So one of the things that we've been talking about is why have a podcast for the Center for Energy and Environmental Research and the Human Sciences, or what we colloquially, colloquially call around here, serves What's the point of trying to create an audio form for this discussion that we've been having here at Rice University and in other locations. That has to do with really pressing questions around how we use energy, how we encounter it, how we think about it, how we theorize it, and also the impacts that, that has or potentially will have in the future upon our various ecosystems and biospheres and environments. And so the podcasts is one way to get that information circulating in a different way. And so in some ways it really is a kind of Ecology of practice or a sort of ecology of knowledge that we want to bring into the fold here. That was very well done, but it was a very cold open. So you should introduce yourself. Oh, my name is semi Hao and I am one of the core faculty in sounds, the Center for Energy and Environmental Research in the human sciences. An acronym, which I can now pronounce well and almost fluidly. So also department, I'm also in the Department of Anthropology at Rice University. And I am Dominic Boyer, the director of sense. And we are sitting here in the basement of Fondren Library. The digital media comments, where we are putting together our podcast, the cultures of energy podcast, which somebody just said is all about finding ways to connect. They're really vibrant intellectual world of energy, humanities and arts, and also environmental humanities and arts to broadcast it. Get it out there. Because the fact is that in just the last few years that we've been working collectively as a faculty group here at sans, we've had really amazing scholars and thinkers and activists com, and artists come and visit with us and talk with us. And so it seems sort of criminal to kind of keep that locked up just in our own individual brains here. And instead we want to share the wealth because we've had fantastic interlocutors. Yeah, it's been really amazing. And it is said that we only just learned about podcasts like three months ago. Should have been doing pod goes from the beginning. But but better late than never, right? That we were born to do this anyway, because we both back in the olden days had radio show that it's true. Why don't you, why don't you talk about your radio show just so everyone you get your bone a few days out there. Well, my radio show was actually shared it with a collaboration with someone and he chose the name, which I didn't, was not exactly in love with, but it was called music to break records by, I don't know. I kind of like it's okay and how to kind of a punk feel to it. And the fact is, is that back in those days we did actually play vinyl. And so these were really records, not World Records outs and running a race. I don't ask. I will entendre. And did you actually break those vinyl records? Well, no. They were property. The university didn't really want to break the records. But I guess the other important thing to know is that this radio show took place from two in the morning until five in the morning on well, I was going to say Saturday night, but it was really suddenly morning. That's actually a common feature because the show that I did on WB are you in Providence, Rhode Island was from well, first I started off three to six AM. The show's called Blue Monday. So it was playing blues to a group of very depressed people in the Rhode Island tri-state area from three to 06:00 AM, depressed and drunk people. And then I got promoted to the 12 to 3M, which was by contrast ICA much more alert audience. But I don't remember quite how I made it through those nights. I'm glad that we don't have to podcast at through this exam. Yeah. Well, that too I am gig on a Saturday night. Sunday morning was actually full of lots of drunk folks too, and they will call up the station because we had a landline phone. They could call up and make suggestions and almost always we would play if we could find it in the stacks, we would almost always play any requested saw. Yeah. Whether it was a break or someone got portray, they always seem to have some kind of crisis around them. That is good. That is, that is, it makes you miss the fact that because we don't broadcast the slide, like we're not going to have that option of having people yet be able to like call in and ask questions, which will be great. Maybe that's something to think about for the future. Right now, what we're struggling with is making sure that we get the tapes mixed right, so that you don't have one vote, one of our voices in one year and one of the other voice in the other ear because that's the level the equipment we're working with right now. Yeah, that would be utterly annoying. Yeah, it ends up but it'll get there, folks. It'll get there. Can I just say one more thing about the wonderful world of radio broadcasting back in the day. And that was, is that we could smoke cigarettes. Oh, yes, we did in the room. Except when the rock the rock deejays came in at six AM, they were really ****** at us if we had been smoking the studio, even if we open the door and everything. I remember that that was a cause for a lot of a lot of friction. But anyway, so this is, this is our first podcast and we have a terrific interview that we're going to play in a second with Paolo bachelor loopy, the author of The wind up girl and the water knife, who came to Rice about a month ago and did a terrific reading and it was really fun to meet him. Interesting guy. These are two terrific books in which he sort of extending the kinds of trends in our current ecological climatological path, taking those forward and imagining what say Southwestern United States might look like after decades of drought, of super drought have set in. What now what Bangkok might look like. Thailand with sea level rise and, and a massive sort of geopolitical conspiracies among Jim, genetically modified organism companies and all of this stuff going on. So the works are great. And he's, he's quite a firecracker that Paolo, I was impressed with his incredible kind of unstoppable energy. Yes, yes. He had seemed to have these standing reserves of internal powers, of perception and energetic life that really, really impressive throughout the day and the evening. And so I really, yeah, super, super dynamic person. And my first impression of him was actually encountered online when we were trying to figure out how in the Hack to pronounce his name, right. And had a long conversation about all of the possibilities that it, it could take all the forums, it might take Bagchi the loop. Bagchi gloopy, bossy gloopy, Moscow loop. I don't know. He kept putting the OH, on the end. It's clearly an I at the end of his name. Well, we had some, I think there was a moment of confusion about that vowel, okay, as well. But anyway, we somehow this got resolved because the male has actually posted something online. Yes. Helpful to help really help to instruct people as to how to pronounce his name. And he even admits, and this shows his sense of humor. He even admits that he himself was not quite sure what the proper pronunciation was because he had selected a pronunciation. So here's an interview with a man who's going to give us a how to guide not only to his own name, to the arts of survival in the Anthropocene. So we'll take it from here. Here we go. Welcome Paola betcha gloopy to Rice University. Welcome to the basement of Fondren Library. Welcome to sense. It's great to have you with us. Thanks for having me. So this is the middle of a kind of action-packed day at Rice. And you've already been having some interesting conversations. And I was curious whether to start in a completely random place, whether you would want to react to a debate that we've been having here already about whether the terrestrial is becoming a more exciting place to do, precise for sci-fi to do its work than the extra terrestrial. Wow. So for me, this is one of the things that you're doing. Yeah, and early, really impressive laterally. For sure, the terrestrial is more interesting, partly because I think that the extra terrestrial is ********. Expand, uh, well, I mean, I mean, fundamentally, I think that there's, there are these certain narratives that exist in science fiction specifically that are about us getting off this dirt ball planet and inheriting the stars. And I think about that is, is what it sort of feels like, is sort of an extension of the sort of the great American westward expansion narrative is like there must be something to explore. There must be something more to explore. There must be something more to explore. Well, we've run out of places on earth. Well, now it's the stars. And, and that's in its seductive from a sort of a narrative sort of like there must be something more to explore perspective. But, but, but I think that it also sort of encourages the sense that like that that the, that the Earth is a largely disposable object that we're supposed to be deserting. And that we, that we, you know, I mean, all the narratives of sort of human expansion and survival all basically depend on the idea. And in fact, explicitly in many cases in science fiction novels, on the idea of a destroyed Earth. While we've gone on into the stars like in fact, the Earth is often depicted as a, as a, as a devastated ecological zone. And, and, and it's, it's sort of like this disposable. Oh yeah. That was just our disposable starting point. Like, who cares if we'd love to garbage dumped behind us? So there's some aesthetic things that I kind of have a problem with that right from the start. But, but the thing that actually really strikes me is the idea that we think that our best human chance of survival lies on some place like Mars. You know, we have a hard time surviving in Antarctica where you still have free water and free air. Uh-hmm. And and so the idea that like that, that a place that doesn't provide literally anything that word bio adapted to require. It is a better option for us. Then what we have right here, I think is sort of putting the cart before the horse. I think that's just sort of a strange thing going on there. It says, oh yeah, the stars are our big opportunity. It's like there is nothing out there when, when people cross the oceans to the quote, New World and decided to invade America, there was actually air and water. There are these basic things. There was land to till there was, there really was opportunity for those people who could go and engage in genocide. So the idea though, so they trying to transpose that concept into this sort of extra terrestrial expansion fantasy, I think is sort of missing a couple of key details. And, and so I feel like There's there's just, we're just sort of missing something there narratively. And I think that there's sort of a, there's just sort of a base stupidity. They're saying that our future lies off planet. If, if we solve our problems on present Earth within the limits of this space, probably we can also figure out how to live in other limited environments and other places if we fail to sorted out here, I'm pretty sure that those limited environments that we managed to establish and other places will quickly die off. You know, just in the same way that if a whale supply ship doesn't make it down to Antarctica, suddenly things get real bidder real fast. And so I just, yeah, I just don't, I just don't take the extra terrestrial explain. Explanation, fantasy very seriously. I mean, it's interesting. I just was reflecting for people of our age who grew up with Carl Sagan's Cosmos, who grew up with Star Trek and its various iterations. And I was going to say, you know, we haven't had Star Trek since 2005. And then they announced one to write it down here, one so that blue, that thesis out of the water. But that idea of, of, of this sort of like endless frontier with all of these opportunities for trade and conquest as you're saying. And we grew up with that sort of imagination of the extra terrestrial. And it seems like in the last decade, we're seeing these films like gravity and interstellar or even the Martian, where it's a much more sort of torture its relationship to the extra terrestrial. You'd like if we get, we just barely get above Earth orbit and then were destroyed. And gravity, you're trying to claw your way back with the remains of this wreckage or Interstellar, which is about devastation, economic and, and especially environmental devastation. But there, there's this weird sort of fantasy that we can get right to some kind of Minnesota makeshift new planet that we can create or with the Martian. Which is interesting, but this, you know, kind of what do they call it? Somebody called on Twitter, competence ****. That nasa can get us there. But even that is sort of fraud. So I don't know. It seems to me in a way, the moment we live in is pulling us back to earth as a sort of objective of reflection and an intervention. Interestingly, at the same time as those things are happening, you also have something like James SA course, The Expanse which is just about to go on to television. Which is, you know, an explicit sort of exploration of the idea of that moment when humanity Trent, transitions from being a solar system base species to an interstellar species. And it's really, you know, it's great fun space opera, all that kind of stuff. And it sells like hotcakes. And, and I really like the writers and all that kinda stuff. But it's like I also see that like I also see those narratives. We still have a hunger for those narratives. I think that they're consolidator I narratives. I mean, I think that's why we love them is because when you, when you have that story that like that, there are future opportunities, there are other places to go. This is not the end just because we nuke this spot or just because we devastate this spot. It doesn't mean it's the end of the awesome is I think you, you, you want to keep telling yourself that because it really looks awful otherwise, I mean, it really looks offloads like you pave the planet OL. And your work is, I mean, you know, again, from, from fans, readership. It is, things don't end, but they get incredibly complicated and they get incredibly difficult. And just even the project of survival becomes something that is really overdetermined by all these forces and technologies that we're familiar with now. But it's amazing how you're able to extrapolate them into the future. I'm really interested in how, how we adapt to whatever circumstances we find ourselves in. The one, the one narrative that if there's another narrative that I don't find interesting, one of them is like we're going to the stars. Hum. Or at least that I can't write because I'll admit I I read a certain amount of like Starship point myself, but but you know, there's the year that narrative that we're going to starts. But the other one is that the narrative of how apocalypse happens or what apocalypse looks like, or what collapse looks like. And we sort of seemed to have built a set of tropes around apocalypse and collapse that are really, really specific and almost always involves some small hardy band of survivors beset by motorcycle gangs. And I don't know why that is, but it's like it's the same **** an apocalypse every single time it's like your bio apocalypse is the same as your nuclear apocalypse is your savings, your drought apocalypse is the same. It's like, it's always the gang and it's always the hardy band, you know, and, and, and, you know, like when you see, you know, different countries devastated by war, when you see different countries devastated by environmental disasters, you see all of these other much weirder complexities where some pieces, a very normal life continue and some pieces are completely broken. And like everybody is sort of like, you know, the people who li versus the people who stay. Like there's all these different things that are going on inside of a site. It doesn't suddenly just become completely depopulated. And I'm far more interested in that space where every base trying to figure out like, wow, a lot of things are broken, but we're all still trying to figure it out. Those, those stories are more interesting to me. And there's more, I feel like there's just more, more potential in those in terms of like storytelling and things then just reverting down to that like, oh, we depopulated everything and now it's gangs. Because it also, I mean, I think also your work really, it breaks apart a lot of these sort of universalist myths that we live with about the future. That in so many ways you know what's great about your novels. I'm thinking, of course, of the windup girl and the water knife here are, or how important locality is, how important this and the breaking apart of what we would call globalization, right into its parts. And for different reasons, I think in both novels. But, but you sort of, I don't know if this is your message or not, but just this idea that locality matters or region matters so much to how this is going to unfold. Specificity, their specificity in and I think that this is something like yeah, there's that like if you can get dropped into that space where it's all about the generalities of something breaking as opposed to the specifics of something breaking. And it's like, you know, if you're going to talk about global warming, you say, Oh, we broke the world, but that's way too general. And then you're going to have to really go down and sort of like, you know, as you 0 down into a question of like, Well, where does the climate change? How does the climate change has an effect a specific region or how might it affect a specific region? The reason why sort of looked at the Western United States was that there's this incredibly fragile water infrastructure that exists in the western United States. And it's all highly engineered and sort of perfected around certain assumptions of climate. We assume that there's going to be this much snowfall in the Rockies. Therefore, there will be this much water flowing through the Colorado River, which will eventually arrived in California. And that's a really interesting assumption. And then it's like okay, so if we start changing the dials of those assumptions with climate change, now you see the vulnerability there, but you know the specificity of how that area might collapse, where all the states argued with each other and fight over state rights versus federal rights versus, There's farmers versus cities, the wealthy versus the poor. You know, those kinds of things. That's going to be a very different sort of climate change or drought apocalypse than the one that you see in Syria. Where what you see is a whole bunch of farmers get pushed off the land, people move into the cities that creates and rest. And then you have a different kind of apocalypse is entirely, which is a civil war. And, and knows those kinds of things that the specificity of those zones is going to define everything is specificity of culture, their specificity of, you know, like how much resilience a population has because they have access to certain kinds of technology or certain amounts of wealth or whatever the things are in. And I think that that's, I think that, that the only way that you can do interesting extrapolate or a work is to sort of start with a pretty clear understanding about what sort of the, the existing baseline situation is and a space, and then you can work out from there. But I think you do have to work at a pretty localized specific level. And honestly it's more interesting. There's just something interesting about the very deep specifics of someone's daily life. We love being inside of people's skin and living their lives in their, in their many times very different details from the ones that are part of our life. But we actually, we actually connect to those details if they're, if they're deeply lived in and they feel real to the characters and all of that only comes from that deep specificity, a place and culture and character inside of a space. I want to get, this is something I want to talk more about, but I also wanted to go to take a step backwards, step up or something and just ask you, at what point in your career did you decide that you write about a lot of topics and a lot of themes and a lot of different audiences. But did you have a kind of epiphany moment where you said, I've gotta write about, I extrapolate some of these really disturbing environmental trends and write about that. Or was it a more gradual thing? I'm just wondering if there was a moment where he said this is something I've and you found that you had a great voice for it. Yeah. That's actually it was sort of a, uh, sort of, uh, found obsession for me actually, when I was first starting out as a writer, really my goal was to just become a science fiction writer. I grew up reading science fiction. I love science fictional stories. I grew up reading things like H9 line. And I love those stories. I read William Gibson, I read Neal Stephenson. That was, that was my, you know, that was my crack or asters. Yeah. I mean, those are the those are like Ursula Le Guin, all these different people like they were. And that was when, when I, when I think about what reading is and what, what, what storytelling wise, it was almost always science fiction. There was a point where my stepmother actually forced me to read Steinbeck's the red pony because I was supposed to read something good instead of trash that I was reading. And it was like this most painful experience that I could possibly have trying to hack my way through this terrible, terrible story. And, and so when I became a writer, you know, the, the, the, the goal in my mind always was to write stories like the ones that I'd grown up reading. But over time, I think again, you sort of find some point of specificity or you find your specific obsessions. I mean, and I think a lot of this ends up connecting to your background and stuff. I mean, this is, I think there's that sort of mysterious thing that we talk about a writer finding their voice. And some of it is that I remember I wrote all these novels that didn't sell. And then I went back and started writing short stories. And this is after a decade of writing, he started writing some short stories. And you can trace, I mean, when I, so when I published pumps six and other stories, I actually all the stories are arranged in chronological order in that collection. And so you can actually see like my first short story is pocketful a dharma are the flute a girl are very much, very much science fictional stories in a sort of very classic sort of way, very cyber punk key or, you know, technologic, but they're just character arcs within strange futures basically. And then, then I wrote the people have sand in slag. And it was the first time that I suddenly thought how, you know, what, what if I used fiction as if this was going to explore a specific question? And there's, there and it's deliberately aimed at a specific question in the end, the thing that was in my mind was that I had an old boss. He'd always argued that we didn't have to worry about things like climate change or environmental degradation or whatever. Because human beings where a smart species and we would always figure out effects, right? And, and it aren't always stuck in my head. I had been an argument that he had quite a while before, but it is stuck in my head, this absolute conviction that technological sort of cleverness would save us. And, and, and I was like, okay, so, so that's fine. That's a theory, but what if the techno fix that we come up with is the wrong fix? And, and suddenly I realized that you could use a fictional story to illustrate that exact what-if. And that was kind of an aha moment for me where it was like, oh, my values and my ideas about the world now can be explained out in this way that like the, or these, That's a story about the future where people have rendered themselves through technology impervious to almost everything. They, they regrow their limbs. They can eat anything so they can basically eat sand and get nutrition out of it. Yeah, there's nothing that poisons them anymore. And as a result, they sort of untethered themselves from the entire biological web. And so they also don't care about it at all. Like it doesn't matter how polluted it is. Like there. At 1, the characters go out to a beach and it's covered in oil, and they light it on fire and kick back and enjoy the sunset through the, through the smoke. And for them it's a beautiful moment and I render it extremely beautifully in the story. It's like, huh, Isn't this romantic? Here we are live at the beach while we like the ocean on fire. And, and, you know, you could realize that you could make that whole argument about like Will is that the right fix? Like, uh, you know, they fixed it so that they know, aren't hurt by the pollutants? Certainly. But is that the right fix? And suddenly you can make that argument in fiction. I think that was like the aha moment and suddenly cracked open. A whole sequence of following stories where suddenly I was looking around at the world really, really differently sort of saying, Oh, where does this go? Well, you know, what happens with GMO foods? What happens with energy, what happens with peak oil? What happens with, you know, and suddenly you could sort of start creating these cascades. And I suddenly had things to write about, like more things that I knew what to do with Relay. And there's so many, I mean, just those, those cases are elaborated so effectively in those two novels that were just talking about. And, you know, kinda curious about the process. I mean, did you, did you have to do a lot of research on GMOs to sort of be able to do the windup girl or on like, I don't know, water rights to be able to do the water knife, those things. Well, I got into the specificity of it. I mean, where somebody who I guess considers himself to be a hard sci-fi writer where you want to get into those technologies, including like legal technology ray to understand your setting, right? Okay. So some of this is like just, you know, it's the water you swim in. Right? And so like when I was, especially when I was first starting to write my short stories and really starting to have some success. I, I was working for an environmental newspaper called High Country News. And so the news of the day that was coming across your desk all the time became this sort of your Zeit geist. And so there's a certain amount of just sort of like, you know, it's, you wouldn't call it research, but it's you're just being informed all the time. And, and so you saw that set of news stories about, you know, when when Monsanto and Scott had created a creeping bent grass, that was Jim, that was glass of eight resistant and that it got off the got off their test fields and got out in the world is a super weed and then they get fined by the USDA that you find like $500 thousand and they get, you know, and I gotta kinda get a slap on the wrist for doing that. And you're, That's an interesting piece of information that you sort of stick it near like Satchel and carry it around with you for awhile. And then you're hanging out near to like I live in a farming community and there are a lot of organic farmers and stuff and so, and they're all up in arms about a variety of different things that are going on with genetic engineering or with pesticides or whatever I write. Very close to me. There was a woman named Theo Coburn who did a bunch of pioneering research work into endocrine disruption and how synthetic chemicals can act like hormones on the human systems and, or on biological systems generally. And and so like your, your sort of whatever year is your environment is sort of your baseline of research. That's the stuff that starts you out thinking about these topics with water rights and drought and stuff like that. My family has a farm and and so we irrigate and we also have somewhat junior water rights on the upper the North Fork of the Gunderson. So so that means when somebody with more senior Rights puts a call on the river, it means our irrigation want to get shut off. So you suddenly start thinking about like, well, what does that mean if there's not enough water in the river for other people. So those are the starting points is just like your life and those those pieces that are already around you. But yeah, once you decide that you're going to do do the work and that's actually the focus of your work. Then there's all of this follow-on research that you end up doing. You start digging around and try and understand what are the implications for different scenarios. Or in the case of something like the windup girl, there was a point where I was like, Oh God, I think I have to go back to Thailand and spend a bunch of time there. And like I spent five weeks traveling around and asking a lot of questions because even though I had a conception for a book, he sort of had to ground-truth it to see whether or not it kinda worked in this space. And so you do things like that and then you read a time, you ask questions and then you sort of take your best shot and you find out what happens. You can find out what everybody says about it after the fact. But I think one of the things that's really striking about both these books is how many different, how many different, you know, sort of vectors you're able to weave together. You know, you're looking at both, right? I'm just trying to put them all together. My head in the windup girl, I mean, you've got, you know, refugee ASME and crisis and violence. You've got new religious movements. You've got the GMO technology with its, I guess unanticipated and anticipated sort of side effects. You've got, you know, an end to fossil fuels are nearly an end to fossil fuels. And then sort of new energy storage devices being invented. These incredible kink springs and the MEG add-ons that are amazing obviously. And you know, that's I mean, part of, part of what makes it so Telling I think as, as a vision is just how, how many of these are able to weave together. So I guess I was curious whether there are still sort of, you know, what I would again, calling the Anthropocene, right? This idea, we're in a new geological epoch defined by our sort of species actions over the past few 100 years are the elements of the Anthropocene that, that you don't want to write about. You haven't been able to get into the book so far. There's still some big issues that are sort of floating out there that you think could become the basis for something else? Oh, yeah. I mean, there I feel like they're everywhere. I mean, some of that I feel like you, you sort of at 1 or another. I realized that I touch on a concept and that I'd never explored the concept or like because. You know, any, any given book or any given story sort of ends up with it's sort of plot thrust that pushes you through to certain questions. But it leaves a lot of things only as sort of fringe explorations really. For me right now, the things that are most interesting, and I feel like I haven't gotten a handle on and is, We are a global species. We exist in our art. Our individual instances are global instances. And that's really interesting to me. The fact that, you know, if I have a cell phone, that mean something that's I'm connected not just to everybody on my cell phone, but that cell phone connects me to the Foxconn workers in, in China. It connects me to the lithium mines in Peru. It connects me to a whole range of things. You know, my, my instance here, I'm spread out all across the globe in terms of like my mouth is in different places. If I eat an apple from New Zealand, my mouth is in different places, my waist is in different places where, where, where things come from to feed me and where my stuff goes to die. I reach out all over the planet. And then I also have these sort of temporal imply impacts. So the decision that I make today, if I fly down to rice to see everybody here, you know, and contribute to a certain amount of global warming. I sort of the process, oh, here's another chunk of carbon for the atmosphere. That means that they're going to be temporal impacts that from my instance as well. And so then those will play out on my son's life more than they'll play out on my life. He's going to have to see what the rest of the century looks like as we roll towards 2100, you know, how many degrees of warming are we going to accept? But my decisions now are going to impact that. And so it's really interesting to sort of look at human beings as individual instances. And we're still very much attached to the sort of meet space concept of us as individuals like I think of myself as sitting here in this chair. And that might be an illusion and I might be, it might be partly limited by the fact that we lack a language to talk about ourselves as both globally spread out individuals and also temporally impactful individuals across scales of time, right? And, and so that, and so that's the thing that I'm really like. That's the thing I'm starting to like poke out right now and trying to figure out like, is there a, is there a language to talk about us? Is being a much more spread out kind of object than just, here's an individual person in my country, in my house with my family. You know, what am I really know? Tim Morton who you just, who you just met and had lunch with, has this term hyper object were talks about these things that are kind of two big and sort of multi phasic to be sort of grasp. And yet you like global warming. And yet they are something that affects all of us do their thing and there's writing we have to, but it's almost as though we're like our brains aren't equipped to comprehend them little and to act on them, right? We're wired as a species to sort of work at the tribal level a on the threats that were supposed to deal with are the ones that like we're embodied in a tiger come in at us and yeah, it's like I can react. We react really effectively. Not in C arrives like rustling of Yea, I think, oh ****, run or fight flight. And do those really well. Yeah. Yeah. And and those those really ephemeral sort of like long-term impacts that we have on the world or whatever that we don't. Yeah, it's hard for us to react to those. Wonder if we create a language around those kinds of things. You know, the, the tiger that does come and eat you in 50 years. Is there a way to, to give that a word? If C is way you can name that thing in a way that we can all start using it as a, as a useful object. I remember when I learned the word schadenfreude and which is to take pleasure in other people's suffering. Which is like my favorite word. And when I got that word, what it meant for how I interpreted the world around me like and each time you acquire a language bit that, that is, you know, it suddenly becomes this useful tool for manipulating and seeing and, and evaluating your environment around you. And so that's, that's what I'm really fascinated right now lives those kinds of ideas. Let me, let me run this by you because I want it. I feel like there's a really interesting tension in your work between, you know, all of us who do this work on, I think energy, environmental issues today, who are trying to see the impasses, who are trying to sort of spur change or trying to sort of think about alternatives. I feel like there's a strong, let's say, kinda preservationist impulse. It's that, Let's, let's return to the Holocene again, right? Like let's write our way back. We need to get back to you right now and we need to write it. Yeah. But then we need to go find the rows cabin and live in it, something. But I think there's like there's a kind of nostalgia in a fantasy to that, to what's interesting in your books is that so many of the characters are, these sorta, are kind of survivors and they've seen a lot of **** and they've been through a lot. And and yet And without giving any spoilers to the end of the water knife, I feel like this is one of these moments where you have the people who want to take things back the way they were and the people who said this is, we're in a new world now. It's got new rules, right? If we're going to survive, we have to live in this new world. And it reminds me a little bit, this is going to be a totally random shout out to Philip K. ****. But there's this short story he did called the days of perky Pat. Okay. Do you remember how to read this one? So again, very briefly. And with all apologies to Philip kit X ghost for getting any details wrong. But it's, you know, it's a standard post-apocalyptic sort of scenario where the parents are sitting around playing this sort of insipid game. You know, like a kind of a role-playing game type of thing that's based upon a sort of ideal, sort of 950 is smiley type of character, perky Pat. And they're totally but you know, there's sort of living in their fallout shelter, like living obsessing about the details in the past civilization. Meanwhile, their kids are sort of like C or we're going to go out and hunt and we're going to go out and, and, and so the, sort of, the punchline of the story is this increasing divide across generations between the people who can't let go and the people who write just say they don't know anything else. And so like that, what happens at the end of the water knife? I don't know. It feels to me like one of those moments where I'm just really curious to hear you talk a little bit about that. About letting go. Yeah, well, I mean, so, you know, I have really mixed feelings actually about some of the, some of the stuff my characters do in their stories. The characters exist inside of the rules of their world. And so within the rules of their world. And I set up the rules pretty badly for them really. I set up the rules saying, there isn't a whole lot for you. Survival is hard. There are many zeros, some choices for you. Good luck. So in a lot of ways, I stack the deck in a, in a really very deliberate way. And so the choice range that these characters experience extremely narrow. So they're nostalgia is when, when a character is sort of trying to work off of that old map of the world. Trying to believe that, well, this is the way things should, ought to be er, damit like they, you know, this is the way things should be. It's like yeah, they should but they ain't too bad. You know, there's there's that sort of SAT versus the ones where like, you know what, I'm gonna do, whatever it takes and I'm just going to try to make it through and I'm not going to there, I have no illusions. All of those characters that are operating inside of a really, really narrow space. When we talk about our present world, I don't think we're in that narrow space yet. I think we have a vast range of options. I think that oftentimes we very cynically try to narrow those down. And I think, I think there's a certain almost I'm going to put on my conspiracy hat here. But I think that corporations are very happy to sort of create this sense that environmental destruction, fait accompli is something that just has to happen. And what we need to do is adapt everybody. We just need to talk about resilience. Now. We need to talk about resilience. And what that really says is we need to accept that we create a climate change. Oops, too bad. My as well suck it up as opposed to race, I can know you ****** is actually delayed action on this. First of all, let's put you to death and then let's fix this because it is a fixable issue. You know, we don't have to keep dumping carbon into the atmosphere. But I think ExxonMobil would very much like us to sort of say, yeah, well, you know, alas, let's talk about resilience instead. Let's talk about the cool seawalls you can build. Instead of talking about the fact that we're still ******* the planet right now every day and we make billions doing it. And so I think that they want to create the perception that we're already inside of that narrow range of choices where all we can talk about is resilience. Instead of talking about flat out stopping global warming, for example. And I think it's sort of a very, very clever sort of shifting a conversation to a much more palatable, much more profitable sort of line as opposed to the one that says no, no. Let's dial back on what your guises, businesses. Resilience is like a kind of Stockholm Syndrome sort of thing. It's right. Oh yeah. How much how much can take how much beating can we give it, right? Oh, yeah, yeah. Well, you just have to accept that you're imprisoned by Exxon Mobil and Chevron and whoever. And they just they said they set the table and you're just going to have to eat whatever they feed us. Like, you know, he's just no point in complaining resilience. So that's why really dark now, I feel very like sort of frustrated every time you hear the word resilience because i'm, I'm actually a big fan of the idea of like sort of looking around and saying, you know what, the sea levels are going to rise a certain amount. I would not buy coastal real estate right now, you know, reality check, but on some other level it's like and yet we still need to talk about really, how many degrees of warming do we want? And let's look at the people who are really trying to drive this conversation in this specific direction as opposed to flat out stopping damage and dialing it back over time. So then the end of like the water knife is really, it's like, it's a particularly tragic moment because these are people with bad options, right? Who sort of have to play it out. And it's just right by sort of doubling down on a reality that, that they'd been handed encapsulated. They evolved, they, none of the people who are in this set of circumstances built the world that they're living inside of the consequences of our decisions. Now, that's what's going on. And so yeah, and so all these people, all of them actually with the best of intentions, basically caught inside of a set of decisions that are all on palatable for them by the yet, yeah. And it's interesting then, especially in the water knife, where it feels as though you're exploring the particular tragedies of what happens to the poor. And in these, in these situations where in the windup girl, you also kind of cast a critical light on the elites to that sort of. And the elite, you know, let's say the games they're playing that also sort of have these effects that cause mass violence, right? Yeah. I think that there are really clear sort of differences about how environmental devastation or any, any number of sort of impacts play out across class. I think it's just sort of like. You know, the, the, the rich, except for in the occasional sort of French Revolution guillotine them all sort of moments like they almost always seem to come out OK. And one of the things I've noticed about techno fix societies, these societies where like we've got a problem, we're going to find the techno fix for it is it's always about finding a techno fix for those people who can buy the techno fix. So it's always about providing mitigation for the wealthy basically, you know, my, my personal favorite, actually of these things right now is that, that Tesla has just put in these new super high power HEPA filters basically in their new model acts. And Elon Musk is talking about like, basically these are, these are practically like filters for the bio apocalypse. Like they're so good. It's like, well, let's admit this. This is like a $100 thousand vehicle like so this is not for everyone to read the bio Apocalypse. This is so that the wealthy can survive the bio apocalypses. So the wealthy can have the most protected lungs. This is a great product for the wealthy in China. This is a great, you know, that kind of thing. And, and you sort of see that like the techno fix, the market responding to the desires of the wealthy by providing the thing that they can purchase as opposed to looking at the larger social or larger sort of like regional or governmental fixes that would actually provide clean air for every line that, you know, it's like, oh yeah, we can create these great filtered vehicles instead saying, let's have clean air. Again, that's sort of reminds me of another and not to harp on and on about movies, but this other movie, Elysium, I don't know if you saw them, but the people who did District 9, and again, it's sort of about this idea that we come up with all these wonderful sort of technologies that allow us to sort of heal ourselves. And, but they're, of course only the elite have them and they decide that they're going to put them on a sort of orbital satellites. So there's a kind of orbital satellite, utopia, and then down on Earth It's how awesome. Okay, yeah, alright. Okay. And it actually again, what's so striking is it's actually not a very good movie. It's a great premise coming up against that feeling that somehow the ideas are exceeding like the filmic possibilities at least, or like we write it like to work them through is too disturbing. So we want it ends up being sort of like a hero, anti-hero. Between five. Yeah. Yeah. And I'll turns on like two guys beating the **** out of each other. Read where as I think in your work it really does work. Like you're able to sort of tease those things out and make those dynamics really vivid and very visceral. At the same time, I think, I think when I think about like media, doing a really good job at exploring sort of dynamics as opposed to sort of dumbing down into that recipe of explosions. I definitely look towards television. One of the, one of the things that I actually think of as being the closest to the science fictional kind of work that I do is the wire. Where the wire is going to tell you a really compelling story about all these interesting characters. But at the same time, it's also going to essentially explore the dysfunctions of Baltimore. And by the end of it, you're going to have this really interesting set of lenses to look at Baltimore with you. You're going to understand the politics, the police, the drugs, the schools, the journalism that you don't like, the, the economy. You know, all these things are going to be threaded through the dynamics of these characters living their lives and, and, and that like kind of really ambitious, sort of like let me explain a concept to you via storytelling. Like you. So when you see it like, I think it happens more often in television than it does in film these days. Like yeah, yeah. Do you think, you know that we this is to kind of echo a previous conversation, but you talked a little bit about the challenges of writing in the era of serialization, right? In the era in which they're sort of increasingly, artists are being attracted to working in a sort of serialized format. Whether that's something that as a writer or something you embrace or something that you, yeah, it's like it's hard to translate into the forms you're working with. It's a little complicated. It's, it's interesting because I think there was a, there was a point where I actually really wanted to write. I mean, there's sort of this general knowledge that you have that like a series of books is a really good idea. Like if you write a series of books, if it takes off than you know, than the next book in the series brings back all the readers from the beginning of the series. You add more because like you're getting promotion for the first book again and kinda keeps going. There's a nice, very easily stacked cascade of experience there where people can move from the taste experience they had the first time to the taste experience that they loved. And now I get to do it again. And it's a great sort of commercial decision to do. I actually attempted it with my YA books. I was writing chip breaker and I had originally envision those as a series of books. And what I found was that I tend to sort of, the way that I work is that I'm exploring an idea. And so by the time I've explored the idea, normally, by the time I've gotten to the end of a book that, that idea feels fully explored, that set of concepts fields fully explored. And so when I sat down to try to write the next chip breaker book, which was meant to be a direct sequel. I failed at it completely and I ended up writing, I did write a direct sequel. It was terrible, It was terrible, terrible, terrible. And I ended up throwing it away and then writing another story set in the world. But not as a direct SQL at all. It was to explore a whole different set of concerns and issues and ideas. In that way I could still work inside of the world, but that was about the closest I could come to building a series really in the end. And, and so it's sort of an interesting thing for me like to just sort of like I had a commercial instinct and then I totally ****** it up. But so I mean, I imagine you'd get this question. I mean, is there no way to imagine that the water knife in the one-up girl are sort of in the same timeline that there could be different parts of the I mean, they're not right, it's not SQL obviously. If anything, it might be a prequel, I guess the array. I was sort of as I was reading it, I had that wondering, well, could they be I mean, there's enough overlap here maybe, but of course, you know, I don't think personally, I don't think of them as all being connected. I think of them as sometimes I'll grab ideas or components and swap them into a story because those components reinforce something that I want to do in the new story. Or I want to reuse the component in a different way. You know, something like clipper ships show up very briefly in the windup girl and then I use clipper ships a lot and chip breaker, you know, those kinds of things. But I don't think of these world is all being interconnected exactly. You know, it's more than that. I think my, my sort of initial premises tend to create similar styles of war worlds where, you know, if I'm going to make an assumption that people think in short-term ways they go for profit over, over sustainability. They go for like this is sort of the like this, the start point parameters. And those start point parameters then generate these sort of familiar feeling like broken futures. And so I think that's where that, where, where my work tends to have that connectivity across a lot of different ****** that always that assumption that like people are going to take the quick and dirty and profitable over the long, slow, complicated and less profitable. And so yeah, that's a lot of it. But yeah, I actually like, I mean, people have asked me a lot of times actually about doing a SQL for the windup girl. And then you're kinda like will, I would totally go back into that world if I knew why I was doing it. Right. And there's this, I don't have a huge urge to do SQL for SQL sacrum. I need to have some idea that I think is interesting or a puzzle or something that I can unpack and that will teach me something as I'm going through it as well. And until I have that set of question marks that I want to answer questions about that I want to hunt for answers about. There's not really, I don't really have the ability to write a story like that, So yeah, yeah. Well, you do want to know what happens to hook saying in the end, right? No, no, seriously, I have this vague idea of these girl Island. Ok, sang and Ryle flying away in a dirigible. And I'm like, I'm like, I just want to land them in Kolkata and I just want to let may have sue the dura. There's this like little nascent sort of seed out there in my head and I'm like, What would I do in them? And, you know, there's there's a possibility, but like I have to find the, the question mark. What's the big question that those characters answer? What's the big question that they hello? We'll write that book, right? Yeah. Yeah, It'd be great. I just want to also express these are minor moments, but they're just some moments that I really love about this. I think you do a lot of interesting things with acceleration and deceleration, sort of playing with our experience of time and space. And there's that moment where Huxley and gets into the gas-powered car and use nauseated by the speed of it. Like I don't know, That's such a great moment and just thinking, it gums up a number of times in the one to go just thinking about sort of what, how we will experientially adapt to sort of like a low-carbon world, right? And those are, those are great moments where you can sort of feel it in your body. You're ready to sort of speed that fossil fuels allow us. And then when their absence, right, how we change will change fundamentally is like sort of social people. Yeah, and one of the things that's interesting to me is how much we change all the time based on whatever inputs are occurring around us. And we don't really notice that we're adapting to those things. There was a moment where I was realizing that I was completely addicted to Twitter and Facebook and all these things. And I had a new phone that was a smart bone and I could be online all the time and I could text all the time and stuff like that. And it was really interesting. There was a moment when I put that phone in a drawer and sort of walked away. And and suddenly like everything came to this sort of weird halt and you realized how lake and I found myself reaching for it all the time. I found myself hunting for that stimuli that I'd been really, really deeply addicted to. And you know, that, that next dopamine rush kinda like everyone everywhere. But we don't notice that there's this, we're basically experiencing these like relentless spurts of sort of, of, of sort of chemical highs from checking our smartphone runs and, and the like. What is it like to sort of step out of that world? And then what is it like to step back in? And one of the things that I noticed immediately when I came back in. Was how much of a rush it was to be back online and how weird that was and in fact, how nausea adding it was like it was almost overwhelming. How many stimuli I had been just naturally accepting in my life. And I didn't notice until I had a quiet period and then it was like when it's happened all at once. And you're like, oh my god, like that's a lot of stimuli. No wonder I'm crazy. And so you then you can sort of start to have some mastery over that space instead of it having mastery over you. But I think like again and again, we don't really notice how much we've changed or how much we've accepted, whatever it is. I remember when I used to work and live in China years ago, you'd go off on these trips out into the really like far hinterlands of China on this like in the early nineties. And, and you know, you're you're on a bus out in the middle of nowhere. I'm one of the thing which is this like it would be all these sort of farmers and people from these villages and stuff like that. And you'd get on a bus and it would be going from miles over these windy roads and stuff like that. And the number of people who got car sick on, on the bus was just phenomenal like is like everybody was like sticking their heads out the windows and puking and and, and, you know, you're like, well, no, it's actually not that bad and you're like, oh, right. Because I've spent all my life riding around in cars on windy roads. Is this amount emotion, this amount of discombobulating and all that stuff is actually entirely natural, but it's not natural actually. It's just, you know, we're adapted to it. And so when you drop somebody right into that moment and they're like, Oh my God, this is genuinely nauseated. And then the next thing you know, they're hanging their head out the window so, well, that sounds like a theme to be explored. Two is sort of extrapolating this video. Always sort of social media acceleration. Yeah, not even to talk about the content at once I'm there, but similarly to talk about just the stimuli is drain lining of Twitter feed. Well, I mean, I noticed this with all of those applications that they're very well-designed to sort of encourage you to check back again and again and again. Again. They are not supposed to be some sort of locked into one specific zone in your life. And how we've lost control of that is actually really interesting to me. That e-mail is now following me around on my phone or whatever. You know, it used to be at least locked into a computer at US. There was 1 when email was locked in the computing center in my college. And the only way that you could actually get access to it was you had to go into the computing center in the library to check your e-mail. That was the only way you can have that specific fix. And, and so it's interesting in those, those kinds of stimuli to those communication stimuli and stuff. And I've thought a lot about that lately just in terms of like what kind of life we lead and is it a good life or is it just a busy life? Yeah, exactly. I liked that. Just has it it's kinda it's sped up but slightly empty somehow and repetitive. And where you sort of feel like you're getting dragged by the feed rather than being dragged by the by the chemical rushes? Sure. I mean, without question, why am I why did I just check my phone again? Cuz I was looking for another high of somebody contacting me. Oh my god. Like that Was it. Like that? I can see it now. I'm an idiot and I'd like your life. Is your yeah. Yeah. Do you recognize right. So let me get a couple more things I want to ask you about 11 is sort of and we've been talking about this a bit. But just to sort of point, the spotlight on a directly is sort of about art and politics. In the Anthropocene, you know, obviously you found a way to work with political ideas, but also to do great compelling narratives and characterizations and create worlds and things like that. And I just curious whether, you know, sort of how you are, what you think about. This is something we talked about a lot of sense here to sort of what you think, you know, art can sort of do or what it should be trying to do. And maybe not in general, but maybe just in your own case. Yeah. I mean, on some level, like I think that art should just do whatever the artist actually wants to do that. Because on some level, like just, just the act of doing art and putting yourself out into the world at all is so hard, fraught and difficult and, and painful in many ways that like you'd better actually just have all your eggs in that basket. And so you never feel like you really have any business telling other artists what they should be doing. For myself. When I'm thinking about, you know, the kinds of stories I want to write. And I'm thinking about, I think, I think that stories can do more than just follow the arc of a character. I think that stories build empathy can connect us to things that we never knew before and that we never understood before. And they can build those into a reality that's big enough and real enough that we can connect to them. As opposed to the abstractions of seeing a news report in the newspaper about, you know, Monsanto's suing a farmer for pulling grain out of a grain elevator and planting out or whatever. You don't have any connection to that. You don't have any visceral response to that. With drought like that. If you read the water knife, the next time that you see a photo of Lake Mead and how beautiful it is with its, you know, it's low, but it's got this beautiful white bathtub ring around it. It's got the blue sky has got the water. It's like this lovely landscape. You'll see that as the disaster that it is because you've lived inside of the disaster of that future. And I think that's what the power of art is, is that power to build empathy and connection with things that would otherwise be abstract. And so for me, at least, you know, the kinds of stories that I want to write. I want to write stories that connect us to potential futures in a really deep, really visceral way that asked questions about like, do we like this future? Do we want this future? And then that you can see that future clearly enough that when you come back into your present moment, that you really see our present moment differently and you see the choices that we're running into every day. You see the choices that we're making in our governmental levels, that are policy levels. You see those choices that we make personally every day and that they're contextualized because you've got that, that visceral connection to a future version of yourself where you've never had that before, you never actually we always discount our future self. We always said replace all the weight of our value on our present self. You can place a way to value on your children's future selves. You know, if you read something that I've written and that's something that's hard to do otherwise. And so, you know, so if you can build that empathy and connection through time to that future version of yourself, it recontextualized as your present moment. And I think that's kind of what I'm interested in doing with my fiction right now. Oh, except for those times when I just want to write a fun story. Right? Well, it's because it's not, it's not that these aren't fun stories. I mean, these, these re like thrillers and you could just enjoy them purely as a, as a page turning thriller if you wanted to. And I think they have to function that way, right? I think that there's something that you're really in dangerous territory when you're working in the sort of the political or the values space with fiction because you're so close to the didactic. And, and, so you see this in every single kind of political writing that wants to grab on to art. Like, you know, it's like whether it's environmental writing or feminists writing or communist writing or whatever, you know, like, you get read. William F. Buckley, like I always pictured, is going to have a certain didactic tone to it. And, and, and so looking, you know, the, the, the thing that holds all of that back as a real deep fidelity to the story, to the characters, to their personal experiences, to making those feel real and big and lived in, and to actually giving the reader the thing that they first signed up for, which was entertainment. That there is a reason to turn the page because they want to know what happens. And I think that's, you know, that's square one, that's base one for telling fiction. If you can layer the other things in, then it's, you know, it's a triple win or whatever. But, but you have to have fidelity of that idea that you are really giving your reader a story with characters who are interesting and you want to know what happens to them. You know, I'm, I'm curious. What are the other thing I wanted to ask, how you find people react to your work. I'm just curious whether, you know, how many of the people who come sort of come with, come to sort of express, you know, I never really thought about, say, climate change this way. And so reading your work or you've got me thinking about something. Do you find that people are, are, are mostly sort of connecting to these as just another sci-fi story or as another thriller? Or do you feel like in some cases are actually touching people and getting them to, as you said, like sort of create a empathetic or emotional investment in some future that really is not all that fantastic way. I don't know. I actually feel like I do have an impact. I think that it's, I think it's like this fun thing where you actually sneak up on people. You know, they think they're picking up this story and then they put it down and then they go away and then they read the newspaper and the next the next article that they read about something like like me, they're like, Oh my god, this looks horrible. You're like, yes, it does. And you've, you know, you've changed the lens that they look at the world without them ever realizing really that that lens was being installed. And so it's really satisfying when people like will, you know, sort of flag a news story and then tag you on Twitter and be like, oh my god, it's just like in the book or oh my god, I, you know, and, or sometimes, you know, that's like this course is huge drought right now in California. And people who read the book and then contextualize it against that drought that they're experiencing. Like, oh, right, Okay. And they look at their drought differently than just being a bad drought. They're like, What if it keeps going and there what if sort of capacity sort of levels up. And that's, that's really neat to see actually. And it feels like you are having a very changed dialogue because of those kinds of things. And I know that wind up girl and water knife or not. Obviously young adult fictional, I'm sure some young adults are diving in there too, do you think? Especially because I'm always one of these questions when you're dealing with with, you know, as grown-ups with parents, you know, people with kids about how to how to sort of, you know, how to provide some reassurance that, you know that a different future is possible at the same time that you want people to be mobilized and take it seriously, but not to especially I'm thinking you're younger or just not to overwhelm them, right? Is that something that you you worry about? Well, there's this weird sort of conversation that a E sort of see going on in science fiction about the power of the positive story, the inspirational story, the mythic story, versus the power of the topic or the warning story. And I think that these are, I don't think these are zero-sum exactly. I don't think it's either one or the other. I think there's, there's power in both of those concepts. I think that writing for young adults. Particularly when I wrote something like chip breaker, I did want to provide some sense of the character, at least having access to a win two, to a brighter future. But, um, but I also did want to really make it explicit that the world that the Naylor lives in is one that's been devastated by, you know, by essentially US. And so, and that, that will never gets fixed. You know, I mean, in many does topic books and teen fiction, what you see is actually teens being empowered to change the world, to change the political system completely and stuff like that. My Stories don't do that. They're like, no, you know that once the world's broken, It's broken leg, you're going to find a new context for your win within this broken world. So there's certain things where I don't want to write a solitary future that essentially says, Oh yeah, I can do spirit. Like, you know, it's all going to be fine. I tend to write ones that say No, no, there are consequences to decisions. Now, that said, I do feel like there's this important sort of power in science fiction specifically where you can build these future memes that people want to live into like. And if you can, if you can find the right aspirational object, people really do want to live into it To the extent that they go out and build it. And, you know, I, you know, Neal Stephenson has been one of the people who's been a sort of a big proponent of the idea that we need to write positive futures, that we need to build these feature MSM is, it's interesting because, you know, he's had that experience of writing something like Snow Crash and then having people go out and build Second Life. He knows that like he can inspire technological innovation simply by imagining it. And, and that's really interesting. And, and so of course you want to play in that play pen too. And you know, when I was working on chip breaker, that was one of the reasons why I have the clipper ships and now it's I wanted to create an aspirational technology and I wanted to say wind power can be really cool and sexy and fun. It's just amazing. Clipper ships out on the ocean with high altitude Paris sales and hydrofoils. It's super high-tech and fast and sleek and adventurous. And there's your aspirational sort of version of sustainability is this global economy based on wind and sale, but it's sleek. And that kind of, and you're definitely sort of thinking about those kinds of things too. Yeah. I mean, every, every story ends up being a set of balances and choices. Two. So I mean, it's interesting because chip breaker was so much more aspirational than something like the drowned cities which became entirely about survival, right? So yeah, I do is I, I kinda bounce all over the map I haven't found like, like, oh, there isn't one answer. It's each book ends up being a different thing. So in our last couple of minutes, Do you want to is there anything you want to talk about? Is there anything Anything projects you're working on now that you're excited about, you want to sort of tell people about, or let's assigns a white girl To which of course we're going to hold you to write down right now. I mean, I think that the next thing that I'm probably working on, it's probably going to work I hadn't is going to be, I think I want to write a book that somehow pokes it the idea of language and how, you know, if we have the right language tools that we can actually get access to the dials and knobs of our present moment and change it. Yeah. Yeah. And and that's that's sort of what I'm most fascinated by. I don't know how I'm going to do it, but that's the idea that's kind of kicking around in my head. Yeah. Well, Paolo, Thanks so much for coming. Thanks for talking. And of course, we wish you the very best with this. Hope we'll be able to see you again sometime soon. Alright, Well thanks, bunch of critters.