Alberto Cairo is a journalist and designer, and the Knight Chair in Visual Journalism at the School of Communication of the University of Miami. He is also the director of the visualization program at UM’s Center for Computational Science. He is the author of several books including his upcoming, How Charts Lie: Getting Smarter About Visual Information, Cairo currently consults with companies and institutions like Google and the Congressional Budget Office, and has provided visualization training to the European Union, Eurostat, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Army National Guard, and many others.
Simon Rogers is an award-winning data journalist, writer, and speaker. Author of Facts are Sacred, published by Faber & Faber in the UK, China, and South Korea. He has also written a range of infographics for children's books from Candlewick. Data editor on the News Lab team at Google, based in San Francisco, he is director of the Data Journalism Awards and teaches Data Journalism at Medill-Northwestern University in San Francisco and has taught at U Cal Berkeley Journalism school.
Episode Description
Data Journalism is a hot topic in the news business. Reporters working in diverse media and diverse markets are increasingly being asked to work with data. What exactly makes for good data journalism and what does a reporter need to understand to use data well. Those are a few of the questions discussed on The Data Journalism Podcast and that is the focus of this episode of Stats and Stories with guests Alberto Cairo and Simon Rogers.
+Full Transcript
Rosemary Pennington
Data journalism is a hot topic in the news business reporters working in diverse media and diverse markets are increasingly being asked to work with data. But what exactly makes for good data journalism? What does a reporter need to understand to use data? Well, those are a few of the questions discussed on the data journalism podcast. And that is the focus of this episode of Stats and Stories, where we explore the statistics behind the stories and the stories behind the statistics. I'm Rosemary Pennington. Stats and Stories is a production of Miami University's Department of Statistics and media journalism and film, as well as the American Statistical Association. Joining me is regular panelist John Bailer Chair of Miami statistics department. We have two guests joining us today. The first is Alberto Cairo. Cairo is a journalist and designer and the night chair in visual journalism at the School of Communication at the University of Miami. He's the author of several books, including how charts lie, getting smarter about visual information. Cairo currently consults with companies and institutions such as Google and the Congressional Budget Office, and has provided visualization training to the European Union Euro stat, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Army National Guard and many others. Joining him is another repeat offender here at stats and stories. Simon Rogers, Rogers is an award winning data journalist, writer and speaker. His book facts are sacred, was published in 2014, and aims to reveal how data has changed our world and what it tells us and quote, he's also written a range of infographics for children books from Candlewick. Rogers is the data editor on the news lab team at Google, and is also the director of the sigma data journalism awards. He's currently teaching data journalism at Medill in Northwestern University in San Francisco. He and Cairo are also the hosts of the data journalism podcast, which they're here to talk about today.
Alberto Ciaro
Thank you for having us.
John Bailer It's such a treat to have you both once again, on the Stats and Stories podcast. I mean, we thought we were lucky to have you once but to have you again, it's just like a dream come true for all of us, you know, so but I love the work that both of you have been doing I mean, Alberto, your books are often something we include in our database classes. And I have certainly been following your work for years. In that regard. I was just curious, you know, what's kind of the process by which you decide on a book to write and, and the topic and sort of your, your whole mechanism for getting these ideas on paper?
Alberto Ciaro Oh, how do I decide what I'm going to write about when it's actually a very artificial piecemeal process? In which I sort of like, I guess that you sympathize with that, because you have your own book come, right. So I sort of like, seize on an idea. And then I build it up from there. And so let me describe what I usually joke about, only that this is only half joking is that my books are truly not about visualization. I use visualization as an excuse to write about other things. So that's full disclosure. So for example, the truthful art is, is a book officially about visualization. But it's more related to my interest in epistemology, and the theory of knowledge, right? And not only that, I'm also interested in elementary statistics and getting and teaching people elementary statistics. That's the core of the book. It's only that I use visualization and excuse, as a means and as a tool, to write about those things that are truly interesting, right philosophy, for example, how charts lie is a book about statistics also about how people can interpret the statistics better, but officially is a book about visualization. And then the book that I'm currently writing, the art of insight, which hopefully will come out in 2023 is a book about visualization also, in which I have I have discussions, I'm having discussions with plenty of visualization designers to see how they make choices, when when they're designing visualization, how they choose about graphic forms, typography, layout, way to structure a data story, and so on and so forth. So officially, the book is about that. But unofficially, the book came out of my interest in philosophy as well because it's a book more about ethical reasoning and about life in general. It's like, the book begins without a long prologue in which I describe my own philosophy of the salutation. Why do I make this conversation is not just because I like this organization's which I do, I love the sensations, but my drive towards getting so interested in visual displays of information and more particularly data is related to an interest that I've always had since I was a kid in learning things, and then explaining things to other people. For some reason I was born like that. I like to learn stuff. And then I get super excited about that stuff. And I want to tell somebody, and that's what drives my career. So the purpose of the book is to disclose what deeply visualization designers are guided by, or what types of values drive their choice of Korea, for example, and also the value of that guy, the way that they present data to other people that interests me much more than, you know, discussions about software, or discussions about statistical methods, because I'm a great believer in talking about ethics, in particular, in the different schools of ethics. And one of them is virtue ethics, which is based on values, the values that people use to drive their choices. That's what underlies the book. So usually, a book arises when I discovered an interest, I started reading deeply about all this stuff, which is usually not related at all, with the solicitation, again, epistemology, or ethical thinking, or whatever, I said, How can I connect these two socialization in a way that I can write about it? And sort of like trick people into believing that I'm actually writing about dissociation? Which I am, in a sense, right, when I'm writing about other things, right, as well.
Rosemary Pennington
Alberto, how did visualization become something that you use in this way? And that you sort of anchored to? So it seems so early? Cuz it seems like as a data journalist and as a designer, and again, these books that you're producing that sort of? Do you anchor themselves on visualizations? It does seem like it's an important way of how you, as you described, explain the world or help people understand the world?
Alberto Ciaro Yeah, absolutely. So I was half joking about it, I do. I do love the services. And I love reading dissociation and designing them. Although that is only half of the picture. What I truly care about, is again, learning things, loving the process of learning about those things. And these things can be completely random. I mean, if during the pandemic, for example, I have been reading extensively about the history of the seventh century. I don't know if it's so fascinating. Because that's, that's the era when you know, you have the Byzantine Empire one and and you have, you know, the remains of the Roman Empire on the western Mediterranean, the Visigothic kingdom in Spain, the rise of Islam as a religion, which is something that is, it's a great unknown. I was never taught that in school, although I went to plenty of history classes, and having reading deeply about the the history of ancient ancient Islam, which is absolutely fascinating. I want to tell somebody about it. How do I, how do I do it? How do I write, for example, about the seventh century? Well, obviously, I will not be able to do that, because I'm not a historian. However, maybe I can use my solicitation to trick a publisher to publish a book with maps and charts about history. And then that will be a way for me to tell other people about the cool stuff that I'm learning about. Right. That has also occurred. So that has driven my career. In that sense, I have seen visualization as a language as a means to convey information to other people since I was a kid. I love drawing. I mean, your listeners are not seeing me that it would send whether you are because we are on camera, but in the background in my office, I have a big drawing table, because I like to sketch things out. If anybody follows me on Twitter, probably they know that I did tweet out sketches that I do during zoom meetings, because I Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. So I am aware of a meeting now, but I'm not sketching because I usually sketch when I'm listening when I'm listening to someone because it really helps me focus my attention on what I'm listening to, because I keep my hands busy. There's a reason why I sketch things out because it focuses my attention on what is being said during the meeting. So since I was a little kid, I was always doing different things and sketching things out. And then there was a point in my past in which my dad, who is a medical doctor, is retired now. He's a medical doctor, a poet, a writer, and also an artist or a renaissance person or renaissance man so to speak. But he's formally a medical doctor. Well, I remember very clearly that when I was a teenager, my father taught me how to summarize things using diagrams. So he taught me. I studied methods that consisted of creating visual mnemonic devices, diagrams, connecting concepts and ideas to summarize entire books, and I remember that one I was about to enter college, I was able to summarize entire books in two pages using those diagrams. That's an infographic. In some sense, data visualization is an association that I created for myself, obviously, because nobody else could interpret those weird diagrams. But I could, I didn't need to return to the book itself to remember what the book said, I just needed to take a look at the diagram. And then I remember, I had a very bad memory. So I really need to use those types of devices. So I, in some sense, in one way or another, I've always been using visualization, even if I didn't call it this realization at the time, right. I also love maps, since I was a kid, I've always been drawing maps of real places, but also imaginary places, as well. So he doesn't sort of like, sort of, like to coalesce into my career at the moment, all those disparate, different, you know, interests that I had, when I was a child.
John Bailer That's really cool. What a great preparation for what ultimately your career blossomed into.
Alberto Ciaro
But he was completely unintended. Mike, my goal, my goal when I studied journalism was not to wasn't to draw or whether or not to use graphics. I love radio, and I wanted to work in radio. And I actually started taking many classes on radio communication. I even interned in the equivalent of NPR in Spain, within the news during a summer, that was my goal. But eventually, you know, drawing visualization for graphics crossed my path at some point, or the end of my, my college add us call it my VA, when, when a professor of mine who knew that I could sketch things out, she recommended me to a local newspaper as an intern in the graphics department. I didn't know anything about infographics at the time, but I could sketch things out, I could draw sort of like a half-developed visual brain that allowed me to explain things visually, because I had been doing it for quite a long time. Up to that point, even if it was not formally I learned all the principles later on. Right. So that shaped my career and my practice later on. But I already had sort of like the seeds of the foundation.
John Bailer So you started out thinking about your being a broadcast journalist on radio, and then at sort of transitioned into working in the press directly for a local newspaper. So what what what then, you know, you've you've moved into the research and academia and then now and then even recently into a podcast, but you know, can you tell us a bit about your, your continued development, ranging from that kind of first experience in a graphic design kind of responsibility to what you do now.
Alberto Ciaro It's all connected. I mean, if you think about the podcast that Simon and I are doing these days is exactly, you know, the same principles that throughout my career, throughout my career, I've driven my career up to this point. Also, during that podcast, I know. So we know, we both know, Simon and I know so many incredible people, do we make consolidations and graphics, etc. And some of them very well known, but some of them who are not very well known, but their work is so incredible, I learn about it, I also want other people or we want other people to know about it, and that the podcast is a great vehicle for that, to bring visibility to the work of people who otherwise you will know nothing about. So one of the efforts that we are trying to make is to bring people not only from the United States, the United Kingdom, but from everywhere else in the world. And it's like given a diversity of voices, right, bringing in a diversity of voices.
Simon Rogers
What we've tried to do is really showcase the breadth of experience that is out there in the world of journalism. Also, I'm really conscious of the fact that it tends to be that we see the same kinds of people everywhere, we want to make sure that we're reflecting the fact that there are people all over the world doing really interesting stuff, and in all kinds of organizations and from all kinds of places. So, you know, we've had people like the pudding who like really kind of, they're not really traditional data on this, but they're doing really interesting visualization, data journalism. And we've had Eva constant terrorists who does data journalism in Afghanistan and Myanmar, and across the south. We've had, and she's been talking about, like, you know, making data journalism more accessible. We've had a surge around making data journalism more kind of accessible for humans. And as it were, we had lamb Toivo, who's a fantastic data analyst who works at BuzzFeed and teaches at CUNY and Shirley Wu and Nadia Bramah, talking about their book data sketches. So we've really tried to kind of just showcase the amount of work that's out there. And then one of the most recent episodes we had was with Ben Welsh and Marija Webster talking about local data journalism because I don't think There's enough attention paid to the really good work that's going on around the world at a kind of very local level. And a journalism particularly suited, I think for local journalism is really supportive of that. And then we are about to later on today, fingers crossed. Talk to the fantastic Anatoly Bondarenko, who's in Ukraine right now he's working as a data journalist in a war zone at the moment. So yeah, we're really trying to try to showcase some of the amazing work that's going on out there.
Alberto Ciaro And the different genres in data journalism, right, because we have, for example, had episodes, not only about how to use data to do recording, not only about using data and visualizing the data, but also, for example, how to produce opinion pieces with data. John, we also interviewed a Stewart Thompson, for example, who used to work in the opinion page on the New York Times, producing opinion pieces that were based on data. So again, it's all about showing the diversity of people, the diversity of approaches, nationalities, genders, also, like the diversity of these of this world, which is booming. And it's super exciting to talk about recovery.
Rosemary Pennington You're listening to Stats and Stories. And today we're talking about data journalism, with Simon Rogers and Alberto Cairo. You've talked about sort of the depth of the guests, you're bringing on to your podcast, the data journalism podcast, and sort of the work they're doing. But the one thing that I think is still kind of squishy about data journalism, as as defining it, right, is that it's become a buzz phrase, like in the journalism industry, right? Like, you've got to be a data journalist, you've got to work with data. But not everyone, I think, is working with the same idea of what data journalism is necessarily. And it's certainly not a new thing, like people have been doing data journalism for a very long time, just not under that sort of moniker necessarily. And I wonder, as you approach the work of the podcast, and what you're trying to highlight, sort of what your working sort of definition of what data journalism is.
Simon Rogers I love this, because journalists are so obsessed with definitions of what their role is more than any other profession, I will guarantee this. I mean, I think honestly, the simple definition for me is telling a story in the best way possible. And the fact that it happens to include numbers and data and statistics doesn't matter. I think that's just part of it. And that process is, I guess, what makes it unique, and also, the fact that, you know, it's the output can be anything. That's the great thing about data journalism, your output, which is very kind of the engineering term, can be a podcast, right? It can be a tweet, it can be a story, it can be an interactive video, there's just so many options there. But Alberto, what do you think I'm totally my idea?
Alberto Ciaro
Oh, absolutely. I mean, one of the jokes that I make about my own work and socialization is that every person who works in digitalization also has their own definition about what is solid. And I believe that this is true of any field. I was born in northern Spain, northwestern Spain, in our region called Galicia. And people joke about collisions that we always answer a question with another question. So I'm going to do that right now. You ask us, as both of us, what is data journalism? And I'm going to reply to you: what is data science? What is statistics? Every person has a slightly different definition of statistics, right? I have my own sort of a very broad definition of what data science is, what statistics are, who cares. That's the point. Who cares, I don't care how to define data journalism, I just want to talk to people who use data in one way or another, to produce journalistic things and to serve the public. Whereas they do that through computational methods, or using Excel, or they produce or use R or Python, I don't care. Whereas they produce data visualizations or witness stories or videos or whatever, I don't care, the court is that they use data in one way or another in sort of like, so I never cared that much about boundaries, definitions, I couldn't care less. I'm not as obsessed, as Simon said, that other people are in the field to define what it is that we truly do. Why do you think that is even necessary?
John Bailer Yeah, that resonates? I mean, certainly the the issue of kind of the the areas that you mentioned, whether it's data science, or statistics, or is it these important differences? I mean, I like the sense of what you do, what skills are needed to do it? And what do you produce as a result of applying those skills? And I think that that speaks to both, you know, to any of these kind of broad areas that are defined. So now I'm curious about the origin story of the podcast. Yeah, I'm thinking that that was there, this, this, I was gonna, it probably wasn't some smoky bar in some part of the world because we've been in the COVID pandemic now for years and so, so we've been restrained. In terms of access, so what was it? You know, who's to blame? That's who's the credit?
Simon Rogers
How many? I mean, so we were working together now for, I want to say like five years, six years, seven years they go. And obviously, it's been a very long time. No, we, we talk a lot about, you know, we work together on these big projects. And basically, well, we know we chat, like, you know, a few times a week normally, and we ended up having these conversations while we're, while we're chatting about work, the work we have to do about things we've seen out there or bits of data journalism, or projects that we local projects we hate, and with all maybe kind of arrogantly I guess we could record some of these conversations. And then we start to think, well, actually, we know quite a few people as well as me, of course, some of them do. And we also I mean, I bet and I listened to so many podcasts. I think that's right about isn't it? I mean, I listened to the podcast all the time. So it kind of seemed like an obvious thing. But
Alberto Ciaro
yeah, it came out of a conversation or conversations, actually, would you say? Well, there are several podcasts about visualization. There are several podcasts about data science and statistics. There are some podcasts that touch upon data journalism in one way or another, but there is no data journalism podcast. So I remember one meeting in which I went directly to. I remember one of these websites where you can buy domains and actually search for the data journalism.podcast.com. And I discovered this is free. And I bought it immediately. So it was a super funny process. It was not planned. If you listen to the first episodes, you will notice how low tech we were with tech?
Simon Rogers Oh, yeah. Yeah, really low tech.
Alberto Ciaro It's just, the podcast is essentially a bunch of relaxed conversations with people whose work we admire, or we like for some reason, or we think that deserves some visibility for one reason or another. And just talking to them about what they do, how they do it, why they do it. And that's essentially the spirit of the podcast.
Simon Rogers Yeah, we are. We are very low tech. Yeah, we edit the stuff with Audition, you know, we use this tool, which we built actually called to tone about that with a group called date devised unto what to turn does if you have the load data into producing music. So we use that for music. And we try and have a different data say,
Rosemary Pennington
Oh, that's really cool. I have no idea. That's what you guys were doing.
Simon Rogers Yeah, well, we were struggling with what to what music to have on I think if I were to take you to deathmatch,
Alberto Ciaro
I don't either listen to death metal, that's nice, I release it to very soft metal that's even mentioned metal in some of my books to discuss data visualization. As soon as I say during the conversation, I used consolidation as an excuse to write out other things that I truly care about. Anyway, I was about to say that two tones are available for free. It's open source, it can be used by anybody. So it's a tool that works on the browser in which you can put any data set in. It needs to be a smallish data set, you cannot, you cannot put in there, like a two gigabyte data set, that wouldn't work. But if you bring a new data set with 200 rows, few columns, etc, it will solidify the data for you. And this is a tool that we developed in collaboration with an organization called Data wells. And essentially, we're a survey that creates music out of data and Simon uses it on a regular basis to create the introduction to the podcast.
Alberto Ciaro Can you actually find interesting music? I was surprised at how good some datasets sound, which is kind of funny.
Simon Rogers
It does actually sound like music.
Rosemary Pennington Yes, I would have had no idea if you had not cuz I've listened to a few of your episodes. And I was like, Oh, this is a nice little Bob, I would have had no idea.
John Bailer
Oh no, you get me really intrigued to think you know what, if you sort the data set first before you put it in the to that, you know what happens if you do various, you know, permutations of it.
Alberto Ciaro
That the tool works better when there is some sort of pattern in the data, for example, there's a seasonal change in the time series. It works really well for that and it works well. If you are trying to certify yes you know, to varying data. If you try to certify multivariate data, it will be a mess. It will still it will still suck Cool, I think but it would be that would sound like death metal. If you tried to multivariant feed it in.
Simon Rogers Yeah, we have tried, we have tried doing data sets that are not time series, and they just don't really work as it is like, there's like a lot of stuff on twiddling around, well, I'm getting a bit better. Each one gets a little bit more interesting. Hopefully,
Rosemary Pennington
You've worked on these, which I wish would have been around when my child was small, but these infographics for kids books, and then you've been involved with this new podcast. And I wonder, how do you approach the communication of complicated material for a broad audience? Like how do you think about how you're going to communicate that?
Simon Rogers
I mean, I think about that a lot, partly because I like very kind of accessible human data stuff. And you know what I teach? And one of the things I teach in my first class is about Richard Scarry. And now I love Richard Scarry books, right? I will, and, and the great thing about Richard Colbert is they're full of how things work, obviously. But you look at those cutouts and diagrams, like the ones of the ship is the one that I use quite a lot. It's accurate, it's correct, you'll learn from that how shit works. It's not like scientifically technical drawing, Dorlin, Kinsley accurate, which I'm not doing because he barely. But I just love that kind of work. And a lot of it is a guess, about working with people who share that. So you know, for the kids books, the designers who worked on those books are amazing people like Jennifer Daniel, and Nicholas Blackman, and so on. They just like great designers who just are very open, flexible numbers. And I've worked on a few projects with designers like that, like Nadia brahma or rocky NGV. And people like that, who are just very into making visuals that are understandable. We've done recently with Michel Riel, which is a very human take on the way that people search for things at different times of day. So yeah, accessibility of data in a way, one of my least favorite things about there was a moment when a lot of data journalism or those organizations called blurb about five years ago, and people were launching websites all over the place. And I felt like a lot of the work that I was saying was not very accessible, it was very, it was quite a bit show offI in a way, like, look how clever I am, I can do this amazing analysis, but my you know, I wouldn't be able to explain it to my family. And I think that's really important. But Albert, what do you think?
Alberto Ciaro
Yeah, absolutely. We both have, in some sense connected to WhatsApp of saying, we both love to laugh and to have fun. And sometimes when statistics are presented to people, they are presented in a way that is completely devoid of humor and joy. And I'm not saying that joy and humor can be part of any presentation. They're obviously topics that deserve a somber, serious presentation. But there are many others that can be presented in a more lighthearted way, which I think is super important. We want to get people on set by people who say the general public is interested in interesting topics. And I mentioned this because one of the many hats that I wear also is the co editor of a series of books for CRC Press, about visualization. And I acquired these with Tamara monster who is a very well known name in data visualization. She's the other editor. And at the moment I am editing a book by Nigel Holmes, longtime infographics and data visualization designer. Nigel is a book that is ready to title joyful infographics, which is all about humor in the solicitation. And he makes exactly that point. By humor. I don't mean to if he says I don't mean trivializing the data, I don't mean making fun of the data. I mean, he says in the book, and I'm not calling or writing here, but the spirit that he says, I'm trying to make friends with my reader is what explained the conversation before like, I learned something cool. Let me show you how cool it is. This can be done in a humorous way, in a gently humorous way. And we both believe in that approach. And many people we have collaborated with share that period or spirit of fun and approachability and friendliness. We don't like to work with people. We're not friends. Right? We sort of like to try to limit ourselves to people we enjoy working with.
Rosemary Pennington
So Simon, you've worked as a data editor for Twitter, and you're working as the data editor at Google for the news lab. How did you get to this point in your career where data is sort of your life?
Simon Rogers Yeah, so I am actually the only data at Google. So I was working at The Guardian. I was you know, I'd always wanted to be a journalist. And I really found myself falling into this world of being the one who worked with the graphics team. And you know, For me, this is great because it was fun. It was the most fun I had with other paper I wasn't used to. But this was like this: the great stuff was working with a graphics team. And I think what was interesting to me was that, although there was a kind of, there was a treatment of graphics by news editors as things that could fill a space like an illustration, I felt like there was stories on the graphic people at work with people like Mike Robertson, The Guardian really felt like you could do an amazing kind of storytelling thing with with graphics and visuals. And yeah, I did a few jobs or the guardian. News I chose aside said for a bit. And then I became the news. So brackets graphics. And and so I became the persons working graphics at the same time while I was doing was I was collecting datasets, not because I'm a collector, but really because you know, once you've looked for GDP once, you kind of don't want to have to go through the whole rigmarole, again on carbon emissions, or whatever it is. So you're kind of collecting these datasets. And then around that time, there was this proposal to launch this kind of open API at The Guardian. And I was saying, why don't we do like a website where we just publish datasets that are cleaned up already to use, because there's this explosion, we could see there was this explosion in data going on. So that's what we did, really, we just set up the site, which was the Guardian data, blog, Guardian slash data. And it was really about publishing data. That's how it started. Over time, it became more analytical, we'd start producing visualizations, we'd explain work that was in the paper on the website and our graphic work and, and we'd talk about some of the issues around data and open data. And so for instance, we used to do this exercise where we would show a big center spread in the paper. And we put it online as though which was public spending. In the UK, what department has spent how much it's just like it was based off of this, all these annual government annual reports, which we collate. So it's quite a word way of pulling all together and putting it into a visual and we make data accessible. And then we'd write pieces about how it was ridiculous that it was so complicated and difficult to get that data. And why was it that the data is stored in different ways, and people don't really understand the difference between the two types of spending and all that sort of stuff. So we kind of got into that. And then I was offered a job at Twitter in San Francisco. And I thought it was a great opportunity, just personally, as well, for families to come live in the States. But also, I felt the work was fascinating, just like having all of that big data to play with and do something with which was great. So there's a great opportunity. And you have a fascinating kind of insight into this kind of huge data set they have. And then when Google set up with Google News Lab, which was basically kind of bridged in the news industry and Google, you know, they offered me a role and it was just, it was just great. So to have access to Google Trends is an incredible dataset to me as like, allows you to see what the world cares about and thinks about. And to get insights into VR. And it's kind of like, it's something very unifying to me about that data. Because we, you know, we're so worried about how, you know, isolated, we aren't split up for everybody else and, and polarized. And then you see this data that shows that we know we all search for that TV show, or you know, those people look for how to cut your own hair during lockdown, or how to bake your own bread or, or like one of the top searches was how to make slime, followed by how to get slime out of the carpet, things things like that, which is just like kind of fun and sweet. And, you know, though, that data is there. So that's how I got to do it. That was a few years ago. Yes, this might actually be the longest I've had a single roller and I'm really lucky to get to look at this every day. And you can see how when there's a crisis, like what's happening in Ukraine right now is on top such as how to help Ukraine. You know, there's a kind of optimism to that data, which I really like, especially at a time when we feel like, you know, the world has become a darker place, it's good to see that actually, people are looking for light in that.