Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Conversations with Tyler. Today I'm chatting with Catherine Rundell. Catherine is a fellow at All Souls College. She is the best-selling author of numerous children's books. Every morning she wakes up and does a cartwheel. But most prominently for me, she is the author of the recent book Super Infinite, The Transformations of John Dunn, which is this year so far probably my favorite book of the year. Catherine, welcome. Thank you so much for having me. Okay, so John Dunn, he's an English poet born in 1572. What is your origin story of how you became obsessed with him? I have parents who believed in the power of memorizing poetry and in the idea that even if you memorize poetry that you don't understand, there will be a time in your life when it will come back for you. So I was paid to memorize poetry and my mother used to put it on the wall next to the sink where we would brush our teeth. And a lot of it was T.S. Eliot's Possum's Book of Practical Cats, but there was also some John Dunn poetry. And even though I didn't fully grasp it, I found it to be faintly alchemic. I loved it. I loved its strangeness and its difficulty, and so I've loved him for a very long time now. And how old are you at that initial point? I was probably about eight. And when does the flipping age come when you think this is my thing? I'm going to do something with this. I think probably in my teen years he became my favorite poet and a kind of a talismanic author. I found him a place of refuge against that which seemed to me often ungenerous in so much of popular culture now offers a quite unexciting vision of what your mind and language might be capable of. And I found him a brilliant antidote to that, a kind of bulwark against a kind of anti-intellectualism. And then also, of course, I had boyfriends who would send it to me and I found that very romantic. So the early John Dunn, he writes poetry about the trans migration of souls. He writes a tract defending suicide that even suggests possibly Christ committed suicide on purpose. Was early John Dunn at all a Christian? I mean, it's a really good question. The one that we will never know the answer to is what precise shape did his inner religious life take? Because, of course, the central thing that most people who know a little bit about Dunn know is that he was born into a Catholic family at a time when to be Catholic was to be persecuted and he died the Dean of St. Paul's Cathedral. And that necessitated both a conversion and a kind of emphaticness in his allegiance to the religion of the crown. So he didn't just cease to be a Catholic. He wrote two major tracts against Catholicism, Pseudomata and Ignatius' Conglave. And the question of how far he ever believed, how far his Christianity, his Catholicism was real and how far his later religion was real and how far it was a necessity born of poverty or a kind of questing ambition is something that a huge number of people will never agree on. Personally, I am inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt that it was a time when many people changed religions throughout their lives. And I think that his writing, the passion and fervour in his religious poetry, the focus and intelligence in his sermons, the breadth of dedication of thought and time it will have taken, I find it very easy to believe both in the reality of his Catholicism and in the reality of his Protestant conversion. Just a general question for perspective. If you take poets and intellectuals in early to mid-19th century England or London life, what percentage of them do you think believe not in God but in the Trinity and literal Christian doctrine? Nineteenth century. No, no, no, Dunstine, 17th century. Right. I think belief is such a difficult word because it will have meant different things. You will have had someone like Kit Marlow who played very openly the idea of real atheism, the idea that we live in an empty universe. And of course, some people believe that he was murdered for it. Other people believe that it was a brawl in a pub when he got knifed in the knife and not paying a bill and will never know. I think, I think, I mean, if you ask me to put a number on it. A number? Yes, this is a podcast, right? Okay, I'm going to say 70% of people found from if you read the letters that we have of the time, people are often in their private lives expressing people are often in their private lives expressing very real comfort and hope from certain forms of religious doctrine. The amount of knowledge that people would have had, what the Bible actually said, the amount of access people who have had to Bibles and English were of course very limited. But I think a lot of people believe because it was offered as a way to put down your anxiety, your hopes, your chaos. It was a structure that gave people purpose and meaning. And then of course, I think there will have been a lot of people who went to church, it was against the law not to go to church, but who went to church out of conformity, out of duty, out of not really caring that much. And I'm sure in every church service, there were the passionate devotees and the people who were thinking about lunch as there are now. For done, can the meaning of a suicide ever be truly transparent? No, I think for done, suicide is one of the things that dogs his life.  It was a crime in that most strange of ironies punishable by death. Suicides could be buried with a straight put through their hearts at the crossroads. In France, there have been accounts of suicides, dead bodies of suicides dragged through the streets as a kind of warning. And of course, it was against religious doctrine. John Dunn's letters tell us about his very real and urgent keenings towards death. He was a man who felt the pull of, he says, his own sword. And he wrote the first full length treaties in the English language biothanatos on suicide, which argues that in very specific limited circumstances, suicide is not a sin, that Christ himself was the one great suicide. And so for done to be pulled towards suicide was both for him to feel he was being pulled towards sin, but also to feel that it would be a shortcut, a leaping into infinity and into the presence of God. And so for him, it was never going to be in any way straightforward or transparent. What's the political meaning of biothanatos done, tracked on suicide? Is it asserting a right of self-ownership or how do we think about it? Is it egalitarian or what is it doing politically in a very political time? Politically, of course, it's complicated by the fact that he wrote it, but not to be read. So he wrote a text that he explicitly told a friend when he went to Germany later in life, neither burn it nor publish it, you know, give it not to the fire, but show it to no one, because he was aware that it was a text that could lead him to be put in very real peril, not necessarily of anything dramatic like court cases, but he would have probably lost his job.  There are those within Done Scholarship who think that biothanatos was in fact a personal bid to write out of himself his desire towards suicide, that in some ways, those who talk about it a great deal are perhaps the least likely to commit it, and that he was in some way protecting himself in that way so that it was a personal text in a way that it doesn't look. I don't think that it is arguing anything as radical as absolute self ownership, because I think that would be anachronistic for the time. But I think it's one of the texts that come closest to arguing that our certainties, it famously says we have been sure about so many things and we have been wrong about them. We have been wrong about the stars. So he is certainly saying all certainty has in it the peril of being not just wrong, but wrong in a way that will create misadventuring chaos. He is doing something quite radical there. He is saying there is no single great truth upon which we can base anything. And that was bold. Whether or not you agree with it, what is the best Straussian reading of John Dunn? Straussian reading? Yes. I don't think I know the answer to that. Can you think of one? Well, if you think he might be an atheist, I don't think he was, but I think it's a plausible reading that he never believed in the Anglican church. He became a dean. It was for survival and for income and for security. What he cared about was his art and a lot of it was a charade. And even in the early work, he was a very high class entertainer and in some way it wasn't sincere. I don't know if I would defend that, but I would give it a chance of 10 percent. Yeah, I think so. It's certainly a position that was very popular in the 1980s and John Kerry's completely spectacular book, John Dunn, Life, Mind and Art, certainly gives truck to that as a possible position. One of the reasons that that vision has really been shifted in the last 10 years or so has been the discovery of new letters and the dating of old letters to suggest that even after he had started to reach some form of real middle class wealth and solidity, he still kept pushing at a way that could have in fact been detrimental to him towards being ordained. That the king's favorite, Buckingham, was trying to put him off and was trying to offer him various forms of secretarial ship, maybe going to Venice, maybe going to Ireland. And that he, in the face of these letters, was pushing back and insisting on the pursuit of God. And also, he reads to me in his letters like a man bent on some form of sincerity. For every letter where there is flattery and a kind of ornate rhetoric that seems to have at the heart of it, when you burrow through only a joke, there are also letters that seem to express a man who wanted to be able to lay down truth in words. And therefore, I do believe in his religion. Now, there's a superficial but possibly true view of done that he wrote too many verses and epithelmians for pay. And the world would have been better if he had just done more songs and sonnets. Do you agree? Yes, of course. Just why don't you agree? I absolutely agree. But then you can say that almost any poet of the period for whom the need to make money meant that they had to compose in all ways, which absolutely were step by step in the fashion of the time and therefore held back their more radical and inventive impulses. So when they weren't being paid, they often wrote their best work. For so long, why was Ben Johnson so much more popular a poet than done? Partly because he was more famous, partly because he wrote plays and the plays Pleased First the Queen and Then the King, partly because he wrote for the boys of the boy players and the boy players had a real glamour at the time and Queen Elizabeth was borderline obsessed with them. Was Johnson ever a great poet or is it all just pretty good? None of it sticks with me. Am I missing something? If you are, if you're missing something, I'm missing it too. I admire Johnson's structural ingenuity and I admire his flair. And I really admire his capacity for gossip because it gave us a lot of the knowledge that we have of the time, but I have never managed to find him a poet who gets into your intestines. There's a recent book by Claire Jackson called Devil Land, which I very much admire, and it stresses how much British thought and life in the 17th century was, I think she even uses the word deranged, crazy. It was a highly ideological era. People started believing, writing, doing all kinds of crazy things. Do you agree? And if so, why did that happen then? I know that's a big question, but I've been very interested in this issue. I think it does look to us now, like a time where a kind of free violent density of thought became not just commonplace but contagious. And certainly, you know, you could wake up in the morning and you could see acts of great devotion and great violence before breakfast. You could see a man burned for his belief, you can see a woman hung for hers, you could see people willing to push large beliefs on themselves to the point of death. So certainly, I think it was also exacerbated by plague, by the fact that every few years in Britain, the plague would come galloping through major cities and thousands of people would die overnight. So I think that that closeness to death, to war, to pestilence, also to beauty, to an influx of money, to the fact that suddenly we had access to far greater knowledge because of the boom of the printing press, that's enough to create a febrile moment, both intellectually and emotionally, I think. Are we in some ways reentering a time somewhat analogous to the 17th century in England? I think it does sometimes feel like we are, that there is something a similarly explosive moment where we have newly explosive possibilities and newly explosive fears, and there feels like something similarly extreme happening, although I would say from different causes. When you're writing about John Dunn, what is the proper music to listen to? Is it William Byrd or is it, you know, Simon and Garfunkel? One could, if one wanted to, listen to Dr. Atomic, which has set better my heart into an aria, which is very beautiful, the cage. You could listen to some semi-contemporary adaptations, though none absolutely contemporary, the campion version of the break of day. I wouldn't, personally. I would say maybe some Mahler, someone who believed in both chaos and glory. You know, our next podcast guest is, in fact, John Adams. And I'm planning on asking him about Dunn. Wonderful. What's your favorite word invented by John Dunn? I am. So the reason the book is called Super Infinite, I do love impossibilitate. I think it speaks highly to his sense of that, which did not look impossible. But in fact, when you look at it closely is so. But most of all, I love his talent for the super prefix that he added it to so many things, a kind of insistence on things which lead outside language. So Super Infinite, Super Miraculous, Super Eternal, Super Dying. These are the linguistic habits of a man who longs for immensities. I like just simple emancipation. That's from Dunn. It is. Although, of course, I think it would be a miss of me not to offer the caveat that often the OED has always found first uses in canonical authors in part because they're just the ones who survive fire. So of course, he may have just been noting down a word in common parlance rather than being an inventor. Why did Dunn visit Johannes Kepler? I think a fascination with the stars. I think that Dunn was compelled by the idea of heavens and compelled by the idea which he found deeply troubling of scientific discoveries which were casting in doubt the great certainties of the previous generations. He had a complicated relationship with innovation. I think he went to Kepler to understand more about the ways that we moved around the sun and that the moons moved around us. In what ways was Dunn a typical homeschooled child? I was very briefly a homeschooled child. So I take that personally. I figured as much, yes. Of course, the vast majority of boys of his class and religion were homeschooled boys because it was very hard to go to school as a young Catholic. And as the book discusses, going to school at the time would have introduced you to a kind of ruthless brutality that would have been difficult to recover from. Boys were beaten, some of them to death. It was expected that you would fight your colleagues, your compatriots from the age of about 12 and boys routinely died at school. I think that he certainly has some of the idiosyncrasies of thought of someone who did not grow up with a huge cohort of friends. But also he became a great maker and keeper of bosom friends. His love for his friends is something I believe very truly. And you know, sir, letters more than kisses mingle souls, he wrote to Henry Goodyear, a man who I think we know he would have given up a great deal to help. Now you have two books, Rooftoppers and Sky Steppers about rooftop walking. Some might call them children's books. I'm not sure that's exactly the right description. But what is the greatest danger with rooftop walking?   Philippe Petit, who is, of course, one of the great roof walkers of the world and the man who strung the wire between the Twin Towers in 1977, talks about vertigo as a beast that has to be tamed piece by piece, that can never be overcome all at once. And vertigo, he says, is not the fear that you will fall. It is the fear that you will jump.  You are trying to unmoor your sense of danger and of not being able to trust yourself, not to jump from your sense of beauty and the vision of a city that you get up high. But I roof walk for very practical reasons to see views that would otherwise be not really available to me in an increasingly privatized city of London. And you're also learning to fly a small plane. Is that correct? That's true, yes. For the same reason? Again, for the feeling of height, I come from a family of pilots, both my grandfather's flu, Spitfires in the Second World War, and my uncle can fly a plane. And so about five years ago, I started learning for the huge pleasure of being above the world and being given a vision of the sweep of it. So if we're trying to build a unified theory of you, how does wanting to see things from above fit into the theory? Because I don't mean I enjoy seeing things from above, but I don't put a lot of time into it. And that's not unusual. So you're you're somewhat different, right? I think I love the idea. So I think it might be connected to fiction. It is very difficult when writing a story to hold the whole of it in one's head. If you complete a book that you feel you have achieved that that feels like a great gift you have given yourself. It is very difficult to conceptualize a place that I have not seen from above. I like the idea of being able to understand the way a city works by seeing its movements from above. Also, cities are more beautiful seen from above. They things that look down at street level grubby and deeply human and, you know, crisp rackers and old burger papers from up high show the sort of prehistoric prehistoric elements of the way that people move in crowds. Does rooftop walking also improve your research at all souls? I don't think that I could claim that rooftop walking really feeds into my research on the grounds that most of my research is done in cold archives and libraries around the world, looking at manuscripts and hunting for traces of done in in old books. My hypothesis is that in the true unified theory of you, which I do not have, that rooftop walking doesn't fact improve your research, that there's somehow a convex combination of like way down low and way up high that you need to maintain intellectual balance. That could be an argument that if you are someone whose work necessitates the dwelling entirely on detail, because, of course, academic study of John Dunn, which is slightly different from my book, requires just borrowing into these very small details to understand about the conditions of production of the moment and that the flip side of that is the kind of totalities of the view that you get up high in the cold outside alone in the dark. At current margins, where would you most like to do more rooftop walking? Well, I would like to do most of roof trick-making. Paris has the best rooftops, I think, and they are quite easy to access. I have quite a few friends who have spent quite a lot of time, most of them are dancers or acrobats on the rooftops of Paris. What epitaph do you want on your tomb? Oh, because you've written on this, right? I have reviewed books about epitaphs, but I don't know, I need a few more years to decide a few decades, if I may. What will you have on yours? I don't want a tomb. I want my body disposed and in effective altruist kind of way. And somehow the proceeds liquidated and used for something productive. That sounds entirely reasonable. Should children be more mischievous? Yes. And I think we should have more patience with childhood mischief because children whose mischievousness is quashed become difficult, thwarted and sometimes quite vile adults. What are the most important lessons of governance from what are called children's novels? Children's novels tend to teach the large uncompromising truths that we hope exist. Things like love will matter, kindness will matter, equality is possible. I think that we express them as truth to children when what they really are our hopes. But I suppose the best politics of children's fiction will be those that argue that as Ursula Le Guin would say, all that we have made, we have made by man and it can be undone by man and that often the first way that we transform the world is through the art that she calls her art, the art of words. She would say it is the utopianist of children's fiction that allows us to imagine something better. She might be right. Should the rest of fiction be more like what we call children's fiction? I would say it would be more that more people should read children's fiction because the rest of fiction performs other urgently necessary tasks. I think the right to elongate and experiment are jobs more of adult fiction. So I would argue rather that adults should occasionally read children's fiction for pleasure but also for the unabashed politics of idealism that they have. If I think of some fictional works I read as a child, like Isaac Asimov's Foundation. There was a thrill to the complete newness of it that I now find harder to create because things are less new to me. How can we get back to what it was like to read as a child? Of course, to an extent it's impossible because it is the freshness of new discovery that children almost every scene they read feels to them. Unlike anything, they have so few collocates. But my argument, I wrote a book called Why You Should Read Children's Books, even though you are so old and wise. And I think you very kindly have. And my argument would be that reading books intended for people in the process of early discovery can remind you, if not what it feels like, then something adjacent enough to that to remember that it existed and therefore it might give you a kind of galvanic push towards seeking out other versions of that feeling of discovery. Because of course, although we feel like our discovery time has largely passed, that's fake. That's not real. Your discovery time has not passed. There are still astonishments that await you. Should we let children vote? There's a very brilliant long read is in The New Yorker by someone arguing that six year olds should have the vote. And it's very impressive in its sweep of the objections. In England, I would like to lower the voting age to 16 because I stand quite far to the left of centre and the youth, of course, sent to skew more left and currently Britain skews right. If much younger children voted, do you think the equilibrium is that more religious families would in essence have more voting power because say the eight year olds, you might think, oh, they'll care more about climate change, but it might just be they do it, their parents tell them there's some cozy in arrangement. And it's more power to the religious, which one may or may not mind, but probably you don't want that, right? It's certainly true that the demographics of it might well not have the impact that we think it would because children's idealism would be very much tampered by the fact that they would be voting in accord with their parents. But then would they? Would children vote the way that their parents told them to? I don't know. Maybe they wouldn't. I frequently did things my parents told me not to do. Perhaps I would also have voted against their wishes, although I actually vote according to their wishes, you know, what they taught me I still believe. There's some heritability to political views, right? There is, exactly. What's your favorite UK bookshop and why? I live very close to a UK bookshop called Primrose Hill Books, which is very close to where Dodie Smith lived, the woman who wrote 101 Dalmatians and I captured the castle and it's both beautiful and in sight of Dodie Smith's house. Are you up for a quick round of overrated versus underrated? Yes. And these will be easy. First, Edmund Spencer, overrated or underrated? Underrated. Why? Because he is no longer red. I think the estimation we hold him in is correct, but nobody reads him and people should put the side about a week of their lives and read the very queen. It's painful, but it's worth it when you come out the other side. I agree with that, but it took me much more than a week. Diana Wynne Jones, overrated or underrated? Underrated only because infinite estimation is what she deserves and therefore, no matter how high her stock, it will always be given. Why is she interesting? I think she's a writer's writer who is somebody who believed that children should never be spoken down to. And I think a lot of her children's fiction is so weird and so full of the furies and anxieties that are extending from childhood into adulthood that those books would also read as great texts for adults, the obvious one being maybe something like Fire and Hamlock or House Moving Castle. Sir Walter Raleigh, overrated or underrated? Overrated because we have given him such credit for so many things he didn't do. He didn't bring back the potato. That's nonsense. The speed of wombats. I think they don't get enough credit for the fact that over long distances they are faster than Usain Bolt. So I think we have underrated that. Seventeenth century British entertainment. I mean, how good was it? So you read about bear baiting. It doesn't sound fun to me at all. And there's a cruelty to animals issue, but it just doesn't sound fun. I mean, how good was it? Overrated or underrated? Bear baiting definitely overrated. I just don't believe it can have been that exciting. I assume it was partly just folk to me or people didn't have much to do. But the theater, even though madly rated in Britain with gold still underrated because of what came before of how staggeringly knew it was. Belgium overrated or underrated? Belgium probably accurately rated. I am aware that I because I spent my teenage years there have an entirely unjustified fury against it. And therefore all of my books have one joke against Belgium. But, you know, I hope Belgium is strong enough as a nation not to take it too personally. I'm not sure Belgium is strong enough. Where in Belgium did you live? In Brussels. I see. OK. Mary Poppins overrated or underrated? As a perfectly rated as a figure or as a film or as a book. Whichever. I'm going to say underrated because the books are much stranger and wilder than we know. Let's say you're back in the time, some some version of you, but you don't know how things turn out. Which side of the glorious revolution would you have been on and why? I don't know because it's so impossible to forget the way it turned out. Which side would you be on? I would be very skeptical. I would think these Dutch people are going to come over and rule us. I would think the resulting constellation of interest groups would be so stable. It would mean perpetual civil war, which is not how it turned out. So I think I would have been wrong. Yes, I think I might have I might have had a weariness of the sort of dramatic shifts. I might have been anxious about what might come. But then again, we would have been completely misplaced. That's right.  Why did you make that decision? Because adamantine was coming at a peak moment in the narrative. So it was the key showdown between a child and a gangster figure. And I didn't want anything that would slow children. But my general stance is with children's writing, you can use pretty much any vocabulary you want because they will either guess or step over or find out the word. And it rarely puts children off as much as we worry that it will. Are there any children's stories improved by the addition of social media to the story?  No, featured in the story. Can that possibly improve a child's story? Or is it just a bad thing? I feel absolutely sure it could improve a children's story, but I have never yet seen it done. Are social media their general existence out there making children's literature harder to pull off? Yes. We now compete, of course, with so many other forms of entertainment. And it is a form of entertainment that offers a kind of it offers your insatiable hunger for being wooed, absolute constant satiety. And so what we are trying to offer to children something slower and richer and ultimately you would hope punchier is vastly harder to sell to them. Should we be getting boys to read more stories about girls or are we at an optimum there? We should, of course, get boys to read more stories about girls. The data constantly reports that boys are by and large reading stories about boys and girls are by and large reading stories about both genders. There is a difficulty that there is a self-fulfilling prophecy in saying boys don't read books about girls. And I don't know how we get around that problem. Children's movies. Again, I know that's a fraught term, but what would normally be called children's movies? What's your favorite one? The Railway Children. Because of that final moment.  And at the end, there is a moment in which the young girl, the oldest of the children who has had to step into the adult world of secret keeping and and adult care sees her father return to her and she runs into his arms and she says, oh, daddy, my daddy. And in that moment, she is allowed to return to childhood and it's a staggering moment of filmmaking. It's so beautiful. I like a little princess very much. Do you know that movie? No, I've never seen it before. It's a Mexican director, but set in England. So it's highly unusual and it's sort of dark and nasty, but cheery in some ways, too. Wonderful. Ideal. What is it the TS Eliot failed to understand about John Dunn? Oh, that's a really interesting question because of course, usually John Dunn is rather usually TS Eliot is given the credit of rediscovering John Dunn after the Victorian period in which his fashion ability had really waned. I think he got a lot right about John Dunn when he says he's trying to picture in John Dunn somebody for whom, you know, every element of his life modifies his sensibility that he is able to couple religion and body and the smell of a rose and the cooking of dinner into one great whole. That I think he got right. I think what he got wrong was he did not accentuate the strangeness of John Dunn. I think he offered to us a John Dunn who was trying to make things whole. But of course, John Dunn's poetry often carries with it a beautiful salute to human fracturing and human strangeness. You know, he was writing at a time when people were offering a profoundly coherent vision of love.  And John Dunn stood up in the center of that fashion and said, No, you are stranger than that and you deserve poetry that is stranger than that. You deserve poetry that uses the images of fleas and sucking fish and suns rising and compasses to express the vertiginous and labyrinthine quality of human desire. And I don't think that T.S. Elliott had a mindset at the time to recognize that. What do you think of the view that Dunn is all about metaphysical beauty and there's an extreme shortage of physical beauty in his writings? I think it's certainly true that if you were to turn to John Dunn to find images of his lovers and specifically of his wife, Anne Dunn, who he met when she was very young, 14 and they married when she was 17, you will find no physical descriptor. You will find no sense of whether she was curvy or slim or large or tall. But what you will have is an understanding of what it is that physical beauty does to the person witnessing it. I think the poems are more about him looking at her than they are about her. They're more about his his startling and embracing and weariness and bitchiness about love than they are about the specific bodily facts of the women he was with. How well do you think Samuel Johnson understood Dunn? Well, of course, the obvious answer would be not at all because Johnson loathed Dunn and felt that there was something in Dunn that was genuinely slightly dangerous because Johnson's vision of poetry still leaned towards the fashion of thinking of it as a mono vocal exercise, that there was a correct form of poetry, that its correctness was something to be prized and that the chipping away at that correctness would lead to, you know, social breakdown. I think he was wrong about that. But I for none the nest remain grateful to him because he did read Dunn and he did think about Dunn and as such, even if he didn't intend to, kept him alive. For you, what is most interesting in Dunn's sermons? The thing I find most interesting would be the radical honesty that he has that you will find in so few other sermons of the time about the difficulty of finding God. So he is a man who writes often with certainty about the idea of reaching the infinite, the divine. But he also writes this famous passage where he says, I summon God and my angels. And when God and the angels are there, I neglect them for, I forget what it is, the sound of a carriage, a straw under my knee, a thought, a chimera and nothing and everything. And that sense that even though he had a brain that could control incredibly rigorous poetry, he did not have a brain that would control itself in prayer. And he offered that to his congregation as a vulnerability and a piece of honesty that's so few sermonizers of the time who thought of themselves more as a kind of regulatory ideal that should never admit vulnerability would offer. How do you think your life has been shaped by having grown up in Zimbabwe? Oh, I think it was profoundly lucky to grow up in Zimbabwe at a time. I grew up with parents who allowed me an enormous amount of freedom and I don't know if they would have done that now. But we were allowed to vanish for the day without adult supervision, me and my siblings and friends and the shining quality of that, of childhood time, even quite young, say 10 or 11, spent entirely without the presence of adults, the freeing quality that gives your imagination, I imagine has something to do with the fact that I became a children's writer. Do you think these free unruly childhoods like yours generate a better class of elites? Oh, I would, I would question the terms of that question because I'm not sure that many people with free unruly childhoods become elites and I wouldn't call myself as one. So if you took people who or maybe had high chance of becoming elites and you gave them freer, more unruly childhoods, would they turn out better? Right. As a kind of retro engineering, yes. Right, not cross-sectionally, but I would not be surprised if they did because the forms that kind of unruly quality takes mostly spending a huge amount of time outside might give you a more urgent sense of the necessity of outside. And that might be something that ongoing elites are going to need to hold hard and fast the center of all their thoughts.  Not delicious. I sort of hoped it would be because some children I met in in the Amazon rainforest had told me that it was. But I think there's a very real difference between fresh and canned tarantula. And my tarantula was from a can. Who sells canned tarantula? The same people who stock cell fridges with little scorpions and whiskey.  It turns out I was surprised. So it's a markets and everything phenomenon. If you just eat a fresh tarantula, do you get poisoned or are you fine? No, you're fine. I think the poison is only dangerous when administered by the stingers immediately. I was I was not warned about any danger and none came to me. As a kid, how was it that you broke your bones? Oh, I fell out of a lot of things, trees mostly. So you wanted to see things from above even early on? Even early on and it because I didn't have the skill to match the ambition, I ended up with quite a few broken bones. What for you is the most fun part of writing? The early stage where there is no imperative towards structural cohesion and you can just write scenes that seem to you vivid and funny and interesting and joyful. And then later when you have to make it cohere into something where the narrative itself is a form of metaphor that bits harder and less fun. What is your most unusual writing habit? I no longer really have one. When I was younger, I used to have many in a bid to meet myself, meet deadlines that were broadly my own imagining. I would, when writing my PhD, have a pact with a friend that if we didn't do the requisite number of words, usually a thousand words a day of our doctoral theses, we had to give £100 to a donkey sanctuary. And it was chosen on the ground that it wasn't harmful to give that money to a donkey sanctuary, but it also wasn't particularly beneficial because we picked the richest donkey sanctuary in England where they're kind of bathing in asses milk and covered in diamonds. And so you couldn't tell yourself that it was a good but it wouldn't do harm if we screwed up. So we wouldn't, for instance, give money to the British National Party or something like that. And it really does work. I didn't want the donkeys to have my money. I only failed once. So you've stopped doing it because you don't need to do it, not that you think it's a terrible idea. Because I no longer need to do it with quite such urgency. A PhD is the hardest form of writing, I think, in terms of galvanizing yourself into wanting to do it. Why do so few writers use markets and self-constrained? So so many people will say, I want to finish. I want to finish earlier. I want to finish my thesis. But very few people do what you did, I find. You claim it's effective. I suspect that's correct. Incentives matter. And no one copies that. What's going on? I think it might be that people want to keep their writing as a form of joy and delight, especially if it's not something they do professionally and that adding those kind of sharp edged incentives will remove the feeling of luxury that writing often has that it's a luxury to spend time with the imagination. Do you feel that the Irish still have an especially rich version of the English language even today? I'm not sure I really have enough knowledge about that. Certainly, I think my Irish friends have a deep well of folk stories that they were given in a kind of cohesive body in a way that perhaps English children are not. But I'm not sure about the linguistic portion. What do you think? It seems to me they are still more narrative, more engaged with longer trains of thought. The fact that not too long ago, so many Irish people had to learn English as a language, as a second language, so to speak. I think still exercises an influence and makes people more self-conscious about language. Certainly my Irish friends have a form of linguistic dexterity that are of my English friends lack. And of course, the stereotype that the Irish are witty, I think, although my Irish friends find it profoundly annoying, does still push them towards enhancing that stereotype. And they are all very funny. And per capita, there's really quite a bit of excellent Irish literature, even not per capita. If you thought it well, it was a nation of 30 million people. You know, you would think, well, this makes sense, how many good novels they have. Yeah, it is remarkable and they keep coming, too. If we think about continental novels of ideas, what is your true love in that genre? That's a really lovely question. I'm wondering what counts as a continental novel of ideas, though, what counts as continental? Giodi, Dostoevsky, Thomas Mann, Franz Kafka. So Kafka was going to be the obvious one that I would say. I was wondering if Madame Bovary counts as a novel of ideas. What do you say? Yes, yes. OK, in that case, Madame Bovary, which I remember reading as a teenager and feeling like it kicked the knees from under me with kind of awe at the at these at the speed and richness and occasional cruelty and generosity of that narrative. But also Kafka, I have a picture book called My First Kafka, which is a children's book retelling. I didn't write it. I just read it of Metamorphosis and now I give them to all the toddlers I know. I think they need to start young. For the toddlers. I think it's an ideal time to get to grips with Kafka, sort of three to four year olds. What's a book you can no longer stand to read? For instance, I find it very difficult to now read Dostoevsky. I don't think he's a terrible author, but it somehow doesn't click with me. It fascinated me in high school, but now it just falls flat. I still love Dostoevsky, but I can't read Dickens anymore. I used to be wildly in love with the atmosphere that he conjured of London and smoke and the smog. But I now find very vividly visible the fact that he was getting paid per word. What do you think is both best and worst about the intellectual environment at all souls? Oh. I think best would be the fact that it is a mix of old and young. Often it's thought of as a place largely populated by older white men, but in fact, a huge proportion of the fellows are under 40. The thing that I loved about it, sort of coming of age there, I was made a fellow at 21 was that you would come down to dinner and you would meet people who were unabashedly keen to talk about their work in terms that were not compromising in detail or technicality or passion. And that was a brilliant coming of age. The least good thing we are still struggling with both the overwhelming whiteness and the overwhelming maleness of the place because it's inheritance. They only had women in 1980 and that does still show. Let's say for a friend you're designing a two-week trip through the British Isles. No London, forget about Stonehenge. It has to be something weird. Where do you send them and what you tell them to do? So I would tell them to first you need to go to Norfolk, a place that is underrated in its beauty. There's a place called Stiffkey where Rachel Cusk's novelist used to live. And if you wade out, it starts to look like you could film sort of Martian-like films and indeed several extraterrestrial films have been filmed on that beach. If you go right to the sea, there's a colony of seals who will come to greet you and that feels faintly like being churched. That part of England is very interesting to me because it's one part where the Industrial Revolution never quite came. So it feels much older still in some ways. Exactly. Its landscape is often compared by people from places like Texas or places like South Africa. They often say that it feels the same sort of prairie feel to it. Not where you've been, but moving forward, how do you think of how travel fits into your work and your writing? It used to be something that I would do in a way to offer rich detail and the plots that I was doing. I think I think that I will stay more put these days in part because of fears of the burning world and what air travel does to that. And in part a sense that I might be at a period of my life when rhythm and a kind of structure might be valuable. I get much more tired than I used to. The thing about doing a cartwheel every day, that was true when I was 25, but it's not true now I'm 35. It's become too hard. It's actually you can see my flat isn't big enough. I would hit the wall. You mean the ceiling or the wall? The walls. There isn't enough space for a cartwheel across without hitting that pole. And you live you must live near Oxford, right? I actually live in London and I commute. I'll go to Oxford tonight. And you take the train. Yeah. What is it that you plan on doing next that you are able to talk about? I want to write a children's book that I truly proud of and I'll keep going until that happens. So I'm currently writing a children's novel that I've been working on for five years. And I think I think I might end up proud of it by the end. I'm not yet. So I think that's what that's what my version of success would look like, something that I didn't read and went so that I think is my next step. If you think of your children's novel side and your all souls, John Dunn's side, how do those two fit together in your mind but also in the minds of those at all souls? In my mind, I think it's that John Dunn's sense of the capacity of language to be something that you shake out of the confines of the day and use in a way that as much as possible fits the rhythms of your own imagination, that he insisted on the necessity of building your own language. I think that I grew up with that and it is why my novels are often referred to as idiosyncratic and literary that they that I want language that belongs to me. So I think they refer to each other in that way. Also, just I think a love of poetry. He taught me to love poetry and other poetry as well as his. And I think that probably affects my prose. All souls, I think would they would note that most of the novels have a John Dunn joke in them. And, you know, that's a very obvious through line. They don't know about the Belgium jokes, or do they? Oh, I haven't told them. I don't think they've read many of the books. So hopefully not. What do you find most frustrating about interacting with the world of publishing? And it's a little publishing in your case, right? It is commercial publishing in my case. There is a great deal that I love. I mean, truthfully, it's the necessity of deadlines. I have never handed in a book without it being clawed from my hands. Because I always want to do one last go. And I would love there to be an extra four months built into it so that when it looks like a book, I'm allowed to read it like it's a book and then make the changes that I would like to make. But I realize that that will be ruinous for the publishing industry. And that that's the most rewarding side. But what's the most frustrating? Or is it both? Oh, that's also the most frustrating. The fact that I'm not allowed to do that, that they don't allow you to that they don't allow you to rewrite your books four years later. If they would let us do that, I know it would cause absolute havoc, both the reading and writing populations of the world. But my great dream would be to be allowed to look back at super infinite in about three years time. And, you know, some I think there are already some adverbs that annoy me. I would go back and take them out. You know, Pierre Boulez did that with compositions. You could, in fact, do that. It may not be profitable. But is there actually anyone stopping you? My publishers wouldn't let me. I have asked my children's publishers and they say, no, you need to write your next book. You can't just keep rewriting your past texts. And they wouldn't take out those adverbs in super infinite. They might say it was a typo. It would be quite you would lie and maybe they would know it wasn't quite true rather than fight the battle. If it didn't acquire too much retype setting, I will try and I'll let you know if I have success. Now, let's say you're meeting younger writers and you're looking for someone who in very broad terms is like you. And I'm not even sure what that means because you're quite in you have quite an atypical career. But what would you look for in that person as a sign of their talent? Obviously, smarts work ethic and so on. But beyond the usual, what do you look for in young writing talent? The difficulty with that is you're asking an English person that which requires me to accept that I'm that I would look for someone like myself. I wouldn't. I would look for someone different and better. I I I can't deal with a question that presupposes assuming myself to have excellence. But if I were looking for excellence, looking for someone better than you, yes. Yeah. Yeah. It would be really important to me that somebody had understood that it matters far or rather as much or far more the way you say the thing as what you say, because the thing you want to say is probably a very similar thing that everyone else wants to say, you know, love, love my season, patience, courage, valiance, attention. But there are only some people who have found a way to say those things with such flair and originality that they cut through your interlocutors complacent in attention and cut through time, cut through space, cut through cultural difference and grab you by the wrist. So it would be a sense that somebody understood. You are going to have to find a new and better way to say this. How do you value the King James translation of the Bible? Oh, very highly, because, of course, that is the version that infuses much of the work I love most, not just obviously done and Shakespeare, but also Philip Pullman talks about being an atheist, but a King James atheist, someone who was informed by the language of the King James Bible. How about the Book of Common Prayer? Is that just worrying? No, no, it's wildly but wildly underrated. The Book of Common Prayer is more beautiful, I think, than we credit credit for. And again, I think its cadences have informed a lot of the poetry that we hold there. I don't think we would have Seamus Heaney without the rhythms of the Book of Common Prayer. So how do we approach reading the Book of Common Prayer so that it makes sense to us rather than boring us? Oh, gosh, that's really interesting. I think you approach it for the how do you approach the Book of Common Prayer, which is, as I agree, not an obviously galvanic text, particularly if you don't happen to believe in Christianity. I think you would have to remember what it was intended to do, the kind of hope and comfort it was intended to give. And you would have to remember the many, many battles that were fought to have it. And that, I think, might make it feel alive. And John Bunyan's Pilgrims Progress, is that book actually good? Yes, it is in some moments. I think it is another one a little like the Fairy Queen that requires your patience, that requires you to do something to take the edge of your panic at the boredom that will ensue. And for some people that will be resignation, I'm sure for some people that will be, I don't know, alcohol for some people, it will be a kind of exhaustiveness, but some thing that will allow you to give in to being quite substantially bored on the grounds that it will slow down the beat of your heart and it will force your imagination to grapple with something slower and broader. The way that Spencer talks about fashioning his ideal reader, the texts tell you how to read them. Catherine Rundell, I just like to recommend you all first. Catherine has a short book called Why You Should Read Children's Books, even though you are so old and wise. She has a wide variety of bestselling children's books, but her most recent book is Super Infinite, the Transformations of John Dunn, which I recommend very, very highly. And of course, I recommend Dunn as well. Catherine, who also goes by the name Kate, it has been great chatting with you. We thank you very much. And good luck with the books. Thank you so much. Thank you.


Finipat ranks number one on the list of the best naturopics for anxiety, but is this drug really effective and safe for supplementation? Well, let's find out. Hi friends, welcome back to the channel. My name is Greg and I'm a certified brain health professional. On this channel, we help professionals achieve big brain performance, so if you're interested then subscribe below and join our amazing community. Oh, and don't forget to press that little bell button as well. Today we are going to talk about Finipat, an anti-anxiety medication used in Russia to help people with anxiety and sleep disorders. Now many people wrongly believe that Finipat is a naturopic, which means a compound that can improve your cognitive performance without causing any side effects. And as a matter of fact, people even rank Finipat as number one best naturopic for anxiety, which is completely mind-boggling to me. Sadly, supplementing Finipat can be extremely dangerous and risky. But before we talk about the risks associated with taking Finipat, let me tell you what this really is, how Finipat actually works, what kind of benefits you can expect. And at the end of the video, I'm gonna share with you my final verdict about Finipat and also some of the alternatives available on the market. So what exactly is Finipat? Well, Finipat is actually a drug, not a naturopic, that has anxiety effects. It was developed in Soviet Union, so basically in Russia, and it is used as a pharmaceutical drug in Russia and countries around it. And because of that, it must be well tested, well researched and totally safe for supplementation. Now, Finipat is not approved for clinical use in the US and in the European Union, but you can still find it in some places online. Now, if we forget about the legal limitations of supplementing Finipat, why do people even consider supplementing this compound? Well, here are the benefits you can expect if you take Finipat. It can help with anxiety, it can help with insomnia, it can help with depression, it can help with fatigue, even stress, and it could potentially improve your cognitive performance, especially it does seem to increase attention and concentration. Finipat works similarly to GABA supplements, and GABA is basically a neurotransmitter in our brain responsible for calm mind. So obviously, since Finipat works similarly, it does calm down your mind while it makes you more focused and increases your concentration. And if you go and read it, for example, or similar forums, you will find many people claiming that they really experienced amazing benefits when they supplement it. But you'll also come across comments saying, guys, please help me, I became addicted to Finipat and I don't know what to do. And this is the big problem with Finipat. Now, in general, Finipat is well tolerated for short term use, at least on the available research that is out there. But long term supplementation can be very, very risky. The common side effects that you can expect are nausea, dizziness, headaches, hangovers, more incoordination, and even the risk of liver disease. But besides the many side effects, there are three big problems with Finipat. The first one is the risk of an overdose. At the dose of 7 grams or more, Finipat can cause even severe side effects and it could be extremely, extremely dangerous. In some cases, it can cause death. So you need to be very careful. The second problem is that Finipat can cause addiction. Actually, many Finipat withdrawal symptoms can occur, especially if you take it for a longer period. And actually, there's a whole thread open on Reddit helping people get off Finipat. So if you're one of the users, really be careful. And the third big problem are contraindications. So first of all, some people are intolerant of Finipat. Then other issues for pregnant women. As I mentioned before, it can cause liver disease. Of course, it shouldn't be combined with alcohol and it shouldn't be combined with many other drugs, especially antidepressants. By the way, guys, have you ever tried Finipat? And if you did, did you experience any kind of side effects? Let me know in the comments section below. So as you can see, Finipat is extremely dangerous. It can cause severe side effects. But people still supplement it. Why is that so? Are there no alternatives available? Well, as a matter of fact, there are many good alternatives available that are very effective and much safer to Finipat. Let's have a look. The first one is Bacopa Monerae. Now Bacopa Monerae is an adaptogenic herb used in Ayurveda medicine for helping people with anxiety. And it also improves memory. It is a very potent and tropic, one of my favorite ones that I highly recommend supplementing if you have issues with stress and anxiety, but also if you want to improve your memory. Bacopa Monerae modulates stress response, making you more adapt to stress situations. And that is one of the reasons why I like it so much. Now to get the best out of Bacopa Monerae, take about 300 milligrams per day for a longer period, at least six to eight weeks, but the longer the better. And for the best results, you can take it in the morning, but if it makes you slightly unmotivated, then take it in the afternoon. That's fine. By the way, if you want to learn more about Bacopa Monerae, check out my video up here. Now the next great alternative to PiniBub is Rodiola Rossea. Rodiola Rossea is another adaptogen similar to Bacopa Monerae, and it can be combined with Bacopa for even better results. And it works in a similar way and provides similar benefits. So it's great for reducing anxiety, for helping people with stress, and I really recommend supplementing it. In addition, supplementing Rodiola can improve your mood and well-being, similarly to PiniBub, and that's why it is so popular. The recombined daily dosage is about 50 to 100 milligrams per day, but if you're going to take it only now and then, then you can take a higher dosage up to 680 milligrams per day. You can learn more about Rodiola up here. The next atropic that I highly recommend taking for anxiety is Ashwagandha, and I really like it because it is so effective and so safe for supplementation. Now for the best results, take 300 to 500 milligrams of Ashwagandha for a longer period. I personally recommend taking it for about three months and then staying a couple of weeks off and then you repeat the cycle if you need it. And the best Ashwagandha extracts out there are called KSM66 or Sensoryl, both are really good and I highly recommend supplementing them. To learn more about Ashwagandha, click up here. By the way guys, if you like this video, please press the like button below. We have two more amazing atropics for anxiety. The first one is L-Tanin. And actually L-Tanin scores very, very high, very, very close to Phinebut on the list of the best atropics for reducing anxiety. Why is that? Well, because L-Tanin is so effective at reducing anxiety. Now for the best results, take 100 to 200 milligrams of L-Tanin in the morning or whenever you need it. However, if you have issues with anxiety, do not combine it with caffeine. This is very important to know. And the last one is Magnesium and Magnesium is a mineral that promotes stress relief. For the best results, take 200 to 400 milligrams per day. And personally, I recommend taking Magnesium L-Trionate or Scytrate. So the final question is, do I recommend taking Phinebut or no? Well, honestly, because of all the side effects that we covered and all the issues with Phinebut, I highly recommend avoiding it. As I said, it's mostly illegal in most countries around the world. It can cause severe side effects and there are such great alternatives available in the market that I would just go for the alternatives, which are very effective and much safer for supplementation. If you guys have issues with anxiety, then Ashwagandha would be my first pick. And to learn more about Ashwagandha, check out my video up here and see how you can benefit from supplementing it. Thank you guys for watching and I hope to see you soon again. Stay well.


We're glad to know you're still there and watching the run-up. We're now being joined by Legal Luminary and an advocate for good governance and public affairs commentator. It's my pleasure to welcome Barista Jimmy Abia to the program. Welcome. Thank you very much, Sairangu. It's my pleasure. Our concerns, we're talking today with him about insurance and we understand that some fights that occur on our roads because sometimes you see traffic gridlock is caused by some people that have scratched themselves and all that. We're just wondering, minor accidents that can be avoided if the persons involved knew more about insurance and how to go about it. So what is it that they are missing? Why does it happen this way? Is there something that we need to know? Okay. Basically, the thing, like you mentioned, there are times that you see people fighting on the road because probably there was a scratch on one vehicle or the other. In this city, there's a lot of traffic. You get to encounter traffic a lot of times and within this traffic, you also have people who get into issues like having two cars scratch each other and they step down from their vehicles and exchange blows. But these are things that could have been avoided if people knew a bit more about insurance. They could have avoided some of these fights because there is the third party insurance which everybody is required. It's something that is encoded in law, that is mandatory, that this motor vehicle third party insurance is one of the insurance policies that every driver, every person who every vehicle owner must have. So in such instance, there's already a third party insurance. It is assumed that people should have, although what you have these days is that because people don't also understand the benefit they need for this insurance, either some people don't have it or some people engage others to get this for them, to get documents that sometimes are even fake. So because of that, you see these kinds of situations where people step down from their vehicles and take up a fight in the middle of the road. But like I mentioned, third party insurance should have taken care of that. Now, what is an insurance? An insurance policy is an insurance contract is a contract that guarantees you in the event of loss, damage, or any eventuality. That's what an insurance contract is meant to do for you. So where there is, in cases of third party insurance, motor vehicle insurance, for instance, where there is a damage to a third party's vehicle, then it is or even to an injury to a third party in terms of a crash, it is that insurance that is meant, that 5,000 insurance, incidentally, interestingly, people don't realize that that 5,000 insurance can give a cover for up to a million Naira. So you have that, with that alone, even when you don't have a comprehensive insurance, because what the comprehensive man does is to also protect you, you know, the car owner. But the third party insurance, now, who are the parties to the insurance? You have the vehicle owner, the vehicle owner who is insuring his vehicle. You have the insurance company who, so these are the first and the second parties. And the third party is the person who is not directly involved in this contract, but is affected by this contract which has been entered into.  And usually it is up to, you know, a one million Naira cover. But comprehensive insurance does more than that. Now, amongst the insurance policies that are mandatory, you know, by law in Nigeria, you have the one I've mentioned, the motor vehicle third party insurance. You have the one which the NSITF, you know, oversees, which is the employer's liability, employee compensation, you know, insurance, which is the one provided for employees, you know, in terms of injury, in terms of illness, in terms of maybe in the event of death, you know, while, you know, working, putting in his service. Now, the employer is meant to be contributing 1% of the annual income, annual salary of the employees, you know, to the NSITF. And this is meant to be used, you know, for an event of these eventualities happening. Then you also have, you also have the group life assurance policy. We are, if any, if you own the owner of a company, the employer, you know, once you have up to five employees, you know, in your, in your employee, you need to take up the group life assurance policy. Now, what does it do? It gives a form of life insurance, you know, for the employees. So in event of also injury, in event of death, in event of any eventuality, it is meant to provide for either the person or the insured or even if it is there, you know, for the family, for the family of the person. So this is what the group life assurance policy, you know, is meant to do. Then there is also the professional indemnity medical insurance, which is in terms of, you know, in hospitals, there could be instances of negligence where a medical personnel, you know, is negligent in his job or for any other reason where a person who comes in, you know, to take medical services, you know, is, you know, has any, maybe in event of death of the person or maybe in event that, you know, due to negligence, there is, you know, further need for medical, you know, maybe a complication, you know, arising from this treatment, the initial treatment which the person had received. Then the person is, this professional indemnity insurance is what now will now be protected, you know, the person. Now you also have the occupiers liability. Now in terms of public buildings, hospitals, schools, other public buildings, even shopping malls, the owner or the occupier of that building is required to have this occupiers liability in terms of the persons, you know, thought parties who come into this building and maybe if there's, you know, maybe a fall, a crash or something or injury, you know, within the premises, this is the kind of insurance that protects those persons. Then there is also amongst true with this, there's also the builders' liability insurance, the builders' liability. So for anybody who is constructing any building which is more than two floors, you are required to have the builders' liability insurance, which is mandatory. Now I'm talking only about the strict, there are so many other kinds of insurance that may not be mandatory, but this is, these are the, you know, then you have the marine insurance for cargo, you have the aviation, thought party insurance, and then you also have, you know, I think I think that I've mentioned, you know, the basic mandatory insurance in Nigeria. Yes. I do know that insurance is very wide that we cannot just finish. That's why I try to restrict it because we already have a terrible situation when it comes to traffic in Lagos. And we've seen cases where because of a small splash, people come out and fight. Sometimes another accident occurs, someone dies. And like you said, these are things that insurance companies could have just done for them. Now we wonder why people are not able to access these insurance or people do not want to, because the complaint on the streets is that even if you have an insurance, you have an insurance policy or something, how do you call it? Accessing whatever funds, accessing whatever help from the insurance company would make you even spend more than what you required an insurance company to spend on the case that you're having. Is it that there are no laws that the government need to put in place? Or is the insurance companies themselves that are just being hydra-headed monsters or just being monsters generally and not doing what they're supposed to do? Actually, there are laws. In terms of insurance, first of all, there is the NICOM, the National Insurance Commission of Nigeria, which is meant to regulate insurance companies. Now, there's also the CBN. Of course, the CBN is the one that takes the deposit of their minimum. There's a minimum paid-off capital, which they need to have with the CBN. Now, this is meant to cover for times that they need to pay up some of the claims, which they may not have enough funds immediately to do. Then you also, that's why they keep this minimum deposit with the CBN. Then there is also the Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Commission to also regulate and protect consumers of insurance, not just consumers of insurance, but consumers of products and services generally in Nigeria. But what you have is that there has been sort of an abdication of responsibility by these bodies, these agencies of government. We have had a number of instances where we have a seeming comivance also between some of these bodies and the insurance companies not to meet up with their responsibilities. So you have instances, a number of instances where you make complaints. Ordinarily, where you have issues of insurance companies defaulting from their responsibility. When you make reports to a body, the regulatory body, like NICOM, NICOM is meant to step in and take relevant actions in order to ensure that such is addressed. But what you have is a situation where it seems that there's a seeming negligence of duty and possibly even connivance. So this is one of the issues. So it's not entirely false when Nigerians say that the insurance companies do not keep to their responsibilities. Just for us to wrap up, I'd like to know if you were to advise government, because we're going to have a new government come into play in 2023. And there are things that maybe some of these people may not know that they need to do. If you were to advise government, what would you tell them to do? What policies do they need to put in place to make sure that either these relevant agencies sit up or insurance generally can be accessed by the ordinary man and we use it optimally? Yes, I think information is important. First of all, there is need, because I wonder what we used to have national organization agency. I think that it's important that information is passed across that the public would know the benefits of insurance, that they can actually get benefit from insuring their property, insuring themselves, taking life insurance, life assurance, other benefits. Then also to know, because even some, a lot of employees don't know about the social insurance trust, which is for them. Then also, government needs to be alive to its responsibility. The federal competition and consumer protection council needs to do a lot more. They need to do a lot more. They have powers already in the act. Then also the National Insurance Commission, National Insurance Commission, generally, they need to sit up and do better. That is what I expect that the coming government should ensure that these agencies work and that insurance companies are meant to keep to their responsibilities and that the public is generally informed about the responsibilities of insurance companies. Okay, if you've been there, I'm sure you're wishing now that we had more time to talk about this, but to avoid the fights that we see on the roads, to avoid the quarrels that we see on the roads, the mishaps that we see on the road. If you are religious about your, your insurance policies, a lot of these problems that we face on the roads can be solved by the insurance company. And Barisa has just mentioned a lot of agencies that are relevant or that can protect you when you find that the services you paid for are not rendered to you. But he also said something very instructive. If you're coming to governors in 2023, you should know that there's nothing that works without supervision. The laws are there. But if the people who are supposed to carry out the enforcement of these laws are not supervised well enough, whether in the education sector, whether agriculture, any sector of our economy, we might just find the kind of things that we are finding and then we blame it on the Nigerian factor. The Nigerian factor is really the people. So government at all levels, you're coming in 2023, know what to do. Well, Barisa, I wish we had more time, but the little time that we had, I'm very sure that it has triggered something in the minds of people. So thank you so much for coming. It's my pleasure. It's my pleasure. Okay, the run up continues tomorrow and we're hoping that you're going to join us tomorrow. Until then, stay fit, stay patriotic and bye for now.


How do you blur something in one of your own YouTube videos after that video has been published to YouTube? I'm going to show you exactly how to do this because I need to do this right now. Let's have a look at my YouTube studio and I'll show you the problem. If you go to the video that you want to blur, so that's this video here for me. On the left-hand side, there are some tabs and we want to go down to editor and that brings up the video editor and you can see we've got these options here. We've got trim, blur, audio and end screen and info cards. Obviously the section that we want is blur. So if I click on the plus sign here, add blur.  I'll show you the problem I've got. On this shot here, the camera moves to the desk and you can see all my papers on the right-hand side. On that paper is some sensitive details. It's some sensitive content that I don't really want to be out here on a public video on YouTube. What I'm going to do is add a custom blur to those papers. At full screen, you can see all the lettering on that letter there. What I'm going to do is I'm going to go roughly to the place in the video where I want the blur to happen and next I'm going to use the comma button to back up one frame. If I wanted to move forward one frame, you can use the full stop button or the period button to move forward frame by frame and to go back, I'm going to hit the comma button and I'll just do that as many times so that I can find exactly the very frame I want the blur to start. I think I'll start the blur just as soon as the letter becomes legible, which I think is about there. Next I'll go up to the blur section and click add blur and then I will choose custom blur and it gives me some options here. There's the blur shape, which is a rectangle or an oval and you can see when you select either of those options on the right hand window, let's move it over so you can see it more clearly. I'm going to hover the cursor over the blur and then I'm going to click and drag it. Let's take it to a section where you can see it there. I think I'll go for an oval, I think it's slightly friendlier and you can click on the edges to shrink or expand these axes here. I'm going to place the oval over the letter and then the second option you have is either track objects or fix the blur position. I'm going to click the cursor back onto the window and then use the full stop and comma button to move forward. Oh look, it tracks it in real time. So I'm going backwards and YouTube is automatically keeping that oval over the letter, isn't that clever? And you can set the in point for this, that's amazing isn't it? And you can set the in point on the blue bar here so you can see above the time of the video, your video is shown as a timeline. I want the blur to start here which is where this line is here. So I'm going to grab this blue section, that's the start of the blur and I'm going to click on it and hold down my mouse button and drag up to that frame there, up to where the cursor point is there, that line. So if I click outside of the blue area here and press play, you'll see the blur will start when that timeline hits the blue section. And you can adjust when the blur comes in by dragging that blue section there. So I'll just wait for it to get a bit closer here and let's drag it out a bit more. There we go. And then I'll move the timeline along one frame at a time hitting the period button or the full stop button. And that is exactly what I wanted to be hidden so that's great. And I'll just keep inching forward by pressing the full stop key. Now it stops there because the picture jumps. So if I go forward one frame, I want the blur to end there which is where the long thin line is on the timeline here. You can make this more accurate by going up to this zoom section here. You can either zoom in or zoom out. Now I'm zoomed out all the way. This is a zoom in of the timeline of the video not of the video. So if I click zoom in, you can see this timeline expands and I can scroll across to move along the timeline here with the scroll bar at the bottom. So I want to grab the end of the blue section here. If you hover the cursor over the end of the blue bar, you see it changes to two arrows. And then I'm going to click and hold on my mouse key and drag this blue bar all the way back to where the cursor is. And that is where my blur will end. There, it snaps to that frame. Actually, I think I want to take it back another frame. So I hit the comma button. I want it to end there. So if I zoom in some more and then go back to the blue bar and drag this blue bar back to here. Now, unhelpfully, it either goes before or after and you can see in the window whether the blur is on. So I'm going to drag it to the right one frame and you can see that the blur has appeared. So I know that frame is covered and now I hit the full stop button to go forward one frame and the blur disappears. That's exactly where I want the blur to end. There, that's perfect. Click before the blue blur section and we'll play it through and we'll see how it looks. What I did, I pressed F on my keyboard to make the whole thing full frame and I'll press the space bar to play the video. Standing desk, there's adjustable look. You can get the handle out and raise it. I think I've raised it. That's exactly where I want the blur to happen. What I need to do now is to save this blur. So I'll go up to the right hand side and hit save here. Now it gives you a warning and the warning says this. It might take a few hours for your changes to apply. So if you have something really sensitive that you need to be blurred right now is probably best to hit save but go and unmask the video, make the video private so no one can see it. And then when you know that the blur has gone through and has been processed and is definitely on the video then you can make the video live again. So I'm gonna hit save and you get this message at the bottom. Video's being processed, please check back later. Leave a comment and say hi if this has helped you. And I have other YouTube tips and tricks for my YouTube studio. That's in that playlist down here and up here is what YouTube thinks you should be watching next. Can you please help my daddy get 10,000 subscribers? Just click in his face. Thanks, bye. All right, this is gonna be the proper one, right?


The the concept that there are microbes in the soil that symbiotically get along with microbes in a cow's gut How that works, I don't know but it sure seems to work and if you put Well, a sheep's got a rumen too So you you put either one of them out in a pasture or in a crop field and you allow them to to recycle the the material and feed it back to the microbes in the soil and The benefits are astronomical Well, we have we have proof of that. Yeah Couple years ago After I'd listened to Gabe Brown speak I said I'm going to try what he did and see if he knows what he's talking about So we took a 45 acre field and we We took it out of crop production and we planted to a cover crop and And grazed it twice that year. Yep, and then the next spring We weren't sure what we were going to do yet The next spring the sweet clover came back and before we knew it. It was shoulder tall So well now we know what we're going to do here and we grazed it down again for that year and the following year We well when we grow corn we do we do it with a strip tiller. We we put the 30 inch rows and we put the fertilizer eight inches in the ground So Eli ran some tests all the way across that field where One strip was zero fertilizer the next strip was half fertilizer fertilizer was NPK or just one all three all three together. Yeah, so we had What we considered the right blend to grow 175 bushel corn so that was our top amount we put on and we did half of that and none at all and When we harvested it we were surprised to find out that where we put on a half rate of fertilizer We maxed out our yield so The two years of cover crop Had really released a lot of nutrients back to the soil But the the zero rate still went up about 150 160 So you raised a hundred fifty to a hundred and sixty bushels of corn on zero in zero p zero k correct Yes, I Think that's that's really important my brother and I have always treated the Opening day of pheasant season as a national holiday and there was a time there when We couldn't find very many pheasants anymore And so we started making an effort right now in South Dakota. We're supposed to have one of the lowest pheasant numbers ever It's not true on our land


I learned a new term tonight that I love, talk-foo, in order to have my business card. My name's John Morgan, and I'm from, I'm actually a business consultant here in town, so sort of a business consultant at a personal protection and counter-violence institute thing, but one of the things I help companies with is communication, and so Shepard asked me if I had any information that I could bring by about the talk-foo side of things, and how to use your most valuable tool, your most effective tool to de-escalate your voice and what you can do. Sorry, I want low-tech here, I didn't know that I could have sent slides and websites to Shepard, but hopefully everybody can see this here. I just wanna touch on a few sort of things that we've already covered, but then give you some tools to understand how you can help develop your own verbal abilities when it comes to confrontation. Confrontation in my view, especially when I'm speaking with clients from a business standpoint, is when opinions vary, when stakes are high, and most importantly, when emotions are strong. This has applications outside of business, obviously, in our personal lives, even in some of the scenarios that we've talked about tonight. I find it interesting that a lot of the scenarios that we've spoken about tonight have been very much that surprise attack, sort of mindset. Someone's in your home, someone comes up to you on the street, there's a dark alley. But oftentimes what people don't realize is that violent situations, violent confrontations escalate to that point. It's not always a surprise event.   When I say social life, the things that we do around the community, you might be a rec sports fan here, be playing basketball over at the rec center, and get in a confrontation with somebody over a rule or a foul that could quickly escalate into an opportunity for violence to happen. And it's important for you to be able to have that mental control, that self control and verbal abilities to hopefully de-escalate that. And hopefully you're not a sealed weapon in your track names. Work certainly not just in your own work environment, but sometimes dealing with competitors or people who are customers of yours who are disgruntled. They feel that they've been mistreated by your business. And of course, home domestic violence is certainly something that's very prevalent and hopefully shouldn't be. So one of the things that I like to ask people to do when they think about different places that they could encounter confrontational situations is to think about your own style under stress. And what I mean by that is a little bit of the old concept of fight or flight. Most people here have heard that fight or flight or are you the type of person to retreat or respond with aggression.  We are human beings. We have the ability to reason unlike most of the rest of the animal kingdom. And we have that ability to identify what our style is. And if you know, if you can think back, when you go home tonight on your drive home, think of some of the situations in your life where maybe there was an opportunity for violence to have escalated to or maybe some time when it actually did, a fight that you were in or a time that you did have to pull your firearm. And think about what was your emotional reaction to that situation as it went in?  Or was your immediate reaction, I'm in command and I'm going to show force to take over this situation. Knowing how you react as your sort of gut reaction in different situations and it's not always the same. Sometimes you may be fight and sometimes you may be flight is very important. A number of the speakers have talked about this, learn to look. You guys all just even by coming here tonight, I know are interested in understanding what you can do to protect yourselves. Learning to look out for the situations that might escalate into a violent confrontation is very important. So thinking about just having a different mindset when you enter different situations and during a room like this where there are firearms open on tables and on people's holsters might give you a different perspective than if you just walked into the grocery store. Assessing a situation.  Start assessing the situation. Half of that is what am I going to do? What are my options? But also what can I understand about the person that I think might be involved with that? Do they appear to be an aggressive person? Do they have weapons visible? Being able to assess the situation so you know at what level you need to perhaps take protection for yourself. And most importantly, making it safe. If you have identified that there is possible danger, you've assessed your abilities against the abilities or dangers of the people in the room, how can you make it safe? We've talked a little bit tonight about retreat, the duty to retreat. Sometimes it's not so easy.  Maybe that's not always the best thing. Sometimes in fights where people, for instance a drunk in altercation, if someone turns tail and starts to run, that can aggravate the other person and actually incents them to want to fight even more. Kind of like that mindset of a bear's running at you, right, don't run away. They'll think it's fun. But here's some ways that you can think about making things safe in a confrontational situation. First and foremost, resist your initial urge to defend. Sometimes you might assess the situation as a potential to escalate violence, but it might not necessarily be that way. And if you start to get into the mode of whether it's physical or even verbal defense, you can escalate the situation when it didn't need to be escalated. So having self-control, being able to go into that assessment mode and think about what the consequences of your actions are is incredibly important. If you get into a situation where there is a verbal exchange, doesn't even have to be fists clenched or guns drawn, that sort of thing. But when you sense that a violent situation or anger is part of an environment, showing respect is one of your best ways to gain control and make a situation that could potentially escalate become safer. When I think of respect, these are a few of the keys that just about anybody can do. First of all, give your attention to the other person. If someone is angry at you and they're screaming at you or they're coming at you, pay attention. Listen to them. Gather as much information as you can so that you do not make a mistake in how you judge the danger of the situation or the attitude of that person. Be non-judgmental. Try your best to keep that defense mind out and think, okay, what's the situation here? It's not necessarily how I perceive it. I need to think from the other person's perspective if at all possible. So approaching things with a non-judgmental attitude will help you keep a clear mind. Allow for silence. I've heard a good term let silence do the heavy lifting. Don't immediately try to jump in and interrupt people in a verbal exchange that's escalating. Don't try to win an argument. The way people win arguments is with guns drawn and people having a violent situation. The goal isn't to win. The goal is to make it safe and walk away. There is no winner and no loser. And apologize when appropriate. So if you have for some reason disrespected somebody intentionally or most likely unintentionally, identifying that and by listening to them, being non-judgmental, figuring out if you identify, they seem as though I have disrespected them. Apologize when it's appropriate. You don't have to apologize for something you didn't do necessarily, but if someone senses that you have disrespected them, you should acknowledge that you understand that they feel disrespected. Sort of a passive aggressive way that people apologize which can incense people because if they say, oh, I'm sorry if I've offended you.  So get rid of that word if and say I'm sorry that I offended you. It doesn't have to mean that you did it on purpose. You can still be sorry and say, I'm sorry that I offended you. Let's talk about this situation and try to find a way other than clinging our fists to solve our problems. Oops, I can't spell, retongue. There's an R in there, look at that. I even belted myself. I was rushing a little on my way here. But these are some ways as well that you can make things safe. So once you have got to a point in an argument, in a confrontation where respect has been breached on one side or the other, how can you bring this conversation back, reel it back? These are three tools that can help you. They won't solve every situation. All three of them don't have to be done in this order. But these are tools that you have at your disposal. We all know how to do these things. Return to a point of agreement. If you are having an argument with somebody and it has escalated from passive to confrontational, chances are at that passive level there is something that you can go back to in a conversation to hope, to retrain people's mindset on, okay, this is where we started from. Let's start from scratch and talk this through. Restate what you've heard. Of course, this involves that whole idea of paying attention and listening to people. Restating what you've heard offers your perspective. If you say to somebody, I'm sorry that I disrespected you. It sounds like the clothes that I'm wearing are offensive to you and for some reason that has incensed this violent situation, ask for clarity. Is that what's the problem? You can really hope to get to a more definite reason that emotions have become high in a conversation by restating what you believe to be the issue and asking the person if that is true or not, giving them the opportunity to say no, you're wrong and stout off on you again and then hopefully you can again go through this exercise. And seeking mutual purpose. Again, this is all about the, you're not in a escalating violent situation to find out who's going to win. If you want to win, shoot the other person. Yay, you won, but now as your wonderful award, you get lawsuit after lawsuit and maybe jail time, et cetera. You want to seek mutual purpose, even if it's from a surprise attack situation. The concept of closing your door, creating a barrier and voicing, I'm armed, don't come in here. You're acknowledging mutual purpose. I want safety, he wants safety. He's out there robbing my house and he wants to do it as safely as possible in, out, box, see ya. I just want to be inside my house or in my room with my kids because I've got a great homo insurance policy and we have seeked mutual purpose from a safety level. It's not always as cut and dry as that and it does take your abilities to leave this room today and think about these concepts and to practice them. It really helps to practice the concepts of avoiding confrontation on a micro level rather than think, oh well, I don't need to worry about that stuff until guns or weapons or martial arts or anything violent are part of the equation. So you can practice these things each day and they will certainly help you and your personal life and your business life, too, if you think about the different types of confrontations that you can have at any point in your life.  Brief guess. Can you ask the person, is there any way that we can agree upon a situation you have with me? Absolutely. And that would be a very good example of seeking mutual purpose, like hey, let's talk this out. Sometimes when people's emotions are high, they don't necessarily want to talk it out. They want to engage in a fight. So it does help to think of things from, if you can almost trick them into that side by saying let's just go back in time and talk about something that we agree upon as a way to bring somebody back into the situation where they can get back on task so that they don't reach that point where I no longer care even about the argument we were having. I am in fight mode of my fight or flight in that situation. So you're just basically assessing the person's emotional situation and trying to get it to it in order to avoid hate? Yes, yes. You are definitely trying to assess their emotional situation. It's not easy, of course. So, but possibly just letting them vent could be... Absolutely. In a business standpoint, I tell people that all the time, let them vent, let it go, have the self-control to resist the urge to defend and have the self-control not to cut them off or disrespect them while they're doing it. If you show respect while that happens, sometimes even in a violent situation that's a surprise, the person might just be trying to puff up their feathers a little bit and I wanna make sure that this person knows that I'm not one to be messed with. Absolutely, I hear you. You're not one to be messed with. I'm gonna walk over here now. It's a great way to get out of that situation. Very good question. Thank you. Just one small thing to add that we read and the other books that we read is that maintaining your baseline personality is the best way to prevent feeding and escalating triggers as they ramp up towards their peak in the crisis which results in acting out physically or if you're on a chair or something. So, if you can maintain baseline rather than feed escalating triggers by being a defensive person, you did this, but you did this.  I like that concept of your baseline because everybody's gonna be a little bit different, but focusing, that's a great concept for self control. Stay on your baseline, because you don't even know if sometimes things that you think wouldn't offend somebody does because of the way that they perceive it. You have no control over the perceptions of another person. You can only control yourself and by focusing on your baseline, that's a really good mindset to have to stay in control. I really like the, once you can, like if you see the mutual purpose, once you get the mutual purpose, you got it. Oh yeah? That's amazing, that's amazing.  It was Glenn who brought up earlier, in a confrontation, the smartest person, the most skilled person, the most experienced person, they are the most responsible for the outcome in that event. Hopefully that's you and if you can keep that mindset of seeking mutual purpose from a good situation, not just from a violent situation, you're gonna be able to help structure how that violent situation becomes de-escalated. Did you have a question? Yeah, I was just gonna say, after working 30 years in a Washington DC emergency room, we learned the phrase that worked the best was, you know what, I think you're right. And we're over there. Just sometimes just listening to people. And if I didn't know he could do all that stuff, I never would have reached your fit in. Exactly. Thank you very much. That's the purpose. Cool, thanks everybody.


This paper proposes dual-functional transmission dielectric meta-lenses that can generate and focus different vector beams in the telecom infrared, depending on the linear polarization state in input. These meta-lenses are based on the mathematical fundamentals for the compact generation of vector beams using dual-functional optical elements, and they are designed and fabricated using silicon. The proposed approach provides new integrated optics for applications in the fields of high-resolution microscopy, optical manipulation, and optical communications, both in the classical and single-photon regimes. This article was authored by Andrea Vogliardi, John Luca Rufato, Simone D'Auzilio, and others.


Ever had that uncanny feeling that the universe is trying to tell you something? Finished a book about love? Only to bump into your potential soulmate moments later? Or perhaps you've been wrestling with a decision and then stumbled upon some unexpected advice in a seemingly random conversation? These are not just coincidences. These are synchronicities. Synchronicities are those mysterious moments when the universe appears to be whispering directly to you. They are these strange, almost magical connections that seem to happen just when you need them. But what do they mean? Are they messages from a higher power or just peculiar tricks of our minds? Let's delve deeper into the captivating world of synchronicities. They're not just about love stories or meeting the right person at the right time. Synchronicities can take many forms. You might repeatedly encounter specific symbols such as seeing the number 1111 on the clock, especially after contemplating a significant life change. Could the universe be guiding you towards a new path? Or perhaps you've had a meaningful dream, one that seems to offer some kind of insight or guidance. For instance, you dream of flying and then out of the blue, you receive a job offer that aligns perfectly with your passion for aviation. Could the dream have been a precursor to this opportunity? And then there are those serendipitous encounters. You're waiting for a delayed flight and you strike up a conversation with a fellow passenger who just so happens to be an expert in the field you're interested in. Their insights provide the clarity you were seeking. Could this be the universe nudging you in the right direction? Of course, not everyone sees synchronicities as divine messages. Some argue that they're simply examples of confirmation bias, a psychological phenomenon where we're more likely to notice things that confirm our existing beliefs. But does understanding this make synchronicities any less magical? Not necessarily. It's possible to interpret them objectively, while still allowing room for deeper personal interpretations. So, how can you become more attuned to these whispers from the universe? Start by becoming a conscious observer. Pay attention to recurring events, symbols, and dreams. And remember, don't force interpretations. Let the meaning unfold naturally. Also, don't be afraid to explore different perspectives on synchronicities. Read books, engage in discussions, and learn about the various psychological and metaphysical explanations. And finally, listen to your gut. While logic is important, sometimes the true meaning of a synchronicity reveals itself over time through your own intuition. In conclusion, synchronicities aren't rigid life scripts. They're gentle nudges, whispers from the universe, that can guide us along our journeys. So next time you encounter an uncanny coincidence, take a moment to pause and listen. What is the universe trying to tell you?