coe107_watts.mp3

Speaker1: [00:00:24] Welcome to Twenty Eighteen Cultures of Energy podcast listeners, we are here with an LED fireside chat speaking to you from Reykjavik.

Speaker2: [00:00:33] Go Simone for brightly glowing candles flickering in the night and Dominic's trying to sound as upbeat and cheerful as a sick man can. He's got the Viking flu, which I hear is a fierce, fierce and formidable enemy that only strikes down the strongest of people. That's me. Even if they're not actually Vikings.

Speaker1: [00:00:55] Yeah, there's no proof.

Speaker2: [00:00:57] I'm not the more frail and meek among us. Don't touch the Viking flu.

Speaker1: [00:01:01] Yeah, evidently not

Speaker2: [00:01:02] As cold as all more pure Celtic folk have stayed strong through it. Yeah, it's like a little bit of shut down. Yeah, a little bit. Yeah. So yeah, we got a bear skin, lots of fake bear skin thing, but it's very cozy. We got lad fires just

Speaker1: [00:01:17] Like we have a fake bearskin rug and fake LED

Speaker2: [00:01:20] Lights. But it's all eco. It's all environmentally conscious. Yeah, that's good. And it's very dark outside and you can actually see the Moon here in Reykjavik, unlike in Houston most of the time, and it's been a brilliant white full moon and then full moon, a Supreme Court heard a waning moon. Is that what it's doing?

Speaker1: [00:01:38] Superman is, and I'm not sure what a bomb cyclone is, but these are the kinds of terms we've been hearing in the past week or so.

Speaker2: [00:01:45] Yeah, the bomb cyclone, that's like a dump of cold air or something. It's snow and whatever that's in New York. We're not quite. We're not there. We're not ready for that. Yeah, we're going to that tomorrow. We're staying warm here in Iceland. Well, there was a warmer than most of the United States.

Speaker1: [00:02:00] There was a day I think it was January 1st New Year's Day that for a brief moment, it actually was warmer in Reykjavik than it was in Houston, which is all kinds of hilarious and tragic

Speaker2: [00:02:11] At the not OK. Yeah, and very trippy, yeah. But it's been a very good holiday celebration, and I just want to do a big shout out and recognition and appreciation of the Garner family. Oh, and so they've been such wonderful hosts and we've been hanging out with yawn and yoga and Noni and Camilla and dugger and Frosty and ATLA and her mom, who has a cool name. But I can't remember right now Yoga's mom, and they've just been such wonderful hosts and we had we had a really nice quote unquote traditional Icelandic New Year's Eve dinner with replete with trays of sushi of various kinds for the non-meat eaters in the house and then the more traditional Icelandic lamb and these kind of potatoes of a sweet gravy sauce and. It was very tasty stuff. And then after you have the festive meal, you wander out into the garden, also known as the backyard, but the garden and you begin to unload many, many pounds or should I say, kilos of gunpowder in the form of fireworks with rather unpronounceable Icelandic names, but all very secure? I mean, obviously you get to light up. Maybe I can.

Speaker1: [00:03:36] Maybe I can add a moment here, too. So Iceland, I think, has some for about a week a year, has some of the most liberal fireworks laws in the world and basically, at least according to you. And we know that Jonas every once in a while in the position to pull somebody's leg. So yeah, but he said there are things that are basically manufactured in China that are so dangerous. They only go to Iceland because people here are basically willing to set a match to almost anything. And it's true. You go to these, all the fireworks are sold by the search and rescue team. So in a way, it's like a big national fundraiser for their search and rescue efforts. And you go to these little tents around the city and you walk in there and they have in addition to these family packs, which includes sparklers and wizards and bottle rockets and all the things that I grew up with. There are these enormous and I don't even know what to relate them to like, like, you know, the size of a, you know, a mini fridge basically that you put a match to and it proceeds to send off what I think is basically like a city fireworks show in like Chicago. But you're lighting that wherever you want to write, pointing it at whatever, on your street, on your street, like next to your neighbor's car. And every once in a while, they malfunction and just explode on contact. We saw some footage of awesome footage.

Speaker2: [00:04:54] Yes. So it kind of blown away, although do, I guess, not hurt too badly. But some of them have been banned, but they do seem a little too too big for civilians to be handling some of them. And of course, there's a lot of kids doing it too.

Speaker1: [00:05:06] It was, yeah, it is. You put out like as the night goes on, increasingly drunk people like wandering around with these incredibly huge fireworks. It was bananas out there and tell them about what happened. As as the the clock counted down to New Year's that night.

Speaker2: [00:05:22] What more and more fireworks were set off?

Speaker1: [00:05:24] Well, yeah. But what was paint a picture for people? Talk about the soundscape, the scent scape?

Speaker2: [00:05:29] Oh yeah.

Speaker1: [00:05:30] Well, New Year's Eve, midnight and

Speaker2: [00:05:32] Yeah, well, exactly. I mean, already people have been setting off these fireworks for a long time. And so this the the era is already filled with plumes of smoke, and it's got that really specific sort of gunpowder smell, right that I don't smell very often because it's not like we ever do fireworks. I think I've done fireworks like my own, you know, custom bought, like hand-held fireworks. I think I've done maybe twice. Ok. But they do have a particular scent to them. And then the the sky gets filled with more and more smoke and you just hear a lot of whirring and you know, the sound of things shooting off. You're not quite sure where they're coming from or where they're going, and you sort of lose track of which fireworks or you're shooting off into the plumes of of grey and black smoke. But it's all very exciting and everyone's into it. And there's a bunch of places around town where it all kind of goes off, but people gather and well, it's a little it's outrageous. And I guess I don't know. Andre Snyder Magnusson was saying today that there's a kind of limit to the amount of fire that makes beauty, right? He's like, there's a kind of a Half-Life to the beauty of fire, because what he remembers growing up is that you could see from where he was out in the kind of the further reaches of town that you could see downtown Reykjavik and you could see the next neighborhoods over and it was sliding off there things. And so it made all these pretty fireworks in the sky. But now you can't even see beyond your neighbor's yard because there's so much smoke. Yeah. And I think he said that, like World Health Organization says, there's was is it measured in micrograms of of this particular toxin that's in the air? That's it.

Speaker1: [00:07:05] It's like the particulate matter

Speaker2: [00:07:07] Right in the air. Was it the particulate or was it a particular chemical? I don't know. I wasn't quite sure what exactly what the the the measure was there, but apparently the safe limit is 15. And at some point during the night, probably around midnight, it got up to 4000 nice the words like the worst kind of the worst air day in Beijing. But all in one shot.

Speaker1: [00:07:29] Yes. So basically, it was like the same errors in Beijing on a nice hot summer day or whatever.

Speaker2: [00:07:34] And then the next morning, the whole city is littered with these carcasses and the bodies of wasted fireworks and their their cardboard bodies. But then you also see these. I mean, you could pretend that they're feral children, but they're not really. They're just kids out having fun like digging through the trash. Finding the the unused fireworks that need to be lit off still. And so this goes on for about three days because there's still more fire to be had. And I totally get it like I would be out there doing that same thing, right?

Speaker1: [00:08:04] Because it gets into such like a kind of audio. Of explosion that undoubtedly people are like forgetting to set off all the fireworks and bring out and then stuff.

Speaker2: [00:08:12] But I have to say, like even the foraging kids the next day who are like rifling around trying to find the, you know, the unused stuff that they could still light up. We're wearing their little safety.

Speaker1: [00:08:21] Yeah, it's

Speaker2: [00:08:22] Hilarious. So that's nice. That's nice.

Speaker1: [00:08:23] Yeah, it was cool.

Speaker2: [00:08:25] The other thing is that there's the big bonfire on the beach, and that is also put together by the search and rescue people. But they make a bonfire that is I'm going to say it's circular and at the base. I'm going to say it's maybe 30 feet across, wouldn't you say?

Speaker1: [00:08:42] I feel like it's going to be the image for this week's episode. So OK, we'll let people see it. No, no. I just I just thought of that right now.

Speaker2: [00:08:48] Video Because the coolest is seeing the flames licking the black.

Speaker1: [00:08:51] We have a great one great photo, which is the bonfire and this like forlorn, abandoned Moet Chandon wrapper that's in the foreground.

Speaker2: [00:08:59] John said someone was trying to heat their champagne by the fire.

Speaker1: [00:09:02] No, I think they were trying to throw it away. But I'm just saying that

Speaker2: [00:09:05] One percent John was making me.

Speaker1: [00:09:08] Yeah, coming for you in twenty eighteen. One percent.

Speaker2: [00:09:11] So that's the bonfire on the beach, and it's it's gigantic and there were hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people there.

Speaker1: [00:09:17] It was fun, but it was crazy.

Speaker2: [00:09:18] And then of course, we got to go over to the soiree at Bjork's house, which is a very exclusive matter. It was, it was. And I'm just there's only like 20 people there. It was like pretty cool. Really low key. Bjork made a hot cocoa for Bruja. That was nice. I shouldn't say she made it just for her. She was making hot cocoa and she gave her a cup. This is sounding

Speaker1: [00:09:41] A little braggy. It's a sad, sad thing, though. Darren Aronofsky was at that party and I didn't recognize him. Ok. I loved. I was.

Speaker2: [00:09:51] I don't even know. I'm sure I'm supposed to know who that is, but I don't.

Speaker1: [00:09:54] So director of Pie director, most recently of the very controversial film Mother OK, which I kind of liked, but most people really didn't like, and I

Speaker2: [00:10:03] Would have loved to just say I thought that was

Speaker1: [00:10:06] Cool. I think I think that movie worked for me.

Speaker2: [00:10:09] I would hope so. And it was at a small soiree to say anything other than something positive would just be luck, buddy. I agree with all the critics. It was go the fuck to Brooklyn. How could I mean, how would you even recognize a director?

Speaker1: [00:10:22] That's well in the dark. I knew exactly who it was after somebody told me later and I looked him up. Oh, that guy, that guy. But I will admit it's different. You know, when you're putting a face to a body instead of a face to a face, if that makes sense.

Speaker2: [00:10:37] Well, I love it because it's one guy. Like as we were leaving, he kind of walked down the driveway and he's like, Excuse me, excuse me, you know? But would you have a bathroom? Ok, so he's walking up to a house like, obviously we have a bathroom, probably even two bathrooms, let's just assume. But I was like, I'm not giving this guy permission to go into Bjork's house. Oh, no. And yoga was like, I was like, Talk to her, like, she's in charge. I'm not, I can't say. And she's like, No, no, no, this is a private party. You know, I'm sorry. We don't we don't have a bathroom available and it's like, Oh, no, I'm sorry, I didn't mean to trespass. I just wondered if you had a bathroom, and I wasn't sure I was like, Well, maybe he just really had to go to the bathroom. But I mean, it is New Year's Eve and people are drinking a lot. So I was like, maybe I just had to go to the bathroom. But then at the same time as like, you just walk up to someone's house and be like, Oh, can I use your toilet? And then and then yoga. Then yoga mentioned. She's like, People find out that this is her house and they want to get in. Yeah, like they want to go see it or they want it. It's like they're little. Yeah.

Speaker1: [00:11:35] So anyway, so you have to be vigilant. Sometimes you've got to be even even in a safe and friendly and generally open door policy place like Iceland.

Speaker2: [00:11:43] Oh yeah, please go use your toilet. No, I'm not going to happen.

Speaker1: [00:11:47] I don't. I don't want to go down in history as

Speaker2: [00:11:49] I've already said enough dumb things to Burak. I don't need to, like, lease out her toilet

Speaker1: [00:11:52] And get clear here and to not hashtag me too. Just me too. Let's talk about who we're talking to this week.

Speaker2: [00:11:59] Ok, so today we are talking to the venerable Michael Watts, who's old school gangster in terms of talking about the politics and the economics and the nefarious ness of oil, particularly in Africa and its contingency, like the places it goes after.

Speaker1: [00:12:17] It leaves the much, much to say about petro culture in Nigeria, especially as you know, we also had some very interesting conversations about Deepwater Horizon and the kind of actuarial logics that bind together the energy industry and the financial industry, and how Deepwater Horizon mirrors 2008 in some ways. And finally, I really enjoyed talking to him also about agriculture, which is where he started before energy. And now he's interested, you know, among other things, in the future of California's agriculture at a time of drought and

Speaker2: [00:12:49] Fire the rice rice crops, right? Yeah, yeah. He's two in the Central Valley rice.

Speaker1: [00:12:53] Why are they growing rice in the Central Valley of California?

Speaker2: [00:12:56] They've done it for a long time. There is a delta there. And I mean, I think in the past, like when they first started doing it, I'm not 100 percent sure. I feel like when they first started doing it, there wasn't as much of a drag on the water sources of Northern California. There would be a channel to the south. Right. There wasn't, there wasn't as much population in the south. And so the Sacramento River Valley and the delta there would fill up with water. And so it was adequate for doing rice. But I imagine it was never the smartest crop to grow, even if it was possible right at a time. But I think at this point it's probably a non-starter. It's just you and Michael talking because I had a conflict that day when we had a chance to talk to him. Did you guys talk about fire? A little bit of the Oh OK, cool.

Speaker1: [00:13:43] Well, I'll just say before we move on to the interview itself, which is great and hope you listen. Is that this is

Speaker2: [00:13:48] I think they just want to listen to us, talk about our New Year's. I'm just pretty excited. I'm kidding.

Speaker1: [00:13:54] Folks, listen to the interview. It's better than this, believe it or not, although this has been

Speaker2: [00:13:59] Awesome, they've already moved on to the interview by now.

Speaker1: [00:14:03] Those of you are still listening and who know how awesome this is. Believe you, me, the interview is still better. You know the thing I wanted to say? All you audio geeks out there is that this is what I hope will be the last of several episodes that I know have had shaky sound. I'm not going to make a lot of excuses other than to say the computer we usually record on was stolen. That was a setback. A new a new a new Skype edition was released

Speaker2: [00:14:27] From our bedroom.

Speaker1: [00:14:28] Fact no shout out to Skype. You guys are terrible. And the newest version of the software, as many of you know, is terrible. That has been a setback. Our mikes were stolen anyway, so we are getting it together. We're hoping that 2018 will be a turnaround, but this episode is a little bit still shaky sound because we've had to kind of jury rig every episode in a slightly different way in terms of the recording. So thank you for your patience. You can still hear the words they're beautiful and brilliant because of Michael.

Speaker2: [00:14:57] What's right? And the only thing missing is Simone. But other than that's pretty good.

Speaker1: [00:15:03] You know, I think I think people kind of like these Simone free episodes just because they like they like just to

Speaker2: [00:15:09] Relax like they like. They like the bass tones they like more soothing to hear.

Speaker1: [00:15:14] Like they hear a couple of guys just tell it like it is

Speaker2: [00:15:17] A couple of mansplain.

Speaker1: [00:15:19] Yeah, a couple of advanced players just laying down the truth, laying down the law without all of this kind of like

Speaker2: [00:15:26] These kind of nattering lady in the

Speaker1: [00:15:27] Background, just kind of soprano, soprano, alto feedback

Speaker2: [00:15:31] From the other people. That's fine. What it sounds like

Speaker3: [00:15:34] Like weren't weren't. Weren't weren't.

Speaker2: [00:15:36] Ok, well, without further ado, Michael Watts would never agree to that. Let us say Go Michael, go Michael.

Speaker1: [00:16:02] Well, welcome to the Cultures of Energy podcast Michael Watts, as I was just saying, you have been a great inspiration to many of us who've been working on energy and environment issues, in part because you have been doing this work great critical work on petrol cultures dating back almost 30 years now. Is that right?

Speaker3: [00:16:20] It is, Dominic, and thank you, incidentally, for the invitation to to participate in your podcast. It does. It does date back to the nineteen seventies and perhaps as with many people yourself included, perhaps I don't know. One falls into these sorts of things. And in my case, I didn't have back in the early nineteen seventies in Nigeria, where I was then living and working, I had absolutely no background or interest in energy. It just so happened. I was living there at a time when Nigeria was becoming a major oil producer in the oil. Revenues were transforming not just the economy, but popular culture and political expectations and the nature of the state and the circulation of money in revenues. It added a huge, enormous fillip to the sort of modernisation project in that country. So it was as it were forced upon me and I had to thereafter when I came back to do research and continue work there over 40 years. And I really it's it forced itself upon me and demanded that I began to offer that language, that partly technical language, partly institutional language, which the oil and gas industry embodies. So yeah, it was an accident in my case. That's how I that's how it all began.

Speaker1: [00:17:36] History came looking for you, I guess. And so you were there during the the fight in the delta with the Ogoni and Ken Saro-Wiwa was all of this has happened during the time you've been researching oil in Nigeria.

Speaker3: [00:17:48] That's right. As I say, I was I was in Nigeria really in the early 1970s, right after the, you know, the Civil War, the Biafran War. And as you know, that Biafran War in part, was fought over access to oil resources in the south east of the country, the Niger Delta broadly construed. And so I was there during that period and likewise then during the 1973 oil price increases and thereafter right up through the end of the 19th when conflicts began to emerge in and around the oil fields. And then particularly in the mid 1990s, of course, when Ken Saro-Wiwa and the Ogoni movement really took a hold of the oil question as it were and made it a profound sort of political issue. And then finally, up through the mid-2000s, when we had something like a fully fledged insurgency, which emerged really in late 2005 on the backs of a large number of conflicts of various sorts of the community level across the Niger Delta that blew into the onto the front pages of the newspapers, as it were when this group threatened and indeed effectively accomplished its claims to close down the oil and gas industry in three months, which it pretty much did so. Yes, across that great arc of various types of conflicts and struggles and transformations and so on I've been in, I've been able to write about about that history in some way. Right.

Speaker1: [00:19:07] So I wanted to ask you, first of all, about the legacies of that insurgency in the mid thousands and how they've formed where the Petro state is in Nigeria today.

Speaker3: [00:19:18] The first thing that I would say that the insurgency is that, of course, insurgencies don't just sort of drop out of the sky, and they don't, in a way, anything but long and complicated histories. And of course, it's perfectly obvious that the 2005 insurgency was preceded by the non-violent activities of Ken Saro-Wiwa. That was a type of largely but not exclusively ethnic movement that arose in the late 1980s. It was making claims not only about an environmental disassociation that was key, but it arose during arguably the darkest military period in Nigerian post-colonial history. And so the Ogoni movement, in a sense, arose in that way. And then because it ended so violently and dramatically with the hanging of Sen Caguioa and some other Ogoni activists, it served as a type of trigger for subsequent types of activism that emerged and not only across very, very different ethnic groups and indeed across the delta as a whole. It act as a trigger in that regard, but it also, in a sense, inevitably pushed popular grievance and popular movement toward increasing militancy. Right? And so in a sense, then that that insurgency that you referred to in a sense then was a long time in the making dominant. And and in some sense, it reflects as much a type of state strategy of, on the one hand, deferring a radical deferral, not wishing or perhaps even be interested in able in addressing the structural problems on the one hand and using the power of the gun stepping in with violent military and security. He forces to repress as necessary, you know, through those two two mechanisms, and sometimes it needs to be said, just simply attempting to co-opt some of these movements. Eventually deferred from that moment of the nineteen eighties when these tensions began to emerge so that when the insurgency indeed did blow up in 2005, as you might imagine, it was both well-organized and it was extremely well equipped militarily and was capable of doing enormous damage to the industry, which it did.

Speaker1: [00:21:29] Yeah. Stepping back a bit and again, with the benefit of such a rich archive of research and time you've spent looking at the Nigerian Petro state as it's developed over time. What are some of the takeaways you think from looking at Nigeria for understanding petro statehood or petro statecraft more broadly?

Speaker3: [00:21:48] Yeah, it's a very interesting question. When I've thought about it a little bit, I would actually start with a very broad and maybe ridiculously broad observation. And again, I don't know whether this is something that you've experienced yourself, Dominic. But one of the things that I struggled with when I began to study the oil and gas industry and to try to come to terms with it as a way of understanding the form and the impact of it in one place in Nigeria. What I struggled with was was a type of epistemological problem. And I've written a little bit about this, which is to say that oil and gas is this enormous industry of huge practical geopolitical significance. The major actors, whether they're national oil companies or transnational oil companies, these are some of the wealthiest and most powerful entities in the globe, in global capitalism, et cetera. The commodity is so strategic to our sort of hydrocarbon civilization, all of that stuff. And yet when you begin to try to study this thing, it's not only at scale and its size and its vastness of almost unthinkably large infrastructures and so on that populate this oil and gas world. It's also the fact that none of the numbers make any bloody sense. And I don't know if you had the sense, you know, it's not.

Speaker3: [00:23:05] There's a huge debate over how much oil remains in the ground. Oh yes, whether we've actually or passed peak oil that no one believes any. The numbers output numbers of any of the national oil companies, which often are much larger than Chevron or BP. So you get into this sort of sense of vertigo, of not actually figuring out what actually is going on. You know, aside from corporate secrecy and all of that sort of thing of actually studying companies that say there's this sort of what's the word elasticity in the numbers of what we're basic sorts of things that you would expect there to be a common understanding of or not the case. And so the reason why I begin there with your question about what can one learn from from Nigeria is I think one thing that is not peculiar to Nigeria is that you are immediately enter into this sort of, well, how would you describe it, a type of dark world, a world of extraordinary secrecy of things not being what they seem of the basic sorts of numbers having little or no veracity. So that that's I found that very unnerving. Yes. And I also found very, very quirky. And in a sense, I think all of us that work in in on the energy sector have some version of that.

Speaker3: [00:24:20] I think it's not peculiar to Nigeria. So that would be one. I guess a couple of other things immediately come to mind, of course. One is that, as you mentioned, the Petro state. I mean, obviously, there's a remarkable commonality outside of the United States anyway, on the degree to which or how the oil industry is structured and organized nationally. And you know, that's typically the establishment of a national oil company, some type of raft of laws which establish statutory monopolies over the oil and gas industry and subsurface mineral rights. Some type of joint venture or agreement between that national oil company and the transnational and the oil service companies often seen through various types of complicated oil contracts and various types of memorandum of agreement, all of which incidentally, are typically quite secret. So one sees immediately a type of model there that one can see in Nigeria. One can see if one looks at some angle and the oil and gas sector in Angola or Indonesia, or, for that matter, Russia. So at one level, in terms of some broad political economy and institutional infrastructural questions, and that would be one issue. A second issue, it seems to me, is that, of course, it's all about the capture of rents and to the degree then that the state, the Petro state, is able to cream off some proportion 70 80 percent of the value over every barrel of oil that that has a powerful centralizing effect and how those monies are captured and what's done with them, of course, is then a primary part of primary common question across Petro state.

Speaker3: [00:25:59] Whether it's contemporary Venezuela or Bolivia, and then the last thing I'll just say is, of course, I think the Commonwealth's once wrote about this very powerfully is that you not only centralize and capture, but you also disperse. It's like an enormous potlatch. Right? And it could be partly seen in consumptive terms. But of course, it's really about a ferocious struggle over who gets access to that pot of gold and what are the institutional and political mechanisms by which those oil revenues are distributed somewhere. Typically in a federal system to the states and local governments, or distributed to particularly powerful constituencies in Nigeria, it's called fiscal federalism, and there are versions of that in virtually every oil state. So those are common things that one sees everywhere. And then one looks, of course, at the particular ways in which a type of petro politics is sort of fostered and institutionalized and embedded around those common dynamics. Right.

Speaker1: [00:27:00] It's a fabulous analysis, a terrific synthesis. What are the more recent works of yours that's come across my desk? Is this marvelous volume you did, together with Hannah Powell and Arthur Mason, called subterranean estates life worlds of oil and gas. And in that project, you talk quite a lot about oil frontiers. You know, both in general and also in terms of your own personal contribution to the volume. And I wanted to ask you again a larger question, which is to say that in an era in which we are starting to hear whispers of internal combustion engines being phased out and more aggressive programs for biofuels and so forth, do you think that we can we glimpse in these oil frontiers finally, the end of oil booms and bubbles? Or do you think that we still have several decades of these to come?

Speaker3: [00:27:45] Yeah, that's a great, great question. I wish I knew, and some of your work, of course, is addressing this issue much more powerfully than mine has. But I would say this and again, I don't know what your experience is being in talking with people, particularly in the oil companies, but more generally in that vast sort of oil consulting world that surrounds it. On the one hand, the oil companies would like to stretch out the time in which they can continue. Given the nature of their fixed investments and some of these are, of course, are enormously expensive, if you think in the Gulf of Mexico, for example, the types of fixed capital investments in in deepwater offshore, you know, the idea is I think this will be from their vantage point stretched out actually for as long as as humanly or economically possible. Right. I think that's obviously their own corporate capitalist sets of of interest. And to that degree, I think that there will be and of course, things have been so radically changed. You and I, if we if we'd been talking a year ago, pre-Trump, we might have had a very different conversation. But it seems like the current political moment is at least from the US side of things, creating a situation in which the conditions for that stretching out are likely to be in all sorts of ways, institutionally and politically supported. Yes. So to that degree, I just think that apropos your point about frontiers, they will. Yes, there will be new frontiers opened up.

Speaker3: [00:29:05] They may be in extraordinarily inhospitable and environmentally fragile areas. The reopening of Anwar or extraordinarily deepwater Arctic, I mean, all sorts of things I think are now back on the agenda that perhaps people like you and I thought were increasingly off the agenda. A couple of years ago. So I think I think that on the one hand, but again, maybe this is also a type of deeply American centric view. Yes. And to that degree, you know, one looks at other places and one looks at the extraordinary new and important sorts of commitments to, let's say, solar or other forms of energy and a country like China. Right. And the degree to which even though the United States has withdrawn from its Paris commitment, global climate change, other things are going to be happening elsewhere, which might radically, radically either resist or radically reshape that trajectory that I just laid out, namely that there will likely be new sorts of booms and bust cycles and new sorts of frontiers. Over the next, I think, 20 to 30 years and certainly people in the industry will tell you, even if we were deeply committed to a radical decarbonization and a radical transition away from oil and gas, we're still talking three to four decades. That's their line. I'm not technically enough equipped to know whether that's that's rhetoric rather than than actual technological, a realistic technological assessment. But I guess that would be my yeah, that would be mine.

Speaker1: [00:30:36] I mean, we hear that line quite a lot in Houston, too. As you can imagine, it seems to be what justifies the city continuing business as usual. At the same time, I can imagine that probably blockbuster thought it had another four decades before Netflix came along, too. So you hope that there is the possibility for radical disruption, whether it's through political movements or through technologies or some combination of both. I don't know, I think the jury's out, I'm not sure how I would answer that question myself, but I thought that it was worth asking anyway.

Speaker3: [00:31:07] It's, you know, it's a very tough one. And you know, I live in California and of course, you know, the fact of the matter is here that even under actually Republican governors, you know, the state has been able at least up until now, to exercise considerable autonomy from the federal center and push along, even in the face of some quite hostile national political trends. Some important sort of things with respect to that transition. And it may well be that we'll see much more of that, if not uniformly across the states, but an increasing type of decentralization where the important things are happening within megacities within very large, complicated urban jurisdictions that begin to do sorts of things that can begin to shift the nature of the debate, as you're suggesting. Yeah.

Speaker1: [00:31:54] So in that book, rather than the volume subterranean estates, you have a marvelous essay about the Deepwater Horizon disaster and a really wonderful contextualization of that disaster. In terms of oil frontiers, I love the part where you talk about Louisiana in particular, which I think is probably the epitome of the oil curse, right? If you want to use that language in the United States, correct? Probably the part of the part of the United States that's most like Nigeria. That's always how things have played out. Exactly. I wanted to ask you to talk to us a little bit about this idea of accumulated insecurity, which I think is a wonderful phrase. Can you talk us through that a little bit? What's that as an analytic for you?

Speaker3: [00:32:34] Yeah. Well, I guess what I was, what I was trying to do here was to obviously like everyone. One was both shocked and terrified by not only the scale and magnitude of deepwater horizons, the blowout itself and the cost environmental and otherwise when on the one hand, I was just shocked by that. First of all, secondly, you know, I was perhaps like many wondering what on Earth or how we began to get our heads around the fact that oil companies were now operating in five six seven thousand feet of water. We're drilling 30 40000 feet through sediments to acquire this black gold. Yes, I mean, it seems to me to be on its feet, either utter madness, total madness operating in the Arctic in frigid temperatures, subsea where a majority of the world a majority of the year, it's dark. How do we begin to explain these sorts of either complete madness or a type of hubris? So a second question for you was not only the fact of this environmental disaster, but also a type of basic, almost banal question about that fact. And then thirdly, a type of technological question How on earth do you pull this feat off? And of course, when I began to talk to people in that business, they would recurrently say, and you'll you'll recognize this immediately. Well, they would say, you know, operating in deep water, this is as complicated. Getting oil is as complicated as putting a human on the moon. Yes. And I think in a profound sense, absolutely right. But that raised even more questions than about the types of risks and securities associated with something of that technological complexity operating in environments where a challenger disaster, as it were, would have enormous ecological consequences.

Speaker3: [00:34:26] So that sort of that was my line of thinking to get me to this point of, you know, a standard set of questions about risk, about insecurity and about whether the the type of protective armatures, the type of carapace of protection to ensure that this wouldn't happen. What was the context in which that that had arisen in the case of the water? Because again, you talk to people in the industry and you'll get typically I got two things. I said, Well, of course, this could never happen, like the blowout preventer, the blowout preventer. It's a blowout preventer. My God. Right. We built levels of redundancy into the system that this can never happen. So on the one hand, you would get that. And then, of course, you almost get in the parallel. Here, of course, is with the financial crisis where you say, of course, well, you know, hedge fund managers and so on. Don't it's a bad apple? That's what explain 2008 09. So you had it can't happen to the degree it happened. It's a one off thing, a bad apple. Or you would talk to people who off the record would say, Michael, you have no idea. Things like this nearly happen all of the time. Hmm. So what are we going to do this? I got these two sorts of things.

Speaker3: [00:35:37] You know, it's it's it's deeply redundant. It's deeply secure. But of course, there will always be the the the improbable, catastrophic event and then people saying on the side, you know, we've had so many near misses. This was, in a sense, a different language. This Deepwater Horizon was bound to happen. Right. So I was cool with that, Dominic. You know that that that type of. Tension not wishing to be, you know, to fall foul to a type of simple alibi. You know, it was unfortunate that the blowout preventer, it was just either a technical or a human error. Those guys on that rig, incidentally, a fantastic rig with a fantastic track record with an extraordinary crew, very hard argument to make, as we saw in the presidential commission. Of course, BP tried to unload it on those guys. Oh, it's a human error. If they just see if they just see gas kicking early on, et cetera, et cetera. So I didn't want to go down that path of sort of the alibi route. And I want to do a sort of work a little bit with this. This notion of of the near misses that it was bound to happen and cut a long story short in tracing that history of the move from onshore to offshore was to trace that in Louisiana and particularly to trace the implications of what if you like to use this language? I know it can be a little bit contentious, but that type of neoliberal turn that deregulatory turn that the legalization turn, particularly from the secretary of the interior, watched from in the Reagan period on what all of those reforms and deregulation meant for the sorts of protections that in theory, should be in place to have prevented this happening.

Speaker3: [00:37:18] And of course, the argument again is I tried to make a parallel here with the financial crisis, you know, in the repeal of Glass-Steagall. And all of that was it was a stripping away. And you had a stripping away of those an accumulation of security, coupled with across the 2000s, an increasingly expensive and competitive inter corporate competitiveness, cutting corners, cutting edges wherever they could be in the context of price volatility, where in addition to the deregulation, deregulation, if you like corporate irresponsibility, could in fact compound those accumulation of insecurities. And then on top of that, it seems to me one had the nature of the corporation itself BP right. And how the industry, particularly since the arrival of Lord Brown as the CEO, how they had a reputation of being more aggressive, more risky, more assertive, et cetera, et cetera, than others. And I tried to build up a picture then of these overlapping multiples over determining types of ways in which the very intrinsic riskiness of deepwater production over time was becoming more and more risky to the point where something like deepwater was overdetermined. Yeah. And so I tried to lay out that that argument linking, if you like the big gears of neoliberal economy with exactly how this industry operates in these unbelievably challenging technological situations.

Speaker1: [00:38:47] And in that sense, I think you do a really wonderful job of comparing the financial and the oil and gas industries and showing how, in some ways their actuarial processes and the risk management processes have have these really striking similarities, both of which exploded in one case literally. And one case, well, still literally, but perhaps with a little less flame. That's exactly right. My favorite sentence, I'll just tell you from that article is where you say this is in the last paragraph you say here, the actuarial imaginary seems to consume the very calculative rationality of capitalism itself. Very well put, I thought.

Speaker3: [00:39:22] You know, again, we all, you know, these sort of mega crises like the financial crisis and so on, and we're all trying to sort of come to terms with with how on earth this could this could come to be and of course, one particular line of of of analysis and these understanding these sorts of crisis crises in contemporary capitalism and anthropology and much of the social sciences has begun to examine this type of actuarial logic in play and the types of the types of ways, on the one hand, that the system seems to take risk into account and yet simultaneously is in the business of producing new and different types of risks. And it was that type of tension or contradiction that that at least I saw playing itself out in the in the Deepwater Horizon case.

Speaker1: [00:40:08] One other thing strikes me about the book, and in the introduction you talk about the task of the book is in some ways being like the task of Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow to connect the natural, the material, the symbolic, the political and the spectacular. And I think, you know, it strikes me that you're somebody who's found quite a lot of inspiration in the arts, whether that's in education, photography or in literature. And I just want to I don't think I've ever seen you write about that, but I wanted to ask you like how the arts fits within your your work as a as a theorist and an ethnographer and just a student of social and political life.

Speaker3: [00:40:41] Well, one thing I would say is that one of the reasons why I was involved in this book, I'll answer your question from a slightly different vantage was that, you know, I'm I'm pushing 70. And, you know, I was part of a generation I was educated in in the U.K. and then in Michigan, and I was at Michigan. I spent most of my time with the anthropologists at Michigan at that point in time and deeply influenced by them and that formation, you know, I operated within, I suppose you'd say, a pretty standard Marxian inflected political economy. That's how I saw the world. It was very helpful to me when I looked at Nigeria or the oil and gas industry, et cetera. And the reason why I'm starting there was the book itself was partly a reflection that over the years, I've been very, very lucky to be able to work with postdoctoral fellows like my co-editors in this case, like Hannah and like Arthur, who had very different theoretical formations than my own. And we're bringing to the study of oil and gas to me, certainly with a skill set that I absolutely didn't have. Sometimes rooted in the humanities, sometimes rooted in the history of science, sometimes much more rooted in a type of structure or discursive type of orientation and deeply immersed in, let's just call it the image world, the aesthetic and the visual. And these are skills that I didn't have and a part of the book's mission. You mentioned the book's mission is actually to introduce because most of the scholars in that book are young scholars, young anthropologists, young geographers, young sociologists, cetera who are very adept in this type of theoretical world in a way that I'm not. And it seemed to me to offer up the prospect of really radically rethinking what a critical social science could offer an understanding of energy or oil or oil and gas. So that was really central. In fact, as a whole project, and I think it's partly why I and we collectively turn to a bunch of younger scholars doing, I think, just terrific work yourself included.

Speaker1: [00:42:37] Thank you. But the relationship with Ed Kashi in particular, is that something that because that's an older relationship I know you had developed,

Speaker3: [00:42:44] That is true.

Speaker1: [00:42:45] How did you come to his photography?

Speaker3: [00:42:46] It's true. And let me just say that that was the second part of my response to your question about how my own, I guess, interest in visual issues. And that is that my father was a very good amateur photographer. And from the time that I was around seven, he he bought me a camera and we had a darkroom in my house and he I loved the outdoors and nature and so on. And he I love ornithology, the study of birds. So he set me up a little hide. So I began to take photographs and my father taught me a lot about the techniques of photography. But I've always loved images, photographs in particular, and I've I taught courses occasionally on photography and so on and so forth. So this is something that I did have a longstanding interest in, even though I didn't know in much of my academic career how to use that interest, to be perfectly honest, other than the fact that I always railed at my students about how I just read another bloody book by a geographer which had absolutely atrocious black-and-white images populating the book. And you know what I'm talking about here? Anyway, that's a different story. But anyway, it was through that that I then, coincidentally through my son, was best friends with Ed Cassie's son when they were in primary school.

Speaker3: [00:44:02] And so that's how I got to meet Ed, and I proposed to him that we do a project together. So we were able to raise some money, and I spent a number of years going to going to Nigeria, going to the oil fields. And can I just say one last thing because I think you might also appreciate this, Dominic, one of the wonderful things about working with ED in particular, who is a great intellectual in his own right, is that we spent lots of going to communities talking to oil workers, et cetera, et cetera, except doing many things literally side by side. And the striking thing about it was that it's a banal point on its face is, of course, ED saw the world very differently than me. He saw it visually, aesthetically or and also politically as a photographer. And so when we were walking around, he would often say things to me that I guess I take it for granted or indeed I hadn't even seen. And and that was enormously generative for me and helpful. In addition to the actual images that he produced in the book that we that we finally were able to get out.

Speaker3: [00:45:06] So for example, just give me a little example. I remember vividly know we were walking through one of these oil producing communities, and I pulled me aside and said, Michael, why is it that all of these local government buildings and every town we've been to, none of them are really finished. Yeah, they're all incomplete. They're all the not just badly constructed, but but whoever had the tender the contractor never. Well, of course, he was absolutely right. And of course, he then did a whole series of photographs on these incomplete buildings. And of course, it was a beautiful lens into the the corruption, the operations of how a primary form actually in any any petro state, namely the contract, the dispersal of oil revenues through contracts and tenders, in theory, competitive, but they never are. And to. You see that incompletion, if you like, as a as a as a political phenomena, as the way in which the Petro state operates. So anyway, that was that was just a little insight that that I got from Ed and his particular way of seeing sort of seeing visually,

Speaker1: [00:46:16] If you like. I think it's very enriched to have those kinds of dialogues and division of labor between the arts and academic researchers. Sometimes you really. I agree with you. We the same experience is what we've had here in terms of different ways of seeing different kinds of inter- illumination of insights. Here's a little rabbit hole I'd love to just maybe there's nothing here, but I just wanted to explore it. So you were at the University of Michigan, talked to a lot of anthropologists in the 1970s. You must have felt the influence there of Leslie White, who in our field was really the first anthropologist to engage energy. So I'm wondering, was he in any way or his his students and colleagues in any way?

Speaker3: [00:46:51] An inspiration? Well, you know, White was still alive and still in his office, and I remember that he had a level. He was not teaching at that point. But my recollection is that there was in his office. This is a weird memory. He had a letter from Trotsky. Do you know anything about his connection to it? Does that mean it ring a bell with you in any way? Why on Earth sent to him?

Speaker1: [00:47:19] That's amazing. You know, the rumor is that I mean, I don't I think this is more than a rumor, but that he was one of the Marxist scholars who had to go deep underground and was under surveillance and suspicion by the FBI for his Marxist disposition, and that part of his interest in energy was a way of rebuilding a kind of historical materialism outside the language of Marx. That's just a theory, but I've always thought it. An interesting

Speaker3: [00:47:44] One. I think is, I think is a I obviously had read some of his work and that I remember vividly that letter. I remember vividly.

Speaker1: [00:47:52] Do you remember what it said? What was what was the content of that letter?

Speaker3: [00:47:57] You know, I was a grad student at that point, though, and that's really intimidated. And that was a pretty intimidating intro department at that point. You know, there were obviously symposia, Rapoport, Mick, Mick Taussig, you know, Simons and Wolff, and on and on and on and on and on and on. So I don't, but just in my own formation anthropology department was there were very close connections at that point between geography and anthropology on that campus. And many of my cohort and sort of intellectual comrades, where were graduate students in the anthropology department. So my own formation was absolutely centrally wrapped up, not only with white in that sense, but also with with other figures in that department. It was absolutely foundational for me.

Speaker1: [00:48:42] This may be a good way of getting back to where you started because we couldn't have a proper discussion of your career and your works without starting. Also to talk a little bit about your interest in agriculture and food insecurity and irrigation, politics and so forth. So in some sense, there are, I'm sure, continuities between these two threads, and as I understand it, you have continued to be interested in agriculture. I mean, you haven't completely given up these projects in favor of work on oil. Is that

Speaker3: [00:49:09] Right? That's right. That's right. And a part of that is, of course, as you, as you know, in our imagine that that's partly driven by the types of doctoral students that show up in our offices. And, you know, working and living here in California, you know, California agriculture, it's a type of breadbasket for the U.S. and so there are always students coming through who have those interests, particularly the intersection of agriculture. Water energy, of course, is enormously generative right now and has been for some time. And I for many, many years, I was on the board of a nonprofit over in Oakland, the Pacific Institute, which works on water politics, water policy. So I never really let that go. Even though again, partly for a sort of conjunctival reasons, I ended up moving in a variety of directions, you know, over the years. But I've certainly retained that interest in food and agriculture, for sure. And and whenever I go back to Nigeria, I invariably end up in the community that that I worked in back in the mid seventies. And at some point, although I don't know when it will be, I'd love to do something a little more systematic in terms of a type of revisiting of that community. But it's also true that, you know, I've been very lucky in a way working in Nigeria, where so much of my sort of fieldwork, if you like, is being as being based in such a huge, complex, diverse turbulence, fascinating, energetic part of the world that things are thrown have been thrown up in my my academic lifetime.

Speaker3: [00:50:37] That sort of set me off in different directions. One was, of course, the the Niger Delta oil fields and other more recently has been the rise of radical Islam. Right? Doing some work with friends on Boko Haram, for example, which is speaking exactly to the transformation of that part of the world that I originally went to study in 1970. Is a village north of Katsina, right on the border with Niger? I mean that that whole material political, ideological, discursive domain from the time that I was that first there in the early nineteen seventies is at one level unrecognizable, transformed and part of that, an expression of that transformation has been, you know, the emergence of Islamist group groups in the North, Boko Haram being one of them. So again, all of these things push me in directions that I hadn't anticipated and when I started off working on these agrarian issues a long, long time ago.

Speaker1: [00:51:28] Yeah, and there are all these interconnections also between religion and petro culture and Salafism in the Middle East. And I mean, you can keep going. I did want to ask you a little bit more about about industrial agriculture in California in a time of drought and fire. It's hard to ignore the fires that are raging and have raged this year in California. Is that an issue that you're

Speaker3: [00:51:50] Following at all? Of course. Absolutely. I mean, I when I first came to to to California, in fact, this is now in the early 1980s. I partly for family and personal reasons. I wanted a project, something that I could do but build upon my interest in agriculture locally rather than having to travel halfway around the world. So I began with a group of students, some of whom went on to do some extraordinary work colleague. Now a colleague of mine at UC Santa Cruz, Judy Guzman's work on organic agriculture in California and so on, all came out of that, that beginning 1980s movement of studying California California agriculture. And I began actually looking at something that I worked on in another part of the world, namely on rice. You know, this great paradox that just such a water consumptive role like paddy production of rice is in fact not only grown in northern Chile, but it's of enormous, enormous consequence. So I began there and that led, among other things, again by students to a project that lasted two or three years on another aspect of not explicitly California, but it had a California dimension, not explicitly California agriculture, namely the U.S. poultry industry. Ah, OK. And I went work there on, you know, on this remarkable career, the American chicken.

Speaker3: [00:53:08] And again, the transformation of the conditions of productivity and production. Why is it that in this case, in the heart of agribusiness, so much of chicken production is produced by quite capitalized but small firms out growers, actually, whether that's in Maryland or whether that's in California or whether that's in parts of the the U.S. South. So in all of these all of these ways I've tried to retain, I've retained a bunch of these, these sorts sorts of interests up until up until the present. And you're quite right. Of course, the fires, we had a huge one, of course, in Napa and Sonoma just a couple of months ago. And now in the South, you know, are in a sense, not only a type of global climate change story. It surely is, but it's also a sort of a larger story about the relationship between human settlement and patterns of human settlement and occupation and and agriculture. Yeah. And so your very life, these are very live live issues right now. And yeah, I hope because to be frank with you, until relatively recently getting at least from my vantage point, students interested in agriculture was a bit of a hard sell.

Speaker1: [00:54:20] Right, right. I can imagine, you know,

Speaker3: [00:54:21] From the time in the nineteen seventies, when half of anthropology was studying, pleasantries and social sciences were interested in the rise of agribusiness. It sort of went off the front burner for whatever sorts of reasons. And I'm still to this day, actually in some respects, even though there's a lot more work now on, let's say, American agribusiness and agro industry, I'm still struck in general. And how much? If you look at a place like California where we still don't know. I just hope that not only the fire is obviously which are catastrophic in their own right, but I hope in a sense there will be a return of that type of ecological anthropology and ecological geographies and so on that began to back in the 60s and 70s. Really focus on these agrarian reform. Yeah.

Speaker1: [00:55:03] Well, I mean, I think in general, it's the rural has been a hard sell of late, at least in our field of anthropology. So but yet as we all try to confront and struggle with what sometimes gloss is the Anthropocene, it seems as though not just rural questions, but urban rural relations have to be re-examined in in the context of understanding the movement of people, you know, the occupation of land, the decisions of resource use and and so on and so forth. I would imagine that what will happen in the politics of California's breadbasket, so to speak, are going to be decisive for food security in this country going forward because all the long term climate maps suggests that the droughts will increase in severity and frequency.

Speaker3: [00:55:44] Absolutely, it is. I think there's there's no question about that and that, of course, coupled with the great unknown of the immigration question. I mean, already a large, very significant proportion of the Central Valley are. A production not only because there's been a massive drawdown on the water table and restrictions and federal water allocation, all of that has been happening, particularly not so much last year when we had a very wet year, but prior to that we had seven really, really bad years. So that reduction and that contraction of agricultural activity in the Central Valley is not only are exclusively about those water driven problems, but of course, it's also about an increasing more recently increasing scarcity of farm labor. And that itself is, of course, about the terror and intimidation of being an undocumented. So much of a farm labor is undocumented. And I have friends who are in that in that business. One in particular, Northern California here has one of the largest organic farms. Simply finding labor is enormously difficult. So I think you put both of these things together, you know, a changing political economy and a type of, you know, the authoritarian populism and anti-immigration sentiments of a Trump with the sort of clanking gears of global climate change of a of an impending profound impending water crisis, you know, represents a huge, huge challenge, as you say, to the great Californian breadbasket. And maybe it's

Speaker1: [00:57:11] A way of wrapping up. Michael, and thank you again for the generosity with your time. Let's talk a little bit about, you know what you might want to do next. Not as though you have anything left to prove, but I can also imagine that you probably have quite a few projects on your back burner that you're interested in pursuing. What are you looking forward to next?

Speaker3: [00:57:28] Well, one of the things that well, first of all, I just want to say that I'm very I've been very fortunate over the years to have just a raft of really extraordinary graduate students. I don't know where they come from and I don't know why they end up in my office, but I've been unbelievably lucky and I have probably another 10 or 15 that I'm working with. I've probably chaired way over a hundred PhDs since I've been at Berkeley. So that's one thing that I'm going to be doing is obviously working with them to make sure that hopefully they can get jobs and do realize their potential as young scholars and all of that. But another thing is it really comes back to the humanities and the visual that you were talking about before. I've I've always had this aspiration of writing a book or writing something about images, photographs in particular. I've written a couple of little pieces that are not terribly good and so on or insightful about images of the petrol world in the same way that there's a petro literature that Amitav Ghosh used to write about. There's also, of course, an incredible photographic anyone worth their salt as a world photographer has waded into oil and gas. You know, whether it's Salgado burtynsky, you can go on and on. So I have this sort of fantasy at present anyway, of of of somehow sort of returning to my interest in photography and doing something something of that sort. So that's certainly certainly one thing that I'll I'd love to throw myself into a pretty serious way.

Speaker1: [00:58:52] Oh, that's terrific. And just another brief little rabbit hole vis a vis your advising your legendary advisor and you have apparently legendary advice for dissertation proposals in particular. Is there one minute version of your advice you can you can share with the younger scholars listening to the podcast?

Speaker3: [00:59:08] Well, I would just say two things why I spent a lot of time putting together a website and writing about writing proposals was and you know, this as well as anyone doing is that to quote Michael tastic proposal is a type of public secret in academia. Yes, it's one of those things where no one sits you down and says Mary. This is what it proposes, and here is a toolkit for you. And here are some pointers and directions of what you need to be thinking about in order to do it. And exactly the same way that field work was almost, I think, in both of our disciplines had a certain public secret aspect to it, which is to say that on the one, if you came back, you presumably did it reasonably well. And if you didn't, we never saw you again and you didn't deserve to be just right. So, you know. So for me, the proposal was this holy grail. It was something shrouded in either secrecy or we all knew that it was important, but you couldn't talk about it. And, you know, I was fortunate and back in beginning in nineteen eighty, I spent a number of years working for various of the committees of the Social Science Research Council. And so every year I would read a hundred PhD proposals from a drone across the social sciences. And it was shocking to me. It was because the vast majority were just staggeringly bad, written, extraordinarily smart people. But as a proposal, they were disastrous because they didn't have a problem. They didn't have a question. And you don't have to in some sense, take on board all the language of hypothesis testing and all of that to realize that there has to be a type of central claim that you're making and you have to be in conversation with some body of work.

Speaker3: [01:00:40] A book, a theoretician, a body of theory. You have to be in conversation with that thing in order to make such a claim. And that has to be clear and unequivocal, and you have to be able to clearly walk a reader who knows nothing about social structure in northern Mozambique that you're studying. You have to walk around. Leaders through in such a way that they no question they can see the type of framing that you have, that imposing that question, you have evidentiary needs, those three needs are going acquired by you in this way. There you go. There's my piece of advice. It takes 10 seconds to articulate, but we all know all of this. It's the most difficult, bloody thing you'll do, perhaps in your academic lifetime. They're unbelievably hard and there is no roadmap. You need to be thinking about it and working with your advisers and putting the foundation stones in place. So, you know, I tried to flag that a little bit and over the years to to work. You know, in a sense, I don't know how you structure your graduate program address, dominate, but but to structure our graduate program in geography here at Berkeley, not exclusively, but around that notion of what it's going to take to both produce this compelling proposal and to for you, the student to acquire the skill set that you need to pull this off. So I just sort of believe fundamentally that it's hard to underestimate the significance of coming to terms with what's contained within this, this thing that's thrown around so in a lazy way, namely the proposal. I think it's enormously demanding and difficult, and you have to be on top of it all the time.

Speaker1: [01:02:14] No, it's true, but I think you're exactly right, Michael. It is. It's a perfect point of intervention because if you can learn how to write a good research proposal, you can essentially learn how to create a good career. I think because it is one of those kind of elementary forms of academic life, especially for a field researcher. You need to be able to to master those set of skills and so many other skills come along the way. Michael, thank you so much for being with us. This has been terrific. Love your passion. It just comes across so clearly your passion for your research, your passion for your teaching. I hope that we will stay in contact and be able to invite you to rise some point.

Speaker3: [01:02:51] Oh, you any, any time, any time. I'd love to come down and and as I say, thank you so much for reaching out. It's been a lovely conversation and I am quite touched that you you thought I might have something to say. It's been a pleasure talking to you.