 My name is Shannon O'Zerny. I am the head of youth services at the West Vancouver Memorial Library, and it is my great pleasure to welcome you to Virtual Booktopia, the literary arts festival for young people, and today's presentation by Tanya Lloyd-Kai. Before we begin, I want to acknowledge that the library has its home on the traditional ancestral and unseated territories of the Coast Salish people, and in particular, recognize the Squamish, Slewa-tooth, and Musqueam nations. I am very grateful that I get to make my home here and that I can keep learning to do better and be better when it comes to sharing this place. Booktopia is a very special partnership between the West Vancouver Memorial Library, our library foundation, and West Vancouver schools. I want to give a huge thank you to all your teachers, teacher librarians, principals who made it possible for you to watch today. Thank you so much for joining us. So our format, how it's gonna work. I am very shortly going to be introducing author Tanya Lloyd-Kai. She will be talking with you about some of the most interesting, coolest, and probably sometimes weirdest stories from her latest nonfiction books, and then we will have time for your questions. I know many of you who are watching live will think of questions as you're listening to Tanya, and it's not too late to send those in. You can email them to us at youthatwestvanlibrary.ca, and that email address is also down in the video description. And even if you don't have a question, but you're a teacher or you're leading a home learning group, if you're watching with a group of kids we want to hear from you, tell us how many kids are watching, and we'd also love to give you a shout out at the end as well. It's just really helpful for us to know exactly how many of you are tuning in. So now I am so thrilled to introduce you to our presenter. So here are some words that I would use to describe Tanya Lloyd-Kai. Curious, determined, generous, kind, tenacious, persistent, and very funny. This very unique combination is totally fitting for someone who writes both nonfiction information books and fiction novels for kids and teens. Tanya's job as a writer combines the work of a researcher, a journalist, a teacher, a TED talker, a stand-up comedian, and sometimes even a therapist. I think she will really open up your eyes to a whole new side of what an author can do and all the different things they can choose to write. Tanya has written over a dozen books, but today she's going to be focusing on three, under pressure, the science of stress. This is your brain on stereotypes, how science is tackling unconscious bias, and the forthcoming snooze fest, which will be released this fall and is all about the science of sleep. So again, don't hesitate to send us your questions if you're watching live. I really hope that you enjoy this whirlwind trip through Tanya's brain. I'm excited and I hope you are too. We're all watching in different places, but I still want you to put your hands together, give a big round of applause, especially if you're watching together as a group for Tanya Lloyd-Kai. Tanya, I am going to turn the screen over to you until our Q&A at the end. Okay, thank you, Shannon, and thank you for having me. Thank you for the West Van Library and thank you for everybody for tuning in. I'm going to talk about where some of my ideas come from today for all of these different information books that I get to write. Because I get to write about all these different topics, which means that every six months or so, I need to come up with some sort of new idea to say to a publisher, this is what I would like to write about next. So to show you how I do this, I've gone and gotten a picture taken of my brain, just for you so you can see where the ideas come from. Are you ready? Here it is, the insides of my brain, very organized as you can see. And the trouble with this brain of mine is usually big parts of it are taken up with things that have nothing to do with books. Sometimes I think about my new puppy, sometimes I think about tennis, gardening, sometimes elephants for no reason at all. The weather, sometimes I just really want a strawberry milkshake and that's all I can think about. Sometimes coronavirus like all of us right now. But the trick is to get some time when my brain can be a little bit more blank, maybe a walk outside or some time by myself. And then these places where a whole bunch of lines intersect tend to be where the ideas come from. So I'm gonna talk about three of these places where different lines intersected in my head today. And the first one has to do with stereotypes. And this is where the ideas came from for this is your brain on stereotypes. So here's my husband and my son. My husband, Min, was born in Burma. So he's brown as you can see. And a couple of years ago I had just listened to a podcast about the ways that our brains categorize things and people without us necessarily realizing it. So I had this podcast in the back of my head. And then Min gets invited to Edmonton to give a keynote talk at a conference. Now the keynote speaker at the conference is kind of the most important guy there. He gets to like really rile everybody up and get them all excited. And Min is a very outgoing, funny guy. So he's really good at this. And he flies in to Edmonton the night before and he checks into the hotel and he asks, can I borrow the key and I'll just go look at the conference room. And he goes and looks at where the people will be sitting the next day and where he'll be speaking at the microphone. And then while he's in there, in rushes a woman from the conference room next door and she says, oh, thank goodness you're here. We have been waiting forever to get the heat turned up. And as I said, Min is a very outgoing and funny guy. So he said, do you think I'm a janitor because I'm brown? And of course that's what she did think. And she was so embarrassed and she of course hadn't meant to make those conclusions but her mind had seen Min and put him in a certain category without her necessarily meaning to do it. In her mind, there was some sort of pictures that looked like this where there was a brown guy who was a janitor and a white guy who was a keynote speaker. And she apologized. She was horribly embarrassed. She didn't do this on purpose. But when Min told me this story, I thought, that's just like the podcast I was just listening to. Those are categories in our minds. Categories that trick us sometimes and make for embarrassing situations where we assume things that we should never have assumed. Now, I'm gonna give you some categories and wherever you are, call out whether that the picture I show you is a breakfast food, a lunch food or a dinner. So call out breakfast, lunch or dinner. Are you ready? Breakfast could be lunch. I'm gonna call that dinner. Lunch, definitely lunch. Definitely breakfast. Dinner? Okay, one more set. Dinner, lunch, wait a second. So we have all these categories in our heads. We have, when we open the cupboard of our kitchen, we know right away which foods we're gonna think about for breakfast and which foods we're gonna think about for lunch. And when we see an umbrella, we know that it is not in the food category at all. So we have to have these categories in our heads. Otherwise we would be very confused about what to eat and we would end up chewing on outdoor gear. So we need categories and they're good for things like food and they're great for outdoor gear, but they're not very useful when we start applying them to people we don't know. So one of the interesting stories I read as I was preparing for this book was about a test called the IAT, the Implicit Association Test. An implicit here means memories we use without thinking about them. So means things like we know what an umbrella is without thinking about it because it's somewhere back in our brain. That's an implicit memory. So this is an implicit association test and it was developed by a team who worked with a scientist named Anthony Greenwald and then a woman named Mazurine Banji came to work on it. And they said, here, take one of these tests, try it out. All you have to do is take the words that have to do with work and put them with the word man and take all the words that have nothing to do with work and put them with the word woman. So she thought, okay, I can do this. So she went through and she put business and work and wealth with man and she put babies and athlete and cooking and fashion and nurture with woman. And then they said, okay, great, we've written down your times and now we're gonna time you again. Do it the same way except backwards. So put all the words that have to do with work with the word woman. So she went through and she put business and work and wealth with woman and all the other ones with man. And they said, okay, here's your time. And it was slower. It took her longer, now she had a lot more words to sort through than I have here, but it took her longer to put the work words with woman than it did for her to put the work words with man. And they said, that's because your brain naturally associates work with men. And she said, well, that's ridiculous. I'm a professor. I've been working my whole life. Of course I associate women with work. And they said, it's not really something that you do consciously. It's something that all of our brains do because they have these categories buried in them. And they said, the same thing happens with black and white. So they have given this test to millions of people all over the world. And they have said, put the positive words with the word white. And so people go through and they put party, awards, rich, success with the word white. And then they say, okay, now put the positive words with the word black. And they go through and put party, awards, rich, success with the word black. And it takes them longer to put positive words with black. It even takes black people longer to put positive words with black. Because somewhere in the backs of our minds we have this category that says, white is positive and black is negative. And it's so hard for us to fight against those categories. Partly because they're in advertising and shows and things we read. They're all around us. And we absorb them whether or not we want to. And that leads to all sorts of crazy stuff happening. For example, when scientists ask boys and girls in preschool, hey, are girls smarter or boys smarter? The boys say boys are smarter and the girls say girls are smarter. But if they ask those same kids in elementary school, everybody says boys are smarter. What? And if you ever watch a show on TV like Dragon's Den or Shark Tank, business ideas pitched by men are likely to get more investors and more money than business ideas pitched by women. And if the men are good looking, they get even more money. So that's not fair. Female politicians get interviewed less in newspapers and magazines than men. And men are given more time to speak on TV when they're running for office. And if you look at the sports section of a newspaper, only 3% of stories feature female athletes. So there's all these things going on all around us that just aren't fair that have to do with stereotypes, have to do with those categories in our brains. Now, the best part of researching this book was I got to find some ways that we can actually change our brains. There's all thank goodness. There's all sorts of ways that scientists are researching to figure out how we can solve some of these problems with the categories in our minds. The first thing we can do is be an ally. So if somebody's being called names, we don't have to get involved in a fight but we can go and sit beside them. If our friend says, hey, I wanna go and check out this new club, we can say, hey, I'll go with you, sure. We can be supportive to those around us who might be experiencing more stereotypes than we are. Another thing we can do is speak up. So if we see somebody getting bullied because of stereotypes or if we see somebody getting categorized when they shouldn't be, we can tell our parents or teachers or the principal or even the police if it's something really bad, we can speak up when we see something going wrong. Number three is we can get involved and actively try to make things better. So we could start a club about diversity or we could help the school librarian create a display of diverse books or we could volunteer and be friends with new refugees coming to town. This is an interesting one because this Easy Bake Oven, the colors of the Easy Bake Oven were changed because of the campaign of a 13-year-old girl whose little brother wanted to cook but didn't wanna use a girl's Easy Bake Oven. So we can actually change things just by writing to companies or writing to the government and saying, hey, you are causing bias with your ads or your policies and you need to change those. And the last way, one of the best ways to change those categories in our brains is to make friends with as many people as possible and as many kinds of people as possible because the more we have real-life friends from all different types of life, the less the categories in our mind are based on stereotypes and the more we start to know real people. And if you don't, maybe you live in a really small town where everybody looks the same and you don't have different types of people you can make friends with, then the next best thing is to go and read books about all different sorts of people because scientists have shown that even reading books about different sorts of people helps change those categories in our minds. So those are some of the things I learned as I was researching. This is your brain on stereotypes and we're gonna go back to that picture of my brain and I'm gonna show you what came up next when I was thinking of book ideas. The idea came up for a book about stress and you might think, oh, Tanya must have been really stressed at work or maybe things were going badly in her family or she was really having a hard time but the truth is I was stressed about tennis because I play tennis in my spare time, not very well and I wanted to look like and Riasco in the top picture here and what I did look like was a person in the bottom picture balls going everywhere, nothing going right and every time I was supposed to have a match against especially if it was against somebody I didn't know I would get so stressed and my hands would get sweaty and the tennis racket would start slipping around and my heart would be beating fast and I thought, this is ridiculous. I need to learn to calm down. I'm not in the Olympics. This is just a friendly tennis game. So I started to look into the science of stress and how I might calm myself down. And as I was doing it, I was like, this is really interesting. There could be a whole book about stress and so that's what I started to write. So one of the very first stress researchers was a guy named Walter Cannon and I have arranged for us to interview Walter Cannon today. So here he is and we are going to ask him, Walter Cannon, did you mean to research stress? No. Well, when you started researching stress then what did you mean to be researching? Digestion. Were you researching human digestion? No. Whose digestion were you researching? Cats. Walter Cannon was researching the digestive processes of cats and he had a cat in the X-ray machine. And so he's watching food go through the cat's body when all of a sudden there was a loud noise. Somebody slammed the door in the lab or something and he noticed that all the cat's systems stopped. Just for a second they stopped and then digestion started again. And so he thought, well, that was very strange. So he had someone try it again like, crash something and yep, all the cat's systems stopped. And so Walter abandoned his research on digestion and he started trying to figure out what was going on in the cat's body. And he discovered something that now we call the flight or fight or freeze response. Which means when we have this sudden burst of stress when a tiger jumps out of the bushes or a bus is bearing down on us, either we get ready to fight, which doesn't work that well against the bus or we get ready to flee to run away or we freeze like a squirrel in the middle of the road, also not a good idea with the bus. So he discovered this and once he did all sorts of researchers got interested in stress and started investigating how it works in our bodies. And the funny thing is, is that our body's stress response hasn't changed for thousands of years. So it was designed to deal with tigers jumping out of the bushes. It was designed for those really sudden stress instances where we had to fight or run away or freeze. But today's stress is a different kind of stress. Today we have like maybe a math test on Friday and then a tennis tournament and then our mom's telling us to clean our room and there's just all these things building up on us and they last sometimes for hours or for days. They're not just that one minute tiger. But our body only has that one response. Our body only has that adrenaline rush in our bodies and our heart rate goes faster and our muscles get ready to fight. So it's hard for our bodies to maintain that if the stress lasts over hours or days. So that's something called chronic stress and that's a tricky thing for our bodies to deal with in this modern world. Now scientists have found four things they think are very stressful for people and they say that's nuts and it's for novelty. So we find new things stressful. U is for unpredictability. So if we can't control what's about, we can't predict what's about to happen, that's stressful. T is a threat to the ego. That means if we feel like we're about to be embarrassed, if you're about to get pushed on stage and you have to sing, that's stressful. And S is a sense of control. Let's say you're locked in your car with your big sister who's just learning to drive, that can be stressful. So those are things in our everyday lives that can cause our heart to race. Fortunately, there's a few things that work against stress. So if you can feel in control, if one day you can drive your own car, it's less stressful. If you feel really confident about something, if you feel like I've been taking singing lessons for years, I've totally got this when you walk on stage, way less stressful. And if you have goals and you know what you're trying to do and you know that, okay, it might be stressful, but I'm getting to this one exact place, that helps. So we're gonna try three different, I showed you those five different ways to combat stereotypes. We're gonna try three different ways to combat stress. Now the first thing here has a few different parts. Let's see, if your last name goes from A to F, then what you're going to do is sit very quietly and think to yourself, I am calm. I am calm, I am calm. So you sit there and think about that. If your last name starts with G to P, then what you're gonna do is make big muscles or sit like a really powerful athlete and you're gonna think, I am so powerful. Don't hit people next to you with your elbows. Shannon, you're looking very powerful right now. And if your last name is something beyond P, then you're gonna think, I'm so excited. I can't wait, I'm so excited. So those are your jobs. Okay, I am about to tell you what's happening in your brain. Now, those of you doing the big powerful poses, some science says that if you do a power pose for two minutes, then all the stress hormones in your body will drop and all the high performance hormones in your body will go up and if you're going into a sports match or a big exam or job interview, you are going to do better. Now, some scientists have found that to be true and other scientists have tried to repeat the same experiments and they haven't been able to get the same results. So the jury's out on that one, but you can try it and see if it works for you. That is called power posing. Now, the people thinking, I am calm, I am calm, I am calm, that works great on everyday things. But if you're about to do something stressful, it's not that effective because if you're just about to go on stage to sing or if you're just about to write that math test, then your heart is probably beating and you're sweating a little bit and just saying I am calm doesn't always do the trick. Now, the you people who are saying, I'm excited, I'm so excited, scientists have found that that is actually a little more effective if you're about to do something like a math test or singing competition because feeling stressed and feeling your heartbeat fast and feeling that little bit of sweat and tingling in your skin actually feels very similar to feeling excited. So if you can trick yourself into thinking you feel excited, instead of thinking you'll feel stressed, you are actually, and this is scientifically proven, going to do better on your math test and better at your singing competition. So those are a few different things to try. Here is my stress buster number two. This is very simple and it is like the best scientific way to combat stress is to go outside. Somehow, when we breathe in plant oils and when we feel the breeze and we hear birds singing and we see green, all the stress hormones in our body start to go away and our immune system that fights off stress and fights off sickness starts to get better and better even after just a few minutes outside. Now you've done research showing this all over the world. The research started in Japan, but now scientists have done the same experiments everywhere and found it's totally true. And let's say you don't have time to go outside. Even looking at pictures of nature helps your stress hormones in your body go down. So even when you've been sitting here looking at a picture of the woods and a picture of a bird, you feel a little less stressed maybe. So that's stress buster number two. Stress buster number three is to breathe because here's a funny thing. Breathing is one of the only things that we can do without thinking about it at all and we can do differently when we're thinking about it. We can do other things without thinking about it at all. We can digest a chocolate chip cookie without thinking about it. We can have our heart beat faster without thinking about it, but we can't change those things by thinking. We can't say, hey, digest that cookie faster. It doesn't work, but we can say, hey, breathe more slowly. And when we tell ourselves to breathe more slowly and more calmly, it calms that stress down as well. So I have a little 20 second timer here. Let's try breathing slowly. That's why things like yoga are really good at stress busting because of all that slow breathing tells our inside brain that's happening without us thinking about it. Nothing stressful here, nothing to worry about you right now can be calm. So those were three of the most interesting ways I found that there was research about to calm that stress in our bodies. So that is where my ideas came from for under pressure. And I'm gonna talk to you about one last thing and you will be the first people ever to see this cover I'm about to show you and to hear about this book because it's not coming out until the fall but it is my newest book and it's called Snooze Fest, the surprising science of sleep. And you might be able to guess where I got the idea for this book because I got it about 4 a.m. while I was laying wide awake and thinking why am I not sleeping? Why can't I sleep? Why do I have bad dreams? Why do I wake up at 4 a.m. when it's not morning yet? Why is my son sleepwalking? Why do people talk in their sleeps? I found at 4 a.m. I had all sorts of different questions about sleeping and it turns out that our brains when we're sleeping are doing really interesting things. It also turns out that the scientists who researched sleep were the first ones to research sleep were very strange people. Some of them researched sleep by going deep into caves where there was no light and dark and living there for weeks so they could see if their body would stay on the same sleep-wake cycle. And you'll see here the scientist has his bed in buckets of water and that's because he was so far back in the cave that centipedes started climbing into his bed. Another scientist was so obsessed with how and why people sleep that he started watching his newborn baby sleep and taking pictures and videos of her sleeping which I think is creepy. And then there's the scientist who study the sleep habits of hedgehogs and bumblebees. All sorts of interesting scientists that I could write about in my book. And as I researched sleep, I learned that we have all these neurons in our brains, these nerve cells and it's kind of like during the day if your whole class was passing notes to each other and they're passing notes to the people sitting behind them and beside them in front of them and they're passing notes in all different directions and of course a whole class can't do something like this quietly so they're burbling and yelling and talking as they're doing this and it's loud and it's crazy. That's our brains during the day. And if you watch a brain scan of people when they're awake, they have all these little waves doing this as all those notes get passed. But at night, it's like everybody is still passing notes but very slowly and they're all passing them in the same direction. So at night, our brain waves are these big slow waves because our brains are all, the brain, the nerve cells in our brains are all working together to sort and file the information that we've learned during the day. And there's all sorts of interesting things that are happening as we sleep. So our immune system that keeps us from getting sick and that heals our cuts or our sprained ankles works at double speed overnight. Our brains sort through the stuff we've taken in during the day and decide what we need to remember and what we don't. If you walked your dog yesterday, you probably don't need to remember where your dog went poo in the street. That is not something that's gonna be useful to you. But if your dog ran into this big other mean dog at a house down the road, you do need to remember where that big mean dog lives. So your brain makes those decisions at night and stores the things you need to remember. Your brain also practices things you've learned during the day, especially movement things. So if you learned a new way to pass a soccer ball or a new song on the piano, your brain actually practices those movements at night. So then you improve your physical abilities. And the other really interesting thing that happens, especially when you dream, is your brain sorts through your emotions and balances them out so you can wake up fresh and start a new day feeling good about the day. So I gave you ways to help combat the stereotypes in your mind. And I told you the ways from my stress book that you can feel a little bit less stressed. So here are some ways from the sleep book that you can get better sleep. You can use foot lotion made from mouse fat. Does that sound good? You could apply live leeches to your skin. You could eat tons of lettuce or you can take the earwax from a dog and rub it across your front teeth. Okay, I would suggest you do none of these things, but there are actually ways that people hundreds of years ago thought would help them sleep better from different parts of the world. The interesting thing is the guy who thought you should take earwax from a dog and rub it across your front teeth. Okay, he was totally wrong about that. But he also invented the combination lock. So next time you lock up your locker or your bike shed, you can thank the guy who thought you could sleep better with dog earwax. Okay, here's the real advice for sleeping better that people now think will work, that scientists have studied. The first one is mindfulness. So those same sorts of deep, long breaths and concentrating on the present moment that we tried with stress, that also helps us sleep. Exercising often helps us sleep. Turning off your screens at least an hour before bed so all that light doesn't mess with your wake sleep cycles, not drinking lots of coffee or tea or pop. And here's the best news. If you are a kid or a teenager, you can sleep in. They say that for grownups who are trying to sleep better, they should try to go to sleep and wake up at the same time every day. But for kids, sleeping in is okay. So there's your best news from sleep research for the day. So those are the spots in my brain that I have been getting my ideas from. And those are the kind of things I think about when I'm looking for ideas for my books, whether I'm telling information book types of stories or whether I'm trying to make up ideas for the novels, I'm looking for people trying to solve interesting problems and discover new interesting things. So I think now Shannon is going to read some of your questions and we'll talk about more about books. Yeah, absolutely. Thank you so much, Tanya. I wanna start by giving a couple of shout outs. One to division eight, the grade four or five class at Equal Pauline Johnson. Thanks so much for watching. Also a grade six class from Ridgeview. You can still send us an email if you're watching for a shout out or you can still sneak in your questions youthatwestvenlibrary.ca, that email address is below. I feel a bit like a DJ, like a radio DJ taking requests and it feels great. So Tanya, some questions for you. When we are working with students, librarians and teachers when we're working with students and they're doing inquiry projects or essays, a question we get all the time from students is how do you know when to cite something or how do you know when to give someone else credit for something that you've learned or something you wanna include in your book or your project? Because when you're brand new to a topic, you feel like you're taking ideas and facts and research from everyone else. So can you talk a little bit more about when you're writing, how you know when to give someone else credit for idea or when you actually need a citation? Oh. Tricky. It is a bit tricky. Sometimes if I find the same idea in a whole bunch of different places, I find it in different scientific journals and different books I'm reading and everybody seems to agree, then I feel like, okay, I can write this in my own way and I don't really need to say that it was the idea of one specific person. But I do feel like lots of these scientists have spent years of their life trying to find exactly the right answers for us. And also those scientists are often pretty interesting people. So if it's something a scientist has really worked to find the right answer about, I feel like I definitely have to say who the scientist was and what they were working on. So as much as I can, I try to give people credit for the ideas that they've come up with. I also noticed too in your books, something that you're able to do also because you write fiction is you're able to kind of put yourself in someone else's shoes. So if you're talking about somebody getting blood taken, you can kind of write about how that person might feel nervous or might feel squeamish. And that's not something you have to go and get a citation for because you're sort of, it's the more imaginative part of nonfiction. That is totally true, yes. Although as far as getting squeamish when getting blood taken, I may or may not have to imagine that. It may have been real. I have a question from Owen at a cold Pauline Johnson. Which one of your books is your favorite? Oh, my very favorite book is, oh, it's on the screen there. When the Worst Happens and It's All Stories of Survival. And I love it because first of all, survival stories are automatically exciting. There's somebody's in a really scary situation and they're obsessed with getting out of the situation. So automatically I have a really exciting story to tell. But also I'm a little bit of a paranoid person. So I'm the one who listens really carefully on an airplane when they give a safety demonstration. And I always look to see where they store the life jackets on BC Ferries like I'm very paranoid. And after writing that book and writing all these survival stories and looking at all the scientific research into why some people survive and maybe some people don't. I felt like, hey, I could actually do this. There's survival strategies I could use. I have to like take action and I have to look after my basic survival skills and I have to work well with the people around me. So I felt like it might help me survive a desperate situation in the future. Which hasn't happened yet. Thank goodness. A question from Evelyn at Eagle Harbor. And also I wanna give a shout out to Eagle Harbor grade four or five class. I bet that's Mr. Price's class. If it is, hi to you. If it's not Mr. Price's class, just as big of a hello. But Evelyn from that Eagle Harbor grade four or five class is wondering how do we get schools to start later so we can sleep in? Oh. What could kids do? Can kids do anything? You're not alone. There are big campaigns to make that happen. Especially in the United States where their schools start even earlier than ours do. But yeah, you can write a letter to your school board and tell them, do some research into the science and then write a letter to your school board explaining the science. Yeah, and your book is coming out this fall snooze fest. People can see a picture of it up on the screen but there's lots of other sleep research. In the meantime, if they can't wait till September to check out and absolutely writing to your school board is a really good first step. A question from Mia at Pauline Johnson School. What do you do if you have tried everything on your sleep list and it doesn't help you? People who are still struggling with sleep. And I know you're obviously not a sleep expert or a sleep doctor but are there things that, or people that students could maybe talk to about that? Well yeah, thankfully there are sleep doctors and I worked with one on the book. So thankfully if you've tried everything and it's just not working for you you can go to your doctor and you can say I really want to see a sleep doctor and they'll send you to somebody who is specialist in sleep and they're actually very, very successful those sleep doctors. So that's the answer to those ones is go see somebody who is more of an expert than I am. Some other questions we have here. It seems like now more than ever people can get really heated and really angry with one another when they're discussing facts and science. And I'm wondering if that's made your job as a non-fiction writer harder than it was 10 or 15 years ago. I don't know if it's made it harder but I do think that that's the reason non-fiction is important. And I think in lots of my books like Eyes and Spies for example was on privacy and surveillance. So in lots of places I would say this is the argument of the people who are on the side of privacy. They think it's really important to protect this information about ourselves. This is the argument of the people on the side of surveillance. They think it's really important to catch criminals. And I present those arguments and I don't necessarily give my readers all the answers. I give them research on both sides and then I let people talk about it and decide. And I think that process of seeing the facts on both sides and sorting them out for yourself and talking to your friends about them is a process that we should all get a little bit better at so that we can talk about things like viruses and what to do about them without getting so angry with each other. Yeah, absolutely. And that's a really good point that you do do that a lot in your writing. You're not just telling kids you should think this or these are the facts that you should understand. You're looking at all different sides and sort of empowering us and giving us the tools to make our own decision. So we may have some viewers who are like me and they get very shy and nervous when they have to do something like call for a hair appointment or call the library to see if they have a book. And I'm wondering when you're doing research how do you get in touch with experts and do you ever get nervous reaching out to these people for help or guidance? I used to get super nervous when I had to phone them because I don't like phoning people either. But now we have this wonderful technology called email. I believe it uses the internet. I'm not totally sure about it. And people are so generous I found when I, especially if I've already read their research so that I'm not asking them a dumb question I could have found elsewhere but if I've read their research and I say I'm writing this book for kids and I'm trying to explain this concept and this is what you've said about it but I'm still wondering A, B and C or if I said this, would I be right? Then people are very, very generous about emailing back and telling me giving me more information. And they're also usually excited to hear that kids might be reading their research and kids might change the way they live or change the world around them because of their research. So it's kind of, I think, exciting for the scientists too. Yeah, another interesting thing we're getting lots of questions about sleep. I think that's a really hot topic that really resonates with people. And we have a question from Clara at Eagle Harbor and sometimes we're not in control of our sleep, right? Sometimes we have siblings who wake us up and our sleep is always interrupted. Are there ways that you think kids can try to take a little bit more control over their sleep or conversations they may be able to have with the adults in their life about sleep? Oh, that's interesting. And often we have a little more control over when we go to sleep than we do about when our little brother is gonna wake us up. So if you can't control when your little brother is gonna wake you up, you might have to take more control of when you're getting to sleep, which is hard. And it's harder and harder. Now that we have phones and screens and Netflix to distract us, it's harder for everybody, kids and grownups, to turn off all those things and wind down for sleep. So I would say start earlier and start with a book instead of a show. Yeah, that's great advice. And it relates to what you were talking about with stress is look for the little pieces where you may have control or if a whole situation seems like you don't have control, what do you have control over? And like you said, that's usually yourself. A question from Quinn from Eagle Harbor. Quinn does not really like sleeping and notices that some people really love sleeping. Did you see anything about sleep preference in your research or if not, are people able to function without sleep? Even if they hate sleep, can they just get through their life without it or with just a little bit? You can't function without sleep. They actually have really funny, funny, funny scary stories about people who tried to go for weeks without sleep and lamppost started talking to them and imaginary spiders turned up on their floors and all these crazy things happened in their brain. So you can't go without sleep, but definitely some people need a little less sleep and some people need a little more sleep. Some people find that they like to go to sleep early and wake up early and some people are the opposite. They're the night owls. So we are all a little bit different. And I think if you're one of those people that needs a little less then you just try not to worry about it and your body will tell you whether you're tired or not. And you're very lucky. Yeah, good point. Our very last question, I'm gonna take this one from Keon from Division 8 at Ecole Pauline Johnson and it's a great wrap-up question. What inspires you to write? Oh, I think the best part about writing is that anything I get curious about, whether I hear it on a podcast or the radio or I see it in a book, then I can do a little research and think, hmm, could I write a book about that? So I'm always on the lookout for ideas and I think I'm a curious type of person. Awesome. Tanya, that was fantastic. Thank you so much for being here with us today. Your work is so timely and we all get to benefit from your endless curiosity and care that you take tackling these topics. We may need to do a sequel just on sleep. I think once NewsFest comes out in the fall we need to have you back and we really need to delve into that. I wanna say thank you to everyone who is watching. It's really helpful for us to know what you thought of this program. There is a link to a very quick survey in the YouTube description below. If you're watching as a class, everyone as a class can fill that out or just your teacher can fill it out totally up to you. It's very helpful for us. I wanna say a final huge thank you to Tanya Lloyd-Kai, West Vancouver Schools and the West Vancouver Memorial Library Foundation for their continued support of Booktopia. This is our final Booktopia presentation of the 2020-2021 school year and it has been a blast. And until next time, I hope you all take care and I hope to see you soon. Bye for now. Thanks, Tanya.