Shaun Newman Podcast - #442 - Kate Crosby

Episode Date: June 2, 2023

She is a Canadian plant geneticist living in California. We discuss plants, time & aging. Let me know what you think Text me 587-217-8500 SNP Presents: Luongo & Krainer https://www.showpass.com/snp-presents-luongo-krainer/ Substack: https://open.substack.com/pub/shaunnewmanpodcast

This is Nicole Murphy. This is Rachel Emanuel. Hi, this is John Cohen. Hey, everyone. This is Glenn Jung from Bright Light News. This is Drew Weatherhead. This is Terracine. This is Ed Dodd, and you're listening to the Sean Newman podcast.

Well, in the podcast, folks, happy June. Ooh, yeah. Love this. I love a new start to the episodes. There's, for newcomers, that's a bunch of the folks who showed up in May start off the episodes in June. So that's exciting. Here in June, June 10th, SMP, presents is back, Luongo and Craneer. You only got a few more days. The hard date or the first date,

I should say not the hard date. The first soft date to have my numbers into the casino is today. So if you're holding on the fence, you're like, ah, maybe I should come, maybe I shouldn't. Today is the day to get your tickets, because obviously the day of you just can't walk in and buy tickets. We have to have their numbers in for supper and all that good stuff in advance. And then obviously, not obviously, then Monday is the hard date of the final number. So if If you're sitting here listening to this and you're like, ooh, I should grab a ticket. The tickets are in the show notes. Of course, we have Tom Luongo coming in from Florida, Alex Craneer coming in from, well, flying in from France.

And I was just ironing out the details, hotels and all that good stuff for them last night. So it's all set to go. We're going to have a few different people in the audience coming to town. You got Leight and Gray coming in, guest to the podcast not that long ago. This guy named Chris Barber is going to be in. I don't know if any of you folks know him. Anyways, it should be an interesting night. Looking forward to, you know, when S&P presents being back rolling,

I think it's going to be a fun evening and look forward to all of you being there. And hopefully we can have some fun and get Tom and Alex, you know, rolling as they do. And hopefully get them talking about some, you know, things that are going on in the world and how it's going to slowly come back to roost here in Canada and, you know, closer to home. We got the substack is in the show notes as well. I've been, you know, it's funny, I, you know, I set off to make one a week and I'm having hit that goal and I'm trying not to be too hard on myself as I, as I slowly work away at learning how to get material out weekly, you know, write, all that good stuff. I know everyone's like, I'll just pound it out. It's like,

I don't know, I'm messing around with my thoughts and trying to get them out on paper and that is an interesting endeavor is what I would say. I've been enjoying the process, but it's taken more, not time, but more, just, it's taken a lot of energy, I guess, to be very methodical on and getting out some thoughts that I think I want to have out there for all you to read. And I know that sounds maybe a little too much of, you know, I don't know how that sounds. I just know if you're following along the substack, you can sign up for that. That also is in the show notes. And certainly I'm just taking my time and making sure I get everything, you know, correct there. And I don't know.

It's a work in progress, folks. All right. How about this? We got a bunch of different sponsors on today's episode. Ignite Distribution out of Wainwright, Alberta. They can supply automotive industrial safety welding and automotive parts. And I said automotive twice. I don't know why I did that.

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When it comes to paperwork and all that stuff, it just, it's not my cup of tea. And then you run into Kristen and her team, and it's like they enjoy it. Funny to run into people who enjoy what they do, folks. Well, she's been in the financial industry since 2009, and her education and experience in this field have been focusing on helping small to medium-sized businesses with a wide range of advice and assistance mainly in agricultural retail, not-for-profit, and in the oil and gas sectors. They're also looking to hire a CPA and would love to grab someone local.

For more information, go to be able to be. McGowan CPA.ca.ca. And, well, and of course, we love, you know, they believe in the show. I wrote this down because I thought this is cool. Kristen believes in the show and supporting free speech and starting conversations. So that's pretty cool. Now, let's get on the tale of the tape brought to you by Hancock Petroleum for the past 80 years. They've been an industry leader in bulkfields, lubricants, methanol, and chemicals delivering to your farm, commercial oil field locations.

For more information, visit them at Hancock, Petroleum. Dat.C.A. She has her PhD in biology, specifically plant genetics. I'm talking about Kate Crosby. So buckle up. Here we go. Welcome to the Sean Newman podcast. Today I'm joined by Kate Crosby.

I'm just clicking play because on this bloody Zoom feature, I know how exactly this is going to go. 40 minutes is going to go like that. And anyways, long story short, happy to have you aboard Kate. Well, thanks, Sean. Appreciate it. This has been, Vance has been on me. about this. And sometimes I seem to drag my feet on things or I get busy or I get whatever it is. And it's been a long time coming to finally have a conversation with you. So I'm happy we finally

get to do it. That being said, there's going to be a lot of people who've never heard of Kate Crosby. So Kate, how will you give us a little bit of your background and we'll jump off from there? Yeah. So born and raised in the east coast of Canada, spent some time, I suppose, in Ontario, eventually migrated, matriculated down to the United States of America. I'm a dual citizen, and I work in agriculture right now with a focused in controlled environment agriculture.

So that's just a fancy word for greenhouses. But yeah, mostly with a focus on like higher value crops, so things like tomatoes, cukes, berries, lettuce, even, and a focus on kind of, like local food sovereignty. Yeah. I kind of really done. I'm going to ask what this is like foreign to me kind of just even the terminology.

Like higher value crops. Why is a tomato a higher value crop? Yeah, that's a really good question, you know. It, it tends to be kind of one of those things. I think we had talked about this like what's more rare is more valuable or what's rare is beautiful. So I think like with respect to crops. that applies to you. So your common ones, your big six, and I used to work in Monsanto, too, are corn, soy, cotton, wheat, canola, and sorghum. Now I got the six. So those are the big

acreage crops down in the States and generally worldwide too. There might be a few others, but they kind of get the commodity charge on them, but everybody needs them, right? It's kind of like the base layer of the food pyramid, similar to oil and gas, maybe. And then further up, you have your more sort of refined products, I guess, like root stock tomatoes. So those are those, there's nice kind of like tomatoes that you get in the garden. You might get like some nice fancy like long English cucumbers. But they're almost luxury items, right? Like they're not kind of high energy in terms of if you eat them.

You don't necessarily get the benefit of the energy, but they're nice to have. And they do have good micronutrients. So there you go. it must be just me because I think a tomato and I'm like it's like one one I don't know what am I calling a vegetable am I calling fruit is it a mixture anyways it doesn't much matter me and it do not get along unless it's got a ton of sugar added to it and they call it ketchup you know like I mean yeah totally and I mean you know I think that that's kind of how within egg we view it so we kind of you vegetables is sort of being the far off sort of low value in the sense that it's low volume,

but it's high value at the census per unit. People tend to pay more for it. I know my folks who are on Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia, are paying a hell of a lot for fruits and vegetables right now in Canada and food costs have seemingly inflated this year and the year before. How is it down in the States? Like, are you seeing, like, I guess what are you seeing down there, you know like you kind of have an interesting a view of things because you obviously having roots from Canada but now living abroad you know what do you stare at when you're you're seeing all the funny things go on here in Canada or even the states for that matter yeah so I mean with agriculture I'm in in California so I'm in the central valley as well so not on the coast

it's the biggest agricultural valley in the world so it gets fast dusty in the summer, very hot. It's much hotter than the coast. It's very flat. But it's extremely diverse and rich in terms of what it can grow. So for the most part, if you go to a roadside stands, you get the benefit of cheap. But if you go to the supermarkets, generally those costs tend to be higher, I would say. But, you know, if you know where to shop, you can get a pretty good deal because we're very close to, close to the ground in terms of tree, nut, vine, anything, really. It's a very lucky climate to live in. It's a Mediterranean climate. So most of those zones through the world

have typically been able to produce a lot of good crops. You can think of Rome or Italy. That was a Mediterranean zone. Greece, similar until it all falls apart, right? I'm just kidding. What, you know, what led you down that road? You know, I always get to ask like, why podcasting? Why did you want to do this? You know, and how did you fall into it? It's like, I stare at what you're talking about and, you know, working for Monsanto, and I would be curious about that.

But it just, you know, the road of going into agriculture, but, you know, you should probably give the listener a bit more of exactly what you do because at the end of the day, I guess my first thought is why? Like, what is it that draws you to plants? Yeah, it's a, it's a really good question. So, um, for me, I guess, like, formally and sort of very short, I did a PhD in plant genetics. So went to Delhousie out east. Got my PhD. She's got my PhD. No big D. But I really like genetics. And, um, so that's a really appealing subject to me. And I think, like, Monsanto as a corporation has use for that skill, right? It's, it, it's, I very much got to apply what I learned in school and an actual job,

which is great. Sometimes people go to school and, you know, doesn't quite match up, right? Yeah, get a history degree and then come work in the oil field and then lined up in podcasting, and then you're like, kind of like, what, anyways, yeah, I know. You're still, you're still successful, man. Come on. Very successful. But it was one of those kind of nice one-to-one. So, and I think with plants, one of the things that's really nice about them is they don't move and they're little energy receptors. And so I have an interest in energy.

And the biggest source of energy, at least in our solar system, is the sun. And even with the sun, you know, you can kind of relate that back to hydrocarbons and oil because, ultimately what oil is is like compressed plants and animals like high under pressure and you probably know more about this but that's initially where it comes from so it's it's all down to the sun right it's all down to plants and so I have an interest in plants because I kind of view them as good receptors for light and in my mind light is a measure of time so I I have some techniques and I suppose some inventions toward growing plants faster using light and time, which is a form of energy, really. So yeah, that's my interest. Well, you make, you make that

sound like it's going to be a great science fiction novel. I'm not going to lie. When you talk about light is a measure of time, can you explain that to me? Yeah, I can. So if you're familiar with kind of the Peterson terms of chaos and order. Think about it that way. So sometimes if you're feeling heated emotionally, right? Feeling heated, you're disordered. Somebody might tell you to go cool down to become more ordered. So with light, typically we experience that as heat and you get more kind of disorder as you go forward.

as you bombard something with energy. So I always like to think of it that way is like light is kind of a form of disorder and more and more and more of it, pushes you more towards like either growth or destruction. And I guess like with less light, you know, you can think of like wintertime in Canada and you're in Lloydminster.

So it gets pretty dark up there. It does. So there's really not a lot of, there's not a lot of particle movement So when light hits something, typically some of that energy is released as heat as disordered heat. So particles move around. That's actually heat. With less of it, there's more order.

And I like to say there's technically less time because if everything were to stop, there would be no time. But with too much, too much heat, you get ultimate disorder as well. So that's what the sun is, right? So this is a very far out conversation, but it does have very proximate sort of parameters to it and how you manipulate it as well. And you're speaking to a dense guy today because I'm trying to grasp what you're throwing at me. I'm like, I don't get it. I don't get how light equals time. Because I mean, if it's warm or it's cold and somebody out there driving along is like, Sean, you're a moron. And that's fine. That's fine today, folks. No, no, no, no. It's a hard concept to wrap your head around. And it's hard. It was a hard concept for. me to wrap my head around. So I'll put it this way. Let me try to put it another way. Okay. In the summer, you've got, you've got three kids, right? Correct. Right. It's the heat of the summer in July. What do you put on them before they go outside? Sunscreen. Why?

Protect them from the sun. Burning. Why do you think they burn in the summer, but they don't burn in the winter? Um, well, I'm going to assume. the position of the sun over us and the fact that, I mean, instead of having zero time with the sun out, which pretty much is six months a year for, I mean, just look at today here and get old Alberta, it's like plus 30. So, I mean, it's just hotter and sun's out longer, very little cloud cover. I don't know if any of that hit the bark. It did. It did. You're totally right. And a lot of older ladies often wear sunscreen on their face to protect themselves from aging. And it's a very specific, so I always like to think of aging as kind of fast time,

and that's that ultraviolet band of the sun that gets through at specific times of year. And so plants respond to that too, but like they do, they have specific colors that they do respond to, but ultraviolet specifically ages, ages human skin cells. It will also stop stomates on plants from opening, so it's stop them growing, if there's too much of it, if there's too little. So I like to think about it that way. That's the easiest way I can probably loop folks in is like, well, why do you put on sunscreen? Because you don't want to age. Oh, because it's fast time in the summer with ultraviolet light.

You want to stop that kind of from coming through. So that's as close as I can probably get to it. but like and the specific like parameter is two 80 nanometers like you don't want that on your skin any any any any further down that that end of the spectrum of the light spectrum and in your so are you saying in this i don't know if i'm getting this right at all so i might be bugling this up in the summertime are you saying it's a different color of light coming through so so more ultraviolet light so that's violet you can think it was purple we experience is just bright light because all colors are coming at once. in the heat of the day. But yes, there is absolutely more ultraviolet light in the summer. And there is less in the winter. Sometimes it bounces off the snow and you can get it in your skiing, but it's definitely way less.

Most of what penetrates in the winter, what we call red and infrared, even if we experience it as, you know, kind of whitish light or bluish light, blue still penetrates, but at midday. and as you get closer to sort of blue, so if you think of the rainbow, right, red's kind of like your low and slow heat. Purple and blue are kind of like your hot heat and high energy heat and things that are that are actually going to warp things a bit. And then you go further out in the spectrum and that's gamma radiation, which is actually radioactive will kill you.

So that doesn't reach our planet. But so I'll just say this. You can use certain colors to direct plant growth and development and manipulate how fast they grow. And that's kind of what I'm very focused on at the moment. You're saying if you give a plant, let's just say you could do this. Yeah. In a certain type of light, you can age it faster. That's correct.

That's correct. So. Hmm, that's a deep thought, you know, when you really think about it. Because, I mean, like, that, I mean, to build that in the universe would be almost impossible, right? But to put it in a greenhouse, all of a sudden you have real control over the environment, and you could essentially grow things really, really, really, really fast, essentially. Yeah, you get more pounds per unit time. That's kind of how we think of it.

Yeah. Pounds of product, pounds of crop. pounds, whatever, per unit times. That kind of hurts my head a little bit. I don't know. I once asked Chris Montoya. Something we're in at the end. It's funny, I've never interviewed him since.

I said something about time travel. He's like, oh, we've done it. And I'm like, what? And he's like, we've done time travel. I'm like, what are you talking about? And he's like, oh, we'll talk about it next time. And I've never followed up on that. And somewhere in the back of my brain, it's lodged.

And you're talking about not time travel in a sense, but that you could speed up time. Well, I mean, yeah, as the plant experiences, yes, yes. And I think, you know, you could probably do it to other organisms and even humans, but it would be very cruel. I mean, you think about solitary confinement if you leave the lights on for 23 hours of the day, like that's going to screw up your internal clock and how you experience time. Yeah, for sure.

Yeah, that sounds like torture, not actual living, doesn't it? It does, doesn't it? But thank goodness plants don't have feelings. At least we think, I'm pretty sure they don't. So where do you see that going then? Do you see like, do you see like the ability for greenhouses to perfect a way to shorten the growing period for plants? So that, I mean, just think about that. Like think of the possibilities, I guess, that could come out of that. Yeah, I think like, I mean, I live in California now, so very lucky to have the like climate that we do. But I do eventually want to return back to Canada. It gets a little hot here in the summer. So anyway, you're missing, you're missing winter, are you? I am missing winter.

You might be the only one, Kate. I don't know how many people really. Everybody's fleeing. They're like, get me out of this. you go through like the dark days of winter in in January and February you're just crawling at the wall you know it gets plus one here and pretty soon you're just walking around T-serge and shorts nobody's even judging you because you just like I get it I get it man drink it in you know yeah yeah no I definitely miss winter I mean Canada is is a place I definitely miss and I always try to go at least three times a year um mostly to Nova Scotia um where I'm from so yeah well that's that's a spot. I've only been, I think, just once in my life. And was, I mean, I've been telling my wife

that we need to take another tour with the kids at some point across Canada because you get to the eastern part, well, you know, certainly Nova Scotia and, and while everywhere over there. And it's just a different world from the West, right? Like they're not even, I mean, just beautiful in their own ways. Yeah. It's interesting. You know, Canada is kind of in my mind divided into different. zones. I never really look at politics. I always look at geography first. Even in the states, like geography speaks to me more than a person's politics or culture initially because I feel like geography is sort of the base layer and sort of influences that moving outward, if that makes sense. So you're saying you're saying if you're stuck in the middle of the oil field and see what it

does for your community, you're going to have certain thoughts on the Ophill. But if you live in the Rocky Mountains per se, and I don't know if that's the right spot or not, folks, but you could have a different view of it because you don't actually, you know, see and deal with it firsthand. It's kind of what you're pointing at. Yeah, that's right. And I think we all experience it that way, but we may not think about it that way. There's a really interesting Russian author. I haven't read the book yet, but I've read sort of the precy.

It's Alexander Dugan. And I think the Greeks sort of talk about this too, but land power and sea power. So I think often what you find, and this is throughout history and even throughout continents. So land, sort of heartland, tends to be more conservative,

especially if there's wide open land and no barriers. So if there's no, sea because the sea is a natural barrier and mountains are natural barriers. So there's a, there's often like a very sort of, I have to, I have to work this land. I have to get stuff out of it. I have to protect it. Whereas if you go to the sea and you live on the coast, you're very much dependent on land power. So sea power is about trade and kind of eking out what you can and forming relationships with others, hopefully, to kind of make your society work. And the idea is, is that both should sort of collaborate and cooperate in order to sort of build something more.

But a lot of times it goes awry. It's not just an Alberta, Sean. Well, I mean, the best of, if you had balance or I guess synergies where they work together, you know, they both offer something the other doesn't have. That's right. And by doing that, you should reap the best of both worlds. But usually things like greed and power and probably a whole bunch of other things coming into effect and it never happens quite exactly how, you know, maybe it's designed to. You, growing up, how close were you the ocean then?

Oh, you're only ever 90 minutes from Nova Scotia. So are you afraid, are you afraid of the ocean or are you like, oh, no, I love being on it? I love the ocean. I love the mountains and I love ag. It's really hard for me to sort of say like what I prefer. I would miss each one. And they all have their uniqueness about them. It seems that in Canada, and this is my read, this is not, I don't, and keep in mind where I'm located, I may not get the best and most updated Canadian news. I don't think anybody really has. much intersubjectivity in news anymore, but it seems to me that like Canada is very kind of separated at the moment, specifically post-COVID. But even it was trending that way even in like the year 2000, 2005-ish onward. And I'm not really sure how that began. I just know that it's, it's kind of increased.

And it's been something that I've just been like kind of down on. Like the 90s was all about Quebec trying to separate. And now it seems like it's the West. And so, yeah, I don't know how that sort of initiated. I have observations on why, but I don't know how it started. I have my own explanations on why. Yeah. What are your own explanations?

Now you got me, I mean, give us some of your wisdom, Kate. I don't know if it's wisdom or if it's just like pulling something out of thin air. So I think I might have talked to you about this before something called regulatory capture and what is rare is valuable. So this is this idea that if you can manipulate the supply of something, it becomes more valuable. So there was a certain company that I worked for that had new technology. And they wanted, let's just say they were GMOs because they were. And they were safe, but they wanted to control the market.

And so the way in which one might control the market is by establishing so many regulations such as to make it rare that they were the only. only one's able to control it. So let's say, oh, it needs to go through seven years of testing before it's declared safe. If you're a young startup company trying to get into that space, it will take you a long time to sort of push that forward. And I think with respect to maybe Alberta and oil companies, I might suggest that, you know, by constraining the supply of oil, it might actually be more valuable to the companies. And that also, who are the shareholders of the companies is the other question I always ask. And in general, it's like for Canadians, I don't even know if most people know this,

but like, it's like there's something ridiculous, like maybe like 10 companies in the TSX that are oil companies. So almost everybody that has a retirement plan is a shareholder and owner. of Canadian oil. And so it's this really weird tension. I would almost say it's like an emergent property of like a big financial system where shareholders want to gain more value out of oil. They own, right? They want to retire.

They want to have a nice life. But simultaneously, it can only maybe get more valuable if that supply is limited. Because if you let it go, maybe it doesn't increase in value, right? like if you flood the market with oil, what happens to the price of a barrel? It goes down. If you constrain at what happens to the price of barrel goes up. And what happens to the profits of those companies? And then what happens to the shareholders, funds, they go up too.

And so these are just things that I've thought about with respect to Alberta, but also kind of in general. I always like to look at like, what are the incentives for why someone might want to restruct. restrict resources in one place or another, rather than getting super upset about it. It's like, what are the incentives for restricting, you know, oil supply in Canada? What are the incentives? Who has something to gain? And I'm not saying I know who, but like those are the questions you might ask. So when you look at different pipelines getting shut down or et cetera, et cetera, et cetera,

you go maybe, just maybe the very oil companies it would help, it would actually help if they never put those through. It's possible, yeah. It is possible. What's rare is valuable, just like Bitcoin. I mean, stock to flow ratio. I don't know. If Canada was the only,

one in the world that could offer it. Maybe that makes sense. But when you have like how many countries can supply the world with oil, doesn't that become a little bit tougher? It does. You think of like Russia. You think of Saudis. You think of Venezuela.

You think of Canada. You think of the United States. I'm sure I'm missing about 20 other countries. But. And then the next question, you know, I guess it comes to mind is, So then is there like eight guys pulling the strings that are behind all that? I don't think it, yeah. So I was like, I want to separate causality from emergent property.

So what I mean by that is like we often look for scapegoats or who's responsible in a big system. And really it's just because incentives got tied together in the wrong way. So if you have like, I don't know, I think the Canadian government is the biggest employer in Canada. I think that's true. and most of them have pension plans, and most of them own the TSX, which is the largest sort of stock index fund, you know, in Canada. They own portions of it. So they own the very oil companies that they may be, they may have opinions against. I don't think, so that's kind of an emergent thing, right?

So when incentives become tied together, I think things go murky. I also think that recently it seems like with respect to a certain, you know, the war in Ukraine, the price of the commodity has spiked up. I mean, who had incentive to do that? I'm not sure. And then you see sort of other games afoot with with kind of OPEC trying to flood supply, right, or trying to restrict supply. So I do think that these kind of games go on, but I never really look at. to the politicians. I always look towards the companies themselves and whoever their shareholders are.

Do their shareholders want to return? Oh yes, they do. Okay, how can they get that return? It might be, when I go back to when you're first mentioning the GMOs and like the seven years to get into it because it's, you know, their technology and they kind of found ways

to put a lot of hurdles in the way. that makes a lot of well I guess in my brain that makes a lot of sense because if you're a company that has you know a hold on a market the way to keep your hold is to is to essentially make it difficult for others to get into the said market essentially that's right the so a that's when I think about that let's just take oil out of it for a second. I'm like, oh man, if you're making billions of dollars, how much, how much money do you, but then, I don't know. I don't know the murky world that is that that's like, nope, nobody's ever coming. Because it's kind of like podcast. Well, I mean, this is in a really cheap sense, folks. I mean, anyone can start a podcast tomorrow, at least for the time being, and I guess

we'll wait and see where that ever goes. But like, it'd be like, Sean's the first podcast ever. and instead of encouraging others to podcast, he's like, no, you actually have to do like the seven years of things to even get to where you get a podcast on the air. And for most people, nobody would be willing to go through that. I mean, obviously that'd be a, we're not talking seven days, we're talking, we're talking a long period of time. When you bring it back to oil, though, certainly in an area you can put in a lot of different stipulations in order for companies to drill. or whatever, you know, there's going to be a whole bunch there. But on the world stage, they're playing a different game than I think I even understand anymore.

Because you mentioned OPEC, you mentioned different countries, how they toy and mess with each other's economies. Like, I think I kind of understand, but at the same time, it's like, I'm playing checkers and they're playing, you know, 40 chess or whatever. Yeah, this is something I'm particularly interested in because it relates to ag on the base layer. But, you know, it seems like there are probably two, maybe three empires out there. So there's the American empire that we don't really speak about,

but we know that Canada is part of. We know that most of Western Europe is part of. And they kind of share resources and trade very deeply. And, you know, if you're not the empire itself, you kind of got to be part of one for arms and defense. And then you have OPEC, an OPEC plus, which is sort of separate. So you have two different teams, really. So one way in which, you know, you could offset trade is by saying, oh, well, maybe there's

alternative energy forms so I don't have to trade with you because I don't like what you're doing. That might also be something that is happening. There may also be just a general kind of like, hey, I need to make sure that the price of oil is a certain amount so that my country thrives. So there's probably games there too. But I do know that it's mostly the United States that guarantees trade throughout the oceans. And that's generally how things flow. So if you think of like the trans mountain pipeline, you know, it needed to roll through British Columbia,

then roll over to where? Where was that oil going? that's the question right it's likely going to a place that the united states didn't want it to go and so if the united states doesn't want it to go there i would say largely it has a large say in where that energy goes so and what they can charge for it because they're the ones defending it and it's not canada that's you know making sure that trade route is clear this is how i think about things i guess yeah for the listener we had to take a short break we're uh patching things together here on good old technology. And I was, you know, we were talking about a few different

things regarding oil and that type of thing. But one of the things we'd written down before we started was why politicians are false gods and do not have as much power as they seem. They are merely middle managers. And I read that and I'm like, you know, we got an election coming here in Alberta in no time flat. And actually, by the time this was released, it'll be dang near happens. So I thought, Why better way to switch gears and really, well, I don't know how much it's switching gears from oil and control from the U.S. and everything else. But politics, what comes to mind when I rattle that off? I kind of tend to view the current PM in Canada. As a jackass?

Oh, sorry, sorry. At the current time to be a middle manager, two larger interests. that he doesn't really control but is dictated to and then dictates downward. But I think they make terrific scapegoats. So, you know, it's interesting. He probably does seemingly have a lot of power, but the power that he actually has is whoever is above him. And so we talked a little bit about how when systems like financial systems,

trade systems get really big incentives get crossed. And so it's like it's kind of almost like who bosses the bosses. And I would say in PM, you know, JT's case, there's probably a few. From a defense and trade perspective, it's pretty clear it's the U.S. But then the question is, okay, well, who is really kind of, you know, guiding the U.S. as well. And it's a combination, I think, of oligarchic companies. So companies that are on the S&P 500 that have to please a lot of shareholders, which we all buy into. And as an emergent property, you can kind of get a little bit of chaos out of that. And it's almost, when I think about

it, it's like big can really lead to a lot of chaos. Too small has its disadvantages too. But when things get very big and convoluted, I generally see like most individuals' power go way down. And I would say that like of any system. So, or in any company even, if you start off your own small business and you have only a few employees, you know, it's easy to control. As that employee base gets larger, you have to answer to more people. And so honestly, like, you know, your power diminishes unless you rule it all. And I'm sure, like, at points in history, there have been kind of monarchs that have ruled over systems that they've had a lot of control.

Like one common U.S. president that had a lot more control over many departments and I would say companies would have been FDR because he was a wartime president. and so had special powers. But I don't think we've really seen a president in the United States have as much power as FDR. And this is something actually that Curtis Yarvin talks about. And I don't know if you've heard of him. But I don't agree with everything that he says, but I agree with that point.

I think FDR was the last U.S. president that had a lot of actual power. You know, it's, I don't want to sound jaded, but often my family will be like, well, who are you voting for? Like, who do you think should be nominated for the U.S. presidency? And I was like, honestly, you know who I think should be nominated? The CEO and board of Exxon, the CEO and board of Johnson and Johnson, the CEO, because that's actually where sort of power sits, right? They kind of direct downward and sort of dictate a lot of laws and legislation, because they're ultimately, responsible to their shareholders and making a profit. This is the phase we're in right now. I don't

think we'll be in this phase forever. But when I look at someone like Justin Trudeau, or I look at someone like Joe Biden or even Donald Trump, I'm not sure the entire power resides in that individual. It's who's behind them. Do you think that's hard for, well, I mean, certainly more people are beginning to understand that, but you think that's a hard thing for people to comprehend maybe? Just, you know, you look at Justin Trudeau and you go, he's our leader, and he's pulling the strings, and he's the guy. Totally. And it's kind of like, it's nice, it's kind of like sports. Politics is totally like sports now, right? In some ways, it's like that's the team. Like, you know, you're either for the team or you're against the team. You kind of

mythologize them. But at the end of the day, you know, it's it, it's a little bit just a game. And I think the other way, maybe humans and people kind of like to externalize and say, like, he's responsible for everything. And ultimately there is in some circumstances. But when something's so big, I really don't think it's one individual. They like to scapegoat and point at somebody, possibly because they don't want to look inward at themselves, right? Like, I'll give you an example. So I used to be, I guess, kind of like, I came up through academia, so obviously I was like a very big like climate change person.

Like, and I'd say I've moderated my views, having learned about commodities and how the international trade system works and how much my entire life revolves around hydrocarbons and also the food system. but I was ready at a certain age to be like, oh, those, you know, those oil producers just being pollutant. And then I go and I look at, you know, my 401K, which is kind of like a, I guess, RRSP in Canada. And I'm like, oh, I'm an owner of an oil company. Interesting. Wow. So I'm being a total hypocrite by doing that. Complete and utter hypocrite. And that's, I think people like to scapegoat certain things in frustration knowing that they're ultimately connected to it. They're connected to the

things. Most people, I don't think want to acknowledge what you just said, you know, like most people don't want to do that level of, you know, they just want to get angry at the machine. Absolutely. And I think, you know, we, you know, the question is like, what do we do if we're constantly getting angry at the machine and how do we, how do we sort of change that? Well, we realize, maybe one we're linked into it. Maybe if a system gets so big and convoluted, it's really hard to control. And so maybe you step back and you say like,

hey, maybe we need a little bit more sovereignty over here and a little less oligopoly oligarchy happening over here. Let's dial it down a little bit. Growing up in Nova Scotia, I always remember that telephone companies, utility companies, were very sort of fructally local in the sense that they were controlled by the community, so we had maritime tell and tell, that got taken over by Bell, Alliant.

And now it's just Bell, I think. And there are only four companies that sort of provide awful sort of cell phone plans in Canada. And it's so expensive. And similar to the states, really, there's only about four or five here to the point where almost every sector in the marketplace has four or five large companies that everybody owns, but everybody hates. And so it's, it, we're kind of wrapped in this embrace, sort of yelling at each other, not realizing. What do you think, what do you, where do you think that goes? I don't know.

I think the first thing to realize is perhaps maybe this isn't optimal. Maybe there are, maybe we should, should break up. some of these systems, maybe allow them to sort of be geographically distinct, would be one way. That's kind of how it worked in the early 1900s till about maybe the 70s. You had much smaller companies. That might be one way. I think, you know, we'll see a lot of change because I don't know, I don't know if this stays functional.

There's always a possibility it gets bigger, which would be, worse, in my opinion, at this point, I think big's really hard to manage, just generally, really big complex systems are hard to manage. Yeah. But you don't see it falling apart. Well, I mean, I don't know, maybe you do see it falling apart. Like you mentioned, yeah, it could. Sorry, go on. No, I am. I'm, I don't know. I'm, I'm listening and you got my brain kind of spinning a little bit. And I'm just like, I don't know, like, where, like, how do you get out of this perpetual cycle we're in? I think in general, historically, there has been some type of falling apart, but it's not so

disastrous as you think. It just kind of happens. But it can be disastrous too, right? It can be disastrous. And so we'll see. I don't have any really bold predictions. I just see a lot of interlinking. And when I see people, in my, self included, you know, scapegoating a lot, trying to find somebody to blame. In general, I think there's too much interlinking in a system. There's too much connectivity. That's like, oh, okay, well, how do we make the best of the bad situation might be a way of looking at it? And how can I go from there? I mean, personally, if, I'll just use the example of Alberta, it seems like Alberta wants to get a lot of what it has because it's a very resource-rich

province. It's very lucky and blessed that way. It wants to get that out and it can't for a number of reasons or it can't as optimally as it would like. One of my questions to Albertans might be, well, what can you do with all the energy that you have right in the province that you live in? Like, what can you build with? You can certainly be food sovereign and even have like a lot of different, like we talked about at the start, a lot of sort of really high value crops growing there with such abundant energy. You could have some really decent manufacturing too. The issue might be like, oh, well, we have to pay workers too much.

But even with abundant energy, if you have very abundant energy, you might be able to control it yourself. I know the provinces have a lot more control and jurisdiction over themselves, even than the states do here. So it's just something I was thinking. about as you were asking, what do we do? That's an interesting point. I forget if I heard Daniel Smith say that once upon a time in here.

Obviously, she's now the premier because I know she has interviewed or maybe even thought about what you just said and talked about how we can, you know, how we can make Alberta better by just embracing some of the things we have. It's funny that, and maybe it gets talked about it and I just, I live under a rock gate and I never see it. But it's, it's funny. We, we want to complain instead of like going, you know, putting the head down. I mean, in saying all that, folks, I can be the first to say the federal government isn't exactly making it easy, are they? But what you're talking about, there's different things that you could be doing here in Alberta that would be, well, I mean, overall, very interesting

moving forward. For sure. Yeah, I don't know about another province, maybe Saskatchewan. Saskatchewan for sure. Yeah. I mean, there's, it's so, they're, they're just as dense with the resources. I mean, it's crazy, like the two provinces here are just a wealth, you know, just an unbelievable wealth of riches. That's right.

And it's people are riches too. Don't forget that. And so, so my attitude towards Alberta is let Alberta do what Alberta does best, which is build things and just keep. going up the tech stack, right? Like, don't just stop at oil. Make something with that oil. Yeah.

I agree. You know, it's funny. I don't know how much time, you know, it's funny. The time just seems to like slip on me here. And then, of course, we've had some issues on the tech side of things. So I, I, you got, you, I got about 18 things going on in my brain. This happens from time to time. And I want to pull us back to plants because I'm like, here I am sitting across.

from a lady who's spent a lot of time staring at plants and genetics and everything else. And I was curious. I'm like, I wonder what you've learned from plants that you can pull across to whether it's the human population, whether it's just an individual person. I don't know how deep or shallow you want to go on that. But I'm just like, you've stared at something for an awful long time, I assume it had to have spurred on a ton of thoughts in your brain on, I don't know, XYZ. I'm not going to try and guide you any further than that, actually. Yeah. I mean, plants is a metaphor. It's very poetic of you, Sean. I'm like, I'm trying to think. It's tough. I guess, you know, one of the things I would think about is plants are sort of a way of,

thinking about the human calendar as well. So kind of in the, we have, we have, I know, and I'm not going to get astrological here, but we do literally have a winter solstice and a summer solstice where we have in really technical terms, kind of the lowest watts per meter squared in the winter of kind of the sun hitting the earth at a specific spot. And then the summer. That's such an interesting way to put it. Oh, my goodness. I know, sorry.

You asked about plants. This is how I think. And then in the summer, you got like the highest, right? So one of the things that I sort of think about as a Canadian and now living sort of much further south is like the season's great on me differently in different places. And that's a lot to do with that watts per meter squared. Like when I'm getting up, like out of high. nation in the winter. I'm kind of like and it's it's just such a big jump into the spring you know tomorrow morning when I wake up five to walk the dog I'm going to be like ooh the wots

are feeling good this morning there you go um and I also just love you know I think one of the things that's really interesting about um you know being further north is you get those really nice long summer days no they're beautiful I mean this is this is is this is the best time of year the next like month to two months although i hate getting past june 21st which is coming awfully flipping quick because you get past them the day start getting shorter right and it's like yeah i just i just want to kind of stay right here anyways yeah and i think the other way i sort of think about it um and i've definitely talked with vance about this is that um i view folks that like we're talking about urban rural divide and i've lived in both

is if you live in a rural area, you typically have kind of like a slower, more intentional pace of life because you have to plan so much. You can't just have everything instantaneously. So I tend to describe cities as blue and kind of rural areas as red, because red's kind of slow and infrared.

Like, everything has to be planned out. So, and then when you go to the cities, everything is fast. they can just pick up a phone and, you know, get takeout right away, like not even talk to a human being. It's great. You know what I love about talking to different people is their perspectives on how they see the world. And your way of like integrating light into everything, energy or however you want to break it down, is rather interesting. I was going to say, you know, you can live in the city though and you can change if you're going to use the how fast, how fast,

time and planning goes, you know, I did the carnivore diet, albeit only for a very short period, but just by switching that one thing, which is a large thing, it's how you eat, obviously, the amount of planning and preparation and everything that went into that really changed my days, like immediately. So you can have things living in a city

or where, or maybe even on the rural side of it, where you can really change, you can flip that script, awfully quick. And I just point to obviously what you have put in your body. But I mean, it's true. I mean, you can probably switch it awfully quick if you really wanted to. Yeah, it's true. And you know, it's really interesting. You mentioned diet. I actually eat kind of a weird diet. I tend to eat more animal-based things in the winter, even here in California. And then in the summer, it just doesn't agree with me. So I'll eat some, but I won't eat it every day.

and I'll eat whatever's here, kind of. And I think like, you know, if you think about it, an animal is a much, it grows much slower than a plant. So it eats plants. It's a bioreactor for a plant. And then you're eating that bioreactor. It's kind of kind of nice. Like if you don't live in a place that can actually outdoors produce plants, well, what do you eat? You, of course, eat the animals that can use them.

So, yeah. Well, one of the ones I haven't tried, me and Dean have talked about this for a long time, and you don't know who Dean is. Anyways, is a beaver tail. They store all their fat and energy and everything into the beaver tail, and the trappers back in the day used to kill a beaver and eat the fat for anyways, because they'd give them all these nutrients and everything. And I'm like, I wonder what that tastes like. It's probably awful.

Leathery, maybe? I actually, I've been, you've got to watch some different shows on it. supposedly it's not that bad, but hey, what do I know? I'm, you know, diet is, I don't know, I always come back to when you're, when you talk about, um, the pace at which we live. I know Vance has brought it up on here before. I think he brought up at the rural urban divide too on stage about, you know, the pace between, um, the two.

Yeah, heck, I don't want to, I'm having kind of deja vu because it might have even been the first time me and him chatted that we talked about this. And it's funny. in your own life you can do things that can drastically impact the time like immediately like tomorrow you know and all of a sudden you can make days seem like really fast really short and how much we distract ourselves can also add in you know like certainly there's differences from rural to to the city but like one of the things that is pretty relevant in both places now is how much TV or streaming and phone is just available.

And that's, time disappears into that machine. Like it's just gone. And pretty soon you're like, where did the day go? And you don't need to be it either. It's one of the similarities we all face now, especially in Western culture. Yeah, I guess what light most of these devices emit? I don't know. Blue, go fast, there you go.

It's almost like our human eyes. drawn to it for some reason. I don't really know if it's intentional or not. I know you can get apps that sort of slow it down that make it a little bit more orange so that you don't. When you think about that, though, do you think that was intentional? Like, do you think the 100%? Yeah. I know user interfaces, even Facebook chose blue for that reason. It's also the color blindness thing. Yeah. What do you mean the color blindness? Most men have red green color blindness. So it's not good as a header. But blue is you have three sort of color receptors in your retina, red, blue, and green. Red and green typically are the most common colorblindness, so you don't really see it. But blue is the least. So blue is

like the really truest color that you can see. So yeah, I absolutely think of this. So I really messed up by having a gold pee for the podcast, is what you're saying? Oh, no, P's great. P's not, it's a combination. So I can see it just fine. It makes sense. Right. Have you ever, you know, like when you mention the phone, when you mention Facebook, I'm curious, like I assume Kate, a woman of your talents and having your background and your expertise, and I don't even know if you can, I'm putting it on the spot, but have you ever, like, been approached to like work on some random projects with, like, you're like, why would you want to know what, you know, how this formulates towards X? Like, does that even make sense? Is that ever happened? Because, I mean,

You're kind of like 100%. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Some really random stuff. I think it's, you know, I guess having kind of the background of like being a geneticist. So geneticists always asks the question of like nature to nurture ratio and kind of like,

then what do you get? And so I think there's a lot of. problems out there where we want to know kind of what's set in the system. So that's kind of almost like the nature. And then what's kind of variable, like what we can tweak in the environment. So yes, lots of, lots of random questions for sure. I guess like one of my titles that a previous company has been data scientist. I would say that I don't do as much of that anymore. But yeah, random, random stuff. You've never been asked to go work for Facebook and then be like, why would you want me

to come work here? That makes zero sense. It has nothing to do with plants. Actually, we do a whole lot with light and we'd like you to look at these different shades of blue and tell us what one's going to drive everybody to it. You know, it's really funny. I was recruited by Facebook, like back in like 2015. I was just enjoying, I, I'm pretty firmly in the ag camp. Like, I enjoy plants way too much to sort of deviate. But yes, it wasn't about light, but it was just, I was actually approached to work for Facebook way back when.

To do what? Or I don't even know if you can say. Oh, yeah. I think it was more like, I mean, it was along the lines of getting people sort of into the product and making recommendations. And whether that has to do with the color or the type of advertisement, Yeah.

You know, when you think about that, that's, that's, it's, it's almost unnerving. I watched a documentary and you know what, now I'm really taking you down a different lane here. But I just finished, I got a guy named, uh, Simon Esler coming on. And, uh, he wrote a documentary, uh, wrote a document, uh, did a documentary called cut, uh, women of the West, girls of the West, girls of the West, maybe. Anyways, it's about, um, girls transitioning, right? Uh, so like, at a young age. and all that and just how much how much the device like when I when I watch the

entire documentary what it's pointing to is like social media and how much influence it's had on specifically young girls and you're like oh man father I got a young girl I'm like okay so okay and even when when I listen to talk about different lights and blue and everything you're like I don't think we realize what we're up against like how much money has been put into the psychology or the science or both of making you addicted to a social well to this thing right like um we're supposed to live our whole lives off there meanwhile you know there's things going on in the world that you're just like this is not okay

and yet we can't seem to give this thing up but when i regardless when i come back to what you're talking about it's like i don't think we understand how much time, effort, money, research, etc., etc., has been put into that thing. Oh, yeah, 100%. I mean, I think, and it's a stat, I'd have to look it back up again, but it's mostly in, I believe,

China, also Japan, Korea, where there's a lot of tech workers that do spend a fair amount of time in front of screens and don't necessarily go outside and actually very much expose their eyes to sunlight so they have higher rates of myopia. So we're literally talking about technology changing the human body. Like without any interference, like now I have to go get glasses because I have my myopia.

And what is myopia? It's near-sightedness, I think, or it's far-sightedness. I don't know. I have 20-20 visions because I spent a lot of time in Canada as a kid in open, open fresh air. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, like, I mean, what a world we're living in, you know? Like, you just, when you think about it, we're up against, like, we're up against something.

Because, I mean, like, this is only what, decade, touch over a decade past, and we're still realizing how far down the chain we really are. like how, you know, like how a part of our society it's become this little device. Totally. And I think, you know, with your mention on teenagers and influencing how they think are kids, you know, I think it's crazy because the printing press, which is sort of like the first foray into, I guess you'd say it's a communication technology, right? You can spread memes very easily if you can print words. but it was only until, I think even the 1900s, like maybe even like 1960s. Not that many people could read. So they were illiterate.

And then, you know, you have a layer on top of that. You have the internet, then you have social media. Then you have AI coming. So you've very much accelerated kind of where this is going. And I honestly, I have no prediction. it's so quick and so fast that it is kind of one of those things where I'm just like, whoa, I have no idea what's going to happen. Like, I sort of jokingly try to make predictions, but in all honesty, I don't really know. I've certainly played around with some of the new AI chat GBT out there and some of the APIs for it.

So it's been interesting. What do you think of all that? I mean, like, well, I'll give you some examples. So when it first came out, I think this was the three version. So chat GPT3 would have been like January maybe. I went on and I signed up for an account because I wanted to see what it could do. And I asked it a question in French thinking I would stump it. So I was schooled in French as a young kid and went, so I speak full in French.

It's just like I'm going to stump it and ask you a French. Replies in perfect French and says, I actually don't speak French in French, in perfect French, but just because I can do pattern recognition so quickly, I'm able to sort of get there. And so proceeds to have a conversation, mind-blown. The other thing that I asked, and this is where I think some of the crazy stuff gets, but another type of language is DNA. another type of language is kind of chemistry molecules. So you can ask chat GPT, hey, create me a different molecule for Agent Orange and

it will answer. Create me a different molecule for carophotinol. I think they've taken that part off, but you can see that it is able to sort of process any text string. So that's fascinating. But at the same time, it's terrifying, right? like pretty terrifying it's not great at um DNA as yet although there are some other um there are some other large language models out there that that are pretty good at at sort of creating genes anew or like

doing insertions altering function um so yeah i don't know where we're going sean i'm i'm i'm I'm, well, I'm, I have my very basic thoughts on chat, GPT. The first time I ever heard anyone talk about it was Vance sitting on stage and him and a guy in the audience, who I'm now in a men's group with, which is kind of funny enough. We're talking about it. Like, Vance was like going back and forth and talking the audience. And I'm like, I'm going to have to look this up, right? So since then, I've looked it up and certainly played around with it. And I'm just like, I think Sean's too simple folks to like really understand the day.

he is working with there. Like, I kind of get it, but I kind of like, you know, okay, you know, like, it's, it's, uh, anyways, it's, I don't know. It's, it's like, where does this go? I don't, I don't freaking know. Do you think they knew where, uh, the iPhone was going when they first, like, certainly some people understood, but I mean, the technology on it and how much the people have just become like, you know, absolutely hooked to this thing is, is wild to watch.

I've been told law and could Sean do a better job of being on social media, certainly, but I understand the dangers of it. It gives you the update of how many hours you've been on it per week or per day or what. I think it's per day, isn't it? And then all of a sudden it'll spit out like three and a half hours. I'll be like, oh, I need to get frick off this thing. Like think about your day and how many hours you get. And Sean's on that thing.

It's like, no thank you. No thank you. So, you know, it's like, could you grow your show more? maybe. I don't know. Can I lose my life in that thing? Probably. No, thank you. I don't know. I mean, yeah, there's a suggestion that with kind of the accelerationism

we're experiencing with tech is that they'll be kind of like these Amish cults spinning up. But they're like 1980s technology instead of, you know, we're just going to do buggies and things. Like, they'll literally be like, okay, we're only going to have VCRs, cassette tapes.

Like, we're not going to haven't. I've heard of things. Like, I mean, are you going to go, are you going to go back? Are we going to get time to stand still and move on the clock? No. So it's like you have to find ways to, you know, like, there's things you can probably put in place on, on devices to make sure that screen time only goes for so long. I'm speaking directly to kids. You can put law, you know, like one of the things back when I was a car salesman when I first came back two weeks, that's all I lasted. But I was like reading the thing. This is 2000. I was like, reading the, you know, like the features of all these vehicles. Because I, you know, I was like, well, if you know the features, maybe you can sell it somebody. All right. So I'm reading through. And one of the vehicles back then, you could program it for who was driving it. So if it was your 16-year-old, you could put max speeds on it.

And that was over a decade ago. And I went on thinking, like, oh, that's pretty smart. If you were worried about your kids and you don't want them doing what Sean did. And maybe Kate did where it's like, let's see where the governor is on this thing. It's like, well, you can't do that now. And it's like, to me, that's pretty slick. So there's no way you're going back. It's just how can we start to put in some safeguards to mitigate some of the problems that

if I can't deal with, you know, this, how's a five or a six-year-old or a 12-year-old you're going to deal with it? It's not possible. One thing before I get you out of here, because good old technology here is going to be our friend again, you said DNA is a language. I'm going to think about that now for like the next week. Can you just briefly explain to me what you mean by that? Yeah, I can.

So DNA in a cell is denoted by what we call nitrogenous bases, A-C-T-G, adenine, thymine, cytosine, guanine. You might have seen the movie Gattaca, so it's G-A-T-T-E. Yeah. So you rearrange those into different, we call them codons. So three letters make kind of a code for an amino acid, which goes to form proteins that enable us to live. And basically everything to live. So it's kind of like the source code of biological organisms.

So, you know, I think with large language models, there's a tremendous possibility of using these. to sort of find and find new genes, find new what we call paralogues between species, maybe like, oh, this might work over here. Not to say that it's, you know, all good or whatever, but I do see that absolutely that style of model can absolutely be trained on, you know, whole what we call genomes of beings to be able to say like, hey, this is maybe where we want to go with this particular gene. or maybe we could fix this disorder if we had this in here. Like, how would we fix it?

What could we do? I'm not going to get too much into it, but it's, that's a part. Am I visualizing this, right? You're saying, like, so DNA, you can read it as a language, okay? And so my brain immediately goes to like a sentence. Let's just, you know, the sentences, whatever. And in the middle of it, it's misspelling thing. So you're saying you could see that and just take that out and put thing in the proper spelling and it would fix the sequence and all of a sudden the disorder would disappear.

Yeah, that has to be done at what we call it in humans it would have to be done at the what we call the embryonic stage. You could do it later. There are moral questions that get attached to that because yes, there are specific genes that underlie things like Huntington's. disease, autosomal polycystic kidney disease, which my partner actually has. So, like, could that be fixed, you know, initially? That would be great. But then you get into other sort of moral dilemmas on what should be fixed and what should not be fixed.

So I'm, well, you know, it's a tool. It's available. And then, you know, leave the philosophizing and morality maybe to the philosophers. But it should be discussed, I think. You know, how do we use this tool? How do we balance it? Like, we're not going to go back to the 80s and be an Amish 80s cult. Although that would be a great name for like a band, Amish 80s cult.

Like, I don't know. Be a great little experiment for a month. Yeah, there you go. Go back to VHS. Can we, in that Amish cult, could they at least have a blockbuster so I could go waste two hours of my night, like searching out the movie I want to rent for the evening? Poor kids, they'll never get to experience that, which is too bad. I know.

I appreciate you coming and doing this, Kate. You know, we bounced around a lot, but that's all right. There's too much, it feels like there's like so many topics that a guy can try and rattle your brain around with. Either way, I appreciate you giving me some time. And I look forward to seeing you again when hopefully we get to bump into each other, I assume, later on this year. Oh, for sure.

Thanks, Sean. Really appreciate it. Nice to talk. Okay, take care. Bye.