Pushkin Hey, Last Archive listeners, this is Jill Lapour. We're hard at work on season three and can't wait to share it with you. It's all about reason, about finding our way towards hope and common knowledge and out of the epistemological pickle we explored in seasons one and two. But making a new season takes time, so meanwhile, I want to introduce you to a new limited run series that I'm doing, called The Last Archivist. Over the years, I've met hundreds and hundreds of archivists, collectors, curators, librarians, keepers of history, people with trinkets and facts and ideas that I want to add to our collection of the known things. In this series, you'll hear from a few of them about their work, like how to sit up a library in a prison, what four decades worth of eyeglasses can tell us about the history of a person, And why a trash collector in Pittsburgh is a kind of archivist too. It's gonna be fun. This series is just for Pushkin Plus subscribers, but we're dropping the first episode for you here in the feed. If you want to hear the rest, subscribe at the Last Archive show page and Apple podcasts or go to pushkin dot fm, slash plus and thanks for listening. Welcome to The Last Archivist, the show where I talked to archivists about the collections and records they keep and why. In this episode, I talked to Reginald Dwayne Betts. He's the author of three books, including Felon, a collection of poems about the effects of incarceration. He's also an actor, a lawyer, and a teacher, and the recipient of a MacArthur Genius Grant. We talked about Freedom Reads, an organization Bets started to bring literature to jails in prison across the country. Bets was incarcerated as a teenager and given a nine year sentence. While in prison, a fellow inmate gave him a book and it changed his life. He wants to give other incarcerated people that experience too, so he's building libraries in prison cells. But I'll let him tell you about it. My name is regend Dwayne Betts, and I'm the founder and director of Freedom Reads, a project that is meant to curate and build freedom libraries and prisons across this country. Thanks so much for doing this when you have so much going on. This is really really exciting. So I wanted to talk to you about the Freedom library as an archive in a collection. I have this podcast that's about kind of where knowledge lives, like where we store ideas and memories, and so I'm kind of fascinated, like, of all the things that you could have done, most of which you're actually also doing different forms of prison education or prison writing programs, or your own poetry and memoir writing, your own performance. Why a library, you know, honestly, I feel like maybe library is the most radical thing I imagine being able to be done. But also it's the thing that's absolutely quintessential to some movement, to actual building of a community, to actually build another civilization, to actually build another democracy. It's like, where's your repository of language? And what does it mean to actually make that accessible? And not make it accessible in a symbolic way. A lot of us don't live in a world with a library actually functions as pure symbol. We think about some public schools that aren't the greatest schools. They still have libraries in the school and they still push the students to attend to go to those libraries. And maybe everybody doesn't go to the new York Public Library who lives in New York. But that's why they have satellite branches, and those libraries work really hard to make the services amenable and attractive to everybody in the community. In prison, you're lucky if you could get to the library once some money, and when you get that, you have twenty five minutes. And so, you know, I remember coming home and people will criticize me because I hadn't read a lot of Shakespeare, and I was like, well, why would I have read a lot of Shakespeare. I was going to the library for twenty five minutes. I just had time to go to what I hungered for. I didn't have the time to explore what I might want. And so for me, it was both a process of curation in a process of creating the expectation for others. And I thought, well, what does it mean when I create the expectation from somebody who's doing time in prison to end up in these spaces. In conversations with Sonya Sanchez, I mean, in conversations with Jill Lapoor, you were publishing books, you were a scholar when I was in prison, and I didn't know that you existed. And that's that's like a tragedy, you know what I mean. It's like, how might my world have been different had I been hipped to more than just that one historical text that people quote. And so I feel like, you know, I want to have a role and saying that the books matter because the books matter. You know, the books don't matter because you you're gonna read them and necessarily become something different. They matter because it's the foundational principle of trying to build something more and without it, you can't build more. So the question I have are you working on this project or the Freedom Library, is whether it's changed how you think about books. You know, we can think about books as a gift or a book says a refuge, books as an escape, Like, there are lots of different ways we think about books. I'm wondering if you're thinking about books has changed in a couple of ways. One, I've realized how a lot of us have a common vocabulary, and I've thought about how to push against that. And so certain books come up and you see that because you share experiences and you share education, folks are where those books. But then I've watched how in conversation you see that the really beautiful moments come when when it's an introduction of a book that somebody hadn't heard of. So one of the things I've noticed is that in curating a collection, you work very hard to see people I do. So I can't just have the run of books that you will read as a PhD student in sociology or a PhD student in law or PhD student in history. It has to be far more complex than that. Going up and down. I recognize that, you know, the dog books have to have light in it, and you have to understand what that light means, and it can't just be because somebody said it so. But also I recognize that it is fifteen different ways to understand every book. And I've been having arguments with people who say, well, Jane Austen means this, I don't know like and somebody will say, are you really I'm going to include hard of Darkness? I mean, don't you understand. Layla Lalami wrote a beautiful introduction to that book where she talked about it was the first book in the English language she read. We bring meaning to books in the same way they bring meanings to us, and the question is what can I make a community aware of as I do this work, and so in developing this library, I'm trying really hard to engage with people in a way in which they've remind me of their similar stories, so that some of those books creep into this library and it's not and it becomes an enterprise that allows people to meet themselves where they are and grow somewhere. But it also becomes i think, a symbol or that very process of becoming and not this idea of like, you know, if I had the books, Like if I was like, who are you as a lawyer? And I put towards and contracts and then you looked at that bookshelf, it wouldn't really communicate much except the finish line. But every beautiful library I think reflects more to journey. So what do you hear from readers? I should tell you, Like one guy, he says, oh you you send it in um Man Search for mena man that book changed my life. I mean, I'm telling you, I was in a bad way and I'm looking at this guy and I'm like yeah, and it was so shoo bought it and it's like just like forty He's like late thirties. Black dude, you know, and like deeply talking about that's the book that made me reimagine the world. But other things though, it's like some guys that I met who really became educated in prison he said, he said, uh, my man, Richard talks about, you know, being stomped out by the guards. He had swung on one of the CEOs and then they beat him up real bad, broke his teeth and being on the floor, mouth bloody, and later reflecting on it and thinking about how that was just KMO moment where you make a decision about whether you want to live or you just want to give up, And you know, it's like, it's something radical about talking to these guys who who get that kind of work from books. And it's interesting because the books get you just up to that ledge where the next thing you under you start asking this, but how do we respond to the world given the decisions that were made? And how do we want the world to respond to us given the decisions that we made. So it's been it's been powerful. And some people haven't liked some book, you know, and it's saying and sometimes the DFC administrators are like, what people don't like the books? And I'm like, that's okay. So that's part of it too. It's like, you don't have to like every book. I think, you know, I told, I told the warden, say, you know, part of my challenge is to remind people why these books matter, but also put emphasis on these and books and it's not singular, so maybe something else will jump out to him. Um. And I've been reminded of that, and that's been a nice lesson for myself as like a writer and a thinker who sometimes gets sad when people don't love. What I say is that, you know, the junk, these these young folks and just men and women in prison have sometimes not like books that I love, and I have to accept that and so do the writers. Yeah, but also discriminating between the books that you love and you hate. It's kind of the spark too, like that's that's how you find out who you are, Like I'm a person who hates Melville. Let's now. I know that that's a lesson though honestly though, because I think that you have to have a certain kind of so confidence to really dislike a book. I know the first book that I vehemently disliked, and I know my response was the writer ten page essay about how I disliked the book and I was in solitary confinement. And I would never forget that book. I'll never forget the ideas in it. I'll never forget exactly what made me dislike it. And and I've only read it once, and I know it. I know it in ways that I don't know books that I love. It was all God's Children, Fox Butterfield, about Willie, about Willie Boskett. He was the kid that led to the New York Youth Offender law. But I know what prison I was at, I know what sale I was in. I know that I paid for the book. God damn it. Yeah. Yeah, But then you own your ideas, you know, like that's the freedom of that, Like you own your opinion about that book. Well, you don't have much, like you can own that, especially when you don't have much. And I also think that's one of the powers of the libraries that you know, when you don't have much, you do have your own ideas, and books help you develop your ideas, to help I had ideas post reading that book that I didn't have before. You know, reading that book helped me understand the world around me. In a way that I didn't before I read the book, because I needed to be confronted with arguments I disagree with to help me know what I cared about. In the same way, in novels, you know, you get confronted with these characters that bother you. I mean, it makes you know why, you know, and it makes you maybe change some of the ways that you act in the world's like I don't maybe I was like him. I don't I want to be like him or heard, you know, I don't want to act like they do. So, Yeah, to imagine yourself being in the role in the place of another human being making a choice is to imagine choices, and in a way that you know, is about fully figuring out who you are. So you started sending out books already to prisons and to juvenile detention centers, and you're also involved in the building of physical bookshelves for the Is that right for the library to be housed in? How's that working? How's that work? It's actually fantastic. I Mean one of the ideas was, okay, what if we just build books, And then some people said, but why don't you just give books away? You know, why build a space. Would you say that about your local library, would you say, why build a space? You know, but a library is not just a collection of books to strewn on the floor or placed on shelves. It's actually like some organizational structure that invites people to come towards it. And so that was a problem. How do you create that kind of space? How do you create a micro library within a building that only has straight lines and right angles that typically your understanding of it is only based on violence. And it has to be more than like the bookshelf behind me. And so we created something beautiful. We had them design something that has curves because no curves exist in prison. We had them designed something when you can access to books on both sides, because we want people to come together and meet at the stacks, you know, and be able to communicate with each other. And what's really de fascinating is that it's forced me to gain knowledge from others, you know, It's forced me to accept what I'm not an expert in. So I'm learning what sheep goods are. I'm learning that some woods are soft and some words at heart. And I'm working with the Department of Corrections and recognizing that prisons are violent places, and so we have to build a structure that doesn't hurt somebody, you know, we have to build a structure where the wood isn't so soft that it could be piled and turned in the weapons. I mean, these are like serious considerations that I think going to creating something beautiful, but going to creating something beautiful within the context where it exists, recognizing at once it's created, all of us will want this in our house. And so I'm trying to bridge the gap between prison and freedom in such a way that it makes another argument for not needing prison. But it's acknowledging the conditions of incarceration right now and looked and fascinating. And you're the first person publicly I've told this. You know already Norton of Malcolm X fame, they gutted a prison cell, and we're turning a prison cell into a library. And I think that that is just like, you know, if I was a person who gets emotional and hadn't been like, you know, radically transformed by prison in both good and bad ways, I will be weeping at the very idea that um, you know, I was once in a hold with books will contraband, and then we'll turn in a prison cell into a library. I mean it is literally both a metaphor but an actual material fulfillment of some promise that that I always hope was possible. You know, it makes me think about her here. I remember reading that when Charles Dickens came to the United States in eighteen forty two, he was really interested in prison reform, and um, he went to this prison in Philadelphia where solitary confinnement was a kind of a new practice, and he was allowed to see someone who had been in solitary confinement. Dickens was hugely opposed to solitary convironment and opposed to the conditions in the prisons. And he met this man who who just lost it, like he just lost it in solitary and he he had been given like a single newspaper sheet and he had made a hat out of it, and he wore this hat made out of a newspaper. And it's just like this wrenching moment in this account of Dickens's, like this was his reckoning with America, that this weird American moment was like watching that mind, you know, be kind of put into this cell and the way that this man was trying to escape. I don't know, just thinking about the cell being turned into a library as this just incredible, almost like Dickenzie and feel of the kind of the magnitude of that, you know, Symbolically, for me, it was walking down those corridors and filling the way that the stones carry memory, and the way that the memory of those stones, I mean they carried the memories that guy from Dickens, you know, his mind unraveling because somebody felt like the way to transform you was to put you in a dark hole and leave you there, and today decided you should be free. And you know, a part of the project is to make people recognize that. So when people say, but really, you want to build a library in a sale, I say, it's one library in one sale in America, but it's two point three million people in all of the other sales. And the question becomes, do you want to talk to me about the library that I built in that sale or do you want to talk to me about the two point three million people that we filled all of the other sales with. Because I bet if we filled all of those other sales up with libraries, it wouldn't be room for people, and nobody would have a problem with those books being there, no matter how decrepit the building was. We will find out a way to get to those books because we have value in it. How can we all find a way to get to those people. Yeah, that's beautiful. I am just sell impressed by everything that you're doing and by the just the scale of this project. And it's just deep humanity and it's really gonna stick with me thinking about what it means to care about each of those two point three million people the way we care about the books in our libraries. And I just want to thank you so much for everything you're doing and for taking a time to talk with us. Well, I'm super humble, and I thank you for participating and for caring about it. You know, it's like it's it's probably the coolest thing I've ever done in this life, you know, if I would have picked one. And I'm glad that other people share some of my finess for it. Thanks for listening. That was Reginald Dwayne Betts. You can find out more about Freedom Reads at freedom reads dot org. If you want to hear the rest of the series, subscribe to pushkin Plus look for the last archive, show page and Apple podcasts, or go to pushkin, dot fm, slash plus, and if you're already a subscriber, thank you. This episode was produced by Lucy Sullivan. Music by Stillwagon Symphony

Pushkin Hey, Last Archive listeners, this is Jill Lapour. We're hard at work on season three and can't wait to share it with you. It's all about reason, about finding our way towards hope and common knowledge and out of the epistemological pickle we explored in seasons one and two. But making a new season takes time, so meanwhile, I want to introduce you to a new limited run series that I'm doing, called The Last Archivist. Over the years, I've met hundreds and hundreds of archivists, collectors, curators, librarians, keepers of history, people with trinkets and facts and ideas that I want to add to our collection of the known things. In this series, you'll hear from a few of them about their work, like how to sit up a library in a prison, what four decades worth of eyeglasses can tell us about the history of a person, And why a trash collector in Pittsburgh is a kind of archivist too. It's gonna be fun. This series is just for Pushkin Plus subscribers, but we're dropping the first episode for you here in the feed. If you want to hear the rest, subscribe at the Last Archive show page and Apple podcasts or go to pushkin dot fm, slash plus and thanks for listening. Welcome to The Last Archivist, the show where I talked to archivists about the collections and records they keep and why. In this episode, I talked to Reginald Dwayne Betts. He's the author of three books, including Felon, a collection of poems about the effects of incarceration. He's also an actor, a lawyer, and a teacher, and the recipient of a MacArthur Genius Grant. We talked about Freedom Reads, an organization Bets started to bring literature to jails in prison across the country. Bets was incarcerated as a teenager and given a nine year sentence. While in prison, a fellow inmate gave him a book and it changed his life. He wants to give other incarcerated people that experience too, so he's building libraries in prison cells. But I'll let him tell you about it. My name is regend Dwayne Betts, and I'm the founder and director of Freedom Reads, a project that is meant to curate and build freedom libraries and prisons across this country. Thanks so much for doing this when you have so much going on. This is really really exciting. So I wanted to talk to you about the Freedom library as an archive in a collection. I have this podcast that's about kind of where knowledge lives, like where we store ideas and memories, and so I'm kind of fascinated, like, of all the things that you could have done, most of which you're actually also doing different forms of prison education or prison writing programs, or your own poetry and memoir writing, your own performance. Why a library, you know, honestly, I feel like maybe library is the most radical thing I imagine being able to be done. But also it's the thing that's absolutely quintessential to some movement, to actual building of a community, to actually build another civilization, to actually build another democracy. It's like, where's your repository of language? And what does it mean to actually make that accessible? And not make it accessible in a symbolic way. A lot of us don't live in a world with a library actually functions as pure symbol. We think about some public schools that aren't the greatest schools. They still have libraries in the school and they still push the students to attend to go to those libraries. And maybe everybody doesn't go to the new York Public Library who lives in New York. But that's why they have satellite branches, and those libraries work really hard to make the services amenable and attractive to everybody in the community. In prison, you're lucky if you could get to the library once some money, and when you get that, you have twenty five minutes. And so, you know, I remember coming home and people will criticize me because I hadn't read a lot of Shakespeare, and I was like, well, why would I have read a lot of Shakespeare. I was going to the library for twenty five minutes. I just had time to go to what I hungered for. I didn't have the time to explore what I might want. And so for me, it was both a process of curation in a process of creating the expectation for others. And I thought, well, what does it mean when I create the expectation from somebody who's doing time in prison to end up in these spaces. In conversations with Sonya Sanchez, I mean, in conversations with Jill Lapoor, you were publishing books, you were a scholar when I was in prison, and I didn't know that you existed. And that's that's like a tragedy, you know what I mean. It's like, how might my world have been different had I been hipped to more than just that one historical text that people quote. And so I feel like, you know, I want to have a role and saying that the books matter because the books matter. You know, the books don't matter because you you're gonna read them and necessarily become something different. They matter because it's the foundational principle of trying to build something more and without it, you can't build more. So the question I have are you working on this project or the Freedom Library, is whether it's changed how you think about books. You know, we can think about books as a gift or a book says a refuge, books as an escape, Like, there are lots of different ways we think about books. I'm wondering if you're thinking about books has changed in a couple of ways. One, I've realized how a lot of us have a common vocabulary, and I've thought about how to push against that. And so certain books come up and you see that because you share experiences and you share education, folks are where those books. But then I've watched how in conversation you see that the really beautiful moments come when when it's an introduction of a book that somebody hadn't heard of. So one of the things I've noticed is that in curating a collection, you work very hard to see people I do. So I can't just have the run of books that you will read as a PhD student in sociology or a PhD student in law or PhD student in history. It has to be far more complex than that. Going up and down. I recognize that, you know, the dog books have to have light in it, and you have to understand what that light means, and it can't just be because somebody said it so. But also I recognize that it is fifteen different ways to understand every book. And I've been having arguments with people who say, well, Jane Austen means this, I don't know like and somebody will say, are you really I'm going to include hard of Darkness? I mean, don't you understand. Layla Lalami wrote a beautiful introduction to that book where she talked about it was the first book in the English language she read. We bring meaning to books in the same way they bring meanings to us, and the question is what can I make a community aware of as I do this work, and so in developing this library, I'm trying really hard to engage with people in a way in which they've remind me of their similar stories, so that some of those books creep into this library and it's not and it becomes an enterprise that allows people to meet themselves where they are and grow somewhere. But it also becomes i think, a symbol or that very process of becoming and not this idea of like, you know, if I had the books, Like if I was like, who are you as a lawyer? And I put towards and contracts and then you looked at that bookshelf, it wouldn't really communicate much except the finish line. But every beautiful library I think reflects more to journey. So what do you hear from readers? I should tell you, Like one guy, he says, oh you you send it in um Man Search for mena man that book changed my life. I mean, I'm telling you, I was in a bad way and I'm looking at this guy and I'm like yeah, and it was so shoo bought it and it's like just like forty He's like late thirties. Black dude, you know, and like deeply talking about that's the book that made me reimagine the world. But other things though, it's like some guys that I met who really became educated in prison he said, he said, uh, my man, Richard talks about, you know, being stomped out by the guards. He had swung on one of the CEOs and then they beat him up real bad, broke his teeth and being on the floor, mouth bloody, and later reflecting on it and thinking about how that was just KMO moment where you make a decision about whether you want to live or you just want to give up, And you know, it's like, it's something radical about talking to these guys who who get that kind of work from books. And it's interesting because the books get you just up to that ledge where the next thing you under you start asking this, but how do we respond to the world given the decisions that were made? And how do we want the world to respond to us given the decisions that we made. So it's been it's been powerful. And some people haven't liked some book, you know, and it's saying and sometimes the DFC administrators are like, what people don't like the books? And I'm like, that's okay. So that's part of it too. It's like, you don't have to like every book. I think, you know, I told, I told the warden, say, you know, part of my challenge is to remind people why these books matter, but also put emphasis on these and books and it's not singular, so maybe something else will jump out to him. Um. And I've been reminded of that, and that's been a nice lesson for myself as like a writer and a thinker who sometimes gets sad when people don't love. What I say is that, you know, the junk, these these young folks and just men and women in prison have sometimes not like books that I love, and I have to accept that and so do the writers. Yeah, but also discriminating between the books that you love and you hate. It's kind of the spark too, like that's that's how you find out who you are, Like I'm a person who hates Melville. Let's now. I know that that's a lesson though honestly though, because I think that you have to have a certain kind of so confidence to really dislike a book. I know the first book that I vehemently disliked, and I know my response was the writer ten page essay about how I disliked the book and I was in solitary confinement. And I would never forget that book. I'll never forget the ideas in it. I'll never forget exactly what made me dislike it. And and I've only read it once, and I know it. I know it in ways that I don't know books that I love. It was all God's Children, Fox Butterfield, about Willie, about Willie Boskett. He was the kid that led to the New York Youth Offender law. But I know what prison I was at, I know what sale I was in. I know that I paid for the book. God damn it. Yeah. Yeah, But then you own your ideas, you know, like that's the freedom of that, Like you own your opinion about that book. Well, you don't have much, like you can own that, especially when you don't have much. And I also think that's one of the powers of the libraries that you know, when you don't have much, you do have your own ideas, and books help you develop your ideas, to help I had ideas post reading that book that I didn't have before. You know, reading that book helped me understand the world around me. In a way that I didn't before I read the book, because I needed to be confronted with arguments I disagree with to help me know what I cared about. In the same way, in novels, you know, you get confronted with these characters that bother you. I mean, it makes you know why, you know, and it makes you maybe change some of the ways that you act in the world's like I don't maybe I was like him. I don't I want to be like him or heard, you know, I don't want to act like they do. So, Yeah, to imagine yourself being in the role in the place of another human being making a choice is to imagine choices, and in a way that you know, is about fully figuring out who you are. So you started sending out books already to prisons and to juvenile detention centers, and you're also involved in the building of physical bookshelves for the Is that right for the library to be housed in? How's that working? How's that work? It's actually fantastic. I Mean one of the ideas was, okay, what if we just build books, And then some people said, but why don't you just give books away? You know, why build a space. Would you say that about your local library, would you say, why build a space? You know, but a library is not just a collection of books to strewn on the floor or placed on shelves. It's actually like some organizational structure that invites people to come towards it. And so that was a problem. How do you create that kind of space? How do you create a micro library within a building that only has straight lines and right angles that typically your understanding of it is only based on violence. And it has to be more than like the bookshelf behind me. And so we created something beautiful. We had them design something that has curves because no curves exist in prison. We had them designed something when you can access to books on both sides, because we want people to come together and meet at the stacks, you know, and be able to communicate with each other. And what's really de fascinating is that it's forced me to gain knowledge from others, you know, It's forced me to accept what I'm not an expert in. So I'm learning what sheep goods are. I'm learning that some woods are soft and some words at heart. And I'm working with the Department of Corrections and recognizing that prisons are violent places, and so we have to build a structure that doesn't hurt somebody, you know, we have to build a structure where the wood isn't so soft that it could be piled and turned in the weapons. I mean, these are like serious considerations that I think going to creating something beautiful, but going to creating something beautiful within the context where it exists, recognizing at once it's created, all of us will want this in our house. And so I'm trying to bridge the gap between prison and freedom in such a way that it makes another argument for not needing prison. But it's acknowledging the conditions of incarceration right now and looked and fascinating. And you're the first person publicly I've told this. You know already Norton of Malcolm X fame, they gutted a prison cell, and we're turning a prison cell into a library. And I think that that is just like, you know, if I was a person who gets emotional and hadn't been like, you know, radically transformed by prison in both good and bad ways, I will be weeping at the very idea that um, you know, I was once in a hold with books will contraband, and then we'll turn in a prison cell into a library. I mean it is literally both a metaphor but an actual material fulfillment of some promise that that I always hope was possible. You know, it makes me think about her here. I remember reading that when Charles Dickens came to the United States in eighteen forty two, he was really interested in prison reform, and um, he went to this prison in Philadelphia where solitary confinnement was a kind of a new practice, and he was allowed to see someone who had been in solitary confinement. Dickens was hugely opposed to solitary convironment and opposed to the conditions in the prisons. And he met this man who who just lost it, like he just lost it in solitary and he he had been given like a single newspaper sheet and he had made a hat out of it, and he wore this hat made out of a newspaper. And it's just like this wrenching moment in this account of Dickens's, like this was his reckoning with America, that this weird American moment was like watching that mind, you know, be kind of put into this cell and the way that this man was trying to escape. I don't know, just thinking about the cell being turned into a library as this just incredible, almost like Dickenzie and feel of the kind of the magnitude of that, you know, Symbolically, for me, it was walking down those corridors and filling the way that the stones carry memory, and the way that the memory of those stones, I mean they carried the memories that guy from Dickens, you know, his mind unraveling because somebody felt like the way to transform you was to put you in a dark hole and leave you there, and today decided you should be free. And you know, a part of the project is to make people recognize that. So when people say, but really, you want to build a library in a sale, I say, it's one library in one sale in America, but it's two point three million people in all of the other sales. And the question becomes, do you want to talk to me about the library that I built in that sale or do you want to talk to me about the two point three million people that we filled all of the other sales with. Because I bet if we filled all of those other sales up with libraries, it wouldn't be room for people, and nobody would have a problem with those books being there, no matter how decrepit the building was. We will find out a way to get to those books because we have value in it. How can we all find a way to get to those people. Yeah, that's beautiful. I am just sell impressed by everything that you're doing and by the just the scale of this project. And it's just deep humanity and it's really gonna stick with me thinking about what it means to care about each of those two point three million people the way we care about the books in our libraries. And I just want to thank you so much for everything you're doing and for taking a time to talk with us. Well, I'm super humble, and I thank you for participating and for caring about it. You know, it's like it's it's probably the coolest thing I've ever done in this life, you know, if I would have picked one. And I'm glad that other people share some of my finess for it. Thanks for listening. That was Reginald Dwayne Betts. You can find out more about Freedom Reads at freedom reads dot org. If you want to hear the rest of the series, subscribe to pushkin Plus look for the last archive, show page and Apple podcasts, or go to pushkin, dot fm, slash plus, and if you're already a subscriber, thank you. This episode was produced by Lucy Sullivan. Music by Stillwagon Symphony