church on Wednesdays and we get a lot of the residents that come through the used mobile market. And they were saying good things. Great. Great. Yeah. Hopefully next, next, our plan is, um, to continue it next summer, June until October. So it's certainly going to be needed. Yep. I just wanted to jump in real quick to say a few things. One is that we're recording the meeting. So I've started recording it. And, um, Chris, I made you a co-host because I've had connection issues. And Ryan, your connection looks maybe about as stable as mine. So, so I thought Chris would be safe. Yeah, I have not had issues with Zoom, but I'm going to knock on wood right now for that sake. Okay. Ryan, I'll make you co-host also. So just in case we lose anybody. Chris, would we have the copy of the agenda also post it? Yeah, we can put that up there. Why don't we get through the minutes first? Sure. Chris, do you want to keep scrolling? That's all. Okay. So when somebody needs to make an emotion to approve the minutes. I'll make it. I'm sorry. Who is that? Everybody. Okay. So Masud made the motion. And then we need a second. And then all in favor. I'm going to actually have to do a roll call. Sorry. I realized. So bear with me one second here. I'm going to do it by how I see you. So if you're in favor, just say yes. To approve the minutes. So Masud. Yes. Chris. Yes. Ryan. Yes. Jada. Yes. And Dave, if you weren't there, you should probably abstain just because you weren't there. To approve the minutes. Okay. Great. So we have a four, zero, one. Great. All right. You're going to have to give me a minute, but I can, you could at least start talking, but Ryan, we had checked in and you said you would give an update on the mobile market. So you already started doing that. So. Yeah. Great. So we just fit. So today was the last day we actually in lieu of a mobile market to Olympia Oaks, we were doing boxes in the last six weeks, just having boxes dropped off to people's houses. But our original plan was for 12 weeks from late June to mid September. And then everyone was pretty happy with it. So we tried to continue it for six extra weeks. It was the last day was the last day of and a lot of that six extra weeks was kind of last minute decision making of just of just like continuing the regular tent setup and sales at three of the sites at Fort River butternut departments and East Hadley Road and then delivering boxes like I said, Olympia Oaks. And we have we we did like $10,000 in sales. I think we're all and about we donated about and that was like selling things for less than the usually less than the actual costs. And we did about $10,000 worth of donations to in a time from grants that were given to a lot of some people are just getting free, free shares and then and then a lot of the money that we got a lot of the sales were done through SNAP and HIP. So people are getting reimbursed through the state if they're paying with SNAP. And we had gotten we had had we had had HIP for CSA shares but we didn't have it for just like kind of off the off the table ship off the table like purchasing like all the cart purchasing. So mid summer or a late summer we finally got approved for our market sales for HIP for reimbursement through HIP. So now we have that and we get to keep it. So next year we'll be able to start off in June. And if for people with HIP is basically a state program, it's called the health healthy incentives program. And it essentially when a customer when someone who has food stamps or snap makes a purchase, they get automatically reimbursed when they when they use their snap to purchase food from farmers from like farm rights and such anywhere that's enrolled. So it's it's an incentive to buying fresh local produce from local farms. So it's a huge, huge boom feminine. It helps some fruit that might be able to afford it. Ryan was there anything about like next year and a way that you all as a as a commission could support the market more in some way or I just wondered if you had any thoughts about that based on this year. Yeah, there's anyone that wants to get involved. There's the Mobile Market Planning Committee meetings. And I have to look up when those when the next one is one is the next one. And besides that, I guess you have to probably have to email Caitlin Markey in order to get on it. Must be another one in November, mid November, I think having trouble pulling up. So anyone that wants to get involved in email C Markey. So C M A R Q U I S at collaborative.org. They want to get more information about the meetings. And we'll be meeting rather winter to figure out like fundraising and what will change we may be for next year. And other ways to get involved or help. I don't know yet. But what we did this year worked out pretty well. And so we'll probably continue. I'm assuming we're going to continue as we did this year with without too many huge changes. And the biggest thing is just like help getting. Yeah, trying to making sure people know about it. Especially people who benefit most from it. And but that like a lot like that's a lot of time before that needs to get going again. Are you thinking about expanding locations? Did you say that for next year? I haven't given it too much thought. I don't know yet. So yeah, I haven't I haven't attended any of the planning committee since the spring, sadly, but because they're usually on days that they're usually on Thursdays when I've been most than the most busy. I don't know yet to get a bit. Oh, this is an update. We so through with healthy Hampshire's help. We also got a big grant to buy a van for the use for the use by the mobile market. So there's also just like so that that's that was a we were using that my farm truck in a trailer before and and that's like the vehicle the farm relies on heavily. So it was nice to nice to have a another vehicle that was more exclusive for use to the to the mobile market. And right now I'm actually trying to think of ways to use the van throughout the winter that would benefit people from the community. So it's trying to think of a way to like basically start lending it out to people who need it. Maybe if a car breaks down or if someone wants to make a trip to the grocery store to buy groceries for a few people, three households. Yeah, maybe they could organize like a van pool like a certain, you know, every other week or something they could do some kind of a each complex could do a van pool to a grocery store. Yeah, because like that's that was something I saw. So Caitlin's already Caitlyn at Hampshire, healthy Hampshire is already starting to write up grants for next year. And one of the tidbits of information I remember seeing in her proposal was just like that Amherst has a very high percentage of people without vehicles. Yeah, so make use of this van that that we great that we were lucky to get. And Dave, I know like you also work with some of the kittens, etc. Like if there's if if in your time there you find a use for a big cargo van, like there's this basically many hands has one and it's available for for use that anything that helps feed people we can make use make use of it. Appreciate the offer Ryan I think I may have some ideas to take you up on that. Great, great. Was there any talk about doing any kind of like even just once or twice during the winter to do a winter market? Not yet. It's and it's difficult to the logistics of that. So one because like so basic I'm tapped out on vegetables and I'm going to other farms to resupply for my winter share. And the other one is just like the the inclement weather every like I'm like I'm really glad we stopped this week because like what it's 19 degrees on Saturday like I can't imagine many coming out in the morning. There's there's so many logistical hurdles like I could imagine like packing boxes and such but it's could work and you know some kind of delivery but that's it's a bit of a logistical nightmare. And I kind of I definitely personally need some time off but again that's something that like I'm happy to help time off but yeah if people start talking about it I can definitely help with some of the like planning and logistics of it and make resources available. Yeah I haven't heard anything and Lord knows you deserve time off so it's been it's just been nothing but great feedback about the mobile market this year. Really amazing really amazing. Yeah it would be great to something happened in the winter but it's it's like the vegetables like they are definitely the least like already the things that are mostly available in the winter are the least popular for sales. Yeah I don't know why you know I love to cook in it they just feel like there's so much work. I think that's why people shy away from them. So do you have anything else about the mobile market specifically? No I don't think so yeah it was a pretty successful year. We had the added boom of getting that that cargo van it's like a 2018 Ford Transit so it's plenty of room and and it's a and it's we're looking for opportunities to use it this winter if anyone has any I need and and then next year's like planning for next year's gonna take get underway in November so. I had sent everybody a link to a food policy meeting that happened today I don't know if anyone was able to jump on or not I know you're all still probably pretty busy right now. Phoned in from the greenhouse it was awesome.  Sure and I'm sorry it was so last minute I realized I should have sent it out to you all last week so I apologize but glad you could make it Jada do you want to maybe talk about that a little bit? The part that I was a little bit late calling in and it was a lot of zoom logistics. The part that I heard but it was it was talking a lot about like getting the group organized and going I missed the first presentation again so I can't speak to that but it said I think the take home was that the the governing circle was actively researching. Governing strategies and organizations to decide how best to organize the governance of the group moving forward that was my take home I don't know if you had a different take away from that. No I had such a horrible connection I kept getting dropped from the meeting so I at one point I finally just gave up. But it was to end like you weren't alone in that yeah they were having a lot of issues at the point where and I kept getting dropped. So I was like right in the middle of their technical challenges so I didn't hear a lot of content. Just too bad. But I think you know it seems like an opportunity where somebody you know and made it maybe Jada if you have interest maybe I don't know how often they're going to meet but maybe you could be some kind of a liaison to what's happening with that group to this commission because oh yeah I'm definitely excited to stay in touch. That's great because then maybe there's a way that you know you can loop in efforts the way Ryan is working with the mobile market. Maybe there's things that this commission can do to sort of support that effort or you all can start brainstorming ways you know maybe in the next meeting more ideas will be coming forward. That'd be great. So right now I sort of feel like I've been stepping in as coming up with ideas but this is really your meeting to chair so I don't mean to be leading things well should we go on to the should we go on to the next one is there anyone have anything else to add. Oh I had a couple questions about the mobile market Ryan now is an okay time for that. Definitely so cool. Thank you first of all thank you so much for doing that that's really great and important. Secondly so is there was there like a limited funding for that is there still available money to keep something going or are we done. No we spent that we spent all the money we have and there's like we're applying for great where are you applying for grant for next year and we but we actually did the last six weeks without funding. I'm not sure I'm not sure I whether I lost money or made money on that yet. I probably it was it was probably close to breaking even and but it and it definitely for next year we're looking to raise $20,000 to $30,000. I think it's the goal and then I've also heard from from somebody that I've worked in the past that they got they're connected to a family trust that has that has money to donate and that they're looking at the mobile market as a as a place to donate to so there's I think there's there's there's good hope there and and I think that something could even without like we'll run it we'll try it we'll run it for next year even like no matter what the funding is it's just a matter of like do we do it as bare bones as possible if I have one person kind of do you know working 20 hours a week or 25 hours a week doing everything or have a person 18 hours behind the scenes and then having two or more people or two people at each market so either two people or or you know two different people at each market running each each one and kind of being more inclusive and having more going on so it's it's and and whether we rely more on whether we whether we rely more on volunteer help or not or or whether we continue to like basically I was trying to be like the dollar store of organic vegetables so most things are priced at a dollar unless they were like pretty big or just generally more spent like really expensive so so that like that model of of having things price as low as they were would also change depending on the on the funding but I'm confident that we could we have something in place next year regardless of funding. Right I'm just curious too about the the boxes the box delivery that you were mentioning about in Olympia folks. That might be a really nice resource to have but I assume that it would require additional funding and I wondered if that was something that we would need to pursue or you all would need to pursue to make that happen things like yes but regardless I'm glad yeah to like make it happen. You mean or for next next yeah well the winter would be ideal but yeah next season. With that it's it's it's also who yeah it also is like who could who would do it right. And so it's it's yeah would be it would be it would be like a little bit of funding a little bit of of personnel and who's who's organizing it who is time to organize it and yeah and then and then the logistics of making it happen throughout you know no matter how much snow we get or what I would have you and how things get delivered because one of the one of the ways that it's worked at Olympia Oaks is we've got an amazing somebody we hired is like you know a few hours a week. We hired people at each site to kind of help do various things and that different people did better some people did better some people did worse as part of their involvement went and we had one really rock star person at Olympia Oaks who was like willing to say yeah I'll take those 28 boxes and I'll make sure they get to everyone's front door. And so one of the one of the difficulties with continuing it in the winter is that like getting things to people while they're home because we can't can't necessarily leave things on people's steps if it's below freezing out. And so that's one of the that's one of my hesitations for doing something in the winter because like I think a lot of time we're just leaving things like people's door while they're out and so there's just been a yeah so so for me it's it's for not not wanting to continue something in the winter is there and the logistics of that and feel like along with along with other money like issues of personnel and funding can everyone still hear me? Yeah, be happy this evening happen in the winter but like I said the root vegetables it's like even interesting things to do of like the my customer base for the winter is about what it is for the summer and I find that people like people eating the root vegetables or not it's always like the things that people want as much as fruits and greens and so I'm not sure how yeah I'm not sure the whether yeah I'm not there's some difficulties with the winter with like continuing deliveries to the winter that it's not something that I personally want to take on but I'd be willing someone else had wanted to step up and do something I would probably have you to work with them. Yeah, I just think like what you were saying about so many people and Amherst not having vehicles and the winter coming and COVID still being very real but I absolutely understand dude take your take your time this like absolutely not the gut thing that you have to do all this. Yep. But thank you for everything. No problem. Yeah and it's and it's difficult you know because produce the produce that we're getting is like yeah it is it is expensive when we're buying organic like and so I don't know when you're buying organic local produce and it's coming out of premium and that's what that's what a lot of the money that from the grant would come from like more or less basically we got we got we had like $30,000 to do it this summer and half of that was to for more than half of that was to labor and and a lot and like almost half of that labor was people in the fields growing stuff. So when we were so in essentially the grant was paying to grow the food to to sell at the market. And so and then in addition to like money we spent on buying produce from other farms which the like the food the farm the money we were getting from our farm was much or the produce we're getting from our farm we were able to sell at a much cheaper price than produce we're getting at other farms because we had that labor input. Yeah. Any other be having to update people about the the there's not as much to report on as far as the community garden goes. We had we only had two gardeners that I met that showed up to garden at Amethyst Brook. I think at least one of them took over two plots and I think the second one might have also I can't quite tell or one and a half plots kind of and they had they're pretty decent looking gardens. They seem happy with it like I was I wasn't able to be as involved with that as I had hoped to be with everything else that was going on. But it seems to work out OK and then I was I have the the unused plots were cover crop this year. So they're in good shape for next year for anyone that wants to garden for next year. Ryan any any problems with irrigation. Yeah definitely I mean that was the I had a 200 gallon water tank and so people were you know in the past at that at that look at the other the old community garden people would have to go to the river with buckets to water their crops. So I had about a hundred feet away. I had a 200 gallon water tank that I'd fill up periodically from from my irrigation pump. And that was so they were so they were able to use that which was you know difficult but but it wasn't but I think it was a slight another one hadn't happened before. Any other questions. Yeah I was getting I've heard a few more. There's been some some more interest in it but I think like from the notes from before I think there are more people had applied who I never had had expressed interest in like people that I know that I see weekly expressed interest but they never ended up following through. So it's something that like like with a lot of things I think it might take time to develop the culture and get people. Well there was COVID this year too. Yeah that sort of throws a wrench in everything. Yeah. Although I Stephanie I don't know if you've you've probably heard people grumbling about this but there's there's there's always I always hear a lot of anger from people about the mowing that happens late in summer at Amethyst Brook. I think it was like September or something and so there's a lot of there's a lot of families that I know who go out and collect monarch larvae and such and and a lot of people are like I guess there's I guess there's a specific time like their last hatching or whatever or their last the the last generation of butterflies that come out of their cocoons that are the ones that that travel south for the winter and that there's like a I guess I guess the town Moe's Moe's Amethyst Brook and all the milkweed that's there like kind of at a sensitive time. So I don't know if you've if you've gotten any complaints about that but I've heard I've heard people express a lot of grief over over over that and it looked like some patches had been kept on mode. So I was I was wondering if there was some some thought to keep some milkweed intact. But I was wondering if if it was possible to Moe like you know to Moe now wouldn't would probably would cause no harm and ultimately have about the same effect. I can make a note. I mean my guess is that if there's a patch of it that's left then that's the intent is to like leave some of it and sort of try to meet dual purposes out there as best they can. But if you know I mean I can it's not my decision. I can just say you know this is some feedback and give it to the land management staff and they'll do with it what they will. Yeah and if it because I don't know if it makes any difference why I figure they must be less busy like at this time of the year since so much less grass is growing and there's no snow yet but like this might be a if there's if there's no perceivable difference between mowing in September and mowing now might as well wait two months. Yeah yeah I mean there may be reasons why they had things timed the way they did I I'm not aware but this is at least feedback that I can share so I will. Yeah I think I think there was like a cleanup planned and that's about when they mowed which they said they might have had it correlating to the cleanup. Yeah. Okay. Great yeah I made a note. I think you have we kind of skipped over the item about the announcements at the beginning. Oh yeah. What was the was it about the announcements whether anybody had anything to share. Anybody. I don't have anything on my end no. I mean. Well I and relating to the mobile market. Well tying the mobile market and the community garden together there there was somebody who I met through the mobile market who had been renting land in Northampton who grows a lot of different Asian vegetables. She's she's podium and she I guess she's tried she sells tries to sell around here but also sells them up in New Hampshire. She's being charged too much in Northampton and she's been looking for a parcel of land in Amherst that she could rent and I was wondering if there was and so like if the plans for the Fort River garden area had been solidified at all yet for next year. That well yeah we're we're working on it we've got we talked to Sarah Bankert and because we're partnering with them to sort of do outreach to the community about it. So we're working with Hope Gardener. Do you know hope. No I don't. Okay. I forget who she works with but she does a lot of community education around things like community garden. So we're working with her and we don't have a plan quite yet but yeah what am I trying to say so she so there's no definitive plan but I think that I know that particular woman I believe reached out to me a while ago and there was it was a pretty sizable area that they were interested in that was more than just like a garden plot so we couldn't just provide that. So yeah it was tricky because their operation doesn't quite fall into like it's too big for a community garden plot and yet they also don't want to you know farm like a whole big parcel so you know I it was really hard to figure out where to put her but I don't know maybe you all you know maybe we can talk about it some more with Dave and try to figure something out because I know she came to us and I tried to help her as best I could. Do you know what size she was looking for was because had heard ranges like she would do she would deal with like 20 but my 20 feet but she was looking for like a half an acre or an acre. Well that's what I was what I heard was like half an acre to an acre. So that was and they never there was nothing ever proposed to me about like 20 feet. It was all like half an acre to an acre and it's like that's more than we have available. So for you know for just a community garden plot it was obviously something bigger and she'd have to like I don't know we'd have to identify a parcel for her to farm. So if she wants to do a community garden plot though I mean I'm sure there's a way we can accommodate that if it's just a 20 by 20. I mean that might even be I'm at this book might even be you know available for that right. So yeah definitely and was there I don't know if this was my idea that I just get stuck on or if there was any thought to this or if I'd heard it from somewhere else but with the Fort River farm because that's that fenced in area was that three quarters of an acre. So that's about it's more like half an acre half an acre yeah. And yeah and that's sort of transitioned to at one point there was going to be like a sharing garden but now it's going to be and I know you had talked about maybe doing like half of it could be leased to a farmer and half of it could be plots but I think now the whole thing is probably going to be plot plots and there could be some that are shared plots you know again like a community sharing and then there could also be some that are for families some that are for groups. So I think we're trying to think a little more creatively about who uses those spaces and how they're designed. So we're about to follow up soon so maybe we could report back out on that at the next meeting. Yeah because if there was room for like a big plot maybe that could also I might have space for her on one of my fields where I've kind of an awkward area that that I don't get to manage very much so I might be able to have her work there if it's large enough but. Yeah that would be that would be great.  Yeah unfortunately so yeah so unfortunately there were just so many challenges with what she needs it's so specific and we just couldn't accommodate it. So I mean if so you know if you or somebody else you know other another farmer in town weren't you know had some space and were willing to maybe even lease it to her you know inexpensively maybe that might work. But you all have those connections I don't so so I don't I. Look Glenroy just came in says Glenroy do you have any announcements you wanted to make. Not really listening has been fun. We're just happy to see you. Oh yeah I'm finally got this zoom thing together. Yeah it takes well and then even when you do it doesn't work. Yeah it's true all some of my my zoom would just drop right out drop right out. It was the connection. And yeah so we're we threw all the agenda items. I think so do you want to talk about your next agenda or something you all might want to work on or maybe this food policy thing I don't I'm just throwing out ideas. Yeah does anyone want to add anything to the next agenda or have any ideas for the next meeting. No I don't. Yeah I guess. I missed the previous email about the policy council meeting but that's definitely something that I think would be a good place to try to get involved or at least see what the potential type of involvement with them would be moving forwards. And how often do those meetings happen. Do you know Stephanie. No I today was the first one. And I got dropped before the end of the meeting. I finally had to get out so Jada did you stay till the end of it. I thought I did but like I said I was I looked like I called in from work and I feel like I got dropped right at the very very end and I didn't when the next meeting was unfortunately. That's OK I'm on the list. So and Jada I'm going to make sure that they have your email address and Chris I can make sure they have yours to Ryan I know they have yours. But I can forward it to everyone as well and you all can you all can reach out to Caitlin and let her know that you're all interested in getting information about the next meeting. So actually why don't I do this. I'm just going to send her all of your email addresses unless anyone has an objection. And that way you'll get notifications about when the meetings are. Sound good. Awesome yeah thank you. And then I guess the questions raised do we need. Do we need to have a meeting next next month if we don't have. If we don't know what if we don't have any items put on the agenda or is that something maybe we can stew and think about for the next three weeks or a couple of weeks and decide decide the week before. So you need to post it. Yeah I need to post it. Technically only 48 hours before the meeting but usually our meetings are on Tuesdays so I have to post it on Fridays but better to post it on Thursdays before. So we'd have to have some idea before then. Yeah and this meeting is really pretty late so then probably the next best time to meet at the early the earliest time to meet would be December the second Tuesday in December. Yeah I mean right now you're scheduled for November 9th which that's only a few weeks away so that seems too soon so December meeting would be December 14th I think. No I'm sorry 15th. Is it the 15th? No sorry let me look again. So we could yeah so we could have a light plan to meet then but I guess that would be conditional based on whether or not we have anything to discuss so we'll we'll just have to if anyone has anything to discuss make sure Stephanie gets it for the agenda the Thursday at least the Thursday before. Yeah so Chris so Brian just so you know that it's Tuesday December 8th is when the next meeting is scheduled so you all would need to let me know maybe good to make a decision by Wednesday December 2nd you and I could check in. Yeah that was good. And my guess would be that there will be some kind of a food policy meeting in the month of November I would think so I will just make sure Caitlin has your information and it could be that maybe if there is a meeting you all want to follow up after that meeting to talk about it and to see how you could get involved. Yeah and I guess thing something based off of this meeting that you think ideas for how to continue like distributing food through the winter in some way like or or also like how to get more people to sign up for community garden plots and to actually use them. So if anyone that would be two things to think about between now and then that sounds great. I'm writing it down to but as always if anyone knows anything else they'd want to work on. That's also open for open for all that. Okay unless other people if anyone has final thoughts we can probably sign off and say goodbye. Say good night. Yeah. Okay. Nice meeting all of you. Bye. Great seeing you all. Take care. Definitely I'll send you the notes. Great. Thank you so much Chris. All right. Take care all.


We're going right to the high protein, Omega 3. It's 30 grams of protein and you snack it. So I buy a snack it, what am I looking at? So you have a little pint shape, so they get like an ice cream or a soup container. Inside there's a can of yellowfin tuna and organic olive oil. And then we've created these textural blends. Crunchy toppers, we have a chili crisp crunchy topper, zahtar crunchy topper and a chili jalapeno crunchy topper. It's different seeds, herbs, nuts, dried fruits. It's 30 grams of protein with a ton of Omega's, vitamin A, B, E. Great, great nutritional dense given meal that you get. And it's not a processed product like a bar or a protein beverage and you're getting 30 grams of protein, which is more than a bag of jerky, it's more than most products. Yeah, that's amazing.


Well, what's going on guys got Collier with Leighton sports cards, and we are ripping this is 2022 23 select basketball hybrid five box break number five We did a randomized for the break. I'll show you guys the results here We had John C with the Rockets down to Shawna and with the pelicans can always check those results guys on our website Leighton sports cards calm underneath the personal section They have Johnny Davis as their rookie. I think he was their only rookie this year Johnny Davis one second here guys. All righty. Good luck guys box number one Select hybrid Tia Botte rookie Caleb Houston on the rookie court side and blue. This is Pascal Siakam on the blue disco court side That one is number to 25 nice low number there rafters a blue Yanis Disco Yanis there number 299 and Tyler hero silver Keegan Murray to 25 we've got tie-dye tell top shelf auto for the Lakers magic Johnson Just pulled a magic redemption in the last one Now we got the on-car or the the live nice one there Lakers to 25 Top shelf magic. That's a sweet one Got a disco rookie behind it Jaden Hardy Bam in a bio red. This is Jalen Durin nice red disco rookie pistons number to 49 and Silver's Jalen sucks box to there's a disco of Kyrie Check home grid base. There's blue Tyrese Halliburton blue disco to 25 Pacers Zach Louvain That's Donnie It's a Christian Brown rookie. We've got light blue. That's Paul George disco To 99 Clippers Rookie Chet got red rookie disco O'Shea Baji That one is the 49 disco of Brandon Murray or Jamal Murray box number three Come on now. Let's see some gold a little one-to-one action Sub Jackson How we doing today and you guys got select football coming up next got two half-gacers If you buy a team in both, you'll get a full case select football for that team There's a dayland Terry red disco bowls to 49 Desmond Bain So got ten teams left in the first one coming up next Nicola, yo, bitch. This one is Devin Booker light blue disco on the court side that one's in 99 and Silver rookie Jabari Smith, Jr. Rockets Jaden Hardy rookie. There's whites. It's Kyrie Irving on the white disco that one is number to 75 for the Mavericks court side and Jaden Ivy a blue disco Carl Anthony Towns 25 and Donovan Mitchell Silver Alrighty guys still ten left on select basketball teams are discounted or select football half case coming up next teams are discounted 10 left right you guys box number four select hybrid it's to beat downs yesterday and men's tennis Yeah, Yoko bitch one in three sets and Algaras one in three sets There's a Jalen Brunson. There's a disco there Donovan Mitchell And Kennedy Chandler. Yeah, I think we discounted them yesterday as well rich there's a abadji rookie and Whites this one is the Aaron Fox white disco to 75 And a silver is Anthony Simon's ready guys Come on. Let's see a goal. Let's see a goal. That is blue. This one is Kennedy Chandler rookie blue disco court side to 25 Gris Marcus Smart rookie Shaden Sharp base Got light blue to 99 Deontay Murray Hawks and LeBron base disco and box five Number five H2. This is a five box break number five Random team style now. Okay, Brandon. We got Fred van Bley on the light blue disco to 99 and Shaden Sharp base Jaden Ivy rookie whites is Chris Paul the 75 CP3 Sons got Jamal Murray silver Two packs left rookie tie tie. We got blue nice one here Jaden Ivy on the rookie court side blue Another nice court side Ivy. This one said 99 for the pistons Some nice court side Ivy's today. There's Jamarant and last pack and this one is bam out of bio on the white court side number to 75 He and a silver Jeremy so on on the back. Alrighty guys, that'll do it for select H2 That was five box break number five We had one auto do a quick hit recap. It was for the Lakers there had the top shelf tie-dye auto nice one there Magic Johnson for the Lakers Sweet one there had a had a redemption of his out of select two interesting there 17 out of 25 Alrighty guys, that will do it for select hybrid five box break number five. We'll get a select football going next


I get asked a lot the question of where do I meet more people who are my prospective clients? How do I find more people who could be interested in my services? And in this short video I'll give you this simple answer from an authentic marketing perspective, which is instead of trying to sell yourself, do things that encourage and inspire other people to talk about your services. Okay, so how do we do that? Let's apply it in three simple ways. The first way is through content, creating relevant content consistently that helps your ideal client audience. And you can see that this is what I try to do. I try to walk my talk whenever I can, which is creating videos regularly that benefit my ideal clients and my current clients and past clients, and writing blog posts as well. So you don't have to do both. Pick one to start with, and then once you get going on that you might want to add the other one, whether it's videos or writing first. Okay, so when you create content consistently, number one, you get better at it. And number two, some of the stuff that you put out there, you know, through video writing on social media, etc., will then get shared by the people who are reading it to others. And if you're creating content with your ideal client audience in mind, naturally it's going to be your ideal client audience who is more likely to like your content and share it forward. And that is when other people start talking about you, okay? And I'll tell you, it's really been almost, it seems almost miraculous that I started creating content consistently three years ago. And, you know, first year, people liked some of my content. Second year, people started sharing a little bit. And now in the third year, what's miraculous to me is that I haven't done anything different other than keep sharing content. But now I almost never need to sell anymore. People find me through recommendations of my content, and then people say, hey, can I work with you? And so it doesn't have to take you three years. Hopefully if you take some of my advice, they'll take you a lot shorter than that, especially if you're creating content that's relevant for your ideal client audience. The more relevant it is for them, the quicker this learning curve, this cycle becomes where you create content and then you get people asking to work with you. Okay, so that's one way we're applying this. The second way we're applying this about being recommended instead of always thinking of how do I find more people and talk to them about my services. The second way is networking, but not any kind of just the traditional networking of getting an elevator pitch and always trying to talk about yourself. The kind of networking that I recommend from an authentic perspective is to always be in service to the other person you're talking to. And of course, be in service in the way that you know how, which is from your expertise. And so see if the person you're talking to can actually be helped by what you do. And if that is the case, then help them as much as you can in that short conversation. Meet as many people as you can who are like them, and help them as much as you can in that short conversation. Or if they're not the kind of person you can help to ask them about what they need help with and see if you have some resource for them that's not even about your business. Be of service, be of help, and others will remember you and start spreading word about you. And maybe you get to partner with certain people to bring your content to their audience. But people are more likely to do that when they like you, when they see that, wow, you are a person of service. You're not just trying to sell yourself all the time, right? And the third and final way, and I'll end the video like this, is do work that is really useful and delightful to your ideal clients and to your clients. If you treat your clients with love and do work that is useful to them, if you do great work in short, people will talk about you, your clients will eventually more and more of them will spread the word about you, and eventually your business will just come from word of mouth. And that's really what we're all trying to get to, right? So how do you find prospective clients? How do you find more people? By doing things that inspire others to talk about your content or about your work. So until the next video, I'm George Cao and I hope this is helpful. Always open to your comments and your questions. And always be serving and you'll find that your word of mouth about your business will continue to grow. Be well.


Hey Mark. Hello. Good day. Hey Alex. Okay great. So I'll update the meeting minutes with your attendance. That'll be helpful so we can get an idea of who's rocking up. Cool. Well welcome everybody to the UDPA working group meeting. We've kind of had a hiatus recently so there hasn't been a ton of activity in UDPA lands of the last quarter essentially. So that kind of grew my goals of the meeting. I was just to sort of bring those up to date with what the roadmap looks like, what our plans are for Q1 and beyond in 2020. So I think maybe a good way to do some of these to go through the Omicron slide and I won't go through the whole talk just to look at some of the roadmap slides. Is our folks generally familiar with that talk or is this new to folks in the meeting? I've skimmed through the slides. They seem very informative so. Okay so I'll be reasonably quick then when this I gave a talk at Omicron based talking about the roadmap for Omois APIs and beyond which is essentially UDPA. So the basic stuff I'm sure everybody's familiar with so let's just import and just like look at where we are on the roadmap which is essentially where I'm roughly at the end of the last quarter. So we had, you know, Omois V2, XCS APIs, V3 which is what most of the work in APIs that I've been focused on has been around especially in land and intercept the Omboi 1 or 13 release which will be next week where there's going to be a turn right now in the Omboi code base. It's largely a mechanical change but it also puts in place what's called the stable API versioning policy where we revenue major version of the API each year in Omboi and gives us the opportunity to maintain trading support for two versions for basically two years and that gives us the ability to you know make major transactions in the API which includes UDPA. So that's actually happening and is landing and now the focus is on this GPV for which slash UDPA. UDPA is what we're in business of doing in this working group. So yes, I talked a little bit about the versioning goals. One interesting thing to point out is just the sheer scale of what we're doing with APIs here. I'm not sure what the APIs or other proxies looks like like HAProxy or Nginx but you know if we look at the just the sheer line counter the protos which are you know it's a specification for the API for Omboi. It's really really large largely because of the extensions. Each extension has you know its own configuration API but we're talking about 15,000 lines of protos and it's actually more like 10,000 code references in Omboi. So there's APIs are huge artifacts and actually evolving them is required us in v3 to build a lot of tooling to support that and I anticipate UDPA as it grows we'll need some of this tooling at first though where we're taking that it's happy that we'll start with smaller and then grow that upwards. So let's see okay so we're kind of roughly at this point where we're talking about the idea is that you know Omboi is before release at the end of the year 2020 and this is where we hope that a lot of UDPA stuff will intercept and we'll be able to move some of the things that exist today in Omboi off to UDPA and consume that as a first class product and basis for API. So let's talk about what we actually want to get done in 2020. So one of the things we've even done in v3 is we've actually started to let's see we've started to populate the UDPA tree and some of the protocols that we're using the Omboi APIs with here there's nothing here that should be particularly controversial or require massive review there's a bunch of annotations we use to express versioning concerns or the fact that some fields might be redacted or this kind of thing. These are all very structural things that actually make a difference what the API looks like we introduced a new type which is called type struct it looks a lot like any but it allows us to use JSON representations for extension objects in the API but also convey a bit of type information so it's essentially type JSON and that's actually very useful in Omboi we've actually phased out the use of plain JSON without types in v3 and I think we would probably be using type structs in various places in UDPA where we want some kind of structured expansion again this is very much the mechanics of how you automate versus what the API looks like there are a few of these things that start to land we also moved I think at some point this is a workload stuff there I'm not sure where we are with that but that was something that's probably not even necessary to the proxy to support other than as a consumer but it's got its own design dock not not not so important but anyway basically products have started to land here and Omboi depends on them in certain ways all these products have no Omboi specifics in there that's generally useful base types and things like that so this point I'm not so interested in speaking to basically it was just that we've started to think about one of the things that we need us to think about is how do we write an API specification which can generate docs and where the docs might be slightly different per project and I don't know if we have a good solution to that yet and maybe folks will I'm going to scroll to speak to what they would see that looking like but you know it's probably going to look something like we've got a base set of docs in a certain format for example Sphinx RST or something like that or that or some sort of doc generator which could be targeted to any format that you choose and that somehow needs to merge some amount of status like you know does this does my proxy support this or do I ever need proxy specific comments on this API with the base documentation and that might maybe we would have anchor points and you would be able to supply a manifest which you know maps each of these anchor points to you know the structured information for your proxy and you just provide this manifest file that the docs build or something like that I think that's the the way that I think ideally that would scale but we certainly don't want to put in sort of things like this if which isn't information yet in the docs that are landing the UDP repository there's obviously that's way too proxy specific. Has anyone had an experience with this kind of documentation building scenario across APIs or is there any thoughts there? I can ask some of my team members I think I think I know we did some things like that and definitely some kind of overlay approach would be useful perhaps to end up as as a special like notes or specifically formatted notes anchored to available anchors or even figure names or heading handing names or something like that. If I if I have any useful information I'll share back. Oh okay thanks a lot yeah I mean I'd love to hear it there is you know existing you know tools or languages that people prefer here and that you know well what works well in practice I think yeah the general structure of using anchors I think is probably where we would head towards but I I rather avoid you know not invented here and cooking something up from scratch which is that would probably go otherwise yeah cool okay so yeah I mean we have we have generated we have a developer generating or a community member generating like html docs out of basic eski documentation so that's like the worst possible example of trying to enrich documentation so like if we can if we were able to accomplish that I think we can sort of hopefully find a more maintainable and of the shelf solution to enrich an existing document structure with additional layers of info. Yeah that makes sense I mean for reference Envoy uses Sphinx which is you know some sort of Python based documentation system which a lot of projects use and it's pretty nice it's like I don't know if it's the best one out there but it's certainly it's got some nice features like for example you create internal links and references and those links consistency checking which is like really good for like scalable documentation and it's a lot of stuff. Yeah I have experience with Sphinx and it's it's a good thing yeah for sure. Okay we'll see if we can if I can get some information there I'll chime in on the mailing list. Oh thank you. Okay so you do pay next steps so there's a lot of I think the developer is pretty clear that we need to actually start doing some things in the repository which will be useful and I think that the probably the least controversial thing to start with would be the transfer protocol which itself is very controversial but it's at least opinionated about you know proxy specifics. The transfer protocol is more about delivering objects over the wire versioned objects and being able to deal with dependencies and being able to deal with you know acknowledgments and errors and all this kind of stuff and a lot of this is largely going to be incremental from XDS we already have you know the UDPATP specification which is it's so implied but I think the foundations are clear enough that we could start to build something within the repository and then actually evolve that specification as an as an as an actual code artifact but not as a low level C++ code artifact because that would probably be kind of a lot of boilerplate and really verbose but the idea is probably to put together some sort of a sexual specification which looks like the protos and something to actually drive those protos on the wire and pretend to be like you know a client in a server and so I was thinking of no we will potentially just start by writing this as a bunch of Python scripts and then that would become the reference implementation and from there we could build compliance tests essentially using these and have something which you know anyone who wants to claim the UDPAT compatibility with could implement and we could then think about how that one looking in terms of getting envoys for example to speak this and speak to the rest of the to do the reference implementation and there's probably already some choices there like for example like what would your specification or your reference model look like with the Python should be written in Go should it be written in Rust and there's all kinds of questions there which it would be good to probably hear from folks on because all things being equal I'll probably just write this in Python because I know Python extremely well and it's high level it lets you write a lot of express a lot of things without actually writing a lot of boilerplates and so on so yeah any thoughts on that? Have my thumbs up for the choice of Python as something readable and sort of close enough to a pseudo language description that other implementations can rely on for like almost like documentation itself. Okay that sounds good. Kostin asks well chat multiple languages to keep us honest that's an interesting idea. Kostin are you able to speak voice or not sure but the main issue here is I would like to just keep this as you know I did use one canonical reference here which folks can be taking as a specification so just write it twice and like once in Python it wants to go that seems kind of like a lot of work. I feel we definitely do want go implementation but there's a difference between like a product implementation I think that which we wouldn't actually use I'd say is your management server and something that's just there to say hey this is a modern culture look like I'm actually very interested in hearing from Mark on this because Mark has looked at the XDS protocol today and he's been a lot of very careful they're picking some they're picking but also just a very careful analysis and auditing of how it looks and where the gaps might be what are you the goal of this exercise is to avoid this occurring with UDPA and the new transfer protocol we put together do you think that just writing a Python reference would be that thing that would take us to that place with some tests or is there something else that you're about to see? I think the compliance tests are probably going to be more important than the reference specification although obviously you need you know something to you know make sure the tests are doing what they're supposed to do but um yeah I mean I the reason I think the compliance tests are particularly important is I'm not so worried that like if we only do the initial implementation in one language we won't be able to do it in other languages I mean I think particularly if we choose Python like we know Envoy is going to be doing this in C++ we know that gRPC is going to be doing it in at least C++ Java and go so I mean if there are problems that somehow don't let other languages implement the spec which is hard for me to imagine I you know I'm pretty sure we'll be able to identify those fairly quickly I'm more worried about just making sure that the spec is rigorous enough that we don't have subtle differences in behaviors between implementations and I think the compliance tests are going to be a lot more helpful with that than the the reference supposed to be the reference implementation cool yeah I'm I'm not going to implement that and yeah hopefully we can you know get folks involved you know she is looking at these tests as they come up about and the and that shows back and we can get we get it with circle box and like initial thoughts are probably too wide is what a reasonable time frame is to get to these basics of the type of protocol out there little artifacts and get to convergence agreement I mean we can meet back you know towards the end of Q1 and say you know are we in a place where we want to call this the UDPA tranquil protocol or not and you know most of the fun hopefully most of the discussion going forward can be other than being done on a google doc can be done as PR reviews and we can you know if we can sell it sitting with at least controversial speech in the UDPA protocol spec get work and write test written and then you know propose a concrete code review through code review extension like you know we need this for federation we need this for on the land support and we can then go work through those discussions in a very focused way so that's the goal there so I'm I'm sort of unless there's more boundless and more folks who are able to contribute towards UDPA in Q1 and maybe there are no it'll be interesting hearing from folks on this I feel we'll mostly be focused on transport protocol then and then Q2 and Q3 would be about data models using all the infrastructure that's been built in Q1 and Q4 would largely be at the where we sort of take this stuff into to a place where we can actually say this is you know intercept the onboard V4 APIs, TRPC we might adopt this other proxies might be adopting this and so on does that sound like a reasonable roadmap is there anyone who's you know interested in contributing boundless in Q1 or Q2 it looks like you're sort of getting an idea from folks that's okay so for us we're a little bit tight on bandwidth during Q1 I'll see if I can at least contribute with someone someone like war stories about for example the documentation enrichment and things like this we are our primary interest for sure lies in the Q2 scope of data models and making sure that we either have like sensible and extensible vendor specific extensions or at least generalized enough basic data structures and processes that allow us to expose as much of our a little bit of functionality as our users expect from us to have so yeah yeah that that makes sense and yeah I think that that's one word definitely really valued the insights from other folks because we just don't necessarily have the visibility into how other proxies work okay yeah I mean I feel sequencing this way makes sense because we do need to build some of the basic infrastructure for just doing tests and you know example clients and servers and transfer protocol is kind of needed before we can really you know do a lot so which is like why are realistic so that's kind of why I went for transfer protocol I also feel like transfer protocol is going to be controversial because for sure if it's a proxies I mean there's a lot of discussion about do we need this this is very complicated to implement yeah yeah we've already had some of those discussions but I think those things concerned alone and they're there that that things we can get into within the time frame of Q1. On this topic I mentioned this before but one way to avoid some of the controversy is to maybe start with subset of the existing XDS protocol which has most of the elements we need anyway I mean it's a generic bi-directional message passing protocol with any and typed and everything else and then iterate on it and make changes as necessary I mean if there is strong justification but we can just put straps the process and have some initial versions that is existing XDS minus all the data model and then fix whatever is necessary so we don't start in avoidant bike shed until we yeah I mean yeah I mean a complete guarantee that constant I mean it'll look kind of like the existing XDS and I'm not going to guarantee it's wire compatible but I think that's where what I was thinking of is we would start with like it's simple enough that it looks very much like the existing XDS because a few slight differences that were there I mean was there a reason that you might want to wire compatibility with existing XDS? I don't care about wire compatibility I care about avoiding the bike shedding and you know making arbitrary changes just because we can I mean if we start with the existing protocol assays I don't care if we change some protocol number we add or whatever but at least we have a basis that is solid and we know we understand and has multiple implementations I think I think what I mean I think the the UDP UDP draft that that Harvey put together is is actually a really good place to start I mean it is very similar to XDS but it I mean I really cannot tell you the number of surprising and and difficult to deal with education that we've run into in gRPC trying to implement XDS there are things that just semantically do not make sense in the current protocol as is so I do think that we shouldn't do anything dramatically different I think custom I think you're right about that but I don't think just starting from the current protocol as is a good thing I think we really need a we need to start sort of fresh which is what the UDP draft does with the same concepts but with a clean thing with well-established semantics that doesn't have any of the backward compatibility problems that that you know tie us to these ridiculous behaviors that are grandfathered indexed yeah yeah yeah I don't disagree with you on is that many are off ages and it'll be wonderful to identify them and fix them but there is no guarantee that if you start fresh you don't repeat the mistakes I mean or you don't end up with something that's us because you know usually iterating it's you know you fix what is broken you keep what is good instead of I don't know that's my experience of course I think like the right way I think about this maybe to think of this is like from a historical perspective so you know XDS when it arose it arose you know we had an idea that it might be more generic than just an onboard but in reality it was built in the onboard code base the only test that existed were the onboard tests the only reference client was onboard and its internal implementation and then led to a number of decisions creep in when you do that so the idea with udpa is we get very clear up front the test for all these crazy corner conditions and I'm hoping we can really help us that's what some of these might be as we go because we want to make sure that you know for example like all that are on our various error cases and situations where there's singletons or there's like you know a failed lazy on the manual load or things like that that could be we have like you know carefully designed things which didn't just essentially evolve into the protocol which is where we are with XDS today and I mean there's been some pretty pretty stuff like you know how we deal with like names and aliases which is still in the ongoing topic of discussion and so this to be fair we can only really have a good discussion about after we had all the experiences of not having it done right the first time and so we're going to ideally just build them out in udpa tp like we may really rethink what aliases look like in udpa tp to make sure that that it's very clear why they're there and what what what purpose they sell but maybe in the first drafts in the first PRA land let's say there will be no aliases well strip the aliases out and then we'll full design discussion around adding aliases an alternative would be to to start with an existing protocols that is you know for messaging like like the NAT streaming or some other protocols that exist and modify to our fits but again if you think that it will we can avoid the bike shedding and and will not repeat mistakes by by trying to be genetic and have second second system syndrome uh maybe see how it evolves in in in the last next month or so and and if it ends up with something stable and we don't go down the rabbit hole yeah and the thing you see in mining is ready for you know order 100 or so management servers out there many artists in house management servers written for xds and so we don't want to go too far away from the existing model like I don't want to move off to some generic like the message bus architecture or something or message streaming system which has nothing to do with you know the the sort of transfer protocol we have today but that's a big rewrite for a lot of folks I feel and it's also just yeah like it's a big conceptual step at the same time things we should just play in weird that we've done there in xds the wrong way we've done better in other messaging systems we definitely should build for our uh taking to account like the other folks do ever handling better or um you know versioning better and uh and we've missed something that we should just build that into the protocol yeah yeah cool um so that's all I had on the agenda uh part of the part part of this video just to make the play that udpa is still alive I I as a tube con and uh the folks were like yeah I heard about the udpa thing but haven't heard anything for a while the the the down to has been we've been very very busy with the v3 apis and now that that work is basically uh tapering off uh udpa is the next focus from an api perspective from the at least from the old boys folks and uh and for myself cool that's okay well thanks all for joining um I'm going to schedule another meeting in let's say probably mid quarter and uh single game then so the next meeting will be in another time right yes this is the us ton zone uh is it Europe next I think Europe's next um I don't know if that helps you out much uh no no I'm not asking for me because the developer people is asking to join the meeting and this is quite not apex apax friendly yeah yeah I I realized that um helps you I can do to make it friendly to europe and apac and I know there is uh someone in Australia yeah I think we agree don't do the rotating so I think that's fine very fine for next time I think they are very interested in like taking the more like data model stuff so okay then get more people involved um yeah that's um I'm going to be joining us next time this time he was traveling um if he's been on vacations cool okay cool then the hurry just quick uh meta roadmap question so at which point do we expect um roughly other proxies to start adopting dpa I assume that's going to be after we start defining data model which is actually going to be some of practical use for those proxies yeah I mean I think there's there's there's multiple reasons proxies will adopt u dpa um some more adopters are almost just going to adopt it because it's part of our api roadmap grpc is likely to do the same because he wants to it's essentially tacking to the same uh uh api roadmap so that's already two we're talking about um uh there are other proxy a lot of folks for example Citrix has written an xds adapter which maps xds to their own internal um what uh consideration you know protocol or language and that's done because they want to be istio compatible and they just call their istio adapter and then they're um they're basically they've adopted xds and so once they need to do that for istio compatibility I feel that will cause other folks to then pick up a u dpa or part the parts of u dpa which are necessary for istio compatibility now I don't know where the a j proxy folks are I know your folks are they're definitely uh checking on in many of these discussions I don't know if you're where you are with your api roadmap but um I'll let them speak to that all right cool all right thank you thanks Harry okay thank you for the meeting guys thanks bye


Mr. President, you've given very eloquent talks about the moral force of non-violence. I was wondering, could you describe the dilemma to be a Nobel Peace Prize winner and getting ready to attack Syria? I would refer you to the speech that I gave when I received the Nobel Prize. And I think I started the speech by saying that compared to previous recipients, I was certainly unworthy.


The respected viewers, thank you for joining us once more live from the holy city of Karbala for your live show Back to the Basics. Of course, inshallah ta'ala, I don't feel there's any need for us to keep continuing to introduce the theme of the show, especially for tonight, we are slightly delayed according to the original schedule we wanted to run against, so to speak. But that is because we had several viewer questions which had to be addressed appropriately. Unfortunately, the question of the viewer who happened to belong to one of the other schools of thought took up roughly two shows and we had not intended for this to happen, so inshallah ta'ala tonight we're going to go straight into our topic for those of you who are confused about what we're discussing, they may refer to the previous shows which give a slight backdrop and context for this topic. The topic tonight is an introduction or building our worldview. How are we going to do that? How are we going to be looking at the concept of worldview? And this allows me to talk roughly about, dare I say the way in which aqaida or our belief system is taught within the traditional seminary. When I say the traditional seminary, I mean the hausat, the hausat al-almiya, in which students of knowledge will study and go out and become muballiqeen or scholars within their respective communities, resident alims, and so on and so forth. How is aqa'id or the topic and subject of discerning which beliefs are accurate and which beliefs are the correct beliefs taught traditionally within the hausat? Traditionally aqa'id is taught within two different ways. There are two different subjects which would strengthen the particular student of knowledge to engage appropriately with the subject of aqaida. Those two subjects are of course aqa'id, which of course is the plural aqaida, in addition to the topic of al-mal-kalam, and allow me to give a brief illustration or summary of what these topics entail. Aqa'id would literally be for us to choose a text, a standardized text by which we would study and memorize and to a certain degree investigate the words of the writer of that book. In some hausats they would choose, well in the vast majority of hausats, rather the vast majority of Islamic seminaries, they would choose to study the text known as aqa'id al-Imamiyah of Sheikh Muhammad Rava al-Muzaffar, r-Rahmatullah al-Ruha. A very important text which has become the standardized creed by which the students of the hausa will traditionally memorize what the standardized aqa'ida of Vashiyah is. This text would take a slight commentary from a teacher who might choose to go into a little degree of depth. When I say a little degree of depth, he might choose to summarize or go further into the expressions utilized by Sheikh Muhammad Rava al-Muzaffar. But in regards to how the text is studied and in regards to how any aqa'ida text is studied, it literally takes the format of our belief in regards to x with a summary and occasionally a very, very brief outline of evidence. Such a text is not meant to be an in-depth text of rational demonstration or even textual demonstration. It is merely a summarized creed, delineating and illustrating what the official position of the mainstream Shia hausa is in regards to theological doctrines. It's a very important subject. The other subject which allows the viewer or the student, Rava, to go into more depth in studying it is known as el-mal-kalam. El-mal-kalam can be translated, well, literally it's translated to mean the science of speech which of course has to do with the fact that there is disputation involved in this science. But if we were to translate it more appropriately, it would be known as dialectical or rational, demonstrative theology. That is to say theology in which we engage using our minds, our intellect with the evidences available in order to reach a correct position in regards to what our correct doctrines are. They're very, very different and what you would find is the texts of aqa'id tend to be very, very short and summarized and don't concern themselves with giving the rational evidence, whereas the texts of el-mal-kalam would be more concerned with giving a rational argument and less concerned with giving a textual argument. So in the hausa traditionally a book like al-bab al-hadi-ashar of al-lam-hali would be studied as the main text of el-mal-kalam. Now where do I want to head with this? I want to head here that or allow the viewer to understand that these two texts and these two sciences, they both have their valid role in doing what, in shaping what we would call a correct worldview. And the reason for that is we have been emphasizing in this new approach we're going to take to looking at the subject of aqa'idah and how to deal with pertaining doubts in regards to our aqa'idah. The best thing to do is to look at our beliefs as an entire package, an entire set of beliefs given to us and inherited from our spiritual fathers and leaders who are of course the ahl al-bayt alaykum as-salam, may the peace and blessings of Allah be upon them, and also the inheritors of the ahl al-bayt. That is to say the rewards of their traditions, the narrators of the imam's traditions. May Allah preserve those who are alive from them and His mercy be upon those who have died and passed away from those righteous souls. We have inherited this great tradition from such men and so we are not merely investigating small isolated beliefs, we are of course engaging with an entire package. And in doing so, we gain the tools from the science of aqa'idah or aqa'idah in regards to learning what that package is, in regards to understanding, memorizing and learning what our pious predecessors, our scholars, the narrators from the ahl al-bayt, may the peace and blessings of Allah be upon them, have stated is the correct position of the shia in regards to doctrine. So there's the first part of learning and memorization. But then using almal kalam, we go on to understand what might be the foundational basis of why we would believe these things. And more importantly, why these beliefs are rational and why other beliefs are irrational. So you have the one science on the one hand informing people. And you have the other science on the other hand informing people as to why we believe in the first. And so there are two necessary wings which allow us to have flight into the process of building an accurate and reliable functioning worldview which makes perfect sense of the data around us. Of course I have mentioned in previous episodes that our approach in this series in analyzing worldviews that is to say analyzing packages of beliefs or interconnected networks of beliefs and how they affect how someone views the world around them and understands their experiences, understands the nature of human beings, Allah Azawajal, and understands their own future is definitely one of the easier ways to engage in conversation with others who are not Shia if Nashariah or Imamiah or even Muslims or even believers in Allah Azawajal. It also allows us to save ourselves the difficult nitty-gritty graft work of having to look into every single small detail of every small sect in the world and what they believe. Because by asking these bigger questions we would know what these smaller answers are. And by finding flaws or apparent truth in the bigger questions we would know again how these smaller beliefs which are interconnected with these bigger questions seem perfectly valid and are perfectly fine to believe in. Of course we haven't had much time to look into this entire process of building a worldview or how one would engage in analyzing different worldviews. So tonight that is our aim inshallah ta'ala. The main thing that I want us to understand when engaging in this particular exercise or this particular engagement with other worldviews is that it is not alien nor foreign nor external to the very methodology given to us by the Imams of the Ahl al-Bayt, may the peace and blessings of Allah be upon them. When we look at a great work of rawayats, a great work of the traditions and sayings, actions and approvals of the Imams, but in this particular case it would be more a traditional work of their sayings, known as Kitab al-Ahtajaj, the book of disputation by the scholar Atabrisi. We would find that the method of engagement within such a text is that the Imams, may the peace and blessings of Allah be upon them, have all traditionally utilized a particular principle. That particular principle is one which finds its way into the works of Qa'ad al-Fiqhiyyah or jurisprudential principles. This particular principle is known as Qa'idat al-Ilzam, the principle of compelling someone. In jurisprudential circles, the way that this principle functions is we would say that if we were in a Muslim-dominated area, or if we were in, for example, the caliphate of Amir al-Mu'mineen, alayhi salatu wa salam, or Imam al-Hassan, alayhi salatu wa salam. The exception of which, other than the caliphate of Rasulullah, sallallahu alayhi salatu wa ala, and these two particular Imams, we do not believe in the legitimacy of any other caliph who has, of course, come out throughout the chronicles of history. So these are the cases that we would look at. But say if we were to hypothetically be in their time of rule, and we were to find that they would judge a non-Muslim in a particular way. What the principles from the Imam state is that we would not judge the non-Muslim according to the precepts, orders, and commands of the religion of Islam. Rather we would judge them in accordance to what has been revealed in the law that they claim they themselves accept. This finds its way into numerous different cases. It's not only applied to people of other religions, but also those who claim to be Muslim themselves and follow a different school of jurisprudence. We would also hold them to this particular principle too. So how does this particular rule work out in the way of discussing with others and disputing with them? The way that such a rule would work is that in studying any other particular religion or sect, in understanding their foundational beliefs, what we would call the big questions in any worldview, we'll understand what the consequences of those beliefs are as well. So for example, if I believe that on Sunday it is a holy day and I'm not allowed to leave the house, but rather the only thing I'm allowed to do is engage in scriptural study, but then I of course go out and do something on a Sunday that would show that there's an inconsistency in my behavior and my worldview. Or for example, if I believe that God is just, but then I believe that he hates a particular race of people, again, this would be an inconsistency in my worldview and it would show that my worldview is inconsistent. Well, inshallah ta'ala we'll go through these principles slightly more after we take a short break. I pray that you join me, salamu alaykum wa rahmatullah. Dear viewers, welcome back. I was discussing shortly before the break the fact that this principle is something that would be utilized in applying to theology. And what the Imam would do is he would hold, may the peace and blessings of Allah be upon him, is he would hold the followers of a particular doctrine to take that doctrine and roll with it or move forward with it consistently. So for example, if you claim that God acts in a certain way, but then you hold another religious belief which completely contradicts that original belief, what we would call in the English language cognitive dissonance, then the Imam would demonstrate that there is an inconsistency in that belief. Or for example, if you were to rationally object to an aspect of someone else's worldview, but then your old worldview was completely inconsistent on that issue and gave you no rational basis to even object to it, this again would be an inconsistency. And we've already stated in numerous previous episodes that inconsistency is the sign of a defeated, false and non-divine worldview. So it is using this principle that would be the foundational governing tool that we will use in this engagement with other worldviews. So what we would do is we would look at the bigger questions, what they believe about X, Y and Z, and utilizing these bigger questions, we would test the waters. We would see, is this something that can consistently be applied and we would try to discover, is there any apparent inconsistencies here? If there is inconsistencies, we would reject that worldview. And this is how this particular methodology is applied. Of course, we mentioned there are certain things which are what we would call the primary questions. What is the nature of mankind? If you believe that you are doomed to failure, and then expect from people a form of perfection, then of course your worldview is defeated from the start. If you believe that we are merely predetermined, predestined, and have absolutely zero free will in the choice of religion, fate, salvation, or the ability to do good or bad deeds, then again your worldview doesn't make the cut because there is no point in me discussing or engaging with anyone if they have absolutely zero free will or any role in the particular process we're talking about. Likewise, if you believe that there are no such thing as good and bad, but then you believe that we're going to be judged, you would again be falling under the banner of inconsistency. And this is where Qa'idah al-Izzam would constantly apply. We would test, do your foundational principles align and happen to be in the process of harmony with the other principles in your religion. So for example, do you claim that God is just, but then attributes in just actions to the nature of that God you believe in? These are of course areas where we would be analyzing, investigating, and thoroughly applying this Qa'idah, and on this Qa'idah al-Izzam to see is the worldview consistent? And it is through determining that a worldview is inconsistent that we would be able to rule it out and say it doesn't really make the cut. So what we're looking for is we won't be comparing or judging these worldviews in accordance to what Islam says, because at the end of the day that's the way that most religious debates work out right now. The Christian will say, I don't like this aspect of your jurisprudence. The Muslim will say, I don't like this aspect of your theology. The Buddhist or the Hindu would say, I don't like your exclusivist claims. I don't like the fact that you guys claim to possess the absolute truth. And the atheist would say, I don't like the fact that any of you are superstitious and believe in things that belong to a non-naturalist, non-materialist realm of existence. I don't like the fact that you guys make reference to something which is beyond the physical that I can see in front of me right now. In this occurring, when this occurs and when we witness this occurring in conversations, it's very clear that we need to have an ability to get beyond this. Why? If a discussion between myself and someone else all revolves around the assumption I have and the assumptions I have about truth and the assumptions I have about good and the assumptions I have about bad. But such a person has entirely different assumptions about truth, different assumptions about good and different assumptions about bad. What's going to happen? It's going to become a case of my desires versus another person's desires. And that is not objectivity. That is subjectivity at its best. And so when you have someone that comes and judges you on the basis of their own standard, a standard or worldview they have not yet established to you to be true, all they are saying to you is that in this conversation I'm going to act like a dictator. This is what we know as personal pontification. Namely, it's themselves issuing a personal fatwa and you have to be bound by their fatawa. This makes absolutely zero sense. This is not how a dialogue works. If anything, what such a person is doing with their assumptions is reducing the conversation to a monologue. But at the same time, are we going to appeal to an entirely neutral standard? Indeed, the real question arises, is there such a thing as neutrality in the first place? Is there a standard that we can even agree to arbitrarily and say that look, this is the standard by which we're going to judge? And unfortunately the answer to that is likewise, there is not. So what we need to be doing is taking everyone's package of beliefs, everyone's worldview and therefore asking the question, which of these worldviews has the ability to explain away the following phenomenon? Number one, us as human beings. Number two, our knowledge and rationality as human beings. Number three, our nature as human beings. Number four, our experiences as human beings. Does this worldview have the ability to explain away in a decent manner that which we see around us? Does it have the capability to explain away our emotions or dreams or feelings? Does it have the ability to explain away human civilization? Does it give a good explanation for the existence of animals, what goes on to animals in the world? And does it provide a decent explanation for that which is beyond this planet Earth? Indeed, the real question is, does such a worldview seem to align or completely disalign with the reality that you and I and every single person watching this program tonight lives in? This is the real way in order to judge the superiority or deficiency, the validity or invalidity of a particular set of beliefs. For those who come to you and with their dominant nature attempt to bully you into providing evidence which aligns with their already pre-existing set of presuppositions, what we find is that they are as unsophisticated as anyone else out there. Really, such an act demonstrates the lack of rational maturity they show, the lack of experience in life they have, and more importantly it demonstrates entirely that they have not fought out nor have they considered what it means to form and shape an accurate series of beliefs. Dear viewers, thank you for joining me once more. I pray that you will join me tomorrow night in which we continue to discuss this. Wassalamu alaikum warahmatullahi wabarakatuh.