Episode 1: In the Beginning

Hello and welcome to the inaugural episode of Wisdom from the Aerial View, the podcast based on my book of the same name. Who is this podcast for? It's for those who wish for less anxiety and more peace in your lives. It's for those who occasionally ask, why am I here on this earth? Is there a purpose to my life? And if there is, what is it? It's for those who seek a more cohesive society, one in which we and our children, our grandchildren, can flourish. My name is Dr. Mark Klein, and I want to introduce my long-term, long-time friend and exceptional human being, Enid Borden. Hi, Enid.

Hello, Mark.

It's always good to see you.

It's always good to see you and it's always good to be seen to tell you the truth. Yeah, it is, it is. Yeah. And I'm delighted to be on this podcast with you. I'm gonna interrupt you for a second because people are gonna be watching this or listening to this and thinking, who are these two? What are they doing? So do me a favor and do our listeners and our viewers a favor. Who are you?

It is good to be seen.

Well, I'm a physician. I've been a physician for many years. Also an author, which is why this podcast actually exists. I practice medicine for a long time. I think I calculate, I've cared for... well over 100,000 patients. I know it sounds like a crazy number, but when you work for a long time and you work a lot of hours per day and you see a lot of patients, they add up over the years. And I was always trying as a doctor to do what I could to benefit each patient. That sounds very trite. mean, sure, every doctor does that. But really, that's the beauty of medicine, the ability to have the opportunity to touch people, to make a difference, I would say, in people's lives every day. So anyway, I decided at this point in my career it was time to see if I could scale this up a little bit, how I could help more people instead of one at a time, help more people reach what I hope is a better approach to life, a better life, a better way to enjoy their lives and to have more meaning in their lives. So that's my goal and I know it's your goal also.

It is, and thank you. I think we should tell everybody how I got involved with this. You and I have known each other for a long time. You're a lot older than I am, of course. No? Why a lot? To be honest with you, actually, I'm older than you are, but that's okay. We're in, I'll tell everybody, we're in our eighth decade of life. And that's good, that's fine. We made it so far. And we fell out of touch, as people do.

By a lot, by a lot.

I wasn't going to tell anybody, Enid.

graduate from high school, and then you go to college, and then your paths go in different directions, and yours and mine did. And mine went in a strange direction, but here we are. And we got back in touch, and I've been in the nonprofit world for a long time, and I was rereading my high school yearbook, and I said, I was gonna leave footsteps in the sands of time, that's what I was gonna do, and I have big feet, so God only knows. But then you called me, we got back together, we had conversations, whatever, and it was amazing to me to think that after so many years we could reconnect in an instant, as though time didn't pass. It was just as though we were running around the schoolyard and just playing games again. And so time was sort of interesting. And then you told me about this book you wrote, and I read it. And I... and a light bulb went off in my head and I said, my goodness, because there's nobody more stressed and more anxious in the world than I am. And I thought, well, maybe this can help. But then I wanna go back and tell you an interesting thing that happened over the weekend. I'm a great fan, I love sports, I've always loved sports. I'm a baseball junkie, I love football too. And I was watching my beloved Buffalo Bills this weekend, who won, and they did a shot. whatever those things are, the blimps, and I said, here's the aerial view that we're looking at. And I said, my goodness, it all makes sense. Mark wrote a book about the aerial view. What is that? What's the aerial view? What is it? What does it mean to me? And what is this podcast gonna be about? And tell us just a little bit about what it is. What is this? What is it?

So you talked about time and we're to talk a lot about time on this podcast because it is one of the most interesting concepts that people, most people have no, do not understand. And it's not their fault they don't understand it because it doesn't, what we're going to talk about in terms of time doesn't really make sense. It just happens to be true. So for instance, when you talk about the fact that we lost touch and for a number of years, Even though I'm gonna guess that you thought about me periodically because I definitely thought about you periodically. That's how it is people who impact you and especially when you spend some time in the aerial view which is we're gonna spend a lot of time in the aerial view over the course of this podcast. Not just today. I'm talking about as we move forward. You recognize the fact that you need to recognize the fact that time is a very interesting thing. So When you talk about our past and when we were running around the schoolyard, I have news for you, Enid. We are still running around the schoolyard. And people, cool listening to this go, time to turn this off, this sounds crazy. No, the way time works is fascinating. And this is all from Albert Einstein. We're not that old. We weren't around when Albert Einstein was alive. we're actually, maybe we were for a couple of years. It's possible we were for, no, actually, I think we were around, we were very little, tiny little people, but we were around, right?

Me longer than you, but yeah.

You were probably even a tinier little person because you're still a pretty tiny little person. So, Einstein figured out in 1905 how time really works. And we're not going to go into all the physics of his theory of special relativity. But that's what it's called, the theory of special relativity. But what he basically found out was all time exists, in a sense, contemporaneously. So here's the first time we're going to introduce a metaphor or an idea that we're going to come back to again and again. So don't worry if you don't get this the first time. I'm not talking about you, Enid. I'm talking about people who are listening and watching. So everybody knows what a jukebox is, right? So now imagine a gigantic, humongous jukebox that holds a gigantic number of records. And each record is going to represent a moment of time. We won't get into what a moment of time is, but you know, we all have general idea of what a moment of time is. So imagine each record is a moment of time. Now in a regular jukebox, you throw in your money and you push F6 or whatever these to be like and now the record pop and it would play, it would stop, next record would play and then it would go back into its slot where it belongs and then another record would come out, another record would play and so on. The way time works, each moment, each record in our magic jukebox is a moment of time. But instead of playing one after another, like we think it happens, like... We started this podcast a few minutes ago and so we would consider that in the past. early things we talked about a few minutes ago are in the past and now we're in the current moment. Oops, now we're in the next moment. Oops, we're now in the next moment and so on. That's how people think time works. So our childhood, we were running around the playground as you were talking about, schoolyard, we would think, well, that's way in the past. It's something we can't get to. It's grayed out. It's just a nice memory, right? But that's not true. that moment, the record that represents that moment is playing no differently, right this second, than the moment we're having this conversation. So all moments exist and it's like every record is playing simultaneously and forever. Now it'd be probably loud, but that's kind of the way to think about it. Every moment is a record in the jukebox. Every record, instead of playing one after the other, like we have

know how they play and how we imagine time works. No, wrong. Einstein said, well, that's not true. What's really happening is every moment is playing simultaneously and forever. So we are still running around the schoolyard. We've both lost our parents. Guess what? We're still in our old homes. We're still with our parents. We still have our siblings. We're still with all our friends from high school that you and I still remember. All those things are still going on. I'm still acting Well, I won't call it acting. I was still appearing in the high school play for my one line. I had one line in the high school play. You want to know what it was? The line was, with pleasure, milady. That was my line because we did Camelot. You remember that show Camelot? Yeah, exactly. So did you have any lines? Aha! See? Yeah.

But you did it very well. What was that line?

Yes, yes, I remember, I was in it as a matter of fact.

I had two lines. I said, that prints over there, something wrong with that prints over there. That was one. Yeah. No, think I, yes, I was in that play, yes.

Anyway, all these moments are still occurring. As Einstein said to his friends, he wrote a famous letter that has been quoted many times, actually to the family of one of his friends who passed away not too long before Einstein passed away. In that letter, he wrote, and I'm going to paraphrase a little bit, to we believing physicists past, present and future are just a stubborn illusion. Meaning it seems to us that there's a past and it's that we can't get to. in the past, it's history, we call it history. And there's a present, which is what we're doing right now. And then there's something called the future, which most people think is a blank sheet of paper. But it just turns out that that future is really no different than the past or the present. The future already exists. And people go, come on, that's insane. Well, I'm not making this up. I'm not Albert Einstein, but that's what he showed through his theory of relativity. And it's very, we'll get to that down the road. Some future. discussion of why that's important. But we're just going to lay the groundwork. The only reason we're talking about time is not to bore people to death, although I think it's like incredibly fascinating. And I'll tell you an interesting story that when I was, we knew each other at this point, but I don't think I ever told you this. I was probably 12 or 13 or something. And I had this sudden epiphany. I guess you have to call it an epiphany or was a revelation that all time existed contemporaneously. That's heavy stuff for a 12 year old, right?

I'd say.

And as you know, I was not the smartest kid in our class. We had a lot of smart kids in our class. I mean, we're smart, we did okay, but we had some super smart people. I wasn't one of those. So why is a 12 year old kid having this epiphany revelation or thought that all time exists contemporaneously? It's kind of crazy. And then I'd have another crazy thought, right? The other crazy thought that would pop into my mind periodically was a question. And the question, I don't know where it came from. Religious people will draw their own conclusions, but I had this voice that in a sense would say to me, not a voice, but a question would pop into my head saying, what's the furthest point in your life? Well, that seems like a silly question. Obviously, the moment I'm thinking about it, Except it clearly wasn't the right answer because I kept getting that question in my head all the time. Every so often it would pop in my head. So putting those two together, all I'm trying to say is I always had a sense and I don't know where it came from. about what Einstein had discovered. Now, at 12 years old, I didn't know who Albert Einstein was, or maybe I heard his name, but I certainly had no idea what his theories were all about. I think that was Jack Weinstein. If they were related, I don't know. Anyway, so why am I talking about this crazy stuff? Because it's going to be very important as we talk about the aerial view. And to tell people right away,

Yeah, you thought it was a kid sitting next to you in homeroom. Yeah. I'm sorry. Okay.

The reason you want to listen to this podcast is we're going to make your life a whole lot better. And I'm not kidding. All that anxiety that Enid's talking about, that many of us experience, we can fix that. We can handle that. Without drugs, by the way.

Yeah, yeah, and you've helped me and I have to tell everybody that you've helped me already. I mean, we've been through, we've been in conversations about this podcast and about the book. And during that period of time, we've been through things. Maybe they were things that seemed superficial to everybody else, but maybe to us they were important. We talked about the death of my dog. And you really basically talked me down because I was very upset losing something like that. It's hard, it's tough. And so that's why I think this is so important. Some of the concepts that we're going to talk about, they do seem a little bit spacey to me. But the more I got to understand what you're trying to say and what it means and the jukebox, and you even talk about baseball in the book, about the Red Sox and the Yankees playing and all of that, we're going to get to that. And that's important. But I think what's most important to me is that we have one of the things you and I talked about was why wouldn't anybody listen to us anyway? We're not famous. Who are we? Why would these two idiots from New York, who now find themselves in Washington, D.C.

Did you know I was an idiot, by the way? Who told you?

Somebody in the jukebox, they were playing your song and they took... Actually, you're not an idiot. You were one of the stars of the class and you skipped the grade, which is why I'm older than you, because they took two grades together because they were so smart.

No, you're actually older than me because you were born before me, not because I skipped a grade.

No, well, maybe that's true too. You see, now that I learned that in the book, you see, this is about time. But it's really important that we talk about these things and maybe learn from them because we do. We are all eager and we're all anxious and there's a difference between that. Everybody says, I'm really anxious to find that. Well, maybe you're not, maybe you're eager, but we are anxious about a lot of things. And when we look at things differently from a different perspective, then things sort of fall into place. I want to ask you a question though about

Sorry.

That was very well said by the way, very well said.

about your jukebox. Thank you. Did you write that down? Because that's a good note.

Yeah, when we're recording this, it's fine.

Okay, thank goodness. But you talked about in the jukebox and the records playing at the same time and it is rather cacophonous and you have all this music going on, but sometimes things in the past weren't so good. And so if those things are still with us, can we change them?

That's true.

I was hoping you wouldn't bring that up. No, only because it's absolutely true. Of course, you can't only have the good moments playing all the time and not the bad moments. we don't have to worry. One of the other things we're going to get to is you don't have to worry about the bad moments. When we get this, when somebody learns, let me just lay this right out, right in the beginning of this podcast. When you learn to ascend, meaning to go up to the aerial view, everything in your life is going to change and everything's going to be better. Everything.

Okay.

Please.

I'm not kidding around. Your relationships will be better. Your anxiety will be, I think, eventually crushed. Your outlook on what's important will be enhanced. You will appreciate moments that you didn't appreciate before, even those bad moments you just talked about. You're going to see them in a different light. So it is when I say the most important thing that's ever happened to me in my life is discovering the aerial view. I'm not kidding. As we go forward together, I hope people hang with us and we're going to have a good time. They probably already figured out we're kind of goofy sometimes because we both think humor is extremely important. By the way, Enid is one of the funniest people I've ever met in my life. So be prepared. She's likely to say some very funny things. Now, not put too much pressure on you, but you are funny.

Yes, yes.

But I promise to keep it clean, so okay. Yeah.

But once you understand what the aerial view really is and how to get there, everybody can do this. You don't need any superpowers. You don't need to go to school. You don't need to any classes. And you just don't have to spend any money. It's free and it's available to all. It will change everything. So this sounds like hyperbole, but I promise you and I promise people who are listening and watching that it's not. That's really what we're going to get to. And it's going to take us a little time to unravel all this and for people to practice like anything else. You want to learn how to play piano, you got to practice. But this kind of practice is easy. But this is where we're getting to. This is the goal.

So let's tell us if you would, what was the aha moment? What was the thing that said, this is, I don't need to be the street level anymore, I can be somewhere else. What was the precipitating factor that brought you there?

Okay, that's a very good question. And we didn't even plan this question.

I'm so glad you hired me for this gig, you know?

So, Enid, by the way, just mentioned the street level view. We're going to differentiate the street view, is where we live. Everything that happens in our lives is on the street view. And we're going to talk, as time goes on, about this aerial view we've already mentioned, which is a different perspective. Now, it's not the 30,000 foot view. It's not like we're sitting in the good year blimp. Is it still good year? There's a couple of blimps out there. But anyway, that blimp is...

I don't know. I know one. One of my neighbors is a blimp. Look at her. It's a bad thing. She's not listening. Anyway.

I don't think you can say that anymore. But anyway, or maybe now you can. At any rate, the 30,000 foot view just means you've rise up and you got a broader perspective. But this is a little deeper, right? It's not just perspective of the landscape in front of you. I'll give you a hint. So remember, we just talked a little bit about the jukebox of time, where all moments exist contemporaneously. Well, when you learn to ascend to the aerial view, you actually see all moments of time. In fact, you can move moments of time around like they're pieces on a chessboard or on a game board. And so when I see you and when you and I talk, I don't just see Enid today. I'm seeing you from years back, from our childhood, because we met, think, in middle school. We didn't actually, it was called junior high school. We were there. So we met in junior high school and then high school and so on. So I see all those Enids. I don't just see this Enid. And that's how I look at the world now. was listening to a podcast actually, I watching a podcast yesterday. Anybody know? Not everybody. You know who, what's his name? my God, flipped out of my mind. Who's the guy from the Hayden Planetarium? Neil deGrasse Tyson, thank you. So was watching Neil deGrasse Tyson and he does, interviews all these people. He actually does something very, I don't know, unusual in his podcast. It's called Star Talk and he's been doing it for a while. It's got lots of episodes. He has some very interesting science guys who are really brilliant people, like really brilliant people. I can't understand half the things they say. Then he has a couple of comedians. I always thought that was interesting because how does a science guy feel about comedians making jokes about because they don't understand the thing he or she is talking about. Anyway, he had this guy on Michio Kaku. Now, I actually quote Michio Kaku in the book. He's a very famous physicist from New York. He says when he looks in the mirror,

All right.

every day, he doesn't see what the reflection is coming back. He sees what he considers an average because he knows that he exists in multiple universes at the same time. So what's very interesting about that to me is that he has, in a sense, the aerial view perspective. He understands that the world is much more than meets the eye. In one of my previous books, this one is my fourth book, my previous books, one of the section of the book is called The World Is Not What You Think. And we're going to talk about that a lot. The world is not what you think. The street view is not what you think. It's certainly only a part of what exists. So when you learn, so it's important people understand this is not astrology. This is not new world thinking. is actually the aerial view has been around a long time. I just happened to give it the name, but there are many people well before me who have discovered this and talked about it. you know, in all cultures. So this is not new idea. I can't take credit for it. But it's an important idea for people who have never learned about this, which is most people, to understand that this exists and that there is, it gives hope, it gives purpose. And what do people want? They want hope and purpose. They want love. They want hope. They want purpose. These are all important things, right? You know, love, we can't give people love, although you've heard me say this before. When I talk to people, I often will say to them, I care more about you than I care about me. And that's when they kind of like roll their eyes, know, like, who is this guy? But it's true. And when you understand the aerial view and as we go forward, you'll understand why that's easy to say, because that actually happens to be the whole point of why we're here. Again, we're getting a little ahead of ourselves, you know, but all these things are possible. And so getting back to your question, what was my epiphany moment? What was that moment? It came from my wife. Now, my wife, who you've met, is the most balanced person I've ever met. And remember, I've seen over 100,000 patients. So I've seen a lot of people, right? More than most people. She's the most incredible person I've ever met. Why? So she doesn't know what anxiety is. She has no idea. She's never had a moment of anxiety. She doesn't know what jealousy, regret or envy are. She doesn't regret anything, ever. Right? So I used to make fun of her and say, you're not a normal person. And because who does that, right?

Right.

And then one day I said, wait a minute, it'd be a lot better to be her than it would be to be me who's anxious, who worries about all kinds of things all the time. And if she can do it, and I don't notice any, she doesn't have any like superpowers that I know of, and she was born on this planet that I'm sure of because I met her parents. So how is it that she can do that? And then I said, well, she can do that. Hmm, probably everybody can do that. Okay, so if you ask her, you how did you get there? How did you get to the fact that have no anxiety, no regret? And she would say, well, it's my faith. Great. Okay, now what? Okay, so there are a lot of people who have a lot of faith, whatever religion, Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, whatever, they have faith. And then there is a subset of those people. I always say to those people, good for you, because it's a shortcut, right? You found the shortcut. If you really are believer, if it really, really works, okay? So for her, she's a real... It's a real deal for her. Not that she's super religious and goes to church every week because she doesn't, but she has this faith and that faith really is in a sense the flip side of what we're going to talk about there. So for people who don't have this pure faith and just release themselves to God or whatever, the rest of us, the good news is there's another way to get to that position of no anxiety, no regret, positivity. happiness, joy, all those great things, right? And meaning, right? Especially meaning. So the aerial view is the way to get there if faith doesn't happen to work for you.

Well, I guess it leads to two questions. One, does she wear tin foil on her head because she's a god? Maybe. Okay, well that would be good. And the other thing, I guess the question would be faith in what? Do we have a faith in something? Is there a faith, is there a god, is there not a god? And I guess we can talk about that in a future episode. But the question is, I don't even know what faith is. What's the definition? What does that mean? And how do we get there? We'll talk about all those kinds of things.

Only on Sundays. Only on Sundays. Yes.

in our subsequent podcasts. We're gonna end, please, yes, please, yeah.

Well, let me just answer the faith question real quickly, because I think we have a few more minutes before we must run. But she has faith in God, right? Very traditional Christian faith, right? So hers is very standard, off the shelf Christian faith, right? Now, you make a very good point. What is faith to people? It's unclear. It's probably different to different people, but that's what hers is. So for those people who really have that faith, that's a really good thing. I mean, it's a really good thing and I do, it's like that shortcut that you're playing a game like Shoots and Ladders or Candy Land where you land on the right spot and you get to go like 50 spaces ahead, right? Faith, think for a lot of people is like that. Well, I have grandchildren.

He still remember, you still remember Candyland? My God, you really are a, okay. Either that or you've been playing that in your office, in the back of the office. I know you, yeah. Okay, I have to tell her that. It is, it's the first episode. But it's interesting though, and even though her faith is different from your faith in all sorts of aspects of your lives, they come together. And do they come together in time or do they come together?

Okay, all right, fine. You didn't have to tell everybody. It's the first episode, right?

Why did they come together?

Well, they don't necessarily come together in the sense that I come from a different perspective, right? Which is what the whole purpose of this, right? So, it's not that I don't have, okay, do I have faith? Not like that, right? It's not enough. It's not enough to me to explain the world. Why is there violence? Why is there brutality and cruelty? you know, I address it with all these things all the time and I dislike them tremendously. But I don't have the kind of faith that she has, which she says, everything's fine, right? I believe in God. I believe in, you know, my religion, my faith, everything's fine. It's going to be OK. Whatever happens, happens. That's pretty much where she comes from. Right. And it gives her that peace. Well, for most people, that doesn't work. Right. It's not enough. You'd have to have some kind of faith. It doesn't relieve all their anxiety. It doesn't eliminate regret and jealousy and envy and all these things. It doesn't do that. The aerial view does all of that. So, you know, this is why I'm so excited about this, because, you know, as doctors, I said it was a one on one. As a physician, I always said, there's only one thing I have to think about, what's best for the patient. I always did what's best for the patient. You got to be careful as a doctor. You don't get distracted by other things like money or more time off or more prestige or whatever, right? If you're a doctor, you don't want to get distracted by those things because they will take away from what your main mission is, was the person in front of you, that patient. So I always tried to keep in mind, do what's best for the patient, everything will work out. Okay, it's the same thing here, right? So now, The world is my patient. That's why I look at it. And I want to bring something that I know works to as many people as possible because there's no reason to go through life super anxious. There's no reason to be regretful and to worry all the time about a decision. I'll you, we'll finish this with a quick short answer. Most people think that if they make the right choice, everything will work out. And if they make the wrong choice, oops, really bad. That implies that there is a correct or best choice. Guess what? There's not. And that could be a tease for our next episode, but there is no such thing as the best or right choice. So we're going to take a lot of that anxiety right off the table in the very early parts of this podcast series. We're going to talk about why you don't have to worry about making the best or correct choice, because there's no such thing.

It is, that's good. That's good.

You make me feel much better. And we'll leave it at that. And that's a good way to leave it because it makes us think. And that's what we want to do at the end of all these programs. We want you to think at the end of every episode, what did he mean by that? What does that mean? And how does that impact my life? And how do I, going forward, take those lessons and take the burden off the shoulders? Because it's tough and the shoulders get heavy.

They get heavy.

And life around us is getting heavier and heavier. We had a school shooting yesterday. I mean, everything in our world seems to be coming at us at once. And you're gonna help us relieve those kinds of pressures, that anxiety, and good. We look forward to it.

100%, 100%. This is not, we're not making this up. This is real. The aerial view is real. I'm gonna teach you how to get there. All right, next time, right, thanks, Enid. Bye.

Good, good, good. Next time, we'll see you next time. Thank you, bye bye.