According to robust psychological evidence, gratitude is one of the truly happy-making traits people can manifest. And interviewing these amazing people who have striven their best to contribute to Children’s Environmental Health (CEH) has given me such a lift, despite grim realities, in part because I am grateful to them. I am particularly obliged to Susan Buchanan, MD, MPH, head of ATSDR/CDC/EPA’s Pediatric Environmental Health Specialty Unit (PEHSU) at UIC, because, after I cold emailed her, she agreed to supervise my MPH internship sharing information about CEH to 210 pediatricians, OB/Gyns, and family practice physicians. While doing so, she connected me with many other people in this world – with the American Public Health Association’s (APHA’s) CEH Committee, with the Science Action Network (SAN) at UCSF, and with other individuals who work in this area. She later agreed to speak at the Teach-In at Benedictine University, where I am a Professor. It is to her I owe the most – I consider her a friend, a budding politician, an impressive person, and a powerful advocate for health and human happiness in several domains. I spoke with her over lunch in Oak Park on January 4, 2024.
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
JMK: Hey, Susan! What first prompted your interest in the health effects of environmental chemical exposures? Is there some story from your childhood or early training about how you got interested?
SB: I was in family medicine and was getting burned out, and I was really annoyed about how my clinic was run. One of my colleagues had a Master of Public Health (MPH). So I decided that I was going to get my MPH, and I was going to become a Medical Director of a Community Health Center and run it better. But the only class that fit into my schedule at UIC – because I was still full-time – was the required Environmental Occupational Sciences course. So I took that course, and it was like angels came down from heaven. I had been in Health Policy Administration, so I changed my focus to Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences (EOHS), and that’s how I landed here.
Doing Family Medicine, we did OB. We did deliveries in our practice, so I have always had a huge interest in maternal and child health. So there was already a PEHSU at UIC, and the head brought me on because he was not a pediatrician. He was an Internist and Occupational Medicine doctor. By that time, I was board certified in Occupational Medicine. I think our PEHSU is one of the only ones that has Occupational Medicine as their content expertise, which I think is really helpful because we have the toxicology training as well as the risk messaging training for whether it is workers or the environment. So when patients come in and ask – “Did my x exposure cause my y outcome?” – you get that in your residency.
JMK: That’s so interesting. So it was really serendipitous.
SB: It was serendipitous. It was my scholarly, nerdy side because I was back in the lab, studying chemical structures and how they act in the body, and learning how to do a really deep literature search to look at the causality decision: did x exposure really cause y outcome? This requires you to be able to digest the literature.
JMK: Yes. That is so interesting. So, you must have been in your 30’s?
SB: I was 40 by then.
JMK: I was thinking that with Occupational Medicine, we still have some heavy industry, and I bet that training was really helpful at times. I know you were heavily engaged with the ethylene oxide at Willowbrook and also the lead in East Chicago. Did you have any cases where it was more occupational?
SB: Yes. I haven’t had any company-wide issues, but definitely over the years, I have seen patients who have come in having exposures, and they have been caused by workplace exposures. For sure, that is going on. Also OSHA limits are not set up to protect all workers. OSHA has to take into account the company’s side when they set standards.
JMK: Is that right?
SB: Yes. So some things are going to be really, really expensive to change, so the companies get to weigh in. So you know the lead action level is set at 3.5 or 5µg/dL, depending on the state, right?
JMK: Yes!
SB: Well, do you know what it is for OSHA?
JMK: No.
SB: It’s 50 µg/dL.
JMK: Oh no – that’s crazy! These people are going to be having seizures!
SB: Well, you know adults don’t have the symptoms that children do, maybe some blood-pressure issues, some renal issues, some red-blood-cell issues, maybe some sperm issues. But OSHA says one level over 60, or two over 50, you are off work until it comes down to 40, and then you can go back to work when it’s 40. Now a lot of people think that should change. Certainly, some people who have worked at recreational shooting ranges have lead levels in the high teens and low twenties, and still, we worked with them about how to reduce exposure and bring those levels down.
JMK: Yes. People eat game meat, and that still can be a notable route of exposure.
SB: I just talked to a doctor who had a question about a patient who had elevated lead levels who shot recreationally several times a week and who had a lead level that was going up. I think he practiced somewhere in the burbs, and he had an elevated level from eating game. It had lead shot in it.
JMK: And then you think, are any of these people women who are working in these positions or eating these foods?
SB: Exactly!
JMK: I mean, I didn’t realize until recently that, because lead is sequestered in the bones, that it could be remobilized during pregnancy. It’s terrible. I talked to Bruce Lanphear. He’s awesome, and he has very interesting thoughts about the cardiac effects. You know we had a huge increase in heart attacks in the 70s, when lead levels were high, especially in men. And then we had a decrease as lead levels declined. And he said the protective effect from estrogen in women for cardiac effects may be because it was sequestered in bones. And of course, that protective effect ends during menopause. The Lancet published an article that argues we lose 5.5 million people globally to cardiac effects downstream from lead.
SB: Of course, that is when the statins came in, but the statins research probably doesn’t take the lead into account. On the other hand, maybe it doesn’t need to because we all have the exposure – it’s 100%.
JMK: Right.
SB: Bruce is a scientist with an agenda. I am a scientist with an agenda. But I think I am a little more careful than he is. I just have to say that.
JMK: It’s hard. In climate change too: Jim Hansen is a big climate scientist who speaks to the general public and as an activist, and he says, if you know something is true, and no one else is saying this, do you share it with the public? Or do you absent yourself? Because you are the one who knows. He has been criticized for his communications with the general public but believes it is essential to share what he knows.
SB: To me, that is an existential problem – climate change. I feel there is nothing we can do that is wrong, as far as drawing attention to it, screaming in panic, throwing money at it. And it’s so much related – it’s all fossil fuels.
JMK: Yes. It’s so distressing. I don’t know if you ever go to Beyond Plastics, but they did a webinar on the climate impact of plastics, and I was shocked.
SB: I didn’t really make that connection.
JMK: But the industry is doubling down on plastics. This is what I hear from my former husband who works for the former BP: if you can’t do the fossil fuels, they switch over to plastics so they continue with hydrocarbon production.
SB: The fossil fuel industry is so powerful. And you look at what is happening in the Middle East, and it’s not all oil – there is antisemitism too! But the mess apart from Israel is all about oil – that’s why we care about the Middle East at all.
JMK: I heard once that the real price of gasoline should be about $7/gallon, but if we included the Middle-East conflict, and our investment in that, it would be more like $17/gallon.
So, is there one thing, among all the things that you have done, that you would say you are proudest of?
SB: Oh my gosh! There are two or three things. It’s funny. I was so driven as a family practice physician to do good outwardly. And ever since I have gone back to academia, I am doing this because I enjoy it. It’s really funny. I am still driven to do good for the world, but it’s different. Is there proof that some of these scientific findings do good? But I think I have to say you have gotten to me in the time of my career when I am more cynical than I was. I used to think that the $175,000 per year for the PEHSUs is going to change the world. And now I understand that it’s such a small amount. What I have done in the past few years is pivot to Environmental Justice (EJ) and community-based work. And I am actually making sure that they get money. So part of that $175,000 is $10,000 to this community group, $10,000 to that community group. So there are two people to reach out to – Princella Tobias in Benton Harbor, MI – do you know about Benton Harbor?
JMK: I know it is a very polluted area.
SB: Yes. And it is across the river from St. Joseph, which is the white beach town. Princella Tobias is a community organizer. She’s unbelievable – endless energy – and I got involved with her through various networking groups, and we’ve now been working with her for two years very closely on the asthma rates. Everyone I know in Benton Harbor knows a kid or adult who has died of asthma. It’s unbelievable. I have to remind them – this is not normal. I don’t know anyone who has died of asthma. Everybody there knows somebody. One in four adults have been diagnosed with asthma, and that is from their county stats. They didn’t report on kids because their Department of Environmental Health didn’t report on that. Asthma is a huge issue. So we have been working on air quality. We started off with AQI; now we are moving to indoor air. Whirlpool Headquarters are over there. So Princella and I are cooking up this plan to approach the Whirlpool Foundation to pay for some electric ranges instead of the natural gas that we know are problematic.
I’m proud of this work for several reasons. One, of course, is the impact. I think we can really have an impact on asthma deaths in Benton Harbor if we can improve their indoor air. We know they are using gas ranges for heat, which brought up another thing that I just figured out a couple of months ago. If we get them electric ranges, we need to buy them electric space heaters because we are taking away their heat source. It just shows the layers of ignorance that somebody like me has compared to the community. I could show up and say, “I am going to get you electric ranges because it is going to help your asthma.” And then they will say, “I don’t want one because induction ranges don’t heat the air.” So that could be a disaster. It could be really impactful. I am also proud of it because of what I have learned about working with communities. And Princella tells us – and this has happened several times over my career, even in my first publications with day laborers. You go to the community and say, “what do you want to find out?” And they say, “we need a study on this because we can use the results to push for change.” The day laborers’ community group could have told us what we discovered in our research. What’s the most dangerous thing people do? Are they getting Personal Protective Equipment (PPE)? Are they getting injuries? All that. We had to do the IRB-approved study and then publish it, and then they could use it for advocacy. And the same is true for Princella. A colleague of mine created this phrase, and I love it. You know, “research to practice” is this big thing; they fund research to practice where you try to get the bench findings into the exam room or out there in the world. There are grants that are funded, where I am going to take this bench research knowledge that x is bad for you, and then my research is putting it out there. She coined this phrase, it’s “practice to research.” Meaning, we go to the community, ask what they need help with, and we create a research project around that.
JMK: Oh, I love that.
SB: So this community of day laborers needed PPE, and so we wrote a grant and bought them a bunch of PPE. But then I researched before and after, whether they used it, did they like it? So I turned it into a research project.
JMK: I love that – it’s so sneaky!
SB: That’s what we will do with Benton Harbor. We applied for a $500,000 grant – we didn’t get it. I’m really pissed at EPA because…. EPA has been doing this great pivot to Environmental Justice (EJ). They have millions and millions of dollars for EJ. The put out an RFA (Request for Applications) and said the money cannot go to a University. But their RFA is 65 pages long; you have to go through Grants.gov, and they said – it has to be a community group. So Princella is a non-profit Community Group, but she doesn’t have the federal ID number. What? She’s going to submit the grant to Grants.gov? Unbelievable. We didn’t put it through UIC; I wasn’t getting a penny. We had a local University – somebody who took pity on us who had done Grants.gov before and had the federal ID number – hit the submit button. And we got disqualified.
JMK: Really?
SB: Yes. That’s why we didn’t get it.
JMK: Oh my gosh!
SB: I’m just furious. It just shows the disconnect.
JMK: And there was talk at the Children’s Health Protection Advisory Committee (CHPAC) about making the grant application process more accessible.
SB: And it actually was easier. The Co-PI (Principle Investigator) didn’t have to have a bio sketch. What? Princella is going to have a bio sketch? So it was easier, but it was still Grants.gov. It just shows the disconnect, which comes back to my point. I am able to make that happen for some of these communities. I currently have a PFAS grant from the Indiana SEA grant from NOAA. Have you heard of the SEA grants?
JMK: Maybe.
SB: To me, it’s a really weird name because it’s Indiana-Illinois SEA grant, and there is no ocean nearby. But it is about water. These SEA grants are entities that give out money, and they are water-resource people. So they put out an RFA, and so Princella and I applied on PFAS. We’re looking at anglers. We landed on anglers as the gender-neutral term.
JMK: That’s great! I hate “fishermen”!
SB: So next summer we are interviewing anglers in Benton Harbor, of which – according to Princella, there are many – and people who subsist on the fish on the South Side of Chicago. We have grad students, including one who wanders around on the south side, and who has met all these fishers, so she set us up with one. This is one thing I am really proud of. So you know how you need a letter of support for your grant application?
JMK: Yes.
SB: And so we have this one guy on the South Side who holds fishing tournaments. He’s totally into fishing, and he writes about fishing in the South Town Weekly. So he is going to be our community liaison. I need a letter from him. I don’t think he has letterhead; I’m not even sure he has a computer, let alone a printer, because we communicate all through text. So for his letter of support, I texted him that I needed documentation that you are going to do this, this, and this, and this is what you are getting to get paid. He said, “sounds great!” I did screenshots of that, and that is what I turned in as the letter of support. And we got funded! [We both laugh.]
And that is what has to happen. They can’t reject us because we didn’t have a letter of support on letterhead. I’m trying to track it back to the community. I’m proud of it because I feel like it’s most impactful, getting services and support to the community.
JMK: That’s great! I do feel like I went into this CHPAC appointment with some cynicism about the EPA. They all work so very hard. How is it possible not to have made more progress? There are a lot of external reasons for that, but there is a lot of complacency I see as well. There is a lot of – have lots of meetings, write lots of things. But are you actually changing things for children?
SB: And creating mapping tools – Oh my God, the mapping tools they have! But who is using them? If they put out one more EJ mapping tool, my head is going to explode! Put the money in the communities to fight these exposures!
When I was on CHPAC, we did this huge pre-natal letter. And we had recommendations for tools and questionnaires – here are the questions that every OB/Gyn should ask – and we never heard any word afterwards.
JMK: It is really hard. I feel like we can do better. We had the opportunity to talk to the Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention (OCSPP), and I did share my story about having lost a child to exposures that could have been prevented. Chlorpyrifos is still not banned, and it’s not all under EPA control, but what are they going to do to try to protect children? They are making incremental progress while children die. I’m sure they don’t love me – but that is not what I am there for – I am not there to make friends. I would like to make friends and admire many of the people, but that is not my purpose.
This is a good question for you. With the PEHSU, I know you work with patients with high lead levels and exposures of various kinds. When you talk to parents, that can be a really hard conversation. What do you say to parents about the implications of your work? There is a lot of fear and guilt around this, and there are some practitioners who feel like they don’t want to make parents feel worse about an exposure or disease that has already occurred. And yet, it is really important to educate. So how do you share information on a topic that is very productive of anxiety for parents?
SB: I am definitely in the camp of not wanting parents to feel guilty because it is in the past, and we all have regrets with our children – I would have done things differently if I had known then what I know now. Alex had a lead level of 7, but the action level then was 10 µg/dL, so I shrugged it off.
JMK: My highest level among my children was 3, which I didn’t think was bad at the time. I thought it was well below.
SB: I think he did get it from our front porch, but I was not overly concerned. To me, it’s really interesting, Jean, where I am in my career. What I have to say about that is, I am tired of holding individuals responsible for their exposures. And I give these great lectures about exposures, and audiences freak out. And I do end talks with, here’s what you can do. Here’s the SkinDeep Database; here’s the Dirty Dozen; here’s the Clean Fifteen; and here’s our Community Exposure Guide. If you want to know, use some of these EPA tools to find out what is in your environment. But I have also started having students call their representative right there, in class. I give them the script, and say, here are the websites where you find the number of either your state rep or your federal congressman or senator. I tell students they can talk to them about anything I talked about today – or anything else they want to see changed in their community – and call them. I give them 10 minutes, say good-bye, and they go off. They all go off, and they make the phone calls. And they come back and talk about the experience and what they called about, because I know that making them call does make a difference – not just your vote but your voice. I went to the Women’s March in Washington, and Michael Moore did a fantastic talk – though too long – but he talked about running for office for school board when he was 18 because he was pissed off about something at the school. And then he asked, how many of you are going to run for office, and I shouted out, “I will!” But he also said, call your reps every single day. So I did. This was right after Trump. We were f’ing horrified! So I called Durbin, Duckworth, and Danny Davis every single day. “This is what I am pissed about today. I want Durbin to do something about x.” And then I went to Washington for this big Occupational Health training grant to do our Hill visits because [the grant funding] is a line in the Congressional budget, and we have to make sure it stays in the budget. And I went to Danny Davis’s office, and I recognized the guy’s voice: “I talk to you every day!” And in Durbin’s office, I saw them taking calls, and I went up and asked, “do these calls really make a difference?” And they said, yes – here, look. I could see they have a form, and they write what you are calling about, and they said, absolutely, they make a difference and go right to the senator.
JMK: I had forgotten – you did that at Benedictine when you spoke – during your break-out session. I should start doing that during class more often. It’s so fun, and it’s doing something right now. And what you said about not blaming individuals for exposures. That is a ploy by the fossil fuel industry, to ask, “what are you doing to reduce your carbon footprint? What are you doing to protect your children” While they poison the entire world in a way that we cannot escape.
SB: There is no way to do it. I tell people, pick a few things, and don’t panic because even at a deeper level, I have thought about this. If you look at the human body as this organism that is part of this Earth, this imperfect organism, evolution has gotten rid of some problems with the human body, but it hasn’t gotten rid of all of them. Appendices burst, and people die for no apparent reason. Tonsils have to be removed because you have too many infections. Anyway. The human body is really resilient.
Now you have a situation of losing a child, which would certainly set you up for the mindset that, no – our bodies are not that resilient. But when you think of everything that we encounter, and we keep surviving, it is pretty impressive. You can’t do everything; you are going to be exposed. You kind of have to have some faith that you should exercise, keep a reasonable BMI – because what else are you going to do? You’re going to curl up in a ball and freak out.
JMK: What is really resilient about the human body is that these are all novel chemicals – most of them did not exist before the 1950s. Evolution has not had a chance to do anything – except killing off all these kids – to address those. Our metabolizer systems are being jury-rigged to tackle all these exposures that we have, and it’s remarkable it works at all.
SB: Yes – the liver is amazing at detoxifying. The kidneys are amazing at filtering. And then if you get enough insults, things start going wrong. But for the vast majority of people, we do survive them. So what I tell parents usually is that in the vast majority of cases, we can’t say that x caused y. Then we talk about other ways of making sure that kids are healthy. It’s hard.
JMK: Yes. That makes a lot of sense.
SB: And I get a lot of angry parents. I had a parent down in Florida. You know, the word is out that I am the ethylene oxide person, so I get calls from all over the country, saying, “I can’t believe that they are spewing all these carcinogens!” I say, “you know what? Call your mayor. Call your state rep. Call your governor. Send all this anger to them.” So I make sure that I mention that too. They are responsible. They can make change. This thing with ethylene oxide in Willowbrook – it was so funny to me that the mayor was just furious, saying, “how can you poison my people?!” And I was thinking, you created the zoning laws that allowed this cancer-causing chemical to be emitted in your air. That is on you. So there needs to be some activism at the local level.
JMK: Yes. And it does seem like things do not get done unless people get angry. That’s something that Bruce said that he needs – to get together all the pissed-off moms who don’t want their kids poisoned anymore.
SB: Like Moms Demand Action against gun violence. They are a force to be reckoned with. I found their leader on Instagram. It could be something similar, like Moms Clean Air Force. That could be turned into something angrier.
JMK: I feel I could play a role in that. But seriously, I want to integrate researchers, activists, healthcare providers, parents, and the children themselves in some cases. This is a huge issue that is not being talked about.
SB: Very cool.
JMK: Thank you. So, if you could single-handedly recreate U.S. policy regulating environmental chemicals, what would such a policy look like?
SB: Well, I would get all the industries and say the jig is up. You are done. You are not shutting down, but you are finding alternatives. And a REACH protocol. You have to prove that your chemical, whatever you are putting out, is safe. You have to prove it. I don’t think we can live without a lot of these things that have been created; now that we are used to this quality of life, we can’t tell everybody all of a sudden, “OK – no more makeup, girls.” I would love that. But it’s not going to work. So you have to go to the makeup companies and say, “Stop. You are done.”
JMK: I ask students sometimes, if you could keep one plastic item, what is the one thing you would not give up? And I would choose medical tubing – it doesn’t seem to me we have a great substitute for that. There are real advantages to the material.
SB: Yes. And I don’t think there is any way we’re ever going to successfully get rid of all fossil fuels. We’re going to need coal for steelmaking. Steel is necessary.
JMK: There was a foundry that somehow used solar to get up to smelting temperatures on a trial basis.
SB: Don’t you need the carbon?
JMK: A little, I think. And of course, lubricants – oil will likely always be needed as a lubricant.
SB: But yes – just cutting fossil fuel use by 90%!
JMK: Wouldn’t that be amazing?!
SB: It would be taking power away from industry, because they are clearly in charge.
JMK: It’s interesting talking to different experts how clear everyone is – really, truly blaming industry – their complicity and their involvement in our political system. It’s hard to get elected without that money.
SB: That could be number two: taking the money out of politics would affect a lot more than the environment.
JMK: I give credit to John McCain, way back in 2000: he focused on climate change and campaign finance reform. If only those two things had happened.
SB: You know, I did this Illinois Women’s Institute for Leadership Training internship for a year, Dick Durbin’s wife started it for Democratic, Pro-Choice women who want to run for office.
JMK: That’s awesome!
SB: They take twelve women through a year-long training; it’s fantastic. But we had our fund-raising training, and what they told us was that if you want to run for Congress, you will have to spend 18 months of 30 hours a week asking for money for yourself.
JMK: What a terrible use of time!
SB: Yes – it’s a terrible use of time. They should be home reading briefs, making policies, and meeting with people! It’s so depressing.
JMK: It is so depressing. If it were publicly funded, everyone would have a level playing field. I don’t know why we don’t do that.
The next question is more of an overall question I am asking in both projects: if we know that we are poisoning our children and destroying our climate, and that there are solutions ready at hand, why are we not doing anything about it? Or in other words, how could we possibly be this stupid?
SB: Capitalism. Capitalism is successful because we are mostly greedy. It’s human nature.
JMK: Short answers can be absolutely true. Is there anybody else I should talk to, including families who are outspoken?
SB: You should talk to Princella Tobias. She is not a content expert, though I have been teaching her. But Benton Harbor also had lead in their water, so she was involved with that. That is what first got her interested in environmental stuff. There are activists in Willowbrook and Lake County – the ethylene oxide activists. Tea Tanaka is one of them – I could put you in touch with her. I don’t really know names, but she’s in Lake County. She might be really good. What about Linda Hansen?
JMK: I was thinking about looking her up. You know she ended up with the ATSDR.
SB: I know. She’s head of the PEHSUs now.
JMK: I know. We knew her when…. It’s very cool because she had been feeling frustrated by trying to treat people for endocrine problems that were probably caused by these exposures. I had lunch with her once, and she said she was just trying to get upstream of the problems she was seeing.
SB: Yes. We held training sessions on PFAS for doctors. The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) report said last year, that if you are exposed, you should get a blood level, and this is what those levels might mean. Finally, some risk assessment – if your level is above this, this is what this could mean. I heard ATSDR funded the National Academies to put out that report, and then they put out that report, and then the ATSDR didn’t like it.
JMK: I don’t understand. ATSDR are the ones who should care. What is causing them to not want to tell them not to get levels?
SB: That’s a good question. One of the issues that they may not say out loud is that the problem is so huge, I mean NHANESsaid 96% of Americans have it in us, so maybe they are afraid to let the genie out of the bottle or open Pandora’s box because they are not a very big agency either.
JMK: Yes. And it was just everywhere by the time we even looked. Industry representatives will say we don’t need to look at PFAS. Brominated flame retardants are really important to protect children – otherwise, they could burn to death. And of course, that red herring was debunked so long ago. Instead, we should follow the precautionary principle.
Ok – last question. Do you have any questions about my experiences or about the project?
SB: I feel like I know you pretty well. What did your daughter die of?
JMK: She died of leukemia.
SB: That’s what I thought.
JMK: And we knew that she had had significant exposures. I was exposed to chlorpyrifos in an apartment before she was even conceived. They sprayed it all over the counters – I wiped it up – it was absorbed through the skin. I was acutely ill with respiratory symptoms for months. I came out of it with a ruined thyroid, and she was conceived some months after that. We moved out, but at the time, I didn’t think…. Then we found out they were spraying chlorpyrifos for mosquitos where we live. We had our windows open. We were all acutely ill and put the timing together and realized that had been it. She had already had her first bone marrow transplant, when we found out.
SB: Where was it?
JMK: In Warrenville. But you would be surprised to find out how many suburbs spray for mosquitoes and how many of them are using organophosphates. It should be illegal, but it is not. And notification is virtually absent.
SB: I thought they were all using pyrethroids!
JMK: Yes – you would think so, but organophosphates are still listed among active ingredients on the website. Also, the evidence on pyrethroids is not encouraging, especially for Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD).
SB: Really?
JMK: It’s legal. There’s no ban on chlorpyrifos. They overturned that in court. And actually, they were looking for a ban on food, but they would probably always reserve the right to use it on mosquitos – it just kills me that mosquito spraying is billed as a public health measure. I will take the mosquitos any day, thank you.
SB: Yes. That is a complicated problem in Africa.
JMK: Yes. Very much so. It’s a different question entirely when you have endemic malaria that kills way more kids. It’s still an important question to ask, but yes.
SB: Yes.
JMK: It was really good to see you and talk to you.
SB: You too!
JMK: Let’s stay in touch!
