Mark Rowlands on Memory and the Stories We Tell Ourselves

Summary

The Gist — “Mark Rowlands on Memory and the Stories We Tell Ourselves”

Date: December 9, 2025
Host: Mike Pesca
Guest: Mark Rowlands, philosopher and author of The Book of Memory: How We Become Who We Are
Duration: ~30 minutes (content-rich portion: ~04:38–20:34)

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Overview

In this episode, Mike Pesca interviews philosopher Mark Rowlands about the nature of memory, its role in shaping identity, and the stories we construct based on what we remember—and what we forget. Drawing from poets like Rilke and literary figures like Proust, as well as scientific memory research, Rowlands explores how memories can persist and influence us even when we think they’re gone. The discussion is both philosophical and practical, touching on personal anecdotes, classic philosophical metaphors, and psychological experiments.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. Rilke’s Influence on the Philosophy of Memory

Timestamps: 04:38–06:07

• Pesca sets the stage by quoting Rilke, emphasizing memory as vital to selfhood, but elusive and transformed over time.
• Rowlands introduces his concept of “Rilkian memory”—a poetic, philosophical approach where memories, even forgotten ones, subtly shape who we are.
  • “Memories are generally thought of as making us who we are… This is puzzling because almost everything that we’ve done and experienced… we’ve forgotten.” — Mark Rowlands (06:07)
• Rowlands uses the metaphor of “a book of memory” that, if examined, would mostly be redacted pages with only scattered remaining sentences.

2. Where Do Forgotten Memories Go?

Timestamps: 06:35–08:09

• Pesca references Rowlands’s child’s question: "Where do our memories go when we forget them?"
• Rowlands explains his view: even forgotten memories may influence us, returning in transformed, unexpected ways—not as traditional memory, but as ingrained patterns or emotional responses.
  • “The act of remembering can live on in a new, unexpected form even when the something that’s remembered is gone.” — Mark Rowlands (08:28)

3. Embodied and Emotional Memory

Timestamps: 08:51–11:02

• Rowlands distinguishes two forms of what he terms “Rilkian memory”:
  • Effective/emotional memory: Underlying emotional states influenced by past experience.
  • Embodied memory: Physical patterns or habits (like running technique) reflecting forgotten experiences.
• Personal anecdote: Rowlands’s altered running style, unknowingly developed to avoid pain, only recalled when a coach draws attention to it.
  • “I remembered why I was running that way in the first place… there were these experiences I had, and as a result, my running action changed subliminally over time.” — Mark Rowlands (10:30)

4. Memory and the Architecture of the Mind

Timestamps: 11:02–13:44

• The “childhood house” thought experiment: when visualizing a generic house, most people unconsciously recall their childhood home, showing the foundational role of real memories in constructing mental imagery and concepts.
• Rowlands: Not all new concepts are memories, but memory is central to how we form and apply concepts.

5. Reliability and Construction of Memory: Psychological Experiments

Timestamps: 13:44–17:13

• Pesca discusses famous memory science:
  • The “Challenger explosion” recall experiment, where students’ memories became highly inaccurate over time.
  • The “Earthquake experiment”: Students close to the 1989 California quake (Santa Cruz, Berkeley) retained nearly perfect recall, whereas distant students in Emory did not.
• Rowlands: The key is repeated storytelling—social reinforcement helps fix memories in stable form.
  • “If you’re a student in Berkeley… people are going to… ask you what you were doing and how you felt… you’ve got this kind of external testimony. And this… seems to fix the memories in a… stable form.” — Mark Rowlands (17:07)

6. Blending Philosophy and Science of Memory

Timestamps: 17:25–19:32

• Rowlands discusses Plato’s wax tablet model—memories as impressions in soft wax that harden over time, paralleling current understanding of short to long-term memory.
• Every time a memory is recalled, it becomes malleable again, introducing opportunities for distortion—recalling isn’t pure retrieval; it’s partial reconstruction.
  • “Whenever we recall a memory… it is a lot more like forming a memory than we originally thought… supposed stable, long-term memory returns to a soft, labile short-term form whenever we recall it.” — Mark Rowlands (19:32)
  • “One of the ironies of memory is that whenever we think memories are supposed to connect us to a past, but whenever we retrieve them, there’s always a danger that we will be led further away from that past.” — Mark Rowlands (19:32)

7. The Social Function of Memory and Storytelling

Timestamps: 16:45–17:13, interwoven throughout

• Retelling memories, especially significant events, with others helps solidify and even shape those memories.
• The collaborative nature of memory-making, hinting at the influence of community narratives on personal memory.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the persistence of memory:
  • “Even when memories seem to have gone, they haven’t really gone. They’re always there in some way, and they return eventually in some form or other.”
    — Mark Rowlands (06:35)
• On memory’s unreliability:
  • “We know this about memory, that memory is in some respects unreliable. Not, not in all respects because no one forgot that the Challenger exploded or that the Challenger was a space shuttle. But what they forgot were the kind of experiential details.”
    — Mark Rowlands (14:16)
• On the malleability of memory:
  • “Whenever we retrieve them, there’s always a danger that we will be led further away from that past.”
    — Mark Rowlands (19:32)

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Important Segments & Timestamps

• 04:38: Introduction to Rilke and “Rilkian memory.”
• 06:35: The puzzle of forgotten memories and self-identity.
• 08:51: Bodily memory and memories’ return in changed behavior.
• 13:03: The “childhood house” thought experiment.
• 13:44–17:13: Scientific studies on memory (Challenger explosion, earthquake recall).
• 17:25–19:32: Wax tablet metaphor and memory as continuous reconstruction.

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Tone and Style

• Mike Pesca is conversational, witty, and intellectually curious, threading accessible humor through philosophical topics (“It was sort of your Achilles heel. Ye.” — Mike Pesca, 09:49).
• Rowlands is reflective and precise, mixing personal anecdotes, philosophical reference, and scientific results.
• The dialogue is approachable but packed with insight, questioning, and a willingness to challenge assumptions about how memory works.

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Conclusion

This episode provides a rich and interdisciplinary investigation into memory: how forgotten experiences can continue to shape identity, how memories are both socially and individually constructed and reconstructed, and how both ancient philosophy and modern science contribute to our understanding. The conversation is marked by lively exchanges, memorable analogies, and a balanced critique of both scientific and philosophical traditions.

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For listeners who missed the episode, this summary preserves the core arguments, main takeaways, and illuminating stories—capturing both the rigor and humanity that make The Gist a compelling listen.

Transcript

[Mark Rowlands]

Foreign.

[Mike Pesca]

It's Tuesday, Dec. 9, 2025, from Peach Fish Productions. It's the gist. I'm Mike Pesca. Eight Matisse works stolen from library in Brazil. The stolen pieces were from Matisse's jazz series. So now visitors to the Mario de Andrade library will have to look at the empty spots on the wall that aren't there. You know, jazz notes that aren't played. Anyway, according to the police quote, the pair of thieves broke into the location known for being the largest library in the country, overpowered a security guard and an elderly couple. That is some Cracker Jack Matisse guarding right there. Perhaps the largest library in Brazil. Has not heard that Brazil is somewhat of a high crime area. The police then adding the that the library quote, has a security team. Yes, we've heard about them. And a camera monitoring system whose footage has been forwarded to the competent authorities. So much better than the incompetent ones. They got a crack at it. Their suggestion was. Well, do you remember where he last put it? Yeah, Reggie the security guard and the elderly couple who were the bold line of defense. Not the greatest security, but I am pleased to announce because of the competence of the competent authorities, as their name would strongly suggest, there has been a crack in the case. An arrest has been made of one of the two thieves. The library will press charges and he faces years in jail and extremely hefty late fees. Now, I know what you're saying. What are priceless works by a French artist doing in a Brazilian library? Shouldn't they be in a French museum? Well, this brings us to the Louvre heist in October, where some of the suspects and most of the jewels are still in the wind. Dune Love on. As they might say in France if they pronounce things like I do. But the Louvre heist was just the highest profile in a series of thefts around the country. The Adrian Dubosh Museum was hitting the Yawn Museum and the Cognac J Museum, or maybe the Brandy J Museum, if we're saying it in English. They were also all robbed this year. Just a drip, drip, drip of setbacks to French art once held in French museums. But now the drip, drip, drip flows directly back to the Louvre. As France 24 reports, in late November.

[Mark Rowlands]

An area of the Ancient Egypt department flooded. Flooded. A valve in the museum's ventilation and heating system had been accidentally opened. Water seeped down into one of the museum's Ancient Egypt research libraries. According to the museum, around 400 rare but not precious books were damaged. The museum said the mostly 19th and 20th century books will be restored.

[Mike Pesca]

An act of carelessness, not evil. Who they get to do the report? Lorne Michaels. Now, I know you're saying what are books doing in a museum? Shouldn't they be put in a library? Well, I think this now shows that there are no really foolproof solutions to guarding the world's treasures. At least when the French or Brazilians are tasked with that. No, no, no amount of elderly couples can stop motivated thieves. It's like one of the great, great scholars of ancient Egypt has written, quote, in order for a culture to last, its guardians must splotch, blot.

On the show today why a desperate drowning Venezuelan drug smuggler suddenly wanted a suntan. Does he know nothing about risk and skin cancer? But first, I do like talking to philosophers. So many of my guests are. But a few of them are explicitly. And that's what they say on their tax forms. Mark Rowlands is one and he has written the book of how we become who we are. I recorded this interview a while ago and looking back on it, it seems pretty good. You be the judge. Mark Rollins up.

The poet and one time novelist Rilke once wrote, now read these words. Still, it is not enough to have memories. One must be able to forget them when they are many. And one must have the immense patience to wait until they come again. For it is the memories themselves that matter. Only when they have turned to blood within us, to glance and gesture nameless and no longer to be distinguished from ourselves. Only then can it happen that in a most rare hour the first word of a poem arises in their midst and goes forth from them. I quote Rilke because the philosopher Mark Rowlands does. He has written a book called the Book of Memory, how we become who we Are. Let's talk all about it, the concept of the Rilke in memory and more. Mark, welcome to the gist.

[Mark Rowlands]

Thanks, Mike. Thanks for having me. Appreciate it.

[Mike Pesca]

So what is this? Is your coinage the real kin memory?

[Mark Rowlands]

It is. It is my coinage. Yeah. I mean it was, it was straightforward.

[Mike Pesca]

And obvious, but still he can't take credit for it, right? All the great philosophers say that, you know, concept of the self think therefore I am. Who, who hasn't thought that and therefore am I not if someone else did? But anyway, tell me what you're getting at and then we'll get at some of the other key concepts. But tell me why Rilke, why the first 20 or 30 pages of his otherwise disastrous novel really stuck with you?

[Mark Rowlands]

Well, memories is generally. Memories are generally thought of as making us who we are, right? So, you know, maybe other things too, but memories essentially important in making us who we are. This is puzzling because almost so the, the kind of underlying idea is, well, what could make us who we are if not the things we've done and experienced in this track through space and time that we call life?

So, but these, these are gone. These are creatures of the past. They're only retained through memory. So memories make us who we are. But this is puzzling because almost everything that we've done and experienced in these lives, we've forgotten. So if we were sort of books of memory, then what you would find when you looked into this book would be just page after page of redaction, you know, with little. Little island sentences here and there, but. But mostly black ink. So Rilke's. The idea of Rilke. Memory, I think, gives you a partial solution to this problem. The idea is, well, okay, even when memories seem to have gone, they haven't really gone. They're always there in some way and they. And they return eventually in some form or other. So, yeah, one of my sons asked me, where do our memories go when we forget them? You know, and I figured, well, that's, that's a very good question actually. Where do they go? And so what. What's going on with the Rilkian Memory is you have an act of remembering and then there's the something that's remembered, but there's something that's remembered has gone. And the act of remembering just lives on in a. In a new, somewhat unexpected form sometimes.

[Mike Pesca]

Yeah. What did other philosophers think about that? I guess you. Your son's question. Because mostly when they're gone, they're gone, was the accepted, more scientific than philosophical answer to it. I guess you got to get into questions of just consciousness and where do our thoughts come from? But what is the standard answer?

[Mark Rowlands]

The standard answer is. I think there probably is no standard answer. I mean, it's generally supposed. I mean, the idea that memories don't really go, that they come back. You find that in certain kind of counter currents of thought, like Coleridge, for example. Campbell believes something like that. Proust believes something like that as well.

But it wasn't. It's certainly, it's certainly a very non standard kind of view. The standard view is, yeah, you. You have an act of remembering and you have the something that's remembered. When there's something that's remembered is gone, then so too is the act of remembering the idea of ban real gim memories. The act of remembering can live On. In a new, unexpected form, even when the something that's remembered is gone.

[Mike Pesca]

So it's like you train yourself. An athlete might train himself to perform a task, and then the task is not before him throwing the javelin, but without even thinking of it, he might pick up some. Some. Something else. Long and thin. He might throw something else. He might even do something that seems unrelated to throwing the javelin, but it shows up in his. We call it muscle memory. Is that an analogy? Yeah.

[Mark Rowlands]

I distinguish two different forms of rugged memory. One is. One is effective emotional r memory. The other is bodily. And I think. I mean from personal experience. I have a very strange running action. My knees are very low. There's not a lot of up, not. Not a lot of knee lift when I run. And eventually it sort of. And because of this, I was prone to various sorts of ailments. Torn calf muscles were a constant kind of thorn in my. Well, not in my side, in my calf.

[Mike Pesca]

You know, it was sort of your Achilles heel. Ye. Yeah, exactly. And.

[Mark Rowlands]

And one day I met a running coach and said, yeah, this is happening because you're not picking your knees up enough. So, you know, concentrate on that. Then more of the. More of the weight will be borne by your calves, which are bigger muscles. They can. They can. They can handle it. So. So I did that. And then I. After a few weeks of dutifully, you know, changing my running style, I remembered why I was running that way in the first place is because of the sort of knee pain and lower back pain that happened whenever I pick my knees up higher. So. So the I think is that there were these experiences I had. And as a result.

My running action changed subliminally over time.

Then the. Then the. Then the experiences, the original experiences are gone. They're forgotten because I can't remember what I'm doing this or why. But then they come back when I meet the running coach who tells me to change my running style. So that would be a case of embodied Rilkian memory, a real game memory that's become embodied in a certain kind of behavior, behavioral characteristic such as running in a strange low knee lift way.

[Mike Pesca]

Yeah. And you also write about. Maybe you. And you did live in a house, and the house had certain characteristics such that when you snuck into it after curfew, you knew to raise your step on the first step. And so. So how does. What's the purpose of that example and how does it relate to what we're talking about that you might even remember why you remember, but you might find yourself lifting Your step at that first step or a similar first step in the future.

[Mark Rowlands]

Yeah. So the example was from the French philosopher called Gaston Bachelor.

Which I used sort of in combination with various experiences of mine which we needn't sort of go into really. But yeah, the idea is, suppose you return to the house of your childhood and you haven't thought about this house for a long time, but you find yourself walking up the stairs and then suddenly your leg lifts over this one stair because that's the one that used to creak. Or when you're opening a door, the latch has to be manipulated in a certain way. You haven't thought about this fore, but it all comes back to you as soon as you're in the. As soon as you're in the house.

[Mike Pesca]

Yeah. Now I'm going to ask my listeners to follow along in this little thought exercise. It's not in your book, but it's been told to me. Picture yourself in a house. You walk inside the house and you turn left. Now, when I said that something like 90% of people will think of the house they grew up in. There are exceptions. Maybe some people moved around a lot and there was no the house they grew up in. Or if the house you lived in the longest was the house you live in. Now, maybe you're remembering that. But two points. One is there is a house. We're not constructing a house. When even I talk about a psych. A theoretical experiment. And I have also heard that, and my wife's an architect and I've tried to engage with her on this. That we can't even construct the house. That not only all memories are memories, but all thoughts and all projections and all of our future hypotheticals are in fact memories. Do you subscribe to that?

[Mark Rowlands]

I'm not sure I would subscribe to.

All depends on how you kind of flesh out each. Each bit of it. I don't think everything is memory. No, I think there are. There. There are new experiences we can have which. Which are not really memories.

[Mike Pesca]

But in order for us to think about a concept, tangible concept, where do we get that? We have to draw upon that from somewhere. Some bank.

[Mark Rowlands]

Right. Y this issue about how we form concepts in the first. First place. And memory will be involved in concept formation. That's right. But that's an issue about the concept formation, not an issue about how concepts are applied.

[Mike Pesca]

Right. So there is a lot of science in the book. I mean, so far we've quoted Cool Ridge and Rilke and different philosophers. But there's also scientific experiments There are a couple of famous ones. One is where were you when the Challenger exploded? An emory professor in 1986 recorded this exact incident and then he asked the senior four years later to recount and they almost all got it wrong. And then there was another similar incident about earthquakes and. Well, tell me about. I think a lot of us have heard the Challenger incident, but what was the earthquake experiment?

[Mark Rowlands]

Well, the earthquake experiment is actually a follow up to the Challenger one. So the Challenger one, the basic story, I think you've got it exactly right. You know, you find after the Challenger exploded, Ulrich Nesser tracked down, well, got some students, asked them to fill in a questionnaire. What were you doing when you heard the Challenger exploded? Where were you? Who were you with? That sort of thing. And then he tracks them down a few years later, three or four years later, and asks them to repeat the questionnaire and the question, the answers they give are wildly divergent. So we know this about memory, that memory is in some respects unreliable. Not, not in all respects because no one forgot that the Challenger exploded or that the Challenger was a space shuttle. But what they forgot were the kind of experiential details that went into having the memory in the first place. Now with the follow, the follow up experiment was a, was a, the experiment of. Pertain to an earthquake that occurred in Northern California in I think it was 89.

So you've got three, three groups of students were roped into this experiment. The, the earthquake, the earthquake took place in Santa cr. So they were one group of students, Berkeley, 60 or 70 miles away. Those were another group of students and Emory, which I believe you know quite well. Yes, was, was the, the control group basically. So.

So, so 18 months later the same students were, were corralled and asked to repeat the questionnaire that they'd filled in the first time. And the, the Emory students, you got the same kind of memory degeneration that you find in degradation that you find in the sort of Challenger case. But both the Berkeley and the Santa Cruz students were nearly perfect in their recall, which was strange because.

Santa Cruz was the epicenter. So the, the levels of arousal among students would be, would be a lot higher there. Berkeley things, you know, earthquakes of that sort were largely old hat. The students were used to them. It wasn't a particularly pronounced one in Berkeley, but nonetheless they remembered perfectly. And some of them even had no recollection of the earthquake, but they remembered exactly what they were doing when the earthquake sort of struck. So this was puzzling. Nice's.

Explanation was basically, well, it all involves talking. So if you're a student in Berkeley, then, and there's a major earthquake not too far away, then people are going to, friends and family are going to call you up, they're going to ask you what you were doing and how you felt and so on, and you're going to be repeating the story over and over again. So you've got this kind of external testimony.

And this, this seems to fix the memories in a sort of fairly stable form.

[Mike Pesca]

Yeah, yeah. Whereas the Challenger was exactly like the Northridge earthquake, if that's the right earthquake to the Emory students. Because it's just the thing on the news.

[Mark Rowlands]

Exactly. Precisely. Yeah. Yeah.

[Mike Pesca]

So how do you incorporate actual social scientific experiment and think about that alongside Cool Ridge or Plato who were engaged in philosophy, and maybe then philosophy meant something closer to science. You know, there are more things in heaven and earth than your philosophies, Horatio, which meant his, he was a man of science. Horatio was. But how do you do it? And is it just as interesting to you? Is there a discounting when it's the gray bearded philosopher stroking his chin and then just thinking abstractly, or is there a discounting when it's a scientific experiment with kids in a classroom roped into it?

[Mark Rowlands]

No, I don't think there's any discounting either way, actually. I mean, Plato you mentioned, I think is a good example because he had a certain picture of how memory works. So he said, think of memory as like a wax, a block of wax. Okay. And when you have experiences, imprints are made in the wax and initially the wax is soft and so those imprints are easily smudged, but eventually.

The wax will harden into a more stable and permanent form. So as many people pointed out, this is very similar to the story about how short term memories are converted into long term memories.

Various connections are built between neurons, but these are easily kind of smudgeable, you know, at the beginning. And it's only when they've hardened into, it's only when they've hardened into permanent or long term form that they're, they're reliable. I mean, this, this is incompatible with the, the, the m, the, the Challenger case, for example, because in those cases with the students were asked a day or so after the, after the event. And so we were talking about long term memories all along. So we got the long term memories of a day after and the long term memories of three years after.

[Mike Pesca]

Yeah.

[Mark Rowlands]

But with Plato's model, I mean, so it maps on quite, quite well to the way memory was understood. Right.

By scientists I think the most significant discovery in memory science over the last two decades is that when we recall a memory, when we retrieve it, it is a lot more like forming a memory than we originally thought. So the supposedly hard, stable long term memory returns to a soft, labile short term form whenever we recall it. And so there are all these opportunities for the memory to become distorted every time we remember. So one of the ironies of memory is that whenever we think, memories are supposed to connect us to a past, but whenever we retrieve them, there's always a danger that will be led further away from that past.

[Mike Pesca]

I will plug you as the author of the book of how we Become who We Are. Mark Rowlands is also the author of the Philosopher and the Wolf and Running with the Pack and the Word of Dog. He writes a lot about dogs memory running. Thank you so much, Mark.

[Mark Rowlands]

Thank you.

[Mike Pesca]

And now the spiel. You know, the visual is so important. I work in an audio medium though there is video of this. The audio is really the preferred medium for me and I'm going to say quite honestly for you. The video however, drives our consciousness. I wonder if because we are a seeing organism or because we live in a time where the things we see are provided much more frequently than what we hear, right? Movies, tv, Instagram, all social media, all on phones, visual becoming a paramount importance. I was thinking about this as I was trying to picture in my mind what actually happened with those Venezuelan boats that were hit by above from US airstrikes. And then what happened to the two survivors who were further hit from above. So before I get to those boats, here's another incident of Trump administration decrees affecting citizens of the world and not in a great way US Deport second planeload of Iranian citizens. Okay, a planeload. How many are you picturing? Maybe are you picturing a cargo plane? Are you picturing a Cessna? I think a planeload is quite large and I think of hundreds of people. But then in the second paragraph of this article in today's New York Times, the plane carrying about 50 Iranian citizens as well as deportees from Arab communities in Russia. So there you go. I think 50 dozens would be fine. But plane load triggers the mind to come up with a picture. And that is the story we're all telling ourselves about these Venezuelans. Now, I have to say, before I heard more detailed descriptions, I literally pictured them clinging with just their arms to a floating piece of wood. I guess I've seen too many New Yorker cartoons. I don't know if there was an old man with A beard on an island with a single palm tree in the background. But I did literally picture them clinging to pieces of wood. And then Tom Cotton was on Meet the Press and disabused me of that assumption. Only what he said, though correcting one misimpression which if true, would have been clearly a war crime if not for the fact that this might not be an actual act of war, just flat out murder. Tom Cotton said this.

[Tom Cotton]

They were sitting or standing on top of a capsized boat. They weren't floating helplessly in the water. And Kristen, I don't think it matters all that much what they were trying to do. It looked at one point like they were trying to fly flip the boat back over, presumably to rescue its cargo and continue their mission or to stay afloat. Maybe they, maybe they were signaling to other airplanes or drug cartel boats because they're in waters that are just off drug cartel areas. At one point, the guy takes off his T shirt. Maybe he's trying to get a suntan. It doesn't really matter what they were trying to do.

[Mike Pesca]

There is so much to pick apart in the Tom Cotton statement working backwards. Probably not to get a suntan right. Probably to wave as a distress signal. So when he says it doesn't matter, I think it does matter. I think the sun tan explanation, probably the last thing on earth that he was taking his shirt off for. It does matter. It certainly does matter. Him injecting the suntan there really denigrates his overall point. Also, there were an international drug waters. This is something that's called tautological. That was a drug boat. It was just a torpedo. The drugs went in the waters. Now it's international drug waters. Used to be international boat with drug waters, no more. And then you have the. Was trying to capsize the boat. Welker. Kristen Welker, host of Meet the Press, comes in, says after Tom Khan says maybe to get the drugs back. Don't know how floating items and capsized boats would actually work. Must get drugs as opposed to must live and then figure out next step or next paddle. Wow. What a both correcting and damning explanation from Tom Cotton. I don't think this scandal will ever get its sea legs, if you will, until the video comes out. There is too much opportunity for everyone to describe it how they wish to describe it. And for even good faith. I don't love the good faith word or phrase, but even people of good faith to not really conclude what happened just from the narratives of the half a dozen or so very motivated people who saw what happened. I do think if we saw the video, it would be a scandal. Unless the video really shows a bunch of guys reaching for the copper tone to get a suntan as they try to live slash rescue their illicit cargo.

And that's it for today's show. The gist is produced by Cory Wara, with Leah Yan as our production coordinator and Jeff Craig running our socials. And Michelle Pesca as coo. Improve is how you pronounce it. Thanks for listening.