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Feb. 20, 2026 - The Glenn Beck Program
45:13
Best of the Program | Guests: Rep. Anna Paulina Luna & Axel Bouchon | 2/20/26

Representative Anna Paulina Luna and Axel Bouchon dissect Trump's UFO file release, Epstein plea deal irregularities involving Russian minors, and Prince Andrew's trade secret arrest. Luna defends reciprocal tariffs as a surplus-generating tool offsetting WIC cuts, while Bouchon details "The Party Line" experiment where 250 Republican-Democrat payphone conversations yielded only one negative interaction due to reduced cortisol. Ultimately, the episode argues that targeted economic policies and low-stakes human connection experiments can effectively bridge political divides and restore American uniqueness. [Automatically generated summary]

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UFO Files and Payphone Experiments 00:03:21
Well, it's Friday, so what the hell?
Why not talk about aliens and little green men?
This story just will not go away.
Is it real?
I mean, the things that have happened this week now lead us to a place to where the president says, you know, I'm going to instruct the Pentagon just to release all of the UFO files.
Is this real or is this a psyop that we've been being played for a very long time?
Also, some really cool, cool news from a neuroscientist who joins me on the show.
He tried an experiment putting a payphone in San Francisco and one in Abilene, Texas.
The one in Abilene, Texas, you pick it up and it says, talk to a Democrat.
And the one in San Francisco says, talk to a Republican.
You pick it up, the other side rings.
What did he find?
It's an amazing story.
Also, Representative Ana Paulina Luna on Epstein.
What is really going on?
What's out there?
And what should we be striving for?
Well, that and so much more on today's Best of podcast.
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Epstein Files: Victims, Co-Conspirators & DOJ 00:08:54
You know, as I'm watching everything that's unfolding with the Epstein files, I just don't understand why people are being investigated and actually seemingly going to jail.
For the first time in 400 years, a royal has been arrested in Prince Andrew.
He's not even, he's Andrew now.
And he is going to jail, but not for anything that he might have done with Epstein except trade secrets.
That's the thing that got him into trouble was he was passing on English secrets to Epstein, which is a whole nother ballgame entirely.
But I don't understand how we can say that he was trafficking, you know, women underage, and yet there's no Johns going to jail.
There's no, we don't have any who is he trafficking to?
Why don't we have any of this information?
There was a tweet that was sent out by Representative Anna Paulina Luna, and she said Susan Hamlin sent this email.
She took a plea deal and was given victim status under previous DOJ.
DOJ should look into charges.
Possible human rights violations were committed.
I say that based on other files with her name on it, these women don't get to hide behind redactions.
There are so many victims, none of which did what this woman did.
This needs to be reopened.
And she gives an email.
It just says, thank you for a fun night.
Your littlest girl was a little naughty.
And she wrote it to Jeffrey Epstein.
Now, Anna is with us now to explain what you might know or why you would say that because she somebody, the son, actually made charges against her, and they had to apologize.
And I think they paid a pretty big price for it because they libeled her, or so she apparently proved in court.
What do you know, Anna?
Who is this woman?
I don't want to get into anything that's libel, but what do you know?
Why would you say this?
I know that many, and this is based on what I've gone through in some of the files.
I've spent about maybe six, seven hours with the files directly and plan on going back in to see more.
But from what I've gathered and from what I've reviewed after looking at an FBI co-conspirator document, she was actually allegedly named as a co-conspirator by the FBI.
Ultimately, that was during Epstein's second run-in with law enforcement in New York.
And it wasn't just her.
It was a list of many other women as well, one of which was Gillene Maxwell, yet Gillene Maxwell is the only one sitting in prison.
And I think, you know, when we're talking about the crimes that were committed by Jeffrey Epstein, well, he didn't just do it alone.
And plenty of the victims that were trafficked didn't turn around and do some of the other things that some of these women who were listed as co-conspirators did.
And so I think that it's very interesting because you're seeing a lot of these emails come out.
A lot of these emails specifically are some of the more egregious ones, whether it was the implications of one that was written.
Also, too, there's a number of other emails where this woman continues to pop up.
There's also one where it's mocking a little girl talking about how she's protected by Jesus.
That was also sent by a woman who was listed as a potential co-conspirator.
And then a number of other emails that get into weird code talk.
I mean, you name it.
It's there.
But from what I've been observing, it appears that these women, whether or not they were, you know, trying to maybe replace Glenn Maxwell, whatever it might have been, they did engage in what I would say is trafficking of 10, 11-year-olds, minors for sure.
And it's not okay because what ends up happening is the American people want names, they want justice.
To be clear, these charges really did start under Bush administration 1.0.
And it does seem that there was a lapse of justice for the victims that were not engaged in these horrible acts against other young women.
But also, too, in addition to that, you have this question of, okay, well, why were they given these plea deals if they're listed in an FBI document as co-conspirators?
And I understand that some of these charges might be now outside of the statute of limitation, but I do think that the DOJ should reexamine these plea deals because although it wasn't this current administration's DOJ that did this, it definitely is now something that I think the American people feel that there needs to be justice for.
And then obviously, too, you have this aspect of, you know, I see a lot of people saying, okay, well, or they're assuming that some of these emails were written by men, but the fact is, is that from what I have seen, a lot of them are written by women.
And it's just, it's crazy to think that that would be shocking how many women.
Yeah.
It's, you know, I think people historically maybe think, and it's just in our nature to think that women might not commit, you know, evil acts.
But as you're seeing with this specifically, one email sticks out to me, you know, point blank in that I read they were basically trying to locate a young girl's birth certificate in Russia, and they were bringing her to the United States, I assume, on email traffic.
And in the same email thread, it also talks about a porn hub introduction.
And so the fact is, is that Jeffrey Epstein did have these girls.
You know, from what I've gathered, his preference was younger, very young girls.
But, you know, what he was doing is he was definitely bringing the ones that looked legal and likely weren't around people who were in positions of influence and or politicians, et cetera.
I think, you know, in Prince Andrew's case, I think that he has a lot of explaining to do.
And I do think also some people were aware of what he was doing.
But then I also think that there were some people that he kind of brought into his orbit potentially with the intention of compromising them and then exploiting that compromise material.
I mean, I saw the video of Donald Trump in 2015 saying, you want to know who Prince Andrew is?
We'll look up his relationship with Epstein.
I mean, that's 2015.
Oh, yeah.
And he said at the time, everybody knows it, which I think is true.
I think all of these people that run in these circles, they knew.
They knew.
So why are we not happened to the names?
Why is this not going anywhere?
Why are we not seeing a bunch of people being charged with anything?
Well, it's multifaceted, right?
So when we had our initial hearing with some of these victims and the attorneys, and to be clear, not all of these victims engaged in co-conspirator behavior, nor did all of these victims engage in trafficking younger girls, okay?
This was a select group of women that even after, let's say they were initially one of Epstein's victims, now when they became adults, they then started getting paid.
They liked the lifestyle.
There are some emails talking about, you know, 10 and 11-year-olds.
If I go through all this stuff, it would probably make you guys sick even just hearing this radio interview.
But the point is, is that, you know, when you're looking at, well, where are the names, right?
Like we were promised by the victims that they would give us a list of names to be able to investigate.
And at the same time, there's this massive lawsuit with Deutsche Bank.
And so what the attorney said to us when we were actually in the meeting with the speaker, members of Oversight, the victims and the attorney, is that from what I'd gathered, they were getting phone calls from people that were potentially exposed and or looking to settle.
And when you settle, you know, a lawsuit, and I'm not saying that these victims don't have right to financial damages because of the fact that they were exploited.
But then from what I gather, there's also an NDA that goes with that.
So I don't necessarily know that we will ever get the names from the true victims that were trafficked, but that's why I say I have a deep invested interest in at least urging and advising the DOJ to look at these plea deals because I do believe the women that were given some of these plea deals may have committed other acts.
Again, I will reference that email where they were trafficking a young girl in from Russia.
And then there's that porn hub introduction kind of correspondence.
For that to be said, you know, there's other things that they can hit them with, human rights violations, et cetera, that don't operate with the same statutes of limitations.
Trump's Trade Deals and Plea Bargains 00:03:45
And so that's kind of where we're at right now.
I think that that's the only way that you're really going to be able to figure out, okay, well, who knew what, who was doing what?
And I would say that the co-conspirators should not have been let off and they should have not have had their sentences dropped.
And I find it deeply disturbing that of the entire list of co-conspirators that we all had access to and we all saw, they're all women.
But guess what?
The only one sitting in jail is Galene Maxwell.
I know.
I've got so many things to talk to you and only about three or four minutes left.
We'd love to have you back and talk about the UFOs that we now have more information on, which is just getting bizarre.
But we found out the Supreme Court today said that most of the Trump tariffs are overturning them and he can't do that.
What are your thoughts on that?
I think Trump's reciprocal tariffs have been the reason why we've had a surplus.
And you guys remember during the first shutdown this year, we were able, or President Trump was able to offset Democrats cutting all funding for the WIC program known as Women Infinitions and Children given to lower income American citizens by using the balance and the surplus that he had from the reciprocal tariffs and then also the benefits for military, the 1776 check.
But it's really, really stupid economics for people to think that that wasn't helping the American people because it gave us a massive negotiating tool, especially with dropping the cost of product.
You're actually seeing it now impact the supermarkets across the country.
And so I think, you know, some of my colleagues are controlled by their donors and some of the donors even were trying to call me, getting me to work against the president, and I would not do it.
I said, you don't understand that this is actually also part of the trade negotiations and it's going to work out.
And it did.
And so you're going to see why people elected Trump is they didn't want any more of the DC policy as normal.
And unfortunately, in this instance, they got it.
I had lots of people call me and say, can you talk to the president?
This is, you know, and I'm like, no, that's not my job.
I'm not going to talk to the president about it.
That's your job.
You take care of that.
And I happen to believe he was working on something far bigger than anybody else could even understand.
Yeah, and these people are worried about, you know, how it's affecting their business in the short term, not looking at the long term, how much it was actually going to impact them for the better.
And unfortunately, a lot of people are very coupled with China, and they will only want to do their trade with China, and that's part of the problem as well.
And we can probably do a whole nother 10 segments on China alone.
But the whole issue that we have now is that we have a slim majority, and a lot of these frontline members are thinking that this will hit them in the midterms.
But as you're seeing, it's actually benefiting our country.
And, you know, you're going to see this thing with the favorite nations pricing, especially there was a group of conservative organizations, which I was surprised at saying that President Trump was basically embracing socialist policies or something along those lines.
And that's completely not true.
And such a terrible perspective to take because these same groups and same politicians are also owned by pharmaceutical.
And so, yeah, we have an uphill battle, but like you have to get in the fight and you can't just, you know, it's one step back, but we'll take two steps forward.
So.
Okay.
I've got 90 seconds left.
Tell me what.
Are we going to war?
I have not heard murmur of that.
I also know, though, that President Trump wants there to be a negotiation with the government of Iran.
And so I think that they should listen.
And I think that they take President Trump very seriously.
So I am hoping that we do not.
But also, I'm not a part of those discussions in the situation room.
So I don't want to speculate.
But I'm hoping that we don't.
Alien Invasion or Distraction? 00:14:45
I'm big that we don't.
Does he believe, so Mai, do you believe he needs an act of war from Congress for something like this?
You know, Iran on a few occasions threatened to assassinate the president.
And to my understanding, there were some interesting things that may have happened leading up to his election, et cetera.
I think that in itself gives him unilateral authority.
However, I am always going to err on the side of caution, especially when it comes to foreign conflict and caution against intervention wherever I can.
However, in this instance, I do not know that we will get to that point because, again, negotiating, negotiating tactics.
Yeah.
Anna Paulina Luna.
Always good to talk to you.
Thank you, Congresswoman.
Appreciate it.
Representing the great state of Florida.
You bet.
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Now back to the podcast.
You're listening to the best of the Glenn Beck program.
Let me just take you to the beginning of the week.
Beginning of the week, Barack Obama is on a podcast.
And he's asked, are aliens real?
And he says, they're real, but I haven't seen them.
And they're not being kept in, what is it, Area 51.
Okay.
Everybody goes crazy.
What is Obama doing?
Blah, blah, blah.
Then Laura Trump, the president's daughter, comes out and she says, what was it exactly?
My dad has a speech ready to go, right?
To talk about aliens.
You're like, wait, what?
What is happening here?
Then after that, you have the president coming out yesterday, and he says he's going to direct HegSeth to release all government UFO files.
Okay, so let's listen to that.
Can we listen to that?
I think it's cut seven.
Something that got a lot of attention this week.
Barack Obama said that aliens are real.
Have you seen any evidence of non-human visitors to Earth?
Well, he gave plenty of right information.
He's not supposed to be doing that.
So aliens are real.
Well, I don't know if they're real or not.
I can tell you he gave classified information.
He's not supposed to be doing that.
He made a big mistake.
He took it out of classified information.
No, I don't have an opinion on it.
I never talk about it.
A lot of people do.
A lot of people believe it.
Do you believe it, Peter?
Well, the president can declassify anything that he wants to.
I may get him out of trouble by declassifying.
We know illegal aliens, Prey.
Yeah, they're illegal.
Only illegals.
Wait, This is crazy.
You wouldn't be breaking the classified information rule if you were saying they didn't exist and they didn't exist.
That's not classified information.
Why would you classify that they didn't exist?
Okay.
So he violated classified information.
I don't know what that means.
And so then he says, yeah, I just might release all of the government files.
Now, he says he might do a lot of things on things like this.
And, you know, who knows?
But let me just take you back a couple of weeks, shall I?
There was a story in the New York Post, and I don't even know.
It was in our show prep, and I don't even know if we got to it.
But I thought it was important enough to include it in our show prep at the time so you could read it.
The bank, this came out January 24th.
The Bank of England has been advised to create a plan for the inevitable financial chaos that will result if and when world governments disclose the existence of aliens.
Former senior financial security analyst Helen McCraw sent a letter to the UK Central Bank urging the institution to prepare for the economic impact of someone disclosing the existence of aliens.
If such a disclosure should come from the White House, Cambridge Educated McCraw projected in her letter, the revelation will send shockwaves through financial markets and the banking system and inspire general unrest among earthlings.
I don't think, I mean, you got to go march out in the streets if you find out that earthlings, I mean, that the aliens are real.
I'm not.
I might actually stay in my house a little bit more than go out into the streets.
In the documentary Age of Disclosure, physicist UFO researcher revealed that George H.W. Bush administration convened experts in the alien field in the early 2000s, tasked them with figuring out the positive and negatives of revealing that mankind is not alone in the universe.
The group weighed the impact on 60 different aspects of human culture, including religion and the stock market, and determined the negative fallout of public disclosure outweighed the benefits for population at large.
Are we really that?
Are we really that fragile?
Jason, would you weigh in on this?
Do you really think we're that fragile on this?
That we would fall apart?
I mean, my faith is not so fragile that I find out that there's aliens that I'm going to lose my faith and stop going to church.
That wouldn't make any sense at all to me.
And I'm like, I'm going to pull my money out of the stock market because we have evidence that aliens are real.
What sense does that make?
I think there's a couple of different things.
Like, did you ever see that movie Contact with Jody Foster back in the early 90s?
Loved it.
It was really good.
And I don't know if you remember, there were like fringe, you know, religious groups that were coming out like in the movie.
I thought that was kind of very, I don't know, similar to how it would be today.
But I think the biggest thing, the big disclosure, people that are within the disclosure movement or were within the entire thing.
You see these on some of the documentaries, some of the guys that used to be part of the program.
There was this one guy that said the biggest worry was that if they come out and confirm everything now was economic.
And he went further into it and he said, well, what happens when a lot of these competing companies, they suddenly found out that some of the technology was based off of recovered craft and it was lent or given over to, let's just say, Comcast.
Let's just throw that out there as an example.
But all the other telecommunication companies.
I mean, come on, man.
Really?
We're like, we've got this alien technology.
Who do we give it to?
Let's give it to the cable company.
Another one, Fisher Price.
Give it over to Fisher Price and let's have them create the best toys ever.
But then Mattel is like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.
We didn't get any of that cool new toy tech.
Like, what is going on here?
We deserve basically reparations or we deserve compensation for everything that they got and gave them an advantage for.
Seriously, that is the scenario that they are the most worried about as far as economic.
Trillions and trillions of dollars that would now go up for grabs for them to fight over for.
And it would happen globally, internationally.
That is the biggest thing when you think about fragility that they're thinking about.
Yeah, go ahead, Ricky.
Ricky was there.
I think you're abnormal.
I think the fact that you're not worried.
I mean, you've seen the alien movies.
It never ends well for the humans.
And the fact that you're not worried does AI makes you abnormal.
People like me, I actually have nightmares about aliens invading Earth.
Am I alone here?
I'm serious.
You are alone.
If I hear that aliens are touching down or they're trying to contact, I'm finding your bunker in Idaho and I'm locking down.
Really?
That's, I think that's really.
How are you not afraid?
Well, because what are you going to do about it?
So you're just going to hang it up and not fight the aliens.
No, if I hear that aliens are on the other side of the moon and they're mounting an invasion, then I'm worried.
But if we find out that aliens landed on Earth in 1956 and they died and we have their bodies someplace, okay, well, we know those are real.
Now, if they say, and by the way, they're shapeshifters and they might be among us, then I freak out.
Are you talking about Nancy Pelosi?
Yes, I am.
I mean, then I freak out.
But if it's just that we have, we know that aliens exist, okay, I mean, I'm not surprised by that.
I mean, I would be very surprised if they're shapeshifters and they're here on Earth, but I'm not surprised.
As it says in that movie contact, as Carl Sagan used to say, what a horrible waste of space if we are alone.
I mean, think of the vastness of space.
All of this was created and we're the only forms of intelligent life that makes no sense whatsoever.
So I'm actually kind of excited by it.
I don't want to arrange the meeting.
You know what I mean?
I'm not like, hey, let's put out all of our Reese's peanut butter cups when they come on down.
They might like them.
It's not going to end well.
So I'm not, yeah.
Have you seen the documentary Mirage Men?
No.
So I'm bringing this up because a lot of the insiders are talking about in the chat right now that this could be or this seems like a distraction, you know, some kind of distraction operation.
And Mirage Men, every time the government wanted to distract you away from something, they would say, oh, look at the, this is like, they would filter it out little by little and say, this is evidence of aliens.
It does seem very, very convenient that every time a major story is going on, we get a new disclosure hint.
I don't know.
I think this is much more likely that this is a psyop.
I think it's much more likely that that's what's happening.
I do believe that there is a good shot that we have had, that we have intelligence that life exists outside of human life, okay, and earth life.
I do believe that there is a good chance that we know that.
Whether we have, you know, alien technology or not, I don't know.
I'd be interested to find out.
But I think this whole thing is much more likely a PSYOP.
I mean, you know, what would be the one thing that would unite everybody on earth?
People in space coming to get you.
So what is the PSYOP?
Are they trying to distract us from?
Is it war with Iran?
The economy?
I think that it's interesting that this is all happening the week of Epstein again.
I mean, when this story came out, you know, we should, we should, anybody who's an insider, anybody who is, you know, just do a quick search, line up the big stories, when the big stories came out on UFO and find out what was happening those weeks.
And line up the big stories and see if there's any correlation to big stories that came out those weeks.
For instance, I mean, if you start to find 60% of them also coincide with Epstein things, I think you have your answer on your PSYOP.
But that should be easy to that should be easy to check.
Run that through.
Get that to me.
888-727-BECK triple.
Isn't that weird?
You would never be able to do that a year ago.
I mean, the access to information that we have now is so incredible.
You can do anything.
And I don't think people really understand.
I don't think they appreciate the time that we live in right now.
Quick, enjoy it because, you know, as I said, I think I said this off the air earlier.
So maybe I shouldn't say it on the air.
But we all know that Elon Musk is going to turn out to be the Antichrist at some point.
But until that time, it's kind of cool to see everything that's happening, right?
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I saw this amazing video.
I think it was on Instagram last week of a guy who set up these like payphones, one in San Francisco and one in Abilene, Texas.
And the one in San Francisco said, talk to a Republican.
The one in Abilene said, talk to a Democrat.
And if you picked up the phone, it would ring in the other city and then people would pick up.
Let me show you what happened.
Payphones That Bridge Divides 00:13:24
It's an amazing experiment.
Let me play a little clip of what I saw.
We bought this payphone on Facebook Marketplace and then modified it a bunch and then changed the signage to say call a Republican.
And then we brought the payphone to San Francisco, California, which is the most liberal city in America.
And then we installed the payphone outside of Black Serum Tattoo, of course, with their permission.
And after we installed the phone, we then got on a flight to Texas where we bought another payphone in Dallas and drove it two hours west to Abilene, the most conservative city in America.
And then at an Airbnb, we modified it a bunch and had it say call a Democrat.
And then we installed this payphone outside of seven in one books, of course, with their permission.
And when you pick up this phone in Texas, it automatically calls the other phone in San Francisco.
And when you pick up the phone in San Francisco, it automatically calls this one in Texas.
The project is called the party line.
And the goal is to get people from different political viewpoints to have meaningful, not hateful conversations.
Because at a biological level, humans are far more similar than we are different.
And while political discourse often causes stress, human-to-human friendly conversations reduce the stress in our brains and activate the neurotransmitters, dopamine, and cannabinoids, which make us happier.
So the guy who did it is actual Bouchon, and he's a neuroscientist.
He's not some political guy.
He's a neuroscientist.
And he is the CEO and founder of Matter Neuroscience.
And his experiment was what happens to our brains when we're given the opportunity to find connection over animosity.
Axel, what a great experiment.
Thanks for being on the program with me.
Thanks for having me, Glenn.
Yeah, I mean, we try to really translate neuroscience into something you can feel.
That's kind of almost like what we do actually since a very long time, to be honest.
What did you find?
Because I've seen some of the conversations and they're amazing.
I didn't expect it.
Amazing.
Yeah.
Maybe I just take one step back to quickly explain what we are because we're actually a hardcore neuroscience biotech company.
And we started because today we don't really understand why people get depressed on a molecular level.
So the company, our company tries to find a biomarker for happiness and depression.
What we did successfully like last year.
So our medical program, what is one of our major activities is in Stanford with patients.
But then we realized that people who were in our studies actually became happier by just doing the study.
And that led us to creating our emotional fitness club, what is literally like a gym where you train the muscles of your brain, what is kind of your emotions.
And the experiment that you've seen is just a stunt of the fitness club, basically, the emotional fitness club.
So tell me, wait, wait, then tell me about the fitness club here before we go any further.
What do you do in the fitness club?
Like, and we take the example of the phone.
We have seen in the experiments in the studies that cortisol, what is the underlying molecule for all our negative emotions, can be overtaken and replaced if you give very strong signals of belonging, like oxytocin for family love or cannabinoids for just friendship.
And this works extremely well when you talk to people, preferably in person, but already when you just talk to them, we as a human species, we realize how emotions are kind of sounded.
And then we feel better if we are not immediately attacked.
And that was the experiment.
We felt like, hey, there's so much negative connotation in the media that is not like really human-to-human interaction that we wanted to reproduce the data we have seen in our study.
That when you calmly talk to someone, you are actually developing an interesting conversation because we are humans.
And that was literally, I mean, to me, huge surprise, very, very nicely reproduced.
So we had like 250 conversations and over 300 voice messages.
And we have not listened to all of them, I think over 200.
We have not found a single negative, aggressive conversation.
Unbelievable.
Okay.
So is this part of, you know, when you say just by talking, you start to feel better.
Is this part of the problem with social media?
We're not talking to each other.
We're only talking to each other via text.
So there's no human to human or much less human to human contact.
And that's why maybe we're starting to see suicide rates and everything else.
I think the connection to suicide rate is most probably a longer conversation where we need an hour together.
But I think that the key, the key thing, the key thing is indeed what you said, right?
If I can write something, I can be aggressive because I don't see the reaction, right?
And then if you just even look at what is shown in classical news channels, it's always like the peak of an aggression, right?
The escalation.
So we are selectively getting exposed to triggers for negativity.
What in our brain is triggering cortisol at its max.
And cortisol is like literally shutting down all the molecules that make us feel good.
It's like the ultimate stop signal for feeling good.
And a normal conversation actually restarts these.
Can you help me out on that?
Because cortisol also is the one that when you got to go, you know, when you got to get up and go in the morning, your cortisol level is very high.
I mean, I've never heard it put in such a negative term before.
Give me the pro and the con on cortisol.
Yeah, and you, good spot.
The point is we have cortisol activities in the body and literally as a neurotransmitter modulator in our brain.
And in the brain, it has a very negative influence on our mood.
So indeed, our body gets up and needs it to get active, but that is only a peak in the beginning of the morning.
But when we are chronically exposed to cortisol, we get literally molecularly blocked to experience good emotions.
And that was a little bit the experiment that we wanted to prove that even if you know, just imagine, you know, you will call a Republican.
You know, you will call a Democrat.
That actually maybe in the day before, you were like, eat these guys, right?
But then just when you start talking about the weather, when you talk about, hey, sandwiches, when you talk, I mean, this was the funny thing, like food was an interesting topic.
Hey, what are you doing?
And that was, I think, was really great.
It almost feels like we should have them in much more sense.
Everywhere.
I strongly believe.
I'd like to see you do one to Canada.
Americans to Canada, Canada to America, because it's, I mean, we just, you know, I know if we just talk, we're going to get past all of this crap.
That was the surprising thing to me on this when I was listening to the conversations that were coming back was they were not what I expected because it is talk to a Democrat, talk to a Republican.
So you would think somebody's going to pick up the phone and go, I got to give you a piece of my mind.
Instead, it was, so what's it like there?
What's happening around you?
And it was very normal.
It's weird.
Weird or I think normal, right?
So I also have to say, I mean, normal is weird now.
I don't know if you know that actually.
Everything is upside down.
But you see, for me, the scientist who only looks at molecules and cells, I cannot see any differences anyways between the political directions.
So for me, we are all the same.
So the key thing for me was actually to kind of just like help us feel that we have really a very, very strong similarity.
Interestingly, even when the conversation chasings moved towards political topics, it was interesting to observe that nobody was kind of subscribing 100% to everything of their respective power.
It was always like, hey, I don't like this particular part, but I like the other thing.
And so it was interesting that actually almost Central America, right?
So I'm from Germany, right?
There was a very strong center party, but we had it.
So in a way, it feels like in the middle, most probably even 90% in the middle, most probably agree on a lot of things.
I'm not saying everything, but it sounded like almost everything.
I know.
Was there a conversation that you did here that really struck you as unique or important?
So actually several, because it was just like everybody just wanted to be okay.
So it was just topics to where you are okay.
It was about food.
It was about how is the weather.
It was about how, what do you do today?
How is the family?
So like literally the foundation of being just okay.
And that, when you hear it over and over again, that was, I think, the remarkable thing that across, I would almost say 90% of the conversations, that was the joint false, like just be okay.
And so, so I couldn't kind of pick one that is an outlier on this.
But I think what's interesting for us is that we received, and that's so confirming, right?
We received, I think, one email with negative writing.
So all voice messages, everything with voice was okay.
Writing was negative.
We got only one negative.
Interesting.
Interesting.
I hear this from so many people on both sides of the aisle.
When you go out into the real world, not Washington, not the Mediascape, not any, you're actually out in the real world.
And you hear this from people.
They're just tired of all of this.
They just, they just, can't we just, can we just go back to being normal people again?
And it's good to see that that's not just something that you kind of feel it.
It's actually you're proving it to be real.
Yeah.
You know, go ahead.
Just add one thing because I lived in the US, worked in the US, and moved a lot around the world.
Now I'm just living in Germany at the moment.
But for me as an outsider, just like to send that message to the US that you were basically the foundation, for instance, for my life, I would not be standing here without you guys.
So what unites you is so strong and so unique that I'm running a US company, right?
So therefore, when I see it, it's like just so bad.
It's just not necessary, right?
So it just feels if you would all kind of come together and think about your absolute uniqueness and kind of building the craziest stuff and even achieve it.
That is kind of just like what unites everything for me.
And I say that as a little bit, we used to believe that about ourselves.
And there's just this movement.
I don't know how big it is, but there is this movement and it is taken a real hold in social media, et cetera, that America should be ashamed of itself, that it's not unique in the world, that it's, you know, it's a failure, where a lot of Americans look at this and go, yeah, you know, we do suck on a lot of things.
Like every country sucks on things.
We've had bad moments in our history, et cetera, et cetera.
Every country has had that.
But there is something unique here.
And that was the unum that used to hold us together in E pluribus unum.
It was these rights that we all had.
And, you know, I'll defend with my life your right to say something that I disagree with, but you have a right to say it.
And that's what made us unique.
Yeah.
It is, it is the uniqueness here.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Let's just get back there.
That's the whole thing.
I mean, if we join, if we join the forces, we will get back there.
I can just say that.
I just remember myself as a little boy standing there in Germany, right?
It was still like, and getting the feelings from the USGIs was amazing.
I can just say that.
It's like it was unique.
It's a unique set of genes, I would even say.
Axel, I cry easily, so this is not a big hurdle to cross here, but that, I mean, that means so much to me.
And I think a lot of Americans hearing that.
Thank you for saying that.
Connecting Elders and Students 00:01:02
I think you guys.
Are the phone booths going elsewhere?
It's interesting now.
We wanted to do it 30 days.
And now there's interest to just leave it open and just let it go.
So we're just discussing with both.
We had some ideas from the users whether we should do phone booth in an elderly home and in a college so that the old and young may just talk to each other.
What I think is another interesting idea.
And they're just like looking, sorting out whether that's possible.
Your company, you can find it.
The website is matter.xyz.
Matter.xyz.
I'd like to have you on again to talk about what you guys do on your, you know, your mental gym, if you will.
It's matter neuroscience.
Find it at matter.xyz.
Axel, thank you very much.
God bless.
I thank you.
Thanks so much.
Have a good day.
You bet.
Doesn't that make you feel good?
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