 global health impacts of nanotechnology law. Hey, so please introduce yourself. It's a mysterious world. Yes, I'm Dr. Lee Spitzans. And I'm very, very pleased and honored that this is my 10th time presenting at the annual conference of nanotechnology here in the University of Aristotle in Greece. And it's been a wonderful, wonderful decade because there's been so much growth in the field. It's been very exciting to be part of this story. So I have just a few souvenirs here from the many years. I have the first abstract book from 2012. And already the conference was nine years old the first time I came. And I just introduced a little taste of the idea that there's law impacting nanotechnology. And nanotechnology, they said, well, what's that going to do with the law? And actually, I ended up writing an entire doctorate on the question of what does that have to do with the law. I wrote before the Geneva School of Diplomacy, but somehow magically got an award from the University of Ozan, a university-wide award for the best research in social medicine and prevention for the first doctorate looking at the legal issues in nanotechnology. And I want to credit Sturios and his team because they let me bring the ideas here and discuss them with scientists and get feedback on what made sense and what didn't. You have books also, right? I have books also, yes. So the most recent book is the French version of Global Health Impacts of Nanotechnology Law. And this book is Nanotechnology Pour Tous, La Révolution Scientifique de Notre État. It's a slight update from the first book because so much happened in 2018. And I want to thank my partner and spouse, Dominique Chawain, who wrote the back and discusses the importance of looking at nanotechnology law as the sort of rules of the road of how to proceed. And you can see that even the simple cover from 2012 until a few years later, we've already got more complexity at nanotechnology and more going on. And the thicker book to the point that the book is so big now, we just put it on the back. What is an abstract book? What is that about? Oh, it's a marvelous document. It's when you come to a conference like this and there are thousands of people and you have to decide where you're gonna spend your time. And so it describes what each speech is going to be about to help you decide which days you're going to see. It takes a lot of work to compile this. It does, it does. They have an entire organizing committee. And I think part of the hard work is the fact that you have people from all over the world and in different languages, different universities, different institutions, sending their work from different fields. You want to get them in there in time so they fit this in one schedule. And the schedule is very, very full. And even now the schedule is very, very full. And I spoke about legal implications of nanomedicine in public health right there in 2012. And so I was the only lawyer at the time and I still am. We still don't have lawyers coming to nanotechnology. And that's something we have to work on because as Stereos pointed out in his plenary session yesterday, the social impacts of nanotechnology. Now that we have the long list of disciplines that work together to create nanotechnology, and we've always been looking a little bit at what that means in terms of society, equity, bioethics and the law, now the time has come to really start looking at those impacts. And I propose that we need a workshop protecting posterity and looking at what it is that nanotechnology is doing in society. So I would call that proposed workshop, protecting posterity, nanotechnology, saving the world. And we could look at the disciplines but also we should look at what theologians have to say about nanotechnology. Is this advancing some of the religious views? Is it a tool for making the world much more the way the divine plan they believe in that existed? And I think it's possible. For example, Lady Gaga did that marvelous concert in the middle of COVID-19 where she brought together 60 million people from 100 countries. This is bringing the world together in ways that technology is doing that nobody could have done before. And that she could have Paul McCartney singing in his kitchen at the same time as the Rolling Stones air drumming and those guys don't even get along. And everybody in the world had the opportunity for free to participate in that concert. That's a gift of technology. But a theologian might think that this is something that's really bringing the world towards unity. So we need to look at that. We need to look at, of course, the laws. And I will talk more about the law in a second. Is there a lot of regulation or not yet in this field? A lot of regulation, not yet. First of all, there's always the fundamental norms of society. And one of the things that I discovered in working on the book, Global Health Impacts of Nanotechnology Law, is that the concept of universality in international law is a very big player here. That there are common needs and basic human needs all around the world addressed throughout the world in different jurisdictions. And those rules were always there. Scientists like to call that the precautionary principles, which is a consensus idea. But very few countries have actually codified the precautionary principles. What they do instead is they operationalize precautionary principles. They make them happen by having laws that protect people and do things. But actually, in some countries, like my home country, there's a tendency not to regulate nanotechnology. And yet in my country of adopted citizenship, my inherited great citizenship, the EU is massively and proactively writing many, many rules. And they're exciting rules about nanostructures in food and rules about how to use nanotechnology safely while looking at the environment and consistent with promoting innovation. So yes, there is no nanotechnology law in some places. And yes, there is nanotechnology law growing like mushrooms in a whole bunch of other places. So it's not like a car bar country where people can just do whatever they want and nobody's checking? Well, people like to think that, but that's not how the law really works. What it really works is that it's a sort of a box. And in that box, you can do what you want. And so long as you don't hurt people too much and you don't violate too many laws, you're probably okay. But we're beginning to see a much more focused and sharper focus on what the law wants nanotechnology to do. It's important to remember also that if we didn't have fundamental laws permitting the research and development, we wouldn't have the joyous, cool toys that nanotechnology gives us today. In the 1990s, President Clinton had the National Nanotechnology Initiative started and their report in 1999 gave birth to a bunch of legislation. And in the EU, there's funding for all kinds of wonderful projects. Those are laws that make that happen. So in order to even do the basic research, there's laws that have to answer. It's always true that if you don't want to obey the law, you can try to get away with it. But it's becoming less and less true that you will be able to do so. Because some of the stuff these guys are talking about here can change the world and make a huge impact. Yes. But you need to have the funding and the regulation and everything just helping to push along and make it happen sooner. Absolutely, absolutely. So the talk I gave yesterday was about 3D printing. And at the time that nanotechnology was starting, people were talking about 3D printing. Would it happen or not? And what we discovered during the COVID-19 pandemic is that people were 3D printing masks and ventilator parts and some of the organic parts that they needed for people in hospitals or in points of care. An easy example is if you had a dentist who needed to do implants and the lines of supplies were frozen during the height of the pandemic, we're still in the pandemic, but we're in a much quieter phase now. And in that height, it wasn't possible to get supplies. So they could 3D print the teeth that they wanted to implant. Well, that sounds lovely. It's a beautiful promise. It's a beautiful promise. We have everything that that patient needs to try and get them well. But here's the problem. When you do that, you push aside a lot of pre-existing structures. You push aside all the quality control and inspection that happens in the manufacturing plant, in the packaging, in the transportation. If it crosses a border, then the customs people look at it very carefully. Maybe there's medical device law or food and drug law or just plain customs law. And all that inspection gets torn away because your 3D printing, you download your information, you make your recipe, and then you give it to the patient. The same magic that gives it to the patient also very anarchistically takes away our understanding of who does something if something goes wrong. Is it just because the patient was so close to death that they died? Or is it because something was wrong in that 3D printing? How would you ever know? And how would you ever be able to do something about it? So we're at a very important crossroads because the law does have the ability to answer these questions. There's always been law about what you give the patients and when they're in an emergency, if you can do things for them without their informed consent, their permission. And if you do and you do it wrong, what are the consequences? That's always existed. But we as a society have to start making choices about what it is that we want to allow and what we want to be very strict about and not care about at all with impunity. Because there are some huge challenges in the world. And maybe nanotechnology has a role in all of it. Nanotechnology is capable of saving just about all of it. But it's a question of choices. The easy one, the one that we're going to look at at the European Scientific Institute in November of 2022, is about food. Because nanotechnology and food is something that not many people think about or know and it affects everybody every day. Everybody needs to eat. And nanotechnology has been involved in creating what's called nanopesticides that you can actually grow on a plant, a pesticide, that you remove and harvest, or nanostructures in pesticide that make stronger and more efficient use of the pesticide so you use less toxic material and less destruction to the land. And then, of course, the way we transport food if you have silver lining in the trucks, the refrigerators, and the things like that, that protects the food. You have packaging that's stronger. When I was a kid, plastic meant something was cheap and easy to break. And now, if I try to break the plastic on the cover of this book, it's not easily done. That's because carbon nanotubes are reinforcing that plastic, so we have better packaging. What does that mean? It means it's lighter to ship the food, we can take longer to ship the food, we can store it, and that means the insurance cost goes down. Well, those are all really cool benefits, but those benefits, each one of those is a trade-off. Each one of those has a cost to society that we need to think about. And my mission, my passion for this, is that there is a sense of justice and equity that people will look at these health issues and have the opportunity as stakeholders to participate in how we're gonna do this for the next generation or 100 years. These are very important questions impacting daily life. Thanks to nanotechnology, we have MRNA. Some people don't want a vaccine, but for those that do, the vaccine exists. Thanks to nanotechnology, we could feed everybody and we could have supply lines for distribution, but is that what we want as a society? And if we do that, what are we trading off? Maybe we'll have only four types of ice cream instead of the thousands of flavors because we'll have an efficient way of feeding everybody. Or maybe we'll have thousands more flavors we never dreamed of. When we talk about 3D printing, I focused yesterday on medical devices, but in fact, we 3D print food already in the industrial companies. And many people believe that 3D printers for food will soon be as commonplace as your laptop. And what kind of choices do we want to make about that? We can feed everybody. We need to think about how we want to feed everybody, what we want to feed them. Do we want that food to be the conduit for bringing them their medicine? Do we want that to be for pleasure, a comfort food as we call it? Do we want it only to be nutritious? We can make gluten-free food for one person and then high carb for the guy that's running and we can do all of this through nanotechnology. We can print the exact portion that's perfect and healthy and customized for every person. Yes, we can. Yes, we can. And delicious. Yes, and delicious. And the people that use it in 3D printing, they say it's delicious. What I believe is whether or not it's delicious, that it's already been creeping into the pre-packaged food economy in industrial commercial food, the food factories, if you will. And if that's the case, then that part of the question is solved. The question is what do we want to do with that? Do we want everyone to have customized food? Do we want the cultural diversity of having different foods from different countries and different ways of eating? Do we want everyone to meet at a certain nutritional level or do we want to say for some people, maybe they don't need to meet that, they can do something else? And what will happen to fresh food? Will there be fresh food? Will we want fresh food? Maybe it's undesirable. These are societal choices. My mission is to try and give people the tools around this to look, first of all, at the law without becoming aware. Law impacts our daily life. Law has to do with if you have electricity in the wall, how that electricity is allowed to travel and whether it's protected in all kinds of ways or just random static electricity. Law is everywhere. And the science of nanotechnology has given us beautiful products now for almost two decades. And we have these products and we use them, but people don't really have access to the time and the information to try and sort it out for themselves. So in my writing, I take on these very complicated areas. Like food, there isn't a country that doesn't regulate food. Even a country that doesn't believe health is a human right or that there's a human right to food will nonetheless regulate food, its quality, its content, its subsidies, its import and its export. These are things that we regulate all the time as humans. So you have a complex area like food that's also at the same time very mundane, very ordinary, very essential for everyone. In my opinion, what people need is access to information that provides a basic idea about the law and a basic idea of the nanotechnology and synthesizes that with the health concerns and the economic concerns. And then you can have a conversation about what is it you want these things to do in society. I guess there must be a lot of big organizations, big companies or universities or startups. They do all kinds of new ideas, new research, new visions. And then they wait until later to figure out if it's legal. Yes, but in France they have changed that. The new approach, you know, the French when they eat the traditional meal, they take a little pause and they digest it and then they go on to the next. This is traditional pre-COVID, pre-fast food where you run to the restaurant before your time runs out for that you're allowed to be on the street. But the traditional meal of taking a very long time and preparing it very carefully and consistent with that paradigm, the French have put into their research grant process what's called lab to market. And you have to think carefully about how you propose to use the commercialization of the nanomaterial in order to get the grant to do research now. This is a very important difference because as you say, we invent these really cool things. We don't know where they'll plug into society. Once they exist, they take on a life of their own. But in fact, we use them in a bunch of places without having thought through the consequences. And the consequences don't have to be big catastrophic consequences. They can be little things. If you have titanium dioxide making toothpaste fluffier and whiter so that people are more willing to brush their teeth, which is a social good, then the next thing is what is it in that titanium dioxide? Is there something that should be limited in quantity when you have titanium dioxide in a donut or in whipped cream? And it's not up to the maker of the toothpaste. It's up to the person that's putting together all those uses at the same time. The individual or the planner, if it's a person that's in a setting where people are planning things for you. So we have to ask a lot more questions, but I think these are really cool toys. I don't think it needs, we don't do it. I think we need to take the time to do it rationally. And then we'll have some marvelous results. What about China, India, Italy? Everybody has their own big pile of laws and stuff, right? Yes. And maybe some of them wants to be more liberal about some of the ideas than others. Yes, that's where I live. That's where people might go and, or do you have to coordinate everything from an international organization that somehow spreads out the regulation globally? Fortunately, we don't yet have an international nanotechnology organization, because there would be nothing outside of its jurisdiction. All the pretty equipment that you're using is nano-enabled. The fact that we can talk on the web with people of the world is using telecommunications that are nano-enabled. And this is very, very important. So fortunately, we don't have a massive nanotechnology governance. But what I've discovered in my research is that we have lots and lots of laws all over the place. We probably, even though people tend not to know that there's a lot of nanotechnology, we probably have more law than we need, actually, because we have so many laws in so many places. And we have to start sorting out which are the laws that work for which purpose and which are the laws that we want to have rule. And this is very different than your traditional, what's called conflict and laws analysis in law, because conflict of laws is usually very specific to a circumstance. And in conflict of laws, it's just what people read. It's not that one law is better than the other. But we actually have several parallel models where we need to start thinking about choosing which model we like better. And we need harmonization because if you don't harmonize, if you don't bring together the laws, then trade becomes impossible. I have a really cool food that people need in a country that's at war. And I could get it to them using nanotechnology. But the law is so inconsistent that in one country, they say this food is possible to eat. And in another country, they say, you can't eat it. Well, you have that. Then you have a conflict of law that has to be resolved. That nanotechnology spotlights that that problem may have existed elsewhere. But that's a conflict of law. And an easy example. In the United States of America, the Food and Drug Administration, where my wonderful tax dollars paid, we have something called the generally recognized as safe. We have the grass list. And on that list is titanium dioxide, which is used in toothpaste, whipped cream, donuts, and a whole variety of household things, cleaners, skin creams. It makes things white and fluffy and attractive. And consumers like it. And according to the grass list, if it's less than 1% of the components of the thing that you're looking at, then in fact, you don't need to worry about the presence at the nanoscale, because it's generally recognized as safe. And yet the European Food Safety Authority, which is a very well-respected body, has said, even though we don't have the power to ban things, and that's a very nice legal question, why they don't have the power? Should they have the power? What would they do if they had that power? Well, EFSA, European Food Safety Authority, has said that at the nanoscale, titanium dioxide is dangerous and should be banned. But they don't have the authority to ban it. So if somebody needs food somewhere, do they accept the generally recognized as safe food with the titanium dioxide? Or do they worry the way EU is saying you ought to worry? This is a very important conflict. It's not about sovereignty that one country has the right to tell people what to do and the other doesn't. It's a scientific question that has very important legal, economic, and health implications. And citizens need to become sufficiently informed to participate in that debate. Without getting into anything controversial, the last couple of years has shown that scientists don't necessarily agree. They don't have to agree. There's no monolith. The question isn't whether they agree. The question is whether you can understand what they're saying. If you understand what they're saying, then you know what to do with that information. When they send out confusing information on a top-down way, I'm the scientist, I know, listen to me. This is very bad, even if they're right. Not only that it sort of deprives the individual of choices and because they're being told what to do in places where they might have autonomy. You will see this in vaccines. But more importantly, it deprives the individual and the society of the ability to really make that subtle analysis because maybe it's great most of the time and then there's one or two times when it's really a very bad idea. And the individual has to have enough information to make that decision properly. All the good times can be erased by two or three really bad decisions. So just saying, well, we've done it a million times and it's fine isn't an answer. The scientists need to behave more responsibly. Responsibly, they need to be giving information in a manner that not only respects the intelligence of the recipients, but actually makes it useful in more than one context so that they can see what happens next when that information is out there. And lawyers are just as bad. We do the same thing too. We tell people, oh, there's no constitutional basis for this case, but we don't tell people, read the Constitution. Here are the lines of the Constitution we're talking about. The Constitution in this country is different than that country and how does that play together when somebody goes across borders? Do they still have the same rights, et cetera? So the fault is not that the information is bad or good. The information is neutral. The fault is that it's packaged cruel. It's presented in a way that's definitive and you must accept it without allowing for the nuances that are the parts of everyday life. And that, my goal is to make people want to have access to that and to try to make some of those complicated ideas more accessible. There are some things that will always remain complex, but there are some things where if you think about it carefully, you can distill it to a few important concepts and then individuals can make choices and have really intelligent responses without feeling that something is taken away from them. A lot of the people that don't wanna be vaccinated feel that their right to say no has been taken away from them. Well, maybe if they have a better packaging of that scientific information, they may make that whole analysis very different instead of that emotional response that this is my right not to do this. Maybe they would think about it as a different body of right. When you think of nanotechnology, the word, is it kind of like branding or marketing? Is it the, what you're talking about is relevant for all the chemistry and medicine that's been going on for centuries? Yes. So it is, the nanotechnology has been going on for hundreds of years. Yes. Well, when I started in this field and it's a really marvelous piece of good luck that I was invited to this field by Dr. John Howard who's the head of the National Institute of Occupational Safety in the United States. When I was invited to this field, nanotechnology was much less prevalent but it was still quite prevalent. And if you just, I spent a great deal of time defining what is nanotechnology. So one thing that it is, there's one strand in my hair. Can you see one strand in my hair here? Yeah, I try to focus. Okay, this one strand has a diameter that is 100,000 nanometers. That's how small we're talking about. We're not talking about the molecular level. Some nanomaterials, it's maybe 50 or 60 molecules. We're not talking about the atomic level. And we're not talking about ultra-fine because that's too big, but we're talking about the nanoscale in a way that's really fascinating. First of all, from the point of view of the science, it was called the revolution right away because matter behaves differently at the nanoscale compared to how matter behaves in what we now call bulk. The carbon nanotubes that are wrapping this book, if they were just carbon, you could have them in a pencil. You could have them in emissions that you're trying to capture. But at the nanoscale, they behave very differently. Carbon in particular was fascinating because carbon has always been very recognized as safe. When I was a child, there were sheets of paper made of carbon. And if you wanted to make a copy of something, you put the sheet of paper of carbon between two other sheets of paper and you wrote and the carbon came out on the second sheet. It was safe, everybody did it. So there was no law regulating the use of carbon at the nanoscale, which we now know it does marvelous things but also may migrate into the skin or lungs and cause cancers. We don't know yet how much, when, why, or how, but we know this possibility exists and we know that we have to start regulating how to use carbon. And in fact, when REACH was written the European law on protecting people from chemical hazards, in 2011, it did not mention carbon but by 2020, it had a separate protocol just for carbon. So things that were safe were in this odd limbo because they behave so differently. Gold, the only thing dangerous about this gold ring is that it makes me marry to somebody. And whatever that means. But gold at the nanoscale explodes and we use it to make the communications rapidly with lots of information. So first you had this change in the science that we were rewriting the textbook of matter and how science understands how things behave. That's the revolution in science. That gave rise to these really cool things that we want to use. The ability to have a vaccine that can end COVID. The ability to send information around the world rapidly. The ability to feed the world. Then the law says, well, wait a minute. We regulate the atomic scale a lot. There, every country of the world has something about atomic energy, atomic weapons. Every country, no exceptions, has law around that. Whether they have the weapons or not and whether they've learned to use the energy or not. And of course in the bulk scale we regulate everything. And there was this little empty space what the law calls a lecuna. And in this lecuna, people said, well there must be no law. Obviously there's no law. It's not atomic, it's not bulk. Obviously nothing's governing. That was wrong for two reasons. First of all, you have the fundamental laws of society. Human rights, universality, laws of trade, laws of customs to get products in and out of countries. Those don't go away. If you want to kill somebody, you better have a really good reason or you've violated the law in just about every country. So those laws continue to exist vibrantly. But also, we have natural nano materials that have existed, is at the nano scale. And we have seen throughout history how those nano materials behave. So even as lawyers, we had precedent. Even as lawyers, we could look at things about nano materials. We just didn't know them. We didn't know the name of it. Now that big hole is being filled by lots of regulation. As I said, now reach is nano materials. It has a separate protocol for carbon. So nano has changed how we look at the law. And then the circumstances of the world like COVID have changed how the law behaves in the nano context. All right. So you're having a lot of interesting conversations here at the show in the last 10 years. I have wonderful conversations. It helps me grow. My biggest problem really is that the scientists are resistant to the idea that the laws is important. They don't understand that after they do really good research, if a court cites them, if a product is advertised on television or used on the web, that takes on a life of its own that is not related to what they were doing in their research when they thought they were creating it. And the law is very, very important in harnessing that. You can have the greatest invention that's going to help people around the world. And with nano, we have seen this, whether it's the concert that makes people feel better so they're not isolated during COVID or it's the vaccine that enables some people to go out and not have COVID or the food that we can give everybody. Whatever that nano-enabled thing, the telehealth of speaking on the communication system to your doctor without actually having to be there when everybody's in lockdown and there's not enough staff to help everybody who's sick, all these wonderful nano-enabled gifts, at the same time, they have to be used in a context where it's understood and it's healthy and the choices, the societal choices. Pesticides is a great example. Nano-pesticides will reduce the amount of pesticide we use. It will save fields that are destroyed by too much toxic waste. It'll reduce risk of exposure to workers for distributing that pesticide on the cross. But what does that mean? It means it's a much more potent pesticide. It's a much, there we want the nano to kill things. We want it to kill the bugs or bacteria that we're after. We want it to kill. So we have to think very carefully about the trade-offs that are involved. Yes, it will bring us these wonderful, wonderful benefits. Using less pesticide is a great idea. So we're gonna use a more potent pesticide and we have to think carefully about what that means if that pesticide is out of context. If somebody says, oh, I could use this product, I have a secondary use. I have a tertiary market. And is that what we want? But those are societal choices. That is not the science itself. That is not the fault of the science. That is about the information that is packaged with the science that goes to the consumer, the general public, the regulator, the policy maker, and the next generation of scientists. Cool, so thanks a lot. Thanks a lot for this presentation, for this conversation. Well, I hope you like it. I hope you will please join us at the European Scientific Institute in November. Maybe we'll even find a way to get some of the live streams. We're gonna be looking at nanotechnology feeding the world. We're gonna have five groups and they'll be working groups of students, but they'll be across disciplines. You're gonna have lawyers, of course, finance people, nanoscientists, bioethnicists, medical people, and I've persuaded at least one theologian to join us. And we're gonna have teams looking at specific questions around nanotechnology. And where is it? It's in the European Scientific Institute in Arshaup, France, which is just the suburbs of Geneva. It's literally at the border. I can walk to the Swiss border and get a bus to Geneva, no problem. The Geneva bus runs right there. In November. November, 2022. And we're gonna, each group is going to be assigned a specific task to really strategize on these big questions that I'm talking about. TIO2, titanium dioxide in food at the nano scale. How are we gonna reconcile that in one place it's recognized as safe and the other wants to ban it? Those may have political components in those decisions, but there's some science there somewhere. And then the law has to do something about it because the mission of both of those agencies, EFSA and FDA, is to protect people and protect their food. So that will be one group. There will be a group looking at food security from the standpoint of theology. And divine plan or whatever, where does the ability to feed everybody fit into a theological context? And then we'll have another group looking at packaging and whether any of this stuff actually migrates from the food into our bodies or our lakes and rivers and streams. And we will have another group looking at food distribution where nanotechnology is a major player in preserving the food and keeping it fresh and available. I mean, there are companies that put expiration dates that are years ahead of when the food was harvested. Years. Well, that's because of a bunch of nano-enabled stuff. And we will have people looking at new foods and nano pesticides. I just do, just to mention also. So you sound like you're American, right? Yes. But you're also Greek. I'm also Greek. All right. So it's nice to be here in the US and FDA to come together because I don't know what to eat anymore. All right, cool. Okay. And you have my contact information. I welcome everybody. Yeah, we'll put this under the video when it's spit out. People can find an information about your event in November. Make sure that you have my contact information. Yeah. ILF at Georgetown.edu. Cool, all right. Thank you. Thanks a lot. All right. So I have to write the speech for tomorrow. Tomorrow's only about food. Oh, you have presentations going on here, yeah? Yes. Tomorrow at noon is the food one. And then I do two hours, all the log concepts that I want the science students to know. You can show some of your old badges. Yes. Your people can find your name there. Here you are. In all the places I've wandered thanks to nanotechnology. This several years back. Yes. There, and people can just Google you. Yes, they can Google me. Find contact. They can look for the Global Health Law Program at Georgetown University. And they can look for the Work Health and Survival Project, which is in the USA and Europe. And they can find me. And that. Cool. And there's this unshepherded collection of videos of me talking at different conferences. Which maybe I'll have to hire you to help me. How many? You have? Oh, there are hundreds of conferences. I've spoken. You've spoken a lot. At over 200 conferences. Well, it's two things. As a lawyer, of course, we speak. That's one of the things we do. But when I was writing the thesis, it was very important to go to conferences with scientists and speak. And if they were angry about something, I said, you know, how can you say the law should do this or whatever? That really helped me clarify the issues that I think are important to write about. And my husband's French, he doesn't speak English. So it forced me to speak in a simple language that I could speak to non-native speakers. I'm, in that sense, very different than most Americans speak in a bunch of idioms about baseball, football, and, you know, how things work in America. And I'm not caught up in that because I'm forever translating myself to non-English speakers. And I think that makes for clearer writing. I think that the most important thing about writing is to listen to other people before I write. And my great sadness is that everybody's writing and not enough people are reading. And that if you want to write, you really need to read and to listen to other people. So if I had any message about writing because I have eight books and literally hundreds of articles, it's that you really have to listen to other people to write well. Cool. All right. Thanks a lot. Thank you, my friend. Okay, see you later. Yes. Thank you, my dear. Very, very fun. All right. In the chat, I'll put you in a break for a second.