Okay, so good morning, everyone, welcome. Let me just click this. So as I was introduced, thank you for that. My name is Alon Reineck, and I work for Synopsys, where I developed, where, sorry, ooh, jitters, sorry about that, where I manage the development of the Node.js and .NET agents for Seeker. If you've never heard of Seeker before, it's probably the best I asked solution out there. If you haven't heard of I asked before, it's fascinating as all application security is, but it's also, unfortunately, not my topic today. So this is the last time I'm going to mention it. I want to start off with a question. So by shove hands, who was at DevCon for CZ earlier this year? Awesome. So if you've never heard about it or haven't attended, first of all, I have to recommend, do attend it. I've been speaking at DevCon for CZ since 2013. This was actually the first conference that gave me the opportunity to publicly speak. It's awesome. It's really one of my favorite conferences throughout the year. Although DevCon for US is kind of giving it a run for its money. So good job, guys, yeah. Final question for the two of you who were at DevCon for CZ. Did you go to DevCon for CZ and miss my talk over there this year by shove hands? Yes, sir. It's a bullion, either. Well, no, no hard feelings. There were quite a few good talks in parallel. I'm actually bummed I missed some of them. So back in DevCon for CZ, I gave a talk on how Open Source made me a better programmer. I got quite a lot of feedback for it. Quite a bit of it was positive, so thank you everyone. And one bit of feedback kind of stuck to me. And this feedback said that I was kind of stretching the truth there, not in the sense that Open Source won't make you a better developer. It definitely would. But calling myself a developer was kind of stretching the truth. And the reason for this is kind of simple. A developer's day should look like this. Now, I see a couple of grins. These are tools I like to use. So just say I am not going to entertain the religious debate of IntelliJ versus Eclipse. I'm most definitely not going to entertain the religious debate of Vim versus Emacs. Like, all religious debates, both sides have a point and the argument is pointless because neither of them will convince the other one. We aren't going to go there. If you use whatever tool to develop software, if it's one of the tools over here, if it's a tool not over here, if you use Notepad, if you use a bunch of butterflies, if you are creating software, you are a developer. No religion involved. Unfortunately, My Day doesn't usually look like that. It looks like this. So I see a couple of people with kind of questioning looks and a couple of people nodding in shared pain. So for those of you who do not recognize these logos, My Day, mostly dedicated to writing a bunch of email, reading a bunch of more email, moving tasks around in JIRA and attending conference calls. A whole lot of conference calls. If you don't recognize these, this is great. I completely envy you. So going back to that point of feedback, can I really call myself a developer? No, fair enough. I get this. But I don't think this feedback undermines my core point. My core point being that working on open source has been the most intense and the most rewarding learning experience in my career. So if I can no longer call myself a developer, but I still want to fly out to conferences and give talks, kind of revamped that talk and asked, can working in open source help me become a better manager? And I'm going to say yes and explain why. So first of all, let's start out on square one. Make sure we're all on the same page.  So even though I am no longer a developer, I've retained a very important skill from my development days and I'm still really good at copy pasting. So here's a definition I lifted off Wikipedia, which I'm going to read to you. Management or managing is the administration of an organization, whether it is a business, a not-for-profit organization or government body. Or if I sum this up really quickly, ugh, moving! Okay, I'm sorry, that wasn't really polite of me. It definitely was impolite to the hard-working contributors to Wikipedia. You really put in the time and create this body of knowledge for all of us. And it really wasn't polite towards managers in general. Although to be completely honest, I've been doing this for, give or take 10 years, it is the truth. Management really isn't that interesting. The reason it isn't that interesting is because it really isn't that difficult. It's kind of simple.  Simple, easy. Well, almost. At least being a bad manager is really easy. If this is the way you manage stuff, it's the easiest job in the world, and you're definitely doing it wrong. Being a good manager is really, really difficult. It's really challenging. It's a whole lot more than just telling people what to do and when to do it and how to do it. And well, there's a lot that goes into being a good manager. A whole profession, it's a whole skill set, but the one key element in my mind that differentiates good managers from bad managers, really sets them apart, is leadership. People don't follow people who just tell them what to do. People don't follow other people by virtue of some taunt up title. Senior manager of Node.js and .NET age, nobody cares. Just is not interesting. People follow other people, people follow leaders because they're inspired to do so because they buy into this shared purpose. They buy into a common goal, they buy into a path that will lead us to this common goal. And well, I can't claim I know all the managers in the world, obviously, but from my own small perspective of being in the tech industry for about 20 years, 100% of the good managers I've worked for, with or have worked for me were good leaders regardless of their position or their title. In contrast, 100% of the bad managers I worked for worth, note that I didn't say worked for me, I don't hire bad managers, 100% of the bad managers I worked for worth were poor leaders. And you can really recognize us when you step out of the scope that they're managing and see how they interact in other places. So if we kind of want to talk about, sorry, how open source can set you up to be a good manager, first step is to ask how you even become a manager. In the tech industry, more often than not, this happens by something I like to call a reverse promotion. Back home, we also call this an Israeli promotion. If you've never heard about this, this is the weird concept of instead of a normal promotion where you get a title and do the job that fits your position, in a reverse promotion, you first do the work, you do it well enough, long enough and visibly enough so you get noticed for doing this work, and then hopefully someone notices and gives you the title or the position to match the work you're doing.  So you kind of fund this new position by spending more of your time, which is always fun. As a side note, there's a small line in this name. Can anyone figure out why I'm lying here? Because I am lying through my teeth. The fallacy, the lie here is that management is not a promotion. Becoming a manager is not a promotion, at least in good companies. Management is a profession. It has its own skill set, it has its own way of doing things, it has its own tasks that need to be done. Transitioning from an individual contributor to a manager is not a promotion. It's a career change. Now, good companies understand this. Good companies have the infrastructure and the processors and the HR facilities to support people who want to change their careers. To support quality engineers want to become software engineers, software engineers want to become PMs or data scientists, scientists, sorry, or managers that have the training, that have the support system around us. Bad companies don't understand this. Bad companies kind of have this arbitrary cap for individual contributors. So you go on and kind of progress in your work and at some point you hit this glass ceiling and then since you're good at your job and you want to continue advancing, your only option is becoming a manager, which is horrible because a lot of the time this isn't done since you're passionate about management or actually want to do this but because you have to. So you have really good engineers who kind of become managers by necessity without wanting to be managers, without understanding the difference in profession and quite often these good engineers become really bad managers. Hopefully in good companies this doesn't happen. Good companies will allow you to advance as an individual contributor throughout your career and will allow you to shift to management if you're actually interested in this. If your company doesn't have this notion, talk to me later. I am recruiting and I do understand the difference here. But sorry, that was kind of a segue. I want to get back to my topic. What does open source have to do with all of this? For me, everything. Open source by definition does not have titles, does not have ranks. It might have roles. Open source has these specific roles of maintainer or committer or someone who's in charge of something but first of all these aren't usually these aren't official titles. And more importantly, these are all reverse promotions. Pleased most of them. 99.999 something percent of all these roles. People who have been doing the work and get noticed for it and the community by consensus kind of votes them into this new role says hey, thanks for a great job. Here's a bunch of new responsibilities for you. Thank you guys. Really appreciate it. So open source has everything to do with this topic. That open source is all about being able to exert influence without the actual authority, which is leadership at its very core. Once you know how to do this properly, once you become good at this, becoming a manager is kind of a non-issue. You just continue doing the same thing with a title match to do it. So how do we do this? How do we treat working in open source as a learning experience as something to set us up for becoming managers or becoming better management? Managers at least. But first of all to quote another great leader, be the change you want to see. Almost, this is probably a misattributed quote. But anyway, be the change. Lead by example. You cannot expect others to do what stuff you aren't willing to do but yourself. It just does not work this way.  You can't go on saying, we need to improve the quality of this project. We need to make sure that all new PRs have at least 90% code coverage, okay great.  It doesn't work. People notice hypocrisy and people do not follow hypocrites. If you aren't willing to actively share that, A, this is doable and B, this is important enough that you're willing to divide your effort to it, no one else will. So this is critical, this is crucial. And this by itself is not enough. It's not enough for a very, very simple reason. Most of us human beings are really bad at reading minds. We are not born telepathic. We don't just get it. Most of us need to be told things. And as a famous programming language says, explicit is always better than implicit. We have, as leaders, we have to convey what we expect from the other members of the community.  We, we as open source communities have become really good at communicating what we once done. And for this we have backlogs and issue trackers and feature review processes, et cetera, et cetera. Really good at listing out the entirety of work we expect. Large projects, better organized projects, have also become really good at communicating when they want stuff to be done. We do this by sprint planning and by milestones. We in open source have become quite good at saying we are at feature freeze. We will not review new feature requests. Although if you're doing this correctly, you can just say that, you turn this into a conversation. Thank you for your contribution. We are at feature freeze. We won't be reviewing new features, but we expect this version to be released on October 23rd, after which we will resume feature reviews.  You also take responsibility for it and say, okay, we won't be doing this now, but here's when I'm gonna get to it. And probably most, most importantly or most obviously, open source projects have become really good at communicating how we want stuff to be done.  First of all, we have our coding styles. We have our guidelines. This is how you're supposed to write code. The interesting thing to note here is you don't necessarily have to have people involved in this conversation. Does your project use a lender of any sort? Lending isn't a technical item. Lending is all about communication. It's a very simple, very explicit, very cheap, very obvious way of communicating to contributors. This is how our code should look, even though you don't need to have anyone else in this conversation.  Use tab instead of four spaces here, camel case instead of snake case, vice versa, whatever. This is all about communication. This is all about telling people how they interact with this project. In a higher level, we also have the infamous contributing MD file, which doesn't just say four loop looks like that, initiative statement looks like that, but you're going to have deeper considerations. We are really concerned about the size of the binary, so make sure you never statically link anything, but I need dynamically link, or this needs to be extra resilient and rely on nothing, always statically link all your dependencies, but follow the approaches for different projects. We've become very good at communicating these. And on the highest level, probably the most interesting part is that open source projects have come to the realization that people don't communicate, people don't really interact with the source code, people interact with other people. And since we are very bad at reading minds and a lot of us don't just get it and we need stuff spilt out, in the last couple of years, projects have started adding codes of conduct. These are, again, documents that say, this is what's, what are valid or invalid ways to interact with other contributors. This is how we can and can't behave. Now, this isn't to put people on the spot and it isn't for lawyering and saying, well, in this email message from 2013, on your fourth line, you did this which violates that section of the code of conduct. You can, but that's not really the point. It's explicitly stating how we want to interact, how we want our community to look and being able to call people out and say, hey, this isn't what we agreed about. This isn't just my opinion. This is a consensus we have written down here. Let's try to follow it. So, as leaders, we started out by leading by example. We continued with very explicitly communicating to our community members what and how we expect stuff to be done. And now we kind of get to the danger zone because we're, as leaders, we are staying the first term. We are starting to get noticed. People start coming to us for questions. What should I be doing? How should I be doing this? And this is usually new managers, classic pitfall. You don't have to know all the answers. It's really fun being the person with the answers. It feels great to have people coming to you and saying, hey, how do I do this? Oh, you look over there. Yes, thank you. You saved my day. Makes me kind of feel great. I'm a superhero. Solved somebody's problem. This is intoxicating. It's addictive and it's really dangerous because once you get to use to this, you kind of get this wrong notion that you have to have all the answers all the time which means nobody else can have any answers because you have all of them. This is terrible. You need to be really, really careful of this. Good leaders aren't intimidated by members of their own communities, of their own teams. They aren't intimidated by someone else having better ideas. Good leaders celebrate us. Good leaders understand that the strength of the team, the strength of the community is as strong as its strongest members. Having other strong members doesn't dilute your leadership. It brings the entire team forward. Once you kind of recognize this and reconcile with us, you can start making better decisions usually by not making them yourself by not insisting on having all the answers but by having conversations, by bringing people in and saying, okay, let's talk about this. Let's bounce some ideas around. Let's see what the best idea is. This is great on paper. In practice, it doesn't necessarily always work. Not because it's a bad idea but because people are people. Quite often, the idea that wins in this situation isn't the best idea but the loudest idea. The text version of this, since most open-source communities and conversation happen in text and not in voice, is the idea that's presented in the best English, which is kind of a shame because open-source in its core is something global and distributed and many of us don't speak English as a first language. It's our second or third language. But we still kind of have good ideas. Even though our English isn't that great. So if you leave this unchecked, quite often you kind of consolidate on the most eloquent people. People with the best English. The people with the most free time who can reply to each and every email in the mailing list. I cannot, right now I have 960 unanswered emails just in my inbox. So you kind of have these natural people who evolve as the go-to people, the people with ideas, but these are not necessarily the smartest people. These are not necessarily the people with the best ideas. And part of your job as a leader, as a manager, is not to moderate us necessarily.  You've spoken enough. Give someone else a chance. That's being a bad manager. But making sure that the best ideas really emerge. And you do this by pulling people into the conversation. First of all, preface for this, which again is kind of obvious, but as I said, we are bad at reading minds. So I'll be explicit instead of implicit. The base thing to do is to make sure this is a safe space. Make sure everyone can voice their opinion. Way too many communities where someone comes up and say, yeah, here's an idea we can do da, da, da, da, da, da. And quite often they get the answer. Excuse me. Who are you? How long have you been programming? Well, I've been programming since you were doing long division.  True story. We're not name names, but I actually have a PR which I sent to some project I want to name. I got an answer, but you don't even have a PhD. You did not formally prove this. People like you should not be writing code. Okay. Thank you for your feedback. This speeds up your process in a factor of 15. If you don't want it, don't take it. But thank you for your feedback. I'll start working on my PhD right now. This is not a healthy community. This is definitely bad leadership. So the very base should be make this safe space. Make sure everyone can voice their opinion. And if they have a bad idea, you can say this idea isn't good because X, Y, Z. But you're criticizing the idea not the person who presented it, which is a key difference. The kind of next stage of this is actively pulling people in. And here too, there's a right way and a wrong way of doing this. The wrong way is putting people on the spot. So Shirley, what do you have to say about this? This is terrible. Now, everyone is looking at her. She has no idea she's going to be called up and chances are she's going to say, no, I don't have anything to say about this. Stop looking at me. And not only have I wasted everyone's time, I've also created this image of her being someone without ideas and no one will come to her for ideas later on. So don't do this. Sorry, Shirley. Nothing personal. The kind of right way to do this is, first of all, to lend your own credibility outwards, especially after you've become recognized as a leader in this community. So you can be in a discussion and say, well, this is really a complicated problem. I'm not really sure myself, but I know David is really knowledgeable about the subject. I'd love to hear his take on this. This is completely different. First of all, you aren't putting someone on the spotlight right now and you are lending your credibility. It's not just David what do you think, but I know David knows a lot about the subject. I'd love to hear his take. Doesn't have to be right now. Let's wait for him to chime in, but let's not move forward till we heard him. If you really want to vamp us up, ramp us up, sorry. What I like to do is go offline and encourage people to come in, which kind of looks the same, but it's even more powerful because it's done privately.  Really impressed by it. Really love to see you chime in here. And now you can start a feedback loop. Chance is on. No, no, I don't want to contribute. Okay, why don't you want to participate? What's a missing piece? Oh, you aren't sure about your English.  You aren't sure about the idea. Okay, let's discuss privately once you're confident enough, you can present this. There are a lot of ways to bring people into this discussion. This to me is kind of the key in good leadership. Not only managing tasks and making sure that this gets done before the release and that doesn't, and we darted all the eyes and crossed all the teeth, but actually helping others grow, making your community stronger by making the participants stronger. Now this, I know this sounds like a lot of corporate management talk, kind of half expecting me to wear suit and tie and charge $500 an hour, because I can, your company's gonna pay for this anyway. It really is not, it really isn't. So here's a real-life example from a project called Moquito, it's a marking framework in Java, which I started, I've been using it for years, I started messing around with contributions about two or three years ago. Been doing these small things and I really got noticed here. And this is feedback for one of my PRs where the maintainer discusses technically what's going on here, da, da, da, da, da, da, da. And here, actively, publicly, he's reaching out and saying, well, you've done a lot of cleanup work and a lot of bug fixes, do you want to contribute an enhancement? Here's something I think could be interesting for you. This ended up being one of the major feature. I think it was 2017-12, don't remember to be honest, it was a couple of years ago, but check out the link if you're really interested. This works, I don't know this person, I never met him. I don't know where he works, I have no idea if he's a manager or not. But this is definitely leadership. This is in the open-source space, no money involved, no corporate management, no nothing. This is how you drag people out, how you help them grow, how you make them more prominent, more effective contributors to your project. Now, if you can do this in open-source, you can most definitely do this within your own teams, within your own groups and stuff you manage. I'll share the slides, of course, if anyone wants to link later, it's just a kind of a last thought, a last notion. We as managers love to measure things, just kind of is corporate management. We get hit up a lot with numbers and metrics and measurements, and we often spend a lot of our times preparing slide sheets and sharing 12.4.5, 12.45 at least, percent improvement here and there. Here's a metric for you as managers. In the last week, month, year, how many people have you helped become better contributors? Have you helped promote? Have you helped become leaders in their own rights? If the answer to this is zero, in my opinion, and I really don't care about your performance review in your parent company, as a manager, if the answer to this is zero, you are not doing your job. This is not good management. And with that, I'll open up the floor for questions. We have the handheld mic in this room. If anyone has a question, you can raise your hand and I can try to get the microphone to you. So you started with some examples of various corporations. Have you had experience with organizations that separate sort of HR management from technical leadership? Well, first of all, yes, definitely. And the different companies kind of do this in different ways. If you started managing in the 1980s and your organization is still stuck there, I call this metrics management, where you have your HR manager and project lead you need to report to, this can work great if they both know what they're doing and they actually talk to each other. It really depends how you implement this because quite often, but it is known to happen that these two functions don't talk to each other. And then you have your functional lead who's sure you're going to deliver a feature by the end of the week and is planning on the next big feature for the next year while your HR manager knows that you're going on vacation for this week and you intend to transition to product management so you won't be doing the next feature. I think it is okay. It is a valid structure of management, but communication is key. First of all, the HR manager has to communicate with the functional leads or technical leads, either you may call them. Second, the HR manager has to at least have a notion of what's going on. You can't have these conversations where the tech lead says, okay, we're gonna have your programmer doing this and that and the HR manager kind of blankly stares and so on. Yeah, good idea. And can we have logging on that, please, also? You have to, the HR manager has to at least have a say and at least understand what's going on. So this can work. I think it works really well if you have really good technical people and really good HR managers who are really good at talking to each other. Usually in my experience, you just add spuffs here. HR manager can just be bad at our job. Technical manager can just be bad at our job and even if they're both great, but they then talk to each other, you have another spuff. I'm not a fan, but if it works for you, great, more power to you. I think we still have about five minutes for questions. Does anyone have questions? If that does conclude questions, I'd like to remind you all that, I believe lunch is going to be starting. It's gonna be right outside the doors. Can we all thank our speaker? Thank you all for your time and if you're interested, feel free to reach out or hit me up late outside. I'll be the only person in a purple synopsis shirt. Really easy to spot. Thank you again.


Personal Finance PowerPoint Presentation Sector and Specialty Funds Prepare to get financially fit by practicing personal finance Most of this information comes from the Vanguard website, which you can find online at investor.vanguard.com In prior presentations, we've been looking at investment goals, strategies, tools, keeping in mind the two major categories of investments That being the fixed income, typically the bonds, the equities, typically the common stock Also thinking about the types of tools we might be using, including mutual funds, including ETFs Helping us to diversify possibly with less of an initial investment as opposed to investing in individual stocks and individual bonds We've recently been taking a look at different types and categories of the mutual funds Because once we think about investing in funds like mutual funds and ETFs We want to think about what kind of mutual funds then are available to us What type of investment strategy should we be putting together? Here's a quick recap of some of the funds we've been looking at in prior presentations We've got the money market funds, the bond funds, the balanced funds, the stock funds, the international funds And now we're going to look at the sector and specialty funds So remember that our investment strategy, we're going to say, hey, I want a balanced portfolio typically as an individual investor And I could do that by buying individual stocks and bonds, but that's quite costly most of the time So I'm probably going to be using ETFs or mutual funds if I'm using some kind of funds in order to invest Then the question is, do I want to have very minimal amounts of fund such as balanced funds Which are going to be investing in a broad range of funds like bonds, like stocks, within the one fund The easy way to go, or do I want to have more leeway even though I'm still investing in mutual funds Possibly breaking out the stocks, for example, versus the bonds Or possibly getting more in-depth from there, breaking out different segments of stock funds Such as small cap, mid cap, and so on and so forth U.S. versus foreign, as we've seen in prior presentations Giving me a little bit more leeway in terms of where I want my balancing to be at any given time Than simply the balancing standards of the balanced fund Possibly using the balanced fund as kind of like a guide to help me with those balancing But in any case, now we're going to go into the sector and specialty funds Also, keep in mind that if you're talking about a 401k plan or an IRA or any kind of retirement plan You're still thinking usually about pretty much a mutual fund but it's now under the umbrella of, say, a retirement plan or something like that So those things aren't like totally different, you don't want to think about them as totally different You want to think, okay, they're using something similar, a mutual fund of some kind, typically That is now under the umbrella of a 401k or IRA or something like that And that has tax implications related to it that you need to consider So instead of thinking about it, it's a whole new world, no, it's the same world It just now has some different tax implications because it's under the umbrella of some kind of retirement plan Okay, sector and specialty funds focus on a specific industry like precious metals, real estate, healthcare, or energy So when we talked last time, we thought about the U.S. stock funds, for example And we broke them out, you could think about breaking them out into small cap or mid cap or something like that The size of the company, but you also might want to break out your investments by sectors You might want to be having funds that are focusing specifically on real estate, healthcare, and so on Now note, you don't want that to be your only fund because although it might be diversified under these sectors If the economy goes down for that particular sector, then all the stuff in the fund, even though it's diversified within a fund Is not going to be fully diversified because it's only diversified over a small area So you want to use them as a part of your overlying strategy But remember, these funds have a very narrow focus exposing you to more risk and should only be used to supplement an already diversified portfolio So for example, you might be saying that let's say you have a balanced fund right now that is all balanced out for you And that's going to be your strategy, but you think that there's a situation right now where you would be more heavily balanced It would behoove you to be more heavily balanced in healthcare for whatever reason Then you might buy a healthcare specific say index fund for example to help balance you into that area in conjunction in alignment with your overall investment strategy So those are the kind of ways that you might think about using these kind of specific sector funds So what are sector and specialty funds? Sector funds also known as specialty funds are mutual funds and ETS exchange traded funds That is that concentrate on a specific industry or market These funds take a targeted approach and invest only in companies in certain segments of the economy So you're saying, hey look, I think for example, there's a health emergency So I'm going to invest in the medical field, it looks like there's a big need for the medical field So maybe you want to be more heavily there, you don't know which companies to actually invest in You could pick actual stocks or you can pick the funds, right? You might say that it looks to me like all the congresspeople seem to be investing in the same area that they might know something I don't know Maybe I'll invest over there and so then you might invest in mutual funds So because of their narrow focus, they offer less diversification Which means they come with higher potential risks, so you don't want to use them as your only investment strategy Typically because you're not diversified if you do over the broad spectrum only within that certain sector So concentrating on a sector can increase your exposure to risk Sector mutual funds and ETS give you access to a small part of the overall market Such as energy, real estate or healthcare for example Though many of these narrowly focused funds and ETS have the potential to grow You should be equally prepared to experience wide swings in the value of your investments including potentially large losses Because it's more narrow So if you were to invest in an individual stock for example You would expect in the short run that you might have more swings You might look something more like this And hopefully in the long run you get that kind of growth that's going to be happening If you invest in a more diversified portfolio you would think maybe you get a little bit less of these swings That are going to be happening over here because something that happens negatively to one part of the market Might not happen negatively to another If however you are investing in one sector you're doing something closer to investing in just one company Than having a more broad diversified portfolio So once again you would expect more variance to be happening over the short term generally So get more diversified exposure to sectors So if you're not comfortable with the increased risk and volatility sector mutual funds and ETS present Consider a few funds that provide broad coverage of the major industries So whether you're interested in U.S. or non-U.S. stocks Fund options are available that provide a diversified mix of securities and a single fund So choose a specific sector fund If your current portfolio is broadly diversified You may already have sufficient exposure to the sector you're interested in So you might be watching like a Bloomberg or some market analyst or something And they're like hey all the congress people are dumping all their money into the healthcare industry Maybe they're going to pass a law or something like Maybe I should have my money in the healthcare industry So you might start to panic and say well you might have some of your money already in there Because if you're investing in a diversified kind of fund Then some of that diversification is probably in that particular industry So then the question would be how much do I have already invested If I'm already invested in mutual funds Do I want to be more heavily invested in this particular area If I do then I want maybe to add on or purchase another industry specific fund at that point possibly Only consider increasing your exposure to narrowly focused funds If you're comfortable with the added risk Sustainable investing with specialty funds So are you part of the growing community of investors who want to invest in companies with strong environmental social and governance Those are the ESG track records We offer a lineup of ESG investments that can help you achieve your financial goals and match your dollars with what matters to you So again when you're investing in these mutual funds You don't have a lot of control over the individual companies you're investing in oftentimes And you might say hey look they're investing in some companies that I think are wrong I don't think I don't agree with the way that they're doing things or whatever So you might try to invest in such a way that you're more conscious of the companies that you're investing in That's kind of the idea behind the environmental and social governance But again I'm highly, highly skeptical of this kind of thing Because it grows into just a badge So whoever has the capacity to put the stamp of an ESG on a particular fund now Has now increased the value of it because they put this brand on it Which is supposed to mean something but in the future I'm not sure it's going to mean as much as it would Or it might be something different It might just be the cool group The cool group put this tag on it and now you're paying a bunch for it I'm not sure it's actually saving the world or anything So I do agree with the idea of investing in places that you think are that you want to invest in But I'm becoming more and more highly skeptical of this particular strategy Because again I think it gives a lot of power to whoever puts that stamp on it But in any case do your research So what risk can I expect with sector funds? Vanguard classifies sector funds as aggressive Which means they can be subject to extremely wide fluctuations in share prices At a high level here are some of the risks involved with specialty funds We got the industry concentration risk A fund that targets a specific industry will generally be more volatile than one that invests more broadly So you're narrowing down your investment, you're less diversified Therefore more risk is typically the outcome There's a chance that particular problems could affect an entire industry So if you're diversified over the whole health industry and all of a sudden like we cured disease Then the whole health industry would fall apart It's probably not likely that you don't have a whole lot of risk I guess on that particular scenario But you get the concept, right? But other industries still wouldn't would be fine So you would think if there was no risk the smoking industry and booze would skyrocket Because now the risk is gone so you could Any case, we're going too far in the hypotheticals here But you get the point, stock market risk Stock markets tend to be cyclical and can have periods of rising and falling prices So there's a chance that stock prices overall could decline Funds that invest in foreign stocks could be riskier than U.S. stock funds Since foreign stocks can be more volatile and less liquid than U.S. stocks Asset concentration risk Targeting a certain sector could mean the fund invests a high percentage of assets And it's 10 largest holdings The fund's performance could be hurt disproportionately by the poor performance of a few holdings So if you just have a few, a lesser diversification than the big Where your big weights are at The big weighting of your funds into particular companies Those particular companies could have an outsized influence on your whole fund These sector funds are considered non-diversified Which means they may invest a greater percentage of their assets In particular securities than most mutual funds There's a chance the fund's performance could be hurt by the poor performance Of relatively few stocks or a single stock


And now we are live. Good morning, everybody. Good morning, all of you. Our conversation with David, we are so happy to have you again. David, I had fantastic conversations with you before. And for those who don't know David's teaching and life path, I really want you to do research, join his Facebook page. He has a lot of wonderful content that you really enjoy. And today, I thought it would be great, David, if we have a conversation about the subject that I think so valuable, especially in today's environments. We have election coming up. We have so many different conflicts on social media that I can absorb everyday arguments. It feels like people have compassion fatigue. Don't you find it? That sometimes it feels like all science pointing, it's compassion fatigue. David, tell me, what is your work in bringing compassion to everyday routine of every human being, no matter what state of awareness a person has, whether they had experience that you are so blessed to have you, me, and many other people, the experience of awakening, the experience of seeing the onboarding mind, what is that that you can share that is relevant? Well, my work centers on the idea and the experience that there's really one of us. We share, we're all connected. We share one mind. And that the belief in separation has projected out a world of differences. But the core disturbance is in mind, in consciousness. So everything that I work with is on healing the consciousness, healing the mind, and then seeing the world in a way where you radiate the love that's already inside of you to everyone and everything. So compassion is a very interesting topic because a lot of times there's many, many spiritualities that will say you need to have compassion towards ignorance and compassion towards suffering and compassion towards conflict and so forth. And from my teachings, it's that you must find the source of the conflict of the suffering of the all differences in mind and consciousness before you can truly extend love. So if you believe that you are not a part of the suffering but you still perceive other people's suffering, I would say you are deluded, you are mistaken because you can't even perceive conflict and perceive suffering unless you actually believe it. It's unconscious. Usually the mind is not aware of how deep the beliefs in ego are rooted. But if you are perceiving the suffering and trying to act compassionately, it's going to be a very difficult struggle and it will bring fatigue and it will bring like a burnout that you mentioned because in one sense, you're saying I'm perceiving it, I have nothing to do with it, but I'm going to send love to it. And if you're perceiving it, you believe it. You actually already do believe it. And so really, as soon as you perceive the conflict and the suffering in whatever, in politics or in different cultures and so on and so forth, then you have to come back inside and say, I need healing in my perception to actually experience the love that's in my heart. So it's quite a journey to clear the consciousness completely. When difficult, did you did or do experience in relation to compassion? Because in interaction between human beings, sometimes so many triggers can happen. And as I listen, a lot of other people who had experiences of awakening, the body, mind, awareness still exists even after the experience itself as the intensity of its upside for a lot of people, probably for majority of people. The reconstruction into the ego happens. And it's almost, like I see in my world, the intensity of experiences of emotion became much stronger before the experience itself happened. It seems like because we became more open to feeling everything that the body is there to feel, you almost feel even more, I cannot say suffering per se, but the pains of the emotions that are perceived to be painful, you feel it stronger. And I can see that it's relevant to a lot of other people. Like yesterday, I just listened to some, a disharmony conversation and some other teachers and sages. It feels like it's very common denominator. I don't know how it's in your world that after the experience of awakening, of experience of the unified consciousness when you get reintegrated as a human being per se, or perceived to be such, the emotions become almost stronger. They're not disappearing. People have this imagination that maybe some cases, I don't know, it's not my situation. I cannot share it because there's no experience on my end that there is something happening to your emotional world when everything becomes this nirvana and peace. No, you just have different relationship with the emotions. But the experience of suffering then become not so personal any longer. You don't suffer, you feel the pain, yet there is not this existential suffering or depression or believing in the emotions any longer. There is observer to that. But through suffering of our own, as we experienced it, it's much easier to come back to relating to other beings that goes through their own struggle. Isn't that so? Well, I think there are many pathways to awakening, but I would say a purely awake mind does not suffer at all, ever. There's not an observer of the suffering, it's just there is no suffering. Because actually spirits or love or oneness doesn't create any kind of conflict or suffering. It always comes from ego. So when people say I had an awakening experience, they maybe had a glimpse of something. They had a glimpse of the divine, we'll say, but they didn't actually fully awaken from the ego if the suffering or even the perception of suffering comes back, even if they're observing the suffering, it's still, there is no suffering in God. So I actually studied, of course, the miracles, which is from Jesus Christ. And here we have a totally awake being, someone who seemingly was on the cross and he basically had blood coming from his limbs and he said, forgive them for they know now, but they do in a calm way. He actually did not have any pain on the cross. A lot of times people in this day and age, they see people that can use the power of their mind to walk across hot coals and not feel pain, or they even walk across hot coals and their feet don't even get burned. Well, this was Jesus Christ, he had transcended, he doesn't need hypnotism. He had actually reached the point where he saw the ego wasn't real and death wasn't real. And so we had a man who seemed to come back after he was buried, dead and buried, just as another witness to say, actually death and pain and suffering aren't real. They'd have nothing to do with a loving spirit, a loving source, a loving oneness that we truly are. Now this takes a lot of mind training. So I would say that for most people, what they do is they are continually having things pop up from the unconscious mind that are little threads of darkness, still the belief in death. It's a death wish that's still in the mind and it's all suffering comes from still holding on and protecting a death wish in the mind. So what it is is, I would say like relationships, anytime we perceive an external world, somehow that the world is outside of us instead of just unified in, we'll call it the unified field, unified awareness, the quantum field, that's all an awareness that everything is completely connected and there's nothing inside or outside. Most human beings perceive an external world and even if you are having a happy day and a mosquito comes along and bites you on the arm and you feel a little irritated at the mosquito bite, there's still an antagonism with what seems to be the skin and you feel it emotionally. You get irritated, you get annoyed, you get itchy and even that is still ego, even a perceiving an irritation with a mosquito bite because any form of irritation and annoyance or upset, even the tiniest upset is still saying that ego is still rooted in the mind, in consciousness and it has to be transcended. So I would say, I work with everybody into the sense of don't try to get into mental games of perceiving suffering and trying to detach yourself from the suffering as long as it's in your awareness, whether it's a mosquito bite or a little fatigue and discomfort, tightness in the body or a little bit of worry or anxiety or whatever. Don't fool yourself into thinking, I can just try to detach from that or push it away. It's coming up into awareness for a reason to be released and we're here to release every scrap of discomfort so that we can truly live a joyful, happy, radiant life, full of love extending. That's really what we're all going for and it does take a lot of discipline. I'm not trying to kid anybody by saying they can just twinkle their nose or click their fingers or put their heels together like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz and just keep clicking their heels together. And I'm not saying it's magic. We can use it in a magical way. It takes prayer and meditation and a real willingness to not hold on to any sense of personal identification. How does it happen in your world? It's your personal experience, not the one that is theoretical idealized but the world of David today. If you look at, I don't know, let's say past number of months or a year, what's happening in the emotional world and relating with still beings that surround us as we perceive them from the angle of the ego? Yeah, yeah. Well, in the past couple of weeks or months, the body of David and the instrument of David is always seems to be used for sharing this message with large numbers of people in many countries. So I could say in the past few months, there's been an experience with Mexico, with all the way across to Australia, way down under over there for a couple of weeks and then back over here in Utah. And then just this past weekend, I went to a spiritual conference, I was a speaker in Las Vegas, Nevada. So let's use that as an example. David hops on the plane, he goes down, he lands and he's right smack dab in the middle of Las Vegas. He's speaking at a spiritual convention that's in a casino so he goes in the casino with his luggage to get very nice rooms provided and women walking around with very skimpy, not many clothes on, serving drinks and there's poker, roulette and all types of flashing lights and there's many, many high stimulation of lights and flashing and women traveling around and famous acts, David Copperfield and Penn and Teller magicians and Beatles thing by Cirque du Soleil and big time shows but it's massive stimulation. And I've just come from a monastery, I was in a very, very still monastery where it was so quiet you couldn't even hear an airplane come. So I've come from complete silence in rural Utah down and right into the heart of Las Vegas which they have nicknamed Sin City because of all the vices of prostitution and gambling and so on and so forth. Yeah, high stimulation. But actually from these last 25 years of training my mind there's no difference for me. So I come from a very still point and I go down there. Now the people I travel with and the people I am speaking to and work with they're working with that. The main organizer of my conference he did a talk on the final day and he was bringing up his childhood memories of being laughed at and neglected and he was giving his talk and I could see his body was shaking as he was giving the talk and he said to start off he said I'm bisexual, I'm polyamorous, I have a female partner for 20 some years but I'm still bisexual and polyamorous and he said all this and then during his talk he took off his hat because he said his mother always said don't wear a hat in church and then he kept taking things off. He took his, he kept peeling off and peeling off until he was down in his underwear addressing almost 500 people standing there in his underwear. Talking about his body issues, talking about sexuality, talking about the things in his childhood that still bothered him, that he was forgiving. So what is the day in the life of David? It seems to be like feeling completely connected with everyone and everything so that there is no significant changes, there's no surprises that come, there's nothing that kind of jolts me. I find it all delightful, I find the stillness in the canyon in Utah delightful but I found my entire experience of Las Vegas to be absolutely delightful. I also am very intuitive so that when it was time for me to go to my room and meditate or be still or sleep or take a nap, I didn't try to fight against anything. I just flowed with it.  I was very well known at this conference so I was like because the whole conference was 500 people that are very devoted to spiritual awakening, every time I would walk through the hall to a restaurant to go anywhere, people bringing books to me to sign from different countries from Japan and whatever, lots of hugs, lots of kisses, just along with the lights and the stimulation of Las Vegas, I was like a celebrity.  They watch me on YouTube for many hours, hundreds of hours and they feel like I'm in many respects like their closest friend and they haven't seen me for some of them have never met me or never hugged me or never had a chance to be face to face so they were all, it was kind of a fun experience but it did feel like being a rock star down there so it was all the stimulation of Vegas and like a rock star kind of vibe. Now I'm back, I'm back with my cats. The cat doesn't think I'm a celebrity, the cat, it's just a simple, simple joys of life but that's kind of what's, to give you an example, that's just what I went through. Do you feel triggers? I don't, I felt triggers for so many years. Felt any triggers, emotional triggers at all? How long do you notice in your world that's happened? It's been quite a few years. Like I think I've been at this spiritual journey probably for 30 years consciously and I would say it goes back quite a few years. It's probably been over 10 years where there just has not been triggers. It's been, I've been more in extend mode where it's just like this love that is me that's in me just wants to pour out like a fountain or like a Niagara Falls, it just wants to pour and so if I wouldn't, if I would try to isolate, it would be, I would feel tense. So I'm constantly in extend mode. So I'm traveling and I'm speaking. I'm kind of in Dalai Lama mode. If we had a little mode in your mind where you could click into Dalai Lama mode.  He's happy, smiling. They introduced me at the conference. They said, well, some people say he's a mystic but the organizer said, I don't even know if that's a word I would use. Some people say he's enlightened. He said, I don't know. He says, he's happy. He said, I can't say that. Every time I look at him, he's smiling. He's just happy. So I'm kind of like a bit in Dalai Lama mode where I'm going around and oftentimes I see pictures of Pope Francis. He's a sweetie, all these popes we've had. He seems to be smiling so much and going to Mexico and going to the prisons and going to the poor. He's, I'm kind of in Pope Francis mode too because I get used in that way. Do you think that if your environment or circumstantial reality would be different? Let's say, for example, imagine this. We take body of David and put him in a corporate world where everybody, let's take extreme. Everybody compete for career role and trying to figure out how to deal with shareholders and that and fighting. All the drama of human existence, especially in Western society, right? Yeah, yes. What do you imagine would happen to your emotional world? If we really kind of honest with ourselves because I remember time when it felt that everything so auspicious in my world and I never ever would have any emotional turbulence anymore and then life took turns and oh, wait a minute, here is emotion and here is relation to the emotion and here is experience and starting to kick in just as you didn't expect it. What do you think would happen to David's emotional world? Well, I can say this for sure. I'm glad you brought that example up because I teach like the Buddha and Jesus that we have to empty our mind of all roles and concepts and I am asked a lot. Can you be a CEO in a corporate world and be enlightened? And I say no, you cannot. A CEO can never be enlightened because there's too many concepts. The competition, the striving for future goals, shareholders, all the things you mentioned are part of a self concept, an ego concept that if you believe that that's you, you bring stress. It's just that simple. So my life has been, I did work in business and I worked in different things. Like I'm sure you did, we've done that and we've had our stressful times doing that too. We could say surely we did. And then I started to question competition. I was a tennis instructor and a tennis player. I started to use the tennis more as like a tai chi. I started to use tennis as a movement to discipline for my mind. I still love tennis, but I used it that way. I also got out of competition entirely. So even when I'm down at a spiritual community and there's 30 other teachers, I'm going around and hugging all 30 teachers because I don't see myself in competition with them around books or workshops or streaming things or YouTube channels or whatever. I've released the belief in competition. So I would say that that's what happens. Like the body of David just went down to Las Vegas which can be a very competitive, some people would say tempting place.  Come, come, yes, very, very like that. But there was a time probably where that would have been alluring to me. Very alluring, I might have been tempted or whatever, but not anymore. It's actually for these 10 whatever years that since I've been out traveling and I had these deep enlightenment experience, then actually it's just very much all the same to me. It's the whole, everything feels the same. It's what's coming out. So I would say I always teach you have to bring the illusions in your mind to the truth of oneness and you can't bring the light into the world. And some people believe that you can just take a light being. They say, how would Jesus do in a corporation? Well, he definitely, from his teachings, he really wouldn't have much to do with the corporation. He could still be there and be like the loving presence. He could just be glowing and shining and moving around and he could still seem to be there, like he seemed to be in this world and he was still talking and eating and out and walking among the people and that's the way my life is. I'm very friendly. I just don't believe in any distinctions anymore. I can have as much fun with a businessman or an atheist or an agnostic as somebody who's a Buddhist or a Christian or a Muslim because I don't have these categories in my mind. It's just all love and light. So I do have a lot of fun with everybody wherever I go but I would not be drawn to take a job because I'm the prana and the mana from heaven is so strong in me that I have no attraction to enter into a contract like in corporate. There's no draw to it anymore. So when we speak about compassion, there is a lot in it around relating to another being as they are, as the awareness is, as the circumstances, experiences of the circumstances are and so on and so forth. And if you take, let's say for example scenario, a little bit more intermediary, a little bit more moderate. I'm not talking about the huge corporate world of competition as extreme example. But let's say for example, let's look around us in order for us to have this opportunity for enjoyment in life we have, let's say a house to live in. This house was built by someone. In the process of building at least how the universe on the earth works right now, it's usually companies build this house, right? There's a company produces material, there's a company that build the house, there's someone to manage it, whether it's corporation or not, competition or not, it's irrelevant. Let's say entrepreneurs create something. Now for entrepreneur that creates something that is need in navigation of this realities of human perceived and build by the mind realities, right? In this realities, there is still interaction between people that have their own wounds that didn't heal by transcending the ego. So you bounce between entities, humans that bring their own unconscious and let's say trigger unconscious within you that when the ego is still alive, the identification with the body, mind and the identity is still alive. So in kind of average common denominator of human life, right? So when we look at compassion and relating, where would you be coming from here? So here is it being he, she build something for the good of another and for the comfort of their own family and so on so forth. So there is a human life average per se semi-awakened human life and there is emotion and there is interaction with other emotions and triggers and there is so much of it. That's what people come to me very often. It's just so much of this energies and emotions and events that I would rather not even participate but almost feel like I'm dragged into it, into meetings that I don't need, into conflict that I don't want to be part of yet. I have to participate and remain still and peaceful and compassionate but I feel like my energy exhausted even to be compassionate because it's filled with so much unconscious behavior, so much unkind and humane very often behavior. And of course it's all labels and it all depends from where you perceive yet it's almost I would say from again from observations it's easy to perceive from the right angle, more awake angle when your emotional world is a little bit at peace. But when the triggers happen, the immersion in emotions happen, you kind of get driven into unconscious side of human experience and now the conversation about the compassion becomes very relevant, more relevant than ever. What do you think about that? Yeah, I followed the teaching where it showed me that the entire cosmos and all the images of the world are projections. So for example, what you're describing is kind of like the human experiences, you're almost caught between two worlds.  We'll say the angel is back in the light and love and wings and can fly everywhere. And yes, it's very nice. It's very nice. And then when you kind of get in between the worlds then it gets to be the struggle. So I've come from a place where I was told by Jesus, I just told the conference, I stood up in front of 500 people and I said, I've heard there's people called devotees. I said, I'm a devotee of Jesus Christ. So I'm a devotee.  Even the pleasure, even the good aspects of this world Jesus taught me, even the positive ones are just as tempting as the negative ones because you can go for a positive for a while and then boom, the drama of the negative just comes and gets you and takes you down. So- Welcome, just to show you how awakened you are. Exactly, so in following the master he basically, I was saying, well, what are you telling me? Then I should just drop the world. And he said, that's exactly what I'm telling you. And I said, so you're gonna call me out of the world. And he said, yes, not your body will still look like it's there but your mind can't be there. Your mind can't be into competition fighting and conflict, superior, inferior, better than, worse than. He said, there's no way that you can be happy and peaceful all the time if you plug into that crazy world of opposites. I was just talking to my friend Nikita. Right before I was talking to Olga from Ukraine, I'm talking to Nikita from Moscow. And Nikita was saying, oh, is Olga, does she speak Russian? Do you need a Russian translator? I said, no, no, Olga's fine with English. But I said, we were talking about that. And she said, oh, Ukraine, they're really into non-duality. And I'm into non-duality. I'm into love and oneness. But I do see that this world of opposites, that if you try to partake in it, if you try to, if soon as you split the world in any way or you split even consciousness up into observer observed, that's two. If you split consciousness up into the subject and the object, that's two. And everybody from Einstein and Niels Bohr and all the quantum physicists and all the mystics and saints, including Jesus, Buddha, Krishnamurti, everybody's telling the same thing. Krishnamurti said, I am the world and the world is me. He was saying, it's all one thing. And as soon as we break it into two, we cannot avoid conflict as long as we believe in two. But if we experience the one, then we need to radiate the one, just radiate it always. Wherever we seem to be, where it's just radiating love, radiating oneness. So I can relate to what you were just describing because that was the majority of my life on earth was that. And now, am I loving? Yes, am I gentle? Yes, am I compassionate? Yes, but it comes from the core of my being. It doesn't come from David. David is like a puppet that's used as part of the transmission. But it's not even David. It goes way beyond David. And that, to me, is the joy of it all. Because I, like for example, how does that play out? Well, I haven't worked a job in many years. So in other words, I'm never waiting to get paid because I'm in give mode. I'm in Dalai Lama mode where I'm give, give, give, give, give. And I'm not looking to get anything back from the world. I'm not looking for a paycheck. I'm not looking for this and that. Do I still go to houses? I go to hotels, I go to houses. The money just kind of flows like energy, almost like a current of energy. But it's not, I'm not identified with it coming this way or going that way. You know, there's no need in it. There's no kind of sense of need or lack. It just kind of swirls around in perfect use by the spirit. But I don't have any identification with it. Do I still brush my teeth? Sometimes do I still take a bath or shower occasionally? Do I still walk and talk and smile and laugh and hug and kiss, hug and kiss? Yes, yes, yes, yes, I do. But basically, I don't put my time and my thoughts into it.  It's just happening and I'm just part of an experience, but I don't try to figure it out. It's almost like in a river being like a twig, a little twig from a tree that's caught in a river. And the river's gonna take the twig all the way to the ocean. And the twig doesn't really have much say in it all. It may get caught along the shore a few times and it may flip over some rocks, but basically it's just gonna get carried as far as it's supposed to be carried. And that's how I feel my life is now. I'm like a twig in the river. And I'm quite happy with the river actually, so I'm not even trying to fight the river at all, really. And again, as we bring back ourselves to the conversation of compassion and look at lives of people who were not blessed with insight. Even experience of awakening, it's just an experience, really, right? It's just simply experience that gives you a lot of insight and shift your angle of perception. So the biases and habits that you had before and all the patterns, they still can remain to a degree, yet there will be huge transition to the level of immersion in the life of the body. Now, as we look at majority of lives, I would say majority, simply based on, for example, my own experience, people come and you hear what they are and you relate to the suffering and do your best to give them other perspectives and other angle from which perception can be happening, even from where they are now, their level of awareness, their level of experience and so on and so forth. And then the conversation even often has to be different conversation. I can talk about the unity consciousness and non-dual and so on and so forth. And unless you experience it, the theoretical understanding gives you absolutely no validity. It's not valid, you can't even understand, right? Because the mind that created the problem cannot understand the other reality in which this problem doesn't exist. So you almost have to be able to extend your compassion to the other mechanism of given and transferring the information and the understanding inside experience. So in my world, the only way I can give to a person who never understood what I would want to transfer is through physical somatic experience of the body. For example, you help person to drop out of the mind. You help them to relax in the body. You help them to become completely present to the sensation that points to emotion and track it back to what the thought would bring.  So talking about very high concept is not really helping because there is no relating to that more than just intellectually relating and wishful thinking, or I wish I could experience it like you. I wish I could experience it like David or someone else or Buddha or Jesus, but it's not my experience, they would say. It's just not my experience. All I know is I'm in pain because I don't know my husband is drinking, my, there's no paycheck and I don't have. Let's say, for example, David trust in the grace of the river in which we are flowing that abundance will be happening and I cannot just make up that trust. It's not within me, right? So you kind of, the compassion and teaching of compassion to yourself and to other for their world to have a difference has to happen on a little bit different level than non-dual for them idealistic reality. Well, I think what I've experienced is when I'm in this glorious oneness and non-dual then it comes out of me in so many ways, almost like the sun sends its rays of light all over the solar system. Basically all the planets are blessed by the rays of the sun, the entire solar system. And the way it comes out for me is I use movies. Everybody likes movies. Everybody feels movies are entertaining, relaxing. I use movies as parables to teach them while they're relaxed to join with them. I make a whole pathway to God that's never been seen before. Movie watching to enlightenment and mwge.org. Very deep, very profound, but I reached them with the movies. So I reached them with the movies and I take their hand and I say, come along with me. We're on this ride together. Come and join me. And people have mystical experiences just watching movies with me like ayahuasca or ecstasy or something. They're just watching movie. Just watching movies and they're having those experience. I use movies. I use experientials. I use meditation. When I'm with friends, I'll be rubbing their back, hugging them, playful, affectionate. It's very, like you said, it's very much, it feels like the body. People love to be hugged. They love to be squeezed. They love touch. They love affection. It's that compassion just radiates out through the body. My hands are active that way. Also, I have a lot of interactive courses so online people have to participate. It's not just reading. It's very audio, very visual. I use a lot like YouTube videos. People love to watch Olga. They like to see your face. They like to see your smile. They like to see your sparkly eyes. They would rather have that than maybe read a book by Olga. They would rather watch it. Oh, they're not reading books. Yes, that's right. You don't need to. You don't need to because you just sparkle. So I agree that we have to, like I was just in Los Angeles and this guy met me and he was, he had a magazine but he said, I don't even know if I'm gonna publish another thing and he was having some health issues but I stayed with him. We talked, we left. He said, can I interview you for my magazine? Maybe I'll make another copy and I said, that's fine. So he does. So then all over Los Angeles and stores for free is the magazine. It just goes all over the place but see, I just happen to be in the spot where he's like, he likes me. He wants to interview me. He's not even sure if he's gonna make the magazine but then after he interviews me he says, whole person is my magazine and I wanna put you on the cover. So now I've got friends in Los Angeles saying, oh my God, I saw you at this shop and this health food place and this gym and UCLA over on the campus of the UCLA University. I'm all over the place. I didn't try to do that but it reaches people in a simple way and I totally agree with you that we can't think of it in terms of higher consciousness and lower consciousness because we have to be the demonstration. We have to be the example. We can't change anybody's mind. We're not trying to recruit anybody or convince them. The low and high consciousness, right? All there is is the consciousness. The consciousness, right. And we're just enjoying being in touch with that and then you're happy and you radiate that happiness and then maybe people will only see the sparkle in your eye and they'll say, wow, I have hope that I can do that. What I want people to see also, I want them to understand, I do have pain. I do have fears. I do have all the human emotions but it does not make it real. I mean, to the degree real to immerse in the suffering and believe that suffering is all there is about life. Even when we talk about non-duality, some people say, oh, there is a duality and there's non-duality, no. The whole point of non-duality, that all dual expression is it. That's how the one looks. The one doesn't look just love and peace.  The one looks like fear today and anger tomorrow. Enjoy day after and sparkles in the eyes and tears. It's all the contrast that constitutes the one, isn't it? And there's a beauty of the one in it and the compassion to another being is only possible when this contrast exists so we can experience contrast. It plays through a little glimpse of this human experience so then we can extend the love that's just flowing because we understand it, not intellectually but experientially, we know it. We've been there, we can relate, isn't it so? Well, I think it's a step.  Somebody grabs the tail, somebody grabs the foot, somebody grabs the trunk. They all say it's different. Everybody, they're all blind but they all grab a different part of the elephant and they say it's different. And I think the elephant is still the elephant but it's like they're getting different aspects of it. So this is the way I would say it. When the mind falls asleep and forgets love and oneness, it's in an experience of multiplicity, differences, duality, it's in the experience of many and many is not one. One is one, many is many but when the mind is asleep, that's what it experiences earth or many planets in the cosmos is that way. And it has an unconscious mind that Carl Jung called the shadow that needs to come up into awareness. Now, we have to allow, this is where you and I are agreeing, we have to allow every emotion, every thought, every belief to come up. We can't judge emotions as good or bad, right or wrong. We're not gonna heal if we keep judging. If I say, oh, that's a bad emotion and I push it back down, I'll never be healed of it. It'll never come up and be free. So I would say that the spirit in each of us has to use contrast to start to work with us. Why does the spirit use a contrast? Because feeling love feels better experientially than fear. Love is, oh, it's not, I'm not talking romantic love or sexual, I'm talking in your heart where you just feel, oh, like everything's beautiful, everything's perfect. That feels better than fear and guilt and pain and suffering. So the spirit uses contrast because we've got so much repression and denial going on to bring everything up. And then when everything comes up, we have opportunities to forgive or release the negativity, the judgments, the attack. We keep clearing our mind and clearing our mind. And that's why Jesus said, blessed are the pure of heart for this you'll see God. He didn't say, blessed are the mixed of heart for this you'll see God. He used the word pure. And we know that purification takes a devotion. It takes a discipline. We're all going through a purification process. It's beautiful. I would say as we go through the purification of process, we do transcend all duality. And not to say that duality was good or bad or right or wrong, but it's what we were dealing with. And I'm saying we're dealing with the unconscious mind. But the goal of spirituality is to be fully conscious. We don't want to be split. Oh, I'm half conscious and half unconscious. That doesn't sound very holistic or healing. So I have a great love for everyone and everything. When people are, I was with people at a dinner table and this one woman told me, oh, I didn't even want to see you at this conference because I didn't like you. I was not going to hear you and speak, but now I'm sitting with you and I did go here something you said and she said, no, I'm going to talk to you now at least. And so she's telling me her story and all this and this on the other side, another friend of mine, she starts crying, crying, crying, crying. She's going through so much emotion. So I said to the one, okay, time out here. I interrupt your story here because I need to go over, I need to go hug this one over here and I'll come back, I'll be back, but I just have the time out here. So I go over here and hug and work with her. Then she stops crying, oh, thank you. Oh, I feel so much better, okay, good. I'm over here. You know, you just flow where it's helpful. You just want to be helpful. You want to be friendly. You want to offer whatever wants to come through you and you don't pledge it. I don't, if somebody's crying, that's okay. It has to be okay. It's a moment. Yes, it's right there. It's presenting itself. And then over here, this one's saying, I don't like you, but I want to get to know you better. Okay, then that's good too. But you see, you kind of just flow along with that and don't judge. That's the main thing. I really don't judge anything. I'm really not even judging people in consciousness as being higher or lower because we're all the same. We're really all the same underneath it all and we just need to let all emotions kind of flow through whatever they are and not judge them. We let them pass, you know, without judging them as good or bad or right or wrong. So to me, that's why I can go to everybody, cheers. You know, I'm saying, always saying cheers and go for it and good on you and good day, mate. Like they say in Australia, good day, mate. And I'm very friendly with people because I love them. And in my heart, I really do. And the reason why I wanted to talk today about compassion because it seems like compassion is the only solution for anything, for anything at all, really. Compassion is the solution.  Your child is misbehaving, compassion is the way. Someone wants some spiritual growth because they cannot find what they want otherwise and they try to escape from this life. And compassion is solution. And someone angered you and compassion is solution. And someone wants bad to your family. Unfortunately, compassion is solution everywhere. Yes. But compassion is not the solution. But the trick of it, the compassion, as I see it in a lot of beings who want to be compassionate, it's not something that happen automatic because I want to be compassionate. I decided, so there is a practice that and there is a inner path to it through clearing your misperceptions about the world, your part in it, the part of the world in you. You have to be so committed to compassionate path then it's happening beyond just decision because decision is still the work of the mind. Compassion is not the work of the mind. I would also, I would probably say compassion is the work of the heart more. If I would know that truth, right? Even though it's not exactly the same either because heart is just the organ of the boy. But it's a path. It's not something that you can just decide, well, let me be compassionate now. It just doesn't work like that. The mind is not ruling the path of compassion. It just doesn't, it's almost, it's beyond the mind. It's only when the mind is not engaged and compassion truly happening because there is no separation then. The mind, the work of the mind is to separate. It's to fragment, compartmentalize. I never can pronounce that word, right? You did, it's very good. You did very well. It's a path, right? It's a path, it's a practice. So, and here it comes. The compassion is the only solution to any conflict in the world, any conflict within us, interpersonal conflict. Compassion is only solution. And it's not automatic solution. It's not intellectual solution. It's a commitment to a path that has to be nurtured again and again, and despite, because it's always despite, right? The practice is always despite, despite the fact that, oh, I would rather do something else right now. And I would rather feel something else right now because sometimes anger and feeling righteous feels much stronger in the moment than compassion that almost sometimes could feel for some week. Oh, I feel compassion, but I want to fight. I am strong, I know better. I have right views and you have wrong, right? So that compassion is the practice of its own, isn't it? It is, I think that's it. We're sounding the note for devote your life to compassion. When you say, well, okay, that's a part of my life, but I want to be ambitious. Well, can we look and explore that if you still have ambition, you have ambition for better, more in the future, you will be ruthless, you will be competitive, you will have fight. There's fight that comes with ambition. If you have future goals and I want a better life, a better house, a better this and this, and I'll work and I'll fight and I'll do whatever I can to achieve it, that doesn't go with compassion. Compassion is, it does take a discipline, it takes your full focus.  No, you have to give your heart and soul. You have to give everything to that. You have to make it the top priority above everything else. And that's why I love that when people come and they say, oh, I'm sorry, you're so busy. I don't want to interrupt you. I said, no, come in.  No, you're not bothering me. Come here. I don't want to disturb you. Oh, no, you're not disturbing me at all. Come here. Come, come, come, come, come. Because compassion can say come. Compassion has all the time in the world because right now is all the time in the world. It's not on some kind of line of scarcity where it's like, go away and come back and this and this. So beautiful, you give your heart of compassion and you've got, like you were saying, you've got a pretty full schedule this afternoon and I just got back from Las Vegas so I'm washing clothes, packing, doing these things and I got up and here we are. We both quickly found our time to join and then once I could get the settings in my computer to work, we have our shared compassion is right there. But because it's our life, it's important to us. Yes, it is. David, I love you so much. I always enjoy our meetings of the reality that merge for a moment and dance for a moment and share for a moment and then part away to do our work in the world in our own little ways and I'm very, very grateful. Thank you Olga. I feel the same way that it doesn't even matter whether it's, we've talked for days or weeks or months when we joined together, our compassionate heart is so strong that we recognize it and it's just like it's there forever and ever and ever. Much love to you. I'm wishing you, well, nothing really, but to wish you, to someone, to not do anything, right? Yes. Thank you so much for your time and I know I will see you again and you will have some sort of chit-chat again and share little pieces of our little wisdom in our heart with the world. Yes. And that's what we do. Big, big hugs and kisses. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.


The Appalachian Wireless Holiday Sale is going on now. Till the end of the year, visit us in store or reserve online for an unbelievable sale on the hottest devices. We know what you want for the holidays because we are you. We are Appalachian Wireless. On Thursday, December 22nd, Pike County Relief Services held an open house event for the summer flood survivors. The community-oriented group spent the evening handing out goods and supplies to families and individuals who were affected. Co-chairs Sandy Penicks and Randy Johnson tell more about the event. What we're doing here today in Dorton is an opportunity for the community who's surviving the flood that they know that there's a local resource. They know that part of their neighbors are doing something to help them get back to a new normal. And so today we're taking information, we'd like to know if people have needs that have not been met by agencies and institutions so far, maybe they've somehow fallen through the crack, maybe they just need a little extra support we're here, we have pastoral support here for spiritual care, we have a few items that will help make life a little easier but we also want to know information to help for their cases to get solved. More than just food and supplies were given out. There were appearances from the Red Cross and FEMA to help any in need apply for aid. A lot of organizations are helping being involved, the Red Cross, the FEMA, SBPUSA.org, just so many others that are staying involved with us in the Kentucky Emergency Management Group providing us with VOAD opportunities. We have a lot of people, a lot of support and we have a lot of assistance out there that we can help provide and we want to make sure people know they're not forgotten To please let us know they can contact us through email on contact us at pikekindareleafservices.org or they can log on to our website and that's pikekindareleafservices.org as well. Find us on Facebook. Yeah, and we're on Facebook as well, we try to share information as we can. Reporting from Mountain Top News, I'm Nick Collum.


Okay, we've got the locomotive out of the box, ready to go. Now I'm going to grab a nice foam cradle to put the locomotive in so that we can get the shell off of it. I did a lot of underwater photography, a lot of slide photography in the years past and I have a bunch of these 35mm slide boxes that I've kept and I use for storing parts when I take things apart. Going right into this, the first thing you need to do is to remove the coupler so that you can get the shell off. You insert a screwdriver right underneath the coupler and just gently pry it up and then kind of worry it out of there. There isn't a really good easy thing I can say if you push here it comes out. It seems like they come out differently every time and it's somewhat difficult to see. I'm sure what I'm doing, but there I have the complete coupler assembly out, ready to go back on the locomotive when we're done.