[Danielle Balocca]: Thank you so much for joining me today. Could you just introduce yourself for us, so with your name and pronouns?
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm Warren Senders, and my pronouns are he, him.
[Danielle Balocca]: Great. Thanks, Warren. And we're going to talk a lot more about who you are today, but if you could just answer the question that we ask everybody on the podcast, which is, what is your favorite place to eat in Medford, and what do you like to eat there?
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, we rarely go there in person, but we love takeout from Chili Garden in Medford Square. And when I'm out for walks, I greatly enjoy stopping at Modern Bakery and getting one of their yummy Italian pastries and eating it on the walk home.
[Danielle Balocca]: That's a skill, eating and walking at the same time. And we did recently interview your wife, and you guys were consistent with your favorite restaurant there. So thank you for that. I will just say, I have a secret co-host with me today, my baby niece. So if there's baby noises in the background, please forgive me. But if, yeah, so we, I think people might know you, might know of you as the man with the sign. So could you tell us a little bit about what's up with that sign?
[SPEAKER_01]: Just to provide context, every weekday morning between 7.30 and 8.30, I stand, usually with a partner in this project, out on the roadside at Roosevelt Circle, the rotary over the expressway. with signs about climate change. There's one sign that's a regular sign, it's a big wooden sign that I clamp to the guardrail that says climate change is real. And then I have an assortment of other signs that I rotate from day to day so the message changes. And I've been doing that every weekday morning. with two weeks off during the year, and I take off holidays, since the day after Labor Day in 2015. So that it's an outgrowth of my awareness of climate change as an existential factor in our lives and in the survival of our species and our cultural heritage, and of my life training as a musician, which involves maintaining the skill and discipline to do something every day, whether I feel like doing it or not. So while I'm outside on the roadside, I stand with a sign and I do my singing practice. So I practice every day for an hour on the roadside, and my practice is of the musical repertoire that I specialize in, which is the repertoire of the Hindustani Khayal, which is a North Indian song form that I've studied for many years. And that again, that informs my discipline as a climate activist. The work that I do as the carrier or the maintainer or the upholder of a cultural heritage is directly linked to climate activism. And so this stems from, as I think I said, from my own development as a musician and my recognition of the importance of daily practice and focused, disciplined attention. And so I actually began a project of doing something every day around the issue of climate change in 2009. at the ending, the December 31st of 2009, New Year's Eve, I made a resolution that I would write a letter to the editor on issues of climate change every day. And I did that for four years. I wrote what's, it's, I think it's like, 1361 or something, I forget what the exact number is, but I wrote a letter a day to newspapers and magazines all around the world on the issues of climate change. I did that every day for four years. It just became a part of my day that I would mark out time to write a response to something that was in the news that had to do with climate change, whether it was sometimes it might be a local newspaper in Montana or Alaska or Louisiana or New York or elsewhere in the world. Sometimes it would be a national news magazine or a big major paper. So just for example, during that period, I did this for four years and then I stopped because it was making me really depressed. But during that time, I was published twice in the New York Times, once in Time Magazine, in the Washington Post, USA Today, the Boston Globe and the Boston Herald, LA Times, local newspapers all around the country. I got published in the Nunatsiak News, which is the weekly newspaper in Greenland. I got published in Pakistan. I got published in Brazil, I got published in the Solomon Islands, in Oceania, in newspapers, literally all around the world. I became, sort of by accident, one of the most widely distributed climate writers. And these were all just letters to the editor. So I did that for four years, and that was a discipline. And then I stopped at the end of calendar year 2014, Sorry, end of calendar year 2013, heading into 2014. And then there was a period when I was casting about for something new to do. And I was, I lost my daily discipline for a little while. And then in 2015, I decided I was going to go out with a sign. And I was just going to stand there.
[Danielle Balocca]: And that's been almost 10 years of doing that, it sounds like.
[SPEAKER_01]: I will start my ninth year this Labor Day. Wow. And I'd like to be able to chalk up 10 years, and then at the end of 10 years, I'm going to decide whether I want to continue it or move on to something different. It's not the only activism I do, but it is the most sort of long form of the activist projects that I do. In music, the development of technique and artistic perspective and the wisdom of an artist is contingent on doing your daily discipline. And if I apply this to my activism, then it becomes something seen on one day at a time, it's not very much. But the way that I look at it is, if you do a cost accounting of what it would cost to rent a billboard in that space for that many rush hour mornings, it would be in the tens of thousands of dollars easily. But if I stand there with a sign, I'm renting it with my body because I have First Amendment rights of freedom of expression. And as a an aging white male, I have certain prerogatives that are granted to me by a fundamentally racially biased society, and if I don't use the privilege that I have, the absolutely unearned privilege that I have as an aging white male, then I don't deserve it. I don't deserve it anyway, but I really don't deserve it if I don't use it as part of work for the betterment of our future generations. Some of the signs that I hold up, I have currently eight signs that are in rotation. The most fact oriented says it's just quotes from the 2021 IPCC report. So the sign says 2021 IPCC report. colon, quote, code red for humanity, and then it's got the URL of the IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. On the back of that sign is, in big letters, I think one of the most important mottos and signature principles that any of us who are involved in climate activism has. It just says, we must be better ancestors. And as someone who believes in intergenerational responsibility, it's our obligation to keep things in order for subsequent generations, and if possible, if we've made a mess, to clean it up so they don't have to.
[Danielle Balocca]: Yeah, thank you. I wonder, well, first I want to know if you've had any reactions from people or like how do people interact with you generally when you're out there?
[SPEAKER_01]: Every day, every day. And I write about those on my, when I journal, I write this, you can find my journaling on Mastodon under my name, on Instagram under man with sign, on Facebook as man with sign. I used to do it on Twitter, but no more since Elon Musk took it over. because I don't believe in supporting fascists. And I'm pretty ambivalent about posting on Facebook, but I've got too many people who follow that. And most of the time, this being Massachusetts, most of what we get are people going, thank you, yay, and clapping and giving thumbs up. But there are people who have negative responses. We regularly get people who give us thumbs down or another finger upraised. Some people twirl their fingers at their temples to indicate that they think we're cuckoo. My visual partner is a guy named Craig Knopf. He lives in Winchester. He's a retired librarian, and he comes out most days, and we're there together. Occasionally, we have some other people join us. There's a guy who drives by every day at around 8, 13, every morning, and he always goes by and goes, get a job and pay some taxes you effing weirdo. Except he doesn't say effing.
[Danielle Balocca]: He's updating himself for the podcast.
[SPEAKER_01]: Right. And, you know, sometimes, sometimes you get some real, some really amazing things. My favorite was the guy driving a panel truck who actually leaned all the way out the window while the thing was in motion and called me a communist, atheist, Freemason faggot.
[Unidentified]: Oh my gosh. Wow.
[SPEAKER_01]: Which is like, I don't know how all four of those descriptors managed to make it into one phrase, but okay, you know, I mean, that's clearly like a Like, that's my next T-shirt, I guess. But on the other hand, I mean, one day I was out there. It was a few years ago, back when we still had blizzards. And it was a real howling Dr. Zhivago style blizzard with visibility like way down. And I've got chemical heat packets in my boots and gloves and 16 layers of clothing on there. And I'm just standing there with my sign singing and the snow was whipping around me. There's nobody on the road, because visibility is down to practically zero. And a state policeman pulls over. No siren, but lights flashing. And I figure this is it. He's just going to tell me to go home. And instead, the patrolman jumps out. The officer jumps out, walks over to me, leans over, puts his head next to mine, takes out his phone, snaps a selfie, gets back in his car and drives off. So, you know, that's kind of interesting. And my state rep Paul Donato, one time he pulls over, gets out of his car and says, I see you every day I brought you a cup of coffee. So, you know, hey Donato got my vote, he's bribed me with a cup of coffee. He would have had my vote anyway. This work that I do, I'll go through the other signs that I have, because I think they're interesting. All my signs, my portable signs are on foam core, and there's one thing on one side and one on the other. So the next sign that I have on the front, or on one side, it says, let's make a better future together. And on the other side of that, it says, and this is my take on the popular bumper sticker, think globally, act locally. It says, think in eons, act now. Because I believe that one of the things that affects our society most in a negative way is our inability to think in long timeframes. We are not temporally literate. And this is one of the things that is a, it's a serious lack. You know, you see, think of the impact on the next seven generations. But there's an organization in San Francisco called the Long Now Foundation. that was founded by Stuart Brand, the guy who put together the whole Earth Catalog and who's behind the Clock of the Long Now, which is a 10,000-year clock in the Mojave Desert. Well worth looking up. Look up the Clock of the Long Now. It's a very important project. The Long Now Foundation, on all their correspondence, uses a five-digit date, or five-digit year code. So we are in year 02024.
[Unidentified]: Oh, wow.
[SPEAKER_01]: So that means they don't need to reset any technology for the next 99 or the next 99,000 years.
[Danielle Balocca]: Is it counting up or down?
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, I mean, eventually it'll go to the year 10,000. Oh, wow. And then 20,000, there's room for up to 99,000. Wow. And then when we finally get to years 100,000, then I guess they'll need to recalibrate. But see, that is thinking long term. that's recognizing that we human beings exist on the top of a long set of much, much slower timeframes. And we are just a kind of fleeting manifestation of consciousness on the top of these very, very long time cycles. So anyway, think in eons, act now. I have another sign. One side says climate chaos increases the likelihood of the next pandemic. I started putting that out when we had COVID because people again think, oh, well, COVID, you know, now that's over. It's in the rearview mirror. No, it's not. As climate instability increases, the number of possible disease vectors increases. And the need for a robust public health infrastructure increases. And because there will be more things which are uncontrollable. Industrial monoculture, agricultural monoculture is more vulnerable to pests and to plant diseases. Because if you have genetic diversity in your agricultural stock, then something will survive. But if everything is the same type of potato or whatever, then all it takes is one virus, and then you have the Irish potato famine. And so this is something that we have to be aware of. So yes, climate chaos increases the likelihood of the next pandemic. On the other side, this is my nod to humor. It says, every disaster movie starts with a scientist being ignored. That always gets laughs. Then I have another sign. This is last of the signs for today. One side says, weird is the new normal. Because if there's one thing that people have been noticing is, gee, the weather's kind of weird recently. And weird is the new normal. It's not that climate change means that everything's going to get hotter uniformly. It means that everything's going to get weirder. And that means that there will be a day in August when for 36 hours, it'll be close to freezing. because of the way that the climate patterns have unfolded, and no one expected it. Well, that's weird. When you have 100-year storms and they're happening once every year, that's weird. When you have temperature fluctuations that go up and down 40 or 50 degrees from the beginning of the week to the end of the week, that's weird. Weird is the new normal, and it has impacts on all of us. And then on the other side of that is my analysis of what needs to be done. And so that says, one, change our conversation, two, change our consumption, three, change our politics. So the work that I do on the roadside is changing the conversation. Because you can't fix a problem if you can't talk about it. And so people, especially people in the industrialized West, need to have the difficult conversation about climate change every day. It needs to be part of our daily discourse. The news should have a daily ticker of what CO2 concentrations are according to the daily measurements. And if that trend is going up, that's bad. So change the conversation, making discussion of climate issues a normative part of our daily existence. Change our consumption. That means making difficult decisions about buying or not buying things according to what they do as part of their usage of the global resource chain. So if your strawberries in December are being shipped from Brazil, well, don't buy strawberries in December. Don't fly gratuitously. And be aware of your decisions as a consumer. And it's worth noting here that just a little over a hundred years ago, The idea of a consumer economy in the West had not been fully established, and the word consumption was – it was a synonym for a disease. It was tuberculosis. People died of consumption. And I think it's worth noting that a hundred years ago, the word consumption meant if you had consumption, it meant you were going to die or you were going to live like a really impoverished life where you couldn't get out of bed. Yeah, because tuberculosis was no joke and well we've taken care of tuberculosis thanks to our public health initiatives, but consumption is going to be is going to be killing more people over the next decades and centuries, unless we change our consumption patterns. And then finally changing our politics which means. transforming the way in which our electoral system reflects the will of people and the long-term interests of our human community and the global ecosystem. Right now, our political system has been largely captured by predatory capitalists, and the result is that even when we have political actors with good intentions, they are hindered by the structural factors that have made it that much more difficult to go forward, things like the Electoral College, which vastly overprivileges the votes, the rural votes of people in Montana against urban voters in New York or Boston or San Antonio or wherever, that privileges white rural votes over black urban votes, for example. And so, This is intended as a form of perspective. I don't, how shall I put this? I don't want to call for a revolution. Revolutions leave an awful lot of people dead. We had a revolution 250 years ago. And if we recognize that patriotism, it's not a static phenomenon. It's not a static thing that we subscribe to. It's a direction of travel. And what we say if we are patriotic is that we are devoted to the ideals that our country expresses and that the fact that our country fails in those ideals is a spur to us to work harder to get it to accomplish those ideals.
[Unidentified]: And so.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think this is really the project of our lives is to try and accomplish a defeat of fascist autocracy and to change the way in which we conduct our political business so that an unelected Supreme Court can't by a judicial fiat wipe out women's bodily autonomy in this country.
[Danielle Balocca]: Yeah, no, it's a scary time for sure. And what I like kind of want to relate this back to your comparison to your musical practice, right? And, you know, I think I sometimes think about this like nautical metaphor, where like, if you are like, you know, steering a boat, and you said sort of just switch tracks by like a centimeter, yes, in 100 miles, they'll be in a totally different place.
[SPEAKER_01]: That's right. Buckminster Fuller's gravesite reads his epitaph reads trim tab.
[Danielle Balocca]: Was that me?
[SPEAKER_01]: A trim tab is the tiny thing on the end of the rudder on a boat, and that adjusts the trim of the boat. And that's what makes that one centimeter adjustment.
[Danielle Balocca]: Interesting.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so Bucky Fuller thought of himself as the trim tap that would provide a course correction that would take effect over hundreds of years.
[Danielle Balocca]: Oh, wow. Well, it seems like that's something that we need to be thinking about for climate change, like what you're saying. If there's an alternative to a revolution, is there anything that you think would be helpful for people to know or to practice or to try to implement that could be, like you're saying, a daily practice to try to have some change over time?
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, I don't believe that what I do is in its specifics an example for everybody. I don't recommend that you start practicing Hindustani music by the roadside. But what I find in my own life is that I'm able to maintain some degree of personal and artistic equilibrium when I do these daily disciplines. I'm not a religious man. I was raised by atheist scientists. I have no religious background or upbringing. But I am a deep believer in the functional power of ritual. When you ritualize something, you make it easier to do every day. And if each of us finds tasks and responsibilities that we can carry out every day, and it could be, for me, my everyday task has to do with changing the conversation. I'm out there, I'm trying to provide people with food for thought. There are some people who've driven past me every weekday for the past eight and a half years. And so I'd like to think they've read those signs at some point. And I do get messages from people who say, you know, you've inspired me to talk about climate change with my colleagues, or you've inspired me to put up a sign outside my house, or I decided to join the local chapter of an environmental group. And those things help me go forward. But there is an infinite number of possible tasks. The environment, the web of life of which we are a part, is in need of our loving attention. And that can be anything from saying, all right, I'm gonna go out with a pair of grippers and a nail on a stick and just spend an hour a week picking up trash in a park. And that's time that you would have otherwise spent watching Netflix. And at the end, the park is cleaner and so are you. And the way that I think about this daily work, you know, in Oceania, people go out on canoes and they do like really long distances in the canoes. And the canoes have outriggers. They have like a separate thing that's off to one side that helps keep it stable. It makes the boat essentially wide. And the vigils are like, that's the outrigger on my canoe so that I don't get capsized. The news comes in, the news goes out. Sometimes the daily news is terrifying. Sometimes it's exhilarating. And if all I do is watch the news, then I get caught up in that. But if I have an outrigger on my canoe, then I don't capsize. And all of us need to be engaged in activism, and all of us need to be engaged in politics, and all of us need to be engaged in the work of cultural transmission as well. Because activism, politics, and culture. Culture is what we're trying to preserve, along with our natural position in the ecological system. Why are you so concerned about the environment? Well, I live in it. It's where I live. Right? This is home maintenance. It's not something separate from me. I'm trying to be responsible to my home. The earth is my home. When going back to Buckminster Fuller toward the end of his life, someone was interviewing him and they said, Mr. Fuller, are you sad that you never had a chance to be in a spaceship? And he said, I am in a spaceship. Because we're on a big ball of rock that's going through space at hundreds of thousands of miles an hour. If that's not a spaceship, then what is? And so that is that perspective. Activism, this is, now you see, once you get me going on this, then there's no getting me off it. Activism is work for the greater good, however you see it. Greater good means that you look at what you believe to be beneficial for humanity, for our posterity, for our collective survival in the long term, and then you refuse to compromise for that. And so I'm not going to let a little bad weather push me in off the road. I'm going to be out there. I'm going to force the change in conversation. I'm not going to give up. I do civil disobedience. I'm a member of the Boston chapter of Extinction Rebellion. So I've been arrested multiple times for civil disobedience in blocking traffic or doing a sit-in at the governor's office or various different kinds of civil disobedience. And again, I'm not going to compromise. And if when the judge sentences me to community service, I'll do my community service gladly. That's activism. Activism is refusal to compromise in the service of the greater good. Politics, and this is the area where a lot of my activist colleagues are misguided, I believe, politics is superficially similar to activism, but it is fundamentally different. Politics is about the actual practical application of resources and attention and budget to getting things done. And so politics is by definition compromising with your ideological opponents because no compromise is necessary with your ideological allies. And so politics is all about agreeing to compromise and the lesser evil. The inherent nature of politics is you're not always going to get what you want, and you want to get the best deal possible, and you elect people in order to represent you in the negotiations with your ideological opponents. So, you know, if our politicians are negotiating with fossil fuel executives, the fossil fuel executives might be saying, well, you know, our position is you should let us burn up the planet because it'll make our quarterly reports look good. And then we say no, we know we, we want it to change. And then at some point, you're gonna have to have an agreement, right. And it's inherent in that agreement that I'm not going to get everything that I want. And like Elizabeth Warren says you take the win and then you keep moving. Activism, refusing to compromise for the greater good. Politics, agreeing to compromise for the lesser evil. And then culture, the chain of culture, the transmission. By training, I learned the style of Hindustani singing called Kayal. It's a style that goes back, that has its origins in the 1600s. So some of the songs that I sing are 400 years old, and they have been taught from one teacher to a student. generation upon generation upon generation. Someone 400 years ago taught a student. Who taught a student? Who taught a student? Who taught a student? Who taught a student? Who taught a student? Who taught a man named Balakrishna Bua Ichal Karanjikar? Who taught a man named Anant Manohar Joshi? Who taught a man named Gajanan Rao Joshi? Who taught a man named Shriram Devastali? Who taught me? And if I teach you that same song, then you're on the receiving end of a chain of transmission that goes back 400 years. The implication is that when you participate in the transmission of culture, then you are engaged in a long form of human communication. Culture is how human beings communicate across time and space. If you sing a piece of music by Bach, you are engaged in a conversation with Bach. And, you know, if I teach you a song that's 400 years old, I'm throwing down a message in a bottle that's supposed to last 400 years in the future.
[Danielle Balocca]: Yeah, well, this is interesting because I feel like I was expecting our conversation to be mostly about climate change, but I really appreciated your I think the messages about how you how you compare like the visual for you to like something to the canoe and what keeps you kind of grounded. I think that is something that I think a lot of us could use right now in terms of like how helpless we might feel with what's going on in the world and how to sort of have like a piece of of our world feel like it's contributing to that greater good you're talking about?
[SPEAKER_01]: One of the great problems that all of us experience is that weirdly, as our connectivity expands, our sense of agency seems to diminish. and we're just endlessly buffeted by more news, feel this, feel that, look at this, do this, play this game, listen to this, and our sense of individual agency diminishes. And it seems like there's less and less that we actually have responsibility for. And what my work is about, and this is, again, going back to that thinking globally and acting locally, is that, You know, everybody's had this experience. You know when you have to clean up your room and it's a big mess and you don't know where to start? The point isn't that, oh, you started in the wrong place. The point is that you start somewhere and you establish a little zone of agency. There's a little space where you have some strength, where you have a sense of coherence of purpose. And then from there, you feel just a tiny bit empowered. And then from there, maybe you can feel a little bit more empowered, and you gain a little bit more strength. And as I do this work every day, then I gain the kind of, sort of temporal mass, if you will, that comes from having done something every day. The everydayness of it winds up giving me strength. And every day I write 20 postcards to voters. And it's not much, but at the end of a week, I've written 140 postcards. At the end of a month, I've written 600 postcards.
[Danielle Balocca]: Yeah, that seems powerful to combat that feeling of doom and gloom, I think that maybe a lot of us are feeling, yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: Right, and linking that with the work of culture, because human beings are storytelling creatures. We need stories to make sense of our world, and we need songs. There has never been a human species without music. There have been some human cultures that have tried to outlaw music. The Taliban springs to mind. And what they find with that is outlawing music, it turns out it doesn't work. People go on singing no matter what. And so we derive our strength and our power from our shared culture and from our capacity to share culture with one another. And that's the nourishment that we need in order to do all the other work. Because face it, activism is very frustrating. I'm a climate activist. Nothing I ever do will be enough. I'm a political activist. Nothing I ever do will be enough, but we got to do it anyway. You do it anyway, and you do it anyway because the music, the culture, the stories, the poetry, Vijaya's work as poet laureate, for example, All of these things are part of the fabric of our human life and the cultural project that we're engaged in as human beings of sharing our songs and stories with one another. is that's one of the other things that brings us together. So the third part of this, right, is like, yeah, do some activism every day, do some politics every day, and do some culture every day. Sing a song for yourself. Find some people to sing with, find some people, join a drum group, join a community chorus, you know, paint, write poems, tell stories. And share culture with people, because that's what glues us together as human beings. That's part of our social infrastructure.
[Danielle Balocca]: Yeah, I think especially in a town like, or a city like Medford, where there is like a big, you know, somewhat of a variety of culture, and a lot of disconnection these days, I think, like, being able to find that common thread throughout, and there's a lot of opportunity for that in Medford, I think. That seems like a nice kind of antidote, like, to, you know, I think all of the disconnection that we're feeling.
[SPEAKER_01]: Human beings crave connection. We want to be with one another. We're a social species. And part of our work, not as activists or political agents, but as human beings, lies in recognizing that culture is part of the way that we preserve our values through time and space. And the more that we learn our history as a nation or as different cultural groups and learn about the ways in which these forces intersect, then we can have a meaningful perspective, we can have meaningful stories to tell that we can share with one another.
[Danielle Balocca]: Well, thank you. I'm wondering, this has been a really helpful conversation for me and very enlightening. I'm wondering if there's anything else you want to share before we wrap up?
[SPEAKER_01]: Right now, I'm working on a long-term musical project where I'm getting contributions from people in different countries all over the world on a setting of a phrase of a piece of prose by Isaac Newton. And so I've been building this over the past couple of years, and it's a long-term project because the very nature of this work is long-term. And the Isaac Newton quote, I think, exemplifies the kind of perspective that I seek to bring. So with your permission, I will sing the material, and I'm gonna put on a little drone that's gonna be in the background so that you'll hear that. That's the vocal accompaniment sound that I use for my... You hear that? That's the sound called a tambura. This is the quote from Isaac Newton. It comes in three parts. There's a medium tempo part, a fast part, and a slow part. And I'll sing each one twice, and then I'll speak the quote.
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't know what I may seem to the world, but as to myself, I seem like a child playing on the seashore. I don't know what I may seem to the world, but as to myself I seem like a child playing on the seashore. Diverting myself, diverting myself, now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell. Now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell. Diverting myself, Diverting myself now and then Finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell While the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me. While the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't know what I may seem to the world, but as to myself, I seem like a child playing on the seashore, diverting myself, now and then finding a smoother pebble or prettier shell, while the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me. Isaac Newton wrote that over 400 years ago, and it exemplifies what I feel about my responsibilities as an artist, as an activist, as a person engaged in the political struggles and the cultural struggles of my lifetime and my world. and I would like to extend an invitation to anybody in Medford or the surrounding areas who would like to come out and join me on Roosevelt Circle. I'm out there every weekday morning, rain or shine. If you let me know, I will bring a sign for you. I'm out there 7.30 to 8.30 every morning. You can contact me via Man With Sign on Facebook or Man With Sign on Instagram or Warren Senders on Mastodon. And if I know that you're coming, I'll bring a sign. Oh, thank you. Come on out. You'd be most welcome. I do lots of music and I teach music for my living. So if you're interested in studying music and you think that I might be able to help, well, you know how to reach me. And Danielle, what a pleasure to talk with you.
[Danielle Balocca]: Yeah, thank you so much. And I can see, you know, I think there's, it's definitely a very intellectual conversation, but I can also see that it's an emotional one as well. And so I just thank you for, you know, sharing this with us and continuing to do the work that you're doing.
[SPEAKER_01]: The pleasure is mine. I hope that you find something useful and I hope that your listeners enjoy this. I mean, I'm just an old white dude just, you know, taking advantage of my unearned privilege. So, you know, feel free to ignore.
[Danielle Balocca]: Yeah, it's a good way to use it. But thank you so much. All right. You take care.
[SPEAKER_01]: Bye bye now.