Episode 35: Memories

Welcome to wisdom from the aerial view podcast of those who wish to learn how to crush their anxiety and find meaning and purpose in their lives. Good morning. Good afternoon. Dr. Klein, Mark, how are you today?

I'm fine, Miss Borden Enid.

Oh, that's nice. That sounds very terrific. You know, you and I talk about topics that we're going to discuss on the show and we come to some agreements. Right, right. Today we're going to talk about popcorn. So today I said, I said, well, what do you want to talk about? You said democracy. And I wrote you back. And I said, I kind of have an issue with that. I don't know that it's relevant. And then you wrote me back and I'm going to read to our listeners and viewers what you said.

Sometimes, unless you decide to surprise me, which you do a lot.

You said, I understand your issue. I need to explain. As a country grows more diverse, the interests of its citizens become more varied. We don't all see the country the same way. It's obvious today with the massive polarization. How do we get everyone pulling in the same direction when it becomes an argument of one opinion over another? And then you wrote, this is from Federalist paper number two. And I quote, this is from the Federalist paper. With equal pleasure, I have as often taken notice that Providence has been pleased to give this one connected country to one united people, a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs, and who by their joint counsels, arms, and efforts, fighting side by side throughout a long and bloody war, have nobly established general liberty and independence." And then you wrote, we're not that anymore. We come from different ancestors. We speak different languages, we practice different religions and have varied customs. Democracy is super challenging in that environment because we don't agree on the same fundamentals. And therefore we don't agree on rules and regulations. The aerial view is an antidote to this problem. Okay. I think this is a great topic to discuss. And the other day we were having a conversation about vaccinations and you said the area of view is a vaccination too. And now you think and you say that the area of view is an antidote to this problem. So good, let's talk about democracy. Let's talk about why we as a nation seem so fractured right now.

Well, when I read the, I don't remember why I read that particular, I think it's Federalist number two. It's one of the earliest ones. So for those people who listen who are unfamiliar with the Federalist papers,

It is.

The federalists, so when we had the Articles of Confederation, which is how we started our country, they tend to fail. They failed. And the reason they failed is because they didn't give enough power to a central government and everybody was off doing their own thing. They couldn't enforce anything. You can make a rule, but there was nobody to enforce it. It's like having a legislature with no, know, FBI enforcement, police, whatever. Okay. So you can't enforce it, it doesn't work. Yeah, very much. Well.

Kind of like today.

Kind of

At any rate, so we say, okay, we need a constitution. We need something better. We need the constitution of United States. So the Continental Congress got together and they wrote this constitution. It went up and back with all the things. And some people think, you know, today people like some things, they don't like some things, doesn't matter. At that point, there was not agreement among the 13 colonies about whether we should actually have this stronger central government and whether we should have this constitution in the United States. Now it goes the Constitution, the Constitution, like it came on tablets from God. But of course, it didn't come on tablets from God. It came from a bunch of people who got together and said, let's see if we can figure this out. So now they had to sell it, right? They had to sell the Constitution to get it to get each state to ratify it. So in New York, specifically, in the papers, a group of three people, Alexander Hamilton, who wrote the vast majority of the federalist papers, I think he wrote maybe not half, maybe something like that. He wrote the majority. And then James Madison wrote a bunch. And then John Jay wrote a handful, I think. And the whole idea was to convince the public that this constitution had been created by the Continental Congress was really good and we should go ahead and ratify it. And there were, I think, 80 something of these things. What's very interesting to me, by the way, we can just digress for a second, is that when you read these things, they are quite erudite. mean, they're they're pretty deep and very well written. And these are written for the public and published in newspapers.

Mm-hmm.

absolutely.

So the public was reading this. Now, no offense, but I don't see the public today picking up a paper reading the Federalist Papers. so my point is, the society at that point was obviously way, way, way smaller, as we discussed, quite homogeneous. But they were all really interested, not all, but many, many, many were interested in this process. And so it took the time to read the Federalist Papers. You know, go back to the Lincoln-Douglas debates that went on for hours and people would stand in the sun

Yes.

for hours listening to these two people in a public square, right? Of course, now the public square is X or TikTok or something, whatever. Anyway, so I just thought it was interesting that the public was much more, was willing to give a lot more time and a lot more interest to reading these things that honestly, I think they're written in such a way that I think many high school students today couldn't understand them because our education system is in the toilet.

In the public square. Correct. Right. Right.

YouTube, yeah.

So anyway, that's a different point. But I think it was Hamilton that wrote this one, said we come from the same set of ancestors who speak the same language, who practice the same religion. Now, there were other religions in the country at that point, but obviously a tiny minority. And George Washington, of course, was very adamant about respecting all religions, and that's enshrined in the First Amendment.

Same religion, right.

All right.

But now you look at our country and go, it sounds nothing like that. We probably come from 150 countries or maybe even more. We speak I don't know how many languages. I have to ask John McWhorter, I'm sure he knows, you quoted him the last time about how many languages, but it's a ton. We have obviously many different cultures. We are not the same place. So you go, well, okay, democracy.

Yes.

Our founding fathers believed in democracy, but they also believed that the public had to be actively involved in the process and they had to be educated. They had to read. They had to read the federalist papers. They had to read the papers. They had to educate themselves. And by and large, they felt that only an educated populace had a chance of keeping democracy going. And of course, we talked about our fact that our education system is not teaching kids basically nothing about civics these days. So that's a problem. So, OK, here we are in the middle of this mess. We're not going to solve it all in terms of our education system and our political, how our political system necessarily works. But here we are. We do have to get along and we still believe in democracy, the will of the people. So, but if the will of the people is such that we don't agree on the same set of rules and regulations, how the heck Are we going to make this work? And we see that today with this obvious polarization.

Yeah, I agree with all of it. There's no question about that. However, first of all, newspapers in our country are dying. People are not reading newspapers because you're right, people are using technology. You don't have to read a newspaper when you can pick up Twitter, I still call it Twitter, and read something in 40 words or less or whatever, and that's way you're getting your news. I don't know that we're less inclined to care about it. I think we're more inclined to be scattered about it. I think that we have more things, we have more options in front of us now than we did during those times. And so we have to pick and choose which one we want. And again, getting to your, our conversations, there are not right choices and wrong choices. But I do think that one of the things that struck me is there was a book written, and I forget the authors, but one of them was Josiah Ober. And he talked about the civic bargain that is democracy. And by that he means that it's a background of culture that the set of norms, behaviors and expectations that enable people with differing goals to work together to sustain essential common goods, to enable the level of cooperation necessary to sustain domestic peace and security against external threats to build a robust economy capable of ensuring basic levels of welfare, food, shelter, health and education. I think that the civic bargain is something that we've lost.

So let's, I'm sorry, go ahead, Aiden. So two things struck me recently. One, we saw Luigi Mangione gunned down that CAO of United Healthcare. And then we just saw, there was another murder, which one was it? No, in a similar vein where it was like people deserved it. The idea was that you deserve what you get. Now.

Go ahead, no, go ahead, I'm sorry, go ahead.

Mm-hmm.

Where there's so many.

at the end.

If you think it's okay to gun down somebody because you disagree with them, we got a big problem. And so you just quoted that gentleman who wrote that book saying we have to accept the universal set of standards and regulations and rules. But clearly, when you see situations like this where somebody's just gunning down a CEO of a health care company because you don't agree with what they're doing, we're not agreeing on a set of rules and regulations. So in the old, back in the days of the late 18th century, when the Constitution was written and we had the federalist papers, We did have an agreement set upon rules and regulations like Hamilton said. We came from a common religion, a common background, a common language. We don't have that anymore. And we see this playing out in the streets where it's okay to murder a CEO of a healthcare company because you don't agree with them. Okay, what are we going to do? Which brings us, of course, to my three favorite words, the aerial view.

But let me back up for a second. And I'm not trying to get political, but we have to in that we are discussing democracy. Okay. No, we do. We do. And I'll tell you why. Because when we're talking about common sets of values and facts are facts. And when a fact doesn't suit you and you don't agree with it, if we have numbers that are there and you don't agree with it, so you change the rules,

We don't have to.

No, no, are not facts, by the way. Okay.

Is that democracy, are we taking democracy and shredding it to fit somebody's, someone's values that might not be the value of the majority?

Well, they go up and back. First of watch out for facts. Even in science, which I'm deeply involved in, they change. The rules change. can be in medicine, can be in physics, it can be in chemistry. Rules change. There's no such thing. Facts, no, no, facts change. Absolutely 100 % facts change in everything. What we thought was true about a medicine or about a pharmaceutical or about even some laws of nature.

Rules change, but do facts change?

turn out not to be quite what we seem them to be. Particle physics, going down to the lowest levels, things are always changing. So you got to be careful of facts. And I agree with you. So fact, there's a lot in politics, a lot of things we call fact turn out to be opinion, because it depends on your point of view. we see, like the New York Times just had to bring what's the right term? Help me with this. Correct, an error, right? And of course, once a statement is made and it's out there, it's very hard to correct it. So all these quote facts, you've got to be careful with facts. But we don't even have to worry about politics because each team thinks they're right. I was watching, we'll spend just a minute on this, but I happened to watch part of Kamala Harris on Stephen Colbert's show. And it was in the newspapers everywhere. You could see, you'd have to watch the show if you didn't want to. The clips on YouTube, all kinds of things.

out there.

beer.

Right. And if you had just watched the two of them, you would have thought that that a minority of the country had somehow elected Donald Trump and that the majority thought he was the worst person on earth. But in fact, we had an election like nine months ago and the country voted, the majority of the country voted for Donald Trump. so you could if your team loses, you can lament it and think it's terrible. But that was democracy. We had democracy. So when people say democracy is in danger, no, the people voted, they picked a guy we didn't like or whatever. Okay, that's democracy.

No, I, yes, but I disagree because we also had January 6th when people thought that the mark that

Okay, let's not go, that's why I don't want to spend a lot of time on this, because it's a bottomless pit. All I'm trying to say is we recognize we have a problem.

Well. it

we recognize that democracy does have a problem because we don't agree on the same set of rules and regulations. We don't see it the same way that the country did in the 1780s when, it's 1789 let's say, when, I guess was in late 1780s, when the federalist papers were written, when people were from a common heritage, were from a common religion, spoke a common language. It's different. So now we have a problem because we don't all agree on the same set of rules and regulations. The fact that A large percent of the country think it was okay for Luigi Mangione to shoot this guy tells us we have a problem. We're not playing from the same hymn book. We're not playing by the same rule book. Okay, how do we fix this? That's really what we have to answer. We can disagree on a politics up and down. I'm like, you know me and you know me, I tend to be, I tend to not take a side on this unless it's agreed just because

And we do, and that's fine, and we do, and that's good.

I see, I understand people have different opinions and they see the world in a different way and I respect that. I don't agree with all of it. I do pick a side on an issue or one issue or another. I definitely have an opinion, but I do. It's much more easy for me to respect the fact that the people who you might disagree with, I get where they're coming from. You don't have to agree with them, but I get it. I respect it. I hear it. Fine. But we're still in this mess. We're in this mess. Our democracy is really... at risk because we don't agree on the same set of rules and regulations. We don't even agree on what's right or wrong anymore. Shooting a person in the back 20 years ago, when certainly when you and I were growing up, I mean there wouldn't have been a person in this country who would have defended that. Now you got a lot of people think, well, he deserved it. He runs a healthcare company that's ripping off the public and causing people's lives. Okay, whether that's true or not, we don't have to get into. But he still shot a guy in the back, right, in cold blood. So, it happened, right? Fine.

As a fact.

So that's a problem. can't live in a society where some people think that's okay and some people don't. We in for an increasing mess if that happens. So we need a way to solve this and the solution will not be political because you're not going to convince the other side of your point of view and they're not going to convince you. It's just not going to happen. we need a way about now. What was the solution? Well, the solution was religion. We were a very religious country at one point or another. religion you believed in, we were primarily religious country and people say, God says that shall not kill. We're done. Okay, sorry Luigi, but God says you can't kill and we're a religious country. We believe in the Ten Commandments. You know, you're going to jail for life or worse, right? So, but religion has waned. Now, it might be making a comeback, but it has waned. We are not the same country we were back in the 1780s or even the 1880s and even the 1980s. We're not the same country. need another, we need another solution. you know, people, sounds like, you know, I'm selling hats at, the area if you want it, or, you know, you know, I'm not, I'm not selling anything. This is free. The podcast is free, you know. But we need, but you and I have the same goal. We want the world to be a better place. We want the country to be better. We want people to live happier, stress-free lives. How do we get there, right? And that's why the aerial view is so critical. It's a way out of this democracy mess, right? You don't have to share the same religion. You don't have to come from the same background. You don't have to be the same ethnicity. When you understand how the world works from the aerial view, then the set of rules and regulations becomes relatively clearer.

Right? What are we here for? What's our purpose? If we're here for each other, if we're here to make that evolution for selfish me to selfless you, then I look at your opinion much differently. I don't berate you. I don't insult you. I don't disregard you. I embrace you. I say, okay, you're a person. My goal is to help your life be better, not my life. I'm here to help you. That's my job. Okay, that's a whole different way of looking at the world. Then all of sudden we respect life, right? If you're out to help other people, if you're becoming selfless, you don't shoot somebody in the back. You don't punch them in the face. You probably saw that video that was also all over the internet of this brawl in Cincinnati, right? You see that recently? You don't get on YouTube enough. You gotta watch more YouTube.

No, I didn't. What's the... I never watch YouTube. I'm too busy reading the Federalist Papers. I have no time for television.

But yeah, there was all this stuff. There was a big brawl. I think, I saw the vice president waiting on it. A bunch of people waited on it. But there was this brawl in Cincinnati and outside a bar at three o'clock in the morning. I think it was when it was. I'm thinking, well, nothing good happens at three o'clock in the morning. But it was this big brawl and some guy and woman were attacked and severely beaten by a large mob and nobody called the police for a while. A guy... the woman, she knocked her unconscious. Okay, I watch this and I go, what kind of world is this, right? He did, because it was Ohio, and he's from Ohio, so he chimed in on it, you know, so that was a terrible thing.

Wait, but you said that the Vice President chimed in on this?

I see. that help things or does it hurt things when it gets raises to that level? No?

I don't think it makes any difference. can't, nah. I think, but here's the point. We don't need the vice president to weigh in. We don't need a politician to weigh in. I agree with you. But here's the thing. When you and I were growing up, 100 % of people would have said, that's wrong. They wouldn't have looked at necessarily, don't, I think this, there might have been a racial issue. I have no idea what it was. I just saw the brawl on YouTube, so I don't know. But.

That's my point. That's the point. Okay. Okay.

Mm-hmm.

The fact that 100 people watched people getting beaten up, to me is like, okay, that's the problem, right? I don't really care what the argument is about.

Or is the problem that because everybody's got a camera and somebody videoed that brawl, we all have an opinion of what happened. When we're talking about the year of Hamilton and Jefferson, there were no cameras. Nobody was taking pictures of what happened in the public square. was just those people who happened to attend who were in the public square.

But that's not the point. The point is everybody there would have looked at this and said, this is horrible. Okay, you're right. You're probably right. I take that back. That's probably an incorrect statement. But the public at large, right, would have looked at this as horrible, just like the shooting by Luigi Mangione. The public at large would have looked at this and said, unacceptable, right? So, let me...

Maybe.

No, you know what's, no, but I'll you, but here's what scares me about that. The public at large on 9-11, when we saw planes going into the wonderful buildings, not, was not a hundred percent in agreement over who did it, whether it was the right thing to do. I mean, there, there is no consensus, I think. Right. Okay. Yes. markekleinmd (20:04.8) Exactly. Exactly. That's the point. So I think you and I would say we don't care which country was attacked on 9-11 by whom. We would have said that attack is unacceptable anywhere in the world. Right? Okay. That's what I'm getting at.

Yes, right.

What I'm getting at is we need to, for us as a democracy to survive, to continue to flourish, we must agree on the fundamental rules and regulations. We cannot be divided over whether it's okay to shoot a healthcare executive in the back. So our politics will not solve this problem. You can see it, right? It is not solving the problem. And as you said, the cameras and the YouTube only exacerbate the problem.

Mm-hmm.

and our politics, those two.

And if we had religion, perhaps it would be better, but we don't. It's not enough anymore. We don't have enough people following those golden rules anymore. And people can say religion is horrible or it's great, whatever. has an overall unifying effect on a society in terms of rules and regulations. But that's where the aerial view comes in. You know, why am I so insanely, such an insane zealot about the aerial view? Because once you've... inhabited the aerial view extensively, these things become absolutely simple. They are simple. What are we here for? What's our purpose? How does the world work? It's clear that shooting somebody for any reason other than self-defense is a terrible idea. It's anathema to not only the society, but to you personally in your mission. When you're, we talked about this recently, know, at the end of your life when somebody's reading your eulogy, what do you want them to say? And that moment we talked about with your mother, your mother was lucid right to then, what's that last thought you want to have in your head? What did I do with my life? If the answer is, I shot a healthcare executive in the back. Well, I don't know if there's such a thing as heaven or hell, I have no idea. But that's generally not a good ending. That was not a good, that's not a life well lived, right? That's not a life of person. You haven't become a person of substance. You haven't fulfilled your mission. Waste, waste, waste, total waste, right? So from the aerial view, these things are very clear and very evident. And it doesn't matter what your political opinion is. It doesn't matter whether we agree on, you know, what the Supreme Court said or whether the big

Yeah. Yeah. Right.

beautiful bill, whether it's a big, beautiful bill or a big, terrible bill. It doesn't matter. It's irrelevant. These are street view items that we can fail free to disagree on and people are entitled to their opinion. The major issues of whether you can shoot somebody in the back from the aerial view are simple, right? How we treat each other, how we behave, what we do to help each other. These become very, very evident, very clear. And that's why, honestly, that's why we're doing this. Because people need some guidance in how we can elevate ourselves out of the street view, out of this mess.

But we live.

But we live in the street view, do we not? We do, right.

We do, we do, we take what we learn in the aerial view and apply it in the street view. The aerial view by itself is worthless, it's worthless. It does exist but it has no value.

Right, it doesn't exist without the Street View, does it? Right. Well, yeah.

then you have to take what you learn in the air view and apply it in the street view. The air view by itself is like reading a George Will column. It's like somewhat indecipherable and it's nice, but until you apply it to the street view, it has no value. It's how we live our lives and watch out for each other and how we get, what's the point of a democracy? The point of democracy is people decide their own fate, right? But it only works if people are involved, they're educated, and if they care about their fellow man and woman.

But don't you believe in the civic bargain? In other words, we as a people have to care, whether it's in the street view, maybe it is in the street view, we have to care, but in aerial view, maybe we come to the conclusion that we have to care, but those among us who are lesser, who have not as much as we have, who might be suffering from hunger, who might be homeless. mean, those are, to me, that's a fact. If I am suffering from hunger, that's a fact, I'm hungry. So the civic bargain we make within the democracy is that we have to care for those among us who are in need. Don't you agree with that?

I think it's more than the civic bargain. think that's we learned from the aerial view. We're to take care of each other, of course. I don't know I've told you this, but I did okay. I did fine financially as a doctor. So I did fine, right? But I didn't have millions of dollars to dole out every year for charities and so on. But at end of every year, I would sit down, generally right after Thanksgiving, and I would write out checks to different charities. told you, I always like to give food charities, because I thought that was always to me.

Thank you.

very important, right? But everybody has their own choice, but there's no right or wrong on this, right? And I felt like I love that. I love that day when I would do that. And, you know, I do it mostly online and, you know, you put in your credit card and boom, and you know, and I'd spend like a couple hours doing this. I'd decide how much money I want to give and I'd do it. And I always felt fantastic. I love that time of year. I've since learned that you don't have to wait till the end of the year. And it's probably better for these charities if you kind of spread it out, right?

Yes, thank you.

Yes, you've taught me that. But yes, I love that. Now, I don't need a what you call, civic bargain to make that happen.

bargain.

clear to me. That's 100 % Arial View stuff. We are here to help each other, selfish to selfless. Right? So that's why the Arial View supersedes the Street View, supersedes these rules and regulations we have in the Street View. It's so obvious that that's your job. If you have the wherewithal to help, you must help. I shouldn't say that. You should help. Do whatever you want. I can't tell you what to do. But you should want to help because that's how you're going to feel great. You know you're fulfilling your role, your mission by helping others as much as you can to whatever degree you I'm always impressed by people who have nothing, right? And then there's a disaster in the community and they donate something. I'm like, wow, these people had nothing in doing this. Then I'm embarrassed, maybe I'm not doing enough, I should do more, right? And I have felt that way many times in my life. But you get the idea, you don't need a civic bargain. You need to understand your mission, why you're here. That's part of the game, that's part of the deal.

That's right.

Yeah, as one who was on the receiving end of a lot of those dollars as in the nonprofit world, I'll tell you an interesting story. I used to get, we used to get those donations and yes, you're right, they would always come at the end of the year. And there was one day that we had on my desk, we had a thousand, least 1100 donations. And I would get the notes and I'm supposed to sign it and send it out. Well, each one, I had this philosophy I still do this very day, that I would write a note to every single person who donated to us. And my staff was, but there were about 1,100 of, I said, that's okay. That's 1,100 people who took the time, who made the civic bargain and said, I'm not going to be selfish. I'm going to be selfless. And I might have nothing, but I'm going to make a donation. And several of the folks that sent those donations might've sent $2. But to me, that $2 was just as important, maybe more important than the someone who sent the $2,000 because that person who sent $2 probably didn't have a whole lot, but took the time to send $2. And then it was up to me then to take the time to thank them. And I would write handwritten notes to every single one them. I'm not a saint. I'm just someone who understood in order for this democracy to work and to work well, is to take care of those who need to be taken care of, who need a little help, not a handout, but a helping hand, and I thank them. So to me, that's what democracy is.

100 % agree, I think it's lovely that you did that. You need it in an auto pen, that's what you needed. No, look, I'm sure you and I see this exactly the same way. My whole point about bringing this up is that, just to summarize, Enid (28:18.7) That's why I lost, that's why I have arthritis in my right arm right now. But it's worth it. Yeah, right, of course. And then somebody would check me on that one,

In that Federalist paper number two, the premise was we're all in this together because we come from the same ancestry, because we speak the same religion, because we speak the same language. And so and he made the case, I think it was Hamilton made the case, and therefore we should all be pulling the same direction and so on. OK, now we're not on any of those things, but we should still be pulling in the same direction. Well, how the heck do we do it when we have Democrats hating Republicans and vice versa and everybody ready to shoot each other, literally shooting each other? Okay, this is a problem. We cannot go on like this. This is unsustainable. So what's the answer? The answer will never be found in politics. You will not hear one member of Congress solve this problem. It will not happen. The answer has to come from somewhere else. It used to come from our churches and mosques and synagogues. Okay, some it does and hopefully they will they will make a turnaround. We'll see more people. But if not, we have something else. It's the aerial view. It's the perspective to understand why you're here. What the point of life. What you're responsibility are. Take care of each other. If your mission is to take care of as many people as you can, certainly rules out shooting somebody, right? So that's the point. There's another thing, perspective, called the aerial view, which can get us there. So that's why I spend time, you know, railing about the aerial view, because it is the panacea to so many things. And that's all I've got to say in it.

You bet, you bet.

It's not a bad thing to say. know, it's interesting. The one thing we all have in common, and here's a fact, that we all have blood, we all have cells, we all have arteries and all those kinds of things. You're a doctor. We are all the same. Basically, we're all the same. We all have a heart, we all have a head, we all have a brain. We just gotta use those brains to tell our, we to use the heart to tell the brain, to tell the mouth to do the right thing. We've gotta do the right thing by each other.

But people will say to you, well, who says this is right thing? So Luigi Mangione said, I did the right thing. I made a statement. no, no, hang on, hang on. But they didn't. Not enough people.

But society will tell them it's the wrong thing.

There's a substantial people who didn't say that. And my point is, it's not good enough to have your heart tell you because your heart may not be telling you the correct thing because we can see in our society, people are doing things that you and I think are just horrible. and I don't want to stick with Luigi Mancioni, but there's a reason I am. It's such a heinous act and some people think it's okay. No, from the aerial view, it's obvious. Either from the pulpit of the church or from the aerial view, it is obvious. This is wrong. And we need to get back to where Hamilton said we have the same, we have to agree on set of rules and regulations. And how do we get there? We either get there from a Bible or some religious text or we get there from the aerial view, which is going to accomplish the same thing. Once you understand how the world works, once you understand why you're here, once you understand the jukebox of time and all the implications, you will never think about shooting somebody in the back no matter what your political persuasion.

Thank you. Okay. I'm looking at the clock and my persuasion is that it's past the hour. Thank you. It was interesting for us to be talking about this issue, democracy. And you're right, politically, politics aside, of course, everything is political nowadays with a small P, not even a large P, with small P. But we can agree on one thing, and that is that stress kills. And so much of what we are railing about and so much what we're thinking about is stressing us. We've had a conversation prior podcast about stress and we are also stressing about what democracy is and how it should be and what it should look like. But I think you're helping us understand that we have a, we have some sweat in this game and we can do it the right way, do it the wrong way. Who decides whether it's right or wrong? Maybe the first thing we need to do is decide for ourselves where we stand in all of this, what our position is, and how do we go forward?

Well, that's why I said to decide what your position is, you got to get out of the street view. You got to get out of the politics and you got to get to something else, either either a deity or religion or we have the aerial view, which will serve the same purpose and get us to the same point, which is deciding which we all want to live.

Right. Gotcha.

Right, we'll find a hobby. Anyway.

You're the best.

I'm taking up knitting. Okay, well, thank you, doctor. Thank you, everybody, for listening. Thank you for the cards and letters and emails and text messages you're sending in. What's the, we're getting thousands a day. And I'm sending, you know, handwritten notes. Yeah, thank you for writing. Yeah. What is that?

And your hand notes to everybody. Send an email to question at wisdomfromtheaerialview.com. All right. Thanks a million and it's always wonderful. See you next time, everybody. Thank you. Bye.

Great. Thank you for listening. We'll see you next time. Peace.