Michael Lewis, THE PREMONITION: A Pandemic Story

[1:39]Zibby Owens: Hi. This is Zibby Owens, you're listening to the award winning podcast, Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books. And speaking of books, I have two of my own books coming out this spring and summer. Princess Charming is a picture book, which debuts on April 19, and Bookends, a memoir of love, loss, and literature comes out on July 1, it is truly a labor of love. I hope you'll preorder, order, and join me on tour as I go across the country. You can find out more at zibbyowens.com or bookendsmemoir.com. And you can follow me on Instagram at zibby owens because I always post about everything. Enjoy the show. Hey, everyone. I need your help. If you love this podcast, you will love my children's book. It's called Princess Charming, and I am really trying to drum up preorder sales. You might not know this, but before a book comes out is actually a really important time for the whole book's trajectory. So please preorder Princess Charming, which comes out April 19 today. Just stop what you're doing and go do that, please. When it arrives on April 19, you can give it to a loved one in your life, a niece, a grandchild, a child, a student, a kid walking by on the street, anybody. But if you could do this, here is my offer. If you email me your receipt showing me that you bought the book online somewhere and pre ordered it, email infozibbyowens dot com. That's infozibbyowens dot com. And I will pick 10 people to do a special giveaway project award to from my new Bonfire merch store, which you should also check out, which is the Zibby Owens Media Bonfire store where you can get all sorts of cool T shirts and tote bags and author sayings and all sorts of great stuff. So what did I say? 10 of you are going to get a special care package of your choice from the Bonfire store, and I will pick at random from all of you who preorder the book. So if that wasn't clear, go preorder Princess Charming. Again, it's called Princess Charming. It's my debut picture book. It's really cute and great, and it's illustrated by Holly Hadham. And then after you get the receipt, screenshot it or forward it to me at info@ZivvyOwens.com, and you will be entered to win one of 10 exciting care packages. So go off and order. Thank you so much. Bye. Michael Lewis. The Michael Lewis is the author of The A Pandemic Story. He also hosts Against the Rules, a Pushkin podcast. He is the bestselling author of many, many books, including The Undoing Project, Liar's Poker, Flash Boys, Moneyball, The Blind Side, Home Game, and The Big Short, among others. He lives in Berkeley, California with his wife, Tabitha Sorin. Welcome, Michael. Thank you so much for coming on moms don't have time to read books. We're gonna discuss the premonition and your life and your podcast and your new Pushkin podcast against rules and everything. So I'm delighted to have you here. I can't even tell you. Happy to be here. And I was just saying to you before it started, when I started my podcast, I had this wish list of some of my favorite authors who I was just, like, would be over the moon excited. And you have been on that list since day one, so this is, like, a personal, just super exciting moment for me from Liar's Poker days to now and everything. So So I don't really understand why it's taking this long then because I've been here.

[5:11]Michael Lewis: You know? Should've just called.

[5:14]Zibby Owens: I tried a while back, but you weren't promoting anything or something. And I don't know, at least now I'm big enough that you want to talk to me or something. So I don't know. Okay, well, why don't we start with the premonition, which oh my gosh, I mean, first of all, some of the characters in this, not even characters, some of the people in this book, I can't believe that let's talk about the young girl who started figuring this out as a science project and how she and her dad were so I mean, I'm like, what is my kid doing? Like, what are my kids doing that are gonna gonna change the world? I mean, oh my gosh. They can barely, like, deal with themselves. I'm kidding. But tell me about this and her and Laura and her family and and all of it. Sure. This So is how the book opens. The book opens with a 13 year old girl in Albuquerque, New Mexico named Laura Glass,

[5:58]Michael Lewis: whose father is a polymath scientist at Sandia Labs. Like one of these guys who's working in a national lab and is just a smart guy. And it has the attitude towards his girls' science projects that most dads have towards their kids' little league careers. Like that's what he cares about. And the two girls know that every year they have to enter the science fair. So they're kind of they like it because it's something they do with their dad. But it's sort of like, uh-oh, we got to find something to do. And Laura Glass is watching her dad play with a model that he had built, a computer model he built at Sandia Labs, where he's on the screen, and this explains the cover of the book actually. On the screen, there are all these green dots except with one red dot. And they're moving there are rules about how these dots are moving. Looks something like a video game, but when a green dot hits the red dot, or when a red dot hits a green dot, the green dot turns red. So slowly, the screen goes from all green dots till eventually all red dots. And he's explaining to her what it's for. He's explaining how he's modeling like how traffic jams happen or how financial cascading financial crises happens. And she looks at it and she says, Well, that looks like a disease spreading. And she says, Could you use it to like figure out how if the bubonic plague came to Albuquerque, New Mexico, how it would spread? And he said, Yes. And let's try to model that. And so this it starts when she's actually 13 years old. It goes on for years, four or five years. And by the time and it gets more and more elaborate, she's like doing things like going out in the community, get everybody to list the social contacts they have every day to try to figure out how a disease might move that's transmissible. And they change the disease to the flu, something more like COVID. And by the time they're done, they're able to ask questions about what you might do in a community to stop the spread of disease, what rules you might introduce. And he sees that things like, I don't know, closing schools has this unbelievable effect on disease transmission. That is really like, that's, you know, if you want to find the place, the laboratory where the, where a bug moves around, that's where it moves around. It's because they're in such close proximity to each other. And he looks in the, he starts to look around and he says, you know, the common wisdom in the world is you can't really do anything to stop a communicable disease. It goes back to 1918, a vaccine, but before you get a vaccine that like interfering in the society doesn't do much. And he gets frantic because he thinks, wow, this is not true. You know, people need to know about this. And he tries to get people in the epidemiology to pay attention to him when nobody pays attention to him until another main character in my book, a doctor named Carter Measure, who's brought into the Bush White House to answer just this question. Like, what happens in our society if a pandemic starts? Like, what do you do between the time the pathogen arrives and you have a vaccine? Can you do anything? Because the conventional wisdom was, not really. Nothing's worth the trouble. Through a social connection, Carter Measure hears about this little girl science fair project. They get the model into the White House, and it becomes part of the right, they use it as the tool to start to do the analysis that leads to eventually to The United States plan, the CDC plan, about what you do in a pandemic. It's an amazing story. It's an amazing story. It's an amazing story. And it's sort of, I love it for a bunch of reasons, but one of them is sort of like, it's a, it's such a different approach to science, the education than I got when I was a kid. Mine was kind I can remember like not understanding why I was lighting the Bunsen burner or cutting the frog up and I didn't like it. And there was never anything it wasn't a question I was really trying to answer. It was just trying to do what the teacher told you to do. This is sort of like real investigation of a question in a rigorous scientific way that leads a little girl to actually make a huge contribution to the world. Now, we as a society didn't really execute the plan that these guys wrote. They didn't imagine it going down quite the way it went down. But other societies took our plan and really understood it and internalized it. It had a big effect in the world. And you can, I mean, I think that I think anybody who's really close to would say, you can attribute some large number of lives saved during the COVID pandemic to the work that little girl did? It certainly contributed. Certainly contributed.

[10:30]Zibby Owens: And speaking also of women who are scientists or doing experiments like this, you also have I think her name is Charity, who's, like, taking over Charity, who's taken over being a health advocate in Santa Barbara, a position nobody thought she would even want. And next thing you know, you have her outside operating on this potential TB patient in this graphic detail. I was like, oh my gosh. I can't believe it. Well,

[10:59]Michael Lewis: it if their book had a trick I mean, if the premonition had something going on, was a sort of a trick it was trying to play, it was a trick I wished the society had played the minute we got ourselves into the, into the pandemic. It was to pay attention, much more close attention, to people who had actually spent their careers battling communicable disease on the streets. This is not the CDC. This is this is local public health officers. This is and it's it's it wasn't COVID. It was, you know, drug resistant tuberculosis. It was measles. It was whatever it was, but you could see the political problems, the logistical problems, the effect powerful people could have on a disease investigation. You see all the things that would manifest themselves in a much bigger way in our society in a petri dish. If you just, if you just looked at what these local health officers endured every day. And in Charity Dean, I found not just the local health office, but a really badass local health officer. She was Santa Barbara County. And at some point she runs the whole state of California, but it was the Santa Barbara County stuff that really interested me. She, because it was for her, it wasn't a job. It was a calling. She'd been obsessed with communicable disease since she was a little girl, had had a really kind of dramatic upbringing. The Tara Westover story, the educated story, that's a bit like her story. She was raised not to have an not to be educated. She was raised in a very religious rural community that didn't want her to go to college. And she insisted on going and getting a medical degree and a degree in public health cost her, severed her relationship with her childhood. And basically, what kind of interesting, I thought she was such a great character. At the center of her was courage, was this bravery. I mean, she was scared of a lot of things and she faced her fears. And she had to do that again and again, just to do this job, do it well. And it told you like, nobody should have to be so brave to do their job saving American lives. It shouldn't be that hard, but it was hard. And the ways it was hard told you, told you a lot about what was going to happen. And the premonition, so the title of the book, it wasn't just that she had the sense that one day we were going to face a pandemic. She did, but you know, that could have, couldn't have happened. The real premonition was she had a real sense grounded in daily experience that if we did have a pandemic, we were not going to handle it well. You could see it coming. And I loved this is an odd thing to say about a book that's about a pandemic. It was the most joyous writing experience I have ever had. And I was aware of it when I was writing it. It was just it was a total pleasure to write. And I kept thinking, isn't this weird? You're like laughing. You're having fun. You can't wait to get out of bed in the morning to write this thing. I had that feeling that you kind of long for it. And I've had this other times in my career where you feel like you're just a conduit of the story. It's just like coming through you and just get out of the way of the thing, and which is an exhilarating feeling. And I think it was just because these characters were just absolutely thrilling as characters. And I had the funny experience of when the book came out, people picking it up, and it took to about page 60 before they couldn't they could figure out whether this was fiction or nonfiction. Like, these people real? And then but then you collide with the Bush White House, and they're making the pandemic creating then you know, well, this is must be real. It's the Bush White House. But the kind of things that the characters were what was happening, it's it feels made up. And I love that. I love that when reality deals you that kind of hand. And in this case, reality dealt me that kind of hand. I feel like people say that about the pandemic too, that it all felt like science fiction and it felt like a movie and could it really be real? And so, I mean, life being stranger than fiction, it's all That was it was a it I was trying to recreate that feeling. Mhmm. And it was so anyway, I appreciate you asking those questions because, you know, this will tell you something about how books get out there in the world. I've done, you know, this is a paperback, right? So this is out eleven months after I first published it. I don't think I've had 50 interviews, 75 interviews. I don't think anybody's asked me about that little girl. Opens It's with an amazing story. Nobody has nobody asked me about it. They want to ask they want to ask me, how much do you blame Trump? Or like, how do you fix the CDC? Or those sorts of questions. And I do feel that that's for the reader to think about. Mhmm. I'm just telling you the story of these people who I think can really help you lead you to some thoughts about what went wrong.

[15:40]Zibby Owens: So I don't have a chance. I don't you know, unless the people read the book, they don't hear that story because people don't ask me about it. Oh, well, I'm glad. I mean, I found those that's what I found most interesting is the people behind it. It's like, why did Charity Leave Her Surgeon Husband? And, like, you know, tell me more. You know? Yes. Exactly. Deeper into that. But, you know, I think this book obviously dovetails nicely into your Pushkin produced podcast about experts and who do we listen to? Who are the experts? How do they become experts? And, you know, I, like, never wanna file a medical claim again after listening to some of the the interviews and everything. Tell me about that the podcast and the third season of that. And and So you've listened you you sounds like you've listened to episode one. I've listened to episode one. Yes. Okay. That's it. Yep. Six levels down. The l six. So the big idea for the podcast, this is the third season,

[16:29]Michael Lewis: was to take a character in American life, like a role in American life, one that had been a little volatile or controversial, and explore what had happened to American life through the role. So the first season was about referees in American life. Second season was about coaches in American life. And the third season's about experts in American life. And each season, I think, not by accident, ends up having a big inequality, unfairness ends up being sitting right in the center of the story. Like, what are the effects of what are the you know, in the first season, what are the effects on inequality when you start to destroy the referee? The the you know, undermine the the authority of the referee or the regulator or whoever's playing that role. I mean, the person in power has more power. It's but the hope of the podcast is you take we have seven episodes, and you kind of look at the problem from different angles. And the particular problem this season, really, it did just grow out of the premonition. It was sort of like, all right, we were easily the world's most equipped society deal with the pandemic. Authorities had experts had had before the pandemic sought to measure each society's each country's ability to deal with a pandemic, and they were measuring knowledge. Were measuring microbiology labs and, and, you know, state of the art pandemic plans and, and material resources to throw at the problem, all that. Yep, you know, we had a little bit more than 4% of the world's population and more than twenty percent of the world's deaths. We really underperformed. Hundreds of thousands of people are dead who didn't have to die if we just performed like an average industrialized democracy. It's tragedy. It's a reflection of, I think, a deeper illness in the society. We're not taking care of each other. But there's other this other thing going on where, we were unbelievably good at generating knowledge about disease, about how to track disease, about the human genome project is here. That's the, it should be at the center of it. So we're unbelievably good at generating knowledge and really not so good at using it or internalizing it or spreading it. Generally, we go to generating these experts and not very good at using them, figuring out who they are. So it was that disconnect that I wanted to kind of play with in the podcast. And the first episode is it grows right out of the premonition because it's this idea that in big organizations, big countries, big systems, complex systems, when there is a particular problem that arises, crisis, very often the person who has the expertise to answer the problem, to deal with the problem, fix the problem, is is way buried way down in the organization. Six L six, six levels down. And mysteriously, the organization has horrible trouble surfacing that problem and surfacing that expert, figuring out who they are, getting them to the problem. In the case of my book, Charity Dean was down in the state of California. It took them a while to figure out that she knew more than anybody about what they should do. It took two months longer than they should to get her into Gavin Newsom's office. And to and the question was like, like, what is this about? So we take a story. It's the it's a story that is generated by the person who found Charity Dean in the state of California, but in another, in another iteration in his life, another, he was trying to solve a problem in the, in the medical industrial complex. It was basically how to get paid, how to get paid by an insurance company. And this is back in the nineties. And he finds that medical billing is its own bizarre, complex expertise. Nobody's ever treated these people as if they're experts. You find the best one in the world and you can build a business around her. And she's six levels down on the orange chart of every hospital or every doctor's office. It's about that woman how they create a billion dollar company around her expertise. But the bigger point is, I think, and this recurs in several episodes, is we have this inequality in a society when you have imbalances of status, when you have hierarchy. Sometimes it's very hard for the people who are important and at the top to figure out what the unimportant, the little people know and take them seriously. So inequality sort of exacerbates the problem. And there are versions of this in the stories we'll tell them the podcast. The podcast is different thing. It's totally fun. It's storytelling. It's not, it's not just, you know, shooting shit with somebody for thirty minutes or forty five minutes. It is, you know, I write a script. I interview a whole bunch of people around some story and then it's like a movie script and then perform it. And it's, for me, it's been, it's been a gas. It's just a different, it's like a, it's like flexing a different muscle or like, it's like cross training that it's a different sort of literary exercise that that feeds back into the books. I saw it feedback in the premonition and it feeds back in a very particular way. It's it's when you're doing the stuff of the ear, the ear is a very emotional, emotionally attuned instrument, much more so than the eye. And you are, if you aren't telling a story with an emotional dimension, you're missing a trick in in a oral storytelling. So you find you it's made me it's made me more aggressive in finding the emotional content of the story. And also made me less patient with boring stuff because maybe I'm doing it now, but when you bore people, when you're actually talking to them You're not boring me. You really pick it up. Whereas if you bore people when you're writing a book, you can even go off in your own fugue state and bore people for pages and not be aware that's what you're doing and lose a reader. So it's made me, I think it's brought me closer to the reader to do the podcast.

[25:18]Zibby Owens: No. Yours show is super produced. I mean, yeah, it's very different than this show where we talk, but no. It's a Nothing nothing against the show. It's a different thing. No. I know. It's it's I feel like there need to be different categories, different ways to describe. I I what I I've been calling it, like, you know, pod tame not entertainment. I had some clever word, which, of course, I can't think of now. But some of these podcasts are really you know, they're it's a different form of entertainment. That's all. It's a different something new, right, that should be analyzed in its own bucket sort of to the side, which is fair. That's right. I think that's And and right now, nobody's it's just all podcast. Yeah, no, not. Are very

[25:56]Michael Lewis: different. They're very different forms and the scripted form. It's a version of This American Life. It's those sorts of things which are really crafted, really time consuming, hard to do. And you know, when they work, they're magical. When they don't work, they're not. But when they work, they're magical. Yes, absolutely true. Yeah, I feel like to your point on experts,

[26:19]Zibby Owens: like, felt like I used to have a healthy respect for experts until 09:11, honestly. I'm a New Yorker, and I'd lost my college roommate and best friend on 09:11. And I was here in in business school at the same time, and all the experts were saying like, no, no, no, it's totally fine. It's safe here. It's safe. You can and I'm like, it doesn't feel safe. It doesn't breathing and smelling, like, this goes against my common sense that everything is okay. And now, of course, it wasn't safe there. It was everyone who was working down got the got all these diseases and all these things are coming out. And I'm like, I knew it. I knew that that wasn't right, but I didn't listen because I just listened to the experts and wanted to believe that they knew what they were talking about. So shame on me. Nine eleven itself is an l six problem. That six levels down in the FBI,

[27:05]Michael Lewis: in the Minneapolis branch, they had really clear early warning signs that these people were were about to prepare some sort of attack, and it never got its that information never reached the head of the FBI. The thing was preventable given what they knew in Minneapolis, if they just followed it hard. And it was, the problem was getting the information up the org chart. So the whole thing is a dramatization of this problem with that one of this aspect of the problem with expertise. But to your more general point about, oh, sometimes the experts are wrong or misleading you. I don't, you know, I still maintain a very healthy respect for, I think it's a healthy respect for experts. It's sometimes hard to figure out who the expert is, especially when the subject is very complicated and it's moving at TV speed. But there is a general thing. I think it is a problem in the society that people, we have a show about expertise where the experts clearly getting better and better and better. But the people who are on the receiving end of the expert's advice think the expert's getting worse and worse and worse, or at least are treating them as if they're getting worse and worse and worse. You find this in a lot of weird places. Medicine is actually a really good example. You go to a doctor like a hundred years ago and he was more likely to kill you than to help you, right? I mean, medicine has become a science and has become they know more and more and more. But even before the pandemic, before people started not wanting to take the vaccine and all that, if you've gone to talk to a doctor about or a nurse, like what irritates you most about what's going on in the world, they might quite likely would have said increasingly people are coming in and saying, No, I don't have this because I read this article on WebMD. Or, Yes, I do. And they think the little knowledge that they're able to get their hands on is leading them to think they know more than the doctor and really interfering with the doctor's ability to do his job. Now, not that you shouldn't participate in your own care. That's not what I'm saying. It's what it is But there is a kind of wrench that's been thrown into the relationship between the medical expert and the patient by the patient's lack of kind of respect for the medical And there are other examples of this that are kind of right under your nose and you don't see them. If you talk to an old weatherman, someone who's been a meteorologist for like fifty years, as I did on one of the shows, he says, you know, was really funny. The guy in Alabama said, fifty years ago, I didn't know anything. I mean, years ago, like, he'd like go outside to see what the weather was and then go inside and like Ron Burgundy on Anchorman, be very confident about what the weather was. But his ten day forecast was useless. He had no idea if a tornado was going to hit. He didn't know he really had very little useful information, but today he has a pretty good ten day forecast. His three day forecast is like three times as accurate as it used to be. He can save people from hurricanes and tornadoes, and he could do, he can work miracles. He said today I get so much more grief than I used to. If I'm wrong, people are all over me. In the old days, I was like people, I was very confident, but I didn't know. And I got very little in the way of blowback. Now it's I getting, you know, people bite my head off every day and I'm mostly right. So it's a, you know, that kind of thing has been happening in a lot of places where the technology information data has enabled us and experts to know more and more,

[30:37]Zibby Owens: but people are more and more suspicious or skeptical or dubious about them. So no good deed goes unpunished. It is a little it's a little bit of that. Yeah. It's a little bit of it's a little bit of that. Well, I don't know if you're comfortable talking about this or not. I've I've had a lot of loss in my life now, apparently, two things caused by l six problems, nine eleven and I lost my mother-in-law and grandmother-in-law in the pandemic. I'm so so much for that. But I just wanted to say how sorry I was to hear about your daughter and your loss of Dixie. And I read this quote you had where you said, it's interesting to be admitted as a citizen to the kingdom of grief. And I just wanted to say, you know, my heart just so goes out to you and just wanted to talk to you for a minute about about that and how, you know, the the grief and all, you know, the randomness of it too. I loved her so much. She was she was so admirable,

[31:26]Michael Lewis: so brave, fantastic kid. And we left nothing on the field. We left it all on the field in our relationship. I mean, we were very we're very tight family. And she was an athlete. She was a softball player, going to be a sophomore at Pomona College. And I'd been her coach her whole life. She was killed in a car accident eleven months ago, a little less than eleven months ago. And the yes, the first thing I noticed is I had this new citizenship. It wasn't it wasn't the club parents who had lost children. It was more of a much more general one that all of a sudden people around me, even people I was quite close to opened up for the first time about their losses. And it made me realize that we don't talk about it very much. It's sort of like it's just an unpleasant subject for a lot of people. But I started to see dimensions of people I loved that I was glad I was grateful to see. And I started to think of that as I thought of that as the first thing Dixie gave me after her death, that there are these I'm going to have this other life now. It's going to be different than the life I would have had, had she lived. I'm not going to pretend it's going to be better. But it's going to be different. And I'm going to pay close attention to the things that happen and the things I do because of her. And, and so that's the first thing I paid close attention to was, oh, I now have this new relationship with my friend Nathan, because he's now talking about the death of his of his first wife, who I never knew, you know, all before I met him. And I don't the people long for an answer to the question of how to feel this, how to endure this. It's unendurable in some means at moments. Right? And there are all around us off the shelf answers you can grab, off the rack answers. And I've found myself still trying to resist those, trying to see this as an independent journey that I have to go on. And I can have companions on this journey. But it's just going to be in the end, my journey. In the end, I'm there alone in the beginning, and I'm going to be there alone at the end with this particular thing. And I've got to figure out the most noble, bravest way to go on the journey and not resort to other people's solutions for how they and I feel it's a bit of a lonely thing, but it happened. It has to be a bit of a lonely thing because the nature, it's all turns on the nature of my relationship with that, with that person, with that child. It's so particular. To who she was. It's who I am. It's how we were together. It's there's no no one has exactly the same experience. So I want to preserve the uniqueness of the experience in how of of loving her and how I grieve her. But it's hard. I I mean, it is hard. It's still hard. And as I told my other children, Walker and Quinn, Walker's a freshman in high school, Quinn's a junior in college. So McDisney was in the middle. I said, right from the beginning, I said, here's what I'm gonna do. And you can you feel free to use this trick. I said, I'm going to keep a list of the things that make me feel better. And I'm gonna keep a list of the things that make me feel worse. And I'm going to do the things that make me feel better. And I'm not going do the things that make me feel worse. And I'm not gonna feel guilty about not doing them. So feel free to join me in this pursuit of like happiness in life. And they're kind of doing it. They're doing it in their own way. But they're kind of doing it. And there's another thing is Dixie has given death, has given me is incredible pride in my family, because they're, they're trying so hard. Everybody's trying so hard. But thank you for asking about it. Talking about it makes me feel makes me feel good, keeps her around.

[35:23]Zibby Owens: Oh, that's beautiful. That's really good advice. It sounds so simple. But just doing the things in life that make us feel better, why is that so hard? Why is that such a why is that such a a leap to to accept and then act on it's it's it's beautiful and your relationship sounds beautiful. And I'm sorry for your loss, but it sounds like, wow. What a what a gift that you had that wonderful relationship too. She was the best, and life is filled with accident and fortune,

[35:54]Michael Lewis: luck, good and bad. You And just got to accept that. I mean, I I I've always accepted that life was full of luck, and I'd always had good luck. Mhmm. Now I have to recognize that that's not always the case. But I should learn to respond as graciously towards bad luck as I've tried to towards good luck. And it's just that's, it's hard. But that's, that's kind of how I think about it. And there is this, there's something really profound about the rules of improvisational comedy that you don't get to choose what is kind of thrown at you. You do it well by accepting what's thrown at you and then building on it, as opposed to fighting it or being angry about it or resisting it or trying to change it when you can't change it. Yeah, this is life that it's it's it throws things at you good and bad. And

[36:51]Zibby Owens: you try to just build on what it throws at you. That's all you can do. I can't, I don't really have another solution. Yeah. Well, I hope at some point you'll write more about her so that the rest of us can get to know her better. And I feel like there's just something magical in recreating someone on the page so that she touches the lives of people that she would never have met otherwise. So I don't know if that's in the plan or whatever, and maybe it's inappropriate to even suggest. But selfishly, I I hope you'll do that. The time will come. Yeah. You know? It's not yet. It's just but the time will come. Yeah. Michael, thank you. Thank you for taking the time with me today. Thank you for all of your work, not just the newest stuff, but your whole career of work that I have followed. So with such sort of interest and respect, and thank you for all that you do and for taking the time to talk to me today. Thank you, Zibby. See you down the road. Okay. Alright. Bye bye. Thanks for listening to this episode of Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books. Don't forget to follow me on Instagram at Zibby Owens and at moms don't have time to read books. Also, sign up for my newsletter at zibbyowens.com and sign up for my virtual book club and meet lots of authors on Zoom every other week. Thanks so much to Steve and Ryan at Texture Sound for the sound editing, and thank you to Morning Moon Productions for providing this fantastic intro and outro music.