Kat Griffith and Chris Krieger

[00:00] KAT GRIFFITH: Can I read your for yours first?

[00:02] CHRIS KRIEGER: Sure.

[00:03] KAT GRIFFITH: Okay. So, Chris from Glencoe, Oklahoma. Typical voting preference, any other party? Interests, reading, suspense fiction, socioeconomic, historical, environmental, nonfiction, and woodworking. Woodworking and cooking. Quirky. Well read, world traveling, divorced father of one daughter, comfortable in the wood shop, woods, library and kitchen. Familiar with SPSS, Excel, Word, ArcGIS, I'm not sure how to say that.

[00:39] CHRIS KRIEGER: GI.

[00:40] KAT GRIFFITH: But just got first smartphone at one year ago. Sometimes profanity still involved, haha. Read a lot, TV only linked to DVD player for 10 plus years. convinced grandchildren will rightly curse us for their Mad Max like world if we don't change soon. All right. Glad to meet you, Chris.

[01:01] CHRIS KRIEGER: Okay.

[01:02] KAT GRIFFITH: All right.

[01:03] CHRIS KRIEGER: Well, Kat, you are in Ripon.

[01:07] KAT GRIFFITH: Ripping. Yep, ripping.

[01:09] CHRIS KRIEGER: Wisconsin. Your typical voting preference is Democratic. You place yourself. slightly conservative on the slightly on the conservative side from from middle spectrum. Interest, you're a writer, mostly essays for a Quaker magazine and a newspaper columns on county governance. You serve on the county board. You love learning about stuff in order to write articles, doing write alongs with sheriff deputies observing 9/11 dispatcher shifts, Learning about addiction treatment, finding out about how highways are built, new road salting techniques, public housing, county finances. I love it all. I homeschooled for nine years. I also taught high school for 11 years. Before all that, I was an agricultural agricultural economist focusing on sustainable agriculture. Before that, I lived and worked in Latin America for many years. I have frequent side gigs as a Spanish English interpreter. You grew up in Boston and Vermont. You currently live in a small town in rural Wisconsin where you love biking and kayaking. You're happily married and have two adult children. Sad thing. Both your mother and your sister died by suicide. I'm sorry. My Quaker faith is very. Your Quaker faith is very important to you. And you are politically active, though more by issue than party. You're proud that 70% of Republicans voted for you in your last election. Immigration is your most passionate issue. You care a lot about the environment, too. Some attributes or recent events, you recently lost a loved one, lost a job, another major event, a parent and animal lover. Wow, okay, there's a lot going on there.

[03:04] KAT GRIFFITH: Yeah, I'm busy.

[03:07] CHRIS KRIEGER: What made you decide to do the OSS, the conversation?

[03:14] KAT GRIFFITH: Well, it's actually similar to things that I do pretty often anyways, because I live in a purple town in a red county. And so I have friends across the spectrum, especially from my homeschooling time and from being on the county board. And I just find, I just like the stimulation of, oh, that's a different way to look at it. Sometimes the differences can be kind of head banging, I'm not going to lie, but there's also times when it's like, no, that changes my mind. Okay. So I guess this just looked like a way to meet people that I might not meet here and do some of what I kind of like to do anyway.

[03:53] SPEAKER C: Sure.

[03:53] CHRIS KRIEGER: All right. Well, you know, I've always been passionate I'm fascinated by a lot of stuff that you mentioned doing both with the writing and with the city, the county governance. Does your county have a board and people sit on it to vote on how to spend the county money? Is that how it works in Wisconsin?

[04:09] SPEAKER C: Right.

[04:10] KAT GRIFFITH: Yeah, we, yeah, we have a.

[04:13] SPEAKER C: Our.

[04:13] KAT GRIFFITH: Board has 25 members, which is big enough that nobody feels like they have any power, but there are a number of standing committees that have to do a lot of work. And so I think the reason for the number is to have five people on a committee, which I actually think is a good number. Sure. There's a lot to decide. There's a lot to keep track of.

[04:31] CHRIS KRIEGER: Right, right. Well, that's something a good way to do it. In this county, we have five county commissioners and there have been shenanigans from time to time. And it seems like a lot of it, they just don't, it's not covered in the paper. You actually, it's very inconvenient to find what they're doing. It takes a long time.

[04:49] KAT GRIFFITH: That is a true thing. You know, I, that's actually one of the reasons that I started writing articles about county affairs was because it's a, it's a level of government that is completely ignored by the press most of the time because most, most news outlets are either very local, like a town or they're state level. There aren't very many that cover county level. They just, it's just not a thing. And so nobody feels like it's their job to cover that stuff. And the other thing is that a lot of what the county does is, I mean, the reason counties were created was to be the boots on the ground for the federal and state governments to carry out the programs that they mandate. And that doesn't sound all that interesting, although it turns out that is where the rubber meets the road. I mean, it's actually more interesting than you would think. But we are given a lot of instructions, a lot of mandates. We don't get to play around very much with our own policies. I mean, there's some room for that, but not as much as you would hope.

[05:48] CHRIS KRIEGER: Sure, sure. Well, I like the number five too, because that presents the three-person cronyism and it has the number, so there's no ties. You can make a decision and go on.

[06:02] KAT GRIFFITH: So do you have, in addition to your five county supervisors, do you have, or commissioners or whatever you call them, what sort of other government do you have? Do you have an administrator? Do you have an elected executive? What do you have? Because five people is not enough to keep track track of what a county has to do unless you've got like a paid administrator that does a lot.

[06:25] CHRIS KRIEGER: Well, there are different county agencies that knows a wave of a county election board. We have a county water board. There are school, supervised education is separate.

[06:39] KAT GRIFFITH: Okay.

[06:40] CHRIS KRIEGER: Each school has its own superintendent. And so there is a county. sheriff's department, and they're fairly autonomous. You know, they, they answer other state law enforcement agencies, but they, they don't answer to anybody else in the, in the county, except they do try and coordinate with, you know, elected people in their bail away. Each city in, in the county has to have its own city government if it wants it, if it's Incorporated. So I live in the county seat. And so we, we do have a city council, but it's, it's relatively small. It's, it's also five people in a mayor.

[07:22] KAT GRIFFITH: Wow.

[07:23] SPEAKER C: Wow.

[07:23] KAT GRIFFITH: That's kind of minimal government. We, we, I think Wisconsin has a lot more people doing it. But maybe bigger legislature, bigger city councils, bigger county boards, though they vary.

[07:35] CHRIS KRIEGER: Sure. We're, I think we're somewhere around four, 4 and a half, 5 million people in the state. So we're not a big state and Stillwater is the county seat, is the biggest city and I think it's it's right at 50,000 when 20,000 college students are here.

[07:51] KAT GRIFFITH: So okay.

[07:52] SPEAKER C: Yeah.

[07:54] KAT GRIFFITH: It's comparable to our yeah, okay. Our county is 100,000 people.

[07:58] CHRIS KRIEGER: Okay, sure. Well, and plus you guys have had more time to be, you know, to get your act together. You know, Oklahoma is a pretty mind-numbingly conservative state and it's not necessarily conservative for good reasons. It's just conservative because that's what they are. And, you know, every county in the state has carried the conservative presidential candidate for the past four presidential elections.

[08:28] KAT GRIFFITH: So, yeah, that's, it's here, I mean, I'm glad that I live in a sort of purple place because Well, for one thing, it helps you avoid sort of ongoing group think. Like Ripon voted twice for Obama and then three times for Trump. It's right on the margins. We can go either way. It's mostly about 50-50, but depending on the election, it can go a couple points either way. Well, tell me more about what you like to read. I like some of your interests, too.

[09:02] CHRIS KRIEGER: Well, I, I do, I read a lot of different kinds of, you know, I like adventure fiction just for entertainment. So, you know, Sanford or about the Mississi, the Minnesota detective or John Grisham, people like that. But I also read, well, for lack of a better term, I'd say chick flicks, you know, like, uh, books. Books by Fannie Flagg or Lee Smith or Sharon McCrumb?

[09:33] SPEAKER C: I.

[09:35] KAT GRIFFITH: Do mostly nonfiction and I noticed you had some nonfiction in there. What remind me of what that was?

[09:41] CHRIS KRIEGER: Well, I usually have two to four books running at any one time depending on what I'm thinking about. So I do read a lot of travel logs by people who travel. extensively in an area where I'd like to go. So I have a whole hallway in my shelf that's just travel logs by area from the Antarctic to Asia, Central Asia, Eastern Europe. I study, I read a lot of American history and American settlement. I'm fascinated by, you know, unlike most other countries, we get to study how our frontier just moved for, you know, more than 200 years from east to west and and how did that change, you know, from frontier to more settled happen over time? And so that fascinates me. And so I read economics. I read books by Naomi Klein. I think she has a lot of common sense on her shoulders, frankly, and I think she well documents her position. So, Yeah, so I'm trying to think like, you know, I've read part, I've skimmed other stuff that's more popular like Thomas Friedman or, you know, Warren Buffett's son has written a book about, you know, solutions to where we're at today, more from an agricultural or economic point of view. Yeah, and so I read geography books too. And sometimes, like right now, I'm reading a book by a professor called, his last name is Unwin, and it's the character of geography. And it's all about how geography has changed as a study, and it talks about how do we know what we know. Which I like to think about, because a lot of times we just say, well, I know something, and we don't really bother to think, well, how do we really know that?

[11:38] KAT GRIFFITH: Yeah. I had a wonderful period early on in my career where I was hired as a research assistant by a geographer to do research for a book he was writing about Costa Rica. And I was in Costa Rica and he was in DC. And he would just send me these questions and I'd get on a bus and go to San Jose and start poking around. And I loved it. It was incredibly stimulating. I think the fact that he was a geographer meant that he was a big picture guy. and nothing was off limits. Like anything that might have a geographic pattern was of interest to him. And yeah, very, very broad, very broad interests and a great storyteller. So that was a really fun collaboration.

[12:18] CHRIS KRIEGER: Well, you know, I think you mentioned what you were writing and I like the idea that you go around and you get in the deputy's car or you try and learn more hands-on experience as you're going to write an article or I guess, make a decision. It made me think there's a great author called Joseph Mitchell. And he wrote for the Saturday.

[12:44] SPEAKER C: Not.

[12:44] CHRIS KRIEGER: The Saturday Evening Post, the New Yorker. He wrote for the New Yorker for years. And there's a collection of his works are in a book called Up in the Old Hotel. And what he did was he did what you do. Like, There was a time in the early, earlier 1900s where the Democrats and Republicans used to throw these different kinds of barbecues where they had lots of barbecue and lots of beer and that's how they were going to get votes. And so, and there are two very specific ways to prepare the barbecue. It was very political, it was very cultural. And so he goes and hangs out with the different guys and how do they season the meat and how do they set up for crowds and but he also he found a black community that was ## ### end of a of a railroad line or a commuter train line and it was kind of forgotten about it was scrub pasture was a long commute and so he happened to just encounter you know some black people always on a train I guess he took and so he went out and got to know them and learn about this whole community He followed one of the city rat killers and talked all about rats in New York basements.

[14:00] KAT GRIFFITH: Kind of like Studs Terkel.

[14:02] CHRIS KRIEGER: Yeah, yeah. Not quite as big.

[14:06] KAT GRIFFITH: I love that. I love to just ask people if I go to the hair, I mean, the lady who cuts my hair, sometimes I'll ask her things like, so what was your nightmare haircut? What was the worst experience you had cutting somebody's hair? You never know what kind of story you're gonna get.

[14:23] CHRIS KRIEGER: Sure.

[14:24] KAT GRIFFITH: So, yeah.

[14:25] CHRIS KRIEGER: You know, I went to India and Nepal for several months, years ago, and I didn't hang out with too many westerners most of the time. It was convenient to go from A to B sometimes because you're always a target, you know, for very proficient backpack snatchers. But I could just sit on a street corner and watch people for Hours.

[14:52] KAT GRIFFITH: I did the same thing. Say more, keep going.

[14:56] CHRIS KRIEGER: Well, you know, that's when you get to see how people are doing things.

[15:00] SPEAKER C: And.

[15:02] CHRIS KRIEGER: We all have to do the same basic things and how that works out in different cultures, different cities, different times is fascinating to me. You know, is it determined by the environment, by the culture, by the individual? I just die the specific task at hand. But so I would just wait like I in Kathmandu, there's a place where there's a few shrines where you can make sacrifices. And this one sadhu was would come and he was very, very portly, obviously not suffering or sacrificing much at all. And but he would charge for his picture and he just happened to catch me every Every time I caught it, I was trying to capture his picture. He was very photogenic. He had the hair and the mustache and the beard. He was styling. And finally, after probably two and a half, three hours, I just happened to get him. It was a great shot. And then he looked up and he realized what I had done and he smiled. And then I did ask him if he wanted me to scratch the photo. and, you know, he said no, and.

[16:12] SPEAKER C: But.

[16:14] CHRIS KRIEGER: So that was, that, that's what I like to do because, you know, like, when I went trekking, I would, I handed my backpack to one of the porters, and I carried the, the basket with the tump line around the forehead, and, and I traveled with them for, for two days, and we, but, and I, I would eat with them and their kid, but I still had to pay tourist prices for my food, so, but. It was fun to just, it took forever to have a conversation because of the language differences, but it was fun to do.

[16:49] KAT GRIFFITH: Yeah, I traveled around South America by myself in my early 20s and what I did, I did get together with other Canadians and Americans and what all, but I always tried to arrive at a new place by myself because I wanted to be open to meeting people. I didn't want to be part of a closed society. And if I was with somebody who looked like me, I was basically unapproachable by local people. And one of the things I would do is I would just go to a plaza and open up my journal so I'd have sort of something to do. I mean, I'd have a pen in my hand and a notebook, you know, but. But I'm just kind of looking around, you know, and people would feel like they could come up to me, you know, people, kids would. Would just be curious and I and I went to a lot of out of the way places. I wasn't always in big cities. So to have a foreign woman all by herself out in, you know, some little town in Ecuador somewhere like that would attract interest. So I would just meet people.

[17:52] CHRIS KRIEGER: That sounds like a blast. There's there's a great book by a travel author from from Ireland, Derblu Murphy. and she believes and have you have you heard of her?

[18:03] SPEAKER C: No.

[18:04] CHRIS KRIEGER: Well, she's a very liberal. I want to say she's in the UK Communist Party or was she's deceased now, but she believed in traveling by local transit or by bicycle or animal or foot. She did not want to join the tourists closed circle like you mentioned.

[18:23] KAT GRIFFITH: Right.

[18:24] CHRIS KRIEGER: And so she rode her bike from England to India. at one point in the 60s, and, you know, she went through the Middle Eastern country. She's been held up by bandits in Cameroon. And she, she and her daughter took, I think it was a 650 or 850 mile trip in the Andes, tracing a, a missionary's route, and it's called eight feet in the Andes, and. She has her biases and you can see them, you know, she's very impatient about getting beer when she's at someplace ## ### end of the day. She, you know, if she's had a miserable day and she has to wait for her beer, she's not happy. But once you learn the biases that somebody have, then you can translate the data for yourself.

[19:14] KAT GRIFFITH: But, yeah, no, I agree. I'm curious, like, Where do you like to get your news? I will say that one of my favorite sources of news is the Economist. And one of the reasons that I like them is that they're more conservative than I am, but they're very clear when they're saying what their opinion is. I mean, they don't shy away from giving their opinion, but they label it as their opinion. And I appreciate that. you know, I mean, I suppose every outlet is selective in what they choose to report. So am I when I'm writing articles about county affairs. But yeah, and I also appreciate the range of there is some range of views there and also I just love the writing. It's just some of it is just great writing.

[20:05] CHRIS KRIEGER: I think reading the Economist is, I mean, you could have college classes based on just one issue.

[20:11] KAT GRIFFITH: Oh, totally. Totally.

[20:13] CHRIS KRIEGER: It just brings in so many terms and ways to look at things for economics, for logistics, for, I mean, I'm not a business major, but, and it's.

[20:23] KAT GRIFFITH: Not just a U.S. perspective. That's the other great thing about it, is that it completely bypasses the usual ways that we slice and dice. You know, it's like, no, this is what we're seeing from England, and this is what we're seeing, you know, and they actually provide systematic coverage of Asia and Africa and other parts of the world.

[20:44] CHRIS KRIEGER: So there's a, I noticed there's a specific India version for India. You know, it's the economist slash India. When you were in South America, was there one there? The economist for, you know, Bolivia or Brazil?

[21:01] KAT GRIFFITH: You know, when I was traveling in South America, I was not aware, I mean, this was back in the 1980s, And I didn't find access to English-speaking media. I read local papers and stuff sometimes in Spanish. My Spanish was marginally good enough to do that ## ### time. But no, anything in print in English was incredibly precious. I mean, people would trade their last whatever, their last roll of film for a VS Naipaul novel or something. You just were so hungry for anything in your language. And I mean, I remember like some of the things, one of the things that was funny was that the things you could get, like what there were always copies floating around were the Teachings of Don Juan, Endless Doris Lessing novels, Dune novels, you know, by Frank Herbert. And, oh gosh.

[22:00] CHRIS KRIEGER: Now Doris Lessing.

[22:01] KAT GRIFFITH: Oh, and there was Doris Lessing. She wrote kind of highbrow fiction, very character oriented, very long.

[22:10] CHRIS KRIEGER: Cave dweller, something like that. I think I have, I think I've read some of her stuff.

[22:14] KAT GRIFFITH: I think she wrote one called Four Gates to the City or something that I remember reading. I mean, she's a very good writer. There was also, there was also, was it the guy who wrote the Pelican Brief?

[22:25] CHRIS KRIEGER: You mentioned him.

[22:26] KAT GRIFFITH: One of your, Grisham. Yeah, I think, was he writing then? I kind of think there were some Grisham novels.

[22:32] CHRIS KRIEGER: Anyway, you just, there was what there.

[22:34] KAT GRIFFITH: Was, you know, you just, right, right. And there were books that I read.

[22:38] CHRIS KRIEGER: Three times Now because you that said was that all you I had. lived in South America for some time.

[22:43] KAT GRIFFITH: Yeah, I traveled, my first trip to Latin America was after college. I traveled in South America, five countries for eight months, just kind of bumming around and trying to figure out, do I want to come back? Do I want to live here? 'Cause I'd gotten really interested in Latin America in college, but I didn't know exactly what I wanted to do with it. And then I decided, yes, I do want to go back. And I thought that I wanted to work in some version of economic development. So I spent another year in the US earning money and researching projects, organizations, places to go. And then I started that my next trip in Nicaragua. So this was just after a few years after the revolution, which ## ### time I certainly supported. I mean, some also was bad news in my opinion. And ## ### time, although I saw reasons to be worried about the Sandinistas, they had also done a number of things right early on. And so I was there for about six months. I was there for their first election in 1984. And then I went to Costa Rica to renew my visa and ended up staying for three and a half years, just found one thing after another to do. And then I came back to the States to go to grad school when I got a consulting job for the Ford Foundation and they paid me less than they paid their taxi drivers because I didn't have any credentials. So they were hot. They would hire me because I could do the work. And the guy, the geography that I'd worked for, put them in touch with me.

[24:12] SPEAKER C: And.

[24:12] KAT GRIFFITH: And, you know, they liked what I could do, but they weren't going to pay me. So I came back to get a degree because I thought, well, I want to stay here. And then I met my husband, and then we ended up going to Chile for pre-dissertation research for him for six months, and then we went back for a year for him to do his. ultimately dissertation research, and then we did a sabbatical in Costa Rica many years later.

[24:39] CHRIS KRIEGER: So, so what do you get to live in a lot of mountainous communities when you were in Chile or travel through them when you were there?

[24:47] KAT GRIFFITH: So when we lived in Chile, we actually lived in Chiyan, which was a provincial capital, kind of like the Fresno of Chile. I mean, it was like very agricultural. You know, a lot of used implement dealers and stuff like that. It wasn't any kind of cultural capital. It wasn't a part of Chile that's famous for anything other than maybe like sugar beets. But, you know, beautiful mountains in the distance. And we had a great year. We had a baby and it was a very memorable, memorable good year.

[25:22] CHRIS KRIEGER: It sounds fascinating. Now, did you grow up in the Quaker faith or was that something you were exposed to later on as an adult and converted to that?

[25:32] KAT GRIFFITH: So I had an aunt and uncle. My mother's sister and brother-in-law were actually really well-known Quakers. So I knew that it was a thing. But I was raised in an Episcopal church. My mother was deeply religious, but the church kind of wasn't. It was kind of weak tea. And I left. I left the church when I was about 14 or 15, when I just wasn't finding anything there. And I was actually the only kid over the age of like seven. And then in college, I got really involved in politics. And I was a pretty, how shall I put it? I was a person with a lot of inner conflict, a lot of unresolved issues. I was kind of complicated. and I met a lot of complicated people, a lot of angry activists, and I was potentially in that camp, but then I met some Quakers and it's like, these people have something I want. They were different. And that's what really drew me into it. And so I started attending Friends meetings in Chicago when I was in college. And then when I was in Costa Rica, I wound up in a Quaker community up in the mountains, and I joined the Society of Friends there. lived there for three and a half years. And I've been a Quaker ever since. So that's when I was 25.

[26:53] SPEAKER C: Yeah.

[26:55] KAT GRIFFITH: How about you? Do you have a religious tradition?

[26:57] CHRIS KRIEGER: Well, I've been in recovery for almost 25 years now.

[27:04] KAT GRIFFITH: Gotcha. So yeah, that's a 12-step is a religious tradition.

[27:09] CHRIS KRIEGER: Well, I look at it as spiritual, not religious.

[27:14] SPEAKER C: Sure.

[27:16] CHRIS KRIEGER: But that's very important to me and I practice the best I can. I was raised Catholic and I knew by third, I went to Catholic schools every year, but kindergarten and my senior year and I did skip seventh and eighth. I went from sixth to ninth because I went to a geeky all boys nerdy college preparatory college school.

[27:40] SPEAKER C: And.

[27:41] CHRIS KRIEGER: But I knew by third or fourth grade that Catholicism was not for me. You know, I mean, I had a. The adult library card before I was in fourth grade, and I. I've listened to NPR probably since I was 12 years old. I used to play it for the classical music white noise so I could do other stuff.

[28:01] SPEAKER C: And.

[28:02] CHRIS KRIEGER: And then, of course, when the programs came on, I just kept listening, so.

[28:06] SPEAKER C: Right.

[28:08] CHRIS KRIEGER: So I really believe in something, but actually that's the thing that gets me, and maybe you have a theological explanation. I think it's great when everyone has a spiritual program, something that helps them build their own close conscious contact with a higher power, God, whatever. But you know, I have been on five continents and I have been befriended by all kinds of people and hosted by them and aided. And some of those people weren't just, you know, nice people. You could tell that they very clearly, from any objective metric, had a close conscious contact with a higher power. And they got there by very different means than, you know, like an Oklahoma fundamental evangelical person. And so my question is why, it seems like all kinds of things get mixed up and included that don't need to be, like real concerns about power and resource distribution when we go from having a program to having the only program. I've never understood why it's so important unless you want to control other people. And I just have a hard time needing to believe in something so bad that everyone who doesn't agree with me is going to some eternal damnation, which I just.

[29:44] SPEAKER C: It.

[29:48] CHRIS KRIEGER: It almost makes my head hurt when I think about it, frankly.

[29:50] SPEAKER C: It's.

[29:51] KAT GRIFFITH: Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I agree with you. And I think one of the things I appreciate about Quakerism, at least the branch of it that I belong to, is it's pretty expansive in the sense of there are different paths. We believe in continuing revelation, so we're not tied into an extremely specific understanding of the Bible. And I would say there's a fair number of Quakers who are not very Bible centered at all. So there's a big range. But yeah, I agree with you. I feel like people of deep faith of any deep faith have more in common than people from the same country, one who has faith and one who doesn't. Like I find, you know, I can talk to somebody who's Hindu or somebody who's Buddhist or somebody who's Jewish or somebody who's, you know, whatever and feel like, yeah, we're talking about the same thing. We have a similar experience. Our experiences resonate. There's a frequency there that we're sharing more than if I talk to somebody who's otherwise very similar to me, you know, well-educated, liberal, atheist. There's things that I will find missing in that person, even though there may be things I love. I mean, they may be a very good friend of mine, but Right, but I will miss that there's no spiritual element and just so you know in my worship group we have a number of 12 steppers and I just adore them. I think 12 step is fantastic preparation for a spiritual or not preparation for is a spiritual life. They're different than me in lots of ways. One of them had a similar background to you. She grew up in a well in a huge very Catholic family. And eventually she and her mother fell away from it completely. Her mother actually went to the priest twice to beg for permission to use birth control. She did not want to have 11 children. And the priest said no. And so she was effectively sentenced to being a mom of 11 children. And she, it's not that she didn't want any of them. Like she, she loved them all, but, but it was, it was too much. And, I think she finally realized that a church that would make me do that and essentially not be really present to my kids. There were just too many of them. All of them kind of felt neglected, you know? What's optimal about that? Why would God want that?

[32:18] CHRIS KRIEGER: Yeah, but you know, to me, I think it's just human nature. We set up these forms to help us with the function of increasing our contact, our connection with of God or whatever we call Allah or. But it's a lot easier, I think, to, for anyone, pretty much, to focus on the form. And then it becomes really important, you know, do you kneel? Do you stand ## ### right time? Are you eating or not eating certain foods at certain times of the year? And, and that seems to become very important and. To me, the only thing that's important about that stuff is if it helps me get right-sized in my mind to be a little more reachable and teachable.

[33:08] KAT GRIFFITH: And I think at its best, ritual can do that. Quakers have less ritual than many faiths, but I would never say we have none. We have anti-ritual rituals. I think one of the reasons that people love to have a faith that excludes everybody else is the sense that, you know, you're part of the inner circle, you're part of the special club, you're, you know, you know something other people don't know. And I think it's, I think it's the same impetus as a lot of conspiracy theories have. There's an out group and an in group. Either you know it or you don't, you know, and everybody who knows it is special. And they have this immediate kinship with other people who know this thing.

[33:50] CHRIS KRIEGER: Sure.

[33:51] KAT GRIFFITH: I think it's just our desire to connect and be part of a tribe kind of gone wrong.

[33:56] CHRIS KRIEGER: Well, you know, that makes sense. I think people find that comforting to say, I'm a conservative or I'm a liberal. You know, I don't, I find I zigzag all over the spectrum on certain things. You know, I have no intention to, to give up my firearms. I use them to hunt and target shoot, and I like having them around, but I I also think it's absolutely none of my business. You know, who freely consenting adults decide to kiss and love and marry, unless of course, you know, I want to be invited to the wedding.

[34:31] SPEAKER C: You know.

[34:33] CHRIS KRIEGER: It'S just none of my business.

[34:37] SPEAKER C: You know?

[34:37] KAT GRIFFITH: Do you have any beliefs that you feel have made you unpopular in certain places or among certain kinds of people?

[34:45] CHRIS KRIEGER: Oh, yes, for sure.

[34:49] KAT GRIFFITH: What are some of those beliefs?

[34:52] CHRIS KRIEGER: I believe America has had problems with race throughout its entire history. I believe that the earth was not created for people. I believe there's no such thing as man and environment. It's environment. And I think this man and environment separation is part of what's gonna get us killed. Why are civilizations going to die? Our species could very well do that. I don't think there's any one spiritual way. So I live in one of the buckles of the Bible belt. I do think that the racism is still systemic and I think we need, I believe just about any organization or institution is prone to problems, systemic problems. Throughout its lifetime and I believe it's important to have a system of checks and balances. You know, for AA, we have a group conscience. If I go to a meeting up in Burlington, Vermont, and I call that my home group, I can call a group conscience about something the group does and we will have one within two weeks. We'll follow the Roberts Rules of Order and we will work that issue out. and, and so I believe it's important for societies to have that and.

[36:10] SPEAKER C: Yeah.

[36:11] CHRIS KRIEGER: So I, you know, like, I'm a bit of an environmentalist. I believe in go, it's not, I believe in global climate change.

[36:18] KAT GRIFFITH: It's just a fact.

[36:20] CHRIS KRIEGER: I accept the science and.

[36:22] KAT GRIFFITH: Yeah.

[36:22] SPEAKER C: Yeah.

[36:23] CHRIS KRIEGER: So because I lived in North Idaho, 50 miles from a grocery store for years, and that was when I was home, I, I ran pack meal strings for. Glacier National Park, Idaho Panhandle Forest. I worked for a hunting outfitter for years. He was really grumpy, but I loved his mules and didn't see him much. And, you know, I was getting paid to ride horses and, and be around these great meals in the biggest Wilderness area in the lower 48 states.

[36:52] KAT GRIFFITH: That's pretty great.

[36:53] CHRIS KRIEGER: I didn't get paid much, but, yeah.

[36:56] KAT GRIFFITH: Hey, who needs to get paid if you're doing that?

[36:59] SPEAKER C: Yeah.

[36:59] CHRIS KRIEGER: Yeah, it was. It was a blast, but I was around a lot of conservative people. And I have noticed that if you live in a state where the economy, the socioeconomic conditions are more directly affected by government agencies, it seems federal government agencies, the antipathy for federal government just goes, it increases drastically. So that means in West Virginia, because we're controlled by the BLM, US Forestry, military sites, and...

[37:37] KAT GRIFFITH: The funny thing is that far more money per person per capita flows to those states than to the liberal blue states and the urban areas. People have this wrong idea that it's the urban areas that are sucking up all these federal resources. Not so. California is funding Montana.

[37:55] CHRIS KRIEGER: Right, right.

[37:56] KAT GRIFFITH: You know, Massachusetts is funding Idaho.

[37:59] CHRIS KRIEGER: It's depending how you measure it. 23 or 24 red states are in the top 25 welfare queen states.

[38:10] KAT GRIFFITH: Yeah, no kidding. Yeah, my husband, my husband's an economist and he, you know, he has many factoids like that. So, yeah, it is interesting. The perception is that all those welfare queens in the Bronx are doing this terrible thing. It's like, actually, you guys are getting more money. And I know farmers, like I'm an agricultural economist, and I know farmers who believe that they are righteously entitled to crop subsidies because they are hard Christian workers. And I'm like, you're getting a handout from the government. How is that different than people in cities who are also working but can't earn enough money to pay the freaking rent?

[38:53] SPEAKER C: Yeah.

[38:53] KAT GRIFFITH: You know, like, yeah, they're getting a rent subsidy, but they're, they're also working. So.

[38:59] CHRIS KRIEGER: Yeah, it depends on the subsidies. I, I actually, you know, I could support many of the subsidies if it was, it was to stabilize that economy or that sector of the economy in certain areas, but. But it's okay for me, not you type mentality is because I support a social safety net too. To me, it's a non-brainer because, you know, let's build people up and get them paying more into the taxes, you know?

[39:27] KAT GRIFFITH: Right, right. Yeah, no, I agree. I agree. I mean, I think if I could point to one part of the world that I think has it right, it would probably be like Denmark, you know? I mean, they have a strong social safety net. They have a high level of, there's a relatively equal distribution of income. They don't have a sort of whole oligarch thing going on. They don't have desperate poverty going on. Finland is the same. Finland, you're not gonna live on the street in Finland. They're gonna find a way to make sure that you're housed, even if you are a complete bum who's addicted to whatever. They don't think that means you should live on the street. And it's not good for Finland that you live on the street any more than it's good for you that you live on the street. So, you know, they solve those problems. And I appreciate that.

[40:16] CHRIS KRIEGER: I think that's terrific. I like what Norway does with their offshore oil proceeds. You know, they turn that right back into society.

[40:24] KAT GRIFFITH: Yeah, they did. They did a really good job of investing that money and saving it for and making themselves the society they want to be. I, I appreciate it, too.

[40:33] CHRIS KRIEGER: I would love it if we did that because, you know, extractive Industries are such a, a feast or famine. And the only people that benefit from that Feast or famine cycle are the people ## ### top, you know, and I've seen it happen.

[40:47] KAT GRIFFITH: Well, and if you, if you look at, I mean, there's a, there's a phrase in economics, the resource curse that resource rich countries in the third world are among the most miserable and were and violent and undeveloped because basically the existence of resources without the existence of strong, well-developed institutions led to kleptocracies.

[41:08] SPEAKER C: Right.

[41:08] KAT GRIFFITH: So you wind up with some of the very worst governments in the world funded by diamonds and oil, you know?

[41:14] SPEAKER C: Yeah.

[41:14] CHRIS KRIEGER: That's a terrible problem.

[41:16] KAT GRIFFITH: Whereas Norway built its institutions and then they found the North Sea oil. They got lucky that they did it in that order.

[41:23] SPEAKER C: Right.

[41:24] KAT GRIFFITH: If it comes in the other order, not so good.

[41:27] CHRIS KRIEGER: Well, I've noticed in Montana and Idaho and Colorado, Wyoming, you can really see it. If you're in an area that's controlled by, by mining, that's the resource that dominates the economy. People are more angry. You know, in Montana, there's an expression. He's got too much butte in him because butte used to have a huge, you know, the Anaconda copper mine, and, and people would work. terrible hours and terrible conditions and go drink in bars and fight with each other. And that's, yeah, that was their life. And I've noticed farming and ranching communities, I think because people have to combine, you know, cooperate with each other to get certain things done. They're typically more friendly to some weird guy traveling around in his pickup with his border collie on the sightseeing trip. So that's my unofficial, you know, unscientific.

[42:21] KAT GRIFFITH: But yeah, yeah, yeah. Interesting.

[42:25] CHRIS KRIEGER: So you said immigration is one of your biggest, that's your most passionate cause.

[42:30] SPEAKER C: Yeah.

[42:30] CHRIS KRIEGER: How did you get there on immigration? What made that your biggest cause?

[42:36] KAT GRIFFITH: So I think it sort of started when I was between times in Latin America, I spent After I got back from South America, I spent a year plus in Boston, and I was looking for a volunteer job that would use my Spanish. I wanted to keep it going. And the job that I found was translating affidavits from Central American refugees applying for asylum. And I was astounded by, like, I had not gone to Central America. I'd been in South. And Central America at that time was kind of in flames. You know, you had the Civil War in El Salvador, you had, you know, things, the revolution in Nicaragua, there was all kinds of stuff going on.

[43:20] SPEAKER C: So.

[43:22] KAT GRIFFITH: I was just shocked by what I read in those affidavits, especially by Salvadorans. And then when I moved to Ripon, shortly after we got here, there was an influx of immigrants from Latin America, mostly Mexico, but not all. and I was one of the very few people in town who spoke Spanish. I mean, there were like three of us. And so I ended up doing a lot of interpreting and I got very close to the immigrant community really quickly because they really needed me. And it gave me a really interesting view of our town. I mean, I saw things that I would never have seen if it hadn't been through their eyes, through their experience. Could you come to the hospital? My wife is having a baby. They didn't have an interpreter. There were no language lines. Could you come to the school? A family has just walked in and they don't speak any English and we think they want to register their children, but we can't do that if you don't help us. Stuff like that. So I got to see how things worked. I translated for arrests for everything you can imagine. It was really rich. And then I just started to get really interested in the dysfunctions of our immigration policy. It was so clear to me that our policies punished the behavior we said we wanted and rewarded the behavior we said we didn't. And there was no way, there was no good way forward for a high percentage of the people. Like if they came undocumented, there was no way to get documented. And if they didn't come, I mean, if they tried to come legally, they would wait forever, you know?

[45:01] SPEAKER C: Yeah.

[45:01] KAT GRIFFITH: And so it was terrible. I started doing some research on it and I like public speaking. I've done it for years and I sort of put together this dog and pony show about immigration and now I'm doing it about every two weeks all over the state, sometimes out of state. I'm doing it, you know, for rotary clubs and churches and retirement groups and colleges and just everybody. So it's and it's a I think it's a good presentation. I mean, people People love it. Every time I do it, I get more invitations to do it somewhere else. So that's a big piece of what I do. But I also, we're housing an asylee right now from Colombia. She had a terrible, terrible time in Colombia. And then when she came to the US, she fled for very good reasons. And she was granted asylum because it was really bad. And she had 270 pieces of evidence, I kid you not, to show how bad it was. Then she was so badly beaten and iced attention that she wound up in a wheelchair for nine months and she came to us in a wheelchair. So she is literally getting her feet on the ground. She is literally learning how to walk again. And so that's been another piece. And I've been, yeah, I've kind of been walking with a lot of immigrants and asylum seekers for some years now.

[46:23] CHRIS KRIEGER: So, yeah, I've been, I volunteered to be a literacy tutor, but I could. Well, we didn't have very many people that would stay with it. So the literacy council was getting asked by Oklahoma State is in Stillwater and it is a really good bang for your buck academically. And so especially in engineering. and agriculture and architecture. So we get and animal science stuff. So, you know, it's a land grant university and we get lots of international students and they bring their spouse. And if it's a male, you know, there is nothing for them and still.

[47:03] KAT GRIFFITH: Water for the wife to do.

[47:04] SPEAKER C: Yeah.

[47:05] CHRIS KRIEGER: For the wife or the husband. And so normally with the literacy Council, we try and keep, you know, same gender tutors and students just. you know, for less potential drama. So, but, you know, I had a Chinese lawyer, you know, I had a, an algebra teacher. I, you know, I had all kinds of different people that came to be with their, their spouse for the year. But, you know, if you don't have a car and Stillwater has lousy mass transit.

[47:37] SPEAKER C: Right.

[47:38] CHRIS KRIEGER: And I, I live in a mobile home. So I would invite them to my house, you know, and we'd have food and, and I mean it was, they got to see real America, not, not, not real housewives of LA America.

[47:53] KAT GRIFFITH: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[47:55] CHRIS KRIEGER: So, yeah.

[47:56] KAT GRIFFITH: That's awesome. I'm so glad you do that. I mean, my mother-in-law did it. She did a lot of tutoring and I, I have to admit that is not one of the things that I have wanted to do. I've been clear, I do not want to become an English teacher. I've been a Spanish teacher. I love doing that. But yeah, good for you. That's such an important contribution and befriending people.

[48:17] CHRIS KRIEGER: I've become more of a cultural liaison, sort of. I explain the cultural things and I have the patience to go through the, you know, the, it takes forever with the English Korean dictionary or whatever. I worked with a Brazilian musician. He was here as his wife was here for a year, microbiology research. But it's fun and I get to learn about their country and their culture. And, you know, I've learned over time a lot of people don't envy certain things about American culture at all. They're here for the economic opportunity. They're here for the rule of law, safety, But, yep. If they could have those things back home, they would not want to come here.

[49:06] KAT GRIFFITH: They would not come here. No, that's, I mean, you know, they know about our violence. They know about our extreme individualism. They know about our, you know, there are some big faults in this country as well as things that I, you know, I mean, I, the more.

[49:24] SPEAKER C: I.

[49:24] KAT GRIFFITH: Found over time that I felt more and more American. as I, even as I spent more time in Latin America, I got clearer and clearer how, yeah, you're not gonna take that out of me. Like, that is who I am.

[49:39] SPEAKER C: Right.

[49:39] KAT GRIFFITH: And now living with a Colombian, this is very, very intimate to have this woman who speaks very little English living with us. And there's times when we go like this because she's really Colombian and I'm really American, you know, and we just disagree sometimes.

[49:56] CHRIS KRIEGER: Can you give me an example?

[49:59] KAT GRIFFITH: Yeah, now can we keep going once it tells us? Yeah, okay, all right, good. So yeah, we had a conversation, very disconcerting conversation, where a member of our worship group asked her, so if you were looking for a man, what would you be looking for? And she described an extraordinarily transactional kind of arrangement for a marriage. Oh, and it involved, like, it involved, he has to take care of me financially, you know, like, what she would say to him is, what's yours is mine and what's mine is mine. And I'm like, what? How does that work? But there was a quid pro quo. Like, she's like, I have to keep myself beautiful for him, and I have to take care of children, and I have to. keep the house really nice and cook and do all these things. I mean, she was willing to accept all of those things, but she wanted security. And, and I, you know, this, we found it a little bit shocking that there was no talk of, like, what I'm looking for is mutual respect and intellectual stimulation and shared interests and shared values and blah, blah, blah. No, it was, you earn a bunch of money. I keep your house clean. I cook your dinner, you bring me, you know, and so we found this very disconcerting, but I also recognized that she grew up in radical insecurity and the most secure moments of her life involved in one instance a sugar daddy, in one instance a Catholic convent where they sent her when they didn't know what else to do with her. She was basically abandoned at a very young age and drifted around to different places. And anybody who has had to survive the level of insecurity and violence that she has with, you know, gorillas offing your brother and running you off your land and kidnapping you and, you know, all this sort of stuff. Anybody who's lived that, you get real good at finding there is my safe place. I'm going to do whatever I need to inhabit that safe place. And she's brilliant at wrapping people around her finger in creative, funny ways. Like she can be absolutely charming. And I've watched her do this gig with her physical therapist. He's this unattractive, overweight, prematurely aging, awkward, like maybe a little bit on the spectrum kind of guy, you know? And she makes him feel popular and smart and funny, and he becomes those things. I mean, he's delightful when he's with her. She brings it out of him. But it's also, it's this tremendous performance. It's always like, people are always looking at us because, like, it's a show what she's doing. She'll go from transgressive teenager to needy little girl to rescue me to working really, really hard to please him and get his praise to, you know, flirting with him. I mean, she's just, she's got this incredible toolkit. And it's, it's the tools of a woman who's been incredibly vulnerable, incredibly in danger her whole frickin life. And this is how she's figured out how to survive. She is a triumph of the human spirit. She is a miracle.

[53:29] CHRIS KRIEGER: Sure.

[53:29] KAT GRIFFITH: And she's very damaged, you know.

[53:31] SPEAKER C: Right, right.

[53:34] CHRIS KRIEGER: That's a, you know, I've worked with so many people in construction and on ranches with, so I've been around a lot of people who are not documented and I've heard the stories of, you know, what they're fleeing sometimes is terrible and what they do to get here is the most American of things. You know, if you're gonna travel through countries and, you know, where you're not wanted, they want you to keep going. Then you have to tie yourself onto the top of a train because it's not going to stop for a couple of days. And, and you can be robbed or killed or raped when you're tied up there. And if you get off in some jungle and, you know, trying to get through the dairy and Gap or. and then when you get to the Border, they have to pay a ridiculous sum to the cartel to get trafficked over. And it's for the chance, it's just for the work to get a job, right, to, to send money home, you know, or to even just stay here and have a life. And, yeah, I can't think of anything more American as we would. alleged our history is than that.

[54:49] KAT GRIFFITH: Right, right, right. No, I agree with you.

[54:53] SPEAKER C: Yeah.

[54:53] CHRIS KRIEGER: I'd like to see an immigration system that is based on two things, the amount of people coming that came from that country last year and by maybe we need to add up all the countries that send immigrants here and have it as a fact, have the total population of the country as a ratio to the world total population combined with, I'm not explaining it very well, but I would like it to be based on empirical numbers that, so the numbers.

[55:29] KAT GRIFFITH: That I would choose, like I would say that we should let in as many people as our economy can absorb. I would, what I would do is I would say Federal Reserve, we want a forecast from you for the next six months. how many people in these general areas do you think we can absorb and then give out that many visas? And then make it easy for people to come and go because the truth is before we beefed up border security so insanely, people would come and go based on economic conditions. Like if somebody lost their job, they're like, you know, this would be a good time to go visit the folks back in Mexico. And they would just cross the border and they would do that. It was fluid. And it didn't feel like it was a life or death thing. When we made the border so tight, we sealed people in as much as we sealed them out. And it meant that during a downturn, they wouldn't leave because they weren't sure they'd get back again. So we actually created the problem that we wanted to avoid, which was having more people than we could absorb. So my feeling is we should make it easy for people to come and go.

[56:32] CHRIS KRIEGER: Sure.

[56:32] KAT GRIFFITH: And we should give out the number of visas that has some relation to our economic needs. And if we did that, fewer people would rely on the asylum system. I know a lot of asylum seekers. And what I would say is many of them have difficult and tragic stories, but the truth is most of them, there is an economic component to their decision to come. They wouldn't come if they didn't think they could get a job. They would wanna, maybe, like if their circumstances were bad enough, they would wanna come, but they wouldn't if they didn't think they could get a job. And if they did think they could get a job legally, they would do that rather than go through the hassle of applying for asylum. We could greatly reduce the number of asylum seekers by making economic immigration easier. And then we could use the asylum system the way it should be used, which is for people who really that is their only reason that they need to come. They are in serious danger.

[57:30] CHRIS KRIEGER: My in-laws my ex-father-in-law he, he had a, a worker who came regularly, seasonally for 14-15 years and he worked out until he finally stopped doing farm work, period, and decided to retire and move back to his family. But he would go see his family for several months a year when, when my father-in-law didn't need him. And, and so I, and there's so many agricultural industries that could really benefit from a seasonal, you know, economic visa. My thing is also true.

[58:05] KAT GRIFFITH: Go ahead.

[58:06] CHRIS KRIEGER: Well, my thing is though, I remember, I'm mixed up on using the right term ratios, but I remember Tip O'Neill when he was Speaker of the House back in the 70s, he got this absurd, you know, Ireland could send whatever 10,000, 20,000 people over, But they only had 23,000 people applying. And then there were other countries that had, you know, 50,000 people that wanted to come over, and they got 837 visas allotted to them.

[58:36] KAT GRIFFITH: Well, you know, I've got a, the Cato Institute has some really good stuff on this. If you're interested in some actual numbers, look up the Cato Institute's various studies on immigration. They've been doing a lot of good work in the last couple of years. Okay. I am not fully a fellow traveler with them. They're libertarian, but I do think that a libertarian approach to immigration is a lot closer to what I believe in than what we're doing now. And so they've got one that shows the wait times for different kinds of family reunification visas. And depending on the category of like adult children, minor children, adult siblings, married adult siblings, all that sort of stuff. Depending on the category and depending on the country, the wait times range from long, like maybe 15 years, to multiples of the human lifespan. If you wanted to bring over an adult sibling from Mexico, you would wait for like 240 years.

[59:34] SPEAKER C: Wow.

[59:35] KAT GRIFFITH: That's how bad it is. It's wildly uneven. And there's just there's no reason to do it like that. If you say, well, we're getting too many people from here and not enough people from there, what does that matter if the basic thing is we're gonna take people because they're refugees or asylees and they fit in that category wherever they come from, or we're gonna take people because we can absorb them and they're good for us. Well, that's why that would be a lot more people that we'd be letting in legally and it would meet our needs, it would serve our purposes, it would be enlightened self-interest, and the humanitarian factor, it would be a smaller piece of the picture, but it would be really genuine. There, you know, we wouldn't be taking people, I don't know, it's a mess right now. Well, there's almost nothing we're doing right now.

[01:00:30] CHRIS KRIEGER: Yes, well, I would support a, I think if we had a tiered system, not one above the other, I guess a two-part one, one would be Just based on the percentage of people coming over. And then the other one would be asylum based. That would not depend upon the country. It would depend upon the need for asylum, the degree of need, I suppose. And I don't know how you go about measuring that in a way that would be fair.

[01:01:01] KAT GRIFFITH: Well, I think you, you know, time was our State Department did State Department reports on countries. and those reports are actually pretty good. They only loosely align with our policies towards those countries. Like, you know, if you read the state department's report on El Salvador, it would be very clear to you why lots of Salvadorans would be seeking asylum. Like, it was really bad. It's better now for more people. I'm talking about pre-Bukele. Now there's other people who are in danger because of Bukele, but the gang problem is much better than it was. People are not fleeing in large numbers because of gangs at this point.

[01:01:39] CHRIS KRIEGER: In El Salvador or throughout Central America?

[01:01:44] KAT GRIFFITH: El Salvador specifically. Yeah, they're still coming from other countries. But yeah, why would you want to make it like country specific? For me, the economic Like the work visas, I would just say this is how many work visas we're gonna put out and anybody who is qualified, it's gonna be a lottery. Like why would we prefer some countries over others?

[01:02:13] CHRIS KRIEGER: Okay, a lottery would work or random drawing or something.

[01:02:18] KAT GRIFFITH: Yeah, I don't like the idea of picking some countries and excluding others. If somebody's qualified and somebody wants to hire them, why is that bad?

[01:02:26] CHRIS KRIEGER: What I was thinking of doing that as a percentage of people wanting to come was just for the reason to prevent one or two countries or one or two companies who got really good at facilitating, you know, immigration, privileging certain people in the system. And so I was thinking of a way, but your lottery takes care of that much better. What I was thinking of.

[01:02:54] KAT GRIFFITH: I think a lottery system would, you would on average get the same percent or you'd get percentages based on, how shall I put it, people would have an equal chance depending on how many people there were. Like you wouldn't be discriminated against because you were Mexican, right?

[01:03:14] SPEAKER C: Right.

[01:03:15] KAT GRIFFITH: Right now you are, you know, and you're privileged if you're Indian.

[01:03:19] SPEAKER C: Well, why?

[01:03:20] KAT GRIFFITH: I mean, as long as the people who come fill the jobs we have, I don't care where the people are from.

[01:03:28] CHRIS KRIEGER: Yeah, and that makes sense to me. I have friends from, I did everything but finish writing and defend my thesis, and I timed out on my master's in geography. I focused on using a mixed quantitative and qualitative methods to study socioeconomic and environmental problems. That's what I wanted to do. But I have most of the friends I met, I made in graduate school were international students because we were all older and all the other kids were just, they had never been out of school, you know, from all the way through. So I just didn't have a lot in common with them. And I have several friends from India. And so I used to have everybody come to my house for Thanksgiving with my daughter, you know, but yeah, but like, I have some friends now that are, They went to Nevada, Missouri to teach and she was teaching geography stuff and he could not get a job because his doctorate was in English. And he was sending out like 200-300 applications. So they went to Armenia and they've been there for three years, but they are paid well for the cost of living and it's taking them a year. to get a tourist visa to come over here because they would like to come here and rent a car and, and travel around for two or three months and do stuff they never could when they were. And to me, it's just ridiculous. And I think it's racist, really. Why?

[01:04:56] SPEAKER C: Oh, yeah.

[01:04:57] CHRIS KRIEGER: Why it takes so long for anyone who's not white to get. Because I have friends from England that it takes them less than two months to get a visa.

[01:05:06] KAT GRIFFITH: Right, yeah, no, we're messed up. We're messed up. Our system sucks.

[01:05:11] SPEAKER C: Yeah.

[01:05:15] CHRIS KRIEGER: I used to be a carpenter on campus at OSU and I go into classrooms. I used to write this on the walls, on the dry erase boards. I called it Fun Facts. I said, Fun Fact 1 was Earth gets the same amount of, I said fact one was everything on the planet is the direct or indirect result of solar energy. Fact two was the amount of solar energy Earth gets every year has been fairly constant for millions of years. Then fact number three is there is no macroeconomic economic model in the country that's in wide use in the world. There's no macroeconomic model and wide use anywhere in the world that accounts for one and two. So then question four was the fun fact was therefore we have no economic model that is even asking the right questions. That was my sabotage for a very conservative campus. You know, Oklahoma State is a and so, but I was trying to get people to think about should we really.

[01:06:28] SPEAKER C: Have a.

[01:06:32] CHRIS KRIEGER: Strictly capitalist system, you know, or something more, you know, a socialized capitalistic system. I, like Denmark or Finland, I would, I would want much more than, you know, I'm not interested in giving billions of subsidies to Exxon. You know, the fact they don't pay any income tax and you know, I have so much paperwork as a self-employed remodeler. It's quite clear they do not want people to be self-employed it is the.

[01:07:02] SPEAKER C: The bark.

[01:07:03] CHRIS KRIEGER: The paperwork is. Is so onerous. And I'm not getting any bonus. I'm not getting any grants. That's a complete segue from immigration, but.

[01:07:17] KAT GRIFFITH: Well, about the woodworking, it's funny because I noticed that in your bio, both my husband and my son do a lot of that. We've got a fair number of tools in the basement and my husband is, he doesn't do so much fine woodworking. He does a lot of really weird, quirky fix-it jobs, which I give him a lot of credit that he manages to make things like I have this homemade recumbent bike that my brother-in-law made, and it's really long and it doesn't fit on any commercial bike racks, and it's too long for our car. It's too wide. It'd be dangerous to drive this thing. So Soren figured out a way to take the wheels off and rejigger the bike rack, so that he can put the forks on it instead of the wheels. And, you know, it was a lot of work, a lot of fiddly stuff, you know, with metal parts and ordering things. And he does stuff like that. And then my son does beautiful woodworking. He's made two mandolins. He's made some furniture. I mean, it's really fine work. He started when he was very young. He started homeschooling, really. He became very, very handy. That was one of the things he enjoyed. His first projects were making armor for his stuffed bear. It was really cute. Went from there to a mandolin. But yeah, yeah, it's not something that I do for pleasure, but it kind of makes me happy when there's, you know, projects going on in the basement.

[01:08:59] CHRIS KRIEGER: Well, I collect user quality, very good user quality. ansi can woodworking tools, you know, planes and scorps and, and chisels and gouges and all kinds of stuff. And, but I like to use them. So I like to do a mixture of hand and power tool working. But I, in remodeling, I don't get to do, you know, I do a couple cabinets from time to time. I find people don't want to pay what it costs to do fine furniture, so I have I've done some antique reconditioning and I had to rebuild a couple drawers or veneer this or that.

[01:09:37] SPEAKER C: But.

[01:09:40] CHRIS KRIEGER: Yeah, people just don't know.

[01:09:41] KAT GRIFFITH: It's a labor of love.

[01:09:42] CHRIS KRIEGER: Yeah, yeah. No, I've learned over time, I did it to make money. I'm not gonna, I have to feed myself, I have to keep my lights on. And if people don't, that's the thing, TV shows have really encouraged people.

[01:10:00] SPEAKER C: You.

[01:10:00] CHRIS KRIEGER: Know, everything can be solved in 47 minutes and commercial breaks. And, you know, that's, you know, like when I do remodeling, I, I don't advertise. My work is my advertising. I want people to spread my name. I do not want to be the cheapest because there's no loyalty in that, in that sector of the customer base. And I want to be the best value for the money because I live in a poor area. We have low median incomes. And the competition for the cherry part of town, the southwest part of town is very high. And it's too stressful to, I just don't want to deal with that kind of stress. So I want to do, I want to work, I don't want to socialize all day. I mean, I'm not trying to get over, but I'm not going to refinish someone's oak dresser for free. just because they think it should cost less. And I will explain the process. But, you know, if I do an add-on or I'm, I'm doing a, you know, room extension or something, I keep everything very clean, whether I'm in an eighty thousand dollar house or a three hundred thousand dollar one. You know, I, I try and do. But I, that is one thing I've noticed is. you know, my dad was a shop teacher and my mom was a marketing professor. And so I got to be around all kinds of adults. And, you know, I had a professor in graduate school because I also do hazardous tree removal. And I do less of that now, but. But I learned in Idaho to do directional falling. And if you're accurate, you don't need to have a bucket and all this stuff people have down here.

[01:11:49] SPEAKER C: And.

[01:11:52] CHRIS KRIEGER: Just there's, I remember one of my instructors wanted me to bring a chainsaw and just let him have it for a couple of days and then he'd bring it back at his convenience the next week. And, you know, the chainsaws I have are even, you know, eight years ago are a thousand to eleven hundred dollar pieces of equipment. with special handles, special carburetors, special chains. And so I asked him, I said, well, you know, while you're doing that, how about if you loan me your laptop? Because, you know, he got the department to buy him a $2,000 laptop. And he got really mad that I suggested that. And I just noticed there's this whole, it takes 10 or 12 years to become a professor and really grounded in your research and a good teacher and have your research, you know, methodology and your, your niche there. It takes 10-12 years to become a true master carpenter. And a lot of that is true. We'll never get there because of the opportunities for the work they get to do. A lot of them technically are still journeyman for most of their lives. But the recognition of skill is and knowledge is far less.

[01:13:13] KAT GRIFFITH: Yeah, my son, I thought for a long time that he might end up going into custom high-end small building projects, complicated building projects. He's an incredibly good problem solver. He just had a mind for it. Without lifting a finger, He was a National Merit Scholar. He just had that brain. I remember one time, he used to spend a lot of time when we were homeschooling, he would be lying on the floor of the playroom, rolling around, humming to himself, doing nothing. But I never worried about it because he was thinking about stuff. And periodically, he would go through one of these humming and rolling periods, and then he would get up and leap into action and do something. And one day he did that. and what he built was a Lego sewing machine that transformed a treadle motion into a circular motion into an up and down motion for the sewing machine. And I'm like, he is eight years old. That is a fine piece of engineering. Like, he worked that out.

[01:14:22] CHRIS KRIEGER: You homeschooled your kids for nine years, then let them. Yeah, okay.

[01:14:28] SPEAKER C: Yeah.

[01:14:29] CHRIS KRIEGER: Do you think that had a lot to do with him becoming a National Merit Scholar?

[01:14:37] KAT GRIFFITH: Not necessarily. I think he became he's really smart. My husband is too. And I think that's part of it. And I think there were some really quirky things that led to it.

[01:14:55] SPEAKER C: I don't know.

[01:14:56] KAT GRIFFITH: I mean, I think there's a lot about who he is that comes from having homeschooled. That I believe. I think his woodworking comes from that, his independent problem solving, his I can do it, I can learn it myself, I can figure it out, I can find the answer. Like all of that is absolutely homeschooling.

[01:15:15] SPEAKER C: Right. Yeah.

[01:15:18] CHRIS KRIEGER: Well, you know, in Idaho, I was several people around in our area homeschooled.

[01:15:23] SPEAKER C: Old.

[01:15:23] CHRIS KRIEGER: And of course, there are not very many people total to begin with, but I noticed that the kids, like my landlord, I lived, I lived with a, an, an Irish Catholic, a Tridentine Catholic family. And their son was a very close friend of mine. And he let, he got his dad to let me live on their land. I had a 1959 Airstream I lived in. That was my home.

[01:15:49] KAT GRIFFITH: But, but It's funny because my husband's family, when he was growing up, had one of those too. Similar vintage.

[01:15:57] CHRIS KRIEGER: Okay. All right.

[01:15:58] KAT GRIFFITH: They lived in trailers for years, including an Airstream.

[01:16:00] SPEAKER C: Yeah.

[01:16:01] CHRIS KRIEGER: Well, it was, you know, it has a wood, I put a wood stove in it. And, yeah.

[01:16:06] SPEAKER C: It.

[01:16:08] CHRIS KRIEGER: Was good for one person, I'll say that. And, but I noticed a difference in the kids because they had nine children. and the first four children went to public high school, and then the rest of them went, started going to homeschool. And the homeschool was a program that was sponsored or created by this Tridentine Catholic movement. It's a very conservative Catholic denomination.

[01:16:36] SPEAKER C: Right.

[01:16:37] CHRIS KRIEGER: I think the Bible from France and they think all the popes in the past 50 years are far too liberal. But at any rate, you know, like their one, their youngest son, when he was 15, he built a 25 by 25 foot building that was going to become his home. So it had a kitchenette and a bedroom. And he also, his parents bought a boot maker's equipment. and they paid him to teach their son to become a boot maker. And, and that later on, he decided to become a monk. And he's a monk now in New Mexico, but they moved the whole equipment. I just think, you know, he's 15 and he's, he's figuring out yardage of concrete and, you know, he would ask me sometimes because I, I had framed houses and stuff, you know, and questions, but he didn't really, he my help. You know, he figured out how to, and I don't think a lot of kids going to public high school here in Stillwater would be able to pull that off.

[01:17:44] KAT GRIFFITH: No, I agree. I think that's one of the great things of homeschooling that even families that I know that I don't think did a particularly fabulous job academically, their kids did have a kind of independent problem solving streak that is rare anymore in this country and that the schools have managed to evidently extinguish. We ask so little of the kids. There's so few challenges for them in school. I mean, I know I taught in a high school for 11 years after homeschooling, so I know what the difference is. And I was shocked at how much coddling and hand-holding the kids needed, how not independent they were in their learning, how incredibly pathetically, they needed to be led by the nose through every little thing. And my kids were not like that. They would spend an entire afternoon trying to figure out how to catch the backyard bunnies, and they would build all these traps, and then they would make them better, and then they would try to attract the rabbits, and they would do all these things. But it's endless problem solving and tinkering. And eventually they got so that they could do really good things. Eventually they solved real problems.

[01:18:59] CHRIS KRIEGER: Well, why do you think schools have changed so much?

[01:19:07] KAT GRIFFITH: I think there's a lot of things going on. I mean, I think one problem is that the schools reflect the over-parenting, the snowplow parenting, Clear the way in front of your child so it's easy for them. Don't make it too hard. And I think that's a disaster. I think I think what we've ended up doing is in becoming better teachers, we've made worse students. I've actually had several exchange students from Europe who said that like your teachers work harder than our teachers and as students, You work much less. I think of, you know, the way like before an exam, it's up to the teacher now to organize review activities. It's up to the teacher to summarize what they've done. It's up to the teacher to come up with an activity that will help the kids review. It's like whatever happened to you go home and you look at your notes and you reread some stuff and you think, you know, whatever happened to that? that's how you learn. And if the teacher has to do all that, well, what have you learned? When I was growing up, I was, I'm gonna say blessed by going to a really outstanding public school district. In my sister's class, 8% of her classmates alone went to Harvard, just Harvard. You know, pretty much the assumption was if you were in first track, which, and we chose our tracks, they weren't assigned to us. If you were in first track, you were aiming for Ivy League's and you had a very good chance of getting there. And we were given independent work to do that is beyond anything kids do anymore. I mean, I remember being handed a copy of Hamlet on Monday and told next Monday we're going to have a graded discussion about Hamlet. Read it. That was homework to read an entire Shakespeare play on our own with no help whatsoever and come in and have an intelligent discussion about it. And this is before the internet, you know, you couldn't just Google it. So we actually had to prepare ourselves and we did. When we wrote papers, we wrote them, it was all homework.

[01:21:26] SPEAKER C: Yeah. Yeah. Pardon me.

[01:21:28] CHRIS KRIEGER: So what grade?

[01:21:29] KAT GRIFFITH: I mean, we did, that was in 10th grade. Okay.

[01:21:32] SPEAKER C: Right. Yeah.

[01:21:33] KAT GRIFFITH: You know, and, and I, I mean, I remember writing, I mean, we were writing eight page papers in high school regularly. Like I did that multiple times. I wrote several 20 page papers. I know people who get through college without ever writing a 20 page paper.

[01:21:53] CHRIS KRIEGER: Now, well, and the big problem too, my friends that are in academics, they tell me that every faculty member now has one to three plagiarism programs. They run everything through before they bother to grade it. And now, I don't know all this chat.

[01:22:14] KAT GRIFFITH: GPT, oh, forget it. Yeah. You just have to write really weird assignments to make that impossible. Or you have to write assignments that depend on you to use ChatGPT well, that challenge you. And I think there are ways to do that, but I still think that we're really shortchanging our kids and they're not learning to write. I loved teaching writing and I was a bulldog about it. But I know it worked because I had a group of kids. An administrator actually called me in one day and said, I want to show you something. and he'd taken a picture of a whiteboard in an administration meeting that they'd had that morning looking at district-wide test results. And it turned out that the greatest gains were made in the freshman class in the Lumen Charter School where I taught. And it was the freshmen, there were 29 of them, and 28 of them were in my reading workshop in which I did very, very targeted writing assignments. and they were extremely intentional. I mean, every single paragraph had a purpose and you had to master that skill and we're going to nail it. We're going to learn how to do this together and then you're going to do it. And my kids went from 13 to 48% proficient between October and April. It was a huge gain.

[01:23:29] SPEAKER C: Yeah.

[01:23:29] KAT GRIFFITH: It's like, yeah, you can do it. You can do it. I mean, it takes work, but it was doable. They really became better. and I don't see other teachers demanding that.

[01:23:41] CHRIS KRIEGER: Yeah, that's, you know, my experience was I, I just didn't like the Catholic parochial school I went to and I wanted to get out of it and I've been nagging my parents, but I, I took a test and we had to pay 20 bucks for me to take it or 25, but I, I took it and I did well enough to just skip and, you know, I liked it because it was a cool place to be a nerd. And there was no other place in my small world to do that, you know, and, but what I noticed, you know, when I got here to Oklahoma for my senior year, I already had more than enough credits to graduate. But since I wasn't even 16 yet, my dad said, no, you're not, you're gonna, you need the year of socialization, especially in all boys school for three years. Yeah, so when I got to OSU, you know, I was not seriously challenged for my first two years. You know, I just, yeah, that was.

[01:24:42] KAT GRIFFITH: That I think, I think my husband had a similar experience. He, he also, he went to a special school when he was young because his, his father was at a, at a university in Pennsylvania and they had a sort of a lab school. And he was allowed to go to the lab school because he was a faculty brat. And they had a contract system. And when he was seven years old, he was in fifth grade. And he would write, they would do these contracts and he would finish his work sometime like Tuesday afternoon. And he'd spend the rest of the week, you know, fishing and reading Hardy Boys novels and whatever. And by the time when they moved to Houghton, Michigan, he he was way ahead of his grade level, but he was really immature and he was really tall. He's 6'9 there was no good place to put him. Like there was just, he just didn't fit anywhere. People thought that he was older than he was because he was tall, but he was immature, but he was really smart. You know, what do you do?

[01:25:40] SPEAKER C: Yeah.

[01:25:41] KAT GRIFFITH: So he was just, his development was hopelessly asynchronous, but he was not challenged. I mean, his mother said basically he was treading or academically for years after they moved to Houghton. And then eventually he, you know, did stuff on his own that got him further. But he went off to college at 16 with a National Merit Scholarship. And then afterwards, he was so immature by the time he graduated from college, he had no idea what to do with himself. So National Merit Scholar starts delivering pizzas, you know? He just needed to grow up, you know?

[01:26:13] CHRIS KRIEGER: So I walked out in the middle of my fifth semester. I just said the heck with it. I took 12 hours of F and just walked away. And, you know, I partied. I worked my butt off for about a year, and. And then I was going nowhere fast. And so my family informed me that if I wasn't in college the next semester, I was going to have to move out. So I joined the military, and I did. I did two years, and I got to go to Germany, and that was a lot of fun. I got to go to England and. you know, on leave and, but that's what I noticed. It gave me a chance to catch up to everybody.

[01:26:51] KAT GRIFFITH: Sure.

[01:26:52] CHRIS KRIEGER: And in some ways I was ahead of them because I had had my own, my own, you know, I had to pay a lease and do my own laundry and, you know, some kids in the army had not had to do that. So, and then when I got back to college, suddenly I I had enough, I wasn't this kid that was two or three years younger than everybody else. Everyone else could go to the 18 club and I couldn't even do that. And I had a lot more self-confidence so I tried a lot more things and I met a lot more people and it was a much more rich academic life too.

[01:27:30] KAT GRIFFITH: Yeah, I think there's a lot to be said for taking time off. and getting some life experience. I've seen a number of college students think that they should go straight to grad school. And I almost always discourage them and say, no, don't do that. Because you don't, grad school isn't very much fun. It's not like college, and you shouldn't do it unless it is the thing standing between you and what you want. And if it's not, if you're just thinking, oh, well, that would be interesting to get a degree in that. No, no, no, don't do that. It's way too much work and way too much money.

[01:28:02] CHRIS KRIEGER: The thing I noticed when I was working on my Masters, and I had an extra semester or two because I had been out of school for more than 20 years, was the master students, they would start to look ## ### job market in their second year. And, you know, normally they're going to graduate in, in four or five semesters, and the job market wasn't that great. So all of a sudden, you know, if you ask them, If you ask the master students in their first year, maybe 30% were interested in a doctorate. But you ask them in their third, ## ### end of their third semester or right after Christmas break in the fourth semester, and that number more than doubles. And you've got, you know, more than one, three quarters of the students are looking at a doctorate. But then I noticed what that does is, It changes the quality of academic inquiry and it marginalizes it. You have students that learn, they can get by in a seminar if they read the abstract in the first couple paragraphs and the last couple paragraphs of an article. You're supposed to read those four or five articles. I would read and come in with another six or seven. I would be excited. I was disappointed by that, frankly.

[01:29:23] KAT GRIFFITH: But yeah, well, I mean, I sort of got to compare three schools because I did my undergrad at one, and I got my first master's at another, and I got a second master's at another. And oh, boy, the difference between the first and the third, they were different planets. Different planets. The third degree was such tiddly shit. compared to the first one. Just no comparison.

[01:29:49] CHRIS KRIEGER: What were all your degrees? What were all your degrees?

[01:29:53] KAT GRIFFITH: Yeah, so my first one was in public policy ## ### University of Chicago, and then I got a master's in ag economics at UW-Madison, and then I got a master's in educational leadership at UW-Oshkosh. And part of it was a difference between the schools. part of it was a difference between the fields. Education is not known for rigor, frankly. And I was just appalled, just appalled that one of the first classes in the education program, they, somebody gave us some negative statistics about teachers and then said, and then said, does this sound like teachers you know? No, this is garbage. And I'm like, You're telling us that we should decide based on anecdote rather than statistics that came through studies. Is that what you're telling us? That's shocking.

[01:30:48] CHRIS KRIEGER: Yeah, that's true.

[01:30:49] KAT GRIFFITH: You want us to tell ourselves pleasing, sort of self-flattering anecdotes, and that's how we're gonna feel good about ourselves. Oh, yay. I was just totally disgusted. But oh well.

[01:31:03] SPEAKER C: Yeah.

[01:31:04] CHRIS KRIEGER: Yeah, that's my dad had a continuous education as an Oklahoma City public school teacher. And in Ohio, he had been a shop teacher and he taught in some of the worst schools in the Cincinnati area. And so when he got to Oklahoma, he only had a shop for a year. And then the entire state started to do away with shop programs. they cut their industrial arts program. And so he had to go back to school and I would hear him muttering, you know, like they wanted him to spend all this time doing lessons plans and, you know, because he started because he got certified in Oklahoma to teach math and science and he started teaching at middle schools that just happened to be where there were jobs and because he lost so much seniority in the move out here and you know, he would just write heat, you know, as for a science topic.

[01:31:57] SPEAKER C: And.

[01:31:57] CHRIS KRIEGER: And that they used to get so mad at him because he was not gonna cooperate, you know, with their.

[01:32:02] SPEAKER C: Right.

[01:32:03] CHRIS KRIEGER: Stuff. He said, because he has a great line. He said a kid is never more ready to learn than when they ask a question.

[01:32:14] KAT GRIFFITH: That's right.

[01:32:15] CHRIS KRIEGER: And if the kids are asking a question from something they. He couldn't have planned. he's gonna go with it.

[01:32:22] SPEAKER C: Right.

[01:32:23] CHRIS KRIEGER: He's constantly in that struggle to find something that'll hook them so they'll pay attention.

[01:32:29] SPEAKER C: So.

[01:32:30] KAT GRIFFITH: Absolutely.

[01:32:30] SPEAKER C: Yeah.

[01:32:31] KAT GRIFFITH: I. I used to. I used to arrange to start my seminars. When I was teaching. Teaching seminars in the Charter School, I got to teach 35 different seminars over the years there.

[01:32:43] SPEAKER C: Wow.

[01:32:44] KAT GRIFFITH: Just. Wildly different topics. And so I would start with an opener to get them asking the questions that the seminar was going to address. I wanted them to start with questions and I loved coming up with stuff like I taught one on coal and the opener was I gave everybody two straws and they had to walk around the building. They had a particular route they had to go. walking reasonably fast and they had to go up a flight of stairs and come down again and then they had to take their pulse and how many breaths per, I don't know, 15 seconds or something. And then they had to do it breathing through two straws and then they had to do it breathing through one straw. And they're like, what the heck? They could not imagine why they were doing this. And then They came back in and they had their data and we talked about it and they were like, yeah, breathing through one straw. That was actually kind of hard going up the flight of stairs, breathing through one straw. And then I showed them a short documentary about a guy with a doctor who was diagnosed with black lung.

[01:33:57] SPEAKER C: Oh.

[01:33:58] KAT GRIFFITH: And they were like, oh.

[01:34:00] SPEAKER C: Wow.

[01:34:01] KAT GRIFFITH: And that just pulled them in to watch this Appalachian coal miner with black lung. lung, you know, and learn that he couldn't do anything because he was effectively breathing through one straw, you know? Yeah, yeah, I just, I just loved doing that because it would just get the, it would just get the kids totally hooked. I did another one where I, it was actually about Shay's Rebellion, but I wanted them to get the idea of what an economy would be like if you had no rules. So I decided to introduce them to piracy. So I started showing them a bunch of pictures of pirates in like around Yemen, in the ocean there, you know, and I showed them all these pictures of, you know, ships being attacked and pirates with their guns and all this sort of stuff. And like, what do you see? What do you see? Just having them describe what they saw in these pictures and they gradually figured out that these are pirates. You know, I would ask them like, what what are the rules that they're playing by? Well, there aren't any. And it's like, okay, so the reason we have rules is because if you don't have rules, you have that, right? You have piracy. You see, that's a problem, you know, and then we got into the rules and what was wrong with the rules and why there was a rebellion and all, you know, all this sort of stuff. But they had the question in their mind of how do you set up to govern an economy. And why do you do that?

[01:35:29] CHRIS KRIEGER: Right, right. Well, you know, that's what I say when I'm pretty much not, I do not like neoliberalism. I don't like laissez faire economics. It just, you know, no rules does not work in a kindergarten classroom. Why would you ever expect it to work in an international economy? I just Yeah, I don't understand why you'd even pretend to think that it works. I think Milton Friedman deserves an ass kicking, frankly. I just, and I'm not, I went.

[01:36:05] KAT GRIFFITH: To school with a lot of Milton Friedman acolytes because he was ## ### University of Chicago when I was there.

[01:36:10] CHRIS KRIEGER: Okay, yeah.

[01:36:12] KAT GRIFFITH: I found them very annoying.

[01:36:14] CHRIS KRIEGER: Well, if you read, but you could read about him in, and the Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein. And she talks about how the government and corporations can use disasters to sort of take over sectors of the economy or acquire a lot more power for government agencies. And apparently Milton Friedman is instrumental in co-opting the New Orleans education system after Katrina. You know, some of his ideas, I.

[01:36:44] KAT GRIFFITH: Thought, yeah, I heard that.

[01:36:45] CHRIS KRIEGER: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Thanks, Milt.

[01:36:50] KAT GRIFFITH: Oh, well, well, you know what? I'm looking ## ### time and I'm thinking that I should be getting on my way. I've got some things I need to do yet tonight. I want to say this has been really fun.

[01:37:00] CHRIS KRIEGER: Yeah, I've really enjoyed it.

[01:37:02] KAT GRIFFITH: Yeah, me too. It's been really vigorous and yeah, good times.

[01:37:06] CHRIS KRIEGER: Do you have Zoom or anything like that?

[01:37:10] SPEAKER C: Yeah.

[01:37:11] CHRIS KRIEGER: I mean, if you want, we could try and do this like once every month or two about something.

[01:37:17] KAT GRIFFITH: I'm kind of, you know, I'm kind of tempted to say yes, and I'm a little bit reluctant mainly because I'm just right now too busy. I've just had to like do a moratorium on commitments for the rest of the month because I've just, like there's days where I got six commitments one right after the other.

[01:37:34] CHRIS KRIEGER: Sure.

[01:37:35] KAT GRIFFITH: So I really have enjoyed this a lot.

[01:37:38] CHRIS KRIEGER: Yeah, I think.

[01:37:43] KAT GRIFFITH: I'm trying to decide. I would not mind giving you a way to contact me in a couple months and see if we want to do it again. Okay. I feel like I could trust you and if I decided not, you would not harass me.

[01:37:59] CHRIS KRIEGER: Well, you know what I can do is I can give you my email and you can email me if you feel like it.

[01:38:04] KAT GRIFFITH: Okay, fair enough.

[01:38:06] SPEAKER C: Fair enough.

[01:38:07] KAT GRIFFITH: Let me write it down right now.

[01:38:11] CHRIS KRIEGER: It's # # # # # -### # # # # # -### ##.

[01:38:23] KAT GRIFFITH: 2323.

[01:38:26] CHRIS KRIEGER: #### ## ### # ## ####.

[01:38:30] KAT GRIFFITH: I'm sorry, say that again.

[01:38:31] CHRIS KRIEGER: I wasn't gonna say it because it's. I think they'll cut it from this, but it's like. Is that instead of Gmail, I was saying # ## ####. Oh, okay. But because I technically, we're not supposed to exchange emails, I think, but. Okay.

[01:38:46] KAT GRIFFITH: Okay.

[01:38:47] CHRIS KRIEGER: If you won't tell.

[01:38:48] KAT GRIFFITH: Okay, fair enough.

[01:38:50] SPEAKER C: Cool.

[01:38:50] KAT GRIFFITH: All right.

[01:38:51] CHRIS KRIEGER: Yeah, we could have.

[01:38:52] KAT GRIFFITH: We could have stopped the recording, so they didn't get to hear that.

[01:38:55] CHRIS KRIEGER: Oh, that's right.

[01:38:56] SPEAKER C: Okay. Yeah.

[01:38:58] KAT GRIFFITH: All right. Well, yeah, me too. Thank you. Have a great night and yeah, thanks a bunch.

[01:39:05] CHRIS KRIEGER: Well, thank you. You too. Take care.

[01:39:07] KAT GRIFFITH: All right.

[01:39:08] SPEAKER C: Yep.

[01:39:08] KAT GRIFFITH: Bye-bye.

[01:39:09] SPEAKER C: Bye-bye.