Okay.

And I had prior knowledge of WSU because I started my career in the national laboratories.

I worked in the... what are called the nuclear weapons laboratories, Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore and Sandia.

But I had worked with people at PNNL who had joined up with WSU quite some time ago, and I was very aware of the history of WSU being a core partner in the follow-on from the Manhattan Project to the initial era of nuclear power in the U.S., nuclear energy.

So I knew about that, and I'm a long career sort of what we call nuclear nonproliferation specialist, meaning how do you keep the bad materials out of the hands of the bad guys, and have been thrilled that not only do we... here at WSU have this capacity, the reactor and the chemistry capacity that we have is also prodigious, but that we have kept it in beautiful shape and have continuously trained so we know not only what was needed in the 70s, 80s, and 90s, but what's needed in the future.

Yeah, so

those practical, but also, you know, really interesting forward-leaning investments.

So I see this as a really interesting moment for higher ed.

Perfect

... and, and that's what brought us here to today, to where we have this outstanding safety record, where, um, you know, when you look at railroad, freight rail systems around the world, we're the best as measured by productivity, uh, cost for shippers, and safety.

Um, so that is the framework for, I think, talking about some of these, um, policy issues that are afoot today, right? You mentioned, so, um, something GoRail's been working on is the Surface Transportation Reauthorization, which expires at the end of September, as you said.

Um, and the last authorization was under the Biden administration.

It was the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law.

Um, so, uh, the, uh, folks, the co- Congress, the h- the House Transportation and Infrastructure committee has been working on writing the next bill.

We learned, we saw, we learned, uh, the base text, or we first saw the base text, um, this past Sunday, so it's only been less than a week now, and, uh, the bill will be c- is, uh, being called the BUILD America 2.0 Act.

So again, per your website at GoRail's, uh, Rail Advocates, which I think is really cool, uh, it says, "The Rail Advocates are a community of leaders from every region of the country who recognize that rail policy decisions made in Washington, DC have real impacts back home." So what more can you tell us about Rail Advocates? Who are these Rail Advocates?