Hello and welcome to a happy place, the show that tries to make sense of where we're at right now and how we can spend more time in our own happy places. Today, we spend time in the company of the master of living. Well, Deepak Chopra.

You know, I used to switch channels in the US, Fox News, the BBC and Al-Jazeera Jazeera. And I realized I wasn't looking at news at all. I was looking at opinion. And they all disagreed with each other. Why bother?

Deepak has been at the forefront of all things alternative medicine for the best part of four decades. And it's such a pleasure. A dream come true, no less to spend time with him today. But before we heal our minds, which I think we all need at the moment, let me tell you about the best news in the world, amongst other things.

And that's because the sponsors of Happy Place this season is stripe and stare.

I love Stripe, and if you listen to this podcast, you'll know all about them. And they've got their brand new subscription service. They are fast becoming the Netflix of neckers, delivering a pair a month through the letterbox for just nine quid. So you never need to worry about underwear shopping again. Oh, so what a nice Christmas gift. A little idea for you who doesn't need Mecca's for Christmas? I wouldn't because for Christmas and of course, this has become a regular.

Now, let me just check out what color stripe and started wearing today.

Navy blue softish like go to stroke and stair dot com and use the code happy twenty at the checkout for 20 percent off on all purchases. That's happy. Twenty eight stripe instead dot dotcom. And now here's the show.

Deepak, what an absolute honor to have you on the podcast. I've been a fan for a very long time, so this is a complete privilege. Thank you so much for giving us your time today. How do we find you? How are you?

I'm very good at reinventing the body, resurrecting my soul and helping others to some extent.

How have you found this peculiar year that we're living through? I think we're going through collective grief. And when there is grief, there is all kinds of stages of grief. First, there's victimization, feeling victimized, then there's anger, then hostility, then resentments and grievances. And then there's frustration that there's resignation, some people, desperation, all of that and others very few find acceptance and meaning. And so we're seeing across the board all these different stages of what we can call grief.

Yeah, I think that's going to resonate with a lot of people because at the moment it does feel treacherous and there's a lot of outside noise, whether that be the media opinion around us, our own internal angst that's going on. And if there was ever a time to meditate, it would be.

Now, does this really loud outside noise at the moment make it harder to go within and listen to our intuition?

Or or should this be acting as a catalyst to really get us to to focus on finding that time in that space where let's say you and I are at a cocktail party and we are next to each other and we are speaking to each other and we don't hear anything in the background is a hum big hum. Although at the party there are lots of people and they're all speaking. But I'm paying attention to you and I'm listening to you. But then somebody at the back of the room starts speaking about me and my attention goes there and you're right next to me.

I don't hear a word. OK, so what do I hear is what I want to hear at that moment. OK, so it doesn't matter what is happening around you, all the noise, all the buzz, all the insanity, all the divisiveness, all the arguments, all the ideological conflicts, everything that's going on right now, which is insane, by the way. And if you don't think it's insane, then we are insane. But everything that's happening is insane.

All you have to do is pay attention to something that you enjoy going to be chocolate ice cream or whatever it is, your focus of attention, because you only hear what you're interested in. And if you're interested in the insanity, then turn on the news.

Yes, that is spot on your new book. Totally. Meditation made a huge impact on me because I think like so many people out there, I. I have a busy life with children and work and trying to juggle different projects. And my meditation practice is pretty inconsistent at the moment, which isn't ideal. But but the notion behind what you're writing about in this in this brilliant new book is, is actually how to look at life in a meditative way.

So rather than it being solely focused on that more traditional practice of of sitting in stillness, it's it's looking at the whole of our lives each moment, every day with that outlook. Can you explain what that might look like for us?

Let's try something right now. OK, so as you are listening to me. Turn your attention to that which is listing. And you feel the presence. That's you. That's the reason and it's OK, it's at peace right now if I asked you anything wrong. You say no. It feels at times I'm speaking for myself and probably many others out there, impossible to have that even momentary pause to experience ourselves, unless, of course, we are in meditation again because of the outside noise and also, of course, because of of the stories that we create in our heads about ourselves, our lives, what we think we're good at, if we think we're a good person, a bad person, our failures, etc.

, that that it gets so muddled.

We sort of forget what that stillness is and and who we are, especially if we we don't take part in a meditation practice daily or very regularly.

How do we start to implement that thinking into our everyday when life is fast and life is busy?

I used to in my much younger days, I used to make a habit of stopping every now and then noticing what is happening around me, noticing what's happening in my body, sensations that or breathing. So stop, notice and choose. Then I would choose what I want to choose. OK, so let's say I'm at a restaurant and looking at the menu. Chocolate ice cream. OK, look at that. I saw I look at that. I try and feel what that would feel like if I took it looks delicious, actually, if I took that little piece of chocolate mindfully ate it and enjoyed it.

It's delicious. It's an experience almost of enlightenment. OK, that little piece of chocolate, but if I unconsciously like a sleepwalker or a biological robot to go by love that fit in my body, I wouldn't be feeling well.

So you can stop anytime, notice and just stop notice.

Yes. So it's really about that self inventory and and looking at what activities or actions are habitual vs. us really experiencing that moment, no matter how small or mundane.

I guess let's take it right back to absolute basics. What is consciousness? How do you explain that?

This is a very interesting question and it's discussed all the time in conferences on consciousness. What is consciousness when many people can't agree on what is consciousness? But I'll tell you what they do agree on. So consciousness is the annoying element in every experience is the annoying element that having a thought is the annoying element, that having an emotion, a certain perception. It's the annoying elephant in every experience. OK, now other people have used other expressions, such as consciousness, is that in which every experience happens, every expense is known and older, which every experience has been.

So you say, what is the experience of this phone made or this hand? Bado it's made of consciousness because I was not aware then there's no experience. So without consciousness, there's no thought. There's no feeling. There's no imagination. There's no emotion. There's no perception is fundamental reality of our existence.

It's it's so it's so much to get my head around. And I and I can sit and understand what you're saying. It's just another thing, I guess, putting it into practice. And I think so many people out there, myself included at times, will feel in suffering or in pain or in angst or confused because of the perception we have of our reality.

So how do we use consciousness? How do we use total meditation to view our reality at a different angle?

You can start to question your habitual certainties because all the conflict in the world is actually about what we're certain about, whatever it is communism, socialism, God, religion, economic, social status. And also we have metal parts in our language that the solution to every problem is a violent solution. A war on drugs, water and education, or lack of education, water and race. Is the war on its most interest is a war on social exploitation, war on war, a war on drugs.

We are romanticize the whole notion of violent solutions. There's no creativity and violent solution. If you just stop and ask, is that is there a creative solution to this, you start a different process altogether. I frequently asked by several questions every day, who am I? What do I want, what is my purpose and what am I? I don't even try to answer the questions. You live those questions and somehow you move into the answers.

Yes, because what you say in the book, which relates to both of those things you've just said, you know, asking a question without there being an answer and also looking for creative solutions, is that a good way of looking at life or to give peace a chance is to look for paths which require the least amount of effort.

And of course, we're sort of indoctrinated on a societal level that we have to, you know, have to fight for stuff that we believe in. We have to put maximum effort and we have to hustle to to get what we want.

But you're actually saying look for the path that is easiest. Is that right?

I would ask you right now, what are you doing to regulate your blood pressure? What are you doing right now to regulate your heartbeat? What are you doing right? Nothing. What are you doing right now to breathe? What I know to maintain your hormones in balance. What are you doing right now to regulate your immune system? Well, what did you do from being a fertilized egg to being who you are right now? And if you don't get the answer right there, then you'll never get the answer.

And do we think in this way?

Because, you know, obviously it's worse. And in a sense, that notion that we don't take the easiest route, perhaps we never have. But is that because outside sources say sort of, you know, consumerism and how the modern world works doesn't want us to honor how miraculous and amazing humans are. So it's sort of taking that power away?

Is that what it is? Yeah, it's the recycling of the conditioned mind. The hypnosis of social conditioning gets receptor GenerationOne and goes back the long time it goes back to the Middle Ages in medieval times. So we still think like frames and hunter gatherers, but we have modern capacities like Zoome or nuclear bombs, like internet warfare, like biological warfare. So a mind that is still in the dark ages, but with modern capacities, that spells danger. Because there was one particular line in the book that really stuck out to me on this thought, that was again to give peace a chance.

One of your your bullet points was walk away from stressful situations. And this one really stuck out to me. And I think, well, for a lot of people, because I often dive into them and I think I've got to fix this. I've got to sort this out. I need to limit the stress. I'm the one that can control this. Whereas actually you are saying you are allowed to simply walk away.

You know, I used to switch channels in the US, Fox News, the BBC and Al Jazeera, CNN, MSNBC. And I realized I wasn't looking at news at all, I was looking at opinion and they all disagreed with each other. Why bother? So just walk away. Well, actually, and again, you say in the book that I think relates to this notion that consciousness doesn't resist itself.

Could you explain that for us?

You can't resist. Existence, existence and consciousness are the same thing because without consciousness, there's no awareness that you exist. It's the same the awareness of existence and existence is the same thing, and existence constantly evolves into diverse expressions of itself. Look at the world maximum diversity of species, of creativity, of opinions. Humanitarians, scientists, technologists, Floyds philosophers, artists, storytellers, entertainment, entertainment people, neuroscientists, cosmologists. Look at the diversity that we have and just try and figure out the resource in that collective maximum diversity of human consciousness.

It has the solution to every problem, including climate change, including social justice, including economic empowerment, including actually reversing some of the damage we've done right now. The pandemic, you look outside and actually the ecosystem is bearing. The birds of the bees are singing. Well, they're back. And they were responsible for 90 percent of the nutrition on this planet not withstanding industrial food production. Bees were disappearing then and now they're back. The air is cleaner.

People are breathing. In Bangalore, you can see the Himalayas from 500 miles away. Fish are returning to dead lakes, even the canals of Venice testing fish for the first time. So now we should realize that there's no separation between us and what we call the ecosystem of the biosphere. In fact, these mutations are more likely to happen when the biosphere is stressed, when the genetic information of the planet is stressed. That's causing all this problem. Yes, we'll have a vaccine.

Yes, it will help a lot. But the long term solution is not just a simple thing like a vaccine. Long term solution is we have to look at the whole situation in a way that we see that connection, really connection between what we call health, well-being, social justice, economic justice, sustainability and the healthy planet. Unless we see that we go back to, you know, we'll have another pandemic.

And are we not connecting those dots simply due to ego?

Is that what is stopping us creating a peaceful ecosystem, peaceful, you know, peace rippling throughout humanity? Is it simply ego that's stopping us from doing that? It's good money, but good money and special interest groups in the United States, we have 28 health care lobbyists for every congressman lobbyist is another very nice word for official official corruption. That's 28 lobbyists, only four that are lobbyists for military lobbyists or weapons, lobbyists for every possibility, special interest groups.

The world is being run by gangsters.

So how do we how do we vote? So we you know, we know that. And we and we know that there's corruption throughout the world. And a lot of it feels out of our control. How do we stop fear permeating our lives, having an understanding of that?

How do we live peacefully within our own human existence, knowing that there is so much outside corruption and war and disease that we cannot control in any way?

Our foundation, the Chopra Foundation, which is a non-profit in the US, we've created a campaign called Never Alone, Never Alone. So if you Dipo w w w never alone Nautla, you come to this website, which is part of our non-profit Denovo, which is creating global communities to support each other. And we are also going on bludging and we are creating a cryptocurrency where if you support somebody, you get paid for it and can exchange this. And it's totally open.

And also we have a chat about. So if you want to, the jackpot is called Pivot and it's named after a young woman, unfortunately, who died of suicide a few years ago. And she was a recording artist in Britain, actually, and her nickname was Pewee. So we named this chat. But Pewee and within a few seconds, it can tell you whether you're depressed or you're having mental challenges. And even if you're at suicide risk and then it can refer you it can actually help you, but can refer you to counselors and help you pay for it to with the currency market.

So we cannot depend on GANGSTA'S as world leaders and or business leaders. This has to be a grassroots movement across the world that people are willing to engage and help each other and actually harness our collective creativity for these problems because the gangsters but can't help us anymore.

So obviously, the community is such an important fundamental that that we all need we need to feel like we're part of something that we've got support and that we are with like minded people and that we can reach out for help if we need it.

You know, how what can we do outside of community? What can we do just for ourselves and our own human experience to, you know, stop that storytelling and and the ego from, you know, being the root cause of things like depression, outside of clinical depression, anxiety or other mental torment, compulsive behaviour, et cetera.

How do we use total meditation to to mitigate that within our own lives?

Paradoxically, by helping other people. Every time you are concerned about something osteosarcoma are concerned about, it's been great. So all my problems come about my concern for me. The moment I shifted to you and I asked simple things, how do I pay attention? Which means how do I listen to you? How do I express affection? How do I tell you how I care for you? How do I appreciate to what you stand for and how do I accept you?

If I start doing that to the other, it automatically helps relieve me. So compassion, empathy, love, kindness, joy. When it is shared, it relieves stress.

I think that's something that, you know, we all need to focus on because, again, you know, the modern world feels like it is a place which is very much about the I you know, I must succeed. I must do this. I must do better. I'm a bad person. I must be punished. It feels it feels like that's definitely exasperated at the moment.

And again, you talk in the book about removing the eye, removing the eye, because that is just taking the ego out of it. And and I guess, again, is that is the quickest route to that reaching out to others. Is that the way to do so? Yes.

The more you care for others, the less it's about me, the better me feels the best way to be happy is to make somebody else Pyhrric.

Yeah, this is a wonderful feeling.

All you have to do is give them attention, affection, appreciation, acceptance. You don't have to buy them a Mercedes.

That's handy.

Another thing that that you've talked about in many ways and in this book is how consciousness, awareness, meditative practice allows you to understand that you are experiencing an emotion.

You are not the emotion. And even though I know this intellectually, I still get caught up in this one all the time.

And I will spiral off in a direction of anger or feeling low and forget that that emotion isn't me. It's just something I'm experiencing. And I wonder if you could just talk about that a little more, because it's something I'm fascinated in and it's something that I really want to grasp for my own life, as I'm sure many of the listeners do today.

The very fact that you can watch an emotion tells you that are not the emotion, right? If you can watch an emotion, you're not the emotion. So instead of denying the emotion, watch it. And the more you watch it, you will see it dissipates. It comes and it goes. And in fact, we can't even hold onto it. In fact, if you try to hold on it, you suffer. So just watch it. And the more you watch and then there comes a stage where you watch the watcher and then you're totally free of it, because at first I was like, does this mean I'm not going to feel emotions if I'm that, you know, step back?

But you feel the more and more.

But they also transform in the direction of empathy, love and joy and compassion and charity. Yes.

And again, that leads us to thinking about our habitual actions, because often when we feel things like rage, it's usually habitual rather than being rooted in a thing that really matters. And I can say that safely about my own life.

I know those moments that I would spiral into anger and it's habitual and and again, how do we rebuild those neural pathways so that that habitual activity lessens and we make new neural pathways that lead us to empathy.

Compassion is that just practice practice.

But being a little more reflexive, if you have a firm conviction of a certain idea or a belief, you know, people have these limited lives. I'm not good enough. I'm not attractive enough. And that would be successful. I can't lose weight. Ask yourself, is it true then I am 100 percent sure. If it's true, then ask is it why do I think this is true? Are there other possibilities? What's the opposite? The more you reflect on that than you realize that for every choice, the infinite other choices and deeper.

Is that again about finding stillness? Because it's something that we absolutely do not honor in the modern world, not necessarily globally, but certainly in the Western world. It's all about business achievement, a fast paced life, and we don't honor stillness and what it can bring. What does stillness mean to you? What do you personally find in silence and stillness?

So stillness is the gap between experience, between this thought and this thought. There's a little gap between this perception and this perception, this little gap between this emotion and this emotion. There's a little gap between this sensation and that sensation. There's little gap. The gap is the gap of stillness, which we don't notice right now even to speak between these words. There's a gap, by the way. There's no syntax, there's no grammar, there's no meaning.

The words would be and I'm accused of that, they say would say, OK, so this is words we don't have to say, but the words don't all come together, right? There's a gap, which means there's still less between each word, which actually creates the story. So what is the stillness? What is the gap? It's a feel of infinite possibilities. It's also unpredictable. So what's your next thought going to be? You can tell it's unpredictable.

It's a feel of infinite possibilities. It is creative. It is evolving. And this is organising your life right now. The stillness, OK? And we don't pay attention to it. Then you'll just be another biological robot asleep.

Yeah, yes, I. I can see that. And I've witnessed more recently in those moments where I have meditated or just paused and had that moment of reflection that it's been a bit of a reset for me as well.

You know, I do think it gives you that clarity and perhaps energy to to move in the direction that that is the right one for you rather than, you know, on the other hand, I can be very reactive. And, you know, in those moments, you've completely ignored the stillness. You've completely ignored the the silence.

And and another thing I think we we don't honor well, we don't tolerate it all in the modern world is what you call the body mind. So this full connectivity within our human form of the mind and the body. And quite often we talk about and think we're experiencing the mind, doing its thing over here and the body doing its thing over here. And we don't see that it's a whole. How dangerous is it to see them as two separate entities, but the majority of the world still does that?

I remember when I wrote my first book on the Mind Body Connection. I was vilified and criticized for it, and I used to ask people then, how do you wiggle your toes if there's no connection between the mind and body? You know, you start with the thought and you end up with wiggling your toes. But then I realized that even that phrase, mind, body connection was wrong. The body mind is one process just in the same way as mass.

And the energies work space and time is one process or wave and particle is one plus one thing, and that is consciousness. So we experience the mind as thoughts and images and emotions. We experience the body as sensations and perceptions, the changing the fluctuations of consciousness. Once you understand it, then that still point around which the whole DCN spoke about, the still point around which the whole world revolves becomes very obvious.

Yeah, you give a great example of this again, how we missed that connection by asking your readers to visualize a lemon being slice just in your head, not in reality. And then you'll soon see that your your mouth starts to water and there it is, you know, and that was such a wonderful example. And and we can all see and we'll all have, I guess, a bespoke physical weakness that is is prone to flare up if we are experiencing stress, whether it's migraines, constipation, a tense neck or whatever.

And again, you know, we sort of missed the trick there that the mental stress, because we know we're not under physical stress, that we may have been hundreds of years ago hunting or whatever. You know, we're under mental stress, but it manifests physically. But I think, again, we we perhaps don't honor that.

As we should see, every physical sensation has a mental component. So, you know, if you're hungry because the physical sensation is starving, OK, you go to the bathroom, pee because the physical sensation is the blood. There is flow, but the mental interpretation is only to go to the bathroom. You go to sleep at night. The physical sensation is sleepiness, but the intention is I want to go to sleep. So it's in September. There's no event that happens to the body that is not happening in the mind.

There's no event that's happening in the mind that's not happening in the brain or the body as a whole. The mind thinks an English with an Indian accent only in the rear. Otherwise you have a thinking body in a thinking universe, which is the ultimate reality.

Um, not to use this as a personal therapy session, but how I experience this in the worst possible way is I, I get these nighttime panic attacks.

So say I have a new job in the morning. I'm working with someone I haven't worked with before, or it's not a project that I've come up with.

I'll go to bed intellectually knowing tomorrow you're safe, you can do the job. It's going to be fine. You might even enjoy it. But my body, I don't know if this is through a hangover mentally of of an experience. My body goes into panic. So I my heart starts racing. Obviously, sleep does not arrive and my body kind of goes into this like I'm running a sprint. Like I'm I'm really, you know, I'm U.S., but my heart is racing and and it's you know, it's obviously a mental sort of torment.

And I can really feel how that's all working together. And in those moments, I feel slightly out of control, if I'm honest, like my even if my brain's saying, look, you're safe, my body kind of still keeps doing its own thing. And I've spoken to lots of other people that have experienced the same. And obviously there are millions of people out there who have panic attacks due to the the stress of the modern world. What is the way to mitigate that?

How do we retain control or if it's the opposite, letting go in those moments where we feel completely out of control, but many ways that you can do that many innumerable ways.

So one is before you react to any situation, you press the pause button and you observe the reaction to react. That's it. You observe your reaction to react and that breaks the circuit and then you do whatever you need to do. That's why it's OK. A second rate is. Observe the panic observed. You can not change anything unless you're aware of it and you feel it, you feel it because if you go into denial, that thing builds up even more.

Yeah, it does even more. So you observe it and you feel it and you feel the sensations. Still they dissipate. This is a very interesting thing. You don't have to visualize or bring light or golden rays of divine being that just feel it. And if you feel it, it dissipates. Why? Because awareness by itself is healing.

Yes.

And that goes back again to your go for the easiest route, which is not to resist is just to go, OK, I can see that powder keg. Fine. Yeah. I mean, I have had that experience and I have noticed that it does dissipate way more quickly than if I am, again, like you just said, trying to visualize some sort of Arcangel floating over my bed, et cetera.

And the flip side of that, looking at the body mind, if stress can physically manifest in in ways that are inconvenient or causes pain or suffering, of course, then seeking out stillness, meditating, finding that peace is going to then manifest positively physically, right?

Yes. What are essential nature isn't that gap. And that gap doesn't have a form, which means it can take any form. Right. Only the formulas can take any form, right? Only the formulas can morph into an experience. Yes, experience that we call a quorum is a phenomenon and every phenomenon is actually the formless experience that gets as desalinization as this thought. So actually, returning to the gap allows us to reframe and reinvent everything in our life.

That's powerful. It's a powerful thing to hear. And I think many people like myself go, wow, that that's a possibility.

This is about reframing things and and practice and discipline come into this, would you say?

Yeah, the more you do something, you start to break your habitual certainties, your habitual ways of thinking, feeling, speaking and behavior, which is what life is all about. Yeah, so the dog then if you leave, then a word and then react. That's the sequence.

When we look at just our physical form, you know, many people have huge problems with feeling comfort in their own bodies because again, we've been indoctrinated to perhaps believe that they're faulty, they're embarrassing.

There's something wrong with them.

How do we align the body and mind? Because we know intellectually that it is one.

But if we feel that separateness, if we feel like our body is faulty, our body is wrong, there's something wrong with me. I'm embarrassed. I'm ashamed. How do we how do we start to navigate that to find peace?

The body is not known. It's a blur. OK, so at one point, as I said, it was a fertilizer, then it was zygote than an embryo. Baby. Toddler. So we say I'm a body, which was the one that you had as a teenager or the one you had last year, the one you're going to have and you get old, infirm and have Alzheimer's. Which one are you talking about? First of all, it's a process.

It's a body mind process. Secondly, if you want to change how it appears. You want to take the just practice a few things, get good sleep, manage your stress, do some exercise, breathe deeply, engage in healthy emotions like love, compassion, enjoy, enjoy, walk in nature and experience. Lightness of being, lightness of being, the all problems are either in the future in the bus. OK, if I'm totally in the presence of my being right now, nothing wrong.

OK, so it's a tight condition. Everything we experience as suffering is a condition response, not being suffering. The difference being is a way to self regulate the body. If I didn't feel pain after an injury, I would be reckless or I might lose a limb. But the pain is a biological process. But suffering is an emotional and psychological. A disconnect with your truth, so often it can be labeled as a simply as a bad habit.

Yeah, mhm, it's really good to know that, because I think when you put it really simply like it's a bad habit, you think, gosh, you know, I do have autonomy over there so I can take the inventory to them, work out how I make that change and and and to look at life in a different way. You know, I've done so many of your meditations online over the years. I did one today, in fact.

And they've brought me that stillness so many times. And often you will include mantra within your meditation. What can mantra deliver us? How can that help us in life?

The mantra takes your attention away from your personal story and distracts you from your personal story, which is basically the basis of all stress. So, you know, there's an upward stroke of meditation, which is your internal dialogue. Thoughts like look at the ripples on the ocean wave needs an upward stroke and a downward stroke. And before it rises again, there's a still point for the moment. And then the wave. So the upward stroke is all the thoughts and all the stories and all the stresses.

The downward stroke is the mantra which takes you away from that. And then there are moments in mantra practice where there's no thought, no mantra, which means neither upward stroke nor downwards. You're in the still point of the universe I love.

Gosh, I. I can't thank you enough for your time. Energy today like this for me is such a moment like wow, I can't believe we've just had that wonderful time to talk together.

I'm, I'm so grateful and I know that my listeners will just take so much from what you've got to say. And again, thank you for writing another sensational book, because it was it was totally beautiful to read.

So, Deepak, thank you so much.

Thank you. Very, very happy to talk to you. Thank you very much. Thanks again to Deepak. I can't believe it. I I'm still in shock that Deepak has been on the podcast. Absolute dream come true for me. If you're interested in his new initiative of championing positive mental health support, you can find out more at Neverland DOT. Love a view of my day. And you can also broaden your horizons by looking back through the archives of Happy Place.

If you fancy it, you can do that when you subscribe for free on your podcast app of choice. Please do. It means a lot to us. A massive thanks again to Deepak, to the amazing sponsors stripe and staff to the producer might help rethink audio and for listening. So appreciate Baklanov.