PODCAST Xchange: Random Nature Episode with Dr. Edward J. Blum

So this is from my other podcast, Random Nature.

Because I am speaking with an historian and he studies race and enslavement, I am sharing this episode with the Freedom on the Move podcast.

ENJOY!

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:04

Hey everybody. Today's episode of Random Nature actually has me with a guest, and that guest is Edward J. Bloom of San Diego State University in the great state of California. And in this episode it made some interesting twists and turns. And if you are a person that's not too keen on hearing about people who believe in God and reflect on that belief in connection with the work that they do as academics, then you might want to sit this one out. But if you're interested in the way that we entangle and disentangle ourselves as historians, have at it. And you know, I have to give you a little backstory on um on Professor Bloom. Now, you may have heard of an Edward Bloom before, but this Edward Bloom, Edward J. Bloom, joining me today. He's a good person. That's Professor Edward J. Bloom, full professor at San Diego State, and he is the guest that you all are going to hear from today. How did I meet him? Well, it's always a conference. And he's a generous friend who has been reading chapters of my upcoming book, Pest Control, Birds, Black Folk, in the History of Environmental Consciousness in the U.S. South. But I first met him through a Shear affiliated conference. Shear stands for the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic. And he attended my talk at Iona University and outside New York City in the fall of 2025. He was so thoughtful and encouraging. And so we stayed in each other's orbit from there. And we became fast friends, in part because we discovered that we share something deeply painful. We are both uh bereaved parents. So that bond cemented our friendship and our academic relationship in a way that's quite hard to put into words. So I hope you'll enjoy Ed and I. Chewing the fat, as they say in North Carolina. And I also uh want to let you know that we also talk about our status as Gen X people. So if you're one of again, if you're one of those people that finds the discussion of the generations to be uh not fun, you might want to sit this one out. Because we yeah, we talk a lot about Gen X childhood. Um so yeah, tune in. Here we go. All right, welcome to Random Nature. It's so good to have you here today, Professor Bloom.

SPEAKER_00 3:01

I'm thrilled to be here as always. Happy to talk to you, Professor Hyman.

SPEAKER_01 3:06

So I always start this off with like this big sky question. And the big sky question is this describe the describe the landscape where you grew up. Was it urban? Was it rural? What was it like?

SPEAKER_00 3:21

I grew up in kind of quintessential middle class suburbia um in New Jersey, uh, outside of the New York City orbit. So we could see the New York City skyline if we drove one or two miles, but it was, you know, individual, every house was a quote unquote nuclear family. It was 90 plus percent white um IBM Um Bell Labs was in in town. So a lot of parents worked there or worked in New York City on the stock market. Um, and so yeah, it was just very suburban, very white, very middle class.

SPEAKER_01 4:05

And so would you say that uh apart from the ethnic dynamics, did you see lots of green spaces? Did you see wild spaces?

SPEAKER_00 4:17

Yeah, so green spaces, there were there were lots of parks, and we did have some kind of not wild per se, but but beyond just a kind of cultivated park. So there were areas that were untended to, and there'd be trees and um and bushes and things like that. And so we would go play out there, we would play, you know, capture the flag and things like that. Um, in at least we were perennially fear of fearful of ticks because of Lyme disease. And so um, you know, I tended to kind of stay away, you know, from that those types of areas. There was, I was not a hunter, but it wasn't terribly uncommon for people that I grew up around, not only parents, but also high school kids, to go hunting for deer. Um and so that's it was a little drive. Um, but then there were kind of um uh a kind of more wild, outdoorsy um places like that.

SPEAKER_01 5:19

Ah, yes, ticks are important because yes, they do carry Lyme disease, and Lyme disease has some pretty icky, some pretty icky long-term effects if you know, if untreated. So that was smart for y'all to avoid it, you know. Um, would you say that y'all had that free-range childhood that us Gen X are known for, where you can't come back inside the house until after the light posts come on, or were y'all more guided?

SPEAKER_00 5:45

Absolutely. Do not be in the house before the sun's going down. Um, I don't know if it was so demanded. It was more, I also didn't want to be in the house before it got dark. And but and definitely my mom and dad had no interest in us being there. So it was definitely like as long as we didn't get caught in trouble, everything was totally basically do whatever the hell you want. So we were on our bikes everywhere. We we kind of stayed to the town province, like um somehow going out of the kind of imagination, you know, the jurisdiction of quote unquote New Providence, New Jersey was something we kind of wouldn't do. Um, but yeah, uh, you know, the bike was our um mode of transportation and we just kind of beboped around and from place to place.

SPEAKER_01 6:37

That's so that's such an emblem of Gen X childhoods because you're right, our parents, they just didn't believe that if it was nice outside, the children should be inside. They just didn't. And you know, in in my case, you know, our parent, my parents, they they didn't get cable until later. So like it wasn't like we could be babysat by the television. And so yeah, we would ride bicycles. Um, I remember one year my cousin's bike got messed up, so it wasn't working. And then my dad found like this old school bike, and it looked like a milk truck according to the neighborhood girl, the neighborhood boys, aka the neighborhood bullies. And so what we would do, we believed in like egalitarian stuff, because I would say, Trina, I'll you can ride my bike while we're over here, but then we go over there. I'll ride my bike and you ride the milk truck. So we would we would share the load of being embarrassed on the milk truck bike. And yeah, it was it was a time, you know. We ran into some boys one day and they tried to steal the bike right from under us. It was a time, but yeah, we ended up getting the bike back, me and Trina on one wheel, the boy on the other, but he didn't leave without throwing a rock at us. So yeah, it was very Gen X. Glad to hear that I'm not alone in that uh character conditioning. So would you say that you were like like in the Boy Scouts and stuff like that, or was it more just a natural curiosity for exploring?

SPEAKER_00 8:28

Well, my kind of getting around was much more just in the kind of friendship cohort. You know, I had three or four uh guy friends, um, boys that we would go play. And we were really into sports. Like I think for our parents, um, organized sports were kind of like the gods of their world. And so um, if we were watching TV, it was baseball, basketball, or football. And if we were outside, it was finding a place to play those sports. And so um that could be, you know, we had a lot of the throwing the football, you know, in the street, and then everyone, car, and everybody, you know, gets off to the side and then comes up, you know, you know, game on. Um, so it was more my life before church, because around middle school, church became the main focus of my life. But before that, sports and anything to, you know, that dream of becoming a college or professional athlete, that was the kind of main emphasis of my mind.

SPEAKER_01 9:34

Oh, that's pretty interesting. Yeah, I'm glad you mentioned church because I remember I once one day I was talking about gen X, weird stuff, and I was like, you know, baby boomers and silent generation parents, they believe that they sheltered you, clothed you, and fed you, and they sent you to church on Sunday, you could literally grow up to become a contributing member of society. Like you didn't need like therapy, you didn't need them to like hug you or anything. Like I was being extra, but church definitely was a feature of uh of growing up for a lot of us in Gen X. So when you say church became central to your life, are you saying that this is something you chose or something that you kind of absorbed in like a sponge?

SPEAKER_00 10:21

You know, I think you you just hit a whole bunch of nails on the head of like when you were saying that, I was thinking, do I really remember my mother or father hugging me between the ages of like six and twelve? Not really. And the main reason for that, right? Part of it the time I grew up, but around 12 for me, my father, who had been an alcoholic, who'd been violent-ish, you know, like in today's standards would absolutely be considered, you know, domestic abuse and violence. But in the 80s, it was like, you know, like not enjoyable, but um, if I told people stories at school, it wouldn't have been that shocking. But so he, my mom threw him out because she's a hero, and he not only sobered up and went to AA and did all that good stuff. Sorry to break your anonymity, Dad, but he's also, you know, he's been sober for like 40 years. Um he uh also had a religious conversion. And so he became yeah, he became an evangelical Christian. And so on one hand, I witnessed that and I went to church. I would then start going to church, but then church was a place where it's like, oh my gosh, where like you kind of do all these family things. We sing together, we talk together, like people actually do hug. They do, you know, you shake somebody's hand. And so things I didn't have at home, um, I was then getting at church. And so these kind of um, you know, youth leaders became like parents to me, aunts and uncles and things like that. So church filled a lot of those. Go ahead, go ahead. Oh no, go ahead. Oh, church filled a lot of those like familial psychological holes that I I felt. Um, because because you're right, like my parents, like I had food, I had health care, they got me to school, they got me to sports, and you know, in their worlds, they were doing a you know killer job.

SPEAKER_01 12:28

That's what it was. That's literally what it was. Like, there wasn't lots of hugs. There wasn't like, let's sit down and reflect on how your day was. Like, none of that stuff, like what we do for our children, but like when you talk when you say that church became a positive association for you with family, I totally get that because one of my favorite holidays when I was a little girl was Easter. And it was because on Easter, everybody went to church. And in my family, my mother and father couldn't go to church every Sunday because one of my siblings is nonverbal autistic. So, like he we at that time in the 80s, early 90s, people just, you know, they just weren't socialized to understand people who are nonverbal and people who, you know, had vocalizations that weren't intelligible to anyone but the person making them. And so if we would, if someone went to church, someone had to be home with my brother Lawrence, who was only three years older than me, and I'm the youngest. So on Sun, on Easter Sunday, everybody went to church. And like you said, everybody got along, nobody argued, nobody, you know, threw things. It was just like this harmonious day. And not only that, people were dressed very nice, and not only that, I got an Easter dress, an Easter hat, an Easter pocketbook, and some patent leather shoes. That's what it was. Patent leather Mary James. And so it was, you know, and by me being a you know, a burgeoning clothes horse and style maven, I was very excited about Easter dresses. I remember when people would come to visit my parents. Uh, I know they thought I was the weirdest girl ever, but I'd be like seven years old and I'd be like, you need to come and look at my closet full of Easter dresses. I would say that. And they would always oblige them to always come and look at like five Easter dresses. But like that just goes to show how church can become, you know, this kind of like this refuge for for kids, you know. But you know, church is church is complicated because, you know, you don't want to you don't want people to think that you're narrow-minded because you're a believer. And I think that sometimes that gets a little strange, especially in our profession. Our profession is, you know, default secular, you know.

SPEAKER_00 15:06

Yeah, you know, I think so one of the things I which I think, and this is a negative, it and obviously there's there's pros and cons to every experience, but so what I witnessed at church, one of the things I witnessed was oh, calls to authority, to meaning. Meaning mattered, right? Outside of church, most of my world was very kind of mathematical, you know, like it was functional, it's like, okay, what kind of job are you gonna get? Everything was kind of pragmatic. At church, things were there were things were open to interpretation, but then there were also claims to authority. So right, so the minister, the youth pastor, these were people who had an authority that then went with a book that had authority. And I didn't think of it at the time, but they always happened to be men. And in my situation, they also happened to be white men, and so in a world already saturated, like with like whiteness and maleness as authoritative, it became like Uber, like you know, that on steroids. And then me being a young white man aspiring to be an authority, oh, it was on for like, oh, oh, by when I was 16, 17, I had all the answers. Like I knew more than anybody I would interact with. Um, and that's definitely how I went to college, which is, I think, actually why college was such a um dissonance, like a the cognitive dissonance for me when I got there. And I'm like, oh my God, there are these incredibly brilliant women teaching me now. And like, A, I don't even understand half the things they're saying, but the things I do understand I know are smart as hell. And it was that was kind of the beginning for me of like the eye-opening of like, ooh, what what the structure I came out of, it it gave me a lot of good tools, but it also gave me a lot of like ways of seeing the world that um might be might be troubling.

SPEAKER_01 17:11

Yeah, that's uh that's the uh line we we tread, you know, when we when we say we're believers or we you know go to church or whatever. And I mean, you know for me, I would say I was it was like like I believed in God and I would pray like as a teenager, but I also knew that because I was a girl slash woman, I I knew that the limitations that society put on me and that the church added even more. And so like at particular periods of my adolescence where maybe I was in a jam, I would go to uh church and actually listen to the preacher. But for the most part, when I was at church, I was finding ways to make it interesting, you know, and sadly sometimes that meant, you know, when my little nephew was with me, because he was a little, he was a little something, he was a little imp. He would laugh. He would laugh when like the main woman who, you know, was always testifying and falling out and screaming and dancing, he would laugh and he shouldn't have laughed, but he did. And then I look at him, and then I'd laugh, and then you know, we'd be sitting there the whole time just holding in laughs. And of course, as I get older, I realized that that wasn't an act. The woman probably had been delivered out of some life-shattering experience by, you know, her own don't her own grace and belief. And so, yes, that very ostentatious display of faith and the falling out that would happen in church uh might have seen is comical to a kid who's bored, but to others in the in the struggle of life, it was uh it was promising. And so, like when it comes, but I would say that, you know, today, you know, with church, especially in our discipline, unless you're a theologian or something. Now, if you're in theology or something, yes, y'all are supposed to talk about this all day. But like, if you're like a humanity or the social sciences and you come talking about, I first want to thank God, people look at you like, who is this? Who is this? Who is this charlatan in our midst? And what did she want from us? You know? So it's it's just interesting how academics can try to put one foot, you know, in their faith and another foot in their in their discipline. So yeah, so you so so church was an immersion, but your first book was on W.B. Du Bois, right?

SPEAKER_00 20:13

Yeah, that was my so I did two books kind of at the same time. And so I did a book on um reconstruction and on whiteness and religion and how those two kind of brought together northern and southern whites. And Du Bois was the grand critic of this quote-unquote white republic, this you know, refashioned white republic. And so, with that first book, I did a kind of companion book, which was a kind of spiritual biography of Du Bois, and especially focused on kind of his, in many ways, his criticism of the world that I inhabited, you know, his criticism of the kind of white um male-centric America that like that thinks imperialism is somehow Christian. Um, and so yeah, that was that was a a book for me in many ways that was like Du Bois just one of my one of the people who opened my eyes to um how kind of the privilege from which I came. And so it was kind of I wanted to honor him with it.

SPEAKER_01 21:21

Did you find like did you find it easy to distill the faith aspects of Du Bois's life, or did you feel like you had to read between the lines?

SPEAKER_00 21:32

Well, I I since I mean Du Bois was just constantly publishing, he was constantly writing his own books or editorials or editing, and he had so much to say about religion and spirituality. I mean, heck, his most you know um famous book um has the word souls um in the title. And it was just it was just everywhere, and so it became, in one sense, easy to write. Just going through um his editorials, like, oh, and here's a short story, here's a poem on Jesus in Georgia or in Texas and things like that. And I I I always punt on the question of kind of like belief, you know, what did he, what did people actually believe? And I think that was also because I was losing belief, you know, in a very kind of like typical post-Christian, like, okay, I believe these things, but then I'm in a wider world, and how could it be that one guy 2,000 years ago who may or may not have lived is, you know, the savior of the world? And so I in my 20s was going through a, I don't really believe this stuff, but I need to kind of keep pretending that I do because it's been such a vital part of my identity. So that if and when questions of like, or like, you know, what did Du Bois or anybody else quote unquote believe? I would always do the like, oh no, no, you can never know what someone believed, right? You can know what they write, you can know what they publish, but you can never know truly what someone feels or what they truly think or believe. But like that's pun that is super punting, though, because like as scholars, we can ask those questions or we can make suggestions about those types of things.

SPEAKER_01 23:21

Yeah, what do they really believe? And so, like that, you know, I think about that whenever I read people who wrote extensive diaries and um and extensive papers and were well known because those are people who know that they're gonna have a legacy. They know that they want their legacy to survive beyond their lived time on earth, and they want their generations, their children and their children's children to read favorable things about them. You know, that's why, you know, people, especially, you know, us 19th century folks, you know, the old so-called billionaires, they wanted to kind of, you know, wash their legacies of labor exploitation by becoming uh the patrons of education and art and things. But like when I read about enslaved people, nine out of ten, unless they've written their own narrative, their beliefs can only be described by the actions that they made. So you you're looking at actions, you're sequ you're sequencing experiences, and you're taking from those experiences what they could have believed. But in the same in the in the slave community, a lot of times, uh, you know, Christianity belief in God was high, but it was high in a way that I don't think was completely understood by those people who would come to the plantation to preach to slaves. You know, they were they were their fervor, their religious fervor was seen as uh primitive and you know, as they say, emotionalism, too emotional, too much bodily involvement with uh moments of spiritual ecstasy. So so it's you know, when it comes to enslaved people, you can't go wrong because if you read the the the ones that were offered by enslaved people, there's lots of God in there. And sometimes I wonder if Yeah, they believed it and they cared about it because they felt that they would deliver it, but also the signposting of God and belief was a kind of um a respectability self-fastening mechanism that these were worthy people to consider their lives and hopefully, you know, help a regular person believe in the cause of abolition. So um so yeah, that's interesting, the way that one conceives of belief and truth and what and what a person might have really believed.

SPEAKER_00 26:17

Right. And you know, as you were sharing that, um, which I think is really astute, the points that you're making, I keep thinking about like, okay, the this the long story of the Protestant Reformation and the long story of quote unquote secularism, and you know, debates over works versus faith, and then like, you know, belief, and then okay, well, belief doesn't become normative, it becomes then a choice. All of those literatures, for the most part, completely leave out um African American experiences, African-American writings. Because one of the things I found when I did I did this study of notions of hell and notions of evil in kind of African-American literature's writings before the Civil War, is that basically one standing vis-a-vis God was all about action. It was all about, you know, like what Frederick Douglass so kind of famously said, that every enslaved person knows enough about theology to know that every slaveholder goes to hell. And yeah, and what I was struck by was like, wait a second, theologically, that is a total intervention in the world of the whole of the Protestant Reformation, of the whole works versus faith issue. The Douglas made it all about if, and he wasn't the only one, Henry Box Brown said this, a whole bunch of them, a whole bunch of folks said this, that basically, like if you are attached to enslaving other people, there is no way you are in the church. You are you're not affiliated with Jesus, you're not getting into heaven. But you know, we can read umteen books on secularism or these kind of theological battles and and struggles, and yet people who talked about these issues, people who, you're right, addressed their belief in action, in thought, in writing, are just like completely marginalized. And it's not because, like, you know, Frederick Douglass's works have been available since he first published them in um, you know, the antebellum period. And I just um I've just always been struck by that. And I think that was part of my own. Okay, so I grew up in this white church. We read C.S. Lewis, we read the Bible. I'd maybe had heard of Du Bois like in high school, but never came up in Sunday school, never came up, um, you know, maybe, oh oh, when we would do quote unquote mission trips. Ah, so we went to Jackson, Mississippi. You know, we were told we were I mean this, and this was like a big deal, the most, the most segregated city in America, we're being told. And that like, you know, and so we're doing a one-week quote unquote mission trip there, where you know, we did some nice things. We cleaned out a basement of a church and ran a little vacation Bible school for a week, and that was nice. And and you know, there were some terrific, terrific people there who kind of like teaching us about race in the city, um, but and then left. And and then this feeling of like, I did something good for the world, um, which and I it was a good thing. It was a good thing to do, and maybe that's part of my own story of becoming interested and I hope an ally um to these causes. But just like when I went to college and I experienced people of color and extraordinarily brilliant white women, my whole kind of like my toolkit didn't make any sense. I was like, wait a second, there's all these things out there I know nothing of. And man, Du Bois is a genius. And man, when Sojourner Truth sells the substance to support, you know, or you know, sells um the shadow to support the substance. Like, is there a smarter, more interesting line in the 19th century than that? I don't think so.

SPEAKER_01 30:21

I don't think so either. When you said you went on a mission trip, I just knew you were gonna say Africa. You know, I was like, well, we went to Africa because that's actually what I would see sometimes in my classrooms uh when I was when I was in Missouri and Southwest Missouri of all places, as you know, very, very conservative place. And this was like maybe circa 2013. Um, and like I remember this class because there's so many different assemblies of God church there, like there's tons in Springfield, Missouri alone. And I had so many students for this required class for future K 12 teachers. And the class was diversity in education. And I was teaching them, and I remember this young person wrote an essay about her time in Africa. And I remember her in her, she, I mean, I didn't penalize her for this, but it was interesting to see her write. And I picked up this black baby, and I didn't care about his dirty black feet. I just felt like he was one of God's children, just like all of us. I was just like, good Lord, not the dirty black feet. But I mean, it just it was important for me to see that wide array of how altruism and uh mission work and the way the positionality of the person going to the developing country or the developing, you know, county in the United States, how they view the inhabitants uh of those places and if when they leave, do they, you know, how, like you said, when you when you leave, you come with this renewed sense of doing something great for the world. And yeah, that's just interesting that you bring up Jackson. I used to live in Starkville, Missouri. I mean, Starkville, Mississippi, when I worked for Mississippi State, and I think I got to Jackson maybe once, and it was for the uh the Mississippi Writers Festival. And um, you say it was segregated when you went. I think it's pretty mono right about now, outside of perhaps the um, you know, where the governor lives, you know, if the governor even still lives there, I can't remember. But like it's it's you know, once they got the once the mayoral ethnicity shifted, you know, a lot of it went from super segregated to just mono, just only black folks. And so like when I was there, when I was in Mississippi, you know, that's when the water went bad. And so, you know, and people weren't talking about it because it was, I could sense that you're not supposed to talk about this because if you talk about it, that means you're like judging the government, um, the you know, the state government. So, you know, people weren't talking about it, but there were students who wanted to drive water to Jackson. So that became the thing that everybody was doing, um, you know, to try to make better use of the world. So we wax poetic about a lot of stuff, but I always try to end the podcast with a question about the randomness of everyday life in nature. So my last question to you is what is the most random thing you've seen while out in nature?

SPEAKER_00 33:46

Most random thing. Um, well, it's it's nature and it's not. I was taking a hike with one of my little kids a month ago, and it was getting a little dark, and then in the sky was this massive like ball of fire, and it turned out it was a SpaceX. Oh you know, one of those shuttles going up. And now, okay, and I'll go back to I'll get to nature in a second, but like I was so struck by I was like, what is that? That is, I've never seen anything like that. And you know, we live in a world where seeing planes or helicopters, and and I'm in San Diego where we get some, you know, some military stuff going overhead. Um, but that was that was kind of amazing. But I think the most the the neatest one for me out in nature was um I was we were doing a little hike, and my four-year-olds like like, hey, what's this? What's this? And we went over and it was some butterflies that like had were just getting their wings dry enough to fly. And so like one or two flew off, but this other one started like started to fly and fell. And Juliana, my wife, who's a kindergarten teacher, has like, you know, actually like you know, grown, had chrysalis become, and so she knew what to do. She's like, okay, we put them back on the stick, and and this we just waited and waited and waited, and then it was dry enough. And that was kind of like amazing to me about this um this that weird process whereby like there's this moment in time when it's so vulnerable, right? That butterfly, and they're always vulnerable, right? But just like it, it it can move but can't fly yet. And you know, getting off the stick, getting off was um that was so neat to see. And of course, my kids who were four and six, our eyes are like, you know, bugging out all over the place.

SPEAKER_01 35:46

That's so beautiful, and that's I mean, like you're saying, it's like I don't know, this preordained thing where a knowledgeable person of how to care for a vulnerable butterfly was in the midst after your little one noticed it. And that's just that's just really cool. That I probably would have shed a few tears at that, actually.

SPEAKER_00 36:06

Yeah, Juliana did. I was I was more just like like you, kind of like look at serendipity. This is such a beautiful little moment.

SPEAKER_01 36:16

Yeah, that's a beautiful little moment. I love that. I love that. So, are you working on anything right now that you'd like to share with the audience?

SPEAKER_00 36:27

Yes, I'm working on something that will interest all of you: numbers and numerical information and visualization of numbers during the American Revolutionary time period. So I'm talking like lists of numbers, tables of numbers. If you want to talk tables of rows and columns, I am your man. Anything counting or a counting. Um, but but I will say, okay, while this might seem that might seem boring and silly, I'm actually finding, I'll give you one little example. Um before the American Revolution, um, counts, population counts were almost always um racially segregated. So you'd have a list of like number of whites, then quote unquote, number of Negroes, number of Indians, quote unquote. And New York actually put all them together. They created a total, total. Well, there was this one artist who didn't realize that. So he added in the number of African Americans into the already total. So inflated the state's number because he just had this racial assumption that, like, when I see total, it doesn't mean total. It means white people total. And so, like, to me, that's like so fascinating that that that a racialized assumption about what the word total means would lead to that kind of little mathematical mistake. So that's the kind of stuff I'm working on right now. Um, I have a piece coming out in the William and Mary Quarterly this summer, which I'm really proud about. And um, yeah, that's what I'm up to. And will you be at Shear? I will be at Shear. Um, I will be will be launching the new Books Network podcast on revolutionary America. Um, and I'll be giving a paper and all the the broader book I'm working on is called A Republic That Counts, and looking at all this kind of number stuff from the Seven Years' War to the Louisiana Purchase.

SPEAKER_01 38:28

Interesting. I'll have to I'll have to get with you about some of those numbers because I might want to know some numbers about rice production, you know, before everything became kind of formalized in the early national period. Absolutely. Absolutely. All right. Well, I'll close it out here. Thanks so much for talking to us today.

SPEAKER_00 38:52

Oh, this was a joy. Thank you so much. Can't wait to see you this summer.