Asa Merritt: Breaking the Silence on Suicide and the Making of "Six Sermons"

This episode of We Should Talk About That focuses on an important but difficult topic - suicide prevention and awareness.
 
***Help is available 24 hours a day at the suicide and crisis lifeline by dialing 988
https://988lifeline.org/

Jessica Kidwell interviews writer ASA Merritt about his audio fiction story,  "Six Sermons", which explores a church community's response to their pastor's suicide.
They have a thoughtful discussion about the complex reasons behind suicide, the desire to make sense of it, and the role that fiction portrayed sensitively can play in creating space for honest conversations. Through personal stories and insights from experts, they model openness, compassion and harm reduction strategies for listeners who may be struggling.

Resources for support:
Help is available 24 hours a day at the suicide and crisis lifeline by dialing 988
https://988lifeline.org/

About Asa Merritt:
A former international reporter for NPR, VICE Sports, The Guardian, and ESPN’s “30 for 30” podcast, Asa brings a compassionate documentary eye to ambitious fictional projects. His one-woman play about mass movements, True Believer, had a sold-out run in New York City. To research that piece, Asa traveled to Cairo to meet with underground performers who helped ignite the Arab Spring. For his new Audible original podcast Six Sermons, starring Oscar nominee Stephanie Hsu (Everything Everywhere All At Once), Asa spent a month embedded with a team of pastors at a Lutheran church in Cincinnati, OH. Six Sermons is dedicated to the actor and musician Caz Liske, who died by suicide in Moscow in 2017. Asa lives with his family in Mexico City.

Listen to "Six Sermons" here

Transcript

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This episode is being recorded in September, which is Worldwide Suicide Prevention Month, and today's episode will talk about suicide. It's so important to me to lead off by giving you resources for support should you or anyone you know be struggling with thoughts of or the impacts of suicide in the United States, the National Suicide Prevention Hotline is nine, eight, eight and is available. You are outside the US. Please contact your local cris center or just reach out to anyone you trust. This podcast was created to be a space for conversation. The topics will vary, but, the conversation will always be honest, authentic, and sometimes even a little uncomfortable. My hope is that through these conversations, we will build a community of people who might not always agree with each other, but will definitely feel less isolated and alone. So I'm Jessica Kidwell and this is we should talk about that. Hi WeSTAT Community. How are you? I genuinely hope that you're doing well, and I'm so grateful to have you listening today. As I mentioned in the opening, today could be a heavy topic for some, and I think it's our discomfort with this heavy topic, which is why so many people don't want to talk about it. And from my standpoint, that's exactly why we should. Study after study shows that being willing to talk about suicide by asking someone if they are having thoughts of suicide and being emotionally present for them saves lives. So we're going to talk about suicide, but we're also talking about so much more like friendship and love and grief and faith, because suicide is not a singular topic. It's layered and complicated and so much more than that final act. And I'm so grateful to Asa Merritt for joining me in this conversation today. Asa is a writer partner and father committed to bringing audio drama to wide audiences. As a former international reporter for NPR, Vice Sports, the Guardian, and ESPN's 30 for 30 podcast, Asa brings a compassionate documentary eye to his fictional projects. His newest project, an Audible original podcast is called Six Sermons and stars Oscar nominee Stephanie Hsu of everything, everywhere, all at once. Fame. Six Sermons is dedicated to the actor and musician Caz Liske, who died by suicide in 2017. Asa thank you so much for joining me on We Should Talk about that. Thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here. So I want to start off by talking about Caz How did you meet and what impact did Caz have on your life? Caz and I met in 2005. I was studying abroad at a theater art school in Moscow, Russia, and we met there. And he was sort of an RA, as it were, for the group of us who were there. And we became fast friends and stayed, close ever since. He's American, but he was living in Russia at the time and building an exciting career in the arts there. And so I spent a lot of time going back to Russia over the years, doing projects with him, and yeah, so our relationship grew as people who made things together. And then when he came back to the States, he would always stay on my couch in New York. And we had one of these friendships that every time we saw each other was a real kind of special, concentrated time. And then, yeah, he died in 2017. He was still living in Moscow at that time. Is it hard for you to talk. About him at this point? I mean, I love him so much. and at this point, so many of the most sort of challenging emotions that have their way with you when you're trying to have a conversation have been, sort of processed that it's not hard in the way it was. And this show, Six Sermons, is to be credited for that. In a lot of ways, like, writing that project really helped me engage with all the kind of challenging emotions that do make it tough to talk about a friend, or loved one who's died by suicide. Yeah. But today it's okay. Well, good. I'm glad. I often wonder about tragic death, or even death in general, the people around you when you, have lost someone, I think, make an assumption that talking about it is too hard, and therefore, no one ever asks. And I believe in my heart of hearts that, in fact, people want to talk about their loved one no matter how they died, because it keeps them present and keeps them here 100%. Yeah. I mean, I think it's in the same way that we have a hard time talking about suicide, we have a hard time talking about grieving suicide. Right. Like, if, someone comes over, like, oh, yeah, I was out of town last week. My aunt died, and I went to the funeral, like, oh, wow, I'm so sorry to hear that. There's, like, a natural idiom to sort of share that moment of grief and sort of be there for somebody, who's in that moment with someone. But, oh, yeah, I was out of town last week, my friend died by suicide. All of a sudden, there's this massive sort of iron being thrown into the wires and electricity everywhere that prevents good kind of communication from happening because we're just not equipped to have those conversations. Right. And again, specifically, again, on someone, like, one degree away, I think it's. Hard, which then kind of stops any healing process. And then the less we talk about it, the more the stigma of suicide continues on, which then leads us to needing these awareness months like September is. And before logging on with you earlier today, I was looking at the World Health Foundation's statement about this year, and 700,000 people a year commit suicide that we know of. And it just seems so short sighted to not figure out, even if we stumble, even if it's awkward, not figure out how to talk about it. Yeah, I agree. I mean, it's a thing that happens all the time. That's like a line in the show. People kill themselves every day. And people are taking their lives today. And so it's kind of just this is something that is part of life. It has been for a long time, and in all likelihood will be. And our collective instinct and social pressure to kind of pretend that's not the case, or demonize it, or sort of frame it as something other, something sort of mystical or almost outside of this kind of normal spectrum of human experience, I think is risky. We have to center it in the conversation, take the edge off it and just lay it on the table. Like, yeah, I was out of town last week, my friend died. Oh, what happened? Well, he died by suicide. And it's like, okay, here we are. It doesn't have to cause that record scratch of awkwardness in the conversation. So, with your background of very much being a journalist and in addition to the fiction writer that you are with this audible podcast, how do you bring the documentary eye to a story centered on suicide? Yeah, I love that question. I think the sort of minimum level which we don't see in all representations of suicide in the media is a degree of kind of expert driven credibility. Right? So that was a huge part of this process was having mental health experts reading this script for just accountability. It's like, here we are. What are the stories we're telling about suicide? What does it mean to put this narrative in the world? Just really thinking in the macro of like, okay, here are these other ways that suicides are being presented in fiction. What am I doing? What that's all about? So for me, the documentary element was really kind of working with folks who don't write fiction, folks who study this stuff, for a living. People who are doctors, people who engage with patients, and sort of just engaging with them on the various parts of the story. An especially cool thing that our director, Sarah Benson did during the production was she actually brought in a suicide expert into rehearsal. So she very astutely recognized that suicide and incidentally in this know, Christianity, the show takes place in the church are ah, these sort of sensitive topics. Actors really want to do these subjects justice. They don't want to screw it up. And so there's this kind of like walking on eggshells that can happen. I'm telling this story about suicide. Wow, I don't want to screw this up. And so she brought in this doctor and everyone had an opportunity to ask this person questions. Just get these questions out of the way in a safe space where wasn't going to be judged. Just kind of, like, laying it out so that when they finally got to performing and rehearsing, it's like, okay, I don't have to worry that I'm misrepresenting this thing. I don't have to worry that what I'm going to do, what I'm doing here in this show, is going to have negative consequences around the conversation, around mental health. So that was a huge piece of it was bringing not only experts into the sort of scripting phase, but also into the performance phase. And so having that sort of umbrella of expertise at all phases of the project, I think is the documentary kind of element to it. The other aspect that you just kind of touched on that I definitely want to dive into is the role that Faith plays in this story. And I'm just curious why you decided to set this story about suicide right in the middle of a church. So what got the story into a church initially really came from kind of left field. I did a freelance gig for a seminary, and during this gig, I got to listen to sermons. Tons and tons and tons of sermons because it was a workshop. this seminary put up a workshop for pastors, and the workshop paired ministers who are still alive from the civil rights movement with this new batch of young ministers. And it was this really brass tax, like, how to write a good sermon, like, where to put the metaphor and how to deliver the message. And I was just like, this is amazing audio. Oh, my gosh, sermons make incredible audio. I should build this into something, right? So it was actually initially kind of a formal consideration, is that sermons offered what to me were really exciting audio. And I think for audio drama, right, it's not always intuitive. Some people don't lead that way, but it was really important for me to lead. Like, what makes good audio? Oh, wow, this makes good audio. That said, once we're there, once we're in this world of, the mainline Protestant church in America, which includes Presbyterians, Lutherans, Methodists, Episcopalians, that is a really fertile sort of intellectual climate to explore themes like, generally speaking, I mean, obviously, there's thousands and thousands of these churches each. Each denomination has their own sort of ins and outs and lefts and rights. Some are more liberal, some are more conservative. But generally speaking, this family of churches are pretty rigorous in their engagement with the Bible, and its texts, and really kind of, like, explore these texts as, things that you just squeeze and squeeze and look at and find meaning. And so that was just such a rich playground for Alexis, pastor Alexis, the main character, Stephanie's character, to kind of wrestle with these issues. Right? So it just was a very organic idiom for a character to struggle against. Right? It's like pushing and pulling, and it's like, all, right here. I can try to come to understand these things through texts that I know well. So it functioned well in that way. And then, yeah. I think sort of adjacent to faith is this notion of community. Right. So, in the Church of Six sermons, the sense of community in this church is very pronounced and sort of the sort of destruction of that community coming together, of that community, is all at the heart of the piece. And I think that communities sort of founded on faith kind of function in really exciting, interesting ways. Has, your experiences in your life been positive with faith in a way that helped you, have such a caretaking eye with the church community in your script? Yeah, I didn't grow up going to church at all. it wasn't part of my life. And I think that was actually kind of a gift for this project. I could come in as a journalist, come in as sort of anthropologically unbiased as possible, without any kind of, traumas or sentimentality around church. Right. And I think folks who spend a lot of time in the church have one or the other or both, you know, growing up. And I really came in kind of being like, okay, this is a group of people who are doing this thing together. They constitute a community, and a crisis strikes this community. What does that mean? I think actually per my own faith in relationship to this story. It's actually the absence of it that's, most significant. And this is certainly not a spoiler for anybody who is listening. The person who dies by suicide is the pastor of this church. And Stephanie Shu's character is kind of already under his tutelage to be the assistant pastor of the church. And now she has to step forward and lead this community with not only this shocking crisis, but the way that suicide is viewed culturally. And to have the leader of this community die by suicide kind of adds this additional layer, I imagine. Yeah. And then her own journey. Right. It's kind of, like, even taken out of context. Right. Like, let's say she came into that church. He wasn't her mentor. Right. She's like, okay, I got a job here. I'm headed up. This guy's retiring. DA DA DA DA. All that you just said is all true. But sort of the added level for her is, like, this shakes her own inner world as well. Right. And that, I think, is what makes her challenge of united the community especially difficult, because her own inner self is just, like, collapsing. Do you find in your writing of this script or the experiences you have personally had with suicide in your life, this need for a why and how it can almost plague people left behind from being able to even begin their grieving process because they get stuck in the why? Definitely. I think that's at the sort of crux of this larger conversation around suicide that we're all having as a society, specifically in this fiction space, is that traditionally suicide on screen is represented as something that had, like, cause that there was a why. Right? And I think that's very much in reaction to our natural instinct to want a why as humans when suicides happen in our real life. Right, but the problem is that that instinct will never properly be stated, right? Because by the nature of suicide, there's never a clear reason why. Right. I mean, this seems to be obvious, but it's not. And yes, sure, there are instances where people die after something specific has happened and you can kind of sort of connect some dots or whatever, but, I think that we all desperately crave kind of an explanation for what seems to be, an injustice. This is like a tragedy, right. I think we all have that. We all have that instinct to ask why. And the project of six sermons is kind of like to go through that whole journey why you pick up every rug, you look in every corner, and you still can't really find it and sort of reckoning with the fact that you're not going to find anything is wisdom. And I think that once we kind of start to aspire for that kind of wisdom collectively as a culture and a society around suicide and reject kind of a more causal, connect the dots vision of it, once we do that, we're just going to have so many better paths towards treatment and harm reduction and prevention. but I think we first have to really kind of reframe the way we think about it. Yeah. I think that this need to understand why probably stems for many people to make sure that it doesn't happen again. If I understand the why, then I can address that issue and then this won't happen again. And that wisdom, that you speak of has to take the place because it's not a Whack a mole situation. It's elevating the conversation in a way where people who are having thoughts or feeling desperate or isolated or completely alone have a community or resources available to them, no matter what the why is. Yeah. And I think your point there about a, ah, community and resources available to them that needs to be really centered in the conversation, too. What does community care look like in regards to mental health? We're trying, right. You see these spasms of efforts in schools of trying to identify kids who are sort of exhibiting suicidal behavior and sort of jumping in. But we obviously have a long way to go. I know that you don't live in the US. And your friend Caz did not die in the US. And this story is set in the US. With your research, is there cultural differences in the way that suicide is looked at? Or is it generally taboo no matter where you. Mean it's hard to speak know. I've lived in here in Mexico for five years now, and did spend a lot of time in Russia. But I don't feel confident enough in my sort of cultural vocabulary of those places to kind of answer mean Mexico is deeply and so, you know, the Bible doesn't have much to say about suicide. So when suicide, that sort of idea that some people have, oh, suicide is a sin, that's not in the Bible, that's apocryphal or that's like subsequent writing, subsequent Catholic writing that sort of planted that idea. So I think that idea is strongest. But, I mean, we should talk to foreigners to get their take on that. But I will say about the United States and suicide is know, you talk about kind of just basic, basic, basic things we can do for harm reduction, as you talked about at the very beginning of the show, asking someone about, hey, are you thinking of taking your life? is actually the kind of thing that can save someone's life. There's simple things like this. Another very simple thing is that there's just a very clear, firm correlation between access to firearms and suicide. And that's not a political statement, it's a fact. And that's where my frustration will get all tied up, is it's not about making a political statement and saying that guns are bad. It is an actual cause effect correlation that should be looked at and talked about, instead of people immediately retreating to this defensive posture of, well, that means you want to take away all guns. Totally. Yeah. I mean, it's just an access thing, right? I mean, in a different universe where there are different sort of objects of, violence, if it's near and ready, that sort of makes it easier to do. And so I think when talking about suicide in America, it's kind of like looking at those kind of things. It's like all know, we can all dig down to the wells of culture and try to sort of identify the roots of kind of the sort of public violence that we're seeing in the United States, like the gun violence, the suicide epidemic. But we might just dig forever. But while we're digging in the meanwhile, we can do some things to kind of try to save a few lives. And just reducing access to firearms, is one of those things, whatever that looks like, whether it's everyone in the home knows where they are, x, Y and Z, but there's a lot of research around that out there. And what are some other besides the two we've mentioned so far asking and access to firearms? Is there other low hanging harm reduction fruit that we should be thinking about? I don't know from a policy perspective what that might look like, but what it looks like from you and me and a lot of folks listening out there perspective. And what it looks like in this show six sermons is like we all have the instinct, or many of us have the instinct to not talk about this, whether publicly or privately. There's just so much resistance to both communicating with others and communicating with ourselves about it. the sort of waterfall of tragedies that flow from, a suicide are so heartbreaking. You have parents who will not believe it, right. You have friends who will not believe it. And so I think a lot of it is, like sort of offering permission for oneself to have conversations with yourself that can be really awful, right? And so, in Six Servants for Know, Pastor Alexis, she has all these conversations with herself, which are ones that I had with myself, which is, know, some expected ones where you're just so angry at this person. It's such a sense of betrayal. but even darker ones, which is, oh, I really respected this person, and they decided to do this. Maybe there's something to this. Maybe I should really look at this and consider this and think through it. And I think that those kind of thoughts and those kinds of conversations need to be introduced into our imaginations as conversations that can be had, so that it's just not balls of feelings burning around in us. And then not only like, hey, listen, there's a zillion conversations that you can have based on the feelings that you have that your friend died this way. Not only are there a zillion of them, we should be having them. So have them with yourself and have them with your friends, and have them with your partner, have them with your congregation, et cetera. So I think what we can all do is, just engage in this material more, and that's going to pop the balloon a little bit and kind of take away some of its power. There's a punitive aspect to talking or thinking about suicide that I think is just so ingrained in all of us. It's seen as such an intrusive thought that you're supposed to turn away from it, and if I give a voice to it or reach out to someone, I'm going to get in trouble. the police are going to be called. There's mandatory reporting that has to be done. And therefore, the system itself is built to keep stuffing, stuffing, stuffing the feeling down instead of this mindset of maybe if you get it out, then it's released, as opposed to something that is trapped within you, and then therefore trapping you into believing that there are no other options. Yeah. And I think, again, to bring it back to representations of suicide in fiction, which is what I've thought so much about, I think also what is going to help us is narratives around suicide that just don't totally land in this place of utter hopelessness and despair, to use your expression like low hanging fruit. from a writer's point, of view. It's like, well, yeah, I'll just throw a suicide in there and it'll be the worst thing ever. And it's like, yeah, you will, and it will be the worst thing ever. And we're sort of continuing the same kind of, cloaking suicide in this shield of darkness and the punitive nature of it. So, yeah, I think that's another piece of it is how do we talk about suicide outside of its darkest elements? Just sort of, again, how do we find places to breathe around this thing? What would be your response to someone who says that adding more representation of suicide into the fiction world is dangerous, it's romanticizing, it it can give people ideas, it can put ideas in ahead that might not have been there. It's happening enough nonfiction wise. Why do we need additional fictional representations? I, think that all those fears are valid, and I think there are many, many representations of suicide that are detrimental. I think that there are those that aren't. Unfortunately, there's data. So it's a question that is kind of one that you can do a relatively good job of, sort of divorcing from. Kind of like, we have a lot of suicides, and I know someone who died by suicide, and you know what? I don't want to see another story like this. What are you doing? And that rage is so justified. But there's really sort of granular type research that's been done. So, for example, depictions, really specific depictions of the means of a suicide has been known to generate other suicides, right? So if it's something super specific that activates the imagination in a specific way, that could sort of contribute to someone taking their life in a specific kind of way. The other side of the coin also applies, right, where it's like, if we can open space for this in ways that don't do Red Flag, Ch, or J, then what we're doing is we're talking about something that no one's talking about and that is going to save lives. We're back to that harm reduction conversation that, there are ways in which it can be represented in a harm reduction instead of harm causing. So with the project specifically, what is the process of an Audible Fiction production? Is everybody in the same room, like it's a play, but it's just audio? Or is everybody in their own house with their headphones on, like you and I are right now and doing it on their own? Well, they're made both ways and, everywhere in between. At the end of the day, it's a script with characters interacting with each other. But given the audio medium and you don't see anything, you'd be surprised how disassociated that process can be. So not only are you on your laptop, and I'm on mine, and we're in different countries and miles apart, and this is our scene. This is like, the podcasters and they're going deep on suicide, we wouldn't even have to be recording these lines together. Some of these projects are made like that, right? Where if we're both super famous and don't have time

to rendezvous at 11: 30:59

00 a.m.. On Tuesday to do the scene together, then you'll do your lines and I'll do my lines, and somebody will add them together. To be clear, that is not how we recorded Six Servants. That is one end of the spectrum. The other end of the spectrum is you get everybody together, and what you'll see often is kind of a bunch of actors around a table behind microphones doing it that way. what we did kind of goes even further in that direction, and we built sets. So we built sets for these actors to play in. And so everyone was using lavalier microphones, the same microphones that you use in film sets. They're up right up there by your mouth, and it gave them stuff to work with. So Stephanie had a know, an actual podium that she could grab and hit and do all these things and really act against. And similarly, we have space and rooms. And so that's the other end of the spectrum, where you really can record these things in dynamic environments. How did you get involved in fictional audio production? Well, I was a playwright for many, many years. And then I, became a journalist and was making a lot of journalism, making a lot of audio journalism. And then I had an idea, ah, for an audio I kind of always wanted to experiment with audio fiction in the tradition of the old radio plays and all that. So it always kind of been a back burner creative dream to maybe do something like that. and the timing really worked out. So I was, like, making great progress making work as an audio producer in the nonfiction space. And then had this idea and just pitched it to Audible, said, hey, here's this story, here's who I am. I'm a playwright, but I have this audio experience, and here's this great story. and that was five years ago, but it all started with, that. Well, it is very much hearkens to that old time radio programming. When I sit and listen to it, it feels nostalgic in sound and today in topic and prose. And I actually full disclosure, I dislike audible experiences. Not audible the company. But, like, I don't listen to books, I listen to very few podcasts. That's not breaking news. I have talked about that before. I am a visual girl, which is why I make every guest, turn their camera on so that almost every guest turn their camera on so that I can see them. But I got lost in it. And it's a credit to your actors. It's a credit to the direction and the production and to the script. And I am, excited and hopeful that it. Will get into many ears, because it's important work. What is the best way for people to find six sermons? Is it strictly an Audible account? For now, it's strictly an Audible account. The good news is, if you do have an Audible account, you don't have to spend a credit on it. That is good news. It is good news. I mean, you only get one a month. It's like, well, I could listen to Tolstoy, which is a 40 hours novel most people say is good, or I could listen to this audio drama thing that's over in 4 hours. So yes. Ah, it's free. It doesn't take a credit. If you're a subscriber for Audible, you can get a free trial, to listen to it. You can also, if you don't want to join Audible but really love the sound of the store, you can buy it. La Carte from Amazon. You can just kind of one off buy it. There's a possibility that it'll go to Spotify at some point in a few months. Occasionally they'll do that with their titles, but, there's no guarantee of that. So what's next for you Asa in Mexico with your family and your dog? Oh my gosh, how did you know? Did I tell you how to talk? No. Your dog was barking earlier. I'm sorry for that's. Okay, m what is next for Know, my my audio company, we're called First Rodeo. It's a partnership between me and Matt Kagan. The two of us are cooking up some more audio fiction stories. So we've got a Dramedy, a teen Dramedy. That's the one that's kind of farthest along in the production development entertainment land, which is so exciting because, it's just so far from a story about faith and suicide. so that's what's coming up for us. But yeah, you can follow us on First Rodeo audio. We're out there online, not so online, but, we'll be definitely bringing you more audio titles over the years. That's the problem when your project is of a heavy nature, like Six sermons. Is I empathize with you because sometimes I get the stereotype of all I ever do is talk about heavy things because of the podcast. But yeah, it's important to have fun and light and be able to demonstrate that you are a full, whole human with full whole human experiences. Some of which are heavy, some of which are quite fun. Exactly. Yeah. No, I mean, if every show is six sermons, we should just all throw our televisions out, just call it a day, just go play with my dog. Because that's it. Yeah. Well, I really appreciate you being willing to be authentic and real with me today. And you are one of my first guests in the new iteration of we should talk about that. And the theme for this season is evolution for so many different reasons. And I am curious, either in reference to six sermons or first rodeo or personally for you. Asa what does evolution bring to mind for you? Yeah, I think since we're talking about it since suicide awareness month and the sort of the theme of this, I think just for know the evolution of my feelings around my friend's suicide was one of the biggest sort of arcs in my life. They really went from A to Z. The journey was long. It was like all the way from Chicago to South Africa by train and plane, automobile to get to a place where I feel like I did at the top of this interview. Is it hard for you to talk about this? And I can say, no, I can talk about this. and that was a pretty profound evolution. And I just think that something like that, it does take a whole bunch of planes and a whole bunch of trains and you're not going to just get there right away. so, I mean, that's what comes to mind and that's what I thought about it in crafting the piece, I tried to depict Alexis's journey through that and that was also the journey I was going through. Was that evolution? Well, you did it credit, and I am grateful to you for doing it and I'm grateful to you for today. So thank you so much, Asa and I look forward to seeing what's next for you. Thank you. Jessica, good luck with the show. We should talk about that is hosted and produced by me, Jessica Kidwell The audio engineering is done by Jarrett Nicolai at Mixtape Studios in Alexandria, Virginia. The theme song Be where you Are is courtesy of Astra via graphic design is by Kevin Adkins. Do you have a topic we should talk about? Let me know. Submit your idea on, our website, www.westatpod.com. There's a form right on the main page for you to get in touch with me. And if you don't have a topic, but you want to let me know what you've thought about the show, think about leaving me a voicemail. You can call WeSTAT at 6314 WeSTAT That's 631-493-7828. Or you can send me a comment on any of our social links facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn threads, that platform formerly known as Twitter. On all of these, you can find me at WeSTAT pod. You may even hear your comments on the air. And finally, there is no we without your participation. I really couldn't do this podcast without your support. So thank you for being here. And if you or your business want to monetarily support the show, I'd appreciate that, too. Email me at, info at, westapod.com for more information. Be where you are? M be where you are? Be where you are? You are? I should love my conservation. Love to navigate close.