TED Talks Daily Book Club: Embrace your limitations | Oliver Burkeman

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Hey, y'all. Happy Sunday. Elise Hugh here. And today we're bringing you a new episode of our very own book club series, where each month we check out new books from TED speakers that will spark your curiosity all year long. Writer and journalist Oliver Berkman wrote a popular weekly psychology column for The Guardian called This Column Will Change Your Life.

But years into this effort, he felt no closer to knowing the secret to, quote, winning at life than before he started. This work led Oliver down the path he's on today, including his newest book, Meditation for Mortals.

four weeks to embrace your limitations and make time for what counts. It's a book I recommend to just about everyone. And so I was so excited for this last book club conversation of the year, where I got to virtually sit down with Oliver in front of a live audience of TED members.

We talked about why he now believes the best guiding philosophy of life is to embrace many of the things we've been taught to run from, our imperfections, limits, and inability to succeed at everything. And yes, even our own mortality. Let's get into it. Enjoy. Oliver Berkman, welcome to the book club.

Oh, thank you so much for having me. I'm really, really glad to be here. Before we get into your newest book, I want to ask you a bit about your journey to this point. Your weekly column for The Guardian was called This Column Will Change Your Life. And it covered psychology, self-help, product...

connectivity and culture. In a sense, just writing the column did kind of change your own trajectory. What did you learn there that kind of got you to where you are today? Yeah, it's a good question. I mean, so yes, I spent a lot of time. having to explain to people that calling a column, this column will change your life was meant to be.

It was meant to be tongue-in-cheek on some level. But it did sort of change mine at any rate. I don't know anybody else's. The reason is that I think for the first part of that decade or more that I was writing that column, I was very much in the mindset of... at least unconsciously, you know, trying to find the system or the life philosophy or the practice that would solve all my problems, that would make me feel like I was finally kind of in control of life. And, you know, if you have a...

different kind of job, you might get the chance to read books and explore these things every so often. But if you're doing it as your work, you get to go through so many candidate... magic bullets for looking your life out, that you actually eventually begin to realize like, oh, maybe the reason I haven't found this yet is not because I just need to find the next one. Maybe there's something...

deeper and more interesting going on here. Maybe there's something problematic about the very idea that I should be looking for a way to solve the problem of being human. So that got me started on the journey that led to 4,000 weeks and then this new book.

There's a lot of time hacking and optimization culture and obviously the larger sort of workaholism that we're in. When did you realize that this productivity mindset... was actually making life smaller rather than larger. Yeah. I mean, it was definitely a gradual thing. It's amazing how... how many of these tricks and tips you can try and have them kind of not work and still feel like, oh, just one more month or 20% more self-discipline than I've ever managed to.

show at any other previous moment in my life, and then I'll be over the hump. But I do write in 4,000 weeks about a moment that I was... sitting on a park bench in Prospect Park in Brooklyn, where we lived at the time, on my way to my workspace and sort of more overburdened with journalistic deadlines than usual and desperately trying to fathom how I was going to use all these techniques.

and the rest of it to get myself through to where I needed to be by the end of the week. And just sort of suddenly realizing like, oh, none of this is ever going to work. Like, this is impossible. The problem here is I'm trying to do something impossible. The problem is not that I haven't found the right way to do it. And there was a big shift in that moment.

give up on the idea of perfectionism. What happens next? How does that practically apply? I'm sort of making the argument, especially in the new book, that perfectionism applies to a whole lot of things, right? So wanting to be perfectly optimized, as you've been...

talking about wanting to be perfectly on top of everything, wanting to produce perfect work, people-pleasing. I think that is also a kind of perfectionism, right? Wanting to know for sure that everybody likes you and isn't mad at you at this very moment, right? And so it's against that.

very broad definition of perfectionism, the attempt to feel in total control of what you're doing in the world, that I oppose this, bring this notion of imperfectionism, which is really just the viewpoint that says, well, What if we start from the idea that there will always be too much to do, that we will never be able to be certain that nobody's mad at us, that we will never...

bring work into the world that matches up to the absolutely perfect standards in our minds and all the rest of it? What if we just sort of began from that broken place, right, that imperfect place? Is it possible that actually that could be a much better recipe for...

really getting the important things done and actually enjoying the process as well. I mean, it sounds a little bit like the foundations of Buddhist thought, right? Like humans have probably experienced some flavor of this problem or this conundrum. for as long as we've been around. No, totally. I think it is absolutely... Firstly, just obviously, this is what all I'm writing about in the new book or any of my books is a sort of synthesis of all sorts of existing...

wisdom traditions and religious traditions. And then, yes, I think it is a sort of a religious thought as well. The parallel with Buddhism may be echoing for lots of people here today, but also there's parallels with Christianity and doubtless all sorts of other... traditions. It's just that notion of seeing the human condition as a problem that we've got to solve seems to not be the way to make it to a life of...

presence and meaning and action. So it's like, can we start from the idea that we're not going to solve that problem and really live the experience instead? Why is imperfectionism

as you write, where the magic begins? Sort of after you kind of come to the realization, like, okay, I can be free of this general quest. Then what? Well, firstly, like... I don't think I'm anything other than a work in progress at this myself, right? So I'm certainly not coming to you from a state of perfect spiritual enlightenment and sharing my insights with you in that way. So one way to respond to this is to point out that actually...

There's something about trying to be in control of life to a certain extent and trying to do everything exactly right and trying to be on top of everything that seems to squeeze out the... the vibrancy, the enjoyment, the juice from life. I rely in the new book to some extent on a German theorist called Hartmut Rosa, who has written a huge amount of scholarly stuff on this idea that he calls resonance, the idea that...

What really gives life its meaning is this certain kind of, well, resonance, right? A vibration of some sort between us and the world. And it turns out that this is not what you get. Even if you succeed in hyper-optimizing your life, firstly, you won't actually get through all the work because it's infinite. And we can talk about that. That's a separate point. But even if you get that level of control, you sort of will wish that you didn't have it.

There's a lovely quote from Alan Watts, you know, the famous old spiritual entertainer from the 60s and the 70s. If you carried technology to its perfect conclusion and you had machines that could do everything you wanted for you exactly as you wanted it, what you would want in the end, at the end of that process, is a button that said, surprise me.

That's what's not there when we really get into the driving seat of life in that way. Let's move on to that other idea because this new book is kind of a companion or in conversation with your previous book, 4,000 Weeks.

which is all about understanding that our time is finite. Why is understanding this the door to meaning, as you write? I guess in essence, because I think that we spend a lot of time a lot of our lives, doing things which, while we may not realize it, are actually kind of ways of emotionally avoiding the truth of being finite. So we put a lot of effort, whether we realize it or not, into not feeling.

limited, both in terms of the amount of time we have and the amount of control we have over that time. So yeah, a lot of the productivity techniques that you will find in the kind of productivity books that I... disdain a little bit, I think are basically offering the promise of not having to feel finite, right? It's like, put this system into place and soon enough, probably later in the future, it's never right now, you won't have to...

make hard choices with your time. You won't have to feel the disappointment and the sacrifice of only ever being able to do a small proportion of the things you can imagine doing. And it's the same with control, right? If you're trying to control perfect work, it makes everything very agonizing and tortured. When you can let in the truth of that limitation a little bit more...

you undergo a shift where you're actually able to be more present in life because it's like, well, okay, I don't need to spend the day beating myself up for not having found the magic way to do all the things. I don't need to be... shocked and surprised that there are still hundreds and hundreds of things I have yet to get around to, because there always will be.

And instead, maybe it's my job today just to pick a few of the things that matter and really pour my time and attention into them. So it's really freeing in that respect.

Stop fighting against the unavoidable truth, I suppose. Yeah, you mention attention, and you write a lot about... kind of focusing our attention, especially as it pertains to this information overload age that we're in and the attention economy. especially given the time that we're living in and the various horrors that we're witnessing or experiencing on a daily basis. I was really struck by a moment early on in the book when you write about the danger of information overload.

especially given social media, which leads us to feel this need to care about everything all at once, all the time. And you wonder... Whether it would be better for just a few thousand people to focus on and care about one issue deeply over the course of a lifetime than for hundreds and thousands of us to care about something for a few minutes after we see it.

come through our feeds. Why? Well, that specific thought experiment comes from a great writer, blogger called David Cain, and he's sort of making the argument that you can't do very much with...

very diluted attention and you can do a lot. A small number of people can do a lot with more focus. I guess the broader point that I'm trying to get at there is just this notion that there is this old idea from from another era really now, that being a good citizen, being a good person means finding ways to make yourself pay more attention to the outside world and to the sufferings of the world.

And we live now, as you well know, in a world where information and information about awful things happening in the world is completely abundant. The scarce resource is our own attention and the way all the social media platforms and the rest of it work is by... is by monetizing our attention. I think it follows from this that actually there's a duty of a citizen in the modern world to be willing to withhold attention.

from things as well, which is very hard for anyone who cares about the world, right? It's like, what, you're telling me I should take this issue, which is obviously really serious and obviously involves an awful lot of people suffering, and not think about it. And my argument is, well, yes, firstly, because there are many ways in which our paying attention is we're misled into thinking we're making a difference, right? The idea that...

Attention isn't necessarily action. Right. And just telling the rest of a social media platform that you care is not necessarily helping anybody on the ground, as it were. But also, like, that willingness to say, okay.

This particular world crisis, this particular humanitarian disaster, this particular aspect of the climate crisis, whatever it is, I'm not saying it's not real or that it doesn't really matter. I'm just saying that's not going to be my battle because this... other thing is my battle and I'm going to put so many hours a week into volunteering or I'm going to give this proportion of my disposable income that I can afford to give to that cause.

I think it's really easy to think that, yeah, more attention is always better and actually our attention is finite. And that is not the case. Zooming back out, when does acceptance of...

The idea that time is finite and acceptance of our limitations lead to a kind of helplessness or resignation. And I'm going to bring in one of our TED members, Kenny S. here, who asks, How can we discern between a healthy acceptance of our limits versus complacency or giving up on something that we really want or care about? I don't think I'm in any personal danger. I have plenty of problems, but they're very much to do with, like...

trying to do too many things and overreaching and then getting burned out. And I don't think I'm at a personal huge risk of sort of being like, oh, what's the point in doing anything then? But it is a real issue. I mean, firstly, there's the point that many teachers of mindfulness and Buddhism make many times, which is that acceptance is not the same as resignation. It's not about saying that the way your life is or the way the world is, it just always has to be that way. It's about...

really acknowledging that it in fact is that way right now. And that's a very powerful move that doesn't need to be confused with the idea of like, I guess nothing's ever going to change then and I've just got to live with it. There's also this idea that I write about in the new book that we tend to get caught up in an idea of what counts as a meaningful action.

that can have lots of sort of ironic unintended consequences, right? We tend to think that the only things that matter in the world are very... big actions or actions that will resonate down the centuries or affect hundreds of thousands of people or something like that. Whereas I think we all know from our lives that really very small things can be completely meaningful, right? There's nothing...

not meaningful about cooking a nutritious meal for your kids or caring for an elderly relative or going for a hike in a beautiful landscape. These things are not going to be remembered on some level a thousand years from now, but they matter.

You also ask us to drop this quest for control, which is pretty prevalent in today's culture. Why do you think that impulse is so stubborn? I mean, it's really stubborn and it's stubborn in me, right? So I'm not, I don't know that I'm even saying drop it. I think I'm saying, can we all find ways to just like unclench just a little?

And any degree to which I think you can do that, even though it's scary and vulnerable to do it, is going to be beneficial. We live in a culture and an economic culture that relentlessly...

causes us to feel it's the only way to keep our heads above water is to get more control. In the Western world, in the global North, we come from cultures that very much prioritize technological and other... control of the world and then right back at the bottom because it always is i think it's just the fear of death right we we are trying to scramble into a position over life where we would feel safe at last. But to be born into life is to sort of be unsafe, right? Because it's to be...

It's slightly depressing material, but I think it's actually not depressing at all, right? It's like to be born as a human is just to find yourself in this vulnerable position on your way to death. I mean, that's what it is. And actually... The prospect of like, well, can I scramble up onto the riverbank instead of being born forward on it is very, very, very seductive. For folks who haven't read the book yet and meditated on the various ideas inside it.

What does unclenching, as you say, what does that get us? How does it actually open up more life? How did it work for you? If I can talk a little bit about the structure of the book, it was very important to me to try to sort of... write the kind of book that is similar to things that have helped me and that might also continue to help me because I definitely approach my writing in that way.

So it's divided into 28 short chapters, which are then divided into four weeks. And the idea, the invitation, right, is to do one a day for 28 days. Given that it's all about not being such a control freak, I can't really try to...

impose that on us, right? In a specific way, that would be unfair, but hypocritical. But what that tries to do, or what I'm trying to do there, is to get over this problem with a lot of... personal development writing i think where it either gives you a great perspective shift but then you don't know what to do with it or it gives you like a whole complicated set of tips and tricks to put into practice and you're like okay okay when i get a free month

I'll finally get around to doing that. And instead say, like, what if I could lead you through a small perspective shift, but repeatedly over the course of a month such that you might live the next 24 hours? a little differently than if you hadn't had that perspective shift. So there's a chapter on taking a slightly different approach to decision making. There's a chapter on slightly different approach to how you set.

goals for the day or how you think about interruptions that might arise in the course of the day. And the idea is just to sort of layer these different perspective shifts. right in the middle of life, right? You don't have to wait until you've cleared the 20,000 emails from your inbox before you put this into practice. It's like right in the middle of things. And stick with us. We'll be right back after a short break.

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An important question that I wanted to bring to you. Catherine N. writes, how should minorities navigate the advice to embrace imperfection instead of fighting it, given that the price we pay, maybe in terms of rights or access, safety, finances. can be considerably higher? This is a great question. I think it's really important to understand that there are at least two

sort of suffering and difficulty that are encountered by humans in the world. And there's the kind that is universal and is related to being a human. And then there's the kind that is relative and societal and arises from... injustice between groups of humans and power dynamics and all the rest of it. So I'm sort of unashamedly focusing on the first kind, right, which is not in any way to sort of deny or undermine the second kind.

Just simply, it is impossible for all of us, for any of us, no matter what background we come from, what heritage or anything else, to produce. work that matches up to the perfect standards we may have of it in our heads if we're perfectionists, right? I still maintain that to whatever degree you feel able in your own life to edge towards acknowledging that fact, it will lead...

to a freer life, to better work, to more productivity of the kind that counts. So it's not that it isn't harder for some people than others and that the stakes aren't higher for some people than others. But underneath that or alongside that, there is the fact that trying to do something that is not possible for humans to do is not a recipe for a stress-free and expansive.

existence. A stress-free and more expansive existence. You've mentioned a freer life. We've talked about resonance, which comes up a lot in meditations for mortals. What is... resonance, how do we get to it without a very complicated system? In fact, this is the opposite, right? It's like let go of the complicated systems.

I'm not actually quite as against systems as I may sometimes suggest. The point is, for me, is why are you using those things, right? So a good example of this in my own life, it's not a very complicated system, it's a simple system, but a good example is the... the famous Pomodoro technique. Oh, right. Explain that again. The Pomodoro technique is a way of dividing up your working day into 25-minute chunks with little breaks. It's a good system, right? Nothing wrong with it.

The problem is if you think that that technique or any other technique is going to kind of save you, right? These days, having gone through this kind of, at least something of an evolution in how I feel about these things. and being much more, I think, grounded and sane about what I can do as a finite human in the course of a given day, well, sure, then the Pomodoro technique is a totally great way of organizing my day sometimes. Nothing wrong with that at all. But it's no longer this...

like ticket out of the human condition. I think that's really the thing that's so important for me. And anything that I do in my life to bring myself back to that absolute reality of like, here I am. These are the talents I've got, the energy levels I've got, the attention I've got, the hours in the day I've got, the relationships I'm in. Anything that brings me back to that, it's like the resonance was waiting all along.

So it's almost like a return to yourself, return to your emotional engine. I know that I'm sort of dicing with cliche here, but it really is true that the world is full of a million small interactions every day. or experiences that are potentially enchanting and absorbing ones. And that at least some of us, the thing that gets in the way the most of that is being relentlessly in pursuit of some schedule or...

the end of a to-do list or something similar. So it's like, yeah, it's like the life is there. You don't so much need to bring it into being as to clear away the things that get in the way.

This is related to a question from a TED community member, Alana W., who writes, Many rising leaders I work with are afraid that if they focus on, quote unquote, softer things, they will lose their edge. I think there's an underlying belief that fear or anxiety in its many forms is their fuel.

How has your personal definition of and relationship to ambition changed over the time you've been doing this work? Oh, I love that question because I think I've been in that place for sure of thinking that like. It's not fun to be as anxious as I am to have the knot in my stomach and all the rest of it. But it seems to work, right? It's motivating on some level. Some definition of the word work. Yeah, right. And I think it's always been really important to me in this...

writing work to sort of salvage a version of ambition that goes along with it, right, that is compatible with this outlook. It's the difference between ambition as a kind of... the sort of deficit model of ambition that says, I've got to keep working and working harder and harder and harder and accomplishing more and more and more just to become an adequate human being. This is the idea that psychologists, the concept that psychologists refer to is that

insecure overachiever. The idea that we're not enough or something. Right, right. No, exactly. And whenever I use this term in... public event or something like half the people in the in the room seem to recognize exactly what i'm talking about this notion that you get a lot done and you achieve a lot maybe you get a lot of accolades but the reason you're doing it is to sort of plug a hole and

You never feel good because every time you achieve something, that just becomes the new minimum baseline for your subsequent achievements, right? If you do really well at some projects, then you've got to do all the future projects just as well or better. It's very stressful. But it is possible to see ambition in a different way, not as a way to try to feel all right, but as an expression of the fact that you know that you already are all right, that you are enough.

Once you're not tangled up so much in these kinds of self-worth related struggles, actually, it's just really fun to build things and create things and do things, right? If you're an ambitious person, it's still there.

As you learn to let go of anxiety and control. You also write about kind of how you're showing up for yourself now. And showing up is a whole section of Meditations for Mortals. Why is showing up kind of the last pillar in your day-to-day action plan for embracing our mortality and our limitations? I mean, I think because really it's... it's the only point of any of this, right? It's hard to put into words, but I think most people know what we're speaking about, that it is possible to sort of...

really be here and really be present in your life. And it is possible to not be. One of the main ways I think that we end up not being is that we are... sort of perpetually living for the future. Sometimes it's very obvious, right? People feel like their life, they're sort of like living until they, I don't know.

settle down with a partner or have kids or till they've retired or some of those kind of milestones. But very often, I've noticed, even in myself, it can be this idea of just sort of living for... three hours in the future from now. It's this sort of perpetual state of like, we've just got to get this out of the way, just got to get this out of the way. But of course, then you're in a new moment and the future is still in the future.

I think the practice and the thing I'm trying to bring people back to in the book and myself, if I haven't made that clear by now, is back towards seeing that this right here is real life. It's as real as it's ever going to get. For finite humans, if you're going to do some things that you care about and that matter to you and that make you feel alive, at some point you're going to have to do them now.

They can't always be later when you've got the other things out of the way or when you finally know what you're doing and don't feel imposter syndrome or whatever it might be. It's going to have to be in a moment of the present. And I find this like a really...

important reminder hopefully not a stress inducing reminder right the idea is not so that now you've got to be incredibly self-conscious about whether you're living life right turns out that that is a terrible way to be in the moment right be constantly asking yourself if you're in the moment. But just to realize that you've got no option. If you're going to have spent some of your life doing...

certain things that matter to you or that you find enjoyable or that you feel make a difference. Like at a certain point, it's just got to be right now whether you feel completely ready for that or not. Meditation is in the title of the book. And so as a result, a lot of people submitted questions asking you for your advice.

This is a problem. We'll talk about that in a moment. Okay. Yeah. On how to start a meditation practice. So I just want to bring this up, you know, or how to keep going. I think a lot of us have now been culturally taught to have a specific view of what meditation should or shouldn't be. And you share a bit about this throughout your book. But for those listening, what advice do you have?

So this is, to some extent, this is an artifact of the title we chose to give the book, and that's on me and my editor. The great figure that I'm arrogantly taking the mantle of here is Les. Buddha and more Marcus Aurelius, right, whose meditations are a collection of short thoughts to reflect upon. I am myself a pretty sort of patchy meditator when it comes to a sort of formal...

seated meditation practice. I think it's wonderful and it really helps me, but it's a place that I've always struggled with to some extent. That said, as you rightly know, I don't think these two senses of the word meditation are as different as one might assume at first. I think that any activity that causes you to sort of disidentify from the conceptual screen through which you view the world and to either...

look at those concepts directly, or to follow your breath and to allow the concepts to be let go of as they arise, I think they can make a claim to something meditative. So if all that some of the sections in this book do is sort of unseat some kind of...

completely settled way of viewing things if it's the act of a sort of a fish understanding what water is, as it were. And I think that gets to count. Also, there's a lot of material in the book about habits and daily habits and all the rest of it of which meditation is. is one for a lot of people. And there I am really banging the drum for how much more important it is to just do five, 10 minutes of whatever the thing is today in reality.

instead of becoming invested in sort of very big deal projected out in months into the future, schedules about how you're going to do it every single day forever. It's such an important skill to be able to let all of that go. And with no guarantee that it's part of some long-term practice to still be able to do the thing, whether that's meditation or exercise or journaling or whatever, to still be able to do it today without the guarantee that you're...

becoming a different kind of person in the long term. Oliver, you write towards the top of your book that you're fine with listeners or readers forgetting a lot of what they read and that it's the little things that really stick with us. that count. So if one of our listeners remembers only one thing from Meditations for Mortals, what is that one thing that you hope it will be?

Okay, here's what I'll say. There's a phrase towards the end of the book where I talk about the idea of starting from sanity. You can argue with the wording, but what I'm trying to say is, if there is a way that you want your life to be... which in my case might be attentive and focused, calm, socially connected, making time for rest, doing my part to address the crises of the world, whatever it is.

It's not going to work to see that as something that you're striving towards, right? As something that you're going to get to one day once you've got your life in place. It has to be something that you live from. So in practical terms, you know. The example I've given before is if you know that your life needs more rest in it, it's less about resolving to take a three-month sabbatical and two years time.

And then working really hard so that you can get them resources together to do that. And much more about asking where in your day-to-day there could be five minutes, 10 minutes for genuine rest. It's that sense of like... What is the identity you want to be in the world and can you live from it a little bit today? I think that's one way of saying the one thing that I'd want people to take away. It's about doing the thing today, not about.

building up to doing the thing perfectly all the time in the future. Yeah, I really like that bird by bird.

Okay, this is from a TED community member. Diana GC says, I particularly like the idea of learning to face the consequences of the decisions we make, but struggle a lot to come to terms with the sacrifices that one needs to make. which leads me to decide that I can't afford to make those sacrifices. My question for Oliver, how does one practice this? How do we trust that we can face whatever comes?

There's a quotation in the book. Each of the days in the book sort of plays off a quotation from someone else. And one of those is from Sheldon Kopp, the therapist and writer, who famously said, you're free to do whatever you like. you need only face the consequences, which is a really empowering frame for decision-making, I think, because it reminds us that all we're ever really doing when we face difficult decisions is...

is choosing which set of downsides we'd like to have. A lot of the time we sort of writhe around in indecision because we're waiting to come up with a solution that doesn't have downsides. And when you understand that for finite humans, there aren't...

such decisions, that anything you choose is not choosing the other things and all sorts of other ways in which everything has a downside. That's the perspective shift that makes the difference to me, right? It's seeing that actually, even if you don't make a decision... you are making a decision. You are moving into the next phase, hour or week or day of your life. You're using it up.

on indecision instead of going down one of these two paths, you're going down this other path. And again and again, I find this kind of negative message to be incredibly liberating. It's like, that ship has already sailed, right? Producing perfect work. making a decision that doesn't come with downsides, finding a relationship that doesn't on some level trigger stuff from your childhood, like all off the table. And it's so great because then you can be like, all right.

Now let's get down to the business of actually living. Yeah, that's a lovely note to end on. Oliver, thank you so much for this. really engaging and absorbing conversation. I have long wanted to speak with you and I'm so delighted that we got to spend this hour together. Oh, thank you. I really enjoyed the conversation. It's been great to be here.

That was Oliver Berkman in conversation with me, Elise Hugh, for the TED Talks Daily Book Club. This conversation was hosted in partnership with our TED membership team. If you want to be a part of slash membership. You'll get live access to virtual podcast recording sessions and the chance to ask writers like Oliver your burning questions. Would love to see you there. Go.ted.com slash membership.

And that's it for today. TED Talks Daily is part of the TED Audio Collective. This episode was produced by Lucy Little and edited by Alejandra Salazar. The TED Talks Daily team includes Martha Estefanos, Oliver Friedman, Brian Green... I'm Elise Hu. I'll be back tomorrow with a fresh idea for your feed. Thanks for listening.

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