“The Symbolic Power of Trump’s Wall” Transcript

Michael Epstein: Welcome to Mind of State, a podcast series on the intersection of politics and psychology. I’m Michael Epstein.

Betty Teng: And I’m Betty Teng. And together, we are your hosts for Mind of State.

Michael: Today on the show, we have Tom Singer, M.D.. Tom is a Jungian psychoanalyst and psychiatrist with a lifelong interest in symbols. Tom serves as the president of ARAS, the Archives for Research into Archetypal Symbolism. A mouthful. For a number of years, Tom has been researching cultural complexes in different parts of the world and written several books on the subject.

Betty: This episode was recorded remotely after the first of the year, when the government shutdown had only been in effect for six days.

Michael: And we invited Tom’s dogs to participate–

Betty: And they did very eagerly

Michael: –in the podcast as well. So, yeah, this is a podcast that we recorded early, early in the New Year. This shutdown was, at that point, still new. So enjoy. Hi, Tom.

Tom Singer: Good morning.

Betty: Hi, Tom.

Tom: Good morning, Betty.

Michael: So, Tom, let me start by saying that I told my wife that today we were going to be having a conversation about the Jungian symbolism of Trump’s wall. And she just gave me this look like this is going to be the shortest lived podcast ever. Like, there’s maybe five people in the world who are going to be able to follow this conversation. Three of them are actually in the podcast. But I said, no, no, no, no. Look, this is actually really fascinating stuff and it is important. So my first question to you is, why should we talk about symbols or, really, I guess more to the point, why should we talk about the symbolism of Trump’s wall? Why does it matter?

Tom: The reason talking about symbolism at all and symbolism of Trump’s wall in particular is that the way we hear and think about the wall in the current media portrayal of the battle that’s going on about it is it’s all about emotion and what symbols do, the power of a symbol, is its ability to tap into deep collective emotion, emotion both in the individual and large groups of people. Symbols are particularly good, and they have been ever since man’s been roaming the earth, at evoking deep emotions, which short of short circuit any kind of rational understanding or explanation of things. So a symbolic understanding allows us to kind of grasp that what we’re responding to has deep emotional origins. It’s the key to the emotionality of the responses people have to, quote, the wall.

Michael: So it’s as if a symbol has meaning. In other words, right.

Tom: A symbol has not just one meaning. A sign would have one meaning. If you see a red light, it means don’t go through this intersection. A symbol, on the other hand, like the cross or the swastika, has multiple meanings, even for one individual. So a symbol carries meaning and its capacity to carry many meanings simultaneously that deeply evoke our deepest human emotions make it extremely powerful. All you have to do is say the wall and you’re off to the races in terms of the emotionality and the multiple meanings that it evokes in many different people.

Betty: So, Tom, are you saying that symbols drive us in the sense that they evoke emotion.

Tom: Symbols do drive us just the same as locomotion. If you look at the ancient cave paintings that are discovered in France and other parts of the world, in Australia and so on, they’re all symbolic images. They’re mostly about hunter gatherers. And they’re magical, potent images often, but also ritual actions, that drive people to action and to deep feeling.

Michael: Right. I think it’s interesting, a second ago you said the wall. You just have to mention the wall and, you know, people immediately, it evokes feeling emotion either for or against. But we don’t say a wall, right. It’s the wall and it’s already become an object, like a physical thing, even though it hasn’t been built.

Tom: That’s a really important point because it’s as if the wall is already real to us in our individual and group psyche even though the wall, as Trump invisions it, it hasn’t been built. It’s as if it’s already alive. And that’s what a living symbol does. It comes alive, whether it actually exists physically or not.

Betty: And how does it drive us? You know, you see a symbol like you are saying the swastika or the cross and now the wall. Emphasis on the. What about it moves us.

Tom: Well, it goes to the core of our deepest concerns, which actually at the deepest level are about survival itself. If you can touch something in a group of people or an individual that calls into question their very survival, you can bet you’re going to get a strong reaction. The wall is about survival, at least in many people’s minds. It’s about whether we continue to exist as a particular kind of America or not. So the wall actually is about American survival, as Trump has offered it to us.

Michael: And he’s brilliant. I mean, let’s for a second stop and as a Jungian, I’m curious about your analysis of how Trump talks about the wall. Actually, I mean, let me just stop for just a second and play Trump. This is a mashup of Trump on the campaign trail in 2016 talking about the wall.

[AUDIO]

Donald Trump: First of all, I want to build a wall. I will build a great, great wall. On day one, we will begin working on an impenetrable, physical, tall, powerful, beautiful southern border wall. And it’s a real wall. This is a wall that’s a heck of a lot higher than the ceiling. And we’re going to have that big, beautiful door in the wall. They built the Great Wall of China. That’s thirteen thousand miles. Here we actually need a thousand because we have natural barriers. The wall’s, probably eight billion dollars, maybe 10 or 12 billion dollars. The wall is peanuts. Remember this, the wall will be paid for by Mexico. Mexico is going to pay for the wall 100 percent. And I would build a wall like nobody can build a wall. I build great buildings all over the world. What’s more complicated is building a building that’s ninety five stories tall.

Tom: Actually, the first thing I want to say in listening to that tape, Michael, is I’m actually more impressed with the reaction of the crowd than I am with Trump’s words, because what he’s playing for are these, that tremendous emotional excitement that he is generating in people. People are thrilled by what Trump is saying. That’s what I mean by the emotionality of the symbol. Now, what I would say about Trump’s use of that, it’s interesting that he refers to the Great Wall of China, which actually started being built well before the birth of Christ, I think two or three or four hundred years before the birth of Christ. So he’s already comparing himself and his creation to one of the greatest creations in human history. So that’s–

Michael: And that’s in keeping with the man, isn’t it? Not a lot of humility.

Tom: It’s in, he’s not known for his humility. He is known for his grandiosity or his sense of his own largeness and bigness. And he’s equating himself with his ability to build as an individual, but that translates to the people who are listening to them, to our largeness as a nation and to making America great again. So he’s got a lot going on in the wall. He’s packing that all into the physical structure of the wall, which he’s comparing to the Great Wall of China. And that’s a symbol, that’s the power of a symbol to move, emotional recruitment.

Michael: Right. It’s fascinating because, you know, if you wanted to, if you said on the other side of this debate, right, that whether that’s for a different notion of immigration policy or the waste of a wall or the fact that it’s not practical or necessary, you know, any kind of rational conversation, facts, The Washington Post, right, or The New York Times or whatever, talking about it. It’s totally apples and oranges. You’re talking past the people that show up at these rallies, that support Trump, that believe in the wall because they’re not talking about facts. The wall means something entirely different beyond a rational barrier, right?

Tom: Yes, that’s absolutely right. And the reason, going back to the reaction, perhaps, of your wife who said, well, you’re going to have a, you’re not going to have many people listening to this, is that we’re having a tremendous emotional debate in this country, huge emotional debate, and there’s very little room for actual rational dialog or discourse or exchange because of the power of the emotionality. The reason you talk about symbols is to actually open up the discussion to include both the rational and the nonrational. You won’t have a discussion until you let the nonrational in and the symbol is carrying the nonrational.

Betty: So you’re saying that The Washington Post, New York Times, those who are talking about reality or fact–

Michael: Wait, say that again.

Tom: Wait just a minute, the dogs are, sorry.

Michael: Who let the dogs in, Tom?

Tom: They’re responding to the wall, and they are–

Michael: They’re very emotional.

Betty: They want to be on the podcast. I think Tom’s dogs should be on every podcast.

Tom: No wall.

Michael: Exactly. Was that the mail being delivered outside?

Tom: I’m not sure what it is, frankly, because they can bark at anything, although actually the dogs barking is a really interesting thing because we all need a sense of protective barriers between us and an unknown world, which is potentially dangerous outside of us. I was in Africa several years ago and I witnessed a group of water buffalo under attack by a pride of lions. And what was amazing to me was that the water buffaloes have a first line of defense. The old strong bulls of the water buffaloes, they create a protective barrier around the rest of the herd. And if a young water buffalo gets separated off by the lions from that, they actually will go out and pull the young buffalo back in before the lions are able to eat it. And then what’s even more amazing is that the older water buffalo in the defensive perimeter get tired and there’s a second defensive line that then comes and replaces them and so animals know about the need for a protective barrier. And what Trump’s speaking to is an animal instinct about protective barriers that gets concretized in the physical wall that he wants to build to protect us from some dangerous attack, whether it be drug dealers, criminals, whoever it is.

Michael: Right, but the problem is that those are often fictions, right? I mean, he’s tapping into people’s fears of the other and he’s criminalizing people who are seeking refuge, asylum. You know, he’s, and I think for a lot of us, perverting, undermining the notion of America as a beacon to build a wall. You can’t be a beacon for the world if you’ve closed yourself off. You know, you can’t get the streets paved with gold, right. The my grandparents coming to America for opportunity. People, immigrants coming for opportunity, seeking asylum, seeking refuge from the world. What you’re talking about is, and he talks, I’m going to read a tweet, right. He says, have Democrats finally realized the desperate need for border security and a wall on the southern border, need to stop drugs and human trafficking, gang members and criminals from coming into our country? Do the people who most, then he goes on, of course, to talk about the shutdown, do the Dems realize that most of the people not getting paid are Democrats? It’s a little silly, but it’s also really pernicious because he’s made everybody outside the wall, on the other side of the wall, is the other.

Tom: Yes. When I talk about the deep need for security and why the wall is so appealing, it’s not that I’m advocating or embracing Trump’s notion of the wall, but as a psychologist, understanding the power of a symbol, I’m trying to recognize what it is that moves people to embrace his ideas. It actually doesn’t have to do with whether the fear is real or not.

Betty: Right. And to my point earlier, so how do you, you were saying before, you need to recruit both parts of the brain, the thinking and the, or aspects of mind, the thinking and the emotions to–

Michael: The Mind of State.

Betty: The Mind of State. To have a dialog with folks who are driven by these emotions or recruited by these symbols. And how do we do that? How do we have this dialog where people are very driven by this compelling, I was compelled by that wall speech. And I could, I’m surprised that I was. So I understand this emotionality piece, but it’s fantasy as you were both pointing out. So how do we recruit reality into fantasy when fantasy is so compelling?

Tom: Well, actually, that’s one reason to have a discussion about symbols, it seems to me, because you’re trying to create the psychic space for people to begin to understand one another. And if you start off by saying, you know, everything you’re thinking and believing and feeling is an illusion. It’s unreal. It’s fear based. And you’re crazy for embracing the idea of the wall, which is actually how people feel when they hear us say that this is all an illusion and a fantasy.

Michael: It’s an attack on them.

Betty: Oh, I wouldn’t listen to them. I’d be insulted.

Tom: Yes. So you have to try and create a bridge, even if in today’s society, nobody seems interested in creating bridges of mutual understanding. But it would be my notion that to get any kind of bridge of understanding, you need to walk around the symbol of the wall and talk about what it means and the feelings that it evokes in people who are for or against it. That feels like an impossible task. But I don’t know where else you begin.

Michael: You guys have brought up two symbols in, certainly the symbol of the cross, right, the symbol of the swastika, the two countervailing, I mean they’re connected in some historical ways. But let’s talk about America. You know, one of the symbols, as you guys were just talking, I thought of the flag, right, because the flag is a very powerful symbol and it’s been used politically as an also very divisive symbol, which it shouldn’t be, right. I mean, we’re all Americans. We all have different emotional connections to our country and sense of pride. And yet this flag is not a, the flag is not a metaphor, right? It’s not. It doesn’t stand in for something else. It is its own living, breathing thing that has meaning for people. And it’s so fascinating to me that we’re now doing the same thing with a wall, and actually not even a physical wall, a proposal for a wall, a conversation about a wall.

Betty: A fantasy wall.

Michael: A fantasy wall. Yeah, but if you say a fantasy wall–

Betty: People get turned off.

Michael: Yeah. Tom, what do you think? Am I wrong?

Tom: I think you’re absolutely correct that the power of living symbols to move us with emotional reactivity is paralyzing the country. The symbol of the wall has brought the government to a standstill. It’s kind of amazing. But that’s the power of a symbol to move people because of its direct link to unconscious or preconscious or semiconscious deep emotional reactivity. As long as a group of people are seized by collective emotion about which they can’t think and there’s no room to think or no room to discourse or to dialog, you’re in deep trouble. That’s exactly where we are. The symbol of the wall has shut down the government.

Michael: Because it means security for some, fantasy for others, it’s worse. It’s you know, it’s on one side it means security. So if Trump gives up on the wall, he’s let, by his own definition, the Mongol horde through, right. He’s going to he’s imperiled, physically imperiled you. And on the other side of the equation, there stand those people who say that the symbol of the wall actually undermines the openness, the generosity, the freedom, the America as a refuge. The ideas of America, which people are also emotionally caught. Those two things strike me as utterly incompatible. And I don’t know how we move forward.

Tom: That’s precisely the point, Michael. That they’re utterly incompatible and that the wall evokes the emotional reaction of their being utterly incompatible. It feels as though it can’t be a both and the need for security as opposed for the need for openness and warm heartedness and generosity of spirit. They seem to be mutually exclusive. And when a symbol gets as concretized as that, you’re totally, you’re stalemated.

Michael: You’re immobilized.

Betty: Frozen.

Tom: I actually have the fantasy, and it’s just a fantasy, that right now it’s important for Trump to evoke and play with the symbol of the wall at which, as you suggested earlier, he’s a master, because he needs his own wall right now. He’s under ferocious attack and it promises only to get worse in terms of the Mueller investigations and other House led investigations. So when we’re talking about the wall at our southern border, we actually may be talking, or this is one interpretation, about Trump’s need for an impenetrable wall to protect his presidency. That’s how confusing these things get. We may not even be talking about the wall. The government may have come to a standstill because Trump personally is feeling so threatened and so under attack that he’s diverting and displacing this huge emotional energy onto something that was his original campaign promise, which was to get them out of here. His first talks were get them out of here. And the wall is the direct consequence of how powerfully people reacted to his say, get them out of here, whether it was Latinos or Muslims or anybody other than his fantasy of who we are as a nation.

Betty: Yeah. And you were talking earlier, Tom, about this wall of being protection against or meaning for survival. And so linking that to what you just said, this is not just about American survival. This is about Trump’s own survival or it’s become enmeshed. It’s become linked. And so we, that implies that, we’re not surviving, because if we need to protect ourselves from attack, if we need to to protect ourselves with a wall, that means that there is a threatening force. So when you’re, you were talking about earlier that we needed psychic space. Can you say more about what psychic space is?

Tom: Well. If you’re governed and motivated only by your deepest emotions, as you know well, Betty, it becomes impossible to have complex thoughts or to think at all because the emotion is so powerful. An emotion is not, emotion is not graciously inclusive. Emotion knows simply what it knows. If you’re a fan of the New York Mets or the St. Louis Cardinals or whichever team you root for, you’re not rooting for your opponent. You’re only rooting for the victory of your own team. When you get emotionally engaged with an issue, the capacity for thinking diminishes or becomes so extremely oversimplified that there can be no discourse.

Michael: Can I ask you, Tom, you know, one of the things that, you know, as for John Kelly’s exit interviews and other people have mentioned, is, oh don’t think about the wall as a wall. Think about the wall as a metaphor. Think about the wall as, you know, it means security. You know the wall, we know we’re going to have drones and all these other high tech things. The wall, I mean, literally, they’ve said the wall is a metaphor. Are they trying to find a way to walk back the symbol? Is that going to be successful in your mind?

Tom: It was, that was a very interesting set of exchanges to follow, whether Trump was speaking literally and specifically about a physical wall, and then the attempt in my mind, it was an attempt to walk it back and say, well it’s just a metaphor. But then Trump immediately came back and said that was a misunderstanding. He really is talking about a wall, a physical wall. He refused to let them walk him back because I think that’s where his shrewdness comes through. I think he understands that the physical wall as a symbol should not be diluted into a metaphor because that’s not where the emotional power of the appeal to the wall is. He wouldn’t let them walk it back.

Michael: And metaphors and symbols are not the same.

Tom: Metaphors and symbols are not the same thing because it makes it more complex. It says, well, we have a wall here and then we have some electronic devices there and we have some more men over here. And that already makes it more complex. Whereas the wall, there’s no complexity about it. It is what it is.

Michael: Right. I was thinking, you know, in this vein, nobody gets all emotionally worked up over metaphor. Well, my English teacher, maybe a–

Betty: A poet, MFA.

Michael: Maybe a poet. Right, exactly. If you were at an MFA workshop, you would get worked up over metaphors, but you get worked up over symbols. People get worked up over the flag as a powerful symbol. And the wall has become that. So if I can go back for just a second because you had said something that I found fascinating. Trump himself right now rightly feels under assault, the Mueller investigation, the Democrats taking over Congress, the multiple subcommittees within Congress that are likely going to start subpoenaing. And so you think he’s also mixing, there’s some transference, if I can, as a nonprofessional. Am I allowed to do that? Can I say that word?

Tom: Yes yes, even if it’s incorrect, you’re allowed to say.

Michael: We’ll edit it out. They’ll edit it out afterwards. Make me seem smarter than I really am. So is there some, in your mind, I mean, should we also be thinking about the wall in terms of the Russia investigation as well, or other things happening. And if so, what hope do we have? Are we going to be coming back here at Labor Day and having this conversation all over again?

Tom: Well, I think there are multiple walls that we are talking about. There is the defensive wall that Trump has tried to build around himself in terms of the Russian case. And that does seem to be, at least, there are cracks in that wall now. Things are quickening. The election of 2020 now is suddenly, sort of, upon us and I think he’s wanting to remobilize his base to get back to the core issues that they identified with. But you see, the wall is also not just about Trump and it’s not just about the United States. It’s actually about the whole world. If you look at Europe, they’re besieged with the same kinds of concerns about immigration. They’re terribly afraid of what immigration means to their own society. So Trump is not just reflecting a peculiarly American symbolic and very real issue about immigration and migration, but it reflects a worldwide problem, which is how defensive do we have to become in order to protect our own interests? And that’s a kind of universal human concern, right?

Betty: I’m just thinking about the fact of, you know, borders and walls and this globalization or the global problem and how it relates to globalization and how this symbol of a wall and how simple it is and how complicated globalization is with multiple trade agreements and–

Michael: And companies that don’t really exist anymore as a multinationals

Betty: Multinationals who function as countries themselves. And the complexity of these things that we do not understand, the financial markets, the derivatives problem, which I source as one of those fears that people have where the entire American economy nearly collapsed in 2007 in ways in which few people understand, except for some quants on Wall Street.

Michael: And even if you do understand it, there’s nothing you can do, right?

Betty: Right. Exactly. And so broadening it outside of Trump, like Trump might equal simple. Wall is simple and symbols are simple. And this antidote of simplicity to an increasingly complex world, which, you know, the Internet and the information revolution has allowed us to know more about. And I wonder, Tom, if what you think of this proliferation or this usefulness of a wall that Trump somehow has capitalized on?

Tom: Yeah, I think you’ve sort of nailed it, Betty. What came to mind, the first thing that comes to mind. is that because many of us really oppose the wall for all sorts of reasons that we’ve already discussed, it’s easy to overlook the positive function of a wall. And as I was thinking about this, Tibetan thangkas came to mind. That sounds very esoteric, but if you look at some of the deepest spiritual traditions of, in the religious world, in the religious mind, often when they’re representing what’s most sacred, it’s surrounded by a wall. You don’t get access to what’s most sacred without having protective barriers around it. That seems to be what we in the Jungian world would call an archetype that what’s sacred needs to be protected.

Betty: And why is that?

Tom: Because it’s vulnerable. Because what’s most sacred can easily be trashed. If you look at the news today about our national parks and the fact that there are no rangers or anybody else there, there are no support services. They’ve literally already been trashed. The garbage is overflowing, the toilets are overflowing. In order to have a treasure, you need to protect it. Otherwise it gets trashed. And that’s whether it’s a physical treasure, like a national park, or a spiritual treasure, such as some sort of deep spiritual insight into the nature of being itself, or an emotional treasure of one’s own vulnerability and sanctity. It requires there are defensive walls for reasons. And we need to acknowledge that if we’re going to have an intelligent discussion about walls, we need to acknowledge that in human history there has been a positive function for walls. Those of us opposed to the wall see the wall as evil or as negative, and we’re really missing something. And then back to your point, Betty, which is that we are being assaulted by so many different ideas, by so much information, whether it be the Internet or whether it be trade agreements, it’s all way more complex than any one individual or group of individuals feels that it can manage. And in that sense of being overwhelmed, including the threat of extinction because of climate change, these are unacceptably intolerable things to be able to think about. So you build walls around it. Climate denial is a kind of psychological wall against something that’s unimaginable. And I do think the growing complexity of globalization and information and Internet technology is deeply threatening to all of us. When you walk down the street and you see eight out of 10 people on their cell phones, you wonder about the nature of human communication.

Michael: But if I can, you know, when you guys we’re talking about this, I don’t see vulnerability. If I transport myself emotionally into the border states, and there’s certainly vulnerability and Trump talks about being under attack, but all the things that you guys have been discussing, say that the walls in Tibet, the walls in Jerusalem, it’s not just the thing that’s precious. It’s that inside is vulnerable. It’s precious, right? You build a wall because something has meaning and value and it’s really precious. And so if you don’t want a wall, what you’re saying is you don’t value this thing. If you don’t want a wall, you’re saying you don’t recognize how special, how precious, how totally unique it is and you’re going to deface it. You’re going to–

Betty: Expose it.

Michael: You know, yes, expose it to the elements. Expose it to–

Betty: Marauders.

Michael: –to the marauders. You know, even if it survives, you don’t see how precious, important it is, not vulnerable. You miss its importance by opposing a wall. And that, to me, I think, is also a huge part of this.

Betty: And I think it speaks to a fragility that there is, as you’re talking about, Michael. I think that’s the emotional component of this symbol. And in Trump’s, he kept saying, big, beautiful, tall, big, beautiful, tall, the shining doors. This thing was like, in and of itself, a trophy of sorts. And that, you know, it ceased to become a wall. And I don’t know what the door meant in the wall, but he had constructed this monolithic, beautiful thing in all of our minds that he feels maybe equates to the preciousness of the United States. I’m not really sure. But the emotion is spot on. He’s hitting, you’re right, Tom, he’s hitting an emotional core. And maybe both sides need to acknowledge that emotional core is important in order to have a conversation about this.

Michael: Yeah, if I can. We’re running out of time, but I’m going to say, you know, the interesting thing in prepping for this is how symbols of walls have different meanings at different times. And when listening to you guys talk about the sense of threat, the sense of change, the sense where you have lack of control in a multinational world, where, you know, economies come and go and you have no say over, and you don’t even get a sense that the politicians do, and thinking about Reagan standing outside the Brandenburg Gate. I went back and listened to the speech. At first I was amazed by how brilliant it was. It made me actually shockingly nostalgic for Reagan. But what he spoke of was freedom tearing down a wall because the wall kept people away. You know, the wall for Reagan meant something drastically, dramatically different, right. The Soviet Union built a wall to keep people in. For the longest time, we thought of walls as bad because of the Berlin Wall, say, and now we have a different world and we think of walls symbolically in a very, very different way.

Tom: Absolutely. The Berlin Wall was to keep people in. And the Mexican wall is to keep people out. They serve entirely different functions. One, we want to tear down and the other, we want to build, both in the name of protecting our precious freedom as we perceive it.

Michael: Let me ask you this last question, Tom. Let me before we wrap up. If you were advising Democrats and or Republicans in Congress, if somehow we’re going to end this stalemate and get back to functioning, and if, as you say earlier, the wall, the symbol of the wall, has completely frozen and arrested the functioning of our government. As a Jungian analyst, what advice would you give them in terms of how they talk about the wall or how do they talk to each other about the wall so we can move forward?

Tom: I think I would advise our leaders to try and do the same thing that we’ve just been trying to do, which is to have a real discussion about what it means to us and both the positive and negative reactions we have to the function of a wall and see if instead of having to be so concrete about five billion dollars for the wall or not the wall to reinitiate a serious discussion about immigration and immigration policies. All of this, actually, all of the talk about the wall has, among other things, stopped any real serious discussion about how we’re going to manage immigration in the future.

Betty: It’s distracting. It’s a distraction.

Tom: It’s a distraction.

Betty: We have to talk about the roots of the symbol in order to get past it.

Tom: Yes.

Michael: Well, you know, maybe they’ll start having conversations in the White House about Jungian symbolism. And that’s our hope.

Betty: We start 2019 with great aspiration, right.

Michael: Instead of, you know, whatever they are planning on doing, budgets–

Betty: Taxes.

Michael: –proposals. We should have Trump have a conversation on Jungian symbolism.

Betty: I’m sure they would have a lot of fun.

Michael: That’s our answer. That’s our solution to the problem. Tom, thank you so much.

Tom: Thank you.

Michael: So we’re 45 minutes in, which means our hour is up. Mind of State is a production of Mind of State Media, LLC and Hangar Studios NYC. I’m one of your hosts, Michael Epstein.

Betty: And I’m Betty Teng. You can connect with us on Twitter at Mind of State Media, on Facebook, and on our website, Mind of State.com.

Michael: You can also subscribe to our show on iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts. We’ll see you next week.

Betty: Thank you.