Dr. Sheldon Eakins:
Welcome, advocates, to another episode of the Leading Equity podcast. A podcast that focuses on supporting educators with the tools and resources necessary to ensure equity at their scopes. Today's special guest is mister Ben Orland. So without further ado, Ben, thank you so much for joining us today.

Ben Orlin:
Yeah. Thanks, doctor Akins. I appreciate being here.

Dr. Sheldon Eakins:
Oh, Sheldon is fine, and the pleasure is all mine. I I appreciate you and your time for spending a Sunday morning or afternoon. I'm not sure what side of town of the of the United States you're on, but thank you for spending your Sunday time with me.

Ben Orlin:
Yeah. I know. Appreciate it. Yeah. Minnesota, which is right now, it's fair country. The state fair just started here, and so it's like that's that's all anybody's thinking about or talking about.

Dr. Sheldon Eakins:
Okay. Alright. Cool. Cool. One of these days, I'm a make my way out. They haven't been been out there in a minute. So but I'm excited for today's conversation. But before we get into today's topic, I'd love for you to share a little bit about yourself and what you currently do.

Ben Orlin:
Yeah. I think so I think my career is being this the 2 halves I teach and I write, and it's kinda moved over the course of my career how those balance. I teach math, and I've not dabbled in other subjects, but, basically, I've taught math everything from 6th grade up through. I teach community college now. I've taught a little bit at the undergraduate level. But, yeah, middle school and high school is sort of more. I've spent more of my time. And then I write these books too.

Ben Orlin:
So the, my blog is called math with bad drawings. And then I have this series of books that's kind of the math with bad drawings series. So they're all illustrated with stick figures. You know, there's some people out there who do stick figures because they think it's, like, fun and playful. That's part of the reason I do it, but also it's probably just, like, I really can't draw. So that's that's the best I can do. So stick figure. That's about so, yeah, that's that's me really putting my all into it.

Ben Orlin:
And so, yeah, they're they're kinda ideas for, silly books. They're they're they're meant to be have some intellectual depth to them, so they really teach you about math. But they're also meant to be fun and playful and accessible. So a lot of my readers are students who are excited about math, 12 13 year olds who just want want something fun and playful to to go deeper with the subject. And so that's, yeah, that's me. I kind of move back and forth between the two worlds where teaching and you're you're in the classroom and it's always going by in a blur and the 1,000,000 things to do every day. And then writing, you get to sit back and sculpt something and edit it if it goes badly, which you'd the classroom is not how it works. So you can't have a bad lesson to be like, alright.

Ben Orlin:
Let me hit the reset button. We're just gonna do that whole lesson again. I just it it happens quicker. So so I I like I like the balance of those 2.

Dr. Sheldon Eakins:
Alright. Well, thank you again. And now your latest one, it looks like, is math for English majors, a human take on the universal language. And this really stuck out to me because I I taught English a little bit. Mainly, I taught history, But I would say, I mean, as a student, as as a math student, I struggle. But I I used to tell my kids all the time, like, you you got any history or any English? I got you. Like, I'll support you and all that. I can I can do to you? I can give you that support needs.

Dr. Sheldon Eakins:
However, don't ask me any math questions because I just it's just never been something I was strong in. And so I'm just so curious about how because they seem like 2 totally opposite areas. So start with how can math relate to English?

Ben Orlin:
Yeah. They do. I mean, I definitely wanna honor the fact that for a lot of students, they just feel so separate. They really feel far apart for the kind of thinking you do in English where you get to, like, look at the text and then share your own ideas and kind of branch off in different ways and have a flowing conversation, and then math, which feels often so rigid and narrow. And it's like, no. No. You had to put your foot in exactly the right place. You had to write your x in exactly the right spot to do exactly this thing.

Ben Orlin:
It feels, yeah, it feels much narrower, I think, to most students. So how did how are they actually connected? What I talk about in the book is that math really is it's a system of communication. That's really it's for sharing ideas. And the ideas we're sharing in math are kind of funny, very specific sorts of ideas. So the language has been designed in a kind of weird way that's make it makes it kind of just the right vehicle, the just the right container for for those peculiar ideas we're sharing in math. But basically, it all starts from trying to assign numbers to the world. You know, you look at the world, you either count something out there or you measure something with some kind of measurement device, and then you use calculations to figure out new information that you never could have measured in the 1st place. One of the classic example is, is the ancient Greek who wants to know how big the world was.

Ben Orlin:
I don't know what transportation technology was like in ancient Greece, but you're not gonna travel all the way around the world, trailing a big string behind you to measure it directly. So it's like, okay. What am I gonna do? Now you can measure kind of the length of a shadow in 2 different places. That's a pretty easy measurement. And then you do some math, and you can actually calculate, you know, to a reasonable degree of accuracy. He got it to a less than 1% error. How big is the world? So that that's sort of the template to me for math. It's taking a little bit of information we have and using it to find new information.

Dr. Sheldon Eakins:
Okay. I got you. So not necessarily or maybe maybe I'm I'm jumping the gun here because I wanna make sure I got a clearer picture of how they how they the 2 of them relate because I when I think about math, I think of kinda like what you said there. There's formulas. Yeah. I guess, technically, in English, there's formulas too, like a sentence, for example. You gotta have a subject, a noun, those kind of verbs, those kind of things. And I believe you talked something about that in your book.

Dr. Sheldon Eakins:
Can you can you open up about that?

Ben Orlin:
Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So we start with nouns. That's where I start in the book. So, right, in English, noun, person, place, thing, sort of anything we're naming out in the world. And I think, actually, the etymology of noun, like, comes from name, basically.

Ben Orlin:
It's like, okay. We're assigning a name to that thing. We call it a tree. And in math, that's basically what numbers are. You've got these these quantities, and we need to assign names to them. It's really hard. You actually showed in the book if you've got, like, 17 dots versus 18 dots and you're looking at them. Like, if they're side by side, you can tell that 18 is larger, but there's no way you'd ever if you were looking at bunch of pictures with 17 and then 18 and then 22 and then 14, you'll you'd never be able to keep track of how many each one has.

Ben Orlin:
So we need we need to give names to those numbers. You can't count 1 by 1 every time. And so the story I start with in the book is I was hiking in Wales. Actually, I lived in England for a little while. And I was hiking there and came across this really cool plaque that's just out on the hillside that showed the numbers in Welsh from, like, 1 to 20. And you can kinda look say, okay. It was 1. They're like, okay.

Ben Orlin:
That looks kinda like 1. And you can kinda get to 10, and then you can see 11 is kinda like 101. So, yeah, a lot of languages work like that. 12 is 102. Then 15 was kind of its own weird word, and then it got interesting because 16, the way they name it in Welsh is basically 15 and 1, which, like, it's not how we call it in English. We call it 16. It's more like 106, but okay. 15 and 1.

Ben Orlin:
And then 17 was 15 and 2. And then you get to 18, which in English, we call it 108. And in Welsh, I was expecting it to be like, okay. That's 15 and 3, but it's not. It's it's do enough, which is double nines, 2 nines, which is like when it's awesome. Like, when I'm gonna tell that to people, the 2 reactions are either, oh, that's really cool. That's a neat way to say 18 because it is, like, 18 is 29. So that you're playing baseball, you got 9 guys on 1 side, not on the other side.

Ben Orlin:
Yeah. That's that's that's 18. And other people are like, that's crazy. You can't do that. You can't just change the naming system in the middle. And I think both those reactions are right, actually, that, like, you know, it is that is a cool way to say 18. That's if you're talking about the number 18, if we were just giving names to things, that's a that's a nicer way to talk about 18 to say, oh, look. It's made up of 2 nines.

Ben Orlin:
But on the other hand, everything else is based on 10. And so it's much harder as a kid to learn a naming system where what it's based on is changing. Imagine if you had to, like, know exactly what the factors of every number were and just in order to be able to count, it's it's sort of it's more complicated. It's harder to learn. Anyway, so even just with numbers, even with counting, you've got this naming system that's designed for a lot of different purposes. But among them, one is ideally to be easy to learn. And another one is, like, the naming system should make it easy to add and subtract numbers, which ours does a pretty good job of 27 plus 32. Yeah.

Ben Orlin:
The 20 and the 30. Yeah. The 7 and the 2, and you can kinda come up just by just by moving around the names. I'll come up with the what the the sum should be.

Dr. Sheldon Eakins:
Okay. Alright. Well, that that makes sense. It kinda made me think about, like, Roman numerals as well. They they tend to look like letters. So that that kind of brought that to my mind when you started talking about what you noticed there. Yeah.

Ben Orlin:
Yeah. And Roman numerals are sort of, like, in some ways, an easier system to learn than, than our numbers. Because you think you got you gotta learn 10 different symbols. You gotta learn 0 through 9. Whereas Roman numerals, it's almost more like tally marks. And then once you get enough tally marks or once you get up to 5, it's like, that's too many tally marks. You just call it a v. So Roman numerals, that kind of accumulating numeral system is sort of a little easier to wrap your head around, but it's not as good for writing pencil and paper arithmetic.

Ben Orlin:
It's harder to you know, multiplying Roman numerals would be really tough.

Dr. Sheldon Eakins:
Okay. And so we talked about nouns. So I would imagine nouns could be, like, variables or something like that within if we're talking to you on a high school level of of math or something like that. Yeah.

Ben Orlin:
Exactly. Yeah.

Dr. Sheldon Eakins:
And then you also talk about verbs. How are verbs related in math?

Ben Orlin:
Yeah. Yeah. So verbs verbs are tricky. So the the story I like to think of is I was visiting my sister who teaches k through 8 math. She's, like, a math specialist for a k through 8 school, and we're hanging out with the kindergartners. And she was asked she's, like, making a conversation with them. She's, oh, how old are you? And they're mostly saying 5. And then she would say, oh, and how old will you be next year? And you sort of figure out I don't know.

Ben Orlin:
Like, I you asked me how old I'm gonna be next year. I just add one to my age. I know what it's gonna be. And some of the kindergarteners did that, but some of them didn't. Some of them would go, oh, I'm 5. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. And they had to sort of count again from 1, almost the way sometimes I feel like if you're blanking on the alphabet. Like, wait.

Ben Orlin:
Does q come before r or after r? You just gotta sing the whole song to get there. It was like that, but but for numbers for them. And it was funny. What it what it highlighted for me was that even before you learn addition and subtraction and division and all that, incrementing, just adding 1, that's kinda like the simplest operation there is. Counting starting at one place and going on to the next number. There's actually there's something there, and you're sort of doing that repeatedly. That's what addition is in the same way that, like, multiplication is repeated addition. And I thought it was cool.

Ben Orlin:
It was interesting to realize that at this stage of math where you think kids are just kinda memorizing the names of the numbers, there actually are processes that they're doing. There's you know, a verb is an action. And so that adding one, that's a real action for them, and there's easier ways to do it and harder ways to do it. And they're they're kind of wrestling with that action. And then later, though, you know what? You've talked to a 4th grader, 5th grader. You know, they don't have to do that. You say, okay. How old are you? 10.

Ben Orlin:
How old are you gonna be next year? They just say 11. It's not it's not hard for them. And so what's going on there is they've taken counting. You know, going 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, and it doesn't have to be an action for them anymore. They can just jump straight to the outcome. Right? They're like, oh, 10. Add 1. It's gonna be 11.

Ben Orlin:
I don't I don't need to do all the counting. And even though that's pretty simple math when it comes down to everything, most of us are pretty good at that. That's kind of the template for how math goes. You learn a process like addition or multiplication. And then what you have to do is you have to start, especially as you get into algebra. You sort of stop thinking about the process and start just looking at the outcome. So this is what's tough about algebra. You see 3 plus 5, and you say, oh, it's 8.

Ben Orlin:
And you see 4+9. You say, okay, 13. You see x plus y, and there's nothing to do. You're not supposed to do anything with x plus y. It's just that's just two numbers added together, and we don't know yet what they are. They could be any numbers. And one of the things I like to do with with students is try to get them to see numbers that way. If you see 10 +8, you could call that 18.

Ben Orlin:
That's another name for that. But you can also just call it 10 +8. That's a perfectly fine name for that number. Same as in in English, the equivalent would be like, you can say a dog and a cat, or you can say 2 pets. Then those are 2 ways of saying the same thing, but you don't have to it's not like if someone says a dog and a cat, you immediately have to say, oh, 2 pets. No. No one's demanding that you paraphrase it. And this is same as 10 plus 8.

Ben Orlin:
When you see 10 plus 8, like, actually, that's just a number. That's fine the way it is.

Dr. Sheldon Eakins:
Gotcha. Okay. Alright. I'm a I'm a shift gears just a little bit because when I look at the title, math for English majors, first thought that came to my mind was, like, word problems. So I was like, oh, okay.

Ben Orlin:
Yeah.

Dr. Sheldon Eakins:
This is probably a book about word problems and how, you know, Johnny has 6 apples and Mary has 4. How many do they have together? This is a great way for math teachers to utilize word problems. But it doesn't seem like that is the gist of where you went with things, unless that is part of the book. I I you have some thoughts there.

Ben Orlin:
Yeah. No. We we we get in this a little bit of word problems there. Yeah. I'm trying to think of it. It's funny because the math for English majors title kinda came late. The original title was, how to speak math.

Dr. Sheldon Eakins:
Mhmm. And it's funny,

Ben Orlin:
like, the genesis, I realized as I'm telling these things, it's sort of like it's a little in the weeds more more so than my other book. So, like, my first book I did, it's called math bad drawings, and it's got chapters on, like, lottery tickets and on triangles in architecture, and on, you know, insurance policies, like, sort of weird kinda the the insurance policies I pick are all really weird ones, like insuring yourself against an alien abduction or or something like that. So so that one's sort of, like, weird little applications of math. And then the book I did before this one, my third one was a book of mathematical games, like pencil and paper games, sort of stuff that's a little more interesting than tic tac toe, but doesn't take as long to learn as chess. There's a lot of space in between those. And so I've done those 3 books, and I was I'm happy with them, proud of those books. But I'd felt kinda like I was missing a really crucial part of what trips people up with math. Like, before we started recording, we were talking about how, right, for the students that you work with, algebra 2 is just like a huge stumbling block.

Ben Orlin:
Yeah. It's it's this gatekeeper in the educational system. And mathematical notation often works that way. It's like, can you look at a page of mathematical notation and, like, do you just feel this really strong fight or flight instinct to run the other way? Or do you can you kinda sit with that and and make some sense out of the symbols? I see that with students I teach. That's that's a huge divide of just, like, how comfortable do you feel with the marks on the page? And usually when people people like me or, you know, like math professors I work with, when they wanna get people excited about math, we just, like, push the symbols under the rug. Just like, no. No. Don't pay any attention to those.

Ben Orlin:
Forget about the x's and the y's. Like, think about these cool shapes, fractals. I think about, the golden ratio. Like, we sort of focus on stuff that's a little more, visual often and and accessible. But then if you look at who's kinda succeeding in math education, you need the symbols. But, like, to access college level, science majors or lots of professions, if we don't teach people how to master those symbols, then there's sort of doors that close. But, yeah, pathways that aren't open to them. So what I want you in this book would be like, okay.

Ben Orlin:
How do I get, what, 10 years of math education? How do I get down to one little book? I'm not gonna be able to cover everything. But what sort of, like, the essential understanding and the kinda unspoken part that doesn't, yeah, doesn't always come through? That, like, we have expert users of math, they don't know kinda what to say. They don't know how to how to express that kind of that unspoken knowledge that they have. And it kept coming back to language because in the same way that, like, a a native English speaker or a native speaker of any language just knows so much about their language they don't even think about. Like, in English, one of the classic examples is adjective order where we always say big blue ball. We would never say blue big ball. It just, like, sound it sounds wrong, like putting the color before the size. And there's a million rules like that that we just kinda apply automatically.

Ben Orlin:
And my feeling is that math is kinda the same way. So I want to sorta unpack some of those rules. What are the things that that fluent speakers of mathematics who have learned it? What are the things that they do that they've picked up without really knowing it, and how do we kinda package that together for for students? Anyway, that's a very long answer, but that those are sort of the genesis of the book. And it really is a language. It just happens to be a a weird language. It's a language where we tend to only say things once. That's one really challenging thing about math. In English, a good persuasive essay kinda circles back and repeats some thoughts.

Ben Orlin:
And in mathematical text, we just don't tend to do that. You tend to you put it down on the page once, and now it's been said, and then you move on to the next thought. And so that makes it very it's kinda slow and painstaking to read. One difference among many.

Dr. Sheldon Eakins:
Gotcha. Okay. Okay. Well, that that makes a lot of sense. I I wanna leave our audience members, especially, I guess, our math teachers out there and, I guess, our English teachers as as well. I wanna leave them with some strategies that are out there. What could you share with some of our teaching? Of course, folks, we want you to get the book. But what are some of the strategies that that are in the book that kinda relates to the concepts that you're we're talking about today?

Ben Orlin:
Yeah. I think my sort of overall view of math education tends to be you really wanna start concrete and then try to build to something more abstract. Doesn't go so well when we try to leap straight to the abstract. Subtraction is is maybe a good example. You talk to mathematicians about subtraction, and they got subtraction. It's just adding the negative. Minus 4, that's the same as adding negative 4. That that's not how I would teach it to 6th graders.

Ben Orlin:
It's really not not the right way for a middle schooler to think about subtraction. I try to think about, like, what are some really concrete settings where subtraction comes up? And there's a few different models actually where subtraction matters. Taking away is the classic one. You got $20 and you spend 4. But there's other ones. So for example, if right now I'm 50 miles from home and I'm trying to get further down the road to 90 miles from home, how far do I have to go? That's also subtraction, but it's not a taking away, actually. If I'm at mile marker 50, I'm trying to get make the numbers a little trickier. Say I'm at mile marker 49, and I'm trying to get to mile marker 92.

Ben Orlin:
You can sort of add instead of subtracting. You go 49 to 50. Okay. I've traveled 1 mile. And then 90 is another 40 miles. And then to 92 is another couple of miles after that, and then you can add up those distances you traveled. So that that would that's just the example of subtraction of how to sort of come up with a concrete scenario. But I think almost all mathematical thinking, you gotta start with with the concrete.

Ben Orlin:
So that's one one kind of theme that I I cycle back to a lot. And and another one, not from this book, but from my previous book actually on games. But you can't cancel math class every day to play games. That's not definitely don't don't advise that. But a couple times during the year, once a month, like, it turns out that that one day of game playing, instructional time is really valuable. I wouldn't wanna waste it. But one day to, like, to, for one thing, build morale, but also to show students that there's more to math than just the procedures that they're learning. They have making time for those kinds of inspirational, exciting lessons.

Ben Orlin:
There's a good YouTube channel. So Numberphile is a fun one that has lots of good, good videos out there. Matt Parker does great YouTube videos. Finding the stuff yeah. And and then, yeah, different different games that can get students thinking mathematically, but in a way that's that's playful and fun. Yeah. I, you know, I I definitely don't advise teachers abandoning the curriculum for just game playing all the time. But but sprinkling it in, finding those those 10 minutes on a Friday to to play a game can just make a huge morale difference.

Dr. Sheldon Eakins:
I I always one of the biggest things that I've learned from speaking with guests that math was their focus, finding ways to relate the concepts to a student's home life or what they're interested in. So kinda hearing you talk about gaming, for example, like, you're gonna have a lot of students that might be interested in in games and and how you can relate all of that. And and just being able to say, okay. What can I do to make that connection for this individual student that, again, math tends to be one of their harder subjects? However, it doesn't mean that it's impossible subject, but it might just require me to find ways to relate that information to them.

Ben Orlin:
Yeah. No. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. They're sort of the the 2 kind of branches in trying to make math accessible exciting for students. I think of this the like, there's the the quote, unquote real world branch where you say, look. Here's how math connects to to things out there in reality.

Ben Orlin:
Often, it's as simple as just putting dollar signs in front of everything. Like, kids know money. Kids kids care about money. So when I've taught and teach negative numbers to middle schoolers when I've taught that in the past, there's lots of different models people like to use and visual models and number line models. And for me, the one that always clicks is talking about debt. Like, if you owe your friend $3, that's my 6th graders, that's visceral for them. They they they get that idea. Like, oh, no.

Ben Orlin:
I owe $3. If you owe that kid $3 and you owe that kid $9, oh my god. Now you owe $12. Like, that that's, like, that's that's very concrete for them. And then you connect that to to the sort of abstract representation of negative numbers. So that's sort of door number 1. Path number 1 is the try to make it real concrete. And then path number 2 is try to make it sort of like fun puzzles.

Ben Orlin:
This can feel harder because especially for students who are not inclined to see math as a set of fun puzzles. But one of the moves I like there is to sort of loosen the question a little bit where instead of saying find the area of this rectangle and find the area of that rectangle and find the area of that rectangle, you say, give me a rectangle whose area is 12. And any rectangle you can come up with, or give me a rectangle whose area is a 100. And then you look around the room. You're like, oh, actually, yeah. These look those 3 kids all did the same thing, but those 3 kids all did a different thing. And here, oh, and this will that's the only person who gave that answer. That's an interesting answer.

Ben Orlin:
Let's dig into that. So if that one's takes a little more agility from the instructor to make sure to pick out the answers that are gonna lead to productive conversation, but it's a really important move, I think. And you can do that with any math. You can always say, okay. Rather than me giving you the example, you give me the example. Like, give me give me an equation where the solution is 4. Kid will be clever and be like, my equation is x equals 4. There.

Ben Orlin:
Solution is 4. And, like, that's actually a good starting point to talk about. And some other kid will be like, okay. Well, x plus 1 is 5. You go, okay. Yeah. That one, again, 4 works. And some some kid will try to be clever.

Ben Orlin:
Be like, well, x squared minus 19. They'll do something very complicated. And then and then that one gives you a different kind of conversation. You can and you can kinda steer into into what the right level is for the class to discuss together. But I find that is both more engaging for the student because they're being asked to think in a slightly different way. They're being asked to produce something rather than just rehearse steps. And so it's it's more engaging and also is a is in some ways a better test of understanding because it's often the case in math that we learn the dance. So we learn,

Dr. Sheldon Eakins:
here

Ben Orlin:
are the steps you follow. But what do the steps mean? What are they producing? It's like, like, we're we're we're doing the dance. We're not really hearing the music. And just asking somebody, like, show show me how you would dance to this or or you you come up with the music yourself almost. Yeah. And kinda open the subject up a little bit.

Dr. Sheldon Eakins:
Gotcha. Okay. Well, listen, I I'll tell you one thing, folks. Math for English majors sounds like a book that I I I definitely need to get my hands on, and I'd I'd love for you to share with our audience because I've learned so much so far. Share with our audience any last words of advice you wanna provide to our listeners.

Ben Orlin:
Yeah. I mean, right. Depends on where where sort of you sit in the educational system, I guess. For for elementary teachers, I I love I love working with, like, primary school teachers. And some some are really excited about math. Typically, that's not the subject that's drawn them into to teaching. Often, they're excited about literacy or they're excited about social studies or do, like, social and emotional development. So I would say, keep in mind that, like, you you can still grow as a mathematician.

Ben Orlin:
That that'd be my my main advice for them that, like, I've I've seen it with with high school math teachers too, people that I've worked with, where they came in 1st year in the profession and, like, their knowledge was not actually as as strong as they wanted it to be. But you give it time and you keep working on it, and your own learning is always important in teaching. It it's sometimes easy to easy to forget as we're telling the students how important their learning is. But, like, yeah, our our learning is important too. You learn something better, and now there's another the rest of your career, those students are gonna learn from you. And so I'd say, yeah, for for elementary school teachers, prioritize your own learning and growth when it comes to to math. And then for for high school teachers, those who are already in the math world, yeah, I would say embrace the idea that math is connected to other subjects. It doesn't need to stand alone as this pure, pristine, untainted thing that that I think math is best when it's when it's got partnerships, when it's in in companionship with other ways of thinking.

Dr. Sheldon Eakins:
Oh, I love it. I love it. Alright. Well, Ben, if we got some folks that wanna connect with you, what's the best way to reach you online?

Ben Orlin:
Yeah. Sure. Yeah. My blog is Math with Bad Drawings, and then that that's also the the name of my first book. I'm on it's sort of reluctantly still on twitter slash x Ben Orland. Also, looks like less reluctantly maybe on Instagram at math with bad drawings. And then my email is just math with bad drawings at gmail. So you can can reach out to me any of those ways.

Ben Orlin:
And, in a ways, I I love hearing questions from teachers in different settings. So part of that yeah. Part of what I really like about doing the books is there are these little ships in a bottle, and I get to hear from people in all different kinds of schools and and different places that that I've never actually been able to travel to and get to hear letters back about what what they're doing in class and and, yeah, what math means to them.

Dr. Sheldon Eakins:
Alright. Well, that sounds awesome. Ben, thank you so much for your time. It's been a pleasure.

Ben Orlin:
Yeah. No. Appreciate it, Sheldon. Yeah. Thank you.

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