Pooches. Planes. Pandemic. Margret Grebowicz and Christopher Schaberg on mass phenomena transformed by Covid.

A lot of societal structures have been permanently upended by the Covid-19 pandemic. We’re here to talk about two: air travel and dog ownership. Margret Grebowicz, author of Rescue Me, talks about the abundance of pet adoptions during the pandemic and the existential and social implications of this trend. Christopher Schaberg, author of Grounded, discusses contemporary air travel and the broad cultural landscape of empty airports and grounded planes in the early months of the virus’s spread. Both are concerned with philosophical and critical inquiries into their subjects; how to think about things, how to frame phenomena and change, and how the future will continue to reshape these experiences.

Rescue Me and Grounded are in the Forerunners: Ideas First series from University of Minnesota Press.

Margret Grebowicz is associate professor at the University of Silesia in Katowice, Poland. She is author of several books, including Rescue Me: On Dogs and Their Humans; Mountains and Desire: Climbing vs. the End of the World; The National Park to Come; and Whale Song.

Christopher Schaberg is Dorothy Harrell Brown Distinguished Professor of English at Loyola University and author of several books, including Grounded: Perpetual Flight . . . and Then the Pandemic; The End of Airports; and The Work of Literature in an Age of Post-Truth.

REFERENCES:

-Rescue Me (Margret Grebowicz)

-Grounded (Christopher Schaberg)

-The End of Airports (Christopher Schaberg)

-The Dodo Videos (Facebook videos)

-cat videos, Tik Tok

-The Ministry for the Future (Kim Stanley Robinson)

-Station Eleven (Emily St. John Mandel; book, TV series)

-Tripoli Canceled (film)

-Trainwreck: Woodstock ‘99 (docuseries)

What is University of Minnesota Press?

Authors join peers, scholars, and friends in conversation. Topics include environment, humanities, race, social justice, cultural studies, art, literature and literary criticism, media studies, sociology, anthropology, grief and loss, mental health, and more.

Margret Grebowicz: 00:19

Hi. My name is Margaret Grebowitz, and I am associate professor of humanities at the University of Silesia, which is in Poland. And I'm also visiting faculty at Hampshire College this year. And I'm here to talk about my latest book, which is called Rescue Me, on dogs and their humans, out in the forerunner series. It's the latest book that I've written in a series of books that are all on different subjects.

Margret Grebowicz: 00:42

I'm interested, generally speaking, in environmental imagination and in environmentalism as culture, and I'm interested in questions of desire. This question of desire led me to write this book when I wondered to myself, what is it we actually want from dogs? I started writing this before there was any talk of anything like a great adoption. But I finished it, after we'd already coined this term, the great adoption. And so, clearly, by the time I was done, there was a phenomenon to point to and talk about.

Margret Grebowicz: 01:13

So, yeah, I guess it's a book about the great adoption, and it asks the question, what is it that we want from dogs today?

Christopher Schaberg: 01:21

Hello. My name is Christopher Schaeberg. I'm a professor of English at Loyola University, New Orleans, and I've, sort of spent my career researching and writing about air travel. And my second to last book was called Grounded, perpetual flight and then the pandemic. And this was a forerunners book about the state of air travel right up to and then during the first few months of the COVID pandemic.

Christopher Schaberg: 01:48

And this is a subject air travel that won't leave me alone. As much as I try to get it out of my system. It just keeps flying back in. I guess in some ways, my question is very similar to Margaret's, what do humans want from air travel? This is actually one of the first times I've had a chance to reflect on the forerunners book, which was written very quickly as the world of flight was changing dramatically over 02/2020.

Christopher Schaberg: 02:16

So I'm really excited to talk about these two books together that seem to both be kind of taking the the pulse of something that's either fighting for life or coming back from the dead or something. I don't know. That's a bad metaphor.

Margret Grebowicz: 02:31

Yeah. I mean, I I think the reason that we decided to put these two subjects into conversation with each other, subjects that I think most people would say are either unrelated or very tangentially related, is because we're both interested in these mass phenomena that changed around COVID.

Christopher Schaberg: 02:49

Right. Yes. Phenomena that in many ways, we just we we took for granted, and we took for granted the ways that they were represented and mediated and enacted in everyday life. And then we had these changes that we're still very much living through.

Margret Grebowicz: 03:04

Yeah. It's funny. I was reading your book, and I'm like, wow. It's a book about COVID. And then I looked at my book, and I was like, this is also a book about COVID, which is how you know, certainly not how I would have described it when I first started thinking about it.

Christopher Schaberg: 03:15

Yeah. And, I mean, for me, I was I was working on this book. Well, the opening pieces were written before COVID, and I was just it was like table scraps from my other books on air travel, and it was just like the remainders that I was still kind of working through. And then when COVID hit, it was like, oh, well, this stuff still matters more than ever in some ways. And your book really has that feeling.

Christopher Schaberg: 03:36

I mean, these are dilemmas you've been thinking through with dogs and companion species for many, many years, but suddenly they took on all these new dimensions.

Margret Grebowicz: 03:45

I was going to ask ask you what that was like for you when they announced the lockdown. And, of course, everyone already had tickets bought to, you know, go to their academic conferences or whatever it was. Right? So at some point, you must have realized, like, oh, right. Something's about to happen.

Margret Grebowicz: 04:02

Something unprecedented is about to happen to air travel.

Christopher Schaberg: 04:05

It was especially strange for me here in New Orleans because, as I talk about in the book, we had just opened this brand new airport. After many, many years of construction and hype, they'd finally just opened the new airport, and it it opened to great acclaim, and everyone was excited about it. And this was in November 2019. So it had about two months or three months maybe of increasing numbers of air travelers, and then it was nothing. And I just found that so fascinating that you that how something that seems to have so much obvious promise could just suddenly become defunct or obsolete.

Christopher Schaberg: 04:42

A lot of the earlier parts of the book are me just kind of like registering that. So I think it was back in 02/2014. I read your book, Margaret, the National Park to Come, which was right in line with my long interests in, environmental philosophy and ecological thought. And I was blown away by that book. Even though it didn't seem to be directly or at all related to air travel, I asked my editor to put your name on the list of potential endorsers for my book, The End of Airports, which was coming out in 02/2015.

Christopher Schaberg: 05:16

And you very graciously blurbed that book before I knew you. And when I emailed you to thank you, I sort of ended the email with, oh, and by the way, I edit this little book series called object lessons if you ever wanna do a little book about something. And you wrote back and you said that I thought you'd never ask. I've been stalking that series since it launched and yes. And so we then had this very spirited back and forth, and you ended up writing Whale Song for object lessons, a book that I love and which was a perfect fit for the series.

Christopher Schaberg: 05:48

And that sort of started our friendship and collaboration in in a lot of other endeavors. It's and it's kind of just been branching out across the environmental humanities and the public humanities and different initiatives that we've both been a part of. And so I was just so happy when this intersection of having these two forerunners books happened.

Margret Grebowicz: 06:08

Mhmm. Yeah. I wrote my forerunners book because you encouraged me to. So, yeah, I did this because when you wrote grounded, you said, you know, this is a really good experience to go through this, and you should do it. And I thought, okay.

Margret Grebowicz: 06:21

I'll do it. But, yeah, for me, getting that email about the end of airports was one of the weirder moments of my academic career because I thought, my gosh. I'm supposed to blurb a book about airports? I don't know anything about airports. And then when I looked at the proofs, I realized it was so close to the way I was thinking about national parks and that these are the kinds of conversations I wanna be having, like conversations that deal not so much with a concrete subject matter, but more about, you know, how to think about things, how to frame phenomena, and how to frame change.

Margret Grebowicz: 06:53

And so I so we've been doing that for a few years now. We got a few good years. Yeah.

Christopher Schaberg: 06:57

We have. We have and as we've gotten to know each other, I you know, you made some joke when we were texting once about something and a joke about we were talking about Derrida or Lyotard, and you said something about that old time religion. And, you know, we both do come out of this, you know, strong kind of post structuralist philosophy tradition. And yet, we've really tried to to turn this work toward I wouldn't say just, like, practical ends, but just to a different mode of of writing and getting this work out in these kind of shorter form crossover platforms. Like, forerunners is has made a space for this that's been really dynamic.

Christopher Schaberg: 07:32

And, my series object lessons, your new series practices coming out with Duke, like, these are places where it's just been so gratifying to see all the the philosophical and critical inquiry that I think animated both of us early on. We're still doing all that work even if we're not doing it in the same way.

Margret Grebowicz: 07:50

Mhmm. So go so returning to your question, for me, I had wanted to write a book about dogs for completely personal reasons that I go into in the book a little bit. Like, it was time for me to confront a major episode in my life in which I lost my first dog tragically, and I and I wanted to start confronting those feelings, addressing the being with those feelings in writing, however loosely, and seeing where that took me. Imagine my absolute surprise when, as I was already well into the process of kind of thinking about this as a very personal book that kind of doesn't have anything to do with other people or mass phenomena. And suddenly, it became clear that one of the effects of the lockdown was this massive, you know, upswing in pet adoptions

Christopher Schaberg: 08:36

Mhmm.

Margret Grebowicz: 08:37

Which is something that I thought none of us would have predicted. Right? When we all thought that everyone was going to die, we didn't predict that one of the major, major national conversations in the media for months was going to be about dogs and cats, which it was.

Christopher Schaberg: 08:52

And you even find yourself firsthand in this position at one point in the book and in your life of suddenly you are adopting a new dog, which is its own intense drama and point of hope and sadness, which does kind of stand in in sort of weird, relation to the more I guess, just like, isolated somber mood of the time, if that makes sense. You know, that like you're like, we're alone, but like suddenly being together with someone or something else takes on even more energy and potential, but also potential for things to go wrong.

Margret Grebowicz: 09:28

Mhmm.

Christopher Schaberg: 09:28

I love those scenes in the book where you're describing, like, what it was like to embrace this new dog and then, spoiler alert, then have to let it go again.

Margret Grebowicz: 09:38

Right. Right. She was a hoarded dog. Right? She came from a hoarding case.

Margret Grebowicz: 09:42

So I actually opened the book by talking about dog hoarding, but not in the way that you might expect. I confessed to being a dog hoarder in my heart, And I think this is something that many dog lovers will relate to very quickly. I mean, everyone I talk to sort of wishes they could adopt more dogs. So given that that's such a normal emotion for people who have made a life with dogs, It's it's quite normal to wish that you could take in all the dogs in the world.

Christopher Schaberg: 10:09

Yeah.

Margret Grebowicz: 10:09

Right? Given that, it's interesting how very, very hard we come down on actual dog hoarding. Right? How hard we come down on it. And the more we learn about dogs, the more there's kind of a more and more popular conversation about what it is that dogs need to to have a good life and how we've been getting certain things wrong, and we need to do them better, and what could we do better.

Margret Grebowicz: 10:31

And then it's like who emerges sort of as this ultimate figure of animal abuse in this story is the dog hoarder. But meanwhile, we've all got these weird quasi hoarding emotions Right. That are also motivating us. And, you know, and of course, all of this is set. I tried to set it in a larger background conceptual landscape of hoarding or maybe scarcity.

Margret Grebowicz: 10:56

Right? Scarcity in late capitalism. Right? What does it mean that we are all we're afraid of this coming poverty, right, of this coming scarcity? It's being announced now that we're all gonna have to tighten our belts, tighten our belts, tighten our belts.

Margret Grebowicz: 11:08

And we're tightening our belts not just materially, but we're also tightening our belts emotionally around a lot of things and socially and intersubjectively around a lot of things.

Christopher Schaberg: 11:17

I was thinking about that a lot as I was reading your book, how it is. This it works allegorically in relation to these larger threats of, you know, supply chain issues and consumer hoarding and, yes, scarcity that these are these are things that we can learn from not just in the context that you're talking about dogs, but it's actually, like, reverberating on these much vaster scales of economy and and sociality.

Margret Grebowicz: 11:42

So I did have to take Maybelline back. I was only fostering her, but I was hoping that she would be a classic foster fail and that I would keep her forever. But I did have to take her back because the behavioral problems were so pronounced, and I didn't have enough support to deal with them. Come here. Come here, Waffles.

Margret Grebowicz: 11:59

Here he is. Here he is. He's gonna sit down now. I think it's important to have those conversations that are sort of very honest about how we fail as dog parents, yep, right, in a serious way precisely because we've got this this situation. You know, my subtitle is on dogs and their humans, but the book initially began with a totally different subtitle.

Margret Grebowicz: 12:18

And it was dog abundance and social scarcity.

Christopher Schaberg: 12:22

Scarcity. Yeah. Something like that.

Margret Grebowicz: 12:23

Yeah.

Christopher Schaberg: 12:23

Yeah.

Margret Grebowicz: 12:24

I really try to kind of give a sense of a feeling of dog abundance, what I'm calling dog abundance. But it could also be, you know, we could also call it dog overpopulation. It's that there are all these dogs, wild dogs and domestic dogs. And they're with us everywhere all the time. And then there's this big kind of machine of, like, producing dogs and destroying dogs.

Margret Grebowicz: 12:47

That's all part of the same adoption and shelter infrastructure. You know, to me, it very much mirrors the human situation. It mirrors the situation that we're in, which is like there are so many of us, and yet everything feels so impoverished.

Christopher Schaberg: 13:02

Right. So many of us and so much from some perspective, so much abundance of resources or capital, frankly, and yet these gaps and fissures where everything sort of falls through.

Margret Grebowicz: 13:14

And then the weird emotions around it all. Like, I was watching the dodo videos. The dodo is a is a is like a Facebook channel where they show these very heartfelt video, like, sort of heart wrenching videos about most of them are success stories, but they start out so in fact, I think they're all success stories. But they start out so tragic that that's how they pull you in right away. And it's like some dog whose mange is so bad that he just doesn't have any fur on him at all, and he's just shaking, and he can't see because the mange has closed sealed his eyes and things like that.

Margret Grebowicz: 13:47

And it's like, oh, this dog was found on the street. I started looking at them more and more closely, and it's like most of them are coming from countries where there is a huge street dog tradition and street dog culture. I mean, most of these videos are actually not coming from The United States, but we're watching them as if they were. We're watching them as if they were sort of telling the story of this culture today. Right?

Margret Grebowicz: 14:10

That it's somehow hitting on emotions that we're feeling now, and it's and it's sort of exacerbating them and massaging them in various ways. But the actual content is coming from countries and cultures in which, you know, there's very much a a long tradition of dogs that live around that don't have human owners. They just kind of hang out. Right? Scavenger dogs on the street.

Margret Grebowicz: 14:35

And but yet we some we somehow think this is very much our story, and that tells me something. The fact that the dodo is such a huge hit shows that we want something from these stories.

Christopher Schaberg: 14:45

And there's this threshold of inaccessibility. I mean, you end with this really poignant scene about the coyotes. Or, actually, they they come in at a few points, but they then you really end with this. There's this realm of dog life that will will remain inaccessible. And that's something we sort of have to confront and not just in an abstract sense, but it could be because it also, like, it it's it informs our mundane relationships with these other, you know, companions.

Margret Grebowicz: 15:10

Yeah. Very much. I own a Basenji. One of my dogs is a Basenji. And the Basenji is, from what I understand, genetically speaking, sort of the oldest dog breed.

Margret Grebowicz: 15:22

They're the ones that are sort of I don't know if you can hear the little pitter patter, but that's my chihuahua waffles. He's just walking around. Yeah. Basenjis are this ancient breed. They're still very, unaltered from their original state, so they're called the African barkless dog.

Margret Grebowicz: 15:38

They don't have a barking mechanism because, of course, wild dogs, wild canids don't bark. Wolves don't bark. Coyotes don't bark. And the older you get in a breed, the less of a barker you have. Right?

Margret Grebowicz: 15:52

So huskies, which are Alaskan malamutes, that family of dog, which is also super, super old, almost as old as the Basenji, they also don't really bark that much. They tend to kind of howl and sing. Husky owners love to talk about that husky sound that they make this. There's a lot of, like, talking. Like, there's there's a ton, by the way, of TikTok videos of huskies talking, which is its own phenomenon.

Margret Grebowicz: 16:19

But, yeah, I own a Basenji, and the reason I bring this up is because I know other Basenji owners. I know how highly coveted the breed is, how much Basenji owners love to talk about how it's not for everyone and you have to really be ready. You know, if you're gonna own a Basenji, you gotta be ready for a lot of problems. And it's this kind of it's not your normal kind of dog, and there's this mythos around the breed. And it's absolutely the mythos that you might have a wild dog at home.

Margret Grebowicz: 16:47

That's the appeal, and that's why so many people get their Basenjis from breeders. It's it's one of those breeds that if you want one, you're gonna have to pay for a puppy because they're so rare still. They're considered a sort of elite dog. They're very popular in Russia right now among, again, like, you know, wealthy owners. They're a symbol of wealth.

Margret Grebowicz: 17:09

And whatever that does I mean, this is new. This wasn't the case twenty years ago. Basenji was not the dog everybody wanted twenty years ago. And the reason I think the reason they want it now is because, you know, what we're what we're after now is this wild inner life of the dog, right, to which we don't actually have any access.

Christopher Schaberg: 17:27

So what's what's so fascinating to me hearing you talk about this, Margaret, and and it just sort of clicked with me. You talk about various social media trends in the book, and you just mentioned a few, the TikTok, huskies. And you just mentioned that duration of, like, over the last twenty years, there's been this increase. On the one hand, humans would seem to be after something very primordial almost or very, you know, an artifact of real contact with something wild. On the other hand, this is getting kind of amplified or revved up by these new digital media technologies and communicative methods that are just so, ubiquitous on social media.

Christopher Schaberg: 18:08

I wonder how you think about that, in terms of, like, what is that tension, or is it not attention at all? Is it act is it actually revealing something about what we think of as something, you know, new new media, but in fact is tethered to something a lot, well, you know, older in scare quotes? I don't know if that's the right word.

Margret Grebowicz: 18:27

That is sort of my take on this. It's it's a version of what you just said. The content that we're sharing, the conversations that we're having having about dogs on social media are very particular. They're not just any conversation. And it's less and less the stuff about, like, cute cute.

Margret Grebowicz: 18:45

Mhmm. I'm sure you remember that when we had, like, the cute cat videos. Right? That was a thing for a while.

Christopher Schaberg: 18:52

Right.

Margret Grebowicz: 18:53

And it was all about cute animals, and that's what we shared. And in fact, when Instagram animals became a thing, the first dogs on Instagram were the cute ones, the ones that could be, you know, made to wear glasses and bow ties, you know, tutus and things like that. And those were the ones who became, like, Instagram influencers. And I'm sure that that's still around, but the latest social media phenomenon, really, the big one is TikTok, and that's no longer about the cute dogs. Dog talk, as we call it, dog talk is more focused on debates around what dogs need.

Margret Grebowicz: 19:32

I like to talk about the training wars that are sort of taking place on TikTok, and they're between actual trainers, but they're also between schools of training. Most notably, balanced training, which uses correction as well as positive reinforcement, and then pure positive, which uses no correction and uses only positive reinforcement. This tension is sort of the big conversation, this this debate, which one of them is right and which one of them is more effective, is the big debate on dog talk right now. So the fact that we're talking about that, I think, is is really key. The fact that all of the conversations we're having seem to point back to a certain set of questions, and that is, what did that first moment of domestication actually look like?

Margret Grebowicz: 20:18

How did the wild dog become our dog? And how did we become these people who can't live without dogs?

Christopher Schaberg: 20:24

Yeah.

Margret Grebowicz: 20:25

Whatever else we're talking about, whether it's food in my book, I focus on three things. One is the adoption infrastructure. The second one is food and enrichment toys, and the third one is training. And I think that all three of them are actually deep down interested in the same grounding questions and sort of grounding concepts. And it's about, like, taking us back to a state of nature.

Margret Grebowicz: 20:50

What was that like when there was a kind of original sociality and an original being in the environment that was not broken? Right?

Christopher Schaberg: 21:01

Yeah. Yeah.

Margret Grebowicz: 21:02

A being with nature that wasn't sort of fundamentally broken or alienated. And in that moment, we had the beginning of this original interspecies friendship. All of the conversations are ones where we're arguing about what that actually was. It's all stuff like trying to actually do the psychology of the dog and trying to understand what dogs really want and trying to give evolutionary explanations for why dogs want this and not that or why humans want this from dogs and not that. Right?

Margret Grebowicz: 21:32

Or why we feel this way and not some other way. So I think this is exactly, you know, what you're what you're saying. We are turning to all the new platforms for social life while at the same time longing for a kind of primordial social life. So I that's what I see it. I see it as, like, an ultimate I don't know I don't know what the I don't know what the Lacanians would call it.

Margret Grebowicz: 21:53

Neurosis, hysteria, psychosis. I don't know what it expresses, but it seems to express some kind of, like, strange, quote, unquote, mental illness. Right? The more we get caught up in these new platforms, the more what we're after is the truth of some real way of being natural and together in the world.

Christopher Schaberg: 22:15

Yes. Yeah. I don't wanna force the connection here or the jump, but everything you've just been saying, it's to me, it's like the obverse and what has fascinated and and what I've been obsessed with about air travel for all these years. Because it seems like the opposite in some ways, like people's desire to fly. And sometimes that becomes like a hysterical thing.

Christopher Schaberg: 22:35

I mean, like, seeing how much you can fly, how often, how how many miles, you know. It's all about escaping, or it would seem to be about escaping some kind of more grounded state of being. Or is it that I I think about just, like, humans traveling and generally coexisting in these small little metal tubes for a couple hours, and everyone's just barely tolerating it. And it's like everyone knows it's, like, the worst, and you're just trying to, like, get back to the ground, I guess. But the way to do that is to travel really fast in these little things, which everyone sort of, like, hates but needs.

Christopher Schaberg: 23:11

What you were saying made me think about how the dynamic is similar but kind of flipped with what people want from from air travel. It's like trying to escape that what would you call it? That being in nature.

Margret Grebowicz: 23:24

That earthbound kind of like, but like a healthy earthbound vibe.

Christopher Schaberg: 23:28

Yeah. And instead of it being, like, about an interspecies connection, it's more about, like, an interspecies connection that we're trying to avoid or overcome almost.

Margret Grebowicz: 23:37

But what's interesting is I started paying closer attention to all of the rhetorics around air travel only after I met you when I was like, of course. Of course, this is something to look at closely. Oh my gosh. I'd actually love to ask you about this because the way we imagine air travel and the way we talk about air travel has has changed. Right?

Margret Grebowicz: 23:57

It changes decade to decade, and I'm thinking of the shift from air travel as a form of luxury.

Christopher Schaberg: 24:03

Mhmm. The golden age of

Margret Grebowicz: 24:05

air travel. Age. Right? Yeah. To to when it becomes

Christopher Schaberg: 24:13

foils. And

Margret Grebowicz: 24:14

then it becomes this thing that, like, suddenly everyone can afford. Everyone, quote, unquote, can afford. Right? And then it becomes kind of not so good. Right?

Margret Grebowicz: 24:21

When it when it becomes this affordable thing sort of democratized in some way, or I don't know I don't know what to call it. When you talk about this thing that we all hate but have to do or feel like we have to do. Right? We all kinda hate it, and it kind of it kinda sucks. Wasn't there a bunch of conversations about how to make it better?

Margret Grebowicz: 24:38

Because I remember something like that. I remember that the research around, like, what the ideal airplane cabin

Christopher Schaberg: 24:45

would

Margret Grebowicz: 24:45

be like or what is enough legroom.

Christopher Schaberg: 24:48

Well, even at the beginning of the pandemic, you know, like, the aircraft manufacturers like Boeing being you know, saying like, well, wait a minute. Don't you all realize we've made these new aircraft like the Dreamliner that have these awesome air filters? So, actually, airplanes are the safest place you can be. And it it was actually true that those airplanes, like the the July Dreamliner and planes, even like the 07/30 sevens, the newer ones, they were more pleasant to be in just atmospherically because there was a lot of conversation about, like, let's just make this a better experience. But then in a lot of ways, the pandemic just shattered that because it was like, oh, you can't get away from the base fact of just we're all gonna be crammed in here together, and some of us are gonna be sick even if we don't know it yet.

Christopher Schaberg: 25:29

And that, of course, led to the grounding of flights, which led to the explosion of pandemic dogs, actually. But, yeah, I mean, I think you talked about, like, the democratization of air travel, but also it started becoming more gritty and grimy. And then, of course, there was the post 09/11 securitization of air travel, which also led to, I think, like, a few years of renewed pride around the experience and a sense of, like, no. This is something we really need to protect and appreciate. But then that went away too after after a while, and it just kinda slumped back into more of the same.

Christopher Schaberg: 26:06

There just does seem to be this constant struggle to both, like, make the experience better and more accessible to more people, but also just always admitting that it's something we we'd really rather not do, or you can't really get away from it from the more abject parts of it. I think that all just kinda got cashed out during the pandemic. I mean, there were some people who were like, oh, I really miss traveling, but but there were also a lot of people who said, wow. I don't I really don't miss traveling by plane. I mean, I felt like that, and now I feel like a total charlatan even writing about air travel because I don't do it anymore, and I don't really wanna do it.

Margret Grebowicz: 26:39

Yeah. But I I think that's why it's so important to have a kind of renewed attention to and focus on not just planes, but airports for true love, which is airports.

Christopher Schaberg: 26:51

Yes. Yes.

Margret Grebowicz: 26:52

Because they're all coming back, but they're coming back different.

Christopher Schaberg: 26:56

Yes.

Margret Grebowicz: 26:57

And it's interesting to see what the difference is and how they're framing the difference and why you and I and everyone should return to air travel, right, and why it's really great. So when you, you know, when we talk about it getting better, we mean better in particular ways. Right? So how have the airports been advertising being better, for example? The last few airports I was in over this past year, because I did have to fly, everything is under construction

Christopher Schaberg: 27:21

Yeah. Yeah.

Margret Grebowicz: 27:22

More than ever before. It's under, like, like, really dramatic construction, and it's always pardon our dust. We're making these amazing, you know, improvements.

Christopher Schaberg: 27:32

Which is really probably more about, like, labor shortages and supply chain snafus that mean that they just projects have been taking longer as we all know. Things are left half done or but you're right. Very much like the the way these things are marketed as is as progress. Progress you're seeing progress in action. I'm finishing this new book right now on adventure, which you know about a little bit, Margaret.

Christopher Schaberg: 27:55

And one of the things I've noticed is the airlines pitching, like, there's one Delta ad that says, you know, ready for your next adventure? You know, the skies are open again or something like that. The world is open to travel. That's what it says. And so it's very much like inviting us back in to fly both as an adventure itself or to an adventure.

Christopher Schaberg: 28:17

It's really interesting to me how there's that kind of glossing over of the the difference between those two possibilities because I don't think flying has really changed that much. And in fact, everything I hear from friends and family over the last year or so is that it's pretty much as awful as it's ever been, if not worse. But on the other hand, it's like, are we gonna experience this in new ways? Is it gonna mean something different to us now? Which also, I mean, just reminds me a lot of how you're talking about the great adoption and, oh, like, now we understand why we need dogs.

Christopher Schaberg: 28:49

Now that we're in lockdown, now that we're alone together with our friends or fan or just family or alone period, like, now I understand why I need a dog, and I will I will treat it differently now. There's that same kind of rhetorical couching of desire there, I think. On the one hand, with dogs, it would seem like we're trying to reclaim something deep in our nature. Whereas with, like, getting back to air travel is like getting back to the cusp of progress, escaping who we were back when we were in wagons or whatever or trains. Like, no.

Christopher Schaberg: 29:23

We gotta get back in the air. You know, keep going forward. I mean, maybe there's something between these two activities that exposes a real existential rift.

Margret Grebowicz: 29:32

Yeah. I mean, I I'm super curious about what you've found since the book because your book's been out a lot longer than mine. Right. A good, you know, year and a half or something like that. Yeah.

Margret Grebowicz: 29:45

And I'm wondering I mean, so much has happened since then. I mean, you know, most notably for us normal people just dealing in the with the world, the space billionaires, billionaire space race. Right? This idea of space tourism and, like, a new luxury, a new golden age with this fantasy that we're gonna inaugurate this new golden age of space tourism. What's happened since the book came out that you've been thinking like, okay.

Margret Grebowicz: 30:11

Here are the next moments of this stuff I'm thinking about.

Christopher Schaberg: 30:14

Well, yeah. I mean, actually, a magazine out of London recently asked me to write kind of the epilogue to this book because they like the book grounded, and they wanted me to kind of answer that question you just posed. Like, so where are we now? A couple years later, like, you know, what has happened? What's gonna happen next?

Christopher Schaberg: 30:31

I mean, one thing is is I was flipping through my book after not looking at it for a while. People actually started flying a lot sooner than the aviation experts really predicted. People predicted this would stretch out to like 02/2324. And certainly, the effects will still be felt. But, you know, airlines and travelers were pretty eager to get everything going again, like get back to the pre COVID levels by last summer.

Christopher Schaberg: 30:54

I mean, we're not quite there yet, I don't think, but, like, they were eager to just let's get back as soon as possible. No surprise, I guess. But, of course, at the same time, you've got, you know, science writers at the Atlantic pointing out that we didn't really learn the lessons from that pandemic and it's not gonna be the last and this will likely or something like it will happen again and shut down air travel. And we've seen now how fragile the system is, air travel. I don't know how much more or how many times the whole, like, infrastructure and system could take that kind of, like, absolute abrupt shutdown.

Christopher Schaberg: 31:27

And so I think while people are, like, eagerly getting back in the skies, there's also just this maybe mostly unconscious knowledge or awareness that, like, this could all go away tomorrow because we've seen it happen. And it could go away, maybe not for good, but it could have to change in ways we can't even yet imagine. I was actually reading I talk about this in the piece that I just wrote. Kim Stanley Robinson's novel, The Ministry for the Future, has an amazing scene midway through the book that takes place in the February. I don't really wanna describe the whole scene, but it's basically a day that changes air travel forever or or at least from that point on.

Christopher Schaberg: 32:05

Like, it's not going back. And it was amazing for me to read that because I think it speaks to, again, just that awareness that, like, we we've seen it happen. It could happen again, and it might be more long lasting. It might necessitate changes that we really are repressing at this point. Like, the the idea that we might actually, you know what?

Christopher Schaberg: 32:25

Stop flying these airplanes. Maybe we fly in a different way, a slower way, or maybe we recommit to, like, rail or a different kind of sea travel. But that that chapter could close, and that's a very unpopular position.

Margret Grebowicz: 32:38

But it's a position you've had for years.

Christopher Schaberg: 32:40

Right. Yeah. No. No. I mean, this is why I wrote a book called The End of Airports.

Margret Grebowicz: 32:43

Yeah. That was my first book that I read by you.

Christopher Schaberg: 32:46

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Margret Grebowicz: 32:46

That's how we met, right, was around that book. And I was like, oh my gosh. There could be an end of airports? And this was now years ago. You've been predicting that, of course, all of this is is on the wane.

Margret Grebowicz: 32:56

Of course, it is.

Christopher Schaberg: 32:58

That book was 02/2015, and I was really writing a lot about how digital technologies and especially, like, smartphones were really changing dramatically the experience of flight and what we expected from what we wanted from flight compared with what we were getting on our little handheld magic computers. And I guess that was another link earlier when you were talking about, like, the social media and how we are channeling our desires with our animals into these machines or how we're receiving those desires from across the interwebs. It also seems like you are locating a kind of nascent I don't know if it's what quite a crisis point, but there's some kind of shift happening. There's a third party here. Right?

Christopher Schaberg: 33:37

There are a third object. It's like it's not just humans and dogs. It's humans and dogs and TikTok. And I guess for me, in 02/2015, it was like, oh my gosh. This isn't just about humans and airplanes anymore.

Christopher Schaberg: 33:47

This is about humans and airplanes, and everyone has an iPhone. And that was to me what was precipitating what I was calling the end of airports. It sounded outlandish at the time and it probably still sounds outlandish to some. But then we saw a version of this happen with the pandemic. We're not we can't fly anymore.

Christopher Schaberg: 34:04

Oh, guess what? We have Zoom. We're we're good. You know?

Margret Grebowicz: 34:08

Right. Yeah. Because, ultimately, all of these things are symptoms of a fantasy of social life.

Christopher Schaberg: 34:13

Right. Right.

Margret Grebowicz: 34:14

I mean or of different I'm not saying it's one fantasy. This is what we're talking about. This is what's motivating all of this stuff is a certain fantasy of what social life could be.

Christopher Schaberg: 34:24

Yeah.

Margret Grebowicz: 34:24

Which means we're in crisis around social life. Otherwise, there would be no reason to keep looking for the better form of it.

Christopher Schaberg: 34:32

Right. Whether that means traveling to a new place or or the kind of manic drive to travel to ever new places, or there was a reason why those stories about COVID, you know, adoptions of pets were going so viral because that that was also about, like, we need to not only recast our desires, but also, like, remediate them. I had this story that I I told you about over the phone a couple months ago, but I still don't really know what to do with. But it was the story of my partner's cousin's husband who is a veteran who has a service dog, and they were traveling over the summer traveling by air. And when they got to the airport, they realized that they hadn't registered the service dog at the right time period.

Christopher Schaberg: 35:13

You know, they were supposed to give twenty four hours advance, but they hadn't. But, apparently, that was a new rule, and he didn't realize they had to. They would have let him on the flight, but not the service dog. Of course, that wasn't gonna happen to someone who needs their service dog. And so it was a, you know, a minor catastrophe and logistical nightmare, and it all was sorted out.

Christopher Schaberg: 35:32

But I it just got me thinking about, like, on the one hand, like, the airport with its protocols, the I mean, service dogs are now, like, the legible form of real social life, and yet, like, where that runs into problems or where we can't, like, fit that in to these other forms of social life. And it was also, like, different, like, competing vectors of authority. I don't know. I just it was something that when it happened, I was like, oh my gosh. I wanna talk to Margaret about this because what the heck was going on there?

Margret Grebowicz: 35:58

I would like at some point to come up with a really robust reading of the service dog phenomenon, which, again, is not a new phenomenon, but the rhetoric around it keeps changing.

Christopher Schaberg: 36:10

Yeah.

Margret Grebowicz: 36:10

So there's always a a newness to contend with around it. I was just visiting Quabbin Reservoir, which is right in Western Massachusetts, and I went there with my dogs because of, you know, it's this massive tract of wild unpeopled land. So, of course, I'm gonna go there with my dogs. And everything was fine. Dogs were on lead.

Margret Grebowicz: 36:28

Nobody was, you know, breaking the law except I didn't know that dogs were not allowed. And so I was stopped by the police. And they said, are these service dogs? And I said, no. And they're like, yeah.

Margret Grebowicz: 36:38

No dogs allowed in Quabbin Reservoir. And I was like, okay. Sorry. And then, you know, we ran off and whatever. But then I thought about it.

Margret Grebowicz: 36:44

And, of course, the reason, as the officer explained to me, the reason is that their feces are bad for the water. This is a reservoir that supplies over 40% of the water of Massachusetts. And so we can't have dog feces around at all. They also have, interestingly, a gull harassment program in effect so that gulls do not set up shop. Basically, they have all kinds of, like, interesting things.

Margret Grebowicz: 37:09

Like, they have fake coyotes. They have coyote decoys out there to scare Canada geese away. So waterfowl or at least certain species of waterfowl are super problematic to the area to to that, and they would just totally set up shop around the reservoir if they were allowed to. So they're constantly being harassed and driven away.

Christopher Schaberg: 37:28

Wait a minute. Presumably, there are fish in the reservoir.

Margret Grebowicz: 37:31

Oh, yes. Don't ask me.

Christopher Schaberg: 37:33

It's this kind of interesting limit case for, like, whose poop is okay, I guess.

Margret Grebowicz: 37:38

Yeah. And what is a healthy ecosystem? And totally not what I thought. I thought, like, a massive freshwater place with no waterfowl. I I would never have thought that that's good, but that's what they're trying to maintain.

Christopher Schaberg: 37:52

But wait a minute. You said if you if it would have been a service dog, it might have been okay?

Margret Grebowicz: 37:56

Yeah. So I'm like, so why is service dog poop okay? I think it has to do with the imaginary around the service dog and what and, you know, this idea that some dogs are necessary and others aren't. This is something that I really, over the next few years, wanna look into very seriously, but I have to do a lot of research around the history of the service dog and why it has this kind of exceptional status beyond sort of the obvious, you know, why it has this exceptional status, and then what happened in that exquisite moment of the emotional support animal, which was a very short lived moment. But there was this almost ecstatic mass phenomenon moment where the world said, of course, all domestic animals are support animals.

Christopher Schaberg: 38:39

A lot of those narratives played out on social media on airplanes

Margret Grebowicz: 38:43

Mhmm.

Christopher Schaberg: 38:43

Where someone would have their peacock in a seat next to them.

Margret Grebowicz: 38:47

Yeah. Well, that was just one time.

Christopher Schaberg: 38:49

But there were there were many, many social media, like, oh my gosh. Look what this person brought on the plane.

Margret Grebowicz: 38:54

Like an eye roll. Right? Like Yeah. All it

Christopher Schaberg: 38:56

was like Yeah.

Margret Grebowicz: 38:56

A peacock. Sure. Right? But, actually, there was I remember flying during that time, and it was this wonderful time where there were all these dogs around airports, and it was kinda weird. And they pee and there was, like, dog pee that someone had to go clean up and all that stuff.

Christopher Schaberg: 39:09

Right.

Margret Grebowicz: 39:10

But it was kind of amazing that Yeah. The idea that you could just fly with your dog and suddenly all your plans around flying could be different and your experience of flying could be different?

Christopher Schaberg: 39:19

I mean, in my my home airport up in Northern Michigan, the Traverse City Airport, has this amazing little outdoor dog park, like, past security. This incredible accommodation and commitment of square footage in an airport, which is, like, premium at, you know, value. This is potentially part of a much bigger project or a kind of, like, opening move for a larger book.

Margret Grebowicz: 39:41

Yeah. No. That's right, which, of course, is what forerunners sometimes is, wonderfully. What I have here are three chapters. I mean, I guess if you count the introduction, like, four chapters that are really kind of dense and intense little critiques.

Christopher Schaberg: 39:55

Mhmm.

Margret Grebowicz: 39:56

And I wanna see what I could do on the more hopeful end of things. Yeah. Yeah. It's one thing to take apart dog owner culture and show how much it's a kind of projection space for all kinds of delusional fantasies.

Christopher Schaberg: 40:09

Mhmm.

Margret Grebowicz: 40:10

But it's another thing to then say, okay. How should we be with dogs? Like, re like, really? What does this mean? I mean, this is kind of the the question that you're asking about air travel too.

Margret Grebowicz: 40:19

Or maybe the question that comes up when we think about the end of air travel, right, is then how do we do it right in a way that isn't going to be completely co opted by the market?

Christopher Schaberg: 40:29

I think that's right. That's exactly right.

Margret Grebowicz: 40:31

What would it mean to have, like, a more real and honest and productive and hopeful relationship with dogs on the large scale? Because, again, with dogs, just like with airplanes or with air travel, you're dealing with a with a tragedy of the common situation. Something that everyone wants access to.

Christopher Schaberg: 40:48

And something that sometimes brutally exposes our own species intrusion to any, you know, notion of what a commons or shared space.

Margret Grebowicz: 40:57

Mhmm.

Christopher Schaberg: 40:58

I mean, ownership. Right? It's this is what is ownership?

Margret Grebowicz: 41:02

I'm sort of changing the topic here a little bit, but I was thinking about the little tiny short piece in your book that's called ode to empty airports. This is related to the question of, like, what now and what should happen now and how could we think about doing it right? What should happen with airports?

Christopher Schaberg: 41:17

Well, you know, the old airport, the abandoned airport in New Orleans since we got our brand new airport. And the old airport, by the way, was kind of fine. But that has since been leased as a skate park where they've been filming these skater events, which is kind of fascinating. I mean, these these are large spaces we're talking about, not just the runways and tarmacs, but just, like, large built spaces. And it does seem to me that there are all kinds of possibilities for reimagining these spaces.

Christopher Schaberg: 41:45

But, I mean, again, that sounds a bit radical, if not post apocalyptic. I mean, we get the version of that in the the novel and then TV series adaptation station 11, which imagines how people might survive and even thrive in an airport that no longer has airplanes flying in and out of it. There's also that great film, Tripoli Cancelled, filmed in an abandoned airport outside of Athens, I believe, sort of reimagining what that space looks like when you don't have passengers coursing through it or airplanes taking off. But I mean, it's really hard to think this when overwhelmingly the cultural drive is for more and get back into the sky and don't miss out and get your miles back in in shape again. And there's just such a I feel a little weird using this word, but there's such hegemony around around flight Mhmm.

Christopher Schaberg: 42:36

That it's really hard to to think anything otherwise.

Margret Grebowicz: 42:40

Like, we can't imagine the end of flight. Like, we can't imagine the end of capitalism. Right?

Christopher Schaberg: 42:46

Yeah. And that goes back to actually your first question. For me, I think I mean, I remember before the lockdowns happened at the beginning of the pandemic, we left town as things were starting to shut down, and we quarantined up in Northern Michigan. And I just remember the unbelievable silence in the sky where there had been before always planes coming over from Europe on their final descent to Chicago. And it was just so quiet.

Christopher Schaberg: 43:12

And I'd never even really noticed before that, like, of course, there's always, like, seven forty sevens flying overhead even up in this, like, remote part of Michigan. But realizing, like, wow, that's just a distinct difference, We're just like atmospherically, environmentally, ambiently. It'll be very interesting to see over the next two decades how the pressure is put on air travel and how humans respond to those pressures and if, if we have new ways of reimagining travel.

Margret Grebowicz: 43:42

I just recently saw a film about Woodstock ninety nine, which was this music festival that took place in 1999. And they called it Woodstock. They used the Woodstock brand, but they actually held it in Rome, New York, which is a suburb of Utica. And they held it in an abandoned airplane hangar, like a military hangar

Christopher Schaberg: 44:02

Yeah.

Margret Grebowicz: 44:02

Where they took these people, and I think it was some sort of, like, 200,000 people or something like that, and closed them in this space. And it turned into just a complete disaster, famously so. I actually don't remember when it happened, but my partner talks about remembering hearing about it on the news, what a complete disaster it was because they didn't have the right sanitation. I mean, the water was filled with feces. People were getting, like, trench mouth from drinking the water.

Margret Grebowicz: 44:31

They had taken all of their water bottles away when they this is interesting. Right? They took all their water bottles away when they entered to force them to buy water from the concessionaires. And then there was so much chaos and so many people and so much price gouging and, of course, like, some kind of very dramatic, very serious drug scene. There was a rape tent that went on for about four days, apparently.

Margret Grebowicz: 44:52

There was no security to speak of. There were multiple reports of sexual assault afterwards on, like, underage girls. There was apparently this massive chaos when you take well, imagine taking 200,000 people, sticking them into this space which is supposed to be again, talk about a fantasy of sociality. It's supposed to be Woodstock. Right.

Margret Grebowicz: 45:13

Right? The ultimate social happy place. And instead, what you have is a flat military, like, airplane hangar space that's empty, and everyone in there doesn't have enough to drink. It's hot. They don't have a proper place to go to the bathroom.

Margret Grebowicz: 45:30

The bathrooms aren't being cleaned. And then you bring in a bunch of, like, late nineties metal bands to play. Korn, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, these kinds of bands. And it was sort of the opposite of what you're talking about as here is this abandoned airport architecture that is trying to be something, but actually it can't be. And maybe one of the reasons it can't be is because of the architecture.

Christopher Schaberg: 45:56

Exactly. Yeah. And because of just the history embodied in that architecture. Right? That everything I mean, it's it's the twentieth century encapsulated, as it were.

Margret Grebowicz: 46:05

And that you can't overcome. Like, there's no that there's reimagining and but reimagining actually has its limits.

Christopher Schaberg: 46:10

Yeah. That's really interesting.

Margret Grebowicz: 46:12

Oh, it was called you'll like this, Chris. It was called Trainwreck, Woodstock ninety nine.

Christopher Schaberg: 46:18

Interesting. Okay.

Margret Grebowicz: 46:19

Mhmm. It was a, like, a docuseries. And no one really knows what happened until much later. It was only much later that we go in and we find out what was actually going on and what drove people to become, you know, really out of their minds. It was, you know, one of the great insights into the phenomenon of the mass stampede or what happens when you put a bunch of people together and you promise them a good time, but you take away all of the infrastructure that they need to actually make it successful.

Christopher Schaberg: 46:47

It also is sounding a lot like that, the Fyre Festival Yeah. Just without, like,

Margret Grebowicz: 46:51

the feeling or or

Christopher Schaberg: 46:52

any of the actual things materializing.

Margret Grebowicz: 46:54

And they actually did set a bunch of it on fire. I know that it's this different spelling of the word fire. I know. Yeah. But they actually did set, like, I think, the sound stage on fire.

Margret Grebowicz: 47:03

I mean, people were just towards the end, people were pissed, you know. And I don't blame them. And somehow, all of this echoes that airport architecture to

Christopher Schaberg: 47:12

me. Mhmm. Mhmm.

Margret Grebowicz: 47:13

And this and this feeling of being trapped. Right?

Christopher Schaberg: 47:16

Yeah.

Margret Grebowicz: 47:17

And we all know that feeling of when the airplane is grounded and they won't let you off the plane.

Christopher Schaberg: 47:22

Right.

Margret Grebowicz: 47:23

And there's only so long you can take that for.

Christopher Schaberg: 47:26

Yeah.

Margret Grebowicz: 47:26

Or you're in the airport and you can't leave because you're waiting for the next flight. You know, you're gonna have to sleep there or they have your bag or something. But there's something that completely robs you of agency.

Christopher Schaberg: 47:37

Oh, that reminds me of an early news article when, like, we were first, like, getting back in the air again and airlines were opened up again, and it was sort of like, time to fly again. You know, there were all these labor shortages, of course, because the airlines laid off or furloughed a bunch of their workers. And so when the airlines started flying again, there were inevitably delays and cancellations. And there was one aircraft that was sitting on the tarmac for so many hours, and two of the passengers and their dog just decided to pop the the exit door and just, like, slide out a wing. They're just like, fuck it.

Christopher Schaberg: 48:11

We're out of here. That is probably a very common feeling. I mean, we know that is. But, like, to to do it, you know?

Margret Grebowicz: 48:17

To do it, no. No one ever does it. Right? It's the impossible thing. There is no exit.

Christopher Schaberg: 48:21

Yeah. Yeah. So So what about you? What about I mean, what is the future with of the great adoption or the this new moment that we're still inhabiting with rescue dogs?

Margret Grebowicz: 48:32

What the great adoption inaugurated was this explosion in industry and work around dogs. So any kind of dog adjacent job, there are now way more of them than there were before.

Christopher Schaberg: 48:43

Mhmm.

Margret Grebowicz: 48:43

And I think that's one thing to look at closely. What's gonna happen to that? What's going to happen to all those jobs? Are people going to continue adopting at these rates? Are we gonna continue this life in which having a dog is more normal than not having one?

Margret Grebowicz: 48:58

I don't know what those numbers are going to look like. The only place that I can kind of try to figure them out is when I look at the projections for all those dog care industries, training especially. There's massive growth projected for the training market. And all of that, apparently, is being fueled by millennials. Millennials are the dog generation.

Margret Grebowicz: 49:17

I don't know what those numbers are, actually. I don't follow population tracking

Christopher Schaberg: 49:23

Yeah. Yeah.

Margret Grebowicz: 49:23

Yeah. Enough to understand what's happening to population, for example, in The United States. But the pope did come out with that statement recently that said, you kids that are, you know, adopting dogs and cats instead of having children, you're doing something that is going to profoundly change. I think it was basically like, whatever you're getting to in place of a child, don't be fooled. Don't think that you can actually, you know, replace a child.

Margret Grebowicz: 49:48

He doesn't see he didn't say that. He just said this threatens our humanity. That's all he said.

Christopher Schaberg: 49:52

Right. Right. Right.

Margret Grebowicz: 49:53

I think he's right. You know, of course, this went viral and everybody was like, stupid poop. Yeah.

Christopher Schaberg: 49:59

No. Yeah.

Margret Grebowicz: 49:59

But I think I think he's he's right. Like

Christopher Schaberg: 50:02

Mhmm.

Margret Grebowicz: 50:03

He's pointing to a profound shift in what counts as social life and what counts as family and in what counts as a satisfying relationship where people are looking at you know, we're also dealing with questions of mortality. We were faced with our own mortality in this very dramatic way very briefly, but we were. And what did people do? They asked themselves, am I doing what I wanna be doing?

Christopher Schaberg: 50:28

Yeah.

Margret Grebowicz: 50:29

Am I living where I wanna be living? Am I with the person I actually wanna be with? Is this career that I've built, is this what I wanted? And I think a lot of the questions were about sacrifice. Were the sacrifices worth it?

Margret Grebowicz: 50:41

I think that's the question that so many people confronted.

Christopher Schaberg: 50:45

And dogs become, like, a much more vivid or visceral register of, like, satisfaction, intimacy, connection?

Margret Grebowicz: 50:53

Absolutely. I don't know of anyone asking themselves the question around their dog, was it worth it? But we are very much asking that question around our marriages.

Christopher Schaberg: 51:03

Yeah.

Margret Grebowicz: 51:03

I think a lot of women are definitely asking the question around having children. That doesn't mean they don't love their children. Right? That's not what we're talking about. But it is a question that, you know, contemporary women have to confront.

Margret Grebowicz: 51:13

Is this how I wanna do my life?

Christopher Schaberg: 51:16

Right. And now where I live also becomes a factor in that, how my body is being controlled.

Margret Grebowicz: 51:22

Yeah. And what and what I can afford. Right? I mean, we're talking about the people who are trying to be homeowners in the cities on the coasts, for example, where it's just absolutely impossible to buy anything. How are they going to organize their finances?

Margret Grebowicz: 51:37

How are they going to plan their financial future? What are they going to quote, unquote invest in? And I mean that broadly.

Christopher Schaberg: 51:43

I'm having this kind of increasingly awkward conversation with my eight year old daughter, Camille, who really, really wants a dog. It's forcing me into these kind of uncomfortable, awkward conversation. I mean, these you'd have to talk about, like, well, maybe if we were to move to a place where we would have, you know, more space, well, well, can we move well? You know? And, like, well, where would we move?

Christopher Schaberg: 52:06

Well, you know, it's forcing us to have these conversations that we wouldn't have if we weren't talking about having a dog right now in 02/2022 in all of our very specific kind of economic and not to mention, like, environmental circumstances?

Margret Grebowicz: 52:22

Mhmm. Just returning to the question of what's gonna happen, I don't know. I think dog ownership has already become and is going to become more so a kind of theater for economic disparities.

Christopher Schaberg: 52:35

Mhmm. Yep.

Margret Grebowicz: 52:36

Dog food is becoming more and more expensive. We know there's a recession coming. But if I want healthy food for my dog, I gotta go in and pay, like, $80 a bag. I mean, prices that are are already prohibitive for many people and pretty soon will become completely prohibitive. How much food costs, how much vet care costs, both of those things are going to start limiting what's available to people and what's available to whom.

Margret Grebowicz: 53:01

Right? So there will still, at the same time, of course, always be the backyard breeders who are going to be trying to make money by selling dogs at a hundred bucks a pop or $300 a pop or $50 a pop because people are gonna need money. I think we're gonna see a growing gulf between a kind of upwardly mobile dog ownership caught up in all kinds of other cultural trends, like, tied to other cultural trends about the good life, and then the dogs in rural life, dogs in, working class contexts, dogs in prison contexts, dogs in, like, tent cities.

Christopher Schaberg: 53:41

Well, I was actually wondering, yeah. Were there many dogs that that would stock 99 or whatever?

Margret Grebowicz: 53:45

No. I don't think I don't think any dogs were allowed inside.

Christopher Schaberg: 53:48

I mean, I I have to know what happened to the dogs around that. Because I know they were they weren't all just kenneled up for the weekend. Thank you so much for joining us today. I hope you read Rescue Me and maybe even Grounded, and I hope you'll join us for the next chapters of these projects.

Margret Grebowicz: 54:07

So thank you so much for listening and for being interested in Rescue Me. And, you know, if you've got a dog at home, go cuddle your dog. And I look forward to talking to dog lovers and thinkers about what it's like to to live with dogs and what the future holds for all of us.

Christopher Schaberg: 54:23

And if you have a trip coming up, pay close attention or maybe even think about canceling it and doing something at home instead, like reading a book.