So, this question is about willpower and how important willpower is in terms of procrastination and personal productivity. If you've seen any of my other videos, you'll know I don't focus on willpower, I focus on something else, something far more powerful, which is actually self-compassion, but we'll get to that. This question starts and says, I can stick to a plan of action for a few days at a time. Then I always slide back. Once I was even able to complete thirty days in a row, I assume of implementing a change or a behaviour. I was hoping that this would become a habit that would stick. Unfortunately this didn't happen and I ended up going back to my old ways again, well I'm sure many of us have been there before, trying to implement something and hoping that this habit formation will take hold. So many people say it's 60 or 90 days, but I'm skeptical of all that to be honest. I think there's something else more important than this.  There's something more deep than this. You're not just purely something that needs to be conditioned, okay? But let me just read forward here. Okay, so this didn't happen. For me this looks like inconsistency, frustration and disappointment. Originally I was having procrastination issues with study, but since finishing school it has shown up in other areas of my life. It will. It will. Unless we begin to acknowledge what it is that's actually underneath it, we'll get through something, maybe with a great deal of difficulty and struggle and indecision. But it will probably come back. Okay, so things that really should be fun for me, painting, which I was always good at or exercise, are now areas I struggle to stay consistent with. I know that in order to achieve any real progress or level of skill, I'll need to stay consistent over time. But some days my motivation just isn't there and I fail to take action. How can I become consistent and end this pattern of sliding back into old patterns after short term success and that's from Anthony. So Anthony, what I would say is, first of all, very common what you're experiencing and it's great that you're interested in really understanding it in a deeper level because it's not just about building willpower. That's not what this is about. Usually we're all obsessed with this thing called willpower and it's actually we're just, well, there's something wrong with me, I don't have enough willpower, I need to get more willpower, it's putting ourselves down and it's needless. So consistency is important and consistency is really one of the fundamental aspects of success, there's no doubt about it. Consistency in what is a question I love to ask because consistency in action, maybe. Maybe that's a part of it, but that's not what the root cause of it is. Consistency in inner work, intimacy. Am I consistently with myself and understanding myself and my emotions and what it is that I need, what excites me, what doesn't excite me. Consistently self-aware, growing self-awareness consistently is really the consistency we're talking about. Are we consistently in the right mindset? Really, that's all that matters. If you get to the point where you're consistently working on my mindset, all the action in the world follows after that. And you may notice that your emotional states are the thing that are sabotaging you. You implement these changes and you stick with them for a while, but what is it that always trips us up? It's our emotion. It's our some negative feeling comes up and then that's the thing that sabotages us. And negative feelings can't simply be acted away, if you know what I mean. We can't just change behavior alone and expect our emotions to fall into place. Emotions have to be met where emotions are. And that's an inner job, right? That's an inside job that needs to be looked at. If that's the case, pushing harder, taking more action won't necessarily accomplish things, accomplish anything. It'll actually probably what it'll do is it'll build resentment in us for the things that we're engaging with and we would like to see growth in. So what I would say for this is do a little experiment with one of the areas that you're procrastinating in, OK? And have that, OK? Whereas I used to focus on I'm going to take action in this goal and maybe being consistent with that even. I'm going to take some time to just sit with my feelings about this thing for maybe 30 minutes, OK? And what I would suggest will be sit with it and in this window of time of 30 minutes, I'm going to sit with the feelings I have around it and see if I can cultivate a positive emotion about doing something in this area for those 30 minutes. And as soon as you get a sort of a positive feeling or something that excites you about the thing, then you can move into action. Now what you're doing is you're going in and you're addressing the feelings and you're doing that in your work and you're setting the right intention for yourself. If you feel terrible before you do something, that is not a sign that there's something wrong with you or that you've failed because we often we can't force our way through these horrible feelings forever. They have to be met and acknowledged and healed and let go. So don't see that as something that's gone wrong. That's very normal for all of us. It's just that we try and ignore it and bulldoze those feelings out of the way. Rather than just going in and just being, OK, what if I stay with this emotion and see and acknowledge and validate it and see if it can change into something else that would look more like a helpful thing that would move me with less resistance in this thing that I'm interested in? Writing is a huge part of this. Understanding where these negative emotions are coming from. Why does it feel so hard for me to do this thing? Why am I so overwhelmed by it? All those things can be a huge, huge help. Now, again, action is important. So if when you sit with that and immediately you start to feel better, move straight into action, it's so, so helpful. People won't like this advice again. I've said this in previous videos because we are so action oriented in our society. But what I would tell a person is five minutes of action taken with the right intention is better than 30 minutes of forced, coercive, non enjoyable action. Just for the sake of having it ticked off a list or something. If you can get into the right mindset first, have the right intention for yourself first, any action you take is like action on steroids. OK, it really is. And also what you're doing is you're acknowledging any emotions and you're not treating yourself like a machine, which we're not. You become far more consistent this way. So if you commit to this. That mindset that we tend to be in, you'll become far more consistent, a more consistent user of a very effective mindset, thinking in a more compassionate way and in a more self encouraging way. Now, what I would say is just do it as an experiment, even if you think I'm full of it. OK, and I'm telling you to ignore things. Give that a go and let me know how it works for you. And I'd be very interested to hear. I'll leave it there for now, guys, but thanks again and bye for now.


Hello and welcome to the session. In this session we discussed the following question which says in the given figure all steps are 0.5 meters high find the area of the shaded region. We know that area of a rectangle is equal to L into B where this L is the length of rectangle B is the breadth of rectangle. This is the key idea to be used in this question. Now we move on to the solution. Consider this figure we are given that AB is equal to 4.5 meters. Now that all steps are 0.5 meters high so in the figure we have that AD is equal to 0.5 meters then PF is equal to 0.5 meters QH is equal to 0.5 meters then BC is equal to 0.5 meters SE is equal to 0.5 meters and RG is equal to 0.5 meters. Also as you can see in the figure we are also given that DP is equal to 0.5 meters, FQ is equal to 0.5 meters, FC is equal to 0.5 meters and RE is equal to 0.5 meters. Now as you can see we have made these rectangles so area of the shaded region would be equal to area of the rectangle ABCD plus the area of the rectangle SPFE plus the area of the rectangle QRGH. Now area of the rectangle ABCD would be equal to AB into BC. Now AB is 4.5 meters into BC which is 0.5 meters so this is equal to 2.25 meters square is the area of ABCD. Next consider the area of SPFE this is equal to SP multiplied by PF. Now this SP would be equal to AB minus 0.5 into 2 that is we subtract these two sides from AB to get the length of SP. So this is equal to 4.5 minus 1 equal to 3.5 meters is SP. So this is equal to 3.5 meters into PS which is 0.5 meters and this is equal to 1.75 meters square. Next we find the area of QRGH this is equal to QR into RG. Now this QR would be equal to PS or SP minus 2 times 0.5 that is we subtract these two portions from the length of SP to get the length of QR so this is equal to 3.5 minus 1 which is equal to 2.5 meters so QR is equal to 2.5 meters. So this is equal to 2.5 meters multiplied by RG which is 0.5 meters and this is equal to 1.25 meters square. Now the area of the shaded region is equal to area of ABCD which is 2.25 meters square plus the area of SPFE which is 1.75 meters square plus the area of QRGH which is equal to 1.25 meters square and this is equal to 5.25 meters square. So area of the shaded region is equal to 5.25 meters square that is area of this region is 5.25 meters square. So 5.25 meters square is our final answer. This completes the session. Hope you have understood the solution for this question.


Since the Sephora VIB sale is going on right now, no matter who you are, you can get 30% off the Sephora collection of makeup, brushes, skincare, everything. It's a great way to try out their line. And I wanted to tell you, I don't know if you know this or not, but the Sephora brand itself is owned by, I can't remember whether it's Gucci Chanel or Dior. I can't remember. It might be Valentino. Okay, I will make sure I put it up on the screen which one it is, but it is really high end because they take those formulas that they use in that super luxury makeup and they put it into their makeup. So I'm about to give you just a few of my very, very favorite ones so that you can decide whether or not this is something that you would like to purchase yourself. Now just as a reminder, we do have a numbering system on my channel where we go one through however many products we get through when I hold up a product. A number will come up on the screen. You can remember that number, go down into the description box, open it up and next to that number will be the product along with the link in any color that I myself wear or what I'm recommending today. We will at the very end also have just a little bit of what I have on today for fashion. I get asked that a lot so I decided to put that at the very end. So that all being said, let's talk about some Sephora Collection makeup that I absolutely love. Before I talk about my first product, I definitely want to tell you that the brushes are super high, beautiful quality. I love their makeup masks, their wipes, their clean skincare is phenomenal. I actually really like all of that. I'm so overloaded right now with brushes and skincare that I don't think that I could buy anymore and stuff them into the drawers that I have. So I'm just sticking with what I have but I do want to tell you that those particular products are fantastic. Let's talk about our first product and that is the Sephora Best Skin Ever Full Coverage Foundation. This foundation, as soon as it came out, I tried it because I was absolutely blown away by all of the colors. Went into the store, tried a bunch on and found my color. Went home, tried this on and just was like, wow, this is a great formula. And now that I know that it's made by one of those super luxury companies, I know why. This is very full coverage so you need a very tiny bit, especially if you're a mature woman, by the way, I'm 55 years old and I have dry skin and this does work on me. It is more along the lines of a matte foundation. So if you like the little bit of a radiant look or you like a little bit of a dewy finish, you might want to put a drop of oil in this or you might want to put a luminizing primer into it. I also would say that you don't necessarily need a primer with this but it does look a little bit better with the primer. Long lasting. It lasts me all day long. It's perfecting, it's gorgeous, it's beautiful. You're wondering why I'm not showing you anything tried on in this particular video. I am experiencing a little bit of health issues still. I'm just teetering and I love that you guys always step up and you're always giving me that encouragement. Don't worry about me, I'm doing fine. It's just a bit of exhaustion, really. And so I get done up and I'm doing this and it's just a little bit harder to film everything. Now, the next year they came out with their best skin ever concealer. Same thing, I ran out and got it because I love the best skin foundation and woo, I love this stuff. This is a full coverage foundation. It is a medium thickness, so you need so very little of it. So go light on it and then if you need a little bit more, go back in and put a little bit more on. But it's pretty, it's so pretty and this is very, very long lasting. I was really shocked at how it didn't crease and it didn't break apart, because I sweat so much underneath my eyes. I do set this down with a little bit of powder after it's dried down itself, but just a beautiful concealer and I can definitely give my stamp of approval to that one. Their eyeliners, they have several. This is the retractable one that has the smudge thingy, whatever that is.  This is one of the ones that I love because it is retractable. Super creamy, super smooth liners. So again, this is called the Sephora Retractable waterproof eyeliner. This one is in glitter green, so it has a little bit of reflex of glitter in it, which I think is so pretty. You can smudge this out or you can use it as an intense liner. This one doesn't stay in the waterline as good as the next one that I'm gonna show you, but as far as smudging out and staying there all day, you know, as a regular eyeliner, so pretty. I absolutely love it. And then the next one is called the Sephora 12 Hour Colorful Crayon and this is in waterfall and it's a little bit of a shimmer as well. These rival any high-end ones. This one is a little bit more teal. That one's a little bit more green and this one does have a little bit of silver glitter in it, which I think is so pretty, especially if you're on a date night or if you have a party to go to, so, so beautiful. Now, this one with the teal just smooth, buttery and every time that I use this one, I just go into my waterline, I put, you know, a line of it down and then I let it sit there for a few seconds and then I'll put it down again. It's so pretty. Now, if you're wondering what I have on my face today, I did do a Sephora recommendations where I recommended 25 products very recently, so I will make sure that I list that video below as well and you can go watch that one as soon as this one's over. Now, I always talk about Sephora's lip products because I am sold by their lip products. The ones that I have been recommending for about eight years, I've been on YouTube coming up eight years and these have been in almost every single Sephora recommendations video for a reason because they're that darn beautiful. These are called the Sephora Rouge Gel Lip Liner. This particular one is in Rum Raisin. It's kind of a very deepened, plummy mauve color. I love this. You can use this as a lip liner. You can use this as your lip color. What I do is I use these two colors together. This next color is called Midday Rose. I use these two together. They blend seamlessly together and they are my lipstick color when I do that and oh my goodness. So I'm gonna show you the two of them together here and I wanna just kinda smudge across there. So there's the two of them and then I wanna smudge up and I want you to see how beautifully seamless they are when they are smudged together. So pretty and of course you can smudge them more. I just don't wanna get the colors too muddled together so you can't see. Great formula. Creamy like a lipstick almost. So they're not matte at all. They don't tug. You know, if you have mature lips and you just have a really hard time with lip liners because they tug, these don't tug. They're beautiful. Another one is the Rouge Shine Lipstick. I think it's called Rouge Shine Lipstick but it's from the Sephora brand and I just wanted to show you this one color because if you like, it's a universal pink. I really love it. Now it's definitely pink. So if you don't like pinks, they have other colors for you but this is definitely pink and I can't remember which one it is. It'll be listed down below. But these Shine Lipsticks act like a balm with a ton of pigment in them and they are gorgeous. Absolutely gorgeous. I love wearing these especially in the summer when I'm always wanting a balm but I really want to elevate and have a pretty color on there. This is it. It's pretty, really, really pretty. So I want you to know that these ones that are their balm type lipsticks are the balm. And then I always share with you these glosses from Sephora and I just wanted to share two colors with you today. Both of these colors are like tricolor toppers. This one is called Money. It's the one that looks gold in the tube right there. It's got this gold look but it also shifts between gold and pink and it's pretty. It just looks gold right there. But as I move, hopefully you'll be able to see that there is some pink in there. So beautiful. This is one that I recommend every single time. I'm like, if you're gonna get any, just go get this one called Money because I don't care if you like the gold colors or not, put it on top of any lipstick. It's gonna look like a million bucks. It's so pretty. And then this one is called Wild. And I love this one too. It has reflex of pink and purple and it's a gorgeous topper. This is one a lot like the Fenty. As a matter of fact, I may have just found a dupe. So just beautiful, just beautiful on that. And when you're getting the 30% off, you just can't beat that. And then lastly, the Outrageous Plump Lip Glosses. This one is Starstruck Pink. This one is, again, been in my recommendations for as long as I can remember. I just have loved this a long, long, long time. Again, just a topper but this one is a true pink topper. No glitter in this. You can't see any glitter in actually any of these really now that I'm kind of going across there and looking no glitter whatsoever. And then the other one, I would say this kind of looks like a corally pink color. So this one is really pretty too. I love this one in summer because it really does a great reflect and it just looks so pretty. I really like these. They're great formula. I like the sparkly ones or the ones that have that beautiful reflect in them. More than I like just a cream one but they do have the cream ones. So if you are looking at the Lawless Forget the Filler but that price tag kind of scares you away, this one is good too and they do have a lot of cream colors in it. All right, that's it for the makeup. Let's check out what I have on now. All right, girlfriends, here's the outfit of the day. I have on this beautiful blue sweater which I'm in love with. Ribbed has a v-neck and it also has some great gold accents with the buttons and you can either push it up or leave it down whichever you want. It is, I would say medium weight sweater. It does come down over the booty so you can wear it a little bit lower. Also my stretchy pants in black. Last time I brought them to you in blue. This time they're in black and they stretch. I actually concise down in these and they work just fine. The boots, the boots are my favorite part of this outfit today. These are a knee-high boots, slouchy. They have the buckle accents on them. They're black suede. I absolutely love them.  This is so cute. It has the drawstring, well fringe first. Last purse I showed you had fringe on it. This part that has the tassels on it that will draw up and close it up for you. It just has the one main pocket but it does have the regular zipper pocket in the back and then the two in the front for your glasses or your phone or whatever you want to put in here. And dang, I am in love with this purse. I hope that you liked the outfit today. Let's take a look at the jewelry. Okay, so I just stayed right here on this side of the room while we're doing the jewelry. The jewelry is a chunky gold chain that I've had for a while. I love to wear a chunky jewelry. It's just my thing. These are really cute too. They are like, I would say maybe a one and a quarter inch hoop, super light. They look like they'd be really heavy, but they're not. Wearing heavy earrings, you know, it pulls my lobe down. Seen too many older women with that and I just don't do that, but these are really light. So that is all the jewelry that I'm wearing today and that's the outfit. That's it for today's video. I hope that you did enjoy seeing all of my recommendations for the Sephora favorites since everyone can get 30% off. It's a great way to get some really quality makeup and not break the bank.  So I will link that below as well so you can go take a look at that. If you have any recommendations from the Sephora line, thank you so much for stopping by and being with me for a little bit. Hope that you're having a fantastic day. Take care of yourselves. I love you so much. Goodbye, my friends.


Hey guys, Thunder E here and I've got two awesome gaming phones here for you today, so let's find out which one is actually the best. Alright, this is time for a battle vid guys and today we are checking out two really awesome gaming phones. One was just announced which is the ASUS ROG Phone 7 Pro. It's part of the ROG Phone 7 series and the other is the RED MAGIC 8 Pro in titanium. So this is going to be a duke out of Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 powerhouses. Now if you're joining us for the very first time don't forget to hit the subscribe button notification icon to get notified about videos just like this on the channel. I know we've got a lot of new subscribers so we do videos like this so go ahead sit down and enjoy. So let's start off with the hardware. Both of them have very unique hardware. These specs will be on screen for each device but we start off with the ASUS ROG Phone 7 Pro. Design wise it's similar to last year the curves and the edges are a little bit smooth that I kind of like. What you do notice of course is that LED display at the back that allows for different graphic prompts so while you're gaming it shows you gaming graphic prompts at the back if you're charging the device there is a charging prompt if you receive a phone call so on and so on which we're getting to the software later. We've got a camera layout it's the standard three across and then we have this lip here that opens up for the aero cooler. That is the custom cooler that you get with the ASUS ROG Phone 7 Pro or you can buy it separately if you want to and this thing does some really impressive work. Now on the right hand side you do have of course top trigger buttons the way it says ROG, a power button volume rocker and then on the bottom headphone jack a USB type C port and then you've got another USB type C port where the aero cooler actually connects to. Display is solid it looks vibrant and we've got a front-facing camera right there. Now when we go over to the red magic 8 Pro this is a titanium version so it's got that titanium type look to it and you can see almost feels very see-through that glass lay on top is really nice in the build. You've got an inline camera set up here and you've got that snapdragon 8 gen 2 logo depicting where it actually is in the device which is cool then then you've got your built-in fan. This is one of the biggest differentiators with the red magic 8 Pro designed wise it's got a vintage fan it's got vents on the side. Now you can see the lettering all around those also do light up indicating of course where your triggers are and those triggers are on the top on the right hand side right next to your right triggers you do have this red action button that is to activate x-mode into your gaming arena where you can start gaming. Display is vibrant I really do like this display 1300 and it's really bright and as you can see it's got no front-facing camera because it's under the display which is actually pretty cool. Volume rock on the other side and this thing can stand on itself headphone jack you name it so who has the better hardware just in terms of looking feel honestly I have to give it to the red magic 8 pro it just feels fresher and newer in terms of design and also I do like the way it looks. Now speaking of power and performance we talked about the fact that it they do have the snapdragon 8 gen 2 chipset on both devices and who talk about impressive the benchmarks on your single score as well as also multiple multi-scores are great where the ASUS wins out on single score by at least 600 points compared to the red magic while the red magic wins slightly on multi-core scores there with maybe about 100 or so so that's where you have it there but again that should give us some really good performance all around that's not another point what we care about is the gaming experience and we'll start off first of course with the very first game we like to play call of duty mobile so I'll start with the red magic 8 pro performance on this we're getting a solid 90 frames per second playing of course on the best setting for this which was really cool but when we went over to the ASUS ROG phone 7 pro we got 122 frames per second this is the first time I've seen this on an android device without any hacks or anything like that but ASUS definitely won that round then we go up to apex legend I know that game is going off soon but I like to test it out apex legend was able to get a solid 60 frames per second at the highest possible settings which is I think ultra with HD all that fun stuff both devices both the ASUS ROG phone 7 pro and the red magic 8 pro got 60 frames per second solid overall so which means gameplay was smooth fast and effective and we head over to our next game pubg mobile now pubg mobile we start off with ultra HD ultra where we get 40 frames a second on the red magic 8 pro which is to be expected again still not optimized and we also get 40 frames a second on the ASUS ROG phone 7 pro now when we move over to usually smooth extreme we actually go to HDR extreme which is actually higher and both devices starting with the red magic 8 pro do 60 frames per second a solid 60 no issues no problems right there so both devices have game centers or gaming hubs where all your games is collected and you could customize it the red magic 8 pro allows you to list all your games there you can go in you can also turn on the fan and have it running at certain times and will automatically turn on with the games you're playing plus you do have the ability to customize the performance per game you also have the snapdragon adreno gpu settings which is very unique to this device allowing you to maximize your gpu performance on the device itself while the ASUS ROG phone 7 pro also has something similar you have your game library section for all your games you do have your console showing your performance and also the different performance node modes if you got your connected and then you can also customize what you do with your air cooler this is the air cooler 7 now let's get to genshin impact now this is the game we all know takes of course the performance to the max for these kind of devices and also temperatures with the red magic 8 pro we're able to play for 30 minutes on the device and our temperatures with the fan on were 105 degrees it got to about 105 roughly around six minutes into gameplay and it stayed there 105 degrees that's our standard so the the highest 105 was between 100 to 105 on there now turning the five fan off we got temperatures of 111 degrees play with the fan on especially graphical intensive games like genshin now the ASUS ROG phone 7 pro has a new cooling layer built into the device that should reduce those temperatures for you and we try different stages with the air coolant there is a smart there is a cool there is a frosty those three do not require an external power source it will run directly plugged into your device and with that the temperatures drop down from 111 down to 105 roughly 102 to 105 which was really cool but here's the kicker when we put it up to frozen it dropped down all the way to 90 60 degrees fahrenheit it ran cool absolutely cool and you could get to that with the arrow cool it is great so temperatures were fantastic and we got a solid 60 frames per second so performance again was great on both but the cooling of the arrow core 7 is on another level so i have to say that really does well but asus actually can handle his own without a built-in fan into its unit now what about of course the cameras ah you're going what about you know game streaming services let's let's take a quick look at what we get from the cameras the first thing i'll tell you is that asus does a really good job with its stabilization as you can clearly see the front-facing cameras for both are not that great especially on the red magic 8 pro it's just not something to kind of write home about but i'd like to see the improvements continue here especially for the kind of pricing these devices are for gameplay and audio is something to go hand in hand and honestly just take a listen because you will be impressed this is where the asus rg4 and 7 pro really shines the speakers not only are tuned well but also carry a lot of bass and you can see the inflection all the way through compared to the red magic 8 pro which may sound high but very tinny i love the way the asus sound and i think that is very key when you're playing your games especially on game streaming services like xbox game pass i tried it on both of them and both devices handled really well no complaints no issues i use the on-screen buttons and hopefully one day we can remap those buttons to these devices on the other hand when it comes to emulators i did try the psp emulator play that no issues and we know very well snapdragon a gen 2 can handle that so that's something it can do quite well so let's talk about what i think about both devices and who actually won this battle now we look at the red magic 8 pro starts at 699 goes all the way up to a 990 it's what i paid for the titanium version here it's a solid device it works really well it's got a vibrant display it's got that built-in fan which means it cools and you know where that temperature will stay and it's got a big battery and it will do everything you need to do now the rg4 and 7 pro has a design that is dated and does have a better camera than the red magic 8 pro now in terms of cooling it's a little behind because of course it doesn't have a built-in fan but that aero cooler is great which is an additional accessory you have to take with you but when i look at it all together though the rg4 and 7 pro wins for me the speakers sound great that great audio really ties into me and of course just the overall gaming experience with it here really takes it to the very next level i like it i like what it brings to the table and i think a lot of gamers will like that too so let me know what you think which is the better gaming device for you is it the isus rog phone 7 which i stated and i like and it starts at 999 or is it the red magic 8 pro leave your thoughts down below and always enjoy the entertainment


Hey everybody, we're talking about deadlifting safely without hurting your back and today I want to give you the the major target for every new deadlifter to kind of shoot for and that is I want you to find and feel your hamstring muscles and Maybe your glutes a little bit, but I talked more about hamstrings. Why is this so? The pelvic bones have these two little sit bones here, and that's where your hamstrings Connect to so your hamstrings are kind of like rudders On a boat that steer the ship of your hips Okay, and I can tug on one tug on the other and it determines the alignment of my hip bones not only that With where they're connected down here at the bottom of my butt as I'm bent over if they pull down It pulls me up and so it's the primary mover of a large portion of the deadlift especially this bottom half of this deadlift Third kind of concomitant with those things is that if I don't have them the only things that can help are my back Muscles, okay.  Oh, it's I like spaghetti. Yeah, like that, right? So you don't need to know those but you do need to know that they can turn on when the hamstrings don't turn on So the goal here is to find and feel the hamstrings First you have to be able to feel them at the knee position So I start everyone with a Romanian deadlift when they're having trouble finding and feeling their hamstrings Usually I am stopping people at the knee if you're really flexible You might be able to go to the knee and not feel a damn thing and that's kind of where I'm at usually So I might let you go a little bit further and then I'm like, oh, yeah, I feel that okay now You feel that good hang on do it while you come back up and that's generally the hard part Oftentimes when people are messing the come back up portion of this They're thinking too much about lifting the weight up and not enough about pushing themselves into the ground What I mean by that is if I try to lift the weight up I'm thinking about what my head is doing and I lead with my shoulders and that turns my back on so instead If I have my stretch back here, I'm pushing through my heels the whole time If I lift with my shoulders my knees bend forward my weight shifts forward on my toes I don't want that. I want to stay back on my heels. So go slow. Keep your weight on your heels. Good. That's much better Outside of all of that just general hamstring training is going to be good for you So I might lay you down. I might get little plates or little sliders under your feet I might say I want you to show me a hip lift here. Okay, good Do you feel your hamstrings turn on they'll say no or yes if they've been with me for a while I'll say, okay exhale and Tuck again. Do you feel your back in the ground? No, okay. Try again push into my hand back here Okay, now I know what you're talking about. Yeah, I feel my hamstrings. Okay, so now we've got some hamstrings that step one You have to get it here first Then if I do have those sliders I can do little hamstring curls I can straighten my legs all the way out like this and then I can pull them back in like this and I can do a couple reps.  Everyone's hears me say do you feel your hamstrings good If you do anything that makes you feel them more Keep doing that. I want you to keep going try to make your legs burn Try to make your hamstrings burn. Okay. I want you to feel that stretch in your hamstrings Again, everyone is searching for this Find and feel your hamstrings and that's the basic Rule that most people need to hear


Our next presenter is Russell Blackford. We have the extraordinary evidence exclamation point. Science, skepticism and denialism. Russell is the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Evolution and Technology, which makes him a Borg, I guess. He's a fellow of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies and in the store is his another fantastic book, Freedom of Religion and a Secular State. Here is his haiku. We say we have proof. Tests, data, studies, yes, proof. To them, not so much. Please welcome Russell Blackford. Indulge me for one moment, folks, while I just say how pleased and privileged I feel to be speaking at this great event. I've come 8,000 miles to speak here but I find myself surrounded by all these welcoming, friendly and refreshingly rational and reasonable people and I feel very much at home. So thank you to Jay Rhett and thank you all for all that. When DJ Grothi asked me if I would speak at this convention I felt honored but I also felt some trepidation. I thought well what can I really say to a bunch of hardened, seasoned, scientific skeptics, right? I'm not a magician. I'm not a scientific investigator. I'm not any sort of scientist. I'm a philosopher. So what can I say that might be helpful but I think I can offer as a philosopher some kind of perspective that may be of interest to you and in offering that perspective I'm going to ask you to cast your minds back 500 years. I'm not a magician. I can't do that for you and I don't know about any of you but I'm not old enough to remember that far back and I don't believe in reincarnation which is something which will come up later in the talk. However, we have good historical records. We have good records of what was happening 500 years ago at least in many parts of the world and so we can rely upon the collective memory that's available to us. So I'm going to make some comparisons between let's say 1513 and 2013. The lesson here, the lesson that I'll be trying to draw is that what once seemed like ordinary or at least acceptable claims in 1513 might be extraordinary claims now and what would have been an extraordinary claim then might now in the relevant sense to us have become an ordinary one and that's not because I take some relativist approach to knowledge it's not anything like that it's because the evidence that's reasonably available to people has changed so much in those 500 years. In particular I want you to think of European civilization in 1513. That was four years before Martin Luther confronted the indulgent cello Johann Tetzel with his famous 95th thesis catalyzing the Protestant Revolution. It was 30 years before the publication of Copernicus's major work on the revolutions of the heavenly spheres. It was about a century before Galileo's great scientific discoveries that arguably marked the beginning of modern science and it was 300 years or more before Darwin. So there's our historical perspective 500 years ago 1513 versus 2013. People in Europe 500 years ago were in effect living in another world that is to say the information available to them at that time was radically different from what is available to us today so much so that it's no wonder that they understood the world very differently. The celebrated Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor has written something along these lines he's carried out an exercise a similar exercise for the one I'm asking of you when you cast your minds back 500 years ago. His exercise is specifically about the existence of God and the truth of Christianity. Now Taylor is actually a religious believer his book A Secular Age is not a book advocating atheism. If you want a book like that there are plenty available and one more that will be available later this year is my new book with Ida Schuchlenk 50 Great Myths About Atheism that's not really what Taylor is on about but in his 2007 book A Secular Age he discusses how things changed during that period of time to enable a movement from a society where belief in God was essentially unchallenged to the current situation in western societies where belief in God is as Taylor puts it understood to be one option among others and frequently not the easiest to embrace so that's that's Taylor's book A Secular Age published in 2007 I should say that a secular age won the much coveted Templeton Prize but we're not going to hold that against the book right okay as Taylor describes it it was virtually impossible or even unthinkable in say 1500 he sees in 1513 whatever the date we choose especially unthinkable not to believe in God well what has changed Taylor identifies you know a range of features of 16th century life in Europe that made the existence of God just obvious just obvious to everybody and some of those points that he identifies apply more widely than belief in God so first you said you had the natural world was seen as testifying to divine activity whether it was the regularities of the natural world or whether it was extraordinary events such as plagues and droughts and floods or even extraordinary good events you know such as seasons of a particularly fruitful harvest all of that was imagined within the ideology of the time as a testing to the action of God either maintaining regularity or interfering with these yeah these acts of God these extraordinary events and that idea was not challenged yeah that was that was the common kind of understanding second if you lived in Europe in the 16th century the whole political and social system was closely integrated with the religious system at all levels of society it was just assumed that human activity was underpinned by the activity of God and all communal life was pervaded with this all communal life was pervaded by ritual and worship thirdly there was a strong sense this is very important actually there's a strong sense the 16th century Europeans of living in an enchanted cosmos full of miraculous beings and powers now a lot of people are still living in that enchanted cosmos a lot of people still have that kind of mentality but that was the common mentality back then and there was no real reason to think otherwise there's no real reason to challenge it no authority you could go to would be challenging that idea that that was the kind of world that we if we cast ourselves back to 500 years ago no authority would tell you anything other than that was the world we were living in and furthermore as Taylor and there was simply no well developed alternative there was no well developed naturalistic secular alternative to religion and to what we'd now regard as superstition so okay that's what Taylor says about life back then in in my view Taylor's book underestimates the degree to which science in particular changed things though there are a number of factors that change things urbanization changed the way we live to get and perceive the world their economic changes but very importantly there are scientific changes in the way we perceive the world and science was transformative in 1513 science as we now know it was in the future Copernicus was still a fair way away 30 years away to his great work Galileo was still you know 100 years away you know Galileo's first great observations with the telescope were 1609 and 1610 so that's a century away to what arguably is the beginnings of modern science even humanistic learning such as in various kinds of textual and historical scholarship you know I was at a relatively early age despite the Renaissance which had started in Italy in the 14th century if you were living in the 17th century you'd have no reason to doubt stories of supernatural events such as miracles hauntings the effects of evil spell spells cast by witches and all the rest of it it was well known to be sure that some seeming miracles probably had natural explanations it was well known that some holy relics were fakes and that some miracles were supposedly fraudulent there's reference to this in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales for example which was written a couple hundred years earlier still there's even references in St Augustine's work written you know a thousand years before when we're talking about or more than a thousand years well well over a thousand years before we're talking about so you know we have Chaucer's partner which Christopher Hitchens often refers to you know he often talked talked about his opponents who he was denigrating as Chaucerian frauds meaning like like this guy the partner Hitchens made that famous comment that when Jerry Falwell died that if you gave Falwell an enema you could bury him in a matchbox right well you know this guy and his horse if you gave them both an enema you could stick them in that funny hat that is wearing you know they were these people that were full of bullshit and it was known but all the same even if you thought that miracles and genuine relics were not here and now you'd think they were not very far away and you'd have no reason to believe that these things didn't exist you'd have no reason to think you did not live in this kind of enchanted cosmos that we've been talking about now today of course ordinary people still have problems knowing just who to trust who has genuine expertise we do live in a propaganda society and we know that much of what we read or hear is misinformation particularly when we turn on Fox News or the like but at least we're in a position to examine who might be genuinely qualified to talk on a particular topic in the 16th century there was no particular reason for an educated person yet to doubt the the church authorities for example or any of the authorities that told them they lived in a world where supernatural forces were at work and supernatural events took place if not here at least nearby and conversely this is important there was no reason to trust anybody who made such seemingly bizarre claims as that the earth revolves around the sun and rotates on its axis that the earth is billions of years old that human beings that ascended from ape like four bears or that the sacred history of the Jews laid out in the Hebrew Bible you know is pretty much false there's no reason to trust somebody who said those things those were extraordinary claims a reasonable person would have had no reason to believe those sorts of claims everything about the way society was structured anything any authority told you you know would have gone against believing claims like that those were extraordinary claims from the point of view of someone living in 16th century Europe yeah those claims were were anomalous in relation to everything that they knew or could trust of what they were told about the world if I had the time and I don't on this occasion I'd go into some detail about how a dramatic claim such as the claim that the earth rotates so controversial in the year of Galileo how that claim was actually established Galileo had to establish that in a situation that claim hardly even made sense to people he had to do a lot of arguing a lot of hardcore scientific world to challenge what was seemingly the common sense view that the earth is stationary right if you've never done so please read some detailed accounts of just what Galileo had to do how he went about this for example you could read Philip Kitch's wonderful book The Advancement of Science from back in 1995 for example Galileo had to respond to the argument that if the earth rotates if you drop an object from the top of a tower why doesn't the object fall as it were behind the tower that seemed to be the common sense sort of thing you'd expect and and of course Galileo put the counter argument well what if you drop an object from the top of a ship's a ship's mast he said well you'll find it doesn't fall behind the ship's mast and that illustration made some kind of sense receiver going culture but he had to put detailed argument produce the evidence to overcome common sense views like that why don't things fall behind us when we drop them in if I drop my classes now it should fall slightly one way because if the earth's rotating right that was the common sense way looking at things it is not obvious that the earth is going to rotate in a world where we don't have the science that makes that picture even thinkable so Galileo had to make that that thinkable and similarly the claim that we're descended through a naturalistic process from earlier primates that was a truly extraordinary claim now until the evidence was actually gathered and of course far more evidence has been gathered augmenting what Darwin had available to him about 150 years ago so the main point of this talk is that modern naturalistic ideas of the world a modern naturalistic picture that we have a picture that even most religious people operate with yeah from day to day when they're getting their car repeat they don't call for the priest to exercise it you know they call for the mechanic to try to work out what's wrong with the engine that did not come naturally that is not intuitive to human beings that's not something that just comes to us without a lot of hard work that view of the world was hard one extraordinary knowledge was won through extraordinary efforts by Copernicus by Galileo by Newton by Darwin and by many others including people whom we'd normally regard as humanity scholars rather than scientists for someone living in 1513 many of the most basic claims in our scientifically informed view of the world would once again have been extraordinary claims and the reason why we now quite rightly accept them is because we actually have the extraordinary evidence accumulated over those hundreds of years right so that's the perspective that i i want to offer don't even start me by the way on things like relativity theory or quantum theory and on how intuitive they are you know the universe opened up for our inspection by the advancement of science is actually very strange indeed and much of what we have learned in that time frame has gone against all our natural intuition so i won't read this quote from Edward O. Wilson i don't know if you can all read it in this large room but you know Wilson you know has this quote in which he says among other things the cost of scientific advance is the humbling recognition that reality was not constructed to be easily grasped by the human mind yeah there's been a huge historical effort to move from what might be intuitive to us to this modern conception of the world that's informed by science now i said don't even start me on relativity and quantum mechanics they're not say for non-scientists like me let alone to say primary school children but what i do say is there is an exciting story to tell there's an exciting story to tell about the advance of science and about just how that scientific knowledge was one you know how did Galileo actually convince people in the 17th century and where Galileo left off Galileo died in 1642 when Newton was born in the same year you know how did the scientists following Galileo actually get it to the point where we had the evidence for what seemed like us obvious things like the earth rotates there's a very exciting story to be told about that and that story should be you know told more often and more filling more more fully i think we should introduce our children to that story as early as possible in their education and we can always learn more about that story ourselves i take it there was some discussion on the panel i was on yesterday about scientific skepticism right i take it that when we talk about scientific skepticism where we're certainly not talking about skepticism about science what what we're really talking about is skepticism about claims that educated people who are informed by science should now regard as extraordinary and they're not regarded as extraordinary really because they are intrinsically bizarre or unintuitive that's not really the problem a lot of these sorts of claims under different conditions without being informed by science and not necessarily unintuitive at all it's actually in many cases the findings of science that don't come naturally to human beings so the point about these extraordinary claims is not that they are somehow intrinsically bizarre or intrinsically unintuitive to us or that they're just you know crazy on their on their face the void of any cultural context the point is that they are anomalous within our hard one scientifically informed picture of the world and the way that scientifically informed picture of the world was hard one is as i say an exciting story that we all need to we all need to know more about think again of reincarnation now that's an idea that seems pretty intuitive in a lot of cultures right but if reincarnation were true if reincarnation were a phenomenon that actually takes place if we found that out it would force us to revise our entire picture of the world we would need to find some mechanism whereby reincarnation can take place and that would change our entire world picture that is what makes the idea of reincarnation extraordinary what makes it extraordinary within our hard one scientific picture of the universe not because it's intrinsically bizarre compared to any other idea without all that hard work that has gone in by science over the past 500 years now reincarnation is an extraordinary claim in our sense it is a claim that would change everything it is a claim that is anomalous within our scientific picture of the world and therefore it is the sort of claim that requires scrutiny there's reason to investigate it in what i would say is in a spirit of suspicion and now by way of analogy i mean we're talking about scientific skepticism skepticism about you know extraordinary claims that are anomalous given everything we know from science from what's been put in by science over the past hundreds of years but by analogy there are other claims that are anomalous given the knowledge we have i mean some people as we said yesterday some people deny the authenticity of of Shakespeare's plays or at least the authenticity of Shakespeare's composition of those plays a lot of people tell you you know the earlier Oxford wrote them or Christopher Marlowe wrote them or or Francis Bacon wrote them or whatever people will make those claims in in the humanities and by analogy you know here we have claims that are made in the face of overwhelming evidence and some people will deny other things some people for example will deny your terrible truths that we have from history they will deny terrible historical events such as the the Holocaust there was a time ladies and gentlemen when the claim that the Nazis murdered nearly six million Jews in their concentration camps there was a time when that claim should have been regarded with suspicion especially because there was so much in the way of false propaganda that was spread about the Germans in the first world war that you know it'd be worth your while you're digging out the information about the propaganda campaigns by the country's allied with us in the first world war given that experience there was a time when it would have been reasonable to be suspicious about that that claim and we should in fact always be suspicious about atrocity propaganda especially the atrocity propaganda promulgated by our own side because it's all too easy to believe that kind of propaganda however the fact of the matter is that the Nazi Holocaust did take place we we have the extraordinary evidence that was required to convince us that those horrific events took place and we have that evidence in much detail you know given the picture that was built up by investigators immediately after the second world war and by historians since we actually do have the extraordinary evidence needed to believe in the occurrence of something as vast and horrific as the the Holocaust someone who now denies those events someone who now denies those events in the face of that accumulation of evidence does not deserve the honorable title of skeptic they are in denial of the evidence and they deserve the title denialist right we live in a society where there are many kinds of denialism many kinds of suspicion of claims that do not deserve the honorable title of skepticism ladies and gentlemen those extraordinary claims that actually we acquire extraordinary evidence thereby change our picture of the world and in the case of something like the Holocaust they change much of the picture of how we understand you know humanity and history and our and our place in it once extraordinary claims are established by the evidence of course they become normalized once they are sufficiently well established those once extraordinary claims can then be used in arguments against new claims that are inconsistent with them and when that happens all of that cumulative evidence that supports such a claim then stands as evidence against any inconsistent claim so I think for example of the rotation of the earth that was once an extraordinary claim and the onus was on proponents such as Galileo to gather the evidence skepticism about that claim was rational and warranted what was not rational and warranted of course was looking Galileo under house arrest the rest of his life you know Jonathan Presk's work but the suspicion and skepticism and investigation you know in a mood of suspicion that was warranted but the evidence was gathered someone who denied that claim now would not deserve the title of skeptic and earth rotation skeptic if there was such a thing you know would not be would not deserve the honorable title skeptic such a person would be a crackpot or a denialist or something else a crank perhaps don't ask me just what the difference is you'd have an interesting talk perhaps on what is the difference from a crank a denialist or a crackpot but they'd be one of those okay and we have in our society now holocaust denialists we have climate change denialists we have evolution denialists and we have the nihilists of many other important claims to which we do actually have the accumulation of the evidence we have denialists of claims for which extraordinary evidence probably was needed but that evidence has been gathered and this distinction between a skeptic in the honorable sense and a denialist that is a distinction that needs to be more widely understood our children need to be taught that distinction just as they need to be taught what I was saying earlier they need to be taught about how hard one our current evidentially informed picture of the world actually was I don't believe those things are well understood by our children generally I'm not going to stood by your children but they don't they're not generally understood by the children in our society and generally speaking they're not well understood even by adults so I suppose the challenge to the bottom here is let's do more about that thank you for your attention colleagues and friends my very last slide was a thank you slide which said question times here but the question time will have to be in the Delray lounge I think but no we have good conversations about these issues wherever we have those conversations thank you once again friends and colleagues and thank you to Jayre for hitting me here thank you Russell Blackford Russell Blackford