then let's get some electric planes, right?

Speaker2: [00:11:10] That's what I like. Or the solar plane.

Speaker1: [00:11:12] That's what the solar plane would be. Really good. Ok.

Speaker2: [00:11:15] So meditate on that.

Speaker1: [00:11:19] Meditate on that. I don't have a good way to close it. I've just been randomly rattling, Oh, okay, we're doing. And I don't have. There's not like a theme this episode. Well, there's lots of ways. So I guess you could say this is kind of like a

Speaker2: [00:11:31] Garbage enter burial. Burial is the thematic. I don't think we actually use that word, but think about

Speaker1: [00:11:37] You just say burial like burrowing into something,

Speaker2: [00:11:40] Their burial, be you or a

Speaker1: [00:11:43] Burial

Speaker2: [00:11:44] Burial burial.

Speaker1: [00:11:46] Wow, that's California burial. It's like a little that's a little valley girl.

Speaker2: [00:11:50] You know, what's this? The guy I listen to the podcast that New York Times one. Yeah, the daily. It's called. And the guy. I like his voice a lot and he's sharp, but he always strikes me crazy. He says figure and sort of figure, figure,

Speaker1: [00:12:06] Figure, figure skating. Yeah, just watch them.

Speaker2: [00:12:08] Nancy Pelosi is a figure who's always, you know, tortured. Like, she's not a figure, a figure. I don't know what affects me, but I guess it's just an East Coast, West Coast thing that makes it Midwest. What do you say? Do you say figure?

Speaker1: [00:12:23] Do you see a figure figure? I mean, my pronunciation has been critiqued on many occasions. I'm certainly not speaking the Queen's English or even the president's English. But yeah, I figure it sounds. I don't. Yeah, it doesn't. I don't like it. I don't like. All right. All right with that, shall we?

Speaker2: [00:12:43] Yeah, let's go. And let's say Go, Josh, go Josh..

Speaker3: [00:13:06] Heather, cultures of energy listeners and hey there, Josh. Reno, hi. Hello. We're glad to have you here, Josh..

Speaker4: [00:13:13] Ok, Josh. Now, first of all, you have officially made me feel older, and I'm going to tell you why you were the first undergraduate student. I had to get tenure, so congratulations on that. But also, congratulations to me on becoming old.

Speaker5: [00:13:31] Yeah, it's always. It's always my pleasure to make people reflect on their own mortality. Yes.

Speaker4: [00:13:37] Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for that, Josh.. Very well. And speaking of of which, in a less lighthearted vein, when the events in the school shooting in Florida happened last week, I was thinking and I do think from time to time about your undergraduate thesis because it was a really fascinating work. And I've heard you describe it as a dissertation, which is not inaccurate because it was like 300 pages. It was a huge amount of work that you put into it. But in those days, you were studying what was called the Columbine effect. No. Do you want to tell us a little bit about your project and how you see it kind of connecting maybe to the discussion around school shootings right now in the U.S.?

Speaker5: [00:14:16] Sure. The the project was to explore the Columbine effect, and specifically what that means is school shootings, a form of mass shooting as represented, debated, interrogated in the sort of larger public culture. So the Columbine effect is, of course, the actual recurrence of this horrible kind of although rare but horrible kind of violence. But it also more than that is something that people reflect on debate, argue about, you know, in various ways. And I thought that was an interesting way of diagnosing different things in American culture going on in the nineties. It never occurred to me that it would be that it would, you know, keep going, that it would even transform a bit. And in the last ten or so years, people, you don't fear the Columbine effect at Columbine referred to. But there are so many more shootings that have happened, and they're no longer specifically school shootings. And it seems that we've sort of forgotten that there's a history to mass shooting. We have started talking about mass shootings generically, but there's never really much discussion about what that means. What interested me as an undergrad is the fact that in addition to being very rare, mass shootings usually were seen as something involving primarily white people in suburban or rural places. And what made it an extraordinary form of violence. Worth talking about and debating was that it wasn't happening in the inner city with nonwhite people. And so I was just fascinated by this as a source of debate, and I ended up interviewing people involved in a near school shooting that occurred not far from Cornell, where I was an undergrad in Elmira, New York.

Speaker3: [00:16:01] Right. So what? What happened with that, Josh, who did you talk to?

Speaker5: [00:16:06] What happened was I talked to a young man named Jeremy Gutman, who was 19 and had been arrested at his high school South Side High School in Elmira, New York. He had brought two guns and over a dozen homemade bombs to school with him on Valentine's Day in 2001. And his plan was to, as with other mass shooters to kill and harm as many people as possible and himself. But what happened was he had decided basically at the school in the process of carrying out his plan. He just decided I don't want to throw bombs and hurt people. I don't want to shoot people. And he met up with a friend who didn't know he was armed. He had a duffel bag with him, and the friend could tell he was distressed, and she encouraged him to sit with her in the cafeteria. Even though there were, there were announcements at the time warning students to get back to their classes because someone had slipped and he slipped a note to a friend and they'd let the administration know that something was going on. So they sent the cafeteria against school orders and she prayed with him and they just sat there together until the officer on site showed up and without force very calmly apprehended him and it was over. And so he went to jail and was awaiting sentencing. By the time I'd heard this, and I was given the opportunity to interview him, his lawyer, various people affiliated with the prison where he was held, friends of his, his parents and so on, and I went to the trial. Well, it was a trial. I sort of showed up for the sentencing really and watch what was happening in the media and was really interested in how the Columbine effect nationally was being was was playing out in this sort of local context and how his narrative and his story was kind of overwritten by the national story so that it didn't matter what decisions he made or what he was like, he had to be sort of represented as just another school shooter like those. Columbine, Jonesboro elsewhere.

Speaker4: [00:18:06] I mean, do you think there's a chance that that that that might still be happening today that, you know, national narratives, whether those might be regarding the militarization of schools or the alienation of young men continue to in some ways have a magnetic attraction to the narratives that people spin around these tragic events.

Speaker5: [00:18:25] I do, and I also think if you can see which shootings get talked about and how they get talked about following not only a narrative of militarism, but also still reproduce the racial politics I refer to before so that Binghamton, where I live now, had a mass shooting that occurred in 2009, but I didn't know that and people didn't talk about it. I found out about it sort of accidentally. And as many people were killed, I think something like 13 14, if you count the shooter as many other famous mass shooting incidents that get covered in the media and get mentioned, you know, together when people talk about Sandy Hook or Las Vegas and how parkland. But people don't talk about Binghamton. And one of the reasons why is that the person committing the shooting was a 41 year old Vietnamese immigrant, and most of the people who were killed were immigrants and people that were working on getting their citizenship and people locally. Know no one likes to know. Town likes to be known for a shooting, but they generally associate the neglect of Binghamton within the national narrative of shootings with the neglect of Binghamton generally.

Speaker5: [00:19:30] But those that talk about it directly related to the fact that it wasn't primarily about white grievance or the racial politics of mass shootings that usually involve conception of white masculinity. That is kind of militarized in some sense. And that, I think, is one kind of story that doesn't get repeated because it doesn't fit with a narrative. It's no longer the Columbine effect, but is now a larger mass shooting narrative. And then in another that doesn't get talked about as what Jeremy's is stories of non-violence. Right. So what's really nice is the story Parkland, the man who stood in between. I can't remember his name, but the man who stood in between children and sacrificed his life to save others. Those kinds of stories of nonviolent sacrifice sometimes get talked about, but not other kinds of stories where people choose not to act violently. That could have. And in general, we should talk more about those stories instead of always looking to talk about the good guy with a gun

Speaker1: [00:20:27] Or the bad guy with a gun.

Speaker2: [00:20:29] All right.

Speaker3: [00:20:29] Good point, Josh. Do you see a distinction, you know, just based on how you've been following the news over the last several years and then thinking about this project you did as an undergrad, do you make a distinction between school mass shootings and just plain old mass shootings, if we can call them that?

Speaker5: [00:20:44] I yeah, I think that I think the general like in general, people make that distinction because schools are culturally we see them as safe havens and places where, you know, children shouldn't be exposed to, you know, to those kinds of threats. But, you know, people have written on how the reason you might not want to make that distinction is that the mass in mass shootings usually refers to some sense of publicity on the part of the target that it's happening at a public place, whether it's open street or a mall or a movie theater or civic center, which is the case of the Binghamton shooting. And all of those along the schools represent kind of an attack on an idea of public space. And obviously, people are the literal target. But the setting for the attack is part of the, if you like, performance of it as a certain kind of violent act. And that is worth distinguishing, I think, from other kinds of shootings. For example, if somebody shoots a bunch of people in their private residence who they know, that is technically a mass shooting because they've murdered a few people. I don't think it'd be likely to be grouped in with Columbine or parkland, partly because it doesn't have that same sense of the general public that somehow the target and not just specific, known individual,

Speaker3: [00:22:05] It's a familiarity. Well, it's reminded me to Josh, like before Columbine was this have, I don't know, set of events and this idea of going postal, right, where, you know, the aggrieved federal worker would go into or went into a post office. I think this happened a few times over. Those were mass shootings in very public places, but it was a supposedly a sort of workplace issue or concern. Yeah.

Speaker4: [00:22:33] And that was kind of a it was, if you will, in idiom in the 1980s and 1990s.

Speaker3: [00:22:37] It definitely was. Yeah, I feel like it was. Yeah, the eighties and nineties. And but the grievance element of it is important because it seems to be that also appears at least in the in the Columbine case. And I think this more recent one in parkland to the shooter sees himself as aggrieved, right? He doesn't have a, you know, it doesn't get enough female attention. He gets bullied, et cetera. It's become kind of a profile coming out of Columbine for this, you know, angry young, usually white man. Who who has these grievances, so there's some interesting parallels there.

Speaker5: [00:23:08] Right, and the it's also tricky because you have going postal and then you have before that the Charles Whitman clock tower shooting in Texas in 66, which quite a few people say that's the, you know, that's the first mass shooting. And this is again where racial politics and representation become involved because I think that most historians would tell you that there are mass shootings of Native Americans going back several hundred years. Yes, long before the shooting in Texas. So it's really about, you know, are the victims white or are, if they're not white, is the object of the violence some sense of generically white public space, like a church or a mall or a movie theater? And that's how it's, as you say, the idiom has been shaped. And that's also what we need to be careful about how we talk about these so-called trends or statements about their historicity because they're always loaded with these symbolic meanings that we're not always reflecting on, right?

Speaker4: [00:24:12] And they often ignore the histories of settler colonial violence that kind of underpinned the formation of this country in the first place. And yeah, point well taken. But anyway, Josh, I will just say, and I haven't been your advisor for a long, long time, but I'll just say it could be an article in the somewhere I could. I could imagine you having something to say to the contemporary debates based on your past research, which which does deserve to get out there because it was really fabulous work. But from those promising beginnings, you have gone on to be one of the most interesting thinkers and researchers working in the space around waste. And we have a seminar coming up at Rice next year on waste, so we wanted to pick your brain a little bit about your work. How did you end up studying landfill?

Speaker5: [00:24:55] It's interesting. I think in some ways it was connected to the work on school shootings because one of the things about school shootings that interested me was that you had kind of an eruption of violence somewhere. And suddenly it seemed as if, as you were saying, like the history of American violence both around the world and domestically of settler colonial violence, for example, becomes like Pierce's ordinary regular American life. Right? And that idea of, you know, I thought there was a bizarre parallel when I don't know there'd be a garbage strike and suddenly garbage would erupt into ordinary, normal streets that are otherwise that cleaned of debris or basements flood with effluent. You know, I sort of was also and I still am fascinated by this way in which there's an ordinary, clean and preserved surroundings that we occupy, things that we own and conditions that we just accept as normal, and that they're the result of labor of work that someone's doing to preserve us from loss and process and change and all of that stuff. We usually call waste and we send it away to the it gets carted off from us, obviously. But where does it go? And landfills interests me because obviously the primary form of waste disposal in the U.S., but I don't think I think what turned into my book was that I was the inside.

Speaker5: [00:26:23] I had the it's not it's not accidental that we're a nation of landfills. It's not sort of an incidental fact that a regrettable fact of how we do waste management, but there's a way in which America is a landfill country. And it's interesting, yeah, that we have a kind of I even thought of calling it once landfill capitalism. Well, and by that, I mean, landfills don't just dispose of waste, they take waste from. They can take waste from very far away and they can bury it as if it as if it doesn't exist. It never existed. Landfilling is not just dumping something, it's the way that process of landfill was innovated in. I think 1938 by John Bentsen's The in Fresno, California. He's usually credited as the first person with the landfill design at digging a hole, putting the waste in, compacting it down and then putting soil over the top of it and planting grass so that it looks just like a normal hill, right? And what you're doing basically is you're using landscape to conceal the products of our economic activity from us, and that aspect of literal material repression sort of interested in me. And this notion that what appears discontinuous our separation from our waste is actually not the case is that we are connected to landfills and to the waste that we produce.

Speaker5: [00:27:43] And in fact, the more the further away we are from landfills and the more of it we feel as if landfills are making our waste invisible, the more they're actually creating us. And by that, what I mean by that is that we feel like we can waste even more. We feel as if there are no limits to our economic. An environmental activity that there's nothing preventing us from engaging in any. There's nothing, there's no limits to growth and there's nothing preventing us from, you know, having a house, owning a house and constantly stripping things from it and putting more in it and increasing its value. And the value of that house goes up and up and up and up and up. The equity builds and all the stuff you stripped away the carpet. You hated the roofing. That was no good. The green waste from your lawn, all of that made possible that kind of durable value of the household. But where did it go? Well, it went somewhere else taking care of by someone else, and I don't need to think about it because it's been turned into a hill somewhere that I wouldn't even notice if I drove past.

Speaker3: [00:28:49] It's interesting to how it becomes a set size as nature with the capital and to I mean, I'm sure it's no accident that the green grass or maybe a forested area that grows over is meant to represent that most sublime form of nature. Right. So there's a kind of a twisted logic to the whole thing as well, taking these products of petro modernity and consumption and repackaging them into, you know, beautiful landscape number one, you know, screensaver or green grass. It's a really interesting kind of aesthetics. But Josh, so then would you argue that perhaps to get away from this consumption waste simplicity that we seem to be wrapped up in should we just let all our garbage hang out? Should we just let it let it be? Let it pile up. Let let us all see the garbage, the trash that we make instead of trying to pretty it up and paper it over.

Speaker5: [00:29:49] Well, in a way, yes. Two points I want to make on that one is that we wouldn't just see the stuff. We would see people. When Vincent created the the landfill, one of the things he was hoping to accomplish by that was to remove people from dumps. Because what happened when you had open waste is you would attract people who would sift through it to find reusable, recyclable products. And by burying end, by burying it and treating it all as unusable, useless rescue. You sort of remove that from foreclose that from from being possible so that if you left waste more open and if you had a closer and more proximity, people would think of that as horrible, like, oh no, the smells and the and how offensive it would be. But they would also quickly see people from their community, maybe people they wouldn't see otherwise in the open, picking through it and looking for things of value. So the benefit there is not just that it would make us. It would force us to reflect on sort of the material that we produce and its environmental consequences, but also on the society that we live in, that we produce and the inequalities that they involve.

Speaker5: [00:30:58] So I find that that's actually a positive thing about parts of the world where you have sort of open dumping and you have communities of people who make a living on dumps in various ways. Normally, though, that's seen as anti, modern and backward, and it's something we should get away from because it's unsanitary and all those poor people, how horrible it really is. No one wants to see poverty in front of them. Right. And it makes them uncomfortable. The only other thing I'd say is that if you had if you this could work, having closer proximity to waste, if we scaled it differently because collecting the waste from whole city, whole regions and piling it together, that becomes unworkable. You know, basically, landfills become necessary in their current form. If you have mega landfills and mega markets of waste distribution, if you can limit them to communities and neighborhoods, then they become less like landfills and they become more like composting piles, shared disposal spaces that can be used, reused, played in even in a variety of ways. Waste becomes a lot less alienating and terrifying and poisonous and destructive if it's scaled down to a manageable size.

Speaker4: [00:32:12] As we're having this conversation, I have this acute, rather vivid childhood memory of driving from my parent's house to my grandparents house in the south suburbs of Chicago and passing just one of these waste mountains watching it grow over the years. In the summer, when the windows of the car were open, you could smell this really distinctive smell that I can't really like into anything else at night, so you could watch the methane flares burning. You know, it was a really fascinating landscape to me. As a child, I kept wondering what that thing was and why I kept getting bigger every year and only later discovered it was one of these landfill sites for the city of Chicago. You have a very interesting approach, Josh, to thinking about waste, and I wanted to give you a little time to talk about it. You've talked about the the long shadow that Mary Douglas has cast over waste theory and differentiated your own approach. I think you describe as a more bio semiotic approach to thinking about waste, which allows you, among other things, to take into account multi-species relations so that waste pits or landfill areas are not only, you know, human landscapes, but they're fundamentally multi species landscapes too. Do you want to talk a little bit about that, maybe connecting the bio semiotic to the multi species?

Speaker5: [00:33:26] Sure. I mean, to be sort of be fair, Douglas is amazing and I it was incredibly important to me. I don't know if you remember Dominic, but she was. She also figured somewhat prominently in my undergraduate piece. I do sure she she really brought me into anthropology in some important way. So as much as I disagree with some of the effects she's had, I think that has more to do with how people have used her and less about her specifically. But yeah, I guess Bio Senseonics is one of the ways that I've tried out to think through the kind of limitations of what's popularly thought of as the Douglas approach. Her approach is typically glossed as, as you both know, lost as dirt being matter out of place. Strictly speaking, she didn't say that waste was a matter out of place. She has a section in her book Purity and Danger, where she says that rubbish, if it's in the right place, for example, a landfill, it doesn't really bother anyone that maybe doesn't even seem all that dangerous or troubling. We might disagree with her about that, but her point is that it depends on context, how it's being valued, how anything is being valued, and that's a perfectly appropriate insight and very important. But you know what? She was interested mostly in people. Why shouldn't she have? Then she was a social anthropologist. But the fact is, I don't think you can study waste in any close detail without concerning ourselves with non-human beings.

Speaker5: [00:34:52] And I don't just mean that because waste and have environmental impacts. I also mean that the smell and the different qualities of your average pile of waste almost inevitably is going to attract other beings to it. So apart from being a purely environmental bad that's going to impact in some way the world around it and therefore index or represent human destruction of the environment, which is, I think, how landfills and waste are typically seen. If you work at waste sites, as I did, if you get close to waste, you'll find all sorts of critters and creatures and things trying to get at it right. And you know, so partly the bias ionic approach is just meant as a as a heuristic to remind us that perspectives on waste are not simply held by people, we're not the only ones who regard it. Otherwise, you'd find seagulls as readily on, you know, in your garden as you did on the beach or at a dump. But you don't. You find seagulls more where there's decaying matter. Right? And that's because they're attracted to it. And so for a seagulls, a landfill might be more like a beach because of the kinds of smells that are generated. Now, if you work at a landfill, you're going to have to learn how to deal with seagulls if you go anywhere near the open space. They learn to deal with you, but it's sort of mutual mutual disrespect. And aside from those kinds of interactions between different organisms that are sort of macro level, a landfill, you know, you were talking Dominic about flaring methane.

Speaker5: [00:36:26] The reason methane comes from landfills when they're breaking down organic matter is because of microbes within landfills that are engaging in methanogenic. And that process of breaking down organic compounds is going to happen when you have land, when you have sort of conditions where there's intense heat and pressure or there's no oxygen, which allows for anaerobic microbes to thrive. Point being that the regulatory compulsion that you have in North America to do something about your methane, either by flaring it off or trying to create an energy plant that would sort of take the the energy from produce energy from the methane it draws from the landfill, which is what the one I worked at did. There are different options, but you have to do something about it to satisfy the Clean Air Act of the United States. So that's a product of what microorganisms are doing, not about what humans think about waste or what we think about being matter being in or out of place. It's about specific non-human organisms engaging with waste and making consequences that we have to make sense of and deal with. So I think that attention to non-human beings, what their purpose is, goals and representations are not only becomes necessary if you understand the waste context, but also is necessary if you're going to understand how waste workers, waste companies, waste markets, waste regulations work in practice.

Speaker3: [00:37:51] I wanted to ask you about those workers, actually, since you brought them up, because it seems to me that the non-human creatures and critters, the insects, the bacteria, the seagulls. Don't have a lot of semiotics that they're necessarily being affected by, and yet the human laborers at those sites are facing a set of sort of regimes of value around what work is valuable and what places. It's good to work with, good to work at. And I wonder if you heard from the workers themselves what their sort of points of pride or negative points were around the labor that goes into waste work?

Speaker5: [00:38:36] Right? Well, first thing I'd say is that I actually think that the organisms are impinged in various ways by semiotics. So just to give you one example. A lot of landfills will play the sounds of screaming seagulls at the open of the landfill of seagulls in peril in order to confuse seagulls and keep them away. In other words, that is semiotic work because they're trying to imagine how seagulls interpret fear and danger and so on anyway. That being said, one 100 percent correct. Because because landfill, very workplace, I sort of naively assumed, oh, the main thing that's going to impact workers is going to be feeling dirty and polluting and so on. Some of them definitely felt that way, and there were workers that were made fun of for having very clean uniforms who never got dirty or who were grossed out by going near the face of the landfill or certain substances at the landfill. So that happened. But for the most part, the complaints that people had were about management and, you know, typical structural arrangements between management and and workers. So, you know, are they giving us enough breaks? Are they working us too hard? They never were, and they always were.

Speaker5: [00:39:51] So there's this kind of general dissatisfaction that was expressed by workers about how management was treating them, and also a complimentary nostalgia about how it used to be better in one way or another. And sometimes the way it used to be better would be about the waste. It would be the waste used to be better and the management used to be better. We used to get better waste that meaning waste that you could pick through and find stuff to resell or to take home, you know, and it didn't used to be this disgusting. Another example I give is one thing that really drove the workers I worked with crazy was when trucks would pass by and quote dust them, which meant you were driving really too fast pass to worker picking on the side of the road, working on the side of the road and a huge cloud of dust would hit them. And this was seen as more offensive to some than any nasty substance you might work with at the landfill because it index sort of a lack of an index to disregard sort of a lack of respect from truck drivers.

Speaker3: [00:40:54] Yeah, no, I can say that.

Speaker5: [00:40:56] Yeah, in terms of what people valued or took pride in, if you were a laborer, you had a lot of autonomy so that you could, you could, in theory, take long breaks and no one would notice or you could walk out and be all alone without anyone telling you what to do for hours at a time. And there were guys I worked with who passed up a chance for a promotion because they didn't want to have a union job, a higher paid job, but one that would have your supervisors staring at you all the time. Mm hmm. Right. So some landfills being big open landscapes can provide that level of freedom for some workers who enjoy. Yeah, you get to take waste home once in a while, but in general, enjoy being outside all day long, being unbothered.

Speaker2: [00:41:40] Yeah, that's interesting.

Speaker4: [00:41:42] So given this, I mean, given some of the interests you have, what do you think about the. Maybe I'm overestimating this or kind of making it sound like a bigger thing than it is, but what we might call the kind of metabolic turn in the human sciences, the interest in metabolism as a way of, say, among the Marxian of engaging capitalism, among others, for just thinking about circulation, as you said, energy and waste. There's a nexus there. There's a nexus there that seems to be charismatic at this moment.

Speaker5: [00:42:12] Yeah, I the idea of metabolic rift that John Bellamy Foster in particular has promoted. I've always found really attractive, and I would say that there are elements of that, but I don't name it explicitly that we're in that motivated parts of my book. The reason I like metabolic rift is this very old Marxian notion of the sort of material conditions that provide for our existence in increasingly becoming distanced from us or become taken for granted to such an extent while we might be acting against them and vice versa. I think landfills are a great example of a kind of perpetual metabolic rift where we're sort of taking for granted our our ability to continue regenerating brand new. Commodities over and over again with no consequence, and I think landfills allow for that metabolic rift to be disavowed for longer and longer and longer and longer accept moments where it erupts into public conversation and makes us have to reflect on who we are. And again, this is for me how they're similar to mass shootings, where you know, there's an eruption and suddenly a conversation, but then it goes away again. If anything, all the fear of the 80s that landfills would. We were running out of landfill space. That's all sort of disappeared. William Rafferty, in his book Rubbish First Written Thing in 1991, basically pointed that out. But like the United States, is not going to run out of space for landfills as much as people are panicked about it. And indeed, it seems like landfills aren't going anywhere. So we're not going to have to be confronted with that rift, if you like, for quite some time. In another sense, I like the notion of metabolism because as you were suggesting Dominic, it connects issues of energy to issues of political economy, to issues of the environment, as opposed to there being an economic anthropology, a political anthropology and environmental anthropology. It requires all of them sort of feeding into each other with a common set of concerns.

Speaker4: [00:44:20] But I think your work does, and it's I think it's exemplary of that nexus. I wanted to give you a chance because you spend a little time in the United Kingdom working with our friend Catherine Alexander, and among the projects you were working on, there were economies of recycling. And I know you did some really interesting writing about the relationship of energy and waste, the efforts to create clean energy economies and green capitalism. That would and again, not that this is a thing of the past. I think it's a thing of the president also obviously a politics of the future. As you look across Europe, the idea of finding ways to feed waste back into the production of biofuels is something that's very actively not only being researched but implemented. So do you want to share with us some of your of your thoughts on that research and kind of what you came up with?

Speaker5: [00:45:05] So essentially, what happened is after I completed my research on landfills, I moved to the UK and was asked if I wanted to study more landfills. And I said I'd much rather study something more, something different, like an alternative waste practice on this project. I was on the Waste the World project, and that's when I started working with Catherine Alexander. Were you honestly

Speaker1: [00:45:29] Just getting tired of hanging around landfills? You can. You can tell us.

Speaker4: [00:45:31] It's perfectly understandable.

Speaker5: [00:45:34] It's more. It's so much tired. More. I was excited at the idea that there could be a different way of doing it right. But oh, you know, if only we could take out all the organic waste and break it down separately so that anaerobic digestion is this method that's quite old and quite simple. It's really just you, you know, have a container or a hole in the ground with a tarp over it and dump the organic waste in. Because oxygen is removed, the anaerobic microbes can go to work and convert the organic waste into usable fertilizer that incidentally doesn't smell. And in methane, hey, it's composting. It's composting, except composting can be open air composting, which is the bacterial rather than anaerobic. But, but and there's slightly different processes. But yeah, it became a big hit for within the UK because it both provided a form of quote renewable energy and it provided a way to divert material from landfill, which both of which were required by new EU directives, neither of which I don't think the UK wanted to go along with, but they didn't have a choice. So back then, anyway, so right. Things are different now. A little different. But so anyway, yeah, so there's all this effort and all this excitement, and I got excited too when I was interviewing, you know, engineers and technical people, inventors and farmers and all these people that were using these things. But what ended up I ended up becoming a bit cynical about it, to be honest with you, mostly because a lot of the same problems that bedevil landfills were reoccurring in these sort of new fangled composting sites because they didn't change any of the basic conditions of wasting waste practice, of consumer practice and of economic production.

Speaker5: [00:47:26] And so it doesn't matter what you do on the back end, having people sort out their kitchen waste, they're still thinking of waste as something eliminated from their lives. That is something that, you know, throwing something out the door. They don't want to know where it goes and they don't ever want to see it again, and they don't want to think about it. And the infrastructure in place is all they're meant to preserve that illusion for them. So some of the things I wrote, I think somewhat controversially, was that look wonderful anaerobic digester or a paralysis or gasification thermal treatment plant can be exactly the same as a landfill if the sort of interest. Structure supporting it is still about producing mass waste, making mass waste go away and making us forget about it. Right. If if all that's the same, you know, even if at the end of the day the, you know, the carbon accounting seems better because, you know, less methane is going into the atmosphere. That's great. But that's not all there is to these waste technologies. They're also they also affect our imaginations and our social lives, and we have to take that seriously, too.

Speaker3: [00:48:30] You know, Josh, when you were talking earlier about the landfill and the beautification of creating this landscape and the grassy knolls and the sort of the tucking away and covering up of landfill, it was reminding me to a little bit of the movement of cemeteries or graveyards from the center of towns and cities in their early parts of settler colonialism here in the United States, when graveyards were right next to the church and right in the middle of the town so that you could go and visit and then at some point, maybe in the 50s or 60s or I'm going to say around that time got moved out to the outskirts, right, so that you didn't have to gaze upon the headstones. And these graveyards became much more like parks and green and grassy, of course. So it got me to thinking about whether there or whether you found any parallels between mortuary practices and burying of humans, I guess, or maybe animals and the practices of landfill. Are there any kind of component parts? Is that something that you've thought about at all, whether there's relationships between those two sets of ideals or practices?

Speaker5: [00:49:45] I actually, I have. That's sort of how I conclude my book. I'm not great at offering policy suggestions, but the one I sort of propose that toward the end of the book is that we get buried in landfills. Yeah. And and that we combine mortuary practice with waste management practice and partly for the reason you mentioned that there is an interesting parallel there where forgetting about waste is connected to forgetting about and denying death. Yeah. And I think the two go together. The other thing I think that is you didn't mention, but I think you'd agree, happens around the same time as you're getting graveyards sort of repositioned in terms of public space. You also are getting on in many places changes in the way people do and think about elder care where old folks homes become. Increasingly this, as I think Barbara Meyerhoff wrote about this kind of process of hiding or concealing the elderly and people that are closer to death in the same way that we hide death in other ways. And I think that there are interesting parallels there in terms of at the landfill there. I started thinking about this partly because they're dangerous places and someone had died there just a short time before I started working there.

Speaker5: [00:51:03] And there is a sense in which people would sort of talk about and think about ghostly presences in, in and around the landfill that I in some cases, very metaphorical talking about, you know, a family that lived when this was a farm. You know that one of the workers is related to thinking about growing up there as a kid. There was this sense of of an absent present, but also there would be, you know, there was at least one person I worked with who was convinced that his mother's ghost was haunting the house located on the landfill, that he was worried about the spirit of the work of the worker who died at the landfill. People talked about death as a possibility because occasionally someone would get horribly injured and it would be something to joke about to, you know, to talk and think about. So I think that people, I suspect that the more time you spend with waste, the more it makes you reflect on those kinds of questions. Maybe not everybody, but definitely the workers that I spent the most time with.

Speaker3: [00:52:09] Yeah, yeah. Just the burial itself. So that the mother, the mother's ghost. Was she haunting the house that was sitting over the landfill because her stuff was in the landfill where she was her spirit connected to her things? Was that the idea?

Speaker5: [00:52:26] I think she would, you know, I think she, like most spirits, she was haunting a person, OK, but the person worked at the landfill and state the landfill and actually his for the house he was staying in was on the landfill and not on it, like directly on the landfill property, like, you know, down slope. But there was at one point they wanted to bulldoze that house to create a new water retention tank, and it was their right to do so. They owned it and so they evicted him, and he was genuinely worried about not having a relationship with his mother anymore, his deceased. If you had to leave the house and took as much of the stuff from the house as he could, hoping that her ghost would sort of cling to it and follow him to his next place residence, and it did so that worked out. So, so it is the case that there is a kind of, you know, a sort of a residue that attaches to the spiritual residue that attaches to the things themselves. But but, you know, I don't want to give the impression that he was he was an exceptional person. Let me put it that way. But you know, there are other things where not far from, where the landfill is, where two of the landfills were in the community was an old graveyard that had flooded and famously a crook had been running the grave, had been running the graveyard and didn't bury people and I think buried them deep enough.

Speaker5: [00:53:47] I don't think he used he he pretended to use better coffins than he actually used. So I think he would sell people good coffins and then he would put them in crummy coffins that broke down. And and at one point the I'm told a bunch of bodies started surfacing. Dogs would come home carrying someone's limb, you know, that kind of thing. Whoa. Yeah, it's pretty upsetting. So partly there is a the reason I mentioned this is that there's also this sense in which this part of the country has an interesting relationship to go and remains and leftovers that I got sort of really interested in their stories like that or their stories about across the street from that graveyard. There was a person who ran seances for any number of years, getting people to talk to the ghosts of celebrities. So there's something about this community that's been processing bodies and ghosts in an unusual way, and now they process waste for people. And I don't think that's an accident, but I haven't thought through exactly what.

Speaker2: [00:54:46] Yeah, that's

Speaker4: [00:54:47] Interesting not to go to to mark seeing on us, but I mean, in a society that sacrifices commodities, it makes sense that there would be kind of hauntings and spectral presences of commodities where they go to to die and where they go to to rest in peace, which is landfill. So it kind of makes sense as a way, Josh may be pivoting towards your new your new project. The book you're working on an almost finished with that is quite fascinating in its own right. I thought I might see if you had any thoughts about not just the regular waste of late capitalism, which I think you've really highlighted and analyzed with great critical vigor. But also, it seems that in the era of climate change, you know, there are, you know, also spectacular instances of disaster waste. And I'm thinking, particularly of Hurricane Harvey, which created a kind of unimaginable eight million cubic yards of landfill waste just from mostly from people's homes, getting saturated with floodwater and then having carpets and drywall being torn out and so forth. I mean, it's such an unimaginable volume. I mean, I can't even it's like, this volumetrics, I can't even think in those terms. And yet, you know, this is something that's become all too routine in Houston is every time there's a major flood and there have been three of these in the past three years. There's just an immense amount of home waste that has to be hauled out somewhere. And so there's a whole new politics of, you know, what to do about that in the city. Do you have any thoughts about, you know, disaster waste if that's an OK way of describing it?

Speaker5: [00:56:16] Sure. I mean, I think it's a it's it's hard to think of a better example of how the kind of stories about I think you put it very well by saying spectacular waste have changed over time in the same way that stories of particular violence have changed so that we started by talking about how going from going postal to school shootings to mass shootings represent various changes in how we think about violent emergencies. Similarly, I think there's a kind of politics of emergency surrounding new, new and horrific forms of waste in the Anthropocene that come from various, you know, human created problems. So some of the ones I've been interested in lately include space debris or orbital space debris that sort of raining down on people every once in a while, usually people in Wisconsin for some reason. At least part of the reason is that some of the trajectories for the sort of orbiting objects tend to pass through pass by Wisconsin. And so various sort of components of Russian satellites and pieces have fallen through there over the years. But I think things like orbital space debris like Pacific, the Pacific garbage patch, right, that people have written talk quite a lot about or indeed the waste that comes from hurricanes or quite a few people talked about the waste that came from the Japanese tsunami from a number of years ago.

Speaker5: [00:57:48] I think that these it's not enough to have a love canal, right? And anymore, you don't have a story that simply focuses on a particular site that could have the possibility of having a particular. Attributable cause or person responsible or company responsible, right? So with Love Canal, famously, you know, a chemical company buried barrels and then years later, various health risks were the result, leading to the creation of a lot of environmental regulation that we take for granted today, including Superfund sites. Now there's a kind of fascination with waste emergencies that have a different scale and different temporality that come unexpectedly, that come all at once, or that cover such an unimaginable scales like, you know, if you've ever seen depictions of orbital space debris, it looks kind of like the Earth has dandruff just so, so many, you know, like half a million pieces floating around. How could you ever think, conceive of it or do anything about it? And the way people talk about the garbage patches, it's the same thing. So I think now with the politics of waste, when people talk about the waste crisis, I think it has a different meaning to it because it's associated with the politics of emergency and with a different kind of way of thinking about scale and time that they bring to bear.

Speaker3: [00:59:11] Yeah, that's great. I love that idea of the Earth's dandruff. It's sort of like the Upside Down and Stranger Things.

Speaker1: [00:59:17] I like waste emergency, too. Yeah, that's

Speaker3: [00:59:18] Good. So, Josh, you're doing really interesting new stuff on military ways. Do you want to give us a little glimmer of that?

Speaker5: [00:59:26] Well, sure. The book's almost done on that. It's going to be called probably war machine waste. In a way. It's sort of like thinking about the military as this very unusual the American military. Is this very unusual, very unusual in world history because we amassed this enormous military for a war that technically was never fought. So the Cold War remained cold for the most part, and quite a lot of the planes and ships and things that we created for the purpose of World War three never got destroyed in battle. I think that's unusual in world history. Normally you build a big army, it gets it, gets used up, consumed as it were. So consequently, it's been half a century since Eisenhower's pronouncement that we should be careful of the Military-Industrial Complex then. And after that time period, we were left with a whole bunch of stuff that is no longer useful and something has to be done with it. So I was sort of interested in the various civilians that are making use of interacting with bits of the American war machine in in creative ways, some of which are actively challenging narratives of American military that are usually part of, you know, celebrating them and visiting a war museum or or what have you.

Speaker5: [01:00:48] So people not memorializing military waste but reusing it or making use of it in various ways. And that sort of started the book. And then it became a larger reflection on how the U.S. has been shaped by militarism. And part of the reason for this, I think, is that a lot of really important and valuable discussion has gone into American militarization in terms of military bases, service workers, anti-vax activism. So, you know, the work of Catherine Lutz, Kenneth MacLeish, lots of people, really important and terrific. But what it typically does is focus on military sites and military personnel, which can give the impression that it's very separate and distance from the rest of American society. And much is with landfills. I want to kind of reconnect things that seem alienated and discontinuous. So I was sort of interested in the ways in which thinking about the military in the U.S. almost like a landfill, how is it? How does pollution seep out of it into the rest of American society?

Speaker4: [01:01:53] And so the research was was mostly done in the United States itself, looking at the kind of apparatus of war that has not been expended and that is still kind of moldering. Or did you think about this in terms of the global impact of American military waste?

Speaker5: [01:02:08] I have thought about the kind of global impact, but the books primarily empirically is based in the U.S., but I sort of have occasion to think about it as a global project, and I would like to think more about that going forward. And there's great work being done by other people looking at it in those terms. Liaison, for example, got her degree from UC Irvine working in Laos on an ordinance that was sort of left behind as a result of the sort of secret war conducted by the U.S. there, which is a form of military waste that has, you know, is radically shaping their lives, but is normally ignored in discussions about U.S. militarism or U.S. empire today, even though it's sort of a lasting effect of U.S. Empire. So I think that works incredibly important. My own book? Has a slightly narrower focus.

Speaker4: [01:03:04] Still an important one, though. Good.

Speaker3: [01:03:05] Yeah, we're going to look forward to seeing it out. When is it due out, Josh?

Speaker5: [01:03:09] Oh, well, I just I just now I'm finishing it, so I have has to get we'll see TBD, TBD.

Speaker4: [01:03:17] But I have no doubt that it'll be out soon. And your book, which came out in 2016, we should mention the title waste away working and living in a North American landfill that's from California press an eminent and esteemed anthropology press. Josh, it has been a delight to talk to you and reconnect. Thank you so much for taking questions on your research. Ancient and and new, right?

Speaker2: [01:03:40] Yeah, turn it all back together to yeah,

Speaker4: [01:03:42] You tied it up with a bow. It's pretty impressive.

Speaker5: [01:03:46] Thanks. And it was a total pleasure. Really appreciate talking, you guys.