Know Thyself

In this episode I sit down with Mel Robbins, host of The Mel Robbins Podcast and author of The Let Them Theory. Mel takes me back to the age of 41, when liens on her house, unemployment, heavy drinking, and constant anger had turned her into a person she didn’t recognize. We explore what finally moved her to change, why thinking alone never changes a life, and how she slowly separated her sense of worth from her success through therapy, a quieter life in Vermont, and learning to slow down a nervous system that never stopped running.

What We Dive Into:

1. For Mel, change came when staying where she was became more painful than doing the small things she had been avoiding. Her life began to turn once she stopped waiting for someone to rescue her and started acting like the person she needed, one ordinary Tuesday at a time, without waiting to feel ready.

2. Saying let them is a boundary that helps you recognize what you cannot control, from a parent’s habits to a friend’s opinion of you. The real power comes in the second step, let me, where you choose your response, your boundaries, and how you want to show up in the relationship from here.

3. Mel came to see purpose as something that happens in other people when you do what you do. It can be lived anywhere, in a grocery store line or with an Uber driver, through the way your energy and presence leave others feeling encouraged, seen, and a little more hopeful about their own lives.

Know Thyself, but not by yourself. A guided space to return home to yourself.

https://www.knowthyselfcollective.com

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___________

00:00 Intro

01:58 The Invisible Social Clock

13:07 The Freedom of Transparency

15:21 Perfectionism and Excellence

19:18 The Decision to Change

25:18 Separating Worth From Success

30:23 Healing a Hypervigilant Nervous System

38:31 Understanding the Let Them Theory

44:39 The Hardwired Need for Control

54:41 Context, Compassion, and Responsibility

58:46 Simple Tools for Chronic Stress

1:01:26 Let Them as an Entry Point

1:09:08 Simplicity and Communication

1:20:38 What We Hope to Leave Behind

1:23:35 Navigating Being Misunderstood

1:27:08 What Success Teaches

___________

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David Whyte trained as a marine zoologist, spent two years as a naturalist guide in the Galapagos, and went on to become one of the most beloved poets of our time. In this conversation we begin with words themselves: how they first arrive in our bodies as children, how they drift into abstraction, and how poetry can return them to direct presence. David describes the stages of attention he discovered while sitting in silence with the animals of the Galapagos, and how each deeper level of attention changes who we are and what can meet us.

What We Dive Into:

1. Watching a Galapagos hawk, David moved from self-absorption to noticing, then to being seen, then to sensing the relationship itself as what was most alive. The same progression is available at the kitchen table with a partner or child, if we are willing to let it look back at us.

2. We often throw valuable things into grief, such as relationships, marriages, and plans, hoping we will not have to go down ourselves. David suggests that falling all the way to the bottom is how we find solid ground, and how the qualities we loved in someone lost begin to live in us.

3. Before David found his path, he had to refuse work that looked close to what he wanted. A stranger’s story by a fireside turned him back toward his original longing. Saying no to the near miss can feel like a loss, but it keeps room open for what is actually calling.

Know Thyself, but not by yourself. A guided space to return home to yourself.

https://www.knowthyselfcollective.com

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___________

00:00 Intro

01:59 Words as Doorways into Reality

04:20 Living Inside Abstraction

09:27 Attention and the Capacity for Conversation

22:28 Zen and the Contemplative Path

36:59 Speaking from Silence

38:56 Overhearing What You Didn’t Know You Knew

50:38 Grieving John O’Donohue

58:52 The Soul Friend Without a Mask

1:01:08 Ambition and Crossing the Unknown Sea

1:10:26 Uncertainty on a True Vocation

1:24:39 The Power of a Stranger

1:26:42 The Courage to Say No

1:34:42 Letting Others Remain a Mystery

1:42:52 Inner and Outer Horizons

2:02:56 Living the Questions

___________

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In this episode, I sit down with Janna Levin, a theoretical astrophysicist at Barnard College of Columbia University, Guggenheim fellow, and author of Black Hole Survival Guide, Black Hole Blues, A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines, and How the Universe Got Its Spots. Janna started out as a philosophy major drawn to the biggest questions, then found in physics a way of answering them that felt true for everyone, everywhere. Preparing for this conversation blew my mind more than almost any other, and sitting with her only deepened that.

What We Dive Into:

1. When a massive star collapses into a black hole, the star itself keeps falling and leaves behind only curved, empty space. With no material features left to observe, every black hole looks alike, which is why physicists treat them like giant fundamental particles holding clues to quantum gravity.

2. Einstein realized the purest experience of gravity is weightlessness, the feeling of falling freely with no chair, floor, or bed in the way. What we call heaviness is really something resisting our fall, while objects simply follow the natural curves of spacetime.

3. Janna suggests technological species may face a bottleneck where the ingenuity that builds rockets also builds bombs. Surviving it could mean reaching a balance with nature so complete that a civilization becomes hard to detect, which may help explain why the cosmos looks so quiet.

Know Thyself, but not by yourself. A guided space to return home to yourself.

https://www.knowthyselfcollective.com

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___________

00:00 Intro

02:24 From Philosophy to Physics

06:39 Made of Star Stuff

12:13 The Ever Expanding Cosmos

17:14 Before the Big Bang

21:31 How Complexity Emerges

24:42 The Nature of Black Holes

32:08 Supermassive Black Holes

39:02 Photographing a Black Hole

45:33 How Stellar Black Holes Form

47:46 Falling Into a Black Hole

56:38 The Information Loss Paradox

1:00:00 Einstein’s Happiest Thought

1:11:00 Nothingness in Physics and Meditation

1:19:56 Why Whales Don’t Go to Mars

1:24:11 Isotopia and Balance With Nature

1:30:50 The Fermi Paradox

1:32:13 Intelligence on a New Substrate

1:37:30 Humility and the Cosmic Perspective

1:41:18 The Odds of Alien Civilizations

1:46:17 Consciousness and Extra Dimensions

1:54:41 How Many Dimensions Exist

2:01:48 Time as the Fourth Dimension

2:04:56 Extra Dimensions and Dark Energy

2:12:06 A Universe Inside a Black Hole

2:19:14 Progeny of One Universe

___________

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Elizabeth Gilbert joins me for her first public conversation after a six month sabbatical, a stretch where she stopped writing, producing, and planning so she could simply be available to life. Liz is the author of "Eat, Pray, Love", "Big Magic", and her memoir "All the Way to the River". In this conversation she speaks openly about the daily practice of two-way prayer that guides her choices, her recovery from sex and love addiction, and the story of loving her partner Raya through terminal cancer and active drug addiction.

What We Dive Into:

1. Liz describes feeling trapped many times in her life, most painfully while caring for Raya through cancer and active addiction. Each time, the only way out was the truth she least wanted to tell, and naming where she was lying, hiding, or manipulating is what finally set her free.

2. Recovery taught Liz that no partner, payoff, or praise could fill her sense of scarcity around love. Sitting with the part of her that wailed for someone else at three in the morning, and promising to stay anyway, slowly built a secure attachment to herself that no other person could provide.

3. Liz no longer believes everyone must create, but she believes everyone is invited. Success can never be promised, yet telling the story within you will change who you are by the end. As AI grows more capable, the lasting reason to make things may be the one our ancestors had: it is pleasing.

Know Thyself, but not by yourself. A guided space to return home to yourself.

https://www.knowthyselfcollective.com

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___________

00:00 Intro

02:30 The Call to Stop

08:30 Listening for a Higher Voice

19:25 How to Recognize the Ego

26:05 The Public, Private, and Secret Self

29:12 Writing From Healed Scars

33:43 Love and Secrecy With Raya

41:10 Codependency and the Truth That Frees

47:06 Generosity With Strings Attached

53:43 Searching for Enough Love

1:00:42 The Inner Child Left Unchecked

1:03:29 Life After Seven Years of Recovery

1:11:46 Redefining Creative Living

1:19:42 Buried Treasure and Ancestral Joy

1:22:44 Ideas as Living Entities

1:30:16 Creating Without Assurances

1:33:44 The Discipline Behind Inspiration

1:38:56 Art Scars and Reclaiming Play

1:45:32 Creativity in the Age of AI

1:50:43 The Practice of Two-Way Prayer

1:55:13 Asking for Our Instructions

2:01:26 Five Days in Darkness

2:06:21 What It Means to Know Thyself

___________

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My guest today is Tom Bilyeu, the entrepreneur behind Quest Nutrition who went on to build Impact Theory into one of the most watched long form interview channels in the world. Tom is now building a procedurally generated video game called Kyzen, and in recent years his content has shifted away from personal development and toward economics, artificial intelligence, and the systems that quietly shape how we live. I wanted to sit with him inside that shift, to understand what pulled him away from the mindset conversation he had mastered and toward questions about money, power, and the trajectory of intelligence itself.

What We Dive Into:

1. Tom credits his success to a simple loop: predict an outcome, run the experiment, and stay honest about what actually happened. He treats being wrong as useful data rather than a threat to his identity, which lets him adjust quickly instead of defending a position that clearly isn't working anymore.

2. Tom argues that meaning isn't discovered but handed to us by evolution as an empty box we get to fill. For him that box holds his wife and his work, and he believes people struggle most when whatever filled the box, a job, a role, a relationship, disappears and nothing takes its place.

3. Tom's core financial message is that not owning assets quietly erodes your purchasing power through inflation, whether you notice it or not. He believes the escape route is available to almost anyone, but most people never take the step of investing consistently over decades instead of waiting for certainty.

Know Thyself, but not by yourself. A guided space to return home to yourself.

https://www.knowthyselfcollective.com

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___________

00:00 Intro

01:50 The Evolution of the Show

05:02 Between What Was and What's Next

08:53 The Spark of Divinity and What Tom Is Building

13:52 Nature, Nurture, and Leverage

15:49 The Physics of Progress

19:35 Facing Ego and Inadequacy

24:08 Feeling Most Alive

25:58 A New Virtual World

27:36 The Coming Bifurcation of Civilization

36:52 Superintelligence and Universal Abundance

40:27 Four Futures and How Soon

50:59 Simulation Theory and Consciousness

1:04:13 Why Something Rather Than Nothing

1:10:17 Letting Go of Certainty

1:21:39 A Communion of Subjects

1:30:22 Meaning in a Disenchanted Age

1:40:42 Who Is Tom Without His Ambition

1:42:10 Rewriting Value in a Post-Scarcity World

1:45:55 How the Money System Is Rigged

1:59:15 Is a Crash Coming

2:02:22 A Message to the West and P(doom)

2:09:57 Why Tom Came On the Show

2:12:15 Rewiring at the Root and What's Sacred

2:18:25 The Movie of Your Life and Your Blind Spot

2:21:16 Utility, Novelty, and Fulfillment

2:25:20 The Most Transcendent Moment

2:27:24 Dabbling in Meditation

2:29:13 The Case for First Principles

2:32:30 From Adyashanti to Kyzen

2:38:20 Outro

___________

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Matthew Hussey is back on the show, and this conversation picks up right where our last one left off, except he's grown a lot since then. Matthew built his early career on a simple idea: create more opportunity and you'll make better romantic choices. Over time he realized abundance alone doesn't fix anything. The real work lives underneath, in the unconscious patterns and emotional reflexes that decide who we choose and how we behave once we have them. That discovery pushed his focus toward emotional regulation, and it's the thread running through everything we talk about today.

What We Dive Into:

1. Matthew built his early career on the idea that more romantic opportunity leads to better choices. He later realized abundance does not override the unconscious patterns formed by our earliest relationships. Real change comes from understanding those patterns, not expanding the pool of options.

2. When someone does not text back for hours and a whole day unravels, the reaction is rarely about the message itself. Matthew describes triggers as reflexive states shaped by earlier wounds, not conscious choices. Curiosity and self-compassion, not shame, create room to respond differently.

3. Matthew traces his readiness for commitment to a relationship built on certainty and standards at once: his wife made clear she was giving it an honest try and expected the same. That let him stop fearing the future and start showing up fully, since the decision no longer sat on him alone.

Know Thyself, but not by yourself. A guided space to return home to yourself.

https://www.knowthyselfcollective.com

✨THANK YOU TO OUR SPONSORS:

https://www.mudwtr.com/knowthyself

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___________

00:00 Intro

01:09 Why the Focus Shifted to Relationships

09:26 How Perspective Shifts With Experience

11:41 Relationship as a Path to Growth

17:11 The Fear Beneath Commitment

34:24 Commitment as Freedom, Not Loss

48:15 Spreading Your Needs Across a Tribe

51:50 What's Actually Essential in a Partner

1:00:37 Choosing a True Teammate

1:07:11 Being Whole Before You Partner Up

1:19:37 The Gift of Real Presence

1:26:07 What Men and Women Actually Need

1:34:33 Beyond Masculine and Feminine Labels

1:36:41 The Illusions and Joys of Parenthood

1:41:37 Letting Go of the Achievement Identity

1:50:27 Working With Emotional Triggers

2:10:08 The Dance of Acceptance and Growth

2:12:18 Life as an Earth School

2:20:23 Learning From Different Wiring

2:22:46 The Power of Shared Vulnerability

2:30:20 Closing Reflections

2:32:36 Outro

___________

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I sat down with Dr. Shefali, clinical psychologist trained at Columbia and the voice behind the Conscious Parenting Movement for over two decades, to explore what it really means to parent from awareness instead of ego. We talk about the illusion of the perfect parent, why children are our greatest mirrors, and how the wounds we carry from our own childhoods get passed down unless we do the work to see them clearly. Dr. Shefali doesn't offer a script. She offers a practice of humility, one that asks us to look at ourselves before we look at our kids.

What We Dive Into:

1. Dr. Shefali explains that most parenting struggles trace back to ego, the desire to control, to be right, to see your child as an extension of your own unmet dreams. Real conscious parenting means constantly questioning whether your actions come from your child's essence or your own unresolved story.

2. Without rites of passage or male mentors, boys are left to figure out masculinity through porn and the manosphere. Dr. Shefali argues that testosterone, purpose, and physical challenge need healthy outlets, and that community, not isolation, is what turns raw masculine energy into something protective and grounded.

3. Dr. Shefali describes how social media exploits children's developing brains, especially girls', feeding insecurity and manufacturing endless standards to chase. She calls it algorithmic abduction, a process that outsources parenting itself and leaves children disconnected from their own inner voice.

Know Thyself, but not by yourself. A guided space to return home to yourself.

https://www.knowthyselfcollective.com

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___________

00:00 Intro

01:51 Defining Conscious Parenting

03:35 Inviting Grace Into Parenting

07:20 Children as the Ultimate Mirror

10:25 Where Support Slips Into Control

11:07 Protecting the Developmental Years

14:05 What a Human Birth Means

17:17 Nature, Nurture, and the Cost of Pushing

21:43 Why Raise Sons and Daughters Separately

26:01 The War on Little Boys

30:54 What the Manosphere Gets Right

38:10 Male Loneliness and Silence

42:45 The Father Wound

47:08 What Conscious Masculinity Looks Like

52:08 Algorithmic Abduction of Girls

58:20 Empowering Girls Beyond Appearance

1:02:31 Boundaries and Sharing Power

1:09:28 Dr. Shefali's Own Hardest Lesson

1:14:43 Preparing to Become a Parent

1:16:42 Parenting With a Misaligned Partner

1:22:13 Sibling Differences and Favoritism

1:33:09 Escaping the Perception Prison

1:38:05 The Mother Bind

1:40:50 Confused Messages About Sexuality

1:45:05 The Machine Behind It All

1:55:16 Closing Message to Parents

___________

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John Wineland has spent nearly twenty years teaching people how to love more deeply, and in this conversation he lays out why intimacy has become one of the most demanding spiritual practices available to us. We talk about why relationships surface our oldest wounds, why the partner we choose so often mirrors the exact pattern we grew up in, and why that mirroring is not a mistake but an invitation to heal. John also opens up about his daughter Claire, who passed away eight years ago, and what her life and death taught him about grief, presence, and unconditional love.

What We Dive Into:

1. John explains that whatever part of you remains unhealed keeps transmitting into the world, and it draws a partner with the opposite wound so you can replay your childhood dynamic together. He frames this pattern as an opportunity rather than a flaw, since the relationship that triggers you most is often showing you exactly what needs attention.

2. Years of unspoken fear shape how we stand, breathe, and hold tension, so real change requires more than insight alone. John describes training the nervous system through practices like breathwork and qigong so the body can stay open in moments that would normally trigger defense, attack, or withdrawal, which is where lasting change actually happens.

3. Reflecting on his daughter Claire, John shares that there is no end to grief because there is no end to love. He describes honoring grief as an act of self love rather than something to rush past, and encourages anyone facing loss to give that grief real space instead of staying busy to avoid feeling it.

Know Thyself, but not by yourself. A guided space to return home to yourself.

https://www.knowthyselfcollective.com

✨THANK YOU TO OUR SPONSORS:

https://www.mudwtr.com/knowthyself

Use code KNOWTHYSELF for up to 43% off sitewide

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___________

00:00 Intro

01:48 The Historical Evolution of Love

05:45 Why We Attract Our Reciprocal Wound

08:17 When Relationships Deepen the Wound

10:48 The ROI of Doing the Work

14:30 The Four Pillars of Divine Union

22:56 Safety, Belonging, and Being Loved

26:34 The Wound of Being a Man

31:47 Patterns in Men's Work

37:49 What the Manosphere Gets Right

40:03 Why Men Stay Silent

46:47 Masculine and Feminine as Universal Forces

55:12 Energetic Polarity and the Three Kinds of No

1:01:22 Liberation Through Relationship

1:03:23 Staying Connected Through Busy Seasons

1:10:14 John's Own Attachment Wound

1:15:51 What Claire Taught Him About Love

1:24:00 Should I Stay or Should I Go

1:33:41 Healing Generational Trauma

1:44:45 Preparing for Divine Partnership

1:49:02 The Practice of Incremental Improvement

1:52:01 Closing and Where to Find John

___________

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Dr. David Spiegel is the Wilson Professor and Associate Chair of Psychiatry at Stanford, the co-founder of the hypnosis app Reveri, and one of the world's leading clinical researchers on hypnosis. He has worked with over 7,000 patients across 50 years, and in this conversation he opened with something I did not expect: he tested my hypnotizability live on camera. I scored a nine out of ten. What followed was one of the most genuinely surprising conversations about the mind I have had on this show.

What We Dive Into:

1. The self you walk around with is not a fixed structure. Dr. Spiegel calls it a convenient assumption, something the brain constructs to simplify experience. Hypnosis reveals this by demonstrating how quickly and completely a person can shift, often in a single session.

2. Memories are not neutral recordings. They are laid down and retrieved from brain regions that manage affect, which means the emotion and the memory are inseparable. Working with a memory hypnotically allows you to enter it, update its emotional meaning, and change how it lives in you.

3. The same capacity that lets a child survive abuse by mentally leaving their body can, in adulthood, become a habitual distance from experience. Understanding whether your detachment is a protective skill or an old survival pattern still running is one of the more honest questions this conversation surfaces.

Know Thyself, but not by yourself. A guided space to return home to yourself.

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___________

00:00 Intro

01:52 What Hypnosis Actually Is

05:34 The Malleability of Personality and Self

07:01 How Trauma Gets Stored in the Body and Memory

12:00 Hypnosis as the Oldest Western Psychotherapy

15:13 What Happens in the Brain During Hypnosis

18:36 The Default Mode Network and the "My Fault" Network

22:29 How Hypnotizability Is Measured

30:28 What High and Low Hypnotizability Looks Like in Life

33:58 Live Demo: Testing André's Hypnotizability

40:11 Dissociation: Adaptive Defense and Pathological Trap

45:50 How to Use Hypnosis for Stress and Performance

49:07 Hypnosis vs. Meditation: Being vs. Doing

54:41 Flow State, Golf, and the Art of Process Over Outcome

58:13 Believing Is Seeing: The Color Perception Experiment

1:01:00 Perception as a Generative, Interpretive Act

1:03:29 Emotions as Signals and Hypnosis as a Flashlight

1:07:01 Smoking, Self-Respect, and Reframing Addiction

1:09:08 Dr. Spiegel's Path: A Genetic Illness in the Family

1:15:44 Dissociative Identity Disorder and the Many Selves

1:19:54 If There's No Solid Self, Who Are We?

1:22:04 Collective Trance and Societal Hypnosis

1:26:50 Reverie and Empowering Innate Abilities

1:27:12 Closing Message: Learn More About Your Innate Abilities

___________

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Rizwan Virk is an MIT-trained computer scientist, video game pioneer, and bestselling author of The Simulation Hypothesis. His work sits at a rare intersection: quantum physics, Eastern mysticism, and the architecture of video games, all pointing toward the same unsettling and strangely liberating conclusion. In this conversation, we explore not the nihilistic version of simulation theory, but the one that actually gives life more meaning rather than less.

What We Dive Into:

1. The simulation Rizwan describes is not one where you are code running on a server. You are the soul outside the game, choosing an avatar and entering by choice. The body is the character. The player is something more.

2. Synchronicities, hunches, recurring patterns, these are not coincidences. Rizwan frames them as messages from a deeper intelligence, perhaps a future self, a guide, or the part of you watching the game from outside. The practice is learning to read them rather than dismiss them.

3. In a well-designed game, difficulty scales to keep you engaged and growing. Rizwan applies the same logic to life: the quests that keep returning are the ones not yet completed, and completing them is what the game is actually for.

Know Thyself, but not by yourself. A guided space to return home to yourself.

https://www.knowthyselfcollective.com

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___________

00:00 Intro

01:46 NPC vs. RPG: Two Flavors of Simulation Theory

07:44 The Universe as Information: It from Bit

13:07 The Second Assertion: Information Rendered as Real

18:06 Non-Locality, Quantum Entanglement, and the Speed of Light

22:32 The Simulation Point: When VR Becomes Indistinguishable

26:44 The Third Assertion: The World as Purposeful Illusion

35:23 Awakening as Becoming Lucid in the Dream

38:52 The Fourth Assertion: You Chose to Play the Game

43:42 Life Selection, Forgetfulness, and the Bardo

49:28 Savant Children and the Autism-as-Backdoor Hypothesis

57:28 The Literal vs. Metaphorical Axis of Simulation Theory

1:01:52 Yogananda and the Film Projector Metaphor

1:07:34 The Life Review, the Book of Life, and the Karmic Database

1:13:47 Samskaras, Vasanas, and Yoga as Cessation of Whirlpools

1:17:34 Clues on the Treasure Hunt: Synchronicity and the Quest Path

1:22:38 The Simulated Multiverse: Running the Simulation More Than Once

1:30:09 The Tiger Swami: External Tigers and Inner Ones

1:36:23 Rizwan's Heart Surgery and the Course Correction

1:44:14 Karma, Dream Palaces, and the Questing Engine

1:48:49 Living the Life Review Before You Die

1:57:01 Kindness Is Enforced by the Architecture

2:03:17 Epistemic Humility at the Edge of Mystical Claims

2:14:22 What Is Outside the Simulation?

2:22:54 UFOs: Interstellar, Interdimensional, or Rendered?

2:33:09 Closing Message: Challenges Are Integral to the Game

___________

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