Mary Roach

My name is Mary Roach and my pronouns are she and her.

You know, I wish I had a really cool inspiration story because I'm usually not inspired.

It's not like there's a moment of inspiration.

It's rather like

a period of random flailing.

I was just like, what about this?

I don't know.

I think this might work.

Nope, that's not going to work.

And then I move on to something else.

But what normally happens is I stumble onto something that I think is kind of cool and interesting.

It would be a good scene and a place to go.

And then I kind of build, I think, well, what would be the book that goes around this nugget?

Or sometimes there's two nuggets.

Like for Packing for Mars,

I had years and years ago for Vogue magazine of all places, because look at me, I was disturbed that I wrote for Vogue magazine.

I was a contributing editor at Vogue magazine.

It was hilarious.

I would hide when I went to meet my editors.

I was like, don't let me run into Anna Wintour.

She'll ban me.

So anyway, I was doing this story about osteoporosis.

You know, I was like, this isn't all that interesting.

What should I do to kind of punch it up?

And I thought, okay, I'll talk to an astronaut because, you know, you lose bone in space and it's something that astronauts have to deal with.

And if they discovered how to deal with it in space, we old ladies like me who are losing their bone could have a cure.

And so, okay.

So I'm on the phone with a guy and

He's like, it's an interesting conversation, but not really that interesting.

And we get to talking about other things.

And inevitably, with space, it comes around to, what's the toilet scenario?

He tells me that there's this, at NASA, kind of like a training potty.

It is a toilet with a camera down in the bowl facing up.

with a closed circuit TV next to the toilet showing you what that video camera is seeing.

So it's like this view of something you know very, very intimately, but you've never really seen it from that angle.

Yeah, yeah.

So it was kind of lodged in the back of my head.

And I'm like, someday I will write about that video toilet.

I will sit on that video toilet.

Fast forward many years now, I'm writing books, looking around for an idea.

And I'd come across the bedrest facility, which is a very cool place where people are paid to lie in bed for months.

It's like an analog place.

for losing muscle and bone in space.

You know, you kind of create those situations and they can find countermeasures and do tests.

Anyway, weird place.

So now I have two chunks, two chunks, nuggets.

And I'm like, what's the book that goes around this?

So that's how Packing for Mars, because I sort of realized that what happens here on Earth in terms of NASA is kind of more interesting than what happens up in space.

But that's usually how it happens.

It's rare that I have a desire to write a book about a certain topic.

There used to be these ads for Kohler Faucets.

It's this faucet company.

There's this ad where this couple comes into an architect's office with a Kohler faucet and they put it on the architect's desk.

So...

And they go, design a house around this.

Around this.

I was like, what assholes?

But anyway, like, the...

Toilet was my Kohler faucet.

It was the seed.

Build a book around this.

What was the seed, the germ of Replaceable You?

The Kohler faucet, yes.

Yeah, the Kohler faucet for this one.

I'd been thinking about

fat as a topic.

I didn't go in that direction, but I was speaking to this woman who actually works in a stem cell lab.

Leah Bellis is her name.

We were just sort of talking and bouncing things around.

And in the course of this conversation, she told me about a surgeon who had taken a man's middle finger and constructed a penis using the finger.

And I, of course, imagined

just the finger being like taken as is you know and put that like you know and also which is quite anatomically improbable thinking that it had been hooked up and that the man could now kind of like beckon and come over here baby and of course that's not true it was used inside

Some skin is a rigidity element.

But I'm like, I will meet this man.

I will go there, wherever this is.

Turned out to be in Tbilisi, Georgia.

They take the nail off?

No.

Well, it seemed to me that the whole finger, is that a phalange?

That means they're phalanges.

Metatarsal something.

Metatarsal.

Yeah.

Anyway, the whole thing, not just the bone, you know, with skin from often here under the side of the forearm gets used because it's hairless.

Although in this case, there was some hair there.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

We've all been there, now here.

Yeah, exactly.

So, yeah, it's basically like finger, wrap it up, kind of a pig in a blanket scenario.

But, you know, I saw the final product and it was very realistic.

Yeah.

And it could bend up, like you could bend it up.

It was like a Gumby thing.

That's handy.

So he can put on his pants.

He can sort of bend it, fold it out of the way.

It was more of a convenience situation.

Like those razor shooters, pop in your backpack, you're out of there.

Exactly.

Or a Murphy bed.

Yeah.

How are you recalling all of it?

Well, I am always doing a, what is it the Brits say?

Belts and braces, right?

So yeah, like a belt and suspenders.

I have a notebook and I'm writing down the things that I see and

and what's going on.

But if it's a situation where interesting things are coming my way verbally, quickly, I turn on a tape recorder.

And if things kind of wander off in a direction that isn't interesting, I sort of subtly

turn it off because I don't want to transcribe that shit.

I still transcribe stuff.

It's a weird thing.

I still want to hear, I mean, I know you can do it with transcription stuff, but it's still documents too long.

I edit as I go.

And anyway, so I I'm recording, I'm turning it off and on pausing on pausing.

I tend to forget to take photographs, but I've gotten better about that just so I can remember what somebody looks like, but I'm not, you know, shooting the whole room or anything.

No, I don't.

If people have said, you know, well, what, why don't you do, you know, you could be shooting video as you go and there could be a TV show.

And I'm like, that's,

No, I don't want to be the person going, let me stop you there.

The lighting isn't very good here.

And can we start over?

You know, I can't because the moment's gone.

Yeah.

What if that happened right when the woman in the office in Tbilisi had been showing me the slide of the penis sort of bent up?

It was actually holding a ceramic water pitcher.

Like, what if I had to go, oh, can we take that?

Can we do that again?

I don't know.

Because it was this moment I was like, oh, wow.

No, I make sure ahead of time to let people know that I need to have something to see.

You know, I just am very straightforward.

It's almost like I'm scouting locations for a documentary.

I need place.

I need people.

I need conversation.

I need things happening.

You know, a PowerPoint is of no use to me.

Get it out of here.

I have a zero tolerance policy for PowerPoints.

I need stuff going on.

What do you got?

What's coming up?

What can I see?

Sometimes that's been difficult.

For my third book, Bonk, which had to do with the study of sexual physiology, people researching sexual physiology.

Well, that means people coming into a lab and being aroused and having orgasms and

You know, and then I'm like, oh, can I be there with my notepad and my tape recorder?

Yeah, yeah.

It was actually ultrasound, which is even worse.

At least with an MRI, you would have some privacy, right?

It's like the guy with the white coat with the wand, the ultrasound wand on my belly and my husband is behind me.

And it's really like, I can't even believe.

I can't even believe that we did that.

I mean, it's a while ago.

That was 2008.

But at the time, I thought, this is going to be really fun to write up.

And it was incredibly awkward and embarrassing and weird.

But at the same time, I was like, this is going to be a fun chapter.

It was a situation where I initially really didn't want to go into stem cells and bioprinting.

It's just, it's very complicated.

And I don't have a background in genetics.

I'm a liberal arts major.

And I'm like, I don't even know if I want to take this off.

You know, science is...

like the era of bodies on slabs is gone.

We're talking protein receptors and genomes and things that can't easily be described visually for people in the way that I like to do it.

But then, you know, you immerse yourself in a topic and very quickly I realized that's absurd.

You really have to cover that to some extent.

So initially I'm always more interested in the human elements of things.

You know, this book, in addition to the finger thing,

And I had also around that time, the other Kohler faucet was I'd gotten an email from a reader, Judy Berna, who said, your next book needs to be about professional football referees, which made no sense to me at all.

I don't watch football.

I never talked about football.

Anyway, that was what she thought.

But we started communicating.

because I wrote back to her because I was intrigued by why she thought that.

But anyway, she happened to mention that she's an amputee.

And I said, oh, well, what's new in the world of amputation?

And as one does, and she said, well, I'm actually, I'm an elective amputee, elective amputation, meaning somebody who makes a decision or wants to have a limb cut off because it's not

performing.

Its functionality is compromised, but it is a healthy foot or hand or whatever it is.

And so it's very hard for her to find a surgeon willing to take off her foot.

Because it's just like, this is healthy tissue, you know, and it's like, there's a finality to amputation.

You're not going to put that foot back on.

And she had spent a long time trying to find somebody who would agree to take it off.

And I thought that was really interesting that we don't have the power over our own bodies in that way.

You know, it also has to do with that bias for wholeness, this sense that

you're just better off with all your parts, especially if we, on the outside of all this, if we see you, we want you to look whole, that kind of thing.

And it's absurd.

You know, she's much better off.

And there's a lot of people who have like foot drop or things that cause them to kind of shuffle.

They can get around, but they can't run.

They can't hike.

They can't do things that they want to do.

And particularly with a below the knee amputation, the things that you can do, you could get all these different attachments for different sports.

You know, you can

Pretty much do whatever you want to do.

Oh, yeah.

I mean, think back to the artificial limbs from the earlier...

half of the 1900s that just, well, even probably into the 60s and 70s, those flesh tone, stiff kind of mannequin parts that people were using.

You know, the whole idea was to pass, you know, that somebody couldn't tell.

And now people go around wearing shorts with a blade, you know, just a tech thing that works.

The functionality is what matters.

So it doesn't matter what materials.

And now it's kind of, I think, developed its own

cool to look a little bit bionic.

I think it's a much better time to have a prosthetic leg.

It's pretty hard to freak me out, Ali.

That's really, like the freakier it is, the more I'm just, wow, this is so cool.

I guess what was a little, a little freaky to me was this idea, okay, you mentioned the pigs, you know, xenotransplantation, you know, that's been a project ongoing for 30 years now, the effort to genetically tweak a pig so that its organs are

Don't create a reaction, like an immune reaction, a hyperimmune.

There's this hyperimmune response where if you were just to take an organ from a pig, put it into a person, the body just goes on the attack, like shuts it down.

It turns black.

It's gone.

And so they've taken that away.

So now there's still longer-term issues, but the place that we're at is you can buy a couple months' time.

There is one man who has got a – I think it's a kidney, and it was like five months as of June, and he's still going.

So if that would buy you enough time to –

be eligible for a human organ.

That's pretty cool.

Now, what I was going to say was a little skeevy to me was I was talking to someone about, well, what's the end point here?

And they were talking about chimerism or like chimera, chimerism, chimerism, I'm not sure the pronunciation.

Chimerism.

But it's been done with rodents to some extent where you would knock out

the genes that would create, say, a kidney, and then you'd put some human pluripotent stem cells in.

And so now there's this empty niche where the human cells would kind of go, oh, this is where we're supposed to do our thing.

And so you'd have a pig growing literally human organs.

And then you could kind of have, the term that was used was your own personal pig.

On reserve.

Like the way people have a car out in back for parts.

Or else I was like, with pizza, it's like the personal pie.

Wasn't that a term a few years back?

Personal pie, like your own personal pizza.

You'd have your personal pig.

And I'm like, I don't know about that.

I mean, I feel bad for pigs in general.

There's like 160,000 pig farms in China.

Isn't that many?

Anyway, we are eating just millions of pigs.

So okay, so a few more to produce organs.

Why is that such a...

awful thing it's not awful it's just it was a skeevy it's just very sci-fi very much you know the matrix kind of the pod people being used to create whatever the living people need

You know, they're plugged in.

I don't know.

I sure hope so.

I mean, that's my intent.

I really believe in

organ and tissue donation.

The number I was given at CORE, the Center for Organ Recovery that I visited in Pittsburgh, they said 75 people can benefit from one organ donor's.

It's bone, it's skin, it's tendon, it's muscle, it's an incredible gift.

And the follow-up question would be, so have you signed the documentation, Mary?

Have you signed the papers?

Right.

And I'm really, I feel terrible.

I haven't.

It has nothing to do with what I've seen.

Having seen organs taken from a body and having seen tissue removed, to me, that's just another kind of surgery.

Surgery is never pretty.

You know, it's messy and bloody and things are being cut and removed, but it's being done frequently.

for a really good reason and good things happen.

So there's absolutely no reason for me not to have signed those papers.

What if they get you and they don't want you?

It is.

I was told by the folks at CORE in Pittsburgh, they're like,

I think it was 90% of people don't make the, it's Yale has a higher acceptance rate because it's like, you can't, there's so many diseases that you might've had also lifestyle things.

If there's any needles, like if you had a tattoo, have you used needle drugs?

Have you had sex with any used needle drugs?

Have you this, have you that?

Did you ever have this disease or that disease?

So they don't want a lot of people.

But if you get rejected, your feelings at that point can't be hurt.

Yeah, I love that like CORE, they give the person who's getting the body part, the bit of bone or whatever it is they're getting, they give them the option to write a letter to the family.

And I read some of those letters and they're so nice.

They're so lovely.

You've made this huge difference in the life of my husband or me or whatever.

And that goes to the family of the donor, which is lovely.

And I hope that they all do that because what a great thing to hear from the person who got

Your Achilles heel or whatever.

Yeah.

Tendon.

Your Achilles heel.

I don't want anybody else's Achilles heel.

Yeah.

Well, the operating room that I was in for this book was an orthopedic operating room, so it sounded like a wood shop.

Nope, don't like it.

There are literally power saws going, a reamer.

There was a reamer going.

Nope, nope, nope.

It was like reaming out to get rid of the damaged cartilage and kind of prepare the surface where you're going to put the socket for the ball, the ball and socket joint.

And then there's a surgical mallet, which is a metal mallet.

And it sounds exactly like putting in a tent stake.

Yeah.

So those are the sounds that you hear.

I don't think I heard anything squishy.

Sometimes if they're doing the laser cauterizing wand, there's kind of a cooked flesh smell.

Does it smell like barbecue?

A little bit.

Yeah, I remember saying the first time I smelled that to the surgeon, do you find that smell a little bit pleasant?

What'd they say?

He said, that's really morbid.

And I'm like, I don't really think morbid is the right adjective for that.

Impertinent, maybe?

Inappropriate?

Wrong?

I would say...

Did you see a lot of 3D printers?

I spent a day and a half in a

Carnegie Mellon has a 3D bioprinting lab.

It was super interesting.

They were not printing bone, but in general, extracellular material like collagen and things that don't need to be fed.

If you're printing an organ or you're printing skin, you need to feed it.

It's like, what does that mean?

You're going to print the capillaries.

You're going to hope that the thing grows its own capillaries, which the body is really great at doing.

up to a point.

So that's kind of what they're trying to tease out.

How much do we have to print versus how much can we let leave to the body to do to kind of like create on its own?

There are 3D printed, probably titanium bits and pieces of bone that take the person's MRI and match that way.

But those sorts of things for sure are being used in addition to bits and pieces of cadaver donor bone.

So they are doing some amazing stuff with

Artificial materials for broken, bashed up joints, bones.

So if you're not using plastic like that, if you're using squishy material, that whole process of doesn't work well because it's squishy.

You need a solid base that you're building from the bottom up.

So you really can't do it.

It would be like building a cathedral out of tofu.

You can't do it.

So the researcher, Adam Feinberg, had patented this method where they'd have a support gel.

You've got this gel that you're printing it

inside of and that is supporting the stuff that you're printing so it doesn't go all would you umpus and wiggly and then you'd heat it up and then the support bath melts away it's not printing a brochure you know i mean it's similar you know like you know you've got different extruder heads and there are different kinds of bioprinting you know i was just looking at this one extrusion method which kind of

You know, similar to the kind that you described.

You know, when I was in China, I was talking to the guy who's been working for 30 years on xenotransplantation, you know, having these organs available.

And while I was there, before I left, rather, I was on this, there's some pig news website.

What's it called?

I can't remember.

It's got a great name, like

pig progress.

It's pig progress.

I was going through back issues of pig progress.

And I came across, there's a 26-story piggery in China, 26 stories of vertical farming.

And there's this elevator that can lift like 26 tons.

And there's pig facial recognition.

And it's just kind of an amazing thing.

So having a conversation with Xiaoping Dong.

Anyway, I was having a conversation with him.

And I said, this is, you know, right now we're talking about

trying to get one organ in one person to last six months.

But I was like, what's this going to be like?

We're going to have like 26-story piggeries that are like churning out organs.

They're going to be for organs.

And he goes, yes, that is the future.

You know, he was very enthusiastic.

But then, you know, I...

The other side of that is I spent some time at a stem cell biotech company, and I was like, well, how far in the future where we can grow from scratch, just grow organs?

He's like, that's science fiction right now.

So the other thing is that things are changing so fast that the future that you would have predicted two years ago has changed direction.

You know, there's ways now where you can take somebody say blood cells and regress them to pluripotency where they're kind of like that.

They've got the potential to become anything and you can instruct them to become a different kind of cell.

And the hope is that one day we could grow whole organs.

But right now, you know, you're just talking about clusters and patches, you know, you could create some dopamine producing neuron cells that would help someone with Parkinson's, but creating a whole organ.

Say.

liver is way off.

Printing it or growing it from scratch, it's a way off.

But what I'm saying is, okay, the pluripotent stem cell scene, you take one person's and you regress them and then you train them and then you put that into one person.

It's a bespoke process.

It's very expensive.

It's not going to be covered by insurance anytime soon.

But what the hope is, is that there could be kind of off the shelf, pre-regressed pluripotent stem cells

that evade the immune system.

They're called stealth cells.

And in that case, you wouldn't have to take each individual patient, you know, take some blood cells, regress them,

train them to become something else, and then put them in.

You would skip the regression.

So you'd be ready to go with these off-the-shelf pluripotent stem cells.

So everything is changing so fast that predicting what's going to be out there is really hard.

You know, I just covered one particular procedure, which isn't very commonly done.

I had dinner with the director of the Cedars-Sinai Institute.

transgender surgery and health center.

He's a urologist, a surgeon, and we met at an Italian restaurant across the street from the urology tower.

And he was explaining this procedure, which is done sometimes if the more typical operation for a trans woman doesn't work out.

And the more typical operation is to kind of invert the penis, you know, to do it that way.

But if that hasn't worked, you can actually take a stretch of the colon

and use that.

And I was just fascinated by just kind of the surgical creativity, you know, that somebody would go, well, I don't know, a colon, it's a tube, it's stretchy, it's moist.

I don't know, maybe that would work.

Let's give a shot.

Yeah.

And that's actually not that new.

Vaginoplasty using the intestinal tract has been done for, I think the

Earliest one was in the late 1800s.

Maybe it was early 1900s.

But anyway, it's been around a while, but it's been finessed quite a bit.

I was fascinated in kind of the amazing flexibility of the human body.

You know, you could take this organ that evolved as a digestive organ.

and turn it into a sexual organ.

And it works well.

With surgery, if you don't have an FDA clearance procedure, it's sort of like, well, if you've done something similar, and you have an idea to kind of change it a little bit to modify it, and you explain it to the patient, you just do it.

I was just kind of blown away by

kind of the resourcefulness, you know, and they'll say, well, what do we got in there?

We got, well, here's this kind of tubular thing that could be a vagina.

And I was like, whoa, does that, you know, peristalsis, you know, the muscle, the contractions that move food along.

I thought, well, that could be kind of sexually exciting.

And he's like, Mary, no, that's a subtle contraction.

That does not, not part of the advantages of.

Was he like good thinking though?

Yeah.

I was also, I said, you know, when you're doing a vulvaplasty, say,

With a vaginoplasty.

I said, so the placement of the clitoris, I know from a previous book, there's a fair amount of variation in how far the clitoris is from the vagina.

And there's been greater orgasmicity the closer it's located.

I said, have you ever thought of just putting it really close?

Because there's some animals where it's almost like inside and

the vagina.

And I was like, well, that could be kind of great.

And he's like, you know, he was very nice.

He was like, good idea, Mary.

I like that idea, but no.

He said, for one thing, you know, trans women often, they want to look normal.

They want it to look the way it should look.

And there is a certain amount of variation with the placement of the clitoris, but not so much that it's like inside that.

And he said also with a neo-vagina, there's a certain amount of dilation that has to happen after surgery and some douching.

To have a clitoris right there would be uncomfortable, was the answer.

I thought it was a good idea.

Yeah.

Okay, I love this question because there is a fact that I learned not that long ago that isn't in any of my books.

And here is the fact.

Okay.

Okay.

When you have a murder victim and you're trying to determine...

the time of death, and you're looking at the insects, right?

Like how far has the body degraded?

And you're looking at the insect life and the maggots, etc.

If the person had been on cocaine, you have to adjust your timeline because the insects feed really fast.

No.

That's what I was told.

This is really good.

This is really good.

Isn't it really good?

Let's keep eating.

Isn't that amazing?

But anyway.

I don't even remember where I learned that or who told me, but it was a science person.

Of course.

It was an ologist.

No, I wish I did.

I don't have another book idea.

And I'm always open to ideas if anybody listening wants to share an idea of and it doesn't even have to be this kind of, you know, the kind of book that I do is a little exhausting.

It's like 17 rabbit holes.

I'd love to go down one

long rabbit hole.

It doesn't even have to be science.

So, you know, if you have, if you've got an idea, something in your life that you think, God, Mary Roach should write about this.

Let me know.

No, I don't know what's next.

I don't.

That's the hardest part for me.

That is brilliant.

That is so me.

With each...

book that i do it gets a little harder to get access because uh people have liability concerns i think for this one i was turned down initially i ended up going to the extracorporeal life support laboratory which is they look at devices that support the body outside the body like ecmo

The guy who invented ECMO, Bob Bartlett, runs the lab.

And initially, the public affairs office, they answered my email and then they just ghosted me.

And I was like, what?

I kept writing to them.

Finally, I called Bob Bartlett.

I'm like, what's the deal?

He's like, you know what?

It's my lab.

You just come here and we'll let you in.

So I go there and I said, what the heck happened?

And he said, oh, the public affairs people were really concerned that you're an animal rights fanatic.

Anyway, so there's a lot of wariness and nervousness.

And I get that.

People are worried about lawsuits.

They're worried about social media.

They're worried about everything.

It's a time of being worried.

So I think that being allowed to go, I mean, I went to Chengdu, China, because I couldn't go to United Therapeutics or eGenesis, the two companies here that are creating pigs that have

more acceptable organs to humans.

So yeah, I mean, thank you to both of them because I had a great time in Chengdu, but that can be very frustrating and I don't blame them.

Like as my agent said, Mary, can you blame them?

I mean, who wants Mary Roach sort of mucking around and who knows what she's going to say, who knows what she's going to do, you know?

Oh, for sure.

Yeah, for sure.

So many of those moments.

I remember when I was reporting for Packing for Mars, I was up in the Arctic on Devon Island, which NASA uses as an analog for the moon and Mars and

I had a week there when I didn't really need the whole week.

So I just talked to a lot of people thinking, I don't see what they do, these researchers.

And there was a guy who studied, he was a suit guy, and he was working on creating an escape suit.

So this would be a suit where if something goes wrong, either as the spaceship is going up or the capsule is coming down,

at any different altitude.

And it's really tricky because depending on how much atmosphere you have, you know, your parachute has no air to unfold or you're going to burn up.

So it's a very tricky suit to create and system to create.

Anyway, he's explaining it all to me.

And I'm like, maybe I'll write something about this.

I don't know.

And he had given me a mission patch.

Okay.

That's a patch that has the name of the mission, the number and all the crew members names around it.

And I didn't really, I'm like, oh, thank you.

And it was for Columbia.

And one of the names on the patch is Clark, Laurel Clark.

And I realized in the middle of his explaining things that his name is Clark.

Like that was his wife.

Wow.

So his wife had died and that was what was motivating him.

You know, he believed that it can be survivable, that you can create a survival suit for surviving an explosion at altitude or, you know, a breakup, maybe not.

depending on the type of explosion.

But that just changed the whole tenor of the conversation.

And it was, you know, you have those moments where, you know, like Mark Randolph, the guy whose iron lung I had spent time in, you know, I went there thinking, this is a chapter about negative and positive pressure breathing and about iron lungs and what is that like?

And, you know, and all of a sudden he was talking about his marriage to Mona and how hard it

you know, everything that he'd done for her.

And he was reciting when she wakes up in the morning and I take her from the iron lung to put her in the hospital bed.

I use a pulley and he just recited all the steps like it was like a prayer, you know, like an incantation.

And I realized sometimes what you think the chapter is about needs to scooch over and you need to give this person room to talk about what it was like

to be with her.

And like, you don't always anticipate the emotional moments because I'm kind of a goober, you know, I'm just kind of like out there to have fun and kind of find cool, interesting things that I can bring to readers.

And all of a sudden I realized I'm stepped into somebody's world and there's more to it than that.

It's such a good book.

Thank you so much.

That is so nice to hear because you're like the goddess of science communication.

That's not true.

No, but you find these people who have this passion for what they do and they're good at explaining it and they're charismatic and they're interesting and fun and you just bring that out in people and you get people to see

what science is.

And it's not, you know, the slog that you thought it was when you were in high school, you know, that it's so interesting and it takes people places.

And

I don't know.

You do that like no one else.

No, no, no.

But you are the best.

I got all teared up talking about you.

That's how much I respect you.