Start by telling your name a Vivian. I mean, and can you tell us the nature of your problem? And what did you came here to receive prayer for? I'm addicted to it is short I far boy over insist and Less than I guess two weeks ago. They want to remove my uterus because of my phaboids I've even attacked and nothing goes no well in my life From you know, actually, so I need some work through healing and now you mentioned it You are addicted to eating chalk. Can you tell us how long have you have you been addicted to eating chalk? Well Because of my waist pain, I was taking a lot of medicine and so at some point mad Digestive track was messed up. I couldn't go to the toilet constipation So some friends told me five years ago to eat a little bit of shock, you know They're going to help me out to use the bathroom. That's what I was doing and see two years ago I start to eat it more than I should so I go to up to sometimes of 500 gram a day So at some point When I use the bathroom I blade so that doesn't good do any good to me so anymore So and you and you eat chak chak every single day 500 Up to you know depending on how much I can have because I know that available and so and what what problems eating chak has caused you More constipation and then colon issue bleeding A lot and then some other issue that I named me at two that make it worse actually Can you please demonstrate?  And how does it how does it taste to you? When it goes it takes really good What when I when it compares to the food, how does it taste like? So means but better than food actually it is better than food Open your mouth Yeah, now Now we've been what do you believe that Jesus Christ can do for you today. What's your confession of faith? I'll be here And now you shop eating chak. No stuff. Everything is going to be fine Sorry, amen. Amen. Now according to your faith receive your deliverance and receive your healing Look at me, who are you fire in a mighty name of Jesus Christ? Who are you? Who are you?  Answer in the mighty name of Jesus. Who are you?  Fire in a mighty name of Jesus Christ Fire in a mighty name of Jesus Christ. What have you done her life? Your spirit listen to me. What have you done her life?  Let there be light in your soul in the mighty name of Jesus Christ. Be free in the mighty name of Jesus. Because of Christ, be free in the mighty name of Jesus Christ. Because of Christ, be free in the mighty name of Jesus Christ. Because of Christ, be free in the mighty name of Jesus Christ. We declare you free in a mighty name of Jesus Christ. First of all, how are you doing? How are you feeling? You feeling much better? Amen. Amen. Amen. No, ma'am, you said you were addicted to getting chocked.  How does it taste to you now? It's okay. She said it's hard to eat now, right here. Here's spit it out and use some water too. Spit it out, have some water and rinse your mouth. Now that it's just to show you that you have been declared free and you are free in Jesus' name. Say thank you Jesus. Thank you Jesus, I'm free. Thank you Jesus, I'm free. We welcome you here today to the anointing water prayer line in the United States. Can you please tell us your name and where you're from? My name is Viviane Ali and I'm from Maryland in various. And can you tell us what was the problem that brought you here to receive prayer with the anointing water? Oh, I came for deliverance. And can you explain for us some things that have happened in your life that would make you say that you need deliverance? Well, I was addicted for two years eating shulk and then had faboid issue, cyst, ovary and cyst. And then stagnation, many things actually, you know, that let me know that I need deliverance. And how did this addiction to eating chalk cause problems in your daily life?  So I stay polymarch on my own because when I eat it, it's kind of mess my mouth. So it's a white and then I have to use a bathroom often because it kind of concepated me.  And can you tell us what happened today during the prayers you're receiving that prayer with the anointing water? Well, what's happened today? I have been freed from addiction to eating shulk. I'm free and delivered from faboid, I'm sure from ovary and cyst and from all of the diseases that I had today. So God has sent me free. Do you remember anything that was happening to you as the evangelist was praying for you? Oh, yes, I was I couldn't stand up. I was dizzy. I was working all around. You know, I was making gesture and then mostly I was kind of something was choking me.  And when they were praying, we've been right here. And then I was, you know, was like I was going to suffocate and then on my stomach also some sun was coming up and things I couldn't control, you know, they wanted to come out. That's how I was. So after you were delivered from that addiction to eating chalk and you tasted that chalk afterwards, how did it taste? I couldn't even break it now in my mouth. It's like I couldn't show it because I need to break it down first before, you know, a second to it, but I couldn't even do it, break it down. You know, that's that's how I was. I couldn't break it down. I couldn't go on with the process anymore. Do you believe that you have now been totally set free from this addiction to eating chalk? Oh, yes. Yes. I'm confident I've been free from them. Yes. Amen. Well, we believe with you that Jesus Christ has completely healed you and delivered you from this addiction to eating chalk as well as the other issues that you were facing in your life. And we want to encourage you now that as you have been set free by God's word that you'll be ruled by God's word and make it the standard for your life so that this wonderful healing, deliverance, and breakthrough will remain permanent in Jesus' mighty name. Amen. Amen. Glory to God. Amen. Thank you, Jesus. Amen. Thanks.


What up Bicycle Internet, Anthony here, and today we are going to be talking about maintenance and what you need to cover the basics at home. Bike maintenance is arguably the most important thing and the most commonly avoided part of cycling. More often than not, we just want to get out on the road and start riding. And maintenance always sounds like a chore. However, when staying safe on the bike is a top priority, having a well-maintained bike is going to be an integral part of making that happen. For most of us, visiting our local bike shop for every small repair is probably going to be out of the question. However, I can assure you most basic maintenance checks are pretty easy to pick up and something that you can do at home. You will find that most adjustments that you are going to be performing can be done with the multi-tool that you carry in your saddle bag. However, this might not be the best way to work on your bike at your homework station. So before you get knee-deep in learning how to do the repairs, you'll need to pull together a basic set of tools to get the job done. We've put together a list of your must-haves for the home kit. The first set of tools that you're going to want to pull into your basic tool kit is going to be a set of screwdrivers. Flathead and Phillips head are definitely going to be your best friend in this case. These come in especially handy as you set out to do any type of work on your drivetrain or any other number of assorted fixes across your bike. Now you might be thinking a multi-tool has got me covered, right? These are a great on-the-road option, but if you're working at your home station, individual allen keys in my opinion work the best. Now we understand that you might not be looking for a full set of allen keys, so if you were to just get three, I would say a four, a five, and a six millimeter will work the best.  So this next one may seem like a no-brainer, but a good quality pump is definitely worth its weight in gold. Now I tend to opt for a pump that has a dual valve chuck, as you see here. You can easily adjust between Schrader and Presta valve. If there is ever one essential item to have in your tool kit, it would definitely be chain lube. There are going to be a wide variety of lubes formulated for different environmental conditions. But with the regular application of the lube, it will definitely keep your drive chain running smoothly. Now the next thing that I like to have in my tool kit is going to be a tube of grease. Not to be confused with chain lube, grease definitely comes in handy for keeping all of those threaded points in your bike happy and prevents any seizing on different screws or bolts across your bike. So the next item that I like to have in my tool kit is going to be a small brush. I find that this really lets me get in there into the nooks and crannies on my bike and clean that stuff out. It's especially helpful when I'm cleaning my cassette. You can get in between the chain rings on the cassette and really clean them thoroughly. If you like what you saw here today or if you have any questions, feel free to hit us up on our email gearcorner at purecycles.com. And if you enjoyed the video, don't forget to subscribe to the Pure Cycles YouTube. Until next time, stay safe and keep a rubber side down.


Good afternoon. Howard Wigg, Code Green, Think Tech, Hawaii. We're going to talk heat today. Today is the first day of spring, and we all in Hawaii can feel that spring heat coming on. And guess what heat does in Hawaii? It comes through windows, and we get uncomfortable. A large part of the job of those of us in the energy field is to get that heat rejected so it doesn't come in the window. That has two very good effects. The occupants of the home or building are much more comfortable and they don't need to reject the heat as much in the form of air conditioning. Air conditioning is a very big energy consumer, and those of us in the energy office don't like very big energy consumers. So we do all we can to keep homes and buildings naturally comfortable, which brings me to my distinguished guest, Andrew Sabaras, president of and CEO of Cornerstone Energy Solutions. Greetings and welcome to the program, Andy. Thanks for having me, Howard. Very happy to be here today. I've heard him speak many times, and he's a super, super techie guy. Do you have your PhD from Princeton Physics, was it? I don't have my PhD at all, but I live on campus at Princeton University. Ah, okay, because when he speaks, when he's doing a real techie type presentation, that's what you sound like. I've hung out with them a long enough, I guess. You get that by Osmosis. And we're going to talk about hubaroptic glazing, and hubaroptic is a German product top of the top of the line. I would say without prejudice, and I'm sure you are totally unprejudiced when you agree with me, and we're going to talk about the difference between high-performance glazing or glass that contains metal and doesn't contain metal, and the effects thereof. So why don't we launch, or would you like to say any opening remarks before we launch into slides? We have a video to share with you. I would love to share the video to get started. The one thing that's real important to understand is that I've spent my life and my passion in green and sustainability. The one product we had mentioned, the hubaroptic is the top of the chain as far as window films are concerned today. But as a cornerstone as an independent consultant, and my colleagues, Rich Goldberg and I, we have the ability to select any product that we feel is best for the consumer and whoever that is. There are certain climates where I like different products, but for Hawaii the choice is very clear. As clear as I believe the hubaroptic window film to be, the choice is very clear. But if we could start the video, I think that would help us greatly. We'll start the video first and here she blows. Why don't you explain us through this video? Because we're not going to get the audio. Hopefully you get the credits across the bottom there, the closed captioning. What's happening is they're talking about from the early days where ceramics have been utilized, whether it had been in pottery and such like that, to make them more sustainable and longer lasting. But now it's our components inside of where we are. Engine blocks by Mercedes-Benz are being tested that won't require the same need of antifreeze or coolant because what's happening is that they're able to dissipate the energy. Our space shuttle for one of the most obvious examples is coated with ceramic tiles. It hits 2300 degrees Fahrenheit on reentry into the Earth's atmosphere, but its ability to have a rapid, if not immediate dissipation of the energy is what keeps the people inside the craft safe. So as opposed to a metal, when a metal heats up it has a tendency to move, metals cause different problems with friction, and in our glazing world what happens with metals today is metals will cause thermal stress if they heat too much. Right now they're talking on the video about its use in the space program as well as weaponry in the dental field. Ceramics are utilized now for tooth replacement as well as bone and hip replacement. They're using ceramics because they find our body adapts with more. It's explaining what a titanium nitride type product is and how the sputtering process occurs through this. And titanium was named after God? Yeah, and there he was. So essentially in the sputtering process and what they're explaining here is that we take a metal type product and it goes into a cathode and through the process where argon filled chamber, the negative ions are what attaches to the substrate. Therefore when they do attach you have a titanium nitride product. We have to insert nitrogen to the end of it which is where you get your titanium nitrogen and actually as if on Q we put a video of it on there. So on the bottom we have the cathode and as you start to charge what happens and what we're seeing there is the window films, the titanium particle goes up and then they're going to add the nitrogen to it. So it is a fully metal and dye free technology. By being metal and dye free you're never going to have a corrosion, a color change and we're able to build a stronger construction that again would rival glass. In the past I think it was safe to say that glass was very permanent. You'd see 80 year old glass. We see it every day here in Hawaii but you put a tint on it and the tint would tend to turn purple or the metal tints are now we're finding corroding. We thought maybe 10, 15 years ago we had some great metal tint but what happens is tint in a salt water environment the metals corrode and some fantastic reports have come out that said anything within 75 miles of a coastline the metals are corrosive. Right now what we're seeing is it's explaining that the ceramics have four times the performance 12 times the comfort. We have these on slides coming up and we'll talk about those a little bit more one-on-one as we hit them. Actually we don't have slides it turns out. Oh no we don't have slides.  Okay well I will lead us through the slides and then you can fill in here. So we've been through the nanotechnology versus the metal technology and we'll get into a lot of detail there but as you said the same product that's going into these windows is going into hip replacements and into the space shuttle we're talking some very very high performance material here. The IR rejection capabilities of ceramics are what was originally put onto the stealth bomber as you think about radar the stealth was able to name itself is to be undetectable by radar because radar is infrared so if you coded ceramic onto the stealth bomber it rejected the infrared away which made radar invisible by radar. Okay which brings us to the fact that you just now sent me some studies from the NIHB National Home Builders and some of the metal based window film that reflects off the heat and gets to its neighbors is actually melting vinyl siding on the neighboring window films. We've seen reports recently where not only is it melting siding and by the way and it's a fair assumption it's some of the metalized coating of tint and there is a huge differentiation between tint and films today but what happens is when the sun is hitting the metal it's reflecting away as Archimedes so appropriately tried to teach us years ago how we all choose to ignore concavity what happens is that the metals when the sun is reflecting has the opportunity to reflect over 200 degrees back against surfaces. In North Carolina just a few weeks back they had on very good international news coverage where a home caught fire it's home catching fire it's wooden sheds and wooden fences some pretty interesting reports on what happens when the sun is hitting it. Here in Hawaii I find it a little bit different yes there's the scare tactic of the vinyl siding may melt and maybe cause your wood chips to get on fire which can cause a home fire very serious but here in Hawaii we used to have jealousy glass everywhere and it was enough if you were warm you opened your jealousy glass and there was nice air temperature coming through what's happening today is we're finding that it's hot and I don't think people understand the heat the urban heat effect heat island effect and that heat island effect is really causing problems and again for those at home it's a man-made problem it's up in the for up on Kaniwi just outside going north shore maybe it's not as big of an effect because there's less buildings but all the buildings that we're seeing along Alamoana they're big beautiful glass structures and to make them energy efficient and in compliance with what we're calling code we're putting reflective glass on well that sun's energy is not just going to go away when it sees it it may be protective to the interior but it is going to reflect backwards and it's going to heat up our air and it causes several problems okay now the ceramic coating I understand doesn't reflect for the audience IR is infrared and that's the real heat that we really feel the ceramic apparently something has to happen to that heat to not get inside Mr. Newton taught us that energy is neither created nor destroyed so something it's there somewhere where does it go? so the way ceramics work differently and when the ceramic films first came out we used to hear people say but we can't have an absorption level above this percentage and it was right around 50% and the reason was because it will cause thermal stress and break glass and today there are still a lot of people here in Hawaii that will claim ceramics will break glass they've been around on Hawaiian buildings large projects since right around the turn of the century about 2000 not breaking glass and the reason is is because those ceramic films although they may only feel 2mm to our hand and they're about 2mm thick the problem or the good part is of that 2mm each individual layer and there's about 6-7 different layers of property in there working some of it does reflect the solar energy back if you happen to have dual pane glass and we're operating on the interior surface some will re-radiate into that airspace up we're often asked if that has tendency to break glass but it doesn't heat it up enough there is a layer that will be more absorbative if you took an IR gun and tried to measure the surface temperature of glass with film it's going to read hotter it will definitely be warmer and that's our offensive line in football it is holding up the heat at the glass the difference is that when metals heat up and they tend to move it can cause that thermal stress a lot of times we'll see old metal window films with very long fingers on the glass and that's because over time that elasticity is the glass heats up and moves and again on low E glass it's more of a concavity it's where it's bending inward or outward and the film cannot the window tint can no longer stretch back and forth the ceramics are intended to hold the heat and dissipate the energy and again what's called a rapid if not immediate fashion one of the slides which if I'm ever invited back we'll have that slide there was when they were developing the space shuttle tiles for NASA was a very big glowing ceramic tile and on that note as hold it there because I remember it's 2200C we do need to take a break this is Code Green Hawaii Think Tech back in a moment I'm Stan Enigaman and I want you to be here every Friday noon thinktechhawaii.com watch the show be there I pity the fool who ain't Hi I'm Tim Appichella I'm the host for Moving Hawaii Forward and this show is dedicated to transportation and traffic issues in Oahu we are all frustrated by sitting in our cars in bumper to bumper traffic and this show is dedicated to talking with folks that not only we can define the problem but we hopefully come to the table with some solutions so I invite you to join me every Tuesday at 12 noon and let's move Hawaii forward Hi I'm Cheryl Crozier Garcia the host of Working Together on Think Tech Hawaii Join us every other Tuesday from 4pm to 4.30 when we discuss the impact of change on employees employers and the economy Good afternoon again Howard Wigg Cold Green Think Tech Hawaii my esteemed guest today is a habitué of Princeton University and his knowledge shows that habitué I said Andrew Sabatos president and CEO of Cornerstone Energy Solutions we're talking about window film but instead of just talking about window film we're talking about space shuttle technology and when that space shuttle comes back into the earth's atmosphere it gets hot how hot is that and how does that relate to ceramic technology which relates to window film again it will hit over 2000 degrees Celsius again Celsius so 2000 degrees so that heat build up we have to keep the participants of this shuttle safe inside so the heat has to absorb but we want it to dissipate the energy away from that doesn't always mean dissipating the temperature off of the tile but can you touch it and you actually can touch it this is very similar to a brick home if you own a brick home and you have a metal garage door on an August day and the sun is beating right on the front of your house feel free to touch your door you can touch your door or your I'm sorry the brick touch the brick and what's happened to absorb the heat but it's dissipated the energy away from the home if you touch that garage door or even sometimes a glass window you'll put your hand on it and you will burn your fingers in your hand because it is absorbing and holding on to little story I like to tell and I'm gonna love that I'm gonna get to say this here for you my daughter Madison and I will do something that's kind of fun we will take a cookie sheet metal cookie sheet to simulate your metal technologies and you take a brick to simulate your ceramic technologies and we'll stick it in the oven and put it in the oven 200-300 degrees for a little bit of time until the oven is nice and hot and if you open up the oven after that time you can put your hand in there and pick the brick up anybody that's ever done some baking around the holidays if you look at a cookie sheet that's been in the oven for 30 minutes to an hour it no longer is flat it's warbled and that's warbled because the metals would like to change when metals heat up they like to move and they change ceramics don't have that ability ceramics again being more of a nitrite type product versus an oxide yeah and just to we've been talking about metals moving around a bit we should note that cold surfaces or cold elements are tightly packed and relatively stable whereas hot elements expand and move all over the place the molecules move in very wild the fashions are dashing all over the place and when that occurs inside of metals the result is that the metals themselves are actually moving so our next topic is high definition clarity now you've got all these little beads there might be millions of beads in a window but you can see out of that window pretty garsh darn clearly what's going on with that how come you're not looking at a lot of little beads I think we'll have to give a little bit of the credit to the fine folks at Mercedes Benz what happened is that this technology has been sandwiched between glass at the factory level the OEM level and to this day is still as I believe the name came up in the heritage video at the beginning they're still utilizing this and they'll put it between in a home or business or office the glass is not normally right to you in your vehicle as you're driving your front windshield where you need the best clarity and to your side windows where it is almost inches away from your face you need the best optical clarity we are able to sputter these an optical clarity that just does not occur with metals or dies because it's more of a particle versus it being a coating and again that is really one of the bigger differences between a tint and a film these go on as in a true nano scale when they're applied to that substrate we feel that the substrate we utilize as well is probably making a very big difference in that technology and just for the audience's clarity a nano if I'm not mistaken is one billionth of a meter one billionth of a meter so we're talking about some pretty gosh darn little particles very small particles and as we put it up there it can be controlled in any visible light transmission as well so as it's being sputtered we have the ability to change its visible light transmission or how clear or dark something is it can be as dark as a 5 visible light transmission one of the first applications in the state of Hawaii was a ceramic 5 project and it can go all the way as clear as an 85 visible light transmission product so with just about every in between roughly by 10 and just to clarify there you're talking about visible light transmittance and that measures the amount you take your say your inside and you're looking outside at a landscape and if you did not have a window in front of you your visibility would be 1 or 100 but if you take a clear quote-unquote pane of single pane glass and look through that you think it's totally clear but in fact it's more like 0.87 you're just getting 13% of the visibility is being blocked and you're talking about the nanotechnology getting up as high as visible light transmittance as 0.85 which the human eye absolutely cannot perceive any difference at that level glad you brought that up as well there are times where we've actually placed samples on glass and asked people to locate where the sample is and in the middle of a 60 by 65 inch piece of glass we'll stick an 8 inch by 11 inch piece of material on the glass and once it's on there and cured it's very difficult to even see where the lines around it are which makes for seeming larger windows than 72 inches very nice. Here in Hawaii I think that the visible we're getting into a different world here with day lighting I'm not a huge fan of day lighting glass and as a US GBC chairman and somebody who has gone globally to speak for that organization on green projects there's a lot of glass that is coming out in this world today and it's very clear whenever I see certain ones come out I absolutely look I know we're going to find blinds a good example would be the building I sent a picture of to you today many people here in the islands are familiar with the NOAA facility on Ford Island that was built with the most state of the art low e-glass with a 60 visible light transmission so very clear day lighting the problem is that we don't always realize and recognize that 44% of heat is delivered through day light and if it's delivered through day light the fine engineers over at the NOAA facility said I'm so glad you came because the heat is killing us in this building it's very hot as the light passes through because as light passes through the heat comes through now that didn't happen in the past now if it was clear uncoated it would be even hotter so I'll be very fair to the technology the problem is again that you're reflecting the heat away from the building so the building outside is warmer and inside if you're trapping the long wave inside the building and not giving it a place that glass is allowing heat in but not allowing the transfer back out for that to escape most buildings that I see with this are going to coding their entire building with blinds and that comes at a very great cost and it takes away from the day lighting we have a local high school that actually partners is going to be filming they put in brand new very energy efficient low glass and it's coded with construction paper and I can share with you where that school is and actually if you would like to see the installation next week I invite you to come by the teacher very excited because Carnegie Mellon Daylighting Report has taught us several things including wherever positive daylight occurs very good things happen so what happens with positive daylight is students have better attention level better test scores and it's just a more positive environment conducive to learning so with construction paper up 24-7 it's not conducive to learning in the school world where where we spend quite a bit of our time in schools hospitals hotels things of that nature two-way communication is also very important is now you know in very great tech reports from the glass manufacturers themselves they're saying that low e-codings will block cell phone and more importantly our first responder signals our police our fire and our EMS their signals are being blocked at the glass that cell phone tower could be directly outside the building but once the doors close you've lost your signal and we've all experienced walking into a building before where we have absolutely no cell phone reception and usually the glass is to blame for that specifically the metal in the glass the metal in the glass because this didn't happen before one of the things that's become really important to me as I've spent the last several years here in Hawaii is that I'm watching a lot of new construction and I won't pick on buildings specifically by name if anybody's ever seen me speak before you've definitely heard me mention the buildings and I've spoke for the AIA there is going to be a reflectivity requirement in the Kakaka Park area which I'm so happy because it came as direct result of what business partner Rich Goldberg and I've done we've had a passion to save the glass from going into landfills we've seen low e-glass on no less I could probably name off the top of my head 15 buildings that are under 5 years old and that low e-glass in the one report I had sent you this morning the one point it makes very loud and clear once low e-glass starts to corrode there is the replacement is the only alternative glass replacement we don't always have the money to do that especially in our state buildings and I can spend hours talking about why low e-glass corrodes it's a great product and I've gone head to head with some of the finest folks at glass manufacturers at the end of the day their own tech reports say within 75 miles of a coastline and when you start to bend stuff into a concavity saltwater corrosion is here and the only way we can beat that is to go to a more inert type material well getting back to schools this is one of my particular passions I happen to be a I have met Lisa Hachong who started the performance and view studies in California probably 25 years ago and what she found was they would take teacher and a bunch of kids who had very very poor views out of their classrooms like maybe it was totally enclosed or it was curtained or whatever and they measured the performance of these kids and then take the same teacher the same kids and put them into classrooms with great views of the outdoors and this is what you're referring to test scores went up by 20 percent and a lot of these those of us who know public schools the portable classrooms quote-unquote we don't that we could go on and on and on about that but we have unfortunately reached the limits of our time thank you Andrew Sabatos president and CEO of cornerstone energy solutions for talking about high high performance glass keeping the heat out keeping the visibility good thank you very much cold green think tech Hawaii see you next time


I'm Steve Sanderson. I'm really glad to be here. This is my second chance to speak here at Lone Star. When I was here a couple of years ago, I had a pretty different job with a pretty different company. Back then, I was with a company called Five Runs. I can see at least two people here that have heard of that company. It's no longer around, but I am. I've moved on to something else that I'm honestly excited about in a whole different way than it was then. That's why I'm here to talk about today. I'm working at a small startup here in town called Food on the Table. As you can guess, it is not a technology company. We do not deliver products to technology folks. What we do is deliver services to moms and dads and families and singles and adults and whoever needs help with meal planning and saving money on their meal planning and eating healthy and nutritious meals. Who don't want to take all the time to spend doing that kind of work, takes a couple hours a week. They want to know what's on sale at their grocery store. So we pull in a lot of data, we integrate it and we deliver a personalized set of recipes and options for folks on a regular basis. It is a consumer product. It's a consumer service in Austin, which I'm very happy about. But we do things pretty differently. I was going to say somewhat a lot differently from pretty much every other startup I've worked at before. I wanted to share some of that because talking in terms of pain. I've worked at startups before, I think probably a lot of you have worked at companies before where you've had the experience that you do great work, you produce really good code. If you are not in product management, you have the experience that product management is very capable of giving you direction and guidance and feedback on what features to work on that represent what the market wants.  This is really cool that you guys did this shiny rotating cube here. I don't really need that. What really hurts right now is this problem over here. So you don't get feedback that you can use until well after you've delivered the product. At that point, you start to scramble. If you're lucky, you have some heart to heart about what you didn't learn and what you did learn and where to go. If you're unlucky, you start the blame game and product management and product marketing and marketing people blame the technology guys for not delivering something that's slick. Technology guys blame the other people for not telling them what to build. And it degenerates into lots of useful conversation and arguments. We do something a little different. And the way I tried to represent that for the piece of talk I want to do here today is get your facts first. Then you can distort them as you please or why I love continuous learning and continuous deployment. So this is just a piece of the larger thing that we do. But continuous learning and continuous deployment, the idea there is we are strongly metrics driven about how we choose what to do and how we know whether what we're doing is useful. And we do it in an increment that's incredibly small. It will probably seem very familiar from a process point of view if you look at it just as how you might do XP, how you might do some agile practices. But the difference is it's applied across the business. That is purposely faded. It's not a problem with the projector. There's two approaches that I think we've all had the chance to live with. One is very well organized, very planned. Everything's very structured up front. Product management and not to disc product management but they're sort of the guys that I get to pick on in this conversation for a moment. Organize and create a very good model of what it is going to be valuable and deliverable to the customers and then off we go to build that. The other alternative is chaos. We just sort of start cranking crap out and we don't know what's going to happen and we don't have a lot of structure involved. It seems like those have been the two alternatives. We've all seen XP and agile and that provides us an alternative to how to improve that in the development life cycle. But it's bigger than that. So what if there was another alternative? What if actually you had a chance to grow organically based on feedback each time you had to make a decision? And the decisions that you made were very, very small and you were actually driven with data as opposed to opinions. So in a real quick way, what I hope to give you a brief introduction to is how you can continually run live experiments with your users to see what works. Gather more metrics than you know what to do with at the very beginning, which is counterintuitive and continually deploy changes to adapt to those learnings. I'll seed some stories as we go about what we did and what results we achieved. So I want everybody to read this closely. Now I'm not actually going to talk about this slide. I put this slide up there to give you the larger context. That there is a larger context, everything I'm talking about is in. But instead of having you guys attempt to read it, because actually it's out of date, I rewrote my talk this morning. What I do want to do is give you a little story about how we got started at food on the table. We went and talked to lots of people. They gave us lots of good feedback about our idea about meal planning.   Well, guess what, nobody says it's a bad idea. Everybody loves it. I mean, it's a little bit like going and saying, do you like puppies? It's like, sure, we're kittens for those of you that don't like puppies. So that's pretty easy. Focus groups are great, but they're only, they only tell you so much. So what we did is we sort of turned this backwards. I'm a software engineer by, or developer by trade. The guy I was partnered with or am partnered with is a marketing business MBA kind of guy by trade. So my tendency is to want to build shiny objects. But what we did instead was, we actually figured out how families do meal planning. We went and met with a mom and convinced her to be our first customer. We called her on the phone, found out where she shopped, what she likes to eat.  We cut and paste them into a pieces of paper. We printed them out. We met her at Starbucks, and we proceeded to simulate the whole process of doing meal planning for her. They're at Starbucks to laptops and a printer. By the end of it, she ended up with a nice meal plan that she went to go shop with. Then we met her again at the same Starbucks next week after getting some feedback from her on the phone, prepared another meal plan, asked her if she liked it well enough, and she did. So we asked her to pay for it. So we got ten bucks out of her to do this service. And the reason we did that is because of our fundamental hypothesis was that this was a valuable service.  If we couldn't get someone to pay us ten bucks for that, then we were not gonna make any money off of this service. We were in the wrong business. So we are never going to deliver the service as a customized personal valet with grown adults at the other end of the phone delivering meal plans to people. But we knew that was the maximal valuable service that we could deliver. So we tried to deliver it and see if we could get results. We did, people paid for it. So it became time to scale. So now I'm gonna jump into where we are now. And I'll see jumping back and forth. One of the first things that we did is we really had to understand what was our important business metrics. And this is a great crowd to start talking about business metrics. By the way, that chart's meaningless, I just found it somewhere. I had another one that talked about gross sadness or something like that versus domestic product. So I thought that was a little too glib. Business metrics, probably not the crowd that's gonna jump up and down and get really thrilled about business metrics. The reason that I started with this slide is because in order to know whether the decisions that are being made about what to work on next are legit or just fantasy or opinion. You've got to understand why you would choose one thing to do over another. So for us, we have business metrics that are pretty basic. We want people to come back every so often. We want them to come back so many times. We want them to pay so and so amount of money. We basically have some idea that we're gonna make a business out of this. Whether it becomes a business that gets sold to food planners international for $100 million in a year. Or it becomes a lifestyle business that I do for the rest of my life is really irrelevant. Pretty much like any kind of development activity, you gotta know what the goal is and you have to work backwards from there. That's representing the business metrics. Now that you've got these business metrics, you need to look at the work that you're doing. So at the very beginning, we had a process going where Manuel and I literally sat down with the newspaper, with the Google. And we cut and paste recipes onto pieces of paper. We actually got a printer at some point. And we serviced one customer, then we serviced two customers, and then three. At some point, we began to encounter obstacles. It became really expensive for us to drive to Starbucks every time we wanted to talk to a mom, not a scalable model. That was the biggest obstacle we had in our current process. So for us to improve the metric, a number of customers, we had to look for the biggest obstacle in that current process, which was time spent in car. Well, they had this cool thing called phones and screen sharing. So now we're on to three or four customers. We're doing collaboration with a customer over phone, screen sharing. And we advanced to Google Docs, where we would cut and paste copies of meal plans and recipes while they were on the other end of the phone looking at a URL that we had emailed them. We had not written a line of code yet, but we had revenue. We had already started iterating on improving our business metrics. So that is almost a cliched photo about the biggest obstacle. I should have put it in the little black frame. It says happiness is something you can achieve. The point is, look at your process at any point in time that relates to the metric you're trying to improve, find the biggest obstacle, and start focusing on improving it. That pattern, if you will, has been true for the last year. So every time we get confused about what we're doing, we'll stop and apply that. Why are we working on this? Is this the biggest problem that we've got right now? And honestly, sometimes it's not, and it's because we've gotten off the path. All right, now just in case you're not clear, we aren't doing anything with dogs nor tape measure. But the idea here is, while almost every other place in our company, we have this notion that we never want to do more work than is necessary. When it comes to metrics, we have a different rule. We instrument our app and everything we've done in an unbelievable amount of ways. Let me just rattle off a few examples for you. When we first started, we were keeping track of sort of major events that people would do, going to pages, creating things, adding things to leading things. And we started writing them all to an event log. At some point, we said, you know, there are these very cool services. There's Kiss Metrics, there's Google Analytics, there's Mixpanel. So we started routing a lot of that event log data, what we called event log data, to Kiss Metrics specifically. We did that for a while. We also kept some of it local, and then we put other stuff into Google Analytics. What we discovered, and this is part of my promise to you guys to give you specific technology and techniques, we discovered that we had a insolvable problem where we had our data distributed over multiple services. Google Analytics, Kiss Metrics, Mixpanel at one point, and our local data. We could not reconcile them. We couldn't reconcile them because the moment the data left sort of our scope, it was transformed into some locally optimized form. Google Analytics keeps our data in a form that works for Google Analytics. It does not work for what we need to do when we have a new problem to solve. Same thing with Kiss Metrics, you can't actually get inside their data store and reexamine their data in a way that you are the ultimate controller of. So after a lot of pain and a lot of missteps, we decided that no data would ever leave our environment about events or what we call metrics that wasn't already copied into our local store. So we are the master for all of this. The big motivation for doing this is since we are so metrics driven, we have this flow where I'll go back and tell you how this flow works. Basically, we will find some problem with metrics, find some problem that we want to improve. We will go back and examine the historical data and slice and dice it in a new way. And then we'll turn around and say, now that I understand the problem, I think I have a hypothesis about how to fix it. We'll do the minimal change to try and fix it, and then we'll monitor to see if we can actually improve the results of that. Because we do not know when we capture our data, how we're gonna use it later. And because all of these other services do transformations on that data, we had to keep that data locally. And because we never were able to reconcile them consistently, we would spend hours, every time we had a really big problem, trying to figure out whether our data, their data, some combination of other people's data was correct when it came to key metrics we were trying to fix. So we spent a ton of time doing that. Kiss Metrics is a neat product, been a big fan of it for a long time. Obviously have some experience with metrics products and how critical that is. And honestly, I'm not really wild about pushing all my metrics data out into the cloud, though I happen to have a company in the past that was responsible for doing that. So I have a different view on that. All right, so measure everything. Last couple of notes on that. One little tip, we were using jQuery. We were using some code to basically keep track of click events, whether those click events did things local to the page or they actually turned the page. We discovered, as many of you probably have, there's a race condition in the browser. When you have a asynchronous request to log an event at the same time that the page request goes out to an HTTP request to get a new page. It's a race condition about who's going to win. And at least 15% of the time for us, the page won and we never got the event for the click. So we saw people who were on page one, then they were on page two. We knew we were on page two because at the control level we logged that event. But we never saw an intermediate event that said user clicked button. That's because the browser basically terminated the thread before it actually had a chance to complete. So what did we do? We stuck parameters on the end of the HTTP request. So now those know how to turn any HTTP request into an event to say, user has clicked on the button that was on this page. It's made life a little simpler. I'll tell you, it's really frustrating when you depend on the data and it's not there. All right, so I mentioned slice and dice historical data. That's been key for us. We accumulate a tremendous amount of data. We originally started out, I love CouchDB. I think it's really cool. I love key value pairs. I want to play with them. I several times wanted to go down the path of dumping all of our data into really nice slick key value pairs. The truth is with our sort of credo of do the minimal required to get it working. I backed off of it a couple of times and we just dumped data into my SQL. Is it perfect? You know what, for what we need right now, it's perfect. Will it be perfect later? No, but we know how to migrate data, so it's not a big deal. So right now, we have a ton of data in my SQL that represents everything every user does. That includes things like checking checkboxes, clicking radio buttons, even scroll events, so we know a lot. How do we analyze that? I've heard that. Yeah, good point. And that's, I keep wanting to find a tool that will do all of that for me. There's a guy here in town, Ash, that's got some great ideas about that. But at the end of the day, what do we use? It's a pretty embarrassingly simple set of tools. My SQL, Excel, we write lots of little queries and dump them out. And Manuel does an incredible amount of slicing and dicing in Excel. And every time we've been tempted to move something out of Excel into hard-coded views that we build, we have to stop ourselves because the only ones we really should migrate into code are ones that we do so often and so frequently that we've proven that we know we're going to keep with them, we should move those. But honestly, that's not our biggest problem, so we're not fixing it. We also continue to use Google Analytics for some things. As I mentioned, we were using Kiss Metrics, we retired use of that. We are using Kiss Insights to gather a qualitative data. I always have to test that. Qualitative data. Nice surveys, though most of my talk right now is on quantitative data. There is a whole long discussion about when to use qualitative data to speed up the results of learning when you're only gathering quantitative data. And then finally, we had been using Mixpanel, but we retired that. So formulate the hypothesis. Everybody knows how to do that. I'm assuming you know how to formulate a hypothesis, if not, there's smart people who can tell you how to do that. So you got a hypothesis. The hypothesis now you need to test it with the minimal change. And here's the interesting part for me.  You slice and dice historical data. You got a hypothesis about what's wrong. Let me give you a concrete example. We have a, we track retention on users. We know if someone's returned once or twice, three times, X times. We were not happy with how many people were returning for a second visit. So we sliced and diced our data in a new way. We determined that of the users who did return two times, that they were strongly correlated with people that added a recipe, looked at our recipe catalog, and printed out a grocery list. So we're like, hot damn, let's make sure everybody does that. So me being really naive in statistics, I was like, well, can we just put all that on the first page? And it's like no, no, there's difference between correlation and causation. So we then looked at the flow for first time users and looked at each step in the user flow. Where are people getting stuck? What we saw that was the biggest percentage of people were getting stuck on going to our grocery list page, which is our last page in our site. So that's our biggest obstacle to solve. So we used the business metric, said we want to improve short term retention. We looked at our metrics data, re-sliced it, and said our biggest obstacle to that right now isn't getting people to go to the grocery list page. So then as a team, we started to brainstorm, how do we solve that problem? My suggestion was a radical redoing of the flow. Right, redo where the pages are, completely change that. Other ideas we had were, let's see what were some of them. Improve the visual design, right? You know, people aren't going on to the next page because the current page kind of is ugly. We make it more attractive and beautiful. Maybe if we actually pull some of the data from the next page, from the grocery list page, up into the current page, that'll motivate people. They'll see what's there. They'll say, damn, I want to go to that next page and see all the cool stuff that's there. Then we did this one thing that I think has become so valuable for us. There's one person on our team at any given point in time who seems to be the one that can punch a hole in a good idea. Now, I don't know about you guys, but most teams I've worked on, there's at least one person like that. And it rotates. The trick we seem to come up with as a group was brainstorm some ideas, understand the problem, brainstorm some solutions, and then turn to this guy, hey Fred, this is our problem. This is how we're going to solve it. We're going to build a big flow and we're going to rework the pages and new controllers. It's going to take us like four or five days to do it. So this guy turns to me and goes, well, why don't you just put a pop up on the meal plan page that says, be sure to go to the grocery list page. Now, that's a really ugly user experience. But the key thing that he remembered that I'd forgotten was the point is not to implement really cool stuff. The point is to test your hypothesis. So you can test a hypothesis really, really cheaply and with minimal effort, which is a lot different than saying you can produce, you can solve a problem in a really elegant and beautiful way. So we had to do one more thing that I forgot to mention. We had to check our ego at the door because that meant that every developer who was on the team was going to be in the position of doing something like putting a really fugly pop up on a page that says, hey, don't forget to do this. The reason we do that is because we want to see if that pop up will change the metric results for people in that alternative. Now we're going to do a split test with the new thing and the old thing. We want to see, does the new thing with that ugly pop up that gets their attention actually get us a better result than moving people on to the grocery list? That took all 20 minutes. My solution would have taken us days and some of the other solutions would have taken us days too. We would have had to get a great designer in there. We wanted to test the hypothesis, not the elegance of our solution. So we did that. The results were interesting. The results in this particular case was that we actually didn't move people on to the grocery list more. But it did not improve our short term retention as much as it should have. Okay, so our hypothesis was not right. So I could have spent time and money having the team spend a week building a new flow and a really beautiful layout and all of this. And then a week later I could have gotten enough data to tell me that it didn't work or I spent a few hours and then a few days of running that test and sure enough, the result was that's not our problem. That's not what's keeping people from retaining. So I don't know about you, but that gave me a lot more life when it came to running out of money at the end for our startup and that makes me happy. So key things there, you have to check your ego at the door.  And we have those calls and emails now. And the answer is, I'm sorry, we'll try and move you to an experiment that's prettier. All right, so isolate the test. You can see his test here, he looks really sad and lonely, he feels isolated. This is a complicated concept that I did a really poor job at trying to communicate on my notes. The notes will be online later. But the essence of this is once you start running multiple tests in a series, to test these different hypotheses and different parts of the user experience, they're gonna start bumping into each other. One test might affect the other. If you do what I've done, which is to drop one test right in the middle of the other, so suddenly, remember with split tests, you have, say, two alternatives, fork in the road, A and B. If on the B path, I stuck another test that suddenly added another step for some of the people on the second test, then one user could have one step to get to the conclusion, another user could have like four steps. So that is not apples to apples comparison. You cannot look at the test results and say, well, everybody that went down this other path is there's so much more problems there and your hypothesis is really wrong. You know, your test is wrong. This is a little bit of an art because I haven't been smart enough to figure out how to make it a science, but I work with enough smart people who can look at this and go, if we have these things together and then you change the data, you're gonna screw this test up. So make sure you isolate your test. It hurts their feelings, but you need to do that. All right, testing solution. This is our testing solution. No, our testing solution is these pieces of technology. We use vanity, okay? I know there's a bingo out there. I haven't used a bingo. We looked at it a while ago. Vanity is solid. There are some tricks with vanity. Let me rattle off a few of them in case you guys have heard of this. But essentially the problem is you need to be able to provide a point in the user flow where a user is given an alternative. They either go down path A or path B, and you keep track of that so that when the user returns, they have a consistent experience. Let me give you a concrete example. You are in our product, you come to the meal plan page and you're in the test about going to the grocery list page. 50% of you will see the page as it exists.  You need to see that same pop up next time you come back. Otherwise, my test is really, really meaningless. If I keep going back and forth, it's not session based, it's user based, okay? Vanity does a good job of keeping track of that for you. So we use it out of the box for a long time. There's AB tests, split tests that people do. They're on page levels so that you get different pages. Feature levels, whether you have features enabled or not. Buttons enabled, or in our case pop ups enabled. Vanity works for all those cases, okay? There are some easier out of the box solutions for doing page level split testing. I think it's Google's website optimizer is one. I know Kissmetrics is at it and AB testing, I haven't looked at it. There are other ones. I have not found an AB testing solution that gives us the kinds of control we need for something that lives outside of our app. So just doing JavaScript in bed isn't sufficient for the kind of AB testing that we need to do. All right, so we've recently modified Vanity to allow for non 50 50 splits. We have tests where we don't want to have everybody included. We want to maybe have just 10%. All right, one other thing is Vanity right now expects to measure just one metric. But as I mentioned earlier, when we do our, for instance, that pop up test to move people on to the grocery list page. We're trying to actually affect two metrics. Trying to affect the number of people who return a second visit, which for us is at least a week later. So that's a long time to wait. And the other metric we're trying to affect is how many people move from the meal plan page to the grocery list page, which should happen in moments, right? Within 60 seconds. So I need to measure two things. Vanity lets me measure one. And by measure, I mean it has built in support for measuring a single metric. It has a notion of showing you a graph and how well you're doing and determining who the winner is. To compensate for this, we have built out our own set of views where we show our event data combined with Vanity's notion of AB tests. And so we can look at additional metrics besides what Vanity provides us. The end of the day, we go back when we are running a test and it starts to look like a conclusion is coming. Unless it's like extremely obviously good, we will do some slicing and dicing of the data again to confirm. Another reason why we log everything. You will never be surprised. Log everything. It's crazy, but you should do it. All right, so that's our testing solution. We use that. We live with that. We're good. We had some stuff in ActiveScaffold. We've since added some more simple pages that aren't ActiveScaffold for showing data. But that's our story for our testing solution. All right, so now building the test out. I think I've covered a lot of this already, but there's two problems that you've got. When you're building a test, you need to make sure that you include the current alternative. When you're doing a split test, you have to compare old against new.  And you have to understand the business metrics that you want to measure. So as I mentioned in that example, we wanted to measure users who returned. We wanted to measure users who moved advance from one page to the next. So those are the metrics that we kept. We designed the test to have 50% use the old way, 50% use the new way. I don't know a good place to mention this. I'm not sure what my next slide is. No, I'll mention it now. One of the things that we've discovered is that there's a tendency that when we find a problem and we think we know we have a solution, our problem is we're not advancing people from the meal plan page to the grocery list page. There are sometimes as a team or as individuals, we will definitely be convinced that we know the exact right solution to build. And we will have the strong temptation to go build the final complete the way we think it should be changed. Back to the point I had earlier about the purpose is not to build out the code as you think it should be sort of in its end state, purposes to test the hypothesis. So you have to make sure you do the minimal required to test the hypothesis. It takes a lot of effort as a team to sort of keep each other in check on that. The urge can be to build out some really cool stuff. And let me give you, this is one of my favorite stories. So right after Manuel and I just got funding, we decided to run this company for real. We went and hired a few developers so that it wouldn't be my code that's actually in production anymore. It would be real code. So we sat down. We understood the process about how people do meal planning. We saw it end in. We had done it ourselves. Even the developers that would join us, got it. So we said, these are the changes we want to make. We're going to build this system to do meal plan generation. Up until now, it had all been manual. The team spent four weeks on it. It's a very beautiful model based on tags and correlating tags between recipes and sale items and ingredients and all this stuff. Put all the code together. Four weeks later, finally it was ready to run. I did a test run. Had a lot of data in the system. Generated the first meal plan. Looked at the ingredients. Chicken, wheat, mayonnaise, and a few other things look pretty good. It's like, damn, nailed it. Generated our first automated meal plan. It found the based on the sale items. It pulled the right recipe and used the right ingredients. Only I then looked at the title to the recipe that it recommended. It was dog biscuits. It was technically correct. It was actually the right recipe for everything we had programmed. But we had violated one of our fundamental rules, which was try and prove the hypothesis. Instead, what we did was build the solution. Our hypothesis was we could do automated meal plan recommendations, automated recipe recommendations. So we spent four weeks building that. Now, in every other company I've worked at before, four weeks off the air building a piece of code is not a big deal for us. In this company, four weeks off the air would be like we had all died. We deploy and we generate code easily a half a dozen times a day on a good day per developer. To have spent four weeks building this and delivering it, what happened was is we proved this notion that we had built this thing without feedback from users. We'd done an increment that was too big. We had missed some key parts of how people actually pick meals, right? They don't pick things that are for dogs when they cook it for their kids. That's a big one we missed. We fixed it, but it taught us that we needed to have lot smaller iterations. Last one, continuous deployment. So this is a great buzzword. Raise your hand if you've heard of continuous deployment. Raise your hand if you haven't heard of it. Don't worry, we won't make fun of you. One, two. I'd say what, like 80% of the room's heard of it?  That's totally all the buzzword now. Continuous deployment. Eric Reese talks about it in his lean startup lessons learned. Timothy Fitz from InView has a great article on continuous deployment. I highly encourage you to check it out. Everything that he talks about a continuous deployment, I totally, I'm there with them on it. I read it and I learned it. Just so happens that my partner in this company was Eric's partner at InView. So I kind of got all this stuff from the horse's mouth. But that's not enough to say you do a continuous deployment. All the stuff leading up to it is what feeds the pipeline so that you continually deploy many, many, many times a day and you don't go off the air, off into La La Land thinking up what you think ought to be done for the customer. But the net effect is following this essential patterns, essential techniques. You've now generated a series of tests, hypothesis to test them with your tests. You've got your events that you're logging. You're always going to constantly add them. So continuous deployment will be how you get this out there. How much time have I got? Two minutes? Negative one. All right, I'm going to wrap it up. I'm sorry. Short answer. Has this worked? We've been doing it a year. We got hit by Life Hacker a few weeks ago, a few months ago, a month and a half ago. Our orders, our number of registrations went up two orders of magnitude in an hour, system scaled. Not a problem. We didn't want that publicity. We're not ready. We haven't cracked the code. That's a whole separate conversation. We are making revenue. We're not making a profit. We are, it's live and it's living. And the net effect is, by following what we did, while we found lots of things we shouldn't do, we did not write code that was useless. We did not write code that was irrelevant to the customer. We were able to test and prove it was relevant and then lay down the real code or the real changes that made it better for them. And I personally wouldn't go and do anything different.  All right. I doubt I have time for questions, but I'll be happy to answer. I'll take, what happens to me if I do it? Am I going to be in trouble? Go ahead and answer questions. Are you going to get mad at me? I'm sorry. Yeah, go ahead. I noticed it says free, so how are you making money? We have upscale. We're a freemium model. One of our experiments we ran is we ran three different monetization models, free, freemium, and paid. We discovered that people sign up for free better, but they retain better when they've paid. We don't know why. So what we did was we have been tuning how much you get for free and how much you get when you pay. It's like any freemium model. And people upgrade. And we know when they upgrade, and we know what conditions were in place when they chose to upgrade, and they upgrade, and they pay us $9 in something a month. Do you get your un-data for sales and how do you get your data? There are like a dozen different ways we do it. All of this stuff is available either printed, some of it's online. There is no, unfortunately, no massive repository in the sky we can dig out, so we have a lot of different methods we had to get it from. And that was one of the things we worked on very early. Because I know the retail industry is very, everybody does their work and it's not. It's not, but they mail that stuff out to everybody's home every week.  So are overseas people typing stuff in. I mean, there's all sorts of alternatives. Other questions? Last thing I wanted to say, if this interests you at all, working this way, there's my pitch. I am looking for help. Please come find me. We're here in Austin. I would love more developers to work with me. Thank you.


الحمد لله الحمد لله رب العالمين والسلام والسيدنا محمد وعلى آله وصحبه وسلم أجمعين اللهم سلي وسلم بارك على سيدنا محمد نورك الساري ومددك الجاري وجمعين بكل أطواري وعلى آله وصحبه وصدم يا نور يا أيها الذين عاملوا اتقوا الله اتقوا الله قد تقاتل ولا تمتن إلا وانتم مسلمون الحمد لله one of the aspects of living in a certain type of society is that we start to adopt the good and many times the bad of that society the people that you and I are around regularly are the people that we begin to imitate they're the people whose habits, whose approaches we begin to absorb and this is not just true for us in the time that we are living in this has been prevalent for human beings throughout history that the human being will adapt to the situations that they're in the human being will adapt to the society that they're in and many times that adaptation starts to become more than this adaptation the human being begins to conform to whatever norms of the society that they're living in to whatever norms of the place that they're living in and so let's say that someone, I'm sure all of us here we're here in Silicon Valley back in the days when we were going to our offices there used to be a time you dress up suit and tie, show up to work and now we can just wear our jeans and t-shirts and that's become the norm for many of us especially if you're working at a tech company or in a startup environment but if you're working in New York or in the financial district you're still going to have to dress up in that kind of old school style it depends on the norms of the people, the culture of let's say the company that you're in you begin to conform regardless of whatever personal clothing choices that one may have had for the more you surround yourself with certain types of people the more that conforming begins to happen and it's not any different with Haram with things that we are not supposed to be doing in our religion the more we see people doing them and the more we see them being taken lightly so we begin to think it's really not that big of a deal everybody else is doing it this is just how the society runs and that has happened for us as a Muslim community in a lot of ways but specifically with regards to the area of interest with regards to the area of Reba that in the society that we live in we live in a society that is laden with interest but the foundations of this society are continually built on interest every single financial instrument that we try to engage with interest is there every human being or the majority of people in this country are caught up in some type of debt that's only growing and growing not because of the amount of the loan that they took out but because of the APR or the interest associated with that loan and one of the sad aspects of this is that as Muslims living in the United States as Muslims living in the West we have begun to take that idea and stop taking it as seriously as Allah took it in the Quran whereas the Prophet ﷺ warned against taking interest in the Hadith we say it's really not that big of a deal what could be so bad about it because they package it nicely they put it in proper documents it's not called what it is they package it with APR it's an annual percentage rate they make it seem like it's not that big of a deal it's a monthly payment that we just pay and we set it and forget it but that doesn't take away the Haram components of that instrument that we're engaging in and that doesn't make it any less weighty in the eyes of our religion and so we have to examine and sometimes ask ourselves the difficult questions in our life of what are we doing that God would not appreciate all of us if we had ourselves or our family members if we knew somebody was drinking we would know hey that's not cool right there somebody was eating bacon we know that's not something that we should do with Muslims if we had our children or if ourselves if we were engaging in adultery engaging in affairs we would know and we would feel the effects too the negative spiritual effects there's an immediate effect that one feels when they sin we would know hey this isn't something I can do if someone was selling drugs and making all their money either selling drugs or using drugs we would know that money is Haram we would know that money is not permissible that money does not have Barakah in it and yet for some reason a sin that Allah outlines in the Quran as being higher than the things that I just mentioned as being worse than adultery as being worse than drinking as having more of a negative effect on us than all of these other major sins that we do we've started to take very very lightly and it's because it's just happening in the unseen you can't see this stuff you can't see you know you can physically count the amount of money that you pay for something but we can't actually see it because it's just happening in our bank account it's just the money is just going and we're just paying these types of payments and so let's just talk a little bit about this this is a topic I feel that is not covered nearly as often as we need to remind ourselves of what exactly is interest any type of loan that we take that demands that you pay back more than that loan amount and has an APR associated with it or has an interest percentage associated with it that qualifies as interest and regardless of how that's packaged regardless of what that instrument is if the contract stipulates that there's interest in it there's interest in it no matter how impressive the terms and conditions may be now in this society that we live in they make it seem like oh you have to do this stuff you've got to get $1,000,000 $2,000,000 $3,000,000 home you've got to get the $100,000 part you've got to get a huge student loan in order to get to the absolute best school oh you just did undergrad you're nothing until you have a master you're nothing until you have a professional degree just keep taking out loans keep taking out loans and keep paying to further your what I'm called progress in society meanwhile our spiritual progress begins to deteriorate we're not progressing spiritually but we think we are we're progressing materially but in fact we are being harmed in the areas that matter to us and that are going to matter to us in the end in the next life so let's just understand this in a little bit of detail the dangers of interest what are some of the dangers of interest what are some of the warnings that Allah has given us Allah tells us no Quran don't even get near this stuff don't even don't even mess with with Reba Laden Loan don't don't don't go near it and he says in the Quran that Allah describes interest of all blessing of all barakah but he blesses charity and then he relates this he says he loves not the ungrateful sinner the sinner who is ungrateful to him and he's associating this now with taking out interest and then he's saying that he deprives of all blessing now what does that mean let's examine that a little bit being deprived of blessing being deprived of barakah doesn't simply mean that we are going to see the effect in the next life Allah especially for the people who He loves and we know this in the hadith of the Prophet ﷺ told us that the Muslims are tested most in this life he begins to show them the impacts in this life when your life doesn't have barakah in it more fighting is happening at home more arguments are happening more problems are coming up more issues with children more negativity a lack of tranquility an overall trepidation in the heart increasing levels of anxiety increasing levels of depression increasing levels of stress these are just the tip of the iceberg of what happens when barakah is removed from a life a life with barakah doesn't mean it's a life without problems no the Prophet ﷺ had the most amount of tribulation the Prophet ﷺ are tested the most but in that tribulation he had a sakina to him in the tribulation for the people of Allah they are able to maintain a state of tranquility that Allah descends upon them but for the people who don't have barakah in their life the tribulation becomes all consuming and more and more tribulation start to come that removes the blessing in one's life so we have to really just understand this concept that when we engage in certain things in this world that are not permissible we have a direct impact and you might not see that impact today or tomorrow that impact God forbid and we hope this never comes but according to the way Allah is described in the Qur'an it can come it comes later on in life and then he says in the Qur'an and this is a very scary verse he says old believers have taqwa of Allah and give up what is still due to you from the interest if you are truly believers and if you do not do so then take notice if you do not give up these interest factors then take notice of war from Allah in his Messenger Allah is warning to the believers take notice of war from Allah in his Messenger you can examine throughout the Qur'an you are not going to find many verses where Allah is telling you to take notice of war it's just not the case Allah says He doesn't like this sin to not do this sin Shaytan is with you when you do certain types of sin but show us where Allah says He and his Messenger from Allah is giving you the warning of waging war we have to examine that we have to think do you and I want in our life at some point or in the lives of our children war from Allah in his Messenger because of the decision that we are making have we ever examined our problems many times we get into this state where we blame everybody for our problems do we ever look down inside and wonder what sins am I doing that I might not even think our sins that might be causing the problems that I am facing in my life and so you know you read this and you think oh you know this is only for the people who are like making millions and millions of dollars from each if I give you $100,000 alone and I make you pay pay me back $150,000 I'm the one being described in this verse that's only for those people right what's the big deal if I'm just taking a loan and paying somebody 3, 4 percentage points of interest what's the big deal everybody's doing it I don't see anything happening or the Prophet ﷺ warned us harshly about it now the Prophet ﷺ says that the the receiver and the payer of interest are cursed the one who records it and the witnesses to the transaction he says they are all a life in guilt immediately negating anybody who says that it's just a person who's actually making significant monetary benefit from the interest he's saying the person who's paying it is also in this bucket describing this because look you can't have a system right if you're trying to sell me something and there's no buyers guess what the demand side is gone you can't just have supply the demand common economics right basic economics so if you do not have the people who give demand who purchase these loans they're not going to have the people who supply these loans so this is we have to wonder how much am I engaging in and then we're going to say you know what's the big deal I mean I've been you know maybe I've been doing this for my whole life I'm not seeing any problems well the problems might not come in this life this is the issue if Allah loves somebody you might show them in this life but for the promise of some said I'm recording in the collection of Ibn Maja that Riba has 70 segments the least serious of which is equivalent to a man committing adultery with his own mother this had been shocking when I read it I really did not imagine that you would have wording this strong condemning something the least serious interest has 70 segments he said the least serious is equivalent to a man committing adultery with his own mother and another hadith says that it's worse than committing adultery 36 times with somebody you and I we have family members we know ourselves we have children if any of our children our daughters our sisters ourselves our sons if we were caught committing adultery that's it all hell would break loose we would never accept it yet we're engaging in car loans in mortgages and all these other things that we're relating with interest and we don't realize the significant negative impact that this could be having on us and the impact God forbid that we're going to feel in the next life and another hadith that the prophet he said Allah would be justified in not allowing four people to enter paradise or to take this blessing the one who drinks habitually the one who takes interest the one who steals and who serves and orphans property without right and the one who is un-dutiful to their parents two things in this hadith we very much take lightly at least I know I do drinking a lot is a problem and stealing somebody's property especially in orphans is a problem and how many of us are taking interest at their level a prophet is comparing it to someone who's drinking all the time and he's saying Allah could be justified in not allowing that person to even taste the blessings of paradise these hadith these are just some of them the hadith tradition has many hadith where the prophet talks about the Islamic economic system and he's giving us an example of the negative impact that you and I engage in seen or unseen that we know of but we don't know of having an impact in the next life and so let's just talk briefly and what are some of the common types of interest that exist first and foremost the biggest one the American dream everybody wants to own a home more give it right it's very very common in the society we live in we think it's okay because we live here right and so we want to get the benefits associated with owning a home and we want that right but we have to think what kind of society are we living in that you have people who take out multiple more give it we'll get one home then we go and we take out another one so we can go buy an investment property and make the rent money and then go and buy another property and then keep buying and keep buying and we think it's all good meanwhile we're taking interest in accruing sins according to the hadith which are significantly damaging to our hearts and we don't understand why I'm always fighting at the house let's examine how many major sins are we committing how many of us would be fool making selling pounds I mean now we eat as legal year but you know ten years ago I wasn't selling pounds and pounds in marijuana taking that drug money and using that money to make invest in things nobody would be okay with that but we think it's okay to go and take a giant loan pay some corrupt institution lots and lots of money so when you do buy these then you will not be heading for a money we're not coming together to buy so much damn but I'm writing I just oh so so but and so I've I've paid now I had had I'm وبالنسبة to the small sins that we commit and leaving the big ones. The prioritization is very very important. The next type of major loan that we take out of car loans. There are so many options in this society. You have something called leasing of car. You have a 0% APR option for many cars. But we got to drive the nicest luxury Benz.  Well guess what? إذا كنت لا تحتاج لأجل شيء ، فأنا سأترك على سيارة بحيث إذا كنت تحتاج لكي تصل إلى أجل هذه المساعدة التي نحن فيها لكننا لا نحتاج لها، فقط want to live the big ballard luxury life right and live beyond our means ونذهب فوق ونقوم بأسأل عليها وكيف ستجد إمكانك أن تقول لك حسنًا عن ذلك؟ كنت أخبرت أنه في هذا المساعدة وقد يمكنك أن تسأل هذه المساعدة وقد يمكنك أن تأخر إلى هذا المساعدة في 0% APR لذا لماذا تأخر إلى 1% على 2.49% APR؟ بس أبو! أعطيها بالمستخدم لكل فتورة مني علينا filing جميعنا الفئران إلى ما هو قد يتبع القضاء قد يضع ديما من الجدرات كنت هنالك تفعل أشياء تفكر الأجراء كأن تفكر الجزيمة كأن تفكر المشيئاء وكما يمكنك ان نستطيع الحياتة هذه الرئيس لن يوجد إ Surprisingly لاحظن أن نطلب مجموعة الثلاثة flowers الامرية مهمة لتحدث عن أولئات هذا الشخص يفعله لأننا يفعل أن يجب أن نأخذ الأجهزة في وقت مدينة جداً ونقوم بإمكانه بالنسبة لفتحة المجموعة التي نحصل فيها وندخل فيها في مجموعة مجموعة لن نحن لم نستخدم وقت المال ونحن نجد أجهزة المجموعة لكي يستطيع أن نقوم بإمكانها بقاعدة مخلق بسيطة في هذه المجموعة لن يعتقد فيها في مجموعة ويقول أنه لأحد أحد يجب أن أعرف بشكل مجموعة أنه يجب أن نتخطي الناس وكم نعقل المفاتحة الل together and organization where we do college admissions guidance and one that not all about going to college going to the best colleges. نعم that's all true. نجب على it but we have to do that but we have to think what's the price types that we're willing to pay right our people are taking $1,200 going to college going to the best colleges. نعم نعم نعم نعم نعم نعم نعم نعم نعم نعم أهلاً شبتح شائن. شكل من العالم الذي تقوم بهذا.  And you know that's a great question to do. So then I think what you guys have to do is to get that one ready to go and سوف يكون هناك المشاكل من قوك ليحظة الله الحمد لله حمد لله رب العالمين مصلقة الله ورحمة الله وبرك رحمة الله ورحمة الله وعالية ورحمة الله يا يولدين عامن إتفظ الله حق سيخاطي ولأ ش bestenنا إلا وأن صمس في مموت إذا كامل ما كان هناك منون يتجربون has been trying to make some room بأن يضهر الصناوط في نظيف بأن يستهر الصناوط بأن يستغفون في نظيف that would be very nice ليس that people don't get completely soaked أم لا يجب أن نتجرب بالسحل الحديث أنا لا اتخيل أن نخبر صحيح ولكن فقط سأجعل حقا أن نتجرب بحقق أم لا إذا الآن، المكطف is أم نحن نخرج من هذا العBAق الأول ب that we have to keep in mind is that we have to realize how serious the problem actually is وهذا أم لا نستطيع تصفيق أمي أكثر The provinces are on set in the hadith The Halal is clear The Haram is clear لذلك نعرف ما يجب أن يكون جداً الثالث ما يجب أن نفعله is if we spend our time engaging in some type of interest نجب أن نتعرف وأن نجب أن نجعل كوبا منه مثل ما يجب أن نجعل كوبا إذا كنت تجربة أو إذا كنت تجربة أيضاً نجب أن نجعل كوبا نجب أن نتوقف يجب أن نساعدنا على أن نفعله ولكن يجب أن نفعله بشكل كبير إذا كنت لا تحبه ولكن نجعله بشكل كبير نجب أن نجعل كوبا ونقوم بحيثنا ثم الثالث نجب أن نتوقف لن يخرج من هنا يجب أن نقوم بفعله الله يقوله مقرآن إذا كان يطلق الله يجعله ومخرجه أي من يقوم بروح الله يجب أن يخطأهم يجب أن يخطأهم من خلال أجهزة لذا الآن ما يجب أن نفعله ونحن نحن نعرف لن نفهم نحن نفعل حقاً نحن لا نذهب في بعض الأجهزة إذا كان it a mortgage أو خارس أو خلال أجهزة يبدو أن نجعله و Get the way out Don't take this lightly The last thing you want to do is meet Allah on the Day kg And when something was very clearly warned against Just because we live in a society which takes it lightly we started to take it lightly Get out If you have a mortgage Refine 반 an Islamic mortgage It's not difficult It doesn't cost anything more It's very very easy to do It's a good time for us to do it If we have a car loan Start paying it off quickly كي أجد أن أستطيع أن أساعد مدى بأعطين أكثر من بلد أو لست أستطيع أن أساعد كذلك إذا كنتم باستيقية بالضبطل أو إضافة إلى هذا المكان لكي أصبرت حديث من المدى تبدأ to think deeply about what are the different strategies that could happen for you to saving money for you to either to wait a year or two going into a community college because it's much more affordable and then going into a proper institution and then saving my money in order to be able to finance college لكن لا يستطيع أن يقوم باستعمل شيء حرام لكي يمكنك أن تقوم باستعمال البخيرة و هذا المجنون يقول لا يمكن أن يقوم باستعمال ببخير محاول. فلن تصدقوا بأن سيارة في قوة اجوانه و ذهبه و ذهبه و ذهبه لأجواني فاستعمال بحركة امريكية و كتابة و كتابة فقط لطاقة كل هذا و تقوم باستعمال بحركة الاصلامية لا يمكنني اصبح شيء حرام لا matter what impact it's going to have و سأعتقد أن الله ستعوى بي طريقة الهاتف سأقوم بعيداً لأنه مفتاح جداً يقوم بعمل كرد ماهذا يجب علينا الكرد في المجموعة علينا أن نتوقف أن نقوم بمرأة يجب علينا أن نتوقف أن نمع مجموعة وقال الوصول الصلاة إلى مجموعة ونفعه ونصف كما يبدأ المجموعة في المجموعة يجب علينا بدء ستمر لجميعنا ومن المجموعة ومن المجموعة ونماً لا تفعل الأشياء ونحن لم نستخدم yet فهذا مثل إذا كاننا لدينا عبرتيون لدى تلك theoraphone to go to graduate school , medical school NBA ,مر than it is but we know that there the major price been associated with them we can't pay it there is a very little justification one could give for saying I'm gonna engage in 200000$ of loans that I have interest associated with them so that I could go and become this profession and maybe my intention is to help people but in Islam the ends be not justified in means the means must be halal and permissible and the end must be halal and permissible لذلك يجب أن نبدأ التجربة ونظر على طريقنا. هناك الكثير من الطريقات التي يمكننا أن نفعل ذلك. لا نستطيع أن نفعل ذلك لحظة الوقت. ولكن في الوقت نحن نستطيع أن نستخدم our brains to think كيف يمكنني أن نجد طريقات من هذه الحالات؟ وكيف يمكنني أن نجد طريقات من هذه الحرام؟ ومن ثم when we do have a major loan. ولكن we also have savings accumulated. أعلم أن الناس who have car loans but they got like $50,000 to $100,000 sitting in the bank. وأن they're still having a car loan because we just didn't set it in forget-it payment mode. فقط even financially, not even Islamically, it doesn't make sense when you have money to be borrowing from somebody else. بارع from yourself and then pay yourself back to $500 a month in payments but get rid of that interest loan. Do that for student loans. Do that for more because whatever we can to reduce that amount if we can't eliminate it, reduce it.   Same thing with us. It doesn't mean that we have to leave it altogether if we can't. If we're not ready to, if we don't have the ability to, if we don't have the strategy to. But it doesn't mean that we just keep engaging in it. We have to start slowly coming up with ways and lastly we have to trust in Allah. This life is not our goal. All these desires, all these things we covet, all these financial instruments that we want, all this success that we want, if it's making us do things that aren't permissible it's not going to be barakah in it. Just take some time to step back and examine what am I compromising in order to get this thing and don't ever compromise your being and don't ever compromise Allah and His Messenger إِنَّ اللَّهَ وَمَنَا إِسَلُونَ عَنَا بِيْ يَا يُهَلَّ بِيْنَا عَمْنِ يِسَلُونَ عَلَيْ وَسَلُونَ مُسْلِمَا أَلَوْمَ اَسَلِي وَسَلِمَا بَارِكَ محمد وعالي صحيح فلم الحمد لله رب العالمي باقينا السلام


This research paper examined the differences between two types of oral-like complainers, OLP, which are characterized by distinctive immunological features. By analyzing the gene expression profiles of OLP patients, the authors identified two distinct clusters of OLP patients, one of which had more severe symptoms than the other. This suggests that there may be two distinct forms of OLP, each with its own unique immunological profile. This article was authored by Jean Hao Zhong, Gao Ge Peng, Hao Kai, and others.