348: How to Experience More Everyday Awe with Dacher Keltner

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We find a lot of awe in the courage and kindness and humility and overcoming of other people. And it's just such a wellspring of awe. It's all around us. It's at our dinner table and at work. And we need to raise the profile of our moral beauty in this conversations we have and the like. And so I think it's a great moment when you think about our crisis of polarization and depression and environmental degradation, that this emotion can get us cheaply and non ideologically to a lot of good things.

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Here we go.

Welcome back Pivoters. I am so delighted to be here today with Dr. Dacher Keltner. He's a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley and the faculty Director of their Greater Good Science Center. He's a renowned expert in the biological and evolutionary origins of human emotion, studying the science of compassion, awe, love, beauty and how emotions shape our moral intuition. And I have to say his new book, Awe is as beautiful to hold and feel and smell the pages as this description of his work. He's also the author of a bestselling book called Born to Be Good and the host of a podcast called the Science of Happiness. Dacher, welcome to the show.

It's good to be with you, Jenny.

I loved the vast exploration of awe. I feel like you've written an awe inspiring Grand Canyon of the canon on this topic. So just first of all, thank you for this beautiful book.

Well, thanks for that description. I haven't been to the Grand Canyon, but to be compared to that is humbling. But awe deserves it.

Yes, you say that one of the big ideas and it's part of the eight Wonders of Life, the eighth Wonder being Epiphany. That it sounds like an epiphany of your research, is that we're part of these larger systems, and awe is, in a way, part of our engineering. It's, like, engineered into us to serve a specific function. So I'd love if we could start there. Of what's the evolutionary biological imperative behind awe.

Thank you for starting there. And it's often overlooked. We live in an era when you think about our digital immersion and Instagram and how fast we move and then the rise of individualism, all have given rise to what I think of as a crisis of narcissism or meaning. We're just too focused narrowly on the self and et cetera. And in point of fact, I think there are two things that awe does for us at an evolutionary level in terms of what its function is and how it benefits us. The first is it connects us to large collectives. Our sense of community and tribe and moral, group and religious, group and meaning, group and awe. It is a defining feature of human evolution. In fact, I think our signature strength, that we can be communal and collective, the contemporary world really works against that. There are epidemics of loneliness and just brief experiences of awe, our research shows, connect us to a sense of community and social integration. So that's one. The other is what you led with, which is really interesting, which is that we had this narrow analytical mindset of breaking things into parts and thinking about specific objects in front of us. But in point of fact, we are really part of large systems, many different systems, ecosystems. You and I are part of the environment, and how we behave influences the environment, and vice versa. We're part of cultural systems, like the music we love. We're part of family systems. We're part of political systems. And so often in life, especially today's modern life, we forget that. We think, oh, I'm just dacker trying to get all my tasks done and make a little money, et cetera. But the deeper lesson, and we hunger for this, is to connect us to these bigger systems that bring us so much meaning in life. And awe does that. It makes you realize, like Yumi Kendall, like Cellist I interviewed, that, you know, when she plays her music, she is part of the history of music. When I do science, I'm part of the history of psychological science. When we see our family members or our neighbors, we're part of these long histories of family and community. And awe awakens us to that really important lesson in life. We're part of these large systems.

Well, it's so powerful, how you say, it even could be considered our species defining passion. And you say at the end, that's a powerful statement.

It's so funny. Like, I've worked in the field of emotion for 30 years, and we think, oh, it's all about Freud. It's all about fear and sex, you know, or aggression.

Right.

And that view has dominated our thinking about who we are. But doing science ON AWE For 15, 20 years, interviewing people from around the world about awe for 15 or 20 years and then writing this book, it's like, wow. Awe is really at the heart of music. It's the heart of spirituality. William James argued. It's the heart of our love of sports. It's the heart of our relationship to nature, which is fundamental today. It's this passion that makes us feel connected to all these great sources of humanity. And as a result, like Einstein, who said, awe is the cradle of science and art and culture, I feel like, wow, here's an emotion that really is about really being our most humane humanity, if you will, of just like creating art and being part of a community and being part of nature at our disposal.

I love that you brought up William James.

Yes.

My dad in particular. He's been telling me for months now, William James, you gotta read his book. The title's escaping me. Maybe you have it off the top of your head. Clearly, I have not read it yet. But he's like, do not pasco. You got to read this work. So we'll be happy to hear it.

And in writing this book, awe, you know, we all feel a lot of awe, and it's so good for our bodies and our minds. And I review that science. But there are these people out in the world who are just like, awe defines their life. Rachel Carson, the great environmentalist who awakened the United states in the 50s to like man, all this industry is. Is hurting our natural world. Which we would have listened to her earlier. And then William James, you know, he was this very depressive, anxious guy and struggling, and he took nitrous oxide of all things, which is laughing gas, and had a spiritual experience like people would have today with psychedelics. And he's like, awe is really the heart of spirituality. It's like my feeling of transcendence and relating to the divine. And he wrote the Varieties of Religious Experience, published, I think, in 1912. That really was a radical statement that our spirituality is defined by all.

So powerful to consider that. And I'm glad you brought up the Freudian interpretation. And you hear people say that we're driven by one of two things. Either go Toward pleasure or away from pain or to procreate. So maybe that's three. It's so true that in these types of conversations, I don't know, in eight and a half years of this podcast, that's all I ever heard from a behavioral motivation standpoint. And yet the awe moments, and I hate to ask you to repeat yourself, you probably have to do this on every show. We could define awe, but it's like that's the experience that stops us in our track. So we might be unconsciously trying to avoid pain or go toward pleasure, but awe is the time stopping egolessness that you describe that imprints itself on ourselves so powerfully. And you're helping me have an epiphany of this eighth wonder of epiphany of those moments serve a function.

Yeah. And thank you for bringing up the models of the human mind and human being that have so dominated our world. If, you know, it's all fight or flight or sex or just pleasure, monetary pleasure. And I would say that those models have really failed us and they've given rise to what we see today, which is high levels of depression, anxiety, poor health in a lot of people when they should be healthy, and really a crisis of like, meaning and awe. Brief moments of awe. I wrote this book when I was grieving the loss of my brother Rolf, who was my spiritual companion, my companion in awe throughout my life. He died of colon cancer in his mid-50s and awe helped me find the way. Because we know from research and the stories I tell in the book that if you can go find a brief experience of awe when you are, I define it as being the presence of something vast and mysterious. It is good for your heart, it's good for your immune system. It opens your mind to creativity, it makes you share, it makes you feel like you have more time in life, you can handle stress better. And you start to see, like, this is what I really care about, independent of pleasure and money and what I'm afraid of. It points to like, wow, I really care about justice or bringing friends together and watching them laugh or taking care of someone, people who are vulnerable. So I think we're at this moment in our culture and people feel it viscerally and the data are clear. Like we need to open up our minds about who we really are and we have a need for awe, as Rachel Carson reasoned. And we need to figure out how to bring more of it into our lives. And I hope the book gets people moving in that direction.

I appreciate you mentioning your brother and a beautiful conversation you had with Krista Tippett. You were describing, first of all, how important he was and is to you. I wonder if you've had awe experiences with him in a way, even after he's passed. But you also say, right after he passed that there was a period where he felt awe less.

Yeah.

And I'm just curious if you can share a little more with us of. Is it that awe has a hard time coexisting with grief? Is grief so all consuming, like, I don't know, wherever you want to take it with this?

I think this is one of the most important conversations, Jenny, we can be having. And the outpouring of interest about awe and grief from this book has just astounded me. My brother, on his last night after battling colon cancer, with the courage and equanimity that I was astounded by, he passed away. And as I sat next to him and, you know, felt his shoulder and watched him leave, like a lot of people, I felt awe. I was watching loved ones pass away is horrifying. It's horrible. It gives you panic, as it did me. But it's also this vast mystery of life, right, that I write about in the book. And I was like, wow, what is life? Why do people we love so fiercely leave us young? What is that? How can I make sense of that? It's an existential wonder. And then after, as you say, Jenny, I fell into a state of awlessness. I was not sleeping, I was panicky, I could barely concentrate like a lot of people during extreme grief. And I suddenly got hit. You know, I was like, I'm doing all this research on awe and I know how good it is for you. So I went in search of awe in. I write about that in wonders like music and meditation and up in the high mountains that my brother and I used to go talking to ministers and figuring out why I love sports so much. And what it led me to is your very interesting observation at the start of this question, which is I started to realize, you know, I'm a biological scientist, if you will, very reductionistic very often. But I kept feeling my brother around me. And this is a deep human tendency. When people leave, when they die, we still feel them with us. I felt his hand on my back. I heard his voice. And that's changed how I look at the world and I know I feel him. It transcends my understanding of the mind and body. It gives me strength and wisdom. And I think I found that understanding about my brother's continuing presence through experiences of awe. In grief. And I think a lot of people now are thinking about grief post grief growth, post trauma growth and awe being an important pathway to that.

We'll be right back just after this.

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It's a fascinating experience you're describing with her brother as well, because that's interconnectedness across time and space, maybe even across. Everybody believes in different things, but from those who are here in the earthly plane to those who might be in a spiritual plane, I mean, that's. I don't know. There's just. It's so powerful to hear you describe it. And I'm often curious about that, too. I love asking people about how they feel somebody's presence still with them.

Yeah.

And I personally don't think it's just memories or just imagination, but it's not something that we can of course, scientifically prove or explain.

Yeah. And that's what's beautiful about these questions that hover near Oz. They're in some sense always mysterious and beyond proof. There's a Japanese monk is translating off or Japan, and he calls himself an ancestrist or something like that. And in Japan, a lot of cultures like Mexico, they have much more sophisticated ideas and ways of understanding how people who die are with us. And they are. You think about them, you hear their voice, you see the present moment through their eyes, as I do often with my brother. And he's an ancestress and he says his part of his practice in teaching people in Japan is to get people to think about the people who have died and are no longer here physically and how they're still with us. And to build that into our psychology and build it into our sense of meaning. And I don't think we do a very good job of that in the United States, obviously. And I think it's something. I like you, Jenny. I don't know what it is scientifically, but I think it's something we all should be considering as a wonder of life.

I mean, it even brings to mind the book the Hidden Life of Trees.

Yes.

Do trees communicate? Do they have emotion? Or is a rock a being in some way? Maybe it's a global thing now with globalization. It honestly makes me so depressed reading about what's happening to the oceans and the forests. And I know what's wrong with us. I will try not to get into a vent here, but always venting to my husband, like, what is wrong with us as a species? So it's this thing that, you know, nature is one of the eight wonders. Part of being in nature is also recognizing nature as worthy of existing. And I don't know where that came from, the ancestor, you know, the person you mentioned in Japan, but I believe that Japanese culture has more respect for the natural world. I think, inherently, in a lot of ways.

Yeah. And a lot of us feel this climate dread. And I think we need to change our understanding of, like you're suggesting, Jenny, how we, as a natural form, we are a species, are part of ecosystems with other species. One of the privileges of writing awe is I got to interview Dr. Yuri Solidwin. C E L I D W E N. She's indigenous, from Mexico, Mayan descent, works on climate rights and indigenous rights at the un and they have a whole other way of understanding our relation to nature that comes through reverence and awe that we are part of these ecosystems. And it is, and I hate to sound like a Berkeley cliche, but it is capitalism and individualism that separated us from nature and some forms of Christianity. And awe brings us back to this sense that we're part of the natural world. There are studies coming out of, from different countries like China, that when we feel awe, we do things that are better for the climate crises. So people like Rebecca Solnit are really starting to strongly make the case that to meet these climate crises. We just learned today that the water in Florida is hot as a hot tub. It is disturbing, but we have to also cultivate the emotions and passions that will reorient our actions in the natural world. And Yuriya Soliguin taught me that can be done. And it's through these transcendent emotions like awe.

And that connects to your work as well, which is that awe is serving a function and it's even morally instructive. I was very interested in the category that you describe about kind of moral greatness. I'm trying to find the exact term moral beauty. So stories or observing others with strength, courage, overcoming something, even kindness, that when we're awed by that, it calls something forth within us.

Yeah.

Who want to mirror that? You know, they say, oh, we're memetic creatures, but all can be mimetic too. Where I have a tag in my little idea collection bucket called exquisite greatness. I remember seeing Adele. You talk about music. I saw Adele. Any one of her performances. That's exquisite greatness. That's awe inspiring levels of talent.

Yeah. She's a virtuosa.

Yes. Okay. This is a slight shift in the conversation, a slight right turn. Psychologists also talk about the hedonic treadmill, of course, of material acquisitions. And I was wondering, is it possible that we get acclimated to awe in such a way that it is escalating what we need to do? So, for example, I would love for you to talk about awe walks. Could a person get almost numbed to a certain level of awe where they need more and more? Or do you think awe is unique in a sense that small things can still trigger it? Like we always still might be delighted by a sunrise and a sunset, no matter how many we've seen?

Thanks for flagging moral beauty. It's such an important concept. And just to wrap that up, I've been hanging around Patrick Gonzalez, who is this climate science activist here at Berkeley, who climate science optimism. And he lives this very modest life to help the environment. And he's so morally beautiful, inspires all kinds of people to take action. He's worth looking into. One of the questions that people ask about awe and we know that, is the hedonic treadmill question, which is can we become numb to it or exhaust ourselves from it? Or if I go after it, will I ruin it? And all of those turn out to be illusions. Yes, it's true in the world of sensory pleasure or material acquisition, when I buy a new pair of tennis shoes, I think they're the best thing in the world and they give me a little juice. But the next day I'm like, ah, they're just shoes. But awe is different. The way we learned this is we did this awok study with Virginia Sturm at San Francisco UC San Francisco. And I was really interested in the cultivation of what I call everyday awe. How can you find Awe right now, right around you. We've done a variety of different studies to show that that's the case. And in this particular study on the awe walk, we took people who are 75 years old or older, which is a period of increasing anxiety, depression and just normatively or typically. And one of the groups took their weekly walk, everybody's walking these days, and they did their walk. The other group did an all walk. And I wrote these instructions about, you know, when you go out and do the walk, like sync up your breathing with your steps and find some quiet. Look at things that are really small and vast. You know, look at the one leaf and then look up at the whole pattern of leaves or whatever. Look at a cloud or a whole pattern of clouds and go somewhere that would be surprising to you or novel or give you a sense of childlike wonder, you know. So for me it's like, oh, I'll go look at the creek in Berkeley that might be overflowing during the rainstorm. Just go somewhere that seems a little mysterious. And what we found, really importantly is our 75 year old participants in the AWA condition, over time felt more and more awe. The more they practiced awe, the richer it got. It helped them with their distress. In life, when you're older, 75 years old, your body gives you distress, People are passing away, that gives you distress. They felt less of that. And then we had them take these photos of themselves each week. They did the awok for eight weeks and their photos become the self kind of gets smaller and starts drifting off to the side in the photo, which is the dissolving of the self, which is throughout the awe research. And that tells us, Jenny, not only is all good for us, but when we pursue it, it gets richer, it gets deeper. You know, when I interviewed musicians for the book, it's not that the more they go after awe in their music, they just kind of understand it. All of a sudden the mysteries of music just get deeper and more mysterious and more awe inspiring. And I think the reason why is awe always has mystery in it. Just like your question about how in the world can someone who has passed away be with us? That's always mysterious and it always animates more curiosity and a sense of finding more awe about that belief.

I like hearing the smile in your voice too while you're talking about this. Like the mystery is there, it's right there on your shoulder.

It is. It's the same with meditation, right? Like for all the meditators out there, the more you meditate and the more you get these epiphanies and bursts of awe and observations of your mind. It's not that you're like, oh, I figured out the mind. I guess that's over.

Right?

It's so complex, a great astronomer or physicist would be like, oh, I've now figured out the universe. I got it. They're like, God, I still don't understand what matter is or light. And so I think awe is about the human need to go after mysteries to try to figure them out and to always be animated by curiosity.

We'll be right back just after this.

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Going back to the awe walks and even everyday awe. So I know that nature is one of your eight wonders of life. And there's not going to be a book on spirituality or connection or healing that does not involve nature.

Yeah.

At the same time, I live in New York City and of course sometimes I'll feel bad, like I should be out in the middle of nature.

Yeah.

But I'm delighted by New York City. I described it to a friend as feeling hugged by buildings.

Yeah.

She said she would feel trapped in a tiny apartment, but I feel hugged. I love walking everywhere. I love the humanity just smashed in the subway cars at any given time. Okay, so could you explain for those of us that are city dwellers, is there something awe inspiring about the scope, the vastness, the crush of people? What is it that because we hear so much about nature inspiring awe and I'm just wondering, there's something I'm getting out of the city life, but it's not as written about in this sense. Many people write about cities, writers, artists, et cetera but curious to hear your take.

Your question is profoundly important for us all to think about, and it raises a couple of issues. The first is there's such a Western bias about awe, the sublime and vast nature. You gotta be out in the silent redwood forest. I think that's a misconception of natural awe, which I write about. And there are a couple of points to your question. One is cities are awe inspiring. Their design is awe inspiring. Their buildings, the facades, the flow of humanity, the culture is awe inspiring. And New York is totally awe inspiring. In fact, I was talking to the mayor's office and they're like, we want to be a city of awe. And I was like, it's a good goal, right? And in fact, people in our AWOK study, some of them lived in cities, so their awalk was through very urban streets with some trees, but they found awe in it. So cities, of course, are places of awe and also horror and the like. But the second point is in this work, and we're now doing a lot of work on this at UC Berkeley, on what Dr. Yuri Solidwin calls ecological belonging, which is we can find awe in all kinds of nature. You talk to birders or gardeners or cloud spotters or people who love rain or planting flowers in cities, trees, those are all very powerful sources of awe. I live in Berkeley, a city. When I walk to work, I pass a single tree, a cedar. Awe inspiring, right? I pass flowers, they're awe inspiring. I look at the sky and there's a big movement right now. London is leading the way, for example, of who are the greenest cities. How are you building greenways into cities, gardens and the like. And I think that tells us that we need a more complex view of nature, more multifaceted. I need to protect as much, hopefully the 30% people are saying of the untouched natural world, if you will. But we also need to build nature into grow nature, cultivate nature in urban areas. And there's a ton of data suggesting that's about as good for the health of a city as anything you can do.

I love that you're in talks with the mayor's office. That's so exciting. And maybe there's something too about the juxtaposition, because I'll be in the city and then you see red tailed hawks flying above and that's the most exciting moment of the day. And it's awe inspiring. And it's like, I didn't expect to see you here. There's even a book called Red Tails in Love about New Yorker's obsession with this hawk or two that lived near Mary Tyler Moore's apartment. Yeah, Breeze side.

I think juxtaposition is critical to awe. Like you very wisely said, Jenny, like you're walking along and all of a sudden you see a comet or you're like, whoa. Or the hawk in New York City, the raccoons in Berkeley. Yes, nature, urban juxtaposition is powerful. And let's hope that some urban designers are out there listening and thinking, oh, if I build a little bit of nature into urban life, you will derive the benefits of awe. Frank Lloyd Wright, I remember visiting one of his homes and he would build homes around trees. The tree would be coming up through the home and there was this juxtaposition of person made and nature.

Even a skylight. My dad's an architect and we've talked about skylights. It's like you're letting the sky in, you're in your home, but there's light, there's natural light and a window to the universe.

Yeah. And I was in Sweden talking to their largest architecture firm, and they're all about using wood to build skyscrapers. Right. And suddenly you've got a nat. Our buildings are natural. So when you have a concept like awe, sometimes it surfaces. A lot of the good things humans are doing that honor these evolved principles that we talked about earlier, You've been.

Studying this for a long time now. And then, of course, putting pen to paper or keyboard to word file, writing the book gives you another whole front row seat. So as we start to wrap up, I'm just curious what has surprised you most after the book came out? So now that you've been talking to people and hearing from people, is there anything that you hadn't considered, even the decade plus leading up to this book launching about awe?

The thing that has surprised me the most is how easy and human and accessible this sublime emotion is. You wouldn't think so given how philosophers have written about it. Right. But it's everywhere. And I have had museum directors, Carnegie hall, people working on prisons, people working on public housing, cities and the like reach out to me and say, this is what our work could be about. How do we design for awe? And so I'm really excited about those conversations about how you take something like the California Academy of Science, hundreds of thousands of visitors, and make it a place of awe, or Carnegie hall sort of surface the sense of awe about the music in place or a school or a prison, and sort of figure out ways to profile things like moral beauty. So that's one is like our hunger to build for awe. And then the second one that I think is really important today, this surprised me empirically is what you referred to earlier of moral beauty, that around the world we find a lot of awe in the courage and kindness and humility and overcoming of other people. And it's just such a wellspring of awe. It's all around us. It's at our dinner table and at work. And we need to raise the profile of our moral beauty in this conversations we have and the like. And so I think it's a great moment when you think about our crisis of polarization and depression and environmental degradation, that this emotion can get us cheaply and non ideologically to a lot of good things.

And the ripple effects. I love what you were saying with Krista about one small act of kindness. You know, maybe we've heard that before about putting a different lens. Just the way it does have ripple effects, it can change everybody's mood for the rest of the day.

When I was around Patrick Gonzalez, this climate scientist won a Nobel Prize for his forestry science and he walks everywhere and he doesn't have a car in California and this isn't New York City, this is California, you know. And I was like just being around him and I went for a walk and we put that on our Science of Happiness podcast. But all of a sudden I'm like my steps doubled to this day.

Wow.

And so I think there is this way in which the moral beauty of people can inspire us to the kinds of actions we need today and hopefully we can channel that.

I love how you're elevating everyday elements of awe. Yeah, it once I won't go too much into this, but I once had a friend tour tell me if I did not do psychedelics I would be stunted as a person forever and he could no longer speak to me because I'd be limiting my personal growth. Some like very bullying and to each their own. Whatever you want to put into your it's not for me to say. I personally just have my own thoughts on it. That's not my path. But I have found it frustrating when people act like, well that's the only way to enlightenment is if you go do all these drugs then you'll know and without them you're a lesser person or something. So that's a rant for another day.

Well, no, but I want to address it because, you know, I'm part of the Berkeley center for Science and psychedelics. They can benefit people with trauma.

Absolutely.

But any Serious contemplative teacher will say, that's one way to get there. And those are poisons that you're putting into your mind. There are serious concerns about the colonization of indigenous knowledge and resources. And I think that is one of the great risks of this whole movement. And the more important point awe is you can find it in music. You can find it in the sunset. You can find it in a conversation about moral beauty with a friend. And those don't have kind of the frenzy of psychedelics right now and the almost cultish feel about the movement. And your friend is wrong and deeply wrong. The Dalai Lama, who has his own moral problems. But most serious teachers of wisdom say you find it in humanity and in your own way and not necessarily through these exterior compounds.

And it's just like to not acknowledge that we can all have a different path. I think that's what frustrates me is whenever. Yeah, whenever anything becomes dogma or the only way I'm gone.

Tell me about it.

I know. Yeah, you're in Berkeley. I grew up right across the Bay. I feel like there is just a rebellious spirit in general on the West Coast.

Yes.

So the last, last question is if we could give listeners a little experiment. Maybe it's an awe walk. Is there anything else around everyday awe that you would encourage them to try?

We've actually been working on this scientifically. This is what I'm working on with Carnegie Hall. It's like, you take those eight wonders that I write about of nature and people's moral beauty and music as three easy examples, and I would just encourage anyone who's listening. And we just published a paper on this with people during COVID who are healthcare providers really feeling a lot of stress? And all you do is you stop for a minute, you breathe deeply, you quiet your mind, you pause, and you just say, what's mysterious around me? How does it connect me to? What's the deeper story of what I'm perceiving? How am I connected to this deeper story? Listen to a piece of music that you know may have brought tears to your eyes, and just ask yourself, why is this so meaningful? And what does it say about my life? Get out in nature, look at a cloud or the cloud system and just think about, you know, how are you related to this larger system? That's all you have to do is just take a couple of minutes of pausing, breathing, quieting the mind a little, and then wonder what your relation is to these larger systems around us. And it brings a lot of good.

To us, inviting all inviting all. Thank you so much. This has been really wonderful. Thank you so much. Deckard I already feel the ripple effects of not just what you're sharing, but how the energy that you bring. So thank you so much for being here.

Jenny these were amazing questions and I am really grateful for this conversation. It's been just as rippling for me.

Yay. Well, likewise. And listeners, if you don't already have a copy, I highly encourage you to check out awe, the New science of everyday Wonder and how it can transform your life.

Thanks so much for listening to this episode of the Pivot podcast. Make sure you don't miss an episode or my insider tips and templates by signing up for Pivot List, a curated twice monthly newsletter where I share the inside scoop on what I'm reading, watching, listening to, and the latest tools I'm geeking out on. Sign up@pivotmethod.com pivotlist get show notes from this episode@pivotmethod.com podcast and connect with me on Twitter ennyblake.

Remember, build first, then your courage will follow. Hasn't it always.

Sam.