Dinosaurs, Dragons and Godzilla with Natalie Lawrence (author of Enchanted Creatures)

In this extended interview Natalie and I talk about her love for the Pangolin and Richard Owen’s fascination with the Aye-Aye. 

Enchanted Creatures
https://amzn.to/4dQqtuK (affiliated link so I might earn commission on items bought)

Links 

Mark Witton: Unicorns, dragons, monsters and giants https://markwitton-com.blogspot.com/2018/04/unicorns-dragons-monsters-and-giants.html?m=1

Richard Owen and the Aye-Aye

https://www.amnh.org/explore/news-blogs/richard-owen-aye-aye

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Presented and produced by Roland Squire

Theme music: Caleb Burnett (@calebcomposed)

Cover artwork: @thejurassicartist

Find us: @JurassicPiratesPod on Instagram 

Transcript

Introduction

0:28

And I'm your host, Roland Squire. Today we're going back to a time before dinosaurs became the cultural phenomenon they are today. Before science gave them a name, back when they were still monsters. To help me unpack this dark, murky world of myths and legends, I'm joined by someone whose book, Enchanted Creatures, explores the historical world of monsters and also their continued importance in the modern scientific world. Please welcome to the podcast, Natalie Lawrence. Hi Natalie, thank you so much for joining me today. Hi, it's a pleasure to be here. To start, I was wondering whether you could just maybe explain a little bit about your background and how you came to write Enchanted

Natalie’s background

1:08

Creatures. My background is actually, it was initially in natural sciences. I was I um specialized in zoology, so I was very much a science enthusiast to begin with. And um after my undergrad, I went on to look into history and philosophy of science. So I did a master's and PhD in history and philosophy of science, and the projects that I found myself drawn towards in that were all about how we had crystallized strange and novel animals when we first encountered them in the early modern period. I was very I was very drawn to the early modern period for um for some reason, so sort of Renaissance Enlightenment. And I looked into animals like the birds of paradise, the pangolin, the dodo, the walrus, and how naturalists had constructed them from pieces of travel logs, pieces of ancient scripture, pieces of body parts. And what they did with a lot of these animals was to turn them into something monstrous, partly because they didn't fit the categories, and partly because it made them into symbolically valuable entities and often commercially valuable as well. That project really got me thinking about how it is that we relate to the natural world, the subjectivity that is inevitable in our interactions, even in s even in science, even in science today, and what it can tell us about us and our relationship to nature. Was there one like fascinating story you you came across that that you just couldn't let go of when you when you were writing the book?

Emperor Tiberius

2:41

I really when I was writing the dinosaurs chapter, I really enjoyed hearing about ancient interactions with fossils and what they had done with them. So, for example, there's a story about the Emperor Tiberius who got sent a gigantic tooth, which was probably a mammoth. Apparently thought it was the head of a Cyclops or a giant, and he commissioned a mathematician to make the bust of this giant. Now, the evidence for this is a little we're we're talking about very secondhand evidence here for this story, so it might be completely made up. Um, and there's also a lot of fabrication about Tiberius' personality in general. But I think I just I just find this I I find this idea of these images of monstrous beings being present already in our imaginations and then people finding evidence of them and using the evidence or the you know the the fossil pieces or the body parts of ancient creatures to reinforce these images. I find that it sort of typifies what I'm interested in in a way. It's it typifies the fact that we've got a lot going on in our imaginations and what we take from the real world is filtered through that view to a large degree.

Myth before the fossils?

3:53

Did the myth arrive with the bones, do we think? Or are the legends it's I I mean, we're talking about a very long time ago, so I'm sure it's quite difficult to unpick that. It's very it is, you almost can't unpick the past in quite in quite that way. And also, these are things that developed over such long periods of time that it probably there probably isn't a simple truth to it either, even if one could access it. I mean, there are certainly people like Adrian Mayer who have made arguments that you know the griffons came from Protoceratops skulls that were unearthed. I think the uh the urge to rationalise monsters and and mythological stories. I mean, while a while an animal while a monster like a griffon doesn't really have necessarily that rich a symbolic uh depth, it it the rationalization I think is to underappreciate the degree to which we have the capacity to just imagine the things and we and our subconscious has the ability to generate images that are wacky as hell. Uh we don't really need we don't we can we can easily take elements of the the world we experience the the uh animals that we see around us and and things that we see around us and create wacky as hell images from them without the need for explanations like dinosaur bones. A lot of the arguments for mythological creatures deriving from fossil findings are quite weak. Mark Whitten has done a really good blog series on this. Um he's gone into great depth, sort of picking apart the different arguments. Um and I think I fall more on that side of things. I don't I don't think that the mythological creatures were generated by fossil findings. I don't think they were an empirical derivative. I think, if anything, fossil findings happened to fit or happened to accord with images that already exist, already existed culturally. And especially if you look at the the ubiquity of some images, like for example, dragons. Dragons exist in every culture across the world. And there's been an there was a an interesting study in 2013 where they tried to create a taxonomy of the dragon myth and pin it down to an original common ancestor, like a sort of evolutionary history. An original, an original sort of out of Africa myth that was based on a gigantic snake, for example. And I the evidence just doesn't quite accord with that, especially when you look at how diverse dragons are. And in some ways, I think you can't you can't rationalise these stories totally, and to rationalise them is to undermine what they're really doing. So I don't think we need we don't need to rationalise these these stories. I think we can we can see them as as originating from us and our connection with uh and our experience of the world in a way that doesn't doesn't need like a a single focus. Why why do you think we need

Why do we need monsters?

6:52

monsters in our society or in our imagination? There's something about the idea of monsters existing that, you know, s we we can see it in small children. They love the idea of monsters or dinosaurs existing and they love to play act and imagine that they're there. You know, we go and see monster films and you know, King Kong, etc. All of those films like we love experien we love the experience of play acting that for a short period of time. Because in some ways it gives a form to the wonder at the world that we it's quite latent, I think, in modern life. You know, when you go about your day, especially if you sit in the city or doing your your your bits and bobs during the day, you you kind of can lose connection with that. But I think we all have this capacity to feel incredible wonder and awe at the world. Um and monsters give form to that capacity, they ignite it uh when we when we imagine them and think about them. There is also the fact that monster making is an inherent process. It's it's it's a it's a human activity that we actually find very difficult not to do. Because you could take, well, it depends what your definition of monster is, but you could one definition is that they are just boundary-breaking things that reveal hidden hidden fears, hidden anxieties. So we are, as as we live our lives, we we are always trying to kind of suppress the things that we're anxious and worried about and deal with the things that we we kind of want to focus on. So there is a there's a degree to which just living your life as a human, you're going to create monsters subconsciously, because you're going to try and suppress things you don't want to face about yourself or about things you're experiencing or your your past. And we also have a tendency, you see this in the media even, we have a tendency to split between good and bad, which is actually, I mean, if you look at the politics at the moment, it's very evident. There's very black and very black and white splitting of good and bad. It's very satisfying to do that because it makes the world seem simple. It makes one seem, you know, like you can be on the side of good and then everything else is bad. But so we have this, we have this tendency to monster even other humans, you know, make other groups of humans into monsters. So I don't think that's actually something that we can get away from very easily. And it's something that it's not it's not just that we need them, because they what they do for us is they allow us to externalize stuff we want to get rid of psychologically. It is it's that we actually can't help but make them. Right. Yeah. I think animals like dinosaurs play into that archetype that we have in our minds. So they they played the same, almost the same mental or symbolic role as dragons for us. And it's that I think is a coincidence. I think almost it's it just happens that there were creatures that existed that were very like the dragons that we had imagined. Yeah,

Anxiety of Deep Time

9:43

and I suppose at the time there was the the issue that finding these fossils and actually getting into the anxiety of deep time that was being brought up while these fossils are being found, and actually how that clashed with the politics of the day, the religion of the day, and so turning them into monsters might made them easier to to deal with at that time. Yeah, the category of monster itself, well, while it's it's hardly a homogenous category, is a way of putting things it's like it's like a silo that you can put difficult things in. Saying something was a monster wasn't necessarily to make it a problem. It was saying, this is problematic, so I'm going to call it a monster, and that sort of deals with it. Because if it's a monster, it doesn't need to, it doesn't need to fit. Yeah. So by its very definition, that makes it some that kind of handles the issue. There's a quote that I found that was uh by somebody called Thomas Hawkins, who called them um carnivorous automata spawned by Satan. Machines contrive from an unimaginable end worthy of a god. I'm like, good grief. I mean That's great. That's really good. It's really good, yeah. And that whole thing just sums up that time, just that one phrase is just just fear, I think, as well. And also this idea that they are somehow like Behemoth and Leviathan, sort of creatures that have been sent by God to show that we're really not what we thought we were. Or we we really don't quite quite exist in the position we thought we existed in the natural order. And not as animals with some kin that we have some kinship with, but this kind of very but sort of this mechanized alienness. Um

Industrial imagination

11:35

it also it's it's very much from a was it was this in the 19th century Thomas Hawkins was a 19th century I mean that's it's also from the an industrial imagination, isn't it? Yeah. This sense that you've that the world is becoming mechanized, and this is one of the fantastical things that has emerged from the change that is is happening. And because I think that's that's what you can really see with the with the Crystal Palace dinosaurs. The the they're called kind of kind of like big truckey, like gigantic steam train kind of dinos that you can imagine sort of chugging along. So they're they're filled with that kind of uh that sort of steel construction imagination. Um I think that really feeds into a lot of the the thought the the the images of the din the early dinosaurs or the early images of the dinosaurs. We now have sort of Apple Mac ergonomic dinosaurs. Yes. Exactly. I I I was interested that as kind of like the science settled, uh we still spin the myths around fossils and

Godzilla!

12:46

I mean just looking at something like Godzilla, w what purpose does Godzilla serve us as as as a monster? I think he sho he shows very much how how the the the the monster role that dinosaurs have taken, despite all of the developments in the science, the monster role that the dinosaurs have taken on and the way that the dinosaurs are like monsters in history, are constructed beings. There's so many layers to their construction from you know the the initial paleontology, all the kind of the modelling of of how they worked, and all the all the imagination that has to feed in and fill the gaps. Yeah. And those those models keep getting refined further and further, and we think closer to objective empirical data, but there's there's all you've always got to be aware that there is gonna be that that imaginative element, which scientific method considerably shrinks, but you know, not a hundred percent. He also really plays out the role that the dinosaurs have had in and and dragons have had in our mythological imagination, in that he's it he's very much a kind of an apocalypse monster. He is so he is all of the implacable, irresistible power of nature embodied in this in this creature that keeps getting bigger and bigger and bigger. Um, and the particular role that he plays has shifted in interesting ways over the franchise. There's been so many films, but I think it's like one of the biggest franchises ever film franchises ever to exist, um fittingly. Um, he started as this kind of nuclear metaphor and this horrible the sort of war-torn aftermath. Um then he's gone through different phases and been more or less friendly or enemy-like. He's had a son, you know, he's had other other um kaiju as enemies. And I think in the recent films, he really plays out our our eco-anxiety and that the fear of what we have done to the world in messing in messing with the power of nature. So I think du I think dragons they represent all the elements, right? They represent water, air, fire, earth, and the kind of the the irresistible nature of fate, the irresistible nature of um of natural power. And there is something dreadful about messing with that order. And I think there's this sort of we have this sort of cultural horror of having done that and having tried to play God. And I think Godzilla, he initially represented that, he initially represented what what we had done. I think now it's more the retribution or the the outcome of what we've done. And even in some of the films, the the potential for being saved. So like a kind of god rising from the earth to come and undo what we've done, he's he becomes potentially our saviour, which is a lovely thought. It'd be really good. I mean he does cause quite a lot of problems when he does arise. Yeah, he's not a simple fix. I think diplomacy first, Godzilla second. Yeah, exactly. But but I think in a way he he's almost like a fantasy of us being put back in our place by the dragons, by the dinosaurs, by fate, by nature. Um this idea that there is some higher power that has greater effect than we do. And I think all

Monsters are there to warn us

16:21

of that feeds into what Crichton was writing for Jurassic Park. That existential threat of science, you know, even for a scientist, he doesn't he never uh he never comes across as somebody who actually particularly trusts scientists. So he creates monsters, dinosaurs are monsters in his books very much, I think. The the connection between dragons, dinosaurs, and particularly the dinosaurs of Jurassic Park and then Godzilla, they all fit that same purpose of trying to warn us. You know, they're warning us of our own misdemeanours. And that is what that is what monsters do. So monsters minere or monstrare to warn, to reveal. So that that is the etymological root of the word monster. Is it is a warning, a revealing warning. I think God Godzilla is in in some ways he's a monster of our omnipotence. He's a he's a monster of our uh sense of power, total power over the world. And he comes in to kind of shatter that illusion that we have. And I think that's what the dinosaurs did in the in the 19th century as well. This this you got this mechanizing world where it felt feel like it felt like magic was possible that had never been changing rapidly. There's all this anxiety about where we sit in the in the grand scale of things. It feels like we're on top of the world and we're ruling, we're ruling the world in a new way. Um, and then the dinosaurs get unearthed and kind of it turns out that there were these incredible beasts that existed that were far more powerful and terrifying than we could have imagined anything that actually existed. Um and it kind of shook the foundations of that fantasy. And one way of dealing with that was to co-opt them. So, you know, in America, all the American dinosaurs that were on Earth, they became emblems of this new empire. But in other ways, they also became this, they became the monsters that kind of haunted what was happening as well, and this this fear of them coming back, the this kind of the idea of cyclical geological time, and the fact that dinosaurs might come back and throw us off the the new throne that we've just sat on. But that's that is also a really good example of how whenever you have that kind of omnipotent fantasy, that sort of sense of unrealistic power, you're always gonna have the fear that there's something that's gonna ruin it. Or you know, you're always gonna have that flip side. Those two things always go together. So Yeah, it's it's it's sort of what I'm looking at this series, looking at the actual books that kind of run alongside the the the fiction side of dinosaurs and how they change. And it is that constantly,

The Lost Worlds

19:04

and even with Jurassic Park and the films, they return to this idea of the lost world. You know, they allow us to still have some magic and some fantasy that these things exist, but they're dangerous and that at any moment they could level us. If you look at a text like Beowulf, for example, the the combination of the Christian and the pagan in that, there's this the the the idea of the brute the brutality and the darkness of the pagan prehistory, and then the kind of the the moral transcendence of Christianity, it's a bit like that. It's it's you've you've got this this bright, this brave new world, that sort of technological brave new world that's emerging and the power that it offers. But then you've also got fantasies of returning back to this kind of dark Eden where all these monsters existed. Yeah. And it's both terrif it's both a terrifying idea, but also an incredibly attractive one. And and um that's a really interesting phenomenon that we we can't that we need that complexity in the world. We need that we can't we can't fully let go of the past. It always haunts us um or our images of the past. We can't fully let go of these other these other ways of being. Um we always we kind of are aware that we need both the shiny technological future and also the slightly the the the complex the complex past in which we were you know just mammals with our um with our dinosaur overlords. Yeah. That's uh yeah, Raquel Welsh um and uh one million years BC. Pelt bikinis. Yes. Uh what what do

Modern Monsters

20:53

the modern monsters tell us about time that we're going through, but also what the future might hold for us? I mean, I think the the obvious answer is that that that the monsters that we're creating now are the ones that derive from our current technologies. That we feel like the world is very explored and much smaller than it is, I think. I think we feel like the world is is much more tractable than actually really it is. But in some ways the monsters are coming closer than they ever have done, and they're they're emerging from our dire our our kind of uh our the activities that we're doing in like genetic modification, etc. Creating chimeras in the lab, or creating new type new types of life with sort of cell assemblies and and uh combinations of biological and artificial minds or or entities that we we don't know where that's going to go. We don't know how much agency it's going to have, and we don't know where we stand in relation to it. It's it's still us creating monsters and in quite a concrete way, a bit like Jurassic Park, but It's almost more terrifying because they are things that may be totally different from anything we can possibly imagine now. Things we give things we give agency to, like artificial intelligence, that then take on a life of their own and you know, it's like the fantasy of a a film like The Matrix, for example. You set something running and you have no you have no idea where it's gonna end up. That's more terrifying almost than the fantasy of something like Jurassic Park. Although we're still obviously trying to we're still obviously trying to revive extinct species as well. You know, the the direwolf all the all the direwolf um Ferrore and the idea of bringing back the dodo or the thylocene. So we still have these despite all the warnings in Jurassic Park, we still have these fantasies of of having power over other species. And they're they're almost cryptid-like in there. Because the thing we bring back won't be the thing that it was, um, most likely, if we if we manage to. Um, especially if we don't have full genomes. So in some ways it will be constructing a new it'll be constructing a new monster from the pieces that we have and our imaginations of what it should be. So you wrote um Enchanted Creatures. Who did you write that for? And what do you hope people will get

Enchanted Creatures

23:26

out of reading it? So I I kind of wanted to g give a more science-y psychological slant for people who are interested in in myth, and I also wanted to give a more mythic psychological slant for those interested in science, to kind of bring bring those two loci together. Not an easy thing to do. And I I I uh I think I learned a lot during the process, and I think I I have a lot of work to do on on how I did it. But um I think I had this awareness that that that there's this there's this cultural split between the arts and the sciences. And I wanted to help help to help to bridge that and show actually how connected they are. And stuff starting my research in the early modern period was particularly important for this because that was a time when you had all these different kinds of truth that existed alongside one another and they weren't mutually exclusive. So you did have empirical, rational, sort of objective truths that existed, because that's how people did things, and they did amazing things. Um, and they, you know, they built, built incredible stuff and sailed incredible distances. But then you also had the this this metaphorical view of the world, which wasn't just purely religious, but had a did also have a religious element. This metaphorical view of the world and this this idea of the world as a created one, which has a literal interpretation, tells God created it, but it also is the idea of generated in our experience, in our subjective experience. And I think that's an im that was actually something we've kind of lost, and we've gone fully over to this idea that everything can be scientised and rationalized, and that anything that doesn't fit into that paradigm is untrue. So we've gone to this very narrow definition of truth, and we lose a lot by doing that, and we actually we misunderstand ourselves quite fundamentally by doing that. So that was one thing I wanted that was a sort of fundamental aspect of the book that I wanted to convey this sense that even now we do still have this uh subjective metaphorical experience of the world that we can't really get rid of, and it's part of being human and it's incredibly important to us. And that connects us to humans, all the other humans that have existed through history. And it is something that we need to be aware of and to pay attention to, and also sometimes to manage as well. I love the book. I just uh it was my one of my favourite things is reading about early interactions with other like animals. So, like you you talk about the pangolin in the book, which I just just love the idea of you come in with one idea of what nature can do and then it presents you with something like the pangolin. Yeah, how was were you a fan of the pangolin before you is that

Pangolin!

26:17

a is that a favourite animal of yours? Yes, I've always loved the weird little animals. Um so I kind of tried to pick those a bit when I in my research. Um that I think the pangolin was especially fun because it was just it it really it was a real doozy. Like they really found it really confusing. Because it wasn't even that they didn't have evidence of it. They had there were actually quite a lot of pangolins that were coming to Europe. So they had these objects, they had these pangolin skins, and sometimes live pangolin. So they could see them, they could touch them, they could hold them, and they still didn't know what the hell to do with them. Because they had this rigid Aristotelian structure, and this thing just didn't fit into that structure. And so they kind of they would they had to really wrestle with it. So it wasn't even, it wasn't like a sort of mysterious creature, you know, like a walrus where they only had bits and bobs here and there from you know, they only had a bit of a bit of tusk and a bit of skin, and they didn't, you know, they couldn't really see the whole thing. They had literally, they literally had these whole animals, and they were just so strange that they just didn't know what to do with them for a very long time. And actually, if you trace um if you trace Linnaeus's taxonomy of the pangolin over the various editions of the System and Naturae, he keeps moving it around into different into different groups because he keeps changing his mind as to where it should be. Um and the way that it got conflated with other animals like the armadillo. So you'd had you'd had all these confusions about where armadillos and pangolins came from, because they they were both these weird, scaly, weird, scaly-shelled animals that seemed to eat insects. Um and so that you've got accounts of pangolins in the Americas or armadillos in East Asia, and they they get very confused with one another. Um, but that's because they both played this role of being these just exotic, weird, shelly monsters. And that was the really important thing. It wasn't really where they actually came from, that wasn't so interesting. Um, and then you you put that in the context of the the early modern fascination that monsters really exploded during this time and there was they were big business. So specimens and books on them and and visual accounts. Um making something monstrous was a way of adding massive value to it. So there was a real monetary incentive to camp things up and to to make them seem more fantastical than they were. Um But yeah, so the pangolin was one of my was was it was an animal I I loved already, and then I I I my love for it grew. And also just thought that the this this like the idea of the poor kind of you know, the pangolin just going about its business, looking for looking for ants' nests. And then it gets it gets characterized in all these different ways. So it gets characterized as this poor, vulnerable creature that was, you know, would be a was trying to help us by killing the pests, was trying to, you know, was trying to be a useful animal, and then and then this idea of it being this scaly devil that would, you know, throttle you as soon as look at you. Yeah. And was sort of digging under the colonial buildings and trying to undermine the colonial enterprise. So it's just the way that humans can project so much onto an animal that really was just doing its thing, yeah, was kind of fantastic. I I love so my my favourite

Aye-aye!

29:46

animal is the eye-eye, and uh so a a very strange creature, but and when researching Richard Owen, I never knew that he had done like the first uh proper exploration of the animal as a way uh to try and counter Darwin's idea of evolution. He wanted to find something that was so strange that could only have been made by a god. But he uh and he produced these incredible, got some um somebody to paint these incredible illustrations and um paintings, full life-size um drawings for this this pant this book that he produced. Um and part of the story is that the person who went and painted them, they were at London Zoo at the time, and the idea of an aye. An aye, yeah. I didn't realise they were there. Uh yeah. Um, and actually this it talks about this person going in with a single candle to go and paint the aye, and just that the image of being in that dark concrete space. Yeah, that idea of being alone in the dark with the with one candle, this kind of creature of the night, that is amazing. Um, there was a there was a great book by Gerald Darrell called The Aye and I. Have you read that? Yeah. Back in the day when you could just go out and collect animals. Collect collect animals, yeah. I know. I used to go always go to Jersey Zoo and stuff. Um, and I I I used to talk to the keeper, yeah, I was a 10, used to talk to the keepers all the time about the I's and they went, Are you here all day? And I said yes. And they went, Come back when the zoo's closed, and I'll let you go in and feed them. And so they told me that at nine o'clock, and my dad was very cross with them because then he had to deal with me very excited for about eight hours just sitting by the you know, didn't want to go too far from the aye house just in case they forgot about me. But that was an incredible experience of actually getting to go in there and then coming down and you know, just it's just an incredible experience. Yeah. What did you how did you feed them? Uh so with a bamboo stick and they then use their teeth and the the the finger to to claw out the the grubs that were inside. So yeah, they kind of look at you suspiciously as they take it away, and they're like, okay, I don't quite trust you, small child. But uh yeah. Normally you're banging on the glass on the outside of the enclosure, small children. Yes.

Mermaids

32:11

Um so are you working on anything at the moment? I'm actually working, I'm having a little bit of a break from the conceptually tricky stuff. I'm working on a an anthology of mermaids for one of the Bloomsbury subsidiaries. Um so it's going to be an anthology of mermaid texts from around the world and looking at what has fed into these these images and and the roles that they play culturally. Um so some some quite a lot of overlap, but a little bit a little bit pared down and and gentler, because um I'm I'm at a stage where I don't want to be I don't want to be getting stuck into a massively complicated project right now. No, that sounds really fascinating, really interesting. It's actually is actually really interesting. Yeah, I bet it is. Yeah, I bet it is. Um I I got a um the first time got a British library card, sort of started to get out the original texts of books and going there, and it's yeah, it feels like I'm in some sort of 1950s film, um, looking for, I don't know, um like uh like folkloric tales and stuff. It's really great fun. And it's amazing that you can do that as well. Yeah, it is, yeah. Yeah. It's amazing. Yeah. I remember because for my PhD I was going through kind of Conrad Gesner's Historia Animalium and all these other texts. And these are hundreds of years old, and you can just get them out and just look through them. No one's supervising you. Um, but it's it really does, it really does bring the kind of the projects that they were engaged in to life in doing that. Yeah. Like feel because there's something very, very tactile about those books, um, and very uh and there's this sense of this being this mammoth, all-consuming task that they were constructing knowledge, this knowledge of the world and putting it all in in these objects. Uh it's really affected. It is, yeah. I I recommend anybody who has any interest in anything to just get that card and go in and just take out something and look at it. It's amazing. It would broaden your mind completely. Well, I'd just like to say thank you so much for joining me today. It's been an absolute pleasure to chat. I

Socials and outro

34:14

was wondering where was the best place people can find you online, if indeed you want them to. Uh yes, for certain. Um I'm on Instagram, natalie.j.lawrence, or my website is also a good way of contacting me if anyone wants to get in touch. Uh NatalieJ Lawrence.com. And then my books are available everywhere, I think, basically. So wherever you'd like to buy your books. Yeah, so I'd love yeah, I'd love to hear from anybody who's interested.