Episodios

  • Starting and Scaling up a Business with Claire Ansell
    May 7 2025
    Starting a business is a big decision, and people do it for different reasons. Maybe you have a passion you really care about, or you just want more freedom in how you spend your time. For some, it's about doing something different from the usual 9-to-5 job and having control over their own path. But what does it really take to start a business—and is passion enough to keep you going? In this episode, I have Clara Ansel, CEO and Founder of Business Powerhouse. Clara shares valuable insights into managing business growth sustainably without burning out. The conversation delves into the importance of having a clear destination or 'Point B,' the role of mindset in business success, and practical steps to avoid chaos and inefficiency. Clara also discusses the significance of decluttering one's mind and surroundings, actionable advice for aspiring entrepreneurs, and her personal journey from corporate consultancy to empowering small business owners. Tune in to learn more! --- Listen to the podcast here: Starting and Scaling up a Business with Claire Ansell Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidotes to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. Today, I want to talk to you all about starting and scaling up businesses. Now, perhaps you have your reasons for wanting to start a business and, usually, it's about passion that you have or just the desire to have a life where you have a little bit more autonomy over what you do and when you do it, something other than the corporate life, but maybe you're looking at these processes of starting a business and seeing how daunting the process is, how much it really goes on, especially if you do end up with an investor that expects you to scale or if you personally have the desire to scale because whatever mission you're serving, you're kind of wanting to bring to more or more people. My guest today is Claire Ansell, and she is the CEO and founder of Business Powerhouse and she has some good thoughts about how we could go about managing this whole process without kind of burning out, without kind of ending up doing too much in a more sustainable fashion. --- Claire, welcome to the program. Hey, Stephen. How are you? I'm doing pretty well today. It's actually a nice 70 degrees here. Nice. That's good. Summer is coming. It always feels nice at this time of year. How are you today? I'm pretty good. It’s been an exciting day with doing lots of –– actually like in the same realm as what you're talking about. We launched a new kind of series in our hub called Awaken, which is all about mindset so it's pretty exciting to be jumping on here with you today and kind of continuing the conversation. Yeah, and that's a good place to start. We can talk a little bit about mindset because I'm assuming you work with a lot of people who are either starting businesses or have a business and they're just starting to become overwhelmed as their web traffic, their client base, something kind of picks up. Yeah, and I think it doesn't really matter what phase of business you're in, whether you're a startup or a ten-million-dollar business, the reality –– or a hundred-million-dollar business. I mean, I've seen it right up to 600 million. I mean, at some point, a business owner is overwhelmed in chaos and facing that burnout. It's just the reality of the way in which we structure and grow our businesses. Now, given your role in your business, is there any way to prevent that burnout? Is there any way someone that's starting a business now can adopt either a mindset or a set of operational practical you want to start a business but you don't want to burn yourself out? Yeah, 100 percent, and I think one of the biggest pieces the business owners really miss is they don't understand what their point B is. We talk about point A is where you are today and point B is where are you going in the future and that could be at ...
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    46 m
  • Understanding HRV and Managing Stress with Matt Bennett
    Apr 30 2025
    Stress is part of life, but learning how to handle it well can make a big difference for your health and well-being. When we don’t have the right tools, even small problems can start to feel overwhelming. The good news is, there are easy ways to bounce back and stay on track. But what if there was a way to actually measure how well you're handling stress? In this episode, I talk with Matt Bennett, founder of Optimal HRV. We dive into heart rate variability (HRV) and how it relates to your body’s ability to recover from stress. Matt shares how HRV tracking can give you early signs of health issues before symptoms even show up. He also talks about affordable tools and breathing techniques that can help anyone improve their stress response and build resilience. --- Listen to the podcast here: Understanding HRV and Managing Stress with Matt Bennett Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. Today, I want to talk to you about stress and, in some aspect, our response to stress, because that’s one of the things that can really get in the way of us following our passions, and you can easily ruin a good reputation you built with one terrible stress response and that’s something that is really sad to see because we all are human and we all have the times where we don’t quite respond the right way but it can be a little bit difficult. So, one of the tools that a lot of people are using to manage their stress as well as their overall health is HRV which, my guest today, Matt Bennett, the owner and founder of Optimal HRV, is going to talk to us more about. --- HRV is the heart rate variability and, Matt, welcome to the program. Thanks for having me. Big fan of the show so it’s an honor to be on. Thank you so much for coming on and I want to start off with explaining to the audience to make sure we’re all oriented, I know some people are probably pretty familiar with what HRV is, others maybe not as much, but I think most people probably aren’t familiar with it and its significance on the level that you are. Really, when you get down to what is heart rate variability, it’s your body and mind’s ability to handle or recover from stress. And, as you said in your intro, the stress response is so fundamental to everything we do. Now, stress can be an illness. Stress can be a very, very difficult workout. Stress is often you talk about on your show, can be, I’ve got five, six hours of screen time today and we know that can add stress to the system as well. So, your ability to handle or recover from stress is the best foundational definition for heart rate variability that I have seen. Now, we’re doing that by measuring millisecond variations in your heartbeat, and I’m happy to explore the science behind that, but that gives us, I think, a good working definition to start out our conversation with. So you’re talking about like millisecond variance in heart rate and some people might be thinking why there should be variance at all because one of the key aspects of it that might be good to orient people to is that is there a too low, a too high number, or is it just a matter of keeping it at or above a certain level? Right. So, we’re in a time where consistency is usually leading to a good outcome. You and I want to turn our computers on and, for the most part, we want it to do the same thing it did yesterday and the day before. You don’t want to sit in your car and have it operate totally different than it did the last time you drove it. In this high tech environment, mechanized environment that we modern humans live in, consistency is usually equated with good quality. We are biological systems so this variation is actually a positive thing. Now, you could have variation in your heartbeats to an extent where you have a medical issue, arrhythmias and other things are obviously not what we’re talking about here and those need t...
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    50 m
  • Healing Emotional Trauma and Understanding Energy with Regard Tang
    Apr 22 2025
    We can’t remove emotion from our lives — it’s always been there since the beginning. Sometimes, when we’re making big life decisions, we have to face and work through past trauma. That trauma can show up in different ways. So how do we start to heal? In this episode, I talk with Regard Tang, an energy healer and channeler who focuses on emotional and social trauma. We chat about how our childhood and our parents’ influence shape our emotional habits as we grow up. Regard shares why it’s important to deal with emotional and generational trauma so we can live healthier lives. She also explains how energy healing works, including how she connects with a person’s ancestors and spirit guides to help uncover and release deep emotional pain. --- Listen to the podcast here: Healing Emotional Trauma and Understanding Energy with Regard Tang Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. When we are preparing for whatever our next move is, oftentimes that will be starting a business, starting a new initiative, or starting a new chapter in our lives, we need to do various things to, whether it be purge the old chapters or just kind of heal, reset ourselves, oftentimes, that will involve kind of overcoming or processing some trauma from previous areas of our lives, and that can take on many different forms, but it is a very important thing that I think a lot of people don’t necessarily think of of why am I in this mentality where I don’t seem to ever be able to get a move on what I’m doing or make a decision or really kind of go for what I’m going for. And so I want to present with you various different forms in which we can heal the trauma, because there’s many different ways that we can process our energy. Today, my guest is Regard Tang, and she is an energy healer and a channeler. --- Regard, welcome to the program. Thank you for having me, Stephen. Thank you so much. And I want to start this podcast with a quick explanation, because I’m bringing on a concept that may be new to a lot of people about the two things that you do, which are energy healing and channeling. By energy healing, what does that mean? What does that really entail? So, energy healing, we all carry different kind of energy. Some people, they carry a little bit like a heavier energy and I’m sure that when you walk into the room, you can just stand –– the room is carrying those very heavy energy versus when you’re seeing some people that they’re very bubbly and they’re just like lighter, they light you up. So energy healing, what I do? I do channeling. So energy healing, you can go to sound healing, you can go to reiki. There’s a lot of different methods, but for me, I specialize in channeling. What does channeling mean? It means that I can talk to my client’s ancestors, I can talk to my client’s spirit guides, which is spirit team, and I can also talk to my client’s inner self, means that, because I specialize in emotional trauma and social trauma, so I’m able to tell are their emotion aligned? Means that they’re like, “Well, I experienced X, Y and Z,” but I’m able to tap into their emotion, it’s like, actually, it’s not exactly what you feel on their surface. I can feel very, very deep emotions that they literally put it in the box and put it away when they were younger. And, of course, in a minute, we’ll explain a little bit more, but that is what I do. Okay. And so I want to start the beginning of the story, which is these emotions that are pushed away and the energy that people all kind of come out in the room, because it sounds like this is something that could be really limiting some people from living their best lives and really presenting themselves in a way. So, what does it look like for someone whose energy is not aligned because of an emotional baggage from the past? What does it feel like when you walk into a room and you encounter that person and...
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    Menos de 1 minuto
  • How to Effectively Communicate Your Vision with Alice and Ed
    Apr 8 2025
    Having a big idea or vision is great—but at some point, you’ve got to share it. Whether you're talking to future customers, hiring a team, or just explaining what you do, people need to get it. And it’s not just about what you say out loud or post online. A big part of it starts with knowing yourself—what you believe in, what you offer, and why it matters. So how do you figure all that out and actually get your message across? In this episode, I talk with Alice Marie Brink, and Ed Moehlenkamp about how to communicate your vision in a way that actually connects. We chat about the impact of social media, communication and leadership. Tune in, to learn more! --- Listen to the podcast here: How to Effectively Communicate Your Vision with Alice and Ed Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. Any vision that you have, you’re going to need to communicate that vision outward somehow. There is just no getting around it. At some point, someone needs to know what you’re doing, whether it is people you hire to enact your vision and do the communication or the communication that you do directly yourself for your vision. And when it comes to communicating your vision outward, there’s actually an internal and an external component of it. The external component is what we often see because those are the words you say or the words you type or the images you put out there. However, there is some also internal work that you need to do in order to understand what you’re communicating, understand who you are, and understanding, in many cases, what your value proposition is, which is important for anyone to understand why they should be doing business with you regardless of what your idea is. To talk about both the internal and external components of this concept of communicating your vision outward, I would like to introduce to you Alice Brink and Ed Moehlenkamp with their Energy Interplay Initiative. --- Alice, Ed, welcome to the program. Thank you. Thank you. Nice to see you. Great to see you as well. And so just to orient us a little bit, we’ll start with you, Alice, as the internal component, which is the first component, and you work with mindset, energy, and mindfulness. That’s right. No matter where we go and what we do, we’re carrying this internal environment with us and so my work helps people get in touch with that, become aware of it, and then learn how to drive that energy, because, after all, it’s all energy. And so, through exercises and then practical application, I love the energy, I’ve been in energy work for almost three decades now, and so that’s shown me a lot of different outpicturings of that. And so one of those, now that I’m with Ed, we’re applying it to our presentation skills offering. So it’s all about what you’re bringing to this presentation internally that drives the energy and the connection of your presentation.Share on X Now, when it comes to energy work, how much of it is kind of overall what energy you bring to every single day interaction, whether you’re attending a networking event, meeting with one of your employees, or even just hanging out with your friends, versus the energy reset that you do in advance of the actual presentation that you’re about to give? This is funny you bring this up. So, in almost every one of my workshops and in my coaching interactions, we get to a point where I share this favorite quote of mine, and it is, “Don’t let the weeds grow on the path to the dear friend’s home.” And I believe it’s an old Chinese proverb of some kind, but the dear friend is you, and so getting familiar with that path that leads you inward and tamping down the weeds, if you will, through repeated trips there allows that connection to be more readily available and to be more authentic to you and more in alignment. So, especially now,
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    47 m
  • Finding Balance and Emotional Well-Being with Vanessa Shippy
    Mar 26 2025
    We all experience moments when emotions overwhelm us, especially if we have trapped emotions that build up over time. In today's fast-paced world, it’s easy to feel overloaded with anxiety, stress, and negative news. How can we find balance and set boundaries to protect our well-being? In this episode, I sit down with Vanessa Shippy, an expert in energy work and emotional healing. Vanessa is dedicated to helping individuals release trapped emotions, cultivate self-awareness, and create a more balanced life. Through her work at Dawning Hope, she guides clients on their healing journeys by integrating energy healing, mindset shifts, and self-care practices. We discuss how emotional buildup affects our nervous system, why setting energetic boundaries is essential, and how self-compassion plays a key role in emotional well-being. Vanessa shares real-life experiences from her clients, practical tips on processing emotions, and ways to stay grounded despite life’s challenges. Whether you're dealing with stress, anxiety, or emotional overload, this conversation will provide actionable insights to help you regain balance. Tune in for an enlightening discussion! --- Listen to the podcast here: Finding Balance and Emotional Well-Being with Vanessa Shippy Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. Today, I want to talk to you about a common situation where we have some trapped emotions, and what I mean by that is you want to get some stuff done, you have an important meeting maybe or even just a list of tasks that you would really like to accomplish and do well, yet something someone said or something someone did just kind of stays tracked in your mind, like it triggered you in a way, and you don’t even oftentimes know why do I keep thinking about that but you just can’t stop thinking about it. Why was her tone of voice like that? Why did he slam the door? Etc. So, today, I want to talk to you about how we can possibly get past some of these and other energetic and balanced situations by introducing to you my guest, Vanessa Shippy, and she is the founder of Dawning Hope. --- Vanessa, welcome to the program. Hi, thank you for having me. Thank you and welcome to Action’s Antidotes. First of all, tell us a little bit about Dawning Hope. Yeah, so Dawning Hope is my business. I’m honored to serve in a way. I get to offer intuitive energy reading, clearing, balancing, and channeling sessions, and I’m actually also currently putting together resources and a guide to help people come into touch with their own energy and body. I typically will encourage this through like nervous system regulation and emotional processing, like through gaining knowledge and restoring balance to the mind, body, and spirit as a whole. I myself went from bedridden to feeling better than I ever have. My vision for my business is to let others know that even after the darkest night, the sun always rises and the dawn brings new hope. With my initial statement, am I even thinking about it properly? Because I guess I was thinking about a situation where, okay, this person said something like this, this person was in a bad mood and it’s weighing in my mind, but is that even the situation or is it about something way more than what happened yesterday, what happened this morning that I just can’t stop ruminating on? Yeah, so that can be more of the effects of what maybe actually happened. Typically, some of our deepest, you could say, traumas or trapped energies will occur in childhood. I personally have a theory that children are so open and, in openness, it’s a gift but it can also be a vulnerability, and so, oftentimes, the way that they perceive the world is rather deep and they can internalize it more than adults might just because they don’t have the same understanding or experience as adults. Say, if someone said something to you this morning and you’re ...
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    40 m
  • Navigating Life Beyond Screens with Dr. Joan Savage
    Mar 13 2025
    In a world that’s increasingly dominated by screens, how does reducing screen time impact our mental health and our connection to the world around us? In this episode, I’m joined by Dr. Joan Savage, a multifaceted author and former professor, who transitioned from academia to pursue her passion for writing. She best known for her gripping murder mystery novel Red Fever, which she published after overcoming a challenging journey, supported by her community. With a background in business management and a deep commitment to mental wellness, Dr. Savage spent years researching the significant impact of virtual reality on mental health, particularly for vulnerable populations like young boys and military personnel. Together, we explore the pervasive issue of screen time and its effects on our lives. Dr. Savage shares her insights on how social media and technology can lead to feelings of isolation, and the importance of community in overcoming these challenges. She also discusses the balance between seeking validation online and forming genuine connections in a digital world. This conversation is full of meaningful insights and tips for fostering authentic relationships while reducing screen time—so you won’t want to miss it! --- Listen to the podcast here: Navigating Life Beyond Screens with Dr. Joan Savage Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. One of my initiatives here in 2025 and something I’m trying to showcase is helping people cut down on their screen time. We’ve been seeing a lot more people take notice on how much of the excess time that we’re spending in front of what’s often referred to as attention grabbing or addictive technology is really impacting the lives we live as well as the mindsets that we adapt, so I’m going to be bringing on some guests from time to time that have their own really unique stories about how cutting down on screen time has changed their lives. Today, I would like to introduce you to Dr. Joan Savage. --- Dr. Joan Savage, welcome to the program. Thank you. Thank you. It’s a pleasure to be here. It’s wonderful. So, Dr Savage, like myself, has a lot of different initiatives in life. I think, traditionally, we’ve always thought of people as their job title, or at least for maybe about 100 years in the 20th century mostly where it’s like, okay, you are a broker, you are a data analyst, but we also know that, in life, people are way more than that so I want to start out by introducing you to my audience as all the different things that you’re a part of right now that you have done recently and are doing. Great. Too many things, I think. Well, as long as it make you happy, right? And it does, yes, you’re right. So, yeah, so you start by telling us about all the different things that you’re –- yeah, all your different things. So my –- I’ll try to do things backwards chronologically. I feel like that makes a little more sense. So, right now, my full-time job, I guess, is I’m an author. So, a year ago, I released a murder mystery. It’s got a little bit of eroticism in it but mostly it’s a murder mystery. It’s called Red Fever and it’s my first attempt at fiction so that was a nightmare getting it published. I was really blessed to have just so many beautiful people in my life to speak into that and help me get that done and give me the courage to resign from my job as a professor. I was an adjunct teacher for about three years at Florida Tech and I was so, oh my gosh, that job came at such a time when everybody was looking for a remote position when COVID had hit so I have no complaints about that. Although I never wanted to be a teacher, that’s just –- it fell into my lap. I knew it was what the universe was guiding me and, in COVID, everyone wanted to be home so I loved it. I took it, again, it wasn’t anything that I’ve studied for,
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    1 h
  • Healing Trauma Through the Body with Dr. Lauren Stefaniuk
    Mar 4 2025
    Did you know that trauma and stress don’t just affect your emotions but can also be stored in your body—especially in your spine? How can we release this tension and improve our overall well-being? In this episode, I sit down with Dr. Lauren Stefanik, a chiropractor at Wellness Rhythms, to explore the powerful connection between stored trauma and physical health. Drawing inspiration from The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk, Dr. Stefanik explains how everyday stressors and past trauma manifest physically, leading to discomfort and emotional imbalances. We dive into Network Spinal chiropractic, a gentle technique that helps release tension in the spinal cord, promoting higher energy states and better health. Dr. Stefanik also shares her journey into this integrative healing approach and emphasizes the importance of self-compassion, body awareness, and open communication for overall well-being. If you're looking for ways to release stored tension, enhance your health, and embrace a holistic approach to healing, this conversation is one you won’t want to miss! --- Listen to the podcast here: Healing Trauma Through the Body with Dr. Lauren Stefaniuk Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. Recently, I read a book called The Body Keeps Score, which talks a lot about the idea of all of our traumas, everything happening in our past, regardless of what it is, kind of being stored in our body, this is oftentimes things that we sometimes tend to forget about, forget about how it’s continuing to impact our lives, such as continued patterns in our childhood that we kind of lived through or even other kind of more acute lived experiences that could be one car accident when you’re 16 and now you’re 35 so it doesn’t really become something you think about in a lot of your minds. Now, there’s been some study about how some of these subconscious patterns continue to emerge through some subconscious programming, but here today, I’m here to talk to you a little bit more about how the body itself keeps score, how certain parts of the body kind of retain the memories of these traumas and how it can still be impacting what we’re doing today and how we’re showing up in everything around. And to facilitate this conversation, I’d like to invite on my guest, Dr. Lauren Stefaniuk with Wellness Rhythms. She is a doctor of chiropractic services. --- Dr. Lauren Stefaniuk, welcome to the program. Hi, Stephen. Thank you so much for having me. I’m really grateful that you have this awesome podcast and that you’ve given me the opportunity to be on it. And, yeah, I do network spinal as a doctor of chiropractor. We’re talking about how the body keeps score, and your focus specifically is on how the spine has kind of kept score of some of these traumas or other items from our past. Yeah. So, what we like to say is that what goes to the back of the mind tends to go to the spine and so what Network Spinal is specifically helping people realize is that there’s events that happen in our life, whether you call them stressors or traumas or just stressful events, your body actually doesn’t really know the difference between a massive stressor like something that we usually, quote-unquote, call “trauma,” or the small kind of everyday stressors, where we’re stressing to get to work on time or we have a deadline or our dog is barking at us and we don’t know why. Your nervous system actually doesn’t know the difference between a massive stressor and a small stressor. It really responds in the exact same way and, sometimes, that is responding by going into fight or flight. So, when we go into fight or flight, there’s a lot of things that people realize happens. So, your eyes, your pupils are going to dilate, your breath becomes a little bit more shallow and more rapid, your heart rate becomes more rapid, your muscles tense, all of those things people recognize,
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    49 m
  • How to Break Free from Screen Time Overload with Sumayyah Emeh-Edu
    Feb 4 2025
    We spend a lot of time on screens these days, whether it's for work, social media, or just relaxing with a show. It's easy to lose track of time, and hours can pass before we know it. But how much is too much? What exactly is the impact on our health and daily lives? In this episode, I talk with Sumayyah Emeh-Edu, Founder of Embedded Consulting. We discuss the impacts of excessive screen time and social media on mental health and the importance of connecting with people around us. Sumayyah shares her struggles with social media and how she observed its impact on her friends and family. Tune in to hear her insights! --- Listen to the podcast here: How to Break Free from Screen Time Overload with Sumayyah Emeh-Edu Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. And, today, I want to talk to you about a topic that’s really near and dear to my heart, as in I know I have my own initiative around this, which is cutting down on people’s screen time. I think you’ve probably seen in the news that we do have a lot of problems associated with the excessive amount of time in front of screens and people come up with different numbers depending on which particular study you’re using or if you’re considering phones, TVs, computers, and everything as well, but, regardless, it seems out of control and anyone that’s old enough to remember the world before smartphones and everything took it over can remember a world where we spent a lot more time relating to each other in person as well as doing things not in front of some form of digital technology and it’s hard not to make a clear connection between that and a lot of the mental health and loneliness issues that we’re experiencing today. So, today, I’d like to bring on someone who is kind of taking on an initiative in the same vein, in the same realm, Sumayyah Emeh-Edu, the founder of Embedded Consulting LLC. --- Sumayyah, welcome to the program. Thank you, Stephen. Nice to be here. Yeah, thank you so much, and thank you so much for connecting because it’s always great to meet and connect with anyone else who’s kind of observed the same issue. So why don’t you start by telling me your story about kind of when you first started observing this whole issue, I think it was roughly maybe 15 years ago-ish that we all started in mass adopting these smartphones and excessive social media and the changes started to be visible in everyday life, regardless of whether or not you saw it as a problem. Yeah. So, I was on Myspace back in the day, 2008 I got onto Facebook, and I didn’t really see it as a problem. I was just like, “Wow, this is awesome.” There was a couple documentaries that came out around like 2014, 2015 that I had watched. There was also a lot of ethical folks and whistleblowers that were coming out of all of the big tech companies. And it was just information I digested but, like most people, I’m like, “Well, that does affect me,” and I would say a majority of my time was spent on Facebook. Twitter was always too fast and I wasn’t even on Instagram at that point, and I had already been a person who didn’t have, for instance, social media notifications in my email and on my phone because it just takes up space and I just hate my inbox just filled with a bunch of junk, but I had been in higher education most of my early career and then I made the transition into diversity, equity, and inclusion in 2015-ish, and it was just interesting because the election was going on, the first election with Trump, and it was a lot of negativity, a lot of just ridiculousness going on from a political perspective. And then, on top of it, I was doing diversity, equity, and inclusion work and I was deeply impacted when I would see injustices go viral or, unfortunately, the murder of a black man go viral, and so when I heard all of this thing about how social media is addictive, how it can impact your mood, and again,
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    44 m
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