We also have 5,000 people who signed a valentine to the Memphis Office of Health and it's saying where is the love for humanity in Memphis? Here we are in front of Congresswoman Louise Frankel's office. Congresswoman Julia Brownlee, Southern California. Congressman Tim Walbert's office from Michigan. Representative Quasimodooney's office. Congressman Jerry Connolly, the team needs to call for a ceasefire. We're in front of Adam Smith's office. Congresswoman Joyce Spadey, Ohio. Frederica Wilson. We're delivering this valentine to Congressman Mark DiCano. We're here at the office of Congressman Mike Quigley from Illinois, who really needs to hear from us today. We're delivering this valentine to the offices of Mike Simpson from Idaho.  This is serious and everybody here walks around like nothing's happening while their hands are on this. So we have 5,000 people who signed this valentine to say, free my Palestine and not only call for a ceasefire, but we have to ask for the funding to onward to continue because humanitarian aid is desperately needed. You've already got 100,000 people who have been killed or wounded and people are dying every day from no medical care. How many women are giving birth with nothing? C-sections with no support. So as a woman, she knows better and she represents people who have hearts. So she needs to find her heart again and call for a ceasefire. We are here at Congressman Garrett Graves from Louisiana who's celebrating Carnival, which is about life. So we're going to ask them to care about the lives of the Palestinian people We're here delivering this valentine to Congressman Jim Costa of Southern California who says stand with Israel and we say stand with the people of Palestine. Just so impressive this morning to be with all these children who are here to say, free my Palestine. We're here to say have a heart. Where is your heart? How could you be doing this?


More people are traveling this holiday season, doubling the amount of travelers California saw in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. This means airports will be busy, which may cause longer lines, less parking, and more stress. There are steps you can take to make traveling this holiday season easier and safer for you and your family. We really encourage people even prior to leaving for the airport to check our website for parking availability and to also check their traffic apps for any accidents or any delays on the freeway that might impede their their arriving here at the airport. Part of leaving and giving yourself time from your home to the airport also encompasses giving you time to be courteous, to be friendly, knowing that those persons on the other side of the on the desk that are giving you issuing your boarding pass have a tough job. We encourage people you know be patient it's a busy time of year for everyone and everybody here is doing their best to get you to your destination as quickly and as easily as possible. Be prepared for the screening process. This allows for TSA security officers to focus on their mission of ensuring passengers are safe during their travels. Take advantage of the TSA website to ensure that you have all the facts and that makes your travel much smoother. Prepare for security when packing and ensure that there are no prohibited items in your carry-on luggage that could result in a bag check. Slowing the screening process for you and all the travelers behind you. The federal mandate for masks is still enforced and it is required to have a mask on anytime you are on airport property. If you see someone not wearing a mask or following COVID protocols, don't take it upon yourself to enforce them on others. Tell an employee. Let the professionals handle an individual that's out of compliance. Throughout your whole experience traveling, it's always smart to stay aware of your surroundings. And if you see something that doesn't seem right, let someone know. Could be nothing, could be something, but you know, it's the old adage of if you see something, maybe you should say something. For more information and safety tips, visit news.caloes.ca.gov. From everyone at Cal OES, I'm Brittany Peterson.


This is a cultural event from the British Library. Thank you, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the British Library tonight for John Gray, Cats, Humans and the Good Life. My name is Susanna Stephenson and I'm one of the cultural events producers here at the library where I've had the very fun job of taking the exhibition that we currently have in the entrance hall and building a programme of events around it. I shared a story with John earlier in the green room about the fact that this all came from the fact that I heard his desert island discs in which he mentioned that he had a cat and was intrigued by their relationship with humans, at which point he received an email. Tonight's event is just one of a series of talks inspired by the exhibition Cats on the Page. So do take a look at the brochures you have and see if there are any others you'd like to come and see. And the exhibition is on until the 17th of March, so don't miss your chance to see it if you haven't already. I'll just briefly summarise the format of this evening. In a moment I'll ask John Gray to come to the stage and he will speak for around 50 minutes or so. I will then reappear and we'll have a Q&A with all of you. So if you find any questions brewing, please do hold on to them because your moment will come. So now it just remains for me to introduce John Gray properly. He is a political philosopher with interest in analytic philosophy and the history of ideas. He retired in 2008 as school professor of European thought at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He contributes regularly to The Guardian, The Times Literary Supplement and The New Statesman where he is the lead book reviewer. I hope you enjoy the talk this evening and please welcome John Gray. Well thank you for all of you for coming to hear my thoughts about cats. I should add that the cat that we have at the moment is one long-versed in the ways of humans. He's 22 years old at his next birthday. Whether he's learned anything of value during those 20 years of close connection with humans, I'm not so sure because one thing my own observations of cats, I've had many other cats too, is that cats are like a certain kind of human, the kind of human who originally gave me the idea of the book I'm now writing on, cats and the meaning of life, who was the kind of person who believed very strongly in human reason and was a philosopher many years ago, the kind of person who first implanted this idea in my mind of writing a book on cats that now several decades later I am doing, believed that human beings were guided by reason in their lives or could be and he was himself as almost inevitably that would follow in some aspects of his life at least completely irrational.  He had, this was about 30 years ago, he had persuaded to become a vegan. Now, vegan cats have always been, shall we say, rare. And the idea of persuading a cat to become a vegan has perhaps even been rarer until recently where it's now seriously proposed and even practiced by a number of people, but then it was unusual. And so originally I thought it was a joke so I smiled and he said, you must have had some very persuasive arguments. And he said, yes I did. I pursued the conversation a little while until I saw him getting angry and I realised that it wasn't a joke. He really had convinced himself that his cat was vegan. I didn't go into many details but towards the end of our increasingly rather tense conversation I asked him, I said, did your cat go out? Capital O. And he said yes, so QED. What I imagined was happening is that the cat went to some other owner who was less, shall we say, besotted with reason and with a certain conception of morality or caught things in the garden and possibly even brought them back but vegan philosophers may not perhaps not be the most observant people in the world. What does this illustrate? Well certainly it illustrates a feature of cats which is that cats are quickly convinced of the incurable irrationality of humans. But they never, even if they could, they would never try and persuade by reason humans to stop being unreasonable. They would take for granted that humans are so unreasonable that no reason could stop them from being unreasonable. So they simply adapt their behaviour if it becomes too trying or boring they leave. I don't know if they can have it. So that planted the idea in my mind 30 years ago of writing this book and our own cat seems to have long accepted that we are unreasonable. But we're reasonable enough, my wife and I when we look after him, for him to forgive us our human status and our unreasonableness and he seems to have had and have a happy life. Now what did that actual event, that actual episode that did in fact happen to me illustrate some of the themes I'm going to try or thoughts that I'm going to try and address at night. I'm not a scientist of cats, I'm not a zoologist. I've had much, lots of books about cats and had many cats but these are simply thoughts that I've had over the years which have been germinated in me by living with cats. And they've really fallen into three categories. The first is cats and morality. The second is cats and happiness. And the third is cats and us. Now I suppose when one talks about cats and morality the first thing people say, well cats have no morality they'll say. Cats are always thought to be amoral. And people who say this have like the philosopher I described a moment ago, they have a very clear idea in their mind or they think it's a very clear idea in the mind of what morality is. They think they know what morality is. It's a set of principles perhaps or rules or values which they never quite clear where they come from. If they're religious perhaps they come from God, if they're not religious it's less clear where they come from. They might say humanity or humankind but of course humankind, human beings have had many different moralities. There's an enormously wide variation. The moralities of Sparta and the moralities of Athens for example in human history. But they're very clear in the minds people who think like this of what morality is. But in fact I think even in the relatively narrow cultural space of western civilization there are at least two different conceptions. Of morality and what's sometimes called ethics. There's the one I've just described which is that morality consists of a series of laws essentially. It's kind of a legal conception or a system of principles which we must obey. And I think this is important. I think it comes from Jewish and Christian sources and although I'm an atheist myself. I think these are very valuable and precious traditions that have contributed a lot to our civilization and we've been greatly impolished without them. But they're not the only way of thinking about the good life. They're not the only way of thinking about how to live. And in other traditions outside of the western civilization, Chinese Taoism for example, or within western civilization, the ancient Greeks didn't think of the good life in quite that way. They didn't think of it in terms of obeying laws. They didn't even think that morality marked out a special part of human life. We tend to think of morality as a kind of special, weighty, terribly important, immensely valuable kind of part of human life. In fact as the supreme kind of locust, the supreme kind of value in human life as if it's separate from everything else. But actually if you read back into Aristotle even, not one of my favourite philosophers for many reasons, but if you read back into Aristotle the way he thought of ethics, to use this other word, was the way most Greeks thought of it at that time, which was the art of life. So ethics was whatever you needed to live well and that would include hygiene, beauty, what we now call aesthetics. It would include lots of areas of life that we don't think of as being moral, of having nothing much to do with morality. Whatever was needed to live a good life was part of ethics. Now one good feature of Aristotle is that even back then, 2500 years ago, he didn't restrict ethics entirely to human beings. In Aristotle long before there were ideas of speciesism or anti-speciesism or animal rights, he talks about the ethics of dolphins. He said dolphins have virtues. What are virtues? Virtues are things you need to live well. To live well he thought meant to realise your nature, to realise your nature. Dolphins, being dolphins, needed certain virtues of courage, bravery, cooperation, trust among themselves to live well as dolphins.  Downside of Aristotle, there are many downsides of Aristotle, is that basically he was writing for middle-aged Greek property-owning males, which is a relatively small part of the human species even at that time. And there's also something when you read him and when you read him on friendship, I mean when he says a friend is someone who mirrors yourself. When reading, I think, well why would it have been simply just a buyer mirror and sit and look at yourself all day? That's not been my experience of friendship. Mine has been that people are very different from the way I am. I've been very often the most valuable friend. So I don't in general find him an inspiring moral philosopher. But in this respect he's very interesting because he sees ethics, the art of life, as something which all species can practice. They can't deliberate about it, maybe the way we do, they can't ponder it about the way that we do. But other species like dolphins and like cats, though he doesn't mention cats, can have virtues and cats I think are like that. Now of course, one feature of cats relevant to any book on cats and philosophy or the meaning of life is that cats don't need philosophy. There's no known feline philosophy and I think they don't need it. Why don't they need it? Because they already know how to live. From a kind of feline point of view, you might say that needing a philosophy or a religion is a human frailty, a human weakness. It's because we don't know how to live that we need to think about it and philosophise about it and take up religions. And also, as far as we know, there are no cat religions. One thing we can be absolutely certain is that they don't regard us as deities. Humans have regarded cats as deities, the ancient Egyptians of course, but there's no known instance of that being ever reversed. Of course, the ethics of cats are shown in their relationship to their kittens. They go to great lengths to protect their kittens, sacrifice their lives for their kittens and in that sense you might say they're altruistic. And we tend to think of ethics nowadays in terms of altruism. Ethics means or morality means caring for others. And that's of course one of the arguments people give for cats being immoral. They say well they don't care for other cats, it doesn't seem unless they're kittens and they don't really care. Many people say for humans, they want certain things from humans and to the extent that they get these things from humans they exhibit affection, but it's kind of switched on and off and it's not really true. I think this is a mistake. I'll talk a bit about that more later, but I think cats can have genuine affection for us and even love us. But unlike humans, they can love us without needing us. That's to say they can walk away. They have their own life, they're independent. Their lives have the meaning they have, and I'll talk about that a bit more, independently of us. So they don't need humans in the way that we humans sometimes need other humans to provide our lives with a meaning. And that's actually part of my main thought tonight, which I'll try and develop, which is that the secret of feline happiness is that cats don't tell their lives as stories. You sometimes read from people who may not have had cats or know them very well, they say cats live in an eternal present. They have no sense of time. Well, if you're woken up as we are twice a night at 3.30 and then 6.30, you begin to doubt that because when they get hungry they seem to remember exactly when they're going to be fed. They have a sense of time, at least as it applies to their practical necessities. The key is not that whether they have a sense of time or not, or whether they live in the present or not, I don't think they do entirely, although they do more than humans. It's that cats more than even other animals don't find the meaning in their lives from constructing a story about their lives. And I think a very deep-seated feature of the human animal and the human culture is that we all tend, all of us have this tendency, I think, and again I'll try and speculate about why this is so. To find meaning in our lives to the extent that they embody a coherent story told to us by ourselves, made up by, fashioned by ourselves, or maybe one that we find ready-made in a religion or a philosophy. And to the extent that that story breaks down or is confounded by events, some dissolution of society, upheaval or a personal catastrophe or tragedy like a bereavement or something else of that kind. To the extent that our story is disrupted, broken, to the extent that our lives which we thought of almost like a novel or a book, we suddenly found the pages ripped out, some of the pages ripped out. We don't know what's coming next. We're unhappy. And we're unhappy in a way which is more pervasive and more diffuse and more disabling to some extent than even the unhappiness which comes from physical pain or danger because it pervades the whole of our lives. And here again we're different from cats because the default condition of a cat is contentment or happiness. The default condition of human beings is diffuse misery. Remember Freud, someone I think is now unpopular but I greatly admire, he wrote to someone that the aim of therapy of psychoanalysis he said was to transform the hysterical misery of neurosis into ordinary everyday unhappiness. Might seem rather limited and modest but stoically even but that's what he said. But it recognizes that for humans happiness is not a natural condition. It's certainly not the default condition but cats it is. They're capable of unhappiness even of great unhappiness or suffering obviously. Terrible things can happen to them as they can to humans. But the impact on them is different because it doesn't, those kind of events don't fragment a story that they've either imbibed, accepted, inherited or made up for themselves which is then broken up by events. So get back to my first cat. Cats have no morality but it doesn't mean they don't know how to live. They do know how to live. It doesn't even mean that they have no ethics. The ethics is what it takes for them to live well. So they need to be brave and cats are brave. They also brave enough to be cautious. That's to say to run away. They don't exhibit bravery in order to be praised or admired by other cats. They run away. They're very cautious when they eat. They make sure it's as far as they can that it's not poisonous. Some of it is anyway but they're cautious in many of the things that they do but they're also extremely good. And they're extremely inventive and resourceful. In fact according to recent studies of cats based on the long history of cats based on DNA evidence it looks as if they initiated their own domestication about 12,000 years ago. When they started haunting grain stores in Turkey and maybe China that humans had set up because in grain stores first of all there were other living things like rats, rodents that they could catch and kill. And they started interacting with humans and unlike dogs there is a view which says that cats as it were took the initiative and being domesticated but they're not of course very domesticated. They're much less domesticated than there are many artificial breeds of cats but cats on the whole have become less, have not become part human the way dogs have done. And that's I think part of their charm for those of us who love cats which is they're not actually mainly human in their mind. Their mind is an inhuman mind, an alien mind and for that reason it gives us like a window to a non human world. But fearless Sylvesteros, a sturdy little tabby who seems to have emerged from Turkey about 12,000 years ago has spread throughout the entire world on ships which went to Australia. It's conquered the world, very, very successful animal, very successful species. And so it has the virtues which enabled it to live well and in this context living well also includes living happily. Unless bad things happen to them cats are happy. Humans are not happy even if good things happen to them. Because very often they have a story in which something even better should still happen or they have a story about their whole lives ending in a successful death of some kind. But the fact of the matter is none of us knows how we're going to die and that by the way I'll come back to that later is I think one of the reasons, I'm only speculating I can't prove this, but one of the reasons we are storytellers in the way that we are as humans is that we know we're going to die in a way that cats don't. We know our lives are finite. We know they come to an end. I mean there are some people in California who won't accept this of course. Including the current director of engineering at Google who's on what he describes as an inexpensive vitamin regime, it's only $1,000 a week. To keep him alive till 2040 or I think it might now be 2032, it's getting nearer as he gets older. When there will be a technological transformation in which he will be rid of his frail human body, however a vitamin boosted. And his mind will be uploaded into cyberspace where he will be immortal. But unless you share that view, or you let your religious, which in some strong way in a type of religion which values immortality, which not all religions do actually, but which thinks that humans can or will be immortal, the common human experience is to know that you are going to die and that your lives and your days and your years are limited. And that I think is one of the factors, one of the forces that turns us into storytellers. If we didn't know that, if we didn't have a vivid sense of that, which even elephants, though they seem to gather around dead elephants, don't seem to have in their own cases, they don't seem to have a sense of their lives as being measured out in three score, ten, or even with four score, five score, six score and ten as technology enables us to live longer. We know that finite and that seems to be one of the factors to me, the awareness of our mortality which makes us into storytellers, which makes us want to tell a coherent story of the whole of our lives which we know will come each of them to an end. The trouble is we don't know any of us how they will end and so there's an element of pretence and also an element of deep anxiety in this because as I said earlier, when something goes wrong, we tend to suffer very badly. So I'll move on, as it were, to cat happiness, the happiness of cats. And I guess one book here, which I mentioned to you, it's a very long book and it's not mostly about the cat, but the title is The Cat from Huey. Any of you ever heard of it? That book, The Cat from Huey. It's written by an American war correspondent who, as a relatively young man, spent a lot of time in Vietnam and while he was in Vietnam, he adopted a Vietnamese cat in the city of Huey, which is some of you who may remember about Vietnam. It was a city, a beautiful Vietnamese city, which was pretty well completely destroyed in the course of the Vietnam War. He adopted the cat, he took it to America, he took it to London and although the cat always had a certain grumpiness and mistrustfulness about human beings, not surprising, being surrounded by in its early months and years by sounds of gunfire and people dropping dead beside it, it grew to trust him and love him, it seemed, and it's a story of partly about his own life as a war correspondent, but partly about that cat. You might want to look at his name as John Lawrence. Now, why is that relevant? Well, one of the things I guess that occurred to me when I was reading the book is that, as any of us would do, we would all do this, we would try to make sense of our time in Vietnam. We'd try to construct some story of what we were doing there and what the war was for and how it worked out, which didn't make it into a completely meaningless farce. I mean, I think the Irish poet Seamusine, he says, people ask what the logic of history is. He says it's got perfectly clear logic, it's the logic of an abattoir. So you're out there, are you among the sheep or the killers of the sheep, the butchers of the sheep? You'd be one or the other at any one time and then switch to another. We'd struggle and of course many of the young Americans who came back, came back psychologically damaged. There were more people, more Americans who served in the Vietnam War, who came back and committed suicide than there were who died in the Vietnam War. Many of them came back with strong addictions and of course countless more Vietnamese in that war, seeing their homes, their cities, their forests destroyed would not quickly or ever recover from it. They'd be traumatised. Now cats can also be traumatised, but what struck me in this story is that the cat was traumatised but it was able to leave it behind to a large degree more than a human could and I don't interpret that as many would say, well it's just less well developed in humans. Cats are, they've got less cognitive abilities, maybe they don't remember things the way we do. I think the reason was more that cats have not developed, don't have, maybe couldn't have but don't have this need to turn their lives and even human history as a whole into a coherent narrative, a coherent story.  I once was talking to another philosopher who said along these lines a different philosopher who said but you must remember John, that cats have no history the way we do. I said you regard that as an advantage of ours. Is history so wonderful when you look back at history? It's so wonderful that cats are deeply impoverished, they can't say well. We cats first of course discovered the pleasure of fish in the Egyptian period. At that time we knew very little about the truth, the true delicacy of fish. We just walked it down. Later on we became gourmets of fish. We often refused fish, often they do actually, sometimes cats offered by humans as not being to our taste but at that time we were pretty undeveloped as cats. It's only over many centuries and long struggles that we progressed to the point at which we now have the highly developed taste in fish that we have. No, cats don't think like that. But then they're also of course for that reason they're not dependent on historical narratives. That can't not only the narratives of our own lives, each of our lives, we each have narratives of our own lives, but we also have big historical narratives which tell us that the future, how the future is going to be. So they tell us that there'll be more of good things, more justice, more liberty, more freedom, more prosperity. What some politicians call the arc of justice will gradually tilt. Not inevitably, not quickly, there'll be periods in which it slides back in which you have periods of regression, but over a long history the idea is that there is a gradual story slowly working out. Now, if you begin to get the feeling which I suspect quite a lot of people do now that that narrative may not be entirely accurate. That there may be sudden rapid losses of gains that have been accumulated over centuries. Very hard to gain or generations that suddenly vanish in the blink of an eye and that they might not come back during your lifetime or even your children's lifetime. Once that seeps into the soul it's very difficult for humans to adapt to that and characteristically I don't want to sound pessimistic, far from me to be pessimistic. They become rather wild and desperate and irrational and it's in those times that people tend to turn to dictators and demagogues and persecutions because they want to, they're terrified by, and there may be practical reasons too by the way like there were in the 1930s, there may be huge inflations. I remember reading about old people in Berlin during the great inflation of the interwar period and when they were asked their address, the number of the street they said, instead of saying 22, so-and-so strasher they said 22 billion, 3 million and 550 thousand, the street number because suddenly the denominations to the notes that they used have really gone into millions and were. So we go get this rough so it can be practical as well as spiritual or psychological and when that happens, when things we've not only grown used to and habituated to but expect to be in the future suddenly vanish or it looks as if they vanish and we don't know what's going to come next. The story breaks down, not just our own personal story but the historical narrative, history. History has a sort of repository of meaning breaks down and the normal reaction to that is fear and a common reaction to that fear is to look round for a saviour of some kind and that often turns out to be a dictator or a tyrant or someone offering some quick and easy solution. Quick and easy solutions if you want a general rule, generally involved killing large numbers of people. That'll do it, never does actually but not much has learned from that. Well in the world of cats which is a world if not of the internal present but a world different from the human world in that they live according to the pleasures of the day and the satisfactions of the day and the long sleeps they take in between the days. None of this occurs so I don't see the absence of a history, I don't see the lack of a history of a ffeline history of improvement, ffeline history in 12 volumes. I don't see that as a loss necessarily, they certainly don't anyway. So this also has another side which is that although terrible things can happen to cats as may have happened to the cat from your way, the cat's lives can't be tragic in the way that human lives can be tragic. Now you can see this as a loss because you can say that what's in a sense valuable even about a tragic life is that it's some kind of will has been asserted against, some kind of struggle has been mounted by a human being individually or collectively against some great disaster or injustice or evil. And even if it's failed then it has value and I think there's something in that actually is important. I think there are some struggles that humans can and have and will and do and should even engage in, even if they know they're going to lose, even if they know they're going to be defeated. It would have been better to go back to Unfashionable now to talk about it but in 1940 it would have been better to go into that war, in the certain knowledge that you were going to be defeated rather than I think to compromise or make a peace because the peace would have been so shameful and so ultimately barbarous that it would be better to resist. You would show some signs of civilization go on there perhaps but it would be better. So I don't see that tragedy as well at value but of course we can be trapped individually or collectively in our tragic stories. There's an interesting historical debate on historical remembrance. Should we remember, I think we should, the great crimes and atrocities and victories and so on on the past. But there is a debate about it because sometimes they can prevent a society moving on. Cats don't have any of these problems. The basic kind of thought I'm having here is that if you want to be happy in the way that cats are happy, you have to forget the stories which you as a human being think will make you happy. You have to put aside those stories because they're necessarily fragile in relation to the events of life. I think the least fragile stories are stories from traditional religions because they're not falsifiable in the way that stories that we know. If you have a story which tells you that if you take up a certain therapy you'll be alright in certain ways and it doesn't work. That's pretty fragile. Ten thousand dollars on that damn therapist and I feel worse now than I did when I started. That's a fairly, I'm not saying it always works like that but fragile stories are ones that depend on events in the world which can easily go the wrong way. Less fragile ones may depend on religious beliefs and I'm not a religious believer myself or practitioner but beliefs which can't be fragile in that way. It's interesting if you read about how people survive in extreme conditions in concentration camps and other extreme conditions. You often find that those with, they're not the only ones but those with strong commitment to a religious narrative of their lives. Ending of course not with death but going on after death lasts longer. That's open to a criticism in one of Solzhenitsyn's stories about the Soviet gulag. He has one of his characters, Evander Mizovic, ask another one in the bunk. The other one said well God sent me here that's why I'm happy and the character Evander Mizovic he says fine but why am I here? So it doesn't always as it would give the kind of deep peace that it's required. What does this non-story telling approach to life give you? Well first of all cats have no regrets. They don't spend their lives wondering what they've lost. Freud again back to Freud said that the uses of fiction, he thought we all tended to fiction in our lives, the logical thinking in fiction in the way we thought about our lives are they provide us with the possible lives we might have wanted or desired but didn't have. That's why we're like that.  I don't know whether that's true. I've always thought that he or she might have regretted a bit too much but she's saying so passionately about not regretting. It's not always possible to believe that. She didn't regret and we have reasons for regrets but we don't live in regret if we're wise and if we're wise we can learn something from cats in that respect. Now this kid takes me to another kind of very important point about cats and about humans. Humans I think can't avoid protecting an image of themselves as they pass through their lives. We have a self image. An image not of us that we recognise in the mirror. Cats don't recognise their image in the mirror. Other animals, non-human animals can and do certain types of ape for example can recognise themselves but cats don't. But more generally quite apart from their physical appearance cats don't have what we all have which is an image of ourselves as we wish to be or would like to be or like to be seen to be which we protect through thick and thin. And this is a feature I think just a feature of being human. We know the kind or we think we know the kind of person we want to be and we think we know the kind of person we want to be seen as being. And of course this can lead and very often does lead to a state of self division. The key feature of humans I think as compared with other animals in particular with cats is not that humans are better or worse by some standard. I don't think there is some cosmic standard of better or worse between species. Not one which puts humans at the top which is the traditional Greek and Christian view for example. Or even one which puts cats at the top although I'm more tempted by that. I don't think there is one like that. I think the good life is specific to a particular species. And this is one way by the way where ethics differs from morality. The vegan philosopher wanted to convert his cat to veganism and thought that because veganism might be the best for humans. It was the best for everyone else, all other species. Well it might be the best for humans. I'm not saying it isn't. But doesn't follow that it's the best for other species. If you think of ethics as being those virtues, those ways of living that enable a particular species with a particular nature to live well. The trouble with humans is that their nature is divided. Our natures are divided in a way that other animals' natures are not. As I say, no cat and all that regrets. Dogs do as having been partly humanised, partly anthropocentised. They can show shame and embarrassment and you can tell from their behaviour that they may think they've done anything wrong. Never noticed that in cats. But that capacity for regret or remorse or backward looking or discontent is one of the human capacities that creates the default condition of diffuse unhappiness in which humans live. Because we can always regret what we've done. Even if it's not bad, it might not have been the best we could have done. It might have led to some better result. So we can always, we've got the capacity, the reflexive capacity to look on our impulses and regret the fact that we have certain impulses at all. Regret the fact that we are what we are. And so nothing is more characteristic than humans than the want to be higher than human. Nothing is more characteristic of humans than to want not to be human. Which is exactly the opposite of cats of course because they're delighted to be cats. They want nothing else but to be cats. Humans write throughout history even back to Chinese alchemy. They wanted ways of kind of early Silicon Valley type thinking. They wanted to make themselves immortal. Other Taoists by the way, maybe more philosophical Taoists thought that they welcomed death when it came because they transformed them into something different, something they welcomed death as part of an endless cosmic process of renewal. So they lyrically accepted death or tried to when it came upon them. But generally speaking throughout human history there are countless traditions in which humans have tried to rid themselves of part of their humanity. And not only themselves unfortunately but other people too by converting them to their own way of life or their own beliefs or their own worldview, their own ideology. And in modern times of course we have this through technology. Many people want to not just live longer but to live longer thinner, more beautiful, more attractive to other people, more sexy, more everything, more everything. And they think that technology can give them that along with perhaps some way of escaping death itself. By the way the reason I don't think we can escape death at all is not because the technology will never exist to upload us. Maybe it will, how do I know, might be quite soon. And certainly we will live longer already now than humans typically did. If you go back and read what Liverpool was like in the early 19th century, the average lifespan I think taking to a kind of child mortality was somewhere in the 20s, early 30s. Now later on you got into the 40s and I'm old enough now to remember a time when most males where I grew up in the northeast of England died in the early 60s. Women a couple of years later. So right in that even in my lifetime there's been a huge increase in mortality and no doubt there will be greater increases. In future though they may be very unequally spread, that's another kind of factor, but there won't be a technological cure of death, why not? Well even if you can upload a mind, a conscious mind into cyberspace, cyberspace is a projection from the human world not part of the, not something independent of the human world. Ultimately it will depend on a material infrastructure, computers, various kinds of devices that do the projection. If they are destroyed in a war or a global economic crash or a change of property rights in the course of a revolution, the sort of thing that's happened countless times, even in the 20th century. Then you can kiss goodbye to your immortality because you'll suddenly disappear. Back in the 80s, get back to cat, but it's relevant to cat. When I lived in California I spoke to some of the techno-immortalists who at that time were going to achieve technological immortality by having their bodies or their brains at least frozen. And I said, well, when will the technology be around? That will defreeze you without the harm that the freezing does. And they said then, because they were more modest then, they said it might be about 100 years or so. So I said, well have you thought about what happened in the last 100 years, even just in America? Civil war? Great depression? Two world wars? So this little company in Nevada that you're sending your remains to your frozen head, that'll still be there.  Well none of these things will happen. In other words, no, no, none of those things will happen. So I admire their faith, not in this case in technology but in human history because what they were saying actually is that the institutions around them were already immortal. But historically it's just not true. Historically, as I say, there was a big crash in the 1930s and countless businesses and banks went under. In Europe there was what we all know what happened in Europe in the 1930s. So although these particular disasters won't happen. Now if you do not live with an awareness of death and therefore of the kind that we humans have, and if you don't live trying to tell a story in which your life will end in the way that you now want it to end, and if it ends in that way you will be happy and if it doesn't you won't. You won't be tempted to seek technological immortality. And you won't be tempted to see human history as an ongoing story which ends with humans controlling nature or controlling themselves or being capable of immortality. And you won't be as horrified or as frightened perhaps. You still will be because we're humans but you won't buy times in history when the improvement or progress that you have inherited from the past seems to be going to be suddenly lost. You'll realise that this is actually historically speaking normal. You'll realise that this happens from time to time and you can resist it. You can join collective movements if you want. You can do various things or you can do as the cat does to try to live well in all circumstances as they unfold even in Huey. The cat doesn't seem to have tried to run away from the war, war observe. In fact when it was taken up in a plane, two or three-seater plane and flown across a battlefield, it sat curiously on the shoulder of the pilot and watched as it flew over the jungle. It seems to have taken its new life in its full stride. So what I say of cats are is they are egoists aside from their care for their kittens, but they're a strange kind of egoists. They're selfless egoists because they don't have any conception of themselves, a self image which they're protecting. Unless their security, their safety or their comfort is threatened, they don't act to achieve some image of themselves in themselves or in the eyes of others. I think we can learn from that. Now what about cats and us? What I've said so far, I'm coming to the end now, has suggested that they're very, very different from us. In fact, that's, I think, one of the reasons why many of us love them, but if they're so different, how can we learn anything from them? If they're so different from us, if they're so radically different from humans in the respect, how can we learn anything from them? Well, we can't become cats. I'm sure that's something that cats would agree with. We can't become cats and we shouldn't try and become cats because we are humans. We should try to be perhaps better humans, but there are certain features of being human, like storytelling, which we might be happier if we were less enslaved to them, less attached to them. In other words, what we can learn from cats, I think, is how to be less attached to the stories we tell of our lives. We may derive great meaning from them in certain ways, the lives we've had with a partner who's gone or in a place that no longer exists. But equally, those stories can sometimes prevent us from moving on. So although we are storytellers and we always will be, which is one of the reasons, by the way, why we will, I think in my view, we will always have religions of one kind or another. Because the stories we tell in the sense that they're all very fragile and we look for anti-fragile stories. That's what we're looking for in religion. We shouldn't be so attached to that part of our natures. Hanging on to our stories is one of the reasons we don't enjoy our lives as much as we can. So what would be the meaning of life for a cat like human being? Well, what's the meaning of life for a cat? It's the sensation of life itself. The meaning is in the sensation of life itself. That is the meaning. Nothing else. Now, if you're religious, that will seem to be a very impoverished view. But if you're not religious, this is one way to think of the meaning of life. The Taoist in China thought like that. Some of the ancient Greek skeptics, for example, thought like that. The meaning of life is in the sensation of life. You then try and find a way to live being human you don't already know. And a way which enables you to interact with other human beings in a beneficial way. In a way which is perhaps even mutually beneficial. So that's in a way where I get. Where I get is we love cats because they're not human. Maybe we envy the fact that they're not human. But we can't become cats because we're so different from them. Because the reasons we love them also tell us that we can't be like them. But we can learn from them even though they're not particularly interested in teaching us. Books on cats, I just mentioned often, this is the first talk I've given on cats. But there are occasions when I've talked about cats with philosophers or others. They say, what about books on cats? I haven't found among philosophers very much. Montaigneur is a great writer on cats. Michelle de Montaigneur, the essayist, wonderful cats. He loved cats. He had, when my cat plays with me, I never know whether I am playing with it or she with me. He thought cats were in fact superior to. And other animals, many of animals in general, were superior to humans. He writes on cats. I'll mention three writers on cats I love. Colette is a film about her at the moment. The cat only appears for two seconds. But her whole life was spent loving cats and living with cats. And she wrote a lovely little novella called Gigi and the Cat. Which is about a love triangle, one of whose points is a cat. In which the cat is determined to drive away a gorgeous young woman who is interested in the cats. Some say owner, others say staff. Patricia Highsmith, the inventor of Ripley, spent an entire life with cats, loving cats. And she has a variety of stories about cats, very worth reading. And also Doris Lessing, many of you have come across. She spent a whole life loving cats, partly in Africa where she lived as a young person. So the kind of lives the cats lived with her in Africa on a farm in the outback in the wild. Quite different from the lives her sub-ascent cats lived when she came to live in London. But there's a little book where some of her stories are collected. And there are one or two poets. There's a kind of rather rough American poet called Charles Bikowski. And if you heard of him, he published a whole book of poems on cats. He wasn't too fond of humans, I don't think, but not even of himself. But he was very fond of cats and that's worth reading. So read more about cats, but maybe read these writers, fictional and other writers on cats. But just open your mind to the possibility that cats knowing so little know more than we do. About how to live a worthwhile life. Thank you. You've been listening to the British Library.


Hey everyone, welcome to another live video. We are out here in Scotland Live from the hot tub at this Airbnb. I'm staying out here Let's see if I can sit down without Dropping my phone got the alcohol-free beer You know how I do The biggest mistake The narcissist ever made What do I mean when I say that? Well The biggest mistake the narcissist ever made Was taking you for granted It was not appreciating you not realizing just how great you are and I'm able to say this because I've personally spoken to so many of you and I found that you're all very intelligent people Very attractive people and of course The narcissist was fully aware of this When they targeted you We know that narcissists Look for the best They want people who are intelligent Attractive powerful and successful That's what they're looking for but then Because we're only human Because we do have flaws and imperfections We do make false and mistakes They devalue us and then in some cases It's not even anything to do with what we've done Maybe they've done something wrong and they don't own it So they project their insecurities on to us They shift the blame as I've said before There comes a point in the relationship But the narcissist has to make a decision They have to make a choice And that choice is between their source and their false self And no narcissist is going to choose their source or their false self Because all that really matters to them is their image of reputation Because their image of reputation gets them supplied it gets them attention and aberration So they're not going to drop the act To treat you with the appreciation and respect that you deserve It's just not going to happen So yeah, the biggest mistake The narcissist ever made Was discarding you Devaluing you Taking you for granted Not appreciating you Not being grateful And that's why They often just End up downgraded in the end They're forced to settle for less But they might brag and boast about it and act like it's so much more than what it really is They have to do that. It's all about their image But deep down they know They know How good they had it with you You just got to look back and think about everything you did for them There aren't many people Who would be willing to do what you did for them You were their grade-A source of supply Most of you if you're watching my videos you were the grade-A source And that's why you're on here trying to figure this stuff out because they took advantage of us They used us But in the end they have to return to where they belong The standard that they're used to They knew all along that they weren't supposed to be with us They knew it was only a matter of time until it was going to end They were all about just getting in taking what they can And then getting out of there As cleanly as possible Thank you for the donations true love ghetto paradise productions and healing hurts. I Greatly appreciate it Yeah, the narcissist made a big mistake and they may never own that mistake Because as we know they don't like to take Responsibility They don't like to hold themselves accountable for what they've done, but we don't have to wait around Long to own that mistake Because as we know they're never gonna hold themselves accountable anyway, you've just got to make the most of our own lives, you know live our best lives Get out here in nature Such a nice view here. I've been traveling through Scotland Got all the Pictures and videos of my travels on my Instagram And I'll survive a YouTube But yeah, just chillin out here. I hope everyone's doing well. I hope you're all focusing on healing practicing self love Self care. All right, that's all for this one Thank you all for joining the life Hope to see you in the premieres later today, and if you're interested in coaching You could now book through the website www.narchsurvivor.co.uk Thank you all for joining


Hello, we will now discuss frequency tables. So frequency table or distribution as it might be known as, groups data into several categories referred to as classes, sometimes they use the word bends instead of classes, by listing all of the categories along with the number or frequency of data values in each of them.  No, you group the data into groups or classes or bends, which is the proper terminology to use. So the anatomy of a frequency table. So what I have displayed would be a frequency table that shows you the age of lottery winners from 20 to 29, 30 to 39, and so forth. So the left column represents my classes or my bends. Then my right column represents frequencies. So as you can see from the 20 to 29 age range that has a frequency of two. For 70 to 79, there's a frequency of nine. Lower class limits are the smallest numbers belonging to each class. So if you look at your classes or your bends, you look at the smallest number for that specific category, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, 70, these are called the lower class limits. In contrast, the upper class limits are the largest numbers that can actually possibly belong to each of the classes. So 29, 39, 49, 59, 69, 79, these right hand numbers, those are called the upper class limits. The class width. That is the distance from or the difference between the lower class limits of two consecutive classes or the upper class limits of two consecutive classes, like 20 and 30, there's a difference of 10 there, 30 and 40, there's a difference of 10, 40 and 50, there's a difference of 10 there. The class width is 10 in this case. Remember, you look at the lower class limits of two consecutive classes and subtract. Upper class midpoints are found, literally you take the lower class limit plus the upper class limit and divide by two. Lower class limit plus upper class limit divided by two.  So 20 plus 29 over two, that's where the 24.5 came from. The 34.5 came from 30 plus 39 divided by two, and so forth. Those are class midpoints. Class boundaries. See the issue with frequency tables, depending on how you make them, because different textbooks have different preferences, notice that my first class cuts off at 29 and my next class cuts off at 30. Well, when we're talking about ages, using years is fine, but what if we were dealing with data where you had something like a 29.5 in there? Well, what class would 29.5 belong to? That's why we have to have class boundaries. So what class boundaries are is you literally take your upper class limit of one class, your lower class limit of the next class, and you average them. So like 29 and 30, you average them to get 29.5, 39 and 40, you average them to get 39.5. That's the halfway point between the upper class limit of the first class and the lower class limit of the next class. In general, to find class boundaries, if your data consists of whole numbers, so for whole number data, you can add or subtract, this is another way to find your boundaries, you can add or subtract .5 from your limits, from your class limits. That would still get you the same data values listed here, the same boundaries listed here. For data with one decimal place, you would have to add or subtract .05 from your class limits. So however many decimal points your data go out to, you subtract one more decimal place with the five at the end. So for no decimal places, you subtract .5. For one decimal place, you subtract .05 or add to each of the class limits. So it's not really a big deal to be able to master finding class boundaries. The important thing is that you're able to create your classes. Like I said, people have different preferences for how to create frequency tables. This depends on who you're dealing with. So with frequency tables, sometimes they'll use what is called interval notation for the classes. For instance, if you see 20 to 29 as a class, they may write 20, 29 enclosed within brackets. You've likely seen this before, it is called interval notation. It's the same thing as saying anything from 20 to 29, including 20 and 29 themselves, is class 1. 30 to 39, you have 30, 39 enclosed within brackets. It means the same exact thing. Another way we might do this, because we have to deal with boundary values overlapping with each other, like 29 and 30, what do you do with that 29.5, if that was a possible data value to have? Well, one way to do this is to still keep interval notation. They say 20 to 29, let's write that as 20 to 30 and the next class is 30 to 40. As you can see, the upper class limit of the first class and lower class limit of the second class are identical. So what if you have an age of 30, where is it supposed to go? So to counter this, what they do strategically here is they put a bracket around the lower value in each class, that means you include that value 20 in the first class, and they put a parenthesis around the upper class limit of each class. What that means is that 30 does not belong to the first class, but anything smaller than 30, but greater than or equal to 20 does, and class 2, this parenthesis by the 40. That means 40 does not belong to that class, but everything smaller than it does, 40 actually belongs to the third class, that's why it has the bracket and so forth. So these are just looking at all the various ways these frequency tables can be created. All a relative frequency table is, it includes the same class limits, it includes a frequency column, but it also calculates the relative frequency, which is the percentage that something occurs. So it's a percentage frequency, or a fraction or decimal frequency. So for instance I'm dealing with exam scores, I have my classes or bins listed in the first column, then I have my frequencies listed in the second column. So notice that I have how many students here? Looks like I have 35 students, right? Alright, so to find the relative frequency, you look at, okay, class 1 has a frequency of 1, 1 out of 35 of the students or the exam scores belong to class 1. 1 out of 35 is 0.029, which is 2.9%. Second class, 4 out of 35 is 0.114, moved a decimal to the right two spots, that's 11.4%. 3, you have 7 out of 35, that's 0.2, so that's 20%, and so forth. And what this last column is, is it's called a cumulative frequency, it says, okay, class 1, your cumulative frequency or total frequency of all the classes is 2.9%. Everything in class 1, which is the only class we have. When we get to the cumulative frequency for class 2, it includes the total frequencies for class 1 and 2. Everything, class 2 and before it. When we get to the cumulative frequency in class 3, well then we're adding up class 1, 2, and 3. That's how cumulative frequency works. It adds up the current class and everything before it. So this class 4, this cumulative frequency includes everything from class 1, 2, 3, and 4. And notice class 5, you finally get to 100%. Depending on how you rounded, depending on how you rounded, might be 99% or it could be 101% your cumulative frequency. Sometimes rounding errors cause us to get slightly different than 100%, just to warn you. So use the relative frequency distribution of exam scores to find the indicated information. Where are the lower class limits? Who are they? Remember that is the smallest number in every single class. We have 5 classes, we need 5 lower class limits. So we have 50, 60, 70, 80, 90. What about the upper class limits? The bigger number in each class. So we have 59, 69, 79, 89, and 99. Then the class width. Remember that is the difference between the lower class limits or the upper class limits of 2 consecutive classes. What is the difference between 50 and 60? 60 minus 50 is 10, 70 minus 60 is 10, 10, 10, 10 is the class width. Class midpoints. Remember how we said to find these? We said you add up the lower class limit and upper class limit of each class and you divide by 2. So for class 1 we are dealing with 54.5. So I have 54.5, here is a little hint. Instead of you averaging every single lower class and upper class limit, you can just add 10 to 54.5 to get 64.5, then they get 74.5, 84.5, and 94.5 and literally just add the class width. And there is your 5 class midpoints. Alright, class boundaries. Class boundaries. Remember I said if you have whole number of data you can literally add or subtract .5 from your limits, from your class limits. So for instance you literally take 50 and subtract .5 and you will get 49.5. So my class boundaries will be 49.5, add 10, 59.5, add 10, 69.5, add 10, 79.5, add 10, 89.5, add 10, 99.5. So notice that these are the boundaries for my classes that began at 50 and end at 99. So you have a lower boundary of 49.5 for the very first class. Notice your cap out for the last class, the boundaries 99.5. These boundaries, well guess that, they're your class boundaries. They separate each of your classes, both below and above. Next, some tips for collecting data, kind of some fun information. Reported data is where people are actually asked to give data directly to those collecting it. So I ask you what your weight is and you tell me. When data is actually measured, those actually collecting data actually measure the data themselves. So instead of me asking for your weight, I have a scale and I'm like step on the scale, let me get your weight. Of course you should never really ask anyone what their weight is. It might get slapped, potentially. So I hear here the weight of 100 people that was collected and the results of the last digit of their weight are shown in the table. So last digit of the weight was a 0, I had a frequency of 46, 1 had a frequency of 1. Last digit of the weight was a 5, that's 30 people, so that's how all that was distributed. Remember, that's the last digit of the weight. So notice 0 and 5 had really high frequencies. Do you think all those people truly had weights that ended in 0 and 5? Do you think this data was actually measured or was it just recorded? I would say it was recorded. I don't think I had a scale and I was weighing all 100 people because there are so many people that had a 0 and 5, meaning when you ask someone their weight, they typically will likely give you some sort of nice, pretty number. So there's lots of 0s and 5s for last digits. So I'd say the data is recorded because there's a lot of people that gave you a weight that ended in a 0 or 5 because we were just so used to nice, pretty numbers. I may weigh or someone may weigh 160 pounds or 163 pounds, but when someone asked me my weight, I could tell them 165 or tell them 160 or I could totally lie and tell them a totally different number. So is the data accurate? No, the data are not accurate in this case. Sorry.


Hello, my name is Chris, or what I used to be called, The Bloxman 2007. I used to play Roblox when I was a kid, until I grew out of it, I fondly remember playing Crossroads and Doomspire with my friends. One day, July 8, 2007, I was scrolling through the Roblox Games page, until I found a game called, Forest, in glitchy text. The creator was no, with ID zero, he had no friends, and only had the badge called, Suffering, which I never saw as most of the badges were created by Roblox themselves. After that, I decided to join the game myself. The first thing I saw was my character in a forest, with a weird ambience in the background. I walked all over the place and I found nothing, one of the places contained a dead Robloxian, with a sword stabbed into his chest. I walked around until I found a house, which I could see a dark silhouette of what seems to be Robloxian. It was no himself, when I was clearly the only player in the game. I walked inside of the house, he said this to me. Hello Chris. Like, how did he even know my name? He continued his speech. You aren't supposed to be here, you cannot escape. I thought he was a troll, so I decided to close the Roblox program, but nothing happened. I even tried to ask manager, but the only thing I saw was an error message saying, you cannot run or hide. After his speech, I got teleported into a distorted dark room. The unsettling ambience turned into blood curdling screams, and I saw Null chasing me. I ran as fast as I can, while more errors with the same you cannot run or hide started appearing. My character started slowing down, and Null started speeding up. The screams became louder and louder, I tried to low down the volume, close the game, or even shut off my PC, but still, nothing happened. Null eventually caught me, and I don't want to remember this ever again, but I saw my player character being brutally murdered, Null literally ate my character's heart, burned my character's corpse and left it to rot. I couldn't move anymore, I was expecting to respawn, but the corpse stayed there. All of a sudden, the game showed a picture of someone hanging from a noose. The game closed by itself, and I got banned forever. The supposed reason said, you can try to hide, you can try to run, and you can try to defend yourself, but I'll always get you. After logging off from Roblox, I tried to look for the game again, but it just gave me an error. But instead of the usual an error occurred. We're sorry, it just said, it's too late, with glitchy text.


Hey everybody, welcome back to Magic Orthodoxy. My name is David and this is a Magic Review. Hey, today we're going to look at Mutate. This is a torn and restored trick. It's not your typical torn and restored. You take the card and you tear it just a little bit, just a little bit down the side, kind of like it shows there on the picture. And then with just a little flick, the spectator is able to watch the tear mystically disappear and you're able to hand out a completely restored card. You want to see what it looks like? This is it. This trick is being released by Magic Tau. Now, you probably want to know why I'm holding it so close to the camera. Well, because it's actually this big. This is what you get. So first question, you know, we always ask about all of our Magic Reviews. The first question is always what is in the box? This is the box. This is what you get.  Now, of course, that means you're not getting a DVD because a DVD wouldn't fit inside this. So you're getting a code inside this for a download. So is it what I thought? No, it's not what I thought at all. But you know, to be honest, I really didn't know what to think. Watching the video trailer, it does kind of have a real mystical, magical appearance. And so without seeing the entire effect from beginning to end, watching it in an edited commercial, it was kind of hard to decipher what actually was happening. And so, no, it wasn't what I expected at all. So how are the angles on Mutate? There are some angle issues. There's some three-dimensional aspects to this so that you have to keep the card in one position and your audience in one position so that you're not casting shadows. So I think you'll have to be both wary of your angles and wary of your audience management with Mutate. Can it be inspected? There is some cleanup. There you will be able to hand the card directly out. You will not have to switch the cards. The card does not have to go back to the deck before you hand it out. You will be able to hand the card out right after the restoration and have it be completely examined. Is it well-taught? The DVD isn't actually taught by Arnell. The DVD is taught by Chris Webb. Chris Webb goes over very basic moves that you're all familiar with. This is not an earth-shattering magic trick in the card force or anything like that. All of the trick part is very basic. The only part you're really going to have to learn is the torn and restored aspect of the trick. So that's the part that requires the practice. Chris goes over the magic portion, the first part, the interaction between the spectator. He goes over that very quickly and he's relying on you to know how to do a lot of that. The video is only 14 minutes long and so a good portion of that video is on just how to do the torn and restored aspect.  What's the overall quality and production value of the video? Magic Tau always makes really good videos. They are always done on HD. They're always beautiful. They're always full shot. I think you're getting exactly what you've seen before from their company. Well, as you can probably guess, there's some part on you to make it. However, it's not very much. It's very simple. It's not really so much that you're doing arts and crafts. It's that you're just kind of putting it together and taking it apart every single time. I don't want to give too much away. However, the gimmick that you're getting or the magic thing I'll say, the magic thing that you're getting will probably deteriorate over time or be destroyed over time. I don't want to use the correct word because again, that would give it away. You're going to have to take your magic thing to some place to find more magic things similar to it so that one day you can make your own magic thing and you'll be able to make your own magic things going forward. Does that make sense? Even though it doesn't require any arts and crafts for you at the very beginning, you just need to understand that your magic thing will kind of fall apart and you'll have to make new ones. How much practice does it require? Anybody who's familiar with magic should already be familiar with the moves required. This is not difficult at all. It should be pretty easy and pretty straightforward. Like I said, you're just going to be practicing your angles, practicing your audience management, and you should be good to go. All right, so what are the positives to Mutate? Obviously, it's very creative, torn and restored. It's creative in its appearance and it's creative in its solution. So I think it's two-fold. The spectators, we get to see a trick that we never get to see and you as a magician will be able to perform something that you don't normally do. This isn't your normal torn and restored. It's almost another trick. I can't tell you what it is, but it's almost another trick that's completely different and kind of added to this and it's done in a very creative way. I think there's massive props to Arnell for putting this together. I think it's a highly creative effect. So what are the negatives? Like we say right here, there's negatives to everything.  These are just the negatives that I saw. Okay, so the gimmick does have a few tells. All right, it has a few tells. So that if revealed or shown or done incorrectly, it would almost give away that you're not really doing what you're doing because spoiler alert, you're not doing real magic. Okay, this is not feel magic. And so there are a couple of tells from this that you'll just have to be a little wary of. How much setup and reset is there? I think anybody who's already familiar with the TNR understands that there's always some. And with this one, I think the setup is very simple. It's really simple. In fact, you would be able to do it walking from one table to the next. That said, you will also need a duplicate card to hand out every single time because this is probably one of those effects where you're gonna give away the card at the end. Even though it's not signed, even though it's not signed, you probably are not gonna use the same card over and over again because obviously you can't tear a new card over and over again. You will need to tear a card every single time you do this trick. So you're gonna need duplicates in advance. Okay, so is it worth your money? Is it worth your money? It's $25. This, okay, this is $25. The gimmicks that you get are handmade. That is a plus. But just the fact that the video itself is a download. You don't get a DVD, so you're not getting much here either. And the video is only 14 minutes long. For me, for my money, for $25, I would have appreciated more video. I would have appreciated more live performances. I would have appreciated more, like, real-world settings. Like, show me what this looks like on the street. Show me what this looks like in a restaurant. Show me what this looks like in parlor. Like, give me some more examples. Show me, give me way more tips. Give me way more advice.  So, like, Arnell, he speaks at the beginning, and he says, thank you for purchasing. And at the end, he says, thank you for purchasing. But he doesn't offer anything of his own mind. Like, this is his effect. And I would have appreciated more from him. I mean, I appreciated Chris Webb's instruction, absolutely. But I would have appreciated more from Arnell as the designer, as the creator to say, like, you know, this is what you do. This is how it goes. Here's me doing it. But that's just me. I would have appreciated a little bit more than a 14-minute video and a little tiny pamphlet. Okay? Who would like this? I think anybody that likes T&Rs would like this. I think anybody that has card magic. I think people that would like a very simple, easy, highly visual T&R would love this. If T&Rs haven't been your thing, just because you're not into the folding origami mess of it and they've all felt a little fumbly, this one's not fumbly. This one is not even a reward. This one, but this one's not that complicated. And I think that if you're already familiar with very simple forcing and switches, I think that this would be highly of your alley. All right, so that is me taking from Arnell Renegato and Magic Val. I would like to thank Murphy's Magic for providing this for us so that we can review it for you. And if you'd like to purchase your own, you can find it at your favorite Murphy's Magic dealer. Thanks. Bye.


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