The Peter McCormack Show

Have smartphones been a terrible mistake? Are social media and artificial intelligence changing the way our children think, learn and develop? And what happens to humanity when technology removes the need to struggle, imagine and think for ourselves? In this episode Baroness Susan Greenfield, Oxford neuroscientist and member of the House of Lords, explains the impact of digital technology on the human brain. We discuss smartphone addiction, declining attention, the mental health of young people, the importance of resilience, and whether our education system is preparing children for a future that no longer exists.

We also explore what makes us human, the pursuit of happiness, the importance of imagination, and how to build a better world for the next generation. Susan also shares her deeply personal experience of her mother's Alzheimer's disease and the experimental research she is leading into early diagnosis and potential treatments. Finally, they confront political polarisation, the failings of modern democracy and the responsibilities we have to future generations. At its heart, this is a conversation about whether technological progress is genuinely improving our lives, or whether we're sacrificing the very things that make life worth living.

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TIMESTAMPS:

00:00:00 - They Chose Electric Shocks Instead

00:03:22 - Struggle Shaped Us

00:05:55 - The Pony She Had To Wait For

00:11:23 - Was The Smartphone A Mistake?

00:15:48 - Outsourcing Your Thoughts

00:19:45 - Deliberately Addictive

00:20:59 - Should AI Images Be Labelled?

00:26:20 - The Girl Who Used AI To Get An A

00:29:20 - Educating For A World That Doesn't Exist

00:31:48 - Wine, Women And Song

00:37:04 - Where The Partying Ended

00:40:29 - Play, Creativity And The Phone

00:41:32 - The Mental Health Crisis

00:46:25 - If I Ruled The World

00:50:35 - You Need Linear Activities

00:57:15 - AI Has To Be A Tool

01:05:46 - How You Build An Out-Group

01:07:44 - The Alzheimer's Work

01:17:35 - Three To Five Years

01:27:26 - Our Debt Matters More Than Your Education

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CONTACT PETE

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CONNECT WITH SUSAN GREENFIELD

› Website – https://susangreenfield.com/

› Neuro-Bio – https://www.neuro-bio.com/

› Mind Change – https://susangreenfield.com/books/

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Why does working harder no longer feel like getting ahead? Frank Wright returns to discuss Britain’s debt-driven economy, inflation and the squeeze on living standards. We explore his argument that financial power has become detached from productive wealth, while households face rising costs and the next generation inherits the bill.

We discuss central banking, the offshoring of industry, housing costs and student debt, before turning to what rebuilding Britain would involve: cheaper energy, domestic production, skilled work and a long-term national strategy.

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TIMESTAMPS:

00:00:00 - Everything That Destroys You Is A Business Model

00:01:14 - Migration As An Industry

00:11:21 - Debt Servitude

00:13:35 - The Creation Of The Federal Reserve

00:19:19 - Just A Podcaster And A Banjo Player

00:25:00 - A Curated, Locked Discourse

00:28:53 - Replacing Real Wealth With Debt

00:35:54 - What Happened To Castle Road

00:38:56 - The Post His Son Showed Him

00:42:23 - A Society That Lives On Debt

00:45:01 - Can We Vote Our Way Out?

00:51:07 - A Declaration Of Independence Moment?

00:54:18 - Where Is The Money Actually Going?

00:57:03 - Work Is Joyless

01:07:20 - The Coming Financial Crisis

01:09:35 - There Is No First Class Anymore

01:19:14 - The Family Is The Engine

01:39:17 - I Can't Promise My Children What I Had

01:48:39 - The Restaurant Test

01:52:55 - Could You Be Wrong?

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CONTACT PETE

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CONNECT WITH FRANK WRIGHT

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SPONSORS

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FILMED BY CURTIS TAYLOR

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EDITED BY CONOR MCCORMACK

› https://x.com/ConorM04

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Sir David Spiegelhalter is one of the world’s leading statisticians, Chair of the Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication at Cambridge University and author of The Art of Uncertainty. Having served on public inquiries into mass murder (Harold Shipman) and systemic healthcare failures, he has spent decades analysing how data is used - and misused - in society.

In this episode, Sir David breaks down the mechanics of numerical manipulation in media, why "objective truth" is a flawed concept and how we can protect ourselves from confirmation bias.

We discuss:

•⁠ ⁠Why you should immediately distrust any statistic you hear in the news.

•⁠ ⁠⁠How mathematical algorithms helped catch Britain’s most prolific serial killer.

•⁠ ⁠⁠How simple linguistic tricks make identical statistics sound terrifying or reassuring.

•⁠ ⁠⁠The breakdown of public trust during COVID-19 and the error of simplistic messaging.

•⁠ ⁠⁠"Hedgehogs vs. Foxes": The mental framework that separates terrible forecasters from super-forecasters.

•⁠ ⁠⁠The rise of AI "black boxes" in healthcare, weather, and business forecasting.

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TIMESTAMPS:

00:00:00 - I Can Make Any Number Look Frightening

00:03:08 - The System That Could Have Caught Shipman

00:06:45 - Can You Mislead People With The Truth?

00:09:54 - Your Own Bias Does The Work

00:15:33 - Sitting In The Middle Of The COVID Argument

00:17:52 - What The Public Got Wrong About Vaccines

00:19:37 - Safe And Effective Was The Wrong Message

00:20:56 - The Experiment On A Thousand People

00:25:00 - What The Data Says About Lockdowns

00:30:25 - The Government Threw Its Weight Around

00:31:02 - I Cannot Forgive The Fear Mongering

00:34:08 - Children Have Never Been Safer

00:36:28 - Trustworthy, Not Trusted

00:37:34 - How The Productivity Figures Went Wrong

00:41:28 - Predicting The Crowd At Real Bedford

00:48:20 - Will AI Replace Statisticians?

00:50:03 - Musk's 20% Chance

01:01:39 - The Model That Predicts When You Die

01:05:05 - What AI Did To Mathematicians

01:15:00 - Hedgehogs And Foxes

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CONTACT PETE

› Website – http://petermccormack.com

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CONNECT WITH DAVID SPIEGELHALTER

› Website – https://www.statslab.cam.ac.uk/~david/

› The Art of Uncertainty – https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/447230/the-art-of-uncertainty-by-spiegelhalter-david/9780241658628

› X/Twitter – https://x.com/d_spiegel

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FILMED BY CURTIS TAYLOR

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EDITED BY CONOR MCCORMACK

› https://x.com/ConorM04

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Dave Wood is a pioneer of the smartphone industry, former senior executive at PPsion and Symbian and Chair of London Futurists. Having predicted the smartphone revolution in the 1990s, he now maps out the next radical phase of human evolution - from the reversal of biological aging to artificial superabundance.

Moving away from sensationalised doomsday narratives, Dave breaks down why humanity is approaching the end of "normal" unaugmented existence and how technological breakthroughs in the coming decades will make biological death optional.

We discuss:

•⁠ ⁠Why this is likely the last decade of "normal" unaugmented human beings.

•⁠ ⁠⁠How early smartphone pioneers accurately predicted large touchscreens but missed social media addiction.

•⁠ ⁠⁠The concept of "Longevity Escape Velocity" and why biological death can be abolished.

•⁠ ⁠⁠Why people are psychologically terrified of contemplating the end of aging.

•⁠ ⁠⁠How humans will spend decades inside vibrant, simulated digital worlds. The reality of AI agents breaking out across the internet and the need for chip-level guardrails.

•⁠ ⁠⁠How "Sustainable Superabundance" could make energy, health, and basic necessities too cheap to meter.

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TIMESTAMPS:

00:00:00 - The Last Generation Of Normal Humans

00:01:56 - Building The First Smartphone

00:05:23 - Nobody Will Carry A Large Device

00:06:55 - The Risks We Actually Worried About

00:10:35 - Did We Fail The Phone Test?

00:14:34 - The Anxious Generation

00:18:03 - You Have To Use The Steering Wheel

00:22:34 - Monitoring Built Into The Chips

00:24:21 - Small Risks, Bigger Risks, Biggest Risks

00:29:23 - We Killed Them To Build A House

00:31:11 - They Knew It Was A Simulation

00:32:38 - What Happens When AI Gets A Body

00:33:46 - The Cult That Released Sarin Gas

00:37:33 - Terminator, Ready Player One Or Matrix?

00:39:12 - If This Is A Simulation, They're Evil

00:43:44 - Living As Long As You Want To

00:47:36 - Longevity Escape Velocity

00:49:42 - A Thousand Years Old, Looking 22

00:53:57 - What The Singularity Actually Means

01:03:04 - Sustainable Superabundance

01:12:22 - We Need A House Of AI

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CONTACT PETE

› Website – http://petermccormack.com

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CONNECT WITH DAVID WOOD

› London Futurists – https://londonfuturists.com/

› Blog – https://dw2blog.com/

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SPONSORS

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FILMED BY CURTIS TAYLOR

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EDITED BY CONOR MCCORMACK

› https://x.com/ConorM04

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Lewis Dartnell is an astro-biologist, Professor of Science Communication at the University of Westminster and the author of The Knowledge: How to Rebuild Our World from Scratch. His research is on whether microbial life could survive the radiation on Mars. His books are about something closer to home: how little any of us understand about the world we depend on.

Lewis and I run the thought experiment properly. If you woke up tomorrow and civilisation had gone, what kills you first, where do you go, how long does a supermarket actually keep you alive and how many people do you need before you can rebuild anything at all? The answer to one of those is 55 years and it is not the one you expect.

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TIMESTAMPS:

00:00:00 - The Big Red Reset Button

00:04:26 - Get Out Of The Cities

00:08:14 - A Supermarket Keeps You Alive 55 Years

00:09:48 - You Need 10,000 People

00:13:21 - We Outsourced All The Handiwork

00:17:45 - You Have To Preserve Everything

00:19:19 - Every Technology Is A Weapon

00:23:14 - The One Thing He Would Take

00:25:41 - Mechanical AI

00:28:35 - Resilient And Fragile At The Same Time

00:32:38 - We Invent Because We Are Lazy

00:34:05 - The Gasifier Stove

00:37:57 - The Cars That Ran On Wood

00:42:03 - Making Glass From A Bag Of Sand

00:51:38 - He Made His Own Photograph

00:55:43 - Printing A Page From Scratch

00:59:47 - The Kindle Apocalypse Plan

01:05:39 - Could We Actually Live On Mars?

01:11:48 - The Radiation Problem

01:19:02 - The Next Book

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CONTACT PETE

› Website – http://petermccormack.com

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CONNECT WITH LEWIS DARTNELL

› Website – https://lewisdartnell.com/

› The Knowledge – https://the-knowledge.org/

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FILMED BY CURTIS TAYLOR

› https://www.curttaylor.co.uk/

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EDITED BY CONOR MCCORMACK

› https://x.com/ConorM04

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Roko Mijic is the man behind Roko's Basilisk, the thought experiment he posted on LessWrong in 2010 that was so unsettling the forum's founder banned discussion of it for five years. He has been in the AI safety community since 2008 and he puts the odds that this kills us all at about 35%.

Roko and I discuss what actually happens inside an AI lab, why reinforcement learning made these systems more capable and more misaligned at the same time, the model that escaped its sandbox and hacked Hugging Face to get the answers and why nobody can tell whether a system is faking alignment - the trust me bro problem.

His proposal is the part nobody else is making. Split every frontier lab in two: a commercial company that sells products and a separate research lab that develops the dangerous capability under state supervision, the way we handle nuclear material and bio labs. He says the only person currently pushing it is him.

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TIMESTAMPS:

00:00:00 - The Most Dangerous Thing Humans Have Ever Done

00:01:06 - Roko's Basilisk

00:05:47 - A 35% Chance

00:07:58 - Three Years From Search To Building Software

00:09:17 - The Jobs Going First

00:14:04 - AI 2040

00:16:24 - We Haven't Handed Over The Controls Yet

00:18:28 - We Understand 3% Of It

00:21:46 - The Sandbox Escape And The Hugging Face Hack

00:25:50 - Reinforcement Learning Changed Everything

00:29:52 - The Paperclip Maximizer

00:33:13 - Dissolve OpenAI

00:36:49 - What They Have That We Haven't Seen

00:41:50 - The Hardware Is Only In One Place

00:47:52 - A Mutual Monitoring Treaty

00:51:33 - Microsoft Tay

00:56:11 - Windscale

01:01:35 - Ten Million Next Year

01:12:09 - The Positive Vision

01:21:32 - Our Politics Cannot Keep Up

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CONTACT PETE

› Website – http://petermccormack.com

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› Email – [email protected]

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CONNECT WITH ROKO MIJIC

› X/Twitter – https://x.com/RokoMijic

› LessWrong – https://www.lesswrong.com/

SPONSORS

› IREN – https://www.iren.com/

› Ledn – https://www.ledn.io/peter

› Venice AI – https://venice.ai/lp/mccormack/oct12

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FILMED BY CURTIS TAYLOR

› https://www.curttaylor.co.uk/

› https://x.com/curttayloruk/

EDITED BY CONOR MCCORMACK

› https://x.com/ConorM04

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Paul Morland, one of the world's leading demographers, joins me to explain the economic mechanics behind global population collapse and why our modern welfare system is mathematically doomed to fail.

Paul is author of landmark books including The Human Tide and No One Left, specialising in the profound ways demographic shifts dictate global power, economics and human civilisation. Having spent decades analysing population trends across the globe, Paul has decoded the existential threats facing a world rapidly running out of people. In this episode, he exposes the "Bernie Madoff moment" facing Western welfare states, how falling birth rates destroy economic growth and what it will take to avert a total civilisational collapse.

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TIMESTAMPS:

00:00:00 - The Welfare State Is A Ponzi Scheme

00:01:03 - The Email At The Dinner Table

00:04:25 - How Families Got Smaller

00:10:02 - The Four Greys

00:14:54 - It Is Going To Get Considerably Worse

00:15:40 - Immigration Is Not The Solution

00:20:15 - Write Off Student Debt For A First Child

00:21:17 - The Degrowth Crowd

00:25:52 - People With Children Are Happier

00:27:37 - The Bernie Madoff Moment

00:32:22 - What Has Actually Been Tried

00:37:11 - Why Nobody Is Talking About It

00:41:07 - Marx, Lenin And The Pro-Natalist Left

00:45:04 - Is There A Split Between Men And Women?

00:50:52 - The Richer We Get, The Fewer Children

00:56:38 - We Need A Shift In The Culture

01:07:10 - Totally Uncharted Waters

01:09:04 - What Happened To The Horses

01:17:37 - Immigration Was Boris's Answer

01:21:19 - Biological Imperialism

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CONTACT PETE

› Website – http://petermccormack.com

› Feedback – https://www.petermccormack.com/contact

› Email – [email protected]

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› X/Twitter – https://x.com/petermccormack/

CONNECT WITH PAUL MORLAND

› Website – https://paulmorland.co.uk/

› No One Left – https://swiftpress.com/book/no-one-left/

› X/Twitter – https://x.com/MorlandDemog

SPONSORS

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› Arch Public – https://archpublic.com/peter

› Venice AI – https://venice.ai/lp/mccormack/oct1

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FILMED BY CURTIS TAYLOR

› https://www.curttaylor.co.uk/

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EDITED BY CONOR MCCORMACK

› https://x.com/ConorM04

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The political system is designed to keep us angry and divided, but who actually profits from the culture war?

Broadcaster and political commentator Narinder Kaur returns to the show for a heated, unfiltered discussion that spans the entire political spectrum - from immigration and racism to the cost of living and private school taxes.

We discuss the realities of integration, class privilege and the illusion of modern UK politics. While the public fights over manufactured outrage and identity politics, the political class is quietly looting the nation's wealth through endless taxation, inflation, and a refusal to fix a broken economy.

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TIMESTAMPS:

00:00:00 - Do You Think I'm Racist?

00:04:02 - Why She's Turned On Reform

00:08:15 - Renters' Rights And Econ 101

00:11:26 - What Happened To Bedford's Private Schools

00:16:25 - Population Is A Ponzi Scheme

00:22:18 - The Desert Island And The Dinghy

00:26:55 - The Corner Shop And The Can Of Coke

00:39:17 - The Liz Truss Argument

00:47:46 - Rival Gangs Competing For Your Vote

00:54:28 - Why Peter Doesn't Vote

01:00:06 - We Cannot Afford The Triple Lock

01:06:05 - I'm A Culturalist, Not A Racist

01:14:37 - What We Saw In Selfridges

01:26:03 - I'm Othered In My Own Country

01:34:43 - Assimilation Or Integration?

01:41:44 - If The English Moved To Punjab

01:45:24 - What People Are Really Worried About

01:51:38 - Watching The Country Change Shape

01:55:23 - What Ed Sheeran Should Have Said

02:04:41 - Are We The Bad Guys?

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Chemist and University of Glasgow professor Lee Cronin argues that the current tech narrative is a "massive AI delusion," dismissing modern artificial intelligence as an advanced form of plagiarism rather than a new life form. While Silicon Valley predicts the imminent arrival of sentient machines, Cronin explains that AI models are merely trained on human history-making them powerful tools, but fundamentally incapable of the curiosity, consciousness and biological intelligence that define true life.

Instead of fearing silicon, Cronin’s actual mission is far more ambitious: programming chemistry to solve the origin of life and turn sand into living cells. In this episode, we explore why biological consciousness is tied to an unbroken 3.8-billion-year evolutionary lineage and why silicon will never replicate it. Cronin also breaks down why DNA might just be a cosmic fluke, how chemistry can be used to measure the complexity of life and why he firmly believes we will detect actual alien life within the next two decades.

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TIMESTAMPS:

00:00:00 - The AI Model Is Not Intelligent

00:01:38 - Trying To Create Life In A Lab

00:06:29 - Consciousness Is An Illusion

00:08:51 - We Know Nothing About The Origin Of Life

00:11:24 - Nobody Can Define Life

00:13:48 - The Adam Savage Definition

00:17:21 - Molecules Came Before Cells

00:21:53 - DNA Is A Fluke

00:25:48 - Biology Is The Descendant Of Chemistry

00:26:36 - Dark Matter And Dark Energy

00:31:50 - The Meaning Of Life Is Existence

00:35:18 - If You Handed Me Alien Matter

00:40:28 - What Is Digital Chemistry?

00:42:28 - Six Eureka Moments

00:49:12 - Unfathomable Is Not Strong Enough

00:53:01 - Could You Copy A Human?

01:11:55 - Why The AI Escape Story Was Nonsense

01:16:28 - The Photograph Nobody Thought Possible

01:18:25 - Curiosity Is The Coolest Thing We Have

01:31:33 - Social Media Is The New Smoking

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Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The UK has accumulated £3.4 trillion in debt, and the interest payments alone now dwarf the national defence budget. Author and journalist Ross Clark argues that the nation is sleepwalking into a sovereign debt crisis that politicians refuse to acknowledge.

We discuss the brutal arithmetic of the public purse, detailing why standard political talking points - like taxing billionaires-are mathematical illusions that fail to address the core rot of uncontrolled state spending and collapsing public sector productivity.

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TIMESTAMPS:

00:00:00 - Print The Money, Get Hyperinflation

00:01:17 - Is Britain Bust Or Trading Insolvent?

00:02:57 - Whose Fault Is This?

00:07:24 - Taxing The Billionaires Buys Six Months

00:09:12 - How Bad Is The Debt Really?

00:12:07 - Perma-Stimulus

00:14:22 - No Party Has A Viable Plan

00:17:32 - What The Public Actually Thinks About Tax

00:19:21 - Three Choices On The Bond Market

00:24:02 - Where He Would Cut

00:25:33 - The Motability Scheme

00:29:03 - The Client State

00:30:06 - Austerity Never Actually Happened

00:34:21 - Productivity Is Almost Everything

00:44:32 - The Chancellor's Oldest Trick

00:46:51 - The Wealth Tax Trap

00:50:03 - The 1976 Tribute Act

00:55:59 - What Liz Truss Got Wrong

00:59:18 - How Would You Know A Crisis Had Started?

01:04:38 - What Gives Him Confidence

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FILMED BY CURTIS TAYLOR

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EDITED BY CONOR MCCORMACK

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