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that is what motivates a substantial proportion of human activity it's not the rational Pursuit Of Truth it is a persistent effort to manage death
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anxiety by maintaining confidence in our beliefs and our self-worth and because of that whenever our belief
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in reality or our self-worth are threatened or whenever existential anxieties are present that we will automatically engaged in a host of
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defensive maneuvers to restore psychological equanimity Planet critical the podcast for a world in crisis my name is Rachel Donald I'm a lecturer a climate corruption reporter
00:00:57
and your host every week I interview experts who are battling to save our planet my guests are scientists politicians academics journalists and activists they explain the complexities of the energy economic and political
00:01:10
crises that we face today revealing what's really going on and what they think needs to be done this is a critical time for our planet it demands critical thinking click the Subscribe button now and go to
00:01:22
planetcritical.com to learn more my guest this week is Sheldon Solomon Sheldon is a professor of psychology at Skidmore College where he's been researching the effects of the uniquely human awareness of death on Behavior
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he's written books about this death anxiety there was also a documentary made on his research flight from Death the Quest for immortality and he joins me today to bring all of these strands together I am so excited to present you with this episode Sheldon talks about
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the psychology of the anthropocene the psychology of the crisis saying very quickly on in the episode that we are drenched in death right now and that having death on our mind drives our consumption and our disordered Behavior
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which of course is causing the climate crisis we discuss the role of imagination in understanding the big picture the link between death awareness and self-awareness individuality the importance of re-embedding culture in
00:02:12
the Here and Now how cultural beliefs are used to anesthetize death anxiety to manage it and how the Western culture that we've exported around the world has the ironic effect of exacerbating that very anxiety that it's trying to solve
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this is an episode about the fact that human beings need to learn how to die and that in refusing to do so we have become so dislocated so isolated from ourselves from our environment we are causing our own death and the death of
00:02:38
the very many species we share this planet with this episode is littered with knowledge with references with insight and with the warning that if we do not wake up and dare to dream we will walk like zombies off the cliff I hope
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you all enjoy the episode if you do please share it far and wide if you're loving this show support Planet Critical with a paid subscription at planetcritical.com or on patreon the link is in the description box below by signing up you'll also get access to the
00:03:04
weekly article I write inspired by each interview thank you to everyone who has signed up and is supporting the project I'm a vehement believer in ad-free and Open Access content so Planet critical wouldn't exist without the direct
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support of the amazing Community thank you so much to all of you who keep the project going every week Sheldon thank you so much for joining me on planet critical it is a real pleasure to have you on the show well thank you it is my pleasure also rage
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could you just uh repeat what you said just before we came on air um about what you were the two books that you're reading in your different classes just to show you know the intersectionality of all of this work yeah no well uh certainly I'd be delighted um that I was
00:03:43
happy to be asked to uh come exchange ideas on the this podcast to begin with just from the title of uh the Enterprise I knew that this was uh timely and important and then one I went on and saw
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the people that I you've been uh talking with just previous guests on the podcast I was like this is quite amazing um you're doing the same thing in your podcasts that I'm trying to do in my
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classes so we're reading uh the ministry for the future in a class that I'm teaching about the psychology of the anthropocene and we're reading uh barky's book on Denial in my
00:04:26
evolutionary psychology Ventures and uh so from my perspective um but I can't think of anything more timely and important and I can't think of a more effective vehicle to
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disseminate ideas widely and effectively than what folks like you were trying to do I mean to be silly um I like the work that I do and what I tell people is if you're having trouble
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sleeping I'll send you some of our experiments so now there'll be non-pharmacological interventions for insomnia maybe it's interesting and even important work
00:05:07
um but the right now I think it's imperative that these ideas are being as widely distributed as possible to as diverse a group of humans on the planet
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as is possible in my hope is that this is the best way to do it I I'm just I'm not seeing any more just Rich bodies of
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knowledge than on but podcasting kinds of Ventures so like the ones that you're doing so anyway I'm delighted and eager to be here today oh wonderful you know it's interesting I was having this debate with a friend the
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other day um he's a he's an engineer and a theoretician and he was saying yeah but like you know you don't you don't go out and do all of this research and you don't always you
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know have time to read all of the books you know isn't that quite isn't that quite dangerous then and sort of the information that you're putting forth and I said well unlike the anonymous peer-reviewed system what I'm trying to do is like
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build relationships with people and then based on the relationship that I build with that person based on who they are as an individual who they are as a human being I will then establish okay I trust this person and I trust their expertise
00:06:23
so I'm going to build that into my understanding of the pig picture and take it Forward because I don't have time to go out and I'm not an expert in any one thing and I see my role more as you know the person that jumps about the
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ecosystem trying to tie tie bits together and as you said try to communicate to a wider audience yeah why I like that I I don't mean this disparaging weight but I see you as like
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a giant interneuron making connections um of course uh there is a danger of being misled but but this is true in any
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domain and uh there are two things that I think are advantageous one is that you have the insight and humility to recognize the possibility that you might
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be wrong or misled and I suspect the Integrity that if you discover that that's the case that you're going to make that known to the people that you're serving and then what my sense is
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that if there's anything that's just wildly discrepant from reality that that would be evident by just stepping back
00:07:40
and looking at all of the folks that you've been engaged with and perhaps just noticing that here and there is something that's glaringly out of line but with the consensus of the variety
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but of people that you're appealing to and so yes we're alone under qualified to be making authoritative judgments
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about problems so vast that we need to begin by stipulating uh that will never know the answers and that there's not one particular way to proceed
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um but for me that's just Browns or humility uh not any justification to you know withdraw from the doing what
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you're doing confidently and forcefully um yeah I think the the easiest sort of way for me personally to decide how and if to engage with people is if they say
00:08:49
that anybody says they've got the solution or it boils down to this one thing immediately just like nope sorry this platform is not for you like the problem is uh systemic and everyone I
00:09:01
speak to I've who I respect says that you know we just cannot focus on one single part that's the whole point of what makes this crisis so complex that's correct compounded by the fact that
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evolutionarily we're kind of designed to just focus on one thing you know in other words I I think you know on here we're kind of wandering in to um territory that you might have covered
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uh with Ajit varkey and the denial book most creatures or your word designed by billions of years of evolution to you
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know kind of metaphorically keep our noses snuffing the ground in other words so you know if the purpose of of being here from an evolutionary perspective
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well there is no purpose life is just exists and you know in order to stay alive um we we need to do certain things and
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um you know for human beings um it has a lot to do with not paying attention to what's going on around us in the overall scheme of things in other
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words like most animals we are quite aware of and responsive to immediate threats and but you know doing that but
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renders it quite difficult to step back and to imagine what might or might not be happening add some vaguely unspecified future moment and I think
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that's part of what makes our current circumstances um so difficult to imagine you know there's other factors including that you
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know work by Nature you know violent and tribal creatures that tend to be naturally antagonistic towards other folks who
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don't share our view of the world uh but just as kind of like a global statement of where we stand just psychodynamically I think we're in an awkward position on
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the one hand you know we've got this massive forebrain that at times allows us to step back as you know Daniel Kahneman won a Nobel Prize it Princeton
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up for his description of the human mind as being uh two systems you know a fast autumn dramatic one that's intuitive and um and that definitely keeps us alive
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but is prone to error and confusion and then we have this uh what he calls slow thinking a more rational detached self-reflective
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mindset and but this does add our best allow us to step back to think rationally to learn from our mistakes yeah but that requires effort attention
00:12:12
and knowledge and so here we are for the most part at our best under optimal circumstances we can as human beings step back and say the planet is in
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perilous condition um it is a problem that we need to all solve at the local level while at the same time simultaneously recognizing uh
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complete interdependence on every other person on the planet and that nothing of value will happen in the absence so but rather Global structural change yeah but
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that's basically um and again we quote know that I think everybody quote knows that and I think what's harder to understand is why it's
00:13:06
so difficult to get most folks to agree that this is the case and then to act on that knowledge in a responsible way and my view based on our work is that the
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reason is that most of us initial sound uh derogatory and judgmental but I'm going to include myself here but most of us whom the one on existential anxieties
00:13:36
are in the air and right now we're drenched then that you know between the pandemic and the planet burning and the political polarization and uh the the
00:13:49
the the massive instability of a global uh essentially a a free market Capital base uh economic system well that keeps
00:14:03
the average individual in our world whether they're aware of it or not in a persistent state of existential apprehension to be more blunt but it
00:14:14
makes us to varying degrees poignantly aware of the inevitability of Our Own Death conscious or not and what our research has suggested is that when
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death is on our minds even if you don't know it we can Flash the word debt on a computer screen through you know 30 milliseconds or so so so fast that but
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you don't even know that you've been exposed to anything and when death is on your mind um it creates a host uh undesirable
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consequences so for example uh when death is on our mind uh we really like people in our tribe but we really hate and will even harm or kill people with
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different beliefs uh when death is on our mind um that we tend to be very attracted uh to certain kinds of political leaders uh and uh that we would call charismatic
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or populous leaders so Hitler gets elected uh saying that he's gonna make Germany great again and but then he was elected without Russian interference and
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now well with uh the pervasive reminders of death in the air uh that we see populous regimes all over the planet uh taking over but um but this is
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problematic because there's a relationship between populist and authoritarian governments and resistance to effectively managing concerns about the environment you know when we remind
00:16:02
people they're gonna die they deny that people are animals they're more uncomfortable in nature it turns us all into mindless consumers of money and stuff when we're reminded that we're
00:16:16
gonna die if you like cookies you eat more of them out alcohol you drink more tobacco you smoke more and then finally when death is on our minds that
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amplifies all pre-existing psychological disorders um and so uh if you're afraid of snakes you become more afraid of snakes if you're obsessive that compulsive you
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wash your hands more and spend more time keeping yourself clean if you're socially anxious uh you hide in the closet more and so the the point is is
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here we are what I think it is kind of a Crossroads of human history not that there haven't been other ones but but there's never been this historical
00:17:06
Confluence of like War political instability economic vulnerability on top of uh impending ecological apocalypse and so here we are yeah you
00:17:21
know just marinated in-depth reminders and what we know from our research is well then that that that turns us into depressed demoralize
00:17:34
proto-fascists plundering the planet in our insatiable desire for dollars and draws in like an alcohol oxycodone Tip Top twittering stupor and
00:17:47
this is uh not a great position to be in uh this is the moment where it would be best as a species to step back and to
00:17:59
collectively reflect on where we stand and it's at the precise moment that we're at least equipped to do that because it's well known that when we are
00:18:13
in a state of existential distress that that essentially lobotomizes is us but um that that's what totalitarian leaders are great at Hana or rent the great
00:18:26
philosopher of yesteryear and her book on the origin of totalitarianism she's like look it's a it's a standard Playbook a populist leader takes over
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and they lobotomize their followers by infusing them uh by by turning their fears into anger and directing swords
00:18:51
and external scapegoat in order to deflect attention from the fact that they rarely care for their constituents and or exploiting them economically in collusion up with corporate entities
00:19:06
and so it's really a vulnerable position for us to be in right now I you know we need as much clarity as possible or but
00:19:22
um we can understand why it's perilously difficult to create circumstances that are conducive to that I and I'm sure many other people but I have always understood imagination as this capacity
00:19:34
for creating possibilities creating the unknown and thereby sort of dealing with the unreal yeah and perhaps how to make the unreal real but as you were talking um and talking about what our sort of
00:19:46
evolutionary like psychology is adapted for I.E understanding immediate threats immediately it came to mind that actually we need imagination in order to stand back and grasp the big picture
00:19:59
because we don't actually have the capacity to quote unquote see it for what it is it must be an act of imagination in concurrence with seeing reality yeah absolutely and um I'm not
00:20:12
sure what to add to that that's quite brilliant I like how Otto Rock who was one of Freud's disciples um or Ernest Becker the cultural Anthropologist from whom our work is
00:20:26
drawn always um leans on wrong who's like look only him elements make the unreal real I like that little nugget and that's because of
00:20:39
our imagination the the capacity to imagine allows us to plan for the future uh by thinking about different possible outcomes and that's a good way of
00:20:52
keeping us alive that's called prospective imagination it also allows us to Fathom things that don't even exist yet and then to make them real like Da Vinci drawing pictures of
00:21:04
helicopters uh in the 1500s and that's all magnificent and I also like um how the Danish existential philosophers sworn Kierkegaard uh talked
00:21:18
about imagination as it being one of the things that allows us to realize that we ourselves exist Kierkegaard was like you're so smart that you know that
00:21:32
you're here we actually imagine our own existence which we take for granted for the most part because that's just the way that we're organized I wake up in the morning and I often say to myself
00:21:47
I'm I'm here I am I woke up I'm walking to my office and I'm like wow here I am walking to my office and then I can even keep thinking here I am
00:21:59
walking to my office thinking about then I'm walking to my office and the point the Kierkegaard makes is twofold one is is that it takes a ridiculously
00:22:11
sophisticated cognitive apparatus to render yourself the object of your own subjective inquiry all right English translation a rose bush is here but doesn't necessarily know it you know a
00:22:25
raccoon is here but doesn't necessarily know it but we're here and We Know It And Kierkegaard goes on to point out
00:22:36
that uh if you're here and you know it then you're gonna necessarily experience two uniquely human emotions that he
00:22:48
calls awe and dreads respectively I um and then it's like he's like hey let's remember that it is awesome to be alive and to know it and and to recognize that
00:23:03
for many of us that are are Mo our finest moments when we feel most keenly aware of and appreciative of being alive are not necessarily the culturally
00:23:18
constructed ones in other words yeah we love it when we graduate from school or get married or celebrate holidays and and uh that is cause for Joy but so too
00:23:31
is waking up on a fine day and getting a face full of fresh air and maybe appreciating that there's some do on a leave glimmering in the sunlight or passing somebody randomly on the street
00:23:45
and just that little nod of acknowledging the existing sense of a fellow human being where you just like it is great to be alive where we're just
00:23:57
literally joyously wallowing and the spontaneous exuberance of life itself and I torment my students uh over here to get them to read James Joyce's book
00:24:12
Ulysses you know giant book and we all have it on our bookshelves most of us keep it use it to keep our cars from Rolling backwards on Mills but if you ever do get to read it you know the last
00:24:25
50 pages of the book it's the longest sentence in English literature no capital letters no punctuation but the sentence begins and ends uh with the same word yes it is great to be alive
00:24:39
and I'm saying that in part to remind myself uh because it is too easy to forget how awesome it is to simply be here because of the Dreadful
00:24:54
Counterpoint that Kierkegaard goes on to note when he uh points out that uh as uh that unless Europe child or an idiot if
00:25:06
you're smart enough to know that you're here you're also intelligent enough to realize that like all living things your life is of finite duration uh that I and
00:25:18
you too will someday die moreover you realize that not only will you die someday but your death can occur for reasons that you could never anticipate or control and then finally just to knee
00:25:31
Us in the psychological groin Freud and other folks like him point out that we don't like the fact that we're embodied animals just respiring pieces of
00:25:45
defecating meat uh born in a time and place not out of our choosing where we're here for an infant testibility small amount of time before we're summarily uh obliterated and that from
00:26:01
the overall scheme of things we're no more significant or enduring than Wizards or potatoes and the point that we make in our work based on the cultural Anthropologist
00:26:14
Ernest Becker is that if that's all you've thought about which in fact is the reality of The Human Condition I'm gonna die someday I can walk outside and get hit by a comet or a plague uh you
00:26:26
know I'm a breathing piece of meat a cold cut with an attitude and I'm just not going to be here forever that we wouldn't be able to stand up in the morning we would be so debilitated but
00:26:40
with tidal waves of existential dread that we would literally be switching opposite biological protoplasm cowering under our beds groping for rather large
00:26:53
sedatives and so this raises the question of well how is it do we uh make it through the day and from an existential perspective according to Ernest Becker it's because
00:27:07
of culture which is defined as humanly constructed beliefs about reality that we share with our fellow humans that minimizes death anxiety by giving us
00:27:19
each a sense that we're persons of value in a world of meaning uh cultures provide each of us with an account of the origin of the universe with a prescription for how we're supposed to
00:27:33
behave while we're here uh with some hope of immortality either literal or symbolic for those who behave in a court with cultural dictates and so according
00:27:47
to this um perspective whether we're aware of it or not uh we spend most of our moments trying to maintain confidence in our
00:27:59
culturally constructed belief systems as well as faith in our value you which for backer and for what we call Terror management theory is is essentially self-esteem
00:28:13
and that that is what motivates a substantial proportion of human activity it's not the rational Pursuit Of Truth it is a persistent effort uh to manage
00:28:27
death anxiety by maintaining confidence in our beliefs and our self-worth and because of that whenever our belief in
00:28:40
reality or our self-worth are threatened or whenever existential anxieties are present that we will automatically
00:28:51
engaged in a host of defensive maneuvers uh to restore psychological Equanimity and so that's why I I mentioned earlier
00:29:03
in our research when we asked people to imagine themselves dying sometimes we just say hey uh what are your thoughts and feelings about your own death sometimes we go outside the lab or we
00:29:18
stop people either in front of a funeral parlor or a hundred meters to either side or thought be in that if we stop you in front of the funeral part where death is on your mind whether you know
00:29:30
it or not and then um we also have a paradigm where we have people read things on a computer while we Flash the word death so rapidly like 30 milliseconds that you can't even see
00:29:45
anything and again as I mentioned earlier when death is on your mind we hate people who are different we tend to love a charismatic populous we leaders
00:29:57
we deny that we're animals we trash the natural environment we become mindless consumers with insatiable desires for money and stuff and this also amplifies
00:30:09
all of our pre-existing psychological disorders and so um and this is why we propose uh that um that that there are unfortunate
00:30:24
consequences of malignant manifestations of death denial and this is why we believe that it is important for us as individuals as well as collectively in
00:30:38
the context of our culture to be able to step back and to reflect in the service of Albert Camus injunction to each of us when he said
00:30:52
come to terms with death thereafter uh anything is possible and what that suggests to us is two different simultaneous Roots uh to
00:31:06
managing death and anxiety one is for each of us at the very personal level um uh you know ever since there's been people um most religious and philosophical
00:31:18
traditions uh emphasize the that you have to learn how to die in order to be able to know how to live I like Abraham Lincoln on our side of the pond the only
00:31:32
Republican that I've ever voted for in America when he said it is not the years in your life it's the life in your years and and I like that and I like it like
00:31:45
the Tibetan Book of the Dead Or Socrates saying to philosophize is to learn uh how to die and we can see right now now
00:31:57
uh throughout the world uh that uh there are lots of efforts to help us move in that direction and so for most of human
00:32:09
history it was in the context of our religious belief systems that we were assisted as individuals in our personal quest to come to terms with our own
00:32:24
mortality but we're seeing those um that those social forces expand uh into the secular realm and this is not to denigrate religious efforts to assuage
00:32:38
uh death anxiety but uh we're also seeing like death cafes death positive movements uh throughout the world just
00:32:50
spaces where people can't get together I and talk about their own concerns about their mortality and
00:33:04
their is research now uh suggesting uh that this can be quite powerful uh that uh serious and protracted efforts to
00:33:18
come to terms with death which is very different than walking past a funeral home and then kicking somebody in the face because they look different than
00:33:29
you that that does uh have a really beneficial effects in terms of rendering us uh happier and more pro-social and so
00:33:42
from positive psychology right now we have bodies of research saying that when we're at our best When Death anxiety is
00:33:54
managed in a mature an effective way but then that increases our sense of awe that life is just awesome and that in turn when we're awed by life that makes
00:34:08
us more humble not self-deprecating it just makes us acknowledge that we are relatively inconsequential specs of dust and the overall scheme of things but
00:34:20
we're not isolated and disconnected specks of dust where in fact connected to all that is I like Otto Rock's point where he says where temporal
00:34:33
representatives of the cosmic Primal Force English translation we're all we're all descendants of the first thing that was ever alive and that makes us
00:34:45
related to everything that's ever been alive and everything that's now alive and everything that will be alive and when we see it that way it's fine being
00:34:59
a speck because your respect in the connected to the web of all that is and that's humbling but uplifting at the same time and not in turn Fosters a
00:35:12
sense of gratitude and and I'm preoccupied with that right now because any of us that slept in a bed last night and had lunch yesterday oh we should be
00:35:25
extraordinarily a grateful to be alive and so at the personal level I I think we can and should make great Headway coming to terms with our own mortality
00:35:39
uh noting that when we go in that direction and existential anxieties are aroused yeah we're more apt to become uh
00:35:50
odd and humbled and grateful uh you know rather than narcissistic socio perhaps wanting more money and stuff as we're out to kill everybody who looks different than the way that we do right
00:36:05
but at the same time we also have to make Headway uh as entire cultures yeah well let's talk about uh the particular culture that seems to be yes particularly
00:36:18
um responsible for the amount of damage in the world right now yeah um because this to again to tease out some uh some of what you're saying so
00:36:30
death death anxiety sort of propels us um and with experiencing death anxiety the only way to combat is to create cultural beliefs that allow us purpose and and values otherwise we'd all be hiding under our beds all day unable to
00:36:44
move that's right this is much like what he says so debt but death awareness Demands a sense of self-awareness like there cannot not be a sense of that one is going to die without one being a one that's right um and that is exacerbated
00:36:57
by individuality but it seems to me that the part of the problem could be that the cultural beliefs that are um propounded by Western culture in order to manage our own anxiety is that
00:37:11
of individualism that's correct and so we are very much propagating the very thing that drives our own death awareness and and anxiety and that seems to be because you said um that
00:37:24
um maintenance and culture belief is a way of managing death anxiety and it sort of it restores psychological Equanimity but what we are seeing all around the world is that this culture that we have exported globally is causing huge psychological distress to
00:37:37
everybody so is that because it exacerbates the very thing which we normally use culture to try and manage and get through that would be my view and to be annoying I I just call it anal
00:37:49
cranial Fusion that we subscribe to a a world view that we're now inflicting on the world around us
00:38:00
that ironically and you you put it an awesome and eloquent fashion um it is a world view created to mitigate deaf anxiety that has the
00:38:16
ironic effect of not doing it very well and at the same time has created physical conditions that will surely if
00:38:29
left unchecked uh render the planet unfit for human habitation and it comes down to our veneration almost worship of
00:38:42
the individual and uh which again turns out uh to be highly problematic to the individual uh that's what Fosters the
00:38:55
pervasive science of alienation and disconnection that pervades the West are rates of depression are 10 times higher than they were after World War II and so
00:39:09
getting back to individualism just for a second uh and not to go all like academically but this is important everyone in the west whether we know it or not or our followers John Locke the
00:39:22
dead Scottish philosopher who in 1690 in his Second Treatise on government he said there's no such thing as Societies in nature there's just individuals who
00:39:38
pursue their best interests and and that in an ideal Universe there wouldn't be societies there would just be rugged individuals
00:39:50
staying alive and then Locke said that but the reason that doesn't happen is because if that was the case we would be in a Perpetual state of War like if I'm
00:40:02
hungry and there's an apple tree uh a mile away well I could walk a mile and grab an apple but if somebody I don't know is sitting 10 feet away uh with an apple that they picked why don't I just
00:40:16
grab a rock and crack their [ __ ] head and grab their apple instead well I might do that but that would piss them off and their people may then grab many
00:40:27
rocks and pound my family into a pulp and that would just lead to an ongoing state of War so what Locke said is we voluntarily relinquish the freedom that
00:40:41
we have in nature in order to join civil society and the sole function of government is to protect our property and and we do that by warding off
00:40:53
Foreign invasions and by maintaining domestic tranquility and the reason Locke does that some people propose is in order to justify his take on private
00:41:05
property because Locke says there is no private property in nature but as an individual you have the right to survive and so when I walk over to an apple tree
00:41:17
and I pack an apple well at first that apple tree belongs to everybody but the minute I pick the Apple I'm turning common property into my own private
00:41:31
property and then lot goes on to say I can have as many apples as I want or need as long as I don't waste them and as long as I don't prevent other people
00:41:44
from pursuing their right to property and he's like hey and if we all do that everybody's gonna be better off and and
00:41:58
then he says but everybody's different that he uses the word industry he's like some of us have more industry than others that means we're smarter we're more motivated we're more effective
00:42:12
therefore uh people are gonna have different amounts of stuff in other words for lock inequality is natural it's necessary and it is also desirable
00:42:26
because in Locke's view of the world nature that we don't cultivate he called it just waste he said what makes humans
00:42:38
function are great individuals that turn nature into stuff and that all of us are better off because of that right so to
00:42:51
make a short story on uh this is one of the few ideas in the social sciences that is unambiguously incorrect In other words this is one of the stupidest
00:43:03
stupidest ideas in the history of claims about human nature no psychologist or evolutionary types take that seriously there is no solitary
00:43:17
primate the last solitary primate was like the Lemur 60 million years ago and yet that's what Americans and other folks in the west they still believe
00:43:30
that to this day and so Margaret Thatcher on your side side of the pond she said there's no such thing as Society Milton Friedman won a Nobel Prize in America in the last Millennium
00:43:44
saying the same thing that we just have individuals pursuing uh their own interests so my point getting back to your question is that this is a world
00:43:59
view that is based on an erroneous set of assumptions about human nature and it has catastrophic psychological as
00:44:13
well as ecological effects it's it's catastrophic psychologically as a Harvard philosopher Michael sandel pointed out in a great book The Tyranny
00:44:24
of Merit he's like look we live in societies where we're trying to be good humans we're like everybody has a chance and so you go out and do your best and
00:44:37
if you don't have as much money as Elon Musk or or Jeff Bezos well that's because you're stupid and lazy and we're stupid or lazy moreover we only regard
00:44:53
people highly in today's world if you're the absolute best at what you do in other words in a meritocracy if I'm the second richest person in the world well
00:45:07
I'm a failure ditto for every other category well think about that Michael sandel says that means in our world in every
00:45:18
category and minus one people are failures and he's like oh wow uh at most of the people in America are either
00:45:29
depressed or enraged and sandel is like well how could it be otherwise moreover in these same cultures we teach our kids
00:45:43
to passionately pursue unobtainable standards of value so uh basically we say to uh we'll do this in
00:45:55
a gendered way just to be annoying we say to males uh look unless your penis is bigger than a phone pole then you need a [ __ ] ton of money and if you don't have it it's your fault
00:46:08
and but the point is is that there is no economic mobility in the United States if you're born in poverty you're going to end up there you're more likely to get out of poverty in Bangladesh than
00:46:22
you are in America for women it's even more challenging because now we have like equal rights and so females are expected uh to be just as successful as
00:46:36
their male counterparts despite the glass ceiling that prevents them from actually achieving that and then on top of all of that we have these gendered expectations if I can't floss my teeth
00:46:49
with you uh you're too fat um if you're older than 25 or 30 you're too old and so wow here we are living in
00:47:03
a world where we're teaching our citizens to strive for that which is unattainable and which is a suicide for psychological despair all right moreover
00:47:15
at the cultural level or we have become victims of a A system that is ultimately based on the pursuit uh the infinite
00:47:30
pursuit of a worthless abstraction in other words basically our world um is based on the idea that our measure of success
00:47:43
is your is framed in terms of money uh gross domestic product or whatever uh quantitative number we use these days uh
00:47:56
and yet as they Point as people point out or money has no intrinsic value well whatsoever uh you know it could be a feather it could be a rock it could be a
00:48:09
coin uh um yeah yeah but what gives it its value is our mutual consent all right well here we are we live in a world uh where uh again speaking from
00:48:24
the United States about a third or so of the children in the United States go to bed hungry was it because we don't have enough food no we pay Farmers not to
00:48:37
grow food in order to keep the prices artificially elevated in order to maximize profit but I think even a third grader should
00:48:49
recognize or even a six-year-old that that's backwards we have enough reality but we don't have enough money up moreover but we're in a world right now
00:49:03
where the planet is melting and the people who run Earth are pointing out that they would like to fix it but because it's not profitable
00:49:17
but they are unable to do so and Max Weber the sociologist who talked about charismatic leaders arising in times of historical upheaval he also amused about
00:49:32
this in his book about the Protestant work ethic he said look we are driven to pursue profit indefinitely and and
00:49:44
infinitely or because it whether we're aware of it or not it's part of the Protestant world view that the judeo-christian tradition is now
00:49:57
primarily reflected in uh where uh you're according to the Protestant theology uh God has decided whether you're blessed or damned when you're born you're either going to heaven or
00:50:11
hell and you don't know it but it's already been decided and the argument is though that you kind of want to know what God has in mind for you and so we
00:50:24
can get a hint of God's um inclinations towards us by how much money and stuff we have while we're here they caught Prosperity Theology and so
00:50:36
the more money and stuff we have uh the more that indicates that God is shining his light upon us and Faber's point is that even people who don't think that
00:50:51
they're religious they're just ardently devoted to maximizing profit that they're still psychodynamically beholden to that assumption and that is that uh
00:51:05
stuff equals divine grace equals protection from reality in the service of not dying but then Weber goes on to say look at
00:51:18
the beginning of the Industrial Revolution well it really did make life better for everybody and I again I'd tell myself and my students if you're sitting in a chair uh if you have like a
00:51:32
metal Skillet and stuff all of our modern conveniences are the results of stuff that happen uh a couple hundred years ago but then Weber says look but
00:51:44
but at first this kind of industrialized and increasingly globalized economy that the economy
00:51:55
worked for humans and nanny said something happened where we've become imprisoned in our own gilded cage and now we are as Karl Marx put it flashy
00:52:08
cogs and a ginormous metal machine where whether we know it or not we're like inebriated hamsters on methamphetamine that just sprinting aimlessly on the
00:52:23
hamster wheel of life in again mindless pursuit of money and stuff mistaking that for genuine meaningful activity and
00:52:36
Vapor said I don't think we will stop until the last lump of fossilized coal has been burned and I was like holy crap
00:52:49
that put me metaphorically in need of PTSD intervention for a few years because he saw this coming and here it is or right now you know again on my
00:53:02
side of Earth we've got uh uh politicians that are doing everything that they can to make it illegal uh to uh address our environmental concerns
00:53:15
and it's the same thing in Europe like in Amsterdam uh in Holland they want to fly less planes this summer in order to reduce carbon emissions now that's the government
00:53:27
all right but of course the people who fly the planes uh they're like that's not good for business we want to fly more planes and so to get back to uh the
00:53:39
point that we started I I I'm with the people like Naomi Klein who write books talking about uh we're at an inflection point we have to choose is it going to
00:53:53
be people who were profit and if we remain devoted to an economic system or that is based on the assumption that the
00:54:07
world has infinite resources and that infinite growth is desirable um that or we're gonna be in a great
00:54:19
trouble because that's not a defensible assumption and so I think points out sorry if we keep going that way then people will be eradicated in relatively
00:54:32
short order that's not bad for nature the jellyfish and the Cockroach will be fine but not great for us so this is I think sorry Sheldon it's interrupts I think what's interesting in what you're
00:54:46
saying here is to take it all the way back to the beginning of this conversation when you talked about Kierkegaard yep and um Kick a guard thing that you know we have an awareness of being here we are
00:55:00
here and we know it yeah it seems to me that actually actually there is no real sense of here yeah um and that speaks also to this Prosperity theology that you were discussing yeah
00:55:13
um there isn't it because this is what I think about all the time like how can we be so divorced from our environment how can how can leaders continue to make such terrible decisions um that are completely misaligned with
00:55:26
what we actually need there does doesn't seem to be a sense of environment of what we are within an environment and you were just talking about our economic system and our sort of social organization and the psychology behind
00:55:38
that well you know right now our economic system seems more real than even the planet itself because how we interact with one
00:55:49
another is through trading essentially on you know with our monetary system I can go into um a store and not speak to the person who is providing me with something I
00:56:01
need because there is no need for trust because the interaction is going to be checked and balanced um on a digital trading platform essentially and so the interaction of
00:56:14
this sort of big well fake this digitized system that represents um relationship becomes more real than the relationship between that person and I because we do not get engages if we are members of the same community and that
00:56:26
also divorces us from the reality of the environment from which that product comes so how do we re-embed ourselves in the here yeah brilliant that's awesome uh play that what you just said like 10
00:56:40
times in a row because I think you have summed up perfectly at least in my estimation the ironic condition that we now find
00:56:52
ourselves in as human beings who on the one hand have never been more quote connected in principle
00:57:04
you know here we are conversing over thousands of miles and I do think ultimately that's going to be critical for helping humankind the
00:57:19
progress personally and interpersonally on the other hand it has reduced us all whether we're aware of it or not first of all we're all victims of the
00:57:34
Cartesian dualistic tradition of separating the mind and body so let me just start out up by saying uh that we in the west are already in trouble this
00:57:49
was something that Martin Heidegger the German existentialist pointed out is that we have a really deranged view of people in the west and I like how he put
00:58:01
it he's like we talk about human beings where being is a noun and he's like yeah that's because we're passive entities Descartes like I think therefore I am
00:58:15
after he just doubted away our bodies in other words the whole Western philosophy is based on the idea that the only thing I can't doubt is that I doubt and that
00:58:27
we're essentially thinking things disembodied Minds surveying the world around us from an exalted Vantage Point well that's
00:58:39
already alienating and disconnecting Heidegger's point is that that has nothing to do uh where there are the way we actually come into the world we're hurled into the world
00:58:52
already dynamically engaged with and connected to everyone and everything around us and we therefore need to understand what it is about the Western
00:59:05
way of life that undermines what is in fact our biological inclination and that is to be Uber social Uber Cooperative hyper-friendly creakers vis-a-vis the
00:59:21
other people that we live with and interact with yeah but herein lies the problem in modernity we live by ourselves and interact with no body we
00:59:34
are world has become so technologically a joy that it has created the impression that we're autonomous individuals who need no one if I want something to eat I
00:59:49
yell into my phone and the Amazon trunk flies through my window a couple minutes later well I haven't seen anyone I haven't talked to anybody and here I am
01:00:02
enveloped in my virtual world to the point where I'm driven to despair when I go to a restaurant then I see young people at a table pretending to have
01:00:14
dinner together but the fact that they're in physical proximity means nothing when their faces are are focused on their phone and then I find out that they're texting and and I'm like well
01:00:28
who are you texting they're texting the person across the table Matt and I'm like you know what I I want now uh you know now I know why nature
01:00:40
said that Consciousness is the most calamitous stupidity by which We Shall Perish someday we we have uh become disembodied disconnected
01:00:53
alienated isolated individuals desperately yearning for that which is unattainable and I do think that part of it is the
01:01:07
result of the prevailing technology noting that technology is neither good nor bad and that what can be used in some circumstances uh to our benefit has
01:01:22
generally become uh you know lobotomizing and emotionally problematic for most of the individuals
01:01:34
and so I liked Sylvia bonso's a philosopher um from Italy but she not practices in the United States and she has a term uh and she calls it
01:01:47
embodied wisdom and yeah her point is it's time to climb back into the here and now and and that
01:02:00
that means that we have to be reintegrated with the carcass in which we reside reconnected to our fellow humans
01:02:13
in the context of the natural environment that has spawned us and uh there's a recent book I'm going to mess it up it's called An Inconvenient apocalypse have you heard yes yeah yeah
01:02:27
I'm reading it I've got those guys booked in for an interview good tell them I love them I'm reading that they're in my course also and I I love when they say that we're a species out of context they're like wait a minute
01:02:40
you know we tend to judge everyone and everything against our world but our world you know giant
01:02:51
Cosmopolitan societies dependent uh on uh the aggregations of large surpluses in a hierarchical organization that
01:03:03
ensures inequitable uh outcomes that uh they're like that's not the way we were for 99.9 of human history what what we were were
01:03:17
groups of about 200 people big enough to have some specialization small enough for us to know each of the
01:03:29
people that were living and working with and for our lives to unfold in an embodied interdependent and interconnected way
01:03:43
all right now Jackson and Johnson uh the inconvenient apocalypse authors they're very clear they're not saying we all need to move out of London or Manhattan and go back and become hunters and
01:03:58
gatherers in small groups but they are suggesting that we may have to resurrect ourselves as human beings from the bottom up in the context of
01:04:13
smaller groups of individuals remembering what it's like to interact with our fellow humans on a daily basis and God I don't want to well I don't
01:04:27
mind sounding like Father time uh but I remember the days when before I taught my classes the students would come in and we would
01:04:41
talk to each other now the students come in with their headphones on Staring at their spring it's not even looking at each other they don't even know each
01:04:54
other's names because even when we're surrounded up by our fellow humans we're behaving as if we're surrounded by six million people
01:05:07
or whatever in Tokyo so back to Jackson and Jensen they're like well oh wait a minute uh why not get back to any kind of groups be it a local government group
01:05:21
or or even a local Football League it's like let's just get back to reality embodied humans uh again interacting with fellow humans
01:05:36
directly I I tell my students throw your phone in the toilet look at a human Point both dry balls in the same direction we need to remember that because I I
01:05:48
know I'm getting shrilled because I am the average American child has their face in a screen more than their face facing other humans
01:06:03
go out to California to Silicon Valley to the people who invented this technology they don't let their kids anywhere near it they understand that it's debilitating psychological heroin
01:06:17
not despite uh its virtues uh is extraordinarily eviscerating both intellectually as well as emotionally I think you know no wonder we're not
01:06:31
experiencing any awe that's true we're not experiencing one another we're not experiencing nature there you go that's correct and the argument and here I don't want to get too political except
01:06:42
that I think that we need to have to at some point and so right now in the United States we're really polarized and yeah there are people and they they're they're like oh we it's terrible when
01:06:56
people are woke I don't know if that term is is a bandied about on your end of things oh yes by ministers okay so and my point and I don't mind being
01:07:08
annoying is like this idea of being woke has a long history in Western history uh Plato used it in the allegory of the cave where he described the average
01:07:22
person as sleeping on the bottom of a dark cave and he's like we you gotta wake up and become enlightened uh you know then
01:07:34
you've got Freud saying that Neurosis is dreaming while away implying that we've gotta wake up and see things as they are are in Ulysses uh James Joyce says
01:07:48
history is a nightmare from which I'm trying to wait I Bob Marley my favorite reggae guy he he's like I want to hit my favorite songs is wake up and live and
01:08:01
so back to America uh where uh folks in the Republican party like in Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has an anti-woke law and his lawyer defines whoa as
01:08:17
recognizing that there are structural factors that produce inequitable outcomes and wanting to do something to remedy that all right think about the
01:08:30
absurdity and upset and the effectiveness of basically making it illegal for people to see things as they
01:08:42
are in the service of repairing them uh we now are outlawing books the state of Missouri this week uh their state budget cut all funding for public libraries
01:08:57
zero dollars uh for reading and so but we now live in a world where there is extraordinary pressure to keep people lobotomized by ensuring that they're too
01:09:12
busy too angry too afraid uh to recognize that we are momentarily imprisoned in a way of life
01:09:24
that again not to be we don't want to be supplemented it's a way of life that did make things better for lots of us and uh again even Karl Marx said a
01:09:40
capitalism is great to a point to the point where we have enough technology to distribute resources uh in an equitable fashion and when when you talk
01:09:54
to the inconvenient apocalypse folks uh they will make a similar claims on behalf ultimately of the need to tweak
01:10:07
our global economic order now again this is not uh to say oh we need to eliminate money or that market
01:10:19
economies are by their nature uh problematic but that's really not the point or the point is is that there's no evidence whatsoever uh for the claim uh
01:10:34
that unregulated markets where people are encouraged to acquire as much as they want uh that that will inevitably make life better for everybody well I
01:10:48
mean even the economists sorry sorry jump in but even The Economist that created these theories called for regulation Friedman Hayek they all said that the market will sometimes have to be regulated well there you go it's a story that's gotten out of control
01:11:00
unregulated again awesome so I that's what I say to my conservative friends why don't you actually read Adam Smith who said that there there are some things that can't
01:11:13
be done for a prophet and he said education public health and infrastructure and he said the government should do that Hayak you know who's considered the biggest proponent
01:11:26
of free markets he said it won't be long till we get to the point where we have so much technology that things that we used to sell we should be able to give
01:11:40
away for free as public goods even the most Ardent uh yeah free market Capital people they never imagined a situation like
01:11:55
we're in now where people are simultaneously getting richer at the same time that the world is becoming more physically impoverished uh yeah
01:12:07
even the most devoted uh capitalists had good intentions in my opinion specifically that there will come a time uh where technological progress uh is
01:12:23
transformed uh into public good and yeah that's where I think we have to go and that's where I don't see us making as much progress as we are well I mean if to take it right back to
01:12:38
your research if the main drive for people to advance technologically is to generate profit for themselves in order to manage their own death anxiety through the cultural belief system that
01:12:50
we've been you know forced that we've adopted or or propagated um for decades or hundreds of years then then it may then then we will never get there right we just we just can't get there in this current story there you go
01:13:03
again I love how you put it and you're making uh you're putting it better than I but yeah we cannot be deaf denying culturally constructed Meat Puppets tranquilized by the trivial
01:13:17
and have anything good results we need to and again on what makes me optimistic is I'm we're not uh lobbying for a radical alteration of human nature which
01:13:31
is unlikely and perhaps even undesirable we're asking for a recalibration and a restoration uh as Jackson and Jensen put it in the
01:13:43
inconvenient apocalypse we want to just remind ourselves of who we are we're not rugged individuals singularly devoted to the acquisition of infinite wealth for
01:13:55
most of our history uh we are as I put it earlier uh Uber social hyper-cooperative cultural animals interested just as much and the welfare of our community
01:14:08
defined not only in the here and now but in terms of what things will be like for the generations to come and so there are lots of extraordinarily productive ways
01:14:23
to Envision ourselves in the context that the world as it might become if we were to shift towards that kind of you towards life yeah yeah amazing right Sheldon I think
01:14:37
that's the sort of clanger note that we should that we should end on what an extraordinary trough of information and theory and insight and possibility you've given us today thank you so much my final question for you is who would
01:14:52
you like to platform yeah so um I want to lobby for uh well relative to me a young Professor when I say young I think he uh finish this graduate
01:15:05
school work in my 2009 uh James Rowe uh is a a professor I'm gonna screw it up he's at the University of Victoria in Canada and I believe he's his background
01:15:19
is in political science but he also has an awesome background um in Buddhism and in existential psychology and he wrote he just wrote an
01:15:31
amazing book that's about to be published um that it'll be published in a few months Autumn 2023 and the book is
01:15:42
called radical mindfulness why transforming fear of death is politically vital and it's really I I hope that uh that
01:15:55
you'll contact him and that um he'll agree to hang out because his argument is that oh we've got the existential types like me uh emphasizing uh the
01:16:08
importance of understanding the pervasive role of deaf anxiety uh in life in general and then you've got all of these other folks uh working
01:16:21
um in uh just like working in reality trying to make the world better uh you know be it through ngos or efforts to
01:16:33
get into politics or even like people that are in like the mindfulness and Buddhist um the way of things
01:16:44
and the James's point is that I I think that everybody needs to start to get together and to exchange ideas that the existential types like me that are
01:17:00
trying to help individuals feel better about themselves let's say like through mindfulness and stuff like that that we're missing the point unless we also
01:17:12
simultaneously recognize that no amount of individual benefit is going to change anything in the absence of wholesale structural reorganization of
01:17:24
Institutions that have adverse effects on the people within them and and but that the people who are actually trying to change those institutions
01:17:36
they don't adequately recognize how tough it is because of the role of deaf anxiety in making people cling tenaciously to them
01:17:48
and yeah and it's a lovely book and it's also making an important point which is uh yeah we need uh we need to figure out ways just pragmatically uh to Foster
01:18:03
conversations between uh the people like me that spent the last 40 years pretending to help people by hiding in my office and writing books rather than ever seeing a person and the people that
01:18:17
are out on the streets every day doing good that there's a lot of benefit to Mutual exchanges and yeah I think that that's um a fine way of thinking about
01:18:30
things and I I really enjoyed James's book so that's what that's who I would recommend oh brilliant I will definitely contact him Sheldon thank you so much for your time yep thank you it was awesome if you want to learn more about Sheldon's work
01:18:43
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01:18:55
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01:19:07
next week
End of transcript