Live Q&A Practice Run

So the first question is: how would you define self-deception and how is that different from, say, cognitive dissonance?

Okay, well, we'll start with the first one. How would you define self-deception? Well, in most accounts of self-deception, most accounts of self-deception have been basically formulated by logicians. The logicians make a presumption, and the presumption is essentially that people think in fully articulated statements, propositions, you might say. And as soon as you accept that, you've run into the paradoxes of self-deception.

So, for example, it doesn't necessarily seem possible to believe proposition A and proposition B at the same time. So those would be stable propositions if they conflict with one another. But that begs a number of questions. One is first whether or not people think in propositions, in fully articulated propositions, which they do, but it's not the only way they think. And then also, what does it mean for two things to conflict?

So I'm gonna start with the second, answering the second question first. So often when I've read badly written essays—often undergraduate essays—one of the things that occurs very frequently is that the writer will make a statement on page one or paragraph one and then two paragraphs later write a statement that directly contradicts the first statement. Because their thinking is confused, because they're young, and because they don't know how to write and aren't particularly careful, they don't notice that the two propositions actually are a logical conflict.

One of the things that indicates is that people actually don't know this when things are in logical conflict, because there's no marker for that. The only time people notice that their presuppositions about the world are in conflict is when they try to act out two contradictory notions at the same time and find out that acting one out interferes with acting another out. And sometimes that happens because they're in conflict with themselves, but even more often it happens because they enter into conflict with someone else.

So you might say that you don't even notice your propositional conflicts until you act them out in the world. So, you can maintain contradictory cognitions endlessly without ever noticing how disorganized you are, because the world doesn't slap you in the face for your foolishness unless you try to act those things out.

So, the idea that self-deception is impossible because people can't hold two contradictory propositions simultaneously—that's completely ridiculous. People do that all the time. So then, that's the answer to the second question.

The answer to the first question is: the way that people generally deceive themselves is that they act out a series of propositions. So say a series of beliefs about the world or even one belief about the world, and then they run into evidence that that enacted belief is not having the result desired.

So, let's say you tell a joke at a party and no one laughs, and your proposition was that the joke was funny. Obviously, the world indicated to you that something about that proposition was faulty. Now, the problem is in part that the world doesn't tell you which part of that proposition is wrong. It just tells you that the frame of reference that you were using when you were telling the joke had something about it that was sufficiently erroneous, so that you didn't get the result that was intended.

But that is subject to all sorts of potential interpretations. And that's a classic situation where the data, which is the outcome of your joke, is insufficiently infirmity to precisely indicate to you where your mistake was made. So it's subject to all sorts of potential interpretations. One interpretation could be, "All these people at this party are too stupid to understand my humor." And that's a perfectly reasonable proposition, although it's unlikely to be true.

Now, generally what people do when they deceive themselves is that they lay forth a belief in the world and the results aren't what they intended. That produces a negative emotional state, and the negative emotional state indicates an error. But then there's a whole process of exploration that has to occur to precisely specify the error, and to precisely specify how the information about the error could be used to revamp the whole propositional sequence.

And that takes a tremendous amount of work—like a ridiculous amount of work—because let's say people don't laugh at your jokes. Well, why is that? Well, maybe you're hanging around with the wrong sort of people, or maybe your jokes just aren't that funny, or maybe you're kind of a jerk, or maybe you don't know anything about social interaction.

All of those possibilities emerge when your joke falls flat. In order for you to fully investigate the consequences of that, you have to do a tremendous amount of cognitive work. Generally, what happens is that people just don't do the work. Then what they do is they have as a representation of their failure what you might describe as an encounter with chaos.

That encounter is negative emotion, emergency preparation, and then complete indeterminacy as to the propositional nature of the information. Now, if you do that enough times—so you lay out your belief and they fail, and you get a negative emotional response personally—but you fail to engage in the difficult process of exploration to specify exactly what went wrong, what will happen is that you'll collect around yourself an absolute morass of chaos—an indeterminate experience—and that's the place that you will end up living.

And that's what self-deception really looks like. It doesn't look like you believe A and B at the same time, and you know you don't notice. It's way more complicated than that, and I would say that's akin to cognitive dissonance. But the explanation that I just provided is far more thorough than the typical explanation of cognitive dissonance.

So, that's an answer to Mike's question: how would you define self-deception and how is that different from cognitive dissonance?

So one of the things you guys might want to do is type more than one question. Don't wait to type a few and then I can select from. There are people in the room with me here, so which would be the case under normal circumstances, but we're just testing this. So any other questions?

Do you think some people seek out drama, e.g., they make things difficult for themselves because they confuse it with meaning?

Yes, people do that all the time. Is it because they confuse it with meaning? Yes, partly. That's a really complicated question that you're asking. The problem with... Okay, so imagine that you gave people a choice, and the choice could be that they could suffer stupidly or they could live a meaningful life.

So, you might say, "Well, obviously they're gonna pick living a meaningful life." But it's not so obvious, because one of the prices that you pay for living a meaningful life is that you have to adopt responsibility. The responsibility that's attendant on living a meaningful life is theoretically without limit.

So, for example, one of the ways that's being conceptualized in classic Christianity is that in order to lead a meaningful life, you have to take the world's sins onto yourself. That means that you have to see inside yourself all of the negative potentialities that being human is characterized by, and then you have to take responsibility for addressing those.

So when Carl Jung talked about this, for example, one of the points he made was that if you do a thorough enough investigation into your own faults, then you end up scouring—what's the word? It's not scouring precisely—harrowing. It'll literally, as close to literally as you might imagine.

And of course that's a very, very, very unpleasant experience. So then you might say, "Well, people are going to perfectly well and logically want to avoid that." And then they do that using all sorts of subterfuge, because they don't want to admit to themselves that they're not taking any responsibility.

So they'll often generate false crises in their own life, and amplify problems beyond necessity, so that they can convince themselves that when they're effortfully struggling through all that mess, that they're actually taking responsibility for their lives. But they're not. So that's one of the reasons that people might seek out drama and make things difficult for themselves.

And it's partly because they confuse it with meaning. But, you know, there's multiple levels of horrible self-deception and confusion and avoidance that go along with that.

What role do you think diagnosis should play in clinical practice?

Oh, that's easy. You need it to get reimbursed by insurance providers, and that's about it. I shouldn't say that because that's just people facile. There's a bunch of—there's a variety of functions diagnosis plays.

Part of engaging in the process of diagnosis is utilizing classification, and you need to utilize stable classifications for a number of reasons. One of them is that you can't understand anything about what you're dealing with without classifying it. And even if you classify it incorrectly, that might be better than not classifying at all because once it's classified incorrectly, you might at least be able to notice specifically what's incorrect about the classification and then rectify it.

Which is to say that a bad theory might be better than no theory at all. But diagnosis also helps you identify potential pathways forward. So, for example, if you diagnose someone as agoraphobic, then you have access to the large wealth of treatment protocols that have already been developed for agoraphobia, and that's very useful.

It helps you rule out other things, and that can be extremely important because sometimes someone will come to see you in the clinical practice and they're just overwhelmed by what's happening to them. What that means is that they're in chaos, they're suffering, and they have no idea why.

Then you could say, "Well, yeah, what's happening to you is horrible, but it's precisely this kind of horrible. Here's what this kind of horrible is like, and here's what you can do about it, and here is a bunch of other people who are also suffering from it, and they've recovered."

So, with this kind of horrible, there are all these other things that you won't have to worry about, and that can be really helpful for people because it narrows the universe of their problems from all potential problems to a potentially manageable set of finite problems.

So, those are some of the reasons for diagnosis and some of the reasons why diagnosis is useful.

So how do you differentiate between having an actually bad life and having depression make your life bad?

Yeah, well that's a good question as well. I think you can do that in a multi-dimensional way, technically speaking. One of the ways I conceptualize that is that you imagine people's human life actually has a fairly stable and identifiable number of characteristics. So some of those are: you need to engage in trade with other people, and that in modern culture would generally be formalized as having a career.

You need to have friends, you need to have an intimate relationship, you need to be embedded within a family, you have to conjure up something of high quality that's productive to do with your life outside of work, you have to attend to your physical and mental health, and you have to regulate your use of mind-altering substances like drugs and alcohol.

There are other dimensions, but those serve the purpose quite nicely as an additional schema. So when you're talking to someone in a clinical intake, the first thing you want to find out is: is the person functional on any or all of those dimensions?

The fewer dimensions on which they're actually functional, the more they just have a bad life and aren't depressed. So if you have no friends and you have no educational history—and you certainly don't have an educational history, say, that's commensurate with your ability—or maybe you have no abilities, you have a patchy work history, your family is an absolute nightmare, and all you do with your time is consume drugs and alcohol, and you have one or more serious physical or mental health problems—your life has fallen apart, and now you're going to be suffering because of that.

But to call that depression is not useful, particularly. Depression technically speaking could spiral you into a place where those things are more likely, but I would generally—I think it's better to conceptualize depression as the mismatch between function and emotion.

So if I did that approximately six-dimensional analysis with someone, and I concluded that, hey, well, no, if this person has friends—they may not be seeing them right now because they're in a bad state, but they have friends, and their friends are good for them—they have an intimate relationship that's functional, they are embedded within a family that isn't too pathological, they have a job that in principle serves the function of a job, but maybe they could even be, or had been, interested in etc.

If they're feeling terrible and they're having a difficult time getting out of bed, I would say, well, that increases the probability that they should be accurately conceptualized as depressed. Then, of course, in a real situation, the clinical presentation is generally some mixture of those sorts of things.

But it's very useful to distinguish one from another. Have I read Ayn Rand, and if I have, what are my thoughts on her philosophy of Objectivism?

Um, Ayn Rand is an ideologue. She's an interesting ideologue because her ideology runs contrary to the most prevalent modern ideology, which is the one that underlies political correctness. So it's fun to read Ayn Rand, especially if you're hyper-irritated by political correctness because she provides almost the perfect antidote to that.

And, you know, I have some sympathy for her because she wrote in an anti-communist vein, and she had her reasons because her family was chased out of what became the Soviet Union by the communists and if I remember correctly had their property stolen and all the terrible things that went along with that.

But she writes hero stories of a certain type, and the hero story is the individual against the collective, roughly speaking. And that's a perfectly reasonable hero story, and it's a useful one. But to think of that as the only valid hero story in the constellation of possible hero stories is a mistake, because you can also write a perfectly good story where the collective is relatively beneficial and it's the collective and the hero against, say, the dire forces of nature—and that's also a perfectly appropriate story.

So you might say that there are circumstances under which the attitude that a man puts forth is accurate and salutary, but to think of that as covering the entire universe of potential proper narratives is a big mistake, and usually Ayn Rand's acolytes do precisely that.

So Ariel says, "Do you think all presuppositions stem from religion?"

No. What I think is that the deepest presuppositions are identical to religion. That actually when we talk about what constitutes religion, what we are saying at the same time is that we're dealing with the most fundamental presuppositions that people make.

The thing that I find interesting about that is that presuppositions are necessary. The reason for that is because you have—you're a finite cognitive agent, you have extraordinarily limited understanding. In order to deal with the world at all, you have to act as if certain parts of it are both understood and stable, like unchanging.

Those elements that you treat as stable and unchanging at the deepest level are your religious presuppositions. Whether you think of them as religious or not is irrelevant. If you don't think of them as religious or know that they're religious, all that means is that you don't know anything about your presuppositions, and that you don't know anything about religion.

I learned that partly from reading Carl Jung, because one of the things Jung posited was that the highest value that exists in a person's hierarchy of values is de facto equivalent to their God. Now, you know, that isn't often how people conceptualize the idea of God or the idea of value, but it doesn't really matter.

His point was that psychologically a person's highest value served precisely the same function that a deity serves in a more explicitly religious society. So, my experience too has been that if you're ever having a conversation with someone that is really digging towards the bottom of things, the language that has to be used is immediately religious, because religious language is the only language that's capable of encapsulating the phenomena that exists at the deepest levels of analysis.

If that language has never become necessary for you, all that means is that you've never been in the sort of crisis that would necessitate its use, or that you don't have the language at hand, which is not good.

Arianna says, "Some researchers see shame as something that is very destructive; the consensus seems to be that it is an emotion that is always destructive. Do you agree with this?"

No, that's absolutely ridiculous, and only modern psychologists and probably social psychologists would be foolish enough to even dare deposit something so absolutely absurd. Psychopathy and shamelessness are the same thing, so shame is a shame. No emotion is always destructive. Any emotion taken to an extreme can be destructive, just like any value taken to an extreme.

You know, joy can be destructive. I mean, people who are manic are in some sense possessed by a radical excess of positive emotion, and they get incredibly impulsive. So, and it's terribly destructive. I mean, there's almost no form of insanity that's more destructive than mania. People will go out and spend all their money—all their family's money—and engage in all sorts of hyper-optimistic interactions with the world, and it will result in their complete ruin.

So, you know, people think of happiness as an untrammeled positive. Well, if you think of happiness as positive emotion—which is partly true because it's also the absence of negative emotion—if you think of happiness as only a good, then you have no idea about the pathologies of positive emotion.

They're manifold, and shame is like, if you do something stupid and destructive to yourself or to yourself and the broader social community, you should feel shame, and you should pay attention to it, and you should learn from it. If you're not capable of doing that, then people should stay the hell away from you because you're shameless.

And of course, for most of Western history—and I don't know enough about other forms of history to also make the same comment—calling someone shameless was a tremendous insult. It meant that they didn't have enough sense to be appalled by their own pathology, and that's just not a good thing at all.

What makes a successful researcher? Curiosity, intelligence, diligence—those might be the personality attributes. Then, being embedded in a kind of social network that supports research endeavors is also extraordinarily necessary. So I guess you would add to that the capability for extended collaborations.

The ability to write is also tremendously important. I mean, the place that I see most graduate students fail, it's very rare that a graduate student is incapable of formulating a research hypothesis, and they can always discuss with other people what those hypotheses might be and also infer the next logical step merely by being conversant with the relevant literature.

They can also run experiments; they can generally also analyze them, although that starts to become a differentiator. But what kills graduate students is that they can't write. Writing is really difficult. So you have to be able to write, and you have to either enjoy it—which means there’s something wrong with you—or you have to be compelled to do it. And if you can't, then you're gonna run into trouble.

Let's see, Christopher: how do you feel psychotherapy and psychiatry should work together in curing psychological disorders?

Hmm. Well, I presume that by psychiatry what you're zeroing in on there probably is the use of psychiatric drugs, because otherwise, there's not much distinction between psychiatry and psychotherapy.

Look, if you have a serious problem, you should be very wary of letting your a priori convictions interfere with your health. So, you know, you hear very frequently that people are all too easily made—all too easily seek help in the form of pills, and I just think that's wrong. I don't see any evidence for that at all.

In my experience, no one comes to a clinician saying, "Please give me a pill for my mental illness so it will go away." First of all, people don't want to think even for a moment that they actually have a mental illness. Second, they certainly don't want to be modified by a pill.

They generally feel that that’s an abdication of responsibility, and they're terrified of the side effects. And even if they do try it, they want to get off it as fast as possible, and it’s shameful that they have to rely on some sort of medication to begin with.

A lot of what you’re doing if you’re dealing with someone who’s truly depressed is helping them come to terms with the fact that a trial of an antidepressant might be a useful thing for them, and that can take months; it can take years.

So, I mean, you don’t want to leave any stone unturned in your search for health, and psychiatric medications can be very useful, and sometimes they're absolutely necessary. So, for example, if you have someone who is flirting with psychosis or who’s already entered a psychotic state, I think the general consensus in the literature—and I think it's appropriate—is that if you don't facilitate their use of anti-psychotic medication, that what you're doing borders on malpractice.

So, now, okay, having said all that, the probability that a medication alone will be sufficient to address the problem is low, partly because medications for psychiatric disorders are much better conceptualized as complex tools than as curative agents. You have to learn to use them. You have to learn what you—have to figure out what the drug should be, you have to figure out what the dose should be, you have to figure out what time of day you're going to take it.

All of those are very complicated decisions and require a fair bit of experience to optimize. Then you also have to learn how you use those medications while you're simultaneously modifying whatever needs to be modified in your attitudes or your life in order to progress forward properly.

So, the optimal balance between the two is: don’t say no to drugs too rapidly, because you just might have the sort of problem that’s best addressed with a psychiatric medication, and that could save you and your family not only suffering but even death, because, you know, the probability of suicide with serious depression is quite high.

Trying to help someone who’s committed suicide because they’re depressed is extraordinarily difficult. So one of the things you really want to do is stave that off. But the drugs—the medications have to be used as tools in a sophisticated way within a therapeutic alliance, because otherwise the probability that they work is just extremely low.

They’re just too complicated, and they have too many negative side effects. Like even with antidepressants, even when they work, they generally interfere with people's sexual function. So, and that can be good if the person who’s depressed is also suffering from something like premature ejaculation because antidepressants are good for fixing that.

But they produce an anorgasmia, which can be a real catastrophe. That’s more likely with women: slow sexual response and inhibited sexual desire. You know, all of that can be extraordinarily problematic, and that's just one of a host of side effects that psychiatric medications are likely to generate.

So, they're like chainsaws, you know? They’re tools and they’re useful, but they’re kind of rough. You know, if you use them improperly, they can do more damage than good.

How do you how should you decide between being hard on yourself and giving yourself a break?

That's a good—that's a very good question. So one of the populations that I've had some experience with has been—I’ve worked with a lot of lawyers—and these are usually very successful, hard-driving, ambitious people who are that way for a variety of reasons, often because they’re hyper-conscientious as well as being competitive.

But they’re almost always at least hyper-conscientious. You know, one question that a person like that addresses is, "Well, how hard should I work, and what am I just being useless?"

The general answer to that isn't, "Well, you should seek some appropriate work-life balance," because that's just a bloody cliché. If you're in a highly competitive job, you're being chased by your peers and your clients and the marketplace to work flat out as fast as you can all the time.

So then the question that you have to face is, "What under what conditions should you not do that?" I found PJ’s thinking very useful in formulating an answer to that, and the fundamental answer is: you shouldn’t work so hard that you fail. You shouldn't work so hard that you can’t continue to work that hard.

So if you're working 80 hours a week and say you don't take a day off, you will eventually hurt yourself in a manner that will make it impossible for you to continue working 80 hours a week. So that's obviously counterproductive.

So let's assume that your goal is instead to maximize your productivity. You might say, "Well, that means that you have to take care of yourself," because otherwise you're gonna burn out, you're gonna get depressed, you're gonna get anxious, you're gonna get exhausted, for which there's no diagnostic category, and that's gonna interfere with your career.

So what you have to learn is how can you maximize your productivity, and often that means learning actually how much work you can do, how much leisure you need, and how much you need to involve yourself in activities that are outside of work.

One of the things that happens to women particularly when they hit their 30s—and I'll speak primarily about the lawyers that I've worked with, because I’ve worked with lots of female lawyers who'd be made partners in large firms, so they've been very successful—is that they hit 30 or so; they're through their apprenticeship and they start to get very disillusioned with their job.

Part of the reason for that is that they make partner and then they find out that the partners that they're associated with have all the foibles that are associated with normal people, and so there's a bit of a decline in idealism. But they also find out that there actually is a lot more to life than working like a mad dog for 80 hours a week purely on legal issues, which might not even be that interesting in and of themselves.

So then they have to figure out, "Well, how much time should be taken off?" Most of the lawyers that I’ve worked with have ended up working fewer hours but billing more hours. In fact, they got to have their take—needed to—they take a day off a week or two days off a week.

They generally can't work shorter hours, because that isn’t how a profession like that works. But they can plan to take time off in the future and do that quite regularly. So maybe a two-week vacation every three months or every four months, something like that—or a week every four months.

What they almost inevitably find is that the boost they get from the vacation increases their ability to concentrate at work and makes them more valuable as a practicing partner. So you can think about it as an attempt to reach an equilibration state.

The question "How much should you work?" is really the question "How much can you work productively so that you can have the longest possible productive and sustainable career?" And that means that you have to set up your career in such a way that it doesn't eat so much of your life that you come to resent and hate it.

Otherwise, you'll bail out, or you'll act in a counterproductive manner, or you’ll hurt yourself, or so forth. So I would say for young people, the way that you figure that out is that you pick something difficult to do, and you work yourself half to death doing it, so that you can figure out where your actual limits are—like your limits of psychological and physiological endurance.

Once you've exceeded your limits, pull back to the point where that becomes sustainable. That way, you're being hard on yourself to test yourself out but you're also allowing yourself the opportunity to pursue what you’re pursuing in the best of possible health and with the highest probability of continuing in a high-quality manner into the future.

What are my views on euthanasia? Is the fact that so many are against it a symptom of individuals' and societal aversion to death, or is it of the more practical issues like consent and morality?

Oh well, I mean, euthanasia is a complete nightmare. I mean, you know, the slippery slope from "It's okay if someone who's terminally ill wants to die" to "Let's empty out the hospitals of all the people in it who are no longer being socially productive" is like—that's a road that societies travel down one tiny little step at a time.

So when you open up the specter of euthanasia, you're also opening up endless cans of snakes, the existence of which many of which you have no idea even exist. Now, I kind of think of euthanasia like torture.

So you can imagine the situation—imagine the following situation, and it's unrealistic because no real situation is this clearly bounded, but we'll use it for the sake of argument. Imagine that you know for certain that someone in your custody has planted an extremely high—an explosive device of extremely high capacity in a football stadium and they are going to detonate it unless you find out where it is.

Well, you might say, "Well, what interrogation techniques might be ethically available to you in order to conduct that investigation?" And I would say—and I know this is a flawed philosophical argument, but I'm just using emphasis as an example—high levels of threat as an interrogation technique should come with the expectation that you should be willing to undergo prosecution for your actions.

You can’t expect to get a free ride, even if—because the use of torture, say, in a situation about—it's so absurdly socially dangerous that even if you could make a case that it was ethically justifiable in that particular circumstance, you should pretty much be willing to give up the rest of your life as a consequence of having participated in that.

I kind of think the same thing about euthanasia. It’s like, you know what Nietzsche said once: that nobody who’s truly lived hasn’t experienced the necessity of killing. You know, when—to put this in simple terms, you know, I had my dog put down in February because he was done.

Allowing him to expire naturally seemed to involve nothing but a lot of unnecessary suffering. So you can certainly imagine the situation where euthanasia seems like the ethical option. But that doesn’t mean that it shouldn’t be absolutely surrounded by high thickets of illegality.

I mean, sometimes I think to do the right thing you're required to break a law and be punished for it. Now, apart from that, I've also learned that commenting generally on questions like that is almost always a mistake, because the devil is always in the details.

So, is there a way to find your true passion, or is that just a cliché?

What's definitely a cliché, and you know, it's the sort of thing that actually annoys me quite a lot about New Age thinkers, and I would more or less put Joseph Campbell in that category. I think you can find what compels you and what might enable you to live in a high-quality manner despite the suffering that's associated with life.

I think you can discover that, and I think part of the way you discover that is by watching yourself and learning when it is that you're meaningfully engaged. You have to notice that it's something that happens to you in some sense rather than something that you do. You have to notice when you're meaningfully engaged, and then you have to work to expand the amount of time that you spend in that state.

But I would also say that there are moral requirements that go along with that too, because you might say, "Well, what if you happen to be the sort of person, for example, who finds torturing small animals meaningfully engaging?"

It seems like that's the sort of meaningful engagement that you probably don't want to expand. So I would say that if you're going to set up your life so that you maximize your meaningful engagement, there’s a number of other things that you have to do at the same time, and one of those is that you have to get very clear about who you are and what you're doing.

So although this would be grounds for a much longer discussion, I think that one of the things that you have to do if you're going to attempt to maximize meaningful engagement is that you also have to do such things as endeavor to stop deceiving yourself and other people in every way you possibly can.

Part of the reason for that is that if you engage in deception of any sort, you pathologize the structure—not just the structure of your being—but you could say you pathologize the structure of your nervous system, and then you can't trust its reports.

So if your—if you're going to rely on your nervous system's reports of meaningful engagement to guide your future activities, you better do everything you can to make sure that you're not filling that nervous system with the kind of garbage that's going to make it malfunction and give—again give you false reports.

So I think that moving towards meaningful engagement has to be associated with making truth your highest value, because otherwise, you can't trust yourself as your own guide. I mean, the Catholics have struggled with this for a long time from a theological perspective, because the Catholic position, roughly speaking, is that human beings are so steeped in sin that they can't trust their own instincts in relationship to good and evil and have to use the Church and the priesthood as an intermediary.

And you can obviously have an argument about that, and of course, Protestants have historically done that, but you got to give the Catholics their due. It's like people aren't pure by nature and only trammelled in their vision by sociological impediments; they're also corrupt beyond belief individually and have to use society as a source of value.

So if you’re going to personalize your life in some sense, you better act in a manner that makes you a reliable guide.

So what time is it? 2:30? Well, I think maybe we'll call that a day, because I'm starting to get tired and I'll start giving answers that not only ramble but never actually come back to the question. So let's call that a day and we’ll take a look and see how it worked.